Clearest, perhaps because his glands were stimulated thereby, was emotion, determination. Erakoum was out to get herself a Flyer.
It was going to be a long night, quite possibly a harrowing one. Hugh expected he’d need a dose or two of sleep surrogate. Humans had never gotten away from the ancient rhythms of Earth. Dromids catnapped; ouranids went—daydreamy? contemplative?
As often before, he wondered briefly what Jan’s rapport with her native felt like. They would never be able to describe their sharings to each other.
***Well into the hills, A’i’ach’s Swarm found a grand harvest of starwings. The heights were less densely wooded than the lowlands, which was good, for the bright prey never went far up, and below a forest crown, the People were vulnerable to Beast attack. Here was a fair amount of open ground, turf-begrown and boulder-strewn, scattered through the shadowing timber. A narrow ravine crossed the largest of those glades, a gash abrim with blackness.
Like an endless shower of sparks, the starwings danced, dashed, dodged about, beyond counting, meant for naught save the ecstasy of their mating and of the People who fed upon them. Despite the wariness in him, A’i’ach could resist no more than anyone else. He did refrain from valving out gas in his haste to descend, as many did. That would make ascent slow. Instead, he contracted his globe and sank, letting it reexpand slightly as varying air densities demanded. Nor did he release gas to propel himself. Rhythmically pumping, his siphon worked together with the breezes to zigzag him about at low speed. There was no hurry. The starwings numbered more than the Swarm could eat. Plenty would go free to lay their eggs for the next crop.
Among the motes, A’i’ach inhaled his first swallow of them. The sweet hot flavor sang in his flesh. Thickly gathered around him, bobbing, spinning, rippling, and flailing their corybantic tendrils, filling the sky with music, the People forgot caution. Love began. It was not purposeless, though without water to fall into, the pollinated seeds would not germinate. It united everyone. Life-dust drifted like smoke in the radiance of Ruii; the sight, smell, taste made feverish that joy which the starwing feast awakened.
Again and again A’i’ach ejaculated. He went past his skin, he became a cell of a single divine being which was itself a tornado of love. Sometimes when he felt age upon him, he would drift westward across the sea, into the cold Beyond. There, yielding up the last warmth of his body, his spirit would take its reward, the Promise that forever and ever it would be what it was now in this brief night . . .
A howl smote. Shapes bounded from under trees, out into the open. A’i’ach saw a shaft pierce the globe next to his. Blood spurted, gas hissed forth, the shriveling form fell as a dead leaf falls. Tendrils still writhed when a Beast snatched it the last way down and fangs rent it asunder.
In the crowd and chaos, he could not know how many others died. The greatest number were escaping, rising above missile reach. Those who were armed began to drop their stones and ü boughs. It was not likely that any killed a Beast.
A’i’ach had relaxed the muscles in his globe and shot instantly upward. Safe, he might have joined the rest of the Swarm, to wander off in search of a place to renew festival. But rage and grief seethed too high. A far-off part of him wondered at that; the People did not take hard the death of a Person. This thing he wore, that somehow whispered mysteries—
And he carried a knife!
Recklessly spending gas, he swung about, downward. Most of the Beasts had vanished back into the woods. A few remained, devouring. He cruised at a height near the limits of prudence and peered after his chance. Since he could not drop like a rock, he must feint at one individual, then quickly jet at another, stab, rise, and attack again.
A wan beam of light struck toward him. It came from the head of a Beast which emerged from shadow, halted, and glared upward.
His will blazed forth in A’i’ach. Yonder was the monster which had his kind of bond to humans. If he had already gained a knife thereby, what might that being have gotten, what might it get, to wreak worse harm? If nothing else, killing it ought to shock its companions, make them think twice about their murderousness.
A’i’ach moved to battle. About him, the starwings happily danced and mated.***
Jannika must search for an hour before she made her contact. An ouranid could not undertake to be at an exact spot at a given time. Hers had simply informed her, while she fastened the transmitter on him, that his group was currently in the neighborhood of Mount MacDonald. She flew there and cast about in ever-deepening darkness until her indicator shone green. Having established linkage, she rose to three kilometers and set the autopilot to make slow circles. From time to time, as her subject passed northeast, she moved the center of her path.
Otherwise she was engaged in trying to be her ouranid. It was impossible, of course, but from the effort she was learning what could never have come to her through spoken language. Answers to factual questions she would not have thought to ask. Folkways, beliefs, music, poetry, aerial ballet, which she could not have known for what they were, observing from outside. Lower down in her, dimmer, but more powerful—nothing she could write into a scientific report: a sense of delights, yearnings, wind, shiningness, perfumes, clouds, rain, immense distances, a sense of what it was to be a heaven-dweller. Not complete, no, a few wavery glimpses, hard to remember afterward; yet taking her out of herself into a new world agleam with wonder.
The thrill was redoubled tonight by A’i’ach’s excitement. Her impressions of what he was experiencing had never been stronger or sharper. She floated on airstreams, life-scents and song possessed her, she was a drop in an ocean beneath Ruii the mighty, there was no home to hopelessly long for because everywhere was home.
The Swarm came at last upon a cloud of glitterbugs, and Jannika’s cosmos went wild.
For a moment, half terrified, she started to switch off her helmet. Reason checked her hand. What was happening was just an extreme of what she had partaken in before. Ouranids seldom took much nourishment at a single time; when they did, it had an intoxicating effect. She had also felt their sexuality; A’i’ach’s maleness was too unearthly to disturb her, as his dromid’s femaleness had disturbed Hugh when she mated and later shed her hindquarters. Tonight the ouranids held high revel.
She surrendered to it, crescendo after crescendo, oh, if she only had a man here, but no, that would be different, would blur the sacred splendor, the Promise, the Promise!
Then the Beasts arrived. Horror erupted. Somewhere a strange voice screamed for the avenging of her shattered bliss.
—As she trotted along a bare ridge, Erakoum had thought, with a leap of her pulse, that she spied afar a faint blue ray of light in the air. She could not be certain, through the brilliance cast by Mardudek, but she altered her course in hopes. When she had scrambled a long while among stones and thorns, the glimmer disappeared. It must have been a trick of the night, perhaps moonglow on rising mists. That conclusion did nothing to ease her temper. Everything about the Flyers was unlucky!
Because of this, she was behind the rest of the pack. Her first news of quarry came through their yells. “Hai-ay, hai-ay, hai-ay!” echoed around, and she snarled in bafflement. Surely she would arrive too late for a kill. Nonetheless she bounded in that direction. If the Flyers did not get a good wind, she could overtake them and follow along from cover to cover, unseen. Maybe they would not go further than she had strength for, before they chanced on a fresh upswelling of firemites and descended anew. Breath rasped in her gullet, the hillside struck at her feet with unseen rocks, but eagerness flung her on till she reached the place.
It was a glade, brightly lit though crisscrossed by shadows, cut in half by a small ravine. The firemites swirled about against the forest murk, like a glinting dustcloud. Several females crouched on the turf and ripped at the remnants of their prey. The rest had departed, to trail the escaped Flyers as Erakoum planned.
She stopped at the edge of trees to pant, looked up, and froze. The mass of Flyers w
as slowly and chaotically streaming west, but a few lingered to cast down their pitiful weapons. From the top of one, dim light beamed aloft. She had found what she sought.
“Ee-hah!” she screamed, sprang forward, shook her javelin. “Come, evilworker, come and be slain! By your blood shall you give to my next brood the life you reaved from my first!”
There was no surprise, there was fate, when the eerie shape spiraled about and drew nearer. More would be settled this night than which of them was to survive. She, Erakoum, had been seized by a Power, had become an instrument of the Prophet.
Crouched, she cast her spear. The effort surged through her muscles. She saw it fly straight as the damnation it carried—but her foe swerved, it missed him by a fingerbreadth, and then all at once he was coming directly at her.
They never did that! What sheened in his seaweed grip?
Erakoum grabbed after a new javelin off her back. Each knot in the lashing was supposed to give way at a jerk, but this jammed, she must tug again, and meanwhile the enemy loomed ever more big. She recognized what he held, a human-made knife, sharp as a fresh obsidian blade and more thin and strong. She retreated. Her spear was now loose. No room for a throw. She thrust.
With crazy glee, she saw the head strike. The Flyer rolled aside before it could pierce, but blood and gas together foamed darkly from a slash across his paleness.
He spurted forward, was inside her guard. The knife smote and smote. Erakoum felt the stabs, but not yet the pain. She dropped her shaft, batted her arms, snapped jaws together. Teeth closed in flesh. Through her mouth and down her throat poured a rush of strength.
Abruptly the ground was no more beneath her hind feet. She fell over, clawed with forefeet and hands for a hold, lost it, and toppled. When she hit the side of the ravine, she rolled down across cruel snags. She had an instant’s glimpse of sky above, stars and firemites, the Mardudek-lighted Flyer drifting by and bleeding. Then nothingness snatched her to itself.—
Folk at Port Kato asked what brought Jannika Rezek and Hugh Brocket home so early, so shaken. They evaded questions and hastened to their place. The door slammed behind them. A minute later, they blanked their windows.
For a time they stared at each other. The familiar room held no comfort. Illumination meant for human eyes was brass-harsh, air shut away from the forest was lifeless, faint noises from the settlement outside thickened the silence within.
He shook his head finally, blindly, and turned from her. “Erakoum gone,” he mumbled. “How’m I ever going to understand that?”
“Are you sure?” she whispered.
“I . . . I felt her mind shut off . . . damn near like a blow to my own skull . . . but you were making such a fuss about your precious ouranid—”
“A’i’ach’s hurt! His people know nothing of medicine. If you hadn’t been raving till I decided I must talk you back with me before you crashed your flitter—”
Jannika broke off, swallowed hard, unclenched her fists, and became able to say: “Well, the harm is done and here we are. Shall we try to reason about it, try to find out what went wrong and how to stop another such horror, or not?”
“Yeah, of course.” He went to the pantry. “You want a drink?” he called.
She hesitated. “Wine.”
He fetched her a glassful. His right hand clutched a tumbler of straight whiskey, which he began on at once. “I felt Erakoum die,” he said.
Jannika took a chair. “Yes, and I felt A’i’ach take wounds that may well prove mortal. Sit down, will you?”
He did, heavily, opposite her. She sipped from her glass, he gulped from his. Newcomers to Medea always said wine and distilled spirits there tasted more peculiar than the food. A poet had made that fact the takeoff point for a chilling verse about isolation. When it was sent to Earth as part of the news, the reply came after a century that nobody could imagine what the colonists saw in it.
Hugh hunched his shoulders. “Okay,” he growled. “We should compare notes before we start forgetting, and maybe repeat tomorrow when we’ve had a chance to think.” He reached across to their recorder and flicked it on. As he entered an identification phrase, his tone stayed dull.
“That is best for us too,” Jannika reminded him. “Work, logical thought, those hold off the nightmares.”
“Which this absolutely was—All right!” He regained a little vigor. “Let’s try to reconstruct what did happen.
“The ouranids were out after glitterbugs and the dromids were out after ouranids. You and I witnessed an encounter. Naturally, we’d hoped we wouldn’t—I suppose you prayed for that, hm?—but we knew there’d be hostilities in a lot of places. What shocked the wits out of us was when our personal natives got into a fight, with us in rapport.”
Jannika bit her lip. “Worse than that,” she said. “They were seeking it, those two. It was not a random encounter, it was a duel.” She raised her eyes. “You never told Erakoum, any dromid, that we were linking with an ouranid too, did you?”
“No, certainly not. Nor did you tell your ouranid about my liaison. We both know better than to throw that kind of variable into a program like this.”
“And the rest of the station personnel have vocabularies too limited, in either language. Very well. But I can tell you that A’i’ach knew. I was not aware he did until the fight began. Then it reached the forefront of his mind, it shouted at me, not in words but not to be mistaken about.”
“Yeah, same thing for me with Erakoum, more or less.”
“Let’s admit what we don’t want to, my dear. We have not simply been receiving from our natives. We have been transmitting. Feedback.”
He lifted a helpless fist. “What the devil might convey a return message?”
“If nothing else, the radio beam that locks us onto our subjects. Induced modulation. We know from the example of the glitterbug larvae—and no doubt other cases you and I never heard of—how shall we know everything about a whole world? We know Medean organisms can be extremely radio-sensitive.”
“M-m, yeah, the terrific speed of Medean animals, key molecules more labile than the corresponding compounds in us . . . Hey, wait! Neither Erakoum nor A’i’ach had more than a smattering of English. Certainly no Czech, which you’ve told me you usually think in. Besides, look what an effort we had to make before we could tune them in at all, in spite of everything learned on the mainland. They’d no reason to do the same, no idea of scientific method. They surely assumed it was only a whim or a piece of magic or something that made us want them to carry those objects around.”
Jannika shrugged. “Perhaps when we are in rapport, we think more in their languages than we ourselves realize. And both kinds of Medeans think faster than humans, observe, learn. Anyway, I do not say their contact with us was as good as our contact with them. If nothing else, radio has much less bandwidth. I think probably what they picked up from us was subliminal.”
“I guess you’re right,” Hugh sighed. “We’ll have to sic the electronicians and neurologists into the problem, but I sure can’t think of any better explanation than yours.”
He leaned forward. The energy which now vibrated in his voice turned cold: “But let’s try to see this thing in context, so we can maybe get a hint of what kind of information the natives have been receiving from us. Let’s lay out once more why the Hansonian dromids and ouranids are at war. Basically, the dromids are dying off, and blame the ouranids. Could we, Port Kato, be at fault?”
“Why, hardly,” Jannika said in astonishment. “You know what precautions we take.”
Hugh smiled without mirth. “I’m thinking of psychological pollution.”
“What? Impossible! Nowhere else on Medea—”
“Be quiet, will you?” he shouted. “I’m trying to bring back to my mind what I got from my friend that your friend killed.”
She half rose, white-faced, sat down again, and waited. The wineglass trembled in her fingers.
“You’ve always babbled about how kind and g
entle and esthetic the ouranids are,” he said, at her rather than to her. “You swoon over this beautiful new local faith they’ve acquired—the windborne flight to Farside, the death in dignity, the Nirvana, I forget what else. To hell with the grubby dromids. Dromids don’t do anything but make tools and fires, hunt, care for their young, live in communities, create art and philosophy, same as humans. What’s interesting to you in that?
“Well, let me tell you what I’ve told you before, dromids are believers too. If we could compare, I’d give long odds their faiths are stronger and more meaningful than the ouranids’. They keep trying to make sense of the world. Can’t you sympathize the least bit?
“Okay, they have a tremendous respect for the fitness of things. When something goes seriously wrong—when a great crime or sin or shame happens—the whole world hurts. If the wrong isn’t set right, everything will go bad. That’s what they believe on Hansonia, and I don’t know but what they’ve got hold of a truth.
“The lordly ouranids never paid much attention to the groundling dromids, but that was not symmetrical. The ouranids are as conspicuous as Argo, Colchis, any part of nature. In dromid eyes, they too have their ordained place and cycle.
“All at once the ouranids change. They don’t give themselves back to the soil when they die, the way life is supposed to—no, they head west, over the ocean, toward that unknown place where the suns go down every evening. Can’t you see how unnatural that might seem? As if a tree should walk or a corpse rise. And not an isolated incident; no, year after year after year.
“Psychosomatic abortion? How can I tell? What I can tell is that the dromids are shocked to the guts by this thing the ouranids are doing. No matter how ridiculous the thing is, it hurts them!”
She sprang to her feet. Her glass hit the floor. “Ridiculous?” she yelled. “That Tao, that vision? No, ridiculous, that’s what your . . . your fuxes believe—except that it makes them attack innocent beings and, and eat them—I can’t wait till those creatures are extinct!”
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