Zach Hughes - The Legend of Miaree

Screaming into the dead communications system. "Engines!" No answer. A dimming scanner showing the gutted compartment and a smear of red on the jagged edge of the gaping hole in the hull.

The ship was dead. It shot past a small, sunside planet and the heat built as he armed the mechanical demo release of the escape hatch. His hands weak, trembling.

Then he was aspin in space, traveling the arc of the dying ship into the sun. Hope. He could tell them. Ah, the rotten luck of it. Valuable tools and equipment going into that goddamned sun. But they had the means to send a lightspeed message. There was hope. Five worlds there. Four

life-zone worlds, packed closely around a fine, stable sun.

Nothing vital had been ruptured in the circuits of the suit and the backpack made sounds inside the suit, fighting the pull of the sun and winning, accelerating, as he browned out. Heat straining the capacity of the suit but cooling as the sun world swam past. And there would be, in a civilization which could beam messages into interstellar space, people on the second world.

After a long period of sleep he awoke with the wetness on his lips and looked into the multifaceted eyes of a tiny angel. Long, soft lips almost touched his, loosing the rain of sweetness. Tiny hands pushed the fruit into his lips. Around him they swarmed in dozens.

"Thank you," he said. The sound sent them skittering on a flare, leaving him alone. Had they, or he, lifted his visor? God, he stank.

His left leg was useless. The abdominal wounds were scabbed over, healing. His head was clear.

Around him an empty world, the six-inch winged angels hovering at a distance. Across the water, trees, dense, thick-leaved. A part of his dream. Things crawled on the limbs. "Come. Come." He rested.

On a limb overhanging the lake something moved, jerked, pulsed. With a feeble hand he closed his visor. He thumbed magnification into it and watched, the hours meaningless, his body using the time to heal. The movement came from a rounded node on the limb, white, silken. And as hours flowed, a tiny hand emerged, clutched, rested, as he rested. A head. Wet antennae unfolded in the heat of the sun. A struggle. One of the winged angels, fully formed, sat, in exhaustion, on the limb. Wings wet, folded. Fascinated, he did not take his eyes off the tiny, beautiful creature until it flexed its drying wings, launched itself into air, fell, caught, soared, wings beating, keening voice singing a note of joy.

A world of butterflies. A goddamned world of bugs. Where were the people who sent the message?

His chronometer said that he’d been healing for fourteen standard days.

On the fifteenth day, he struggled out of the stinking, soiled suit,

crawled to the water’s edge. He checked it carefully. But he’d been in that water. It was unhospitable to the sucking things which crawled the trees and munched leaves on the other side of the lake. He pulled himself in, bathed, discarding his clothing, letting the perfumed water cool his burning, scabbed wounds.

His movements frightened the tiny winged creatures. No longer did they bring him food. At a distance, he watched them, saw among them creatures, less delicate, unwinged, who walked the ground on two legs, much like men.

He had swum ashore to a grassy knoll. From the top, gained by much effort, pulling his still mending leg behind him, he could see a plain of flowers. The flowers were alive with the winged angels.

He could not get far from water, not in his condition. But he had to have food. Apparently, the angels had fed him their own food, nectar. He grinned, his face feeling crackly under his fifteen-day beard. Kept alive for fifteen days by a bunch of bugs feeding him flower juice.

He reached the near flowers. They smelled sweet and the nectar was a cluster of grains, pulpy, in the stamen. He ate. Around him the angels twittered and seemed to laugh.

"Good," he said to them, scattering them. "Very good. You live quite the life, don’t you?"

The flowers, themselves, offered more bulk and were quite tasty.

In the evening he sat on top of the knoll. The angels circled him at a distance. He waved to them, motioned them to come closer. One, with a head larger than the others, a head so heavy that she flew rather clumsily, approached. He made motions to his mouth. They had to have some intelligence to know that he required food to live, water to survive. They’d kept him alive. The angel with the large head twittered and keened. He repeated the eating motions.

She had tiny hands, perfectly formed. Her legs, tucked up, seemed less well formed. They had given him something other than flower nectar. He made the motions. He started to speak, but remembered that the sound of his voice frightened them. He’d seen the fruit on the large trees across the lake. He pointed, shaped his hands in the circle of the fruit, motioned.

The angel keened, flew heavily across the water. Others followed. It took three of them, working together, to bring a whole fruit. They placed it a few yards away and retreated. He crawled to it. Ate with relish. The fruit was good. The juice ran down his chin. He motioned again and the same three angels brought a second fruit. He smiled, waved. He took the second fruit and crawled back down the hill. The chill of evening was upon him. He crawled into the suit and slept.

He awoke with the sun in his eyes and they were there, at the top of the knoll. Some of the wingless ones carried a shapeless mass, placed it there on the smooth grass. He crawled to it. It was flesh, but flesh of a sort he’d never seen. He tasted it cautiously. It was spicy, chewy. Yet it was new. He ate the fruit, left the flesh. He’d been fantastically lucky. The flower food and the fruit were compatible with his system. The flesh was strange. He withdrew to bathe in the lake. The wingless ones came to the flesh and, gesturing, ate of it. Finding that he’d had no ill effects from the bite he’d sampled that morning, he tried some of it for lunch, ate hungrily.

By the twentieth day, the large-headed angel would approach to within a few feet of him, stand erect on her legs, which seemed to be developing, and twitter at him. Her head was growing. Now she was so heavy that she walked, instead of flying.

He was able to make the link between the crawling things of the trees and the winged angels. Butterflies in metamorphosis. The round, mawed things the larvae, the rounded sac the chrysalis—the sac he’d observed as it gave birth to a fully formed angel. But this change which took place from day to day in his large-headed friend with the feminine features, the large eyes, the cute, protruding rear? After perfection, what?

When he was able, after twenty-five days, to limp on his leg, the flowered plain drew him, led him away from the lake, water stored in his suit-pack. He carried fruit and a hunk of the spicy flesh. He traveled slowly. Ahead were low hills and beyond, mountains. He walked through a grove of the thick-leaved trees and looked warily for the crawling larvae. Apparently there was some natural boundary, some natural rule. Only the winged angels and the walking ones, looking much like tiny men, watched his passage. The trees supplied him with fruit.

His large-headed friend paced him. Flying now and then, walking tiredly most of the time. She was growing visibly and flying became more and more difficult for her as the third day of his journey took him past

clear, perfumed streams and groves of the fruited trees. They seemed to know no season; young pips of fruit mixed with maturing and ripened fruit on the same branch.

He was following the sun. It led him up steep hills to the crest of the low range and before him was the sea and there, far below, was movement. He used the magnifier in his visor and saw them, angels, grown large, wings tiny on their backs.