The Far Shore of Time e-3

by Pohl Frederik

  “I mean Pat Adcock.”

  “Ah,” he said. Well, it wasn’t “ah,” exactly, but it was the same sort of exhalation of breath, indicating that he comprehended. The breath was warm on my face. “You wish me to have a copy of your sexual partner made for you, is that it?”

  His tone sounded disappointed in me. It made me defensive. “Is that too much to ask?”

  He paused, the sinuous neck curling and straightening thoughtfully. “I don’t know if it is too much. Tell me why you want this.”

  Now he was making me angry. “Why do you think? Because I’m frustrated and lonely and hopeless, that’s why!”

  “And you think it would make you happier to copy someone you care about, who then would herself become frustrated and lonely and hopeless?”

  Well, it sounded all different when he put it like that, but he didn’t give me a chance to try to defend myself. He took me firmly by the arm with one of those sinewy tentacles of his and said, “We will speak of this later, Dan, but now we must go. We must not keep the Greatmother waiting.”

  The Greatmother kept us waiting, though. We trudged to the topmost level of the nest, where a subadult Horch let us into a room, far larger than my own and with many more furnishings. There an ancient female Horch lay sprawled on an immense bed. She had an ungainly thing like a huge metallic corset wrapped around her midsection. It could not have been comfortable to sleep in, but she wasn’t sleeping. Her long neck dangled limply off the side of the bed, her eyes half open but unseeing.

  I whispered to Beert, “Is she all right?”

  “Shh! Of course she is all right. She is simply accessing certain files. Her belly viewer is a thing like your helmet, do you understand?”

  I did-after the moment it took me to figure out that the belly was where Horch kept their brains, since of course their heads were too small. I kept looking at Beert to see if he seemed to be getting receptive to my request, but his head was down low, staring at the floor. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking; and just as I was making up my mind to ask him again, the Greatmother stirred. Her limbs straightened. Her head lifted to gaze at me, while her arms snaked down to the latches of her viewer.

  That was the cue for Beert to spring forward to help her. When she had the thing unlatched he carefully stowed it away in its wicker container, turned his head toward me and said proudly, “The Greatmother will speak to you now.”

  The first thing she did was to direct Beert to lay out some food and drink for us. While I was munching on the only part that looked familiar she explained to me that she had been viewing some of the scenes of our life as captives of the others. It was all like a silent film for her, since she couldn’t understand any of our talk, but Djabeertapritch had filled her in and she was full of questions. Did the Old Female Rosaleen Artzybachova possess among us the rightful dignity and authority that she herself had in her nest? Had I in fact bred with the young female Pat Adcock-that is, with one of the three young female Pat Adcocks-and if so, what had led me to choose that one over the identical other two? And if breeding was desirable, why had the Old Female not assigned a Pat to each of the other two males in our party so that all three might become pregnant?

  When I told her there would be no young coming from our quick idyll, the idea of contraceptives startled her. “But why would this Pat not wish to gestate?” she asked incredulously.

  I ran through all the reasons in my mind and settled on one that she might view sympathetically. “We did not wish to bear a child to suffer captivity in a place far from home,” I said, and saw Beert’s head swerve toward me thoughtfully.

  She wriggled her neck at me in gentle reproof. “If our ancestors had thought that way when our planet was overrun, you and I would not be having this conversation. Life is worth saving, Dannerman. Offspring are worth having. Always.” She flipped her neck in a complicated curve, and then asked politely, “Has Djabeertapritch told you all you want to know about our nest?”

  “Not everything,” I said, and then I hesitated for a moment. Maybe I was a little annoyed with Beert for not promising to make me a Pat, but I didn’t feel like being tactful. I said, right out, “I know this is a sensitive matter, but is it true that you don’t get along with your cousins in the Beloved Leader base?”

  Beert gave me a shocked, warning hiss, but the Greatmother answered at once. “We are all one folk, Dannerman. It is, however, true that some of the ways of our cousin Horch have changed greatly in the long, long time we have been separated from them, while this nest has kept to the old ways.”

  “The ways of your home planet?”

  “Of our particular home planet, the Two Eights. There were many planets inhabited by our species when we were taken, Dannerman, and each had its own customs. Now there are even more. The Two Eights was one of the newest and smallest at the time, with only eight sixty-fours of sixty-fours of sixty-fours of sixty-fours of inhabitants.” I calculated quickly: something less than 150 million. “Most of the other Horch planets were much larger. When the Others came-But perhaps Djabeertapritch has told you all this?”

  “Not all, I think.”

  She gave Beert that quick, reproving neck-twist. He said hastily, “I have been busy with the cousins, Greatmother, as you know.”

  She patted his arm affectionately. “Of course. Well, you know, Dannerman, that all through our star-going history we Horch had met many strange species, a few of them nearly sentients. Those we always treated with kindness-as, you have seen, we in this nest have treated you yourself, Dannerman. When the Others’ scoutship came to our world it was the first time another species had come through space to us. The ones who came to us were not the Others themselves. The Others were too frail to come to the surface of our planet, but they sent their subject species, and those were welcomed. All that they asked was given to them. They did tell us of the Eschaton; that was one gift of the Others. It was the only one.”

  She looked inquiringly at Beert, who was twitching restively. “They also gave us death,” he growled.

  She sighed. “Yes, that is so. It is what the Others often give, and they have many ways of giving it. They alter the reaction of a star, so that it goes nova, or change the orbit of a small planetoid so that it collides with the planet they would destroy. They can bring about an emission of poisonous gases from a planet’s oceans if they choose. Or they can do what they did to our Two Eights. In their laboratories the Others developed a terrible new disease made out of the proteins of our own bodies, and they spread it secretly among us, and we began to die. Many, many of the people of our planet died. Nearly all. On the Two Eights fewer than sixty-four sixty-fours survived. Those were the ones who were brought here, and we are their descendants. Or,” she corrected herself somberly, “the descendants of those who survived what happened here. The Others interrogated our first generations without mercy. Many of us died here as well, usually in great pain. Even when we no longer had any information to give, we were still valuable to the Others, because we were still genetically Horch. So from time to time they seized numbers of us and carried them away, to test new diseases and weapons on them; and that is what our lives were like, Dannerman, for eights of generations-until our cousins of the Eight Plus Three came and set us free.”

  Abruptly the Greatmother sat straighter on her bed. Her head sprang up to mine, until her pointy, hard-skinned nose was almost touching my own.

  “Now I will give a more complete answer to your question, Dannerman. The Eight Plus Threes have treated us very well; they shared everything they have with us, and they offered to take anyone who wished to a Horch planet to live. Most of my nest did go, willingly. A few of us did not. Our cousins have had a long history of struggle and warfare, which we did not share. It has changed them, as our lifetimes of captivity have changed us. We in this nest wish to make a different life for ourselves, though we do not know how.

  “But we intend to try.

  “What you must remember is that we are all still Horch,
Dannerman. We will never do anything to harm our cousins. Djabeertapritch understands this well. You must understand it, too.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When we left the Greatmother, Beert’s bubbly mood was restored. “She likes you, Dan,” he said on the way down the staircase, his neck dancing with pleasure. “Now we can act. Do you remember our earlier conversation?”

  My heart leaped. “The one about Pat?”

  “No, not the one about Pat,” he said crossly. “We have had other conversations, have we not? I am speaking about the one in which I told you that you could help another person in a great matter.”

  As we walked out into the open air, I tried to remember. “Oh, that,” I said, disappointed. “You mean the one where you didn’t tell me what it was, or what I was supposed to do. How could I forget all that?”

  Irony was wasted on him. “Yes, that conversation, exactly,” he said abstractedly, glancing at that bent-tree sundial. He frowned. “The person who needs your help will be here shortly, but first we must go to my laboratory, if you don’t mind.”

  I didn’t mind. Didn’t have much chance to object, either, because Beert was leading me rapidly toward his pink shed. I looked around apprehensively while he was opening the door, but the Christmas trees were absent. When he touched something just inside the doorway, bright lights sprang up, and he said with pride, “This is my personal workspace.”

  It was certainly something special. There weren’t any luminous fungi here. The lights Beert had turned on came from the glowing walls themselves, with additional spotlights that were fixed on specific items, one a workbench, with several gadgets and tools on it, a couple of larger gadgets on the floor-and one other thing.

  I swallowed. The other thing stood motionless against one wall, the light sparkling from its million little needles. It was a Christmas tree.

  I must have made a sound, because Beert twisted his neck around from where he was taking objects out of a cabinet and tossing them into a basket. When he saw where I was looking, he reassured me. “I have told you that you need not fear the robots. This one in particular; I have taken it apart and rebuilt it, and now it does not even have a channel to the central controls.”

  “Urn,” I said, studying the thing. But it didn’t move, so I decided to take him at his word. “Why do you bother?” I asked.

  He seemed a little embarrassed, his face held low and not meeting my eyes. “I want to learn all that our cousin Horch know, Dan. It is the only way this nest can ever hope to stand on its own. And,” he added, pride returning and his head lifting, “I have even been able to build some instruments for my own use. Like this.”

  He lifted one of the gadgets from the workbench and held it high. It was a sort of fish-shaped, flattened oval, looking rather like a metallically glittering flounder or sole. “It is a scrambler, Dan. It generates static, which interferes with the communications channels of the Others. Instruments of this sort were very valuable to the cousins when they attacked this base.”

  I looked at it with more respect. “Valuable” was a conservative word for it; something like it would have come in very useful when we were captives. It wasn’t the only thing around, either. Beert’s lab was full of high-tech alien gadgets of all kind. It was exactly what I’d been looking for to take back to the Bureau’s technicians, when I’d still had hope of that.

  But I didn’t have that hope anymore.

  Beert was still talking. “This particular device is not exactly like theirs; I built it in a different shape, to serve the purposes it is planned for, and had to waterproof it to protect its power.” That reminded me. “And it’s self-powered?” He stared at me. “Of course. Why would it not be?” “Well,” I said, “I’ve been wondering about that. I’ve looked at some of your other gadgets, and I don’t see any wires.”

  He made a hissing noise of exasperation. “There are no wires. Each device draws its energy from-“

  That wasn’t the end of his sentence, it was just the point at which it turned into gibberish and I couldn’t understand it anymore. I asked, “What?”

  “I said it draws its energy from the garble of the garble garble which is present in the garblegarblegarble.”

  That was no improvement. I shook my head apologetically. “I guess this translator thing doesn’t work as well as I thought,” I said, touching the thing behind my ear. “I didn’t understand any of that.”

  He sighed, wriggling his neck regretfully. I said, “If you could just try to explain a little-“

  “I did try,” he said testily. “You simply do not have the background to understand the words, and I do not have time to teach you just now. The person I wish to help will be waiting for us.” He put the scrambler in the basket with the other things and closed the lid, gesturing for us to leave the lab.

  Outside, Beert slammed the door behind us and grabbed my arm. I let him lead me toward the stream that went through the grounds of the nest, and there, standing by one of those round little bridges, I saw the person Beert wanted me to help.

  It was no friend of mine. The thing was a Wet One, one of the amphibians who had killed Patrice.

  I didn’t say anything to Beert. Well, maybe that’s not true. I think I probably did say something like, “Screw this,” under my breath, but I doubt that Beert heard me. I wrenched my arm free from his grip, turned around and walked away, not looking back ... for no more than three or four meters.

  Then I stopped.

  Beert was a funny-looking little dinosaur, and his unpredictably fluctuating moods-his often childish moods-sometimes made that particular little dinosaur difficult to live with. But he had done his best to befriend me. Had, in fact, saved my life, just for starters. And if he was now asking me to help him, even to help him do something for a species I hated-didn’t I owe him something?

  “Oh, hell,” I said, this time out loud, and turned around. Beert was peering after me.

  I retraced my steps to the stream bank. “Exactly what is it that you want me to do?” I asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I don’t know if Beert had any idea of why I had walked away. He didn’t comment. Maybe he figured it was just another bit of Earth-human queerness. He simply said, as though nothing had happened, “I will show you,” and began pulling things out of his little basket and carefully setting them on the ground next to the Wet One.

  Who was studying me intently with those bulging hippopotamus eyes that were set on the top of his head. I didn’t speak. Neither did he. I did see that the tentacular electric organs that sprouted from his face were writhing restlessly. That didn’t seem to be a friendly sign. It crossed my mind that Beert might have misjudged the situation, and I instinctively began looking around for something that might work as a weapon if the thing suddenly jumped me.

  Beert’s tap on my shoulder distracted me and I looked around. “Are you paying attention?” he asked crossly. “See, this is how the scrambler fits on the Wet One’s body.” He had it in his other hand, and began carefully to place it on the amphibian’s gross belly, just behind its tiny mid-arms. I wondered what he was going to use for glue to make it stick to the Wet One’s hide, but he didn’t have to do that. He had something more effective than glue. A metal socket was actually embedded in the amphibian’s flesh; the creature had evidently allowed someone to fasten the socket to his body surgically, right through the skin. There were two similar sockets flanking the one with the scrambler, and the next thing Beert did was to attach a couple of stout leather pouches to them.

  Then he pulled the last of the basket’s contents out.

  It was a pair of handguns. My handguns. Two of the twenty-shot, Bureau-issued guns that had been my basic carry weapon ever since I became an agent.

  I nearly lost it one more time, as the anger I had managed to push back out of sight boiled over again. If anybody was going to have my guns, it damn well ought to be me. I made a grab for them, snarling, “Hey! Those are mine!”

  Th
e amphibian slithered a half step away toward the stream, grunting a protest, but it didn’t try to stop me. It didn’t have to. Beert was fast as well as strong; he dropped the weapons, and his two rubbery arms clamped quick and hard around my wrists. He didn’t raise his voice. “Actually,” he said, “these two projectile weapons are for the Wet One. If you have a requirement for one, it can be copied for you, but I do not see any such necessity.”

  I wrenched free of his grip. He let me go, but his arms stayed near mine and his face danced before me. “They belong to me!” I complained. “That thing is a killer. How do I know he isn’t going to shoot me with them?”

  Beert said patiently, “He has no such intention.”

  That was when the amphibian spoke up, surprising me. He wasn’t easy to understand. He spoke that same Horch language-naturally enough; I could see that he was wearing an implant of his own, tucked under his jaw. But he didn’t have the same sort of vocal cords as I did, or even as the Horch did. The sounds he made were more like a hoarse, unpleasant kind of roaring than conversation, and I had to strain to make them out: “That is true. Shall I now speak of unfortunate past events?”

  I guess the question was rhetorical, because the Wet One went right on talking. “The lethal pulsing of your female person should not have happened,” he stated. “The sharp-object stabbing of our persons by yours should not have happened as well. The reason for these wrong happenings may be that my party was in Other Water, where we did not know its tastes. In Home Water,” he explained, “where our females stay and the pups are reared, we know which tastes are persons and which are prey and which do not matter. In Other Water we may not know all the tastes. Yours were strange to us, and then your persons attacked us, so they were wrongly pulsed.” He regarded me for a second with those knobbed eyes, then finished. “There is nothing else to speak on this matter.”

  I listened to his little speech impatiently, and turned to Beert. “What’s he talking about?”