Starquake.pdf

The hunger-twinges in Speckle-Top moved from one eating pouch to another. They got so bad she
began to think about the old days in the dump when the garbage sleds from the centertown eating places
would come. It was long past turnfeast and shehad to get something to eat. The trouble was, the crust
around her was too quiet. The clankers would hear her for sure when she pushed the rock away from the
end of the tunnel. So she moved to the tunnel entrance and stuck one eye through a crack between the
rock and the wall.
"Bright's Curse!" she whispered as she pulled her eye back in—a clanker was out there. But there was
something wrong with her. Putting her eye back out to watch the reaction of the clanker, she moved the
rock slightly. A rasping sound radiated out through the crust, but the clanker didn't move. Growing
bolder, she pushed the rock aside and flowed out into the still sparkling atmosphere.
Keeping her eyes half-shielded under their flaps, she went over to the clanker. The large body had
flowed into a wide oval. A few dull yellow-red eyeballs hung out over their fleshy eyeflaps and the large
clanker badges had fallen from their holding sphincters.
"Too tender to stand a little crustquake, you slink-treading egg-sucker?" Speckle-Top picked up a
clanker badge and stuck it onto her decorationless hide. The badge was heavy, but felt good.
"It looks better on me than you, you eye-ball-sucking father-lover," she said as she flowed up on the
carcass of the clanker and took the rest of her badges. In one pouch she found an
electronic lash. Speckle-Top's hide had tasted the lash the first time she had been caught and had been
foolish enough to try to run away. Ever since, the just let the clankers lead her away when they caught her
doing something wrong. She flowed off the dead clanker and turned on the lash. High voltage currents
flickered across the crust. She swept the lash under the tread of the clanker. The first sweep produced
some reflex reaction in the edges of the tread, but even that stopped as the lash played its aura over the
dead body.
"Just let any clanker try and get me now!" she bragged, waving the lash around. "I'll fry their treads and
eat them for a 'tweenfeast snack!" She pouched the lash and moved on toward the center of town, the
huge badges almost dragging in the crust. The silence bothered her. Ever since she had hatched in the
dump on the other side of town, her tread had felt the constant rustle of tread and hum of machine
coming through the crust. Now there was nothing, not even the high-pitched whine of the Jump Loop.
She finally thought to look up to where the Jump Loop should be, hanging in the sky. It was no longer
there.
"That must have been a slider of a quake!" she whispered to herself as she moved slowly on, her
street-wary tread alert.
When turnfeast came again, she was no longer hungry. She had loaded her pouches full of
strange-tasting foods taken from shops guarded by flowed shopkeepers. Her stuffed hide now glistened
with badges of every kind, including the two-star admiral badges she had stolen from the space-trooper.
Her speckles were covered with splotches of fluorescent body paint inexpertly applied, and around each
eye-stub was one or more expensive glow-jewel eye-rings stolen from a jewelry shop. Her tread felt a
sound off in the distance.
"A clanker!" She moved quickly to a narrow alley between two store compounds. Once in the alley, she
took off the heavy badges, hid the eye-rings in a pouch, and listened carefully with her tread. There
seemed to be only one thing moving and it sounded like a Slink. Feeling a little lonely, she moved off to
find the source of the noise. As soon as she started to move, the noise changed direction and headed