A Fire Upon the Deep

The OOB's landing boat was a wonderful thing, and not nearly as strange as it had seemed in the midst of battle. True, they had not yet figured out how to program it for automatic flight. Perhaps they never would. In the meantime, this little flier worked with electronics that were barely more than glorified moving parts. The agrav itself required constant adjustment, and the controls were scattered across the bow periphery — conveniently placed for the fronds of a Skroderider, or the members of a pack. With the Spacers' help and OOB's documentation, it had taken Pilgrim only a few days to get the hang of flying the thing. It was all a matter of spreading one's mind across all the various tasks. The learning had been happy hours, a little bit scary, floating nearly out of control, once in a screwball configuration that accelerated endlessly upward. But in the end, the machine was like an extension of his jaws and paws.

Since they descended from the purpling heights and began playing in the cloud tops, Ravna had been looking more and more uncomfortable. After a particularly stomachs-lurching bump and drop, she said, "Will you be able to land okay? Maybe we should have postponed this till — " unh! "— you can fly better."

"Oh yes, oh yes. We'll be past this, um, weather front real soon." He dived beneath the clouds and swerved a few tens of kilometers eastwards. The weather was clear here, and it was actually more on a line with their destination. Secretly chastened, he resolved to do no more joy-riding… on the inbound leg, anyway.

His second passenger spoke up then, only the second time in the two-hour flight. "I liked it," said Greenstalk. Her voder voice charmed Pilgrim: mostly narrow-band, but with little frets high up, from the squarewaves. "It was… it was like riding just beneath the surf, feeling your fronds moving with the sea."

Peregrine had tried hard to know the Skroderider. The creature was the only nonhuman alien in the world, and harder to know than the Two-Legs. She seemed to dream most of the time, and forgot all but things that happened again and again to her. It was her primitive skrode that accounted for part of that, Ravna told him. Remembering the run that Greenstalk's mate had made through the flames, Pilgrim believed. Out among the stars, there were things even stranger than Two-Legs — it made Pilgrim's imagination ache.

Near the horizon he saw a dark ring — and another, beyond. "We'll have you in real surf very soon."

Ravna: "These are the islands?"

Peregrine looked over the map displays as he took a shot on the sun. "Yes, indeed," though it didn't really matter. The Western Ocean was over twelve thousand kilometers across, and all through the tropics it was dotted with atolls and island chains. This group was just a bit more isolated than others; the nearest Islander settlement was almost two thousand kilometers away.

They were over the nearest island. Pilgrim took a swing around it, admiring the tropic ferns that clung to the coral. At this tide, their bony roots were exposed. Not any flat land here at all; he flew on to the next, a larger one with a pretty glade just within the ringwall. He floated the boat down in a smooth glide that touched the ground without even the tiniest bump.

Ravna Bergsndot looked at him with something like suspicion. Oh oh. "Hei, I'm getting better, don't you think?" he said weakly.

An uninhabited little island, surrounded by endless sea. The original memories were blurred now; it had been his Rum member who had been a native of the island kingdoms. Yet what he remembered all fit: the high sun, the intoxicating humidity of the air, the heat soaking through his paws. Paradise. The Rum aspect that still lived within him was most joyous of all. The years seemed to melt away; part of him had come home.

They helped Greenstalk down to the ground. Ravna said her skrode was an inferior imitation, its new wheels an ad hoc addition. Still, Pilgrim was impressed: the four balloon tires each had a separate axle. The Rider was able to make it almost to the crest of the coral without any help from Ravna or himself. But near the top, where the tropic ferns were thickest and their roots grew across every path, there he and Ravna had to help a bit, lifting and pulling.

Then they were on the other side, and they could see the ocean.

Now part of Pilgrim ran ahead, partly to find the easiest descent, partly to get close to the water and smell the salt and the rotting floatweed. The tide was nearly out now, and a million little pools — some no more than stony-walled puddles — lay exposed to the sun. Three of him ran from pool to pool, eyeing the creatures that lay within. The strangest things in the world they had seemed to him when he first came to the islands. Creatures with shells, slugs of all dimensions and colors, animal-plants that would become tropic ferns if they ever got trapped far enough inland.