The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  “I hope so too,” Lavon said soberly. “I don’t mean to mock, Shar, or to be impatient. I’ve got questions, too; we all have. But we’re going to have to put them off for a while. Suppose we never find the whole answer?”

  “Then our children will.”

  “But there’s the heart of the problem, Shar: we have to live to have children. And make the kind of a world in which they’ll have time to study. Otherwise—“

  Lavon broke off as a figure darted between the guards at the door of the hall and twisted to a halt.

  “What news, Phil?”

  “The same,” Phil said, shrugging with his whole body. His feet touched the floor. “The Flosc’s castles are going up all along the bar; they’ll be finished with them soon, and then we won’t dare to get near them. Do you still think you can drive them out?”

  Lavon nodded.

  “But why?”

  “First, for effect. We’ve been on the defensive so far, even though we’ve made a good job of it. We’ll have to follow that up with an attack of our own if we’re going to keep the Eaters confused. Second, the castles Flosc builds are all tunnels and exits and entrances—much better than worm-houses for us. I hate to think of what would have happened if the Eaters had thought of blockading us inside this hall. And we need an outpost in enemy country, Phil, where there are Eaters to kill.”

  “This is enemy country,” Phil said. “Stephanost is a Bottom-dweller.”

  “But she’s only a trapper, not a hunter. Any time we want to kill her, we can find her right where we left her last. It’s the leapers like Dicran and Notholca, the swimmers like Rotar, the colony-builders like Flosc that we have to wipe out first.”

  “Then we’d better start now, Lavon. Once the castles are finished—”

  “Yes. Get your squads together, Phil. Shar, come on; we’re leaving the hall.”

  “To raid the castles?”

  “Of course.”

  Shar picked up his plates.

  “You’d better leave those here; they’ll be in your way in the fighting.”

  “No,” Shar said determinedly. “I don’t want them out of my sight. They go along.”

  Vague forebodings, all the more disturbing because he had felt nothing quite like them ever before, passed like clouds of fine silt through Lavon’s mind as the army swept away from the hall on the Bottom and climbed toward the thermocline. As far as he could see, everything seemed to be going as he had planned it. As the army moved, its numbers were swelled by Protos who darted into its ranks from all sides. Discipline was good, and every man was armed with a long, seasoned splinter, and from each belt swung a stonewort-flake hand-axe, held by a thong run through a hole Shar had taught them all how to drill. There would probably be much death before the light of today faded, but death was common enough on any day, and this time it should heavily disfavor the Eaters.

  But there was a chill upon the depths that Lavon did not like, and a suggestion of a current in the water which was unnatural below the thermocline. A great many days had been consumed in collecting the army, recruiting from stragglers, and in securing the hall. The intensive breeding which had followed, and the training of the newborn and the newly recruited, had taken still more time, all of it essential, but all irrevocable. If the chill and the current marked the beginning of the fall turnover…

  If it did, nothing could be done about it. The turnover could no more be postponed than the coming of day or night. He signaled to the nearest Para.

  The glistening torpedo veered toward him. Lavon pointed up.

  “Here comes the thermocline, Para. Are we pointed right?”

  “Yes, Lavon. That way is the place where the Bottom rises toward the sky. Flosc’s castles are on the other side, where she will not see us.”

  “The sandbar that runs out from the north. Right. It’s getting warmer. Here we go.”

  Lavon felt his flight suddenly quicken, as if he had been shot like a seed from some invisible thumb and forefinger. He looked over his shoulder to watch the passage of the rest through the temperature barrier, and what he saw thrilled him as sharply as any awakening. Up to now he had had no clear picture of the size of his forces, or the three-dimensional beauty of their dynamic, mobile organization. Even the Protos had fitted themselves into the squads; pattern after pattern of power came soaring after Lavon from the Bottom: first a single Noc bowling along like a beacon to guide all the rest, then an advance cone of Didins to watch for individual Eaters who might flee to give the alarm, and then the men, and the Protos, who made up the main force, in tight formations as beautiful as the elementary geometry from which Shar had helped derive them.

  The sandbar loomed ahead, as vast as any mountain range. Lavon soared sharply upward, and the tumbled, rawboned boulders of the sand grains swept by rapidly beneath him in a broad, stony flood. Far beyond the ridge, towering up to the sky through glowing green obscurity, were the be-fronded stems of the plant jungle which was their objective. It was too dim with distance to allow him to see the clinging castles of the Flosc yet, but he knew that the longest part of the march was over. He narrowed his eyes and cleft the sunlit waters with driving, rapid strokes of his webbed hands and feet. The invaders poured after him over the crest of the bar in an orderly torrent.

  Lavon swung his arm in a circle. Silently, the following squadrons glided into a great paraboloid, its axis pointed at the jungle. The castles were visible now; until the formation of the army, they had been the only products of close cooperation that this world had ever seen. They were built of single brown tubes, narrow at the base, attached to each other in a random pattern in an ensemble as delicate as a branching coral. In the mouth of each tube was a rotifer, a Flosc, distinguished from other Eaters by the four-leaf clover of its corona, and by the single, prehensile finger springing from the small of its back, with which it ceaselessly molded its brown spittle into hard pellets and cemented them carefully to the rim of its tube.

  As usual, the castles chilled Lavon’s muscles with doubt. They were perfect, and they had always been one of the major, stony flowers of summer, long before there had been any First Awakening, or any men. And there was surely something wrong with the water in the upper level; it was warm and sleepy. The heads of the Flosc hummed contentedly at the mouths of their tubes; everything was as it should be, as it had always been; the army was a phantasm, the attack a failure before it had begun—

  Then they were spied.

  The Flosc vanished instantly, contracting violently into their tubes. The placid humming of their continuous feeding upon everything that passed was snuffed out; spared motes drifted about the castle in the light.

  Lavon found himself smiling. Not long ago, the Flosc would only have waited until the humans were close enough, and then would have sucked them down, without more than a few struggles here and there, a few pauses in the humming while the outsize morsels were enfolded and fed into the grinders. Now, instead, they hid; they were afraid.

  “Go!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Kill them! Kill them while they’re down!”

  The army behind him swept after him with a stunning composite shout.

  Tactics vanished. A petalled corona unfolded in Lavon’s face, and a buzzing whirlpool spun him toward its black heart. He slashed wildly with his edged wooden splinter.

  The sharp edge sliced deeply into the ciliated lobes. The rotifer screamed like a siren and contracted into her tube, closing her wounded face. Grimly, Lavon followed.

  It was pitch-dark inside the castle, and the raging currents of pain which flowed past him threw him from one pebbly wall to another. He gritted his teeth and probed with the splinter. It bit into a yielding surface at once, and another scream made his ears ring, mixed with mangled bits of words in Lavon’s own language, senseless and horrible with agony. He slashed at them until they stopped, and continued to slash until he could control his terror.

  As soon as he was able, he groped in the torn corpse for the eggs. The poi
nt found their life and pricked it. Trembling, he pulled himself back to the mouth of the tube, and without stopping to think pushed himself off at the first Eater to pass it.

  The thing was a Dicran; she doubled viciously upon him at once. Even the Eaters had learned something about cooperation. And the Dicrans fought well in open water. They were the best possible reinforcements the Flosc could have called.

  The Dicran’s armor turned the point of Lavon’s splinter easily. He jabbed frantically, hoping to hit a joint, but the agile creature gave him no time to aim. She charged him irresistibly, and her humming corona folded down around his head, pinned his forearms to his sides—

  The Eater heaved convulsively and went limp. Lavon half slashed, half tore his way free. A Didin was drawing back, pulling out its seizing organ. The body floated downward.

  “Thanks,” Lavon gasped. The Proto darted off without replying; it lacked sufficient cilia to imitate human speech. Possibly it lacked the desire as well; the Didins were not sociable.

  A tearing whirlpool sprang into being again around him, and he flexed his sword-arm. In the next five dreamlike minutes he developed a technique for dealing with the sessile, sucking Flosc. Instead of fighting the current and swinging the splinter back and forth against it, he gave in to the vortex, rode with it, and braced the splinter between his feet, point down. The results were even better than he had hoped. The point, driven by the full force of the Flosc’s own trap, pierced the soft, wormlike body half through while it gaped for the human quarry. After each encounter, Lavon doggedly went through the messy ritual of destroying the eggs.

  At last he emerged from a tube to find that the battle had drifted away from him. He paused on the edge to get his breath back, clinging to the rounded, translucent bricks and watching the fighting. It was difficult to make any military sense out of the melee, but as far as he could tell the rotifers were getting the worst of it. They did not know how to meet so carefully organized an attack, and they were not in any real sense intelligent.

  The Didins were ranging from one side of the fray to the other, in two tight, vicious, efficient groups, englobing and destroying free-swimming rotifers in whole flocks at a time. Lavon saw no fewer than half a dozen Eaters trapped by teams of Paras, each pair dragging a struggling victim in a trichocyst net remorselessly toward the Bottom, where she would inevitably suffocate. He was astonished to see one of the few Nocs that had accompanied his army scouring a cringing Rotar with its virtually harmless tentacle; the Eater seemed too astonished to fight back, and Lavon for once knew just how she felt.

  A figure swam slowly and tiredly up to him from below. It was old Shar, puffing hard. Lavon reached a hand down to him and hauled him onto the lip of the tube. The man’s face wore a frightening expression, half shock, half pure grief.

  “Gone, Lavon,” he said. “Gone. Lost.”

  “What? What’s gone? What’s the matter?”

  “The plate. You were right. I should have known.” He sobbed convulsively.

  “What plate? Calm down. What happened? Did you lose one of the history plates or both of them?”

  Slowly his tutor seemed to be recovering control of his breathing. “One of them,” he said wretchedly. “I dropped it in the fight. I hid the other one in an empty Flosc tube. But I dropped the first one, the one I’d just begun to decipher. It went all the way down to the Bottom, and I couldn’t get free to go after it—all I could do was watch it go, spinning down into the darkness. We could sift the mud forever and never find it.”

  He dropped his face into his hands. Perched on the edge of the brown tube in the green glow of the waters, he looked both pathetic and absurd. Lavon did not know what to say; even he realized that the loss was major and perhaps final, that the awesome blank in their memories prior to the First Awakening might now never be filled. How Shar felt about it he could comprehend only dimly.

  Another human figure darted and twisted toward him. “Lavon!” Phil’s voice cried. “It’s working, it’s working! The swimmers are running away, what’s left of them. There are still some Flosc in the castles, hiding in the darkness. If we could only lure them out in the open…”

  Jarred back to the present, Lavon’s mind raced over the possibilities. The whole attack could still fail if the Flosc entrenched themselves successfully. After all, a big kill had not been the only object; they had started out to capture the castles.

  “Shar—do these tubes connect with each other?”

  “Yes,” the old man said without interest. “It’s a continuous system.”

  Lavon sprang out upon the open water. “Come on, Phil. We’ll attack them from the rear.” Turning, he plunged into the mouth of the tube, Phil on his heels.

  It was very dark, and the water was fetid with the odor of the tube’s late owner, but after a moment’s groping Lavon found the opening which led into the next tube. It was easy to tell which way was out because of the pitch of the walls; everything the Flosc built had a conical bore, differing from the next tube only in size. Determinedly Lavon worked his way toward the main stem, going always down and in.

  Once they passed beneath an opening beyond which the water was in furious motion, and out of which poured muffled sounds of shouting and a defiant buzz. Lavon stopped to probe through the hole with his sword. The rotifer gave a shrill, startled shriek and jerked her wounded tail upward, involuntarily releasing her toehold upon the walls of the tube. Lavon moved on, grinning. The men above would do the rest.

  Reaching the central stem at last, Lavon and Phil went methodically from one branch to another, spearing the surprised Eaters from behind or cutting them loose so that the men outside could get at them as they drifted upward, propelled by the drag of their own coronas. The trumpet shape of the tube prevented the Eaters from turning to fight, and from following them through the castle to surprise them from behind; each Flosc had only the one room, which she never left.

  The gutting of the castles took hardly fifteen minutes. The day was just beginning to end when Lavon emerged with Phil at the mouth of a turret to look down upon the first City of Man.

  He lay in darkness, his forehead pressed against his knees, as motionless as a dead man. The water was stuffy, cold, the blackness complete. Around him were the walls of a tube of Flosc’s castle; above him a Para laid another sand grain upon a new domed roof. The rest of the army rested in other tubes, covered with other new stony caps, but there was no sound of movement or of voices. It was as quiet as a necropolis.

  Lavon’s thoughts were slow and bitter as drugged syrup. He had been right about the passage of the seasons. He had had barely enough time to bring all his people from the hall to the castles before the annual debacle of the fall overturn. Then the waters of the universe had revolved once, bringing the skies to the Bottom, and the Bottom to the skies, and then mixing both. The thermocline was destroyed until next year’s spring overturn would re-form it.

  And inevitably, the abrupt change in temperature and oxygen concentration had started the spore-building glands again. The spherical amber shell was going up around Lavon now, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was an involuntary process, as dissociated from his control as the beating of his heart. Soon the light-generating oil which filled the spore would come pouring out, expelling and replacing the cold, foul water, and then sleep would come….

  And all this had happened just as they had made a real gain, had established themselves in enemy country, had come within reach of the chance to destroy the Eaters wholesale and forever. Now the eggs of the Eaters had been laid, and next year it would have to be done all over again. And there was the loss of the plate; he had hardly begun to reflect upon what that would mean for the future.

  There was a soft chunk as the last sand grain fell into place on the roof. The sound did not quite bring the final wave of despair against which he had been fighting in advance. Instead, it seemed to carry with it a wave of obscure contentment, with which his consciousness began to sink more and mo
re rapidly toward sleep. They were safe, after all. They could not be ousted from the castle. And there would be fewer Eaters next year, because of all the eggs that had been destroyed, and the layers of those eggs….There was one plate still left….

  Quiet and cold; darkness and silence.

  CYCLE TWO

  In a forgotten corner of the galaxy, the watery world of Hydrot hurtles endlessly around the red star Tau Ceti. For many months life has swarmed in its lakes and pools, but now the sun retreats from the zenith, and the snow falls, and the ice advances from the eternal ocean. Life sinks once more toward slumber, simulating death, and the battles and lusts and ambitions and defeats of a thousand million microscopic creatures retreat into the limbo where such things matter not at all.

  No, such things matter not at all when winter reigns on Hydrot; but winter is an inconstant king.

  Old Shar set down the thick, ragged-edged metal plate at last, and gazed instead out the window of the castle, apparently resting his eyes on the glowing green-gold obscurity of the summer waters. In the soft fluorescence which played down upon him, from the Noc dozing impassively in the groined vault of the chamber, Lavon could see that he was in fact a young man. His face was so delicately formed as to suggest that it had not been many seasons since he had first emerged from his spore.

  But of course there had been no real reason to have expected an old man. All the Shars had been referred to traditionally as “old” Shar. The reason, like the reasons for everything else, had been forgotten, but the custom had persisted. The adjective at least gave weight and dignity to the office—that of the center of wisdom of all the people, as each Lavon had been the center of authority.

  The present Shar belonged to the generation XVI, and hence would have to be at least two seasons younger than Lavon himself. If he was old, it was only in knowledge.

  “Lavon, I’m going to have to be honest with you,” Shar said at last, still looking out of the tall, irregular window. “You’ve come to me at your maturity for the secrets on the metal plate, just as your predecessors did to mine. I can give some of them to you—but for the most part, I don’t know what they mean.”