Saturn Rukh (33 page)

“Make sure the holoviewport imager is on record!” yelled Sandra, frustrated that she couldn’t see a thing, while Pete had a front-row seat. “And don’t just sit there watching! Tell me what’s going on!”

“It’s Falcon and Harrier,” replied Pete. “Harrier is flying in close formation with Falcon, just below and a little behind.” He paused.

“And?!” said Sandra, exasperated.

“You know that penis-like thing that trails out of the bottom of a rukh’s body?”

“Yes, the elimination tube,” she replied.

“Well... this may be just my dirty mind ... but I think the upper eye on Harrier is ‘tickling’ it.”

“It
is
your dirty mind,” replied Sandra with scorn. “You’re anthropomorphizing—a typical problem with people who don’t have the proper training you get in the life sciences. What exactly is the upper eye doing to the waste tube? Don’t forget, these birds groom each other. Perhaps the upper eye on Harrier is just grooming Falcon’s waste tube to get rid of some vermin or something.”

“Perhaps so,” replied Pete. “But to me it looks more like groping than grooming. The upper eye on Harrier is extending its neck and climbing up the underside of the tube with its neck claws, then contracting the neck sacs to pull the tube closer to Harrier’s body, then climbing upward again to repeat the pulling motion. And I’m not sure, I guess I could be anthropowhatsing again, but I could swear the tube was expanding and getting longer. Too bad you’re not up here to see it.”

Sandra couldn’t stand it any longer. She dropped the portable console she had been going to use to talk to Uppereye and quickly climbed the rungs up the side of
Sexdent
until she was standing at the top of the cone.

“Oh my gosh! You’re
right,
“ she said. “It
is
bigger.”

“And longer,” added Pete, as Peregrine continued slowly sinking as it circled with the rest of the flock around the two rukhs in the middle. “Here comes the lower eye on Falcon. I wonder what it’s going to do about Harrier’s upper eye pulling on his privates.”

As they watched, the lower eye of the upper rukh expanded its neck sacs and crawled along the bottom of its body. When it came to the elimination tube, it took the top side of the tube, crawling down to the tip while the upper eye of the lower rukh climbed up the bottom side of the tube toward the tube’s root in the upper rukh’s body. The lower eye stopped crawling as it came near the end of Falcon’s elimination tube. In front of it, the tip of the tube started to expand.

“Look at the tip swell up!” said Pete in astonishment. “It’s developing wings! Just like the canards on the heads, except there are four of them. If Falcon’s lower eye is going to act as pilot for the penis, it’ll have control in both pitch and yaw!” The engineer in him was impressed by the design evolution had developed. “You’ve got to admit now that it isn’t just an elimination tube. It’s sure acting like a penis to me.”

“You’re right,” admitted Sandra, her crotch cinching up in involuntary reaction as she saw the giant penis develop a wicked-looking barbed tip as the canard wings inflated. She tried hard to return to a mood of scientific objectivity. “Of course, there are many Earth species where tip expansion is used to maintain coupling after initial penetration.”

“I know about dogs,” said Pete. “Where the tip of the dog’s penis swells up after penetration, but barbs?”

“Snail penises have barbs,” replied Sandra. She thought for a moment. “And snails are hermaphrodites! Every single rukh we’ve seen has a similar elimination tube. I wonder... are the rukhs also hermaphrodites?”

“Men have nipples too,” Pete reminded her. “That doesn’t mean they can have babies. Got to watch out that you don’t anthropize there, Sandra.”

Sandra ignored his jibe.

“I guess we’re going to miss the climax,” said Pete with a resigned tone as Peregrine’s altitude continued to drop. Soon all they could see was the bottom side of Harrier, its elimination tube a mere withered imitation of the giant one approaching Harrier’s top side.

Sandra was disappointed, but was still glad that they had been able to get some images of what for most species is a rare and usually private act. While she waited up on the top of
Sexdent
for Peregrine to rise up on the other side, she had time to listen again to the primitive chordal patterns coming from Body Peregrine. She looked down at Seichi. He was lying flat on the surface of the giant body. The first time he had done this, Sandra had been concerned that something was wrong, but it was just his way of “feeling” more of the actual chordal pattern notes in their natural octave to augment the frequency-shifted versions of the notes coming into his helmet phones from Jeeves.

~ * ~

The group experience the flock was undergoing was beautiful, sensuous, friendly, pleasurable, rejuvenating, and exhilarating. Petra slowly switched her chordal patterns as her position changed in the rotating ring surrounding Falru and Renru. The sound of the flock enveloped, surrounded, and encouraged the couple at the center. Petra knew that the two in the center of the ring were experiencing stronger and more intense sensual and pleasurable feelings than the others flying in formation with them, but the whole flock enjoyed the experience, vicariously feeling twinges of pleasure while enjoying the beauty and friendliness of the act taking place. Most important to the flock as a whole was the strong feeling of group rejuvenation that came with the realization that soon a new baby would be joining the life of the flock.

~ * ~

By the time Peregrine had risen up in the circling ring to the point where the humans could once again see over the top of Harrier, the two rukhs were fully coupled together. The lower eye of Falcon had ridden down with the tube as it had penetrated Harrier and had crawled off onto Harrier’s back and was using its neck claws to grip tightly onto Harrier’s tailfeather-roots in order to hold the two giant bodies together, while the upper eye of Harrier was doing the same by holding on to the featherroots on Falcon’s lower prow.

“Now we know what that notched clearing Rod found on Peregrine’s back is for,” said Sandra.

“They sure make it last a long time,” remarked Pete, almost wistfully.

Sandra ignored his comment. “I notice that on both rukhs, the eyes that are not involved in the sex act are closed. Has that been true all during this interaction, Jeeves?”

“That is correct,” replied Jeeves after an almost imperceptible pause during which it extracted and examined in detail every image stored that day in its incredibly cavernous memory. “The upper eye of Falcon and the lower eye of Harrier have been asleep. I conclude they are asleep because their eyeballs will occasionally jerk rapidly under their eyelids in the same manner as human eyes do when they are asleep.”

“I’m sure the sleep researchers back on Earth will find that interesting,” Sandra mused, looking at the others in the flock as they circled around the coupled couple. “All the rest of the flock have both eyes open, like they usually do during the morning and evening socializing periods. They all seem to be busy watching the event. No wonder Uppereye didn’t come for its language lesson.”

“Bunch of voyeurs,” interjected Pete.

“Except for the one closed eye each on the two rukhs involved,” Sandra mused further. “Only one eye controls the body at any time. I guess during intercourse the eye not actively involved goes to sleep to avoid complicating the interaction with its thoughts. I’ll have to ask Uppereye all about this. Wonder if it’ll be reluctant to talk about sex.”

Darkness finally came. With the darkness the primitive chord coming from Body Peregrine faded off and was replaced with the more complex and varying chordal patterns that indicated “gossip” between members of the flock. Body Peregrine tilted and started the long nighttime climb to altitude.

“Well, we didn’t see the ending, but I guess it’s all over,” said Pete. “I wonder, will Peregrine be tempted to try something like that with us still on its back? It looked kind of interesting from a distance, but I don’t think I would really enjoy seeing a winged penis flying right over my head and coming in for a landing, no matter how scientifically interesting it might be to you.”

“Hmmm,” mused Sandra. “I think I’d better query Uppereye about that possibility as soon as it arrives.”

“Do you want to come inside and play some mommy and daddy rukh games while you’re waiting?” Pete asked, switching to a private channel to do so.

“Don’t be silly,” Sandra replied. “Besides, seeing that barbed head is going to put me off playing any kind of games for a long time.”

Shortly afterward, Uppereye appeared for the long-delayed language lesson. It turned out that Uppereye was quite willing to talk about what they had seen, and rukh sex life in general. It soon became clear to Sandra that the rukhs were indeed hermaphrodites. The upper eye on each rukh was the “female” half of the hermaphrodite bird, while the lower eye was the “male” half. When a female head felt that the body was ready to produce young, she would initiate the coupling. Usually she would wait until they were near another flock, and pick one of that flock for her partner. If she couldn’t wait, then she would pick one of the rukhs in her own flock, avoiding inbreeding by following the advice of the elder rukhs who kept a memory of the genealogy of the flock.

“Harrier have baby. Soon,” said Uppereye, concluding.

“What number days?” asked Sandra.

“Three times sixty times sixty plus thirty times sixty,” replied Uppereye. Sandra had found out early that the rukhs used a base-sixty number system, like the Babylonians, and rather than forcing Uppereye to learn the human decimal system, she counted on Jeeves to give her instant translations.

“About twelve thousand of their days. Fifteen Earth years, or half a Saturnian year,” Jeeves informed her.

Sandra had been hoping that they would still be around when the baby came, but it was not to be. The long gestation time made sense for creatures this large, and the long Saturnian year stretched it even longer. She had learned that the flock crossed over to the southern hemisphere at the equinox so they could hunt the food prey there as the prey rapidly multiplied in the southern summer season, so a birth cycle of half a Saturnian year made sense. There were two young “dependent” rukhs in the flock. Buzzard had a fuzzy “baby,” Owl, who was always kept well tucked into the feather forest along the leading edge of its parent’s wing, while Merlin had a “child,” Osprey, who would often venture out to “glide” in the rush of air over its parent’s wing, where it could swallow smaller prey that its parent had expertly underflown so the prey was directed by the slipstream directly into one of Osprey’s maws. Within half a Saturnian year, Osprey would be big enough to hunt on its own, Buzzard’s baby would be the “child” of the flock gliding along on Buzzard’s bow wave, and Harrier’s new youngster would be the flock “baby.”

~ * ~

A month passed. They now had fifty tons of meta. The language lessons were going well, information about the lifestyle of
Rukh raptosaturnus
copied from Jeeves’s ever-accepting memory was flowing back to excited scientists on Earth, and the crew was beginning to have renewed hope that they would be able to make it back home to Earth. Their previous thoughts about how they would spend their individual billion dollars had faded as each was forced to realize that life was more precious than money—even a billion dollars of money.

Rod, trying to be a good symbiote, was vermin-hunting out on the surface of Peregrine, so he was the one who felt it first— a strong multitone “twang” vibrating the surface of the balloon body beneath his boots. The flock was halfway through the daylight hunting dive. Something fast and heavy had struck the tether trailing the nuclear reactor below Peregrine.

“That was a strong one,” Rod muttered worriedly to himself, turning off his meta torch and casting aside the charred crisp of another feather louse. “I’d better get back and help Seichi with the tether repair. We may have to operate both Kitty and Mouser if a lot of lines need repair.”

He was wending his way back, carefully reeling in the “Hansel and Gretel” line he had left behind to mark his way through the feather forest, when a booming warning from Jeeves made him break into a bounding trot, following the line without trying to reel it up.

“REACTOR DAMAGE! INITIATING EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN!”

There was some static and the radio link went dead for a moment. The silence in the helmet earphones drove Rod’s adrenaline glands and legs into high gear. Mercifully, the radio link was soon restored.

“BACKUP POWER NOW OPERATIONAL.”

“Who’s on the bridge?” Rod panted as he slowed to a steady trot.

“Seichi here, sir,” came the calm reply. “The strike was directly on the reactor secondary loop cooling fins. All lines are now showing zero overpressure. I am presently using Tabby to survey the extent of damage. I will report the results as soon as I have them.”

Rod, bothering only to drop off his backpack and helmet in the airlock, climbed the ladder up to the command deck in his bright yellow saturnsuit. Seichi turned from the holoviewport, which now had an image of what Tabby was seeing. It looked somewhat like a rotary card file except the cards were badly bent.

“The situation is not good, sir,” said Seichi grimly. “The last secondary cooling loop has developed a fracture leak. In Saturn’s gravity field, the sodium-potassium coolant in the portion of the line above the leak has drained out. Even if we could use Tabby to weld the fracture, there wouldn’t be enough coolant in the line for it to function.”