Riya's Foundling
By ALGIS BUDRYS
[Transcriber note: This etext was produced Science Fiction Stories 1953.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyrighton this publication was renewed.]
The loft of the feed-house, with its stacked grainsacks, was a B-72, afort, a foxhole—any number of things, depending on Phildee's moods.
Today it was a jumping-off place.
Phildee slipped out of his dormitory and ran across the yard to thefeed-house. He dropped the big wooden latch behind him, and climbed upthe ladder to the loft, depending on the slight strength of his youngarms more than on his legs, which had to be lifted to straining heightsbefore they could negotiate the man-sized rungs.
He reached the loft and stood panting, looking out over the farm throughthe loft door, at the light wooden fences around it, and the circlingantenna of the radar tower.
Usually, he spent at least a little time each day crouched behind thegrainsacks and being bigger and older, firing cooly and accurately intocharging companies of burly, thick-lipped UES soldiers, or going over onone wing and whistling down on a flight of TT-34's that scattered likefrightened ducks before the fiery sleet of his wing rockets.
But today was different, today there was something he wanted to try.
He stood up on his toes and searched. He felt the touch of Miss Cowan'smind, no different from that of anyone else—flat, unsystematic.
He sighed. Perhaps, somewhere, there was someone else like himself. Fora moment, the fright of loneliness invaded him, but then faded. He tooka last look at the farm, then moved away from the open door, letting hismind slip into another way of thinking.
His chubby features twisted into a scowl of concentration as hevisualized reality. The scowl became a deeper grimace as he negated thatreality, step by step, and substituted another.
O is for Out.
R is for Reimann.
T is for Topology.
H is for heartsick hunger.
Abruptly, the Reimann fold became a concrete visualization. As thoughprinted clearly in and around the air, which was simultaneously botharound him and not around him, which existed/not existed in spacetime,he saw the sideslip diagram.
He twisted.
Spring had come to Riya's world; spring and the thousand sounds of it.The melted snow in the mountaintops ran down in traceries of leapingwater, and the spring-crests raced along the creeks into the rivers. Theriverbank grasses sprang into life; the plains turned green again.
Riya made her way up the path across the foothills, conscious of hershame. The green plain below her was dotted, two by two, with thefigures of her people. It was spring, and Time. Only she was alone.
There was a special significance in the fact that she was here on thispath in this season. The plains on either side of the brown river wereher people's territory. During the summer, the couples ranged over thegrass until the dams were ready to drop their calves. Then it became thebulls' duty to forage for their entire families until the youngsterswere able to travel south to the winter range.
Through the space of years, the people had in