Only a culvert lay between them and the edge of the desert, and as Rik approached it he saw the green carpet of vines already flowing over the lip. They were now moving faster than he, and they would either catch him in the culvert or on the other side.
He flexed his elbows and the metal hands withdrew up his arms. Without breaking stride, he kicked off his shoes and dropped onto his paws. The joint in the middle of each foot flexed and bent until only half his feet touched the ground. His body stretched out, his chest arched, and with his head held high into the breeze, he leaped out over the culvert with almost as much agility as his early ancestors had possessed. He and his brother cleared the farthest side and let momentum carry them skidding onto the desert.
Jak started to run again but Rik caught him by the leg. “It’s all right! The vines can’t come onto the sand!”
The boy he had saved from the zizzys came plowing toward them, a foot or so ahead of the green carpet. It looked as if he were going to make it but then a vine flashed into the air and struck his arm. He howled and dodged as it swung toward his throat. Another vine came at him from the left, tossed a tendril across his chest, curled around his back and tied itself in a knot. Seconds later, dozens of tendrils were wrapped around him. He dug in with his toes. His body bent forward, he strained with all his might and walked the last few inches over the grass with a hundred tendrils trying to hold him back. He touched the sand with a foot and continued to inch forward. The vines went with him until their length ran out. Giving a vicious wrench, the boy pulled free. He ran wildly across the desert and didn’t look back.
The vines crawled to the edge of grass and stopped. Those behind the front fringes also halted. For the first time in many minutes, all was calm. Movement ceased. The green stretches of oasis once again lay quiet.
“Oh, God, I hurt!” wept Jak. “Why did so many of them have to die?”
Rik lay on his back and breathed deeply. “They aren’t dead. They’ll wish they were, though, for a couple of weeks. Then they’ll be as good as new.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anyone with no sense at all could fight his way out of that green stuff.”
“What is it?”
“Kru. The more you struggle, the harder it rubs on you. Gives you one hell of an itch.”
Jak hauled up his pants legs. His ankles were pink and glistening, already swelling, and they were spotted with a dark rash. As he scratched, he stared at the oasis. His face was pale. “Like a baby who needed a spanking,” he said huskily. “Goddamn them. The superior bastards. I hate them.”
chapter ii
Rik laid a gloved forearm across his mouth to stifle sudden mirth and faded back into the foliage in case some small sound had carried across the clearing. The figure leaning against the golden dais didn’t turn.
As always, Rik marveled and snickered at the nakedness of Tontondely. The Brain, the Five-Fingered, the Great, yet for all this, the God looked ridiculous with his bare rump glaring in the sunlight like twin moons. Tontondely was a fine representative of his breed. What a head, what shoulders, what a rear!
Rik risked a wary step into the clearing. The old sun turned the hair on his head to amber. Sluggish wind ruffled it, chilled his neck. Tension dried his throat and nostrils. He knew he was asking for a hot bolt between the eyes. All Tontondely had to do was will it, and his energy shield could become a killing spear.
But Gods weren’t perfect. Tontondely’s formidable mental powers were concentrated on a game of creation. An enemy could now approach with stealth, even draw near if he dared, and, if he were foolish, he might hope to leap swiftly enough to evade the monarch’s shaft of wrath when he was perceived.
The Gods seldom missed a trick, and Rik expected to be perceived. But there remained the tantalizing gamble that the youth wouldn’t immediately destroy what he had made but would lay it down and turn to something else.
Above Tontondely’s head, Andromeda lay suspended in space like a miniature plate of jewels. The boy destroyed a meteor swarm and a solar system grew in its place. Rik knew what was being built. He had always been interested in astronomy. He also wondered why a young God should be so interested in a particular solar system in another galaxy.
The system was huge, or the distance between bodies was great. The bodies themselves were few. There were the sun and three immense planets, one the color of an emerald and cloaked with snowy atmosphere. This was the thing Tontondely seemed to love.
Like one of the petrified corpses in the forest, Rik stood without making a sound and watched as the young God made his toy in the air. The face of Tontondely was frozen in concentration. Not a line marred his brow, no expression touched his eyes or mouth. He was the great grandson of Luvon who had once walked down the main street of Osfar and stopped to lay his hand on a child’s head.
Tontondely was seven feet tall and wouldn’t reach his full height of eight feet for two decades. Sixteen years old, he would be mature at thirty-six and begin to age a century after that. Unlike the beasts and ratmen scattered over the earth, Tontondely had no body hair. His skull was covered by a dark brown layer of calse which was neither protoplasm nor metal. Calse was a combination of the two and grew naturally from the boy’s head. The top edges of his fingers and toes were fortified with calse. His teeth were hard and small, twenty-eight of them, and the inner pulp was so solidly encased in white calse that no bacteria could bore through. His ears were small and round, nose short, eyes large and dark; the lips were thin and brownish-red. The facial skin was taut while the neck was soft but firm. Tontondely had no waspish waist. Heavy-shouldered and thighed, his powerful trunk tapered slightly at the belly, yet his body was supple.
This was Tontondely, great grandson of Luvon whose solidified corpse stood ankle-deep in the loam of Echo Valley.
The boy looked at the tiny galaxy he had made and suddenly gave a sigh. With a flick of his finger, he erased a corner of stars. Shifting his weight from the dais, he reached behind him and gestured it into oblivion. He called a low-lying cloud to him, braced it with thin netting and lay upon it. He picked the toy from the air and gently lowered it to the ground. Then he began to make himself a make-believe lover.
His new creation was less real than the galaxy. Tenuous in outline, she hadn’t a fraction of the substance of the little worlds that rested beneath him. She would never lie in his arms or touch his lips with hers or perceive his thoughts and desires. She would never be as beautiful as Vennavora whom he loved.
In the meantime, Rik was running swiftly and silently across the clearing. Every nerve in his body flinched in anticipation of a hot bolt as he grabbed the toy cluster of stars. Turning, he raced back toward the foliage. He ran with his prize held close, and had Tontondely killed him on the spot he would have died smiling. Anyone with a grain of courage would choose to go down resisting a God. The big brown lump named Tontondely was no deity. He and his kind were not omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-anything. They were evolved creatures, the same as ordinary people, and people would realize it if they weren’t so stupid.
Rik cried out his triumph as he sped through the sheltering trees, but he did it softly because the Gods could fly on wings of their own making. He didn’t slow down even after he knew he had escaped. Across a wide flat rock he ran; down he slid into a gully and scrambled up the other side. Suddenly realizing that he was on top of a living hill, he came to a quick halt.
The wrinkled brown hill didn’t slope upward to a peak. Three feet high and many yards in diameter, it had an uneven surface peppered with fat round pores from which grass blades sprouted. The surface rippled and bulged as the hill moved stones and pebbles toward its edges to be discarded. Now and then a pore stuck up in the air as the organism attempted to squeeze out a grass blade. No one knew what the living hill would become. It spent its long life eating and clearing debris from its flat top.
The living hill couldn’t know what Rik was, having no brain to speak of, but it responded to his w
eight by forming two prongs that sought to grasp him and draw him to its center where its mouth yawned and hungered. It ate copper, phosphorous, protein and a variety of other elements, and Rik met some of the requirements. It would suck him into its internals, absorb what it needed and pass out the rest.
It tried to grab hold of him. He sidestepped the sluggish prongs, retraced his steps across the heaving slab and went hurrying down an ordinary incline that hadn’t yet decided to evolve into something else.
The breeze was more brisk and moisture from the morning rain blew from trees and sprayed his face. His shoes sank into soft soil. The sun dragged in its orbit. The earth was hot and peaceful. Reluctantly he started to leave the oasis and step onto the desert. Heat thrust him backward. Though he wasn’t thirsty, he drank from the flask on his belt. His eyes slitted as he put one foot onto the cracked ground.
He withdrew the foot. It was too hot. He wasn’t ready to go back. Finding a shady spot beneath a rock, he threw himself down on the grass. Carefully he laid the toy aside.
By and by, a silver ball rolled from the shrubbery to pause by his dusty feet.
“I’m a failure and afraid in a world of sin,” said the silver thing.
Rik took a grass blade out of his teeth. With a frown of annoyance he kicked at the shiny ball. It flowed around his sock and rolled away, leaving no trace of itself there. Having it on him for those few seconds had been like wearing a plaster cast that never came in contact with the skin. It was an uncanny sensation.
“My name is Sheen,” said the glittering ball. “How do you do?”
“Beat it, whatever you are,” said Rik. He slumped against the rock and stared up at a dark cloud. His head ached and there was a bad taste in his mouth. Sport with the Gods was no cure for what ailed him.
It would be some time before he took real note of Sheen. At the moment, he saw with only part of his mind. The larger reality was blocked off. It might have been a defense mechanism. Whatever, the weird phenomenon of the silver creature’s existence was now only a half-realized annoyance.
He groaned, kicked the ground, showered the silver ball with clods. Absently he noted how it moved from beneath them in a fluid motion that left no dirt clinging to it.
“Wish me a happy birthday,” said Sheen. “I was born mere days ago in the bowels of a volcano.”
Rik renewed his interest in the dark cloud overhead. It would probably rain. He would get wet. He would shiver and be generally miserable, maybe even catch a cold. He was too lazy to move.
“Are you so stupid you don’t know I’m here?” said Sheen. He became a two-pronged stalk of brightness that rose several feet into the air. “See me and know that I am Sheen.”
Rik had a sudden hallucination. He thought he saw a tare skulking in the nearby brush. His mouth watering, he leaped to his feet with a stone in his metal hand. Rushing through the body of Sheen and nearly dividing it, he charged into a patch of foliage and stood looking about. There was no tare and there were no tracks. Satisfying himself that the animal wasn’t hiding behind a tree, he crossed a clearing and stood staring out across the oasis. Nothing moved wherever he looked. He must have been mistaken. There hadn’t been a tare in the bushes. There was nothing living here. And that was damned strange. This place was usually teeming with small life. Now there was nothing.
“I am obtuse,” murmured Sheen, behind him. “I am inferior, a no-account. Don’t be offended but I love you.”
Rik returned to his former place and picked up the toy galaxy. He walked away in search of some animal life.
Sheen watched him go. A little pulse throbbed somewhere in him. “For this cause was I born?” he said softly. “This is an interesting situation if I ever saw one. That man is either an idiot or blind or … how shall I say it? Tasty? Yes, I think he may have good taste.”
Like a raised blister on a parched slab, the city of Osfar humped in the desert and baked white under the sun. Even colored stone tended to fade so that newer parts of the city assumed the same desiccated look as the old. Osfar had been laid out piecemeal in a sprawling oasis of green grass, orchards and cool streams. Almost as soon as the last patch of mortar had been slapped smooth, the first underground rumblings were felt. Then came an earthquake. When the air cleared, it was seen that nature had played a cruel trick. The streams had been diverted and Osfar was a desert city.
There was no rain where there was no grass. Torrents could fall on one spot while only yards away the ground was cracked and arid. Men perspired and wiped their necks with big handkerchiefs and wished for another earthquake to come and turn back the waters. They couldn’t abandon so much and start over again. Osfar was too big, too important. The entire eastern industrial complex depended upon this one city. Within its walls throbbed a thousand different commercial organs without which the east would have reverted to barbarism. Among the essential things made in Osfar were artificial hands. A man with only a pair of paws was scarcely a man, and the old city could have justified its existence with just the one product.
It was common knowledge that early man wore a loincloth and ate like an animal. As his intelligence increased, he learned to manipulate ropes and pulleys with his teeth. From those crude beginnings he progressed to machines and artificial hands. No one wanted to go back to pulleys or loincloths, and so Osfar must live, desert or not. A great water system had been built beneath the city and deep reservoirs were tapped.
Outside Osfar lay thousands of miles of the hottest land on earth. There were two seasons, summer and winter, the former lasting three-fourths of a year which numbered 365 days. In summer, a man wore insulated shoes and carried a water flask wherever he went, whether on foot or in a vehicle.
Perhaps this part of the world had been a verdant plain millions of years ago. It made no difference now. A man relied on his senses to tell him if it was safe to travel. He was prepared for hail or flood. Old Sol was master. If he dried up the biggest stream before it could lunge underground, the rain might not come, and if the rain failed, the ground died. If a man liked things cold he had to wait for winter or go across the desert beyond the oases to the Horny Mountains, weird stalks of granite that seemed to march down the world forever. Cold places lay on the other side and trains journeyed through them, carrying men and trade goods to the big cities thousands of miles away. A man’s body temperature was 102 degrees and he liked warm weather.
The one sea provided the world’s moisture. It was large and reached from the shore of Enjy, a hundred miles east of Osfar, to Alf and Nisa, the earth’s western shoreline. Legend had it that the world was once mostly water with several separate land masses. Now there was one great piece of land and one sea. The area along the shore was mapped but most of the hinterland was unknown. Aside from the huge coastal cities—Osfar, Enjy, Alf, Nisa, Chin—the world was unexplored desert. Probably nothing lived inland but the Gods who didn’t care what the weather was like because of their powers. They rode on clouds, wore no clothes, had no place to call home. They seemed to be the only creatures who didn’t live with conflict or claw their way, inch by inch, up the evolutionary ladder.
Everyone had seen Luvon. He was a dead God who once walked down Osfar’s main street and paused to pat a child’s head. Now he stood in the oasis called Echo Valley that lay three miles south of the city. An underground spring surfaced there. Everyone had journeyed to see Luvon. They had touched his metallic skin and tried to pull his eyelids down over his staring eyes.
They hadn’t seen him die, but his death had been ordinary. A century and a half after he reached maturity, Luvon sensed a stiffening in his joints and spine. There was little pain since vital parts of his brain were hardening. His powers continued to diminish until creating the simplest objects was impossible. Increasing rigidity soon rendered him helpless and then one day he was unable to blink his eyes. The end came swiftly. Luvon became a stiff and silent statue. His friends placed him in Echo Valley and he stood there staring blindly at the white walls. The winds of
the kingdom came to play with his petrified parts. Rain painted him hoary while the sun tried to burn him. Nothing could touch him. He was a dead monarch who would stand where he had been placed and go on standing forever. In time, his condensing mass would sink into the earth. The burial might require centuries but eventually Luvon would be one with the nations underground.
The people in Osfar liked dead Gods better than mobile ones. Sometimes men suffered from the wrath of the living Gods, though not often. A petrified God could be admired without fear. He never contradicted, never objected, never tried to make rules. Summer picnics were inspired by Luvon’s presence in the oasis.
The Valley of the Dead, where Sheen first entered the world, had been given the name because it stank. Likely, some of the deep openings between rocks led down into old burial grounds or mineral springs. No one went there but archeologists or hikers passing through.
The Valley crawled with small game, and while Rik wasn’t much for killing, he liked to do as much of his own providing as he could.
Society didn’t want him to do things they couldn’t understand. Why would a man in his right mind spend hours wandering around looking at things? Meditation was fine, but it shouldn’t be overdone. If a man went into the wilds with a gun, no one asked questions. So Rik carried a gun when he took his walks. He probably knew the Valley of the Dead better than anybody and he realized that if all the animals had disappeared, it meant something cataclysmic had happened. People would want to know about it and since no one ever went into the Valley they would never learn of it unless he told them.
Noise grew as he approached Osfar’s suburbs. Women were stringing laundry on lines in their yards. Their artificial hands clicked rhythmically as steel fingers snatched up shirts and trousers and hung them to dry.
He caught a cross-town bus that let him off a block from his house. Even before he reached the sidewalk, he saw Aril. She stood on the hill beyond the back yard of their home, her head bent as she looked down at a gravestone. There was no body in the grave. Behind her reared another gravestone, and this plot had a body in it. Aril paid no attention to it.
A Billion Days of Earth Page 4
