Hunter's Moon

Both suns were now down. The western mountains had become a wave of blackness, unstirring, as though the cold of Beyond had touched and frozen it even as it crested, a first sea barrier on the flightway to the Promise; but heaven stood purple above, bearing the earliest stars and two small moons, ocher edged with silvery crescents, like the Promise itself. Eastward, the sky remained blue. There, just over the ocean, Ruii was almost fully lighted, Its bands turned luminous across Its crimson glow. Beneath the glade that It cast, the waters shivered, wind made visible.

A’i’ach felt the wind too, cool and murmurous. Each finest hair on his body responded. He needed but little thrust to hold his course, enough effort to give him a sense of his own strength and of being at one, in travel and destination, with his Swarm. Their globes surrounded him, palely iridescent, well-nigh hiding from him the ground over which they passed; he was among the highest up. Their life-scents overwhelmed all else which the air bore, sweet, heady, and they were singing together, hundreds of voices in chorus, so that their spirits might mingle and become Spirit, a foretaste of what awaited them in the far west. Tonight, when P’a crossed the face of Ruii, there would return the Shining Time. Already they rejoiced in the raptures ahead.

A’i’ach alone did not sing, nor did he lose more than a part of himself in dreams offcast and love. He was too aware of what he carried. The thing that the human had fastened to him weighed very little, but what it was putting into his soul was heavy and harsh. The whole Swarm knew about the dangers of attack, of course, and many clutched weapons—stones to drop or sharp-pointed branches shed by trees—in the tendrils that streamed under their globes. A’i’ach had a steel knife, his price for letting the human burden him. Yet it was not in the nature of the People to dread what might sink down upon them out of the future. A’i’ach was strangely changed by that which went on inside him.

The knowledge had come, he knew not how, slowly enough that he was not astonished by it. Instead, a grimness had meanwhile congealed. Somewhere in those hills and forests, a Beast ran that bore the same thing he did, that was also in ghostly Swarm-touch with a human. He could not guess what this might portend, save trouble of some kind for the People. He might well be unwise to ask. Therefore he had come to a resolve he realized was alien to his race: he would end the menace.

Since his eyes were set low on his body, he could not see the object secured on top, nor the radiance beaming upward from it. His companions could, though, and he had gotten a demonstration before he agreed to carry it. The beam was faint, faint, visible only at night and then only against a dark background. He would look for a shimmer among shadows on the land. Sooner or later, he would come upon it. The chance was not bad now at this, the Shining Time, when the Beasts would seek to kill People they knew would be gathered in vast numbers to revel.

A’i’ach had wanted the knife as a curiosity of possible usefulness. He meant to keep it in the boughs of a tree; when the mood struck him, he would experiment with it. A Person did once in a while employ a chance-found object, such as a sharp pebble, for some fleeting purpose, such as scooping open a crestflower pod to release its delicious seedlets upon the air. Perhaps with a knife he could shape wood into tools and have a stock of them always ready.

Given his new insight, A’i’ach saw what the blade was truly for. He could smite from above till a Beast was dead—no, the Beast.

A’i’ach was hunting.

Several hours before sundown, Hugh Brocket and his wife, Jannika Rezek, had been preparing for their night’s work when Chrisoula Gryparis arrived, much overdue. A storm had first grounded aircraft at Enrique and then, perversely moving west, forced her into a long detour on her way to Hansonia. She didn’t even see the Ring Ocean until she had traversed a good thousand kilometers of mainland, whereafter she must bend southward an equal distance to reach the big island.

“How lonely Port Kato looks from the air,” she remarked. Though accented, her English—the agreed-upon common language at this particular station—was fluent: one reason she had come here to investigate the possibility of taking a post.

“Because it is,” Jannika answered in her different accent. “A dozen scientists, twice as many juniors, and a few support personnel. That makes you extra welcome.”

“What, do you feel isolated?” Chrisoula wondered. “You can call to anywhere on Nearside that there is a holocom, can you not?”

“Yeah, or flit to a town on business or vacation or whatever,” Hugh said. “But no matter how stereo an image is and sounds, it’s only an image. You can’t go out with it for a drink after your conference is finished, can you? As for an actual visit, well, you’re soon back here among the same old faces. Outposts get pretty ingrown socially. You’ll find out, if you sign on.” In haste: “Not that I’m trying to discourage you. Jan’s right, we’d be more than happy to have somebody fresh join us.”

His own accent was due to history. English was his mother tongue, but he was third-generation Medean, which meant that his grandparents had left North America so long ago that speech back there had changed like everything else. To be sure, Chrisoula wasn’t exactly up-to-date, when a laser beam took almost fifty years to go from Sol to Colchis and the ship in which she had fared, unconscious and unaging, was considerably slower than that…

“Yes, from Earth!” Jannika’s voice glowed.

Chrisoula winced. “It was not happy on Earth when I left. Maybe things got better afterward. Please, I will talk about that later, but now I would like to look forward.”

Hugh patted her shoulder. She was fairly pretty, he thought: not in a class with Jan, which few women were, but still, he’d enjoy it if acquaintance developed bedward. Variety is the spice of wife.

“You really have had bad luck today, haven’t you?” he murmured. “Getting delayed till Roberto—uh, Dr. Venosta went out in the field—and Dr. Feng back to the Center with a batch of samples—” He referred to the chief biologist and the chief chemist. Chrisoula’s training was in biochemistry; it was hoped that she, lately off the latest of the rare starcraft, would contribute significantly to an understanding of life on Medea.

She smiled. “Well, then I will know others first, starting with you two nice people.”

Jannika shook her head. “I am sorry,” she said. “We are busy ourselves, soon to leave, and may not return until sunrise.”

“That is—how long? About thirty-six hours? Yes. Is that not long to be away in… what do you say?… this weird an environment?”

Hugh laughed. “It’s the business of a xenologist, which we both are,” he said. “Uh, I think I, at least, can spare a little time to show you around and introduce you and make you feel sort of at home.” Arriving as she did at a point in the cycle of watches when most folk were still asleep, Chrisoula had been conducted to his and Jannika’s quarters. They were early up, to make ready for their expedition.

Jannika gave him a hard glance. She saw a big man who reckoned his age at forty-one Terrestrial years: burly, a trifle awkward in his movements, beginning to show a slight paunch; craggy-featured, sandy-haired, blue-eyed; close-cropped, clean-shaven, but sloppily clad in tunic, trousers, and boots, the style of the miners among whom he had grown up. “I have not time,” she stated.

Hugh made an expansive gesture. “Sure, you just continue, dear.” He took Chrisoula under the elbow. “Come on, let’s wander.”

Bewildered, she accompanied him out of the cluttered hut. In the compound, she halted and stared about her as if this were her first sight of Medea.

Port Kato was indeed tiny. Not to disturb regional ecology with things like ultraviolet lamps above croplands and effluents off them, it drew its necessities from older and larger settlements on the Nearside mainland. Moreover, while close to the eastern edge of Hansonia, it stood a few kilometers inland, on high ground, as a precaution against Ring Ocean tides, which could get monstrous. Thus nature walled and roofed and weighed on the huddle of structures, wherever she looked—

—or listened, smelled, touched, tasted, moved. In slightly lesser gravity than Earth’s, she had a bound to her step. The extra oxygen seemed to lend energy likewise, though her mucous membranes had not yet quite stopped smarting. Despite a tropical location, the air was balmy and not overly humid, for the island lay close enough to Farside to be cooled. It was full of pungencies, only a few of which she could remotely liken to anything familiar, such as musk or iodine. Foreign too were sounds—rustlings, trills, croakings, mumbles—which the dense atmosphere made loud in her ears.

The station itself had an outlandish aspect. Buildings were made of local materials to local design; even a radiant energy converter resembled nothing at home. Multiple shadows carried peculiar tints; in fact, every color was changed in this ruddy light. The trees that reared above the roof were of odd shapes, their foliage in hues of orange, yellow, and brown. Small things flitted among them or scuttled along their branches. Occasional glittery drifts in the breeze did not appear to be dust.

The sky was deep-toned. A few clouds were washed with faint pink and gold. The double sun Colchis—Castor C was suddenly too dry a name—was declining westward, both members so dim that she could safely gaze at them for a short while, Phrixus at close to its maximum angular separation from Helle.

Opposite them, Argo dominated heaven, as always on the inward-facing hemisphere of Medea. Here the primary planet hung low; treetops hid part of the great flattened disc. Daylight paled the redness of its heat, which would be lurid after dark. Nonetheless it was a colossus, as broad to the eye as fifteen or sixteen Lunas above Earth. The subtly chromatic bands and spots upon its face, ever-changing, were clouds more huge than continents and hurricane vortices that could have swallowed whole this moon upon which she stood.

Chrisoula shivered. “It… strikes me,” she whispered, “more than anywhere around Enrique or—or approaching from space… I have come elsewhere in the universe.”

Hugh laid an arm around her waist. Not being a glib man otherwise, he merely said, “Well this is different. That’s why Port Kato exists, you know. To study in depth an area that’s been isolated a while; they tell me the isthmus between Hansonia and the mainland disappeared fifteen thousand years ago. The local dromids, at least, never heard of humans before we arrived. The ouranids did get rumors, which may have influenced them a little, but surely not much.”

“Dromids—ouranids—oh.” Being Greek, she caught his meanings at once. “Fuxes and balloons, correct?”

Hugh frowned. “Please. Those are pretty cheap jokes, aren’t they? I know you hear them a lot in town, but I think both races deserve more dignified names from us. They are intelligent, remember.”

“I am sorry.”

He squeezed a trifle. “No harm done, Chris. You’re new. With a century needed for question and answer, between here and Earth—”

“Yes. I have wondered if it is really worth the cost, planting colonies beyond the Solar System just to send back scientific knowledge that slowly.”

“You’ve got more recent information about that than I do.”

“Well… the planetology, biology, chemistry, they were still giving new insights when I left, and this was good for everything from medicine to volcano control.” The woman straightened. “Perhaps the next step is in your field, xenology? If we can come to understand a nonhuman mind—no, two, on this world—maybe three, if there really are two quite unlike sorts of ouranid as I have heard theorized—” She drew breath. “Well, then we might have a chance of understanding ourselves.” He thought she was genuinely interested, not merely trying to please him, when she went on: “What is it you and your wife do? They mentioned to me in Enrique it is quite special.”

“Experimental, anyway.” Not to overdo things, he released her. “A complicated story. Wouldn’t you rather take the grand tour of our metropolis?”

“Later I can by myself, if you must go back to work. But I am fascinated by what I have heard of your project. Reading the minds of aliens!”

“Hardly that.” Seeing his opportunity, he indicated a bench outside a machine shed. “If you really would like to hear, sit down.”

As they did, Piet Marais, botanist, emerged from his cabin. To Hugh’s relief, he simply greeted them before hurrying off. Certain Hansonian plants did odd things at this time of day. Everyone else was still indoors, the cook and bull cook making breakfast, the rest washing and dressing for their next wakeful period.

“I suppose you are surprised,” Hugh commenced. “Electronic neuranalysis techniques were in their infancy on Earth when your ship left. They took a spurt soon afterward, and of course the information reached us before you did. The use there had been on lower animals as well as humans, so it wasn’t too hard for us—given a couple of geniuses in the Center—to adapt the equipment for both dromids and ouranids. Both those species have nervous systems too, after all, and the signals are electrical. Actually, it’s been more difficult to develop the software, the programs, than the hardware. Jannika and I are working on that, collecting empirical data for the psychologists and semanticians and computer people to use.

“Uh, don’t misunderstand, please. To us, this is nearly incidental. Mindscan—bad word, but we seem to be stuck with it—mindscan should eventually be a valuable tool in our real job, which is to learn how local natives live, what they think and feel, everything about them. However, at present it’s very new, very limited, and very unpredictable.”

Chrisoula tugged her chin. “Let me tell you what I imagine I know,” she suggested, “then you tell me how wrong I am.”

“Sure.”

She grew downright pedantic: “Synapse patterns can be identified and recorded which correspond to motor impulses, sensory inputs, their processing—and at last, theoretically, to thoughts themselves. But the study is a matter of painfully accumulating data, interpreting them, and correlating the interpretations with verbal responses. Whatever results one gets, they can be stored in a computer program as an n-dimensional map off which readings can be made. More readings can be gotten by interpolation.”

“Whe-ew!” the man exclaimed. “Go on.”

“I am right this far? I did not expect to be.”

“Well, naturally, you’re trying to sketch in a few words what needs volumes of math and symbolic logic to describe halfway properly. Still, you’re doing better than I could myself.”

“I continue. Now recently there are systems which can make correspondences between different maps. They can transform the patterns that constitute thought in one mind into the thought-patterns of another. Also, direct transmission between nervous systems is possible. A pattern can be detected, passed through a computer for translation, and electromagnetically induced in a receiving brain. Does this not amount to telepathy?”

Hugh started to shake his head, but settled for: “M-m-m, of an extremely crude sort. Even two humans who think in the same language and know each other inside out, even they get only partial information—simple messages, burdened with distortion, low signal-to-noise ratio, and slow transmission. How much worse when you try with a different life form! The variations in speech alone, not to mention neurological structure, chemistry—”

“Yet you are attempting it, with some success, I hear.”

“Well, we made a certain amount of progress on the mainland with both dromids and ouranids. But believe me, ‘certain amount’ is a gross overstatement.”

“Next you are trying it on Hansonia, where the cultures must be entirely strange to you. In fact, the species of ouranid—Why? Do you not add needlessly to your difficulties?”

“Yes—that is, we do add countless problems, but it is not needless. You see, most cooperating natives have spent their whole lives around humans. Many of them are professional subjects of study: dromids for material pay, ouranids for psychological satisfaction, amusement, I suppose you could say. They’re deracinated; they themselves often don’t have any idea why their ‘wild’ kinfolk do something. We wanted to find out if mindscan can be developed into a tool for learning about more than neurology. For that, we needed beings who’re relatively, uh, uncontaminated. Lord knows Nearside is full of virgin areas. But here Port Kato already was, set up for intensive study of a region that’s both isolated and sharply defined. Jan and I decided we might as well include mindscan in our research program.”

Hugh’s glance drifted to the immensity of Argo and lingered. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said low, “it’s incidental—one more way for us to try and find out why the dromids and ouranids here are at war.”

“They kill each other elsewhere too, do they not?”

“Yes, in a variety of ways, for a larger variety of reasons, as nearly as we can determine. Let me remark for the record, I myself don’t hold with the theory that information on this planet can be acquired by eating its possessor. For one thing, I can show you more areas than not where dromids and ouranids seem to coexist perfectly peacefully.” Hugh shrugged. “Nations on Earth never were identical. Why should we expect Medea to be the same everywhere?”

“On Hansonia, however—you say war?”

“Best word I can think of. Oh, neither group has a government to issue a formal declaration. But the fact is that more and more, for the past couple of decades—as long as humans have been observing, if not longer—dromids on this island have been hellbent to kill ouranids. Wipe them out! The ouranids are pacifistic, but they do defend themselves, sometimes with active measures like ambushes.” Hugh grimaced. “I’ve glimpsed several fights, and examined the results of a lot more. Not pleasant. If we in Port Kato could mediate—bring peace—well, I’d think that alone might justify man’s presence on Medea.”

While he sought to impress her with his kindliness, he was not hypocritical. A pragmatist, he had nevertheless wondered occasionally if humans had a right to be here. Long-range scientific study was impossible without a self-supporting colony, which in turn implied a minimum population, most of whose members were not scientists. He, for example, was the son of a miner and had spent his boyhood in the outback. True, settlement was not supposed to increase beyond its present level, and most of this huge moon was hostile enough to his breed that further growth did seem unlikely. But—if nothing else, simply by their presence, Earthlings had already done irreversible things to both native races.

“You cannot ask them why they fight?” Chrisoula wondered.

Hugh smiled wryly. “Oh, sure, we can ask. By now we’ve mastered local languages for everyday purposes. Except, how deep does our understanding go?

“Look, I’m the dromid specialist, she’s the ouranid specialist, and we’ve both worked hard trying to win the friendship of specific individuals. It’s worse for me, because dromids won’t come into Port Kato as long as ouranids might show up anytime. They admit they’d be duty bound to try and kill the ouranids—and eat them, too, by the way; that’s a major symbolic act. The dromids agree this would be a violation of our hospitality. Therefore I have to go meet them in their camps and dens. In spite of this handicap, she doesn’t feel she’s progressed any further than me. We’re equally baffled.”

“What do the autochthons say?”

“Well, either species admits they used to live together amicably… little or no direct contact, but with considerable interest in each other. Then, twenty or thirty years back, more and more dromids started failing to reproduce. Oftener and oftener, castoff segments don’t come to term, they die. The leaders have decided the ouranids are at fault and must be exterminated.”

“Why?”

“An article of faith. No rationale that I can untangle, though I’ve guessed at motivations, like the wish for a scapegoat. We’ve got pathologists hunting for the real cause, but imagine how long that might take. Meanwhile, the attacks and killings go on.”

Chrisoula regarded the dusty ground. “Have the ouranids changed in any way? The dromids might then jump to a conclusion of post hoc, propter hoc.”

“Huh?” When she had explained, Hugh laughed. “I’m not a cultivated type, I’m afraid,” he said. “The rock rats and bush rangers I grew up amongst do respect learning—we wouldn’t survive on Medea without learning—but they don’t claim to have a lot of it themselves. I got interested in xenology because as a kid I acquired a dromid friend and followed her-him through the whole cycle, female to male to postsexual. It grabbed hold of my imagination—a life that exotic.”

His attempt to turn the conversation into personal channels did not succeed. “What have the ouranids done?” she persisted.

“Oh… they’ve acquired a new—no, not a new religion. That implies a special compartment of life, doesn’t it? And ouranids don’t compartmentalize their lives. Call it a new Way, a new Tao. It involves eventually riding an east wind off across the ocean, to die in the Farside cold. Somehow, that’s transcendental. Please don’t ask me how, or why. Nor can I understand—or Jan—why the dromids consider this is such a terrible thing for the ouranids to do. I have some guesses, but they’re only guesses. She jokes that they’re born fanatics.”

Chrisoula nodded. “Cultural abysses. Suppose a modern materialist with little empathy had a time machine, and went back to the Middle Ages on Earth, and tried to find out what drove a Crusade or Jihad. It would appear senseless to him. Doubtless he would conclude everybody concerned was crazy, and the sole possible way to peace was total victory of one side or the other. Which was not true, we know today.”

The man realized that this woman thought a good deal like his wife. She continued: “Could it be that human influences have brought about these changes, perhaps indirectly?”

“It could,” he admitted. “Ouranids travel widely, of course, so those on Hansonia may well have picked up, at second or third hand, stories about Paradise which originated with humans. I suppose it’d be natural to think Paradise lies in the direction of sunset. Not that anybody has ever tried to convert a native. But natives have occasionally inquired what our ideas are. And ouranids are compulsive mythmakers, who might seize on any concept. They’re ecstatics, too. Even about death.”

“While dromids are prone to develop militant new religions overnight, I have heard. On this island, then, a new one happens to have turned against the ouranids, no? Tragic—though not unlike persecutions on Earth, I expect.”

“Anyhow, we can’t help till we have a lot more knowledge. Jan and I are trying for that. Mostly, we follow the usual procedures, field studies, observations, interviews, et cetera. We’re experimenting with mindscan as well. Tonight it gets our most thorough test yet.”

Chrisoula sat upright, gripped. “What will you do?”

“We’ll draw a blank, probably. You’re a scientist yourself, you know how rare the real breakthroughs are. We’re only slogging along.”

When she remained silent, Hugh filled his lungs for talk. “To be exact,” he proceeded, “Jan’s been cultivating a ‘wild’ ouranid, I a ‘wild’ dromid. We’ve persuaded them to wear miniaturized mindscan transmitters, and have been working with them to develop our own capability. What we can receive and interpret isn’t much. Our eyes and ears give us a lot more information. Still, this is special information. Supplementary.

“The actual layout? Oh, our native wears a button-sized unit glued onto the head, if you can talk about the head of an ouranid. A mercury cell gives power. The unit broadcasts a recognition signal on the radio band—microwatts, but ample to lock onto. Data transmission naturally requires plenty of bandwidth, so that’s on an ultraviolet beam.”

“What?” Chrisoula was startled. “Isn’t that dangerous to the dromids? I was taught they, most animals, have to take shelter when a sun flares.”

“This is safely weak, also because of energy limitations,” Hugh replied. “Obviously, it’s limited to line-of-sight and a few kilometers through air. At that, natives of either kind tell us they can spot the fluorescence of gas along the path. Not that they describe it in such terms!

“So Jan and I go out in our separate aircraft. We hover too high to be seen, activate the transmitters by a signal, and ‘tune in’ on our individual subjects through our amplifiers and computers. As I said, to date we’ve gotten extremely limited results; it’s a mighty poor kind of telepathy. This night we’re planning an intensive effort, because an important thing will be happening.”

She didn’t inquire immediately what that was, but asked instead: “Have you ever tried sending to a native, rather than receiving?”

“What? No, nobody has. For one thing, we don’t want them to know they’re being scanned. That would likely affect their behavior. For another thing, no Medeans have anything like a scientific culture. I doubt they could comprehend the idea.”

“Really? With their high metabolic rate, I should guess they think faster than us.”

“They seem to, though we can’t measure that till we’ve improved mindscan to the point of decoding verbal thought. All we’ve identified thus far is sensory impressions. Come back in a hundred years and maybe someone can tell you.”

The talk had gotten so academic that Hugh positively welcomed the diversion when an ouranid appeared. He recognized the individual in spite of her being larger than usual, her globe distended with hydrogen to a full four meters of diameter. This made her fur sparse across the skin, taking away its mother-of-pearl sheen. Just the same, she was a handsome sight as she passed the treetops, crosswind and then downward. Prehensile tendrils streaming below in variable configurations, to help pilot a jet-propelled swim through the air, she hardly deserved the name “flying jellyfish”—though he had seen pictures of Earth-side Portuguese men-of-war and thought them beautiful. He could sympathize with Jannika’s attraction to this race.

He rose. “Meet a local character,” he invited Chrisoula. “She has a little English. However, don’t expect to understand her pronunciation at once. Probably she’s come to make a quick swap before she rejoins her group for the big affair tonight.”

The woman got up. “Swap? Exchange?”

“Yeah. Niallah answers questions, tells legends, sings songs, demonstrates maneuvers, whatever we request. Afterward we have to play human music for her. Schönberg, usually; she dotes on Schönberg.”

Loping along a clifftop, Erakoum spied Sarhouth clearly against Mardudek. The moon was waxing toward solar fullness as it crossed that coal-glow. Its disc was dwarfed by the enormous body behind, was actually smaller to the eye than the spot which also passed in view, and its cold luminance had well-nigh been drowned earlier when it moved over one of the belts which changeably girded Mardudek. They grew bright after dark, those belts; thinkers like Yasari believed they cast back the light of the suns.

For an instant, Erakoum was captured by the image, spheres traveling through unbounded spaces in circles within circles. She hoped to become a thinker herself. But it could not be soon. She still had her second breeding to go through, her second segment to shed and guard, the young that it presently brought forth to help rear; and then she would be male, with begetting of her own to do—before that need faded out likewise and there was time for serenity.

She remembered in a stab of pain how her first birthing had been for naught. The segment staggered about weakly for a short while, until it lay down and died as so many were doing, so many. The Flyers had brought that curse. It had to be them, as the Prophet Illdamen preached. Their new way of faring west when they grew old, never to return, instead of sinking down and rotting back into the soil as Mardudek intended, surely angered the Red Watcher. Upon the People had been laid the task of avenging this sin against the natural order of things. Proof lay in the fact that females who slew and ate a Flyer shortly before mating always shed healthy segments which brought forth live offspring.

Erakoum swore that tonight she was going to be such a female.

She stopped for breath and to search the landscape. These precipices rimmed a fjord whose waters lay more placid than the sea beyond, brilliant under the radiance from the east. A dark patch bespoke a mass of floating weed. Might it be plants of the kind from which the Flyers budded in their abominable infancy? Erakoum could not tell at her distance. Sometimes valiant members of her race had ventured out on logs, trying to reach those beds and destroy them; but they had failed, and often drowned, in treacherous great waves.

Westward rose rugged, wooded hills where darkness laired. Athwart their shadows, sparks danced glittering golden, by the thousands—the millions, across the land. They were firemites. Through more than a hundred days and nights, they had been first eggs, then worms, deep down in forest mold. Now Sarhouth was passing across Mardudek in the exact path that mysteriously summoned them. They crept to the surface, spread wings which they had been growing, and went aloft, agleam, to mate.

Once it had meant no more to the People than a pretty sight. Then the need came into being, to kill Flyers… and Flyers gathered in hordes to feed on yonder swarms. Hovering low, careless in their glee, they became more vulnerable to surprise than they commonly were. Erakoum hefted an obsidian-headed javelin. She had five more lashed across her back. A number of the People had spent the day setting out nets and snares, but she considered that impractical; the Flyers were not ordinary winged quarry. Anyhow, she wanted to fling a spear, bring down a victim, sink fangs into its thin flesh, herself!

The night muttered around her. She drank odors of soil, growth, decay, nectar, blood, striving. Warmth from Mardudek streamed through a chill breeze to lave her pelt. Half-glimpsed flitting shapes, half-heard as they rustled the brush, were her fellows. They were not gathered into a single company, they coursed as each saw fit, but they kept more or less within earshot, and whoever first saw or winded a Flyer would signal it with a whistle.

Erakoum was farther separated from her nearest comrade than any of them were. The others feared that the light-beam reaching upward from the little shell on her head would give them away. She deemed it unlikely, as faint as the bluish gleam was. The human called Hugh paid her well in trade goods to wear the talisman whenever he asked and afterward discuss her experiences with him. For her part, she knew a darkling thrill at such times, akin to nothing else in the world, and knowledge came into her, as if through dreams but more real. These gains were worth a slight handicap on an occasional hunt… even tonight’s hunt.

Moreover—there was something she had not told Hugh, because he had not told her earlier. It was among the things she learned without words from the gleam-shell. A certain Flyer also carried one, which also kept it in eldritch contact with a human.

The big grotesque creatures were frank about being neutral in the strife between People and Flyers. Erakoum did not hold that against them. This was not their home, and they could not be expected to care if it grew desolate. Yet she had shrewdly deduced that they would try to keep in its burrow their equal intimacy with members of both breeds.

If Hugh had been anxious for her to be soul-tied to him this night, doubtless another human wanted the same for a Flyer. It would be a special joy to her to bring that one down. Besides, looking as she fared for a pale ray among firemites and stars might lead her toward a whole pack of enemies. Rested, she began to trot inland.

Erakoum was hunting.

Jannika Rezek was forever homesick for a land where she had never lived.

Her parents had politically offended the government of the Danubian Federation. It informed them they need not enter a reindoctrination hospice if they would volunteer to represent their country in the next shipful of personnel to Medea. That was scarcely a choice. Nevertheless, her father told her afterward that his last thought, as he sank down into suspended animation, was of the irony that when he awakened, none of his judges would be alive and nobody would remember what his opinions had been, let alone care. As a matter of fact, he learned at his goal that there was no longer a Danubian Federation.

The rule remained in force that, except for crewfolk, no person went in the opposite direction. A trip was too expensive for a passenger to be carried who would land on Earth as a useless castaway out of past history. Husband and wife made the best they could of their exile. Both physicians, they were eagerly received in Armstrong and its agricultural hinterland. By the modest standards of Medea, they prospered, finally winning a rare privilege. The human population had now been legally stabilized. More would overcrowd the limited areas suitable for settlement, as well as wreaking havoc on environments which the colony existed to study. To balance reproductive failures, a few couples per generation were allowed three children. Jannika’s folk were among these.

Thus everybody, herself perforce included, reckoned hers a happy childhood. It was a highly civilized one, too. In the molecules of reels kept at the Center was stored most of mankind’s total culture. Industry was, at last, sufficiently developed that well-to-do families could have sets which retrieved the data in as full hologrammic and stereophonic detail as desired. Her parents took advantage of this to ease their nostalgia, never thinking what it might do to younger hearts. Jannika grew up among vivid ghosts: old towers in Prague, springtime in the Bohmerwald, Christmas in a village which centuries had touched only lightly, a concert hall where music rolled in glory across a festive-clad audience which outnumbered the dwellers in Armstrong, replications of events which once made Earth tremble, songs, poetry, books, legends, fairy tales… She sometimes wondered if she had gone into xenology because the ouranids were light, bright, magical beings in a fairy tale.

Today, when Hugh led Chrisoula outside, she had stood for a moment staring after them. Abruptly the room pressed in as if to choke her. She had done what she could in the way of brightening it with drapes, pictures, keepsakes. At present, however, it was bestrewn with field gear; and she hated disorder. He cared naught.

The question rose afresh: How much did he care at all, any longer? They were in love when they married, yes, of course, but even then she recognized it was in high degree a marriage of convenience. Both were after appointments to an outpost station where they would maximize their chances of doing really significant, original research. Wedded couples were preferred, on the theory that they would be less distracted from their work than singletons. When they had their first babies, they were customarily transferred to a town.

She and Hugh quarreled about that. Social pressure—remarks, hints, embarrassed avoidance of the subject—was mounting on them to reproduce. Within population limits, it was desirable to keep the gene pool as large as possible. She was getting along in age, a bit, for motherhood. He was more than willing. But he took for granted that she would maintain the home, hold down the desk job, while he continued in the field…

She must not reprove him when he came back from his flirtatious little stroll. She lost her temper too often these days, grew outright shrewish, till he stormed from the hut or else grabbed the whiskey and started glugging. He was not a bad man—at the core, he was a good man, she amended hastily—thoughtless in many ways but well-meaning. At her time of life, she couldn’t likely do any better.

Although—She felt the heat in her cheeks, made a gesture as if to fend off the memory, and failed. It was two days old.

Having learned from A’i’ach about the Shining Time, she wanted to gather specimens of the glitterbug larvae. Hitherto humans had merely known that the adult insectoids swarmed aloft at intervals of approximately a year. If that was important to the inhabitants of Hansonia, she ought to know more. Observe for herself, enlist the aid of biologists, ecologists, chemists—She asked Piet Marais where to go, and he offered to come along. “The idea should have occurred to me before,” he said. “Living in humus, the worms must influence plant growth.”

Moister soil was required than existed at Port Kato. They went several kilometers to a lake. The walking was easy, for dense foliage overhead inhibited underbrush. Softness muffled footfalls, trees formed high-arched naves, multiple rays of light passed through dusk and fragrances to fleck the ground or glance off small wings, a sound as of lyres rippled from an unseen throat.

“How delightful,” Piet said after a while.

He was looking at her, not ahead. She became very conscious of his blond handsomeness. And his youth, she reminded herself; he was her junior by well-nigh a decade, though mature, considerate, educated, wholly a man. “Yes,” she blurted. “I wish I could appreciate it as you do.”

“It is not Earth,” he discerned. She realized that her answer had been less noncommittal than intended.

“I wasn’t pitying myself,” she said fast. “Please don’t think that. I do see beauty here, and fascination, and freedom, oh, yes, we’re lucky on Medea.” Attempting to laugh: “Why, on Earth, what would I have done for ouranids?”

“You love them, don’t you?” he asked gravely. She nodded. He laid a hand on her bare arm. “You have a great deal of love in you, Jannika.”

She made a confused effort to see herself through his eyes. Medium-sized, with a figure she knew was stunning; dark hair worn shoulder length, with gray streaks that she wished Hugh would insist were premature; high cheekbones, tilted nose, pointed chin, large brown eyes, ivory complexion. Still, though Piet was a bachelor, someone that attractive needn’t be desperate, he could meet girls in town and keep up acquaintance by holocom. He shouldn’t be this appreciative of her. She shouldn’t respond. True, she’d had other men a few times, before and after she married. But never in Port Kato; too much likelihood of complications, and she’d been furious when Hugh got involved locally. Worse yet, she suspected Piet saw her as more than a possible partner in a frolic. That could break lives apart.

“Oh, look,” she said, and disengaged from his touch in order to point at a cluster of seed pyramids. Meanwhile her mind came to the rescue. “I quite forgot, I meant to tell you, I got a call today from Professor al-Ghazi. We think we’ve found what makes the glitterbugs metamorphose and swarm.”

“Eh?” He blinked. “I didn’t realize anybody was working on that.”

“Well, it was a, a notion that occurred to me after my special ouranid started me speculating about them. He, A’i’ach, I mean, he told me the time is not strictly seasonal—that is not necessary here in the tropics—but set by Jason—the moon,” she added, because the name that humans had bestowed on the innermost of the larger satellites happened to resemble a word which humans had adopted, given by dromids in the Enrique area to an analog of the sirocco wind.

“He says the metamorphoses come during particular transits of Jason across Argo,” she continued. “Roughly, every four hundredth. To be exact, the figure is every hundred and twenty-seven Medean days, plus or minus a trifle. The natives here are as keenly conscious of heavenly bodies as everywhere else. The ouranids make a festival of the swarming; they find glitterbugs delicious. Well, this gave me an idea, and I called the Center and requested an astronomical computation. It seems I was right.”

“Astronomical cues, for a worm underground?” Marais exclaimed.

“Well, you doubtless recall how Jason excites electrical activity in the atmosphere of Argo, like Io with Jupiter”—the solar system, where Earth has her dwelling! “In this case, there’s a beaming effect on one of the radio frequencies that are generated, a kind of natural maser. Therefore those waves only reach Medea when the two moons are on their line of nodes. And that is the exact period my friend was describing. The phase is right, too.”

“But can the worms detect so weak a signal?”

“I think it is clear that they do. How, I cannot tell without help from specialists. Remember, though, Phrixus and Helle create little interference. Organisms can be fantastically sensitive. Did you know that it takes less than five photons to activate the visual purple in your eye? I suppose the waves from Argo penetrate the soil to a few centimeters’ depth and trigger a chain of biochemical reactions. No doubt it is an evolutionary relic from a time when the orbits of Jason and Medea gave an exact match to the seasons. Perturbation does keep changing the movements of the moons, you know.”

He was silent a while before he said: “I do know you are a most extraordinary person, Jannika.”

She had regained enough equilibrium to control their talk until they reached the lake. There, for a moment, she felt herself shaken again.

A canebrake screened it from them till they had passed through, to halt on a beach carpeted with mosslike amber-hued turf. Untouched by man in its chalice of forest, the water lay scummy, bubbling, and odorous. The sight of soft colors and the smell of living things were not unpleasant; they were normal to Medea—yet how clear and silver-blue the Neusiedler See gleamed in Danubia. Breath hissed between her teeth.

“What’s wrong?” Piet followed her gaze. “The dromids?”

A party of them had arrived to drink, some distance off. Jannika stared as if she had never seen their kind before.

Nearest was a young adult, presumably virgin, since she had six legs. From the slender, long-tailed body rose a two-armed centauroid torso, up to the oddly vulpine head, which would reach to Jannika’s chest. Her pelt shimmered blue-black under the suns; Argo was hidden by trees.

Four-legged, a trio of mothers kept watch on the eight cubs they had between them. One set of young showed by their size that their parent would soon ovulate again, be impregnated by a mating, shortly thereafter shed her second segment, and attend it until it gave birth. Another member of this group was at that stage of life, walking on two legs, no longer a functional female but with the male gonads still undeveloped.

No male of breeding age was present. Such a creature was too driven, lustful, impatient, violent, for sociability. There were three postsexual beings, grizzled but strong, protective, their biped movements fast by human standards though laggard compared to the lightning fluidity of their companions.

All adults were armed with stone-age spears, hatchets, and daggers, plus the carnivore teeth in their jaws.

They were gone almost as soon as Jannika had seen them, not out of fear but because they were Medean animals whose chemistry and living went swifter than hers.

“The dromids,” she got out.

Piet regarded her a while before he said gently: “They pursue your dear ouranids. You tell me that will get worse than ever on the night when the glitterbugs rise. But you must not hate them. They are caught in a tragedy.”

“Yes, the sterility problem, yes. Why should they drag the ouranids down with them?” She struck fist into palm. “Let’s get to work, let’s collect our samples and go home, can we, please?”

He was fully understanding.

She cast the memory out and flung herself back into preparations for the night.

Hugh Brocket and his wife departed a while after sunset. Their flitters jetted off in a whisper, reached an intermediate altitude, and circled for a minute while the riders got bearings and exchanged radioed farewells. Observed from below, catching the last gleam of sunken Colchis on their flanks, they resembled a pair of teardrops.

“Good hunting, Jan.”

“Ugh! Don’t say that.”

“Sorry,” he apologized in a stiff tone, and cut out the sender. Sure, it had been tactless of him, but why must she be so goddamn touchy?

Never mind. He’d plenty to do. Erakoum had promised to be on Shipwreck Cliffs about this time, since her gang meant to proceed north along the coast from its camp before turning inland. Thereafter her location would be unpredictable. He must lock onto her transmitter soon. Jannika’s craft dwindled in sight, bound on her own quest. Hugh set his inertial pilot and settled back in his safety harness to double-check his instruments. That was mechanical, since he knew quite well everything was in order. Most of his attention roamed free.

The canopy gave a titanic vista. Below, hills lay in dappled masses of shadow, here and there relieved by an argent thread that was a river or by the upheaving of precipices and scarps. The hemisphere-dividing Ring Ocean turned the eastern horizon to quicksilver. Westward in heaven, the double sun had left a Tyrian wake. Overhead reached a velvety dark, becoming more starry with each of his heartbeats. He saw a pair of moons, close enough to show discs lighted from two sides, rusty and white; he recognized more, which were mere bright points to his eyes, by their positions as they went on sentry-go among the constellations. Low above the sea smoldered Argo—no, shone, because its upper clouds were in full daylight, bands of brilliance splashed over sullen red. Jason was close to transit, with angular diameter exceeding twenty minutes of arc, and nevertheless Hugh had trouble finding it amidst that glare.

The shore came in view. He activated the detector and set his craft to hovering. An indicator light flashed green; he had his contact. He sent the vehicle aloft, a full three kilometers. Partly this was because he would be concentrating on encephalic input and wanted plenty of room for piloting error; partly it was to keep beyond sight or hearing of the natives, lest his presence affect their actions. Having taken station, he connected and secured the receiver helmet to his head—it didn’t weigh much—and switched it on. Transmitted, amplified, transformed, relayed, reinduced, the events in Erakoum’s nervous system merged with the events in his.

By no means did he acquire the dromid’s full awareness. Conveyance and translation were far too primitive. He had spent his professional lifetime gaining sufficient fellow-feeling with the species that, after as much patience as both individuals could maintain over a span of years, he could barely begin to interpret the signals he gathered. The speed of native mental processes was less of a help—through repetition and reinforcement—than an added hindrance. As a rough analogy, imagine trying to follow a rapid and nearly inaudible conversation, missing many a word, in a language you do not know well. Actually, none of what Hugh perceived was verbal; it was sight, sound, a complex of senses, including those interior like balance and hunger, including dream-hints of senses that he did not think he possessed.

He saw the land go by, bush, branch, slope, stars and moons above shaggy ridges; he felt its varying contours and textures as feet went pacing; he heard its multitudinous low noises; he smelled richness; the impressions were endless, most of them vague and fleeting, the best of them strong enough to take him out of himself, draw him groundward toward oneness with the creature below.

Clearest, perhaps because his glands were stimulated thereby, was emotion, determination. Erakoum was out to get herself a Flyer.

It was going to be a long night, quite possibly a harrowing one. Hugh expected he’d need a dose or two of sleep surrogate. Humans had never gotten away from the ancient rhythms of Earth. Dromids catnapped; ouranids went—daydreamy? contemplative?

As often before, he wondered briefly what Jan’s rapport with her native felt like. They would never be able to describe their sharings to each other.

Well into the hills, A’i’ach’s Swarm found a grand harvest of starwings. The heights were less densely wooded than the lowlands, which was good, for the bright prey never went far up, and below a forest crown, the People were vulnerable to Beast attack. Here was a fair amount of open ground, turf-begrown and boulder-strewn, scattered through the shadowing timber. A narrow ravine crossed the largest of those glades, a gash abrim with blackness.

Like an endless shower of sparks, the starwings danced, dashed, dodged about, beyond counting, meant for naught save the ecstasy of their mating and of the People who fed upon them. Despite the wariness in him, A’i’ach could resist no more than anyone else. He did refrain from valving out gas in his haste to descend, as many did. That would make ascent slow. Instead, he contracted his globe and sank, letting it reexpand slightly as varying air densities demanded. Nor did he release gas to propel himself. Rhythmically pumping, his siphon worked together with the breezes to zigzag him about at low speed. There was no hurry. The starwings numbered more than the Swarm could eat. Plenty would go free to lay their eggs for the next crop.

Among the motes, A’i’ach inhaled his first swallow of them. The sweet hot flavor sang in his flesh. Thickly gathered around him, bobbing, spinning, rippling, and flailing their corybantic tendrils, filling the sky with music, the People forgot caution. Love began. It was not purposeless, though without water to fall into, the pollinated seeds would not germinate. It united everyone. Life-dust drifted like smoke in the radiance of Ruii; the sight, smell, taste made feverish that joy which the starwing feast awakened. Again and again A’i’ach ejaculated. He went past his skin, he became a cell of a single divine being which was itself a tornado of love. Sometimes when he felt age upon him, he would drift westward across the sea, into the cold Beyond. There, yielding up the last warmth of his body, his spirit would take its reward, the Promise that forever and ever it would be what it was now in this brief night…

A howl smote. Shapes bounded from under trees, out into the open. A’i’ach saw a shaft pierce the globe next to his. Blood spurted, gas hissed forth, the shriveling form fell as a dead leaf falls. Tendrils still writhed when a Beast snatched it the last way down and fangs rent it asunder.

In the crowd and chaos, he could not know how many others died. The greatest number were escaping, rising above missile reach. Those who were armed began to drop their stones and boughs. It was not likely that any killed a Beast.

A’i’ach had relaxed the muscles in his globe and shot instantly upward. Safe, he might have joined the rest of the Swarm, to wander off in search of a place to renew festival. But rage and grief seethed too high. A far-off part of him wondered at that; the People did not take hard the death of a Person. This thing he wore, that somehow whispered mysteries—

And he carried a knife!

Recklessly spending gas, he swung about, downward. Most of the Beasts had vanished back into the woods. A few remained, devouring. He cruised at a height near the limits of prudence and peered after his chance. Since he could not drop like a rock, he must feint at one individual, then quickly jet at another, stab, rise, and attack again.

A wan beam of light struck toward him. It came from the head of a Beast which emerged from shadow, halted, and glared upward.

His will blazed forth in A’i’ach. Yonder was the monster which had his kind of bond to humans. If he had already gained a knife thereby, what might that being have gotten, what might it get, to wreak worse harm? If nothing else, killing it ought to shock its companions, make them think twice about their murderousness.

A’i’ach moved to battle. About him, the starwings happily danced and mated.

Jannika must search for an hour before she made her contact. An ouranid could not undertake to be at an exact spot at a given time. Hers had simply informed her, while she fastened the transmitter on him, that his group was currently in the neighborhood of Mount MacDonald. She flew there and cast about in ever-deepening darkness until her indicator shone green. Having established linkage, she rose to three kilometers and set the autopilot to make slow circles. From time to time, as her subject passed northeast, she moved the center of her path.

Otherwise she was engaged in trying to be her ouranid. It was impossible, of course, but from the effort she was learning what could never have come to her through spoken language. Answers to factual questions she would not have thought to ask. Folkways, beliefs, music, poetry, aerial ballet, which she could not have known for what they were, observing from outside. Lower down in her, dimmer, but more powerful—nothing she could write into a scientific report: a sense of delights, yearnings, wind, shiningness, perfumes, clouds, rain, immense distances, a sense of what it was to be a heaven-dweller. Not complete, no, a few wavery glimpses, hard to remember afterward; yet taking her out of herself into a new world agleam with wonder.

The thrill was redoubled tonight by A’i’ach’s excitement. Her impressions of what he was experiencing had never been stronger or sharper. She floated on airstreams, life-scents and song possessed her, she was a drop in an ocean beneath Ruii the mighty, there was no home to hopelessly long for because everywhere was home.

The Swarm came at last upon a cloud of glitterbugs, and Jannika’s cosmos went wild.

For a moment, half terrified, she started to switch off her helmet. Reason checked her hand. What was happening was just an extreme of what she had partaken in before. Ouranids seldom took much nourishment at a single time; when they did, it had an intoxicating effect. She had also felt their sexuality; A’i’ach’s maleness was too unearthly to disturb her, as his dromid’s femaleness had disturbed Hugh when she mated and later shed her hindquarters. Tonight the ouranids held high revel.

She surrendered to it, crescendo after crescendo, oh, if she only had a man here, but no, that would be different, would blur the sacred splendor, the Promise, the Promise!

Then the Beasts arrived. Horror erupted. Somewhere a strange voice screamed for the avenging of her shattered bliss.

As she trotted along a bare ridge, Erakoum had thought, with a leap of her pulse, that she spied afar a faint blue ray of light in the air. She could not be certain, through the brilliance cast by Mardudek, but she altered her course in hopes. When she had scrambled a long while among stones and thorns, the glimmer disappeared. It must have been a trick of the night, perhaps moonglow on rising mists. That conclusion did nothing to ease her temper. Everything about the Flyers was unlucky!

Because of this, she was behind the rest of the pack. Her first news of quarry came through their yells. “Hai-ay, hai-ay, hai-ay!” echoed around, and she snarled in bafflement. Surely she would arrive too late for a kill. Nonetheless she bounded in that direction. If the Flyers did not get a good wind, she could overtake them and follow along from cover to cover, unseen. Maybe they would not go further than she had strength for, before they chanced on a fresh upswelling of firemites and descended anew. Breath rasped in her gullet, the hillside struck at her feet with unseen rocks, but eagerness flung her on till she reached the place.

It was a glade, brightly lit though crisscrossed by shadows, cut in half by a small ravine. The firemites swirled about against the forest murk, like a glinting dustcloud. Several females crouched on the turf and ripped at the remnants of their prey. The rest had departed, to trail the escaped Flyers as Erakoum planned.

She stopped at the edge of trees to pant, looked up, and froze. The mass of Flyers was slowly and chaotically streaming west, but a few lingered to cast down their pitiful weapons. From the top of one, dim light beamed aloft. She had found what she sought.

“Ee-hah!” she screamed, sprang forward, shook her javelin.

“Come, evilworker, come and be slain! By your blood shall you give to my next brood the life you reaved from my first!”

There was no surprise, there was fate, when the eerie shape spiraled about and drew nearer. More would be settled this night than which of them was to survive. She, Erakoum, had been seized by a Power, had become an instrument of the Prophet.

Crouched, she cast her spear. The effort surged through her muscles. She saw it fly straight as the damnation it carried—but her foe swerved, it missed him by a fingerbreadth, and then all at once he was coming directly at her.

They never did that! What sheened in his seaweed grip?

Erakoum grabbed after a new javelin off her back. Each knot in the lashing was supposed to give way at a jerk, but this jammed, she must tug again, and meanwhile the enemy loomed ever more big. She recognized what he held, a human-made knife, sharp as a fresh obsidian blade and more thin and strong. She retreated. Her spear was now loose. No room for a throw. She thrust.

With crazy glee, she saw the head strike. The Flyer rolled aside before it could pierce, but blood and gas together foamed darkly from a slash across his paleness.

He spurted forward, was inside her guard. The knife smote and smote. Erakoum felt the stabs, but not yet the pain. She dropped her shaft, batted her arms, snapped jaws together. Teeth closed in flesh. Through her mouth and down her throat poured a rush of strength.

Abruptly the ground was no more beneath her hind feet. She fell over, clawed with forefeet and hands for a hold, lost it, and toppled. When she hit the side of the ravine, she rolled down across cruel snags. She had an instant’s glimpse of sky above, stars and firemites, the Mardudek-lighted Flyer drifting by and bleeding. Then nothingness snatched her to itself.

Folk at Port Kato asked what brought Jannika Rezek and Hugh Brocket home so early, so shaken. They evaded questions and hastened to their place. The door slammed behind them. A minute later, they blanked their windows.

For a time they stared at each other. The familiar room held no comfort. Illumination meant for human eyes was brass-harsh, air shut away from the forest was lifeless, faint noises from the settlement outside thickened the silence within.

He shook his head finally, blindly, and turned from her. “Erakoum gone,” he mumbled. “How’m I ever going to understand that?”

“Are you sure?” she whispered.

“I… I felt her mind shut off… damn near like a blow to my own skull… but you were making such a fuss about your precious ouranid—”

“A’i’ach’s hurt! His people know nothing of medicine. If you hadn’t been raving till I decided I must talk you back with me before you crashed your flitter—”

Jannika broke off, swallowed hard, unclenched her fists, and became able to say: “Well, the harm is done and here we are. Shall we try to reason about it, try to find out what went wrong and how to stop another such horror, or not?”

“Yeah, of course.” He went to the pantry. “You want a drink?” he called.

She hesitated. “Wine.”

He fetched her a glassful. His right hand clutched a tumbler of straight whiskey, which he began on at once. “I felt Erakoum die,” he said.

Jannika took a chair. “Yes, and I felt A’i’ach take wounds that may well prove mortal. Sit down, will you?”

He did, heavily, opposite her. She sipped from her glass, he gulped from his. Newcomers to Medea always said wine and distilled spirits there tasted more peculiar than the food. A poet had made that fact the takeoff point for a chilling verse about isolation. When it was sent to Earth as part of the news, the reply came after a century that nobody could imagine what the colonists saw in it.

Hugh hunched his shoulders. “Okay,” he growled. “We should compare notes before we start forgetting, and maybe repeat tomorrow when we’ve had a chance to think.” He reached across to their recorder and flicked it on. As he entered an identification phrase, his tone stayed dull.

“That is best for us too,” Jannika reminded him. “Work, logical thought, those hold off the nightmares.”

“Which this absolutely was—All right!” He regained a little vigor. “Let’s try to reconstruct what did happen.

“The ouranids were out after glitterbugs and the dromids were out after ouranids. You and I witnessed an encounter. Naturally, we’d hoped we wouldn’t—I suppose you prayed for that, hm?—but we knew there’d be hostilities in a lot of places. What shocked the wits out of us was when our personal natives got into a fight, with us in rapport.”

Jannika bit her lip. “Worse than that,” she said. “They were seeking it, those two. It was not a random encounter, it was a duel.” She raised her eyes. “You never told Erakoum, any dromid, that we were linking with an ouranid too, did you?”

“No, certainly not. Nor did you tell your ouranid about my liaison. We both know better than to throw that kind of variable into a program like this.”

“And the rest of the station personnel have vocabularies too limited, in either language. Very well. But I can tell you that A’i’ach knew. I was not aware he did until the fight began. Then it reached the forefront of his mind, it shouted at me, not in words but not to be mistaken about.”

“Yeah, same thing for me with Erakoum, more or less.”

“Let’s admit what we don’t want to, my dear. We have not simply been receiving from our natives. We have been transmitting. Feedback.”

He lifted a helpless fist. “What the devil might convey a return message?”

“If nothing else, the radio beam that locks us onto our subjects. Induced modulation. We know from the example of the glitterbug larvae—and no doubt other cases you and I never heard of—how shall we know everything about a whole world? We know Medean organisms can be extremely radio-sensitive.”

“M-m, yeah, the terrific speed of Medean animals, key molecules more labile than the corresponding compounds in us… Hey, wait! Neither Erakoum nor A’i’ach had more than a smattering of English. Certainly no Czech, which you’ve told me you usually think in. Besides, look what an effort we had to make before we could tune them in at all, in spite of everything learned on the mainland. They’d no reason to do the same, no idea of scientific method. They surely assumed it was only a whim or a piece of magic or something that made us want them to carry those objects around.”

Jannika shrugged. “Perhaps when we are in rapport, we think more in their languages than we ourselves realize. And both kinds of Medeans think faster than humans, observe, learn. Anyway, I do not say their contact with us was as good as our contact with them. If nothing else, radio has much less bandwidth. I think probably what they picked up from us was subliminal.”

“I guess you’re right,” Hugh sighed. “We’ll have to sic the electronicians and neurologists into the problem, but I sure can’t think of any better explanation than yours.”

He leaned forward. The energy which now vibrated in his voice turned cold: “But let’s try to see this thing in context, so we can maybe get a hint of what kind of information the natives have been receiving from us. Let’s lay out once more why the Hansonian dromids and ouranids are at war. Basically, the dromids are dying off, and blame the ouranids. Could we, Port Kato, be at fault?”

“Why, hardly,” Jannika said in astonishment. “You know what precautions we take.”

Hugh smiled without mirth. “I’m thinking of psychological pollution.”

“What? Impossible! Nowhere else on Medea—”

“Be quiet, will you?” he shouted. “I’m trying to bring back to my mind what I got from my friend that your friend killed.”

She half rose, white-faced, sat down again, and waited. The wineglass trembled in her fingers.

“You’ve always babbled about how kind and gentle and esthetic the ouranids are,” he said, at her rather than to her. “You swoon over this beautiful new local faith they’ve acquired—the windborne flight to Farside, the death in dignity, the Nirvana, I forget what else. To hell with the grubby dromids. Dromids don’t do anything but make tools and fires, hunt, care for their young, live in communities, create art and philosophy, same as humans. What’s interesting to you in that?

“Well, let me tell you what I’ve told you before, dromids are believers too. If we could compare, I’d give long odds their faiths are stronger and more meaningful than the ouranids’. They keep trying to make sense of the world. Can’t you sympathize the least bit?

“Okay, they have a tremendous respect for the fitness of things. When something goes seriously wrong—when a great crime or sin or shame happens—the whole world hurts. If the wrong isn’t set right, everything will go bad. That’s what they believe on Hansonia, and I don’t know but what they’ve got hold of a truth.

“The lordly ouranids never paid much attention to the groundling dromids, but that was not symmetrical. The ouranids are as conspicuous as Argo, Colchis, any part of nature. In dromid eyes, they too have their ordained place and cycle.

“All at once the ouranids change. They don’t give themselves back to the soil when they die, the way life is supposed to—no, they head west, over the ocean, toward that unknown place where the suns go down every evening. Can’t you see how unnatural that might seem? As if a tree should walk or a corpse rise. And not an isolated incident; no, year after year after year.

“Psychosomatic abortion? How can I tell? What I can tell is that the dromids are shocked to the guts by this thing the ouranids are doing. No matter how ridiculous the thing is, it hurts them!”

She sprang to her feet. Her glass hit the floor. “Ridiculous?” she yelled. “That Tao, that vision? No, ridiculous, that’s what your… your fuxes believe—except that it makes them attack innocent beings and, and eat them—I can’t wait till those creatures are extinct!”

He had risen likewise. “You don’t care about children dying, no, of course not,” he answered. “What sense of motherhood have you got, for hell’s sake? About like a balloon’s. Drift free, scatter seed, forget it, it’ll bud and break loose and the Swarm will adopt it, never mind anything except your pleasure.”

“Why, you—Are you wishing you could be a mother?” she jeered.

His empty hand swung at her. She barely evaded the blow. Appalled, they stiffened where they stood.

He tried to speak, failed, and drank. After a full minute she said, quite low: “Hugh, our natives were getting messages from us. Not verbal. Unconscious. Through them”—she choked—“were you and I seeking to kill each other?”

He gaped until, in a single clumsy gesture, he set his own glass down and held out his arms to her. “Oh, no, oh, no,” he stammered. She came to him.

Presently they went to bed. And then he could do nothing. The medicine cabinet held a remedy for that, but what followed might have happened between a couple of machines. At last she lay quietly crying and he went out to drink some more.

The wind awakened her. She lay for a time listening to it boom around the walls. Sleep drained out of her. She opened her eyes and looked at the clock. Its luminous dial said three hours had passed. She might as well get up. Maybe she could make Hugh feel better.

The main room was still lighted. He was asleep himself, sprawled in an armchair, a bottle beside it. How deep the lines were in his face.

How loud the wind was. Probably a storm front which the weather service had reported at sea had taken a quick, unexpected swing this way. Medean meteorology was not yet an exact science. Poor ouranids, their festival disrupted, they themselves blown about and scattered, even endangered. Normally they could ride out a gale, but a few might be carried to disaster, hit by lightning or dashed against a cliff or hopelessly entangled in a tree. The sick and injured would suffer most.

A’i’ach.

Jannika squeezed her lids together and struggled to recall how badly wounded he was. But everything had been too confused and terrible; Hugh had diverted her attention; before long she had flitted out of transmission range. Besides, A’i’ach himself could hardly have ascertained his own condition at once. It might not be grave. Or it might. He could be dead by now, or dying, or doomed to die if he didn’t get help.

She was responsible—perhaps not guilty, by a moralistic definition, but responsible.

Resolution crystallized. If the weather didn’t preclude, she would go search for him.

Alone? Yes. Hugh would protest, delay her, perhaps actually restrain her by force. She recorded a few words to him, wondered if they were overly impersonal, decided against composing something more affectionate. Yes, she wanted a reconciliation, and supposed he did, but she would not truckle. She redonned her field garb, added a jacket into whose pockets she stuffed some food bars, and departed.

The wind rushed bleak around her, whoo-oo-oo, a torrent she must breast. Clouds scudded low and thick, tinged red where Argo shone between them. The giant planet seemed to fly among ragged veils. Dust whirled in the compound, gritty on her skin. Nobody else was outdoors.

At the hangar, she punched for the latest forecast. It looked bad but not, she thought, frightening. (And if she did crash, was that such an enormous loss, to herself or anyone else?) “I am going back to my study area,” she told the mechanic. When he attempted to dissuade her, she pulled rank. She never liked that, but from the Danubian ghosts she had learned how. “No further discussion. Stand by to open the way and give me assistance if required. That is an order.”

The little craft shivered and drummed on the ground. Takeoff took skill—with a foul moment when a gust nearly upset her—but once aloft her vehicle flew sturdily. Risen above the cloud deck, she saw it heave like a sea, Argo a mountain rearing out of it, stars and companion moons flickery overhead. Northward bulked a darkness more deep and high, the front. The weather would really stiffen in the next few hours. If she wasn’t back soon, she’d better stay put till it cleared.

The flight was quick to the battleground. When the inertial pilot had brought her there, she circled, put on her helmet, activated the system. Her pulse fluttered and her mouth had dried. “A’i’ach,” she breathed, “be alive, please be alive.”

The green light went on. At least his transmitter existed on the site. He? She must will herself toward rapport.

Weakness, pain, a racket of soughing leaves, tossing boughs—“A’i’ach, hang on, I’m coming down!”

A leap of gladness. Yes, he did perceive her.

Landing would be risky indeed. The aircraft had a vertical capability, excellent radar and sonar, a computer and effectors to handle most of the work. However, the clear space below was not large, it was cleft in twain, and while the surrounding forest was a fair windbreak, there would be vile drafts and eddies. “God, into Your hands I give myself,” she said, and wondered as often before how Hugh endured his atheism.

Nevertheless, if she waited she would lose courage. Down!

Her descent was wilder still than she had expected. First the clouds were a maelstrom, then she was through them but into a raving blast, then she saw treetops grab at her. The vehicle rolled, pitched, yawed. Had she been an utter fool? She didn’t truly want to leave this life…

She made it, and for minutes sat strengthless. When she stirred, she felt her entire body ache from tension. But A’i’ach’s hurt was in her. Called by that need, she unharnessed and went forth.

The noise was immense in the black palisade of trees around her, their branches groaned, their crowns foamed; but down on the ground the air, though restless, was quieter, nearly warm. Unseen Argo reddened the clouds, which cast enough glow that she didn’t need her flashlight. She found no trace of the slain ouranids. Well, they had no bones; the dromids must have eaten every scrap. What a ghastly superstition—Where was A’i’ach?

She found him after a search. He lay behind a spiny bush, in which he had woven his tendrils to secure himself. His body was deflated to the minimum, an empty sack; but his eyes gleamed, and he could speak, in the shrill, puffing language of his people, which she had come to know was melodious.

“May joy blow upon you. I never hoped for your advent. Welcome you are. Here it has been lonely.” A shudder was in that last word. Ouranids could not long stand being parted from their Swarm. Some xenologists believed that with them consciousness was more collective than individual. Jannika rejected that idea, unless perhaps it applied to the different species found in parts of Nearside. A’i’ach had a soul of his own!

She knelt. “How are you?” She could not render his sounds any better than he could hers, but he had learned to interpret.

“It is not overly ill with me, now that you are nigh. I lost blood and gas, but those wounds have closed. Weak, I settled in a tree until the Beasts left. Meanwhile the wind rose. I thought best not to ride it in my state. Yet I could not stay in the tree, I would have been blown away. So I valved out the rest of my gas and crept to this shelter.”

The speech held far more than such a bare statement. The denotation was laconic and stoical, the connotations not. A’i’ach would need at least a day to regenerate sufficient hydrogen for ascent—how long depended on how much food he could reach in his crippled condition—unless a carnivore found him first, which was quite likely. Jannika imagined what a flood of suffering, dread, and bravery would have come over her had she been wearing her helmet.

She gathered the flaccid form into her arms. It weighed little. It felt warm and silky. He cooperated as well as he was able. Just the same, part of him dragged on the ground, which must have been painful.

She must be rougher still, hauling on folds of skin, when she brought him inside the aircraft. It had scant room to spare; he was practically bundled into the rear section. Rather than apologizing when he moaned, or saying anything in particular, she sang to him. He didn’t know the ancient Terrestrial words, but he liked the tunes and realized what she meant by them.

She had equipped her vehicle for basic medical help to natives, and had given it on past occasions. A’i’ach’s injuries were not deep, because most of him was scarcely more than a bag; however, the bag had been torn in several places and, though it was self-sealing, flight would reopen it unless it got reinforcement. Applying local anesthetics and antibiotics—that much had been learned about Medean biochemistry—she stitched the gashes.

“There, you can rest,” she said when, cramped, sweat-soaked, and shaky, she was done. “Later I will give you an injection of gas and you can rise immediately if you choose. I think, though, we would both be wisest to wait out the gale.”

A human would have groaned: “It is tight in here.”

“Yes, I know what you mean, but—A’i’ach, let me put my helmet on.” She pointed. “That will join our spirits as they were joined before. It may take your mind off your discomfort. And at this short range, given our new knowledge—” A thrill went through her. “What may we not find out?”

“Good,” he agreed. “We may enjoy unique experiences.” The concept of discovery for its own sake was foreign to him… but his search for pleasures went far beyond hedonism.

Eager despite her weariness, she moved into her seat and reached for the apparatus. The radio receiver, always open to the standard carrier band, chose that moment to buzz.

Argo in the east glowered at the nearing, lightning-shot wall of storm in the north. Below, the clouds already present roiled in reds and darknesses. Wind wailed. Hugh’s aircraft lurched and bucked. Despite a heater, chill seeped through the canopy, as if brought by the light of stars and moons.

“Jan, are you there?” he called. “Are you all right?”

Her voice was a swordstroke of deliverance. “Hugh? Is that you, darling?”

“Yes, sure, who the hell else did you expect? I woke up, played your message, and—Are you all right?”

“Quite safe. But I don’t dare take off in this weather. And you mustn’t try to land, that would be too dangerous by now. You shouldn’t stay, either. Darling, rostomily, that you came!”

“Judas priest, sweetheart, how could I not? Tell me what’s happened.”

She explained. At the end, he nodded a head which still ached a bit from liquor in spite of a nedolor tablet. “Fine,” he said. “You wait for calm air, pump up your friend, and come on home.” An idea he had been nursing nudged him. “Uh, I wonder. Do you think he could go down into that gulch and recover Erakoum’s unit? Those things are scarce, you know.” He paused. “I suppose it’d be too much to ask him to throw a little soil over her.”

Jannika’s tone held pity. “I can do that.”

“No, you can’t. I got a clear impression from Erakoum as she was falling, before she cracked her skull apart or whatever she did. Nobody can climb down without a rope secured on top. It’d be impossible to return. Even with a rope, it’d be crazy dangerous. Her companions didn’t attempt anything, did they?”

Reluctance: “I’ll ask him. It may be asking a lot. Is the unit functional?”

“Hm, yes, I’d better check on that first. I’ll report in a minute or three. Love you.”

He did, he knew, no matter how often she enraged him. The idea that, somewhere in the abysses of his being, he might have wished her death, was not to be borne. He’d have followed her through a heavier tempest than this, merely to deny it.

Well, he could go home with a satisfied conscience and wait for her arrival, after which—what? The uncertainty made a hollowness in him.

His instrument flashed green. Okay, Erakoum’s button was transmitting, therefore unharmed and worth salvaging. If only she herself—

He tensed. The breath rattled in his lungs. Did he know she was dead?

He lowered the helmet over his temples. His hands shook, giving him trouble in making the connections. He pressed the switch. He willed to perceive—

Pain twisted like white-hot wires, strength ebbed and ebbed, soft waves of nothingness flowed ever more often, but still Erakoum defied. The slit of sky that she could see, from where she lay unable to creep further, was full of wind… She shocked to complete awareness. Again she sensed Hugh’s presence.

“Broken bones, feels like. Heavy blood loss. She’ll die in a few more hours. Unless you give her first aid, Jan. Then she ought to last till we can fly her to Port Kato for complete attention.”

“Oh, I can do sewing and bandaging and splinting, whatever, yes. And nedolor’s an analgesic stimulant for dromids too, isn’t it? And simply a drink of water could make the whole difference; she must be dehydrated. But how to reach her?”

“Your ouranid can lift her up, after you’ve inflated him.”

“You can’t be serious! A’i’ach’s hurt, convalescent—and Erakoum tried to kill him!”

“That was mutual, right?”

“Well—”

“Jan, I’m not going to abandon her. She’s down in a grave, who used to run free, and the touch of me she’s getting is more to her than I could have imagined. I’ll stay till she’s rescued, or else I’ll stay till she dies.”

“No, Hugh, you mustn’t. The storm.”

“I’m not trying to blackmail you, dearest. In fact, I won’t blame your ouranid much if he refuses. But I can’t leave Erakoum. I just plain can’t.”

“I… I have learned something about you… I will try.”

A’i’ach had not understood his Jannika. It was not believable that helping a Beast could help bring peace. That creature was what it was, a slaughterer. And yet, yet, once there had been no trouble with the Beasts, once they had been the animals which most interested and entertained the People. He himself remembered songs about their fleetness and their fires. In those lost days they had been called the Flame Dancers.

What made him yield to her plea was unclear in his spirit. She had probably saved his life, at hazard to her own, and this was an overpowering new thought to him. He wanted greatly to maintain his union with her, which enriched his world, and therefore hesitated to deny a request that seemed as urgent as hers. Through the union, she helmeted, he believed he felt what she did when she said, with water running from her eyes, “I want to heal what I have done—” and that kind of feeling was transcendent, like the Shining Time, and was what finally decided him.

She assisted him from the thing—which-bore-her and payed out a tube. Through the latter he drank gas, a wind-rush of renewed life. His injuries twinged when his globe expanded, but he could ignore that.

He needed her anchoring weight to get across the ground to the ravine. Fingers and tendrils intertwined, they nevertheless came near being carried away. Had he let himself swell to full size, he could have lifted her. Air harried and hooted, snatched at him, wanted to cast him among thorns—how horrible the ground was!

How much worse to descend below it. He throbbed to an emotion he scarcely recognized. Had she been in rapport, she could have told him that the English word for it was “terror.” A human or a dromid who felt it in that degree would have recoiled from the drop. A’i’ach made it a force blowing him onward, because this too raised him out of himself.

At the edge, she threw her arms around him as far as they would go, laid her mouth to his pelt, and said, “Good luck, dear A’i’ach, dear brave A’i’ach, good luck, God keep you.” Those were the noises she made in her language. He did not recognize the gesture either.

A cylinder she had given him to hold threw a strong beam of light. He saw the jagged slope tumble downward underneath him, and thought that if he was cast against that, he was done for. Then his spirit would have a fearful journey, with no body to shelter it, before it reached Beyond—if it did, if it was not shredded and scattered first. Quickly, before the churning airs could take full hold of him, he jetted across the brink. He contracted. He sank.

The dread as gloom and walls closed in was like no other carouse in his life. At its core, he felt incandescently aware. Yes, the human had brought him into strange skies.

Through the dankness he caught an odor more sharp. He steered that way. His flash picked out the Beast, sprawled on sharp talus, gasping and glaring. He used jets and siphon to position himself out of reach and said in what English he had, “I haff ch’um say-aff ee-you.”

From the depths of her death-place, Erakoum looked up at the Flyer. She could barely make him out, a big pale moon behind a glare of light. Amazement heaved her out of a drowse. Had her enemy pursued her down here in his ill-wishing?

Good! She would die in battle, not the torment which ripped her. “Come on and fight,” she called hoarsely. If she could sink teeth in him, get a last lick of his blood—The memory of that taste was like sweet lightning. During the time afterward which refused to end, she had thought she would be dead already if she had not swallowed those drops.

Their wonder-working had faded out. She stirred, seeking a defensive posture. Agony speared through her, followed by night.

When she roused, the Flyer still waited. Amidst a roaring in her ears, she heard, over and over, “I haff ch’um say-aff ee-you.”

Human language? This was the being that the humans favored as they did her. It had to be, though the ray from its head was hidden by the ray from its tendrils. Could Hugh have been bound all the while to both?

Erakoum strove to form syllables never meant for her mouth and throat. “Ha-watt-tt you ha-wannit? Gho, no bea haiar, gho.”

The Flyer made a response. She could no more follow that than he appeared to have followed hers. He must have come down to make sure of her, or simply to mock her while she died. Erakoum scrabbled weakly after a spear. She couldn’t throw one, but—

From the unknownness wherein dwelt the soul of Hugh, she suddenly knew: He wants to save you.

Impossible. But… but there the Flyer was. Half delirious, Erakoum could yet remember that Flyers were seldom that patient.

What else could befall but death? Nothing. She lay back on the rock shards. Let the Flyer be her doom or be her Mardudek. She had found the courage to surrender.

The shape hovered. Her hair sensed tiny gusts, and she thought dimly that this must be a difficult place for him too. Speech burst and skirled. He was trying to explain something, but she was too hurt and tired to listen. She folded her hands around her muzzle. Would he appreciate that gesture?

Maybe. Hesitant, he neared. She kept motionless. Even when his tendrils brushed her, she kept motionless.

They slipped across her body, got a purchase, tightened. Through the haze of pain, she saw him swelling. He meant to lift her—up to Hugh?

When he did, her knife wounds opened and she shrieked before she swooned.

Her next knowledge was of lying on turf under a hasty, red-lit sky. A human crouched above her, talking to a small box that replied in the voice of Hugh. Behind, the Flyer lay shrunken, clutching a bush. Storm brawled; the first stinging raindrops fell.

In the hidden way of hunters, she knew that she was dying. The human might staunch those cuts and stabs, but could not give back what was lost.

Memory—what she had heard tell, what she had briefly tasted herself—“Blood of the Flyer. It will save me. Blood of the Flyer, if he will give.” She was not sure whether she spoke or dreamed it. She sank back into the darkness.

When she surfaced anew, the Flyer was beside her, embracing her against the wind. The human was carefully using a knife on a tendril. The Flyer brought the tendril in between Erakoum’s fangs. As the rain’s full violence began, she drank.

A double sunrise was always lovely.

Jannika had delayed telling Hugh her news. She wanted to surprise him, preferably after his anxiety about his dromid was past. Well, it was; Erakoum would be hospitalized several days in Port Kato, which ought to be an interesting experience for all concerned, but she would get well. A’i’ach had already rejoined his Swarm.

When Hugh wakened from the sleep of exhaustion which followed his bedside vigil, Jannika proposed a dawn picnic, and was touched at how fast he agreed. They flitted to a place they knew on the sea cliffs, spread out their food, and sat down to watch.

At first Argo, the stars, and a pair of moons were the only lights. Slowly heaven brightened, the ocean shimmered silver beneath blue, Phrixus and Helle wheeled by the great planet. Wild songs went trilling through air drenched with an odor of roanflower, which is like violets.

“I got the word from the Center,” she declared while she held his hand. “It’s definite. The chemistry was soon unraveled, given the extra clue we had from the reviving effect of blood.”

He turned about. “What?”

“Manganese deficiency,” she said. “A trace element in Medean biology, but vital, especially to dromids and their reproduction—and evidently to something else in ouranids, since they concentrate it to a high degree. Hansonia turns out to be poorly supplied with it. Ouranids, going west to die, were removing a significant percentage from the ecology. The answer is simple. We need not try to change the ouranid belief. Temporarily, we can have a manganese supplement made up and offer it to the dromids. In the long run, we can mine the ore where it’s plentiful and scatter it as a dust across the island. Your friends will live, Hugh.”

He was quiet for a time. Then—he could surprise her, this son of an outback miner—he said: “That’s terrific. The engineering solution. But the bitterness won’t go away overnight. We won’t see any quick happy ending. Maybe not you and me, either.” He seized her to him. “Damnation, though, let’s try!”