The Jotok was glad that it had remembered to specify both sexes. The warclone clanpod would have flayed it alive if it’d brought only males. It gave its student a few last-minute reminders about the weapon as the lain clambered out. Then it tabbed the navigation panel to mark the coordinates, looked to make sure that its passenger was clear, lifted out and turned west, keeping low just to be on the safe side.
As the skyship rose into the air, Swift-Son leapt onto the familiar surface of his watch-rock and settled down. His eyes followed the magical craft as it shrank to a dot over the horizon and disappeared into the setting sun. He kept watching after it was gone, until the sun was gone too and the purple skyglow faded to star-dappled black. Then he slid into the shadows, making his way homeward down familiar trails, carrying the magic weapon slung on his back.
That night took him better than halfway home. He stopped before daybreak and found a well-hidden hunt-blind to lay up in. He could have pushed on and been back while the sun was up, but what he had in mind would have to wait for evening and the gathering at the pride-circle. He slept soundly, dreaming of demons and fire magic and flying and stars. When the sun slipped below the horizon, he was up and moving, more carefully now. For the last thousand-twenty-four paces he approached the pride-circle as if it were prey alert for the watchers he knew were waiting in the darkness. Finally he gained a vantage point that looked onto the hillock beneath the bluff, where the pride gathered in the open den.
Surroundings changed as the pride moved, but the spirit was always the same. There was Pkrr-Rritt, lying in his place of honor on the rock by the fire and old Ktirr-Smithmaster himself was silhouetted against the flames, conjuring up the shapes of another story as the youngsters crowded close. Further back the adults reclined against rocks, listening or talking quietly. New mothers would be there nursing kits, while other kzinrett supervised older newlings as they tussled in the sand. And somewhere out in the dark, four-or-eight of the young adults were hidden in the shadows, silently watching to protect the pride. Swift-Son had stood such watches himself, missing the comradeship of the fire but proud of the trust the pride put in him. The whole cycle of life was represented in the pride circle, each generation playing its role, then passing it to the next. Here mothers presented their newborn kits to the pride, here the young learned traditions from the old. Here the challenge duels were fought and the stories told. Here the dead were mourned and, so said the legends, here their spirits returned every year on their Name-day.
For a moment he paused, caught up in his fate. He was a legend now, a legend that had just begun to unfold—a fated warrior of Chraz-Mtell, and his yet-to-be saga would be heard at tale-tellings forever. He, Swift-Son, who was content to watch his brother claim a double-name; he, Silent Prowler, who preferred only the Hunter’s Moon for company; he would be Patriarch! Patriarch not only of Rritt-Pride but of the Great-Pride of the broad savannah, Patriarch of all the countless lands beyond that. He raked claws across the sky. Patriarch of the very stars!
A faint click of rock on rock twitched his ears to the sides to pinpoint the sound’s source. It was not repeated, but he had already recognized the heavy tread of Iron-Claw. He must be one of the watchers tonight. Swift-Son could hardly wait to relate the news of his adventure. Soon they would be together again, joking and sparring like old times. It was good to be home.
But first he must claim a Name. He rippled his ears and stood up, then strode boldly toward the pride-circle. Behind him a rustle of paws on grass warned that Iron-Claw was crouching for the kill should he prove unworthy. Elder Brother had never been stealthy enough to surprise Swift-Son. Let him crouch, he would not leap.
As he entered the circle of light, Pkrr-Rritt rose from his place of honor in the center of the gathering. “Rritt-Pride welcomes this stranger to our pride-circle and asks for news of Swift-Son.” The Patriarch intoned the tradition.
Swift-Son raised the alien weapon to his shoulder and fired over their heads, splitting the darkened sky with his thunder. The startled pride fled, even Iron-Claw and Pkrr-Rritt, leaving gratifying fear scents behind. He leapt to the center of the circle and screamed in triumph as a few of the braver ones took cover behind rocks and peeped out at him.
“Swift-Son is dead,” he scream-snarled the tradition into the night. “I am Chraz-Rritt!”
SLOWBOAT NIGHTMARE
Warren W. James
Stark white cold. That was the first thing I noticed. That and the quiet sounds you learn to ignore while in space; the whisper of the air circulators, the hum from the electronic systems and the subsonic rumble of the drive. But there was something wrong with those sounds, like a chord with one note off-key.
The glassine shell of the autodoc was frosted over. I blinked my eyes wide open and saw nothing but milky whiteness and someone moving haltingly outside the ‘doc. I blinked some more and the milky shapelessness became individual strips of brightness on the ceiling.
My labored breathing puffed thin white clouds into the cold air as I felt a warm dry breeze start to blow into the autodoc. I became aware of the clean antiseptic smell of the autodoc’s interior, layered over with a stale metallic tang and a scent like that of sweaty grass mixed with ginger. My arms and legs were tingling, as if they had fallen asleep, while their muscles pulsed with the rhythmic contractions of electronically induced isometric exercises. I felt a sharp jerk and looked over to see a set of intravenous needles withdrawing themselves from my arm. How long had they been feeding me? Where was I? Sick or recovering from some accident? In some organlegger’s chop shop? My thoughts came as a jumble of memories and dreams. And then I remembered. The anticipation, the hopes, the dreamless sleep. I was on a starship bound for a colony world.
Would we find a world as perverse as the others the ramrobots had found? Like Mt. Lookitthat on Tau Ceti II, a sliver of inhabitable land on an otherwise uninhabitable world. Or a world where conditions were clement, but only for a few days out of the year, like what the Crashlanders found on Procyon IV.
For several hundred years humans had been sending unmanned interstellar probes, ramrobots, to find habitable environments in other star systems. And that they did. But showing true machine literal-mindedness, they couldn’t tell the difference between a habitable environment and a habitable world. As often as not, the worlds they found bore as much resemblance to their reports as the typical vacation destination resembled its tridee advertisements. Who knows how many colony ships finished their long interstellar trip with no way to return to Earth and only a marginal world to carve into a home. Would our voyage end differently?
Observations of Vega from the multi-kilometer fresnel lens telescopes at Persephone Station had indicated the existence of planets along with a large and densely populated disk of post-accretion debris. Those rocks had interested the Belt Science Commission enough to make them cough up half the UN Marks needed to send an unmanned probe to investigate further.
Ramrobot #124 had found that Vega’s fourth planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, had a moon that was larger than Mars with a thicker atmosphere. The scientists thought it would be inhabitable, although a bit cold and dry. But being a young planetary system, the gas giant was still glowing brightly in the IR and that would make the sub-primary parts of the moon quite bearable, if not downright comfortable. (Who cares that in a million years or so that gas giant would have cooled to the point to where it could no longer help keep the moon warm. Let the people of 1,957,811 AD worry about that problem.)