She was Artonuee and doomed, but she flew, and the sun gave her energy and the sails used it and the convertors hummed and gravity was the rudder, and down, down, down she soared on the wings of the solar wind, until with First Planet on the sunward wing, sails baffling on a hard tack, she was near, near to the source, the heat of it, the power of it.
And to the appointed minute, the storm rose out of the white fury of the sun, an enormous flare, a hurricane of energy. Vast thermonuclear fusion reactions gutted a portion of the sun’s disc, and she felt it, felt her naked fur stand and quiver, and sails set, she waited as the winds came blasting up at thirty-seven thousand miles per second, and mass reduced to the limit of the straining convertors, the Rim Star leaped before the storm, a mote in darkness, and fled down the wind, leaving First World in the distance and passing the orbit of The World as Miaree sang the song of flight and felt the sails strain under the onslaught.
She drank jenk as she flew past New World, letting the sweet bite of it add to her exhilaration, a tipsy, slim, beautiful Artonuee female in flight, soaring on the light of the sun, riding the most wonderful storm she’d ever had the fortune to meet. Singing, feeling the pre-eggs in her lower abdomen, letting the jenk liquor surge through her bloodstream, disobeying the rules of flight but high, high, loving it, singing it, lithe and naked in the padded chair, watching the flow of particles with a part of her senses and seeing New World pass swiftly and looking off on a tangent to sight Outworld and, thrilled, remembering the sweetness of it on the viewers and knowing that she’d be there soon, not merely passing it on the fury of a solar storm, but there, on its surface.
Three days later, when the wind speed had dropped to a mere one million miles per hour, lonely in the outback, past the orbit of Outworld and nearing the area of Five, where the strange male builder, Bertt, chose to set up his flyer works in the eternal cold, she was feeding on concentrated fuplee fruit and feeling mournful, for soon the wild ride
would cease to be free and easy, and the major portion of her holiday would be spent in beating back, laboriously and with a tedious slowness, toward New World and Haven. Yet that in itself was pleasure, the ultimate challenge. Only a Class VI could do it. Only a Corleu VI, female built, could do it in the time allotted to her.
Now there was time, full time, boring time, time to be devoted to study of her techniques and time to merely sit, viewer on full magnification, and look at the lights of God, for out here they seemed so near. Like a broad band of arcs, they covered the viewer, sharp outlines undistorted by atmosphere. And she could see the titanic joining of two globular clusters on the angle of the far rim, thick with stars in collision, the single loudest object in the near sky.
She herself, in Rim Star, had moved faster than the stars.
There were times, in contemplation, when she fought against the traditional sense of doom. Galactic distances are not compatible with the life-span of even an Artonuee female, and it was, in a sense, strange to know the racial feeling of impending death when generation upon generation would crawl and fly and walk and return and there would be no apparent change in the fires of the night. It was all relative, and the approach of death for the race, at thirty-five thousand miles per second, was a chilling concept unless one related it to time, and then, if one were irresponsible—and, at times, during flight, the female can be irresponsible, witness her flouting of the ironclad rule against intoxicating liquids aboard a flyer—it could be ignored.
True, determine the ages before the good sun burned and fused, and it seemed futile to carry the load of doom on shapely, winged shoulders. And yet, nagging at her was that racial consciousness, that something, that link.
All Artonuee being one, riding the single life-force allotted to them—and, perhaps, to the entire galaxy, since all attempts at communication with intelligent races theorized to inhabit other systems had failed— there was the heaviness of knowledge that the beauty would die, that life would cease and be replaced by the fires of God in cold space.
Thus, with a mercurial change of mood, she saddened and remembered the old mech at Haven, bless him. Old Beafly and his appointment on The World. It came to all. It would come to her and that part of her which was
aware would sink, be replaced with another awareness, and although there was a link, a feeling of oneness, Miaree as Miaree would cease to be.
But not now. Not with the wings atilt and beating up the wind slowly, gaining speed as the computer advanced mass just enough to seize the sun’s far pull and use it. Not with the planets wheeling in the viewer. Not with the pre-eggs making themselves felt and the lingering scent of pleele in her, somewhere. Now she lived and flew, and Rim Star strained and creaked its hull as opposing forces buffeted it, and she was near Outworld, homebound, able to see the Outworld shuttle belch upward on an arc of fire and to see Outgate swimming in space, destination of lovers.
In the storm, the interplanetary magnetic fields were strengthened, and reading them, she knew once again the love of her system, knew the prickling of its forces, and it was impossible to be melancholy.
She sang.
A song of love, of dreams, of endless bliss.
Between the orbits of Outworld and home, she flitted among moon-sized planetoids, playing with disaster casually, displaying a navigational skill attained by few flyers as, just for the pure hell of it, she did a complete orbit of a jagged, spinning, juggernaut of death in the form of a rock which would have filled the inland sea of The World. Rim Star could do it. She could do it. So that made it necessary for them to do it and laugh, the slow wheeling of the jagged rock portside, near, so near she could see, slightly magnified, that diamonds studded the barren rock. She noted and ran the orbit of the rock into her onboard course recorder. It would be duly reported and, perhaps, if the find was important enough, would add to her flight time in the form of a reward for exploitable discovery. It was highly unusual, the find. And it was sheer accident, happy accident. The asteroid belt had been picked clean, said the veterans, who spent much time there in the early days of flight.
And that made the long flight something to be remembered. She would not let her high hopes build to a level of potential disappointment, but there was the possibility. It was a small rock, and that, perhaps, explained its being unknown, uncharted. And yet there was a possibility that some flyer in centuries past had found it, reported it, and had been disappointed to find, after exploration by a mining driver, that it was not worthy of exploitation.
She luffed, drew closer. Fist-sized stones, gleaming and, to her eyes, perfect, shone in the viewer at full magnification. She rechecked the inflight recorder, making sure that the coordinates recorded there would lead a mining driver to the rock.
She had lost speed. To regain it, it was necessary to orbit with the belt, mass equalized with pull. And a new course had to be plotted. Busy with it, she started when, with a piping complaint, the sensors told of another flyer, approaching from outward. She noted its distance, continued with her calculations. Finished, she addressed herself to the intruder.
Amazingly, it was approaching on a direct line, heading toward the asteroid belt at storm speed. No, faster. Unbelievingly, she watched as her instruments confirmed the speed and bulk. No flyer, that. Not driving directly into the wind. And a driver coming head on at the belt? Were they mad?
'Danger, danger,' she sent, on all frequencies, emergency and communicative. 'To unknown driver in Area Y- 23-5-A, you are on collision course with belt. Veer off.'
She listened. From Outworld she heard communicators. A mining driver in the belt identified itself. There was no communication from the driver, which, at strange speeds, came toward her.
She turned communicators to maximum peak, repeated her warning. And now the viewer picked up the approaching driver and measured it. Mass, size. Incredible. Her heart leaped. God!
In all of the system there was no driver of that size. In all of the system no driver of that configuration.
She flashed the system-wide danger signal in all forms, visual, auditory. Light flared from the nose of the driver, and it was braking, but too late. It swept into the belt at a speed which she had not matched at the height of the storm’s fury, going outward. With its speed and mass, it weaved only slightly, picking its way. It passed within thirty thousand miles of her, and at first she hoped that due to its incredible maneuverability, it would pass through untouched. The brief bursts of light, comparable to the light of flares on the sun, seemed to be immensely powerful. The driver was using the force of the sun and that made it absolutely certain that it was not of the Artonuee system. And there was a feeling of awe about her, watching,
praying. Behind, the blackness of space was fired by the massed, exploding stars and there, in local blackness, the fires of a miniature sun as the alien blasted a terrible curve past still another hard, faceted chunk of
