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By Root 1507 0

excitement. If it is them, he thought, they know more about us than we know about them. They could see into the lighted tent. They sorted through our stuff. They may be nervous, but they’re bound to keep us under observation. We’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to them since they decided to give up on civilization, and they must know it. Even if they don’t want to make contact now, they’ll want to know exactly where we are and where we’re going. They won’t go far, and they’ll be back. All we have to do is wait, and make our plans with due care. Everything else is subsidiary now; this is the spearhead of Hope’s mission, the determining fact of all our futures. And I’m on the spot, running the show. Destiny needed a prophet, and it picked me. Whatever it needed to get me here, it had to have me. This is it. This is what it was all for: every moment of every one of those forty-eight years. Dulcie was just an innocent part of the apparatus of fate, like Shen Chin Che and the cometary blizzard and the Crash, and fifteen billion years of the prehistory of the universe. It was all leading down to this: to Matthew Fleury’s advent in the New World, and his first meeting with the Other Human Race. This is my moment, my winning play, my reason for being. This is the beginning of the New Era. It was easy to forget, in the circumstances, that he was stuck halfway down a cliff with a worse-than-useless rifle and a nonfunctional control box.

He spent the rest of the night forgetting it, in the cause of making grander plans—and now the twenty-one-and-a-half-hour Tyrian cycle of day and night didn’t seem too short at all, but far too long. Eventually, he lay down again and tried to sleep, knowing that he was going to need every atom of intelligence he had to see him through the crises of the next few days, but he couldn’t do it. His IT wasn’t up to the job; there was too much adrenaline in his system and no matter how hard the nanobots worked they couldn’t stop his adrenal cortex producing more and more.

It was a very long night—subjectively, the longest in his life. But it came to an end eventually, as all his nights were bound to do. When dawn broke, he was more than ready to greet it. He waited until the light was a little better before he actually struggled to his feet again, but the precaution was unnecessary. The sight that met his eyes would not have disappointed his appetite for startlement no matter how dimly it had been lit.

The first casual sweep of his gaze over the area of devastation told him that the tentacled slugs still had secure tenure over their empire, and they had grown prodigiously during their occupation. He knew, at the back of his mind, that there was a second possibility—that the moderately sizable specimens that had held the terrain when dusk fell had been driven out during the night by more powerful competitors—but he never gave it a moment’s serious thought. He had confidence in his guesses now, and he was certain in his own mind that the creatures had grown fat, processing food into flesh with un-Earthly rapidity.

On another occasion he might have been more surprised by the changes that had overtaken the battlefield on which the serial killer anemones’ victory had been won, but in his present mood he saw it as an inevitable confirmation of his most recent speculations.

If giant slugs had been making their way back and forth across the scattered debris of a thousand shredded bushes, they too would have left the terrain embalmed in slime, but it could not have been so vitreous, nor so dramatically uneven. It would not have been studded with the upper hemispheres of glass basketballs, or the bubble domes of half-embedded footballs … or the pyramidal extrusions of “bipolar spinoid extensions.” Had there not been more urgent matters of concern, Matthew would have paused to wonder, but as things were he merely clocked up one more lucky guess to his rapidly escalating score.

He phoned Lynn, thinking that it was he who had news to impart, but he didn’t get a chance to speak.

“Matthew,” she said.