Collected Short Fiction, page 735
“They wouldn’t, Bug.” Hoarse with dread, he gulped again to get his voice. “You know they wouldn’t. Just think of all they have against us now.” He gestured at the bodies sprawled outside. “They—they’ll kill us, Bug!”
“I don’t think they can.” Her eyes blazed. “I think we’ve just proved that. I suppose we’ll have to prove it again—and still again. But. in the end, I think they’ll be glad to ship us on to join our people.”
Trembling, he tried to get his breath.
“I’m afraid, Bug,” he whispered. “Terribly afraid.”
“So was I.” Her face was strangely serene, and her voice began to lift him. “But now I’m sure. We’re the true ultimen, Davey. Our children may be greater than we are, but I think we’ll find powers enough of our own. We’re going to beat the gods!”
1978
Kinsman to Lizards
Trying to exterminate a species forces its best members to hone their survival talents—and to fight back.
“Sometimes I wonder . . .”
My father used to say that and stop, as if overcome by bleak foreboding. A huge pink silent man, he was already far from the common human norm. Most of his associates feared him and my own devotion was mixed with awe. I think he was haunted by a sense of his own strangeness; once I heard him call himself a genetic experiment skating on the edge of failure.
Slow in body and even in mind, he made up with his inhuman routine. One hour for food, one for sleep, one for me. Twenty-one for genetic creation. The sleep came in four brief naps, after his simple meals. I always looked forward to the hour with me, which came precisely at midnight, when my own day was over and his next had just begun.
He would come into my lab section, moving with a soundless bearlike grace. Too intense to sit, he would roam with me about the room, sipping just one beer and listening while I spoke about my work. He was nearly always cheerful, and his brief comments were often brilliant hints for new research.
Sometimes, however, events had refused to fit his iron schedule. Expensive equipment had broken down, or an assistant had made some human blunder, or nature had thrown him some stunning surprise. He was more talkative then, sometimes moody. He asked for another beer. Now and then he even outstayed his hour.
“We can’t be sure . . .”
I can see him now, frowning as he shook his head. Almost an albino, with long silky white hair and beard, he wore dark bubble-shaped glasses to guard his eyes. In such black moods, he was almost frightening.
“We’re only pawns, boy. You and I. In a game we never asked to join. We can only guess the rules, and we’ll never live to see the winners—or even see if anybody wins. I guess it’s still exciting to you, but sometimes I wish we didn’t have to play.
“I don’t know, boy . . .”
At such times I felt terribly alone, terribly sad for him. He was already old—a creator must spend most of his life learning how to make a better being than himself. More than once my eyes stung with tears for him, but I never told him how deeply I loved him.
“Our job is building angels,” he used to say. “Angels out of jungle stuff. That’s our problem, boy. For all our skill with genetic engineering, we’re still kin to the ape and the hawk and the lizard. Our best creations carry the taint of that ancestry. I’m afraid they always will.”
When I tried to cheer him up, he cut me bluntly off.
“I know you’re brighter than I am, boy. Your own son will be a new creation, abler still. But don’t you get too cocky.” His huge bubble eyes stared away into the gloomy space of the lab. “There were big lizards once, that thought they owned the Earth.”
[From an unfinished essay, found in the papers of Darwin Smithwick.]
1.
The old preman town of Redrock was a tiny island now, its one crooked street sloping from the empty agency mansion down past the twin chapels and the jail to the ragged row of abandoned mud huts crumbling into the rising lake. An attack class Inquisition skimmer floated low over the weed-clotted plaza, watching the muman guards who watched the jail.
Inside, Davey Dunahoo sat up on a concrete bench. His head hurt and his dry mouth had a queer bitter taste. At first his sticky-feeling eyes were blurred, but he knew the stale foul reek and soon he could see the words of hope and lust and hate that other premen long ago had scratched into the rough concrete.
He knew the cell, because one winter a friendly preman jailor had let him and Buglet sleep here when snow had fallen on the reservation and they had nowhere else to go. But the other bench was empty now, and nobody answered when his swollen throat croaked her name.
A surge of panic swept him to the door. He rattled the bars and tried again to shout. When he stopped to listen, all he could hear was a hollow emptiness. He was alone in the jail.
Knees wobbling, he swayed around the narrow cell. Old concrete, patterned with the knots and grain of the planks in which it had been set. Yellowed whitewash and splattered grime. Three odd crosses scratched above a curve that looked like the crest of a hill.
The peeling whitewash felt cold and greasy to his testing fingers. Nothing yielded anywhere. He caught a sobbing breath and kicked the wall, slammed his fist against it. There was no way out, unless for a god.
If he were Pipkin, the wistful thought struck him, he could dissolve concrete and steel. Spin the atoms out of space, however it was done. Step through solid substance into freedom. But he wasn’t Pipkin—and didn’t really want to be.
With a grimace of pity for that small botched godlet, he shook off the useless thought. His head swam, and that sour bitterness was sharper in his mouth. Cold with sweat, he sank back to the bench and tried to think why he was here.
Memory came, at first in shreds. The god’s decree that every preman must be shipped outside the universe to die on Andoranda Five. His own escape with Buglet from the reservation. The truman commune, its life too easy, too happy, too empty. The battle on the mesa, when the clone general tried to recapture them. The muman fighters lying sprawled on the desert where Buglet had killed them—or somehow used her half-known transvolutionary gifts to make them kill themselves.
“Bug!”
Her image was suddenly so sharp in his mind that he called her name. Dark hair flying. Lemon-colored eyes wide and bright. The sunlit dust blazing like a halo around her as she reached out one empty hand and somehow toppled the general into the brush.
“Where are you, Bug?”
His hoarse shout rang and died in the dim-lit corridors. Bewildered and afraid, he groped again through the haze for all he could remember. His joy at her triumph over the red-scaled mumen. His awe at her unfolding power. His sick dismay when she decided to surrender.
For they had been free again, the armed skimmer theirs to fly. Her stunning victory was evidence enough that they were really latent ultimen, born with the hidden genes of the fabulous Fourth Creation, destined to challenge the gods.
Belthar, he had tried to warn her, would tolerate no challenger. His inquisitors would kill them. But she had refused to hear his protests. They were still premen, at least until their latent gifts emerged. They belonged with their own people. If surrender was dangerous, danger was what they needed to stimulate their awakening powers.
When the stunned clone revived, they told him they were giving up on condition of safe passage to Andoranda Five. He had refused to grant any conditions, had made them wait until a black-clad Inquisition prelate arrived.
Pale-faced, the Inquisitor stared in unbelief at the red sun-glitter on the scales of the dead mumen and cringed in dread from Buglet’s eyes, shrinking back among the blue-robed sacristans who had followed him off the skimmer.
“You stand accused—accused of mortal heresy.” Having trouble with his voice, he looked at Ironlaw as if for aid. The shaken general shrugged. Peering back at Buglet, the prelate gulped and wet his lips. “Belthar is merciful,” he rasped. “We grant you his grace.”
At his command, the nearest sacristan thrust an odd little gun at Buglet’s temple. Davey sprang to snatch it away, but she waved him silently back.
“A godsgrace gun,” the general said. “It will not kill.”
It clicked and came away, leaving a black triangular patch where the muzzle had touched her skin. His nostrils stung from a whiff of sour bitterness. He saw Buglet turning white, falling into the arms of another sacristan. The gun jabbed his own cheek and he heard another click.
All that seemed only a moment ago. Sitting now on the naked concrete, he fingered his cheek and found the slick patch. When he peeled it off, its bitter reek burned his eyes. Shivering, he flung it through the bars.
“Bug?” he gasped again. “What has become of you?”
Most of the bold hope that nerved their rebellion had belonged to her; it was she, not he, who had defeated their captors and then chosen to risk surrender. If his own genes carried any latent talents, they were latent still. Without her, he was naked, and he felt a raw fear for her.
Goaded by it, he swayed half to his feet and sank limply back. His head throbbed and spun when he moved, and the bitter scent of godsgrace seemed suffocating. Chilled with his own sweat, he pulled his trembling knees up against his cheek and tried to imagine where Buglet could have been taken.
To the transvolutionary ship, as the inquisitor had promised, for exile to Andoranda Five? The ship would be out in orbit, waiting for the shuttle to come from the new field beyond the Lord Quelf’s castle. If it were the last ship, if the Inquisition had taken her and left him behind, they might never meet again.
He pictured that barren planet, as he had seen it on truman wallscreens. Naked granite cliff and peak where no life had ever been. Bright red mud-plains, turning orange as they dried. Dunes of dull brown dust. Wild rivers feeding blood-colored floods.
He recalled the abandoned terraforming station as a truman gestalt book had showed it, the narrow shuttle strip blasted into the side of a dark granite knob, the tiny huddle of rusting huts. Nothing moved there. Nothing lived. No recent shuttle skids had cut the dust-stained snow, and he couldn’t see where the premen had been landed.
The yellow sky was darker now than he recalled it from the wallscreens, and a long squall line was rolling down across the river bend, hiding the black blades of an old lava flow. Shifting winds stirred yellow sand. He heard thunder crashing in the boiling cloud, smelled salt dust, shivered in the sudden gusts that howled around the huts. In a moment all he could see was angry lightning stabbing through the dust.
How long could the exiles survive there?
If Buglet—
Startled, he pulled his mind away. A shock of awe took his breath. In some manner that he couldn’t understand, his dim old images of that remote planet had become vivid actuality. The gods, he knew, claimed powers of parasensory perception. Belthar’s priests were always warning that he could watch malfactors all around the Earth, though Davey had never been sure of that. He doubted now that Belthar himself could see Andoranda Five from Earth.
A wild elation swept him, and cold terror shook him. He needed Buglet desperately. She had promised him that their unfolding gifts would make them greater than the gods. This incredible perception was evidence of some new power, but he had no notion of its dimensions or its limits, no idea how to use it. Only one thing was certain; if the Inquisition knew he possessed it, he would never leave the jail.
Quivering with that conflict of fear and hope, he tried to get the vision back. Sitting in just the same position on the concrete shelf, he pulled his knees hard against his chest again, stared at the same obscenity scrawled on the wall, tried to imagine that dead waste-world again, exactly as he had before.
But he didn’t know how. The gritty reality of that brief glimpse was gone, and no effort brought it back. He groped again for those snow-banked huts, for the choking odor of the yellow dust-cloud, for the chill of the wind and the crack of thunder, but nothing happened. His recollections swam and danced and dimmed, until at last he gave up.
The dull throb behind his forehead had become a crashing drum. He felt weak and giddy, exhausted by his effort. Leaning back against the cold concrete, he wondered for a moment if the vision had been only a dream induced by the godsgrace drug, but his sense of its truth was too strong to be denied.
What had turned it on? Buglet’s notion came back, that danger was the key. He nodded uncertainly. Perhaps his own uncertain predicament and his fears for her had been the stimulus. And perhaps it had been his own elated emotion that had turned it off. Was that paradox—or simple contradiction? He had too much to learn.
He hoped for more control, when the drug wore off. It was still bitter on his crusted tongue, and his head still swam when he moved. He was leaning back against the concrete, sunk in his troubled apathy, when steel clanged. Heavy footfalls echoed along the corridor. The cell door clattered, and he looked up to see a muman guard at the wicket. A startled recognition brought him upright.
“Lenya!” The hoarse shout hurt his throat. “Lenya K.”
Too huge for the preman building, the sleek-scaled warrior had crouched to see him through the bars. With savage talons awkward for the task, she was pushing a dish through the wicket. Her bright black seeing eyes watched him with emotionless alertness; her killing eye, immense in its dark-armored crest, glowed deadly red.
He stumbled toward her.
“I do know you.” He peered at the long orange stripe across her frontal armor, where once a laser had slashed her and the scales had grown back paler. “We’re old friends, remember? You used to guard the agent’s house when he was afraid of preman riots, remember? Riots against the Lord Quelf’s recreation lake, when it began to flood their fields. Remember?”
Her killing eye brightened, ready to fire.
“Bug and I used to live at the agent’s house, remember?” He clutched the bars with his sweaty hands, begging desperately. “We used to bring you goodies out of the kitchen. One day you gave Bug a ride with your null-G belt. Don’t you remember?”
She slammed the wicket shut.
“What have they done with Bug? Her name is Jondarc now—”
Nothing melted the frozen ferocity of the muman’s facial armor. An unfeeling fighting machine, she turned and stalked away, leaving only her pinelike scent and the little dish inside the wicket.
Clinging weakly to the bars, he listened to the receding thud of her footfalls. He heard the muffled clash of one steel door, then another. The echoes died. The jail was still. Again he was alone.
Yielding to the drug’s aftermath, he sagged back to the bench and sat staring at a dull brown spatter where some forgotten prisoner must have bled against the wall. With no appetite for whatever the guard had left, he let his hazy brain drift back to Buglet.
To their flight from Redrock. The battle by the lake. The way she felt against him, so light and warm and wonderful, when they were flying on with the muman’s null-G belt. Her bright courage, that helped them on to Pipkin’s island after the belt had failed.
The islet would be even smaller now, he thought, with the lake still rising. A drowned sandstone butte, it looked desolate at dusk. The boulder beach where they had struggled ashore was now submerged, and dark waves broke against the cliff where the little god had come out through solid rock to meet them.
Something drew him to another oval spot, higher up the cliff, which had begun to glow. He watched rough stone swiftly dissolving to open a smooth-walled tunnel. A black-and-yellow blur, Pipkin came flying out, to hover and perch like a bird on a wave-splashed ledge. Both his big hands clutched it, his blighted feet hanging free.
“Dunahoo?” The waspish drone of his voice rose sharply, and his oneeyed stare became a frown. “How did you get here?”
“I don’t—don’t quite know.” Davey hesitated, afraid to be glad, afraid of anything that might break this unexpected contact. “But you were good to us before. We need help again.”
“You were not to come back.” The lone green eye squinted forbiddingly. “I don’t want you here.”
“We—we couldn’t stand the trumen.” Too much feeling shook his voice, unbelieving hope mixed with fear of all he didn’t understand. “The Inquisition caught us. I don’t know what became of Bug, but I’m in the Redrock jail.”
“The best place for you.”
“You’re our friend. Buglet’s, anyhow.” He paused, trying to quiet his disturbed emotion before it killed the vision. “You’ve just got to help me help her. Can’t you—please!—teach me how to move through rocks and walls the way you do?”
“Can you learn?” The green eye blinked sardonically. “Can a frog learn to fly?”
2.
The young goddess threaded her transvolutionary vessel out of multispace and slid it into a low Earth orbit. The ship secure, jets quenched, she spread her nimbus to hail the god of Earth.
“Belthar of Sol!” Hiding a tiny tremor of dislike, she addressed him with full formality. “Lord of Love, Well of Wisdom, Pillar of Power, I beg an audience.”
“Welcome, daughter of Zhey.” His mellow voice came back at once through her extended aura, thinned by many thousand miles of space but still clear as actual sound. “Your unfortunate father was my ally in the reconquest of Earth a thousand years ago, and I owe his memory whatever you ask.”
“What I want, you won’t want to give,” she warned him. “But I want it very much. I beg your time.”
“Land at Redrock castle.” His tone grew cooler. “I’ll have you brought to me.”
Her shuttle dropped her to the port on the mesa beside the Lord Quelf’s castle. The half-god’s chief ecclesiarch was waiting to greet her, bowing low, yet eyeing her covertly in his effort to guess what she wanted from Belthar.
With hushed apologies for his master’s absence, he escorted her to the skipper ship that stood ready to take her to the African temple. A gift to the god from his faithful worshipers the ecclesiarch explained, the temple commemorated the millennial year of his arrival to liberate the mother planet from the follies of the aging Creators and the demoniac malevolence of their last Creation.
