Four of them sat across the fire from Craig, talking loudly and loading explosive pellets. They wore blue field denims and had roached hair and a red dot tattooed on their foreheads. Bork Wilde, the new field chief, stood watching them. He was tall and bold featured, with roached black hair, and he had two red dots on his forehead. Craig’s reddish hair was unroached and except for freckles his forehead was blank, because he had never taken the Mordin manhood test. For all his gangling young six-foot body, he felt like a boy among men. As the only blanky in a crew of red dots, he caught all the menial jobs now. It was not pleasant.
They were a six-man ringwalling crew and they were camped beside their flyer, a gray, high-sided cargo job, a safe two miles downslope from a big ringwall. All around them the bare, fluted, silvery stems speared and branched fifty feet overhead and gave a watery cast to the twilight. Normally the stems and twigs would be covered with two lobed phytozoon leaves of all sizes and color patterns. The men and their fire had excited the leaves and they had detached themselves, to hover in a pulsating rainbow cloud high enough to catch the sun above the silver tracery of the upper branches. They piped and twittered and shed a spicy perfume. Certain daring ones dipped low above the men. One of the pellet loaders, a little rat-faced man named Cobb, hurled a flaming chunk up through them.
“Shut up, you flitterbugs!” he roared. “Let a man hear himself think!”
“Can you really think, Cobbo?” Whelan asked.
“If I think I think, then I’m thinking, ain’t I?”
The men laughed. The red-and-white fibrous root tangle underfoot was slowly withdrawing, underground and to the sides, leaving bare soil around the fire. The new guys thought it was to escape the fire, but Craig remembered the roots had always done that when the old ringwall crew used to camp without fire. By morning the whole area around the flyer would be bare soil. A brown, many-legged crawler an inch long pushed out of the exposed soil and scuttled after the retreating roots. Craig smiled at it and stirred the stew. A small green-and-red phyto leaf dropped from the cloud and settled on his knobby wrist. He let it nuzzle at him. Its thin, velvety wings waved slowly. A much thickened midrib made it a kind of body with no head or visible appendages. Craig turned his wrist over and wondered idly why the phyto did not fall off. It was a pretty little thing.
A patterned green-and-gold phyto with wings as large as dinner plates settled on Wilde’s shoulder. Wilde snatched it and tore its wings with thick fingers. It whimpered and fluttered. Craig winced.
“Stop it!” he said involuntarily and then, apologetically, “It can’t hurt you, Mr. Wilde. It was just curious.”
“Who pulled your trigger, Blanky?” Wilde asked lazily. “I wish these damned bloodsucking butterflies could know what I’m doing here.”
He turned and kicked one of the weak, turgor-rigid stems and brought it crumpling down across the flyer. He threw the torn phyto after it and laughed, showing big horse teeth. Craig bit his lip.
“Chow’s ready,” he said. “Come and get it.”
After cleanup it got dark, with only one moon in the sky, and the phytos furled their wings and went to sleep on the upper branches. The fire died away. The men rolled up in blankets and snored. Craig sat there. He saw Sidis come and stand looking out the doorway of the lighted main cabin. Sidis was the Belconti ecologist who had been boss of the old ringwall crew. He was along on this first trip with the new men only to break Wilde in as crew chief. He insisted on eating and sleeping inside the flyer, to the scorn of the Planet Mordin red dots. His forehead was blank as Craig’s, but that was little comfort. Sidis was from Planet Belconti, where they had different customs.
For Mordinmen, courage was the supreme good. They were descendants of a lost Earth-colony that had lapsed to a stone age technology and fought its way back to gunpowder in ceaseless war against the fearsome Great Russel dinotheres who were the dominant life-form on Planet Mordin before men came and for a long time after. For many generations young candidates for manhood went forth in a sworn band to kill a Great Russel with spears and and arrows. When rifles came, they hunted him singly. The survivors wore the red dot of manhood and fathered the next generation. Then the civilized planets rediscovered Mordin. Knowledge flowed in. Population exploded. Suddenly there were not enough Great Russels left alive to meet the need. Craig’s family had not been able to buy him a Great Russel hunt and he could not become a man.
I’ll have my chance yet, Craig thought dourly.
Ten years before Craig’s birth the Mordin Hunt Council found the phyto planet unclaimed and set out to convert it to one great dinothere hunting range. The Earth-type Mordin biota could neither eat nor displace the alien phytos. Mordin contracted with Belconti biologists to exterminate the native life, Mordin laborers served under Belconti biotechs. All were blankies; no red dots would serve under the effete Belcontis, many of whom were women. Using the killer plant Thanasis, the Belcontis cleared two large islands and restocked them with a Mordin biota. One they named Base Island and made their headquarters. On the other they installed a Great Russel dinothere. He flourished.
When I was little, they told me I’d kill my Great Russel on this planet, Craig thought. He clasped his arms around his knees. There was still only the one Great Russel on the whole planet.
Because for thirty years the continents refused to die. The phytos encysted Thanasis areas, adapted, recovered ground, Belconti genesmiths designed ever more deadly strains of Thanasis, pushing it to the safe upper limit of its recombination index. After decades of dubious battle Thanasis began clearly losing ground. The Belcontis said the attempt must be given up. But the phyto planet had become the symbol of future hope to curb present social unrest on Mordin. The Hunt Council would not give up the fight. Mordin red dots were sent to study biotechnics on Belconti. Then they came to the phyto planet to do the job themselves.
Craig was already there, finishing out a two-year labor contract. Working with other blankies under a Belconti boss, he had almost forgotten the pain of withheld manhood. He had extended his contract for two more years. Then, a month ago, the red dots had come in the Mordin relief ship, to relieve both Belconti biotechs and the Mordin field crews. The Belcontis would go home on their own relief ship in about a year. Craig was left the only blanky on the planet, except for the Belcontis, and they didn’t count.
I’m already alone, he thought. He bowed his head on his knees and wished he could sleep. Someone touched his shoulder. He looked up to see Sidis beside him.
“Come inside, will you, Roy?” Sidis whispered. “I want to talk to you.”
Craig sat down across from Sidis at the long table in the main cabin. Sidis was a slender, dark man with the gentle Belconti manners and a wry smile.
“I’m worried what you’ll do these next two years,” he said. “I don’t like the way they order you around, that nasty little Cobb in particular. Why do you take it?”
“I have to because I’m a blanky.”
“You can’t help that. If it’s one of your laws, it’s not a fair law.”
“It’s fair because it’s natural,” Craig said. “I don’t like not being a man, but that’s just how it is.”
“You are a man. You’re twenty-four years old.”
“I’m not a man until I feel like one,” Craig said. “I can’t feel like one until I kill my Great Russel.”
“I’m afraid you’d still feel out of place,” Sidis said. “I’ve watched you for two years and I think you have a certain quality your own planet has no use for. So I have a proposition.” He glanced at the door, then back to Craig. “Declare yourself a Belconti citizen, Roy. We’ll all sponsor you. I know Mil Ames will find you a job on the staff. You can go home to Belconti with us.”
“Great Russel!” Craig said. “I couldn’t never do that, Mr. Sidis.”
“Why couldn’t you? Do you want to go through life as a Mordin blanky? Would you ever get a wife?”
“Maybe. Some woman the red dots passed over. She’d
hate me, for her bad luck.”
“And you call that fair?”
“It’s fair because it’s natural. It’s natural for a woman to want an all-the-way man instead of a boy that just grew up.”
“Not for Belconti women. How about it, Roy?”
Craig clasped his hands between his knees. He lowered his head and shook it slowly.
“No. No. I couldn’t. My place is here, fighting for a time when no kid has to grow up cheated, like I been.” He raised his head. “Besides, no Mordinman ever runs away from a fight.”
Sidis smiled. “This fight is already lost.”
“Not the way Mr. Wilde talks. In the labs at Base Camp they’re going to use a trans-something, I hear.”
“Translocator in the gene matrix,” Sidis said. His face shadowed. “I guarantee they won’t do it while Mil Ames runs the labs. After we go, they’ll probably kill themselves in a year.” He looked sharply at Craig. “I hadn’t meant to tell you that, but it’s one reason I hope you’ll leave with us.”
“How kill ourselves?”
“With an outlaw free-system.”
Craig shook his head. Sidis looked thoughtful.
“Look, you know how the phyto stems are all rooted together underground like one huge plant,” he said. “Thanasis pumps self-duplicating enzyme systems into them, trying to predigest the whole continent. In the labs we design those free-systems. They can digest a man, too, and that’s what you get inoculated against each time we design a new one. We also design a specific control virus able to kill off each new strain of Thanasis. Well, then.” He steepled his fingers. “With translocation, Thanasis can redesign its own free-systems in the field, you might say. It could come up with something impossible to immunize, something no control virus we know how to make could handle. Then it would kill us and rule the planet itself.”
“That’s what happened on Planet Froy, isn’t it?”
“Yes. That’s what you risk. And you can’t win. So come to Belconti with us.”
Craig stood up. “I almost wish you didn’t tell me that, about the danger,” he said. “Now I can’t think about leaving.”
Sidis leaned back and spread his fingers on the table. “Talk to Midori Blake before you say no for sure,” he said. “I know she’s fond of you, Roy. I thought you rather liked her.”
“I do like to be around her,” Craig said. “I liked it when you used to go there, ’stead of camping in the field. I wish we did now.”
“I’ll try to persuade Wilde. Think it over, will you?”
“I can’t think,” Craig said. “I don’t know what I feel.” He turned to the door. “I’m going out and walk and try to think.”
“Good night, Roy.” Sidis reached for a book.
The second moon was just rising. Craig walked through a jungle of ghostly silver stems. Phytos clinging to them piped sleepily, disturbed by his passage. I’m too ignorant to be a Belconti, he thought. He was nearing the ringwall. Stems grew more thickly, became harder, fused at last into a sloping, ninety-foot dam. Craig climbed halfway up and stopped. It was foolhardy to go higher without a protective suit. Thanasis was on the other side. Its free-systems diffused hundreds of feet, even in still air. The phyto stems were all rooted together like one big plant and Thanasis ate into it like a sickness. The stems formed ringwalls around stands of Thanasis to stop its spread and force it to poison itself. Craig climbed a few feet higher.
Sure I’m big enough to whip Cobb, he thought. Whip any of them, except Mr. Wilde. But he knew that in a quarrel his knees would turn to water and his voice squeak off to nothing, because they were men and he was not.
“Just the same, I’m not a coward,” he said aloud.
He climbed to the top. Thanasis stretched off in a sea of blackness beneath the moons. Just below he could see the outline of narrow, pointed leaves furred with stinging hairs and beaded with poison meant to be rainwashed into the roots of downslope prey. The ringwall impounded the poisoned water. This stand of Thanasis was drowning in it and it was desperate. He saw the tendrils groping the flinty ringwall surface, hungry to release free-systems into enemy tissue and follow after to suck and absorb. They felt his warmth and waved feebly at him. This below him was the woody, climbing form. They said even waist-high shrubs could eat a man in a week.
I’m not afraid, Craig thought. He sat down and took off his boots and let his bare feet dangle above the Thanasis. Midori Blake and all the Belcontis would think this was crazy. They didn’t understand about courage—all they had was brains. He liked them anyway, Midori most of all. He thought about her as he gazed off across the dark Thanasis. The whole continent would have to be like that, first. Then they’d kill off Thanasis with control virus and plant grass and real trees and bring birds and animals and it would all be like Base and Russel Islands were now. Sidis was wrong. That trans-stuff would do it. He’d stay and help and earn the rest of the money he needed. He felt better, with his mind made up. Then he felt a gentle tug at his left ankle.
Fierce, sudden pain stabbed his ankle. He jerked his leg up. The tendril broke and came with it, still squirming and stinging. Craig whistled and swore as he scraped it off with a boot heel, careful not to let it touch his hands. Then he pulled on his right boot and hurried back to camp for treatment.
He carried his left boot, because he knew how fast his ankle would swell. He reached camp with his left leg one screaming ache. Sidis was still up. He neutralized the poison, gave Craig a sedative and made him turn in to one of the bunks inside the flyer. He did not ask questions. He looked down at Craig with his wry smile.
“You Mordinmen,” he said, and shook his head.
The Belcontis were always saying that.
In the morning Cobb sneered and Wilde was furious.
“If you’re shooting for a week on the sick list, aim again,” Wilde said. “I’ll give you two days.”
“He needs two weeks,” Sidis said. “I’ll do his work.”
“I’ll work,” Craig said. “It don’t hurt so much I can’t work.”
“Take today off,” Wilde said, mollified.
“I’ll work today,” Craig said. “I’m all right.”
It was a tortured day under the hot yellow sun, with his foot wrapped in sacks and stabbing pain up his spine with every step. Craig drove his power auger deep into basal ringwall tissue and the aromatic, red-purple sap gushed out and soaked his feet. Then he pushed in the explosive pellet, shouldered his rig and paced off the next position. Over and over he did it, like a machine, not stopping to eat his lunch, ignoring the phytos that clung to his neck and hands. He meant to finish his arc before the others, if it killed him. But when he finished and had time to think about it, his foot felt better than it had all day. He snapped a red cloth to his auger shaft and waved it high and the flyer slanted down to pick him up. Sidis was at the controls.
“You’re the first to finish,” he said. “I don’t see why you’re even alive. Go and lie down now.”
“I’ll take the controls,” Craig said. “I feel good.”
“I guess you’re proving something,” Sidis smiled. “All right.”
He gave Craig the controls and went aft. Driving the flyer was one of the menial jobs that Craig liked. He liked being alone in the little control cabin, with its two seats and windows all around. He lifted to a thousand feet and glanced along the ringwall, curving out of sight in both directions. The pent sea of Thanasis was dark green by daylight. The phyto area outside the ringwall gleamed silvery, with an overplay of shifting colors, and it was very beautiful. Far and high in the north he saw a colored cloud among the fleecy ones. It was a mass of migratory phytos drifting in the wind. It was beautiful too.
“They’re very fast at transferring substance to grow or repair the ringwalls,” he heard Sidis telling Wilde back in the main cabin. “You’ll notice the biomass downslope is less dense. When you release that poisoned water from inside the ringwall you get a shock effect and Thanasis follows up fast. But a new
ringwall always forms.”
“Next time through I’ll blow fifty-mile arcs,” Wilde said.
Craig slanted down to pick up Jordan. He was a stocky, sandy-haired man about Craig’s age. He scrambled aboard grinning.
“Beat us again, hey, Craig?” he said. “That took guts, boy! You’re all right!”
“I got two years’ practice on you guys,” Craig said.
The praise made him feel good. It was the first time Jordan had called him by name instead of “Blanky.” He lifted the flyer again. Jordan sat down in the spare seat.
“How’s the foot?” he asked.
“Pretty good. I might get my boot on, unlaced,” Craig said.
“Don’t try. I’ll take camp chores tonight,” Jordan said. “You rest that foot, Craig.”
“There’s Whelan signaling,” Craig said.
He felt himself blushing with pleasure as he slanted down to pick up Whelan. Jordan went aft. When Rice and Cobb had been picked up, Craig hovered the flyer at two miles and Wilde pulsed off the explosive. Twenty miles of living ringwall tissue fountained in dust and flame. Phytos rising in terrified, chromatic clouds marked the rolling shock wave. Behind it the silvery plain darkened with the sheet flow of poisoned water.
“Hah! Go it, Thanasis!” Wilde shouted. “I swear to bullets, that’s a pretty sight down there!” He sighed. “Well, that makes it a day, men. Sidis, where’s a good place to camp?”
“We’re only an hour from Burton Island,” Sidis said. “I used to stop at the taxonomy station there every night, when we worked this area.”
“Probably why you never got anywhere, too,” Wilde said. “But I want a look at that island. The Huntsman’s got plans for it.”
He shouted orders up to Craig. Craig lifted to ten miles and headed southeast at full throttle. A purplish sea rolled above the silvery horizon. Far on the sea rim beaded islands climbed to view. It had been a good day, Craig thought. Jordan seemed to want to be friends. And now at long last he was going to see Midori Blake again.
Worldmakers Page 13
