Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  His hand hovered over the lamp, hesitating to snuff it out.

  Then he realized: he had tried to kill that flame twice and had not succeeded. He had merely stepped into a new sequence. What guarantee did he have that this was not yet another nightmare, and the lamp an illusion?

  How could he put it out - if the act of quenching it was itself a dream?

  Subble smiled. The manta hadn't attacked because it did not understand his ploy. Why should he stand on land, after establishing that his tactical posture was deficient there? Why - unless he had come up with something special?

  And perhaps he had. He was not the same man who had begun the contest. The things he saw were entirely different now. He appreciated Pent in a new and marvelous perspective, and would not react as he had before. The information had been delivered hallucinogenically, as though he had been listening to the manta's quarter of the story, immersing himself in it as he had during the human quarters but that did not mean that it was invalid.

  On the contrary. He must have killed Pent and earned contact, learning to interpret the peripheral signals, to operate without dependency upon the transceiver. The drug made his mind responsive to suggestion, even alien suggestion. When he had taken it in the presence of the manta he had recreated the world-view of the manta, and had seen to some extent what the manta saw, modified somewhat by his humanity. Somewhat....

  Yet Pent circled still, alive. He could as easily have invented the entire thing, including the fungal origins of the manta. Was he victor or vanquished?

  Twice the vision had become dominated by his own ambitions - and twice he had realized this and cut it off. Agents were not supposed to be subject to ambition. Such visions indicated personality breakdown, making him unsuitable as an agent. He had been moved by beautiful Aquilon's body, so he had recreated her in a willing situation, much as he might have done subconsciously had he possessed a differentiated subconscious. Balked, he had jumped ahead, then, to the completion of his mission - and perceived the distortion more readily, that time.

  The drug affected his perception, making real any transitory thought that had sufficient force. He had taken an overdose, but it did not impair his reasoning facilities - faculties! - or his memory. He had entered a world of hallusions - but he could control them.

  At this moment he was matching hal - illusion to reality. He could now snuff out the flame successfully - and did not need to. Assuming that his reasoning were valid. Otherwise he was trapped anyway.

  He tested. The genie Myco appeared, grinning. Tut on your turban!' Subble said. The slave obeyed.

  'Kill Pent.'

  'Master, Pent is dead already.' The language was wrong; Myco should not be speaking modern.

  'Well, kill him again!'

  'Gladly!' Myco swelled up, launched enormous jeweled hands at Subble's throat.

  The five watched him die, unable to protect the omnivore from himself. Contact had been a failure after all.

  Cal woke with a start, the dream fading. Strange, the way it had become an obsession: the simple fact of drinking the blood of the Nacre omnivore. He knew now that he had suffered from the same compulsion syndrome that Veg and Aquilon had - except that they had not possessed the intellectual determination to carry it to such a macabre extreme. The simple refusal to eat meat, or to smile - but he had made of his entire life a nightmare, like the man who believed he must commit a crime every day or die. Cal had taken unto himself the action he considered most reprehensible: the parasitic consumption of the blood of other animals.

  Though the origin was psychasthenic, the effects were real. He had wanted to die, and for years had driven himself to it, fighting the internal censors of self-preservation ... only to be balked at the climax by the blind faith of friends.

  A man who gave of his strength, a woman who bled herself to show their faith in him.

  He opened his eyes and saw Star standing at the window. Was someone coming?

  That had been the breaking point, he thought, resuming the chain. They had beaten him, for he could not bring himself to sacrifice either the man or the woman he loved to his own morbidity. Veg would have driven himself, like a faithful horse, to a running collapse, traveling two miles loaded for every mile while others went unburdened. Aquilon would have bled herself dry - to save the feeble creature they called friend. The two had overcome his death-wish by tripling the cost of success. Better that he should live, than they die.

  And so he had been given the impetus for change, and had searched for a pretext. He had taken the blood of the omnivore and thrived upon it - knowing, beneath a new suppression, that it was a nutrient fluid unrelated to human or Earthly blood except in general function. How could it be blood - drawn from the corpse of an animate fungus? And from that first exhilarating step, that concession to the needs of life and health, he had progressed steadily toward a more normal diet, and gained back much of the strength the years had dissipated.

  Yet, like Aquilon, he had replaced his chains with stronger ones. He had accepted life for himself - at the possible expense of that of his species. Thus his new nightmare stemmed from that cup of blood - Aquilon's or Nacre's, he was not sure - and climaxed in rivers of the blood of man drenching the earth of Earth.

  'Wake and dress immediately,' the voice said, and for a moment it seemed the manta had spoken. 'I will carry you.'

  That was what had disturbed Star. A man had been approaching. 'Subble!' he said. 'Did you-?'

  'No. I am Sueve, assigned to complete this aspect of the mission. Subble is otherwise occupied.'

  Cal dressed hurriedly. Now he heard the movements of trucks outside, of human activity. 'What's going on?'

  'Evacuation.' Sueve picked him up and strode to the door.

  'But my books, my notes-'

  'Sorry. Nothing but yourself. Your clothing will be destroyed when you enter decontamination.'

  'What's happening?' But Sueve did not reply. He was running now, down the street that covered the length of the beach establishments, avoiding the slowly maneuvering army trucks and confused, milling people, while Star kept up easily. The wind whistled by Cal's ear; the agent was astonishingly strong and swift.

  It was early dawn, still too dark for the birds to sing. The greens and whites and browns of the plaster and wood houses were only shades of gray. 'Truth is a shade of gray,' he thought, and wondered who had said it first. Now and then the gulf was visible, its water dark and still. Palmettoes and pines leaned over the winding street, and large century plants spoked beside it. The bright signs of the all-night stores, the motels and restaurants catering to restless tourists, these shone eerily in the absence of their proprietors and clientele. The evacuation was almost complete already, proceeding with a swiftness he had not thought possible as the sealed trucks moved out. The drivers wore bacterial masks. But there were no sirens, no shrill radio exhortations or loudspeaker warnings. All was accomplished silently. Why?

  Sueve was cutting across the barbered golf links. In the center of the convoluted greens stood a ship. A booster rocket, grossly misplaced here. Then they were inside. Sueve - so much like Subble! - set the controls and tied Cal into a deep acceleration couch, while Star braced against what was coming.

  'What happens to all the other people? Why them, too?'

  'They are being interned for the duration.' The panel was clicking off the countdown.

  Yet he was sure there had been no declaration of war, no reports of oncoming hurricane or other natural calamity. This was a sudden, complete and secret evacuation of the beaches - and he could think of only one reason. The one he had dreamed about so guiltily.

  'What about the ones who refuse to go? Who demand reasons? Who hide, who are missed?'

  'They remain.' The rocket ignited and acceleration crushed him back into sleep.

  The line of men in fire suits combed through the forest, driving everything before them by spraying a toxic chemical. Where they passed, the green foliage wilted and dead insects and small
animals littered the leafy floor.

  'Hey!' Hank Jones exclaimed. 'This is my land! Get outta here!'

  Then, seeing that they paid him no attention, he took up his axe. 'Go get Veg!' he yelled to Job. 'He'll help. Tell 'im it's an invasion - they're laying down mustard gas!'

  Job bolted as the second line of invaders, masked and armed, conducted Hank away. Job leaped over the wall and pounded down the trail to the neighboring work area.

  But Veg was the major object of the advance. He had problems of his own, that early morning, as the troops converged.

  Hex, knowing the meaning of the weapons and the spray and the hovering ring of helicopters, permitted himself to be herded in with Veg. The omnivore had little sense of individual ethics. The only defense here was no defense.

  Behind them, as the flyer lifted, the reluctant smoke of burning greenwood pushed up from the dying forest.

  Joe looked up from his computer flow chart, but there was nothing in the hall. The noise came from the air circulation vents: not a hiss, not the usual knocking of incipient breakdown, but a subtle change in rhythm, as though the texture of the air had changed. A fine haze emerged.

  He reached for his phone. He had authorized no addition of chemicals, and certainly not so unselectively as via the air. What was good for the rabbits was not necessarily good for the hens, and-

  He slumped over his chart, letting the receiver fall. In their cages the animals also slumped. In minutes all were dead.

  Incendiary gas now descended from the vents, filling the chambers. A spark, and it burned fiercely but not explosively, charring everything in almost complete silence. The farm had become a thorough oven by the tune someone realized that there had been a small error: the man was supposed to have been evacuated first.

  Circe alone escaped. She well knew the nature of the omnivore, and had been alert for the telltale sonic waves of the first faint preparations. She sped for the elevator before closure was complete. Its mechanism was powered by the same trunk line as the air circulators, and by the time the omnivores realized their oversight, Circe was out of the death zone.

  But Aquilon's apartment too was a trap. Woman and manta were caught and sealed in a pressurized capsule: air and water but not freedom. The capsule was taken from the building secretly as the suited demolition crew razed the apartment, burning the furnishings and paintings and melting down all other fixtures.

  The faceless units of the incendiary crews moved relentlessly, guiding their tanks delicately down the length of the beaches spraying gasoline and igniting it with bursts from the flame throwers. Men ran screaming from the fired houses: the ones who had avoided relocation by intent or mistake, fearing the quarantine stations, the loss of their expensive properties and household possessions, or just plain ornery about their rights. The omnivore cared nothing for their rights. They ran, touched by jets from the tanks, their clothing and then their skin dropping from their bodies in bright embers, arid after them their women and children, crying skinlessly. Some tried to attack the massive tanks that crushed their homes - and were themselves crushed beneath the unswerving metal treads. Some dived into the ocean, swimming beneath the hovering white-breasted gulls, and the burning oils pursued them across the water, converting the gray-green depths to orange and black.

  It was swift, it was merciless. Lin, symbol of the line, paced the length of it, observing the omnivore in action. What the tanks did not destroy, the napalm bombers did. By the time the sun appeared in the sky, the beaches for a hundred miles had been leveled. If anything survived there, it regretted it

  Lin left, urged by time and the increasing light. Beyond the beaches the nets extended, reaching far into the sea and penning all surface marine creatures behind them. Ships patrolled this perimeter - robot vessels, armored, no man upon them, diffusing deadly fluids to plumb the lowest regions. Automatic weapons shot down everything that approached from either side - flights of birds, a straying pilot, even large insects. Here, too, the closure was complete.

  Lin joined the others at the robot shuttle that bore them rapidly away, but he knew what happened behind. A single missile arched over land and water, homing in on an isolated island. A hundred feet above the tiny beach where Subble lay it disappeared.

  The island became a ball of incandescence as land and water vaporized.

  Where it had been, a monstrous mushroom sprouted.

  'You mean - everything's gone?' Aquilon asked, shocked. 'Veg's forest, the whole cellar farm, all the gulf beaches?'

  'They had to go,' Cal said. They were crowded with the seven mantas into an orbiting chamber awaiting decontamination: a thoroughly unpleasant process. 'There is no other way to be sure - and even the two hours they allowed for evacuation before ... liquidation were a calculated risk.'

  'I don't get it,' Veg said. 'Why did they leave us alone so long - no quarantine, no trouble - then suddenly, pow!'

  'Because it took the bureaucracy some time to become aware of the danger. They suspected that the mantas might revert to a dangerous wild state, or something minor like that, I think. When Subble figured it out and made his report, they had to act immediately. We're extremely fortunate they decided to save our lives; that surprises me, as a matter of fact.'

  What danger? The mantas have no diseases, and they know they aren't supposed to attack people.'

  Cal sighed. 'It is complicated, but I'll try. Briefly, the danger is inherent in the nature of the mantas and the other creatures of Nacre. They are of a fungus world, where animals of our type never evolved at all. The mantas are the most advanced representatives of the third kingdom. They are in fact evolved from parasitic fungi resembling our slime molds, while the ones we call herbivores are similarly advanced saprophytes. Naturally they couldn't be true herbivores, with no living vegetation on the planet's surface, and they certainly aren't plants themselves.'

  'I never thought of that!' Veg exclaimed. 'No trees, no grass, no flowers-'

  'Then - they aren't really animals, even?' Aquilon wanted to know.

  'Not as we think of them. Parallel evolution has brought the Nacre animates to a state surprisingly similar to the higher Earth animals, which is why we made the mistake we did. But their life cycle remains mycotic - that is, they reproduce by spores, and at some period they are unable to move independently.'

  'But so do Earth fungi,' Aquilon said.

  'Precisely. And Earth fungi are exceedingly important to Earth's economy, as I explained to Subble. So important that no interference with their development and exploitation can be tolerated. If we lost our food-yeasts alone, billions of people would starve before alternatives were developed. And if the carbon-dioxide cycle were broken-'

  Veg was shaking his head dubiously, and Aquilon seemed uncertain also. He kept forgetting that although they had been on Nacre, the chemistries of ecology meant little to them. But there were other facets.

  'Can you imagine what havoc would be wreaked in our civilization if an octillion super-advanced fungus spores were released in our atmosphere to mix with these here? There could be millions of mantas overrunning the planet, looking for omnivores - men, that is - to feed upon; and the next generation would see more mantas than men in the world.'

  They looked at him, trying to visualize it.

  'Or the spores might succeed in merging with local spores to produce Earth-Nacre half-breeds that might very well displace all other life on Earth. The mantas by themselves, you see are self-limiting; they feed only on omnivores, whether animal or fungus, and have the intelligence and conscience to preserve some equitable balance. Man can live with them, though perhaps not as master. But the halfbreeds could be-'

  'Omnivores,' Aquilon breathed. 'Beasts with no controls. ...'

  'Worse. They could operate on the molecular level, and start our common molds and yeasts changing, leapfrogging freakishly along the path of a billion years of evolution. That's what would hit our food supply. We are able to work so effectively with our fungi because they are pr
imitive. But we know now that their evolution can lead to forms in many ways superior to us. Since most mutations are not beneficial, all life as we understand it today could be imperiled while savage semi-primitive strains competed for dominance. Our yeasts could begin feeding on us.'

  'But I thought different species could not mate unless they were closely related,' Aquilon said. 'The Nacre spores should be quite different from ours.'

  'Perhaps. Perhaps not. We know so little about the third kingdom that we just can't be certain. There is no such thing as complete convergence in the animal kingdom - but spores are about as hardy and versatile an instrument of reproduction as exists. Some may grow to maturity without mating, but ingest other spores they encounter. Alien enzymes in a local predator could result in modification. There are so many billions of spores in our atmosphere that some kind of mutation becomes a probability rather than a possibility. The danger is theoretical - but so great that every vestige of alien life must be expunged from the planet. Our existence may depend upon it.'