Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6) (42 page)

“Child!” Deltain said in juddery response. “How did you survive the summer?”

“We went up the mountain to where it’s cooler.”

“We?”

“Syrdian and I. We’re mated now.”

Deltain
’s eyes widened, “But Syrdian
…” Hie broke off turning to look at Syrdian. Syrdian stood with hies parents but was looking at Deltain. Syrdian lifted hies wings gently, spreading them. Deltain
noticed
large slightly rippled marks in Syrdian’s right wing with curious little dots along them.
Hie’d never noticed those before

Suddenly Bultaken, first among the Yetany stepped into their little tableau. “Syrdian!
You’re alive! That’s wonderful!
We
thought that
you were killed
…” Hie stumbled to a stop
,
staring
at Syrdian’s right wing which
Syrdian
had again lifted to display the funny marks. “
What happened to
your wing?
Where did you spend the summer?”

Syrdian drew himrself up, “My wing was torn by a talor.
Ripped badly with enormous holes where you see these marks!
Qes
was there, but he
fled
.”
Syrdian’s tone as hie said “fled” left little doubt about how Syrdian felt about Qes now. “While Qes flew away, leaving me to the talor,
Dex
arrived and
killed
it. T
hen
,
like hie does hies amazing leatherwork,
Dex
sewed up
my wing
.”

The crowd
had
all had
their
fore eyes on Syrdian
. N
ow they turned to stare at Dex.

Syrdian continued
with disgust
, “
Qes
left me for dead,
” and with love, “
but
Dex
stayed with me and kept me alive through the summer
when
I couldn’t fly south.”

The crowd near Syrdian backed away from himr, a few muttering “dyatso.” Syrdian said, “I am
not
dyatso! With Dex’s magic sutures holding it, my wing healed and I can fly again.” In the space that had appeared around himr hie beat briefly into the air to the astonished moans of many of the dalin surrounding himr
. Thier
wings rose involuntarily
in amazement
.

A commotion appeared in the crowd and then Qes pushed through to stare at Syrdian,
then stole a glance
at hies wing. Qes, who to Deltain’s disgust, over the summer
had broken up the near-
mating of Fantais and Malten by making evident hies wish to mate with Fantais
now that
Syrdian had been lost. “Syrdian!” hie cried, stepping forward, arms outstretched.

Deltain felt a quiver run over Dex but Syrdian blocked
Qes’
approach with an outstretched arm. “I’m mated to Dex now. Even if I
weren’t
I wouldn’t want
to be with
the dalin who left me when I
was
injured.”

Qes said plaintively, “But you were dyatso!”

“I fly, and I’m not dead!” Syrdian
’s eyes turned lovingly to Dex
, “Thanks to Dex.”

“Is this a zornit?”
s
omeone
cried
from over near the fire pit. Eyes turned that way.

Deltain realized that hie’d been smelling something wonderful ever since hie’d landed. Hie turned hies head and stretched hies neck up to look over the dalin behind himr.
A very
large animal had been broken
down
and was roasting over a large fire in the pit. Hie wondered briefly if someone had flown in a day early and found a zornit fallen off a cliff or something?

Syrdian said, “Yes, that’s a zornit. Dex has learned how to hunt them. We killed it yesterday and began roasting it this morning to welcome
you
Yetany on your return.” Murmurs of awe and interjections of disbelief shot through the crowd.

Deltain turned hies eyes searchingly to Dex, “Really?!”

Dex dipped hies head yes.

“And you repaired hies wing?”

Dex dipped hies head again.

Deltain frowned, “Who taught you to do that?”

Dex grinned, wings quivering with mirth, “You did.”

Deltain’s head went up and back in disbelief, “I?”

“I
did it
just like a side to side joint in leather.”

“Really?!”

“Really.”

Bultaken said unbelievingly, “
How
do you claim that you hunt zornit?”

Syrdian drew himrself up, “We will probably teach you, but it will depend on the rank we are given in the tribe.”

Tanif, one of Syrdian’s parents
,
reached out for Syrdian’s arm saying, “You still have high rank from us.
We
will not permit you to mate with Dex, hie is not of sufficient rank for
us
to even
consider it
.”

Syrdian dodged Tani
f’s hand and walked over to Dex. Hie
stepped
up to
the other side of Dex
from Deltain
and put an arm around himr, “I
told
you, I’m
already
mated to Dex. You have not seen the
amazing
things hie can do—someday hie will be
first
among the Yetany…
There is no doubt about that.

I am proud to tell you that I carry hies child… and hie mine.”

Deltain’s head whipped around to stare and hies eyes widened to hear this. For both members of a mated couple to carry child at the same time was
a very rare and
highly
venerated
omen…
Deltain’s
wings quivered with the joy hie felt to have gone from childless and lonely to being the parent of an enormously accomplished child
…
and to have two grandchildren on the way
. Hies hearts sang…

Epilogue

In the morning,
Shan woke to the sound of the shower running in the bathroom behind him. He felt indescribably happy and wondered why for a moment, then the events of the past few days washed over him.

Could all this be true
? N
ot a dream
? Raquel, the wonderful Raquel
,
and the
sweet joy of the
t
ime he’d been spending with her!

His questions about weird extrapolations of Donsaii’s math, explained by the amazing Donsaii herself?

The meeting of a lifetime with Ell Donsaii, surely something he’d remember for the rest of his life!

Realizing that he
loved
Raquel.

His advisor accepting his work with Donsaii’s math as worthy of his PhD dissertation.

Last night…! Last night had been astonishing in ways he could never have bel
ieved before living through it…

He stretched and rolled over to face the bathroom door, ready to enjoy looking at the love of his life again.

After long minutes he was feeling frustrated, but then the door cracked open. He threw his arm up over his face
, peering under
and thinking to himself,
I’ll
pretend
I’m
still
asleep as she enter
s
the room.

The door opened farther and two feet appeared in it, visible beneath his arm.

They were paler and pinker than they should be!

Confused,
he
slowly
lifted his arm, peering under it. Lithe calves and knees, check, but also too light
ly colored
. Then brunette hair, the right color
,
but down by her knee?

He wondered,
is she bending over?

She didn’t move so he raised his arm slowly as if he were stretching in his sleep. A light skinned hand appeared, holding a brunette wig.

Wig?!

Heart
suddenly
pounding he threw his arm back.
Short strawberry blond hair!

There,
leaning
in the door
frame
of his bathroom,
holding Raquel’s hair
and
wearing nothing but a towel
was Ell Donsaii!

Grinning at him!

“Hi Shan,” she said quietly in Raquel’s voice
…

The End

If you liked reading about the “primitives” in this book you might also like reading my novel “Bonesetter” about primitive humans. The first three chapters are provided as a sample at the end of this book.

Hope you liked the book!

If so, please give it a positive review on Amazon.

Try the next in the series, to be published
someday
.

Author’s Afterword

This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I have always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically possible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Then you ask,
what if
something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world? Each of the Ell Donsaii stories asks at least one such question.

“
Tau Ceti
”
continues asking what kinds of cool things we could do with even small wormholes or “ports,” but it also
asks
,
“
what if
” we
actually
reach another life bearing world out amongst the stars? How might it be different? A common assumption in science fiction is that Earth
is
the
“
typical
”
life bearing world and that the kind
s
of world
s
that might bear life will be similar.
For interest there might be some “odd” worlds that are different than Earth in some way.
That there might be “heavy” worlds where the beings are massively muscled, or snowy worlds, farther from their suns
but that they
will
be the oddballs
.

Here I’ve tried to consider the question “what if” the “Goldilocks zone”
(
where worlds are the righ
t temperature for liquid water
and presumably life) is farther out because the atmosphere on
most
worlds is denser and has a stronger greenhouse effect
than Earth’s
?
Such a
dense atmosphere would mean that more animals would fly right? Because it would be easier for even large animals to fly in dense air. Especially if
that atmosphere
had a high oxygen content
which could
support a hotter metabolism capable of driving those wings. One
prevailing
theory is that the reason large pterosaurs could fly back in the Triassic and Cretaceous (the biggest birds of today are much smaller
than pterosaurs were
and
yet
can barely take off) was because Earth’s atmosphere had a higher oxygen content, and
that
the atmosphere
may
have been denser
back then
too
.

Another interesting question is, “If you were a intelligent
flying
being who lived a much more three dimensional life than we
humans
do
, wouldn’t you have a separate word for many of the different directions in your three dimensional life?” I’ve tried to give life to this concept by hyphenating a direction such as “
back-up-right” thus implying that the teecees might have a separate word for that direction.

I’ve
often wondered if Earth might be
at
one extreme of the spectrum of life bearing worlds out there. What if Earth is at the big, heavy, thin atmosphere
d
end of the spectrum of living worlds? What if
,
when we get out there
,
we
turn out to be the “heavy worlders” who are heavily muscled and
we’re
among the
very
few intelligent species who
can’t
fly?