1A/N: In which Ledi, Wyman, and Brendan meet the Medusas and get quite muddy. Please enjoy, and review if you will!
Though the sun was hidden by the thick hazy blue atmosphere and scattered grey clouds, they could feel its heat and sweated more profusely than before. Each of them held their own canteens and drank liberally. The ground proved difficult to traverse, the furrows making for uneven, if predictable, ground that sunk a few inches every step. Ledi's shallow boots quickly accumulated the moist dirt, packing against her skin. Thankfully the soil had few stones, and she only had to stop a few times to pick out an irritating rock.
They spoke little. Like in the ship, Ledi felt as though they were preparing themselves. She walked behind Wyman, fixing her eyes on the black horse tail tied at the base of his skull, the leather armor and metal plates that made him look even more of a giant. They found a rhythm to move more easily, stepping high each step in a ridiculous mockery of a march. The huge stones, as tall as a house, leaned at odd angles and gave them perspective, landmarks to see go by them though they dotted the red earth as far as they could see. Ledi felt exhausted. She wished they were walking parallel to the waves of earth instead of straight across them, but Gilbert had said west, so west they moved.
The heat lessened as the hours wore on. Ledi began to feel restless.
"Shouldn't we have seen something by now?" She said, not quite hiding the exasperation in her voice.
"Maybe." Wyman said.
It wasn't until the troughs of the furrows were hidden in deep shadow and the diluted sun colored the sky a luminescent orange that they felt something; a vibration, more a hum hardly discernable in the soles of their shoes.
Brendan paused, looking down in surprise, then gestured that they should keep moving. Ledi noticed him pulling Polly out of his pack, the double sided ear trumpet wired to a black gem Gilbert referred to as living stone. The device was commonly called the Polylingual Parrot, a handy mechanism his people used to communicate with different lingual communities on his planet. He speculated it should work with other races, though he wasn't certain the bacteria in the stone could adapt to a language that evolved from a completely different source.
As the vibration grew in intensity, Ledi found herself very much wishing the bacteria would be able to adapt. The thrum under their feet reached a buzzing crescendo, and then faded.
Abruptly something shot from the soft earth about twenty feet ahead of them. Ledi gasped in surprise, clutching the telephone buttoned to the front of her overalls in defense. She realized glumly this was actually her only defense. That and a piece of rock with ear trumpets and an undoubtedly confused colony of bacteria living in it.
"Good day," Brendan said, holding Polly up to his mouth. The machine gave an amplified, deep moan. Ledi got a good look at the thing before them, and through her mingled shock and horror managed to be impressed at Brendan's quick recovery.
The creature was struggling out of the earth. It looked at first glance like an oversized maggot. It tugged itself forward on clubbed feet that gave her the impression of a crippled praying mantis. Smaller, insectile legs were slowly popping out of the earth, joining in the pull with scrabbling uselessness on such a big body. Its torso and head bobbed as it tried to gain leverage against the earth. The head was a pale grey tinted by the earth's reddish hue. Small black hairs covered it, and clumps of dirt fell off of these as it struggled to pull itself out of the ground. Four mandibles formed a mouth, like two parrots' beaks come together in an indented, sinister center. Its neck stretched a while before reaching the clubbed claws, wrinkled infinitely as though deflated and wobbling with the erratic movement. The neck, too, was lined with dark wiry hairs. As more of its body gained leverage, the wrinkled skin gave way to a fat body with taut skin that shone with underlying muscles straining impossibly in a writhing movement that did more to help it move than the useless, scrabbling legs.
Finally it pulled a rounded, dark grey rump out that seemed to end abruptly. It shook its head, sending clumps of dirt flying and setting its neck into a flapping frenzy. Then it turned blindly towards them. It made a deep, animated rumble without moving its mandibles that came out of Polly as a tinny "Good day, bad harvest." The folds in its neck expanded briefly with the sound.
Ledi found she was more surprised than relieved that the machine worked. The monster before them repulsed her, but she was not frightened.
"I am sorry for that," Brendan said, echoed by a projected grumble filled with mysterious inflections from the ear trumpet. Brendan eyed the machine suspiciously.
The huge worm bobbed his head and swung a claw before him lightly like a knobby grey pendulum, moving the dirt distractedly in a way not unlike a nervous child busying his hand with pulling out strands of grass.
"I don't think I have met you," the creature rumbled.
"We have never been here before. Are you the only one who lives here?"
"No. Who are you?" Polly phrased the question with benign curiosity, though Ledi wasn't sure how accurately it translated intonations.
"I am Brendan. This is Wyman," he gestured at the steady man, "and this is Ledi. We are curious about you."
"I thought you came with someone else," the worm said.
"On the ship, yes."
"Are you his children?"
Brendan inspected Polly untrustingly again.
"No, we just rode in it."
"Where is he?" the creature moved closer, its skin rippling with the movement of unseen muscles. The wiry hair that covered its head and neck like down writhed slowly. The three ambassadors could feel humming beneath them again. Ledi fingered the telephone again, wondering if things were going well or if they were in imminent danger.
"He went home," Brendan finally said.
"Oh." The answer, at least from Polly, sounded sad. Ledi thought she could detect a definite deflation in the worm's voice.
Another fuzzy head struck out of the ground thirty feet off, and another much closer. Both were significantly bigger than their current conversationalist, the heads larger than a wheelbarrow. Their entrance was much smoother, slipping out of the ground with practiced ease and almost none of the awkward scrambling from the thin legs on its side. Their wiry hairs were much longer, looking more like a shaggy, balding mane.
The close one regarded the three. Ledi was horrified to see that even though the hair was much longer, it still twitched and moved as though sniffing the air before them.
"Hello," it said. The deep bass trembled in their chests, though Polly's translation was the same thin, tinny voice.
Ledi waved shyly, then put her hand down with a snap, embarrassed she had forgotten herself.
"You must excuse the child. He is still barely more than blind." It bobbed its head, the mane wriggling manically. "So you seem to be, as well."
"Not in the way we know blind to be," Brendan said. He glanced anxiously towards the darkening sky, now a blood red that mirrored the earth. "Though I suppose soon that might be true." It was doubtful any moon could pierce the thick atmosphere.
The three worms began speaking to one another their necks bulging and shrinking, voices mingling and overlapping each other like landslides, if landslides occurred in differing pitches and intonations. Polly did its best, but only caught snatches of words, phrases that made little sense and without context were useless. The voices thrummed through the humans' chests. Ledi felt like she was all hollow inside and if she opened her mouth she, too, would have a deep rumbling bass.
Finally they silenced, and the world felt still and empty.
The farthest worm filled its wrinkled neck so full of air that it stretched taut and shone. The fading rays of the sun filtered through the thin membrane, displaying the tiny veins that ran through it. Like a bullfrog's bellow in slow motion, the neck ballooned out below the beast's bulbous head.
They braced themselves for a powerful noise, but none came. The neck slowly deflated, a sound carried at an octave so deep it went undetected by the straining humans. The other two worms swayed as if in pain, and the down hairs writhed like so many stuck snakes. Finally the neck had returned to its natural, wrinkled state and the worms recovered themselves.
"You must be blind," the youngest said, shaking his head slowly as if to clear it. "That even hurt me."
But they hardly heard the patronizing remark, because shadows were coming from the sky in answer to the call, black against the deepening dark. As they grew closer they seemed to be great beetles, large as small houses, with long, flowing beards that streamed behind and under them as they flew. They pawed at the air with winged forefeet as if they were swimming. Four of them, wing casings fluttering furiously, landed nearby. Their black wings folded down, just as a beetle's.
Like the worms, they had four mandibles where a mouth, eyes, and nose should have been. Long, black wiry hair grew thickly on their head and necks that protruded from the beetle's body like a parody of a grandfather turtle. Where the worms had clubbed feet like a praying mantis' claws, the beetles had knobby forefeet that forked into thin claws, with a thick skin strung between them to create additional wings. The hair writhed in a wild halo that stretched impossibly long in every direction. Ledi thought of a bearded Medusa, and tried not to giggle. They were easier to look at than the worms, but felt as profoundly alien as everything on the red world.
It was a sensation Ledi realized she needed to familiarize herself with.