Luna’s chickens had finally come home to roost. When we arrived there with Anastasia Wheeler, the Coordinated Arm’s War with the Clusterian Powers had already been raging across the galaxy for much the better part of half a century.
“ ’Tis called ‘lamina,’ Miss.” The deformed old man tugged at a forelock in a manner Bretta detested and her father had put an end to upon moonringed Skye. Over the centuries, Bretta knew already from her many long convalescent discussions with Tarrant and his friends, the fugitives had domesticated these creatures, training them to perform tasks such as salvaging potentially useful refuse—like herself—from passing spacecraft or those the Aggregate had destroyed.
“All of them,” she asked him, “or just this individual?”
“All of ’em, Miss. They’re all called lamina, ‘animal’ spelt back-wise. Don’t ask me why—I didn’t think of it—we’ve called ‘em that for a thousand years.”
Bretta nodded, her fatigue suddenly washed away by her excitement. Here she was, at long last, just where she had wanted to be for what now felt like most of her life. She leaned heavily upon both of her canes, necessary even within this microgravitic environment, if only to keep her in one place when she desired, or help push her from one place to another when it was required. Tarrant had demanded that she remain in bed for another week, but Bretta would have none of it. In the end, he had thrown up his hands and given in to her. It had been the beginning—and they both realized it well—of a serious habit.
Kombi, the old lamina keeper and trainer she was speaking with was one of the oddest beings she had met so far in a remarkably odd population. To begin with, like many another here, he possessed more than two arms—that sort of experiment appeared to represent a kind of research priority to the Aggregate, although she had yet to see one of their standard Oplyte models equipped in such a fashion. This fellow had three, positioned radially about a collection of collarbones that must have looked like an extraordinarily complex child’s hoop.
Where her friend Kanvor the cyclops seemed to have been deprived of half his bilateral symmetry, Kombi, here, seemed to have acquired an extra half. He had three eyes, spaced evenly about his head, no nose of any kind she could discern, and a mouth that wrapped hideously round the lower half of his face like a terrible red wound. Even the poor man’s lower body had not been spared, for he had three legs with feet pointing away in all directions. Bretta would have been more shocked at his appearance had she not been born upon a world where all life-forms native to that planet were trilaterally symmetrical, like Kombi.
But even had she not been prepared for his appearance, all her attention would have been riveted, precisely as it was now, not upon him, but upon the remarkable creatures he loved and had been placed in charge of by his fellow refugees.
They stood together deep inside the largest cavern within the asteroid—almost perfectly spherical and perhaps a hundred measures in diameter—upon a jutting platform that resembled a railed diving board. Clustered about them were three of the animals in question, apparently hoping for an extra treat of some variety from their old keeper since, he explained, he had brought them a guest. It was almost impossible to tell, in the almost negligible gravity of the asteroid, whether the three creatures were hovering, somehow, or merely standing upon some portion—difficult to see owing to their bulk—of their underquarters.
“Hold breath, now, Miss, whilst I give ’em summat.” With no more warning than that, he lifted what she had presumed to be a fire extinguisher from its bracket upon the rail and sprayed in their general direction. “Formaldehyde,” Kombi told her, coughing a trifle from the fumes. “One of the chemicals they graze upon in the open Deep, but never purer or more concentrated than what I give ’em. Can’t let ‘em have too much—too rich, y’know. But they do love it!”
The creatures bobbed and jostled to get at the rapidly dispersing cloud of noxious vapors. Despite the overpowering odor, Bretta watched, perfectly entranced.
All three of the lamina were perhaps ten measures long and half as wide, a little like a teardrop in shape, with the larger end at the front. A rounded dorsal ridge a measure high and half as wide ran tapering from the very front of the creature to the very back, serving as eyes, ears, and nose. The underside of the lamina, Bretta would learn, was rather more concave than the upper side. Nowhere could she see anything like a corner or an edge to the animals, who were as smooth, both in their contours and their texture, as a well-washed river rock, or a half-used bar of soap. Even as early as that, Bretta found herself wondering why a creature that had evolved in the Deep needed to be so streamlined.
At the time, what struck her most profoundly were the colors the lamina displayed—or failed to display might have been a choicer expression. It was difficult to say precisely what color they were. They were glossy, that much was definite. They were dark—a rich, depthy black or blue—the same as the Deep itself. And yet if one looked away for just an instant, from the corner of one’s eye they also seemed to be transparent, as if made of living glass.
She had expected the lamina to be cold to the touch, wet and slimy. But they were just the same temperature as her fingers, outstretched at the urging of old Kombi, as dry beneath them as the curved transparency in the room she had been given, and as rigidly resilient as a child’s balloon. Kombi flicked one of them in a friendly, familiar manner with the nail of his middle finger. The sound was that which had once been rendered, in a different century, as “blimp”!
“Are they hollow, then?” She did not think such a thing possible.
The old keeper shook his head, one of the eeriest sights Bretta had ever witnessed. “Not so you could tell, Miss. They appear t’be filled with what they’re made of on the outside, the same stuff through and through. Mind you, I’ve never cut one up to look. I’ve found one of ’em dead now and again, is all.”
By now, one of them began nuzzling her hand. She caressed the surface it presented, and it pushed even closer, until the platform creaked and it backed away. “They seem rather intelligent,” Bretta observed. “Have you given them names?”
Old Kombi puffed up for a moment with a proprietary pride. “That I have, Miss, that I have, indeed. These three lovelies here are Wynken, Blynken, an’ Nod!”
CHAPTER XXXVII:
SHAH NAMAH
“Do you have even the faintest idea, Princess,” Tarrant demanded, knowing before he began that it was useless—and also several weeks too late—to argue with the girl, “how dangerous what you are proposing to do happens to be?”
They both stood upon the narrow, railed platform extending out into the center of the lamina cavern. A single animal stood near. Dressed from head to toe in sturdy leather, plastic, and kefflar—her knife was upon her hip; she would never again go anywhere without it—Bretta had just handed him her canes. She took the rail in her hands, lifted herself, swung her legs over, and stood upon tiptoe at the outermost edge of the platform, holding on to the rail.
“Purposing, Hanebuth, not proposing. It is what I intend, without asking anybody’s permission first. Either I am the owner of my life, or I am not.”
His answer consisted of no more than a shrug, for what else could he say, agreeing with her as he did? Nonetheless, he was sorely afraid for her safety and must convey that much to her, at the least. Nobody had ever done what she was about to attempt—nor even thought of it before. And the idea of living out the remainder of his life inside this hope-forsaken rock, deprived of the brightly colored magic she had already brought to it, was more than he liked contemplating.
“I have watched carefully over the past weeks as I was getting the legs under me again. The airlocks are a long series of twisted tunnels—volcanic bubble-chains, I would guess—with viewports set in the wall of each chamber against any chance of intruders. They are connected by gates the lamina can nudge aside.” She held up a §-speculum, an old-fashioned §-field detector she had found rummaging about the storage caves. Resembling a hand mirr
or set with clear glass, it now hung from a lanyard attached to her belt. “They must do it a dozen times before they are out in the open Deep; as soon as they experience a noticeable drop in the air pressure or temperature, up come their §-fields.”
He nodded, reluctantly. “I know, Princess, I have watched you watching. Still . . .”
She shook her head, “I understand.” She squatted down to look upon him between the horizontal bars of the rail. Abruptly, she reached out with one hand as she held on to the rail by the other, seized him by one spindly arm, dragged him closer, and kissed him upon the cheek. “And I do love you for it, my dear friend. Please have something hot for me to drink when I return, will you?”
An astonished Tarrant had to clear his throat. “You may rely upon me, Princess.”
“Have I always not, Hanebuth?” And with those five words, she sprang free of the platform, dropping three measures to the back of the lamina below her.
She gave out a “Whoop!” that was almost involuntary. This was not the first time she had sat astride one of the Deep-going creatures. She had been doing it—as well as studying them from a distance—for weeks, until she felt ready to take it a step further. From the first, Bretta had noticed that the lamina were extraordinarily streamlined, which had struck her as puzzling. According to Tarrant, in their own way they closely resembled a long-extinct ocean animal of ancient Earth called a manta ray. She had wondered: if the lamina had evolved, were born, dwelt, and bred, in hard vacuum—rather than in the water—then why should their shape confer any particular survival advantage?
“I shall be back within the hour!” Bretta shouted, waving at him as the lamina began to pivot in response to pressure from her knee. “Now, my sweet Rakush,” she spoke to the creature, uncertain whether it could hear her, but aware that the words soothed her, if nobody else. Kombi had told her it was a reproductive male—there were male lamina that never bred, but associated themselves with a breeding pair and helped protect them—named for the war-steed of an ancient hero his mother had told him stories about. “Now we shall see!”
As Rakush surged forward beneath her, she felt an effect she had awaited, the texture of the lamina’s surface, where she touched it, altering radically, adhering to her skin as well as to the fabric of her clothing. It was neither painful nor uncomfortable, not even in the slightest. Nor was it the strongest of attachments—Bretta could pull away whenever she desired to—but it kept her seated securely atop the lamina’s great dorsal ridge, exactly as if she were one of the creature’s offspring, clinging to its powerful, protective parent.
Momentarily, Bretta thought back over the past few, increasingly exciting weeks. As she had continued to heal, she had made a point of becoming friends with handlers like Kombi—only too eager to talk about their charges—and with the marvelous animals themselves. She had found that they could somehow envelope themselves in a low-intensity, natural §-field, somewhat akin to the electrical field surrounding eel- and fishlike species native to many worlds. Apparently it insulated them from cold, heat, airlessness, micrometeorites, and radiation. It was by this means as well—exactly like many another of those eel- and fishlike species—that lamina managed to navigate and propel themselves.
Bretta had ultimately deduced that the lamina were streamlined, in order to minimize the volume of their §-fields and, therefore, the energy required to generate them. Despite this, having observed them using the dorsal ridges of their broad backs to hold and carry their young—who appeared to be unable to generate a §-field for themselves—she had come to believe that they could be trained to generate a §-field big enough to protect a human rider, as well.
At the same time, Bretta had also discovered that she possessed a natural aptitude for handling the wonderful creatures, herself. But now the real test had begun, as Rakush nudged open the first airlock upon its way into the open Deep.
By the time the ninth of a dozen airlocks had sprung closed behind them, Bretta was bitterly cold, out of breath, and mortally afraid. The lamina she had observed had varied, from one individual to another, and from one day to the next, with regard to when they chose to raise their personal §-fields upon leaving the asteroid. She had never seen one wait this long (although she had also never been in one of these bubble-tunnels before, at least as a conscious passenger) and she worried that there might be something wrong with Rakush, or that her presence interfered with some important step vital to the process in question.
Of a sudden, Bretta’s heart froze as she watched an impossibly huge drop of bright red blood splash upon her hand, and then another, and another. Her nose had begun bleeding from decompression, and for all the practicing she had done, she had no idea how to get Rakush to go backward, or even whether he could. And there was no longer room enough for him in the cave to turn around in.
Bretta began to feel dizzy, to see things with difficulty, through a pink gauze, and to lose consciousness. While her life failed to flash before her eyes, she discovered what she regretted most was missing the opportunity to watch Woulf die slowly and in pain. She would have enjoyed seeing her mother and father, as well. And she would never meet the handsome Captain Nathaniel Blackburn!
At once, she felt a kind of tingling wave pass through her body, and she was warm again. She was also able to breathe—she had ascertained that lamina required oxygen, just as she did, and manufactured it in much the same way that a sailing vessel did, from the Deep’s endless supply of elementary particles. Now she was experiencing the process firsthand, and enjoying it thoroughly. Perhaps her distress was what had triggered this response in the animal. She hoped she would not have to get a nosebleed each time they took a ride.
She unstuck her right hand—no residue of any kind came away with it, that was not how the adhesion worked—and slapped the great beast upon the ridge before her as Kombi had taught her to do. “Good Rakush,” she told it, “gentle Rakush. You had me badly frightened there for a moment, but I believe now that this will work. Onward to the next lock, then, and away into the Deep!”
Which was exactly where they rode.
The risk had been worth it just for the view, she decided. As Bretta and Rakush slipped through the final gate, she discovered that the transparency in the chamber she had been given was not nearly as transparent as everyone had believed. Out here, separated from them only by the subtlest of §-fields—and billions of kiloklommes—the stars were pinpoints of multicolored glory and the immediate celestial neighborhood she found herself in, a whirlpool of diamonds.
She urged the lamina round for a look at the asteroid that had been her home and refuge over the past weeks, although it felt like a lifetime. In a sense, Bretta had been reborn here, or at least resurrected from the dead. A trifle less than three klommes in diameter, from the outside it looked like a root vegetable native to Skye called nadlyaque and considered edible only by livestock. Bretta began searching for her domed bedroom window but was soon distracted.
The Vouhat-Letsomo System, she reminded herself, had nothing that could be called a planet. More than anything, it resembled the ringed world where she had been born and raised—“reared,” her mother always insisted—albeit upon a vaster scale. Tarrant had said that it was as if the rings of Saturn had been enlarged to fill the empty reaches between the orbits of Mercury and Pluto. Having never heard of them before, Bretta needed to be told of their significance. These were other planets in the Earthian system—it had not occurred to her that there might be other planets—named after the gods of prehistory.
Before Bretta knew it, she and Rakush had completed their circuit of the planetoid. She had never found her bedroom window; she had been far too busy looking outward to where she meant to go, rather than inward to where she had already been. Now she guided the lamina away from the asteroid to get an idea of his best speed, urging him outward, faster and faster with both her knees. Before she curbed him, their home had dwindled in the distance until it was another dot, indistinguishable among a thousa
nd others, and she was utterly lost.
Panic filled her again until she gained control of it. Never mind: old Palfrey, the gentle female who had found her in the waste canister had been further from home than this—almost outside the system in the interstellar Deep—and she had experienced no difficulty finding her way home. Bretta would trust Rakush to know where his next formaldehyde was coming from. She would enjoy the ride, meantime, learn to communicate with him better, and think, something she had less and less time for in these increasingly busy days.
Bretta had been surprised to learn, from Tarrant and the others, that for trade, or even purely social purposes, travel within the Vouhat-Letsomo System between the “particles” of its “rings”—some of them the size of planetary nation-states—was achieved upon an everyday basis by her Oplytoid rescuers with a relative ease, usually in makeshift lamina-propelled containers she had realized at once would never withstand the rigors of a voyage into the great Deep.
It had never occurred to anyone, before Bretta, that lamina might also be ridden. Given the animals’ widespread use, in this system, as retrievers of a sort as well as beasts of burden, she thought that it represented a peculiar cultural blindness. Perhaps, she had reasoned, it was because so many of the fugitives had made their initial escape from the Aggregate in small auxiliary spacecraft—the Deep-going equivalent of life rafts and rowboats—piled up endlessly for eventual destruction by their captors and more or less forgotten for prolonged periods until some bureaucrat remembered them, and ordered the current accumulation destroyed. And at the same time, the refugees appeared to have few Deep-suits among them—even Bretta had believed, initially, that such protection would be necessary if lamina were to be used in the manner she contemplated—not many Deep-going civilizations, her own included, finding a sufficient everyday necessity for the technology to justify such a lavish expense.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 40