by Ivan Cat
Vidun: What about cloning? Why aren't we cloning him?
Dr. Uttz: We are, but I must warn you, it is a widely held misconception that clones are identical copies of the original individual. This is simply not the case. Whatever makes Lindal Karr a Pilot is not merely reflected in his sperm cells. Random factors effect both cloned and normal human zygotes, in utero and after birth. Exposure to chemical and biological influences as well as radiation may cause DNA mutations outside the germ cells. I believe that a whole series of unlikely cellular mutations have combined in Lindal Karr to produce fugue-immunity. The chance of recreating such random mutations in a clone is practically nil.
Vidun: I refuse to admit defeat, Doctor. The stakes are too high. It may be that there is something we don't know about old-fashioned intercourse that is part of the equation.
Dr. Uttz: Unlikely.
Vidun: Unlikely or not, we will try. We must push him harder.
Dr. Uttz: You push too hard. Some things cannot be pushed. They wither under too much pressure.
Vidun: Bullshit. Too much thinking: that's his problem. It's not good for a man to get locked up inside his own head. He gets to questioning every action. Fear takes over. Moral paralysis follows. That is why we train to focus on action.
Dr. Uttz: We also train our candidates to avoid human contact. It is a measure of our very success that he has difficulty with intimate behavior.
Vidun (rubs his temples): He does like girls doesn't he? That would be just our luck; we finally find a Pilot and he's gay.
Dr. Uttz (sternly): Not that that would have any effect upon artificial insemination, cloning, gene splicing—or his ability to perform his duties as a Pilot.
Vidun: No, not of course not, but it would be problematic as far as reproduction is concerned.
Uttz: Would it? I wonder. In any case, trainee Karr is heterosexual. He simply does not like the girls you send. If you insist upon pursuing this course of action, I suggest eliminating prostitutes from your selection pool.
Vidun: Prostitutes! These women have undergone the highest scrutiny. Only the most intelligent, most well-bred, physically attractive candidates are chosen.
Dr. Uttz: They give their favors in exchange for personal profit, for the not inconsiderable prestige and riches that ensue should they be lucky enough to bear a future Pilot. They have no feelings for Lindal and he knows it. That is the core of the problem.
Vidun: He must be bred before he ships out. (pause) Can you give him something for it?
Dr. Uttz: A pill to cure him of his conscience? I think not.
Vidun: No, no. Calm down, Doctor. I am only suggesting a shot to get his blood, you know, flowing.
Dr. Uttz: I suggest you consider the tried and true method of exposing him to a wide selection of females his own age and letting nature take its course. That is how normal people do it.
Vidun: Oh, no. No, no, no. Normal people fall in love. Normal people become attached and don't want to leave their families behind. Normal people don't become fugueship Pilots.
Karr spotted Jenette at the edge of the fractured island section. She sat at the rim of newly-formed cliffs, atop an arch of drying tube root, hugging her knees girlishly, her face buried in her arms. Karr wound through the limp-noodle topography and climbed the arch. The slight young woman did not react as he sat down beside her. Karr waited patiently, inspecting the root surface. It was dying in the sunlight, like all the other underwater life forms which had been stranded by the break up and roll over of the once large island. Bark-like flakes sloughed off under Karr's fingers and fluttered down into ocean far below.
Without raising her head, Jenette eventually spoke. "Pilot Karr?"
"Yes."
"I'm sorry I hit you."
Karr unconsciously rubbed his solar plexus. Jenette might be small, but she had given him a good bruise. "That's all right. I think I deserved it. My self-preoccupied Pilot training led me to believe that purging the null-field sectors was a sound strategy. In fact, I only succeeded in getting us into more trouble than we were already in. You and the others got us out. Obviously I should have trusted you. Obviously I was wrong."
"You were what?" Jenette asked, surprised.
"Wrong?"
Jenette's head lifted. Here eyes were rimmed red. Unfocused, confused thought processes were clearly visible in the movement of her face. "Why can't I hate you, Lindal Karr? It would make things so much easier."
Karr did not know what to say. He fumbled for a different course of dialogue. "That's, um, a wonderful view you've found here...."
A rare New Ascension sight spread out before them: a blue-green sea, with no silver sheen anywhere to be seen. Foam frothed against the remaining fragments of Coffin Island, which floated around the island Jenette and Karr watched from. In the distance storm clouds billowed up from the horizon. Cumulonimbus clouds, Karr remembered from some deep crevice of his mind. Towers of fluff boiled up into the atmosphere, meeting New Ascension's jet stream and smearing downwind into enormous, anvil-shaped thunderheads in a blue, blue sky.
Jenette was not looking at the vista, but at Karr. Her nostrils flared, she took a deep breath, and then buried her head in her arms once more and shook.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
Even Karr with his limited interpersonal skills could see that was not true. "Well... the thing is, I just had an encounter with a four-legged friend of yours. After we recovered the reactor, he trotted off to find you, happy as a Pilot in fugue, but he came back looking like a grumpy light-festival tree."
Jenette clutched her knees tighter.
"I'm no expert," Karr ventured, "but I'd say he's pretty upset."
"So?"
"So, he claims you yelled at him and told him to go away. He says that you were angry, but that he didn't do anything wrong, and that you said he smelled bad."
"He needs a bath," Jenette snapped. Arrou smelled of immune venom.
Misunderstanding her comment, Karr whiffed his own armpits. "Guess I'm pretty ripe, too," he said apologetically.
"Oh, no," Jenette objected. Her chest expanded as, without looking up, she drew another deep breath. "You smell good."
Karr considered. Their recent underwater ordeal had washed away most of Coffin Island's nasty filth. In fact Jenette looked relatively clean, her blonde-gray hair showing no trace of embalming-fluid stain. She wore a suit of mottled green-and-black battledress (probably one of Liberty's); it hung loose on her smaller frame, but it was neat. Karr, on the other hand, had just spent a sweaty day prying the null-fusion reactor free from the keelroot's clutches. Karr stank; so he questioned Jenette's pronouncement that he smelled nice. He also noted that she looked even paler than usual.
"It's the Scourge," Karr decided, "isn't it?"
"Dr. Marsh has a big mouth."
"Dr. Marsh didn't say a thing."
The pain in Jenette's cramped posture reminded Karr of fugue withdrawal, which he had endured so many times.
"If there's any way I can help, any way at all...."
Jenette turned her frosty eyes on Karr.
"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked suddenly.
"Um..." said Karr.
"Do you think I'm pretty?" she repeated.
Karr was struck by how pretty Jenette looked just then, tearyeyed, ill-fitting daysuit, and all. It made no rational sense, but that was how he felt. "Yes, very pretty," he admitted quietly. "But I don't see how that affects—"
Jenette abruptly clasped the back of Karr's neck and drew him to her lips. She was tender and soft. He smelled the incense of her breath, felt the delicate intimacy. It was a surprise. And it was nice.
He allowed the contact to continue. He even began to participate.
But the encounter changed. Soft became tense. Tender became urgent. Caressing hands gripped tighter, holding his head to her hungry mouth. She was probing, devouring. Feasting.
The girl-woman seemed to be sucking at his very soul.
; Karr broke her grip and pushed her away. Jenette fell back in shock and then turned away in shame. Again, she shook. Not weeping, but shuddering as hints of color flushed her ghostly skin. She swooned and nearly fell off the root arch, but Karr quickly grabbed her. He steadied her, utterly confused. He had no experience with Scourge. Should he run back to camp and get Dr. Marsh, who was hardly in a state to make the trek back, or try to carry Jenette to base camp? Just as Karr was testing to see if Jenette was light enough to convey such a distance, her eyes fluttered open.
"I'm sorry," Jenette said, feeling despicable. She had compromised after all. She had been utterly wicked. And yet... the immune venom cravings were already abating, the fog rapidly lifting from her mind as the traces of fugue in Karr's kiss worked into her body. She had bought time at the cost of her honor. "Please don't hate me."
Karr wiped his mouth, more confused than ever. "I don't hate you."
Jenette smiled sadly. "You should."
"No..." said Karr, trying to figure out his own mixed-up feelings. He had enjoyed the kiss, just not the way it ended. "No, I shouldn't. I kind of liked what just happened. It was just a little too fast. I don't exactly have a lot of experience with ... this sort of stuff. Pilots are solitary creatures, you know. And, uh, I know intellectually that you are twenty-three standard years old, but you don't look a day over fifteen by off-world standards."
Jenette shook her head. What could she tell him? Until that day she had feared every change her body made towards adulthood. Now she fervently, irrationally, wished that she had never taken hormone inhibitors at all. Frustration laced her voice. "I can't change the way I look! If I looked my true age I'd be dead!"
"I don't want you to change the way you look," Karr hurried to explain. "There's nothing wrong with looking young. When you're thirty-five and look twenty-five, you'll be the envy of every off-world woman, believe me. It's just that right now you look out-of-bounds young—underage, off limits upon pain of imprisonment, banishment, loss of rank, or marriage-at-the-barrel-of-a-splatter-pattern-projectile-weapon young."
Jenette resigned herself to that explanation.
Karr groped for a consoling thought.
"It must be rough, being born—" Karr almost said on a Plague World, but caught himself at the last instant and said, instead, "—here. Scourge and Feral wars and hormone inhibitors. Destiny can be a harsh master."
Jenette snorted. "I don't believe in destiny, other that that which I make for myself."
"No? No greater meaning? No purpose for existence? How do you keep your sanity?"
Jenette's forehead crinkled philosophically. "One day," she said with a nod of her chin at the spectacular skyscape, "I plan to be a cloud."
Karr didn't understand.
Jenette waxed poetic. "One day, when I'm dead and gone, all the water in my body will be free. The molecules of water will evaporate from my mortal shell, float into the air and join clouds high above all these earthly troubles." Jenette pointed at a wispy streak high in the stratosphere. "Little bits of me will bask in eternal sunlight. Young humans and Khafra will lie on their backs and stare up at me. I'll be a treasure ship, or a mushroom, or a faraway island castle. Scourge won't mean anything to me then. I'll be a tiny, content part of the larger cycle of life."
For some reason, Karr, was reminded of his relationship with Long Reach. "And you won't be lonely?"
"No. The way I see it, every cloud up there was part of somebody alive at one time or another. I'll have good company." Jenette didn't speak for a while. "Sometimes I'll have to be rain, but I can put up with that. I'll float and rain and then evaporate back into clouds, over and over. Maybe I won't know it's me anymore, but I'll be a part of it. Leave the worrying to someone else."
"I like it," Karr declared.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Count me in."
"Okay then." Jenette smiled. "It's decided."
They sat quiet for a while then, not touching, but feeling very close as souls billowed and raced across the afternoon sky.
Karr kept Jenette safe when she slipped into a brief fugue coma. He said nothing about it afterwards and the two of them returned to base. An hour later the camp was packed up and the heavy lifter hovering with Karr at the controls. Grapple arms flexed down and plucked the null-fusion reactor from its slimy bed.
No one noticed a cancerous shape that clawed to the surface from a deep gouge in the island, sniffing and listening, head cocked intently. Nor did anyone notice as it ducked out of sight and fronds wriggled from mole-like movement underneath the island's sloppy surface, or as a creature clad in anthropoid skin scrambled up in the blind spot under the lifter's hull. Thruster engines throbbed. The lifter's bow dipped. And soon the flying slab was no more than a speck, accelerating away from the foul-smelling shores of Coffin Island, with the even smaller speck of a four-legged in-human clinging, inverted, to the precious Null which had given meaning to its wretched life for so very, very long.
XL
Two days later.
Ferals were thick on the ocean, in paddleboards and other grown-to-order craft. Arrou was on shift at the heavy lifter controls, Karr and Jenette standing just behind the cockpit, and they all saw the vast net of Ferals. There were so many that Arrou could actually smell them, even from fifteen yards up and traveling twenty-five knots per hour.
Jenette found the display captivating. The Ferals appeared to be following some sort of overall plan. Scores and scores of legs and paws paddled in perfect rhythm. Each and every bow of each and every vessel pointed in the same direction—the very same direction the heavy lifter was heading.
It was a development Karr did not relish. Where were all those aliens going? They hardly looked up as the lifter's rectangular shadow passed over them. What could be so all-consuming that these Ferals paid such little heed to a flying machine from another planet? The sooner the Ferals were specks in the distance behind them, the happier Karr would be.
"Arrou " he ordered, "accelerate to thirty knots."
"Urrr, accelerating."
Arrou pulled the throttle up a bit and pushed the steering yoke forward a bit further. The lifter's nose dipped slightly and the breeze caused by its passage through the air rushed slightly faster, but the increased speed brought Karr no greater sense of security. Rather, even more Ferals on paddleboards scrolled into view from beyond the horizon ahead—and a cluster of islands came into view with them. Karr squinted distrustfully at the green blobs.
They seemed to be spaced very evenly across the water.
Jenette observed that the green silhouettes appeared different from those she saw regularly around the Enclave. As the lifter drew closer, checkered patterns of lush jungle foliage and lighter, cleared plots became visible on the backs of the ring-islands. Furthermore, the islands were not ring-islands at all, but solid, healthy disks without a characteristic sinkhole at the center. Jenette began to get excited. She almost squealed aloud in delight as she spied large dome structures peeking out from stands of trees and clusters of smaller domes gathered where several open plots joined together.
"Give them a wide berth," Karr said to Arrou.
"No, please," Jenette said, a hopeful sparkle in her eyes. "I'd like to see what's down there."
Karr acquiesced, against his better judgment. "All right. Hold your course, Arrou, but keep us well above the tallest trees."
"Hold course, keep vertical clearance, urrr."
The lifter swooped up over the first emerald isle, giving a beautiful top-down view. The open spaces were clearly agricultural plots: viridian squares with neat pink furrows or khaki patches with light green hedges, some even contained herds of animals.
"Look, look!" Jenette pointed. "Domesticated forfaraws! And villages! And roads!"
Beaten mulch pathways linked the fields and domes. Golden roadwort connected clusters of domes to other clusters of domes. And there were Ferals everywhere, not like the abandoned-looking Feral islands near the Enclave. Ferals worked the fie
lds. Ferals carried baskets full of fruits and tubers along the paths. Ferals tended groups of kits that played in pools of standing water or raced in and out of the domed huts. Some of the adults even seemed to be teaching classes of kits. Jenette could hardly believe her luck.
At that moment, a collective gasp rose from the other expedition members, who were peering over the side of the heavy lifter.
Orderly lines of sailtrees soared above the island below. Swarms of Ferals clung to the noble white trunks, injecting immune venom into bud and branch, stimulating the trees to keep every single sail-shaped leaf fully unfurled and spread before the wind.
"They're sailing," Karr exclaimed.
The island was indeed pressing through ocean rollers, the foaming swells breaking across its prow-like forward shore as it moved by power of the wind.
"In formation," Arrou added as the lifter cleared the first island.
At least two dozen more islands stretched across the ocean ahead, each green mound keeping perfect place in a multi-tiered formation, holding pace with the web of Ferals on paddleboards and progressing slowly, inexorably to the northwest.
"I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!" Jenette said, unable to contain her excitement any longer. "I mean," she babbled giddily, "I didn't really know they could do that. We've always known Ferals could influence the drift of their islands by stimulating sailtree growth, which is why Enclave recon teams carry flamethrowers and regularly torch sailtrees on nearby islands, to stop the islands from drifting out of range and depriving us of a supply of domestics ... not that I would have minded." The torrent of words expended, a smile split Jenette's face and the lithe young woman dashed aft, leaned into her bubble tent and extracted the starlure from its high-impact case. Safety strap over her neck, powerpak belt cinched around her waist, she returned to the bow cradling the crystalline sphere.
Hairs rose on the back of Karr's neck.
Connecting a wireless trans-tap from the powerpak belt to a receptacle on the lure, Jenette noted Karr's reaction. "If you didn't want me to use it, you shouldn't have given it to me in the first place."