Collected short fiction, p.694
Collected Short Fiction, page 694
The silvery girl was silent for a moment. Ben Line knew that, through her I’mal translator, she was communicating with FARLINK, the computer that processed all the manifold information-handling procedures on the orbiter called Cuckoo Station.
FARLINK was the station’s nerve center. It processed the tachyonic transmissions that replicated new personnel for the station. It coordinated reports from the drones they sent down to the surface of the strange object. It stored cumulative data, solved research problems and sent findings—such as they were—back to Sun One.
Its main terminal was a ring-shaped console inside the hollow hemisphere where Pertin, the silvery girl and other beings were working. The beings on duty sat inside the console or rested or clung or stood there as their anatomies dictated, with input devices within reach of their manipulative organs. The output flashed and shimmered on the screens that lined the dome, translated into the visual symbols of half a hundred cultures.
Ben Line became impatient. “What’s the matter, Venus?”
She did not move but her expression, as far as she could be said to have one, seemed to cloud. “There is difficulty,” she said.
“Difficulty?” That seemed unlikely. FARLINK was as close to perfect as any machine ever made. It owned its own built-in power sources and many tachyonic channels linked it to the banks of the even larger computers and research teams back on Sun One. And yet . . .
Abruptly, before Ben’s very eyes, the myraid screens suddenly flickered and went black.
There was an instant rumble of consternation. Cries and hoots and clangs of shock echoed all around the ring. From the console position nearest Pertin’s own a scorched-fur scent of T’Worlie dismay came from the bat-headed, butterflywinged being named Nimmie.
“What the devil?” he muttered. The screens were black for only an instant. Then they glowed with the green computer signals that spelled out the same message in half a hundred languages.
REGRET INTERRUPTION. INTERFERENCE DISTORTING INCOMING SIGNALS. ORIGIN OF INTERFERENCE NOT KNOWN.
Venus whispered, “We’ve never had any interference before—”
Pertin had no answer. Suddenly he felt very lonely. The tachyonic channels were the only bridge of thought and communication across a gulf of space that was too vast for anything material to cross. With the bridge broken, the thirty thousand light-years between all the beings on board and their diverse homes became terribly real.
The T’Worlie beside him was fluttering on frantic wings above its console position, stabbing at the keys and whistling at its mike. After a moment it rose from the keyboard and turned its five-eyed face to Ben.
“Mode emergency—query implications of signal distortion.”
“I wish I knew,” Pertin said, shaking his head.
“Propose conjecture. Assume sentient masters of Cuckoo. Query. Have they discovered us? Are they initiating contact? Query probable intentions.”
“I don’t know, Nimmie. Do we know where the interference comes from?”
The T’Worlie spun, punched a combination and all the myriad screens lit up.
SOURCE UNKNOWN. DF PROGRAM INITIATED.
And then, abruptly, the green symbols shimmered off the screen. Patterns of color flashed and vanished in the deep tanks that were their three-D vision screens. A new message appeared.
INTERFERENCE FADING. STAND BY. SIGNAL RECEPTION RESUMING.
The Sun One sign burned itself onto the screens—a red disk inside a thin green elipse: the artificial satellite called Sun One, inside the galaxy. Before it appeared the tall, glowing cone of a Sheliak official, back at Sun One. He was speaking, apparently oblivious of the interruption, while his translator turned his soft hooting into Earth English on Ben Line’s screen. Green symbols overrode the image for a moment.
INTERFERENCE HAS CEASED. SOURCE NOT TRACKED.
Venus and Ben Line looked at each other.
“What was that all about?” he demanded.
Slowly she shook her silvery head. “At any rate, it’s over.” All around the dome beings were resuming their interrupted chores. “One moment, Ben Line.” Then: “Yes, we have concurrence. We authorize you to transmit a call for additional survey forces.”
Ben Pertin nodded and cued in the tachyon transmitter. Carefully he began to phrase the report that the tachyons would flash toward the distant galaxy and to the artificial planet called Sun One—where all the races of the galaxy maintained the headquarters that had launched this survey party—and from there on to the home planets of scores of kinds of beings. His words might sooner or later reach his own world, Earth.
Ben Line wondered if somehow, back on Earth, that original Ben Pertin who had volunteered for tachyon transmission long before might hear the voice of his double.
But that was not profitable wondering. Behind it lay too much pain, too much loss, too many regrets for what could never be undone—including the memory of the girl he had married on Sun One. Zara had not lost her husband, but Ben, her husband, in this copy at least, had lost his wife, forever. And it hurt.
II
ALTHOUGH Fifteenth was strong, launching himself from the ground was hard work suited only for emergencies. When at last he began to run out of strength on his first long flight across the plain toward Knife-in-the-Sky he was careful to choose a landing spot where hillocks would give him a small height advantage for the next launch. A tall tree would have been better, but here he saw only fire-trees and bee-trees and neither was any good for climbing. No matter how careful you were, when you climbed fire-trees some of the fire clung to your skin and, although it did not seem to do immediate harm, after a time you sickened and died. And bee-trees were guarded by beings with a disposition to assault invaders en masse.
He did not sleep on his first landing, only ate from the stocks he carried, rested drowsily for a thousand breaths and then launched himself again. Flying over the marshes was unsatisfying. There were few updrafts—and those only weak ones—to climb in. Nearer home, generations of wingmen had located reliable springs of rising air in many places—where the lowest slopes of the mountain shaped the wind or where, for some reason, the ground was always warm. But he was already at the edge of the known world as far as his people were concerned. He could recognize some helpful signs. Nearly always fire-trees meant rising air, not because the trees themselves were warm but because they grew only in warm soil. But the stands of fire-trees here in the marshes were spindly and infrequent.
So he climbed mostly with the power of his lean, long arms and chest muscles and flying was steady work. But his purpose held and after every rest or meal or sleep he launched himself again and drove on toward Knife-in-the-Sky.
He had known that mountain all his life, but he hadn’t known how far it was. He slept twenty-three times crossing the alternating marsh and flatlands past the edge of the grass, and eighteen times more crossing what was pure marsh, where he could rest only on hillocks and the steamy mist that rose around him while he slept was malodorous and cloying. Each time he knotted the count into the cord around his throat when he awoke, and looked toward Knife-in-the-Sky—and still it seemed no larger.
Beyond the marches he crossed a seemingly endless carpet of thick bright moss that had a strangely sharp smell—he associated it with the electrical storms that rolled around the upper reaches of his mountain. It made him sneeze. The moss bore no fruit, gave him no game. He counted twenty-eight sleeps on his way across it and came out giddy with hunger and thirst.
He came down, with the last of his strength, on the bank of a shallow river that rimmed the moss world. He kneeled and drank the black water until he began to feel ill. Then he looked for food in the forest on the far bank. Its plants were club-shaped and leafless, shining with their own cold light like dwarfed, warped fire-trees. Shining daggers of thorns guarded the hard red nuts they bore. He picked a few doubtfully and looked farther. But there was none of the game he knew from the grasslands near his home—he saw none of the fleet four-legged herd animals, or the horned, two-legged hoppers. His arrows killed a small weakly flying thing that fed on the nuts, but its flesh was tasteless and dry. He roasted some of the nuts and felt sicker after eating them than he had felt before.
He summoned the strength to pitch his wings together to make a tent, pegged against one of the club-shaped trees. He rolled inside, curled up in a ball and tried to sleep. It was not easy. Fifteenth had never known insomnia, but he had heard old people speak of it sometimes and now he understood what the word meant. He was drained and aching. For the first time he began to wonder if he were not as crazy as his brother had said. His brains truly felt as though they were bound to the ground. His thoughts could not rise and fly—they were weighted by fear and misery and depression.
After a time he decided that he must eat, no matter what, and crawled out again.
Here in the marshes the sky was darker than on the slopes of his mountain. There were fewer fire-trees and the light from the steely bright moss on the far side of the river was of little help.
He felt dizzy and faint and when he saw the bright cube that whirled away out of sight he thought at first it was the imagining of sickness.
NEVERTHELESS, his brain cleared almost at once. Once or twice before, during the long flights over grass and marsh and moss, he had thought he glimpsed something small and bright pursuing him at a great distance. But it had always hung just at the threshold of visibility. He knew that the watchers traveled in huge things that were bright and shiny. But this did not seem very large and until now it had never come close. He had heard of the small new watchers—was this one of them? He could not say.
All he could be sure of was that it had not harmed him so far, but certainly it would never have a better chance to do him harm than while he lay shaking and weak in the wing-tent. He had left shelter just in time. To have glimpsed the thing gave him much to think about.
The efforts of thinking seemed to sharpen his mind and his will. He must regain strength before he slept. He stood up, drank again from the river and began to search for the sprays of flame-bright red bloom he had seen from the air. These marked clusters of a thick-rooted plant. When he found them he dug out roots and uncovered nests of blood-red worms he had heard older wingmen of his people describe as edible in bad times.
The roots were sweet and white and good—the worms less good. They were gritty and revolting raw, but he made a fire and soon learned to clean them of their digestive sacs before broiling them. He ate his first satiating meal in many sleeps, rolled back into the wing-tent and slept well, despite his alertness to possible danger nearby.
He stayed by the riverbank for three more sleeps before he felt strong enough to pack himself with roots and smoked worms and go on again.
He flew steadily and low, saving energy, careful with the worn bands of his harness. He strained his neck, ceaselessly scanning the sky all around for orgs or for another sight of the small watcher that had fled from him by the river, searching the forest for signs of game, studying the horizon for evidence of updrafts that might help him.
The dully glowing forests now sloped sharply upward. He slept seven times in a belt of fog and rain. With Knife-in-the-Sky lost in the lowering sky his target was gone. He set his course as much as he could by following the upward slopes. When those signs failed—or were doubtful—he drew from his harness the one gift his mother had given him that had been her father’s.
It was a crystal-cased object that glittered like the small watcher. Inside it a needle spun freely, but seemed ever to quiver toward a single direction. His mother had not known much about it, except that the wingmen of her people had used such devices to mark the direction of flight when landmarks failed.
The air grew colder as he climbed. When he camped for one sleep on a moss-grown rock he awoke shivering and chilled. He crept stiffly from beneath his tented wings and found the low clouds gone.
He looked up and caught his breath.
KNIFE-IN-THE-SKY filled all the world ahead. The forests lifted toward it forever, rising piles of pale brown and gray and ivory, splashed with vast black masses of fallen stone.
So high he had to stretch his neck to look, the mountain itself rose out of those broken boulders. Walls of black rock marched up and at the top of that unclimbable wall, higher than he could imagine, the jagged summit slashed across the rippling colors of the sky.
He studied that summit for a long time, looking for orgs, while the damp wind that blew down the slopes of the mountain numbed him with unexpected cold. He knew the orgs were there. They were always there—when they were not sweeping down to the lower slopes and the marsh and the grasslands and forests, seeking prey. Perhaps those distant black spots, so hard to distinguish from the motes of dust one sees on the surface of one’s own eye, were orgs—he could not tell. Whatever, they were still a long way off. He stepped back to see more clearly over that giddy wall, felt a sudden gust as he was caught off-stride. The ground slid away under him. He grabbed wildly for the anchor rope that secured his tented wings, but his chilled fingers slid off it. The wind spun him off the rock. He flailed his arms, trying to get his balance. The moss was slippery and the cold had made him clumsy. He went sprawling over the edge.
The fall was only twenty times his height, so there was no real danger. Even without wings he could glide to some extent. He picked out a landing spot where a bank of crimson moss promised some cushion, stretched out his arms, writhed and landed not too badly, considering the sluggishness of his muscles from the cold. A pink cloud of spores rose around his plowing feet and partly blinded him. He sprawled, sneezing and choking, then stood up and looked around.
He could see across the great bowl of marsh and plain almost to the lift of his own mountain. Past the brown and yellow slopes beneath him the moss world made an endless sea. The marshes beyond were traced with thin black lines of rivers. In the hollows lay white fog.
He turned and looked up the rock to where his tented wings and supplies were. Without wings he could not fly, but he could still climb. Unfortunately he rock was sleep and he could not trust his stiffened lingers to seek out holds in its crevices. He would have to climb the long way around.
Without wings the feat could be dangerous. The combination of low gravity and dense atmosphere that his world possessed made the lifting of mass easy, but unbalanced the equation of wind versus inertia. Caught by a gust on a vertical face, it was quite possible he could be flung so far out that even the slow acceleration of his world’s gravity would crush him when he struck ground again. So he sought an easy way and sprang carefully from point to point. He was concentrating so hard on his task that he almost did not see the small watcher as it swooped past his head and spun toward the place where his gear waited for him.
FIFTEENTH shrank back into a crevice in the moss and waited for attack.
The attack did not come. Actually this small watcher did not seem menacing to him. Yet what could it want with his gear? He could hear nothing. He could see nothing—then, in a flash, he saw something startling—a bright flare of golden light that washed the side of the mountain and disappeared in a moment.
Cautiously Fifteenth eased his way out of the little fold in the terrain and stretched himself to peer upward. He listened, looked, smelled, reaching out with all his senses. They told him nothing.
He squatted for a hundred breaths, considering. Strictly speaking, there was nothing on the rock that he could not do without. Food, spear, bow, wings, harness—he could not make them as well as the specialists among his people, but he could make them well enough to get by. The wings and harness would be the most difficult, but he had seen enough of his brother’s work to know that replacing them would not be impossible.
Still, the gear on the top of the rock was his and he wanted it back.
If the small watchers were the same as the big ones his only option would be to flee—and to do so would almost certainly be useless, if his brother’s stories were halfway true. But he did not think there was any hostility stored in the glittering little cube he had seen.
So with great daring, slowly and cautiously at first, then more quickly and openly, Fifteenth made his way around a boss on the mountainside, up and over it, and emerged above the rock where he had slept.
He had not known what to expect, but he had not expected what he saw.
The cube was no longer simply a cube. It hung in air above the moss, not far from his wing-tent, steady as though it were nailed there, not dipping or even trembling in the winds. But it was growing something. From one face of it a glowing, filmy bubble was spreading to form a sphere almost the height of Fifteenth. It became larger while he watched:
The sphere stopped growing. For dozens of breaths nothing happened, unless a shadowy sort of movement inside the sphere meant something. Fifteenth could see his gear waiting for him. He could detect no harm in the cube or the bubble.
He did not come to a conscious decision, but in a moment he discovered that his legs were gathering under him and he sprang toward the top of the rock. He turned in air to bring his feet under him, landed well, spun to face the small watcher.
And then something did happen. There was another flash of that intense golden explosion of silent light and for a moment he was blinded. And when he could see again at all he saw that the bubble had broken open, sliced from within like an org’s egg, and out of it was stepping—what? A man? Short, fat, squat, dark, curiously clothed—but yes, a man.
III
THE figure that came out of the bubble was twice as wide as Fifteenth and nearly a head shorter. It wore strange bright clothing.
The wingmen and their women wore no more than they had to—the harness to hold their necessities and fasten to their wings, a few square inches of cloth or shaved leather for ornament, a few more for modesty.
