Collected Short Fiction, page 709
“Don’t laugh at me!”
Thornwall’s breath had caught.
“I’m not laughing—but you make me wish I were young again.” A brief smile twitched his parchment lips. “If our mission here on Nggongga is too much for you, I think you’ll find the way to Snowfire ten times harder.”
“I’ll take the risks.”
“Have you really faced the odds?”
“I’ve had nightmares about them.”
“You’ve no chance at all.” Thornwall’s face was sadly stem. “You’re a primitive. You’ll be lost in the most advanced culture known—the swarmworld has been evolving new technologies for twenty thousand years. You don’t know the folkways. Not even the language.”
He had to nod in uneasy agreement.
“Even if you get there, how will you find her? The swarmworlders have been exploding into space for dozens of generations. The swarm is many billion life-spheres, all in orbit. Each one holds as many people as a planet. Looking for her, you’ll be like a blind man searching all the deserts of Nggongga for one special grain of sand.”
Blacklantern stiffened impatiently, “I’ve met swarmworlders before. I’ve even killed one. Goldforge. The manager of their mine here—when he was hunting my head in the desert. I have his translator and his name ring. I have Snowfire’s swarmworld address—probably Toolsmith’s home—from the label of the stereogram. I even have money, from selling a few trinkets I’ll never need again.”
“I drink to your enterprise!” Thornwall raised his glass, with a quick ironic smile. “Even though I think you wouldn’t be going if you had attacked your problems here with this sort of spirit.”
Blacklantern gulped his wine and said nothing.
“Is she really worth so much?” Cold again, the old eyes probed him. “Your whole career as a Benefactor? All our hopes for the future of your people?”
“I’ve tried to be rational.” Blacklantern scowled at the dead message disk. “I used to laugh at the love-crazed heroes in our old epics. I know there are women enough on Nggongga—girls my own color, sharing my own culture, fit for anything. I even know Snowfire will never be entirely mine, wherever I find her.”
He spread his hands in a native gesture of submission.
“But—you see, sir—I can’t help how I feel. She—she’s burnt into my brain. The image of her festers in me like a barbed desert thorn. Not that I want to forget!”
For a moment they sat silent. A lazy fan above them stirred the scents of stale wine and rancid musk and black sweat. Glasses clinked somewhere in the steamy gloom, and a girl laughed.
“You trouble me.” Thornwall pushed the pottery bottle aside. “You and Snowfire. Top agents. People I trusted—loved. Doing something very foolish, that I can’t understand.”
“I know how to fight a tly.” Blacklantern paused uncomfortably. “Nggongga is harder to handle. I guess I’ve just lost faith. In the Benefactors. Even in myself.”
He saw the hurt in Thornwall’s eyes, and still went on.
“I believe the swarmworld philosophy is right. Nggongga must have been a better place before the eye was ever opened. My people had their own way of living, shaped and tested by a dozen dozen generations.”
“Yet they were quick enough to give it up,” Thornwall said. “Just watch them now, leaving their desert trails and their old mud towns to flock into Nggonggamba.”
“The city seems to draw them, as flames draw night-moths.” He nodded and paused to think. “The unbreakable problem is the people explosion. The old clan system here was a working answer to it—each clan owned only a limited list of names, and nameless men were not allowed to marry. The younger sons had a hard choice—the priesthood or the tly arena. But at least they knew who they were.”
He made a face, as if the wine were bitter.
“The opening of the eye has wrecked all that. The clans are breaking up. The old traditions are thrown away, the old gods forgotten. Progress has betrayed us. We wipe out old diseases with the miracle medicines—and breed more people than the planet can feed. We buy bright new atomic pumps to irrigate bur croplands—and dry up the geologic water under the old oases. In flight from the spreading deserts, we follow the promise of progress into Nggonggamba—and die in the streets.”
He pushed his glass aside, to lean across the table.
“Tell me what I could have done,” he challenged Thornwall. “As resident Benefactor, after Snowfire left, I was alone here. With no power over anybody. Tell me what one man can do for two hundred million. For hordes of hungry people like those who tried to rob us. They can’t eat culture or social theory or even benevolent intentions.”
“We can’t help people,” Thornwall objected patiently. “We learned that long ago. You have millions here demanding food—when there isn’t that much food. Even if you somehow fed them, you would have twice as many millions in another generation, twice as desperate. It may seem cruel, but all you can do is tell them how to help themselves.”
“If they’re too-hungry to listen—”
“We always find a few to listen. We train those few to teach and lead the rest. Better than food, we can offer membership in the new galactic culture. We can build a university, design a planetary language, plan a new government. Rather than food alone, we bring knowledge and purpose and hope. We lead the way to a new social discipline.”
“If people won’t follow—”
“We can’t compel anybody—but the facts of nature can.” Thornwall straightened sternly. “If you Nggonggans could keep on doubling your numbers with every generation, in only six thousand years the whole mass of the universe would be black flesh. If we Benefactors have authority, it comes from such harsh brute facts.”
“I tried.” Blacklantern shrugged. “I’m through.”
Suddenly smiling, he leaned to pick up the black message disk.
“All I want is Snowfire.”
“I don’t think you’ll find her.” Yet Thornwall’s smile reflected his own. “If you do reach the swarmworld, I want to know that new solution to the people problem. I thought the swarmfolk already had the final answer, with all their available mass built into space vehicles and all their solar energy trapped and utilized. I can’t imagine anything better.”
“I’ll try to learn their answer. But I don’t expect to be coming back.”
“Good hunting, anyhow!” Bright youth had come back to Thornwall’s deep-sunk eyes, and he lifted his glass with a flourish. “We trained you well on Xyr. Perhaps you’ll make it!”
III
BLACKLATERN gave up his ensign that afternoon, though Thornwall still protested. He outfitted himself at a manhunter’s shop. Next morning, wearing Goldforge’s name ring and translator, he set out on a chartered flight south toward the old hunting lands of the Game clan.
His pilot was a nervous little mud-colored man, a compulsive chewer of saltflower seed, a compulsive worrier about the voltage drop in his reserve power cell, a compulsive talker about his Sea clan wife and his nine unmarried daughters, two of them unaccountably pregnant.
Only half listening, Blacklantern was scanning his route map and the unrolling desert. At last he found the narrow green oasis where the ritual hunts had begun. He picked out the bare red mesas he and Snowfire had crossed, the ripple of yellow dunes where Goldforge had overtaken them, the flows of black lava beyond, and the white blaze of the dry salt lake where the body hunters had finally brought them to bay.
Beneath the flyer, all their endless days and nights of love and pain were telescoped into meaningless moments. There was the last red ridge—where the world broke off. Beyond it, sheer cliffs of broken sandstone lipped a pit too vast to show any farther rim.
The brown pilot fell abruptly silent.
He leaned against the window, looking for the bottom of the pit. He found rubble slopes, level shelves, deeper slopes and steeper cliffs. What he discovered at last, miles and miles below, was no bottom, but the tops of towering clouds, floating out of a hazy void.
“Do you want to land on the rim, sir?” The pilot still thought he had come to hunt wild nearmen. “Our agreement doesn’t cover spotting or shooting from the air.”
“We aren’t landing here,” he said. “We’re flying down inside.”
Profanely, the pilot called the name of dark Cru Creetha, eater of suns. His flyer had been chartered for a flight to the pit, not into it. Of course, personally, he was not afraid to fly anywhere. The Sun Lighter would bear witness to his courage. But he was legally obligated to adhere strictly to the terms of their official flight plan.
“I’ll double the charter price,” Blacklantern offered. “If you’ll land me near one of the old mining machines down inside.”
The pilot’s muddy color faded. He had heard all he wanted to know about the great metal worms the swarmworlders had sent to eat up the planet, and he was already closer to them than he wanted to be.
The old excavators were stopped and abandoned, Blacklantern, said. They couldn’t harm anybody.
So I hope, he told himself.
The pilot crunched another saltflower seed. Muttering huskily through froth-purpled lips, he said he must consider not only the alarming signs of failure in the reserve power cell and his duty to his wife and daughters, but also the terms of his flight insurance.
Blacklantern estimated the funds he had left. Gates and gongs would be useless, he supposed, in the swarmworld, and he wasn’t coming back. He offered to triple the charter fee.
The pilot munched thoughtfully and spurted purple fluid at the cabin floor. Squinting shrewdly across that jagged brink into the cloudy depths, he announced that another gross of gongs would complete the dot for his first daughter. Blacklantern paid him, and they dived.
They found the excavator lying on a black granite ledge. A small bright worm, it swelled and swelled beneath them to become a mile-long monster. The pilot set the flyer down at a judicious distance, and Blacklantern scrambled out with his hunting gear.
“I’ll wait overnight,” the pilot offered, “For six gross of gongs.”
“Don’t wait.”
“You can’t live here. You can’t climb out.” The pilot peered uneasily up at the slopes of broken stone and the fracture-carved precipices and the broken benches that made a giant’s stairway toward the far sky. “I’ll come back in three days—for another triple fee.”
“I don’t have the money,” Blacklantern said. “I’m taking the excavator out.”
Chewing hard, the pilot blinked up at the monstrous metal mass and took off hastily.
From the lip of that wide ledge, Blacklantern looked down into the pit. Though the jagged rim that framed the narrow scrap of sky was miles and miles above, his rocky ledge was less than halfway down. The clouds that hid the bottom were still far beneath his level. Lightning flickered in them now, and an endless peal of thunder began crashing and rumbling and rolling away against those looming walls.
He turned to watch the flyer climb. Dwindling fast, it was only a black insect before it reached the top of the first talus slope. Before it rose above the first black granite wall, he had lost it.
He stood there alone.
His neck hurt from looking up, and he couldn’t help a tiny shiver from his shattering sense of the vastness of the pit and the power of the swarmfolk who had abandoned it so casually. Perhaps he had been a fool to let the flyer go, but he had no time for fear. He hitched up his hunting pack and hiked toward the excavator.
The cautious pilot had left him a long way to hike. He was sweating before he reached the great machine. Its curved armor swelled out far above him, scarred from titantic rockfalls, bright and massive and impregnable. Under its shadow, he plodded on toward its rockcrushing jaws.
A new rockslide had half-buried the machine since it stopped. Huge fallen boulders faced him with sheer cliffs as grim as any he had conquered long ago, hunting nestling tlys. It cost him a hard hour’s climbing to reach the rotary teeth of the excavator.
In the echoing cavern behind those enormous metal molars, he used his hunting lantern to pick a way along the titanic conveyor that had carried broken stone back to the transflection portal. A blue light flashed suddenly ahead.
Alert to the danger of toppling into some ore-bin or smelter in the far-off swarmworld, he took that for a warning. Climbing off the conveyor, he explored great strange mechanisms until he found a railed inspection walk that led him at last into a high control booth.
Lights came on, when he closed the door. One wall turned transparent to show him a bright picture of the swarmworld—a tiny blue sun wrapped in a milky mist of life-spheres, each invisibly small. A long panel against the opposite wall glowed with symbols he couldn’t read.
The third wall framed a dark opening beyond a level ramp. When he walked toward it, new lights picked out a little vehicle without wheels, somehow suspended just above a wide black track. Its transparent shell showed half a dozen seats inside.
Trembling now with the same breathless sense of risk and elation he had felt when he faced his first diving tly, he pulled at its oval door. The door stayed fast—but, beside it, an amber-circled sensor began to blink.
He stopped for a moment, frowning. Any error, now, could be as quickly fatal as a false move in the arena. Yet this was clearly the transport system of the vanished miners. The vehicle promised to carry him to the swarmworld, while the blinking sensor seemed to question his right to go.
He caught his breath and thumbed Goldforge’s name-ring to flash its color-coded signal ray into the black center of the sensor. The amber circle quit blinking. The door slid open. Light came on inside the crystal shell. Heart thudding, he stepped inside.
The door clicked shut behind him.
He waited, almost afraid to breathe. Nothing happened until he slid warily into the nearest seat. Then a soft bell-note rang, and a bank of keys shone green on an oval panel beside his seat. Most of the symbols that marked them were strange, but he saw that two of them were numerals, oddly shaped, like those on the label of Snowfire’s stereogram.
He sat for a moment thinking, muscles as taut as when he first had to judge the strike of a screaming tly. Hopefully, then, he began using the portal print on the label to translate the green symbols, punching out what he hoped would be Snowfire’s swarmworld address.
The life-sphere number—or was it? As he touched the last digit, the panel chimed faintly and one green key turned golden. Elated and more anxious, he stabbed out what he thought should be the level number.
A higher note chimed. Another symboled key changed color. With a heady sense of success, as if he had discovered the blind side of a dangerous tly, he tried the octant number. Another rising chime. Another golden glow.
He kept tapping, his whole body cold with sweat and quivering. The sector number. The zone number. The corridor number. At last, the dwelling number. Its final digit startled him with a deep-toned gong and a flashing crimson symbol.
He froze, as if an unseen tly had bellowed above him. While he stood wondering what to do, a toneless synthetic voice hummed from the panel.
“—transposed.” Goldforge’s translator picked it up. “Dwelling no longer occupied. Access restricted. Revised destination instructions required.”
All his muscles tightened, but he had nothing for them to do.
“Request—” His voice failed, and he had to catch his breath. “Request destination information. New address of—of last occupants. Of Benefactor Snowfire and Engineer Toolsmith.”
For an endless second, nothing happened.
“Benefactor Snowfire not identified,” that dead voice droned at last. “Engineer Toolsmith transposed. No local dwelling in use. Revised destination instructions required.”
Grimly, he tried to slow his drumming heart.
“Request assistance,” he called again. “Required destination is current address of Engineer Toolsmith, former occupant of destination first requested.”
For longer seconds, there was no response.
“Body of Engineer Toolsmith located,” the machine purred suddenly. “Revised destination will be Ironforge Clinic of Exotic Pathology, Sphere 101011100, Level 1100101, Octant 101, Sector 1010101, Zone 11100, Corridor 110011, Dwelling 11001010. Prepare for departure.”
He sank back in the seat with a gasp of relief.
The crimson winking stopped. A triple chime rang. Silently, the crystal capsule swept forward into a gray-walled tunnel. Ahead, a giant eye widened.
He shrank in spite of himself from its blue-rimmed blackness.
The vehicle toppled down its track, through the painful depthless flicker of the iris, into the flat enormous pupil. The cavernous belly of the excavator was instantly five thousand light-years behind. The vehicle swayed and fell again, through another gray tunnel and into a stranger space.
For a heart-clutching moment, he felt weightless. The capsule tipped up a steeply climbing track. As it gained speed, his sense of weight came back. He caught his breath and tried to see where he was.
On his left, a dark wall was blurred smooth by his motion. On the right, he looked out into a hollow cylinder, its dimensions too vast for him to estimate. Mottled blue and green, its far-away curve was below and above and all around him. Its farther end was lost in misty distance.
The cylinder seemed to roll beneath his racing vehicle, spinning around him at a giddy rate. A wave of vertigo swept him. Clutching at the seat ahead, he groped for his lost orientation. Though he supposed the life-sphere must be rotated to create a centrifugal substitute for gravity, he knew it couldn’t be spinning so crazily.
Most of the actual motion, he soon decided, was that of his own capsule, plunging around and around a spiral track built into the near end of the cylinder, carrying him away from its axis toward the wall.
This long hollow, then, must be only the core of the huge life-sphere. The inhabited levels would be farther from the axis, where the centrifugal pull was stronger.
