Analog SFF, May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  To top it all off, Earth's destabilized climate brought calamitous rains to the hills of Tennessee. Where the rains washed raw gullies in the hills, the land looked like it had been raked by monstrous claws. We Fishers, like everybody else in the county, had lost most of our crops. We were just lucky that the house and barns hadn't been in the way of a flood avalanche.

  My parents called a family meeting about what to do. In truth, the question was where to go. American farmers had been moving to Central or South America for decades. But it had become almost impossible to find a country that wasn't aflame with violent civil unrest and arable land not overrun by desperate people displaced by the rising sea. My mother threw up her hands. “Where else in the world can we go?” We were sitting at the table of our rambling old farmhouse around a still-sturdy, century-and-a-half-old oak dining room table.

  My father looked across the table at me. He said, “It may have to be to another world.”

  Until that instant, I'd been following the work of the Aeon Foundation with detached fascination. The Aeon Foundation intended to privately fund a starship to colonize a new world. It was a fascinating endeavor, but I knew I could never leave Earth for good, forever leaving behind the farm and the family I came from, the land I grew up on.

  But the land was dying. And my family decided to go to the stars.

  * * * *

  In his sorrow for the ruin of the world, and because he had spent days in a dragon-free place, Wander forgot to look up. A dragon plummeted down at him and he barely dodged its gaping beak. He smelled its foul breath. But suddenly the air filled with Ravens, Quickclaw's mate and many others, all darting at the dragon's eyes and tail. The dragon swatted at the Ravens, but they were small and nimble. Wander wheeled close and raked the dragon with his talons. The dragon turned tail and flapped away.

  Wander returned to the People with a flock of Ravens in his wake. He told the People: I've seen the world beyond the Hinge of the All. And the Ravens are now my friends, and they will teach us all to fly in the Hinge's winds. Let's go.

  But the She-people slicked their feathers down angrily. They said: Few enough eggs hatched this year and our young are just beginning to fly. Do you expect us to leave our young behind? Or let these Ravens eat them?

  Wander said: Show the Ravens where to find fibrous marsh grass and stringy seaweed. The Ravens will weave nest-bags to carry everyone too young to fly to the New World.

  Are we to carry burdens like that and fight off dragons too? demanded the suspicious She-People. Are you planning for us to carry snacks to the dragons?

  He answered: I have a better idea.

  With Quickclaw, he flew south to the land of the trolls.

  For trolls, read huge carrion-eating birds with gray feathers. A better translation than “trolls” might be “teratorns"—the enormous Ice Age vultures of Earth.

  The intelligence's persistence in translating the words for additional intelligent bird species as supernatural beings is very interesting. When you think about it, coexisting with an equally intelligent species was a situation we never had as humans on Earth. Or if we did, it was in the Paleolithic, when Cro-Magnons shared part of Europe with Neanderthals. By the Neolithic, the Cro-Magnons had the continent all to themselves.

  * * * *

  As I write this today, it's Green Year Twelve, the twelfth year since Starfall. My personal account of the Story Bird Cave translation was always a pick-up-and-put-down, spare time kind of amateur history, but the last time I touched it was six years ago. A lot has happened since then. Some things were good and hopeful. Other things were ominous or bad.

  Earth crops in our pilot projects didn't grow as readily as we expected. The probable reason was microbe disconnect. Earth had an invisible world of microbes that the visible plants evolved to coexist with. The microbes of Green are alien. Until we get this figured out, until crops grow reliably, we won't revive many farmers from stasis. I may not see the rest of my family for a while.

  Without mineral resources and terrestrial crops, what we have to work with on Green is sand, sun, sea, and tides. A certain amount of plastic and paints can be made out of native plant matter, and buildings out of concrete and glass. What we need more than anything else is energy. I went back to my original profession, being a structural engineer, and I designed a tide machine to straddle the river near Unity Base.

  Building the tide machine has taken politics and persuasion, blood, sweat, and tears, and engineering that's never been done before. It's also cost me one of my best friends in the universe. The river is how the Green seals come inland to give birth to their sluglike young. Joe got upset because the tide machine might kill migrating seals.

  I said, “Look, Joe, for humans to live, something has to die. It may be cows or catfish or pole beans, but that's always the cost of keeping people fed, clothed, and housed. Something has to die, even if it's just the weeds on a fallow field when you plow it to plant a crop.” I didn't say out loud what I thought about the worldview of city people. For city boys like Joe, food is something that just appears. It costs only money. The universe doesn't work that way.

  Joe said, “The Green seals aren't weeds.”

  “No, they aren't, and they can learn to stay out of the tide machine.” I was so upset that I raised my voice, almost shouting at him. “I don't want to hurt the seals! I don't think the machine will hurt or kill many of them before they learn to avoid the machine.”

  He scowled. “Killing any of them is too many.”

  And then he relentlessly opposed the tide machine. His opposition fractured the colony. Some who took Joe's side were people I cared deeply about. Some on my side were careless young visionaries and others were politicians I don't trust. Catharin adamantly refused to take sides. She stayed on cordial terms with me, but I could no longer confide in her. For a long time I didn't have the heart to go back to translating Story Bird Cave.

  On my forty-fourth birthday, celebrated with a small group of friends not including Catharin and Joe, I picked the story up again where the bird heroes went to talk to the big gray vultures.

  The Teratorns lived on a plain of grass between the Hinge of the All and the sea. Herds of four-legs lived and died on the plain, and the Teratorns ate dead ones. Wander and Quickclaw arrived at the end of the day as the Teratorns returned to their roost on a ridge swept by the wind from the sea. Wander said: We flew over the Hinge of the All and saw another world. It has many four-legged grass-grazers, alive and dead, so there is plenty of carrion, as well as food for Ravens and my People. If we join forces, we can all get past the dragons and the mountains and reach a safer world. Rise as much as it will, the sea will never get over the mountains.

  Most of the Teratorns laughed. But one she-Teratorn said: I can see with my own eyes how the sea surges higher with every tide. When it inundates the grass plain, we will have sea on one side and stone on the other, with the four-legs all swept into the water for sea monsters to feast on. Then we will starve. I see no reason to perch here while the world drowns. My clan will go to the new world.

  Now the she-Teratorn's name was Sees-Far-From-On-High.

  Another way to render her name is Descry. But it makes sense for vultures to have a long-winded language with many-syllabled names. Their lunch won't run away while they take their time saying things.

  Quickclaw's relatives made nest bags, just like they made for their own young, but larger. Wander, Quickclaw, and Sees-Far-From-On-High decided that the middle of the day was the time to set out. Into the nest bags went the People's young and the oldest who could no longer fly far. Then the People climbed into the sky with Quickclaw and his mate and relatives, and the Teratorn clan carried nest bags full of the very young and very old People. Young Teratorns clung to the backs of their parents.

  In the foothills the air swarmed with hungry dragons.

  Not all stories have happy endings. I don't know how happily the story of our colony on Green will end, much less the story of my ow
n life. I feel a need to find out how the Bird People's adventure ended. I'm guessing that it turned out pretty well. Even though it doesn't look that way now.

  Ravens darted around the dragons, pecking at the thin skin of the dragons’ bellies. The most daring of the Ravens pelted the dragons’ eyes with sharp rocks. The People raked the dragons’ throats with their talons. Dragon blood watered the wind. The she-People were the fiercest fighters of the People, keeping the dragons away from the Teratorns.

  The Teratorns were almost as big as the dragons, but could turn smaller circles, Stretching out their wings in the air that swirled up from the Sun-warmed foothills, the Teratorns climbed the sky faster than the dragons.

  Two young People fell out of their nest bag. A dragon snapped up one of them. The other one fluttered to land on a Teratorn's back. The Teratorn said: Hang on!

  Teratorns with their burdens circled tightly and soared high while the Ravens and the People fought the dragons. Blood and feathers scattered in the air.

  Everyone who was still alive soared after the Teratorns and escaped toward the safety of the mountain passes. Behind them the dragons hissed in fury. Wander was the last of all the People, and the dragons almost caught him. But his feathers quickened and he escaped.

  In the mountains, the People regrouped and flew on, with Ravens teaching People how to fly the quick winds. The Teratorns were able to stay higher, in smoother air.

  Deep in the mountains lay the high plain with its grass and snails. The People wanted to stop there. The Ravens warned them about the Sky Spiders. Then Sees-Far-From-On-High called out to her clan: Don't stop, stay high. I see Spiders getting in and out of shells with wings. And the Spiders have stretched their threads far and wide. They are cutting holes in these mountains, melting the mountains’ hearts like ice, and bleeding the mountain hearts away. We are too big to hide from those Sky Spiders, and we should have nothing to do with them.

  * * * *

  Did a giant vulture just describe resource extraction? I think she did. We've been exploring the land westward of Unity Mountain for resources, but it looks like the Sky Spiders got there first and plundered the land. Surprise.

  A new world wouldn't be new without some surprises—not always nice ones.

  The People found flat clouds and lifting winds and flew over the smoking Perch of the Sun. The new world unfolded under their wings. The People told Wander: Truly it is a new world with rivers full of fish. Sees-Far-From-On-High said: There's more. Far to the west, between here and the Sun's nest, I see an inland sea, and it has many fish in it and many four-legs in the grass around it. This is a very rich new world. But in the air over the inland sea, I see dragons even bigger than the ones we left behind.

  Oh, hell. The story started at the apex of the cave ceiling, where the lines of marks were obscured by soot when we first found it. Now the story is down to where the marks were half hidden behind sand at the bottom of the cave, they've got dragons in their new world, and the word /a*a/ is conspicuous by its presence in the last line of writing around the cave.

  * * * *

  A couple of day ago, I shared the sky with cloud-dragons: cumulonimbus clouds with lightning claws. I used gliding speed to dodge them, pushing Kite to the limits of its performance, and Kite outran the clouds. The Sinha-Blazek deturbulator strips on Kite's left wing caught my attention. In the striped areas, the wing skin shimmered. The technically advanced materials on the wing were vibrating at just the right frequency to damp down the beginnings of the turbulent separation of the air stream from the wing. Deturbulator strips let Kite fly better in more attitudes, open up the corners of Kite's performance box.

  Just like that line from Story Bird Cave about how Wander got away from the dragons. His feathers quickened.

  It had been under my eyes every time I flew Kite. Nature got there before Sinha and Blazek did. The feathers of raptors can vibrate in a highly specific way, deturbulating the air stream over a bird's wings. It may feel like a pleasant shiver to the owner of said wings. For Bird People, it attracted cultural meanings. Metaphorically, the word /a*a/ can mean quiver with wonderful consequences—speed; intelligence; harmony; goodness.

  I told Joe about it. I added that maybe my own mind isn't very quick. I've been thinking like an optimistic and ox-stubborn engineer, intent on solving a problem without fully understanding it, plowing my way to the solution of an engineering challenge with principled disregard for unintended consequences. It hurt to admit that to a brilliant scientist. But my conscience said I had to.

  Then I challenged him to figure out a way for the seals and the tide machine to coexist. He thinks he can get the seals to follow a channel around the machine. And I'm holding up the machine to let him.

  * * * *

  Maybe the Bird People were quick in a way we aren't.

  At most of the fast-moving, tight-maneuvering moments of human history, we had turbulent separation. War. We've had whole civilizations clash and crash. Even on a new world on the other side of the stars, in a colony only twelve years old, we've already experienced an ugly rupture.

  In the Green Bird's whole vast literature, we can't find references to wars among Bird Peoples. Territorial tiffs, yes. Conquests, pogroms, and world wars, no, and nothing about gods and kings either. Perhaps there's a connection. The Bird People's hyperevolved without the destructive turbulence that marked human history. What made them so quick? Green genes? Having wings? Not having a world rich in mineral resources because an earlier race mined everything out on their way to a level of technology high enough to move the blue moon?

  Maybe all of those factors contributed, but I think the true answer is written in the last line of the story—the line that runs all around Story Bird Cave at the bottom of the wall.

  Wander said: Ravens are quick of claw, the People quick of wing, and Teratorns have quick sight. We are all People, and we are quicker together than apart. Dragons or no dragons, this is the world for us.

  Wander was a culture hero. For humans, a culture hero is the legendary person who discovered fire or founded a dynasty, or someone who invented a momentous machine at the dawn of history. On this new world, the dawn of history is now.

  My tide machine works. It turns the river tides into energy enough for a city.

  The seals are bypassing the machine in the channel that Joe devised. He figured out how to infuse the channel with water-soluble scents that mean this is the right way, while suffusing the tide machine's water intakes with smells that shriek danger to the brains of the seals. What gave Joe the motivation to devote months of his life to a side channel for Green seals, I'll never know; I think it has to do with expiating his old scientific sins on Earth. How an arrogant primate figured out the high points of the smell language of giant aquatic slugs is even harder to understand. But he did it. The seals are using the channel and staying out of the tide machine.

  Meanwhile the long, bitter rift in my friendship with Joe had the effect of mending fences between me and Dom. By the time Joe and I became friends again, Dom was firmly entrenched in the habit of being my husband. Our on-again, off-again marriage is on for good.

  Dom is ferrying materials by helicopter to the site where we'll build the first human city on Green. It will be a city made of glass, with daylight and starlight streaming into it. Since you can't have a city without farming—food won't magically appear here any more than it did on Earth—we now have an all-out project to establish crop cultivation, with the intense involvement of microbiologists, and the results are starting to look good. To no one's surprise, or I should say, to no farmer's surprise, we have to have animal husbandry too. It takes cattle and sheep, their manure and their microbes, to successfully cultivate terrestrial plants here.

  Before long it will be time to revive the other Fishers. My mother and two of my brothers are agricultural engineers. As farming gets started on Planet Green, there will be Fishers’ hands on the plows and mass spectrometers.

  Crops and calves would
n't matter if we couldn't have children. But thanks to Joe's inventive repair work on the human genome, there will be a human future on Green. Some of the very first children born here have grown up and had healthy babies of their own. Maybe in a thousand years, Joe and I will be culture heroes for Green humans.

  Wander, the bird-culture hero, invented the cooperation of intelligent species.

  We don't know for a fact that Homo sapiens ever had that opportunity, but it might be a test we flunked in the Paleolithic by driving the Neanderthals into extinction. If cooperating with other intelligent species is a test the universe administers, then the Bird People of Green passed with flying colors. They used fire. They farmed shellfish and grains—I can't wait to inform my brothers that the first and finest farmers on Green were intelligent crows.

  The Bird People domesticated dragons. They adorned themselves with jewelry, sang songs, dreamed dreams, made love, wrote a vast and subtle literature, and built cities on the shore of their inland sea. They buried their dead in the silt of the deltas where rivers met the sea. Above all, they cooperated.

  A decade after the first time I saw Story Bird Cave, after years of poring over digital images of the cave and the computer's repristination of the original writing, I went back in person yesterday. Joe went with me. Humans going out into the wilderness on Green still use the buddy system, especially when the big blue moon is nearly full.

  I'm a first-generation leader now, with a lot of leeway if I want to use it. Yesterday I used it. I gave myself permission to light a small, clean fire in Story Bird Cave. Then I sat cross-legged in front of the long-winged fossil bird in the cave floor.

  “I see why you wanted the fire,” said Joe. “It makes the bird look alive.” Flickering firelight made the fossil impression of the bird seem to breathe. The stone feathers seemed to quiver. “What do you think? Is it him?”