Worlds Enough and Time (34 page)

I told it that I did not want the responsibility.

It must be an individual. You may suggest another
.

I thought about that and said No, as well me as anyone. If this is a test, I have some talent for that.

The first thing we want you to do is simple. Stop them from killing us. You have one day
.

The tendril slid out of my head, trailing wetly on my brow for a moment. The creature disappeared, then reappeared with my robe and dropped it at my feet. It was stiff as cardstock, so cold it stuck to the skin of my fingers.

I would wait for it to thaw. There was a faint yellow light, three or four kilometers away, that I assumed was Hilltop, but I didn’t want to go crashing through the woods in the dark. Sunrise in an hour or so, and I had some thinking to do. Some feelings to get under control. I touched the icy fabric again, to reassure myself that this had really happened.

When the gown was as warm as it was going to get, I put it on, despite the clamminess, for protection against thorny twigs and vines. I started walking as soon as I could see individual trees, while I could still barely follow the yellow light. It did turn out to be Hilltop—not some floating spider shopping mall—but I bypassed it and went straight to my house. On the way, I shucked the damp gown and rinsed off in the swimming pool. Alien mucus, how picturesque.

After living with him for thirty-four long years and two short ones, I knew better than to wake Dan immediately. I heated some water and put a cup of coffee on the table next to him. I sipped on mine while waiting for the smell of it to work through to his subconscious and ring a quiet bell.

He grunted, rose on one elbow, nibbed his eyes. “What the hell time is it?”

“Later than you think, dear.” I laughed. “I just came from a meeting.”

Raleigh Dennison was infuriating. He didn’t deny that I had been “attacked” by one of the creatures, not out loud, though he did wonder why, this time, it didn’t pull any hair out. Doc Bishop went over my scalp with a magnifying glass and did find a tiny dot, but he couldn’t be sure that’s what it was without using the axial tomography equipment in orbit. He pointed out that I was due to go on the next shuttle, two days hence, as part of my regular schedule. I could come back with real proof.

“That will be too late. I’m not going anywhere, anyhow, until we change our policy toward the natives.”

That amused Dennison. “Natives! Like your American Indians.”

“Sure. It would be just like the Europeans and the socalled Indians all over again—if the Indians had nova bombs and short tempers.”

“Really.”

“Worse than that. As I said… any one of them can kill every one of us with very little effort. You don’t have any choice.”

“Ah, but I do. I do.” He looked around his office, with its sheet-metal walls, metal and plastic furniture, monitors instead of windows. The air was cooled and filtered and a ficus tree grew under an artificial light. It was a crude handmade caricature of his office in ’Home, and it spoke volumes. “I have three choices. Inaction comes to mind first. Second, hold off action until you have been properly examined.”

He swiveled to stare at me, seated slightly below his level, how subtle. “Actually, there are two more choices, even if I take what you have said at face value. I could tell everybody to put away their weapons and start treating the brain-eaters as the sentient, omnipotent creatures they are.
Or
I could see that you’ve been through a terrible experience that resulted in completely convincing hallucinations—”

“You can’t—”

“—and suggest that you seek help from the specialists in ’Home.
Strongly
suggest it.”

Dan spoke up from the corner where he was leaning, watching. “That’s ridiculous. She’s the sanest person in this room.”

“You’re not the best judge of that,” Dennison said.

I appealed to Bishop. “What do you think, Doctor? Can a person respond to physical trauma with a sequence of ‘completely convincing hallucinations’?”

Bishop started to speak, but Dennison interrupted. “Maybe not a normal person, but Dr. O’Hara is
not normal!
Her alien torturer supposedly made a big deal of that!”

“Alien torturer, come on—”

“And one very significant way she is not normal is a half-century of dependence on virtual reality machines. A dream world is natural to her.”

“That’s a stupid libel. I’m not dependent on VR or anything else.”

He leaned back with a smug smile. “I have access to ’Home’s dream room logs. You essentially had your own private machine for most of the time you were Entertainment Director. No one alive has logged even half the VR time you have. Can you deny that?”

“I have no reason to. Most of that use was job related. If I were addicted to the damned thing, why would I have worked so hard to be assigned down here, where there aren’t any of them? If I’m addicted, why haven’t I been bouncing off the walls for two years?”

“You go back to ’Home all the time,” he said. “I assume that you—”

“Assume away. Try to find one time I used the dream room in the past two years. You won’t.” I stood up and turned my back to him. “This isn’t productive. Dan, how long will it take to cook off the shuttle?”

“Thirty-four minutes.” He checked his watch and pushed a button. “We can rendezvous with ’Home in seventy-two minutes.”

“Let’s go.”

“I can’t authorize that,” Dennison said.

I turned around and planted both hands on his desk and leaned down. “Read the fine print, Raleigh. You’re temporarily in charge of this settlement, but you don’t outrank me. That shuttle belongs to ’Home, and on ’Home’s table of organization I’m a twelve, and you’re a ten. I’ll let you come along, if you want. You might want to talk to some people about a new job.”

He leaned away, almost comically. “Hold on, now. Let’s not be hasty.”

“We have eight hours to save the lives of everybody here and on Earth, and you don’t want to be hasty. We don’t have time for you.”

“All right, all right!” He put on a headset and asked it for Channel 12. “This is Dennison, anybody there?” He pushed a button and we heard the response through a desk speaker.

“Niels here. What’s up?”

“There’s been a… well, quite a complication. I want you to bring all units back immediately. Stop killing the creatures.”

“Easy enough. We haven’t even seen one since yesterday afternoon. I think they’re pretty smart.”

“Yes. They probably are.”

“We can be back before noon. Endit?”

“Endit.” He took off the headset. “Will that satisfy you?”

“For now, yes. Of course you’ll want to get the message to the other outposts, and put it on the day’s announcements here.”

“Of course. If you want, you can go tell Red Heliven how you want it worded. He should be in his office by now.”

“Okay.”

“Look. I’m sorry I was so short with you. But you know I’m… close to Katy Paz, and one of your damned things almost killed her last night.”

“The specimens she was guarding?”

He nodded. “One of them got out and started to choke her. She blacked out and woke up inside the damned cage. It was hours before somebody came by and released her.”

“How did she get in the cage? The thing didn’t carry her.”

“She didn’t say. She’s under sedation. The other one was in the cage with her all that time.”

“Did it try to attack her?”

“No, it never moved. The recording shows that it stayed in the, what you call it, vegetative state.”

“I hope nobody harmed it.”

“It’s under guard, armed guard. They won’t shoot unless it tries something.”

“I’ll talk to her when she wakes up. Maybe I could make her feel better about it. I don’t think it wanted to hurt anybody.”

“It hurt her.” He suddenly flinched. “Jesus!”

One of them had materialized behind me, floating at eye level. I wondered whether it was the one that had taken me to Earth. Or whether it made any difference which one it was. “Don’t do anything,” I said softly.

It spoke. Actually, it made a sound that can’t be described politely, like a modulated belch or fart. “O’Hara. Thank you for this thing. Dennison. Thank you for this thing.” It was forcing air through a slit between two tentacles. It slowly descended as it spoke, losing helium. It spilled swamp water onto Dennison’s floor and rose again.

“What do I do next?” I asked.

“This way is not enough. Let me into your head.” A pink tendril uncoiled toward me.

Daniel stepped forward. “Use me instead.” It didn’t surprise me that he would do that, but it made me proud. He would be a lot more afraid of it than I was.

“No,” the thing buzzed. “It has to be her.”

“It’s okay, Dan.” But it was worse when you could watch it happening. The wet thing felt its way through my hair, and there was a little pain as it removed the scab and a kind of pressure, like the onset of a sinus headache, as it slipped down into my brain. The room got blurry, but I realized it was just that I was looking through the creature’s skirt as it enveloped me.
Tell them we are going somewhere and will be back soon
. I did that and we fell through the floor, to the sloping metal ramp. Without being told, I walked forward until we passed through the resistance—

And stepped into a hall of monsters. Bipedal lizards with huge tyrannosaur heads, barracuda snouts with needlesharp fangs, black globes for eyes; three meters tall and slab muscle under gray wrinkled skin. They wore elaborate vests of metal links, some short, some reaching the ground, rattling as they moved, and they moved constantly, tails flowing in counterpoise, almost human hands gesturing as they growled. The near ones also made a noise like leather folding, creaking, and they smelled good, sweet and fresh like a baby’s hair. There were about thirty of them, and they all turned to look at me. Feel like a snack, O’Hara? Oh yes.

We were in a cave where dripping limestone had calcified into fantastic shapes, pink like melting flesh or the grayish white of exposed bone. Yellow flames flickered from a hundred oil lamps.

This is a sort of tribunal. When a case is morally peculiar, they enlist our help to bring in foreign advisors, to give them a different perspective. What you decide will not be binding, but will add to the sum of their deliberations
.

I asked what the moral problem was.

It has to do with familial responsibility. The female lays eggs in clusters, typically fifty to sixty at once, in pools of warm water. They do this only three times in their life. A male of their choice sprays the eggs with milt and then guards them until they hatch
.

It takes about thirty days for them to hatch. The male never leaves, never sleeps. It is physically difficult for him, but an honor that happens only a few times in his life
.

He eats about half of the eggs in order to stay alive, one per day. It is his responsibility to study the egg cluster, and cull the least active ones, so as to increase the probability that the ones that hatch will be strong, and survive
.

Eating the eggs is physically and spiritually revolting. Sometimes the eggs die, though, and that is much easier
.

In this case the male could not bring himself to eat. He starved for eleven days, and then removed fifteen of the eggs from the water. When they dried out and died, he ate them all. He was seen doing this, and does not deny it. Many males do encourage the egg to die before they eat it, although this is considered a venial sin, because the male’s suffering supposedly invests the remaining eggs with strength. Most males and some females consider this to be a meaningless superstition
.

But to devour fifteen dead eggs at once is unheard of. The male claims that he was irrational from hunger and a virus that affected his central nervous system. A healer confirmed the presence of the virus, but pointed out that he would not have been infected if he had been properly eating the eggs. It is well known that there is a protein in the eggs that strengthens the immune system, and watcher males who don’t eat them fall ill
.

The problem is further complicated because this is the female’s last brood, the brood expected to provide physical support for a female in her declining years. But they are physically incompetent, slow and feeble, all but five of them carried away by predators in their first year
.

I said that an obvious approach would be to require that the male support the female, or in some way guarantee her support.

This is not possible. The male agrees that he must die for his irresponsibility
.

I asked Why couldn’t he put off dying long enough to guarantee her support?

He must die while the guilt is fresh
.

I asked if it could tell me something about the nature of this support. I said that in most human societies, it would be a form of money, which the female would use for food, shelter, and protection.

This culture has evolved beyond the need for that particular abstraction. The support normally offered by the brood is physical: they take turns bringing her food and guarding her while she sleeps
.