Read Online The Candle of Distant Earth by Alan Dean Foster - Free Book Online

until you showed up.”
    â€œSorry,” he told her, genuinely apologetic. “What’s wrong?”
    This time when she looked back over at him, her horizontal pupils had expanded to their fullest extent. “What’s wrong? What’s
wrong
?” From her tone, it was apparent that his comment had finally exceeded even her capacity for sardonic reply. Nevertheless, she tried.
    â€œI am alone, lost with and wholly dependent upon inferior beings. I have none to engage in intelligent discourse with, none with whom to debate issues of real importance. Never again will I be enfolded in the soothing, damp embrace of K’erem.”
    Her manifest misery was so palpable that had it been expressed by anyone other than the redoubtable Sque, Walker would have been moved to tears. As a visual expression of sympathy, they would have been ineffective in the rain anyway.
    â€œThis doesn’t sound like you, Sque. Well, not entirely like you. You’ve always shown so much confidence in our chances, even when it seemed we were going to be stuck on Seremathenn for the rest of our lives.”
    Alien though they were, those metallic gray eyes could still convey the emotion that lay behind them. “And you’ve thought all along that I believed that. Lesser lifeforms are so easily deceived.” Her tentacles stirred sand from the streambed. “Such expressions of sanguinity as I may have declaimed over the past years were for your benefit, and that of your companion and that saga-spinning oaf of a Tuuqalian. Since you have all been necessary to my survival, it was necessary that I keep your own feeble, faltering spirits up.” She looked away, down the stream that did not lead to home.
    â€œI have from the beginning never been anything other than realistic about our chances. I believe you yourself, in your simple, uncomplicated way, are equally aware of that reality.”
    He refused to be disheartened by her despair. He knew nothing of other K’eremu, but this one, at least, he knew was subject to wild mood swings. Rather than go on the defensive, he tried as best he could to raise her spirits.
    â€œEssentially, then, every expression of hope you’ve put forth has been for our benefit. I’m surprised you’d be so concerned for our mental welfare, even if such efforts were self-centered at heart.”
    â€œI am equally surprised,” she retorted. “It is a sign of my advancing weakness in the face of utter despondency. I am losing my true K’eremu nature.” Tilting back her head and upper body in a single, supple curve, she regarded the benign but leaden sky. Rain fell in her open eyes, but did not affect her. “I will never get home. You will never get home. It is possible, just possible, that the Tuuqalian will get home—if these chittering, chattering, childlike natives with mild pretensions to intelligence can actually coordinate their primitive science with that of the only slightly less primitive Niyyuu. But you and I? We will never see our respective homeworlds again, except in dreams.”
    They were both silent then, the only sound the tap-patter of gentle rain falling on and around them, plinking out piccolo notes in the mild flow of the stream. After several minutes of mutual contemplation of time, selves, and the alien yet comforting elements, Walker rose from his crouch, scrambled and slid down into the shallow brook, and sat down alongside the startled Sque. When he reached out an arm toward her—a heavy, human, inflexible, bone-supported arm—she started to flinch back. He waited until she was ready. Then he let his arm come down. Since she had no shoulders, and her upper body was one continuous smooth shape from head to lower torso, he let it rest against the place where two of her ropy limbs joined to her body. She did not move it away.
    Later, two more of her own appendages writhed around and came to rest atop his wet, hirsute