Collected Short Fiction, page 743
“Pipkin!” Buglet’s greeting was a cry of delight. “How did you get here?”
“With Zhondra Zhey.” The godlet hopped to a halt, cocking back the fat pink baby-head to grin at them with one green eye. “Flooded out of my home, with nowhere else to go, I got her to sneak me aboard her ship—not expecting to meet the two of you again.”
“Is she still here?”
“About to leave.” His voice was a keen mosquito whine. “If you want to come, you’re just in time.”
“Come where?”
“To a kinder world than this one.” Standing on one gold-furred hand, he gestured with the other as if to erase the ice-crowned black cliffs and the scarlet sea. “One where Belthar and his arrogant kin will never trouble us.”
“But—is there such a world?” Davey frowned at him. “One of Belthar’s creatures has already tracked us here. He’ll be sending others—”
“They’ll never find us,” Pipkin whistled. “It’s a place I discovered myself, but only by an accident I’m sure they won’t repeat. On the way here, Zhondra was giving me a lesson in transvolutionary navigation. By what should have been a fatal mischance, I skipped the ship through a forbidden discontinuity, into a universe that had been charted as antimatter—”
“Oh—” Buglet gasped.
“But it wasn’t.” Pipkin gave her his impish grin. “We didn’t die. It turned out the charts were wrong. Before we got out, Zhondra had located a Sol-type sun with a family of friendly-seeming planets. She’s reloading the premen now, with all the supplies she can carry, and we’ll soon be on our way. I’m certain she’ll make room for you—if you can explain how you got here.”
“We somehow jumped—teleported, maybe I should say—to Station One. And came on from there in a skimmer the monks had abandoned by the strip.” Shifting uncomfortably before Pipkin’s doubtful one-eyed stare, he turned to gesture at the dome and the tower. “We were pretty lucky, stumbling on this installation.”
“If you call it luck.” Pipkin blinked at the beacon, still flashing green-and-blue. “But how did it get here?”
“Didn’t the Polarians—” His breath caught. “It was an observatory. Maybe a weather station, too. The equipment is gone.”
“Don’t you know?” Pipkin shook his hairless head, with a grimace of sardonic disbelief. “The preman pilots have been flying along this coast, looking for a likelier site for the colony—which they never found. They swear they passed this spot a few days ago and saw nothing here. I’ve seen the records and charts the Polarians left at the station. They don’t mention any observatory—and they didn’t need one, because they never saw the sky.”
“Then why—why did you come?”
“Your beacon.” Pipkin nodded at it.
“Blazing all night it was.”
Davey saw Buglet staring strangely at him.
“Something else needs explaining.” Pipkin hopped toward him, green eye shrewdly squinting. “The skimmer you found and flew. The Polarian records do mention that. They say it crashed and burned, with the cargo and the crew aboard. Nothing could be salvaged.”
“Burned?” Blankly, Davey echoed the word. “It was loaded with burned machines. But the skimmer itself?”
“That survival pod!” Buglet bent to stare at the tiny god, her voice hushed with awe. “Lying exactly where we had to find it. With the suits and stove and food we had to have, to keep us alive.” She drew a long uneven breath. “Is it—is it true?”
“True.” Pipkin nodded, grinning at her amazement, and peered again at Davey. “You have become creators. Gaining powers no god has ever owned—powers so awesome that you had to hide them from yourselves. Creating the devices to save your lives and bring you safely here, you felt forced to disguise them as lucky accidents.”
“Davey—” Her yellow eyes shone. “Can you believe?”
“I guess—” He reached to grasp her quivering hand. “I guess we must believe.”
“If you know who you are, let’s move along.” Pipkin swung on one big hand and bounded toward the skimmer. “Before Belthar catches on. As creators, you’ll be needed in our new home. One of the preman passengers found a name for the planet, in an old tribal myth. We call it Eden.”
Farside Station
The uncommon planet Medea belongs to the complex system of the star we call Castor, in the constellation Gemini, 50 light-years from Earth. Seen in the telescope, Castor is a remarkable triple double. The main components, Castor A and Castor B, are a pair of splendid blue-white doubles of spectral class A, revolving around their center of gravity with a period of about four centuries. Castor C is a pair of orange-red dwarfs, spectral class M10, in orbit around the brighter stars with a period estimated at 100 centuries.
Not yet visible in our telescopes, Medea itself was invented and designed by a panel of experts for a project sponsored by Harlan Ellison, Medea: Harlan’s World. The experts are Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Frederik Pohl. They and half a dozen others have written stories for the book, edited by Ellison, to be published in 1979 by Bantam. “Farside Station” is one of these stories.
Medea is actually a moon, locked in an orbit that keeps the same face of it toward the huge, red-hot gas planet Argo, which in turn orbits Castor C. Deformed by Argo’s massive gravity, it is a little egg-shaped, with the Ring Sea between the hot end and the cold end. Most of its heat comes from Argo, though the twin dwarf suns give most of its light. The first human settlements were on the tropic coasts of the Ring Sea, safely between the Hotside, where temperatures reach 80°C, and the Farside, where the maximum is -110°C and carbon dioxide freezes out of the air. The Medean day is about 76 hours, which the colonists have divided into their own more convenient three-day week.
I.
The office intercom grunted.
“Olaf?” It was Sakuma, head of Northcape Engineers. “Clients for. you. A couple of motherworlders, pretty fresh to Medea. Want a research station built. I told ’em you could do it.”
“Where?”
A silent second.
“Listen to ’em, anyhow,” Sakuma said. “They’re serious. Well funded. We’ve talked about the risks, and they’re still determined. They want to see Farside—”
“I’ve seen Farside. Too much of it.”
“Not the part they want to explore. The Banda Basin. Where the firebags go to die.”
“No!” He shook his head at the intercom. “Send ’em anywhere else.”
“Tried to. Tried to tell ’em why it’s crazy. But I can’t put ’em off. They understand the odds and they want an engineer.”
“Give ’em McBent.”
“Won’t leave his wife. Says this thing could take a year.”
“Tell ’em—”
“I’ve told ’em. They’re coming up to see you now.”
His office was high in the mirrored tower that the Northcape Engineers had put up to overlook the streets they had paved, the mills and smelters and hydroponic circles they had designed, the great tidal turbine complex where they had been the prime contractors.
A bare little cell, because he was a very minor member of the firm, who chose to work in the open. But he loved the view: the thermal roofs of Chong, a forest of silver cones; the landing strips and piers around the river bend; best of all, the High Cascades.
Though they were twenty kilometers away, he often imagined, at times when the city was quiet, that he could feel the vibration and hear the ceaseless roaring of all those cubic kilometers of tidal water pouring down the black cliffs that marched half around the horizon, exploding plumes and foaming raceways and tall walls of falling water, tawny when the twin suns shone, plunging down into boiling golden clouds.
It was Darkday now, the double sun behind the planet. Low in the south, Argo burned red on the mirror roofs and turned the falls into a deluge of blood. Brighter than Argo, dull red and pale green, the aurora rippled across the moonless sky. Pulling himself away from that familiar splendor, he turned to wait at the door.
Nearing forty, he was thick-set and muscular, with close-cropped sandy hair and weathered, flare-tanned skin. His pale blue eyes had a wary squint, alert for the unexpected. Dressed for Darkday, he wore his field outfit: high thermal boots and hooded thermal coveralls, flaremask pushed back on his head. The bulging ruby goggles made him look a little sinister, like some big-eyed hotlands monster.
The clients were coming off the elevator, escorted by Sakuma’s office abo, a tail-clipped, rank-smelling, post-sexual male with an unpronouncable name, who let people call it Charlie. Norlund resented the abos in Northcape. Stinking six-legged vixen that came apart like ugly insects, dropping off two-legged wombs until the final section became a sex-crazed male. They weren’t native to this polar coast, but now there was no keeping them out. They learned too fast and worked too cheap. Charlie was actually reading for its own degree in engineering.
Norlund shrugged, resolving not to be bothered. Sensitive even to the Northcape climate, the fuxes had to keep indoors. Certainly, Charlie wouldn’t be joining any Farside expedition.
“Engineer Olaf Norlund.” Charlie’s voice was a sweetly accurate imitation of the girl who had made its learning cassette. “Bring honored clients of Northcape Engineers. Dr. Aum Padhai, Ph.D. Dr. Leda Lovato, Ph.D. Doctors arrive from Earth five years now, seeking construction of Farside station.”
He shook hands with them while it leaned back on its surgically shortened tail, red tongue lolling, grinning at him. The long bright eyes had a malicious glint. Amusement, perhaps, at his predicament. He would never guess what the fux was thinking, but he suspected that it understood too much.
“Thank you, Charlie. Mr. Sakuma wants you back right now.”
He ushered the visitors into the room, trying to seem more courteous than he felt, and shut the door on the abo. They went to the window before they came back to the chairs at his desk, the girl exclaiming in her wonder at the falls. He liked her voice.
Dr. Padhai was tall and gaunt. Handsome, perhaps, in a haggard, restless way, but also disturbing. The livid scar of some old wound slashed across his dark cheek and forehead, letting his right eyelid droop, making his intense black stare strangely disconcerting. He had a penetrating scent of something like camphor.
The girl held Norlund longer. She was slim enough, but ripely inviting, her olive skin aglow from the Northcape chill, her hair long and sleek and dark. In this light her eyes looked violet, warm and trustful. She wore a bright platinum bead nestled against the wing of her left nostril. Younger and lovelier than any Ph.D. he had known in his few semesters at Medeana University, down in the hotlands, she was far too fresh and tender for the Banda Basin.
“Mr. Sakuma tells me you’re trying to organize a Farside trip.” Sitting back at the desk, he tried to be diplomatic. “Technically, of course, Northcape itself is a projection from the Farside continent, but we’re protected here by the coast range and the Mushanga Sea, and we do get heat from Argo. Even here, the cold can be severe enough, but it gives you no idea of the climate beyond the glaciers—”
“The difficulties have been explained to us.” Padhai’s voice was harsh and hoarse, as if from too much shouting, his accent a little hard to understand. “We accept whatever risks there are.”
He turned to the girl for confirmation.
“We do, Mr. Norlund.” Her own soft Earth accent was more alluring, her tones firm and pure, so warmly melodious that he thought the fux should have had her for a model. “Please don’t try to delay us. Just remember what we’ve given up for this—our world and our time. Sixty Terran years to get here. Sixty more to go back, if we ever do, to a world we wouldn’t know. But we do know what we want.”
She touched the platinum sphere against her nostril.
“You must understand that we are Seekers.”
He nodded, not trying to understand. His people had been gone from Earth for six generations, and he disliked even the Medean hotlands, with their swarming races of fuxes and gasbags, their teeming predators, their human colonists nearly as strange. Northcape was his home, Earth too far away to matter. At the university, he had dropped the dull course in Terran history after the first idiotic test.
“Seekers of truth.” Padhai’s hollow voice was loud and impersonal, as if from too much preaching to unbelieving multitudes. “Seekers of life. Seekers of God.” He lifted his lean left hand to show a symbolic ring, a bright metal globe mounted on a black oval ground. “I suppose you would call us mystics.”
Norlund nodded again. The hotland campus had been a baffling buzz of queer phrases and queerer ideas which he had commonly ignored—though there had been one hot-blooded redhead, nearly as alluring as Leda Lovato, who had led him to the brink of baptism in the scummy Ring Sea.
“Try to understand.” It was less request than command. “My earlier ancestors had been seekers of oneness with the whole universe for many generations. I cannot say that they were wrong, but the goals of later searchers changed when the great radio telescopes began picking up evidences of other minds in our galaxy.”
Carefully, Norlund controlled his skepticism.
“I’ve read that much history,” he agreed. “The mother-worlders detected radio waves they thought were signals. They began sending ships to meet the senders. That’s how we humans got to Medea.”
“A turning point in the evolution of the human spirit.” Padhai’s dark eyes gleamed, and his hollow voice had the ring of worship. “The old quest for nirvana had been a difficult abstraction. For many, far too difficult. Suddenly, when those signals were received, we could begin to look for cosmic truth, for communion with a universal intelligence on this side of death.”
“You didn’t find it on Medea.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps because we forgot to look.”
“Is that why—” He turned to the silent girl. “Have you come to hunt for cosmic truth in the Banda Basin?”
“We have.” Her limpid eyes made a mute appeal. “Don’t laugh.”
“We’re Seekers, remember,” the dark man said. “The reach from Earth into space is the noblest thing our race has done—at least as it began. Later, tragically, that supreme first goal was almost forgotten. Our destined universal union has yet to be achieved, but it must be.”
“If those old space pioneers came looking for universal harmony . . .” Norlund paused to soften his sardonic tone. “The supposed signal turned out to be natural radio emissions from the hydrogen envelope of Argo, modulated in odd ways by the magnetic fields of the flaring suns and by Medea and Argo’s other moving moons. The fuxes and cosmic truth!” He laughed. “As for communion with the firebags—”
The girl’s hurt face stopped him.
“You must understand our disappointment.” Padhai’s voice was still commanding. “Recall the transit time to Earth. A laser beam takes fifty years to carry news there. The ship took sixty to get us here. We set out on reports now a century old. We arrived expecting to build upon a hundred years of progress—”
“And you found the hotlands!” Norlund grinned at the contrast. “The abo cultures wrecked by contact with the human—if the abos ever actually had any culture. The humans scrabbling to survive in a world they weren’t made for, most of their own culture lost, trying to live on the natives, getting their highs however they can, waiting for the next ship from Earth.” He made a face. “I’ve lived down there and I don’t like it.”
“We had hoped for more.” Padhai nodded solemnly. “Though the first explorers found no high technologies, some of them did report evidence of advanced achievement among the balloons. Linguistic, aesthetic, intellectual—”
“Gasbags!” The girl had flinched, but Norlund let his scornful voice run on. “Down at the university, I took a course in Medean biology. We spent a week on a lab ship to study the balloons.
Half-plants. They hatch out of floating weed in the tropical ocean. Inflate themselves with hydrogen when they mature. Drift on the wind or pump themselves along with their syphons. Living on insects or swamp-vermin or anchored by their drag-ropes over any sort of garbage. About as brainy as plastic market-bags!”
“Some, perhaps.” The girl showed no resentment, but her warm fervor surprised him. “Not all. We’ve been here five years now, looking for brainy balloons, if you want to call them that, digging through official records, touring the tropics, searching the tapes in the university archives, turning up clues wherever we could. We believe they do exist.”
The color of emotion became her as she continued. “There were—are—hundreds of different species of the balloons and the things they call fuxes. Evolved to fit the enormous range of habitats between the hot pole and the cold pole. Most pretty primitive. Many, as you say, degenerate now. Some already extinct. But at least a few were highly advanced, even with little or no material technology.”
She gestured toward the power stations under the falls and the blue-glowing hydroponic circles and the red-lit thermal roofs of Chong as if her aloof disdain could sweep them all away. “We’re looking for contact with a species never well-known: the Ahya—the kind you call fire balloons. A great part of their cycle of life is what you have just outlined; individuals bud from a plant-like matrix floating in the tropic seas. They inflate, fly, feed and grow, breed, shower and back into the sea. The difference we know is their way of death.”
“On Farside?” The words reflected more mockery than he had meant to show, and he saw her flush of resentment.
“Individuals past the sexual phase leave their swarms.” Her voice became coolly impersonal, her emotion well controlled. “They work their way to upper latitudes and catch a jet stream that carries them across the Ring Ocean and on over Farside.”
“To the famous Banda Basin?”
“We hope to follow them there.”
“A hazardous hope.” More careful now, he tried not to smile at her innocent intensity. “The basin’s a fine place, I guess, for old firebags to die. But not much good for anything else. Certainly not for people. The carbon dioxide doesn’t actually freeze out of the air. till you reach the great ranges beyond it, close to the cold pole, but the basin’s cold enough.”
“With Zhondra Zhey.” The godlet hopped to a halt, cocking back the fat pink baby-head to grin at them with one green eye. “Flooded out of my home, with nowhere else to go, I got her to sneak me aboard her ship—not expecting to meet the two of you again.”
“Is she still here?”
“About to leave.” His voice was a keen mosquito whine. “If you want to come, you’re just in time.”
“Come where?”
“To a kinder world than this one.” Standing on one gold-furred hand, he gestured with the other as if to erase the ice-crowned black cliffs and the scarlet sea. “One where Belthar and his arrogant kin will never trouble us.”
“But—is there such a world?” Davey frowned at him. “One of Belthar’s creatures has already tracked us here. He’ll be sending others—”
“They’ll never find us,” Pipkin whistled. “It’s a place I discovered myself, but only by an accident I’m sure they won’t repeat. On the way here, Zhondra was giving me a lesson in transvolutionary navigation. By what should have been a fatal mischance, I skipped the ship through a forbidden discontinuity, into a universe that had been charted as antimatter—”
“Oh—” Buglet gasped.
“But it wasn’t.” Pipkin gave her his impish grin. “We didn’t die. It turned out the charts were wrong. Before we got out, Zhondra had located a Sol-type sun with a family of friendly-seeming planets. She’s reloading the premen now, with all the supplies she can carry, and we’ll soon be on our way. I’m certain she’ll make room for you—if you can explain how you got here.”
“We somehow jumped—teleported, maybe I should say—to Station One. And came on from there in a skimmer the monks had abandoned by the strip.” Shifting uncomfortably before Pipkin’s doubtful one-eyed stare, he turned to gesture at the dome and the tower. “We were pretty lucky, stumbling on this installation.”
“If you call it luck.” Pipkin blinked at the beacon, still flashing green-and-blue. “But how did it get here?”
“Didn’t the Polarians—” His breath caught. “It was an observatory. Maybe a weather station, too. The equipment is gone.”
“Don’t you know?” Pipkin shook his hairless head, with a grimace of sardonic disbelief. “The preman pilots have been flying along this coast, looking for a likelier site for the colony—which they never found. They swear they passed this spot a few days ago and saw nothing here. I’ve seen the records and charts the Polarians left at the station. They don’t mention any observatory—and they didn’t need one, because they never saw the sky.”
“Then why—why did you come?”
“Your beacon.” Pipkin nodded at it.
“Blazing all night it was.”
Davey saw Buglet staring strangely at him.
“Something else needs explaining.” Pipkin hopped toward him, green eye shrewdly squinting. “The skimmer you found and flew. The Polarian records do mention that. They say it crashed and burned, with the cargo and the crew aboard. Nothing could be salvaged.”
“Burned?” Blankly, Davey echoed the word. “It was loaded with burned machines. But the skimmer itself?”
“That survival pod!” Buglet bent to stare at the tiny god, her voice hushed with awe. “Lying exactly where we had to find it. With the suits and stove and food we had to have, to keep us alive.” She drew a long uneven breath. “Is it—is it true?”
“True.” Pipkin nodded, grinning at her amazement, and peered again at Davey. “You have become creators. Gaining powers no god has ever owned—powers so awesome that you had to hide them from yourselves. Creating the devices to save your lives and bring you safely here, you felt forced to disguise them as lucky accidents.”
“Davey—” Her yellow eyes shone. “Can you believe?”
“I guess—” He reached to grasp her quivering hand. “I guess we must believe.”
“If you know who you are, let’s move along.” Pipkin swung on one big hand and bounded toward the skimmer. “Before Belthar catches on. As creators, you’ll be needed in our new home. One of the preman passengers found a name for the planet, in an old tribal myth. We call it Eden.”
Farside Station
The uncommon planet Medea belongs to the complex system of the star we call Castor, in the constellation Gemini, 50 light-years from Earth. Seen in the telescope, Castor is a remarkable triple double. The main components, Castor A and Castor B, are a pair of splendid blue-white doubles of spectral class A, revolving around their center of gravity with a period of about four centuries. Castor C is a pair of orange-red dwarfs, spectral class M10, in orbit around the brighter stars with a period estimated at 100 centuries.
Not yet visible in our telescopes, Medea itself was invented and designed by a panel of experts for a project sponsored by Harlan Ellison, Medea: Harlan’s World. The experts are Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Frederik Pohl. They and half a dozen others have written stories for the book, edited by Ellison, to be published in 1979 by Bantam. “Farside Station” is one of these stories.
Medea is actually a moon, locked in an orbit that keeps the same face of it toward the huge, red-hot gas planet Argo, which in turn orbits Castor C. Deformed by Argo’s massive gravity, it is a little egg-shaped, with the Ring Sea between the hot end and the cold end. Most of its heat comes from Argo, though the twin dwarf suns give most of its light. The first human settlements were on the tropic coasts of the Ring Sea, safely between the Hotside, where temperatures reach 80°C, and the Farside, where the maximum is -110°C and carbon dioxide freezes out of the air. The Medean day is about 76 hours, which the colonists have divided into their own more convenient three-day week.
I.
The office intercom grunted.
“Olaf?” It was Sakuma, head of Northcape Engineers. “Clients for. you. A couple of motherworlders, pretty fresh to Medea. Want a research station built. I told ’em you could do it.”
“Where?”
A silent second.
“Listen to ’em, anyhow,” Sakuma said. “They’re serious. Well funded. We’ve talked about the risks, and they’re still determined. They want to see Farside—”
“I’ve seen Farside. Too much of it.”
“Not the part they want to explore. The Banda Basin. Where the firebags go to die.”
“No!” He shook his head at the intercom. “Send ’em anywhere else.”
“Tried to. Tried to tell ’em why it’s crazy. But I can’t put ’em off. They understand the odds and they want an engineer.”
“Give ’em McBent.”
“Won’t leave his wife. Says this thing could take a year.”
“Tell ’em—”
“I’ve told ’em. They’re coming up to see you now.”
His office was high in the mirrored tower that the Northcape Engineers had put up to overlook the streets they had paved, the mills and smelters and hydroponic circles they had designed, the great tidal turbine complex where they had been the prime contractors.
A bare little cell, because he was a very minor member of the firm, who chose to work in the open. But he loved the view: the thermal roofs of Chong, a forest of silver cones; the landing strips and piers around the river bend; best of all, the High Cascades.
Though they were twenty kilometers away, he often imagined, at times when the city was quiet, that he could feel the vibration and hear the ceaseless roaring of all those cubic kilometers of tidal water pouring down the black cliffs that marched half around the horizon, exploding plumes and foaming raceways and tall walls of falling water, tawny when the twin suns shone, plunging down into boiling golden clouds.
It was Darkday now, the double sun behind the planet. Low in the south, Argo burned red on the mirror roofs and turned the falls into a deluge of blood. Brighter than Argo, dull red and pale green, the aurora rippled across the moonless sky. Pulling himself away from that familiar splendor, he turned to wait at the door.
Nearing forty, he was thick-set and muscular, with close-cropped sandy hair and weathered, flare-tanned skin. His pale blue eyes had a wary squint, alert for the unexpected. Dressed for Darkday, he wore his field outfit: high thermal boots and hooded thermal coveralls, flaremask pushed back on his head. The bulging ruby goggles made him look a little sinister, like some big-eyed hotlands monster.
The clients were coming off the elevator, escorted by Sakuma’s office abo, a tail-clipped, rank-smelling, post-sexual male with an unpronouncable name, who let people call it Charlie. Norlund resented the abos in Northcape. Stinking six-legged vixen that came apart like ugly insects, dropping off two-legged wombs until the final section became a sex-crazed male. They weren’t native to this polar coast, but now there was no keeping them out. They learned too fast and worked too cheap. Charlie was actually reading for its own degree in engineering.
Norlund shrugged, resolving not to be bothered. Sensitive even to the Northcape climate, the fuxes had to keep indoors. Certainly, Charlie wouldn’t be joining any Farside expedition.
“Engineer Olaf Norlund.” Charlie’s voice was a sweetly accurate imitation of the girl who had made its learning cassette. “Bring honored clients of Northcape Engineers. Dr. Aum Padhai, Ph.D. Dr. Leda Lovato, Ph.D. Doctors arrive from Earth five years now, seeking construction of Farside station.”
He shook hands with them while it leaned back on its surgically shortened tail, red tongue lolling, grinning at him. The long bright eyes had a malicious glint. Amusement, perhaps, at his predicament. He would never guess what the fux was thinking, but he suspected that it understood too much.
“Thank you, Charlie. Mr. Sakuma wants you back right now.”
He ushered the visitors into the room, trying to seem more courteous than he felt, and shut the door on the abo. They went to the window before they came back to the chairs at his desk, the girl exclaiming in her wonder at the falls. He liked her voice.
Dr. Padhai was tall and gaunt. Handsome, perhaps, in a haggard, restless way, but also disturbing. The livid scar of some old wound slashed across his dark cheek and forehead, letting his right eyelid droop, making his intense black stare strangely disconcerting. He had a penetrating scent of something like camphor.
The girl held Norlund longer. She was slim enough, but ripely inviting, her olive skin aglow from the Northcape chill, her hair long and sleek and dark. In this light her eyes looked violet, warm and trustful. She wore a bright platinum bead nestled against the wing of her left nostril. Younger and lovelier than any Ph.D. he had known in his few semesters at Medeana University, down in the hotlands, she was far too fresh and tender for the Banda Basin.
“Mr. Sakuma tells me you’re trying to organize a Farside trip.” Sitting back at the desk, he tried to be diplomatic. “Technically, of course, Northcape itself is a projection from the Farside continent, but we’re protected here by the coast range and the Mushanga Sea, and we do get heat from Argo. Even here, the cold can be severe enough, but it gives you no idea of the climate beyond the glaciers—”
“The difficulties have been explained to us.” Padhai’s voice was harsh and hoarse, as if from too much shouting, his accent a little hard to understand. “We accept whatever risks there are.”
He turned to the girl for confirmation.
“We do, Mr. Norlund.” Her own soft Earth accent was more alluring, her tones firm and pure, so warmly melodious that he thought the fux should have had her for a model. “Please don’t try to delay us. Just remember what we’ve given up for this—our world and our time. Sixty Terran years to get here. Sixty more to go back, if we ever do, to a world we wouldn’t know. But we do know what we want.”
She touched the platinum sphere against her nostril.
“You must understand that we are Seekers.”
He nodded, not trying to understand. His people had been gone from Earth for six generations, and he disliked even the Medean hotlands, with their swarming races of fuxes and gasbags, their teeming predators, their human colonists nearly as strange. Northcape was his home, Earth too far away to matter. At the university, he had dropped the dull course in Terran history after the first idiotic test.
“Seekers of truth.” Padhai’s hollow voice was loud and impersonal, as if from too much preaching to unbelieving multitudes. “Seekers of life. Seekers of God.” He lifted his lean left hand to show a symbolic ring, a bright metal globe mounted on a black oval ground. “I suppose you would call us mystics.”
Norlund nodded again. The hotland campus had been a baffling buzz of queer phrases and queerer ideas which he had commonly ignored—though there had been one hot-blooded redhead, nearly as alluring as Leda Lovato, who had led him to the brink of baptism in the scummy Ring Sea.
“Try to understand.” It was less request than command. “My earlier ancestors had been seekers of oneness with the whole universe for many generations. I cannot say that they were wrong, but the goals of later searchers changed when the great radio telescopes began picking up evidences of other minds in our galaxy.”
Carefully, Norlund controlled his skepticism.
“I’ve read that much history,” he agreed. “The mother-worlders detected radio waves they thought were signals. They began sending ships to meet the senders. That’s how we humans got to Medea.”
“A turning point in the evolution of the human spirit.” Padhai’s dark eyes gleamed, and his hollow voice had the ring of worship. “The old quest for nirvana had been a difficult abstraction. For many, far too difficult. Suddenly, when those signals were received, we could begin to look for cosmic truth, for communion with a universal intelligence on this side of death.”
“You didn’t find it on Medea.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps because we forgot to look.”
“Is that why—” He turned to the silent girl. “Have you come to hunt for cosmic truth in the Banda Basin?”
“We have.” Her limpid eyes made a mute appeal. “Don’t laugh.”
“We’re Seekers, remember,” the dark man said. “The reach from Earth into space is the noblest thing our race has done—at least as it began. Later, tragically, that supreme first goal was almost forgotten. Our destined universal union has yet to be achieved, but it must be.”
“If those old space pioneers came looking for universal harmony . . .” Norlund paused to soften his sardonic tone. “The supposed signal turned out to be natural radio emissions from the hydrogen envelope of Argo, modulated in odd ways by the magnetic fields of the flaring suns and by Medea and Argo’s other moving moons. The fuxes and cosmic truth!” He laughed. “As for communion with the firebags—”
The girl’s hurt face stopped him.
“You must understand our disappointment.” Padhai’s voice was still commanding. “Recall the transit time to Earth. A laser beam takes fifty years to carry news there. The ship took sixty to get us here. We set out on reports now a century old. We arrived expecting to build upon a hundred years of progress—”
“And you found the hotlands!” Norlund grinned at the contrast. “The abo cultures wrecked by contact with the human—if the abos ever actually had any culture. The humans scrabbling to survive in a world they weren’t made for, most of their own culture lost, trying to live on the natives, getting their highs however they can, waiting for the next ship from Earth.” He made a face. “I’ve lived down there and I don’t like it.”
“We had hoped for more.” Padhai nodded solemnly. “Though the first explorers found no high technologies, some of them did report evidence of advanced achievement among the balloons. Linguistic, aesthetic, intellectual—”
“Gasbags!” The girl had flinched, but Norlund let his scornful voice run on. “Down at the university, I took a course in Medean biology. We spent a week on a lab ship to study the balloons.
Half-plants. They hatch out of floating weed in the tropical ocean. Inflate themselves with hydrogen when they mature. Drift on the wind or pump themselves along with their syphons. Living on insects or swamp-vermin or anchored by their drag-ropes over any sort of garbage. About as brainy as plastic market-bags!”
“Some, perhaps.” The girl showed no resentment, but her warm fervor surprised him. “Not all. We’ve been here five years now, looking for brainy balloons, if you want to call them that, digging through official records, touring the tropics, searching the tapes in the university archives, turning up clues wherever we could. We believe they do exist.”
The color of emotion became her as she continued. “There were—are—hundreds of different species of the balloons and the things they call fuxes. Evolved to fit the enormous range of habitats between the hot pole and the cold pole. Most pretty primitive. Many, as you say, degenerate now. Some already extinct. But at least a few were highly advanced, even with little or no material technology.”
She gestured toward the power stations under the falls and the blue-glowing hydroponic circles and the red-lit thermal roofs of Chong as if her aloof disdain could sweep them all away. “We’re looking for contact with a species never well-known: the Ahya—the kind you call fire balloons. A great part of their cycle of life is what you have just outlined; individuals bud from a plant-like matrix floating in the tropic seas. They inflate, fly, feed and grow, breed, shower and back into the sea. The difference we know is their way of death.”
“On Farside?” The words reflected more mockery than he had meant to show, and he saw her flush of resentment.
“Individuals past the sexual phase leave their swarms.” Her voice became coolly impersonal, her emotion well controlled. “They work their way to upper latitudes and catch a jet stream that carries them across the Ring Ocean and on over Farside.”
“To the famous Banda Basin?”
“We hope to follow them there.”
“A hazardous hope.” More careful now, he tried not to smile at her innocent intensity. “The basin’s a fine place, I guess, for old firebags to die. But not much good for anything else. Certainly not for people. The carbon dioxide doesn’t actually freeze out of the air. till you reach the great ranges beyond it, close to the cold pole, but the basin’s cold enough.”
