by Huskyteer
Officials met them; bureaucrats screened them; and assistants guided them, finally to the quarters the humans were being offered. They’d been built a domed insta-concrete building at the base of one of the spires, little more than a hardened tent, but still luxurious compared to what most of the refugees were living in. In addition to basic bedding and a washroom without proper plumbing, the dome contained an ad hoc laboratory, stuffed with computers and other scientific equipment frantically saved from the burning spire city.
“Is this what we’re expected to work with?” Einray complained to the group of wrombarran guides watching them. “We should have stayed at Wespirtech,” he grumbled. “I can’t do anything with this junk.”
“Well…” Ivan Bower said, looking at the wrombarrans with their wings folded, “we could try…to…” He clearly wanted to please them but was as deeply troubled as the angry-looking Einray. “No, he’s right.” Ivan turned to Druthel, the wrombarran he knew best. “This isn’t going to work. We need a real laboratory.”
Joni was perched on Druthel’s shoulder, translating for the room. Druthel said to her, “Tell them this is only their quarters. The equipment here is for them to use, if they want it, but the main laboratories are all in the spire building. When they’re settled, I can take them there.”
As soon as Joni finished repeating his words, Ivan said, “We’re settled. Let’s go.”
The other humans all agreed, except for Rhiannon who had begun looking through the equipment that had so offended Einray. Druthel and the other wrombarran guides led the rest of the humans to a ground-level entrance to the main spire building, but Rhiannon stayed behind as Druthel feared she would.
Druthel turned to one of the wrombarran aides, a woman he knew well. “Will you guide them?” he said, speaking lowly so Joni would know not to translate. “I need to go back and talk to the human who stayed behind.”
“Sure,” the aide agreed, flicking her ears lightly.
The rest of the group, including the three Keats, followed the aide into the base of the spire. Druthel turned around, planning to rejoin Rhiannon in the human quarters. Instead, he saw her already leaving.
* * * *
The small human had shed her outer layer of clothing in the wrombarran heat. Now her slender, pink-skinned arms were bare to her shoulders. The shirt she wore scooped loosely at her neck, and her thick mane of hair was pulled back behind her head.
Druthel took his electronic translator out of its waistcoat pocket, clipped it on, and turned it on. “You must be hot,” he said.
Rhiannon startled at the sound of his voice, before the translator even began to speak.
Druthel realized his heart was racing and his wings were restless. He should be angry. He’d brought this human many light-years to ascend into the spire and begin work. Instead, she slipped away from the rest of the group and tried to disappear into the refugee city. He didn’t have time to look for her if she got lost… Yet, he wasn’t sure that anger or impatience were what he was feeling. “Where are you going?” he said.
The small primate woman stared up at Druthel. Wrombarran eyes had no whites, and the dark and light contrast of her eyes captivated him. “I’ve never been to a planet other than Da Vinci and its moon, Kong-Fuzi,” she said. “Besides… I don’t think they’ll need me. I told you that back at Wespirtech.”
“I think they will,” Druthel breathed, almost a reflex. On an impulse, he clicked the tip of his tongue, wanting to feel the shape of Rhiannon with the reflection of that quiet sound. The space she filled in the air in front of him. Wrombarrans used echolocation mostly for navigation while flying, but, it could also be intensely personal. It let him touch her without actually touching her. If another wrombarran had been there… But none was. And Rhiannon didn’t know the significance of the quiet click. Nonetheless, Druthel felt embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” Rhiannon said. “I know that you and your people have gone to great expense to bring me here… And, if I thought I could help, I would. But, I think you’ll find that the others are much more qualified. They have some interesting theories…”
Rhiannon tilted her head, and Druthel clicked his tongue again, tasting the shape of her subtle gesture. His embarrassment was fading because she was so clearly unbothered. Druthel had always been an awkward man. It was part of why he’d thrown himself into his work. His science. Why did it feel easier to talk to a woman of a different species? A woman he couldn’t even understand without an electronic box clipped to his vest?
Rhiannon saw the flickering movement in Druthel’s ears. She didn’t know what he was thinking, but she knew how important it was to him that her colleagues save his world. So, she kept talking, trying to reassure him that the other Wespirtech scientists were more than competent. “They think they can construct a replacement moon for you. The mass of the outer asteroid belt in your solar system is approximately the same as the mass of your missing moon. So, if we could design a…well…a scoop for a spaceship…like a space tractor…”
Druthel flattened his ears, and Rhiannon’s words tripped to a stop. “That won’t work,” Druthel said.
“You don’t want a replacement,” Rhiannon said. “You want to reverse the disaster. Bring the original moon back. From hyperspace.”
Druthel flared his wings. “Yes,” he said. “You understand me.” The translated echo of his voice filled his ears with irony, but he didn’t care. “All the other strategies—a replacement satellite, counterbalancing the quakes with controlled explosive bursts—they’re incomplete. Unstable. We need to reverse the catastrophe…the mistake…when the acoustiscope…” Druthel’s enthusiasm drained away as his thoughts drew back to his horrible act of hubris. It hadn’t been his act alone.
The whole institute had been devoted to the project for months—using half-phased quark beams to map the topology of local hyperspace. They’d hoped to magnify the power and trace the contours of the cartography of hyperspace much further afield. They’d hoped to develop a map of a deeper layer of hyperspace that would allow them rapid travel—more rapid than human, srellick, or even lintar technology. Instead, the burst of phased quarks had pushed their moon onto a different physical plane. And their home planet quaked with its loss.
As little as a month ago, Druthel had been a vociferous supporter of wrombarran isolation and independence. He’d studied the alien cultures who reigned supreme in their arm of the galaxy, and he knew that small worlds, early in their scientific development, had a way of being consumed by them, only to be regurgitated as tourist planets—dead-ended by the exodus of their greatest minds to join the intellectually exciting, further advanced society of the Human Expansion or the Srellick Mercenary Syndicate.
Druthel hadn’t wanted that for his world. He’d hoped that his institute’s work on hyperspace cartography would protect his world from ever suffering that fate. It would put them on equal footing. Instead, it had left them crawling, crippled and begging for help.
He should hate this human. This whimsical creature who he knew had the intelligence and insight necessary to help him. But, instead, she sulked and demurred. Yet, all he wanted was to reach out and touch her.
“Take me somewhere on your world,” she said. “Show me something—some place—that’s special to you.” Rhiannon tilted her head and looked up at him. “Your eyes,” she said, “they’re so dark, I hadn’t realized that they’re blue.”
Druthel blinked and looked away, but the steadiness of her gaze drew him back. Could she be feeling the same strange attraction that he felt for her? It made no sense to him, having feelings like this for another species. But, then, he’d never met another sentient species before…
“When we come back,” Druthel said, “you’ll work?”
Rhiannon nodded her head, swinging the hair gathered in a ponytail behind her head. “Yes, I’ll work with you.”
Druthel couldn’t help thinking that they should already be working with the other scientists in the spire. Ye
t, the trip here had taken three days. Another few hours wouldn’t hurt.
“Come with me,” he said, reaching out a winged arm. His furry fingers at the hinged joint of his wing wrapped around Rhiannon’s bare-skinned fingers. Her skin was smooth like the skin of his wings, just like his sonar had told him it would be. “Where we’re going,” he said, “I’ll have to fly, so wrap your arms around me.” He guided her around his back, where she grasped his neck with her thin, flightless arms. “You should be light enough to carry.”
* * * *
As soon as his wings began to beat, Druthel started clicking his tongue in a rhythm. He felt the shape of the empty air in front of him, and he pulled them both through it, ascending to the sky. Once they were high enough above the makeshift city, drawing further and further away from the artificial spire housing the other scientists and all their work and equipment, Druthel relaxed his wings into a glide. Air cut above and below him, but he caught the wind of a powerful current. His body felt out of balance and heavy with Rhiannon clinging to his back, so he tilted his shoulders forward to compensate.
He marveled as they flew together that Rhiannon had willingly put herself in such a dangerous situation—many meters above the ground—for a flightless creature. He couldn’t help but feel a rush at the power it gave him over her, but he also felt himself intrigued by her trust. And drawn to protect this helpless creature that was a silent, warm weight upon his back.
For her part, Rhiannon buried her face deep in the fur on Druthel’s neck. The whistling rush of air around her was exhilarating but also terrifying. But, then, so was the feel of his fur against her arms and face.
When she risked looking out over his shoulder again, Rhiannon saw that Druthel was flying them toward a canyon. The base of the gorge was a pool of bright colors, all pink, chartreuse, and neon. Alien plant life? Rhiannon wondered, but Druthel turned swiftly about before she could get a good look at it. She buried her face in his fur again.
“We’ve landed,” Druthel said, his translator echoing his words in Solanese. “You can let go.”
It took Rhiannon another moment to trust the sensation of being stationary again. She relaxed her hold on Druthel’s shoulders tentatively. She didn’t let go entirely until he hunched down low enough for her feet to firmly touch the ground.
Druthel watched Rhiannon as she looked out from the cave in the cliff face of the canyon that they’d landed in. It was a mere pocket in the rock, big enough to hold the two of them but not much more. Druthel thought it might have been a large bubble in the magma when this igneous rock had formed millions of years ago. Since then, the chemotrophic lifeforms—analogues to the photosynthetic lifeforms on most human worlds—had eaten their way down through the rock, revealing the underground bubbles beneath.
Although Rhiannon’s specialty was quantum chemistry, she had been exposed to enough biology to make a solid guess as to what she was looking at. “Those plumes of color in the pools down there…” she said, “…that’s chemotrophic life?” She wasn’t sure if the translator would know scientific words like that. But it did.
“Yes,” Druthel said. “The bacto-bogs are the building blocks of life on my planet. They convert heat in the spring water and iron from the rocks into energy. Then the swarmers eat the bactoforms; avians eat the swarmers; and we eat avians. The chain of life.”
Rhiannon cocked an eyebrow, that thin semi-circle of fur. “Your species is carnivorous, then?”
“Right.”
“And you eat birds…”
Druthel saw immediately where she was heading. “The Keats are safe. They are so different from our own avians—anyone can see in an instant that they’re alien. It would be dangerous to eat them. It might insult their owners—”
“It would insult their owners,” Rhiannon interrupted.
“— and their bright plumage might even mean they’re poisonous. But, yes, I did think they might have been brought on board as snacks.”
“That must have offended them,” Rhiannon said, lowering herself to the floor of the cave. She sat down and leaned her back against the cave wall.
“Apparently the words for pet and snack are very different in Solanese,” Druthel said. He folded his knees up, trying to sit down beside Rhiannon. He simply wasn’t built for it, and his wings crushed uncomfortably against the ground. “They’re essentially the same word in Wrimbrin.”
Rhiannon laughed.
“Fortunately, my electronic translator happened to pick the less offensive option until I figured out what was going on.” Druthel shifted his wings and accidentally hit Rhiannon in the shoulder.
“Here,” she said, taking the edge of his wing—his thickly muscled arm—in her hand. She helped him stretch out and refold the wing less awkwardly. In the process, his arm ended up around her, draped over her back.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Why do you come here if it’s so uncomfortable for you?”
Druthel pointed up with one of the fingers at the joint of his other wing. Rhiannon looked up and saw a metal bar installed in the ceiling.
“Usually, I hang upside down,” Druthel said.
“I don’t mean to stop you…” Rhiannon said, starting to shift her body under the light pressure of his leathery wing as if she meant to stand up.
“No, that’s okay,” Druthel said. He liked the feel of Rhiannon close to him. “If you don’t mind my wing over you, this configuration works for me.”
Rhiannon didn’t answer, so Druthel assumed she must be okay. They sat together, staring out at the bacto-bogs. Fist-sized swarmers with glittery exoskeletons flitted about above the pools. Sunlight glinted off the swarms as they flew in formation, first one way then the other. Their aimless flight patterns were soothing to watch. It’s why Druthel liked coming there.
“This is peaceful,” he said. Though, as he said it, he felt the rumble of a minor quake in the stone around them. He knew the quakes were much worse at the city spires, and the gentle rumble he felt here could be shaking homes and property to rubble farther away. While his people cowered in a makeshift city in the desert, he was secluded with a member of an alien race so far advanced that the fate of a single world seemed small to them.
“I’m going to tell you why I don’t want to work with you,” Rhiannon said.
Druthel’s wings constricted, pressing against her, for her words filled him with anger. But, she continued to speak as the translator echoed her, so Druthel forced himself to be calm and listen.
“The last project I worked on was an algae pack air convertor,” she said. “Highly compact. Highly efficient. It’s so much better than the current state of the art that every station and spaceship in the Expansion will fork over the money to have their systems upgraded before the year’s over.”
“That’s…good?” Druthel said. They were both still staring out of the cave at the lazily drifting colors of the bacto-bog, but Druthel could feel bitter laughter shake Rhiannon’s body.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”
The voice of the translator stayed the same, but Druthel could hear a change in Rhiannon’s tone. She sounded sad and a little angry.
“My roommate and I developed them,” she said. “I don’t usually work on projects with so much biology, but Keida’s a biologist, and, well, the idea just kind of came together. One night we were lying in our room in the dark, talking across the space between our beds about how Einray was collaborating with a biologist to grow chrono-accelerated trees, and the next thing we knew, we’d come up with our own bizarre bio-physics collaboration.”
Druthel remembered the empty bed in Rhiannon’s room. “Your roommate left Wespirtech?” he asked.
“Yes,” Rhiannon said. “She found out that the algae we gengineered for the air convertors releases a low level toxin. It’s nothing really… It can be filtered out. Though, the filters do take up more space than the original algae packs…and they’d need to be scrubbed every few months…”
Rhiannon trailed off, and the two of them sat in silence until another tremor shook their cave. Druthel shifted his weight restlessly. “If it’s nothing,” he said, “why did she leave?”
Rhiannon’s voice was very quiet when she spoke, but the translator managed to pick it up: “Most people aren’t allergic to the toxin. In fact… We haven’t found any humans who are. The only people allergic to it that we’ve found are members of a species called Hoilyn. Some of them work at Wespirtech. In low level jobs. They’re not powerful. No one will listen to them. No one will install the filters just for them.”
“So don’t publish your research,” Druthel said.
“Too late.” Rhiannon laughed again. It was a sad laugh. “We didn’t realize the problem until the algae packs were installed in Wespirtech. Hoilyn workers and some of their children went into anaphylactic shock. We got them shipped down to Da Vinci in respirators—the ones we got to in time—but, once these algae packs are installed everywhere, we’ve essentially cut their species off from space. Me and Keida, single-handedly.”
“So you work to fix it!” Druthel declared.
Rhiannon’s head lowered. “That’s not my area,” Rhiannon said. “I did the chemistry, designing the catalyzation process in the algae chloroplasts. Keida’s the one who understands the biology. And she’s gone off to be a doctor in the asteroid belt of Hegula Hephasta. Somewhere she can do some real good.” The final words were ones Keida had said to Rhiannon the last time they’d seen each other. They still stung.
“Then she’s a coward,” Druthel said simply. “A scientist doesn’t abandon research entirely because she’s made…a mistake.” The translated word hung in the air between them. A horrible, horrific understatement when sitting on a world that once again rumbled with the symptoms of the wrombarrans’ own mistake. A mistake that Druthel had played a part in.
