Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

by Diane Duane

  Given such an environment, the heredity inhabiting the beings trapped inside it inevitably starts looking for ways to game the system. Some strands of Tauwff heredity became expert at looking as if they would not be worth anyone’s time to eat who didn’t want anything but a fast meal. Some began perfecting the art of looking as if eating their host might make you sick. Taking the theme in the opposite direction, some early bloodlines came to look so delicious or otherwise advantageous-for-ingestion that the mere appearance of them was irresistible. The unwary would quickly be lured close enough to be unexpectedly dispatched by more covert “sport” evolutionary developments like poison fangs or powerful prehensile tails. Yet the temptation would be difficult to resist, for Tauwff who ate such gifted opportunists and were clever enough about managing their own biology could decide which of those ingested traits to keep and which to adapt further.

  Life on Wimst throughout the initial millennia of the Doom therefore became a long, long series of episodes in a game that might as well have been called “Evolution in Action”. No one won that game, or at least not for long. The most basic rule was to avoid being eaten for as long as possible. Initially the youngest Tauwff were the most disadvantaged in that game—and well the Lone One was thought to like the sight of the only hope of Tauwffkind, the next generation, being eaten when just out of the egg by those who did not accept the stricture that came with their kind’s Choice.

  But good parents among the Tauwff went to some trouble before they clutched to give their children all the advantages possible. With care they first located and incorporated (this being one of the commoner euphemisms for eating) other Tauwff who were willing to uphold the Stricture and willingly surrender their own lives for the sake of the new life to come. When one parent or another was ready to start the business of eggbearing (which any of the Tauwff’s four sexes may choose to do), immediately after fertilization the sacrificing Tauwff became the parents’ last meal—their intent being to pass the maximum value to their young in terms of nourishment, energy, and memory.

  Then, just before producing the clutch, one or more of the parents would surrender their own lives for their children’s sake. At least one parent would remain alive in order to stay close by and keep marauding nonparents away from the feast intended for the hatchlings. This intention was of course not always successful. Other Tauwff who had got wind of the impending clutch would sometimes attack the clutching site, devouring parents and other sacrificers alike, and even sometimes the eggs—though even the most depraved or amoral Tauwff often seemed to share the belief that eating eggs was for some reason likely to incur the Lone One’s enmity.

  But assuming the marauders did not find the clutching site, assuming that other predators did not (for though there were few other lifeforms left on Tauwff, the ones that remained were relentlessly hungry and could smell a clutch of eggs a great distance away), the hatchlings would in the fullness of time come forth into the light of day. Wimst’s star’s light would fall on them for the first time and Wimst’s air would fill their lungs with their first breath; and activated by these, memories the hatchlings had never lived through would come flooding into their minds.

  That was how it went for the last hatchling who stood among the rocks in the long low sunlight, and remembered her parents’ names: Ehlmeth and Centif and Sishpeht. Their friend and sacrificer-by-choice Tivish would be somewhere nearby if she hadn’t fled, driven away by predators or marauders. She could see in memory how her parents had prepared this place, hidden, walled about with stones, where she and her clutch-sistern and -brethren had been meant to take their first meal—and what might be their last one for many days, or ever.

  She knew that she had to hurry, for though the heat of the day reflecting off the sand lent her for the time being some protection, once the sun went down those predators that tracked by heat would see her moving and make short work of her. Right now she had one duty only—to partake of the sacrifice that had been left for her and then to get away into the wide world and make what she could of her life.

  So she went; but not without a last look at the egg with the empty shell, the one that had been broken from the outside. Away she whisked across the sand, breathing the new air deep, and hearing still in memory—her own memory—the sound of another heart just a couple of shells’-thickness away.

  ***

  The Tauwff have a saying, “as sharp as a new hatchling’s nose”. Hers was as sharp as the saying suggests. More, the continuing inrush of memory from her egg-parents told her what she was smelling for: meat. The wind might blow as it pleased but the sand, even constantly shifting as it was, still kept strong traces of the trail purposefully laid down for her. The blood of her sacrifice-dam Tivish was mixed with this sand and trodden well into it, too hard and deep to blow away easily in a matter of just a few days. That blood had been changed before it fell so as to speak its nature to her nose while hiding itself from all others’, and to her nose that trail stood out clearly enough to have been painted as a stripe of light across the empty world.

  Before her first nightfall she found what she sought. It was another outcropping of stone rearing up out of the sand, identical to a thousand others that might have been found across any million square Tauwff-lengths of that part of Wimst. But this one, right up at the top, held hidden the flesh and blood of those who had died so that she and her egg-sibs might live. Even had she not been desperately hungry, she would have won her way up there to greet them had the slopes been made of glass.

  Stones had been tipped down over the bodies to prevent any of the larger wingborne predators from ripping off large portions of the precious flesh and carrying them away. The only one not so fully covered was her sacrifice-dam, who had managed only to pull down one stone over herself before rendering up her life. Still, she had managed to cover almost all of the barrel of her body, where the organs richest in memory and lore were concentrated, and much remained of those despite the attentions of the smaller daytime predators.

  The new arrival already knew at least this much of the Protocols: one ate first and gave thanks after, for time wasted could mean vital nourishment or enlightenment lost. So she went straight to her sacrifice-dam’s body first and gladly took her nourishment from it—gorged herself on the delicacies laid aside there for her, and felt the knowledge slowly come rolling in over her mind like a strange internal restaging of the slow brightening of her world inside the shell. Words came in, understanding came in, peculiar concepts that would have had no way to occur to her when she was so new in the world came in. Finally she started to feel engorged in mind as well as body, and had to stop.

  She knew she was going to need to sleep—that was brand new information, come of the flesh and the blood. She pushed herself down under one of the biggest of those stones, nearly into the body of her egg-dam, of which little was left after the birthmeals of her whole sib. Nonetheless she curled into those empty ribs and whispered, “I am here!”

  Very strange she found it, then, and a little frightening, to close her eyes for the first time and slide over the edge of life into sleep. But as she did she thought, This is part of putting the world right: I mustn’t be afraid. And so, surrounded by the reassuring smell of her egg-dam, she slept.

  In the morning one of the wingborne predators came down not far from her. The scratchy sound of it moving on the sand and picking and scratching at the stones woke her; opening her eyes, from under the stone she could see its long thin legs, hopping around. The thought of this thing coming so close to her dam and sire, be they ever so dead, made her angry.

  Let’s see how you like what you’re about to do when it’s you being done to, she thought. Quick as lightning (which she remembered though she’d never seen) she shot her head out and caught one of those legs in her jaws and pulled the legs’ owner under the stone.

  There the two of them spent some time communing in a manner almost exactly the opposite of what the predator would have preferred. She found it
had initially had little to tell her except some generalities about what flight felt like. But soon, as she licked its bones clean and crunched them up, she realized that the predator had incorporated into its nerves and its marrow a surprisingly detailed and expansive map of that whole region of the world. If you ate enough of these, she thought, you would soon know where everything in the world was, or might be. That could be useful. And she determined that she would devise a way to eat flying predators whenever possible, because if one was going to put the world right, surely it would be easier to do that while knowing where things were.

  Then she came out from under the stone and went again to visit the body of her sacrifice-dam, her egg-parents’ friend, who had walked behind them and hidden their tracks and finally, when they had won up here, covered them with the stones. She gazed at Tivish and thought it strange, perhaps a trick of the light, that her sacrifice-dam seemed smaller than she had the afternoon before. But then she realized that she herself was bigger, and this was by the sacrificer’s gift. As they were alone and no more predators were in sight, therefore, she took enough time to say the words that she remembered but had never yet spoken.

  “Know that I know the gift you’ve made me,” she said. “It’s one I won’t forget. I’ll take you everywhere with me in mind and right inside my heart. Together every day we’ll teach the one who tried to make us enemies that instead It’s made us Its worst dreams come true. All It’s done in killing us is make us all immortal! So come be young again in me, and from now till I’m young in someone else, we’ll dine together morn and eve, and all the meals between!”

  Then she broke her fast on what fare Tivish still had left to offer her, and after that spent the rest of the morning with great difficulty digging under and around the stones that shielded the bodies of her egg-dam and egg-sire. They had not much of themselves left to share, for her siblings had had (she knew from Tivish’s memories) some days’ start on her. In fact her egg-parents had wondered what might be the matter with their last-clutched egg, and had feared her possibly damaged or dead, hurt somehow in what had happened to the egg that had leaned against hers until the morning the predators attacked—

  She had to hold still and work to master herself as that memory, otherwise mercifully vague, surfaced for consideration, then faded again. But then she turned her mind to her task. It took her hours of pushing and nudging and digging in the loose gravel and sand under where her parents lay for her to be able to get at all of the last of the gift they had left her, and gratefully she made them part of her. She was too small to deal with the biggest bones except to crack them for the marrow, and when this task was done she had little energy left for anything but crawling out from under the over-roofing stones and out into the sunlight of a day already swinging toward its eve.

  She went away from the rocks to the far side of the outcropping, a place of jagged stones and leg-deep fissures where some cracked bones had been dragged away by her brethren and sistern. These final parts of the feast were now being partaken of by multitudes of little manylegged lives—a thin, sometimes-parting, sometimes-rejoining, always-moving veil of a blue-green dark as the sky, made of a million tiny legs and bodies that clambered and crept all over the remnants holding the final and tiniest morsels of the repast her parents had set forth.

  Other-memory immediately told the hatchling that these were malfeh, who lived in big colonies under the sand and came out at night to forage for whatever scraps of leftover life they might find above. Some of the flesh they would eat to improve the nest’s intelligence, and some they would bear down below to serve as the growth medium for simple fungal life to eat when meat was scarce. They were the wounded world’s way of making sure that absolutely nothing was wasted—not a scrap of food, not a whisper of memory.

  She lay down beside one of the deeper crevasses that cracked through the top of the outcropping here, and watched the malfeh about their work. In the frenzy of feasting that must have been ongoing when numerous hatchlings had been here at once, a long bright green leg-bone that must once have had much luscious meat on it seemed to have got itself tossed away onto one of the upthrust jags of stone that were separated from one another by the network of deep cracks on this side of the outcropping. There the bone had lodged perhaps unnoticed, and now the malfeh covered it from one end to the other. To her it looked almost bare, but plainly not to the malfeh’s eyes. With their tiny jaws they were industriously worrying away every last speck of the precious flesh, even dry and tough as it now was from being this long exposed.

  As she watched them scurry about, the hatchling perceived something strange going on at the end of the rock where the bone lay. It seemed that a chain of malfeh reached down from there into the crack on the far side of the bone rock, and out of sight.

  Curious, she got up and moved around to the other side of the bone rock, having to choose her footing carefully because of the width of the cracks. Looking down the other side of the rock, in the crack on the far side she saw something most unusual: her own silhouette against the brilliance of the sky. For the crack was half full of water, the first water she had ever seen, and (so her egg-sire’s memory whispered to her) possibly the last she would ever see like this. Though water fell from the sky often enough, it was rare for Tauwff or any other life on this world to see it trapped or pooled, so swiftly it sank once fallen into the desperately thirsty ground. If she had but turned the other way when she got up, she might never have seen this small wonder at all.

  Indeed as it turned out the whole bone-rock was a little island inside its crack, and all the malfeh who had come to it were trapped there. Except that, to her surprise, she saw they were not. Over on this side of the rock, and well down in the crack, she could see where that chain of malfeh led to the surface of the water. Other malfeh, some bearing food, were carefully climbing down the chain of their sibs’ bodies. Then once at the bottom of the chain, she saw a sort of lump or cluster of the malfeh forming, all of them holding tight to one another. But they are still trapped, the hatchling thought. This is very sad!

  The cluster of malfeh stayed as it was for a little while, maybe a few breaths of time. And then without warning the lump lost its hold on the chain, and lurched out into the water.

  The hatchling cried out in surprise and distress, for she thought they were going to sink. It isn’t fair, you’re trying so hard to get back to where you live! But then to her surprise she realized that the little clump wasn’t sinking. It stayed on the surface, and went floating across the water.

  Little by little, propelled by the frantic movement of tiny legs at the edges of the cluster, the lump of floating malfeh made its way across to the wall of the crack on the other side. There it caught, and clung: and then the malfeh at the top and edges of the cluster grasped hold of the stone of the far side of the crack and started climbing up it. Those that went first didn’t go all the way, but held the rock for long enough to make a chain of themselves, by which the rest of the malfeh who had floated over climbed up out of the water, and up the stone. Then at the top of the stone wall they turned sideways, as if following some trail the hatchling couldn’t see, and vanished down a different crack, one that held no water.

  That might have been an accident, the hatchling thought. So she turned back to watch the malfeh on the bone again, and saw the same thing happen several times more.

  ***

  This made her strangely glad. This is how things should be, she thought. It should be like this. We should all be helping each other, and putting the world right together.

  Of course she knew, even now, that this was not how things were. Just from the knowledge that her egg-dam’s body had put in her own yolk sac to bring her this far, and from her birthmeal that had taught her much more, the hatchling already knew that it was the old Enemy of Wimst, the Power that some Tauwff called the Poison-Fanged and others merely called Lone, that had made things the way they were. It had dug Its talons into the planet’s flesh and torn it open,
laid its cruel Doom on the world and forced its people to devour one another to stay alive. And apparently as far as her egg-parents knew, no one had ever found a way to change that.

  This annoyed the hatchling. Someone should do better, she thought. Someone should find a way to change the world!

  And she looked at the malfeh again. Even these little things are doing that! They could have eaten each other when they found they were trapped. But instead they found a way to save each other and keep on living, by using their own bodies all together.

  Then the hatchling wondered how anyone was ever going to convince all the Tauwff to come together and find a way to change the world so that they no longer needed to suffer the Doom. Her people were scattered all across the planet, mostly avoiding each other to avoid being eaten—coming together only when they could not avoid it, when desperation or hunger or the need to clutch drove them to.

  The hatchling thought again of what the malfeh were doing, and by contrast the Tauwff’s problem seemed hopeless. They can’t save each other just alone, or a few at a time. They need a lot of them, all acting together. The more the better.

  …But even with the malfeh, there had to be a first one, the hatchling thought. Yes, maybe they found out how to do this floating-together thing by accident, the way it was an accident that I went over to look in the crack. But there still had to be one who got other malfeh to do it… maybe just a few others at first. And then the more of them who did it after that, the more who got away to do it again…