Collected short fiction, p.701
Collected Short Fiction, page 701
“Sure I would. Can I speak to her?”
“Negative. She has left with a survey expedition. Their circuits are fully occupied with telemetry and necessary administrative communications at this time. There will, however, be a direct channel opening in—” the T’Worlie spun in air to look at something out of Ben Line’s field of view, then spun back to look at him—“in about two and one-half consensual hours. I can then relay a message if you wish.”
“I’d rather talk to her direct, Nloom,” Pertin pleaded. “Can you patch me through?”
“Affirmative,” chirped the T’Worlie, “although that is, of course, contingent on Zara Doy Gentry’s desire to use available time for that purpose.” It hung there silently for a moment, then added: “Friend Ben Line, it is a different version here. She does not know you, I think. What shall I tell her of your desire to speak with her?”
Ben Line hesitated.
Of course the T’Worlie was right. This Zara had come directly from Earth. If she had heard of his existence at all it would have been only casually: someone her Sun One duplicate had met there and married. She did not know him; worse, she herself was married to another man.
What could he say to her?
To that question he had no answer at all.
“I don’t know, Nloom,” he said dismally. “I guess—I think you’d better forget I called. I have to think this over.”
He flipped the switch that dissolved the compassionate stare of the T’Worlie into a silvery mist as the stereo stage went blank. He sat there, staring into the empty tank of the stage, seeing nothing, feeling nothing but a wretched, suffocating, overwhelming ache of loss.
IX
THAT other Ben Pertin who distinguished himself with the middle name “Yale” sat, filthy, bruised and exhausted, ravenously tearing with his teeth at the flesh of a kind of watersnake, watching the skinny young man croon at his monster, called an org.
He was delighted that the other human—or near-human, the one called Redlaw—had found his equipment and brought it to him. But it was badly damaged. He had managed to repair the pmal translator enough to get across a few words to the man and learn their names—the youth was called Org Rider—but the device was not functioning well. All he had been able to understand was that Redlaw wanted to use him to fight some enemies—why, he did not know. He also did not know if he had any freedom of choice in the matter. Was he an ally or a draftee?
But at least he was alive and he had not expected that much when the young man had caught him trying to break open the egg. The first thing Ben Yale had tried to get across through his pmal translator was an apology for that. He hadn’t known it was a pet. He had only been hungry. Whether the youth had understood or not, he could not tell. That lean, sharp face was hard to read. The young man’s words through the spottily functioning pmal had been hardly reassuring: “Mine . . . not kill . . . punish . . .”
Now the org was perched on a rock, swaying uncertainly as it regarded the watersnake in Ben Yale’s hands. Pertin turned, watching the creature over his shoulder. It was still learning to keep its balance. Wings not yet unfolded, it looked ridiculous, like a trunkfaced, big-eyed fish with bird legs.
The exploring trunk reached out toward him and Ben Yale swore under his breath. He tore off a shred of the watersnake and threw it to the org. Org Rider cried something, which the I’mal clucked over without producing a single intelligible word. From the curtain of spray that concealed the cave the man named Redlaw called, “He says: ‘Meat not spoiled? Not make org sick?’ ”
Ben Yale shook his head. “It doesn’t seem to be harming me any,” he said. The giant muttered something to the boy, who stared appraisingly at Pertin, then bobbed his head.
“Can give more,” said the giant generously through the pmal.
“I think I’d rather have a drink,” said Pertin, not caring whether the translator dealt with it or not. He pushed past the giant, under the shrouding waterfall and walked toward the lake, indifferent to the others.
Org Rider followed him, carefully scanning the sky. Pertin was not flattered. He knew the youth’s concern was not for his own safety, but fear he might attract the attention of some predator or enemy to the cave.
Pertin knelt on the gravel beach and leaned forward on his spread hands to drink. The water was cold and good, but it gave him little pleasure.
His position, when he thought it over carefully, was not happy. The giant, Redlaw, seemed to want to talk only about weapons—and he had none. Weapons had not been in the junk the giant had carried from the wreckage of the ship. To Org Rider Pertin appeared to be only an inconvenience, possibly useful to taste doubtful meat for the org but otherwise a net liability. Neither of them seemed in the least interested in Pertin’s reason for being on their world. What he had tried to tell them of the great universe outside had been received by the giant without comment and by Org Rider, apparently, without understanding; the pmal translator, in its damaged condition.
seemed to function sporadically with Redlaw and almost not at all with the boy.
Ben Yale Pertin stood up and looked around him. He did not even notice the beauty of the scene—the deep, rock-walled valley in which he stood, the lazy waterfall behind him, the cold little lake with water so deep it looked black, the strange, colorful vegetation. From the orbiter the prospect of exploring these jungles had seemed interesting—to the extent that anything could interest him more than his own misery and loss of his wife and future. Back on Sun One, when he and Zara had been together, this adventure would have seemed enchanting, a marvelous holiday surrounded by beauty. And farther back still, on Earth, before he had ever submitted to tachyon transmission, when there was still only one of him and that one knew nothing but cities and crowding, this whole scene would have seemed a total fantasy.
Now his eyes did not even register its color or its strangeness. It meant no more to him than a cell.
By the side of the lake Redlaw and Org Rider were building a fire, roasting nuts they had gathered, muttering to each other, too far away for the pmal to pick up what they were saying and try to render it into English.
The giant stood up and walked easily toward Pertin. His green eyes were cold and judging. He put his fists on his hips as he stood before Pertin, towering over him by nearly two feet, and spoke in his liquid tongue, rapidly and at length.
The pmal, stammering to keep up, produced bursts of words: “Orgs gone. Watchers gone. Safe to travel. Can now find other slamming machine, other man like you. Can find killing things.”
Ben Yale Pertin kicked a pebble aimlessly into the water. “Travel?” he repeated. “You want me to come with you somewhere, to find another ship with weapons?” Redlaw nodded vigorously. “Go soon now, two hundred breaths,” the pmal rattled. “Travel long, hard. You become ready.”
Get ready? Pertin looked around him, almost smiling. What was there for him to do to get ready? What to pack, what to miss? He was ready to go anywhere . . .
But for Ben Yale Pertin where was there to go?
THEY did not dare to fly and Org Rider’s muscles soon began to ache with the unaccustomed strain of trying to move at ground level, under the cover of the trees. The young org wanted desperately to fly, so Org Rider’s task was twice as hard, for sometimes he carried the fledging and sometimes kept up a running stream of talk with it, encouraging it to keep hopping along on its wobbly legs, cajoling it back when it attempted to take off. That was what his mother had taught him to do—talk to the infant org, let it know always that you were there. She swore that the orgs could even understand words after a while, like human children. And indeed Babe already had seemed to learn what words like “fish” and “water” and “meat” meant.
That was more than the dumpy stranger knew. Org Rider had gotten over the superstitious fear he had felt when he had first seen the stranger bending over Babe’s unhatched egg—he could not understand how this man could be alive when a dozen sleeps before he had seen him dead. But the puzzle had receded into the back of his mind and lost its power to instill fear. He wanted desperately to ask the man about it, but the clacking machine the stranger talked through did not seem to work well and Redlaw only shrugged and reported that he could not understand what the man had said to him. “The words are clear enough,” Redlaw rumbled. “He says it was another him. How can there be another? He could not say.”
When they had eaten four times they decided to sleep. They were a good distance from the last place where they had seen either orgs or watchers, and so they risked building another fire and roasting more of the green nuts that hung all about them. The stranger moved a little way apart from them and flung himself on the ground—in a moment he began to snore.
Org Rider stroked Babe softly along the gently squirming length of its trunk and listened to what Redlaw was saying about the stranger. “He says he comes from another world. He knows arts the watchers don’t—arts that I think are strange and frightening to them. But he only speaks of these things, he does not have the weapons to prove them.” Redlaw scowled at the fire.
“What is ‘another world’ ?” Org Rider asked.
Redlaw shrugged morosely. “What he says about his world is not to be believed. He says it is not flat.”
“Not flat? You mean mountainous?”
“No, not mountainous. Round. A little ball so tiny that men have gone all the way around it.”
“That is unlikely,” agreed Org Rider.
“What is even more unlikely,” continued Redlaw, glowering across the fire at the sleeping stranger, “is that he says our world is also curved like a ball. This is clearly false, but he holds to it. He says that in his place everything is very heavy. A man can’t jump much above his own height. And he says, let me see—oh, yes. He says that although there are trees and plants and clouds on his world, they do not glow of their own light. None of them.”
“How strange! It must be a gloomy place. How does one see?”
“There is one cloud,” said Redlaw. “He does not call it a cloud, but it is in the sky, so what else could it be? It is so bright that its light hurts your eyes and so high that it looks quite small.”
“I have never seen such a thing,” Org Rider declared. He peered around, squinting through the leaves at the great flank of Knife-in-the-Sky rising above them. “Where is the way to such a place? Over the mountain?”
“Farther! He says you climb beyond the rain clouds and beyond the flying rocks. He says you come up into a darkness where there is nothing at all. The darkness is bigger than you can imagine—so big that, when you begin to cross it, our flatworld shrinks to a point you can’t even see, like an org flying out of sight toward the top of the mountain.”
“It is all too strange for me,” said Org Rider uneasily, stroking Babe. “If his world is so far away, how is it that he is just a man?”
“He does not know, he says,” growled Redlaw. “He says he and his friends came here for learning, and that is one of the things they wish to learn—how it is that he is so like us, though from so far away.”
“I wish him luck,” said Org Rider dubiously. “I saw the machine he came in. It made a great noise in the sky, like slam-bang-bang, slam-bang-bang. But in spite of all the noise, it was slower than the orgs. They ripped the wings off it and tore it apart in the sky. And when the watchers caught him, he died.” Org Rider added thoughtfully, “I do not understand how that can be, either. But I have seen it.”
Redlaw rumbled impatiently, “The man you saw die was another like him, he says. Part of that is nonsense, for he says it is him and says it isn’t him—both.
“What is not nonsense,” Redlaw added somberly, “is that he has something the watchers fear. I must have that from him, or he must die.”
THEY traveled fast and far and the strain began to tell on all of them. Even Redlaw grew short-tempered and gaunt-faced. In some ways his was the most difficult job of all. Ben Yale Pertin was ill and injured—Org Rider had Babe to care for and often to carry, so it fell to Redlaw to keep alert for watchers or for wild orgs and there was never a moment while they were moving when he could relax. When they rested over the campfire they no longer talked amiably—they bickered. It troubled Org Rider that Redlaw seemed sometimes to believe in the stranger’s insane stories and other times to hate and mistrust him. He could not hear the stranger directly. Whatever the machine was that Ben Yale Pertin wore on his armbands, it seemed to respond only to the squeals and whistles of the language of the watchers, not to normal human speech. So Org Rider could only communicate with him through Redlaw’s imperfect understanding and he was not sure how much was getting across.
Conscience made him try to correct some of the stranger’s errors. “I have thought,” he told Redlaw gravely, “and Ben Yale Pertin is wrong about our flatworld. It is not round—my mother has told me this. And also I understand how he looks so like us.”
Redlaw scowled at him, then guffawed. When he was done laughing he chirped for a moment in the language of the watchers, then turned to Org Rider. “Ben Yale wishes to be enlightened, young one,” he said, his tone half laughing but not pleasantly. “So do I. Please tell us what your mother has to contribute.”
The boy said stubbornly, “It is truth, all people in my tribe agreed to that. The flatworld was made by the makers.” He peered into the fire, trying to remember exactly. “My mother used to say they were terrible beings, taller than people, shining with a light of their own. They sang deathsongs—and the songs themselves killed those who displeased them.”
He waited for Redlaw to finish translating and chuckling, then went on: “My people came from seven eggs the makers had made, in a cave down under the bottom of the world. The eggs were guarded by seven keepers, but still they were stolen by the watchers. The evil creatures first blinded the keepers with death-weed dust, then stole the eggs for a feast. As our guest would have done with my org,” he added carefully.
Redlaw choked, but managed to translate and receive a reply. “He apologizes again for that,” he reported. “He says he was hungry and did not know better.”
Org Rider nodded and went on. “The feast was to be at the top of the Watchman’s tower, where the blinded keepers couldn’t climb. But the makers were angry when they found the keepers blinded and the eggs gone. They did not sing their deathsong, but they sang a special song for the wild orgs. And the orgs heard it as they flew over Knife-in-the-Sky.
“Seven wild orgs dived on the feast and carried the seven eggs in different directions, all around Knife-in-the-Sky. The orgs hovered over the eggs, keeping them warm. When each egg hatched, it produced a boy and a girl and two of every creature that is useful to man.
“But the watchers spied where the orgs had gone—all but one. One by one, they found the eggs just as they hatched and devoured the hatchling creatures and killed the orgs that guarded them.
“But the seventh org they did not kill. It flew out into the shadow-world, where Knife-in-the-Sky hides the flatworld from the Watchman’s tower. Here the hatchlings escaped. Green grass sprouted from the droppings of the creatures. The boy baby and the girl baby were nursed by the wild org that had saved them. They grew to be man and woman and became the parents of all our people.
“And what has come to me,” ended Org Rider gravely, “is that one of the other eggs did in fact get safely away, and its hatchlings were the parents of Ben Yale Pertin.” Org Rider paused. The giant was laughing boisterously. “What rot, boy! Ignorant superstition!”
Org Rider leaped to his feet. “It is as my mother told it to me, Redlaw.”
“It is nonsense,” Redlaw insisted. “You should spend a few sleeps with the watchers sometime. You’ll learn the difference between savage myths and scientific truths. I do not know whose superstitions are worse, yours or Ben Yale Pertin’s.”
“And what then is truth, Redlaw?” Org Rider demanded stiffly.
“Ah, that I don’t know,” the giant confessed. “Some of the things Ben Yale Pertin says may have truth in them somewhere. He says our world may be hollow—”
“Hollow?” Org Rider cried scornfully.
“Yes. Does that seem unlikely? It does to me, too, and yet I know there are levels below. The tower of the Watchman guards one of the gates to those levels. I have been there while a captive of the watchers—and I know. And there is some truth in what your mother told you, too, I think. There are such things as keepers and watchers.” He was silent for a time, staring across the fire at the sleeping stranger. Then he stood up. “It is time to sleep,” he said, his voice hardening. “We are wasting time.”
FAST and low, they kept going.
They were halfway around the thrust of Knife-in-the-Sky’s largest bastion, carried by Redlaw’s driving purpose. For Org Rider that purpose seemed strange and remote. He could understand Redlaw’s burning hatred of the watchers, who had enslaved him and threatened his life, but now that they were free of the watchers it seemed pointless to seek revenge. Org Rider himself was most occupied with his young org, which seemed to grow in size, intelligence and maturity with every breath. When Org Rider awoke, it was to the infant org hopping unsteadily toward him, seeking not food—he was capable of finding his own well enough by now—but affection, the ritual rubdown of his golden fur with a handful of moss. Org Rider did not neglect the duties his mother had described to him. In particular he talked to the org, crooningly, repetitiously, and was rewarded by having Babe repeat some of the words to him. If it mangled some of the syllables, it nevertheless made itself clear.
Babe’s stubby wings began to unfold as Org Rider groomed them. Tapered triangular fins, they had been molded invisibly into his sleek flanks. They looked almost too thick and too narrow to be useful in flight, but Org Rider’s caressing fingers could feel their muscular power.
He decided to show Babe what they were for. He climbed a rock, the org hopping after him. Org Rider spread his arms, flapped them as he leaped toward another rock.
