Wall Around a Star

SEVENTEEN

Living with the Kooks was more tedious than fright­ening, but it was frightening, too. There were at least ten of the giant glassy crabs, as well as countless smaller ones, down to the size of a quarter. The crabs seldom slept. There was never a time when one of the big ones was not near Jen Babylon. He thought of them as his guards; no other term fit them, although they presumably had other functions, too, since they could not have been stationed there simply on the chance that he might arrive. But they guarded him. If Babylon wandered too near an outside door, one of them scuttled between him and it. If Babylon got in the way of something that was going on, one of them warned him off, talking to him in that curious, tape- recorded manner of speech that they possessed, or simply rose up silently before him. Which was warning enough. He was never harmed, or even touched, but the message was clear. As a linguist, he could not help observing their strange speech patterns. Puzzling at first, they became clear in a burst of comprehension. The crabs simply copied words spoken to them! Somewhere, inside their arthropod bodies there was an information-processor not unlike a Pmal. The more language they heard, the more they could repeat and use. The larger ones spoke in almost normal vocabularies, though stiltedly; the smallest ones seemed to have to learn as they went along.

There were at least half a dozen human Kooks—if you could call them human! If they would stay still long enough to be counted! They were not kept prisoner in the apartment, like Babylon. They came and went freely on mysterious errands, and on some not so mysterious. Some of them left bearing little packets of what looked like dia­mond dust—he did not at first see where it came from— and returned hours later, if they returned, usually with shopping bags full of food, sometimes with what looked like simple trash scavenged at random. The scrap went into the bathtubs of the joined apartments—bits of iron, chunks of rock, shards of broken glass, odds and ends of unidenti­fiable debris. (So much for bathing! Which accounted, partly at least, for the way the human Kooks smelled.) The food became the diet for the humans in the apartments— weird mixtures of things like lettuce and honey, eels and carrots stewed together; the tastes were indescribable and sometimes awful, but the Kooks did not seem to care, and Babylon's complaints were laughed at. Or, more often, ig­nored. At odd intervals throughout the day an old- fashioned electric alarm clock would go off and the Kooks would stop whatever they were doing to prostrate them­selves, chanting, before the larger crabs—which seemed, if anything, amused, if you could be sure of detecting amuse­ment in a glass crustacean.

"Why can't I leave?" Babylon demanded, and Sheryl placed her hand over his.

"You aren't one of us," she said with tender reproach.

"I don't want to be one of you! I just want to go back to my life."

"We must all do what Cuckoo gives us to do," she told him seriously. "Let your soul open to the Savior and De­stroyer, Jen, hon! You will find such peace!"

He sighed. He had not been able to get a rational word out of her. "What I really want," he said bitterly, "outside of getting out of here, is a bath."

She laughed sweetly. "That's not possible just now, Jen."

"Then I want to go to sleep," he muttered.

"Of course! I, too. Come along, hon." And she led him into one of the bedrooms. There were twin beds, and each of them was occupied by two Kooks, lying on bare mat­tresses with an old army blanket pulled over them. There was a strange bulge in the middle of each bed. Sheryl leaned over the couple in the nearest bed and whispered softly to them. They woke instantly, smiling, and threw off the blanket. They rose from the bed, genuflected to the single crab that crouched on the dresser, and left the room. "Time for bed," Sheryl whispered tenderly. "Come on, Jen, hon!"

For a startled moment Babylon felt a quick priapic shock; but he had mistaken her meaning. This was no invi­tation to the sort of bedding they had shared so often be­fore. Even if she had wanted that—with the two other Kooks snorting gently in their sleep in the next bed and the glassy crab clattering softly as it stirred on the chest—there was an obstacle. The lump in the center of the bed revealed itself as a prim reminder of old New England. A bundling board! It was an old ironing board, really, with the legs snapped off; but as Sheryl got in on one side she propped it between them as she held the blanket for Babylon to climb in on the other.

"Good God," said Babylon, "is that thing necessary?"

"It's better to have it, hon," she whispered soothingly. "Hush, though! Please don't wake the others."

"Better how?" he demanded, but obediently lowering his voice as he slipped under the blanket.

She closed her eyes and spoke dreamily. "It is a symbol, hon. Sex is over. Reproduction is over. We are fulfilling our vow to Cuckoo the Savior and Destroyer."

"And what's the vow, exactly?"

She said with pride, "We are voluntarily becoming ex­tinct! When Cuckoo comes, the worlds awaiting him will be nice and clean—and empty! And, oh, what bliss for our Galaxy to serve him in such a way!"

When Jen awoke it was daybreak, and Sheryl was gone. Her place in the bed was taken by a short, dark man with a beard, snoring away. Babylon lay there, trying to reconcile the queer turn his life had taken with the almost as queer dreams that had disturbed his night—sexual dreams, with the smell of Sheryl in his nostrils; imprisonment dreams, perhaps sparked by his captivity, perhaps by the bundling board that kept him from his lover—or former lover, strange dreams of vacant worlds waiting a redeemer. He lay with his eyes tight shut, contemplating the dream world. They all had sensible roots in reality—all but one. What to make of that dream, so vivid, so frightening for reasons he could not identify, of a great jewel-studded chamber with glowing walls, where something terrible was happening?

He shook his head, opened his eyes, got up, and exam­ined what was for breakfast. It appeared to be a soup of uncleaned spinach and unshelled shrimp; he shuddered and turned away. He could not eat that, so early in the morn­ing.

Which left him with nothing to do at all. Sheryl was not in either of the apartments at that moment. None of the other Kooks seemed disposed to conversation. He prowled the rooms, dodging crystal crustaceans and flesh-and-blood Kooks with equal repugnance, and finally settled on a win­dow with bright morning sun coming in, where at least he could gaze on freedom.

Although the building Sheryl lived in was not very old, it was in Boston. Therefore it was preserved, though centu­ries past its prime. It looked out on the sort of backyard Boston tenements had had since the early days of electric­ity, rectangular plots, each with its postage-stamp square of grass and its scattered, sickly shrubs and its ailanthus tree. And, across the garden, ancient Irishtown flats, also pre­served. "Historical landmarks," they were called.

They were not beautiful. But Jen Babylon sighed, wiped his glasses and replaced them to stare at the buildings with longing. The roof of the nearest of them was no more than a meter from the little balcony outside the apartment win­dow. An easy jump . . .

An impossible jump. Impossible, because every square centimeter of that balcony was occupied. The entire floor surface was filled with crabs, small ones, torpid in the Bos­ton sun—such as the Boston sun was. But such as it was they seemed to need it. They spent every sunlit hour soak­ing up radiation. When the shadows shifted to darken the little balcony they would scratch and clatter their way back into the already crowded apartments to cluster around the electric heaters that were kept going day and night. Baby­lon found himself sweating and begged relief of one of the Kooks, without result. The gaunt old lady he addressed merely told him—very sweetly!—that this small discomfort was a tiny price to pay in die service of the Savior and Destroyer.

He tried again with Sheryl, when she came back into the apartment with one of those loads of miscellaneous trash, and she listened, vaguely sympathetic, but gave him the same patient answer. "But why?" he demanded. "Don't we smell bad enough already without making us sweat?"

She laughed sweetly. "It's for our brothers and sisters, the Lambs of the Maid," she explained, nodding lovingly toward the nearest of the crystal crabs. "They have to have thermal radiation to survive. That's why they were sent first to the tropics, where they do really well—here not so well," she said sadly. But then brightened. "But look, hon! I know you don't like our food, so I got you a special treat!" And she pulled out of the shopping sack a six-pack of peanut butter and cheese crackers.

He turned away—but then reconsidered and took it.

He could not even use the shower for relief, for the bath­tubs were filled with the dirty, debris-strewn water he was forbidden to disturb. So he stared longingly out of the win­dow most of the time, and pondered schemes. When all the crabs came inside for warmth . . . When, somehow, they forgot to lock the windows one time . . . When everyone was asleep at once . . .

But there were no such times.

Apart from that, he was fed when he needed it, allowed to talk to the human Kooks when he was inoffensive in what he said, given as much room to fall down in as any­one else . . . until the time when Sheryl answered a coded knock at the door of the smaller apartment, murmured briefly to someone inside, and then came to his window to call him. "Jen, hon! Come and see! We've got company!"

As he started to turn he hesitated, his eyes fixed on the rooftop next door.

A moment later he said, as calmly as he could with his heart thundering in his ears, "All right, Sheryl, I'm com­ing." And he resolutely did not look toward the window again, though it took all his strength to keep from smashing it open to shout at the figure he had barely glimpsed, peep­ing from behind a pigeon roost, with its fingers to its lips.

It had looked very much like Ben Pertin.

Sheryl's surprise was the Crystal Maid herself, the same one Babylon had seen on the beach at Moorea, and she was not alone.

She laid her hand on the shoulder of the giant who en­tered with her and spoke in slow, chiming tones, which sounded like snippets from an artificially generated speech program. "This man is to be . . . treated ... as a full and equal . . . comrade among us." She turned her dia­mond eyes on Babylon. "Why is this . . . person . . . here?" she demanded.

Sheryl apologized quickly, "He came looking for me, and I didn't know what else to do with him. He can't get away."

The Maid seemed to meditate for a moment. "I . . . know this person," she announced. She stared at him for a moment longer, then dismissed him. "He may remain. Now ... I wish to see . . . the Lambs!"

Babylon's eyes were studying the man who had come in with her. He was tall, bronzed, with wide shoulders; he towered over everyone else in the room, and Babylon rec­ognized him. Of course! He had seen that bronzed face on the news stereo often enough, had even seen him in person, with the other convicts at the Tachyon Base. Te'ehala Tu­paia! The mad revolutionary who had been captured while he was still in Polynesia!

Tupaia seemed to have come down in the world, for now he appeared to be a slave to the Crystal Maid. He came in burdened with shopping bags obviously strained to capac­ity. They proved to be full not of food but of sand, salt, pieces of scrap metal. A couple of the largest crabs reared up and took them from him, and Tupaia turned to look contemptuously at his surroundings and at Babylon.

The entrance of the Maid had produced a great stir, with all the humans abasing themselves to her and even the crabs seeming to genuflect briefly before taking the materi­als from Tupaia and clattering off to the bathrooms with them. When the Maid had completed her inspection, she summoned all the human Kooks to one room and closed the door, leaving Babylon with Tupaia and two great guardian crabs. The Polynesian paid no attention to them. He turned away from Babylon and found himself a plate of the greasy stew the occupants of the apartment had been preparing—lentils and salt pork, with what seemed to be turnip greens floating in it—and began to devour it.

Babylon approached him. "They haven't been feeding you much, have they?" he offered, staring at the gaunt cheeks.

The giant glowered at him for a moment without an­swering, but finally he shrugged and nodded, his mouth full. When he had stuffed a full kilo of the mess down his huge throat he was even willing to talk. Not out of friend­ship, surely; mostly out of disdain. Only when Babylon asked about the look he had intercepted in the Tachyon Base did he pause to laugh. "It is true," the giant said con­temptuously. "I was not as the others! I am Te'ehala Tu­paia, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Polynisie-libre, and not a common convict." Evidently, Babylon discovered as the giant boasted on, Tupaia's distant owner had either died or lost interest, and the slave had found himself free. But only relatively free. If he was not domi­nated by the master within his mind, he had remained a prisoner all the same—until in the confusion of the Kook demonstration at his hearing he had managed to break free. Since then he and the Crystal Maid had been running strange errands, skulking and hiding by night. The Maid, said Tupaia, for the first time subdued, seemed to have much manna.

Babylon coughed and ventured, "But do you, ah, believe in all this stuff about Cuckoo the Savior and Destroyer?"

Tupaia grimaced. "I do not invest belief in the doings of whiteskins," he said, and would say no more.

The conference in the bedroom was over, and Sheryl came out to supervise what the crabs were doing. Babylon followed, peering over her shoulder, and at last the purpose of those stagnating pools of trash and water in the bathtubs became clear. The crabs, with help from some of the Kooks, patiently fished out all the larger, undissolved bits of debris. Then, gently and carefully, they sieved out of the murky stew what seemed to be thousands of tiny new crabs! The larger ones carried the infants to the balcony and placed them in the sunlight, then refilled the tubs with the litter of rock and sand and metal and ran water to cover them.

Then, lining up like a students' queue at the registrar's office, the crabs did the strangest thing of all. One by one the largest ones came to Sheryl, who patiently began strok­ing their undersides—like a milkmaid, Babylon thought— catching in a bowl a fine rain of diamond dust from each. When she had finished her chore she packed some of the dust into little plastic bags and handed them to Tupaia, who silently stowed them away in the shabby shopping bags. The rest she sifted meticulously into the tubs. Then she rose from the side of the tub, sighing as she stretched her cramped leg muscles, and caught sight of Babylon gawking incredulously. "Oh, Jen, isn't it wonderful?" she said, glowing. "In just a few days there will be thousands of others to distribute around the city!"

"Thousands of, for God's sake, what?"

"Why, of Cuckoo's dear Lambs, of course," she ex­plained. "We hatch them here, because it's so unpleasant for them out in the open, this far north. Then we release them. Or the Maid spreads the seeds in the water—along the Charles, down by the Bay, in the park ponds, anywhere where there's water and sunlight and minerals to make their beautiful bodies. But there's not a lot of sunlight in Boston," she said regretfully. "So some of the poor darlings that try to grow in the river just don't make it. But the ones we grow here—ah, they're perfect!"

She patted Babylon's cheek gently, and then ran to an­swer a knock at the door. "Oh, you're here!" she cried joy­fully. It was one of the skinny, bearded, filthy Kooks, and he was incongruously carrying a box and packages from Filene's department store. Sheryl set them on a table and began opening them eagerly. For a moment she looked like the old Sheryl, thrilled with new clothes, excited by cosmet­ics. But it turned out the finery was not for her. Some of the clothes were a man's, in giant sizes, for Te'ehala Tu­paia. The rest were for the Crystal Maid, and so were all the cosmetics.

Sheryl caught sight of Babylon's gaze and shook her head ruefully. "Isn't it a pity to cover up that beautiful person?" she asked. "But she's so conspicuous, you see, and this way she'll be able to move around the city on Cuckoo's work without attracting so much attention. —Now excuse me, hon, but I'd better get to it!"

Pancake makeup, covered by blusher and powder; eye shadow and mascara; when Sheryl was finished the Crystal Maid was crystal no longer. She looked, if anything, like a bartop dancer in a Combat Zone honky-tonk—but at least she did not look like the alien creature she was. And she and Tupaia—now resplendent in conservative flamingo-pink tunic and slacks, with dark glasses and a jaunty be­ret—took up the sacks of demon seed and went out.

As soon as the door was closed, the tempo in the apart­ments slowed down appreciably. Sheryl slumped down on the shabby living-room armchair, exhausted. "Wow," she said, fanning herself, "it's so good to work so hard for Cuckoo!"

She paused in fanning herself and looked critically at Babylon. "What's the matter, hon?" she asked.

Babylon shifted position morosely. "Are you sure you know what you're doing, Sheryl?"

"Of course I do! Hon, I wish I could make you under­stand. They are the true inheritors of Cuckoo. Everything we do is for them and him!"

"You mean the crabs?"

"The Lambs of Cuckoo, hon," she corrected gently.

"Queer-looking lambs! And what about that criminal—is he a lamb, too?"

She shrugged patiently. "Mr. Tupaia is merely an instru­ment the Maid uses. He doesn't matter. Even the Maid doesn't matter, really—I mean, not in herself. She's merely an edited version of the Lambs herself, you know. De­signed to be able to move around more freely in human society than they could—although if it hadn't been for my idea about the makeup," she added proudly, "it wouldn't work so well! Apart from that, there's nothing for her here on dismal old Earth—not with the human race as rotten with disbelief as it is! Even ourselves, really," she added thoughtfully. "Sometimes I wish we were more worthy—"

The skinny old Kook with the beard standing near, came nearer still and scowled at her. "Fine talk!" he barked. "Are you weakening in your faith, Sheryl?"

"Of course not!" she flared. And then, repentantly, "But we all need to reinforce ourselves all the time, don't we? Come! Let's reconsecrate ourselves and worship!"

And she dragged Babylon down on his knees next to her, as she fell to the floor.

All around them the other Kooks were falling to an atti­tude of prayer, their faces enraptured. "Oh, glorious Cuck­oo!" Sheryl cried strongly. "Sacred redeemer! Heavenly visitor! Our Savior and Destroyer, we give you our worship and our love! Let your coming be soon—if it please you— and let us go content into the darkness eternal, fulfilled in the knowledge that we have made way for your coming—"

She didn't stop. She was interrupted. There was a sud­den peremptory banging at the door, and a man's voice from outside bawled hoarsely, "Militia! Open up! In the name of the law!"

But the police did not wait for their orders to be obeyed. There was a rending crash, and the door was battered down. In flooded a mass of armed men and women, thick clubs in their hands, flailing at the crabs that failed to get out of their way.

***

Babylon was the first one out, helped by a husky militia- woman, stumbling down the fire stairs and into the street. "You all right?" she demanded, and turned to race back into the building without waiting for an answer. Babylon turned, blinking in the afternoon sunlight. The street was filled. Half a dozen militia hovervans purred in the road­way, on the sidewalks, wherever they had come to rest, while curious onlookers laughed and pointed as, one by one, the Kooks were dragged through the doorway.

And Ben Pertin, grinning broadly, squeezed through the police lines and came up to him. "I thought it was about time we got you out of there," he said. "Don't thank me, Jen. I'm just paying back what I owe you."

Babylon said from the heart, "Well, I do thank you. I was going crazy in there."

"I figured," Pertin said modestly, and they paused as the militia led Sheryl, sobbing, into one of the vans. She caught Babylon's eye and turned away. For some reason she made him feel guilty.

"Too bad about your girlfriend," Pertin observed philo­sophically, "but I guess you'd have to say she brought it on herself."

"What will they do with her?"

"Oh, nothing too serious, I' guess—probably. Unless you want to press kidnaping charges?"

"No, no!"

"I didn't think so. But I could tell from the way you looked you didn't want to be there, and when I saw those damn animals all around you— Well. You probably want to know how I found you."

"I sure do."

Pertin's expression was filled with self-satisfaction. "I went to the university to talk to you about . . . some­thing." He hesitated. "Well, to tell you that things weren't working out for me. I found they're pretty worried about you. Especially that little girl, Althea. The cute grad­uate student? Anyway, she told me you'd been talking about Sheryl, so I came to take a look, and I listened at the door, and then I thought I'd better reconnoiter a little be­fore I knocked and maybe got grabbed myself!" He stepped aside, wrinkling his nose as the dirty old man with the beard came out, swearing furiously at the militiaman holding him- "I had a little trouble at first getting the mili­tia to act," he complained, "but of course they don't like Kooks. Or those crabs, either. They wouldn't accept my theory you'd been kidnaped, but after a while they figured out a crime that had been committed." He grinned. "'Keeping dangerous animals in a populated area,' it's called. That was all they needed." He paused, and added, "She's real pretty, isn't she?"

"Who, Althea? I thought Zara Doy Gentry was the only woman who interested you in the whole Galaxy!"

Ben looked shamefaced. "Aw—I went to see her, but she just laughed me off. Hell with her. Now, that Althea—"

For the first time in days, Babylon laughed out loud. "Spare me," he said, turning to watch the militia as they came out with body bags made of tough netting, each one containing the squirming, clattering body of one of the larger crabs. Two others were staggering with a huge sack containing scores of the smaller ones. Babylon wondered what they would do with the creatures and, queerly, almost felt concern. After all, the crabs had not actually hurt him. Or anyone else, as far as he knew; they had not even de­fended themselves against the clubs of the militia, simply tried to get out of the way.

Babylon said, "Well, thanks again, Ben. I guess I'd bet­ter get back to the school to set their minds at ease. And I wanted—I mean, that other 'I' on Cuckoo wanted—some linguistic data from me. He's probably—that is, I'm proba­bly—getting pretty impatient."

Pertin's expression was suddenly tense. "Oh, of course," he said. "You couldn't know what's happened."

"What?"

Pertin shook his head fretfully. "God knows," he said moodily. "But Tachyon Base announced that all communi­cation with Cuckoo has been cut. Terminated. The fault's at the originating station. No signals are coming in. The orbiter may have been destroyed, Jen, and what's become of the you and the me that's there, I can't even guess."

"I wish—" Babylon began, but what he wished was drowned out by a hissing, chittering sound that sprang from nowhere, seemed to come from everywhere, grew in volume—and then abruptly cut off. The human voice of one of the militiamen rose in the silence:

"The crabs! They're having a fit!"

It was the crabs—all of them—but it wasn't just the crabs. The human voices of the Kooks in custody had risen in hysteria, in the same way, and in the same way cut off. Babylon and Pertin were surrounded by stacked crabs in their mesh body bags, all writhing spasmodically, convul­sively—and then, all at once, they stopped, rigid in tetanic spasm.

There was silence. Then Babylon said wonderingly, "What was that all about?"

But Pertin was pointing at the hovervan Sheryl had been taken into. She was pressed against the bars, rapt, arms outflung, eyes to the sky. She held that painful, precarious pose for a long moment.

Then she shouted something unintelligible.

Pertin and Babylon looked at each other questioningly, then Babylon shook his head. "I didn't understand," he be­gan to say; and then Sheryl repeated it, louder than before and clearer:

"HE is waking!"