Heritage of Flight

by Susan Shwartz

  "Yes?” Give Neave that, he barely raised an eyebrow at the Secess’ tone.

  "These two ... officers are under arrest. A person in the status of arrest cannot be required to perform his full military duty, and if he is placed—by the authority who placed him in arrest or by superior authority—on duty inconsistent with such status his arrest is thereby terminated."

  Neave achieved a mild glare. “Thank you,” he said blandly.

  "For God's sake!” Pauli spat. “You've got a chance to meet an intelligent, friendly alien race, and you want to play this by the book? Who knows more about the Cynthians than the man who made the first contact?” She flushed, and her voice trailed off awkwardly.

  "We aren't asking to take command,” Rafe put in quickly. “Just to serve in an advisory capacity. That doesn't have to be ‘military duty,’ is it, Commissioner?"

  Taking Neave's look of relief for consent, “Come on,” Rafe repeated. “Let's dust off those tapes."

  As no one had had the heart to do for many years, he darkened a dome's wall. Once again, the great swooping Cynthian elders Pauli had called Uriel and Ariel darted across the night sky, whorls and comets gleaming along their wings, the scales of their bodies shimmering and the eerie glow of their compound eyes catching the light of both moons.

  "We can't hear them ‘speak,'” Rafe had long since deteriorated into lecture mode. “But the computer breaks the frequencies down into the analogical constructions typical of their thought processes..."

  He could feel eyes on his back. How could you kill creatures this beautiful?

  How? Deliberately Rafe skipped forward to the mercifully brief footage of the hatching towers, arrayed across the world's magnetic lines, and the one or two shots of the meter-long larvae they had called “eaters.” He heard Pauli gasp, and himself gagged at his memories: Borodin falling into a field that teemed with the larvae; Pauli's “I hope he died before he hit the ground"; the awful stink of acid and ozone as they trained their blasters on creatures they had only begun to realize would metamorphose into winged splendor ... a shot of a young adult, wings unnaturally bright from the pigments we gave them; the last elder dying once they answered his question “Why?"

  "Shut it down, Rafe,” Pauli muttered desperately

  He brought the lights up and stared bleakly about the crowded room.

  "Those are Cynthians,” he said. “Tell me, what did you see?"

  "Well, sir,” said the senior man of the survey team—about Lohr's age, Rafe judged, “we crossed the ocean and did some tests. Your man Halgerd ought to be really proud; the composites he's been working out for his gliders would definitely survive the storms we ran into. We picked up definite seismic activity, one or two dormant volcanoes, and a number of extinct ones. Apparently there's a chain of them. Well, in one of the largest caldera...

  "We were getting readings on infrared. Life readings. So we dived to check..."

  And saw the wings, the gleaming wings, Rafe thought. The catch of breath, the wonder, the ache at the back of the throat at all that beauty ... at least some are still alive! I hope they prosper.

  "They didn't seem to have any fear of our craft, Captain,” came a reply to Neave's question.

  "No, they never did fear ... except their own children,” Pauli muttered.

  Winged, beautiful, and you killed them. How could you bring yourself to kill them? Neave, his mind full of the glory that they had thought—and thought wrongfully—had existed only on tape.

  "You have no idea just how big this crater was. Down below was a sort of lava flat, but the crater itself was ... it was carpeted with ground scrub like you have here, but wilder, lusher. We saw some of those towers like you showed us."

  Hatching season, Rafe thought. The pale, fragile towers would split as the larvae woke to whatever ravenous instinct passed for awareness in them, and they ate. He shuddered, and realized that Neave was watching him. Carefully he drew himself erect and still.

  "The tapes,” he husked. “Take them. If I can help you, don't hesitate to let me know. I'm not going anywhere."

  For the first time since she broke her leg, Pauli had consented to swallow a sedative. Rafe sat by their bed until she fell into uneasy sleep, then left the darkened room to look in on their children. One decent thing about house arrest: they had left them Serge and ‘Cilla to care for.

  But how long could that continue? Rafe stared down at his children. They were fearful now, afraid as he had once sworn no Cynthian child must ever be. Though years ago Serge had demanded the dignity of his own tiny room, tonight he and his younger sister huddled close together. Rafe bent over them, straightening their covers, easing twisted arms and legs that might ache tomorrow if he didn't move them now. ‘Cilla whimpered a little, then sighed into peaceful dreams.

  Two children were a heavy burden to lay on Lohr and Ayelet; perhaps David ben Yehuda ... but if David too were sentenced ... Rafe tried to ward off panic by thinking. Who would take the children? Thorn, perhaps: if all went well, in his grief for Alicia, he might turn toward a woman who had wanted him for years. It didn't matter. There were many children on Cynthia who had no parents. Lohr, for example: though these days he called himself ben Yehuda.

  The settlers would look after Serge and little ‘Cilla. It might be better that way. Others would be coming: farmers, refugees, scientists, teachers. What sort of life would his children have if the newcomers learned their parents had been the genocides who had tried to wipe out the native culture? No: the nights when Rafe could wander into his children's rooms just to observe them were fast running out.

  The thought made him feel old and tired. Life on Cynthia aged a person. Hard as it seemed, those glossy young lawyers Neave had assigned him and Pauli were about their age; yet they were unlined, unscarred ... innocent. Rafe chuckled sardonically.

  A low, desperate cry made him whirl and run back toward the room he and Pauli shared. Like their children, she had twisted herself into a tight knot of fear, almost a fetal ball. He laid a hand on his wife's shoulder.

  "Pauli, Pauli, come out of it,” he murmured. Unaccustomed as she was to sedatives, she must be reacting to this one. Shadows still underlay her eyes; the sedative had brought her unconsciousness, but no rest.

  She moaned and curled herself even tighter, rejecting the waking world. “No,” she whimpered. “Don't ... don't want to face them ... it's cracking ... oh, God, they're going to break free!"

  Her cry woke her, and she hurled herself into a seated position. For a moment her eyes were blank with terror. Then they focused on Rafe. Warmth and sanity returned to them.

  He laid fingers on his lips, stepped to the door, and listened. No, Serge and ‘Cilla hadn't been disturbed by their mother's nightmare. Reassured, he sat on the edge of the bed and held out his arms. She threw herself into them and clung to him as he wiped her forehead and eyes, then stroked the sweat-damp short curls—beginning to gray now—at the nape of her neck back into some order.

  "Easy, love,” he whispered. “It's almost over now.” “Tonight, when you showed the old tapes..."

  "Hush, Pauli. They needed to know for the people who will come here after we're gone. And it's all evidence. Now quiet, rest now. Lean back..."

  He eased her back down onto the bed and lay beside her, propped on an elbow to look at her while she molded herself against his side. So many years now they had been together, years when she had led, and he had followed until her strength was gone. Then it was he who would hold her, sustain her until that magnificent, dogged nerve of hers returned and she could fight once more.

  For the last time, my love. Take my strength too, he wished at her and drew her close. She sighed and smiled, already more than half asleep again.

  "Don't want to face them...” Long after Pauli slept, Rafe lay holding her, pondering her words. Face whom? There was only one possible answer to that. Pauli feared the eaters.

  Scarcely daring to breathe lest he wake her, Rafe slid his arm out from beneath her he
ad, lay still while listening to her even, shallow breathing, occasionally broken by little sobbing whimpers. Then, finally, he rose from their bed, and went into their living quarters.

  Pauli wasn't the only one who could study law on the sly. He typed in a brief search. Genocide ... Extradition. The screen flickered a few times, then cleared as letters formed on it. “Genocide ... shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition. The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in accordance with their laws and the treaties in force."

  Neave, who seemed to subscribe to some weird variant on an ethic of nonviolence, was just looking for an out; and here it was—the thing that Pauli feared most of all: to be turned over to the Cynthians.

  Rafe's breath came fast. Despite the chill in their quarters, he was sweating. Neave's exploration teams had sighted hatching towers. And he had seen one crack open, seen one of the meter-long larvae fasten its mandibles in a child's foot, smelled the acid, and heard her scream. Poor ‘Cilla. She had survived that attack, but the lamed foot it left her with had ultimately killed her.

  Borodin—until she was dragged back, Pauli had tried to blast her way through to his body, or whatever the eaters had left of it. Rafe still prayed that the old captain had been dead or unconscious, never to feel the bite of chitin or the burn of acid.

  He and Pauli ... bile gushed into his mouth. To be given to the eaters while still conscious, aware. “O God, help,” he whispered.

  If that were their sentence—Rafe shuddered. Through a haze of tears, he rummaged in a chest until he found his old kit and sighed with relief. People never questioned a xenobiologist's need for unpleasant chemicals: aromatics, or caustics, or even poisons. He caught up a glass pipette, dipped it into one such vial, then sealed it in a tiny tube which he secreted in an inner pocket of his jacket.

  He yawned as the day's emotions finally registered on his nerves and body and headed back to bed. Gently he drew Pauli into his arms until she sighed in her sleep and curled against him, her head pillowed on his shoulder. So many years they had lain like that; the first time seemed like only a day or so ago. Soothed by the rhythm of his heartbeat, her breathing softened and steadied.

  Such a fierce spirit in such a tiny frame. He knew that Pauli had submitted herself to justice and would never evade her sentence by suicide. But as long as Rafe had that tiny pipette with its heavy dose of quick, lethal, and painless venom, she would not suffer. A flick of the thumb to open the tube, a quick scratch; and Pauli would have the peace she yearned for.

  In that much, at least, he could protect her. Pauli wasn't the only one in the family to have secrets. Don't let me lose my nerve, he prayed.

  He buried his face in Pauli's hair, which smelled of mown grass and sunlight. Her warmth lulled him, and within moments, he was asleep.

  25

  The moons had set, and the night sky had not even begun to turn gray when the summons came. The people who had sat with them all that night started, then forced faces and bodies to stillness—all except Lohr. Like a much younger boy, Lohr flung himself first into Pauli's arms, then Rafe's. Ayelet embraced them slowly, as cautious of her pregnancy as Pryor (rest her soul) could have wanted.

  "It kicked!” Pauli breathed.

  "Pauli or Paul: not ‘it,'” Ayelet corrected gravely. “I have always wanted...” she gulped, then went on, “a big family."

  Rafe bent and kissed her cheek, cast a longing glance at the closed door of the room where Serge and ‘Cilla slept.

  "We mustn't keep them waiting,” he spoke quickly. “Come on.” His hand on Pauli's arm was warm, familiar, and it shook only slightly.

  Only Amory Neave, his pilot, and two of the huskier survey personnel waited outside. Pauli looked them over ironically. He cannot believe we need to be restrained. Not after all this time. They had chosen the time well. Most restless of the settlers, Thorn Halgerd (finally accompanied by Ro Economus, thank God!), had joined some of the ship's crew in more flight tests of his ultralights; and at this hour, anyone else in the settlement was asleep, too tired to notice that their leaders had gone on ... been sent on ... ahead.

  "Let's go quickly,” she said. “If you'd wanted to draw a crowd, you could have let us sleep in."

  Her bravado contrasted poorly with her pale face and dark-circled eyes. Still, for an instant, it was she who led the way toward the waiting scoutship. Her feet rang on the landing ramp. Once on board, she strapped herself into the padded seat, a movement still instinctive even after all these years. One last flight, she thought. At least, I'll have that.

  She wished they would have permitted her to pilot the ship that would take her and Rafe across the ocean: an exercise in futility, seeing that her licenses must have expired years ago. But still, a last request ... they had not asked her what her last request was, an attempt to preserve the illusion that she and Rafe were being taken to the eastern continent to help the survey team already camped there to speak with the Cynthians.

  Weight pressed Pauli against the seat, which tilted as the ship rose into the air. Vibration built up, rose into a hum, then a whine: the ship quivered in a downdraft, then righted itself and gained altitude.

  Rafe lay with his eyes closed, but opened them even as she watched. He brought one hand up to brush the breast pocket of his workjacket, then smiled at her.

  The ship trembled again, then steadied. Trade winds? Pauli thought. A sort of slipstream? The surveyors working with Thorn Halgerd to build ultralights able to cross this world's oceans would need to know that. She would remember...

  She would not have that chance. That, and the task of encouraging, leading, and loving the one small human settlement on Cynthia, would pass to cleaner hands today. It was good that Thorn and the crewmembers got along so well; it augured well for the day when Earth and its allies would send more settlers to Cynthia. Perhaps, she mused, it would be better if the newcomers built towns of their own, and didn't try to live among people who had all but forgotten that faces other than their own existed in the cosmos. They might like and respect the older settlers, but they could never, never understand.

  From the moment when the exploration team disrupted her court-martial with shouts that they had spotted winged Cynthians, she had known Neave would extradite her and Rafe.

  It was like him to have broken it gently. He had seen the Cynthians, she knew. There had been days when he had ... vanished. “I am sorry, the commissioner is unable to see you...” Oh, she knew what that translated into. Neave would study the Cynthian survivors, would pity them as any decent person must; and when he returned, Pauli would finally see in his eyes the chill disgust with which decent men and women must regard her, regardless of her protests. The Cynthians had been winged, free, and beautiful; and she had killed them. The commissioner could not help but be revolted by the thing into which she had turned herself.

  "They want to see you,” he had told them.

  "Do they understand what we did?"

  "I tried to make them,” he said. “I don't know how well I succeeded. You may have to explain the rest of it."

  Somehow, Pauli doubted that. As a scholar and politician, Neave had proved too adept at the game of constructing verbal analogies that, raised from the level of human voices into the high frequencies of Cynthian communications, enabled humans and Cynthians to speak together. He would have made them understand. Still, if they wanted to hear her own admission of guilt, she had confessed once already; a second time wouldn't alter anything. And it would be good to see winged Cynthians again, she thought ... Uriel and Ariel dancing on the thermals ... then, pallid, febrile, their wings shedding brightness, trying to restrain the younger Cynthians ... folded wings plummeting into the flame ... She whimpered at the memory, then glanced about.

  No one had heard. Not even Rafe had noticed. The whining of the ship's engines rose in pitch as it gained speed. Pauli shut her eyes, remembering the fantasy that had stayed with her from the first time she flew
: that her nerves and muscles were keyed in with the fuselage, her arms extended with the aircraft's wings as it balanced and swooped—like her son and his glider, or a Cynthian swooping down the airstreams. Not a day had passed that she didn't yearn for that sight.

  Likely, it would be one of her last. How could the Cynthians fail to condemn her and her husband? Loyalty to species—to Pauli's shock, even Elisabeth von Bulow had dragged out species loyalty as a reason not to extradite her.

  "Do you call human having arms and legs, a pale skin like yours?” Beneatha had demanded. “Then why did you call Halgerd a construct? What about Armand over there, who lost a foot? And then there's me, of course."

  Rafe lifted an eyebrow. “What are you thinking?"

  "Of the way Beneatha set up Elisabeth von Bulow,” Pauli said softly. Rafe chuckled, the low, rich sound Pauli loved. “Next thing she knew, she was protesting that humans didn't have to have pale skins, that she wasn't a racist..."

  "'Then why,'” Rafe drew Beneatha's words out of his own recollections, “'do you argue against extradition in this case? Because they don't look like people? Because they're just bugs, and you don't need to worry about the rights of a bunch of moths?’” Deliberately she had used an epithet for which she had punished a generation of children on Cynthia. “'What's Thorn, then, but a moth with arms and legs? What's to stop you from thinking of me as just a moth with black skin? Oh, you claim that your people made him? Show me the building blocks you used: egg, sperm; human, down to the last chromosome. He looks like you, but call him a moth too. Easier to kill him that way, isn't it?

  "'Racism, shape-prejudice—damned if I know which is uglier. Maybe this is. After all, you don't enslave moths; you just kill ‘em. Look, I've met Cynthians. You haven't. They're human all right, a lot more human than some I could mention.’”

  That was when Beneatha realized that she had just argued successfully to turn her own friendly old enemies over to the Cynthians. Intelligent they were, human by the extended moral definition she had proposed. But they were alien. What sort of punishment would they mete out? Pauli had never seen Beneatha flee the site of a victorious argument before. And she had only heard her weep once.