Earth and Air (23 page)

EPILOGUE

One late summer afternoon two old people, brother and sister, sat in front of the house where both of them had been born almost a hundred years before. Below them, terrace after terrace, stretched their vines and olive trees, and beyond that a placid sea, with two islands on the horizon, cloudy masses against the bright streaks of sunset. Around them sat, or strolled, or scampered, the enormous gathering of their joint family, sons and daughters and grandchildren, all with their husbands or wives, great-grandchildren, two by now also married, and one great-great-grandchild, the first of all the brood to descend from both brother and sister, for her parents were second cousins. That was why everyone had come to celebrate her naming day. Though several of the husbands and wives had died, none of the direct descendants was missing, for they were a long-lived family and those who had married had done so for love and stayed loving. Many had come from the island, more from other islands nearby, or the mainland, some from far-off cities. There were farmers and fishermen there of course, but also merchants and craftspeople—one of the grand-daughters was a famous weaver, whose work hung in palaces and cathedrals—a scholar or two, a judge and two other lawyers, priests, monks and a nun with special dispensations to leave their monasteries—all there for this day.

Now an owl floated out of nowhere, settled on the old man's shoulder and sat blinking at the red sun. The light darkened. Voices became hushed and fell silent, as if a long-hidden knowledge had woken suddenly in the blood they all shared.

“
Prrp, prrp,
” said the owl, and the evening air filled with owls. Owls are territorial birds, and it is rare to see more than two together once they have left the nest for good, but for this evening they appeared to have forgotten their boundaries and eddied in silent swirls above the human gathering.

Now some came lower, and the children raised their arms as the owls swooped and turned among them, and ran in interweaving circles, as if birds and people were taking part in some game or dance whose rules none of them knew but all of them understood. The watching adults clapped out a rhythm and the owls called to and fro.

In the middle of the calling and clapping the owl on the old man's shoulder, the fourteenth Scops of that name and line, called again, “
Prrp, prrp,
” so softly that one would have thought only the two old people could have heard, but one owl broke from the dance and flew towards them. The old man stretched out a shaky arm and the owl settled onto it, a bit clumsily, as she was one of this year's hatch and had not been flying more than a week or two. The woman reached out and the young owl leaned luxuriatingly against her touch as her fingers gentled among her neck feathers.

“Well,” said the old woman. “They're all here. Which of them are you going to choose?”

The owl flipped itself up onto the old man's shoulder, scrabbled for a hold and then perched beside the older one, studying the crowd below. It slid away and was lost among the swirling owls. But in less than a minute the dance stilled. The children stood where they were and the birds swung away to perch among the olives, all but one, which hovered for a moment in a blur of soft wings and settled on the shoulder of a nine-year-old girl.

Instantly the bond formed, as the girl put up a hand to stroke the owl and the owl nibbled gently at the girl's ear. The girl was island-born, Euphanie's great-granddaughter, her father a fisherman, hitherto a shy and stammering child. But now, with apparently complete assurance, despite all those watching eyes, she turned and climbed the steps to where the old couple sat.

“Well done,” said Yanni. “Both of you. There isn't much we can do for you, except pass on the blessing that was given to us. You have a lot to find out, but trust each other and do what seems right, and all will be well for the island.”

The girl was about to answer when she stiffened.

“Someone's watching us,” she whispered.

The old couple glanced at each other. Yanni nodded.

“Yes,” said Euphanie quietly.

“Is
she
here?” whispered the child.

“Not quite,” said Euphanie. “Most of us here know the story. Many still believe it. Perhaps we are enough, gathered together like this, to bring an echo of her faintly back.”

“Us and the owls,” said Yanni. “We believe. They know.”

The girl nodded and asked the question that had been on her lips, speaking without any hint of a stammer.

“Shall I be able to see in the dark?”

“Perhaps, provided you believe,” said Euphanie.

The Fifth Element

In the slow dusk typical
of the planet David carried the body back towards the camp. He was thinking not about its death, but about its name. Cat. Except for being roughly the right size it was nothing like a cat—a plump body covered with coarse gingery hair too sparse to conceal the folds and dewlaps of indigo flesh which sagged in a variety of curves according to the attitude the creature chose to lounge in. It was a not-quite-biped, with long forelimbs, three-fingered, and short hind limbs. It had no visible neck, but a hackle of black fur ran from its shoulders over the almost perfect sphere of its skull, stopping abruptly at the line which would have joined the centres of its round yellow eyes, whose double lids closed inwards from the sides. Its mouth was round too. It had no nose and no sense of smell, which made it one of the rare exceptions to the galactic norm of five senses for all higher creatures. (Not all had the same five, of course—the crew of David's ship disposed of nine, between them.) But then Cat was hardly a crew member, only a pet or mascot, really. David had never heard of a ship that didn't carry a Cat—that was odd, because he had never heard either of a Cat doing anything useful for a crew, and ships didn't normally lug waste weight round the galaxy, even the odd four kilos of Cat's body. It wasn't a normal kind of superstition either, half-mocked and half-revered. You didn't blame the Cat for a luckless voyage. You just took it along with you, and barely noticed it. By the time he reached the camp David was beginning to think that he should have noticed these oddities before. After all, it was his function to notice and remember facts and then to fit them into patterns.

He found a Bandicoot by the fire, curled asleep like an ammonoid fossil, but twitching violently with its dreams. Hippo was by the ship, rubbing her back against a support strut, like a cow scratching at a post.

“Hey, careful!” said David. “That strut's designed for most shocks, but not for that.”

“Ooh, isn't it?” said Hippo, vaguely. “Sorry. I forgot. I'm itchy.”

She trundled towards the fire and stood gazing pathetically at David with her large-fringed eyes, pinker than ever in the light of the flames. Hippo was better named than Cat. Coming from a large planet which was mostly glutinous swamp her species had evolved to a shape something like a terrestrial hippopotamus, only larger. Her head was different, with its big braincase and short prehensile trunk, but her eyes lay on its upper surface so that she tended to lower her head, as if shy, when talking to one. She was a lot of weight to ferry around, but less than her equivalent in tractors and carrying-machines; and she could seal off her huge lungs and work in vacuum conditions, or in noxious gases, for several hours at a time. Hippos came in a wide variety of colours. This one was pale yellow.

“Do you think I'm pregnant, Man?” she said. “That would be most inconvenient.”

The lowered head made her look as though she should have been blushing as she spoke. David snorted with suppressed laughter.

“I don't think it's likely, darling,” he said. “I know you go in for delayed implantation, but it must be a couple of years since you last went to a dance, isn't it?”

“But it would be inconvenient, all the same?”

“Understatement of the century.”

Hippos were the kindest, gentlest, most lovable creatures David knew. This made their lifecycle seem even more horrifying than it was. At certain seasons on their native planet they would meet for a “dance”, a massive sexual thresh-about in the sludge, with all the males impregnating all the females, if possible. Then nothing happened till the wind was right and the weather was right, when the females would go through their incredibly brief pregnancy, which would end with their backs erupting into a series of vents and releasing a cloud of seedlike objects, each consisting of a hard little nut at the core which contained the foetus and a fluffy ball of sticky filaments surrounding it, the whole thing light enough to float on the wind like thistledown. These “seeds” seemed to have some instinct that drew them towards living flesh; those that failed to find any perished, but those that landed on a warm-blooded animal stuck there and burrowed in, completing their foetal development inside the host, supplying themselves with all their physical and chemical needs from the host's organs. The host did not survive the process. The variety of possible hosts accounted for the different colours of Hippos.

David thought it extremely unlikely that this one was pregnant. For some reason he couldn't at the moment recall the maximum known period between fertilization and birth, but it couldn't possibly be two years. Surely not. But just supposing . . . the idea of surveying a planet in which Hippo spores might still be drifting on the wind made him shudder. And Hippo herself wouldn't be much use till her back had healed. He decided to change the subject.

“I'm afraid Cat's dead,” he said.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Hippo. “Where did you find him?”

“Out among the rocks over there. He must have been scrambling about and fallen, or something.”

“Are you sure he's dead? Couldn't Doc do anything?”

“I doubt it. He feels very dead to me.”

“Do go and fetch Doc, Man. Please”

“All right.”

Doc was in a bad mood. As David lifted his bucket off its gimbals he put a hooter out of the water and said, “I thought you told me this wasn't an earthquake planet.”

“Nor it is.”

“Whole ship's been jumping around like a . . . Hi! Careful! You're going to spill me, you dry slob.”

David ignored him, but carried the bucket rapidly through the shuddering ship till he reached the entry port.

“Hippo” he yelled. “Stop that! You'll have the ship over!”

Apologetically she moved away from the strut.

“Oh, I
am
sorry, Man,” she lowed. “The Bandy should have told me.”

“Didn't notice,” squeaked the Bandicoot, awake now. “Why should I?”

“Where are the others, Bandy?” called David.

“Coming, coming,” shrilled the Bandicoot.

Bandicoots were a four-sexed species, deriving from a planet so harsh that it took many square miles to support a single specimen. They had evolved great telepathic powers in order to achieve occasional meetings of all four sexes, and this made them an ideal communications network on the many planets where mechanical systems were swamped by local radio stars. David had no idea why they were called Bandicoots—they looked more like armadillos on stilts—and even after years of companionship he couldn't tell one from another. They could, of course, because the network only functioned at full strength when all four sexes took part. Their normal voices were far above David's hearing-range; the twittering he could just hear was for them the deepest of basses.

“Here's your patient, Doc,” he said, settling the bucket by Cat's body.

Doc extended a pseudopod, shimmering orange with the firelight and green with its own luminescence, and made it flow up Cat's spine. His hooter emerged from the water.

“Blunt instrument,” he said.

“Sure it wasn't a fall?” said David.

“Course I am, you idiot. It takes more than a fall to kill a Cat. You have to know exactly how and where to hit. Somebody did.”

“Somebody?” said Hippo. “I thought there wasn't anybody on this planet. Skunk said so.”

“How long ago, Doc?” said David. “Sure he's dead?”

“I'm still looking. H'm.”

David had never much cared for Doc's bedside manner, but had always trusted him totally, as all the crew had to trust each other. Now he wondered how, that time he was infested with green-fever larvae out round Delta Orion, he could have lain so calmly and let Doc extend his filaments all through his body, locating and destroying the little wrigglers and modifying David's autoimmune system to produce antibodies against the bacteria they had carried. Doc was a sea anemone. The pseudopod he was using to explore Cat's body was a specialized section of his digestive organs, and the filament tips were capable of recognizing at a touch the identity of all the microscopic particles which he needed for the endless process of renewing every cell in his body once a week. Almost all Doc's life was taken up with the process of self-renewal, but he said it was worth the trouble because it made him immortal. It also made him a good doctor, when he could spare the time.

“Tsk, tsk,” he said. “Yes, dead as nails, whatever they are. About twenty minutes ago.”

“That's not long,” said Hippo. “Can't you patch him up?”

“I'd have a go if it was you, darling,” said Doc. “It's not worth the effort for a Cat.”

“But you spent so much time looking after it,” said Hippo, pleadingly.