Deep Eyes

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He and Quath found the alien machine in the yawning darkness. Quath sent an emag warning, a crisp orange pinprick popping through Toby’s sen-sorium—then silence.

Toby waited. Quath moved silently to his right, enclosed in a sullen black so deep he could not see his hand without using his sensorium. The Mantis was up ahead somewhere. Senses he could not even name told him that other creatures moved here, too. They had little or no emag but they were tracking, following chemical trails left by others—scents seeping from deep glands, puffs of clinging odor released by accident or design. Everything here had mastered these chemical channels.

Toby’s natural senses were deaf to them. Humans drank in sounds and sights, the primate strong suits. Here the small noises of burrowing and scampering told him that there were other theaters, other plays in progress, and he would never be in the private audience. Yet he and even Quath had been of that theater, graduated from it perhaps to this curious shadow world of electromagnetic scents and jolting voltage deaths.

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