Collected Short Fiction, page 733
“If you were, you wouldn’t need to ask.” Pipkin shrugged. “Or perhaps you are, if you think you are. As for me, I could only guess.”
“What would you guess?”
“I did watch Eva’s desperate race to complete her last creation. I observed several schemes to conceal her new creature from the returning gods. One was to make it latent, hide it in the genes of the premen. Since I’ve met you, my guess would be that you do carry the ultiman in your genes.”
“Then what can we do—”
“If you want another guess, all I can give you is the obvious.” The lone green eye squinted quizzically at Buglet and back at Davey. “Perhaps your children will be the ultiman—if you survive to bear them.”
He caught Buglet’s hand, felt her body sway against him. Emotion washed him, a sharp ache of longing and a wave of icy dread.
“That’s all we hope for,” she was saying. “We’re trying to reach the truman lands. We hope to hide there, to live our lives as trumen.”
“We have passports,” Davey added. “To show that we are wandering laymen. Yedsong and Yedsguide, followers of the missionary teacher, Yed—”
“Let me see.”
Pipkin squinted at Davey’s passport and shook his head.
“A childish forgery. It would only get you killed.”
“So what can we do?” Davey looked at Buglet’s anxious face and back at the imperfect god. “If we do have new powers, we need to find them now. To save our lives. Can’t you—can’t you help us discover what we are?”
“Only you can do that.”
“But you will help?”
“I’m no friend of the great Lord Quelf.” Pipkin grinned. “But I won’t risk my own skin. I can’t keep you here, though getting you safely away may tax my limited powers. I need time to work at the problem.”
He swung from the table, dropped before them on his hands.
“While you’re here, accept my hospitality.”
He danced away on twinkling feet.
Whatever his powers, they found that he had somehow installed a modern robochef in the kitchen that adjoined the old ready room. They carried their loaded trays back to the tables, but Davey felt almost too anxious to eat.
“What now?” he whispered.
“We must trust him.” Buglet’s eyes turned dark. “I feel sorry for him. Think how lonely he must be. The only one of his kind that ever existed, or ever will.” Smiling solemnly, she reached for Davey’s hand. “I hope he finds a place for us.
A good place, where we can have children.”
He leaned across the table to kiss her sun-cracked lips.
The robochef did not dispense the simple dishes they loved, the peppery meat and savory squash and roasted corn, but the truman food was good enough. They filled themselves and climbed into the bunks. Wondering what fate the little god might find for them, Davey thought he ought to stay awake and watchful, but suddenly Buglet was shaking him out of a terrifying dream in which an insect swarm of flying Pipkins had been hunting them across an endless desert with hissing crimson firebolts.
“You must have been pretty desperate.” She was almost laughing. “I thought you needed rescue.”
“Thanks, Bug.” He sat up, shaking off the nightmare, and saw that she was wearing an odd gray coverall.
“Our old clothes are gone,” she said. “Passports, too.”
He put on the garment that had been left for him and tried to explore the rooms around them. All the passages he found were closed with heavy metal doors he couldn’t open, most of them sealed with what looked like a thousand years of dust and rust.
“We’re prisoners.”
“Or guests.” She smiled gravely. “Perhaps it’s better if you think we’re in danger. It might help you discover yourself.”
He sat with her a long time, groping for some unconscious recollection that would make him part of Eva Smithwick’s last creation.
“No use!” Angry at himself and almost at her, he stood up to pace the narrow room. “Really, Bug, I think I’m just a common preman.”
She wanted to try gain, but he had no heart for another useless effort. They ate another meal. He went to listen at the metal doors, but he heard no sound at all. He was lying in his bunk, half asleep again, when he heard Pipkin squeaking.
“I have done what I can.” The dwarf god bounded to a table near them. “Dropped your clothing and passports on the west shore. Should divert Quelf’s people to the dam and canyons around it. You’ll be flying east. Null-G belt recharged. Promise you a strong west wind tonight.”
“But,” Davey said, “without passports—”
“Better passports, and a better story for you,” Pipkin chittered. “You are Threll Bluesea and Ven Hillstone. Truman students from a small colony in a frontier star system. Your god is Crethor, very junior, setting up his own domain. An actual god, by the way—distant relative of Belthar. His subjects remain marginal survivors. No surplus time or wealth for education. You got your passports through friends in his harem. But don’t talk about them—life on Kroong IV is so grim you prefer to forget it. You are here to visit holy places and get an education. No funds. You’ll have to work your way.”
The green eye fixed them.
“Can you do it?”
“We can,” Davey said.
“Envy your good cheer.” Pipkin’s baby-smile seemed wistful. “Doing the best I can for you. Passports will stand inspection. Good season for you—time when students often seek temporary jobs in the farming settlements beyond the lake. Have to warn you, however. No more help from me. Expect you’ll have problems enough. Quelf’s clone hunter will never give you up.”
“Thank you, Pipkin!” Buglet whispered. “I know we can’t repay you. But, whatever happens, we won’t tell—”
“Need no promises.” His small laugh jingled. “Because I take no chances. Blocks set in both your minds. Even under inquisition, you couldn’t tell.”
He gave them the recharged null-G belt and the new passports. A glowing oval on the wall of the ready room dissolved to open a blue-shining tunnel. Davey caught Buglet’s hand, and they stepped toward it together. Glancing back to wave farewell to Pipkin, he saw the dwarf god spinning high in the air, clapping gold-furred hands. The field caught them, swept them through the tunnel, tossed them out on broken sandstone. On the cliff behind, a luminous spot faded and vanished.
It was dusk above the lake, and a bracing wind blew out of the west.
UTOPIA HOLY WAS NAMED for a preman myth of the perfect state. A young tithing, it had been granted the arid western end of a dismembered preman wilderness that once adjoined the Redrock reservation. Its truman settlers were industrious as ants, repairing the ravages of natural erosion and preman neglect for Belthar’s glory and their own benefit. A survey team was staking out the route for a new irrigation canal across the north mesa on that hot Tenday afternoon when the two strangers climbed out of a rocky arroyo.
Scratched and sunburnt, they were desperate with thirst. They looked young, the girl barely nubile, the boy not fully grown. Speaking Terran with a slight accent, they explained that they had been searching the mesa for a sacred place, a shrine built many centuries ago to mark the spot where the Creators made the gods. Finding nothing, they had been wandering for several days.
“You’re really lost,” the surveyor told them. He was Brother Lek, a vigorous brown muscular man, a lay expositor and a deacon in the tithing. “According to the legends, Creation Mesa is a long way west, out in the preman reservation. I’ve never heard of any shrine there—”
“We need water,” the boy begged. “Please!”
“You’ll have to wait a bit,” Lek said. “We have work to finish—”
“The work can wait.” Sister Yeva was his apprentice, a sturdy, well-tanned redhead. Lek had been her instructor in love as well as surveying, and in her awakened glow of total satisfaction, she wanted no pain for anybody. “I’ll bring up the skimmer.”
He questioned them, somewhat critically, while she was gone. They were Threll Bluesea and Ven Hillstone, from a frontier world beyond a newly-found contact plane. Their god was Crethor, who had claimed the planet only a single truman generation before. Looking legal enough, their passports carried visas from the Terran Thearchy granting them the status of student guests with permission for an indeterminate visit.
“Can you help us find a place to stay?” the girl asked. “Kroong IV is a poor planet. Our money is gone, and we must find work.”
Brother Lek had become suspicious of students asking for work at the tithing. Too many, in the past, had been worthless idlers; a few had even been exposed as secret scoffers at the infinite love of Bel and the infinite wisdom of Thar. These two, however, looked too young and too hungry to be professional vagrants; and the yellow-eyed girl was already budding into a very alluring maturity.
“We’re willing,” the boy was urging. “We don’t know your ways, but you’ll find us anxious to learn.”
“You can ask to visit the tithing, or even for a probationary membership.” Lek frowned at him sharply. “But we don’t admit many. Our quotas are almost full.”
Sister Yeva was landing the skimmer in the sharp-scented juniper near them. She came out with bottles of water and a basket they had brought for an after-work picnic. The two drank avidly though the girl paused to apologize for their greed.
Leaving them with the basket in the shade of the skimmer, Lek and Yeva tramped back to their surveying. The two were asleep when they returned, but the boy sprang up as if in fright when he heard them snapping through the brush.
In the skimmer, on their way back to the center, Lek began asking about their lives on Kroong IV. Though the boy seemed uneasy and evasive; the girl answered with a wide-eyed candor.
“Kroong IV is a small planet. Too far from Kroong itself. Too cold and too dry and too poor in everything—even atmosphere. I wish Crethor could have found a better world. We want to forget everything that happened to us there, and I hope we never have to go back.”
She smiled shyly at Lek.
“Won’t you . . . Won’t you let us stay here?”
“That’s for the deacons to decide.”
“But he’s a deacon.” Yeva giggled and nudged him intimately. “He’ll help you.”
The center capped a gentle hill in the older section of the tithing, among fruit-bearing trees and ripe grain fields laced with full canals. They landed on the paved square between the chapels of Bel and Thar, and Yeva waited with Davey and Buglet in the skimmer while Lek went to speak to the rector.
The boy still seemed apprehensive, but the girl was asking eager questions about the buildings under the mirror domes around them, the dining halls and dormitories, the toolhouses and barns, the packing plants where the food products of the wide commons were processed for shipment, the hall of culture, and the sports complex.
“A good place.” She nodded eagerly. “A kind and friendly place. I hope they let us stay.”
“We’re happy here.” Yeva smiled, almost complacently. “The land is bountiful when we bring water to it—I can’t quite imagine why the old premen let it go to rock and dust and brush. Of course Belthar is good to us. A more generous god, I’m sure, than your Crethor was.”
When Lek came back, he had permission for them to stay at least until the deacons met. He gave them cards for work and food and shelter, and Yeva helped them find quarters. On Tharday afternoon, with Yeva as a sponsor, they appeared before the deacons and came away with the rector’s blessing as probationary members of the tithing.
“You couldn’t find a better place,” Lek boasted that night in the dining hall. “I’ve seen the cities and studied in the great seminaries and worshipped in the holiest temples—I’ve even seen the living Belthar. There’s no place like our tithing. We live on the good earth and make it better. We feed ourselves with our hands; there is plenty for others. We have good air, wide space, and peace. We share one another, to Bel’s delight. If we sometimes wish to touch a wider world, we have the learning center and the hall of culture. You’ll love Utopia Holy.”
“We’re lucky—” the girl’s voice was broken with emotion, “very lucky to be here.”
Lek nodded, in unspoken approval of her young loveliness. “Sometimes,” he went on casually, “I think of the premen who used to claim this land. You’ve seen the north mesa, the way they left it. Washed to dry ravines full of thorns and snakes and scorpions. Sometimes I try to imagine what sort of creatures they really were, how they lived, why they died.” The boy’s sunburnt face set grimly, as that picture pained him. Perhaps, Yeva thought, it reminded him too bitterly of his hardships on Kroong IV.
“Imagine the premen!” Lek’s lean brown face grimaced with disgust. “Killer apes, pretending to be men. Actually killing one another often enough, if their own legends are true, in organized wars and private fights. Robbing one another, misruling one another, while they all rotted alive with a thousand vile diseases. Decaying of age from the moment of maturity. Wallowing in filth and ignorance and their own stupidity, worshipping whole galleries of fantastic gods they generally had to imagine.”.
He stared at the uneasy boy, almost as if accusing him.
“Think of all that—and thank our Creators for the difference!”
“We’re thankful.” The girl spoke quickly, her eyes fixed on the boy. “To the Creators.” She turned her luminous smile on Lek and Yeva. “And to you, for finding room for us.”
They seemed for a time entirely delighted with life in the tithing. Cheerfully, they tried to master their unfamiliar tasks. Silent about themselves, they seemed alert to learn new ways and new customs. With the boy’s quick readiness and the girl’s warm charm, they began to win friends.
Yet they were always somehow detached and reserved. They had not time for games, not much even for the chapels. After meals and after work, they always hurried to the information center. As illiterate as premen at first, they were learning to read.
Their progress was remarkable, as if the primitive rigors of Kroong IV had left them famished for knowledge. With Lek for a teacher, or sometimes Yeva, they came to grasp the shifting gestalts as swiftly as premen used to scan their primitive print. Soon they were spending long nights at the center, devouring a strange array of texts.
Some of their choices puzzled Lek. Ignoring the basic works he suggested on the ethics of Bel and the philosophy of Thar, on the history of the Terran Thearchy, on the social organization and the economic management of the secular state, they turned instead to difficult studies of divine metaphysics.
“Be practical,” Lek urged. “These are revelations from the gods and the half-gods, made to guide the supreme thearchs. What do you care about the energy-sources of the holy nimbus or the mechanics of extra-spatial perception or the processes of transvolutionary rotation?”
The boy looked tense, somehow disturbed.
“There’s so much to learn,” the girl whispered quickly. “So much we long to know.”
“There are things you’ll never know—never need to know.” Lek smiled at the girl. “These are texts I never tried to read, because good scholars at the great seminaries told me that no truman could really master them. Actually, the multiverse is too complex for the truman brain to understand. There are sciences only the gods can learn.”
“That must be true,” the boy agreed, his expression oddly grim. “But we want to know all we can.”
Their concern with current history seemed equally odd, because outside events seldom mattered to the tithing. Belthar had reigned a thousand years and he would live forever. His consecrated servants had neither need nor fear of change. To its pious people, Utopia Holy was world enough.
“I know you’re students, but you always seem too anxious,” Yeva protested, when she had seen them hovering too often over the flashers in the news section. “When you learn our ways, you’ll be content here. You won’t have time to fret about statistics on industrial production or Thearchy politics or the loves and the hobbies of Belthar’s sons—You’ll never learn much about our Lord Belthar himself, because his affairs are not reported.”
“It’s the premen that trouble me.” The boy frowned. “Their lands have been taken away. The last of them have been shipped to a far-off planet, where the newsmen say they can’t have children. Since the Creators themselves were premen, that seems unfair—”
“Maybe we’re wrong.” The girl spoke quickly, with a sharp look at him. “We’re still strangers here, with many things to learn.”
“You’ll learn not to question Belthar’s will,” Yeva told them gently. “Here on Earth, he is our only god. If he has disposed of the premen, that’s because they have no future place in his divine plane. When you learn Terran history, you’ll find that they have always been wrong-headed rebels, always crazily unwilling to submit to the wisdom of Thar or to enjoy the love of Bel.”
She paused to smile at the boy, to eye the girl more thoughtfully.
“We like you both,” she went on. “We want to keep you here, but sometimes you worry us. As Brother Lek says, you don’t seem to feel at home. If you wish to belong to the tithing—to belong truly, to share our happiness—you must learn that Utopia Holy offers everything you will ever need. You must cease to fret about those few surviving premen who still refuse to give their hearts to Belthar.”
“We’re trying,” the girl whispered. “Trying hard.”
Yet, in spite of such kind advice, they kept searching the flashers for reports of outside events and kept struggling over difficult works of holy metaphysics, never showing a sign that they were finding anything that pleased them.
They were alone in the information center one Belseve, screening a lecture on the mathematics of the multiverse, when Lek and Yeva dashed in, laughing, their clean brown bodies fragrant with the garlands of Bel and already aglow with excitement.
“Wake up!” Lek shouted at them. “You don’t need any seminarian professor to teach the rites of love. Tonight belongs to Bel. Come along with us. Wash away your worries and let Yeva weave your flowers—she has a blessed gift for that.”
