Collected Short Fiction, page 699
“Move on where?” Org Rider asked.
“No choice, boy,” boomed Redlaw. “This fellow you’ve got here—he’s what the watchers are looking for. Says his name’s Ben Yale Pertin—whatever that means. And he’s from outside the sky.”
“That’s crazy,” Org Rider said seriously. “There’s nothing outside the sky.”
Redlaw nodded. “Time was I’d have agreed with you, but the watchers think otherwise. They spotted him coming in. Right now they’re not looking for you, but him. And if we want to keep him alive we’ve got to get him where the watchers won’t look.”
“Where would that be?” Org Rider slipped the compass off his wrist, stood gazing at it. “They know where this is. They must know you’re here—”
“Not necessarily—but they might.” Redlaw was thoughtful. “I crawled out through a disposal hatch when they weren’t looking.
But you’re right about the telltale compass. When they miss me they might come zeroing in on it. And I don’t know, boy. You think the three of us might travel fast enough to get out of range?”
“Four of us.” Org Rider turned to look at his charge. “There’s Babe,” he said. “I won’t leave him.”
“Is that his name? Babe?”
“It is for now. And he’s not ready to travel.”
“You mean he might travel right away from you, don’t you?”
Org Rider grinned. “I’m not taking that chance!”
A silence fell.
“I don’t know, boy,” Redlaw said at last. “One thing is—we can’t just stay here. The watchers won’t only kill us, boy—they’ll feast on us—you, me and your org. That’s a pleasure I’d like to deny them.” He gestured at the stranger. “This other fellow might not be lucky enough to be on the menu. They’ll want him to talk.”
“Talk about what?”
“Where he came from. What he’s up to, him and his friends that pop up all over.” Redlaw looked ill at ease. Suddenly he grinned. “I know. We’ll use their own telltale to confuse them. I can move fast enough by myself—I’ll take it a good long way down Knife-in-the-Sky and drop it off a cliff somewhere. Let them hunt it there. They won’t have any reason to come back here then, and this is as cozy a spot as we’ll find.” He was already standing, beginning to strap his wings on again. “Stay out of sight. I’ll be back in a thousand breaths or so—if I’m lucky.”
THE time stretched to more than a thousand breaths. It became fifteen hundred, then two thousand.
Org Rider could have stayed in the cave forever, delighted with watching his hatchling grow stronger with every breath, but the growth required food and he had at last to steal out from under the waterfall and forage. Redlaw had left his cleaver. Org Rider took it and bounded along the river course to the forest, where huge fat golden moths trailed gray wakes of sickly bittersweet fragrance. He despaired of catching one of them without exposing himself, but the trees themselves were sources of food. He leaped to hack off huge seed cones with the cleaver, split them open and found them full of edible seeds as well as wriggling, blind, horned grubs, probably those of the moths.
When he came back to the cave behind the waterfall the stranger was sleeping again. Org Rider regarded him with suspicion tinged with fear. He had not forgotten that he had seen this man die once. He did not understand how it was he was alive again, but something about all this made the bristles at the back of his neck crawl.
Still, for the moment, Babe was more important. The young org was awake and eager. He drained the water Org Rider brought him, then whimpered and crooned for more food. The grubs went into his capacious maw so fast that before the boy knew it they were gone and he and his sleeping guest—or captive—were still unfed. No matter. The humans could go hungry. A newly hatched org had to eat or die.
The stranger awoke briefly, barely long enough to drink some water, look around for food, find a few scraps and return to sleep. Org Rider sat with his hatchling, singing softly to it as his mother had taught him. It pleased him immensely to see it respond and fall asleep, but it woke again to be fed and the scraps that were left were meager.
Another thousand breaths later Org Rider decided he had to forage once more. At the waterfall’s edge he paused uncertainly, then dived for the shelter of the vegetation.
At once he realized he was in danger. The rush of the waterfall had drowned the sound that came from the sky, the shrieks of the angry adult orgs.
He burrowed under a thick cluster of tough gray-green vines, inedible and useless to him but not, he discovered, to some tiny biting creatures that disputed possession with him. Hundreds of breaths passed before he dared venture out.
He stood beside the vines, listening. The shrieks of the orgs were far away again. But now came something else—a clattering sound, more like the sound of the stranger’s slamming machine than anything else Org Rider could remember hearing.
A many-jointed object appeared over the lip of the canyon and dropped toward him. As it hit the pebbly fringe of the pool it made a clattering racket. It was followed by another similar object and then by the huge form of Redlaw, dropping easily down toward Org Rider.
Redlaw said, “There are orgs up the slope and a watcher ship is cruising around. Get this stuff inside.”
“But I’ve got to find food—”
“You won’t have a mouth to eat it with if we don’t get under cover.”
Org Rider could not argue with that clear wisdom. The many-jointed, clattering objects turned out to be collections of queer metal shapes, held together by vines. Org Rider picked up one, Redlaw the other, and they managed to get them inside the cave.
Panting from his effort, Redlaw said proudly, “I found it—I found his slamming machine. Couldn’t carry the whole thing—it was banged up so bad. But I took all the loose pieces and brought them here.”
The stranger propped himself on an elbow, staring at the collection of bits and pieces. He said something in his unintelligible speech and creakingly got to his feet.
Dried blood was black on his nearly naked, half starved body. Org Rider felt compassion for him, mingled with the dread and the anger—actually he had little anger left, since Babe had not been harmed by the man’s attempt to smash the egg and eat it, but there was still a vestigial core of dread.
The man shuffled over in his curious stumbling gait and thumbed through the hardware excitedly. He fumbled out a flat black oblong with a handle and touched it in some way Org Rider did not understand. It sprang open, revealing oddly shaped shining objects that looked like tools. With them the stranger began to assault the bangles he wore on his wrist. Org Rider involuntarily stepped back, remembering how those bangles on the other stranger had seemed to speak to him with a voice of their own.
“Go to it,” boomed Redlaw lustily. “Fix up your gadgets for us. That’s what I want you to do.”
“What is?” Org Rider demanded.
“Why, I want him to repair those trinkets of his. They’re powerful things, man! Weapons. Machines. I don’t understand them, but I know they’re something that’s never been seen in the world before—and I want them.”
“For what?”
“For the big job that’s ahead of us. This funny-looking fellow is the key to our chance to deal with the watchers. Nothing in the flatworld has a chance to break their power, certainly not your people. Not even me, and I know more than anyone else you’ve ever met about weapons and how to use them. But this man has weapons I mean to have.”
Org Rider stared at the scarecrow figure disbelievingy. “He’s only a man,” he said. “Not much of a man at that. Our potter was bigger than he is and I beat the potter in fair fight.”
“You won’t beat this one, boy. He’s stronger than you think.”
“Stronger than the watchers?”
“His weapons are. And he’ll give them to us, I promise. Or—”
“Or what?”
After a moment Redlaw finished his thought somberly. “Or we’ll kill him and take the weapons away from him,” he said.
VIII
WHEN they stepped out of the tachyon-transport chamber, Jon and Zara Gentry were greeted by a female creature, human in shape, but with great angel wings. Her face was remotely, cruelly beautiful, but it was not the face of a human being and the Gentrys knew her for what she was, an edited version of some nonhuman race of the galaxy that had revised its transported copies into a physical form more useful in the environment of Cuckoo.
“Welcome to Ground Station One,” the creature chimed in a voice like sweet bells. “My name is Valkyrie. I am pleased to see the first representatives of Planet Earth arrive on the surface of Cuckoo.”
Zara looked doubtfully at her husband, then reached out a hand, which Valkyrie took politely. Clearly she had been with human beings in some other environment before coming to Cuckoo—the custom of a handshake did not disturb her at all.
Beyond the silver girl floated a glittering cloud that changed shape like a swarm of diamond bees, so tiny that the individual members were almost indetectable. Over them, partly obscured by their dazzle, a creature swam gently in the air. It had the wings of a butterfly and the head of a bat. Zara Gentry identified both lifeforms readily enough. The swarm was a collective entity—usually identified as Boaty-Bits—from a planet of a star in the constellation of Bootes. The single creature was a T’Worlie.
From the T’Worlie came a shrill whistle that Zara’s pmal rendered into, “I identify you, Zara Doy.”
Zara looked doubtfully at her husband, who shrugged. “I am Zara Doy,” she said. “Or was. This is my husband. According to our custom I have taken his name and so I am now called Zara Gentry.”
The T’Worlie did not respond. In the languid gravity of Cuckoo it did not need to exert itself to fly—it was enough for it to ripple its wings slowly. From it came a sharp but not unpleasant odor suggesting an open pickle jar in a warm pantry.
Neither of the Gentrys had ever seen Boaty-Bits or T’Worlies in the flesh before—if “flesh” was the right word. The two humans had no difficulty in recognizing the two alien species from stereo-stage pictures, but nothing in the stereoviews had prepared them for the sense of whirling power in the Boaty-Bits, or the acrid odor of the T’Worlie. “My identity,” it rapped metallically through the pmal translator—how quickly, Zara thought, one became accustomed to listening to that rather than the shrill pipings of the T’Worlie itself—“can be described as one Nimmie. We did have mutual identification on Sun One, but I now perceive you are a different version.”
“And I knew you too,” sang the silver girl sweetly. “Will you look around your new home?”
It was a confusing new home. Its plan was hard to make out, but Zara Gentry had seen stereo-stage images of it—spherical shells blown out of some transparent golden-hued material, linked together and outfitted to meet the needs of its inhabitants. Some of those needs were bizarre, she knew. Parts of the complex were out of bounds to air-breathing mammals—places where the methane creatures lived, or those whose natural waste products were violently poisonous to humans.
The largest of the bubbles was elevated above the others and from it Zara and her husband could look out to see a distant flat plain rimmed by mountains. They were themselves on a mountain, for she could see, just outside the bubble, rocky slopes that fell away endlessly. Turning to look out the other side, she saw a shelf of woodland and the rest of the mountain rising incredibly toward the sky. Its top was not in sight.
The inhabitants were as strange as the home. There was a curious thing like a single enormous blue eye that moved about without wings or legs, by the manipulation of electrostatic forces. When it moved it sounded like fine gravel thrown on a tin roof and the discharge produced a tingle of ozone. The creature was Sirian, Jon whispered. Beyond it he pointed out a thing like a rippling blob of baker’s dough that he called a Sheliak. As Zara and he approached the shapeless bun it protruded a stalk that formed lips and made a sound their translators rendered as: “It gives joy to encounter you once more.”
Zara found it disconcerting to be recognized by creatures she had never seen. Flushing faintly, she repeated her apologies for being a different version; apparently nearly all the beings here were direct copies from individuals on the artificial planetoid called Sun One, where all the races of the galaxy had representatives to mediate and interpret their differing interests and goals.
After so long a voyage—tens of thousands of light-years—Zara felt she should rest and freshen up. But of course tachyon transport was not tiring. The patterns of their bodies, carried by faster-than-light tachyons, had not really moved anywhere. When they were in transit they were only concepts, so to speak—they were patterns, and had no more sensation or thought than a schematic diagram. Nevertheless she was fatigued. It was culture shock, she thought—the impact of so much change in so short a time. She pleaded fatigue in any case and without demurrer—no two races of the Galaxy really understood each other’s foibles—Val showed them their own quarters.
WHEN Zara awoke to her first “day” on Cuckoo she incautiously got out of bed as though she were still on Earth. Even edited, her muscles were disproportionate to Cuckoo’s needs. She flew off the airbed as though it had exploded, catching her balance at the very last second necessary to keep from crashing into the wall.
The noise aroused her husband. He opened his eyes and said, “I dreamed were were on Cuckoo.” He looked around and added: “I never had a dream turn out to be true before.”
Zara was listening only politely.
She had gone at once to their stereo stage to refresh her memory of the place to which they had exiled themselves for the rest of their lives.
Cuckoo was an enormous ball that hung in empty space, forty thousand light-years outside the fringing arms of the galaxy.
It had been a puzzle for all the galaxy’s scientists since the cruising robot scoutships of the T’Worlie had first detected it. It was a perfect monad of polar opposites—huge and hard-crusted, yet with an average density not much above that of a total vacuum. Alone in space in the hard emptiness between galaxies, heading toward the Milky Way at a velocity that was a substantial fraction of c.
There was no such thing as day or night on the surface of Cuckoo. There was no external object bright enough to shed light on it. What light there was came from bright phosphorescing clouds that hung in its thick air.
It was as big as a solar system, nearly two A.U. in diameter. Did it rotate? Yes, in a manner of speaking—the question was confusing, coming down to rotation relative to what? Relative to the nearest globular cluster of the Milky Way, Cuckoo turned on its axis once every eight hundred-odd Earth days. To natives of Cuckoo the rotation would have been difficult to understand and of no importance at all; there was never anything to see from the flatlands where they lived, and even from the high mountains it was only occasionally that one might catch a glimpse of the Milky Way. It would take many generations to realize that that tipped spiral puddle of light rose on one horizon and, over the course of an Earthly year and more, slowly climbed to its zenith and disappeared below the western sky. The Milky Way was not the only thing that could be seen in the sky—M-31 in Andromeda was quite visible with a little luck, as were the Magellanic Clouds. But the Milky Way was by far the biggest and brightest, occupying nearly half the sky when fully risen.
None of these were of any use in telling time. Ground Station One was on galactic arbitrary standard time, a metrication that cycled at some thirty Earth hours. Zara found out quickly that it was close enough to a terrestrial day to be recognizable, different enough to be disconcerting. It made her first “day” unusually long.
Even so, there was hardly time enough to do all she and Gentry had to do. The briefings on Earth had been intriguing and even proved useful—but here in the face of the massive reality of Cuckoo, swelling all around them, both Gentrys had everything to learn. The process was exhausting. They spent hours just in learning to deal with the flimsy gravity of Cuckoo. Even in their down-muscled edited forms, every step sent them flying at first. (“I know you’ve been trying to lose a few pounds—” Jon grinned—“but this is ridiculous.”) They had to learn to deal with the representatives of the nine other races in Ground Station One. T’Worlies, Sheliaks, Arcturans and all, each had their own purposes and needs and all had as much right to be represented here as had Earth humans. More, thought Zara fairly—the galactic culture exchange had been going for thousands of years before humanity had become aware of it.
And above all she and Jon had to learn what was on Cuckoo itself.
There existed, in the central workroom, a three-dimensional stereo stage program which, on command, conjured up a slowly spinning image of the body itself. Much of it was blank even yet. The tachyar mapping, scanning the surface of Cuckoo from the orbiting space station, had not completed even one full revolution and some ninety per cent of the surface of Cuckoo had been mapped only at extremely long range or not at all. This was not at first evident. The basic sphere was wholly featureless to the naked eye, except for some blurry discolorations. The program could on command magnify any desired portion of the surface. Where the scan was complete, such portions showed seas, mountain ranges, forests, deserts—a thousand different kinds of locale. The one little area they were now exploring, Zara saw with dismay, was only an insignificant point on the globe—yet it stretched half the diameter of Europe. There was simply too much to map. Less detail showed on their globe than the maps of the Elizabethan admirals had showed of the interior of Africa.
Valkyrie was a patient teacher and an even-tempered friend. Zara found herself relating to the silvery creature as though she were a human girl. It was a shock to her to remind herself that this shape was probably nothing like Val’s real body in whatever hellishly inhospitable environment she had lived on her home world. It had been edited into a more viable form, but Zara knew very well that the shape they saw was not “Valkyrie’s” own.
