by Larry Niven
“Then she’ll keep going. If she doesn’t wreck herself, she’ll go straight back to Touchdown City. Let’s see, Morven’s on the other side of the planet now. Say it’ll be up in an hour, and we’ll let them know what’s happening. That way we’ll know she’s safe almost as soon as she does. Grace, you don’t think she’d try to rejoin us?”
“She can’t get lost, and she can’t stop, and Touchdown’s visible from fifty miles away. She’ll just head home. Okay…” There was a funny edge of doubt in Grace’s voice. She stabbed at an intercom button. “Lightning? Me. You watched Rachel go over the crest, right? Did she have her headlights on?”
Bronze Legs was wondering just how teed off the rammers would be if Rachel was dead. It took him a moment to see the implications of what Grace was saying.
“The searchlight too? All right, Lightning. The long range sender is on your roof. I want it ready to send a message to Morven by the time Morven rises, which will be to south of coldward in about an hour…No, don’t go out yet. The way the beasts are running around they should die of heatstroke pretty quick. When they fall off the roof, you go.”
The rock demons followed Rachel twelve kilometers downslope before anything distracted them.
The howler was riding higher now, but Rachel wasn’t out of trouble. The emergency override locked the vents closed. If she turned it off the power would drop, and so would the howler. She was steering with her weight alone. Her speed would last as long as she was going down. She had almost run out of mountain. The slope leveled off as it approached the river.
The vicious pegasus-type birds had disappeared. The rolling mountainsides covered with feathery wheat were now covered with stubble, stubble with a hint of motion in it, dark flecks that showed and were gone. Millions of mice, maybe?
Whatever: they were meat. The demons scattered in twelve directions across the stubble, their big heads snapping, snapping. Rachel leaned forward across her windscreen to get more speed. Behind her, three rock demons converged on a golden Roman shield…on a mock turtle that had been hidden by feather-wheat and was now quite visible and helpless. The demons turned it over and ripped it apart and ate and moved on.
The howler slid across the shore and onto flowing water.
Each patch of scarlet scum had sprouted a great green blossom. Rachel steered between the stalks by body english. She was losing speed, but the shore was well behind her now.
And all twelve rock demons zipped downhill across the stubble and into the water. Rachel held her breath. Could they swim? They were under water, drinking or dispersing heat or both. Now they arched upward to reach the air.
The howler coasted to a stop in midstream.
Rachel nerved herself to switch off the override. The howler dropped, and hovered in a dimple of water, churning a fine mist that rapidly left Rachel dripping wet. She waited. Come what may, at least the batteries were recharging. Give her time and she’d have a howler that could steer and fly.
The heatward shore was black with a million mouse-sized beasties. They’d cleaned the field of feather-wheat; but what did they think they were doing now? Watching Rachel? The rock demons noticed. They waded clumsily out of the water and, once on land, blurred into motion. The shore churned with six-legged white marauders and tiny black prey.
It seemed the fates had given Rachel a break. The water seemed quite empty but for the scarlet scum and its huge blossoms. No telling what might be hugging the bottom while the flare passed. Rachel could wait too. The coldward shore looked safe enough…though it had changed. Before the flare, it had been one continuous carpet of chrome yellow bushes. The bushes were still there, but topped now with a continuous sheet of silver blossoms. The clouds of insects swarmed still, though they might be different insects.
Upstream, something was walking toward her on stilts. It came at its own good time, stopping frequently. Rachel kept her eye on it while she tried the intercom.
She got static on all bands. Mountains blocked her from the expedition; other mountains blocked her from Touchdown City. The one sender that could reach Morven in orbit was on a crawler. Dammit. She never noticed the glowing pinpoint that meant Bronze Legs had called. It was too dim.
Onshore, two of the rock demons were mating head-to-tail.
The thing upstream seemed to be a great silver daddy longlegs. Its legs were slender and almost long enough to bridge the river; its torso proportionately tiny. It paused every so often to reach deep into the water with the thumbless hands on its front legs. The hands were stubby, armored in chitin, startlingly quick. They dipped, they rose at once with something that struggled, they conveyed the prey to its mouth. Its head was wide and flat, like a clam with bulging eyes. It stepped delicately downstream, with all the time in the world…and it was bigger than Rachel had realized, and faster.
So much for her rest break. She opened the rear vent. The howler slid across the river and onto shore, and stopped, nudging the bushes.
The daddy longlegs was following her. Ten of the dozen rock demons were wading across. As the bottom dipped the six-legged beasts rose to balance on four legs, then two. As bipeds they were impressively stable. Maybe their tails trailed in the mud bottom to serve as anchors. And the mice were coming too. Thousands of them, swimming in a black carpet among the patches of scum.
Rachel used the override for fifteen seconds. It was enough to put her above the silver-topped bushes. The lily-pad-shaped silver blossoms bowed beneath the air blast, but the ground effect held her. She wasn’t making any great speed. Bugs swarmed around her. Sticky filaments shot from between the wide silver lily pads, and sometimes found bugs, and sometimes struck the fans or the ground effect skirt.
She looked for the place that had been cleared for a fux encampment. Deadeye would be there, a feisty male biped guarding his nest, if Deadeye still lived. She couldn’t find the gap in the bushes. It struck her that that was good luck for Deadeye, considering what was following her.
But she was lonely, and scared.
The daddy longlegs stepped delicately among the bushes. Bushes rustled to show where ten rock demons streaked after her, veering to snatch a meal from whatever was under the blossoms, then resuming course. Of the plant-eating not-mice there was no sign, except that here and there a bush had collapsed behind her.
But they were all falling behind as the fuel cells poured power into the howler’s batteries.
Rachel oriented herself by Argo and the Jet Stream and headed south and coldward. She was very tired. The land was darkening, reddening and it came to her that the flare was dying.
The flare was dying. The goggles let Bronze Legs look directly at the suns, now, to see the red arc enclosing the bright point of Helle. A bubble of hellfire was rising, cooling, expanding into the vacuum above the lesser hell of a red dwarf star.
There were six-legged rock demons all around them, and a few on the roofs. All were dead, from heatstroke or dehydration. A far larger number were gathering all along the Ring Sea shore. Now they swarmed uphill in a wave of silver. They paired off as they came, and stopped by twos in the rocks to mate.
The diminished wave swept around the expedition and petered out. Now the mountains were covered with writhing forms: an impressive sight. “They make the beast with twelve legs,” Bronze Legs said. “Look at the size of those bellies! Hey, Grace, aren’t the beasts themselves bigger than they were?”
“They have to be. They’ve got to form those eggs. Dammit, don’t distract me.”
The intercom lit. Grace wasn’t about to notice anything so mundane. The paired rock demons were growing quiet, but they were still linked head to tail. Bronze Legs opened the intercom.
Lightning’s voice said, “I’ve got Duty Officer Toffler aboard Morven.”
“Okay. Toffler, this is Miller. We’ve got an emergency.”
“Sorry to hear it.” The male voice sounded sleepy. “What can we do about it?”
“You’ll have to call Touchdown City. Can you patch me thro
ugh, or shall I record a message?”
“Let’s check…” The voice went away. Bronze Legs watched a nearby pair of rock demons crawling away from each other. The thick torsos seemed different. A belly swelling that had extended the length of the torso was now a prominent swelling between the middle and hind legs. It was happening fast. The beasts seemed gaunt, all bone and skin, except for the great spherical swelling. With fore and middle legs they scratched at the earth, digging, digging.
“Miller, you’d better record. By the time we got their attention they’d be over the horizon. We’ll have them in another hour.”
“Good—”
“But I don’t see how they can help either. Listen, Miller, is there something we can do with an interstellar message laser? At this range we can melt a mountain or boil a lake, and be accurate to—”
“Dammit, Toffler, we’re not in trouble! Touchdown City’s in trouble, and they don’t know it yet!”
“Oh? Okay, set to record.”
“To Mayor Curly Jackson, Touchdown City. We’ve weathered the flare. We don’t know if the fuxes survived yet. The rammer, Rachel Subramaniam, is on the way to you on a howler. She has no reason to think she’s dangerous, but she is. By the time you spot her you’d be too late to stop her. If you don’t move damn quick, the human colony on Medea could be dead within the year. You’ll need every vehicle you can get your bands on…”
The expedition had crossed a great bay of the Ring Sea in twelve hours. Rachel could cross it in three; but she’d be rid of what followed her moments after she left shore. She had heard Lightning mention the parasitic fungus that floated on this arm of the Ring Sea, that was deadly to fuxes and any Medean life…unless the flare had burned it away.
The flare was long over. She rode through the usual red-lit landscape, in a circle of the white light from headlights, taillights, searchlight. She hungered and thirsted for the light of farming lamps, the color of Sol, of ship’s sunlights; the sign that she had come at last to Touchdown City.
But she hungered more for the fungus that would kill the rock demons and the daddy longlegs. She hated them for their persistence, their monstrous shapes, their lust for her flesh. She hated them for being themselves! Let them rot, slow or quick. Then three hours to cross the bay, half an hour more to find and navigate that rubble-strewn pass, and downhill toward the blue-white light.
That was the shoreline ahead.
Ominously blood-colored beasts milled there. One by one they turned toward the howler.
Rachel cursed horribly and without imagination. She had seen these things before. The expedition’s searchlights had pinned a tremendous thousand-legged worm, and these things had been born from its flesh. They were dog-sized, tailless quadrupeds. Flare time must have caught a lot of the great myriapods, brought vast populations of parasites to life, for this many to be still active this long after the flare.
More than active. They leapt like fleas…toward Rachel. She turned to heatward. Weak as she felt now, one could knock her out of the saddle.
Her entourage turned with her. Two more rock demons had dropped out. Eight followed, and the great spider, and a loyal population of proto-mice, exposed now that the bushes had ended. And hordes of insects. Rachel’s reason told her that she was taking this all too personally. But what did they see in her? She wasn’t that much meat, and the spider wasn’t that hungry. It reached down now and then to pluck a proto-mouse, and once it plucked up a rock demon, with equal nonchalance. The demon raved and snapped and died within the spider’s clamshell mouth, but it clawed out an eye, too.
And the demons had the proto-mice for food, but they had to streak down to the water every so often to cool off, and fight their way back through the blood-red quadrupeds, eating what they killed. The mice had fed well on the yellow bushes, and who knew about the tiny might-be-insects? What did they all want with Rachel?
After a couple of hours the shore curved south, and now it was white tinged with other colors: a continuous crust of salt. Rachel’s climate suit worked well, but her face and hands were hot. The wind was hot with Argo-heat and the heat of a recent flare. The daddy longlegs had solved its heat problem. It waded offshore, out of reach of the red parasites, pacing her.
It was five hours before the shore turned sharply to coldward. Rachel turned with it, staying well back from shore, where blood-colored quadrupeds still prowled. She worried now about whether she could find the pass. There would be black, tightly curled ground cover, and trees foliated in gray hair with a spoon-shaped silhouette; and sharp-edged young mountains to the south. But she felt stupid with fatigue, and she had never adjusted to the light and never would: dull red from Argo, pink from two red dwarf suns nearing sunset.
More hours passed. She saw fewer of the red parasites. Once she caught the daddy longlegs with another rock demon in its clamshell jaws. The hexapod’s own teeth tore at the side of the spider’s face…the side that was already blind. Flare-loving forms used themselves up fast. Those trees…
Rachel swung her searchlight around. The ground cover, the “black man’s hair,” was gone. A black fog of insects swarmed over bare dirt. But the trees were hairy, with a spoon-shaped silhouette. How far had those trees spread on Medea? She could be in the wrong place…
She turned left, uphill.
There were low mountains ahead, young mountains, all sharp edges. A kilometer short, Rachel turned to parallel them. The pass had been so narrow. She could go right past it. She slowed down, then, impatient, speeded up again. Narrow it had been, but straight. Perhaps she would see farming lamps shining through it. She noticed clouds forming, and began cursing to drive away thoughts of rain.
When the light came it was more than a glimmer.
She saw a sun, a white sun, a real sun, shining against the mountains. As if flare time had come again! But Phrixus and Helle were pink dots sinking in the west. She swerved toward the glare. The rising ground slowed her, and she remembered the spider plodding patiently behind her; she didn’t turn to look.
The glare grew terribly bright. She slowed further, puzzled and frightened. She pulled the goggles up over her eyes. That was better; but still she saw nothing but that almighty glare at the end of a bare rock pass.
She rode into the pass, into the glare, into a grounded sun.
Her eyes adjusted…
The rock walls were lined with vehicles: flyers, tractor probes, trucks, crawlers converted to firefighting and ambulance work, anything that could move on its own was there, and each was piled with farming lamps and batteries, and all the farming lamps were on. An aisle had been left between them. Rachel coasted down the aisle. She thought she could make out man-shaped shadows in the red darkness beyond.
They were human. By the pale mane around his head she recognized Mayor Curly Jackson.
Finally, finally, she slowed the howler, let it sink to the ground, and stepped off. Human shapes came toward her. One was Mayor Curly. He took her arm, and his grip drove pain even through the fog of fatigue. “You vicious little idiot,” he said.
She blinked.
He snarled and dropped her arm and turned to face the pass. Half the population of Touchdown City stood looking down the aisle of light, ignoring Rachel…pointedly. She didn’t try to shoulder between them. She climbed into the howler’s saddle to see.
They were there: half a dozen rock demons grouped beneath the long legs of the spider; a black carpet of proto-mice; all embedded in a cloud of bright motes, insects. The monsters strolled up the aisle of light, and the watching men backed away. It wasn’t necessary. Where the light stopped, Rachel’s entourage stopped too.
Mayor Curly turned. “Did it once occur to you that something might be following your lights? Your flare-colored lights? You went through half a dozen domains, and every one had its own predators and its own plant eaters, and you brought them all here, you gutless moron! How many kinds of insects are there in that swarm? How many of them would eat our crops down to the ground before
it poisoned them? Those little black things on the ground, they’re plant-eaters too, aren’t they? All flare-loving forms, and you brought them all here to breed! The next time a flare goes off would have been the last time any Medean human being had anything to eat! You’d be safe, of course. All you’d have to do is fly on to another star…”
The only way a human being can turn off her ears is to turn off her mind. Rachel didn’t know whether she fainted or not. Probably she was led away rather than carried. Her next memory began some time later, beneath the light of home, with the sounds and the smells of home around her, strapped down in free fall aboard the web ramship Morven.
On the curve of the wall the mobile power plant and one of the crawlers had finally left the realms of crusted salt. They ran over baked dirt now. The howler was moored in the center of the ground-effect raft, surrounded by piles of crates. It would be used again only by someone willing to wear a spacesuit. The four remaining fuxes were in the crawlers. Argo was out of camera range, nearly overhead. The view shifted and dipped with the motion of the trailing crawler.
“No, the beasts didn’t actually do any harm. We did more damage to ourselves,” Mayor Curly said. He wasn’t looking at Captain Borg. He was watching the holo wall. A cup of coffee cooled in his hand. “We moved every single farming lamp out of the croplands and set them all going in the pass, right? And the flare-loving life forms just stayed there till they died. They aren’t really built to take more than a couple of hours of flare time, what they’d get if both suns flared at once, and they aren’t built to walk away from flarelight either. Maybe some of the insects bred. Maybe the big forms were carrying seeds and insect eggs in their hair. We know the six-legged types tried to breed as soon as we turned off the lamps, but they weren’t in shape for it by then. It doesn’t matter now. I suppose I should…”
He turned and looked at her. “In fact, I do thank you most sincerely for melting that pass down to lava. There can’t be anything living in it now.”