The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (24 page)

Now that he knew she was alive and had been caught, probably while trying to get him out, he rose from the lethargy that had lately been making him doze the clock around. He asked Polyphema if
she would open the entrance so he could talk directly with the other captive. She said yes. Eager to listen in on a conversation between two mobiles, she was very cooperative. There would be a
mountain of gossip in what they would have to say. The only thing that dented her joy was that the other Mother would also have access.

Then, remembering she was still Number One and would broadcast the details first, she trembled so with pride and ecstasy that Eddie felt the floor shaking.

Iris open, he walked through it and looked across the valley. The hillsides were still green, red, and yellow, as the plants on Baudelaire did not lose their leaves during winter. But a few
white patches showed that winter had begun. Eddie shivered from the bite of cold air on his naked skin. Long ago he had taken off his clothes. The womb-warmth had made garments too uncomfortable;
moreover, Eddie, being human, had had to get rid of waste products. And Polyphema, being a Mother, had had periodically to flush out the dirt with warm water from one of her stomachs. Every time
the tracheae-vents exploded streams that swept the undesirahie elements out through her door-iris, Eddie had become soaked. When he abandoned dress, his clothes had gone floating out. Only by
sitting on his pack did he keep it from a like fate.

Afterward, he and the Sluggos had been dried off by warm air pumped through the same vents and originating from the mighty battery of lungs. Eddie was comfortable enough – he’d
always liked showers – but the loss of his garments had been one more thing that kept him from escaping. He would soon freeze to death outside unless he found the yacht quickly. And he
wasn’t sure he remembered the path back.

So now, when he stepped outside, he retreated a pace or two and let the warm air from Polyphema flow like a cloak from his shoulders.

Then he peered across the half-mile that separated him from his mother, but he could not see her. The twilight state and the dark of the unlit interior of her captor hid her.

He tapped in Morse, “Switch to the talkie, same frequency.” Paula Fetts did so. She began asking him frantically if he were all right.

He replied he was fine.

“Have you missed me terribly, Son?”

“Oh, very much.”

Even as he said this he wondered vaguely why his voice sounded so hollow. Despair at never again being able to see her, probably.

“I’ve almost gone crazy, Eddie. When you were caught I ran away as fast as I could. I had no idea what horrible monster it was that was attacking us. And then, halfway down the hill,
I fell and broke my leg . . .”

“Oh, no, Mother!”

“Yes. But I managed to crawl back to the ship. And there, after I’d set it myself, I gave myself B.K. shots. Only, my system didn’t react like it’s supposed to. There are
people that way, you know, and the healing took twice as long.

“But when I was able to walk, I got a gun and a box of dynamite. I was going to blow up what I thought was a kind of rock-fortress, an outpost for some kind of extee. I’d no idea of
the true nature of these beasts. First, though, I decided to reconnoiter. I was going to spy on the boulder from across the valley. But I was trapped by this thing.

“Listen, Son. Before I’m cut off, let me tell you not to give up hope. I’ll be out of here before long and over to rescue you.”

“How?”

“If you remember, my lab kit holds a number of carcinogens for field work. Well, you know that sometimes a Mother’s conception-spot when it is torn up during mating, instead of
begetting young, goes into cancer – the opposite of pregnancy. I’ve injected a carcinogen into the spot and a beautiful carcinoma has developed. She’ll be dead in a few
days.”

“Mom! You’ll be buried in that rotting mass!”

“No. This creature has told me that when one of her species dies, a reflex opens the labia. That’s to permit their young – if any – to escape. Listen, I’ll –
”

A tentacle coiled about him and pulled him back through the iris, which shut.

When he switched back to C.W., he heard, “Why didn’t you communicate? What were you doing? Tell me! Tell me!”

Eddie told her. There was a silence that could only be interpreted as astonishment. After Mother had recovered her wits, she said, “From now on, you will talk to the other male through
me.”

Obviously, she envied and hated his ability to change wave-bands and, perhaps, had a struggle to accept the idea.

“Please,” he persisted, not knowing how dangerous were the waters he was wading in, “please let me talk to my mother di – ”

For the first time, he heard her stutter.

“Wha-wha-what? Your Mo-Mo-Mother?”

“Yes. Of course.”

The floor heaved violently beneath his feet. He cried out and braced himself to keep from falling and then flashed on the light. The walls were pulsating like shaken jelly, and the vascular
columns had turned from red and blue to gray. The entrance-iris sagged open, like a lax mouth, and the air cooled. He could feel the drop in temperature in her flesh with the soles of his feet.

It was some time before he caught on.

Polyphema was in a state of shock.

What might have happened had she stayed in it, he never knew. She might have died and thus forced him out into the winter before his mother could escape. If so, and he couldn’t find the
ship, he would die. Huddled in the warmest corner of the egg-shaped chamber, Eddie contemplated that idea and shivered to a degree for which the outside air couldn’t account.

However, Polyphema had her own method of recovery. It consisted of spewing out the contents of her stew-stomach, which had doubtless become filled with poisons draining out of
her system from the blow. Her ejection of the stuff was the physical manifestation of the psychical catharsis. So furious was the flood that her foster son was almost swept out in the hot tide, but
she, reacting instinctively, had coiled tentacles about him and the Sluggos. Then she followed the first upchucking by emptying her other three water-pouches, the second hot and the third lukewarm
and the fourth, just filled, cold.

Eddie yelped as the icy water doused him.

Polyphema’s irises closed again. The floor and walls gradually quit quaking; the temperature rose; and her veins and arteries regained their red and blue. She was well again. Or so she
seemed.

But when, after waiting twenty-four hours, he cautiously approached the subject, he found she not only would not talk about it, she refused to acknowledge the existence of the other mobile.

Eddie, giving up hope of conversation, thought for quite a while. The only conclusion he could come to, and he was sure he’d grasped enough of her psychology to make it valid, was that the
concept of a mobile female was utterly unacceptable.

Her world was split into two: mobile and her kind, the immobile. Mobile meant food and mating. Mobile meant – male. The Mothers were – female.

How the mobiles reproduced had probably never entered the hillcrouchers’ minds. Their science and philosophy were on the instinctive body-level. Whether they had some notion of spontaneous
generation or amoeba-like fission being responsible for the continued population of mobiles, or they’d just taken for granted they “growed,” like Topsy, Eddie never found out. To
them, they were female and the rest of the protoplasmic cosmos was male.

That was that. Any other idea was more than foul and obscene and blasphemous. It was – unthinkable.

Polyphema had received a deep trauma from his words. And though she seemed to have recovered, somewhere in those tons of unimaginably complicated flesh a bruise was buried. Like a hidden flower,
dark purple, it bloomed, and the shadow it cast was one that cut off a certain memory, a certain tract, from the light of consciousness. That bruise-stained shadow covered that time and event which
the Mother, for reasons unfathomable to the human being, found necessary to mark
KEEP OFF
.

Thus, though Eddie did not word it, he understood in the cells of his body, he felt and knew, as if his bones were prophesying and his brain did not hear, what came to pass.

Sixty-six hours later by the panrad clock, Polyphema’s entrance-lips opened. Her tentacles darted out. They came back in, carrying his helpless and struggling mother.

Eddie, roused out of a doze, horrified, paralyzed, saw her toss her lab kit at him and heard an inarticulate cry from her. And saw her plunged, headforemost, into the stomach-iris.

Polyphema had taken the one sure way of burying the evidence.

Eddie lay face down, nose mashed against the warm and faintly throbbing flesh of the floor. Now and then his hands clutched spasmodically as if he were reaching for something
that someone kept putting just within his reach and then moving away.

How long he was there he didn’t know, for he never again looked at the clock.

Finally, in the darkness, he sat up and giggled inanely, “Mother always did make good stew.”

That set him off. He leaned back on his hands and threw his head back and howled like a wolf under a full moon.

Polyphema, of course, was dead-deaf, but she could radar his posture, and her keen nostrils deduced from his body-scent that he was in terrible fear and anguish.

A tentacle glided out and gently enfolded him.

“What is the matter?” zzted the panrad.

He stuck his finger in the keyhole.

“I have lost my mother!”

“?”.

“She’s gone away, and she’ll never come back.”

“I don’t understand.
Here I am
.”

Eddie quit weeping and cocked his head as if he were listening to some inner voice. He snuffled a few times and wiped away the tears, slowly disengaged the tentacle, patted it, walked over to
his pack in a corner, and took out the bottle of Old Red Star capsules. One he popped into the Thermos; the other he gave to her with the request she duplicate it, if possible. Then he stretched
out on his side, propped on one elbow like a Roman in his sensualities, sucked the rye through the nipple, and listened to a medley of Beethoven, Mussorgsky, Verdi, Strauss, Porter, Feinstein, and
Waxworth.

So the time – if there were such a thing there – flowed around Eddie. When he was tired of music or plays or books, he listened in on the area hookup. Hungry, he rose and walked
– or often just crawled – to the stew-iris. Cans of rations lay in his pack; he had planned to eat those until he was sure that – what was it he was forbidden to eat? Poison?
Something had been devoured by Polyphema and the Sluggos. But sometime during the music-rye orgy, he had forgotten. He now ate quite hungrily and with thought for nothing but the satisfaction of
his wants.

Sometimes the door-iris opened, and Billy Greengrocer hopped in. Billy looked like a cross between a cricket and a kangaroo. He was the size of a collie, and he bore in a marsupialian pouch
vegetables and fruit and nuts. These he extracted with shiny green, chitinous claws and gave to Mother in return for meals of stew. Happy symbiote, he chirruped merrily while his many-faceted eyes,
revolving independently of each other, looked one at the Sluggos and the other at Eddie.

Eddie, on impulse, abandoned the 1000 kc band and roved the frequencies until he found that both Polyphema and Billy were emitting a 108 wave. That, apparently, was their natural signal. When
Billy had his groceries to deliver, he broadcast. Polyphema, in turn, when she needed them, sent back to him. There was nothing intelligent on Billy’s part; it was just his instinct to
transmit. And the Mother was, aside from the “semantic” frequency, limited to that one band. But it worked out fine.

Everything was fine. What more could a man want? Free food, unlimited liquor, soft bed, air-conditioning, shower-baths, music, intellectual works (on the tape), interesting
conversation (much of it was about him), privacy, and security.

If he had not already named her, he would have called her Mother Gratis.

Nor were creature comforts all. She had given him the answers to all his questions, all . . .

Except one.

That was never expressed vocally by him. Indeed, he would have been incapable of doing so. He was probably unaware that he had such a question.

But Polyphema voiced it one day when she asked him to do her a favor.

Eddie reacted as if outraged.

“One does not – ! One does not – !”

He choked, and then he thought, How ridiculous! She is not – and looked puzzled, and said, “But she is.”

He rose and opened the lab kit. While he was looking for a scalpel, he came across the carcinogens. He threw them through the half-opened labia far out and down the hillside.

Then he turned and, scalpel in hand, leaped at the light gray swelling on the wall. And stopped, staring at it, while the instrument fell from his hand. And picked it up and stabbed feebly and
did not even scratch the skin. And again let it drop.

“What is it? What is it?” crackled the panrad hanging from his wrist.

Suddenly, a heavy cloud of human odor – mansweat – was puffed in his face from a nearby vent.

“????”

And he stood, bent in a half-crouch, seemingly paralyzed. Until tentacles seized him in fury and dragged him toward the stomach-iris, yawning man-sized.

Eddie screamed and writhed and plunged his finger in the panrad and tapped, “All right! All right!”

And once back before the spot, he lunged with a sudden and wild joy; he slashed savagely; he yelled. “Take that! And that, P . . .” and the rest was lost in a mindless shout.

He did not stop cutting, and he might have gone on and on until he had quite excised the spot had not Polyphema interfered by dragging him toward her stomach-iris again. For ten seconds he hung
there, helpless and sobbing with a mixture of fear and glory.

Polyphema’s reflexes had almost overcome her brain. Fortunately, a cold spark of reason lit up a corner of the vast, dark, and hot chapel of her frenzy.