Short Fiction Complete, page 39
V
Late one evening when all is still at one of their compounds, I dress in an empty Tepen suit, and wind my way slowly along a silver pathway. Searching for traps at every instant, I warily shift in strange continuous motion. Inside their communication centre are racks and wires, flickering lights and tubes, knobs and strange power transformers bulking huge and ungainly and filling every niche. Hesitating an instant, but without qualm, I teleport heavy equipments outside the compound, scattering pieces that tinkle and shatter throughout the ravenous jungle.
In like manner I work my way to their transport centre, watchfully shearing and propelling equipments outward and beyond.
By count, and information, I should now find forty-two helpless and sleeping Tepen in the nearby long metal mound, which I now silently enter. They float low, one by one, in rows and columns, odorous metal monsters hovering rigid and stonelike, sleeping in evil peace!
Unlimbering a death ray tube, I slowly, methodically, spray across all but one, and that one wakens, squealing and babbling.
It rushes outward, first to the communicator, then to the equally useless teleporter, finally to the experimental building. Simulating one of its kind and through the use of indirect faculties, I make an empty Tepen suit move with waving appendages, and I open doors and make it wiggle as though one of them.
It is not deceived.
It reaches for a bulky weapon, swivelling about to face the floating suit. I sense its appendage reach for the “on” switch. In quick sequence: I kick the suit with my mental faculties, making it lunge; I teleport outward a large chunk of metal, part of the mound’s wall; I clamp down the Tepen’s appendage, freezing it against its smooth side; and, with muscles, I jump through the open hole, landing near its side.
My muscles are more than sufficient against the surprised Tepen, and its weak appendages. Besides, I am again free to use my indirect faculties.
The bulky weapon and object of my search, a strange device which intuitive reasoning predicted, is nearly twice as tall as me, and almost exceeds the mass that my mind can handle: barrel-shaped, like the Cien, cables and linkages through and beside, a square and black box with switches and meters. I reach outward, locating a sleeping Cien, and I teleport it nearby, also snapping the activating switch to “on” At once the Cien compresses, just as smaller weapons of the same type had done to my Brethren.
Indifferently I kill the remaining Tepen, as one might spear lazy fish.
I tug and prod this mighty device mile by mile, triggering it through telekmass again and again, until at last I have it located in the place of grouping, far below ground.
Minutes later I again stare at the Tepen power place, where rods deeply within seem to slow disintegration of heavy and unstable atoms. I cannot reach the level, so I squat – as seems to be my growing habit – and ponder. Experimentally I move chemicals, observing that with some changes, activity sometimes increases. Fortunately I am well over thirty miles distant when the source blows, and the Tepen village vanishes, now a rich, deep hole, exposing fresh nutrients to Enithra’s life forms.
Tepen are not unintelligent: I respect their fresh viewpoint, their ability to duplicate through direct action devices of clever design nearly all indirect action faculties. They will not overlook too many coincidences, and I dare not antagonize them further. A year – a whole, long, Enithra year ’till next grouping! What should I do?
I rejoin the children on a day that is nearly gone, with a sun deeply reddened, and they cluster about on my arrival, excitedly calling for the conjecture game.
“Have you thought of an infinite series of teleportations across an infinite set of points?” I proudly ask, also demonstrating what is meant by walking backward and forward.
They pop in and out, enthusiastically changing positions here and there so as to watch my demonstration of continuous motion.
“What is the relationship between twinning structure and language?” I ask, also demonstrating how common Ayorian words can be transposed to mean things of concreteness. I teach the Tepen language.
“What of tools required to perform, if indirect action be denied the user?” Except for myself, Ayorians do not have fingers and hands and arms and legs, and extensions, so I demonstrate using all of those appendages, and also by extending with sticks for hitting and digging and spearing of fish, and for shoveling and levering.
Slowly I bring them to a thought base wherein Tepen direct action machinery is comprehensible, and where thought processes convolute in new and different ways.
The year goes slowly, counterpointing my anxiety. Spork, the moron, keeps the children busy and amused, and for a purpose. One leaves us, having reached his plateau and twinned. Another matures early, joining the adults. Such extraordinary events bring the children closer, whence they press me even more diligently for novel philosophies.
I save the best concept for the time of grouping.
VI
When grouping time nears, I ask the children to ponder: “Can intelligent beings exist who do not twin?” and: “What happens to a race that refuses to accept their twinning problem!”
The time is upon us, and I, lonely, and alone, swing slowly about the warm, dripping cavern, waiting for the long, single chain to form and to stabilize. Almost I can sense Eme again, my beloved, up high in her proper position, and I imagine with colourful vividity that her attention lies upon me, again providing me with food and water, and now and then a gentle, needed touch, comforting and securing my inner being. I also imagine that I answer her saying, “Eme, I know the purpose for your twinning problem Bear with me through this next great trial. You will be free . . . free to reach your proper destiny!”
The cavern fills and they are ready. I flick on the Tepen switch. The entrapping field expands and holds the Ayor, my Brethren, and slowly squeezes them. “It’s the Tepen,” they shout as one, hysteria crowding them.
“NO!” I shout back. “It is Spork, the Ayorian moron!”
“What are you doing? And why?” they chorus.
“Last grouping, I, Spork, was given my twinning problem. I’ve come to solve it!”
I turn a knob and twist the field tighter, and wait.
“We are not Tepen! Why treat us like this?”
“I am presenting the Ayor with a racial twinning problem!” I respond enigmatically. Then no matter how they argue and shout, or scream with terror, I will say no more. My seeds are planted. Now they must grow.
Days pass. I compress them more. Each Ayorian contributes ever more of himself to the vital solution of this overpowering field.
Silent weeks pass, and then, at last, “We understand! We accept our racial twinning problem, Spork!” Heart gladdened, I release the terrible field.
Faced with threat to the total race, they recognize that the Tepen have always been their primary twinning problem. Somehow, over many twinning and grouping cycles, this fact had become replaced by trivia and goal substitutes. Eventually, they now recognize, the Ayor would become extinct, or worse, enslaved like lower beasts.
I know my Brethren well, for once they recognize and fully accept a problem, they ready themselves for solutions. It is their nature. No obstacle will hinder us in overcoming the Tepen.
How close, how ignorantly close, to wrong I was.
VII
On the day set for our attack, each Ayorian is matched for the destruction of at least one Tepen, while surveillance by another Ayorian – also matched one to one with an enemy, gives protective overlap. Simultaneously each will seize his matched Tepen and teleport it far beneath the earth where the sudden intermingling of Tepen and ground will certainly prove fatal.
The signal comes, and all happens according to plan. Degraded, bestial egocentrics that they are, yet they have brains, and at the top is their leadership, one with foresight or paranoia, according to view.
Since each Ayorian is assigned to his single act, and also to view another, one to one – completing a safety chain symbolic of the growing – Athie, who was assigned to the leader, falls first. He reaches out to the brown, stocky, citadel, and disappears. His watcher reaches, and also disappears. And so the next, and the next, one by one, tens and hundreds and thousands. . . .
Only the children and I, Spork the idiot, remain. The children move me the total planetary diameter so as to be near the source of our racial disaster, and suddenly I know that only I, Spork, master moron, greatest of imbeciles, remain! – of all the good and beloved Ayor!
What I did or did not do had to be right, if not already too late. Also I could not use my telekmass senses, those very same functions that had entrapped all of the Ayorians. Brazenly, as never before, I physically walk through a doorway and up a solid and white stone stairwalk, slowly and fearfully approaching step by step a monstrous metal mound There inside the huge, sparkling dome is the suited figure of the last remaining Tepen, floating over a circular platform all surrounded by anguished Ayor squeezed one against another in tightly packed, sorrow-filled arrays.
Not even at the time of Eme’s death, had I to control such terrible and uncommon emotions. I surge forward, ready to crush this – this – Tepen thing – and am hit unconscious by a new physical barrier field!
When I awake, all is as before, except now the Ayor are misshapen and spent. I can feel their cries by my every pore, my every cell, every strand of hair. The Tepen leader ignores me, as of no consequence, probably assumes me to be an animal of strange kind from out of the wide Enithra jungles.
I regain my footage and uselessly batter against the invisible shield surrounding me. The frightening polycyclic field starts. In moments all Brethren will be gone, and only I, Spork, the Belated Avenger, will be left.
What good mourning then?
Suddenly I know the answer –!
Teleporting, I find myself as expected, captured inside the squeezing cage along with fellow Ayorians. Ah! But unlike them, I can reach through this shield, and walk my way outward, as I do. Only the tiny familiar sensitive pluck of field against field way down at my cellular beingingness is sensed. I jump, landing at the floor near the suited and protected master Tepen. Swiftly, more swiftly than his death ray can be raised, I swing my closed fist through the thin artificial layering and through and through again until the yellowish ichors follow freely outward. The Tepen beast lays dead.
VIII
They’d grasp the strange Tepen knowledge of direct action; and they’d retain their knowledge for indirect action.
But why do I speak of them. Am I not also Ayorian? Had I not solved my accepted twinning problem? Then why do I not twin? Here I am, Spork, the moron, Spork, avenger, untwinned!
The sun shines brightly when I teleport from point to point, vaguely puzzled and apathetic. Flowers in all their varigated splendour do not cheer, nor does the sudden and wondrous jumping of life to life. I hadn’t twinned! Who am I? What am l?
The place is profusely covered by dense violet foliage. It is also the place where Eme found me. I had not given it thought during all those long years –.
Most metal is nearly gone, having been drawn upon molecule by molecule by nearby growths. My hand touches the polarized barrier surrounding the very dense metal within which Eme had found me. Inscribed is still the strange geometry:
HEART
OF THE HOUSE
OF THE GALACTIC COUNCIL.
Inside lies broken and scattered pieces that remind much of Tepen skills. Clearly there is no hint as to who or what Spork is.
Where had Eme hidden? What did she hide behind, and where was her hollow cave?
With rarely watering light receptors, I reach my forty miles, and imagine this hollow or that, where Eme lay, tuning finely to reach and to study me.
Her mind, I feel, must have pushed from atom to atom. How was it I must have lain? Just so and so? I can feel soft hands pressing and caressing my baby skin.
I really am being held! I can feel hands on my back, and a soft breast at my chest! Clean perfume comforts, and I know security and deep, deep contentment that comes with a full stomach and a mother’s biological love.
She pats my buttocks while the other speaks, saying, “Though we headed the house of the Galactic council, Patricia, the sabotage was inevitable. We may be genetically superior. But to the common people we are still only human. Place the baby in the life container now.”
I sleep a dreamless sleep, deep with comfort and contentment. The weather comes mild while my mind seems to compose itself in nature’s way, also preparing me for a long journey ahead.
Perhaps I cannot twin, but here is a new twinning problem – and perhaps a destiny!
Spork and the Beast
I was twelve years old when we destroyed the Tepen, and seventeen when the ship came screaming through our atmosphere. Ouble made the discovery while playing the nut game. Popping from the planet’s sunny side, Ouble came before me with a clap as loud as thunder and lightning above, his protective field spattering rain across my face. “A second ship has crashed,” he stated in his quiet, determined manner. “We think you should come.”
Of course I agree, and several move me that instant.
It all happens at once: I sense the pitted grey metal, and two shallow graves where even now plant life is taking molecules, and the terribly weakened condition of another biologically similar to me. He slowly, agonizingly, methodically shovels dirt into the useless graves.
Ignorant of direct faculties? I wonder, with shock.
This human is unprotected from life forms that eat away his minerals, his blood, his very flesh and muscle and bone. I extend him protection, and also about his strange vehicle, saying to Ouble, “Go to the old Tepen citadel for one of their mechanical protectors.”
By the time this strange – dare I say it? – animal – raises its head, Ouble is back, and the field in place. How truly ugly I must be!
From the body portion two arms hang loosely – just like mine – while his legs shiver with sickness and fatigue, they resemble mine. His head is attached, as is mine, and also thatched with long strands of tallow hair, like mine. His light receptors are deep violet, as are mine. His facial features are rounded, where mine are lean and craggy.
His light receptors widen – as I later learn – with astonishment, not at my naked and lanky form, but at my ability to hover quietly over ground. I fill up his hard worked graves, after which he tiredly passes a hand over face.
I cannot think he will know either the extinct Tepen language, or that of my Brethren, although I experimentally try both.
Reflecting on another language which I did not know, I mimic my dead father’s tone, saying, “Though we headed the house of the galactic council, Patricia, the sabotage was inevitable. We may be genetically superior, but to the common people we are still only human. Place the baby in the life container now!”
Our visitor falls unconscious.
Inside the ship, where I telekmass the stranger, are platforms covered with rectangular square patterns made from imitation fibres and knitted with springy materials beneath. He lies weak and white on one of those.
I cannot but explore him, and my sensors pass through his body, comparing chemistry against chemistry: Calcium and phosphorus molecules are low, and certain complex proteins, as would be the case were I to permit Enithra’s ever-plucking fingers at my body. I reach into the surrounding forest, recovering calcium from soft mushy growths, perhaps the same that had caused his depletion. Phosphorus molecules I retrieve from golden puffballs wafting around and above the grotesque vessel.
Within his blood I find dissimilarities which I dare not disturb, though deep beneath Enithra’s top soil is iron, sulphur, and oxygen and these, mixed with other chemicals, and placed inside his stomach, help to replace red blood platelets.
I dare go no further, even though Ouble has guided my mind.
He wakens, but only for a moment do his light receptors peer eerily into mine, after which he sleeps for many days while we watch after his biological needs.
His strength returns slowly. I study him, his language, his odd way of chewing and swallowing each bit of food, his clothing: stiff collars and decorations, bright red shirts, buckles and shoes, and even smaller clothing beneath all of these. Most peculiar of all is his total inability to mass sense or teleport.
If the Ayor call me moron, then what of him?
Tony Randolph – as I learned was his name – also studies me.
One day when Ouble hovers nearby, I point and say, “Ayor.”
Tony says, “Cabinet.”
I say, “Ayor,” pointing to where Ouble has moved.
Tony says, “Food.”
Ouble shifts to lie beside Tony Randolph, and I say, “Ayor.”
He says, “No. Tony Randolph. Human.”
He also scratches his head in what is the very first of behaviour mannerisms that I find most difficult to encipher. He says, “Air?”
“No.” I wave my hands about.
After much frustration on both sides, Tony shrugs his shoulders in that most peculiar human way, saying, “I give up, Spork.”
Ouble vibrates the air, saying, “He does not see me with the light receptors similar to yours, Spork.” Then I understand the greatest of all human peculiarities, next to their absence of proper faculties. He does not see in infrared and ultraviolet.
Eventually we both learn, and so many months later I again try the language of my biological father, but Tony is unversed with it, only shaking his head in the Human negative.
Tony Randolph came from a distant planet many parsecs distant, and he belongs to the household whose crest is affixed to the downed craft. Outside, now pitted and as vacuous as might be any random hole in Enithra’s surface, lay the remains of his two masters, a male and female. I do not understand things having to do with economics and peculiar law abstractions and other human cultural relationships, but Tony describes himself as a kind of slave scientist, which I think to be peculiar, too.
