Limits, p.14
Limits, page 14
He turned the howler and continued uphill.
At the crest of the ridge a fux waited for him, the pinkish-white suns behind her. She was a black silhouette, four thin legs and two thin arms, a pointed face and a narrow torso bent in an L: a lean, mean centaur-shape.
As he topped the ridge and let the howler settle on its air cushion, the fux backed away several meters. Bronze Legs wondered why, then guessed the answer. It wasn’t the smell of him. Fuxes liked that. She was putting the ridge between herself and the white glare from Touchdown City’s farming lamps. She said, “I am Long Nose.”
“Bronze Legs. I meet you on purpose.”
“I meet you on purpose. How goes your foray to heatward?”
“We start tomorrow at dawn.”
“You postponed it once before.” She was accusing him. The fuxes were compulsive about punctuality; an odd trait in a Bronze Age culture. Like certain traits in humans, it probably tied into their sex lives. Timing could be terribly important when a fux was giving birth.
“The ship from the stars came,” he said. “We waited. We want to take one of the star people along, and the delay lets us recheck the vehicles.”
Long Nose was black with dull dark-red markings. She bore a longbow over one shoulder and a quiver and shovel slung over her lower back. Her snout was sharply pointed, but not abnormally so, for a fux. She might be named for keen curiosity or a keen sense of smell. She said, “I learn that your purpose is more than exploration, but not even the post-males can tell what it is.”
“Power,” said Bronze Legs. The harnessed lightning that makes our machines go comes as light from Argo. In the Hot End the clouds will never hide Argo from our sight. Our lightning makers can run without rest.”
“Go north instead,” said Long Nose. “You will find it safer and cooler too. Storms run constantly in the north; I have been there. Free lightning for your use.”
If she’d been talking to Lightning Harness she would have suffered through an hour’s lecture. How the heat exchangers ran on the flood of infrared light from Argo, focussed by mirrors. How Argo stayed always in the same place in Medea’s sky, so that mirrors could be mounted on a hillside facing to heatward, and never moved again. But the colony was growing, and Medea’s constant storms constantly blocked the mirrors…Bronze Legs only grinned at her. “Why don’t we just do it our way? Who-all is coming?”
“Only six of us. Dark Wind’s children did not emerge in time. Deadeye will desert us early; she will give birth in a day and must stay to guard the…Is ‘nest’ the word you use?”
“Right.” Of all the words that might describe the fuxes’ way of giving birth, “nest” carried the least unpleasant connotations.
“So, she will be guarding her ‘nest’ when we return. She will be male then. Sniffer intends to become pregnant tonight; she will leave us further on, and be there to help us on our return, if we need help.”
“Good.”
“We take a post-male, Harvester, and another six-leg female, Broad Flanks, who can carry him some of the time. Gimpy wants to come. Will she slow us?”
Bronze Legs laughed. He knew Gimpy; a four-leg female as old as some post-males, who had lost her right foreleg to the viciously fast Medean monster humans called a B-70. Gimpy was fairly agile, considering. “She could crawl on her belly for all we care. It’s the crawlers that’ll slow us, and the power plant. We’re moving a lot of machinery: the prefab power plant, housing for technicians, sensing tools, digging tools—”
“What tools should we take?”
“Go armed. You won’t need water bags; we’ll make our own water. We made you some parasols made from mirror-cloth. They’ll help you stand the heat, for awhile. When it gets really hot you’ll have to ride in the crawlers.”
“We will meet you at the crawling machines, at dawn.” Long Nose turned and moved downslope into a red-and-orange jungle, moving something like a cat in its final rush at a bird: legs bent, belly low.
They had been walking since early afternoon: twelve hours, with a long break for lunch. Lightning sighed with relief as he set down the farming lamp he’d been carrying on his shoulders. Grace helped him spread the tripod and extend the mount until the lamp stood six meters tall.
Rachel Subramaniam sat down in the orange grass and rubbed her feet. She was puffing.
Grace Carpenter, a Medean xenobiologist and in her early forties, was a large-boned woman, broad of silhouette and built like a farm wife. Lightning Harness was tall and lean and lantern-jawed, a twenty-four-year-old power plant engineer. Both were pale as ghosts beside Rachel. On Medea only the farmers were tanned.
Rachel was built light. Some of her memory-recording equipment was embedded in padding along her back, giving her a slightly hunchbacked look. Her scalp implants were part of a polished silver cap, the badge of her profession. She had spent the past two years under the sunlights aboard a web ramship. Her skin was bronze. To Rachel Medea’s pale citizens had seemed frail, unathletic, until now. Now she was annoyed. There had been little opportunity for hikes aboard Morven; but she might have noticed the muscles and hard hands common to any recent colony.
Lightning pointed uphill. “Company.”
Something spidery stood on the crest of the coldward ridge, black against the suns. Rachel asked, “What is it?”
“Fux. Female, somewhere between seven and eighteen years of age, and not a virgin. Beyond that I can’t tell from here.”
Rachel was astonished. “How can you know all that?”
“Count the legs. Grace, didn’t you tell her about fuxes?”
Grace was chuckling. “Lightning’s showing off. Dear, the fuxes go fertile around age seven. They generally have their first litter right away. They drop their first set of hindquarters with the eggs in them, and that gives them a half a lifetime to learn how to move as a quadruped. Then they wait till they’re seventeen or eighteen to have their second litter, unless the tribe is underpopulated, which sometimes happens. Dropping the second set of hindquarters exposes the male organs.”
“And she’s got four legs. ‘Not a virgin.’ I thought you must have damn good eyes, Lightning.”
“Not that good.”
“What are they like?”
“Well,” said Grace, “the post-males are the wise ones. Bright, talkative, and not nearly so…frenetic as the females. It’s hard to get a female to stand still for long. The males…oh, for three years after the second litter they’re kind of crazy. The tribe keeps them penned. The females only go near them when they want to get pregnant.”
Lightning had finished setting the lamp. “Take a good look around before I turn this on. You know what you’re about to see?”
Dutifully, Rachel looked about her, memorizing.
The farming lamps stood everywhere around Touchdown City; it was less a city than a village surrounded by farmlands. For more than a week Rachel had seen only the tiny part of Medea claimed by humans…until, in early afternoon of this long Medean day, she and Grace and Lightning had left the farmlands. The reddish light had bothered her for a time. But there was much to see; and after all, this was the real Medea.
Orange grass stood knee-high in slender leaves with sharp hard points. A score of flaccid multicolored balloons, linked by threads that resembled spiderweb, had settled on a stagnant pond. There was a grove of almost-trees, hairy rather than leafy, decked in all the colors of autumn. The biggest was white and bare and dead.
Clouds of bugs filled the air everywhere except around the humans. A pair of things glided into the swarms, scooping their dinner out of the air. They had five-meter wingspans, small batlike torsos, and huge heads that were all mouth, with gaping hair-filled slits behind the head, where gill slits would be on a fish. Their undersides were sky blue.
A six-legged creature the size of a sheep stood up against the dead almost-tree, gripped it with four limbs, and seemed to chew at it. Rachel wondered if it was eating the wood. Then she saw myriads of black dots spread across the white, and a long, sticky tongue slurping them up.
Grace tapped Rachel’s arm and pointed into the grass. Rachel saw a warrior’s copper shield painted with cryptic heraldics. It was a flattened turtle shell, and the yellow-eyed beaked face that looked back at her was not turtle-like at all. Something small struggled in its beak. Suddenly the mock turtle whipped around and zzzzed away on eight churning legs. There was no bottom shell to hamper the legs.
The real Medea.
“Now,” said Lightning. He turned on the farming lamp.
White light made the valley suddenly less alien. Rachel felt something within her relaxing…but things were happening all around her.
The flat turtle stopped abruptly. It swallowed hard, then pulled head and limbs under its shell. The flying bug-strainers whipped around and flew hard for the hairy trees. The clouds of bugs simply vanished. The long-tongued beast let go of its tree, turned and scratched at the ground and was gone in seconds.
“This is what happens when a sun flares,” Lightning said. “They’re both flare suns. Flares don’t usually last more than half an hour, and most Medean animals just dig in till it’s over. A lot of plants go to seed. Like this grass—”
Yes, the slender leaves were turning puffy, cottony. But the hairy trees reacted differently; they were suddenly very slender, the foliage pulled tight against the trunks. The balloons weren’t reacting at all.
Lightning said, “That’s why we don’t worry much about Medean life attacking the crops. The lamps keep them away. But not all of them—”
“On Medea every rule has exceptions,” Grace said.
“Yeah. Here, look under the grass.” Lightning pushed cotton-covered leaves aside with his hands, and the air was suddenly full of white fluff. Rachel saw millions of black specks covering the lower stalks. “We call them locusts. They swarm in flare time and eat everything in sight. Terran plants poison them, of course, but they wreck the crops first.” He let the leaves close. By now there was white fluff everywhere, like a low-lying fog patch moving east on the wind. “What else can I show you? Keep your eyes on the balloons. And are there cameras in that thing?”
Rachel laughed and touched the metal helmet. Sometimes she could forget she was wearing it; but her neck was thicker, more muscular than the average woman’s. “Cameras? In a sense. My eyes are cameras for the memory tape.”
The balloons rested just where they had been. The artificial flare hadn’t affected them…wait, they weren’t flaccid anymore. They were swollen, taut, straining at the rootlets that held them to the bottom of the pond. Suddenly they rose, all at once, still linked by spiderweb. Beautiful.
“They use the UV for energy to make hydrogen,” said Grace. “UV wouldn’t bother them anyway; they have to take more of it at high altitude.”
“I’ve been told…are they intelligent?”
“Balloons? No!” Grace actually snorted. “They’re no brighter than so much seaweed…but they own the planet. We’ve sent probes to the Hot End, you know. We saw balloons all the way. And we’ve seen them as far coldward…west, you’d say…as far west as the Icy Sea. We haven’t gone beyond the rim of ice yet.”
“But you’ve been on Medea fifty years?”
“And just getting started,” Lightning said. He turned off the farming lamp.
The world was plunged into red darkness.
The fluffy white grass was gone, leaving bare soil aswarm with black specks. Gradually the hairy trees loosened, fluffed out. Soil churned near the dead tree and released the tree feeder.
Grace picked up a few of the “locusts.” They were not bigger than termites. Held close to the eye they each showed a translucent bubble on its back. “They can’t swarm,” Grace said with satisfaction. “Our flare didn’t last long enough. They couldn’t make enough hydrogen.”
“Some did,” Lightning said. There were black specks on the wind; not many.
“Always something new,” said Grace.
Tractor probe Junior was moving into the Hot End. Ahead was the vast desert, hotter than boiling water, where Argo stood always at noon. Already the strange dry plants were losing their grip, leaving bare rock and dust. At the final shore of the Ring Sea the waves were sudsy with salt in solution, and the shore was glittering white. The hot steamy wind blew inland, to heatward, and then upward, carrying a freight of balloons.
The air was full of multicolored dots, all going up into the stratosphere. At the upper reach of the probe’s vision some of the frailer balloons were popping, but the thin membranous corpses still fluttered toward heaven.
Rachel shifted carefully in her chair. She caught Bronze Legs Miller watching her from a nearby table. Her answering grin was rueful.
She had not finished the hike. Grace and Lightning had been setting up camp when Bronze Legs Miller came riding down the hill. Rachel had grasped that golden opportunity. She had returned to Touchdown City riding behind Bronze Legs on the howler’s saddle. After a night of sleep she still ached in every muscle.
“Isn’t it a gorgeous sight?” Mayor Curly Jackson wasn’t eating. He watched avidly, with his furry chin in his hands and his elbows on the great oaken table—the dignitaries’ table the Medeans were so proud of; it had taken forty years to grow the tree.
Medea had changed its people. Even the insides of buildings were different from those of other worlds. The communal dining hall was a great dome lit by a single lamp at its zenith. It was bright, and it cast sharp shadows. As if the early colonists, daunted by the continual light show—the flare suns, the bluish farming lamps, the red-hot storms moving across Argo—had given themselves a single sun indoors. But it was a wider, cooler sun, giving yellower light than a rammer was used to.
One great curve of the wall was a holograph projection screen. The tractor probe was tracing the path the expedition would follow and broadcasting what it saw. Now it moved over hills of white sea salt. The picture staggered and lurched with the probe’s motion, and wavered with rising air currents.
Captain Janice Borg, staring avidly with a forkful of curry halfway to her mouth, jumped as Mayor Curly lightly punched her shoulder. The Mayor was blue eyes and a lump of nose poking through a carefully tended wealth of blond hair and beard. He was darkened by farming lamps. Not only did he supervise the farms; he farmed. “See it, Captain? That’s why the Ring Sea is mostly fresh water.”
Captain Borg’s hair was auburn going gray. She was handsome rather than pretty. Her voice of command had the force of a bullwhip; one obeyed by reflex. Her off-duty voice was a soft, dreamy contralto. “Right. Right. The seawater moves always to the Hot End. It starts as glaciers, doesn’t it? They break off in the Icy Sea and float heatward. Any salt goes that way too. In the Hot End the water boils away…and you get some tides, don’t you? Argo wobbles a little?”
“Well, it’s Medea that wobbles a little, but—”
“Right, so the seawater spills off into the salt flats at high tide and boils away there. And the vapor goes back to the glaciers along the Jet Stream.” She turned suddenly to Rachel and barked, “You getting all this?”
Rachel nodded, hiding a smile. More than two hundred years had passed on the settled worlds while Captain Borg cruised the trade circuit. She didn’t really understand memory tapes. They were too recent.
Rachel looked about the communal dining hall and was conscious as always of the vast unseen audience looking through her eyes, listening through her ears, feeling the dwindling aches of a stiff hike, tasting blazing hot Medean curry through her mouth. It was all going into the memory tape, with no effort on her part.
Curly said, “We picked a good site for the power plant before the first probe broke down. Heatward slope of a hillside. We’ll be coming up on it in a few hours. Is this the kind of thing you want, or am I boring you?”
“I want it all. Did you try that tape?”
The Mayor shook his head, his eyes suddenly evasive.
“Why not?”
“Well,” the Mayor said slowly, “I’m a little leery of what I might remember. It’s all filtered through your brain, isn’t it, Rachel?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t think I’d like remembering being a girl.”
Rachel was mildly surprised. Role-changing was part of the kick. Male or female, an epicurean or a superbly muscled physical culture addict or an intellectual daydreamer, a child again or an old woman…well, some didn’t like it. “I could give you a man’s tape, Curly. There’s McAuliffe’s balloon trip into the big gas giant in Sol system.”
Captain Borg cut in sharply. “What about the Charles Baker Sontag tape? He did a year’s tour in Miramon Lluagor system, Curly. The Lluagorians use balloons for everything. You’d love it.”
Curly was confused. “Just what kind of balloons—”
“Not living things, Curly. Fabric filled with gas. Lluagor has a red dwarf sun. No radiation storms and not much ultraviolet. They have to put their farms in orbit, and they do most of their living in orbit, and it’s all inflated balloons, even the spacecraft. The planet they use mainly for mining and factories, but it’s pretty, too, so they’ve got cities slung under hundreds of gasbags.”
The tractor probe lurched across mile after mile of dim-lit pink salt hills. Rachel remembered a memory tape in Morven’s library: a critical reading of the Elder and Younger Eddas by a teacher of history and poetry. Would Medeans like that? Here you had the Land of the Frost Giants and the Land of the Fire Giants, with Midgard between…and the Ring Sea to stand in for the Midgard Serpent…and no dearth of epic monsters, from what she’d heard.
Captain Borg spoke with an edge in her voice. “Nobody’s going to force you to use a new and decadent entertainment medium from the stars, Curly—”
“Oh, now, I didn’t—”
“But there’s a point you might consider. Distance.”
“Distance?”
“There’s the trade circuit. Earth, Toupan, Lluagor, Sereda, Horvendile, Koschei, Earth again. Six planets circling six stars a few light years apart. The web ramships go round and round, and everyone on the ring gets news, entertainment, seeds and eggs, new inventions. There’s the trade circuit, and there’s Medea. You’re too far from Horvendile, Curly.”
