Beastchild

Chapter Four

As Hulann drove, he allowed his mind to wander, for a deluge of memories seemed the only present manner of assauging his depression. Therefore, he raised up a monolith of the past and walled off the recent events, then studied the brickwork of his partition.

He had met his first human while aboard the naoli ship Tagasa which had been of the private fleet of the central committee. He had been a guest of the government, a writer of creative history then. The Tagasa had been en-route from the home worlds to a series of outlying colony planets in the Nucio System. The rich background of the Nucio colonies had been obvious material for a series of tapebook adventures, and Hulann had been quick to take the chance to investigate the worlds first-hand.

The Tagasa had been in port on the world called Dala, a place of vegetation and no animals. He had returned to his cabin after a day of exploration of the surrounding jungle. He had seen the snake vines which moved almost as fast as a man could walk, slipping oily over each other and the trees on which they grew, pollinating the flowers that grew on the bark of some of the larger pines. He had seen the plants which ate other plants (and which impolitely spat out his finger when, at the urging of his guide, he had stuffed it into the pulpy orifice). He saw the breathing plants with their baggy, lunglike flowers, busy spewing out carbon dioxide to continue the cycle that had started here eons earlier.

"An incredibly old culture," his guide had said. "To have evolved plant life this far."

"No animals at all?" he asked.

"None. They've found a few insects, little mites, that live between the outer and second layer of bark on the red-top trees."

"Ah…"

"But there's a question about those two. Seems the boys working on them in the labs have found traces of chlorophyll in them."

"You mean — "

"Plants too. Looking quite like insects. Mobile. Able to suck up nutriment from other plants and move about like animals."

The guide — an elderly naoli with a jewelry affectation: he wore a raw iris stone around his neck on a wood bead necklace — had shown him more. The Quick Ferns, for instance. Cute little, frilly, green things, lush and vibrant, swaying briskly under the slightest breath. They lined the forest floor, the shortest growth, a carpet beneath all else. As he watched, they grew, pushed up new plants, spread their feathery leaves — then grew brown, blackened, collapsed, gave off a puff of spores, and were gone. In a place where there was no animal feces, no animal decay, the vegetation had come to rely on its own death to give it life. For so much life — there was a wild, thick sprawl of growing things unlike anything he had ever seen before — a great deal of fertilizer was required. It was natural, then, that the Quick Ferns should have a total life span, from spore germination to death of the plant and ejection of the next spore cycle of fourteen minutes. At the end of each summer on Dala, there was a five foot layer of thick, black organic material lying on, the forest floor. By the following spring, it was decomposed, gone, and the Quick Ferns began their job again.

"No animals at all," he said to the guide, still amazed at the society of this primitive world.

"Not now," the guide replied, chuckling.

"What's that?"

"I said, not now. There used to be."

"How do you know?"

"They've found the fossils," he said, fingering the stone hanging about his withered neck. "Thousands of them. Not any that might have been possessed by intelligent creatures. Primitive animals. Some small dinosaurs."

"What happened to them?" Hulann asked, fascinated.

The old naoli waved his arms around at the jungle. "The plants happened to them. That's what. The plants just developed a little faster. They think the animals were a slow lot. When the first ambulent plants arrived on the scene, they ate flesh."

Hulann shivered.

The forest seemed to close in on him, to grow from just a pleasant patch of trees to something malevolent and purposeful. He felt himself backing away toward their shuttlecraft, stopped himself, and chided himself for his youthful superstition. "Yet now the plants are finally subservient to animals. To us."

"Wouldn't be so certain," the old man said. He pulled on the iris stone. The warmth of his gnarled hand made the black and green gem pulsate, the green iris growing larger and smaller with the changes in temperature.

"How so?"

"The plants are trying to adapt to us. Hunting a way to do us in."

Hulann shivered. "Now you're talking the kind of superstition I just got finished scolding myself for."

"It's not superstition. Couple of years ago, the first Concrete Vines showed up."

"They — "

"Yeah. Eat concrete. The wall of the central administration building fell in. Killed a hundred and some. Roof collapsed under the stress. Later, they found a funny thing. They found these vines, only as big around as the tip of your tail, honeycombing the wall. They had come in from the forest edge, growing underground until they reached the wall. Then they grew upwards until they had weakened it. Ate the insides out of that wall. After a few more cases like that, we started building with plastics ant plastic metals." He laughed an ancient, dry cough of a laugh. "But I suppose we'll be seeing some Plastic Vines before long. The jungle has had time to work it out, I guess."

Hulann had gone back to the Tagasa with a brooding idea for a speculative fiction work about what might happen on Dala when the plants finally launched a successful attack against the naoli colonists. The book had been a critical and financial success. Twenty-one million cartridges had been sold. Forty-six years after publication, the plants of Dala launched a successful revolt.

He had been making notes into his recorder about his day with the guide when a messenger had come from the captain's quarters with a private note that he did not want sent over the Phasersystem. It was a simple request to come to meet a few humans who had come to Dala to argue various trade contracts and whom the captain had requested aboard.

Hulann, having seen only seven of the eleven races (some are quite hermetic) and never having seen a human, was more than eager to comply with the request. Too, humans were the novelty of the many worlds, having only appeared in galactic society some twenty years earlier.

He had gone to the captain's quarters highly excited, unable to control the dilation of his primary nostrils, or the faint quivering of his interior eyelids. In the end, he had come away disappointed — and more than a little frightened.

The humans were cold, efficient men who seemed to have little time for pleasantries. Oh, they made all the gestures and did some customary small talk in broken naoli home-world tongue to prove their desire for cooperation. But the pleasantries ended there. They constantly steered the conversation back onto business topics whenever it strayed for more than a moment or two. They only smiled — never laughed. Perhaps it was this last quality which made them, in the final analysis, so terrifying. When those solid, phony grins were summoned to cover their faces, Hulann had wondered what laid behind the facade.

At first, this difficulty was deemed natural. None of the other races had been easily understood. It had taken as much as fifty years to break down the cultural lines and begin meaningful communications and day-to-day relationships. The naoli expected it would take at least as long with the humans.

Fifty years came and went. The humans moved farther into the galaxy, spreading out, founding colonies on unclaimed worlds (only the naoli, the glimm, the sardonia, and the jacksters wanted to compete for oxy-nitrogen planets; the other races considered such places at least undesirable, and at worst intolerable). Their rate of expansion into the many-peopled stars was slow by some standards, but the humans explained that they had their own method of pioneering. It was a not-so-polite way of telling everyone else to mind their business.

Fifty years came and went, and the humans that the naoli — and the other races — saw were still as withdrawn, cool, and unfriendly as ever. By the end of the second fifty years, various disputes arose between the naoli and the humans over trade routes and colony claims and half a hundred other things more petty. In not one case, could the races reach agreement. The humans began to settle many problems by force, the most expedient route — and the most illegal in the eyes of the naoli.

Eventually: the war.

It was not necessary to convince Hulann that the war was essential to the naoli's survival. He had always carried with him the memory of those humans on the Tagasa, the strange, smooth-skinned, hairy creatures with the brooding eyes and the quiet, solemn faces that argued for a shrewd and wicked mind within their skulls.

Long ago.

And this was the Here and Now. And Leo was beside him, sleeping, curled feotally. Why was the boy different? Why was the boy easy to reach? This was, as far as he knew, the first instance of intercommunication between naoli and man in the hundred and eighty years of their acquaintance. It went against all that was known of humans. Yet, here they were.

He abruptly broke his train of thought. It was leading him back through the events of the last two days, and he did not want to be plagued with those things again.

He blinked his large eyes and looked carefully through the wet glass at the road and the landscape around it. If anything, it was snowing harder now than when they had left Boston. Long, almost impenetrable walls of snow swirled by on both sides while the craft knifed between them, kicked up an even whiter inferno behind as its own draughts stirred the fluff on the road surface. The markers at the edges of the throughway were drifted over here and there. Elsewhere, just their orange, phosphorescent caps peaked out. The direction signs suspended overhead were collecting a film of the hard driven snow, becoming increasingly difficult to read.

If the storm grew worse and the drifts covered the roadbed, they would founder. A shuttlecraft could cross snow — as long as it was light enough to blow out of the way and give the down-draught a clear blow surface on the roadbed. Hard-packed drifts created an uneven surface, which invariably led to disaster.

Near Warren, in the human province of Pennsylvania, moving at a hundred and ninety miles an hour toward the province of Ohio, disaster stopped waiting and leapt at them.

Hulann was squinting through the snow, paying strict attention to the highway in order to keep his mind off things he would rather not ponder. It was this extra attentiveness that saved their lives. Had he been lax, he would not have seen the glow of the crater.

He made out a light, green flickering between the sheets of white that whirled by him. Then, through a part in the curtain of the storm, a brilliant ripple of emerald fire shot out into the distance.

He braked, fought the wheel to keep the tilted blowers from carrying them toward the guardrails and into the fields beyond.

The blades whined, ground as if tearing through metal grit. The shuttle bumped, started a spin. They were going backwards now toward the shimmering green fire.

Then they were around, had swung an entire three hundred and sixty degrees.

He steadied them.

The speedometer read fifty miles an hour. The edge of the crater was only a few hundred yards away. He could see the great black depression, the sheets of energy shimmering and exploding across its vast length.

He pushed the brake into the floor, stomped and stomped it like a madman. The engine stalled. The blades clattered to a halt. He braced himself for the impact to come.

The rubber rim of the shuttlecraft sloughed into the ground as they dropped (now without an air cushion under them) onto the road. The craft bucked, leaped, came down hard again. Hulann was thrown forward, had the air knocked out of him as he struck the controls with his chest.

Then they were sliding. There was a jolt as the rubber cushion rim began to rip free. He saw a great snake of it spiral into the air and fall away behind them. The bare metal grazed the road, sent up sparks of yellow and blue.

The craft listed, then righted, turning sideways.

And then, they were still.

Hulann sat, his head bent over the wheel, taking in heavy loads of air which felt good in his lungs. It could have been the stalest, most polluted air in the galaxy, and yet it would have been a treasure to him. For, had they slid another fifteen feet, he would never have breathed again. That close, the rim of the crater gleamed with its jeweled flames "That was close," Leo said from his nook next to the far door.

Hulann sat up. "Very. Perhaps you don't know how close."

The boy leaned forward and stared out the window at the seemingly endless expanse of the crater. He watched it making its lights for a while, then asked, "What is it?" "Come," Hulann said. "I'll show you."

They got out of the car and hunched against the power of the winter night. Winter morning, now. Leo followed the naoli to the edge of the depression, stood with him, staring across the nothingness.

"What did it? What exploded?"

"One of our weapons," Hulann said. "Although it was not quite what you would call an 'explosion'."

Leo stepped closer to the crater and cocked his head, pushed his long, blond hair away from his ears. "What's that noise?"

There was a faint hissing noise, now and then a grumble like the first stirrings of a volcano.

"That's part of it," Hulann said. "It wasn't a bomb really. Not as you're thinking of a bomb. All along your ' Great Lakes, there was, at the start of the war, a vast complex of factories, robo-factories producing the vast quantities of materials needed to wage a galactic battle. Not only was ore mined from your own world, but brought from your moon, from the asteroid belts of your solar system. It was a formidable complex. The easiest way to wipe it out was to drop a few conversion cannisters on it."

"I don't understand," Leo said. "We weren't told the Lake production centers had been hit."

"Only seven years ago. It was the final blow. Otherwise, the planet would have held us off incredibly long."

"You said 'conversion cannisters'?"

The constant sheet of green fires that played across the crater from rim, up and down, zig-zagging, puffing like balls of burning gas, now flashed through with a faint streak of purple that caught their attention and held it for some minutes.

"Conversion cannisters," Hulann continued, "contain one of the most virulent bacterial lifeforms in the known universe. The bacteria are capable of attacking certain forms of matter and converting them to energy. In the labs, various strains have been developed, some of which will attack only fixed nitrogen, others which will convert only iron, others for calcium, lead, on and on for as many elements and types of elements as there are."

"The hissing — "

"Is the conversion of matter taking place. The variety of strains included in the cannisters dropped here during attack, only the elements in your chief building supplies — and in the average sample of your topsoil for this area of the earth. The bacteria will convert everything in its path, convert it to a slowly-leaked form of energy rather than explosions of the atomic sort, down until it hits bedrock which it is not equipped to devour, and onward until it reaches water or some other 'indigestible' barrier."

"And the green light is the only result?" Leo asked, stepping back as the edge of the pit came almost imperceptibly closer.

"No. The green light energy is what we can see. Above your range of audio reception — even above mine — there is a great deal of sound energy generated. Also, there is an enormous amount of energy consumed by the bacteria themselves to enable them to continue their conversions and to reproduce at the rate the lab men set for them."

"And it'll go on until there's nothing left?"

"No. We don't want to destroy a world. Within a few days, a special naoli team will arrive to begin antibacterial work to halt the progress of the crater and destroy the mites."

"But the air will carry them," Leo protested.

"No. Such catastrophes have been guarded against. The bacteria are designed to anchor themselves to whatever elemental molecules they are bred to attack. Thus, a wind would have to blow away the entire linkage of ferrous trace elements in an area to also spread the iron-eating bacteria. And if a bacteria cannot find, within moments, any of its particular 'tropic' substance to latch on to, it dies. There are all sorts of built-in protections."

"Why not a series of nuclears to wipe out the Lake complex?"

Hulann shook his head. "Nuclears cannot damage well-shielded underground establishments. The bacteria can — by dissolving the earth that covers them, then converting the very structural materials of the installations."

They watched the pit, the shimmering, glimmering flames. Faint heat waves rolled over them and kept the snow melted around the perimeter of the hole. If they strained their ears, they could hear the sound of the energy of conversion being released far up the scale of vibrations.

"We didn't really have a chance against you," Leo said at last.

Green erupted, staining their faces.

"No," Hulann agreed.

Leo went back to the car. Hulann followed.

"Will it still fly?" Leo asked.

Hulann bent and inspected the bottom of the craft. There was almost nothing remaining of the heavy rubber cushion rim. The metal frame was bent and ripped, but not so severely that it would push in against the blades in the recessed undercarriage. If there still were any blades under there. He looked back on the snowy highway but could not see any large dark objects that might be shafts or rotars.

"Let's see," he said.

The engine coughed, but turned over. They rose on the wind of the blades, though there was a steady vibration that gently rattled the frame. "Well, it runs," Hulann said. "But where do we go from here? The road ends, as you see."

"Over the median," Leo said. "On back to the next exit. We'll just have to take secondary roads until we're past the crater and can get back on the good beater surface of the throughway."

Hulann took the shuttlecraft over the concrete bump in the center of the highway, wheeled the craft around and started back, looking for a way off the useless expressway — a way that would take them west where they wished to go.

The Hunter will soon be awakened.

The Hunter will rise up in his glory and take upon him the robes of his power.

The Hunter will seek.

Before, there has always been success.

The Hunter was born to hunt, as his prey was born to be brought down at his desire.

They made much poorer time on the secondary roads than they had on the highways where the beater surface was solid and flat. Here, the pavement had been originally designed for wheeled vehicles, which made it far too uneven and twisted to offer much to a shuttlecraft. Besides, they were moving into the mountains near' the end of the Pennsylvania line where the weather, if anything, was more fierce than before.

The wind had picked up a few notches, battered the already beaten craft until the shuddering of the wounded mechanical beast grew severe enough to shatter one of the two round ports on the rear, behind the luggage shelf. Glass imploded, spun throughout the cabin. A piece of it caught Leo on the cheek, drew blood. Other pieces stuck in Hulann's flesh but not deep enough to cause him pain or to make him bleed.

Hulann maintained a low blade revolution count in order to hug the road and avoid the draughts that were much stronger even a few feet farther up. Sudden rises in the pavement gave them hair-raising moments as Hulann fought to go around them — or increase the rotar speed and go over them — to keep from sheering off the blades.

Then there was the snow. There seemed to be half a dozen inches of it now, and the steadiness with which it fell indicated no soon end to the storm. The biting wind — now whistling and howling through the shattered rear port and leeching out their cabin heat-piled the white stuff into every nook and crevice, stacked it against every outcropping of stone, layer on layer until it backed up across the highway, thick, cold fingers packing hard and making progress on air cushion even more difficult. Un-drifted snow was light and flushed away under the blades. But the wind-packed stuff was solid as ice, would not blow away, and gave Hulann trouble with his machine.

"How much can it snow here?" he asked Leo as they flitted up the side of a mountain which should have been tunneled through. He was amazed at the impracticality.

"Maybe a foot. Two feet is not unusual."

"Two feet!"

"Like you and me."

"That's impossible!"

"You don't have snow on your world?"

"Not that much!"

"Wait," the boy said, smiling.

He waited.

The snow continued. Mounted. Blew. Drifted. The shuttlecraft slowed and slowed until he could not drop their forward speed any further. It was maddening to realize there were forces behind which would soon be after them and that they could only crawl along at under ten miles an hour. The only consolation Hulann could find was the realization that those chasing them would also have to move slowly. Then that consolation was ruined too. The Hunter — would the Hunter be turned loose on them? It seemed likely although the situation would be unique — would wait until the storm had ended, then come by air, in a helicopter.

They rounded a bend in the road near the top of the mountain, were confronted by a wall of packed snow four feet high, stretching across from the road bank of their right to the precipice on their left. Hulann braked, but not fast enough. The shuttlecraft bumped into the drift at seven miles an hour and wedged the first few feet of itself into the smooth, wind-polished whiteness.

"Stuck," Leo said knowledgeably.

"We have nothing to dig with. I'll have to manuever."

Leo braced himself, feet against the dash, back pressed into the seat. Hulann laughed. "Ready," Leo said.

Hulann fed power to the blades, and kicked the side jets into reverse, The craft lurched but held fast. He eased down on the accelerator until it was almost floored. The blades chewed at the snow that packed the front section of them, seemed only to lodge themselves more firmly.

He eased off on the pedal until the blades whirred softly, then tramped it down hard. The shuttle started like an animal, wiggled. He eased up, slammed down again. The craft jolted free and swept backwards, sliding sideways toward the guardrails and the long, deadly embankment.

Hulann let up on the pedal, but too quickly as… … the engine died and the blades choked and he no longer had control of his machine.

They struck the rails, tilted, went over.

The car hung there, caught on some projection, teetering. Then it fell.

Glass shattered.

And they were rolling down, down.