Mother of Demons

  Her slender hand had been engulfed in Julius' vigorous handshake. He was a large man, fat in a healthy-looking sort of way. His complexion was ruddy, and his features were round and pudgy. Except for the kinky black hair, and the lack of a beard, he was the spitting image of Santa Claus.

  Despite his harmless appearance, she was tense with anger. She tried to relax, because she knew that her thin, sharp features (normally quite attractive) were extremely intimidating when she was mad. But she couldn't help herself.

  Arrogant bastard.

  "Tell me, something, Mr. Cohen—"

  "Please, please! Julius!"

  "All right, then. Julius. I was born on the Altiplano. My father's Latin American. But I'm descended from Bengali immigrants, and I still have lots of relatives living in Calcutta. It's only been in the last generation or so that the Bengalis have finally been able to pull themselves out of some of the worst poverty the human race has ever experienced. They've even managed to limit the destruction during the monsoon season. But it's still a hard life, for most of them, and they're still packed together like sardines. What are those millions—millions, Mr. Cohen—of people supposed to do after you raise the sea level? Learn to swim? Or will you take them into all the extra space you've got in New York City?"

  He shook his head ruefully. "Damn, my accent always gives me away." He stared at her thoughtfully, and she couldn't help but notice the intelligence in his eyes. Then, with a warmth that struck her like a great wave, his eyes had crinkled and a huge grin had spread across his face.

  "Hey, lady, I really don't wanna drown a lot of cute little Bengali kids. Honest, I don't."

  He made a self-deprecating gesture. "You've got to forgive my big mouth. I have a bad habit of fixing on a point and taking it to its logical conclusion. But I'm really not a stupid jackass, honest."

  Then, more seriously: "I know we've got to maintain the earth's temperature where it is. The human race has only finally—barely—managed to carve out a decent enough life for everyone. The last thing we need to do is shatter all that hard work by upsetting the climatic apple-cart. It's just—oh hell, the thing that irritates me about these ecofreaks isn't what they call for, it's their goddammed self-righteousness. For all their claims to being the guardians of life, the truth is that they're at least as homocentric as anyone else. They just won't admit it. It's not 'life' they care about, it's the way life affects humans."

  "I think you're being unfair."

  He shrugged. "Maybe. But as a professional biologist I've always found that people have the screwiest ideas about life. Let me ask you something. Where would you rather spend a week's vacation—next to a beautiful clear blue lake in the mountains, or next to a swamp?"

  She snorted. "What do you think?"

  "Of course—at the lake. And while you were there, I'm sure you'd gaze out over that beautiful stretch of bright blue water and think serene philosophical thoughts about the glories of nature. But are you aware that cold mountain lakes are one of the most inhospitable conditions for life? It's true. That lake is a sterile desert. There are a few life-forms that have managed to adapt to those conditions—trout, for instance. But the biomass in that lake is a pittance compared to the life that thrives in a swamp."

  He waved his arms about enthusiastically.

  "Swamps are great! They're wonderful! Life adores a swamp! You don't believe me? Try walking around in a swamp sometime without stepping all over all kinds of juicy life-forms. Really juicy—soft, and slimy, and wriggly, and crawling all over the place."

  She couldn't help but laugh. "Ugh! No thanks."

  He grinned. "See? You're just another bigot. And that's my point. People will get all worked up over pollution in a mountain lake. Trout are pretty; tasty, too. But who cares about a swamp?"

  He shrugged. "And that's fine with me, in and of itself. I'd much rather spend a week by a mountain lake, myself. Hate swamps. Don't know anybody who doesn't except herpetologists, and they're all a bunch of lunatics." One of the men nearby snorted. "But I don't go around preaching about the sanctity of all life, when what I really care about is life as it impacts on the human race. I'm opposed to destroying life where it's needless. But like any biologist—certainly any paleontologist—I have a keen sense that eventually all species become extinct. That's the way it is—and has been for eons, long before we humans popped onto the scene. So, to get back to your point, I care a hell of a lot more about what happens to people in Bengal than I do about the abstract fact that if we flooded the lowlands we'd enable millions of new species to come into existence. I'm just willing to be honest about it."

  "That's all very sane and logical, Mr. Coh—Julius. But let me ask you a question. Would you rather have an ocean with whales or without them?"

  He frowned. "What is this, some kind of trick question? With whales, of course."

  "You are pleased, then, at the fact that the Earth's oceans are teeming with whales?"

  "Sure!"

  "Hmm. Yet it's a fact—I'm an historian, as I said—that the whales were only saved from extermination because of the actions of people who were not driven by logic but by an irrational passion. The type of people you call 'ecofreaks.' Had it not been for them, the great cetaceans would have disappeared. For it is also a fact that during the period of the great whale slaughtering, sane and logical men such as yourself stood to one side. Clucking their tongues at the barbarity of it all, of course, and shedding tears over the plight of the poor whales. But always quick to correct the scientific errors of the 'ecofreaks,' as if genocide and failing a biology quiz were of equal weight in the judgement of history."

  She relaxed, slightly. "Mind you, I take some pride myself in my own rationality and logic. But I am an historian by profession. And if there is one thing that historians know, it's that nothing great was ever achieved except by those who were filled with passion. Their passion may have been illogical, even bizarre to modern people. Their understanding of the world and what they were doing may have been false. It usually was. But they were not afraid to act, guided by whatever ideas they had in their possession. Do not sneer at such people. You would not be here without them."

  Silence followed for a moment. Indira was surprised to see that there was not a trace of irritation in the face of the man opposite her. Instead, Julius was gazing at her with a strange look. Interest, she suddenly realized.

  Koresz spoke. "I fear I shall have to exercise my medical skills, lest Julius bleed to death from the many great wounds inflicted upon him."

  Laughter erupted, with Julius joining in.

  "If I'd known there was an historian in the vicinity," he chuckled, "I would have kept my mouth shut. 'Keep your fat lip buttoned around historians,' my mother alway told me. 'They're too smart for you.' "

  Indira peered at him suspiciously. "That's a crude attempt at flattery."

  He looked surprised. "What do you mean? It's the simple truth. There's no subject on earth as complex and intricate as human history. I get dizzy just thinking about the variables. Makes the double helix look like a tinker-toy! And there's no comparison to that mindless one-two-three the physicists putter around in."

  "You're just jealous, Julius," laughed a woman sitting to his left.

  Julius' rubbery face twisted into an exaggerated sneer.

  "Jealous? Of what, Ruth? The money they shower you plumbers with? Sure. But I wouldn't be a physicist for all the money in the world." He shuddered. "God, think of it! Spend your whole life counting the elementary particles. How many are there, anyway? Bet I can count them all on my fingers."

  He began imitating a toddler.

  "Dis widdle piggy is da lepton. An' dis widdle piggy is da quark. Dere's six a dem! Or is it eight? Such a big number! An' dis widdle piggy—oh, boy, is this fun or what?"

  Again, the circle erupted in laughter. When the laughter died down, Julius was watching Indira. For a long few seconds, they stared at each other in silence. Then the great warm smile spread across his face,
and Indira felt her heart turn over.

  I don't believe this, she thought to herself.

  But it was true. Within three days, they were lovers. The weeks which followed, before they reluctantly entered the coldcells, were the happiest of her life.

  Her reminiscence was interrupted by a commotion in the village below. No, she reminded herself, looking down into the valley, the "homeheart." She sub-vocalized the owoc hoot, trying, as always, to improve her pronunciation. The sounds produced by the owoc speaking tubes—evolved from ancestral water siphons, Julius had speculated—were very difficult for humans to reproduce. Children, with the plasticity of youth, managed fairly well. But she could only make herself passably understood. Julius never managed at all.

  The difficulty was not due simply, nor even primarily, to the difference in sound-producing apparatus. The siphons of the gukuy were generically similar to those of their owoc cousins. But she had no trouble speaking any of the gukuy languages which she had encountered. Gukuy thought-processes, and the languages in which they were expressed, were much closer to the human norm than the strange gestalt-concepts of the owoc.

  That's because the gukuy approach life the way we do. As a place to establish control, and mastery. A place to manipulate, to change to our liking. A place to conquer. A place to kill.

  It was mealtime. The humans were gathering at the center of the homeheart, wearing their khaki-colored feeding scarves. The owoc givers appeared, moving slowly into the excited crowd of children. The boys and girls surrounded the huge beings, hooting affection and stroking their mantles. Their parents—themselves not much older than children—hung back with greater dignity. Each human held a bowl, made from the thick outer integument of awato-plants ("oh, hell," Julius had said, "let's just call it 'bark' "; then he'd muttered something to the effect that if he ran across Willi Hennig in the afterlife he was a dead duck). The owoc givers began regurtitating into the great tureens located at the center of the homeheart. When they were done, each human would scoop a bowlful of the khaki-colored paste and retire to eat it.

  Even after all these years, the sight made her queasy. She herself ate the childfood, of course. She would die without it. But she still refused to participate directly in the process. Julius or one of the children would bring her a bowl, which she would eat at a distance. Trying to pretend it was lukewarm porridge. The children had no such compunctions at all. They had never eaten anything else, and took it for granted. Even their parents had only the dimmest memories of a life without childfood.

  Julius had tried to find a substitute. His search had become desperate, once it became clear that not all of the humans could survive on the childfood. His daughter, among them.

  But he had failed. Completely.

  "Goddammit," he had exclaimed once, "if only Estelle had survived the crash! She was the biochemist. I'm just a paleontologist. I can tell you why and how I think every form of life I've seen on this planet evolved, and how they're related to each other, and where they fit into the ecological zones and niches. But I can't tell you why we can't eat anything. Except the childfood."

  He rubbed his face wearily. "I know it's a metabolic problem. It has to be. Most of the children seem to thrive on the childfood, after an initial period of adaptation."

  A long silence had followed. She hugged him, knowing he was feeling the loss of his daughter. Ann had been a plump, cheerful five-year-old girl, who, when she died in her father's arms only a few months after the crash, had looked like something out of a death camp.

  "All the proteins, the amino acids—everything humans need to survive—are out there in that alien biosphere. If they weren't, none of us would still be alive. But there's something about the way they're put together that the human digestive system can't handle. Except that most of the children can survive—survive well, in fact—once the plants have been broken down in the owoc guts."

  He rubbed his face again. "But I don't know why. After all this time, all I know is that meat is poisonous and we can only eat vegetation if the owoc process it." A dry, humorless laugh. "And we knew that within two months."

  The first two months had been a nightmare, horror piled upon horror.

  The confused awakening. Her muddled mind, still sluggish from the long years in coldsleep, had not been able to register much beyond the desperate urgency with which members of the crew had hustled her into one of the landing boats. All she had been able to grasp, as they strapped her into a seat, was that something had gone terribly wrong on the Magellan—ironically, at the very end of its immense voyage. An engineering malfunction of some sort, human error—she never knew. And never would. The only thought which had been clear was that Captain Knudsen had ordered all the children placed into the landing boats, along with a few adults. The adults, Indira realized later, had been ruthlessly selected by Knudsen. Those who had skills which the Captain thought would be most useful for survival (and why me, an historian? Indira often wondered; until the years brought the answer). The children could thus be saved—or, at least, given the best possible chance—while Captain Knudsen made the desperate attempt to land the Magellan itself.

  Half-conscious as she was, the shock had registered.

  "That's impossible!" she protested.

  The face of the crew member strapping her down had been grim.

  "It's a long shot," he admitted. "But Knudsen's a great pilot. If anyone can do it, he can."

  The Magellan had never been designed to land directly on the planet. It was supposed to stay in permanent orbit, while the colonists were shuttled down on the two landing boats. Before he died, the pilot of her landing boat had told her of the Magellan's end.

  "I swear to God," he hissed, "he almost did it!" He paused, coughed blood. Indira stared helplessly. She had not been hurt, beyond bruises, but she was pinned in the wreckage, her hands fluttering helplessly. There was nothing she could do—and, in any event, the pilot's body was a hopelessly shattered mass of bloody tissue.

  "I watched it on the screen," he whispered. "He got through the jetstream—he almost made it! But then—" More coughing blood. "I don't know what happened. It blew up. There was nothing left—just a huge red cloud spread over the ocean."

  Finally, in a whisper: "Like—like those old pictures of the Challenger." And he died.

  Both of the landing boats had crashed. Although they had been designed for planetfall, they were carrying far too much weight—every cubic centimeter, it seemed, had been packed with wailing children. The first boat had landed in the center of a valley atop a huge low mountain, and in fairly good shape. No fatalities, at least. But in his over-riding concern to bring the second boat down near to the first one, its pilot had struck the mountainside, tearing the boat in half.

  Indira had suffered little, physically. But the time she had spent—endless hours, it had seemed, although it had only been a few minutes—before she was pried loose were a nightmare.

  What had happened to her children?

  She had found Juan first. She would not even have known who the mangled little body was, if she hadn't recognized the shirt he was wearing.

  But before the tears had barely started to flow, worse horror came. From somewhere outside the broken shell of the landing boat, she heard a piercing shriek.

  Ursula!

  She raced out of the ship, tripping and falling over pieces of wreckage. Outside, she cast her head wildly about, oblivious to her surroundings, trying to locate her daughter.

  Again, the shriek.

  "That way!" cried a man, whom she vaguely recognized as Doctor Koresz, pointing down the slope. He raced off, Indira on his heels. They plunged into some kind of trees (trees? at the time she didn't care), floundering through the thick growth, desperately trying to pinpoint Ursula's location.

  The child's shriek had become an unending scream of fear and agony.

  Koresz found her first.

  "Oh God!" he bellowed, lunging forward into a thick patch. A moment later he was haulin
g Ursula out.

  There was a thing on her neck. Vaguely like a huge snail. With a cry of fear and rage, Indira grabbed the thing and yanked it off her daughter. The creature came loose, but she had a glimpse of a horrible sharp proboscis, covered with blood, and the terrifying wound on her daughter's neck.

  She flung the thing to the ground and grabbed her daughter. Collapsing, cradling her four-year-old girl's body in her arms, weeping hysterically. She was only dimly aware of Koresz stamping the pseudo-snail into pieces.

  She had hoped, at first. The wound looked bad, but the girl's carotid artery hadn't been ruptured. And after a minute or so, Ursula stopped screaming.

  "Mommy," she'd whispered. And then she became rigid, and died within seconds.

  In the time to come, Indira would learn that the creature which killed her child was a kakapoy. Like many of the snail-like predators on the planet, it was an ambusher, lurking high in the clusters of idu thickets. It would drop down on its prey and kill them with a venomous stinger. The venom was not designed to kill Terran life-forms, of course, but it was more than toxic enough to do the job.

  The owoc had little fear of them. They simply avoided idu thickets, which were the only habitat of the small predators. But at Indira's insistence, the adults—and then the children, when they were old enough—scoured every idu thicket in the valley, year after year, killing every kapapoy they found.

  She still maintained the patrols, even though no kakapoy had been found in the valley for years. Usually the most rational of people, Indira bore an implacable hatred toward the almost-mindless little killers.

  She remembered little of what followed. Koresz had carried both her and her daughter's body back to the wreck of the landing boat. At first, she lay there dazed, unable to move, while all around her the few adults rounded up the surviving children. After a time, the sound of children crying roused her into motion. She did what she could, then, along with the others. She helped Koresz as the doctor organized the triage. Except for the unnatural paleness of his face, there was nothing in his demeanor to indicate the torment he must have been feeling. Professional relexes, she remembered thinking vaguely. It was only days later that she learned how Koresz had assigned one of his own sons to the group of dying children, those whose injuries were too severe to be healed. Somehow, the moral strength of that act brought her courage, if not comfort.