Nor Crystal Tears

by Foster, Alan Dean;

  "As to the preparation of your new identification, admit­tedly that will require something of a rush job on the part of the lady I have in mind, but I believe she can manage. She is a true artist. Wait until you see her work. She uses all four hands simultaneously with a flow nothing short of erotic. A thing of beauty as your eventual identification will surely be. Beautiful and believable both.

  "I will book passage for us on the transport. Not upper class, not lower, but middle. We don't want to be pushed around as we might be in lower and we don't want to at­tract the attention that upper would bring.

  "We'll travel with the average this time 'round, in search of distinctly unaverage discoveries, and if no alien monsters should be skulking about on Hivehom well, it's been a while since I've been off my home world. While the local and familiar are soothing to the soul, the mind requires somewhat more extensive stimulation. The journey itself will be worthwhile. I take it you have never been to Hive­hom?"

  "I've never been outside Paszex until my journey here."

  "It will be something for you to see. A bucolic lad like yourself. Yes, three days should be enough."

  "I don't know what to say or how to thank you for this," said Ryo, adding a little click and gesture of amusement, " `Father.' "

  "Good. You're beginning to get into the spirit of subter­fuge. Treat me with respect, call me always as you would a real adoptive sire. We will surely gain acceptable verse from the drama."

  Suitable attire was ordered for Ryo. In keeping with Wuu's intentions to stay as inconspicuous as possible, the clothing was new but not fancy. Those constraints aside, the vest and pouch were attractive and sturdy.

  A day prior to their scheduled departure a secretive little Thranx appeared at Wuuzelansem's entryway to hand­ deliver a tiny package. This produced a remarkable brace of identification documents, including even a credit charge stick. The latter was supposedly unforgeable, for the finan­cial institutions of all Thranx worlds were extremely security conscious. Ryo would use it only in an emergency.

  "I will handle all fiscal transactions," said Wuu. "No sense in tempting fate. That stick will be the most difficult to pass, but it's important that you at least be able to show one. No one travels intersystem without a stick." He stud­ied the younger Thranx. "How do you like your new cloth­ing?"

  Ryo dropped to all sixes, rose again and twisted his up­per body, shook his abdomen. The vest stayed securely in place.

  "I hardly know what to say."

  "One wordless and one overflowing with words. We'll complement each other well." The poet made a gesture indicative of second degree amusement mixed with disavowal of sarcasm. "Tomorrow then, we take ship."

  "And if there are problems?"

  "We'll deal with them as they present themselves. Spon­taneity is one of the joys of existence, my boy, especially if you prepare for it in advance." He wagged a truhand at the younger male.

  Ryo didn't sleep well that night as he dreamed unreas­suring dreams that centered on a gigantic slobbering thing with a mouth full of crooked, snaggly teeth, crimson fur all over its body, and a half dozen claw fingered hands that groped anxiously after him. It wore its skeleton inside, like the yaryinf, and it wanted to suck out his head.

  He woke uneasily to the soft chimes of Wuu's house alarm.

  They packed little, carrying only hand luggage. "We're not going to an investiture ball," Wuu had pointed out, "and those who travel light travel fast."

  Exiting the level complex in which Wuu lived, they took a shaft lift below surface and then a fourth level transport to the nearest module terminus, where they boarded a di­rect module to the shuttleport.

  "I regret only one thing that has happened thus far," said Ryo in the quiet of their private compartment.

  "What's that?"

  "That those who beat and robbed me should escape with­out punishment."

  "Who says they suffer no punishment? I know what their lives are like. They are miserable most of the time and at best a little of the simplest pleasures may trickle down to them. They live in many ways worse than our primitive ancestors who grubbed a bare existence from the earth, for the advantages of modern society are denied them. Yet ignorant and unhappy though they are, they must somehow live too."

  Wuu made an all encompassing gesture with all four hands. "The universe is a jungle, my boy. You could spend all your life in Willow wanes wildest reaches fighting poi­sonous flora and carnivorous fauna, be healthy and happy, and come to the Hive of Ciccikalk one day only to be run over by a transport module. If you regard every place as being dangerous and uncivilized you will find yourself much more relaxed in mind."

  It was quiet in the module then. Ryo thought how very far from home he was and how farther still he was about to go. Very far from family and clan, and from Fal.

  What would she make of the cryptic message he and Wuu had concocted and sent her? Would she forget him altogether? Assume he was lost mentally? He hoped she would simply sigh deeply and return to the Nursery in hope of his reappearance. Then again, she might seek an­other premate.

  A mental shake shattered the thoughts like little crystals. He was pursuing a dream the way an addict pursues his next fix. All that mattered now was getting safely off­planet.

  His nervousness increased exponentially as they walked up the ramp to the shuttle entrance.

  "What if the identification fails?" he whispered to Wuuzelansem. "What if? ..."

  "Everything will be fine if you'll simply relax and look normal," was the poet's response. "Your antennae are so stiff they're going to crack. Straighten your posture, incline your thorax properly, and act like you're bored by the whole procedure, offspring."

  "Yes ... sire."

  There was a pause while their names were checked against the passenger manifest. A line of Thranx waited to ascend the ramp. A single official stood there, looking in­different as the machinery monitored both manifest and personal identification.

  He didn't even look up as Ryo and Wuu passed through and announced themselves. Their ident slips were pro­cessed, checked, and efficiently spat back at them by the boarding console.

  Wuu appeared slightly miffed as they continued up the boarding ramp into the shuttle. He hadn't been recognized.

  "Not a reader or listener," he grumbled, referring to the official who'd passed them through. "Civilization is really run by unaesthetic illiterates."

  "Is there then such a thing as an aesthetic illiterate?"

  They launched into a discussion so animated and intense that Ryo almost didn't notice when the shuttle's jets hissed and the thick bodied craft lifted into the air.

  Airborne, Ryo thought in disbelief. Actually airborne. Like a hesornic. Like a dream.

  They quickly rose above the clouds. Only a dim red line marked the horizon where the sun of Willow wane was trying to hide. Airborne! What must it have been like, he wondered, for his distant ancestors whose wings had been, for the mating season at least, functional instead of vestigial? Was intelligence such a good trade off for the mo­mentary power of flight?

  Before long rockets took over from the starving jets. The shuttle was now above the highest clouds, and the sky was fading from blue to purple, aging much like a Thranx. Many songs had employed the analogy. Then they were swimming through the long night and the stars were bright­er than they'd ever been.

  A scream rose from behind Ryo, down the central aisle. A female had tumbled from her saddle and lay on her back, kicking at the air with all four legs, pawing at it with her hands.

  Two attendants rushed to her. One clamped a breathing pack over her thorax and administered air from a tank while the other injected a drug directly down her throat.

  She quieted down immediately. Ryo glanced around and noticed that of the two dozen or so passengers on the shut­tle, perhaps a fourth of them wore glazed looks and sat in their saddles as if in a trance. He'd been too absorbed by the view outside to notice it earlier. Now he looked ques­tioningly at Wu
u.

  "The lady in distress experienced a severe attack of Out­side. It particularly affects hive dwellers who spend most of their lives underground. An ancestral carryover that some of the race is still heir to, when we dwelt almost ex­clusively below ground and when to venture outside was to expose oneself to the prowling carnivores that then roamed the whole surface of Hivehom. This is ,probably her first flight and she suppressed the feeling as long as she could."

  "What about those?" Ryo indicated the strangely sub­dued passengers.

  "The same problem, but those are experienced travelers. Certain drugs safely counteract the Outside. The side ef­fects are minimal but obvious. He turned to inspect Ryo.

  "You feel no fear, no sense of panic?"

  "Not a thing."

  "Have you looked out the port?"

  "I've been doing little else.

  Wuu made a gesture of third degree confidence mixed with mild curiosity. "Most Thranx on a first extra atmos­pheric journey experience a certain amount of mental dis­comfort. After repeated travel the discomfort passes. Some, of course, feel nothing. They are the exception rather than the rule. As I mentioned, I've done considerable traveling and therefore feel nothing at all. As for yourself, I should not be surprised that you are the exception in this way as well as in others."

  "Open spaces have never bothered me," Ryo explained. "That was one of the things, I think, that helped me to advance so rapidly in my profession."

  "Ah yes, the exploiter of new agricultural land. You put food on my table, so I won't start in on the morality of butchering Willow wanes native jungle simply to plant asfi."

  It developed that Ryo was not quite as immune to the vagaries of Deep Space travel as he first thought. When the ship passed beyond the last of the system's six planets and shifted into Space Plus he fell prey to the same nausea as everyone else, experienced or otherwise.

  The stars became streaks and their colors changed as if they were being viewed through a shaded prism. Once the nausea passed there was ample time to enjoy the luxuries of middle class shipboard life.

  Days and nights fled apace, with the only indication of movement coming from the slowly changing starfield.

  Eventually the passengers had to return to their cabins a last time. The ship dropped from Space Plus into normal space, stomachs were wrenched, and the stars resumed their normal colors and positions and shapes.

  Ahead lay a bright and somehow familiar sun. There were twelve planets in the Hivehom system, the home world fully inhabited, of course, and three others less so. Several timeparts passed and then they were in orbit around Hivehom. The home world of the Thranx. The spawning place. The where we all come from.

  Chapter Six

  As the shuttle descended Ryo stared avid­ly out the long port. Hivehom was a beau­tiful world. Not so beautiful as Willow-­wane perhaps, but then his own home was a paradise.

  Hivehom had 20 percent more surface area than Willow-wane, but only a little more habitable territory because it was a cooler world. As they dropped lower Ryo could make out white smears at the northern pole solid water, he knew from his studies. It was hard to imagine a place where, there was little vegetation, where the air was cold and yet so dry that your breath seemed to crackle in your lungs.

  Then the shuttle fell too low to see that far north and there was only green, green and brown like on Willow-­wane. Air began to scrape the little craft and it skipped nimbly through the atmosphere as they dropped through the rain clouds above Daret, the capital city of the Thranx.

  Fifty five million citizens claimed the Hive Daret as their home. The capital city extended hundreds of kilome­ters in all directions, plunged two hundred and fifty levels toward the center of the planet. Low hills flanked the val­ley beneath which the city had been cut. A great river, the Moregeeon, meandered over the metropolis. Long barges plied its surface and for forty levels beneath its rocky bot­tom an intricate complex of artificial aquifiers soaked up water to slake the city's enormous thirst.

  Air intakes rose a half kilometer into the damp sky. They vibrated slightly from the drag of immense suction pumps pulling air down to the lowest levels. The forests of intakes and ventilators resembled a city of windowless sil­ver towers.

  Six shuttleports ringed the valley of the Moregeeon, the smallest dwarfing the shuttleport serving Willow wanes capital of Ciccikalk. The shuttle banked sharply to avoid a cluster of cloud spearing ventilators.

  Wuuzelansem pointed out the port as they leveled off slightly in preparation for landing. There, to the northwest, shone sunlight on the towers of Chitteranx, a satellite city of six million particularly wealthy Thranx. Still farther north lay the important metropolitan complex known col­lectively as Averick, famed for incredibly ancient temples raised by some pre Thranx intelligence. Both lay hard by the base of the vast frigid plateau that loomed like an island in Hivehom's sea of clouds and was rarely, even at this modern date, visited or explored.

  Daret itself was close to Hivehom's equator. Its surface boasted a mean temperature of 33° C and average humid­ity ranging from 90 to 95 percent. With such ideal climatic conditions it was no wonder the valley of the Moregeeon bad become the center of Thranx civilization.

  The little craft leveled off and soon bumped slightly as its landing gear contacted pavement. They were down and taxiing toward a dock. Ryo tried to count the shuttles, lighter than air transports, and sleek aircraft as they eased toward disembarkation, but soon lost track of types and numbers.

  The wonders of Hivehom from the air had fully occu­pied his attention during the descent. Now that he and Wuu were on the ground, his early worries returned. Slipping into Daret was likely to prove more difficult then leaving Ciccikalk had been.

  As usual, he was buoyed by Wuu's bottomless supply of optimism. "Worlds may differ but bureaucrats are every­where the same. Do you recall our departure from Cicci­kalk? Did that Servitospector linger over your new identifi­cation?"

  "I don't believe he ever looked at it," Ryo admitted. "He left everything to the computer. But shouldn't it be differ­ent here? Not only is this the mother world, but taking things out is not dangerous. Bringing things into another world can be."

  "I don't think we'll have any difficulty." The debarking tube and ramp were rising from the ground toward the shuttle. No other structures marred the smooth surface of the shuttleport.

  "We've come direct from Willow wane, a known world. We're not carrying produce or sample material; in any case, there are few restrictions on what can be brought in."

  Those few restrictions were enough to inspire a very thorough customs inspection, however. While Ryo and Wuu had indeed come direct from Willow wane to Hive­hom, other passengers had not. Ryo fought to conceal his nervousness as a bright eyed Servitospector went through his identification. It seemed to Ryo that a lot of time was spent studying the identiplate.

  Eventually they were passed through, accompanied by the kind of polite indifference the inhabitants of the capital reserved for those citizens unfortunate enough to have been born on other worlds. Ryo was too relieved at having successfully passed identification to feel any upset at such chauvinism. Wuu seemed to know where he was at all times and quickly located a hotel on Level 75, which was reasonably close to the city center.

  Save for areas of historic importance, the center of Daret for twenty five prime levels served only the growing Thranx government.

  As their transport module carried them along wide corri­dors Ryo noticed burrows with stone facings. This was the heart of the eternal city of Daret, and Daret was the heart of the modern Thranx civilization. History pressed close all around him.

  If he was slightly overwhelmed, Wuu was exactly the opposite. "Doesn't this mean anything to you?" Ryo asked him, gesturing out the module's single forward port. "Doesn't such grandeur inspire your poet's mind?"

  "Yes, it does. Ten thousand years of bureaucrats."

  They were to have begun their search the following morning, bu
t Wuu insisted there was no need for hurry and offered to show Ryo more of the city. For example, there were the fabled Echo Falls. These fell from an opening in the underside of the River Moregeeon past a hundred and fifty levels to a great artificial cavern where the tremen­dous power of the vertical cascade was harnessed to supply energy for the city.

  This and the poet's descriptions of other wonders caused Ryo to hesitate, but only briefly. It was unreasonable to expect the authorities to trace him quickly, but it worried him nonetheless and he was anxious to begin the hunt as soon as possible. Wuu grumbled at the thought of having to plunge so soon into the morass that was officialdom, and it had been Ryo's turn to supply the enthusiasm.

  It was all basically so simple. "We just locate this Broh­welporvot," he'd explained blithely to the poet, "and he di­rects us from there."

  Wuu had executed a gesture indicative of third degree naivete mixed with fourth degree intimations of absurdity. "My boy, you are bright and persistent, but there is still much you have to learn. Consider the second communica­tion that was received by your premate, the one that went to such pains to deny everything which had been communi­cated before. If we inquire after this perplexing fellow we would doubtless discover that he has been transferred to a `rest' position somewhere many light years from here. That is, if we can find anyone or any machine willing even to admit to his existence.

  "In addition, such an inquiry would attract unwanted at­tention from whoever compelled him to send that second negative communication. You must know, my boy, that I am not at all convinced there is anything to all this blather about alien monsters and such. I simply find the prospect of pursuing so outrageous a rumor attractive.

  "But if the opposite should be in some manner true, then we are likely unless we are very careful to find our­selves shipped off to some distant resting burrow until we agree to drop our private search. In any case, we will not find truth. If we would discover the latter, we must be cir­cumspect as we delicately circumvent."