What a thought! Plainly she was trying to keep me off balance. I could feel control slip away. Soon I’d find myself vowing to set sail for those dark ruins you can dimly see from Terminus Rock, if you aim an urrish telescope across the Rift’s deep waters.
Just then, my eye caught a familiar disturbance under the placid bay. A ruddy shape swarmed up the sandy bank until a dappled crimson carapace burst forth, spraying saltwater. From that compact pentagonal shell, a fleshy dome raised, girdled by a glossy black ring.
“Pincer!” I cried, glad of a distraction from Huck’s hot enthusiasm. “Come over and help me talk to this silly—”
But the young qheuen burst ahead, cutting me off even before water stopped burbling from his speech vents.
“M-m-mo-mo-mon—”
Pincer’s not as good at Anglic as Huck and me, especially when excited. But he uses it to prove he’s as humicking modern as anyone. I held up my hands. “Easy, pal! Take a breath. Take five!”
He exhaled a deep sigh, which emerged as a pair of bubble streams where two spiky legs were still submerged. “I s-s-seen ’em! This time I really s-seen ’em!”
“Seen what?” Huck asked, rolling across squishy sand.
The vision band rimming Pincer’s dome looked in all directions at once. Still, we could feel our friend’s intense regard as he took another deep breath, then sighed a single word.
“Monsters!”
II. THE BOOK OF THE SLOPE
The better part of a million years has passed since the Buyur departed Jijo, obeying Galactic rules of planetary management when their lease on this world expired, whatever they could not carry off, or store in lunar caches, the Buyur diligently destroyed, leaving little more than vine-crusted rubble where their mighty cities once towered, gleaming under the sun.