Android at Arms

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Authors: Andre Norton
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swim?”
    â€œYes.” Andas laid the girl down and unsealed his coverall. The air was humid, warm enough so that he felt no chill. He lowered himself cautiously and found that the waters curled only slightly above his waist. Good enough—he could manage.
    â€œLet me have her.”
    Yolyos lowered the limp body into his grasp. The coverall dragged as he dipped her below the surface, save for her face. Her hair floated out, hardly differing in shade from the water weeds. Andas steadied her as best he could and hoped that the pool had no dwellers interested in meat meals. There were always unpleasant surprises on new worlds, and only a great emergency would drive a man to take such a chance as this.
    Elys sighed and her eyes opened. Already those scaled patches on her throat were less shrunken, more the normal color of her skin. She wriggled in his hold.
    â€œLet me go!” There was such force in her order that he did that. She pushed away, disappearing under the surface of the water before he could prevent it. He started to splash after her when she bobbed to the surface some distance away.
    â€œThis is my world. Let me be!”
    Already she seemed to have regained her vigor. If that was the way she wanted it—but she had already gone under the water again. Andas climbed out of the pool and found the Salariki waiting with handfuls of dried grass. The prince toweled himself as dry as he could with those and dressed again, wishing he had fresh clothing to wear.
    Yolyos had gone a little way along the pool side. From a bush there hung festoons of creamy flowers, and the Salariki buried his face deep among them, his wide chest rising and falling in deep breaths as he drew in all of their scent his lungs would hold.

5
    It was a new Elys who finally emerged from the pool in answer to Andas’s calls, though it was apparent that she came reluctantly. As a starving man might have reacted to some weeks of careful feeding, her too-thin body was normally rounded once again.
    â€œI feel”—she flung her arms wide as she still stood with her feet awash—“like a priestess of Lo-Ange who has flung her name tablet into the sea and so is reborn again!”
    Andas was impatiently pacing up and down. A thought pricked at him. What if Turpyn had made his way back to the ship? Neither Grasty nor Tsiwon would be prepared, or perhaps wish, to prevent the Veep’s taking off to locate some other Guild lair. By lingering here they were offering him a chance to do just that. And to be marooned here—no!
    He looked to the Salariki, but Yolyos had wandered on, like a man drunk with Formian wine, or else bemused with happy smoke, to sniff at some purple veined leaves, which, after smelling, he crushed between his hands, rubbing the resultant mass up and down his wide chest. Their aromatic scent was strong enough to reach even Andas’s nostrils.
    â€œWe have to get back to the ship!” The prince said to Elys. “If Turpyn tries to take off—”
    But she was too fascinated by her own form of refreshment, stooping to catch up palmfuls of water, splashing about like a child. He was thoroughly exasperated by both of them.
    â€œAhhhhhh—” A rumble of sound from Yolyos, who had now wandered out of sight, was startling enough to bring Andas on the run.
    The screen of flowering and scented growth that had been planted about the pool was a thin one. And the prince pushed through it to see the alien facing a small glade.
    For a moment of surprise and awe, Andas was misled enough to think he might indeed be fronting the owners of this overgrown garden. Then he saw the truth. Tree trunks had been rough-hewn into those figures, gathered in a half circle about a spring bubbling from a stand of rocks. Bleached, perhaps by some rotting process of the jungle from which they had been hacked, they had an aura of life. Their bodies were humanoid, if gross and clumsy, but their faces were

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