On arrival, we noticed a marked difference to the landscape that had been described to us. We landed on the age-cracked pad next to the ruined, brick built experimentation centre and personnel quarters, overgrown with the same yellow plant that covered the rolling hills on all sides. The only other thing to break the line of yellow was a tall tree to the south of us. It must have been all of five hundred years' growth, for it seemed to be at least eighty feet tall with a base of twenty feet in diameter. Small, sturdy branches stood out at random intervals up its trunk and, at the top, was a bushy crown drooping over and down. Small figures seemed to be swooping about the tree, perching on branches and generally flying about. We took these to be birds and thought no more on the subject at the time.
Looking closely, the yellow cover plant seemed to grow in clumps with a ground cover of leaves and a centrally mounted 'cup'. The leaves seemed to operate in the same fashion as Terran plantlife and, at first, we put this down to the colour of the sky - crimson - which seemed to be some form of atmospheric freak. Cherra soon changed that theory when she discovered one plant with an additional stalk, almost spinelike, which contained a crimson powder which was shot violently into the air when disturbed. We had finally discovered this after boredly watching the plant for an hour and finally touching it to see what happened. It seemed that the red powder contained a mixture of mature seeds and pollen. As the cup from each clump caught the pollen and the seeds hit the ground to take seed or hit other plants, so this would trigger other ripe plants, and so propagation continued.
We decided, after a short meal, to set out for the tree. It was obviously old, from its size, and probably one of the few remaining examples of Darra's flora from before the abandoning of the planet. We observed, as we closed with our destination, that the three 'birds' seemed to be more than just avian curiosities. There was a blue one, a green one and a purple one, each with white markings. It was as we got to the tree that we saw that they seemed to be some variation on a humanoid race. We were so startled that we did not bother to hide ourselves. So it was that the blue one saw us and dropped neatly down in front of us.
'Can I help you at all?'
The voice was definately female, and the person seemed to bear this out by her shape and mannerisms, but then the differences started to cloud the definition. Her hair was similar to human hair save for the colour - blue. Her face was pert, with large, blue eyes, and she seemed friendly. The skin of her face and hands was white but, from the neck down, covering her body, was a smooth, feathery down, also bright blue. Her hands were misshapen; only her thumb and forefinger were free to move independantly, the rest merged into a flat appendige, and there were no nails on any of these. The only vestige of toes was an indentation which denoted where the big toe may once have been. She was about four feet tall and seemed very light for her size; I tried picking her up and found that she could only have weighed about twenty pounds in all. Her wings emerged from her back between, and a little lower than, the shoulder blades, with a total wingspan of about seven feet. I surmised that this was an end product of an experiment, probably using the genetic material of a human and a large bird of some kind. Her chest was proportionally larger than the rest of her body, obviously to house the wing muscles. It was possible that this mutant had hollow bones similar to the bone structure of Terran birds, which would explain some of the weight to size ratio imbalance. The white 'markings' turned out to be nothing more than the white costume that they wore; cut low and the back to allow freedom of movement of the wings, high at the legs to allow them to steer and stabilize, and tied at the neck to keep it tight so as to cause minimum body turbulance.
'Is that all you are going to do?' she said, impatient with the examination.
Cherra looked up. 'I'm sorry. I didn't know...' she started.
'Is that so?' The blue bird-girl had a lisp, and I was to find that her friends did too. 'You look odd without wings.' It probably would do, but we could have said the same of her. 'Are you of the Murdering Realm?'
'No, they are gone,' Cherra replied. 'Are there any more of you?'
'Oh yes,' The blue avian smiled, 'but not here. You must come to our village.... oh!'
'Problem?' I asked.
'Our village is at the top of a high mountain. It was put there so that the people of the Murdering Realm could not catch us. I cannot carry you, you cannot fly, so how do we get there?'
The green avian had joined them now, and she suggested that, if all three linked, they could carry the smaller and lighter Cherra, and I could wait for them back at the ship for the present until others could come for me. Cherra suggested that she could walk to the foot of the mountain so that the three would not have to fly so far with the weight. I accompanied them as far as the mountain. We noticed that none of them walked, even for short distances; all three preferring to fly or jump using a version of their takeoff jump. In fact, none of them seemed to be able to walk or even separate their legs at all; indeed, the green bird-girl seemed as though her legs were fused.
Once at the base of the mountain, the green and purple avians wrist-locked with Cherra on either side, then with the blue girl who hovered above them. Then, in a spectacular diamond formation, Cherra started to rise toward the village. I turned away, starting back to the pad. To be honest, I envied my colleague and her unique position, conferring with this people, this new race, so related to us but so different. I had no idea then that this was not the case, no idea that Cherra was getting a far from friendly welcome.
The first I knew was, a few minutes later, when I heard a scream, turned to see Cherra falling from the village, the blue girl catching her, battling valiantly with the extra weight of Cherra but failing to stop the ruinous fall. Cherra shouted something to the birdgirl, and let go of her ankles, falling, shattering her body on the cruel rocks at the base of the mountain. The blue avian still seemed to be in trouble, probably exhaustion; floating raggedly out from the mountain, gliding down brokenly, only a token flutter to slow herself as she landed heavily on the ground not far from Cherra's lifeless body. Whatever Cherra had hit had been taken head first. I went to the blue girl, hoping for an explanation, but she looked so small and defeated that I could feel nothing but pity for her.
'Are you hurt?' I asked. She looked up with tearful eyes and shook her head.
'She is dead. My people are too hasty to condemn people without explanation. They remembered only the crimes of the Murdering Realm against their ancestors and pushed her from the village, though I tried to stop them.'
I put an arm around her shaking body to try to comfort her, and she leaned into me, sobbing. After a while, she flapped herself to her feet and took my hand. She kissed it.
'My name is Fenerra,' she said, evenly. 'I am yours. I'll do all I can to make up for her death.'
She had, I later found, become my wife, subject to my consent. I had a notion of rejecting her, but when I came to do it I found it too difficult. I had reason to be glad that I didn't later on, for I became attached to her, and I learned that a rejected Darran usually commits suicide in a similar way to which Cherra died. Fenerra felt that she owed me for failing to save Cherra; I did not think so, but I never pursued the matter.
It took two more weeks of negotiation, via Fenerra, to get the villagers to accept that I was not from the Realm so that I could enter the village. Once I had got over the shock of Cherra's death, I started to study Fenerra again. The language that she employed, which everyone spoke in the village, was virtually uncorrupted Terran English; certainly a throwback to the Realm. In fact, she used a dialect similar to East Anglian rural, with smatters of Americanese and very occasional Cockney. It made awkward listening, especially since everyone had a lisp, since I was used to standard English as spoken on my native planet, Altair IV, and was used to hearing it, one way or another. Cherra was from Scotland and employed the dialect of eastern Scotland, rather than the harder version used nearer Glasgow, further softened by years of association with people, like myself, that spoke standard, 'unaccented' English.
I had not forgotten the observation that I had made about the odd way in which the bird people got around. After a while, I got up the courage to ask Fenerra if she could move her legs independantly.
'I can...' she seemed to struggle, and her left foot came forward, level lengthwise with her right, a matter of five inches with her small feet, which also seemed to be common among the bird people, 'but it'th hard to do.'
I examined her in that position, and found that her inner leg skin was very tightly drawn, her muscles straining, a bit like someone someone trying to do the splits for the first time. This was also tied to an inbuilt reflex that seemed to try to keep the legs together at all times, so Fenerra found it totally impossible to straddle. She gave a little cry as her feet sprang back into their normal position, as though her ankles were bound by elastic. I also had a chance to examine the green bird girl, whose given name was Lenirra, and found that her legs were indeed fused, almost down to the ankles. She was, needless to state, unable to emulate Fenerra's steps. Fenerra said that the hop she used normally was used by all the villagers, and this was supported by the village historian, whom I met during a visit to the village. His explanation was that, because of the predators on the ground, their ancestors stopped walking on the ground and succesive generations had lost that ability.
I added this together with all my other information and came up with a theory that I did not like. A possible recession of the sentient trait. They would never know it, but the Realm scientists had got it all wrong. I had one last test to make. On board my ship was a system used to analyse and forecast any genetic progression. This would test out my theory. I obtained a sample from Fenerra and fed it into the system, and watched for the results.
The present, Fenerra stood in the 3D field. This version had slightly more fusion in the legs than Fenerra herself, and it was noted that this trait was indeed dominant. I set the next scan further into the future. The result was still Fenerra, but now the down covered her face except for her lips, which had become hard and yellow, with no teeth. Her arms had slipped forward and down and were now wholly bare of down, her hands now clawlike with the thumb permanantly reversed and finger and fused section of equal size, whole construct incapable of manual use. The brain complexity and sentience was also decreasing, and as we increased the timespan, the construct became totally incapable of sentient thought, its arms now becoming the main leg component, the original legs merging and shrinking into the base for a bushy tail. The whole thing was mutating back to the bird component. The stage that the bird-people were at now was probably the last stage before they plunged into wholesale regression, and were probably already suffering from various degenerations of which the problem with the legs was only one of the more noticeable. This would continue unless someone intervened with a dominant strain of the regressive genes. The bird-people needed new human genes; they were too inbred.
This could be done by any number of scientific methods, but the obvious method was the one that was eventually used by me, with Fenerra. I think I loved her too much to see this happen to her people, but reasons for such things can never be fully discussed. I only know that seeing this happen finally convinced me that I really did love this strange, winged Miss Four-foot-Nothing, and she seemed to read my thoughts. More than that, I am unwilling to report.
That happened ten years ago. The Terrans have indeed colonised Darra, and many have married bird people, which I have found to be just right for them. It would take a long time, but the resulting race would be stable in the form that I knew of as the Darran Avian; even checking through extrapolation proved it. I chose the name Nesta for my wife, and that is how you know her best; it is a Darran custom that Darrans use given names, saving their real names for personal friends and relations, and it is customary for the name to be given by the mate. She accompanies me in my work much as Cherra did, except that Nesta is a far better pilot, flying even up to Class 9. She lisps through very passable renditions of certain songs, with preference for songs about flight, has learned to walk in very small steps, but still returns to Darra regularly, with me in tow most times, to see our daughter Cherra.
Whatever caused the Realm to evacuate Darra in the first place is still unknown, even by the bird-people.