Meanwhile the thing under the bush began to convulse in earnest, so much so that it actually turned over. One area of it—the half-healed, half-withered place where the spine had torn out—showed some agitation, and suddenly a sharp little probe appear from inside, followed by a second. These two whipped in toward the flesh, paused, trembling, whipped and tore again, until it could be seen that something was fighting its way out. As it gradually emerged and freed itself from the entanglements of what had to be the uterus, Dom Felix saw it to be a startlingly perfect miniature of the first female he had seen, with eight legs and two forelimbs with sharp little claws on them—the tools of its first emergence.
The male, blood and brains dripping from his long snout, stood over the—baby?—until it was almost out, and patiently pulled it the rest of the way. From the center of the abdomen, between the second pair of legs, extended a vein, or tube—clearly the umbilical cord. This he grasped in his long fingers and broke. The infant began to crawl, and in minutes, to lift its segmented body clear of the ground and walk. It waddled blindly over to the shelter of the nearest bush and began poking its snout into the leaves, trying to feed. The male grasped the cord from the ruin that was left from the birth, drew out a wrinkled, fist-size many-veined tissue, the afterbirth or true uterus. This he immediately devoured, and went his way.
Dom Felix followed him, shocked, nauseated, and fascinated. There may have been another swift misting; he could not be sure, but it seemed now to be a different and lower part of the valley, the lake nearer, the mountain shouldering higher. The male approached the same female he had seen before, dropping her rear segment; Dom Felix knew because she had only six legs, not eight. She was in the throes of dropping the last segment again.… Aquare, do I have to go through this whole thing again?
Apparently not; the scene misted and cleared, with just a glimpse of the male gulping down the afterbirth and the infant crawling away to the nearest shadows. Dom Felix found himself following the now quadrupedal female, apparently not at all the worse for wear, beginning to rear and cavort and leap like a young goat, for no reason at all except for the joy of it. It took very little time for him to observe that this was female no longer, but a young, strong, immature, four-legged male.
The mist, and again the view of the adult male. He seemed to be having trouble keeping a steady gait as he trotted along the flat rock of the streambed above the lake. Suddenly he fell, tried to rise, could not. He lay for a while, gathering strength, and then twisted himself and began furiously attacking his own haunches as of plagued by absolutely intolerable itch. Twice he stopped to rest and shift his body so he could attack it again, when by an unbelievable twist and a spastic wrench he literally tore off his own useless hindquarters. He fell back, gasping, now a biped with the spine now a long tail; and the dead hindquarters unmistakably carried with them the male organs.
At length the creature got to its feet, took a few tottering steps and but for a quick stoop and a touch on the ground with one of the wiry forelimbs, would have fallen. It tried again, with a little more success, and very soon was walking almost upright—weakly, certainly, but with increasing certainty.
The mist: then a mature, bipedal adult, perched on a rock, staring off into the distance. Under the rock, another, contemplatively chewing on a melon-like fruit. A third, poking along a stream-bed apparently looking for whatever might be edible there. A young adult male emerged from the undergrowth and stood on the bank looking at the biped and licking his lips. The biped slowly raised both forelimbs and covered its head with them, upon which the others, on and around the big rock, came down, moving carefully and steadily, to gather around the one in the stream. The male stared at them, they stared back, and then the male reared, turned and trotted off. The bipeds watched him go, and then went back to their contemplations.
The mist, then Arca.
How long had it taken? Dom Felix had no chronometer with him; there was one out in the cycle, but he was not moved to go for it. Judging by the indices of hunger and thirst, he felt no more and no less than he had when that first vision exploded on him. “Aquare, what are you doing?”
“Answering.”
Answering what? He hadn’t asked anything. “Yes you ask,” rasped the translator. “From defrost you ask, all day, all time.”
Then “Aquare! I didn’t say anything! Can you read my mind?”
“Do not know read.”
“Do you know what I’m thinking when I don’t talk?”
“Confidence.”
Dom Felix was a little nettled at this. “I have promised and I’ll stick to it. Do you know what I’m thinking?”
Aquare droned: “Filthy little cannibalistic vermin. Also how the hell. Also what is he doing to me fear.”
“Should I fear?”
“Is no should. It is only is.”
With a touch of exasperation, Dom Felix rephrased it. “Did you—do you intend to do me any harm?”
“No harm. It may be hurt. Just truth.”
“The truth cannot hurt,” said Dom Felix triumphantly.
Chirp-chirp-chirp.
“Not with Acceptance, it can’t,” said Dom Felix in his Q.E.D. tone.
“Filthy little cannibalistic vermin is acceptance.”
Dom Felix suspected, and rightly, a question mark on that one. “Aquare, I make no moral judgments on animal behavior. I do reserve the right to express disgust at what I find disgusting. You still haven’t told me how you do this, what those—those pictures are.”
“All sentient intelligences can do.”
“Well, I can’t.”
Aquare said nothing. The nothing lasted a long time, and the more Dom Felix replayed that interchange, the more flustered he became. He did what he was trained to do: he confronted. “I think you just said I am not a sentient intelligence.”
“Yet.”
“I can learn it, then. Here? From you?”
“Good.”
Steaming, Dom Felix thought his thoughts.
“Not arrogance. Truth,” responded the Medean, just as if Dom Felix had spoken aloud.
This could get to be a real nuisance. Hastening to safer ground: “What were those—uh—pictures I saw, the place with the white sky, the one with the birds?”
“Not pictures. Is real.”
“Somewhere on Medea?”
“Not on Medea.”
“The birds, that sea—that looked like Terra.”
“Is Terra.”
“How long ago?”
“Is now.… You don’t believe.”
“Of course I don’t. It takes a beam of light fifty terrayears to travel that far!”
“This not light. This is now.”
It was at this moment that the Receiver was born.
“Can you show me Terra again—Terra now?”
With one sweep of his head, Aquare scanned the entire chamber. “No one is being on Terra now.”
I thought not. Wishing he could retract the thought, Dom Felix said, “I’d like you to explain that.”
“This is place of reward. Arcans safe here. Arcans come, sit, be far places. Be any sentient intelligence, anywhere, now.” Sensing Dom Felix’s perplexity he apparently decided to expand. “Reward,” he said again. “Difficult life. Near end, come here, sit, be anywhere. Enough, go back, end.”
A sort of shrine, retreat. He had the exasperating sense of almost understanding. “Aquare, why are you telling me this—me, when you have told no one else?”
In answer, Aquare mimicked the Acceptance gesture, hand on hand, hands raised, head bowed. It looked very strange when he did it. “You have Acceptance idea. You say, be him. Be her. Be some other. One step away, Be bird on Terra. Be plant on white-sky place, no have name. I say before, maybe you very very great Terran. Maybe you most great Terran. Maybe you make all Terrans be any sentient intelligence anywhere, now.”
“I’m sorry: I have to take this very slowly. You can teach me to live as—to be some other creature, see a
nd feel what they are seeing and feeling right now, instantaneously? And then I could teach it to anyone else?”
“If you very great Terran. Yes. If no, no.”
“You’re not teaching me—you’re testing me!”
“Both.”
“Go ahead then. I have to tell you—I’m damn interested but I’m not convinced.”
“You want see more—” the final word was not a word, but the flash of the picture—the quadruped male.
“Lord, no. I’ve had enough of that. Why did you give me that … that natural history lesson anyway?”
The answer came in pictures: the naked Terran, then, beside it, a child. No, not a child, a tiny, stooped, spindly, hairy humanoid, like—not like, it was Australopithecus. The “dawn man.”
The figures remained. Beside them, an Arcan, perhaps Aquare himself, and beside it, the small, long-snouted, long-tailed Medean biped. The pictures held, obscuring all else, until it came to Dom Felix: “You’re descended from that—that creature!”
The pictures faded, and Dom Felix rubbed his eyes, though it had not been with his eyes that he had seen them. Oh, my God, filthy little cannibalistic vermin. He said sincerely, “Aquare, I am sorry. I couldn’t be sorrier. I—I’m sure Australopithecus had some pretty awful habits too.” He made the gesture.
He thought Aquare was about to return it but it was something else—the long fingers pointed across the hall to a squatting Arcan against the far wall. “Is Terra.”
Dom Felix’s vision was swept away before it could cross the room, to be replaced by that extraordinary sense of being …
… of being strong and swift and perfectly adapted, and imbued with a sense of health and joy surpassing anything he had ever known. Sleek, streamlined, moving as if choreographed in the best of company: see them curving up out of water and swimming in air, the friends, the lovers, with their permanent smiles and their radiation of joy. This, however, was infinitely more than the ineffable rightness of red leaves in a white sky and the good hunger for pale orange light, more than climbing the wind on the way to a home-calling. A dolphin is more than a plant or bird; a dolphin lives in more than speed and foam and joyfulness. To the five senses add a dozen more, some even now without names; touch and speak with them, live in them, weave them to intricacies beyond human comprehension. No living thing exists more immediately, more intimately with its here and its now than the dolphin; few are in closer contact with that timeless and continuing Self which appears dimly and flickering in some humans as what it is called ‘racial memory’, but which is, in the dolphin, a total presence. In that sense all dolphins are one dolphin, and have been ever since, by conscious decision, and for good reasons, they returned to the sea from their evolutionary adolescence on shore.
The “allness” of all dolphins in space and time, is an analog and a microcosm of the unity of sentience throughout the universe. High evolutionary development is not a certification of membership in this unity; far and away most of its elements are no more advanced than the veined red foliage of the world of the white sky, yet have and permit access to other sentience from anywhere. Because of this, red plant and joyous dolphin share one basic: the fusion with this great Unity is prime, and individual self-survival is secondary. A dolphin will fight to the death to free itself from the net, but when the death comes, it is a little more importance than the loss of dead skin-cells from the greater body—to itself or to others of its kind. What it had when it was an individual was shared. When the individual is no more, the sharing endures and is immortal.
Much of this—because there is so much—escaped Dom Felix’s grasp, but would leave its mark on him permanently. What overrode it was the sight of the city.
The city nestled in a small deep cove flanked by pillars of rock—a huge one on the north side and a much taller, slender spire on the south. Most of the city was white, and conforming architecture with curved walls and slightly domed roofs, and overlooking it, perched on the cliffs which formed the backdrop to the town were linked white buildings—nine of them.
Dom Felix knew that city intimately—had lived much of his Terran life in it, had involved himself deeply in its designed growth—most particularly in the chain of buildings atop the clips. The Research Center, and Acceptance Headquarters. There was certainly no mistaking it; the city was unique on all Terra. What filled him with astonishment and incredulity was that there, real and gleaming and complete, and, in addition, with that weathered look of something established and used rather than band-box new, were nine buildings—nine, when he had, on departure, said his farewells to four, some design plans, and some graded ground-plans which would take half a careful century to complete.
He had given credence to these overwhelming Arcan experiences, and was aware of very little doubt as to the reality of these wonders, or that they might be other than what Aquare said they were. What he now saw in his dolphin self was something that can hardly be a dolphin’s concern, but was monumentally his: the projected construction on the cliffs was now complete, had been completed during the fifty-one years of his passage to Medea.
Therefore he was, he really was, looking at Terra now; he was looking at a faster-than-light transmission.
Humanity has always responded to that spur. Prove that anything can be done, and humanity will find a way to do it, even if that way is not the same way. Witness the Terran winghouses. Witness man’s flight: man learned that he could not fly like the birds, but he found a way to fly—and that way was higher and faster.
(But … always higher and faster?)
City and sea faded; the high arc of the dolphin’s leap in its multiplied awareness left him suspended in Arca, overwhelmed—so much so that when Aquare spoke to him twice without a response, he relaxed in the typical timeless stillness of Arcan meditation, ready to wait for however long it might take.
Dom Felix rose from his own depths at length, and said, “I need to know more.” Simple words, with layer upon underlayer of inspiration, urgency, fascination, and successive explosions of planning.
“Yes.”
Vision upon vision, with the swift partitions of mists between them:
Arcans, single file, toiling through the badlands toward the mountains.
The Entry (not an Arcan word; the Arcans have no words)—not so much a cave-mouth or doorway but a myriad of overhangs, cavities, entrances which soaked up the pilgrims like a thread of water falling on a sponge.
Underground (of course underground! Would not a high culture, but a non-technological culture, find for itself some environment of continuity, not subject to the hellish attacks of Medean weather? And of course the Terran enclaves, preoccupied with their own survival, were as yet unaware of it!)—underground, the city, the country of the Arcans. Here was their agriculture (largely fungoid) and their animal husbandry, caged and corralled creatures of great variety, feed and excreta neatly sequenced through the farming, or its analogs. Here was their industry, such as it was, tools being hands and pincers, powerful limbs, sheer numbers, and that strange ability, uncaptained, to team—to move in concert or individually with near-perfect synchronization. It was largely a silent city, completely nonverbal, for they apparently had something better—something, at least, better for them; and they had as little use for machines as they had for words.
Here were the young and the females—and an explanation for the almost total similarity of all the Arcans Dom Felix had yet seen. The inhabitants were anything but similar to one another. The infants had ten appendages, and so had all the young until adolescence. Dom Felix was led to many scenes of regularization, organization, and ritual, most of which he could not begin to understand, but which he could acknowledge as their schools, their religious institutions, and their conventions. He saw no hospitals, and few injured or maimed individuals, though once or twice a damaged or even amputated part obviously healing, even regenerating. It occurred to him that a species evolved from those creatures he had seen in the pocket-valley, promethean
as they were, undergoing successive metamorphoses in each single lifetime, may well have regenerative abilities. As far sicknesses were concerned—anything that survived on Medea was by that definition a prime survival type, and anything that had not killed them off by now, could not.
He saw courtship, and the choosings—a far cry from the coarse brutality of the couplings of the primitives; and once he was aware of those, he had to notice that only six-legged females were so wooed.
He began to recognize something akin to a family grouping; a centaur-like male, a six-legged female, an infant. Sometimes there were two males, one invariably older than the other.
When familiarity began to replace curiosity and confusion, Dom Felix was introduced to the more intimate and—could one say “sacred?”—aspects of the city’s life.
He saw the metamorphoses, each surrounded by gentle ritual: the first birthing, which apparently changed the child into the marriageable female, and its two phases, the parting of the last body-segment, and the care and guarding it went through until its moment came and it delivered, witnessed in joy by the entire “family,” and (ritual echoing of a far-past biology) the delivery of the afterbirth to the male. Then the second birthing, which changed bride into male centaur, and the delivery of this afterbirth to the father of the new child.
Then the ritual of departure for the new centaur, no longer wife and mother, now single and free and male and ready to seek a wife.
And at last the ordeal of final metamorphosis—the separation of the male segment of the centaur, and the appearance of the Arcan bipeds known to Terrans—the totally mature, the completed.
Case and the Dreamer Page 27
