Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  'Still, let's not try to camp right here,' Aquilon said, looking down distastefully at the bubbling goo covering her feet. 'Sleeping in a flooding cabin was bad enough, but this -'

  There was something hilarious about it, and Veg laughed. Aquilon tried to glare at him, but looked at her mired ankles again and joined in.

  Yes, it was good to be back. Earth was like a pressure cooker with the temperature rising and the escape valve blocked. They were better off here.

  The two remaining mantas, Diam and Star, had rejoined them at some point, perhaps while he was preoccupied with the problem of landing the raft. Veg was sure they agreed. They hadn't been scouting this territory just for the fun of it.

  Night found them camped under a large tree whose stout branches and small twigs gave it the aspect of a stiff-armed octopus. Each twig had a cleft, fan-shaped leaf, unlike the branching greenery of conventional trees. This was a ginkgo, and Cal seemed to feel it was something special, though he claimed they existed on contemporary Earth.

  They were in a lean-to improvised from cycad barrels, palm fronds and fern leaf, on a rise overlooking the beachhead. Cal had designed it, showing more practical ability than Veg had expected. Veg had done the brute work, collecting the peculiar wood. Aquilon had plaited fibers to make the roof tight. Yes, they were a functioning team, a good one.

  The finishing was a more tedious task than the designing or building, and Veg had time to loosen the nylon bindings of the nacre, get the logs enough apart to free the supplies within the crushed cabin, and begin ferrying supplies to the camp. Cal and Aquilon remained cross-legged by the lean-to, weaving fern stems in and out.

  Veg kept a sharp lookout for life, hostile or otherwise, though Hex was with him and made an effective bodyguard. He did not know much about dinosaurs except that they were big and dangerous - even the herbivorous ones, as the wrecked raft testified. Brach would not be wandering on land, however, if what Cal said was true - and of course it was. But other creatures might be found anywhere. Brach would not have been so ready to flee to deep water unless there were things on land it feared.

  A creature that could frighten a fifty-ton dinosaur could hardly be ignored by a one-tenth-ton man.

  Unfamiliar birds twittered in the tree-ferns, scouting for bugs. Small things scuttled in the brush. Fish swam in the water. There was plenty of life, but nothing to fear, yet.

  He lifted the last of the cases they had decided to move, brought it to his shoulder, and tromped through the sludge. Yes, they all had to be alert here, on guard against unknown menaces. But the air was wet and warm, the biting insects had not yet discovered him, and he felt marvelously free. Perhaps he would die tomorrow in the jaws of some monster whose name he could not pronounce - but he would die a man, not a sardine.

  Hex ranged ahead as they came out of the swamp and recovered firm footing. It was dusk, growing too dim for him to see clearly, but he liked the challenge. The manta drifted to one side and stopped beside a tree - a maidenhair, Aquilon called it, but it looked exactly like the ginkgo - and stood as a black blob. By tricks of vision - looking slantwise at specific objects, narrowing his eyes - Veg could still make out good detail. What was Hex looking at?

  He came up and peered. Was that a - ?

  It was.

  Veg squatted down beside the manta, holding up the teetering carton with one hand while he cleared away obstructing foliage with the other.

  It was the print, in hardening mud, of either a bipedal dinosaur or a very large bird. Three sturdy clawmarks, the points digging down and forward, no rear toe showing.

  Whether toothed or beaked, a land walker armed with effective talons that could gut a man in a hurry.

  The creature was somewhere within range of their camp. Veg was glad the mantas would be mounting guard this night.

  XI - ORN

  The spoor was not fresh; only its protected location had preserved it. It could have been made a season ago, since the merest suggestion of odor remained. But it was sure, for his memory was strongest of all on such identification: a female of his species had roosted here.

  Did she remain in the valley? Was she still alive? Could he locate her? These questioas were vague and peripheral and largely beside the point. His mind grasped the fact that she existed, and his glands responded and ruled. The mating urge was upon him, no longer to be denied.

  Orn spent the night under the waterfall. It was uncomfortable and tiring, on top of his preceding labors, but the discovery of a trace of his own kind prevented him from leaving. He had to begin here and follow the trail until it became fresh. Convenience was unimportant. If there were another male - but there was not; the trace was that of an unbred bird. Such things were specific, in his line.

  In the morning he explored the neighboring terrain. She had been here; there had to be signs of her avenue of departure. He would discover them, however faint or fleeting.

  It was not easy, but he was geared for this. He would not be able to perceive so old a trail at all, were it of any other creature. But his pumping glands sharpened his senses, and all his memories focused on this one task. His search pattern identified another trace, downstream, and a third, and he was on his way.

  In two days he located fresher spoor, and in another day the roost she had used for a time. It was in the raised hollow of a rotting flat-leaf tree. Nose and eye and memory informed

  him that she had departed when a predatory rep had scouted the region. She had lost some feathers, but not her life.

  She had fled into the mountain, perhaps as recently as Orn's meeting with the expanding sea on the other side of the continent This season, certainly. Here the trail became exceedingly difficult, for she had passed over shuddering, heated rock in her effort to shake the pursuit. But Orn widened his search pattern and persevered, as he had to, and in time picked up the spoor again where she had descended to the valley.

  Her prints and smell became mixed with those of many animals, as though she had frequented the haunts of a herd of Tricers. Again he had to cast a wider net, seeking a line of emergence, and again he succeeded, as he had to. Days old now, her trail stimulated him exquisitely. She was alone and nubile, and not very much older than he; she wanted a mate, but had found none. All this he read in her spoor, knowing the signals from millennia past, and his desire for her became savage.

  But he did not find her. She found him.-

  She had come upon his own trail, in her roundabout rovings, and recognized it immediately. In less than a day she had caught up.

  Orn looked up from the newly hatched brach he was feeding on, suddenly aware of her presence. Across the open space of the deserted Tricer stamping ground they peered at one another. His beak was smeared with the blood of the fleet young rep, his nose suffused with the fresh odors of its open-carcass, and in this delicious and romantic moment he viewed the bird who was to be his mate.

  Ornette: she was shorter than he by the width of one dry tail feather. Her beak was slender, a delicate brown matching the scales of her muscular thighs. Her eyes were large and round, half shuttered by the gray nictitating membranes. The white neck feathers were sleek and bright, merging gracefully into the gray breast area. Her body plumage fluffed out slightly, lighter on the underside, for she had been moving through high brush. Her wings were well kept and handsome, looking larger than they were because of the unusual, almost regressive length of their primaries. Her tail, too, had sizable retrices, and the coverts displayed the grandeur of the nuptial plumage. Even the claws of her feet glistened with natural oil. from her drifted the perfume of the distaff, at once exciting and maddening to the male. She was beautiful and wholly desirable.

  Then she was away, whirling her shapely sternum about and running from him; and he was running after her with all his strength, his meal forgotten. She disappeared into high palmetto brush, outdistancing him; but it was a chase he was certain to win, for his thews were heavier, his masculine endurance greater. This was the way it was meant to be
, and had been, throughout the existence of the species.

  She fled toward the swamp, passing into the territory of the Struth, that zealous rep so like Orn himself. That surely meant trouble, but there was nothing Orn could do about it. If he tried to circle to head her off, he would only lose distance, for she was for the moment as fleet as he.

  She dodged around a giant fir, sending green sprigs flying, and sheered away before encountering the Struth. She knew! She bore north, much to his relief, though that was territory he had not scouted. Her pace slowed as the ground became marshy - but so did his own. It would be a long time before he caught her, this way. This, too, was as nature had decreed.

  She ran north for a time, then veered west, toward the mountains. Soon they were ascending, leaving the steamy valley below. Flying aves scattered from their path and grazing young reps scooted away. A wounded adult Tricer, come this far to die, looked up startled. Through increasingly leafy trees they went, where mams twittered in the branches, and on into the grassy elevation where arths swarmed in sunlight, but Ornette did not slacken her pace, running up until the air became cool; on until the snows began. But Orn did not feel the cold. Slowly he gained on her.

  She changed course at last, running north along the fringe of white while the sun dropped toward the mountain crest. Then down again, into the valley, into the thickest greenery, spreading her wings to aid control in the precipitous descent. She gained on him again, utilizing those longer feathers, but on the level bottom where the reps roamed he got it back. And up again, almost to the snow, and still Orn gained on her, though he had never run so long without resting.

  The second time they came down at the northern apex of the great valley, beyond the swamp. Here there was a higher plain, too dry and cold for the comfort of most reps though the little mams were plentiful. And here, abruptly, the light of the sun was cut off by the mountain range. It was early dusk, Ornette stopped, panting. Om, hardly two wingspans behind, stopped also. The chase had to halt when the sun dropped, to resume in place when it rose again. The night was for feeding and resting and ... courtship. Thousands of generations before them had determined this, and the pattern was not to be broken now.

  The swamp spread out below from a comparatively tiny tributary stream here, and there were fish in it and mams in burrows adjacent and arths available for the scratching. They hunted separately, and fed separately. Then, as full darkness overtook them, they began the dance.

  Ornette crossed the plain, away from him, until she was a female silence in the distance. Orn stood, beak elevated, waiting. There was a period of stillness.

  Then Orn stepped forward, spreading his wings and holding them there to catch the gentle evening breeze. He gave one piercing, lust-charged call. She answered, demurely; then silence.

  Orn moved toward her, and she toward him, each watching, listening, sniffing for the other. Slowly they came together, until he saw the white of her spread wings. The remiges, the rowing feathers, were slightly phosphorescent when exposed in this fashion, slick with the oils of courtship exercise; and so she was a winged outline, lovely. He, too, to her.

  In the sight of each other, they strutted, he with the male gait, she the female. They approached, circled, retreated, their feet striking the ground in unison, wings always spread. Then Orn faced her and closed his wings, becoming invisible, and she performed her solo dance.

  Wings open; wings closed. On and off she flashed, a diffuse firefly, her feet beating the intricate courtship meter, now steady, now irregular, always compelling. Far back into her ancestry the females had done this series for waiting males, taunting them with the nuptial ritual.

  Then her dance halted, and the plain was quiet again. Orn's turn. He spread, commenced the beat, closed, whirled, jumped, spread, and instinct carried him on irreversibly. Tap-tap-tap against the turf, the flapping of wings measured by that cadence but not matching it. A faster, fiercer dance than hers, domineering, forceful, signifying what male expression in any species signified, but artistically, and not without gentle undertones. Forward, back, around; one wing flashing, then the other, as though he were jumping back and forth. But silent, except for the feet; a pulsing ghost. Finally an accelerated beat, wings and feet together, climbing as though into takeoff - and silence. The dance was done. Orn rested, alone in the dark, letting his heart subside. It had been a good effort, following a good chase - but better things awaited the morning. He made his way to the roost he had selected while foraging. Ornette, out of his sight as the ritual dictated, did the same.

  A quick meal at daybreak. Then, as the sun struggled over the eastern pass, the chase resumed. She was fresh again, recovering better than he, and she was familiar with this terrain, and he lost ground. Up the face of the northern range, across a low, hidden pass leading into another rich valley - but she turned back into their own, south. Even to the verge of the swamp she ran, passing briars, moss, and fungus that wrenched feathers from him or powdered him with spores as he charged carelessly through. At one point she intersected the spoor of a giant rep predator, and reversed her field hurriedly. It would not do to have trouble of that nature on this romantic occasion!

  Up to the snows again, across a hot stream that melted its own channel through ice, down ... and before noon Orn was gaining on her again. She was tired; her feathers no longer glistened sleekly, her beak was no longer held high. She made to ascend once more, but he shortened the distance between them so rapidly that she desisted, staying on the contour. They were near the southeast corner of the valley now, separated from his original entry by swamp and bay.

  Orn approached within a wingspan, no longer straining. She was so worn he could keep the pace easily; his season's travel had conditioned him for this, and he had recovered his strength during his days in the valley. And - he was male. But the time to catch her was not quite yet, and he dallied.

  Aware of her defeat, Ornette stumbled and hardly caught herself in time. In desperation she waded out into the shallow water of the bay, toward a nearby island, but she was so gaunt and tired that this was even worse, and she had to turn back.

  Orn was waiting for her, victorious. As she climbed slowly to the bank he pounced on her and buried his beak amid the tender down feathers of her neck, but did not bite. She hardly resisted; she had been conquered. She dropped to the ground and lay there at his mercy.

  Orn shook her once, not hard, and let her go. He trotted to a nearby bed of moss. He gathered a succulent beakful and brought it to her as a counteroffering. She sniffed it weakly, looked at him through the nictitating lid, and accepted. With these first tokens of submission and of the nest they were to build and share, their courtship was done. They had found each other fitting; soon they would mate and settle, uniting their memories in their offspring.

  Another morning - the first of their new life. They scouted the vicinity and decided to cross to the island Ornette had not been able to reach before. This was thickly wooded with firs, and seemed to represent a suitable haven from most carnivores. The big land walkers would have difficulty crossing to it, while the sea dwellers would be unlikely to venture among trees of such size, even if they were able to leave the water.

  The two waded in and paddled with their abbreviated wings, entering the water while the chill remained in the air. The sea itself was warm, and they would be vulnerable to submerged

  predators. But the reps of the surface or shore would still be torpid, and so less dangerous than usual. Morning was the best time to forage when such creatures were near. Not a ripple disturbed the sea, apart from those of their own motions. They crossed quickly and safely - but this was not a risk they would take again soon.

  The island ground was spongy but not soggy; the matted fir droppings made an excellent fundament. Though the island was small, it was not flat. The trees ascended a mound in the center. Orn perceived it for what it was: the tip of a submerged mountain. Once it might have stood as tall and cold as the peaks of the ranges enclosing this warm v
alley, but its understratum had given way and allowed the bay to encroach. Its original formation had been volcanically inspired. None of that animation remained to it now, or Orn would not have stayed.

  Near the water were thick stands of club moss, the tops of the plants as high as his head. Once this species had been a giant many times that height, but somehow it had diminished to this innocuous status, and was still shrinking elsewhere on the continent. Horsetail rushes were also abundant, though similarly restricted in size.

  At the fringe of a twisting inlet they discovered the ideal nesting site: a mossy peninsula sheltered within a northern baylet. It was protected from the harsher waves of the ocean, and from the openness of the main island. The bridge to the site was narrow, so that a single bird could defend it, and the bay itself was deep enough to discourage wading. Yet the mouth of the inlet was toothed by jagged rocks, preventing access by most large sea creatures. A stand of several pine served as a breaker against offshore wind, and the main body of the island guarded against the sea wind. The soil was rich with grubs, and small fish teemed in the inlet, and clams in th gravel below it.