Explore "The Defiant Agents" by Andre Norton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Travis, one knee braced against the red earth, blinked as he parted a screen of tall rust-brown grass with cautious fingers to look out into a valley where golden mist clouded most of the landscape. His head ached with dull persistence, the pain fostered in some way by his own bewilderment. To study the land ahead was like trying to see through one picture interposed over another and far different one. He knew what ought to be there, but what was before him was very dissimilar.
A buff-gray shape flitted through the tall cover grass, and Travis tensed. Mba'a -- coyote? Or were these companions of his actually ga-n, spirits who could choose their shape at will and had, oddly, this time assumed the bodies of man's tricky enemy? Were they ndendai -- enemies -- or dalaanbiyat'i, allies? In this mad world he did not know.