Analog SFF, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I heard about Joe's guesswork that night at supper in Unity Base.

  “Story Bird Cave could be a historical record,” I said.

  “That would depend on how the rest of the story goes,” Catharin answered.

  * * * *

  The sea rose. Waves climbed onto the land and snatched at the People's nests. The sea flooded the nursery marshes, and sea monsters swam up into the marshes. The old People said: That sky pearl has deranged the sea. The sea is climbing out of its nest. Soon we will be caught between hungry dragons swooping down from the air and many-toothed monsters swimming up out of the sea, with nowhere safe for our young. The world is ending.

  It's a mistake to think of anything on Planet Green in Earth terms, but I can't resist imagining a Cretaceous sea full of toothy plesiosaurs. Then the big blue moon gets shoved in close—as near to Green as Luna was to Earth, but six times the apparent size in the sky, and twenty times as bright. It twanged Planet Green hard—probably set off earthquakes and volcanoes, possibly induced global warming and rising sea levels, and certainly created tides like nothing the Bird People had seen before.

  There was a bold young fish-hunter named Wander. Now Wander said: I have watched the sky. Not all clouds blow against the Hinge of the All and stop. The highest clouds freely go back and forth. Maybe there is another world on the other side of the Hinge of the All. I am brave and strong and [unclear]. I will go look.

  The she-People, brooding eggs saved from the waves of the sea, clacked their bills in anger. They said: You should stay here guarding our nests!

  But he set out anyway.

  Clear as a bell, except for one word. In the phonetic notation we're using, the unclear word is /a*a/. It consists of the most common vowel sound in the language flanking a rasp or rattle from a bird's throat. /A*a/ probably means “smart,” because next comes this passage:

  Wander was very /a*a/. He remembered what the old People said about dragons. He waited for a windless day and set out early in the morning because he knew that the dragons couldn't climb the sky then. Without a strong wind, dragons can only fly down.

  I visualize the story's dragons as pterosaurs. A survey team out in the field recently found a fossil like that. It looks mangled, as if it died by accident. Like pterosaurs, it would have been too big to get airborne without a headwind, too heavy to stay airborne without ridge lift or midday thermals to keep it up.

  A dragon leaped from a cliff, its greedy beak gaping. But Wander had /a*a/ feathers. He outflew the dragon. Unscathed, he soared into the high chasms of the Hinge of the All.

  That /a*a/ word perplexed me for weeks. Meanwhile, I carried geologists and their instruments all over local creation searching for crude oil. Green is very old and has been vegetated longer than Earth has existed. Plenty of organic matter should have accumulated underwater and been buried by silt and sand, heated and compressed and cooked into oil. The geologists have identified ancient basins, the ghosts of long-dead seas, and deep beds of shale and sand. Places where oil should seep and puddle and pool under the planet's skin. Except geology on Green apparently didn't work that way. On some of my flights I imagined my Green bird friend again because the imaginary bird was better company than the frustrated geologist sitting in Kite's passenger seat. I pondered how a Green bird might feel about flying. I wondered what /a*a/ could mean. I've never seen a feather that's smart.

  When I found a little spare bandwidth in the uplink to the ship, I talked it over with the intelligence. We decided on the word “quick.” Wander was brave, strong, and quick. As a child he was a quick study. His feathers were quick in the sense of aerodynamic. An imperfect translation, but it'll do for now.

  * * * *

  Wander expected it to be hot in the Hinge of the All. Did the Sun not alight on the Hinge at the end of every day? Instead it was bitter cold. Frigid winds blew in Wander's face, tossed him to and fro, and tried to fling him against raw stone.

  It took humans more than a century to learn how to fly up close and personal with mountains. Sailplane wreckage in the Alps and Andes and other mountain ranges attested to the danger of the learning curve. In that environment, hang-gliders have some advantages over sailplanes and airplanes. A hang glider in a bad patch of wind may be able to put his feet down and land. Which is what Wander did.

  He took shelter in the lee of a boulder. Even there the wind disheveled his feathers. Cold and hungry, he longed for the nursery marsh of the People, the warm water full of sweet crabs and minnows. Then he heard a voice. It said: Hello!

  A witch hovered in the air.

  Witch? The intelligence's peculiar linguistic sensibilities are showing again.

  Of the three kinds of Green birds that were interred in watery sediments, the smallest kind has opposable claws at the main bend of their wing. They were sometimes buried with artifacts, including polished stones and sticks just the right size for their opposable claws to grasp. Using sticks might have seemed witchy to Bird People like Wander who talked, but didn't use tools. Instead of “witch” I'll use the word “raven.”

  When I mentioned this to Joe, he shook his head. “No organism here is what we knew on Earth. Green birds aren't birds. Green seals aren't seals. Green genes are deoxyribonucleic acid, but with coding utterly alien to ours.”

  Joe may have been the smartest human being in the twenty-first century. He was a genetic inventor, creating genetic tools and marvels and a few monstrosities that never should have seen the light of day. Finally he made an enemy so powerful and so vengeful that Joe's only escape route was the starship. In his spare time, Joe tries to understand Green DNA.

  I conceded his point about Green life. But convergent evolution happens. On Earth, both bats and birds had wings. A penguin's wing had the same cross-section as a fish's body to move efficiently in water. For my own paraphrase of an ancient story written by birds, I'm going to call the Green birds with short wings and opposable digits “Ravens.” Not “Green ravens.” Microanalysis of fossil feathers found evidence of color; their plumage was purple.

  Now the Ravens were smaller than People and lived in all the nooks and crannies of the world, eating every kind of small thing with fur or scales or feathers. That included nestlings, so she-People on the nest spread their wings and clacked their bills whenever Ravens came near. The People's sentinels at the nursery marsh chased Ravens away. But in the bleak Hinge of the All, even a Raven was better company than wind and snow and rock. Wander moved over and the Raven deftly landed beside him. The Raven carried a magic stick under his wing. Leaning on his magic stick for balance in the wind, the Raven asked Wander: What brings you here?

  Wander answered: The world is ending. I want to fly over the Hinge of the All and look for another world.

  The Raven cocked his head and said: You have long wings and quick feathers, but you don't know the ways of the wind in the mountains. I do. Let me ride on your back and let us go together. I'd like to see another world, but own wings are too weak to make it over that.

  The Raven pointed with his staff. In the distance the highest part of the Hinge of the All stretched like a bleached sea monster's bony spine from one end of the sky to the other. Dismayed at the sight of it, Wander asked: Do you think there's a world on the other side?

  The Raven answered: When I pry at stones or roots or leaves or ice, there's always something interesting to find. We should pry at the edge of the world and see what's there.

  Never before had any of the People had a Raven for a companion. But the world had never been about to end either. Wander said: Hop on.

  * * * *

  The best guess from the intelligence is that the consonant in /a*a/ was a trill. Nice to know, though it would be nicer to know what the word means. It comes up again and again.

  Now the Raven's name was Quickclaw. He preened his feathers smooth and perched between Wander's shoulders. Hunching low as he clung to Wander's feathers, he taught Wander how to ride the wild tangled winds. They threaded their way throu
gh the Hinge of the All until they saw a pale green plain among the mountains. Quickclaw shouted: We need to rest and eat. Fly down, but be careful because Sky Spiders live there. They go back and forth to the sky on strings, and they have many shiny things and pry even more than Ravens do.

  God Almighty. Does “back and forth to the sky on strings” mean contrails? Could this be the intelligent race that moved Blue, and they had a space base on an altiplano on Green? Story Bird Cave might contain historical clues to the ultimate mystery of Planet Green—the huge blue moon. By pointing that out, I got the priority of translating Story Bird Cave upped.

  The ship's intelligence soon produced this:

  Wander spiraled down to a quick stream in the high plain. They thirstily drank. It was very cold that night, but Quickclaw found a hot vent in the ground. Snails clustered around the vent. They gorged on snails and stayed out sight of the Sky Spiders. After two days they saw strange flat clouds overhead. Quickclaw climbed on Wander's back and said: Fly high!

  Wander flew up and up. Quickclaw urged him on: Fly higher!

  Wander beat his wings and climbed higher into the sky than he had ever flown before. The breath sawed in and out of Wander's lungs until he thought his chest would burst from exertion. Then a strong wind seized him and lifted him up, higher than the Hinge of the All. The tallest mountain bore a smoking black crater on its peak. It was the Perch of the Sun, scorched from the Sun sitting there.

  Quickclaw spotted lenticular clouds, a sign of mountain wave. Wander flew up into the wave and it carried them over the highest mountain in the range, which was a live volcano. I wanted more about Sky Spiders and didn't get it, but I did get evidence that this story is reliable. It describes mountain flying realistically. People with wings would know.

  The cold air was too thin to feed Wander's blood. He dizzily panted. The edges of his vision faded. Staring ahead, he saw the Sun gliding away from its Perch. Wander stretched out his aching wings and followed the Sun. Quickclaw shouted: Look! Under the Sun!

  Below the Sun a green land stretched away into distant haze. Wander glided down into good thick air. Then he laughed. The Raven on his back chortled and cheered.

  * * * *

  The starship's intelligence really is eccentric. Stubborn. It doesn't like to speculate about what comes next until it's sorted out what it already has. I think its linguistic expertise was based on a professor who kept her cards up her sleeve until her conclusions were ironclad enough to publish. The next line of the story came out as Beyond the Hinge of the All, they found many cathedrals. The intelligence couldn't explain why it used that word. Then it wouldn't give me any more translation of the story. I wished we could bring a linguist-colonist out of stasis, but there was no way to justify that, for an incredibly ancient linguistic puzzle, when our colony's future had just hit an utterly unexpected roadblock.

  Not only was there no crude oil in the sedimentary rocks, waiting for us to find it, but there were no diamonds in igneous rock formations. No copper or iron ores anywhere. No bauxite. No uranium. We came up empty-handed for every mineral resource on our shopping list. More people were awake now, revived from stasis, including the core of the colonial government. And the boneheadedness of our leaders was astonishing. They weren't interested in developing the resources that we had in abundance: sand, sun, sea, and tides.

  When I fumed about the colonial government's stupidity, Catharin shook her head. “It's not simple stupidity. They're afraid, and they haven't yet faced it.”

  She knows about facing fear. As the starship's physician and chief medical researcher, she'd realized early what stasis that lasted a thousand years had done to us. It wrecked molecules, triggered autoimmune disorders and cancer, and, in insidious ways, damaged the human genome. She's battled biomolecular catastrophe ever since. To help her, she enlisted Joe, who had been no humanitarian on Earth. His unflagging genetic repair work represented a major change of heart, after he faced his own psychological demons soon after we got here.

  Cat and Joe both knew that all of our original colony plans were dead on arrival at Planet Green, and for there to be a human future on Green, we'll have to invent new plans. When I advocated alternate resources, they backed me up. Meanwhile there was endless discussion about the puzzle of geology so deficient in metals, oil, diamonds, etc.

  I had my own guess about that, but I only confided in Cat and Joe. I told them, “If Green was the cradle of a civilization powerful enough to move the blue moon, then on the way up they mined this world out. There won't be much left for us to find.”

  “The ground rules are different from Earth,” Joe said ironically. “We knew that.”

  “Yes, but we can't comprehend what it means,” Catharin pointed out.

  In the end, the cathedrals riddle solved itself in the very next line of the story: They saw no people in the branches. Oh. To birds a tree can be a cathedral.

  The rest of the Bird literature uses images even more poetic than that. There's one cave so large and with so many scratches on the walls that it might be a library. It's mostly untranslatable. The Bird People seem to have had a mystical Dreamtime concept, somewhat like that of the Australian Aborigines. The Green Dreamtime inspired reams of otherworldly poetry.

  Story Bird Cave is a simpler type of literature. It has the earmarks of being ancient oral tradition that crystallized into writing soon after writing itself was invented. The original events were carried in the Bird People's unwritten memory for a long time and turned and cut and polished like gemstones. Whoever finally wrote it down added their own rudimentary literary sensibilities. But it's understandable. Mostly.

  They glided down to a small river. Wander saw the riffle that gave away a fish. He swooped to seize the fish in his talons. Wander ate the fish and it was very good. In the grass beside the water, Quickclaw snatched up a fat little no-legs. It quicked and he ate it with relish. Right now I don't like my translation of /a*a/ as “quick.” The context makes the word seem to mean “twitch.” Language is based on metaphors, and this particular metaphor isn't obvious to hominids like myself. Especially not in the next line. Quickclaw said: This is a good world with plenty of quicking meat! Evidently, /a*a/ can mean “delectable.” Maybe food so fresh that it's still twitching as it goes down qualifies as really tasty....

  At the end of the day the Sun fluffed its fiery feathers and settled into its nest at the end of the sky. Wander said: This is a good world. My people could live here.

  Cleaning his bill, Quickclaw said: I would like for my mate to see this.

  As far as we've decoded the Green Bird literature, there's nothing about Wander's people having mates. Maybe they were never monogamous. Or they always were. Either way, it wasn't a detail worth singling out. On the other hand, there's a lot in the literature about mated Ravens. Ravens in love, Ravens making babies, Ravens fooling around with Ravens other than their mates. Ravens in off-and-on mating situations that seem to resemble my relationship with our colony's chief helicopter pilot, Dom Cady. Humans are a lot like the Ravens.

  * * * *

  We know where the Hinge of the All is. Once it was a coastal range of high mountains, but eons of weather and the tidal assault of the sea eroded it down. On the seaward side, after the new blue moon's tides scoured away the Bird People's homeland, erosion rebuilt a wide sloping shelf of land. Salt marshes grew back again.

  Inland from the mountains, a wide shallow basin filled in and heaved up into the ridgy limestone plateau that's there now. Finally we arrived and picked this timeworn mountain range to bear the first human footprints on Planet Green. Unity Mountain, with our base on its top, is an unimpressive mountain now. Two hundred million years ago it was the volcano called the Perch of the Sun.

  At midday the Sun bypassed its Perch on its way to its nest at the end of the sky. At night the great blue pearl raced across the dark sky. The stars in the blue pearl's path dimmed, hiding from it. Wander said: At home in the old world, the blue sky pearl is driving the
sea crazy. My People are in danger. I must go back to them.

  Quickclaw said: We should pry at the valleys on this side of the mountains. We might find passes that will be easier going than flying over the mountains into the wind.

  Now Wander had been thinking about the cleverness of Ravens and how, being much smaller than the People, the Ravens ate different things. Wander said: When we get home, let's invite your mate and your relatives to help my People fly the mountain winds, so People and Ravens together can come here to live. Ravens would all enjoy living here. Ravens could pry for a thousand years and not find all of the new things in this new world.

  Liking the idea, Quickclaw chortled.

  Wander flew homeward with Quickclaw on his back. They picked their way through windy, barren passes in the Hinge of the All. Finally they reached Quickclaw's home territory. They soon found Quickclaw's mate. When she heard what Quickclaw had to say and saw how glossy his feathers looked from the nutritious food in the New World, she flew to tell her friends and relatives the news. But when Wander saw the old world again, he knew that he didn't have much time. The deranged sea was chewing on it. The world looked like a ragged blade of grass. The sight wrenched his heart.

  I know how Wander felt.

  Like Wander, after I grew up I journeyed far away from home. Farmers, including my parents, tend to want descendants who stay on the farm and an offspring or two who go find success in the wider world; belt and suspenders. I had three brothers, all hardworking farmers. I was the kid who left the farm. I became an engineer and an astronaut with missions to the Moon and asteroids under my belt. But when I came home for my first visit in ten years, I saw that we were in big trouble. Earth's oceans rising in the twenty-first century had triggered huge population shifts when people living in coastal areas were flooded out. Sunbelt cities like Chattanooga and Atlanta, burgeoning at the end of the twentieth century, grew even more wildly. That meant a lot of farmland paved over. It also meant family farm economics trumped by high-output factory farming. Factory farms bred not only livestock and crops, but pesticide-resistant weeds, anthelmintic-resistant internal parasites, and antibiotic-resistant diseases. Every one of those problems threatened the Fisher farm.