by Robert Reed
“Could we?”
“I can arrange it, yes.”
“What about Timothy?” Tee-moo-shay?
“We’ll bring him, too.” She winked, human-style. “He’s no natural, not like you Novak men. But he’s got some talent, and this isn’t a strange world, either. Which is a big reason why it was picked.”
Nathan hesitated, then confessed, “I wasn’t asking to include Timothy.”
She said nothing.
“Someone must have betrayed us.” A pause. “Am I right?”
“Until I know Timothy did, he didn’t. In my mind.”
Nathan remained silent for a long while, concentrating on the climb, working hard enough to pant. The air grew warmer and more humid, and they could hear the canopy—a chorus of buzzes and chirps punctuated with distant roars. A crust of lichen clung to the pseudobark. Epiphytes grew in the hollows, black-gold leaves straining out the last little meals of light. Then the trunk suddenly sprouted trees, some horizontal and most angling upwards, each tree adorned with its own bark and wood and ginger-colored leaves, an airborne jungle caressing their instincts, welcoming them, smelling like some long-forgotten home.
Porsche urged Nathan to rest.
Shivering despite the tropical heat, he was exhausted. But he ignored the offer, glancing down into the distance, then asking, “Which way?”
She hesitated, for an instant.
“Have you been here before? Are we lost, maybe?”
“No, and no.” Nestled in the top of the trunk was a giant epiphyte, its bowl-like tissues filled to the brim with rainwater. Perched on the edge of the unexpected pond, she explained. “An associate came here for me. Months ago. Among other things, he left behind a little care package for us.”
“Underwater?” Nathan inquired.
“Not anymore.” A simple wooden ball broke the surface. Mechanisms inside it had watched them come through the intrusion, and when they were close enough, the ball had come out of hiding.
The ball had a threaded lid.
Inside were a map and various instructions, everything written in Trinidad’s best script, in English. Plus there were four fabric pouches, each one filled with the local currency—ornately carved sticks of rare wood, their value determined by their feel and flavors.
The map aligned itself, pointing them in the best direction.
Porsche returned two of the pouches, resealed the ball, then forced it underwater, halfway burying it into pond’s living floor.
They moved, crossing from limb to limb, and gradually, very gradually, the canopy showed the symptoms of civilization. The overhead branches had been pruned, then reinforced with networks of fine cable. Elaborate nests were built in the high places, fashioned from gaudily-colored fabric. And with the nests came people—giant males, just a few of them, and multitudes of tiny females and their children, their bright chattering voices obscuring every other sound.
No one wore clothes, which was a blessing.
All seemed to accept the strangers moving among them, which was perfect.
Porsche spotted an open platform above, turned and told Nathan, “You’re my father. We have come to visit distant relatives. Don’t speak until someone talks to you, please. And try not to touch their tails with yours.”
He nodded, then quietly, with a genuine fear, admitted, “I hope I don’t do anything too wrong.”
She looked at his dancing eyes, at the worried twisting of his tail, thinking that he was such a fine, sweet man.
“You’ll do fine,” she promised.
Then she laughed sadly, human-style. “I just pray that I’m a good enough daughter.”
The public car was enormous and insubstantial, built of warm air and transparent foam laid over an aluminum skeleton, swinging on electrified cables strung above the canopy.
In shape and in motion, the car resembled an overgrown gibbon.
They paid with a stick, then entered the gibbon’s chest. Nathan was quiet and compliant, nothing escaping his worried gaze. The floor was uneven, looking like so many branches laid side by side; the ceiling was adorned with hand- and tail-holds. With a beep and hiss, the doors closed themselves. Then the car was moving, leaping to an adjacent cable that rose even higher. The long swinging motions would have sickened humans, but Porsche, tucked inside her new physiology, found the sensation pleasant, even soothing. Long mechanical arms reached farther and farther, a blue bolt of lightning coming when a hooked hand found its grip. Gradually, the overhead canopy thinned, then vanished, and they could see the sky, a pure elemental blue to the east, and in the west a stack of fat white rain clouds, the small brilliant sun diving into a building storm.
“A brighter sun than ours,” Porsche whispered, hoping to pull him out of his worries. “Isn’t this place lovely, Nathan?”
The sun disappeared into the clouds; the world’s everted face grew brighter. Turquoise seas balanced the golden lands. A tiny ice cap clung to the northern continent. Quietly, as if embarrassed, Nathan admitted, “The sky is special to me. Is that right?”
“These people worship their sky,” she told him. “It means safety and comfort, and everything else good.”
Nathan closed his eyes for a moment, then looked down. The jungle was every shade of yellow, nests linked into complexes and built along the sturdiest limbs. A human-born fear of heights suddenly latched hold, and he stiffened, asking with a secretive voice, “What do we call ourselves?”
She pulled her tail into a circle, smiling. “Maybe you already know, Nathan. Why don’t you guess?”
With surprise and a genuine awe, he muttered, “Sky-lords.”
“Very good, Father.”
Nathan’s hands played in his white beard, and with a cautious delight, he whispered, “What else do I know, daughter?”
“It depends on your talent.”
“I have a little, I think.” He spoke earnestly, like a man applying for a new job.
“I know you do,” she said. “Concentrate.”
With that encouragement, Nathan began to ignore their altitude, his eyes half-closing, his attentions focused momentarily on the strange, unexpected beauties of his mind.
Their destination was an elaborate nest set above a broad, strong river. They arrived with the afternoon rains, standing on the sheltered porch while Porsche, following Trinidad’s elaborate instructions, struck chimes with a quartz hammer.
The curtainlike door was pulled aside.
Half a dozen young girls stood together, tails twisting into a Gordian knot, everyone gawking at the strangers.
“Is your great blessed father at home?” asked Porsche.
The girls were astonished that the old man hadn’t spoken first. “Yes, he is home,” one girl replied, no one making an effort to find him.
“I am one of your relatives,” Porsche reported. “A very distant relative, and I’m very much in trouble.”
The oldest girl mangled the name, “Trinidad.” Then she asked hopefully, “Is he your blessed father’s nephew?”
“He is.”
The response was swift. With whoops and whistles, the mob left them, racing into the house, shouting, “They are here! They have come!”
Nathan peered inside. The floor lay at every pitch except horizontal, and there were doors in the ceiling leading to small rooms, little brown-eyed faces gazing down at them. Softly, very softly, he confessed, “I’ve always tried to imagine an alien’s home.”
“Have you?”
“This,” he said, “I never pictured.”
Suddenly an enormous male sky-lord appeared, stepping onto the porch and drawing the curtain closed behind him. His very long tail swished back and forth, betraying a worrisome giddiness. Powerful muscles rippled as he leaned close, sniffing the air, staring hard at Porsche, but never quite looking into her eyes. “I had given up on this girl,” he said. “Her father’s nephew promised that she would come before now.”
“Events took longer than anticipated,” she replied. Th
en she made curt introductions, their host touching Nathan’s tail with his tail, the perfunctory gesture triggering another question.
“Was I told to expect two more visitors to come with the girl?”
Porsche admitted, “Events went sour.”
The sky-lord’s expression was curious, even suspicious. “This girl is a disappointment to me,” he said over the drumming of the rain. “Her father’s nephew promised that she was a confident girl. Afraid of nothing, he told me.”
She didn’t care what he saw in her now. “We came here for help,” said Porsche, exasperation showing. “Did we make a wrong turn?”
“I intend to help,” their host replied.
Then Nathan blurted out, “My son is in terrible danger.” His face gave a human grimace, and his tail went limp, in desperation.
“Good sons are rare,” said the sky-lord, apparently impressed.
Porsche remained silent, her thoughts private.
“On your world, is it the same?”
Nathan said, “Of course.”
The sky-lord could look another male in the eye. “As I promised Trinidad, I have prepared a mock-bird. You should be home again before nightfall.”
“Thank you,” Nathan gushed. “Oh, thank you!”
“An honorable father,” the sky-lord declared. “I will loan you one of my wives, and she will take you to the mock-bird. Will that suffice?”
“I think so,” Nathan told him. “Will it, Porsche?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Then the big male addressed her once again, concluding with the words, “It’s good to finally meet the girl. When she visits again, hopefully, she will have found her old confidence. Yes?”
The storm was pleasantly enormous, fat bolts of lightning coursing across the gray-black sky, bringing with it a kind of anonymity, the world narrowed to two or three arm-lengths in any direction, every sane person indoors and oblivious to the fools scurrying past, embroiled in some unimaginable errand.
Their guide—the borrowed wife—was tiny. Even Porsche dwarfed her. She wore an enormous rain hat that hid her face, and she barely spoke or looked at them. Racing along rope roads and rain-greased branches, she led them downward through the canopy, down to where Porsche could almost feel the ground underfoot.
Suddenly, the rain was passing.
Porsche saw ships moored on the river, engines sleeping, broad decks forested with masts that held the crews’ nests high above the storm-tattered water. The riverbank was covered with great stone warehouses and floating docks, and as the last of the rain fell, there came sunshine, more liquid than any water and pouring over the three of them as they suddenly, unexpectedly turned between two warehouses.
The air in the alley was dripping and stale, almost suffocating.
The tiny woman paused, using coded words to speak with the hidden eavesdroppers. “Safe,” she declared, then released half a dozen locks on a tall doorway.
Inside, hunkering in the darkness, was a large birdish shape, wings folded against its body, its nose dipped in apparent submission.
The mock-bird was large enough to carry three male sky-lords, plus an oversized female. Its fuel tanks were full, its systems waking in an instant. The autopilot was more sophisticated than the systems built locally, and it had been preprogrammed to take them to the wrong destination. Months ago, Trinidad gave Porsche the correct intrusion. And only when she had reset the pilot did their guide finally remove her rain hat, reaching inside and handing them the key.
The key was a child’s puzzle, a swatch of colored fabric that could be folded into innumerable pictures—the most ordinary object imaginable.
Speaking to the ridged floor, their guide whispered, “My husband’s wife wants to wish both of you well.”
“And we wish you well,” Porsche replied.
In the eyes and tail, for an instant, there was delight. Then with a breathless gravity, the tiny woman asked, “Is he well? Your father’s nephew?”
“Very well, yes.”
The woman’s smile told everything.
Nathan coughed, then said, “Come visit us someday.”
The woman’s gaze lifted, her expression amused. Or offended. Or baffled, perhaps. “My husband’s wife must leave first.”
She turned, vanished.
Porsche and Nathan took their seats. With a word, the mock-bird ignited its jets and rose, hovering for a moment, then drifting through the doorway.
Only then, with a faint gray voice, did Nathan admit, “I really dislike flying.”
There wasn’t time for encouragement or a single platitude.
The jets roared, and the wings were dropped into position and locked. The mock-bird shot out from between the warehouses, and its nose tilted back eagerly, the last of the rain yielding to dry air and a brilliant, reborn sunshine.
Looking very tired, and amazed, Nathan stared down at the shrinking river, admitting to Porsche, and perhaps himself, “All of my interest in aliens and starships, and I’ve always been terrified of flying.”
She took his hands, saying, “These people build wonderful planes.”
The face behind the white fur tried to smile.
But it was a temporary comfort, and both knew it. Holding hands, they watched the golden land and the receding clouds as the machine climbed higher, its engines screaming, a genuine passion making it try to pierce the sacred sky.
The typical world possessed tens of billion of intrusions.
But it was a false abundance. Most intrusions led to dead moons and comets, or to living worlds too primitive to house sentient souls. Many of the rest were duplicates. Since the humans and sky-lords were neighbors, and since their worlds were large places equally twisted, they shared dozens of intrusions. But that was another false abundance: Most were difficult to use, located at sea or inside a glacier. The nearest suitable intrusion was to the west, in an isolated location, and even better, it had never been marked with a glass disk—the passageway easily opened with a single key.
A thinner, more ragged jungle rose beneath them, then dissolved into the raw bones of a mountain range. Tilting its wings, their mock-bird slowed and hovered, then settled with a cloud of rock dust, its jets cutting back, then dying.
Except for gray ruins on the nearby peak, the country was wilderness.
“What are those buildings?” Nathan inquired.
“Temples,” Porsche recalled. “And observatories, too. Brave priests would come here to worship their sky, the moons, and stars. When they eventually learned to grind lenses, the priests built their telescopes inside their temples.”
“Long ago,” he guessed. “Judging by appearances.”
“It was, yes.”
They stepped outside as the sun began to set. The mountain air was thin and cold, their tropical bodies already suffering.
Intrigued, Nathan asked, “What happened when their sky changed?”
“I don’t know the full history.” She moved toward a pile of stones that looked much like every other pile of stones. Trinidad had stacked them, planning for today. “The simple history,” she said, “is that the Change came too soon. The sky-lords had plenty of telescopes, but they lacked the mathematics to interpret what had happened. In the confusion, they blamed their own churches. There was a worldwide war. Twenty generations of fighting. And that was followed by an enormous Dark Age.” Shivering, she picked up pieces of mudstone until she found Trinidad’s mark—his name written in English. “According to my cousin, those temples have been empty for more than five thousand years.”
“The follies of religion,” was Nathan’s verdict.
“Except the churches reformed and brought stability,” she replied. “Today, they’re the source of order and prosperity. And it was their priests who deciphered why the sky had changed. And given time, the priests will learn about the intrusions, too.”
Nathan gazed at the ruins for a long while.
Porsche moved away from the rock pile, counting her step
s, then set the key into position and carefully stepped back again.
In the east, night was lapping against the mountain slopes. The dark countryside beyond was sprinkled with city lights, and above the jungle, the rich velvet black of empty water clung to the world’s skin.
Porsche joined Nathan, wrapping her tail around his.
“What’s on your mind?” she whispered.
“It has been quite a day,” he began. A human astonishment made his eyes brighten, and he took a thin long breath, then said, “And do you know what really startles me?”
“What startles you?”
“Human beings, it seems, have done pretty well dealing with the Change. Better than these people, surely.”
She waited a moment, then told the dear man, “Let’s go.”
Nathan nodded, turned, and took a last little walk on his newborn hands.
2
Porsche was standing in a damp dark basement, the persistent flavor of concrete in her mouth and nostrils, her bare human feet recoiling when they touched the chill floor.
“Where are we?” asked Nathan.
Then he answered his own question.
“Earth, again,” he muttered, gawking at his own furless, baby-soft body.
Weak fluorescent lights were buried in the ceiling. Four sets of clothes waited for them, each bearing a name tag, the PORSCHE tag flipping like a kite as a nearby vent began to blow.
Porsche pulled on panties, her remade finger aching where it had been pierced by the bent nail.
Nathan was watching. His eyes tracked down and up again, meeting her eyes, and he looked at the ceiling, squeaking quietly, “Sorry.”
“No harm done.” She half-smiled, pulling on heavy trousers, then a sports bra, two shirts, and heavy wool socks. Her footwear was top-of-the-line hiking boots. In her pockets were a Canadian passport, a wallet, and three flavors of dollars. She had a new, temporary identity. “Priscilla?” she called out. “Is this a joke?”
No answer; her voice rattled against the concrete, then vanished.
Nathan was dressing hastily, staring resolutely at the floor.
