'Are those irrigated lands?' I asked, gesturing toward a swatch of blue-green on the surface swelling toward us. It could as easily have been a lake. I wasn't sure whether the patterns I saw in the colored area were real or an artifact of the unfamiliar optical apparatus.
'We live on mats of vegetation,' Cseka said in a drugged voice. He didn't look at me when he spoke. 'On Chay has too many earthquakes to live directly on the ground. The mats slide when the earth shakes, you see.'
'Life couldn't arise on a planet-'moon'-so unstable,' I said, speaking the thought I'd had ever since I connected the Chay with the mummy on Respite. 'It must have been colonized from somewhere else. Perhaps in the far past.'
'Yeah, that's probably so,' Cseka agreed without interest. 'There's maybe a hundred Chay worlds. They all call themselves On Chay. I suppose the Chay had a Collapse too.'
Translucent circles like strings of frog eggs clung to one another within the mat we were approaching. Elsewhere, larger circles differed in hue from the neighboring vegetation. The primary lowered in the sky above us, a turgid purple mass shot with blues and yellow.
The controls spoke in a guttural, blurry voice. The two sober Chay looked around. Cseka roused himself from his couch and growled toward the controls.
The engines fired at high output. We accelerated sideways, and I fell against a bulkhead. The resilient surface cushioned me, then formed into a grip for my furious hand.
'I'm to guide your friends down outside the city,' Cseka grumbled. 'I forgot the way plasma thrusters tear up everything around.'
The Chay vessel was smaller inside than I'd expected. The thick hull contained everything necessary for the starship's operation and the well-being of the crew, but it didn't leave much internal volume.
'The
Cseka looked at me as if he were trying to remember where I'd come from. I hadn't noticed anything odd when I ate rations prepared for Cseka-none of the food was meat, according to him, though I'd have sworn otherwise. Most likely, the castaway's problems had nothing to do with his present diet.
'You said we were guiding my friends down,' I prodded. 'So they were waiting for us?'
'Yeah, sure,' Cseka said with an angry frown. 'Look, we got here, didn't we? Our ships don't process course equations as fast as the Feds do, maybe, but they don't come down sideways because a cosmic ray punched the artificial intelligence at the wrong time.'
We'd transited from above Duneen almost as soon as we reached orbit. A human vessel-even the
The next transit, from a point so removed that the system's sun was only a bright star when it rotated across the ceiling screen, had taken what I think was the better part of a day. I was used to transits in quick series, several to several score insertions in sequence, followed by periods of an hour or more to recalculate. Chay vessels used a completely different system.
The advantage-it minimized the horrible sickness of transiting through nonsidereal universes-was balanced by the fact that the Chay didn't continue accelerating during calibration. We were in free fall all the time we waited for the brain built into the vessel's hull to prepare for the next transit. Combustion rockets weren't as fuel-efficient as plasma thrusters, and the navigational system obviously didn't cope with small, sudden changes as well as humans' silicon-based microprocessors did.
'They were met in orbit,' Cseka murmured, settling back onto his couch. 'But they didn't want to land until we'd arrived. You had.'
The ceiling visuals were more like mural paintings than the screens I was used to. The mat of vegetation covered the bow third of the image. There were circular fields of varying size within the general blue-green mass. Occasional bright, straight lines suggested metalwork. From what Cseka had told me about Chay culture, I assumed they were biologically formed as well.
I'd thought the castaway would be babblingly glad of human company after his years among aliens. Instead, Cseka remained in his own world throughout the voyage. He gave verbal orders to the controls when the ship demanded them. My questions were answered in monosyllables or brief phrases, the way a busy leader snaps at an importunate underling; responses only in the technical sense, which in no way attempted to give me the understanding I'd requested.
Despite that, I'd learned a great deal about the Chay to guide Piet when he dealt with the race. A day's discomfort was nothing compared to what we'd been through already; and the risk-
I'd made that decision when I came aboard the
The vessel was settling to the west of the mat. As we neared the ground I realized that resolution of the Chay optics was amazingly good, more like still photographs than the scanned images I was used to. The visuals were real, too, not data cleaned up by an enhancement program. The surface had all the warts and blemishes of a natural landscape.
The soil beneath us was russet, yellow, and gray. There were dips and outcrops, but no significant hills. Frequent cracks jagged across the surface, often streaming sulphurous gases. Vegetation outside the large mats was limited to clumps and rings. None of it was high enough to cast a shadow from the primary on the eastern horizon.
'Is it breathable?' I asked as I watched a fumarole just upwind of where we trembled in a near-hover. 'The air.'
'What?' Cseka said. He blinked, then frowned. 'Of course it's breathable. A little high in carbon dioxide, that's all. These-'
He plucked the cowl of his cape. It stretched across his face as a veil.
'— filter it. I'll have some brought to your ship.'
He spoke to the vessel's controls again. We resumed our descent at less than three meters a second.
'The Chay wear them also,' I said. We would land in a shallow depression hundreds of meters in diameter, half a klick from the inhabited vegetation. Atmosphere vessels-platforms supported by three or more translucent gas bags-drifted from the city toward the spot.
'When they're out of their domes, yes,' Cseka said.
I squatted against the bulkhead's lower curve, not that we were going to land hard enough to require my caution. If the Chay couldn't breathe the atmosphere of On Chay without artificial aids, there was no question at all that they were the relicts of a past civilization rather than autochthons.
The engines roared at higher output and on a distinctly different note. I recalled how the nozzles had dilated as the Chay vessel landed on Duneen. The exhaust spread to reflect from the ground as a cushion against the lower hull.
'Do you have a filter for me?' I asked, pitching my voice to be heard over the engines. How quickly did CO2 poisoning become dangerous? Could I run to the
'Christ's blood,' said Cseka. He wiped his good eye with the back of his hand, then waved toward the guard whose muscles had frozen while the last of the fruit was a centimeter from his mouth. 'Take his!'
Cseka growled a few additional words to the Chay. The mobile guards unfastened their fellow's cape by running a finger down a hidden seam. They pulled the garment away from him as we landed lightly as thought.
One of them handed the cape to me. I wrapped it around my shoulders, avoiding the patch of sticky purple juice. The edges sealed when I pressed them together, though the fabric felt as slick as the surface of the
The Chay's naked body was skeletally thin. The pebbly frontal skin was light gray-brown, while the sides and back were a darker shade of the same drab combination. The color variations of the face and arms were absent.
The creature wore a net garment similar to a bandeau across its midriff. A few small objects hung from the meshes. I couldn't guess what their human analogs might be.
One of the Chay spoke. It was the first time I'd heard one of their voices. The word or words seemed sharper than those of Cseka speaking the language, but obviously he managed to communicate.
The whorled patch of bulkhead spun slowly outward, opening to a dark sky and the coruscation of the
