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moved off. Only a few minutes later he found his first cornul bush.

    The cornul bush possessed a star-sectioned green stem and ferny leaves. In its branches were hundreds of fruits small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. They were yellow and red, green and white, and in as many different shapes as there were fruits on the bush. The Almanac had provided him with no explanation for this. He just knew that all of the fruits were edible for someone with the symbiont. Ansel plucked a white fruit, shaped like a banana, and studied it.
    This innocuous object would have killed him five days ago, after protracted painful convulsions, just as similar fruit had killed the Director and ten members of the board two months ago. He bit down and relished the taste explosion in his mouth. Even to people without the symbiont the fruits tasted like this, hence the way they had been so well received at the banquet in the Strine Station. No one had suspected a thing. No one would have believed that someone could smuggle highly toxic fruits aboard the station, then into a high-level Company banquet. After he had eaten his fill, Ansel moved on. He decided he should ask Kelly, before he killed him, just how he had managed that. Certainly, Kelly must have contacts on the station, and a shuttle secreted somewhere.

    The footprints in the sand turned inland and soon became difficult to follow, but Ansel did not worry too much about this. The village of Troos lay a couple of kilometres from here. Kelly’s family lived there, and that was where Ansel would doubtless find him.

    Inland the fauna and flora changed markedly. The goss thorns were more dispersed now and here grew into solid trees with trunks like barrels, short and viciously thorned limbs, and blue-green spines hazing their bark. Occasionally things that looked vaguely like butterflies went winging past. Ansel knew these to be flying flowers - the ultimate pollen-carriers. Botanists and entomologists had concluded, after many years of discussion, that these flowers had once been nectar-feeding insects, and that this mutualism had been carried to its ultimate extreme. It was after he watched one of these objects fall on the still-attached flower of another plant, for mating, that the wind changed, and Ansel got his first hint of putrefactor.

    The putrefactor was not the most pleasant of creatures. Ansel had heard descriptions of them and of the smell that often surrounded them, and thought nothing of it. The Almanac justly pointed out that the creature had its place in the environment of Fores, just as the maggot has its place in the environment of Earth. The putrefactor was the mortician of this world.

    The ‘factor was stretched out over the upper branches of a huge goss thorn. It looked like a great spread of drying grey-green mucus deposited there. Ansel guessed that this one had not fed in quite a while, as it was possible to walk close to it without gagging. He knew the creature would have a territory covering about a square kilometre, and that anything that died in that territory would immediately become its property. Only death would motivate it. The ‘factor had a store of patience to make a vulture look frenetic, often staying unmoving for periods of ten years or more.

    Ansel closed his eyes for a moment to more clearly see the images and text scrolling down his visual cortex from the Almanac download:

    With a death in its territory the putrefactor will immediately tense, cracking away its hard outer covering, then ooze from its perch or hide. Its rate of travel is not much faster than a slug’s, a creature it does resemble. On its arrival at the corpse, the factor spreads out and engulfs it completely, even should the corpse be ten times its size. Digestion is quick: the corpse broken down into simple organic compounds. Very little is wasted.

    Ansel opened his eyes and grinned to himself. He felt that the colonists’ name for it was the most appropriate. It was called a