A Beautiful Friendship

by David Weber

  She laughed aloud at her deduction, but then her glider slipped abruptly sideways, and her laughter died as she stopped thinking about the sorts of trees beneath her and recognized instead the speed at which she was passing over them. She raised her head and looked around quickly, and a fist of the ice seemed to squeeze her stomach.

  The clear blue skies under which she had begun her flight still stretched away in front of her to the east. But the western sky behind her was no longer clear. A deadly looking line of thunderheads marched steadily east, white and fluffy on top but an ominous purple-black below, and even as she looked over her shoulder, she saw lightning flicker.

  She should have seen it coming sooner, she thought numbly, hands aching as she squeezed the glider’s grips in ivory-knuckled fists.

  Idiot! she told herself sickly. You should’ve checked the weather reports! You know you should have! Dad’s pounded that into you every single time the two of you plan a flight!

  Yes, he had . . . and that, she realized sickly, was the point. She was used to having other people—adult people—check the weather before they went gliding, and she’d let herself get so excited, focus so intently on what she was doing, pay so little attention—

  A harder fist of wind punched at her glider, staggering it in midair, and fear became terror. The following wind had been growing stronger for quite some time, a small logical part of her realized. No doubt she would have noticed despite her concentration if she hadn’t been gliding in the same direction, riding in the wind rather than across or against it, where the velocity shift would have to have registered. But the thunderheads were catching up with her quickly, and the outriders of their squall line lashed through the air space in front of them.

  Daddy! She had to com her father—tell him where she was—tell him to come get her—tell him—!

  But there was no time. She’d messed up, and all the theoretical discussions about what to do in bad weather, all the stern warnings to avoid rough air, came crashing in on her. But they were no longer theoretical; she was in deadly danger, and she knew it. Counter-grav unit or no, a storm like the one racing up behind her could blot her out of the air as casually as she might have swatted a fly, and with just as deadly a result. She could die in the next few minutes, and the thought terrified her, but she didn’t panic.

  Yes, you have to com Mom and Dad, but it’s not like you don’t already know exactly what they’d tell you to do if you did. You’ve got to get out of the air, get yourself down on the ground, now! And the last thing you need, she thought sickly, staring down at the solid green canopy below her, is to be trying to explain to them where you are while you do it!

  She banked again, shivering with fear, eyes desperately seeking some opening, however small, and the air trembled as thunder rumbled behind her.

  * * *

  Climbs Quickly reared up on true-feet and hand-feet, lips wrinkling back from needle-sharp white fangs as a flood of terror crashed over him. It pounded deep into him, waking the ancient fight-or-flight instinct which, had he but known it, his kind shared with humanity. But it wasn’t his terror at all.

  It took him an instant to realize that, yet it was true. It wasn’t his fear; it was the two-leg youngling’s, and even as the youngling’s fear ripped at him, he felt a fresh surge of wonder. He was still too far from the two-leg. He could never have felt another of the People’s mind-glow at this distance, and he knew it. But this two-leg’s mind-glow raged through him like a forest fire, screaming for his aid without even realizing it could do so, and it struck him like a lash. He shook his head once, and then flashed down the line of netwood like a cream-and-gray blur while his fluffy tail streamed straight out behind him.

  * * *

  Desperation filled Stephanie.

  The thunderstorm was almost upon her—the first white pellets of hail rattled off her taut glider covering—and without the counter-grav she would already have been blotted from the sky. But not even the counter-grav unit could save her from the mounting turbulence much longer, and—

  Her thoughts chopped off as salvation loomed suddenly before her. The black, irregular scar of an old forest fire had ripped a huge hole through the trees, and she choked back a sob of gratitude as she spied it. The ground looked dangerously rough for a landing in conditions like this, but it was infinitely more inviting than the solid web of branches tossing and flashing below her, and she banked towards it.

  She almost made it.

  * * *

  Climbs Quickly ran as he’d never run before. Somehow he knew he raced against death itself, though it never occurred to him to wonder what someone his size could do for someone the size of even a two-leg youngling. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the terror, the fear—the danger—which confronted that other presence in his mind, and he ran madly towards it.

  * * *

  It was the strength of the wind which did it.

  Even then, she would have made it without the sudden downdraft that hammered her at the last instant. But between them, they were too much. Stephanie saw it coming in the moment before she struck, realized instantly what was going to happen, but there was no time to avoid it. No time even to feel the full impact of the realization before her glider crashed into the crown of the towering near pine at over fifty kilometers per hour.

  9

  Climbs Quickly slithered to a stop, momentarily frozen in horror. But then he gasped in relief.

  The sudden silence in his mind wasn’t—quite—absolute. His instant fear that the youngling had been killed eased, yet something deeper and darker, without the same bright panic but with even greater power, replaced it. Whatever had happened, the youngling was now unconscious, yet even in its unconsciousness he was still linked to it . . . and he felt its pain. It was injured, possibly badly—possibly badly enough that his initial fear that it had died would prove justified after all. And if it was injured, what could he do to help? Young as it was, it was far larger than he; much too large for him to drag to safety.

  But what one of the People couldn’t do, many of them often could, and he closed his eyes, lashing his tail while he thought. He’d run too far to feel the combined mind-glow of his clan’s central nest place. His emotions couldn’t reach so far, but his mind-voice could. If he cried out for help, Sings Truly would hear, and if she failed to, surely some hunter or scout between her and Climbs Quickly would hear and relay. Yet what message could he cry out with? How could he summon the clan to aid a two-leg—the very two-leg he had allowed to see him? How could he expect them to abandon their policy of hiding from the two-legs? And even if he could have expected that of them, what right had he to demand it?

  He stood irresolute, tail flicking, ears flattened, as the branch behind him creaked and swayed and the first raindrops lashed the budding leaves. Rain, he thought, a flicker of humor leaking even through his dread and uncertainty. Was it always going to be raining when he and his two-leg met?

  Strangely, that thought broke his paralysis, and he shook himself. All he knew so far was that the two-leg was hurt and that he was very close to it now. He had no way of knowing how bad its injuries might actually be, nor even if there were any reason to consider calling out for help. After all, if there was nothing the clan could do, then there was no point in trying to convince it to come. No, the thing to do was to continue until he found the youngling. He had to see what its condition was before he could determine the best way to help—assuming it required his help at all—and he scurried onward almost as quickly as before.

  * * *

  Stephanie recovered consciousness slowly. The world swayed and jerked all about her, thunder rumbled and crashed, rain lashed her like an icy flail, and she’d never hurt so much in her entire life.

  The pounding rain’s chill wetness helped rouse her, and she tried to move—only to whimper as the pain in her left arm stabbed suddenly higher. She’d lost her helmet somehow. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but it had. She felt a painful welt rising u
nder her jaw where the helmet strap had lain, and her hair was already soaking wet. Nor was that all she had to worry about, and she blinked, rubbing her eyes with her right palm, and felt a sort of dull shock as she realized part of what had been blinding her was blood, not simply rainwater.

  She wiped again and felt a shiver of relief as she realized there was much less blood than she’d thought. Most of it seemed to be coming from a single cut on her forehead, and the cold rain was already slowing the bleeding. She managed to clear her eyes well enough to look about her, and her relief vanished.

  Her brand new glider was smashed. Not broken: smashed. Its tough composite covering and struts had been specially designed to be crash survivable, but it had never been intended for the abuse to which she’d subjected it, and it had crumpled into a mangled lacework of fabric and shattered framing. Yet it hadn’t quite failed completely, and she hung in her harness from the main spar, which was jammed in the fork of a branch above her. The throbbing ache where the harness straps crossed her body told her she’d been badly bruised by the abrupt termination of her flight, and one of her ribs stabbed her with a white burst of agony every time she breathed. But without the harness—and the forked branch which had caught her—she would have slammed straight into the massive tree trunk directly in front of her, and she shuddered at the thought.

  But however lucky she might have been, there’d been bad luck to go with the good. Like most colony world children, Stephanie had been through mandatory first-aid courses . . . not that any training was needed to realize her left arm was broken in at least two places. She knew which way her elbow was supposed to bend, and there was no joint in the middle of her forearm. That was bad enough, but there was worse, for her uni-link had been strapped to her left wrist.

  It wasn’t there anymore.

  She turned her head, craning her neck to peer painfully back along the all too obvious course of her crashing impact with the treetops, and wondered where the uni-link was. The wrist unit was virtually indestructible, and if she could only find it—and reach it—she could call for help in an instant. But there was no way she was going to find it in that mess.

  It was almost funny, she thought through the haze of her pain. She couldn’t find it, but Mom or Dad could have found it with ridiculous ease . . . if they’d only known to use the emergency override code to activate the locator beacon function. Or, for that matter, if she’d thought to activate it when the storm first came up. Unfortunately, she’d been too preoccupied finding a landing spot to bring the beacon up, and even if she had, no one would have found it until they thought to look for it.

  And since I can’t even find it, I can’t com anyone to tell them to start looking for it, she thought fuzzily. I really messed up this time. Mom and Dad are going to be really, really pissed. Bet they ground me till I’m sixteen for this one!

  Even as she thought it, she knew it was ridiculous to worry about such things at a time like this. Yet there was a certain perverse comfort—a sense of familiarity, perhaps—to it, and she actually managed a damp-sounding chuckle despite the tears of pain and fear trickling down her face.

  She let herself hang limp for another moment, but badly as she felt the need to rest, she dared do no such thing. The wind was growing stronger, not weaker, and the branch from which she hung creaked and swayed alarmingly. Then there was the matter of lightning. A tree this tall was all too likely to attract any stray bolt, and she had no desire to share the experience with it. No, she had to get herself down, and she blinked away residual pain tears and fresh rain to peer down at the ground.

  For all its height, the near-pine into which she’d crashed wasn’t a particularly towering specimen of its species, which could easily run to as much as sixty or even seventy meters, without a single branch for the lower third of its height. It was still a good twelve-meter drop to the ground, though, and she shuddered at the thought. Her gymnastics classes had taught her how to tuck and roll, but that wouldn’t help from this height even with two good arms. With her left arm shattered, she’d probably finish herself off permanently if she tried. But the way her supporting branch was beginning to shake told her she had no option but to get down somehow. Even if the branch held, her damaged harness was likely to let go . . . assuming the even more badly damaged spar didn’t simply snap first. But how—?

  Of course! She reached up and around with her right arm, gritting her teeth as even that movement shifted her left arm ever so slightly and sent fresh stabs of anguish through her. But the pain was worth it, for her fingers confirmed her hope. The counter-grav unit was still there, and she felt the slight, pulsating hum that indicated it was still operating. Of course, she couldn’t be certain how long it would go on operating.

  Her cautiously exploring hand reported an entire series of deep dents and gouges in its casing. She supposed she should be glad it had protected her back by absorbing the blows which had left those marks, but if the unit had taken a beating anything like what had happened to the rest of her equipment, it probably wouldn’t last all that long. On the other hand, it only had to hold out long enough to get her to the ground, and—

  Her thoughts chopped off as something touched the back of her head, and she jerked back around, in a shock spasm fast enough to wrench a half-scream of pain from her bruised body and broken arm. It wasn’t that the touch hurt in any way, for it was feather-gentle, almost a caress. Only its totally unexpected surprise produced its power, and all the pain she felt was the result of her response to it. Yet even as she bit her pain sound back into a groan, the hurt seemed far away and unimportant as she stared into the treecat’s slit-pupilled green eyes from a distance of less than thirty centimeters.

  * * *

  Climbs Quickly winced as the two-leg’s peaking hurt clawed at him, yet he was vastly relieved to find it awake and aware. He smelled the bright, sharp scent of blood, and the two-leg’s arm was clearly broken. He had no idea how it had managed to get itself into such a predicament, but the bits and pieces strewn around and hanging from its harness straps were obviously the ruin of some sort of flying thing. The fragments didn’t look like the other flying things he’d seen, yet such it must have been for the two-leg to wind up stuck in the top of a tree this way.

  He wished fervently that it could have found another place to crash. This clearing was a place of bad omen, shunned by all of the People. Once it had been the heart of the Sun Shadow Clan’s range, but the remnants of that clan had moved far, far away, trying to forget what had happened to it here, and Climbs Quickly would have much preferred not to come here himself.

  But that was beside the point. He was here, and however little he might like this place, he knew the two-leg had to get down. The branch from which it hung was not only thrashing with the wind but trying to split off the tree—he knew it was, for he’d crossed the weakened spot to reach the two-leg. And that didn’t even consider the way green-needle trees attracted lightning. Yet he could see no way for a two-leg with a broken arm to climb like one of the People, and he was certainly too small to carry it!

  Frustration bubbled in the back of his mind as he realized how little he could do, yet it never occurred to him not to try to help. This was one of “his” two-legs, and he knew that it was the link to him which had brought it here. There were far too many things happening for him to begin to understand them all, yet understanding was strangely unimportant. This, he realized with a dawning sense of wonder, wasn’t “one” of his two-legs after all; it was his two-leg. Whatever the link between them was, it reached out in both directions. They weren’t simply linked; they were bound to one another, and he could no more have abandoned this strange-looking, alien creature than he could have walked away from Sings Truly or Short Tail in time of need.

  Yet what could he do? He leaned out from his perch, clinging to the tree’s deeply furrowed bark with hand-feet and one true-hand, prehensile tail curled tight around the branch, as he extended the other true-hand to stroke the two-leg’s chee
k. He crooned to it, and he saw it blink. Then its hand came up—so much smaller than a full-grown two-leg’s, yet so much bigger than his own—and he arched his spine and crooned again—this time in pleasure—as the two-leg returned his caress.

  * * *

  Even in her pain and fear, Stephanie felt a sense of wonder—almost awe—as the treecat reached out to touch her face.

  She’d seen the strong, curved claws the creature’s other hand had sunk into the near-pine’s bark, but the wiry fingers which touched her cheek were moth-wing gentle, claws retracted, and she pressed back against them. Then she reached out her own good hand, touching the rainsoaked fur, stroking its spine as she would have stroked an Old Terran cat. The outer layer of that fur, she realized, was an efficient rain shedder. The layers under it were dry and fluffy, and the creature arched with a soft sound of pleasure as her fingers stroked it. She didn’t begin to understand what was happening, but she didn’t have to. She might not know exactly what the treecat was doing, yet she dimly sensed the way it was soothing her fear—even her pain—through that strange link they shared, and she clung to the comfort it offered.

  But then it drew back, sitting higher on its four rear limbs. It cocked its head at her for a long moment while wind and rain howled about them, and then it raised one front paw—no, she reminded herself, one of its hands—and pointed downward.

  That was the only possible way to describe its actions. It pointed downward, and even as it pointed it made a sharp, scolding sound whose meaning was unmistakable.

  “I know I need to get down,” she told it in a hoarse, pain-shadowed voice. “In fact, I was working on it when you turned up. Just give me a minute, will you?”

  * * *