Short Fiction Complete, page 54
The Drecklin teleports dirt from the ground beneath, pushing it behind in discrete chunks until it has created a burrow safe from the reach of other Enithra life. Far below ground, it lives – eating, nesting, sleeping – safe, it would seem, from every kind of danger – all, that is, except the Gefisher.
It is hard to classify a Gefisher: had it wings it might have been a bird, had it legs, it might have been an insect. Whatever, it is a natural and persistent Drecklin hazard.
The Gefisher that I sense below soil follows the burrowing Drecklin in lively manner moving dirt and rocks as rapidly as debris is tossed into its awesome face. I almost sense the rising telekinetic tension as each come closer, until the Drecklin turns. They face one another.
They are closely matched, one normally winning decisively. When both the Gefisher and the Drecklin explode simultaneously, the experience is unique. I am shortly absorbed by this curious display, and then, little by little, its broader implications register and trigger me to action.
At the same time, behind my priorities, I sense the immature trio. I call for an immediate grouping, and Baby I says, “What is group?”
“We have seen the Drecklin and the Gefisher destroy one another,” the group says, as one. “Perhaps the Beast of Planet Two can be moved to confront the Bio-logs. At the least they may weaken one another.”
“Oh dear! They’re going to kill off the entire Bio-log civilization with that horrible beast,” Mary irrationaly cries to her cohorts. “Won’t they learn that death is not the answer?”
Robert seems disgusted, but is quiet and listens in.
“We believe the idea feasible,” the group continues. “But how shall the Beast be moved?”
“Spork is so bloodthirsty!” Mary anxiously exclaims.
“We can focus sun plasma on the Beast and cause it to move away from the intense pain and cellular disruption.”
“What is bloodthirsty?” asks Baby I.
“We can trace the Beast through hyperspace with each jump, and our instant doors will permit us to control ships that restore the net at each jump.”
“I can’t stand their ways. I’m going to open my, thoughts,” Mary says.
“Don’t!” Robert seems to shout in her mind. “Besides. what can you offer as a solution?”
“What is killing?” Baby I asks.
IX
All over the seventeen galaxies factories and laboratories began full shifts for the production of materials necessary to capture and to control solar plasma. All Ayorians, including the children, are placed at the tasks. Debris is swept away from planetary systems, as well as moons and moonlets, for the requisite quantities of ordinary matter are great when making extraordinary ultra-dense matter. Pieced together by telekinetic forces, the very thin plates force gigantic machinery into place. Meanwhile telekinetic mathematicians and xenobiologists compute probable jump paths for the Beast when under intense pain.
Positioning begins, even as the Beast grows. Telekinetic doorways establish linkages between suns found on the expected pathways.
Small, well protected recorders are buried on the Beast’s underlayers. Everything is readied. The time of trial has come!
The Sun’s protoplasm spears and lances with fury through the Beast, penetrating with a broadness of a thousand miles, a tiny pin-prick at best, representing less than five one thousandth percent of the Beast’s surface area. It is our best. Will it work?
Plasma boils inward and outward, creating a cancer hole that spouts hard and soft radiation. Molecules disrupt. Atoms strip, each weaving inward and outward with properties that differ, one from another.
Light and darkness geyser upward a hundred miles, and then downward again, where the Beast ravenously, perhaps even with its pain and hunger and anger, seizes the falling pieces, tearing them asunder. Sometimes deep burns probe lines of writing in searing gashes.
Time after time the Beast heals itself.
Will it never jump?
At last – and along a predicted pathway!
Again and yet again it is lanced and burned and it surges forward, and we follow and ensnare and torture it again.
I fret. Can anyone truly predict the autonomous responses of such a dangerous giant? So much is my worry and doubt.
Vessels are relieved and cycle back again – home for rest, back to guard and guide and torture.
At last it jumps into Bio-log space!
Again it jumps, and deeper and deeper, until it is surrounded and must face the slicing rhythmical reinforcements arriving through the Bio-log alert system. We spear it through and through – just one more prod, one more jump, and it is within Temthe range.
Long imprisoned, increasingly and instinctively frustrated, the Beast lashes with long, powerful telekinetic pulses, tearing at the relatively feeble encircling and protective satellites, satiating itself everywhere the opportunity presents.
Seriously endangered for the first time, Bio-log tension turns inward, and tension and counter-tension lifts billions upon trillions of tons thousands of miles, jockeying the warming mixture back and forth through an indifferent space. Gouts and dimples grow swiftly, like cancerous bumps on the surface of both great antagonists. On Temthe craters fill with flowing lava and sludge radiates inward and upward and outward. Sometimes materials squeeze into powder so fine it seems to simply radiate away, and other dust drifts downward slowly or sideways or upwards, as though winds waft them gently and neutrally from one side to another.
Temthe boils and seethes with cracks and lava and shudders as the Beast seeks to grasp large quantities of nutrients.
Planet-based generators of unthinkable power automatically surge and inexorably tear huge chunks from the pained and angered Beast, some as large as whole continents.
Neither gives quarter, and the battle is a war of no quarter.
Had the Beast intelligence, it could have predicted the slicing and counter-slicing. Even so, Temthe becomes one boiling, spherical puddle. Its one great citadel floats free.
Had the Bio-logs used a simple carving knife, and had the Beast been a blind, ignorant blob of flesh that insists on running through and through the carving knife, the result could have been no different.
Something vital deep inside the Beast is struck and it collapses into smoking, fuming ingredients – fluff and dust – a new moonlet circling Temthe now as dead as any other common, airless planet that might circle its major century by century.
Below, stark and apparently mindless, the last fortress swims in seething, glowing red and infrared lava, still slicing this way and that with disregard for the battle’s end.
Who could reason away unseen life within the Bio-log fortress?
Though the shape is different from that of the deceased and deadly Tepen, with its windowless and strict geometrical features, I am reminded of my first lesson in traps. Infrared radiates brightly from compressed blocks of matter that pile high in crawling heaps, one on the other, cubicle on top of cubicle, until bump upon bump spreads upward and outward in some simple numerical progression.
My task is obvious. I must gain access through protective fields that are mighty and diversified. Assuming no alarms trigger, I must disable their dangerous slicing machines.
X
Their citadel is perhaps ten miles a side with an unknown depth, since shields still deny sensing to its roots. And even through the planet’s present grinding and volcanic action induced by the struggle, was gigantic, nothing at all has penetrated through their physical object barrier.
Dressed cumbersomely in space suits designed wholly for the Human, I clamber to rough and moulten ground, stepping physically downward below the slicing, indifferent, and efficient telekinetic blades. My small craft disappears as it is timed to do, and I am alone, facing the behometh’s strange caverns.
Unlimbering an ungainly hose and tank, I press it against an invisible barrier. All around grows the glowing sphere, indicating protection for myself, as a young bird cocoons within. Slowly I force muscles to push against the glowing lava, pressing my bubble against the Bio-log fields.
At first there is nothing, and then a black dot, an oval, a large circle, and then a hole large enough. I press against the greying wall a tiny gravity torch, a new development. Powder puffs outward, even as I jump through the cavity into silent darkness.
I note the absence of pressures, and now hover but inches above a hard surface. Senses spread upward and outward and inward, touching, feeling, dissecting – and – yes – right there – way off – just the flick is enough to draw inward my senses, guarded within the bubble that follows my every move.
Restricted to mere Human senses, I flash light. Images partially blur, reflecting from my protective bubble. Encased in transparent fluids, with eye-slits closed, is rank upon rank of Bio-log units.
Knowing how phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny in the Human embryo, I no longer doubt that Homo Sapiens was this species’ originators.
Oversized embryos grow, or were stored, in tiers of tanks, each unit biologically frozen between one and two months of the Human embryonic development, each representing the characteristic transition from fish to amphibia, slitted features, rather than rounded and staring, hyomandibular cleft, where the ear should some day be, the chorion, long, horn-shaped umbilical cord, the large olfactory pit and the tiny club-shaped limbs and the bulging but curved and still fish-like head.
Protruding from the bulging, grotesque head and from several other body locations are fine silver wires that extend through the synthetic amniotic cavity toward and outward to connect to the tank surrounding the whole.
Rather than a normal seven point five to seventeen millimetres long, this creature is perhaps a full metre.
One or two monstrously inhuman Human distortions might have brought sympathy and perhaps even empathy. Rank upon tier, stretching as far as the light beam carries is a different order of bizarreness.
I name it Homo Pisceslog. There are perhaps ten thousand here, and hundreds and thousands elsewhere.
Some subliminal impression or instinct causes me to move back and behind a row of Pisceslogs. Encircled by its own light comes floating another which I silently follow. Minutes later I stand behind it and before banks of dials and levers. Near one dial a bubble, iridescent and of beauty, forms about the hovering Pisceslog, and that encystment flows as fast as the reaction time of the adult Ayorian, landing near or on a button, which triggers, changing thereafter a reading. The bubble collapses and the Unit floats onward, oblivious to its quiet watcher, me, Spork of the Ayor.
Curious and hopeful, I approach the bank of dials and levers, extending my protective bubble through them. I sense solid and pure silver frozen near absolute zero with torrents flowing through each busbar.
One by one as I envelope each busbar I telekmass the solid silver out and away. The citadel shakes and shudders and moments later comes the strong reach of Ayorian fields, followed by thousands upon thousands of my beloved Brethren. Seconds later the fortress city teems with us, except for one centralized and mysterious sphere that defies the most concentrated and imaginative attacks.
XI
“I told you they’d destroy everything,” Mary Susan seems to pout from side-space.
Robert is silent.
“What’s destroy?” Baby I asks.
I silently and secretly ponder their attitude and puzzle again over the possible dangers of their immaturities. Then I and dozens of the Ayor shift to the strange room diffused with an intense blue radiation surrounding a transparent bubble.
“Why it’s a single cell of gigantic size!” I exclaim after some silent study.
“Shall we penetrate it – or at least try?” Lingant-Charlie asks.
Mollsic answers for those who had already failed the task, saying, “There’s something else – not physical, not telekinetic – a rigid thing that hinders any known probe.
“We’ve tried living things, and they pass through. Small mammals, insects.”
“What happens?” I ask Lingant-Charlie.
“We don’t know. They disappear. Possibly torn apart by unknown currents.”
I order one of Enithra’s ravenous Ciens. They are unintelligent but have a single-minded telekinetic purpose, absorbing everything within their limited reach.
The Human cell is principally an energy-producing unit composed of protoplasm. Though cells of different tissue vary in size and shape, those of a particular tissue are more or less alike. The protoplasm in the cells grows until it has reached its characteristic size limit through the conversion into protoplasm of the raw materials which are taken in as food.
Protoplasm will respond to the physical and chemical stimuli, such as heat, cold, light, electricity, acids, bases, salts and others. It is variable in its responses, so that certain stimulations are specific only at certain times, or may be specific only for certain types of protoplasm. Thus, while one kind of protoplasm may respond negatively to a particular stimulus, another type may do the opposite. One may safely state that the protoplasm of a given cell is never the same as that of any other kind of cell.
Stimulation with responsive adjustment to the environment is one of the outstanding properties of living matter. Stimuli received are carried almost instantaneously throughout the entire protoplasm of the cell and result in its proper morphological and chemical adjustment to the immediate environment.
Cells, therefore, may also conduct stimuli to neighbouring cells by associated induction.
As I wait and view the cellular spectacle with Human sense, I realize the vast gulf between this arrested development, and its symbioses, the Homo Pisceslogs, and other life forms.
This cell is unique. It is at least ten feet in diameter and roughly but only roughly so, spherical. It more closely resembles the shape of the Adult Ayorian than it does the Human cell, for it has been arrested somewhere in its telophase. Its dumbell like, or figure eight appearance is exaggerated somewhat by spindle, chromosome and centrosome markings making its appearance much like that of a huge iron-filing trace caught in three dimensional form by a bar magnet surrounded by water tissue.
Surrounding this composite of central radiating forces are oil vaculoes that provided food for the cell, and they serve, too, to accent the basic assymetry of the whole. The cell, at the time of its arrested fission, had not divided along cleavage lines of equal volume. Other than the assymetry, its outline shape closely resembles the Ayorian, but much larger.
I felt as though the centrioles radiating in rays from the centre were like dark, mysterious eyes, though this cell did not have light receptors.
Surrounding the cell is an ingenious liquid sac, slightly pink in colour, which apparently provides the cell’s stimulation as well as the media for its response. Transducers in and around this sack apparently conveys messages to mechanical equipment found near the cell and also well within the cell’s protective fields. Other leads trace from that equipment to other devices, still inside the protective field, and from there, probably to those Units which serve it galaxy wide.
This cell could respond to stimuli, could react to stimuli by transmitting reactions, and is unlike any other cell known. But can it think? Is it cognant?
I do not think so, but I only guess.
The whole of the Bio-log system seems like an invented organism by some mad Human scientist, for purposes never to be known. Telekinetic forces must have accidentally evolved, or been manufactured. Each Unit, though of more advanced and complex form – the Pisceslogs – could not think, and they most certainly passed – transmitted information to this integrating cell. But again, did this cell think?
No wonder even the Kepinders could not make intelligent contact with the Bio-logs. Somehow the system seems preset. It grows and acts – that is, it accretes and behaves within the framework of its own forces, its own ties.
I finally conclude that the Bio-log culture is simply a biological machine, neither moral nor amoral nor immoral – a machine, simply and completely that.
The Cien is placed against the protective shield and, like other living things, drops inward, still alive. It awakes, opening its large stomach sack to feed. No one can see or sense the silent tug of war but eventually it again closes its sack and sleeps. The interior of the cell appears undisturbed.
“That answers one of our questions,” a newly arrived Human scientist comments for all. “Weak telekinetic life survives within the interior. But what disturbs it, causes it to tear small animals asunder?”
“I’m going through,” Lingant-Charlie announces, popping at once to the field’s outward barrier.
I stop my friend using hand and muscle. He cannot have pushed his way through without physical action anyway. “No.” I command. “I’m going.”
I jump, pushing the sleeping Cien aside. Radiating spindles turn blazing crimson, then orange and green, then twist and stretch and wiggle. When they become space-black, I disappear from the view of all.
XII
Wherever I am, one tie, and only one is unsundered.
My senses do not reach, and my arms and legs are as figmentive as my Human light receptors. There is only that single but strong binding.
Baby I is already days overdue.
The whole intergalactic civilization reflects disturbance over my unexplained disappearance, I learn, but in a distorted way.
