Heritage of Flight

by Susan Shwartz

  She sighed. What other punishment could there be? If only Rafe thought she was a restless sleeper, not every night, she waked sweating from a vision of him staked out on a plain that writhed with newly hatched, ravenous Cynthians while, overhead, their elders watched to see a grisly justice done.

  Better not to think of it now. Concentrate on the flying. Considerately, Neave had ordered the pilot not to opaque the ports as the ship arced up to where the sky was perpetually dark. The condemned woman gets one last request: to fly again. But what is Rafe's request? Then, sunlight exploded over the arc of the terminator, slashing across land and cloud-frosted water alike, shimmering in the haze of atmosphere; and Pauli shivered with delight.

  Just for this moment, the ship was hers. She could imagine herself and Rafe hurtling free of the constraints of Cynthia's air and Cynthia's gravity and Cynthia's burdens, speeding clear of the system and then, in one triumphant Jump, leaving it behind them forever. Then the ship changed attitude. The arc of its climb began to level out, and the whine of its engines hushed to the whisper of hypersonic travel.

  Of course, they could not break free. Beneath the stars and indigo of true space, so like the whorls on a Cynthian's wings, the horizon glowed crimson and yellow; and they sped toward it, the air in the tiny ship vibrating with the speed of their passage. Moments later, the ship arced downward. The sharp contrasts of dawn and deep space diminished and blurred as the ship reentered atmosphere over the eastern ocean. As it slowed and slashed downward, it quivered, buffeted by the fierce ocean winds. Lashings of rain vanished into steam as they neared the ship, its skin superheated by the speed of deceleration. Curdled white and gray, pierced by an occasional flash of lightning, enveloped them.

  In the half-light, Neave's mouth was pursed into a thin line, and his skin was greenish. Rafe kept his eyes shut, retreating into that calm fastness that had sustained them both for all these years. Pauli swallowed hard and prayed that she didn't disgrace her former career by heaving up her last meal all over the bulkhead. It truly had been too long since she had flown. She was truly earthbound now. Perhaps that was part of her punishment.

  "The ocean,” Neave nodded toward the viewports. Star pilot turned landswoman, turned Franklin, what could she know about seas? A tossing immensity of waves, capped with white like the clouds through which they had passed, a violence of motion and color that held her enthralled—the ship leveled off. For the first time she felt a sensation not of acceleration, but of speed. They were hastening toward a blur on the horizon that resolved, even as she gazed, into a barrier range of rock cliffs that the ship gained height to surmount. Again rain and wind buffeted them; and once again they descended.

  "Must be a barrier range,” Rafe murmured. “We're beyond it now."

  Sun shone through the clear ports now, drying the beads of rain that still slanted across them.

  "Sensors report life,” the pilot announced.

  Instinctively Rafe and Pauli sat upright. That would be the Cynthians.

  "Careful,” Neave ordered. “They may not know to evade us."

  After all, it would hardly do if the very ship that carried Pauli and Rafe to justice inadvertently shredded the judges.

  "I'm running the warn-off tape,” announced the pilot, and Neave nodded approval.

  "There they are!” Rafe cried, turning in his straps to point at a blur of sunlight on wings far feebler, but more wonderful than the ship's wings which had lured them too close. The ship slowed and lost altitude with such speed that Neave swallowed convulsively.

  The Cynthians withdrew to a safer distance. Seeing them bank and wheel, Pauli sighed once, then subsided. These Cynthians were not hers to marvel at; she was theirs to judge and, most probably, execute. She gulped against the sick fear that flowed up from her belly at what means they might choose.

  "Caldera below,” announced the pilot's voice, filtered from controls. The ship banked, then descended so steeply that the passenger restraints tightened and the seats shifted into full landing position. Below them yawned an enormous crater. Whatever volcano had created it must have lain dormant for hundreds of years. Now a lake glistened like a sapphire in a setting of red gold ... and emerald, since the rest of the basin was thick with lush ground cover above which only a few skeletal trees projected.

  At a safe distance, the Cynthians followed them down.

  The ship touched down. Pauli released the seat restraints and stood. With the vibration of the engines and the wind no longer coursing through the ship and up into her own body, she felt abruptly weak. The ship itself seemed like a dead thing—unlike the glowing creatures that poised nearby the instant the landing ramp extended.

  Their antennae and palpae quivered back and forth so quickly that they were practically a luminous blur.

  "That's a lively conversation they're having about us,” Rafe commented as he helped the survey team set up the translators.

  "Were your Cynthians always so curious?” asked Neave.

  "Always,” Rafe said, low-voiced. “The young adults especially. They would try to snag things with their winghooks and pull them over to where their claws could get a grip on them. The elders stopped them every time they could."

  "This group seems fascinated by us,” remarked a woman from survey. “Each time we land, more and more Cynthians come to meet us."

  "It isn't just you,” Pauli told her. “Look."

  Not a hundred meters away rose the first of a series of pale towers. She knew that if she checked, she would see that on this continent too, the Cynthians’ instinct had led them to build their incubators along the “lines” spun out by their world's magnetic poles.

  "They build those towers to hold their eggs,” Rafe said. “So they come to check on the hatching. See those fissures? It won't be long now."

  He moved to stand beside Pauli. He had one hand pressed against his chest, and alarm stabbed through her: he had never complained of chest pains, never suffered shortness of breath. With his free arm, he hugged her to him. Her head came to the top of his shoulder. She rubbed her cheek against his arm, even as her nostrils flared at what she couldn't help thinking of as “moth-spoor": the musty, musky smell of excited creatures, combined now with a hint of something acrid, which must be the larvae before they hatched.

  Her hand clutched for the sidearm she had surrendered weeks past, and she knew that Neave had seen the move.

  "You couldn't judge me before,” she told him. “So don't try to on this. You can't imagine what the eaters look like. Or smell like."

  Once the first larva touched her, how long would it be till she fainted from shock and agony? Even now, she could remember Captain Borodin's surprised, agonized bellow as an adult's venom touched him. She drew a shuddering breath and moved out from the circle of Rafe's arm. Three or four of the largest adults mantled their wings, lifted easily into the air, and let themselves drift toward the humans, landing with a clap of wings that quite evidently called the meeting to order. Bright scales drifted from their wings to settle on Pauli's face and hair. How like Uriel and Ariel they were.

  "Let's get this over with,” she said.

  The translators glowed, their screens taking on the green glow she remembered so well, and the Cynthians, antennae shivering in anticipation, drew nearer.

  "The cracks in those towers are getting wider,” Pauli warned Neave and his crew. “If they should split, head for the ship and take off!"

  The sun had long since turned the amber of late afternoon, and a wind had picked up: exciting weather, if you had wings or a glider to fly with. Many of the Cynthians circled aloft, though their gemlike compound eyes always returned to the translators and the humans that clustered about them.

  "What about the Cynthians?"

  "They're just as scared of their young as you'll be. Believe me, you'll be scared.” She forced herself not to shudder just this once and hoped that her comment hadn't sounded like a rationalization of her crime.

  "They're not moving,” Nea
ve pointed out. “Let's go through it one more time."

  Pauli sighed. So far, this business of getting sentenced to death was more tedious than frightening. She nodded at Rafe, who crouched beside the translators, only one or two meters away from the largest Cynthian of all. If he stretched out a hand, he could probably touch him.

  That reminded her. “Rafe,” she warned in a low voice. “Don't stay so close. Remember, the horns below the palpae—they secrete a nerve toxin.” Just one touch of it had been enough to send Captain Borodin screaming out of control and to his death in a field full of eaters.

  The translator's screen flickered, then lit.

  "Here it goes,” Rafe said. His hands were shaking from the strain. After one or two errors that made him hiss, clear his screens, and begin again, he produced the first of the analogies that he had constructed to explain to these Cynthians what happened to their sibs far to the West.

  Adult Cynthian/larvae; human adult/human children.

  One of the elders flicked out a wing toward the nearest tower in an almost human gesture. Rafe nodded, then thought better of it, and keyed in the signal both groups had agreed upon for affirmative. As the larvae were to the Cynthian adults, those small, two-legged creatures curled up on the screen were to the human adults.

  Well enough.

  Now for the next one.

  Cynthian larvae/ground scrub, human children/ground scrub.

  Actually, that stretched the truth. Humans didn't really eat the ground scrub, but they needed the land it. covered in order to grow their own food.

  The Cynthian elders waited, antennae and palpae rigid, wings motionless.

  Sighing, Rafe keyed in the next analogy.

  Larvae/human children; human children/sign of prone figure or dead body.

  The larvae needed the same food as the human children and would destroy them if they could.

  Abruptly Rafe became angry. He keyed in a new analogy.

  Larvae/Cynthian adult, one wing broken, lying on the ground; larger larvae/blank space. Surely it had happened that an injured Cynthian could not flee the hatchlings and lay in their path, to be devoured along with everything else. The elders quivered, a quick flash of splendor as their wings shook, then reverted to their previous stillness.

  "Tell them, Rafe. For God's sake, let's make an end!” Pauli muttered.

  Humans/adult Cynthians; humans/adult Cynthians lying dead.

  There it was in so many words: humans had killed Cynthians.

  Humans/larvae; humans/blank space.

  Humans had eliminated the Cynthians’ larvae. On one continent, at least, there had been no next generation for bright winged elders and rash nymphae to guard, then flee from. An instant later, all the Cynthians had thrust themselves into flight, as if terrified of the humans.

  The screen went blank, and red lights flashed on the translators as the Cynthians’ agitation burned out one of the boards.

  Behind him, he heard one of the survey team ask Commissioner Neave in an unhappy, low voice, “Sir, are we really going to leave these people to be eaten by grubs? Doesn't seem decent."

  Neave glared at the man. “Well, it doesn't!” he muttered, then turned back to the translator, opening its back and replacing the board. The fissures in the hatching towers seemed to have widened. Rafe checked his breast pocket, gauging the distances between the towers and him, between him and Pauli. He would have time to grab the hypodermic and spare his wife before the larvae overran them. She would never scream like ‘Cilla when the acid and the mandibles attacked her foot; she would never know what killed her. Reassured, he waited for repairs to be finished.

  The elders’ antennae flared, whipped into immobility, then fluttered more slowly. Good, They'd reached agreement on what they wanted to ask.

  Larvae/ground scrub; humans/ground scrub.

  That was a restatement. Rafe signed “affirmative."

  A new message formed on the screen, and he took so long to puzzle it out that the screen blanked, and he had to signal for the Cynthians to send it again.

  Yes, that was a tower, a hatching tower forming pixel by pixel on the screen. A tower encircled ... by what? A crater like the one in which they stood.

  Well enough. Hatching tower/crater; human children/interrogative?

  "They want to know whether the Cynthians we killed built their towers in craters like this one!” Rafe said.

  "What difference does it make?” Pauli asked.

  "Just answer the question,” Neave said.

  Rafe's hands trembled as he typed out his answer:

  Cynthian larvae/open plain; human settlement/open plain.

  Not only did the larvae and the humans require the same food sources, and the same land, the larvae, like the humans, roved unchecked upon it.

  The elders opened their wings. One pointed with its winghooks at the humans. Wings/Cynthians; wingless arms/humans.

  Winged Cynthian/mountains; wingless human/beneath mountains.

  "I think they understand we had no place to go,” Rafe whispered. “They don't seem to realize...” He wanted to crawl off and throw up, or weep because so far, these Cynthians did not regard him as a monster.

  "Do you see that, Neave?” Pauli demanded. “You tell that to von Bulow, and you ask her, which of us is more human. They don't have the slightest idea what genocide is."

  A scream of sound and light blanked the translators and nearly shorted out the entire communications system. Most of the Cynthians circled aloft, agitation in every movement of their tiny grasping claws and their wings. Several even showed the everted horns, bright drops of poison glinting on them, indicating extraordinary distress.

  "I think that that really upset them, sir,” said the, woman from survey. “By their definition, civilized people keep their kids ... their larvae ... in check."

  Finally, insistently, one signal appeared on the screen. Larvae/towers; towers/crater. Over and over again.

  "Let them know we understand!” Neave ordered.

  Rafe signalled agreement. “I think that this is what we've got so far. Civilized Cynthians understand that their larvae are a menace, so they build the hatching towers in craters like this, where the ground scrub is thick enough to sustain them until they hibernate and can emerge as nymphae, to fly out of the crater. I assume that once they've metamorphosed, the others take them in charge, just like they do ... they did ... back home. Anything else seems unthinkable to them."

  "As if,” Neave spoke half to himself, “aliens had landed on Earth among headhunters or cannibals, and we had to explain them."

  "What difference does it make?” Pauli asked. “'Civilized’ or not, they're still people!"

  Rafe sealed his breast pocket and strode over toward her. “Are you truly that determined to die?” he asked. "They think it may make a difference.” He gestured at the towers. “Pauli, for the love of God..."

  "Getting another signal."

  Rafe drew Pauli with him as he went to study it.

  Five human figures/ship; interrogative/many ships.

  "Yes,” Rafe muttered. “There will be more ships, more people...” His fingers flew on the keyboard and the screen filled: many humans/many ships.

  Clearly the Cynthians wanted something of the people who had placed themselves in their power.

  Cynthians/interrogative, many humans/many ships.

  "What happens to you when those humans come?"

  That was quite a question. It was only a matter of time, months perhaps, until Neave's report drew the homeless or the adventurous to Cynthia to settle there. He was a man of Earth; he knew his world's history, one in which technologically sophisticated cultures drove out and destroyed less advanced ones.

  Neave stepped forward. This was definitely something he could understand. “We hang together, or we all hang separately,” he muttered. “You tell them, Rafe. You tell them that when those humans come, they will be protected."

  Pauli grimaced at him. “Like the Indians or the Tasmanian
s? We went through those rationalizations years ago."

  Neave smiled. For the first time since he had touched down on this planet, he knew his course. “But we've got two things that the Indians and the Tasmanians never had."

  "What?"

  "First, the determination never to allow that to happen again. I know, we've heard that before. But now, we have you and your descendants, to make certain that no one tries it. To stop anyone who dares."

  Rafe blinked hard. When they returned to the settlement, he would destroy the poisoned needle. He shook and drew Pauli close to him. They would have years yet. They would not be easy years; he foresaw a day when settlers would outgrow the west, and demand to explore this continent, to strip it of its resources, and drive its inhabitants off their home. Not while he lived, they wouldn't. And not while his children lived either.

  "You know,” Neave told the two of them, “some, people used to think that the worst punishment for a genocide was to be forced to live in the midst of people he had tried to kill. You ... you can never forget, you know. And you must pass the knowledge on to your children. You will be truly set apart, for all time."

  "Signal again!"

  This time the screen showed Tower, falling on its side/larvae; humans/ship.

  "The hatcheries are beginning to break up!” Rafe pointed. In a few moments the ground would swarm with eaters. Already the adult Cynthians had all taken to the air.

  Neave turned toward the Cynthian elder and nodded with real respect. “We've been warned,” he said. “So long as we leave them in peace, they want nothing more: no punishment, no vengeance."

  "I told you how gentle they were,” Pauli said. “There was only one time when they fought; and that was to protect their young."

  "Speaking of which—"

  Collecting their equipment, they raced for the boarding ramp as a crash from behind them warned that the first of the hatching towers had fallen. The stink of acid grew strong in the clear, cool air of the dying afternoon.