Case and the Dreamer (33 page)

The
holo’s
, Dom Felix thought,
are just too damn good
. He was by no means the first to have that thought; it had been a common observation and occasionally a battlecry for over a century before he left Terra. Psychologists and educators had cried doom over that technological refinement for a long time, lamenting the increasing tendency of Terrans to lie personally dormant in the glow of their holo’s, vicariously experiencing other places, other times for (sometimes) days at a time while automatic machines fed and massaged and evacuated them. It was argued on the one hand that the holo’s expanded the mind and multiplied experience and understanding, and that as the artificial qualitatively approached the real, the copy the original, it would effectively be no difference at all, with the ultimate good on the side of the perfected imitation, for it eliminated all the perils of real experience.

On the other hand there always had been, there always would be, a portion of humanity which insisted upon its own real experience and was willing to run risks and pay the price of potential scars, agony and death. Or ridicule … the whole matter being yet another indication of the effort of the human animal perennially to separate itself into disagreeable factions, necessitating the existence of such movements as Acceptance, which alone could prevent the species from stinging itself to death by its own poison like the scorpion.

These thoughts trickled through his mind as he sat on the slightly resilient floor with his back against the glossy, varnished wall of Arca’s central building, the one with the aeronautical tower. Made entirely of the same material, light, strong, and composed of particles
matted together in some way, the hall was bare of furniture of any kind. Irregularly placed patches of luminescence, part of the wall itself, glowed dimly, but there were so many that the light, at least on Medean terms, was adequate, though for a Terran it took some getting used to. Forty or so Arcans squatted against the walls or knelt or crouched out on the floor. He saw none lying down. Occasionally one would rise and leave, presumably to eat.

The entire structure thrummed as it yielded to the ever-shifting pressures of the supporting wings, but due to the great size of the enclosed space, the overall note was far down toward the subsonic, and was felt rather than heard. There was also a perpetual susurrus, soft and sourceless, the result probably of particulate matter being constantly swept against and along the outside surfaces of the structure, the sound, absorbed and diffuse, delayed and mixed. It was like sitting inside a gigantic tympanum which was being energetically bombarded by snowballs made of absorbent cotton. There was no other sound, no speech, no song. There was no decoration, no art save for the beautifully poised substructures of the roof, but that was not so much art as engineering; a kind of visible logic, like the hexagonal form of a honey cell.

And all this, in depth and detail, had surrounded him for days in his research; he was completely familiar with every sight and sound and texture, and the difference between a holo and the actuality was slight indeed. It was this that brought up the thoughts of the function of holography in Terran culture, and “Going to Arca? What the hell for?”

He found out what the hell for.

Aquare, seated beside him, whimpered and burped into the translator, which said, “Food for you in cycle.” The almost-monotone sounded harsh and loud in the big hall. No Arcan indicated any response.

“Thanks, Aquare. I know. I’m not hungry just now.”

“Sleep.” Damn it, thought Dom Felix, isn’t it within the state of the art to design in some punctuation for that talk-box of his?
Sleep
. Would that be imperative, interrogative, informational, abstract, or something he hadn’t thought of yet? He took a chance and said, “I’m not sleepy either.”

Aquare said, “Confidence.”

The scene in the cycle rushed back. “Absolutely, Aquare. You have my word. You may trust me.”

“Trust. Yes.”

Silence again. How in time, thought Dom Felix, do you bring Acceptance to people who can’t, or anyway don’t, communicate with you and can’t, or don’t, or maybe don’t need to communicate with one another? They—

He gasped.

For perhaps fifteen seconds, he wasn’t there at all—not on Arca, nor on Medea, nor anywhere else he had ever been or read about or been told about or holo’d.

The sky was white, dazzling, bright all over and brighter still at the distant horizon he faced. The ground was splintered rock, grays and browns nearby, smoky with distance as it receded. The land was treeless, and he grew on a high bluff, yearning toward the brightening horizon. All around them was a tinkling as the freezing wind, the good chill wind, moved his leaves and those of the other red-leaf, blue-vein plants around him. All bent toward the growing light, and spread. With a glorious flash the limb of the sun appeared, and as it rose it was very pale orange and its limb was enormous, a widening arc, huge and close and generous, profligate with the good, needed, orange light, pouring out across the prairie and shooting ahead of it long sharp shards and spears of shadow.

The ground shook and he was aware of the great creature which approached—an armored slug with many pairs of legs and heavy feet, and low-slung horizontal mandibles mowing across the crest of the bluff. It caught the red leaves, helpless in their starving dawn-time extension, and fed as it moved, scalping a swath out of the gravelly ground. He knew he was in its path; flight never occurred to his plant self, fear hardly at all, for fear was simply unreasonable. When the jaws closed on him there was regret, and oh yes, agony for a moment, and something else:

Acceptance.

Dom Felix tried to open his eyes and could not: he had not yet closed them. He began to pant, clawed for a moment at the floor
and each side, started up away from the wall, and then had to pull down his cowl to wipe the sweat that poured down into his eyes. “What was that?”

Wordlessly, Aquare pointed to an Arcan hunkered against the wall to the right.

“I don’t understand.”

“Try.”

 … and he was weightless … no, free was a better word, riding warm wind. He looked ahead and saw others of his kind with wide curved wings and white, clean bodies. He looked down a thousand meters to a sparkling blue sea speckled with whipped foam. He looked across to his left and saw long line of birds like himself, eleven of them, and understood that they were flying in a V formation, strong and easy, somewhere to go, everything right.

He blinked, and was back in Arca.

Shaken, he said, “And they said nothing ever happens in Arca,” and tried to laugh.

Chirp-chirp-chirp
. The sound was strange there; none of the others did it.

“Aquare—please.”

Aquare averted his strange head to look at Dom Felix. He said, “Come with me.” But when Dom Felix started up, he stayed with the gesture, sat him back down.

 … and they moved through a landscape, the Medean badlands, down from a mountaintop into a pocket canyon with a crooked little lake at the bottom. It was heavily overgrown with low shrubs of many kinds and long-limbed, reaching trees. The wind was rather more merciful here in the sheltered valley, and it was easier to see without the perpetual whirl of dust-devils and shrouding clouds that plagued the coastal plains of the Ring Ocean. Dom Felix was Dom Felix now, not a plant or bird; he sensed the presence of Aquare beside him and was aware surprisingly without surprise, but they were both invisible to one another, and to whatever, whomever, might be in the valley to see.

An animal was snuffling into a bush, whether to browse or to hunt, Dom Felix could not be sure. It was somewhat larger than a Terran
fox; it was six—no, eight-legged, with the segmented body covered with fine red fur. As it backed out of the underbrush, Dom Felix could see two small limbs hanging from the base of the neck, which was upthrust like the neck of a llama; the limbs were smaller and more slender than the legs, rather like the forelimbs of a kangaroo.

As they watched, another animal of the same species—or was it? It was larger, with longer forelimbs equipped with clawlike fingers, and—yes, it had only four legs and a short, straight, thick tail; a sort of centaur; this creature, without preliminaries, flung itself on the back of the first, digging its claws into the front of the first body segment, and began to copulate enthusiastically. Ah. Male with four legs, female with eight.

Everything seemed to mist over, and return again to clarity. A very small portion of Dom Felix’s mind was amazed at this combination within him of intense observation and uncritical acceptance.
Watch now, think later
.

There was a change in the Valley, probably seasonal, part of the complex gumbo of Medean weathers to which, as in all of its kind, the vegetation had learned to accommodate. Bushes seen before were now leafless; new vines were rioting up the trees, which had dressed themselves for some new occasion. Clearly some time had passed.

Again he saw the two animals. The male hovered alertly near her. She had changed distinctively. Her hindquarters had blown up grossly, and the last pair of legs seemed barely able to support them, and had lost some of their mobility, so that they dragged rather than lifted. She seemed fairly unconcerned as she rooted among the underbrush.

Suddenly the male spun about and froze, alert, his forelimbs up and its claws splayed way some crabs alert for danger. Down the slope toward him galloped a second male, ready apparently to crash straight into the first. At the last possible instant he swerved, lashing out with his right hind foot with a blow that would have disemboweled the other had it landed. But the animal guarding the female twisted deftly, avoiding the foot, and struck out with the forelimb, which seemed somehow to reach much farther than it should, and the taloned paw (hand?) struck the other a terrible blow in the
back of the long neck, which, with the invader’s downslope speed, serve to somersault him down the hill, to land sprawling and sliding. He got painfully to his feet and started back up, but the sight of the other standing there unscathed, his forelimbs out and fairly quivering with eager readiness, apparently made him think again. He stopped, pulled a leaf off of a bush, put it in his mouth, chewed for a moment, then turned and trotted away.

The other turned back to the female, who had regarded this knightly conflict with dull disinterest. She had other concerns. Her heavy hindquarters had collapsed the spindly legs, and she was numbly dragging it along the ground. Dom Felix felt an urge to help her, to stop her, to keep her from injuring herself, but he was invisible, he wasn’t really there, was he?

Very concerned, he watched the stretching in the last body section, down in the groove between it and the next; and he saw it split and bleed. The female kept dragging it laboriously along the ground, now headed toward the thicker underbrush, the male following watchfully. She stopped at last, rested, and then suddenly lunged. The entire back portion broke almost entirely away, except for the end of the spine. Another lunge, and she was free of it altogether. It lay there under the bushes, the little legs twitching. Surprisingly, there was not a great deal of blood.

The female stood panting, ignoring what lay under the bush, and Don Felix was horrified to see the male immediately fling himself upon her again, forelimbs and four legs holding her immobile while he penetrated her somewhere in the center of what seem more like a wound than anything else. He was soon finished and flung himself off, to go and stand by the discarded thing lying in the leaves. The female moved off, beginning to snuffle for food again; the male gave her not a glance.

Again the scene misted over and cleared. Obviously, time had passed again. The male had trodden much of the nearby ground, as if in restless pacing, and the thing under the bush had undergone changes. It was smaller overall, much of the excess fat gone from it. It was obviously still alive, though the legs had atrophied to crooked little sticks. They quivered, and now and again gave little convulsive
jerks. The male approached it, staring intensely in its sideways way, and was apparently preoccupied when the attack came.

The second male (whether it was the one he had seen before or not, Dom Felix could not be sure) exploded on the scene as if from nowhere, landing on the first one’s back and driving in a veritable blur of blows to the upright portion of the neck. The defender immediately fell and rolled over, dislodging the attacker. He gathered his forefeet under them and leapt straight up, to come down with fearful accuracy on the attacker’s head. Two strong kicks finished the job. He sank down, panting, to rest for a moment and then crouched over the corpse. With a series of blows with the hard spurs in the center of his forelimbs, he cracked a line of cavitations along the crest of the skull, the way one might chip a line in a block of ice preparatory to cracking it in two. It was done with such expertise it appeared to be an old skill, or insect-like pre-programming. He then forced the long finger-like claws of both hands into the crack and strained. With a snap the skull open like a book, and he plunged his face into it, gobbling.

Meanwhile the thing under the bush began to convulse in earnest, so much so that it actually turned over. One area of it—the half-healed, half-withered place where the spine had torn out—showed some agitation, and suddenly a sharp little probe appear from inside, followed by a second. These two whipped in toward the flesh, paused, trembling, whipped and tore again, until it could be seen that something was fighting its way out. As it gradually emerged and freed itself from the entanglements of what had to be the uterus, Dom Felix saw it to be a startlingly perfect miniature of the first female he had seen, with eight legs and two forelimbs with sharp little claws on them—the tools of its first emergence.

The male, blood and brains dripping from his long snout, stood over the—baby?—until it was almost out, and patiently pulled it the rest of the way. From the center of the abdomen, between the second pair of legs, extended a vein, or tube—clearly the umbilical cord. This he grasped in his long fingers and broke. The infant began to crawl, and in minutes, to lift its segmented body clear of the ground and walk. It waddled blindly over to the shelter of the nearest bush
and began poking its snout into the leaves, trying to feed. The male grasped the cord from the ruin that was left from the birth, drew out a wrinkled, fist-size many-veined tissue, the afterbirth or true uterus. This he immediately devoured, and went his way.