‘There went External Input,’ Colver observed grimly.
How long, Mika wondered, before Jerusalem had to deal with a contaminated human instrument in the same manner?
Mr Crane marched indefatigably through darkness, pausing only to fend off the regular attacks of second-stage sleers that were neither albino nor sapphire-eyed. Then, halfway through the night, these attacks ceased, and he even walked past a third-stager crouched atop a low butte, with its nightmare pincers silhouetted against starlit sky, without incurring any reaction. Later he halted to observe some twenty rear breeder sections of both second and third stages of sleer in an orgiastic tangle, like mating frogs. He watched them for some time, noting their two-pronged tentacular extrusions intertwining, spilling glutinous fluids and dark blood, how sand got stuck to chitinous limbs and body segments by this mess, and was rolled into balls and clods that tumbled stickily away.
He had been ordered to keep going until he reached Dragon, but to do that it was necessary to protect himself, which raised conflicting imperatives. Speciously he reasoned that he watched these creatures because when whole they attacked him, therefore he must carefully assess in advance what danger they represented. Never, in the fractured chaos that comprised his mind, did one fragment reveal to another one evidence of that condition called curiosity.
At length the tangle began to unravel and, like revellers heading drunkenly for home, the sleer breeder sections began staggering away, some on four legs and some on two like escapees from The Garden of Earthly Delights. One of these Boschean creatures, Crane noted, was ambushed by the front or hunting section of another sleer, and devoured even while the devourer’s own breeder section reattached behind it. After the final hardened partiers went on their way, Crane stood and continued on his—and once again creatures unable to resist investigating anything that moved shot out of the shadows to fracture their mouthparts on his adamantine body. Just before the sunrise, these attacks ceased for a second time, and the reasons for all smaller sleers to keep their heads down soon became apparent.
Their pincers were huge and lethally sharp-edged, their sawing mandibles larger than any he had seen and also sharp along the opposite side to their saw-teeth. Below them, and the mouth itself, extended two limbs terminating in something that looked exactly like ice-axes. In some part of himself Crane guessed that all these extra horrors had evolved for feeding upon similarly thick-shelled creatures—like saws and hammers and levers used to get at the meat inside—but he was also aware of how they might apply to himself. Those mouth parts were level a metre above his head — the creatures were truly massive—and Crane understood that now he faced a real threat. But what he could not guess was that he was witnessing creatures that many on Cull considered purely mythical.
One of the fourth-stage sleers kept still. The other swung its head from side to side, as if excited to be about the chase but not yet taken off the leash, then abruptly it surged forwards and bore down on Mr Crane. The Golem immediately turned and ran full pelt into a narrow side canyon. Like some giant charging bull, the monster had difficulty turning in after him. Kicking up rocks and debris as its huge weight bore down on four feet, it skidded and crashed into the side canyon’s wall as it attempted to pursue him inside. It paused for a moment, perhaps puzzled as to why he had entered this blind alley, and was now standing, perfectly motionless, at the far end. But the delay was only brief- then it went in after him.
Crane just waited and watched as the monster bore down on him. His next actions would be dictated by a minuscule fraction of one fragment of his wrecked mind. The sleer was big, it was heavy, and its eating utensils could certainly damage him—therefore he must avoid them. He squatted suddenly, and as the sleer drew close, he straightened up his legs with the full force of their industrial torque motors, leaping high above and to one side of the creature. It slammed into the canyon wall, shattered sandstone and dust raining down all about it. Mr Crane’s lace-up boot came down briefly on a narrow ledge, then he bounced back out and down, landing astride behind the sleer’s head, which it was shaking furiously from side to side as it backed up the way it had come.
The beast then froze as it processed this new input into its already stunned brain. Crane helped it in making a decision by closing his thighs hard enough to start cracking the forward carapace. The enraged sleer began to buck and thrash its body from side to side. Its ovipositor, whirling like a drill bit, stabbed again and again over above Crane, but the sleer could not twist it low enough to strike him. Rolling up his sleeves, he then stabbed the blade of one hand into the back of the monster’s head—three times—to break through the thick carapace. The sleer rolled, trying to dislodge him, but as it came back upright, its passenger was still in place, just having lost his hat. He rubbed a hand over his bare brassy skull, then thrust that same hand deep inside the sleer’s head, and methodically began to tear out its contents.
The sleer tried smashing its back against the canyon wall to dislodge him—failed. Crane continued excavating glistening nodules and scarves of pink flesh, rubbery masses of tubes and handfuls of quivering jelly. Eventually the creature’s movements became spasmodic, when not painfully slow. It walked sideways up towards one canyon wall, leant there as if resting, then walked sideways towards the other wall… but never made it. Suddenly the life went out of the beast as if Crane had pulled its power plug. Its legs gave way and, with a sigh, it collapsed.
After dismounting, Mr Crane used sand to clean his hands, rolling the gore away in balls just like the sleers he had watched earlier had shed sand mixed with their mating juices. He took some time doing this, occasionally glancing back towards the main canyon. Once his hands were pristine again, he used the edge of a sulerbane leaf to scrape much of the ichorous mess off his coat. Only then did he look around for his hat.
Seemingly undamaged by its brief departure from Crane’s head, it was lying over by the far wall of the canyon, where first-stage sleers had bored numerous burrows. He walked over, stooped and picked it up, straightened it and brushed away the dust. Only as he was placing it on his brass skull did he notice the blue eye gleaming in shadow. Then the great cobra thing hurtled out and slammed into his chest, bore him to the ground and pinned him there, smoke boiling away around it as if it were the contact head of a giant spot welder. Crane struggled to rise, then slumped back like the sleer he had just killed. The Dragon pseudopod remained connected to his chest for some time, then, as if having thoroughly drained its victim, slid back into the sleer burrows.
Crane remained motionless, deep down inside himself.
There were all sorts of interesting and complex compounds floating about in the air—the pollution produced by a nascent industrial society. But, as he walked through the streets of the Overcity, Skellor also noticed oddities that could only result from such industry ascending from a basis of a previously acquired body of knowledge. The phocells were a prime example: photoactive electricity was not something you stumbled across in a society where people still used oil lamps and candles. Another such example was invisible to the few citizens still up and about this night, but not so to Skellor. He tracked the neat line of red-shifted photons spearing up from the tower below which he now stood. This edifice was a steel column topped by a small dome, from which protruded the cylinder of an optical telescope. Yet certainly it was not that item which was producing the laser beam.