Collected short fiction, p.748
Collected Short Fiction, page 748
“Watch yourself, brother, or they’ll beat you.” Belthar glared his indignation. “Their petty-seeming preman shapes are cunning disguises for creatures designed to kill us all.”
“Weren’t they exiled to die on Andoranda V?”
“That plan failed.”
“Were you too clever, brother?”
“My good son’s plan.” Belthar’s aura trembled, but he controlled his tone. “No escape was considered possible, from that lonely universe. The planet itself should have killed the preman race, with no damage to their precious treaty rights.”
“So what went wrong?”
“The two young demons found traitors among us.”
“Gods?”
“Two of our fellow eternals.” His blue accusing eyes scanned the silent columns. “They somehow corrupted the pilot of their transport ship—the child goddess Zhondra Zhey. I knew she had always coddled them, but I never expected her to betray her own immortality.”
Fury flickered in his nimbus and quivered in his voice.
“They found another ally we didn’t know existed. A strange genetic blunder of old Huxley Smithwick’s, that should have been destroyed. A monstrous little demigod with a demon’s cunning, hiding here on Earth right under our nose. Its last den was on the old preman reservation. When Quelf flooded that, it got aboard Zhondra’s ship and joined the rebel demons.”
“So we face outlaw gods?” Kranthar’s mockery had vanished. “Where are they now?”
“Our gravest problem.” Belthar scowled at the starcharts above him. “The premen killed my son at Redrock and disappeared from there. My able clone commander guessed that they had fled to join their people on Andoranda. I sent him there on my best battlecraft, with orders to kill every preman he found.
“He found none at all.”
“Good enough!” Kranthar rumbled. “The planet was to kill them.”
“They didn’t die there.” Belthar glared at his self-content. “Ironlaw found evidence to tell a more shocking story. The demons did arrive. He found their footprints in the snow and traced them to the exile camp. But they were gone, and all the premen. He found nearly all their last cargo of supplies stacked around the landing pad. Thrown out, he thinks, to lighten Zhondra’s transport. He believes she took the whole colony away—but he found no clue to tell him where they went.”
“So what can we do?” Kranthar’s halo was streaked with anxious orange now. “If the demons have disappeared?”
“We can arm ourselves!” Belthar’s voice rang against the towering pillars and came back in dying echoes from the ice-crags below. “We can search the universes!”
“All the universes?” Kranthar blinked. “For one small ship?”
“For your own best chance to stay alive.” Belthar glowered through a crimson blaze. “Because the demons won’t be gone forever. With our best efforts and the best of luck, we can hope to find and kill them wherever those traitor gods have helped them hide. With worse luck—if our efforts fail—they’ll be back to erase us all, as the last Creator planned in her insane senility.”
He set the black throne to turning, his hard blue stare slowly sweeping the enormous circle of transceiver columns. The full moon shone through the columns, reaching with white gigantic fingers across the frost-dusted floor. Overhead, the black vault was alive with its flashing maps of the divine dominions.
“You know our peril.” Outside the nimbus, red sparks of ice froze from Belthar’s breath. “What is your will?”
Unease rippled through the pillared, images.
“I share your apprehensions, Bel.” The first clear voice was Cynthara’s. “I recall our desperate war to put an end to the lunatic mischief of old Eva Smithwick a thousand years ago. I perceive a deadlier danger now, and I think we must all unite to face it. I place myself and all my planet under your command.”
“Brother—” Kranthar’s tone was chastened. “So do I.”
Colors of assent shone across the columns.
“Your will is mine.” Belthar pealed his answer, the red nimbus bright. “I accept your leadership. The demands upon you may be unexpected and severe. My first commands are these: You will join the search for the hidden demons with every means you can invent. You will arm your fastest starcraft with the deadliest weapons you can find. You will stand prepared. When the demons are found. I’ll lead you anywhere, into any universe, to win the battle for our lives that we began a thousand years ago.”
The pillars burned with strong applause.
They called the planet Eden.
“Our safe place,” Buglet whispered. “At last, our home.”
In the starlit afterdome, they swam in free fall, clutching the hold-ropes now and again as Zhondra braked the transport into a parking orbit. The planet was mostly water. The one great continent, wreathed with archipelagoes, was round as some ancient battle-shield, bossed at the center with a high crown of ice.
“A world without tectonic motion.” A transceiver prism brought Pipkin’s doll-voice from the nosecone, where he was learning astronautics. “The whole continent was evidently built from one volcano that never drifted off a single subcrustal hot spot.”
Glaciers had burst in three directions from that high central basin, feeding three major rivers that had cut their black canyons through a wide ring of tawny desert to wander across immense cloud-veiled lowlands and spread their deltas into the planetary sea. Those green lowlands were scattered with huge blue lakes, all oddly circular.
A double moon spun above the planet, one element airless and crater-scarred, an iron-stained red, the other brighter than Luna, dazzling with snow. Close together, locked in orbits that held them face to face, they whirled like a strange dumbbell tossed into the starry dark.
“A wonderful world!” Buglet turned to him from the swelling planet, golden eyes alight. “Beyond the reach of all the gods.”
“We should be safe.” Davey caught her cool hands. “So long as they overlook the error of their starmaps. But—” A haunting dread shook his voice. “I wish we could be sure.”
“We are sure.” She pulled him closer. Her floating body collided gently with him and he caught the sweetness of her sleek black hair. “Starships don’t get back from antimatter universes—not often. Pipkin got us here by unlikely accident. No god is going to risk his immortality to take another look.”
Suddenly she was in his arms, her eager lips on his mouth.
“We’ll have time enough,” she breathed. “To have our child.”
Dread touched him again, and she must have felt his tiny shudder.
“That’s what we were born for.” Her whisper was stronger. “To make the ultiman—the Multiman our people used to dream about when they needed faith in some new savior to rescue them from the reservation. The ultiman will have all your transvolutionary genes and all of mine, with powers we can’t imagine. When we do meet the gods again, he can laugh at them.”
“I hope—”
“I know.”
“I love you, Bug.” He tried not to tremble. “But I’m so afraid—afraid you’ll be hurt.”
“If you really are afraid, we must make the baby right away.”
The goddess called them to the nosecone to help select a landing spot. Pipkin was there, anchored to a hold-bar with a yellow-furred arm longer than his body, his one green eye squinting at her young loveliness as avidly as if he had been a sexual being.
The area they chose was high on the west coast, where the gods agreed that the weather should be mild and not unduly wet or dry. Davey went down on the first shuttle flight, along with Pipkin and half a dozen preman volunteers.
Assuming command, the dwarf god had the muman pilot land them on a narrow cape that jutted into the sea beside a wide circular bay. When the muman had tested the air and found it good, Davey managed to be first upon the virgin world.
His heart was pounding, and he sniffed the fresh scents of Eden as eagerly as if they had been some precious perfume. The planet was smaller than Earth, its year and its day somewhat shorter and its mass a quarter less. The slighter gravity gave him a delightful sense of lightness.
They had come down in the shallow valley of a stream that ran into the bay. The almost-grass was soft and ankle-deep, greener than anything he had ever seen on the desert reservation, starred here and there with huge yellow blooms. Across the meadows, the forest on the low hills was a darker green, mysterious but silently inviting.
“A good world.” He smiled back at Pipkin, dancing lightly after him down the gangway on his two huge hands. “Better than I ever hoped for.”
“You don’t know it yet.” Tiny body swinging in the air, the godlet paused to squint suspiciously into the empty landscape. “You may get a bad surprise,” his wasp-voice whined. “There are signs I don’t like.”
Davey didn’t wait to ask what those signs might be. Breathless to see more of Eden, he liked all he found. The sweet-scented plants, the sea-freshened air, the clean blue sky, the tranquilizing quiet. Nothing hostile met them anywhere.
“No large life forms.” Their absence seemed to worry Pipkin. “I’d like to know why.”
Without learning why, he went back on the shuttle in the middle of the short afternoon. Davey stayed. A big-bellied man called El Sapo had taken control of the landing party, setting up a tent and preparing for the night.
Davey had never liked El Sapo. Back at Redrock, he had been always sucking around the preman agent, scheming for appointments as sheriff or tax collector or judge and using his petty authority to harass El Yaqui for the peyote he chewed and the untaxed mescal he sold and the women La China kept upstairs. More than once, raiding the place, he had jailed Davey and Buglet until El Yaqui got them out.
He wouldn’t look at Davey now. Assigning one man to drive tent stakes, one to dig a drainage trench, others to cut firewood and bring water from the stream and cover their equipment, he said nothing at all to him.
“Please,” Davey asked, “what can I do?”
“I can give commands to men.” El Sapo stopped to scowl at him with bulging, mud-brown eyes. “I have none for such as you.”
“I’m a man.” Davey flushed. “Old enough—”
“It’s not your age.” El Sapo shrank back. “It’s what you do that men can’t. No man—or Belthar himself—could have jumped from Redrock to the prison world without a ship. I don’t know what you are.”
“Buglet—Jondarc says we’ll be the ultimen.” His voice lifted quickly. “She says we were born with latent transvolutionary gifts that we can use to help the premen—”
“Help the premen?” El Sapo’s hoarse croak mocked him. “You got us torn out of our Terran homes and shipped off to die in exile—those Quelf’s torture gangs left alive—because the gods are afraid of latent transvolutionary gifts. That’s how much you’ve helped us.”
Davey stood silent for a moment, stricken with his recollection of San Seven and his parents, truman friends who had died for aiding him and Bug. This accusation held a cruel truth that he couldn’t deny.
“We mean no harm,” he muttered at last “We can’t help the gifts we have—or even understand them.” He tried to smile. “Here, we’ll have time to master—”
“I don’t know about you.” El Sapo cut him off. “I don’t want to know.”
2.
He had a bad night, his joy in Eden dimmed. The cook gave him a ladle of yellow synthetic mush from the supper kettle and El Sapo tossed him a blanket, but nobody talked to him. He slept in a corner of the tent, dreaming that the twin moons were the mis-mated eyes of another demon sent to hunt them down.
The dawn restored a little of his spirit as he walked away from the tent to pee. Dew had silvered the grassy stuff and the cool air smelled fragrantly clean. Though he saw nothing moving, some creature in the nearest clump of trees kept repeating a musical, dovelike call. Eden was new, mysterious and beautiful, theirs to claim. Its unspoiled promise was headier to him than El Yaqui’s mescal had ever been.
The shuttle came back before sunrise, settling slowly on its jet of roaring steam. It brought half a dozen more men and another half-load of equipment. When the muman said he needed a harder landing pad, placed where his suction hose could reach fresh water for reaction mass, Davey volunteered to build it.
Stiffly, El Sapo told him to go ahead. The laser drill was like the one he had learned to run at the truman commune and he took it to attack a rocky knob near a bend in the stream. Working all day alone, he split slabs of weathered granite and dragged them on the null-G line to dam the stream.
His hard pad was leveled and ready when the shuttle returned, with clear water pooled above the dam. The muman came out to inspect it, grinning approval, but he got no thanks from anybody else.
Next day he found another job. El Sapo had left him out of the gang of axemen sent upriver to begin cutting timber for their first building, but he was allowed to ride the floating logs down the stream and roll them back into the channel when they ran aground.
He was waiting for Buglet when the shuttle touched down with the last full load of people and supplies. She ran eagerly to meet him, but checked herself abruptly when she saw his face.
“Davey! What’s wrong?”
“El Sapo blames me—both of us—for everything bad that ever happened to the premen. I guess he’s afraid they’ll be hit again, if the gods ever find us.” He shrugged unhappily. “The worst of it is, he’s half-right.”
“Never mind.” She kissed him gently, then very warmly. “A few of the premen have been strange with me. But when our child comes—when the ultiman is born—they’ll know and like what we are.”
They slept that night in the end of a new storage tent. El Sapo was careful to see that they got a fair share of the limited food and gear, but his mistrust had been contagious. Nobody felt easy with them.
Pipkin returned next day, alone with the muman in the empty shuttle. When they gathered around the pad, he came hand-hopping halfway down the gangway to ask for volunteers. The goddess had sent him back, he said, to search the planet for ores and other resources. He wanted two helpers.
With a glance at each other, they asked to go. Pipkin took off with them at once. Though the cruise took a dozen of Eden’s brief days, his methods of exploration seemed oddly casual. On the maps they were making he would pick a spot for inspection and tell the pilot to set them down. He would dance down the extended gangway and back again, often without touching the soil. His cynical solitary eye would sweep and abandon another virgin landscape—which Davey’s imagination had always painted with undiscovered promise. A shrug of disdain would toss his tiny body.
“Nothing here,” he would shrill. “We’ll go on.”
Sometimes, when Davey and Buglet insisted, he would allow them time to dig a plant or pick up a rock or take a photograph, but he was always contemptuous of their specimens.
“A poor Eden,” he droned, when the muman was dropping them back toward that round western bay. “No free metal or rich ores anywhere. No oil or coal or radioactives. Everything stripped clean.”
“Stripped?” Davey echoed. “How?”
The enigmatic green eye blinked. “I wasn’t here.”
“Maybe we were just too hasty,” Buglet said. “Maybe we should keep on looking.”
“We looked long enough.” Pipkin opened his chilling blind eye. “I saw enough to know this wasn’t always Eden.”
Uneasily, they waited.
“I did see metal, deep underground.”
The white eye closed, and Davey breathed again.
“But no native veins,” that trapped-fly whine went on. “Only scattered masses, rusted and corroded, in the ruins of cities buried many million years ago.”
Davey blinked and shook his head.
“Surprised.” Pipkin’s sardonic chuckle rattled like gravel. “Didn’t you see the shape of all those lakes? And the bay where we landed? Craters! Made I think by missiles shot from the red moon—it has equally recent craters too, made I’m sure by missiles shot from here.”
“If there was a war—”
“Both sides won.” Wry malice furrowed the pink babyface. “Neither survived.”
When they were on the pad, he capered down the gangway to squeak that same report to the premen who had gathered to welcome them.
“No ores?” El Sapo yelped his dismay. “No metal at all?” His murky stare shifted accusingly to Davey and Buglet. “Without metal, we’ll go savage.”
“Not so savage, I hope, as the creatures who did have metal here.” The godlet grinned. “There is metal left, however, if you want to dig for it. Right under your feet. Used once, but still good enough for making weapons.”
Standing on one huge hand, he swung the other toward the bay.
“That must have been a city before the missile hit it. The old suburbs stretch for miles east and north of here, buried under ejecta from the crater. You can use sonic probes to locate the scrap, some of it only a few hundred feet down.”
Leering at Buglet, El Sapo muttered something Davey didn’t hear. Pipkin beckoned him into the shuttle. He soon came back, croaking as he passed that El Muneco wanted to see them.
“The Toad’s unhappy with you.” The green eye had a bright ironic glint. “Afraid to offend you, but more afraid to have you near him. I think you two must arrange to live apart.”
Delighted, Buglet chose a spot they had seen from the air. A few miles west of the landing, it was on a narrow isthmus between the bay and the sea. As happy as she was, El Sapo detailed men to move them there, with a tiny tent, a few simple tools, and their fair share of the rationed food.
Pipkin rode the shuttle back to rejoin the goddess on the transport. She and the mutant were still teaching him transvolutionary navigation, and he was planning to explore the double moon.
They pitched the tent, and Davey began cutting logs to build a cabin. That went slowly, because he had no power tools—no power machines for lumbering or farming had been shipped to the exile planet, because no Terran life could grow there, and many tons of precious cargo had been abandoned when they left it, to make space for people.
