by Bill Adams
“I’ll try,” I told her earnestly. She snorted and pulled ahead of us again.
Hogg-Smythe leaned in my direction, speaking quietly. “She gets on my nerves, too. But she’s probably right.”
Though we held our course, the mysterious bushes Foyle had noticed appeared closer and closer, some due north now. We would get to see them after all.
◆◆◆
Lagging behind together, Hogg-Smythe and I engaged in nervous small talk. She complimented me on my Ur-Linguish translation again, and I mentioned how strange the robot’s Avalonian dialect had been.
“I can understand borrowing from Deutsch, but you don’t expect to see an old basic word like ‘danger’ supplanted by something as foreign as ‘gefahren.’ ”
“Oh, but the Avalonian tongue was quite artificial, Commissioner,” she explained. “Deutsch and Svenska words were officially adopted on some sort of proportional system, for political reasons. The master plan didn’t take, of course—synthetic languages never do—but it left its marks. Since you have some Deutsch, be on the lookout for bilingual puns; I gathered that those were common.”
“Great. I always thought my life would depend on a pun someday.”
“What do you think about this fasces symbol, Commissioner? Do you share Foyle’s dark opinion?”
“I didn’t do the background reading you two did. But that did appear to be a character out of Roman mythology back on the plaque. And if we assume that the religious change that bound the Elitists together again was a harder attitude, a harsher discipline—then yes, maybe their cult was a harking-back to Ancient Rome. Stoic, class-ridden, militarist. ‘Come back with your shield, my son, or on it.’ That’s the parental spirit we have to be scared of.”
“Why hark back to Old Earth?”
“That’s standard for secret societies, to pretend that they’ve preserved the folk wisdom of one of the earliest cultures. Ancient Egypt for the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, Minoan Crete for the Kanalists, and…uh, matriarchal prehistory for the Green Church, I guess. Rome is only slightly younger. Hell, they’re all the same age now that Old Earth’s uninhabitable.”
“But that was my point,” Hogg-Smythe said. “There’s been a blurring and borrowing across many traditions.”
“It may look that way,” I answered. “The fasces is like an inverted ankh, the double axe like a Christian cross. But the differences are significant. The double axe comes from an earlier time than the fasces, but a more mature civilization. The Cretans’ days of sacrificing children to the state were far in their past; their royal axe was tall, thin, stylized—a ritual weapon, from a land of traders and artisans, not slavers and soldiers.”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “You seem to know a good deal of Kanalist lore, Commissioner. Are you an initiate? I know many government officials are. Reformed Rite, of course.”
“Once upon a time—” I began.
“Look!” Foyle cried out. Our heads snapped in the direction she pointed. Upward.
It was unmistakably a balloon—a large one, judging by its position on the horizon. An inverted teardrop shape of pale green, it had been launched somewhere to our north. With the wind at our back faster than we could walk, it soon sank out of sight in the same direction.
“But we’ll overtake the place it launched from,” Foyle pointed out. “Perhaps that’s the next form of transportation we’ll get.”
We saw another balloon within an hour. This one had popped up from somewhere in the west, and we had a long time to observe it before it, too, would disappear in the north.
I hated to watch it go, with the endless march ahead of us. And—I still thought—with something malign waiting for us in the tall grass.
“It does seem to be carrying passengers,” Hogg-Smythe said. “Or cargo, anyway. Can either of you make that out?”
I borrowed her field glasses; Foyle was using her own. But we both found the mass at the bottom of the balloon too shapeless to evaluate.
“Seems to have found an equilibrium altitude, anyway,” Foyle noted. “That’s interesting.”
“Isn’t that normal?” Hogg-Smythe asked.
“In a real sky, yes. But we’re inside a container—I wouldn’t expect as much of an air-pressure gradient. I’m no physicist, though. And of course, we don’t know how the atmosphere is managed here. This steady breeze, for instance. No reason for it to arise naturally. I wonder if it’s manufactured.”
“To accommodate the balloons!”
“Why not, Helen? Why not?”
By then we’d reached the bushes. But “bush” turned out to be the wrong word. Foyle thought they might be some sort of cactus, but none she’d ever seen.
Imagine a hard, sausage-shaped gourd with two, four, or six thick roots raising it off the ground, like stilts. As if even these plants were scared of something that crawled in the grass. Some of the gourds were smaller than my head, others over two meters long and half as wide. Scaly-skinned, they ranged in color from orange and yellow and green to dark brown, and came in a number of bizarre shapes.
Only the young, colorful ones were still rounded; they were like kegs on wooden legs, and as we proceeded northward, we saw strange-looking birds tap them with needle-shaped beaks. The browner, older-looking gourds had collapsed inward until opposite sides touched and merged, becoming warped planes, like parachutes or sails. But not thin enough for balloon material, I noted—very strong, almost petrified, though there was a slight leathery give when I tried to bend one of the four-rooted ones.
Weird, twisted. A garden for Hieronymus Bosch. I could tell that the others shared my vague repulsion. But then we were in clear prairie again, and finally saw the hornvieh—Deutsch/Avalonian for “cattle.”
The herd creatures were big enough to have been alarming if the plaque hadn’t told us they were harmless: shaggy brown mammaloids as high as my shoulder, each carrying a thousand kilos on its six cowlike legs. We decided to call them “hex-oxen,” and later just “hexen”; Foyle’s more correct “hexungulates” didn’t seem worth the effort.
We soon left the first herd behind. They never stopped grazing except to groom the confetti-moths off each other, and slowly. Ludicrously so.
“They might be natives of the Titans’ world,” Foyle said. “This artificial Titan sky seems to be low in ultraviolet light. Titanworlders might tend to be more energy-conservative than we. Like the confetti-moths. Hence the slowness.”
But the hexen’s other peculiarities were hard to understand. The second herd we passed, like the first, was grouped around a mudhole. Another hint that the river was somehow dangerous? And it was odd that the creatures didn’t space themselves out at random, as grazers usually do, but instead worked in a circle, outward. Maybe they just didn’t want to get too far from their mudhole. Or did the grazed-flat circle itself represent some kind of safety?
I wondered if the eels were electrified after all. And amphibious, too, slithering invisibly through the grass and—
But that was stupid. Their mouths were strainers for algae, and they had as much food as they could want right where they were. The eels were not the predators. We soon found out what the eels were.
◆◆◆
Foyle had said “Balloon!” when it was still just a dark mass behind a clump of feather trees on the horizon. When its green roundness became apparent, Foyle and I took some of the weight from Helen Hogg-Smythe’s pack and we proceeded at double-time.
But when we reached the river, there was nothing to do but watch and marvel.
The balloon was an eel. One of the bloated ones. It rested in a pool at the center of an island composed of hundreds of normal eels, in the middle of the river. Most of its body was inside the envelope of balloon skin, out of sight. The neck emerged near the bottom of that envelope and looped through the water back up to the head, which was clamped into a thick valved pad of skin on the outside.
A dozen other eels were doubled over this meter of neck, their tails
in their mouths and each of them linked in turn to dozens of others, the whole mass of the eel island anchoring the huge balloon in place. But there was always at least one detached eel with a different mission, its head engaged, half-submerged, in some operation with the balloon-bearer’s.
“They’re inflating it,” Foyle said. “You were right all along, Helen. They generate electricity, but in a more localized way than Terran eels. Those prongs on their heads are electrodes.”
“Are you trying to tell me—” I said.
“It’s the only explanation. Electrolysis! They’re breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen. See that darker sphere inside the balloon? I think that’s the oxygen; every now and then one of the free eels clamps on to that side patch and the inner bladder gets smaller. Get it? The balloon retains the lighter-than-air hydrogen, and the inflator sucks the pure oxygen to supercharge its metabolism. I wondered why they put away so much algae. They need the fuel; it takes a hell of a lot of energy to do what they’re doing.”
“But why are they doing it?” Hogg-Smythe asked.
Foyle shrugged. “For the ride, I guess. Let’s say these are the feeding grounds, and the breeding grounds are elsewhere, someplace that can only be reached by air, by balloon. The pool where they land is the source of this river; after breeding, they flow back here to feed. Some simple cycle like that. It’s bad enough to ask ‘Why?’ of evolution, but these things could never have evolved, especially not in an energy-poor environment—no, they were genetically engineered. One of the ‘entertainment’ species we read about, created by Titan biotechnology.”
“The envelope can’t get much larger,” Hogg-Smythe observed. “Not with trees on either side of the river. It’ll brush the branches anyway; lucky they’re so soft.”
“Luck has nothing to do with anything here,” Foyle said.
A few minutes later, the balloon eel gave the signal for departure. A short hissing whistle came from its head and inflator eels stopped approaching. Anchor eels at the edge of the island released their tails and squirmed loose.
The mass became smaller and smaller, but there were still hundreds of kilos of dripping passenger eels hanging on when it became light enough, and, with a ripe unhurried suddenness like an apple dropping from its branch, the balloon lifted free of the water. Clear of the windbreak trees, it rapidly gained speed and drifted away to the north.
“Lovely. But just entertainment,” Hogg-Smythe said wistfully. “I guess walking’s safer, anyway.” Foyle agreed like a Stoic.
I didn’t.
◆◆◆
At dusk the temperature dropped and the wind became gustier, more erratic. The high grass swayed and broke apart. The birds huddled and emitted hushed whistles. Panic flights of larger and larger moth swarms could be seen here and there in the distance.
My nerves were screaming, the more so as the others did not feel what I felt, the imminence of attack. They were calmly discussing whether it was time to make camp yet, on this bridge, as I scanned both sides of the river for danger.
One bit of unusual activity stood out. A nearby herd of hexen had been mowing what looked like a dead straight corridor parallel to the river. But now they retreated back to their starting circle for the night, not quickly, but perhaps as quickly as they could.
I’d already put the glasses down, had turned to talk to Foyle, when it happened. The three of us heard an achingly loud, inhuman cry and spun to see the last of the retreating cattle lurch out of formation. He was coming straight toward the river and us, his movement through the ungrazed sward stirring up great clouds of white moths, his lung-bursting bellows testifying that something had hold of him. Something big.
I felt the women shrink back, and Helen Hogg-Smythe’s hand gripped my shoulder from behind, drew me down to crouch with them past the crown of the bridge. But I couldn’t bring my head all the way down. I ripped the glasses away from Foyle; I had to see, I had to know.
I swore under my breath—Foyle the one tugging now, only to rise next to me and look as the hex-ox stopped screaming. We were staring right at it, not fifty meters away; it was being tortured and killed in a cloud of panicky moths, a few other hexen coming to its aid while the others lumbered back to safety, lowing piteously; and yet I could not see the predator.
Until something fell into place behind my eyes, like watching the foreground become the background in Schaelus’s sculpture. I handed the glasses back to Foyle without using them, didn’t need them anymore.
The predators had been in plain sight all along, all day, responsive to every movement in the area that might mean prey. And now they had their victim, fluttering down upon him in a great white storm—none of the blue or pink ones participating, just the white confetti-moths, flying in and plastering themselves to the beast from south, east, west, even north, as they beat their mock wings against the wind. Tens of thousands of them; we’d never realized how many lay quiescent in the taller grass.
The hex-ox wasn’t running anymore, nor crying out. It didn’t seem able to. Its six legs had splayed and straightened in a stiff and unnatural way that balanced its body securely off the ground, maximizing the area the moths could reach. One of the other hexen made a few feeble attempts to lick off the steadily thickening coating of white while the other tried to nudge the victim forward, toward the river; they seemed exempt from the blizzard attack, but soon gave up and lumbered off with sad moos.
Now the hex-ox was finished. In another few seconds the moths had covered its eyes, nose, mouth, and every square centimeter of skin, layer atop layer, like papier-mâché on a piñata.
After a minute all motion had ceased. The hex-ox no longer resembled an animal, but could now be recognized as something else—a scaly gourd on six long stalks.
We huddled together on the lowest of the stone steps, the breeze cold against our backs.
After what seemed like a long time, Foyle said quietly, “And the ones with four roots were rabbits. And the ones with two were birds…”
Night was falling fast, colors fading; the last shadows of hundreds of piñata gourds lengthened across the plain. It was just possible to make out the blue and pink and white flecks of confetti floating passively on the waves of grass, in every direction, as far as the eye could see.
Chapter Seventeen
“Let me recap,” Foyle said.
“Fine, if you’ll leave it alone after that,” Helen Hogg-Smythe replied.
We’d camped on the bridge, where few moths clung, though we would have to move out among them, somehow, in the morning. Foyle had collected enough hex-ox chips during the day for a fire. It was welcome; the stones we sat on were cold. The sluggish river swept below us quietly, except for the occasional splash of an eel breaking the surface.
Foyle sighed and nodded. “Very well…The moths would seem to be native Titanworld creatures, from the original version of the park before the humans came. Adapted to the Titan sky, energy conservers. Most of the time passive, either wrapped around grass-blades or permitting themselves to drift in the wind. If there’s a disturbance in the grass or air nearby, the closest individuals settle on the source—a big puff of air creates a big swirl of searchers—but judging by our experience neither case necessarily triggers a mass attack.”
“Some threshold number,” I suggested.
She nodded again. “Only when they sense they’ve already got ‘a good start’ on a capture do they emit some signal—a pheromone, perhaps—that prompts a whole cloud of them to fly in, even against the wind. They didn’t even settle on the hexen that tried to help. Because of the energy cost, or because they begin to change to paste as soon as they hit, they have to go for the maximum chance of making a capture, a single target.”
“Notice that they come in three colors,” Hogg-Smythe pointed out, “but only cooperate with their own.”
“Agreed,” I said. “All the piñata gourds we’ve seen were one solid color—yellowed, so that we didn’t recognize the original white,
blue, or pink. Maybe that’s another reason why we didn’t see mass attacks happening all the time. Maybe there has to be a chance predominance of one color first…”
Foyle sighed. “Maybe. An evolutionary device to make them more selective. After all, this is the climax of their life cycle.
“The commissioner has suggested that they pass some substance into the skin.” I found myself once again scratching the back of my hand, where I’d let the moth light. “In the massive dose it may act on the nervous system, to spread and straighten the limbs of the victim. This makes coating the victim easier, and stabilizes it on what will eventually become its ‘roots.’
“Because the piñata—victim plus coating—turns into a plant-like thing. The moths, scales, whatever you want to call them, differentiate into new functional forms. Maybe the roots obtain water and acids to help digest the animal inside. Somehow, this vampirism must lead to the birth of new moths. Maybe they breed inside the piñata as it hollows out, or maybe those birds which feed on the piñatas carry their seed somewhere…And maybe you’re right, Helen—this isn’t getting us anywhere.
“I see a single ray of light: their essential passivity. We may just keep lucking through them.”
“I believe we’re immune, not lucky,” Helen Hogg-Smythe said firmly. “As you say, the hexen and the vampire moths probably evolved together, on the original planet of the Titans. They complement each other—the cattle move so slowly that they rarely attract moth attention. We move quickly, but must be biochemically incompatible, the wrong taste or smell to be their proper food.”
“They usually land on our clothes,” I mentioned. “No flesh taste there—another thing in our favor.”
“We can’t be sure organic fabric is indigestible,” Foyle said, shaking her head, “or that the moths will know it is. They stick to it, we know that. And if enough stick…I’ll grant you that their skin toxin doesn’t figure to paralyze us, coming from a different biochemistry, but it could still poison us. And—”
