James Blish by The Night Shapes

Author:The Night Shapes [Shapes, The Night]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-04-12T05:00:00+00:00

V The Lodge

Kit stepped out of his lodge onto the springy turf and took a deep breath. All around him the baobab trees towered, except directly back of the lodge, where the mountain began. Pearly morning light filtered through the leaves onto the deep, rich green of the loam. Over the sonorous whispering of the nearby river, there came a chittering of monkeys, and the sound of a scampering game being played invisibly high up among the leaves.

Kit sighed. Here, in the deep Gunda province, it was cool and clear most of the day in this season. The coast was the steaming country, where white men wasted and died quickly, yellow with the jaundice of alcohol, their ears ringing with quinine. Here he was not even a white man, and he had no encumbrances. He should be satisfied. He was satisfied. What was the matter, anyhow?

The wind shifted slightly and Kit felt a delicate pulsing in his ears, as if tiny paws were pattering directly on his eardrums. He stiffened and turned. Yes, sure enough; there was a word in the air, from a long way away, somewhere down by the Luberfu. After a while the thrumming became stronger, as the Wassabi village girot picked up the message and passed it along.

Over Kit’s head the foliage stirred, and a great, flat wedge dipped down to stare at the lone man. Kit grinned wryly.

“Hello, Manalendi. Hear something?”

The python shot out its forked tongue and withdrew it with the quickness of lightning. To that tongue the noise was painfully loud, and probably obscured sounds in which the snake was really interested, sounds no human being could hear. The huge head wove uneasily.

Kit could be of no help. Manalendi’s overwhelming curiosity never failed to amuse him, but fundamentally he still did not like having been adopted by a twenty-five-foot constrictor. The creature had been following him around for nearly a year now, sleeping somewhere near the lodge, departing only on brief trips to snitch a chicken or a pig from the Wassabi; and who could say what that meant?

Kit resisted the temptation to believe that he understood it, even partially. It was true that he had something of an affinity for snakes, ever since that memorable summer at a boy’s camp when a beautiful king snake had adopted the cabin in which the eight-year-old Kit slept, and had allowed him alone to handle the living cableeven to carry it about, coiled drily around one arm, tail high, head at wrist. He had rapidly lost all fear of snakes as a class, and soon thereafter had learned to respect them; but to understand them? That was something else again.

In the past year he had allowed no one to molest Manalendi, not even the justifiably resentful tribesmen on whom he was poaching; and once, with unusual fool-hardiness, he had helped the awesome mass of power through one session of its only recurrent crisisthe shedding of its skin. That had been downright crazy, for Manalendi had

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