Furious Gulf Read Online Free PDF Page A

head. Yellow stick-arms like hard plastic. Fleshy purple folds.
     But metal, too, because Quath was a composite creature. Bossed steel studded with protrusions. Riveted copper—or were those
     really warts, not rivets? Crusted flanks above the legs looked like shaped ceramic, but seemed to flex and work as Quath walked.
     “End of pleasantries, goggle-eyes. Cermo-the-Slow sent me. We’re wondering if you know anything about getting food out of
     these clouds.”
    
    “Great—tell us how.”
    
    “The blue balls? Okay, we skip them.”
    
    “The sail-snake? How about eating the snake itself?”
    
    “Hmmm. We don’t kill other animals any more, even though we used to, back on our homeworld.”
    
    “The mechs, I guess.” Toby had to make himself recall the horrors of the Bishop’s retreat from their home. The mechs were
     a mechanical civilization that dominated this entire region of space. “They came to Snowglade way before I was born. Mechs
     killed off just about anything not smart enough to get out of the way, fast—including forests. Which made Family Bishop decide
     to stop helping them out by eating our fellow creatures. Now we eat plants.”
    
    “How do you know that?”
         has shaped you as dietary opportunists.>
    “So we’re talented—any problem with that?”
    
    “But that sail-snake—it’s nothing like us. I mean, maybe we can bend the rules a little.” He wondered how much of his reasoning
     was based on his rumbling stomach.
    Quath swiveled her eye-stalks, which from Toby’s experience might mean that she had decided to act.      decided by experience, not rumination.>
    Toby had to call up his teacher Aspect, Isaac, to tell him what “rumination” meant. It was irksome when an alien knew the
     language better than he did.
    Toby was figuring out the definition and so was caught off guard when Quath came clambering up the bowl, her bulging green
     throat pulsing. Without a further signal she swept up Toby in two telescoping copper arms. Quath accelerated, ignoring Toby’s
     squawks. Thick pads held him as they raced at startling speed through twisting corridors, down a shaft—and into open space.
    Perspectives whirled. Toby felt a hard shove of acceleration. “Hey, what are you—where—”
    
    Toby sputtered objections, but Quath paid no attention to his injured pride. Instead, the huge alien held him even more tightly
     as they jetted away from
Argo
.
    He was nearly completely enclosed by massive, soft pads. Somehow, it was restful to know that Quath, despite an annoying abruptness,
     was looking after him—in fact, looking after the whole Family Bishop. Toby had not had anyone hold him in this enveloping
     way for a long, bleak time. His memory slid back to Snowglade again, to better times.
    He recalled distant, fuzzy images, coated with the soft tones of his mother’s voice. Long-ago nights in the lost, hidden Citadel,
     he had lain in his bed, tangled in the sheets, awakened by some noise. He had heard his parents murmuring. His door was ajar,
     letting a slant of feeble light into his room. The warm glow and distant talk had been reassuring, as if his parents made
     the same soft, furry sounds that his stuffed animals did, or he imagined they did, as he slept with them. He had hugged his
     animals happily, Billy Bigsnout and Alvin Apple-eater, and sung to them. His mother had heard and come into his room and his
     father too, and his father had said, “Those