Limits, p.15
Limits, page 15
“Oddly enough, we’re aware of that, Captain Borg.”
“No need to get huffy. I’m trying to make a point.”
“Why did you come?”
“Variety. Curiosity. The grass-is-always-greener syndrome. The same thing that made us rammers in the first place.” Captain Borg did not add altruism, the urge to keep the worlds civilized. “But will we keep coming? Curly, Medea is the strangest place that ever had a breathable atmosphere. You’ve got a potential tourist trap here. You could have ramships dropping by every twenty years!”
“We need that.”
“Yes, you do. So remember that rammers don’t build starships. It’s taxpayers that build starships. What do they get out of it?”
“Memory tapes?”
“Yes. It used to be holos. Times change. Holos aren’t as involving as memory tapes, and they take too long to watch. So it’s memory tapes.”
“Does that mean we have to use them?”
“No,” said Captain Borg.
“Then I’ll try your tourist’s view of Lluagor system, when I get time.” Curly stood. “And I better get going. Twenty-five hours to dawn.”
“It only takes ten minutes,” Rachel said.
“How long to recover? How long to assimilate a whole earthyear of someone else’s memories? I better wait.”
After he was gone, Rachel asked, “What was wrong with giving him the Jupiter tape?”
“I remembered McAuliffe was a homosexual.”
“So what? He was all alone in that capsule.”
“It might matter to someone like Curly. I don’t say it would, I say it might. Every world is different.”
“You ought to know.” The rumor mill said that Mayor Curly and Captain Borg had shared a bed. Though he hadn’t shown it…
Too lightly, Captain Borg said, “I should but I don’t.”
“Oh?”
“He’s…closed. It’s the usual problem, I think. He sees me coming back in sixty or seventy years, and me ten years older. Doesn’t want to get too involved.”
“Janice?”
“Dammit, if they’re so afraid of change, how could their parents have busted their asses to settle a whole new world? Change is the one thing…yeah? What is it?”
“Did you ask him, or did he ask you?”
Captain Borg frowned. “He asked me. Why?”
“Nobody’s asked me,” said Rachel.
“Oh…Well, ask someone. Customs differ.”
“But he asked you.”
“I dazzled him with sex appeal. Or maybe not. Rachel, shall I ask Curly about it? There might be something we don’t know. Maybe you wear your hair wrong.”
Rachel shook her head. “No.”
“But…okay. The rest of the crew don’t seem to be having problems.”
Nearly dawn. The sky was thick with dark clouds, but the heatward horizon was clear, with Argo almost fully risen. The dull red disk would never rise completely, not here. Already it must be sinking back.
It was earthnight now; the farming lamps were off. Crops and livestock kept terrestrial time. Rows of green plants stretched away to the south, looking almost black in this light. In the boundary of bare soil between the wilds and the croplands, half a dozen fuxes practiced spear casts. That was okay with Bronze Legs. Humans didn’t spend much time in that border region. They plowed the contents of their toilets into it, to sterilize it of Medean microorganisms and fertilize it for next year’s crops. The fuxes didn’t seem to mind the smell.
Bronze Legs waited patiently beside his howler. He wished Windstorm would do the same.
The two house-sized crawlers were of a pattern familiar to many worlds: long, bulbous pressure hulls mounted on ground-effect platforms. They were decades old, but they had been tended with loving care. Hydrogen fuel cells powered them. One of the crawlers now carried, welded to its roof, a sender capable of reaching Morven in its present equatorial orbit: another good reason for waiting for the web ramship’s arrival.
The third and largest vehicle was the power plant itself, fully assembled and tested, mounted on the ground-effect systems from two crawlers and with a crawler’s control cabin welded on in front. It trailed a raft: yet another ground effect system covered by a padded platform with handrails. The fuxes would be riding that.
All vehicles were loaded and boarded well ahead of time. Windstorm Wolheim moved among them, ticking off lists in her head and checking them against what she could see. The tall, leggy redhead was a chronic worrier.
Phrixus (or maybe Helle) was suddenly there, a hot pink point near Argo. The fuxes picked up their spears and trotted off northward. Bronze Legs lifted his howler on its air cushion and followed. Behind him the three bigger vehicles whispered into action, and Windstorm ran for her howler.
Rachel was in the passenger seat of the lead crawler, looking out through the great bubble windscreen. In the Hot End the crawlers would house the power plant engineers. Now they were packed with equipment. Square kilometers of thin silvered plastic sheet, and knock-down frames to hold it all, would become solar mirrors. Black plastic and more frames would become the radiator fins, mounted on the back of that hill in the Hot End. There were spools of superconducting cable and flywheels for power storage. Rachel kept bumping her elbow on the corner of a crate.
The pinkish daylight was dimming, graying, as the Jet Stream spread to engulf the sky. The fuxes were far ahead, keeping no obvious formation. In this light they seemed a convocation of mythical monsters: centaurs, eight-limbed dragons, a misshapen dwarf. The dwarf was oddest of all. Rachel had seen him close: A nasty caricature of a man, with a foxy face, huge buttocks, exaggerated male organs, and (the anomaly) a tail longer than he was tall. Yet Harvester was solemn and slow-moving, and he seemed to have the respect of fuxes and humans both.
The vehicles whispered along at thirty kilometers an hour, uphill through orange grass, swerving around hairy trees. A fine drizzle began. Lightning Harness turned on the wipers.
Rachel asked, “Isn’t this where we were a few days back?”
“Medean yesterday. That’s right,” said Grace.
“Hard to tell. We’re going north, aren’t we? Why not straight east?”
“It’s partly for our benefit, dear. We’ll be in the habitable domains longer. We’ll see more variety; we’ll both learn more. When we swing around to heatward we’ll be nearer the north pole. It won’t get hot so fast.”
“Good.”
Bronze Legs and a woman Rachel didn’t know flanked them on the one-seater ground-effect vehicles, the howlers. Bronze Legs wore shorts, and in fact his legs were bronze. Black by race, he’d paled to Rachel’s color during years of Medean sunlight. Rachel asked, half to herself, “Why not just Bronze?”
Grace understood. “They didn’t mean his skin.”
“What?”
“The fuxes named him for the time his howler broke down and stranded him forty miles from civilization. He walked home. He was carrying some heavy stuff, but a troop of fuxes joined him and they couldn’t keep up. They’ve got lots of energy but no stamina. So they named him Bronze Legs. Bronze is the hardest metal they knew, till we came.”
The rain had closed in. A beast like yesterday’s flying bug strainers took to the air almost under the treads. For a moment it was face to face with Rachel, its large eyes and tremendous mouth all widened in horror. A wing ticked the windshield as it dodged.
Lightning cursed and turned on the headlights. As if by previous agreement, lights sprang to life on the howlers and the vehicles behind. “We don’t like to do that,” said Lightning.
“Do what?”
“Use headlights. Every domain is different. You never know what the local life will do when a flare comes, not till you’ve watched it happen. Here it’s okay. Nothing worse than locusts.”
Even the headlights had a yellowish tinge, Rachel thought.
The gray cliffs ahead ran hundreds of kilometers to heatward and coldward. They were no more than a few hundred feet high, but they were fresh and new. Medea wobbled a little in its course around Argo, and the tides could raise savage quakes. All the rocks had sharp angles; wind and life had not had a chance to wear them down.
The pass was new too, as if God had cleft the spine of the new mountains with a battle-ax. The floor of it was filled with rubble. The vehicles glided above the broken rock, riding high, with fans on maximum.
Now the land sloped gently down, and the expedition followed. Through the drizzle Bronze Legs glimpsed a grove of trees, hairy trees like those near Touchdown City, but different. They grew like spoons standing on end, with the cup of the spoon facing Argo. The ground was covered with tightly curled black filaments, a plant the color and texture of Bronze Legs’ own hair.
They had changed domain. Bronze Legs hadn’t been in this territory, but he remembered that Windstorm had. He called, “Anything unexpected around here?”
“B-70s.”
“They do get around, don’t they? Anything else?”
“It’s an easy slope down to the shore,” Windstorm called, “but then there’s a kind of parasitic fungus floating on the ocean. Won’t hurt us, but it can kill a Medean animal in an hour. I told Harvester. He’ll make the others wait for us.”
“Good.”
They rode in silence for a bit. Drizzle made it hard to see much. Bronze Legs wasn’t worried. The B-70s would stay clear of their headlights. This was explored territory; and even after they left it, the probes had mapped their route.
“That professional tourist,” Windstorm called suddenly. “Did you get to know her?”
“Not really. What about her? Mayor Curly said to be polite.”
“When was I ever not polite? But I didn’t grow up with her, Bronze Legs. Nobody did. We know more about fuxes than we do about rammers, and this one’s peculiar for a rammer! How could a woman give up all her privacy like that?”
“You tell me.”
“I wish I knew what she’d do in a church.”
“At least she wouldn’t close her eyes. She’s a dedicated tourist. Can you picture that? But she might not get involved either.” Bronze Legs thought hard before he added, “I tried one of those memory tapes.”
“What? You?”
“History of the Fission Period in Eurasia, 1945-2010, from Morven’s library. Education, not entertainment.”
“Why that?”
“Whim.”
“Well, what’s it like?”
“It’s…it’s like I did a lot of research, and formed conclusions and checked them out and sometimes changed my mind, and it gave me a lot of satisfaction. There are still some open questions, like how the Soviets actually got the fission bomb, and the Vietnam War, and the Arab Takeover. But I know who’s working on that, and…It’s like that, but it doesn’t connect to anything. It sits in my head in a clump. But it’s kind of fun, Windstorm, and I got it all in ten minutes. You want to hear a libelous song about President Peanut?”
“No.”
Through the drizzle they could see the restless stirring of the Ring Ocean. A band of fuxes waited on the sand. Windstorm turned her howler in a graceful curve, back toward the blur of the crawlers’ headlights, to lead them. Bronze Legs dowsed his lights and glided toward the fuxes.
They had chosen a good resting place, far from the dangerous shore, in a broad stretch of “black man’s hair” that any marauder would have to cross. Most of the fuxes were lying down. The four-legged female had been impregnated six Medean days ago. Her time must be near. She scratched with sharp claws at her itching hindquarters.
Harvester came to meet Bronze Legs. The post-male biped was slow with age, but not clumsy. That tremendous length of black tail was good for his balance. It was tipped with a bronze spearhead. Harvester asked, “Will we follow the shoreline? If we may choose, we will keep your vessels between us and the shore.”
“We plan to go straight across,” Bronze Legs told him. “You’ll ride the raft behind the bigger vessel.”
“In the water are things dangerous to us,” said Harvester. He glanced shoreward and added, “Things small, things large. A large one comes.”
Bronze Legs took one look and reached for his intercom. “Lightning, Hairy, Jill! Turn your searchlights on that thing, fast!”
The fuxes were up and reaching for their spears.
“So it’s the fuxes who give you your nicknames,” Rachel said. “Why did they call you Lightning?”
“I tend the machines that make lightning and move it through metal wires. At least, that’s how we explained it to the fuxes. And Windstorm—you saw the big redhead girl on the other howler? She was on guard one earthnight when a troop of fuxes took a short cut through the wheat crop. She really gave them hell. Half of Touchdown City must have heard her.”
“And you? Grace.”
“They named me when I was a lot younger.” Grace glared at Lightning, who was very busy driving and clearly not listening, and by no means was he smiling. “But they didn’t call me Grace. The way we have children, the fuxes think that’s hilarious.”
Rachel didn’t ask.
“They called me Boobs.”
Rachel felt the need for a change of subject. “Lightning, are you getting tired? Would you like me to take over?”
“I’m okay. Can you drive a crawler?”
“Actually, I’ve never done it. I can run a howler, though. In any terrain.”
“Maybe we’ll give you one after—”
Then Bronze Legs’ voice bellowed from the intercom.
Something came out of the ocean: a great swollen myriapod with tiny jointed arms moving around a funnel-shaped mouth. Teeth churned in the gullet.
The fuxes cast their spears and fled. Bronze Legs tucked Harvester under one arm and sped shoreward; the howler listed to port. Deadeye fell behind; two fuxes turned back and took her arms and pulled her along.
The monster flowed up the beach, faster than any of them, ignoring the spears stuck in its flesh.
One, two, three searchlights flashed from the vehicles and played over the myriapod. The beams were bluish, unlike the headlights. Flare sunlight.
The myriapod stopped. Turned, clumsily, and began to retreat down the beach. It had nearly reached the water when it lost coordination. The legs thrashed frantically and without effect. As Rachel watched in horrible fascination, things were born from the beast.
They crawled from its back and sides. Hundreds of them. They were dark red and dog-sized. They did not leave the myriapod; they stayed on it, feeding. Its legs were quiet now.
Three of the fuxes darted down the beach, snatched up their fallen spears and retreated just as fast. The myriapod was little more than a skeleton now, and the dog-sized feeders were beginning to spread across the sand.
The fuxes climbed aboard the air-cushioned raft that trailed behind the mobile power plant. They arranged their packs and settled themselves. The paired vehicles lifted and glided toward the water. Lightning lifted the crawler and followed.
Rachel said, “But—”
“We’ll be okay,” Lightning assured her. “We’ll stay high and cross fast, and there are always the searchlights.”
“Grace, tell him! There are animals that like the searchlights!”
Grace patted her hand. The expedition set off across the water.
The colony around Touchdown City occupied part of a fat peninsula projecting deep into the Ring Sea. It took the expedition twelve hours to cross a bay just smaller than the Gulf of Mexico.
Vermilion scum patches covered the water. Schools of flying non-fish veered and dived at sight of the wrong-colored headlights. The fuxes stayed flat on their platform…but the water was smooth, the ride was smooth, and nothing attacked them.
The rain stopped, and left Phrixus and Helle far up the morning sky. The cloud-highway of the Jet Stream showed through a broken cloud deck. Lightning and the other drivers left their headlights on, since the sea life seemed to avoid them.
Somewhere in there, Rachel reclined her chair and went to sleep.
She woke when the crawler settled and tilted under her. Her brain was muzzy…and she had slept with the recorder on. That disturbed her. Usually she switched it off to sleep. Dreams were private.
The crawler’s door had dropped to form a stairway, and the crawler was empty. Rachel went out.
The crawlers, howlers, raft and mobile power plant were parked in a circle, and tents had been set up inside. There was no living human being in sight. Rachel shrugged; she stepped between a howler and the raft, and stopped.
This was nothing like the Medea she’d seen up to now.
Rolling hills were covered with chrome yellow bushes. They stood waist high, and so densely packed that no ground was visible anywhere. Clouds of insects swarmed, and sticky filaments shot up from the bushes to stab into the swarms.
The fuxes had cut themselves a clearing. They tended one who was restless, twitching. Bronze Legs Miller hailed her from their midst.
Rachel waded through the bushes. They resisted her like thick tar. The insects scattered away from her.
“Deadeye’s near her time,” Bronze Legs said. “Poor baby. We won’t move on until she’s dropped her ‘nest.’”
The fux showed no swelling of pregnancy. Rachel remembered what she had been told of the fux manner of bearing children. Suddenly she didn’t want to see it. Yet how could she leave? She would be omitting a major part of the experience of Medea.
She compromised. She whispered earnestly to Bronze Legs, “Should we be here? Won’t they object?”
He laughed. “We’re here because we make good insect repellants.”
“No. We like humans.” Deadeye’s voice was slurred. Now Rachel saw that the left eye was pink, with no pupil. “Are you the one who has been among the stars?”
“Yes.”
The feverish fux reached up to take Rachel’s hand. “So much strangeness in the world. When we know all of the world, it may be we will go among the stars too. You have great courage.” Her fingers were slender and hard, like bones. She let go to claw at the hairless red rash between her front and back legs. Her tail thrashed suddenly, and Bronze Legs dodged.
