Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  The port opened.

  Before the humans could move, the mantas did. Three of them angled around Veg and launched through the hole, flaring into the flying shape as they emerged into the pressured connecting tube. There were no other spacelocks here; the passage entered the main station directly. The three were out of sight in a moment.

  'What?' Veg exclaimed.

  Then he piled out after them, determined to find out what they were doing. Cal and Aquilon followed. The four remaining mantas stayed in the shell, motionless.

  Shouts and noises sounded ahead. Aquilon pulled herself along by the deep corrugations of the tube, floating after the men. She was surprised the mantas had been able to move so well in free-fall - though she realized, now that she thought about it, that it was air resistance that stabilized them, not gravity. They were like powered kites, perpetually tacking against the wind, except that they were doing the moving, not the air. One pushing foot, one sail -

  There was gravity inside the station proper. A guard was rolling on the floor, clutching his hand. Aquilon stopped automatically to help him - and recognized the clean wound of a manta attack. The manta's tail was a deadly weapon, capable of indenting a television screen - or of severing the human hand from its wrist. In this instance the hand had only been cut. She saw the anesthetic gun on the floor and realized that the manta had merely disarmed the man. Few people could fire before a charging manta struck.

  But why? Why had those three mantas bolted?

  'They were going to ambush us,' Veg said angrily, watching the guard. 'Kill us out of hand -'

  'Ridiculous,' Cal snapped. Somewhere down the hall there was a continued commotion, and cries of anguish. 'There are innumerable ways they could have dispatched us and the mantas without ever releasing us from the capsule, had they wanted to. Those three mantas provoked this.'

  'Then why did that bastard have his gun drawn?' Veg demanded. 'He never could have reached it if he waited until he saw them.'

  He was right. The guard had to be waiting with the weapon ready, or he would have been struck down with it still in his holster. Or, more likely, not struck at all, since the manta would not have had to disarm him. But Cal was right too, for it was a sleep-gun, not a kill-gun.

  Then she remembered: no deadly weapons were permitted in a normal orbiting station. The risk to personnel was too great, but that answered only the smallest part of it. The guard could have been instructed to stand by with weapon at the ready, just in case; that did not necessarily constitute aggressive intent. He would have tried to use it when he saw the horror shape of the manta coming at him, however.

  She helped the guard to his feet. 'Better get over to sick bay, mister. Your hand's laid open to the bone, and that's arterial bleeding. Next time remember: never point a weapon at a manta. They know what guns are, and their reflexes are faster than yours.'

  Dazed, the man departed. She wondered how it would have turned out had the guard been an agent. Agents' reflexes were super fast, and with the gun already drawn - but the mantas had obviously been ready for trouble. Could there have been such an encounter between Subble and Pent on the defunct island? Had Subble won, then been killed by the others? She really would have to inquire about that.

  'I think we'd better get back to the capsule and wait,' Cal said. 'We weren't ambushed - but we weren't told the truth, either. I'm sure the mantas had reason for moving out like that. Notice how neatly executed it was - three took off, four sat tight.'

  They returned with alacrity. The four mantas remained, immobile as the fungi they were kin to. Somewhere in the bowels of the station a commotion continued, showing that the three were still on the rampage. The screen in the shell was still lighted, but now no face showed.

  Cal faced the mantas. 'All right, comrades - what is your purpose? Are we in immediate danger?'

  One of the four flexed its tail twice, making a double snap: the signal for 'no'.

  'Maybe they went berserk!' Veg cried. 'Being cooped up for so long -'

  Three snaps: question mark.

  'Berserk,' Cal explained, first to recognize the problem. 'Going wild, acting unreasonably, making unnecessary trouble. A form of insanity.'

  Again the tail: no.

  'Find out whom we're talking to,' Aquilon suggested, wondering how long they would be allowed before station personnel closed in. 'And who's left.' She was not in the line of sight of the answering manta, but it made no difference. They had no ears, yet picked up human speech and other sounds quite nicely by seeing the compressions and rarefactions of the atmosphere that comprised sound. In effect, they could hear with their eyes - and very well, too.

  Four snaps, answering her implied query. 'Diam,' she said recognizing the code. The four-sided symbol, the diamond.

  Another manta moved: two snaps. 'Circe,' she said. 'The two-sided symbol - inside and outside. I'm glad you're still here.' It was a foolish sentiment, but it did seem to her that she could tell her erstwhile companion from the others, and that Circe had more personality, more feminine attributes.

  A third snapped: six. 'Hex,' Veg said. 'My pal. I knew it was you. You have more savvy than those others.'

  Personification, she thought.

  And at last: seven. 'Star.'

  'That means Lin, Tri, and Oct are gone,' Cal said. 'But we still don't know why. We weren't in physical danger - none that we weren't in all along, at least. They must have had a reason, just as the station personnel had one for rushing us. I think we'd better discover what that reason is. I wish we'd taught them Morse code.'

  'The mantas only learn what they choose to learn,' Aquilon said. 'We're lucky they communicate at all. They never did before.'

  'Your attention, please.' It was the officer on the screen again, 'There has been a disturbance.'

  'Now he tells us,' Veg muttered.

  'Your beasts attacked station personnel. We had understood they were tame.'

  'That's why you had guns on 'em,' Veg said sarcastically: 'Real brave.'

  'How can civilized individuals be "tame"?' Aquilon demanded in her turn. 'Do you have tame men, tame computers?' But she wondered. She had thought there had been an understanding with the mantas, and this breach of manners didn't jibe. Why had they done it?

  'What happened to the three?' Cal asked, more practical.

  'One is dead. The men cornered it with bayonets and stabbed it through the eye. The others -'

  Aquilon flinched, knowing how terrible a wound of that type was to a manta. The eye constituted the substantial majority of its apperceptive mass; a blind manta was virtually a dead manta, except for the suffering.

  'How many men dead?' Cal inquired softly.

  'No fatalities. Our men are trained for trouble. Several lesser casualties, however - mostly cuts on the hands.'

  Thank God, she thought. The mantas weren't on a killing spree. They were merely trying to avoid capture. But again: why?

  'We're in a hurry,' the officer said. 'Ordinarily there would be severe repercussions - but the phase is beginning to slip. Can you keep your remaining animals under control?'

  'Yes,' Cal said before anyone else could comment. Aquilon understood, then. The station personnel still thought the mantas were merely pets - dangerous when out of control, but basically subject to man's will. The demonstration of the mania's geometric ability had been deemed a stunt, no more. If these people realized the truth, after what had just happened -

  And she had been trying to blab it out! She could have cost the lives of all the mantas!

  That made one more reason to separate from this group, to go her own lonely way. They would survive better without her.

  But Veg was hustling her along, and this time the mantas followed docilely behind. They had made their move, whatever it was. She was unable to make hers.

  She felt a terrible relief.

  III - ORN

  It was an island he dwelt on. Orn's explorations had long since verified that no exit from it existed for him, sinc
e he could not fly and did not care to swim. But his memory informed him that this bit of land, which he could cross many times in the course of a single day without fatigue, was not the total of the world. He was able to appreciate its recent history to a certain extent because there were evidences of many prior nestings of his species, and his memory suggested that land had been here several million years ago. Spot details, such as the cave he had hatched within, were too transitory to register; but the body of rock itself was stable enough to be familiar.

  Orn's ancestors had ranged the entire continent, mapping its shifting configurations in the memory of fifty million years. Orn saw portions of the whole whenever he contemplated the local landscape. He was aware that this island was a tiny fringe of the great land mass, a part of it really, despite the gulf of sea cutting between them. The island rode the continent's western perimeter. He was aware too that the continent itself was moving, and had already traveled many times the breadth of the island, though slowly. Ponderous upheavals had split the original continent apart, fragmenting it. Though changing bridges of rock connected the new subcontinents, the last of these had severed hardly ten million years ago, isolating an entire ecological population. The influx of new species of animal from far regions had halted, ranging grounds had become comparatively restricted, and the increasing violence of the geography had led to the decline of certain established creatures and the sudden rise of others. The great reps had largely vacated the cool northern regions and the mountainous terrain, though they still predominated in the southern marshes. The tiny mams had overrun those deserted areas and, more importantly the orders of aves had flourished. A new balance of nature had occurred.

  Orn's memory faded out for the most recent period. It required many generations for the racial record to become firmly established, so that he was clearest on the situation of five to twenty million years before. Prior to that period his memory became more general, being specific only in relation to his own line. Even much of that had faded as he grew farther away from the egg; he no longer remembered the impressions of swimming or conquering the land.

  Some recent images were clear but uncertain, others foggy, and some so transient as to be meaningless. Had his parents lived, they would have educated him to the specifics of contemporary existence; memory was less important than example for day-to-day life. Lower creatures like the arths made do entirely on memory - but this would not do for himself. His own experiences would be added to that mass of memory already inscribed within his genes, strengthening some images infinitesimally and weakening others that were no longer applicable. His descendants would benefit accordingly.

  The western section of this traveling subcontinent had buckled as it moved, tripping over the sea floor it overrode in its geologically precipitous traverse. An expansive shallow interior sea arm had drained away as the land wrinkled into a tremendous mountain range instead. Thus one natural barrier had been replaced by another, and the range was still rising as Orn's memory faded out. The flora had changed rapidly here; flowering plants had spread explosively over the highlands, leaving the old varieties to the warmer lowland coastlines.

  Orn knew the geologic history of his present island mainly by extrapolation from precedent. This was a volcanic framework. It had risen out of the sea as the residue of frequent emissions of liquid stone and airborne ash. From a single cone it had grown to three, all feeding on that same restlessness inspired by the larger motion of the continent much as thunderstorms fed on the motions of large air masses. Though two cones had subsided, the third and smallest still erupted periodically over the centuries. Orn had seen the traces of its erstwhile furies, recognizing the typical configurations though the vegetation now covered them richly. It was from its subterranean furnace that the heat had come to make the island pleasant; Orn's memory implied that the surrounding geography grew distressingly cold in winter - too cold for his kind to nest.

  It was summer now, better than a year after his rude awakening here. Orn had grown to better than half the mass of the avian parents he had never known in life, whose rotting flesh had sustained him those first difficult days after hatching. They had done that for him, at least: given him food when he was too small to hunt effectively himself. Now his feathers had filled out comfortably, white around the neck and handsome gray on the breast, and his wings and tail were sturdy. He could twist his neck to reach any part of his body, and his beak was a respectable weapon. His thighs were well muscled for running, and his flesh well toned. He had grown up strong and fleet and smart; had it been otherwise, he would not have grown up at all, even in this protected locale.

  He was aware that most birds of his type had parental care in the chick state, and were sheltered from the savagery of climate and predators. He had suffered, at first. But he was also aware that his particular parents had chosen their nesting site well; few really dangerous animals lived here. The croc that brought tragedy had come wandering from another isle, a loner, and with its demise the area had been rendered safe again. Occasionally Orn had seen another such croc swim by, but had hidden and it had not noticed him. Yes - his parents, by their sacrifice, had made it possible for him to survive even without their immediate care. They had been resourceful birds.

  Once, he knew by the traces, many couples had nested here, and many eggs had hatched. Now he was alone; somehow his species had declined over the millennia along with the reps. Oh, there were birds on the island - more lines than ever before - but none of his own species. He did not wonder why the same circumstance that encouraged a general avian rathation simultaneously discouraged his particular line; he merely knew it was so. He did feel a general loss, a loneliness, and was from time to time disturbed by it.

  Now, as he grew into his second year, he became aware of a more immediate problem. The island underpinning was building up to one of its periodic eruptions. He could feel the ground shuddering and swelling, and he could see and smell the increasing gases emerging from the active cone. He read the multiple signals: danger.

  The other creatures were aware of it too, but largely helpless. Fish floated belly-up in ponds grown hot; tiny, warmbodied multis scrambled by day in the open, driven from their caved-in burrows. Birds hovered in the sky, afraid to perch for long on uncannily vibrating branches.

  The aves at least could fly; Orn could not. Had he thought in those terms, he might have envied his distant cousins their ability to depart so readily. But he knew that physical escape was only part of it; their home was being destroyed as much as his own was. He paced the shore facing the mainland, peering at the mountainous vista so near by air, so far by water. He was not an efficient swimmer, and the sea had its own threats.

  Yet even the mainland was restive. Dark clouds drifted above the mountains as other great cones vented their fury. There were tremors not of the island alone, but of the area, and the tide was off schedule.

  He had to remove himself from this locale. He would not have chosen to travel in a half-grown state, but survival required it. He had to get across the water and away from the shore, and soon. But how?

  Any decision he might have made became irrelevant. The crisis was on him even as he balked at the water.

  A tremendous quake shook the island, making the ocean dance and the trees splinter and tumble. The ground lifted, dropped, and lifted again, throwing him violently on the side. As he scrambled back from the beach large cracks opened in the ground, grinding against each other noisily and spewing up gravel and mud. The sea pulled back momentarily, as though afraid; then it rushed at the beach in mighty waves, smashing into the rocks and foliage there and foaming well beyond the normal high-tide limit. The water was brown, and where it passed a coating of mud and debris remained.

  Then it was very quiet, but Orn knew that the island was doomed. His ancestors had tended to nest in similar places, and had met this situation before, and the warnings in his memory were lucid. He had to flee it, for there was no memory of those who had not done so; none of tho
se had become his ancestor.

  That memory also guided his course of action. He ran to the single river that wound down from the oldest and largest mountain and gathered token tributaries to itself. There should be trees in it now - floating trunks toppled by the quake and wrestled about by the current. He might board one there, where he could reach it, and ride it into the sea. With that extra mass and buoyancy he might achieve the crossing he could not hope to accomplish alone.

  His trip was wasted. The river had been dammed by a mass of rock, and was already backing up into what would develop into a small lake. There were floating logs - but on the wrong side of that barrier.

  Again the ground shook, less violently but more persistently than the last time. Before the vibration subsided there was a subterranean snap followed by a different and, to Orn, more ominous type of rumbling.

  Alarmed, he looked up at the tremendous elder mountain. His fear was justified: yellowish gas was rising from its weathered cone. The fire mountains never really died.