Vacuum Diagrams

There was a breath of Air at Thea’s back. A faint shadow.

She shifted her head to the right, feeling the lip of her cocoon scratch her bare skin.

A ray, no more than two mansheights away, slid softly towards her.

Thea froze. Rays were among the forest’s deadliest predators. She couldn’t possibly get out of the cocoon and away in time — her only hope was to stay still and pray that the ray didn’t notice she was here…

The ray was a translucent cloud a mansheight across. It was built around a thin, cylindrical spine, and six tiny, spherical eyes ringed the babyish maw set into its sketch of a face. The fins were six wide, thin sheets spaced evenly around the body; the fins rippled as the ray moved, electron gas sparkling around their leading edges. The flesh was almost transparent, and Thea could see shadowy fragments of some meal passing along the ray’s cylindrical gut.

The ray came within a mansheight of her. It slowed. She held her breath and willed her limbs into stillness.

I might live through this yet…

Then — with ghastly, heart-stopping slowness — the ray swiveled its hexagon of eyes towards her, unmistakably locking onto her face.

She closed her eyes. Perhaps if she didn’t struggle it would be quicker…

Then, he came.

There was a blue-white flash: a pillar of electron light that penetrated even her closed eyecups, and ripped through the encroaching silver-gray shadow of the ray.

She cried out. It was the first sound she had made since waking into this nightmare, she realized dully.

She opened her eyes. The ray had pulled away from her and was twisting in the air. The ray was being attacked, she saw, disbelieving: a bolt of electron light swept down through the Air and slanted into the ray’s misty structure, leaving the broad fins in crudely torn shreds. The ray emitted a high, thin keening; it tried to twist its head around to tear into this light-demon—

No, Thea saw now; this was no bolt of light, no demon: this was a man, a man who had wrapped his arms around the thin torso of the ray and was squeezing it, crushing the life out of the creature even as she watched.

She hung in her cocoon, even her fear dissolving in wonder. It was a man, true, but like no man she’d seen before. Instead of ropes and ponchos of Air-pig leather, this stranger wore an enclosing suit of some supple, silver-black substance that crackled with electron gas as he moved. Even his head was enclosed, with a clear plate before his face. There was a blade — a sword, of the same gleaming substance as the suit — tucked into his belt.

The ray stopped struggling. Fragments of half-digested leaf matter spewed from its gaping mouth, and its eyestalks folded in towards the center of its face.

The man pushed the corpse away from him. For a moment his shoulders seemed to hunch, as if he were weary; with gloved hands he brushed at his suit, dislodging shreds of ray flesh which clung there.

Thea stared, still in her cocoon, unable to take her eyes from his shimmering movements.

Now the man turned to Thea. With a single, feathery beat of his legs he Waved to her. The suit was of some black material inlaid with silvery whirls and threads. Apart from a large seam down the front of the chest, the suit was an unbroken whole, complete like an spin-spider eggshell. Behind the half-reflective helmet plate she could see a face — surprisingly thin, with two dark eyecups. When he spoke, his voice was harsh, but sounded as natural as if he were one of her own people.

“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

Before Thea could answer Lur came Waving clumsily out of the sky, her small breasts shaking. Lur grabbed at Thea’s cocoon and clung to it, burying her face in Thea’s neck, sobbing.

Thea saw the stranger’s shadowed gaze slice over Lur’s body with analytical interest.

Thea encompassed Lur’s shoulders in her arms. She kept her eyes fixed on the man’s face. “Are you real? I mean — are you him? The Hero?”

Was it possible?

He looked at her and smiled obscurely, his face indistinct in the shadows of his suit.

She tried to analyze her feelings. As a child, when she’d envisaged this impossible moment — of the actual arrival of the Hero, from out of nowhere to help her — she’d always imagined a feeling of safety: that she would be able to immerse herself in the Hero’s massive, comforting presence.

But it wasn’t like that. With his face half-masked the Hero wasn’t comforting at all. In fact he seemed barely human, she realized.

Behind the translucent pane, the Hero’s eyes returned to Lur, calculating.

Her father wept.

Wesa’s thin, tired face, under its thatch of prematurely yellowed hair-tubes, was twisted with anguish. “I couldn’t reach you. I could see what was happening, but—”

Embarrassed, she submitted to his embrace. Wesa’s thin voice, with its words of self-justification, had less to do with her safety than with working out his own shock and shame, she realized.

As soon as she could, she got away from her father’s clinging grasp.

Her people were clustered around the Hero.

The Hero ran a gloved thumb down the seam set in the suit’s chest panel; the suit opened. He peeled it off whole, as if he were shedding a layer of skin. Under the suit he wore only gray undershorts, and his skin was quite sallow. He was much thinner than he’d seemed inside the suit, although his muscles were hard knots.

Thea felt repelled. Just a man, then. Is that all there is to it? And an old man, too, with yellowed hair-tubes and sunken, wrinkled face — older than anyone in her tribe, she realized.

He passed the suit to Wesa. Thea’s father took the ungainly thing and tied it carefully to a tree branch. Suspended there, its empty limbs dangling and its chest sunken and billowing, the suit looked still more grotesque and menacing — like a boned man, she thought.

Wesa — and Lur, and some of the others — clustered around the Hero again, bringing him food. Some of their prime food, too, the most recent of the Air-pig cuts.

The Hero crammed the food into his wizened mouth, grinning.

Later, the Hero donned his suit and went up into the forest, towards the root ceiling, alone. When he returned, he dragged a huge Air-pig after him.

The people — Lur and Wesa among them — clustered around again, patting at the fat Air-pig. The Air-pig’s body was a rough cylinder; now, in its terror, its six eyestalks were fully extended, and its huge, basking maw was pursed up closed. Futile jetfarts clouded the Air around it.

It would have taken a team of men and women days to have a chance of returning with such a catch.

Even through his faceplate Thea could see the Hero’s grin, as the people praised him.

She Waved away from the little encampment and perched in the thin outer branches of the forest. She snuggled against a branch, feeling the cold wood smooth against her skin, and nibbled at the young leaves which grew behind the wide, mature outer cups.

Then she curled into a ball against the branch, pushed more soft leaves into her mouth and tried to sleep.

A soft moan awoke her.

The smell of growing leaves was cloying in her nostrils. Blearily, she pushed her head out of the branches and into the Air.

There was motion far below her, silhouetted against the deep purple of the Quantum Sea. It was the Hero and her sister, Lur; they spiraled languidly around the vortex lines. The Hero wore his shining suit, but it was open to the waist. Lur had wrapped her legs around his hips. She arched away from him, her eyes closed. The Hero’s skin looked old, corrupted, against Lur’s flesh.

Payment for the hunter…

Thea ducked back into the forest and crammed her fists to her eyecups.

When she woke again, she felt depressed, listless.

She dropped out of the forest. She hovered in the Air, her knees tucked against her chest. With four or five brisk pushes she emptied her bowels. She watched the pale, odorless pellets of shit sail sparkling into the Air. Dense with neutrons, the waste would merge with the unbreathable underMantle and, perhaps, sink at last into the Quantum Sea.

The Hero was sleeping, tucked into a cocoon — her father’s cocoon, she realized with disgust. The empty suit was suspended from its branch. There seemed to be nobody about; most of the tribe were at the Air-pigs’ net, evidently preparing one of the animals for slaughter.

Suddenly she felt awake — alive, excited; capillaries opened across her face, tingling with superfluid Air. Silently, trying to hold her breath, she pushed herself away from her eyrie and Waved to the suit.

Its empty fingers and legs dangled before her, grisly but fascinating. She reached out a trembling hand. The fabric was finely worked, and the inlaid silver threads were smooth and cold.

The front of the suit gaped open. She pushed her hand inside; she found a soft, downy material that felt cool and comfortable…

It would be the work of a moment to slip her own legs into these black-silver leggings.

The Hero groaned, his lips parting softly; he turned slightly in her father’s cocoon.

He was still asleep. Perhaps, Thea thought with disgust, he was dreaming of her sister.

She had to do this now.

Briskly, but with trembling fingers, she untied the suit from its branch. She twisted in the Air, tucked her knees to her chest and dropped her legs into the opened-up suit.

The lining sighed over her skin, embracing her flesh. She wriggled her arms into the sleeves. The feeling of the gloves around each finger was extraordinary; she stared at her hands, seeing how the tubes of fabric — too long for her own fingers — drooped slightly over her fingertips.

She pulled closed the chest panel and, as she’d seen the Hero do, ran her gloved thumb along the seam. It sealed smoothly. She reached back over her shoulders and pulled the helmet forward, letting it drop over her head. Again a simple swipe of the thumb was sufficient to seal the helmet against the rest of the suit.

The suit was too big for her; the lower rim of the faceplate was a dark line across her vision, cutting off half the world, and she could feel folds of loose material against her back and chest. But it encased her, just as it had the Hero, and — when she raised her arms — it moved as she moved.

Cautiously, experimentally, she tried to Wave. She arched her back and flexed her legs.

Electron gas crackled explosively around her limbs. She squirted clumsily across the tree-scape, branches and leaves battering at her skin.

She grabbed at the trees with her gloved hands, dragging herself to a halt.