Anthony, Piers - Cluster 4 - Thousandstar

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Thousandstar by Piers AnthonyPiers Anthony
Thousandstar
Cluster series, book 4
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1: Alien Encounter
Chapter 2: Triple Disaster
Chapter 3: Space Race
Chapter 4: Holestar Abyss
Chapter 5: Threading the Needle
Chapter 6: Planet Eccentric
Chapter 7: Nether Trio
Chapter 8: Site of Hope
Epilogue
Prologue
She was lank and lithe and startlingly fair of feature for her kind, and as she
ran her hair flung out in a blue splay. Her skin was blue, too, but light and
almost translucently delicate. By Capellan standards she was a beauty.
"Jess!" she called, as she intercepted the blue man. "What are you doing home?"
He grinned, his teeth bright against the blue lips. He was beardless and small,
as like her in size and feature as it was possible for a male to be. "I thought
you'd never ask! It's a saw, of course."
She kissed him with the barely platonic passion typical of this Solarian
subculture, her teeth nipping warningly into his lip. "Did you flip out from the
training exercise? If they catch you—?" She paused, her features hardening
prettily. "What saw?"
He stepped back, ran one thumbnail along the translucent wrapping, and allowed
it to fall open, exposing the machine. "A genuine top-of-the-mill heavy-duty
self-powered laser," he announced proudly. "Now we can hew our own timbers for
the summer house. Bet we can carve the first ones this afternoon."
"Jess," she said, alarmed. "You didn't—" But she knew from his aura that he
suffered no abnormal guilt.
"Of course I didn't steal it," he said, flashing a mock glare at her. "I bought
it outright. It's more legal that way. It's ours, Jess, all ours! Isn't it a
beauty?"
"But Jess—we can't afford—"
"Girl, the trouble with you is you have no confidence," he said with jubilant
sternness. But there was something in his aura, an excitement that communicated
itself to her via their interaction of auras. "Would I waste money?"
"Jess—you didn't remortgage the castle? You know we're on the verge of broke
already. We can hardly pay our retainer, Flowers, or finesse the taxes! Besides,
you need my countersignature to—"
"Remortgage, heavenhell!" he exclaimed. "I paid off the old mortgage, O ye of
little wit." Even his aura was teasing her with its strange excitement.
"Come on. I can only chew so much joke in one swallow. What's the real story,
Jess? Are the creditors on your tail?"
He settled into a serious expression, but still his aura belied it. "Well, Jess,
you have to void the safety latch, like this, so the thing will operate. Then
you set it for the type of cutting you require, which we can skip because it's
already set at the standard setting. Then you switch it on and—"
"Jess!" she exclaimed peremptorily. This time her aura gave his a sharp nudge.
"Jess," he replied equably.
"Jess, pay attention to me!"
"Jessica, don't I always? What little I have to spare?" His eyes were blue
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mirrors of malicious innocence.
"The money, Jess—the money."
"Now isn't that almost just like a woman," he chided her. "Here I have this
superlative expensive laser saw, quite fit for royalty, and all she cares about
is the morbid mundane detail of—"
"Jess, do you want me to start being difficult?"
He shied away with a look of horror he could not maintain, dissolving into
laughter. "Oh, no! Anything but that, Jess-ca! Anything you can do, I can do
better, except that! Oh, I can't stand you when you're difficult. That's what
the X chromosome does, all right; it is jam-packed with diffi—"
"That's not true!"
"Oh, it's true! Too too true! You are the most difficult creature in System
Capella! You—"
"I was referring to the other thing, Jess. That I can do better than you."
He glanced at her, seeing her vibrant in her petulance. "That doesn't count,
Jess. That's inherent in the sex. To be fair we'd have to survey my liaisons
against yours, and compare partner-ratings. I'd bet I—"
"I was talking about the artistry," she said, fending off the baiting. "You
can't make a decent holograph freehand."
He held up his hands in the millennia-old Solarian gesture of surrender.
"Acquiescence, sis. Two things. Holograph and difficult. If I'd been the female
aspect of the clone, I'd have them too, though."
"If you'd been the female aspect, Jess, you wouldn't have squandered credit we
don't have on a saw we can't afford, to build a summer house we'll never use
because we'll be evicted for debt from the estate. Now out with it, and don't
try to lie, because you know I can feel it in your aura."
"That's the one thing about a cloned aura," he complained. "No decent secrets.
Not until one clone abdicates his heritage and deviates too far to—"
"The money, Jess," she prodded.
"Well, if you must pry, in your female fashion—it's the advance on the mission."
"What mission? You're still in training!"
"Not any more. They needed an anonymous Solarian with intrigue expertise, and I
needed a quick infusion of credit, so—"
"Who needed? For what? Where?"
"Thousandstar."
She stared mutely at him.
"Segment Thousandstar," he repeated, enjoying her amazement. "You've heard of
it? Farthest Segment of the Milky Way Galaxy, twenty thousand parsecs from here,
give or take a few light seconds? All those non-human sapients crowded into—"
"I took the same geography courses you did. We have just as many sapient species
here in Segment Etamin. What about Thousandstar?"
"So the advance is twenty thousand units of Galactic credit, and a similar
amount upon successful completion of the mission. This saw was only five
thousand, and our old mortgage twelve thousand, so we have three thousand left—"
"I can handle the basic math," she said faintly. "But that fee—"
"Well, I admit it's small, but—"
"Small!" she exploded. "Will you get serious? It's a fortune! How could a nit
like you, Jess-man—?"
"But it's firm, Jess-girl. All I have to do is show. So I don't even need to
complete the mission successfully, though of course I'll do that too. You won't
have to go out selling your favors anymore."
"I don't sell my—" She broke off, retrenching. "Don't try to divert me with your
spurious slights! Why would Segment Thousandstar advance twenty thousand
Galactic units to an anonymous Solarian clone?"
"Hey!" he cried with mock affront. "Don't you think I'm worth it, Jess?"
"You're worth a million, if you marry the right aristocratic clone girl and
preserve the estate," she said coldly. "That's why I don't want your head on the
royal execution block. You're no wild giant like Morrow who can get away with—"
"Ah, Morrow," he said. "What I wouldn't give for his muscle, money, and moxie,
not to mention his cute wife—"
"Now stop fooling around and cough it out!"
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He coughed it out: "Jessica, I don't know. The mission's secret. But it's legal.
It came through Etamin and Sol."
"Through the Imperial System and the mother world," she said softly. "It has to
be legitimate. Unless Andromeda's started hostaging again."
"Impossible. Melody of Mintaka fixed that, remember? For the past century
there's been no hostaging; the host controls the body, no matter what the aura
of the transferee may be, unless the host lets the visiting aura take over.
Anyway, Andromeda's no threat; the Milky Way controls all Andromeda's Spheres."
"True," she said uncertainly. "But it must be a dangerous mission. Really
grotesque, to warrant such a fee." She turned to him, and he felt the unrest in
her aura. "Jesse, you and I are closer than any two other people can be, except
the same-sex clones, and sometimes I think we're actually closer than that,
because we have been forced to concentrate on our similarity so constantly. If I
lost you—"
He tamed his enjoyment momentarily, meeting her with equivalent candor. "That's
why I bought the saw, Jessica. I knew you'd go along. It's not a waste of
credit; it will pay itself back within a year, slicing out all the boards and
timbers we need. This is the break we've needed to put our family back into its
aristocratic mode. The seed of Good Queen Bess will flourish again."
"But the mission! All that credit for a secret job! Why is it secret, Jess?
Because they know you'll die?"
"I asked about that. I have a cunning mind, remember; that's part of my
training. Mortality expectation is five percent. That's not bad, Jess. One out
of twenty. So when I go on that mission, I have a ninety-five percent chance of
survival—probably ninety-eight percent for someone as smart as me—and a hundred
percent chance of keeping the advance credit. So maybe the chance of successful
completion is small—I don't know—but at least I'll be home again, and we don't
need that matching payment. The advance alone will solve our economic problem.
I'm willing to take that miniscule risk for the sake of our castle, our estate,
our family line. Without that advance, we stand a thirty percent chance of a
foreclosure on the property. You know that. Royalty is no longer divine. We may
derive from Queen Bess, but our family power has been fading a thousand years,
because we've become effete. System, Sphere, and Segment have waxed while we
have waned. The universe does not need aristocracy anymore. Now at a single
stroke I can restore our status—or at least give us a fair chance to halt the
erosion. Isn't it worth the gamble?"
"I don't know," she said, biting her lip so that it turned a darker blue.
"There's something funny about this deal. You didn't get this assignment through
merit, did you?"
He did not bother to inflate his wounded pride. "No, there are lots of qualified
candidates. But two thirds of them wouldn't take a blind mission at any price,
and of the remainder I was the only one with royal blood. Royalty has pride,
more pride than money or sense; they know that. We won't let them down when the
mission gets hard, because we are allergic to failure. It's bad for the image.
So I was their best bet: a qualified, foolhardy royalist."
"Foolhardy—there's the operative term. Jess, I don't like this at all!"
He laughed, but his aura belied him. "Come on, let's make the first beam while
we consider."
She smiled agreement, troubled.
They took the saw to their mountain stand of purple pine. The old royal estate
possessed some of the finest standing timber on the planet. Some of the pines
dated from the time of Queen Bess, who as legend had it had taken jolly green
Flint of Outworld as a lover, conceived by him, and settled this estate on the
produce of that union. Regardless of the validity of this dubious historical
claim, it was a fine estate. The castle still had the old dragon stalls and the
equally impressive giant bed, where the green man was reputed to have performed
so successfully. Unfortunately, that phenomenal two-hundred-intensity aura had
never manifested in Flint's successors, and with the passing of the formal
monarchy the proprietors had become virtual caretakers of the estate.
When the Second War of Energy burst upon the Cluster, a thousand Solarian years
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after the first, there had been no high-aura hero from this Capellan realm to
save the Milky Way Galaxy. Instead Melody of Mintaka had come, an alien, unhuman
creature transferred to a Solarian host. She had done the job, and she was
indeed another distant descendant of Flint of Outworld via non-human line, but
the luster of Sphere Sol had dimmed, and System Capella had become a virtual
backdust region.
That was part of what passed through the minds of the unique male-female clones
Jess as they approached the stand of purple pine. To be an anonymous remnant of
a once-proud System of a once-great Sphere—there was a certain dissatisfaction
gnawing through the generations. The male wanted to achieve some sort of return
to notoriety, if not to greatness, and the female, though more cautious about
the means, desired a similar achievement.
Jess started the saw. The laser blade leaped out, a searing white rod
terminating at a preset distance. "Stand clear," he said, but his sister-self
needed no warning. She was afraid of that short, deadly beam.
He approached a tree. Not one of the millennia trunks, for those were monuments,
but a fine century individual. Its bark was as blue as his skin, its needles
deep purple. "Where's the lean?" he inquired.
She surveyed it, walking around the trunk, her breasts accentuating as she
craned her head back. She was highly conscious of her female attributes, because
only here in the seclusion of the estate could she ever allow them to manifest.
No one outside knew her for what she was. "No lean," she decided. "It's a
balanced tree."
"I don't want a balanced tree! I want one that will fall exactly where I know it
will fall!"
"Take another tree, then. One that suits your temperament."
"Unbalanced... temperament," he murmured. Then he lifted the saw. "I believe
I'll trim off an excrescence or two here," he said, making a playful feint at
her bosom with the laser.
She scooted backward. "You do, and I'll trim off a protuberance there," she
said, indicating his crotch. "Your bovine girl friend wouldn't like that."
He cocked his head. "Which bovine?"
"That cow Bessy, of course."
"Oh, that bovine." He shrugged. "How about your lecherous commoner buck, who
thinks you're a chambermaid? Now there's a protuberance that needs trimming!"
"Don't be jealous. Nature grants to commoners' bodies—"
"What they lack in intellect," he finished for her.
"You have a tree to fell."
"Um." He set his saw against the trunk just where the tree began to broaden into
the root, and angled the laser blade slowly across the wood.
"It's not working," the girl said, concerned.
"That's what you think, you dumb female," he said with satisfaction. He angled
his cut back without removing the beam from the tree. The bit of white visible
between the saw and the tree turned red. "Oops, I'm going too fast; the blade's
dulling. Slowing, rather. It's molecule-thin; the visible bar is only to mark
the place. Still, there's work in burning through solid wood; you have to cut
slowly, give it time. There." The beam had converted back to white.
"But there isn't any cut," she said.
He ignored her, angling up. In a moment the beam emerged. The tree stood
untouched. "Now take out the wedge," he told her.
"Sure." Playing the game, she put her hands on the trunk where the imaginary
wedge of wood had been sliced out, heaved with exaggerated effort—and fell over
backward as the wedge came loose.
Her brother-self chuckled. "Now get your fat posterior off the grass and
straighten your skirt; I'm not your protuberant commoner-friend. I'm going to
drop the tree there."
She looked at the wedge in her hands, then at the gap in the trunk. The edge of
the cut wavered somewhat because of his unsteady control, and one section was
ragged where he had pushed it too fast. That was why the wedge had not fallen
out of its own accord. There was no doubt the laser had done it. She hoisted her
slender derriere up. "That's some machine!" she remarked with involuntary
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respect.
"That's what this mission means to us," he said smugly. "I've got three days
leave before I report; I want to get that summer house built."
"In three days?" she asked incredulously. "We can't even set the foundations in
that time."
"True, the saw can't do it all," he said, reconsidering as he started to cut
from the opposite side of the tree. "You may have to put the finishing touches
on it while I'm away. Give you something to do when you're not polishing your
claws. The mission only lasts ten days or so. It's good payment for that time."
"It certainly is," she agreed, involuntarily glancing at her neat, short,
unpolished nails. Her suspicion was reasserting itself. "There has to be a
catch."
"So maybe it's an unpleasant mission," he said, his eye on the progress of the
cut. "An obnoxious transfer host. A giant slug made of vomit or something. I can
put up with it for ten days. And if the mission is successful, and I get the
completion payment—" He glanced at her and the beam jerked, messing up his cut.
"We could afford a marriage and reproduction permit for one of us, nonclone. No
more fooling around with sterile partners."
"Yes..." she breathed. "To be free of this ruse at last. To have meaningful sex,
a family, security—"
"Recognition, status," he added. "Timber."
"Timber?"
"That's what you say when the tree's falling."
"Oh." She skipped out of the way as the pine tilted grandly.
The crash was horrendous. Purple needles showered down, and a large branch shook
loose and bounced nearby. The sound echoed and reechoed from the near hills. The
base of the trunk bucked off the stump and kicked back, as though trying to take
one of them with it to destruction.
Brother and sister selves stood for a moment, half in awe of what they had
wrought. Even a comparatively small tree like this had a lot of mass! A large
one would shake the very mountain.
Jesse hefted the laser. "Now for the beams," he said, his voice calm but his
aura animated.
"Beams? How many does that saw have?"
"Idiot! I meant the beams of wood. Measure off a ten-meter length, and I'll hew
it now."
"Doesn't it need to season?" she asked. "Suppose it warps?"
"Don't you know anything, cell of my cell? Purple pine doesn't warp. It hardly
even woofs. Or tweets. It merely hardens in place. That's why it's such valuable
wood, that has to be protected by being included on grand old estates like ours.
So that only selective cutting is done, to thin the groves, no commercial
strip-cutting. We want to hew it now, while it's soft."
"Oh." She was of exactly the same intelligence as he, and had had the same
education, but that particular fact had slipped by her. Sometimes they had
substituted for each other during boring classes, so one could pick up sundry
facts the other missed. She was beginning to diverge more obviously from her
brother, and the mask of identical garb in public would not be effective much
longer.
She brought out her measure, touched the little disk to the base of the trunk,
walked along the tree until the readout indicated ten meters, then touched the
trunk again. A red dot now marked the spot.
He trimmed the base smooth, then severed the trunk at the ten-meter mark. The
log shifted and settled more comfortably into the spongy ground. Now he fiddled
with a special control, adjusting the saw. "Actually, I'm doing this for you.
I'll have to marry another aristocratic clone; you'll get to pick a real person
to family with."
"Want to bet? There are more males of our generation than females. That's why
they operated on me to turn me female, hedging the bet. I'll probably have to
marry the clone, while you get to graze among the common herd."
"There is that," he agreed. "I must admit, there are some commoners I wouldn't
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mind hitching to. Clonedom is seeming more sterile these days; so few of our
kind have any real fire or ambition. They're mostly all socialites, forcing us
to play that game too. Stand back, doll. This can be tricky."
The laser beam shot out way beyond its prior length. He aligned it with the
length of the log, then levered it slowly so that it made a burn in the bark
from end to end. He moved the beam over and made a similar burn, a quarter of
the way around. Then he readjusted the saw and used the short cutting beam to
trim an edge lengthwise along one line. A meter on the saw showed him precisely
what orientation to maintain to keep the cut correctly angled.
"You know, someday the other clones will have to find out about you," he
remarked as he worked. Jesse was never silent for very long. "We can't keep it
secret forever."
She knew it. She had nightmares about premature, involuntary exposure. Yet she
responded bravely enough: "If you find an aristocratic spouse soon, we can. It
would be nice to save this hedge for another generation, protecting our line.
Once the other clones catch on, they'll all be doing it, and our line will have
no advantage."
He nodded soberly. With four cuts, he had a beam roughly square in cross
section, ten meters long. The irregularities of his trimming only made it seem
authentically hand-hewn. "Where could we get a finer ridge-beam than that?" he
asked rhetorically.
"Nowhere," she answered, impressed.
"Still mad at me for buying the saw?"
"No, of course not."
"Five thousand credits—you could buy a lot of silly perfume for that, to make
commoners think you're sexy."
"I'll take the saw."
He grinned, pleased. "Make that literal. You hew the next beam. Why should I do
all the work?"
"And the castle mortgage paid off," she said, liking the notion better. "That's
the first time our family's been solvent in a generation."
"Still, considering the danger of the mission—" he teased.
"Oh, shut up!"
"Now you know how to turn it on and off, Jess. The saw, I mean. It's not heavy,
just keep your arm steady and your dugs out of the way; don't let them dangle in
the beam."
"I don't dangle, you do!" But she accepted the saw, eager to try her skill. She
had, of course, been raised in the male tradition, and there were aspects of it
she rather enjoyed, such as hewing beams.
"I don't dangle when I'm with someone interesting." He took the measuring disk
and marked off another ten-meter section. "Sever it here."
She started toward him. "The trunk, not me!" he protested, stepping back with
his hands protectively in front of him.
She shrugged as if disappointed and set the saw at the mark. The laser moved
into the woods. "I can't even feel it!"
"Right. There's no recoil, no snag with laser. Just watch the beam, make sure it
stays white. With this tool we can saw boards, shape columns, polish panels,
drill holes—anything! I plan to cut wooden pegs to hold it together, along with
notching. This saw has settings for carving out pegs, notches, and assorted
bevels and curlicues; you just have to program it. We can build our whole house
with this one saw!"
"You're right," she said, no longer even attempting to be flip. "We need this
machine. It is worth the credit. You just be sure you report for that mission on
time!"
"Precious little short of death itself could keep me away," he assured her. "And
the Society of Hosts insurance would cover the advance, if I died before
reporting, so even then you'd keep the money. But it's not just the money I'm
doing it for; I'm tired of this dreary aristocratic life. I want real adventure
for a change! I want to go out among the stars, travel to the farthest places,
experience alien existence, see the universe!"
"Yes..." she breathed, envying him his coming adventure.
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"You just make sure I wake up in time to report for transfer when—"
The log severed before she was aware of it. It dropped suddenly and rolled
toward them. It was massive, half a meter thick at the cut: weight enough to
crush a leg. Jessica screamed in temporary panic and swung the valuable saw out
of the way, her finger locked on the trigger. Jesse grabbed for her, trying to
draw her bodily out of harm's way.
The wildly shifting laser beam passed across his spine. His shirt fell open,
cleanly cut, but for a moment there was no blood. He fell, his arms looped about
her thighs.
The rolling log stopped short of his body, balked by the chance irregularity of
the ground. Jessica, acting with numb relief, drew her finger from the trigger,
turned off the saw, set it down carefully, and caught her brother under the arms
as he slid slowly facefirst toward the turf. "Oh, Jesse, are you hurt?"
But even as she spoke, she knew he was. His aura, which really merged with hers,
was fluctuating wildly. The beam, set to cut wood, had touched him only
briefly—not enough to cut his body in half or even to cut his backbone, but
sufficient to penetrate a centimeter or so. Elsewhere it would have made a nasty
gash in the flesh; across his spine it was critical.
His body was paralyzed, but he retained consciousness and speech. "Jess—" he
gasped as she rolled him over and tenderly brushed the dirt from his face. "My
aura—is it—?"
"Jess, the beam cut into your spinal cord," she said, horrified. "Your aura is
irregular." She knew the extent if not the precise nature of the injury because
the sympathetic response in her own aura touched her spine, lending a
superficial numbness to her legs. His aura irregular? It was an understatement.
"I'll call an ambulance." She fumbled for her communicator. The health wing
would arrive in minutes.
"No, Jess!" he rasped. "I may live—but hospital'd take weeks! I have only two
days."
"To hell with two days!" she cried, the tears overflowing. "You can't go on that
mission now! Even if you weren't badly injured, your aura would never pass. It
reflects your physical condition. It has to be fully healthy to pass, you know
that! I'll take care of you, I promise!"
"Kill me," he said. "Say it was part of the accident Just pass the laser across
my chest, slowly, so as to intersect the heart—"
"No!" she screamed. "Jess, what are you saying?"
"The insurance—death benefit—only if I die, it covers—"
"Jess!"
"Jess, I can't renege on that mission. The advance would be forfeited, the
insurance invalid, and we'd lose the whole estate and the family reputation.
Have Flowers pick up the body; he'll cover for you. He's been in this business a
long time, he's doctored family skeletons before, you can bet on it, and he's
completely loyal to us. He'll do it. I'd rather die than—"
"Jess, I won't do it!" she cried. "I know Flowers would cover for us. I don't
care. I love you, clone-brother! I don't care what—"
But he was unconscious; she knew by the change in his aura. He had fought for
consciousness until his message was out, then let go.
She brought the communicator to her mouth—and paused, comprehending the position
they were in. The first flush of emotion was phasing into the broader reality of
their situation. She could save her brother's life— for what? For a remaining
life of poverty and shame? He had spoken truly! He was a joker, but never a
coward. He would prefer to die. Now, cleanly, painlessly, with a certain private
honor, leaving her to carry on the reputation of the family and maintain the
millennium-old estate. She knew this—for his aura was hers, his mind was hers,
and she shared this preference. They were aristocrats! If she had been injured
in such a way as to forfeit honor and fortune together, death would seem a
welcome alternative.
She could do it. She had the nerve, bred into the royal line, and because she
was royal, she would not be interrogated. Her word and the visible evidence
would suffice. Flowers would employ his professional touch to make the case
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tight. She could kill her brother-self, and save the family honor and fortune.
It was feasible.
Yet she did love him, as she loved herself. How could she face a world without
him? Though he might later marry, and she also, with one being royal and the
other becoming a commoner, they would always be closest to each other,
clone-siblings.
She had to decide—now. Before his metabolism adapted to the injury, making a
biochemical/aural analysis possible that would show the separate nature of her
act. Now, this minute—or never.
Jessica picked up the saw and held it over Jesse's body. She knew the expedient
course—yet her love opposed it with almost equal force. Was there no way out?
Chapter 1: Alien Encounter
Heem of Highfalls emerged from the transfer chamber and followed the HydrO ahead
of him toward the acclimatization wing. Another HydrO host rolled into the
transfer chamber behind him. The operation had to move with precision; there
were more than three hundred HydrOs to process as nearly simultaneously as
possible.
Yet Heem moved without vigor, hardly perceiving his surroundings. A squirt of
flavored water struck him. "Thirty-nine! Are you conscious?"
Heem yanked himself to a better semblance of awareness. "Yes, yes," he sprayed.
"Merely adapting to my transfer-guest."
"Then get to your chamber. You have bypassed it."
So he had. He was up to forty-two. Heem reversed course and moved to
thirty-nine. He picked up the vapor taste of it and rolled into its aperture.
The chamber was small and comfortable. The air was fresh and neutral, with
plenty of free hydrogen. "You have three chronosprays before release," the room
informed him.
Heem collapsed. In his subconscious he dreamed the forbidden memory. He was a
juvenile again, among his HydrO peers. In that secret time before he
metamorphosed into adult status. He was rolling with his siblings in the
beautiful ghetto of Highfalls, bouncing across the rock faces, through the chill
rivulets, and around the huge soft domes of the trees. They were racing, their
jets growing warm with the competitive effort.
Hoom was leading at the moment. He had the strongest torque jets and usually
gained on direct-land terrain. Heem was second, closely followed by Hiim. Haam
trailed; he had a clogged jet and it hampered his progress.
Heem had been gaining jet strength recently and had always had finesse in
liquid. Today was especially good; his metabolism was functioning better than
ever before. Now Hoom was tiring, becoming too warm; his conversion efficiency
was declining slightly. Heem remained relatively cool, yet was putting out more
water; he was gaining. The feeling of victory was growing.
Hoom, as leader, chose the route. Hoping to improve his position, he plunged
into the highfalls itself.
It was an effective tactic. Heem plunged in after him, and suffered the
retardation his cooler body was liable to. He lost position. But soon his liquid
finesse helped him, enabling him to recover quickly, and he was gaining again.
He caught up to Hoom, then passed him as they emerged from the water.
"Lout!" Hoom spurted. He fired a barrage of jets at Heem in an unsporting
maneuver. Some of them were needlejets that stung. Heem, alert for such foul
play, fired one needle back, scoring on Hoom's most proximate spout as Hoom's
own jet faded.
"Cheat!" Hoom sprayed, enraged. He fired another barrage which Heem countered
with another precise shot. Heem had the most accurate needles of them all.
Now the others caught up. "No fighting, no fighting!" they protested.
"He needled me, trying to pass!" Hoom sprayed.
For a moment, the audacity of the lie overwhelmed Heem, and he was tasteless.
Thus it seemed he offered no refutation, and that was tantamount to confession.
But Haam was cautious about such judgment. "I did not taste the initiation of
this exchange," he sprayed. "But it was Hoom, not Heem, who needlejetted me at
the outset of this race, clogging my jet."
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Perceiving the shift of opinion, Hoom took the offensive again. "What use in
winning a race, anyway? We have raced every day, now one winning, now another.
How does it profit us? Which of you has the nerve to roll up to a real
challenge?"
"Why roll to any challenge?" Hiim inquired reasonably. "We have no needs we
cannot accommodate passively. So long as there is air, we are comfortable."
"You may be comfortable," Hoom replied. "I want to know what lies beyond this
valley. Are there others of our own kind, or are we alone?"
"Why not go, then, and report back to us?" Hiim asked him.
"I do not wish to go alone. It is a long, hard roll over the mountain range,
perhaps dangerous. If we all go together—"
"I find difficulty and danger no suitable challenge," Hiim sprayed. "It seems
foolish to me to risk my convenient life in such manner."
But Heem found himself agreeing with Hoom. "I do not entirely relish the roll up
the mountain slope or the prospect of drastic shift in environment," he sprayed.
"Yet my mind suffers dulling and tedium in the absence of challenge. I value my
mind more than my convenience. Therefore I will undertake the roll up the
mountain with Hoom."
Hoom was uncommunicative, caught in the awkwardness of being supported by the
party he had fouled. It was Haam who sprayed next. "I too am curious about the
wider environment, but disinclined to undertake the enormous effort of such a
roll. I would go if I could ascertain an easier mode of travel."
"Make it really easy," Hiim scoffed. "Ride a flat-floater."
There was a general spray of mirth. The flatfloater was a monster whose biology
was similar to their own. It drew its energy from the air, merging hydrogen with
oxygen, with a constant residue of water. But its application differed. Instead
of using jets of waste-water to roll itself over land or through the river, it
used them to push itself up into the air a small distance. This required a lot
of energy; in fact the force of its jets was so strong, and the heat of its
conversion so great, that a large proportion of its elimination was gaseous.
Water expanded greatly when vaporized, so that the volume of exhaust was much
larger than the volume of its intake. Hot water vapor blasted down from it,
billowing out in disgusting clouds, condensing as it cooled, coating the
surroundings. The sapient HydrOs stayed well clear of the flatfloaters!
Hoom, however, was foolhardy. "Why not?" he demanded. "The upper surface of the
floater is cool enough, where the air intakes are. It indents toward the center.
We could ride safely there—"
It might just be possible! Their analytic minds fastened on this notion. But
almost immediately objections developed. "How would we guide it?" Haam asked.
"How would we get on it—or off it?" Heem added.
Hoom found himself under challenge to defend a notion he had not originated, for
indeed if a flatfloater could be harnessed, it could surely take them anywhere
rapidly—even over the mountain. If he could establish the feasibility of the
flatfloater, he could make them all join the traveling. "The floater is stupid.
When it feels distress, it flees it. We could needle it on the side opposite the
direction we wish it to go, and it would flee— carrying us along."
They considered, realizing the possibility.
"And to board it," Hoom sprayed excitedly, "the floater descends to bathe
itself, for it has no jets on its upper surface and the sun dehydrates it.
Periodically it must immerse itself in water. We have only to lurk at its
bath-region and roll aboard as it submerges. To deboard we must simply force it
near a slope and roll off the higher side. Since the floater is always level,
the drop to ground will be slight."
They considered further, and it seemed feasible. Hoom had surmounted the
challenge of method; now they were under onus to implement it. Since none came
up with a reason to refute this course of action, they found themselves
committed.
Heem was excited but not fully hydrogenated by the notion. He wanted to explore,
but feared the possible consequence. So he went along, as did the others. The
physical race had become something else, and Hoom had retained the initiative.
Given the specific challenge, they set about meeting it without immediate
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emphasis on the long-range goal. They located the spoor of the flatfloater, in
the form of taste lingering on vegetation and ground, diffuse but definite. They
traced it in the direction of freshness, locating the floater's favorite haunts.
It preferred open water, not too deep, with no large growths near enough to
disrupt the takeoff. That made approach more difficult.
They decided to lay in wait underwater. It was more difficult to breathe in
liquid, since it was in effect a bath of their own waste product, but there were
tiny bubbles of gas in it that sufficed for slow metabolism, for a while. In
flowing water it was possible to remain submerged indefinitely, for new bubbles
were carried in to replace the used ones, and the non-hydrogenated water would
be carried away. However, flowing water tended to be cool.
The advantages and disadvantages were mixed. Their ambient taste would be
diminished by the reduced rate of metabolism necessitated by the limitation of
hydrogen, and the surrounding water would dilute that taste, and the slow
current would carry it away, until their precise location was virtually
indistinguishable. The danger was that if the wait were too long, they could be
cooled to the level of inadequate functioning. This had happened to a former
peer; he had soaked himself in chill water to abate a fever, had slept and never
awoken. He remained there now, functioning on the level of a beast, his sapience
gone. It had been a cruel lesson for the rest of them: one of many. Do not
suffer your body to cool too far, lest the upkeep of your sapience deteriorate!
Heem remembered a time when thirty or more sapients had inhabited Highfalls; now
only the four of them remained.
However, the season was warmer now, and the river was more comfortable. Heem
wondered about that: what made the seasons change. The heat of the sun beat down
throughout the year, yet in the cold season it came from a different angle and
lacked force. Obviously the cold inhibited the sun, whose presence they knew of
only by the heat of its direct radiation against their skins, or possibly the
different course of the sun inhibited the season—but why was there a change?
Heem had pondered this riddle many times, but come to no certain conclusion. The
answer seemed to lie elsewhere than in this valley, perhaps across the mountain
range. The more he considered the ramifications of this project, the more he
liked it. Surely there was danger—but surely there was information, too. Since
ignorance had caused most of the deaths of his peers, especially the massive
early slaughter before the thirty he remembered had emerged from anonymity,
knowledge was worth considerable risk.
They settled under the water at the site, hoping the monster would come soon.
Heem, required to be still and communicative for an indefinite period in the
proximity of potential danger, found his thoughts turning to fundamental
speculations. Where had he and his siblings come from? How had they known how to
intercommunicate? What was their destiny?
The third question had an obvious and ugly answer: they were destined to die.
Most had succumbed already. Perhaps escape from the valley was their only hope
of survival. Heem felt his own mortality, the incipience and inevitability of
death. Was there any point in opposing it? Why, then, was he opposing it?
But he rebounded from this line of thinking. He must be suffering the chill of
the water, of immobility. He raised his metabolic level slightly, hoping the
increased flavor diffusing about him would not be noticeable to his companions.
Maybe they were doing the same.
Now he pursued the other questions. Communication? Somehow they had always known
how to spray and jet and needle flavor at each other, and quickly learned to
interpret the nuances of taste to obtain meaning. Certain flavors portended
certain things, as was natural. Sweetness denoted affirmation, bitterness
negation. From that point, the shades of taste flowed naturally to ever-greater
definition. Why this was so seemed inherent in the nature of the species.
What was their origin? They had all appeared together in the valley, as nearly
as he could ascertain. All had been physically small; he knew that because
landmarks, boulders, and such things that had once seemed large now seemed
small, and it seemed reasonable that it was the living things who had changed.
All had been able to fend for themselves from the outset, lacking only the
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