Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (42 page)

BLOODPRIDE
by Gregory Benford

Writer and scientist
Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel
Timescape
won the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and is widely considered to be one of the classic novels of the last two decades. His other novels include
Beyond Jupiter, The Stars in Shroud, In the Ocean of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact,
and
Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, Sailing Bright Eternity, Cosm, Foundation’s Fear, The Martian Race,
and
Beyond Infinity.
His short work has been collected
in
Matter’s End, Worlds Vast and Various,
and
Immersion and Other Short Novels.
His non-fiction books include
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, Habitats in Space, Skylife: Space Habitats in Story and Science (
with George Zebrowski
),
and
Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs (
with Elizabeth Malartre
).
As editor, his anthologies include
Far Futures, Microcosms,
and the four-volume
What Might Have Been
series, edited with Martin H. Greenberg. His most recent book is a novel,
The Sunborn.
Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where his research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics.

The Ythrians are a race of flying, warlike aliens who featured in Poul Anderson’s novel
People of the Wind,
and in other stories such as “Wings of Victory” and “The Problem of Pain” that were collected in
The Earth Book of Stormgate.
Here Greg Benford shows Ythrians and humans cautiously sniffing each other out, bristling, wary, suspicious, neither side trusting the other. With, it turns out, good reason.

The sceptre, learning, physic, must

All follow this, and come to dust.

—Shakespeare

She smelled the aliens coming. They were above her as she got caught in a down draft. She tumbled. The draft brought their pungent odor—rank, feathery, strange. She fought against the current pushing her down, arms churning, legs kicking with their ailerons. The hinged flaps fluttered as she tried to control her banking, but she rolled too, getting dizzy—and the ground was coming up fast.

Ruth had thought she was a reasonably good flyer, but now she regretted telling anyone about her hobby. Maybe a hundred meters to go below her, and she was too far from the fusor-warmed pink walls where the updrafts were. She heard the aliens flap down the wind, calling out their air song, their scent getting riper—and then they were flashing around her like a whirlwind.

What could a Ythri do—grab her? Then they would both fall.

The answer came suddenly. Wings fully spread, the one called Fraq swept close and threw a gossamer strand around her helmet. He pulled. As it snapped straight he worked upward and toward the wall. The rope tugged her after him as she thrust hard with her arms, letting her foot flaps straighten along her legs. They stopped fluttering. Sharp cries came from the other Ythri. She was under tow.

Humiliating, but better than a snapped neck any day.

Fraq was heading up and over toward the speckled void walls. That gave Ruth a chance to stare at him, which she couldn’t politely do in the formal, diplomatic sessions she had attended with him. A keelbone jutted beneath a strong neck like a ship’s prow. The tow line wrapped around the heavily muscled shoulders. Fraq’s head was blunt-nosed and without external ears. As he turned his head to bark an order—“Hold steady offwind!”—she saw that the mouth had flushed lips, cherry red. Two big golden eyes stabbed sidewise, checking clearance from the others flapping above, who were blocking the downdraft. His crest of black-tipped white plumage rose stiffly above, a control surface he could tilt—and protection for the bulging skull, she guessed. The fan-shaped tail flexed with white streamers among gray fan feathers. Fraq’s lean body was mahogany that reddened along the naked legs. His yellow claws out at the wing tips made a palm that canted for lift. Beautiful.

The pink wall was close now and she felt the caress of the updraft winds. Fraq shouted, “Go!” and somehow with a toss of his head sent a wave down the tow line that slipped it from her helmet. Smart birds knew a lot of tricks. She was free.

Still she dropped, catching the wind on her arm wings. It would be even more humiliating to tumble now. She strained hard, flexed her body, thrust—and got stable. The aliens were hovering now, watching her, and she had to get this right. She tilted her ailerons and steadied, starting to rise.

From below she saw they had three slits in parallel on the body, flared to take in air. They resembled gills and shone bright pink, blood rich. As their wings lifted, she saw the slits drawn wide, three mouths yawning. As their elegant down strokes began, that action forced the gills shut.

The Ythrians had big barrel lungs, a passive system resembling humans’. Their secret lay in those supercharger gills, probably evolved from some amphibianlike ancestor. Those livid mouths worked in bellows fashion as the flight muscles contracted and big arteries sucked the air directly into the bloodstream. Higher air intake organs let them burn their fuel as fast as necessary.

Ruth thought,
Smart birds. I wonder how it feels to be so alive.

She landed by funneling down the updraft layer along the walls. She arrowed down against the warm breezes from the vents below, then skimmed off to land with some redeeming grace on the take-off platform. She looked up and the Ythrians were spiraling down, taking their time, still watching her. Had she proved herself in alien eyes?

She wanted to look unconcerned, so she gazed up at the view, hands on hips. This was the big, newest void, honed with an antibaryon fusor burst that rendered rock to plasma and lava, then vented the hot gruel through the top knothole. Media had showed all humanity the Lunar volcano show, as the ruddy rock flowed with liquid grace above the Lunar highlands, jetting into space in rosy filaments. Some caught it to shape habitats on the surface; the voids were an industrial miracle with real profits to be had. The fusor eruption left behind this oblate spheroid twenty kilometers high and five wide, cooling quickly into a hollow pink egg. Lunar subsurface sculpture was getting so adroit the engineers could shape any space you wanted. Rumors circulated that some rich magnate had ordered up a pyramid-shaped space, but even a fusor couldn’t do that. This big void was for flying, a unique Lunar pleasure for poor ground-bound primates. Hundreds of people were winging it as she looked up, most of them watching the aliens do astonishing feats. Fraq came by flying upside down with effortless grace, eyeing her on the ground as he shot across the void.

Those eyes—piercing, even at this distance. His golden-brown feathers covered but did not conceal the rippling muscle. Or that he was male. The Ythri could lock the joints of their limbs at will and on Luna, 0.18 gravs, seem to defy gravity’s existence for long, leisurely arcs. The forepart of their wing skeleton had humerus, radius, and ulna, much as in Earth birds. These locked together in flight and gave the Ythris a look of utter unconcern as they did the impossible.

An admirable addition to the Library’s category
Sapientia
, yes. But she reminded herself that Earthly birds’ sexual organs shrivel outside their reproductive times, a process called “involuting.”
But these aren’t birds, they’re aliens. Librarians must scrupulously avoid category errors . . .

When the Ythri flock landed with high, barking cries she consoled herself at how clumsy they were on ground. Slow and awkward afoot, shorter than her, yet Fraq’s head had a regal air. The ivory crest riff helped, looking like the defiant ridge of an ancient Roman helmet.

Still, up close and walking, she could see Fraq’s imposing body was mostly feathers and his wing-arms had light, hollow bones. All the Ythri landed with a final, artful pause before alighting—spidery, kitelike skeletons anchoring thin flesh. Still, Fraq stood out with his elegant muscles and tawny feather-coat, the elegance of his flight.

Earth birds had at least long ago lightened their burden, permitting a little more brain, by changing jaws to beaks. Not the Ythris. They sported the jaws and sharp teeth of dominant predators. Big and beweaponed, instantly ready to mount the wind, they need fear no beast of prey. And they had come across the light years through the wormhole humans still did not command.

“Thank you,” Ruth said as Fraq approached with his lurching gait. “I might have recovered in time—”

“You not. Yet still I admired your daring.”

“I haven’t tried this Void before, don’t know its currents.”

“Dirts do not know the air in their bones,” Fraq said, golden eyes so intense she felt their pressure like a force.

The new translation software was so fast and able she could sense no pause between the movements of his still blood-rich red lips and the voice that sounded in her ear. Of course it came to her electromagnetically, swamping the Ythri words that swam though the air like slippery song.

“We thank you for saving our assistant,” the Prefect said in a calm, mild tone at her elbow. “Now may we proceed?”

“We grant substance,” Fraq said, his wings held back so he could make something that reminded her of a bow. But he bowed to her, not to the Prefect, whose face tightened. The other Ythris made the same abrupt bowing gesture and formed a crescent behind Fraq.

So this had worked after all. Early on the Ythri had made it clear that those who cannot fly are sub-species, unworthy.

She nodded and the Prefect said ponderously, irked, “In truth, surely. Let us unfold our stories and . . . negotiate.”

The Ythris had come out of the mysterious Oort cloud wormhole at high velocity, plasma drives burning hot and luminous. Lunar telescopes picked up their cylindrical craft too late to get a back-trace on the trajectory. The wormhole’s position far out among the tumbling icestroids was still the big secret, vital to any human expansion out to the stars. Though aliens who had come from it before had carefully blurred their tracks. The civilizations that communicated with microwaves or wormholes did not give away secrets, especially where the wormhole mouths might be. The SETI Library was under enormous pressure to find its location. Negotiation seemed the only path.

So when the Ythri demanded a ritual flight before negotiations, the Library sought out Ruth. She had flown often in the smaller voids fusion-dug deep in the Lunar volcanic masses, and few librarians had ever even tied on the arm wings, so . . .

She breathed a sigh of relief as they sat in the diplomacy room of the SETI Library. The Ythri got their flock in order in a long arc around the table only after the humans sat. Fraq sat at the center of their arc, and pointedly sat opposite Ruth, not the Prefect. Ruth suppressed a smile.

“Ah, um.” The Prefect frowned, then got right to the point. “What do you seek?”

Fraq said, “Bloodpride requires we undertake this ancient task. Thanks to your submitting to concordance ritual, we can now tell truth. You are dirt-huggers but worthy of station, thus can help us with our search.”

“We fly in sympathy,” the Prefect answered. Ruth saw that the Prefect had learned this ritual from the translator team. Mutual gestures were essential in social intelligences. But with these carnivore aliens, the hard decisions came from the top. Fraq seemed in charge, but it was hard to tell.

She wondered if her being female mattered. Maybe not. So she said while the Prefect conferred with the translators, “What are you looking for?”

“The legacy ark,” Fraq said immediately with no diplomatic phrases. His big sharp eyes focused intently and moved swiftly to watch all the faces in the room—like an eagle high in the wind, she thought. “It came here before your species emerged. Many millions of your orbital cycles before.”

“We are used to such time scales at the SETI Library.”

“We have beamed you before, but got no response,” Fraq said.

“Only lately have we come to prosperity,” a Prefect underling ventured. “But we may know of your signals. Much we have received in the past we did not comprehend.”

“Permit us to unfold our history, then.”

The tale emerged under close questioning. They had images as well, sweeping in their majesty.

The Ythris knew of an earlier alien civilization that had used the wormhole to the Sol region, after eons of neglect. Those experiments had sent mass down through the wormhole network, and one had passed momentarily through the center of a star. Wormhole exits could sink into stars, yet survive. This one had passed a fiery mass from the star into other wormhole routes, for the system was complexly interwoven. The flaring plasma came out at the exit near Fraq’s world. The avians had seen it—the telltale crimson burst of violent plasma lighting their sky, tracing out the mouth’s position. A revelation.

The Ythris had gone through their own troubles—long eras of decline caused by resource losses, such as Earth had suffered when the fossil oil ran out, amid a terrible era of warming air and biting acid oceans. That had hobbled mankind for many centuries.