Furious Gulf

by Gregory Benford

  On the viewscreens he saw mottled lanes of dust. Here and there, rays from nearby stars shot through the murky banks, splashing blues and burnt-oranges across the cinder-dark fogs.

  A shout from an officer. “There it is!”

  Officers crowded around the screens to see the sail-snake. It glistened and writhed, plainly trying to get away from Argo. The hunter was now the hunted. Toby stood on tiptoe to get a good look but the crowd was too thick. Nearly everybody here, being older, was quite a bit taller. A Lieutenant saw him and Besen craning their necks, yanked them both by the collar, and set them back to work.

  There were enormous perspectives on the viewscreens, brimming with light, shrouded by the great cloaking dust. Beauty. Wonder. Awe. Vast spectacles that brought a trembling reverence to the human soul.

  Meanwhile, Toby bent over to mop up the scummy sewage. Rank. Smelly. Squishy.

  “Crap and cosmos,” he muttered.

  “What?” Besen asked.

  “Just trying to keep things in perspective.”

  TWO

  The Sail-Snake

  Toby got to see the sail-snake up close the next day. Not because he was going out with one of the hunting crews, of course. When Toby and Besen asked, Cermo had said officiously, “Hunting’s for full grown, not kids.”

  Besen’s mouth twisted. “Get off it!”

  “We’re better at zero-g work than you are,” Toby said.

  “And quicker,” Besen added.

  “Experience is what counts here,” Cermo said, keeping his face blank—which meant he was going to follow orders, whether he agreed with them or not. Cap’n Killeen’s orders.

  “Experience doing what?” Toby asked irritably, seeing that Cermo wouldn’t budge. Nobody had ever done space hunting.

  “Surviving,” Cermo said mildly.

  Toby and Besen had been in tough places before, same as anybody in Family Bishop—but he had to admit Cermo had a point. Seniority stood for something when to get up in age meant you’d dodged plenty of trouble.

  But even adult crew members, men and women alike, hesitated. The only hunting Family Bishop had done had been back on the home world, Snowglade, with firm ground underfoot and game they knew. They had run down mechs that carried organic food-fuels, pillaged them. And that had been a long time ago.

  Outside loomed daunting, mysterious spaces. Family Bishop was hungry, tired of lean rations, but still wily. They sized up risks with a practiced eye. They had survived while other Families in the Grand Ensemble—the Rooks, Knights, Pawns, and more—had withered. Bishops muttered and fretted about venturing into such vast expanses, to drift among shrouded mountains of dust and gas in frail little shuttlecraft.

  So they sent a message to their only possible consultant, the alien Quath. But Quath was a moody sort, and didn’t answer. Maybe this meant Quath didn’t know anything useful. Or maybe she did. That was Quath’s way. The point about aliens, as Cap’n Killeen always said, was that they’re alien. You not only couldn’t be sure about what they said, you couldn’t even be sure about what they didn’t.

  Quath wouldn’t talk to just anybody, either. Toby had a reasonably close relationship with the big, insectlike thing—as nearly as anybody really could be sure. Ideas like friendship just didn’t easily apply to Quath.

  Cermo sent Toby to talk to Quath, since the alien didn’t respond on comm or any other line. Which meant suiting up and going out to the hull, where the hunting teams were busy assembling the shuttlecraft.

  Because Quath didn’t live in the ship at all. She lived on it—attached to the hull, inside a strange warren of rooms and spires the alien had shaped from waste and debris yielded up by Argo. There was even human waste in it, Toby knew, because he had seen Quath carefully pat the stuff into shit-bricks. Baked by vacuum and ultraviolet starlight, the gunk hardened fast and made good building material. Not to human taste, of course, but that was hardly the point. Besides, things didn’t smell in space—to humans. Quath, though, went into space without a suit, so maybe to it the bricks did have a scent. To Quath it could be perfume, for all anybody knew.

  Toby cycled outside through the personnel lock and stood on the hull. It took a moment for his inner ear to make the change to zero-gravs, to stop sending out alarms that he was hanging above an infinite drop. His head had to get used to the idea that “up” and “down” were useful ways to orient himself, but didn’t really mean anything.

  His magnetic boots kept him secure and he let his skinsuit readjust itself, sorting out pressure imbalances and its own wrinkles. The suit was alive, in a way. It had its own nerve net to sense problems. Thin organic muscles and computer chips set into the armpits made it all work. As engineering it was a marvel, but Toby by now took it for granted, and just griped when a pesky fold didn’t straighten itself out.

  He started across the broad curve of Argo’s hull, looked “up”—and froze. The sail-snake loomed large. It coiled slowly, turning in the pale blue luminosity—and Toby saw that it was half as big as Argo. When he had seen it before, through telescoped, tech-assisted vision, he had gotten no feel for size. He had never thought about what life in gravity-free space might mean.

  The sail-snake was a long tube assembled from the same repeating hexagonal segments. Toby could now see through its translucent skin, into a feathery skeleton that framed chambers of fluids and gas. It was a complex, interlocking array of orange rods and sliding gray muscles. They moved with sluggish, huge purpose—taking the snake away, as fast as the broad, triangular plates of shiny sails could push it. Through its shimmering jade skin Toby saw milky fluids sloshing. Bubbles popped along thin veins.

  So much, and so close. Could they eat any of it? Or would the chemistry of such an alien thing be impossible to digest?

  He picked up on comm the random talk of the hunting crews. They were tinkering with their shuttle vessels, and the voices brought him back to his own job. He hiked over the brow of the hull, coming down into a little valley formed by the bulge of the Wheat Dome. Through the dome he could see the blighted fields, brown and black—testament to their lack of ability to really run Argo right, even with all the computer programs.

  Nestled in the valley was Quath’s dwelling. It looked like a wasp’s nest, honeycombed with tunnels. Mingling with that basic pattern was a dizzying profusion of sharp edges, ornaments, puzzling juts and thrusts.

  Toby walked into the nearest portal, a perfect circular opening. Green phosphorescent slabs lit his way, flaring into life as he approached, dimming when he had passed. He didn’t know where he was going. He had visited here many times but the scheme never seemed the same twice. He suspected Quath spent a lot of time rearranging the labyrinth, maybe as a kind of art object. What else did an alien do with its time out here? Or was art a human idea that Quath didn’t share? The odd holes of varying sizes, shooting off at eccentric angles, made the art idea seem probable. Or maybe, Toby reminded himself, it was Quath’s idea of an elaborate joke. Who could tell?

  He stopped at a ledge, peering into the murk beyond—and panels flashed into blue brilliance, illuminating a spherical vault. This he had never seen before—and at the bottom of the bowl stood Quath, waiting.

 

  The transmission from Quath had a ringing quality, like bells chiming in the distance, yet the words were clear. Toby did not hear them through his ears, but through his mind. Every Family member had comm gear embedded in the neck and lower skull, standard issue. Quath had simply learned how to tap into those channels, and Toby’s own systems translated into a tinkling voice.

  “Hello, joke-face Quath’jutt’kkal’thon.” He used the formal, full name immediately. It meant Brave Crawler with Dreams, or so Killeen said. From experience, he knew that otherwise the big thing might turn and walk away. And Toby could never find Quath in this maze unless Quath wanted him to.

 

  “Must’ve caught them from your rotten carcass. What’s that about
a mountain?”

 

  “Some mountain. More like a stink-hole, I’d say. And you’re the one looks like a giant maggot.”

 

  There was something to be said for an alien who liked insults. Quath gave anybody who had the bad judgment to open with compliments a sudden, cold shoulder. The maggot routine Quath particularly liked, maybe because Quath did look a lot like a creepy bug—and probably knew people thought so, too.

  She was a weird, ever-changing combination of slinky, green lizard with an insect that had too many legs. Quath sprouted glassy eyes all along the wriggly body, not just from the bulging head. Yellow stick-arms like hard plastic. Fleshy purple folds. But metal, too, because Quath was a composite creature. Bossed steel studded with protrusions. Riveted copper—or were those really warts, not rivets? Crusted flanks above the legs looked like shaped ceramic, but seemed to flex and work as Quath walked. “End of pleasantries, goggle-eyes. Cermo-the-Slow sent me. We’re wondering if you know anything about getting food out of these clouds.”

 

  “Great—tell us how.”

 

  “The blue balls? Okay, we skip them.”

 

  “The sail-snake? How about eating the snake itself?”

 

  “Hmmm. We don’t kill other animals any more, even though we used to, back on our homeworld.”

 

  “The mechs, I guess.” Toby had to make himself recall the horrors of the Bishop’s retreat from their home. The mechs were a mechanical civilization that dominated this entire region of space. “They came to Snowglade way before I was born. Mechs killed off just about anything not smart enough to get out of the way, fast—including forests. Which made Family Bishop decide to stop helping them out by eating our fellow creatures. Now we eat plants.”

 

  “How do you know that?”

 

  “So we’re talented—any problem with that?”

 

  “But that sail-snake—it’s nothing like us. I mean, maybe we can bend the rules a little.” He wondered how much of his reasoning was based on his rumbling stomach.

  Quath swiveled her eye-stalks, which from Toby’s experience might mean that she had decided to act.

  Toby had to call up his teacher Aspect, Isaac, to tell him what “rumination” meant. It was irksome when an alien knew the language better than he did.

  Toby was figuring out the definition and so was caught off guard when Quath came clambering up the bowl, her bulging green throat pulsing. Without a further signal she swept up Toby in two telescoping copper arms. Quath accelerated, ignoring Toby’s squawks. Thick pads held him as they raced at startling speed through twisting corridors, down a shaft—and into open space.

  Perspectives whirled. Toby felt a hard shove of acceleration. “Hey, what are you—where—”

 

  Toby sputtered objections, but Quath paid no attention to his injured pride. Instead, the huge alien held him even more tightly as they jetted away from Argo.

  He was nearly completely enclosed by massive, soft pads. Somehow, it was restful to know that Quath, despite an annoying abruptness, was looking after him—in fact, looking after the whole Family Bishop. Toby had not had anyone hold him in this enveloping way for a long, bleak time. His memory slid back to Snowglade again, to better times.

  He recalled distant, fuzzy images, coated with the soft tones of his mother’s voice. Long-ago nights in the lost, hidden Citadel, he had lain in his bed, tangled in the sheets, awakened by some noise. He had heard his parents murmuring. His door was ajar, letting a slant of feeble light into his room. The warm glow and distant talk had been reassuring, as if his parents made the same soft, furry sounds that his stuffed animals did, or he imagined they did, as he slept with them. He had hugged his animals happily, Billy Bigsnout and Alvin Apple-eater, and sung to them. His mother had heard and come into his room and his father too, and his father had said, “Those animals, he still squeezes the life out of them. Hey boy, you’re getting kinda old for those toys. Have to give them up soon.” His mother had said reproachfully, “Oh no, oh no, he’s just a baby still. There’s plenty of time for him to have Billy Bear.” Her warmth tenderly brushed his face and her smell was like flowers in the spring.

  So long ago. So far.

  Before the Calamity, when the mechs of Snowglade finally tired of pesky human raids on their factories. Before they crushed the last human outposts, leaving the Bishops to flee and forage.

  Heavy braking. They came to a stop and Quath released him. Toby spilled into bright space. Argo was a distant bulk of shiny curves and green domes. Toby turned—

  And faced a wall of slick jade. The wall heaved, surged.

 

  “Anybody’d be afraid of you, Quath.”

 

  “I’m more worried about the other way around.”

 

  That seemed easy enough. The far end of the snake was a distant slash of mouth and a mass of working pink tentacles. Toby closeupped them and saw that some were eyes, others something like crude hands. It was fascinating, watching them move. Curiosity did not make him want to get any closer, though.

  He peered at the shimmering green side of the beast. Then he looked into it, through the skin and into the lattice of sliding orange rods, tubes, and sacs that made the sail-snake work.

  “I wonder what’s in those?” He pointed to a big vessel made of what looked like plastic. It held a red fluid.

 

  Toby thought of his mother’s warm breath. So long gone, into that black place where the dead dwell. He had come a long way since then. What would she think of him now? Would she be proud?

  “Let’s go see,” he said abruptly.

  He glided over to the wall of green skin. With care he drew his knife from its boot sheath. There is nothing in space more dangerous than a sharp edge, and Toby handled the long blade carefully. He measured distances to the skin with his eye and cut one quick stroke—then backed off.

  Nothing came rushing out to assault him. Not even a puff of gas, which he had half expected.

 

  “Aw, stuff it. You got us out here. Let’s do the job.”

  Toby thumbed his jets on for just an instant, enough to send him directly through the cut.

  The beast was complicated. Toby kicked off one of the orange lattice struts of the thing’s skeleton. He pushed aside a tangle of flexible pipes and reached the red fluid sac.

 

  “You’re too fat to get in here, eyes-on-sticks. Let me take a sample of this stuff.”

  He jabbed a needle probe into the thick-walled sac, let his carrybottle fill with the red liquid, and slapped a patch on the hole. No need to let the thing bleed to death, just because he wanted a drop or two.

  He nearly got snarled in the pipes as he made his way out. They seemed to know where he was, and Toby realized this was some slow-moving defense. Tangle up the intruder, and wait for some guard to come round him up. Something told him he didn’t want to be around that long.

  Quath took the bottle and quick
ly reported.

  “Can we use it?”

 

  “I can make a passable soup out of anything that won’t kill us.”

  Little fuzz-balls were rolling along the jade skin. They were no bigger than his hand but there were lots of them, coming from all along the length of the sail-snake. Several reached the skin just below where Toby hung in free space.

  “Come on—we’ve outlasted our welcome.”

  Just as he said it two fuzz-balls leaped across the gap. They struck his boots and kept going, sticking lightly and rolling quickly up his skinsuit. He felt a prickly heat, right through his suit.

  Quath made a furious buzz. Toby slashed at the fuzz balls with his knife. He got one off him but the other rolled onto his helmet. There it started spreading, like a pool of gray oil.

  “It’s eating through!” Toby batted at the stuff, but it wouldn’t come off.

  Quath grabbed his boots with one telescoping arm. Then she stuck a tube out of her side and aimed it directly at Toby’s face. A torrent of air blew over him. The gray oil rippled but clung, started to break up into drops—and suddenly was gone.

 

  Toby gasped in relief. “I’ll have to remember that.”

 

  “I’ll have to swear off the stuff.” He wriggled away from an approaching fuzz-ball. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Quath helped him get free.

  “Like a blood transfusion, sort of?”

 

  “It’s okay to take them?”

  The team assembling in the ship was going to search for plants, or even raid mechs if there were any here—but certainly not slaughter animals. Family Bishop had a deep moral code against using animal products, too, unless the animal cooperated, like dairy cows. To damage living things was to be no better than mechs.