Fugue on a Sunken Continent
(a story of Epona)
by G. David Nordley
Illustration by Wolf Read
“Disaster, Anna, is the way of life on Epona.” Gregos Konstantis, Chief of Ground Service Operations, smiled ironically and looked past the beautiful but impatient woman on his office balcony across the Nell Strait and into the mainland. Disaster—and deception.
There, under the mist in the deceptively normal morning light of the star Taranis, lay Tir fo Thuinn—human names whimsically derived from Welsh, as Greg remembered, for the remnants of an ancient, slowly sinking continent. Its tropical lowlands glistened with a forest of triple-decked umbrella-leafed “pagoda trees” that were not really plants under what looked like a greenish gray-topped ridge. But the gray was dry-season forest, not stone, and the green was not forested foothills, but nearly vertical serpentine left bare as the last season’s landslides ate a little more away from the old continent. Above it all was a sky crossed by occasional V-shaped flocks of beings that were not birds.
He turned back to Anna Wolf and shrugged. A classical vocalist, she had arrived with a cultural exchange mission thirty years ago, and as the Contact Mission’s instant artistic establishment, had proved herself a prima donna in every meaning of the word. Beyond the reach of solar system birth boards, Anna had borne herself a child—who everyone assumed had been conceived by artificial insemination, given the mother’s personality. Anna’s disaster was that she was ready to take her daughter and leave Epona, but the daughter was nowhere to be found.
Kanti Wolf had inherited none of her mother’s chauvinism and only a little of her temperament, but all of her perfect pitch and facility with the Uther language—which made her very important just now. Anna had to be put off.
Greg spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “You may need to make different plans.”
“Your favorite line!” She was used to the favors of men and had run afoul of Greg’s indifference to her charms before. “Plans!” She waved her hands dramatically and strode into his office. “Did you turn your cyberservant off?”
At least she showed that much discretion. What a cybernetic intelligence didn’t know, couldn’t be hacked out of it—and the native Uthers’s sophistication in electronics was increasing exponentially. He followed her meekly inside. “Yes, Anna.”
“Well, I hear that—” she sang four notes, “—is going to demand that we give him the inner system starbase and may hold some of us on Epona hostage to get it.”
The notes, Greg thought, were likely Db, C, E and G, the tonal symbol of the airlord of the local metaflock. “D-flat Seege” was what most humans on Epona would have said.
“I want us in a starship,” Anna continued, “riding a mass beam out of this star system while we still control it!”
“You’ve been here long enough, Anna, not to worry too much about the plans of an Uther. Such plans have a half life of about three weeks.” That was only partly true; while most Uthers were characteristically volatile, Uther leadership could and did plan for the long term.
She ran long, delicate fingers through her straight jet-black hair and sighed in dramatic exasperation. “Then why are we building another starbase way out at Borvo?”
Greg frowned. Borvo was the Taranis system’s equivalent of Jupiter, and the new starbase in its Trojan asteroid cluster was supposed to be kept very quiet. Even quieter were Knute’s plans to totally dismantle the inner system base before the Uthers demanded it be given to them.
“Anna, the Uthers are expanding, colonizing the inner worlds of their planetary system. The long-term plan is to lessen our impact on this evolution by quietly moving human interstellar traffic out to the outer part of this solar system.”
“Nuts. I’ll tell you why!” Anna didn’t quite shout, which would have been an ear splitting weapon at this range, but put just enough volume into her exclamation to threaten what might be, if she got really disturbed. “We’re building one at Borvo equilateral because Coordinator Larsen is going to sit by like an overly permissive parent and let them have the inner system starbase!”
Close, Anna, Greg thought. “Anna, please avoid saying anything aloud, even in English, that hints that we are the Uthers’s parents. Don’t even think it!” He paused a moment, for effect. “Now, the Coordinator has no intention of giving the inner system star-base to an aggressor flock like the Fay D-flat Seege. They don’t speak for all the flocks of Epona.”
“You fill me with confidence. When, if ever, will our dear Knute act on such noble lack of intent?”
He smiled. Next to Knute Larsen’s plodding deliberateness, the spontaneous Uther seemed almost human. Even so, the other thousand or so humans in the system relied on the Coordinator’s constancy and carefulness—it let them take the little chances that led to progress and understanding. He turned back to Anna and lied. “Look, we are all boringly safe. At worst, we might be inconvenienced. Now, do you have any idea of where Kanti might have gone?”
“Don’t you? Who’s Kanti been flying with, besides you? Don’t think I haven’t seen you strapping on wings and flying with her. I’m worried. She isn’t careful enough and it’s going to end badly for her. Like Icarus or something—you know the story; you were bom in Greece, somewhere.”
“Khania,” he told her for the fourth or fifth time. What would she make of her Icarus analogy when, and if, she realized that Khania was on Crete itself? “Flying isn’t dangerous if you know what you’re doing, and it lowers many Uther-human barriers. They can’t help but consider ground bound beings as their inferiors, but flying—”
“Khania’s near Athens, isn’t it? I’ve sung in Athens, and in Greek, too!”
God save the Hellenic Republic, Greg thought. “Another time, Anna. Kanti flies with an Uther friend, a Geecee, about her own age—just coming into maturity. The family often perches in the red cliff hollows over Fingal’s Cave.”
“They’re still under the so-called protection of that duplicitous, she sang four different notes.
Likely F, E, Db, and G, Greg thought. Roostlord Feedyflat-gee had sheltered the human mission for a dozen Eponan years—the longest residence in the century-plus since people had come to study the Taranis System. Eventually loyalties shifted, and the humans were sold to the Fay Seeffay, who had loaned them their present quarters. Anna’s emotion toward Feedyflat-gee was unwarranted, he felt—a projection of human moral ideas on the Uther. Uther philosophy was to “fly with the flock the storm winds give to you.” How Anna could be so fluent in the Uther language and so dense about other Eponia was an unending source of amazement to Greg.
“It’s where she grew up, Anna—it’s where her young Uther friends are.”
“But we’re the enemy now, part of the—” she sang F, A, C, F, F, A, which Greg mentally translated to Fay Seeffay “—metaflock. I just don’t understand how Kanti could fly away alone now, like some Uther on a fugue! I’ll bet they’ve kidnapped her just to keep me from going. She’s in deadly danger!”
“The situation’s a lot more complicated than that, Anna. These are intelligent beings, and there are lots of cross-flock ties.” Uthers were the ultimate team players, but they were capable of changing teams with bewildering quickness. In theory, friends, and even seasonal lovers, can become deadly enemies overnight at the flip of an airlord’s wing, and in primitive areas, neonates of newly alienated partners were still destroyed when flocks parted. “Locally, roostlords, harvestleads, and elders still have influence. I doubt that she’s in any real danger.”