By the colds and unmentionable voices that fill the Rind ...
They come up to a trapdoor. Without pausing in his stride, Moolab goes at it full tilt, stopping dead with his occular vibrlssi almost touching the solid stone.
He moves forward slowly. He presses himself against the stone. He heaves. Hind pairs of legs drum in the tunnel for additional purchase. The stone rolls aside.
Moolab climbs out on to the Rind, beneath the awful emptiness. The brood-sisters follow, bellies flat to the ground. The antennae swivel in dread.
They feel the colds, hear the unmentionable voices.
Overhead, the Wheel of Evil grinds.
The warrior Moolab feels the living Rind beneath him. He clings to the great carcass with all claws, knowing that this body now forms part of the division between Good and Evil. Below is all Good—the farther below, the more good, until the deep hives are reached, nestled forever among the greatest good. Above is all Evil—the farther above the greater evil until the high stars are reached.
He fixes his multiplex vision now upon the high stars. He must reach the place of the kimarsunss. To get there, he must use the directions pointed by the high stars; in this way. Evil is used for Good; that is part of the pattern.
Above him in the emptiness, he makes out the constellations, the Bat, the Devil Bull, the Boulder, the Night Worm, the queen’s Scar, and others.
The Night Worm is in the ascendant. Its hated length spirals up from horizon to zenith, marked by stars whose names Moolab recites to himself: Boylat, Crabarty, Pros-shing, Hrozne, Ramarkkan. Ramarkkan burns in the fangs of the mouth of the Night Worm. It is a baleful orange star.
And Moolab knows it threatens his life. He sees that it is tonight’s enemy.
He uses Ramarkkan to betray itself. Taking it as a bearing, he sets off in the direction of the plateau where the kimarsunss are.
Neece and Reneece are left behind. They stay by the trap. They will die if he does not return. They will never move again if he does not return. Their bodies will be possessed by the kimarsunss and the high stars, and they will stride the empty plains of the Rind on rear legs whenever Ramarkkan rises in the clotted west.
Moolab travels in an intense wave motion best suited to the undulating terrain. He is without fear. In him live the fifteen hundred generations underground.
The ground slopes upward in an antique and unbroken geometry, its euclidean symmetries taking it towards the pleateau of the mighty kimarsunss. Nothing changes. Even the light that falls becomes permanent with time.
When everything withers, the stones retain their life.
He flows over the step separating the incline from the plateau. He stops.
Here are the monstrous creatures. The radiance of the high stars falls on the sine curves of their flanks. Their shoulders are dwarfed by distance. Their skulls are lighthouses, blinking from a far headland. Their colossal size makes them abstract. The night upon their carcasses makes them legendary.
Low rumblings of hatred start somewhere amid the joints of Moolab’s abdomen and work forward towards his thorax. He channels the rumbling through his glands, so that its help ferments the poisons he will soon need. He rejoices to feel his own chemistries at work, knowing their cyclic stains will aid him against evil. Until they are ready, he waits.
As he waits, he observes the monstrous kimarsunss. They have stayed on this starlit plateau for ever. Although Moolab has never been here before, he has a folk-memory of the beings. He knows their very positions on the plateau. None of them have ever moved.
When the season comes about in the core, when the axis grinds round on the impulse, when the desire falls on the hive, then comes the Swarming. Then the hives go forth, breaking through the Rind, soaring aloft in the emptiness between Good and Evil. The Swarming flies over the plateau of the kimarsunss and those that survive will recall the dispositions of the enemy. But most will fall, dying, their wings bursting into flame as they plunge down to dust. One kimarsun can bring about twenty thousand deaths.
Moolab will revenge the deaths. As he waits, he turns some eyes again at the high stars. The Mottled Egg, the Queen’s Scar, they are to his left shoulder. The Night Worm still burns overhead, the orange tooth of Ramarkkan still flaring in the fanged mouth.
The stars, revolving on the great Wheel of Evil, have more motion than their guards down below. No Swarming has ever reported the movement of a single kimarsun. Moolab sees that they are still with an immeasureable stillness.
That terrible immobility is because the kimarsunss work on a different time scale to the rest of the living things in the universe. For there is no doubt that the kimarsunss are alive. They can be killed.
Occasionally, dull internal glowing overtakes one of the colossi. Moolab is fortunate. As he waits for his chemistries to become effective, he sees that one of the more distant kimarsunss is undergoing this colour-change.
To the oblique concave surfaces of the colossus comes a dull crimson flush. It travels like a wave across the bulk of the being, over the abstractions which serve for limbs, abdomen, shoulders. The wave is like a signal of anger. Anger is communicated to Moolab; he raises his belly from the ground and flexes his rear segments over his head, preparing to charge.
The eyes of the kimarsunss watch him. They will turn him to stone if he entertains a moment’s doubt. Doubt is defeat in a moral war.
The flushing colossus is now a dull red all over, but the colour seems to fade slightly. Then, a sudden shock. The creature emits a helium flash. The blaze of white light extends all over its bulk, bursts outwards, illuminating the plateau for an instant.
The flash serves as a signal to Moolab. He waits no more, but launches himself savagely across the powdered plain. He hits top speed, his multitudinous feet pulverizing ground as he runs between the living mountains. The noise of his progress is such that it wakens echoes among the surrounding canyons of rib and flank. Avalanches of stardust roll down the ancient sides of the nearest kimarsunss.
But Moolab does not see. He directs all his vision at the target ahead, which appears to swell monstrously as he approaches, eclipsing the Twin Cinders, the Queen’s Scar. It is still undergoing colour-change. Now a dusky red expands over its surface again, lit from inside with shots of brighter colour. The sight would be terrifying, petrifying, if Moolab did not close his mind with incantation.
Now it’s near. He goes in for the kill. His antennae vibrate, his maxillae sweep back, his poisoned mandibles open wide. He directs his travelling bulk at one grotesque corner of the kimarsun. The sound of his charge is left to rattle far behind him. Noiseless, he bears in towards the motionless foot, the heel. Jaws wider still. He bites.
Without pause, he plunges on, bearing away with him part of the substance of the colossus. Then he halts, turning right around in one moment. The great clatter of his charge sweeps about him and is gone.
Silence falls.
The high stars shine.
The kimarsun begins to shed matter as Moolab’s poisons take effect. It seems to grow, become unstable. Bits fall off it and die into the plateau. An eye tumbles down, to lie there, glowing and white. The whole process is pitiful, insignificant. In a few moments, there is nothing left but a little white eye. Evil is defeated. Good has triumphed.
Moolab goes back and picks up the eye. He will take it to the High Priest.
He is almost too tired to feel the stir of victory. But he looks up through the unmentionable piles of emptiness to the great revolving Wheel of Evil.
There he sees the high stars comprising the Night Worm. The Night Worm’s hated length still spirals up from horizon to zenith. Boylat, Crabarty, Prosshing, Hrozne, still burn. But Ramarkkan no longer blazes in the Worm’s fanged mouth. Ramarkkan has gone out.
In time, the forces of Good will eradicate all the high stars. The hive will possess everything.
* * * *
XII The Year Of The Quiet Computer
Whispers of a faint boutique and the band p
laying its own tune, endlessly, on and on. Every now and then, someone takes a musician out to the beds of daffodils, brings him to orgasm, garottes him, and buries him among the spring flowers. The ground is wonderfully warm for the time of year.
Toy fish swim in enigmatic fountains. They are learning to devour each other.
Alphonse Didcot reclines on a self-invented chair, reading some tales from the quiet computer. He has his own music. The magic word Cathay hangs in shades of T’ang gold over the food-divider. And his great-great-grandfather, five foot two and the best potter of his day, smiles down mummified from above the fireplace; the teeth are rather yellow now, but the gums still shine with a redeeming blue.
Outside the tall flanks of the tower, the ceremony of Fluctuating Lanterns is still in progress. Children flounce in long lean grass.
‘We will bear them away, we will bear them away. Transience will be banished, banished to the eternal hills,’ chant the little holy orphans. Surely enough, the mists roll in about the gaunt building.
‘Let us move to Gorica 57901,’ Alphonse says. Already, he can feel the start of the multiple births. The great-great-grandfather nods, its backbone creaking comfortably, like a familiar board in a family house.
One man walking sniffs the familiar flavours of the sky. Despite the lanterns, the trains are still coming in, burrowing through inter-stellar gas in a fury of speed; their great broad firemen bend their backs, shovelling in the helium-coal. Some engines are black, some red. In their rattling trucks, they bear the last of the stars to the depot,
Betelgeuse, Procyon, Aldebaran, poor Vega, lying on its side. Already, the wreckers wait in the yard.
When the whistle blows, Alphonse is ready. He pulls back the heavy curtains. From the outside of the windows, things fall away, crying, crying. The mist is all about. Some trees appear, stifled by the mist, entangling it in their unkempt gestures. The musicians have all been finished now.
The mist clears. Gone is the old clutter of habitation, with its lockers and appearances. Instead, the castle stands on a flat unclothed plain. It stretches away into all distances. Only to one side stand the mountains. The mountains stand aloof. Strange lights of sunrises and sunsets, interplaying, confuse their contours. Something skips from peak to peak, looking for destiny.
Alphonse takes up a daffodil and smiles. The daffodil returns the smile.
<
* * * *
THE PHOBOS TRANSCRIPTS
Cherry Wilder
The dispossessed of this Earth yearn for a home. If an intelligent entity were dispossessed of a body as well as a planet would not the yearning for communication with old friends, the personal awareness of another mind, become intolerable? No one knows what space holds for the future. The exploration of space has often been likened to the exploration of the seas, and many and wonderful were the tall tales brought back from the far oceans. Even from so close a fellow world in the ocean of space as Mars, and his satellite Phobos, this tall tale would be looked at with scepticism by the official mind - and with credence enough to take comfort from the thought of a covenant.
* * * *
Quentin D. Thomas, MD., DSM., PhD (Columbia)
Director of Psychological Testing and Studies,
Sheppard Rehabilitation Centre,
Department of Space Medicine,
Houston, Texas
to
Air Commodore Margaret A. Voss, MA (Princeton)
Assistant Director of Public Relations,
United States Space Service,
Washington, DC.
... You’ll find my reports on the file, Margot, but I want to make a few of the more important points over again in this covering letter. There has been too damned much speculation and gossip in the service about the so-called ‘Phobos transcripts’. Before long ... certainly when Morris receives his medical discharge.. .the public will get hold of the story.
I am enclosing copies of all the relevant statements and tests in this file, including recent film of the site, taken by a local reconnaissance team from Marsport, and a strip of video tape showing the alleged fight. I’d like to make two things quite clear: I consider the whole experience as detailed by Erikson and Morris entirely subjective and hallucinatory triggered off by the delirious outbursts of Gale. Secondly: there is no question of conscious deception on the part of John Gale. There is nothing in the three short speeches transcribed from tape that could not emanate from the mind of a young space crewman, nourished I’m sure on Sci-Fi cassettes and even books.
There is no need to postulate for one moment an ‘alien’ intelligence. Cases come to mind from last century: Bridie Murphy, not to mention the lad on the ‘Jet-Propelled Couch.’ Most striking of all is the resemblance to the Elvira Wyatt humbug of the nineties. The only remarkable thing about the Phobos transcripts is that they were obtained under service conditions on a satellite... if three farmers in Arkansas had told the same story they’d be laughed out of court!
You must also consider that these men, along with the twelve service personnel on the mothership, were under ‘stress of time and distance’ ... a space probe of eighteen months.
In Gale’s monologues notice the lofty tone, the archaic, not to say biblical turn of phrase, the latin base for the proper nouns. Certainly the young man’s mind has hidden depths; we need look no further than his personal background. His father, G. H. B. Gale, is an emeritus professor of Anthropology, living in Perth, Western Australia; his mother writes verse. The actual transcription from tape was done first by John Gale, then independently by myself ... the spelling of ‘alien’ names was the same.
* * * *
Triclamadan to the lost entities of the Four Worlds, Greeting! This is a crude and practical tongue not more than two thousand years old. It is rich in metaphor... I speak a tongue, I speak with a tongue, a differentiated fleshy member, strung in the mouthpiece of this skull. I have encountered this speech and others like it several times since their inception. The brain size of this species has not altered but the physique has improved and the technology has, I admit, grown up like grass. In many respects they resemble the Moruia of Torin but the Moruia are more innocent. The Men of Earth have music to their credit and number and some simple systems of communication.
Last time I greeted you, my friends, it was in the great reading 6,700 degrees, in the galactic reading Amfur to the seventh; it was 169 degrees 46 minutes below the apex of the orbit of an un-named planet... un-named by us, these cautious travellers call it Uranus. I am shuttling about, as you perceive, in and out of this distant galaxy. I do not know when I will have a voice again. But time is our special treasure, our ocean, our tide, our solace, our perpetual meditation, and I am content in time to take what time brings to me. I am Triclamadan; waking I speak; I recall, I bear in me the marvellous certainties, the lights and sounds of the Four Worlds. Message discontinued but not ended.
* * * *
In the moment before the thrust roared Morris sat forward, straining at his seat belt.
‘Hear that?’ he said.
Erikson listened but he could hear nothing unusual: nothing loose, no channels open; then as he picked up a faint trace of sound the rockets roared. Both men were set back into their recliner chairs. He shouted to Morris through his chest mike
‘What did you hear?’
Morris shouted back
‘Nothing... some kind of vibration, maybe.’
The shuttle grated on rock and bumped, with the broken strut taking hold. The emergency landing was a hazardous procedure in such a light craft but both men were experienced. They had been in each other’s company for eighteen months, crew members of a distance probe.
Theta Nebraska swung in space like a loose blimp not more than 5000 kilometres away; all systems going, going gone. The rest of the crew were waiting, suited up, as the residual air grew thinner. Erikson and Morris were on a rescue mission, taking the shuttle into Marsport. They had other freight: John Gale, the youngest
crew member, measuring his stuporous length in the cramped shuttle cabin. Slight concussion and a broken collar-bone.
Erikson thought of the boy and loosened his straps.
‘Might have been Johnny talking.’ He said.
‘I’ll take a look.’ said Morris.
Erikson was already working his way aft.
‘Wait!’ said Morris. ‘He’ll keep, won’t he?’
Erikson didn’t like Morris. He had worked with him closely and well on the probe mission but he still couldn’t stand the guy and remarks like that had something to do with it.
‘The kid is in bad shape,’ he said.
‘So are we!’ snapped Morris. ‘Take a look. Have you got out of position on this goddamned hunk of rock?’
‘Phobos.’ said Erikson.
He brought up their position on the console and opened the scanner. Outside it was dark as crude oil; the beam from the scanner showed a patch of grey sand, a rock, another rock...
New Writings in SF 26 - [Anthology] Page 6
