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chamber,"
Randall explained, taking us down into the bowl. We carefully avoided the
crumbling supports for the roof beams, crawled through a succession of holes
knocked through the chamber walls, and came to the second-to-last chamber.
Randall had no words to describe what they had seen. He entered the chamber
reluctantly behind Salap. Above, standing gingerly on the walls, Shimchisko --
the only sailor present -- waved down at me, but with little energy and no
cheer.
"I've never heard of ecoi eating humans," Cassir said, his voice quiet in the
shadowed stillness. We splashed carefully between piles of odorless, colorless
brown and white bones. From the walls, uncataloged scions the size of soccer
balls, shriveled limbs tightly curled close, like dead spiders, hung from
twisted brown cords. Drops fell from these into the dark, cloudy puddles
below.
Salap pushed aside the piles to see what Cassir and Randall had spied from
above. It lay half submerged, empty eye sockets staring at the sky, toothless
lower jaw slumped to one side, giving it a grimly joking expression. Salap
hesitated before stooping, and held his hands out for several long seconds
before touching the round shape, or the scatter of slumped and broken bones
and a section of feeble gray carapace, like a tarnished cuirass, covering what
might have once been a chest or thorax.
"It's small," Salap said. "Less than a meter long."
"A child," Randall said, his voice shaky.
"Never a child," Salap said, shaking his head. "Not a human child."
"The skull," Shatro said loudly, lips curled as if offended.
"Leg bones and ... hands," Cassir said.
I knelt beside Salap and turned my attention to the hands. They had five
fingers, but the fingers were unjointed, flexible as rubber. The wrist was
likewise one unit, and the joint that connected it to a long, two-boned
forearm -- the bones given one twist around each other, with a smooth
cartilaginous material between -- was not the joint of any human.
"I've doubted her story from the beginning," Shatro said. "Why would they
leave her here?
What could she and Yeshova have done -- or did she bury her husband -- "
"This isn't Yeshova, or any other human, and there's been no murder here,"
Salap concluded, standing and coughing. "Whatever it is, it isn't fully grown.
It's unfinished."
Randall's face became even more pale, his eyes staring at us as if we were
dreadful angels.
"My God, what, then?"
"Made here," Salap said. He held up his left hand imperiously, palm up, and
coughed again into his other hand. Something in the cloudy water irritated
him. Then he looked between Randall and me, and said, "Get the largest jars.
Throw other specimens out if you have to." He suddenly swore under his breath
and glared at the men and woman standing on the walls overhead, and peering
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through the hole gouged in the chamber. "Not a word of this to Nimzhian, and
not a word to anyone on board ship. We will tell them after we've studied the
specimen, and in our own good time.
Master Randall, will you guarantee this for me?"
Randall nodded, face still pale.
"Good."
Digging around the bottom of the chamber, within an hour we found three of the
unfinished scions -- if indeed that was what they were. I helped Salap
photograph the remains, using our hands and a metric ruler for size
comparison, in case the specimens disintegrated, as some already had. "Send
down some hot wax," Salap instructed as the glass jars were lowered. I filled
the jars with water from the chamber, and one by one, we lifted the fragile
remnants and lowered them delicately into the jars, through the muddy fluid to
the bottom.
As he sealed the jars with paraffin, Salap looked up at me and said, "A fair
imitation, no?" He gave me a grin that seemed more than a little ghoulish.
We stored the specimen jars in a small volcanic cave near the beach, out of
the sun, and file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Legacy.txt (100 of
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file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Legacy.txt covered them with wet
tarps to keep them cool. Leaving us to guard them, Salap and Randall took the
longboat to the _Vigilant_ and spent several hours offshore. Shatro and Cassir
became involved in an argument about what the humanlike remains signified.
Shatro was arguing for some sort of conspiracy between Nimzhian and the ecos
queen; he had made some ridiculous elaborations on the captain's obsession.
Shatro, I saw, would always limit himself to the opinions of those in
authority, and rather than improve upon those opinions, he would make them
seem ridiculous.
Shimchisko had fallen into a silent funk, head bowed, staring at the sand
between his feet as he sat near the cave entrance. I sat beside him, concerned
that his cynical cheer had vanished so completely.
"Olmy, this is the worst thing that's ever happened," he confided.
"Why?"
"It's going to tear us apart. Salap can't keep it secret forever. Randall
doesn't like it;
I don't like it." He shook his hand loosely at Cassir and Shatro, as if
dismissing them. "The first time we're in port..."
I was content just to listen for the moment. In truth, I was stunned myself.
"It shakes my faith," Shimchisko said. "First, that this island has died. Now,
that it was trying to _make_ one of us..." He shrugged. Shimchisko was crafty,
but not a quick thinker about large issues. "Why?" he stared directly at me.
"I don't know," I said.
"They _all_ sample us," Shimchisko continued, frowning deeply. "They steal
from each other -
- are they going to steal from us now?"
The captain came ashore with Salap an hour later. They entered the cave alone
and Salap showed him the jars and described what was in them. When they
emerged from the cave the captain seemed feverish. His face was flushed and he
lurched a little and took Salap's arm. Looking at
Randall and me, he said in a gruff voice, "We need to set sail in two days.
We'll take a direct course to Jakarta. We don't know what we have. We could
stay here and study for years. Primary science. But we don't have the luxury.
Tell Nimzhian we'll be leaving. We'll deliver the supplies we promised
tomorrow."
"Should we tell _her_ anything?" Shatro asked, deep into his suspicions of
conspiracy.
Everyone ignored him, and he lowered his head, staring at us sullenly.
The captain whispered in Randall's ear. Randall turned to Shimchisko and
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Shatro, lifted his hand, and swung it to include Cassir and me in the sweep of
his orders. "Back to the boat. We need to talk in private."
Thornwheel did not seem happy to be left behind.
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