Free Heritage of Flight by Susan Shwartz Page B

when evening came, she was content simply to sit with the others.
    After stormy days, or on windy evenings, the Cynthians would not appear. But on the clear nights, or those with only a few freshening winds, that the Cynthians did appear, no one could ever tell what might startle them, hurling them aloft and back to their mountains. Perhaps it would be the smell of meat cooking, or a too-rapid movement by one of the settlers.
    Anything could jeopardize the fragile accord Rafe was building between himself and the winged natives of the refuge world.
    But gradually he reported progress. Gradually he moved out farther and farther from the camp to where the Cynthians would be willing to land. Their visits increased in frequency. Rafe had been right, Pauli thought. He had succeeded in intriguing the Cynthians. After a time, not even a storm that might have shredded their wings could keep them away from the fires, from Rafe, and from the signals that he, and they, tried to send to one another.
    "Their semiotic usage—their system of signs—is vastly different from ours,” he reported to Borodin after one particularly successful visit. “No specific nouns and verbs; just concepts that can be adapted to either. Most of them have to do with flight ... you wouldn't expect winged creatures to have a sign for swimming; and sure enough, there isn't one. This doesn't surprise me.
    "They've got a sign for fire. It's semantically allied—do you see?—with the sign for destruction. Your analogy of Earth moths, Pauli..."
    So that first evening, it had been the fire that frightened the Cynthians. Odd , Pauli thought. At first, I thought they feared the children . But how could anyone fear children, especially those as badly traumatized as the ones here had been? Strange: she had always assumed that one good way of establishing contacts with aliens was through the young of each species.
    "There's something that's been puzzling me,” Rafe spoke up the next evening, after the Cynthians braved rain and wind to appear at the tiny camp. “I want to get a sample of that fluid on their horns."
    "Rafe, if they turn on you, we haven't got an antidote for that,” Pryor warned him.
    "I think they know they can trust me,” he replied.
    "You'll cover him,” Borodin mouthed at Pauli, who moved in.
    "You'd better let me take the sample,” she told Rafe. He was too valuable to risk, and she—she knew her reflexes were faster than most. After all, she was—had been!—a pilot.
    Taking a slide, she dabbed with it at the horn of the nearest Cynthian, then leapt back before it could do more than rear up in surprise. She smelled the alien: dusty, like old leaves in the autumn on the homeworld she remembered now only in the sort of dreams from which one woke crying. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she could remember it thus, not as a nightmare vision of a world charred until it no longer had autumns or any other season, or a world irradiated into a trackless, endless winter.
    Some of the dust from the Cynthian's scales seemed to cling to the slide along with the fluid she had dabbed from the protective horn along its mandible. Even as she watched, frowning with an absurd sense of guilt, of having trespassed upon another creature, the horn went flaccid, the fluid it had secreted evaporating.
    When she gave Rafe the slide for analysis, he stopped glaring at her long enough to process it. “Strong neural toxin,” he announced. “Must be their major weapon. Their mandibles are imperfect; it's a wonder that they can eat at all. I'd say that their backup defenses are the barbs on their wings and those forearms. My guess is that they'd use them to grasp an enemy long enough to bring it close, then shred its wings or brush it with their poison."
    A Cynthian battle ... horns glistening, winged Cynthians darting, dodging, reaching out with those hooks and claws ... what a beautiful, lethal sight such a battle must be.
    Pauli hoped she never saw