Irritated, Flinx spoke without looking up from the green-and-blue ground cover that gave the floor of the lounge the look of a well-manicured meadow. “What did I just say about understatement?”
“Usefully,” the ship-mind went on, “there is an alternative possibility.”
“Alternative?” Now Flinx did look up, focusing his gaze on one of the unobtrusive visual pickups scattered around the lounge. “How can there be an alternative?”
Sounding pleased with itself—although it was nothing more than a subset of its conditional programming—the ship-mind continued.
“The structural repairs and reinforcements I need to effect are within the capability of my integrated maintenance faculties. I am convinced that I can carry out the requisite maintenance without outside assistance. Provided, of course, that a location is found that will support my weight while simultaneously making available certain essential raw materials. These consist primarily of carbon and titanium, two quite common elements, that need to be worked under terrestrial-type atmosphere and gravity. It should be possible to locate such a world here within the Blight. This would obviate the need for us to return to the Commonwealth, a course of action I infer from your reaction to my previous suggestion that you would clearly prefer to avoid.”
“You infer correctly.” Flinx was much relieved. With luck, they would not have to subject themselves to Commonwealth scrutiny, nor retrace the parsecs they had already covered. He did not doubt that the Teacher could successfully carry out the necessary repair work. If it was in the least bit uncertain, it would never have put forth the proposal.
For just a moment, he considered instructing the ship to press on ahead and ignore the required repairs. What was the worst that could happen? That the ship would fragment and he would die? In space-plus, the convergent disintegration would occur in less than the blink of an eye. It would all be over and done with: the burden of responsibility, the endless worrying, his confused concerns for Clarity Held, the recurrent head-splitting headaches—all forever finished, and him with them.
Then he remembered what the ever-gruff but affectionate Mother Mastiff had always told him, even when he was a pre-adolescent, about dying.
“Just remember one thing about death, boy,” she’d growl softly, in between spitting something better left unidentified into a receptacle in the corner of the small kitchen. “Once you decided to be dead, you don’t get to change your mind if you don’t like the consequences.”
And, he reminded himself, there was Clarity to think of.
A new thought caused him to break out in the slight, subtle grin that always teased and bemused those fortunate enough to gaze upon it. Once again he eyed a pickup concealed among the foliage that enveloped him. “I don’t suppose you would by any chance already happen to have located a suitable nearby world?”
“As a matter of fact,” ship-mind replied unexpectedly, “there are virtually no systems in the general, let alone immediate, spatial vicinity that fit all of the obligatory needs.”
Flinx frowned slightly. “You said virtually. Go on.”
“There is one. That is, it should prove suitable if the single isolated and relatively old record referring to its location, existence, and physical makeup is of sufficient accuracy.”
The sole human on board the expansive, softly humming starship nodded knowingly to himself. “Then we ought to head there, don’t you think?”
“I do. Unfortunately, I cannot do that unless you specifically grant permission for me to do so.”
“And why is that?” Something small and bright yellow darted between a pair of solohonga trees, energetically pursued by the blur of blue-and-pink wings and body that was Pip.
“Because,” ship-mind intoned solemnly, “while the extant situation for a system lying within the Blight is unusual, it unfortunately for our purposes is not unprecedented. This is because the world in question is inhabited.”
Even as they changed course to head for the system where the Teacher would attempt to carry out repairs to itself, Flinx brooded on whether or not he had made the right decision in authorizing access. Arrawd, as the depressingly inadequate old records indicated it was called by its nonhuman inhabitants, was a Commonwealth-equivalent Class IVb world. Knowing that presented him with an ethical dilemma of a kind he had never before been forced to face.
Class IVb sentients existed at a pre-steam or lower level of technology, usually accompanied by similarly primitive political and social structures. The study of such societies was permitted only after applicants, nearly always scientific and educational bodies, submitted and had their intentions rigorously screened and passed by peer review and the appropriate authorities. Even with suitable safeguards in place, orbital observation was permitted only under advanced camouflage and from strictly regulated distances. Surface study was outright forbidden, actual contact with the species under examination punishable by revocation of academic and scientific accreditation and, in extreme cases, selective mindwipe of the offending individuals.
The Teacher was unequivocal in stating its needs. In order to obtain the raw materials to effect the necessary repairs to its structure, it had to set down on Arrawd itself. As for any contact, Flinx determined to hold his natural and inveterate curiosity in check. He would stay inside the disguised ship and wait out the delay while essential renovations were completed.
It had been a long time since the single Commonwealth survey vessel that had filed the only report on Arrawd had visited its isolated system. Though not exceptionally far from Commonwealth space, it lay well within the boundaries of the Blight. As was typical of such remote, inhabited worlds, there were no other populated systems nearby. The likelihood of the Teacher encountering another Commonwealth vessel in such a region was more than remote. That comforting improbability did not make his intended visit any less illegal.
His alternative was to reverse course and return to the nearest developed Commonwealth world, there to continue concealing his identity and that of his vessel while the obligatory repairs were surreptitiously carried out. Flinx had never been one to backtrack. Perhaps it was because he was more conscious than most of the absolute preciousness of time.
Also, once a thief, always a thief. In this instance, he would filch an illegal stopover. Somehow it struck him as less unlawful than stealing goods or money. Just a brief, if illicit, visit. Then he would depart, he and his swiftly repaired ship stealing away just as though they had never been there, leaving any natives none the wiser or Commonwealth authorities any the angrier.
So it was with the most righteous and honorable intentions that he entered the Arrawd system, flew past a ringed world that generated unexpectedly powerful pangs of homesickness, and allowed his suitably cloaked vessel to settle into orbit high above the fourth world of the local sun. It was there and then that his virtuous intentions unexpectedly began to unravel.
For one thing, Arrawd was astonishingly beautiful.
Even from orbit, the surface was achingly tempting. In the space immediately in front of him, images of the world below materialized and shifted at his beck and call. There were rainstorms but no hurricanes, seas but no oceans, dry land regions but only unassuming deserts. Capillary-like, rivers threaded their way through rolling plains and dense forests. Jungles matched icecaps in moderation. According to the Teacher’s sensors, the atmosphere was almost painfully human-normal while the gravity was sufficiently less to make an athlete of all but the most incapacitated visitor. He could not only survive unprotected on Arrawd’s surface; he would have to take care not to let himself go.
As for the local dominant species that carefully crafted government regulations were designed to shield from the potentially unsettling effects of superior Commonwealth technology, there was little enough information on the Dwarra. Since the robotic probe that had discovered and studied their world was prohibited from setting down its surface, all measurements, readings, approximations, evaluations, and opinions of that unfamilia
r species were necessarily fragmentary and incomplete.
The last time he had been compelled to call upon the Teacher’s prodigious archives to provide him with a portrayal of a soon-to-be-visited alien race, he had been forced to wrap his perceptions around the completely alien (and not a little grotesque) Vssey from the distant world of Jast. So it was with some relief that he found himself gazing upon body shapes that were considerably less outlandish as the ship called them forth from its files. Even the recorded analysis of their primary language was simple and straightforward.
The Dwarra were bipedal, bisymmetrical, and bisexual, like himself. No more reproducing via spores or budding, like the Vssey. Aside from a distinctive slenderness that bordered on the anorexic, their most distinguishing physical characteristic consisted of a pair of short, whip-like antennae that protruded from their flat, back-sloping foreheads. Concerning the possible function of these prominent appendages, the relevant archive was disappointingly uninformative. For all Flinx was able to find out, their purpose might be nothing more than decorative—or they might be equally capable of sending and receiving radio signals. Though the vaguely humanoid Dwarra displayed ample evidence of sexual dimorphism, both genders appeared to sport antennae of equal length and diameter. He had to smile. The fleshy gray protrusions lent their owners something of the appearance of emaciated sprites.
Waif-like bodies suited to the lighter gravity boasted two upper arms that divided halfway along their length into two separate forearms. Instead of hands and fingers, each forearm tapered until it split again into a pair of flexible gray flanges that looked oddly clumsy and flipper-like but were doubtless capable of sufficient manipulation with which to raise a civilization. Legs were characterized by a similarly subdivided arrangement. Two legs and two arms giving way to four feet and eight hand-finger equivalents made for a disconcertingly busy physical appearance. Fortunately, hearing organs and eyes were not similarly partitioned. As in humans, the former were small and positioned on the sides of the narrow head, while the eyes were wide, round, and set in deep, muscular sockets in the center of the equally round face. A single small air intake located just above the mouth slit and set flush with the gray skin of the hairless face completed the alien visage.
In place of body hair or scales, flattened fingernail-sized flaps of skin that ranged in hue from light gray to an almost metallic silver covered the visible parts of the slim body. Varying in length from one to three centimeters, they flapped like leaves in the breeze when the projection demonstrated the Dwarra’s ungainly but satisfactorily motile gait. Females tended to be slightly smaller than males. According to the sparse records, the Dwarra gave birth to young who remained encased in a nourishing sac of gelatinous material until they were approximately a year old, at which point a second birthing ritual took place to celebrate the emergence of the infant from its mother’s insides and manual transfer to its nurturing pouch, where it remained for an additional year before finally being asked to stand erect on its eight wobbly podal flanges.
As he finished perusing the limited information and waved off the floating, three-dimensional imagery, he decided that perhaps the inhabitants of looming, scenic Arrawd were not as much like himself as he had first thought.
Upon arrival, conducting leisurely observations from high orbit, the Teacher was able to reconfirm the available historical data on the state of Dwarran civilization. It was impossible to tell what, if any, advances the locals had made since the time the robot probe had carried out its survey, but there was no question that the alien civilization spreading across the world below remained at a low-tech level of scientific accomplishment. There were cities, but they were unexceptional in size and even under high resolution exhibited nothing in the way of explosive technological development. If there were factories, they were fueled by nothing more exotic than the simplest of hydrocarbons. Though roadways were present in abundance, none appeared to be paved with any material more advanced than stone.
Harbors displayed a more sophisticated appearance, boasting among other recognizable components ingenious slipways for the handling and repair of large vessels. Evidence for extensive commerce was present in the form of extensive built-up areas and warehousing complexes. The seas of Arrawd, many in number and unassuming in extent, would be highly conducive to waterborne transportation. The smaller the body of water, the less ferocious were likely to be any prevailing storms, though the lighter gravity would permit higher waves. Mountain ranges further reduced the efficacy of land-based transportation and would tend to cause the locals to focus even more intensively on waterborne shipping. Even so, further observation revealed the presence of nothing more elaborate or advanced than large sailing craft.
Unfortunately for his purposes, while there were no great, sprawling conurbations, all indicators pointed to a sizable and largely dispersed population. When the Teacher finally announced that it had located an area appropriate to its needs, Flinx decided that he’d had enough of staring blankly from orbit. The small peninsula the ship had chosen was reasonably far from the nearest community of any size, distant from even a small harbor, and rippling with titanium-rich sand dunes. There was also ample carbon locked up nearby in the form of an extensive and untouched deposit of fossilized plant growth. No indicators of urban population, no signs of commerce, no agriculture. A better spot might be found, but it would take more time to search.
“I concur,” he told the ship-mind. “Take us down as fast as practical. At the slightest sign of reaction from the native population, return to orbit and we’ll try again on another continent.”
“I will be as subtle as possible,” the ship-mind replied. A slight lurch indicated that the Teacher had already commenced its owner-approved descent.
Of course, what it was doing was not only highly illegal, but almost universally thought to be impossible. By their very nature, KK-drive craft were not supposed to be able to come within a specified number of planetary diameters of any rocky world without causing destruction on the ground and damage to the ship. Only the Ulru-Ujurrians, who had fashioned the Teacher as a gift to Flinx, had been able to find a solution to the problem, which continued to bedevil the physicists and engineers of all other space-going species.
Not that the Ulru-Ujurrians could properly be called space-going, Flinx mused as the ship continued to drop surfaceward. More like otherwhere-going.
The touchdown of the Teacher would have enormously impressed anyone on the ground—had there been anyone around to witness it. Executed under cover of night, as far as Flinx could tell the massive shape terminating in its coruscant Caplis projector came to rest in near silence among the thirty-meter-high dunes of the bucolic peninsula unnoticed by any living thing save for a pair of nesting amphibians. What little noise the ship generated was masked by a nocturnal onshore breeze, with the result that even the two jet-black, half-meter-long creatures hardly stirred in their burrow.
For several long minutes, an edgy Flinx paced the confines of the command cabin while the ship-mind made note of and absorbed everything about its immediate surroundings, from the chemical composition of the gentle sea nearby (less salty than terrestrial oceans, its tidal shift hardly affected by the three small moons in the sky) to the efforts of a number of surprisingly mobile nearby plants to uproot themselves and move away from the Teacher’s imposing bulk. Walking up to the curving foreport, he gazed down the length of the ship’s service arm toward the now dark disc of the KK-drive generating fan. His craft was as exposed, obvious, and unnatural a part of the landscape as a thranx clan meeting in the arctic.
“How much longer?” The ship-mind was sufficiently intuitive that he did not have to specify the subject of his query.
“Working,” the Teacher replied succinctly. “I do not foresee a lengthy study period. The immediate surroundings are simple and straightforward and will be easy to mimic.”
“Then how about simply and straightforwardly concealing us?” Responding to her master’s uncharact
eristic irritability, Pip looked up from her resting place on the forward console.
“Processing.” The Teacher could be talkative when the environment was relaxed, and equally concise when the situation demanded it. “Observe.”
Once again, Flinx turned his attention toward the bow of the ship. It was no longer there. In its place was a narrow, low dune that terminated in a higher barchan of mineral-rich sand. The programming and complex projection mechanics that enabled the Teacher to alter the appearance of its exterior to resemble anything from a contract freighter to a small warship also allowed it to impersonate more mundane surroundings. Gazing at the forward part of his vessel, a relieved Flinx had no doubt that the larger habitable section that formed his home now also blended effectively into its immediate surroundings.
Not far off to the left, a placid sea glistened invitingly in Arrawd’s dim, tripartite moonlight. After weeks spent cooped up on board, the thought of a nocturnal swim in tepid salt water was tempting. No doubt his presence in such waters, however, would prove equally enticing to whatever predators roamed the perhaps deceptively sluggish shallows. Taking a reckless plunge in an alien sea was a good way to meet one’s maker in advance of one’s designated time. He would wait until morning, see what developed, have the Teacher run a bioscan out to depth, and then decide if his present locale was safe enough for him to take the plunge.
Seduced by the serene, moonlit surroundings of solid ground, he had already set aside his promise not to emerge from the ship.
“How soon before you can begin acquiring necessary raw materials and commence repairs?”
“I already have,” the ship informed him. Somewhere deep within its self-maintaining mass, faint mechanical noises sifted upward into the living quarters.
Flinx gestured toward the console. Obediently, Pip rose on thrumming, chromatic wings and glided over to settle on his shoulders. “That’s great. If I’m not up, wake me at sunrise.”