Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (44 page)

Fraq sang forth again from his booming lungs, this time in Anglish, for her benefit. “No few be the winds that blow on our souls! Maychance our technics bring to bear! Stiffly upwind we go a-wing!”

More claw-clashing and hooting big-lung calls. The Ythri females added skittering grace notes, Ruth noted, probably challenging the males to do better than they. The battle of the sexes was a galactic scale universal. Or perhaps more like a dance.

Meat desire rang in their booming voices. The Ythri rustled and fretted and now steam rose from their feathers as their blood pumped energy into swollen tissues. Eyes jerked with predator speed and beaks clattered a rattling rhythm.

The Ythri were now steamed with energy. Eyeing them, Ruth checked her own gear and wondered what it would be like to have feathers she could arch and bunch into control surfaces, the better to master the vagrant winds.

Into the brawling air, Fraq sheered off his perch at a steep angle. He opened to the full five meter wingspan and floated without labor. Ruth took a breath of the thick, sweet air and leaped after him, arms opening to embrace the updraft with her wings.

The Library had set the atmospheric pressure higher to give Ruth a bit of help keeping aloft. The rich green canopy had breaks and corridors that funneled winds, creating turbulence and even vortexes, driven by the updrafts that rimmed the Void and the descending currents that dove down at the center. A side effect—unavoidable, the Prefect assured her with lofty tones—was increased vapor density, which meant . . . clouds. A gray puffball glided up from the distant floor, getting darker as it rose and droplets condensed. And Ruth was swooping into it, following Fraq.

He was already hundreds of meters ahead, swooping in a V search pattern with other Ythris. She was playing catch-up in every turn they made, surveying the canopy. Some Ythri dove down in long swoops to peer under the broad stretching branches of the tall trees. There was maneuver space for them because under Lunar grav Earthly trees had shot up, many of them several hundred meters tall. Give life opportunities and it seizes them.

Something seized her then—a vortex. She tumbled, turned her ankle flaps, got back in line to cut across the turbulence. A Ythri nearby, making a return swoop, looked at her oddly, mouth wide, and she saw its tongue and palate were purple. A hunting sign?

Here came the gray cloud. She angled in, rising, and suddenly droplets washed over her. Rain! Within moments, flying blind in the gray mist, she could feel herself gain weight as rivulets ran along her back. When she popped out into the shafts of light she was above the canopy and Ythri were angling below the treetops. She coasted, watching, and when a clearing came she made herself dive lower, scooting under the dense branches. Still fifty meters above the ground, she watched the Ythri throng down on—wild pigs! The animals snarled up at the immense birds and the Ythri fell upon them with glad cries. Claws sank deep into the boar. The slaughter brought whooping calls as the sky predators savaged a dozen pigs within minutes. She had never seen anything like it.

Fraq rose from the bloody ground, jumping into the air effortlessly, and shot up to fly parallel to her circling. “Like stump legs, these are!” he shouted, and she supposed his twisted mouth bespoke fun. “Come!”

He veered away and she labored to follow. Soon they came out onto a grassy plain and Fraq bellowed with obvious joy. “Sugarmeat!”

He dived immediately at a group of kangaroo. She zoomed over the killing, as Fraq sprang from one to the next, expertly slicing their throats with his claws as they turned to flee. He caught each at the top of the hop. The roos fell dead, legs still kicking. Blood stained the ground.

She let her left wing drag to double back to see more and it caught on a branch. Her “Uh!” made Fraq look up as she tumbled in a slow, stupid gyre—and smacked down hard on her left shoulder.

Sitting up, she was sure Fraq was laughing, a high booming cackle no human had heard before.

The Lunavator Bolo dropped down the black sky for them.

The grappler looked like a long cable plunging straight down vertically from the starscape, jaws yawning. Its tip speed at the grab platform was exactly zero, she knew, but Ruth braced herself for the yank.

It was a heavy load to haul. The Ythris were in the craft they had flown in on from the wormhole, in its own big chamber. The entire human vehicle held Ruth, Prefect and staff, plus the booster crew, a complete interplanetary spacecraft ready to fly. Here it came—
snap
and they were aloft, zooming up into the dead black Lunar sky. She watched the silvery ground rush away and then saw the latest comet head slide up from the horizon. It seethed with fogs, all captured by a gossamer envelope. Kilometers across and managed by robots, it glowed under sunlight focused by silvery mirrors. Water, food, fuel—the key to mastering the inner solar system lay in dropping iceteroids down the grav gradient, sliding them into useful orbits, and sucking them dry. Luna needed about one comet head a week these days, a burgeoning world.

They arced up into the black under an easy half-a-grav acceleration. Ruth had been a Lunatic long enough to notice the strain. The Lunavator was a rotating bolo that touched down at the launch port exactly the same way every time, a classical mechanics milk run. Best to rest and not think too much about the high-wire handoffs involved. She let herself drowse, thinking about the still mysterious Ythri motives, when the Prefect said at her elbow, “I wish I knew more about what they plan.”

This was unusually revealing. “Um, why?”

The Prefect allowed himself a frown. “They say this Ark is a legacy they want to ‘harvest’ but . . . somehow, it’s connected to their own history.”

“Maybe one visited them?”

“Then why would they need this one?”

“They’re hunters.”

“With long memories, apparently.”

“They insisted on bringing their own ship, too . . . ” she prompted.

“It makes sense. The ship is very small and they say it fits their physio needs. All they took aboard was the basics: volatiles, air, food.”

“Which means they could scoot out to the Oort, jump through the wormhole wherever it is, and be gone with whatever they get from the Ark.”

The Prefect gave a small eye-twitch. “We have thought of that, yes.”

“And taken measures . . . ”

“Yes.” He would say no more.

The Bolo central tether facility was a big captured asteroid, massive enough to prevent payloads from stealing too much energy, lowering the Bolo orbit. The Lunavator rotated in the same direction as its orbit, precisely so that the velocity of each Bolo end’s tip equaled the orbital velocity of the system’s center of mass. So the center had to hold steady.

They spun upward, sliding elevator fashion around the dark asteroid, a rocky cinder brightly lit by the control station, and onward to the Flinger. Ruth knew she was not privy to Prefect-level strategies, since the Library historically sponged up knowledge and gave forth only trickles, even to librarians such as her. But he seemed relaxed, and this was an unusual chance. She gave him her best party-girl smile. It seemed to have no effect, so she said, “I’m getting on well with Fraq.”

“Yes, I see him eyeing you at our table meetings.”

“What?” She never knew where his thinking came from. “He’s another species!”

“From an entirely different kingdom of life, true. But male strategies seem to be an invariant.”

She wondered if this was a joke and suddenly felt a blush spread cross her cheeks. She had liked the strong look of Fraq, his tawny feathers wreathing slim muscles, the glinting golden eyes—

Best to deflect this talk, yes. “I tried to get out of him where the Ark is.”

“I know. You failed.”

Okay, try the front door. “You didn’t seem bothered when the issue came up.”

“I already knew.”

“Where is it, anyway?”

The Prefect grimaced, another unusual expression.
So you’re not the perpetual Sphinx after all.
“They finally revealed that. They spotted it using code-response transmissions while they came in from the Oort. How they knew the code they didn’t say.”

“They must’ve had a visit from an Ark, then.”

“They won’t discuss that, which means you are probably right. The translators think so, too.”

“So the Ark, it’s . . . ?”

“A small thing in the asteroid belt, the obvious place to hide.”

“That big a sail—”

“It’s probably folded up, to elude detection.”

Ruth tried to get more but the Prefect went forward to the
Venture
bridge. She sat, watched Luna shrink to aft, and pondered the Ythri mysteries. She was having coffee in a bubble cup when the Flinger came rushing down. She could make out the slender cables as they came out of the dark, spindly fingers reaching for the grapple. Their “package” in Lunavator lingo was the human ship,
Venture
, and the smaller Ythri ship, bundled together. The package got handed off in gruff shoves to the wrought-carbon Flinger cable. It snatched them at high, slam-into-the-couch accelerations, a brutal thrust heading them into their fast interplanetary orbit. She relaxed as the huge invisible hand forced her deep into her sighing smart-cushions. Her joints ached.

Clunks, rattles, and thunks told her their package was taking on more masses of water, to later burn in the reaction engines. She could see the feeder lines snaking into their carbon-black package, delivering water fresh-harvested from the comet nucleus she had seen only a few hours ago, looking up from the launch point. All the while the Flinger was pumping water into their fusion fuel tanks. They would shove steam out to decelerate at their destination.

Their speed was so high now as to be incomprehensible, the view a blur. All she could think of was the unending pressure forcing them onward. She had extra oxy just to stay conscious; Loonies had it hard. The Flinger orbited far above the Lunavator in centrifugal haste, rotating so fast that within another hour it let them go at a speed above two hundred kilometers a
second
. The solar system was big, and it was best not to think about hitting a wandering rock at such speeds. Their forward-looking radar linked to laser cannon could do that, thank you.

They popped free on course. It was like turning into an angel after a week in hell. Light, airy, she was a free bird.

She unstrapped in the zero gravs and tried a tumble-thrust to get her popping joints aligned. She had done zero grav before but now her flying experience paid off in easy, unconscious grace.

The Prefect was asleep, or maybe unconscious, his face lined. She headed for the hibernation capsule ahead of the staff, got her injections from the nurse, and snuggled into the smart comfy clasp of the hiber tech cocoon. She didn’t want to hear the Prefect’s ideas, or the staff’s. And she didn’t want to be bored with a month of speculation. Sleep, bliss, yes.

She wanted to see the Ark, a month’s ride away.

The Ark sail was folded up into a tight scroll, which explained why humans hadn’t found it. The sail had been kilometers across, and now was just a white rod bound with straps. Its cargo, the ship that had sailed the eons, basked in the ruddy glow of a red giant, then coasted for centuries across to the nearby Earth—well, it looked ordinary. A dull composite cylinder, streaked and pitted and worn, hardly a hundred meters long and seventy meters across. But the door was open, a yawning circle. Pretty obvious:
Come on in, whoever you are. You’re why we came.

Except the Ark arrived before humanity had swung down from the trees. It had to be designed to welcome whatever sprang from ancient forests, glimpsed in pixels by a species long extinct.

Staff up and coffee-strong, they prepared a team to haul alongside the Ark and board. Then the Prefect suddenly cried, “The Ythris are already there!”

Ruth glanced out a port while she slipped on her skin suit. Floating across the space between them and the Ark, lit only by starlight, were . . . bubbles. With her helmet on she close upped those motes and saw that Ythri space suits were the opposite of theirs: expanded, transparent oblate spheroids with appliances socketed into the walls. A Ythri swam in the bubble, breathing air and propelling itself with tiny jets. The suit bubbles had grappling arms and the team of six Ythri were forming a ring around the Ark cylinder. Each carried a teardrop thing of tan ceramic alongside. “They’re not going for the front door,” she sent before sealing her suit.

By the time she got out their air lock the Ythri had the tan ceramics attached to the Ark hull, encircling it. “What’s up?” she sent on private com to the Prefect—who, she saw, hadn’t bothered to get into his skin suit. Maybe he didn’t bother to have one, either; he was standing at the big port in the ship’s bridge.

She glided past him on a tether, skating cross the
Venture
’s hull in the inky dark. “We anticipated this,” he said blandly and she could see his lips move.

“What’re they—”

“Probably mounting those simple fusor packs they’re carrying. They want to get the full implosion impact, tear the Ark down to atoms.”

“
Why?
”

“Some ancient grudge, I surmise. I had their ship sounded from outside, when it first came into Lunar orbit. The fusor warheads showed up clearly.” He stood with hands behind his back, a traditional Prefect stance of measured patience.

Ruth wasn’t feeling patient and would probably never be a Prefect. “You knew all this—”

“And did not tell you, yes. I could not predict how well the Ythri could read your unconscious signals.”

“What do you—”

“A moment.” The Prefect nodded to the
Venture
Captain. From the forward hull a concealed projector suddenly jutted forth. Its snout turned, focused, and Ruth heard a
braaaack
in her microwave inputs. Nothing happened that she could see but the Prefect nodded and allowed himself a small smile. “Their simple warheads are now dead. Go tell them.”

So she was message girl now. Still, Ruth was glad to be free of
Venture
and jetting toward the floating Ythri bubbles. As she approached they seemed disturbed, working furiously at their socketed tools. The tan ceramic warheads were just lumps on the Ark cinder-dark skin.