Limits (23 page)

“See you soon,” Bronze Legs said. He led Rachel after the fuxes. “He
won’t want company now. He’ll guard the ‘nest’ till the little ones eat most of it and come out. Then he’ll go sex-crazy, but by that time we’ll be back. How are you feeling?”

“A little woozy,” Rachel said.
“Too much blood.”

“Take my arm.”

The color of their arms matched perfectly.

“Is she safe here? I mean
he
.
Deadeye.”

“He’ll learn to walk faster than you think, and he’s got his spear. We haven’t seen anything dangerous around. Rachel, they don’t have a safety hangup.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sometimes they get killed. Okay, they get killed. Deadeye has his reasons for being here. If his children live, they’ll own this place. Some of the adults’ll stay to help them along. That’s how they get new territory.”

Confusing.
“You mean they have to be born here?”

“Right.
Fuxes visit. They don’t conquer. After awhile they have to go home. Grace is still trying to figure if that’s physiology or just a social quirk. But sometimes they visit to give birth, and that’s how they get new homes. I don’t think fuxes’ll ever be space travelers.”

“We have it easier.”

“That we do.”

“Bronze Legs, I want to make love to you.”

He missed a step. He didn’t look at her. “No. Sorry.”

“Then,” she said a little desperately, “
will
you at least tell me what’s wrong? Did I leave out a ritual, or take too many baths or something?”

Bronze Legs said, “Stage fright.”

He sighed when he saw that she didn’t understand. “Look, ordinarily I’d be looking for some privacy for us…which wouldn’t be easy, because taking your clothes off in an unfamiliar domain…never mind. When I make love with a woman I don’t want a billion strangers criticizing my technique.”

“The memory tapes.”

“Right.
Rachel, I don’t know
where
you find men who want that kind of publicity. Windstorm and I, we let a post-male watch us once…but after all, they aren’t
human
.”

“I could turn off the tape.”

“It records memories, right? Unless you forgot about me completely,
which I choose to consider impossible, you’d be remembering me for the record. Wouldn’t you?”

She nodded.
And went back to the crawler to sleep.
Others would be sleeping in the tents; she didn’t want the company.

The howler’s motor was half old, half new. The new parts had a han
d
made look: bulky, with file marks. One of the fans was newer, cruder,
heavier
than the other. Rachel could only hope the Medeans were good with machinery.

The tough-looking redhead asked, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

“I took a howler across most of Koschei,” Rachel told her. She straightened,
then
swung up onto the saddle. Its original soft plastic seat must have disintegrated; what replaced it looked and felt like tanned skin.
“Top speed, a hundred and forty kilometers an hour.
Override—this switch—boosts the fans so I can fly. Ten minutes of flight, then the batteries block up and I’ve got to come down. Six slots in the ground-effect skirt so I can go in any direction. The main thing is to keep my balance.
Especially when I’m flying.”

Windstorm did not seem reassured. “You won’t get that kind of perfo
r
mance out of a fifty-year-old machine. Treat it tender. And don’t fly if you’re in a hurry, because you’ll be using most of the power just to keep you up. Two more things—” She reached out to put Rachel’s hands on a switch and a knob. Her own hands were large and strong, with prominent veins.
“Searchlight.
This knob swings it around, and
this
raises and lowers it. It’s your best weapon. If it doesn’t work, flee. Second thing is your goggles. Sling them around your neck.”

“Where are they?”

Windstorm dug goggles from the howler’s saddlebag: a flexible strap and two large hemispheres of red glass. A similar set swung from her own neck. “You should never have to ask that question again on Medea. Here.”

The other vehicles were ready to go. Windstorm jogged to her own howler, leaving Rachel with the feeling that she had failed a test.

It was past noon of the Medean day. Harvester was riding Giggles, the six-legged virgin. The rest of the fuxes rode the ground-effect raft. The v
e
hicles rode high, above the forest of chrome yellow bushes.

Windstorm spoke from the intercom. “We stay ahead of the crawlers and to both sides. We’re looking for anything dangerous. If you see something you’re afraid of, sing out. Don’t wait.”

Rachel eased into position. The feel of the howler was coming back to her. It weighed half a kiloton, but you still did some of your steering by shifting weight.… “Windstorm, aren’t you tired?”

“I got some sleep while Deadeye was dropping her hindquarters.”

Maybe Windstorm didn’t trust anyone else to supervise the rammer. Rachel was actually relieved. It struck her that most Medeans had lost too many of their “safety hangups.”

The bushes ended sharply, at the shore of a fast-flowing river carrying broad patches of scarlet scum. Some of the patches bloomed with flowers of startling green. Harvester boarded the raft to cross.

There was wheatfield beyond, but the yellow plants were feathery and four meters high. Hemispheres of white rock appeared with suspicious re
g
ularity. The expedition had swung around to north-and-heatward. Argo stood above the peaks of a rounded mountain range. Many-limbed birds rode the air above them.

Rachel looked up to see one dropping toward her face.

She could see the hooked beak and great claws aiming at her eyes. Her blind fingers sought the searchlight controls. She switched on the searchlight and swung the beam around and up.
Like a laser cannon:
first
fire,
then
aim.
Calmly, now.

The beam found the bird and illuminated it in blue fire: a fearsome sight. Wings like oiled
leather,
curved meat-ripping beak, muscular forelegs with long talons: and the hind legs were long, slender, and tipped each with a single sword blade. They weren’t for walking at all,
nor
for anything but weaponry.

The bird howled, shut its eyes tight, and tried to turn in the air. Its body curled in a ball; its wings folded around it. Rachel dropped the beam to keep it pinned until it smacked hard into the wheatfield.

The intercom said, “Nice.”

“Thank you.” Rachel sounded deceptively calm.

“Grace wants to call a halt,” Windstorm said.
“Up by that next boulder.”

“Fine.”

The boulders were all roughly the same size: fairly regular hemispheres one and a half meters across.

Grace and Bronze Legs came out of the crawler lugging instruments on a dolly. They unloaded a box on one side of the boulder, and Grace went to work on it. Bronze Legs moved the dolly around to the other side and u
n
furled a silver screen. When Rachel tried to speak, Grace shushed her. She fiddled a bit with various dials,
then
turned on the machine.

A shadow-show formed on the screen: a circle of shadow, and darker shapes within. Grace cursed and touched dials, feather-lightly. The blurred shadows took on detail.

Shadows of bones, lighter shadows of flesh.
There were four oversized heads, mostly jaws, overlapping near the center; and four tails near the rim, and a maze of legs and spines between.
Four creatures all wrapped intimately around each other to just fill the shell.

“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 big-headed foetuses 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 d
e
signs for crude steam engines and myriads of wafer-sized computer brains, and returning to find steam robots everywhere: farmland, city streets, wi
l
derness, 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 a
l
lowed 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.