Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [49]
As the creature continued methodically demolishing food bricks, one dark round eye rotated on its stalk to watch him. Gritting his teeth, he lowered his head until his face was all but in the dirt. Occasionally he would glance up to check his location.
As he neared the monster, he slowed his pace. This required little effort since he was near collapse from lack of nourishment anyway. It took nearly an hour to submissively travel the last forty feet on his belly. By that time, exhausted and filthy, he hardly cared whether he succeeded in snatching a few crumbs of food brick or not.
It struck him that he had made it to within arm’s length of the circle that descended into the ground and returned with food. While the bricks themselves were all but odorless, he could swear that he smelled the water in the cistern: cool, sweet, and beckoning. Glancing up, he saw the huge alien looming over him. It continued to eat without pause. There were only three of the big food bricks remaining. Walker hardly dared to breathe. He only needed one. One brick, he thought as he fought to remain focused through an increasing haze of frailty. One brick, and if he was extremely fortunate, maybe a few swallows of water. Timidly, slowly, he extended his right hand as he reached for the nearest unit. Try as he might, he could not still the trembling in his fingers.
Like a rust-colored steel cable, one thick tentacle slammed down inches from his questing fingers, blocking their path.
Walker could have burst out crying. He could have launched into hysterics. He could have risen to his feet and made a mad, doubtless futile dash for the food. But the time spent on board the Vilenjji vessel had changed him. Time, and talking to his fellow captives. Especially to one fellow captive. He neither went mad nor lost control.
Instead, he rolled onto his back, bent his knees up toward his chest, held his open hands palm upward, let his tongue loll loose, and opened his eyes wide in what he hoped was a manner any sentient would interpret as doleful pleading.
The reaction this provoked was not expected.
“Stop that,” the creature rumbled softly.
Walker maintained his posture of naked vulnerability. He was sure the creature had spoken. He had seen its ripsaw-lined jaws move at the same time as his implanted translator had brought him the words. Nevertheless, he stayed as he was. For one thing, he was unsure precisely what the monster wanted him to stop.
“I said, stop that,” it growled a second time.
Walker retracted his tongue and swallowed. “Stop what?” he whined, as piteously as he could manage.
“Groveling. Begging. It’s embarrassing. No intelligent being should have to act like that.”
There was no question that it was the creature who was addressing him, Walker realized. It was after all not a mute mountain of bristle-coated alien protoplasm, then, but something more.
Warily, he rolled onto his belly and backed up onto hands and knees. “No intelligent being should let another one starve.”
“Why not?” the newly voluble monster grunted. “Supposedly intelligent beings should not try to reduce others to the level of property, yet we are ample evidence such practices exist.”
“Then you and I have something in common.” Rising slowly to his feet, Walker brushed muck and ground cover from his dirty clothing.
“We have nothing in common except misplaced intellect.” Eyestalks rose and dipped. “Sentience and sentenced, adrift among the stars, lost dreaming.”
Oh, Lord, Walker thought. Alien haiku. Or something like that. Next thing you knew, the monster would launch into an animated discourse on flower arranging. Was there an opening here he could exploit? And if he tried, would it translate properly, or end up getting him killed? Drunk from lack of nourishment, he felt he had nothing to lose.
“Uh . . . prisoners in arms, trapped among many strangers, sharing pain.”
Both eyes turned to look at him as the entire massive body, squatting