Stumbling down a slope strewn with rocks, glassy bushes, and turquoise-hued saplings that snapped like plastic under his grasp, it struck him yet again that as a privacy-preserving ploy, leaving behind his rented skimmer’s location tracker had been a less-than-stellar idea. Eventually someone at the rental company would get nervous and initiate a search for their missing craft. Other than knowing that he planned on traveling north from Sluuvaneh, however, they would have no idea where to look for him. Even if it had not been broken into fragments following its plunge over the waterfall that had nearly claimed him as well, Flinx realized how difficult the ruined vehicle would be to spot from the air. In any event, he could not sit around waiting to find out.
He did, however, have his privacy.
His one real chance lay with his own ship, the Teacher. If it did not hear from him after a designated interval, it was programmed to assume he was in difficulty. His shuttle would lift from its parking pad at Tlossene’s shuttleport and start looking for him. Its internal AI was designed to perform a relentless search until it homed in on his personal communit.
Which, even if still functioning, was either trapped with the other equipment on his service belt somewhere at the bottom of the river into which the skimmer had crashed, or floating indifferently downstream. That was another reason why he continued to follow the course of that same river. If his shuttle managed to locate the submerged unit, it would respond by beginning a search that would take the form of an ever-widening spiral with the device as its nexus.
None of which was likely to happen before he perished from hunger, exposure, attack, or accident. The Teacher would not even activate a shuttle search for another several days. But with nothing else on the horizon to offer encouragement or cheer, such hopes were the best he could come up with.
At least he was not alone. Periodically, Pip would descend from her inspections of the surrounding treetops to wriggle back beneath his jacket. She would ride there until his body heat had warmed her anew. Thus refreshed, she would slither out, spread her blue-and-pink wings, and again take to the sky. Watching her dip and soar among the blue-green alien boles, he reflected on a bit of serendipity: the same blue, pink, and green skin color that made her stand out in the forests of her native world of Alaspin served to camouflage her presence on Gestalt.
Her coloring did nothing to mask her flii, however. Twice while airborne she was attacked by predators. One was sinewy to the point of invisibility, with long, slender transparent wings that rendered it even more difficult to see. She just did avoid its attack by braking sharply upon catching sight of it and soaring straight up. It was an aerial maneuver the predator could not match. After trying and failing to corner the elusive minidrag against a tree trunk, it finally gave up and glided away.
The second attack on Flinx’s winged companion was less direct and more insidious.
From time to time she would pause to rest in the branches of a tree. Since with few exceptions the majority of forest growths put out branches only from their summits, this frequently placed her out of his line of sight until she once again spread her wings and took to the sky. It was a rare bole indeed that featured branches between crown and ground in the fashion of a Terran tree. One such sturdy exception held out the opportunity for her to take a break within sight of her ground-bound companion. Choosing a limb that was halfway up the trunk she touched down lightly, folded her wings against her sides, and gripped the woody surface with her ventral scales.
The tree promptly tried to grab her.
While not as subtle in its actions or as fast-reacting as the ferocious carnivorous plants Flinx had encountered on Midworld, the brown-spotted blue tree that did its best to trap and ingest the minidrag would not have been out of place in their company. Flexible strips of pseudo-bark retracted like coiled springs, folding shut around Pip with the audible cracks of a dozen whips being snapped simultaneously. She avoided them by simply spreading her wings and rising straight up. Evolved to seize unwary visitors by their feet, the dynamic growth was stymied by the fact that Pip had none. As she hovered safe and unharmed above the booby-trapped branch, Flinx saw the deadly coils slowly relax and lie flat once more. They were not large enough or strong enough to pose a danger to him should the occasion arise when he might have to climb such a tree, but anything Pip-sized or smaller and devoid of wings would have found itself immediately restrained. Scrutinizing the growth, he looked for a mouth, but could not find one.
Half-transparent aerial carnivores one couldn’t see clearly, predatory trees, no food, no certain path, constant cold—at least, he told himself, things couldn’t get any worse.
Then it started to snow.
As on previous occasions, he found himself wondering exactly which trace minerals were responsible for the splash of pale pink that tinted the snowflakes. They descended around him in languid spirals, as if the sky were bleeding. As drifts began to accumulate, it became harder to make progress. He was grateful for the presence of the river that had swallowed his skimmer. Its chortle and clatter offered company, albeit of the inorganic kind, and gave him a route to follow, even if one that led only downward.
Stumbling through the cold and snow, he was burning calories the way a gambler burns house credit. Both he and Pip had to find food soon, or all the fresh snowmelt in the world would not keep them going.
Accompanying a brief break in the weather came an opportunity to try local nourishment. This presented itself in the form of a squat, thick-boled growth that was the color of burnt turquoise. Empty dumbbell-shaped shells lay scattered around the plant’s bulging base. Examining several of the baby-blue husks he saw that their interiors had been scraped clean, though by what kind of animal he could not tell. The odd shapes were some kind of nut, he theorized. The multitude of cracked and emptied shells hinted strongly at the edibility of their contents. How would his human digestive system deal with it? How would the alien nutmeat respond to his gastric fluids? He was so hungry he was on the verge of not caring.
Some sharp-eyed, slow-footed inspecting of the ground produced a double handful of unopened pods. Setting one on a flat rock, he smacked it solidly with another chunk of loose granite. The action exposed the pod’s interior. Like its parent growth, the nutmeat itself was a speckled blue. The color did not dissuade him. Right then, he would gladly have bitten into a bright green steak. He reached down to pry out the shell’s contents—and got a shock.
Literally.
Pip was in front of him instantly. Sitting up, he waved her aside. “I’m okay,” he told her. “Surprised, but okay.” The fingers that had tried to extract the nut tingled as if his entire hand had gone to sleep.
A cautious search of where he had been standing before the shock had knocked him down led him to the shell. It was empty now. A unique method of seed dispersal, he told himself. If each nut was like a storage battery, waiting for some unsuspecting herbivore to bite down on it before flinging it aside, it did not explain the abundance of empty shells that ringed the tree. It made sense that at least one herbivore had evolved a method for dealing with the growth’s heavily defended reproductive system. Perhaps, he told himself, whatever fed on the fallen nuts was immune to their stored energy. Or possibly it possessed a means for safely discharging the potentially lethal shock. A better one, he told himself, than he did.
Nutritious though they might be, he decided to give the tempting nuts a pass. A more powerful jolt from a larger one might do more than just knock him backward and down. The thought of trying to eat a handful of what were essentially organic batteries was less than appealing. Even if he could somehow force them down, there was no telling what might happen subsequently. The inside of his stomach was not the place to risk a series of secondary shocks.
In the end, it was Pip who provided dinner.
In fairness, she was attacked first. The flock of aerial predators that swarmed around her were smaller than the single soaring, graceful carnivore with the transparent wings that had tri
ed to make a meal of her earlier that day. Given their smaller size, only a drop or two of accurately spat venom was enough to send one after another of the fluttering, fuzz-covered fliers crashing to the ground. When she had effortlessly dispatched half a dozen of the persistent but overmatched hunters, the survivors sensibly broke off the assault and hastened for the cover of the nearest low-lying cloud.
Flinx paused to examine the broken corpses. While their brown, furry wings were as long as his forearm, none of the creatures’ bodies was much bigger than his closed fist. Though far smaller and tinted green, their eyebands were not unlike those of the Tlel. Short, powerful jaws were lined with small serrated teeth for slashing and tearing at prey. Instead of talons, their limber feet terminated in clusters of tiny suction cups that were equally adept at grasping tree branches, tree trunks, or unfortunate prey.
As he knelt examining one, Pip dropped down beside him. Folding her pleated wings against her sides, she dislocated her lower jaw and began the slow, steady process of swallowing the smallest of the dead predators. Picking up the one he had been studying by its X-shaped tail, a hungry Flinx contemplated joining her, though he knew he could not do so right away. He knew from experience that by tomorrow morning the caustic poison that had killed the creature would have degraded to the point that it would be safe for him to eat. Pip, of course, was immune to her own venom. Furthermore, self-defined by its teeth and actions as a meat-eater, the dead flier’s flesh was unlikely to contain any dangerous plant toxins. Or so he argued to himself.
His insistent, demanding innards made it difficult to wait out the night. The following morning, when he felt sufficient time had passed for the minuscule amount of venom in the creature’s system to have degraded sufficiently, he considered tearing off the wings and tail and emulating Pip by swallowing his meal raw. While the idea was acceptable to his advanced, developed mind, his more discriminatory primitive stomach rebelled. Virtually empty it might be, but it was not yet wholly indifferent. While Flinx felt that he could repress his gag reflex, the entire exercise would be useless if he promptly threw back up anything he succeeded in choking down.
What he needed was a fire. How did one make a fire in the absence of tools? Fallen branches lay everywhere, some in places where they had remained relatively dry. Utilizing a bit of ancient lore known to his kind from when it had first stood upright on the mother planet, he proceeded to gather an armful of likely kindling. Selecting the two driest pieces, he set to work rubbing them together.
They broke almost immediately. It was the same with each pairing he tried, irrespective of origin. Tree-like the forests of Gestalt might be, but they were composed of alien growths, not solid Earth-like trees. Rubbing bits of them against each other did indeed generate friction, but only enough to cause every piece to crumble to a powdery substance. Hours of hard work brought forth no flame and no heat: only a pile of what looked like a mixture of sawdust and crumbled sponge.
A lesser individual might have given up. Flinx had been through too much, had endured too many similar desperate circumstances, to abandon hope. Then he remembered the seeds that had given him such a jolt, both literally and figuratively. Retracing his steps, he gathered up as many as he could find, stuffing them into pockets while being careful not to touch any that had been opened.
Returning to where a now stuffed and contented Pip was relaxing, coiled between two folds of a tree, he dumped the nuts on the ground next to the pile of fibrous powder his energetic but so far useless rubbing had produced. While the preponderance of his attire was decidedly nonferrous, the front seal on his boots was fashioned of flexible adhesive metal. Although the morning had dawned cold and he did not have the means to accurately gauge the temperature, the air continued to warm as Gestalt’s sun rose steadily higher in the sky. He did not think frostbite would result from a short period of semi-exposure.
Sitting down near Pip, he removed his left boot. Carefully gripping one of the cracked but unscavanged nuts by its neutral outer shell, he brought it toward the boot’s open metal seal. How would the nut react to the possible contact?
The consequent flash and crackle that jumped the gap between seed and boot seal brought the first smile to his face in a long time.
Though not strong enough to ignite something as dense as a branch, the spark was more than hot enough to ignite the pile of powder that had resulted from his heretofore futile stick-rubbing. Quickly piling first small and then larger punky branches onto the flames, he soon had a respectable blaze going. Carefully watched over and maintained, it would allow him to cook the small predators Pip had brought down.
Choosing the largest of the deceased carnivores, he shoved the sturdiest branch he could find down its gullet. Gripping the remaining exposed length of the stick in both hands, he held the incipient meal out over the open flames and settled himself down to wait until it was thoroughly cooked. It was hard to be patient. The pungent aroma that arose from the fire as animal fat dripped into the flames and was incinerated was almost overpowering.
Happily, the small carcass did not take long to roast. Torn from the cartilage-like internal support structure, the meat tasted faintly of bad fish. He devoured it nonetheless, wolfing down mouthfuls as if he were dining in the finest restaurant on Earth itself. Fur that had been crisped but not burned off added an attractive crunchiness to the rudimentary meal. Forthrightly omnivorous, Pip was happy to clean up those parts, such as the predator’s diminutive organs, that despite his hunger her master simply could not stomach.
When all but the last of the deceased, crumpled aerial predators had been roasted and consumed, he shoved the remaining well-cooked corpse into a pocket to gnaw later and prepared to continue following his chosen path downriver. He was careful to scatter and douse with pink snow the remnants of the cook-fire, making sure not to leave so much as a single glowing coal or warm ember behind. Given the spongy composition of the woods through which he was hiking and the higher oxygen content of Gestalt’s atmosphere, it would take no time at all for a forest fire here to rage violently out of control. While such a conflagration might attract distant observers to his present desperate situation, the attention would prove moot if he was incinerated before anyone could spot him.
His one lump of heavily carbonized “trail food” made for a bland supper. Although no stranger to cooked food, Pip would not swallow any but the least burned pieces of meat Flinx stripped from the modest carcass. After that, there was nothing. Two days later, she killed and consumed something small and dazzling that she cornered in the upper floral spread of an unusually narrow growth. It left her weak and listless, barely able to fly. Though Flinx’s own body demanded sustenance and his belly was once more growling ferociously, he thought hunger the better part of expediency and declined to try the remaining fragments of glistening meat his smaller companion had eschewed. If the flash flesh made her sick, there was no telling what it might do to his already stressed digestive system.
By afternoon of the next day, he was so famished that he considered retracing his steps to recover that which he had shunned the previous afternoon. He did not do so only because it would have involved trekking uphill. With little strength remaining, he could not afford to waste any on doubling back.
That meant he and Pip would have to find something to eat somewhere downstream.
An hour later they encountered a new species of flier no bigger than his thumb. Observing these small aerial grazers feeding on flat, low-lying deep blue ground cover, he scattered the flock as he fell to his knees to share the bounty they had identified. The fingernail-sized, sickle-shaped seeds the fliers had been eating had virtually no taste, but neither did they outrage his stomach. He picked and downed handfuls in hopes that they were more nutritious than they looked. Most of them, alas, passed through his gut unaffected by his human digestive juices. Eating them had briefly taken away the emptiness inside, but the effort had delivered precious little in the way of sustenance. In a couple of hours, he was hungr
y again. Pip did better, disdaining the seeds in favor of catching and gulping down a number of the seed-eaters.
Clouds began to veil the sapphire sky during the day and the stars at night. Intermittent bursts of silver moonlight shivered and shimmied until the last of them finally melted into dirty sunshine. The hours, like the days, became indistinguishable. Native fauna howled, peeped, squealed, and rustled in the occasional blue copses whose tempting interiors he forced himself to bypass. Lie down among welcoming alien boughs, he knew, and he might not rise again.
By now, his shuttlecraft should have received instructions from the Teacher’s AI to start looking for him. The same ought to be true of the firm from which he had rented the skimmer, anxious for the return of their now overdue property. He needed to be vigilant lest searchers miraculously appear in the vicinity. Unfortunately, lack of nourishment had steadily sapped his alertness along with every other aspect of mental acuity.
Once, he thought he sensed the faint presence of human emotion and tried to stagger in its direction. It was very faint and distant, cutting in and out on the edge of his perceptiveness like a bad radio signal. Either that, or he had begun to hallucinate. That led him to consider if one could hallucinate feelings. While it brought forth no rescue, the mental exercise did help to keep him conscious and aware.
I’m losing it, he had sense enough remaining to realize. He was too tired to be angry at the turn of events. His remaining strength was focused on remaining upright and putting one foot in front of the other while hoping Pip might kill something that was even remotely edible. Tracking the treetops, she evidently succeeded in finding enough to keep her going. None of it fell his way, however, and he had never tried to train her to hunt on his behalf. There had never been any need to do so.
She was at his side in an instant when he stumbled, going down hard. His right knee protested when he tried to rise. Clenching his teeth, swaying slightly from weakness, he managed to straighten and resume the plodding downward tread that had kept him going. Next time he tripped, or the time after that, he knew he might not have the strength to get up again. Everything revolved around time, he mused. Or perhaps it was time that revolved around everything. Learning the truth of his origins. Trying to find something with which to counter that which was coming out of the Great Emptiness. Clarity Held healing from her injuries, waiting for him to return, expecting him to return. Understanding himself. Acquiring wisdom. Finding his father. Time, time, time…