Forge of the Elders, page 5
"Down there?" Recognizing a pressure lock when he saw one, Gutierrez laid a reluctant hand on the door-frame, turning to confront his strange guide with an expression, more than skeptical, which he wondered if the nonhuman could read. "What the hell do I wear, scuba gear?"
There it was again, that blue-green flash amidst the powdery gray-white of scaly feathers. Aelbraugh Pritsch blinked at him. "If you refer to mechanical breathing apparatus, not at all, sir. The liquid's fully charged with oxygen, every bit as breathable as air, and rather pleasant to the tactile senses. Nor will it damage anything you wear or carry with you, even the most primitive electronics. In that sense, it's quite inert. However, I do advise you to exhale completely before you take your first breath, as an uncomfortable cramping, owing to bubbles trapped in the respiratory system, may otherwise result."
The general braced both hands against the door-frame, like the family dog, he realized, reluctant to be bathed. His ostensible purpose was to lean in for a better look. "Let me get this straight: I'm supposed to walk down those stairs, duck my head, take a breath, and—"
The Proprietor's assistant raised a long, slender, admonitory finger. "Remembering to exhale thoroughly first."
This time Gutierrez blinked. "Remembering to—remind me to take you sky-diving some time. You're not coming along?"
The dinosauroid's scaly plumage fluffed out around his body, as if in alarm. In vain, Gutierrez watched for another glimpse of the turquoise-colored symbiote or parasite, wondering why it seemed so important. "Oh, no, sir! Not at all. This interview is to be private. Besides, I've other business to attend."
"I'll bet you do." Feeling a good deal less jocular than he hoped he sounded, he trod down the steps. "Well, my GI insurance is paid up. Here goes nothing!" He entered the liquid, which surprised him with its warmth where it lapped his ankles, his knees, his thighs up to the crotch, the waist, and at last his chest. It wasn't entirely odorless, but the odor wasn't entirely unpleasant. With all the trepidation in the world, he exhaled hard and ducked his head.
A moment passed.
A small string of bubbles rose to the surface.
Unable to overcome a lifetime of reflex, Gutierrez crashed back up through the wave-chopped liquid without having taken a breath of the stuff, coughing, his lungs aching for no reason he knew.
"Do keep trying, General, please!" Aelbraugh Pritsch stood, a single amber eye peeking around the door at the top of the stairs. Another pair of eyes, black and tiny in their turquoise settings, glittered down at Gutierrez from the feathered creature's shoulder. The avian's voice echoed in the bare-walled chamber as he raised it over the man's spluttering. "The first breath's the hardest!"
Gutierrez wiped liquid, not entirely tasteless, from his eyes. "That's what they told the guy in the gas chamber!" Nevertheless, he set his jaw, exhaled, and took two steps in a single, inexorable bound, surprised to find himself breathing. As with water, he discovered he was quite nearsighted. It gave him a shut-in, claustrophobic feeling. Hand on the rail beside him, he approached another door, placed his free hand as he'd seen his guide do upstairs, let it swing before him, and stepped through.
It closed behind him, plunging him into darkness.
For more than a moment, this time, he regretted having turned down Estrellita's offer of her pistol. No expression he could think of was adequate to describe the utter blackness that enveloped him, after the cheerful glare of the pressure chamber upstairs. He was blinded, cloaked in silence as absolute as the darkness. Adjusted now to the surrounding liquid, its smell, its taste, its temperature, his sensory deprivation was complete. Nameless fear of the unknown rode his spine in waves which threatened to paralyze his mind altogether.
Concentrate! he ordered himself. What is there left to feel? The floor still retained its tackiness. The liquid medium in which he stood was less dense than water. Faint currents he could feel running through it didn't prevent him from maintaining an upright posture. When thirty seconds had crawled by, he began to make out blue-gray outlines. This wasn't an empty room; something was moving around him! Panic almost overtook him before he realized that the moving objects were marine plants, undulating with the gentle motion of the liquid.
Despite his fear, Gutierrez stepped forward, slowed by the fluorocarbon which made it all seem even more like the nightmare it was beginning to remind him of. Another slow-motion step. In the distance, blurred and exaggerated by refraction, he could make out the faint sparkle of colored lights. They twinkled at the far end of the chamber like pilots on a console, winking on and off at apparent random, appearing, disappearing, replaced by others which winked on and off in turn. They formed a pattern, he thought, like faraway Chinese lanterns strung on a line, bobbing in a breeze.
A few more steps brought him closer, but not to any better understanding of what they were. Darkness seemed to lift by stages as his eyes adjusted. The room, more and more visible in shades of gray-on-gray, began to assume dimensions: a ceiling low and oppressive overhead, enclosing walls more palpable than seen. Humped amorphous shadow-forms lurked about him. The blackest, most shapeless lay ahead. The chill he felt wash through his body had nothing to do with temperature.
Without warning, the darkest of the shadows pivoted before him with a low moan and a grating noise. Moved by a reflex he hadn't known he possessed, he slapped at his thigh, feeling liquid stream between his outstretched fingers, clawing for the weapon he wasn't carrying. A tangled mass of thick, writhing, fleshy ribbons squirmed toward his unprotected face, each illuminated along its undulating length by row after row of the bioluminescent spots he'd first seen a moment before.
A deep voice boomed. "You are the human leader, General Horatio Z. Gutierrez?"
The general gulped the sour taste of panic, prevented from mindless flight by nothing more than the density of the liquid around his body. He opened his mouth, only to discover that whatever knack speech required in this medium, he didn't have it. In front of him, the thrashing horror grated closer, the obscene mobility of that portion nearest him somehow limited by a grotesque, massive object at the rear.
Unbidden, the surrealistic image came to him of landed eels: horrible, slimy, maddened by barbed hooks in their tongues, squirming to regain the water, yet cruelly fastened by their tails to a granite tombstone grinding across the bank behind them.
Above the unthinkable junction where the tentacles found root, a pair of cold, golden, luminescent eyes regarded him, englobed in glassy corneal spheres and slitted, like those of a jungle cat. Behind them, the meter-thick tube of the monster's gigantic body disappeared into a vaster spiral-coiled shell that might have garaged a small automobile.
Somehow, Gutierrez found his voice, deepened by the liquid medium he forced it into.
"You're . . . the Proprietor?"
SIX Beer and Sympathy
A tentacle-tip stabbed toward a wall.
Illumination sprang up in a sudden flood, making Gutierrez blink. Before him, across the diameters of eyes the proverbial size of dinner plates, vast pupils shrank to fine, black vertical lines.
"Forgive me for not having done that sooner. You're rather earlier than expected, General Gutierrez, doubtless at the urging of my overly punctilious assistant, and I'm afraid you startled me. I'm descended from abyssal species, you know, and in any event, like you, would enjoy my dark, quiet hour of contemplation."
"I startled you," Gutierrez gulped, "the Proprietor?"
" `If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?' " A respiratory organ two hundred centimeters long and forty in diameter seemed to generate a colossal, godlike chuckle, rattling the man's teeth. "I'm a simple tradesman, my boy, no distinguished military hero like yourself, with nerves of steel. The individual who refers to me as `the Proprietor' possesses an unfortunate predilection for the melodramatic. Also, I suspect he thinks it looks good on his résumé. Everybody else calls me Mister Thoggosh, for the excellent reason that it happens to be my name."
Nerves of steel. Now that the danger was past, another humiliating wave of panic swept through the man's body, this one worst of all. This, he thought, must be what Vivian's been feeling—maybe even what Art feels all the time. "I'm pleased," he lied, attempting to control his bodily functions, "to meet you."
"Do try to relax," the giant told him. "I realize I'm something of a spectacle for anyone who's never seen the like, but I assure you I'm quite an ethical being. I wouldn't dream of eating you."
Gutierrez found himself muttering an inane, "That's nice . . ."
"And before we start, my boy, the next time you come to see me, by all means wear your side arm. Everybody here carries personal weapons. You appear quite unclothed without yours."
Gutierrez suddenly wished for a chair, although most of his weight was supported by the liquid filling the room. Growing calmer, he glanced around. In one corner, suspended on light, decorative cords between floor and ceiling, hung a cage about the right size for a small parrot. Through the bars, he could see, "perched" in "midair," a brightly-striped, spiny fish, trilling an undistracting, if not exactly musical, song.
"I'll, er, try to remember."
If there is a next time, he thought. His recent, peremptory orders from Earth intruded themselves into the forefront of his mind, although it wasn't as if he'd forgotten them. He tried to breathe deeply. The floor directly in front of Mister Thoggosh, an area three meters wide by two across, was set aside as a desk, dappled with buttons and lights, handy to the giant being's sinuous manipulators. Behind the technicolor house-sized horror lay an unnaturally broad door (now he understood the infirmary's architecture) flanked by a pair of large, upright boxes resembling stereo speakers. Gutierrez realized he hadn't been listening to Mister Thoggosh, but to their output, balanced so the sound seemed to emanate from the great mollusc.
Mister Thoggosh noticed him noticing. "Your surmise is correct, my boy. My species is quite mute, incapable of uttering a sound, although our hearing's rather keen. For reasons peculiar to our evolutionary history, we communicate by what would no doubt strike you as telepathy, although, in point of plain fact, it's rather less romantic than that. You'd understand better if I told you that, had you worn your spacesuit to this meeting, I might be able to speak with you directly."
Gutierrez peered at the monster. "Natural radio?"
"I assure you, sir, your vocal ability to compress and rarify the medium about you at will is no less marvelous to me. We're all beings, are we not, of infinite wonderment?"
Mister Thoggosh chuckled, his many tentacles twining a complex pattern. Gutierrez couldn't estimate the number of those writhing limbs, but he remembered that a squid (which his host resembled) had ten, while a nautilus (which he also resembled) had more, he thought. One of them lashed across the "desk" and touched a colored light. A wave of pressure passed through the fluid. Gutierrez glanced toward the ceiling, where an object—a plastic-coated wire chair—sank to the floor beside him.
"Will you be seated, General?" Mister Thoggosh asked him. "I prefer eyes at a level. And, as I suspect this conversation will continue rather a long while, I'd be more comfortable if I felt you were."
"Thanks." Gutierrez sat.
"And so, my boy," Mister Thoggosh began, "contact has at long last occurred between humanity and another sapience, just as your species dreamed of for so many centuries. And on your first real deep-space voyage, at that. Yet none of you seems much prepared to celebrate it."
The general grunted. "Mister Thoggosh, before this goes any further, I have an important—an official—message to relay to you from my superiors. I haven't been looking forward to it."
"A moment, sir." Two of the mollusc's tentacles were longer than the others. Instead of tapering to slender ends, they possessed splayed tips. Mister Thoggosh laid one across his "desk," crossing the other over it. "Do you care for refreshment? I'm having beer. This liquid we steep ourselves in has its uses, but it will dehydrate the tissues."
"Beer?" Gutierrez felt his eyebrows rise. At the rate they were getting exercised here, he thought, they'd eventually take up residence at the back of his neck. Suddenly, to his even greater astonishment, one of his host's tentacles separated from his body with a plop, and began swimming like a snake toward a wall on the right.
"Surely, General, you can't imagine yours the only culture, in a universe far wider than you know, to have discovered fermentation."
Open-mouthed, the human watched the mollusc's disembodied limb wriggle through the handle of a round-cornered door (inside, a light came on), remove a pair of containers, and place them on a tray.
"Not," Mister Thoggosh told him, "by at least five hundred million years."
At the desk, the tentacle wound itself about a small gold-colored metal accessory, piercing the top of a container and bringing it, with a slender plastic tube trailing behind, to the general. Mister Thoggosh reached for his own beer and reclaimed his wandering limb.
"This, for example, and at the risk of sounding like your legendary Captain Nemo, is brewed from a variety of kelp native to the waters off the landmass you call New Mexico. Or is it Old Mexico?"
With another tentacle, Mister Thoggosh inserted the tube where Gutierrez knew his mouth must be.
"Or perhaps it was California. In any event," the mollusc sighed (no other word could describe it), "I find it very satisfactory. My only regret is that I can't invite you to smoke, a fascinating habit. This liquid carries heat away too quickly and won't support combustion."
The songfish warbled in its cage. Gutierrez sampled the exotic beverage, surprised to discover he agreed with that individual's evaluation of it. He admitted as much.
"I'm highly gratified to hear it," Mister Thoggosh replied. "And now, my boy, if I may help you: you've been instructed to inform me—that is, whoever's `in charge' among my party—that this asteroid, indeed every celestial body and the entire volume of space within the `Solar System,' is the property of Earth, under the authority of your United World Soviet, as `the common heritage of all mankind.' "
Gutierrez's jaw dropped. The beer-tube floated free. "How—?"
Tentacles lifted and spread in a shrug. "It must certainly have occurred to you by now that our command of English, Spanish, Russian, and quite a number of other human languages results from the fact that your planet, in certain frequencies, is quite the brightest—or, rather, the loudest—object in the Solar System."
"Yes, but—"
"Further reflection would make it clear that the computative sophistication requisite to sort this tangle of signals out from one another—and, in a word, `decode' those languages—empowers us, by necessary implication, to comprehend them whatever enciphering may have been imposed upon them. It isn't so much that we set out to break your rather childish codes, General, our apparatus simply removes interference, be it from solar radiation or our own machinery."
Gutierrez reached for his siphon. "Which is how you knew we were coming, the names of some of the people onboard the shuttles—and the rest of my message."
It was as if the mollusc sighed again. "Sir, you've my profoundest sympathies. The spectrographic signature of this little world signifies to any observer a concentration of resources highly desirable to the prospective colonist expected to support himself as soon as possible. Moreover, the planetoid describes an orbit which carries it near quite a variety of other such bodies. To your American Soviet Socialist Republic, as it is to us, 5023 Eris is perfectly conceived as a base for science and exploitation. Thus you're ordered to evict us, no allowance being made by those with the power to command you for the priority of our claim, or the fact that you possess no means whatever of carrying out that order."
Now that it had been mentioned, Gutierrez found himself wishing for a cigarette, although he'd given up the habit a quarter of a century earlier. "Well," he told the mollusc, "at least all my cards are on the table. I ought to thank you. I was dreading it."
Mister Thoggosh emitted a chuckle. "As I would in your place, my boy. Permit me to put my cards on the table, as well. Let us discuss what alternatives present themselves, before you try to carry out that preposterous command. First, we'll dispose of this `common heritage' nonsense: that a body lies within the same stellar system as your United World Soviet scarcely means that you own it. I gather that this pernicious doctrine was first promulgated to prevent the assertion of private property claims in space, in effect assuring a Marxist revolution there before your species had even arrived on a permanent basis."
Gutierrez raised his eyebrows significantly, but patriotically refrained from comment. The chuckle became Olympian before the great mollusc managed to get it back under control.
"Do forgive me, sir, I beg you. Where was I? Oh yes: those penalized most by this doctrine nevertheless felt compelled, for some reason, to accept it, to their eventual fatal disadvantage. Now, it's being used to assert a property claim—a collective one, your own—in the face of our having arrived here first. In short, those you call your superiors wish to retain their pie and consume it at the same time."
It was probable, the general realized, given government control of education and the media, that the Proprietor was better informed regarding Earth's recent history than any member of the expedition, with the possible exception of Piotr Kamanov. In his profession, Gutierrez couldn't help understanding how eventual American acceptance of United Nations treaties governing such unclaimed territories as Antarctica, the ocean floor, and outer space (after earlier periods of rejection) had deprived it of resources and defenses appropriate to the late twentieth century, and disproportionately influenced subsequent political events. It was one of the things that made him a dangerous liability to the ASSR.
"Cake," he corrected, "although I wouldn't want to go on record agreeing with you about that."
