The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (94 page)

“You figured out how to get us back?” Ing asked.

“Earthside says it has the answer if you can assemble enough mass at your end to anchor a full-sized beam.” Again Ing thought of that ride through chaos. He wasn't sure he wanted another such trip. Time to solve that problem when it arose, though. There'd be something in the book about it.

Ing smiled at himself then, sensing an instinctive reason for all the handbooks of history. Against chaos, man had to raise a precise and orderly alignment of actions, a system within which he could sense his own existence.

A watery world down there,
he thought.
Have to find some way to make paper for these kids before they come out of their vats. Plenty of things to teach them.

Watery world.

He recalled then a sentence of swimming instructions from the “Blue Jackets Manual,” one of the ancient handbooks in his collection: “Breathing may be accomplished by swimming with the head out of water.”

Have to remember that one,
he thought.
The kids'll need a secure and orderly world.

 

THE FEATHERBEDDERS

Once there was a Slorin with a one-syllable name who is believed to have said: “niche for every one of us and every one of us in his niche.”

—Folk saying of the
Scattership
People

There must be a streak of madness in a Slorin who'd bring his only offspring, an untrained and untried youth, on a mission as potentially dangerous as this one, Smeg told himself.

The rationale behind his decision remained clear: The colonial nucleus must preserve its elders for their detail memory. The youngest of the group was the logical one to be volunteered for this risk. Still …

Smeg forced such thoughts out of his mind. They weakened him. He concentrated on driving the gray motor-pool Plymouth they'd signed out of the government garage in the state capital that morning. The machine demanded considerable attention.

The Plymouth was only two years old, but this region's red rock roads and potholes had multiplied those years by a factor of at least four. The steering was loose and assorted squeaks arose from front and rear as he negotiated a rutted downgrade. The road took them into a shadowed gulch almost bare of vegetation and across the rattling planks of a wooden bridge that spanned a dry creekbed. They climbed out the other side through ancient erosion gullies, past a zone of scrub cottonwoods and onto the reaching flat land they'd been crossing for two hours.

Smeg risked a glance at Rick, his offspring, riding silently beside him. The youth had come out of the pupal stage with a passable human shape. No doubt Rick would do better next time—provided he had the opportunity. But he was well within the seventy-five percent accuracy limit the Slorin set for themselves. It was a universal fact that the untrained sentience saw what it
thought
it saw. The mind tended to supply the missing elements.

A nudge from the Slorin mindcloud helped, of course, but this carried its own perils. The nudged mind sometimes developed powers of its own—with terrifying results. Slorin had learned long ago to depend on the directional broadcast of the mind's narrow band, and to locate themselves in a network limited by the band's rather short range.

However, Rick had missed none of the essentials for human appearance. He had a gentle, slender face whose contours were difficult to remember. His brown eyes were of a limpid softness that made human females discard all suspicions while the males concentrated on jealousy. Rick's hair was a coarse, but acceptable black. The shoulders were a bit high and the thorax somewhat too heroic, but the total effect aroused no probing questions.

That was the important thing: no probing questions.

Smeg permitted himself a silent sigh. His own shape—that of a middle-aged government official, gray at the temples, slightly paunchy and bent of shoulder, and with weak eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses—was more in the Slorin tradition.

Live on the margins,
Smeg thought.
Attract no attention.

In other words, don't do what they were doing today.

Awareness of danger forced Smeg into extreme contact with this body his plastic genes had fashioned. It was a good body, a close enough duplicate to interbreed with the natives, but he felt it now from the inside, as it were, a fabric of newness stretched over the ancient substance of the Slorin. It was familiar, yet bothersomely unfamiliar.

I am Sumctroxelunsmeg,
he reminded himself.
I am a Slorin of seven syllables, each addition to my name an honor to my family. By the pupa of my jelly-sire whose name took fourteen thousand heartbeats to pronounce, I shall not fail!

There! That was the spirit he needed—the eternal wanderer, temporarily disciplined, yet without boundaries. “If you want to swim, you must enter the water,” he whispered.

“Did you say something, Dad?” Rick asked.

Ahhh, that was very good, Smeg thought. Dad—the easy colloquialism.

“I was girding myself for the ordeal, so to speak,” Smeg said. “We must separate in a few minutes.” He nodded ahead to where a town was beginning to hump itself out of the horizon.

“I think I should barge right in and start asking about their sheriff,” Rick said.

Smeg drew in a sharp breath, a gesture of surprise that fitted this body. “Feel out the situation first,” he said.

More and more, he began to question the wisdom of sending Rick in there. Dangerous, damnably dangerous. Rick could get himself irrevocably killed, ruined beyond the pupa's powers to restore. Worse than that, he could be exposed. There was the real danger. Give natives the knowledge of what they were fighting and they tended to develop extremely effective methods.

Slorin memory carried a bagful of horror stories to verify this fact.

“The Slorin must remain ready to take any shape, adapt to any situation,” Rick said. “That it?”

Rick spoke the axiom well, Smeg thought, but did he really understand it? How could he? Rick still didn't have full control of the behavior patterns that went with this particular body shape. Again, Smeg sighed. If only they'd saved the infiltration squad, the expendable specialists.

Thoughts such as this always brought the more disquieting question:
Saved them from what?

There had been five hundred pupae in the
Scattership
before the unknown disaster. Now, there were four secondary ancestors and one new offspring created on this planet. They were shipless castaways on an unregistered world, not knowing even the nature of the disaster which had sent them scooting across the void in an escape capsule with minimum shielding.

Four of them had emerged from the capsule as basic Slorin polymorphs to find themselves in darkness on a steep landscape of rocks and trees. At morning, there'd been four additional trees there—watching, listening, weighing the newness against memories accumulated across a time-span in which billions of planets such as this one could have developed and died.

The capsule had chosen an excellent landing site: no nearby sentient constructions. The Slorin now knew the region's native label—central British Columbia. In that period of awakening, though, it had been a place of unknown dangers whose chemistry and organization required the most cautious testing.

In time, four black bears had shambled down out of the mountains. Approaching civilization, they'd hidden and watched—listening, always listening, never daring to use the mindcloud. Who knew what mental powers the natives might have? Four roughly fashioned hunters had been metamorphosed from Slorin pupae in a brush-screened cave. The hunters had been tested, refined.

Finally—the hunters had scattered.

Slorin always scattered.

“When we left Washington you said something about the possibility of a trap,” Rick said. “You don't really think—”

“Slorin have been unmasked on some worlds,” Smeg said. “Natives have developed situational protective devices. This has some of the characteristics of such a trap.”

“Then why investigate? Why not leave it alone until we're stronger?”

“Rick!” Smeg shuddered at the youth's massive ignorance. “Other capsules may have escaped,” he said.

“But if it's a Slorin down here, he's acting like a dangerous fool.”

“More reason to investigate. We could have a damaged pupa here, one who lost part of the detail memory. Perhaps he doesn't know how to act—except out of instincts.”

“Then why not stay out of the town and probe just a little bit with the mindcloud?”

Rick cannot be trusted with this job,
Smeg thought.
He's too raw, too full of the youthful desire to play with the mindcloud.

“Why not?” Rick repeated.

Smeg pulled the car to a stop at the side of the dirt road, opened his window. It was getting hot—be noon in about an hour. The landscape was a hardscrabble flatness marked by sparse vegetation and a clump of buildings about two miles ahead. Broken fences lined both sides of the road. Low cottonwoods off to the right betrayed the presence of the dry creekbed. Two scrofulous oaks in the middle distance provided shade for several steers. Away on the rim of the badland, obscured by haze, there was a suggestion of hills.

“You going to try my suggestion?” Risk asked.

“No.”

“Then why're we stopping? This as far as you go?”

“No.” Smeg sighed. “This is as far as
you
go. I'm changing plans. You will wait. I will go into the village.”

“But I'm the younger. I'm—”

“And I'm in command here.”

“The others won't like this. They said—”

“The others will understand my decision.”

“But Slorin law says—”

“Don't quote Slorin law to me!”

“But—”

“Would you teach your grandfather how to shape a pupa?” Smeg shook his head. Rick must learn how to control the anger which flared in this bodily creation. “The limit of the law is the limit of enforcement—the real limit of organized society. We're not an organized society. We're two Slorin—alone, cut off from our pitiful net. Alone! Two Slorin of widely disparate ability. You are capable of carrying a message. I do not judge you capable of meeting the challenge in this village.”

Smeg reached across Rick, opened the door.

“This is a firm decision?” Rick asked.

“It is. You know what to do?”

Rick spoke stiffly: “I take that kit of yours from the back and I play the part of a soil engineer from the Department of Agriculture.”

“Not a
part,
Rick. You
are
a soil engineer.”

“But—”

“You will make real tests which will go into a real report and be sent to a real office with a real function. In the event of disaster, you will assume my shape and step into my niche.”

“I see.”

“I truly hope you do. Meanwhile, you will go out across that field. The dry creekbed is out there. See those cottonwoods?”

“I've identified the characteristics of this landscape.”

“Excellent. Don't deviate. Remember that you're the offspring of Sumctroxelunsmeg. Your jelly-sire's name took fourteen thousand heartbeats to pronounce. Live with pride.”

“I was supposed to go in there, take the risk of it—”

“There are risks and there are risks. Remember, make real tests for a real report. Never betray your niche. When you have made the tests, find a place in that creekbed to secrete yourself. Dig in and wait. Listen on the narrow band at all times. Listen, that is all you do. In the event of disaster, you must get word to the others. In the kit there's a dog collar with a tag bearing a promise of reward and the address of our Chicago drop. Do you know the greyhound shape?”

“I know the plan, Dad.”

Rick slid out of the car. He removed a heavy black case from the rear, closed the doors, stared in at his parent.

Smeg leaned across the seat, opened the window. It creaked dismally.

“Good luck, Dad,” Rick said.

Smeg swallowed. This body carried a burden of attachment to an offspring much stronger than any in previous Slorin experience. He wondered how the offspring felt about the parent, tried to probe his own feelings toward the one who'd created him, trained him, sealed his pupa into the
Scattership.
There was no sense of loss. In some ways, he
was
the parent. As different experiences changed him, he would become more and more the individual, however. Syllables would be added to his name. Perhaps, someday, he might feel an urge to be reunited.

“Don't lose your cool, Dad,” Rick said.

“The God of Slorin has no shape,” Smeg said. He closed the window, straightened himself behind the steering wheel.

Rick turned, trudged off across the field toward the cottonwoods. A low cloud of dust marked his progress. He carried the black case easily in his right hand.

Smeg put the car in motion, concentrated on driving. That last glimpse of Rick, sturdy and obedient, had pierced him with unexpected emotions. Slorin parted, he told himself. It is natural for Slorin to part. An offspring is merely an offspring.

A Slorin prayer came into his mind. “Lord, let me possess this moment without regrets, and, losing it, gain it forever.”

The prayer helped, but Smeg still felt the tug of that parting. He stared at the shabby building of his target town. Someone in this collection of structures Smeg was now entering had not learned a basic Slorin lesson:
There is a reason for living; Slorin must not live in a way that destroys this reason.

Moderation, that was the key.

A man stood in the dusty sunglare toward the center of the town—one lone man beside the dirt road that ran unchecked toward the distant horizon. For one haunted moment Smeg had the feeling it was not a man, but a dangerous other-shaped enemy he'd met before. The feeling passed as Smeg brought the car to a stop nearby.