Certainly Magdy never gave any indication of actually caring about the fanties at all. He’d allow himself to be dragged to the gate by Gretchen when a herd passed by, but then he spent most of his time talking to the other guys who were also happy to make it look like they had gotten dragged to the gate. Just goes to show, I suppose. Even the self-consciously cool had a streak of kid in them.
There was some argument as to whether the fanties we saw were a local group that lived in the area, or whether we’d seen a number of herds that were just migrating through. I had no idea which theory was right; we’d only been on planet for a couple of weeks. And from a distance, all the fanties looked pretty much the same.
And up close, as we quickly discovered, they smelled horrible.
“Does everything on this planet smell like crap?” Gretchen whispered to me as we glanced up at the fanties. They waved back and forth, ever so slightly, as they slept standing on their legs. As if to answer her question, one of the fanties closest to where we were hiding let rip a monumental fart. We gagged and giggled equally.
“Shhhh,” Enzo said. He and Magdy were crouched behind another tall bush a couple of meters over from us, just short of the clearing where the fantie herd had decided to rest for the night. There were about a dozen of them, all sleeping and farting under the stars. Enzo didn’t seem to be enjoying the visit very much; I think he was worried about us accidentally waking the fanties. This was not a minor concern; fantie legs looked spindly from a distance but up close it was clear they could trample any one of us without too much of a problem, and there were a dozen fanties here. If we woke them up and they panicked, we could end up being pounded into mincemeat.
I think he was also still a little sore about the “exploring tonsils” comment. Magdy, in his usual less-than-charming way, had been digging at Enzo ever since he and I officially started going out. The taunts rose and fell depending on what Magdy’s relationship with Gretchen was at the moment. I was guessing at the moment Gretchen had cut him off. Sometimes I thought I needed a graph or maybe a flow chart to understand how the two of them got along.
Another one of the fanties let off an epic load of flatulence.
“If we stay here any longer, I’m going to suffocate,” I whispered to Gretchen. She nodded and motioned me to follow her. We snuck over to where Enzo and Magdy were.
“Can we go now?” Gretchen whispered to Magdy. “I know you’re probably enjoying the smell, but the rest of us are about to lose dinner. And we’ve been gone long enough that someone might start wondering where we went.”
“In a minute,” Magdy said. “I want to get closer to one.”
“You’re joking,” Gretchen said.
“We’ve come this far,” Magdy said.
“You really are an idiot sometimes, you know that?” Gretchen said. “You don’t just go walking up to a herd of wild animals and say hello. They’ll kill you.”
“They’re asleep,” Magdy said.
“They won’t be if you walk right into the middle of them,” Gretchen said.
“I’m not that stupid,” Magdy said, his whispered voice becoming louder the more irritated he became. He pointed to the one closest to us. “I just want to get closer to that one. It’s not going to be a problem. Stop worrying.”
Before Gretchen could retort Enzo put his hand up to quiet them both. “Look,” he said, and pointed halfway down the clearing. “One of them is waking up.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Gretchen said.
The fantie in question shook its head and then lifted it, spreading the tentacles on its trunk wide. It waved them back and forth.
“What’s it doing?” I asked Enzo. He shrugged. He was no more an expert on fanties than I was.
It waved its tentacles some more, in a wider arc, and then it came to me what it was doing. It was smelling something. Something that shouldn’t be there.
The fantie bellowed, not from its trunk like an elephant, but from its mouth. All the other fanties were instantly awake and bellowing, and beginning to move.
I looked over to Gretchen. Oh, crap, I mouthed. She nodded, and looked back over at the fanties. I looked over at Magdy, who had made himself suddenly very small. I don’t think he wanted to get any closer now.
The fantie closest to us wheeled about and scraped against the bush we were hiding behind. I heard the thud of its foot as the animal maneuvered itself into a new position. I decided it was time to move but my body overruled me, since it wasn’t giving me control of my legs. I was frozen in place, squatting behind a bush, waiting for my trampling.
Which never came. A second later the fantie was gone, run off in the same direction as the rest of its herd: away from us.
Magdy popped up from his crouching position, and listened to the herd rumbling off in the distance. “All right,” he said. “What just happened?”
“I thought they smelled us for sure,” I said. “I thought they’d found us.”