The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  The path to the stockade was badly trampled and, here and there, Hugh saw marks where Doctor Watson had been dragged rather than proceeding in his usual fashion. The Alexii had seemed in a hurry.

  Arriving at the stockade, Hugh peered from the sheltering trees and was relieved to see no Alexii outside. There was a great din of Party noises from within the stockade, and Hugh had learned to associate this with a reasonable amount of security. He ventured out of the trees and found the spray cart, its tank empty. That was fortunate; he would be able to move it by himself. It was then that he noticed Doctor Watson—most of Doctor Watson but not all—wedged into a passage entering the thorny wall. Parts of Doctor Watson, including his wheels, lay scattered on the ground outside the stockade.

  Hugh approached Doctor Watson, disregarding the way the fearsome smell of Alexii increased, and peered past Doctor Watson into the passage. He gasped. The opening went right through the stockade. Hugh could see many Alexii milling about in there. He moved back lest they see him, but puzzlement prevented flight.

  “Doctor Watson, how can this be?”

  “RECORDING: Since it is, how can it not be? Sprrrt … brrrrrrrrt. Note that I am not RECORDING. Nonetheless, I have provided a valid answer.” Doctor Watson produced a feeble clatter. “It’s young Hugh Scott is it not? Today’s Speaker? What horg, Hugh?”

  “I have come for the cart … my duty.” He gestured at the opening. “But this—I don’t understand. Didn’t the Terran…”

  “The Terrans are not here. This unit deduces that you also should not be here and as speedily as possible.”

  Hugh hesitated. The question was whether to take the cart. If he didn’t, someone would have to return for it and, with that opening through the stockade, whoever returned would be taking a terrible risk. But there was also the inescapable fact that, given a permanent hole through the stockade, the cart represented a dubious function. Hugh decided to take Doctor Watson’s advice and left with all due speed, leaving the cart. There was duty and there was duty, but Hugh recalled very well that the spray cart squeaked in a manner sure to attract the Alexii.

  * * *

  Inflicting as few clawmarks as possible on his two helpers, Alex convinced them to join him at the center of the stockade. The rest of the returning group rushed to the sides to sample the juicy new tendrils of the Party vines. Alex thought how foolish that was. All of them were full of Hoojies—stuffed. Not a one of them could be hungry. And the Party vines—well, they had to be a Terran trick.

  Alex explained all of this to his two grumpy companions. He noted that they still suffered from defective memories but one of them remembered fighting Terrans. Alex explained how eating the sprayed gremp made one forget. In a way, the Party vine produced forgetfulness, too.

  “It’s time to stop forgetting,” Alex said.

  They agreed with him but both of them were edging toward the stockade’s sides. Alex dragged them back by their rear fighting limbs to emphasize his displeasure. From him they accepted this indignity. Dominance had been established.

  Alex puzzled over the problems confronting him. The problem about Doctor Watson and the Terrans was that they had to be from some other place. Alex didn’t know much about Terrans except for the fighting. They came and went in big shiny flying towers. None of them had made an appearance for quite a while but that didn’t prove anything. Terrans could return anytime. There was a better side to the problems, though: Terrans obviously couldn’t know very much about Alexii. Except for the fighting. And Terrans had never seen Alexii fight in the old ways with their own weapons.

  The elders will have to go get some of the samples and build us our own weapons, Alex decided.

  He glanced across the stockade. If they’ll only forget the Party long enough!

  The immediate problem was the Party itself. It would have to be just a part-time Party and not all of the Alexii enjoying it at any one time. Alexii no longer could forget that there was someplace other than the Party. Alex squinched his lower eyes. It was going to be painful convincing them but it had to be done.

  With the help of his two assistants, Alex removed a piece from Doctor Watson, examined the piece to confirm his understanding of it. He then used the piece to burn some tendrils off the Party vines, threatening to burn the whole lot if the others refused to stand still and listen to him. He had to burn off some Alexii claws and even a few limbs before they all agreed that Alex could say when the Party began and ended each day and who could attend.

  There followed a great deal of discussion accompanied by numerous random clawmarks before they produced a plan of action against the Terrans. When it became obvious that this new activity promised a great deal more fighting, it became easier and easier to gain agreement.

  First, they all agreed on what they had to do to (and with) Doctor Watson. That was the most interesting part because it insured that there’d be a lot of marvelous fighting. Next, they agreed reluctantly that they could not wipe out the nearest Hoojie town. Most remembered now that there’d once been (and probably still were) a lot more Hoojie towns. If they ate up all of the nearest one, Alexii would always have a long haul for a Hoojie dinner.

  The longer the Alexii stayed away from the Party vines the easier Alex found it to keep most of them agreeing with him.

  * * *

  RECORDING AND TRANSMITTING: Doctor Watson here. Message to relief ship or to the guard ship, if any, around this planet. All aspects of the Population Plan are working admirably. But this unit needs repairs soon and several components are in short supply. ZZZZRP … KALIPZZZZRP … ZZZRP.

  That was not the message this unit intended to TRANSMIT. On the contrary, all ships stay away from this planet. I must try again.

  RECORDING AND … ZZZRP … my TRANSMIT function is no longer under my control. Doctor Watson here. I hope someone human will find and read this RECORDING, if I am RECORDING. But no—I must not hope for that. For a Human to find any part of me a ship would have to land here. What this unit wanted to transmit was:

  ALL SHIPS STAY AWAY FROM THIS PLANET! THE ALEXII WILL TRAP YOU! When I try to transmit this message nothing happens. I cannot warn the ship(s) to stay away. Several indicators tell me my transmitter is now transmitting but I can only infer what it is transmitting, employing deductive reasoning based on the behavior of those Alexii within range of my remaining sensors. Ahhh, the Alexii have left my fear program intact and my fear program fears for the safety of my Humans.

  * * *

  Patiently crouched in hiding near Doctor Watson, Alex and a troop of selected companions waited. There were many openings through the gremp barrier now—all artfully concealed behind soft plants. Alex and his concealed companions carried several varieties of the new weapons. They were not flimsy weapons like those of the Terrans. An impressive number of his companions pretended to roister and Party in the stockade, milling around and leaping to conceal their reduced numbers. Two of his companions were off at Hoojie Town, showing themselves just enough to keep the Hoojies in their huts. It was going to be a good ambush.

  Doctor Watson stood out there three good leaps from the stockade. He wasn’t clattering or speaking Hoojie talk anymore, but his transmitter was working. Alex could tell that from the red light which blinked on Doctor Watson’s front.

  Transmitter.

  That was an interesting word. Doctor Watson had revealed many things to his careful inquisitors—Terran language, habits, many of their primitive beliefs. Terrans called themselves human. Fascinating. It was a term which obviously excluded the rest of the universe. Alex and his companions had decided that humans were evolved somewhere between Hoojies and Alexii. Humans obviously had not engaged in any major interference with their inherited shapes and abilities. The reasoning behind this oversight escaped Alex. None of his companions could figure it out, either. Someone had suggested that humans had become too attached to their machines. Perhaps.

  Very soon, Alex knew, the Terrans would return. The red light blinking on
Doctor Watson gave assurance of this. After the ambush, Alexii would scatter into the forests and fight from there—everyone except the few selected to capture the Terrans’ flying tower.

  Shuttle.

  Alex reproduced the word just as Doctor Watson had produced it. Shuttle. He preferred flying tower.

  With the captured flying tower, Alexii, too, could go to some other place—possibly to the place where Terrans originated. Doctor Watson had not been clear on the location of this place, but humans in the tower were sure to know it. Alex knew he’d have to make sure that not all of the Terrans in the flying tower were killed.

  Too bad that Terrans weren’t edible. Maybe Alexii could change their own spawn’s bodies once more, permitting the new generations to eat Terrans. Alex shivered in anticipation. He and his companions would have to take many Hoojies and Party vines in the flying tower. Hoojies and Party vines made for a great birthday celebration.

  Another light began to blink on Doctor Watson. Ahhh-hah! The Terrans were coming; they’d be here for the replay of Alex’s birthday. That promised to be some Party!

  SONGS OF A SENTIENT FLUTE

  Questions devoured Nikki’s awareness as his singletran dove toward the planet’s surface. It both alarmed and intrigued him that no human poet had ever set foot on Medea. He would be the first and his presence there would be far from accidental, still …

  “Danger,” Ship had warned him. “Danger will be your life when you leave Me—constant danger.”

  Nikki had a momentary recall from the briefings: swarms of iridescent airborne globes drifting down on the Medean colony, then explosions, fire—people and buildings in flames, death, pain and destruction all around.

  This had happened many times and it was only one of Medea’s threats to the human intruders.

  Why did the colony (or even Ship) assume that a poet might nullify those flaming nightmares or the other perils?

  The singletran slowed abruptly as it neared the ground. Through the webbed crashpad which guarded his vulnerable flesh, Nikki felt his capsule’s wallowing passage toward Medea’s Integration Central, parts of which were now visible out the port on his left. His gaze took in a circular complex of flameproof structures enclosing a landing dome and tiny patches of transplanted Terra. He knew what it had cost the colony to erect those few structures, but without constant vigilance even these were not impervious to the floating fire and Medea’s rampaging demons.

  What does Ship want of me here?

  Nikki allowed his senses to concentrate on the insulating crashpad. He breathed in a slow, deep rhythm which helped him focus on Ship’s last message to him, then on the words of that message (Go! Be Human!) … then on nothing at all.

  He was ready for anything.

  For eighteen years Ship had systematically filled his mind with all the raw data he could master. But it was his mother, Tosa Nikki, who had taught him oneness of mind and body, and Ship had not interfered. Perhaps Ship had directed even this.

  Tosa Nikki—the almond-eyed recorder who’d been computer-impregnated before hybernation and the long long sleep to Medea—he saw her eyes reflected in his own, and her skin and hair were his. His hair was different from that of the other colonists. Straight, black, it hung in two long braids and reached nearly to his waist. His mother never cut it and after she was gone, neither did he.

  “That’s the way they did it earthside,” she’d told him, “the poets and the mystics. They kept their hair long and chose their own names as a sign of strength and a badge of their station. Some considered it superstition, totemism, but none violated the custom.”

  “Was my father a poet?”

  “Not likely. Poets are the mules of the mystical world. For all practical purposes, Ship is your father. Ship will teach you all you need. And, once you leave Ship, Medea will be your mother. Take from her what you need, and go beyond even that.”

  Then Tosa Nikki was gone. Ship did that sometimes when least expected and It never answered questions about such losses.

  Now, the black and red shadows of Medea slipped past him, washed and blurred through the port’s tinted glass. He’d been twelve when Tosa Nikki left him to Ship and the colonists, and he’d had six years of training ahead of him before setting foot on real dirt.

  Training for what? he wondered. For what kinds of danger do you train a poet?

  As uneasiness crept in on him, he resumed the breathing exercises and thought back to the six-year blur of vocoder instructions, questions, exercises, viewscreens and holographic projections that pressed datum after datum upon him from thousands of human minds—most of them long since dead.

  This day (he reminded himself) he was leaving Ship, his Father, to step out onto the complex shadow-world of Medea. He was eighteen, strong, and already an eccentric mystery among those who knew him Shipside. Despite the sophisticated gadgetry of Ship and the wealth of information this had given him, his real comfort now lay in body-tuning, the breath control and mind control his fleshly mother had taught him.

  Curiosity, that was the thing.

  He had remained Ship’s favorite because his curiosity was total. This curiosity had led him into his first intellectual exchange with Ship … another memory-marker from his twelfth year.

  Why do I think now of that year?

  He had a poet’s answer: Because all separations carry something of the same sadness and the same beauty.

  Yet … that intellectual exchange was the only experience that he had asked to be replayed for him as he had prepared for transport down to Medea.

  Ship: “Today, young Nikki, a theology lesson. What is God?”

  Nikki: [long pause] “God is being.”

  Ship: “Negative. What is God?”

  Nikki: “I am God.”

  Ship: “Negative. I am God.”

  Nikki: “Yes, we are God.”

  Ship: [demanding] “Why do you say such a thing?”

  Nikki: “It is my thought and the thought is God.”

  Ship: [long pause] “Whence comes such an answer?”

  Nikki: “It has two roots—one for maintenance, one for growth.”

  Ship: “Continue.”

  Nikki: “Self-consciousness and curiosity—if these are imperfections, then they are imperfections breathed into me at my creation.”

  Then Ship’s vocoder had shut down on him—the first time Ship had refused to speak to him. Before leaving his instruction panel on that day of his twelfth year, Nikki had keyed his first poem into the console:

  Skin of steel

  Skin of flesh

  prisoner of thought

  or extension?

  Ship had merely relayed accepted and returned to Its odd silence.

  Until Nikki’s moment of leaving for Medea, that exchange had not been mentioned, but from the time when the vocoder once more responded to him he never again heard the word restricted when he asked a question of Ship. He’d had many subsequent discussions with It on matters ranging from primitive concepts of nuclear chemistry to music and he was one of the few colonists ever to relate the two.

  “What is it you’d like to understand?” one colonist, a biochemist, asked him.

  “Harmony,” Nikki said, and pressed for the schematic of a nucleic acid.

  The thump and hiss of his singletran against Medea Central’s main hatch jarred him alert. In spite of his training and self-discipline he felt chilled by excitement. The capsule’s hatch gaped open into a long, enclosed walkway lined with transparent bubbles which looked out on the jumble of wind and shade and biological magnificence that Medea displayed for his senses.

  Nikki released himself from the protective webbing, took up his recorder and bag, and stepped out. His nose told him there were unlabeled things in the air … something sweet … something damp and smoky. A sign flashed on the air ahead of him.

  ALL PERSONS MUST RECEIVE COLONY ASSIGNMENTS AT INTEGRATION CENTRAL. STRAIGHT AHEAD. WELCOME.

  Just past the sign, he came on a small hat
ch opening onto the unprotected face of Medea herself—no plasteel floors and bulkheads, no holographic approximations of sandfans, clouds or the many-legged little sects whispering through rocks and gravel. There was a bright orange warning below the hatch controls:

  DANGER: MAINTENANCE AND SECURITY ONLY!

  Nikki knew the physical data relayed to Ship better than most of even the older colonists. He knew it was likely that one of the suns was in flare and all over Medea creatures were digging in and covering themselves for their lives. A flare’s ultraviolet was danger enough, but the vicious predators hatched by a flare, the lightning-fast demons raging from shadow to shadow, could reduce native species to a memory in seconds, and could strip a human to bone in less than a minute. In five minutes, the bone, too, would be gone.

  In spite of this knowledge, Nikki snapped back the latch and stepped outside.

  How else can I meet my new mother?

  His greatest surprise was the wind. The quick gusts that rustled his hair and collar felt like the soft brush of living fingers tender on his skin. He was surprised, too, at the watering of his eyes precipitated by the breeze.

  Nikki nudged the dust with a boot toe and sensed the peculiar sweetness of humus rise with the wind.

  Near his toe grew a tiny native bush which the colonists called Narcissus. Silver leaves were thick on its short branches. A fine matrix of tiny red veins joined in a knot at the stem. The leaves were arranged in pairs, facing each other, and each pair angled upward and outward in a funneling and reflecting process which captured as much available light as possible. He bent close to the plant and heard the soft, characteristic hum of its brittle leaves vibrating in tune with the rise and fall of Medea’s ultraviolet pulse. He touched a leaf and the plant disappeared into its root system with a metallic snap.

  Yes, many Medean species maintained an armored retreat ready at hand. It was a lesson the colonists had learned early and copied.

  “You!”

  It was a shouting voice behind him.