the comradeship of the fire but proud of the trust the pride put in him. The whole cycle of life was represented in the pride circle, each generation playing its role, then passing it to the next. Here mothers presented their newborn kits to the pride, here the young learned traditions from the old. Here the challenge duels were fought and the stories told. Here the dead were mourned and, so said the legends, here their spirits returned every year on their Name-day.
For a moment he paused, caught up in his fate. He was a legend now, a legend that had just begun to unfold-a fated warrior of Chraz-Mtell, and his yet-to-be saga would be heard at tale-tellings forever. He, Swift- Son, who was content to watch his brother claim a double-name; he, Silent Prowler, who preferred only the Hunter’s Moon for company; he would be Patriarch! Patriarch not only of Rritt-Pride but of the Great-Pride of the broad savannah, Patriarch of all the countless lands beyond that. He raked claws across the sky. Patriarch of the very stars!
A faint click of rock on rock twitched his ears to the sides to pinpoint the sound’s source. It was not repeated, but he had already recognized the heavy tread of Iron-Claw. He must be one of the watchers tonight. Swift-Son could hardly wait to relate the news of his adventure. Soon they would be together again, joking and sparring like old times. It was good to be home.
But first he must claim a Name. He rippled his ears and stood up, then strode boldly toward the pride-circle. Behind him a rustle of paws on grass warned that Iron-Claw was crouching for the kill should he prove unworthy. Elder Brother had never been stealthy enough to surprise Swift-Son. Let him crouch, he would not leap.
As he entered the circle of light, Pkrr-Rritt rose from his place of honor in the center of the gathering. “Rritt- Pride welcomes this stranger to our pride-circle and asks for news of Swift-Son.” The Patriarch intoned the tradition.
Swift-Son raised the alien weapon to his shoulder and fired over their heads, splitting the darkened sky with his thunder. The startled pride fled, even Iron-Claw and Pkrr-Rritt, leaving gratifying fear scents behind. He leapt to the center of the circle and screamed in triumph as a few of the braver ones took cover behind rocks and peeped out at him.
“Swift-Son is dead,” he scream-snarled the tradition into the night. “I am Chraz-Rritt!”
SLOWBOAT NIGHTMARE
·
Warren W. James
Stark white cold. That was the first thing I noticed. That and the quiet sounds you learn to ignore while in space; the whisper of the air circulators, the hum from the electronic systems and the subsonic rumble of the drive. But there was something wrong with those sounds, like a chord with one note off-key.
The glassine shell of the autodoc was frosted over. I blinked my eyes wide open and saw nothing hut milky whiteness and someone moving haltingly outside the ‘doc. I blinked some more and the milky shapelessness became individual strips of brightness on the ceiling.
My labored breathing puffed thin white clouds into the cold air as I felt a warm dry breeze start to blow into the autodoc. I became aware of the clean antiseptic smell of the autodoc’s interior, layered over with a stale metallic tang and a scent like that of sweaty grass mixed with ginger. My arms and legs were tingling, as if they had fallen asleep, while their muscles pulsed with the rhythmic contractions of electronically induced isometric exercises. I felt a sharp jerk and looked over to see a set of intravenous needles withdrawing themselves from my arm. How long had they been feeding me? Where was I? Sick or recovering from some accident? In some organlegger’s chop shop? My thoughts came as a jumble of memories and dreams. And then I remembered. The anticipation, the hopes, the dreamless sleep. I was on a starship bound for a colony world.
Would we find a world as perverse as the others the ramrobots had found? Like Mt. Lookitthat on Tau Ceti II, a sliver of inhabitable land on an otherwise uninhabitable world. Or a world where conditions were clement, but only for a few days out of the year, like what the Crashlanders found on Procyon IV.
For several hundred years humans had been sending unmanned interstellar probes, ramrobots, to find habitable environments in other star systems. And that they did. But showing true machine literal-mindedness, they couldn’t tell the difference between a habitable environment and a habitable world. As often as not, the worlds they found bore as much resemblance to their reports as the typical vacation destination resembled its tridee advertisements. Who knows how many colony ships finished their long interstellar trip with no way to return to Earth and only a marginal world to carve into a home. Would our voyage end differently?
Observations of Vega from the multi-kilometer fresnel lens telescopes at Persephone Station had indicated the existence of planets along with a large and densely populated disk of post-accretion debris. Those rocks had interested the Belt Science Commission enough to make them cough up half the UN Marks needed to send an unmanned probe to investigate further.
Ramrobot #124 had found that Vega’s fourth planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, had a moon that was larger than Mars with a thicker atmosphere. The scientists thought it would be inhabitable, although a bit cold and dry But being a young planetary system, the gas giant was still glowing brightly in the IR and that would make the sub-primary parts of the moon quite bearable, if not downright comfortable. (Who cares that in a million years or so that gas giant would have cooled to the point to where it could no longer help keep the moon warm. Let the people of 1,957,811 AD worry about that problem.)
But what interested us Belters wasn’t that moon, but the extensive family of rocks circling Vega. Analysis of the ramrobot’s data showed that they were a rich combination of ice, rock, metal and carbon compounds. The stuff of life. Let the Flatlanders have what was at the bottom of that moon’s well; we Belters would have no problem carving out a civilization from the rich rocks surrounding Vega.
Well, at least that was the plan. But something seemed wrong and I didn’t think it was just the imaginings of my coldsleep-addled brain. If we had really arrived at Vega IVb, then the Med-Center should have been filled with glassine coffins being thawed out by the ship’s autodocs. I couldn’t see clearly, but I could tell that my coffin was the only one in the room.
With a click the restraints that had been holding my arms and legs in place retracted and I held my hands in front of my face. Their nails were long and clean. The pale pinkness of my skin surprised me, but then coldsleep wasn’t meant to be like dozing under a tropical sun. My face and scalp were itching and I touched my hand to my face to scratch but pulled it away in shock. Hair. On my face. On the side of my head. I had always worn my Belter’s crest trimmed short, but now it was lost in the confusion of fresh hair covering my head. How could this be? Hair doesn’t grow when your body is a corpsicle held at liquid nitrogen temperatures. When did my head have the time to become covered by a ragged stubble of hair?
“Still in coldsleep. There’s been a problem.” Tom tried to continue but a sound at the door stopped him and focused all of my attention on the other side of the room. The source of the sweaty grass and ginger scent was now obvious. Coming through the door was a creature that walked upright but looked like a cross between a tiger and a gorilla. (I remembered seeing both at the holozoo at Confinement Asteroid when I took my sister there in ‘57.) It must have been close to eight feet tall with long arms that ended in hands with four digits and a naked rat- tail twitching behind it. The creature was wearing rough-hewn clothing that looked like leather. Metal shapes with handles, ugly but vaguely familiar and sized for overly large hands, hung from a belt at its waist. As it looked at me I had the distinct impression that I knew what a frozen meal felt like when it got popped out of a microwave cooker.
A second creature came through the door and then a third. This last one was different. Smaller and unkempt. The others walked, no, make that strode, with an upright posture that bespoke an unquestioned belief in their authority. But this one? He (she? it?) walked slowly, hesitatingly, and with a slumped posture that screamed fear. The others had long orange-brown fur with variegated patterns of stripes that showed the obvious effects of frequent grooming. This one, his fur looked as unkempt as the unwelcome hair that covered my head. And his
