You don’ know.
Know what?
About Australia, about Earth.
He blinked slowly, the fever making his eyes glassy.
Your mob haven’t read up on us yet, have they?
The Conquered has extensive general data on your species, said Sepha.
But I confess I have never studied your home world’s fauna.
Oh, Doc, said Hamish and started to laugh again and then stopped because it hurt.
Oh, Doc, pull up a chair.
You’re going to want to sit down for this.
For the next 3 hours, as the fever burned and his arm throbbed and the station slept around them, Hamish Doyle told Sepha Ilenvith about the animals of his home world.
He told her about the taipan, a snake whose single bite carried enough venom to kill 100 adult humans.
He told her about the brown snake, which was less potent but far more common and lived in people’s gardens and wood piles.
He told her about the funnel web spider, which hid in shoes and could kill a grown man in hours, and the red back, which hid under toilet seats, and the box jellyfish, transparent and nearly invisible, whose stinging tentacles could stop a heart before the swimmer reached the shore.
He told her about the stone fish, which looked exactly like a rock and had spines that delivered a venom so painful that people who had been stung begged for amputation.
He told her about the blue ringed octopus, small enough to fit in a child’s palm, beautiful and deadly, and about a plant called the jimpie jimpie whose sting could hurt for months.
And the platypus, he added as an afterthought.
Venomous spurs on its back legs, furry little thing with a duck’s bill, lays eggs.
Nobody quite knows why it exists.
Sepha had stopped taking notes somewhere around the funnel web.
She was simply staring at him.
You live there, she said, with all of these creatures.
Yeah.
By choice.
It’s home, said Hamish simply.
Beautiful place.
Best beaches in the galaxy, I reckon.
You just check your boots in the morning and keep an eye out, that’s all.
Have you been bitten before by any of them?
He held up his right hand and counted on his fingers.
Red back when I was about 20.
Got me on the leg in an old shed.
Hurt like nothing else for two days.
Stonefish fishing off the reef when I was 26, right through the sole of my reef shoe.
