57

You grab the bulky camera and check the plasticine film strips it uses instead of glass photographic plates. Everything looks ready: you raise the camera, peer through the circular glass aperture, and take perhaps a dozen pictures as the feathered apes grow ever more restless. You stop only when another hurled stone bounces off the canoe to splash into the water near you.

You'll have to wait to see if you managed any good pictures—if you don't die in the next five minutes—but you feel confident. Even in black and white, the feathered apes will be magnificent.

The offshore apes hurl their stones. Most fall short, but one smashes into the canoe, tearing free a Byzantine supply cask. You can only watch as a tin box of medicine flies away into the water.

Feathered apes leap down from the overhanging branches into the canoes. Stralchus's rifle cracks and one flies off his boat into the water, followed by a cloud of iridescent feathers. The controllers abandon rowing all at once, but keep their oars, swinging them at the mass of feathered apes. Individually neither strong nor combat-trained, the controllers move in synchronized harmony to fend off the wild claws of the apes. But the sheer number of fighters involved in this sudden, desperate melee threatens to swamp your boat.