Flare Time

Larry Niven

Produced by calibre 0.6.40

FLARE TIME

If the starship's arrival had done nothing else for Bronze Legs, this was enough: he was seeing the sky again.

For this past week the rammers had roamed through Touchdown City. The fifty-year-old colony was still small; everybody knew everybody. It was hard to get used to, this influx of oddly-accented strangers stumbling about with vacuous smiles and eyes wide with surprise and pleasure. Even the Medean humans were catching the habit. In his thirty-four earth years of life Calvin "Bronze Legs" Miller had explored fifteen thousand square miles of the infinite variety that was Medean. Strange, that it took people from another world to make him look up.

Here was a pretty picture: sunset over the wild lands north of the colony. Peaks to the south were limned in bluish-white from the farmlands beyond, from the lamps that kept terrestrial plants growing. Everything else was red, infinite shades of red. To heatward a level horizon cut the great disk of Argo in half. You could feel the heat on your cheek, and watch sullenly glowing storms move in bands across the face of the red-hot super jovian world. To coldward, Phrixus and Helle were two glaring pink dots following each other down to the ridge. The Jet Stream stretched straight across the blue sky, a pinkish-white band of cloud from horizon to horizon. Thirty or forty multicolored balloons, linked in a cluster, were settling to graze a scum-covered rain pool in the valley below him.

Blue-tinged shadows pooled in the valley, and three human shapes moved through the red and orange vegetation. Bronze Legs recognized Lightning Harness and Grace Carpenter even at this distance. The third had a slightly hunchbacked look, and a metal headdress gleamed in her straight black hair. That would be Rachel Subramaniam's memory recording equipment. Her head kept snapping left and right, ever eager for new sights.

Bronze Legs grinned. He tried to imagine how this must look to a rammer, an off worlder; he succeeded only in remembering himself as a child. All this strangeness; all this red.

He turned the howler and continued uphill.

At the crest of the ridge a fux waited for him, the pinkish-white suns behind her. She was a black silhouette, four thin legs and two thin arms, a pointed face and a narrow torso bent in an L: a lean, mean centaur-shape.

As he topped the ridge and let the howler settle on its air cushion, the fur backed away several meters. Bronze Legs wondered why, then guessed the answer. It wasn't the smell of him. Fuses liked that. She was putting the ridge between herself and the white glare from Touchdown City's farming lamps. She said, "I am Long Nose."

"Bronze Legs. I meet you on purpose."

"I meet you on purpose. How goes your foray to heatward?"

"We start tomorrow at dawn."

"You postponed it once before." She was accusing him. The fuxes were compulsive about punctuality; an odd trait in a Bronze Age culture. Like certain traits in humans, it probably tied into their sex lives. Timing could be terribly important when a fux was giving birth.

"The ship from the stars came," he said. "We waited. We want to take one of the star people along, and the delay lets us recheck the vehicles."

Long Nose was black with dull dark-red markings. She bore a longbow over one shoulder and a quiver and shovel slung over her lower back. Her snout was sharply pointed, but not abnormally so, for a fux. She might be named for keen curiosity or a keen sense of smell. She said, "I learn that your purpose is more than exploration, but not even the post-males can tell what it is."

"Power," said Bronze Legs. "The harnessed lightning that makes our machines go comes as light from Argo. In the Hot End the clouds will never hide Argo from our sight. Our lightning makers can run without rest."

"Go north instead," said Long Nose. "You will find it safer and cooler too. Storms run constantly in the north; I have been there. Free lightning for your use."

If she'd been talking to Lightning Harness she would have suffered through an hour's lecture. How the heat exchangers ran on the flood of infrared light from Argo, focused by mirrors. How Argo stayed always in the same place in Medea's sky, so that mirrors could be mounted on a hillside facing to heatward, and never moved again. But the colony was growing, and Medea's constant storms constantly blocked the mirrors Bronze Legs only grinned at her. "Why don't we just do it our way? Who-all is coming?"

"Only six of us. Dark Wind's children did not emerge in time. Deadeye will desert us early; she will give birth in a day and must stay to guard the . . . Is 'nest' the word you use?"

"Right." Of all the words that might describe the fuxes' way of giving birth, "nest" carried the least unpleasant connotations.

"So, she will be guarding her 'nest' when we return. She will be male then. Sniffer intends to become pregnant tonight; she will leave us further on, and be there to help us on our return, if we need help."

"We take a post-male, Harvester, and another six-leg female, Broad Flanks, who can carry him some of the time. Gimpy wants to come. Will she slow us?"

Bronze Legs laughed. He knew Gimpy; a four-leg female as old as some post-males, who had lost her right foreleg to the viciously fast Medean monster humans called a B-70. Gimpy was fairly agile, considering. "She could crawl on her belly for all we care. It's the crawlers that'll slow us, and the power plant. We're moving a lot of machinery: the prefab power plant, housing for technicians, sensing tools, digging tools-"

"What tools should we take?"

"Go armed. You won't need water bags; we'll make our own water. We made you some parasols made from mirror-cloth. They'll help you stand the heat, for awhile. When it gets really hot you'll have to ride in the crawlers."

"We will meet you at the crawling machines, at dawn." Long Nose turned and moved down slope into a red-and-orange jungle, moving something like a cat in its final rush at a bird: legs bent, belly low.

They had been walking since early afternoon: twelve hours, with a long break for lunch. Lightning sighed with relief as he set down the farming lamp he'd been carrying on his shoulders. Grace helped him spread the tripod and extend the mount until the lamp stood six meters tall.

Rachel Subramaniam sat down in the orange grass and rubbed her feet. She was puffing.

Grace Carpenter, a Medean xenobiologist and in her early forties, was a large-boned woman, broad of silhouette and built like a farm wife. Lightning Harness was tall and lean and lantern-jawed, a twenty-four-year-old power plant engineer. Both were pale as ghosts beside Rachel. On Medean only the farmers were tanned.

Rachel was built light. Some of her memory recording equipment was embedded in padding along her back, giving her a slightly hunchbacked look. Her scalp implants were part of a polished silver cap, the badge of her profession. She had spent the past two years under the sunlights aboard a web rainship. Her skin was bronze. To Rachel Medea's pale citizens had seemed frail, un-athletic, until now. Now she was annoyed. There had been little opportunity for hikes aboard Morven; but she might have noticed the muscles and hard hands common to any recent colony.

Lightning pointed uphill. "Company."

Something spidery stood on the crest of the coldward ridge, black against the suns. Rachel asked, "What is it?"

"Fux. Female, somewhere between seven and eighteen years of age, and not a virgin. Beyond that I can't tell from here."

Rachel was astonished. "How can you know all that?"

"Count the legs. Grace, didn't you tell her about fuxes?"

Grace was chuckling. "Lightning's showing off'. Dear, the fuxes go fertile around age seven. They generally have their first litter right away. They drop their first set of hindquarters with the eggs in them, and that gives them a half a lifetime to learn how to move as a quadruped. Then they wait till they're seventeen or eighteen to have their second litter, unless the tribe is under populated, which sometimes happens. Dropping the second set of hindquarters exposes the male organs."

"And she's got four legs. 'Not a virgin.' I thought you must have damn good eyes, Lightning."

"Not that good."

"What are they like?"

"Well," said Grace, "the post-males are the wise ones. Bright, talkative, and not nearly so . . . frenetic as the females. It's hard to get a female to stand still for long. The males . . . oh, for three years after the second litter they're kind of crazy. The tribe keeps them penned. The females only go near them when they want to get pregnant."

Lightning had finished setting the lamp. "Take a good look around before I turn this on. You know what you're about to see?"

Dutifully, Rachel looked about her, memorizing.

The farming lamps stood everywhere around Touchdown City; it was less a city than a village surrounded by farmlands. For more than a week Rachel had seen only the tiny part of Medean claimed by humans . .until, in early afternoon of this long Medean day, she and Grace and Lightning had left the farmlands. The reddish light had bothered her for a time. But there was much to see; and after all, this was the real Medean.

Orange grass stood knee-high in slender leaves with sharp hard points. A score of flaccid multicolored balloons, linked by threads that resembled spiderweb, had settled on a stagnant pond. There was a grove of almost-trees, hairy rather than leafy, decked in all the colors of autumn.

The biggest was white and bare and dead.

Clouds of bugs filled the air everywhere except around the humans. A pair of things glided into the swarms, scooping their dinner out of the air. They had five-meter wingspans, small batlike torsos, and huge heads that were all mouth, with gaping hair-filled slits behind the head, where gill slits would be on a fish. Their undersides were sky blue.

A six-legged creature the size of a sheep stood up against the dead almost-tree, gripped it with four limbs, and seemed to chew at it. Rachel wondered if it was eating the wood. Then she saw myriads of black dots spread across the white, and a long, sticky tongue slurping them up.

Grace tapped Rachel's arm and pointed into the grass. Rachel saw a warrior's copper shield painted with cryptic heraldics. It was a flattened turtle shell, and the yellow-eyed beaked face that looked back at her was not turtle-like at all. Something small struggled in its beak. Suddenly the mock turtle whipped around and zzzzed away on eight churning legs.

There was no bottom shell to hamper the legs.

The real Medean.

"Now," said Lightning. He turned on the farming lamp.

White light made the valley suddenly less alien. Rachel felt something within her relaxing . . . but things were happening all around her.

The flat turtle stopped abruptly. It swallowed hard, then pulled head and limbs under its shell. The flying bug-strainers whipped around and flew hard for the hairy trees. The clouds of bugs simply vanished. The long-tongued beast let go of its tree, turned and scratched at the ground and was gone in seconds.

"This is what happens when a sun flares," Lightning said. "They're both flare suns. Flares don't usually last more than half an hour, and most Medean animals just dig in till it's over. A lot of plants go to seed. Like this grass-"

Yes, the slender leaves were turning puffy, cottony. But the hairy trees reacted differently; they were suddenly very slender, the foliage pulled tight against the trunks. The balloons weren't reacting at all.

Lightning said, "That's why we don't worry much about Medean life attacking the crops. The lamps keep them away. But not all of them-"

"On Medean every rule has exceptions," Grace said.

"Yeah. Here, look under the grass." Lightning pushed cotton-covered leaves aside with his hands, and the air was suddenly full of white fluff. Rachel saw millions of black specks covering the lower stalks. "We 0611 them locusts. They swarm in flare time and eat everything in sight. Terran plants poison them, of course, but they wreck the crops first." He let the leaves close. By now there was white fluff everywhere, like a low-lying fog patch moving east on the wind. "What else can I show you? Keep your eyes on the balloons. And are there cameras in that thing?"

Rachel laughed and touched the metal helmet. Sometimes she could forget she was wearing it; but her neck was thicker, more muscular than the average woman's. "Cameras? In a sense. My eyes are cameras for the memory tape."

The balloons rested just where they had been. The artificial flare hadn't affected them . . . wait, they weren't flaccid any more. They were swollen, taut, straining at the rootlets that held them to the bottom of the pond. Suddenly they rose, all at once, still linked by spiderweb. Beautiful.

"They use the IJY for energy to make hydrogen," said Grace. "UV wouldn't bother them anyway; they have to take more of it at high altitude."

"I've been told . . . are they intelligent?"

"Balloons? No!" Grace actually snorted. "They're no brighter than so much seaweed . . . but they own the planet. We've sent probes to the Hot End, you know. We saw balloons all the way. And we've seen them as far coldward . . . west, you'd say . . . as far west as the Icy Sea. We haven't gone beyond the rim of ice yet."

"But you've been on Medean fifty years?"

"And just getting started," Lightning said. He turned off the farming lamp.

The world was plunged into red darkness.

The fluffy white grass was gone, leaving bare soil as warm with black specks. Gradually the hairy trees loosened, fluffed out. Soil churned near the dead tree and released the tree feeder.

Grace picked up a few of the "locusts." They were not bigger than termites. Held close to the eye they each showed a translucent bubble on its back. "They can't swarm," Grace said with satisfaction. "Our flare didn't last long enough. They couldn't make enough hydrogen."

"Some did," Lightning said. There were black specks on the wind; not many.

"Always something new," said Grace.

Tractor probe Junior was moving into the Hot End. Ahead was the vast desert, hotter than boiling water, where Argo stood always at noon. Already the strange dry plants were losing their grip, leaving bare rock and dust. At the final shore of the Ring Sea the waves were sudsy with salt in solution, and the shore was glittering white. The hot steamy wind blew inland, to heatward, and then upward, carrying a freight of balloons.

The air was full of multicolored dots, all going up into the stratosphere. At the upper reach of the probe's vision some of the frailer balloons were popping, but the thin membranous corpses still fluttered toward heaven.

Rachel shifted carefully in her chair. She caught Bronze Legs Miller watching her from a nearby table. Her answering grin was rueful.

She had not finished the hike. Grace and Lightning had been setting up camp when Bronze Legs Miller came riding down the hill. Rachel had grasped that golden opportunity. She had returned to Touchdown City riding behind Bronze Legs on the howler's saddle. After a night of sleep she still ached in every muscle.

"Isn't it a gorgeous sight?" Mayor Curly Jackson wasn't eating. He watched avidly, with his furry chin in his hands and his elbows on the great oaken table-the dignitaries' table the Medeans were so proud of; it had taken forty years to grow the tree.

Medean had changed its people. Even the insides of buildings were different from those of other worlds. The communal dining hall was a great dome lit by a single lamp at its zenith. It was bright, and it cast sharp shadows. As if the early colonists, daunted by the continual light show- the flare suns, the bluish farming lamps, the red-hot storms moving across Argo-had given themselves a single sun indoors. But it was a wider, cooler sun, giving yellower light than a rammer was used to.

One great curve of the wall was a holograph projection screen. The tractor probe was tracing the path the expedition would follow and broadcasting what it saw. Now it moved over hills of white sea salt. The picture staggered and lurched with the probe's motion, and wavered with rising air currents.

Captain Janice Borg, staring avidly with a forkful of curry halfway to her mouth, jumped as Mayor Curly lightly punched her shoulder. The Mayor was blue eyes and a lump of nose poking through a carefully tended wealth of blond hair and beard. He was darkened by farming lamps. Not only did he supervise the farms; he farmed. "See it, Captain? That's why the Ring Sea is mostly fresh water."

Captain Borg's hair was auburn going gray. She was handsome rather than pretty. Her voice of command had the force of a bullwhip; one obeyed by reflex. Her off-duty voice was a soft, dreamy contralto. "Right. Right. The seawater moves always to the Hot End. It starts as glaciers, Doesn't it? They break off in the Icy Sea and float heatward. Any salt goes that way too. In the Hot End the water boils away . . . and you get some tides, don't you? Argo wobbles a little?"

"Well, it's Medean that wobbles a little, but-"

"Right, so the seawater spills off into the salt flats at high tide and boils away there. And the vapor goes back to the glaciers along the Jet Stream." She turned suddenly to Rachel and barked, "You getting all this?"

Rachel nodded, hiding a smile. More than two hundred years had passed on the settled worlds while Captain Borg cruised the trade circuit. She didn't really understand memory tapes. They were too recent.

Rachel looked about the communal dining hall and was conscious as always of the vast unseen audience looking through her eyes, listening through her ears, feeling the dwindling aches of a stiff hike, tasting blazing hot Medean curry through her mouth. It was all going into the memory tape, with no effort on her part.

Curly said, "We picked a good site for the power plant before the first probe broke down. Heatward slope of a hillside. We'll be coming up on it in a few hours. Is this the kind of thing you want, or am I boring you?"

"I want it all. Did you try that tape?"

The Mayor shook his head, his eyes suddenly evasive.

"Why not?"

"Well," the Mayor said slowly, "I'm a little leery of what I might remember. It's all filtered through your brain, isn't it, Rachel?"

"Of course."

"I don't think I'd like remembering being a girl."

Rachel was mildly surprised. Role-changing was part of the kick. Male or female, an epicurean or a superbly muscled physical culture addict or an intellectual daydreamer, a child again or an old woman . . . well, some didn't like it. "I could give you a man's tape, Curly. There's McAuliffe's balloon trip into the big gas giant in Sol system."

Captain Borg cut in sharply. "What about the Charles Baker Sontag tape? He did a year's tour in Miramon Lluagor system, Curly. The Lluagorians use balloons for everything. You'd love it."

Curly was confused. "Just what kind of balloons-"

"Not living things, Curly. Fabric filled with gas. Lluagor has a red dwarf sun. No radiation storms and not much ultraviolet. They have to put their farms in orbit, and they do most of their living in orbit, and it's all inflated balloons, even the spacecraft. The planet they use mainly for mining and factories, but it's pretty, too, so they've got cities slung under hundreds of gasbags."

The tractor probe lurched across mile after mile of dim-lit pink salt hills. Rachel remembered a memory tape in Morven's library: a critical reading of the Elder and Younger Eddas by a teacher of history and poetry. Would Medeans like that? Here you had the Land of the Frost Giants and the Land of the Fire Giants, with Midgard between . . . and the Ring Sea to stand in for the Midgard Serpent . . . and no dearth of epic monsters, from what she'd heard.

Captain Borg spoke with an edge in her voice. "Nobody's going to force you to use a new and decadent entertainment medium from the stars, Curly-"

"Oh, now, I didn't-"

"But there's a point you might consider. Distance."

"Distance?"

"There's the trade circuit. Earth, Toupan, Lluagor, Sereda, Horvendile, Koschei, Earth again. Six planets circling six stars a few light years apart. The web ramships go round and round, and everyone on the ring gets news, entertainment, seeds and eggs, new inventions. There's the trade circuit, and there's Medean. You're too far from Horvendile, Curly."

"Oddly enough, we're aware of that, Captain Borg."

"No need to get huffy. I'm trying to make a point."

"Why did you come?"

"Variety. Curiosity. The grass-is-always-greener syndrome. The same thing that made us rainmers in the first place." Captain Borg did not add altruism, the urge to keep the worlds civilized. "But will we keep coming? Curly, Medean is the strangest place that ever had a breathable atmosphere. You've got a potential tourist trap here. You could have ramships dropping by every twenty years!"

"We need that."

"Yes, you do. So remember that rammers don't build starships. It's taxpayers that build starships. What do they get out of it?"

"Memory tapes?"

"Yes. It used to be holos. Times change. Holos aren't as involving as memory tapes, and they take too long to watch. So it's memory tapes."

"Docs that mean we have to use them?"

"No," said Captain Borg.

"Then I'll try your tourist's view of Lluagor system, when I get time." Curly stood. "And I better get going. Twenty-five hours to dawn."

"It only takes ten minutes," Rachel said.

"How long to recover? How long to assimilate a whole earthyear of someone else's memories? I better wait."

After he was gone, Rachel asked, "What was wrong with giving him the Jupiter tape?"

"I remembered McAuliffe was a homosexual."

"So what? He was all alone in that capsule."

"It might matter to someone like Curly. I don't say it would, I say it might. Every world is different."

"You ought to know." The rumor mill said that Mayor Curly and Captain Borg had shared a bed. Though he hadn't shown it .

Too lightly, Captain Borg said, "I should but I don't."

"Oh?"

"He's . . . closed. It's the usual problem, I think. He sees me coming back in sixty or seventy years, and me ten years older. Doesn't want to get too involved."

"Janice?"

"Dammit, if they're so afraid of change, how could their parents have busted their asses to settle a whole new world? Change is the one thing yeah? What is it?"

"Did you ask him, or did he ask you?"

Captain Borg frowned. "He asked me. Why?"

"Nobody's asked me," said Rachel.

"Oh . . . Well, ask someone. Customs differ."

"But he asked you."

"I dazzled him with sex appeal. Or maybe not. Rachel, shall I ask Curly about it? There might be something we don't know. Maybe you wear your hair wrong."

Rachel shook her head. "No."

"But . . . okay. The rest of the crew don't seem to be having problems."

Nearly dawn. The sky was thick with dark clouds, but the heatward horizon was clear, with Argo almost fully risen. The dull red disk would never rise completely, not here. Already it must be sinking back.

It was earthnight now; the farming lamps were off. Crops and livestock kept terrestrial time. Rows of green plants stretched away to the south, looking almost black in this light. In the boundary of bare soil between the wilds and the croplands, half a dozen fuxes practiced spear casts. That was okay with Bronze Legs. Humans didn't spend much time in that border region. They plowed the contents of their toilets into it, to sterilize it of Medean microorganisms and fertilize it for next year's crops. The fuxes didn't seem to mind the smell.

Bronze Legs waited patiently beside his howler. He wished Windstorm would do the same.

The two house-sized crawlers were of a pattern familiar to many worlds: long, bulbous pressure hulls mounted on ground-effect platforms. They were decades old, but they had been tended with loving care. Hydrogen fuel cells powered them. One of the crawlers now carried, welded to its roof, a sender capable of reaching Morven in its present equatorial orbit: another good reason for waiting for the web rainship's arrival.

The third and largest vehicle was the power plant itself, fully assembled and tested, mounted on the ground-effect systems from two crawlers and with a crawler's control cabin welded on in front. It trailed a raft: yet another ground effect system covered by a padded platform with handrails. The fuxes would be riding that.

All vehicles were loaded and boarded well ahead of time. Windstorm Wolheim moved among them, ticking off lists in her head and checking them against what she could see. The tall, leggy redhead was a chronic worrier.

Phrixus (or maybe Helle) was suddenly there, a hot pink point near Argo. The fuxes picked up their spears and trotted off northward. Bronze Legs lifted his howler on its air cushion and followed. Behind him the three bigger vehicles whispered into action, and Windstorm ran for her howler.

Rachel was in the passenger seat of the lead crawler, looking out through the great bubble windscreen. In the Hot End the crawlers would house the power plant engineers. Now they were packed with equipment. Square kilometers of thin silvered plastic sheet, and knock-down frames to hold it all, would become solar mirrors. Black plastic and more frames would become the radiator fins, mounted on the back of that hill in the Hot End. There were spools of superconducting cable and flywheels for power storage. Rachel kept bumping her elbow on the corner of a crate.

The pinkish daylight was dimming, graying, as the Jet Stream spread to engulf the sky. The fuxes were far ahead, keeping no obvious formation. In this light they seemed a convocation of mythical monsters: centaurs, eight-limbed dragons, a misshapen dwarf. The dwarf was oddest of all. Rachel had seen him close: A nasty caricature of a man, with a foxy face, huge buttocks, exaggerated male organs, and (the anomaly) a tail longer than he was tall. Yet Harvester was solemn and slow-moving, and he seemed to have the respect of fuxes and humans both.

The vehicles whispered along at thirty kilometers an hour, uphill through orange grass, swerving around hairy trees. A fine drizzle began. Lightning Harness turned on the wipers.

Rachel asked, "Isn't this where we were a few days back?"

"Medean yesterday. That's right," said Grace.

"Hard to tell. We're going north, aren't we? Why not straight east?"

"It's partly for our benefit, dear. We'll be in the habitable domains longer. We'll see more variety; we'll both learn more. When we swing around to heatward we'll be nearer the north pole. It won't get hot so fast."

"Good."

Bronze Legs and a woman Rachel didn't know flanked them on the one-seater ground-effect vehicles, the bowlers. Bronze Legs wore shorts, and in fact his legs were bronze. Black by race, he'd paled to Rachel's color during years of Medean sunlight. Rachel asked, half to herself, "Why not just Bronze?"

Grace understood. "They didn't mean his skin."

"What?"

"The fuxes named him for the time his howler broke down and stranded him forty miles from civilization. He walked home. He was carrying some heavy stuff, but a troop of fuxes joined him and they couldn't keep up. They've got lots of energy but no stamina. So they named him Bronze Legs. Bronze is the hardest metal they knew, till we came."

The rain had closed in. A beast like yesterday's flying bug strainers took to the air almost under the treads. For a moment it was face to face with Rachel, its large eyes and tremendous mouth all widened in horror. A wing ticked the windshield as it dodged.

Lightning cursed and turned on the headlights. As if by previous agreement, lights sprang to life on the bowlers and the vehicles behind. "We don't like to do that," said Lightning.

"Do what?"

"Use headlights. Every domain is different. You never know what the local life will do when a flare comes, not till you've watched it happen. Here it's okay. Nothing worse than locusts."

Even the headlights had a yellowish tinge, Rachel thought.

The gray cliffs ahead ran hundreds of kilometers to heatward and coldward. They were no more than a few hundred feet high, but they were fresh and new. Medean wobbled a little in its course around Argo, and the tides could raise savage quakes. All the rocks had sharp angles; wind and life had not had a chance to wear them down.

The pass was new too, as if God had cleft the spine of the new mountains with a battle-ax. The floor of it was filled with rubble. The vehicles glided above the broken rock, riding high, with fans on maximum.

Now the land sloped gently down, and the expedition followed. Through the drizzle Bronze Legs glimpsed a grove of trees, hairy trees like those near Touchdown City, but different. They grew like spoons standing on end, with the cup of the spoon facing Argo. The ground was covered with tightly curled black filaments, a plant the color and texture of Bronze Legs' own hair.

They had changed domain. Bronze Legs hadn't been in this territory, but he remembered that Windstorm had. He called, "Anything unexpected around here?"

"B-70s."

"They do get around, don't they? Anything else?"

"It's an easy slope down to the shore," Windstorm called, "but then there's a kind of parasitic fungus floating on the ocean. Won't hurt us, but it can kill a Medean animal in an hour. I told Harvester. He'll make the others wait for us."

They rode in silence for a bit. Drizzle made it hard to see much. Bronze Legs wasn't worried. The B-70s would stay clear of their headlights. This was explored territory; and even after they left it, the probes had mapped their route.

"That professional tourist," Windstorm called suddenly. "Did you get to know her?"

"Not really. What about her? Mayor Curly said to be polite."

"When was I ever not polite? But I didn't grow up with her, Bronze Legs. Nobody did. We know more about fuxes than we do about rammers, and this one's peculiar for a rammer! How could a woman give up all her privacy like that?"

"You tell me."

"I wish I knew what she'd do in a church."

"At least she wouldn't close her eyes. She's a dedicated tourist. Can you picture that? But she might not get involved either." Bronze Legs thought hard before he added, "I tried one of those memory tapes."

"What? You?"

"History of the Fission Period in Eurasia, 1945-2010, from Morven's library. Education, not entertainment."

"Why that?"

"Well, what's it like?"

"It's . . . it's like I did a lot of research, and formed conclusions and checked them out and sometimes changed my mind, and it gave me a lot of satisfaction. There are still some open questions, like how the Soviets actually got the fission bomb, and the Vietnam War, and the Arab Takeover. But I know who's working on that, and . . . It's like that, but it Doesn't connect to anything. It sits in my head in a clump. But it's kind of fun, Windstorm, and I got it all in ten minutes. You want to hear a libelous song about President Peanut?"

Through the drizzle they could see the restless stirring of the Ring Ocean. A band of fuxes waited on the sand. Windstorm turned her howler in a graceful curve, back toward the blur of the crawlers' headlights, to lead them. Bronze Legs dowsed his lights and glided toward the fuxea.

They had chosen a good resting place, far from the dangerous shore, in a broad stretch of "black man's hair" that any marauder would have to cross. Most of the fuxes were lying down. The four-legged female had been impregnated six Medean days ago. Her time must be near. She scratched with sharp claws at her itching hindquarters.

Harvester came to meet Bronze Legs. The post-male biped was slow with age, but not clumsy. That tremendous length of black tail was good for his balance. It was tipped with a bronze spearhead. Harvester asked, "Will we follow the shoreline? If we may choose, we will keep your vessels between us and the shore."

"We plan to go straight across," Bronze Legs told him. "You'll ride the raft behind the bigger vessel."

"In the water are things dangerous to us," said Harvester. He glanced shoreward and added, "Things small, things large. A large one comes."

Bronze Legs took one look and reached for his intercom. "Lightning, Hairy, Jill Turn your searchlights on that thing, fast!"

The fuxes were up and reaching for their spears.

"So it's the fuxes who give you your nicknames," Rachel said. "Why did they call you Lightning?"

"I tend the machines that make lightning and move it through metal wires. At least, that's how we explained it to the fuxes. And Windstorm- you saw the big redhead girl on the other howler? She was on guard one earthnight when a troop of fuxes took a short cut through the wheat crop. She really gave them hell. Half of Touchdown City must have heard her."

"And you? Grace."

"They named me when I was a lot younger." Grace glared at Lightning, who was very busy driving and clearly not listening, and by no means was he smiling. "But they didn't call me Grace. The way we have children, the fuxes think that's hilarious." Rachel didn't ask.

"They called me Boobs."

Rachel felt the need for a change of subject. "Lightning, are you getting tired? Would you like me to take over?"

"I'm okay. Can you drive a crawler?"

"Actually, I've never done it. I can run a howler, though. In any terrain."

"Maybe we'll give you one after-"

Then Bronze Legs' voice bellowed from the intercom.

Something came out of the ocean: a great swollen myriapod with tiny jointed arms moving around a funnel-shaped mouth. Teeth churned in the gullet.

The fuxes cast their spears and fled. Bronze Legs tucked Harvester under one arm and sped shoreward; the howler listed to port. Deadeye fell behind; two fuxes turned back and took her arms and pulled her along.

The monster flowed up the beach, faster than any of them, ignoring the spears stuck in its flesh.

One, two, three searchlights flashed from the vehicles and played over the myriapod. The beams were bluish, unlike the headlights. Flare sunlight.

The myriapod stopped. Turned, clumsily, and began to retreat down the beach. It had nearly reached the water when it lost coordination. The legs thrashed frantically and without effect. As Rachel watched in horrible fascination, things were born from the beast.

They crawled from its back and sides. Hundreds of them. They were dark red and dog-sized. They did not leave the myriapod, they stayed on it, feeding. Its legs were quiet now.

Three of the fuxes darted down the beach, snatched up their fallen spears and retreated just as fast. The mynapod was little more than a skeleton now, and the dog-sized feeders were beginning to spread across the sand.

The fuxes climbed aboard the air-cushioned raft that trailed behind the mobile power plant. They arranged their packs and settled themselves. The paired vehicles lifted and glided toward the water. Lightning lifted the crawler and followed.

Rachel said, "But-"

"We'll be okay," Lightning assured her. "We'll stay high and cross fast, and there are always the searchlights."

"Grace, tell him! There are animals that like the searchlights!"

Grace patted her hand. The expedition set off across the water.

The colony around Touchdown City occupied part of a fat peninsula projecting deep into the Ring Sea. It took the expedition twelve hours to cross a bay just smaller than the Gulf of Mexico.

Vermilion scum patches covered the water. Schools of flying non-fish veered and dived at sight of the wrong-colored headlights. The fuxes stayed flat on their platform . . . but the water was smooth, the ride was smooth, and nothing attacked them.

The rain stopped, and left Phrixus and Helle far up the morning sky. The cloud-highway of the Jet Stream showed through a broken cloud deck. Lightning and the other drivers left their headlights on, since the sea life seemed to avoid them.

Somewhere in there, Rachel reclined her chair and went to sleep.

She woke when the crawler settled and tilted under her. Her brain was muzzy . . . and she had slept with the recorder on. That disturbed her. Usually she switched it off to sleep. Dreams were private.

The crawler's door had dropped to form a stairway, and the crawler was empty. Rachel went out.

The crawlers, howlers, raft and mobile power plant were parked in a circle, and tents had been set up inside. There was no living human being in sight. Rachel shrugged; she stepped between a howler and the raft, and stopped.

This was nothing like the Medean she'd seen up to now.

Rolling hills were covered with chrome yellow bushes. They stood waist high, and so densely packed that no ground was visible anywhere. Clouds of insects swarmed, and sticky filaments shot up from the bushes to stab into the swarms.

The fuxes had cut themselves a clearing. They tended one who was restless, twitching. Bronze Legs Miller hailed her from their midst.

Rachel waded through the bushes. They resisted her like thick tar.

The insects scattered away from her.

"Deadeye's near her time," Bronze Legs said. "Poor baby. We won't move on until she's dropped her 'nest.'"

The fux showed no swelling of pregnancy. Rachel remembered what she had been told of the fux manner of bearing children. Suddenly she didn't want to see it. Yet how could she leave? She would be omitting a major part of the experience of Medean.

She compromised. She whispered earnestly to Bronze Legs, "Should we be here? Won't they object?"

He laughed. "We're here because we make good insect repellants."

"No. We like humans." Deadeye's voice was slurred. Now Rachel saw that the left eye was pink, with no pupil. "Are you the one who has been among the stars?"

"Yes."

The feverish fux reached up to take Rachel's hand. "So much strangeness in the world. When we know all of the world, it may be we will go among the stars too. You have great courage." Her fingers were slender and hard, like bones. She let go to claw at the hairless red rash between her front and back legs. Her tail thrashed suddenly, and Bronze Legs dodged.

The fux was quiet for a time. A six-legged fux sponged her back with water, the sponge seemed to be a Medean plant. Deadeye said, "I learned from humans that 'deadeye' meant 'accurate of aim.' I set out to be the best spear-caster in.. ." She trailed off into a language of barking and yelping. The odd-looking biped held conversation with her. Perhaps he was soothing her.

Deadeye howled-and fell apart. She crawled forward, pulling against the ground with hands and forefeet, and her hindquarters were left behind. The hindquarters were red and dripping at the juncture, and the tail slid through them: more than a meter of thick black tail, stained with red, and as long as Harvester's now. The other fuxes came forward, some to tend Deadeye, some to examine the hindquarters. . . in which muscles were still twitching.

Ten minutes later Deadeye stood up. He made it look easy; given his tail and his low center of mass, perhaps it was. He spoke in his own language, and the fuxes filed away into the yellow bushes. In the human tongue Deadeye said, "I must guard my nest. Alone. Travel safely."

"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 handmade 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 performance 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 Medean. 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 vehicles 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 wheat field beyond, but the yellow plants were feathery and four meters high. Hemispheres of white rock appeared with suspicious regularity. 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 iii 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 wheat field.

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 unfurled 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 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 Smith people, 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 Docs. 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 Medean 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 Medean? 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? Medean 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. Son of a bitch, we could live without that son of a bitching 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 fiat, 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."

"Oft? 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 rxk 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 fuses 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 now." 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."

"Then she'll keep going. If she Doesn't wreck herself, she'll go straight back to Touchdown City. Let's see, Morven's on the other side of the planet now. Say it'll be up in an hour, and we'll let them know what's happening. That way we'll know she's safe almost as soon as she Docs. Grace, you don't think she'd try to rejoin us?"

"She can't get lost, and she can't stop, and Touchdown's visible from fifty miles away. She'll just head home. Okay. . ." There was a funny edge of doubt in Grace's voice. She stabbed at an intercom button. "Lightning? Me. You watched Rachel go over the crest, right? Did she have her headlights on?"

Bronze Legs was wondering just how teed off the rammers would be if Rachel was dead. It took him a moment to see the implications of what Grace was saying.

"The searchlight too? All right, Lightning. The long range sender is on your roof. I want it ready to send a message to Morven by the time Morven rises, which will be to south of coldward in about an hour. . No, don't go out yet. The way the beasts are running around they should die of heatstroke pretty quick. When they fall off the roof, you go."

The rock demons followed Rachel twelve kilometers downslope before anything distracted them.

The howler was riding higher now, but Rachel wasn't out of trouble. The emergency override locked the vents closed. If she turned it off the power would drop, and so would the howler. She was steering with her weight alone. Her speed would last as long as she was going down. She had almost run out of mountain. The slope leveled off as it approached the river.

The vicious pegasus type birds had disappeared. The rolling mountainsides covered with feathery wheat were now covered with stubble, stubble with a hint of motion in it, dark flecks that showed and were gone. Millions of mice, maybe?

Whatever: they were meat. The demons scattered in twelve directions across the stubble, their big heads snapping, snapping. Rachel leaned forward across her windscreen to get more speed. Behind her, three rock demons converged on a golden Roman shield . . . on a mock-turtle that had been hidden by feather-wheat and was now quite visible and helpless. The demons turned it over and ripped it apart and ate and moved on. The howler slid across the shore and onto flowing water.

Each patch of scarlet scum had sprouted a great green blossom. Rachel steered between the stalks by body english. She was losing speed, but the shore was well behind her now.

And all twelve rock demons zipped downhill across the stubble and into the water. Rachel held her breath. Could they swim? They were under water, drinking or dispersing heat or both. Now they arched upward to reach the air.

The howler coasted to a stop in midstream.

Rachel nerved herself to switch off the override. The howler dropped, and hovered in a dimple of water, churning a fine mist that rapidly left Rachel dripping wet. She waited. Come what may, at least the batteries were recharging. Give her time and she'd have a howler that could steer and fly.

The heatward shore was black with a million mouse-sized beasties. They'd cleaned the field of feather-wheat; but what did they think they were doing now? Watching Rachel? The rock demons noticed. They waded clumsily out of the water and, once on land, blurred into motion. The shore churned with six-legged white marauders and tiny black prey.

It seemed the fates had given Rachel a break. The water seemed quite empty but for the scarlet scum and its huge blossoms. No telling what might be hugging the bottom while the flare passed. Rachel could wait too. The coldward shore looked safe enough . . . though it had changed. Before the flare, it had been one continuous carpet of chrome yellow bushes. The bushes were still there, but topped now with a continuous sheet of silver blossoms. The clouds of insects swarmed still, though they might be different insects.

Upstream, something was walking toward her on stilts. It came at its own good time, stopping frequently. Rachel kept her eye on it while she tried the intercom.

She got static on all bands. Mountains blocked her from the expedition; other mountains blocked her from Touchdown City. The one sender that could reach Morven in orbit was on a crawler. Dammit. She never noticed the glowing pinpoint that meant Bronze Legs had called. It was too dim.

Onshore, two of the rock demons were mating head-to-tail.

The thing upstream seemed to be a great silver Daddy-long-legs. Its legs were slender and almost long enough to bridge the river; its torso proportionately tiny. It paused every so often to reach deep into the water with the thumbless hands on its front legs. The hands were stubby, armored in chitin, startlingly quick. They dipped, they rose at once with something that struggled, they conveyed the prey to its mouth. Its head was wide and flat, like a clam with bulging eyes. It stepped delicately downstream, with all the time in the world . . . and it was bigger than Rachel had realized, and faster.

So much for her rest break. She opened the rear vent. The howler slid across the river and onto shore, and stopped, nudging the bushes.

The Daddy-long-legs was following her. Ten of the dozen rock demons were wading across. As the bottom dipped the six-legged beasts rose to balance on four legs, then two. As bipeds they were impressively stable. Maybe their tails trailed in the mud bottom to serve as anchors. And the mice were coming too. Thousands of them, swimming in a black carpet among the patches of scum.

Rachel used the override for fifteen seconds. It was enough to put her above the silver-topped bushes. The lily-pad-shaped silver blossoms bowed beneath the air blast, but the ground effect held her. She wasn't making any great speed. Bugs swarmed around her. Sticky filaments shot from between the wide silver lily pads, and sometimes found bugs, and sometimes struck the fans or the ground effect skirt.

She looked for the place that had been cleared for a fux encampment. Deadeye would be there, a feisty male biped guarding his nest, if Deadeye still lived. She couldn't find the gap in the bushes. It struck her that that was good luck for Deadeye, considering what was following her.

But she was lonely, and scared.

The Daddy-long-legs stepped delicately among the bushes. Bushes rustled to show where ten rock demons streaked after her, veering to snatch a meal from whatever was under the blossoms, then resuming course. Of the plant-eating not-mice there was no sign, except that here and there a bush had collapsed behind her.

But they were all falling behind as the fuel cells poured power into the howler's batteries.

Rachel oriented herself by Argo and the Jet Stream and headed south and coldward. She was very tired. The land was darkening, reddening and it came to her that the flare was dying.

The flare was dying. The goggles let Bronze Legs look directly at the Suns, now, to see the red arc enclosing the bright point of Helle. A bubble of hellfire was rising, cooling, expanding into the vacuum above the lesser hell of a red dwarf star.

There were six-legged rock demons all around them, and a few on the roofs. All were dead, from heatstroke or dehydration. A far larger number were gathering all along the Ring Sea shore. Now they swarmed uphill in a wave of silver. They paired off as they came, and stopped by twos in the rocks to mate.

The diminished wave swept around the expedition and petered out. Now the mountains were covered with writhing forms: an impressive sight. "They make the beast with twelve legs," Bronze Legs said. "Look at the size of those bellies! Hey, Grace, aren't the beasts themselves bigger than they were?"

"They have to be. They've got to form those eggs. Dammit, don't distract me."

The intercom lit. Grace wasn't about to notice anything so mundane. The paired rock demons were growing quiet, but they were still linked head to tail. Bronze Legs opened the intercom.

Lightning's voice said, "I've got Duty Officer Toffier aboard Morven."

"Okay. Toffier, this is Miller. We've got an emergency."

"Sorry to hear it." The male voice sounded sleepy. "What can we do about it?"

"You'll have to call Touchdown City. Can you patch me through, or shall I record a message?"

"Let's check . . ." The voice went away. Bronze Legs watched a nearby pair of rock demons crawling away from each other. The thick torsos seemed different. A belly swelling that had extended the length of the torso was now a prominent swelling between the middle and hind legs. It was happening fast. The beasts seemed gaunt, all bone and skin, except for the great spherical swelling. With fore and middle legs they scratched at the earth, digging, digging.

"Miller, you'd better record. By the time we got their attention they'd be over the horizon. We'll have them in another hour."

"But I don't see how they can help either. Listen, Miller, is there something we can do with an interstellar message laser? At this range we can melt a mountain or boil a lake, and be accurate to-"

"Dammit, Toffier, we're not in trouble! Touchdown City's in trouble, and they don't know it yet!"

"Oh? Okay, set to record."

"To Mayor Curly Jackson, Touchdown City. We've weathered the flare. We don't know if the fuxes survived yet. The rammer, Rachel Subramaniam, is on the way to you on a howler. She has no reason to think she's dangerous, but she is. By the time you spot her you'd be too late to stop her. If you don't move damn quick, the human colony on Medean could be dead within the year. You'll need every vehicle you can get your bands on . . ."

The expedition had crossed a great bay of the Ring Sea in twelve hours. Rachel could cross it in three; but she'd be rid of what followed her moments after she left shore. She had heard Lightning mention the parasitic fungus that floated on this arm of the Ring Sea, that was deadly to fuxes and any Medean life. . . unless the flare had burned it away.

The flare was long over. She rode through the usual red-lit landscape, in a circle of the white light from headlights, taillights, searchlight. She hungered and thirsted for the light of farming lamps, the color of Sol, of ship's sunlights; the sign that she had come at last to Touchdown City.

But she hungered more for the fungus that would kill the rock demons and the Daddy-long-legs. She hated them for their persistence, their monstrous shapes, their lust for her flesh. She hated them for being themselves! Let them rot, slow or quick. Then three hours to cross the bay, half an hour more to find and navigate that rubble-strewn pass, and downhill toward the blue white light.

That was the shoreline ahead.

Ominously blood-colored beasts milled there. One by one they turned toward the howler.

Rachel cursed horribly and without imagination. She had seen these things before. The expedition's searchlights had pinned a tremendous thousand-legged worm, and these things had been born from its flesh. They were dog-sized, tailless quadrupeds. Flare time must have caught a lot of the great myriapods, brought vast populations of parasites to life, for this many to be still active this long after the flare.

More than active. They leapt like fleas . . . toward Rachel. She turned to heatward. Weak as she felt now, one could knock her out of the saddle.

Her entourage turned with her. Two more rock demons had dropped out. Eight followed, and the great spider, and a loyal population of proto mice, exposed now that the bushes had ended. And hordes of insects. Rachel's reason told her that she was taking this all too personally. But what did they see in her? She wasn't that much meat, and the spider wasn't that hungry. I reached down now and then to pluck a proto-mouse, and once it plucked up a rock demon, with equal nonchalance. The demon raved and snapped and died within the spider's clamshell mouth, but it clawed out an eye, too.

And the demons had the proto-mice for food, but they had to streak down to the water every so often to cool off, and fight their way back through the blood-red quadrupeds, eating what they killed. The mice had fed well on the yellow bushes, and who knew about the tiny might-be insects? What did they all want with Rachel?

After a couple of hours the shore curved south, and now it was white tinged with other colors: a continuous crust of salt. Rachel's climate suit worked well, but her face and hands were hot. The wind was hot with Argo-heat and the heat of a recent flare. The Daddy-long-legs had solved its heat problem. It waded offshore, out of reach of the red parasites, pacing her.

It was five hours before the shore turned sharply to coldward. Rachel turned with it, staying well back from shore, where blood-colored quadrupeds still prowled. She worried now about whether she could find the pass. There would be black, tightly curled ground cover, and trees foliated in gray hair with a spoon-shaped silhouette; and sharp-edged young mountains to the south. But she felt stupid with fatigue, and she had never adjusted to the light and never would: dull red from Argo, pink from two red dwarf suns nearing sunset.

More hours passed. She saw fewer of the red parasites. Once she caught the Daddy-long-legs with another rock demon in its clamshell jaws. The hexapod's own teeth tore at the side of the spider's face . . . the side that was already blind. Flare-loving forms used themselves up fast. Those trees .

Rachel swung her searchlight around. The ground cover, the "black man's hair," was gone. A black fog of insects swarmed over bare dirt. But the trees were hairy, with a spoon-shaped silhouette. How far had those trees spread on Medean? She could be in the wrong place. .

She turned left, uphill There were low mountains ahead, young mountains, all sharp edges.

A kilometer short, Rachel turned to parallel them. The pass had been so narrow. She could go right past it. She slowed down, then, impatient, speeded up again. Narrow it had been, but straight. Perhaps she would see farming lamps shining through it. She noticed clouds forming, and began cursing to drive away thoughts of rain.

When the light came it was more than a glimmer.

She saw a sun, a white sun, a real sun, shining against the mountains. As if flare time had come again! But Phrixus and Helle were pink dots sinking in the west. She swerved toward the glare. The rising ground slowed her, and she remembered the spider plodding patiently behind her she didn't turn to look.

The glare grew terribly bright She slowed further, puzzled and frightened. She pulled the goggles up over her eyes. That was better; but still she saw nothing but that almighty glare at the end of a bare rock pass.

She rode into the pass, into the glare, into a grounded sun.

Her eyes adjusted.

The rock walls were lined with vehicles: flyers, tractor probes, trucks, crawlers converted to firefighting and ambulance work, anything that could move on its own was there, and each was piled with farming lamps and batteries, and all the farming lamps were on. An aisle had been left between them. Rachel coasted down the aisle. She thought she could make out man-shaped shadows in the red darkness beyond.

They were human. By the pale mane around his head she recognized Mayor Curly Jackson.

Finally, finally, she slowed the howler, let it sink to the ground, and stepped off. Human shapes came toward her. One was Mayor Curly. He took her arm, and his grip drove pain even through the fog of fatigue. "You vicious little idiot," he said.

She blinked.

He snarled and dropped her arm and turned to face the pass. Half the population of Touchdown City stood looking down the aisle of light, ignoring Rachel . . . pointedly. She didn't try to shoulder between then. She climbed into the howler's saddle to see.

They were there: half a dozen rock demons grouped beneath the long legs of the spider; a black carpet of proto-mice; all embedded in a cloud of bright motes, insects. The monsters strolled up the aisle of light, and the watching men backed away. It wasn't necessary. Where the light stopped, Rachel's entourage stopped too.

Mayor Curly turned. "Did it once occur to you that something might be following your lights? Your flare-colored lights? You went through half a dozen domains, and every one had its own predators and its own plant eaters, and you brought them all here, you gutless moron! How many kinds of insects are there in that swarm? How many of them would eat our crops down to the ground before it poisoned them? Those little black things on the ground, they're plant-eaters too, aren't they? All flare-loving forms, and you brought them all here to breed! The next time a flare goes off would have been the last time any Medean human being had anything to eat. You'd be safe, of course. All you'd have to do is fly on to another star..."

The only way a human being can turn off her ears is to turn off her mind. Rachel didn't know whether she fainted or not. Probably she was led away rather than carried. Her next memory began some time later, beneath the light of home, with the sounds and the smells of home around her, strapped down in free fall aboard the web ramship Morven.

On the curve of the wall the mobile power plant and one of the crawlers had finally left the realms of crusted salt. They ran over baked dirt now. The howler was moored in the center of the ground-effect raft, surrounded by piles of crates. It would be used again only by someone willing to wear a spacesuit. The four remaining fuxes were in the crawlers. Argo was out of camera range, nearly overhead. The view shifted and dipped with the motion of the trailing crawler.

"No, the beasts didn't actually do any harm. We did more damage to ourselves," Mayor Curly said. He wasn't looking at Captain Borg. He was watching the bob wall. A cup of coffee cooled in his hand. "We moved every single farming lamp out of the croplands and set them all going in the pass, right? And the flare-loving life forms just stayed there till they died. They aren't really built to take more than a couple of hours of flare time, what they'd get if both suns flared at once, and they aren't built to walk away from flare light either. Maybe some of the insects bred. Maybe the big forms were carrying seeds and insect eggs in their hair. We know the six-legged types tried to breed as soon as we turned off the lamps, but they weren't in shape for it by then. It Doesn't matter now. I suppose I should . .

He turned and looked at her. "In fact, I do thank you most sincerely for melting that pass down to lava. There can't be anything living in it now."

"So you came out of it with no damage."

"Not really. The locusts hurt us. We moved the farming lamps in a hurry, but we took our own good time getting them back in place. That was a mistake. Some flare-hating bugs were just waiting to taste our corn."

"Too bad."

"And a nest of B-70s killed two children in the oak grove."

Captain Borg's mind must have been elsewhere. "You really reamed Rachel out."

"I did," Curly said, without satisfaction and without apology.

"She was almost catatonic. We had to take her back up to Morven before she'd talk to anyone. Curly, is there any way to convince her she didn't make a prize idiot of herself?"

"At a guess I'd say no. Why would anyone want to?"

Captain Borg was using her voice of command now. "I dislike sounding childish, especially to you, Curly, but baby talk may be my best option. The problem is that Rachel didn't have any fun on Medean."

"You're breaking my heart."

"She won't even talk about coming down. She didn't like Medean. She didn't like the light, or the animals, or the way the fuxes bred. Too bloody. She went through thirty-odd hours of hell with your power plant expedition, and came back tired to death and being chased by things out of a nightmare, and when she finally got to safety you called her a dangerous incompetent idiot and made her believe it. She didn't even get laid on Medean-"

"What?"

"Never mind, it's trivial. Or maybe it's absolutely crucial, but skip it. Curly, I have sampled the official memory tape of Medean, the one we would have tried to peddle when we got back into the trade circuit-"

Curly's eyes got big. "O-o-ob shit!"

"It comes to you, Docs it? That tape was an ugly experience. It's unpleasant, and uncomfortable, and humiliating, and exhausting, and scary, and there's no sex. That's Rachel's view of Medean, and there isn't any other, and nobody's going to enjoy it."

Curly bad paled. "What do we do? Put Rachel's equipment on somebody else?"

"I wouldn't wear it. No rammer is really manic about her privacy, but there are limits. What about a Medean?"

"Who?"

"Don't you have any compulsive exhibitionists?"

Curly shook his head. "I'll ask around, but . . . no, maybe I won't. Doesn't it tell you something, that she couldn't get screwed? What man could go with a woman, knowing she'll be peddling the memory of it to millions of strangers? Yuk."

The crawlers had stopped. Human shapes stepped outside, wearing skintight pressure suits and big transparent bubbles over their heads. They moved around to the ground-effect raft and began opening crates.

"It's no good. Curly, it's not easy to find people to make memory tapes. For a skill tape you need a genuine expert with twenty or thirty years experience behind him, plus a sharp-edged imagination and a one track mind and no sense of privacy. And Rachel's a tourist. She's got all of that, and she can learn new skills at the drop of a hat. She's very reactive, very emotive."

"And she very nearly wiped us out."

"She'll be making tapes till she dies. And every time something reminds her of Medean, her entire audience is going to know just what she thinks of the planet."

"What'll happen to us?"

"Oh . . . we could be worried over nothing. I've seen fads before. This whole memory tape thing could be ancient history by the time we get back to civilization."

Civilization? As opposed to what? Curly knew the answer to that one.

He went back to watching the wall.

"And even if it's not . . . I'll be back. I'll bring another walking memory like Rachel, but more flexible; Okay?"

"How long?"

"One circuit, then back to Medean."

Sixty to seventy earthyears. "Good," said Curly, because there was certainly no way to talk her into any shorter journey. He watched men in silver suits setting up the frames for the solar mirrors. There was not even wind in the Hot End, and apparently no life at all. They had worried about that. But Curly saw nothing that could threaten Touchdown City's power supply for hundreds of years to come.

If Medean was to become a backwash of civilization, a land of peasants, then it was good that the farmlands were safe. Curly turned to Janice Borg to say so. But the rammer's eyes were seeing nothing on Medean, and her mind was already approaching Horvendile.