The Caterpillar's Question by Piers Anthony and Philip José Farmer (8 page)

The man's mouth tightened. He seemed to understand Jack, but be refused to answer, and the threat of the radiator was no longer persuasive. Strange. And awkward, because the man had called his bluff, and he couldn't do anything about it. It was a mistake, ultimately, to bluff, he realized, because once it was proved empty, all was lost. It was necessary either to be able to follow through on a threat or to make the bluff so bold that the other did not dare call it.

He couldn't carry through. He just couldn't kill a man who wasn't attacking him. He probably couldn't kill even if the man did attack him. He was a sensitive artist, not an insensitive goon. Only if Tappy were threatened would he --

Jack had an inspiration. He pointed the radiator at Tappy.

"Nao!" the man cried, horrified.

So he had guessed right! It was Tappy they wanted to capture. He had suspected they didn't much care about Jack himself; he was nobody, just an ignorant person who had happened to get involved with her. Tappy had known or remembered how to reach this world, so she must have been here before. The aliens must have been waiting for her-- and they wanted her alive.

Larva-Chrysalis-Imago. There was something about Tappy that made her valuable-- so valuable that this monstrous flying cage had been sent to catch her. But she had been given a weapon, and taught its use, so that she remembered once the situation required it. That knowledge must have been hypnotically suppressed. Her return to a more familiar environment was bringing back her memory.

But why give a blind girl a weapon that required sight for its operation? If Jack hadn't been along, Tappy would have been virtually helpless.

These thoughts were buzzing through his mind as he faced the man. He knew that they did not have much time; at any moment there would be others coming here. But there were questions that had to be answered, lest they fall into the next trap their pursuers sprang.

"So you do speak English," Jack said. "You may not care much about your own life, but you do about hers. Well, keep quiet and follow us, or I will radiate her." He was ashamed for the lie, but he was afraid Tappy would be subject to some fate worse than death if he didn't use this lever to get the truth. "Find a place we can talk," he murmured to Tappy.

Tappy immediately moved to the edge of the nulled tunnel and felt her way into the green and purple foliage. Jack followed, pointing the radiator at her. She understood what he was doing.

"Yao are naot serious!" the man said. He had a strong but indefinable accent, as if this was a language he had learned in a class and hadn't used much. "Yao are with hur! Yao will naot radiate hur."

Jack used his pencil to touch the scarlet button. The dim light came on. Don't let him call this bluff! he prayed.

"Aokay! I um caoming!" the man exclaimed, his accent worse. There was no doubt that the threat to Tappy really unnerved him, despite his suspicion that Jack didn't mean it.

Empire of the stars. Could she be the daughter of the Emperor, stolen away and now to be recovered? But surely she would want to be returned to her family and her status! Unless this was a hostile force, a usurper who wanted to hold her for ransom or brainwash her and set her up as a figurehead. If she died, they would have no chance to make a pretense of legitimacy, and the loyal subjects would rise up and throw them out.

But then why send her to a backwater region of a primitive planet like Earth? Why let her suffer as the ward of an unfriendly family all these years? Anything could have happened to her! If they had the technology to give her the radiator, why hadn't they at least fixed her sight? Jack was no psychologist, but even he had seen that she was a desperately lonely and unhappy girl. She was about as unlikely a princess as he could imagine.

Tappy was better at finding a hiding place than he would have been, because she tended to explore with her hands and body, while he depended more on sight. Soon they were in a niche in the undergrowth where the sunlight hardly penetrated. They would be able to hear any searchers before they got close.

The man sat on one side, and Jack faced Tappy on the other side, keeping the radiator pointed and his pencil poised. He knew that the moment he got careless the man could jump him. Even if Jack won the struggle, the noise would give their position away and the others would close in. With the best luck, he was unlikely to have much time. He had to make it count.

"Why are you after Tappy?" he demanded.

The man's gaze flicked to the girl, and Jack realized that he had blundered already: the man had not known her name. Not her Earth name, at any rate. But he answered. Jack was already getting used to the accent, and tuned it out in favor of the meaning. "We must restrict the Imago."

There was a key word! "What is the Imago?" Jack demanded. "Why must you restrict it?"

The man seemed at a loss. "It has to be restricted!"

"Look, Joe, I'm an ignorant lout from a primitive planet. I don't know anything about this Imago, except that it's gotten me into a lot of trouble. So you'd better give me good reason not to wipe her out, and wipe you out, and anybody else who comes after me, so that I can go home and forget all this. Tell me all about the Imago before anybody else gets here. Give me reason not to radiate everything in sight." He hardly believed himself! He was talking like a thug from a grade F movie. But he didn't have time to figure out how to act like a tormented perfectionist from a grade A film.

The man told him, somewhat awkwardly. It wasn't that he didn't know it, but that he could not believe that Jack didn't, so he kept skipping over elements that he assumed Jack already understood. In the course of this Jack picked up some background about the empire and the planet they were on.

It seemed that there were several components of the empire. It wasn't exactly an empire, but whatever it was was too complicated for Jack to assimilate at the moment, so he used the term as mental shorthand. It included so many stellar systems that there was no reliable survey listing them all. Human beings were on several of its planets, not because they were native but because they had been imported as labor from overpopulated Earth, which didn't even miss them. The alien rulers were called the Gaol, as it were the gaolers of the empire. They did not care what the human laborers did, as long as they did their jobs; they were allowed to have their own families and entertainments. One of the planets they worked on was this one, where the dominant native species was what Jack thought of as the honkers. The empire was governed by completely alien creatures who had no biological and little intellectual association with human beings, but whose technological power was such that no known force could oppose it.

Except the Imago. Therefore it was to the Gaol's interest to nullify the Imago. The Imago seemed to be another type of alien entity, possessing no body of its own, other than what for want of a better term was a spirit. It seemed to be singular, though perhaps it was that only one of its kind chose to interact with solid creatures. When it did, it manifested only by the enhancement of the powers of that person. Whether it entered other than human hosts was unknown, but probably it did, because sometimes it skipped a generation of human beings, only to reappear seemingly randomly. It seemed to associate with this honker planet, where spirits had more force than they did elsewhere.

But when it entered a person, it took time to manifest. At first it was the Larva, largely quiescent, inhabiting the person from conception into childhood. That stage seemed to last for about seven years, until the child was six, and the spirit could not be detected. Then it metamorphosed into the Chrysalis. The child did not change physically, but now the symbiotic entity manifested. The child developed mental or emotional rapport with other life, including animals and plants, and there was a faint mental aura that sophisticated sensors could detect. After another seven years it metamorphosed to its adult stage, whose nature no one knew except the Gaol who governed the empire. It was conjectured that the rapport with other forms of life expanded into full-scale telepathy and the power to modify the emotions of others. If so, it meant the Imago could take over even the minds of the Gaol and make them do its will. That would give it the capacity to rule or to destroy the empire-- even if it was based in the body of a blind human girl.

"Then why don't you just kill it?" Jack demanded. "So it can't mess with your alien masters?" He still hated to talk this way, as if he didn't care about Tappy. His feeling for her was a strange and wonderful thing, not exactly love and not exactly apart from love. Already he recognized the truth of what the man was telling him: Tappy related to other life, and he felt that relation through his mind and heart. He was beginning to understand why he had made love with her, as the Chrysalis of her nature touched him. If this was only the suggestion of her mature power, what would be its full expression?

The man explained: The Imago could not be killed. If its host was destroyed, it simply sought a new host. Then, fourteen years later, the threat to the empire returned. In the early days, perhaps millennia ago, the Imago had so disrupted the empire as to cause its dissolution. Only when the Gaol had learned how to nullify the Imago had they been able to reconstitute and maintain the empire. Now they tracked the Imago diligently, and when it manifested they captured its human or other host, drugged it into unconsciousness, and maintained it in tight security within a field that scrambled any possible mental or other emanations. They kept it in that condition, carefully alive, as long as nature and technology permitted; with luck their reprieve lasted as long as a century.

When the captive Imago-host finally died, the search began again. Its occupation of a new host seemed to be random; no one could predict where on this planet it would appear next. The Gaol had the power to obliterate the planet, but feared the would only manifest on another; it was better to keep it. So this world was left in its natural state, unlike most other planets. The Gaol intended to locate and nullify the Imago as usual, forestalling any possible threat to the empire's stability. If the Imago-host was found and killed, the process would have to begin over. Therefore the empire impressed upon its minions that due care should be taken. Whoever was responsible for the loss of the Imago would suffer in ways no ordinary person could imagine-- and so would his family and his community.

Now at last Jack understood. Tappy was the current host of the Imago. She had been the child of a human colonist on this honker planet. When her expanding empathy for life had manifested at age six, she had been hustled to a place where the Gaol could not quickly find her. There must have been trouble; maybe the minions of the empire had been in pursuit, and Tappy's father had been killed, and she maimed and blinded. But she had gotten free, though at the terrible price Jack had seen. Her injuries had turned out to be an advantage, because they restricted her, so that she did not call attention to herself. She had been put under a hypnotic block against even speaking the language. All this had been necessary to hide her from the notice of the Gaol, whose search methods had to be sophisticated and unscrupulous. Indeed, the empire must have searched, and finally was on the verge of locating her. So she had had to be moved-- and an ignorant Earth native had been hired to transport her. Jack.

"Why didn't she return to her family here?" Jack asked.

The man grimaced. "What family? When the Gaol found out she was gone, poof! So was her community."

Jack looked at Tappy. She nodded. She had known throughout that she was orphaned. The Earth cover-story had been accurate in essence if not in detail. That was the price of being the host of the Imago.

"So where are you going?" Jack asked her. For she had certainly been headed somewhere with great urgency.

"That is what we want to know," the man said. "So we can stop her from getting there. But it no longer matters, because we have captured the Imago."

"Don't you wish!" Jack exclaimed. "You're not locking Tappy up drugged for the rest of her life! I'll radiate her into nothingness first!" This time he was telling the truth: death was better than that. He saw her nod; she agreed.

Then there was a faint flash. Jack did not lose consciousness, or even feel pain. He simply lost his volition. The minions of the empire had closed in on them and used some sort of weapon. He had talked too long, and been caught. Worse, he had betrayed Tappy into their power.

Now other men appeared. "Good job, 'Joe'." one said, mockingly using the name Jack had bestowed on the man. "You kept them distracted until we were sure of our shot."

Jack had after all played the fool. He had been so interested in what he was learning about Tappy that he had not kept properly alert, and they had crept up close. No wonder Joe had been so cooperative, once he got started talking! It hadn't mattered how much Jack learned, so long as he was kept occupied.

"Get up, follow that man," the new man said to Jack and Tappy, indicating a man who was now standing nearby.

Jack got up and followed the man, and Tappy did the same. His body was not paralyzed, just his control over it. He had to do what anyone told him.

"Go to the container and get the null dose," the leader told the one they had been talking to. Now that man got up; apparently he, too, had lost his volition.

Jack found that though his body obeyed the directive, his mind remained free. He could think anything he wanted, for what little good that might do him. So he pieced together the remaining elements of what had happened.

The weapons the men carried were not for killing or stunning, but for blocking off the mind's conscious control of the body. They probably generated an intense local field that affected all people in it, but did not extend far. So one shot had taken out all three of them in the niche, but not those standing beyond it. This was surely a necessary limitation. That explained why the men pursuing them had not fired at them before: they had to get within the short range of the will-stunner before using it. The radiator seemed to have no such limit, so had been a fearsome counterweapon. If only he had remained alert with it!