The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (114 page)

“How naive of them,” he said, “to want to be told that truth is untruth, that what the senses report must not be believed.” He inhaled a deep breath. “Truth changes so rapidly that it's dangerous to look only in one direction. This is an infinite universe.”

Mieri heard her teeth chattering, tried to still them. Fear drove her now and not the sudden cold of nightfall. She felt a trembling all through her body. Something Bjska had once said came back to her now:
“It requires a certain kind of abandoned courage even to want to be a City Doctor.”

Do I have that courage?
she asked herself.
Humanity help me! Will I fail now?

Bjska, turning to face her in the darkness, detected a faint odor of burning. Someone from the city had a forbidden fire somewhere along the beaches. The tension of protest rode on that odor and he wondered if that tension carried the kind of hope that could be converted into life. Mieri no longer was visible in the darkness. Night covered the perfection of her beauty and the clothing that was like armor in its subtle harmonizing with her flesh. Could she ask
how
rather than
why?
Would she make the required transition?

He waited, tense and listening.

“Some of them will always hate,” she whispered.

She knows,
he thought. He said, “The sickness of a city reaches far beyond its boundaries.”

Mieri clenched her fists, trembling.
“The arm is not sick without the body being sick.”
Bjska had said that once. And:
“A single human unloved can set the universe afire.”

“Life is in the business of constructing dichotomies,” she told herself. “And all dichotomies lead to contradictions. Logic that is sound for a finite system is not necessarily sound for an infinite system.”

The words from the City Doctors' creed restored a measure of her calm. She said, “It'll take more than a few adjustments.”

“It's like a backfire with which our ancestors stopped a runaway grass fire,” he said. “You give them a bad case of discontent. No comfort whatsoever except that you love the human in each of them. Some contradictions
do
lead to ugliness.”

He heard her moving in the darkness. Cloth ripped. Again. He wondered:
Which of the infinite alternatives has she chosen?
Would she scar the brittle armor of her beauty?

“I will begin by relocating the most contented half of the city's population,” she said.

I will
 … he thought. It was always thus the City Doctor began his creation.

“There's no profit in adjusting their memories,” she said. “They're more valuable just as they are. Their present content will be the measure of their future energies.”

Again, he heard her clothing rip. What was she doing?

She said, “I will, of course, move in with you during this period and present at least the appearance of being your mistress. They will hate that.”

He sensed the energy she had required to overcome personal barriers and he willed himself to remain silent. She must win this on her own, decide on her own.

“If you love me, it will be more than appearance,” she said. “We have no guarantee that we will create only beauty, but if we create with love and if our creation generates new life, then we can love … and we will go on living.”

He felt the warmth of her breath on his face. She had moved closer without his hearing! He willed himself to remain immobile.

“If the people of the city must hate, and some of them always will,” she said, “better they hate us than one another.”

He felt a bare arm go around his neck; her lips found his cheek. “I will save
our
city,” she said, “and I don't believe you will hate me for it.”

Bjska relaxed, enfolded her unarmored flesh in his arms. He said, “We begin with unquestioning love for each other. That is a very good prescription, Doctor, my love, as long as there remains sufficient energy to support the next generation. Beauty be damned! Life requires a point of entry.”

 

COME TO THE PARTY

BY FRANK HERBERT AND F. M. BUSBY

Confused, Alex sat back on his protumous, automatically shielding his rear fighting limbs. He realized he didn't know where he was. Thinking back, he retracted and extruded his lower eyes.

He'd been at the Party; he knew that much. Singing and glorching with the best of them. But now he wasn't there. What could have happened?

Alex looked around the dingy landscape—gray and brown, slightly green at the edges. He snuffled the air. It carried interesting smells but none told him what he wanted to know. He recognized the light-between-noons that let him see even farther than usual. Under him the ground was soft, but most ground softened when he sat on it. And the air felt hot—yes, the hot-between-noons. That agreed with the light. But something was wrong. Where was the Party?

Alex ran a claw through the stippled fur of his center forelimb, noticing that instinct had brought drops of multipoison to the tips of claws and fangs.

Then he saw it: the Horizon!

It was wrong. But the fact that it was so close; that was normal for a horizon. But it shouldn't be there at all! Alex puzzled and found one of his throats making a snarl. Something was wrong with his memories; he didn't know where he was, and what was the horizon doing there? He hadn't seen the horizon for a long time … very long. That could be a bad sign.

At the Party there was no horizon; there was—what? Trees? Yes, vine trees, thorny vine trees thickly entwined and protective. The prickly barrier kept the Party in one place so nobody got lost—well, not until now, anyway. It kept out the Hoojies, too. Hoojies were all well and good in their own way, but they did spoil a Party.

It can't always be dinner time.

Alex lifted himself far enough to turn, and there, not two jumps away, he saw a tree. Not a vine tree but one of the good kind; its scratchy trunk carried no thorns or poisons. This tree had many uses: to sharpen claws, tone up the fighting limbs, wet on, or scratch against and rub the burrs out of hair and fur. It was no use for dinner, but its leafy branches could hide leftover Hoojie until the next hunger time.

Out of habit, Alex irrigated the tree.

Where were all the Hoojies?

*   *   *

As Today's Speaker, Hugh Scott had carried that responsibility for many cycles. Today he felt this weight with a special poignancy. At midpoint between noons when the red heat of Heaven's Lamps had deliquesced his dawn height down to two-thirds of its morning firmness, he found his duties more than irksome. By evening he'd be little taller than a squish. This was no day to have any reminder of a squish—but thus it was in the hot season, even here in the safe shielding of his Family hut.

The three he had sent on their perilous mission to the Alexii stockade had not returned. Lonesome, he grumbled a bit; low-frequency echoes thrummed around the hut, kicking up wisps of dust. The flame wavered in the tiny lamp of gremp oil; it made moving shadows which reminded him of gruesome things.

Lonesome … lonesome … All his dear companions, the mates who shared hut safety with him, were absent: Elizabeth the female, Wheelchair the ultra, and Jimcrack the squish—all out there on dangerous duty. Dangerous but necessary …

If only two of them were here! Any three together in hut safety and privacy could warple. To warple now—that was Hugh's greatest desire. He felt the characteristic weftance bodily response. Ahhhh, nothing like a warple to drive away gruesome thoughts … even when it produced a squish.

But that was the problem: too many squishes already. This crisis had sent Elizabeth, Wheelchair and Jimcrack to the Alexii stockade.

Hugh sighed. The breath whiffled through the foliage around his underlimb openings. Four of the openings, at least. The fifth was partially plugged by a catarrhal infection, one more legacy from the departed Terrans. Such amusing names the Terrans had, but … ahhh, well …

He ventured to the door, unbarred and opened it, peered out.

A sleek, tall ultra wandered past.

Hugh stared after her. If only the Terrans had not imposed their moral strictures as well as their language upon Hugh's people. The oldsters now claimed that an incomplete warple was no warple at all, and a hazard to one's health. Perhaps, but with an ultra such as that one …

A familiar noise ended Hugh's fantasies. There came Doctor Watson, clattering as usual, his metal carapace glistening redly in the light. Doctor Watson moved on wheels nearly hidden beneath the skirts of his carapace, his usual means of locomotion on the packed earth between the domed village huts. Doctor Watson's protruding antennae turned to indicate that he had seen and identified his target—Today's Speaker.

Hugh Scott prepared to try to explain things, to answer questions he knew he would not understand very well. His underlimb openings vibrated with low-frequency protests. What did Doctor Watson expect from a ten-year-old?

MEMO FOR CHARLES VORPEL: EYES ONLY

Okay, Charlie, here's the data you requested. It should cover our collective ass. We've already protested aborting the mission and
that's
on record. You should have enough here to hang the snafu (if it comes out the way we expect) on those quibblers at Headquarters. Read and wail:

If the contact team's guess is right (and you know the odds as well as I do), the most intelligent species here on Delfa is in deep trouble. My observations confirm the following: Delfans have four sexes—male, female, ultra and squish. (Trying to translate sounds that go both ways out of our hearing range and which
may
be accented by odors, that's the best we could come up with. See the attached holoscans.) Any three of those four sexes can breed together, and the result is always an offspring of the fourth sex—the one not in the warple. (Well, it sounds like warple. Let us have a little humor; that's about all we get in some of these foul-up operations.) Yes, I've heard the rumor that
we
put this tag on their sexual acrobatics. And at the same time some horse's ass politico was crying that we'd forced the Delfans to take Terran names. We did not do that! They did it on their own. One of them even adopted
my
name.

Anyway, the problem here is positive feedback. We don't know precisely why (and being pulled out prematurely, we're not going to pin it down) but periodically the breeding pattern goes crazy and one sex of offspring dominates. This raises hell with local society. Imagine a small human colony with a five-to-one sex imbalance in births and a code of rigid monogamy. That's not quite the situation but it's close.

As usual, nature provided an antidote. In this case, my distinguished ivory-skulled predecessor took the Delfans' word that the major predator here needed extermination. The big five-star poop damn' near made it, but he took so many losses that HQ pulled him out. When I took over, there were two hundred and sixteen Alexii (the predators) left alive. In view of the subsequent order for us to bug out, the survival of those two hundred and sixteen Alexii was our lucky break.

I doubt that you've scanned the Alexii data, Charlie. I know how busy you are. For starters, the name apparently is what they call themselves. It's on the one intact set of holotapes we recovered. We couldn't ask the cameraman because an Alex ate him. Don't bother to punch up the Alexii language; it's either very complex or else they make a few meaningful noises and a lot of random ones. We have a few words and some gestures but that's all. The Alexii term for Delfans is “Hoojies,” for example. (Get the tape on “Excretion Rites” if you want the origin of the label.)

Right now would be a good time for you to refer to your index and punch up one of my holoscans on Alexii. It's shudder time, Charlie. Those things are the closest to an ultimate predator that we've ever found. A full grown Alex masses nearly six hundred kilos and is a match for a full squad of armored Gyrenes. Why do you think my predecessors on Delfa sent in such a pile of casualty reports?

The Alexii are long-lived, according to the Delfans—perhaps more than two hundred standards. (Delfa's year comes to two point one six standards.)

While you have my holoscans in your viewer, notice the claws and fangs. They can extrude various nasty substances, some of which are merely painful, but some paralyze and some probably kill. I qualify that last because if an Alex kills you, there's usually not much left to analyze.

Look at the rear view: those rear fighting limbs reach out almost three meters—front, back or sideways—and the barbed tips pull you in where the other limbs can work on you. The only way we found to stop them was to cook their guts with concentrated microbeams. As you know, that can take a while, so it didn't always save our people. I expect you've had access to the real casualty reports before they were whittled down for the official announcements. I personally saw Caplan buy it—halfway up the ramp into the ship, but he wasn't fast enough and neither was his projector. I still have nightmares.

You see the picture. Still, our four-sexed Delfans
need
the Alexii. Which is why I ignored the orders left by my predecessor. Here's what I've done: I set up one (1) barricaded enclave of Alexii. I got them in there by playing a hunch. The first field reports hinted at an interesting Alexii susceptibility to alcohol. I never saw a ship on which the cooks didn't have a stash of boozevines; so I went upship and ‘requisitioned' a supply of the vine and had it planted to bait a stockade. Within a week, I had all two hundred and sixteen Alexii inside, and they're still in—most of the time.

Here's how it works: Delfans shack up four to a hut, one of each sex, and they only warple indoors. Excess population lives outside, unprotected. When sex imbalance gets out of hand—well, the Delfan Head Cheese has been indoctrinated on how to release temporarily one (only one!) Alex from the stockade. The liberated Alex eats the surplus Delfans before he sobers up all the way, at which point he heads back to the stockade for the continuous booze party.