Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  Veg's mind was spinning. Cal had been walking a tightrope while juggling flaming torches barehanded! So many complex factors were interacting. This was a type of contest alien to him, and one he had certainly not appreciated at the time.

  'Why did 'Quilon and Circe come in, then?'

  'Two sets of spores were sufficient,' Aquilon said. 'No point in having us all die.'

  'But we didn't follow through on the bargain,' Veg said. 'We didn't bring in all the mantas. So the agents don't have give us any break. Maybe they'll kill us all, now.'

  'Does it matter?' Aquilon inquired dully, staring at the egg she held.

  'Revenge would be pointless,' Taler said. 'Mr Smith's bargain was made in good faith; it did not occur to him that the others would not honor it. We agents are realistic, not recriminatory - otherwise we would have brought you to accounting for the damage done by the three fungoids back at the Earth station, and particularly for the one that escaped entirely. But we chose instead to learn from the experience, and so we followed you as rapidly as was feasible.'

  'You mean you didn't plan to come here anyway?' Veg asked, wondering just how bad a mistake that manta break at the station had been.

  'Not this particular party. The original expedition was to consist of normals - extraterrestrialogists, geologists, paleontologists. When we realized the potentialities of your fungoids, this military unit was substituted.' Taler faced toward the mainland, as though watching for something. 'You have demonstrated that as a group you are too valuable to waste. Future agents will be programmed to avoid mistakes of the nature of those we have made here, and you will be reassigned as agreed.'

  Veg shook his head dubiously. 'So you're letting Paleo go, after all that trouble?'

  'By no means. Our alternate program to salvage the planet for mankind is already underway. Observe.'

  They looked across the water. Smoke was rising from the valley - a wall of it on the west side, near the trio's original camp. The breeze was blowing it east.

  'You're burning the enclave!' Aquilon exclaimed, horrified.

  'The spores, as you pointed out, are beyond recovery. It is necessary to destroy them and the habitat in which they might prosper. We are doing so.'

  'But the dinosaurs! They have nowhere to go!'

  'They are part of that habitat,' Taler said. 'This will hasten their extinction, yes.'

  She stared at the smoke, stricken.

  'You can't get all the spores that way,' Veg said, similarly palled. 'They're tough. Some will ride high in the sky, it stays cool. Some will settle in the water - ' He stopped, wondering whether he had said too much.

  'Some spores will survive, inevitably,' Taler agreed, 'But the point is that they require hosts for their maturation. By priving them of these - chiefly the omnivorous mammals of

  valley - we are making it impossible for them to develop. Some will drift beyond the mountains - but as you saw, landscape is barren, and their numbers will be diffuse after hurdles of fire and snow. The ocean is not a conducive habitat, either, since the fungoids are land-based. The probability is that a long-range program of survey and extermination will prevent any fungoid menace from erupting.'

  'The whole valley!' Aquilon said. 'How could it possibly be worth it!'

  'Perhaps you should have considered that at an earlier time. We were prepared for this contingency, but it was not our desire to destroy the enclave. You forced it.'

  'I didn't know!' But it sounded to Veg as though she lacked conviction. She certainly should have guessed that the omnivore would not be easily balked.

  'Dr Potter knew.'

  He was right, Veg thought. Cal would certainly have anticipated the consequence of his plot. Had he betrayed Paleo after all, making dupes of those, like Veg and Aquilon and the mantas, who would have saved it? Veg did not look at him.

  'Some will escape,' Cal said. He sounded worn. 'The spores can survive for many years, and there will be an entire planet to hide on. In as little as a year some will mature sufficiently to respore, and there will be no way to control that secondary crop of mantas. It will be cheaper to vacate Paleo than to police it effectively. Your superiors will realize that in time, and act accordingly. This valley had to be sacrificed for the sake of this world.'

  'You are gambling with genocide,' Taler said. He turned to Veg and Aquilon. 'If I were this man's companion, I would be afraid.'

  Veg watched the smoke rising, knowing that Cal had foreseen this and probably planned on it, and understood.

  XXII - QUARTET

  Aquilon stood holding Orn's egg: a nine-inch shell containing all that remained of a gallant pair of birds. She had wrapped a soft blanket about it, but could not be satisfied that it was warm enough. She kept turning it so as to hold a new face of it against her body, lest any side chill. This was an unreasonable fear, for the air was warm and the egg's requirements were not that critical; she suspected it would survive up to half an hour in isolation at normal temperature, and perhaps more. All it needed was a general, mild warmth, such as that provided by a clothed human body.

  Tell that to my female psyche, she thought. Orn had died protecting her - because she held the egg. It was her egg now, never to part until hatched. There could never be enough warmth for it.

  Smoke shrouded the dinosaur valley. Soon the enclave would be a mass of embers - all because she had tried to fight the ruthless agents. She was a murderess now; it had been at her behest that Orn and Circe had attacked that agent Taner, who so resembled Subble. Almost, when she had seen him first, she had capitulated. But then she realized what his presence meant...

  Cal thought it was worth it. But his analytical brain was sometimes frightening. Even human colonization, with all its inequities, would have been better than this. Why had he set it up this way?

  Everything had turned out wrong. The night of love with Veg had aborted; she knew now that she did not love him. Not that way. She had loved Orn, in a fashion - only to see him die. Such a noble spirit! Now there was only the egg.

  She could not get close enough to it. She cradled it with one arm and reached under the blanket with the other, pressing her hand between its rough surface and her own abdomen. She found the catches on her blouse and disengaged them, opening her bossom to the egg. Still it was not close enough. She released her brassiere and slid it up over one breast and then the other, letting it cling just beneath her shoulders while her softly resilient breasts pressed yieldingly against the shell. Then, almost, she felt close enough.

  The fires were rising. Open flame showed in patches at the west fringe, licking at the cycads. Obviously it was not a natural conflagration; it ate too readily at green wood, consuming living fern and horsetail as well as ground debris. Tongues of it snaked out over the water, sending up gouts of vapor. No - this was the incendiary product of man, the omnivore. Like its master, it destroyed every living thing it touched, and despoiled the nonliving.

  She suspected, intellectually, that Cal was right. Earth had been ready to move in on Paleo from the start, and the actions of the trio had had little bearing on that decision. Only if they had turned up some imperative reason for caution would this rape have been blunted. Carcinogenic vegetation, poisonous atmosphere, super-intelligent enemy aliens - one of these might have done it. But dinosaurs? They were merely a passing oddity, a paleontological phenomenon. Animals.

  Animals. Suddenly she realized what it meant, this fire, in terms of life, of feeling. This was not merely the destruction of an anachronism. These were living creatures.

  Veg and Cal beside her had field glasses, and both were using them silently. She was occupied with the egg, her naked flesh embracing it, giving it warmth, drawing some subtle comfort from it. She would not be helped, Paleo would not be saved, nothing useful would be accomplished, were she to witness the enlarged optic details of the fall of the reptile kingdom. She needed no glasses. She saw the distant orange flickering, the smoke smudging up, and that was already too much. The camps they had
made, the raft, Orn's body ... everything, incinerated at the behest of the omnivore.

  She turned about, glancing at Charybdis to the south - and saw the smoke there too. They had not overlooked any part of the enclave! Yet she had not seen any agents traveling about to start those devastating blazes.

  The water rippled. Things were swimming past, outward, fleeing the heat, though surely there was nowhere to go. Fish, reptiles - and the latter had to come up for air. Ichthyosaurus with the monstrous eyes? No, this was a paddler, Elasmosaunts. The same, perhaps, that she and Orn had fought. Was that a scar on its neck? Was it blind of one eye?

  It passed the ship, hasty, frightened, pitiable.

  Fire bathed it. The reptile struggled in the water, burning, dying, and the odor of its scorching flesh was borne to her across the brief distance between them. She did not need to turn to see the agent with the weapon. That would be Tamme, an omnivore with female form. Naturally these butchers would not allow any large swimming reptile to escape, for it might conceivably serve as host for a microscopic manta.

  She hugged the egg. How could she sit in judgment on her species? She herself had killed, useless gesture that it turned out to be. She was an omnivore too.

  The dream of bliss was cruelly ended. The idyll of Paleo had been revealed as genocidal naivete. What good was it now to feel sorry for Elas, the one-time enemy plesiosaur? It was less vicious than man.

  She had known it before. She had seen this on earth, this savagery.

  She held the egg, wondering whether it would not be kinder in the long run to dash it against the deck.

  Veg focused the glasses on the fringe of the valley, fascinated in spite of himself. The fire burned everything, even the ground, even the water. The lenses brought every detail within arm's reach.

  Amazing, how quickly and uniformly the fires had started, spaced to spread across the entire valley. They must have fired incendiary shells, and must still be firing them, because new centers of flame appeared at intervals, hastening the death march of orange.

  He had seen such carnage before. They had burned his own forest, back on Earth, and for the same reason: to get the manta. The omnivore (now he was thinking in manta terms!) was ruthless. He had thought to foil it, here on Paleo, but that never had a chance to work.

  He sneaked a glance at Aquilon, keeping the glasses to his face and pointed forward. She stood beside him, wild and beautiful, holding the egg she had saved. A blanket covered it and her shoulders, though the air was warm. Through an open fold he thought he saw -

  He snapped back to the glasses. A trick of vision, surely. But, bewilderingly, his eyes suddenly stung, and the glasses seemed to cloud for a moment. He remembered his night with Aquilon, the joy of which had faded so quickly. It was as though he had expected more than a mere woman and was disappointed to have found her, in the dark under a tarp, to be less than ethereal. It seemed to him now that it could have been anyone he embraced then. Should have been anyone ... but her.

  He saw now that he wanted a dream Aquilon, not the flesh 'Quilon. And the dream had been sullied. And his friendship with Cal had been demeaned.

  The reptiles were charging into the water, trying to escape the fire, but it pursued them. Tricers, Boneheads, Straths and Ankys, drowning simultaneously, inhaling water and flame. With them, he was sure, were many more mammals, too small to show up amid the giants. And birds, and insects.

  Veg was not, despite his pretenses, a violent man. But had he had any real opportunity to wipe out this shipload of killers, he would have done so.

  He saw a large duckbill, Parar-something-or-other, smash through the smoke and dive into the sea. For a moment only its bony crest showed above the surface, and it seemed that smoke plumed back even from that. Then the dinosaur came up, reared skyward - and a jet of flame shot from its nostrils. It had taken in some of the chemical, and its lungs were afire. A true dragon for the moment, it perished in utter agony.

  And farther out to sea the head of Brach emerged, clear of the fire. But the stupid brute was charging the wrong way again, going toward the conflagration. Back! Back! he mouthed at it, to no avail. Monstrous, it lumbered out of the water, fire coursing off its back outlining neck and tail and pillarlike thighs. The tiny brain tried to make sense of the agony surrounding fifty tons of body, and could not; burning brightly, Brach keeled over like a timbered redwood tree and rolled with four trunks in the air.

  For a long time Veg watched the spasmodic twitching of Brach's smoking tail, until at last that smoke seemed to get in his own eyes, and the stench of it in his nose, and he cried.

  Cal watched the destruction of the reptile enclave with severe misgiving. It was true that he had foreseen this, even precipitated it, but the cruelty of the denouement was ugly. Certainly the extinction of most major lines of reptiles was inevitable, here, regardless of the actions of man. One could no more halt that natural process than one could turn back the drifting of the continents. But the dinosaurs did have the right to expire in their own time and fashion, rather than at the fleeting convenience of man.

  The masses of herbivorous reptiles had thinned, the majority already perished in the flaming ocean. Now the carnivores, unused to fleeing from anything, were coming into sight. Struthiomimus, birdlike predator; several young Tyrannosaurs; then a real giant -

  He refocused the glasses. That was no carnosaur! It was an ornithischian dinosaur, a bipedal herbivore. Iquanodon! But of what a size! Sixty feet from nose to tail tip, as scaled on the range measure of the field glasses. Larger than Tyrann full-grown, and heavier in proportion, for the gut was massive. A total weight of twelve tons, at least. A herbivore would be heavier-set, of course; the digestive apparatus had to be more voluminous...

  If a biped that size - the largest ever to tread the had hidden unsuspected in the valley, what other treasures been concealed? The lost opportunities for study...

  Yet it had to be. He had intended to set the manta loose before the Earth mission arrived, knowing it would arrive. But he had misjudged how soon. He had debated with Veg and Aquilon, putting it all on record so that the investigators would know he had intended to summon them. And he had so intended - but he had meant them to arrive too late. They would have discovered that Veg and Aquilon, despite their stand, were innocent. That the mantas had traveled with him - and apparently acted without his knowledge and against his wishes. Acted to take Paleo for the third kingdom, for the manta. Cal himself would have been gone, presumed dead, for the plan did not tolerate any interrogation of him by agents. Thus the Earth invasion would have been balked, and the other two either deported again or simply left on Paleo, but not punished.

  But in his vanity he had delayed, seeking to vindicate his right to make such a decision for a world. And in so doing, he had thrown away his chance to make it. And so he had been caught, and had had to play the game the hard way, making it expensive for everyone. Perhaps if he had not suppressed his real thoughts and intentions, had not constructed his elaborate justifications for the sake of verisimilitude -

  Yet it changed nothing. The age of reptiles was finished here, whether man came or not. And the battle was for Paleo, not the class of mammals or the class of reptiles, or even the kingdom of animals or fungus.

  No, the battle was not even for this world. He could have advised the mantas long before the actual enclave had been discovered. The enclave was nothing, Paleo was nothing - nothing more than the convenient battleground. There would be a million enclaves, a billion Paleos, and trillions, quadrillions, quintillions of other alternate worlds. That was what the confirmation of the parallel-worlds system meant. He had known, despite his earlier words to Aquilon, that it could not be the paradox of time travel. Paleo had to be one of an infinite series of parallels, each differing from its neighbor by no more than an atom of matter, a microsecond of time. The two went together, space and time displacing each other in a fixed if unknowable ratio. No alternate world could match Earth exactly; no two alternates could
jibe precisely, for that would a paradox of identity. But they could come close, had to come close - and Paleo and Earth were close (or had been, or to the crossover), almost identical physically, almost

  identical temporally - even though to man's viewpoint sixty-five million years was not close, and an intelligent flightless bird was not close. Such distinctions were trivial, compared to those between potential other alternates.

  Perspective. If Aquilon liked Orn, she could find millions like him, in those quintillion other frames of reality. And millions of other Aquilons were finding those Orns.

  Yes, it was vast. A sextillion worlds, each complete in every detail down to the atomic level. A septillion worlds, octillion, nonillion decillion - there were not numbers in the mind of man to compass the larger reality. Infinity trailing behind Earth, ranging back to the age of reptiles, die age of amphibians, the age of fishes, the age of invertebrates - all the way back to the primeval formation. Millions of contemporary Earths discovering millions of Paleos, raping them...