“Have done with your supposing!” he shouted. “What can they do to retaliate? Bomb Pakistan? Let them! Let them destroy Hyderabad and Multan, let them bomb Karachi, let them wipe out all the cities and burn the whole coast. You have been there, Ana. How much of Pakistan can be destroyed? What bombs can blast through mountains? The people will survive. The leeches that flock to the cities to beg, the government parasites — yes, the intellectuals, the proud bloodsuckers like you and me — what do I care if they all die? The people in the valleys will live!”
She was silent, frightened, searching for words that might sway him and finding none. “Ah,” he said in disgust, “what is the sense of this? But do not be angry with me.”
“Angry? That is not what I feel,” she said miserably.
“Then what? Hatred? Fear? Ana, what are we to do? Let them starve us? We have one small ship to save us, and what have the Fats and the Greasies? Navies! And if the fighting spreads—” He hesitated and then burst out, “Let it! Let all the rich ones kill each other. What do we care? Remember, six out of ten human beings on Earth are ours! If there is war on Earth — if only a million survive, then six hundred thousand of them will be citizens of the People’s Republics. And here—”
She shook her head, almost weeping. “And here? Sixty percent too?”
“No. More. On Son of Kung — if anyone survives — one hundred percent ours.”
SIXTEEN
THE RAINS were all around, squall clouds driving toward them, squall clouds already past them, up toward the Heat Pole, where the raindrops fell a kilometer or two and then evaporated, never striking the hot, salt ground. The flock was spread out over a kilometer of sky, and grumbling in dissonant chords.
“Have patience,” Charlie scolded them. “We must stay, must stay.”
And they echoed, “We must stay,” but it was poorly sung.
No matter. Charlie had promised his two-legged friend that they would stay on station, waiting to observe certain strange and incomprehensible events, and the flock would do as he vowed.
Still, it was uncomfortable to him, like an itch or a sunburn to a human being, to have the swarm in such disarray. The place he had promised to watch was upwind of the camp of the Big Sun. It did not do to come too close to that. Many of his flock, and even more of other flocks, had been punctured or burned by the far-striking missiles of that camp, and so he had to try to keep the flock from drifting toward it, seeking every counterflowing gust, and still avoid the squalls as much as possible. Dalehouse had told him that it would be difficult. But he had also said it was important.
Charlie rotated his eye patches over the entire horizon. No sign of the aircraft he had been told to expect. But he did see a vagrant drift of thistledown and spinner silk moving across the hills below. A crosscurrent! He sang his flock together and vented gas.
The swarm followed, dropping into a level where the wind took them away from the rain to a likely-looking area of up-draft. They followed well, everything considered. Expertly he guided them under the base of a fair-weather cumulus, and they rose with the drift.
The song of the swarm became contented. It was at the top of these invisible pillars of rising air that the best feeding was found: pollen and butterfly-seed capsules, the small, soft creatures that filled the same ecological niche that insects did on Earth, dried salt particles from the wavelets of landlocked seas, and even tinier things. A flock at feed was queer-looking, with every fin and frill extended to trap whatever touched it. It was also at risk, or once would have been. It was a favorite time for the ha’aye’i to knife in, slashing every bag they passed and tearing the life out of the victims before the helpless gaze of their flock-mates. Helpless no more! Charlie sang a boastful song of his great friend Danny Dalehouse, who had given them the far-striking weapons that drove the ha’aye’i a hundred clouds away. Or sometimes did. Now each male and some of the females in his own flock had the weapons, and the ha’aye’i had come to recognize Charlie’s swarm and avoid it.
Although, in truth, it was no longer as tempting to the predators as it had once been. So few were left! Once there had been hundreds, now fewer than a score.
There was still no aircraft on the horizon, nothing happening on the mesa upwind of the camp of the Big Sun. Charlie relaxed and fed with his swarm, and as he ate he became more mellow. He led the flock in gentle songs of childhood and joy.
There had been a time when Charlie was a tiny pip-sized pod, pumping mightily to bulge the creases out of his little gasbag but still tied to the ragged end of his sailing ribbon and to the winds that bore it where they liked. Gusts blew. Air-to-air lightning spat all around him. Because he had no real control over his altitude he was sometimes tossed up through the tops of towering convection clouds, with the dull red sun hot on his tiny balloon and actual stars shining through the murky sky; other times he was so low that he brushed hills and fern trees, and shelled or furred creatures clutched after him as he spun by. Eighty out of a hundred of his brood-mates died then, in one of those ways or in some other. Ten more died almost as soon as their drift-ribbons fell away, when they were tasty hors d’oeuvres for the ha’aye’i, or sometimes for the protein-hungry adults of another chance-met flock. Or even of their own. Only a few out of each hundred survived to reproduce. And then there were still the ha’aye’i. And the storms. And the clutching beasts from below.
But still — to be a balloonist! To soar and to sing! Above all, to share the chorused flocklore that united them every one, from the tiniest pod to the leaky, old, slow giants that even the ha’aye’i scorned. Charlie’s song was triumphant, and all the flock around him stopped their greedy gobbling to join in the harmony.
Still his eye patches rotated watchfully toward the mesa; but still there was no sign of the airplane or of the New Friend he had been told would rise from the spot. And they were drifting with the cloud, away from the camp of the Big Sun.
Many of the flock were sated now, softly singing their private courtesy songs of thanksgiving. They were a fine flock, although, Charlie admitted, very few in number.
He sang to them, “Stop feeding, stop feeding! We must go!”
“Go where, go where?” grumbled a chorus of the slower and hungrier ones, and an individual song sounded above the choir.
Faintly: “I must eat more. I die.” That was the old female, Blue-Rose Glow. Her bag had been meanly seared when half the flock was set aflame.
“Not now, not now,” sang Charlie commandingly. “Follow!” And he sang the new song, the duty song he had learned from his friend Danny Dalehouse. It was no longer enough to float and sing and replenish hydrogen and breed. Not anymore. Station must be kept and the mesa observed. And the camp of the Big Sun must be avoided, and the ha’aye’i guarded against, and the swarm kept together; so many imperatives, both the new and the old! And so he led them through their slow, bobbing dance, crisscross with the winds.
For a long time he led them, watching ceaselessly as he had promised. Even so, it was not he who first saw the thing. From far behind, old Blue-Rose Glow sang feebly, “There is a new Sky-Danger.”
“Catch up, catch up!” he commanded. “You sing poorly.” It was not sung in unkindness but only because it was true.
“I leak,” she apologized. “Nevertheless it is there, almost in reach of the Earth-Dangers, far away.”
He rotated his eye patches and rose to another air current. There it was. “I see the Sky-Danger,” he sang, and the rest of the flock confirmed. It was not a ha’aye’i. It was the hard mechanical thing from the camp of the Middle Sun, as he had been told. In it, he knew, was the Other Friend who had sometimes soared with Danny Dalehouse, and also the New Friend he had not yet seen.