Limits, page 16
The fux was quiet for a time. A six-legged fux sponged her back with water; the sponge seemed to be a Medean plant. Deadeye said, “I learned from humans that ‘deadeye’ meant ‘accurate of aim.’ I set out to be the best spear-caster in…” She trailed off into a language of barking and yelping. The odd-looking biped held conversation with her. Perhaps he was soothing her.
Deadeye howled—and fell apart. She crawled forward, pulling against the ground with hands and forefeet, and her hindquarters were left behind. The hindquarters were red and dripping at the juncture, and the tail slid through them: more than a meter of thick black tail, stained with red, and as long as Harvester’s now. The other fuxes came forward, some to tend Deadeye, some to examine the hindquarters…in which muscles were still twitching.
Ten minutes later Deadeye stood up. He made it look easy; given his tail and his low center of mass, perhaps it was. He spoke in his own language, and the fuxes filed away into the yellow bushes. In the human tongue Deadeye said, “I must guard my nest. Alone. Travel safely.”
“See you soon,” Bronze Legs said. He led Rachel after the fuxes. “He won’t want company now. He’ll guard the ‘nest’ till the little ones eat most of it and come out. Then he’ll go sex-crazy, but by that time we’ll be back. How are you feeling?”
“A little woozy,” Rachel said. “Too much blood.”
“Take my arm.”
The color of their arms matched perfectly.
“Is she safe here? I mean he. Deadeye.”
“He’ll learn to walk faster than you think, and he’s got his spear. We haven’t seen anything dangerous around. Rachel, they don’t have a safety hangup.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes they get killed. Okay, they get killed. Deadeye has his reasons for being here. If his children live, they’ll own this place. Some of the adults’ll stay to help them along. That’s how they get new territory.”
Confusing. “You mean they have to be born here?”
“Right. Fuxes visit. They don’t conquer. After awhile they have to go home. Grace is still trying to figure if that’s physiology or just a social quirk. But sometimes they visit to give birth, and that’s how they get new homes. I don’t think fuxes’ll ever be space travelers.”
“We have it easier.”
“That we do.”
“Bronze Legs, I want to make love to you.”
He missed a step. He didn’t look at her. “No. Sorry.”
“Then,” she said a little desperately, “will you at least tell me what’s wrong? Did I leave out a ritual, or take too many baths or something?”
Bronze Legs said, “Stage fright.”
He sighed when he saw that she didn’t understand. “Look, ordinarily I’d be looking for some privacy for us…which wouldn’t be easy, because taking your clothes off in an unfamiliar domain…never mind. When I make love with a woman I don’t want a billion strangers criticizing my technique.”
“The memory tapes.”
“Right. Rachel, I don’t know where you find men who want that kind of publicity. Windstorm and I, we let a post-male watch us once…but after all, they aren’t human.”
“I could turn off the tape.”
“It records memories, right? Unless you forgot about me completely, which I choose to consider impossible, you’d be remembering me for the record. Wouldn’t you?”
She nodded. And went back to the crawler to sleep. Others would be sleeping in the tents; she didn’t want the company.
The howler’s motor was half old, half new. The new parts had a handmade look: bulky, with file marks. One of the fans was newer, cruder, heavier than the other. Rachel could only hope the Medeans were good with machinery.
The tough-looking redhead asked, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
“I took a howler across most of Koschei,” Rachel told her. She straightened, then swung up onto the saddle. Its original soft plastic seat must have disintegrated; what replaced it looked and felt like tanned skin. “Top speed, a hundred and forty kilometers an hour. Override—this switch—boosts the fans so I can fly. Ten minutes of flight, then the batteries block up and I’ve got to come down. Six slots in the ground-effect skirt so I can go in any direction. The main thing is to keep my balance. Especially when I’m flying.”
Windstorm did not seem reassured. “You won’t get that kind of performance out of a fifty-year-old machine. Treat it tender. And don’t fly if you’re in a hurry, because you’ll be using most of the power just to keep you up. Two more things—” She reached out to put Rachel’s hands on a switch and a knob. Her own hands were large and strong, with prominent veins. “Searchlight. This knob swings it around, and this raises and lowers it. It’s your best weapon. If it doesn’t work, flee. Second thing is your goggles. Sling them around your neck.”
“Where are they?”
Windstorm dug goggles from the howler’s saddlebag: a flexible strap and two large hemispheres of red glass. A similar set swung from her own neck. “You should never have to ask that question again on Medea. Here.”
The other vehicles were ready to go. Windstorm jogged to her own howler, leaving Rachel with the feeling that she had failed a test.
It was past noon of the Medean day. Harvester was riding Giggles, the six-legged virgin. The rest of the fuxes rode the ground-effect raft. The vehicles rode high, above the forest of chrome yellow bushes.
Windstorm spoke from the intercom. “We stay ahead of the crawlers and to both sides. We’re looking for anything dangerous. If you see something you’re afraid of, sing out. Don’t wait.”
Rachel eased into position. The feel of the howler was coming back to her. It weighed half a kiloton, but you still did some of your steering by shifting weight.… “Windstorm, aren’t you tired?”
“I got some sleep while Deadeye was dropping her hindquarters.”
Maybe Windstorm didn’t trust anyone else to supervise the rammer. Rachel was actually relieved. It struck her that most Medeans had lost too many of their “safety hangups.”
The bushes ended sharply, at the shore of a fast-flowing river carrying broad patches of scarlet scum. Some of the patches bloomed with flowers of startling green. Harvester boarded the raft to cross.
There was wheatfield beyond, but the yellow plants were feathery and four meters high. Hemispheres of white rock appeared with suspicious regularity. The expedition had swung around to north-and-heatward. Argo stood above the peaks of a rounded mountain range. Many-limbed birds rode the air above them.
Rachel looked up to see one dropping toward her face.
She could see the hooked beak and great claws aiming at her eyes. Her blind fingers sought the searchlight controls. She switched on the searchlight and swung the beam around and up. Like a laser cannon: first fire, then aim. Calmly, now.
The beam found the bird and illuminated it in blue fire: a fearsome sight. Wings like oiled leather, curved meat-ripping beak, muscular forelegs with long talons: and the hind legs were long, slender, and tipped each with a single sword blade. They weren’t for walking at all, nor for anything but weaponry.
The bird howled, shut its eyes tight, and tried to turn in the air. Its body curled in a ball; its wings folded around it. Rachel dropped the beam to keep it pinned until it smacked hard into the wheatfield.
The intercom said, “Nice.”
“Thank you.” Rachel sounded deceptively calm.
“Grace wants to call a halt,” Windstorm said. “Up by that next boulder.”
“Fine.”
The boulders were all roughly the same size: fairly regular hemispheres one and a half meters across.
Grace and Bronze Legs came out of the crawler lugging instruments on a dolly. They unloaded a box on one side of the boulder, and Grace went to work on it. Bronze Legs moved the dolly around to the other side and unfurled a silver screen. When Rachel tried to speak, Grace shushed her. She fiddled a bit with various dials, then turned on the machine.
A shadow-show formed on the screen: a circle of shadow, and darker shapes within. Grace cursed and touched dials, feather-lightly. The blurred shadows took on detail.
Shadows of bones, lighter shadows of flesh. There were four oversized heads, mostly jaws, overlapping near the center; and four tails near the rim, and a maze of legs and spines between. Four creatures all wrapped intimately around each other to just fill the shell.
“I knew it!” Grace cried. “They were too regular. They had to be eggs or nests or plants or something like that. Windstorm, dear, if we pile this junk back on the dolly, can you tow it to the next rock?”
They did that. The next rock was very like the first: an almost perfect hemisphere with a surface like white plaster. Rachel rapped it with her knuckles. It felt like stone. But the deep-radar shadow showed three big-headed foetuses just filling their environment, plus a tiny one that had failed to grow.
“Well. They all seem to be at the same stage of development,” Grace observed. “I wonder if it’s a seasonal thing?”
Rachel shook her head. “It’s different every time you turn around. Lord! You learn a place, you walk a couple of kilometers, you have to start all over again. Grace, don’t you ever get frustrated? You can’t run fast enough to stay in one place!”
“I love it. And it’s worse than you think, dear.” Grace folded the screen and stacked it on the dolly. “The domains don’t stay the same. We have spillovers from other domains, from high winds and tidal slosh and migration. I’d say a Medean ecology is ruined every ten years. Then I have to learn it all over again. Windstorm, dear, I’d like to look at one more of these rock eggs. Will you tow—”
The windstorm was sudden and violent. “Damn it, Grace, this isn’t the way we planned it! We do our biological research on the way back! After we set up the power system, then we can give the local monsters a chance to wreck us.”
Grace’s voice chilled. “Dear, it seems to me that this bit of research is quite harmless.”
“It uses up time and supplies. We’ll do it on the way back, when we know we’ve got the spare time. We’ve been through this. Pack up the deep-radar and let’s move.”
Now the rolling hills of feather-wheat sloped gently up toward an eroded mountain range whose peaks seemed topped with pink cotton. The three-legged female, Gimpy, trotted alongside Rachel, talking of star travel. Her gait was strange, rolling, but she kept up as long as Rachel held her howler to the power plant’s twenty KPH.
She could not grasp interstellar distances. Rachel didn’t push. She spoke of wonders instead: of the rings of Saturn, and the bubble cities of Lluagor, and the Smithpeople, and the settling of whale and dolphin colonies in strange oceans. She spoke of time compression: of gifting Sereda with designs for crude steam engines and myriads of wafer-sized computer brains, and returning to find steam robots everywhere: farmland, city streets, wilderness, households, disneylands; of fads that could explode across a planet and vanish without a trace, like tobacco pipes on Koschei, op-art garments on Earth, weight lifting on low-gravity Horvendile.
It was long before she got Gimpy talking about herself.
“I was of my parent’s second litter, within a group that moved here to study your kind,” Gimpy said. “They taught us bow and arrow, and a better design of shovel, and other things. We might have died without them.”
“The way you said that: second litter. Is there a difference?”
“Yes. One has the first litter when one can. The second litter comes to one who proves her capability by living that long. The third litter, the male’s litter, comes only with the approval of one’s clan. Else the male is not allowed to breed.”
“That’s good genetics.” Rachel saw Gimpy’s puzzlement. “I mean that your custom makes better fuxes.”
“It does. I will never see my second litter,” Gimpy said. “I was young when I made my mistake, but it was foolish. The breed improves. I will not be a one-legged male.”
They moved into a rift in the eroded mountain range, and the incredible became obvious. The mountains were topped with pink cotton candy. It must have been sticky like cotton candy, too. Rachel could see animals trapped in it. Gimpy wanted no part of that. She dropped back and boarded the raft.
They crossed the cotton candy with fans blasting at maximum. The big vehicles blew pink froth in all directions. Something down there wasn’t trapped at all. A ton of drastically flattened pink snail, with a perfect snail shell perched jauntily on its back, cruised over the cotton candy leaving a slime trail that bubbled and expanded to become more pink froth. It made for the still corpse of a many-limbed bird, flowed over it, and stopped to digest it.
The strangeness was getting to Rachel; and that was a strange thing for her. She was a rammer. Strangeness was the one constant in her life. Born aboard a ramship, not Morven, she had already gone once around the trade circuit. Even a rammer who returned to a world he knew must expect to find it completely changed; and Rachel knew that. But the strangeness of Medea came faster than she could swallow it or spit it out.
She fiddled with the intercom until she got Grace.
“Yes, dear, I’m driving. What is it?”
“It’s confusion. Grace, why aren’t all planets like Medea? They’ve all got domains, don’t they? Deserts, rain forests, mountains, poles and equators…you see what I mean?”
She heard the xenobiologist’s chuckle. “Dear, the Cold Pole is covered with frozen carbon dioxide. Where we’re going it’s hotter than boiling water. What is there on the trade circuit worlds that splits up the domains? Mountain ranges? An ocean for a heat sink? Temperature, altitude, rainfall? Medea has all of that, plus the one-way winds and the one-way ocean currents. The salinity goes from pure water to pure brine. The glaciers carry veins of dry ice heatward, so there are sudden jumps in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. Some places there are no tides. Other places, Argo wobbles enough to make a terrific tidal slosh. Then again, everything has to adapt to the flares. Some animals have shells. Some sea beasts can dive deep. Some plants seed, other grow a big leaf for an umbrella.”
Beyond the pass the mountains dropped more steeply, down to an arm of the Ring Sea. Rachel had no problem controlling the howler, but the mobile power plant was laboring hard, with its front vents wide open to hold it back and little pressure left for steering. There should be no real danger. Two probes had mapped this course.
“Everything is more different, huh?”
“Excuse me, dear…that’s got it. Sonofabitch, we could live without that sonofabitching tail wind. Okay. Do you remember the mock turtle we showed you yesterday evening? We’ve traced it six thousand kilometers to coldward. In the Icy Sea it’s seagoing and much larger. Follow it heatward and it gets smaller and more active. We think it’s the food supply. Glaciers stir up the bottom, and the sea life loves that. To heatward a bigger beast starves…sometimes. But we could be wrong. Maybe it has to conserve heat in the colder climates. I’d like to try some experiments someday.”
The white boulders that turned out to be giant eggs were thicker here on the heatward slopes. And on the lower slopes— But this was strange.
The mountainsides were gay with pennants. Thousands of long, flapping flags, orange or chrome yellow. Rachel tried to make it out. Grace was still talking; Rachel began to feel she’d opened a Pandora’s Box.
“The closer you look to the Hot Pole, the more competition you find among the sea life. New things flow in from coldward, constantly. All the six-limbed and eight-limbed forms, we think they were forced onto the land, kicked out of the ocean by something bigger or meaner. They left the ocean before they could adopt the usual fish shape, which is four fins and a tail.”
“Grace, wait a minute, now. Are you saying…we…”
“Yes, dear.” The smile Rachel couldn’t see had to be a smirk. “Four limbs and a tail. We dropped the tail, but the human form is perfectly designed for a fish.”
Rachel switched her off.
The hillside trees had extensive root systems that gripped rock like a strong man’s fist, and low, almost conical trunks. On each tree the tip of the trunk sprouted a single huge leaf, a flapping flag, orange or chrome yellow and ragged at the end. All pennants and no armies. Some of the flags were being torn apart by the air blast from the ground-effect vehicles. Perhaps that was how they spread their seeds, Rachel thought. Like tapeworms. Ask Grace? She’d had enough of Grace, and she’d probably have to start with an apology.…
The day brightened as if clouds had passed from before the sun.
The slopes were easing off into foothills now. Gusts of wind turned some of the flapping pennants into clouds of confetti. It was easier to go through the papery storms than to steer around. Rachel used one hand as a visor; the day had turned quite bright. Was she carrying dark glasses? Of course, the goggles—
It was a flare!
She kept her eyes resolutely lowered until she’d pulled the red cups over her eyes and adjusted them. Then she turned to look. The suns were behind her left shoulder, and one was nearly lost in the white glare of the other.
Bronze Legs was asleep in a reclined passenger chair in the trailing crawler. It was like sleeping aboard a boat at anchor…but the sudden glare woke him instantly.
Going downhill, the mobile power plant rode between the two crawlers, for greater safety. The angle of descent hadn’t seriously hampered the ponderous makeshift vehicle. But all bets were off now. Flare!
The fuxes were still on the raft. They could be hurt if they tumbled off at this speed, but their every instinct must be telling them to get off and dig. Bronze Legs flattened his nose against the windscreen. Charles “Hairy” McBundy, fighting to slow the power plant and raft, wouldn’t have attention to spare; and there had to be a place to stop. Someplace close, someplace flat, dirt rather than rock, and damn quick! There, to the left? Not quite flat, and it ended short, in a cliff. Tough. Bronze Legs hit the intercom button and screamed, “Hard left, Hairy, and when you stop, stop fast!”
