CHAPTER II
His Own Kind
Above them, the sky was blue. The five aliens who were alien to all worlds alike stood together on a hilltop looking down.
“It’s beautiful,” Kua said. “I’m glad we chose this one. But I wonder what the next one would have been like if we could have waited.”
“It will be the same no matter where we go,” Byrna’s infinitely sweet voice murmured.
“Look at the horizon,” Bruce said. “What is it?”
They saw then the first thing that marked this world alien to earth. For the most part it might have been any hilly wooded land they knew from the old place; even the roofs of the village looked spuriously familiar. But the horizon was curiously misted, and before them, far off, rose—something—to an impossible height halfway up the zenith.
“A mountain?” Kern asked doubtfully. “It’s too high, isn’t it?”
“A glass mountain,” Kua said. “Yes, it is glass—or plastic? I can’t be sure.”
She had uncovered her single eye and the shining pupil was contracted as she gazed over impossible distances at the equally impossible bulk of that thing on the horizon. It rose in a vast sweep of opalescent color, like a translucent thundercloud hanging over the whole land. Knowing it for a mountain, the mind felt vertiginous at the thought of such tremendous bulk towering overhead.
“It looks clear,” Kua said. “All the way through. I can’t tell what’s beyond it. Just an enormous mountain made out of—of plastic? I wonder.”
Kern was aware of a tugging at his wing-surfaces, and glanced around in quick recognition of the strengthening breeze. He was the first to notice it.
“It’s beginning to blow. And listen—do you hear?”
It grew louder as they stood there, a shrill, strengthening whine in the air coming from the direction of the cloudlike mountain. A whine that grew so rapidly they had scarcely recognized it as noise before it was deafening all about them, and the wind was like a sudden hurricane.
That passed in a gust, noise and wind alike, leaving them breathless and staring at one another in dismay.
“Look, over there, quick!” Kua said, “Another one’s coming!”
Far off, but moving toward them with appalling speed, came a monstrous spinning tower of—light? Smoke? They could not be sure.
It whirled like a waterspout in a typhoon, vast, bending majestically and righting itself again, and the air spun with it, and the wild, shrill screaming began again.
The vortex of brilliance passed them far to the left, catching them in its shrieking hurricane of riven air and then releasing them again into shaken silence. But there was another one on its way before they had caught their breath again, a whirling, bowing tower that spun screeching off toward the right. And after it another, and close behind that, a fourth.
The noise and the violence of the wind stunned Kern so that he had no idea what was happening to the others on the hilltop. He was susceptible because of his wings. The hurricane caught him up and whirled him sideward down the slope—shrieking in his ears with a noise so great it was almost silence, beyond the range of sound.
Stunned, he struggled for balance, leaning against the rushing wall of air as solid as a wall of stone. For a moment or two he kept the ground underfoot. Then his wings betrayed him and, in spite of himself, he felt the six-foot pinions blown wide and the muscles ached across his chest with the violence of the wind striking their spread surfaces.
The horizon tilted familiarly as he swooped in a banking curve. The glass mountain for a moment hung overhead and he looked straight down at the wooded hills, seeing tiny blowing figures reeling across the slopes in the grip of the hurricane winds. Hanging here far above the treetops, he could see that the monsters of whirling light were coming thicker and faster across the hilltops, striding like giants, trailing vortices of wind and sound in their wake. For an instant he swung in the grip of the hurricane, watching the vast whirling spindles moving and bowing majestically across the face of the new earth.
Then the vortex caught him again and he was spun blindly into the heart of the whirlwind, deafened with its terrible screaming uproar, wrenched this way and that upon aching wings, too dizzy for fear or thought. Time ceased. Half senseless, he was whirled to and fro upon the irresistible winds. He closed his eyes against flying dust, locked his hands over his ears to shut out the deafening shrill of the blast and let the hurricane do with him as it would.
Kern felt a hand on his arm and roused himself out of a half-stupor.
He thought, I must be on the ground again, and made an instinctive effort to sit up. The motion threw him into a ludicrous spin and he opened his eyes wide to see the earth whirling far below him.
He was coasting at terrific speed through the upper air upon a cold, screaming highway of wind, and moving easily beside him, riding on broad pinions like his own, a girl paralleled his flight.
Long pale hair streamed behind her away from her blue-eyed face, whipped to pinkness by the blast. She was calling something to him, but the words were snatched from her lips by the wind and he heard nothing except that shrill, continuous howling all around them. He could see that she held him by one arm, and with her free hand was pointing downward vehemently. He could not hear her words, and knew he probably could not understand them if he did, but the gesture’s meaning he could not mistake.
Nodding, he shrugged his left wing high and arched his body for a long downward spiral toward the ground. The girl turned with him, and together they glided sidewise across the rushing air-currents, delicately tacking against the wind, picking their way by instinctive muscular reactions of the spread pinions, while below them the ground swayed and turned like a fluid sea.
Together they glided across the rushing air currents.
Kern glided downward on a wave of exultation like nothing he had ever experienced before in his life. He knew little about this world or about the girl beside him, but one thing stood out clearly—he was no longer alone. No longer the only winged being on an alien planet. And this long downward glide, like the motion of perfect dancers responding each to the other’s most delicate motion, was the most satisfying thing he had ever known.
For the first time he realized one of the great secrets of a flying race—to fly alone is to know only half the joy of flying. When another winged being moves beside you on the airways, speed matching speed, wings beating as one, then at last you taste the full ecstasy of flight.
Kern was breathless with joy and excitement when the ground swooped up at them and he banked against the rush of his glide. With suddenly fluttering wings, he reversed his position in the air and felt with both feet for the solid earth. He had to run a little to cut down his speed, and the girl ran beside him, breathless and laughing a bit as she ran.
When they came to a halt and swung to face one another the long ashen hair blew forward in a cloud that had caught up with her at last, and she fought it, laughing, and brushed back the tangled mass with both hands, the pale wings the exact color of her hair folding back from her shoulders.
He saw now that she wore a tight tunic of some very fine, supple leather, and long tight boots of the same material. The hilt of a jeweled knife stood up against her ribs from a jeweled belt.
Around them the wind still blew cold and shrill, but the blast of it was slackening noticeably and warmth was creeping back little by little into the air. They stood on a wooded hill, under trees whose whipping branches added to the tumult of noise, and Kern could see a broad vista of the land before him, with no more of the vast bending giants of the hurricane moving across it. The storm must be over, he thought.
The girl spoke. She had a pleasant contralto voice, and the language she spoke was slightly guttural and of course entirely strange. Kern saw the surprise and doubt on her face when she saw that he did not understand her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a pretty thing. I wish we could talk to each other.”
She matched his smile, but the bewilderment deepened on her face.
Kern thought, She can’t believe I don’t know her language. Could that mean there’s only one tongue spoken in this world? It’s wishful thinking—I want so much to believe it! Because that might mean the people here are all winged, and move around so easily that separate languages haven’t had a chance to evolve.
His heart was beating faster, with an eagerness that he found a little ludicrous. He had never suspected even in his own dreams how much it would mean to him to belong at last to a race that could accept him as one of its own. Bruce Hallam had set his machine in the aggregate pattern of the whole mutant group, knowing as he did so how unlikely it was that more than one of them could hope for an equivalent world on a single planet. But Bruce’s skill being what it was, Kern told himself there was no reason to be surprised that the expected had happened.
This world was his own. A winged world. He was luckiest and first of the group to find a place where he belonged. Exultation closed up his throat with the joy of being no longer alien.
“Or maybe I’m building too much on one example,” he warned himself aloud. “Are we all winged in this world, girl? Say something, quick. I want to learn your language! Answer me, girl—are you an alien too, or is this the world where I belong?”
She laughed at him, recognizing the half-serious tone of his voice though the words meant nothing. And then her glance went across his shoulder, and a look of subtle withdrawal crossed her face. She said something in her guttural tongue and nodded toward the trees behind Kern.
He turned. A third winged figure was walking toward them under the still-roaring trees, wings whipped by the wind until the newcomer staggered now and then when the full blast caught him.
Kern was aware at first only of profound thankfulness. Another winged person was almost the answer to his remaining doubt. Where there were two, surely there must be many.
This was a man. Like the girl, he wore thin, tight leather and a dagger at his belt. His hair was red, and so were his silky wings, but his face was duskily tanned and Kern caught the flash of sidelong, light eyes as the man approached them. He saw, too, in another moment, that the newcomer was a hunchback. Between the shining reddish wings the man’s back was slightly crooked, so that he looked up at them with his head awry. He had a young face, with beautiful clear planes, beneath the darkness of his tan.
“Gerd—” the girl called, and then hesitated. He flashed the light eyes at her, and Kern decided it was probably his name.
The pale gaze moved back to Kern, and watched him searchingly as the hunchback fought the wind to the shelter of their tree. The man was wary, ready for distrust before he so much as saw Kern’s face. It was odd, in a way.
They talked, the girl excitedly in her contralto voice, guttural words tumbling over each other. Gerd’s answers were brief, in an unexpectedly deep tone. Presently he unsheathed his dagger and with it gestured toward Kern and the valley below them.
Kern bristled a little. There was no need for threats. If these people were still in a state of undevelopment where knives were their customary weapon, he was far beyond them in some ways at least. It was not a pleasant introduction to this world, where he felt himself already native, to have those first directions pointed out with a bare blade.
The girl, seeing his scowl, laughed gently and came forward to take his arm. She gestured Gerd away with her other hand, and he smiled grimly and stood back. The girl fluttered her wings a little and made a swooping gesture of her hand to indicate flight. She pointed to the valley. Then she stepped away to the brow of the hill, unfolded her wings, tested the dying wind with them, and leaned forward with sublime confidence into the void.
The updraft caught her beneath the pinions and bore her aloft on a beautiful sweep, her pale hair blowing like a banner. In midair she twisted to beckon, and Kern laughed in sheer delight and ran to follow her, spreading his dark wings so that at the fourth stride, with a leap, suddenly he was airborne. It was a glorious feeling to fly without shame or need of concealment. He scarcely heard the beat of wings behind him as the hunchback took to the air in their wake. The joy of flying in company was great enough just now to shut out all other thoughts from Kern’s mind.
They swept high along the slow-running river of wind over a winding valley. Kern, watching for the companions with whom he had entered this wonderful world, saw no motion at all among the trees they soared over. He caught sight presently of a cluster of roofs far ahead, at the top of the valley, built around a stream that wound to and fro among the houses, and was filled with excited speculation as they neared the village.
My people, he thought. My own people. What kind of a town will it be, and what sort of culture? How fast can I learn the language? There’s so much to find out.
The thought broke in his mind. For something—he had no name for it—was stirring very strangely through his body.
For an instant the whole airy world went blind around him. It was as if a new pair of lungs had opened up within him and he had drawn a deep, full breath of such air as no human ever tasted before. It was as if new eyes had opened in his head and he had looked on a new dimension with multiple sight. It was like neither of these, nor was it like anything a man ever experienced before. New, new, inexpressibly new!
And it was gone.
In flight Kern staggered a little, his wings forgetting to beat the sustaining air. The thing had come and gone so quickly, and yet it was not a wholly unfamiliar thing, after all. Once before something like it had happened. Something, different, but at the time heart-breakingly new. It was when he first felt the wings thrust out upon his shoulders. When he first felt the change within himself that cut him off from mankind.
“Am I changing again?” he asked himself fiercely. “Isn’t the mutation over yet? I won’t change! I belong here now—I won’t let anything spoil that!”
The feeling was gone. He could not remember even now what it had been actually like. He would not change! He would fight change while breath remained in him. Whatever strange new mutation struggled now for being in his mysterious flesh he would strangle before he let it come between him and these people with wings.
It had gone, now. He would forget it. It should be as if it had never happened.