Limits (20 page)

Blue-tinged shadows pooled in the valley, and three human shapes moved through the red and orange vegetation. Bronze Legs recognized Lightning Harness and Grace Carpenter even at this distance. The third had a slightly hunchbacked look, and a metal headdress gleamed in her straight black hair. That would be Rachel Subramaniam’s memory-recording equipment. Her head kept snapping left and right, ever eager for new sights.

Bronze Legs grinned. He tried to imagine how this must look to a rammer, an offworlder; he succeeded only in remembering himself as a child.
All this strangeness; all this red.

He turned the howler and continued uphill.

At the crest of the ridge a fux waited for him, the pinkish-white suns behind her. She was a black silhouette, four thin legs and two thin arms, a
pointed face and a narrow torso bent in an L: a lean, mean centaur-shape.

As he topped the ridge and let the howler settle on its air cushion, the fux backed away several meters. Bronze Legs wondered why,
then
guessed the answer. It wasn’t the smell of him. Fuxes liked that. She was putting the ridge between herself and the white glare from Touchdown City’s farming lamps. She said, “I am Long Nose.”

“Bronze Legs.
I meet you on purpose.”

“I meet you on purpose. How goes your foray to heatward?”

“We start tomorrow at dawn.”

“You postponed it once before.” She was accusing him. The fuxes were compulsive about punctuality; an odd trait in a Bronze Age culture. Like certain traits in humans, it probably tied into their sex lives. Timing could be terribly important when a fux was giving birth.

“The ship from the stars came,” he said. “We waited. We want to take one of the star people along, and the delay lets us recheck the vehicles.”

Long Nose was black with dull dark-red markings. She bore a longbow over one shoulder and a quiver and shovel slung over her lower back. Her snout was sharply pointed, but not abnormally so, for a fux. She might be named for keen curiosity or a keen sense of smell. She said, “I learn that your purpose is more than exploration, but not even the post-males can tell what it is.”

“Power,” said Bronze Legs. The harnessed lightning that makes our machines go comes as light from Argo. In the Hot End the clouds will never hide Argo from our sight. Our lightning makers can run without rest.”

“Go north instead,” said Long Nose. “You will find it safer and cooler too. Storms run constantly in the north; I have been there. Free lightning for your use.”

If she’d been talking to Lightning Harness she would have suffered through an hour’s lecture. How the heat exchangers ran on the flood of i
n
frared light from Argo, focussed by mirrors. How Argo stayed always in the same place in Medea’s sky, so that mirrors could be mounted on a hillside facing to heatward, and never moved again. But the colony was growing, and Medea’s constant storms constantly blocked the mirrors…Bronze Legs only grinned at her. “Why don’t we just do it our way? Who-all is coming?”

“Only six of us.
Dark Wind’s children did not emerge in time. Deadeye will desert us early; she will give birth in a day and must stay to guard the…Is
‘nest’ the word you use?”

“Right.”
Of all the words that might describe the fuxes’ way of giving birth, “nest” carried the least unpleasant connotations.

“So, she will be guarding her ‘nest’ when we return. She will be male then. Sniffer intends to become pregnant tonight; she will leave us further on, and be there to help us on our return, if we need help.”

“Good.”

“We take a post-male, Harvester, and another six-leg female, Broad Flanks, who can carry him some of the time. Gimpy wants to come. Will she slow us?”

Bronze Legs laughed. He knew Gimpy; a four-leg female as old as some post-males, who had lost her right foreleg to the viciously fast Medean monster humans called a B-70. Gimpy was fairly agile, considering. “She could crawl on her belly for all we care. It’s the crawlers that’ll slow us, and the power plant. We’re moving a lot of machinery: the prefab power plant, housing for technicians, sensing tools, digging tools—”

“What tools should we take?”

“Go armed. You won’t need water bags; we’ll make our own water. We made you some parasols made from mirror-cloth. They’ll help you stand the heat, for awhile. When it gets really hot you’ll have to ride in the crawlers.”

“We will meet you at the crawling machines, at dawn.” Long Nose turned and moved downslope into a red-and-orange jungle, moving som
e
thing like a cat in its final rush at a bird: legs bent, belly low.

They had been walking since early afternoon: twelve hours, with a long break for lunch. Lightning sighed with relief as he set down the farming lamp he’d been carrying on his shoulders. Grace helped him spread the tripod and extend the mount until the lamp stood six meters tall.

Rachel Subramaniam sat down in the orange grass and rubbed her feet. She was puffing.

Grace Carpenter, a Medean xenobiologist and in her early forties, was a large-boned woman, broad of silhouette and built like a farm wife. Lightning Harness was tall and lean and lantern-jawed, a twenty-four-year-old power plant engineer. Both were pale as ghosts beside Rachel. On Medea only the farmers were tanned.

Rachel was built light. Some of her memory-recording equipment was
embedded in padding along her back, giving her a slightly hunchbacked look. Her scalp implants were part of a polished silver cap, the badge of her profession. She had spent the past two years under the sunlights aboard a web ramship. Her skin was bronze. To Rachel Medea’s pale citizens had seemed frail, unathletic, until now. Now she was annoyed. There had been little opportunity for hikes aboard
Morven
; but she might have noticed the muscles and hard hands common to any recent colony.

Lightning pointed uphill.
“Company.”

Something spidery stood on the crest of the coldward ridge, black against the suns. Rachel asked, “What is it?”

“Fux.
Female, somewhere between seven and eighteen years of age, and not a virgin.
Beyond that I can’t tell from here.”

Rachel was astonished. “How can you know all that?”

“Count the legs. Grace, didn’t you tell her about fuxes?”

Grace was chuckling. “Lightning’s showing off. Dear, the fuxes go fe
r
tile around age seven. They generally have their first litter right away. They drop their first set of hindquarters with the eggs in them, and that gives them a half a lifetime to learn how to move as a quadruped. Then they wait till they’re seventeen or eighteen to have their second litter, unless the tribe is underpopulated, which sometimes happens. Dropping the second set of hindquarters exposes the male organs.”

“And she’s got four legs. ‘Not a virgin.’ I thought you must have damn good eyes,
Lightning
.”

“Not that good.”

“What are they like?”

“Well,” said Grace, “the post-males are the wise ones. Bright, talkative, and not nearly
so…
frenetic as the females. It’s hard to get a female to stand still for long. The males…oh, for three years after the second litter they’re kind of crazy. The tribe keeps them penned. The females only go near them when they want to get pregnant.”

Lightning had finished setting the lamp. “Take a good look around b
e
fore I turn this on. You know what you’re about to see?”

Dutifully, Rachel looked about her, memorizing.

The farming lamps stood everywhere around Touchdown City; it was less a city than a village surrounded by farmlands. For more than a week Rachel had seen only the tiny part of Medea claimed by humans…until, in
early afternoon of this long Medean day, she and Grace and Lightning had left the farmlands. The reddish light had bothered her for a time. But there was much to see; and after all, this was the
real
Medea.

Orange grass stood knee-high in slender leaves with sharp hard points. A score of flaccid multicolored balloons, linked by threads that resembled spiderweb, had settled on a stagnant pond. There was a grove of almost-trees, hairy rather than leafy, decked in all the colors of autumn. The biggest was white and bare and dead.

Clouds of bugs filled the air everywhere except around the humans. A pair of things glided into the swarms, scooping their dinner out of the air. They had five-meter wingspans, small batlike torsos, and huge heads that were all mouth, with gaping hair-filled slits behind the head, where gill slits would be on a fish. Their undersides were sky blue.

A six-legged creature the size of a sheep stood up against the dead a
l
most-tree, gripped it with four limbs, and seemed to chew at it. Rachel wondered if it was eating the wood. Then she saw myriads of black dots spread across the white, and a long, sticky tongue slurping them up.

Grace tapped Rachel’s arm and pointed into the grass. Rachel saw a warrior’s copper shield painted with cryptic heraldics. It was a flattened turtle shell, and the yellow-eyed beaked face that looked back at her was not turtle-like at all. Something small struggled in its beak. Suddenly the mock turtle whipped around and
zzzz
ed away on eight churning legs. There was no bottom shell to hamper the legs.

The
real
Medea.

“Now,” said Lightning. He turned on the farming lamp.

White light made the valley suddenly less alien. Rachel felt something within her relaxing…but things were happening all around her.

The flat turtle stopped abruptly. It swallowed hard,
then
pulled head and limbs under its shell. The flying bug-strainers whipped around and flew hard for the hairy trees. The clouds of bugs simply vanished. The long-tongued beast let go of its tree, turned and scratched at the ground and was gone in seconds.

“This is what happens when a sun flares,” Lightning said. “They’re both flare suns. Flares don’t usually last more than half an hour, and most Medean animals just dig in till it’s over. A lot of plants go to seed. Like this grass—”

Yes, the slender leaves were turning puffy, cottony. But the hairy trees
reacted differently; they were suddenly very slender, the foliage pulled tight against the trunks. The balloons weren’t reacting at all.

Lightning said, “That’s why we don’t worry much about Medean life attacking the crops. The lamps keep them away. But not all of them—”

“On Medea every rule has exceptions,” Grace said.

“Yeah.
Here, look under the grass.” Lightning pushed cotton-covered leaves aside with his hands, and the air was suddenly full of white fluff. Rachel saw millions of black specks covering the lower stalks. “We call them locusts. They swarm in flare time and eat everything in sight. Terran plants poison them, of course, but they wreck the crops first.” He let the leaves close. By now there was white fluff everywhere, like a low-lying fog patch moving east on the wind. “What else can I show you? Keep your eyes on the balloons. And are there cameras in that thing?”

Rachel laughed and touched the metal helmet. Sometimes she could forget she was wearing it; but her neck was thicker, more muscular than the average woman’s.
“Cameras?
In a sense.
My eyes are cameras for the memory tape.”

The balloons rested just where they had been. The artificial flare hadn’t affected them…wait, they weren’t flaccid anymore. They were swollen, taut, straining at the rootlets that held them to the bottom of the pond. Suddenly they rose, all at once, still linked by spiderweb.
Beautiful.

“They use the UV for energy to make hydrogen,” said Grace. “UV wouldn’t bother them anyway; they have to take more of it at high altitude.”

“I’ve been told…are they intelligent?”

“Balloons?
No!” Grace actually snorted. “They’re no brighter than so much seaweed…but they own the planet. We’ve sent probes to the Hot End, you know. We saw balloons all the way. And we’ve seen them as far coldward…west, you’d say…as far west as the Icy Sea. We haven’t gone beyond the rim of ice yet.”

“But you’ve been on Medea fifty years?”

“And just getting started,” Lightning said. He turned off the farming lamp.

The world was plunged into red darkness.

The fluffy white grass was gone, leaving bare soil aswarm with black specks. Gradually the hairy trees loosened, fluffed out. Soil churned near the dead tree and released the tree feeder.

Grace picked up a few of the “locusts.” They were not bigger than te
r
mites. Held close to the eye they each showed a translucent bubble on its back. “They can’t swarm,” Grace said with satisfaction. “Our flare didn’t last long enough. They couldn’t make enough hydrogen.”

“Some did,” Lightning said. There were black specks on the wind; not many.

“Always something new,” said Grace.

Tractor probe Junior was moving into the Hot End. Ahead was the vast desert, hotter than boiling water, where Argo stood always at noon. Already the strange dry plants were losing their grip, leaving bare rock and dust. At the final shore of the Ring Sea the waves were sudsy with salt in solution, and the shore was glittering white. The hot steamy wind blew inland, to hea
t
ward, and then upward, carrying a freight of balloons.