GENELLAN: PLANETFALL(137)
The clouds! The clouds were flowing like wild things overhead! They were changing colors—luminescent and pulsing and golden. The clouds were beautiful animals descending from the skies. MacArthur could reach out and touch them. He could fly! He could fly—fly like the animals in the clouds. What was happening? This was not real. His intellect struggled to overcome his senses, but he was no longer sure of anything. Something was wrong with his body—with his mind. He was hallucinating. It was too real, too vivid. Golden horses! Golden horses, heavy chested and silky manes streaming, were running over the prairie. Beautiful. So beautiful. He could smell them.
MacArthur was afraid to move. His very being eclipsed his corporeal form, as if he would burst his skin like an overinflated balloon. The spinach stuff—the cud! He stopped chewing. He dimly deduced the dweller's stimulant was causing him to hallucinate. He spit it out just as his arms and legs seem to disappear; he fell forward, like a falling tree, squarely on his face. Helpless, mouth open and drooling into the tundra, he watched magical horses gallop across the plains, just paces in front of him, thundering hoofs vibrating the ground. What magnificence! Euphoric, he managed to roll over on his back and stare at the sky. Everything was beautiful.
* * *
"The thickweed is taken over!" Brappa exclaimed.
The stampeding herds were clear, and a veering wind kept the invisible musk cloud at bay. Braan looked back at the other longlegs, Giant-one and One-arm, stumbling drunkenly over the prairie grasses in the far distance.
"He has spit it out. He will recover," Braan said, standing over the prostrate stranger. "Let us skin the buffalo."
Brave-crazy-one lay spread-eagled, eyes glazed. Braan picked up the discarded wad of thickweed pulp, broke it apart, and placed it in his leather pouch. The hunters pulled out knives, and each headed for a downed animal.
Braan was not long at his task when he noticed the stricken long-legs staggering toward him, head in his hands. His comrades were trying to help him, but Brave-crazy-one rejected their assistance.
"The long-legs recovers," Brappa screeched.
"Its head will surely ache," Braan warbled.
* * *
Buccari adjusted her position so that the light from the extravagant campfire fell more directly on the dweller message. She half listened to the raucous banter, feeling peculiarly light-hearted. They were starting a new life, their new settlement awakening. And they had just finished their first year on the planet. Not an Earth year—a full Genellan year—four hundred days, four hundred twenty-six hour days.
"I saw horses. Golden horses!" MacArthur declared.
"You're crazy, Mac," Fenstermacher said. "Tatum says you were all as drunk as a dogs."
"Leave him alone, Winfried," Dawson said. "Look what he did for us. What a feast."
"Dawson' s right, for the first time in her life, Fenstermacher," Wilson said. "Stop picking on Mac, and be thankful you've survived a year on this planet. I don't know how we managed to put up with you."
"Yeah, Winnie," Lee said. "Happy anniversary to us all."
Cliff dwellers and humans sat around the evening fire. The midsummer sun had reluctantly settled behind the soaring peaks, leaving clear skies layered in vivid orange and deepest blue above the stark sawtooth silhouette. The meal was over, but the campfire burned brightly, a celebration of survival.
MacArthur's provision of buffalo steaks and hides had changed the dubious nature of the occasion into a festive and social mood. The campers reveled in the telling and retelling of MacArthur' s adventure, embellishments growing with each new version. MacArthur regaled the listeners, humans and cliff dwellers, with outrageous histrionics and exaggerated sign language. The Marine danced around the fire, pulling Tonto along behind him. The young hunter parodied the dancing human, and soon all the hunters were jumping to their feet and dancing a pagan conga, whistling and screeching in a snaking line behind MacArthur, while the humans pounded out a rhythmic chant, clapping and laughing.
The cliff dwellers had taken to joining the humans at their evening campfire. The taller guilders had grown comfortable with the humans, having found living with earthlings more tolerable than living in the woods with their hunter cousins. A tent adjacent to the campfire had been provided for the visiting workers, while the hunters remained content inhabiting the rocks on the wooded peninsula, close to the fish.
Dancing shadows cast by the flickering firelight struck the newly risen stone walls and foundation of the main lodge looming above the fire pit, sheltering the flames from steady northerlies. With the help and guidance of dweller stone carvers, construction of the lodge had moved rapidly, and its stone walls were nearing completion.