The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “And give up your rule?”

  “And give it up, if the rule of men is better. That is reason. Now we can go; Noc is coming back with light.”

  Lavon looked up. Sure enough, there was a brief flash of cold light far overhead, and then another. In a moment the spherical Proto had dropped into view, its body flaring regularly with blue-green pulses. Beside it darted the second Para.

  “Noc brings news,” the second Para said. “Para is twenty-four. The Syn are awake by thousands along the sky. Noc spoke to a Syn colony, but they will not help us; they all expect to be dead before the Eaters awake.”

  “Of course,” said the first Para. “That always happens. And the Syn are plants; why should they help the Protos?”

  “Ask Noc if he’ll guide us to Shar,” Lavon said impatiently.

  The Noc gestured with its single short, thick tentacle. One of the Paras said, “That is what he is here for.”

  “Then let’s go. We’ve waited long enough.”

  The mixed quartet soared away from the Bottom through the liquid darkness.

  “No,” Lavon snapped. “Not a second longer. The Syn are awake, and Notholca of the Eaters is due right after that. You know that as well as I do, Shar. Wake up!”

  “Yes, yes,” the old man said fretfully. He stretched and yawned. “You’re always in such a hurry, Lavon. Where’s Phil? He made his spore near mine.” He pointed to a still-unbroken amber sphere sealed to a leaf of the water-plant one tier below. “Better push him off; he’ll be safer on the Bottom.”

  “He would never reach the Bottom,” Para said. “The thermocline has formed.”

  Shar looked surprised. “It has? Is it as late as all that? Wait while I get my records together.” He began to search along the leaf in the debris and the piled shards of his spore. Lavon looked impatiently about, found a splinter of stonewort, and threw it heavy end first at the bubble of Phil’s cell just below. The spore shattered promptly, and the husky young man tumbled out, blue with shock as the cold water hit him.

  “Wough!” he said. “Take it easy, Lavon.” He looked up. “The old man’s awake? Good. He insisted on staying up here for the winter, so of course I had to stay too.”

  “Aha,” Shar said, and lifted a thick metal plate about the length of his forearm and half as wide. “Here is one of them. Now if only I haven’t misplaced the other—“

  Phil kicked away a mass of bacteria. “Here it is. Better give them both to a Para, so they won’t burden you. Where do we go from here, Lavon? It’s dangerous up this high. I’m just glad a Dicran hasn’t already shown up.”

  “I here,” something droned just above them.

  Instantly, without looking up, Lavon flung himself out and down into the open water, turning his head to look back over his shoulder only when he was already diving as fast as he could go. Shar and Phil had evidently sprung at the same instant. On the next frond above where Shar had spent his winter was the armored, trumpet-shaped body of the rotifer Dicran, contracted to leap after them.

  The two Protos came curving back out of nowhere. At the same moment, the bent, shortened body of Dicran flexed in its armor plate, straightened, came plunging toward them. There was a soft plop and Lavon found himself struggling in a fine net, as tangled and impassible as the mat of a lichen. A second such sound was followed by a muttered imprecation from Phil. Lavon struck out fiercely, but he was barely able to wriggle in the web of wiry, transparent stuff.

  “Be still,” a voice which he recognized as a Para’s throbbed behind him. He managed to screw his head around, and then kicked himself mentally for not having realized at once what had happened. The Paras had exploded the trichocysts which lay like tiny cartridges beneath their pellicles; each one cast forth a liquid which solidified upon contact with the water in a long slender thread. It was their standard method of defense.

  Farther down, Shar and Phil drifted with the second Para in the heart of a white haze, like creatures far gone in mold. Dicran swerved to avoid it, but she was evidently unable to give up; she twisted and darted around them, her corona buzzing harshly, her few scraps of the human language forgotten. Seen from this distance, the rotation of the corona was revealed as an illusion, created by the rhythm of pulsation of the individual cilia, but as far as Lavon was concerned the point was solely technical and the distance was far too short. Through the transparent armor Lavon could also see the great jaws of Dicran’s mastax, grinding away mechanically at the fragments which poured into her unheeding mouth.

  High above them all, Noc circled indecisively, illuminating the whole group with quick, nervous flashes of his blue light. He was a flagellate, and had no natural weapons against the rotifer; why he was hanging around drawing attention to himself Lavon could not imagine.

  Then, suddenly, he saw the reason: a barrel-like creature about Noc’s size, ringed with two rows of cilia and bearing a ramlike prow. “Didin!” he shouted, unnecessarily. “This way!”

  The Proto swung gracefully toward them and seemed to survey them, though it was hard to tell how he could see them without eyes. The Dicran saw him at the same time and began to back slowly away, her buzzing rising to a raw snarl. She regained the plant and crouched down.

  For an instant Lavon thought she was going to give up, but experience should have told him that she lacked the sense. Suddenly the lithe, crouched body was in full spring again, this time straight at Didin. Lavon yelled an incoherent warning.

  The Proto didn’t need it. The slowly cruising barrel darted to one side and then forward, with astonishing speed. If he could sink that poisoned seizing-organ into a weak point in the rotifer’s armor—

  Noc mounted higher to keep out of the way of the two fighters, and in the resulting weakened light Lavon could not see what was happening, though the furious churning of the water and the buzzing of the Dicran continued.

  After a while the sounds seemed to be retreating; Lavon crouched in the gloom inside the Para’s net, listening intently. Finally there was silence.

  “What’s happened?” he whispered tensely.

  “Didin does not say.”

  More eternities went by. Then the darkness began to wane as Noc dropped cautiously toward them.

  “Noc, where did they go?”

  Noc signaled with his tentacle and turned on his axis toward Para.

  “He says he lost sight of them. Wait—I hear Didin.”

  Lavon could hear nothing; what the Para “heard” was some one of the semi-telepathic impulses which made up the Proto’s own language.

  “He says Dicran is dead.”

  “Good! Ask him to bring the body back here.”

  There was a short silence. “He says he will bring it. What good is a dead rotifer, Lavon?”

  “You’ll see,” Lavon said. He watched anxiously until Didin glided backwards into the lighted area, his poisonous ram sunk deep into the flaccid body of the rotifer, which, after the delicately organized fashion of its kind, was already beginning to disintegrate.

  “Let me out of this net, Para.”

  The Proto jerked sharply for a fraction of a turn on its long axis, snapping the threads off at the base; the movement had to be made with great precision, or its pellicle would tear as well. The tangled mass rose gently with the current and drifted off over the abyss.

  Lavon swam forward and, seizing one buckled edge of the Dicran’s armor, tore away a huge strip of it. His hands plunged into the now almost shapeless body and came out again holding two dark spheroids: eggs.

  “Destroy these, Didin,” he ordered. The Proto obligingly slashed them open.

  “Hereafter,” Lavon said, “that’s to be standard procedure with every Eater you kill.”

  “Not the males,” one of the Paras pointed out.

  “Para, you have no sense of humor. All right, not the males—but nobody kills the males anyhow, they’re harmless.” He looked down grimly at the inert mass. “Remember—destroy the eggs. Killing the beasts isn’t enough. We want to wip
e out the whole race.”

  “We never forget,” Para said emotionlessly.

  The band of over two hundred humans, with Lavon and Shar and a Para at its head, fled swiftly through the warm, light waters of the upper level. Each man gripped a wood splinter, or a fragment of lime chipped from stonewort, as a club; and two hundred pairs of eyes darted watchfully from side to side. Cruising over them was a squadron of twenty Didins, and the rotifers they encountered only glared at them from single red eyespots, making no move to attack. Overhead, near the sky, the sunlight was filtered through a thick layer of living creatures, fighting and feeding and spawning, so that all the depths below were colored a rich green. Most of this heavily populated layer was made up of algae and diatoms, and there the Eaters fed unhindered. Sometimes a dying diatom dropped slowly past the army.

  The spring was well advanced; the two hundred, Lavon thought, probably represented all of the humans who had survived the winter. At least no more could be found. The others—nobody would ever know how many—had awakened too late in the season, or had made their spores in exposed places, and the rotifers had snatched them up. Of the group, more than a third were women. That meant that in another forty days, if they were unmolested, they could double the size of their army.

  If they were unmolested. Lavon grinned and pushed an agitated colony of Eudorina out of his way. The phrase reminded him of a speculation Shar had brought forth last year: if Para were left unmolested, the oldster had said, he could reproduce fast enough to fill this whole universe with a solid mass of Paras before the season was out. Nobody, of course, ever went unmolested in this world; nevertheless, Lavon meant to cut the odds for people considerably below anything that had heretofore been thought of as natural.

  His hand flashed up, and down again. The darting squadrons plunged after him. The light on the sky faded rapidly, and after a while Lavon began to feel slightly chilly. He signaled again. Like dancers, the two hundred swung their bodies in midflight, plunging now feet first toward the Bottom. To strike the thermocline in this position would make their passage through it faster, getting them out of the upper level, where every minute, despite the convoy of Protos, concentrated danger.

  Lavon’s feet struck a yielding surface, and with a splash he was over his head in icy water. He bobbed up again, feeling the icy division drawn across his shoulders. Other splashes began to sound all along the thermocline as the army struck it, although, since there was water above and below, Lavon could not see the actual impacts.

  Now they would have to wait until their body temperatures fell. At this dividing line of the universe, the warm water ended and the temperature dropped rapidly, so that the water below was much denser and buoyed them up. The lower level of cold reached clear down to the Bottom—an area which the rotifers, who were not very clever, seldom managed to enter.

  A moribund diatom drifted down beside Lavon, the greenish-yellow of its body fading to a sick orange, its beautifully marked, oblong, pillbox-like shell swarming with greedy bacteria. It came to rest on the thermocline, and the transparent caterpillar tread of jelly which ran around it moved feebly, trying vainly to get traction on the sliding water interface. Lavon reached out a webbed hand and brushed away a clot of vibrating rods which had nearly forced its way into the shell through a costal opening.

  “Thank…,” the diatom said, in an indistinct, whispering voice. And again, “Thank…Die…” The gurgling whisper faded. The caterpillar tread shifted again, then was motionless.

  “It is right,” a Para said. “Why do you bother with those creatures? They are stupid. Nothing can be done for them.”

  Lavon did not try to explain. He felt himself sinking slowly, and the water about his trunk and legs no longer seemed cold, only gratefully cool after the stifling heat of that he was breathing. In a moment the cool still depths had closed over his head. He hovered until he was reasonably sure that all the rest of his army was safely through, and the long ordeal of searching for survivors in the upper level really ended. Then he twisted and streaked for the Bottom, Phil and Para beside him, Shar puffing along with the vanguard.

  A stone loomed; Lavon surveyed it in the half-light. Almost immediately he saw what he had hoped to see: the sand-built house of a caddis-worm, clinging to the mountainous slopes of the rock. He waved in his special cadre and pointed.

  Cautiously the men spread out in a U around the stone, the mouth of the U facing the same way as the opening of the worm’s masonry tube. A Noc came after them, drifting like a star-shell above the peak; one of the Paras approached the door of the worm’s house, buzzing defiantly. Under cover of this challenge the men at the back of the U settled on the rock and began to creep forward. The house was three times as tall as they were; the slimy black sand grains of which it was composed were as big as their heads.

  There was a stir inside, and after a moment the ugly head of the worm peered out, weaving uncertainly at the buzzing Para which had disturbed it. The Para drew back, and the worm, in a kind of blind hunger, followed it. A sudden lunge brought it nearly halfway out of its tube.

  Lavon shouted. Instantly the worm was surrounded by a howling horde of two-legged demons, who beat and prodded it mercilessly with fists and clubs. Somehow it made a sound, a kind of bleat as unlikely as the birdlike whistle of a fish, and began to slide backwards into its home, but the rear guard had already broken in back there. It jerked forward again, lashing from side to side under the flogging.

  There was only one way now for the great larva to go, and the demons around it kept it going that way. It fell toward the Bottom down the side of the rock, naked and ungainly, shaking its blind head and bleating.

  Lavon sent five Didins after it. They could not kill it, for it was far too huge to die under their poison, but they could sting it hard enough to keep it travelling. Otherwise, it would be almost sure to return to the rock to start a new house.

  Lavon settled on an abutment and surveyed his prize with satisfaction. It was more than big enough to hold his entire clan—a great tubular hall, easily defended once the breach in the rear wall was rebuilt, and well out of the usual haunts of the Eaters. The muck the caddis-worm had left behind would have to be cleaned up, guards posted, vents knocked out to keep the oxygen-poor water of the depths in motion inside. It was too bad that the amoebae could not be detailed to scavenge the place, but Lavon knew better than to issue such an order. The Fathers of the Protos could not be asked to do useful work; that had been made very clear.

  He looked around at his army. They were standing around him in awed silence, looking at the spoils of their attack upon the largest creature in the world. He did not think they would ever again feel as timid toward the Eaters. He stood up quickly.

  “What are you gaping at?” he shouted. “It’s yours, all of it. Get to work!”

  —

  Old Shar sat comfortably upon a pebble which had been hollowed out and cushioned with spirogyra straw. Lavon stood nearby at the door, looking out at the maneuvers of his legions. They numbered more than three hundred now, thanks to the month of comparative quiet which they had enjoyed in the great hall, and they handled their numbers well in the aquatic drill which Lavon had invented for them. They swooped and turned above the rock, breaking and reassembling their formations, fighting a sham battle with invisible opponents whose shape they could remember only too well.

  “Noc says there’s all kinds of quarreling going on among the Eaters,” Shar said. “They didn’t believe we’d joined with the Protos at first, and then they didn’t believe we’d all worked together to capture the hall. And the mass raid we had last week scared them. They’d never tried anything of the kind before, and they knew it wouldn’t fail. Now they’re fighting with each other over why it did. Cooperation is something new to this world, Lavon; it’s making history.”

  “History?” Lavon said, following his drilling squadrons with a technical eye. “What’s that?”

  “These.” The old man leaned over one arm of
the pebble and touched the metal plates which were always with him. Lavon turned to follow the gesture, incuriously. He knew the plates well enough: the pure uncorroded shining, graven deeply on both sides with characters no one, not even Shar, could read. The Protos called the plates Not-stuff—neither wood nor flesh nor stone.

  “What good is that? I can’t read it. Neither can you.”

  “I’ve got a start, Lavon. I know the plates are written in our language. Look at the first word: ha ii ss tuh oh or ee, exactly the right number of characters for history. That can’t be a coincidence. And the next two words have to be of the. And going on from there, using just the characters I already know—” Shar bent and traced in the sand with a stick a new train of characters: i/terste/ /ar e/ /e/ition.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a start, Lavon. Just a start. Someday we’ll have more.”

  Lavon shrugged. “Perhaps, when we’re safer. We can’t afford to worry about that kind of thing now. We’ve never had that kind of time, not since the First Awakening.”

  The old man frowned down at the characters in the sand. “The First Awakening. Why does everything seem to stop there? I can remember in the smallest detail nearly everything that happened to me since then. But what happened to our childhoods, Lavon? None of us who survived the First Awakening seems to have had one. Who were our parents? Why were we so ignorant of the world, and yet grown men and women, all of us?”

  “And the answer is in the plates?”

  “I hope so,” Shar said. “I believe it is. But I don’t know. The plates were beside me in the spore at the First Awakening. That’s all I know about them, except that there’s nothing else like them in the world. The rest is deduction, and I haven’t gotten very far with it. Someday…someday.”