CHAPTER 5
One way that escort and employer passed the time as the skimmer cruised steadily northwestward was to work on improving their knowledge of each other’s language. In this the willing and voluble Bleshmaa had the clear advantage, since she already spoke very good terranglo while Flinx’s knowledge of Tlelian barely qualified as minimal. Ten meters below the skimmer, the crests of the highest alien treetops unfolded like cauliflower florets in a recurring eruption of green and shocking blue.
“Nono,” she told him, employing the characteristic Tlelian doubling of a word to indicate emphasis. “Clelet cleleen jlatat. Notnot jliteet.”
Flinx tried again. As befitted a moderately expensive rental, the skimmer’s seats were warm and comfortable. Plush but not pushy. Outside, the lush but chilly surface of Gestalt sped past at a constant speed maintained by the skimmer’s automatics. Pip dozed nearby, only occasionally glancing up whenever her master or his new friend grew more than usually excited.
Bleshmaa, it developed, was not presently conjoined. Both she and her deceased mate, who had been killed in a backcountry encounter with something large, hairy, and tooth-laden called a sleang, had supplemented their income by escorting not only human visitors and settlers but also other Tlel into some of the more primitive, less visited expanses of Gestalt’s wild northland.
“Clelet cleleen jlatat.” Flinx repeated the phrase clearly despite the fear that by doing so correctly he risked swallowing his own tongue. The feeding cilia beneath Bleshmaa’s flattened, horizontal chin rippled in a brief wave of approval.
“Muchmuch better. If yu continue tu progress, tomorrow we will try some more advanced action words.”
The farther north they traveled, the more variable and unpredictable the climate became. The good weather continued to hold, however. Nothing beyond the occasional light hailstorm or brief shower interrupted the spectacular view outside. Flinx was most impressed with the ferocious rivers. Descending from the high mountains that marched down from the northern pole, these roared southward in what seemed to be a multiplicity of never-ending cascades of churning, frothing water anxious to reach the equator. The glint and flash of white water was particularly striking where it cut through tall stands of fibrous growths that were azure or cobalt in hue. Against dense alien forest, the rushing rivers resembled shifting cracks in a vast pane of blue glass.
When not initiating her employer into the mysteries of Tlelian enunciation, Bleshmaa busied herself with typical native amusements. Some were simple enough to improvise without external input. Others required downloads accessible via her own basic but perfectly adequate communit. Due to Gestalt’s long association with the Commonwealth, advanced technology had made more than casual inroads into Tlel society, transforming it in ways her ancestors could not have dreamed. Like most of her kind she was as comfortable with the progressive advances and with the skimmer’s full complement of sophisticated instrumentation as was her current human employer.
The fourth day of steady flight found him three-quarters of the way to his goal: the coordinates that had been supplied by the helpful Rosso Eustabe. Accessing information from the skimmer’s instrumentation via his own communit, he continued to hunt for additional information on the enigmatic Mr. Anayabi. As with his original probe conducted from Tlossene’s administrative center, search after surreptitious search turned up nothing new. In lieu of hope of actually learning anything, he had given to substituting persistence, a quality that had served him well in the past.
His attention was drawn sharply away from his research by the voice of the skimmer’s AI. For a change, the message did not involve the weather. The announcement was as terse as it was utterly unanticipated.
“I must please ask you to secure yourselves in your seats, as we are currently under attack.”
Taken aback, a startled Flinx asked the AI to repeat the alert. It promptly did so, in the same even tone of voice. As alarms went, Flinx thought the rental craft’s excessively polite.
Throwing himself into the forward passenger chair, he instinctively pushed back into the crash padding and allowed the safety harness to activate around him. While it did so and as an agitated Pip settled onto his shoulder, he looked around wildly, searching for the source of the declared threat. A quick scan of the deep blue sky through the craft’s transparent plexalloy dome revealed no imminent danger; no diving aircraft, no incoming kinetics, no paralleling vehicles of any kind. Bemused, he started to press the AI to project whatever it had detected into the air above one of the forward consoles.
Then he felt it.
The hlusumakai came diving out of the brilliant white sun, heading straight for the skimmer. A bare moment after Flinx’s cantankerous special Talent sensed the creature’s murderous intent, he saw it. Swift, septuple-winged, golden-hued, and furry, the aerial predator had eyes as big as the skimmer’s aft port, a trailing cranial crest of feathery crimson tassels, and a mouth large enough to swallow Flinx whole. One outstanding feature dominated the remarkable beast’s appearance. Like a great golden sail, a translucent membranous arc formed an enormous spine-supported, fan-shaped semi-circle from one side of the creature’s head to the other.
As the hlusumakai swept past, pulling up at the last minute to avoid a head-on collision with the skimmer, Bleshmaa flinched in her seat. Letting out an untranslatable cry and moaning in obvious pain, her long arms doubled up to allow their cilia to grasp her flattened head, she remained upright on a floor pad only due to the support of her automated safety harness. At the same time, several readouts on the skimmer’s instrument console went temporarily crazy. In contrast, all Flinx felt was a slight tingling.
“I will now proceed to take evasive and defensive action.”
The voice of the AI was as calm as if it were delineating standard arrival procedures at Tlossene shuttleport. Sharply descending several meters, it dropped dangerously close to the cerulean crowns of several of the highest forest growths before resuming flight on a more or less level path. Leaving her perch on Flinx’s shoulder, an angry Pip fluttered and beat at the transparent canopy like a frustrated, oversized butterfly, seeking the open air beyond and a chance to strike back. Meanwhile a concerned Flinx, disregarding the skimmer’s request to remain in his seat, had thumbed the manual release on his harness to go to the aid of the obviously beleaguered, suffering Bleshmaa.
“My head!” Her alien whimpers reminded him of a distressed kitten. The Tlel did not cry, not in the human sense. But the emotions were undeniably akin. “Hlusumakai attacks with very strongstrong flii.” She managed to recover her equilibrium enough to gesture outside with one long arm. “If I not protected by partial diffusion mechanism integrated as safety measure into all Tlel transportation, I might be dead now.”
“Dead?” Flinx had seen no poison spewed, witnessed no strike of fang or claw, observed no emission of a natural explosive or disabling gas. Come to think of it, other than a possible attempt to intimidate through sheer size he had not seen the hlusumakai initiate any kind of hostile action whatsoever. Then he remembered the short-lived but unmistakable reaction of several of the skimmer’s instruments. They had gone momentarily crazy when the creature had been at its closest to the skimmer.
The Tlel had the ability to sense the electrical fields emitted by other living beings. The carnivorous kasollt that had tried to vacuum him up subsequent to his arrival at the shuttleport had possessed the same natural faculty. What if a native predator had evolved the ability not only to sense such fields, but also to overpower them with some kind of projection? In the same way that a human would be blinded by contact with Pip’s caustic venom, could a Tlel’s highly evolved electrosensory facility literally be short-circuited by a high-powered blast from another denizen of Gestalt?
In Flinx’s widespread travels he had encountered creatures that could blind by focusing and concentrating light, and others that could stun by emitting deafening blasts of sound. Why not a disrupter of natural electrical fields as well? Much in the fashion of a solar flare or lightning discharge, a sufficiently powerful natural emitter might for a split second even generate a strong enough pulse to momentarily interfere with the electrical systems of a modern vehicle. Just as the skimmer’s instruments had been momentarily affected.
He recalled his fleeting view of the diving hlusumakai’s flaring cranial membrane. A sexual attractant—or some kind of organic transmitter? The burst emitted by the beast had only given him a slight tingle—because unlike Bleshmaa, he possessed no highly developed capacity for detecting electrical current in others, no wide-open sensory apparatus for the attacker to disrupt. Similarly, a sound-generating creature would have little effect on someone who was totally deaf. Just as the olfactory-deprived Tlel would be immune to the odiferous persuasions of skunks.
A glance upward through the transparent canopy showed the imposing dark mass of the hlusumakai pacing the skimmer overhead. Perhaps it was puzzled, Flinx reasoned, as to why its peculiar intended victim continued onward above the treetops instead of plunging to the ground like proper prey, stunned into immobility. As he stared, the predator’s shape changed. Folding its multiple wings, it plunged like an arrow and began to grow larger. Pip continued to bang against the skimmer’s unyielding canopy, desperate to gain open sky in which to fight.
“Here it comes again!” he shouted more forcefully than he intended. Whimpering and rocking slightly against her safety harness, Bleshmaa folded both arms across the front of her head, completely blocking her arc of vision.
Gazing deliberately at the fast-diving hlusumakai, Flinx readied himself to try to project onto it. He would conjure a sense of danger and attempt to frighten it off. As it happened, his questionable effort was not needed.
No Gestaltian enterprise worth its liability insurance would allow a rental skimmer out into the wilds of the northlands without suitable protection and appropriate defenses against the manifold dangers that lurked there. Its partial diffusion screen had served to keep Bleshmaa from being numbed into insensibility. Now it responded to the hlusumakai’s second attack with a more proactive apparatus. This took the reassuring form of an integrated pumper built to unleash explosive shells. Having identified the target from its initial pass, the skimmer’s targeting apparatus locked on. Deploying from a port in the craft’s ventral side, the protruding weapon swiveled, locked on, and fired once.
Not wishing to have to pause in his journey in order to clean the skimmer’s canopy, Flinx was relieved when the hlusumakai blew up well off to the craft’s starboard side instead of directly overhead. Or worse, forward. Blood, shattered bone, and torn flesh rained down on the forest below, unexpected manna of Gestaltian biblical proportions for the hungry scavengers undoubtedly roaming among the cobalt growths.
“Evasive and defensive action concluded.” The skimmer’s AI voice was identical to the one it had used when it had first declared the emergency. Unlike the Teacher, it was not sophisticated enough to have a command of emotional modulation.
Careful not to exert too much pressure on her strong but slender arms, Flinx helped a trembling Bleshmaa out of her safety harness. Though her wide, flattened feet provided a stable base for her tapering body, she still swayed slightly for a moment or two after he released his grasp on her and stepped back.
“Very painfulpainful,” she declared when she finally spoke again. Tilting back her disc-like head, she focused her cryptic eyeband on him. “Yu humans are so very different from us. Sometimes it is a lucky thing tu be blind. But yu are ignorant uv the beauty uv the fliiandra. Yu will never—see it. Nono,” she corrected herself. “That is not the right wording fur what I am trying tu say. I think in yur language there is no right wording.”
He nodded, because it seemed the proper thing to do. “Yes, I’m afraid that the beauty and mysteries of the fliiandra will always remain an enigma to me.” A hand gestured outward, past where Pip was humming back to rejoin him. “On the other hand, I am immune to the danger posed by the hlusumakai and any others like it.”
“Passengers will please resume safety seats,” the AI suddenly declaimed.
Both Flinx and his escort looked around apprehensively. This time he could detect no homicidal animal emotions rushing toward them. Bleshmaa sensed no oncoming disruption of her flii.
“I don’t see anything,” he finally declared aloud. Nor perceive anything, he added, but only to himself. “Another hlusumakai?”
“The problem is not organic in nature,” the skimmer explained. “We are approaching an area of very turbulent low atmospheric pressure. If you prefer, I can set down and wait for it to pass.”
Flinx considered. “How long do you estimate, at our present speed, it would take to go around it?”
“It is a fairly large, active area moving rapidly south-southeast and transecting our present course. Perhaps a day or two.”
“How long to fly straight through it?”
“Approximately one hour.”
Flinx had battled and survived serious weather on a host of worlds boasting wildly disparate climates. Where rough conditions presented an obstacle, he had always found it better to get through them as quickly as possible. He would not waste days sitting on the ground waiting for a storm to pass, or even one going around it, and he so informed the skimmer’s AI. Besides, how bad could it be?
Very soon he found himself presented with yet one more reason why Gestalt did not rank high on the list of those humans and thranx who were desirous of emigrating to another habitable world. In fact, he soon found himself completely engulfed by that particular reason.
It was a thunderstorm to match the mountains through which the skimmer was currently flying, though perhaps flying was not, at that moment, the most truthfully descriptive word. Rattling would have been more accurate, or even the hoary term bucking that related not to mechanicals but to the violent gyrations of a certain domesticated Terran ungulate. Despite its robust engine and advanced stabilization technology, the skimmer jumped and slid wildly through the violent air currents. Powerful downdrafts threatened to send it crashing into trees whose weirdly outstretched upper branches began to resemble beckoning hands. The besieged, wind-tossed craft actually did “top” a couple of native growths, sending splintered branches and spore-laden spongy packets flying. The rental agency, a grim-faced Flinx reflected as he vibrated helplessly in his seat’s safety harness, would not be pleased with the appearance of the vehicle’s underside when he returned it.
Rain machine-gunned the transparent canopy. It alternated with heavy hail and occasional blasts of snow as Gestalt’s atmosphere threw everything in its meteorological arsenal at the stubborn skimmer. Not so idly and given the current circumstances, Flinx found himself wondering if removing the craft’s locator and leaving it behind in Sluuvaneh might have been a less-than-optimal way of disregarding procedure in order to protect his privacy. On the other hand, if anyone at the rental agency happened to currently be tracking the weather in the northlands, they would not be worrying about their vehicle. According to its locator, their skimmer was at present safely and comfortably at rest in a well-protected service hangar in Sluuvaneh.
As he gritted his teeth and held on, both physically and mentally, he reminded himself that this was not New Riviera. Then again climate, terrain, and isolation combined to create exactly the sort of discouraging place that would appeal to the hermetically inclined. Someone like, he could not keep himself from yearning hopefully, his father.
Raising his voice in order to make himself heard over the banging and rattling against the plexalloy of the current hailstorm, he shouted at his escort. “Is the weather like this often up here? Should we put down and wait it out?” He was starting to think that where local Gestaltian meteorology was concerned, maybe allowing a little extra travel time was the better part of traveling valor.
Despite the unabated violence of the current storm, however, Bleshmaa did not seem at all concerned. “Weather in north can be viciousvicious, as yu see, but usually not longlong.” She was looking, he noted, not at him but at the forward console readouts. “I agree with skimmer-mind. We will be through this very soon. Not tu be worried. Besides, ground here is covered with snowdriftings. If forced landing necessary, would be very soft.”
Another Tlelian attempt at humor, he thought. Or maybe not.
His escort was as good as her doubled words, however. Five minutes after he had seriously considered directing the skimmer to find a landing site where they could wait out the tempest, it subsided as swiftly as it had overtaken them. Impenetrable rain-swept darkness gave way to an uncertain drizzle. Then the clouds parted, to reveal blue forest carpeting the steepest slopes they had encountered thus far. Towering pink-tinted cumuli clustered protectively around the highest peaks like giant cherubs guarding a goddess. Turning slightly farther to the west, the skimmer began following the course of yet another ferociously churning wild river.
“I am going tu open canopy slightly.” Disdaining the artificial supports that had kept her upright during the worst of the storm, Bleshmaa slipped out of her safety harness. A curious Pip hovered behind her, fascinated by the two sets of grasping cilia whose supple curling movements were not so very different from those of her own coils. The flying snake was a presence the native had already learned to tolerate.
Disengaging from his own fastenings, Flinx reached up and outward in a long stretch that emphasized his lean frame. “Letting in some fresh air?”
“Yu will see.” In the absence of a physical smile on the native’s wide, flattened face, he found that he was able to perceive an emotional one. “I think yu will enjoy.”
A portion of the port-side canopy slid down into the skimmer’s lightweight composite frame. By design, the craft slowed its speed to reduce drag and allow for onboard observation without instruments. Scrubbed clean by the storm, alpine atmosphere heavy with oxygen flooded the single compartment. Having experienced firsthand one more reason why offworlders might not want to live on Gestalt, Flinx now found himself enveloped by a reason why they might.
It was the most wonderful air he had ever inhaled.
Filtered and flushed through the immense undisturbed alien forest below, richer in oxygen than the atmosphere of Earth or Moth or even Nur, the air that filled the skimmer was infused with the full, unadulterated fragrance of the blue forest: redolent of scents half remembered and swirled with others he was unable to isolate and identify. The simple act of breathing threatened sensory overload. Similarly stimulated, an equally exhilarated Pip proceeded to turn a series of backflips and pinwheels that suggested her respiratory intoxication exceeded even his own.
“I…” He had to pause long enough to take in another wonderful, invigorating lungful of air. “…see what you mean.”
Standing near the opening but not sticking her head outside the canopy, Bleshmaa, too, was drawing in breath after breath. “It is wonderfully clean and clear, is it not? No contaminants ever drift this far north. A visitor does not need a sensor capable uv detecting airborne poisons, because there are none. The atmosphere uv the northlands is safesafe.”
“Of course it is,” Flinx responded, “but it’s so much more than that! The aroma, the sheer combination of fragrances is simply—”
He broke off. She was staring at him. He could sense the confusion in her mind even if he could not see it in her wholly nonhuman face.
Fragrances? Aromas? What are those? her feelings seemed to suggest. It hit him hard. The extravagant perfumes the blue growths were releasing, the full-bodied bouquets—she could not detect any of them. Nor could any member of her olfactory-deprived species. They could measure such emissions scientifically. Instruments would tell them something was being added to the atmosphere in the same way others could detect the paths of subatomic particles by recording their paths. But like all Tlel, Bleshmaa had no sense of smell. The phantasmagorical, pungent perfumes of the blue boreal forests of Gestalt must remain forever an unknown quality to those who had evolved among them.
By the same token, he went on in ignorance of anything organic in the skimmer’s vicinity that might be generating electrical impulses. While he could smell the spectacular forest, she could “smell” him and Pip and doubtless the skimmer as well by sensing and measuring the strength and type of current that ran through their brains and bodies. He found himself wondering. If some djinn or sorcerer of legend could somehow offer him the ability that among sentient species was unique to the Tlel, would he trade one sense for the other?
Of course, he knew nothing of what an individual’s electrical field “smelled” like. Was it like a scent, or more like a clashing of bright colors? Or perhaps more like the emotions his own singular ability allowed him to perceive? In the absence of the requisite biological equipment, how to imagine such a thing?
Not only could the Tlel not whiff their marvelous surroundings, they could not whiff one another. That ability was left to visitors and settlers who arrived with the properly evolved detection mechanisms pre-installed. He did not have to inhale deeply to smell his escort. Her body odor, to which she and her kind were completely oblivious, fell somewhere between a stench and a reek. Even were he tactless enough to point this out and complain about it, it would not matter.
She would not know what he was talking about.