When she remained silent, Hugh filled his lungs for talk. “To be exact,” he proceeded, “Jan’s been cultivating a ‘wild’ ouranid, I a ‘wild’ dromid. We’ve persuaded them to wear miniaturized mindscan transmitters, and have been working with them to develop our own capability. What we can receive and interpret isn’t much. Our eyes and ears give us a lot more information. Still, this is special information. Supplementary.
“The actual layout? Oh, our native wears a button-sized unit glued onto the head, if you can talk about the head of an ouranid. A mercury cell gives power. The unit broadcasts a recognition signal on the radio band—microwatts, but ample to lock onto. Data transmission naturally requires plenty of bandwidth, so that’s on an ultraviolet beam.”
“What?” Chrisoula was startled. “Isn’t that dangerous to the dromids? I was taught they, most animals, have to take shelter when a sun flares.”
“This is safely weak, also because of energy limitations,” Hugh replied. “Obviously, it’s limited to line-of-sight and a few kilometers through air. At that, natives of either kind tell us they can spot the fluorescence of gas along the path. Not that they describe it in such terms!
“So Jan and I go out in our separate aircraft. We hover too high to be seen, activate the transmitters by a signal, and ‘tune in’ on our individual subjects through our amplifiers and computers. As I said, to date we’ve gotten extremely limited results; it’s a mighty poor kind of telepathy. This night we’re planning an intensive effort, because an important thing will be happening.”
She didn’t inquire immediately what that was, but asked instead: “Have you ever tried sending to a native, rather than receiving?”
“What? No, nobody has. For one thing, we don’t want them to know they’re being scanned. That would likely affect their behavior. For another thing, no Medeans have anything like a scientific culture. I doubt they could comprehend the idea.”
“Really? With their high metabolic rate, I should guess they think faster than us.”
“They seem to, though we can’t measure that till we’ve improved mindscan to the point of decoding verbal thought. All we’ve identified thus far is sensory impressions. Come back in a hundred years and maybe someone can tell you.”
The talk had gotten so academic that Hugh positively welcomed the diversion when an ouranid appeared. He recognized the individual in spite of her being larger than usual, her globe distended with hydrogen to a full four meters of diameter. This made her fur sparse across the skin, taking away its mother-of-pearl sheen. Just the same, she was a handsome sight as she passed the treetops, crosswind and then downward. Prehensile tendrils streaming below in variable configurations, to help pilot a jet-propelled swim through the air, she hardly deserved the name “flying jellyfish”—though he had seen pictures of Earth-side Portuguese men-of-war and thought them beautiful. He could sympathize with Jannika’s attraction to this race.
He rose. “Meet a local character,” he invited Chrisoula. “She has a little English. However, don’t expect to understand her pronunciation at once. Probably she’s come to make a quick swap before she rejoins her group for the big affair tonight.”
The woman got up. “Swap? Exchange?”
“Yeah. Niallah answers questions, tells legends, sings songs, demonstrates maneuvers, whatever we request. Afterward we have to play human music for her. Schönberg, usually; she dotes on Schönberg.”
Loping along a clifftop, Erakoum spied Sarhouth clearly against Mardudek. The moon was waxing toward solar fullness as it crossed that coal-glow. Its disc was dwarfed by the enormous body behind, was actually smaller to the eye than the spot which also passed in view, and its cold luminance had well-nigh been drowned earlier when it moved over one of the belts which changeably girded Mardudek. They grew bright after dark, those belts; thinkers like Yasari believed they cast back the light of the suns.
For an instant, Erakoum was captured by the image, spheres traveling through unbounded spaces in circles within circles. She hoped to become a thinker herself. But it could not be soon. She still had her second breeding to go through, her second segment to shed and guard, the young that it presently brought forth to help rear; and then she would be male, with begetting of her own to do—before that need faded out likewise and there was time for serenity.
She remembered in a stab of pain how her first birthing had been for naught. The segment staggered about weakly for a short while, until it lay down and died as so many were doing, so many. The Flyers had brought that curse. It had to be them, as the Prophet Illdamen preached. Their new way of faring west when they grew old, never to return, instead of sinking down and rotting back into the soil as Mardudek intended, surely angered the Red Watcher. Upon the People had been laid the task of avenging this sin against the natural order of things. Proof lay in the fact that females who slew and ate a Flyer shortly before mating always shed healthy segments which brought forth live offspring.
Erakoum swore that tonight she was going to be such a female.
She stopped for breath and to search the landscape. These precipices rimmed a fjord whose waters lay more placid than the sea beyond, brilliant under the radiance from the east. A dark patch bespoke a mass of floating weed. Might it be plants of the kind from which the Flyers budded in their abominable infancy? Erakoum could not tell at her distance. Sometimes valiant members of her race had ventured out on logs, trying to reach those beds and destroy them; but they had failed, and often drowned, in treacherous great waves.
Westward rose rugged, wooded hills where darkness laired. Athwart their shadows, sparks danced glittering golden, by the thousands—the millions, across the land. They were firemites. Through more than a hundred days and nights, they had been first eggs, then worms, deep down in forest mold. Now Sarhouth was passing across Mardudek in the exact path that mysteriously summoned them. They crept to the surface, spread wings which they had been growing, and went aloft, agleam, to mate.
Once it had meant no more to the People than a pretty sight. Then the need came into being, to kill Flyers… and Flyers gathered in hordes to feed on yonder swarms. Hovering low, careless in their glee, they became more vulnerable to surprise than they commonly were. Erakoum hefted an obsidian-headed javelin. She had five more lashed across her back. A number of the People had spent the day setting out nets and snares, but she considered that impractical; the Flyers were not ordinary winged quarry. Anyhow, she wanted to fling a spear, bring down a victim, sink fangs into its thin flesh, herself!
The night muttered around her. She drank odors of soil, growth, decay, nectar, blood, striving. Warmth from Mardudek streamed through a chill breeze to lave her pelt. Half-glimpsed flitting shapes, half-heard as they rustled the brush, were her fellows. They were not gathered into a single company, they coursed as each saw fit, but they kept more or less within earshot, and whoever first saw or winded a Flyer would signal it with a whistle.
Erakoum was farther separated from her nearest comrade than any of them were. The others feared that the light-beam reaching upward from the little shell on her head would give them away. She deemed it unlikely, as faint as the bluish gleam was. The human called Hugh paid her well in trade goods to wear the talisman whenever he asked and afterward discuss her experiences with him. For her part, she knew a darkling thrill at such times, akin to nothing else in the world, and knowledge came into her, as if through dreams but more real. These gains were worth a slight handicap on an occasional hunt… even tonight’s hunt.
Moreover—there was something she had not told Hugh, because he had not told her earlier. It was among the things she learned without words from the gleam-shell. A certain Flyer also carried one, which also kept it in eldritch contact with a human.