Free Ecce and Old Earth by Jack Vance Page B

fabric which insulated him from exterior heat and humidity by means of a flowing film of cool air from a small air-conditioning unit. He stepped outside and with a machete hacked the sharloc corpse into four segments, grateful that the filters in his air-conditioning unit excluded all but a trace of the stench.
    One of the segments he tied to the forward end of the Skyrie’s frame with twenty feet of light cord; he similarly tied a second gobbet to the after end of the frame. The other two pieces he gingerly caught up in a bag and loaded upon the bed of the flyer.
    Syrene now stood an hour high in the east. Glawen looked to the north across the river, here two miles wide and marked only by drifting snags and detritus. Before him, at the back of swamp and jungle, nose the bulk of Shattorak, gloomy, brooding and sinister.
    Glawen climbed into the Skyrie, took it aloft, and flew at low altitude back across the river with the two gobbets of sharloc dangling below. Where swamp impinged upon the river he saw a tribe of mud-walkers, hoping and sliding, leaping and marching, from tuft to tuft, running high-legged across the slime with great finesse and style, pausing to thrust down their lances in hopes of harpooning a mud slug. Glawen saw that they were being stalked by a flat black many-legged creature which slid across the slime with stealthy movements. Here, thought Glawen, was a good test of his theory. He changed course, to drift over the flat black predator, the segments of sharloc hanging low. The predator writhed forward suddenly, but the mud-walkers had fled in bounds and jumps; and now, from a distance, inspected the Skyrie with astonished attitudes.
    The test, thought Glawen, had been indecisive. He flew on, toward the dark line of dendrons and water-logged trees where swamp merged with jungle. In one of the trees he noticed a monstrous serpent forty feet long and three feet in diameter, with fangs at one end and a scorpion’s sting at the other. It slid slowly down a branch, head dangling toward the ground. Glawen flew close above; it writhed and coiled and flailed its sting into the air and then slid rapidly away.
    In this case, thought Glawen, the trial had seemed to yield positive results.
    Skimming the treetops Glawen searched the area below and presently noticed a large hammer-headed saurian directly ahead. He lowered the Skyrie slowly above the mottled black and green back, until the sharloc segments dangled only three feet from the saurian’s head. It became agitated, lashed its heavy tail, roared and charged a tree; the tree fell crashing to the ground. The saurian pounded onward, whipping its tail to right and left.
    Once again the test might be interpreted positively, but whatever the case, Glawen deemed it prudent to delay his expedition up the side of Shattorak until mid-day, when – so it was said – the beasts of Ecce became torpid. In the meantime, he must find cover for the Skyrie, to keep it safe from molestation. He approached the edge of the jungle, and landed in a small open area.
    The mud-walkers had been watching with curiosity and a constant interchange of rattles and squeaks. With grotesque celerity they scampered around to the windward slide of the Skyrie, and slowly approached, beating on the ground with their lances and extending red ruffs to signal displeasure. Fifty feet from the Skyrie they halted and began to hurl mud-balls and twigs. In exasperation Glawen took the Skyrie into the air and flew back toward the river. A half-mile upstream he found a cove shaped by the current and dropped the Skyrie into the water, so it floated on its pontoons. He took it to a tuffet of thorn but was deterred from mooring the flyer by a horde of angry insects, oblivious to the submerged chunks of sharloc – of questionable efficacy in any case, after submersion.
    Glawen let the flyer drift on the current to a stand of black dendrons, all pulp, punk and scaly bark, but adequate for the mooring of the