Of Man and Manta Omnibus

by Piers Anthony

  The walking plants did not seem to feel much pain, but after Veg had lopped off quite a few branches and stems, they got the message and withdrew. Veg was able to clear a path wherever Tamme wanted to go. He was enjoying this, she knew; though he would not kill animal life to eat, he would kill attacking vegetables.

  Then something else appeared. Not a plant; it was vaguely humanoid, yet quite alien. It had limbs that terminated in disks and a head that resembled a Rorschach blob. It emitted a thin keening.

  "Is that a machine, plant, or fungus?" Veg asked.

  "Mixture," she replied tersely. "Inimical."

  "I'll hold it off," Veg said. "You find the projector."

  "No, the thing is dangerous. I'll tackle it."

  "Thanks," Veg said sourly. But he moved off, allowing her to make a stand while he searched.

  Aliens were hard to read, but the malevolence seemed to radiate out of this thing. Obviously it recognized her general type and intended to exterminate it. Had a human agent done something on a prior visit to arouse justified antipathy, or was the creature a hater of all aliens? Or could it be the farmer growing these plants they were mutilating? In that case, its attitude was more that of a man with bug spray. It hardly mattered now; she had to deal with it.

  The creature came close and suddenly charged her, its hand wheels leading. They were spinning like little buzz saws -- which they surely were. She leaped aside, not wishing to reveal her technology by using a power weapon. The longer she fenced with it, the more she would learn about it. Was it intelligent, civilized -- or was it more like a vicious guard dog? The evidences were inconclusive so far.

  The saw-wheels came at her again. This time she stepped in, blocking the two arms with her own, forcing the wheels out while she studied the musculature and perceptive organs of the torso. The thing's skin was cold and hairy, like that of a spider.

  In the moment her face was close, an aperture opened and spewed out a fine mist. Caught off guard, she did not pull her face away in time. It was an acid, and it burned her skin and eyes, blinding her.

  She touched her hip. Her blaster fired through her skirt, bathing the creature in fire. It's body crackled as it was incinerated. The keening stopped.

  "Yo!" she heard Veg call.

  She ran to him, orienting on the sound. She had been trained to handle herself regardless of injuries. She used the echoes from her own footsteps to identify obstructions, such as the tall moving plants.

  "Here -- in a pile of rocks," Veg said as she came up.

  "Is it charged?"

  "Think so. I've never been quite sure how you could tell."

  "Time to learn." While she talked, she focused on her autonomic system, blocking out the pain. "There's a little dial in the base with red-green markings. Read it."

  He stooped. "It's on green."

  "Right," she said, though she could not see anything. The flaming in her face retreated as her pain-block took effect, but that was only part of the problem. The damage was still being done, but she could not yet wash the acid off. "Now let's see if you can activate it."

  "That I know. You shove this thing, this little lever -- "

  She heard the echoes of his voice and knew that the changing walls were there. They had made the shift.

  "Now let's see if you know the way to the next projector."

  "Hey -- how come all this practice now?" He paused. "Hey -- your face -- it's bright red! What happened?"

  "That animal-mineral-vegetable was also a skunk."

  "Acid!" he cried, alarmed. "Acid in the face! We've got to wash that off!"

  "No water here. Let's move on."

  "Your eyes! Did it get your -- ?"

  "Yes. I am blind."

  She did not need the visual input to pick up his shock and hurt anger. "God, Tamme -- "

  "I can function. But it will help if you find that projector."

  "Come on!" He took her hand.

  "You run ahead. I am well aware of your location."

  "Okay." He let go. They moved down the flexing passage.

  He did know the way. They reached the projector. "Lefthanded -- and it's not ready," he announced.

  And the next frame should be the forest -- safe, pleasant, with plenty of fresh cold water in a nearby stream. Out of reach.

  "Someone must have used it since we did," he said. "Been almost eight hours since we were here last." Then he caught himself. "No -- I'm thinking of the time we slept. We left here only about an hour ago. Hey -- I never gave you back your watch. You don't need it right now, though, I guess."

  It was a pitifully naïve attempt to distract her from the insoluble problem. "I doubt anyone has been here since we were," she said. "But we have no notion how many are traveling this pattern. This is an inversion, possibly part of another hexaflexagon, with its own personnel."

  "Can't we push it?" he asked plaintively. "The dial is getting toward the green..."

  "Dangerous. An incomplete transfer might deliver dead bodies. We don't know."

  "We've got to clean out those eyes. Make them tear." Another hesitation. "Or do agents ever cry -- even for that?"

  "My eyes teared. The damage was done in the first seconds, and after that it was probably too late for water, anyway." Had she not been preoccupied with their escape, she would have thought of this before. It was another mark of the pressure she was under and her loss of capacity as an agent, quite apart from her vision.

  "Permanent or temporary?"

  "Temporary, I think. It is a superficial burn, clouding the retinas."

  "Then we're okay. We'll rest until you heal."

  "We may not have time."

  "Stop being so damned tough and act sensibly! Going off handicapped is stupid -- you know that."

  She nodded. "It was stupid letting myself fall into the acid trap. I've been making too damn many human errors."

  "Now you even sound human." He sounded pleased.

  "We'll give it a few hours. Agents recover quickly."

  "Any other girl'd be crying and dependent," he grumbled.

  Tamme smiled. "Even Miss Hunt?"

  "Who?"

  "Deborah Hunt. I believe you were close to her at one time."

  "You mean 'Quilon!" he exclaimed. "We never use her original name, any more than we use yours." He paused. "What was yours?"

  "I have no other name."

  "I mean before you were an agent, you were a girl. Who were you? Why did you change?"

  "I do not know. I have no memories of my civilian status -- or of my prior missions as a TA-series agent, female. The debriefing erases all that. All agents of a given series must start their missions with virtually identical physical and intellectual banks."

  "Don't you miss it sometimes?"

  "Miss what?"

  "Being a woman."

  "Like Aquilon Hunt? Hardly."

  "Listen, don't cut at her!" he snapped.

  "I admit to a certain curiosity about the nature of this emotion that grips you," she said. "Passion, pleasure, pain, hunger, I can understand. But why do you maintain an involvement with a woman you know must go to your best friend and avoid one with me that would carry no further entanglements?" The question was rhetorical: She knew the answer. Normals lacked fit control over their emotions and so became unreasonable.

  "You want my involvement with you?" he asked incredulously.

  "It is a matter of indifference to me except as it affects my mission." Not wholly true; she had no real emotional interest in him but would have appreciated some entertainment during her incapacity. This conversation was another form of that entertainment.

  "That's why," he said. "You are indifferent."

  "It would be useful to know what she has that I do not."

  "Any other woman, that would be jealousy. But you only want to know so you can be a more effective agent."

  "Yes." Another half truth. The continuing strain of too long a mission made her desire some kind of buttressing. The temporary love of a ma
n offered that. But it would not be wise to tell him that; he would misinterpret it.

  "Well, I'll answer it. 'Quilon is beautiful -- but so are you. She's smart, but you're smarter. As a sex object, you have it all over her, I'm sure; she has the body, but she doesn't know how to -- well, never mind. What it is, is, she needs a man, and she cares."

  "Agreed. You have not answered my question."

  Veg choked. "You don't care. You could drop me in a volcano if it helped your mission. You don't need anyone -- even when you're blind."

  "True. I have never denied this. I have no such liabilities. But what positive asset does she have that -- "

  "I guess I can't get through to you. Her liabilities are her assets -- that's how Cal would put it. Me, I just say I love her, Cal loves her, and she loves us. I'd let the universe go hang if that would help her. It has nothing much to do with sex or strength or whatever."

  Tamme shook her head, intrigued. "This is far-fetched and irrational. It should be informative to put it to the test."

  "Shut up!"

  "That, too, is intriguing."

  Veg got up and stomped away. But he did not go far, for the walls were waiting.

  Tamme threw her mind into a healing state, concentrating on the tissues of her face and eyes. She, like all agents, had conscious control over many ordinarily unconscious processes and could accelerate healing phenomenally by focusing the larger resources of her body on the affected area. The external lenses of the eyes were small but hard to act on directly; this would take several hours of concentration.

  When the projector was recharged, Veg took them through.

  Tamme continued the effort in the forest, and in four hours her vision began to clear.

  "You mean you can see again?" Veg demanded.

  "Not well. I estimate I will have three-quarters capacity in another two hours. Since we should have two familiar frames coming up, that will suffice. Once I desist from the specific effort, the rate will slow; it will take several days to get beyond ninety per cent. Not worth the delay."

  "You're tough, all right!"

  "A liability, by your definition."

  "Not exactly. You can be tough and still need someone. But we've been over that before."

  In due course they moved on to --

  -- the mist frame --

  -- and the alien orchestra, following the hexaflexagon pattern. Their strategy of plowing straight ahead seemed to be paying off; they were stuck in no subloops. Probably they had not been stuck before; they just had not understood the pattern.

  "Now we strike a new one," Tamme said.

  "You ready?"

  "My vision is eighty per cent and mending. The rest of my faculties are par. I am ready."

  "Okay." And they went through.

  Tamme lurched forward and caught hold before she fell. Veg dropped but snagged a hold before going far. It was an infinite construction of metal bars. They intersected to form open cubes about six feet on a side, and there was no visible termination.

  "A Jungle gym!" Veg cried. "I had one of these at my school when I was a kid!" He climbed and swung happily.

  "Let's find a projector," Tamme said. "Got to be on one of these struts."

  "We need to establish a three-dimensional search pattern. There is no variety here as there was in the colored planes. We don't want to double back on checked sections."

  "Right. Maybe we'd better mark where we started and work out from that. Take time, but it's sure."

  They tied his shirt to a crossbar and began checking. Sighting along the bars was not much good; the endless crosspieces served to interrupt the line of sight so that the presence of the projector could not be verified. It was necessary to take a direct look into each cube. In the distance the effect of the massed bars was strange: From some views, they became a seemingly solid wall. From the center of a cube, there seemed to be six square-sectioned tunnels leading up, down, and in four horizontal directions.

  When sighting routinely down one of these tunnels, Tamme saw a shape. It looked like a man.

  She said nothing. Instead, she sidled across several cubes, breaking the line of sight in all three dimensions, and searched out Veg.

  She was able to orient on him by the sound. "You're out of position," she said.

  "No -- I'm on the pattern. You're off yours."

  "I left mine. We have company."

  "Oh-oh. Alien?"

  "Human."

  "Is that good or bad?"

  "I'm not sure. We'd better observe him if we have the chance."

  "Here's the chance!" Veg whispered. Sure enough, a figure hove into view along a horizontal axis. "That's you!" Tamme whispered. "Another Veg!" She knew what he was going to say: Your eyes must be seeing only forty per cent! I'm HERE! But she was wrong. "Well, we figured this could happen. Another couple, just like us, from a near alternate. We've just got to find that projector first."

  Tamme made a mental note: The episode with the acid thrower must have thrown off her perceptions. Not only had she misread Veg's response, he sounded different, less concerned than he should be. She would have to reorient at the first opportunity to avoid making some serious mistake.

  Meanwhile, she concentrated. "We have the advantage because we saw them first. We can enhance our chances by conducting our search pattern ahead of them. That way they'll be checking a volume of space that we have already covered -- where we know there's no projector."

  "Smart!" he agreed.

  Tamme calculated the probable origin of the competitive party, based on her two sightings of the strange Veg and the assumption that the other couple had landed not far from their own landing. They worked out from that. There was some risk the projector would happen to be on the wrong side of the other couple, but all they could do now was improve their chances, not make them perfect.

  And suddenly it was there, nestled in a hangar below an intersection. Tamme approached it cautiously, but it was genuine. And it was charged.

  Now she had a dilemma. She had control of the projector -- but her larger mission was to eliminate Earth's competition, even that of a very near alternate. Should she tackle her opposite number now?

  No. If the other couple had taken the same route around the hexaflexagon, it had to have been earlier, for the two-hour recharging time of the projectors required at least that amount of spacing out. But it was also possible that the others were flexing the other way -- backwards, as it were. In which case they could not yet have encountered the walking plants and the acid-spraying keeper. So that other agent, male or female, would be in top form and would have a material advantage. That was no good.

  Better to proceed on around the next subloop and tackle the competition when they crossed again in this frame. Then she would be ready. With luck, the other agent would not even know the encounter was incipient, and that would more than make up for the eye deficiency.

  She activated the projector.

  And they stood amidst sparkles.

  "Well, look at that!" Veg said, impressed.

  "A home-frame of the pattern-entities," Tamme said. "Another major discovery."

  "Yeah. They told us at the bazaar, but I didn't expect it so soon."

  Tamme did not stiffen or give any other indication of her reaction; her agent-control served her in good stead. Instead, she continued as if he had said nothing unusual, drawing him out. "They said a lot at the bazaar."

  "Yeah. But what else could we do? By cooperating, at least we save our own alternates, maybe. I'm sorry if we have to go against our duplicates who didn't make it there -- but in the end, it's every world for itself. And with the pattern-entities right here on the circuit -- well, so much the better."

  "If those patterns don't spot us and transport us right out of the network."

  "Yeah. Let's get on with it."

  They got on with the search. But now Tamme knew: She had picked up the wrong Veg. This one was traveling the other way and had been through at least one alternate -- the
"bazaar" -- that she hadn't. And some sort of agreement, or treaty, had been made there involving other alternate Vegs and Tammes.

  She had been right: Herself, from another alternate, was her enemy. And it was herself, for Veg would have known the difference immediately had his companion been a male agent.