![]() In all his lifetime he had never seen the sun, though he surely had seen the sky often enough. His skin was fair without a trace of sunburn. He wore a single garment twisted about his middle, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth which the members of his tribe had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. Clinging to the yard-thick stalks of the toadstools were still other fungi, parasites upon the growths that once had been parasites themselves.īurl appeared a fairly representative specimen of the descendants of the long-forgotten Icarus crew. Towering far above his head, three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the gray sky from his sight. When horror did not press upon him, it was better not to think, because there wasn’t much but horror to think about.Īt the moment, he was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus, creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew only by the generic name of “water.” It was the only water he knew. When he did think, it was mostly agonized effort to contrive a way to escape some immediate and paralyzing danger. He had done very little thinking of any sort. Surely he had never wondered what his great-grandfather had thought, and most surely of all he never speculated upon what his many-times-removed great-grandfather had thought when his lifeboat landed from the Icarus. The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a fashion which Burl remembered as a succession of screams coming more and more faintly to his ears, while he was being carried away at the topmost speed of which his mother was capable.īurl had rarely or never thought of his grandfather since. In all his lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred to Burl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings.
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