“Feel?”
“My lord, yes, my lord. Nothing…certain.… It is as if there is…something both…there…and not there.”
Torq felt his ventral plates quiver. “Like the old witticism about the twelve in the closed box? Neither dead nor alive, but both?”
Wisely, the five did not respond.
Keeping a good three quarters of his eyes on his own consoles, Torq scanned the command deck.
“Other reports?”
No responses.
“Anomalies?”
Again, silence.
He turned his attention back to the five. It sill quivered violently but showed no other signs of retreating, in spite of the intense distress it had to be feeling.
“One last attempt. What have you to report?”
The five waved its second arms meaninglessly as its firsts raised helplessly above its head.
“My lord, I…the scans…sometimes they…and then.…”
Soundlessly, Torq removed the thin metal rod.
A moment later, he said flatly: “Dispose of that.”
Then: “Decant another five.”
* * * *
It was more than unusual for his God to demand that he attend upon her personally. This would, in fact, be the first time he had seen her since his farewell address in the portico near the ship, where she had lain in silent grandeur on a long, drapery bedecked structure, built specifically for her body to recline upon during the ceremonials. It had been burned the moment she had left it, lest some lesser Koleic deign to touch it, much less rest upon it.
Such was standard for all of the seeding ships and their Gods.
Torq, in spite of being the Chaptain of the ship, had never expected to see her face-to-face again.
One did not see one’s God face-to-face…and live.
Just ask the tens that attended upon her.
No wait. There would be no answer. They were—eventually, to be sure, but invariably—dead.
Now Torq stood within the Hatchery for the first time since the ship was completed. Then it had been little more than a huge, empty chamber, lined front, back, and both sides with narrow shelves into which eggs would be inserted and sealed.
When the time was right, when the ship had reached a promising world, the correct number would be decanted—although the official term for these eggs was released—along with a pre-pubescent God, and placed in special containers until planetary conditions were optimum for their survival.
If they survived.
Torq had no way of knowing how many seeding ships had actually succeeded, how many worlds might even now harbor nascent communities of Koleic. But neither had he any interest in knowing.
He merely guided this ship and served his God.
As she commanded.
“My God.” He said no more, merely stood waiting for her to acknowledge his presence. She did so with a flicker of a handful of her eyes, the rest remaining focused on some unseeable spot on the ceiling…or perhaps into the future, or the past.
The Gods only knew.
He took the flicker as permission to speak.
“My God, I have come as you have requested.” One never spoke to the Gods about commands; to do so reeked of insolence.
The flicker returned, rested on him momentarily, then drifted away again.
“My God, how may I please you?”
The flicker returned once more, but this time the compounds remained trained on Torq. He could feel her wisdom surrounding him. It made him immensely uncomfortable.
“I…have…heard…” she said finally, taking deep breaths between each word, “of the seven…and the…five.… Why?”
“My God, the first curl—, withdrew into itself until nothing more remained of it. I performed a mercy.”
There was a long, nearly painful passage of time, as if she were considering each of his words for every possible level of meaning. Suddenly, Torq found himself almost empathizing with the unfortunate seven. He almost wanted to curl himself.
He stood straighter.
“Accept…ed.”
He waited a moment, then: “The five. That was more troublesome. It appeared to have…broken…in some unaccountable way. There are no records from other ships of such behavior.”
“I…have…seen…and heard.…” A long release of breath. “It…troubles….”
“The five…” Torq said, then stopped.
She had turned fully half of her eyes to him.
“Not…the…five…. They live…to serve. If…broken?…they die.”
“Then what?”
“The…other.”
“The oth—. My God, there was no other. Only the broken five reported—felt—anything. All other monitors read clear. I warrant this to you.”
“So…be…it.…” She remained silent for a long time, too long for Torq to feel anything approaching comfortable. The only sounds in the huge chamber—now fully half full of sealed eggs awaiting planetfall—were her labored breathing.
And something more.
Something tiny, insignificant almost.
A soft, wet, plop just before each exhalation.
Every time.
It took Torq—name though he was, and Chaplain of this ship—a long while to figure out the sound.
And when he did, his chitin quivered with embarrassment, even though logically, he should have known, should have anticipated.…
She was laying eggs.
The mysterious rite only the Gods could perform and that few—outside of the munchable tens—would ever see.
He swallowed convulsively.
Something like an infinity later, he was about to ask permission to withdraw, when she spoke again. Now that he understood more, each of her harsh respirations left him feeling.…
But she spoke: “About…this…world.”
He recognized the intent of her words.
“My God, this is the most nearly habitable we have found yet. Investigations suggest that air, water, land are all suitable for seeding.”
She may have nodded. At this point Torq wasn’t certain that he could trust his eyen.
“In…hab…it…ants.”
“My God, yes. Two legs. First arms only. Soft-bodied. Telemetry can only tell us so much.”
Another long silence.
Plop.
Plop.
Plop.
“Per…haps.…”
When he was convinced that she had said all that she wished to, he responded: “My God, what do you wish?”
“Com…mun…i…cate.”
“The trans-comm? I mean, the translation-communicator? We haven’t used it yet. There were no inhabitants capable of speech on the first two worlds; and on the third, somehow the aboriginals seemed not to need language.”
“Not…?”
“My God, what remains we…found…indicated no organs of speech or hearing. That we could identify as such. And nothing suggesting writing. Nothing except huge buildings, bare and empty when we came, barren ash when we left.”
In spite of himself, Torq was particularly pleased with his answer. He almost preened.
“No…speech…?”
“No, my God. None.”
Plop.
Plop.
Plop.
“This…world.… Try.…” The final word tapered off into a breathy sibilant.
“But why…I mean, so be it.”
The compounds had flickered back. Now both eyen, and all of the faceted eyes within each, stared toward the ceiling. Toward the past. The future. Infinity.
Torq backed out of the Hatchery. He heard the door iris behind him but even then did not tear his glaze from the God.
He had spoken to her.
She had answered him.
All was well with ship.
With his world.
* * * *
“Report.” Torq’s voice sounded throughout the command deck, restored to perfect placidity after his meeting with God. He hadn’t expected the mee
ting, much less the way…well, the way things might affect him. His eyes, however, skittered back and forth in a wholly uncharacteristic display, almost as if he had lost command of his compounds.
Even so, the crew knew immediately what was needed.
“My lord, approach is flawless.”
He had expected nothing less.
“My lord, except for.…”
A thin voice from the far side of the deck struggled against the speaker’s natural impulse to silence.
Torq turned one full eyen toward the speaker, a six, who should have known better than to interrupt the Chaptain’s thoughts.
“Well?”
“My lord, something…unusual.” Torq wasn’t certain, but it did seem for an instant that the five flickered more than a few compounds toward the station where the previous five had been seated. The newly decanted five seemed not to notice.
But Torq did.
And that small movement disquieted him more than the stuttering voice.
“More.”
“My lord, it may be a problem with the investigators, but there seems to be a…a shell of some sort.”
“Where?”
“My lord, surrounding the planet.”
Torq fell silent, unwilling to share his sudden apprehensions.
“Around the entire planet?”
“My lord, yes.”
“My lord.…” This time the voice came from the other side of the deck. “I too…my monitors show…something I…they cannot explain.
“My lord, and mine.”
By now, half a dozen of the numbers were nodding slightly or waving second arms to indicate agreement.
“Silence!”
Perfect silence reigned.
“You, four, explain!”
“My lord, I can’t.…”
“As best you can, then,” Torq said. His chitin quivered with exasperation. Truth be told, his tarsi flexed and involuntarily twitched toward his pouch, where the thin tube still rested, but he restrained himself. If this many numbers dared to speak, there must be something.
“My lord, my monitor, and, I assume, the others, show nothing.”
Torq started to interrupt but the four continued, speaking rapidly to get to its point.
“Nothing physical…at least nothing tangible. But it also reports that there is some kind of interconnected…field?…that begins at the atmosphere terminus. And it extends entirely around the world.”
“How soon?”
There was a distinctly awkward silence, even with the faintest shuffling of scales against hammocks.
“How soon?”
“Any momen—”
The ship lurched, hung motionless, then lurched in the reverse direction. Lights overhead wavered in intensity; then first singly, then in sections, glowrods burst, showering the deck with glittering bits of crystal. Sparks flew everywhere, some igniting the material of several hammocks, which threw the nearby numbers into mindless panic. Three of them curled instantly, and before the sparks had died, black ichor had begun oozing through carapaces.
Half a dozen monitors winked black, flared with static, then resumed their normal purple. The ship twisted once again.
A single bulb on Torq’s terminal blinked on, accompanied by the sound of a different klaxon, one which no one on the ship had ever actually heard activated before.
The Hatchery.
The God was calling.
And Torq did not know what he could tell her.
He started to depress a switch with his tarsi and…the ship righted itself. What lights were still intact shimmered, grew brighter, dimmer, then settled at normal illumination. Most of the remaining black terminals came on again.
Most…but not all.
And overriding all was the unending whine of the klaxon, disquieting the numbers perhaps even more than the shipquake had.
Torq punched the button savagely, hoping against hope that nothing in his voice would betray his agitation.
“My God, I listen.”
The control room went quiet, except for the faint drip, drip, drip of ichor against metal. Two more numbers had curled. Several looked unsteady.
“Chaptain Torq.”
“My God, I am here.”
“What?”
Torq hesitated, then: “An…anomaly, my God. An atmospheric anomaly encountered when the ship entered.…”
“Now?”
Torq glanced around the command deck. All seemed under control, except, of course, the dozen or so curlers. Lights were stable. Monitors flickered with messages and normal data. No fires. And the remaining numbers’ eyen were split as they should be, one eyes watching their duty station, the other—all compounds active—focused on Torq.
None of them spoke.
“My God, all is now as it should be.”
There was no answer, but the comm light blinked out. She had returned to her eternal round of creating new life. She was satisfied.
Torq was not.
There had been…something indefinable there. It had momentarily derailed the ship from its planet-fall course. The fact that the ship was now on course and apparently unharmed did nothing to placate him. His ventral plates quivered, not with pleasure this time but with apprehension.
What was going on?
* * * *
The Crwth chittered, oblivious to the accompaniment of the clumsy trans-comm taking up a fair amount of the space just before the dais upon which it—she, Torq reminded himself—stood alone.
Even before her words rustled from the device, however, Torq recognized the short complex of whistles, breaths, and musical tones.
He should.
He had heard it often enough since that moment half-a-day (current planet-time) past when the lander had set down and he, followed by his minion of numbers, had set foot on the fourth world.
It had been an eerie experience. The first three times, the planets had been dead, either as they were originally, or as they became after the blasts from the ship. On the third world, everything had been black and twisted. And there had been the sounds…and the smells.
Here, nothing had been touched. Almost, almost, Torq found himself doubting the wisdom of trying to communicate with this alien, this sub-Koleic species.
The trans-comm began its own twittering, but Torq did not need to listen. He had heard that same complex of sounds often enough since he had arrived in this great, empty, drapery-hung hall to confront the single creature that awaited them.
“So be it.”
Torq sighed, feeling the fluttering movement of transpiration along his plates. His first and second hands each flexed, contracted, flexed again. He grimaced inwardly at his own unease.
The creature before him stood as pliantly as ever, as pliantly and acquiescent as melting wax. The two of them had long since dispensed with cool formalities. For the past while, Torq had been addressing the alien as conqueror to the conquered.
And she had simply replied with her unchanging, infernally undeviating chittering: “So be it.”
Torq stared with one eyes at the Crwth’s silhouette, then through one of the seven oppressively narrow windows in the huge heptagonal chamber. Beyond, he could see only cloudless skies, even though he knew that the ship hung, tiny but visible, somewhere above them.
He shivered. The angles in the room were wrong. He was used to angles, of course. The square, the triangle, even the hexagon. But the unnecessary asymmetry of this room bothered him.
He forced himself to ignore his unease and return to his duty.
“You understand our demands, then?”
Again the whirr of the trans-comm filled the room. As he finished speaking the translator broke out in a volley of inarticulate sounds, random sounds to Torq but apparently intelligible to the Crwth.
Crwth.
Even the name echoed abominably in Torq’s mind, almost rattling loose segments of his exoskeleton. Cwrth. An impossible collation of sounds equally impossible to speak or to understand. Still, it
was good an approximation as any for the particular set of sounds that came through the trans-comm as “untranslatable.” It was what she had first called herself, but there was no cognate for it.
So. Cwrth.
Well, it would soon make little difference. The enclave would cease to exist as an independent community soon, and whatever names they chose to give themselves would become irrelevant.
But enough linguistics. Torq understood enough of the technicalities of translation to know that he didn’t know enough. And besides, a ten by any other name was still a ten.
Cwrth was sufficient.
Now, however, for the business at hand.
She was listening patiently—eternally patient, damnably patient. Her horrible dual eyes—compound-less, fixed in bony sockets and therefore unable to split and take in more than what stood directly before her—her eyes turned slightly away from him, as if she found his form unpleasant.
Her tall, fragile-looking, soft-fleshed body—naked in spite of its filmy covering of some sort of glistening cloth—towered over him. Folds of the scintillant white material as still as columns of opaque crystal fell to her feet.
Her feet.
Another abomination. She had only two hands, apparently firsts. Where the seconds should be, there was only smooth, vulnerable-looking tissue.
Then those two clumsy, flat appendages, altogether too broad and short for substantial support as they were, without dividing into even smaller, less efficient-seeming minor appendages at the ventral end.
He shuddered.
On her breast, a single faceted stone sparkled coldly.
He did not know what the stone was called. He did not care. But in the broad central facet, he could see himself in small…a compact, dark, impenetrable body, designed for gravitational forces many times that of this small clot of dirt. His image gleamed dully.
The trans-comm clattered into silence.
The Cwrth remained silent for a moment.
She was apparently considering what the trans-comm had just said.
Then, as she had done so often before, she repeated the incessant pattern that Torq had grown to despise.
“So be it.”
He moved. He paced slowly around the single visible bit of ornamentation in the room, a wooden pillar just over his height, polished until it shone, and surmounted by a piece of hideously carved stone of some sort.
Just glancing at the carving with a handful of his compounds made his blood heat. It was as loathsome as everything else here, even though it bore no resemblance at all to the tall, attenuated lines of the Cwrth. It was lumped, awkward, barely more than the suggestion of something that seemed implicitly ancient and terrible.
The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack Page 62
