Collected Short Fiction, page 750
“Anyhow, as their story goes, the space people and the land people each believed that the other had stolen the secret crafts of creation. Each feared that the other would make deadlier things to destroy them. To prevent that, they fought. Their final war left the craters we have seen and wiped both races out.
“The amphibians survived, though pretty narrowly. Most of their city domes were wrecked, and the whole ocean was poisoned with residual radioactives that washed off the land. They were saved—at least a handful of them—by their transvolutionary powers.”
On three sides, the altar place was open to the sky. Moonlight fell across them, silver bars rimmed with crimson. A cold night wind came through the axe-carved posts behind them, and Davey felt Buglet shivering against him.
“So now you’ll understand.” The goddess extended her aura to pour more steaming tea. “That’s why the amphibians fear you.”
“But I don’t understand,” Buglet whispered. “We won’t hurt them.”
“They’ve lived through one war between new creations. They want to avoid another.”
“How?” Davey demanded. “What can they do?”
“We were debating that. I wanted them to help us hide and protect the young ultiman, but they’re afraid to take sides.” Uncertainty shadowed her nimbus. “I don’t know what they’ll do.”
“How do they know so much about us?”
“They have transvolutionary senses.” Her quick smile forgave his unuttered accusation. “They were observing us before we ever landed. I was careful to tell them no more than they had already suspected.”
“Now what?” Defensively, his arm slid around Buglet. “What can we do?”
“We can keep on hoping the gods don’t find us.” In her faintly glowing veil, Zhondra shrugged. “The amphibians are afraid they will.”
Returning to their cabin, Davey and Buglet had to walk along the beach. They hurried silently, hand in hand, watching the moonlit sea. A cloud had covered the snow moon, and the other dyed the murmuring surf a fatal scarlet. Davey’s throat was dry with dread before they reached their own rocky path.
“If we needed danger,” he muttered, “we have it now.”
“Trust the ultiman,” Buglet urged him cheerily. “He won’t have to fear amphibians—or anything.”
That winter they sowed a narrow strip of wheat in front of the cabin, and rice in a tiny plot they could flood from the dam. They bartered red beans for a hen and a setting of eggs. On a soft spring morning, Davey persuaded Buglet to come with him to the clinic the colonists had built. The preman surgeon shook his head very gravely when the examination was done and pronounced the child too large for her. Only a section, he said, could save it. Unfortunately, with his limited equipment and inadequate supplies, in such a difficult case he promised nothing for the mother.
Untroubled, she refused his surgery.
“I’ll be okay,” she whispered to Davey as they were leaving. “The ultiman won’t hurt me.”
She was napping, the next afternoon, and he was building a wattle coop for the hen, when the mild sky began to ring with the jets of the shuttle. Unbelieving, he saw it settling on its cushion of dazzling steam toward the landing. He woke her to tell her.
“Go get the news.” She sat up heavily. “I’ll wait—I don’t want to walk so far.”
Jogging up the beach, he was passing the chapel when he saw a small yellow projectile dropping toward it from the direction of the landing. It was Pipkin, levitating. The tiny god alighted, waved a long arm at him, and hopped into the altar place.
He found El Sapo and his followers still near the pad, locked in a hostile confrontation with El Jefe, the new leader of the premen. The men were long-bearded and the women bedraggled, all of them pinched from starvation, but El Sapo was trying to assert his old authority.
Before he became El Jefe, the new leader had been Jesus Cabrito, named by his mother for some forgotten preman demigod. A stringy little weak-eyed man, he had been the Redrock jailor for many years. His present elevation came from a few marijuana seeds he had brought from Earth. Now, squeaky-voiced with alarm, he was demanding information about where El Sapo had been.
“Nowhere.” El Sapo’s heavy paunch was gone. “We were looking for a better place—better for all.” His murky eyes squinted shrewdly at El Jefe. “A place where we could mine good metal and eat the plants and hunt for meat that wouldn’t give you colic.”
He clucked and shook his grizzled head.
“We never found it. We did get lost—or Pipkin did. Stupid little mis-creation. Wits gone the way of his legs. We had to ration everything. Pure luck the muman astronaut got us back before we all died of famine.”
He demanded food and shelter. El Jefe sent for tortillas and a pot of beans, but he wanted confessions and apologies from the deserters and a promise of respect for his own position. El Sapo kept insisting that he had been risking himself and his friends for the benefit of all, with no intention of deserting.
Snatching ravenously with filthy fingers, he and his people scooped up the tortillas and beans, but at sunset their future status was not yet settled. With no real information gained, Davey hurried back down the beach. At first he meant to stop at the chapel to see what he could learn from Zhondra and Pipkin, but a vague unease spurred him home. The moonless dusk was thick when he climbed back to the cabin.
“Bug?”
She didn’t answer his apprehensive hail. The cook fire was dying, the cabin dark and empty. She was gone.
4.
He stirred the coals to get fire for a torch and searched the cabin again. Table and stools had been overturned. Fragments of a broken pot grated under his feet. The floor was sticky with spilled chili stew, the air edged with a faint burnt scent of the yams Buglet had been baking in the ashes. Nothing told him anything about her attacker.
Frantic now, he ran circles around the cabin, bending to scan the ground. He found no strange footprints, no sign of further violence, no clues at all. When the torch flickered out, he picked his way by starlight down to the sea and ran up the beach toward the chapel, reckless of the rocks and driftwood that tripped him again and again.
The dark moon was rising before he arrived, its blood-colored glow in the altar hall as ghastly as his terror. Zhondra sat slumped down on her rough stone altar, so lifeless that he wondered if her dim gray nimbus had become too weak to lift her. Pipkin was hopping erratically here and there, as if the floor burned his hands.
He panted his news that Buglet was gone.
Zhondra’s eyes were dilated and black, staring blankly out into the red gloom beyond the posts. She made no sign of hearing.
“Don’t vex her now,” Pipkin whined. “She’s got troubles enough.”
“Can’t you hear?” he shouted. “Bug’s gone!”
“I know.” She turned briefly to him then, with a glance of sad sympathy. “She vanished from my perceptions just after sunset. I sensed an instant of shock and fear, but I couldn’t catch the cause! That was all. I have been searching, but I can’t feel her mind.”
“What could have got her?” He waved the furry godlet out of his way. “What can we do?”
Deaf to him again, she gazed back into the reddened dark.
“Blame me, Davey.” Pipkin shambled toward him, narrow face abject, green stare fixed on his feet. “Forgive me, if you can. I gave us all away—but not because I meant to. I was afraid of Belthar—I’ve always been afraid. I took the ship and that pack of rascals to look for a safer planet.”
“Which you didn’t find.” Anger grated in Davey’s voice. “I guess you brought trouble back.”
“The tragic truth.” His bald head bobbed. “But not out of malice—believe me, Davey! We were victims of monstrous mischance. I knew Belthar would be scouring all the universes, and I never planned to compromise our safety here—and don’t you forget that I’m the one who found this asylum for us! You’ll forgive me, Davey, when you know the dark story of our misfortunes. An evil fate pursued us, more fearful than the gods.”
A tear of self-pity shone in his eye.
“When the other planets of this sun proved unfit for life, we set out for the only nearby star—it’s a red dwarf you can’t see from these latitudes. The muman tried to warn us that it was too far, but I didn’t want to risk breaking through a contact locus into any space where Belthar’s armadas might be cruising.
“Our voyage took too long. The reaction mass was dangerously depleted, and food for the premen ran short. When at last we got in telescopic range, the star proved to be a close binary, with no planets at all.
“With no oceans for water, we had to orbit the double sun to search for cometary snowballs from which reactor mass could be refined. That took too long. The premen were near starvation. With no other star within possible range, we were really desperate—don’t you understand?”
“I understand enough.”
“Believe me, Davey!” the pink doll-face twitched as if with actual pain. “We had no choice. I had to search out a contact plane. We slipped through it—hoping not to be observed. Unluckily for everybody—by unexpected and appalling misadventure—the gods had a monitor there. We were observed.”
“So you did betray us?”
“Don’t—don’t be so harsh.” The piercing insect creak hurt Davey’s ears. “We were all betrayed, don’t you see? Cut down by the monstrous enormity of fate.” Pipkin bent his arms to sit weakly on the floor. “Don’t—don’t you see?”
“I see your treason,” Davey rasped. “You gave away the secret that had been saving us. The gods observed you. I guess they followed you back.” He swung to Zhondra. “Is that why—whatever happened to Bug?”
“Possible.” She nodded forlornly. “The coincidence does suggest a connection, but I can’t discover what it is.”
“But the gods have found us.” He scowled at Pipkin. “And they’re coming now?”
“I’ve just had a glimpse of Belthar in his Terran temple.” Her faint aura grew even fainter. “I don’t know how, because that’s far beyond the normal reach of my perceptions. But I saw him.”
Her pale hands spread and fell in a gesture of despair.
“He was giving orders to scores of the gods, there in his transceiver columns. Most of them were already on their battlecraft in space. He’s sending them through all the contact planes around Eden, to close in all around us. He wants the planet sterilized.”
“I thought—” He braced himself as if to take a blow.
“I hoped it wouldn’t be so soon.”
“The nearest ships did follow Pipkin,” she said. “They’re all faster than our transport.”
“Are they already—” Dread dried his throat. “Could they have taken Buglet?”
“I don’t know.” The snow moon was rising now. In its cold light, she looked small and vulnerable and infinitely sad. “If they aren’t here now, they will be soon.”
“What—” He stood swaying, clenching his fists, feeling utterly trapped, unable to think or act or even to breathe. “What—”
“You’ve been saying you need danger.” She aroused herself to give him a wry and tiny smile. “Our situation has surely become dangerous enough. If you’re ever going to find your ancestral gifts, you’d better find them now.”
“But Bug’s gone.” Hopelessly, he shook his head. “Our transvolutionary actions always took both of us. More always came from her than me. I can’t—can’t do anything alone.”
“If you can’t defend us—” She looked suddenly through the posts into the milk-white sky, as if she had sensed something new there—something that appalled her. Her voice was fainter than her aura, “—nobody can.”
He stood numb, unnerved and powerless.
“Davey?” Pipkin’s tiny whine seemed far away. “Won’t you understand that we never meant to harm you or your wonderful Buglet.” Standing on one hand, the godlet reached to tweak his sleeve. “Can’t you forgive me?”
He looked down at Pipkin with a stiff little grin.
“I’ll forgive you, Pip,” he whispered. “If that matters now.”
“Thank you, Davey!” Pipkin seized his hand. “It matters greatly to me that now we’re friends again.”
The grasp of the horny paw seemed pathetically firm, but the lone green eye stabbed at him with such a calculating shrewdness that he knew the godlet was moved more by fear than friendship—fear, even of him.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Now what can we do?”
“Nothing we can do.” Pipkin sagged back to the floor, great arms sprawling, lifeless as a broken doll. “It’s all up to you.”
“Zhondra—”
Sunk down on her rude little altar, still as a statue in the white moonlight, she didn’t seem to hear. Her dilated eyes were gazing far away again, perhaps at the jealous gods.
“I’m going back.” He turned uncertainly away. “To look for Bug.”
Outside the chapel, he glanced toward the preman town. Except for one torch flaring above the door of the council hall, it seemed peacefully asleep, unwarned of any peril. He saw no help there. El Sapo and Jesus Cabrito were probably still squabbling for domination, but neither would love the unborn ultiman.
He tramped back down the moon-washed beach. Though rocks and driftwood were now easy enough to see, he still sometimes stumbled blindly. Grappling desperately to reach his latent powers, he found only sick frustration. His few successful leaps out of space and back had always required a clear image of the arrival point. The battles he had won, with muman and clone, demon and Belthar’s son, had always been close face-to-face encounters. With all his groping, he could reach no actual contact with any enemy, find no picture of any place where he could go for Buglet.
He was turning up the path off the beach when sudden thunder crashed across the moon-white sky. Cliffs and trees stood sharply black against a blue false dawn behind him. A hot blue star climbed out of it, trailing a swelling wake of illuminated steam.
The shuttle, taking off. Was Pipkin trying to escape again before the gods could strike at Eden? Had the goddess fled? Or both of them? He watched until the sky was silent and the fire had faded from the vapor trail. Feeling utterly abandoned, he turned bitterly again to search the path for footprints, for blood, for bits of Buglet’s clothing.
For anything, for any clue—
A purple flash made him duck. Something heavy grazed his shoulder. The impact knocked him off the trail, sent him reeling to his knees, his nostrils filled with a rank muskiness.
What had struck him was a long, sharklike shape. Sliding on above him, it spun against the sky and came flying back, vast eye-discs blazing. Pale blue fire bathed it, flowing in thin bright fingerlike jets from its reaching flippers.
The truth hit him, a second dazing blow. The amphibians, with their transvolutionary senses, had already perceived the approaching armada of the gods. Trying to forestall the kind of conflict that had once wrecked their world, they had taken Buglet—where, he couldn’t guess.
Now they had come back for—
The thing was diving at him again, snatching for him with those long claws of sapphire light. He dropped flat, rolled aside. He felt the reaching nimbus seize him. His body dragged on the gravel, began to lift. He caught a shrub with both hands, clung desperately.
The great tapered body went on by, swept ahead by its own momentum. The drag upon him weakened and broke. He fell heavily back to the path. The creature whirled above him, eclipsing the double moon, and dived again.
Half stunned from the fall, his breath knocked out, he scrabbled for any sort of weapon. For a stick he could punch into those purple eyes. A rock he could throw—
Something caught his feet.
Before he could clutch at anything, he was dragged into the air. Hanging head down, he was carried toward the sea. The moon-bright beach raced back beneath him. He saw the red-fringed shadow of the thing that had captured him. Two others followed.
The amphibians came in threes. They shared the multiversal energies of the gods, and they meant to defend their underwater world. Considered objectively, they were perhaps as blameless as El Sapo and Pipkin claimed to be. But, with his senses spinning and his blood pounding in his ears, Davey didn’t feel objective.
He bent his body, clutching at the lean black flipper. His fingers slipped at first, but then they clung. He clawed his way upward around that huge, blue-glowing barrel. Suddenly he was astride it.
The amphibian began to buck beneath him, like a mule he had tried to ride long ago back at Redrock in El Yaqui’s corral. The brown mule had thrown him, while little Buglet shrieked with terror for him and the old trader laughed, but now he kept his seat, digging his heels into yielding, rank-scented, gill-tissue, hanging on with both hands.
With his own halo!
For his hands were shining now, filmed with cool white fire. It flowed from his fingers into long bright talons hooked into the creature’s fighting flesh.
A savage exultation seized him. The amphibians were targets he could reach, and they had brought the shocking danger he had to have. Testing the new power of his aura, he probed into its pitching body, searching for something vital.
It screamed. The creatures had been mute, the whole encounter silent, and that eerie whistle startled him. The thing dived into the shallow surf, splashing him with brine. It climbed again, turning until he hung beneath it. As if blind with fear and pain, it wheeled back toward the shore.
Deep inside it, he found a firm pulsing organ that he thought must be a heart. He gripped it hard, squeezing for its life. Shuddering above him, the creature dived for the beach.
He tore again at that dark heart. The sleek-scaled flesh jerked and stiffened. The blue aura flared and flickered out. He knew the thing was dead, but still the wind of its dive whistled in his ears. Falling on its back, it would catch him beneath it.
Still high above the white line of sand and surf, he let it go. Kicking away, he tumbled in the rushing air. Beneath him, the dark sea crept back. The sand expanded, bits of weed and shell creeping away from the jagged granite outcrop he would strike. It would surely kill him—unless he could levitate.
“The amphibians survived, though pretty narrowly. Most of their city domes were wrecked, and the whole ocean was poisoned with residual radioactives that washed off the land. They were saved—at least a handful of them—by their transvolutionary powers.”
On three sides, the altar place was open to the sky. Moonlight fell across them, silver bars rimmed with crimson. A cold night wind came through the axe-carved posts behind them, and Davey felt Buglet shivering against him.
“So now you’ll understand.” The goddess extended her aura to pour more steaming tea. “That’s why the amphibians fear you.”
“But I don’t understand,” Buglet whispered. “We won’t hurt them.”
“They’ve lived through one war between new creations. They want to avoid another.”
“How?” Davey demanded. “What can they do?”
“We were debating that. I wanted them to help us hide and protect the young ultiman, but they’re afraid to take sides.” Uncertainty shadowed her nimbus. “I don’t know what they’ll do.”
“How do they know so much about us?”
“They have transvolutionary senses.” Her quick smile forgave his unuttered accusation. “They were observing us before we ever landed. I was careful to tell them no more than they had already suspected.”
“Now what?” Defensively, his arm slid around Buglet. “What can we do?”
“We can keep on hoping the gods don’t find us.” In her faintly glowing veil, Zhondra shrugged. “The amphibians are afraid they will.”
Returning to their cabin, Davey and Buglet had to walk along the beach. They hurried silently, hand in hand, watching the moonlit sea. A cloud had covered the snow moon, and the other dyed the murmuring surf a fatal scarlet. Davey’s throat was dry with dread before they reached their own rocky path.
“If we needed danger,” he muttered, “we have it now.”
“Trust the ultiman,” Buglet urged him cheerily. “He won’t have to fear amphibians—or anything.”
That winter they sowed a narrow strip of wheat in front of the cabin, and rice in a tiny plot they could flood from the dam. They bartered red beans for a hen and a setting of eggs. On a soft spring morning, Davey persuaded Buglet to come with him to the clinic the colonists had built. The preman surgeon shook his head very gravely when the examination was done and pronounced the child too large for her. Only a section, he said, could save it. Unfortunately, with his limited equipment and inadequate supplies, in such a difficult case he promised nothing for the mother.
Untroubled, she refused his surgery.
“I’ll be okay,” she whispered to Davey as they were leaving. “The ultiman won’t hurt me.”
She was napping, the next afternoon, and he was building a wattle coop for the hen, when the mild sky began to ring with the jets of the shuttle. Unbelieving, he saw it settling on its cushion of dazzling steam toward the landing. He woke her to tell her.
“Go get the news.” She sat up heavily. “I’ll wait—I don’t want to walk so far.”
Jogging up the beach, he was passing the chapel when he saw a small yellow projectile dropping toward it from the direction of the landing. It was Pipkin, levitating. The tiny god alighted, waved a long arm at him, and hopped into the altar place.
He found El Sapo and his followers still near the pad, locked in a hostile confrontation with El Jefe, the new leader of the premen. The men were long-bearded and the women bedraggled, all of them pinched from starvation, but El Sapo was trying to assert his old authority.
Before he became El Jefe, the new leader had been Jesus Cabrito, named by his mother for some forgotten preman demigod. A stringy little weak-eyed man, he had been the Redrock jailor for many years. His present elevation came from a few marijuana seeds he had brought from Earth. Now, squeaky-voiced with alarm, he was demanding information about where El Sapo had been.
“Nowhere.” El Sapo’s heavy paunch was gone. “We were looking for a better place—better for all.” His murky eyes squinted shrewdly at El Jefe. “A place where we could mine good metal and eat the plants and hunt for meat that wouldn’t give you colic.”
He clucked and shook his grizzled head.
“We never found it. We did get lost—or Pipkin did. Stupid little mis-creation. Wits gone the way of his legs. We had to ration everything. Pure luck the muman astronaut got us back before we all died of famine.”
He demanded food and shelter. El Jefe sent for tortillas and a pot of beans, but he wanted confessions and apologies from the deserters and a promise of respect for his own position. El Sapo kept insisting that he had been risking himself and his friends for the benefit of all, with no intention of deserting.
Snatching ravenously with filthy fingers, he and his people scooped up the tortillas and beans, but at sunset their future status was not yet settled. With no real information gained, Davey hurried back down the beach. At first he meant to stop at the chapel to see what he could learn from Zhondra and Pipkin, but a vague unease spurred him home. The moonless dusk was thick when he climbed back to the cabin.
“Bug?”
She didn’t answer his apprehensive hail. The cook fire was dying, the cabin dark and empty. She was gone.
4.
He stirred the coals to get fire for a torch and searched the cabin again. Table and stools had been overturned. Fragments of a broken pot grated under his feet. The floor was sticky with spilled chili stew, the air edged with a faint burnt scent of the yams Buglet had been baking in the ashes. Nothing told him anything about her attacker.
Frantic now, he ran circles around the cabin, bending to scan the ground. He found no strange footprints, no sign of further violence, no clues at all. When the torch flickered out, he picked his way by starlight down to the sea and ran up the beach toward the chapel, reckless of the rocks and driftwood that tripped him again and again.
The dark moon was rising before he arrived, its blood-colored glow in the altar hall as ghastly as his terror. Zhondra sat slumped down on her rough stone altar, so lifeless that he wondered if her dim gray nimbus had become too weak to lift her. Pipkin was hopping erratically here and there, as if the floor burned his hands.
He panted his news that Buglet was gone.
Zhondra’s eyes were dilated and black, staring blankly out into the red gloom beyond the posts. She made no sign of hearing.
“Don’t vex her now,” Pipkin whined. “She’s got troubles enough.”
“Can’t you hear?” he shouted. “Bug’s gone!”
“I know.” She turned briefly to him then, with a glance of sad sympathy. “She vanished from my perceptions just after sunset. I sensed an instant of shock and fear, but I couldn’t catch the cause! That was all. I have been searching, but I can’t feel her mind.”
“What could have got her?” He waved the furry godlet out of his way. “What can we do?”
Deaf to him again, she gazed back into the reddened dark.
“Blame me, Davey.” Pipkin shambled toward him, narrow face abject, green stare fixed on his feet. “Forgive me, if you can. I gave us all away—but not because I meant to. I was afraid of Belthar—I’ve always been afraid. I took the ship and that pack of rascals to look for a safer planet.”
“Which you didn’t find.” Anger grated in Davey’s voice. “I guess you brought trouble back.”
“The tragic truth.” His bald head bobbed. “But not out of malice—believe me, Davey! We were victims of monstrous mischance. I knew Belthar would be scouring all the universes, and I never planned to compromise our safety here—and don’t you forget that I’m the one who found this asylum for us! You’ll forgive me, Davey, when you know the dark story of our misfortunes. An evil fate pursued us, more fearful than the gods.”
A tear of self-pity shone in his eye.
“When the other planets of this sun proved unfit for life, we set out for the only nearby star—it’s a red dwarf you can’t see from these latitudes. The muman tried to warn us that it was too far, but I didn’t want to risk breaking through a contact locus into any space where Belthar’s armadas might be cruising.
“Our voyage took too long. The reaction mass was dangerously depleted, and food for the premen ran short. When at last we got in telescopic range, the star proved to be a close binary, with no planets at all.
“With no oceans for water, we had to orbit the double sun to search for cometary snowballs from which reactor mass could be refined. That took too long. The premen were near starvation. With no other star within possible range, we were really desperate—don’t you understand?”
“I understand enough.”
“Believe me, Davey!” the pink doll-face twitched as if with actual pain. “We had no choice. I had to search out a contact plane. We slipped through it—hoping not to be observed. Unluckily for everybody—by unexpected and appalling misadventure—the gods had a monitor there. We were observed.”
“So you did betray us?”
“Don’t—don’t be so harsh.” The piercing insect creak hurt Davey’s ears. “We were all betrayed, don’t you see? Cut down by the monstrous enormity of fate.” Pipkin bent his arms to sit weakly on the floor. “Don’t—don’t you see?”
“I see your treason,” Davey rasped. “You gave away the secret that had been saving us. The gods observed you. I guess they followed you back.” He swung to Zhondra. “Is that why—whatever happened to Bug?”
“Possible.” She nodded forlornly. “The coincidence does suggest a connection, but I can’t discover what it is.”
“But the gods have found us.” He scowled at Pipkin. “And they’re coming now?”
“I’ve just had a glimpse of Belthar in his Terran temple.” Her faint aura grew even fainter. “I don’t know how, because that’s far beyond the normal reach of my perceptions. But I saw him.”
Her pale hands spread and fell in a gesture of despair.
“He was giving orders to scores of the gods, there in his transceiver columns. Most of them were already on their battlecraft in space. He’s sending them through all the contact planes around Eden, to close in all around us. He wants the planet sterilized.”
“I thought—” He braced himself as if to take a blow.
“I hoped it wouldn’t be so soon.”
“The nearest ships did follow Pipkin,” she said. “They’re all faster than our transport.”
“Are they already—” Dread dried his throat. “Could they have taken Buglet?”
“I don’t know.” The snow moon was rising now. In its cold light, she looked small and vulnerable and infinitely sad. “If they aren’t here now, they will be soon.”
“What—” He stood swaying, clenching his fists, feeling utterly trapped, unable to think or act or even to breathe. “What—”
“You’ve been saying you need danger.” She aroused herself to give him a wry and tiny smile. “Our situation has surely become dangerous enough. If you’re ever going to find your ancestral gifts, you’d better find them now.”
“But Bug’s gone.” Hopelessly, he shook his head. “Our transvolutionary actions always took both of us. More always came from her than me. I can’t—can’t do anything alone.”
“If you can’t defend us—” She looked suddenly through the posts into the milk-white sky, as if she had sensed something new there—something that appalled her. Her voice was fainter than her aura, “—nobody can.”
He stood numb, unnerved and powerless.
“Davey?” Pipkin’s tiny whine seemed far away. “Won’t you understand that we never meant to harm you or your wonderful Buglet.” Standing on one hand, the godlet reached to tweak his sleeve. “Can’t you forgive me?”
He looked down at Pipkin with a stiff little grin.
“I’ll forgive you, Pip,” he whispered. “If that matters now.”
“Thank you, Davey!” Pipkin seized his hand. “It matters greatly to me that now we’re friends again.”
The grasp of the horny paw seemed pathetically firm, but the lone green eye stabbed at him with such a calculating shrewdness that he knew the godlet was moved more by fear than friendship—fear, even of him.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Now what can we do?”
“Nothing we can do.” Pipkin sagged back to the floor, great arms sprawling, lifeless as a broken doll. “It’s all up to you.”
“Zhondra—”
Sunk down on her rude little altar, still as a statue in the white moonlight, she didn’t seem to hear. Her dilated eyes were gazing far away again, perhaps at the jealous gods.
“I’m going back.” He turned uncertainly away. “To look for Bug.”
Outside the chapel, he glanced toward the preman town. Except for one torch flaring above the door of the council hall, it seemed peacefully asleep, unwarned of any peril. He saw no help there. El Sapo and Jesus Cabrito were probably still squabbling for domination, but neither would love the unborn ultiman.
He tramped back down the moon-washed beach. Though rocks and driftwood were now easy enough to see, he still sometimes stumbled blindly. Grappling desperately to reach his latent powers, he found only sick frustration. His few successful leaps out of space and back had always required a clear image of the arrival point. The battles he had won, with muman and clone, demon and Belthar’s son, had always been close face-to-face encounters. With all his groping, he could reach no actual contact with any enemy, find no picture of any place where he could go for Buglet.
He was turning up the path off the beach when sudden thunder crashed across the moon-white sky. Cliffs and trees stood sharply black against a blue false dawn behind him. A hot blue star climbed out of it, trailing a swelling wake of illuminated steam.
The shuttle, taking off. Was Pipkin trying to escape again before the gods could strike at Eden? Had the goddess fled? Or both of them? He watched until the sky was silent and the fire had faded from the vapor trail. Feeling utterly abandoned, he turned bitterly again to search the path for footprints, for blood, for bits of Buglet’s clothing.
For anything, for any clue—
A purple flash made him duck. Something heavy grazed his shoulder. The impact knocked him off the trail, sent him reeling to his knees, his nostrils filled with a rank muskiness.
What had struck him was a long, sharklike shape. Sliding on above him, it spun against the sky and came flying back, vast eye-discs blazing. Pale blue fire bathed it, flowing in thin bright fingerlike jets from its reaching flippers.
The truth hit him, a second dazing blow. The amphibians, with their transvolutionary senses, had already perceived the approaching armada of the gods. Trying to forestall the kind of conflict that had once wrecked their world, they had taken Buglet—where, he couldn’t guess.
Now they had come back for—
The thing was diving at him again, snatching for him with those long claws of sapphire light. He dropped flat, rolled aside. He felt the reaching nimbus seize him. His body dragged on the gravel, began to lift. He caught a shrub with both hands, clung desperately.
The great tapered body went on by, swept ahead by its own momentum. The drag upon him weakened and broke. He fell heavily back to the path. The creature whirled above him, eclipsing the double moon, and dived again.
Half stunned from the fall, his breath knocked out, he scrabbled for any sort of weapon. For a stick he could punch into those purple eyes. A rock he could throw—
Something caught his feet.
Before he could clutch at anything, he was dragged into the air. Hanging head down, he was carried toward the sea. The moon-bright beach raced back beneath him. He saw the red-fringed shadow of the thing that had captured him. Two others followed.
The amphibians came in threes. They shared the multiversal energies of the gods, and they meant to defend their underwater world. Considered objectively, they were perhaps as blameless as El Sapo and Pipkin claimed to be. But, with his senses spinning and his blood pounding in his ears, Davey didn’t feel objective.
He bent his body, clutching at the lean black flipper. His fingers slipped at first, but then they clung. He clawed his way upward around that huge, blue-glowing barrel. Suddenly he was astride it.
The amphibian began to buck beneath him, like a mule he had tried to ride long ago back at Redrock in El Yaqui’s corral. The brown mule had thrown him, while little Buglet shrieked with terror for him and the old trader laughed, but now he kept his seat, digging his heels into yielding, rank-scented, gill-tissue, hanging on with both hands.
With his own halo!
For his hands were shining now, filmed with cool white fire. It flowed from his fingers into long bright talons hooked into the creature’s fighting flesh.
A savage exultation seized him. The amphibians were targets he could reach, and they had brought the shocking danger he had to have. Testing the new power of his aura, he probed into its pitching body, searching for something vital.
It screamed. The creatures had been mute, the whole encounter silent, and that eerie whistle startled him. The thing dived into the shallow surf, splashing him with brine. It climbed again, turning until he hung beneath it. As if blind with fear and pain, it wheeled back toward the shore.
Deep inside it, he found a firm pulsing organ that he thought must be a heart. He gripped it hard, squeezing for its life. Shuddering above him, the creature dived for the beach.
He tore again at that dark heart. The sleek-scaled flesh jerked and stiffened. The blue aura flared and flickered out. He knew the thing was dead, but still the wind of its dive whistled in his ears. Falling on its back, it would catch him beneath it.
Still high above the white line of sand and surf, he let it go. Kicking away, he tumbled in the rushing air. Beneath him, the dark sea crept back. The sand expanded, bits of weed and shell creeping away from the jagged granite outcrop he would strike. It would surely kill him—unless he could levitate.
