Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

FEAR drove the slow orgasmic thoughts from his mind. Absorbed in gluttony, he hadn’t noticed that the filament had tightened and was slowly drawing back into the cylinder from whence it came. And now it was too late! He was already over the rim of the metal disc.

  Feverishly, he tried to disengage his absorptive surfaces from the filament and crawl down its length to safety, but he couldn’t move. He was stuck to the dark cord by some strange adhesive that cemented his cells firmly to the cord. He could not break free.

  The line moved steadily upward, dragging him inexorably toward a dark opening in the cylinder overhead. Panic filled him! Desperately he tried to loosen his trapped surfaces. His pseudopod lashed futilely in the air, searching with panic for something to grip, something to clutch that would stop this slow movement to the hell of pain that waited for him in the metal high overhead.

  His searching flesh struck another’s, and into his mind flooded the Ul Caada’s terrified thought. The old one had reacted quicker than he, perhaps because he was poaching, but like himself he was attached and could not break free.

  “Serves you right,” Kworn projected grimly. “The thing was on my land. You had no right to feed upon it.”

  “Get me loose!” Caada screamed. His body flopped at the end of a thick mass of digestive tissue, dangling from the line, writhing and struggling in mindless terror. It was strange, Kworn thought, that fear should be so much stronger in the old than in the young.

  “Cut loose, you fool,” Kworn projected. “There isn’t enough of you adhered to hurt if it were lost. A little body substance isn’t worth your life. Hurry! You’ll be too late if you don’t. That metal is poisonous to our flesh.”

  “But it will be pain to cut my absorbing surface,” Caada protested.

  “It will be death if you don’t.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “I can’t,” Kworn said hopelessly. “All my surface is stuck to the filament. I can’t cut free.” He was calm now, resigned to the inevitable. His greed had brought him to this. Perhaps it was a fitting punishment. But Caada need not die if he would show courage.

  He rotated his eye to watch his struggling neighbor. Apparently Caada was going to take his advice. The tissue below the part of him stuck to the filament began to thin. His pseudopod broke contact. But his movements were slow and hesitant. Already his body mass was rising above the edge of the disc.

  “Quick, you fool!” Kworn projected. “Another moment and you’re dead!”

  But Caada couldn’t hear. Slowly his tissues separated as he reluctantly abandoned his absorptive surface. But he was already over the disc. The last cells pinched off and he fell, mantle flapping, full on the surface of the disc. For a moment he lay there quivering, and then his body was blotted from sight by a cloud of frozen steam, and his essence vanished screaming into Emptiness.

  KWORN shuddered. It was a terrible way to die. But his own fate would be no better. He wrapped his mantle tightly around him as his leading parts vanished into the dark hole in the cylinder. In a moment he would be following Caada on the journey from which no member of the Folk had ever returned. His body disappeared into the hole.

  —and was plunged into paradise!

  His foreparts slipped into a warm, thick liquid that loosened the adhesive that bound him to the cord. As he slipped free, he slowly realized that he was not to die. He was bathed in liquid food! He was swimming in it! He was surrounded on all sides by incredible flavors so strange and delicious that his mind could not classify them! The filament had been good, but this—this was indescribable! He relaxed, his mantle spreading through the food, savoring, absorbing, digesting, metabolizing, excreting. His energy levels peaked. The nuclei of his germ plasm swelled, their chromosomes split, and a great bud formed and separated from his body. He had reproduced!

  Through a deadening fog of somatic sensation, he realized dully that this was wrong, that the time wasn’t right, that the space was limited, and that the natural reaction to abundant food supply was wrong. But for the moment he didn’t care.

  For thousands of seasons he had traveled the paths between equator and pole in a ceaseless hunt for food, growing and rejuvenating in good seasons, shrinking and aging in bad. He had been bound to the soil, a slave to the harsh demands of life and Nature. And now the routine was broken.

  He luxuriated in his freedom. It must have been like this in the old days, when the waters were plentiful and things grew in them that could be eaten, and the Folk had time to dream young dreams and think young thoughts, and build their thoughts and dreams into the gleaming realities of cities and machines. Those were the days when the mind went above the soil into the air and beyond it to the moons, the sun and the evening stars.

  But that was long ago.

  He lay quietly, conscious of the change within him as his cells multiplied to replace those he had lost, and his body grew in weight and size. He was rejuvenated. The cells of his growing body, stimulated by the abundance of food, released memories he had forgotten he had ever possessed. His past ran in direct cellular continuity to the dawn of his race, and in him was every memory he had experienced since the beginning. Some were weak, others were stronger, but all were there awaiting an effort of recall. All that was required was enough stimulation to bring them out of hiding.

  And for the first time in millennia the stimulus was available. The stimulus was growth, the rapid growth that only an abundant food supply could give, the sort of growth that the shrunken environment outside could not supply. With sudden clarity he saw how the Folk had shrunk in mind and body as they slowly adapted to the ever-increasing rigor of life. The rushing torrent of memory and sensation that swept through him gave him a new awareness of what he had been once and what he had become. His eye was lifted from the dirt and lichens.

  WHAT he saw filled him with pity and contempt. Pity for what the Folk had become; contempt for their failure to recognize it. Yet he had been no better than the others. It was only through the accident of this artefact that he had learned. The Folk couldn’t know what the slow dwindling of their food supply had done to them. Over the millennia they had adapted, changing to fit the changing conditions, surviving only because they were more intelligent and more tenacious than the other forms of life that had become extinct. A thousand thousand seasons had passed since the great war that had devastated the world. A million years of slow adaptation to the barren waste that had been formed when the ultimate products of Folk technology were loosed on their creators, had created a race tied to a subsistence level of existence, incapable of thinking beyond the basic necessities of life.

  The Ul Kworn sighed. It would be better if he would not remember so much. But he could suppress neither the knowledge nor the memories. They crowded in upon him, stimulated by the food in which he floated.

  Beside him, his offspring was growing. A bud always grew rapidly in a favorable environment, and this one was ideal. Soon it would be as large as himself. Yet it would never develop beyond an infant. It could not mature without a transfer of germ plasm from other infants of the Folk. And there were no infants.

  It would grow and keep on growing because there would be no check of maturity upon its cells. It would remain a partly sentient lump of flesh that would never be complete. And in time it would be dangerous. When it had depleted the food supply it would turn on him in mindless hunger. It wouldn’t realize that the Ul Kworn was its father, or if it did, it wouldn’t care. An infant is ultimately selfish, and its desires are the most important thing in its restricted universe.

  Kworn considered his situation dispassionately.

  It was obvious that he must escape from this trap before his offspring destroyed him. Yet he could think of no way to avoid the poison metal. He recognized it now, the element with the twelve protons in its nucleus, a light metal seldom used by the Folk even in the days of their greatness because of its ability to rapidly oxidize and its propensity to burst into brilliant flame when heated. With sudden shock he realiz
ed that the artefact was nothing less than a gigantic torch!

  Why had it been built like this? What was its function? Where had it come from? Why hadn’t it spoke since it had released that flood of unintelligible gibberish before it had drawn him inside? Ever since he had entered this food tank it had been quiet except for a clicking, chattering whir that came from somewhere above him. He had the odd impression that it was storing information about him and the way he reacted in the tank.

  And then, abruptly, it broke into voice. Cryptic words poured from it, piercing him with tiny knives of sound. The intensity and rapidity of the projections shocked him, left him quivering and shaking when they stopped as abruptly as they had begun.

  In the quiet that followed, Kworn tried to recall the sequence of the noise. The words were like nothing he had ever heard. They were not the language of the Folk either past or present. And they had a flow and sequence that was not organic. They were mechanical, the product of a metal intelligence that recorded and spoke but did not think. The Folk had machines like that once.

  How had it begun? There had been a faint preliminary, an almost soundless voice speaking a single word. Perhaps if he projected it, it would trigger a response. Pitching his voice in the same key and intensity he projected the word as best he could remember it.

  And the voice began again.

  KWORN quivered with excitement. Something outside the artefact was forcing it to speak. He was certain of it. As certain as he was that the artefact was recording himself and his offspring. But who—or what—was receiving the record? And why?

  This could be a fascinating speculation, Kworn thought. But there would be time enough for that later. His immediate need was to get out. Already the food supply was running low, and his offspring was becoming enormous. He’d have to leave soon if he was ever going to. And he’d have to do something about his own growth. Already it was reaching dangerous levels. He was on the ragged edge of another reproduction, and he couldn’t afford it.

  Regretfully, he began moving the cornified cells of his mantle and his under layer toward his inner surfaces, arranging them in a protective layer around his germ plasm and absorptive cells. There would be enough surface absorption to take care of his maintenance needs, and his body could retain its peak of cellular energy. Yet the desire to feed and bud was almost overpowering. His body screamed at him for denying it the right that food would give it, but Kworn resisted the demands of his flesh until the frantic cellular urges passed.

  Beside him his offspring pulsed with physical sensation. Kworn envied it even as he pitied it. The poor mindless thing could be used as a means to the end of his escape, but it was useless for anything else. It was far too large, and far too stupid, to survive in the outside world. Kworn extruded a net of hairlike pseudopods and swept the tank in which they lay. It was featureless, save for a hole where the filament had not completely withdrawn when it had pulled him into this place. A few places in the wall had a different texture than the others, probably the sense organs of the recorder. He rippled with satisfaction. There was a grille of poison metal in the top of the tank through which flowed a steady current of warm air. It would be pleasant to investigate this further, Kworn thought, but there was no time. His offspring had seen to that.

  He placed his eye on a thin pseudopod and thrust it through the hole in the wall of the tank. It was still night outside, but a faint line of brightness along the horizon indicated the coming of dawn. The artefact glittered icily beneath him, and he had a feeling of giddiness as he looked down the vertiginous drop to the disc below. The dark blotch of Caada’s burned body was almost invisible against the faintly gleaming loom of the still-warm disc. Kworn shuddered. Caada hadn’t deserved a death like that. Kworn looked down, estimating the chances with his new intelligence, and then slapped a thick communication fibril against his offspring’s quivering flesh and hurled a projection at its recoiling mass.

  Considering the fact that its cells were direct derivations of his own, Kworn thought grimly, it was surprising how hard it was to establish control. The youngster had developed a surprising amount of individuality in its few xals of free existence. He felt a surge of thankfulness to the old Ul Kworn as the youngster yielded to his firm projection. His precursor had always sought compliant germ plasm to produce what he had called “discipline and order.” It was, in fact, weakness. It was detrimental to survival. But right now that weakness was essential.

  UNDER the probing lash of his projection the infant extruded a thick mass of tissue that met and interlocked with a similar mass of his own. As soon as the contact firmed, Kworn began flowing toward his eye, which was still in the half-open hole in the side of the tank.

  The outside cold struck his sense centers with spicules of ice as he flowed to the outside, clinging to his offspring’s gradually extending pseudopod. Slowly he dropped below the cylinder. The infant was frantic. It disliked the cold and struggled to break free, but Kworn clung limpetlike to his offspring’s flesh as it twisted and writhed in an effort to return to the warmth and comfort into which it was born.

  “Let go!” his offspring screamed. “I don’t like this place.”

  “In a moment,” Kworn said as he turned the vague writhings into a swinging pendulum motion. “Help me move back and forth.”

  “I can’t. I’m cold. I hurt. Let me go!”

  “Help me,” Kworn ordered grimly, “or hang out here and freeze.”

  His offspring shuddered and twitched. The momentum of the swing increased. Kworn tightened his grip.

  “You promised to let go!” his offspring wailed. “You prom—”

  The infant’s projection was cut off as Kworn loosed himself at the upward arc of the swing, spread his mantle and plummeted toward the ground. Fear swept through him as his body curved through the thin air, missing the edge of the disc and landing on the ground with a sense-jarring thud. Behind and above him up against the cylinder, the thick tendril of his offspring’s flesh withdrew quickly from sight. For a moment the Ul Kworn’s gaze remained riveted on the row of odd markings on the metal surface, and then he turned his attention to life.

  There was no reason to waste the pain of regret upon that half sentient mass of tissue that was his offspring. The stupid flesh of his flesh would remain happy in the darkness with the dwindling food until its flesh grew great enough to touch the poison metal in the ceiling of the tank.

  And then—

  With a harsh projection of horror, the Ul Kworn moved, circling the artefact on Caada’s vacated strip. And as he moved he concentrated energy into his high-level communication organs, and projected a warning of danger.

  “Move!” he screamed. “Move forward for your lives!”

  The line rippled. Reddish mantles unfolded as the Folk reacted. The nearest, shocked from estivation, were in motion even before they came to full awareness. Alarms like this weren’t given without reason.

  Varsi’s reaction, Kworn noted, was faster than any of his fellows. The young Ul had some favorable self-preservation characteristics. He’d have to consider sharing some germ plasm with him at the next reproduction season, after all.

  In a giant arc, the Folk pressed forward under the white glow of emerging dawn. Behind them the artefact began to project again in its strange tongue. But in mid-cry it stopped abruptly. And from it came a wail of mindless agony that tore at Kworn’s mind with regret more bitter because nothing could be done about it.

  His offspring had touched the poison metal.

  Kworn turned his eye backwards. The artefact was shaking on its broad base from the violence of his offspring’s tortured writhings. As he watched a brilliant burst of light flared from its top. Heat swept across the land, searing the lichens and a scattered few of the Folk too slow to escape. The giant structure burned with a light more brilliant than the sun and left behind a great cloud of white vapor that hung on the air like the menacing cloud of a samshin. Beneath the cloud the land was bare save for a few twisted pieces o
f smoking metal.

  The roadblock was gone.

  KWORN moved slowly forward, gleaning Caada’s strip and half of his own which he shared with Varsi.

  He would need that young Ul in the future. It was well to place him under an obligation. The new thoughts and old memories weren’t dying. They remained, and were focused upon the idea of living better than at this subsistence level. It should be possible to grow lichens, and breed a more prolific type of lichen feeder. Water channeled from the canals would stimulate lichen growth a thousand-fold. And with a more abundant food supply, perhaps some of the Folk could be stimulated to think and apply ancient buried skills to circumvent Nature.

  It was theoretically possible. The new breed would have to be like Varsi, tough, driving and selfishly independent. In time they might inherit the world. Civilization could arise again. It was not impossible.

  His thoughts turned briefly back to the artefact. It still bothered him. He still knew far too little about it. It was a fascinating speculation to dream of what it might have been. At any rate, one thing was sure. It was not a structure of his race. If nothing else, those cabalistic markings on the side of the cylinder were utterly alien.

  Thoughtfully he traced them in the sand. What did they mean?

  1967

  A HAIR PERHAPS

  He had no weapons to fight the aliens—except a few million little ones he was born with!

  I

  The VTOL turned its propellers skyward and settled softly on its tail in the middle of the fifty-foot square of reinforced concrete that was the landing field of Friday Island.

  Major William Bruce crawled out of the rear cockpit and lowered his lean body to the concrete. He looked upward at die vertical sheer of the aircraft’s fuselage. He didn’t like VTOL’s, but except for a helicopter (whose range was too short) and a blimp (whose speed was too low) nothing else could land on this tiny spire of rock jutting out of the South Atlantic.