The People of the Wind

I

“You can’t leave now,” Daniel Holm told his son. “Any day we may be at war. We may already be.”

“That’s just why I have to go,” the young man answered. “They’re calling Khruaths about it around the curve of the planet. Where else should I fare than to my choth?”

When he spoke thus, more than his wording became bird. The very accent changed. He was no longer using the Planha-influenced Anglic of Avalon — pure vowels, r’s trilled, m’s and n’s and ng’s almost hummed, speech deepened and slowed and strongly cadenced; rather, it was as if he were trying to translate for a human listener the thought of an Ythrian brain.

The man whose image occupied the phone screen did not retort, “You might consider staying with your own family,” as once he would have. Instead Daniel Holm nodded, and said quietly, “I see. You’re not Chris now, you’re Arinnian,” and all at once looked old.

That wrenched at the young man. He reached forth, but his fingers were stopped by the screen, “I’m always Chris, Dad,” he blurted. “It’s only that I’m Arinnian too. And, and, well, if war comes, the choths will need to be prepared for it, won’t they? I’m going to help — shouldn’t be gone long, really.”

“Sure. Good voyage.”

“Give Mother and everybody my love.”

“Why not call her yourself?”

“Well, uh, I do have to hurry… and it’s not as if this were anything unusual, my heading off to the mountains, and — oh—”

“Sure,” said Daniel Holm. “I’ll tell them. And you give my regards to your mates.” The Second Marchwarden of the Lauran System blanked off.

Arinnian turned from the instrument. For a moment he winced and bit his lip. He hated hurting people who cared about him. But why couldn’t they understand? Their kind called it “going, bird,” being received into a choth, as if in some fashion those who did were renouncing the race that begot them. He couldn’t count how many hours he had tried to make his parents — make any number of orthohumans — see that he was widening and purifying his humanity.

A bit of dialogue ran through memory: “Dad, look, two species can’t inhabit the same globe for generations without pretty deep mutual consequences. Why do you go sky-hunting? Why does Ferune serve wine at his table? And those’re the most superficial symptoms.”

“I know that much: Credit me with some fair-mindedness, hm? Thing is, you’re making a quantum jump.”

“Because I’m to be a member of Stormgate? Listen, the choths have been accepting humans for the past hundred years.”

“Not in such flocks as lately. And my son wasn’t one of them. I’d’ve… liked to see you carry on our traditions.”

“Who says I won’t?”

“To start with, you’ll not be under human law any more, you’ll be under choth law and custom… Hold on. That’s fine, if you’re an Ythrian. Chris, you haven’t got the chromosomes. Those who’ve pretended they did, never fitted well into either race, ever again.”

“Damnation, I’m not pretending—!”

Arinnian thrust the scene from him as if it were a physical thing. He was grateful for the prosaic necessities of preparation. To reach Lythran’s aerie before dark, he must start soon. Of course, a car would cover the distance in less than an hour; but who wanted to fly caged in metal and plastic?

He was nude. More and more, those who lived like him were tending to discard clothes altogether and use skin paint for dress-up. But everybody sometimes needed garments. An Ythrian, too, was seldom without a belt and pouch. This trip would get chilly, and he lacked feathers. He crossed the tiny apartment to fetch coverall and boots.

Passing, he glanced at the desk whereon lay papers of his work and, in a heap, the texts and references he was currently employing, printouts from Library Central. Blast! he thought. I loathe quitting when I’ve nearly seen how to prove that theorem.

In mathematics he could soar. He often imagined that then his mind knew the same clean ecstasy an Ythrian, aloft alone, must know in the flesh. Thus he had been willing to accept the compromise which reconciled him and his father. He would continue his studies, maintain his goal of becoming a professional mathematician. To this end, he would accept some financial help, though he would no longer be expected to live at home. The rest of what little income he required he would earn himself, as herdsman and hunter when he went off to be among the Ythrians.

Daniel Holm had growled, through the hint of a grin, “You own a good mind, son. I didn’t want to see it go to waste. At the same time, it’s — too good. If ’tweren’t for your birding, you’d be so netted in your books, when you aren’t drawing a picture or writing a poem, you’d never get any exercise; at last your bottom would grow fast to your chair, and you’d hardly notice. I s’pose I should feel a little grateful to your friends for making their kind of athlete out of you.”

“My chothmates,” Arinnian corrected him. He had just been given his new name and was full of glory and earnestness. That was four years ago; today he could smile at himself. The guv’nor had not been altogether wrong.

Thus at thirty — Avalonian reckoning — Christopher Holm was tall, slender, but wide-shouldered. In features as well as build, he took after his mother: long head, narrow face, thin nose and lips, blue eyes, mahogany hair (worn short in the style of those who do much gravbelt flying), and as yet not enough beard to be worth anything except regular applications of antigrowth enzyme. His complexion, naturally fair, was darkened by exposure. Laura, a G5 star, has only 72 percent the luminosity of Sol and less ultraviolet light in proportion; but Avalon, orbiting at a mean distance of 0.81 astronomical unit in a period of 0.724 Terran, gets 10 percent more total irradiation than man evolved under. He made the customary part-by-part inspection of his unit before he put arms through straps and secured buckle at waist. The twin cone-pointed cylinders on his back had better have fully charged accumulators and fully operating circuits. If not, he was dead. One Ythrian couldn’t hold back a human from toppling out of the sky. A couple of times, several together had effected a rescue; but those were herders, carrying lassos which they could cast around their comrade and pull on without getting in each other’s way. You dared not count on such luck. O God, to have real wings!

He donned a leather helmet and lowered the goggles which were his poor substitute for a nictitating membrane. He sheathed knife and slugthrower at his hips. There would be nothing of danger — no chance of a duel being provoked, since a Khruath was peace-holy — not that deathpride quarrels ever happened often — but the Stormgate folk were mostly hunters and didn’t leave their tools behind. He had no need to carry provisions. Those would be supplied from the family stores, to which he contributed his regular share, and ferried to the rendezvous on a gravsled.

Going out the door, he found himself on ground level. Humans had ample room on Avalon — about ten million of them; four million Ythrians — and even here in Gray, the planet’s closest approximation to a real city, they built low-and widespread. A couple of highrises sufficed for resident or visiting ornithoids.

Arinnian flicked controls. Negaforce thrust him gently, swiftly upward. Leveling off, he spent a minute savoring the view.

The town sprawled across hills green with trees and susin, color-patched with gardens, that ringed Falkayn Bay. Upon the water skimmed boats; being for pleasure, they were principally sail-driven hydrofoils. A few cargo vessels, long shapes of functional grace, lay at the docks, loaded and unloaded by assorted robots. One was coming in, from Brendan’s Islands to judge by the course, and one was standing out to the Hesperian Sea, which flared silver where the sun struck it and, elsewhere, ran sapphire till it purpled on northern and southern horizons.

Laura hung low in the empty west, deeper, aureate than at midday. The sky was a slowly darkening blue; streaks of high cirrus clouds, which Arinnian thought of as breastfeathers, promised fair weather would continue. A salt breeze whispered and cooled his cheeks.

Air traffic was scant. Severa Ythrians passed by, wings gleaming bronze and amber. A couple of humans made beltflights like Arinnian; distant, they were hardly to be told from a flock of slim leathery draculas which evening had drawn out of some cave. More humans rode in cars, horizontal raindrops that flung back the light with inanimate fierceness. Two or three vans lumbered along and an intercontinental liner was settling toward the airport. But Gray was never wildly busy.

High up, however, paced shapes that had not been seen here since the end of the Troubles: warcraft on patrol.

War against the Terran Empire — Shivering, Arinnian lined out eastward, inland.

Already he could see his destination, far off beyond the coastal range and the central valley, like a cloudbank on worldedge, those peaks which were the highest in Corona, on all Avalon if you didn’t count Oronesia. Men called them the Andromedas, but in his Anglic Arinnian had also taken to using the Planha name, Weather-mother.

Ranchland rolled beneath him. Here around Gray, the mainly Ythrian settlements northward merged with the mainly human south; both ecologies blent with Avalon’s own, and the country became a checkerboard. Man’s grainfields, ripening as summer waned, lay tawny amidst huge green pastures where Ythrians grazed their maukh and mayaw. Stands of timberwood, oak or pine, windnest or hammerbranch, encroached on nearly treeless reaches of berylline native susin where you might still glimpse an occasional barysauroid. The rush of his passage blew away fretfulness. Let the Empire attack the Domain… if it dared! Meanwhile he, Arinnian, was bound for Eyath — for his whole choth, of course, and oneness with it, but chiefly he would see Eyath again.

Across the dignity of the dining hall, a look passed between them. Shall we wander outside and be ourselves?

She asked permission to leave of her father Lythran and her mother Blawsa; although she was their dependent, that was mere ritual, yet rituals mattered greatly. In like fashion Arinnian told the younger persons among whom he was benched that he had the wish of being unaccompanied. He and Eyath left side by side. It caused no break in the slow, silence-punctuated conversation wherein everyone else took part. Their closeness went back to their childhood and, was fully accepted.

The compound stood on a plateau of Mount Farview. At the middle lifted the old stone tower which housed the senior members of the family and their children. Lower wooden structures, on whose sod roofs bloomed amberdragon and starbells, were for the unwed and for retainers and their kin. Further down a slope lay sheds, barns, and mews. The whole could not be seen at once from the ground, because Ythrian trees grew among the buildings: braidbark, copperwood, gaunt lightningrod, jewelleaf which sheened beneath the moon and by day would shimmer iridescent. The flowerbeds held natives, more highly evolved than anything from offplanet — sweet small janie, pungent livewell, graceful trefoil and Buddha’s cup, a harp vine which the breeze brought ever so faintly to singing. Otherwise the night was quiet and, at this altitude, cold. Breath smoked white.

Eyath spread her wings. They were more slender than average, though spanning close to six meters. This naturally forced her to rest on hands and tail. “Br-r-r!” she laughed. “Hoarfrost. Let’s lift.” In a crack and whirl of air, she rose.

“You forgot,” he called. “I’ve taken off my belt”

She settled on a platform built near the top of a copperwood. Ythrians made few redundant noises; obviously he could climb. He thought she overrated his skill, merely because he was better at it than she. A misstep in that murky foliage could bring a nasty fall. But he couldn’t refuse the implicit challenge and keep her respect. He gripped a branch, chinned himself up, and groped and rustled his way.

Ahead, he heard her murmur to the uhoth which had fluttered along behind her. It brought down game with admirable efficiency, but he felt she made too much fuss over it Well, no denying she was husband-high. He didn’t quite like admitting that to himself. (Why?, he wondered fleetingly.)

When he reached the platform, he saw her at rest on feet and alatans, the uhoth on her right wrist while her left hand stroked it. Morgana, almost full, stood dazzling white over the eastward sierra and made the plumes of Eyath glow. Her crest was silhouetted against the Milky Way. Despite the moon, constellations glistered through upland air, Wheel, Swords, Zirraukh, vast sprawling Ship…

He sat down beside her, hugging his knees. She made the small ululation which expressed her gladness at his presence. He responded as best he could. Above the clean curve of her muzzle, the great eyes glimmered.

Abruptly she broke off. He followed her gaze and saw a new star swing into heaven. “A guardian satellite?” she asked. Her tone wavered the least bit.

“What else?” he replied. “I think it must be the latest one they’ve orbited.”

“How many by now?”

“They’re not announcing that,” he reminded her. Ythrians always had trouble grasping the idea of government secrets. Of government in any normal human sense, for that matter. Marchwardens Ferune and Holm had been spending more energy in getting the choths to cooperate than in actual defense preparations. “My father doesn’t believe we can have too many.”

“The wasted wealth—”

“Well, if the Terrans come—”

“Do you expect they will?”

The trouble he heard brought his hand to squeeze her, very gently, on the neck, and afterward run fingers along her crest. Her feathers were warm, smooth and yet infinitely textured. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they can settle the border question peacefully. Let’s hope.” The last two words were perforce in Anglic rather than Planha. Ythrians had never beseeched the future. She too was bilingual, like every educated colonist.

His look went back skyward. Sol lay… yonder in the Maukh, about where four stars formed the horns… how far? Oh, yes, 205 light-years. He recalled reading that, from there, Quetlan and Laura were in a constellation called the Lupus. None of the three suns had naked-eye visibility across such an abyss. They were mere G-type dwarfs; they merely happened to be circled by some motes which had fermented till there were chemistries that named those motes Terra, Ythri, Avalon, and loved them.

“Lupus,” he mused. “An irony.”

Eyath whistled: “?”

He explained, adding: “The lupus is, or was, a beast of prey on Terra. And to us, Sol lies in the sign of a big, tame herd animal. But who’s attacking whom?”

“I haven’t followed the news much,” she said, low and not quite steadily. “It seemed a fog only, to me or mine. What need we reck if others clashed? Then all of a sudden — Might we have caused some of the trouble, Arinnian? Could folk of ours have been too rash, too rigid?”

Her mood was so uncharacteristic, not just of Ythrian temperament in general but of her usually sunny self, that astonishment jerked his head around. “What’s made you this anxious?” he asked.

Her lips nuzzled the uhoth, as if seeking consolation that he thought he could better give. Its beak preened her. He barely heard: “Vodan.”

“What? Oh! Are you betrothed to Vodan?” His voice had cracked. Why am I shaken? he wondered. He’s a fine fellow. And of this same choth, too; no problems of changed law and custom, culture shock, homesickness — Arinnian’s glance swept over the Storm-gate country. Above valleys steep-walled, dark and fragrant with woods, snowpeaks lifted. Closer was a mountainside down which a waterfall stood pillarlike under the moon. A night-flying bugler sounded its haunting note through stillness. On the Plains of Long Reach, in arctic marshes, halfway around the planet on a scorching New Gaiilan savannah, amidst the uncounted islands that made up most of what dry land Avalon had — how might she come to miss the realm of her choth?

No, wait, I’m thinking like a human. Ythrians get around more. Eyath’s own mother is from the Sagittarius basin, often goes back to visit… Why shouldn’t I think like a human? I am one. I’ve found wisdom, rightness, happiness of a sort in certain Ythrian ways; but no use pretending I’ll ever be an Ythrian, ever wed a winged girl and dwell in our own aerie.

She was saying: “Well, no, not exactly. Galemate, do you believe I wouldn’t tell you of my betrothal or invite you to my wedding feast? But he is a… a person I’ve grown very fond of. You know I planned on staying single till my studies were finished.” She wanted the difficult, honored calling of musician. “Lately… well. I thought about it a lot during my last lovetime. I grew hotter then than ever before, and I kept imagining Vodan.”

Arinnian felt himself flush. He stared at the remote gleam of a glacier. She shouldn’t tell him such things. It wasn’t decent. An unmarried female Ythrian, or one whose husband was absent, was supposed to stay isolated from males when the heat came upon her; but she was also supposed to spend the energy it raised in work, or study, or meditation, or—

Eyath sensed his embarrassment. Her laughter rippled and she laid a hand over his. The slim fingers, the sharp claws gripped him tenderly. “Why, I declare you’re shocked! What for?”

“You wouldn’t talk like that to — your father, a brother—” And you shouldn’t feel that way, either. Never. Estrus or no. Lonely, maybe; dreamy, yes; but not like some sweating trull in the bed of some cheap hotel room. Not you, Eyath.

“True, it’d be improper talk in Stormgate. I used to wonder if I shouldn’t marry into a less strict choth. Vodan, though — Anyhow, Arinnian, dear, I can tell you anything. Can’t I?”

“Yes.” After all, I’m not really an Ythrian.

“We discussed it later, he and I,” she said. “Marriage, I mean. No use denying, children would be a terrible handicap at this stage. But we fly well together; and our parents have been nudging us for a long, time, it’d be so good an alliance between houses. We’ve wondered if, maybe, if we stayed hriccal the first few years—”

“That doesn’t work too well, does it?” he said as her voice trailed off, through the bloodbeat in his ears. “That is, uh, continual sex relations may not be how Ythrians reinforce pair bonds, but that doesn’t mean sex has no importance. If you separate every lovetime, you, you, well, you’re rejecting each other, arent you? Why not, uh, contraception?”

“No.”

He knew why her race, almost if not quite uniformly, spurned that. Children — the strong parental instinct of both mates — were what kept them together. If small wings closed around you and a small head snuggled down alongside your keelbone, you forgot the inevitable tensions and frustrations of marriage as much as if you were a human who had just happily coupled.

“We could postpone things till I’ve finished my studies and his business is on the wing,” Eyath said. Arinnian remembered that Vodan, in partnership with various youths from Stormgate, Many Thermals, and The Tarns, had launched a silvicultural engineering firm. “But if war comes — kaah, he’s in the naval reserve—”

Her free arm went around his shoulder, a blind gesture. He leaned his weight on an elbow so he could reach beneath the wings to embrace her stiff body. And he murmured to her, his sister since they both were children, what comfort he was able.

In the morning they felt more cheerful. It was not in Ythrian nature to brood — not even as a bad pun, they giving live birth — and bird-humans had tried to educate themselves out of the habit. Today, apart from a few retainers on maintenance duty, Lythran’s household would fly to that mountain where the regional Khruath met. On the way they would be joined by other Stormgate families; arrived, they would find other choths entirely. However bleak the occasion of this gathering was, some of the color, excitement, private business, and private fun would be there that pervaded the regular assemblies.

And the dawn was clear and a tailwind streamed.

A trumpet called. Lythran swung from the top of his tower. Folk lifted their wings until the antlibranch slits beneath stood agape, purple from blood under the oxygen-drinking tissues. The wings clapped back down, and back on high; the Ythrians thundered off the ground, caught an updraft, and rode it into formation. Then they flew eastward over the crags.

Arinnian steered close to Eyath. She flashed him a smile and broke into song. She had a beautiful voice — it could nearly be named soprano — which turned the skirls and gutturals of Planha into a lilt. What she cataracted forth on the air was a traditional carol, but it was for Arinnian because he had rendered it into Anglic, though he always felt that his tricks of language had failed to convey either the rapture or the vision.