Robert Sawyer - Foreigner

She was neither accelerating nor decelerating.

And yet she floated.

Floated!

She wasn’t completely weightless. She was drifting slowly downward, and her equipment still sat stolidly on the floor. Still, she now weighed so little that her tossing as she slept had been enough to lift her off the floor and send her drifting toward the ceiling.

It was a giddy sensation. Her arms were spread like loosely folded wings, her legs were bent gently at the knees, and she could feel her tail swaying behind her.

She’d been aboard the lifeboat for almost nine days now. The world below looked like a giant ball, filling most of her field of vision. About two-thirds of it was illuminated; the other third was in the darkness of night. Breathtaking as that sight was, even more spectacular was what was slowly becoming visible behind the world. Orange and yellow light spilled past the edges of the illuminated disk, and already she could see a hint of the vast colored bands of cloud.

The Face of God. The planet around which the Quintaglio moon orbited.

The lifeboat continued upward. As the sight of the world with a single equatorial landmass diminished, more of the Face of God beyond became visible. Her world looked now like a vast blue-green pupil in the center of a yellow eye. As time went by, she could see the two superimposed spheres—the Face and the Quintaglio moon—waxing and waning through phases in unison. When they were both full, as they were at high noon, the glare from the ring-shaped Face behind was so intense that Novato had trouble looking at it without her inner eyelids involuntarily sliding shut.

It was spectacular. When seen from the deck of a pilgrimage ship, the sight of the Face, with its roiling bands of cloud, its infinitely complex array of swirls and vortices and colored whirlpools, its vast majestic grandeur, was enough to induce an almost hypnotic state in a Quintaglio. But to see her own world, with its cottony clouds, its shimmering blue waters, and the endlessly convoluted shoreline of Land, and at the same time to also see beyond it the glory of the Face of God—that was almost too much beauty, too much wonder, for the mind to grasp. Novato found herself transfixed, mesmerized. If she hadn’t already been floating on air, she would be now.

Emperor Dy-Dybo was lying on his dayslab in his ruling room, hearing the appeal of a young Quintaglio who had been accused of theft. He couldn’t deny the crime, of course: his muzzle would betray his lies. Still, he sought clemency on the basis that what he had taken—spikefrill horn cores from the palace butchery, items often used in Lubalite ceremonies—would simply have been thrown out anyway. Penalty for theft was to have one’s hands amputated. This fellow’s lawyer contended that such an act would be cruel punishment, for the youth apparently had a flaw that would prevent the hands from regenerating. As proof, he offered his client’s left foot, which had only two toes; the third had been lost kilodays ago and had never regrown.

The ruling room’s doors burst open and in ran an elderly female Dybo didn’t recognize. The imperial guards quickly stepped forward, interposing themselves between the emperor and the intruder; there was always the chance that someone mad with dagamant would get into the palace. The stranger was panting hard, but her torso was steady. She held up a hand, showing that her claws were sheathed, and caught her breath. Then: “Your Luminance, forgive me. I’m Pos-Doblan, keeper of the maritime rookery north of the city.”

“Yes?” said Dybo.

“A homing wingfinger has just arrived. I wouldn’t have interrupted you, but the message is urgent.” She held up a coil of leather. Dybo was recumbent on the slab, tail sticking up like a rubbery mast. He flicked it, and a guard moved forward, retrieved the leather strip, took it to Dybo, then backed off to a respectful distance. Dybo unwound the strip and read it quickly. “God protect us,” he said softly.

One of Dybo’s advisors rose from a katadu bench. “Dybo?” she said, the lapse into informality within the throne chamber betraying her concern.

Dybo’s tone was decisive. “You, page“—he never could remember names—”summon Afsan right away. And send word to Fra’toolar that Novato should return as soon as possible. I’m going to need my best thinkers.” He pushed off the dayslab and began to leave the chamber.

“Emperor,” called the lawyer for the youth. “What about my client?”

“No punishment,” snapped Dybo. “We’re going to need all the hands we can get.”

“I have a feeling we have not gone back far enough,” Mokleb said to Afsan. “What’s the earliest memory you have?”

Afsan scratched the loose folds of the dewlap hanging from his aeck. “I don’t know. I remember, well, let’s see… I remember my vocational exams.”

“Those would have been when you were ten or eleven. Surely you remember older things.”

“Oh, sure. There’s that time I got lost in the forest; I’ve mentioned that before. And, let’s see, I remember getting in trouble for biting off the finger of one of my creche mates when I was young.”

“Did you do it in anger?”

“No, we were just playing around. It was an accident, and the finger grew back, of course.”

“What else do you remember?”

“Learning to cut leather. Catching butterflies. Let’s see… I remember the first time during my life that Pack Carno picked up and moved itself along the shores of the Kreeb River. I remember—what else?—I remember all the commotion when some dignitary came to visit the Pack. I didn’t know who it was at the time, but I later learned that it was Dybo’s—ah, what would the term be? Dybo’s grandmother, the Empress Sar-Sardon.”

“You remember an imperial visit to Carno?”

“Vaguely, yes. They took us youngsters down to the Kreeb and -washed us off so we’d look clean for her. I remember it because it was the first time they’d actually let us near the river; they were always afraid the current would sweep us away.”

“What else?”

“Learning to play lastoontal . God, what a boring process that was: walking up to the game board to make my move, then backing off so the other player could come up and make his or her move.”

“Anything else?”

“Oh, many things, I suppose, but they all seem trivial. A great thunderstorm. The first time I experienced a landquake. Finding a dead wingfinger.”

“A wingfinger? Was it purple?”

“No, it was white with pale orange stripes. A banded swift, I think.”

“What else?”

“Learning to read; memorizing endless series of glyphs and the words associated with them.”

“And do you remember which of these things came first?”

“It’s hard to say. They’re jumbled together in my mind.”

“What about anything that disturbed you, or frightened you, when you were a child?”

“Well, I mentioned the landquake: that scared me. Of course, one gets used to them. And I was quite frightened when I was lost in the forest. But no, nothing really shocking, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Yes,” said Mokleb. “That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

Finally, it was about to happen: the moment Novato had been waiting for and dreading. The four blue sides of the ladder were no longer simply fading into nothingness. Instead, she could see where they ended. Far, far above, she could see the actual summit of the tower. Novato’s claws hung half out of their sheaths, and her tail, floating in the air behind her, twitched left and right.

She thought of Rewdan and the Vine .

A giant blackdeath.