Joseph Green
A sentient object on one planet could well be an inanimate one of immense value on another, given the right catalyst. Mr. Green’s concept in the following story is startling as well as unusual, and presupposes a conflict between carbon-based life and a silicon-based one.
* * * *
The wall slid upwards and he went charging down the ramp, wheels driving hard against the steel. Fear drove him, fear gave him strength, fear pushed him across the open space and into the sheltering growth, out of sight of the alien tower of steel that stood so strong and looked so strange in this fragile fairyland of flower and light.
The fear began to fade. He rolled on a moment more before stopping, impelled by its memory. His unorganized flight had carried him to the edge of a silvery-surfaced pool. He glanced at his reflection in the heavy liquid, then closed his eyes. He felt a sense of shock and a sense of complete rightness, and suddenly he became very confused. He wanted to scream, but instead told himself, I am Soames Chacedony! I am Soames Chacedony, Soames Chacedony! He stopped. There was memory, harsh and hurting, but memory, an implanted voice that said, There will be an initial period of confusion. Find a hiding-place and wait it out. Don’t struggle, just wait. You will understand.
The voice was too strong to resist. He looked around, one wheel moving slightly when his neck would twist no farther, the wheel swinging him half around. There was a thick patch of vegetation a few yards behind him. He glanced again at the water, seeing the plump, rounded armless body, heavy tapering tail, snake-length of neck topped by a blunt and broad-nosed dragon’s head, the open mouth showing pointed tongue and diamond glitter of teeth in wide, wicked jaws. He looked at the two wheels of bone that supplied his locomotion as he moved away, at the massive bones which protruded from both sides of the muscular abdomen to serve as their axles, the clever arrangement of great thews powering extended bones with rounded ends that swung in small constant circles, fitting into the deep hollows between the wheel’s twelve spokes on half the cycle. He looked like an oversized seahorse mounted on a crossing shaft with rollers on its ends.
He watched the bones revolve and the wheels move as he headed for the refuge of the sheltering growths, felt his tail curl in or out, sensitive to every slight shift of balance, heard the faint whispering sound of the grease his body automatically supplied easing friction in the bone sockets. He moved into the bushes, and waited.
I am Dr. Soames Chacedony! I am Professor Soames Chacedony! Chacedony! Chacedony! Chacedony! He repeated this earnestly, sincerely, because he believed it, because it was truth. He wanted to add that he was an Earthman, that he walked on two legs, that he had hands, feet, a face. He wanted to say all this aloud, but his throat could not utter human speech and it would obviously have been a lie anyway.
He closed his eyes. The darkness was comforting; this world was too bright, too real, and the voice of memory spoke more easily when it was hidden.
What am I doing here ? he asked himself. I am dead, he added before he could answer.
You are a mental pattern, a matrix of electrical forces taken from one mind and forcibly imposed on another. We are not cerebrotechs and cannot explain the process. It is a temporary imposition; in a few hours the sleeping mind of your host will reassert itself and you will fade into nothingness. Your true brain is unconscious but tied to your present mind by very strong bonds. If one dies it affects the other.
Why was this done? he asked himself, and waited for the answer to appear from his own subconscious.
We are on a treasure hunt. We are after the fresh-laid egg of the firebird, the most beautiful object in the galaxy, and this is the only way one may be obtained. You were chosen to share this effort with us because our computer selected you as the philosopher most likely to succeed.
Selected me ? Why me ? I am dead! Memory came back with a rush, and he was dead, legally, and buried as well, and they had fished up his body, a clear violation of the euthanasia law, and withdrawn the dream serum he had injected into his bloodstream with much ceremony the day before, and revived him, and offered him a share of the fabulous wealth they earnestly felt was almost within their grasp. He could even remember the overly dramatic farewell speech he had made to some of his followers and students as he sat in the coffin holding the hypo, the conscious but silent comparison of himself to a Greek who had said farewell between swallows of hemlock three thousand years ago. He, too, was dying for a cause, though the drug he was voluntarily taking would extend life for many days before his body finally wasted into death. He would lie in his simple coffin in its assigned place on the bed of the Mediterranean, and live a thousand years of dreams during each day his body died. He was a healthy and vigorous man of eighty, with another sixty years of slow degeneracy ahead if he chose to take them, but he would end his life by this faster-in-reality but longer-by-dreams route to dramatize the movement he headed.
He was the leader of the dedicated band of men and women who claimed that the tortuous rejuvenation operation giving near immortality should be available to all who desired it. The government’s official position was that it was impossible for everyone to undergo treatment, that it must be reserved for those persons so valuable to the war they could not be spared, or those who could afford the million credits needed for private treatment. A deceptive statement which ignored the alternatives. Radium was plentiful now, and more surgeons could be trained. The government was simply unwilling to accept the perfectly fair terms the Rekriksah had offered because it would mean returning some of the star systems Earth had stolen from them.
It was true that as long as the interplanetary war went on mankind’s resources must remain tied up in arms, but they could end the fighting tomorrow if they would, freeing technology to work for the needs of the individual. Sol Central had the attitude that had characterized governments since the days of his Greek mentor, the willingness to work for the future of the race regardless of what it cost the members living in the present. That attitude had to be changed.
Background knowledge faded as the specific answer which had been implanted in his subconscious appeared. All four of us have made the attempt, and failed. We think we know why. When you meet the firebird you will find that the instincts of the chariot-horse body you possess, plus the normal fear of death, will make it difficult for you to submit to her. We found it impossible. It is our hope, which the computer bears out, that a trained philosopher who is honestly willing to accept death, who has only to overcome the natural reaction of the chariot-horse, can force himself to submit to capture.
With this information came a picture of the two Earthmen waiting in the tall steel ship, two young men with muscular bodies and hands trained to gun or tool, two men who were daring and loved adventure, and loved life more than most because they had many times seen it in deadly peril. In them the desire to live was strong.
But there was another man sitting vacant-eyed in the ship, and a body buried somewhere under the glittering mica and sand of the landing field. This world had killed one man by brute physical violence. In sorrow and deep regret they had told him about those two men, their companions through many a voyage rough and strange; especially they had spoken of Silversohn, the cerebrotech who had managed to restore the ancient and alien identity transfer machine when they found it on a remote dead planet in their last far wandering. He had restored it, and used it after his three companions had failed, to become the second casualty when a hungry carnivore caught him far from the ship and killed and ate his borrowed body. They had obtained this much by putting him under deep hypno, but his mind was gone. Now Silversohn puttered about with the transfer machine, still capable of repairing it despite his idiocy, keeping it going in order that Soames Chacedony might try where all others had failed.
But your logic is faulty, he had cried to them when he awakened in deep space. I do not wish to live. Why, then, should I endure this agonizing and unpleasant experience of which you speak, when death is so much more preferable?
They had smiled, their handsome faces masks of mocking cynicism, and his memory supplied the answer they had given then: You chose death because it was inevitable anyway, professor. You were already past the best years, could only go downhill without the rejuvenation treatment. With your share of the egg credit you can buy the long life. All four of us had the first treatment, and we are far older than you. It is time for the second one, which will prevent ageing for another hundred years. We think you will choose to live, even though others die, once there is a real choice.
And betray the cause for which I martyred myself? he had asked in anger, and then thought about it and realized he would have to try for the egg. They had raised doubts he could never forget if he did not face the temptation and resist it.
Thus he stood under the weird trees, in a body grotesque and strange, in search of the egg of beauty and life, in order that he might reject that life and prove himself true to his beliefs.
He opened his eyes.
For the first time he saw his surroundings with conscious perception. Till now he had accepted, a chariot-horse seeing its own strange land with its own bright eyes, uncaring.
He saw a world of light. A viciously bright sun with only a tinge of aged red burned close at hand. There were no true shadows. He was in a vari-formed forest of translucent trees, some lean and spare and bending like vertical whips, others more nearly in the standard plant form, a central trunk supporting smaller branches which supported twigs, with round patterned plates attached to the twigs like oversized leaves. On some trees the plates had. combined into a single canopy, like a protective tent. The one universal characteristic of all visible vegetation was its semi-transparency. The flat plate structures passed reddish sunlight almost without hindrance, turning the area beneath a soft shade of violet. The thicker twigs contained a trace of resistance near their centres, while the branches held enough light to be a darker shade of red. The massive central supports had cores that were almost opaque, but this was because the entering light diffused there, spreading up and down the body rather than passing through. The very soil on which he rolled glittered in the light, a composition of polished silicon and sparkling mica. Human eyes would have been blinded, lost in the assault of brilliance.
Another fragment of memory returned. This was one of those rare planets where the life-chain had formed on a silicon rather than a carbon base, a world so completely alien human senses were virtually useless, human consciousness unable to function competently in its forests of crystal growths. The atmosphere his borrowed body breathed was a mixture of nitrogen oxides, hydrogen sulphide, sulphurdioxide and ammonia, with not a trace of oxygen in free form. The pool in which he had admired his reflection had been of liquid mercury. The temperature was high enough to vaporize water in seconds.
He looked at his body again, and realized with amazement that while he was not actually transparent his flesh did admit sunlight easily. His outer cell layers received energy directly from the sun, and synthesized compounds which circled through the remaining tissues. When he moved he gave off light, and now he realized this was true of every plant and animal on this sphere. His borrowed eyes knew and allowed for this. He was a humble vegetarian, with teeth of diamond and stomach of hydrofluoric acid, and there were growths of prisms, seed carriers of crystal bells, fruits of gemmed translucency which were his food. There were other animals like himself, and many like his firebird mate ... which was carnivorous.
He felt a sudden and powerful fear, and knew that already the instincts of the submerged personality he dominated were coming to the surface. He had to finish his mission, quickly, or they would become an added interference.
His journey through implanted memory was over. It was time to find a firebird. He wheeled out of the dubious shelter of crystalline cabbages grown overly tall, looking about with new interest at the shimmering landscape. The gossamer growths were thick and varied, and despite their lack of opacity he could see little farther than in a real jungle. Each shard of crystal crooked, curved or splinted the ray of light passing through it, giving illumination without vision.
There were other carnivores in this fairy jungle in addition to the firebirds, some of which preyed on him. The speed of wheels was his only protection. He rolled along slowly, keeping a wary eye overhead as well as around. There was a constant struggle in his borrowed brain between impressions of wonder incredible and normal routine of life, the conscious Earthmind and the deep-buried animal instincts. He decided to work with the inherited knowledge as much as possible, and let his sense of strangeness fade. Those instincts might keep him alive when all intelligence failed.
He became aware of a multitude of small life-forms on the ground. Large areas were covered with tiny prismatic flowering plants, none over a few inches tall, of some siliceous material that sparkled with excruciating brightness. He bent closer, and saw a spider web framework holding what seemed to be thousands of individual crystals in a vaguely mushroom shape. A small flying creature whirred through the air below his nose and settled on a nearby growth, diaphanous wings giving off coruscations of soft purple. There were others like it scattered through the multitude of flowers, performing some magical fertilization act attesting to the harmony between crystal insect and crystal plant. A larger shape sometimes dropped violently from overhead, glass wings blurring with speed and snatched a small flying beauty out of the air.
He saw a tall creature in the open path ahead, eating fruit from a branch far above his reach. He changed course. A vegetarian, but vicious. He started to circle; he needed to stay close to the ship. Suddenly his stomach told him he was hungry, but he ignored it. This body was destined to die. It might as well be with an empty stomach.
He moved through the forest for what seemed hours, while the rosy sun swung across the centre of the sky and slowly downward. The hunger grew and at last in desperation he bit at some little bells hanging from an elf’s umbrella of a plant, tinkling in every breeze. The glass crunched into splinters between his diamond teeth and suddenly he was eating without control, though some buried sense told him this was not the chariot-horse’s favourite food. When the rounded belly was partially full he regained control and resumed his slow circling.
If the hunger instinct could be that powerful it was understandable that the life instinct might overcome the imposed control and send the creature fleeing. He would have to be strong indeed to succeed where the others had failed.
There was a slight whistling in the air. His wandering path had taken him into a small open area, and the faint noise was from overhead.
His left wheel dug into the ground with strain and violence, throwing him half around before the right one caught and shot him to one side. The great glass beak of the attacking flyer speared into the ground where he had been a second before. The massive feet hit with a thousand explosions of bursting bells among the little plants.
The violence of the stop almost broke its neck. By the time it recovered its dazed senses he was out of sight.
He hid for a time, shaken, and then resumed his roll. That had been the wrong fowl. The firebird could not fly.
He saw one.
It came with arrogant truculence through the more open ways, its high back brushing the bottom of the leaf-plates four times his height off the ground, its drill-sharp beak probing the air in the jerky, pecking manner of a chicken. It came on great splayed feet of stained-glass talons, its useless little wings tucked close to a bulbous body of silvered quartz. It came in peace and tranquillity, but when the great ruby eyes saw him the red lights of lust and love flared and flamed in their scarlet depths. He saw the new burn and knew it was his death if caught, and before he could assert his will the stubborn body had already turned to flee.
He halted it peremptorily, and it moved again anyway, and he fought the flood of fear that surged through him from wheel-rim to dragon nose. I am not afraid to die! he screamed to himself, but there was no hidden memory left to answer him. I am not afraid, he said again, and steadied himself for the harder fight with the body. Even as he began the war some secret sense, some dim erg of electrical energy that would soon fade from this borrowed brain, said he was lying, he was as afraid of death as the men who had failed.
Fear grew, fear spread, fear condensed, focused, strengthened. Roll! Roll! Roll! the body commanded; there is still time, we are faster than our mate! Hold! Hold! Hold! he told it mercilessly, and waited. Death! Death! the blighting awareness came, and Life! Life! he repulsed it. The muscles twitched and quivered, the wheels shivered, the tail coiled and curled, swung and battered brush and ground. The great bird came on, unholy joy on planed-glass face of many facets, urge to procreate a pulsing warmth in veins of gauzy silicon. The warmth reached him, enfolded him, a strange and enervating aura, and the urge to flight diminished and he knew the body he inhabited had reached a state of sensual readiness, and the battle was over.
On she came, towering over him with one last great hop, this Brobdingnagian nightmare for whom he yearned, this bird of paradise who laid the egg of life and death. He closed his eyes resolutely, and heard the sound of the great beak cutting the thick vapour, felt the stunning blow to the back of the neck that sent his head crashing to the mica-spattered dirt in mute surrender, his long tail rising in automatic balance and quivering appeal. But there was no salvation from her need. Vaguely he sensed the great leg swinging over his back, was aware of great weight crushing down as she settled on him, dimly felt her shifting his stunned body into position.
Once in the shaped hollow space between her legs, where he fitted as though fashioned for it, there was no escape. But the mating fever had seized him, too, and he was quiescent; the death fear had given way before this greater need for life in a new generation. He lay immobile and knew that his body would survive the assault, a sign of the skill of a mother who had laid many eggs. In another moment the new life arrived, the fabulous egg of the firebird fell on his back with a gentle thump, and rolled into its assigned hollow at the base of his long neck. It put out tendrils immediately, locking itself to him indissolubly in seconds, but the mother held him a moment more for surety.
When she finally stirred, and shivered a little, and suddenly lifted off him and stretched to her full height, pointed beak among the patterned plates that diffused the sky, he knew she was pleased. Motherhood was pleased, and it was father’s turn to carry the burden of egg and future children, father’s destiny to die. For the egg was unfertilized. To gain the matching genes of heredity he must contribute it would send its chisel tendrils digging through the siliceous flesh on which it rode, penetrating at last into the widened spot in the mixture of boron, phosphorous and silicon that was his backbone, where the gametes of new life lay hid and waiting. When the tendrils cracked the bone he would become partially paralysed, and while he dragged himself to a hidden spot, that he might preserve the dying flesh of his body for his children rather than have it devoured by some carnivore, the paralysis would grow. When he finally collapsed he would be near death, and by the time death came the egg would have already begun to eat him, the egg that was flesh of his flesh and child of his bone. And by that time the egg would have changed colour, and started to change shape, dividing into three little chariot-horses and one firebird sister. It would have no loveliness at all and no value. The gametes must not reach their matching ovums if beauty was to be served.
The great motherbird of flame went flouncing off through the woods, queen of her world of glass without shadow, and it was time to go. He rolled away, testing his control and finding it unimpaired as yet, but already feeling the tug of instinct that told him to seek a hiding-place. He ignored it, heading for the spaceship by the nearest open way, his borrowed sense of direction without doubt or fault. He kept a wary eye overhead for birds, another alert for enemies on the ground or in the trees. He rolled as swiftly and quietly as the rough ground and winding trails among the taller shrubs of sheerness permitted, and after a few minutes knew the ship was close ahead and he would soon be safe. Within its sheltering walls he could afford to die.
He heard the sound behind him, and recognized it, and knew it was only proper somehow, he had not striven enough. He jerked into full speed, heedless now of noise or danger. If there was a killer ahead as well as behind he must take the chance of darting by it. He rolled through a crushed verdure of opalescent sparkles where some giant foot had recently trod and behind him the sound of danger drew closer. It was not a large creature who pursued; a many-legged whip of a body supporting a head of all teeth and a tail of deadly poison. But it was one of the few creatures on the planet faster than himself, and he knew with the sureness of instinct that it could overhaul him before he reached the safety of the ship’s waiting ramp.
He rolled at his best speed, as straight as the growth permitted, and instead of fear the thought came that at least his body no longer rebelled against his will, seeking that hiding-place the unborn generation at the base of his neck demanded for itself.
He burst from the edge of the undergrowth just feet ahead of his pursuer. Heedless of attack from the sky he fled across the open space towards the steel tower waiting in silent readiness and knew he could not reach it before being overhauled and killed. He fled in fear and despair, knowing the two young-old Earthmen who were his best friends and worst enemies could do nothing to help him, that human sight was faulty on this planet, that even instruments adapted to human eyes failed to translate accurately the grossness of this world of light. Chariot-horses could be caught by traps in their paths, but even this work could only be done at night, with infra-red lights that did not sparkle.
He rolled with every ounce of strength in his doomed body, and his crazed mind did not even consider the danger, but instead thought of the first men who had landed here, the lucky accident that had let them walk out of their ship and on to a chariot-horse just killed by a carnivore. It had eaten some of the flesh before the approaching spaceship frightened it away, but the egg was untouched. They had cut it from the neck of its father-host in reverent awe, and carried it back to Earth in a box filled with its own atmosphere, to see it acclaimed the most beautiful object ever brought from space, and beyond price. Other men had come, some had gone mad, and many had died in strange ways, but slowly some facts about the silicon planet were gathered. Laboriously, in their patient and plodding way, men had accumulated knowledge concerning its inhabitants, the strangest creatures known in a galaxy made of strangeness. But not until the four young-old men who must have four million credits or die had landed—not until their strange machine which transferred minds had sent all four of them into alien bodies—had they discovered the full life-cycle of the creatures men called chariot-horses. That wonderful machine, tended by an idiot who understood it and run by two men who did not, had made it remotely possible to accomplish by purpose what blind chance had done so easily by accident. And so Dr. Soames Chacedony was called from the dead, and his veins were drained of the drug of dreams, and his soul sent forth in the body of a seahorse on wheels, that wealth might come and young life endure.
He was rolling alone through the pastures of a crystal heaven. The sounds of pursuit had died behind him.
He turned his head when he reached the ramp and knew the feeling of safety, turned and looked back where shadows should have started at the edge of the woods, to see the whip-on-legs standing there, its agate eyes fixed on the looming steel that had no place here. The alienness of the tower which light could not penetrate frightened and repelled it.
He rolled up the ramp and into the ship and with only a mild effort put down the desire to flee this eerie place and find a hiding-spot where his children would be safe. He moved easily over the flat floor to the little recess in the wall, and thrust his dragonhead inside, and saw with a feeling of vague surprise that he was far smaller than the two Earthmen who were waiting. He heard the ramp lifting into place behind him, felt the jaws he had helped repair while in another body closing around his neck, locking his head in position in the machine. He knew that in seconds the matrix of balanced electrical currents which was his personality would be removed from its temporary home, the operation done without harm to his sleeping brain in its human body because the machine had this capability.
Afterwards the two Earthmen would put on spacesuits and come into the chamber, and cut off the tendrils which the egg had dug into the yielding flesh, and remove the egg and watch it withdraw its tendrils into itself, become again a perfect sphere, a beautiful ball of glass the size of a man’s clenched fist, with four lights inside that curled and glowed and twisted and moved, burning, in a fashion indescribable, and beautiful beyond compare. They would place it tenderly, though it was diamond-hard and virtually indestructible, in a container with a glass top, that the gases around it might remain alien but human eyes see through it to the glory beneath. They would push out the smaller airlock door the dead little wheeled body that had served them so well, and drain the cavity of its alien air. And they would go home.
There came a nothingness.
* * * *
Soames Chacedony awoke, and felt first the yielding firmness of his accel-decel couch and next a disorientation of the mind that he thought he could not bear. He lay still, eyes closed, fighting the memories, and when they grew worse opened his eyes instead and found some relief. He looked at the functional grey walls of his tiny cubicle with greedy hunger and after a time, when the unbelievable memories faded a little, he fumbled for the button that would release him from the couch. It worked, which meant they were still on the ground or already past light-speed in space.
His body was amazingly weak, as though he had actually endured the adventures he had shared only in mind. He staggered into the central passage and down it to the control-room, where Harbeson and Santee greeted him with wide grins and ribald jokes about miscegenation that made him wince.
Silversohn wasn’t in sight. Probably with his transfer machine in the hole, cleaning and fondling with competent hands while his idiot mind thought idiot thoughts.
“To be serious a minute, Doc, Abe and I have been thinking it over,” said Santee when Soames eased himself into a seat. “We like your guts, or character, or whatever it is you have that drove you on to success where we turned back; and there’s room for one more man on this boat. We want to offer you a partnership, if you’ll have it. We plan to take the rejuve treatment, store what’s left of the credits in hopes we’ll have enough for another when we get back in a hundred years, and take off to see the galaxy. We plan on Deneb for a first stop—the war hasn’t spread that far as yet—and from there we’ll just wander around. I don’t suppose it’s what you’d call a constructive life, but it’s lots of fun. Interested?”
He was terribly interested. He considered it a moment, wishing desperately that he could accept, and then slowly shook his head. “I would like to. Perhaps when you come back next time ... because you see, you were right. I was a hypocrite and a liar. I do want the rejuvenation now that I can afford it. To be young again, like you ... but I learned something out there, fighting the chariot-horse’s instinctive fear of death. I made a discovery that completely eluded me when I drank the coward’s brew and lay down to dream myself to death. I learned just how much I do value life; but I am still a philosopher. I want the gift of long life for all men, not just for myself. I am going back to Earth, back to the fight to get the war stopped. Perhaps now I will live to win it. But if the offer is still open when you come back...”
“We’re going to be looking for some way to get Silversohn’s brains unscrambled, Doc, but beyond that our plans are flexible,” said Harbeson. “If Santee is agreeable we’ll head out with one empty berth and keep the offer open. After all, a hundred years isn’t a very long time.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Soames Chacedony, thinking of the amount of work he might accomplish in that time, the work that would enable him to leave Earth for a life of excitement and daily wonder among the stars with his principles intact. “No, it isn’t long at all!”