Around him, the angels, all grown, wings dwarfed, heads heavy, twittered, seemed to ignore him. They were few in numbers, so few that he thought he could identify his traveling companion. Grown to the size of a ten-year-old child, she was preening herself. The delicate, multicolored fur shredded away. He watched with amazement as she seemed to expand, to grow.
Nearby, the process of molting completed, an angel launched herself off the cliff. She was so large that her tiny wings could not possibly hold her; he thought she had leaped to her death, far below in the waves which pounded the rocks, pushed by the constant wind. But she steadied in her downward flight, circled, soared, wings almost motionless, riding the updraft and then gliding off on a wing toward the distant land.
Head large, eyes glowing, his friend pushed down the last remnant of her outer skin, kicked it aside. He’d seen women take off a skirt with identical motions.
"Wait; please wait," he called.
She did not look at him, her eyes fixed on the distant land. And, as he moved toward her, she was gone. Falling, then feeling the updraft, gliding, impossibly heavy for such flight, but flying, soaring, becoming small in the distance.
There was no food on the barren shore. The water, if it were fresh, was far below. He climbed the hill, found food, running water, and spent the days sitting on the hilltop, watching as the angels molted, leaped, soared.
It took two weeks, fourteen standard days, for the angel, the newly changed Artonuee female, to develop her powers of communication to the point where she could tell of the strange male who escaped the ifflings and fed on nectar and fruit and the flesh food of the walking males.
Chapter Nine
"We know, dear," said First Mother Piiree, when, with much agitation and self-pleasure, the third-change infant formed her first coherent message in a keening mixture of sweet sounds and labored thoughts. "Concern yourself with the application of the sound eeeeen. Now, now, he is well. He is being watched. He is feeding." Lovely, thought First Mother Piiree, to be fortunate enough to share these lovely children’s first odd and ancient joys. Unfortunate that this group of changelings should have had their wingling stage complicated by the presence of the alien. The trauma of it could color their future lives, and the life of each was a precious jewel to be treasured, protected. Now that the three pleasant worlds of the Artonuee were population-stabilized, the flow of changelings through the Development Center was slow and carefully regulated.
There were times when Piiree wished that she had lived during the period of expansion, when the Artonuee were peopling new worlds. She herself had voted, at the last Public Opinion, to expand Five, cold as it was. She had argued against the quality-of-life advocates, stating with some force that she knew from her personal experience and her graduate research that a one-on-one relationship at the iffling stage was no more desirable than multiple relationships. The age of expansion, she had said, should prove to even the most skeptical that the life force was powerful enough to give being to two, three, even as many as five ifflings. The great Lonwee was a fiveling. It was a terrible waste to allow only one iffling the gift of advancement when an Artonuee came home.
Just last night she had talked about it with the Lady from Nirrar. "It is not as if we are denying them life." the Lady said. "We are merely
postponing it. Look at it this way. In our mythology, the Lady Andee suckled fifty ifflings. Each became great. I agree that it is possible to advance more than one or two ifflings with each homecoming, but is it desirable? Part of our history is the sad story of the age of overpopulation, of rampant changeling mortality. Rather than condoning artificial concern with unfertilized eggs and unadvanced ifflings I, personally, would advise a continuation of careful control, of watchfulness, of Artonueeistic benevolence in regard to those who are allowed the gift of sentient life."
The Lady was high in the government, and in her position, had access to information unavailable to Piiree. She bowed. Moreover, the Lady was carrying a wing load of sorrow. It registered there around her eyes, in the sad purse of her lovely lips.
"Your load is heavy, Lady," Piiree said, in consideration. "I will allow you to retire, with just one more question. The meaning of the alien’s presence on The World, Lady?"
For an unguarded moment, there was a chaos of thought, then the Lady controlled herself. "Great change, First Mother. For good or for ill. At best, your wishes granted in a staggering surplus." Pictures of thousands, millions of changelings. An outflowing of changelings to live great and exciting lives of—Piiree was lost.
"I will wish for it," Piiree said, leaving the chamber as the tired Lady, clad in official purple, keened goodnight.
Still, Piiree resented the presence of the alien, the male. He sat, a malignancy in paradise, atop the Cliffs of Flight, eating the fruit which properly belonged to the trekking changelings. Piiree had a healthy respect for the ability of the male of the species, as long as he stayed in his place. This alien male was definitely out of his place. She was glad, after so many days of suspense and anxious watching, that the government had, at last, sent someone to deal with the situation. All she wanted was for the alien to be removed so that her changelings would not have, as one of their first memories, the image of him in their minds.
Behind her, the Lady could not sleep. To one who knew her, a dullness of eye, there in the outer facets, would have told of her fatigue, and of other things. To a soul mate—one who could, upon invitation, come into her head—all would have been revealed and then tears would have fallen, for the Lady had sacrificed much to be on The World, to hear the eager,
childish voices of the changelings, to smell the drift of the aroma of the pleele flowers and the fuplee forests across the inland sea. The pleele smell saddened her most.
Sleepless, she activated the darkened arcs and, from her carry case, extracted papers and leaned over them as she sat in her bed. Her lips formed sounds, unnatural sounds, guttural and strange and, although systematized, wounding to her ears still. And some of the sounds were incapable of being formed by her frail vocal chords. Some had to be thought, motioned. This gave her doubt. The mind which was the target of these sounds was unknown. Would her mixture of thought and sounds make sense to it?
It was an old worry and she had to live with it for yet a few hours, until the dawn and after the floater trip across the inland sea. And if she could not communicate, then it had all been for nothing. She felt a wave of unaccustomed bitterness.
No. She would not be able to bear failure. She would not even think of failure, not after the long days of work and the sleepless nights and the frightful psychic pain which still, in unguarded moments, smote her with a hurtful blow.
Still, there was the possibility of failure. For the first time in history, the Artonuee were exposed to the concept of linguistics, a term which she herself had coined in the first dramatic days of her study of the alien messages in that section of the Research Quad which had been turned over to her. The Artonuee, of course, had always had language. The libraries of Outworld were filled with the written word of the Artonuee, going back, in the ancient picture form of the language, over three hundred thousand Artonuee years to the days of the first tool users. But even in that early, rudimentary form of the language there was no difficulty, for the written pictures were merely graphic transcriptions of the pictures of the mind. It was thought in University circles that a primitive Artonuee female, from the early days of self-spun nests, would be able to converse with a modem-day Artonuee in basic terms, leaving out the additions to the language caused primarily by technological development.