Dark of the Woods

XII

Davis sat in the richly padded maroon easy chair behind the ornate desk which seemed very large and blocky and Comfortably solid before him but which was, by human standards, a mite too small to do business from. It had been a little more than two weeks now since he had awakened under the hand of the mechanical surgeon in the genetic chambers in the bottom floor of the subterranean fortress and had discovered that he no longer possessed the body of an Earthman, and still he continued to compare the sensations and the time-space judgments he made with those he would have made in the much different human shell he had been born with. More often than not, the Demosian body came out the winner in such comparisons, for it was more compact, more muscular, considering the fine tuning of what muscle it did possess, and quicker than the looming hulk of the old-Stauffer Davis.

He found that, unlike a man of Earth, a Demosian moved in a fluid, catlike manner so natural and rhythmical that he was not aware of his body in any conscious plane. He never tripped over a seam in the floor. He never bent to pick something up and found his stomach in his way. He never cracked head or hips against doorways, never fumbled something he was attempting to pick up. He was one with his environment, as a human could never be, and met and coped with it on a subconscious level that freed his mind for almost continual deep thought on the things he had learned in these past several days.

He turned off the tapeviewer on the desk, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes, letting his mind wander. The tape concerned the operation of the genetic wombs and the theories advanced to explain their inability to produce beings with serviceable brains inside their skulls. He still did not understand two-thirds of the technical language, but he was learning with the aid of sleep-teach machines that fed the data into his own brain at a hundred times the speed he could have learned it under normal classroom circumstances. The theory that most interested him was the one constructed by Dr. Mi'nella — who was now dead, slaughtered in the senseless Alliance takeover of Demos. Mi'nella believed that the problem with the mindlessness of the artificial men did not lie in. the genetic engineering at all, but, instead, in the time-ratio chamber where the untouched fetus was put and — in ten days subjective time — aged twenty years objectively. Thus, Mi'nella argued, they were producing twenty-year-olds with the minds of newborn babies and the sensory equipment of the adult body — which was sexually complete — the most devasting blew to the confused, blank mind was shorting out the seeking brain of the infant, bringing insanity in the first few moments of life outside the time-ratio chamber. Mi'nella wanted to work out a retooling of the process on the main computer in Fortress Two as soon as possible and see if the bugs could be ironed out of the time-ratio chambers or whether it was worthwhile to produce infant Demosians who could not be ready for battle for at least a dozen years.

The war had ended without Mi'nella being given that chance.

But the theory and the — if even slight — possibility of getting the Artificial Wombs working on a practical level fascinated and cheered Davis. He had come to feel, after the first couple of days of celebration at their escape and his resurrection, that it would be criminal for them to spend the rest of their lives in pursuit of pleasure within the vast complex while all the facility of the Demosian culture, all the knowledge and expertise, was here at hand in an easy-to-use form. The library was vast; the sleep-teachers could make them experts in any field overnight. Or, at least, overmonth. The machines that performed the miracle chores from genetic juggling to maintenance were the type that either responded to verbal commands or to keyboard instructions typed out in native Demosian tongues (which Davis learned the first week under the sleep-teachers). It seemed to him that all of this could be put to some use, though he was not certain what. The thought had passed through his mind that the two of them might take some form of revenge upon the Alliance — not only for the misery they had been put through, but in retaliation for the destruction of the millions of winged men and women who had died in the genocidal conflict.

On a simpler basis, he realized that if he and Leah were to have children, to raise them as a guerilla army against the Alliance control, they would have to form the fetuses in the Artificial Wombs, working with the basic chemicals of creation — for Leah was, after all, sterile.

The door to the study opened, a thick slab of wood that hummed away on power runners as Leah entered bearing a box of spools. She had been doing research in the tape library, looking up those subjects he wished to know more about, and she was the sort of clever and selective research aide every writer dreams about, never bringing him anything esoteric unless it was in some way illuminative of the major topic — in which case, he guessed, it wasn't esoteric at all.

“Success, I see.”

“A good bit of it. There are three other fortresses, just as I told you. It's all here. And this number two fortress you've been finding mention of, the one Mi'nella speaks about in conjunction with its computer, is the largest of the four. It makes this place look like a mole hole. There are 48 floors, each 450 feet long by 600 wide. The last 10 stories contain the main computer and an auxiliary node computer whose purpose is to extrapolate on scientific data discovered in the genetic engineering chambers and project possible research avenues a man might not think of.”

“We could use that lovely machine.”

“We can get to it,” she said.

“You have the location?”

“It's 86 miles from here, at the northern tip of this range, the third major mountain from the end. The other two fortresses are both over twelve hundred miles from here. We're fortunate it isn't one of those.”

“Eighty-six miles. Well, we know we can use the computer if the standard model we have here can't help us. That extrapolative node might very well be the turning point. But I want to learn everything here, first, before we move.”

“It's getting dark,” she said, holding out her hand.

It had become their custom to fly, together, when the last light of day was in the sky and the world was in that lovely stage that corresponded to half-undressed in a woman. He did not break that custom tonight, but joined her in the bubble of the lift that carried them smoothly toward the top of the mountain where a disguised observation nook had been built — which they used for a launching and landing platform.

That first night, when he had arisen from the couch of the mechanical surgeon, suffering from the emotional shock of finding himself in an alien body and knowing his own temporal shell was rotting in a grave, he had been unable to fly. He had spread the wings, done as she had told him to, but he could not lift himself, not even a foot. That had depressed him, on top of all else that had happened, and he had thought he would have to look forward to a future in which his body was perfectly capable of flight but his mind was too earthbound and hungup to allow it.

The next evening, she had persuaded him to go out again, after a great deal of urging and argument that Demosian children, after all, didn't fly from the moment of birth. Why, then, she wanted to know, did he expect to be any different? Sure, his was a grown Demosian body, but he was still a child in the sense that he had a great deal more to learn about the function of his new flesh. Reluctantly, feeling like a petulant child, he went with her.

It had been a clear night, with a pink-yellow sunset that spread questing fingers from the horizon to the middle of the sky.

He had grudgingly gone through the routine of “learning” how to fly again, positioning himself as she did, listening to what muscles should be-used, trying to use them — meeting with failure again. It was the most frustrating experience of his life, especially since she could do it so easily and he could only stand there, grunting comically and flapping his membranous appendages like sheets on the clothesline during the hurricane. He had vowed to give it up forever after this session, but was determined to stick it out now that he was here. She had said half an hour, and he had five minutes to go — and then he had suddenly moved the wings correctly, in time, smoothly, catching a gust of wind under them, ballooning them, lifting off the observation, deck. He had closed them swiftly, lest he should raise away from the landing area, thousands of feet above the ground, and find he could not repeat the performance.

But he had done it again and again until, at last, he took the last step, risked everything, and flapped off the side of the mountain, falling like a rock for a moment until his wings got air beneath them and he was soaring, gliding, a creature of the wind and sky as surely as Leah was.

Now, two weeks later, he still looked forward to flight as a child looked forward to the zoo. There was always something new to try, some stunt he had worked out in his head and had not, until now, had the guts to see if he could pull off. He wondered if he would ever grow weary of the sky and of his wings, decided that was about as likely as his ever getting tired of Leah — which was not very likely at all. Perhaps if he had been born with wings, he would have eventually come to take them for granted as an earthbound human comes to take his legs for granted after — for a brief few weeks — finding great joy in taking his first few steps as a babe. But being winged in middle-age, after a lifetime of walking the ground, negated any diminuation in the wonder effect.

But none of this was the meat of the nut, the real reason why he found himself so happy and contented in this new form, why he had been able to recover, so swiftly, from the shock of losing his body. At first, he had been worried that he was not being honest about the horror he must certainly feel over losing the old Stauffer Davis husk; he was certain that he was suppressing the disgust and terror, and that his subconscious mind would accept them and let them fester. Someday, he would pay for not being honest with himself now, he thought. But, day by day, he came to understand that he was being honest when he said he was happier with his new body than his old one and that he wished he had died sooner and been resurrected as a Demosian years ago. And he came to see that, down deep, being freed of the old physical shell had freed him, more than ever, from his mother and father. He was no longer their child. They would not — if they were alive and came to Demos — even recognize him. He could walk among them and be unknown. The form, the mannerisms, the tic in his left cheek they had given him — all these things had been sloughed away, and only the essence had been left: the mind which he had faithfully scrubbed of their hatred years ago and which Leah had helped him to free in these past months on Demos. He would no longer have to look in the mirror and see the long, thin, patrician nose that reminded him, always, of his mother — or the square, heavy jaw that was distinctly his father's. Yes, this was the seed of the blooming joy: that he no longer had even the slightest ties to those people he loathed so much, to that twisted and hate-filled couple who had conceived him.

The bubble of the elevator came to rest, and Leah thumbed for the doors to open. The fake rock partitions slid back, and they walked out onto the observation niche near the top of Tooth Mountain. The forests and peaks of Demos spread out before them, majestic in the multicolored light of the dust-filtered sun.

Spreading his arms (and his wings behind them), Davis dashed to the edge of the niche, leaped into space, and barely managed to get air under the thin membranes in time to avoid a collision with a long antigrav bus which was using its plates against the side of the mountain to negotiate high enough to give the passenger's inside a thrill. On the side of the vehicle was lettered PIKE'S WOLF HUNT TOUR. The men and women inside, dressed in hunter's camouflage and holding drinks, looked at him wide-eyed, as if he had materialized out of nowhere. He saw them look above, where Leah still stood on the niche, and he knew that their respite from the pursuit of the authorities had ended in one, short second when he had been too Stupid to look before leaping.