Carr, Terry - Dance Of The Changer And The Three.txt Read online

  made it. The rest were caught in the tunnels when the Loarra

  swarmed over them, and they went up in smoke too. Then

  the automatic locks shut, and the mountain was sealed off.

  And six of us sat there, watching on the screen as the Loarra

  swept back and forth outside, cleaning up the bits and pieces

  they'd missed.

  I sent out three of my "eyes," but they too were promptly

  vaporized.

  Then we waited for them to hit the mountain itself . . . half

  a dozen frightened men huddled in the comp-room, none of

  us saying anything. Just sweating.

  But they didn't come. They swarmed together in a tight

  spiral, went three times around the mountain, made one final

  salute-dip and then whirled straight up and out of sight. Only

  a handful of them were left behind out there.

  After a while I sent out a fourth "eye." One of the Loarra

  came over, flitted around it like a firefly, biinked through the

  spectrum, and settled down to hover in front for talking. It

  was Pura Pur who was a thousand million billion life cycles

  removed from the Pur we know and love, of course, but

  nonetheless still pretty much Pur.

  I sent out a sequence of lights and movements that trans-

  lated, roughly, as, "What the hell did you do that for?"

  And Pur glowed .pale yellow for several seconds, then gave

  me an answer that doesn't translate. Or, if it does, the transla-

  tion is just "Because."

  Then I asked the question again, in different terms, and she

  gave me the same answer in different terms. I asked a third

  time, and a fourth, and she came back with the same thing.

  She seemed to be enjoying the variations on the Dance; maybe

  she thought we were playing.

  Well . . . We'd already sent out our distress call by then,

  so all we could do was wait for a relief ship and hope they

  wouldn't attack again before the ship came, because we didn't

  have a chance of fighting themwe were miners, not a mili-

  tary expedition. God knows what any military expedition

  could have done against energy things, anyway. While we

  were waiting, I kept sending out the "eyes," and I kept talk-

  ing to one Loarra after another. It took three weeks for the

  ship to get there, and I must have talked to over a hundred

  of them in that time, and the sum total of what I was told

  was this:

  Their reason for wiping out the mining operation was

  untranslatable. No, they weren't mad. No, they didn't want

  us to go away. Yes, we were welcome to the stuff we were

  taking out of the depths of the Loarran ocean.

  And, most importantly: No, they couldn't tell me whether

  or not they were likely ever to repeat their attack.

  So we went away, limped back to Earth, and we all made

  our reports to Unicentral. We included, as I said, every bit of

  data we could think of, including an estimate of the value of

  the new elements on Loarrwhich was something on the

  order of six times the wealth of Earthsystem. And we put it

  up to Unicentral as to whether or not we should go back.

  Unicentral has been humming and clicking for ten months

  now, but it hasn't made a decision.