The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (121 page)

Why did Ship let me believe I was fully prepared for Medea?

It was quite obvious that basic survival rules had been changed. Nikki felt a tightness in his chest, a sense of betrayal.

“Nikki, you'll have to be our systems monitor,” Root said. “I can fly us through anything and Tam's the best DataMaster we could want. Homeostasis is your department. You understand homeostasis?”

“An organism's tendency to maintain constant internal environment.”

“Good. Without Central we can't automatically monitor some important floater systems.” Root depressed a key on the far right of his board. “Your viewer will now readout all the necessary levels and their priority. Tam.”

She took it up as though they'd practiced a training presentation. “If it's Priority One, like our helium supply, run a check at the indicated intervals. If it's Priority Ten, like the cooler motor in our drinktank, ignore it. If you have questions, ask.”

Hesitantly, Nikki keyed for helium readout against their lift, read it and shot a questioning glance forward at the terrain. They were lifting far faster than the readout indicated. He checked it. Even the best of thermals could not change the basic properties of the floater's helium. He looked up at the billowing bag, back to the readout.

“Root?”

“What is it?” The man didn't even try to conceal irritation.

“My helium readout rates our Kg/m
3
at two point nine adjusted. What gives? We should be at no more than two point seven-six.”

Instead of answering, Root concentrated on his own controls and viewer. The ride
was
getting rougher. The sharp lurch at the end of every twisting bounce had become a jarring dead-weight drop. Through the transparent ceiling Nikki watched a series of four-meter ripples run the width and length of the bag. The nest banged and slewed, forcing him to bring up the web hood to steady his head. Against these restraints, he peered forward and had his first view of the seacoast with a play of angry colors in the offshore clouds. The floater had reached the upper winds growling in from the sea.

“Root?”

“I heard you. Ignore it.”

It was an unmistakable reprimand.

As though to counter this, Tam said: “We aren't very lucky today, Nikki. To make the bloom we have to beat this wind and move out over the water.”

The next lurch gathered the nest up against the floater bag and dropped it the full length of the fifteen-meter lines. Both Tam and Root appeared unruffled by the jolt, going right on with their work. Nikki smelled the unmistakable taint of blood in his nose, wiped red with his sleeve.

“Nikki, what're your compressor specs?” Root asked.

He punched for them, still shaken by the jolt and still wondering why neither Tam nor Root appeared interested in the helium discrepancy. Helium was a floater's life. A leak, a loss of heat control, bad valves—any of a hundred related details—could drop them into deadly sea, desert or mountaintop. To drop out here over land meant certain death. No human could negotiate the shadow zones with their rim of blink-fast predators. Not without support from Central or Ship … and Root had isolated them from that support. Why?

“What're those compressor specs?” Root demanded.

“Safe levels.”

“Don't make me ask twice.”

Nikki accepted this and thought:
We are lifting.

He decided, at least for the moment, that he would not worry about the helium discrepancy if the others didn't.

Root was making course corrections now. The floater tacked its way into the wind toward the white-edged shoreline.

Whenever he could take his attention from his controls, Nikki peered forward where winds and Medea's oblique tides whipped the sea surface into a thrash of dark water and foam. He saw that they were approaching a large bay. Nikki guessed its width at ten kilometers, then twenty, then realized one of his Shipbound limitations: he could not estimate large distances.

The bay's shoreline appeared high and rocky, difficult for human or demon to negotiate. Between rocks and water stretched a thin buffer of tidelands and then, as the floater drew closer in its angle toward the sea, Nikki saw a thick bank of kelp-like growth just below the surface. It furled and unfurled as far out as he could see. The water at its edges curled green and yellow.

Between system checks and corrections, Nikki divided his attention—now on the kelp-covered sea, now on the helium discrepancy. Still two point nine adjusted. They were operating at about one hundred and ten percent efficiency and he couldn't understand it.

Tam, busy with her own duties, tried to divert Nikki. He must not see through the helium discrepancy—not yet. She spoke quietly, forcing him to concentrate on her voice.

“Whatever generates the bloom's gasbags does so at times of intense solar activity. And we know that somehow they communicate. Root and I feel that they possess an extremely complex, high-order communications system.”

“Fully sentient,” Root said.

“But their cellular base is vegetable,” Nikki said.

“Would you limit intelligence to animals?” Tam asked.

Root was scornful. “This is a new world and if there's one unwritten law of the physical-biological-social universe, it's that anything can happen, given the conditions, and given time, probably will happen.”

“They communicate,” Tam said. “And they exhibit social behavior which has to be based on communication. You've heard their songs.”

Nikki had thought himself the only human to call the sounds of the globes
songs
. He thought back to the Shipside times when he'd listened to the records of those odd sounds—moans, wails, squeaks and grunts. Shipside people played them briefly for amusement, but Nikki had played them often, lulled by … what? Rhythms? He'd often wondered about those sounds. Ancient poets had enjoyed the poetry of many languages—even when they did not understand the language or its literal world.

Belatedly, he focused on Tam's words. She knew he'd listened often to the records of the songs. Was that why he'd been chosen?

“Song implies singer,” he said. “Why not capture a few for a short time or study older ones that drift close to the base?”

Tam darted a quick glance at him. Was he serious?

“They lift by hydrogen,” she said. “How do you capture and confine a firebomb? And even if they don't explode they disintegrate. Capture's out of the question.”

“What're we studying?” Root demanded. “We need accurate data. The less contact we have with them, the truer our data. We're like physicists getting down into the world of particle physics to study it.”

“How much is our influence and how much original behavior?” Tam asked.

All of this was true, but Nikki could not evade basic misgivings.
Root is trying to misdirect me and Tam is following his lead consciously and unconsciously. Where are they pointing me?

“You never know when you might be giving your subject subtle clues about what you expect, thereby influencing the outcome,” Tam said. “Besides, Root has discovered some startling facts about our vegetable friends down there.”

Nikki expected them to expand on this, but Root was forced to concentrate on a course change as the wind shifted, backing around to their stem. First the jets, then the compressors were shut down and they drifted silently before the wind. The view ahead filled with a thick yellow-brown froth breaking across the kelp.

“Thousands of them come off the water at the bloom,” Tam said. “But wind and electrical activity allow only a fraction of them to make it inland.”

Root was busy venting gas, dropping their floater closer to the sea. It was now less than five hundred meters below them and the high walls of the bay's surrounding cliffs created a pocket of deceptive calm at the sea surface.

“Look! There!” Tam pointed across Root.

“At seven o'clock,” Root said.

At first Nikki saw only waves and froth churning over the kelp. Then, slowly, bubbles in the froth began to swell and rise, each in its own violet, green or yellow. Each trailed a long thin strand of itself, much like its tentacles, that appeared to be attached to the kelp. As they rose, the umbilicus stretched thin and broke. The bags floated free and, within seconds, began to play every color of the visible spectrum across their surfaces. Water and air swirled with dancing colors.

Root keyed in the external sensors and, above the high-pitched shriek of wind through the floater's lines, they heard the tentative flutings of the gasbags—clear whistles and odd cadences.

Nikki felt deep within his shoulderblades that those whistles were directed at him. He was both stimulated and upset in ways he could not define. He found it hard to imagine danger in that airborne display of beauty, but knew they could drift down on a colony installation and, unless thwarted, could engulf with flame everything they touched.

“They're a dream,” Nikki whispered. “They're all the beauty of a child's best dream.”

Neither Root nor Tam responded. All three of them sat enthralled within the nest, rocking in the wind, and watched as thousands of the colorful bags broke the sea's drab surface, swelled and lifted.

Nikki listened to the siren fluting of the bags as they lifted closer and closer, hearing distinct voices waver through the colorful mob. He spoke in a whisper.

“They sound like Ship children when they get up in the morning. They come out of their cubbies and into the dressing room and they jabber themselves awake.”

Tam looked at him with a curious softness.

“I would like to see children. I haven't seen a child in almost ninety years.”

Root laughed, oddly harsh and when her blue eyes snapped a demanding look at him, he cleared his throat, spoke placatingly.

“Tam, you slept more than fifty of those years in the hyb tanks. Look down there.” He stretched his hand across the view, alive now with gasbags tumbling over themselves in the fits and starts of the wind. “These are children that only we three have seen. We saw them born … or hatched.”

“I find no comfort in that,” she said.

What an odd turn of phrase,
Nikki thought. He felt that he'd been an eavesdropper on an exchange with deep and portentous meanings.

Once more, Nikki scanned his console, still curious about the helium but even more curious at this real-time observation of a bloom.

“Tam and I have watched four blooms this year,” Root said. “Are you superstitious, Nikki?”

He's goading me again,
Nikki thought. When he spoke, he couldn't conceal resentment.

“There are certain things … powers we can't measure. And you're right that all things are possible; maybe luck works somewhere in that. But I wouldn't call myself superstitious.”

“Good!” Root sounded elated. He glanced at Tam who was busy adjusting the external monitors. “Out of four trips here and a total crew of fourteen, we're the only two survivors.”

Nikki felt as though the bottom had dropped out of his stomach and it was not the lurching of the floater. He was in genuine physical danger with no Ship to guard him. He was actually exposed to dangerous elements.

Constant danger.

Is this what Ship meant?

Even as he thought this he knew it was too easy to be true. Ship had something else concealed in that warning. Nikki knew this with a sure instinct.

“Listen!”

It was Tam, speaking as she increased the volume on the external sensors. The hesitant, youthful jabber of the rising globes was being replaced by babbling confusion. Quickly, it built into the short, unmistakable sounds of creatures in panic.

As though the sound threw a switch within Nikki, he felt the panic in his own breast.

Evil!

Evil!

Evil!

He didn't know whether he was crying it or just thinking it. But there were screams in his throat and he saw his own gloved fists pound at the console in front of him, then move toward the release catches of his safety harness, fingers clawing.

Through all of this, he was aware of Root watching him with a distant, clinical coldness. Root made no move to help, no comment.

Tam threw a switch on her panel to take over Nikki's controls.
The floater first!
In the same motion, she kicked the safety interlock which secured Nikki in his seat. Nikki thrashed and twisted there like a tortured animal, screaming and crying.

Why wasn't Root doing something to help?

But Root had turned his attention to the forward bubble and its view of the colorful bloom.

“Tam, please observe,” he said.

She turned her attention to the view and saw thousands of whirling bags as one boiling mass of visible scream. Color flamed in them. The external sensors relayed a diminishing babble. Only a scattered few of the bags had escaped the destructive dance and she knew from experience that those few would assemble and guide themselves toward the colony with violent intent.

The wind was picking up, tearing at the whirling mass below them. The babble of screams faded and most of the bags emptied, scattering like torn fabric across the surface of the sea. Only the few survivors moved inland.

Nikki had subsided into moaning unconsciousness.

“How very interesting,” Root said. “We were correct in asking for this young man.”

“His hands are bleeding. Shouldn't we do something?” Tam asked.

“Yes. We should save ourselves by returning to the colony. The young man will be all right until we deliver him to the medics.”

“Why is it you're always right?” Tam demanded.

“Careful, Tam. It's my function to be right. And that's why we're alive while the others are dead.”

“I still wish we could warn our people.” She nodded toward the surviving globes which were now beyond the cliff tops headed toward the distant colony.