The Crystal Variation Read Online Free PDF Page A

beach and wings that beat. Perhaps the distant tremble of air as some flying thing cavorted . . .
    Now here there was comfort, for there had been flying things once, of many sizes, and if they’d fought amongst themselves at times, they’d done their work, too, moving seeds and pods about, taking away loose branches, warning of fires and off-season floods, sharing a measure of joy in the world until they were vanquished by some short-term calamity beyond the thought of trees.
    What an interesting idea . . .
    In his mind’s eye, he soared with great wings above a world populated by trees and quiet creatures, above seas willing to carry rafts of the flood-swept for years, rafts where nests and young might travel in the shade of those still green, growing, and accomplishing. Very nearly he could feel the weight of such a pair, singing and calling, perched in his crown at sunrise, answering the call of others across the canyon, and those passing on rafted currents along the sometimes untrustworthy coastal cliffs . . .
    No! He knew he had never had a crown of green, nor had creatures perching in it! His mind took that thought, rejected it as it might a bad element in a dream, came back to the sounds, things that he might measure, rather than ones that might keep him comfortably immobile.
    The sounds he was hearing were old sounds, echoed off of canyon walls last week or last month or last year or . . . or when?
    If he’d been half asleep moments before, now he was one quarter asleep. His muscles still lounged, and his eyes, but his ears recalled a distant mammalian heritage and would have twisted like those of a fox if they could . . . for there was something there, something that hadn’t been there in the days of his walk, or the nearer days of his hibernation—something he was hearing as if through a template.
    He agreed with himself somewhere deep in the near-sleep: a template. A template not of sight, but of sound and vibration. An old template that shuffled a million years of experience and separated the sounds and shifted other templates to form a nearest match.
    Flying thing .
    Not a fox’s template though. Not usually heard through ear, but through branches.
    Flying thing .
    He willed his eyes open, did Jela, who found his name then, and his duty, but his lids remained closed, so he listened harder, for this was a template recently used, despite its age, and he must connect it to the sound in the root and branches and—
    Then there was thunder enough to open his eyes, and his ears were his, and to his wakeful mind the pattern came: sonic boom.
    He shed sleep entirely then, and glanced at the tree, which had been shading him as best it might.
    “Flying things, my friend? And dragons?” He laughed, to hear his voice sounding remarkably like the dragons of the dream. “Dragons and now spaceships? What a fine delirium you bring!”
    His eye caught the line of a single narrow contrail in the sky, floating with no obvious sign of an attached craft. It looked like they were heading away from him—to the place he’d touched down. Else they were headed in the other direction. Directly for him.
    Sighing, Jela the soldier reached for his sun shades, tapped the knife on his belt for comfort, and drew the gun to be sure the barrel was not full of sand, nor the charge useless.
    “Field of fire,” he remarked to the tree, “favors both of us. If it isn’t someone we know and they can read the signs, they’ll have an idea where I am, so I’ll be just a little bit someplace else. If they’re bright, they’ll expect it, but hey, I’ve got the rescue beacons on.
    “You . . . I’m going to camouflage as best I can.”
    His handiwork, when admired from a distance, appeared to be another random pile of debris, though his tracks around it were hard to disguise entirely. He’d used his vest to sweep the more obvious tracks into smudges, and left the beacon on. He took one transceiver, leaving all the other powered items in