Half Past Human (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by T. J. Bass

  ‘No cubicles above the ten-thousand-foot mark. We can take our time along this range. Farther north there is the remnant of a tree line – a few real soft woods and lots of lichens.’

  Moses discarded his Pelger-Huet helmet as they crossed a saddle ridge. He got a glance westward, saw fields of geometries. Monotonous tiered crops with shaft caps and canals. Millions of four-toeds lived in darkness while they were enjoying the sun and the wind. His forehead burned and then tanned.

  He also learned. Toothpick tuned in on the agricultural robots and guided the group to food supplies. A few pounds of dried plankton gave them energy to reach the wooden tomatoes. A bedroll of those carried them into grain fields. His insulated suit had handy pockets and a water bottle, but they moved faster in the warmer low lands. Its bulk was in the way. Soon Moses and Moon were dressed alike – tattered rags.

  When they had to cross open ground they trotted briskly, staying fifty yards apart. Buckeye sensors paid little attention to single warm-blooded forms.

  Val and old Walter studied the report in disbelief.

  ‘Moses Eppendorff has gone buckeye? First our Tinker, now our Pipe,’ moaned Val. ‘Why?’

  Walter gasped for air in his usual fashion, but he spoke calmly: ‘I don’t see any connection. Tinker was forced out by the Big ES decision to take away his natural child. Even you and I could see the logic in that. We tried to have the child certified.’

  Val wasn’t being soothed. ‘But we can’t condone what he did. We hunted him, and would have killed him – I suppose – if we had to.’

  They looked at the file that held the Sampler’s report. Neither had looked inside – for it held the findings on the three decaying bodies that were found near Tinker’s escape air vent.

  ‘And Moses,’ continued old Walter, ‘he was sent out by his supervisor, Birk – a reward for his discovery of the Moses’ Melon. Tinker’s child and Moses’ Melon – both resulted in the loss of a citizen to the Outside. Just a coincidence.’

  ‘And the tightbeams?’ Val prodded.

  Walter shrugged.

  ‘Don’t know, but that’s Security’s problem – not HC.’

  Val was not satisfied. Too many of the citizens he had come to admire had gone buckeye. Something was wrong.

  4

  Kaia the Male

  High on his frozen mountain, Kaia stirred in his nest. Hibernation time still remained on his metabolic clock, but hunger called. The hunters’ constant pursuit had made his feedings scanty during the previous warm season. Now his winter sleep was being interrupted by protein starvation – acute amino acid deficiency. Enzyme systems faltered, screamed and tried alternate pathways. Reluctantly he left the dark warmth of his nest and crawled toward the pale glow of the cave mouth. Icy stones numbed hands and knees. He fingered the translucent white crust that sealed him in. It was still thick and hard. The snow line had not yet receded up the mountain. Outside he could only expect the white death. Shivering, he returned to his nest and wrapped a tattered cetacean hide around his old bony shoulders. His metabolic furnace sputtered without fuel. Coldness of death crept into fingers and toes. Desperate, he sorted through the debris at the bottom of the nest: sucking on long bones for the rusty grit in the tubular-shaped cancellous marrow cavities; chewing dry fruit pits for a few coarse bland lignen fibers; and licking cold mussel shells for stringy tags. Nothing. The cold continued to creep in. He didn’t need the ferrous ions in the marrow dust, and his efforts had produced little else.

  Kaia’s grinding molars cracked open a fruit pit, releasing a meaty seed so bitter that it puckered his parotid. He spat out the lignen shells and chewed the meat. The plant’s hoarded starch granules promised to rekindle his furnace. Gathering a handful of the pits, he crawled back to the light of the cave mouth and cracked them open with a stone – munching the bitter seeds with swallows of melted snow. With the resinous starchy mulch coating his rugal folds and quieting his hunger pangs, Kaia burrowed back under the musty hides and returned to his cool torpid state.

  Earth’s axis tilted. Longer, warmer days melted back the snowcap and thawed Kaia’s niche. The translucent crust dripped and sagged for a time. Then it fell into the cave, exposing his nest to the welcome glare of sunlight. He sat up stretching and squinting. After wrapping on strips of hide as leggings and loincloth, he crawled cautiously outside and stood in a wet cool breeze. The mountainside was a bright mosaic of gray stone and stubborn drifts of white snow. The sun warmed his hairy neck and shoulders. Hunger gnawed. He studied the horizon. Only an occasional Agromeck moved, bug-like, on Filly’s cultivated skin. Calories beckoned from below – a twinkling green filigree of plankton towers clinging to bare rock faces. He started down. A richer warmer atmosphere greeted him.

  He climbed into the forest of plankton towers. The trunklike conduits pulsed and glowed with an inner coherent light of 570 nanometers. The carotenoids and phycobilins of the chloroplasts captured most of the light energy, but enough filtered through to produce a soft green glow. The trunks rose, arborizing freely, to form a tubule canopy which captured additional energy from the sun.

  The noisy approach of a cumbersome Agromeck sent Kaia scurrying deeper into the syntheforest. After it passed, he emerged and started for the herb gardens. Filly, the cybercity, felt his clandestine movements on her skin. Footsteps itched. Filly moaned when he snapped open a tubule and began to suck plankton. Before she could sphincter down the leak, rich amino acids of zooplankton were fueling his starving enzyme systems. Refreshed, he munched his way across chickpea, soybean and thyme. Filly screamed when he pulled off a stalk of fennel. Her sorrow traveled along inorganic nerve fibers to Hunter Control.

  ‘Sucker in my garden. Varmint on my skin,’ she cried.

  Val glanced up at the wall panel.

  ‘Looks like a sighting over by Filly’s Mountain again. Haven’t been any buckeyes around there since the one we got last fall. Filly sure has sensitive skin. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got this one too. Foxhound is on the way.’

  A small light moved across the wall map.

  ‘Val!’ exclaimed old Walter, glancing up from a folder of dusty papers. ‘Have you seen these reports on Tinker’s body?’

  Val shrugged and turned his seat around.

  ‘No – why?’

  ‘It isn’t Tinker.’

  Val jumped up and strode purposefully to Walter’s desk.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look here. Both adults were male – had been dead about nine months. Hunters, I’d guess. And the infant was a female nearly five years old. It had enough skin pigment to be a jungle bunny. Probably killed by a hunter’s arrow.’

  Val picked up first one report, then another. His face tightened.

  ‘They must have been deliberately planted on Tinker’s trail to delay us. Look at the grass under the bodies – hardly stained at all,’ he mumbled. Stepping back, he sat down weakly – the reports held limply in his hand.

  ‘Who—?’

  ‘Tinker,’ suggested Walter, ‘perhaps Tinker put them there. He was a clever one.’

  Val shook his head. ‘No. Where could he find just the right bodies. This is garden country. These corpses must have come from high country – the mountains.’

  They were interrupted by a report from the Hunt at Filly’s Mountain. The hunter’s hypnoconditioning was reinforced, and his neck titrator gave a priming dose of Speed. The molecular courage brought a sinister grin to his face before the helmet snapped on.

  Kaia, the aborigine, sat hidden in the tall grain while he savored the aromatic juices of fennel. Rich sharp flavors jolted pristine taste buds and stirred violent parasympathetic storms. Copious gastric juice flowed. Peristalsis gurgled. Soon his abdomen protruded comfortably, and he became more selective – choosing only the most succulent morsels.

  Val watched the remote screen at HC. He recognized the sinewy form and took some stills for higher magnification.

  ‘The scar is right there on the neck,
’ he said. ‘This is the same buckeye we watched die on Filly’s Mountain last fall.’

  Walter asked the HC meck, Scanner, to dig up the old optics. Stills overlayed perfectly. Same bone structure. Walter nodded.

  ‘Looks like we have our second resurrection,’ said old Walter. ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Second?’ said Val puzzled.

  ‘The coweye you saw while tracking Tinker.’

  Val wrung his hands together. He had actually touched that coweye – felt the still, cold flesh. Death. The memory of her rewarming and swimming off was still with him. He shuddered.

  ‘I get the feeling that we’re dealing with the occult,’ mumbled Val. ‘But there must be a logical explanation. Can the HC meck get this data to the Class One for a work up – see how it computes?’

  Scanner said: ‘Done. We’ll hear in a minute.’

  The passing Huntercraft sent Kaia scurrying off in a zigzag course. Foxhound had difficulty tracking. The bugeyed, white-suited hunter swung down-harness with his bow. Kaia saw the skull-like Pelger-Huet helmet and the deadly arrows. Fear tightened his chest. He curled up and went cold.

  The sensors searched, but the viewscreen indicated ambient. No warm-blooded body showed.

  ‘There he goes again,’ said Walter, pointing to the screen.

  ‘Vanished?’ said Val.

  ‘If I didn’t believe in the Kjolen-Milo experiments, I’d say we had a case of teleportation here,’ said Walter.

  Val shook his head. ‘No, they came up with some pretty convincing equations. That buckeye is still out there. He just isn’t showing up on the sensors.’

  ‘Foxhound,’ called Val, ‘let the hunter keep searching. He may stumble on the buckeye’s hiding place.’

  The craft returned to Garage to suck energy.

  Twelve hours later the hunter began to slow down. He was standing, blurry-eyed, on the bank above Filly’s effluent grating watching the warm, uriniferous fluids swirl off into the canal system. A cloud of gnats hung in the vapors around his helmet. During the night he had examined every heat source on Filly’s skin – mostly the city’s own appendages. Now he dozed on his feet. A jolt of Speed pumped into his jugular vein. Eyes opened wide – unfocused. His detector indicated a moving body by the canal. He nocked an arrow and crept off, stalking an Agromeck on its way to the fields.

  Kaia’s senses returned. The long hours of silence had relaxed his hibernation reflex. Peering from the tall grain, he saw no hunter. Dashing into an orchard, he sucked a sweet thing from a tree. Running briskly, he sought the safety of the canal.

  The first arrow kicked him in the right femur, pinning his loincloth into his upper thigh. The impact threw him to the ground, bent over the arrow. He crawled a few feet and saw the skull-mask rise above the grassy canal bank. Bowstring taut. Kaia tugged on the bloody shaft. Shreds of loincloth moved deep in the wound, but the broad barbs held firm in the quadriceps. He struggled to his feet and tried to run, but the three-foot shaft vibrated and grated painfully. Nerves and bone chips. The second arrow struck his back – entering under the right scapula and passing through the right lung. He glanced down to see the wet red barbs jump out of his sternum. Grass hit him in the face.

  The sight of the kill triggered the hunter’s post-hypnotic suggestion to take a trophy. His tracking frenzy ended and he relaxed. His neck console moved to the end of its tape and readied the Molecular Reward. He sauntered up to Kaia’s body where it lay in a pool of clotted blood – thick purple jellylike clots. He bent down over the cooling form and took out his trophy knife.

  The gurgle in the canal did not carry through his helmet. He didn’t see the coweye. She was on him with both feet – stamping and kicking – spreading the pieces of his mangled body over a twelve-foot circle. His chalky bones snapped, and his rose-water blood splattered.

  The coweye bent over Kaia and touched his throat with her hand. Satisfied, she snapped the barbed arrow head off the shaft in his chest. Carefully, she edged the shaft out from under his shoulder blade. Pressing wooden pegs in his thigh, she widened the wound and engaged the barbs. His leg arrow came out easily.

  Foxhound found the remains of the hunter later in the day. The hunter’s belt communicator had optic records that told the story. Val and Walter examined the large, purple jellylike clots and broken arrows.

  ‘Send for the Bioteck,’ said Val. ‘I’d like to see what these clots are made of. They don’t look anything like our own rose-water blood.’

  Walter nodded. He was studying the stills of the arrow impacts. ‘While he is here, have the teck project these wounds into their three-dee mannequin. They look fatal to me.’

  The Bioteck returned with a transparent mannequin under one arm and a stack of reports under the other.

  ‘It’s blood clot,’ he said, referring to the jellylike material. ‘It isn’t normal, of course. Hemoglobin, fibrinogen and hematocrit are all about three times normal. The hemoglobin is fifteen grams – if you can imagine!’

  Val nodded.

  The teck stood up the mannequin.

  ‘This chest wound is fatal. The arrow passes through the hilum of the right lung. There are big vessels there, bronchi too. The leg wound, though serious, probably would not kill . . . if it were treated promptly.’

  Val walked around the mannequin and compared the optic printouts. If the buckeye’s anatomy was anything like their own, he should be dead.

  ‘What would a coweye want with a dead buckeye?’ asked Val.

  The teck shrugged, ‘They’re cannibals, sir.’

  Val wasn’t satisfied. There were still too many unanswered questions – the tightbeams from Outside, the decoy corpses on Tinker’s trail, and the peculiar resurrections.

  ‘Why would cannibals decoy us away from Tinker’s trail?’

  Silence.

  ‘Answer from the CO,’ announced Scanner.

  Val put it on print and audio, hoping it would clear up some of the mystery.

  The Class One worldwide computer spoke with the kindly voice of an old man, sympathetic, yet confident.

  ‘Your problems with the cooling buckeyes are not new,’ began the CO. ‘The hibernation reflex has been showing up in the aborigines ever since we started hunting them with the heat-seeking detectors. They have the gene for increased tone in their neurohumoral axis, so metabolic shut-down can be a defense mechanism in the proper environment. The hunters have provided that environment. If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Meanwhile, we can use any data you accumulate.’

  They waited politely until the screen cleared.

  ‘Playing possum,’ smiled Val. ‘At least we aren’t fighting the occult. Witchcraft makes me nervous.’ He shuddered. ‘I can still feel her wet cold body. I’m sorry now that I didn’t cut her carotid. Let her get away. That won’t happen again.’

  Walter dictated a few notes to Scanner for inclusion in hunter orientation.

  ‘With knowledge of this reflex we should have more success on our Hunts. Finding a buckeye who is playing possum should be easy with the coordinates of his last sighting – killing him should be even easier.’

  Val nodded.

  The Bioteck picked up his papers and mannequin. As he was leaving he suggested: ‘If you ever come across a live buckeye you might just tie off the dominant carotid and bring him to the lab for study.’

  Walter stopped his dictation. ‘How’s that again?’

  ‘Check his palms for calluses,’ said the teck. ‘If his right hand is hornier – more keratotic – you can assume he is right-handed. His left cerebrum would be dominant. Cut into his left neck and tie off the internal carotid on that side . . . should infarct part of the brain. He should live, but he’ll be almost a vegetable – ideal for the boys down in Bio to work with. There are lots of parameters of five-toeism we should know more about before they become extinct.’

  ‘Right,’ said Val, ‘good idea.’

  Walter cancelled the rest of his dictation.

/>   Kaia opened his eyes in a strange nest. The coweye soaked his wounds and changed his dressings frequently. Chest pains along the tract of the arrow shaft caused him to wink in and out of hibernation. She forced boiled mussel meat and rich barley soup into him. It was her follicular phase, and she needed a mate.

  At night she came to him grasping with her copulatory apparatus. Her demand-type thrusting failed to initiate his pelvicautonomic-cycle, for his granulating thoracic wound kept his parasympathetics depolarized by irritating the right vagus nerve. At new moon she went luteal and disappeared into the canal.

  For two weeks he foraged painfully for scraps of food on the grassy slopes of the canal. In his crippled condition he couldn’t risk exposure to the buckeye detectors that monitored the gardens – he would never be able to escape if hunters found him again.

  At full moon she returned – tense follicle. His sperm still waited. Her previous ovum had languished in its corona and died. A new ovum was soon to take its place in the tube. He enjoyed warm food during the days and a hot nest at night. After she was fertilized, her golden corpus luteum again commanded her moods. She left the nest one morning, threw him two mussels from the canal bottom, and swam off without a word.

  He limped back to Filly’s Mountain.

  Try to go through life a little bit hungry.

  You never know when you’ll meet someone edible.

  – Buckeye Kaia

  For several months Hunter Control was very quiet. The thousands of square miles of Orange Country gardens flourished, were harvested, and flourished again with only a rare buckeye sighting. Craft reported empty campsites – bones, chewed and charred – ashes – broken tools. Nothing to track.

  Val chuckled over the lull. ‘With Jupiter in Sagittarius you’d think we’d be having better hunting.’

  Walter frowned. The supernatural was nothing to joke about. After a long moment of strained silence the old man spoke.

  ‘Not funny. In the ten years I’ve been in HC I’ve come to respect the buckeye’s peculiar cycle of activity and migration. Their shamen go by the planets – have to – cycles of weather and crops are important to them. And they sleep right under the stars. Hive citizens can laugh at astrology. The Big ES protects them. Horoscopes are faulty when cast by a meck who isn’t watching the heavens anyway. But my charts are serious. Help with the Hunt. I try to outguess buckeye shamen. Right now I think they’ve gone into hiding because Jupiter is in Sagittarius. They figure it is a good sign for the hunter. More citizens will request a Hunt after seeing their horoscope – so the buckeyes are smart to avoid detection.’