Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

thought she kept that a secret.

It was unthinkable that Jenette would leave Arrou.

It had to be Karr's fault.

Too bad. Arrou was just beginning to like Karr and he might still have given Karr the benefit of the doubt, but Jenette always told Arrou that humans who broke their promises were bad and Karr had definitely promised to teach Arrou to fly? and had not ? which made Karr bad and made Arrou doubly angry with him.

Urrr.

Too many bad thoughts. Arrou lost his paddling rhythm.

Dark thoughts were not typical for Arrou, and he didn't like them. There was always something to be dark about, he knew. It was better to be happy, even if you had to work at it. So he concentrated on paddling and getting rid of the bad thoughts.

Fortunately, the paddleboard itself made Arrou feel better. Arrou had made it all by himself and he was quite pleased with it. The boards Arrou saw Tlalok's Ferals use had not been made out of bodybag pods like in the human documentary. They were made out of layered sailtree leaves. After a little trial and error, Arrou had succeeded in pressing two living leaves together and stimulating their growth with his immune venom. Injections at key spots cause them to bind together. More venom injected at the stems caused the leaves to harden as he pressed against them, forming a shallow boat in the shape of his body.

By dawn Arrou had snipped the cured hull free (careful not to damage the living tree it came off of) and trimmed the edges with his teeth. By mid-morning he had a working paddleboard.

It took a few hours to get the handle of paddling, but a little after noon, and with the help of the rhyme, Arrou was going quite fast. He got bored with the first four lines of the rhyme soon, so he experimented making up new ones.

"Fatty wants, he try, try, tries,

"Fatty dreams, he sigh, sigh, sighs,

"Fatty weeps, he cry, cry, cries,

"Fatty fights, he die, die, dies."

Arrou didn't like that batch of lines. They were too dark. And they didn't all end in sounds. The rules were that the lines had to end in sounds, but it was hard for Arrou to think of better rhymes because human words were hard to rhyme. In the end he settled for timing his strokes by humming the rhythm without words.

Time passed. The cool water felt good on his legs and prevented him from overheating in the glare of the sun.

He would make a better board next time, Arrou decided. For instance, the Feral boards had funny knots where paddler's legs hung over the edge. Arrou had not understood what these were for until he

paddled for a few hours and rubbed his thick skin raw against the edge of the board. Also, he had used the wrong side of the leaf on the bottom. The smooth side should go down, so that it was slipperier in the water, never mind that the fuzzy side would make him hot. And it would be good to figure out how to make the sharkworm lures. Arrou cold not get the peepers to hold still long enough to mold a cage around them. Three got away before he gave up and took a running leap off the shore, paddling like mad to get away from the dangerous waters near the island. Fortunately he had not tipped over, because he didn't think he could get back on the tippy board if he did.

More time passed. It was exhilarating paddling up the face of waves and racing down their other sides. The movement of ocean rollers in the direction opposite his line of travel added a great sensation of speed. Arrou was tranquil for quite a while, but then he started to think about the speed difference between his paddle-board and the heavy lifter. If Karr flew for eight hours at just twenty knots, then Arrou would have to paddle all day and all night long to keep the same distance between them. If Karr went faster, or Arrou stopped paddling ... more bad thoughts.

He worried about Jenette.

The world outside the Enclave walls was dangerous. Arrou didn't know much about that world; Jenette knew less than he; and Karr? well, Karr didn't know a thing. That was why Karr lost his clothes and almost got killed by Tlalok. If Karr had forced Jenette to leave without Arrou, who knew what stupid thing Karr would do next? Arrou hoped to find the humans soon, before the Burning Heart made everything crazy.

Arrou had few memories from before Jenette, but he remembered a nighttime feeling, big, soft, and warm (he guessed this was his mother), and he remembered a gentle voice cooing to him and his siblings about the Burning Heart of Night. The others in that pleasant memory were all dead now, and Arrou did not recall the exact words spoken, but he remembered ... the Burning Heart brings change. Big things happened when the night wept ? big hurts that make people wise. Or dead.

Arrou paddled harder, spurred on by the belief that he, Arrou, could somehow keep Jenette from harm if he could just find her.

About then, when the sun was highest in the sky, things got complicated. Arrou heard a whining noise, far away but crystal clear in the way that sounds can be when they travel long distances over water. It came to his ears in spurts, intermittently as his paddleboard dipped into wave valleys then rose on wave crests. Arrou's first thought was of Tlalok and the Ferals. They were on the ocean, but they should have been ahead of Arrou. Had he somehow passed them by without knowing it?

Arrou spun his board, trying to stay on the wave crests as long as possible, and tried to keep his ear pits focused on that sound. Over the course of several minutes, the sound swept back and forth, from north to south and back again.

It was searching.

Arrou recognized the sound as it got closer. It was not Ferals. It was a colony vehicle. And not the one that Arrou had ridden in recently, but a fast one. It was probably a skimmer. In spite of his love of speed, Arrou did not like the skimmer's turbine whine. It was a bad memory. Human raiders used skimmers to collect young Ferals.

So Arrou did not know how to feel when he saw a fast moving speck on the horizon. Of course it was humans, but what humans? And what would they do? Arrou knew that humans in skimmers killed Ferals on sight and few humans could tell a domestic from a Feral, especially if the domestic was in a handmade Feral boat, like Arrou was.

It was not a good situation. Definitely not.

XVI

"An adequate solution applied vigorously is better than a perfect solution applied half-heartedly."

? from the speeches of Olin Tesla

The speck continued to sweep the horizon, an ivory plume of water billowing up behind it. It moved out of view each time before coming back, larger than before. Arrou focused his vision on it as much as possible. The speck widened into an oval and, as the distance between Arrou and it diminished, stubby wings sprouting from its sides became visible. It was definitely a skimmer. Skimmers did not plow through the water like boats or lumber on top of it like crawlers, but floated a couple yards above the waves, cushioned on a pillow of air trapped under the stubby wings. Raised at the rear of the craft, in an oversized cylindrical cowling, Arrou recognized the PanaTech G-14 B turbine that gave it power: 1500

bhp, 1100 lbs torque, max speed when mounted in skimmer 175 knots.

But, Arrou reminded himself, those things were not important just then.

Should Arrou try to meet it or should he try to hide? Maybe he could use the rollers to keep from being seen. He could certainly imitate the color of the ocean, but if he did that and they saw him anyway, then he would really look like a running Feral.

Arrou decided hiding was not the thing to do.

Next time the skimmer came by, he turned into an oncoming swell and, as his board slid diagonally up to the crest, sat up and waved with his good foreleg. Initially the skimmer looked like it would pass by, but it banked at the last moment and then circled in wide arcs around Arrou. He watched a human stand up at the controls.