Gods of the Greataway (14 page)

Yet the artist had no model. He was an Everling. In over twenty-six thousand years of exile on the People Planet, he had seen no True Human woman apart from Selena. He had painted the same girl, over and over again, several hundred times. Selena looked at the picture. She’d always wondered who this mystery girl was; now, for the first time, she could see something familiar in that pretty face. She decided she must visit Joe, the artist, as soon as possible. The Everlings’ latest creative cycle was coming to an end, and she was looking forward to seeing Joe’s latest portrait. In the past, each one had been slightly different from the last, slightly improved, as though a real character was forming behind the pigments. The last SHE was a perfect work of art. Could Joe possibly have improved on it?

She would have
to see him soon, because each of the Everlings’ thirty-year cycles of creative activity was terminated by an orgy of destruction. She must save SHE from the fate of all the other artwork. They were a curious race, the Everlings.

*

Indeed, everything about the People Planet would seem curious to a visitor from Earth. It was a rain-sodden world with just one island large enough to support life, where creatures of various types lived.

Of the Second Species of Man — those who called themselves True Humans — there were only two: Selena and Mentor.

Of the Third Species, the animal-people created long ago in the laboratories of Mordecai N. Whirst, there were many.

Of the Fourth Species, the neotenites, there was a fluctuating number. They were produced at regular intervals — and just as regularly shipped off to Earth for recycling, because rules concerning births and deaths were very rigid on the People Planet. If a count were not strictly kept, the Specialists would be smuggling them into their homes and raising them.

Of the Sixth Species, the Everlings, there were eighty-three.

And finally there was the creature that the Specialists lived to serve. Hua-hi was its name, and it was a giant aquatic mammal created by the kikihuahuas. It was a gift to Mankind from those tiny, kindly aliens, designed for the complex needs of the breeding program.

*

There
was a time, before the moment of our story, when certain humans became skeptical about the integrity of the kikihuahuas. Here were these aliens (they said) who were reputed to be totally good, who never killed a living creature, who existed only to help others, who never even used metal or fire or any other sharp cruel element; instead, who gently created other animals to help them — from the Space-bats, with their thousand-kilometer wingspan, to the tiny sapas that wove cloth for the beautiful Ana.

“So how can you create new life-forms,” the skeptics asked, “without vats and tubes and generators and wires? Even the great Mordecai N. Whirst, who created the Specialists, needed vats.”

The answer, as humans eventually discovered, lay in the Beast with Two Mouths, which the kikihuahuas called the Hua-hi.

Before human history began, the Hua-hi was a terrified little running animal on a world called Ach. The Hua-hi had many enemies, but it also was a predator in its own right and chased and ate creatures smaller and weaker than itself, which likewise hunted smaller creatures still. There were no plants on Ach, and at the bottom of the food chain sat tiny flightless mosquitoes, carpeting the ground and drawing nourishment from the soil through threadlike probes.

By the time the kikihuahuas arrived on Ach, there were seventy-two basic species of predator, evolved through the ages, and one oddity, the Hua-hi. The Hua-hi had not evolved by natural selection. Instead, it absorbed the best survival characteristics of its prey and passed them on to its young. At first the kikihuahuas thought that the fifty or so varieties of Huahi were different species, because they were so disparate in size, appearance and behavior. Only years of observation enabled them to distinguish true, evolved creatures from Hua-hi imitations, and to realize that the Hua-hi, dissimilar though individuals might be, was a single asexual species.

When
a Hua-hi killed its prey, it ate most of it in the normal manner. But a small part was ingested through a separate orifice, the maga. The tissues were broken down and analyzed, and their best genetic survival characteristics were stored until a Hua-hi decided it was time to give birth. Then they were used, and each child of a Hua-hi emerged a different creature from its parent.

The kikihuahuas found that the Hua-hi was well on the way to becoming the dominant predator on Ach, because it was gaining the ability to kill animals larger than itself, and even to prey on its own species — a habit that gave it the prospect of achieving almost infinite savagery. The kikihuahuas, kindly creatures, shivered …

But later, when the kikihuahuas began to develop their Examples and to shun the use of fire and metal, they remembered the Hua-hi. They brought a Hua-hi into their society and showed it their ways, meanwhile keeping it safely confined. In due course a heroic kikihuahua called Ahia sacrificed himself to the Hua-hi, which then produced an intelligent and gentle offspring and died.

To the Hua-hi’s offspring they brought another creature, a telepathic bat-thing called Sa. With Sa as a medium, they set up scenarios in the Hua-hi’s imagination: mind-pictures of the Greataway and of other worlds, and of the needs of the kikihuahuas. The Hua-hi would go into a trance while it “believed” the scenario, whereupon the kikihuahuas would feed it selections of desirable genetic material.

Thus the Hua-hi was persuaded that the creation of certain life-forms — those the kikihuahuas wanted it to create — was essential to the survival of its species. Sometimes a growth factor was added; in this manner the Space-bats and the beacon hydras were created. When the Hua-hi began to age, it was easily persuaded that death was undesirable, so it produced an immortal duplicate of itself.

The telepathic Sa lived and died, but the Hua-hi lived on, helping the kikihuahuas to fulfill their Examples. Sometime around the 110th millennium Cyclic, when Earth appealed for help in its breeding program, the kikihuahuas produced a Huahi suitable for the People Planet. Then they drifed off into the Greataway in their Space-bats, immune from the Hate Bombs because of the physical nature of their travel. By the time the Cuidadors discovered that their human genetic material
was imperfect, it was too late to recall the kikihuahuas.

T
hey
say you were disgraced,” said Alice the next day. “Is it true?”

“It’s true,” muttered Brutus, examining the birth tubes of the ocean cow where they projected through the thick transparent wall of the delivery room. On the other side he could see the hide of the vast creature itself, stirring slightly with the waves as it lolled on the continental shelf.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were trying to save the lives of those babies? I’m your wife, aren’t I? Do you think I wouldn’t have approved?”

Brutus sighed and faced this woman of surpassing ugliness with whom he spent his days and nights. “I didn’t want to involve you. It’s been going on for generations — my father and his father. It’s a man’s problem. A man’s secret.”

“Mordecai!” Alice roared, her voice carrying to the far reaches of the chamber and causing distant dolphin-people to look up from their work. “Only men could be such fools! Don’t you realize every Specialist on the People Planet would have been behind you, male or female? Don’t you know how our people feel? Don’t you understand how we prize children — we, above all other humans!”

“It’s our code.”

“It’s more than our code! It’s in our genes and it’s in our laws, and in the True Human laws, too. Why do you think the True Humans restrict our ability to have children, Brutus?”

“Well, to
keep the population down, of course. We’re hardly self-supporting. Most of our food is shipped up from Earth.”

“That just shows how much you know. They curb our own natural instincts so we’ll have more time for
their
children, don’t you see? The whole Specialist population on this planet is conditioned to love True Human children, Brutus. You can’t be blamed for what you did. True Humans made you that way!”

Brutus sighed again. Three of the birth tubes were swollen and pink-tipped, signifying the imminent arrival of babies. Behind the wall the ocean cow pulsed with muscular contractions, green-grey and immense, longer than the half kilometer–long window.

“We’ve been through all this before,” he said.

“Well, you’re going to hear a lot more. The people are furious, and there was a meeting this morning. They say the True Humans have disgraced us all by reprimanding you. Any one of us would have done what you did. We’re going to be taking some action, Brutus, believe me!”

“I hope not,” said Brutus quietly.

He was saved further discussion by the arrival of a baby. Outside the window, a birth tube thickened suddenly and a bell rang. They hurried down the chamber, and Alice, with surprising gentleness in one of such ferocious appearance, took the tube, which more than anything resembled a green elephant’s trunk, in her hands. Rippling contractions convulsed it as the bulge moved through a grommet where the tube passed through the window. Alice gripped the end of the tube tightly, so that it would not damage itself lashing about. Other Specialists arrived at a run: raccoon-nurses and delphids, pushing trolleys. Rhythmically thrusting, the tube pushed the bulge toward Alice’s hands. A nurse was murmuring a ritual prayer.

The baby was born.

It was a tiny sexless human, but whether it was a True Human or destined to become a neotenite, only time would tell. It lay in Alice’s huge hands, coughed, and cried. There was no umbilical cord, no blood. By human count, it was already two weeks old. Selena would give it a sex if it was True Human — which was very unlikely.

“Good luck,
little one,” said Alice, laying it gently on a trolley.

Then she looked at Brutus. “Our people look on you as their leader,” she said. “Did you know that?”

*

Brutus, moved as ever by the birth of a baby, hurried away before she could see the tears in his eyes. Confused emotions caused him to mumble to himself and he barged heedlessly through a door, almost knocking over a young dolphin-girl. Yelling some apology — too loudly — he raced up the stairs.
I am not a leader
, he told himself.
I do not want to lead. We are a team with a job, we Specialists. We do not need a leader. The laws are enough
.

He paused, greatly embarrassed by what he was shortly to do. He leaned his massive fists on a window ledge and stared across the endless, storm-ridden sea of the People Planet. The baby factory consisted of a series of interlinked caverns. Southward the caverns became smaller and tunneled up to small outcropping rooms and entrances. Here people lived, a few hundred Specialists in a tiny and strictly regulated society. When the True Humans decided that a bloodline was becoming too inbred, they shipped up fresh Specialist stock from Earth.

Somewhere at the back of Brutus’s mind was a feeling of vast injustice …

He watched the heavy rollers that smashed into the cliff fifty meters below. Occasionally they left a trough low enough to reveal some part of the ocean cow, looking like an encrusted reef. Half a kilometer north lay an island that was the creature’s breathing apparatus, a knobby projection spouting a steamy spray. Brutus pounded his fists on the stone ledge, grunted, wheeled round and opened the door of the Records Office.

The long-faced clerk looked up. “Ah. Brutus. I … I’d like to tell you how sorry

“Yes — I
can’t understand how everyone got to hear about that so soon,” said Brutus hurriedly. “Anyway, that’s not what I came about. I want to see the production records.”

“You
what
?” The horse-man’s sympathy evaporated.

Brutus explained the discrepancy in the Dome. “The inventory was short one neotenite.”

“I can assure you my records are in perfect order.” The clerk’s neck lengthened as he stared at Brutus in outrage.

“Well,
somehow or other
,” said Brutus forcefully, “there’s been a mistake, and I’m not going to take the blame.”

“Nobody’s blaming you.”

“I’m going to get to the bottom of it. There’s a body missing and I need to know why.” He moved close to the horse-man, overpowering him with his presence. It was against his nature to threaten, but it was the only way to get cooperation.

“If there’s a body missing, then, by Mordecai, we must find it,” agreed the clerk quickly, horny fingers prodding at his console. The screen lit up. Figures trotted across it like mounting arguments. Clone bank accumulations were checked with usage. Stocks on hand were checked with physical counts. Usage was checked with birth counts. “See, there’s nothing wrong,” said the clerk.

“Earlier years, please.”

The headings changed.
143,622. 143,621. 143,620
.

“Just search for discrepancies,” said Brutus.

There were none.
143,427.143,426
…
143,000
.

“That’s enough,” said Brutus. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. “Perhaps a baby died once, and they covered it up for some reason.” Perhaps a Specialist-nurse was to blame.

“We haven’t finished yet,” said the horse-man slyly.

“It couldn’t have been more than five hundred years ago. It would have been discovered.”

“It could have been quite recent,” said the horse-man, “if the gene material didn’t come from the clone bank.”

“Where else could it have come from?”

“It could have been fresh tissue. There have been certain experiments in the past …”

“Show me.”

Now the
record of births was checked against the record of shipments to Earth, and Brutus, fingers twisting, watched the screen intently.

143,600. 143,550. 143,545
…

“Stop!”

143,545.

“Please leave me alone for a while,” said Brutus.

“But …”