Cosmocopia Read Online Free PDF Page B

sending long shadows of the reeds across the land when Crutchsump decided it was safe to venture out onto the drained flats. She roused Pirkle and descended the ramp. At the base of the ramp she removed her huaraches, slinging them over a shoulder, and stepped barefoot onto the mud. Each step immersed her to the ankles, but no further, and so while progress was laborious, she was in no immediate danger of becoming mired.
    Here and there among the reeds, Crutchsump found an occasional drifted shifflet skeleton which she promptly bagged. But she knew that the bulk of the harvest lay beyond the reeds, closer to the ocean’s marge. The shifflet bones were anchored by organic threads formed during the decomposition process of the parent to the heavy, stable egg clutches, providing a protective cage for the future generation of shifflets. Removing each bone cage would doom that clutch. Nevertheless, despite the harvest, shifflets returned in force each year, so Crutchsump had no remorse.
    As she forced her way through the reed jungle, Crutchsump looked warily around for signs of the monster.
    She came to a dry mound, a trampled area of the reeds that might have denoted a person-sized nest elevated above the high tide. And indeed, there were discarded fruit rinds and gorgit skins there. But no monster.
    Yet.
    Crutchsump’s steady passage through the reeds was interrupted once, when Pirkle chanced to tangle with a grapple-gnaw. The wurzel stumbled in its eager bumbling explorations on the grapple-gnaw’s burrow and was instantly wrapped by three slimy ribbed and striped tentacles that shot forth from the mud. But Pirkle’s stout mandibles severed those fleshy ropes easily, and in the end it was Pirkle who dined, not the grapple-gnaw.
    When Crutchsump finally reached the actual beach, she was rewarded by the sight of innumerable shifflet skeletons. Scintillas practically in her pocket! She began to reap them hurriedly, discarding the worthless eggs, for only half of Watermilk remained above the horizon.
    Her back sore from repetitive bending, her sack full, Crutchsump turned at last, amidst deepening twilight, toward the shore.
    There at the edge of the reeds, just yards away, stood the monster, watching her.
    Crutchsump let out an involuntary shriek. Pirkle, an egg clutch dangling from his mandibles, looked up. Spotting the monster, the wurzel commenced a shrill metallic keening and began to charge the apparition.
    Expecting her pet to be torn in half, mutilated and tossed aside, Crutchsump cried out, “Pirkle, no!”
    But the wurzel did not listen this time, and continued its charge.
    The monster did something utterly unexpected then.
    It collapsed in a heap to the muck, shielding its obscenely naked head with its arms, and emitting an all-too-human wail.
    Realizing her golden opportunity to flee with her life and harvest intact, Crutchsump darted inland, the bag full of lightweight bones thumping against her back in encouragement.
    But then she stopped, awash with anxiety.
    Pirkle! She couldn’t abandon her pet! Life was lonely enough with the beloved wurzel as her companion. How could she live after consigning Pirkle to such a horrid fate?
    Every nerve ablaze with anguish and fear, Crutchsump turned back to face the monster and advance upon it, to rescue Pirkle. She prepared the swing her only weapon, her lightly laden sack.
    What she saw utterly confounded her.
    Sunk in the muck, the monster was clutching Pirkle as if for comfort, its obscenely naked face pressed against Pirkle’s back. And the wurzel was licking the amniotic mud from the monster’s legs with its raspy strigil.
    Slowly, Crutchsump advanced on the unlikely tableau, ready to flee or defend herself at any second.
    But the monster made no threatening moves, continuing instead merely to clutch Pirkle like a man adrift at sea clutching a log, all the while sobbing and wailing.
    As Crutchsump got closer, she could make out words of distress and pain in the