The time had come for him to use that knowledge, because he was of an age to use it—and for another reason. For the girl who had become his brother's new wife had been the girl Fifteenth himself had wanted.
The brother picked up his awl again. "If you have to be a fool—" He shrugged and suddenly grinned. "I'll make a new harness for you."
And so, for many meals, the boy hunted meat while his brother made the harness. The dark-eyed girl who had become his brother's wife helped him smoke the meat, and if her presence near him was a steady pain he never showed it, and if she knew she never told.
When the harness was finished and fitted he loaded himself and the three of them trudged up the friendly mountain toward the finest of the launching places. There where the slope fell steeply away for a thousand feet, the gentle, cradling updraft never failed. From this cliff edge one could circle and soar more than a mile into the thick, sweet air of their world, and launch oneself many sleeps away across the plain in a single flight.
They stood and stared at Knife-in-the-Sky, and then the dark-haired girl caught her breath and cried, "A fire in the clouds! Look!"
Before them, even higher than Knife-in-the-Sky, a lance of silvery light was extending itself in a soaring arc down through the bright, living clouds. Neither the boy nor his brother was frightened, although it was a strange thing to them; their world knew nothing of meteorites, since near them there was nothing small enough to fall into their air. It was not unique. It was rare.
The brother muttered, "There was such a flame a hundred sleeps ago, and after that the small Watchers appeared."
"Has anyone been harmed by a small Watcher?" the boy demanded.
The brother shook his head no, though what he meant was "not yet."
"Then I will not fear if there are more. Good-bye," the boy said, kissed them both, grasped his buttocks with his hands, and leaped headfirst into the air. When he was well clear of the rock he swept his arms up in the sinuous stroke of the wingman, extended the filmy wings of scraped leather, and flapped and soared until his brother and the girl were all but invisible to him, tiny, staring figures no larger than pebbles.
And then he turned out of the updraft and stroked through the air toward Knife-in-the-Sky.
He did not look behind him.
Even if he had looked, he might not have seen that something shared the air with him, a cube of metal, bright on all its faces, brighter still with lights and lenses on the face toward him. It was no larger than Fifteenth's fist and a long way behind as it stolidly punched a passage through the air, borne on magnetic forces of which none of the boy's people had ever heard. The boy did know it was there. He was not meant to.
TWO
A long distance away in terms of the boy's world—but only a step in astronomical distances—a man named Ben Line Pertin watched a holographic virtual image of the flying boy and turned away, shaking his head. "They're skinny and funny-looking," he said, "but by God they're human. Figure that for me, Venus."
The girl beside him was not a girl. She did not look like a human girl except in the way that a statue does; she was silvery metal, thixotropic, anisotropic, tamed by the science of her people to flow and move like flesh. Oh her home world Venus had not looked human at all; for that matter she had not been female, because her race had not bothered with sexual distinctions in its development. She said, "Not only human beings live on Cuckoo, Ben Line. We have already found Sheliaks and Boaty-Bits, or beings genetically parallel to them. And we have only begun to look."
"None of your folks, though," Ben Line observed cheerfully. "Guess you weren't popular."
"As to that, Ben Line, how could you tell?"
He grinned. Venus was an edited form, specially tailored to operate well in the near Earth-normal environment of Cuckoo Station.
"Well," he said, "I suppose we might as well retransmit these tapes. I think we need help, Venus. More equipment, more survey scouts. And more beings. I think it's about time we sent people down to Cuckoo. What do you say?"
The silvery girl was silent for a moment. Ben Line knew that, through her Pmal translator, she was communicating with FARLINK, the computer that processed all the manifold information-handling procedures on the orbiter called Cuckoo Station.
FARLINK was the station's nerve center. It processed the tachyonic transmissions that replicated new personnel for die station. It coordinated the reports from the drones they sent down to the surface of the strange object itself. It stored their cumulative data and solved their research problems; and it sent their findings— such as they were—back to Sim One.
Its main terminal was a ring-shaped console inside the hollow hemisphere where Pertin, the silvery girl, and other beings were working. The beings on duty sat inside the console, or rested or clung or stood there as their anatomies dictated, with input devices within reach of their manipulative organs. The output flashed and shimmered on the screens that lined the dome, translated into the visual symbols of half a hundred cultures.
Ben Line became impatient. "What's the matter, V&- nus?"
She did not move but her expression, as far as she could be said to have one, seemed to cloud. "There is difficulty," she said.
"Difficulty?" That seemed unlikely! FARLINK was as close to perfect as any machine ever made. Many tachyonic channels linked it to the banks of the even larger computers and research teams back on Sun One, and it had its own built-in power sources. And yet—
And yet abruptly, before his very eyes, the myriad screens suddenly flickered and went black!
There was an instant rumble of consternation. Cries and hoots and clangs of shock rang out all around the ring. From the console position nearest his own a scorched-fur scent of TWorlie dismay came from the bat-headed, butterfly-winged being named Nammie.
"What the devil!" he cried. The screens were black for only a second; then they glowed with the green computer symbols that spelled out the same message in half a hundred languages:
"REGRET INTERRUPTION, INTERFERENCE DISTORTING
INCOMING SIGNALS. ORIGIN OF INTERFERENCE NOT KNOWN."
Venus whispered, "But we've never had any interference before . . ."
Pertin had no answer. Suddenly he felt very lonely. The tachyonic channels were their only bridge of thought and communication across that gulf of space that was too vast for anything material to cross. With the bridge broken, the thirty thousand light-years between all of them and all of their diverse homes became terribly real.
The T'Worlie beside him was fluttering on frantic wings above its console position, stabbing at the keys and whistling at its mike. After a moment it rose from the keyboard and turned its five-eyed face to him.
"Mode emergency!" it shrilled. "Query implications of signal distortion."
"I wish I knew," Pertin said, shaking his head.
"Propose conjecture! Assume sentient masters of Cuckoo. Query: Have they discovered us? Are they initiating contact? Query probable intentions."
"I don't know, Nammie. What about DFing? Do we know where the source comes from?"
The T'Worlie spun and punched a combination; and all the myriad screens lighted up:
"SOURCE UNKNOWN. DF PROGRAM INITIATED."
And then abruptly the green symbols shimmered off the screen. Patterns of color flashed and vanished in the deep tanks that were their three-D vision screens. A new message appeared: