Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  "Some light!" he exclaimed. She could have traced the process of his eyes by his reactions: warm appreciation for face and hair, half-guilty voyeurism for the thrust of her bosom and newly accented cleavage thereof, wholly guilty desire for the enhanced swell of her hips and posterior.

  But his guilt was not straightforward. He ordinarily did not hesitate to appreciate the charms of women. But he had not been exposed to other women for some time. His experience with Aquilon and the knowledge that he was in the company of an agent made him hold back. He felt no guilt about cleavages and posteriors -- merely about reacting to them in the present circumstances. This guilt in turn heightened the allure in a kind of reverse feedback. Forbidden fruit!

  She turned away, interrupting his view of the fruit, and led the way along the path, accenting her gait only that trifle necessary to attract the eye subtly. Here the way was like a tunnel under swirling mists. Translucent figures loomed within the ambience, never quite coming clear, even to Tamme's gaze. There were so many marvels of this city -- if only it were possible to establish contact with Earth so that it all could be studied and exploited!

  They had built the privy over the Black Hole: a well of opacity fifteen feet across and of no plumbable depth. Cal had conjectured that it had once been an elevator shaft. Now it served as a sanitary sink.

  While Veg was inside, Tamme brought out the miniature components of her projector. It would project a spherical aperture seven feet in diameter that would hold for fifteen seconds. After that, the unit would shut down, conserving its little power cell. The cell recharged itself, but slowly.

  One problem was that she could not take the aperture projector with her. She had to step through the sphere while it existed. It would be disastrous to be caught halfway into the field as it closed down! Part of her would be in the other world, the remainder here -- and both would be dead. Too bad people did not possess the regenerative powers of earthworms: cut one in half, make two new individuals!

  Actually, the apertures were two-way. They were really tunnels between alternates that one could move through in either direction. The trouble was that the device could not be activated from the far side. No doubt in time the technicians would develop a key for that purpose -- or perhaps they had already but simply hadn't gotten it into production yet. Alternate-projection was a nascent science.

  She expected no difficulty but took no unnecessary chances. She wrote a short message addressed to Calvin Potter and attached it to the generator.

  Veg emerged. It had only been a couple of minutes, but the agent had worked extremely rapidly. All was in order.

  "What's that?" he asked.

  "An aperture generator," she said, rising to approach him.

  "You mean you had one of those all along?" he demanded. "We could have gone back anytime?"

  "Yes and no," she said. "I could have used it anytime -- but it is a calculated risk. Our aperture technology is emergent; we seem to have less than a fifty per cent reliability of destination."

  "You're getting too technical for me," Veg said, eying her displayed torso again. But she knew he understood the essence; he merely liked to assume a posture of country-boy ignorance when anyone used difficult words. This window might or might not take them back where they started from.

  "We set our aperture projector on Paleo for Earth," she said. "Instead, it opened onto the machine desert. This one has a complementary setting. It should take us back to where the other one is. But it may not."

  "We?" he asked. "You can go where you want to; I'm staying with my friends."

  She could knock him out and toss him through. But she wanted his cooperation in case of emergency, and it was always better to keep things positive when possible. "I thought it would be more private this way," she said, using her specific muscular control to twitch her left breast suggestively.

  The suggestion scored. But with his flare of desire came immediate suspicion. "What do you want with me?"

  Time for a half-truth. "These generators are two-way -- but it is better to have an operator. When I'm over there" -- she indicated the prospective field of the projector -- "I can't turn it on again over here. And if it doesn't open in the right place, I could be stranded." She shrugged, once more making a signal with her décolletage. "That might please some of you, but..."

  "Uh-uh," he said, giving her one more correct call. "We're all human beings, up against things we don't understand. We've got to stick together."

  "That's right. So -- "

  "So you want me to cross over first? No thanks! I did that before and almost got gobbled by a machine."

  "No, I'll go," she said.

  He relaxed, his suspicion warring with his desire to believe her. She knew Cal had warned him not to get involved with an agent. "Then you want me to turn it on in an hour to bring you back?"

  "Yes." She took a breath, skillfully accentuating the objects of his gaze in yet another ploy. "Of course..."

  "Not much privacy," he remarked, "if I'm here and you're there." Now he was getting angry, as the lure retreated, despite her seeming agreement to his prior objections. Fish on a hook.

  "Well, the projector can be set to go on automatically after a certain period. A simple clockwork timer. And the limit is not necessarily an hour. It's a combination stress-time parameter with a safety factor. We could slip a load of five hundred pounds through -- twice the normal -- but then we'd have to wait four hours to return. The time multiplies at the square of the mass, you see. For sustained use, two hundred and fifty pounds per hour is the most efficient."

  "I see," Veg said. "So we could both go through. Together we wouldn't weigh more than three fifty -- "

  "Three sixty."

  "Hold on! I'm two hundred, and you can't be more than one thirty -- "

  "You're two-oh-five; you have prospered in the wilderness, I'm one fifty-five, including my hardware."

  "You sure don't look it!"

  "Heft me."

  He put his big hands under her elbows and lifted her easily. "Maybe so," he said. "Sure no fat on you, though."

  "Agents are more solid than they look. Our bones are laced with metal -- literally. And the android flesh with which we are rebuilt is more dense than yours. But you're right: no fat in it."

  "I know you're tough," he agreed, not altogether pleased. "Still, might be safer if we both went in case there were bad trouble at the other end."

  She would be better off alone if there were real trouble. But that was not the point. "Yes. But then there would be a long, uninterrupted wait -- and no one could reach us." She breathed again.

  Veg was not slow to appreciate the possibilities. Two, perhaps three completely private hours with this seductive woman! "Safety first!" he said. "Let's go take a look."

  He had taken the bait, lured by the thrill of exploration as well as her own enticements. And she really had not had to lie. It was safer with two, in a routine crossover, and the limitations of the generator were as she had described.

  She really had taken more trouble than strictly necessary to bring him along. A knockout or a straight lie would have done the job in seconds. But either of these techniques would have led to complications later. This way, not only would he serve as an effective hostage -- he could be of genuine assistance in a variety of circumstances. All she had to do was prepare him.

  She could do a lot with a man in three hours.

  "All right," she said. "You're armed?" She knew he was; she was merely alerting him.

  He nodded. "I keep a knife on me. I lost my other hardware to that machine back in the desert."

  "If there's any long-distance threat, I'll cover it."

  He glanced once more at her half-exposed breasts. "Yeah -- like Taler."

  She laughed honestly this time, knowing he knew there was no jealousy between agents. She set the return aperture timer for three hours, leaving a reasonable margin for recharging, then activated the projector.

  As the sphere formed, she drew him t
hrough the aperture beside her.

  There was no passage of time, just the odd transfer wrench. They emerged in a world apart. Where there had been surrealistic buildings, now were trees.

  Not the desert world. She had been afraid of this.

  "Not Paleo, either -- or Earth," Veg said, for once divining her thoughts before she read his.

  Tamme looked about warily. "How do you know? This is a forest -- and there are forests on both worlds."

  "This is the forest primeval," he said, unconsciously borrowing from American literature.

  "Evangeline," Tamme said.

  "Who?"

  "Longfellow's poem from which you quoted. Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, vintage 1847."

  "Oh. That's right -- you agents do that. Got too much of that dense android muscle in your brains." He grimaced. "What I meant was that this forest has never been touched by man. So it's not Earth -- not our Earth. And it's a high rainfall district, so it's not the desert world -- not this place, not this millennium, anyway. Look at the size of that pine!"

  "The aperture does not necessarily lead to the same geographic spot on the alternate," she reminded him. "Each alternate seems to differ in time from the others, so it could differ in space, too, since the globe is moving. For instance, we're in day here instead of night, so we must be elsewhere on the globe. There was vegetation on other parts of what you call the desert world."

  "That's what I said. But no trees like this. Those machines ate wood, too. They'd have sawed into this long ago -- and they haven't."

  He was right. Her perceptions showed a slightly differing chemical composition of this world's atmosphere. Though it would be foolish to judge an entire world by one view of a tiny fraction of it, it was a new alternate. The changes were minor but significant.

  "I am not surprised," she admitted. "My aperture projector is set for Paleo -- but we did not start from the desert world. That sparkle-cloud moved us to an unspecified alternate, so we're out of phase."

  "Yeah -- like taking the wrong bus."

  That was hardly precise, and she was surprised he thought in terms of such an ancient vehicle, but it would do. "It may be a long, hard search for home."

  "Your home, maybe. I'd settle for Paleo. Or Nacre."

  "Nacre is part of the Earth-alternate. So you'd have to -- "

  "But we can get back to the city-world all right? We're not lost from there?"

  "Yes -- in just under three hours. We're in phase for that. But we shall have to be standing right on this spot, or we'll miss it."

  "Well, let's not waste the time!" he exclaimed. "This is beautiful! Finest softwood forest I ever saw!"

  She laughed. "By all means, look at the trees. But how can you be sure this isn't Paleo? Plenty of virgin softwood there!" She knew this wasn't Paleo, but was interested in his reasoning.

  "Not the same. These are modern pines. See, the needles are different. Trees evolve, you know, same as animals do. This white pine, now -- actually, it's different from Earth white pine, in little ways -- "

  She raised her hands in mock surrender. He was not pretending; at this moment, the forest really did interest him more than she did, and he knew more than she in this area of botany. Agents had an excellent general education, but they could not be experts in every field.

  Meanwhile, the social environment had changed as well as the physical one. Just as sex was relatively attractive to this country man when he was confined to the city, this challenging new -- rather, old -- forest was more attractive yet.

  Which was not quite what she had anticipated. There were always unexpected wrinkles appearing in normals! Agents, in pleasant contrast, were completely predictable -- to other agents. They were designed to be that way.

  Pleasant contrast? It actually made for a certain tedium, she realized, when the mission stretched out longer than a few hours or days. In some things, predictability was less than ideal.

  Watch yourself, she thought then. She was beginning to suffer from an overload of experience, and she had no dream mechanism to restore her mind to its prior equilibrium. It was inevitably shaping her into more of an individual than the computer could readily tolerate. If this went too far, her report would be suspect, even useless. The general rule was that an agent's mission should not continue longer than ten days because of that deterioration of reliability. She had already been nineteen days, and the end was not in sight.

  She shuddered. How good it would be to return to computer central to be reset -- and how awful to remain out so long she lost her affinity with her series, TA!

  Veg was moving among the trees, tapping the trunks, looking at needles. This was his element! He suffered no pangs of dawning identity!

  There were, it seemed, plenty of untouched worlds available for man's expansion. Earth's population and resources problem would be solved -- just as soon as she got back.

  She would have to return, try another setting, and begin a survey of alternate-worlds. It would be too cumbersome to step through every time. She would fashion a spot sensor that used very little power in projection because of its small mass. By bouncing it through and back like a tennis ball, she could check a dozen worlds in an hour, the only delay being the adjustment of the projector settings between uses.

  She would not need Veg, after all. Not until she located familiar territory.

  Three hours. She could sleep, for she had perfect timing and would wake when the return aperture was due. But first she would make a spot survey of this locale, for it might turn out to be the most suitable one yet discovered for exploitation. Earthlike, modern, no dinosaurs.

  She lifted her hands, caught hold of a dead spoke on the huge pine, and hauled herself up. The trunk was a good six feet in diameter at the base, and the top was out of sight. She climbed rapidly, wriggling between the branches as they became smaller and more closely set. She was getting dirty, but that didn't matter. She really should have adjusted the seductive design of her outfit; trees were not much for that sort of thing, and her clothing inhibited progress. A few welts or scratches on the visible surfaces of her breasts would not bother her but could well turn off Veg -- and she just might need him.

  The trunk thinned alarmingly at the top and swayed in the stiffening wind. At an elevation of two hundred feet she halted, looking about. There were a number of tall trees, some reaching to two hundred and fifty feet. White pine, when allowed to grow, was one of the tallest trees, comparable to the Douglas fir and young redwood. Veg would know all about that! But now these tall trees interfered with her vision, so that all she could see was more forest. She had wasted her time. No doubt Veg could have told her that, too!

  She descended, to find him waiting for her, looking up. How like a man! She hardly needed to make an effort to show off her wares; he knew how to find them for himself. Tree-climbing skirt!

  "No good climbing," he remarked. "That's boy-scout lore -- useless in a real forest. All you see is -- "

  "More trees," she finished for him.

  "I had a better view from the ground."

  "Thank you."

  "Found something else."

  Now she read the signs in him: He was excited, and not merely by his nether-view of her thighs as she came down the tree. He knew that what he had to tell her would affect her profoundly.

  Tamme paused, trying to ascertain what it was before he told her. It was not a threat, not a joke. Not a human settlement. What, then?

  "Can't tell, can you!" he said, pleased. "Come on, then."

  He showed the way to a small forest glade, a clearing made by a fallen giant tree and not yet grown in. The massive trunk, eight feet thick, lay rotting on the ground. And near its sundered stump --

  "An aperture projector!" she exclaimed, amazed.

  "Thought you'd be surprised. Guess we weren't the first here, after all."

  Tamme's mind was racing. There was no way that such a device could be here -- except as a relic of human visitation. Agent visitation, for this was an agen
t model, similar to hers. But not identical -- not quite.

  "Some alternate-world agent has passed this way," she said. "And not long ago. Within five days."

  "Because the brush has not grown up around it," Veg said. "That's what I figured. Can't be yours, can it?"

  "No." The implications were staggering. If an alternate-world agent had come here, then Earth was not alone. There could be millions of highly developed human societies possessing the secret of aperture travel, competing for unspoiled worlds. What would she do, if she encountered one of those foreign agents, as highly trained as she, as dedicated to his world as she was to Earth?

  By blind luck she had learned of the other agent first. Before he learned of her.