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The Burning Heart of Night
| No change without fear, No destiny without dreams, No wisdom without suffering, No dark times without hope ... . -- Feral aphorism. Enclave of the Body Pure, planet New Ascension, 4615 AD. Jenette Helena Tesla was the girl's name. She was six years old, slight of body and blonde of hair, but she was strong on determination--and she was angry, very, very angry. Her daddy was mean. Lights flickered and bobbed in the distance behind Jenette. Strobing red streaks and sweeping yellow beams flashed through the swaying trees. She must not let them catch her. She did not know where she was going, but she knew where she was not going: back to her daddy. Her daddy did mean things to her friends. Her daddy made her friends go to Sacrament. He said it was because of the sickness that killed all the grownups, but Jenette didn't care about mean grownups. She only cared about her friends. That was why she was running away and taking her friends with her. Of course, no other human but Jenette could have seen her friends just then. Her friends were too good at hiding and nearly invisible in the dark. Only Jenette knew they were nearby. Leaves rustled and brainturf squished in the jungle around her and not from the falling of her own feet. Jenette stumbled onto a heap of swollen puff sacks. A cloud of archerbush spines exploded. She fell. The spines didn't penetrate her olive-gray, colonist's daysuit, but her exposed face and hands burned from a thousand pinpricks. Right away shadowy forms converged. She felt velvety muzzles nosing her back to her feet. Her friends cared about her. Not like her daddy. Her friends were always nice to her. The heat of their bodies around her felt good that night. Jenette wanted to thank them, but she knew she must not talk, and she certainly must not cry out from the pain of the archerbush stings. If she or her friends made too much noise, they would be caught. Jenette looked back. The lights were closing. Red patches and yellow beams spilled over the crest of a land wave and then disappeared into the depths of a following trough. The wind carried snatches of urgent, howling voices. "Where? Where? There!" They were getting too close. Jenette turned and splashed through a stretch of sinkhole bog. Its glistening surface splattered with the passage of many four-legged shadows following her. Across the bog, Jenette dropped and squirmed under a thicket of iron-brambles. "Hide!" she whispered, unnecessarily; the pitter-patter of following feet had already ceased. Through the spiky brambles Jenette saw the hunting lights circle, confused, and then head off in the wrong direction. Jenette scrambled out of the thicket and ran the other way, her friends rustling along behind. "We fooled them!" she hissed. But not all of the lights had been fooled. One of the red patches had slipped away from the others, dim and invisible at first, then growing stronger as it sprinted nearer and became more distinct. The baleful red glow did not emit from a human searchbeam or a torch, but shone from the body of a half seen alien predator. It flashed like a glow-in-the-dark chameleon, racing four-legged along hook grass and then bounding over sweeping sailtree buttresses. Angry red and black patterns cascaded across its lethal form, like little avalanches of red hot coal. Claws scraped and plant fronds crackled as the hunting form darted around ahead of Jenette. Leaves parted as the monster burst into view. Low and wide it was, like the legendary Terran wolverine, but it had no tail and it was much larger. The creature weighed more than four hundred pounds and stood over four feet tall at its massive, hunched shoulders. Leathery hid thickened into armor plate at its outer flanks, limbs and back; on that hide and armor, patterns of light glittered from thousands of tiny flashbuds. A bullet-shaped head hung low from the creature's neck. Black spheroid eyes glistened maliciously. This was a Khafra, alien, ferocious, intelligent. It growled, aiming its ring of prehensile teeth at Jenette. "Bad Jenette, bad Jenette." In response, dozens of patches of light flared into view around Jenette--where before sophisticated camouflage patterns had been hiding her friends. Each was a miniature version of the large Khafra, but with the gangly legs, oversized heads and eyes, and fat bodies common to young creatures on all planets. Arching their backs, they bared tiny teeth and growled at the older alien in small, shrill voices. "Rrrrrrr, rrrrrr-grrrrrr, grrrrrr!" The larger alien growled louder. "RRRRRRRRRR!" Jenette stepped forward and bopped the large Khafra in the center of its forehead. "I'm not bad!" she said defiantly. "You're the one that's bad!"The creature blinked its orb eyes deep into its head in surprise. "Urrr ... Tarkas bad?" "Yes, Tarkas bad!" Jenette said angrily. "I'm taking my friends back to their mommies and you're not helping!" This was why Jenette had broken the Khafra kits out of the Enclave nursery. Jenette didn't have a mommy. Jenette's mommy had died when Jenette was just one and a half years old. Jenette could cry all she wanted, but Jenette knew her mommy wasn't coming back, but the kits had mommies, somewhere, and she was going to take them back to their mommies before her daddy did any more mean things to them. "I thought you were my friend!" she accused the large alien. "Am Jenette friend," the alien replied, hurt, "but Jenette must go back to Enclave. Tarkas must take." "I'm not going back." "But Enclave safe. Enclave good." "No it's not!" Jenette said fiercely, "and you know it because my daddy does mean things to you too!" Tarkas hung his head, conflicted. "Yes, but ... long time back, Jenette mother said for Tarkas to take care of Jenette. Tarkas promised." Now Tarkas looked sad. That made Jenette sad. Tarkas was the closest thing she had to a mommy now that her real one was gone. He took care of her, not like her busy daddy who never had any time. It was cold and dark and miserable that night. She wanted to give Tarkas a hug. She wanted to cry and she wished for all the bad things that were happening to go away, but even at six years old, Jenette knew that wanting and wishing almost never made things come true. "My mommy wouldn't make me go back," Jenette sniffled. "You told me she always said to do the right thing." Tarkas clattered his teeth in consternation, looking from the kits, to the stormy sky, to Jenette. "Are you going to help or not?" Jenette demanded. "Urrkurrkurrk." The colors on Tarkas' flashbuds froze in a troubled pattern. The alien had made up his mind. "Hnrrrph ..." he rumbled, "Tarkas, Jenette and Jenette's friends must run away together." Boom ... boom, came thunder from ahead where the island ended. Jenette ran with her iridescent friends, struggling to maintain her balance on the rippling ground. One moment they were deep in a trough, cut off from the rest of the world, the next they were high on a wave crest. Sheets of rain fell. It was hard to breath. Her chest hurt. Her legs hurt. She needed to rest. But they could not stop running. They had to escape. Boom ... boom. Jenette burst out of a waxy thicket onto a cliff top where the island ended. A wall of spray caught her and the aliens in the face. Salt water stung her eyes as a great black shape rose and fell a few yards away. Boom ... boom. The thundering mass was another floating island, driven too close to the one Jenette was on by wind and sea. Boom ... boom. The two islands crashed together, thousands of tons grinding mercilessly. Showers of ghutzu--the gnarly, interlocking root that made up the islands' structure--splintered and fell into a frothing, platinum-colored sea. Wherever that nutrient-rich water splashed, plant shoots and tendrils grew so fast that Jenette could see them move, like worms. To her this was natural--she had never seen the blue-green ocean that her mother had sung about in lullabies from another faraway planet--but the fury of the storm and the islands smashing together still scared the her. And it scared the kits, too. "What now, what now?" they trilled, huddling around her. Jenette did not know. All she had thought about was running away from her mean daddy. She did not have a plan. She did not know where to go now. Tarkas watched the rise and fall of the colliding islands. "That Feral island," he said, looking across the rift. "Ferals live there." By Ferals, Tarkas meant Feral Khafra. Tarkas was a domestic Khafra, stolen from the wild when he was young, like Jenette's friends the kits, and raised in cages by Jenette's daddy and the other Enclave humans. "Are Ferals nice?" Jenette asked, hugging the nearest kits for warmth and courage. The large Khafra shook his head sadly. "Tarkas does not remember." Jenette squinted at the other island, shielding her eyes from salt spray with one petite hand. "Are there Feral mommies there?" "Urrr, Tarkas thinks so. Yes." "Then we have to go there," Jenette decided. "How do we get across?" "Jump," the adult Khafra said after some thought. "Tarkas takes Jenette and kits on back." "Okay," Jenette agreed. Tarkas wanted to take Jenette first, but Jenette made him take the kits first, three at a time. They scrambled onto his gnarly back and clung on tight as he timed the rise and fall of the two islands. His strong rear legs coiled up as the Enclave island surged up. When it apexed, he leapt, springing high through rain and spray. Jenette lost sight of him for a second. She tensed with the remaining kits. Had he fallen? He would be crushed! But then she spotted Tarkas, safely depositing the kits on the other side. Another carefully timed leap and he was back on her side. "Jenette goes now?" "No, not now. Later." Tarkas loaded up another three kits and leapt again. Tarkas made many leaps taking kits across. Soon most of the kits were across, but Tarkas was getting tired--and the searching lights were picking up Jenette's trail, getting closer again. "There! There! Track! Follow track!" howled the hunting voices. "Jenette goes now?" Tarkas huffed worriedly. "Not now! Keep going!" Jenette urged the last three kits onto the large Khafra's back. With a last look at Jenette and the closing lights, he reluctantly leapt, but he mistimed his launch and arched through the air, impacting against the side of the far cliff. "Hang on! Hang on!" Jenette cried as Tarkas scrambled with the claws on all four of his legs, trying to grip the crumbling root face. One of the kits on his back slipped. A wall of spray blocked Jenette's view as the older Khafra shot a forearm down to grab the youngling. The pursuing lights honed in on Jenette. Eight large, domestic Khafra bounded out of the jungle and formed a half-circle around her and the cliff. They edged closer. Jenette scrambled as close as she could to the cliff. She tottered, windmilling her arms for balance. Pieces of ghutzu broke free under her small boots and tumbled into the chasm. "Not jump, not jump!" they howled. "Stop!" boomed the voice of a man. The domestics froze. Jenette froze. A man strode out from the undergrowth, a great, bullish man, thick boned with brutally short hair and eyes like cold iron. He towered over the domestics and the six-year-old human girl. One scouring glance sized up the situation. Meaty hands clenched on a pulse-rifle. This was Olin Tesla, Jenette's father. Jenette froze as his voice boomed. "Jinny get away from the cliff!" "No!" said Jenette, still searching for what had happened to Tarkas. "It's okay," her father said. "Daddy's not going to punish you. Daddy just wants you to be safe." "Go away! I hate you!" The large man's face flinched as the rain and spray abated for a moment. Jenette spotted Tarkas, safely atop the cliff; he had not lost any kits. "Run! Run! Get away!" she yelled. "Get away!" The kits hesitated on the other side. They did not want to leave her. "Go! Find your mommies! Go!" Finally, the kits turned away, but not Tarkas. He saw the other domestics and the grim featured human, but his legs still coiled for another leap. Frowning, Olin Tesla cocked his pulse-rifle. "No!" Jenette yelled. "No, Tarkas! Stay! Don't jump! Run away!" Unable to imagine abandoning Jenette, let alone do it, Tarkas sprang. The alien arched through the air as Tesla methodically raised his pulse-rifle and led his target. Jenette loosed a shriek of utter, forlorn terror. "Don't hurt him, daddy!" Tesla pulled the trigger. The weapon's shot-torque was set perfectly. There was no splatter of blood, no explosion of bone; Tarkas' skull cracked like a super heated stone. His body cartwheeled, his flashbuds flaring and fading to black. Four hundred pounds of lifeless Khafra impacted the cliff beside Jenette. Jenette's mean daddy was quite satisfied--that is, until she lost her balance and tumbled over the precipice. "No!" Olin Tesla cried, running to grab his daughter. His two human legs were far too slow to carry him to the edge in time, but his domestics leapt after the little girl. Stinging spray obscured his vision as the vast islands pulled apart and slammed back together. Boom! Boom! Surely there was no hope. Numb horror swept over Tesla. What had he done? But then paws, each with two pairs of opposed thumbs and no fingers, scrambled into view. The domestics pulled themselves back up. The fabric of his daughter's daysuit was pinched in their teeth. Tesla hurried over. A huff of fear shook his heavy frame as he checked the biosentry sewn into her garment. "Blessed be the Body Pure," he prayed, fumbling to activate the tiny display. "All contamination it purges. All faithful it protects ... ." The display blinked green. Alive! His precious Jinnybug was alive! He hugged her to his chest. Jenette did not struggle, did not fight, but hung limp, tears streaming from her eyes. "I hate you. I hate you," she wept. The domestics flushed crimson, nosing Tarkas' inert form. They shone accusing colors at Tesla. "Hunter man." "Killer man." They pulsed in time. Two heartbeats on, two heartbeats off. The grisly scene strobed. "Chaos man!" "Quiet!" barked Tesla. "Quiet damn you, beasts!" Blood pounded in Tesla's head. This was the disaster of weakness. It was all his fault. He knew what his daughter was like. He should have known. She was his flesh and blood, his responsibility. She was the last trace of his beloved wife Helena. "Howarooooooooooo!" the aliens grieved. "I said quiet!" Tesla swiped wetness from his eyes. More weakness. He had been fond of the traitorous Tarkas. But he could not afford the luxury of grief. His feelings for what had been lost did not matter. He must be strong for that which remained. The woods rustled behind Tesla. The other colonists had caught up. They hung back, ghostly shadows in the night. Tesla tensed. What would be their judgment upon seeing the grisly scene? Would they condemn or embrace? As one, the colonists bowed their heads, stacking and kissing balled up fists. "The Body must be Pure," they murmured. Another huff of breath shook Tesla's form, this one of relief. Without letting go of Jenette, he bowed his own head and kissed his own balled-up fist. "The Body must be Pure," he repeated. Of course there had never been a choice for the colonists of New Ascension. Not for him, not for them, not for his beloved Jinnybug; not since they had set foot on this new planet. Anything less than fighting tooth and nail to survive betrayed the Body Pure. They might succeed or they might fail, but they would fight. That was why they had come. And suddenly it was over. One by one, the humans disappeared into the darkness, winding their way back to the Enclave. The domestics looked across rift where the kits had fled, and at their dead brethren. "Tears must fall," they keened. "Tears must fall." Tesla followed the other humans, clutching his daughter tightly and praying that one day she would find a way to forgive him. She never did. Location: deep space. Velocity: 0.7 lightspeed. Mission status: past the point of no return. Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh. Worry twisted Fugueship Pilot Lindal Karr's face as he stood before the ailing airlock. The portal looked normal. Its skin was a healthy pink. But the circular inner door was irising open and shut inexplicably, twice in one second, then staying shut for two seconds, then the pattern repeated. The portal made about twenty of its strange cycles per minute, one hundred in the five minutes Karr watched.v Of course, Karr's blood stream was saturated in fugue. His metabolism and perception were slowed so that only one subjective day passed for each realtime year. Karr did a quick calculation in his head. The airlock cycle took a languorous eighteen minutes in realtime, not the rapid three seconds that he saw. Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh. Karr tilted his head, as if a different viewing angle would explain the malfunction. Dark hair, cut short on the sides and long on top, flopped from one side of his dour face to the other, but he did not notice. Neither did he notice the blocky kilnsuit's weight on his tall lean body. What was wrong? Mercifully, the outer airlock door was not malfunctioning, otherwise Karr and everything else not bolted down would have been sucked out into space. But if the inner iris-portal could malfunction, so could the outer one. It was just a matter of time. Karr pondered. There were nine other airlocks. One potential solution was to simply seal off the malfunctioning lock and use an alternate, but then that was not Lindal Karr's way. If there was a problem with the ship, he would not rest until he found out what was wrong and corrected it. He must take care of his ship. Karr inspected inflammation around a hose, which pierced a nearby, plump, bulkhead: nothing out of the ordinary there. The hose swelled rhythmically as a small life support unit pumped atmosphere in and out of the airlock. The life support unit itself was sealed and theoretically never needed service, but Karr gave it a once over anyway. He depressed a red knob atop the unit, to shut it down. Pumping stopped for a few seconds, but then a green knob beside the red one mysteriously clicked down and the machinery chugged back to life. Karr blinked. How odd. He pressed the red knob again, then again and again as the green knob kept depressing by itself and reactivating the small unit. How very odd. And a little bit creepy. Karr stepped up and ran his hand across the iris-portal itself. It was leathery and warm, no abrasions or other signs of trauma. No clues to what was wrong there, either. It took a moment before Karr realized that the unusual cycle had stopped. He watched a few seconds longer. The portal remained shut. On impulse, Karr stepped aside Zik, shsssh. Zik shsssh. Step in front of the portal. No activity. Step aside. The cycle began again. Karr frowned. Airlocks were not supposed to behave like this. They were not triggered by proximity sensors. The iris-portals were manually activated. Karr blocked the door again, determined to stand there until he figured what was wrong. The cycle stopped. Seconds, then minutes ticked by. Suddenly, an invisible impact knocked the wind out of Karr. The interlocking plates of his kilnsuit locked up, as they were designed to do against impact or pressure, and he found himself airborne, shooting down the organic passage and colliding against its far end. Karr wiped deck sweat off his face and looked back. The undulating passage was empty. There was no sign of a pressure rupture in the iris-portal or its surrounding membranes, nothing that could have propelled Karr through the air with such force. Karr did notice unusual blurring motions at the corners of his vision, but he quickly forgot about these as he stood up to get a better view of the passageway. The problem with the airlock was not limited to just the airlock. Unhealthy purple veins were visible through the translucent passage walls and angry bruises were developing along its entire length. Karr leaned into one of the large veins and took a pulse. The rhythm felt deep and slippery where it should be shallow and firm. And it was too warm. Whatever was affecting the iris-portal was spreading. Zik, shsssh. Zik, shsssh. Karr patted the ship walls nervously. "It's okay. I'll take care of it." Karr knew the ship could not hear or even understand him, but confirmation of the bond between them made Karr feel better. He hurried back to the airlock. The cycle stopped again. Determined to get to the bottom of the problem, Karr pulled on his kilnsuit gloves. He picked up a bubble helmet and locked it on. He also retrieved a five foot long chrome implement with six rotating barrels and a cluster of chrome spheres on one end: Karr's Colt & Krupp AB-8 Gattler. Each of its long barrels had a different function. The chrome spheres were binary propellant tanks and munition clips. Grasping the Gattler's handgrips, Karr thumbed a selector. Barrel number one rotated into position and he shot a slow-resorbing qi needle into a muscle group beside the airlock. Pffft. The fatty bulge quivered around the long needle, then relaxed. The inner portal irised open and stayed open. Karr stepped inside. Ten seconds later, the needle dissolved and the portal irised back shut. The interior of the lock appeared normal. Scarring circled the chamber where the outer iris-portal had been grafted on to form the airlock chamber. There was nothing else in the space, except a reserve kilnsuit locker. Karr shot another qi needle into a nerve cluster controlling the outer portal. It dilated. Karr slung the Gattler over a shoulder, hooked a safety tether around his waist and stepped outside into space. For a moment, Karr was awestruck. No matter how many times he saw it, the fugueship took his breath away. He grasped a handhold as the airlock closed behind him. Karr was a flea on the midsection of an immense, grub-shaped body, a living creature four kiloyards long and two kiloyards thick. Wart encrusted hide stretched away fore and aft of Karr, narrowing to engine orifices at either end. During the first twenty years of Karr's present mission, knotty stern bulges had spewed fusion fire, accelerating the fugueship. Now, after the mission's halfway point, they were closed. Ahead of the ship, an aurora danced where five hundred kiloyards of electromagnetic field met with faint ripples of solar wind. Rainbows pulsated against the stars of deep space, like oil on water, as interstellar hydrogen swept down the cone shaped field into a gaping maw. The fugueship digested the hydrogen in fusion furnaces deep in its belly and spit the atomic fire back out engine orifices on its bow. Karr felt the rumbling fury through the palm of his glove on the handhold. He also felt the subtle g-force of deceleration tugging his inner ear down toward the bow, giving him the distinct sensation that the ship was falling headlong into the bowels of the universe on four shafts of star-hot flame. This was Karr's astounding companion. His fugueship. His cosmosaurus planetos. His Long Reach. A string of tumbling beads arched out from the airlock, trailing down as the fugueship slowly decelerated and they did not. Karr did not at first know what they were. Was Long Reach shedding some part of itself? Karr's throat tightened as he began to understand what he was actually looking at. The irregular shapes were not beads. Each shiny object was a part of Karr's cargo: a human body. Each body was swathed in a hermetically sealed membrane, each one having somehow been ripped from the safety of a dreamchamber deep within the ship and ejected. Karr counted hundreds--no, thousands--of bodies spinning into the void. Frozen-solid death was transforming the victim's peaceful fuguesleep into nightmares that would last for all of eternity. The airlock twitched behind Karr. He twisted around, but not fast enough to keep from being bowled over by the ejection of another body from the airlock. Karr was not hurt, the plates of his kilnsuit locked up protectively. But he tumbled away from the ship, plunging down toward the ramscoop along with the string of dead human bodies. Karr grabbed frantically for his maneuvering thrusters, however by the time his fugue-slowed reactions kicked in, his realtime rate of fall had yanked him to the end of the safety tether. Karr spun on the end of the pendulum. When his fingers finally hooked into thruster controls inside his gloves, a shot of acceleration swung him inward at Long Reach. Karr hit hard, grabbing a rope-thick hair so as not to bounce off. After a moment to catch his breath, he began the arduous climb back to the airlock. Every three seconds the lock shot another victim into space. Something was very wrong. Sick or not, fugueships did not eject dreamers into space. As Karr climbed he wrestled with an unthinkable, improbable theory. He couldn't believe it. He didn't want to believe it. But Karr could think of no other explanation that made any sense.There was a stowaway on his ship ... . |
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