Collected Short Fiction, page 656
“You bet III wait,” growled Andy Quam, and sank back in his seat. He ached. Battling rogue stars and strange beings and men from space was not the kind of life he was used to, he thought dourly. But if it was what he had to do to save Molly Zaldivar, he would get used to it!
A small figure appeared at the corner of the square, running hard toward him. Tiny spurts of dust flowered at his heels, and he was panting as he reached the flyer.
“Preacher!” Rufe gasped. “What happened? How’s Molly Zaldivar?”
“She’s still in the cave,” said Quamodian shortly. “I think. Anyway, I never saw her.”
“Then what—what are you going to do?”
“Wait.” But they didn’t have to wait long.-The speaker clicked and hummed, and a sweet non-human voice sang:
“Companions of the Star, Chief Warden of Monitors speaking. How may I serve you?”
“You can serve me best,” said Andy Quam belligerently, “by getting an emergency survey team out here on the double! This is Monitor Andreas Quamodian speaking. I request—no, cancel that. I demand immediate action!”
The sweet high voice sang sorrowfully, “Ah, Monitor Quamodian. We have been advised of your statements and actions.”—”
“Ha!” barked Andy Quam. “Of course you have! You’ve been told of my report that a created intellect in the form of a rogue star is loose here; that I have requested authority to use force against it; that I have stated that certain humans and non-human intellects have been damaged, destroyed or threatened by it. And you’ve ignored what I said.”
“Unfortunately, Monitor Quamodian, we have seen no reason to accept this report.”
“You think I’m wrong, eh?”
“Not ‘wrong,’ Monitor Quamodian. It is merely that we do not assess the same quantitative need for action.”
“I see,” snapped Andy Quam.
“Then look at it this way, I report that a Monitor of the Companions of the Star is suffering paranoid delusions; that he believes himself and his friends attacked by monsters; that in his insanity he is capable of wildly destructive acts of violence; and that this will inevitably reflect great discredit to all Monitors. What quantitative assessment do you give that!?”
“Why—why, Monitor Quamodian, that’s frightful! We’ll send a survey team at once. Who is this deranged monitor?”
“Me!” snapped Andy Quam, and severed the connection.
They left the flyer grumbling to itself in the middle of the square before the transflex gate. “—stupid thing to do,” it was saying resentfully. “They’ll take you off the roll of Monitors sure. Then what will become of me? Some menial job ferrying tourists—”
The boy’s house was only minutes away, and there Andy Quam showered, ate, drank thirstily of the cold, rich milk the kitchen machines produced for him and braced himself for the arrival of the emergency survey team. “How long, preacher? How long before they get here?”
Quamodian considered. “Twenty minutes to think things over. Half an hour to assemble a team. Ten minutes to get their transflex priorities approved—a few seconds to travel. I’d call it an hour.”
“Gee! Why, that’s only twenty minutes from now. Just think, in twenty minutes I’ll be seeing all those crazy three-headed beings, and green-shelled beetles, and—”
“We do not comment on the physical peculiarities of any citizen,” Andy Quam said firmly. “Didn’t your parents teach you that?”
“Well, yes,” the boy admitted. “Come to think of it,” Quamodian went on, “where are your parents? Aren’t they ever home?”
The boy shuffled his feet. “Sure, preacher. They’re just, uh, busy.”
“Rufe!”
“Yes, preacher?” His face was angelically innocent.
“Rufe, let’s cut out the nonsense. You’re hiding something. I can’t imagine what, or why—but let’s have it!”
“Aw, preacher. It’s nothing. It’s—” He looked up at Andreas Quamodian anxiously. Quamodian gazed implacably back. “Well,” said the boy, “it’s just that they were acting a little funny. They’ve gone off in a flyer to Nuevo York.”
“Nuevo York! Why, that’s two thousand miles away!”
“A little more, preacher. Figured it’d take them a day or two each way.”
“Why?”
“Well, that’s the part that’s kind of funny. I mean—gee, preacher, there’s nothing wrong with my parents! They’re not crazy or anything. They just, well, said the same kind of thing you were saying. About some sort of rogue intellect loose on the earth, and the robot inspector here wouldn’t listen to them and they didn’t have the right of direct contact with Almalik, like you. So they figured they’d better report it to Nuevo York, where people might be more interested.”
Quamodian sat up alertly. “You’re still hiding something,” he accused. “Why would you be ashamed of their knowing about the rogue star? It’s true, you know.”
“Sure, preacher. Only—”
“Only what?”
The boy flushed. “It’s just that they were talking about it two days ago. That’s when they left.”
Quam said, “But that can’t be! The rogue star wasn’t even created then! . . . Oh, I see.”
The boy nodded unhappily. “That’s the part that’s got me a little mixed up, preacher. They thought there was one when there wasn’t!”
They were back at the transflex cube with minutes to spare, but the emergency survey team was early. Evidently they had wasted no time. The control dome cried, through Quamodian’s flyer radio: “Stand back! Keep the area clear for a party from Almalik Three, now arriving!”
“Gosh,” whispered Rufe. His eyes were round as Saturn’s rings, his worries about his parents temporarily out of his mind. “Where are they, preacher? Shouldn’t they be coming through? What’s keeping them?
A dozen grass-green spiral beings, like tiny coils of springs, emerged from the cube. They were twisting in orbit around each other, approaching the man and the boy with a whistle of high-frequency sound. “What in tarnation is that, preacher?” he asked.
“It is not courteous to stare. I don’t recognize the species; a multiple citizen of some kind—”
“And that! And—oh, gosh, look at that one!”
“All citizens, I’m sure.” But even Quamodian drew his breath sharply, as from behind a foamy, almost translucent bubble of pink there appeared the shark’s fangs and slitted eyes of a citizen of clearly carnivorous ancestry. The rest of the citizen was no improvement; it loped on enormously powerful clawed legs like a kangaroo’s, possessed two pairs of upper limbs that seemed boneless and lithe as an elephant’s trunk, terminated in vivid blue manipulating organs that were almost the duplicate of a star-nosed mole.
But the fourth member of the team, and the one who advanced on Andy Quam, was human enough. In fact, she was lovely.
“Monitor Quamodian?” she demanded. “I am Clothilde Kwai Kwich, temporarily assigned to clean up the mess here on Earth and thus your acting supervisor. What the devil have you idiots been up to?”
Andy Quam swallowed hard. He wiped the palm of his hand on his tunic and extended it to her for shaking. “I—I’m delighted to meet you, Miss—”
“Kwai Kwich,” she said, clearly and emphatically. “Monitor Kwai Kwich. Please speak briefly and responsively, when it is necessary for you to speak at all. These other citizens and I have little time to waste, and we wish to use it effectively. I suppose our best first move is to make an on-site investigation of the locus of the alleged events which you have tricked us into coming here to investigate.”
“Certainly,” said Andy Quam feebly, propping his unshaken hand. “Of course. That’s why I was hoping—”
“My associates can of course provide their own transport but, as you see, I am myself human. I assume you have some sort of vehicle?”
“Oh, yes. This one right here.”
“Then shall we go?” And Monitor Kwai Kwich brushed past him without a word to enter the waiting flyer.
Dazed, Andy Quam turned to follow, but the boy caught his sleeve. “Say, preacher!” he hissed furiously. “What the dickens is the matter with you?”
Quam stared at him blankly. After a moment he shook his head and followed the girl into the flyer. He didn’t know what to say. It was just that he was astonished at his temporary supervisor’s appearance.
She wore the garb of an urbane, sophisticated citydweller, her face made up almost past the point of visible humanity, her hair impeccably coiffed. But change her clothes and makeup, Andy Quam thought—put a sicpple dress on her instead of the mirror-bright tights, the fluffed bodice and shoulders, the diamond of bare skin at the back; scrub her face of the two-inch angled eyebrows and bright blue eyeshadow and rouge—and Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich would become a dead ringer for Molly Zaldivar.
XVI
The rogue was much larger now, and wiser, and stronger.
It did not seem much different in the despairing eyes of Molly Zaldivar, for at best it was only a cloud of stripped surging electrons, a controlled violence of particles that would have been her death if the rogue’s own energies had not kept its components bound to its central mass. But it had fed and grown. It had assimilated neural reactions from Cliff Hawk, the robot, the sleeth, the hundred living creatures larger than microorganisms that it had absorbed into itself. It was by no means finished with either growing or learning. Perhaps it could be called adolescent. Almost mature in size and strength and intelligence. Far from mature in its understanding of itself.
Molly made no sound as the radiant whirl summoned the sleeth to it, and entered into the black terrifying shape of the predator from space. The sleeth dropped down upon her and caught her, coldly but harmlessly, in its razored talons, now sheathed in slick, cold chitin. It rose with her through the center of the globe, flew through the cold core of that edgeless opal glow and on and out, tracing the endless passageways to the surface.
Molly did not stir. She was past fear and worry; she was not resigned, but she was passive.
She would not have struggled even if she had known how close to death that murderous opal glow had brought her. But she really did not know.
She did not respond even in the hues of emotion by which the rogue interpreted her mental state. No green blaze of hate, no blues or violets of fear. No spark of love; emotion had left her, leaving her dark, and empty, and merely waiting.
Bearing Molly Zaldivar in the bubble of atmosphere trapped in the sleeth’s transflection fields, the rogue left the round Earth.
Tardily they dawdled through the “thick” gases that were the solar atmosphere—so tenuous at one A.U. that human instruments could barely record them, and human bodies would have burst and foamed; but still too thick for the sorts of speed that the sleeth, commanded and driven by the starlike energies of the rogue, could develop. But even so, in minutes they were past gassy Jupiter and Saturn; the void was more nearly empty now, and the rogue drove the sleeth more fiercely.
So fiercely that time seemed to stop.
These were not physical energies that the rogue commanded now; they were the transflection fields of the sleeth and itself. They leaped through empty spaces, through folded light and darkness, through bitter cold and twisting force and giddy deeps of vastness, leaped to the golden suns of Almalik . . .
And were there.
A thin sighing shout whispered passionately in the ears of Molly Zaldivar:
“Observe!” it shrieked, almost soundlessly. “I have begun to destroy Almalik!”
“You cannot,” she said bleakly.
“Observe!” it shrieked again, and subsided. It was the molecules of atmosphere itself that the rogue was shaking now, to make sounds that the girl could hear; it could produce little volume, but in the girl’s tiny bubble of air, gazing at the twelve bright but distant stars and one nearby, blinding sun that was Almalik, in the middle of the awful soundlessness of interstellar space, there was no other sound loud enough to drown it out, nothing but her own heart and breath and the faint mindless singing of the sleeth.
“I begin!” whispered the tiny scream, and like a hawk swooping its prey the rogue drove them toward the nearest planet.
It was a small world, less than Pluto and farther from its primary; the horizon was queerly rounded, the surface mottled with creeping blobs of liquid gas.
With a power summoned from its infinite reserves, the rogue seized it, entered it—became it. It grew once more. It fed quickly and avidly, seized new atoms, sucked electrons into the spreading patterns of its being, took new energies from frozen stone. It reached out to survey the space around itself, found ions, gas molecules, a hurtling moonlet—and farther off, a small metal mass inhabited by organic masses of organized matter. The rogue did not know it was a spaceship, did not care.
It drew the spaceship and the sleeth at once to itself. The ship crashed bruisingly on the surface of the tiny world. With the sleeth it was far more gentle, but not gentle enough. The creature struck against a spire of frozen hydrates, screamed soundlessly and went limp. And as it lost control, with it went the bubble of air it carried in its transflection fields, and Molly Zaldivar lay open to the murderous empty cold of space.
For many nanoseconds the rogue considered what it had done. As best it knew how to do so, it felt alarmed.
At length it seized upon a buried shelf of rock beneath the frozen gases and shook it to make words. “Molly Zaldivar!” rumbled the planet. “What is happening to you?”
The girl did not answer. She lay cradled in a bed of the planet’s—of the rogue’s own, now—crystal snow, beside the crumpled black body of the sleeth. She did not breathe; there was no longer any air for her to breathe. Dark blood frothed and froze on her face.
“Molly Zaldivar!” groaned the rock of the planet’s crust. “Answer!” But there was no answer.
The rogue tested its powers, felt its new magnitude. Now it was a planet, its coat of frozen gas a skin, its cragged granite mountains bones, its deep pools of cooling magma a heart of sorts. The rogue was not used to so large a body. It regretted (insofar as it understood regret) that its body was unkind to Molly Zaldivar, too airless, too cruelly cold.
From the wreckage of the spaceship, organized masses of organic matter were exiting, clad in metallic artificial skins. The rogue did not recognize that they were citizens and might be of help to Molly Zaldivar; it reached out a thoughtless effector and slew them. And then it again practiced the sensation it experienced as regret; for it realized that they had owned supplies of water and air, warmth and pressure that could have been used for Molly Zaldivar.
No matter. The rogue was now the planet and could dispose of the planet’s resources. It would not let her die.
It shielded her from the cold, warmed the frozen gas around her and cupped it in a sphere of transflection forces. With bits of matter taken from the creatures it had destroyed it healed the damage to her lungs. It warmed her stiffened body, helped her breathe again, found the spark of life in her . . .
And the girl stirred and spoke.
“What are you doing, monster?” she moaned.
“I am saving your life, Molly Zaldivar,” rumbled the rocks. “I am destroying Almalik!”
“You cannot, monster,” sobbed the girl.
“Observe!”
The rogue’s transflection field was vaster now, spreading to hold all its continents of dark and ancient rock, its seas of snow, all its great mass.
With all its might, the rogue prepared to strike at Almalik.
It halted the planet in its orbit and turned inward, toward that white and splendid single sun, the brightest star of Almalik.
And in its hate for Almalik it drove inward, toward collision with the star.
The sleeth was cruelly hurt; but the creature that had been bred to kill pyropods in space was not easily killed. It stirred. The great empty eyes gazed into space, then bent to look into the eyes of Molly Zaldivar. Ripples of muscles pulsed under the dark, hard flesh. Ifs transflection fields grew again; it lifted lightly from the frozen gas on which it lay, and its high singing sound grew in volume. The sleeth was not an intelligent creature as Man is intelligent, or the other citizens of the galaxies; but it had awareness. It recognized that something had owned it for a time; it felt that the something was gone, now that the rogue had retreated to explore its new planetary body. It remembered Molly Zaldivar . . .
And when the rogue next turned its attention to the girl she was gone.
The rogue was quick to search for her, and find her. She was in flight.
Mounted on the sleek black shoulders of the sleeth, veiled in its transflection fields, she was climbing away from the rogue planet’s frigid skin of snow, flying toward the inner planets of that great white star toward which the planet was plunging.
The rogue thrust out a darting arm of plasma, of its own electrons meshed in transcience forces. It reached to overtake her, pierced effortlessly the sleeth’s transflection shield, shook her small sphere of air with an effector.
“Where are you going, Molly Zaldivar?” the air screamed shrilly in her ear.
She turned her head to look at the rogue’s shining plasma finger, but she did not answer. The rogue paused, considering. There was strangeness here. Strange that to the rogue she seemed so very lovely. The redder suns of Almalik struck red fire from her hair; the blue suns burned violet in her eyes. But why should these things matter? the rogue asked itself, interested and curious. Why should the remembered and absorbed thought-patterns of the organized matter called Cliff Hawk exert so powerful an influence on it still? The rogue made the air shriek in a piercing whisper again: “I love you, Molly Zaldivar. Once I was tinier than you, so small you could not see me; now I am so huge you are no more than a fleck of dust. We have never been akin, and I see no bridge-for love between us . . . but I love you!”
“You’re insane, monster,” she said at last. But her eyes were gentle.
