by R. M. Meluch
And for the first time he realized that he was going to live. He was too numbed to know how he felt about that.
He held his breath and rejoined the ship’s captain in the control room.
The ship had started a slow descent. Alihahd felt the added tug of the planet’s gravity and the ship’s resistance as the brakes cut in. He could tell by the way the ship was going down that she was not an in-atmosphere vehicle.
They were entering twilight, descending on the night side of the world. The creepingly slow landing would use all the ship’s reserves, but the battered vessel was not going to take anyone anywhere again. When Alihahd left this world, it would be in another ship—or never.
He glanced at the stats on the computer screen. They read in Scientific, a specialized language even more universal than Universal. The figures told him the planet was smaller than Earth and heavier, its density 7.19. It was .9 astronomical units from a sun whose spectrum was strong with heavy elements. The planet’s atmosphere was oxygen-rich and contained more inert gases than Earth’s, but not enough to be a problem. Pressure at sea level was three Earth atmospheres.
Already Alihahd felt hot and heavy and crowded. He started again to take off his harness, but a silvery-suited hand closed on his wrist and stopped him.
The contact startled Alihahd, and he looked up at the opaque faceplate in surprise.
The strong hand slowly let go of his wrist. The grip hadn’t been tight, but it had been powerful, and Alihahd was not at all sure he could have pulled free had he tried.
He retreated from the control room, paused at his oxygen mask to breathe, then went searching for and found the head. The ship’s owner was male. He also owned a cat or a ferret or some small pet. There was no one else aboard, no room for anyone else. For all the sense of space in the moody corridors, it was a small ship.
The fittings were rich, heavy, and dark with gilded borders. The ambient strength, even arrogance, of the place was disconcerting.
Alihahd returned to his oxygen mask and sat on the deck. Had he been alone, he would have stolen into the engine room to see what kind of equipment the generators were loaded for. The number of exterior leads would tell quicker than anything what this ship was about. He suspected he knew. He wanted to look for a lead to an exterior hologram projector.
But laws dissolved in outer space, and a ship’s master was its god. There was nothing to say that the dark stranger could not put Alihahd and his companions right back where he found them.
For the crew’s sake, Alihahd stayed where he’d been put—on the short leash of his oxygen tube.
As he watched his dozing comrades, he became convinced that they’d been drugged. He heard the engines complain, more and more as hours dragged by. Then tension gave way to tedium and at last he slept.
• • •
A star fell out of the sky.
Five tall slender figures stood with the sentinel, silhouetted against the star field out on the eagle ridge, gazing up.
It was a new star. It hadn’t been in the sky the night before. At twilight it gleamed in the Red Geese like a nova, but then it slowly slipped out of the Ring of constellations and down toward the River Ocean beyond the horizon.
The Fendi, Roniva, turned to the younger aghara beside her with a wave of her night-colored hand, a black glitter of onyx flashing on her forefinger. “Go thou. Take thine fire kin and see. And take thou one from the fire clan of the carnelian serpent. Take Arilla.”
She met a quizzical look. “Fendi?”
“Someone who knows of humankind. Thou may need.” Roniva turned away, her thin, hard arms crossed. Naedenal, the night wind, moaned down the cliff face in a cold gust to become lost and voiceless in the deep ocean of air in the valley. “I sense. I sense.”
“Humans?”
Roniva murmured assent. Her black gaze swept the wide heavens. “After such a long time. . . .”
• • •
Alihahd was still asleep when he heard a crashing. The deck heaved beneath him, and he was catapulted into empty air.
He woke falling. He gasped in air, icy-cold and sharp, not pure oxygen. He opened his eyes to bright blue all around him. The ship was gone. He was in Iry’s atmosphere.
And dropping like a rock, headfirst, eight kilometers up, the air so cold it burned and sliced like knives. His tunic flapped wildly in the wind. His heart galloped, skin prickled. There was a sweet-sour taste of fear in his mouth, a roaring in his ears, nauseous terror in his throat. The oxygen mask was still strapped to his face, its disconnected tube whipping madly at his ear. He saw the dizzily closing ocean far below tracked with white, saw sky and white clouds and morning sun until his eyes teared shut. And he went down, faster and faster, trying to scream.
Then he felt a yank at the harness straps as if grabbed from behind and above, and he was righted, swinging suspended under an expansive white canopy, floating down at a gentle speed. Had there been anything at all in his stomach, he would have thrown up.
The pounding of his heart subsided slowly till he was left with only the ashes of fear, a dull lump in his stomach and a flat taste in his mouth. His skin was icy. He took off his useless mask and let it drop.
He looked up at his parachute. He had never seen one before. It seemed a primitive thing. He wondered what had triggered it to open and guessed it had to be his speed. His hands sought the harness straps and gripped them, trembling involuntarily.
He looked down. A silvery glint on the water still four kilometers below had to be the ship. He was drifting quickly away from it. Seeking a way to steer, he tugged at the risers and managed to guide himself back without setting himself into a spin.
Another parachute blossomed below him and to the windward. He looked for others, but remembered with sinking sickness that only one of his companions had been harnessed.
The ship had not been equipped for guests or for emergencies.
Then he caught sight of a long thin line plummeting straight down. At least one other person had acquired a parachute while Alihahd had slept.
A bad one. Alihahd watched, mentally screaming as it hurtled down and out of sight. It never opened.
The only other things in the sky were the circling birds. The enormous creatures already clustered around where the fouled parachute had gone down, while others glided around in lazy arcs on broad wings.
Scavengers.
Alihahd looked up again and clutched the risers, this time in anger and horror. If only he had known. He was wearing a parachute, and others weren’t. He should’ve given his to someone else.
He could already hear the question always put to a surviving captain. Where is your crew?
He tried to make his hand release the clasp of his own chute, but it wouldn’t move. He had a hideous survival instinct for someone who shouldn’t be alive.
He closed his eyes hard, grimaced, and tensed back his neck. He felt as if someone were driving nails into his skull.
Does it never stop?
He opened his eyes and looked down at the blue ocean. It was much closer now. The air had become very warm, then hot, and the wind was heavy like a current of water. He could make out some definition in the craft on the water. It wasn’t the Marauder. And, closer, he could see it was not even a spaceship. It was a seaplane. He couldn’t find the spaceship anywhere.
Surface winds across the sea swept him swiftly away from the seacraft so he couldn’t see it anymore. He was aware of the dark moving shadow of a bird above his chute, and he wished he were armed.
Descent seemed very fast during the last few meters. He hit the water hard and plunged under. The parachute billowed down over him like a wide compass on the water’s surface. He bobbed up, but the parachute draped over his head and clung closely without space for air. He tried to breathe through it, but it drew in, impermeable as plastic, suffocating him. He pushed up
on the fabric, but it only formed a vacuum and sucked up the water with it.
Head ringing, lungs hurting, he fought to get out from under the canopy, but there seemed to be no end to it. Heat built up behind his eyes. He saw black and red. He thrashed, tried to breathe, took in water, coughed on reflex, and gasped in more water.
Strength and even fear left him at once and he began to sink in a druglike torpor.
Thought he was dying. Thought he was dead.
Suddenly there was light above as the chute ripped away. There was a splash and a column of bubbles from something plunging into the water beside him, going down and shooting up. A myth closed powerful hands under his arms and heaved him up. His head broke surface. A fist pressed under his rib cage. He expelled water in a violent rush, coughed, choked, spat, and finally drew air.
When the whirl of bright-dark colors blinked clear, Alihahd was staring into the green, kohl-smeared eyes of an Itiri warrior-priest.
• • •
Alihahd couldn’t speak. He opened his mouth, squeaked, then coughed.
Unconcerned with its own improbability, the myth disengaged Alihahd from the parachute harness with agile hands and pulled him clear of it. The Itiri encircled Alihahd’s upper body with a long hard white arm and swam toward the ship. Dazed, Alihahd let himself be dragged. Saltwater and the heat of the air hurt his eyes. Steam was rising from the painfully bright glittering water, searing his brine-inflamed lungs with each breath.
The ship was the one he had seen from the air, a primitive aluminum seaplane afloat on pontoons. Alihahd smelled fossil fuel, tasted it on the water, the back of his mind making note that this was not the product of a space-age civilization.
As they drew near the plane, a wave came over Alihahd’s head and set him coughing and gasping again. From above, two hands seized his armpits hard enough to hurt, heaved him out of the water, and sat him down heavily, a dead weight on the hot metal pontoon.
On the plane were a few more aliens, climbing over the wings and fuselage. And there were two wet humans on the pontoons—a boy spitting up, and a man.
When Alihahd could breathe again, he grabbed one of the tall, lithe humanoid aliens. Green eyes turned to him curiously. Alihahd thrust up two fingers, gesturing urgently at the humans, then to the ocean. He croaked, “Two more. There are two more of us.”
Alien eyes seemed to register comprehension. The Itiri parted from him. Alihahd continued to speak after him as if the alien could understand, “I saw one go down with a parachute that did not open.”
A voice behind Alihahd said in Universal, “That was mine.”
Alihahd turned. Water trickled down a strand of hair plastered to his forehead and ran into his eyes. He brushed the wet hair off his lofty brow and blinked at the man.
“It opened, then?” said Alihahd.
The parachute must have opened. Obviously. The man was alive, not smashed into the water’s surface at terminal velocity.
But the man said, “No.” He pointed up.
There was an eagle.
Alihahd shaded his eyes and squinted up at the bird. From below, it appeared dark until it passed out of the cloud shadow. Then the sun struck its back, and its plumage burst into all the shades of fire.
It was fully large enough to carry off a man.
Alihahd remembered the shadow over his parachute and the Itiri dropping out of the air to rescue him. The immense birds were not scavengers after all.
Alihahd looked again at the humanoids. They looked just like all the impossible stories said, creamy white with golden hair and brilliant green eyes. All six of them were two meters tall with long, lean, hairless bodies. They moved with a grace Alihahd considered the province of the animal kingdom. But then these were not humans. They had the physical fascination of big cats and fine Arabian stallions: beautiful, powerful, and frightening like cats, creatures that could prey on human beings.
The Itiri eyes were elaborately lined with kohl like Egyptian tomb paintings. The single female was squatting atop the plane, balanced on the balls of her feet. She faced into the wind, her arms resting on her knees, the image of a hawk ready to take flight. Gold tassels bobbed from a wide gold band across her forehead. Evenly spaced scars welted her fair cheeks. In a sheath at her side she wore a long double-curved sword.
Alihahd jerked his gaze away.
At least she didn’t have wings.
The seaplane rose high on a swell, then settled into a horizon-swallowing trough as the wave rolled under. The sea had looked calm from the air.
Alihahd groggily regarded the Itiri warrior-priest on the pontoon with him, and he spoke, rhetorically as much as anything, as some people talked to their cats or some drunkards to their pink elephants. “What men are you? What woman is this?”
He was astounded to get an answer in kind. “We are such as thou see.”
Alihahd jerked back. The elephants were not only pink, they were talking to him in his language.
The alien warrior crouched down before him. Deliberate scars and smeared eye paint marred his high cheeks. There was intelligence in his green eyes. His expression, if Alihahd could read alien faces like human faces, was benign, a little whimsical, and Alihahd sensed that his elephant was laughing at him.
Alihahd spoke again with a feeling of the High Absurd. “Then I am dead, for Itiri warrior-priests are nothing more than the dreams and hopes of despairing souls.”
The Itiri cocked his head quizzically, then replied with an equal sense of absurdity, “If I were born of thine desperation, I could not say. Though I could swear I remember existing before I found thee drowning. All the same, we are now.”
Alihahd raised his brows. He had read enough of the old histories to decipher the dialect. He nodded. He had to admit this was all real—the planet, the eagles, the swords, and the warrior-priests speaking archaic Universal as it was spoken before the Collapse some two thousand years ago.
His head felt very thick, his ears caving in. The atmosphere was oppressive, too much pressure, too much oxygen. He was dizzy, hot, and sick.
The Itiri started to rise. Alihahd caught his arm. “Others,” he said. “There were two others.”
“We continue to look,” said the Itiri and nodded up at the soaring eagles.
The birds wheeled high over the water with slow turns on the heavy sea breeze.
The warrior-priest climbed atop the plane’s wing and waved the eagles farther downwind.
Alihahd turned to see who had already been rescued.
The boy was standing on the pontoon, clutching the airplane strut in both white-knuckled fists and staring out to sea. He was very slender, clad in light-blue space coveralls. Alihahd couldn’t think of his name.
“Are you hurt?” said Alihahd.
“N-n-no,” said the youth, trembling. His brown face had paled. His brown eyes were wide and white-ringed. His appearance was unremarkable except that there was nothing particularly Negroid or Oriental about him. Even his skin color was still within the confines of the broad spectrum known as White. He looked suspiciously pureblooded Caucasian. It might explain what made him a rebel.
The Na′id Empire espoused a doctrine of dissolution of all barriers that could splinter the unity of humankind, be they cultural, religious, or—most visibly—racial. The Na′id despised persons who carried recessive genetic traits. The persistence of recessive traits was a symptom of isolation from the general gene pool. Recessive traits needed to be reinforced in order to perpetuate. If individuals of all kinds mingled freely, recessive characteristics would diminish and die out. People like the boy were symbols of elitist rebellion and disunion.
“Vaslav,” said Alihahd, remembering.
The youth perked up at the sound of his name in Alihahd’s voice, and he beamed to be known by his leader.
Alihahd had a memory for names, but this young ma
n was not memorable, and, in truth, Alihahd couldn’t say whether the name was first, middle, or last. He could not for the life of him recall the lad’s other name or names, so henceforth he was simply Vaslav.
The other human survivor was mixed-blooded, older, striking. He was also wet. The eagle that caught his failed parachute must have slowed but not completely stopped his fall to the sea. He was sitting on the pontoon, emptying water from his rawhide boots one at a time.
His dark, red-bronze skin stretched taut over a lean, imposing frame. His wedge-shaped face narrowed wolfishly toward his chin. Soft lips curved slyly at the edges beneath a neat mustache. His cheekbones, very high, seemed to crowd his eyes and gave the effect of a permanent squint when actually he didn’t squint at all. His brows arched sharply over almond-shaped eyes. The eyes were really very beautiful—like one of those angels who was asked to leave heaven—the whole face astonishingly demonic. His wiry, graying copper hair was pulled back and tied at the nape of his neck. He wore a russet bandana twisted into a headband across his forehead. Two bright gold loop earrings pierced through one ear, making him look like a pirate or a gypsy.
Gentleman pirate, it would seem. His kid leather vest was lined with gold.
He wore a rawhide redingote that fell to midway down his thighs. He possessed the air of one unrepentantly self-confident as if he were someone of importance. Even sitting down he moved with a kind of swagger. There might have been no one else aboard the seaplane. All his attention went to pulling his sodden leather boots back on, acting as if nothing was wrong in the world except that his clothes were wet.
His gun was a self-customized, crazy-looking thing with a wood handle and a long stabilizer that jutted out like the barrel of an old projectile weapon. He wore the gun at his belt toward his right side, grip forward, as a right-handed person would wear a sword.
Once finished emptying his boots, he drew from his waistcoat a white-gray meerschaum pipe fitted with an amber mouthpiece. Its bowl was carved into the figure of a fox head. He fished out from his coat pocket a mess that used to be tobacco. At this, Alihahd had to smile.