f fighting pairs had been reduced to perhaps
sixteen. He crawled in through the high opening, moved carefully down
the back-leaning arc of wall and onto a level with the combatants, all
unnoticed. A narrow wrinkle in the chamber, nearly flat at the base,
ran like a sunken path before him, dividing the battle in half. Having
no choice, he began to walk the shallow gauntlet, moving stiffly,
always ready for a fight.

First one pair and then another released their grip as they saw him,
confused. Some, already on the verge of death, lay writhing and
legless, fighting still. The four queens, each from its raised
pedestal, looked on in disbelief: their sacred ritual had been
disturbed. Simin moved steadily forward, staring down and backing off
each male as he passed. He was nearly halfway through.

Finally one of the females raised up her forward body, and began moving
it back and forth like an impatient cobra. The male closest to her
---it seemed to Simin the largest he had seen---broke away and came
forward, moving toward the dry canal where the intruder stood waiting.

Unlike the others it showed no outward fear. It advanced without
hesitation, or thought, or much of anything except the blind mating
aggression of its kind. It stopped only once, looking back at the
female from the lip of the sunken path, then came forward with only one
impulse in its mind. Kill him.

Simin had only a short time to plan his fight. As the creature drew
nearer he opened his wings instinctively and strafed the air with his
foreclaws. His wings! In all the time since finding the abyss he had
forgotten them, first from the weak amnesia of near-death, then from
simple disuse. With no more time to marvel he moved in a quick
half-circle to avoid the lumbering bulk, then flitted up behind it onto
the slanting edge of the rift. These short bursts of flight he
repeated several times (the thought that he could fly to safety and
forget this fight never occurred to him), searching for a weakness.
Though filled with a sullen rage, he knew there could be no mistakes.
Rising higher, he hovered briefly above his baffled foe, then swept
down onto its back, and in three quick motions of jaws and foreclaw,
tore off its head and left it to die.

Still full of bitter and unused anger he landed again on the plain
closest to the female, clawing the rock as if clinging to a rope, as
his blurring wings drummed threateningly. Then letting go he fl