Collected Short Fiction, page 749
Buglet helped him lever the cut logs into place on the stone foundation, helped mix mud to plaster them and peel rafters for the roof. Toiling together under the mild sun of Eden, they spaded up a tiny plot of soil where they could test the few Terran seed the preman had shared with them.
Once he stopped his spade to grin at her. They had been digging around a stubborn stump that proved too heavy for them to move. Dark hair bound with a strip of red rag, wearing only grimy shorts and halter, she was streaked with sweat and dust. An ache of mixed pity and joy throbbed in his throat.
“Strange work for the ultiwoman!”
“Don’t fret.” She stood up to get her breath, mopping at her muddy loveliness. “We’ve never been so happy.”
“El Sapo isn’t. We’re still a thorn in his paw. If we can outfight muman deadeyes and kill Belthar’s son and jump between universes, he can’t see why we must sweat to stay alive like ordinary premen.”
“If they’ll just let us live—” She reached to stroke his gritty arm. He saw the blisters on her fingers, and her lean smile touched his heart. “Till the child is born.”
They didn’t go back to the landing, but now and then a few preman friends came calling. She was laughing once, after two women had brought gifts: a newly fired clay cook pot and a bundle of native roots they said were edible if boiled long enough to kill the bitterness.
“They poked into everything we have and wanted to know everything we do.” Her lemon eyes danced. “They hinted that we ought to marry.”
“If you want—”
“If we were premen.” She shrugged. “But we aren’t—not since they put us out.” Her gaze grew thoughtful. “I would like to see Zhondra Zhey.”
By coincidence or not, the goddess came next day. They heard the shuttle roaring down to land at dawn and saw it climbing skyward again on its tapered plume. Davey was carrying water from their spring in a bark bucket that afternoon when she dropped before him out of the air, wrapped in the pale opal glow of her nimbus. Awe of her power chilled him for an instant, but her smile of greeting was as easily friendly as if they both had been common premen.
“Pipkin came down with me,” she told him. “He’s gone again now, with El Sapo and some of his people. They don’t like this location, because there’s no metal—”
“And because we’re here?”
Her pearly halo winked.
“Anyhow, they’ve gone to search the continent again for ruins richer in metal, buried not so deep. If they can find a more promising spot, El Sapo wants to move the colony.”
Levitating, she floated beside him to Buglet, who was tending a fire beside the still roofless cabin, trying to cook those bitter roots.
“Must you eat such things?” She made an entrancing face. “With all your ancestral gifts, can’t you draw on transvolutionary energies the way we do?”
“We aren’t gods.” Buglet tossed her dark hair back, smiling lightly. “Not yet. We’ve never been able to unlock our latent powers without the stimulus of danger, and we’re out of danger here.” Davey thought she looked as luminous as the goddess did, beneath her streaks of soot and dust. “We’re content enough to live like premen until the child is born.”
“I’m afraid you feel safer than you are.” Zhondra’s glowing veil was flecked with a troubled blue. “In truth, there’s more danger than you need. The gods are powerful, and you’ve alarmed them. I know Belthar. He’ll be arming and searching desperately. If he should ever guess that our new universe isn’t actually antimatter—”
“The child will make us safe,” Buglet insisted serenely. “He’ll be a match for Belthar.”
The goddess stayed with them three days. She levitated the ridgepole, which had been too heavy for them to hoist. She lifted that great stump and the boulders out of their garden plot, piling the stones to hold a little pool below their spring.
She kept urging them to discover and exercise their transvolutionary gifts, but Buglet always insisted that the ultiman would come in time. Once Davey overheard low-voiced talk about the business of bearing a child. The goddess seemed concerned, and Buglet was certain she wouldn’t need a preman midwife. For a moment he felt a little hurt at being left out, because he and Buglet had always shared every thought.
On the fourth day, the goddess was expecting Pipkin back. Busy that morning cutting tall grass to thatch the cabin, he listened and watched the sky, waiting for the shuttle. It didn’t return. By late afternoon Zhondra was anxious, her aura pale and unsteady. She left them at last, levitating toward the zenith. The sun had set before she dropped back.
“They’ve gone.” Her aura was faint in the dusk, dimly blue. “I climbed above the air, high enough to survey the whole continent. I couldn’t find the shuttle. I searched the orbit for my ship. It too is gone.”
Davey stood silent, stunned that a goddess should suffer such a loss.
“So Pipkin took it?” Buglet frowned. “I trusted him.”
“Don’t blame him too much,” Zhondra protested. “He has lived his whole life in hiding, in terror of the gods. He must have been afraid Belthar would find him here and punish him for aiding you.”
“El Sapo—” Davey blinked into the twilight. “They must have planned it together.” His breath caught. “That’s why he took so many of his cronies and their women.” He peered at the shining goddess. “Where do you think they went?”
“No telling. The other planets of this sun are either hot and airless or cold gas giants, all unfit for settlement. There’s no other star in normal cruising range. To find any better world, I think they would have to climb back through some contact plane—”
“And leave this universe? With the risk that Belthar might detect them?”
“That’s possible.” She gave Buglet a quizzical smile. “Maybe it will be the danger you need.”
She went back to the landing that night, along with the worried group of leaderless premen who had come begging her for help.
“It’s time, Davey,” Buglet whispered when they were gone. “We must make the baby now.”
They ran down hand in hand to bathe in the quiet sea. The double moon cast their shadows on the sand, long and black, oddly edged with red.
Buglet was talkative at first, wondering whether the little ultiman would have their preman form, or whether he would wear a halo like a god, or perhaps be something altogether new. When he said nothing, she too fell silent. He was trembling, filled with a solemn awe.
In the cool surf, they washed off the day’s grit and sweat. Watching her rise before him out of a dark wave, he shivered again. The moonlight drew a strange outline around her, one edge rose, the other silver. Her white skin shone and her thrusting nipples parted the bright black strands of her clinging hair. Her quick kiss had a cool salt taste, and her loveliness made an ache in his loins.
Needing no speech, they climbed silently back up the rocky trail to the new cabin. Their bed was a frame of peeled poles across the end of the tiny, mud-walled room, filled with branch-tips and dried grass. The glow of their dying cook fire came faintly through the open doorway, redder than the rusty moon, and he caught its smoky scent.
When the moment came, when he met the magic of her warm and firmly yielding flesh and had the clean taste of her discovering tongue, he felt suddenly weak and afraid. Who was he, to make the ultiman? With his toil-blistered hands still stinging from the sea salt, how could he dare challenge the hostile gods?
“Davey!” Her breath was warm and sweet in his face. “The baby won’t wait!”
She moved deliciously beneath him, and they began to make the ultiman.
3.
When two short months had gone with no news from Pipkin or the missing starship, they built a home for Zhondra Zhey on Eden. She picked the site for it—a rocky point above the sea but near the landing—and she gave her own transvolutionary aid.
Davey used the laser drill to level the floor and to square massive stones that she levitated to lay up the walls. Pious premen cut logs that she lifted, riding them through the sky to plant them for entry columns or place them for roof beams.
The finished chapel was modest enough, but for Davey it held more sublimity than all of Belthar’s enormous Terran monuments. To the abandoned premen, Zhondra was becoming mentor, healer, and judge, a genuine divinity. To him and Buglet, she was now a cheerful friend, unassuming and undemanding.
They had needed her aid through that first hard season. Starvation had been near. Though some of the native fruits and roots could be prepared and eaten, they bloated the belly without sustaining life. A few of the shy little wild creatures had been trapped, but they were no more fit for food—because, she said, Eden’s ecology was built from an alien set of amino acids.
Precious seed had been lost at first, until they learned how to feed the young plants with recycled waste, but the soil was rich enough with minerals and watered nearly every afternoon with a brief and gentle rain. By the time the chapel was roofed, bits of Eden had become abundant gardens, yielding beans and squash and yams and corn. A few stray grains of rice and wheat had sprouted, promising seed for future fields. There was still no meat—no large domestic animals had been shipped to Andoranda Five, because they couldn’t reproduce there—but the colonists were breeding rabbits and chickens from pets the children had managed to bring.
Gold eyes bright, Buglet told Davey that the little ultiman was on the way. Her elation gave him a pang of unexpected fear that the coming child, so wonderful and powerful, might take away the love that had been his. Though he strove against that disloyal dread, it came back again and again to haunt him.
Yet, most of the time, he felt happier than he had ever been, because Buglet was so radiant. Certainly her love had not yet diminished. The days were good, spent together at work or swimming in the tranquil sea; the nights revealed new orders of joy.
Out of habit, he listened now and then for the shuttle or scanned the sky for its plume of steam, but it did not return. At the urging of the goddess, he tried sometimes to recover those genetic gifts that had once been strong enough to lift them away from Earth, but Buglet was too utterly absorbed with the child to give him any aid and the placid charms of Eden always hid the reality of danger too completely. His uncertain efforts failed.
With Eden’s axis only slightly tilted, the brief seasons flowed by with little change. Mild spring changed to milder summer, only slightly warmer. They finished the dam and opened a ditch to bring water to the garden if the rains should fail. They planted a row of chili and an apple seedling. They added another room to the cabin, to be a nursery for the ultiman. Preman friends brought gifts for it, and slabs of a white bark that could be pounded into cloth.
Summer turned to fall, not quite so warm or wet, too soon for Davey. Living with that secret terror of springtime and the ultiman, savoring each fleeting day of Buglet’s love, he felt almost glad that Pipkin had not come back with the ship.
“Dave—Davey!”
Wanting nothing to break the simple cycle of their lives, he had to hide a jolt of fear that day when she came back from a visit to the goddess, breathless with a new excitement. He had been clearing a new garden plot. He dropped the spade and waited uneasily.
“Zhondra says we aren’t alone.” Flushed with feeling, she gestured toward the beach. “She has got in touch with civilized creatures—living under the ocean!”
He breathed again, relieved. “Under the ocean, they shouldn’t matter to us.”
“But they’re amphibian. They can breathe air. Zhondra hasn’t seen them yet, though she has been learning their language through transvolutionary contact. They’re coming ashore tonight—a group of three. She wants us to wait with her to meet them.”
“Must we?”
“Of course we must.” She stared at him, startled. “Why not?”
“I’m happy as we are.” He reached to take her hand. “I don’t want anything to change.”
With an understanding smile, she leaned to kiss him. “I love the way we are,” she whispered. “But things do change. You know that, Davey. We can’t stop change.”
The meeting was planned for moon-rise—even the soft sun of Eden, the goddess said, was too severe for the amphibians. They went down with her at dusk to the beach beneath her chapel.
Waiting, they swam in the softly breaking surf. The goddess, in her opalescent halo, looked as humanly seductive as Buglet. His awe of her was not entirely gone, but she seemed as easy with them as another preman, racing with them, diving till he couldn’t help feeling frightened for her and darting up beside him, nude and dripping, alluring in her pale iridescence. Once he felt his penis rise and dived to hide his sudden confused desire. She and Buglet stood together, smiling, when he dared look at them again.
Graver when the moonglow came, she led them back to the hard white sand. Drying, shivering a little in the cool land breeze, they sat watching the water. The moons rose together, the white one in eclipse. The dull glow of the crimson moon seemed baleful to Davey, but soon the other had climbed from behind it, silvering everything.
With a shining dart of her aura, Zhondra pointed.
“There—” Wonder had broken Buglet’s voice. “There they come!”
Three bright flakes of foam, swimming in through the silvered surf. Three tapered shapes that left the black water, came sailing through the moonlight, settled lightly below them on the sand.
The goddess called a strange sound of greeting and levitated a little way to meet them. Buglet moved as if to follow, but Davey caught her arm. He shivered again, as if the night wind had grown colder, and stood peering at the creatures, groping for some sense of what they were and what they meant. Streamlined for the sea, they were shaped a little like the seals and dolphins he had seen on truman wall-screens, but they were luminous, wrapped in blue auras almost as bright as Zhondra’s.
“They can levitate,” he whispered to Buglet. “They’re—”
He wanted to call them godlike, but dread had hushed his voice. Floating in the moonlight, dipping graceful flukes for anchors on the sand, they seemed as light as balloons. Sleek within their separate blue cloudlets, they had very fine scales or very fine fur—he couldn’t be sure. It was white over the belly, shading smoothly into jet across the back. Their arms were slender flippers, edged with streaks of brighter fire. One had picked up a shell with its fingered nimbus.
Their eyes were even stranger. Wide, bright discs, with bars of shifting color radiating from tiny black pupils. Their owlish stares alarmed him, because they seemed to see too much.
Floating closer, Zhondra spoke to them with words he had never heard. Their replies were silent—seemingly, their physical speech was the play of shade and hue in those glowing rings around their actual eyes. He understood nothing of it, and he began to wonder why she had wanted them to come.
That odd conference continued for a long time. Tired of standing, he and Buglet sat back on the damp sand. He saw her shiver and put a towel around her. The moons climbed higher, the red-rimmed shadows drawing shorter. Once, when the land breeze lulled, he caught the odor of the creatures, rank and snakelike.
“Jondarc!” the goddess called suddenly. “They want to meet you.”
She stood up, tossing off the towel. He caught her hand to hold her back, but she slipped away from him with a look that seemed a warning. Silently, seeming unafraid, she walked past the goddess toward the amphibians. They lifted and swam to gather around her. Their great eyes studied her. Drifting closer, they reached almost to touch her with their quick black flippers. With tendrils of pale blue fire, they fingered her face and her hair. They palped her swelling belly.
It seemed an endless time to Davey before they swam aside, dropping back to touch the sand and turning the wink and shimmer of their talking eyes again to the goddess. Left alone, Buglet stood crouched against the wind. Now, Davey thought, she looked bewildered and afraid.
“Thank you, Jondarc,” the goddess murmured. “That was what they wanted.”
For a moment, as if paralyzed with dread, she didn’t move at all. Turning as if the movement took an effort, she looked back at the amphibians. They ignored her now. She caught a gasping breath and darted up the beach and into Davey’s arms. He could feel the pounding of her heart.
Drawing farther back behind the goddess, they watched. At last they sat again, the towel around them both. The moons climbed, and still that singular parley went on. He was stiff and chilled before the amphibians blinked their enigmatic farewell and dived back into the sea.
Zhondra floated gravely to them, her halo pale.
“They frighten me.” Buglet stared after them, across the dark ocean. “What do they want?”
“They’re afraid,” the goddess said. “Afraid of you.”
They climbed after her back to the rustic chapel. She invited them inside. Sitting at an axe-hewn table behind the altar, they had crisp little bean cakes from offerings the premen had brought, and pottery cups of a spicy tea brewed from a benign native herb.
“I know we talked a long time.” She smiled at Davey’s restless impatience. “The amphibians were trying to summarize a good many million years of history. Though the details are mostly lost, it seems that high intelligence had evolved here—on dry land. The arts of genetic engineering were invented. The new creators made three races. One was to inherit the continent. Another was adapted for space. The third was these amphibians.
“Their history prefigures our Terran tragedy. Having supplanted their own creators, the new beings were afraid of new supplanters. The chief conflict rose between the continental beings and the space mutations, who had been established on the moons.
“The creators had been killed, as Eva Smithwick was, in the effort to stop creation. The amphibians claim that their histories don’t tell whether it was the land folk or the space folk that killed them. I can’t help suspecting that the sea folk did it themselves.
