The young one comes into range. He’s bowling downstream, shepherding a raft of fat-plants. Must be one of the Station children bringing in supples. Very young, too, his claspers are showing, his tiny life-aura barely extends beyond his mantle. And he’s moaning purple with strain. What’s wrong?
As he nears her she sees his trouble: a small fragment of his life-energy is detached and riding just ahead of him. The child is lunging to catch it up but it veers in toward the magnetic plant. He can’t swerve in after it without losing his flock of plants.
Tivonel grins to herself. The child was experimenting with adult field-detachment, as young ones will. Now he’s in real trouble.
She suppresses her amusement and flashes a formal greeting. Never add to another’s pain, how often her Father has told her. The child flickers a muffled response, bright blue-green with shame at having to pass her in this state.
As he and his erring life-field come abreast of her, Tivonel deftly extrudes a thought-filament, blocks the stray energy and flicks it out at him. Done like a Father!
The child rejoins himself with a jolt, too embarrassed to do more than stammer broken colors. Then he herds his flock out to the fast stream and is gone in a rush.
Tivonel jets on, amused, recalling her own early indiscretions. All youngsters worth their food try to manipulate their fields too early. So boring, waiting for their Fathers’ supervised practice. It’s dangerous; her own Father had to reassemble her once. Every so often a young one mutilates its field that way. Sad. The Healers say the loss of the natural energy-configuration can be regenerated in time. Like most people, Tivonel doesn’t quite believe it. Who can tell what the person would be like if they hadn’t lost field?
Her thoughts go back to Giadoc; in the privacy of the trail she can let her field bias and tingle as it will.
Dear Giadoc! She has thought much of him in the long noisy nights of the Wild. His strangeness, his strong mysterious mind.
Their mating had been a routine first-child one. I was too ignorant to appreciate him truly, she thinks, though I’m older than he. I just saw him as sexually exciting. And a wonderful Father for my first egg. In the years since, of course, she hasn’t seen him at all, save for the annual ceremonies of greeting their child Tiavan.
Now she has come to realize Giadoc was someone special. So unexpectedly tender and underneath it something she can’t define, like a delicious wildness new to her. His son is grown now, his first Fatherhood is over. Will Giadoc have changed too, become still stranger and more exciting?
She jets harder, striving to retain composure by organizing a condensed engram of her year in the Wild. Surely Giadoc will be interested in the Lost Ones and the strange wild life-forms she’s seen.
But oh, those memories of their mating! How strong-sensitive he’d been, a perfect match from the start. The opposing polarity had snapped into being with their first ritual gestures and gone to both their heads. Young fools—they’d actually raced up into the winds above Deep to mate. Giadoc hadn’t even waited to select co-mates.
Up there, alone, the strength of his field amazed her. At first she’d hovered conventionally close upwind of him. And then his amazing power had built up and thrust her physically far out into the wind—had held her there thrillingly helpless while he played with her out of sheer vitality. The repulsion between them was perfect. Every least eddy of her life was countered and teased to resonance, and she knew her own field was doing the same for him. And then came the climax, when he had pushed her unbelievably far away into the wind’s teeth, held her off perilously while the orgasmic current boiled through them both!
Even in her ecstasy she had been terrified as the force of her spasm expelled the precious egg. How far away he was! She could still see it sailing downwind, receiving as it flew the life-giving exposure to Tyree’s energy which would ready it for his fertilization. What if he missed it? Without co-mates it would be lost, they were totally alone!
But he caught it hurtling, pouched it like a master male—and in a rush the sustaining fields, collapsed and they both went tumbling dishevelled down the Winds, laughing for the egg safe in its Father’s pouch. Winds knew how far they blew, guilty and joyous, before they recovered to make their slow way back.
That was when he had done the rare thing, had stayed in partial merger with her, so that she feld a deep sharing of his sensitive Father soul, his mystery. She hadn’t realized how extraordinary it was for a male to do that. They had been so happy, coming home; over and over he told her how good the long exposure-time would be for the egg, how it would make a strong-fielded child. And of course Tiavan was a fine young one, a potential Elder certainly. But Giadoc—
Suddenly Tivonel realizes that she is so shamelessly polarized that the gura-plant is swirling wildly. And the Hearer’s signal ahead has grown much stronger. Ahura! What will Giadoc think of her if she arrives this way?
She damps herself hard, remembering that Giadoc is probably absorbed in his work and hasn’t thought of her at all. And maybe he won’t think her experiences are enough to benefit a second egg. But the Elders believe that the mother’s memories help the egg’s field, and aren’t hers unusual? Well, at any rate she has a formal excuse for the visit; he can’t criticize her asking for news of Tiavan after a year away.
She jets on energetically—and is suddenly struck by weirdness. A ghostly clamor of light invades the natural hush. She checks, disoriented—and finds herself among dim forms. Why, there is Ober… and the others! She’s in the floater with them, going down. What’s happening?
Panicked, she pumps her mantle and the hallucination fades. She is back by the trail. But ahead of her is the blue mantle of the young one she’d met—he is approaching again, his field-fragment bowling ahead. Oh, no! She forces more air through herself to clear her senses—and she’s back in ordinary reality, sailing downwind in disarray.
Not really frightened, she snaps herself back on course. She knows now what has hit her—one of the so-called time-eddies Mornor’s daughter warned her about. They’re strange pockets of hallucination or alternate time, who knows?—not dangerous unless one gets blown while in them. Her father said they started to be noticed in his youth, and only near weird places like the poles.
So she must be getting close. Yes—the signal is much stronger, and the wind-streams are subtly roiling and losing direction. It’s the beginning of the enormous turbulence of the Polar Vortex. Here at the pole the planetary winds circle forever around a great interface, where the Hearers work. Tivonel remembers the conditions from long ago when her Father had taken her to see Near Pole. The Hearers there have a dense wealth of sky-life to study. Tivonel jets energetically through the cross winds, wondering why Giadoc has chosen to come and Hear here at Far Pole where the Companions must be few and faint.
The plant-marker is ending in a great luxuriant tangle, balanced on a standing eddy. The winds are omnidirectional now, it’s the start of the interface zone. Tivonel’s mantle-senses automatically analyze the complex gradients of the pressures around her; she cuts across local wind-loops, steering by the life-signals ahead and above. The point-source has opened out to several separate groups of life-emanations. The Hearers must be spread all over the Wall. It is still silent, a beautiful day, still dark and silent although she has been traveling well into normal night. Untired, alight with anticipation, she sends herself shooting through another huge cloud of plant-life—and emerges at the End of the World.
What a scene!
Forgetting her eagerness, forgetting Giadoc, Tivonel stops and hovers, awe-struck.