“Here’s something new!” ’Harles Ib’r recognized the change. But he said it without wonder.
“Quiet!” P’al answered. The reason wasn’t immediately apparent.
Even so, all of them held their tongues while the coleopteroids continued their struggle up the steep gullies toward the middlemost of the three peaks. So far, neither P’al nor ’Dward had much trouble in finding a path – both their eidetic memories of the holo shown by the Voice & Eyes back at the Great Temple seemed to be as excellent as they had claimed.
Now Ay’r thought he heard something too. A new sound, different from the scrabble of the Colley’s feet upon the hard rock and loose dirt of the gully trail: more like a soft swishing, as though children were trudging through heaped-up leaves without lifting their feet.
He looked to either side of the gully. The same sort of succulentlike plant in which he had first landed his T-pod while alighting upon Pelagia’s continent now stretched in seemingly endless profusion. Like Monosilla, these mountainous valleys, while far steeper and rougher and far less fertile, held similar plant life. Below these sharper rises, they had passed stands of the towering gray fungal trees, topped by globular spores. And in places along the trail had lain tiny meadows of the lichenlike grass. But most prevalent of all were the succulent bushes, so omnipresent that Ay’r and the others had given them little thought. Now he observed them carefully – and swore he saw motion among them. Not a great deal, but more than could be accounted for by the mild, irregular wind.
“There!” ’Dward exclaimed in a whisper. “And there, too!” pointing on all sides of them.
“It looks like the lichen is moving!” Oudma said. “How can that be?”
“It’s an animal of some sort,” P’al observed. He turned to ’Harles, “What do you know of the creatures of these mountain valleys?”
“Nothing! ’Dward? Oudma? Have you heard aught?”
They had heard nothing of the life here.
“Something is moving,” Ay’r insisted. “It keeps low to the ground. Look!”
He pointed to where a slight, but noticeable furrow was being made through the succulent plantation by some creature whose back was the same dull gray-green color as the plant itself, and thus difficult to distinguish.
“It looks close to two meters in length!” Ay’r guessed. “Could it be a lizard?”
“Ser Kerry!” P’al chastised him. “Have you seen anything but indigenous insect life in Dryland?” And before Ay’r could answer, he added, “No amphibian, lizard, or mammalian life exists here.”
“And as far as any Drylander knows,” Alli Clark now put in, “the insects have always been at their current size.”
“Meaning they were dominant before the Seeding,” P’al explained.
“Even here?” Ay’r argued. “So distant from any life? The last insect we saw was on the plain, a day and a half ago.”
“Let’s have Colley catch one!” ’Dward suggested.
Oudma agreed, “Colley’s good at collecting strays from my pen!” ’Dward and P’al hopped to the backs of the other two coleopteroids, and ’Dward mumbled in a low, almost-resonant voice to Colley, who waved about its antennae a bit, stood still a long time, then lifted itself higher on its eight spindly-looking legs than Ay’r had seen before or thought possible for so heavy a beast. Suddenly it leaped six meters into the midst of the succulent cover.
Ay’r heard what almost sounded like Hume cries and saw a great scattering of the creatures in all directions as they fled the coleopteroid. A minute later, Colley leapt back to the path. When it lifted itself up again, something was squirming and moaning within its front two legs, firmly held in place by Colley’s palps.
“It has arms and legs!” ’Dward shouted, jumping to the ground. He approached the squirming creature held in Colley’s grasp.
“It’s a Hume!” Oudma said. “A child!”
Indeed, but for the lichen covering the entire top part of its body, it did seem to have thin, fair-skinned arms and legs, though they were also covered at the knees and elbows with wraps of more of the lichen cover.
“Try to keep it still, Colley!” ’Dward ordered, waving his own arms and legs about, until the Colley got the idea and used two more of its legs to hold down the lower limbs of its burden. The strangely garbed Hume child froze.
“Shall I take a closer look?” ’Dward asked. He tapped one of the thin legs, which seemed to jerk convulsively at his touch. Ay’r and P’al joined him on the ground, inspecting the child.
“This lichen material is clothing,” ’Dward touched it. “I feel ribs and bones underneath.”
Ay’r lifted the head, and pulled the hood covering off the scared, dirty little Hume face. The pale blue eyes were terrified and shut immediately against the glare. Tears streaked its filthy round cheeks. A piece of something that might be a bit of dried mushroom hung out of one side of its mouth.
“What did I say?” Oudma asked. “It’s a Hume child, and it’s frightened.”
“Stay where you are!” ’Harles ordered. “Look!”
The three of them turned to see the telltale signs of the lichen creatures approaching en masse through the succulents.
“Might as well let it go!” P’al said and tapped Colley on the frontal lobe of carapace over its eyes. The legs and palps released the child, who dropped to the ground with a sudden cry, turned quickly onto its front, and scuttled away on knees and elbows into the succulents. A few seconds later, its path was bisected by other creatures, which moved around it, as though checking for harm and comforting the child. They separated again – and vanished.
“These are Humes like you and me,” ’Harles said to P’al. “Yet also different. Where did they come from? Why are they as they are?”
“They’re Seedlings, like yourselves,” Ay’r said. “Sent here like yourselves to grow. But it appears that somehow they lost their early guidance by the mechanisms that were sent to aid them. Possibly the mechanisms were destroyed in one of the natural catastrophes the Voice and Eyes spoke of. Left alone in this area, the Humes must have adapted to the place and to its habitat.”
“Humes are wondrously adaptable!” Oudma exclaimed and began to blush.
“More adaptable than you could believe possible,” P’al said, as though Oudma had asked a question. “They live amid ice and desert, in places with no air to breathe in, even at the bottom of oceans.”
“And in air, above the canopy!” ’Dward said confidently, pointing directly above them.
“Yes, in air, too,” P’al said. “We have been to many places – Ser Kerry and Mer Clark and myself – and we have seen many wondrous things. But among all the creatures and sights, none is quite so impressive as the wonder of the Hume species, which is everywhere, and everywhere makes itself at home.”
Ay’r was frankly startled and even somewhat touched by this statement. Whatever image he had come to have of his companion, it was always of a cool-headed, cautious, even calculating Hume. This outburst seemed oddly out of character.
“They’re gone, whatever they are,” ’Dward reported, and ’Harles agreed; from his perch atop Colley, he could make out no motion in the plant cover around them.
“Why do you think they adapted such a method of getting around?” Alli Clark wondered aloud. “I haven’t seen any flying predators.”
“What about the Gods?” ’Dward asked.
“Perhaps,” P’al considered. “Or perhaps it’s a holdover from the infant stage, combined with fear of whatever may hunt above the foliage.”
The three mounted again, and the sluggish beasts continued forward. After a short climb, they reached a level area, and as the three peaks looked equidistant, they had to choose which way to go. P’al and ’Dward finally managed to agree on one direction, and the coleopteroids took off again in single file, with Ay’r and Oudma’s mount in the rear.
Once again, she was reining and he merely sitting behind her on the animal’s carapace, with an a
rm loosely around her waist. Yet they had been together, bonded unofficially, for days, and although much about Oudma’s thoughts and feelings continued to baffle and elude Ay’r, yet he knew when something was bothering her.
“What is it, Oudma?” he asked softly into her ear.
“That child. So strange. So frightened.”
“It’s back with its mother!” Ay’r said, meaning to comfort her. Instead, he felt a stab of pain inside his own chest. Words meant for her comfort caused him pain.
How could he ever explain to Oudma – to anyone! – what it was like growing up without a mother in the Matriarchy. “Motherless” was an insult equal only to “childless”! But also worse than being without a mother, since there were many neonates in Ed. & Dev. whose mothers were on Matriarchal or commercial business leave for months, sometimes years, and who relied upon Substitute Mothers, of which there were always a great many willing volunteers.
No, it wasn’t being an orphan that had set him apart from the moment he had realized his unique position; it was the knowledge that somehow he – a male – and his father – another male – were guilty – guilty of letting his mother die so he could be born. That was unthinkable. Few children of either gender in the century before Ay’r’s birth could claim that unsettling distinction. And none after his birth. He was the last. As though, after his mother’s death, every woman in the Matriarchy had said “Enough! This shall not, must not, ever happen again!”
He had been young when he had made that discovery, and although the Ed. & Dev. Dean had been kindness and compassion itself in telling him, Ay’r had sensed behind her sympathy a distance between them he had never sensed in her before – almost a sense of relief that finally he had asked, and finally he could be told. She was released of the burden, and now he – its rightful heir – would have to carry it alone. His Substitute Mother of those years, Janna Ge’Ner had been blunt: “It’s not your fault! I doubt it was even your father’s fault. It was an accident! Could have happened to anyone!”
But why had that particular accident of all the accidents in the galaxy befallen him? That’s what Janna could never explain, and what Ay’r could never stop himself from wondering. It colored his life slowly, yet totally, like one of those Canopus Tears tattoo dyes, which seeped into your skin and bloodstream for days on end – and were forever unremovable, even by a full cosmo.-dermectomy. Ay’r would forget it for weeks, sometimes for months on end. Then a companion would say something quite ordinary about her own mother, real or substitute, something truthful or lying, and suddenly Ay’r would be reminded. It had taken a half dozen decades of the Matriarchy’s best Ed. & Dev. Psych-Counselors to remove the sharpest edge of his pain. But now, once more, with his own words to Oudma, the fact that what was natural for that simple, lichen-covered, crawling creature-child, had been denied to him. Would ever be denied to him.
He became aware that Oudma was talking: “Anyway, it couldn’t have been more frightened than you were when Colley first lifted you and threw you into his wing flap. But, Ay’r, what’s wrong? Your face. It’s set so hard. Your teeth must hurt!”
“Do you remember” – he couldn’t bring himself to say “mother” – “Gitte? Is it always pleasant?”
“Not always, no. Most of the time. Sometimes, when I speak to ’Dward, or even to Father, I hear her voice in my own words. Sometimes I hear it in ’Dward’s words and in his voice. We catch each other out. Sometimes we laugh. But other times we look away from each other, into our own memories.”
“Yet you’re not so eager to become a mother yourself?” he asked.
“I am,” Oudma replied. “Especially” – she tried turning it into a tease – “if you are to become the Great Father of them all, as the Truth-Sayer foreordained.”
“Mer Clark could tell you if you carried my child.”
“When I wish to know, I will know,” she spoke brightly, but her last words trailed off.
“Don’t you think I wish it, too?”
“Ay’r, there is something strange! There – on the plants and ground. Look!”
In front of them, P’al and ’Dward were also moving around nervously on their perches, P’al speaking rapidly. Yet Ay’r didn’t hear any sound, didn’t see the telltale signs of the lichen-covered crawlers.
“What, Oudma?”
“I don’t know. But look, there and there! That dark shape. It seems almost like ... yet... what is it? It follows us. And look up there! The other Colleys have dark shapes following them.”
“I don’t see anyth –” Ay’r looked behind them. Through a vale of two of the three peaks, Pelagia’s sun, having shredded the clouds, now shone. Weakly, true, and distantly, beginning to set, yet it shone for the first time since they had been in Dryland.
“It’s shadow!” Ay’r said. He turned Oudma’s face away from the shadowed ground and toward the sun. She lifted a hand up immediately to cut the glare.
“What is it?” she whispered, grabbing his arm to hold her closely, so he could feel her body trembling. “It gives off heat, like a great and steadily burning peat fire.”
“I think that is what your people’s legends call Ecilef, the Enigmatic One. We call it a star. A sun. The giver of all life. As Dryland is the Great Mother, so Ecilef is the Great Father. Even the canopy cannot stop its power from making seeds and spores grow.”
“It’s wondrous! Beautiful, although it hurts my eyes to look at it too long.”
No more wondrous than its glow upon your skin, its reflection in your eyes, Ay’r thought, and wondered immediately: Is this, then, what they call love? This delight at seeing the refulgence of someone’s face in sunlight for the first time? Or is it merely infatuation?
“Tonight,” he said, “when the sun has set, it will be dark. Night black, as your father once glimpsed, and you will be treated to an even more wondrous sight!”
“First the brightness, then the darkness,” she repeated ’Harles’s words.
Ay’r looked beyond her face, glowing in the yellow tint of the sun, beyond to ’Harles and Alli Clark, looking up at the sun, and to P’al and ’Dward, who – clever as he was – had understood immediately what a shadow was and who now stood upon his Colley’s carapace, making his shadow dance, and laughing, showing off for the others.
“How little we know, here in Dryland,” Oudma sighed. “You’ve probably seen the sun many times before.”
“Many times. And many suns. Red and blue and orange suns and yellow and white suns like this one. Sometimes there are two in a sky; sometimes three.”
“It’s true, what Father said then at the Great Temple. We are your children. That is one reason why I would not bond officially with you.”
“What other reason is there?” Ay’r asked.
But though he asked several times more, Oudma wouldn’t say. And already ’Harles and Alli Clark were moving forward again.
They traveled slowly for another half hour before the level ground came to an end at an impassibly steep runnel of gullies leading up almost vertically.
By the time Ay’r and Oudma joined them, ’Dward was arguing, “But this was the way! I remember it clearly.”
P’al agreed, but wondered if perhaps they had missed a turning.
’Dward closed his eyes and repictured the path in his mind. “No! There was no wrong turn.”
“There must have been!” ’Harles said, acting like any obstinate father who doubts his son.
“The holo we saw was an old one” – Ay’r defended ’Dward – “possibly many centuries old. There is no reason to trust its accuracy.”
Alli Clark went on to add, “And if it is centuries old, it’s possible the landscape has changed.” This peacemaker role was a new one for her; she was embarrassed by it and added quickly, “It will be getting dark soon, and we can’t go on much longer today. Perhaps this is a good place to encamp.”
’Harles looked around; at their backs was a shallow crescent of tall mountains, in front more of the succulents
. It was as good a place as any to stop.
The six of them were strangely silent as they dismounted and went about the by now familiar business of setting up a night camp – perhaps because the setting sun had suddenly dropped out of sight, yet continued to bathe the rock faces in ever-changing colors, staining the tips of the succulents so their dull gray-green was transformed first to metallic gold then to a matte brass before becoming black, in a parody of fire.
After unharnessing the Colleys and finding them a nearby spot where they might nibble wild lichen, ’Dward had nothing to do but to sit upon a rock ledge and look in wonder at the darkening of the blue sky and to observe the multicolored glory of sunset light upon all it touched. Oudma, surprisingly assisted by Alli Clark this entire leg of the journey, set up a campfire and burned peat to warm their provisions. But she, too, would occasionally stop to gawk at some object that was changing hue in front of her. ’Harles was confabbing with P’al, and if he was amazed, he did little to show it.
Ay’r had gone off to one side, unwilling to let go of the emotions he had experienced so recently: that renewed sense of loss, that ambivalent sense of affection for Oudma. He was sitting a few meters away from the others at the edge of the succulents when he heard that curious swishing sound and then noticed the faint traces of two paths of lichen crawlers coming toward him.
He jumped up just in time to step back and see one of the lichen coverings rise off the ground before him, stand up, and throw back its hood. Like the child they had seen earlier, this Hume had a full back-and-arms covering of the stuff, with patches around its knees, elbows, and wrists for crawling. Unlike the child, it wore a garment made of another cloth, barely covering its midsection. An adult male, with a full growth of unkempt beard and darker blue eyes within its dirty face, its fair skin was dyed deep orange by waning sunlight.
It looked at Ay’r, head left, head right very quickly, and reached jerkily into its garment to pull out something brown, which it put into its mouth and began to chew on, so rapidly that Ay’r wasn’t certain what it was or even if he had seen it correctly.
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