Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  'Any of that make sense to you?' Veg inquired after a bit.

  'Too much,' Subble said, suffering a personal pang that surprised bun.

  'But it still hurt, knowing how he died,' Veg said, encouraged. How often people were afraid to express their true feelings, for fear of ridicule, and so presented artificial ones instead. Veg was concerned because he had let slip the mask and failed to be artificial, but now it was all right. 'I thought about it, and if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that death like that was wrong. I don't care what they say about statistics and survival - so many boys might've died, and him being the one that - but then I saw that those other boys were all somebody's brother too, you know, and probably if I knew them I'd know why they should live too. It wasn't all right to kill anybody's brother. And then I thought, what about the animals....

  'And when I stopped thinking, I wasn't killing anything that moved, or letting anybody else do it for me. It's as though that meat is his flesh.'

  'But you will fight,' Subble observed.

  'Yeah. I never did understand those pacifist types that preach nonviolence and demonstrate against war and then go home to a big juicy steak dinner. At least a man can fight back. Smack on the jaw doesn't hurt him, but-'

  Subble moved so quickly that Veg, who was looking right at him, spoke the last several words and finished his stroke before realizing he was alone.

  'Wha-?' But Subble was already coming back to resume sawing, disappointed. The menace at the fringe had moved faster yet, which deepened the mystery. Few animate things on Earth could elude an agent on the move.

  'What kind of man are you?' Veg demanded somewhat belligerently. 'You were just a blur-'

  'I was after that thing. It's been stalking us all afternoon. I'm pretty sure that's what I was sent for.'

  'You saw it?' Veg made no pretense of ignorance, though this would have made little difference to Subble in any event.

  'Only a flicker. Just enough to tell me it is animal and alien. You're fooling with strong medicine, Veg.'

  'Yeah.' The big man seemed almost relieved to be committed. 'But it isn't what you think. I don't know what you think, but it isn't that.'

  'I don't have an opinion. I was sent to gather information on a matter relevant to Earth security. I make no judgment and no final decision. When I tell you that thing is dangerous, that's observation, not opinion. It reacted faster than I did.'

  Veg's brow wrinkled. 'Just because it got the jump on you, it's a threat to the world?'

  'I'm a very quick man, Veg. My powers are a threat to any normal community, unless completely under control.'

  Veg was hostile again. 'So why should I trust you at all?'

  'It's not a question of trust. You have to take me for what I am and make your decisions accordingly.'

  'Okay - tell me what you are.'

  'I'm a special breed of government agent. I'll have to give you some background-'

  'Give.'

  'This continent is lightly populated compared to some, but its economic and political organizations are still immensely complicated. Every facet contributes exponentially to the overall-' Subble saw that Veg wasn't following, so shifted his ground. 'Take crime. If a woodsman murders his neighbor to get his cutting rights, the other lumbermen will have a pretty good idea who did it, won't they?'

  'Yeah. Not too many secrets hereabouts.' 'That's the "isolated community" approach. Everybody knows everybody, and trouble is easily handled by the group. But suppose I killed someone here, and went back home in my flyer before anything was done about it?'

  'Guess we'd have to report it to the sheriff. But it'd be pretty hard for him to-'

  'Precisely. Crime is no longer simple when there are many communities involved and interacting, and so many conflicting interests. Your sheriff's estimate of the situation would be valueless in running me down, because he wouldn't know me or my motives. I could walk into any body shop in Appalachia and have my, facial features modified, hair restyled and recolored, body profile altered by braces and injections -I could be quite unrecognizable to you in half an hour. Even if the sheriff had my exact identity - which he probably wouldn't - it could take enough tune to run me down so that my lawyer could cover the evidence against me. And believe me, the changes a body shop could make in my physical appearance are as nothing compared to what a lawyer can do to my legal appearance.'

  'You telling me you can get away with murder?'

  'Yes. In today's complex world, almost anybody can - if he knows how. All he has to do is avoid detection or capture for the few hours necessary to cover his traces - his legal ones - and the job of bringing him to justice becomes so complicated and expensive that it isn't worth making the attempt.'

  Veg shook his head. 'I'm just a simple country boy. I'll take your word it's rough in the big city. What has that got to do with why you're here?'

  'Obviously we can't let the murderers go free - or any other criminals. And that's only one section of the problem. What we need is a carefully trained and disciplined force of investigators, who can wrap up most cases so quickly that complications never develop. Men who can be assigned at a moment's notice and take hold immediately. Men who have the brains and muscle to act on their own, but the discipline to be inhumanly fair. Men whose reports will be so similar that a central computer can correlate them without having to make adjustments for individual ignorance or bias.'

  Veg frowned again. 'You still aren't answering my question.'

  Subble smiled in reply. 'I'm almost there. You wouldn't let Jones' brother arbitrate your dispute with Jones, would you?'

  'Hell no! He'd-'

  'So you understand what I mean by bias. The trouble is every person on this world is biased in some manner, even if he doesn't want to be. But when thousands of reports are being submitted by thousands of agents on thousands of unique situations every hour, bias is a luxury we can't afford. The computer has to be sure that the case is accurately presented, or the report is worthless. Yet it can't send out a bunch of identical robots-'

  'You are a man?' Veg demanded.

  'I am a man - but not an ordinary one. That is, not ordinary in the usual sense.'

  'Cut the pussyfooting and tell me!'

  'I'm a stripped-down human chassis rebuilt to computerspecifications - physical and mental.'

  'An android!'

  'No. I am a man, with a man's memories and feelings. I was born and raised as you were, and I'm sure I had my problems and my successes - but the past I have now has been grafted on with the body.'

  Veg struggled with the concept. 'You mean you aren't real? You can't-'

  'I'm real - but not as I was born. Whatever I was was cut away, and the entire framework of the ideal agent substituted. My memories - all of them - are his memories, and my abilities are his abilities. There are thousands like me, male and female.'

  'Just so your report will be like someone else's?'

  'More or less. It's not merely a matter of standardization, but conformity to the highest qualifications. I can do things that my original personality could never have achieved.'

  'Like moving in a blur,' Veg agreed. Then, after a moment: 'I guess I see why you understood about my filling in for my brother's life. That's what you're doing. You're another peavey made out of a cant hook - only you don't even know what you started out to be.'

  Subble decided not to inquire what the difference was between a peavey and a cant hook.

  They had finished the sawing. Veg stood up and stretched cramped legs. 'Sub, I guess I know everything about you I want to. I'll tell you as much as I can, but I can't tell you everything. I mean, I know more, but-'

  'But there is Aquilon. I understand.'

  'Yeah. 'Quilon and Cal and the rest of it. And when I stop, you don't ask any more questions, you just get out of here and I won't see you again, okay? And you don't poke around after what's in the forest, either.'

  'Agreed,' Subble said. The discomfort normal people felt around
the retread was a fact of his life, and did not disturb him. Perhaps some of the antipathy stemmed from the fact that agents only questioned people who had something to conceal. Veg had agreed to cooperate to a certain extent, and that was all that was required.

  As Veg talked, Subble forgot the man's lingering homespun mannerisms and language and absorbed the episode as though it were his own. He imagined himself on a distant colony-planet, gazing at scenery unlike any on Earth, breathing through a filter in his nose and riding beside a lovely but unsmiling woman.

  * * *

  'Don't smile, 'Quilon,' the big man said, forearms flexing on the controls.

  The girl beside him put both hands to her lips in a naturally graceful reaction, searching, as though afraid her features had betrayed her.

  ' 'Quilon,' Veg continued, 'you know you're a mir'cle of beauty in summer shorts. Be a shame to ruin it with a little smile, now.'

  Aquilon leaned over, unsmiling, to rest her forehead against his muscular shoulder. 'Don't,' she pleaded quietly.

  Veg stared ahead, realizing that he had hurt her but not understanding why. The truth was that he rather admired Aquilon's composure; it lent her features a classic splendor that few living women possessed. He had known many smiling females and respected none; they were always to be found hanging around the spaceport, eager for his money and his muscle and most of all for his notoriety: a spaceman. The mature ones were competent - and expensive - and not always trustworthy. The teeners were agog with puppylike willingness, anxious to question him on what simply had to be exciting, and too often taking the more prosaic truth for some veiled criticism of their feminine worth.

  He was not a philosophic man, apart from one area that he kept to himself, and craved little more than physical pleasure and honest companionship; but circumstances had forced cynicism upon him. He was unsatisfied, and when driven to probe the reasons for this had realized that it was because he was in fact a non-person. The dedicated women of the spaceport were eager for news of space and for proximity to it - though not eager to undertake offworld voyages themselves. They had little interest in the personal needs or feelings of the man within the uniform. They paid off in sex and thought that was enough. It was true that he needed sex - but that was only the physical side of the coin. Sex was minutes; what about the hours remaining?

  Aquilon was different. First, she had come to space herself, and that was a definite signal of determination, talent and courage. Second, she was young and astonishingly beautiful - an almost foolproof formula for serious trouble in space. She gave no shred of encouragement to any man but she needed a man, if only to protect her boundaries from other males.

  She had come to Cal.

  If the choice seemed ludicrous, it was quickly apparent that it was not. Cal had no designs on her, and was knowledgeable about many things. She could talk to him without affectation or defensiveness, and touch him without being forcibly reminded that they were male and female. She could sleep in his cabin safely, for he forced himself on no person in any way. Indeed, she served him by bringing him books from the ship's library, by making up his bunk and cleaning his instruments and buttoning his uniform for him the few times uniforms were used in space. Cal was not always strong enough to do these things for himself.

  But no one interfered. At first there had been little restlessness, but Veg had talked to the men in question and it passed.

  'As with Ferrovius and the Roman courtier,' Cal had remarked sagely. Veg had failed to comprehend, and so the little man explained. 'Ferrovius was a character in Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion. He was constructed somewhat like you, Veg, and I think there would be a fair comparison in temperament too. He was an early Christian, back in the days when such faith was unfashionable, and pledged to nonviolence. When the Roman struck him on the cheek, he dutifully turned the other cheek - but then he suggested that the Roman should try a similar exercise. "I sat up all night with that youth wrestling for his soul;" he tells us, "and in the morning not only was he a Christian, but his hair was as white as snow."'

  After that Veg, who had little interest in literature, had taken the trouble to read the complete play, and had discovered that the Irish playwright himself was a vegetarian. Small cosmos.

  At any rate, Veg had impressed upon the remaining complement of the ship that Cal was his friend. When Aquilon entered the picture, she became Cal's second friend. It was that simple. What upset her, upset Cal - and that in turn made Veg restless and brought about Ferrovian exercises of pacifism.

  The relationship between Veg and Aquilon was somewhat cooler. It was absolutely polite, and there was even innocent banter, as there had been just now - but they did not quite understand each other, as the recent dialogue had just reminded him.

  She touched his tense biceps. 'I'm sorry, Veg. My fault.'

  'Naw,' he said, grinning. Suddenly his world was bright, though what he viewed was not. He swung the tractor around one of the giant fungi, wrinkling his nose at the fetid odor he fancied he smelled. He squinted through the front screen, trying to penetrate the haze that covered the planet of Nacre. The level plain ahead became lost in the gloom, its foreground broken only by the massive fungoid growths ballooning out of the fertile dust.

  'Are we near the mountains?' Aquilon asked, slender fingers toying with a small but rather special art brush. Veg grunted.

  The tractor accelerated, forging through the thick atmosphere. The wind whipped into the open cockpit, carrying Aquilon's hair out in short blonde streamers. She faced ahead, inhaling deeply through the concealed nostril filters. She did not smile.

  Veg eased up as the mountain ridge appeared. Nacre had never been mapped, largely because there was no economical way to do it, but men were working on the problem now, and he enjoyed exploring. The outcroppings at the base of these hills of his were stark, while the tops projected into the encompassing mist and vanished. Aquilon's fingers moved in air, shaping the vision she saw, eager to express it on canvasite.

  'Look at the vegetation!' she exclaimed. 'The toadstools!'

  Now that they were moving slowly, Veg could see what she meant. The plain had been largely featureless, a foggy desert, but the foot of the mountain at close view was covered with fungoid brilliance. What had seemed like bare stone was actually gray and blue fungus, its hugely spreading tops an umbrella over the lesser growths. What appeared to be sand was the salt and pepper of myriad tiny spokes emerging from a brown spongelike underpinning. Between were layered colors - red, yellow, blue and black, the individual plants shaped like funnels, horns, brackets, plates and, yes, toadstools. From a distance it was all a blur, largely the fault of the atmosphere; close, it was a wonderland of shape and color. He pulled to a halt.

  'Don't touch anything,' he warned her. 'Some of these mushrooms could be poisonous.' Then he felt foolish, remembering her training; she should be warning him. There was no danger of anyone taking a bite.

  Aquilon unfolded a tripod from her pad and painted busily. She wore brown shorts and a white blouse and filled both so well Veg found it hard to look at her. He wondered again why she had deserted the popular life she could have had on Earth to venture into lonely space. But she offered no hint, as she twirled her brush and duplicated item after item in full color.

  He walked to the rear of the tractor and lifted the catch on the back equipment hold. There, suspended in a comprehensive padded harness, was a very small, thin, bespectacled man with sparse brown hair. His trousers and sleeves were full length, as though he did not want people to see his limbs, and his shirt came together in a snug collar about a small neck.

  'How you doing, Cal?'

  The little man smiled bravely. 'Well enough,' he said, but his face was pinched and white.

  'We stopped to draw some pictures,' Veg explained. 'Maybe you want a few samples?'

  The sunken eyes brightened. 'You found some distinctive varieties!' The emaciated hands came up to touch the fastenings of the harness, then dropped wearily. 'Perh
aps you could select a few for me.'

  'Sure,' Veg said, embarrassed. He could see that the ride had been hard on his friend. He kept forgetting that others did not always share his enthusiasm for speed. Cal had not adapted properly to the gravity of Nacre, though it was less than that of Earth, and the filters Impeded his breathing. In space, under null-gravity conditions, he was all right, and he had a liquid suspension bath for conditions of acceleration. On land - he suffered. But Cal was Cal, and had insisted on coming on the exploratory excursion, rough as the journey might be. He was as excited as Aquilon about what might lie in the mountain range. It was not courage he lacked, but strength.