Heritage of Flight (9 page)

"No!"
Rafe shouted, and leapt forward. “We're friends!” The lights on the comm danced a frantic pattern, while sounds squealed up painfully until they were too high-pitched for human ears.

Pauli rested her hands on the children's shoulders and walked them back to the fire where Dr. Pryor received them protectively.

"Pauli, get back here. They're going to land!” Rafe cried. No thought of danger, of where she might be needed, but “get back here!” he ordered, and she still dropped everything to be near him.

This time Pauli drew her weapon, ignoring various civilian scowls, before she left the fire. Borodin, she was glad to see, also drew. The significance of those horns, and their gleaming tips, hadn't escaped him. That had to be some natural defense.

"Look at that!” murmured the botanist, who had put up such a fight at any military personnel being allowed—allowed!—to remain on Cynthia. “Why must they automatically assume that these ... flying things are hostile?"

Pauli wanted to snarl at her. But it was more important to get out there in the dark and help Rafe. He was hooking the commgear to the ports of the readout display. From time to time, squeals and screeches and flutters of dazzling wings showed that he was making some progress.

Finally he stood, weariness apparent in his stooped shoulders. The sky was beginning to pale; and the fire had burned down. The Cynthians took off and circled about the camp once before they headed back toward the mountains.

"We can't just let them go!” Ro whispered, her voice hoarse.

"We won't,” Rafe said. “They'll be back. They're just as curious as we are.” He rubbed an aching spot on his back, stretched, then shook himself. “I managed to intrigue them ... I swear I did. That should give us the time we need to learn to talk with them."

He turned to walk back toward his own quarters, and never once spared Pauli a glance.

Why not talk with these creatures?
she thought with a return of that morning's bitterness.
After all, what else do we have to do?

It took weeks even to work out a simple code, long frustrating evenings in which no one could tell whether the Cynthians would even appear or not, or whether the settlers were too weary to do more than stare at the winged creatures and tap out a few desultory experiments on the computers. The planet was hospitable, after a fashion: after its own fashion, which was to demand work of those who hoped to live there.

A day of storms, of struggle even to move from dome to dome, and the Cynthians could be counted on not to appear. On such days, clouds would hide the mountains that served, effectively, to isolate them on a broad, fertile plain. Many times, Pauli wished to explore, to take the flier she no longer had, or even the gliders that Borodin had spoken of, and soar over the plain, up into the foothills—but usually, when evening came, she was content simply to sit with the others.

After stormy days, or on windy evenings, the Cynthians would not appear. But on the clear nights, or those with only a few freshening winds, that the Cynthians did appear, no one could ever tell what might startle them, hurling them aloft and back to their mountains. Perhaps it would be the smell of meat cooking, or a too-rapid movement by one of the settlers.

Anything could jeopardize the fragile accord Rafe was building between himself and the winged natives of the refuge world.

But gradually he reported progress. Gradually he moved out farther and farther from the camp to where the Cynthians would be willing to land. Their visits increased in frequency. Rafe had been right, Pauli thought. He had succeeded in intriguing the Cynthians. After a time, not even a storm that might have shredded their wings could keep them away from the fires, from Rafe, and from the signals that he, and they, tried to send to one another.

"Their semiotic usage—their system of signs—is vastly different from ours,” he reported to Borodin after one particularly successful visit. “No specific nouns and verbs; just concepts that can be adapted to either. Most of them have to do with flight ... you wouldn't expect winged creatures to have a sign for swimming; and sure enough, there isn't one. This doesn't surprise me.

"They've got a sign for fire. It's semantically allied—do you see?—with the sign for destruction. Your analogy of Earth moths, Pauli..."

So that first evening, it had been the fire that frightened the Cynthians.
Odd
, Pauli thought.
At first, I thought they feared the children
. But how could anyone fear children, especially those as badly traumatized as the ones here had been? Strange: she had always assumed that one good way of establishing contacts with aliens was through the young of each species.

"There's something that's been puzzling me,” Rafe spoke up the next evening, after the Cynthians braved rain and wind to appear at the tiny camp. “I want to get a sample of that fluid on their horns."

"Rafe, if they turn on you, we haven't got an antidote for that,” Pryor warned him.

"I think they know they can trust me,” he replied.

"You'll cover him,” Borodin mouthed at Pauli, who moved in.

"You'd better let me take the sample,” she told Rafe. He was too valuable to risk, and she—she knew her reflexes were faster than most. After all, she was—had been!—a pilot.

Taking a slide, she dabbed with it at the horn of the nearest Cynthian, then leapt back before it could do more than rear up in surprise. She smelled the alien: dusty, like old leaves in the autumn on the homeworld she remembered now only in the sort of dreams from which one woke crying. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she could remember it thus, not as a nightmare vision of a world charred until it no longer had autumns or any other season, or a world irradiated into a trackless, endless winter.

Some of the dust from the Cynthian's scales seemed to cling to the slide along with the fluid she had dabbed from the protective horn along its mandible. Even as she watched, frowning with an absurd sense of guilt, of having trespassed upon another creature, the horn went flaccid, the fluid it had secreted evaporating.

When she gave Rafe the slide for analysis, he stopped glaring at her long enough to process it. “Strong neural toxin,” he announced. “Must be their major weapon. Their mandibles are imperfect; it's a wonder that they can eat at all. I'd say that their backup defenses are the barbs on their wings and those forearms. My guess is that they'd use them to grasp an enemy long enough to bring it close, then shred its wings or brush it with their poison."

A Cynthian battle ... horns glistening, winged Cynthians darting, dodging, reaching out with those hooks and claws ... what a beautiful, lethal sight such a battle must be.

Pauli hoped she never saw one.

5

Rafe Adams stared at his printouts. Human/Cynthian equivalences ... this world's Rosetta Stone. Behind him murmured voices. Sparks from the nightly fire crackled. That fire had turned into a ritual that comforted the entire settlement and drew it closer together. Pauli too—they were working together now, almost as they had planned. Only she was still reserved around him—except when she should be, he thought.

Damn the woman! Who had told her to leap at one of the Cynthians like that, armed only with a slide, determined to protect him from the consequences of his own research? Was she so unhappy here that she courted death? God, he wished she would court him instead, then grimaced at the absurdity of the image. She had to be crazy to think he liked being stranded here either, or to imagine his delight at her presence here with him caused him anything but guilt. Perhaps she would come around.

Pauli ... alive! he thought, guilty in his relief. Once he had watched ships die; now he watched her. All too often, since planetfall, her face had been leaden, lifeless; the moment's risk, the moment's protectiveness, made her face lose the masklike resignation that had hurt him, even as he sought to break through it.

After all, things could have been much worse. The settlement was beginning to pull itself together, to cope with Cynthia's turbulent climate and to develop some type of local economy.

And, as important, the children at the tiny settlement's heart were beginning to live again. Today Ayelet had been a brat, the real variety, even down to the selfishness and sullenness of a child never balked of a toy or a sweet. So, on Borodin's orders, Ayelet had been sent into a dome to go to bed early. Rafe was delighted: Ayelet had acted like a child. Well enough—she had a father and brother alive.

But ‘Cilla—frail, tiny ‘Cilla—had snapped at her brother Lohr for spilling her paints. They were important to her; she had turned out to have real talent, and was quickly becoming the group's artist. Lohr, however, had snapped back loudly, instead of with the watchful quiet that made Pauli go cold around him and check the position of her sidearm. Dr. Pryor could scarcely conceal her exultation. After all, it was remarkable that children who had been brutalized as badly as these could make a fresh start. Autism was far more likely.

Each day the refugee children, especially the ones whom the larger children called “the littlests,” were laughing more, losing the preternatural control and jumpiness that still made some people nervous when they had to be around them.

With a great show of studying his screen (and a more subtle scrutiny of the children, as well as the winged Cynthians), Rafe decided that much of the children's adjustment was due to Pauli and the captain. Probably because they knew no other way of acting, they treated the children like cadets. Perform well, and they handed out rewards, chief among them work with the gliders. Shirk, and there were punishments, like early bedtimes, no gliders, and no sight of the Cynthians, who fascinated the children, unlike human strangers, who made them hide, growl, or reach for the nearest rocks.

But what child would not have been fascinated by the Cynthians? Rafe thought of the younger brothers he had.
Had
was the operative word; his family had lived on a station when the Secessionists struck it. And he had better not think of that again now. Or ever, unless he wanted to submit to Dr. Pryor's attempts at therapy.

Ben Yehuda sauntered over toward him and grinned, undisturbed at Ayelet's punishment. Rafe tossed more wood on the fire and coiled himself down beside a pile of logs to wait. Pauli stationed herself at the comm. If habit were any indication, soon the Cynthians would begin to arrive.

Two in particular turned up almost every evening. Some odd whimsy of Pauli's had made her dub them Uriel and Ariel; he wouldn't have assumed that she even knew those names—and he would have wagered on her not knowing what they meant.

"I'm a pilot,” she had always told him, half-boastful, half-apologetic, whenever he had tried to draw her away from talk of them or of the day-to-day into visions of art and peace. “Specialized. How would I know anything about that?"

And then she would smile at him, and he would lose his train of thought. She had dissembled, he knew. Pauli was better educated than her boasts.

So, she had named the Cynthians, and the names had stuck. Uriel and Ariel were among the largest of the Cynthians and, assuming that the pallor of their fluorescent wings indicated age, they were probably among the eldest. Rafe chuckled, thinking of Uriel and Ariel as having to keep order among the younger, more brilliant Cynthians—
you raced one another despite wind shear, so no visit to those wingless freaks by the river tonight!
(The possibilities for Cynthians'-eye humor made him suppress laughter.) They might have many of the same problems as Captain Borodin.

But now as Rafe looked up, he saw a gleam of wings descending from the foothills.

"They're coming,” he murmured.

"Good. Can you ask them if there's a cold season and, if there is, how they manage to survive?"

"I can try,” said Rafe. The Cynthians circled and landed, dipping wings in a gesture Rafe had concluded was a form of compliment to the humans. Rafe tried to imitate the gesture with his arms and shoulders, but, as always, failed gracelessly. After an exchange of ritual phrases, Rafe repeated the captain's question to the Cynthians. The sound of his words went into the common-coder and appeared on the readout as symbols:
cold/visualization of a Cynthian/interrogative.

Antennae quivered. The screen blanked, then lit with the symbols of the Cynthians’ reply:
mountains/ hollowed-out caverns/Cynthians, wings folded, within.

"Nice work,” hissed Borodin.

At least human eyes perceived some of the same wavelengths as Cynthians! Rafe thought. Otherwise communication would have been impossibly hard, instead of just arduous. Studying the signs on his screen, Rafe concluded that the Cynthians were not just primarily nocturnal. They hibernated too.

But wait. Now new symbols were forming, replacing the previous analogy.
Cold
. The screen split into two displays, preparing for the analogical constructs that seemed to be such a major characteristic of Cynthian thought or “speech.”
Cynthians/mountains
; humans/
domes
. Assuming the unattractive stick figures were humankind, that was plain enough. Cynthians lived in the mountains; humans lived on the alluvial plain.

The screens lit again.
Humans/mountains.

"They're asking us to move,” Rafe said.