Collected short fiction, p.666
Collected Short Fiction, page 666
“So we’re poison to them?” Thorsen relaxed, grinning now at the flask. “I suppose they’ll learn to respect us.”
“That depends on their level of evolution.” She gave him an odd look, both baffled and sad. “Anyhow, we have other problems, closer to home.”
Thorsen himself was one of those problems. To understand the children, as Carolina said, we needed to know precisely what the grit had done to the seeker’s three-man crew. Though my brother had disappeared, Marko and Thorsen were still under study.
Except for his sterility, Marko displayed no. permanent effects of his experience on the moon. Though Thorsen angrily denied any effect on himself, he had lost flesh and youth and nerve. The flame of his hair and beard had slowly dulled to a rusty gray and his old boisterous charm had died into a bleak taciturnity. We had watched that change with sharp concern, yet the outcome surprised us. He tried to kill Nick.
It was a warm autumn afternoon, the year the children were five. Suzie had arranged a picnic, hoping to revive Thorsen’s fading interest in the children and perhaps also in herself. Nick didn’t want to go, but Kyrie thought Guy would enjoy the outing.
Trouble began when Thorsen commanded the children to dress. Kyrie slipped obediently into a sunsuit and brought shorts for Guy, but Nick came out naked. Thorsen lost his temper and shouted a new command. Nick said quietly that he didn’t need clothes and wouldn’t wear them.
Thorsen called him indecent and pulled him out of the car. He walked quietly back to the nursery. By that time Suzie was crying and Guy had begun to moan. Kyrie ran after Nick and brought him out in a pair of red swim trunks.
I watched them drive away in Suzie’s new electric car—a gift from Thorsen in the wake of some earlier domestic incident they wouldn’t talk about. He looked grim and gloomy at the wheel, but Kyrie was soon happily excited, showing everything to Guy.
AN HOUR before they were to return the hospital called us. We found all three children laid out in the emergency ward, splashed with blood and grime, limp as death.
Carolina rushed to them and soon assured us that they were only sleeping. Mark and I left her to tend them, while we tried to learn what had happened. Suzie had driven them back in the car, but she was battered and exhausted, already under sedation. A police airtrac picked Thorsen up at the picnic spot. His deep facial scratches were still oozing blood. He glared at us sullenly and told the officers to take him on to jail.
We got the story the next day, when Suzie and Kyrie were awake. The explosion had come when the new car stalled on the last rocky climb toward the seep we called the Indian spring, where they had planned to eat. Thorsen lifted the hood, read the fuel cell handbook and finally said they would have to wait for help.
But Nick spoke up. He said the cell just needed adjustment and reached past Thorsen to twist a relief valve. The motor hummed at once, but Thorsen came apart. Gasping with a wordless fury, he seized Nick’s throat and swung him off the ground.
Suzie screamed, while Nick kicked and strangled, but Thorsen ignored her. She attacked him, clawing wildly at his face. He freed one hand long enough to slap her off the road. Guy hugged Thorsen’s leg, mewing like a hurt kitten, as the man shook Nick with both hands again.
Kyrie was more effective. She found the jeweled rescue gun in Suzie’s purse—a gift from Thorsen himself when he had brought his bride back from the moon to the turbulent Earth. One quick jet knocked him out.
Nick was limp by then, but Kyrie knew he was still alive. She helped Suzie load him into the car and waited until they were safe on the mesa pavement before she herself went to sleep.
Released by the police when Suzie wouldn’t file charges, Thorsen took a room at the Skygate Hudson. Marko and I tried to question him there. His patched face looked pale and drawn and his breath had a faint alcohol reek. At first he wouldn’t talk at all.
“No, I’m not drunk!” he burst out at last. “Yesterday I wasn’t even drinking. The whole thing became just too much for me when that smart-faced kid fixed the car. I can’t stand ’em any longer.”
“But they’re our children.” Marko blinked in owlish astonishment. “Little Kyrie’s your own daughter.”
“A damned cuckoo!” His face was red and twitching now. “They’re all cuckoos. Something planted ’em in us—to be hatched in human bodies. But they’re actually no kin. No more human than a crocodile!”
“You can’t believe—”
“We’ve been damned fools!” He raised his voice to drown Marko’s.
“Trying to bring them up—to take the world away from us. They’ve got to be exterminated.”
We stood staring. I couldn’t understand him. After a moment he staggered away as if exhausted by his own trembling violence.
“I guess I was a fool today, letting that little devil tempt me to touch him, but they’re all too much for me. Too clever and too quick. I saw that months ago.” He paused to peer at us, bewildered and afraid. “Can’t you see what demons they are?” he whispered desperately. “Can’t you see what they’re scheming to do?”
VII
THORSEN’S assault on Nick revealed new fissures in the sand castle of COSMOS. The directors quarreled with the doctors at the space hospital about his sanity, but he was finally relieved of his post and transferred to a psychiatric clinic for treatment. The directors failed at first to agree on a man to replace him. They finally called Marko into a closed meeting and sent him back as acting head, with a new program for the Center.
“Half the directors think Erik was right.” He shook his head gloomily. “They’d like to get rid of the children. Since they don’t know how to do that they want us to watch them. We’re to record every change we see. Report every word and every act.”
The crumbling castle thus became a sort of prison, but we were able to keep the children safe inside it a little longer. Though the new joint research committee gave us no funds for formal research, Nick and Kyrie were turning sharper minds than ours to the riddle of their own existence.
Trying to shield the children, Carolina had often warned us not to talk to them about the alien biocosms and the riddle of their own origin. When they began asking questions about themselves, her first answers were evasive.
“Of course you three are different,” she used to say. “You’re the moon babies. Your fathers were the moon men. That’s why you’re all so special and so precious. You aren’t like us poor dull earth people at all.”
They outgrew such simple answers. The spring they were seven, Nick found Carolina’s name in a child’s book about “our neighbors in space.” He brought it to me to ask if Dr. C. Marko was actually his mother. When I said she was, he and Kyrie demanded a tour of the exobiology lab.
Carolina reluctantly agreed, though she masked them cautiously against infection by some alien organism. Kyrie clung close to me, frightened into silence by the strange smells and machines.
Nick was eagerly excited, shouting breathless questions through the gauze.
Huge-eyed, he peered at flasks of cultured beta-life. He squinted and prodded at a coiled iridium nugget from Mercury. He blinked at projected films of the snakeshaped creatures that had come out to circle Jupiter Station.
As we were about to leave, sudden bells jangled. Automatic doors thudded shut, sealing the hall ahead of us. A blinding violet glare flooded the glass-walled corridors around the incubators.
“Uncle Kim!” Kyrie gripped my hand. “What’s this?”
I was unnerved, but Carolina seemed delighted.
“Don’t fret,” She gathered both children in her arms. “It’s just the beta-life. Sometimes it changes shape’, you see. Like tadpoles changing into frogs or grubs into butterflies.”
She turned more gravely to me.
“We’ve been observing this for several months, though we don’t yet have data for a formal report. The cultures bubble along for generation after generation in single-cell form. But now and then something happens. The cells combine into an amazing metamorph.”
“Let’s have a look.”
She made us wait while she got into a plastic gown and went back through double doors into the incubator block to bring a stoppered flask to the glass barrier where we could see it. The children gasped and stared.
The milky fluid in the bottle had become a big scarlet bubble, oddly spotted with gold and black, fringed with silky silver tendrils. With an uneven rhythm it expanded against the walls of the flask and contracted again, as if trying to breathe.
“Poor creature!” Kyrie whispered. “It wants out.”
CAROLINA set the flask on a stand. We stood there half the afternoon, watching the imprisoned thing while she made notes and photographs. Vigorous at first, its breathing movements became irregular and slow.
“That bottle’s choking it.” Kyrie looked accusingly at Carolina. “Can’t you set it free?”
“Our breath would kill it.” Carolina patted Kyrie’s golden shoulder, soothingly. “We’d all like to help, but it can’t live in our biocosm.”
We saw it die. Its last fluttering movements ceased. Its vivid colors faded into leaden grays. The bubble burst and shrank, its fragile membranes dissolving into a few drops of brown liquid mud.
Its odor reached us when Carolina opened the doors, a thin, revolting sweetness a little like rotten eggs. I wanted to leave, but Nick and Kyrie had questions to ask.
“We’re getting two or three such changes a week,” Carolina told us. “Each metamorph has a different color and shape. They’re all trying to escape—that’s why we’ve installed the sensors and the automatic doors. None has gotten away—or lived more than two hours. Really, we don’t know much about them yet.
We followed her to her office and waited while she put away her notebooks and cameras. Kyrie nestled uneasily against my knees, as if frightened by what we had seen. Equally troubled, Nick kept asking questions.
“Mother, what are we? Why do you keep us here—in our own special lab? Why do you watch us all the time? Are we specimens too? Like the metal.” He tried again, careful with the word. “Like the metamorphs?”
“Don’t you worry, dear.” She tried to hug him. “You’re our children. We love you very much.”
“But we are different.” He slipped out of her arms and backed uncertainly away. “You do observe us. You film us and tape us and test us. You keep records and file reports, just like you do for those funny bugs in your bottles.”
I felt Kyrie shiver.
“Why?” Nick shrilled. “What kind of thing are we?”
“You’re people,” Carolina said, “But unique people. That’s why you’re so priceless to science. As well as to us.”
“What makes us—unique?”
“Something happened to your fathers out in space.” Carolina’s eyes were big and black as his, imploring him to understand. “They were the crew of a seeker survey craft exploring the moon. They found a bed of strange black grit splashed around an impact crater. Some force from that grit caught them and changed them—changed the genes of their sperm cells—so that you are their children.”
“But they aren’t exactly our fathers? We are not exactly human?”
“Not entirely human.” Nodding reluctantly, Carolina caught her breath and tried to smile.
“Who made the grit?” Nick demanded. “Who put it on the moon?”
“Nobody knows,” Carolina said. “Though Yuri has a theory.”
NICK dragged her off at once to look for Marko. Kyrie tugged me after them, her tiny hand trembling in mine. Nick pushed into Marko’s office in the nursery without waiting to knock. Coffee was brewing on his desk, bubbling fragrantly through a device of his own invention, a complex hookup of glass tubes and stopper flasks. With a genial nod he offered to share it.
“Father—” Something briefly checked Nick’s high voice. “Yuri, we’ve seen a metamorph. My mother has been telling us about the moon grit and how it made us what we are. I want to see the grit and I want to hear your theory.”
Marko turned off his coffee apparatus.
“The joint research committee keeps the grit in a vault.” He blinked gravely at Nick. “What’s left of it. Half of what we had was used up in experimental study over the years and spies were stealing the rest.”
“How do you open the vault?”
“I petition the joint committee.” Marko smiled a little at Nick’s determination. “But here’s a mode! of one grit crystal, magnified a hundred times.”
The model was a shining black pyramid, two feet tall. It stood on a metal pedestal. Marko swung a slice of it out on hinges, to show its inner blackness intricately patterned with shining lines of gold and glass.
“The black mass is a granular allotrope of carbon, elsewhere unknown,” he explained. “Seeded with microscopic thorium beads. Latticed in a very intricate way with those wafers of silicon and gold. Mixed with trace amounts of other elements.”
Kyrie shrank back beside me, but Nick listened eagerly. “Your theory, Yuri?”
“The crystals were made somewhere,” Marko said. “But not, I think, on any planet we’ve found. The splash pattern around the crater shows an impact from the south—the direction of our nearest star. I think the crystals were manufactured and shot to the moon by an unknown technology far ahead of us.”
I felt Kyrie quiver.
“By the starfolk?” she whispered. “Our own far people?”
“That was just a baby game.” Nick glanced at her reprovingly. “We made up the starfolk,” he told Marko. “But we didn’t know about the grit. What could it be for?”
“Maybe there is an interstellar culture.” Marko smiled soberly at Kyrie. “Maybe it is spreading across the galaxy, from star to star. Maybe the grit was contained in a messenger missile, shot from Alpha Centauri to make contact with us.”
“Why the grit?” Nick peered at the black pyramid. “Why not a ship?”
“I’ve wondered for years,” Marko said. “At least I think I see why. I think intelligent worlds are too rare and too far for ships to find them all. I think the messenger missiles must have been scattered like seed across dead worlds and live ones—to be awakened by any evolving intelligence. Our seeker woke it.”
“And we were born.” Nick nodded slowly. “Now what are we?”
“The messengers, I imagine.”
“So what is the message?” Nick looked tiny and puzzled and afraid. “What are we to do? If the grit made us, what are we for?”
“You’ll discover that.” Marko paused, with an odd look of owlish foreboding, before he added, “I think you’ll find a splendid destiny.”
Nick smiled hopefully, but Kyrie was still afraid.
“Uncle Yuri—” Her small voice quivered and broke. “If Nick and I are messengers from the stars—what is poor dear Guy?” Uncomfortably Marko shook his head.
“Tell us, Uncle Yuri. Tell us what your theory is.”
“The messenger missile struck the moon millions of years ago.” His eyes shifted uneasily from her to the tall black pyramid. “The grit had to wait for us to find it. Too long, I think. Most of the crystals were damaged by micrometeorites. If they are fission-powered solid-state devices—as I think they are—most of them are now defective.” He looked unhappily back at her. “I’m afraid their defects appear in Guy.”
“No!” Her voice turned sharp with pain. “You’ve got to be wrong, Uncle Yuri. Poor Guy is not defective. We love him exactly as he is.”
NICK clamored to see the actual moon grit until Marko filed a requisition. The joint research committee took three days to approve it, but then a security squad brought six crystals to the nursery, along with a receipt for Marko to sign.
All three children came to watch him pour the black grit from the test tube to a table top. Guy cried out when he saw the shining bits. More alive than I had ever seen him, he snatched at them and darted away with one clutched in each gray fist.
“They’re for Nick.” Marko looked at me. “Get them back.” Guy dropped to the floor when I reached him. He was moaning and quivering either in ecstasy or pain. His eyes rolled blindly upward and his barnyard scent rose rank around me. His hoarse breathing slowed and ceased. He was suddenly asleep, all his body limp except the knotted fists.
“Let him keep them,” Kyrie begged. “He needs them so.”
Marko agreed and distributed the others to her and Nick. Their rapt delight almost equaled Guy’s. Kyrie cradled the tiny tetrahedrons in her cupped hands, crooning plaintive little sounds I had never heard her make. Her palms and her bent face grew golden, as if tanned by some unseen radiation.
Nick was examining his own crystals with an air of alert intelligence, weighing them in his hand, listening to their ring when he tapped them with a fingernail, searching their bright triangles with a pocket lens. His skin was turning dark.
“They are nexodes.” She, glanced delightedly at him.? “Real nexodes!”
“What’s that?” Marko started.! “What’s a nexode?”
“Something we made up.” Nick shrugged. “In a game we used to play.”
“What game?” Marko swung urgently to Kyrie. “Please tell me.”
“You saw it.” Her voice was faint and absent, her eyes still fixed on the glittering crystals. “We were spacefolk, remember? Marooned and waiting for our people to come.”
Marko nodded. “But I hadn’t heard of any—nexodes.”
“It looked like this.” She showed the tiny tetrahedron on her small brown palm. “Only bigger—and bright with lovely light. A precious, precious thing. We used it to locate our people among the stars. And then to help their ship find us.”
“How did you come to think of such a thing?”
She turned uncertainly to Nick. “Just made it up.” Scorn tinged his voice. “Baby stuff. Please, let’s not bother about it now.”
He bent again, methodically testing each face of one pyramid against each face of the other, as if he expected them to stick together. When they did not he produced a pocket magnet to try them with.
