fly or to fall to their deaths. Lukoris’s mutation rate was high. The survival odds for infant sphexbats were no better than 30 percent.
Drake was interested in the animals mainly because they were interested in him — manders formed one of the sphexbat’s preferred forms of food. An immortal body was immortal only against aging. It could still be killed. He, of course, could be reembodied, but death by sphexbat sounded unusually unpleasant. The sphexbats did not swoop down on their prey and carry it off, like the Earth raptors. First they made a low-level run across the surface, blowing a fine cloud of neurotoxic vapor from glands at the base of their wings. Vegetation cover was not enough protection. Any mander inhaling the fog did not die, but it felt the urge to crawl into the open and there became paralyzed. The sphexbat returning at the end of the day for its second run found the prey alive and conscious but unable to move. The victim was scooped up from the surface and consumed at leisure. The sphexbats maintained live larders on high rock ledges, and a mander — or Drake — might wait there awake and immobilized for many days.
Danger from sphexbat attack was a potential problem on the surface, but that’s not where Drake intended to spend most of his time. No one could live alone and conscious for a million years, in his own body or any other, and remain sane. Drake would mostly be at the bottom of the swamp with the other manders, ten meters down, dormant and safe from attack. His species estivated regularly.
Events on the surface would not be ignored. A network of instruments would record data until Drake’s return to the surface. That information supplemented the observations of the orbiting ship.
Drake expected to return to the surface for Lukoris’s winter, but not every time. Once every hundred or thousand years he would be above ground for a few months, to check the instruments and to conduct a planetary survey. Changes that occurred too slowly to be noticed in real time might jump out at him if he saw the planet as a series of snapshots, glimpses caught at widely separated intervals.
First, though, he needed a baseline from which to measure change. He must understand Lukoris in all its parts. He would travel around the world and observe as he had never observed before.
Drake sighed, and said to himself,
But he knew the answer to that. He set to work.
Prior to Drake’s arrival, Lukoris had been the home of a thriving colony for hundreds of millions of Earth years. When the great amalgam of panic-stricken humans, computers, composites, and all their trappings fled the path of the Shiva, they did not take everything. Drake was the inheritor of a whole planet and of the former colony’s technology.
That technology was useful in Drake’s own survey of Lukoris. The planetwide data net showed a divided world of extreme horizontals and verticals, of sluggish seas and swamps encircling near-vertical mountain ranges. The mander body could not survive the rarefied air of the highest peaks without equipment, but Drake had to know what was going on there. Who could say where and in what form the Shiva might choose to appear?
He spent the first long winter roaming the planet. In person and vicariously with the help of miniature remote sensing units, he traveled the three-thousand mile ice river in the south, visited the tropics where summer water boiled to steam and only sulfur-loving bacteria could survive, and surveyed the northern badlands where the sphexbats were evolving their first primitive art, drawing stylized animals in blood on sheer rock faces. The sphexbats circled about his equipment. They were cautious and they did not attack at once, but they called to each other constantly in what was clearly a developing language.
Drake stored every image and sound and smell in his body’s augmented memory. He omitted nothing, and he did not hurry. There was plenty of time. If he missed something this winter, there would be a thousand more chances to pick it up.
Finally it was time for the first estivation.
His body started the process automatically, exuding a transparent liquid that hardened into a tough semi- permeable membrane. Small amounts of oxygen and water could be imported, and waste products expelled. As the shell solidified, Drake’s body began to dig. Beyond his conscious control it dived and tunneled its way through a thick green ooze that thickened steadily with depth.
The process was natural to the mander, but not to the consciousness trapped within it. Drake felt that he was
drowning in total darkness, surrounded by viscous fluid that thwarted any effort to save himself.
When it finally became clear that he was not drowning, that the body he inhabited could take prolonged immersion in its stride, he was not much comforted. This was not the way he had imagined his future: trapped in a swamp, in an alien body, the single human intelligence within many light-years with nothing to look forward to but solitude. And he must go through this many thousands of times.
His body was beginning to turn off, powering down for the long night. Drake fought against it, trying to dictate the course of his dreams. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted to fight his way back to the surface, to signal the watching ship to pick him up. He wanted to go home to Earth. He wanted time turned back, to the happy days of youth and love and music.
He wanted Ana…
But that, of course, was why he was here. That was why it was
As his body cut back the oxygen supply to the brain, Drake clung to that thought. He curled into a ball and went contentedly to sleep.
The pulse of Lukoris’s seasons was slower than Earth’s. With little tilt to the axis of rotation, summer and winter were dictated only by the planet’s movement along its twenty-year eccentric elliptic orbit.
Drake’s modified body had been programmed to sleep through fifty of those long cycles. Awakening at last one early winter, he crawled from the depths and waited for his shell to crack. When it had crumbled enough to give him freedom of movement, he tried to begin his inspection. His mander body would not let him do it. It insisted that he eat and drink, ravenously, breaking an eight-hundred-year fast. Only after that was he allowed to turn his attention to Lukoris.
At once he thought that he saw changes. The instruments assured him that it was illusion. The variations he seemed to observe were purely psychological. He was adapting to the mander body, and as he did so Lukoris’s bottle-green swamps and flame-colored precipices became beautiful to him.
It confirmed the wisdom of coming here long before any Shiva influence might be expected. The adaptation was a transient effect, something that would settle down after the first few estivations.
He continued his careful monitoring and recording of plant and animal populations, diurnal temperature variations, surface and subsurface geology, solar radiation levels, and ten thousand other variables. All measurements went up to the orbiting ship. From there they were transmitted by S-wave data link to headquarters, half a galaxy away.
What was important? Drake did not know. Maybe everything, maybe nothing.
There was one unplanned and unpleasant incident, when he became too interested in a threadlike plant that wove great mats on the swampy surface and lured big animals there. When the threads broke, apparently by intention and all at once, the animal sank into the ooze to die and provided nutrients. Drake was not heavy enough to be at risk; but he was far from any cover when the sphexbat came sweeping on its first run of the day.
It saw him and changed course. A cloud of white vapor came drifting toward him as it passed overhead. The only possible escape route was downward. Drake plunged headfirst into the ooze with his mouths and eyes tightly closed, wondering if this was merely a different way of dying. It was still midwinter, much too early in the year for the mander to estivate.
The slime of the swamp was cool on his skin. After a few minutes Drake realized that he was not suffocating. His body could absorb enough oxygen through its epidermis to keep him alive, provided that he did not move much.
He waited for seven hours, almost half a Lukoris day. The neurotoxin cloud must be given enough time to be absorbed into the swamp, or to dissociate chemically in the presence of sunlight.
When he wriggled back to the surface through the sucking ooze, the sphexbat was right in the middle of its collection run and only a couple of kilometers away. It swooped noiselessly toward Drake on twenty-meter pinions, the capture scoop already open for pickup. It was within thirty meters when it saw that Drake was upright and moving, rather than lying immobile on the mat of the swamp. Twin maws hooted a two-tone call of surprise and
