AS YOU COME IN from the hunting grounds at daytime, Morgre looks very different from my room’s nighttime view. Thin sculptures designating the old travel guide, from the pre-human days when neuter and female evelmi who could fly did a lot, leaned beside the human-built highway: pedestals and ten-meter clear display walls preserved by the evelm-human organizations who concern themselves with such. Bow-sail shadows shivered on pitted topping.
Overhead a propeller platform moved above clouds.
Right, humping above a shoulder of blue needles, tolgoth hid the -wr and its fumes. In the distance, Morgre was smudges behind girder-work, with a few towering stone supports walling its north end.
The webwork of feed-paths on our left stretched away to the child’s red toys of the Myaluths, interrupted here by a weather tower, there by the verdigrised dome of one of the forty-thousand-cubic-meter water pumps that sucked the lower wet-sands dry, worked by a convocation of huge, flapping thermofoils taking power from Iiriani. At this range they looked like miniature radar-bows dancing beside the greeny globes, over the orange sand.
I don’t recall when I noticed the half-dozen scooters zagging the narrow paths laid along the ancient runways. I first thought they were another hunting party—only no bows glinted and flopped on their racks.
I had been aware of them for five or six minutes when I realized, for all their swerving back and forth, how closely they paralleled us.
I thought of speaking over my shoulder to Rat. But air chattered by my ears. Then a moment of heat at my right cheek: Rat’s mouth brushed it as he leaned close to shout: “They’re following us, Marq …” which was neither about our northerners in reds behind us, I realized, nor the group of six. As I glanced back (his mouth still closing over my name), I saw, behind and beyond them another twenty—no, forty, or even fifty—scooters gliding along the sandy strips that lay like gold ribbons in an orange sandscape that would go copper at Iirianiset.
Negotiating the interwoven paths, lingering scooters joined the lead group. And I looked up—our scooter lurched a little—because the creatures laboring maybe a hundred meters above in the air were not small dragons, but some dozen evelm women.
The sky was streaked with the clouds we call fireneedles here and which, only fifty k’s to the east, are called ’manshair: nobbly filaments of darkness like wires across Iiriani.
But do you know how rare it is to see evelmi fly?
They flocked.
Among the riders were more humans than one would have expected with a random gathering; almost forty percent.
Flyers and riders flocked nearer.
I looked back over Rat’s arm at the two red figures following.
Ahead, three or five feed paths fed onto the highway—and a hundred meters further, three or five more.
Six, a dozen, twenty scooters splatted noise and shadow onto the road. Sound around us trebled. Bony faces passed, staring—too many without scales. (When humans mass in too great numbers on Velm, though I am one, I think of the dangerous north.) Zub and zub zub zub and zub zub, in the welter and rumble passing. Glancing right, I saw a dark face: her gum bluish, her black eyes narrowed in the wind, watching, her blue-black claws clamping her machine’s guide bar. Then she dropped away among and behind others. Skimmers pulled ahead and fell behind. Their drafts slapped us like dragon wings.
I wanted to call out and could think of nothing to call. I mauled my guide bar with my hands and marveled Korga’s hands did not maul me. We grumbled up on another sand-spilled junction. And, as the scooters had come, they went.
Scooters growled away along feed-paths, out across the plain.
We moved down the raw highway in our own quiet roar; I glanced aside to watch scooters dispersing over the sandy web, under the unsettling flights of the women.
On my left, sound increased. I shifted my shoulders under Rat’s hands, and turned to see first Ollivet’t’s, then Shalleme’s scooter pull abreast. Ollivet’t said with three tongues at once, loud enough to cover it:
{“WHAT WAS THAT?”
{“WHAT WAS THAT?”
{“WHAT WAS THAT?”
I shouted, loud as I could (it doesn’t compete): “I’LL TELL YOU LATER.” Then as an afterthought: “YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE ME IF I DID,” and hoped Shalleme could read my lips. It’s a talent many of us humans have been developing as a sort of racial compensation.
Their scooters fell behind, and I watched them to detect some reason in their passage—saw only their intentness at driving.
Morgre’s stone walls—we were coming in at the Broidwey Tunnel—loomed, blotched high as the wing-spread of a neuter dragon with the rock-algae that gives the stony Fayne (but not the Vyalou) its characteristic purple. We dove in.