The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (118 page)

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Patiently crouched in hiding near Doctor Watson, Alex and a troop of selected companions waited. There were many openings through the gremp barrier now—all artfully concealed behind soft plants. Alex and his concealed companions carried several varieties of the new weapons. They were not flimsy weapons like those of the Terrans. An impressive number of his companions pretended to roister and Party in the stockade, milling around and leaping to conceal their reduced numbers. Two of his companions were off at Hoojie Town, showing themselves just enough to keep the Hoojies in their huts. It was going to be a good ambush.

Doctor Watson stood out there three good leaps from the stockade. He wasn't clattering or speaking Hoojie talk anymore, but his transmitter was working. Alex could tell that from the red light which blinked on Doctor Watson's front.

Transmitter.

That was an interesting word. Doctor Watson had revealed many things to his careful inquisitors—Terran language, habits, many of their primitive beliefs. Terrans called themselves
human.
Fascinating. It was a term which obviously excluded the rest of the universe. Alex and his companions had decided that humans were evolved somewhere between Hoojies and Alexii. Humans obviously had not engaged in any major interference with their inherited shapes and abilities. The reasoning behind this oversight escaped Alex. None of his companions could figure it out, either. Someone had suggested that humans had become too attached to their machines. Perhaps.

Very soon, Alex knew, the Terrans would return. The red light blinking on Doctor Watson gave assurance of this. After the ambush, Alexii would scatter into the forests and fight from there—everyone except the few selected to capture the Terrans' flying tower.

Shuttle.

Alex reproduced the word just as Doctor Watson had produced it.
Shuttle.
He preferred
flying tower.

With the captured flying tower, Alexii, too, could go to some other place—possibly to the place where Terrans originated. Doctor Watson had not been clear on the location of this place, but humans in the tower were sure to know it. Alex knew he'd have to make sure that not all of the Terrans in the flying tower were killed.

Too bad that Terrans weren't edible. Maybe Alexii could change their own spawn's bodies once more, permitting the new generations to eat Terrans. Alex shivered in anticipation. He and his companions would have to take many Hoojies and Party vines in the flying tower. Hoojies and Party vines made for a great birthday celebration.

Another light began to blink on Doctor Watson. Ahhh-hah! The Terrans were coming; they'd be here for the replay of Alex's birthday. That promised to be some Party!

 

SONGS OF A SENTIENT FLUTE

Questions devoured Nikki's awareness as his singletran dove toward the planet's surface. It both alarmed and intrigued him that no human poet had ever set foot on Medea. He would be the first and his presence there would be far from accidental, still …

“Danger,” Ship had warned him. “Danger will be your life when you leave Me—constant danger.”

Nikki had a momentary recall from the briefings: swarms of iridescent airborne globes drifting down on the Medean colony, then explosions, fire—people and buildings in flames, death, pain and destruction all around.

This had happened many times and it was only one of Medea's threats to the human intruders.

Why did the colony (or even Ship) assume that a poet might nullify those flaming nightmares or the other perils?

The singletran slowed abruptly as it neared the ground. Through the webbed crashpad which guarded his vulnerable flesh, Nikki felt his capsule's wallowing passage toward Medea's Integration Central, parts of which were now visible out the port on his left. His gaze took in a circular complex of flameproof structures enclosing a landing dome and tiny patches of transplanted Terra. He knew what it had cost the colony to erect those few structures, but without constant vigilance even these were not impervious to the floating fire and Medea's rampaging demons.

What does Ship want of me here?

Nikki allowed his senses to concentrate on the insulating crashpad. He breathed in a slow, deep rhythm which helped him focus on Ship's last message to him, then on the words of that message (
Go! Be Human!
) … then on nothing at all.

He was ready for anything.

For eighteen years Ship had systematically filled his mind with all the raw data he could master. But it was his mother, Tosa Nikki, who had taught him oneness of mind and body, and Ship had not interfered. Perhaps Ship had directed even this.

Tosa Nikki—the almond-eyed recorder who'd been computer-impregnated before hybernation and the long long sleep to Medea—he saw her eyes reflected in his own, and her skin and hair were his. His hair was different from that of the other colonists. Straight, black, it hung in two long braids and reached nearly to his waist. His mother never cut it and after she was gone, neither did he.

“That's the way they did it earthside,” she'd told him, “the poets and the mystics. They kept their hair long and chose their own names as a sign of strength and a badge of their station. Some considered it superstition, totemism, but none violated the custom.”

“Was my father a poet?”

“Not likely. Poets are the mules of the mystical world. For all practical purposes, Ship is your father. Ship will teach you all you need. And, once you leave Ship, Medea will be your mother. Take from her what you need, and go beyond even that.”

Then Tosa Nikki was gone. Ship did that sometimes when least expected and It never answered questions about such losses.

Now, the black and red shadows of Medea slipped past him, washed and blurred through the port's tinted glass. He'd been twelve when Tosa Nikki left him to Ship and the colonists, and he'd had six years of training ahead of him before setting foot on real dirt.

Training for what?
he wondered.
For what kinds of danger do you train a poet?

As uneasiness crept in on him, he resumed the breathing exercises and thought back to the six-year blur of vocoder instructions, questions, exercises, viewscreens and holographic projections that pressed datum after datum upon him from thousands of human minds—most of them long since dead.

This day (he reminded himself) he was leaving Ship, his Father, to step out onto the complex shadow-world of Medea. He was eighteen, strong, and already an eccentric mystery among those who knew him Shipside. Despite the sophisticated gadgetry of Ship and the wealth of information this had given him, his real comfort now lay in body-tuning, the breath control and mind control his fleshly mother had taught him.

Curiosity, that was the thing.

He had remained Ship's favorite because his curiosity was total. This curiosity had led him into his first intellectual exchange with Ship … another memory-marker from his twelfth year.

Why do I think now of that year?

He had a poet's answer:
Because all separations carry something of the same sadness and the same beauty.

Yet … that intellectual exchange was the only experience that he had asked to be replayed for him as he had prepared for transport down to Medea.

Ship: “Today, young Nikki, a theology lesson. What is God?”

Nikki: [long pause] “God is being.”

Ship: “Negative. What is God?”

Nikki: “I am God.”

Ship: “Negative.
I
am God.”

Nikki: “Yes,
we
are God.”

Ship: [demanding] “Why do you say such a thing?”

Nikki: “It is my thought and the thought is God.”

Ship: [long pause] “Whence comes such an answer?”

Nikki: “It has two roots—one for maintenance, one for growth.”

Ship: “Continue.”

Nikki: “Self-consciousness and curiosity—if these are imperfections, then they are imperfections breathed into me at my creation.”

Then Ship's vocoder had shut down on him—the first time Ship had refused to speak to him. Before leaving his instruction panel on that day of his twelfth year, Nikki had keyed his first poem into the console:

Skin of steel

Skin of flesh

prisoner of thought

or extension?

Ship had merely relayed
accepted
and returned to Its odd silence.

Until Nikki's moment of leaving for Medea, that exchange had not been mentioned, but from the time when the vocoder once more responded to him he never again heard the word
restricted
when he asked a question of Ship. He'd had many subsequent discussions with It on matters ranging from primitive concepts of nuclear chemistry to music and he was one of the few colonists ever to relate the two.

“What is it you'd like to understand?” one colonist, a biochemist, asked him.

“Harmony,” Nikki said, and pressed for the schematic of a nucleic acid.

The thump and hiss of his singletran against Medea Central's main hatch jarred him alert. In spite of his training and self-discipline he felt chilled by excitement. The capsule's hatch gaped open into a long, enclosed walkway lined with transparent bubbles which looked out on the jumble of wind and shade and biological magnificence that Medea displayed for his senses.

Nikki released himself from the protective webbing, took up his recorder and bag, and stepped out. His nose told him there were unlabeled things in the air … something sweet … something damp and smoky. A sign flashed on the air ahead of him.

ALL PERSONS MUST RECEIVE COLONY ASSIGNMENTS AT INTEGRATION CENTRAL. STRAIGHT AHEAD. WELCOME.

Just past the sign, he came on a small hatch opening onto the unprotected face of Medea herself—no plasteel floors and bulkheads, no holographic approximations of sandfans, clouds or the many-legged little sects whispering through rocks and gravel. There was a bright orange warning below the hatch controls:

DANGER: MAINTENANCE AND SECURITY ONLY!

Nikki knew the physical data relayed to Ship better than most of even the older colonists. He knew it was likely that one of the suns was in flare and all over Medea creatures were digging in and covering themselves for their lives. A flare's ultraviolet was danger enough, but the vicious predators hatched by a flare, the lightning-fast demons raging from shadow to shadow, could reduce native species to a memory in seconds, and could strip a human to bone in less than a minute. In five minutes, the bone, too, would be gone.

In spite of this knowledge, Nikki snapped back the latch and stepped outside.

How else can I meet my new mother?

His greatest surprise was the wind. The quick gusts that rustled his hair and collar felt like the soft brush of living fingers tender on his skin. He was surprised, too, at the watering of his eyes precipitated by the breeze.

Nikki nudged the dust with a boot toe and sensed the peculiar sweetness of humus rise with the wind.

Near his toe grew a tiny native bush which the colonists called
Narcissus.
Silver leaves were thick on its short branches. A fine matrix of tiny red veins joined in a knot at the stem. The leaves were arranged in pairs, facing each other, and each pair angled upward and outward in a funneling and reflecting process which captured as much available light as possible. He bent close to the plant and heard the soft, characteristic hum of its brittle leaves vibrating in tune with the rise and fall of Medea's ultraviolet pulse. He touched a leaf and the plant disappeared into its root system with a metallic
snap.

Yes, many Medean species maintained an armored retreat ready at hand. It was a lesson the colonists had learned early and copied.

“You!”

It was a shouting voice behind him.

“Get back in here!”

Nikki straightened and turned, saw a maintenance man in a flare suit standing in the hatchway's shelter. The man moved to step outside, but reversed himself as Nikki slipped past him into the walkway. The man's anger remained, however, even after he closed and sealed the hatch.

“What were you trying to prove out there?” He pointed to the warning below the hatch. “Didn't Ship teach you how to read?”

Interesting question. Nikki heard the overtones of many fears. It brought home to him that Ship, while teaching him to read, had used this as a lever to teach him how many things there were more important than reading.

Danger.

Nikki glanced back through the walkway's transparent shielding, saw the tips of the
Narcissus
beginning to venture once more into the open. He glanced at the maintenance man.

“Ship taught me that it takes many signs to make a warning,” he said, and he resumed his course down the walkway toward Integration Central.

Even
Narcissus
balances the demands of relative dangers.

He found this thought reassuring.

All through the swift routine of processing, Nikki kept himself as open as possible, absorbing the newness, comparing. He stored his questions, preferring to listen. The chief receptionist was an elderly man, one of the First Down. He had bored eyes and puffy cheeks and there was the fatigue of death in his voice.

The reception room was like a Ship room: functional, two hatches in metal walls, instruments in racks, no ports or windows. It was barred by the console behind which the receptionist sat, a gate on the right leading to the rear hatch. The man grudged every effort of speech.

“Brought your own recorder.” He punched a notation into the console which shielded him from the waist down, as though he did not exist except as part of the machine.

Nikki felt the weight of the recorder on its strap over his shoulder.
How odd.
It was as though the man's words had created the weight of the recorder.