Winners!

by Poul Anderson

  Westward rose rugged, wooded hills where darkness laired. Athwart their shadows, sparks danced glittering golden, by the thousands—the millions, across the land. They were firemites. Through more than a hundred days and nights, they had been first eggs, then worms, deep down in forest mold. Now Sarhouth was passing across Mardudek in the exact path that mysteriously summoned them. They crept to the surface, spread wings which they had been growing, and went aloft, agleam, to mate.

  Once it had meant no more to the People than a pretty sight. Then the need came into being, to kill Flyers . . . and Flyers gathered in hordes to feed on yonder swarms. Hovering low, careless in their glee, they became more vulnerable to surprise than they commonly were. Erakoum hefted an obsidian-headed javelin. She had five more lashed across her back. A number of the People had spent the day setting out nets and snares, but she considered that impractical; the Flyers were not ordinary winged quarry. Anyhow, she wanted to fling a spear, bring down a victim, sink fangs into its thin flesh, herself!

  The night muttered around her. She drank odors of soil, growth, decay, nectar, blood, striving. Warmth from Mardudek streamed through a chill breeze to lave her pelt. Half-glimpsed flitting shapes, half-heard as they rustled the brush, were her fellows. They were not gathered into a single company, they coursed as each saw fit, but they kept more or less within earshot, and whoever first saw or winded a Flyer would signal it with a whistle.

  Erakoum was farther separated from her nearest comrade than any of them were. The others feared that the light-beam reaching upward from the little shell on her head would give them away. She deemed it unlikely, as faint as the bluish gleam was. The human called Hugh paid her well in trade goods to wear the talisman whenever he asked and afterward discuss her experiences with him. For her part, she knew a darkling thrill at such times, akin to nothing else in the world, and knowledge came into her, as if through dreams but more real. These gains were worth a slight handicap on an occasional hunt . . . even tonight’s hunt.

  Moreover—there was something she had not told Hugh, because he had not told her earlier. It was among the things she learned without words from the gleam-shell. A certain Flyer also carried one, which also kept it in eldritch contact with a human.

  The big grotesque creatures were frank about being neutral in the strife between People and Flyers. Erakoum did not hold that against them. This was not their home, and they could not be expected to care if it grew desolate. Yet she had shrewdly deduced that they would try to keep in its burrow their equal intimacy with members of both breeds.

  If Hugh had been anxious for her to be soul-tied to him this night, doubtless another human wanted the same for a Flyer. It would be a special joy to her to bring that one down. Besides, looking as she fared for a pale ray among firemites and stars might lead her toward a whole pack of enemies. Rested, she began to trot inland.

  Erakoum was hunting.—

  Jannika Rezek was forever homesick for a land where she had never lived.

  Her parents had politically offended the government of the Danubian Federation. It informed them they need not enter a reindoctrination hospice if they would volunteer to represent their country in the next shipful of personnel to Medea. That was scarcely a choice. Nevertheless, her father told her afterward that his last thought, as he sank down into suspended animation, was of the irony that when he awakened, none of his judges would be alive and nobody would remember what his opinions had been, let alone care. As a matter of fact, he learned at his goal that there was no longer a Danubian Federation.

  The rule remained in force that, except for crewfolk, no person went in the opposite direction. A trip was too expensive for a passenger to be carried who would land on Earth as a useless castaway out of past history. Husband and wife made the best they could of their exile. Both physicians, they were eagerly received in Armstrong and its agricultural hinterland. By the modest standards of Medea, they prospered, finally winning a rare privilege. The human population had now been legally stabilized. More would overcrowd the limited areas suitable for settlement, as well as wreaking havoc on environments which the colony existed to study. To balance reproductive failures, a few couples per generation were allowed three children. Jannika’s folk were among these.

  Thus everybody, herself perforce included, reckoned hers a happy childhood. It was a highly civilized one, too. In the molecules of reels kept at the Center was stored most of mankind’s total culture. Industry was, at last, sufficiently developed that well-to-do families could have sets which retrieved the data in as full hologrammic and stereophonic detail as desired. Her parents took advantage of this to ease their nostalgia, never thinking what it might do to younger hearts. Jannika grew up among vivid ghosts: old towers in Prague, springtime in the Bohmerwald, Christmas in a village which centuries had touched only lightly, a concert hall where music rolled in glory across a festive-clad audience which outnumbered the dwellers in Armstrong, replications of events which once made Earth tremble, songs, poetry, books, legends, fairy tales . . . She sometimes wondered if she had gone into xenology because the ouranids were light, bright, magical beings in a fairy tale.

  Today, when Hugh led Chrisoula outside, she had stood for a moment staring after them. Abruptly the room pressed in as if to choke her. She had done what she could in the way of brightening it with drapes, pictures, keepsakes. At present, however, it was bestrewn with field gear; and she hated disorder. He cared naught.

  The question rose afresh: How much did he care at all, any longer? They were in love when they married, yes, of course, but even then she recognized it was in high degree a marriage of convenience. Both were after appointments to an outpost station where they would maximize their chances of doing really significant, original research. Wedded couples were preferred, on the theory that they would be less distracted from their work than singletons. When they had their first babies, they were customarily transferred to a town.

  She and Hugh quarreled about that. Social pressure—remarks, hints, embarrassed avoidance of the subject—was mounting on them to reproduce. Within population limits, it was desirable to keep the gene pool as large as possible. She was getting along in age, a bit, for motherhood. He was more than willing. But he took for granted that she would maintain the home, hold down the desk job, while he continued in the field . . .

  She must not reprove him when he came back from his flirtatious little stroll. She lost her temper too often these days, grew outright shrewish, till he stormed from the hut or else grabbed the whiskey and started glugging. He was not a bad man—at the core, he was a good man, she amended hastily—thoughtless in many ways but well-meaning. At her time of life, she couldn’t likely do any better.

  Although—She felt the heat in her cheeks, made a gesture as if to fend off the memory, and failed. It was two days old.

  Having learned from A’i’ach about the Shining Time, she wanted to gather specimens of the glitterbug larvae. Hitherto humans had merely known that the adult insectoids swarmed aloft at intervals of approximately a year. If that was important to the inhabitants of Hansonia, she ought to know more. Observe for herself, enlist the aid of biologists, ecologists, chemists—She asked Piet Marais where to go, and he offered to come along. “The idea should have occurred to me before,” he said. “Living in humus, the worms must influence plant growth.”

  Moister soil was required than existed at Port Kato. They went several kilometers to a lake. The walking was easy, for dense foliage overhead inhibited underbrush. Softness muffled footfalls, trees formed high-arched naves, multiple rays of light passed through dusk and fragrances to fleck the ground or glance off small wings, a sound as of lyres rippled from an unseen throat.

  “How delightful,” Piet said after a while.

  He was looking at her, not ahead. She became very conscious of his blond handsomeness. And his youth, she reminded herself; he was her junior by well-nigh a decade, though mature, considerate, educated, wholly a man. “Yes,” she blurted. �
�I wish I could appreciate it as you do.”

  “It is not Earth,” he discerned. She realized that her answer had been less noncommittal than intended.

  “I wasn’t pitying myself,” she said fast. “Please don’t think that. I do see beauty here, and fascination, and freedom, oh, yes, we’re lucky on Medea.” Attempting to laugh: “Why, on Earth, what would I have done for ouranids?”

  “You love them, don’t you?” he asked gravely. She nodded. He laid a hand on her bare arm. “You have a great deal of love in you, Jannika.”

  She made a confused effort to see herself through his eyes. Medium-sized, with a figure she knew was stunning; dark hair worn shoulder length, with gray streaks that she wished Hugh would insist were premature; high cheekbones, tilted nose, pointed chin, large brown eyes, ivory complexion. Still, though Piet was a bachelor, someone that attractive needn’t be desperate, he could meet girls in town and keep up acquaintance by holocom. He shouldn’t be this appreciative of her. She shouldn’t respond. True, she’d had other men a few times, before and after she married. But never in Port Kato; too much likelihood of complications, and she’d been furious when Hugh got involved locally. Worse yet, she suspected Piet saw her as more than a possible partner in a frolic. That could break lives apart.

  “Oh, look,” she said, and disengaged from his touch in order to point at a cluster of seed pyramids. Meanwhile her mind came to the rescue. “I quite forgot, I meant to tell you, I got a call today from Professor al-Ghazi. We think we’ve found what makes the glitterbugs metamorphose and swarm.”

  “Eh?” He blinked. “I didn’t realize anybody was working on that.”

  “Well, it was a, a notion that occurred to me after my special ouranid started me speculating about them. He, A’i’ach, I mean, he told me the time is not strictly seasonal—that is not necessary here in the tropics—but set by Jason—the moon,” she added, because the name that humans had bestowed on the innermost of the larger satellites happened to resemble a word which humans had adopted, given by dromids in the Enrique area to an analog of the sirocco wind.

  “He says the metamorphoses come during particular transits of Jason across Argo,” she continued. “Roughly, every four hundredth. To be exact, the figure is every hundred and twenty-seven Medean days, plus or minus a trifle. The natives here are as keenly conscious of heavenly bodies as everywhere else. The ouranids make a festival of the swarming; they find glitterbugs delicious. Well, this gave me an idea, and I called the Center and requested an astronomical computation. It seems I was right.”

  “Astronomical cues, for a worm underground?” Marais exclaimed.

  “Well, you doubtless recall how Jason excites electrical activity in the atmosphere of Argo, like Io with Jupiter”—the solar system, where Earth has her dwelling! “In this case, there’s a beaming effect on one of the radio frequencies that are generated, a kind of natural maser. Therefore those waves only reach Medea when the two moons are on their line of nodes. And that is the exact period my friend was describing. The phase is right, too.”

  “But can the worms detect so weak a signal?”

  “I think it is clear that they do. How, I cannot tell without help from specialists. Remember, though, Phrixus and Helle create little interference. Organisms can be fantastically sensitive. Did you know that it takes less than five photons to activate the visual purple in your eye? I suppose the waves from Argo penetrate the soil to a few centimeters’ depth and trigger a chain of biochemical reactions. No doubt it is an evolutionary relic from a time when the orbits of Jason and Medea gave an exact match to the seasons. Perturbation does keep changing the movements of the moons, you know.”

  He was silent a while before he said: “I do know you are a most extraordinary person, Jannika.”

  She had regained enough equilibrium to control their talk until they reached the lake. There, for a moment, she felt herself shaken again.

  A canebrake screened it from them till they had passed through, to halt on a beach carpeted with mosslike amber-hued turf. Untouched by man in its chalice of forest, the water lay scummy, bubbling, and odorous. The sight of soft colors and the smell of living things were not unpleasant; they were normal to Medea—yet how clear and silver-blue the Neusiedler See gleamed in Danubia. Breath hissed between her teeth.

  “What’s wrong?” Piet followed her gaze. “The dromids?”

  A party of them had arrived to drink, some distance off. Jannika stared as if she had never seen their kind before.

  Nearest was a young adult, presumably virgin, since she had six legs. From the slender, long-tailed body rose a two-armed centauroid torso, up to the oddly vulpine head, which would reach to Jannika’s chest. Her pelt shimmered blue-black under the suns; Argo was hidden by trees.

  Four-legged, a trio of mothers kept watch on the eight cubs they had between them. One set of young showed by their size that their parent would soon ovulate again, be impregnated by a mating, shortly thereafter shed her second segment, and attend it until it gave birth. Another member of this group was at that stage of life, walking on two legs, no longer a functional female but with the male gonads still undeveloped.

  No male of breeding age was present. Such a creature was too driven, lustful, impatient, violent, for sociability. There were three postsexual beings, grizzled but strong, protective, their biped movements fast by human standards though laggard compared to the lightning fluidity of their companions.

  All adults were armed with stone-age spears, hatchets, and daggers, plus the carnivore teeth in their jaws.

  They were gone almost as soon as Jannika had seen them, not out of fear but because they were Medean animals whose chemistry and living went swifter than hers.

  “The dromids,” she got out.

  Piet regarded her a while before he said gently: “They pursue your dear ouranids. You tell me that will get worse than ever on the night when the glitterbugs rise. But you must not hate them. They are caught in a tragedy.”

  “Yes, the sterility problem, yes. Why should they drag the ouranids down with them?” She struck fist into palm. “Let’s get to work, let’s collect our samples and go home, can we, please?”

  He was fully understanding.

  —She cast the memory out and flung herself back into preparations for the night.

  Hugh Brocket and his wife departed a while after sunset. Their flitters jetted off in a whisper, reached an intermediate altitude, and circled for a minute while the riders got bearings and exchanged radioed farewells. Observed from below, catching the last gleam of sunken Colchis on their flanks, they resembled a pair of teardrops.

  “Good hunting, Jan.”

  “Ugh! Don’t say that.”

  “Sorry,” he apologized in a stiff tone, and cut out the sender. Sure, it had been tactless of him, but why must she be so goddamn touchy?

  Never mind. He’d plenty to do. Erakoum had promised to be on Shipwreck Cliffs about this time, since her gang meant to proceed north along the coast from its camp before turning inland. Thereafter her location would be unpredictable. He must lock onto her transmitter soon. Jannika’s craft dwindled in sight, bound on her own quest. Hugh set his inertial pilot and settled back in his safety harness to double-check his instruments. That was mechanical, since he knew quite well everything was in order. Most of his attention roamed free.

  The canopy gave a titanic vista. Below, hills lay in dappled masses of shadow, here and there relieved by an argent thread that was a river or by the upheaving of precipices and scarps. The hemisphere-dividing Ring Ocean turned the eastern horizon to quicksilver. Westward in heaven, the double sun had left a Tyrian wake. Overhead reached a velvety dark, becoming more starry with each of his heartbeats. He saw a pair of moons, close enough to show discs lighted from two sides, rusty and white; he recognized more, which were mere bright points to his eyes, by their positions as they went on sentry-go among the constellations. Low above the sea smoldered Argo—no, shone, because its upper clouds were in full
daylight, bands of brilliance splashed over sullen red. Jason was close to transit, with angular diameter exceeding twenty minutes of arc, and nevertheless Hugh had trouble finding it amidst that glare.

  The shore came in view. He activated the detector and set his craft to hovering. An indicator light flashed green; he had his contact. He sent the vehicle aloft, a full three kilometers. Partly this was because he would be concentrating on encephalic input and wanted plenty of room for piloting error; partly it was to keep beyond sight or hearing of the natives, lest his presence affect their actions. Having taken station, he connected and secured the receiver helmet to his head—it didn’t weigh much—and switched it on. Transmitted, amplified, transformed, relayed, reinduced, the events in Erakoum’s nervous system merged with the events in his.

  By no means did he acquire the dromid’s full awareness. Conveyance and translation were far too primitive. He had spent his professional lifetime gaining sufficient fellow-feeling with the species that, after as much patience as both individuals could maintain over a span of years, he could barely begin to interpret the signals he gathered. The speed of native mental processes was less of a help—through repetition and reinforcement—than an added hindrance. As a rough analogy, imagine trying to follow a rapid and nearly inaudible conversation, missing many a word, in a language you do not know well. Actually, none of what Hugh perceived was verbal; it was sight, sound, a complex of senses, including those interior like balance and hunger, including dream-hints of senses that he did not think he possessed.

  He saw the land go by, bush, branch, slope, stars and moons above shaggy ridges; he felt its varying contours and textures as feet went pacing; he heard its multitudinous low noises; he smelled richness; the impressions were endless, most of them vague and fleeting, the best of them strong enough to take him out of himself, draw him groundward toward oneness with the creature below.