Once the hive meeting was over they sent
their cleverest healers and scientists to examine the sleeping Celia. They had
spun a silk hammock for her to sleep in and she hung in it now, betraying no
sign of her recent ordeal. They hadn’t dared to prise Boo from her grasp – they
were both in the deepest possible sleep – and so she lay against her chest. The
insect-like creatures had no way of calculating when they might possibly wake up.
They buzzed around
her touching her with their antennae and clicking in their strange stridulating
language. They tried loud noises, energy
nectar and gentle blows to different parts of her body, but she showed no sign
of waking. They left Boo alone – they
could sense the extraordinary density of thaums within her. Some of them
suggested that she might be a sort of bomb.
Eventually, when they
were completely stumped, and fear had begun to build up inside them, they made
the decision to take their visitors to their humanoid trading partners, deep in
the centre of Nux. They looked much more like her kind and perhaps they would
know to do with her. Fear was one of their primary motivations – they had
witnessed phenomena of a power that they had never seen before. They really
didn’t want to see anything like that again.
Two insectoids cut
the cocoon with their sharp mandibles and they eased the sleeping pair into a very
large basket, clearly woven in some green place a long way away. Then they
picked the basket up and flew with it, slowly and gently, down the long, wide,
tunnel that snaked its way away from the blue cloud world and into the night
world. Behind and in front of them were torch bearers; the blue world was
illuminated with a strange diffuse light, but Nux was not. They carried many
spare torches and round spheres of nectar – they knew that it would be a long
dark journey. They clicked encouragement
to each other; perhaps we would call it a travellers’ song.
Deep in her bruised
sleep, Celia was desperate to wake but, although she struggled, she slept on
and on. Their little patch of light
travelled on in the shadows; it was no more than a tiny spark floating through
the roughhewn passageway. Behind and in
front of it there was a darkness that stretched on outwards indefinitely.
No comments:
Post a Comment