Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Whoops, thought Jenette. What had she said?

Blank-one seeks the Burning Heart of Night in sky-flyer? Kthulah asked, more specifically.

Yes, Jenette answered, trying to choose nonthreatening hues.

Silence. Seemingly endless.

"What's happening?" Karr asked.

"I think I messed up," Jenette said, stepping back from the lifter's forward rim.

Ferals on the water took on edgier colors and began to fidget.

"Maybe we should move along," Karr suggested, ever the paranoid.

Jenette hung her head and stared angrily at the starlure. In her excitement she had not been as cautious as she should have been, and that was stupid. She would never let her guard down with members of her own species; what had possessed her to make such a foolish mistake in a dialogue with a society of unknown Ferals? Jenette felt the frustration hot and moist at the corners of her eyes and she gritted her teeth.

Karr let go of Jenette's legs. "Arrou, ease us on out of here."

"Easing."

"Oh, wait!" Jenette blurted as another light code message headed their way.

Blank-one?

Yes? Jenette hurried to flash.

Sky-flyer will arrive at the Burning Heart before Pact?

Sky-flyer arrives at Burning Heart in one day. On the water, another orange gasp.

Blank-one?

Yes?

Kthulah wants to go on sky-flyer, too.

Karr was adamant. "No. No. Unequivocally, unthinkably: no. Arrou, get us out of here. And don't fly over any more islands, either."

Engine thrum and headwind picked up.

"But this is the chance of a lifetime!" Jenette pleaded. "This could be the beginning of a whole new era in human-Feral interaction!"

"Interaction from a distance is one thing," Karr countered, "but a bunch of bloodthirsty Ferals on board the lifter, with us? Too risky."

"One is not a bunch, and you don't know he's bloodthirsty!"

"I don't know he's not bloodthirsty!"

Jenette looked big eyes at Karr and spoke as sweetly as she could. "Please? This is really, really important. There has to be a compromise."

"Pilots don't compromise."

"And Pilots are wrong sometimes," Jenette said, just as sweetly. "Aren't they?"

Karr cursed and rubbed his temples, feeling suddenly, excessively guilty. "That is not fair. I'm not the one who wants to take chances this time. This time it's you. And besides, saving my ship could very well benefit human-Feral relations, because human colonists will no longer require immune venom and Sacrament if they have a ready source of fugue from Long Reach."

"That's long-term. This is now," Jenette countered. "What did you say about trusting me more?"

The argument bounced back and forth for a while, and so it was not entirely surprising that Karr and Jenette did not at first notice the phenomena on the water below. In a slow ripple, spreading out from the west, every Feral on the ocean began to mimic the exact hue of the sky. So close was the color match that the ocean appeared to be a giant, platinum sieve, punched with holes wherever there were Ferals? a silver sieve with turquoise sky shining up from below, as well as down from above.

What Karr noticed first was a disagreement between his inner ear's perception of level and the angle of the deck under his feet.

"Are we drifting?" he asked. "Arrou, check your drift."

Arrou's head was tilted at a peculiar angle to the left.

"Are we in a bank?" said Karr. "I think we're in a bank."

In fact Arrou's whole body was canted subtly to the left and was thereby pulling the steering yoke off center, so the heavy lifter was slowly banking left.

"Check your attitude. Arrou? Arrou?"

"Oooooooooooooooh," said the alien.

Karr followed Arrou's glassy stare down to the ocean. The skycolored Ferals were blinking on and off in swirling, hypnotic patterns. The effect was not so strong directly below the lifter, but as distance and perspective packed the Ferals closer together near the horizon, the patterns became quite intense.

"What is that?" Jenette shrugged.

Karr rapped on Arrou's leathery back. "Arrou? Pilot to Arrou,, we need to make a course correction.

Hey! Is anybody in there?"

"Arrou? in? here," the alien responded, zombie-like. "Arrou? follow? sky? holes."

The Feral patterns were a giant whirlpool of dots swirling in the same westerly direction that Arrou was leaning.

"Go to auto-pilot," Karr ordered. "I'm taking control."

"No," Arrou said simply, and, as Karr began to climb into the tiny cockpit behind him, he swatted Karr with a foreleg. It was a casual swat, but one with the force of a four-hundred-pound creature behind it. Karr sailed through the air sideways, hitting the lifter's side rail in the vicinity of the right front thruster cowl.

Karr made an internal note not to try that again. A few inches further and he would have taken the long plunge overboard. "You might help," he gasped at Jenette as he staggered back behind the cockpit.

"I might," Jenette remarked, "if I thought there was a problem."

At which point Karr realized he would not prevail in that situation. Short of severing control system microfibers from the individual thrusters, so that the heavy lifter would go into safety glide-down and sink into the horde of Ferals, there was nothing he could do to alter Arrou's course.

The sky holes were growing more psychedelic by the minute. "I don't get it," he complained. "It's not affecting us. Why is it affecting him?"

"Khafra are extremely sensitive to certain phenomena involving vision," Jenette said loftily. "Remember his reaction to the Feral light display on the night we first met."

"But that was night, with bright, bright lights. This is broad daylight and a bunch of dumb, blue spots on the water."

"Perhaps you should take it up with him," Jenette suggested, in reference to Arrou. "Reason it out."

"Preeeetttty," Arrou cooed, as to confirm how useless that course of action would prove.

"This is just wonderful," Karr grumbled.

The heavy lifter flew into the midst of a vast Feral fleet. If the islands on the periphery had been destroyers and frigates, then these islands were cruisers and battleships. Karr counted ten islands bigger than the Enclave colony island and more were appearing as Arrou took the lifter deeper into the formation, following the sky holes, which now cycled like landing lights at a spaceport.

"Wow," said Jenette.

On a flat ocean planet, where nothing was taller than a sailtree, it was a shock to see the island at the end of the landing lights. To Jenette it seemed to be a fabled off-world mountain, towering many times higher than the tallest sailtree. To Karr? who had seen many mountains on his own homeworld and others? the island's silhouette resembled the spiraling end of an enormous seashell, its landforms twisting up out of the water hundreds of feet into the air.

It was a city. A burgeoning Feral metropolis.

Tier upon tier of squat violet domes and spindly indigo minarets competed for space on the slopes of the great cone. Countless Ferals walked four-legged across impossibly thin arch-spans and swarmed

along boulevards of roadwort cobblestones and crowded open-air markets and floating docks, which jutted out in profusion from the city's waterfront. Large double and triple hulled vessels with spider-leg outriggers and sails that fanned out like peacock tails, unloaded goods from surrounding islands.

Offshore, other vessels waited in turn for a berth and still others plied the waters between islands, deftly maneuvering through the ever-present communication net of Ferals on paddleboards, to acquire cargo from other islands of the fleet.

Karr imagined landing and all those Ferals swarming aboard the heavy lifter. He imagined tearing, limb from limb, and he wasn't the one doing the tearing. Karr began pounding on Arrou's back. "Stop! Stop!