The Lavalite World

On the other hand, because of the much weaker gravity, only one-sixteenths that of the primary, their expenditure of energy took them much more swiftly and further than it would have on the planet. And there were so many carcasses and dead plants around that they didn't have to hunt for food. Another item of nourishment was the flying seed. When the separation had started, every plant on the moon had released hundreds of seeds which were borne by the wind on tissue-thin alates or masses of threads. These rose, some drifting down towards the parent world, others falling back onto the satellite. They were small, but a score or so made a mouthful and provided a protein-high vegetable. Even the filmy wings and threads could be eaten.

"Nature's, or Urthona's, way of making sure the various species of plants survive the catastrophe," Kickaha said.

But when the mutations of terrain stopped and the carcasses became too stinking to eat, they had to begin hunting. Though the humans could run and jump faster, once they learned the new method of locomotion, the animals were proportionately just as speedy. But Kickaha fashioned a new type of bola, two or three antelope skulls co

Those seeds that fell back on the splitoff put down roots, and new plants grew quickly. The grass and the soil around them became bleached as the nutritional elements were sucked up. The plantling would grow a set of legs and pull up the main root or break it off and move on to rich soil. The legs would fall off but a new set, longer and stronger, would grow. After three moves, the plants stayed rooted until they had attained their full growth. Their maturation period was exceedingly swift by Terrestrial standards.

Of course, many were eaten by the elephants, moosoids, and other animals which made plants their main diet. But enough survived to provide countless groves of ambulatory trees and bushes.

The three had their usual troubles with baboons, dogs, and the feline predators. Added to those was a huge bird they'd never seen before. Its wing-spread was fifty feet, though the body was comparatively small. Its head was scarlet; the eyes, cold yellow; the green beak, long, hooked, and sharp. The wings and body were bluish, and the short, thick heavily taloned legs were ochre. It swooped down from the sky just after dusk, struck, and carried its prey off. Since the gravity was comparatively weak here, it could lift a human into the air. Twice, one of them almost got Anana. Only by throwing herself on the ground when Kickaha had cried a warning had she escaped being borne away.

"I can't figure out what it does when there is no satellite," Kickaha said. "It could never lift a large body from the surface of the primary. So what does it live on between-times?"

"Maybe it just soars around, living off its fat, until the planet spits up another part of it," Anana said.

They were silent for a while then, imagining these huge aerial creatures gliding through the air fifty miles up, half-asleep most of the time, waiting

for the mother planet to propel its meat on a Moon-sized dish up to it.

"Yes, but it has to land somewhere on the satellite to eat and to mate," he said. "I wonder where?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"I got an idea, but it's so crazy I don't want to talk about it yet. It came to me in a dream last night."

Anana suddenly gripped his arm and pointed upward. He and McKay looked up. There, perhaps a half a mile above them, the palace was floating by.

They stood silently watching it until it had disappeared behind some high mountains.

Kickaha sighed and said, "I guess that when it's on automatic it circles the satellite. Urthona must have set it to do that so that he could observe the moon. Damn! So near yet so far!"

The Lord must have gotten pleasure out of watching the shifts in the terrain and the adjustments of people and animals to it. But surely he hadn't lived alone in it. What had he done for companionship and sex? Abducted women from time to time, used them, then abandoned them on the surface? Or kicked them out and watched them fall one hundred miles, perhaps accompanying them during the descent to see their horror, hear their screams?

It didn't matter now. Urthona's victims and Urthona were all dead now. What was important was how they were going to survive the rejoining of primary and secondary.

Anana said that her uncle had told her that about a month prior to this event, the satellite again mutated form. It changed from a globe to a rough

rectangle of earth, went around the primary five times, and then lowered until it became part of the mother world again.

Only those animals that happened to be on the upper part had a chance to live through the impact. Those on the undersurface would be ground into bits and their pieces burned. And those living in the area of the primary onto which the satellite fell would also be killed.

Urthona had, however, given some a chance to get out and from under. He'd given them an instinctive mechanism which made them flee at their fastest speed from any area over which the satellite came close. It had a set orbital path prior to landing, and as it swung lower every day, the animals "knew" that they had to leave the area. Unfortunately, only those on the outer limits of the impact had time to escape.

The plants were too slow to get out in time, but their instincts made them release their floating seeds.

All of this interested Kickaha. His chief concern, however, was to determine which side of the moon the three would be on when the change from a globe to a rectangle was made. That is, whether they would be on the upper side, that opposite the planet, or on the underside.

"There isn't any way of finding out," Anana said. "We'll just have to trust to luck."

"I've depended on that in the past," he said. "But I don't want to now. You only use luck when there's nothing else left."

He did much thinking about their situation in the days and nights that slid by. The moon rotated slowly, taking about thirty days to complete a single spin. The colossal body of the planet hanging in the sky revealed the healing of the great wound made by the withdrawal of the splitoff. The only thing for which they had gratitude for being on the secondary was that they weren't in the area of greatest shape-change, that near the opening of the hole, which extended to the center of the planet. They saw, when the clouds were missing, the sides fall in, avalanches of an unimaginable but visible magnitude. And the mass shrank before their eyes as adjustments were made all over the planet. Even the sea-lands must be undergoing shakings of terrifying strength, enough to make the minds and souls of the inhabitants reel with the terrain.

"Urthona must have enjoyed the spectacle when he was riding around in his palace," Kickaha said. "Sometimes I wish you hadn't killed him, Anana. He'd be down there now, finding out what a horror he'd subjected his creations to."

One morning Kickaha told his companions about a dream he'd had. It had begun with him enthusiastically telling them about his plan to get them off the moon. They'd thought it was wonderful, and all three had started at once on the project. First, they'd walked to a mountain the top of which was a sleeping place for the giant birds, which they called rocs. They'd climbed to the top and found that it contained a depression in which the rocs rested during the day.

The three had slid down the slope of the hollow, and each had sneaked up on a sleeping roc. Then each had killed his or her bird by driving the knives and a pointed stick through the bird's eye into its brain. Then they'd hidden under a wing of the dead bird until the others had awakened and flown off. After which they'd cut off the wings and tail feathers and carried them back to their camp.