The Wave and the Flame Read online

  The Wave and the Flame

  Volume I of Lear’s Daughters

  M. Bradley Kellogg

  with

  William B. Rossow

  FOR BRADLEY LANGDON KELLOGG

  With thanks for their expertise and encouragement:

  Antonia D. Bryan, Claire S. Derway,

  Sheila Gilbert. Olenka Hubickyj,

  Jarvis P. Kellogg. Jr. and Dr. Katalin Roth

  Special thanks to Barbara Newman Morris and Lynne M. Kemen

  BOOK ONE

  “… rain, wind, thunder, fire,

  are my daughters…”

  King Lear,

  Act III, sc. ii

  1

  The little man huddled in his rock shelter high among the snow-shrouded cliffs. Deep in the curl of a fleece-lined collar, his face was dark, a young man’s face in the weathered skin of an ancient. He sat cross-legged and alert in the center of the small domed space, facing a round doorhole that leaked pale light from the white swirling sky. His narrow body was swaddled against the cold by a thick nest of blankets. Fine snow drifted in to lie unmelting among the folds.

  His head inclined as if listening, but his back curved at rest beneath the many layers of his clothing. One brown hand smoothed a strip of tooled leather against his thigh. The other held a threaded needle. He matched two edges between thumb and forefinger, eased the leather onto his knee and began to sew.

  The wind moaned beyond the open doorway. Outside, the endless snow threw smothering drifts against the thick masonry of his shelter and wiped clean the trail that threaded down the precipitous cliffs. Below his cramped ledge, the white land vanished into the storm. Time passed unnoticed as the leather took its shape in his lap. For hours or weeks he might have been waiting there, perched in his chill aerie. His breath rimed the rough rock with frost. The storm enclosed him in a chaos of white ordered only by the deft logic of his bone needle: hover, like a ravenous hawk, swoop to pierce the resisting leather, pull up, thread taut, to hover and swoop again, in time with the shallow swell of his breathing.

  When the wind died, he noted its sudden silence. The spare line of his mouth continued its voiceless count of long neat stitches, but his eyes flicked up and outward. He scanned the whiteness automatically, then returned his concentration to the garment growing in his lap.

  Then, in the middle of a stitch, his back straightened. From a distance above came a drawn-out warbled cry, so faint even in the utter quiet that it might have been imagined. The bone needle froze in its downward swoop. The little man listened, intent as a huntsman. The cry came again, from high and far away, but repeated now from nearer by. This time he nodded, and unthreaded his needle, folding it into the ornate leather with disciplined haste. He rose, stretching stiffened limbs. His ringleted hair grazed the domed ceiling as he slipped his work bundle into a pouch sewn into the layers of his woolens, then gathered the blankets into a larger pack slung low across his back. He glanced around the shelter, patting, at his chest with an absent frown. His thin fingers burrowed nervously among the layers to draw forth a carved blue stone fastened by a worn and knotted thong. Satisfied, he returned the amulet to the safety of his innermost garment. He shrugged his furs about him, stooped, and crawled into the open.

  The snow fell gently now, its wildest fury spent. The blind whiteness calmed and coalesced into a landscape. The little man surveyed the cliffs behind him. They towered forbiddingly, then climbed sharply into mountains torn by crevasses and rockfalls, range after range of white crags rising into the whiter distance.

  One long pace from the door of his shelter, the ragged ledge fell away in a shivering drop to meet a faceless white plain some thousand feet below. The plain rolled softly toward a horizon made invisible by the lowering cloud cover. The little man sniffed the frigid air and waited.

  The shrill cry came again, followed by its nearer echo. When a third, still closer voice took up the relay, he answered it with a shorter, trilled reply and heard his own call relayed back, voice by voice, up into the mountains behind. With another, grimmer nod, he fastened his furred hood tightly about his face, pulled on leather mittens and started down the narrow trail.

  He moved carefully at first, easing the cramp out of long-immobile muscles, then picked up his pace steadily, his head held low to search the snow for signs of hidden danger. He worked into a stiff-legged lope that sent sprays of powder flying with every falling leap. Arms flung wide for balance, he banked into his turns without slowing. His backpack flapped loosely to the rhythm of his stride as he raced along angled ledges where bare rock broke through the drifted snow. He swerved with each hairpin turn, leaped, raced and swerved again in a controlled fall down the mountainside. Along the lower reaches, the deepening drifts rose about him as he descended, slowing his progress. He plowed through them ungracefully, until his furs and eyebrows were crusted white. His breath puffed out in tiny clouds. His arms flapped like tired wings.

  A hundred feet above the plain, the deep snowpack hardened under the weight of its own layers. The trail dropped through the surface drifts into a tunnel that bored into the compacted mass of snow and ice. Its rough-cut walls were glassy with frozen melt. A ghost of daylight filtered in to guide the runner’s feet along the rippled floor. The light dimmed with each descending pace. For a distance, the tunnel followed the contour of the cliffs, snaking around outcroppings of rock as pale and translucent as the ice. As it approached the bottom of the cliffs, the tunnel floor was pierced by brittle edges of granite that warmed the icy gleam with glimmers of rose. The little man ran an urgent agile slalom around every twist and obstacle. He slowed only when the floor began to level and smooth out. Then, where a second tunnel intersected at right angles to the first, he skidded to a stop.

  The second tunnel was larger, squarer. Yellow sand had been scattered across its glossy floor. A hard white glow reflected along its icy walls. The little man hesitated at the intersection, his face turned away from the glow. He paced in a narrow circle, catching his breath, kicked at shattered tusks of ice lying along the bottom of the walls. Someone taller than he had cleared headroom among the icicles clinging to the ceiling. He stared longingly up the smaller tunnel. Its round cool greenness continued into watery dark as it curved back toward the cliffs and began to rise again. He sighed, pressed his jaw with a balled fist and turned into the light of the larger tunnel. It widened as he rounded a corner, then straightened like a ruled line. He took up a reluctant jog, his delicate features tight with uneasy purpose. Farther along, the ceiling arched into a smooth barrel vault. It threw the chatter of his footsteps back at him in whispering echoes. After a long flat stretch through the snowmass smothering the plain, the tunnel turned a final right angle and dead-ended in a wall of clear blue ice.

  The little man halted. The end of a mirrored cylinder protruded through the ice wall. The top of its arc was three times his height. Its open mouth exuded warmth and hard white light. He squinted and shoved back his hood, then edged along the wall toward the opening. He slid off one mitten to touch cautious fingertips to the giant shining curve, then toed its silvered floor as if testing for solidity. His knees flexed as he peered down the cylinder’s length, poised for retreat. Less than twenty paces away, bodies moved in a confusion of brightness, bodies larger than his own. He lingered in the shadow and reflected light, hopeful of invisibility, then shivered once and cupped thin hands to his mouth. By the time his shouted message had echoed the length of the cylinder, he had whirled around and was gone.

  2

  Inside the warm white space, the two women at the table looked up from their work, to stare at the silvered entryway. Glare from the overhead lights flashed in a pair
of gold-rimmed eyeglasses. The older woman leaned forward on her stool as if to rise, and then did not.

  “What was that?”

  “Was it Liphar?” asked her companion simultaneously.

  A third woman, the youngest, stretched lazily in her low-slung recliner. “Some one of them yelling,” she commented, laying aside her reading. “Little buggers never stick around long enough for me to tell ’em apart.”

  The older woman abruptly shoved aside her sketching terminal. She pushed back her archaic glasses and rubbed at the bridge of her nose in pained disgust. “You’d have less trouble if you gave it some thought, McPherson.”

  Here we go, thought her dark-haired companion at the table. Regular as clockwork. The midafternoon battle. She opened a plastic sample bag and emptied its woody contents on the table. “Easy, Meg. She’s only teasing you.”

  “So who can tell?” Megan complained. She lifted martyred eyes to the landscape of scorched metal above their heads. The landing craft was heat-bruised, sand-scoured and grimed with condensation and grease. Its circular underbelly was crisscrossed with the plastic pipe and looping cables of temporary living. All but two equipment bays dangled open, their contents plundered or replaced with decreasing care as the long weeks wore on. Scattered and uneven stacks of plastic storage crates hinted at a once-orderly partitioning of living spaces that had devolved into haphazard division.

  The young blonde flopped around in her recliner with a self-satisfied chortle. “Jeez, Meg, I wish the Lander’s buttons were as touchy as yours!”

  Megan sniffed. “People are trying to work here, McPherson.”

  The blonde nodded with mockingly pursed lips. “Yeah? Well, there’s good ole Susannah working all right, but you sure ain’t getting much observing-the-natives done, Meggies, laying down here on your ass!”

  As Megan’s heavy features puckered towards a retort, Susannah raised a restraining hand. “Don’t, Meg. It’s bad enough in here as it is.”

  Megan sighed and contented herself with a glare at McPherson over the glinting rims of her eyeglasses. Susannah was convinced that Megan had never opted for the standard corrective surgery because she preferred being able to stare at her students over her glasses, just the way she was now staring at McPherson.

  McPherson lay back into the curve of the recliner and flexed one trim white-clad leg in the air. “Hell, don’t blame you, Meg, sticking down here. You anthropologists don’t get shit to sit on when you’re working.”

  “I’m working now,” responded Megan tightly, then muttered to herself, “I’m just not getting anything done.” She resettled the glowing sketchpad in front of her and fiddled guiltily with its keys.

  “Ah, the joys of cabin fever,” murmured Susannah. She bent back to the mound of dried leaves lying half sorted on the table. She brushed aside crushed twigs and dirt to set out a withered leaf cutting for study, and found herself listening to the silence. She thought it sounded different, in an indefinable way that made her uneasy. She wondered if the runner in the tunnel had been trying to tell them something important. “It probably wasn’t Liphar.” she commented.

  Megan pushed the sketcher aside with a grunt of futility. She picked up a stray leaf which she pretended to examine. “No. He at least stays around for a bite when he ventures down from the Caves. But, you know, delighted as I am to prove his digestive system compatible with ours, I do wish he was a trifle more enthusiastic about my cooking.”

  Susannah’s laugh was gentle. “Mere adolescent snobbery, Meg. I think young Liphar considers our cuisine a bit limited.”

  “Well, he ain’t lying,” drawled McPherson from the depths of her chair.

  “This expedition never promised a four-star galley,” grinned Susannah.

  McPherson flexed the other leg. “For god’s sake, don’t tell Emil. You’ll hurt his feelings.”

  “What feelings?” grumped Megan.

  “Not even Emil can do much with freeze-dried soy cake.” Susannah grasped her specimen gingerly and reached for her magnifier.

  “The Sawls’ own diet is just as limited,” pursued Megan with a hint of a whine. “How they survive on what’s available to them on this planet is a miracle of dietary ingenuity.” Susannah nodded. “True, but if I understand him right, Liphar’s real complaint is with our packaging. It bothers him that we use something once and then throw it away. I haven’t been able to make the purpose of the recycling unit clear to him.” Turning over the specimen on her palm, she frowned and increased the power of her magnifier. “Meg, see the spore cases on the underside of this leaf? It’s structured a lot like our Equisetum, see? But what would a water plant be doing up here in this frozen desert?”

  “Who knows why anything’s the way it is on this wretched world,” Megan grumbled, but her irritation had ebbed. “Did he actually say that?”

  “Who?” Susannah squinted at her leaf, then touched a key on her wrist terminal. “CRI, while you’re analyzing the new samples, remember to scan for trehalose.”

  “Yes, Dr. James,” replied the computer.

  “Did Liphar really say that about the waste?” Megan insisted. “That’s a sophisticated notion for a low-tech society like this one.”

  “Is it? Well, maybe I’m projecting. He didn’t say it in so many words.”

  “He doesn’t know so many words-in English,” tossed in McPherson.

  Susannah ignored her. “The Sawls are a subtle people,” she concluded.

  “Polite,” Megan corrected.

  Susannah shrugged. “If you like.”

  McPherson snorted, flicking invisible dust from the white spacer uniform that fitted her short athletic body like a second skin. “He’s so polite he scrounges a free lunch every time he comes around.”

  “When you were Liphar’s age, I’ll bet you were doing the same thing around the Academy cafeteria,” Susannah chided with a smile. “Besides, free lunches are hard to come by on this snowball.”

  McPherson reflexively brushed at the silver figure-eight on her collar. “He ain’t so much younger than me. By the time I was his age, I’d graduated and won my first commission. I was buying other folks their lunch!”

  “You might remember,” intoned Megan, “that food is a time-honored medium for social exchange, here on Fiix as well as throughout the galaxy. Food is a potent symbol of trust and hospitality that crosses all cultures. In fact, many of the smaller Terran colonies, on the harsher worlds where subsistence is marginal, have evolved highly intricate food-based etiquettes. Food is—”

  “Phooey.” McPherson waved a careless hand. “Save your lectures for the classroom, Megs. It’s all wasted on me.”

  “I’ll say,” growled Megan.

  McPherson bent to retrieve a discarded engineering manual and turned her back. The plastic facsimile pages crinkled loudly as she flipped through them, searching for her place, and Susannah realized what was different about the silence. For the six weeks since their arrival, the storm-strummed vibration of the Lander’s shell had hummed a constant accompaniment to the expeditionaries’ sleeps and squabbles. Now it had ceased. “Listen to how quiet it is,” she said.

  But Megan had folded her arms, pouting, and leaned back against the hard trusswork of the landing gear that towered behind her. “Someday they’ll fully automate these crates and spare the Sciences from the ignorance of career spacers!”

  “Meg…” Susannah warned.

  “Oh, yeah?” McPherson sprang up from her chair. “You think some machine could have landed us in shit like this? Snow up to the retros? That nice gale-force wind that blew up out of fuckin’ nowhere just as I was settin’ us down and nearly mashed us against those cliffs? Not your everyday landing, y’know! Even CRI congratulated me!”

  “CRI is programmed to be supportive!” Megan retorted.

  “Man, when I get my seniority built up, you won’t catch me chauffeuring no bunch of scientists around the place!” McPherson exclaimed. “No offense, Susannah.”

  “None t
aken,” returned Susannah mildly. “By the way, have you got that Sled problem ironed out yet?” Her diplomatic efforts had long ago abandoned subtlety. A moment had come on the long trip out from Earth when she had realized that if she didn’t try to keep peace among the seven of them, nobody would. With five such thorny personalities thrown together under a commander whose authority extended only to the physical welfare of ship and passengers (and who took this as a directive not to meddle elsewhere), Susannah was left, as the one determined to remain neutral, to be cast as mediator. She would have preferred to stay out of the battling altogether. Though she was too fed up with the role to remain creative in it, peacekeeping had become so integral to her shipboard identity that it would be difficult to abandon it now. Besides, her success rate was considerable.

  The little pilot grimaced, subsiding into her chair to thumb through the manual brusquely. Then she shrugged and allowed herself to be distracted. “Nah. It’s not like a thing you can really solve, y’know?” She held up a colored schematic for Susannah’s perusal. “It’s a joke them things ever got to be called Sleds—that class of skimmer ain’t worth a spacer’s damn in the snow. But then, we weren’t exactly expecting snow, were we…” She waved the manual at two large shrouded hulks parked across the crate-littered Underbelly, alongside the blue-green wall of ice that pressed in against the Lander’s encircling force field. One hulk was partly uncovered, exposing an open cockpit. Clothing decorated the windscreen. A wrinkled foil blanket lay in a comfortable nest along one of the triangular wings. The pilot’s seat was strewn with printout and plastic eating utensils. Deserted coffee mugs lounged on the control console. “No power in ’em,” McPherson mourned, the animation in her round face wilting momentarily. “Not against these winds. Told myself, while they’re trapped down here in the ice with us, I’d work ’em up a little, but…” She shrugged again. “Phooey.”