V
“Are you all right?” a small, china-tone voice whisper-spoke to him as he swam upward through the inkiness that seemed endless, thick, and sticky. But, after all, there was light, and he homed in on the words as if they were a small beacon that would lead him out of his fuzziness into clarity — a very pleasant, gentle beacon.
“He just passed out is all,” another, gruffer, voice said.
“You have no sympathy,” china-tone snapped.
Sam opened his eyes completely and found he was looking at a tiny, elfin face. Elfin! Pointed ears… small and delicate features… tiny but well-formed body… Wings! A pair of velvet-like wings fluffed gently behind her like sheets on a line, then drew shut. Their color matched the toga that fell to an end above her round and lovely knees. He remembered Hurkos and calmed himself. This was a mutant of some sort — whether a product of Nature or of the Artificial Wombs. A delightful mutation, to be sure. She was one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen.
“Are you okay?” she asked again, tiny lips parting slightly to let the little words out.
Sam groaned, tried to sit up.
“Don’t strain yourself,” she said, grasping his shoulders in her fine, shell hands in an effort to restrain him, her sculptured fingers pressing him back.
“I’m… okay,” he said, fighting off a headache that he knew could not successfully be fought off.
“I told you,” the gruff voice said.
Sam turned to the right, looked into the wide, handsome face of the man with the gruff voice. There was a wild mane of hair framing his head, partially covering his two large ears. Memories of being dragged into the floater by a man-horse came back to him. “I guess I should thank you for saving—”
“Wasn’t anything to it,” the man-horse said, flushing slightly and grinning.
“It was my life, though…”
“Don’t praise Crazy too much,” a third voice said. It was Andrew Coro, the man he had met briefly on Horner’s Earth ranch when a Beast hunt had been initiated some months ago. Coro stepped between the girl and the man-horse. “Things like that go to his head, and he gets impossible to live with.”
“Hmmph!” Crazy snorted.
“I haven’t met your… your colleagues, Mr. Coro.”
“Of course not,” Coro said. “I’m sorry. This is Lotus, our nursemaid, comforter, and spoiled friend. She’s also a famous botanist, but she’ll have you seeing plants in your sleep if you get her talking about it. Fair warning. This is Crazy Horse,” he continued, pointing to the other mutant before the elfin girl-woman could respond. “Crazy is our muscle, as you might have guessed — and a bit, I imagine, of our brains also. And me you know, Mr. Penuel.”
“Sam. And I’m pleased to meet you two. You did a fine job for Congressman Horner. Do you have anything for a headache?”
“It’s as makeshift as anything could be,” Andy said.
“It’ll do,” Crazy grunted, crossing his arms over his massive chest and shuffling his hooves on the metal deck.
“Sam? After all, you’ll be sitting there.”
Sam dropped into the homemade chair, fastened the seat belt. Crazy had taken a wall cot and bent it into the rugged form of a chair. Together, he and Coro had bolted it to the deck while Lotus had sewn a spare belt to it. He was reminded of the flexoplast chair in the jelly-mass ship. Suddenly things seemed to be revolving on a wheel, the playing of old events all over with just a few different characters. “I think it will do just fine.”
“Okay,” Coro said, turning and dropping into his own seat. “Now let’s find out what happened to those two colony-cities.”
Coro plotted the position of the larger of the two silent cities, Chaplin-Alpha, set the floater on a high speed, automatic course for the place. As they bobbled along at what seemed like a leisurely pace but was really a wild, lightning-fast streaking, Sam learned to know the trio by their personalities and not just by their physical appearances. Lotus was tender, greatly affectionate, and very proud of her two men. She was also a lever to maintain humility and tranquillity within the group. She did these last two things with humor, not with nagging, and Sam came to appreciate this very much in only minutes. Crazy was quick-witted, quick-temered, and extremely friendly. He seemed the type who would lend you everything he owned — then kick your head in if you proved no more than a thief. He had a bit of the boyish wonder at the marvelous everyday things in life, a quality which most men lose early and never manage to regain. And Coro… Coro was different altogether. He was friendly, to be sure, and there was nothing but kindness in his manner. But he was not as candid as Crazy and Lotus, not as easy to know. He was withdrawn, and a touch of melancholy tinted his dark eyes, giving him a perpetual look of hurt.
They were talking, despite Coro’s warnings, about botany, when he began reducing the floater’s speed and shifting from plotogram to manual control. “We’re almost there,” he said, interrupting Lotus as she related her adventures with a Porcupine Rose.
All four faced front. The conversation had been a diversion, a way to keep their minds off the missile that had torn up their ship, and to stop any questions about who might possibly have fired it in a world of pacifism. Suddenly the screens popped to life under Coro’s hands. The city of Chaplin-Alpha swam into clarity before them.
Rather, what had been Chaplin-Alpha…
Once a thriving metropolis. Now ashes. How blithely this peaceful society tripped into disaster! Never expecting anything like this because things like this just didn’t happen. In the old world, police and rescue teams would have come by the droves. But there had been no police for centuries, and no one had foreseen that the fifty-five robodocs would be shot down before they could land.
Ashes. A gray-white film like the thinnest veneer of snow lay obfuscating all. Rubble lay in mounds like camel humps. Here and there the girders of a building stood like broken, singed bones, some of their stone and mortar flesh still clinging to them. Some places, the rubble stretched in long rows where the buildings had fallen directly sideways to crumble and decay like the body of a huge animal.
Plants. Lotus knew what kinds. They grew snakily from the burned edges, searching through the rubble, seeking sustenance from the two million bodies that, certainly, lay smashed beneath. Some others, dark and with slender leaves like knives, were carbon-eaters, relishing the richness of their coveted food.
“The people—” Lotus began.
“Dead,” Coro finished.
“But how—”
“Killed.”
Everyone sat silent a moment.
“But men don’t kill,” Crazy insisted. “Not like this. And since the Breadloaf Shield and the death of God—”
Sam was slightly surprised to hear the casualness with which the man-horse mentioned the death of God. But then, the news media had splashed the story in depth and everywhere. Breadloaf had been interviewed to the point of exhaustion. Hurkos had become a minor celebrity on the variety-talk shows. Gnossos’ book On God’s Demise, was a runaway best seller on any world you could name. Breadloaf’s scientists had been badgered, bothered, pumped for opinions and facts. Only Sam had managed, with a great deal of difficulty, to keep his privacy intact. With this bounty of media coverage, the fact of divine expiration was a common piece of knowledge, unquestioned and — ten months after the act-generally unthought of. But what Crazy was saying was correct. Men should be less able to kill than ever. The perpetrator of aggression was gone. Man was saner than ever. This sort of atrocity should be impossible. Men should not have the ability to… and of course, Sam thought, men didn’t do it!