There was only one half that was recognizable. That was the front section accordioned against the black cliffside. The back section was queerly warped and sculped into a caricature of a gaunt, metallic tree. Grim shook his head dazedly and lifted his eyes.
The landscape was riotous, mad. Things that looked like trees and bushes lifted branches bent and swollen attached to trunks that looped in bulbous curves. Tiny animals with seven horns and eight legs loped past. A gigantic beast with the hairy head of a mastodon, but with three long trunks, stared at him over the top of a blue bush; trumpeted, and was gone. And high above, a great yellow orb blazed heat and light.
Grim pulled himself up onto a gnarled rock. He squinted upward under a shading hand. He grunted, "Looks synthetic. Something about it—"
Leather rasped on rock, above him. Grim whirled, right hand going for the orris-nut handles of his disintegrator.
A girl stood on a ledge above him. Both hands were raised to the mass of rich black hair tumbling about her cape-hung shoulders. She was almost as tall as Grim, her long legs encased in tight golden skirts, her midriff bare below an ornate bolero that hugged her breasts. Seeing him, she brought her arms down fast, slant dark eyes widening.
Grim chuckled. "If I thought you could understand me, I'd ask you what kind of a crazy place this is."
The girl went back two steps, still staring at him. Her brow wrinkled. She said, "I do not understand you. Please—go away! If you are one of Althaya's men—"
Grim stared in amazement. He had spoken in the space patois that was used by the Fleet and the Caravan crews from Mars on outward. But the girl had spoken to him in the pure, almost archaic mother tongue! He had to stop and recall the idioms and phraseology that men still used on Tellura. Grim, like most others of his breed, had never been on the Earth. They were born and bred among the stars and there they usually died.
"What is your name?" he said haltingly, remembering lessons in the Fleet school. "What is this place? And what in the name of Hades makes all—this?"
He waved his hand at the distorted trees, at the little animals, at the oddly humped ground. The girl did not look at his gesturing hand. Her sloe eyes were fastened to his face; in fright, he thought.