Free For Love of Mother-Not by Alan Dean Foster Page A

Mother Mastiff surely had customers suffering from snake phobias, and they might not take kindly to Pip’s presence—besides, the stall was unheated. By the same token, he didn’t think Mother Mastiff would react with understanding if the snake playfully sprang out at her from one of the kitchen storage cabinets while she was trying to prepare a meal.
    His own room was spartan: There was only the small computer terminal and chip readout, the single clothes closet he had rigged himself, and the bed. The closet would have to do. Carrying the snake into his room, Flinx set it down on the foot of the bed. Then he made a pile of some dirty clothes on the closet floor. Pip looked clean enough; most scaled creatures were dirt-shedders, not collectors. He lifted the snake and set it down gently in the clothes, careful not to bruise the delicate wings. It recoiled itself there, seemingly content. Flinx smiled at it. He didn’t smile often.
    “Now you stay there, Pip,” he whispered, “and in the morning we’ll see about scrounging something for you to eat.” He watched the snake for several minutes before fatigue returned with a rush. Yawning, he pushed his own clothes off the bed, set his boots on the drypad, and climbed back into bed. A few droplets of water had crawled under the edge of the slickertic. He brushed them from his hair, sighed deeply, and lapsed into a rich, undisturbed sleep.
    Once the flow of mental energy from the human in the bed had smoothed out and the snake was certain its new symbiote was not about to enter a disturbing REM period, it quietly uncoiled itself and slithered out of the closet. Silently, it worked its way up one of the bed legs, emerging next to the single battered pillow.
    The animal rested there for a long moment, gazing through double lidded eyes at the unconscious biped. Inside itself, the snake was warm and comfortable. The hunger was still there, but it had received an indication of sorts that it would soon be fed.
    The bed was very warm, both the thermal blanket and the symbiote’s mass exuding comfortable, dry heat. The snake slithered across the pillow until it was resting against the back of the human’s head. It stretched itself once, the wings flexing and retracting. Then it coiled itself tightly into the convenient pocket formed by the symbiote’s neck and shoulder. Soon its own brain waves matched those of the human as it drifted into its own variety of sleep.

5
    M other Mastiff was careful not to wake the boy as she slowly began backing out of his room. Her eyes, alert and fearful, remained fixed on the alien thing curled up against his head. There was no telling what it might do if startled into wakefulness.
    How the invader had penetrated her tight little home, she had no idea. No time to worry about that now. Her thoughts went to the little gun, the delicate, ladylike needler she kept under her pillow. No, too chancy—the snake was much too close to the boy’s head, and she was not as good a shot as she had been twenty years ago.
    There was also the possibility the invader might not even be dangerous. She certainly did not recognize it. In the ninety plus years she had spent on Moth, she had seen nothing like it. For one thing, there was no hint of fur anywhere on its body. Only scales. That immediately identified it as a non-native. Well, maybe. Moth was home to a few creatures—deep-digging burrowers—that did not sport fur. This didn’t look like a burrower to her, but she was no zoologist, nor had she ever traveled far outside the city limits.
    Yet she felt certain it came from offworld. Something she couldn’t put a mental finger on marked the beast as alien, but that didn’t matter. What did was that it had somehow penetrated to the boy’s room, and she had better do something about it before it woke up and decided the matter for her.
    Get it away from him, she told herself. Away from his head, at least. Get it away, keep it occupied, then wake the boy