Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Karr wiped his mouth, more confused than ever. "I don't hate you."

Jenette smiled sadly. "You should."

"No..." said Karr, trying to figure out his own mixed-up feelings. He had enjoyed the kiss, just not the way it ended. "No, I shouldn't. I kind of liked what just happened. It was just a little too fast. I don't exactly have a lot of experience with ... this sort of stuff. Pilots are solitary creatures, you know. And, uh, I know intellectually that you are twenty-three standard years old, but you don't look a day over fifteen by off-world standards."

Jenette shook her head. What could she tell him? Until that day she had feared every change her body made towards adulthood. Now she fervently, irrationally, wished that she had never taken hormone inhibitors at all. Frustration laced her voice. "I can't change the way I look! If I looked my true age I'd be

dead!"

"I don't want you to change the way you look," Karr hurried to explain. "There's nothing wrong with looking young. When you're thirty-five and look twenty-five, you'll be the envy of every off-world woman, believe me. It's just that right now you look out-of-bounds young? underage, off limits upon pain of

imprisonment,

banishment,

loss

of

rank,

or

marriage-at-the-barrel-of-a-splatter-pattern-projectile-weapon young."

Jenette resigned herself to that explanation.

Karr groped for a consoling thought.

"It must be rough, being born? " Karr almost said on a Plague World, but caught himself at the last instant and said, instead, "? here. Scourge and Feral wars and hormone inhibitors. Destiny can be a harsh master."

Jenette snorted. "I don't believe in destiny, other that that which I make for myself."

"No? No greater meaning? No purpose for existence? How do you keep your sanity?"

Jenette's forehead crinkled philosophically. "One day," she said with a nod of her chin at the spectacular skyscape, "I plan to be a cloud."

Karr didn't understand.

Jenette waxed poetic. "One day, when I'm dead and gone, all the water in my body will be free. The molecules of water will evaporate from my mortal shell, float into the air and join clouds high above all these earthly troubles." Jenette pointed at a wispy streak high in the stratosphere. "Little bits of me will bask in eternal sunlight. Young humans and Khafra will lie on their backs and stare up at me. I'll be a treasure ship, or a mushroom, or a faraway island castle. Scourge won't mean anything to me then. I'll be a tiny, content part of the larger cycle of life."

For some reason, Karr, was reminded of his relationship with Long Reach. "And you won't be lonely?"

"No. The way I see it, every cloud up there was part of somebody alive at one time or another. I'll have good company." Jenette didn't speak for a while. "Sometimes I'll have to be rain, but I can put up with that. I'll float and rain and then evaporate back into clouds, over and over. Maybe I won't know it's me anymore, but I'll be a part of it. Leave the worrying to someone else."

"I like it," Karr declared.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Count me in."

"Okay then." Jenette smiled. "It's decided."

They sat quiet for a while then, not touching, but feeling very close as souls billowed and raced across the afternoon sky.

Karr kept Jenette safe when she slipped into a brief fugue coma. He said nothing about it afterwards and the two of them returned to base. An hour later the camp was packed up and the heavy lifter

hovering with Karr at the controls. Grapple arms flexed down and plucked the null-fusion reactor from its slimy bed.

No one noticed a cancerous shape that clawed to the surface from a deep gouge in the island, sniffing and listening, head cocked intently. Nor did anyone notice as it ducked out of sight and fronds wriggled from mole-like movement underneath the island's sloppy surface, or as a creature clad in anthropoid skin scrambled up in the blind spot under the lifter's hull. Thruster engines throbbed. The lifter's bow dipped.

And soon the flying slab was no more than a speck, accelerating away from the foul-smelling shores of Coffin Island, with the even smaller speck of a four-legged in-human clinging, inverted, to the precious Null which had given meaning to its wretched life for so very, very long.

XL

Two days later.

Ferals were thick on the ocean, in paddleboards and other grown-to-order craft. Arrou was on shift at the heavy lifter controls, Karr and Jenette standing just behind the cockpit, and they all saw the vast net of Ferals. There were so many that Arrou could actually smell them, even from fifteen yards up and traveling twenty-five knots per hour.

Jenette found the display captivating. The Ferals appeared to be following some sort of overall plan.

Scores and scores of legs and paws paddled in perfect rhythm. Each and every bow of each and every vessel pointed in the same direction? the very same direction the heavy lifter was heading.

It was a development Karr did not relish. Where were all those aliens going? They hardly looked up as the lifter's rectangular shadow passed over them. What could be so all-consuming that these Ferals paid such little heed to a flying machine from another planet? The sooner the Ferals were specks in the distance behind them, the happier Karr would be.

"Arrou " he ordered, "accelerate to thirty knots."

"Urrr, accelerating."

Arrou pulled the throttle up a bit and pushed the steering yoke forward a bit further. The lifter's nose dipped slightly and the breeze caused by its passage through the air rushed slightly faster, but the increased speed brought Karr no greater sense of security. Rather, even more Ferals on paddleboards scrolled into view from beyond the horizon ahead? and a cluster of islands came into view with them.

Karr squinted distrustfully at the green blobs.

They seemed to be spaced very evenly across the water.

Jenette observed that the green silhouettes appeared different from those she saw regularly around the Enclave. As the lifter drew closer, checkered patterns of lush jungle foliage and lighter, cleared plots became visible on the backs of the ring-islands. Furthermore, the islands were not ring-islands at all, but solid, healthy disks without a characteristic sinkhole at the center. Jenette began to get excited. She almost squealed aloud in delight as she spied large dome structures peeking out from stands of trees and clusters of smaller domes gathered where several open plots joined together.

"Give them a wide berth," Karr said to Arrou.

"No, please," Jenette said, a hopeful sparkle in her eyes. "I'd like to see what's down there."

Karr acquiesced, against his better judgment. "All right. Hold your course, Arrou, but keep us well above the tallest trees."

"Hold course, keep vertical clearance, urrr."

The lifter swooped up over the first emerald isle, giving a beautiful top-down view. The open spaces were clearly agricultural plots: viridian squares with neat pink furrows or khaki patches with light green hedges, some even contained herds of animals.

"Look, look!" Jenette pointed. "Domesticated forfaraws! And villages! And roads!"

Beaten mulch pathways linked the fields and domes. Golden roadwort connected clusters of domes to other clusters of domes. And there were Ferals everywhere, not like the abandoned-looking Feral islands near the Enclave. Ferals worked the fields. Ferals carried baskets full of fruits and tubers along the paths.

Ferals tended groups of kits that played in pools of standing water or raced in and out of the domed huts.

Some of the adults even seemed to be teaching classes of kits. Jenette could hardly believe her luck.

At that moment, a collective gasp rose from the other expedition members, who were peering over the side of the heavy lifter.