by Larry Niven
“I knew it!” Grace cried. “They were too regular. They had to be eggs or nests or plants or something like that. Windstorm, dear, if we pile this junk back on the dolly, can you tow it to the next rock?”
They did that. The next rock was very like the first: an almost perfect hemisphere with a surface like white plaster. Rachel rapped it with her knuckles. It felt like stone. But the deep-radar shadow showed three bigheaded fetuses just filling their environment, plus a tiny one that had failed to grow.
“Well. They all seem to be at the same stage of development,” Grace observed. “I wonder if it’s a seasonal thing?”
Rachel shook her head. “It’s different every time you turn around. Lord! You learn a place, you walk a couple of kilometers, you have to start all over again. Grace, don’t you ever get frustrated? You can’t run fast enough to stay in one place!”
“I love it. And it’s worse than you think, dear.” Grace folded the screen and stacked it on the dolly. “The domains don’t stay the same. We have spillovers from other domains, from high winds and tidal slosh and migration. I’d say a Medean ecology is ruined every ten years. Then I have to learn it all over again. Windstorm, dear, I’d like to look at one more of these rock eggs. Will you tow—”
The windstorm was sudden and violent. “Damn it, Grace, this isn’t the way we planned it! We do our biological research on the way back! After we set up the power system, then we can give the local monsters a chance to wreck us.”
Grace’s voice chilled. “Dear, it seems to me that this bit of research is quite harmless.”
“It uses up time and supplies. We’ll do it on the way back, when we know we’ve got the spare time. We’ve been through this. Pack up the deep-radar and let’s move.”
Now the rolling hills of feather-wheat sloped gently up toward an eroded mountain range whose peaks seemed topped with pink cotton. The three-legged female, Gimpy, trotted alongside Rachel, talking of star travel. Her gait was strange, rolling, but she kept up as long as Rachel held her howler to the power plant’s twenty KPH.
She could not grasp interstellar distances. Rachel didn’t push. She spoke of wonders instead: of the rings of Saturn, and the bubble cities of Lluagor, and the Smithpeople, and the settling of whale and dolphin colonies in strange oceans. She spoke of time compression: of gifting Sereda with designs for crude steam engines and myriads of wafer-sized computer brains, and returning to find steam robots everywhere: farmland, city streets, wilderness, households, disneylands; of fads that could explode across a planet and vanish without a trace, like tobacco pipes on Koschei, op-art garments on Earth, weight lifting on low gravity Horvendile.
It was long before she got Gimpy talking about herself.
“I was of my parent’s second litter, within a group that moved here to study your kind,” Gimpy said. “They taught us bow and arrow, and a better design of shovel, and other things. We might have died without them.”
“The way you said that: second litter. Is there a difference?”
“Yes. One has the first litter when one can. The second litter comes to one who proves her capability by living that long. The third litter, the male’s litter, comes only with the approval of one’s clan. Else the male is not allowed to breed.”
“That’s good genetics.” Rachel saw Gimpy’s puzzlement. “I mean that your custom makes better fuxes.”
“It does. I will never see my second litter,” Gimpy said. “I was young when I made my mistake, but it was foolish. The breed improves. I will not be a one-legged male.”
They moved into a rift in the eroded mountain range, and the incredible became obvious. The mountains were topped with pink cotton candy. It must have been sticky like cotton candy, too. Rachel could see animals trapped in it. Gimpy wanted no part of that. She dropped back and boarded the raft.
They crossed the cotton candy with fans blasting at maximum. The big vehicles blew pink froth in all directions. Something down there wasn’t trapped at all. A ton of drastically flattened pink snail, with a perfect snail shell perched jauntily on its back, cruised over the cotton candy leaving a slime trail that bubbled and expanded to become more pink froth. It made for the still corpse of a many-limbed bird, flowed over it, and stopped to digest it.
The strangeness was getting to Rachel; and that was a strange thing for her. She was a rammer. Strangeness was the one constant in her life. Born aboard a ramship, not Morven, she had already gone once around the trade circuit. Even a rammer who returned to a world he knew must expect to find it completely changed; and Rachel knew that. But the strangeness of Medea came faster than she could swallow it or spit it out.
She fiddled with the intercom until she got Grace.
“Yes, dear, I’m driving. What is it?”
“It’s confusion. Grace, why aren’t all planets like Medea? They’ve all got domains, don’t they? Deserts, rain forests, mountains, poles and equators…you see what I mean?”
She heard the xenobiologist’s chuckle. “Dear, the Cold Pole is covered with frozen carbon dioxide. Where we’re going it’s hotter than boiling water. What is there on the trade circuit worlds that splits up the domains? Mountain ranges? An ocean for a heat sink? Temperature, altitude, rainfall? Medea has all of that, plus the one-way winds and the one-way ocean currents. The salinity goes from pure water to pure brine. The glaciers carry veins of dry ice heatward, so there are sudden jumps in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. Some places there are no tides. Other places, Argo wobbles enough to make a terrific tidal slosh. Then again, everything has to adapt to the flares. Some animals have shells. Some sea beasts can dive deep. Some plants seed, others grow a big leaf for an umbrella.”
Beyond the pass the mountains dropped more steeply, down to an arm of the Ring Sea. Rachel had no problem controlling the howler, but the mobile power plant was laboring hard, with its front vents wide open to hold it back and little pressure left for steering. There should be no real danger. Two probes had mapped this course.
“Everything is more different, huh?”
“Excuse me, dear…that’s got it. Sonofabitch, we could live without that sonofabitching tail wind. Okay. Do you remember the mock turtle we showed you yesterday evening? We’ve traced it six thousand kilometers to coldward. In the Icy Sea it’s seagoing and much larger. Follow it heatward and it gets smaller and more active. We think it’s the food supply. Glaciers stir up the bottom, and the sea life loves that. To heatward a bigger beast starves…sometimes. But we could be wrong. Maybe it has to conserve heat in the colder climates. I’d like to try some experiments someday.”
The white boulders that turned out to be giant eggs were thicker here on the heatward slopes. And on the lower slopes—But this was strange.
The mountainsides were gay with pennants. Thousands of long, flapping flags, orange or chrome yellow. Rachel tried to make it out. Grace was still talking; Rachel began to feel she’d opened a Pandora’s Box.
“The closer you look to the Hot Pole, the more competition you find among the sea life. New things flow in from coldward, constantly. All the six-limbed and eight-limbed forms, we think they were forced onto the land, kicked out of the ocean by something bigger or meaner. They left the ocean before they could adopt the usual fish shape, which is four fins and a tail.”
“Grace, wait a minute, now. Are you saying…we…”
“Yes, dear.” The smile Rachel couldn’t see had to be a smirk. “Four limbs and a tail. We dropped the tail, but the human form is perfectly designed for a fish.”
Rachel switched her off.
The hillside trees had extensive root systems that gripped rock like a strong man’s fist, and low, almost conical trunks. On each tree the tip of the trunk sprouted a single huge leaf, a flapping flag, orange or chrome yellow and ragged at the end. All pennants and no armies. Some of the flags were being torn apart by the air blast from the ground-effect vehicles. Perhaps that was how they spread their seeds, Rachel thought. Like tapeworms. Ask Grace? She’d had
enough of Grace, and she’d probably have to start with an apology…
The day brightened as if clouds had passed from before the sun.
The slopes were easing off into foothills now. Gusts of wind turned some of the flapping pennants into clouds of confetti. It was easier to go through the papery storms than to steer around. Rachel used one hand as a visor; the day had turned quite bright. Was she carrying dark glasses? Of course, the goggles—
It was a flare!
She kept her eyes resolutely lowered until she’d pulled the red cups over her eyes and adjusted them. Then she turned to look. The suns were behind her left shoulder, and one was nearly lost in the white glare of the other.
Bronze Legs was asleep in a reclined passenger chair in the trailing crawler. It was like sleeping aboard a boat at anchor…but the sudden glare woke him instantly.
Going downhill, the mobile power plant rode between the two crawlers, for greater safety. The angle of descent hadn’t seriously hampered the ponderous makeshift vehicle. But all bets were off now. Flare!
The fuxes were still on the raft. They could be hurt if they tumbled off at this speed, but their every instinct must be telling them to get off and dig. Bronze Legs flattened his nose against the windscreen. Charles “Hairy” McBundy, fighting to slow the power plant and raft, wouldn’t have attention to spare; and there had to be a place to stop. Someplace close, someplace flat, dirt rather than rock, and damn quick! There, to the left? Not quite flat, and it ended short, in a cliff. Tough. Bronze Legs hit the intercom button and screamed, “Hard left, Hairy, and when you stop, stop fast!”
Hairy was ahead of him. Vents had already opened in the air cushion skirts of raft and power plant. Robbed of thrust through the forward vents, the vehicles surged left and forward. Bronze Legs’ teeth ground against each other. One silver parasol had opened on the raft, probably Harvester’s, and five sharp fux faces were under it. Their tails thrashed with their agitation.
Grace brought the crawler around to follow. Left and forward, too fast, like the power plant. Hairy was on the ledge now. He cut his air cushion all at once. The power plant dropped. Its skirt screamed against rock, then dirt, then, at the edge of the drop, quit. The fuxes boiled off the raft, raised parasols, and began digging.
The crawler vibrated sickeningly as Grace cut the air cushion.
She was wearing her ruby goggles. So was Bronze Legs; he must have donned them without help from his conscious mind. He glanced again at the fuxes and saw only silver disks and a fog of brown dirt. The other crawler had stopped on the slant.
Windstorm’s howler sat tilted, but not rolling. Windstorm herself was sprinting uphill. Good enough. She should be inside, in one of the crawlers. Strange things could emerge in flare time. Where was the other howler pilot?
Far downslope and losing ground. Too far to climb back in any reasonable time. That was Rachel, the rammer, wasn’t it? With a little skill she could turn the howler and use the larger rear vents to bring her back; but she wasn’t showing that skill. She seemed to be trying to back up. Not good at all.
“Grace? Can we take the crawler down to her?”
“We may have to try. Try the intercom first, dear. See if you can talk her back up.”
Bronze Legs tried. “Her intercom’s off.”
“Off? Really? The little idiot—”
“And she’s not about to notice the little light. Wait, here she comes.” Rachel’s howler lifted on emergency power, hovered, then started uphill.
Grace said, “She may have trouble landing.”
Then Bronze Legs saw what was happening around them.
To Rachel it seemed that everyone was in panic. Far above her, both crawlers and the power plant had come to a screeching halt. Tough, competent Windstorm had abandoned her own vehicle and was fleeing in terror from nothing visible. The fuxes, the native Medeans, were nowhere in sight. Could they all know something Rachel didn’t?
She was having her own problems. The damned obsolete sluggish howler refused to back up; it coasted slowly, frictionlessly downhill, further and further from safety. To hell with that. She flipped the override.
The howler went up. Rachel leaned far back, and the howler tilted with her, staying low, following the upward curve of terrain. If the power quit early she wanted some chance to land. But the howler purred nicely uphill, faster now, while Rachel concentrated on her balance. She was marginally aware that the gay orange pennants had all turned to dead black crepe, and that certain round white boulders were cracking, crumbling.
But when things emerged from the boulders, she screamed.
All in an instant the mountains were acrawl with a thousand monsters. Their skins were shiny white. Their eyes were mere slits in heads that were mostly teeth. As Rachel rose toward the precarious safety of the crawlers, the creatures chose their target and converged. They ran with bodies low, tails high, legs an invisible blur. In seconds that meager flat place where the crawlers rested was covered with rock demons.
No safety there.
She flew over the crawlers, glimpsed peering faces behind the windscreens, and kept going. The boulders had been rare near the crest, and the rock demons weren’t there yet. Neither was Rachel, of course. She’d get as far as possible before the howler quit. And then what?
She flipped on the headlights and the searchlight too. The rock demons throve in flare time, but even they might fear too much flare sunlight. It was worth a try.
The mountain’s rock face grew steeper and steeper. No place to land, unless she could reach the crest. The fans howled.
Here was the ridge, coming level. Rachel cursed venomously. The crest was carpeted in pink, sticky cotton candy. Its proprietors had withdrawn into huge snail shells.
The howl of the fans dropped from contralto toward bass.
Pale six-legged monsters, searching for meat on bare rock, turned big heads to squint as Rachel sank low. They blurred into motion.
The crawler coasted just above the pink froth, riding the ground effect now, not really flying. Strange corpses and strange skeletons were marooned in that sea. The wind from the fans was full of pink froth.
Then she had crossed and was coasting downhill, and it was already too late to land. The howler rode centimeters above the rock, too fast and gaining speed. Here the slope was shallower, and she was still in the pass chosen long ago by Medeans monitoring a tractor probe. But the howler rode too low. If she opened a slot to brake, the skirt would scrape rock, the howler would flip over. Find a level spot—
A quick glance back told her she didn’t want to stop anyway. A dozen of the rock demons had crossed the cotton candy. Probably used their siblings for stepping stones after they got stuck! Rachel held hard to her sanity and concentrated on staying right side up. The things were holding their own in the race. Maybe they were even catching up.
Bronze Legs squeezed between the crates and the roof to reach the crawler’s observation bubble. It was big enough for his head and shoulders. He found one of the rock demons with its forelegs wrapped around the bubble, blocking part of his view while it gnawed at the glass.
Rock demons swarmed on the ground. The fuxes couldn’t be seen, but a few rock demons lay unnaturally quiet where the fuxholes were, and Bronze Legs saw a spear thrust through the melee. He called down, “Try the searchlights.”
“Won’t work,” Grace answered. She tried it anyway. Other searchlights joined hers, and the thrashing rock demons blazed painfully bright even through goggles. They turned, squinted at the situation, then came all in a quick rush. The bronze spearhead on Harvester’s tail stabbed deep into a straggler. The rock demon’s blood jetted an incredible distance. It died almost instantly.
If there were live fuxes under the somewhat tattered silver parasols, they were safe now. All the rock demons were swarming round the vehicle’s searchlights. They liked the light.
Grace chortled. “Tell me you expected that!”
“I wouldn’t dare. I feel a lot safer no
w.” The monsters weren’t tearing at the lights; they fought each other for a place in the glare. “What do they think they’re doing?”
“We’ve seen this kind of reaction before,” Grace answered. “Medean life either loves flares or hates them. All the flare-loving forms act like they’re programmed to stay out of shadows during flares. Like, in the shadow of a mountain they’d be in just the conditions they aren’t designed for. Most of ’em have high blood pressure, too, and terrific reserves of energy. They have to accomplish a lot in the little time a flare lasts. Be born, eat, grow, mate, give birth—”
“Grace, get on the intercom and find out if everyone’s still alive. And see if anyone knows which sun flared.”
“Why? What possible difference could it make?”
“Phrixus flares last up to three quarters of an hour. Helle flares don’t last as long. We’re going to have to wait it out. And see if Rachel called anyone.”
“Right.”
Bronze Legs half-listened to the intercom conversation. Along the heatward slopes of the mountains the black flags flew in triumph, growing longer almost as Bronze Legs watched, making sugar while the sun flared. The rock demons milling in the searchlight beams were now hungry enough to be attacking each other in earnest. A vastly larger number of rock demons had deserted the mountainsides entirely, had swarmed straight down to the shoreline. The waves were awash with sea monsters of all sizes; the rock demons were wading out to get them.
Grace called up to him. “Rachel didn’t call anyone. Lightning says she made it over the crest.”
“Good.”
“What do you think she’ll do?”
“Nobody knows her very well. Hmm…She won’t land in the cotton candy. She probably could, because those snails are probably hiding in their shells. Right?”
“But she won’t. It’d be too messy. She’ll stop on the coldward slope, or beyond, anywhere it’s safe to wait it out. If there is anywhere. Do you think she’ll find anywhere safe?”
“She won’t know what’s safe. She won’t find anyplace that isn’t swarming with something not this far to heatward. The further you look to heatward, the more ferocious the competition gets.”
