The People of the Wind

IV

A campaign against Ythri would demand an enormous fleet, gathered from everywhere in the Empire. No such thing had been publicly seen or heard of, though rumors flew. But of course units guarding the border systems had been openly reinforced as the crisis sharpened, and drills and practice maneuvers went on apace.

Orbiting Pax at ten astronomical units, the Planet-class cruisers Thor and Ansa flung blank shells and torpedoes at each other’s force screens, pierced these latter with laser beams that tried to hold on a single spot of hull for as long as an energy blast would have taken to gnaw through armor, exploded magnesium flares whose brilliance represented lethal radiation, dodged about on gray thrust, wove in and out of hyperdrive phase, used every trick in the book and a few which the high command hoped had not yet gotten into Ythrian books. Meanwhile the Comet- and Meteor-class boats they mothered were similarly busy.

To stimulate effort, a prize had been announced. That vessel the computers judged victorious would proceed with her auxiliaries to Esperance, where the crew would get a week’s liberty.

Ansa won. She broadcast a jubilant recall. Half a million kilometers away, an engine awoke in the Meteor which her captain had dubbed Hooting Star.

“Resurrected at last!” Lieutenant (j.g.) Philippe Rochefort exulted. “And in glory at that.”

“And unearned.” The fire control officer, CPO Wa Chaou of Cynthia, grinned. His small white-furred body crouched on the table he had been cleaning after a meal; his bushy tail quivered like the whiskers around his blue-masked muzzle.

“What the muck you mean, ‘unearned’?” the engineer-computerman, CPO Abdullah Helu, grumbled: a lean, middle-aged careerist from Huy Braseal. “Playing dead for three mortal days is beyond the call of duty.” The boat had theoretically been destroyed in a dogfight and drifting free, as a real wreck would, to complicate life for detector technicians.

“Especially when the poker game cleaned and reamed you, eh?” Wa Chaou gibed.

“I won’t play with you again, sir,” Helu said to the captain-pilot. “No offense. You’re just too mucking talented.”

“Only luck,” Rochefort answered. “Same as it was only luck that threw such odds against us. The boat acquitted herself well. As you did afterward, over the chips. Better luck to both next time.”

She was his first, new and shiny command — he having recently been promoted from ensign for audacity in a rescue operation — and he was anxious for her to make a good showing. No matter how inevitable under the circumstances, defeat had hurt.

But they were on the top team; and they’d accounted for two opposition craft, plus tying up three more for a while that must have been used to advantage elsewhere; and now they were bound back to Ansa and thence to Esperance, where he knew enough girls that dates were a statistical certainty.

The little cabin trembled and hummed with driving energies. Air gusted from ventilators, smelling of oil and of recycling chemicals. A Meteor was designed for high acceleration’ under both relativistic and hyperdrive conditions; for accurate placement of nuclear-headed torpedoes; and for no more comfort than minimally essential to the continued efficiency of personnel.

Yet space lay around the viewports in a glory of stars, diamond-keen, unwinking, many-colored, crowding an infinitely clear blackness rill they merged in the argent torrent of the Milky Way or the dim mysterious cloudlets which were sister galaxies. Rochefort wanted to sit, look, let soul follow gaze outward into God’s temple the universe. He could have done so, too; the boat was running on full automatic. But better demonstrate to the others that he was a conscientious as well as an easy-going officer. He turned the viewer back on which he had been using when the message came.

A canned lecture was barely under way. A human xenologist stood in the screen and intoned:

“Warm-blooded, feathered, and flying, the Ythrians are not birds; they bring their young forth viviparously after a gestation of four and a half months; they do not have beaks, but lips and teeth. Nor are they mammals; they grow no hair and secrete no milk; those lips have developed for parents to feed infants by regurgitation. And while the antlibranchs might suggest fish gills, they are not meant for water but for—”

“Oh, no!” Helu exclaimed. “Sir, won’t you have time to study later? Devil knows how many more weeks we’ll lie in orbit doing nothing.”

“War may erupt at any minute,” Wa Chaou said.

“And if and when, who cares how the enemy looks or what his love life is? His ships are about like ours, and that’s all we’re ever likely to see.”

“Oh, you have a direct line to the future?” the Cynthian murmured.

Rochefort stopped the tape and snapped, “I’ll put the sound on tight beam if you want. But a knowledge of the enemy’s nature might make the quantum of difference that saves us when the real thing happens. I suggest you watch too.”

“Er, I think I should check out Number Three oscillator, long’s we’re not traveling faster-than-light,” Helu said, and withdrew into the engine room. Wa Chaou settled down by Rochefort.

The lieutenant smiled. He refrained from telling the Cynthian, You’re a good little chap. Did you enlist to get away from the domination of irascible females on your home planet?

His thought went on: The reproductive pattern — sexual characteristics, requirements of the young — does seem to determine most of the basics in any intelligent species. As if the cynic’s remark were true, that an organism is simply a DNA molecule’s way of making more DNA molecules. Or whatever the chemicals of heredity may be on a given world… But no, a Jerusalem Catholic can’t believe that. Biological evolution inclines, it does not compel.

“Let’s see how the Ythrians work,” he said aloud, reaching for the switch.

“Don’t you already know, sir?” Wa Chaou asked.

“Not really. So many sophont races, in that bit of space we’ve sort of explored. And I’ve been busy familiarizing myself with my new duties.” Rochefort chuckled. “And, be it admitted, enjoying what leaves I could get.”

He reactivated the screen. It showed an Ythrian walking on the feet that grew from his wings: a comparatively slow, jerky gait, no good for real distances. The being stopped, lowered hands to ground, and stood on them. He lifted his wings, and suddenly he was splendid.

Beneath, on either side, were slits in column. As the wings rose, the feathery operculum-like flaps which protected them were drawn back. The slits widened until, at full extension, they gaped like purple mouths. The view became a closeup. Thin-skinned tissues, intricately wrinkled, lay behind a. curtain of cilia which must be for screening out dust.

When the wings lowered, the slits were forced shut again, bellows fashion. The lecturer’s voice said: “This is what allows so heavy a body, under Terra-type weight and gas density, to fly. Ythrians attain more than twice the mass of the largest possible airborne creature on similar planets elsewhere. The antlibranchs, pumped by the wing-strokes, take in oxygen under pressure to feed it directly to the bloodstream. Thus they supplement lungs which themselves more or less resemble those of ordinary land animals. The Ythrian acquires the power needed to get aloft and, indeed, fly with rapidity and grace.”

The view drew back. The creature in the holograph flapped strongly and rocketed upward.

“Of course,” the dry voice said, “this energy must come from a correspondingly accelerated metabolism. Unless prevented from flying, the Ythrian is a voracious eater. Aside from certain sweet fruits, he is strictly carnivorous. His appetite has doubtless reinforced the usual carnivore tendency to live in small, well-separated groups, each occupying a wide territory which instinct makes it defend against all intruders.

“In fact, the Ythrian can best be understood in terms of what we know or conjecture about the evolution of his race.”

“Conjecture more than know, I suspect,” Rochefort remarked. But he found himself fascinated.

“We believe that homeothermic — roughly speaking, warm-blooded — life on Ythri did not come from a reptilian or reptiloid form, but directly from an amphibian, conceivably even from something corresponding to a lung-fish. At any rate, it retained a kind of gill. Those species which were most successful on land eventually lost this feature. More primitive animals kept it. Among these was that small, probably swamp-dwelling thing which became the ancestor of the sophont. Taking to the treetops, it may have developed a membrane on which to glide from bough to bough. This finally turned into a wing. Meanwhile the gills were modified for aerial use, into superchargers.”

“As usual,” Wa Chaou observed. “The failures at one stage beget the successes of the next,”

“Of course, the Ythrian can soar and even hover,” the speaker said, “but it is the tremendous wing area which makes this possible, and the antlibranchs are what make it possible to operate those wings.

“Otherwise the pre-Ythrian must have appeared fairly similar to Terran birds.” Pictures of various hypothetical extinct creatures went by. “It developed an analogous water-hoarding system — no separate urination — which saved weight as well as compensating for evaporative losses from the antlibranchs. It likewise developed light bones, though these are more intricate than avian bones, built of a marvelously strong two-phase material whose organic component is not collagen but a substance carrying out the functions of Terra-mammalian marrow. The animal did not, however, further ease its burdens by trading teeth for a beak. Many Ythrian ornithoids have done so, for example the uhoth, hawklike in appearance, doglike in service. But the pre-sophont remained an unspecialized dweller in wet jungles.

“The fact that the young were born tiny and helpless — since the female could not fly long distances while carrying a heavy fetus — is probably responsible for the retention and elaboration of the digits on the wings. The cub could cling to either parent in turn while these cruised after food; before it was able to fly, it could save itself from enemies by clambering up a tree. Meanwhile the feet acquired more and more ability to seize prey and manipulate objects.

“Incidentally, the short gestation period does not mean that the Ythrian is born with a poorly developed nervous system. The rapid metabolism of flight affects the rate of fetal cell division. This process concentrates on laying down a body pattern rather than on increasing the size. Nevertheless, an infant Ythrian needs more care, and more food, than an infant human. The parents must cooperate in providing this as well as in carrying their young about. Here we may have the root cause of the sexual equality or near equality found in all Ythrian cultures.

“Likewise, a rapid succession of infants would be impossible to keep alive under primitive conditions. This may be a reason why the female only ovulates at intervals of a year — Ythri’s is about half of Terra’s — and not for about two years after giving birth. Sexuality does not come overtly into play except at these times. Then it is almost uncontrollably strong in male and female alike. This may well have given the territorial instinct a cultural reinforcement after intelligence evolved. Parents wish to keep their nubile daughters isolated from chance-met males while in heat. Furthermore, husband and wife do not wish to waste a rich, rare experience on any outsider.

“The sexual cycle is not totally rigid. In particular, grief often brings on estrus. Doubtless this was originally a provision of nature for rapid replacement of losses. It seems to have brought about a partial fusion of Eros and Thanatos in the Ythrian psyche which makes much of the race’s art, and doubtless thought, incomprehensible to man. An occasional female can ovulate at will, though this is considered, an abnormality; in olden days she would be killed, now she is generally shunned, out of dread of her power. A favorite villain in Ythrian story is the male who, by hypnosis or otherwise, can induce the state. Of course, the most important manifestation of a degree of flexibility is the fact that Ythrians have successfully adapted their reproductive pattern, like everything else, to a variety of colonized planets.”

“Me, I think it’s more fun being human,” Rochefort said.

“I don’t know, sir,” Wa Chaou replied. “Superficially the relationship between the sexes looks simpler than in your race or mine; you’re either in the mood or you’re not, and that’s that. I wonder, though, if it may not really be more subtle and complicated: than ours, even more basic to the whole psychology.”

“But to return to evolution,” the lecturer was saying. “It seems that a major part of Ythri underwent something like the great Pliocene drought in’ Terra’s Africa. The ornithoids were forced out of dwindling forests onto growing savannahs. There they evolved from carrion eaters to big-game hunters in a manner analogous to pre-man. The original feet became hands, which eventually started making tools. To support the body and provide locomotion on the ground, the original elbow claws turned into feet, the wings that bore them became convertible to legs of a sort.

“Still, the intelligent Ythrian remained a pure carnivore, and one which was awkward on land. Typically, primitive hunters struck from above, with spears, arrows, axes. Thus only a few were needed to bring down the largest beasts. There was no necessity to cooperate in digging pits for elephants or standing shoulder to shoulder against a charging lion. Society remained divided into families or clans, which seldom fought wars but which, on the other hand, did not have much contact of any sort.

“The revolution which ended the Stone Age did not involve agriculture from the beginning, as in the case of man. It came from the systematic herding, at last the domestication, of big ground animals like the maukti, smaller ones like the long-haired mayaw. This stimulated the invention of skids, wheels, and the like, enabling the Ythrian to get about more readily on the surface. Agriculture was invented as an ancillary to ranching, an efficient means of providing fodder. The food surplus allowed leisure for travel, trade, and widespread cultural intercourse. Hence larger, complex social units arose.

“They cannot be called civilizations in a strict sense, because Ythri has never known true cities. The, mobility of being winged left no necessity for crowding together in order to maintain close relationships. Granted, sedentary centers did appear — for mining, metallurgy, and other industry; for trade and religion; for defense in case the group was defeated by another in aerial battle. But these have always been small and their populations mostly floating. Apart from their barons and garrisons, their permanent inhabitants were formerly, for the main part, wing-clipped slaves — today, automated machines. Clipping was an easy method of making a person controllable; yet since the feathers could grow back, the common practice of promising manumission after a certain period of diligent service tended to make prisoners docile. Hence slavery became so basic to pre-industrial Ythrian society that to this day it has not entirely disappeared.”

Well, we’re reviving it in the Empire, Rochefort thought For terms and under conditions limited by law; as a punishment, in order to get some social utility out of the criminal; nevertheless, we’re bringing back a thing the Ythrians are letting die. How more moral are we than they? How much more right do we have?

He straightened in his chair. Man is my race.

A willowy blonde with the old-fashioned Esperancian taste for simplicity in clothes, Eve Davisson made a pleasing contrast to Philippe Rochefort, as both were well aware. He was a tall, rather slender young man, his bearing athletic, his features broad-nosed, full-lipped, and regular, his hair, kinking itself into a lustrous black coif over the deep-brown skin. And he stretched to the limit the tolerance granted officers as regards their dress uniforms — rakishly tilted bonnet bearing the sunburst of Empire, gold-trimmed blue tunic, scarlet sash and cloak, snowy trousers tucked into low boots of authentic Terran beef-leather.

They sat in an intimate restaurant of Fleurville, by a window opening on gardens and stars. A live sonorist played something old and sentimental; perfumed, slightly intoxicant vapors drifted about; they toyed with hors d’oeuvres and paid more serious attention to their champagne. Nonetheless she was not smiling.

“This world was settled by people who believed in peace,” she said. Her tone mourned rather than accused. “For generations they kept no armed forces, they relied on the good will of others whom they helped.”

“That good will didn’t outlive the Troubles,” Rochefort said.

“I know, I know. I shan’t join the demonstrators, whatever some of my friends may say when they learn I’ve been out with an Imperial officer. But Phil — the star named Pax, the planet named Esperance are being geared for war. It hurts.”

“It’d hurt worse if you were attacked. Avalon isn’t far, and they’ve built a lot of power there.”

Her fingers tightened on the stem of her glass. “Attack from Avalon? But I’ve met those people, both races. They’ve come here on trade or tour or — I made a tour there myself, not long ago. I went because it’s picturesque, but was so graciously treated I didn’t want to leave.”

“I daresay Ythrian manners have rubbed off on their human fellows.” Rochefort let a draft go over his palate, hoping it would tingle away his irritation. This wasn’t supposed to be a political evening. “Likewise less pleasant features of the Ythrian personality.”

She studied him through the soft light before she said low, “I get an impression you disapprove of a mixed colony.”

“Well… in a way, yes.” He could have dissembled, facilely agreed to everything she maintained, and thus improved his chances of bedding her later on. But he’d never operated thus; and he never would, especially when he liked this girl just as a person. “I believe in being what you are and standing by your own.”

“You talk almost like a human supremacist,” she said, though mildly.

“To the extent that man is the leading race furnishes most of the leaders — in Technic civilization, yes, I suppose you’d have to call me a human supremacist,” he admitted. “It doesn’t mean we aren’t chronically sinful and stupid, nor does it mean we have any right to oppress others. Why, my sort of people are the xenosophont’s best friend. We simply don’t want to imitate him.”

“Do you believe the Terran Empire is a force for good?”

“On balance, yes. It commits evil. But nothing mortal can avoid that. Our duty is to correct the wrongs… and also to recognize the values that the Empire does, in fact, preserve.”

“You may have encountered too little of the evil.”

“Because I’m from Terra itself?” Rochefort chuckled. “My dear, you’re too bright to imagine the mother system is inhabited exclusively by aristocrats. My father is a minor functionary of the Sociodynamic Service. His job caused us to move around a lot. I was born in Selenopolis, which is a spaceport and manufacturing center. I spent several impressionable years on Venus, in the crime and poverty of a planet whose terraforming never had been quite satisfactory. I joined the navy as an enlisted rating — not out of chauvinism, merely a boyish wish to see the universe — and wasn’t tapped for pilot school for two-three years; meanwhile, I saw the grim side of more than one world. Sure, there’s a cosmos of room for improvement. Well, let’s improve, not tear down. And let’s defend!”

He stopped. “Damn,” he said frankly. “I’d hoped to lure you out of your seriousness, and fell into it myself.”

Now the girl laughed, and raised heir glass. “Let’s help each other climb out, then,” she suggested.

They did. Rochefort’s liberty became highly enjoyable. And that was fortunate, because two weeks after he reported back from it, Ansa was ordered into deep space. Light-years from Pax, she joined the fleet that had been using immensity as a mask for its marshaling; and ships by the hundreds hurled toward the Domain of Ythri.