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like a light up here in the day."
"Say! What are you, anyway? I don't think I ever saw somebody of your race
before."
"I'm a Kauri."
The mermaid stared at Marge, then looked at Joe, and gave a knowing smirk.
"Oh...."
"Hey! It's not that way!" Joe protested. "We're old friends and partners,
that's all."
The mermaid looked startled. "Why not?"
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Why not that way? You one of them muscle boys who only likes other muscle
boys or something?"
Joe flushed. "Of course not! I'm happily married!"
Realizing that the mermaid would never let Joe off her hook and that he was
incapable of getting off it gracefully himself. Marge intervened. "I'm a
changeling. We're from the same place and knew each other before I changed."
Tura sighed, and Marge knew that she'd put it down as a case of fate stepping
between two old lovers. Wrong, of course, but unrequited love was a more
convenient explanation than the truth.
They were now well past Castle Terindell and out into the River of Dancing
Gods. The Rossignol and the Danc-
ing Gods met rather gently, but did not immediately mix.
It was fascinating to see the difference in coloration as the two rivers
flowed side by side without any barrier between them except speed and density.
When these finally equaled out, perhaps a few miles south of the junction,
there was a gradual merging into one body.
Marge yawned as the sun took its toll on her. Finally she said, "I'm going to
go down and get some rest. Con-
sidering everything, I think it'll be a good idea if I keep my usual schedule
for this trip. Somebody with good night vision should be awake while we're
tied up."
He nodded. "Go ahead." In point of fact, he thought, it was a very good idea
all around. He wondered if the crew had been told anything about the possible
dangers, and, if so, just how much of a fight they would put up.
He decided not to press the question now, but to ease into it. Marge went
below, and he and the mermaid just sat there and enjoyed the nice day for a
while.
"I hear a lot of birds," Tura said suddenly, frowning.
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"I can't see them, but my hearing and sonar are pretty good, even up here. It
seems as if they're staying directly over the ship."
He looked up and around, only now aware of it as well.
The birds were pretty high up and both overhead and a bit behind, but they
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were only dark shapes at this distance and under these conditions. "Do you
have a telescope or something?" he asked her. "I'd like to know what kind of
birds those are." He was suddenly quite tense. If those were ravens...
"Sound like eagles to me," Tura said. "Funny that they'd be around these
parts."
He relaxed a bit. "That's okay. I think that they and we have a mutual
friend."
In about an hour they came upon a herd of wild hip-
pocampuses, whose horselike heads and forequarters blended into huge,
mermaidlike tails. They were far larger than horses, and they looked meaner
than hippopota-
muses, despite colors ranging from pale blue to passionate
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JACK L. CHALKER 73
VENGEANCE OF THE DANCING GODS
pink. It didn't look as if it would take too many of them to sink the small
ship, and that worried Joe.
"Oh, don't worry so much," Tura chided him. "They're peaceful vegetarians
living in the shallows and feeding off bottom plants much of the time. The
only problem we ever have with them is a stampede, when they'll panic and
instinctively head for deep water. It mostly happens during sudden
thunderstorms, and the weather's clear and sunny."
"Yeah, just the same I "
At that moment, a tremendous explosion seemed to go off right over the herd of
more than thirty of the huge creatures. There was no flash or blast or any
other sign of its cause, but the tremendous boom it created was so strong it
could be felt as well as heard.
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