with affection and her leathery nostrils flared wetly. The past year since their last encounter had seen her acquire a deep ragged notch in one ear. Pertinax reached up to touch the healed wound. Chellapilla only laughed, before grabbing his paw-hand and kissing it.
“Are you troubled by that little nick, Perty? Just a brush with a wounded wolverine when I was checking a trap line for specimens last winter. Well worth the information gained.”
Pertinax found it hard to reconcile himself to Chellapilla’s sangfroid. “I worry about you, Chell. It’s a hard life we have sometimes, as isolated guardians of the biosphere. Don’t you wish, just once in a while, that we could live together…?”
“Ah, of course I do! But where would that end? Two stewards together would become four, then a village, then a town, then a city of wardens. With our long life spans, we’d soon overpopulate the world with our kind. And then Earth would be right back where it was in the twenty-second century.”
“Surely not! Our species would not fall prey to the traps mankind stumbled into before the Upflowering.”
Chellapilla smiled. “Oh, no, we’d be clever enough to invent new ones. No, it’s best this way. We have our pastoral work to occupy our intelligence, with the tropospheric mind to keep us in daily contact and face to face visits at regular intervals. It’s a good system.”
“You’re right, I suppose. But still, when I see you in the flesh, Chell, I long for you so.”
“Then let’s make the most of this assignment. We’ll have sweet memories to savor when we part.”
Pertinax nuzzled Chellapilla’s long furred neck, and she shivered and clasped him close. Then he whispered his thoughts regarding Sylvanus’s desired retirement and the needful successor child into her ear.
Chellapilla chuckled. “Are you sure you didn’t put Sylvanus up to this? You know the one exemption from cohabitation is the period of parenting. This is all a scheme to get me to clean your hutch and cook your meals on a regular basis for a few years, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I admit it. There’s never been a universal proseity device made that was as nice to hold as you.”
“Well, let me think about it for the rest of this trip, before I go off my pills. It’s true that you and I are not getting any younger, and I am inclined toward becoming a mother, especially if our child will help ease Sylvanus’s old age. But I want to make sure I’m not overlooking any complications.”
“My ever-sensible Chell! I could have dictated your reply without ever leaving my hutch.”
Chellapilla snorted. “One of us has to be the sobersided one.”
The two lovers rejoined their fellow stewards. Tanselle immediately took Chellapilla one side, in an obvious attempt to pump her friend for any gossip. The feminine whispers and giggles and sidewise glances embarrassed Pertinax, and he made a show of engaging Cimabue in a complex discussion of the latter’s researches. But Pertinax could lend only half his mind to Cimabue’s talk of fisheries and turtle breeding, ocean currents and coral reefs. The other half was still contemplating his exciting future with Chellapilla.
Eventually Sylvanus roused them from their chatter with a suggestion that they resume their journey. Bix, Flossy, Amber, Peavine and Peppergrass bore their riders north, deeper into the already encroaching forests of the Great Lakes region.
When they established camp that evening in a clearing beneath a broad canopy of lofty treetops, Sylvanus made a point of setting up a little hearth somewhat apart from his younger comrades. Plainly, he did not want to put a damper on any romantic moments among the youngsters.
The five shared supper together however. Sylvanus kept wrinkling his grizzled snout throughout the meal, until finally he declaimed, “There’s a storm brewing. The tropospheric mind must be performing some large randomizations or recalibrations. I suspect entire registers will be dumped.”
Baseline weather had been tempered by the creation of an intelligent atmosphere. Climates across the planet were more equitable and homogenous, with fewer extreme instances of violent weather. But occasionally both the moderately large and even the titanic disturbances of yore would recur, as the separate entities that constituted the community of the skies deliberately encouraged random Darwinian forces to cull and mutate their members.
“I packed some tarps and ropes,” said Cimabue, “for just such an occasion. If we cut some poles, we can erect a shelter quickly.”
Working efficiently, the wardens built, first, a three-walled roofed enclosure for their hardy hoppers, stoutly braced between several trees, its open side to the leeward of the prevailing winds. Then they fashioned a small but sufficient tent for themselves and their packs, heavily staked to the earth. A few blankets strewn about the interior created a comfy nest, illuminated by several cold luminescent sticks. Confined body heat would counter any chill.
Just as they finished, a loud crack of thunder ushered in the storm. Safe and sound in their tent, the wardens listened to the rain hammering the intervening leaves above before filtering down to drip less heavily on their roof.
Sylvanus immediately bade his friends goodnight, then curled up in his robe in one corner, his back to them. Soon his snores—feigned or real—echoed off the sloping walls.
Swiftly disrobed, Cimabue and Tanselle began kissing and petting each other, and Pertinax and Chellapilla soon followed suit. By the time the foursome had begun exchanging cuds, their unashamed mating, fueled by long separation, was stoked to proceed well into the night.
The reintegrational storm blew itself out shortly after midnight, with what results among the mentalities of the air the wardens would discover only over the course of many communications. Perhaps useful new insights into the cosmos and Earth’s place therein had been born this night.
In the morning the shepherds broke down their camp, breakfasted and embarked on the final leg of their journey to “Chicago.” Pertinax rode his hopper in high spirits, pacing Chellapilla’s Peavine.
Not too long after their midday meal (Tanselle had bulked out their simple repast with some particularly tasty mushrooms she had carried from home), they came within sight of the expansive lake, almost oceanic in its extent, that provided the human settlement with water for both drinking and washing, as well as various dietary staples. Reckoning themselves a few dozen kilometers south of the humans, the five headed north, encountering large peaceful herds of elk and antelopes along the way.
They smelled “Chicago” before they saw it.
“They’re not burning petroleum, are they?” asked Cimabue.
“No,” said Sylvanus. “They have no access to any of the few remaining played-out deposits of that substance. It’s all animal and vegetable oils, with a little coal from near-surface veins.”
“It sure does stink,” said Tanselle, wrinkling her nose.
“They still refuse our offer of limited universal proseity devices?” Pertinax inquired.
Sylvanus shook his head ruefully. “Indeed. They are stubborn, suspicious and prideful, and disdain the devices of the Upflowered as something near-demonic. They claim that such cornucopia would render their species idle and degenerate, and destroy their character. When the Upflowered stripped them of their twenty-second-century technology, the left-behind humans conceived a hatred of their ascended brethren. Now they are determined to reclimb the same ladder of technological development they once negotiated, but completely on their own.”
Cimabue snorted. “It’s just as well they don’t accept our gifts. The UPD’s would allow them to spread their baneful way of life even further than they already have. We can only be grateful their reproductive rates have been redacted downward.”
“Come now,” said Chellapilla, “surely the humans deserve as much respect and right to self-determination as any other species. Would you cage up all the blue jays in the world simply because they’re noisy?”
“You don’t have any humans in your bioregion, Chell. See what you think after you’ve met them.”
The pathless land soon featured the start of a crude gravel-bedded road. The terminus the travelers encountered was a dump site. The oil-stained ground, mounded with detritus both organic and manufactured, repelled Pertinax’s sensibilities. He wondered how the humans could live with such squalor, even on the fringes of their settlement.
Moving swiftly down the pebbled roadway, the wardens soon heard a clanking, chugging, ratcheting riot of sound from some ways around the next bend of the tree-shaded road. They halted and awaited the arrival of whatever vehicle was producing the clamor.
The vehicle soon rounded the curve of road, revealing itself to be a heterogeneous assemblage of wood and metal. The main portion of the carrier was a large wooden buckboard with two rows of seats forward of a flatbed. In the rear, a large boiler formed of odd-shaped scavenged metal plates threatened to burst its seams with every puff of smoke. Transmission of power to the wheels was accomplished by whirling leather belts running from boiler
