Double Full Moon Night Mass market paperbound - 2000

Excerpt

It was a terrible night.  Johann stayed awake for over an hour, going over all his conversations with Maria since Hansel had been killed.  Was there anything else he could do? He felt inept and inadequate.  In one internal monologue he entreated Beatrice to reappear and give him some advice on how to handle the situation.  Johann even seriously considered Maria's suggestion that he should hunt and kill the nozzler.  At least I would regain my lost stature in her eyes, he thought, before dismissing such a venture as foolhardy.

When Johann finally fell asleep, he was awakened only a few minutes later by a bloodcurdling scream from the mat beside him.  His heart pumping furiously and adrenaline pouring into his body, Johann was immediately alert and ready to protect his ward.

The girl had had a nightmare.  She crawled over on Johann's mat and snuggled into his arms, still whimpering from fright.  All Maria would say about the dream was that a nozzler had attacked Gretel and her while they were swimming.

Maria managed to fall asleep again quickly but Johann remained awake for another hour.  Later, not long before morning, he had a dream so vivid that it took Johann a long time, even after he was awake, to convince himself that it was not real.

Johann had been in a deep green forest in the dream, following a yellow and black bird with a beautiful voice who was leading him to a magic mountain.  The top of the magic mountain was hidden behind a barrier of flames.  Johann understood in the dream that he needed to wade through the flames to reach the sleeping Brunhild, who would fall madly in love with him as soon as he awakened her with his kiss.  But the sleeping woman on the mountaintop was not Brunhild; she was Beatrice, whose kisses after waking stirred Johann's sexual ardor.  In the dream, as he tried to remove her clothes, Beatrice whispered "Not yet," and pointed off to her right.  There, coming up the side of the mountain, was a huge, bizarre monster breathing fire.  The monster vaguely resembled a dragon, but instead of hands this creature had hundreds of long blue tentacles with claws on the ends.  Most of these tentacles were extended in Johann's direction.  When he felt the first sharp touches on his neck Johann awakened with a shudder.

He did not sleep again.  When the artificial daylight first lit the front of the cave, Johann checked the sleeping Maria and then jogged down toward the lake.  He plunged into the water and began to swim.  Within minutes, as his long body eased through the water, stroke after stroke, Johann felt his frustration and anxiety begin to lessen.  Years of competitive swimming had made Johann completely comfortable in the water.  After the initial release of pent-up energy, his body moved into an effortless rhythm so natural that it seemed to be totally disconnected from Johann's volition.

During these periods Johann's mind sometimes focused on a specific topic, but more often it drifted idly, serving up a potpourri of unrelated thoughts and images.  Later, after fifteen to twenty minutes of steady swimming, Johann usually entered a slightly altered state of consciousness, one which a friend of his had once called "exercise nirvana." A sense of peace, harmony, and communion with the world around him pervaded Johann during this portion of his swim.  This feeling of contentment, and the residual sense of well-being that often lasted the rest of the day, were the primary reasons that Johann swam every morning.

Johann was well into the nirvanic phase of his morning swim when he began to feel an unsettling disquiet whose origin he could not pinpoint.  When it would not go away, he opened his eyes during his breathing.  There was nothing unusual about the island landscape that greeted his eyes on the right side.  On the other side, the lake extended to the horizon in an unbroken line.  What was disturbing him, then? Johann was miffed at this intrusion into his most peaceful sanctuary and was about to dismiss his disquiet altogether when he happened to look more closely at the water.  It was discolored.

Johann stopped swimming and examined the water around him.  On an impulse he decided to taste it.  The taste seemed familiar, but Johann could not identify it.  Looking around, he could see that the discoloration increased off to his right, away from the island.  Johann began swimming in that direction.

Just after Johann positively identified the strange taste as blood, he saw an unusual object about two hundred meters in the distance.  The object was bobbing up and down in the small waves of the lake.  At first Johann was wary of possible danger, but as he drew closer he became certain, from the object's lack of movement, that it was not alive.

When he first recognized Kwame's body, Johann could not believe what his eyes were telling him.  But what in the world was that thing with Kwame? Johann continued to approach, swimming breaststroke so that he could keep the scene in view.  Both surprise and horror swept through him moments later when he realized that Kwame was floating on the water, locked in a death embrace with one of the nozzler creatures who had attacked Hansel.

Kwame's knife was embedded deep in the frontal underbelly of the nozzler.  Both of the creature's blue tentacles were wrapped around Kwame's back.  One of its vicious claws, which was still affixed to the side of Kwame's neck, had obviously sliced through the jugular vein.  The fight to the death had occurred not many hours earlier, probably sometime during the night.  Blood was still oozing out of the many wounds in both Kwame and the nozzler (its blood was bright purple), and there were not yet any signs of rigor mortis in Kwame's body.  Johann's feelings of grief were accompanied by a thousand questions that rushed into his mind.  What was Kwame doing here? Johann asked himself.  Where did he come from? Where are the others?

Johann swam in an ever-widening circle around the two corpses, searching for clues that might provide answers to his questions.  He found nothing.  When he returned to Kwame and the nozzler, he carefully inspected the alien creature.

The nozzler's body was long and thin, approximately as tall as Kwame, and consisted of ten identical middle segments with hard black carapaces that were connected to a broader head-and-chest segment in the front and a fanlike tail at the rear.  Three oval, bulbous gray eyes were distributed uniformly in a line along the top of the turquoise-colored head-and-chest segment.  The front two of these eyes were placed at an angle that suggested their primary look direction was forward; the third eye was positioned so that its natural field of view was to the rear.  Along the sides of this front segment were three symmetrical pairs of attachments, the first pair being the long blue tentacles with the terrifying claws that could reach a full meter in front of the head, the second resembling a pair of circular washboards built against the side of the head next to the middle eye, and the back pair looking like clusters of tiny pearls on either side of the rear of the head.

The body of the nozzler narrowed slightly behind the frontal region, tapering into a centipedelike arrangement of the ten middle segments, each with the hard black carapace (above the body and partially around the sides) and a soft, fleshy underbelly with hundreds of flexible cilia extending below.  The fanlike tail, which looked solid from a distance, was actually thirty or forty individual strips of textured material attached to a central nexus or ganglion located at the rear of the last of the middle segments.

Johann was fascinated by the nozzler.  Although he was horrified by the sight of Kwame, the astonishing biology of the alien corpse piqued his curiosity.  Surveying the entwined pair while continuing to tread the water, Johann decided that he would tow them together to the island so that he could study the nozzler more closely.

He heard Maria's frantic cries while he was still well offshore.  When Johann had not returned to the cave at his normal time, the girl had panicked.  Fortunately, she had had the good sense to search the water for him, and her keen eyes had located him far out in the lake.  After first verifying that the local currents were insignificant, Johann left his discovery a hundred meters from the beach and swam into shore so that he could reassure the girl.

Johann's description of the dead pair was sufficient to send Maria into another bout of hysteria.  No matter what he said, she insisted that the nozzler corpse should not, under any circumstances, ever touch their island.

"What if its friends or family should find it here," she said, "and somehow decide that we were responsible for its death? What would happen to us then?"

Johann's biological assessment that a nozzler was not a land animal was of no importance to Maria.  She adamantly repeated that she never wanted to see "one of those things" again, dead or alive.  There was no way that Johann could mitigate her fear.

He reluctantly swam back out to where he had left the pair of corpses and began the process of disconnecting Kwame from his foe.  It was not an easy procedure.  The tentacles around Kwame's back were still tight and Johann could not muster much strength while he was treading water.  Eventually he separated the pair.  Remembering his lifeguard training in Berlin, Johann swam back to the island with Kwame in tow.

Maria was pointing outward with a terrified look on her face when Johann finally reached the shore with Kwame.  She did not scream.  She did not say anything at all.  Out where he had left the nozzler corpse, Johann saw churning water and as many as a dozen blue tentacles wafting through the air.  After depositing Kwame's body on the sand near a grove of trees, Johann picked up Maria and carried her back to their cave.

Media reviews

Praise for the Rama novels of Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee:

Rama II

"This is a space trip that no reader will want to miss."
--Playboy

"Offers one surprise after another."
--The New York Times

The Garden of Rama:

"A fascinating mix of technology and humanity, soaring high into the mysteries of the universe and far into the depths of the soul."
--Chicago Tribune

Rama Revealed:

"Breathtaking."
--The New York Times Book Review

"More than fulfills the awesome scale of size,  alien presence and spiritual exploration that were introduced in Rendezvous With Rama 20 years ago."
--The Indianapolis Star


From the Hardcover edition.