Authors: Jo; Clayton
Skeen's Search (16 page)
“I'll think about it,” Picarefy murmured, “you might be right.”
“You better believe it.” Skeen continued to wander a while longer, poking into things, clicking her tongue against her teeth, whistling at times, lovely liquid trills. The others watched her without saying anything to her or to each other. Finally she ambled back, flung herself down beside Tibo, her shoulders braced by the divan's side, her head pushing against the seat padding, one leg drawn up, the other a black line scrawled across the rug. “So. Ross. Tell us about Rallen.”
PART III: THE WORLD
Rallen Tuzeykken. Rallen Firesky.
Sun: Nepoyol
Planets:
1. NAMELESS. | a blob of molten rock smaller than a mid-size moon, close enough to Nepoyol to spend most of the time brushing his corona. |
2. NARAZAT. | the dark sister, twin to Rallen, though much hotter, marginally habitable, some life, mostly fungal and bacterial, heavy clouds, infested with microscopic plant and animal forms which turn the clouds almost black. |
3. RALLEN. 0.9 g
diameter - 12,783 km.
continents:
i. IZAKALA ZIGA - | eastern hemisphere, mostly north of the equator. |
ii. TALAHU ZIGARU - | eastern hemisphere, south of the equator, subcontinent size, but too large to be classified as an island. |
iii. TANUKA ZIGA - | western hemisphere, long irregular land mass straddling the equator. |
islands:
i. GALASSIT KISKUR - | major island chain, four great islands, half a dozen large, several midsize and a scatter of small islands. Situated close to Talahu Zigaru. |
ii. | a scatter of smaller islands, sown semé through the various oceans, most though not all uninhabited, a few developed as vacation resorts, those close enough to the continents to make soaring to them possible and reasonably safe. |
4. ASTEROID BELT. | as far from Rallen as Rallen is from the sun, most of the asteroids are stone, but there are several rich iron sources, also some lodes of light metals. If the development problems could be overcome and a means of getting offworld could be constructed or acquired, a number of Rallen's resource problems would be removed or lessened. |
5. EGGEN. | gas giant, very close to star size, impressive ring system. |
A HISTORY OF THE YKX OF RALLEN FIRESKY.
The Kinravaly speaks:
This we know. There was a homeworld called Ysterai. There were three colonies planted from Ysterai. Keelava, Tozeed, Tovazh. Tovazh was a world in the middle of emptiness, a way station more than a colony, a place for studies the Elder Kinra considered too dangerous for Ysterai. A fourth colony was planned for a world we named Rallen, not this world. We named this world Rallen because we wished a reminder of what we had lost. We skipped first to Keelava, refueled there and went on. During that second skiptime the trouble happened. The three transports were com-linked while in skip space so they wouldn't emerge in the wrong place. To save on cost there was only one full computer; it was placed in the hen ship, the chicks were little more than vast sleep-pods. It was the Hen that controlled entry to and exit from skip space, though each of the Chicks had a much less complex brain used mainly to regulate life support and pass along data to the Hen. It is not clear what happened. What survivors pieced together afterward was this: something like an infection started in one of the Chick brains and leaped from there into the Hen. It happened so swiftly that two-thirds of the Hen's brain was wiped clean before anyone knew what was happening. The links were broken then, the Hen isolated. The wake crews labored with little rest, struggling to limit, then control, then reverse the damage. The infecting pod was discovered, the sleepers and their support were transferred to another pod brought dangerously close. That was a heroic time, you must believe, we've got many songs celebrating the wake crew and what they did. When the transfer was at last complete, the pod was taken into normspace and sent off into a sun. Gradually the links were re-established between the Hen and the remaining Chick. Then the crew tried to recover the route to the original Rallen. Unfortunately, during the Wild Time, the Hen went into a blind panic flight. There was neither data nor sufficient working computer capacity to trace what happened in that Wild Time. The Hen's captain and the Kinra of the colonists consulted and had to acknowledge they were thoroughly lost. They decided to break out into normspace and take a look around to see if they could identify anything. They came out into a strange sky. The computer proved incapable of star matching, but the ship's sensors did locate a nearby star that had planets. It was Nepoyol and one of the planets proved suitable for sustaining Ykx life. Again the Captain and the Kinra consulted. Having little real choice, they opted to land the pods on the habitable world and wake the colonists who then could consider what they should do. In the end, they brought the Hen down also because they needed the computer and the memory capacity. So much had been destroyed that almost no technical information remained, little history, literature, music, little of the culture with which they meant to make life warm and easy. While crew and colonists did all the things necessary to sustain life, they poured Ykx memories into the blank, frantic to gain a more permanent record of what was left, what existed only in the fragile organic brains of the living Ykx. Even the most technical elements were more an incantation of the possible than a vigorous development of argument. Ykx working at the boundaries of any of the disciplines do not volunteer for colonial expeditions where their special interests are useless and their apparatus not available.
There was a primitive race on Rallen Firesky; they were at the transitional stage between sedentary agriculture and hunter/gatherer; they had several semi-domesticated beasts that provided food and fiber. They were six-limbed creatures, egg layers. The females were larger than the males. Generally six females were hatched for each male, each female produced no more than six eggs during her entire fertile life, two eggs at a time. The males tended to appear as one of the middle pair of eggs. It was not an easy relationship that developed between Ykx and six-legs. There were elements among the colonists who used genetic knowledge and manipulatory skills to enslave and breed the natives like beasts, doing some genetic tinkering to produce subsets of the basic form, lowering intelligence and inducing a docility that tended to result in a reduced lifespan for the six-legs so treated.
The chaos of the landing smoothed away. The world worked its slow changes on the Ykx. WATCHERS died, no more were born so Rallen Ykx lost that skill. Fate played a joke on us, giving us a world we could live on with comfort and even delight, but it was also a world greatly deficient in heavy metals. The elements beyond iron were rare to nonexistent and even iron was not abundant. The technology of Ysterai, even what was left of it, could not be sustained. It was a long slow struggle finding substitutes, most of them organic. We couldn't build lift belts, but we could develop the Wings using a helium-producing bacteria that was self-regulating and kept pressure at the desired level as long as it was exposed to the proper amount of light. By providing or removing the light with a simple on-off process we have since produced flight aids of considerable sensitivity and subtlety. More and more we turned from metals to organics as the millennia passed, using the metals at last primarily for sculpture and other decorative arts. The one thing we could not do was get offworld. By the time we had reordered our lives, by the time we were capable of fighting around the limitation of this world and ready to attempt solving the difficult problems of building a ship of organics, the double motion of the gas cloud and Nepoyol our sun plunged us into the Veils of Fire.
That was a difficult time. Weakened by our genetic tampering, the native six-legs died out except for a few of the hardier wildings. Many Ykx died also. Industry and commerce were shattered by the sudden extinction of many varieties of bacteria and fungi. But we survived this as we had survived earlier disasters. Out of shame at what we'd done to the native species, we did our best to help the remnants of the six-legs survive also, but all our efforts failed and it was a blot on our common conscience. Something we did not speak about or think about, something that came out in nightmares and severe depression. An Ykx would leave his Gather, go out and poke among the ruins in the native preserves, then he would sit facing the west, he would neither eat nor drink nor sleep, just sit until he left his bones with the shells of the six-legs. Periodically one of the Kinra would propose we destroy the relics and put the event completely behind us since there was nothing we could do about it, but that seemed to many of us the final insult to the six-legs, that they be forgotten, so the preserves were left to melt slowly into the soil from which the six-leg structures had risen.
Rallen slid finally into clearer space and we began to regain stability, replacing what had been lost, honors going to those who could discover a new means for doing what had already been done. Redundancy became a never-ending search. But escape from Rallen was lost. The energies that once went into that project were needed elsewhere. The sky was fire curtains pulled across the stars, a symbol our poets have long noted and used. There was no moon to serve as a stepping stone, no nearby stars visible to call out to us, come see, you Ykx, come see what once you had. This was a disturbing thing. There is in us a profound need to soar. It did something to our souls to see a lid on aspiration, to feel our world as a cage we couldn't escape from. We can also see the time coming when we plunge back into the Fire. When that youth who called himself Rostico Burn burst through the Veil and landed here, he found a yeasty chaos that whirled around him, tempted him; he traded and stole, promised nothing, yet promised far too much by his presence and the possibilities he suggested. By the time he left, he had begun, I think, to understand and be afraid of what he had helped to create.
YEAR ONE AFTER THE COMING OF ROSTICO BURN.
Veratisca climbed the tower, carefully testing each rung. The Utaro Har Gather was long abandoned. Too close to the shame fields. You could look out over the patch of waste ground where no one plowed and planted, where here and there pale bones or the decaying remnant of a wall shone through the green and gray of the vegetation. She reached the crenelated platform, settled herself atop one of the uprights. Out near the horizon on her right side, a dustcloud rose where forty-four hitches of grubbers were plowing their horny snouts along, breaking up the earth so the seeders they pulled could drop their load into the furrows. She kept her back to the Wasteland, she hadn't come here to contemplate species shame but to find if there was any peace left inside her. There were times since the alien Rostico Burn left when she looked up at the filmy streaks of pale fire and felt them burn her face, times when she felt like going into the waste and sitting and stopping. Yet there was something jagged and intractable inside her that would not let her do that. In the end she still might and she knew it. She wanted so much, so many things she couldn't name; at times she felt as if she would explode from the pressure of that wanting. One day she might sit on the far side of this tower and stare into the Waste, into the Shame Death and she would cast herself from the tower, soar in a slow spiral downward and pull in her flightskins and give way to the despair that clawed at her.
It was a hardwind day. The wind blew into her face sharp and cold, teased at her flightskins though she kept these tucked tight about her. It brought her the damp dark smell of the turned earth, the leafy slickness of the grubbers. She heard the encourage-whistles from the handlers and the dull clack of the seeders as they bumped over the rough soil.
She scratched uncertainly with a stylus at the pad she'd brought with her:
Dark, damp, secret, the soilâ
Extruded wombâthe seed implantâ
Fervid ferment, and
Forms damp and dark and secret
What coils within the seedâ
Waitingâ
With a tongue-clicking curse at the impossibility, she thrust the stylus through the loop and returned the pad to her belt pouch. She began and began and began. And finished nothing. Nothing eased the anguish, the wanting that churned in her, nothing exhausted her, not the long walk, not the perilous climb up the rotting ladder into the tower. The Veils very faintly visible at dawn and dusk and throughout the night, brighter then, streaks of fire, they were cords wound round and round her head and sometimes they tightened, until she almost couldn't bear it. She got to her feet with awkward grace, stood balanced a moment on the upright, then snapped open her flightskins and fell off the tower into the wind.
Bohalendas put the welder down, passed his hand across his eyes. He leaned back in the chair, eyes closed, dorsal muscles twitching and sore. The power just wouldn't cross the gap, he couldn't marry the cells. He lay like that a few minutes, weariness pinning him down as effectively as brads nailing him to the chair.
He heard a bustling behind him but couldn't rouse himself.
“Tata.” A small hand touched his arm.
Making an effort, closing his hands about the padded curve of the rests, he pulled himself up.
Lih stood beside him, patting his arm and Lah stood half a step back, holding a tray with determined steadiness. He dredged up a smile.
Lih pulled up a stool and Lah put the tray down so carefully nothing jarred. Bohalendas smelled the hot spicy bite of the iska and swung the chair around, ignoring its creak though as usual Lih clapped her hands over her flower-petal ears, but grinned as she did it and whistled a much pleasanter version of the grinding rise and fall of the sound. Beautifully true. She showed strong signs that her joychoice would be music and her dutychoice would be something to do with animals. She had no interest or aptitude for submicroscopic herding and plants were things to eat.
