Heaven (16 page)

The Huphun quickly found out what was happening in the walled-off section, and it terrified them. They had to listen for hours
to the cries of the trapped mothers. They could not cover their hearing buds; they could not remove themselves from the vicinity,
because their own brood were making their evening return to the warmth of the nest. They had to stay and listen, however distressing
the sounds might be.

And at starrise, the mothers removed the spittle plugs from their nest openings and looked out to greet the new day, knowing
the scene that would await them. The forcewalls had vanished. All that remained were mothers, flattened against the cliff,
solidified by the cold of the deep night. And pathetic corpses of fledglings, scattered obscenely at the base of the cliff.

The Huphun knew what was happening inside the forcewalls. Oh, yes. What they still did not know was why this was being done
to them.

And now it was happening again. The carnage had resumed every evening since the aliens arrived. Eleven consecutive starsets
of unparalleled horror.

Why are they torturing us?

When broodmother PinkStripedLozenge saw the forcewall forming around her, she knew she was going to die a terrible death—but
that was not her greatest fear. Over and over again, until her vocal organs were torn and inflamed and her voice was hoarse,
she screeched warnings to her approaching young.

“Not here! Not me! To the nest! To the nest!”

The noise of panic-stricken mothers was the worst thing she had ever heard. And through it all, the same questions beat in
her head:
Why, why, why? What have we done to suffer such pain? Whom have we ever harmed? Why have the Wings of the World exposed us
to this atrocity?

She knew that even if her fledglings had obeyed her commands, it would have been useless. The young did not know how to close
the nest opening, and in any case their spit glands were not yet functional. There was no chance that they would obey. The
fledglings were operating on instinct, and they ignored the desperate cries of the mothers. They lacked the mental powers
to understand the danger they were in, or to escape it.

Like all the mothers inside the forcewall, PinkStripedLozenge had been glued to the cliff. The alien invaders had tried to
force her wings open, and she had fought against them like a maddened bant-eagle until the struggle broke several of her wing
bones and dislocated one of her trailing struts, so that the pain became unbearable. Then, ignoring her screams of anguish,
they pulled her wings wide apart, tearing skin and snapping skeletal struts. They sprayed the backs of the wings with a sticky
chemical, whose very smell nauseated her, and then they held her against the cliff next to her nest.

A puff of gas from a stubby cylinder set the glue like rock. At that moment she finally accepted that she was going to die,
as thousands of others had on each of the previous starsets. She hung from the cliff in a haze of pain, knowing that the true
horror was yet to come.

The fledglings were too young to reason. Their instinct knew no better than to seek out the symbols of their own nest, flagrantly
displayed upon her inner wings. PinkStripedLozenge knew that when her young reached her and clung with their mouth-tusks,
she would be unable to fold her wings around them. And even when the whole brood had attached itself to her calluses, she
would not be able to step into the nest to escape the bitter cold of the night.

The fledglings’ approach was hesitant. They knew something was terribly wrong, but they did not know what. Their panic-stricken
mewling drove the mothers frantic, and they renewed their struggles to get free. One, whose bone structure had been severely
damaged, ripped away from the cliff and fell to her death, leaving her wings still attached to the rock, dripping body fluids.

“Stay away! Stay away!”
PinkStripedLozenge could not tilt her head far enough to see her brood as they attached themselves to her torso, but she
could feel their mouth-tusks gripping the toughened calluses that ran across the front of her upper body, and the weight of
the youngsters against her breathing cavity. And she knew that they could not hold on for long. Time and again one of the
fledglings would fall off, clatter down the cliff until it bounced into open air, spread its ever-more-tired wings, and reattach
itself to her.

After a time, they no longer returned.

Barely conscious, awash with pain, and half-insane from the loss of her brood and her own helplessness to prevent it, PinkStripedLozenge
watched the last arc of the Evenstar disappear below the canyon rim. At once she began to freeze.

And still she did not know why.

Although he had sounded confident when he’d made his promise to the Neanderthal child, Sam wouldn’t have been surprised if
his request to consult the archives had been turned down. The regimen at the monastery was very restrictive, and he didn’t
need
to find out about Fall’s parents to heal her lifesoul. In fact, it was conceivable that she would be more likely to develop
spiritually if she just accepted that whatever had happened to them had been a necessary contribution to the pursuit of a
united cosmos. But when he made a diffident approach to his instructor, he was immediately granted an hour’s access to all
unrestricted personnel records and given the necessary qubit crystal to activate it.

It took him a few minutes to find the right section of the archive; after that it was relatively easy to select the glyphics
for a primary search procedure to locate the girl’s father and mother, and a secondary one to inquire into the fate of her
pet. The archive quickly gave him access to Fall’s parents’ files. What he read there shocked him.

The early part of the record was pretty ordinary stuff. Fall’s father, Alert Ears Hear Silence, had been born on board a Neanderthal
spacecraft. So had her mother, but on a different vessel. They had met when both ships overlapped on a trade venture, paired
up, and jumped ship. This left them trying to make a living in a very ordinary town on an insignificant planet that had not
at that time enjoyed the benefit of Cosmic Unity’s ministrations.

Seven years ago they had produced their one and only child, Fall.

Four years and five months later, a mission of Unity had arrived on that world and converted its inhabitants to the cause
of universal tolerance and love. Alert Ears Hear Silence had been among the last to convert, but it was well known that Neanderthals
lacked the common spiritual graces and were difficult in this respect. His wife, Golden Mane Floats Softly, had proved less
awkward and had volunteered to take on the task of bringing spiritual luminance to those members of her species that were
finding its concepts confusing. She had enjoyed modest success, but none whatsoever with her husband, Hear—a failure that
grew to haunt her. And so she tried harder and argued with him constantly about his indifference to the realm of the lifesoul,
the omnipotence of its Giver, and the immanence of its Cherisher.

All of which, Hear told his wife, was superstitious claptrap.

As time passed, the relationship became ever more strained by this spiritual incompatibility, and they separated. Fall remained
with her mother, Floats, and the authorities moved her father to a distant city, where suitable counseling was available.

Just over a year later, Hear returned, to be reunited with his wife, but he was a shadow of his former self. He had finally
embraced the tenets of Cosmic Unity, but he had also contracted a rare disease, which had left him with a physical deformity
to his hands and feet—and, it turned out, a serious but undiagnosed mental instability. One day, when Fall was at school,
Hear and Floats had begun arguing. Neighbors heard the shouting, then silence. When one of them became concerned, she found
the door open and went in. She found Floats lying dead on the floor, and Hear in another room in a pool of blood, with a knife
in his chest.

The neighbor alerted the authorities, who took over Fall’s upbringing. She did not return to the house; instead, an order
of female monks took her under their wing. She was told that a terrible accident had happened to her parents. The truth—that
Alert Ears Hear Silence had killed his wife in a violent argument and then committed suicide—was deemed unsuitable for such
a young child. So was the autopsy report, which had found anomalies in Hear’s brain, attributed by the coroner to his previous
disease.

Sam was greatly distressed by this discovery. He now knew the truth, but he had no idea how much of it he would be able to
tell Fall. He would have to ask the advice of his instructor. A mistake could prove very damaging to the child.

In his state of shock, he nearly forgot his secondary objective, but the machine had been hunting through its memory banks,
and it had come to a disturbing conclusion.

Of the incident with the grenvil, there was no record. In fact, there was no record that Fall or her parents had possessed
any pets. The girl must have imagined the whole thing—maybe dreamed it, then confused dream with reality. He tried to find
out whether she was known to suffer from sleep paralysis, which could cause dreams to be confused with reality, but found
no record of it.

Several hours after quitting the archives, a nagging thought finally surfaced. Sam reviewed the session in his mind. Hadn’t
Fall said that she had
seen
the priests take her parents away? He could review the records, but it would be simpler to ask her again at the next session,
which was scheduled for tomorrow. Anyway, he was sure that was what she’d told him.

The archives flatly contradicted her statement. They said that she had left her parents in the normal manner and never returned
home from school. Had she dreamed about the priests taking them away,
too
?

This was a very disturbed child, but he was sure he could heal her. His love was great enough. He simply needed to keep trying.
But in their next sessions, she was immovable. Sam began to realize that it would take a huge effort to correct her misconceptions
and bring her to the truth. His slowly building confidence began to drain away again.

Still he stuck to his task. There
had
to be a way to get inside her shell of obstinacy. But Fall simply could not be convinced that her memories were false. No
matter how Sam tried, in session after long, frustrating session, she would not be shaken from her story. It infuriated him
that she could
sense
his sincerity but took no notice of it. Then he would realize that she could sense his fury, too, and that made him ashamed
of his inadequacies as a lifesoul-healer . . . and, of course, she could sense those feelings, too. . . .

It is extraordinarily difficult, Sam discovered, to engage with an empath. They cannot read your mind, but they can read your
emotions perfectly, however well you conceal them. Yet, paradoxically, this was what bound the two of them, client and healer,
together—for the main emotion that Fall could sense was love. Sam really did want to help her, to heal her, to make her whole
again. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t believe her. He believed what the priests’ records told him.

She
didn’t. She was convinced that the records were wrong.

He knew they were right. His upbringing and his training left him no choice. All his life he had obeyed the priests, accepted
their advice, studied their teachings, and striven to make himself like them.

The contradictions were driving him crazy. And it wasn’t only Fall who could sense
that
.

The soul is the life, and life shall cherish life. Thus, life shall cherish the soul of life, and strive always to enhance
its becoming. There can be no limits to the love of the lifesoul, no restraint on the ways of its preservation.

The Book of Biogenesis

S
econd-Best Sailor emitted a wild whoop of joy from his speech-siphons and spouted a fountain of seawater into the air in a
looping parabola. Gusts of wind ripped it to pieces as it reached the apex. He whooped again. It was so good to be out of
the belly of the ’Thal ship and back in a real ocean.

Well, a small bay, really. But that was just temporary. The ocean might be off limits for the moment, but it was
out there
. He could taste it. One day, he and his kind would make it their own. He contracted his ring muscles to squeeze water out
through his rearward siphons, and shot across the bay in a cloud of bubbles, stirring up sand from the shallow seabed. His
chromophore skin turned yellow and turquoise in slowly drifting chevrons, a sign of overexcited happiness. He sensed the color
change, which normally would have been embarrassingly juvenile.

He didn’t give a squirt.

The sea was clear today, and visibility was good. No more than half a mile away, out in the deeper water away from the beach,
he could make out several of his companions, racing two boats against each other. He would have placed a bet on the outcome
if there had been anything to act as currency . . . though perhaps that was all to the good, since he now saw that the boat
he had favored was wallowing in a sudden calm. The one that obviously hadn’t stood the chance of a jelloid in a riptide was
cutting through the water like a marlon in pursuit of its mate, which only went to show that even a completely incompetent
captain sometimes got lucky.

He opened his siphons wide and gulped the alien seawater. The taste was strange, but to the mariners the freedom of the bay
was infinitely preferable to the restricted confines of the ’Thal spaceship. One reason why Aquifer had been chosen was that
the mix of salts in its ocean was similar to that on No-Moon; the differences were evident enough to the mariners’ sensitive
taste-buds, but not unpleasant.
A taste of the exotic
, Second-Best Sailor had remarked, and not all the resulting amusement had been forced.