Masters of Everon

  "No," he said.

  "No what?" he heard her ask.

  "I can't! No. Mikey—" He reached out with the feeling in him, helplessly, to the maolot. "Mikey—"

  He could not help, Mikey told him, also as if from a long distance away, although Mikey in the body was almost within arm's reach.

  "Jef, what is it?" he heard faintly from Jarji. "It's me," he answered her dimly. "That's what it's all about. That's what they've been waiting for. The whole business of planting Mikey with me so that we could grow up with each other. They want me to be the one to justify..."

  He swayed. He was conscious of Will's hands catching him, holding him up.

  "Justify what?" Jarji was asking.

  "Everything!" It was a cry torn from the innermost parts of him. "They want me to tell them why they should try to live with us. They want me to give the answer. They want me to tell them why they should let the human race live!"

  "Then you've got to try to," said Will.

  "Try?" Jef turned blindly to him. He felt as if he was being torn apart and scattered to the farthest reaches of the universe. "Me? But I'm the last one in the universe to do that. I've got no use for the rest of the human race. I've been apart, lonely, and had no use for anyone outside our family from as far back as I can remember! I think we deserve to be wiped out—wiped out and forgotten!"

  Chapter Nineteen

  there was silence in the Valley of Thrones.

  It was as if all those present were holding their breath, as if the history of that place had come down all its centuries, only to pause in this moment of waiting.

  "No," said the voice of Will. "I don't believe it."

  The silence was shattered beyond repair. Jef turned to him.

  "No," said Will, again. "You don't feel like that. I know you."

  "Will," said Jef and his voice hurt his throat. "I do. It's been years since you saw me. The only part of the human race I had any use for was our father and mother. There would have been you, too, but you were gone so long, essentially you got dropped out. When they died, there was no one left."

  Will did not move. He stayed, looking into Jef's face. His voice held on exactly the same level.

  "Think, now," he said. "You say you really don't see any reason why the human race should live? No part of it? None of it? No one?"

  "I don't..." said Jef, and hesitated.

  It was not that he doubted what he felt, and had felt since his parents' death. It was that Will's steady questioning raised an unreasonable fear in him that somehow he had overlooked something, forgotten something. He looked around him and saw Jarji.

  She stood, watching him with a detached thoughtfulness, as if what concerned her had nothing to do with the question awaiting an answer from him. He looked at her, remembering her from that first meeting, sitting cross-legged across the fire from him, the crossbow laid out before her on the ground.

  With that memory, suddenly, something else came back. Again he remembered standing at the top of the spaceship's landing ladder at Everon City spaceport, tasting his bitterness against the colonists he had traveled with. He felt it all just as he had then; but now for the first time he realized that all the time, underneath his bitterness, had still been his early dream that the people out here on the new worlds would be his sort, as he remembered Will being, and his parents being.

  Now that he faced the truth, he recognized that that particular dream had survived even seeing the guests at Armage's dinner party, his encounter with Chavel and his early disappointment in a Martin who was Will in disguise; and it had taken life again when he had first met Jarji. For all her thorniness, she had been exactly the sort of human he had looked to find on Everon.

  He faced facts now, accordingly. Will had always known him better than he knew himself. He had never really buried his hope of finding people he could belong to. His belief in his self-sufficiency and his own self-isolation had been only a con game played on himself.

  He reached out his hand to Jarji and she took it. The touch of her fingers sent an almost chemical heat flooding through his body.

  "All right," he said to Will. "Have it your way. I guess I don't hate anyone that much, after all."

  "Hate!" said Armage. "It's them—those maolots out there who hate us!"

  "No," said Jef.

  "No? What do you mean—no! Of course they hate us. It's the way they're built!"

  "No," Jef told him. "Not the way they're built. Just the way we are. Look."

  Jef pointed with his free hand to the jimi, now gently pressed against the side of Yvis Suchi, the side of its head resting against the woman's elbow, as if it would send the warmth of its own small body into the numb one of the human.

  "Some of them even love," said Jef. "The trouble is, love isn't enough. Not for them, or for us either, in this matter."

  "I'm talking about the damn maolots!" said Armage.

  "Maolots!" anger boiled up in Jef. "What's the matter with all of you, here? Can't you get it through your heads it's not the maolots you've got to deal with—it's Everon? All the life here, of any kind, from the maolots down to the damn viruses in the dirt!"

  Armage stared at him. So, too, did Beau and those others who were conscious enough to understand his words.

  "Can't you see what's under your noses? Look at that jimi!" said Jef. "It loves Yvis Suchi, but it brought her here, just the same. It hadn't any choice. Can't you understand? Everything on Everon is part of one creature—one total ecologic creature. The maolots are just the top link of the chain—the head-part. They can hear us and answer us. But it's the whole creature that needs to know whether it can live with us safely, or whether it has to destroy us to protect itself. Every insect, every amoeba, is in on that decision. Each of them is one of the real masters of Everon."

  They stared at him. He saw that, even now, they did not really comprehend what he was telling them. Only Jarji and Will showed understanding—Jarji with a pressing of her fingers that signaled clearly her agreement with what he had just said; and Will, by nodding.

  "Yes," Will said, almost to himself. "Yes."

  "Anyone who lives here—who really lives here—" said Jarji, unexpectedly, "knows how everything's hooked together. Anyone who lives in the woods has seen prey walk right into the mouth of a galusha or a maolot, more than once. Even if you hadn't you could feel how it is. The animals fit with the plants, and they both fit with air and the earth. It's all one thing, together. Jef's right!"

  Beau's face was dark and twisted. In the area of his own new sensitivity, Jef could feel the struggle that the big woodsman was having with himself. But Beau said nothing.

  "All right," said Armage. "What of it? Tell them what they want to hear and get us out of here. We can decide what to do about them later. Tell them they can live with us. Tell them we'll arrange to live with them. Tell them anything!"

  "It's not that simple—" began Jef.

  "Why the hell not?" shouted Armage. "How can they tell whether it's the truth or not?"

  The anger Jef had felt a moment before licked up toward a total loss of patience, flared at the edges of explosion.

  "It's not words they're waiting for," he said. "Don't you understand? It's something they'll be able to feel in us if we have it— and if we can't show it there for them to feel, then we're done for. They can seed the clouds with spores and raise anything up to a hurricane against us in the next ten hours, if they want. They can change the climate and freeze us out, or kill our crops where they stand in the field. They've never made any serious effort against us until now. But if they decide to, we're done for. They can turn every animal, bird and insect against us—even the variforms—to hunt and kill us. And that's what'll happen. Understand—the maolots won't do it; Everon will do it. It won't be a thought-out plan. It'll be a reflex, an instinctive striking back against their fear of us. The only hope is that I can somehow give them a feeling about us that'll disarm that reflex, make it unnecessary. Don't you understand?"

/>   He stared at Armage, trying to read some flicker of comprehension in him. But Armage pinched his lips and looked away, back out at the rock columns and the waiting figures upon them.

  "Jef," said Will, "you are going to try, then?"

  Jef turned to him.

  "I'll try. I don't know how."

  Will nodded.

  "What can I do to help?" he asked.

  "Nothing," said Jef. "I don't even know if what they want is really in us—in me."

  "It's in you," Jarji said. Her positiveness was like a powerful hand, holding him up. "Things wouldn't have gone this far, with them giving you Mikey to grow up with and their bringing you and all of us here, if it wasn't in you. The only question isn't whether it's there, but whether you can make them see it."

  Jef nodded, steadying.

  She was right. She had to be right. Things could not have gone this far, if there had been nothing in him. Had humanity lacked utterly what Everon wished to find, he and everyone else would have betrayed themselves for what they were, long ago; and in his case, he would have demonstrated his lack to Mikey, back on Earth. That would have been the end then—not only for himself but for Mikey. The Everon life-chain was all one animal, but the bond between its members was one of utility, not affection.

  It was a matter of survival, not of affection. What had he said, himself, just a few minutes ago? Love alone was not enough.

  It was something beyond love. It was something so basic...

  The feel of it came to him then, clearly, for the first time. It came riding on a mental image of the Everon life-mass warily looking at the Earth life-mass, saying—"Can we combine? Can we interlock in an ecological sense? Can we be one animal?"

  What Everon-life needed to know was whether what made up Earth-life followed the same rules as what made Everon-life. The same rules and patterns had to apply—Everon had to know that Earth worked as it did, or that it could be made to work the same way. But all Everon had seen so far was a self-destructive, insane version of the rules it knew, a version in which one species had turned on the rest of its own ecological chain and was cannibalizing it to its private benefit.

  What Everon wanted was proof that this was only a temporary sickness, not an in-born fault of the makeup of Earth-life as a whole. Nothing less than that would stop Everon, with the maolots as their head, from reaching out to destroy the structure that was the Earth-born ecological chain.

  There would be no vindictiveness to such a destruction if it came to that, Jef thought. Many of the lower forms of Earth-life might even survive, incorporated into the Everon chain. But the sick part, the human part, would be removed from all worlds where it existed.

  But humans were not all sick. Some were not. And the race as a whole had not been, once.

  Once...

  His mind slipped back in time, across the dusty ages to the very youth of man and woman, to the late Paleolithic when humans-no longer just man-apes, but true humans—were still a sound and wholesome part of the ecological chain on Earth. The animal paintings from the Magdalenian culture in the caves at Lascaux, in the Dordogne, France—running deer painted into life, with magic and a fellow-feeling—deer, horses, bulls...

  From then, on down the millenia to the slaughter of the American buffalo...

  A possible proof exploded in him suddenly. Still holding Jarji's hand, he made two swift steps to the bull wisent and threw his free arm around its head, lifting the shaggy skull so that he could look into its dulled and dusky eyes.

  "Wisent..." he said to it, in a low, angry voice. "Wisent, I know you. I knew you eight thousand years ago. I know you now. I know you, wisent..."

  The dulled eyes stared into his. Deep within them there was something that might be a stirring, an awakening.

  "Wisent," he said. "Listen to me, wisent..."

  Something deep in himself had taken him over and was carrying him irresistibly away. His mind-image of what had been, and what was, of the very bones of man and animal together, was no longer half-formed. It was coalescing, taking solid shape; and as it did, the wisent was rousing from the influence of the Everon planetary mind that had dampened the natural fires of its spirit down to docility and driven it here. Jef let go of Jarji to grasp the woolly fur of the heavy head in both hands, and hold it eye to eye with him.

  "Wisent," he almost whispered, "we're the same thing. We're the same blood and bone, part of the same life. Wisent, listen to me-"

  The dullness was beginning to go from the eyes. The horizontal, slitted pupil stared back, dark brown and innocent, but at the outer circumference, the rim that was the conjunctiva was beginning to flush red with the beast's wakening of emotion. Jef felt the first faint onset of normal awareness in the wisent, the kindling of a reflexive panic, of a fear that was fury and a fury that was fear, breaking the surface of animal consciousness.

  "Wisent," he was telling it, "I love you, wisent, but there has to be more than that. And there is—we're the same thing, you and I. We were always the same thing. We could never be anything else because we both belong to something that holds us both. You're, Its wisent-shape and I am Its man-shape, but to It there's no difference between us. Do you hear me, wisent?"

  The wisent was waking. Between his hands Jef could feel a growing tenseness, a rousing to a readiness to fight or flee. The uncomplex mind he faced was lifting swiftly from the cloudy waters of near unconsciousness to the light and clarity of decision and action. Jef ran his right hand down the neck and felt the great shoulder muscles quivering. The short, sharp horns began to lower. In a moment the wisent would be fully awake and he would attack out of instinctive fear.

  But in the structure of Everon-life, such an attack did not need to happen. There were greater laws that reached out to dominate such fears and abort such reactions. If—but only if—such a law was with him, a maolot did not need to physically hold still a leaf-stalker. The leaf-stalker would wait by itself in those critical moments when the greater need of the whole, multi-species creature took precedence over the individual need and will; just as a jimi would lead an Yvis Suchi to the Valley of Thrones. If there was an equal response still in Earth bones and soul, then with what Jef had learned from Mikey and Everon, he should be able to hold this wisent quiet and abort the natural fear growing now in the animal.

  "Wisent..." he whispered in its ear. "Wisent..."

  It heard him and it did not understand. The eyelids lifted, showing a whitish brown. The elliptical iris widened, and the ring of the conjunctiva around it all reddened and swelled. Panic beat like a tom-tom in its deep chest. The two-thousand-pound body seemed to swell and loom over Jef.

  He half-closed his own eyes. He sent his own mind out beyond the present moment, beyond the small known history of his two-legged race and reached back and back to where each other life form on the face of his native globe owned that world as much as he and such as he. Back... back to the time when they were all together, man and bull and all else that had lived and died on the continents of the late Paleolithic.

  "We are the same..." he kept saying. "We are the same..."

  For a long moment he rode the upsurge of fury-fear in the awakened wisent's mind like a chip on the surface of a whirlpool—under its control, not it under his. Then, convincing himself, he began for the first time to feel the real power and presence of the great supra-species laws, the laws of a physics of life, beginning to emerge from the gloom of instinct to wake memories he had not known he had.

  "Brother bear..." he heard himself murmuring. "Brother bear, forgive me. I kill you so that my people may live. Brother bear, great bear, wise bear—wiser and greater than I am—bear, forgive me for killing you, so I can live. Brother wisent, forgive me. Wisent, great wisent, you are stronger and braver than I am, but I must hold you down, I must control you, so my people will live. Brother wisent, still... be still... stand quiet, brother wisent, so my people may live..."

  ... And from beyond history, from beyond all the things known by the co
nscious mind, and from before the idea of time itself, came the operation of those great laws binding all life on Earth together, like massive girders reinforcing the little, individual structure of his own will... and the wisent calmed. Its panic and its fear descended, dwindled, sank back into a resignation, a willingness on the part of the wisent. The enormous, hunched shoulder muscles untensed, stretching out, going lax.

  The red faded from the exterior circle of the eye, the iris shrank and the brownish-white disappeared as the eyelids drooped again.

  The wisent stood still, passive and waiting, locked together with Jef by the invisible bonds of life that had existed before the earliest ancestor of either one of them had been conceived. Laws that were the counterpart of the laws of life on Everon.

  Slowly Jef opened his hands. They had been clenched so hard in the hair on each side of the heavy beast-head that he could barely manage to unfold his fingers. About him was an aching silence that held all the people and beasts close about him, all of the watchers on the hillsides, all of the amphitheater.

  He felt Jarji close beside him. Instinctively he reached out and put an arm around her, holding her to him. Still the silence persisted.

  Then, without warning, one of the maolots lying on a rock column directly before them lifted her head. The powerful jaws opened, and the ear-shaking roar of the species reverberated through the Valley of Thrones. Before it had even begun to reecho, the roars burst forth everywhere. Not the droning hunting calls, but the full and absolute roar that could be heard, as Jef had heard it earlier, for kilometers.

  Now the maolots on the columns were all roaring; and the sound, penned in by the rock walls and thrown back and forth by them, was stunning. Riding his empathic link with Mikey, Jef's vision swept over the columns before him, swept in close—and everywhere he looked from close up into the opened eyes of the maolots. Eyes of sapphire color, topaz, garnet eyes—each one different, each one deep with a knowledge and a wisdom he now realized would have defeated him utterly if he had seen it before he had learned to handle the great laws himself, for the power of those laws were there, visible in the eyes of the grown maolots, and if he had faced them before, he would never have had the courage to try to find such ancient and awesome power in himself.