The World of Ptavvs (4 page)

With a tremendous effort he managed to exclude most of the Greenberg mind from his consciousness. The vertigo didn't pass. Now his body felt weird, hot and malformed. He tried to open his eye, but the muscles wouldn't work. Then he must have hit the right combination and his eye opened. Twice! He moaned and shut it tight, then tried again. His eye opened twice, two distinct and separate motions, but he kept them open because he was looking down at his own body. His body was Larry Greenberg.

He'd had enough warning. The shock didn't kill him.

Gingerly Kzanol began to probe the Greenberg mind. He had to be careful to get only a little information at a time, or he would be swamped. It was very different from ordinary use of the Power; it was a little like practicing with an amplifier helmet. He got enough to convince him that he really had been teleported, or telepathed, or some ptavv-sired thing, into an alien slave body.

He sat up slowly and carefully, using the Greenberg reflexes as much as he dared because he wasn't used to the strange muscles. The double vision tended to confuse him, but he could see that he was in a sort of metal mesh enclosure. Outside. Kzanol got the worst shock of all, and again he went insane.

Outside the enclosure were slaves, of the same strange breed as his present self. Two of them were actually coming toward him. He hadn't sensed them at all and he still couldn't.

Powerless!

A thrint is not born with the Power. Generally it takes around two thrintun years for the Power sense to develop, and another year before the young thrint can force a coherent order on a slave. In some cases the Power never comes. If a thrint reaches adulthood without the Power, he is called a ptavv. He is tattooed permanently pink and sold as a slave, unless he is secretly killed by his family. Very secretly. There is no better ground for blackmail than the knowledge that a wealthy family once produced a ptavv.

An adult thrint who loses the Power is less predictable. If he doesn't go thrint-catatonic he may commit suicide; or he may go on a killing spree, slaughtering either every slave or every thrint that crosses his path; or he may compulsively forget even the existence of a Power. The Powerloss is more crippling than going blind or deaf, more humiliating than castration. If a man could lose his intelligence, yet retain the memory of what he had lost,, he might feel as Kzanol felt; for the Power is what separates Thrint from Animal.

Still daring to hope, Kzanol looked directly at the advancing aliens and ordered them to STOP! The sense wasn't working, but maybe The slaves kept coming.

They were looking at him! Helplessly he cast about for some way to stop them from looking. They were witnessing his shame, these undersized furry whitefoods who now considered him an equal. And he saw the disintegrator, lying near the abandoned Kzanol body's out-flung hand.

He got to his feet all right, but-when he tried to hop he almost fell on his face. He managed to walk over, looking like a terrified novice trying to move in low gravity. The nearest slave had reached the cage. Kzanol bent his funny knees until he could pick up the disintegrator, using both hands because his new fingers looked so fragile and delicate and helpless. With a growl that somehow got stuck in his throat, he turned the digging instrument on the aliens. When they were all cowering on the floor or against the walls he whirled and ran, smashed into the wire, backed off and disintegrated a hole for himself and ran for the door. He had to let Greenberg through to open the door for him.

For a long time he thought only of running.

There were green lights below, spaced sparsely over the land between the cities. You had to fly high to see two at a time. Between cities most cars did fly that high, especially if the driver ivas the cautious type. The lights were service stations. Usually a car didn't need servicing more than twice a year, but it was nice to be able to see help when you were in open country. The loneliness could get fierce for a city man, and most men were city men.

It was also nice to know you could land near a green light without finding yourself on top of a tree or halfway over a cliff.

Kzanol steered very wide of the cities, and avoided the green lights too. He couldn't have faced a slave in his present state. When he left the physics level he had gone straight to the roof parking levels, to the haven of his Volkswagen, and taken it straight up. Then he had faced the problem of destination. He didn't really want to go anywhere. When he reached altitude he set the car for New York, knowing that he could change back to California before he got there. Henceforth he let the car drive itself, except when he had to steer around a city.

He did a lot of steering. The green country was more nearly islands in a sea of city than vice versa. Time and again he found narrow isthmuses of city, lines of buildings half a mile across following old superhighways. He crossed these at top speed and went on.

At one hour he had to bring the car down. The drive had been grueling. Only his mad urge to flee had kept him going; and he was beginning to know that he had nowhere to flee to. He felt aches and pains that were sheer torture to him, although Greenberg would have ignored them from habit. His fingers were cramped and sore; they seemed more delicate than ever. He was not mistaken in this. The Greenberg memory told him why the little finger of his left hand ached constantly: a baseball accident that had healed wrong. And Greenberg had taken this crippling disaster for granted! Kzanol was almost afraid to use his hands for anything. There were other pains. His cramped muscles ached from sitting in one position for five hours. His right leg was in agony from its constant pressure on the throttle during override maneuvers. He itched everywhere that clothing pressed against his body.

He brought the car down in the middle of a stunted wood in Arizona. Hurriedly lie got out and stripped off his clothes. Much better! He tossed them into the right-hand seat-- he might need them again sometime-- got back in and turned on the heater. Now he itched where he touched the seat, but he could stand it.

He had been letting Greenberg's reflexes drive the car, and in the process had gotten used to the presence of Greenberg in his mind. He could draw on the memory set with little discomfort and without fear. But he had not become used to the alien body he now wore, and he had no slightest intention of adjusting to the loss of the Power. Kzanol wanted his body back.

He knew where it was: he'd seen it when he got the disintegrator. The Greenberg memories filled in the details for him. Obviously he had thrown the disintegrator when he put his arms out to protect himself. The body would keep until he found some way of getting back to it.

To do that he would need a way to operate the men who operated the contact machine. He would need a great deal of technological help to break the Kzanol body out of stasis; he'd seen, as Greenberg, the rusted spot on his back. But to get all this help he needed the Power. How? His human brain didn't have the Power in it.

But there was one chance. Humans had space travel, remembered Kzanol/Greenberg. Pitiful space travel: ships that took decades to cross between the inhabited worlds, and days even to cruise the planets of the "solar system." But space travel it was. If he could find the F124 system, and if it were close enough to reach, he could get the amplifier helmet. And Greenberg had had rudimentary telepathy.

The helmet could boost his tiny talent into a semblance of thrintun Power.

Where was he now? He must have missed F124, Kzanol decided, and gone on to a haphazard collision with this planet Earth. Where and when had he landed?Could he reach the lost planet within Greenburg's lifetime?

Greenberg's body wanted dinner (it was 1:20 hours), water, and a cigarette. Kzanol had no trouble ignoring the hunger and thirst, for a thrint would kill himself if he ate enough to satisfy his hunger, and rupture his storage sac if he drank until he wasn't thirsty. The battle for food had been very fierce among the thrint's dumb ancestors. But he had cigarettes. He smoked and found that he liked it, although he had to fight an urge to chew the filter.

Where was he? He let Larry Greenberg's memory come to the surface. High school. History class, with lousy grades. The race for space; Moon bases; Mars bases. The Belt. Colonization of the Belt. The economics behind the Belt. Confinement Asteroid. Overpopulation on Earth. Fertility Laws; Fertility Board; Superman Insurrection. Sanction against the Belt, during an argument over the use of the Jovian moons. There was a lot of extraneous material coming through, but Kzanol was gettmg a good picture of the solar system. He was on the third planet, and it was binary. He had been extremely lucky to hit it.

The UN power sender on Mercury. Failure of the economic sanction. Limits of Belt autonomicity. Industrial warfare. Why was the Belt being treated as a villain? Forget it. Belt mining of Saturn's rings for water. Saturn's rings. Rings!

"Youch!" Kzanol hurled the cigarette butt away and stuffed his burnt fingers in his mouth.

F124. So this is F124, he thought. It doesn't look like F124. He started to shiver, so he turned up the heater.

At one-thirty Judy got up and went out. The nightmare feeling had become too much to bear, alone in the dark. And Larry hadn't called.

A cab dropped to the corner in answer to her ring. She didn't know the address of the UCLA Physics Level, but there was a phone in the cab. She had Information type the address on the cab destination board. The cab whirred and rose.

Judy leaned back in the soft seat. She was tired, even though she couldn't sleep.

The enormous pillar that was UCLA blazed with light; but these were night lights, to protect the structure from aircraft. Yet-- a level halfway up was three times as bright as the rest. Judy guessed which level this was, even before the cab started down. As they swooped toward the landing balcony she noticed other details.

The big square vehicle was an ambulance, one with large capacity. Those little cars with the extended motor housings were police. There were tiny figures moving around.

***

Automatically Kzanol lit his last cigarette. His mouth and throat were raw; was that normal? He remembered that it wasn't, except when he had been smoking far too much.

. And then the Time of Ripening would come. Suddenly everyone would be in a hurry; Dad and Grandpa would return to the house very late and bone-tired, and the slaves never rested at all. All day and night there was the sound of trees being. felled, and the low whirr of the stripping plant.

Before he was old enough to help, he used to sit beneath the guardian sunflowers and watch the trees go into the stripping plant. They would go in looking like any other mpul tree: perfectly straight, with the giant green flower at the top, and the dark blue stalk ending in a tapering tap root. In the stripping plant the flower and the soft bark and the tap root would be removed. The logs would come out shining in the sun, with nothing left but the solid fuel rocket core and the thin iron-crystal skin beneath the bark. Then the logs would be shipped to all the nearby civilized worlds, in ships which lifted on other stage tree logs.

But first there was the testing. A log was selected at random and fitted into the testing block. Grandfather and Dad would be standing by, each looking like he had sucked a sour gnal. They watched with single-minded concentration as the log was fired, ready to disapprove a whole crop at the slightest sign of misfire. Kzanol used to try to imitate their expressions. The little tnuctip technicians would be running around setting instruments and looking harried and important. They seemed too small to be intelligent animals, but they were. Their quaint biological science had mutated the stage trees out of worthless mpul trees. They had created the sunflowers which guarded the house: a hedge of twelve-foot trunks, each bearing a flexible silver mirror to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node, or to shift that focus onto an attacking enemy. Tnuctipun had built the gigantic, mindless yeast-eating whitefoods which fed the family and the carnivorous tnuctipun themselves. They had been given more freedom than any other slave race, because

they had proven the worth of their freethinking brains.

A tnuctip would set off the log. The flame would shoot

out over the valley, blue-white and very straight, darkening at the end to red smoke, while instruments measured the log's precise thrust and Grandfather smiled in satisfaction. The flame shook the world with its sound, so that little Kzanol used to fear that the thrust was in-creasing the planet's spin.

Kzanol/Greenberg reached to knock the ash off his last cigarette and saw his second-to-last burning in the ash tray, two-thirds smoked. He hadn't done that since high school! He cursed a thrintun curse and almost strangled on it; his throat positively wasn't built for overtaik.

He wasn't gaining anything with his reminiscing, either.

Wherever in the universe he was, he still had to reach

a spaceport. He needed the amplifier. Later he could figure out why there were aliens on F124, and why they thought they had been here longer than was possible. He started the motor and punched for Topeka, Kansas.

He'd have to steal a ship anyway. It might as well be an armed ship (since this region of space was lawless by definition, having no thrintun), and there was a military spaceport near Topeka.

Wait a moment, he thought. This couldn't be F124. There were too many planets! F124 had only eight, and here there were nine.

Now that he was started he noticed other discrepancies. The asteroid belt of F124 had been far thicker, and her moon had had a slight rotation, he remembered. He was in the wrong system!

Merely a coincidence! Kzanol grinned. And what a coincidence! The habitable planet, the ringed planet, the ordered sizes of the worlds . come to think of it, he was the only thrint ever to have found two slave planets. He would be the richest being in the galaxy! He didn't care, now, if he never found the map. But, of course, he still needed the amplifier.

***

Judy felt that she was on the verge of a tantrum. "But can't they talk at all?" she begged, knowing she was being unreasonable.