"Come. Come."
He cast them, bound together by their own force, into the smooth water, and then he was sinking. He fell only feet from them. The shore was near. He swam. He could hear the younger one calling.
"Come. Come."
Mindless.
Ahead of him in the smooth, perfumed water, was the broad, flat back of a Bolun, familiar, ancient, kept alive, some eons past, by love and daily medication. Old, fine, loved pet. He put him to sleep, the finest Bolun in the system, and he cried. The Bolun knew what was happening. After dozens of trips to the veterinarian, the Bolun knew what was happening, for he’d never complained before, never wept that howling wail before. The Bolun had struggled against needles and rectum worm checks and parasite removal and all such indignities, but he knew that this was more than just one more needle. It wouldn’t hurt going into the tough, fight-scarred scruff of the neck, but the Bolun knew that this was the final needle, and the world’s finest Bolun howled because his friend didn’t have the guts to stay there and watch him die. Howl in his ears going out the door with tears forming in his eyes, and ahead of him in the perfumed water the broad, fat, black back, swimming. How could it be? And the young thing calling.
"Come. Come."
Far down the light-lined tunnel were the doors to the universe. He screamed and reached for them, his arm stretching, stretching, falling short. Inside those doors, warmth, love, safety.
"He got away."
"Who got away?"
"Him."
His hand went through the doors. All he ever wanted was inside, all of it there. Behind him the water. He turned his head and listened. A keening in his ears. Musical.
"Come. Come." The dark voice under the music.
He knew who he was not by name, not by identity, and there it all was behind him inside the doors, and he could open them, only his hand went through the doorknob, and out there were the things from which he’d escaped, and the water had not always been perfumed. The water was timeless until it began to boil and steam as a world died. The mad, grasping, deadly feel of it.
The brown coming back, misty, and he could no longer fly, and if the things were not to take him, then what? He had escaped to what?
Chapter Eight
To unbearable pain. To perfumed water being sprinkled on his lips. To fever and heat and a burning sun and drenching rains and endless pain and the taste of an alien sweetness as he opened his mouth, seeing his action from a distance, eyes closed, feeling it. A twittering, keening musical presence. Breeze fanned into his burning face and the festering of the terrible wound and the raw hurt of his hip joints and a weakness.
He screamed soundlessly, for he knew the room, the long, cold room with steel cabinets. The needles to draw fluid from lifeless bodies. The first expedition, racked by internal explosion, body parts strewn, the ship towed home and the parts gathered and boxed in steel cases and embalmed, since no one knew the force which destroyed them and autopsy was necessary.
His strong body fighting the wounds. Mind imprisoned. Fighting to be free, but weakened by the total war his cells fought against the infections. Boji, Boji, fat, black Bolun.
Perfumed water, pure, alien. And the alien sweetness. Mouth dry, swallowing. Body wastes accumulating. Unable to move. Stinking. Sun after sun.
"The goddamned sensors failed!" Terror. Feverish activity. The rumble of the engines.
Wham!
Soundless scream as walls buckled, compartments burst. The ring of impact at speed.
"Brake, Rei. Full brake."
Birds. No. Insects. Beautiful. Lovely eyes. Tiny. Twittering. Long, flexible lips on tiny faces. The sprinkle of sweetness.
And his body fighting, strong, healthy, fantastically versatile in healing itself. Endless suns and the cooling rain and the washing away of filth and the sound of children’s voices fading into that tuneless, musical keening and wings beating like giant moths and a part of his mind alive, now.
He tried to focus his eyes. His lips moved. A croaking sound which stopped the musical twittering.
They were dead.
All of them, dead, and with them had died hope and the excitement of discovery. The first men to find an alien civilization and all dead. Free electrons floating on the surface of a sun.
It was clear. He could not see, but it was clear. The impact had ripped the engineering section, taking three men with the shattered bits of rock and metal which burst into free space. The panel erupting in his face, a long, hot sliver piercing him. Juanna screaming, "Suits!" Suits mandatory on planetary approach, but Juanna holed by a rock which penetrated the hull as if it were so much soft flesh, her blood spewing as she was exposed to hard vacuum.
The engines, the remaining port-side pair, screaming, failing as servos went with the rain of space debris. And the sun ahead. His suit patch, automated, holding. Bleeding inside the suit, the warm fluid sinking to his feet and wetting them until, with concentration, he closed the veins and hit the engines, screaming, "Start, damn you. Start."
Screaming into the dead communications system. "Engines!" No answer. A dimming scanner showing the gutted compartment and a smear of red on the jagged edge of the gaping hole in the hull.
The ship was dead. It shot past a small, sunside planet and the heat built as he armed the mechanical demo release of the escape hatch. His hands weak, trembling.
Then he was aspin in space, traveling the arc of the dying ship into the sun. Hope. He could tell them. Ah, the rotten luck of it. Valuable tools and equipment going into that goddamned sun. But they had the means to send a lightspeed message. There was hope. Five worlds there. Four
life-zone worlds, packed closely around a fine, stable sun.
Nothing vital had been ruptured in the circuits of the suit and the backpack made sounds inside the suit, fighting the pull of the sun and winning, accelerating, as he browned out. Heat straining the capacity of the suit but cooling as the sun world swam past. And there would be, in a civilization which could beam messages into interstellar space, people on the second world.
After a long period of sleep he awoke with the wetness on his lips and looked into the multifaceted eyes of a tiny angel. Long, soft lips almost touched his, loosing the rain of sweetness. Tiny hands pushed the fruit into his lips. Around him they swarmed in dozens.
"Thank you," he said. The sound sent them skittering on a flare, leaving him alone. Had they, or he, lifted his visor? God, he stank.
His left leg was useless. The abdominal wounds were scabbed over, healing. His head was clear.
Around him an empty world, the six-inch winged angels hovering at a distance. Across the water, trees, dense, thick-leaved. A part of his dream. Things crawled on the limbs. "Come. Come." He rested.
On a limb overhanging the lake something moved, jerked, pulsed. With a feeble hand he closed his visor. He thumbed magnification into it and watched, the hours meaningless, his body using the time to heal. The movement came from a rounded node on the limb, white, silken. And as hours flowed, a tiny hand emerged, clutched, rested, as he rested. A head. Wet antennae unfolded in the heat of the sun. A struggle. One of the winged angels, fully formed, sat, in exhaustion, on the limb. Wings wet, folded. Fascinated, he did not take his eyes off the tiny, beautiful creature until it flexed its drying wings, launched itself into air, fell, caught, soared, wings beating, keening voice singing a note of joy.
A world of butterflies. A goddamned world of bugs. Where were the people who sent the message?
His chronometer said that he’d been healing for fourteen standard days.
On the fifteenth day, he struggled out of the stinking, soiled suit,
crawled to the water’s edge. He checked it carefully. But he’d been in that water. It was unhospitable to the sucking things which crawled the trees and munched leaves on the other side of the lake. He pulled himself in, bathed, discarding his clothing, letting the perfumed water cool his burning, scabbed wounds.
His movements frightened the tiny
winged creatures. No longer did they bring him food. At a distance, he watched them, saw among them creatures, less delicate, unwinged, who walked the ground on two legs, much like men.
He had swum ashore to a grassy knoll. From the top, gained by much effort, pulling his still mending leg behind him, he could see a plain of flowers. The flowers were alive with the winged angels.
He could not get far from water, not in his condition. But he had to have food. Apparently, the angels had fed him their own food, nectar. He grinned, his face feeling crackly under his fifteen-day beard. Kept alive for fifteen days by a bunch of bugs feeding him flower juice.
He reached the near flowers. They smelled sweet and the nectar was a cluster of grains, pulpy, in the stamen. He ate. Around him the angels twittered and seemed to laugh.
"Good," he said to them, scattering them. "Very good. You live quite the life, don’t you?"
The flowers, themselves, offered more bulk and were quite tasty.
In the evening he sat on top of the knoll. The angels circled him at a distance. He waved to them, motioned them to come closer. One, with a head larger than the others, a head so heavy that she flew rather clumsily, approached. He made motions to his mouth. They had to have some intelligence to know that he required food to live, water to survive. They’d kept him alive. The angel with the large head twittered and keened. He repeated the eating motions.
She had tiny hands, perfectly formed. Her legs, tucked up, seemed less well formed. They had given him something other than flower nectar. He made the motions. He started to speak, but remembered that the sound of his voice frightened them. He’d seen the fruit on the large trees across the lake. He pointed, shaped his hands in the circle of the fruit, motioned.
The angel keened, flew heavily across the water. Others followed. It took three of them, working together, to bring a whole fruit. They placed it a few yards away and retreated. He crawled to it. Ate with relish. The fruit was good. The juice ran down his chin. He motioned again and the same three angels brought a second fruit. He smiled, waved. He took the second fruit and crawled back down the hill. The chill of evening was upon him. He crawled into the suit and slept.
He awoke with the sun in his eyes and they were there, at the top of the knoll. Some of the wingless ones carried a shapeless mass, placed it there on the smooth grass. He crawled to it. It was flesh, but flesh of a sort he’d never seen. He tasted it cautiously. It was spicy, chewy. Yet it was new. He ate the fruit, left the flesh. He’d been fantastically lucky. The flower food and the fruit were compatible with his system. The flesh was strange. He withdrew to bathe in the lake. The wingless ones came to the flesh and, gesturing, ate of it. Finding that he’d had no ill effects from the bite he’d sampled that morning, he tried some of it for lunch, ate hungrily.
By the twentieth day, the large-headed angel would approach to within a few feet of him, stand erect on her legs, which seemed to be developing, and twitter at him. Her head was growing. Now she was so heavy that she walked, instead of flying.
He was able to make the link between the crawling things of the trees and the winged angels. Butterflies in metamorphosis. The round, mawed things the larvae, the rounded sac the chrysalis—the sac he’d observed as it gave birth to a fully formed angel. But this change which took place from day to day in his large-headed friend with the feminine features, the large eyes, the cute, protruding rear? After perfection, what?
When he was able, after twenty-five days, to limp on his leg, the flowered plain drew him, led him away from the lake, water stored in his suit-pack. He carried fruit and a hunk of the spicy flesh. He traveled slowly. Ahead were low hills and beyond, mountains. He walked through a grove of the thick-leaved trees and looked warily for the crawling larvae. Apparently there was some natural boundary, some natural rule. Only the winged angels and the walking ones, looking much like tiny men, watched his passage. The trees supplied him with fruit.
His large-headed friend paced him. Flying now and then, walking tiredly most of the time. She was growing visibly and flying became more and more difficult for her as the third day of his journey took him past
clear, perfumed streams and groves of the fruited trees. They seemed to know no season; young pips of fruit mixed with maturing and ripened fruit on the same branch.
He was following the sun. It led him up steep hills to the crest of the low range and before him was the sea and there, far below, was movement. He used the magnifier in his visor and saw them, angels, grown large, wings tiny on their backs.
Steep cliffs ran along the shore. The descent to them was tortuous. The large-headed angel glided down on the updrafts, body ungainly in flight, too big for flight. He, being a mere man, had to walk, crawl, slide.
A wind came off the sea into his face. There was a perfume in it. And, using his magnifier, he saw that the sea was not an ocean. There, on the far horizon, was land.
Around him, the angels, all grown, wings dwarfed, heads heavy, twittered, seemed to ignore him. They were few in numbers, so few that he thought he could identify his traveling companion. Grown to the size of a ten-year-old child, she was preening herself. The delicate, multicolored fur shredded away. He watched with amazement as she seemed to expand, to grow.
Nearby, the process of molting completed, an angel launched herself off the cliff. She was so large that her tiny wings could not possibly hold her; he thought she had leaped to her death, far below in the waves which pounded the rocks, pushed by the constant wind. But she steadied in her downward flight, circled, soared, wings almost motionless, riding the updraft and then gliding off on a wing toward the distant land.
Head large, eyes glowing, his friend pushed down the last remnant of her outer skin, kicked it aside. He’d seen women take off a skirt with identical motions.
"Wait; please wait," he called.
She did not look at him, her eyes fixed on the distant land. And, as he moved toward her, she was gone. Falling, then feeling the updraft, gliding, impossibly heavy for such flight, but flying, soaring, becoming small in the distance.
There was no food on the barren shore. The water, if it were fresh, was far below. He climbed the hill, found food, running water, and spent the days sitting on the hilltop, watching as the angels molted, leaped, soared.
It took two weeks, fourteen standard days, for the angel, the newly changed Artonuee female, to develop her powers of communication to the point where she could tell of the strange male who escaped the ifflings and fed on nectar and fruit and the flesh food of the walking males.
Chapter Nine
"We know, dear," said First Mother Piiree, when, with much agitation and self-pleasure, the third-change infant formed her first coherent message in a keening mixture of sweet sounds and labored thoughts. "Concern yourself with the application of the sound eeeeen. Now, now, he is well. He is being watched. He is feeding." Lovely, thought First Mother Piiree, to be fortunate enough to share these lovely children’s first odd and ancient joys. Unfortunate that this group of changelings should have had their wingling stage complicated by the presence of the alien. The trauma of it could color their future lives, and the life of each was a precious jewel to be treasured, protected. Now that the three pleasant worlds of the Artonuee were population-stabilized, the flow of changelings through the Development Center was slow and carefully regulated.
There were times when Piiree wished that she had lived during the period of expansion, when the Artonuee were peopling new worlds. She herself had voted, at the last Public Opinion, to expand Five, cold as it was. She had argued against the quality-of-life advocates, stating with some force that she knew from her personal experience and her graduate research that a one-on-one relationship at the iffling stage was no more desirable than multiple relationships. The age of expansion, she had said, should prove to even the most skeptical that the life force was powerful enough to give being to two, three, even as many as five ifflings. The great Lonwee was a fiveling. It was a terrible waste to allow only
one iffling the gift of advancement when an Artonuee came home.
Just last night she had talked about it with the Lady from Nirrar. "It is not as if we are denying them life." the Lady said. "We are merely
postponing it. Look at it this way. In our mythology, the Lady Andee suckled fifty ifflings. Each became great. I agree that it is possible to advance more than one or two ifflings with each homecoming, but is it desirable? Part of our history is the sad story of the age of overpopulation, of rampant changeling mortality. Rather than condoning artificial concern with unfertilized eggs and unadvanced ifflings I, personally, would advise a continuation of careful control, of watchfulness, of Artonueeistic benevolence in regard to those who are allowed the gift of sentient life."
The Lady was high in the government, and in her position, had access to information unavailable to Piiree. She bowed. Moreover, the Lady was carrying a wing load of sorrow. It registered there around her eyes, in the sad purse of her lovely lips.
"Your load is heavy, Lady," Piiree said, in consideration. "I will allow you to retire, with just one more question. The meaning of the alien’s presence on The World, Lady?"
For an unguarded moment, there was a chaos of thought, then the Lady controlled herself. "Great change, First Mother. For good or for ill. At best, your wishes granted in a staggering surplus." Pictures of thousands, millions of changelings. An outflowing of changelings to live great and exciting lives of—Piiree was lost.
"I will wish for it," Piiree said, leaving the chamber as the tired Lady, clad in official purple, keened goodnight.
Still, Piiree resented the presence of the alien, the male. He sat, a malignancy in paradise, atop the Cliffs of Flight, eating the fruit which properly belonged to the trekking changelings. Piiree had a healthy respect for the ability of the male of the species, as long as he stayed in his place. This alien male was definitely out of his place. She was glad, after so many days of suspense and anxious watching, that the government had, at last, sent someone to deal with the situation. All she wanted was for the alien to be removed so that her changelings would not have, as one of their first memories, the image of him in their minds.
The Legend of Miaree Page 5
