Aliens from Analog Page 7

  Or again, Yd would delve into Yd’s own history.

  “Among my kind, intelligence was directly related to size. That is one of the reasons I fear the Evil One, for Yd must be unimaginably huge by now, and therefore clever beyond understanding. And that is why I puzzled for so many centuries over how you tiny things could have intelligence; yet you obviously did. Finally I realized that you had almost as many brain-cells as I, perhaps, but the cells themselves were extraordinarily small. With that hint, I solved the quandary that had long vexed me, how to increase my own intelligence without growing too large for the Lake to support. I began experiments to mutate the motherkind of which I am composed, for smaller and smaller units. It only took a few millennia. I would guess I am now about as intelligent as one of my kind eleven or twelve times my size. Whether that will be enough to out-think and defeat the Enemy, I know not.”

  Or Yd would tell her of the many discoveries Yd had made over the long centuries of solitary observation and meditation.

  “The stars do indeed form a pattern, one that seems to you ephemeral creatures to be solid and unchanging. But I have lived long enough to watch some of them slowly drift across the silence. See that bright red one? No, there: the one caught in the yellow-white net of other stars. Yes. Well, I remember when it wasn’t in that net; it used to be paired with the blue one to the left. And those very bright white ones in a line used to form a triangle. I’ve thought about it and it seems to me that some stars must be closer to us than others, and they move relative to one another; and that is why some of them appear to me to sail across the face of the sparkling blackness.”

  “Then—the sky is not the great carapace of your first High Priest, standing sentinel over the vault of the world, sending us messages of divine wisdom from the inside of its shell, which we are too stupid and corrupted to read?”

  “Of course not! Childish nonsense!”

  “And it is not the hollowed-out broodwarren of the world, with airvents to a greater outside world to let light in and smoke out?”

  “No. Intriguing image, but I doubt it.”

  “Then what is it, O Skysinger the Wise?” She had progressed in her confidence with Yd to such a degree that she felt almost safe in expressing a little teasing challenge now and then.

  “Well—I have wondered whether perhaps the sky—is not simply sky, whether it is not air that just goes on forever. Still, there are reasons why that theory doesn’t quite fit, either…”

  “And the stars are but another species of skYdweller?”

  “Oh, no. They’re—at least, I suspect they are something quite different.”

  “Well, then?”

  “You’ll laugh at me if I tell you.”

  “I shall not!” Wink replied indignantly.

  “You will, though.”

  “How would I dare?! Please tell me.”

  “I suspect the stars are really suns, like ours, only so remote that—”

  She laughed at Yd.

  But some nights Skysinger seemed melancholy and weary of speaking, and then Wink sang for Yd. In the course of time she went through her entire repertoire of hymns; and when Yd demanded more, she hesitantly shone some of the secular folksongs of her people, with many apologies for their imperfections and unworthiness. But Yd loved them, of course. Eventually, she ran out even of these. She began to compose her own, but soon discovered that the Muse does not always mass-produce upon demand. The priests sent out novices as runners to all the tribes of the Known World, to gather songs and stories for God. Thus began something of a classical fluorescence….

  And on some nights Skysinger and Wink simply chatted together, philosophizing, gossiping, speculating.

  “If you are not God,” Wink asked abruptly, once, “who is?”

  They worked away at that one (always an entertaining question whenever and wherever it arises), off and on, for countless nights.

  And so the nights passed, and the dawns intruded, sending them to their respective nests, she to sleep and dream, Yd to ponder and reflect in lonely silence. The nights curled by like the stars, all alike, each unique….

  “…I may be late tomorrow-eve, Skysinger, with your permission. A desire has taken me to speak and play once more with my broodmates and friends. I have hardly seen them for—oh, quite a long time,” Wink said vaguely.

  “Naturally you may do as you please. You ought not to permit me to take up so much of your life, Morsel.”

  “But I so enjoy our grand communions, Skysinger, my big old friend,” she gently replied. “There is really no-one I would rather talk to than my poor old Prisoner of the Lake.”

  Next twilight she left the massive white temple through the mighty portals rather than through the pier-altar. The ways of the City of God seemed unusually crowded with jostling strangers; yet always a passage opened up before her as if a great invisible claw had brushed the people aside. As she made her way through the nighted streets—brilliantly lit by a thousand babbling conversations—a wave of gleaming purple seemed to spread before her, followed by a wave of lightlessness and blank dark carapaces. The shadows returned to the streets.

  “What word bring you from God, Great Lady?” flashed out one on the edge of the crowd.

  She courteously turned both eyestalks toward him. “Only that Yd is pleased with all the labors of Yd’s people,” she replied, benignly lavender.

  Bright white lights erupted around her: huzzahs.

  Wink clambered up the ancient trail to the cave where she’d been hatched and raised.

  “Longstalks—! It’s Wink! I’m home for a visit, but I can’t stay long.”

  A small, glittering, clattering swarm of hatchlings swept past her and scuttled away. The largest of them came but up to her penultimate segment. Silver sparks shivered over her abdomen, in fond nostalgia.

  “Longst—?” She brought up sharply. A young Yd unknown to her occupied Long- stalk’s chamber. The brood scrambled around Yd, sparkling for attention. “Who are you? Where is Longstalks?”

  The young Yd hunkered down, scooting backwards and lowering Yd Is eyes several inches in superstitious awe.

  “I am Ringtail Puce.” Yd seemed unwilling or unable to venture further.

  “Great Lady.” A reflection off the ceiling, coming from the mouth of the chamber, caught her attention; she swiveled an eye.

  “Gimp!”

  “I can answer your questions, Great Lady,” Yd continued soberly. “They beamed to me that you had come into the City.”

  They trudged in darkness through the tunnels to Gimp’s quarters nearby.

  “May I ask the Great Lady where her guards are?”

  “Guards—? Do drop the Great Lady nonsense, Gimp; we’re alone now.”

  “Nonsense, Great Lady?”

  “You know me, Gimp; I’m only Wink.”

  “As you say, Great Lady.”

  With a mental sigh, Wink decided to let it pass. After all, one could not expect towering intellect from an Yd.

  “Where is Longstalks?”

  “Longstalks has passed into Holy Water for the glory of God.”

  Dead—Wink went black and lowered her upper body to the floor.

  “…When?”

  “Twenty-eight nights ago.”

  “Why was I not told? Why was I not told?” she blazed.

  “You were communing with God, Great Lady. Who would dare to interrupt?” Who indeed? Her shell creaked; but the emotion remained locked inside, dark.

  . Yd was very old,” Gimp offered.

  “I know, but…”

  “Yd was only an Yd,” Yd replied.

  “Yd was my broodfoster!”

  “As you say, Great Lady.”

  Time passed in wordless darkness.

  “Well. I’ll mourn later. I have a halfnight break and I must use it well. Where are Red and Sweetscales and Smoothly and the rest of the old swarm? Take me to them; I would see foolish jests and insults once again.”

  “Smoothly the Rotund He h
as gone missioning to a new tribe dwelling beyond the Melancholy Mountains. Sweetscaled She has left the Service and joined the Corps of Warriors. And Red-Footed He has been a Fisher these three years and more. I cannot take you to any of them, Great Lady.”

  “Three—” Years? Three years? Had she been gone so long?

  “Yes, Great Lady, I know that three years is longer than the normal tour of duty for a Fisher. But it is as he wishes it. He is one of those whom the life of the wilderness has claimed, and now he cannot bear to live in the City of God.”

  She went to the Lake not at all that night; nor the next, nor the next. She remained in her guarded temple chambers—how long had those guards been there? who had ordered them to guard her?—and grieved. By the twilight of the third night the shock had passed and she could think cogently once more.

  She had been “communing with God”—and with no-one else—for over four years. She had never noticed the time passing. She felt she had lived a hundred lifetimes of scholarly acquisition of knowledge, and she did not grudge it—but she had lost so much! Track of the time, her religion, her old broodfoster, her broodmates and friends; and her proper, normal niche is her society….

  All I ever wanted was to live in the City of God and sing in the choir, she thought. I only wanted the natural honors due a Servant, not to be a—a Great Lady, for God’s sake!

  Yes. For God’s sake. For Skysinger’s sake.

  And in the time she had remained absorbed, her dear broodfoster had died—for the glory of God; and Red—

  He never wanted to be a Fisher at all! He feared it so! Now he had succumbed to the mysterious lure that marked so many of those with a vocation to the Service, the “savagery” he had so condemned.

  How had she permitted her life to go off on such a tangent? What else had occurred while her attention had fixed so steadily upon Skysinger? Who were all those crowds of strangers? Why were her chambers guarded? (Had there been a slight tinge of sarcasm beneath Gimp’s dutiful blandness? “Where are your guards, Great Lady?”

  “I cannot take you to them, Great Lady.”) Well, she knew where to start peering out the answers, She might as well make use of the privileges she had apparently acquired. She marched from her room.

  “Guard!” she flashed. “Fetch me—” She broke off and stared. The cavernous interior of the temple had become a bedlam of stroboscopic color. Priests and other Servants scurried about, slipping and iridescing frantically. For a big blue eye just about filled the arched portal over the pier, and a long questing pseudopod of colorless ropy muscle was worming its way hither and thither over the stone floor, dripping mud and frondy weeds, pushing into side-passages, probing….

  Oh yes. She’d dared absent herself for two, going on three, nights, and without sending any word.

  “You I’ll get to later,” she blitzed at Skysinger. “Guard, fetch me the High Priest!” But the young he only continued to goggle at the manifestation above the altar, his eyestalks quivering.

  The manifestation blinked twice at Wink’s peremptory remark, than narrowed dangerously. But the tentacle ceased its wanderings and retracted, carefully backing out the way it had come, bowling over only a few more Servants in the process. Then the eye itself gradually withdrew, finally to sink into the Lake, staring at her all the while.

  “Well?” Her right middle foot tapped. The guard scurried off.

  Old Mottling Swiftly Changing greeted her with, “What have you brought down upon us? God is angered! We are doomed!”

  “Dim that! We’re nothing of the kind. I have questions.”

  So. She felt used. She felt a fool—twice a fool. While Skysinger had assumed the center and become the purpose of her existence—despite Yd’s constant protestations to the contrary, Yd had always made Yd’s expectations felt—the orthodox priests had taken steps to defend against what they saw as a threat to their status. They had created for her a special title—one separate from the standard hierarchy—and isolated her from the populace. The guards allegedly were necessary to protect her from the demands of the importunate rabble; idle gawkers and tourists, the priests had characterized them. In fact, she suspected, her escort had probably often “protected” her from seeing old friends and people with legitimate business or with requests she would have been glad to undertake. (What harm could lie in taking prayers to Skysinger? God though Yd may not be, still Yd had vast wisdom.) They had kept her ignorant of events on the ground that she who communed with God ought not soil her semidivine mind with such mundane, trifling matters. The Servants had always carried out God’s commands, relayed by her, with the same pious alacrity with which their predecessors had done so throughout innumerable centuries; but they had usually managed to twist them subtly to their own advantage. For example, most of the skittering throngs out there were outlander males and females, come on pilgrimage to the City of God, in hopes of gaining entrance to God’s Beach to deposit and fertilize eggs, and of acquiring mana thereby. But since their clutches would be brooded by the local Yds, it meant an ever-escalating concentration of the desired characteristic here in the City of God—and under the effective control of the priesthood. Had Skysinger intended this? She doubted it. It seemed to her that quite often Yd evinced insufficient concern about all the ramifications and effects of Yd’s schemes. How much did Yd really care about her people? Or was Yd so consumed by Yd’s obsession with vengeance that none of the secondary consequences mattered to Yd at all?

  But first she must deal with immediacies.

  “You were right about one thing, venerable one,” she told the priest wryly. “When I am communing with God my mind is so free of common, trifling thoughts that I completely lose contact with mundane reality.”

  “It is good that your ladyship is pleased with her prodigious evolution,” said Mottling Quickly Changing.

  “I am not pleased,” she flared. “Nor have I evolved, prodigiously or any other way. I have simply lost track of the time. Henceforth, priest, you will make it your business to see to it that I have time to live my real life every now and then. And let there be regular times when the people may come to see me!

  “And send all those people back home! Tell them to breed on their own beaches, according to the word of God. Do not seek to molt so swiftly into a shell too large for you, old priest!”

  “You forget yourself, Green-Eyed She.” Dull red lightnings flickered around his words. “You forget to whom you speak.”

  “You forget to whom you speak. You saw God at the Gate. Yd was looking for me…not in anger, but in anxiety, for when Yd saw me, Yd returned peacefully into the Lake. Consider what Yd might have done had Yd not seen me, had Yd, for example, conceived that, for some reason, I was being kept from Yd. Consider that, and keep that image firmly in mind. Now, do you remember the blasphemous words of God, that you told me of four years ago when I was but a novice? Or have you managed to shut your inner eyes against their light entirely? For I remember them.

  “And now consider what would happen if the populace happened to glimpse such words. How long would they continue to support and obey the Servants of God—if God is not God? How long would the outlying tribes and clans of tribes continue to submit to the domination of the City of God and its priest, if our visible, tangible god is proven no less false than their invisible, insubstantial ones, who never accept the challenge to contest for supremacy? They would say, ‘Of course our gods would not accept a challenge from a mortal creature, no matter how gargantuan and great.’ “So consider carefully both of those things. And know this also.” She softened the harshness of her colors. “I am no enemy to you. All in all, I appreciate my life quite as much as you do yours. While a few small things must change, those things I have mentioned, I would grieve to alter it to any large degree. I do not want your office, or any other. I believe that the City of God should continue to rule the tribes of mortals and the Servants of God should continue to rule the City, for it has always been so, and it is right. But if I do not get my way,
there will begin to appear in the City glimmerings of dangerous reflections!”

  “Great Lady, the words of her who communes with God are always observed with boundless reverence, and it is the privilege of the devout to obey them.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Skysinger offered obstacles of a different nature.

  “Where were you, Morsel? I feared something had befallen you.”

  “Something had—four years had passed in but a handiful of days! How could you have done this to me? Did it never occur to you that I might have a life of my own to tend? Ever you claim we are friend and friend, but you treat me as a god would treat a votary.”

  “Little Green-Eyes, you show me nonsense. Many and many a time have I told you to do as pleased you, to live your life as you would, to give me only such time as you might without hardship; for I have lived many long millennia before you came, small one, and I shall continue to live many long centuries after you go, and my patience is vaster than my body, deeper than my lake.”

  “Oh, indeed, such were your hues and shapes; but your thoughts were far other. And how can a poor small mortal mind venture so close to the thought of a god without perceiving it, without bending before its strength? No, the truth is, you have dealt with me as you have dealt with my people: you have captured us, and tamed us, and forged us into that which we were not, and made tools of us, weapons for your coming war of vengeance against the Evil One.

  “Who is the Evil One, O Skysinger, Prisoner of the Lake?”

  “You know that,” replied Skysinger, surprised. “I have told you that story many times

  “But I am only a mortal hatchling, Great One, and my understanding is small. Please tell me who is the Evil One.”

  Yd sensed a trap, of course, but decided Yd might as well feed her the lines she wanted, anyway.

  “Yd is my ancient enemy, First One, Lord of Mother Sea.”