Collected Short Fiction, page 729
“Eva was his daughter and his student, herself perhaps his greatest creation—but not immortal, of course. The last Creator. She took over the lab when he died. By that time, the extent of his blunder was clear. The gods were far too powerful, too scornful of their makers, with too much self and passion from their Valkyrie mothers, more anxious to extend their own divine might than to aid and shield the older human races.
“The first three gods made no trouble. Bound by that compulsion, they stayed away from Earth. But after they had found their Valkyrie mates—their children inherited their immortality and all their powers, without the compulsion. Alarmed. Eva went to work on a new creation—”
“The Multiman?”
“Not by such a name.” Buglet shook her head. “She was trying to design a new sort of being, greater than the stargods, with a better control of the multiversal environment and a stronger love for all the older races. But she had to rush her work, because she was afraid the jealous young gods would try to wreck it, to defend their own supremacy.
“There simply wasn’t time—”
She stopped again, frowning at nothing, absently kicking at the next hollow box.
“That’s about as far as I can go. About all Eva knew, when her memory somehow got mixed up with mine. She was still busy in the lab on what we call Creation Mesa, working to perfect that new life-cell. Out in the multiverse. Belthar and his brothers and cousins were growing up.
afraid of her work and free to attack her. The new creation wasn’t ready to be implanted in a proxy-mother. She was making plans to hide it—”
“Where?” Davey whispered. “Where?”
Her lemon eyes looked through him. while she groped for Eva Smithwick’s thoughts.
“The mine!” She smiled a little, as the details came. “In that old copper mine, where her father had hidden. It’s under the end of the mesa. The centuries and the preman wars had already erased all the surface signs that it was ever there, and her father had dug an escape tunnel to it from the basements of the lab.
“She knew the gods would be looking for new creatures. To outwit them, she had set her engineers to work on a robot nurse that could keep the germ-cells frozen for years—maybe for centuries—till a safe time came for it to be incubated and developed.”
“So he’s out there?” He was breathless with excitement. “Asleep under the mesa!”
“I don’t know, Davey.” With a shrug of regret, she slid off the container. “That’s where Eva Smithwick was in time. She didn’t know what was going to happen. I’ve come to the end of the memory—if it was a memory.”
“Do you think—” He caught her hands, and found them oddly cold. “Do you think we could find a way into the mine? Wake the Multiman?”
“That’s all I know.” Though the still air was hot around them, bitter with the smell of the yellow containers, something made her shiver. “If he’s there at all. the monks will probably find him first.”
4.
Their preman teacher scowled and their fellow students winked and tittered when they came late to school. Davey sat dumb all day. hearing nothing, vainly trying to imagine ways to reach and wake the sleeping Multiman before the gray monks found him. Working out on a null-G belt that afternoon, he was so preoccupied that he tumbled clumsily into the ceiling of the gym. When San Seven asked what the trouble was. a wave of terror swept him.
“Just worried, I guess,” he muttered. “About Andoranda V.”
“I’m sure you are.” San looked at him almost too keenly. “If I can help, just ask.”
He had to quench a spark of hope. San was his best male friend, but also a sharp-witted truman. faithful to Belthar. “Thanks,” he said. “But I’m afraid there is no help.”
On graduation night, he filed into the old adobe auditorium just behind Buglet, half-drunk with the scent and shine of her long black hair. Seated side by side, they listened to the commencement address. The speaker was San Six.
The occasion was significant, he said, because they would be the last graduates from Redrock. They would be carrying their memories and the traditions of the school to a far-off frontier world, where they would be facing novel and exciting challenges. To survive there, to succeed, to make their careers and nurture their ancient preman culture, they must call on the lessons they had learned from their faithful teachers and the aid they might earn through steadfast devotion to the gods—
Listening to the agent’s mellow oratory and thinking of those empty containers waiting on the plaza. Davey tried not to shudder. He turned impulsively to Buglet, who looked very grave and pale in her dark robe, more alluring than a goddess.
“If we could run away together—” The whisper burst out before he thought. “If we could hide somewhere—live somewhere as trumen—”
He stopped, stifled by the fear of his own audacity. She turned a little toward him. her lemon eves wide. After one breathless instant, she nodded slightly.
“I’ll come.” Her lips moved soundlessly. “If we can find a way.”
“But that’s crazy.” His wave of elation was already gone. “We’ve got to stay. Understand your vision—whatever it was. Look for the Multiman. If he does exist.”
They went next morning to the Thar chapel, to ask for work at the excavation. The fat dean was sorry, but the monks had stopped hiring anybody. The dig had not been productive, and the new lake was rising fast. Within the next six-square of days, their expedition would be leaving Redrock.
“Anyhow,” Buglet whispered to Davey. “I want to see where Eva lived. The place might wake another memory.”
They rented two mules from La China and rode out for a picnic on Creation Mesa. A skimmer came sailing to meet them at the top of the trail, and a gray monk leaned out to warn them that the area was closed to visitors.
“Your permission. Master.” Davey bowed respectfully. “We’re only looking for wild flowers and a place to eat our lunch.”
“Flowers?” the Polarian snorted. “All you’ll find is cactus.”
“There’s a spring—” Buglet caught herself. “We heard there’s a spring below the north rim.”
“Dry rocks.” the monk muttered.
But he let them ride on.
“There was a spring.” Buglet whispered. “A thousand years ago. A tunnel, actually, dug to drain water out of the mine. It could be our way inside.”
She rode ahead through the glaring noon, her brown mule clattering over naked rock and crashing through brittle brush. Davey followed eagerly, breathing the juniper scent, searching ahead for the green of a spring, but his bright hope died when they came to the rim. Buglet had stopped there, shading her eves, peering blankly down at the desert.
“Things—things are wrong. Nothing looks quite like it should. Maybe Belthar’s bombs caved the cliffs away. I guess the spring has dried up. Anyhow. I don’t know where to look.”
They hitched the mules to a piñon stump and scrambled down the slope looking for the scar of a drill, the red of iron rust, even one green weed. When they found nothing. Buglet chose another place to search, finally a third.
“No use.” She was scratched and grimy, drooping in the heat. “I guess the monk was right.”
They sat in the shade of a sandstone cliff to eat their bread and cheese. Late in the suffocating afternoon. they were riding back toward the trail when Davey slid off his mule.
“Bug. look!”
What he had found was half a red brick, one face burnt black. Kicking breathlessly into the gravel, he uncovered a gray mass of battered aluminum, an opal blob of fused glass, a blackened silver coin. Reining up her mule. Buglet peered off into the heat-hazed distance.
“Eva’s view!” Her eyes grew wide. “From the parking lot behind the exobiology lab. Davey. this is where the monks think they’re digging.” With a quick little nod of recognition. she looked south across the mesa. “Actually, they’re down at the site of the old mining town.”
“Shall we tell them?” Davey frowned doubtfully up at her and down at the opal ball. “If we do, they may find the Multiman—and maybe kill him. If we don’t, the lake will drown him.”
She sat for a moment staring down at the gravel as if her yellow eyes could penetrate it. “The escape tunnel from the lab to the mine must be fifty feet down. Farther than we could hope to dig. I think we’ll have to risk help from the monks.”
When the pudgy Polarian dean came that night to dinner at the agency. Davey showed him the bits of brick and metal and glass. Squinting at them, he forgot his appetite. They went with him next morning in the skimmer to guide him to the site and watched while he explored it with strange machines.
“Probes.” he told them. “Sonic and magnetic and gravitic. They’re mapping the solid masses and the metallic bodies under the gravel and rubble. Broken walls. Pavements and foundations. Old excavations. An important site. I wish we had found it sooner.”
“Since we found it.” Davey begged, “may we work here?”
“Till you leave.” the dean agreed.
They drove stakes for him that afternoon and helped stretch the colored cords that outlined the foundations of the buried lab. Davey went to work next morning with a spade, tossing gravel against a sloping screen, while Buglet knelt in the dust to scrabble for artifacts.
“You’re right above old Huxley’s tunnel.” she told him. “If we can ever dig that far down.”
His hands were raw blisters before the long shift ended, but he had begun to uncover ancient masonry, walling his narrow pit.
“An old elevator shaft.” Buglet told him. and dropped her voice. “Old Huxley’s escape tunnel opens from the bottom of it.” She frowned uneasily. “If we can somehow get into it first—”
Day after day. he shoveled rubble into a bucket, to be hoisted and sifted above. Foot by laborious foot, he cleared the ancient shaft. The pit was hot and his muscles ached, but he dug through a level of broken porcelain and glass that came. Buglet said, from the biochemical lab. He due past a shattered archway into what she said had been a cold room for a colony of alien methane-breathers.
He dug on down beside a vast concrete slab that had covered a bomb shelter. Dripping muddy sweat, reeling with fatigue, still he shoveled rubble.
But time ran fast. From the windows of the skimmer, as the monks took them home after work, they began to see dusty sunsets burning red in the rising lake. The preman magistrates had begun scattering the yellow shipping containers through the town, one to every dwelling. Most of the other premen. stopped coming to work, but they kept on.
Breathing the dust of dead centuries. Davey piled the bucket with broken stone and muck, with charred wood and rusty iron, with stray hones and battered bullets. Spitting bitter mud. he worked on down beyond the floor of the buried shelter.
“Just a few feet more!” Buglet’s tawny eves shone. “The tunnel opens from the south side of the shaft. There was a false wall to hide it. I don’t think the monks suspect it yet.”
Energized with eager hope, yet half afraid that the wall had broken, that some flood had washed debris through to choke the tunnel, he toiled through most of another day. Abruptly, in midafternoon, the Polarian foreman called him out of the pit. Work had stopped. The expedition was departing.
“Sorry to go.” the dean told the agent at dinner that night. “Because of your excellent hospitality. And because we’ve finally located the true site of creation. We could spend our lives here, uncovering relics of the holy progenitors. But the church has ordered us out.”
He reached to spear a second steak.
“Enjoy yourself,” the agent urged him genially. “Everybody’s going. The transport’s in orbit at last. Long overdue. Delayed somewhere to wait for a pilot. Now we’ve only three days to clear the premen out.”
Afraid to look at Buglet. Davey reached under the table for her hand. Cold and quivering, her fingers clung to his. San Seven sat across the table, watching them with a troubled intentness. He followed when they left the dining room.
“Davey—” His uneasy whisper stopped them. “Bug—please!”
He beckoned them into his own room and closed the door. Nearly always cheerily confident, he looked so pale and nervous now that Davey thought he must be ill.
“You heard—” Nervously, he went back to listen at the door. “Andoranda V—unless you get away—”
Unless we find the Multiman, Davey thought.
With a tiny gesture. Buglet warned him to say nothing.
“I’m not used to this.” San Seven was breathless and sweating. “I’ve never broken the code before. But we—we’ve grown up together. I love you both. More than my truman friends—”
Buglet ran impulsively to kiss him.
Davey grinned gratefully. his own throat aching.
“I’m no—no criminal.” He was almost sobbing. “Not till now.” Brown fingers trembling, he thrust a tiny envelope at them. “I got into Father’s office. Stole forms. Forged truman passports.”
Well never need them. Davey thought. Unless—
“Invented identities for you. Priests of Bel. You belong to the wandering order of Yed. Your society owns no property and observes no discipline. Your obligation is to preach the Lord Belthar’s boundless love. Understand?”
“We’ve seen the priests of Yed.”
Davey nodded. “They used to bring their message to us premen. Wearing rags. Sleeping on the chapel floor. Begging food at El Yaqui’s. Preaching Bel to everybody.” He grinned his gratitude. “A clever way to help us hide!”
“We can’t repay you.” Eyes dark and wet. Buglet accepted the envelope. “But we’ll always remember—”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t thank me.” San Seven shrugged a troubled apology. “I’m not a skillful forger. You’re likely to be picked up, and you know the penalty for trying to pass yourselves as trumen.”
Death.
“We know,” Buglet whispered. “It’s not as bad as Andoranda V.”
“Anyhow.” he mumbled. “I wanted you to have a chance.”
With a guilty haste, he looked out to see that the hall was empty and rushed them from his room. They slipped away from the agency and hurried through back streets to the trading post.
“The starship’s in orbit.” Davey told La China. “They’ll be shipping us out. We want to remember the mesa by moonlight. We’d like to rent two mules.”
“Take them.” She blinked sleepily across her cash machine. “Take these.” Her fat black fingers dug into the drawer for a heavy roll of coins. “Take—take anything you need.” Her husky voice caught. “If I were young enough. I’d be running with you.”
“Maybe—” Davey whispered. “Maybe the Multiman can help.”
“There’s no help.” She smiled dreamily. “I’m dying tonight.”
They saddled the mules and followed dark alleys out of town. The moon was full, the desert all silver and shadow.
“It’s all so beautiful.” Buglet murmured. “Too lovely to leave.”
The dig on the mesa was silent, black cranes jutting like skeletal arms into the sky. They hitched the mules and he showed Buglet how to run the bucket. Down in the narrow pit he dug desperately.
One jagged mass of fallen concrete was too heavy to move. With no tools or explosive to break it up. he burrowed around it. His headlamp found a dark hollow behind it. and he smelled musty dampness.
“Bug!” His voice boomed back from the walls of the pit. magnified into a monstrous bellow. “We’ve found the tunnel—open!”
She rode the bucket down. Thrusting and prying with the shovel, hauling bare-handed at muddy concrete masses, they widened the opening. Before it was big enough for him, she dived through. For a moment she was lost in the dark.
“We’ve found the Multiman!” Her face came back into the light, grime-streaked and eager. “If Eva really left him here.”
They strained together to move another boulder, and he slid down beside her. Roughly cut through dark sandstone, the narrow passage was so low they had to stoop. Sloping steeply down, it brought them at last into a wider drift, where drops of falling water crashed and echoed.
“Which way now, Bug?”
She shrugged uncertainly.
“The robot nursery—” Her voice brought chattering echoes out of the dark, and she dropped it to a whisper. “The nursery hadn’t been installed. All I know is Eva’s idea. She wanted a high spot, safe from flooding. She wanted easy access to it from the lab. through Huxley’s tunnel.”
The drift curved and sloped, where the miners must have followed a wandering vein. Ancient timbers had gone to dust, letting it cave. They climbed it. till a larger rockfail stopped them. Crawling through the jagged crack above the boulder mound, they saw the loom of a huge, dark-cased machine.
“No!” Buglet gasped. “Oh. no!”
Davey’s searching headlamp struck dull glints from the rock-piled floor around the silent machine. Once a thick glass shell had covered it, but that lay shattered into dusty fragments beneath a great stone mass from the ceiling. Clambering down the slope, he let his light play over broken glass and rusting metal. Nothing moved, and the air had a reek of old decay.
“Dead!” Buglet sobbed. “The Multiman is dead.”
5.
Still damp with sweat, Davey shivered. That cold cavern had suddenly become a tomb—for Eva Smithwick’s last creation, for the premen waiting exile to Andoranda V, for all their dreams. Though they stayed an hour, digging under the great glass shards in search of something more than rust and dust, they found no hope.
“Nothing!” Davey flashed his lamp on the boulder that had crushed the machine. “It happened too long ago. A quake. I guess.”
Buglet stood trembling in the gloom, fingering a broken scrap of stainless metal. She shaded her eyes from his light. “Belthar’s bombs, more likely.”
“What now. Bug?” He peered at her hopefully. “Shouldn’t there be a spare machine? A second Multiman?”
“I don’t know.” She dropped the useless metal fragment and started a little when it jangled on broken glass. “Eva was afraid the machine might fail. She did think of a spare. But—” With a tired shrug, she turned to stare at the dead pile of rock and wreckage. “I don’t know anywhere to look.”
