Vonda McIntyre - Fireflood

Jay looked at her sharply, his thick flaring eyebrows raised in surprise. He veiled his eyes for a moment with the translucent avian membranes, then let them slowly retract.

"Join you? In... your preserve?" He was polite enough to call it this time by its official name. Though she had expressed herself badly, Dark felt some hope.

"I misspoke myself," she said. "I came-- the others and I decided to come-- to ask you to join us politically. Or at least to support us."

"To get you a better home. That seems only fair."

"That isn't quite what we're hoping for. Or rather it is, but not the way you mean."

Jay hesitated again. "I see. You want... what you were made for."

Dark wanted to nod; she missed the shorthand of the language of the human body, and she found she was unable to read Jay's. She had been two years out of contact with normal humans; or perhaps it was that Jay was a flyer, and his people had made adjustments of their own.

"Yes. We were made to be explorers. It's a useless economy, to keep us on earth. We could even pay our own way after a while."

Dark watched him closely, but could not tell what he thought. His face remained expressionless; he did not move toward her or away. Then he sighed deeply. That, Dark understood.

"Digger-- " She flinched, but inwardly, the only way she could. He had not seemed the type to mock her. "-- the projects are over. They changed their minds. There will be no exploring or colonizing, at least not by you and me. And what difference does it make? We have a peaceful life and everything we need. You've been badly used but that could be changed."

"Maybe," Dark said, doubting his words. The flyers were beautiful, her people were ugly, and as far as

the humans were concerned that made every difference. "But we had a purpose, and now it's gone. Are you happy, living here with nothing to do?"

"We're content. Your people are all ready, but we aren't. We'd have to go through as much change again as we already have."

"What's so bad about that? You've gone this far. You volunteered for it. Why not finish?"

"Because it isn't necessary."

"I don't understand," Dark said. "You could have a whole new living world. You have even more to gain than we do, that's why we thought you'd help us." Dark's planned occupation was the exploration of dead worlds or newly formed ones, the places of extremes where no other life could exist. But Jay's people were colonists; they had been destined for a world that was being made over for them, even as they were being suited for what it would become.

"The terraforming is only beginning," Jay said. "If we wait until it's complete-- "

"But that won't be for generations."

Jay shrugged. "We know."

"You'll never see it!" Dark cried. "You'll be dead and dust before it changes enough for people like you are now to live on it."

"We're virus-changed, not constructed," Jay said. "We breed true. Our grandchildren may want another world, and the humans may be willing to help them go. But we intend to stay here." He blinked slowly, dreamily. "Yes, we are happy. And we don't have to work for the humans."

"I don't care who I work for, as long as I can be something better than a deformed creature," Dark said angrily. "This world gives my people nothing and because of that we're dying."

"Come now," Jay said tolerantly.

"We're dying!" Dark stopped and rocked back on the edge of her shell so she could more nearly look him in the eye. "You have beauty all around you and in you, and when the humans see you they admire you. But they're afraid of us! Maybe they've forgotten that we started out human or maybe they never considered us human at all. It doesn't matter. I don't care! But we can't be anything, if we don't have any purpose. All we ask is that you help us make ourselves heard, because they'll listen to you. They love you. They almost worship you!" She paused, surprised by her own outburst.

"Worship us!" Jay said. "They shoot us out of the sky, like eagles."

He looked away from her. His gaze sought out clouds, the direction of the sun, for all she knew the eddies of the wind. Dark thought she sensed something, a call or a cry at the very edge of one of her new perceptions. She reached for it, but it eluded her. It was not meant for her.

"Wait for me at sunset," Jay said, his voice remote. He spread his huge furled wings and sprang upward, the muscles bunching in his short, powerful legs. Dark watched him soar into the sky, a graceful dark blue shape against the cloud-patterned gold and scarlet dawn.

Dark knew she had not convinced him. When he was nothing but a speck she eased herself down again and lumbered up the flank of the volcano. She could feel it beneath her feet. Its long rumbles pulsed through her, at a far lower frequency than she ever could have heard as a human. It promised heat and danger; it excited her. She had experienced no extremes, of either heat or cold, pressure or vacuum, for far too many months.

The ground felt hollow beneath Dark's claws: passages lay beneath her, and lava beaten to a froth by the violence of its formation and frozen by exposure into spongy rock. She found a crevice that would leave no trace of her passing and slid into it. She began to dig, slowly at first, then faster, dirt and pulverized stone flying over her shoulders. In a moment the earth closed in around her.

* * *

Dark paused to rest. Having reached the gas-formed tunnels, she no longer had to dig her way through the substance of the mountain. She relaxed in the twisted passage, enjoying the brilliance of the heat and the occasional shining puff of air that came to her from the magma. She could analyze the gases by taste: that was another talent the humans had given her. Vapors toxic to them were merely interesting scents to her. If necessary she could metabolize some gases; the ability would have been necessary in many of the places she had expected to see, where sunlight was too dim to convert, where life had vanished or never evolved and there were no organic chemicals. On the outer planets, in the asteroids, even on Mars, her energy would have come from a tenuous atmosphere, from ice, even from the dust. Out there the challenging extremes would be cold and emptiness, unless she discovered hot, living veins in dying planets. Perhaps now no one would ever look for such activity on the surface of an alien world. Dark had dreamed of the planets of a different star, but she might never get a chance even to see the moon.

Dark sought a living vein in a living world: she moved toward the volcano's central core. Her people had been designed to resist conditions far more severe than the narrow range tolerated by normals, but she did not know if she could survive this great a temperature. Nor did she care. The rising heat drew her toward a heightened state of consciousness that wiped away caution and even fear. The rock walls glowed in the infrared, and as she dug at them, the chips flew like sparks. At last, with nothing but a thin plate of stone between her and the caldera, she hesitated. She was not afraid for her life. It was almost as if she were afraid she would survive: afraid the volcano, like all else, would finally disappoint her.

She lashed out with her armored hand and shattered the fragile wall. Steam and vapor poured through the opening, flowing past her. Before she stopped normal breathing she chanced a quick, shallow mouthful and savored the taste and smell, then moved forward to look directly into the crater.

Whatever she had imagined dissolved in the reality. She was halfway up the crater, dazzled from above by light and from below by heat. She had been underground a long time and it was almost exactly noon. Sunlight beat down through clouds of steam, and the gases and sounds of molten rock reached up to her. The currents swirled, hot and hotter, and in the earth's wound a flood of fire burned.