Heritage of Flight (15 page)

On some worlds, people baited the creatures they wanted dead by poisoning foliage. The Cynthians were herbivores, so this seemed quite logical to Rafe. Too logical to work, he sighed, wincing, as Beneatha hurtled onto her feet.

"Not here you don't!” she insisted. “You don't know what the effects of your poisons will be on the entire ecosystem, let alone on us. Long-term, as well as short-term, since you all seem so interested in preserving our...” Thank God, Rafe thought, closing his eyes, that she managed to stop herself before she spat out the words
racial purity
. He saw Pauli's eyelids tic, and knew that she had anticipated Beneatha's words.

"As I was saying,” the xenobotanist continued, “I haven't the resources, much less the training, to heal anything you ruin. Since we're going to be here quite a while, I think it's important to consider the effects of anything we do on what's now our home.” She spoke, and looked, as if she hated the idea.

"Rafe, I've got to agree with Beneatha,” Pauli said.

"Then what's left?” Rafe asked. “We'll have to apply the pesticide directly. Anyone have any suggestions as to how?"

"Make up some scent that the Cynthians would like,” Lohr's voice (which had started to crack) came from the blanket on which he sat with his sister, her foot still immobilized, as she covered sheet after sheet of reusable plastic with gleaming swirls of paint. “Then make them trade for it."

Rafe wanted to slap the boy. The idea of profiting from the death of a species was indecent.
How long, though, has the boy even known what decency was? What does he, know: all right, he protected his sister. Then the Cynthians hurt her, so now, naturally, he thinks of ways to stop them.
And he had a point. After the Cynthians had killed the captain, they had avoided the settlement. It wasn't like that they would accept an offer of a gift from the people they had injured: aliens they might be, but they were intelligent—
which is why we're in this situation,
Rafe grimaced to himself.

"What would you suggest?” he asked the boy. “You wouldn't accept food from enemies, would you?"

The boy laughed bitterly. “I might,” he said. “But giving it to me would be the last thing they'd ever do. I can see what you mean, though. Why does it have to be food?” He glanced around as if for inspiration, and his eyes fell on ‘Cilla's artwork. “Why not paint? They like colors, don't they?"

In the end, Rafe could come up with no better ideas for dispensing the toxic pheromones; and he had little time for trial and error. If he had been wrong, if the toxins didn't turn this mating season into sterility and death, the next generation of Cynthians could probably destroy the tiny human settlement.

For the last time before she started up the rock chimney, Pauli wiped her hands on her legs. She only hoped Rafe was right when he claimed that this was the way to the Cynthians’ hibernacula. It was ironic that those were the very caves into which they had attempted to persuade the humans to evacuate.

Well, this was as good an approach to them as any; and, since it was protected by a rock passage too narrow for the Cynthians to enter, it was safer than most. That is, if Rafe was right. If he was wrong, then one of the smaller aliens, the nymphae as he called them, might well swoop down into the chimney to touch them with poison horns and send them toppling and screaming to the sharp rocks at the bottom of the shaft.

In that case, there would be no eaters to finish them off, as there had been for Borodin. (
Dear God
, Pauli made the familiar prayer,
grant he died quickly!
) They could lie there broken for hours.

Pauli had refused to allow Rafe to climb up into the mountains alone. Someone had to cover his back as he stole into the Cynthians’ caves. She was small enough and fast enough to do it. More than that, if she had to, she could fly back to the settlement on the glider she carried into the hills ...
if the Cynthians allow you,
whispered the nagging, worrying voice that had interrupted her thoughts ever since she inherited responsibility for the entire settlement.

This was one betrayal that she would not delegate.

"Look,” whispered Rafe. “There they are."

High in the air, the Cynthians were dancing, a mating dance of such beauty that Pauli wondered for one traitorous instant if this trip really was as necessary as they thought. Surely, if they moved, or built barricades—
we haven't the time or resources
, she told herself sternly.
The decision has been made
. But she knew she would regret it lifelong.

Deliberately she blotted out the sight of the Cynthians, darting and swooping on the air currents, their wings hotly aglow, with her last sight of Borodin, falling and smashing against rock
just like what I'm climbing now.
To the end of her life, she thought, she would hear that last scream of his, and the sound he'd made as his bones shattered against the rock.

"I'm going in now,” Rafe mouthed. “Cover me.” Not three meters away, the rock hollowed out. Rafe disappeared in the cave. Pauli drew her sidearm and prepared to wait. If Rafe couldn't find the clue he needed, she would have to give another order she feared and hated: the synthesis and use of pesticides so powerful that they might poison their own thriving crops if anything went wrong. It would be terrible if they were destroyed by their own weapon, wouldn't it? Or would it be a weird sort of justice? It wasn't a question she cared to debate, even within herself; and certainly not now.

To prevent destroying their own fields, such pesticides would have to be applied directly to the Cynthians. In other words, direct confrontation—war against beings who secreted their own poison.

Now the Cynthians were diving, turning in incredible loops before they paired off. Pauli felt not just like a voyeur but a voyeur who stalked her prey and readied the weapon that would destroy it. Then she shook her head. The lives they fought to safeguard wouldn't be worth living if they used them only to wallow in their own (admittedly monumental) guilt. And such guilt was not fair to the children. Even Ayelet and Ari, who had spoken of Masada, and Lohr, who suggested creating toxic pigments, were innocent of the settlers’ decision. If anything decent could be salvaged from it, the children must be brought up as free of their elders’ guilt as could be contrived.

Rafe emerged, and Pauli could breathe freely for the first time in hours. She sagged against the rock, then wrinkled her nose at how he smelled. “You smell like Cynthians, only more so.” She wanted to sneeze, The fragments of powdery scales that clung to him and glittered as he rubbed streaming eyes had an odor that was musty, yet aromatic.

"You knew, didn't you, that Cynthians’ scales and wings shed. What you didn't count on was the fact that they're excited now, which is why this stuff smells so high. I can do my bioassay now. And if I can't get my synthetics to test out, I'll simply grind up this stuff and return for more."

He'd have to make this climb again, Pauli thought. They had been lucky once. She would be reluctant to have him try again.

"Come on, Pauli. It's getting on toward dusk; and we need light for the climb back down."

Lohr had been right all along, Pauli thought, some weeks later. The Cynthians had to be tricked into acquiring the toxic paints. After Borodin's death, they definitely would have suspected a gift. But seeing ‘Cilla (whose foot was healing about as well as anyone dared expect) painting by the firelight, the Cynthians had pricked up and vibrated their antennae at the paints she used—brilliant, full of metallic flecks, utterly enticing to them both in color and in scent. And when they learned (
glitter/humans; fruit/Cynthians; glitter/Cynthians
) that gifts of fruit or leaves or glittering rocks would enable them to own that paint, they were taken in.

Now even old Ariel and Uriel gleamed with new potency. They cavorted in the air above the settlement with the abandonment of nymphae in their first mating season. When they flew back to their caves at dawn, the sunlight striking rejuvenated wings, they were dazzling. Even ‘Cilla clapped her hands in delight. Now she was making plans for a mural. Somehow, Pauli thought, she would have to deflect that particular hope. She had already warned Lohr not to tell ‘Cilla of the relationship between Cynthians and eaters. Let her simply think she had run into a wild animal: it was kinder thus.

As summer progressed, fewer and fewer eaters crossed the charred lines which now marked out human territory on Cynthia. Search parties accounted for some of the eaters. The watches set over the fields accounted for the rest. Then scouts began to report the appearance of structures that resembled those of a year before.

The Cynthians were building them and preparing to lay their eggs. They had been spotted dancing on the thermal currents: more Cynthians than could be accounted for in the one, local, now-dwindling swarm, and more of them glittering with the lovely, lethal paint that had proved such an inducement to prospective mates.

"Come next year,” said Pauli, “they'll crack. And we'll have more eaters than we will know how to kill. And the ones that survive will hibernate, to emerge as nymphae and breed even more eaters. So tomorrow, I want fire parties out to attend to those hatcheries. But,” she warned her scouts, “
no more Borodins
. You go armed, and one of you has always got to be watching the sky for Cynthians. If you're attacked"—she drew a deep breath, and suppressed her revulsion—"aim to kill."

Subsequent scout parties found little need to protect themselves from angry Cynthians. Certainly they trailed the humans, but their flight patterns were labored, as if they were too weak for much resistance. They could be dodged or run from; and this, with a dreadful pity, such scouts did.

Still, every night, a flock of Cynthians would hover around the central fire. Their wings were brittle now, their body scales dulled and falling off in patches. But wings and bodies were stippled by the lovely, deadly paint. Even now they were using it to adorn themselves, hoping that the pungent scents would stimulate them to mate, to produce more young to replace those slaughtered by the humans.

And many of the Cynthians who flew down to the settlement to trade for the pigments never made it back into the mountains. Their wings tore or snapped, and their desiccated bodies fell where the humans could find them. Beneatha and ben Yehuda, their differences laid aside, appointed themselves a sort of dawn patrol; each day they buried such bodies before the children could stumble onto them.

"They smell like dust,” Beneatha reported, mourning, “or like dead leaves, rotting after a wet autumn. I can't forget it."

"I can't forget either,” said Pauli. “None of it.” She turned toward Rafe. “I hope the Cynthians never guess why they're dying."

"That's wishful thinking, love,” he answered. “They're bound to, if they haven't already. But the effects of the toxins are cumulative and irreversible. Even if they stopped using the paint tonight, the damage it's done has gone too far to be healed.” Though his voice was gentle, Pauli shuddered at the inflexibility of his words.

She remembered the inexorability of that sentence each evening at the fire. The winged creatures still appeared, their wings feeble now, bringing more and more “trade goods” for the glistening paint they seemed to think might restore their strength. That was the only reason Pauli could come up with for their craving for the paint. Each night, Pauli marked that the fruits and shining stones were harder and harder for them to carry. Their dusty, morbid smell filled the air and clung to the garments of the humans forced to approach them with the paints.

The weather was turning much cooler. Since the cold snap started, Ariel had not appeared. But the evening they expected frost for the first time Ariel showed up, leading a band of nymphae. When it saw the paintpots, however, it swooped down and overturned them with deft flicks of its winghooks. Then it stood, wings outstretched, before the avid nymphae as if trying to protect them from the dirtied pools of sweet-smelling, lethal pigments.

Several nymphae dodged their elder to dip wingtips into the poison. Ariel went into threat-display and even everted its poisoned horns. But the nymphae ignored it. Ariel mantled, then, antennae quivering in agitation, with a convulsive sweep of his great wings, the elder flew above the fire. Brightness fell from its scales into the fire. But it avoided colliding with the nymphae, reluctant, even at the last, to harm them. Higher and higher Ariel climbed above the fire. Then it banked, folded its wings, and dived into the fire's heart.

'Cilla screamed and burst into tears. In all the painful months of her convalescence, not even during skin grafts, she had never wept so bitterly. Pauli hugged the girl and motioned for people to lead away the rest of the children.

The fire smelled of charred eaters, of the field where Borodin died. It made her ill and, ordinarily, these days, Pauli was only ill in the mornings. Which was another reason to have taken the action she had.
Try not to hate me
, she wished the child she bore.

Uriel appeared and flew down toward them. It too looked tired and worn. But the only signal on the comm screen was a simple interrogative.

Why have you done this to us?

Rafe drew a deep, quivering breath.

"It deserves to know,” Pauli said. “Tell it!” She raised her face above ‘Cilla's bright hair, condemning herself to watch her victim.

Rafe keyed the screen to transmit one symbol: a human child. Pauli remembered how the Cynthians had panicked at their first sight of a child. Seeing how revolting their own were, that had been a completely natural reaction.
Could we have guessed?
Pauli asked. She knew she would be asking such questions for the rest of her life.