Hero
When Thea wore the Hero’s suit, Waving became extraordinary.
Breathless, she swept from the leafy fringe of the Crust forest and down, down through the Mantle’s vortex lines, until it seemed she could plunge deep into the bruised-purple heart of the Quantum Sea itself!
Was this how life had been, before the Core Wars? Oh, how she wished she had been born into the era of her grandparents — before the Wars — instead of these dreary, starving times.
She turned her face towards the South Pole, that place where all the vortex lines converged in a pink, misty infinity. She surged on through the Air, drowning her wistfulness and doubt in motion…
But there was something in the way.
Everyone had heard of the Hero, of course. The Hero myth was somehow more vivid to Thea than, say, the legends of the Ur-humans, who (it was said) had come from beyond the Star to build people to live here in the Mantle — and who then, after the Core Wars, had abandoned them. Perhaps it was because the Hero was of her own world, not of some misty, remote past.
Even as she grew older — and she came to understand how dull and without prospect her parents’ world really was — Thea longed for the Hero, in his suit of silver, to come floating up through the sky to take her away from the endless, drudging poverty of this life of hunting and scavenging at the fringe of the Crust forest.
But by the time she reached the age of fifteen she’d come to doubt that the Hero really existed: in the struggle to survive amid the endless debris of the Core Wars, the Hero was just too convenient a wish-fulfilling myth to be credible.
She certainly never expected to meet him.
“Thea! Thea!”
Snug inside her cocoon of woven spin-spider webbing, Thea kept her eyecups clamped closed. Her sister, Lur, was eighteen — three years older than Thea — and yet, Thea thought sourly, she still had the thin, grating tones of an adolescent. Just like a kid, especially when she was scared—
Scared.
The thought jolted Thea awake. She struggled to free her arms of the cocoon’s clinging webbing, and pushed her face out into the cool Air. She shook her head to clear clouded Air out of her sleep-rimmed eyecups.
Thea cast brisk, efficient glances around the treacherous sky. Lur was still calling her name. Danger was approaching, then. But from where?
Thea’s world was the Mantle of the Star, an immense cavern of yellow-white Air bounded above by the Crust and below by the Quantum Sea. The Crust itself was a rich, matted ceiling, purple-streaked with krypton grass and the graceful curves of tree trunks. Far below Thea, the Sea formed a floor to the world, mist-shrouded and indistinct. All around her, filling the Air between Crust and Sea, the vortex lines were an electric-blue cage. The lines filled space in a hexagonal array spaced about ten mansheights apart; they swept around the Star from the far upflux — the North — and arced past her like the trajectories of immense, graceful animals, converging at last into the soft red blur that was the South Pole, millions of mansheights away.
Thea’s people lived at the lower, leafy fringe of the Crust forest. Their cocoons were suspended from the trees’ outer branches, soft forms among the shiny, neutrino-opaque leaves; and as the humans emerged they looked — Thea thought with a contempt that surprised her — like bizarre animals: metamorphosing creatures of the forest, not human at all. But the cries of children, the frightened, angry shouts of adults, were far too human… The tribe’s small herd of Air-pigs, too, were squealing in unison, thrashing inside the loose net that bound them together, and staining the Air green with their jetfarts.
But where was the danger?
She held her fingers up before her face, trying to judge the spacing and pattern of the vortex lines. Were they drifting, becoming unstable?
Twice already in Thea’s short life, the Star had been struck by Glitches — starquakes. During a Glitch, the vortex lines would come sliding up through the Air, infinite and deadly, scything through the soft matter of the Crust forest — and humans, and their belongings — as if they were no more substantial than spoiled Air-pig meat…
But today the lines of quantized spin looked stable: only the regular cycles of bunching which humans used to count their time marred the lines’ stately progress.
Then what? A spin-spider, perhaps? But spiders lived in the open Air, building their webs across the vortex lines; they wouldn’t venture into the forest.
She saw Lur, now; her sister was trying to Wave towards her, obviously panicking, her limbs uncoordinated, thrashing at the Magfield. Lur was pointing past Thea, still shouting something—
There was a breath of Air at Thea’s back. A faint shadow.
She shifted her head to the right, feeling the lip of her cocoon scratch her bare skin.
A ray, no more than two mansheights away, slid softly towards her.
Thea froze. Rays were among the forest’s deadliest predators. She couldn’t possibly get out of the cocoon and away in time — her only hope was to stay still and pray that the ray didn’t notice she was here…
The ray was a translucent cloud a mansheight across. It was built around a thin, cylindrical spine, and six tiny, spherical eyes ringed the babyish maw set into its sketch of a face. The fins were six wide, thin sheets spaced evenly around the body; the fins rippled as the ray moved, electron gas sparkling around their leading edges. The flesh was almost transparent, and Thea could see shadowy fragments of some meal passing along the ray’s cylindrical gut.
The ray came within a mansheight of her. It slowed. She held her breath and willed her limbs into stillness.
I might live through this yet…
Then — with ghastly, heart-stopping slowness — the ray swiveled its hexagon of eyes towards her, unmistakably locking onto her face.
She closed her eyes. Perhaps if she didn’t struggle it would be quicker…
Then, he came.
There was a blue-white flash: a pillar of electron light that penetrated even her closed eyecups, and ripped through the encroaching silver-gray shadow of the ray.
She cried out. It was the first sound she had made since waking into this nightmare, she realized dully.
She opened her eyes. The ray had pulled away from her and was twisting in the air. The ray was being attacked, she saw, disbelieving: a bolt of electron light swept down through the Air and slanted into the ray’s misty structure, leaving the broad fins in crudely torn shreds. The ray emitted a high, thin keening; it tried to twist its head around to tear into this light-demon—
No, Thea saw now; this was no bolt of light, no demon: this was a man, a man who had wrapped his arms around the thin torso of the ray and was squeezing it, crushing the life out of the creature even as she watched.
She hung in her cocoon, even her fear dissolving in wonder. It was a man, true, but like no man she’d seen before. Instead of ropes and ponchos of Air-pig leather, this stranger wore an enclosing suit of some supple, silver-black substance that crackled with electron gas as he moved. Even his head was enclosed, with a clear plate before his face. There was a blade — a sword, of the same gleaming substance as the suit — tucked into his belt.
The ray stopped struggling. Fragments of half-digested leaf matter spewed from its gaping mouth, and its eyestalks folded in towards the center of its face.
The man pushed the corpse away from him. For a moment his shoulders seemed to hunch, as if he were weary; with gloved hands he brushed at his suit, dislodging shreds of ray flesh which clung there.