Nor Crystal Tears

by Alan Dean Foster

  “That’s fine,” Ryo said admiringly.

  “Nothing, nothing. Garbage not worth setting to chip. Rough words, but we will find inspiration worthy of publication, my boy.”

  “I hope something good comes of all this. What if your—ah, forger proves not as efficient as you seem to think he will?”

  “I have a title, this ‘Eint.’ It must be good for something. Surely it will enable us to brazen our way past any uncertainty. Since you don’t have the experience for it, I shall do the brazening for us both. I do it all the time. Is not poetry a method of brazening one’s way past a listener’s defenses, in order to get directly at his emotions? Poetry’s more than harmonics and math, you know. We’ll manage our way, don’t worry.

  “There is one thing. Have you given thought to your family and premate?”

  Suddenly Ryo did not feel very well.

  “Constantly,” he murmured.

  “That is as it should be. You struck me as a responsible young fellow. We’ll draft a communication to one of them. It will arrive in this Paszex of yours by a most circuitous route so that its origin cannot be traced. It will not go off at all until we are safely on our way and out of the Willow-wane system.

  “It will not tell them your whereabouts or intentions, but that you are well and thinking of them. If what you’ve told me so far is true, the last thing they will believe is that you’ve succeeded in making your way off-planet. It will be something of a shock to them when you return with the truth, but until then they will at least not consider setting a burial service for you.”

  Ryo watched the poet instead of the scene beyond the window. “You do realize what you’re doing?”

  “What’s that?” asked Wuu. He’d settled himself before a beautifully inlaid computer console and was busily running his fingers across the square touchboard.

  “You’re breaking at least four laws on my behalf.”

  “Oh, laws.” Wuu made a shockingly rude sound. “What do you think the task of poets is if not to break laws?” Information rippled across the console screen. “A transport departs from Hivehom in three days. I think we can be ready by then, my boy.”

  “So soon? But don’t you have things to prepare, affairs that need to be tidied up before you can leave? We’ve no idea how long we’ll be gone.”

  “My affairs always need tidying up,” said Wuuzelansem, adding a third-degree twinkle. “Ryo, there are three great excuses one can use in life. To say that one is mad, drunk, or a poet. It makes amends for a great many delightful outrages one can safely perpetrate upon society.

  “As to the preparation of your new identification, admittedly that will require something of a rush job on the part of the lady I have in mind, but I believe she can manage. She is a true artist. Wait until you see her work. She uses all four hands simultaneously with a flow nothing short of erotic. A thing of beauty—as your eventual identification will surely be. Beautiful and believable both.

  “I will book passage for us on the transport. Not upper class, not lower, but middle. We don’t want to be pushed around as we might be in lower and we don’t want to attract the attention that upper would bring.

  “We’ll travel with the average this time round, in search of distinctly unaverage discoveries, and if no alien monsters should be skulking about on Hivehom—well, it’s been a while since I’ve been off my home world. While the local and familiar are soothing to the soul, the mind requires somewhat more extensive stimulation. The journey itself will be worthwhile. I take it you have never been to Hivehom?”

  “I’ve never been outside Paszex until my journey here.”

  “It will be something for you to see. A bucolic lad like yourself. Yes, three days should be enough.”

  “I don’t know what to say or how to thank you for this,” said Ryo, adding a little click and gesture of amusement, “‘Father.’”

  “Good. You’re beginning to get into the spirit of subterfuge. Treat me with respect, call me always as you would a real adoptive sire. We will surely gain acceptable verse from the drama.”

  Suitable attire was ordered for Ryo. In keeping with Wuu’s intentions to stay as inconspicuous as possible, the clothing was new but not fancy. Those constraints aside, the vest and pouch were attractive and sturdy.

  A day prior to their scheduled departure a secretive little Thranx appeared at Wuuzelansem’s entryway to hand-deliver a tiny package. This produced a remarkable brace of identification documents, including even a credit charge stick. The latter was supposedly unforgeable, for the financial institutions of all Thranx worlds were extremely security-conscious. Ryo would use it only in an emergency.

  “I will handle all fiscal transactions,” said Wuu. “No sense in tempting fate. That stick will be the most difficult to pass, but it’s important that you at least be able to show one. No one travels intersystem without a stick.” He studied the younger Thranx. “How do you like your new clothing?”

  Ryo dropped to all sixes, rose again and twisted his upper body, shook his abdomen. The vest stayed securely in place.

  “I hardly know what to say.”

  “One wordless and one overflowing with words. We’ll complement each other well.” The poet made a gesture indicative of second-degree amusement mixed with disavowal of sarcasm. “Tomorrow then, we take ship.”

  “And if there are problems?”

  “We’ll deal with them as they present themselves. Spontaneity is one of the joys of existence, my boy, especially if you prepare for it in advance.” He wagged a truhand at the younger male.

  Ryo didn’t sleep well that night as he dreamed unreassuring dreams that centered on a gigantic slobbering thing with a mouth full of crooked, snaggly teeth, crimson fur all over its body, and a half-dozen claw-fingered hands that groped anxiously after him. It wore its skeleton inside, like the yaryinf, and it wanted to suck out his head.

  He woke uneasily to the soft chimes of Wuu’s house alarm.

  They packed little, carrying only hand luggage. “We’re not going to an investiture ball,” Wuu had pointed out, “and those who travel light travel fast.”

  Exiting the level complex in which Wuu lived, they took a shaft lift below surface and then a fourth-level transport to the nearest module terminus, where they boarded a direct module to the shuttleport.

  “I regret only one thing that has happened thus far,” said Ryo in the quiet of their private compartment.

  “What’s that?”

  “That those who beat and robbed me should escape without punishment.”

  “Who says they suffer no punishment? I know what their lives are like. They are miserable most of the time and at best a little of the simplest pleasures may trickle down to them. They live in many ways worse than our primitive ancestors who grubbed a bare existence from the earth, for the advantages of modern society are denied them. Yet ignorant and unhappy though they are, they must somehow live too.”

  Wuu made an all-encompassing gesture with all four hands. “The universe is a jungle, my boy. You could spend all your life in Willow-wane’s wildest reaches fighting poisonous flora and carnivorous fauna, be healthy and happy, and come to the Hive of Ciccikalk one day only to be run over by a transport module. If you regard every place as being dangerous and uncivilized you will find yourself much more relaxed in mind.”

  It was quiet in the module then. Ryo thought how very far from home he was and how farther still he was about to go. Very far from family and clan, and from Fal.

  What would she make of the cryptic message he and Wuu had concocted and sent her? Would she forget him altogether? Assume he was lost mentally? He hoped she would simply sigh deeply and return to the Nursery in hope of his reappearance. Then again, she might seek another premate.

  A mental shake shattered the thoughts like little crystals. He was pursuing a dream the way an addict pursues his next fix. All that mattered now was getting safely off-planet.

  His nervousness increased exponentially as they walked up
the ramp to the shuttle entrance.

  “What if the identification fails?” he whispered to Wuuzelansem. “What if? …”

  “Everything will be fine if you’ll simply relax and look normal,” was the poet’s response. “Your antennae are so stiff they’re going to crack. Straighten your posture, incline your thorax properly, and act like you’re bored by the whole procedure, offspring.”

  “Yes … sire.”

  There was a pause while their names were checked against the passenger manifest. A line of Thranx waited to ascend the ramp. A single official stood there, looking indifferent as the machinery monitored both manifest and personal identification.

  He didn’t even look up as Ryo and Wuu passed through and announced themselves. Their ident slips were processed, checked, and efficiently spat back at them by the boarding console.

  Wuu appeared slightly miffed as they continued up the boarding ramp into the shuttle. He hadn’t been recognized.

  “Not a reader or listener,” he grumbled, referring to the official who’d passed them through. “Civilization is really run by unaesthetic illiterates.”

  “Is there then such a thing as an aesthetic illiterate?”

  They launched into a discussion so animated and intense that Ryo almost didn’t notice when the shuttle’s jets hissed and the thick-bodied craft lifted into the air.

  Airborne, Ryo thought in disbelief. Actually airborne. Like a hesornic. Like a dream.

  They quickly rose above the clouds. Only a dim red line marked the horizon where the sun of Willow-wane was trying to hide. Airborne! What must it have been like, he wondered, for his distant ancestors whose wings had been, for the mating season at least, functional instead of vestigial? Was intelligence such a good trade-off for the momentary power of flight?

  Before long rockets took over from the starving jets. The shuttle was now above the highest clouds, and the sky was fading from blue to purple, aging much like a Thranx. Many songs had employed the analogy. Then they were swimming through the long night and the stars were brighter than they’d ever been.

  A scream rose from behind Ryo, down the central aisle. A female had tumbled from her saddle and lay on her back, kicking at the air with all four legs, pawing at it with her hands.

  Two attendants rushed to her. One clamped a breathing pack over her thorax and administered air from a tank while the other injected a drug directly down her throat.

  She quieted down immediately. Ryo glanced around and noticed that of the two dozen or so passengers on the shuttle, perhaps a fourth of them wore glazed looks and sat in their saddles as if in a trance. He’d been too absorbed by the view outside to notice it earlier. Now he looked questioningly at Wuu.

  “The lady in distress experienced a severe attack of Outside. It particularly affects hive dwellers who spend most of their lives underground. An ancestral carryover that some of the race is still heir to, when we dwelt almost exclusively below ground and when to venture outside was to expose oneself to the prowling carnivores that then roamed the whole surface of Hivehom. This is probably her first flight and she suppressed the feeling as long as she could.”

  “What about those?” Ryo indicated the strangely subdued passengers.

  “The same problem, but those are experienced travelers. Certain drugs safely counteract the Outside. The side effects are minimal but obvious. He turned to inspect Ryo.

  “You feel no fear, no sense of panic?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Have you looked out the port?”

  “I’ve been doing little else.

  Wuu made a gesture of third-degree confidence mixed with mild curiosity. “Most Thranx on a first extra-atmospheric journey experience a certain amount of mental discomfort. After repeated travel the discomfort passes. Some, of course, feel nothing. They are the exception rather than the rule. As I mentioned, I’ve done considerable traveling and therefore feel nothing at all. As for yourself, I should not be surprised that you are the exception in this way as well as in others.”

  “Open spaces have never bothered me,” Ryo explained. “That was one of the things, I think, that helped me to advance so rapidly in my profession.”

  “Ah yes, the exploiter of new agricultural land. You put food on my table, so I won’t start in on the morality of butchering Willow-wane’s native jungle simply to plant asfi.”

  It developed that Ryo was not quite as immune to the vagaries of Deep Space travel as he first thought. When the ship passed beyond the last of the system’s six planets and shifted into Space Plus he fell prey to the same nausea as everyone else, experienced or otherwise.

  The stars became streaks and their colors changed as if they were being viewed through a shaded prism. Once the nausea passed there was ample time to enjoy the luxuries of middle-class shipboard life.

  Days and nights fled apace, with the only indication of movement coming from the slowly changing starfield.

  Eventually the passengers had to return to their cabins a last time. The ship dropped from Space Plus into normal space, stomachs were wrenched, and the stars resumed their normal colors and positions and shapes.

  Ahead lay a bright and somehow familiar sun. There were twelve planets in the Hivehom system, the home world fully inhabited, of course, and three others less so. Several timeparts passed and then they were in orbit around Hivehom. The home world of the Thranx. The spawning place. The where-we-all-come-from.

  VI

  As the shuttle descended Ryo stared avidly out the long port. Hivehom was a beautiful world. Not so beautiful as Willow-wane perhaps, but then his own home was a paradise.

  Hivehom had 20 percent more surface area than Willow-wane, but only a little more habitable territory because it was a cooler world. As they dropped lower Ryo could make out white smears at the northern pole—solid water, he knew from his studies. It was hard to imagine a place where there was little vegetation, where the air was cold and yet so dry that your breath seemed to crackle in your lungs.

  Then the shuttle fell too low to see that far north and there was only green, green and brown like on Willow-wane. Air began to scrape the little craft and it skipped nimbly through the atmosphere as they dropped through the rain clouds above Daret, the capital city of the Thranx.

  Fifty-five million citizens claimed the Hive Daret as their home. The capital city extended hundreds of kilometers in all directions, plunged two hundred and fifty levels toward the center of the planet. Low hills flanked the valley beneath which the city had been cut. A great river, the Moregeeon, meandered over the metropolis. Long barges plied its surface and for forty levels beneath its rocky bottom an intricate complex of artificial aquifiers soaked up water to slake the city’s enormous thirst.

  Air intakes rose a half-kilometer into the damp sky. They vibrated slightly from the drag of immense suction pumps pulling air down to the lowest levels. The forests of intakes and ventilators resembled a city of windowless silver towers.

  Six shuttleports ringed the valley of the Moregeeon, the smallest dwarfing the shuttleport serving Willow-wane’s capital of Ciccikalk. The shuttle banked sharply to avoid a cluster of cloud-spearing ventilators.

  Wuuzelansem pointed out the port as they leveled off slightly in preparation for landing. There, to the northwest, shone sunlight on the towers of Chitteranx, a satellite city of six million particularly wealthy Thranx. Still farther north lay the important metropolitan complex known collectively as Averick, famed for incredibly ancient temples raised by some pre-Thranx intelligence. Both lay hard by the base of the vast frigid plateau that loomed like an island in Hivehom’s sea of clouds and was rarely, even at this modern date, visited or explored.

  Daret itself was close to Hivehom’s equator. Its surface boasted a mean temperature of 33° C and average humidity ranging from 90 to 95 percent. With such ideal climatic conditions it was no wonder the valley of the Moregeeon had become the center of Thranx civilization.

  The little craft leveled off and soon bumped s
lightly as its landing gear contacted pavement. They were down and taxiing toward a dock. Ryo tried to count the shuttles, lighter-than-air transports, and sleek aircraft as they eased toward disembarkation, but soon lost track of types and numbers.

  The wonders of Hivehom from the air had fully occupied his attention during the descent. Now that he and Wuu were on the ground, his early worries returned. Slipping into Daret was likely to prove more difficult then leaving Ciccikalk had been.

  As usual, he was buoyed by Wuu’s bottomless supply of optimism. “Worlds may differ but bureaucrats are everywhere the same. Do you recall our departure from Ciccikalk? Did that Servitospector linger over your new identification?”

  “I don’t believe he ever looked at it,” Ryo admitted. “He left everything to the computer. But shouldn’t it be different here? Not only is this the mother world, but taking things out is not dangerous. Bringing things into another world can be.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have any difficulty.” The debarking tube and ramp were rising from the ground toward the shuttle. No other structures marred the smooth surface of the shuttleport.

  “We’ve come direct from Willow-wane, a known world. We’re not carrying produce or sample material; in any case, there are few restrictions on what can be brought in.”

  Those few restrictions were enough to inspire a very thorough customs inspection, however. While Ryo and Wuu had indeed come direct from Willow-wane to Hivehom, other passengers had not. Ryo fought to conceal his nervousness as a bright-eyed Servitospector went through his identification. It seemed to Ryo that a lot of time was spent studying the identiplate.

  Eventually they were passed through, accompanied by the kind of polite indifference the inhabitants of the capital reserved for those citizens unfortunate enough to have been born on other worlds. Ryo was too relieved at having successfully passed identification to feel any upset at such chauvinism. Wuu seemed to know where he was at all times and quickly located a hotel on Level 75, which was reasonably close to the city center.