Collected Short Fiction, page 746
The balloons replied!
Though they were still far too high for him to hear whatever they sang, he saw them brighten and then begin to wax and wane in unison. Breathlessly intent, Leda stopped the booming song of her translator. When she touched a button on the console, the massed voices of the Ahya trilled and quavered faintly from a little speaker there.
“Dr. Aum, they’re waiting!” Relief shook her voice. “They’re still offended by our intrusion into this last sanctum, but at least they’re willing to let us try to explain.”
The explanation took a long time. Talking into the translator, Leda told her story of the Seekers and their search for a universal mind, almost in the words that Norlund remembered. Padhai took a turn, hollow-voiced and hoarse, shouting what Norlund thought must be his native Hindi. Much of the message, however, must have come from the memory banks of the computer itself, because the signals continued while the two Seekers stood silent, merely watching the sky.
The auroral curtains rippled, paler and brighter, redder and greener, reflecting Helle’s recent flares. The hard, bright twin points of Castor crept along their slow circle around the celestial pole. The northeast wind grew colder, soundless but deadly.
Chilled through in spite of his power pack, Norlund climbed into his crawler to heat a meal and brew smoking sealeaf tea for Leda and Padhai. When he came back with his tray, however, they had no time for it.
The first compact cluster had grown, as more scattered groups came back to join it. As it settled slowly back toward the sacred place, its member creatures began to shift positions in a strange and puzzling way.
Straight lines bent into whirling rings. Smaller rings meshed into the larger, to make a vast disk. It spun slowly, the balloons that formed it moving with a precision that looked almost mechanical. Bulging slowly, it became an enormous dish. A single balloon, glowing bright green, swam into place above it—and a stunned realization took Norlund’s breath.
That oddly shifting flow had outlined the shape of a reflecting telescope, with the lone green individual at the point where its focus should be. He wanted Leda to confirm or deny his dazing intuition, but she and Padhai were still bent over the console, watching the flash and flow of symbols on its scope, listening to its little speaker, which still trilled the swift, mind-piercing music of the Ahya.
When he looked back into the sky, that outlined telescope was already coming apart, its glowing components separating into two new clusters, which swiftly formed two new telescopes, axes aimed at new points of the midnight sky.
Soon those two dissolved again, the bright balloons flowing again to make up something else. Sometimes there were three slowly spinning telescopes, sometimes one again. Often there were other shapes, whose function he dared not try to guess.
Once, for perhaps three minutes, there was a lofty form that caught his throat with the breath-stopping beauty of its shape and changing radiance. The bright spires pointing at the Castor twins made him think of the Terran cathedrals he had seen in films at Medeana, but most of it matched nothing in his imagination. After those few aching, dazing, endless minutes, it too flowed apart.
Groping for sense in what he saw, Norlund felt utterly perplexed and somewhat frightened. There was purpose visible in that slow celestial dance, but its goal lay beyond him. There was power in it—which might be benign, for all he knew, or might be unimaginably evil.
“They understand why we’re here.”
Leda had turned at last from the console. Shivering with cold, even in her powered suit, she accepted her container of tea with a grateful little smile.
“Now,” she added, “they’re considering a tougher question. What to do about us. A pretty complex issue. To put it in a way you ought to understand, they’re deciding whether the human race has earned admission to universal civilization.”
That staggered him, even though he had half begun to anticipate something of the sort. Shivering to apprehensions colder than the silent northeast wind, he stared again at that strangely blazing celestial quadrille. Looking back at Leda, he tried to get his breath.
“There was—there was a metal-looking film.” He leaned toward her, trying to read some expression behind her dark goggles. “On some of the fragments of dead firebags I picked up. Inflated, they were spheres. A partial metallic lining would make a natural spheric mirror—or I suppose the inner membrane could be stretched to control the focus. When I saw them forming into something like a radio telescope—”
His breath failed again.
“True.” She nodded, pausing to sip from the hot container. Though he couldn’t see her features, she seemed curiously calm. “They do have a radio link.”
A shock of dismay shattered his awe.
“If they have to call the stars about us, we can’t wait for any answer. Except from the other suns in the Castor system, a reply would take years. Maybe hundreds or thousands of years. We’ve no time—”
“I believe the Ahya have a different sense of time.” Her mask lifted toward that intricate dance in the sky. “It was hard for me to grasp at first, because the individual balloons live no longer than we do. But here, for a time, each one is merged into a united mind that is eternal—or can be eternal, if we human beings can manage not to kill it.”
He glanced uneasily at the crawler where he supposed Dork was asleep. “How long will they need? To decide—whatever they are trying to decide?”
“We don’t know yet. We’ve been trying to communicate a sense of urgency. Without saying that we’re afraid of violence from our own kind—we don’t want to prejudice the verdict. But we can’t yet be sure of anything.”
With a baffled shrug, she glanced at the console.
“Even after all we’ve done, translation is still very largely an unsolved problem. Maybe unsolvable. We and they have too little in common—when you come to think about it, the human beings here have known the Ahya for several centuries without even beginning to guess what they are.”
“Dork is going to make trouble.” He frowned at the crawler. “Unless Padhai is ready to start back Sunday. Floreal and Nannuk will support him. I can’t hope to hold them any longer. The fact is, we’re already dangerously late.”
“We’ll see what they say.”
“We can’t wait a hundred years for an interstellar signal.”
“I don’t think they’ll ask us to.” He did glimpse her face as she handed back the empty tea container, worn, strained, half afraid yet half exultant, that bright bead gleaming against her nostril. “It’s true they send and receive interstellar radio signals. Their first link, probably, to the great galactic mind, but I don’t think it’s very important to them now. We don’t know enough to set any limits to what they can do. They can help us—if they decide we’re worth it.”
She returned to the console, while Padhai came to gulp his tea and wolf a few mouthfuls from the heated tray. When she called, he thrust the tray at Norlund and darted back to her. They listened silently, conferred in breathless whispers, fed some new message into the computer.
Norlund watched a long time, growing slowly colder. That unending minuet continued in the sky, dazzling with all its implications but still bewildering. He understood nothing that came from the Ahya, nothing that Leda sent back in reply. At last he climbed stiffly into his crawler, intending to watch from the pilot dome. Instead, warm again, he went to sleep.
He was never sure just what aroused him, but he started suddenly awake, haunted by a dim sense of trouble. He had been dreaming that he was back on the glacier, buried with Leda at the bottom of a deep crevasse. He had thought he heard a blizzard howling above them, and it took him a moment to recognize the singing of the Ahya.
His neck Was stiff and his dry mouth foul. Struggling upright in the seat, he rubbed his gummy eyes and stared at the Ahya swarming low outside the dome. Distended parchment bubbles, three or four meters in diameter, snaky limbs dangling, siphons pulsing as they sang. A few had patches of long, coarse hair, but most were bald and glistening, flushed with their changing radiance.
Uncertain what to think, he stumbled outside. The bitter wind took his breath and blurred his eyes with tears. For a moment, fumbling clumsily to adjust his mask, he couldn’t see anything. When he could breathe, he caught a sharp pungence, sweetish and strange, the odor of the Ahya.
Padhai was now at the console, a thin stick figure in his yellow thermal suit, waving his lean arms and shouting hoarse-throated Hindi into the mike. The beacons on the crawlers seemed to flash and change with the cadences of his speech, and the same rhythms echoed in the song that pealed from the speakers.
When he found Leda, she was standing behind him on the crawler hood, arms lifted toward a roseate globe that hovered above her. Face tilted, she was singing directly to it, her tones as strange as the response from its own throbbing siphon.
Its live ropes were reaching for her. One brushed her, flexed its tip to touch her arms and kiss her singing lips, slid its sleek coils around her. He was jarred with a momentary fear that it might carry her away. But that would be impossible, of course; its lift would not support a human being. Anyhow, she was not alarmed. Her own reaching hands found another probing rope, stroked it gently.
“Lee—” Fear had dried his throat, but he had to know what was happening. “Leda?”
She heard him and paused in her song.
“We’re okay, Olaf.” She looked down for a moment, her mask half lifted, her face almost luminous in the glow of the sphere, that symbolic bead shining white. Her voice was tremulous with joy. “They’re accepting us! It’s wonder—”
She had looked across from him to the other crawler, and he saw her suddenly frozen in unbelieving shock.
A gun crashed.
Padhai’s last shout died into a gasp of pain.
The nerve-probing chorus of the Ahya was cut off. All their motion stopped. Their changing hues stood still. In that stunned and breathless hush, he heard the clang of a crawler door and the grating of a boot on frozen gravel.
The gun slammed again, twice.
Whirling, he saw Dork crouched outside the crawler, wearing only the boots and his filthy underwear, red eyes squinting through the black tangle of his hair and beard. He gripped the gun with both bare hands, still aiming at Padhai.
“Got the crazy fux!”
He spat, spittle crackling in the deadly cold.
His gun swung toward Norlund.
Norlund was still in his exposure gear, his own gun slung under his arm but inside the heavy coverall—worn outside in this savage cold, it would have become too stiff to fire. With no time to reach it, he ducked back into the crawler.
Dork’s bullet crashed against the open door and whined away into the dark. Backing away toward the driver’s dome, he ripped at the closure, found the balanced mass of his own gun.
The bright metal frame of the doorway was outlined in the pale glow of the Ahya, a chill blue at first but slowly flowing into green. Pebbles grated. A shadow fell across the green. He caught Dork’s unclean odor.
Their guns exploded together, deafening in the crawler. Something plucked at his pushed-up mask, but he was still alive. Trembling, head ringing, he snapped on the inside lights.
Dork lay limp in his dirty underwear, hairy face down, one bare fist still clutching the gun. Most of the back of his head was gone.
Outside, Padhai stood swaying beside the console, bleeding through his mask, gloved hands against his chest. Leda was darting to him. She threw her arms around him, trying to support his sagging weight. Before Norlund could reach them, the balloons came back to life.
Their colors turned scarlet. The sound of their siphons became a wailing threnody, the cadence strange and slow. They sank again, toward the stricken man. Their quick ropes wrapped him. A dozen in a cluster, they lifted him away from Leda.
He was still alive. Norlund saw his lean limbs moving, heard his choked and gasping voice. Standing beneath, spotted with his blood, Leda sang something after him—or tried to. Her quavering tones broke into a sob of agony. No reply came from the cluster, but another red-glowing balloon dropped to wind its ropes around her while its siphon breathed a soft response to her broken song.
Norlund stood watching, breathless and bewildered, knowing nothing else to do. After what seemed to him a long time, that last balloon let Leda go and soared away after the cluster that carried Padhai.
All the Ahya he could see had now begun to glow in slow unison again, brightening and darkening together, rose and pink and rose and scarlet, rose and pink and rose and scarlet. Their wailing faded as they climbed. Moving in a dazed and automatic way, Leda tried to pick up their voices on the directional mike, but all she got was silence. When Norlund joined her, hoping somehow to help, they found that one of Dork’s shots had gone into the computer, riddling its banked microchips with fragments of the exploding bullet.
With the binoculars, finally with the telescope, they followed the clustered globes that climbed with Padhai higher and higher into the greenish, unsteady aurora. Several times they thought they saw him moving, until suddenly the globes stopped their flow of color, glowing crimson. There was no further movement of the dark, stick-like frame until the living ropes unwound to let it fall.
The Ahya scattered, their radiance fading.
When Leda finally lost the last of them in the telescope, he helped her back into the crawler. She was shivering, drained of energy. He brewed hot tea for her and warmed a meal. Not yet ready for food, she sipped a little of the tea. He offered to drive the crawler to search for Padhai.
“No.” Her husky tones were slow and dead, beyond sobs or tears. “Don’t do that. He lies where he should. Where the Ahya die.”
He put her into her bunk and broke radio silence to call the station. When Nannuk answered, he reported briefly that Padhai and Dork were dead. The balloons were gone and the mission was over. Seeming relieved with the news, Nannuk and Floreal agreed to bring their crawler to join him.
He was ready when they arrived, with Leda’s now-useless communication gear stripped off the crawlers and the pressure seal on his own repaired where Dork’s glancing bullet had torn it. He had taped his report on the tragedy for the firm and the Northcape Council. Dork’s body he left lying on the icy gravel, beside the ruined computer and whatever else he thought might slow down their race back across the ice.
“Try to forgive him,” he urged Leda.
Even after she had slept and eaten, she still looked pale and drained, hopelessly despondent.
“For your own sake,” he said. “What he did does look absolutely evil. A crime against all humanity—if you and Padhai were really getting through to some higher intelligence. But he was afraid of the Ahya and afraid of Padhai. He must have panicked when he woke and found the creatures swarming all around us. Perhaps he thought they were attacking you. He didn’t understand.”
“What does it matter?” She shrugged, not looking at him, her voice tired and dull. “Nothing matters now.”
Riding with him in the lead machine, while they climbed out of the basin and crossed that bare plateau again, following a new route that looked more direct, she kept bleakly silent. When he tried to talk, she seemed not to hear.
“What will you do?” He put the question more than once. “Assuming we do get out alive?”
They were on the ice again, the three crawlers tied in line, before she tried to give him any answer.
“I don’t know.” She sat staring blankly at the white horizon. “Dork killed more than Dr. Aum. I’m afraid he killed the human future. After what they saw of us there in the basin, I don’t think the Ahya will ever give us another chance.”
For a long time, as they lurched and slid and bumped across the glacier, she said no more.
“But I do owe a debt to Dr. Aum.” She sighed and shook her head. “I owe a report to the Seeker Society—but now there’s really nothing to report.”
“I think there is,” he said. “What I saw convinced me that the Ahya have at least a radio link with intelligent life on the planets of other stars. That fact should excite any scientist.”
“Maybe you’re convinced.” She watched without interest while he pulled the crawler out of a skid toward a gaping cleft in the ice. “But nobody else was there. All our solid evidence was in the computer. All we’ve learned since we arrived, about the language and the history of the Ahya. All they told us, there in the basin. All the evidence that they really do belong to a great galactic culture. With the computer gone—”
Her voice faded into listless silence as the second crawler slid toward that ice-pit in the wake of the first. He needed all his skill to ease the slack out of the connecting cable without a jerk that might snap it.
“Of course I must go back to Earth,” she went on when she saw that he could listen again. “I’ll tell the story, with whatever evidence I can put back together. Perhaps a few will believe. Perhaps the Society will find resources to mount another expedition.”
She sat silent while he towed the following machines up a narrow and hazardous ridge, away from the fissure.
“Little enough promise in that,” she muttered when they were on level ice again. “That would take a hundred years and more. By that time, your own descendants will be mining uranium and thorium on the plateau—maybe even in the sacred basin. The Ahya will be gone. I don’t know where, but I think they’ve had enough of us.”
She said no more.
Later, when they were crossing another stretch of smoother ice, he attacked her silence again, talking about his life in Northcape and his place in the engineering firm. She sat listening, with little show of interest. Somewhat clumsily, because of her bitter apathy and all the gulfs he felt between them, he led up to his own urgent question:
“Leda, why don’t you stay? You may think I’m crude to ask you now—so soon—but I’ll never have another chance. Won’t you—marry me?”
