Mutants

by Robert Silverberg

  Regaining a little control, Haris landed heavily on an outcropping ledge. The two women alighted chattering and scolding beside him. They looked up. Two lips fringed with green fern sucked a narrow purple segment of sky. Jury could not be seen, though her cries still echoed down to them.

  Behind the ledge on which they stood, a tunnel ran into the cliff. All the rock face was peppered with similar holes, so that it resembled a sponge. From the hole behind the ledge ran three flymen, two male and one female. They rushed out with ropes and spears.

  Flor and Lily-yo were bending over Haris. Before they had time to recover, they were knocked sprawling and tied with the ropes. Helpless, Lily-yo saw other flymen launch themselves from other holes and come gliding hi to help secure them. Their flight seemed more sure, more graceful, than it had on earth. Perhaps the way humans were lighter here had something to do with it, “Bring them in!” the flymen cried to each other. Their sharp, clever faces jostled around eagerly as they hoisted up their captives and bore them into the tunnel.

  In their alarm, Lily-yo, Flor, and Haris forgot about Jury, still crouching on the lip of the crevasse. They never saw her again. A pack of thinpins got her.

  The tunnel sloped gently down. Finally it curved and led into another which ran level and true. This in its turn led into an immense cavern with regular sides and a regular roof. Gray daylight flooded in at one end, for the cavern stood at the bottom of the crevasse.

  To the middle of this cavern the three captives were brought. Their knives were taken from them and they were released. As they huddled together uneasily, one of the flymen stood forward and spoke.

  “We will not harm you unless we must,” he said. “You come by traverser from the Heavy World. You are new here. When you learn our ways, you will join us.”

  “I am Lily-yo,” Lily-yo proudly said. “Let me go. We three are humans. You are flymen.”

  “Yes, you are humans, we are flymen. Also we are humans, you are flymen. Now you know nothing. Soon you will know, when you have seen the Captives. They will tell you many things.”

  “I am Lily-yo. I know many things.”

  “The Captives will tell you many more things.”

  “If there were many more things, then I would know them.”

  “I am Band Appa Bondi and I say come to see the Captives. Your talk is stupid Heavy World talk, Lily-yo.”

  Several flymen began to look aggressive, so that Haris nudged Lily-yo and muttered, “Let us do what he asks.”

  Grumpily, Lily-yo let herself and her two companions be led to another chamber. This one was partially ruined, and it stank. At the far end of it, a fall of cindery rock marked where the roof had fallen in, while a shaft of the unremitting sunlight burned on the floor, sending up a curtain of golden light about itself. Near this light were the Captives.

  “Do not fear to see them. They will not harm you,” Band Appa Bondi said, going forward.

  The encouragement was needed, for the Captives were not prepossessing.

  Eight of them there were, eight Captives, kept in eight great burn-urns big enough to serve them as narrow cells. The cells stood grouped in a semicircle. Band Appa Bondi led Lily-yo, Flor, and Haris into the middle of this semicircle, where they could survey and be surveyed.

  The Captives were painful to look on. All had some kind of deformity. One had no legs. One had no flesh on his lower jaw. One had four gnarled dwarf arms. One had short wings of flesh connecting ear lobes and thumbs, so that he lived perpetually with hands half raised to his face. One had boneless arms trailing at his side and one boneless leg. One had monstrous wings which trailed about him like carpet. One was hiding his ill-shaped form away behind a screen of his own excrement, smearing it onto the transparent walls of his cell. And one had a second head, a small, wizened thing growing from the first that fixed Lily-yo with a malevolent eye. This last Captive, who seemed to lead the others, spoke now, using the mouth of his main head, “I am the Chief Captive. I greet you. You are of the Heavy World. We are of the True World. Now you join us because you are of us. Though your wings and your scars are new, you may join us.”

  “I am Lily-yo. We three are humans. You are only flymen. We will not join you.”

  The Captives grunted in boredom. The Chief Captive spoke again.

  “Always this talk from you of the Heavy World! You have joined us! You are flymen, we are human. You know little, we know much.”

  “But we—”

  “Stop your stupid talk, woman!”

  “We are—”

  “Be silent, woman, and listen,” Band Appa Bondi said.

  “We know much,” repeated the Chief Captive. “Some things we will tell ycu. All who make the journey from the Heavy World become changed. Some die. Most live and grow wings. Between the worlds are many strong rays, not seen or felt, which change our bodies. When you come here, when you come to the True World, you become a true human. The grub of the tigerfly is not a tigerfly until it changes. So humans change.”

  “I cannot know what he says,” Haris said stubbornly, throwing himself down. But Lily-yo and Flor were listening*

  “To this True World, as you call it, we come to die,” Lily-yo said, doubtingly.

  The Captive with the fleshless jaw said, “The grub of the tigerfly thinks it dies when it changes into a tigerfly.”

  “You are still young,” said the Chief Captive. “You begin newly here. Where are your souls?”

  Lily-yo and Flor looked at each other. In their flight from the wiltmilt they had heedlessly thrown down their souls. Haris had trampled on his. It was unthinkable!

  “You see. You needed them no more. You are still young. You may be able to have babies. Some of those babies may be born with wings.”

  The Captive with the boneless arms added, “Some may be born wrong, as we are. Some may be born right.”

  “You are too foul to live!” Haris growled. “Why are you not killed?”

  “Because we know all things,” the Chief Captive said. Suddenly his second head roused itself and declared, “To be a good shape is not all in life. To know is also good. Because we cannot move well we can—think. This tribe of the True World is good and knows these things. So it lets us rule it.”

  Flor and Lily-yo muttered together.

  “Do you say that you poor Captives rule the True World?” Lily-yo asked at last.

  “We do.”

  “Then why are you Captives?”

  The flyman with earlobes and thumbs connected, making his perpetual little gesture of protest, spoke for the first time.

  “To rule is to serve, woman. Those who bear power are slaves to it. Only an outcast is free. Because we are Captives, we have the time to talk and think and plan and know. Those who know command the lives of others.”

  “No hurt will come to you, Lily-yo,” Band Appa Bondi added. “You will live among us and enjoy your life free from harm.”

  “No!” the Chief Captive said with both mouths. “Before she can enjoy, Lily-yo and her companion Flor—this other man creature is plainly useless—must help our great plan.”

  “The invasion?” Bondi asked.

  “What else? Flor and Lily-yo, you arrive here at a good time. Memories of the Heavy World and its savage life are still fresh in you. We need such memories. So we ask you to go back there on a great plan we have.’

  “Go back?” gasped Flor.

  “Yes. We plan to attack the Heavy World. You must help to lead our force/’

  The long afternoon of eternity wore on, that long golden road of an afternoon that would somewhere lead to an everlasting night. Motion there was, but motion without event—except for those negligible events that seemed so large to the creatures participating in them.

  For Lily-yo, Flor and Haris there were many events. Chief of these was that they learned to fly properly.

  The pains associated with their wings soon died away as the wonderful new flesh and tendons strengthened. To sail up in the light gravity became an incr
easing delight—the ugly flopping movements of flymen on the Heavy World had no place here.

  They learned to fly in packs, and then to hunt in packs. In time they were trained to carry out the Captives’ plan.

  The series of accidents that had first delivered humans to this world in burnurns had been a fortunate one, growing more fortunate as millennia tolled away. For gradually the humans adapted better to the True World. Their survival factor became greater, their power surer. And all this as on the Heavy World conditions grew more and more adverse to anything but the giant vegetables.

  Lily-yo at least was quick to;ee how much easier life was in these new conditions. She sat with Fbr and a dozen others eating pulped pluggyrug, before they did the Captives’ bidding and left for the Heavy World.

  It was hard to express all she Mt.

  “Here we are safe,” she said, indicating the whole green land that sweltered under the silver network: of webs.

  “Except from the tigerflies,” F or agreed.

  They rested on a bare peak, where the air was thin and even the giant creepers had not climbed. The turbulent green stretched away below them, almost as if they were on Earth—although here it was continually checked by the circular formations of rock.

  “This world is smaller,” Lily-yo said, trying again to make Flor know what was in her head. “I [ere we are bigger. We do not need to fight so much.”

  “Soon we must fight.”

  “Then we can come back here again. This is a good place, with nothing so savage and with not so many enemies. Here the groups could live without so much fear. Veggy and Toy and May and Gren and the other little ones would like it here.”

  “They would miss the trees.”

  “We shall soon miss the trees no longer. We have wings instead.”

  This idle talk took place beneath the unmoving shadow of a rock. Overhead, silver blobs against a purple sky, the traversers went, walking their networks, descending only occasionally to the celeries far below. As Lily-yo fell to watching these creatures, she thought in her mind of the grand plan the Captives had hatched. She flicked it over in a series of vivid pictures.

  Yes, the Captives knew. They could see ahead as she could not. She and those about her had lived like plants, doing what came. The Captives were not plants. From their cells they saw more than those outside.

  This, the Captives saw: that the few humans who reached the True World bore few children, because they were old, or because the rays that made their wings grow made their seed die; that it was good here, and would be better still with more humans; that one way to get more humans here was to bring babies and children from the Heavy World.

  For countless time, this had been done. Brave flymen had traveled back to that other world and stolen children. The flymen who had once attacked Lily-yo’s group on their climb to the Tips had been on that mission. They had taken Bain to bring her to the True World in burnurns—and had not been heard of since.

  Many perils and mischances lay in that long double journey. Of those who set out, few returned.

  Now the Captives had thought of a better and more daring scheme.

  “Here comes a traverser,” Band Appa Bondi said. “Let us be ready to move.”

  He walked before the pack of twelve flyers who had been chosen for this new attempt. He was the leader. Lily-yo, Flor, and Haris were in support of him, together with eight others, three male, five female. Only one of them, Band Appa Bondi himself, had been carried to the True World as a boy.

  Slowly the pack stood up, stretching their wings. The moment for their great adventure was here. Yet they felt little fear; they could not look ahead as the Captives did, except perhaps for Band Appa Bondi and Lily-yo. She strengthened her will by saying, “It is the way.” Then they all spread their arms wide aid soared off to meet the traverser.

  The traverser had eaten.

  It had caught one of its most tasty enemies, a tigerfly, in a web, and had sucked it till only a shell was left. Now it sank down into a bed of celeries, crushing them under its great bulk. Gently, it began to bud. Afterward, it would heal out for the great black gulfs, where heat and radiance called it. It had been born on this world. Being young, it had never yet made thai; dreaded, desired journey.

  Its buds burst up from its back, hung over, popped, fell to the ground, and scurried away to bury themselves in the pulp and dirt where they might begin their ten thousand years’ growth in peace.

  Young though it was, the traverser was sick. It did not know this. The enemy tigerfly had been at it, but it did not know this. Its vast bulk held little sensation.

  The twelve humans glided down and landed on its back, low down on the abdomen in a position hidden from the creature’s cluster of eyes. They sank among the tough shoulder-high fibers that served the traverser as hair, and looked about them. A rayplane swooped overhead and disappeared. A tr o of tumbleweeds skittered into the fibers and were seen no more…All was as quiet as if they lay on a small deserted hill.

  At length they spread out and moved along in line, heads down, eyes searching, Band Appa Bonii at one end, Lily-yo at the other. The great body was streaked anc pitted and scarred, so that progress down the slope was not easy. Tl e fiber grew in patterns of different shades, green, yellow, black, breaking up the traverser’s bulk when seen from the air, serving it as i atural camouflage. In many places, tough parasitic plants had rootec themselves, drawing their nourishment entirely from iheir host; most of them would die when the traverser launched Itself out betwc en worlds.

  The humans worked hard. Orce they were thrown flat when the traverser changed position. As he slope down which they moved grew steeper, so progress became more slow.

  “Here!” cried Y Coyin, one of tie women.

  At last they had found what tiiey sought, what the Captives sent them to seek.

  Clustering around Y Coyin with their knives out, the pack looked down.

  Here the fibers had been neatly champed away in swathes, leaving a bare patch as far across as a human was long. In this patch was a round scab. Lily-yo felt it. It was immensely hard.

  Lo Jint put his ear to it. Silence.

  They looked at each other.

  No signal was needed, none given.

  Together they knelt, prizing with their knives around the scab. Once the traverser moved, and they threw themselves flat. A bud rose nearby, popped, rolled down the slope and fell to the distant ground. A thinpin devoured it as it ran, The humans continued prizing.

  The scab moved. They lifted it off. A dark and sticky tunnel was revealed to them.

  “I go first,” Band Appa Bondi said.

  He lowered himself into the hole. The others followed. Dark sky showed roundly above them until the twelfth human was in the tunnel. Then the scab was drawn back into place. A soft slobber of sound came from it as it began to heal back into position again.

  They crouched where they were for a long time. They crouched, their knives ready, their wings folded around them, their human hearts beating strongly.

  In more than one sense they were in enemy territory. At the best of times, traversers were only allies by accident; they ate humans as readily as they devoured anything else. But this burrow was the work of that yellow and black destroyer, the tigerfly. One of the last true insects to survive, the tough and resourceful tigerflies had instinctively made the most invincible of all living things its prey.

  The female tigerfly alights and bores her tunnel into the traverser. Working her way down, she at last stops and prepares a natal chamber, hollowing it from the living traverser, paralyzing the matter with her needletail to prevent its healing again. There she lays her store of eggs before climbing back to daylight. When the eggs hatch, the larvae have fresh and living stuff to nourish them.

  After a while, Band Appa Bondi gave a sign and the pack moved forward, climbing awkwardly down the tunnel. A faint luminescence guided their eyes. The air lay heavy and green in their chests. They moved very slowly, very quietly, fo
r they heard movement ahead.

  Suddenly the movement was on them*

  “Look out!” Band Appa Bondi cried.

  From the terrible dark, something launched itself at them.

  Before they realized it, the tunnel had curved and widened into the natal chamber. The tigerfly’s eggs had hatched. Two hundred larvae with jaws as wide as a man’s reach turned on the intruders, snapping in fury and fear.

  Even as Band Appa Bondi sliced his first attacker, another had his head off. He fell, and his companions launched themselves over him. Pressing forward, they dodged those clicking jaws.

  Behind their hard heads, the larvae were soft and plump. One slash of a sword and they burst, their entrails flowing out. They fought, but knew not how to fight. Savagey the humans stabbed, ducked, and stabbed. No other human died. With backs to the wall they cut and thrust, breaking jaws, ripping llimsy stomachs. They killed unceasingly with neither hate nor m^rcy until they stood knee deep in slush. The larvae snapped and writhed and died. Uttering a grunt of satisfaction, Haris slew the last o: them.

  Wearily then, eleven humans crawled back to the tunnel, there to wait until the mess drained away- -and then to wait a longer while.

  The traverser stirred in its bed of celeries. Vague impulses drifted through its being. Things it had lone. Things it had to do. The things it had done had been done, the things it had to do were still to do. Blowing off oxygen, it heaved its* If up.

  Slowly at first, it swung up a cable, climbing to the network where the air thinned. Always, always 1 )efore in the eternal afternoon it had stopped here. This time there seemed no reason for stopping. Air was nothing, heat was all, the heat that blistered and prodded and chafed and coaxed increasingly with height…* .

  It blew a jet of cable from a i pinneret. Gaining speed, gaining intention, it rocketed its mighty vegetable self out and away from the place where the tigerflies flew. Ahead of it floated a semicircle of light, white and blue and green; it was a useful thing to look at to avoid getting lost.

  For this was a lonely place for a young traverser, a terrible-wonderful bright-dark place, so full of nothing. Turn as you speed and you fry well on all sides … nothing to trouble you… .