Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Forcing himself to turn away, Karr set off down the slope in search of other humans. Kitrika followed.

Their wanderings took them past several solitary, digging Ferals before encountering a group that was pulling a naked human out of a freshly burrowed pit. Karr hurried over to look. It was a man Karr did not recognize. The Ferals had cut him out of his clothes in order to extract him from the ghutzu. Based on the shreds of uniform cloth in the pit, Karr concluded the man was a Guard. He lay limp and his skin was bluish and clammy. It would have been easy to assume he was dead, except that Karr was quite familiar with the signs of fugue- coma. As he had done to so many colonists in Long Reach's dreamchamber, Karr bent and checked the Guard's vital signs.

"Peculiar," Karr said, resisting the urge to look back at his distant ship. Long Reach could not possibly be exuding enough fugue to put the man into suspended animation. If it had been, Karr would

still be in fuguetime. "In fact, impossible."

The Ferals, who were of the sophisticated sort who held patterns immobile on their glowbuds like body paint or badges of rank, gestured for Karr to follow. There was nothing else to do for the Guard but let the fugue -coma run its course, so Karr arranged him in a comfortable position and walked along with the quadrupeds.

Over a small rise, around a copse of shooting-star palms and on into a bowl between several rolling hills they went. Lying at the bottom of the depression was physical evidence that answered Karr's confusion. The segments had originally been ring or pipe shaped, between ten to twenty feet in diameter and six to ten feet tall. Now they were twisted and charred. Quite a few were missing, probably having fallen to the bottom of the ocean, still the Ferals had done a reasonable job of placing the sections into a semblance of their original, missile-like, shape, right down to positioning the remains of a bulging nose cone on the proper end.

A Feral with white accents on its paws pantomimed objects rushing skyward. "Frrooooosh, frooooosh, frooooosh, frooooosh? FOOOOOM!" It pantomimed an explosion and debris spreading out and fluttering down.

Karr needed no further explanation. One of the booster-spawn had not survived the attempt to escape its birth planet's gravity well? most likely the one in-bob had chewed the hole in. The burned segments were all that remained of a baby fugueship. It was sad, but Karr did not allow himself to be too morose. The dead spawn was part of a larger, near miraculous scenario, he reminded himself. Up, far beyond New Ascension's azure stratosphere there were three baby fugueships. Probably they were making their way to CG-423's single gas giant, to feed and grow strong on the fodder of its atmosphere and rings. That was a glorious thing in itself, but in addition to that, the last spawn's demise had spread an enormous amount of fugue in the area around its parent ship. The local flora, having evolved over tens of millennia, constantly battling Scourge to stay alive, had been unexpectedly freed of that struggle. It had suddenly been able to use all of its energy to grow at a phenomenal rate. The death of the spawn had lead to the birth of an entire continent.

"It seems a worthy trade," Karr decided quietly.

At which point Kitrika and White Paws and the other Ferals again prostrated themselves before him.

"Ghrrikitakadishtriss."

Karr and the Ferals wandered.

The Ferals spent their time sniffing for buried fugue dreamers. Sometimes they dug up humans. Many times they unearthed other creatures: large grazing animals, small fuzzy beasts, serpentine things, all in suspended animation. The Ferals did not eat any of the helpless creatures, but laid them in groups of their own kind and returned to sniffing and digging with unflagging dedication. It was, Karr noted, as if the Ferals were midwives to the rebirth of their world, and in this role they somehow could not kill.

Karr was not of much use. His olfactory senses were insignificant next to the Ferals. He could not dig through roots with his bare, feeble human hands, nor could he accelerate the revival of dreamers from fugue-coma. Karr had gone through withdrawal quicker than they because his body had suffered the process so many times. He did not know why the Ferals had come out so much quicker than he, nor what it was about the local fauna that allowed it to keep on growing instead of being paralyzed, but as he wasn't likely to discover those answers soon, he didn't worry about it much.

With nothing else to do, and a strong desire to be alone, Karr split off from the Ferals. Kitrika stayed with the others, helping as Karr could not.

A few days went by.

The new land was vast and beautiful. Flowers of untold numbers in different shapes and colors grew in fields, gems on green velvet. The color brushed off on Karr's legs like wet paint and rich perfumes arose, temporarily overpowering the smell of fresh-grown soil, which pervaded the continent. While there were no creatures to make noise, the new world was full of sounds, for the flora continued to grow rapidly in the Scourge-free environment, so fast that it made a soothing, rustling whisper, which eased Karr to sleep each evening. Every morning he would twist free of the growth that had blanketed him over night. Karr ate fruits shaped like barbells and drank water collected in plants formed like pitchers. His loose goal was to find open ocean. He wasn't sure why, but the water was still there, deep under all the ghutzu. If he closed his eyes and stood motionless, Karr could feed the ocean's movements, ever so slight, like a faint ground tremor on Solara. And it was somehow important to see it.

One afternoon, Karr spotted a great platinum arc on the horizon. He did not know what he had expected to see when he arrived, but there was only endless open water, reflecting clouds and sky in its alien, mirror-like surface. That sight was comforting, though, to know that New Ascension was still the ocean world Karr had seen from orbit, a silvery-blue sphere peppered with green ring-islands? and one large green continent. Pilot Lindal Karr had not screwed things up too badly. Perhaps that was what he had wanted to see.

Karr was sitting in a patch of yellow flowers, staring over nearby cliffs down at the ocean and listening to the trees grow when he saw her. She stepped out from behind a hillock, young and lithe, her short hair grown a bit wild and looking more yellow-blonde than Karr remembered it being before. The crystal starlure hung from her neck and it was her only garment. She did not see Karr at first, but moved sprightly through sights, sounds, and sensations of the world reborn around her, seeing with childlike eyes, gasping and reveling at each new discovery. She ran and dove into a heap of soft blooms.

"Jenette! Consul!" Karr called as she rolled in glittering pollen.

"Lindal!" she cried, a smile splitting her face. She rushed through the flowers, threw her arms around him and gave him a big hug.

"Ouch," Karr flinched.

"Oops," Jenette giggled, drawing back with an expression of exaggerated regret. "Sooorrr-y." She removed the spiky starlure and dropped it into the flowers. She gave Karr another hug and then twirled giddily in the sunlight. "I've had the most wonderful dreams, Lindal!"

Karr nodded knowingly; non-Pilots dreamed heavily under fugue. "I'm sure you have."

"Everything was perfect," Jenette bubbled on, "all beautiful and peaceful and Utopian. And then I woke up and it was all true!" She stopped spinning. Her attention fixed on Karr, her thoughts turning mischievous. "I bet you'd look pretty good without those silly tights on."

"Pardon?"

Jenette paced sultrily closer. "That geeksuit...."