“The rub of reality,” Besen said theatrically. “A symphony of space.”
On the viewscreens he saw mottled lanes of dust. Here and there, rays from nearby stars shot through the murky banks, splashing blues and burnt-oranges across the cinder-dark fogs.
A shout from an officer. “There it is!”
Officers crowded around the screens to see the sail-snake. It glistened and writhed, plainly trying to get away from Argo. The hunter was now the hunted. Toby stood on tiptoe to get a good look but the crowd was too thick. Nearly everybody here, being older, was quite a bit taller. A Lieutenant saw him and Besen craning their necks, yanked them both by the collar, and set them back to work.
There were enormous perspectives on the viewscreens, brimming with light, shrouded by the great cloaking dust. Beauty. Wonder. Awe. Vast spectacles that brought a trembling reverence to the human soul.
Meanwhile, Toby bent over to mop up the scummy sewage. Rank. Smelly. Squishy.
“Crap and cosmos,” he muttered.
“What?” Besen asked.
“Just trying to keep things in perspective.”
TWO
The Sail-Snake
Toby got to see the sail-snake up close the next day. Not because he was going out with one of the hunting crews, of course. When Toby and Besen asked, Cermo had said officiously, “Hunting’s for full grown, not kids.”
Besen’s mouth twisted. “Get off it!”
“We’re better at zero-g work than you are,” Toby said.
“And quicker,” Besen added.
“Experience is what counts here,” Cermo said, keeping his face blank—which meant he was going to follow orders, whether he agreed with them or not. Cap’n Killeen’s orders.
“Experience doing what?” Toby asked irritably, seeing that Cermo wouldn’t budge. Nobody had ever done space hunting.
“Surviving,” Cermo said mildly.
Toby and Besen had been in tough places before, same as anybody in Family Bishop—but he had to admit Cermo had a point. Seniority stood for something when to get up in age meant you’d dodged plenty of trouble.
But even adult crew members, men and women alike, hesitated. The only hunting Family Bishop had done had been back on the home world, Snowglade, with firm ground underfoot and game they knew. They had run down mechs that carried organic food-fuels, pillaged them. And that had been a long time ago.
Outside loomed daunting, mysterious spaces. Family Bishop was hungry, tired of lean rations, but still wily. They sized up risks with a practiced eye. They had survived while other Families in the Grand Ensemble—the Rooks, Knights, Pawns, and more—had withered. Bishops muttered and fretted about venturing into such vast expanses, to drift among shrouded mountains of dust and gas in frail little shuttlecraft.
So they sent a message to their only possible consultant, the alien Quath. But Quath was a moody sort, and didn’t answer. Maybe this meant Quath didn’t know anything useful. Or maybe she did. That was Quath’s way. The point about aliens, as Cap’n Killeen always said, was that they’re alien. You not only couldn’t be sure about what they said, you couldn’t even be sure about what they didn’t.
Quath wouldn’t talk to just anybody, either. Toby had a reasonably close relationship with the big, insectlike thing—as nearly as anybody really could be sure. Ideas like friendship just didn’t easily apply to Quath.
Cermo sent Toby to talk to Quath, since the alien didn’t respond on comm or any other line. Which meant suiting up and going out to the hull, where the hunting teams were busy assembling the shuttlecraft.
Because Quath didn’t live in the ship at all. She lived on it—attached to the hull, inside a strange warren of rooms and spires the alien had shaped from waste and debris yielded up by Argo. There was even human waste in it, Toby knew, because he had seen Quath carefully pat the stuff into shit-bricks. Baked by vacuum and ultraviolet starlight, the gunk hardened fast and made good building material. Not to human taste, of course, but that was hardly the point. Besides, things didn’t smell in space—to humans. Quath, though, went into space without a suit, so maybe to it the bricks did have a scent. To Quath it could be perfume, for all anybody knew.
Toby cycled outside through the personnel lock and stood on the hull. It took a moment for his inner ear to make the change to zero-gravs, to stop sending out alarms that he was hanging above an infinite drop. His head had to get used to the idea that “up” and “down” were useful ways to orient himself, but didn’t really mean anything.
His magnetic boots kept him secure and he let his skinsuit readjust itself, sorting out pressure imbalances and its own wrinkles. The suit was alive, in a way. It had its own nerve net to sense problems. Thin organic muscles and computer chips set into the armpits made it all work. As engineering it was a marvel, but Toby by now took it for granted, and just griped when a pesky fold didn’t straighten itself out.
He started across the broad curve of Argo’s hull, looked “up”—and froze. The sail-snake loomed large. It coiled slowly, turning in the pale blue luminosity—and Toby saw that it was half as big as Argo. When he had seen it before, through telescoped, tech-assisted vision, he had gotten no feel for size. He had never thought about what life in gravity-free space might mean.
The sail-snake was a long tube assembled from the same repeating hexagonal segments. Toby could now see through its translucent skin, into a feathery skeleton that framed chambers of fluids and gas. It was a complex, interlocking array of orange rods and sliding gray muscles. They moved with sluggish, huge purpose—taking the snake away, as fast as the broad, triangular plates of shiny sails could push it. Through its shimmering jade skin Toby saw milky fluids sloshing. Bubbles popped along thin veins.
So much, and so close. Could they eat any of it? Or would the chemistry of such an alien thing be impossible to digest?
He picked up on comm the random talk of the hunting crews. They were tinkering with their shuttle vessels, and the voices brought him back to his own job. He hiked over the brow of the hull, coming down into a little valley formed by the bulge of the Wheat Dome. Through the dome he could see the blighted fields, brown and black—testament to their lack of ability to really run Argo right, even with all the computer programs.
Nestled in the valley was Quath’s dwelling. It looked like a wasp’s nest, honeycombed with tunnels. Mingling with that basic pattern was a dizzying profusion of sharp edges, ornaments, puzzling juts and thrusts.
Toby walked into the nearest portal, a perfect circular opening. Green phosphorescent slabs lit his way, flaring into life as he approached, dimming when he had passed. He didn’t know where he was going. He had visited here many times but the scheme never seemed the same twice. He suspected Quath spent a lot of time rearranging the labyrinth, maybe as a kind of art object. What else did an alien do with its time out here? Or was art a human idea that Quath didn’t share? The odd holes of varying sizes, shooting off at eccentric angles, made the art idea seem probable. Or maybe, Toby reminded himself, it was Quath’s idea of an elaborate joke. Who could tell?
He stopped at a ledge, peering into the murk beyond—and panels flashed into blue brilliance, illuminating a spherical vault. This he had never seen before—and at the bottom of the bowl stood Quath, waiting.
<You have climbed the mountain.>
The transmission from Quath had a ringing quality, like bells chiming in the distance, yet the words were clear. Toby did not hear them through his ears, but through his mind. Every Family member had comm gear embedded in the neck and lower skull, standard issue. Quath had simply learned how to tap into those channels, and Toby’s own systems translated into a tinkling voice.