Collected Short Fiction, page 728
“Maybe he’s only a story,” Buglet decided at last. “Maybe we’ll have to let them send us off to that awful world where no life grows.”
“My mother believed,” Davey always insisted. “I won’t give up.” One morning on their way to school they found a strange skimmer on the plaza beside the chapel of Thar. Branded with a black star inside the triple triangle, it had brought six gray-robed monks of the Polaris order, who scattered over the reservation to ask for preman antiques and look for preman ruins. Their dean came to the school.
“The gates are closed at Prince Quelf’s dam.” He was a short fat man who kept licking his lips as if his words had a good taste. “The lake will be rising fast. We want to gather all the preman artifacts we can, before the water gets here. If you know of any old records or tools or weapons—or where any old buildings stood—please help us preserve them for history.”
“I think they’re looking for the Multiman.” Buglet whispered to Davey. “Don’t tell them anything.” Meeting that night in the adobe town hall, the senate voted to let the monks explore Creation Mesa, which legend said had been the actual birthplace of the trumen and the gods. Though El Yaqui had always been as silent as his wife about the Multiman. he called softly next morning as Davey was passing:
“Venga, muchacho!”
El Yaqui was brown as the earth, bald as a pebble and quick as a spider. Coming late to the reservation from far high mountains where the church had left them alone, his people had brought strange words and strange things. In the hungry times before the goddess came, he had been generous to Davey and Buglet with bowls of milk and bits of sun-dried goat meat, and he still liked to share his desert lore and his peyote buttons on fiesta days. Breathing fast. Davey followed him down the stairs behind the bar and back through the stale stinks of spilled beer and mescal to a serape hanging on the wall.
“I think you are now ready to become a man.” Hard brown fingers squeezed his arm, as if that had been the test. “You have asked about the Multiman. Really. I know nothing—there was no Multiman in the dry sierra from which my people came. Yet there are certain ancient artifacts I must show you. before the monks take them.”
Behind the faded serape was a tiny room carved out of raw earth. A preman book with torn and yellowed pages lay open on a cloth-covered box, and a tiny flame burned beneath the image of an agonized man nailed to a cross.
“The book tells of a preman god.” El Yaqui knelt before it, his brown hand jumping like a spider. “The son of the god was killed. The book promises that he will return to aid his true believers. I once thought that perhaps it foretold the Multiman’s awakening.”
“Do you—” The musty little pit seemed suddenly very cold, and Davey found himself quivering and voiceless with awe. “Do you believe?”
El Yaqui stood up slowly.
“I believe in the stargods.” he said. “I have seen them and felt their power.”
“Then why—” Davey frowned at his hard dark face, mysterious in the flicker of the candle. “Why do you keep these things?”
“Because they were my father’s.” El Yaqui said. “A powerful sorcerer and a very wise man. He knew the language of this book, and he used to read the story of the tortured god to me. He could take an owl’s shape to watch the churchmen, and a coyote’s shape to escape them. He expected the old god’s forsaken son to return and rescue the premen. But he is dead. The waters will be rising over Redrock. The monks of Polaris have come to take the cross and the book for their museum of preman heresies.”
Bending, he blew out the candle.
Buglet was waiting at a sidewalk table under La China’s sleepy smile when Davey came out of the bar. She looked at him, and her bright face clouded.
“Davey. I’m afraid.” Her small voice shivered. “I’m afraid of Andoranda V.”
“I think we must learn all we can.” he told her as they walked on to school. “All about the trumen and all about those worlds that are not for us. If there is no Multiman, I think we must plan to leave the reservation and hide among the trumen.”
She stopped to stare at him. eyes round and huge and dark.
“I know the penalty,” he told her. “But no penalty could be quite so bad as Andoranda V.”
They learned all they could at school, though term by term their teachers seemed more and more stupid and indifferent, their fellow students less and less concerned with anything except sex and drugs and vandalism. They heard that the tunnels were flowing, heard that water was already deep in the lower canyons, heard that their camp was ready on Andoranda V. They saw the new square mountain rising, far-off in the north, which San Seven said was to be the foundation for Prince Quelf’s palace. They listened to the fat gray Polarian dean, who sometimes dined at the agency and talked about the excavations on Creation Mesa.
Davey kept hoping the monks would uncover some hint that the Multiman was real, but the digging went slowly. There was only legend to tell where the old labs had stood, and the preman workers came only when they needed mescal and La China’s girls. Beneath the barren dunes and the desert brush, all they had found was the story of Belthar’s attack from space, written in buried craters and glassy flows of lava. Davey’s last spark of hope was nearly dead, when Buglet had her dream of the Creation.
3.
Unfolding like some desert flower, Buglet had begun to call herself Joan Dark after the heroine of a tragic preman legend she had heard from La China’s girls. Taller that year than Davey, with straight black hair and yellow-gray eyes, she was suddenly alluring. Half the boys in school were in hot pursuit, and he was haunted with a secret dread that some churchman might see her and take her away for Belthar or himself.
Moody that morning, she met him with only a smile. They walked in silence down the hill from the agency and along the muddy road toward school. She was deaf to the whistles of two preman boys setting the sidewalk tables for La China. Unaware of the black-starred skimmer that dived by them, gray monk staring. Blind to the new arroyo that rain had cut in the trail ahead.
“Don’t brood. Bug.” He caught her arm to steer her past the ditch and trembled from the contact. “The lake’s still miles away. We may have months yet to find something, though I don’t know what—”
“Maybe I do.”
He heard the hope in her voice and saw then that she was not despondent, but full of some confused elation. They had come to the plaza, which was stacked with big yellow plastic shipping containers, waiting to be packed with the effects of the premen for the long star-flight to Andoranda V. She led him back among them, off the trail.
“Last night I had—I guess it was a dream.”
Her eyes were lemon-colored in the reflected light from the containers. She stood peering into the empty sky above them, as if searching for something she couldn’t quite make out.
“But it was real. Davey. Real as anything! It didn’t fade when I woke up, the way dreams do.” Her troubled eyes came back to him. “Yet it’s hard to talk about. Because I was somebody else. The places and people and ideas—they’re all so new.”
Shivering, she caught his hands.
“I’m getting a headache, just trying to remember.”
He didn’t beg her to tell about it; they understood each other too well for that. Instead he beckoned her farther away from the trail, and they sat face to face on two empty containers. Eagerly, he waited.
“It’s like a memory, though it never happened to me. In it. I’m Eva—Eva Smithwick.” She was hesitant, groping. “The last of the Creators. But the Creation wasn’t the instant miracle they talk about in church. It took hundreds of people, working for hundreds of years.”
She stopped to think again, unconsciously combing a black-shining sheaf of her hair with slim white fingers.
“The real Creators—the leaders—all belonged to one great family——Adam Smithwick and his descendants. I believe—Eva believed that the family itself had been the actual first creation.”
Leaning closer, he caught the faint sweet exciting scent of her hair.
“You can’t guess how hard it is.” Her tawny eyes flashed him a wry little smile. “It’s all terribly real. So plain I’ll never forget. But when I try to talk about it the words aren’t there. Even the language Eva spoke wasn’t yet our Terran. After all. I’m still me.”
“I’m glad.”
With only a grave, pleased nod. she went on searching out the words that rang so strangely when she spoke them. “The first actual creators must have been Adam’s parents. They had been geneticists, working to control mutations in lab animals and then in human beings by micromanipulation of chromosomes—”
She saw his puzzled expression and paused to think again.
“They had been working with the genetic code, trying to revise the blueprint for a new body and a new mind carried by the germ cell from parents to child.”
“I can understand that.” he said. “From exobiology class.”
“Adam’s parents had both been in trouble. His father had to leave a country called England when people learned about his experiments with humans—I guess they were already afraid of what he might create.”
Gazing at the yellow containers, Davey nodded somewhat grimly.
“His mother was a refugee from what was called a labor camp in another country—she had been sent there because she wouldn’t work in a secret genetic project to grow military clones. Adam was born in Japan. He grew up to be the best geneticist anywhere.
“The reason was, his own genes had been improved. Anyhow, that’s what Eva thought. She must have been his great-granddaughter.” Bug-let stopped again, frowning with effort, twisting the strands of bright-black hair. “Sorry. Davey. It’s all in broken bits. I need time to fit them together—and we’re already late for school.”
“Forget school.”
She sat very still for awhile, her searching eyes fixed on things beyond the yellow boxes and the dusty sky. “Adam—” She brightened again, remembering. “Adam came to North America to be the first director of a new space clinic. Men were exploring the planets by then, and he was already the greatest specialist in space medicine.
“Secretly, he was already creating the trumen. I guess he had learned from the the misfortunes of his parents, because he kept the secret well. He arranged for the trumen to be accepted as the normal children of his wives—he was married three times in all—and children of his friends and associates.
“They looked like premen. of course. They were simply better. Stronger and smarter. Immune to all the old diseases. Free, of all the old genetic defects. Rid of all the animal jealousies and aggressions that have always kept the premen in conflict with each other. Their social adaptiveness kept them out of trouble. For a whole generation, their existence wasn’t suspected at all.”
She paused again to think.
“People like San Seven wouldn’t be suspected,” Davey murmured. “He’s as normal as anybody. Just brighter and nicer.”
She hardly seemed to hear him.
“Darwin—Darwin Smithwick was the next Creator. Adam’s last child and probably himself another special creation. He made the mumen—mutant creations shaped to meet all the different challenges of space. With their new senses, the mumen began finding the first shortcuts to other star systems through the contact planes—up till then, the finite speed of light had limited exploration.”
Her lemon eyes smiled at something he couldn’t see.
“To the premen of those days, the Creators themselves must have seemed like gods. They were nearly immortal. Adam lived and worked a hundred years. Darwin even longer. Before he died, the trumen were changing history. Never fully revealing themselves—at first not even aware they were a new species—they had become the leaders in everything.
“War ceased, because the trumen saw that it was stupid. They dissolved the old contending nations into a new world republic. They revised social systems to end crime and disorder. They invented new sources of energy and food, found a new equilibrium with the environment. There was a long age of peace and abundance, till the premen revolted.”
“They had never known—”
Half a mile across the town, the school bell had begun to ring. Buglet moved as if to slide off her yellow perch, but Davey checked her with a gesture. Frowning in a way that charmed him. she went on again, groping for the words she recited in a grave slow voice that hardly seemed her own.
“For a hundred years and more, the trumen had been the faithful public servants Adam Smithwick wanted. Under them, the premen were better off than they had ever been. As Darwin wrote in his journal, the world had become the paradise the old preman prophets and philosophers had always dreamed about. Most of the premen must have understood that their new leaders were too useful to be destroyed. because the rebellion was delayed a long time, even after the truth was pretty well known.
“When it came, the rebellion was savage. As illogical as always, the premen refused to see that they had nothing at all to gain. Their own irrational leaders magnified the number and the powers of the trumen. In a wave of insane panic, they overturned the world republic to revive the old conflicting nations and parties and unions and classes. Trumen were mobbed and slaughtered. War came back. Famine and disease and misrule.
“Yet, through most of that dark age. the premen seemed about to win. They had the numbers, billions against a few tens of thousands. They had their old aptitude for senseless violence. They seized or burned most of the cities. Trying to kill the Creators, they wrecked the space clinic. Darwin Smithwick had to hide in an old copper mine.
“In the end, of course, the premen lost. Numbers meant nothing. Though the trumen lost most of the Earth, they found refuge in space. No fighters themselves, they brought muman soldiers to defend their strongholds around the spaceports. And Huxley Smithwick made the stargods.
“Darwin’s son. Huxley had grown up in hiding—most of the time in that abandoned mine. He learned his father’s crafts of creation and improved on them. When he escaped to space, he carried three new synthetic life-cells in cryogenic flasks. Alpha and Beta and Gamma.
“Those names seem to have come from the phonetic symbols of some lost language. Huxley separated the new beings for their own safety, arranging for proxy-mothers to bear them on three different planets. Not really divine, not yet immortal, they were gifted enough. He called them his three Valkyries, from the warrior women in some forgotten preman legend. When they were old enough for battle, he sent them back to face the rebels.
“Though their powers were limited, they had been designed for battle. Withdrawing from simple space at will, they were untouchable. They could levitate where they pleased, unstoppable. With one flash of a nimbus, they could kill a preman leader or explode an arsenal. After two or three encounters, the premen panicked.
“Huxley recalled his Valkyries to space, and the trumen tried to restore the world republic. For reasons they couldn’t understand, the effort failed. Defeat had changed the premen. They refused to trust anybody, or to accept any aid. or even to help themselves. As Eva saw it. they had suffered an emotional wound that never healed. And I guess that’s the way Redrock began.”
Buglet wrinkled her nose at the sewer stink drifting between the yellow containers.
“The two cultures grew apart as the centuries went on—and the premen lost most of their own. When the world-state came back, it was a union of the spreading truman enclaves, with the premen left out. I wonder—”
Her breath caught, and her voice was again her own.
“I wonder if San Six is right—if the premen really are the mongrel stepchildren of creation. Because they just gave up. They quit trying. In government. In science and art. In everything. When the troubles ended, they still owned most of the planet. But they died of their own strife, their own plagues, their own despair. Their numbers dwindled as the trumen grew. Again and again they gave up land, till Redrock is their last stronghold—”
“You and I are premen,” Davey objected gravely. “Really, Bug, do you feel so inferior?”
Her yellow eves blinked.
“I guess I was still thinking Eva Smithwick’s thoughts.” With a quick little smile, she reached to touch his arm. “We’re different, of course. We can’t do what the stargods can. We aren’t even as sharp as San Seven, in a good many ways. But we’re—ourselves.”
“We’re just as good—as good as anybody!” A gust of anger shook his voice, and he sat bleakly, silently until it had passed. “Go on. Bug.” He bent toward her hopefully. “Is there anything about the Multiman?”
“Maybe.” She frowned at the yellow boxes. “It’s like trying to fit the pieces of a broken pot together when half of them are gone. I don’t know what I know. I have to put the scraps of Eva’s memory into a language I can speak.
“But Huxley Smithwick had a daughter—”
Absently combing at her hair, she forgot to go on.
Davey watched the monk’s skimmer sail above them toward the dig on Creation Mesa, and listened to the hooves of a mule clopping along the trail.
“When the war was over, Huxley came back from space.” She nodded to herself, as if to confirm the recollection. “He built the laboratory—the exobiology lab—where the old space clinic had stood. There he created mates for his three Valkyries.
“The first of the stargods. True immortals, with keener senses to explore the multiverse and greater powers to control it. The mumen had begun encountering advanced and sometimes hostile alien cultures, and he thought they needed stronger champions than the Valkyries.
“In his old age, talking to his daughter, he confessed that the gods had been a blunder. Even at the time, he was aware of the danger, but he thought he was taking precautions enough. Like the Valkyries, those first gods were implanted in the wombs of proxy-mothers, to be born and raised on other worlds. Trying to guard himself, he gave them an avoidance compulsion, to keep them light-years away from Earth.
