Even during interglacial periods, the polar caps are extensive; having fallen there frozen, water does not readily rise again. Moreover, the circulation patterns of air and water combine with the slight axial tilt to make for much greater dependence of climate on latitude alone than is true of terrestroid worlds. Because of that same axial tilt, plus the nearly circular orbit, there are no real seasons on Ramnu. The basic cycle is not of the year but of the half-month-long day.
Across it strides another cycle, irregular, millennial, and vast—that of the glaciers. Given its overall chilliness, its extensive cloud decks, and its reluctance to let water evaporate, Ramnu is always close to the brink of an ice age, or else over it. No more is necessary than the upthrust of a new highland in a high latitude. Accompanied as it is by massive vulcanism, which fills the upper atmosphere with dust that will be decades in settling, this makes snow fall; and given the pressure gradient, the snow line is low. The ice spreads outward and outward, sometimes through a single hemisphere, sometimes through both. Nothing stops it but the subtropical belts. Nothing makes it retreat but the sinking of the upland that formed it.
For the past billion years or more, Ramnu had alternated between glacial and interglacial periods. The former usually prevailed longer. Humans arrived when the ice was again on the march. Now it was advancing at terrible speed, kilometers each year. Whole ecologies withered before it. Native cultures fled or crumbled—as how many times before in unrecorded ages?
Banner sought help for them. A starfaring civilization could readily provide that. Intensive studies would be needed at first, of course, followed by research and development, but the answer was simple in principle. Orbit giant solar mirrors in the right sizes and numbers and paths, equipped with sensors, computers, and regulators so that they would continuously adjust their orientations to the optimum for a given set of conditions. Have them send down the right amounts of extra warmth to properly chosen regions. That was all. The glaciers would crawl back to the poles where they belonged, and never return.
Banner sought help. The Grand Duke of Hermes placed himself squarely in her way. Flandry could guess why.
Hooligan contained a miniature gymnasium. Her captain and passenger took to using it daily after work, together. Then they would return to their cabins, wash, dress well, and meet for cocktails before dinner.
In a certain watch, about mid-passage, they were playing handball. The sphere sprang between them, caromed off bulkheads, whizzed through space, smacked against palms, flew opponentward followed and met by laughter. Bare feet knew the springiness of deck covering, the jubilation of upward flight. Sweat ran down skin and across lips with a rousing sting of salt. Lungs drew deep, hearts drummed, blood coursed.
She was ahead by a few points, but it hadn’t been easy and she was not a bit sure it would last. Seventeen years made amazingly little difference. He was nearly as fast and enduring as a youth.
And nearly as slim and supple, she saw. Above and below his shorts, under smooth brown skin, muscles went surging, not heavy but long, lively, greyhound and race horse muscles. Wetness made him gleam. He grinned at her, flash after white flash in those features that time had not blurred, simply whetted. She realized he was enjoying the sight of her in turn, more than he was the game. The knowledge tingled.
He took the ball, whirled on his heel, and sped it aside. Before it had rebounded, he was running to intercept. She was too. They collided. In a ridiculous tangle of limbs, they fell.
He raised himself to his knees. “Banner, are you all right?” As she regained her breath, she heard anxiety in his tone. Looking up, she saw it in his face.
“Yes,” she mumbled. “Just had the wind knocked out of me.”
“Are you sure? I’m bloody sorry. Both my left feet must’ve been screwed on backwards this morning.”
“Oh, not your fault, Dominic. Not any more than mine. I’m all right, really I am. Are you?” She sat up.
It brought them again in close contact, thighs, arms, a breast touching him. She felt his warmth and sweat through the halter. The clean man-smell enfolded her, entered her. Their lips were centimeters apart. I’d better rise, fast, she thought in a distant realm, but couldn’t. Their eyes were holding too hard. As if of themselves, hers closed partway, while her mouth barely opened.
The kiss lasted for minutes of sweetness and lightning.
When he reached below the halter, alarm shrilled her awake. She disengaged her face and pushed at his chest. “No, Dominic,” she heard herself say. It wavered. “No, please.”
If he insists, she knew, I won’t. And she did not know what she felt, or was supposed to feel, when he immediately let go.
He sprang to his feet and offered his assistance. They stood for a moment and looked. Finally he smiled in his wry fashion.
“I won’t say I’m sorry, because I don’t want to lie to you,” he told her. “It was delightful. But I do beg your pardon.”
She managed a shaken laugh. “I’m not sorry either, and no pardon is called for. We both did that.”
“Then—” He half reached for her, before his arm dropped. “Have no fears,” he said gently. “I can mind my manners. I’ve done it in the past . . . yes, right here.”
How many women has he traveled with? How few have denied him?
If only I can make him understand. If only I do myself.
She knotted her fists, swallowed twice, and forced out: “Dominic, listen. You’re a damned attractive man, and I’m no timid virgin. But I, I’m not wanton either.”
“No,” he said, with utmost gravity, “the daughter of Max and Marta wouldn’t be. I forgot myself. It won’t happen again.”
“I told you, I forgot too!” she cried. “Or—well, I w-wish we knew each other better.”
“I hope we will. As friends, whether or not you ever feel like more than that. Shake on it?”
Tears blurred the sight of him as they clasped hands. She blinked them off her lashes, vexedly. Too fast for her to stop it, her voice blurted, “Oh, hell, if I had a normal sex drive we’d be down on the deck yet!”
He cocked his head. “You mean you don’t? I decline to believe that.” In haste: “Not that it’d be any disgrace. Nobody is strong in every department, and no single department is at the core of life. But I think you’re mistaken. The cause is easy to see.”
She stared at her toes. “I’ve not had much to do . . . there . . . ever . . . nor missed it much.”
“Same cause. You’ve been too thoroughly directed toward the nonhuman.” He laid a hand on her shoulders. “That’s not wrong. In many ways, it’s wonderful. But it has given your emotions different expression from what’s customary, and I think that in turn has made you a bit confused about them. Not to worry, dear.”
All at once her face was buried against him, and he was holding her around the waist and stroking her hair and murmuring.
Presently she could stand back. “Would you like to talk about it?” he asked. With a disarming chuckle: “I’ll bend a sympathetic ear, but it’ll also be a fascinated one. What is it like, to share the life of an alien . . . to be an alien?”
“Oh, no, you exaggerate,” she said. Relief billowed through her. Yes, I do want to talk about what matters to me. I can’t just go take a shower as if nothing had happened, I have to let out this fire. He’s shown me I needn’t be afraid to, because the talk needn’t be about us. “It’s basically nothing but a wide-band communication link, you know.”
(The collar that Yewwl wore was a piece of electronic sorcery. A television scanner saw in the same direction as her eyes. An audio pickup heard what she did. Thermocouples, vibrosensors, chemosensors analyzed their surroundings to get at least a clue to what she felt, smelled, tasted. The whole of the result became more than the sum of the parts, after it reached Banner.)
(It did that by radio, at the highest frequencies to which Ramnu’s air was transparent. A well-shielded gram of radioisotope sufficed to power a signal that human-made comsats
could detect and relay. A specialized computer in Wainwright Station received the signals and converted them back to sensory-like data. The ultimate translation, though, had to be by a human, brain and body alike, intellect, imagination, empathy developed through year after year. Seated beneath the helmet, before the video screen, hands flat on a pair of subtly vibrant plates, Banner could almost—almost—submerge herself in her oath-sister.)
(How she wished it could be a two-way joining. But save when they were together in the flesh, they could merely speak back and forth, via a bone-conduction unit. Nevertheless, they were oath-sisters in truth. They were!)
“It’s not telepathy,” she said. “The channel won’t carry but a tiny fraction of the total information. Most of what I experience is actually my own intuition, filling in the gaps. I’ve spent my career training that intuition. I’m trying to discover how accurate it really is.”
“I understand,” Flandry replied. “And you aren’t linked continuously, or even as much as half the day, as a rule, let alone your absences from the planet. Still, you’ve been very deeply involved with this being. Your chief purpose has been to learn how to feel and think like her, hasn’t it? Without that, there can be no true comprehension. So of course you’ve been affected yourself, in the most profound way.”
They sat down on the rubbery deck and leaned against the bulkhead, side by side. “And therefore I won’t know you, Banner, before I know more about Yewwl,” he said. “Will you tell me?”
“How?” she sighed. “There’s too much. Where can I begin?”
“Wherever you like. I do have a fair stock of so-called objective facts to go on by now, remember. You’ve taken me well into the biology—”
Although the Ramnuan atmosphere resembles Terra’s percentagewise, the proportions of the minor constituents vary. Notably, we find less water vapor most places, because of the pressure and temperatures; more nitrogen oxides, because of frequent and tremendous lightning flashes; more carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur oxides, because of vulcanism. These would not be what killed us, if we breathed the air directly; they would simply make it acrid and malodorous. What we would die of, pretty soon, would be oxygen and nitrogen. They are not present at concentrations which are intolerable for a limited span, but their pressure, under seven gravities, would force them into our lungs and bloodstreams faster than we can stand. Incidentally, that pull by itself forbids us to leave our home-conditioned base for any long while. Our cardiovascular system isn’t built for it. Gravanol and tight skinsuits help, but the stress quickly becomes too much.
Just the same, Ramnuan life reminds us of our kind in many ways. It employs proteins in water solution, carbohydrates, lipids, and the rest. The chemical details vary enormously. For example, the amino acids are not all identical; since weather provides abundant nitrates, nitrogen-fixing microorganisms, while they do exist, are—like Terra’s anaerobic bacteria—archaic forms of rather minor ecological significance; et cetera endlessly. In a broad sense, though, evolution has followed a similar course to ours. Here too it has founded a plant and an animal kingdom.
The critical secondary element is sulfur. It is so common in the environment, thanks to vulcanism, that biology has adopted it somewhat as Terran biology has adopted phosphorus. On Ramnu, sulfur is vital to several functions, including reproduction. It is usually taken up by plants as sulfate, or in the tissues which herbivores and carnivores eat. Where an area is deficient in it, life is sparse. Forest fires help, redistributing it in ash which the dense atmosphere disperses widely. Most important are certain microbes which can metabolize the pure element.
When it becomes freshly abundant, as around an active volcano, these organisms multiply until sheer numbers make them visible, a yellow smoke in air, a hue in water. Dying, they enrich the soil. This is the Golden Tide whose coming has brought fertility to land after land, whose dwindling has brought famine till populations died sufficiently back. The natives also transport sulfur, on a far smaller scale; their trade in it has conditioned their histories more than the salt trade has those of humans.
Given the oxygen concentration and the incidence of lightning, fires kindle easily and burn fiercely. Outside of wetlands, such a thing as a climax forest scarcely exists; woods burn down too often. Vegetation has made various adaptations to this, deep roots or bulbs, rapid reseeding, and the like. Most striking is that of the huge, diverse botanical family which we call pyrasphale. It synthesizes a silicon compound which makes it incombustible.
The pyrasphales have numerous analogies to the grasses of Terra or the yerbs of Hermes. They are comparative latecomers, that have taken over the larger part of most lands and proliferated into a bewildering variety of forms. Many do bear a superficial resemblance to this or that grass. Their appearance was doubtless responsible for a period of massive extinction about fifty million years ago; they crowded out older plants, and countless animals could not digest their fireproofing. Later herbivores have adjusted, either excreting it unchanged or breaking it down with the help of symbiotic microbes.
Pyrasphale has not displaced everything else. Where it reigns alone, that is apt to be by default. Ordinarily, a landscape covered by it has stands of trees, shrubs, thorn, or cane as well.
The animals of Ramnu exhibit their own abundant analogies to those of Terra, including two sexes, vertebrates and invertebrates, exothermic and endothermic metabolisms. The typical vertebrate has a head in front, with jaws, nose, two eyes, two ears; it bears four true limbs; commonly it sports a tail. But the differences exceed the likenesses.
Among the most obvious is the general smallness, under that gravity. Outside the seas, the very biggest creatures mass a couple of tonnes; and they inhabit regions of lake and swamp, where the water supports most of their weight as they browse around. A plain may teem with herds of assorted species, but nearly every one is dog-sized or less. An occasional horse-tall beast may loom majestic above them. It has a special feature, of which more later. Otherwise, at first it strikes a human odd to see a graviportal build on an animal no bigger than a collie. The gracile forms are tiny.
The long, cold nights set a premium on endothermy. Exotherms must find a place to sleep where they won’t freeze (or, they hope, be dug up and eaten) or else start a new generation by sunset whose juvenile stage can survive. Plants have developed their own solutions to the same problem, including a family which secretes antifreeze and several families which make freezing a part of their life cycles.
An intermediate sort of animal has a high metabolism to keep warm at night but—outside the polar regions and highlands—must take shelter by day, lest it get too warm. Complete endothermy is harder to achieve than on Terra, since water evaporates reluctantly. The larger animals grow cooling surfaces such as big ears or dorsal fins.
Flyers face less difficulty in this regard, for their wings provide those surfaces; but it is worth noting that none have feathers. They are abundant on Ramnu, where the gravity is more or less offset by the thickness of the atmosphere. The swift drop of pressure with altitude does make most of them stay close to the ground. A few scavengers can soar high. Then there are the gliders; but of these, too, more later.
Among the land vertebrates, an order of viviparous endotherms exists which has no Terran parallel: the pleurochladoi. Between the fore- and hindlimbs, a pair of ribs has become the foundation, anchored to an elaborate scapular process, of two false limbs, which humans call extensors. It is thought that these lengths of muscle originated in a primitive, short-legged creature which thus found a way to hitch itself along a trifle faster. The development was so successful that descendants radiated into hundreds of kinds.
Extensors give added support; grasping, hauling, pushing, they give added locomotion. Hence they have enabled certain of their possessors to become as big as mustangs.
In quite a different direction, extensors produced the sub-order of gliding animals. These grew membranes from the forequarters to the tips of the extensors, and
from the tips to the hindquarters. The membranes doubtless began as a cooling device, which they remain, but they have elaborated into airfoils—vanes. Such a beast can fold them and run around freely. Or it can stiffen the extensors, thereby spreading the vanes, and glide down from a height. Given favorable currents, it can go astonishingly far in the dense air, or perform extraordinary maneuvers. Thereby it gets fruit, prey, escape from enemies, easy transportation.
Most gliders are bat-sized, but a few have become larger, and a few of these have become bipedal. Among them are the sophonts.
Red-gold, Niku waxed bright among the stars. In less than a day, it would be the sun.
Flandry saw how Banner’s glance kept straying to its image in the screen. This was to have been a happy evenwatch, the last peaceful span they would know for a time they did not know—perhaps an eternity. Garbed in the finest they had along, they sipped their drinks in between dances until Chives set forth the best dinner he was capable of. Afterward Flandry had him join them in a valedictory glass, but the batman said goodnight as soon as that was done. Now—
Cognac was mellow on the tongue, fragrant in the nostrils, ardent along the throat and in the blood. Flandry didn’t smoke while he savored stuff as lordly as this. He did make it an obbligato to the sight and nearness of Banner. They were side by side; when she looked ahead, into the stars, he saw the proud profile. Tonight a silver circlet harnessed the tide of her mane. The hair flowed lustrous brown, touched by minute, endearing streaks of white. A bracelet Yewwl had given her, raw gemstones set in bronze, would have been barbarically massive on her left wrist, save that the casting was exquisite. She wore a deep-blue velvyl gown, long, low-cut, and though her bosom was small, the curve of it up toward her throat made him remember Botticelli.
He was not in love with her, nor—he supposed—she with him, except to the gentle degree that was only natural and that, in ordinary life, would only have added piquancy to friendship. He did find her attractive, and thought the cosmos of her as a person, in her own right, not merely because she was daughter to Max Abrams. So much had he come to respect her on this voyage that he no longer felt guilty about having brought her.
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 8