Collected Short Fiction, page 705
The flapping sounds and the reek receded, and dared to look up. She saw that the watcher had returned to the beach. It shrilled some message at the unseen crew of the brown-mottled ship, and slowly other creatures like it began to come through the dark doorway. One by one they vaulted across the flat platform and glided into a ragged circle around the first watcher.
They engaged in a colloquy of whistles and screeches, until another appeared from the ship and hopped and flew down to them with what looked like a bundle of white staves or lances. It passed them out to the others, then squealed something. All rose hooting into the air.
ZARA realized she was in desperate trouble. This was a search party, no doubt of it, and more likely than not she was the quarry. Perhaps they had seen her dive into the forest here, or perhaps she had given herself away in some other manner. No matter; they were intent on a trail, and at the end of it would be Zara Doy Gentry.
She whimpered in fear, trying to decide what to do. But her choices were so few! She could use the laser weapon at her belt, hoping to kill a few of the creatures before the rest killed her. She could try to flee—but where? And with what hope of success? Or she could continue to cower in her bower of vines, being eaten alive by the tiny insects, until the ugly invaders found her . . .
And likely they would find her soon. Already one of the watchers was circling near her. She heard it shriek almost overhead, saw the bright-spotted blackness of its slick hard body, saw the flash of its yellow wings. She could not tell which way its bulging greenish eyes were looking, but for a moment she thought it had seen her.
Then its great pliant ears cupped toward something ahead. Squealing, it flapped out of sight, brandishing its long white staff. She gasped with relief, although the creature’s evil reek had her on the point of vomiting.
She lay quiet. The hoots and squeals of the searchers kept up an insane yammering all around her. At long last the noises seemed to concentrate and recede.
She dared to peer out, saw that one by one the creatures were landing near their vessel.
Had they given up the search? Were they about to vanish into their ship and take off?
She crawled out of the tangle of vines to see better. They were in a confused, bickering huddle around the ship. The golden snake that had hung into the water was wriggling insanely about, touching them and recoiling, darting into the underbrush and coming blindly back. They ignored it. They seemed to come to some conclusion, then, and two of them leaped ponderously onto the platform and waddled into the ship.
In a moment they reappeared, bearing great platters of what looked like raw meat. They dropped down in their ungainly way to the beach and began to parcel out bits of meat among their fellows.
It was lunchtime, Zara realized.
Their table manners—even allowing for the fact that they had no table—were atrocious. They bickered and fought over the choicer pieces, throwing the bones and offal carelessly into the woods. The squealing noises did not stop while they ate; they clearly had no compunctions about talking with their mouths full, if indeed so gross a species had compunctions about anything.
At that point it occurred to Zara that she had been thinking of them as animals.
But they were not animals. They used advanced technology. They communicated among themselves.
And if she were able to get a little closer to them, her I’mal translator might be able to pick up enough from their squeals and screeches to give her some idea of what they communicated.
With agonizing care she slipped along the margin of the lake, eyes firmly on the feeding watchers, until she was less than a dozen yards from the sandy beach where they had landed. She activated the I’mal and held it to her ear. It would take time for it to store up enough speech to be able to deduce meanings, but it should only be a few minutes before it could at least identify and translate a few words . . .
Time was growing short. They were close to finishing their meal. Filthy though the creatures were, a few had evidently been detailed to the task of cleaning up—to hide their tracks? They were picking up left-over pieces that happened to have fallen to the beach or the platform of the ship. One flapped and waddled toward her.
She became conscious of her exposed position, but the watcher did not seem interested in exploring the undergrowth. It was only looking for a place to dump its tray of slop. It did so, and turned away.
For just a moment Zara felt a quick thrill of relief.
Then she saw what the slop consisted of.
“Dear God!” she moaned aloud, unable to stop herself.
The hooting and squealing rose like a barnyard chorus as the watchers caught the sound. Hopping, flapping their great yellow wings, they came at her. But the golden snake hung from their ship writhed faster than any of them. Before she could move it had slipped across the beach with the sinewave wriggle of a sidewinder, touched her gently, then locked on her.
She was held so tightly she could hardly breathe, much less run.
But she had not been able to run before that, either—not run, not even stand up. Not since looking at the trash and offal the creature was throwing away, and seeing one rounded bit of waste, melon-sized and bloody, roll languorously toward her and stop . . .
She knew then what these creatures had been feeding on. She was looking at the severed head of her husband.
The next moments for Zara were a desert of half-understood misery. The choking coils of the golden rope seemed to have intelligence of their own as they wrapped themselves around her, bearable when she was still, tightening cruelly with every move she made to work them off. She was tumbled face-down on the talc-white beach, with the hideous squeals and hoots of the watchers piping querulously or menacingly all around her, their foul reek choking her nostrils. All that was painful. What was unbearable was the memory of the empty staring eyes of her husband fixed on eternity. If Zara had been asked to describe her marriage, back on Earth, she would have defended it as a convenient thing costing little to maintain and, if it gave little in return, no burden to her. His death had killed no part of herself. But it was unbearable nevertheless, unbearable to see this close person destroyed so callously, used so demeaningly, to stuff the maws of these filthy creatures.
It was only then that Zara began to realize she might share that same fate herself.
She struggled to turn over, free her mouth from the choking sand. The golden coils punished her, but gasping and panting she managed to flop onto her side. “Please!” she begged. “I mean you no harm.
Give me that metal thing there—it will let us talk to each other.” And she tried, at terrible cost of agony as the golden coils remorselessly fought her movements, to point to the I’mal translator, whispering away to itself on the sand.
The hideous mask-faces thrust themselves at her, hooting and whistling. She knew what they said was language of a sort, and it was frustration to know that a few yards away the I’mal was surely translating faithfully every word—but inaudibly, because she had set the sound low lest they hear her. “Please,” she screamed as one came near her with a great curved cleaver. It paused, seeming to enjoy her fear. The gabbling whistles and honks burst like laughter around her.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember her brief training. What were her options? Talking was useless, with the I’mal gone. Her laser weapon was long since taken away. They had left her only the instruments strapped to her arms—medicpac, chronometer, communicator . . .
Communicator!
She took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. She lay still as stone for long seconds, remembering where the transmit switch was on the communicator, feeling with her body-image senses where her hands were, where the switch was. There would not be much freedom of action.
Then she flung herself onto her back, forcing her hands together, clawing with the fingers of her right hand for the forearm of her left.
The golden coils responded at once by tightening so violently that she thought she felt bones snap; but she had touched the switch. “Help!” she screamed. “This is Zara Doy Gentry calling. Help. Please. Help me!”
A HUNDRED-ODD degrees of arc distant on the great bulk of Cuckoo, Ben Line Pertin was talking to himself.
On his watch duty, desolately killing time while trying to solve the insoluble problem of what to do about the wife that was not his, he had observed a curiosity. The comm frequency that had been abandoned—because no transmissions had been received and its owner, that other avatar of himself named Ben Tom Pertin, was presumed dead—had suddenly come back to life.
When he first beheld himself he was aghast. This devastated face, harried, sick and in pain, was himself! “Ben Tom!” he cried. “What’s the matter?”
The face in the stereo stage reflected annoyance. “I’m not Ben Tom,” it snapped. “And I don’t know what you mean. What’s the matter with you people? I’ve been trying to call you for—I don’t know, for days!”
“Sorry,” said Ben Line Pertin. “But what do you mean, you’re not Ben Tom?”
The ravaged face split in an unpleasant smile. “Glad I’m not,” he said. “Ben Tom’s dead. I’m Ben Yale. Remember? When you—we—volunteered for the sixth time? Well, that’s me. I lost my ship, nearly lost my life. I’ve been through hell, Ben Line! But at that I’m better off than Ben Tom, because his bones are twenty feet away from me. This is his ship I’ve found; my own was destroyed, communications and all.”
“You look as though you’ve been through hell,” Ben Line agreed fervently. “What are those bandages?”
The walking skeleton looked incuriously at his arms and legs. “Oh, some sort of fungus, I think,” he said. “It itches. Hurts, too, but I’ve blocked it with stuff from the medicpac. I imagine I’ll need treatment.”
“Well,” cried Ben Line, finding something to be cheerful about for the first time in some days, “I think I’ve got good news for you, Ben Yale. We’ve just been transmitting a new-model exploring ship to the ground station. This one’s armed and armored, ready for anything. And it’s got full ground-to-space capability! We can get it over to you and have you up here in orbit in jig time—as soon as it’s ready.”
“Fine,” said Ben Yale—strangely, thought his duplicate; why wasn’t he more excited. But he was looking narrowly at Ben Line. He said at last, tangentially, “Have you heard anything from Zara?”
Ben Line shook his head. Then he corrected himself. “Yes, as a matter of fact I did,” he said. “I don’t remember—did you split off before I got her message about not coming because she was pregnant?”
“Pregnant?” Ben Yale demanded. “I don’t believe it!”
“Well, it’s true. That is—it’s true of our Zara. But there’s another copy of her—” He stopped. He was not sure how much he wanted to say.
“On Cuckoo, right?” cried Ben Yale. “I knew it! I saw her, Ben Line. She’s in trouble. Not more than five thousand yards from here, bearing two seventy-four degrees!”
“Trouble? No, I don’t think so,” Ben Line said.
“Don’t be a fool, Ben Line,” cried his avatar. “I tell you, I saw her!”
Ben Line Pertin hesitated, filled with confusion and a painful mixture of hope and fear. Another Zara, so close? But in danger?
“Stand by,” he said. “I’ll scan that vector.” And his fingers danced over his console to FARLINK, ordering a search for transmissions from a point five thousand yards, at bearing 274°, from Ben Yale’s signal.
From her perch across the console from him, Venus sat quietly regarding Ben Line. “What is the matter?” she asked, spraying a tiny violet cloudlet from her atomizer.
He shook his head as the rich menthol scent reached him. “It’s Zara,” he said. “Something I don’t understand. And one of my replicates down there, looking—well, I don’t know what’s keeping him alive.”
“I ache with your pains,” said Venus softly. Though her dark stare had always seemed blankly opaque, he felt her compassion coming through it. “So difficult for you, to see yourself. I have at least been spared that. I have no contact with my replicates, save one or two—and then, for one of us to die in this edited form would not be bad.”
Distracted, Ben Line scowled at the console. There was no response to the search although he could see that the program was functioning. Lately he had found it more and more difficult to distinguish sleep from waking. His sleep was filled with troubled dreams, and his waking life was a nightmare.
The dreams lingered with him even when he was awake. He shivered, remembering one dream—
SCAN UNSUCCESSFUL, reported FARLINK’s screen, UNIDENTIFIED TRANSMISSIONS FROM AREA.
“Continue,” snapped Ben Line, reinforcing the verbal order with his keyboard.
And he stared into space, remembering that one dream.
IN IT he had been a child again.
On Earth. Not the Earth he had left—so many replications before!—but the Earth he imagined, as it had been before the first contact with the galactic civilizations. He had been sitting at a child’s desk, in an upstairs room with an open window, looking out over a sunny yard, reading a book, when something had come in from outside. It had fluttered through the window, alighted on the page in front of him. When he had raised a hand to slap it, it had leaped away and he had seen it was no common fly but a tiny five-eyed bat shape with bright butterfly wings. When he had heard it squeaking, had caught its faint vinegar scent, he had known it was a T’Worlie—incongruously there in that pre-galactic age, but somehow Earth’s first visitor from deep space.
He had seized a flyswatter to kill it. Its shrill scream of protest had hurt his ears, and its fear had been a carrion reek. Wings whirring, it had risen to fly away but he had smashed it on the open page.
For a moment, now, he felt secure in that dream. Then he remembered the rest of it . . .
He had heard a droning roar from outside. The sun had darkened. Shadows had filled with window. When he had looked out, he had seen that the sky had turned black with alien beings descending—T’Worlie and Sheliaks, Boaty-Bits and Scorpians, endless processions of a thousand shapes and sizes all arrowing down upon him.
He had wakened then briefly, tossed and turned, drifted off again . . .
To even worse horror.
He had dreamed then that he was his other self, Replicate 5154, at the strange tachyonic station to which he had been transmitted. But his form had no longer been human. He had been edited, transformed into a thick metal block, unable to move. He had understood at last—attempting to shudder, and failing—the silvery girl’s abhorrence of the form into which her own body had been recast to survive in an oxygen atmosphere. His case had been worse. He had become a chess piece in a three-sided match; he stood on a queer triangular game board, a hapless piece in a game that FARLINK played against two terrible opponents.
One opponent was a bright thing of lambent white flame, writhing and twisting and flickering, without any ordered shape. The other was equally shapeless; but black instead of bright. They reached across the board with curling tongues of bright fire and terrible empty blackness, as if to move their pieces; but Ben Line could not see their pieces, only the ones on his own side: One was the pseudogirl Venus, her silver body frozen and rigid. Another was Zara Doy, alive and moving but imprisoned under a bell-jar, pale and gasping, agonized for air. A third was Doc Chimp, a lifeless figure in brightly painted metal like a cheap child’s toy, holding out a tin cup. The pieces moved, or the board itself perhaps moving them, responding to FARLINK’s rapped electronic orders; but FARLINK was losing the game. Most of its triangular spaces were already empty. The last move had isolated Ben Line far from his companions. A fluttering tentacle of icy blackness stretched out toward him, and he knew that it was going to remove him from the board and then the game would be ultimately, irretrievably lost . . .
“Ben Line,” chimed the voice of the silvery girl, “where are you?”
He came back to the reality of the orbiter and the screen. “Sorry, Venus,” he muttered. “I was thinking about . . .” His voice died out, but hers picked up the thought from him:
“About that other Ben Pertin? About Replicate 5154? About all those others of you, Ben Line?”
He nodded. There had been no other signal from the copy of himself sent back along the tachyon trace to whatever that galactic source of interference had been: one more dead Pertin, he thought; the universe is getting seriously polluted with my corpses . . .
He sat up abruptly and realized FARLINK was still methodically scanning the surface of Cuckoo for a signal that did not seem to be coming. He sighed and reached from the console to terminate the program—
And at that moment the screen lit up:
STAND BY. CARRIER FREQUENCY DETECTED. NO COMMUNICATION AS YET.
And while his fingers were still poised over the console he heard it. There was no doubt.
On the emergency frequency.
Zara’s voice.
And the words:
“Help! This is Zara Doy Gentry calling. Help. Please. Help me!”
At virtually the same moment, in the wrecked survey vessel on the surface, Ben Yale Pertin heard Zara’s voice repeated from the orbiter. That voice had traveled nearly half a billion miles, round trip, to get to him, but on the instant flash of tachyon transmission it had taken less time than was measurable. The time the message had taken to travel from the speaker on the satellite to the microphone three yards away that had picked it up was longer than the time for the message to fly on the backs of tachyons through space.
He burst out of the vehicle, limping and rubbing at his bandages, but traveling as fast as ever he had in his life. He was not in pain now. He had been steadily doping himself with pills and salves from the medicpac; he was no longer quite sober or sane. Although the pain of the ulcers under the bandages was blocked, the effects of the blocks were shaking the stability of his mind. All things seemed possible. The entire universe seemed ready to meet his commands. He scrambled through the undergrowth toward Redlaw and Org Rider, shouting, “My wife! She’s in danger. We’ve got to help her.”
