Footfall

Above his head was a full-sized representation of a thuktun: a weathered granite rectangle covered with script and with a centered representation of a thuktun, which was covered with script and a representation of a thuktun, which… Fathisteh-tulk wondered if the priest Fistarteh-thuktun had ever seen this part of the ceiling. Such a thuktun would be a legendary thing. The thuktunthp spoke of every subject a fi’ could imagine, but none spoke of the thuktunthp themselves, nor of their makers.

Fathisteb-tulk was the only sleeper in a crowd of spaceborn.

“It’s not that we don’t trust planets,” the gangling warrior said. “We trust one planet, the Homeworld, the world on which you were born, sir. We trust other worlds to obey other rules.”

“Mating seasons,” Fathisteh-tulk said, half listening.

He filled his mouth and sprayed water at a spaceborn female, barely mature, who had been avoiding him. This social barrier between spaceborn and sleepers had to be broken, even if done one fi’ at a time. There was power in Fathisteb-tulk’s lungs. She preened in the spray, then (belatedly, but as protocol required) sprayed him back. She was just able to reach him.

The gangling warrior-Rashinggith? something like that-was still talking. “Exactly! The target world orbits in about seven eighths of a Homeworld year. After three generations in space, we still follow a mating season of one year; and the sleepers, because they were wakened at the wrong time—”

“I know. During your mating season we feel a discomfort, an itch we can’t wet.”

“It’s the same with us. So, will both mating seasons be skewed on the target planet?” The spaceborn dissidents did not obey the custom established by the Herdmaster. They would not call the target world Winterhome. “Suppose some of us adjust and some do not? A few generations on the target world and we could all be mildly in heat all the time. Woo!”

“Two mating seasons a year might be fun. If it comes, it will come whether we land or not.”

“And that’s only one possible problem. There are bound to be parasites we never adjusted to—”

A voice bellowed through the room. “Tulk!”

“I am summoned,” Fathisteh-tulk said, and he moved toward the voice of his mate, answering with a cheerful “Tulk”

Moving among sleepers now, spraying muddy water to greet friends, he passed beneath an older frieze. The time was mating season, by the state of the foreground plants and the activities of half-seen fithp among the trees. He had worked on this bas-relief himself. He was pleased to see that it had been kept up, repainted.

But these next ones were recent. Here a swath of jet black powdered with white points, and a small pattern of concentric rings: the Winterhome sun, repeatedly outlined as it grew larger over the decades. There the ringed storm-ball with its company of moons, and the raggedly curved horizon of the Foot, with a mining party around a digit ship tanker—

“Tulk!”

He stopped his dawdling.

She waited impatiently at the exit. Smatter than the average female, Chowpeentulk was turning massive with the increase in her unborn child. She said, “Come. We must discuss.”

The platform elevator lifted them into a corridor. Fathisteh-tulk said, “We are halfway between Winterhome and the Foot. What can be urgent?’

“You were among dissidents!”

“So I was. Dissidence isn’t forbidden.”

“Tulk, I think it will be, soon. The dissidents claim that-the War for Winterhome is unnecessary. I remind you that we are fighting that war now. Will you persuade warriors not to fight, even as they struggle with the prey? Need I remind you that Fookerteh is even now on the ground of Winterhome, and that he is the favorite of K’turfookeph?”

“I’ve said little. Mostly I listen. What I hear makes sense. We reached the ringed gasball with the ship depleted of virtually every necessity. Within three years Message Bearer was resupplied. We could have left then if we had not needed the Foot, or we could have stayed as long as we liked.”

Fathisteh-tulk had not bred her when mating season followed the Awakening. This was common enough, even expected, among males who had lost status. Chowpeentulk remembered that she had been almost relieved. Her next child would not be of fighting age during the War for Winterhome

The Traveler Herd had reached the ringed gasball and were at work on the Foot when her season came again. Again her mate was impotent. Perhaps she had treated him badly then. She remembered her own irritability well enough.

The next season he had recovered; and the season after that had borne fruit. Her mate’s status as the Herdmaster’s Advisor had been enough; he had recovered his self-respect. She had been slow to recognize the other change in him.

Fathisteh-tulk was still talking. “Space holds most of the resources we need, and no prey to be robbed. We—”

“Tulk! Have you forgotten what it is like to wallow in natural mud beneath an open sky? To take natural prey? The difference between a shower and rain?”

He hesitated. “No.”

“Then what is this nonsense?”