Short Fiction Complete, page 37
“Then he must be brought to self-suficiency,” another responds.
“Place him with the children while he develops. Eme shall guide him under her twining,” they all conclude.
My sleeping mind echoes the thought: Eme shall guide him – Eme shall guide him . . .
Now Eme is dead.
II
The deadly, scorching sun awakens me. No puffy white clouds float against a pale violet sky, and though below and all around life stirs, seeming to move about in jerky, discontinuous jumps – grasping and hungry – neither can I perceive with light receptors any evil Tepen advancing along the valley’s floor.
Scurrying down to the waterfall’s final basin I still use only direct faculties of arms and legs and mouth to clean and move and eat and drink. I scramble back, muscles aching from excruciating lumps and pin-pricks of pain.
I wait angrily and impatiently for the Tepen. My body seems to suffer less, as I deliberately bring to mind my most early life with the children . . .
. . . they laugh, naming me awkward and ungainly, for my indirect faculties are as clumsy as the very youngest. “Spork!” they shout gleefully, which means “moron. “
They talk and hear by permitting vibration at their ends, their concavity. My advantage is my special organs designed just for the purpose. Such is trivial when compared to general telekmass faculties, and
therein I am lean, indeed a moron . . . a Spork.
Ayorian children play games that are to prepare them for later responsibilities, and one such is hide-and-seek. One member teleports an object to an unknown location. On signal all enlarge their telekmass network in ever-expanding radii, searching for the hidden object. Though the object may be hidden but twenty miles distant, such an expanding sphere requires careful scrutiny throughout. At each linear increase in search distance, the volume to be searched increases as the cube of the radius . . .
Most children learn to find any object no matter where located on Enithra’s globe. Whereas I, Spork of the Ayor, am never able to find anything beyond forty miles. How moronic I am!
In a game called “squeezing,” each player attempts to teleport another, and each is bound to resist the other. When players are evenly matched, he feels as though squeezed, until eventually one gives way to the other.
At first, and because of my greater mass, I am best at squeezing, but then one by one other Ayorian children surpass me immeasurably.
Null-thought consists of shutting off one’s thought processes. While most, with their natural unified field are expert, I, with my biological peculiarities – individual cells having very weak magnetic fields – cast loud identity waves in all directions. . . .
I am best at philosophical speculations. An object or set of relations is selected for the game. If an object is chosen, we extend our mass senses downward to its lowest level to learn and to discuss composition and structure. If relationships are chosen, we contemplate and speculate and form hypotheses. Those who advance the most novel conjecture which also fits consistently within the framework of past accepted conjectures wins, according to majority vote.
I cannot play this game until I arrive Enithra years of age, and one day I win. Spork, the moron, won!
Nabo had selected a relationship, a triangle drawn upon the dirt floor with a right angle. While all busy themselves in sensing the relationship of lines to lines and angles to angles, I walk up to the triangle and draw a square along each side, using the sides of the triangles as one side of each square. It seems obvious that the sum of the areas of the two small squares must equal the area of the large square, and I say so.
Checking carefully, they finally agree to the worthiness of my conjecture.
How big I am that day!
Usually when speculation involves some object, I lose, because I cannot sense below molecular levels.
Thick, white clouds form at my right, shielding the fierce sun. I prepare a fresh vegetable covering for warmth, and eat and drink according to my new way. . . .
How purposeless those games . . . designed to increase our survival . . . but under the Tepen they are useless . . .
Steam rises. Billowing white clouds grow faster than puffballs can consume. More and more puffballs crowd the air in search of minute algae also freely floating. Moisture drips from the ravenous puffballs like tiny, glistening raindrops.
I could always – until today – push water away as fast as rain drops. But now I become soaked through and through.
I almost smile, thinking of the philosophical games. I can win with what I’ve recently learned about direct action. Grovelling beneath dead organic skins at the edge of a cave – incessantly sprayed with cold water – aching everywhere – well – there is more than Ayorian humour with the thought!
But all things are unimportant when compared to my need to avenge Eme’s death.
I wake late in the morning, cold and stiff. Steaming tendrils rise from last night’s heavy rains. Water unused by Enithra’s jungle life now flows in tiny trickles and rivulets to the valley floor. The waterfall behind which I so painfully crouch thunders, a thousand new fountains fanning wider and thicker from every splattering ledge.
Trying unsuccessfully to avoid the larger sprays I move hard against the rocky backdrop. My vegetable covering is now pitted and holed from the evening’s telekinetic activity. It offers little warmth. Nervous and irritable, almost despondent, I eat and drink and replace my organic wrap. . . .
Thousands of years ago the Tepen and Ayor had been one. During the time of twinning by some Ayorian of long ago, he solved his problem – probably one involving the purpose of material things – by conjecturing the use of direct action as opposed to his more natural indirect faculties. After twinning, each descendent, his children, followed his speculation, until more and more the Tepen race became genetically separated from the Ayorian main branch. They now work consistently within the framework of direct action; they had developed a material science, and an urban society. Most importantly, they now prey upon their cousins, my beloved Brethren.
As the Tepen capacity for directly using material things grew, their capacity for mass sensing and teleportation declined. Their philosophical sense of rightness, the instinctive Ayorian feeling for balance and justice, degenerated. Groupings disappeared, and therefore so did the sharing of personal experiences and solutions and group concerns. Single all-powerful leaders directed both Tepen problems and their solutions. A distorted, evil drive toward the mastery of their environment through direct means became their single directed goal.
Capacity for telekmass not only shrivelled, but strange, new, but feeble senses grew. Each Tepen is surrounded at twinning with complex mechanical devices that respond to mental commands, and their cleverly constructed shells contain direct action driven shields that protect them from Enithra’s surging life forms.
Their other ingenious energy fields capture life forms which is then pulverized and chemically reconstituted to provide Tepen with nourishment. I shudder at the bizarre thoughts in my half sleep and especially at what has happened to my beloved Eme.
My earliest memory of the Tepen came when we children chased tree nuts. As each tree teleports away its ripened seed – hopefully to a region of good soil somewhere within the seed’s weaker sensing apparatus – we would joyfully spring after the seed. First to find the nut is free to consume it.
How sweet and delicious!
This day we sense the quickened ripening of one large seed. We tense, readying for sudden movement in any direction.
The nut suddenly ripens, and disappears from all telekmass sensors to our consternation and surprise. Ovef, who is by far the best, has also disappeared from our senses.
We search long and diligently, not aware that we are the hunted.
By sheer luck, I find Ovef.
Floating above a jungle clearing is a large cage surrounded by pulsating fields that cycle from low infrared through ultraviolet. Each time light flickers through ultraviolet, Ovef’s small, shrunken and lonely form reflects briefly. The small, brownish nut floats lazily, most diabolically beside him. Somehow that tiny and innocent seed had been drawn far beyond its normal range. Ovef had followed instantly, and both are trapped.
I, Spork, the moron, do not understand nor respond when the children arrive and shout “Tepen!” and then fearfully depart.
Having had no grouping experiences upon which to pyramid fear, I hide and wait. Using only my light receptors so that Tepen traps will not trigger, I watch my friend, the terrified and lonely Ovef who seems so shrunken and hollow.
Darkness swallows us. The background buzz and stir of jungle foliage and mosses and insects is penetrated by the sharp screech of metal against rock. They come one by one, ugly, ungainly, arrogantly floating, the Tepen, so evil and wanton among Enithra’s paradise.
Now I understand how Eme suspected my vessel, thinking it to be a Tepen trap.
They talk to one another, and the sounds undulate strangely. They make much noise clanking and banging and squeaking – hideous, arrogant jungle lords!
On the turn of a tiny knob on one’s metal suit, the variable colours steady to ultraviolet. My frightened friend, Ovef, crouches, unmoving.
A second Tepen unlooses a tube that radiates ultraviolet as well as other colours. Its beam steadies on
Ovef.
A hose unlooses as though self-motivated, and it points directly at my shrunken friend. Suddenly an intense beam hisses. From Ovef, who is silent, comes a thickened energy pudding that enters the hose’s lower half. Ovef shrinks and turns from brilliant ultraviolet to a deep, muddy grey. Then, like puff balls that disintegrate into nothing when air is teleported from inside, Ovef simply is no more.
The coruscating energies vanish and the trap is reset. The three Tepen float away. Had I the wisdom and knowledge and courage and maturity – had I but followed them – Eme might be alive today!
Puffballs loft overhead, filling the valley which is again steamy and hot. The lean and hungry Ettel silently flit from place to place, stalking the rock-still Cien. The waterfall flows and tinkles, though smaller now. Dust blows in swirls about the tempting cages below. . . .
My attempts to overcome handicaps created agony until twelve Enithra years. I lose in most games, am least of mass-sensors, unable to sense or mass teleport beyond forty miles, unable to reach below molecular levels. . . . Now I can watch Tepen traps from hiding, while other Ayorians cannot? Will this be my twinning problem? And, if solved, will I twin to become two equally incompetent morons?
. . . after Ovef’s death my growth continues with a kind of unconcern, tinged with a touch of caution and, yes, perhaps some fear. We move about and play games and once each year is the grouping, without me. And here and there a twinning as one or another reaches a philosophical plateau. . . .
I constantly wonder how can my Brethren live carefree when everywhere lives are endangered? We live as though the stark nature of our hazard is merely peripheral to our ways . . .!
I question adults and they respond as is their nature, saying, “That must be your twinning problem, Spork. In many ways you are a child. Perhaps for you twinning will come early.”
There will be no dent in their complacency, and they have no strong feelings in hatred or revenge, as does my small animal body. Am I physiologically closer to the dreaded Tepen?
At each game I am taunted by my instinct to avenge Ovef’s life, and though I conjecture many things, I conjecture vainly.
One bright and fateful day Eme and I slowly teleport across this sunken valley so brilliantly arrayed with colourful snapsticks and montreses and other growths hued so as to maximize stimulation on my light receptors. I comment with singing heart how I wished for her the gift of sight, describing how one particular montres is slowly amassing bundles of red and green nodes preparing for the maturity of seed. Each brilliant node swells, forming a hemispherical dot that aligns itself with others to form a symmetrical and striking pattern.
As each dark red node teleports on ripening, a shift of the pattern spirals inward, and the background blue replaces the missing red. Shifting blues and reds and greens spin a dazzling wheel that explodes within my light receptors.
We stop. A chunky Cien bulges with edibles and inedibles. Usually they engorge until sacks howl with pain, and then they sleep, awakening only to repeat the endless cycle.
Behind and to one side the clever and careful Ettel swiftly teleports with quick pops from hummock to hummock. One Cien disappears whence Eme and I can sense its quiet appearance inside the Ettel’s wet and waiting stomach.
Perhaps Eme is getting old and careless. More likely her twinning problem weighs her mind. Close to the valley’s end, near a waterfall, there is the Tepen trap. Forgetting caution, perhaps assuming the trap to be something different, she searches with her keen mind for its outer boundaries. A second trap set for this contingency catches her probe and springs far faster than her reaction – and she – beautiful beloved – Eme is caught. Her voice screams beside me, and suddenly she is gone, already churned to chemicals and frozen magnetic fields bearing no resemblance to her.
I rage with frustrated fear and anger and grief – repeatedly I strike at the trap with hands – and wildly, like some stupid and undiscriminating Cien, I toss sticks and stones and other debris at the weird and deadly assemblage – to no avail.
Totally exhausted I drop to the cool earth. My light receptors strangely let forth liquid streams, and my chest breathlessly heaves.
Eme is gone! I am alone.
I know that only I, of all the Ayor, will seek Eme’s revenge, and that only I will seek to prevent this tragedy from happening again. I force still my engrieved mind. I use arms and legs to walk about the trap. I hold my hand in its sustaining field, ready at an instant to withdraw.
Only the jungle’s normal background pluck of mass sensing fingers tickle. My hand, apparently having triggered mechanisms, is drawn as though sucked by invisible and breathless winds. I tense leg muscles and bulge my chest and stomach until the hand pops out free and unhurt.
Less cautiously, I explore inside until I find I can wrench free something. I crush it beneath my feet, scattering small crystals and wires into the underbrush. When my hand finds the container that controls the magnetic fields, I break it with a heavy, pointed rock. Just as swiftly and maddened, I destroy the second trap, strangely searching for Eme. Alas! I find but a thin, dusty residue, perhaps all that testifies to her past presence.
Not Ayorian children, nor the adults will accept this problem. Only I, Spork the moron, am so constructed. Somehow it seems an alien but sweet kind of justice that I, who am Eme’s twinning problem, should carry on her twinning goals: What am I? What is my purpose in life?
But not yet, not quite. Too much must be done and learned!
That night, with the shrinking of the waterfall, my ledge is roomier. But I am too weary to stretch. I hold myself tightly, forming a ball. My hands and legs are tangled with vines that will warn if Tepen come in the dark, and I dream:
Eme is alive, only ten times larger. My small child’s form grows to her size, then expands beyond her until she is no longer than my fist. I reach for her with aching direct action muscles and swallow her. She grows and grows until each of my cells are filled with her.
Afterward I sleep peacefully . . .
III
Like the tiny, glittering glowlight insects that skitter from point to point, the Tepen’s body-suit reflects the morning’s stark and stabbing sunlight. They weave in and out of long overhanging purples and ultraviolets until at last they are clearly visible for sustained periods. Unlike any other moving object these tiny sparks move continuously, strangely contrasted against the normal here, now there, mode.
Seven glinting sparks, oval metallic jackets, mechanical protrusions of unknown functions, each floating as high as my knee, their tops perhaps reach my shoulder – my direct action muscles involuntarily tighten as my mind races. I am close, so close, to avenging Eme’s death.
At their slow pace, the day lumbers to halfpoint. At last below me, they have reached their death traps. Strange and indecipherable noises burble upward as back and forth between traps they weave.
When one comes directly below, I roll a rock to the ledge and push it off. Yellowish fluid oozes from between crushed joints.
My conjecture – that they will not search for those with direct action potential – is correct. Those who remain unlimber queerly pointed devices and wave them in every direction. I drop another rock, squashing a second. And then a third squishes exuding a malodorous yellow, for now the scent comes through and through the cascading water.
Crouching unseen from the edge of my ledge with just my hair and light receptors brazenly showing, I give thought to my next action. They scurry about until at last the four that remain gather together, and they surround themselves with a colourful field I’d seen before. Somewhere inside is a tubed device that points, ready to discharge at anyone foolish enough to use telekinetic probes, just as the nut tree seed and Ovef had been caught.
I might have continued to drop rocks, but with that one, or the rock after, survivors will deduce the absence of indirect faculties. Risk is too great, nor will I yet want them to know of my direct action abilities. Neither will death to seven begin to fill my bitter hunger for sweet Eme’s sake.
The sun glazes early, long shadows probe and twist like dangling vines, while we wait out our deadly games. At dusk I descend behind their line of vision, reaching the splashing water that arcs gracefully downward, and also to their level. Circling fountain and jungle growth now athrob with evening’s life, I silently reach the grotesque row of Ciens where was sure to be one dormant. Almost unequal to the task, my arms surround a bulging sleeper and, half dragging, half carrying, I locate it directly behind the foliage near the four Tepen trappers.
I reason that on waking the Cien’s horrendous appetite will almost certainly trigger the trap, causing it to pull in the Cien, and leaving the trappers to believe they’ve at last caught their recent and dangerous enemy.
