Collected Short Fiction, page 698
“I will,” she promised. “I have done this before, you know.”
“Yes, of course, but each time you create a copy you create the same problem.” Then he relented, smiling. “To be sure,” he said, “when you come right down to it, the problem is more legal than real. There isn’t much chance you’ll ever see your copy, is there? And a half-interest in a condominium in Buzzard’s Bay isn’t going to mean much to the copy of you that’s on Cuckoo. But there is always the chance some question could arise, so you have to file the statement. Otherwise they won’t accept you for transmission.”
“Don’t make that too tempting,” said Zara, not wholly joking.
“Mmm,” he said thoughtfully and made a check mark on her personality profile card.
“I really do want to go,” she said quickly. “Or at least, I’m going.”
He nodded. Hers was not an unfamiliar reaction. If the tachyon boards rejected applicants who were doubtful they would never send anyone at all. “I see you’ve been issued all the cassettes.”
“And I’ve listened to them,” she said.
“So you’re about as well briefed on Cuckoo as you can get, I imagine. Do you have any questions?”
She said, “Well, those briefings are more distinguished for the questions they raise than the answers they give, aren’t they? I mean, nobody seems to know exactly why the object is as funny as it is. The size is all wrong for the mass—and nobody seems to understand how come there are creatures so much like humans and Sheliaks and Boaty-Bits on it.”
He grinned. “If we knew the answer to questions like that we wouldn’t have to send out people like you. Our lack of answers is why you’re going.” He hesitated, looking thoughtfully at her papers. “Although there seems to be some more specific reason for your transmission. Do you happen to know why you were requested by name?”
“No,” she said. “And I’ve wondered. The request came from Sun One, I understand. I have a copy here. I suppose she could be behind all this. But we haven’t been in touch lately, so I don’t know anything more.”
“We could send her a message if you like. You could ask her yourself.”
“Oh,” said Zara, “actually I’m rather intrigued by the mystery. I’m not fearful about it. That other Zara can’t have changed all that much in a couple, of years. If she thinks it’s a good idea for me to go to Cuckoo—then it probably is. I mean, after all, she is me.” She hesitated, then added: “The only thing that does puzzle me is why she doesn’t send a copy of herself.”
The man said with visible pleasure, “You don’t know how glad I am that you asked that. I can answer it. It puzzled me, too, so I got her records. The other Zara, you’ll be pleased to know, married a man named Ben Pertin. He’s a copy, too, of course—his identification is Ben Charles Pertin. And she expects to bear their first child in a couple of months. My impression is that she was anxious enough to go, but not with an unborn baby.”
“Ah!” said Zara, vastly relieved. “I’m glad for her. What a nice thing to hear about yourself!”
“And you yourself, Mrs. Gentry? I see you’re married. Are you planning a family?”
“Why, very likely,” she said. “But I’m not pregnant now.”
He nodded and closed her folder. “I think that takes care of all the loose ends,” he said. “See the legal officer. Get a few more shots. Then you’ll be all ready to go.”
“I’m ready now,” said Zara Gentry.
WHEN she was through with the legal officer—an episode that left her feeling she had signed a part of herself into slavery—she took the express elevator that dropped her into the physical training rooms below ground. The splat of firearms told her the weapons class was in session. She tarried at the door, looking in at the range. The cassettes had been quite candid about the possibility of physical danger on Cuckoo. Several transportees had already experienced close calls and two were dead. Besides the known predators—winged creatures like flying seals, armed savages, creatures like Sheliaks gone mad and others—there were countless trillions of square miles of surface that had been only sketchily photo-mapped from orbit. What dangers they held no one could tell.
The other thing that troubled Zara in the conscious part of her mind was that the Zara who went to Cuckoo would not be quite the Zara Gentry who filled the holovision receivers on Earth. Cuckoo’s surface gravity was so preposterously slight that the first transportees had nearly destroyed themselves leaping about like jumping beans. Zara’s physical attributes would therefore be slightly modified. They had promised that her appearance would not be changed, but she would be a little weaker, a little slower in reaction time. Even so, they said, she would have to watch herself; but it was thought that a little extra strength and speed might be helpful against the known and unknown dangers of Cuckoo.
The class was ending. One of the men caught sight of her, grinned, waved, checked his gun with the instructor and came toward her. “Three bull’s-eyes and twelve in the first circle,” he said proudly, running a hand through his tousled mop of red hair. He was no taller than Zara and barely weighed more than she did, but the compact muscles were like steel. He would need a great deal of editing, she thought, leaning forward to be kissed. “I’m all set, dear,” she said. “We’re due for shots in half an hour, and that’s the last.”
“Great,” her husband said, putting an arm around her. “Cuckoo, here come the Gentrys!”
TO BE CONTINUED
The Org’s Egg
PART II OF III
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
The astronomical object called Cuckoo is plunging toward the Galaxy. It is. literally, the biggest riddle in the universe: a body with the dimensions of a solar system, it is both impossibly large and impossibly light. With ten million times the Sun’s bulk, it has only about ten times the mass. And yet, although its average density is not much more than a high vacuum, it somehow has a solid surface . . . and that surface is inhabited.
Human beings live on Cuckoo, or creatures so like human beings that it seems impossible they should not share a common ancestry with Homo Sapiens. [Yet Cuckoo has never been nearer Earth than it is now!] Because Cuckoo’s surface gravity is so tiny, men can fly in its thick, deep atmosphere.
ORG RIDER is a young man from a tribe of native wingmen. He is taller and slimmer than men who have lived their lives in Earth’s gravity, but he is clearly human. He has set out to find an org’s egg, hoping to hatch from it one of the great tameable flying creatures to use for a mount.
THE WATCHERS are among them, beetle-like creatures who are the overlords of his homeland, who rule by fear and violence, who make men their slaves.
REDLAW, a giant even by Org Rider’s standards, and thickly muscled as well, is one of these slaves: but he escapes from them and joins Org Rider.
The boy also encounters a tattered. hunger-crazed man, one who is strangely squat and thick to Org
Rider’s eyes: and, although they cannot communicate well, the boy begins to understand that the stranger is from outside his own world entirely.
BEN PERTIN is the stranger’s name, and he is one of a dozen or more identical copies of himself. Because the distances between stars are so great spaceships cannot travel between them in a human lifetime. Instead, a man who wishes to go from the Earth to. say, the planet of a G-type star near the Pleiades steps into a transmission chamber. Every atom of his body is marked and charted. A blueprint of his body is transmitted to the other planet. He himself steps out of the chamber unchanged—but from the blueprint an exact copy is created on the other planet. It is not radio that transmits these messages. Radio is too slow; the blueprints are carried on the charges of those strange, faster-than-light particles called “tachyons”. Ben Pertin was born on Earth. One copy of him—call it the “original”,—still lives there. Another Ben Pertin was transmited to the artificial planet called Sun One, the headquarters of the galactic federation of intelligent races. From Sun One still other duplicates of himself have been transmitted to the orbiting satellite that circles Cuckoo, and from it in turn still others have been transmitted to the surface of Cuckoo. Most of these have died; most of the survivors know that death is inevitable. The stranger is one such.
While on Sun One Ben Pertin met and married a girl named
ZARA DOY, also a “copy” of a human still living on Earth.
Now the original Zara has been asked to volunteer once again for duplication, to be sent directly from Earth to the surface of Cuckoo for exploration. She agrees—and invites her husband, a man Ben
VII
ORG RIDER’s knife was at the stranger’s throat before he could check himself. The man seemed both desperate and startled. He brought up his arm, less in a gesture of defense than as violent reflex. He was strong and his swing brushed Org Rider’s hand and knife away, but threw the stranger off balance. He lurched against the rock wall behind the waterfall—his head met rock and he slumped to the ground, stunned.
Org Rider dropped to his knees and embraced the egg fearfully. Its bright curve showed no damage. He pressed an ear against its warm, pliant shell and heard the even, faint throb of the young org’s heart—along with a random skittering that meant the creature was close to hatching.
Then Org Rider turned to the intruder.
The crawling sensation at his back was still there. There was no doubt of it, the man who lay before him was the man the watchers had killed. Yet here he was—alive. Cut, scratched and battered—all those things. But he was not dead.
Pertin has never met and knows nothing of, to come with her.
And so the two newcomers from Earth come to Cuckoo. They know that it will be strange and dangerous. They do not know that among its dangers is a dying man who thinks he is married to Zara.
Org Rider studied him carefully. The stranger’s clothing was not quite the same as before. The colors were different and the puffsleeved tunic he wore was torn and filthy. The bright, metallic objects on his arms also seemed different, but they seemed the same kind of things as those he had worn before.
No doubt about it—this was the same man!
It dawned on Org Rider that this man was the figure he had seen falling from the slamming machine. Perhaps in that lay some sort of explanation. Perhaps the machine laid eggs that hatched into identical creatures like this one. He had never heard of such a thing, but he had never heard of a dead man’s living again, either.
Remembering that the man in his previous life had spoken a few intelligible words, Org Rider asked carefully, “Are you hungry? Do you desire food?”
The man opened his eyes warily. There was no comprehension in them. He stroked the metallic clutter on his wrist with his other hand as though the effort were too much for him, and motioned Org Rider to speak again.
“Are you hungry?” Org Rider repeated. “I have some food.”
The stranger shook his head, but his eyes fell on the pouch of food Org Rider had dropped. He stretched his hand toward it.
“You are hungry, then,” said Org Rider. Quickly he cut a slice of flesh from a watersnake and tried it. The taste was sweetish and good. He put a thin strip of it against the stranger’s bearded lips. The man whimpered and sucked at it eagerly.
“It will be better cooked,” Org Rider said and offered some of the tender purple stalks. The stranger chewed at them while Org Rider whittled a drill, twirled it to light a fire and set some of the snake meat to roast. Before long the fragrance of roasting meat became as tantalizing to Org Rider as to his guest—they shared the first half-cooked strips contentedly while the rest continued to brown.
Then Org Rider forgot the stranger, because the egg made a sound like ripping cloth.
IN THE nest, the egg was rocking from the thrusts of some internal eruption. A dark split opened and spread. Org Rider squatted next to the nest, watching in fascination, urgently wanting to help but not knowing how. Inside the egg dull thumping sounds accompanied thrusts against the thick internal membrane. It ripped, and ripped again—and finally he could see the dark, wet head of the baby org, struggling feebly to emerge.
The stranger limped over to look, then shrugged and went to the waterfall. He drank thirstily, his eyes fixed on Org Rider and the hatching egg.
The org’s head burst through the slit, slick and black. Almost at once it began to dry, changing to a pale, tawny color. The huge eyes opened, the pupils wide and black and mysterious, rimmed with luminous blue. It fixed its gaze at once on Org Rider.
Fascinated, Org Rider stared back. The baby org seemed to be resting and he thought he saw a plea in its gaze. For what? He could not guess until he saw that the infant was laboring for breath. He seized the edge of the glistening membrane and used his knife to widen the opening.
The great head reached out. The hatchling gave a strangled, mewing cry and its warm breath, sharply scented with the odor of parching grain, enveloped Org Rider. He leaned forward and wiped from the tip of the infant’s emerging trunk a thick brown clot.
He relaxed his attention and realized for the first time that, over the splash of the waterfall, the stranger was shouting at him. The man was pointing at the sky. Were the org’s parents still hunting their offspring? And then Org Rider heard a familiar whine.
It took him a moment to catch sight of the mottled ship of the watchers. It was flying low over the pool below the waterfall, its sound suddenly magnified by the surrounding black walls to a shout of distant thunder.
And Org Rider realized he had been seen.
He turned in indecision, peering back into the cave. Would they take the infant org away from him? Worse—he remembered the warning about the watchman’s eye. He had thrown it away. Would they punish him?
The gaunt stranger babbled fresh gibberish, pointed again at the sky and Org Rider saw that a gray fleck had separated from the ship. The ship flew on, lifted over the rim of the canyon and away. The fleck dropped toward the pool and in a moment spread great wings and circled gently down toward the waterfall.
Org Rider pushed the stranger back into the cave and ran to his org. It had freed itself of the luminous membrane, except for a few rags that still clung stickily. Its tail unfolded, wet and delicate. Its whole body burst out in a rich cloud of that parched-grain fragrance.
It was twice Org Rider’s length, now that its full dimensions had unfolded, but it was still an infant and drained of strength by its struggle to be born. Its short trunk lifted to sniff him—then it slumped to the damp rock floor of the cave.
The boy began to rub it down with his wadded shirt, crooning to it a song he had learned from his mother. Sleepily the org arched its thin body to meet the strokes of his hand, and its voice seemed to echo the song.
It was out of the question to leave the org and impossible to move it. It would be an hour or more before it could fly and he could not carry it and still manage the tricky rocks around the falls. He stared desperately at the stranger, wondering how to get him to help.
And then beyond the stranger, in the arch under the edge of the waterfall, appeared another figure.
It was not a watcher—it was human, tall, with a fire-red beard and keen green eyes.
“Redlaw,” Org Rider gasped.
“Org Rider,” acknowledged the giant, grinning through the flowing beard. “I see you’ve got your org after all.”
HE REACHED out a hand. Org Rider drew back instinctively, fingers leaping toward his knife, before he decided the gesture was friendly and allowed Redlaw to shake hands with him. “I followed you here,” Redlaw said. “Saw two adult orgs looking more frantic than usual and wondered if you were what they were worrying about. I see you were.”
Org Rider grinned, then asked, “Followed me? But how? I got rid of the watchman’s eye—”
The giant’s laughter boomed. “Clever about it, too, weren’t you?
We located it—inside an org! The watchers aren’t going to like it if they see you again, so I recommend you don’t let them. So you’ll have to lose that thing.” His finger shot out to point at the compass on Org Rider’s wrist.
“But that was my father’s—”
“No doubt. But where he got it—or someone before him—was the watchers. It’s trade goods and they can trace you buy it as easily as by a watchman’s eye. Made for that purpose.”
“If that’s so—why didn’t your friends come down and kill me?”
“Thank me, boy. I convinced them you’d been eaten by that org. When it came to explaining how one telltale was inside the org and the other here, I rose to the occasion. I told them the second one had been excreted. But you’ll have to take it off before you leave here. Org excrement doesn’t move from place to place by itself.” He peered wonderingly at the stranger, then at the infant org. “What’s all this?” he demanded.
Org Rider said proudly, “That’s my org—I think he’s hungry.” Ignoring Redlaw for the moment, he ran to slice strips from the water-snake remnants and offered them to the hatchling. It devoured them, great eyes fixed on the boy. Its externals were now nearly dry. Most of its body loomed a pale gold, shading into white along the tips of its tail and its wings. Not yet scaled like the adult orgs, it was covered with a fine velvet that felt like fur but consisted in fact, of fleshy protuberances that would turn to chitin.
Org Rider fetched water and doled it out to the infant. While he was tending his org Redlaw spoke to the stranger. Org Rider paid no attention until he was called.
“We’ve got to move on, boy,” Redlaw said. “Take off that compass. Don’t break it—they’ll know if you do. Just leave it.”
