Saturn Rukh (25 page)

“Fortunately,” interjected Dan, “the radiation dose received by an organ is proportional to the density of the organ. Most of a rukh is air, so not only is the radiation dose spread out over a wide volume, most of the dose is absorbed by the air, not the body tissue. The rukh will have a nasty burn where the reactor is now lying, but the rest of it shouldn’t suffer too much.”

“We should get it out as quick as we can, anyway,” insisted Sandra. “The first rule of being a good symbiote is not to harm your host.”

“I’m afraid we’re more parasite than symbiote,” said Dan, handing his soup bowl to Puss to put into the dishwasher. “But I agree. Let’s get a move on.”

“Right!” said Rod, taking command. He looked at Seichi. “You’ll have to stay here, of course, Seichi. We’ll need an expert at the scottyboard to give commands to Tabby and get the reactor started once we have it free. Just to make sure we have enough hands to handle the reactor, all the rest of us will be going to haul it out of the rukh’s gizzard.”

Seichi wished that it were otherwise. He would greatly enjoy the experience of trekking across the back of a being as large as the Imperial Palace Gardens. But he knew he must subjugate his personal desires for the greater benefit of the entire crew. He now began to appreciate the feelings that the American
Apollo
command module astronauts must have felt—the ones that stayed up in their lonely orbit about the Moon while their comrades had the opportunity to visit the lunar surface.

“I shall be at my assigned post when needed,” he replied, bowing. “First, however, I shall make you additional meta torches.” He opened the door to the engineering sector and started touching the icons on the mechfab console inside the door.

“And I’m going to have Mouser braid us some decently thick climbing lines,” said Chastity, heading for the scottyboard on the control deck above. “Those hextube strings may be strong enough for a safety line, but they’re too thin and slippery for climbing and belaying.”

~ * ~

While Seichi serenely watched their departure from his post behind the holoviewport high above them, the remainder of the crew exited out on the airlock door and made their way onto the quiveringly alive “ground” in their bright yellow saturnsuits with their different-color reflective identification bands. Each carried extra tanks of oxygen, bottles of water, and as much line as they could shoulder. He or she bounced through the forest of feathers in a ragged column. While the tailenders would wait under a break in the feather cover through which could be seen the Hoytether passing overhead, the leaders would bound ahead to the next break where the Hoytether could be spotted again. After hiking along the bouncy surface for about half a kilometer, they began to notice that the canopy overhead was now closer to the ground, and the rush of air across the tips of the feathers became so loud they could hardly hear each other through their radio link. They were approaching the leading edge of the wing of the giant bird. They turned up the volume in their helmet earphones and continued on.

Once they had reached the leading edge of the wing, they turned and headed inward to pick up the end of the Hoytether attached to the reactor. Their search was aided by Seichi, who had jury-rigged a radio transmitter to the power line, causing it to give off a signal that they could home in on with their helmet radios. It didn’t take long to find the other loop segment of the Hoytether and they started along it.

“The ground is starting to really slope downward here,” said Rod as he gathered the group together under a break in the canopy. “Drop your empty tanks and water bottles here. Tie them to a quill so they’ll be there when we come back. We’ll then lash to each other and head on downhill, anchormen tied to a quill while the climber is belayed to the next quill.”

The surface got steeper and the feathers got smaller and more dense. They were in no danger of falling off since there were so many quill roots to grab on to. But that also meant that the Hoytether leading to the reactor stayed out of reach at the top of the feather canopy. Rod called a halt.

“It looks like my idea of hauling the reactor out by pulling on the Hoytether from on top of the wing isn’t going to work. We’re too tiny. We’re dwarfed by all these gigantic feathers. Even if we climbed a feather and pulled the tether down to ground level where we could anchor our feet against a quill and pull, the tether would just get caught in the feathers somewhere between us and the reactor.” He took a big breath. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to climb down into the mouth of this beast and work inside where there aren’t any feathers to snag the tether.”

They found a break in the black feather canopy where the Hoytether was only a few tens of meters overhead. With a boost from Rod and Pete pulling on long lines from higher up on the wing edge, and Dan and Chastity helping her keep her balance with lines from the side, Sandra, chosen because she was lightest, managed to shinny up a feather and tie a line to the multiline Hoytether passing overhead. The Hoytether, which was normally cylindrical in shape when hanging freely, had collapsed into a double-sided tape, draped from one feather top to the next. They climbed up the line to the Hoytether and soon were traveling over the top of the feather canopy, climbing partially downward and partially horizontally with the Hoytether acting as a multiline rope ladder.

“Look over there,” said Dan during a rest stop. He pointed to the inflated keel at the center of the giant bird. They still were too close to the rukh to get any sense of how big it was, but the keel stuck up out of the flat forest of black wing feathers like a small feather-covered ridge, making it visible at a distance.

“I don’t see anything,” said Chastity.

“It’s what you don’t see that counts,” said Dan. “When we flew over this bird earlier, there was a large eye perched at the front of that keel ridge. Now it’s gone. Instead there is a bunch of neck segments running down the ridge and heading over the leading edge of the wing and down under the left side.”

“I bet that top eye is inside the mouth,” said Sandra. “Trying to do something about that nuclear reactor.”

“That could be a problem,” said Rod. “I don’t fancy meeting a giant caterpillar face to face in a dark cave.”

“We have it trained, Rod,” said Sandra confidently. “Just make sure you take your meta torch with you and you’ll be perfectly safe ... probably.”

They finally came to the place where the Hoytether parted from the feather tops and hung freely downward. Instead of being collapsed into a tape as it was in the feather canopy, the twelve primary lines of the Hoytether had sprung open to form a hollow cylinder a meter in diameter. At intervals, the primary lines were cross-connected by secondary lines that gave them “rungs” to climb on.

“What a wind!” exclaimed Sandra as she clambered into the comparative safety of the inside of the one-meter-diameter Hoytether. “Good thing we have these helmets.” She was even more glad that she had a helmet on when her visor was suddenly splattered by a jellyfish-like flying creature. Sandra thought it might have been a ringswimmer, but there wasn’t enough of it left for accurate determination.

Now that they were out from under the feather canopy, they could look around and see that the rukh was still flying in formation with the large flock of rukhs that had formed the hunting cone. They were no longer in the hunting cone formation, but instead were flying around in lazy circles.

“Dan,” said Sandra. “Notice that nearly all the other rukhs have their two eyes settled in their niches at the top and bottom of the keel.”

“Also notice that both eyes are open,” said Dan. “When they were in their hunting cone formation, only the bottom eye was open. The top eye was closed. Probably asleep.”

“Makes sense,” said Sandra. “Especially if they have highly intelligent brains. For some reason, intelligent brains need to have rest periods—probably to take care of computer housekeeping functions like erasing garbage bits, firming up memories, and rearranging files. Dolphins sleep that way. One eye and one brain hemisphere at a time. One eye-brain set keeps watch and keeps the dolphin swimming and coming up for breath, while the other eye-brain set takes a nap. Then they switch. The rukhs must do the same thing with their pair of eye-brain systems.”

Climbing rapidly down the inside of the multiline tether, the group soon cleared the wing edge and hung in space in front of the gigantic mouth of the amazing winged beast. The mouth was an oval cavity some two hundred meters high and four hundred meters wide. The opening pulsed slowly as it gulped in air, sparsely laden with food. The illumination from the setting sun allowed them a glimpse inside.

“Works just like a baleen whale, all right,” remarked Dan, as he made sure that images of what he was seeing through his visor were being broadcast back to the massive memory banks of Jeeves while simultaneously being broadcast back to Earth. The wingtips of the rukh tilted slightly, sending the giant body off in pursuit of a larger-than-normal morsel. At the same time deep pulses of sound could be heard coming from the leading edge of the wing.

“That proves that they don’t just hunt by eyesight,” said Dan. “Both eyes are inside the mouth, but the creature just sensed a large piece of prey and changed course to get it. It must be able to see by sonar as well as light.”

The prey was a medium-sized bubblefloater. They watched as the balloon-like creature passed below them and into the maw of the giant bird. The balloon portion of the bubblefloater burst as it struck the sharp edges of the long stiff feathers hanging from the roof of the mouth. Although the feathers were long, they were not very wide. The barbicels that kept the feather barbs locked together must have been numerous and strong, for the barbs did not separate under the impact.

“Although they may look like feathers, they act like a knife blade,” remarked Sandra. “Featherblades instead of featherbones.”

They watched as the shreds of balloon, strands of tendrils, and pieces of bubblefloater body dripped down off the featherblades into a conical cavity at the base of the mouth. At the bottom of the cone could be seen pulsating bladder sections covered with what looked like black shark teeth, which ground away at the dripping fragments, turning them into a pulp that drained into the gullet at the center.

“Thank heaven the reactor didn’t go in there,” said Rod, looking at the pulsating gizzard with its grinding shark teeth. “Where did it go, anyway?”

“After the rukh sieves the food out of the air with the featherblades, it channels the air to its exhaust jets,” said Dan. “Since the reactor hasn’t come out of the end of the jets, it must still be inside the rukh’s windpipe, hanging from the end of the Hoytether.”

Below them, the Hoytether described an arc that went through the featherblade curtains and into the dark recesses of the mouth. They continued their climb down the inside of the tether and started to approach the featherblade curtain.

“Look over there at the bottom of the keel,” said Dan, pointing. “When we swung by here a few hours ago, there was an eye there. But now it too has left its perch and gone into the mouth. All that’s left outside is the base of the neck.”

They could now see where the neck segments from the lower eye joined up with the neck segments from the upper eye at a point where the featherblade curtain met the inner wall of the mouth. The slender inflated necks didn’t move in the turbulent wind. They were securely attached to the wall by the pairs of claws between each neck segment. The two necks went around the curtain and past the gullet into the windpipe, heading in the same direction as the Hoytether.

“Looks like they’re in there waiting for us,” said Rod, concern in his voice. “But there’s no helping it. In we go…” He continued the climb down the swinging Hoytether.

By the time they passed over the lower “lip” of the mouth they were traveling almost horizontal. It was now possible to slip and fall through the large gaps in the Hoytether, so Rod made sure that everyone used a safety line as well as a climbing line attached to the person ahead and the person behind.

“Pit stop!” Rod announced as they came to the baleen curtain.

“What!?” shouted Chastity, who was leading the way.

“Whatever it is we’re going to run into in there, it’s more than likely to scare the piss out of us,” said Rod. “So to make sure that doesn’t happen, we’re going to piss right here before we go in. Downwind first. That’s you, Chass. The rest of us will look the other way. When you’re done, give a holler, and the next one will take the upwind position.”

“This is crazy,” said Chastity in protest. But despite her protest she started to roll down the top of her saturnsuit pants.

Soon the necessities had been taken care of. They started through the featherblade curtain, Rod first, meta torch at the ready, and Sandra last.

“I wonder if the gizzard noticed the new taste among all its usual tastes?” mused the scientist in Sandra as she looked down the one hundred meters of dripping featherblades into the grinding gizzard below. As she watched, another small cloud of miniature bubblefloaters struck the featherblades and were sliced to dripping shreds that became grist for the living mill below.

Dan was in front of Sandra and stopped to look at the featherblades that had been parted by the Hoytether.

“Seems to be just a specialized feather with an edge as sharp as a razor,” said Dan as he felt the edge with his yellow-gloved finger, then looked at the undamaged glove. “Not as sharp as a razor—more like ‘as sharp as a knife’—a slightly dull knife.”