Asimov's SF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Pod intelligence? What an odd notion, boy,” I said, keeping my tone casual.

  “I know pods, sir,” Pren insisted. “I grew up on a farm. Even the smallest wild pod has the sense to turn its spine membranes to the sun, and to roll in search of water, and knows when to rise into the sky and burst to spread its seed. And bigger pods are smarter, especially house pods. I've seen them roll over smaller pods to block their sun, or strangle another's vines to take over a nice moist patch of dirt. They grow more cunning with age. And so I wondered, sir, how intelligent is the Glory?”

  “Come up here, boy. Guards, let him through,” I ordered.

  To my relief, they obeyed. Pren scuttled up the Glory's vines in an instant, reminding me painfully of my age.

  “You have discovered our secret,” I said in a low voice, watching his face. “Yes, the Glory is an excellent conversationalist and each evening joins me in singing Majesty's praises. If not for this voyage, I would have appointed it my deputy astronomer, for it has more wit and charm than Tlik.”

  Pren grinned nervously, and glanced down as if checking the guards were out of earshot. “Surely you jest, sir. Even this fine pod is as blind, deaf and mute as its lesser brethren. Forgive me, but I have observed you in my spare moments each day—you stroke the Glory's spines, and I see them move under your touch. I can only presume your intention to be navigation, sir. You cannot drift through the sky at the aimless mercy of the winds; the Glory must be set to face its correct heading, as if it were a sailer-pod upon the waves.”

  “Remarkable,” I said. “You are the first to deduce that; the Queendom's leading botanists and astronomers have noticed nothing more than an oversized pod. So, boy, do you think it will work?”

  “Yes, sir. The Glory is a most ingenious craft, and the voyage will be a great adventure. I beg you, may I join your crew?”

  “Crew? What crew? I do not even want Tlik onboard, he will only get in the way.”

  “I mean no disrespect to Professor Tlik, sir, but that's precisely why you need me. Your . . . maturity has brought great wisdom, but also . . . well, sir, neither of you are as strong or agile as you once were.”

  “I will consider it,” I sighed, knowing he was right.

  * * * *

  Majesty sent two of Her bodies to personally observe our launch—an unheard-of honor. Her more fashionable and energetic courtiers accompanied Her, as did the entire Royal Observatory staff.

  To my surprise, most of the crown city's population also crowded the nearby streets to watch us clamber up into the Glory's woven net of vines. I took a small ocular from our equipment case and peered at the crowd suspiciously.

  “They are gambling on us,” I spluttered.

  “Most expect the pod to explode and for us to fall to our deaths before their eyes,” said Pren cheerfully. “So I have sold everything I own, and wagered the proceeds that we shall return safely. The dividends were most generous; I will be rich.”

  I said nothing, took a pruning hook and began cutting the lower vines that attached the Glory to the ground. Pren sighed and joined in with his own hook.

  “Yes, yes, your logic is most admirable, boy, if we return,” muttered Tlik, tightly clutching vines with all his limbs. “Well, Thithiwith, tell us honestly, shall this ridiculous pod of yours really take us to the moon?”

  “I sincerely hope so,” I said, and slashed the final vine.

  The Glory heaved upwards into the air. I heard a shrill whistling and feared we had already sprung a leak, only to realize that the noise came from the excited crowd below us. Perhaps to them we were just an amusing spectacle, but I was more concerned at our erratic spinning and lurching. The Glory, as new to flying as we were, was flapping its spines wildly—perhaps natural behavior for a feral pod, but hardly conducive to our comfort or safety.

  I climbed the vines to the spine clusters and stroked their twitching flesh. As hoped, the Glory recognized my touch, and the twitching diminished, as did our wild swaying.

  The crowd noise faded and was replaced by gentle creaking and thrumming from the Glory above us. I peered down and to my astonishment saw the entire crown city laid out far below.

  “We are still alive, which is more than I had expected,” sniffed Tlik. “Congratulations, Thithiwith. We are now higher than anyone in recorded history, and may each rate a graciously worded grave brick in the walls of Majesty's next palace.”

  “Is the Glory well?” asked Pren, looking up at me. “Can you navigate, sir?”

  “We will soon find out.” I stroked the nearest spine, and to my relief, it obediently stretched just as when on the ground. I guessed at the wind, sighted the sun, and slowly nudged the Glory Fallwards.

  * * * *

  Tlik seemed happy consulting a huge collection of maps and comparing them with the view below, occasionally chortling as he discovered some inaccuracy and annotated a map in red ink.

  I kept Pren busy rubbing yinkle oil into the Glory's skin—he understood as well as I that its supple skin was all that differentiated it from an ordinary house pod's dry brittle shell. But I bade him keep well clear of the spines.

  “Look, sirs,” he cried, pointing down. “The borders of the Queendom! The whole country is in our view, from the Kraaf Mountains to the Tiroon Sea. But . . . with all respect, sirs, I must say that the barbarian wastes beyond our borders look much the same as our own lands. I see farmland and roads and cities.”

  “Of course, boy, use your brain,” I said. “There are Queendoms in all directions, each little different to our own, and each with a Queen convinced that She alone rules the civilized world.”

  Pren looked shocked.

  Tlik snorted. “Have you never asked yourself how we know the sky is a perfect hemisphere, boy? Trigonometry. Long before you were born, astronomers of a dozen Queendoms secretly collaborated on measurements to prove it. Any one Queendom is too small to allow enough observation points for accurate calculations.”

  “But sirs, then this voyage is of even greater importance. Imagine how flocks of flying pods will now revolutionize science, cartography, trade, allowing us—”

  “Allowing what?” shouted Tlik. “Flying armies dropping rocks on neighboring Queendoms at the command of jealous Queens, that shall be the only outcome if we succeed. Use your brain, indeed. This irrational fool"—he pointed at me—"has not used his brain, has not considered the consequences for a moment!”

  Speechless, I gaped at him. “My apologies, Professor Tlik. You are correct, we must ensure this voyage is not . . . too successful. Perhaps . . . perhaps we might arrange a quiet crash landing for our return, near some village in the Kraaf Mountains. Then again, fate has not yet decided to let us return at all.”

  Tlik nodded curtly, and went back to his maps. Pren silently rubbed yinkle oil onto the Glory.

  * * * *

  “Is that a cloud?” asked Pren, some hours later.

  I turned and saw that what at first appeared to be an ordinary cloud was in truth a writhing mass of thousands, perhaps millions of white tentacles.

  “How can such a creature float through the air?” Pren wondered.

  “Some equivalent of pod gas, no doubt,” said Tlik, sketching energetically. His artistic skills were excellent, I had to admit.

  I peered through the ocular as we neared the cloud's height. “Actually, it appears not to be floating at all,” I said. “It looks more as if it is . . . crawling upside down. But on what?”

  The question answered itself with a soft thud as we lurched to a halt. Around us were nothing but sky and clouds. I climbed the Glory for a better view, only to hit my head as I neared its top. I reached up and touched solid blue.

  “We have hit the sky,” I yelled, scarcely believing it myself.

  “Nonsense,” said Tlik and began clambering up to join me.

  He was overtaken by nimble Pren. “The edge of the universe,” he said in wonder.

  “Nonsense,” repeated Tlik, only to hit his own head on the b
lue surface.

  “What else can it be?” I asked. “Perhaps the ancients were right and the universe itself is a giant pod, and our sky its inner shell. Although I recall no mention of cloud animals crawling upon it.”

  Tlik tapped the sky dubiously several times as if hoping to disprove me, but could offer no better explanation himself. “I am unimpressed by your navigation,” he muttered at last.

  “As am I,” I confessed. “But with no means to measure our speed or height, and the ground a mere blur even through the ocular, we can trust only our eyes and wits. Is that a line I see in the distance?”

  I passed the ocular to Pren, and he confirmed he too could see a faint line far across the sky. As it seemed to take us near the path of the slowly approaching sun, the line seemed a sensible destination, even to Tlik.

  At first I feared we might be trapped against the sky, for we had no means to lower the Glory, but some experimentation and flapping of spines soon nudged us into a lower breeze that blew gently Fallwards.

  “We have accidentally collected some sky creatures,” reported Pren, holding a handful of pulsing blue bubbles.

  “Take care that they do not feed upon pods or us,” I warned, seeing great swarms of the same bubbles crawling across the sky above our heads.

  “Apparently not,” said Pren. “I suspect they are food for the clouds.”

  “Both clouds and bubbles avoid those black flowers, and I propose we do likewise,” said Tlik.

  The wind blew us near one of the “flowers.” Whether they were gigantic dead blossoms as they appeared, I knew not, but Tlik was right, they were given a wide berth by all creatures, and I was relieved we came no nearer.

  The line in the sky grew closer, but no less mysterious. It was an enormous ridged groove square-cut into the sky, perhaps twice as deep and wide as the Glory, and the same perfect blue as the rest of the sky. A gust of wind blew us up into the groove, giving us an uncomfortably close look.

  “Could it be the trail of some stupendous creature?” wondered Tlik.

  “Yes,” I said. “The sun.”

  “Ridiculous. Why would the sun leave such a path?” sneered Tlik, but he could see as well as I that why was not the point, for the sun undeniably approached along the groove.

  Perhaps the Glory somehow sensed the impending danger, for it bucked and spun and flapped its spines to no good effect. It calmed a little when Pren joined me in rubbing its spines—had he learnt to do so from watching me?—but we remained trapped.

  “We have only one chance.” I pulled out a pruning hook and prepared to cut a small hole in the Glory.

  “You are mad, Thithiwith!” yelled Tlik, trying to grab the hook from me, while Pren restrained us both.

  The sun bore down on us with a strange grinding and rattling noise, its heat already harsh on our faces and further agitating the Glory. But before I could again attempt to puncture the pod, we were hit by a wave of hot air from the sun's wake and tossed out of the groove and across the sky.

  “The holy sun spared our lives!” Tlik squealed. “Our eternal thanks, Shuloku, Queen of Heaven!”

  Was he mocking me? “All right, Tlik, I was wrong, I admit it. Yes, the sun is a machine, a clanking monstrosity of more metal than exists in our entire Queendom, but a machine nonetheless. Our whole world is clearly artificial, just as you mechanists insist.”

  “Idiot,” he shouted back. “I was wrong. Such a miraculous creation can only be the work of a goddess—what more proof could you need?”

  “Cloud,” shrieked Pren. I looked up, only to see the top of the Glory vanish under a layer of white tentacles. No, not tentacles at all—I saw now they were in fact an uncountable swarm of individual worm-like creatures.

  I thought us doomed, but the pod seemed unconcerned by the cloud's attentions.

  “Another miracle,” declared Tlik.

  “The cloud is eating the bubble creatures,” said Pren. “But it seems to have no taste for pod flesh.” To my horror, he calmly held out a forelimb to a questing white worm, and was briefly investigated, then ignored. “Or ours.”

  “Truly we are blessed by the Queen of Heaven,” said Tlik.

  “Truly we are stuck,” I said. “The Glory's vines are tangled in the worms.”

  We waited, but the cloud showed no sign of releasing us or moving away. Perhaps it was digesting its last meal of bubbles; perhaps it slumbered.

  We passed the time arguing, Tlik scorning my newly mechanist views and I deriding his new theosophical zeal. Pren pointedly ignored us both.

  The sun continued its slow traverse Fallwards along the groove, and the sky began to darken. At last the sun disappeared at Fall, and at Rise at the other end of the world, we saw the moon emerge. The stars appeared one at a time, glowing with a cold light.

  “The black flowers,” I said, pointing. “They have awoken as stars.”

  Having nothing better to do, we bickered over why the stars now glowed. Our cloud also showed interest, its worms waving at the nearest star.

  * * * *

  I must have nodded off. I jerked to attention and saw the moon noisily passing us, grinding and rattling along the groove just as the sun had done.

  “Another great machine,” I observed.

  “Another divine artifact,” said Tlik.

  That would have started another argument, except that our cloud chose to then casually split in two, releasing us at last. One cloudlet hesitantly approached a nearby twinkling star.

  Before we could celebrate our freedom, the star lashed out with long tendrils, and we were surrounded by blindly fleeing cloud worms. The Glory lurched and I saw it too had been struck by a tendril. We were slowly dragged towards the flowerlike mouth along with thousands of worms.

  “Foul creature!” shouted Tlik. “How dare you interrupt our observation of the divine moon?” With surprising speed, he climbed a vine and slashed at the tendril with a pruning hook. After a couple of blows, he bellowed in triumph as the tendril parted, but more tendrils lashed at us, one catching both the Glory and Tlik himself in its sticky grasp. “Begone, I say,” he yelled, slashing wildly, but this time succeeded too well, severing the new tendril's grasp on the pod but not on himself, and he was drawn screaming and shouting into the star's mouth.

  Perhaps he was not entirely to the star's taste, or perhaps it merely whipped blindly at anything nearby—for whatever reason, no more tendrils hit us, and we left the star gorging on worms and one Royal Assistant Astronomer.

  “He was a fine scientist and a credit to the observatory,” I said shakily, astonished at finding myself close to tears. “Keenly intelligent, although obstinate, self-absorbed, illogical at times, a terrible waffler—”

  “Yes, and we apprentices say exactly the same about you,” snapped Pren. “Sir.”

  I had no reply to that.

  “We must complete our mission,” I said at last. “Tlik would have wanted it.”

  “Agreed, but what is our real mission?” asked Pren. “You never believed in moon petals, did you?”

  I glared at him. “We are scientists, and have a moral duty beyond pleasing any Queen or our own petty theories. We are here to observe the heavens and we shall do so. To the moon!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The star's tendrils had done some minor damage to the Glory's skin, and Pren claimed he could feel a slow leak, but even so we made good time chasing the moon, helped by the prevailing Fallwards wind. Pren proved he was an excellent pod handler; I really should have trained him in navigation earlier.

  We drew and made notes as best we could. As far as we could tell, the moon was similar to the sun in every way but brightness, which certainly made our observations easier but helped our understanding not at all. What manner of creature or goddess could build such machines and send them rolling through our sky?

  * * * *

  We neared Fall and saw just below us the gaping hole where the sun disappeared and the approaching moon would soon follow. Crosswinds and ed
dies buffeted us as we floated above where ground met sky.

  I leant out, looking for some suitable mooring point. “A question for you, Pren. If the world is truly a perfect spherical pod, and I have seen nothing to contradict that, then what is on the underside of the hemisphere we occupy? Another world, perhaps?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, sir, we will not follow the moon down that hole.”

  “That is not your decision, boy. Think of your duty to science.”

  “Sir, what use are our observations if we cannot return to share them? Tlik will have died in vain.”

  I snorted. “What use would those fools at the observatory make of our discoveries? Half would ignore us or call us liars; the other half would write learned books full of misquotations to rot forgotten on library shelves. No, pure knowledge is its own reward.” I climbed down a vine and tied its end to a sturdy wild pod root. The vine came loose and I looked up to see Pren had slashed its other end with his pruning hook.

  “I apologize, sir,” he said tearfully, as the Glory bobbed up out of my reach. “But I must respectfully and forcefully disagree. Pure knowledge is not enough, I have a duty to share it with the world. The Glory is injured and leaking and I know not whether it will bear me home, but I must try. You and Tlik will be remembered and honored, sir. Goodbye.”

  “Good luck, Pren,” I called. “I mean it. Remember to take Majesty a moon petal—something big and shiny, no one will know the difference. Perhaps you will be Royal Astronomer one day. Perhaps then you will understand.”

  The moon approached. I waited at the edge of the Fall hole as it slowly rumbled past. When I judged the moment right, I leapt onboard, and sank into darkness.

  Copyright © 2010 Peter Friend

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  * * *

  Poetry: OF LYCANTHROPY AND LILACS

  by Sandra Lindow

  * * * *

  * * * *

  In March the howling through the lilacs

  was nearly unendurable.

  I looked outside but couldn't see the source.