Voyage Across the Stars (11 page)

“Of course,” said the greeter. She stood up. Her age was as indeterminate as the color of her hair. She was no longer young, but the body she displayed as she raised her patterned smock was firm and attractive. Because her breasts had been small to begin with, they had not sagged noticeably with age. Her belly twitched with a shudder of ecstacy; faked, no doubt, but—

“Lord!” Slade blurted. There was a wire from the wall to the back of the woman’s neck. Not a wire, a tendril, the sorm the official had talked about.

“The root bothers you?” the greeter asked without concern. “It’s not necessary.” She tossed her head forward. Her hair was indeed russet. The shudder that wracked her body for an instant now was neither ecstatic nor counterfeit. But it was brief, and the smile was back on the woman’s face even as the tendril subsided to the wall through which it grew. Slade noticed, however, the change in the woman’s nipples. They had been as erect as bullet noses. Now they were relaxing almost as suddenly as the root had dropped away from the woman’s spine.

“You’re a strong man,” she said. She stepped toward the tanker with the front of her dress still lifted to shoulder height. “Your children would have fine, sharp minds, too, wouldn’t they?”

“Maybe another time,” said Slade. He dodged back into the sunlight. He was furious with his body because it insisted on shivering for several more minutes.

A heavy air-cushion truck was grumbling down the street. It was almost the first vehicle Slade had seen on Toler. It pulled up beside one of the closed buildings.

The building’s door opened. People from within joined the two men on the truck in unloading sacks of vegetables and flour or legumes. They worked without expertise, but they seemed to be in good health. The locals glanced at Slade as he walked past, but their attention was primarily focused on their task. No one spoke. The tanker half expected to see roots trailing back into the dwelling, but there was nothing of the sort. All the locals bore the puckered scars of the sorm tree, but they were free now and functioning normally.

Slade walked faster. “He took her to the topmast high,” trembled the words in his mind. “To see what she could see.”

Slade was whistling through his teeth, but the result would have been a monotone to anyone not inside his mind as well. “He sunk the ship in a flash of fire,” snarled the ballad to its conclusion. “To the bottom of the sea!”

Three soldiers stumbled out of a doorway ahead of Slade. They were blinking in the sunlight. Two of them dabbed at the backs of their necks. “You don’t
know,
Donnie-boy,” said one of that pair.

Slade jumped, but the third outlaw was the subject of the address, not the tanker who stood unnoticed as the others approached. “The most beautiful girl in the world could lie there with her legs spread, and it wouldn’t be as good.”

“Listen!” snapped the third soldier, “I
watched
that thing poking into you. It ain’t natural.”

“Never put anything in a vein yourself, Donnie?” asked the other of the pair who had tried the sorm trees. Then the outlaw bumped into Slade, although the tanker had flattened himself against a building to give the others more room.

Instead of the curse and violence Slade had bunched his fists to respond to, the outlaw patted the bigger man on the chest. “Scuse, brother,” the fellow said as he stepped around the human obstruction. Not only had the outlaw himself responded mildly, he seemed to have forgotten that such a collision on a liberty night could bring a savage reaction from the other party.

“But I don’t care, man,” the outlaw was saying as the three of them continued on their way. His fingers had spread blood in roseates across his neck, but there was no real damage, nothing an injection might not have left. “You’re chicken, but it doesn’t hurt anybody but you. And you’ll never know how much you’re pissing away. . . .”

Slade cursed, very softly. Then he stepped into the building the three soldiers had just left.

The interior was much like that of the first dive Slade had entered, though the greeter here was male. “Good day, sir,” the local said from his chair. “How can we help you?”

The automated bar in this entry lounge was unoccupied. Slade had been concerned that the hundreds of outlaws would overwhelm Toler with consequent disaster, but the cribs and dives were in adequate supply. What they did in the long intervals between landings was another question. For that matter, most freighters would have a score or fewer crewmen. Only fifteen of GAC 59’s complement were actually Levine’s men. “Stim cones?” Slade asked through dry lips.

The greeter shrugged. “Sorry, not on Toler,” he said. He gestured to the bar. “There’s alcohol, of course. And the sorm.”

“Yeah,” said the tanker. He opened the right-hand door and entered the sorm parlor he had expected to find there. “I’m not a coward,” he said, but the sounds Slade’s lips and tongue formed were too soft for even the speaker to hear them.

“Yes, sir?” said a local, one of the two men within the good-sized room. The other man wore ship’s coveralls. Blaney, Slade thought his name was, one of the drive operators. The man lay on one of six narrow couches. He was flaccid except for rhythmic shudders moving from his torso to his extremities.

“He’s all right?” the tanker asked. His finger traced the path of undulations. Slade was trying desperately to keep his voice normal.

“Certainly,” said the attendant without a sneer or condescension. He was changing the covering of the end couch. The cushion was overlaid with a thin, hard sheet that might have been either vegetable or synthetic. A pair of used sheets lay crinkled on the floor. “The sorm makes his muscles shudder at intervals to keep up their tone. Not that there’s any need for that in a short touch, but the plant does its best for its clients.” The attendant gave Slade a glass-smooth smile. “After a time,” he added, can work perfectly well without uncoupling, you see.”

The attendant’s own tendril waggled back to the wall as he tucked in the sheet.

There was a grommetted hole in the cushion. It was at about the point where a man’s neck would rest if he lay supine on the couch. The sheet covered that hole, but the material was too thin to stop a tendril probing up, through it and skin and into the base of the brain. “I see,” said the tanker. He was sure his voice was squeaking. “How much does a touch cost?”

“The first is free,” said the attendant. He gathered up the used sheets and stuffed them into a chute in the wall beneath his tendril. “After that—” the local man turned around. “You’re from Friesland, sir?”

“I’ve been there,” Slade answered guardedly.

“Then the equivalent of thirty Frisian talers per touch,” the attendant explained with a smile. “The length varies. This man and two others were touched at the same time.” He gestured at Blaney. The crewman was quiescent again after his bout of “exercise.” “The others have left—not dissatisfied, I’m sure. But this man’s mind permitted a greater level of interaction with the sorm, and consequently even greater—pleasure—for the client.”

The local man must have correctly interpreted Slade’s grimace, for he shook his head at the tanker and added gently, “No, Captain Slade. The client can sever the connection at will.” The attendant arched his neck back slightly as if he were baring his throat to a razor.

“No!” said the tanker. “No, I’ve seen that, you don’t have to show me again.” Then he said, “You know my name, friend?”

The local man’s body relaxed. There may have been a hint of relief in his expression. “We aren’t peasants here on Toler, Captain Slade,” he said with dignity. “Our culture doesn’t lend itself to crystal and metal, but we have a very satisfactory data bank. The Port Commandant entered information on our visitors, and the information was made available to potential users. You are, of course, a noteworthy man.”

In a sharper tone of voice, the attendant went on, “You don’t have to stand here and feed your fears, Captain. You can walk away. There’s no sin in being afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Slade harshly. “I just lie down here?” He sat, swinging his legs onto the nearest couch, even as the attendant nodded agreement.

The sheet rustled beneath Slade’s neck. The big man relaxed all his muscles. He had been operated on without anesthetic. This pain would be nothing.

But the pain had nothing to do with his fear, either. Hairs prickled as something brushed past them, but even so Slade did not feel any touch on his skin proper. Then a sense of euphoria swept away every other feeling. He was still aware of his former fears, but his mind held them up to his detached appraisal and his laughter.

Slade slipped deeper into an outside awareness with the ease of a diver entering a blood-warm lagoon.

The attendant had been quite truthful about Toler’s data bank, but the statement was a joke as well. The sorm’s joke, in a way, because the sorm colony connected all those humans who were in fact that data bank.

The tree had developed its properties as a means of ensuring pollination and good planting locations on a dry and windswept world. Some of the runners by which the sorm colonies spread learned—and the term could not be understood to imply intellection—to contact the nervous systems of small burrowing animals. This gave the adapted sorms a degree of mobility unmatched by any other plants on the world. Moreover, as a colony added symbiotes, it gained a level of consciousness which no single animal mind could equal.

The adapted colonies spread and flourished. Tendril-dragging animals scampered from anther to distant pistil. When the symbiosis became more complete, animals could carry out tasks without being in immediate contact with the sorm. They would return after they had scrambled over barriers to plant nuts or whatever other task had been set them. It was less the attitude of a junkie seeking another fix than it was the thankful longing of a laborer returning home after a hard day. The result was a true and flawless partnership for the individual animals and for the sorm species as a whole.

The human settlement of Toler provided an increase of potential knowledge and reasoning power of a magnitude which humans had taken several million years to develop. That the amalgam outstripped in its way any single human was inevitable. And that the amalgam none the less resembled a human society was perhaps also inevitable. After contact, the Toler colony needed further human contacts to survive; and in any case, the amalgam built from the instincts and memories of its animate partners.

The sorm’s problem was that its symbiotes could not reproduce themselves. Male symbiotes lost the capacity to ejaculate and, after a few days or weeks of linkage, no longer even produced sperm. By the time the symbiosis was complete enough for the sorm to guide its partner in the complex operation, the animal was sterile.

Ovulation was not affected, perhaps because its cyclic nature recovered more quickly from suppression of hormones which the sorm’s touch entailed. Prostitutes—female members of the colony in estrus—provided an indigenous birthrate when the sparse interstellar traffic cooperated. Recruits directly from that traffic made up the rest of the colony’s requirement.

Slade’s body trembled. His muscles massaged themselves and squeezed the blood in his veins back to feed his heart’s slow pumping. Slade was unaware of that movement save as a datum reported through the eyes of the smiling attendant.

The Toler colony never stripped a visiting ship. It was common on any port for one or two of the crew to go missing: jailed or floating in a ditch or simply jumping ship to await a better berth on a future vessel. On Toler, the minds that stayed behind in blissful comfort were those with a particular sharpness of focus which fused best with the structure of the sorm. They were not always the minds that would have rated highest in human tests of intelligence, though that was often a concomitant.

And all but the core of Slade’s being rejoiced to know that his was one of the minds that would be permitted to merge with the colony.

The feeling was not simply that of drug euphoria or the instant before orgasm, though it encompassed those things. There was also an enormous sense of physical well-being and the triumphant riding-down of an opponent. There was no dream quality to Sladeperceptions. They had the clarity of cells in a diamond lens. The tanker was barred from the control of his own body only by his multiplicity of viewpoints as a part of the sorm colony. The physical Don Slade was a needle among thousands of needles, safe and discrete but unnecessary for the moment.

“I am,” insisted Slade’s being.
“I
am.”

And of course he was, healthy still and happier than every man who had not been to Toler, had not merged with the sorm. But Slade’s mind was drawing away, plunging toward the roiling sea of Tethys.

Slade hit the surface and tendrils of the sorm recoiled from the droplets of the harsh gray salt. A shudder wracked the tanker’s body. His arms drove him upward, clutching madly for the spray-drenched air.

Slade had fallen off the couch. The big man hyperventilated. His arms swam several flailing strokes before consciousness reasserted itself. “Blood and Martyrs,” he wheezed as he stared at the impassive attendant. “Blood and Martyrs!”

Blaney was trembling again on the next couch. There were tiny speckles of blood on the sheet on which Slade had lain. Through the hole in the sheet gently quested the sorm tendril. Its tip was not a single tube as Slade had expected. It was a brush of tiny filaments, now drawn to a ghostly point and slick with fluids from Slade’s neck.

Slade rocked to his feet. His limbs worked. He had his sense of balance. Don Slade had a body and soul once more. He gave the attendant an open-handed slap that rocked the smaller man against the wall without stunning him as it should have. Slade’s hand throbbed beneath its calluses.

The tanker strode through the door and the lobby, then back into the street. The greeter’s expression had the same drugged calm as the attendant’s when Slade recovered from the couch.

There was some activity around the ship when Slade returned. The tanker had seen no sign of food-shops, now that he thought about it. Hunger must have driven back at least some of the outlaws. At the entry hatch stood one of the crewmen with a ration packet in his hand.