by Ian Stewart
Uhlirach-Bengtsen was beginning to wonder if Sir Charles had been the right choice. The man worked tirelessly, but tangible achievements . . . not so clear. The undersecretary for world affairs was coming under increasing pressure from all directions— the politicians, the military, the ecowarriors, the religious right, the crypto-communist left, the fence-sitting liberals . . . Today he'd been told rumors that some long-defunct group of freedom fighters had gotten their hands on a cache of nuclear weapons that should have been destroyed half a century ago under the Global Disarmament Treaty, and were getting ready to bomb Jupiter. Bombing the comet might have made some kind of sense, though a few nukes would just give it a pimple or two, but Jupiterl It was probably nonsense, but it had to be checked out.
There were protest marches and sit-ins and strikes and mass love-ins, teenagers romping naked in CenterParc, and the drug trade had surged overnight from its near-comatose state into a booming industry.
Everyone wanted answers, progress, action. The comet was all over the X. It wasn't a joke anymore. It was changing from something millions of miles away in outer space to a personal threat. You could feel the terror rising. Soon the world would wake up to what had been the case all along: this was a potential worldwrecker. And what did the task force have to show? One wheeler, a lot of indecipherable noise, and some extraterrestrial bugs.
In a few minutes he would be giving a press conference, telling the world's media what an excellent job Sir Charles was doing. He checked his tie, brushed some fluff off his jacket, and tried to put himself in a positive frame of mind.
Halfholder had cast off from the side comer of the city's trailing edge, but below the habitable levels the airflow was unpredictable. For the next half hour she had just two aims in mind: to avoid becoming entangled in the city's hanging tendril jungle, and to keep a weather-eye open for snarks.
A vortex train spun her out, down, and away, whirling in the misty air, her six trunks spread wide like the spokes of a floppy wheel. The city began to dim behind intervening mist trails . . . Desperately she spun, unbalancing her trunks to start a long, slow, controlled sideslip back toward the tendril jungle. If she lost contact now, the winds would carry her too far away from her objective.
The mists thinned, and she slipped diagonally past the vast tangled wall of tendrils—down, down toward their flailing tips, tapering in toward the center where the city was vulnerable.
Halfholder consulted her prompter. Whispering Volve was still on its intended course, now seventeen miles below, and she was well within her safety envelope. But she was dropping faster than planned. Carefully she extracted a liftstick from her belt-bag, opened a trunk-sphincter, and sucked it inside. When the digestive juices hit, it would bubble liftgas into her abdominal cavities.
Trunks spread-eagled for maximum resistance, she floated slowly downward like a bizarre snowflake. She rotated clockwise, paused, then counterclockwise. She was tempted to try a Death Spiral, but it was her first dive and such a maneuver might all too likely live up to its name. She settled for a conservative seesawing motion.
The tendrils' stalks began to narrow, the jungle thinning with every passing second. Her plans had reached the critical phase. With infinite care she opened the pouch and removed the Carrier. She primed its nodules with some of her own precious lift-gas, drifted in as close to the edge of the tendril jungle as she dared, felt her gas-sacs tense uncontrollably.
She cradled the Carrier in the strongest cluster of trunks that she could assemble, drew it back—and hurled it from her, toward the jungle.
The Carrier fell in a parabolic arc, slid past the outer fringe of tendrils, and dropped like a stone. Its vestigial wheels spun uselessly in the airflow Between it and Secondhome's metallic hydrogen core was nothing but roiling gases and liquids. Then its nodules jetted liftgas, slowing its descent. Its tiny graspers reached, touched, clung.
The Carrier began to climb the tendril.
Within was a capsule of rotworm spores, genetically tailored to that one city's genome. Over the next few days the Carrier would inject those spores, one by one, into the succulent flesh of the tendril. There they would encyst into egg masses, then grow into tiny mobile plasts, burrowing deep into the city's interior. The plasts would metamorphose into tiny parasitic worms, each of which would consume tiny amounts of tendril flesh— and, every few days, deposit several thousand new spores.
Soon the cooling-vanes would be riddled with rotworms. Then the citizens of Sparkling Spires of the Colder Deep would have to evacuate—a tedious, disruptive procedure, for even an undamaged city was difficult to maneuver. After that, the city would die, sliding helplessly into the colder deep from which it had taken its name.
Halfholder seesawed between wild elation and sick horror. But there was no way back—the course of the infestation was now unstoppable. Tormented by doubt, teetering on the brink of insanity, she drifted downward, no longer aware of her surroundings.
Jonas set the probe's camera to its highest level of magnification and checked that the recorder was functioning. The images shivered as the balloon rode the bumpy air currents, but the computer managed to filter most of that out, so there was little doubt as to what they were seeing. Sensational!
"Dear god, it's a city," said Bailey.
"So this is where the aliens live?" asked Cashew.
"Must be. The place is swarming with them! And look at those— buildings. And all those ramps and . . . roadways. Shit, they're crawling with wheelers!"
"Well, they would be, wouldn't they?"
Time passed. Sparkling Spires of the Colder Deep had long since faded into the orange-gray mists overhead.
A semblance of sanity returned.
She felt heady, wild, flooded with weird emotions. This she would never forget, not through a thousand estivations. Now she knew why the skydivers were unable to resist the urge to risk their lives, time and time again, in Secondhome's dangerous skies. The rush flowed through her sensitized cannulas, until her canopy felt as wide as a dozen cities, yet as small as a single parasitic shrimp.
Her initiation task was accomplished. The next task was survival.
In an obsession born of arduous training, she checked her trajectory once more, and saw with some alarm that she was still falling too rapidly. She was within the safety envelope, to be sure—but if Whispering Volve changed course, she could lose what little margin remained, and her remains would join those of countless others, revolving forever in the lopsided ammonia vortex of the Whirl or sinking to the inferno of the core.
She was just opening her beltbag to pull out another liftstick when the snark pack emerged from a thicket of airweed. There were five of them, carving effortlessly through the turbid air, their spiny mouths clamped shut in a grimace of instant death.
She had trained for this, too. Waiting until the pack had completely encircled her, edging closer for the kill, she removed a flash grenade from her beltbag.
The mouths began to open, revealing—as she knew they would, but that made it more frightening, not less—their short, razor-edged spines, able to tear her canopy to shreds. As the snarks surged forward, she tossed the grenade as high as she could throw it, clamped her trunks into a tight wedge, and exhaled a great bubble of liftgas.
Attracted by the sudden movement, the snarks darted after the grenade. As they did so, the gas bubble expanded, rising slowly.
The effect was even better than in the training simulators. The lead snark actually swallowed the grenade an instant before it exploded. Plastered thickly around the grenade's luminescent core was an oxygenic paste, and the explosion triggered a spurt of the toxic, corrosive gas. Mixed as it was with the bubble of liftgas, primed with the snark's bodily moisture, the unstable combination exploded in a burst of light that must have been visible back on Sparkling Spires of the Colder Deep. Halfholder kept her eyes tight shut and felt rather than saw the blast as the snark pack came to pieces in a shower of torn, burning flesh. They fell around her like
slow shrapnel.
She opened her eyes. One wounded, blinded, burning snark spiraled downward trailing oily brown smoke, wailing terribly in an agony of death. Of the other four, she saw no sign.
She pulsed in ripples of relief. Then, having calmed down, she reached once more for a liftstick. The maneuver, effective though it had been, had cost her half a mile in height.
Her groping trunks encountered nothing more than an empty bag. With growing horror, she realized what had happened. She had failed to secure the open bag when she threw the grenade, and the force of her dive had sucked out the beltbag's contents, to tumble irretrievably toward Secondhome's core, forty thousand miles below.
No liftsticks, no grenades, no knife, no ballast pods.
No hope.
Infuriatingly, Whispering Volve pursued its stately course. But that scarcely mattered now. She was falling outside the envelope, drifting lower with each passing second. Her prompter's computations were simple and deadly. She would come agonizingly close, she might even be able to reach the target city's fringemass—but she would miss the Edge by several hundred yards.
Halfholder took a deep breath, forced her trunks to rigidity, hoped for unexpected lift from a passing vortex, and began to chant her deathsong in a wavering voice.
"Jonas—am I going mad, or does that one have some kind of artifact slung 'round its body?"
"Which one. Cash?" Jonas was concentrating on his filming.
"Bottom of the screen, in among all those sleek, fast-moving things. They look predatory, don't you think? But isn't that a sort of bag?"
"I see. Let's take a closer look!" The technician swiveled one of the probe's cameras until the creature came into view on the screen. As he zoomed in on it, the focus adjusted automatically. "No, I don't think—"
A brilliant explosion turned the screen white, and the overload shut it off for an instant. When the image came back, the ruined bodies of the predators were fluttering down into the darkness below, trailing ugly clouds of thick smoke.
"As I was saying, Jonas—yes, the creature does have some kind of bag, and it took something out and threw it. At those things I reckoned were predators."
"Which are now turning themselves into aerial bonfires."
"Yes. But they didn't turn themselves. The creature did that to them."
"A weapon! It was a weapon! The damned thing's intelligent!"
"Despite using a weapon . . . Yes, Jonas, I rather think it is. In which case we've made contact. With an alien. Is it the right kind of alien? I have no idea, but an alien in the hand is worth two in the brood-hive. So obviously we give it the portable communicator—but howl I hadn't expected an aerial encoun—"
Jonas was watching the creature closely through the viewfinder of his Suzuki-73. He could almost empathize with the alien. It had been attacked, had beaten off the enemy, and now . . . "Pru, it looks in distress to me. Listen to the sonar! It's making noises! Reminds me of a pod of whales. And I rather think it's lost its briefcase. I can't see the bag anymore."
"If I didn't recognize the danger of anthropomorphizing," said Cashew, "I'd say it's scared. Look how frantically it's waving its tentacles! It's trying to reach the edge of the city!"
"Even aliens," said Jonas, "must have a few things in common with us. There isn't enough room in organism-space for all aliens to be totally different from all the other aliens—us included . . .
"Cash, if it was trying to reach the city, it missed."
They watched the creature slip past the fronds that decked the city's edge, plummeting into the far depths, dangerously close to the huge, dangling tentacles . . .
A flock of pancake birds shot from the edge of the jungle, ripping and tearing as Halfholder whirled through them, smashing into her, destroying her forward momentum. The fringe-mass stayed tantalizingly out of reach—even a quick death eluded her. Now there was nothing to stop her from falling endlessly into Secondhome's gravity well, down to where the pressure became so inconceivable that the atmosphere turned liquid, then (madness) solid. Long before she reached the layer of liquid molecular hydrogen, she would either have starved or been squashed flat. . . With her knife lost, there was no way to hasten her end. She tore in a frenzy at the remains of a pancake bird, scattering it to the six winds—
And froze.
What in the name of the Original Elders was that?
"Left—no, right, right, right, damn you . . . Hold the goddamned arm steady, Jonas . . . Caught it!" yelled Bailey. The alien hung from the one of the probes robotic arms, like a soggy dishcloth slung over a wash line. "Nice driving, Prudence! Just look at that mother!"
"Maybe it's a father," said Jonas. Cashew decided not to enlighten him. "Or a drone. Or A Thing Of Which Man Is Not Intended To . . ."
"I still think it was in distress," said Cashew. "You saw how those things tore into it. It fought hack. I don't care what you say, that's the only sensible explanation of what we saw. Oh, don't start trying to be clever, Jonas! I've got an imagination, too, you know. Sure, it was the Jovian equivalent of a poetry recital . . . But I've also got a well-developed intuition, and I know what I saw."
"Me, too. I was just thinking aloud. Look at that. . . tentacle! Well, whatever it is, it's dripping yellow gore. Yuck! What a great sequence!"
"It's not quite the first contact scenario I was anticipating," said Prudence. "This alien is injured. For all we know, it's dying. It's a traveler, not a resident. It could even be the wrong kind of alien, though two kinds would surely be a bit much ... Do we try to give this one a communicator, or pass it up and wait for a better chance?"
Bailey had been watching events unfold, and until now he hadn't said much. Sometimes Bailey was amazingly bright. Not often, but when he was . . .
"Narrative imperative," he said quietly.
"Pardon?"
"The power of story. Cash. Remember all those tales you heard or read as a kid? The mouse that helped the lion? If we give this one the communicator and the alien dies, all we've lost is a communicator. The probe has several, right? Must have, Charlie Dunsmoore would never put all of his eggs in one basket. We can try again. But, if the alien lives, we may just have made a friend for life." He waved his hands in embarrassment. "Yes, I know it may not work like that for aliens, but just suppose it does! Think what an opportunity we may miss! Don't you realize that this is a surefire award-winning W sequence?"
Jonas looked at Cash, who nodded. Prudence watched them impassively. "Narrative imperative? Guys, the universe doesn't work like that." Then she laughed. "But people do, that's what you're telling me. Okay, you all risked everything to accompany me on this wild goose chase—so you get to call this one."
"Jonas, I appoint you chief mouse. See if you can bell the alien. Cash can work the camera."
Jonas started muttering. "First find your bell ... I wonder where Dunsmoore's guys put the bloody—ah, must be that boxy thing over there. Lift the lid—bingo!" He fiddled with the control circuits for the probe's manipulator arms and managed, after a couple of false starts, to persuade a second arm to pull a communicator unit out of the box.
It was wired in place. Laboriously, he untwisted the thick wire until the unit came free.
Where to put. . . The mobile weather balloon had lost its pouch . . . Nowhere obvious . . .
Except for those flexible, sensitive tentacles.
He thought for a moment and set the communicator to replay the last few minutes' events. Then he turned its small but bright display to face the alien's ring of eyes and offered the communicator to the creature as it hung from the first robot arm, apparently helpless. For all he knew, it was terrified.
Or angry.
He'd half expected the alien to shy away as the second arm approached it, but it didn't budge. Some of the eyes, however, seemed to swivel, redirecting themselves to focus on the approaching communicator. They watched, occasionally popping in and out, as the tiny images of the predators exploded and spiraled to their deaths. Whether those e
yes saw anything, nobody could be sure. The humans didn't know what range of light those eyes were sensitive to. But it looked as if they could see something.
Hesitantly, the alien reached out with a tentacle. It touched the communicator, and the rubbery limb slid across its plastic surface. Then the alien slipped a tentacle tip through the handle attached to the top.
Jonas took a deep breath, gave the necessary command, and the robot arm let go.
The tentacle didn't.
The alien shivered a little as it lay draped across the nose of the probe. It brought the communicator up near its ring of eyes again and held it there, turning it from side to side. It seemed puzzled.
I hope it doesn't drop the bloody thing, thought Jonas. It's a long way down.
The alien reached some kind of decision and tucked the communicator away beneath its fringe of tentacles.
"Hey, she likes it!"
"Jonas, why are you so sure that thing is female?"
"My media-training tutor told me always to sound confident, even if I was talking crap. Cash."
"That explains why you're always so confident, Jonas."
By now, the probe had floated well away from the city. Prudence used its attitude thrusters to bring it around in a huge circle. It gained height as it went.
"We can't detain her indefinitely," he said. "The planet's rotation has already carried the probe close to the limb, and we'll soon have to put it on autopilot until it reemerges from radio shadow. I dare not hack into the comsat network; they're too likely to notice. It's time we escorted the lady home. I say we spiral up, wait till she's well above the city, let the little lady go, and see what she does. If I'm right, she'll drop right back down again. I hope she gets it right this time."
They spiraled up.
When he got to where he wanted to be, nobody had contradicted him, so he let the robot arm swing the alien sideways. Then, with a deft toss, he threw the creature into the Jovian air. It floundered about for a few heart-stopping moments, then recovered, reoriented itself, and began to float downward apparently under control.