Collected Short Fiction, page 711
Hastily, he raised both hands against Blacklantern’s anger.
“Share peace! We mean well, believe me, and the wisdom of our position has been established many times. Cultures grow. When you Nggonggans are ready for a new technology, you’ll find it for yourselves.”
“You’re wrong!” Blacklantern rasped. “Cultures have always spread from people to people. The impact of new ways may be painful—but progress always is. Our business as Benefactors is to ease the pain.”
Toolsmith shrugged, his contempt not entirely veiled.
“About Snowfire—” Blacklantern stopped to smooth his tone and he spread both hands in the Game clan gesture that begged for hospitality. “Can I speak to her? Whereever she is!”
“If she likes.” Toolsmith waved a limp freckled hand at the stereo tank. “You’ll have to remember that transposition has enlarged her whole scale of being. I really doubt that you matter to her now. But you can try.”
Lazily, he rose.
“With all respects, Benefactor.” He stood dipping his white-stubbled head in a Nggonggan bow of parting. “You’ve had a pretty full briefing, and now the medics want me at the lab. Their gross observations are completed. I’m reporting now for the histological studies, so I don’t expect to be back.”
“You mean—” Shock caught Blacklantern’s voice. “You expect to die?”
“The medics will be using up my body.” He nodded casually. “It’s good for nothing else. But the real me, programmed into the machine, is more alive than ever. I’ll never die.”
“Once in the arena I heard a disciple of Cru Creetha make the same boast. An hour later he was stung and begging for the dagger.”
“People don’t return from Cru Creetha’s mythical kingdom.” Toolsmith murmured. “But if you’ll wait here, I think Snowfire will come back to you.” His white head bobbed again. “Share drink, share food, share peace.”
“Tleesh,” Blacklantern answered stiffly. “Share life.”
He was busy for a moment at the control panel in the entry. Blacklantern heard him humming an old Sand clan love song. Then the door whispered, and he was gone.
V
LEFT ALONE TO WAIT for Snowfire in that tiny odd oasis of Nggonggan culture. Blacklantern felt lifted with the same curious lightness and keenness that had filled him before his first tly fight. The smoke from the muskweed censer became unendurably sharp and sweet. The aftertaste of the wine turned acid in his mouth. The breathless stillness seemed to promise some intolerable explosion. Each beat of his heart opened another anxious infinity.
The faint click of the stereo tank seemed louder than a mangun. He had to squint and blink against the sudden glare that burst through its fog. Before any form took shape, he heard Snowfire’s eager low-pitched voice: “Blackie! I’m so glad you came.”
While she spoke, the burst and swirl of fire in the tank had become another Nggonggan room, with ornamental daggers and patterned carpets on the walls and muskweed stalks charring in a black clay censer on a bronze tripod. Almost exactly, it mirrored the room where he was—but the person reflected where he stood was Snowfire.
He ran to meet her, rejoicing in her warm golden loveliness. She wore something snug and lustrous that flowed to the floor but bared one firm pale-gold breast. Her green-gold eyes smiled into his, dazzling with delight.
“Watch the glass!”
In his hot desire to take her in his arms, he had almost forgotten the wall of the tank. She raised her hand to stop him and laughed at the way he checked himself, a glint of malice in her eyes.
“You can’t just walk into the computer,” she said. “I’ll have to send a car to bring you to the transposition center.
A few minutes—if you can wait!”
He recoiled, almost as if she had slapped him.
“You’re really—dead?” he whispered. “Except—”
“I suppose.” Her carefree shrug sent waves of fire through her red-golden hair. “The bodies aren’t revived. They go straight to the mass exchangers.”
“You can’t—” His aching throat caught again. “You can’t come back?”
“Why should anyone go back?” Her long body shivered in the tight scarlet sheath, and her eyes grew dark with something close to terror.
“I remember life as it used to be—when I knew no better. I thought it was good, as you still do. But now I could never endure all its agonies again. The limits of the organic body. The frustration and weakness and pain. The dread of inevitable death. Worst of all, the loneliness.”
Her long golden arms opened toward him.
“I loved you, Blackie. I believe you loved me. But we were both terribly alone—shut up in the prisons of our organic bodies as all mortal humanity is. I could never really understand you—never really reach you. We always had a barrier between us.”
She gestured impatiently, as if to brush the wall of the tank aside.
“Out here, we communicate. The old barriers are gone. Contact is closer than speech or touch. You’re part of everybody else, as fully as you wish to be. All that anyone has ever learned or lived is yours to remember—to be—with no loss of the individual you.”
She made a wry little grimace that twisted a dagger in his own recollection.
“Words aren’t good enough. They never were. Nothing was—not even the love we had in the desert, with the Game clan hunters behind us.” She paused to smile at him dreamily, eves half closed, lips a little parted, arms slowly lifting to her red-golden hair. “You’ll know what I mean,” she breathed, “when you’re transposed. When we love, we’ll truly share each other. I’ll feel all you feel, and you’ll feel all I feel. We’ll be entirely one.”
Thinking of Toolsmith, he felt weak and cold.
“Here outside, all of us share everything.” She reached again as if to grasp his hand. “A quantum jump in human evolution!” Her breathless huskiness begged him to understand. “In all the history of the universe, the only important fact has been the slow expansion of awareness, from a tiny spark in the first one-celled things to each stage of brighter light as some new power of mind emerged. If you look for the quantum jumps, they have all been inventions in communication—nerve tissue, sense organs, language, writing, electronics, the space gates.
“Now, transposition!”
She was leaning closer to the barrier, so ripe and warm and wonderful that he quivered with desire.
“Those inventions have always fused minds together, into greater and greater social beings. Into many-celled individuals. Into families. Into tribes. Into nations. Into the whole galactic civilization. Each stage enjoyed wider perceptions, a vaster experience, a higher level of awareness. Now, through our computer net, uncountable merged minds have reached a new era of conscious evolution. We’ve become a supermind!”
The light in her green eyes frightened him.
“The final limits of our new power are not yet tested—if any limits do exist—but we can already control mass and energy and space and time as no lone human brain could ever hope to. We can already sense older and greater superminds in the farther arms of the galaxy, and we’re reaching out for contact with them. We can already foresee even more exciting quantum jumps on our way. toward a full conquest of all the brute stuff of the whole universe by a completely conscious mind. A fully sentient cosmos!
“Blackie, aren’t you thrilled?”
Both hands now pressed hard against the cold crystal wall between them, he stood frozen, dazed with a shapeless dread, gripped in spite of himself by her triumphant emotion yet stunned by the stark immensity of her vision.
“Blackie, haven’t you been troubled by the nature of things?” Her voice fell appealingly, as if she had suddenly sensed his whirling uncertainty. “By the deadness of all the cold mass around us? By all the stubborn facts that feelings can’t change? By the terrible gap between what we are and what we want?”
When she paused, he had to nod.
“The world has always been a poor fit for us.” Her urgency was almost plaintive. “Most science and most art and religion has been a pathetic effort to improve that fit—to discover or invent some sort of order or meaning in the shape of nature. Now we’ve found the natural plan.”
Elation quickened the rythm of her voice.
“Now at last, we belong! We’re all part of an increasing natural order that will expand without limit until it has transformed the whole space-time universe into the mental instrument of a single ultimate awareness—”
A gong boomed.
“Your car.” Her bright head moved toward the doorway behind him. “Waiting to take you to transposition center.” Her voice sank huskily again, almost caressingly. “You needn’t hesitate. The process has been perfected for several generations, and tested many trillion times. There’s no risk. No pain at all. The scanner itself puts you to sleep, and your body will never be revived.”
Her full lips pouted as if to kiss him. “In an hour, you’ll be with me.”
The gong throbbed again.
He drew back from her, trembling.
“Listen to me, Blackie!” Her voice was flat and shallow now, alarmed. “If you’re still doubtful, I can understand. I was a Benefactor, too, you know. The old way of thinking was hard to shake off. When Engineer Toolsmith first told me about transposition, I begged for permission to take the invention—or even just the news about it—back to the fellowship. He said it wasn’t possible. I appealed to the transposition staff, on the grounds that isolation law didn’t apply to me because I wasn’t a swarmworld citizen. Once I thought I was about to win, but they kept delaying the decision till Toolsmith persuaded me to come through with him. Now I wouldn’t go back—not for anything!”
Her pleading voice sank breathlessly.
“Trust me, Blackie!”
“I—” A throb of pain closed his throat. “I guess I’m still a Benefactor. I thank you for reminding me of that.”
“Blackie!” She cried his name sharply. “I was so happy when Toolsmith said you were here to join us. You can’t—” He saw her bright tears welling. “You can’t turn back!”
Her golden arms had opened for him. He swayed toward her till his head struck the crystal wall. In an agony of frustration, he drove his fist against it.
The impact dimmed her image and set diamond sparks to dancing all around her.
“Don’t!” Her image cleared again, her eyes black with pain. “You could smash the glass. You could bleed. You could die, Blackie. Die!” Dread hushed her voice. “You could miss immortality—all your splendid chance to share the transformation of the universe.
“If you love me—”
A third time, the gong boomed. “Come, Blackie!” she breathed. “Come now. The car can’t wait.”
“I—I can’t!”
“Why, Blackie? Why?”
“Maybe—maybe I’m too primitive.” Stiffly, with both hands, he pushed himself away from the tank. “I do love you, Snowfire—at least I loved the human you. But I’m not quite ready to become a god. I’m going home to be a Benefactor.”
“You’re refusing transposition?” Her wet eyes widened. “The greatest gift there is! I don’t understand you, Blackie. I never could.”
“You’ve become a goddess. I’m still a black Nggonggan.”
“Knowing about transposition—” Her hurt eyes searched him again. “How can you be just a Benefactor?”
“I think I see my mission now,” he told her. “I’m going to take the news back, as you wanted to—if I can get back. I can’t take the actual process. Maybe Nggongga isn’t ready for it. But I think my troubled people need new beliefs to replace the old myths that progress and knowledge have killed. Perhaps the legend of eternal life in the computer can replace the old legend of Cru Creetha.”
She shook her head, bewildered.
“I offer godhood.” Her eyes were blankly accusing. “You want only a legend. I hope you’re never sorry—”
Her head turned as if to listen.
“Good-by, Blackie!” Briefly, sadly, she glanced back at him. “Freckles is calling me now.”
The projected room around her dimmed and faded. The Nggonggan daggers and rugs and censer were gone. Where they had been, he saw the fleeting image of a bare black granite peak. Toolsmith stood there with his angular arm flung out toward a huge red sun rising from a flat black ocean.
When Snowfire appeared there, he turned to welcome her with his gaptoothed, grin, and she was scrambling to his side as they vanished.
Blacklantern stood a long time gazing into the empty stereo tank.
“Freckles!” The sound grated harshly in his throat. “Freckles!”
He swung abruptly from the tank to stalk the empty room, all his new resolution crumbling into pain and doubt. Even though he had refused Snowfire’s gift of something like divinity, her golden image still haunted him. Not eternal, he was not yet ready to die. He had rashly spoken of returning to Nggongga, but he knew no way to get there.
He felt utterly lost, in a world he would never know.
That mellow gong throbbed again.
Uncertain what it could mean, he started toward the entry.
“Blackie!”
The doorway was open, and another Snowfire stood there, quietly smiling. He stared, recoiled, gasped for breath, and swept her into his arms. Her golden flesh felt warm and firm and real. Her red-glinting hair was fragrant with her own clean sweetleaf scent, and he found no barrier between them.
“You look—terrible!” She caught his arms and pushed him off to study him. “Was my other self so frightful?”
“I thought you were dead.”
“That was my transposed self.” She nodded at the gray-fogged tank. “But I’m the original me.”
Her green eyes smiled at his mute astonishment.
“I. hadn’t really expected to be revived, but I had applied for permission to return to Nggongga and the transposition staff has finally agreed that we’re not under their legitimate jurisdiction. They’re opening the gates to return us to Nggongga. The car’s waiting.
“Shall we go?”
He glanced back into the stereo tank, where her superhuman self had offered him everlasting life. Its cloudy depths looked cold and dead. He waggled three black fingers at it, in a childhood gesture against Cru Creetha, and swung eagerly back to grasp her mortal hand.
They ran together to the waiting car.
Counterkill
In which the young man known as Blacklantern, seeking to join the Benefactors to bring civilization to his home planet, instead finds himself in the middle of a terrorist conflict.
1.
In the Sand clan suburb of Nggonggamba, the one-legged guide waved a yellow crutch to lead his sunburnt tourist flock off the passenger slideway to a sun-parched ramp. Before them stood a blank stone wall, broken only with a tall iron door, black from smoke.
“What’s this?” A fat and dew-lapped otherworlder mopped at his sweat and scowled up and down the empty platform. “What’s to see here?”
“The tragedy of our planet.”
The old guide’s voice boomed out of his black-leather face with an unexpected eloquence. Hopping vigorously ahead, he swung the crutch toward the fire-bombed door and the crude native script splashed in red across the wall.
“ ‘Nggars beware!’ That’s what it says. The Night clan warns you! Sunsdeath is coming! The just wrath of Cru Creetha must be cooled with alien blood.”
The crutch dropped to indicate a rough drawing placed like a signature, the outline of a red-eyed angular creature, dangling snaky tentacles.
“So some vandal paints a slogan on a wall,” the fat man grumbled. “We’ve seen the same red scrawl all over the city. What’s that to us?”
“For one thing,” the guide said, “it means our tour is over. Because of the Night clan terrorists and the near approach of Sunsdeath, all tourists visas have been canceled, effective at sunset. I stopped you here to show you why.”
“Swindler!” A rawboned blonde turned up her translator till its bellow echoed off the fire-scarred wall. “I’ll have you know I’ve paid in advance for the Black Desert Safari. Five days and four nights at air camps or full-service hotels, with spotters and beaters included and a trophy kill guaranteed.”
“Respected visitor,” the guide said gently, “I advise you to take your own head away while you have it.”
“I’ll have you know that I’m a professor of exoethnography.” She bridled indignantly. “I demand my trophy kill or a full refund.”
“You may speak to the office,” the guide said. “But I won’t be there. You few people are my last tour group. The terror has ruined our business, and I’ve had my fill of fire and bombs. . . . Where am I going, sir? To an old town named Krongkor, off at the far end of our long sea. A busy trading center in the old days before the space gate opened, but a quiet refuge now, well out of the terror. I have spent my savings to buy a hotel there.” His voice became a droning chant.
“A noble landmark, respected guests. A monumental relic of our historic past. If our darkened star is indeed restored—if you ever return to Nggongga—I hope you will plan to visit me there. I promise you the hospitality of the old desert clans, as it was before the shadow of terror fell upon us. We offer full service, with the latest cooler equipment, and we feature the local seafoods and wines.”
“Don’t hold a room for me!” shrilled a scrawny otherworlder cloaked in the fog from his cooler suit. “Frankly, I’m baffled by all this talk of terror. I happen to own a few shares of space transport, and I came here to look at my investment. We’ve brought you people all the benefits of technological progress. I came here expecting gratitude. Instead, it seems you want to run us off your backward planet.”
“Respected sir, you state our situation precisely.” The lean old black gave him an ironic bow. “We’ve had several generations of your sort of progress. Most of us are sick of it. That’s what makes this coming Sunsdeath so dangerous to you.”
