by IGMS
In a short time, or maybe a long time, Ann didn't know, she was holding her bloody child in her arms, with Edward leaning over her. "It's a boy, Ann," he said. That part she heard. The baby cried, weakly. Then she heard something else. The undru were moaning.
The hatching was beginning.
Only a few feet away, Ann saw a scupp shell begin to rock back and forth. Everywhere the shells were moving. Edward jumped to his feet in terror.
"Oh god, Ann. We're too late. It's starting."
The undru began to lower themselves onto their knees, their heads pulling in towards their chests.
"Edward. Edward, listen." His eyes were wild and she didn't know if she had the strength to make him hear her. "The undru."
"What about the undru? They'll survive without my help. We're the ones who will die, Ann. We didn't make it, after all. I was right!" He started laughing. It was not a sane sound.
"Edward. Take the baby. Hide inside the undru." She pulled weakly at the knife on her belt.
Edward had one too. At last he understood what she meant.
There was a moment that seemed to last an eternity in which Edward was obviously torn between making a run for the caves - so near! - leaving her and the baby to their fate, or staying to help his family, his flesh and blood. Ann held her breath and simply stared into his eyes, willing him to be a man, to do the right thing. Then he blinked and looked away from her, his decision made.
He whipped out his own knife and turned to the nearest of the two beasts. The undru were hooting and moaning, and trying to crunch into protective balls. The yoke was preventing them from completing their crouches. Edward was still able to get to the softer underbelly of the near one. Thank god his knife was sharpened recently. A large red gash appeared where Edward slashed at the animal. He dug his hands into the side of the undru, ignoring its bellows and struggles to get away from him. He pulled out handfuls of steaming innards, gagging and coughing at the stench and the sight of the animal's viscera, then turned to Ann. As he picked her and the baby up, the shells opened, disgorging their contents in a violent spew towards the sun. He ran with her to the bleeding carcass, and began to pull open the tough side of the creature, to make a space for her. She tried to get him to take the baby and save himself, but he either didn't understand her or chose to ignore her, continuing to open the belly of the undru.
All at once, the sky darkened with teeming untold numbers of flying discs. They began to land on Ann, on Edward, on everything. As soon as one landed the disc sprouted claws, and a mouth. Then it began to feed on any creature in its path. The bites were excruciating and Ann found herself writhing around in an attempt to beat them off her body and that of her son. They came off easily, but there were so many of them that she would be unable to hold them off for long.
Edward shoved Ann and the baby into the body of the animal. He barely got them in, Ann shielding her son with her body and trying to make sure the baby had air, before turning to the other undru, to slash its belly open and make room for himself. But he was too late. The undru had managed to complete its crouch, and now its scales were a defense against Edward's knife, as much as from the scupps.
He was forced to turn back to the first undru and try to squeeze himself into the opening that was already a tight fit for Ann. He couldn't get completely inside. The scupps began to feed on Edward's unprotected back. She desperately tried to make room for him, but he couldn't come any farther.
Edward bit his lips, but couldn't keep from screaming with the pain. He forced his body to remain still, to block the opening, protecting Ann and the baby. He could have run, but he didn't. Ann looked into his eyes. He hadn't been a coward after all, at the end, when it mattered. She should be the one dying, the one protecting him. She was the strong one. But she couldn't help feeling glad that she would live, despite her guilt at watching Edward die in her place.
"I love you, Edward." She had said it before. She realized now that she meant it.
"Love. You. Ann." The words were bitten out through the pain. Then one of the scupps burrowed into Edward's spine, and he suddenly went limp. His body blocked the scupps from coming further into the undru's carcass and feeding on Ann as well, but that wouldn't hold them for long. She had to think, to be strong still. Edward's death was not enough.
Ann sobbed inside the undru, holding her son, looking at her husband, his now dead eyes staring unblinkingly back at her. She forced herself to burrow deeper into the beast, retching with the stench and hot closeness and blood. She was up behind the ribcage now, and she pressed against the lungs and heart of the beast. She found the windpipe and tore it free, letting a bit more air into the cramped space. The scupps were eating behind her, she could hear them everywhere.
Nearly blinded by the darkness and the gore, her sense of hearing was heightened as never before. As she listened, the sound changed. The scupps were doingsomething different now. They were scraping against each other, shell on shell, rhythmically, hypnotically. The sounds of chewing stopped, changed to an odd vibrating hiss. The sound was frightening, but not as menacing as the chewing. She slid back down to Edward's body, or what was left of it, and peered out.
The scupps were changing. The little discs were now completely unfurled, and were more oblong than round, one side rough and shell-like, the other raw and unprotected. I must remember this and tell the others. When they are like this we can find a way to defeat them. As she watched, the scupps rubbed over and under each other, hissing, until two of them rubbed raw sides over each other and stopped, fastened together, with only the rough outsides exposed. Then others paired off, and more, until the ground was covered with very small versions of the large scupp shells, with only seams to show that what had once been two creatures was now one.
The scupp shells burrowed back into the earth, hiding themselves once more from view, as the cycle began anew.
Ann crawled carefully from the body of the undru. Its hide had protected her, but Edward had saved her. He was little more than a skeleton now, though his face had largely escaped the predations. He looked at peace to Ann. In fact, he looked strong.
She looked up at the cliff caves, and saw people pouring out of them, running to meet her, now that the scupps were no longer a threat. She sat, grateful that her journey was at an end, nursing her son, waiting for them to come. The thought that life had come from so much death was soothing to her, and she rocked her son in her arms and crooned to him as she nursed.
Nathaniel was the first of the people to reach her.
"My god. What happened to Edward? How did you make it? We couldn't quite see what was happening here. I wish we could have come to help you. We had no way to get past the scupps."
He knelt beside her, concern on his face. The others examined the body of her husband, and that of the undru that had to die for her to live. The other undru was still alive, and trying to get up out of the crouch but was hampered by the yoke and the dead weight of its companion. Two of the men removed the yoke and helped the undru to its feet, then loaded Edward's body carefully onto it, to take back to the cliffs for burial.
"Edward was very brave. In the end, when it mattered. He might have made it, if only he'd left me behind and run for it. But he stayed. He was strong for me. I was too weak. I wouldn't have survived on my own."
The others exchanged glances at this, probably wondering how to compare this new description of Edward with the way they had previously viewed him. Let them never know how he was during the journey. I will never shame his memory. His sacrifice is enough, his penance completed.
"We used the undru hide as protection. In future, we should all have hides with us to use as a shield, so we're never caught like that again. I saw how the scupps mate. They're vulnerable and soft on one side, just before they join together into new scupp shells. We can use that to our advantage. This planet can still be a good home for us, for our children."
"This is my son," she held him up for everyone to see. The first child born o
n Respite. The hope of the future. The source of her strength. "His name is Edward."
A Rarefied View at Dawn
by Dave Wolverton
Artwork by Michael Graham
* * *
In the sandstone sanctuary atop the mount of Kara Kune, in ancient times there was only one punishment for men who committed crimes: the guardian droids, called Valkyries, hurled them from the battlements, to fall through the cinnamon-colored mists to the jungle below, and live or die as fortune decreed.
Now Bann and Maya raced along the wall-walk in the early dawn, their bare feet slapping the smooth sandstone ramparts, the mists boiling outside the castle like a cauldron while the coming sun silvered the sky. They were dressed alike, wearing the black silk tunics of schoolchildren with black skullcaps and golden sashes about their waists. Both had long dark hair braided down their backs, falling nearly to their knees. Of the two, Bann was the most beautiful. The girls of the city envied his lustrous dark hair, his incredibly long eyelashes, and his thin, graceful hands. He was so small-boned and delicate that he looked as if he were made of porcelain. Maya, at twelve, was two years older than Bann, and was developing the wide hips and breasts of a young woman.
Suddenly, Bann became aware that Maya was no longer following. He turned impatiently. Maya had climbed atop the fortress's smooth wall, and now sat with her legs dangling over hundreds of feet above oblivion.
Bann's heart thumped in his chest. He called back, "Mara, hurry, the muysafed said that there will be a surprise for us this morning!"
Maya grinned. "The muysafed often makes such promises, silly," she teased. "It is her way of making you want to come to school."
I know, he thought. And I'm grateful to her for it. School is so much better than home. Sometimes his mother's sad countenance weighed on him, and he hated being there.
"But I think that today she will have the baby chicks," Bann urged. It was no secret that their teacher had received some eggs from a far-off fortress, and that she had just been waiting for them to hatch.
"They're just chickens," Maya dismissed. "You've eaten chicken many times. Let's watch the sunrise."
"But this is different," Bann urged. "These are alive." He couldn't express how much he wanted to see them. They were, after all, fellow creatures from Earth, a tenuous connection to his heritage. They had eyes like other earth creatures, not probas with which to sense magnetic waves. They had hearts and guts and other organs like humans.
From far below the fortress, in the steaming jungles, sounded the rumbling hornlike cry of a yarrev, a creature that dwarfed even the largest dinosaurs of old Earth. It must have leapt a few strides, for Bann heard trees crashing and the fortress suddenly trembled slightly.
Bann ambled back to Maya, who sat upon the stone wall. He placed a hand protectively on her shoulder, lest she slip.
Below the walls of Kara Kune there were only rust-colored mists for as far as the eye could see. In late summer the omni-present clouds often raised high enough to tumble over the walls and cover the city for days on end. In the winter, as the air cooled, the clouds would drop low. But Bann had never seen the sprawling valley below the fortress. It was rumored that there were ocher hills and winding rivers the color cinnabar and tangled violet jungles bursting with alien life.
But Bann saw nothing more than he had ever seen in his ten years -- the sun of Lucien groping at the distant horizon, as if seeking a finger-hold in the clouds.
"Look," Maya urged. "The clouds have dipped lower than I've ever seen, and the air is rarified today. Follow the lights toward the edge of the world."
Bann followed her pointing finger and spotted the lights from a pair of floater ships that skimmed above the boiling red clouds. Their shimmering air sacs filled with clear light from time to time as the hydrogen furnaces fired, and their stabilizer struts and gondolas hung beneath them, making the ships look like luminous jellyfish the color of ash, hovering in the distance.
And then Bann saw it just at the edge of the world -- the very tip of a pale sanctuary shining above the mists, white castle walls dominating some mountain peak.
"Tahaj?" he asked. It was the nearest city, forty miles away.
"It must be," Maya agreed. "You're pretty smart, for a runt." She smiled at him playfully, then suggested. "Sit up here. There's a warm wind drifting up from the jungle. It feels good between your legs."
Not me, Bann thought. The notion of climbing up on the wall terrified him.
"Come on," Maya said. "It's fun. Even if you fell, we're on the east wall."
"East?" Bann asked.
"The east side is the easy side," Maya said. "The ground is only a hundred feet down through the mist, and the hill is steep and sandy. If the city ever comes under attack, jump off the east side, if you want to live."
Bann heard the whine of electric motors and noticed a Valkyrie careening toward them on its single wheel. The droid had a body of carbon polymers, but wore a helmet to give it a human shape. Lasers inside the helmet projected an image on the inner surface of the visor -- a gray-haired matriarch whose stern features clashed with her caring voice.
"Please, citizen," the Valkyrie warned Bann. "Do not push her."
Bann held Maya's shoulder, afraid that she might slip and fall if he did not hang on. Maya reached up and with her right hand and touched his left. "He'd never do that. He's my friend."
The Valkyrie was just as stern with Maya. "Do not let your legs dangle over the wall."
"It feels good," Maya said.
The Valkyrie drew near, close enough to snake out a mechanical clamp if Maya tried to jump.
"You have received a demerit," the droid notified her. "It will appear in your daily logs. Your mother and your muysafed will also be warned that you have been using thermal air currents to engage in vaginal stimulation, and that you did so in the presence of a male. Although these acts in themselves are not illegal, it will be noted that you are pubescent, and need extra guidance and monitoring."
The droid rolled forward, placing its bulk between Bann and Maya, pushing Bann back. He didn't understand what the droid was saying -- using words like pubescent and vaginal, but Bann knew that it wanted him to leave.
He took a step backward. Maya swung her legs toward him and dropped onto the wall-walk.
"Come on," she told him, taking his hand and casting a defiant look at the droid. They raced along the wall, leaving the Valkyrie behind.
Class that morning was held in the dome. The midwinter sun would hardly climb above the horizon, and so the children would not have to flee into the caverns to avoid the heat.
Instead, twelve young girls and one boy basked in a garden-like atmosphere, the grow-lights glowing like small suns above them, willow trees in a small grove arching overhead, their white-robed teacher looking proudly down at her treasure -- a handful of baby chicks that trundled about, some still wet from the shell. His teacher was called the muysafed, the white hair, out of respect. But actually she had dark hair and braids, though rumor said that she was over two hundred years old.
Bann studied his chicken. It was like nothing that he had ever seen, and not quite what he had imagined. He'd once seen a holo of a bird from old Earth, a sea eagle in flight. And so he knew of feathers and wings.
But this creature seemed to have neither. Instead of wings, it had stubby malformed stumps. Instead of feathers, it had a covering that looked like the yellowed balls of cotton that grew in the fields atop the highest hills of the sanctuary.
Its eyes were nothing like human eyes -- dark little pools that blinked too much. And its tiny talons were the kind of thing that would give a child nightmares. Yet as he held it, Bann was delighted to feel its tiny heart kicking like a cricket within its chest, and to enjoy cool warmth. It was so like a human -- nothing like the wild oily "geckoes" that sometimes climbed over the sanctuary walls upon their sticky pseudopeds.
Bann decided that he liked his chicken. The little creature pecked at grain when Bann hel
d it in his hand. He named it Yusaf.
"Today," the muysafed said in a loud voice, "we are going to perform an experiment upon these chickens." She was staring right at Bann as she said it, as if to see his reaction. "Chickens are much like humans," she added. "As you can see, they have eyes like ours, and feet, and hearts that beat."
"And lungs, too," Bann added.
The muysafed smiled at him. Bann knew that he was one of the brightest children in the class. He felt proud to have recognized the bird's lungs.
And wings. They have wings, and it was birds that showed mankind how to fly.
He wanted to say that, too, but was just waiting for the appropriate moment.
"And lungs," the muysafed admitted. "And chickens respond to some chemicals in exactly the way that we do," the teacher said. "One such chemical is a hormone called testosterone. Does anyone know what testosterone does?"
Amayah, the oldest girl in the class, more of a young woman really, raised her hand and said, "It's what makes a man a man."
One girl behind Bann snickered, and others moved away from him, just barely. Only Maya drew closer, holding his hand, reassuring him.
Talking about men was discomforting. It was men who had destroyed the old world, Earth, with their wars and violence, forcing the Three Thousand sisters to flee in their starships. Men were frightening things, evil, and were kept outside the sanctuary walls. Bann had never actually seen one. Two other boys lived within Kara Kune, but they were younger than Bann, mere toddlers. Rarely did a woman choose to conceive a boy. Usually she merely cloned herself, or mixed her seed with that of another woman.
Still, there were men who lived outside the sanctuary, small tribes of wild men who rode the Floater ships. There were pirates, too, who sometimes stole women from the sanctuaries if the Valkyries couldn't stop them. And in some way that Bann didn't understand, these men forced women to make babies for them.