Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [4]
“We’ll see you when you come back, then.”
“No, no!” Old Malakotee was uncharacteristically insistent. “I come warn you.” He gestured emphatically. “You come with Akoe. You big skypeople good folk. Come with us. We keep you safe during migration.”
Bowman smiled condescendingly to the native, whose appearance never failed to put him in mind of an anorexic Munchkin. “That’s very kind of you and your people, Malakotee, but Gerard and I are quite comfortable here. We have protections you can’t see and wouldn’t understand even if I tried to explain them to you.”
The miniature tripartite snout in the center of the Akoe’s face twitched uneasily. “Malakotee know you skypeople got many wondrous things. You show Malakotee plenty. But you no understand. This is ixtex,” he explained, using the native word for the bipedal muffins, “migration!”
“So you’ve told us. I promise you, we’ll be all right. Would you like some tea?” The chemical brew that was Terran tea had been shown to produce interesting, wholly pleasurable reactions within the Akoe body.
Ordinarily Old Malakotee, like any Akoe, would have jumped at the offer. But not this morning. Stepping down from the porch, he gestured purposefully with his staff. Beads jangled and bounced against the rose-hued, dark-streaked wood.
“I tell you. You come with Akoe, we take care of you. You stay here”—he made the Akoe gesture for despair—“no good.” Reaching the ground, he promptly launched into a slow-spinning, head-bending, tail-flicking tribal chant-dance. When he was through, he saluted one final time with his ornamented staff before turning his back on them and striding deliberately away from the outpost.
As LeCleur called forth the heads-up and rotated the bridge shut behind the retreating native, Bowman pondered what they had just seen. “Interesting performance. Wonder if it had any special significance?”
LeCleur, who was more of a xenologist than his partner, banished the command panel display with a word and nodded. “That was the ‘Dance for the Dead.’ He was giving us a polite send-off.”
“Oh.” Bowman squinted at the sky. Just another lovely day on Hedris, as always. “I’ll get the skimmer ready for the census.”
The Akoe had been gone for just over a week when LeCleur was bitten. Bowman looked up from his work as his partner entered. The bite was not deep, but the thin bright line of blood running down the other man’s leg was clearly visible. It emerged from beneath the hem of his field shorts to stain his calf. Plopping himself down in a chair, LeCleur put the first-aid kit on the table and flicked it open. As he applied antiseptic spray and then coagulator, Bowman looked on with casual interest.
“Run into something?”
A disgruntled, slightly embarrassed LeCleur finished treating the wound with a dose of color-coded epider-mase. “Like hell. A damn muffin bit me.”
His partner grunted. “Like I said: run into something?”
“I did not run into it. I was hunting for burrowing arthropods in the grass over in the east quad when I felt something sharp. I looked back, and there was this little furry shitball gnawing on my leg. I had to swat it off. It bounced once, scrambled back to its feet, and shot off into the grass.” He closed the first-aid kit. “Freakish.”
“An accident, yeah.” Bowman couldn’t keep himself from grinning. “It must have mistaken your leg for the mother of all casquak seeds.”
“It wasn’t the incident that was freaky.” LeCleur was not smiling. “It was the muffin. It had sharp teeth.”
Bowman’s grin faded. “That’s impossible. We’ve examined, not to mention eaten, hundreds of muffins since we’ve been here. Not one of them had sharp teeth. Their chewing mechanism is strictly basal molaric dentition, evolved to grind up and process vegetation.”
His partner shook his head slowly. “I saw the teeth, Jamie. Sharp and pointed. Saw