What the Thunder Said

by Walter Blaire

  “Existential fear.”

  “This is fear? Your internals are—”

  “It’s fear, it’s fear. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

  The panels blinked off, and Caulie screamed.

  The panels blinked back on.

  “Would you like to listen to the traffic dispatch communications?” the panther asked. “It is a soothing high pitch squeal, much like the one you just made.”

  “Nothing please, do nothing to me,” Caulie gabbled. She couldn’t tear her eyes off the screens. “How much longer in the tunnels?”

  “We exit now.”

  It was almost too fast for her to perceive, the speed at which an opening in the tunnel’s roof approached. The panther leapt skyward, and Caulie lurched in her netting. If she had been unrestrained, she would have spread like soft butter across the cockpit. If she’d simply been belted to the seat, she would have segmented like a head of blandfruit.

  They landed on the ground with barely a jolt. The panther cut around a looming building and then shed speed on an open field of textile crops. If there were surface streets available, the panther ignored them.

  Caulie recognized where they were by the sparse buildings and the farmland. This was the outer edge of the city, the extreme tips of the petals that had originally unfolded from Falling Mountain’s ark ship. The land between the petals was reserved for critical crops, about which the panther clearly had no concern. Its claws gouged the orderly rows as it shifted into a steady, distance-eating lope. The machine was ridiculously fast on the straightaways under the city, but on the surface, where there were buildings, inclines, and trees to worry about, its movement slowed to human scale.

  Caulie sighed approvingly. “Are we even near a gate?”

  “Gate to where, effendi?”

  “A gate to the city wall. Hello—the wall is right there!”

  The panther’s stride changed. Shortening its steps, it gathered its hind legs under its body. At the last conceivable moment, it sprang into the air. The walls of Falling Mountain stood fifty feet tall. Caulie had always believed that they were purely decorative, but now she wasn’t so sure. The panther clawed its way up the vertical surface and leapt again, catching the top of the wall with two sets of metal claws that flashed in the view screens.

  No wonder this thing doesn’t care about roads. The panther ran along the top of the wall, its body impossibly balanced—Caulie knew that the pointed crest of the wall was narrower than the soles of her sandals.

  Ahead, a broad featureless plain filled the thermal screens with black. When it leapt again, she tensed in her seat. The panther landed in the edge of a lake and plummeted to the bottom like a stone. The thermal vision showed nothing at all.

  “Are we swimming?”

  “Prowling, effendi, across the floor of the lake. There are civilian boats above us, and they should not see me.”

  At least the ride was smoother now.

  “What is an effendi?” Caulie asked.

  “A learned and respected man. It is the closest translation of the concept in the Haphan language.”

  “I’m a woman,” she pointed out.

  “I can indicate similar respect for females. I can call you matron, crone, spinster, schoolmarm.”

  “That hardly seems fair, doesn’t it? Just use my name. Caulie.”

  “That is a contraction of your formal name. What does Caulie stand for?”

  Her real name was her best-kept secret. “That you will never learn, effendi.”

  “I am not effendi. I am a servant machine.”

  They reached the far edge of the lake, where the panther climbed the slope to the shore. It paused a moment and shook its body, shedding residual water.

  The panther’s thermal sensors flickered back to life. This part of the shore was relatively uninhabited, but there were bright points scattered among the dense trees, each surrounded by more heat signatures. Thrill-seekers camping outside the city walls, she guessed, and their campfires.

  The panther loped into the woods. It dodged trees, scrambled up slopes, and leapt onto boughs. It was truly effortless movement through what had quickly devolved into chaotic wilderness.

  The novelty wore off after the first hour, and the steady pace grew repetitive.

  “How far to Ed-homse, panther?” Caulie asked.

  “Four days.”

  “Four days!”

  “Or more, if we run into trouble.”

  As usual, one question grew into many more. She tried to prioritize. “What if I have to visit the washroom?”

  “Do you mean void your bowels?”

  “Unfortunately, I do mean that.”

  “Your need has been anticipated, Caulie,” the panther said. “Simply expel your waste as aerosol particles into this intake funnel.”

  A small hole in the ceiling irised open and blinked for her.

  When she didn’t—reach for it?—the blinking stopped. What, precisely, did the panther expect her to do? Shoot fecal matter from the top of her head? Extrude an ovipositor from between her missing dorsal legs? How did the high spetsa eliminate waste? She didn’t know. It hadn’t come up in any of Caulie’s conversations about alien defecation, conversations which themselves also hadn’t come up.

  “What did Luscetian do when he had to—well, you know.”

  “The lieutenant?” She could swear the panther’s voice changed. It almost seemed to purr. “He never wanted to void his bowels in the cockpit.”

  “So you stopped and let him out?”

  “To void his bowels? Yes.”

  If Caulie kept blushing, she felt sure that the panther would probably interpret it as some sort of violent bloodlust and ask whom she wanted killed. Just that afternoon she had been stroking daggie memory glass at her lab at the university. Even if she hadn’t been happy, at least she had been content—and if not content, then manageably calm. Leap forward a few hours and now she was trapped without a washroom, moving through a landscape that seemed utterly alien in thermal view, discussing personal medical issues with a machine that couldn’t remember she was human.

  “Can we just stop for a moment?” She asked softly. “Can we stop so I can get out and just . . . walk around? Can we stop?”

  “We cannot stop here, Caulie,” the panther said.

  “There’s nobody around.” The screens showed she was well and truly alone in the wilderness. She zoomed them out with a pinch. The city of Falling Mountain glowed behind them. In front of them was a vast stretch of absolutely nothing.

  “We cannot stop here, Caulie,” the panther repeated. “It is not safe.”

  “Not safe even for you? How can that be?”

  “There are Tachba settlements nearby, multi-family compounds that you will not see in the thermal view. Young Tachba males are no doubt moving in this forest.”

  “You’re not afraid of a few little Tacchies, are you?” Caulie chided. “Civilized, northern Tachba, in a settled Haphan province, just outside the capitol?”

  “They must always be considered with caution,” the panther said. “In addition, there are other fauna in the forest that could severely damage or destroy me.”

  “Come now.” Caulie glanced at the screens again. They were so blank that she wondered for a moment whether they had switched off.

  “I will notify you when we are in a safe region. Then you may void your bowels wherever you wish.”

  Caulie sighed. She no longer wanted to do . . . that thing. She didn’t like the sound of these forest creatures—anything that could make a high-tech, possibly self-aware alien military vehicle fear for its safety was not something she wanted to be around. She reminded herself that the fauna of Grigory were not mysterious. From furry little haverlambs to those things that hide in helmets on Front West, every lifeform had been catalogued a century and a half earlier during the establishment of the local empire while ark ships dropped from the sky and turned into cities. Children learned about the local species in class. Ther
e were stuffed animals, video dramas, and sports teams with animal mascots.

  There were also, Caulie realized, no zoos with Grigory wildlife inside the city. The zoos only presented exotica hatched from genetic records from the home world. Strange how she had never noticed that.

  * * *

  The panther’s tireless prowl across the irregular terrain turned out to be exhausting. As Caulie slept, her body compensated for the machine’s movement, tensing and straining with each step. She woke feeling even more weary, her muscles stiff and sore, and immediately wished she had stayed asleep.

  But questions beget questions. Why had she woken up? She opened her eyes and found the screens.

  The panther was not moving. It hadn’t powered down; it wasn’t supine like it had been in the loading bay. It was crouched at the edge of a low bluff that overlooked the forest twenty feet below. It was nearly morning, and Caulie could distinguish individual trees swaying in a breeze she didn’t feel.

  “What’s going on?” she croaked.

  “Danger.”

  “Where—”

  “Quiet, Caulie,” the panther said. It had never interrupted her before.

  She closed her mouth and watched the screens, finding nothing. The panther switched to thermal vision and Caulie stared. The forest radiated a mute glow. The air was warming as the early dawn crept through the leaves.

  In the trees: a galaxy of bright pinpoints. Constellations of dots—so many that they outlined the trunks and branches. If Caulie had the scale right, each bright pixel on the screen represented a creature about the size of her fist, and each creature glowed with living heat.

  What in the world?

  A heartbeat later, her question was answered. The dots took to the air, a vast flock that collected and flowed over itself as the individual elements drew together.

  Birds.

  Caulie forced herself to be calm. Birds could be trouble for a young woman in the wilderness, but surely not for a huge metal predator like the panther.

  Then again, that’s a lot of birds.

  The small four-winged creatures were benign enough at Falling Mountain, though you shouldn’t feed them and you wouldn’t let them near infants or small pets. They were voracious, and when they found a food source, they would call more birds over long distances with voices pitched above human hearing. If a person somehow overpromised, offended, or disappointed a small flock of birds, they had better step inside a building before the reinforcements arrived.

  Here, on the screens, the swirl of birds was a glimmering mist. The flock seemed to be condensing around some invisible nexus in the clearing. Was that her imagination?

  They were coalescing into a form.

  She watched in disbelief as the birds joined together and settled through the trees. The mass landed on the ground, spreading briefly like liquid before collecting again. The huddled amalgamation glowed like a campfire in thermal view.

  The flock rose to its feet.

  “You’re kidding me,” Caulie said.

  The bird bear pivoted toward the panther and took a step in her direction.

  Words appeared on the screen: Be as quiet as possible. Bird bears can hear the heartbeat of prey from miles away. It may sense your vocalization.

  She nodded, then swallowed hard.

  Caulie reminded herself that it was still a hundred yards away, though it loomed in the screens like a glowing monster. She was also inside her panther, encased in high spetsa technology. If that wasn’t enough, add that ton of scrap metal to its exterior. She was safe.

  Then again, the panther didn’t seem so confident.

  Caulie brushed her fingers on the screen, changing the camera view. Individual birds may have been difficult to pick out on their tree branches, but the coalesced flock couldn’t be missed. It had gathered itself into a massive, blunt-limbed creature, twelve feet tall at the shoulder. It stood on two hind legs, but something about its stance gave Caulie the impression it would be more comfortable on all four. It looked as if it was sniffing the air, but that didn’t make sense.

  Honestly, she thought, planet Grigory IV can deliver. Everybody in Falling Mountain knew about bird bears, but only in the usual uninformed way. They were something that menaced historical figures or clever heroines stranded in the wilderness. They were monsters that prowled the enemy’s side of the eternal front. Rationally, Caulie knew she was seeing something wholly natural—the bird bear was simply a composite creature. Nothing magical at all.

  The fauna on Grigory IV tended toward two forms: small individual creatures, or composite creatures derived from those creatures. Fish pods were the benign example everybody knew. Some cities even held quaint contests to see who could accumulate the largest functional fish pod in the public parks. The average fish pod found in the wild usually numbered a dozen individual fish, give or take. The record-setter was a composite creature built from three thousand—it had been named Leviathan. Fish pods could live indefinitely as individual fish died and were replaced, but when the pods became stressed or frightened, they burst apart like nervous firecrackers into schools of constituent fish.

  This is completely natural, Caulie repeated as she stared at the screens. She, of all people, should not be this astonished. When she studied the Pollution in grad school, she had theorized that Tachba neurology had been modeled upon Grigory’s coalescing wildlife.

  Between five and eight thousand years ago, the Tachba’s human genetics had been blighted by an unknown advanced race, the Antecessors. The humans had been twisted into a fast-breeding army of capable soldiers and then left to rot on Grigory IV. Caulie had broken with nearly a century of academic assumption by demonstrating that the Antecessors had conducted their twisting locally, on Grigory IV itself, rather than on some other planet. In her first published paper, she’d shown evidence that the planet’s composite creatures interacted in a nearly identical manner to how the larger, self-managing nerve clusters in the Tachba nervous system interacted with each other.

  It had been a bombshell in her field. While the academic argument still raged, she grew that first paper into her doctoral thesis, which in turn earned her a research post-doc and the university lab she had just forsaken. With her theory, Caulie had stumbled into something that seemed to make her family name irrelevant. Any progress with the Pollution was disproportionately rewarded, because so little progress had been made.

  Bombshell or not, her theory was built from secondary sources and reference materials; Caulie had never personally witnessed a composite creature. Her work was academic, intellectual, and removed from the real world. It was nothing like that bird bear on the view screens.

  Caulie watched the creature’s surface ripple like liquid as the constituent birds jostled for position. Somewhere in the middle of that creature would be the brain bird, the single animal that directed the flock using sounds. When regular food grew scarce or when some environmental imbalance resulted in an overpopulation of birds, the brain birds would summon a flock and hunt larger prey.

  Prey like . . . giant metal panthers? University researchers?

  The bird bear took another step in their direction. The panther didn’t react. It remained as inert as if its batteries were dead. Caulie hoped that they weren’t. She forced herself to be analytical, to not hyperventilate. She zoomed her screen to actual size. The bird bear shrank, but not enough.

  Could the panther move faster than the composite creature? Undoubtedly so, were they on one of the causeways under Falling Mountain. But what about in a forest?

  With a chill, she realized that if the panther believed it could get away, it would have done so by now. Instead, it was pretending to be a rock.

  Could the bird bear hear her? Caulie stopped breathing. Lack of air would be a problem eventually, but for the moment, she didn’t care if she ever breathed again—she only knew she couldn’t make a sound. The bird bear hesitated, sampling the air with the narrow funnel-like snout where its head should have been.

&
nbsp; All at once, the danger passed. The bird bear abruptly turned and sprinted away from the panther into the deeper forest. Caulie exhaled slowly. Something that large should be bulky and slow. In moments, it was out of sight, even off the thermal screens.

  “Why did it leave?”

  “You couldn’t hear, Caulie,” the panther replied, “but a sound came from that direction. Perhaps two miles away, perhaps farther still since the air is cool. It sounded like a Tachba community. That is where the bird bear went.”

  “Oh! Are they in danger? The community?”

  “They are Tachba. If there’s more than one of them, they are in grave danger from each other. But to answer your question, yes, the bird bear creates more danger for them.”

  “That’s what I meant, panther. We should warn the community.”

  The machine didn’t deign to answer.

  “I know it’s not your mission,” Caulie said, “but they’re people and we need to warn them.”

  The panther still didn’t answer, and she rather thought it should. Still, it rose to its feet and scrambled down the bluff, following the bird bear.

  Chapter 5

  Caulie watched the screens. There it was—the panther was circling the composite creature, and at the screen’s current scale, it was just over a mile distant. She played with the display, dragging it back and forth, but saw no sign of the Tachba community that had attracted the creature’s attention.

  “Panther, what does this gold band around the screen indicate?”

  “It indicates uncertainty,” the machine said. “There are limitations to what I can perceive with my sensors. What you are seeing now is merely a possible representation of the truth. The thicker the band, the less confidence you should have.”

  “Ah. So the bird bear could be about to jump on us from behind?”

  “Unlikely. I maintain situational awareness, updating constantly with new readings.”

  As it spoke, the gold band at the edge of the screen thinned suddenly, and the superheated blob representing the bird bear flickered closer. The panther had revised its earlier sensor estimate.

  “If you’re able to communicate with Falling Mountain,” Caulie said, “can you get the view from one of the satellites?”