THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT

by Ivan Cat

  Time passed. The cool water felt good on his legs and prevented him from overheating in the glare of the sun.

  He would make a better board next time, Arrou decided. For instance, the Feral boards had funny knots where paddler's legs hung over the edge. Arrou had not understood what these were for until he paddled for a few hours and rubbed his thick skin raw against the edge of the board. Also, he had used the wrong side of the leaf on the bottom. The smooth side should go down, so that it was slipperier in the water, never mind that the fuzzy side would make him hot. And it would be good to figure out how to make the sharkworm lures. Arrou cold not get the peepers to hold still long enough to mold a cage around them. Three got away before he gave up and took a running leap off the shore, paddling like mad to get away from the dangerous waters near the island. Fortunately he had not tipped over, because he didn't think he could get back on the tippy board if he did.

  More time passed. It was exhilarating paddling up the face of waves and racing down their other sides. The movement of ocean rollers in the direction opposite his line of travel added a great sensation of speed. Arrou was tranquil for quite a while, but then he started to think about the speed difference between his paddle-board and the heavy lifter. If Karr flew for eight hours at just twenty knots, then Arrou would have to paddle all day and all night long to keep the same distance between them. If Karr went faster, or Arrou stopped paddling ... more bad thoughts.

  He worried about Jenette.

  The world outside the Enclave walls was dangerous. Arrou didn't know much about that world; Jenette knew less than he; and Karr—well, Karr didn't know a thing. That was why Karr lost his clothes and almost got killed by Tlalok. If Karr had forced Jenette to leave without Arrou, who knew what stupid thing Karr would do next? Arrou hoped to find the humans soon, before the Burning Heart made everything crazy.

  Arrou had few memories from before Jenette, but he remembered a nighttime feeling, big, soft, and warm (he guessed this was his mother), and he remembered a gentle voice cooing to him and his siblings about the Burning Heart of Night. The others in that pleasant memory were all dead now, and Arrou did not recall the exact words spoken, but he remembered ... the Burning Heart brings change. Big things happened when the night wept—big hurts that make people wise. Or dead.

  Arrou paddled harder, spurred on by the belief that he, Arrou, could somehow keep Jenette from harm if he could just find her.

  About then, when the sun was highest in the sky, things got complicated. Arrou heard a whining noise, far away but crystal clear in the way that sounds can be when they travel long distances over water. It came to his ears in spurts, intermittently as his paddleboard dipped into wave valleys then rose on wave crests. Arrou's first thought was of Tlalok and the Ferals. They were on the ocean, but they should have been ahead of Arrou. Had he somehow passed them by without knowing it?

  Arrou spun his board, trying to stay on the wave crests as long as possible, and tried to keep his ear pits focused on that sound. Over the course of several minutes, the sound swept back and forth, from north to south and back again.

  It was searching.

  Arrou recognized the sound as it got closer. It was not Ferals. It was a colony vehicle. And not the one that Arrou had ridden in recently, but a fast one. It was probably a skimmer. In spite of his love of speed, Arrou did not like the skimmer's turbine whine. It was a bad memory. Human raiders used skimmers to collect young Ferals.

  So Arrou did not know how to feel when he saw a fast moving speck on the horizon. Of course it was humans, but what humans? And what would they do? Arrou knew that humans in skimmers killed Ferals on sight and few humans could tell a domestic from a Feral, especially if the domestic was in a handmade Feral boat, like Arrou was.

  It was not a good situation. Definitely not.

  XVI

  "An adequate solution applied vigorously is better than a perfect solution applied half-heartedly."

  —from the speeches of Olin Tesla

  The speck continued to sweep the horizon, an ivory plume of water billowing up behind it. It moved out of view each time before coming back, larger than before. Arrou focused his vision on it as much as possible. The speck widened into an oval and, as the distance between Arrou and it diminished, stubby wings sprouting from its sides became visible. It was definitely a skimmer. Skimmers did not plow through the water like boats or lumber on top of it like crawlers, but floated a couple yards above the waves, cushioned on a pillow of air trapped under the stubby wings. Raised at the rear of the craft, in an oversized cylindrical cowling, Arrou recognized the PanaTech G-14 B turbine that gave it power: 1500 bhp, 1100 lbs torque, max speed when mounted in skimmer 175 knots.

  But, Arrou reminded himself, those things were not important just then.

  Should Arrou try to meet it or should he try to hide? Maybe he could use the rollers to keep from being seen. He could certainly imitate the color of the ocean, but if he did that and they saw him anyway, then he would really look like a running Feral.

  Arrou decided hiding was not the thing to do.

  Next time the skimmer came by, he turned into an oncoming swell and, as his board slid diagonally up to the crest, sat up and waved with his good foreleg. Initially the skimmer looked like it would pass by, but it banked at the last moment and then circled in wide arcs around Arrou. He watched a human stand up at the controls.

  The human had a pulse-rifle.

  The long weapon foreshortened, pointing Arrou's way. Arrou hoped the human was looking through the far-sight tube to check him out, and not aiming.

  The skimmer circled again.

  The human's arm rose and jerked the weapon back in an all too obvious arming motion. The human would have a perfect shot the next time by.

  "Urrrk-urrrk-urrrk," Arrou worried. What to do? What to do? Everything died, but this would be a silly way to die, killed by humans of his own side. In a flash of desperation, Arrou waived both forelegs in the air, pointing and calling attention to his lame right one. The skimmer circled around. The human did not lower the weapon. Arrou waved harder and almost capsized the paddleboard.

  Eventually the human sat back at the controls and the skimmer turned in, its rooster tail spraying sideways and diminishing as it slowed. The hull glided lower, hydroplaned on the vertical ends of its short wings, and then sunk into the water, pushing a large bow wave which fanned out and almost swamped Arrou's tiny boat. The skimmer engine whined down to idle as it drifted within hail.

  Now Arrou saw that it wasn't just any old skimmer, but the fastest one, so he was not surprised when Olin Tesla stood up into view.

  "Arrou!" Tesla demanded, not at all pleased. "What are you doing out here? Where's Jenette?"

  "Ferals attacked. Separated," Arrou answered. "Arrou follows Jenette."

  Tesla grunted. "That's what I thought. The homing device went dead yesterday."

  "Home device?"

  "Homing device," Tesla corrected. "Every Enclave vehicle has a transponder." He looked around the empty ocean for any sign of Jenette. "It's like a big smell that you can sniff from far away—oh, never mind."

  Arrou understood enough to know that a transponder was a device in the crawler that he hadn't known about before, and that Karr had probably accidentally disabled it when they borrowed parts from the crawler. Arrou also understood that Tesla was talking down to him.

  The skimmer drifted closer. Arrou grabbed its wing, to keep it from crunching into his fragile leaf boat and he noticed with displeasure that Toby sat on the seat beside Tesla.

  <> the larger Khafra hissed in Domestic dialect. <>

  Tesla ignored Toby. "Is Jenette all right?"

  "All right, last night," said Arrou.

  "Good." Tesla actually looked concerned, which surprised Arrou. Tesla usually looked and acted angry, but true to form, Tesla's next words sounded gruff again. "Get in."

  Arrou hesitated.

  "I said get in."
>
  Arrou did not want to go with Tesla. Tesla was not nice. Tesla made him and Jenette do bad things. Also, Arrou was proud of his little boat, no matter what Toby said, and he did not want to leave it behind. Things got lonely when they were left behind.

  Tesla misread Arrou's hesitancy. Shaking his head, he attempted to speak in a softer tone (which seemed to Arrou a bit like a pitlurker trying to talk sweet around all its many, many sharp teeth). "You're not in trouble, Arrou. I know you only did what Jenette told you to. You won't be punished."

  Arrou let Tesla be confused. Jenette always told Arrou not to tell Tesla the truth. So Arrou gave up and tried to step carefully onto the skimmer, but his paddleboard wobbled and filled with water anyway.

  He watched it sink.

  Toby read his colors and gloated. <>

  Arrou did not return the growl. Toby was bigger and not very nice, either. Toby thought he was better than Arrou because Tesla was his human. Toby was a bully. Arrou wished he could wipe the smug colors off Toby's back.

  Tesla did it for him. "Toby, get in the back."

  Toby turned a humiliated brown. "Toby in back?"

  "That's right. Out of the front seat. Let Arrou sit there."

  "But... Toby not bad today."

  "It's not about bad."

  "Toby's place in front. Arrou go in back."

  "Toby," Tesla warned. "Don't make this hard." Arrou noted a dangerous change of tone in the human's voice. Toby did not.

  "Toby want sit in front," Toby protested submissively.

  Tesla matter of factly grabbed a triangular, palm-sized device from his belt. Arrou recognized the device instantly. So did Toby. The large domestic half-jumped out of his skin scrambling to get into the back, but not before Tesla touched it between Toby's eyes with a bzat! Toby yowled in terror, falling into the rear compartment, teeth chattering convulsively from the effects of the prod. Jenette had once told Arrou that it was actually an amaurotic prod, in an effort to lessen his fear of the device; it temporarily short-circuited the neural connections between eyes and brain, she had explained. But those explanations did not lessen Arrou's sickly horror of the device which domestics called the blinder. Nothing could be more terrifying to a Khafra than to be forever without light. Butt pressed against the rear bulkhead, Toby's claws clattered on the deck. He tried to back away from the awful darkness—like a mlum with a bag over its head. Tesla methodically replaced the prod at his belt. Arrou felt sorry for Toby, bully or not. Tesla casually held Toby's head to keep him from injuring himself while the blindness lasted. Toby whimpered. Then, eyes clearing, Toby snapped at Arrou.

  <> Toby hissed.

  Oblivious to the conflict, Tesla demanded, "Arrou, you sit there. You know where Jenette went."

  Arrou climbed off the wing into the front seat.

  Tesla revved the skimmer. The turbine built up speed. The hull hydroplaned, whipping salty mist onto the windscreen and Arrou's nose, and then lifted off the water to a height of two yards.

  "Which way did she go?" asked Tesla.

  Arrou obediently pointed southwest and Tesla steered in that direction. Arrou didn't offer any information about Karr, the Burning Heart, or anything else. The less Arrou said, the less chance Tesla would get mad at him. For the rest of the trip, Arrou did what he was told and thought bad thoughts about Tesla, for which he felt very guilty.

  The fog had taken on a suffocating yellow tinge. Visibility was up to a hundred yards, but Karr wished it was not. Big chunks of disintegrated flesh littered the ocean under the heavy lifter and their origin was clear. Karr was looking at the remains of his fugueship. They smelled like burned meat, even from twenty feet up, and they grew thicker in the water the farther the lifter penetrated into the fog. Karr did his best to keep his emotions in check.

  Focus. Focus on the mission. You are a Pilot, damn it.

  "Is it always this hot?" Karr asked, raising his voice over a rumble that had been building ahead of them for the last few kiloyards. Both he and Jenette were drenched in sweat.

  "Can be," Jenette replied, "but this yellow fog is not normal. Hey, what's that?" She pointed ahead to several patches of flickering red and orange in the mist, ghostly candles with dark smudges above.

  Karr did not want to know.

  Jenette's dainty nostrils flared. "Smells like burning hair."

  Karr rode out a lurch of his stomach and forced himself to alter course and fly close by one of the patches. It resolved out of the fog into a smoldering clump of organic growth, half the size of the lifter. Sickly smoke rose off of it into the air, but to Karr's relief it was not a piece of Long Reach.

  "It's a fragment of ring-island," Jenette decided. "I don't see any surface growth at all, no brainturf, no trees, but that dark stuff is ghutzu."

  Like a scene from Hades, the debris grew denser as the lifter proceeded. The ring-island fragments progressed from smoldering to burning and came in all shapes from head-sized bits to sections poking skyward like the sterns of sinking ships. One large serpentine form, easily as big as three or four Terran blue whales placed end to end, Jenette said was the shattered island's keelroot She said that they always floated to the surface when a ring-island broke up.

  Karr steered the lifter through pillars of lazily rising smoke.

  "Ouch," said Jenette, blinking rapidly and scrubbing her face as clouds of sooty flakes stung their eyes.

  Glints of metal and plastic bobbed in the debris field, amid much, much more fugueship tissue. It coated the oily water, like the leavings of an unsavory butcher shop.

  Jenette whistled at the destruction.

  Karr suddenly felt very cold in the tropical heat. The stinking remains confronted Karr with the awful end Long Reach had suffered. The burning wasteland was a graveyard.

  Jenette shot Karr a glance. "You didn't expect to find your ship alive ... did you?"

  "No, no," Karr said a bit too quickly.

  As he had a thousand times in the last two days, he checked the cockpit compass. It read the same as it had for the last two days: the lifter was pointing southwest. "Does that look right to you?"

  Jenette craned her head up, trying to place the position of the obscured sun. "Near as I can tell. Why?"

  "A living fugueship has an electromagnetic field large enough to cause false readings on a compass."

  "Ah." Jenette remembered how the crawler's compass had acted up when a certain shooting star had passed over the Enclave. "So if your ship was alive, you would expect the compass needle to point straight at it, as if it were the north pole...?"

  "Or the south pole," Karr said darkly. "At least it went with a bang and not a whimper," he added, too softly to be heard over the growing rumble.

  "I wonder why sharkworms haven't eaten the remains?" Jenette wondered indelicately. "There was a ring-island here. There should sharkworms."

  Karr shrugged, trying to muster the cool professionalism that he expected from himself, but it was elusive.

  Jenette touched his arm. He jumped. "Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine," Karr lied.

  "You look gray."

  Karr changed the subject. "It's louder here." The rumble was becoming louder, but it did not emanate from the burning fragments.

  The sound resonated full and huge, seemingly from just out of sight ahead of the lifter. "Like a big waterfall or a forest fire," Karr observed.

  Jenette did not understand either concept. The debris field thinned as Karr explained them. Jenette countered that New Ascension had no waterfalls or forest fires. "There is no water above sea level, except that stored in plants, so no waterfalls, but the idea sounds very beautiful," she yelled, trying to imagine the concept. "And as for forest fires, natural fire is rare. It rains a lot here and the plant life tends to be quite moist, so it takes a lot to set it on fire—although," she allowed, "I guess a fugueship exploding would be pretty hot."

  "Hydrogen fuel burns at forty seven hundred degrees," Karr said,
becoming more and more pallid, "and it fuses into helium in the fusion core a whole lot hotter than that."

  Jenette stared at the smoldering fragments of ring-island. "These tiny fires couldn't be the cause of the glow we saw on the horizon last night, could they?"

  Karr shook his head somberly.

  The temperature in the fog rose rapidly as they proceeded. The yellow tinge became a yellow radiance ahead of the lifter, which grew in intensity until it rivaled the sun above. They were very near the source of the mysterious phenomenon.

  "Are you sure you want to see this?" Jenette asked, leaning close for Karr to hear.

  Karr's expression tightened. "Yes."

  The rumble had become a roar. They squinted as the fog became painfully bright. The enveloping water vapor abruptly parted, leaving them face to face with a breath-stealing panorama. Fog surrounded a sunny, clear circle of ocean that in turn centered around four columns of yellow-white fire, the cause of the fog's yellow tinge. The pillars of fire extended from sea level high into the heavens, leaving sharp after-images on the awed observers' eyes. Below the pillars was an iceberg-sized mass of... raw meat?

  Jenette didn't know what to make of it. "It's big. What is it?"

  Karr's face fell in utter, ashen disbelief. "It's ... it's my fugue-ship!"

  XVII

  Pact, guard your actions! Do not unleash great evil to perform small good! Great is that arrogance. Great is that guilt. Purge hearts of this selfishness or the Balance will swing.

  —Feral warning

  Even from five hundred yards the heat was scorching. Karr raised an arm to shield his face. There, bobbing face down in the ocean with its stern humped above the surface and its engine fires thundering into the sky, was Karr's ship. Somehow, Long Reach had landed without tearing into a million pieces. Karr was overwhelmed. Tears of relief mingled with the sweat pouring off his face.