“This is a tiny, fast pursuit ship,” Ledebur said. “According to my psychic presentation related by the primordial forces. Like a bee. It hurtled down, landed near the Poly settlement, Hamlet Hamlet.”
At once Baines thought of Annette Golding. He hoped to heaven that she was all right. “Do you have any kind of vehicle? Anything I can ride back to Adolfville in? There was his own car, presumably parked at the spot the Terran ship had occupied. Hell, he could walk to it from here. And he would not drive to his own settlement, he decided; he would go to Hamlet Hamlet, make certain that Annette had not been raped, beaten up or lasered. If she were harmed in any way—
“I let them down,” he said to Ledebur. “I claimed I had a plan—they depended on me, naturally, because I’m a Pare.” But he had not given up yet; his Pare mind was filled with schemes, active and alive. He would go to his grave this way, still planning how to defeat the enemy.
“You should eat something,” Ledebur’s woman suggested. “Before you go anywhere. There’s some kidney stew left; I intended to give it to the cats but you’re welcome to it.”
“Thanks,” he said, managing not to gag; Heeb cooking left something to be desired. But she was right. He needed to regain a certain amount of energy, otherwise he’d fall dead in his tracks. It was amazing he had not already, considering what had befallen him.
After he had eaten he borrowed a flashlight from Ledebur, thanked him for the clothes, ointment and meal, then set off on foot through the narrow, twisted, junk filled streets of Gandhitown. Fortunately his car was still where he had left it; neither Heebs nor Terrans had seen fit to cart it off, saw it up or pulverize it.
Getting in he drove from Gandhitown, took the road east toward Hamlet Hamlet. Once more at a pitiful seventy-five miles an hour he was on his way across the open, exposed landscape between settlements.
With him rode a dreadful sense of urgency, of a sort he had never before experienced. Da Vinci Heights had been invaded, perhaps already had fallen; what was left? How, without the fantastic energy of the Mans clan, could they survive? If perhaps this single small Terran ship meant something… might that not be a hope? At least it was unexpected. And, within the realm of the expected, they had no chance, were doomed.
He was not a Skitz, or a Heeb. And yet in his own dim way he had his vision, too. It was a vision of the off-chance, the one possibility plucked from the many. His first plan had fallen through but there was still this; he believed in this. And he did not even know why.
ELEVEN
On her trip home from the council meeting at Adolfville, a meeting which had seen the Terran ultimatum expire and the enemy go into action against Da Vinci Heights, Annette Golding considered the possibility of suicide. What had happened to them, even to the Manses, was overpowering; how did one combat the arguments put forth by a planet which had recently defeated the whole Alphane empire?
Obviously it was hopeless. And, on a biological level, she recognized it… and was willing to succumb to it. I’m like Dino Watters, she said to herself as she scrutinized the murky road ahead, the glow of her headlights against the plastic ribbon which connected Adolfville with Hamlet Hamlet. When the chips are down, I prefer not to fight; I prefer to give up. And no one’s making me give up: I just want to.
Tears filled her eyes as she realized this about herself. I guess I must basically admire the Manses, she decided. I venerate what I’m not; I’m not harsh, aloof, unyielding. But theoretically, being a Poly, I could become that. In fact I could become anything. But instead—
She saw, then, to her right, a streak of retro-rocket exhausts tailed out along the night sky. A ship was descending, and very close to Hamlet Hamlet. In fact if she kept on this road she would encounter it. She experienced at once—typical of a Poly—two equal, opposite emotions. Fear made her cringe, and yet curiosity, a blend of eagerness and anticipation and excitement, caused her to speed her car up.
However, before she reached the ship her fear won out; she slowed, drove the car onto the soft dirt shoulder and cut the switch. The car glided in silence to a stop; she sat with headlights off, listening to the night sounds and wondering what to do.
From where she sat she could dimly perceive the ship, and occasionally from near it a light flashed; someone was doing something. Terran soldiers, perhaps, preparing to invest Hamlet Hamlet. And yet—she heard no voices. And the ship did not appear large.
She was of course armed. Every delegate to the council had to be, although the Heeb rep traditionally forgot his. Reaching into the glove compartment she fished out the old-fashioned lead-slug pistol; she had never used it and it seemed incredible to her that she might soon find herself using it now. But it seemed that she had no choice.
On foot, quietly, she sneaked past scrubby bushes, until all at once she had reached the ship; startled, she backed away, and then saw a flash of light, the activity near the base of the ship continuing.
One man, utterly absorbed, was busy with a shovel, digging a pit; he labored away, perspiring, his face wrinkled with concentration. And then suddenly he hurried back to the ship.
When he reappeared he carried a carton which he set down beside the pit. His light flashed into the carton and Annette Golding saw five grapefruit-like spheres, faintly moist and pulsing; they were alive and she recognized them. Newly-born initial constituents of Ganymedean slime molds—she had viewed pics of them in edutext tapes. The man of course was burying them; in the soil they would grow at great speed. This portion of their life-cycle fulfilled itself immediately. And so the man hurried. The spheres might die.
She said, surprising even herself, “You’ll never get them all in the ground in time.” One sphere, in fact, had already darkened and become sunken; it was withering before their eyes. “Listen.” She approached the man, who continued working, digging with the small shovel. “I’ll keep them moist; do you have any water?” She bent down beside him, waiting. “They really are going to perish.” Obviously he knew this, too.
Roughly the man said, “In the ship. Get a big container. You’ll see the water tap; it’s marked.” He snatched the withering sphere from its fellows, set it gently into the pit, began to cover it with loose soil which he broke with his fingers.
Annette entered the ship, found the water tap and then a bowl.
Back outside with the bowl of water she doused the swiftly-deteriorating spheres, reflecting philosophically that this was the way with fungi: everything happened fast with them, birth, growth, even death. Perhaps they were lucky. They had their tiny time to strut about.
“Thanks,” the man said as he took a second—now wet—sphere and began to bury it, too. “I don’t hope to save them all. The spores germinated on my trip—I had no place to put the plants, I just had a pot for the microscopic-size spores.” He glanced up at her briefly as he dug to enlarge the pit. “Miss Golding,” he said.
Crouched by the carton of spheres Annette said, “Why is it that you know me but I’ve never seen you before?”
“This is my second trip here,” the man said cryptically.
Already the first-buried sphere had begun to grow; in the light of the handtorch Annette saw the ground quiver and bulge, tremble as the diameter of the sphere radically increased. It was an odd, funny sight and she laughed. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “But you scuttled about, popped it into the ground, and now look at it. In a while it’ll be as big as we are. And then it can move on.” Slime molds, she knew, were the sole mobile fungus; they fascinated her for that reason.
“How come you know so much about them?” the man asked her.
“For years I had nothing to do but educate myself. From the—I guess you would call it hospital… anyhow from it, before it was razed, I got tapes on biology and zoology. It’s true, is it, that when they’re fully ripe a Ganymedean slime mold is intelligent enough so you can converse with it?”
“More than that intelligent.” The man swiftly planted another sphere; in his hands it quivered, jellylike, soft.
/> “How wonderful,” she said. “I find that terribly exciting.” It would be worth staying here, to see this. “Don’t you love this?” she said, kneeling down on the far side of the carton to watch his work. “The night smells, the air, the sounds of creatures—little ones, like hipfrogs and bellcrickets—stirring about, and then this, making these fungi grow instead of just letting them die? You’re very humane; I can see that. Tell me your name.”
He glanced at her sideways. “Why?”
“Because. So I can remember you.”
“I have someone’s name,” the man said, “so I could remember him.”
Now only one sphere remained to plant. And the first had burgeoned out, exposing itself; it had become, she discovered, a multitude of spheres, now, gummed together into a mass. “But,” the man said, “I wanted his name so that I could—” He did not finish, but she got the idea. “My name is Chuck Rittersdorf,” he said.
“Are you related to Dr. Rittersdorf, the psychologist in that Terran ship? Yes, you must be her husband.” She was positive of it; the fact was totally obvious. Remembering Gabriel Baines’ plan she put her hand over her mouth, giggling with mischievous excitement. “Oh,” she said, “if you only knew. But I can’t tell you.” Another name you should remember, she thought, is Gabriel Baines. She wondered how Gabe’s plan to reduce Dr. Rittersdorf by love-making had gone; she had a feeling that it had failed. But for Gabe it might well have been—even still be at this moment—a good deal of fun.
Of course all that was over, now, because Mr. Rittersdorf had arrived.
“What was your name,” she asked, “when you were here before?”
Chuck Rittersdorf glanced at her. “You think I change my—”
“You were someone else.” It had to be that; otherwise she would remember him. Have recognized him.
After a pause Rittersdorf said, “Let’s just say I came here and met you and returned to Terra and now I’m back.” He glared at her as if it were her fault. The last sphere having been planted he reflexively gathered up the empty carton and the small shovel, started toward the ship.
Following, Annette said, “Will slime molds take over our moon, now?” It occurred to her that perhaps this was part of Terra’s plan for conquest. But the idea did not ring right; this man had all the appearances of someone working in stealth alone. It was too much a Pare-like idea for her.
“You could do a lot worse,” Rittersdorf said laconically. He disappeared into the ship; after hesitating she went in after him, blinking in the bright overhead light.
There on a counter lay her lead-slug pistol; she had put it down when she was involved in filling the container with water.
Picking up the pistol Rittersdorf inspected it, then turned to her with a peculiar expression, almost a grin, on his face. “Yours?”
“Yep,” she said, humiliated. She held out her hand, hoping he would give it back. However he did not. “Oh please,” she said. “It’s mine and I laid it down because I was trying to help; you know that.”
He studied her a long, long time. And then handed her the pistol.
“Thank you.” She felt gratitude. “I’ll remember you did that.”
“Were you going to save this moon by means of that?” Now Rittersdorf smiled. He was not bad-looking, she decided, except that he had a hectic, care-worn expression and too many wrinkles. But his eyes were a clean nice blue. Perhaps, she guessed, he was in his mid-thirties. Not really old, but somewhat older than herself. His smile had a pained quality, not as if it were contrived but-she pondered. As if it were unnatural, as if for him being happy, even briefly, was difficult. He was, perhaps like Dino Watters, addicted to gloom. She felt sorry for him if that were so. It was a terrible malady to have. Far worse than the several others.
She said, “I don’t think we can save this moon. I just wanted to protect myself personally. You know our situation here, don’t you? We—”
A voice inside her mind croaked into abrupt, rudimentary life. “Mr. Rittersdorf…” It creaked, faded out, then returned, like the feeble sputter of a crystal set radio. “…wise thing. I see that Joan…” The voice was gone now.
“What in god’s name was that?” Annette said, appalled.
“The slime mold. One of them. I don’t know which.” Chuck Rittersdorf seemed transfixed with relief. Loudly he said, “It carries the continuity!” He shouted at her as if she were a mile away, “He’s back again! What do you say, Miss Golding? Say something!” He grabbed her all at once by the hands, whirled her in a dance-like circle of joyous, child-like celebration. “Say something, Miss Golding!”
“I’m glad,” Annette said dutifully, “to see you so happy. You ought to be as joyous as often as possible. Of course I don’t know what happened. Anyhow—” She disengaged her fingers from his. “I know you deserve this, whatever it is.”
Behind her something stirred. She looked back and saw at the doorway of the ship a yellow lump which progressed sluggishly forward, undulating over the doorstep, entering. So this is how they look, she realized. In their final stage. It was breath-taking. She retreated, not in fear but in awe; it was certainly a miracle the way it had developed so rapidly. And now—as she recalled—it would stay this way indefinitely, until killed at last by too cold or too warm a climate, or by too much dryness. And, in its last extremity, it would sporify; the cycle would repeat.
As the slime mold entered the ship a second slime mold crept into sight behind it, following. And behind it a third.
Startled, Chuck Rittersdorf said, “Which is you, Lord Running Clam?”
In Annette’s mind a series of thoughts progressed. “It is a custom for the first-born to take the formal identity of the parent. But there is no actual distinction. In a sense we are all Lord Running Clams; in another sense none of us is. I—the first—will assume the name, the others are instead inventing new names that gratify them. To me comes the feeling that we will function and thrive on this moon; the atmosphere, the humidity and the pull of gravity seem quite in order to us. You have helped diversify our location; you’ve carried us more than—allow me to compute—three lights years from our source. Thank you.” It—or rather they—added, “Your ship and you yourself are about to be attacked, I’m afraid. Perhaps you should take off as soon as possible. That is why we came inside, those of us who had developed in time.”
“Attacked by whom?” Chuck Rittersdorf demanded, pressing a button at the control panel which slid the hatch of the ship shut. Seating himself he prepared the ship for departure.
“As we ferret it out,” the thoughts came to Annette from the three slime molds, “a group of natives is involved, those who refer to themselves in their own minds as Manses. Evidently they have succeeded in blowing up some other ship—”
“Good grief,” Chuck Rittersdorf grated. “That would be Mary’s.”
“Yes,” the slime mold agreed. “The approaching Manses are quite consciously congratulating themselves in their typically prideful fashion on successfully fighting off Dr. Rittersdorf. However she is not dead. Those in the first ship were able to escape; they are at unknown loci on the moon at present, and the Manses are hunting them.”
“What about the nearby Terran warships?” Rittersdorf asked.
“What warships? The Manses have thrown some novel variety of protective screen about their settlement. So for the moment they are safe.” The slime mold, then, amplified with a conjecture of its own. “But it will not last long and this they know. They are on the offensive only temporarily. But still they love it. They are extremely happy, while all the while the baffled Terran line-ships buzz about uselessly.”
The poor Manses, Annette thought to herself. Unable to look ahead, dwelling on the now, sallying forth to do battle as if they had a reasonable chance. And yet, was her own view much better? Was her willingness to accept failure an improvement?
No wonder all the clans of the moon depended on the Manses; it remained the only clan with courage. And the vitality wh
ich that courage gave.
The rest of us, Annette realized, lost long ago. Before the first Terran, Dr. Mary Rittersdorf, showed up.
Gabriel Baines, driving at a paltry seventy-five miles an hour toward Hamlet Hamlet, saw the small, brisk ship race up into the night sky and knew that he was too late, knew it without having any understanding directly of the situation. Annette, his near-Psionic talent informed him, was in the ship or else the ship— those aboard it—had destroyed her. In any case she was gone and so he slowed the car, feeling bitterness and despair.
There was virtually nothing he could do, now. Hence he might as well turn back toward Adolfville, to his own settlement and people. Be with them in these last, tragic days of their existence.
As he started to turn his car around, something rumbled and clanked past him, heading toward Hamlet Hamlet; it was a crawling monster if not a super-monster. Cast of high-process iron as only the Manses knew how to bring off, sweeping the landscape ahead with its powerful lights, it advanced flying a red and black flag, the battle symbol of the Manses.
Evidently he was seeing the initial stages of a surface counterattack. But against precisely what? The Manses were certainly in action, but surely not against Hamlet Hamlet. Perhaps they had been attempting to reach the small, swift ship before it took off. But for them, as for himself, it was too late.
He honked his horn. The turret of the Mans tank flopped open; the tank circled back toward him and a Mans, unfamiliar to him, stood up and waved in greeting to him. The Mans’s face was inflamed with enthusiasm; obviously he was hotly enjoying this experience, his military duties in defense of the moon, for which they had prepared so long. The situation, depressing as it was to Baines, had an opposite effect on the Mans: for him it permitted a flowery, bellicose puffing and posturing. Gabriel Baines was not surprised.
“Hi,” the Mans in the tank yelled, grinning broadly.
Baines called back with as little sourness as he could manage, “I see the ship got away from you people.”