Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [18]
Something was crawling across his stomach. Sitting up quickly, he saw a giant centipede making its many-legged way across his body. Uttering the forlorn cry of a lost child, he slapped and swung at himself until the enormous but harmless arthropod had been knocked aside. It was a harbinger, but he had no way of knowing that.
Then he turned once again face down to the street and began to retch violently.
4
As time passed and contact was not resumed, Desvendapur could not keep from wondering if his friends had indicated their willingness to help him in his endeavor only to shut him up, and had forgotten all about his request as soon as they had returned to the comfort and familiarity of their own homes. But though it took a while to make things happen, the reluctant Broud eventually proved to be as good as his word.
There came a day when Des received a formal notification from the sub-bureau in charge of poets for his region, informing him that he had been assigned the post of fifth-degree soother to Honydrop. Hastily, he looked it up on his scri!ber. It was a tiny hive situated outside the main current of Willow-Wane life whose inhabitants worked at gathering and processing a few fields of imported, cultivated berries. Located high on a mountainous plateau, it suffered from weather sufficiently harsh to discourage most thranx from wanting to visit, much less immigrate. He would need protective clothing, a rarity among his kind, and a stolid disposition to endure the unforgiving climate. Furthermore, accepting the transfer would drop him two levels in status. He did not care. Nothing else was important.
What mattered was that the Honydrop hive was situated less than a day’s journey from Geswixt.
There was no information to be had on a hypothetical, unacknowledged, and highly improbable human colony, of course. His personal scri!ber was a compact device capable of accessing every information storage dump on the planet, and he had long since given up hope of finding even the most oblique reference to such a development in its innards, no matter how clever or rigorous a search he assigned to it. There was plenty of information on the humans—more than he could hope to digest in a lifetime—and some on the progress of the mature project on Hivehom. But there was nothing about a continued presence on Willow-Wane of bipedal, intelligent mammals. Despite his most probing efforts, it all remained nothing more than rumor.
Reaching Honydrop involved no less than four transfers, from a major tube line to, at the last, a place on one of the infrequent independently powered supply vehicles that served the isolated mountain communities of the plateau. He had never imagined so hostile an environment could exist on a world as long settled and developed as Willow-Wane.
Outside the transparent protective dome of the cargo craft in which he was riding, trees grew not only at absurd distances from one another, wasting the space and soil that lay between, but stood independent of mutual contact. No familiar vines or creepers draped in graceful arcs from one bole to its neighbor. No colorful blossoms added color to trunks that were drab and dark brown. The tiny leaves they sported seemed too insignificant to gather sufficient sunlight to keep the growths alive.
Still, many grew tall and straight. It was exactly the sort of landscape in which one might expect to encounter alien visitors. But the only movement came from animals that, while exotic to his lowland eyes, were quickly recognized by the transport’s crew and were well documented in the biological history of the planet.
A glance at the cargo craft’s instrument panel showed that the temperature outside was much nearer freezing than he had ever hoped to experience other than theoretically. He made sure his cumbersome leg wrappings were securely belted and