Collected Short Fiction, page 668
Such-black moods distressed us all, but Nick was hard to help. Even when his problems proved impossible to solve, he would not forget them. He saw through the good news we tried to manufacture and indignantly rejected most attempts to encourage or distract him. That year was difficult, though Guy and Kyrie brought us occasional relief from his gloomy moodiness.
Guy was heavier than I by now and nearly as tall. Awake, he had the unpredictable vigor of a yearling grizzly and an appalling appearance. Though he enjoyed clothing no more than did Nick and Kyrie, he had reluctantly begun to hide his shaggy strangeness under a shapeless old raincoat when he was outside the nursery.
Carolina still worked when she could to train and study his sluggish intelligence. Sometimes she got him to fumble clumsily with a leaching device or an educational toy. More often he simply sprawled or squatted wherever he was, waiting dumbly for Kyrie, Nick’s desperate plight did not exist for him.
Kyrie was desperately concerned, but Nick seemed not to want her with him in the lab or on his solitary walks. Trying to learn enough to understand his problems with the grit, she got Carolina to bring in a series of tutors for her.
Carolina helped her choose an international team of genetic specialists and she begged them to tell her why Nick and Guy were so different. Those experts took new case histories of all three children, scowled at the grit and muttered vaguely about anomalous genetic mutations.
Searching as urgently as Nick for any sort of understanding, she called in a group of noted composers, who turned out to like or understand her music no better than I did. She sent for philosophers and anthropologists, a female psychologist, finally a Chilean poet.
SHE liked the poet best. A sun-dried gnome with lank black hair and black child-eyes, he beat a many-stringed guitar to a whining chant about his own Homeric life. A one-time spaceman, he had ridden seekers around a dozen moons and asteroids, yet never discovered the meaning of life. Kyrie must have seen Nick and herself in his sad songs. When he was gone, she wouldn’t send for anybody else.
“The wisest men aren’t wise enough,” she told Carolina. “They can’t help Nick. They can’t tell us what we were born for. They can’t explain why Guy is like he is.” she sighed. “Really, you know—in spite of you and Uncle Yuri and Uncle Kim—the three of us are all alone.”
Unable to do anything for Nick, she turned to Guy. His slow being quickened eagerly when she came near and she seemed not to mind his backward strangeness. For months they were always together. They talked little—words, she said, were still too hard for Guy. But she used to sit crooning beside him while he slept and, awake, he used to whimper for her music.
Music—an odd word for the throbs and moans and howls that she beat and scraped and blew out of unlikely bits of junk—or even for the wailing songs she sang. Those tormented sounds were never melodious to the rest of us—rather, they were disturbing in a way I could never understand. But they set Guy to writhing and whining with an animal delight.
Uncontrolled, his gorilla strength had become a problem for security. When he learned to like working out in the gym, he broke equipment and threw balls too hard and fractured the jaw of a guard who was trying to teach him to box. The security chief was afraid he might hurt Kyrie.
She laughed at the notion of danger from her baby Guy, but Carolina, observing their sex development, began to take it seriously. Kyrie, too, had outgrown Nick. Still child-slight, her figure had matured distractingly. Carolina warned and cajoled and ordered her to wear at least bikinis. She obeyed now and then.
Though Nick had never given up his quest for the secret of the grit, it was Guy who made the breakthrough. It happened on a blazing summer afternoon. I was sitting in the publicity office, staring through the window at blue mirages on the mesa and not dictating my daily security report, when Kyrie burst in, screaming.
“It’s the messenger stuff!” She was so breathless I failed to get the words at first. “Uncle Kim, the messenger stuff! Guy wants to show you. He’s learned what to do with the messenger stuff.”
I followed her back to a playroom in the nursery. We found Nick and Guy huddled over a child-sized desk. Nick sat on a chair, naked and alert and deep brown. Too big for the furniture, Guy was crouching over the desk, doing something with a handful of the tiny tetrahedrons.
I heard her say, “Guy knows how—”
“Shhh!” Guy hushed her, and we stooped to watch.
THE grit was spread out on a sheet of white paper. Moving with a deftness that surprised me, Guy’s stubby, short-furred fingers were pushing three tiny pyramids into a triangular pattern. Squinting with care, a new yellow gleam in his eyes, he lowered the base of a fourth pyramid upon the upright points to complete a taller tetrahedron.
When that last crystal clicked into place, a soft blue glow lit the larger pyramid, brightest in its hollow center. Guy raised his browless head with a thick grunt of satisfaction and Nick snatched the thing he had made.
“We’ve got it, Ky!” His voice turned shrill as hers. “He can stick them together. In fours, like this. And the fours into fours of fours, the way they were meant to go. He’s making our nexode—”
A savage growl unnerved me. In a blur of action, the little desk was splintered, black grit scattered, Nick flung to the floor. Kyrie bent over him, gasping and voiceless with terror. Guy lurched away, clutching that glowing thing against his belly fur.
Two security men burst in, shouting at him. He lumbered toward their drawn pistols until I called his name. He stopped then, mute and trembling. With Kyrie’s aid, I managed to make peace. The guards put up their guns and helped gather the spilled grit. Nick said he hadn’t meant to be rude and begged Guy to go ahead and finish the nexode.
Guy shook his head at first and clung moaning to the blue pyramid, but Nick brought the rest of the grit from the lab and Kryie coaxed him back to work. He was at it all that night, painstakingly clicking the crystals into fours and these into taller and taller steps, sixteens and sixty-fours. Each larger pyramid glowed with another color, strong at first but slowly fading, the sixteens greenish and the sixty-fours a tawny topaz.
Nick and Kyrie tried eagerly to help, but the art was Guy’s alone. Though the undamaged tetrahedrons had always looked identical to everybody else, he selected each for its own place, turning and trying it as if to make some kind of invisible fit. He didn’t explain what he was doing and the black bits refused to stick together for the rest of us.
Guy changed as he worked—in ways that are hard to explain. He visibly shed his fumbling clumsiness. He looked more alive and happier than I had seen him. His fur seemed to shine with a sleeker luster. His ungainly frame grew straighter—after midnight, he moved everything to the top of a filing cabinet, so that he could stand at his task.
His brain was awakening, too, in ways less visible to me. I saw Kyrie watching the growing pyramids and Guy himself with a breathless fixity. Turning abruptly away, she wanted Nick and me to come with her to the kitchen for a snack.
We walked off slowly.
“It’s doing things to Guy,” she whispered, with an awed backward glance. “I don’t know how to say it, but I keep feeling what he feels. When he touches the grit, I feel with his fingers.”
Nick looked blank.
“The slick cool blocks.” Kyrie’s golden fingers stroked and lifted an invisible pyramid. “The edges like black blades. The pattern of the faces—all threes of threes. I caught other feelings, too.”
Her amused eyes flashed at me.
“He’s really fond of you. Uncle Kim. He thinks you’re more like him than anybody else is. Not too smart.”
“Ky!” Nick was startled. “How does he feel about me?”
HER brief smile went out. She sat down in a kitchen chair too big for her, suddenly forlorn. I brought her a glass of yeastract plus, but she didn’t want it.
“He loves me,” she breathed at last. “I never knew how much. But not you. Not you, Nick.”
“It’s nothing we can help.” Nick stood behind the chair, his brown hand just touching her golden shoulder, his voice quietly matter-of-fact. “There’s one of you for two of us.”
“How can you hate—” Pain stifled her. “How can you hurt each other when I love you both?”
“I’ll never harm Guy.” His promise had a quiet finality that made him seem strangely mature. “I couldn’t injure him, Ky. Not even for you.”
Cheered by that assurance she decided that she was hungry after all. I left them at the table and carried a sandwich back to Guy. Busy with a new blue pyramid, he greeted me with a friendly grin but took no time to eat.
He finished the fourth topaz tetrahedron before dawn. Exhaustion had drained his new vitality by then. His gray paws were awkward and uncertain again, but he turned and tried his new pyramid above the other three until at last it snapped gently into place.
“Guy, Guy!” Kyrie gasped. “It’s so very lovely!”
This final tetrahedron was four inches tall. A cool, rose-colored glow shimmered along its knifelike edges and filled its interior hollow, but lingering gleams of yellow and green and blue clung to the smaller triangles that made up its faces, filming all its intricately patterned blackness with a splendid flowing glow.
Nick was squinting at it critically.
“I don’t think it’s done,” he said. “You could make it twice as tall. There’s grit left over and we can requisition more.”
“I used all the good ones.” Guy shrugged disdainfully at the handful of crystals scattered on the filing cabinet. “These went bad. See?” Though the crystals had been nearly diamond-hard, his pinching fingers crumbled two or three of those left over into soft black dust. “Burned out.”
“May I, Guy?” Kyrie reached eagerly toward the bright pyramid. “May I just touch—”
“Please keep it for me.” With a grace that astonished me, Guy set it in her quivering hands. “I’m dead—for—sleep.”
His voice slowed and his body stooped and his yellow eyes grew dull, as he gave up the pyramid. He stood gaping vacantly at Kyrie. Like some trained animal, I thought, waiting dully for its next command.
“Thank you, Guy.” Captured by the pyramid, she scarcely looked at him. “Go on to bed.”
He shambled heavily away, already half-asleep. Turning to Kyrie, I was enchanted by the transformation flowing over her like some magic fluid from the rosy tetrahedron. She looked taller, rounder of buttock and bust. Her startled smile of sheer delight was quickly veiled with Mona Lisa’s mystery. Somehow the thin and wistful child had been clad in instant womanhood.
What I felt was a stab of desire so sharp I turned away. When I dared to look back her golden gaze was on me, wise as Aphrodite’s, aware of all I felt, her mocking amusement at my disquiet mixed with a silent pride in her newly gained power to kindle it. For one astonished moment I met her candid eyes, inhaling a wave of her lilac scent. Then she forgot me, peering again into that blazing pyramid.
“Nicky, this is better than the game,” she whispered eagerly. “It’s our nexode—real! The record our people in the stars made for us. It with tell us who we are and what our lives are for—and maybe how to find our way to them.”
TO BE CONTINUED
The Moon Children
PART II
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
The Moon Children were born to the wives of three lunar explorers who had become mysteriously contaminated during an unscheduled moon landing in response to a light phenomenon.
NICK and KYRIE were born days apart, mentally precocious and aware of each other before they met—and of GUY before he was born some months later. Earth had had experience of the dangers of contact with alien biocosms—particularly those of Jupiter and Mercury—and the children were hated and feared. KYRIE and GUY were rejected even by their parents and all three were brought up under laboratory conditions under the aegis of COSMOS, an official body. Their immediate supervision was in the hands of Nick’s parents, YURI MARKO and DR. CAROLINA CARTER.
By the age of seven NICK and KYRIE were matching wits with Earth’s top scientists. NICK solved the mystery of the propulsion system used by Jovian delta-life—and traded his knowledge for some of the moon grit that had contaminated his father. The grit held an instant message for the children. It told them they were not children at all—and not human.
INIQUITY
IX
NICK and Kyrie worked all week with that great tetrahedron, while Guy slept. Nick failed to do much with it. Still convinced that it was incomplete, he got Marko to requisition the moon grit left in the vault, hoping that we could build the nexode yet another stage larger.
The joint committee released the grit with no delay and security brought it to the lab in six lead drums. Nick opened the drums one by one, dipping an anxious hand into each, and sank on the floor beside the last, sobbing like any child who has lost a special toy.
Something had changed the grit in the vault. All the crystals had lost their glassy hardness; some were already crumbling into sootlike powder. Nick wanted no more of them, but Marko and Carolina tried to learn what had happened. Their tests showed all the thorium gone, most of the gold fused into microscopic beads.
“Burned out,” Marko summed up their results. “By what must be nuclear or partly nuclear reaction. The carbon residue is mostly graphite now, mixed with stable elements that must be fission products. I’d like to know what became of the energy released.” He crushed a dead crystal in his palm, frowning at the dull black dust. “That energy could have exploded the canisters like bombs. All it did was overload the gold conductors. Even the fission products don’t show any residual radiation. Where did it go?”
Nobody knew. Yet, somehow, the assembly of the nexode had exhausted all the crystals in the vault. Security was uptight about it, suspecting fraud or robbery, and the joint committee demanded a full report. Next day we questioned Nick.
At first he wouldn’t talk. He seemed to be merely waiting outside the lab darkroom, where Kyrie was working alone with the nexode.
“You don’t want me.” He shrugged ruefully. “Ask Ky. Or Guy, maybe, when he wakes up. They can work the nexode. Somehow I can’t get the knack of it. I don’t know why.”
“We’ve got to file a report,” Marko persisted. “Tell us what you can.”
Nick stared moodily at the darkroom door.
“The nexode’s half machine,” he said. We knew that all along. It runs on nuclear power. The units are like computers—though each crystal has more circuits than any computer on Earth. That’s the part I nearly understand.”
“The other part?”
“That’s Kyrie’s.” His small bare feet shuffled uncomfortably, as if the floor had gotten hot. “Something locks the units together. Something reaches out, sensing and spending energy. Something almost alive.”
“Alive?” Marko whispered. “How?”
“If the nexode’s like a computer,” Nick said, “it’s also like a brain. The circuits in both are pretty much the same. I think the nexode is a sort of interface between the energy we call physical and something else. Another spectrum.”
“You think the missing energy disappeared through that interface?” Marko squinted doubtfully. “I mean, the missing power from that fissioned thorium?”
“Where else?” Nick’s worried scowl gave him the look of a small old man. “The laws of nature stand, though our notions of them change. The nexode channels energy in unfamiliar ways—as the space snakes do. But it’s nothing more than a device—”
He stopped abruptly and ran to meet Kyrie as she came out of the darkroom. She looked like a tired and troubled child again, with no sign of that vital power which had flowed into her from the new nexode. She took Nick’s hand and they slipped away to stand for a while, watching Guy’s deep sleep. When they came back, Marko stopped Kyrie to ask what she was doing with the nexode.
“It’s—hard.” Trouble shadowed her face. “The room has to be very dark and still, with nothing to distract me. I can’t even think of anything except of the nexode shining. I just wait—and wait—and wait. Sometimes something comes.”
“A message?”
“Bits of one.” She glanced unhappily at Nick. “Maybe most of it is lost because the grit lay on the moon too long before anybody found it. Everything is dim and broken. But something—something tries to come while I sit there in the dark.”
MARKO had more questions, but Nick asked us not to delay her any longer. Neither slept all that week. Kyrie sat hour after hour in the darkroom, while Nick waited at the door. Image by shadowy image, they put together a fragmentary picture. One breathless desert midnight, after Kyrie had taken her break and gone back to the darkroom, Nick decided to share it with us.
The day had been long and hot for me, with a suspicious security agent dogging me all afternoon with questions I couldn’t answer about the affairs of my absent brother. I was longing for a quiet beer and bed until Nick spoke.
“Ky’s getting the hang of the nexode now.” Beneath his offhand tone, I heard a throb of veiled elation. “We’re learning who made the grit—and finding a bit of truth in our old baby games about our people in space and their tachyon ships.” He grinned soberly. “I guess the grit did help me make them up.”
“Your old theory was pretty good.” He glanced at Marko with a new respect. “There is a great galactic culture. A sort of super-biocosm. All kinds of races with different biologies, united in one universal civilization. They’re bound together with the cosmic altruism that Platon Papanek couldn’t find on any of our planets—maybe it doesn’t evolve very often.
“Anyhow, the messenger missiles that carry the grit were scattered like seed through space to spread that great culture—to find any new races evolved far enough to welcome it. The ships do travel faster than light. Ky can’t say yet whether they’re really tachyon craft, but she says they can’t come here without a proper beacon to guide them and a proper terminal where they can land.
