READ A BIT!

. . . He shoved his door open and, with some effort, grasped it to pull himself away from his seat belt, the deflating air bag, and out of his car. He reached back inside to retrieve a flashlight. Its beam passed across a stretch of khaki panel van, poised more or less upright, its headlights still staring into the darkness. His late model sedan squatted, lifeless, its smashed nose imbedded into the mid section of the van. Wisps of steam drifted up from the point of impact. He swung his light around, noting the blacked-out country store, the church. An acrid, burned-rubber smell pervaded the air. A crow commented in the distance.
        He hobbled around the front of the van. The license plate was federal government issue. Its sliding side door was partially open to the night. He peered into the darkness inside. His flashlight lit the uniformed driver slumped over his wheel. A thickset passenger, also in uniform, hung in his seat belt, his forehead over the dashboard.
        Through the side door, slid open in the impact, the sedan driver saw a narrow crate where rear seats would have been. Its cover was ajar revealing a small body bag inside. On impulse, he reached out to unzip the end nearest him.
        His nose told him Cheddar cheese, cinnamon, and, more faintly, sulphur, but in the beam of his light, his eyes were transfixed by a small, somewhat leathery grey face with huge, elliptical, black eyes staring out at him. Featureless, without pupil or iris, they evoked an underlying presence that shook the man, made him recoil into his most secret core. A tiny, lipless mouth and negligible nostril slits completed the bizarre features. Unreality gripped him, a feeling of transgression into a world no human should experience.

. . . So he hit her.
        His knuckle just grazed her shapely jaw but the contact put her into a stupor.
        He threw her over his shoulder, grasped her curvaceous thighs together tightly in one arm, and, using the occasional shouts of pursuit as his guide, ran as fast as he was able through the empty side streets and back alleys of Faanitzi. He ran on, oblivious to the frigid air, striving to increase his awareness of the direction away from the Temple, while trying desperately to dampen his awareness of his prickling, smouldering back. Abstractly, he noted that few windows opened onto the street level, and the few that did were protected by stout iron grills. Here and there a balcony jutted over the street.
        He found himself staring at the dead end of a narrow alley. A small, multi legged shape slunk away from several low tubs, their acrid stench marking them as fullers’ urinals. Echoing cries of distant pursuit sounded behind. His urgent scrutiny revealed ancient stone steps leading up out of the cul-de-sac.
        He halted at the top step, his right arm tightening around Naedaara’s thighs. Spread out before him in the light of the Milky Way was a piazza-sized area of honeycombed, earthen vats enclosed by the rectangular, shadowed shapes of stone and adobe walls punctuated here and there by unlit windows. Nowhere was there an actual walkway across. Merely the narrow, rounded rims of the vats, some wider than others but none more than a catwalk, a zigzag challenge to a pain-tormented man carrying a burden growing ever heavier, even in the lighter gravity of Angelus.
        Tagg turned to the advancing cries in nearby streets behind him, then plunged across the sea of dyers’ vats. Pungent hides or woven fabric floating in the muddy vegetable dyes reflected the sky-blaze in muted colours, awaiting morning and the tanners of Faanitzi. Other vats were empty, or nearly so, showing glassy, tiled walls amazingly unstained.
        Nearly across, Tagg realized the dyers’ compound had only one access. He continued to one of the few doors facing the enclosure. Unsurprisingly, it was bolted fast. He stood, still clasping the door latch, listening for the outcry of pursuit in the last street.
        Through the maddening agitation of the skael sting, Tagg scanned the couple of hundred vats. Finding the one he wanted, he lowered Naedaara inside, and dropped down himself. The bottom held not enough murky liquid to cover his feet. Lying the unconscious girl on her back, he propped her straightened legs up against the tiled walls, her feet wide apart. Reaching up, he grasped a hide from the damp pile left by the tanners on the lip of the vat and tucked one end over her feet, pinning it against the vat wall. The remainder of the hide he held above them and against the opposite wall, his back and head reducing the suspicious sag in its centre.
        The shouts and slap of sandaled feet above Tagg thrust aside the bursting strain of his awkward position. . . .

“I am sorry,” said Tagg with sincerity.
        “I know you are, and I thank you for that. But you cannot appreciate my loss. We Grays are a hive mentality with a social, mental and intellectual dependency to the Connective, a mental core composed of our many elder members. To think with the autonomy of a human is an act of insanity for our kind. The Connective has limited understanding of human individuality and think it to be a case of arrested primitive evolutionary development. All of the many different beings which visit your home planet are members of a Connective of one sort or other. It is a matter of much speculation and study that humans have progressed thus far without benefit of a connective mental structure. Your social designs show interesting tendencies and your Religions are complex beyond our experience...”
        Hive mentality, thought Tagg, forgetting his thoughts could be overheard. Like ants or honey bees.
        “Quite,” spoke Artisan Eleven agreeably in Tagg’s mind. “But with shared intellectual awareness far beyond your imagining. In this, your species is the aberration. Primates are genetically hardwired for selfish tendencies, even at the risk of same-species violence. It is embedded in your languages, your symbolism, your thinking. The Connective finds it a disturbing development among fledgling sapients, and has long sought the answer in your genetics . . . .”
        The Gray’s thoughts faded from Tagg’s awareness like a hand withdrawn from a glove, but not before he sensed, faintly, a forlorn, emotional aside not meant for him.
        The Gray did not, perhaps could not, close its huge eyes, but nevertheless gave the notion of that sense being shut down. Obviously the dispirited creature wished to be left to itself.
        They left the Gray in the unresponsive ship and found themselves in the adjoining section, the drill crew mess, before speaking aloud.
        “Poor bugger,” said Tagg. “Poor bleeding bugger.”
        Naedaara made no comment. The specific sadness of the moment did not match any words they had available.

“Where are they herding us to?” Gina asked. “To feed their young?”
        “I shouldn’t think guard gnats would have young out in the woods,” Tagg suggested.
        “The young hatch in live prey as maggots,” Naedaara stated helpfully. “After they have eaten it up, they molt into little gnats, and then they are on their own. Learned it in school.”
       “Hush, girl!” said Gina. “We don’t need the ghastly details.” Then she wondered aloud, “What if we just stay where we are? Just sit awhile.” She sat, huddled, as if to illustrate, her back against a tree trunk. The rest stood at relative attention around her, waiting.
        The gnats stood where they were for several minutes, dimly lit, hispid chimeras of ugly death. Presently they began chittering to each other, alternating back and forth. It was an eerie experience listening to their dry, rustling chirrups, a softly rasping conversation. A running commentary, or planning their menu? Tagg wondered.
        Suddenly one of the taloned horrors made a running leap, landing immediately in front of Naedaara. She screeched in terror, stumbling over the huddled Gina in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to back away from immediate disembowelment. The image of the gnat ripping at the girl’s torso and Naedaara standing in rigid shock, her bloody insides hanging in gory loops to the ground would haunt Tagg forever. Formic acid was strong in his nostrils. He roared his anguish amid the cries of the others, then blinked as she appeared whole again as before with nothing disturbed but her tangled hair and her peace of mind.
       The gnat resumed its previous position, its message harmlessly but effectively delivered.
        They continued their forced march at once.