had two hundred years with Blueshell. Sometimes he was petty and a little spineful, but he was a great trader. We had many wonderful times. And at the end even you could see his courage.”
Ravna nodded.
“We found a terrible secret on this last journey. I think that hurt him as much as the final… burning. I am grateful to you for protecting us. Now I want to think, to let the surf and the time work with my memories and sort them out. Maybe if this poor imitation skrode is up to it, I’ll even make a chronicle of our quest.”
She touched Peregrine on two of his heads. “One thing, Sir Pilgrim. You trust much to give me freedom of your seas… But you should know, Blueshell and I were pregnant. I have a mist of our common eggs within me. Leave me here and there will be new Riders by this island in future years. Please do not take that as betrayal. I want to remember Blueshell with children—but modestly; our kind has shared ten million worlds and never been bad neighbors… except in a way that, Ravna can tell you, cannot happen here.”
In the end, Greenstalk was not at all interested in the protected stretch of water that Peregrine had discovered. She wanted—of all the places here—the one where the ocean crashed most ferociously. It took them more than an hour to find a path down to that violent place, and another half hour to get Rider and skrode safely into the water. Peregrine didn’t even try to swim here. The coral rock came in close from all sides, slimy green in patches, razor jagged in others. Five minutes in that meat grinder and he might be too weak to get out. Strange that there was so much green in the water here. It was all but opaque with sea grasses and swarms of foam midges.
Ravna was a little better off; at the water’s greatest height, she could still keep feet to ground—at least most of the time. She stood in the foam, bracing herself with feet and an arm, and helped the skrodeling over the lip of rock. Once in, the mechanical crashed firmly to the bottom beside the human.
Ravna looked up at Pilgrim, made an “okay” gesture. Then she huddled down for a moment, holding to the skrode to keep her place. The surf crashed over the two, obscuring all but Greenstalk’s tallest standing fronds. When the foam moved back, he could see that the lower fronds draped across the human’s back, and hear a voder buzzing that wasn’t quite intelligible against all the other noise.
The human stood and slogged through the waist deep-water toward the rocks Peregrine occupied. Peregrine grabbed onto himself, reached down to give Ravna some paws. She scrambled up the slime green and coral white.
He followed the limping Two-Legs toward the crest of tropical ferns. They stopped under the shade, and she sat down, leaned back into the mat of a fern’s trunk. Cut and bruised, she looked almost as hurt as Johanna ever had.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she ran her hands back through disheveled hair. Then she looked at him and laughed. “We both look like casualties.”
Um, yes. Sometime soon he needed a fresh-water bath. He looked around and out. From the crest of the atoll ring they had a view of Greenstalk’s niche. Ravna was looking down there too, minor injuries forgotten.
“How can she like that spot?” Peregrine said wonderingly. “Imagine being smashed and smashed and smashed.”
There was a smile on Ravna’s face, but she kept her two eyes on the surf. “There are strange things in the universe, Pilgrim; I’m glad there are some you have not read about yet. Where the surf meets the shore—lots of neat things can happen there. You saw all the life that floated in that madness. Just as plants love the sun, there are creatures that can use the energy differences down at that edge. There they have the sun and the surge and the richness of the suspension… Still, we should keep watch a little longer.” Between each insurge of the waves, they could still see Greenstalk’s fronds. He already knew that those limbs weren’t strong, but he was beginning to realize that they must be very tough. “She’ll be okay, though that cheap skrode may not last long. Poor Greenstalk may end up without any automation at all… she and her children, the lowest of all Riders.”
Ravna turned to look at the pack. There was still that smile on her face. Wondering, yet pleased? “You know the secret Greenstalk spoke of?”
“Woodcarver told me what you told her.”
“I’m glad—surprised—she was willing to let Greenstalk come here. Medieval minds—sorry, most any minds —would want to kill before taking even the faintest risk with something like this.”
“Then why did you tell the Queen?” About the skrode’s perversion.
“It’s your world. I was tired of playing god with the Secret. And Greenstalk agreed. Even if the Queen had refused, Greenstalk could have used a cold box on the OOB.” And likely slept forever. “But Woodcarver didn’t refuse. Somehow she understood what I was saying: it’s the true skrodes that can be perverted, but Greenstalk no longer has one of those. In a decade, this island’s shore will be populated with hundreds of young Riders, but they would never colonize beyond this archipelago without permission of the locals. The risk is vanishingly small… but I was still surprised Woodcarver took it.”
Peregrine settled down around Ravna, only one pair of eyes still watching the Rider’s fronds down in the foam. Best to give some explanation. He cocked a head a Ravna, “Oh, we are medieval, Ravna—even if changing fast, now. We admired Blueshell’s courage in the fire. Such deserves reward. And medieval types are used to courting treachery. So what if the risk is of cosmic size? To us, here, it is no more deadly for that. We poor primitives live with such all the time.”
“Ha!” Her smile spread at his flippant tone.
Peregrine chuckled, heads bobbing. His explanation was the truth, but not all the truth, or even the most important part. He remembered back to the day before, when he and Woodcarver had decided what to do with Greenstalk’s request. Woodcarver had been afraid at first, statecraftly cautious before an evil secret billions of years old. Even leaving such a being in cold sleep was a risk. The statecraftly… the medieval… thing to do, would be to grant the request, leave the Rider ashore on this distant island… and then sneak back a day or two later and kill it.
Peregrine had settled down by his Queen, closer than any but mates and relations could ever do without losing their train of thought. “You showed more honor to Vendacious,” he had said. Scriber’s murderer still walked the earth, complete, scarcely punished at all.
Woodcarver snapped at the empty air; Peregrine knew that sparing Vendacious hurt her too. “…Yes. And these Skroderiders have shown us nothing but courage and honesty. I will not harm Greenstalk. Yet I am afraid. With her, there’s a risk that goes beyond the stars.”
Peregrine laughed. It might be pilgrim madness but—'and that’s to be expected, My Queen. Great risks for great gains. I like being around the humans; I like touching another creature and still being able to think at the same time.” He darted forward to nuzzle the nearest of Woodcarver, and then retreated to a more rational distance. “Even without their starships and their datasets, they would make our world over. Have you noticed… how easy it is for us to learn what they know? Even now, Ravna can’t seem to accept our fluency. Even now, she doesn’t understand how thoroughly we have studied Dataset. And their ship is easy, my Queen. I don’t mean I understand the physics behind it—few even among star folk do. But the equipment is easy to learn, even with the failures it has suffered. I suspect Ravna will never be able to fly the agrav boat as well as I.”
“Hmmf. But you can reach all the controls at once.”
“That’s only part of it. I think we Tines are more flexibly minded than the poor Two-Legs. Can you imagine what it will be like when we make more radio cloaks, when we make our own flying machines?”
Woodcarver smiled, a little sadly now. “Pilgrim, you dream. This is the Slow Zone. The agrav will wear out in a few years. Whatever we make will be far short of what you play with now.”
“So? Look at human history. It took less than two centuries for Nyjora to regain spaceflight after their dark age. And we have better records than their archaeologists. We and the humans are a wonderful team; they have freed us to be everything we can be.” A century till their own spaceships, perhaps another century to start building sub— light-speed starships. And someday they would get out of the Slow Zone. I wonder if packs can be bigger than eight up in the Transcend.
The younger parts of Woodcarver were up, pacing around the rest. The Queen was intrigued. “So you think, like Steel seemed to, that we are some kind of special race, something with a happy destiny in the Beyond? Interesting, except for one thing: These humans are all we know from Out There. How do they compare with other races there? Dataset can’t fully answer that.”
“Ah, and there, Woodcarver, is why Greenstalk is so important. We do need experience of more than one
