Earth and Air (24 page)

“It was a lousy hypochondriac.” said Doc. “I've got better things to do.”

“Coming, coming,” shrilled the Bandicoot.

“Hippo, get away from that strut,” said David. “Find a tree or something.”

“Trees on this planet are so feeble,” said Hippo. “I've used up all that lot.”

Through the remains of dusk David could see that the grove of primitive palms by which they had set up camp had considerably altered in outline. He remembered hearing a certain amount of splintering and crashing as he was walking back to camp.

“You'd better get Doc to have a look at you,” he said. “Doc, poor Hippo's got an itchy back.”

“Never get through that ugly thick hide,” mumbled Doc “Got better things to do.”

“I know it's nonsense, but I can't help thinking I'm pregnant,” said Hippo.

“Get yourself an obstet . . . an obstet . . .” said Doc as he withdrew all but the limb of his pseudopod beneath the surface.

“Doc!” said David. “You aren't eating Cat!”

“Oh, no!” said Hippo, with all the revulsion, normally suppressed in her case, of herbivores for meat eaters.

“Doc!” shouted David.

The hooter came an inch out of the water.

“Lot of good stuff in there,” said Doc, slurring the syllables until he was barely comprehensible. “No point wasting it. All these months, living on chemical soup.”

“What about the Hippocratic oath!” said David.

“Coming, coming!” shrieked the Bandicoot, rising and jigging like a sandhopper on its spindly legs. Its cry was answered by another from the sky, and a moment later, with the usual blur and buzz of wings, Bird settled at the edge of the ring of darkness. The second Bandicoot dropped from her back and jigged across to join the first.

“Bandy said to skim home,” said Bird in the metallic voice produced by moving one wing-case to make a flow of air and then modifying the flow with the sensitive leading edge of the wing itself.

“What's up, Man?” she added. “The Bandy told you about the wreck?”

“No. And I didn't say anything about bringing you home. The last my Bandy told me was about a seam of Sperrylite you thought you'd spotted. What kind of wreck? How old?”

Bird raised a wing-case and let it fall back, producing a sharp explosion like a mining blast. This was her form of swearing.

“I'll chop him up and feed him to my husband,” she rasped.

She had met her “husband” in the larval stage, when they were both about three inches long, and after a brief, blind courtship had incorporated him in her body, where he now lay, like an extra gland, somewhere near the back of her four-foot thorax. Doc had once paid him a visit, out of curiosity, and said that there was still an intelligence there, of a sort, but that it spent all its time dreaming. He guessed that the dreams were nonrepresentational, but had never been able to interest Skunk or the Bandicoots in finding out. Bird was not merely a flying scout. She had evolved from a migratory species whose guidance system depended on their ability to sense the magnetic field of their planet with great accuracy; so now she was able, skimming on her gauzy wings above the surface of a strange planet, to map the irregularities where different metallic ores showed up. And in deep space she was like an old sailor with a weather eye, able to sense long before it registered on the instruments the coming of one of the particle-storms that could rush like a cyclone out of the apparently blank spaces between the stars.

“Yup, space wreck,” she said. “More than a month old, less than a year. Real mess. Didn't go in, but my Bandy said he couldn't feel anybody thinking down there. I was just going to skim in close when he told me to hurry home. I was coming, anyway, but what made him do that?”

“Nothing, except Cat's dead.”

“Somebody killed him,” said Hippo.

“With a blunt instrument,” said David.

Bird made a contemptuous rustle with her wing-cases, and before the sound had ended Mole came snouting out of the earth beyond the fire, shaking soil from his pelt like a dog shaking off water. As the flurry of pellets pattered down, the third Bandicoot scrambled out of the capsule which Mole trailed behind him on his subterranean journeys and skittered off to join the other two. Now all three were hopping like hailstones on paving, and shrilling at each other in and out of the limits of David's hearing range.

“What's up?” growled Mole.

“Cat's dead and I'm pregnant,” said Hippo.

“I don't know why I bother,” said Mole. “Soon as this trip's over I'm paying off and going home.”

He would have trouble finding it, thought David. Home for Mole was somewhere in the Ophiucus area, a planet—or rather an ex-planet—which had become detached from its sun and all of whose life-forms had evolved in a belt between the surface permafrost and the central fires.

“Home?” said Bird. “Yup. Good thinking. Count me in on payday.”

She clicked and tocked in a thoughtful way. Doc put his hooter up, sighed “Ho-o-o-o-ome,” and plopped back under.

Home. Why not? Earth. Clothed, soft-skinned bipeds. David was a rich man, in theory, by now. He could afford to retire, buy four or five young wives and a mother-in-law, and a nice little island . . .

The Whizzers cut the reverie short by slithering into the camp, bringing the last of the Bandicoots. At once all thought and talk were impossible in the frenzy of jigging and shrilling, until Bird turned on the four of them and drove them, with a series of fierce explosions, round to the far side of the ship. Meanwhile Skunk crawled down from the Whizzer he had been riding. The Whizzers were legless reptiles from a planet of crushing gravity. They were about seven feet long and three feet wide, but less than a foot high, and on planets less massive than their own they could carry reasonable weights over almost any surface at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour. They flowed. David seldom got the chance to ride one, because his function was to stay at base and coordinate information with his own stored knowledge; but sometimes, when he needed to see something with his own eyes, a Whizzer had taken him and he had found the ride as much fun as surf boarding. Despite being hermaphrodites, Whizzers paired for life. They were deeply religious.

Skunk was also a hermaphrodite and legless, but otherwise nothing like a Whizzer—slow, sightless, a nude blob, corrugated with scent glands. He could synthesize and aim a jet of any odour he wished. He could stun even Hippo with a stink, provided her nostril was unsealed. On the anniversary of David's first joining the crew Skunk had presented him with a smell which was all the pleasures of his life, remembered and forgotten, linked into ten minutes of ecstasy. Skunk knew what odours to produce because he was a telepath, not in the style of the Bandicoots, but able to sense the minutest variations of emotion: thus he could attract or repel, numb or excite, at will. David had seen him organize the slaves of a fully functioning mine in Altair to load the ship with jade while their trance-held guards watched impotent. That had been a rich trip, if risky. Pity they'd had to trade the loot for fuel at a way station . . . Skunk had almost total power except over creatures such as Cats, which had no sense of smell. He could be any colour he chose. He could feel danger long before David could analyse it. Surface-scouting on a new planet was always done by a team of two Whizzers, one Bandicoot, and Skunk.

“The Bandicoot said we were to return,” hissed one of the Whizzers. “What new providence has the Lord effected?”

“I don't know,” said David. “I think that the Bandicoots just wanted to get together.”

“Listen to them,” said Mole.

“Disgusting,” said the Whizzers.

“A very untidy relationship,” said Bird, smugly.

“Dear little things,” said Hippo.

“Hippo, get away from that strut,” said David.

“Sorry,” said Hippo. “You
know, I really am pregnant.”

“You and who else?” said Bird. “You aren't the only female in these parts, remember. There's me, too, and several halves and quarters.”

“But it's important,” said Hippo.

“It's hysterical,” snapped Bird. “Get Doc to check. He'll tell you.”

“Doc's drunk,” said David. “He's found some substance in Cat's body . . . But if Hippo does give birth it means she'll produce a cloud of seeds which float about until they stick to a living body—then they burrow in and eat it out from the inside.”

“Charming,” said Bird. “What happens if they land on another Hippo?”

“Why do you think they've evolved that hide, and the ability to seal off?” said David.

“Well, we'll just have to copy her,” said Bird. “Get inside the ship, seal off, and wait till the happy event is over.”

“But you can't do that,” said Hippo. “What about my babies? What will they eat?”

“Oh, they'll find something,” said Bird.

“But was it not revealed to Brother/Sister Skunk that the Lord has not yet seen fit to bring forth warm-blooded creatures upon this planet?” said one Whizzer.

“Infinite is His mercy. Strange are His ways,” said the other.

David started trying to work out whether Hippo could bust her way into the ship. His analysis wouldn't cohere. He didn't know how much extra strength to allow for the desperation of maternal feelings, and all the other constants seemed to be slithering around. Then, in the middle of this mess, a wholly irrelevant point struck him. He ought to have seen it before.

“That means one of us killed Cat,” he said.

There was a sudden silence, apart from the climax of shrilling beyond the ship. Strange are His ways, thought David.

“Yes. Man,” said Skunk in his laboriously produced groan. “Something. Odd . . . Cat. Dead . . . Must. Know. How . . . Why?”

“Sorry, I can't help,” said David. “I don't know.”

“Come off it,” snapped Bird. “You've got to know. That's what you're there for, to classify and analyse information. That's why we bother to cart you around with us—it's your function.”

“I'm afraid I'm not functioning very well today,” said David.

“Feeling all right?” hooted Doc. “Like me to have a squint inside you?”

“Not on your life,” said David. “I'm fine. Only . . .”

“Only you're not kissing well going to bother,” said Bird.

“Sister Bird,” hissed the Whizzers. “You must modify your language or we desert.”

There was a moment of shock. Nobody ever deserted. Nobody ever joked about it. By the same token Bird always remembered not to swear in front of the Whizzers.

“Yet the Lord has revealed to Brother/Sister Skunk that the duty has fallen on us to discover how and why Brother Cat was called to his Maker,” said one Whizzer.

“Blessed is His name,” said the other.

“
All
right,” said Mole, “let's go along with that. We can all analyse a bit, I suppose. We don't have Men around at home, do we? Doc, sober up and pay attention. Bird, go and see if the Bandies have finished whatever it is they do . . .”

David withdrew into himself. He was not Man, he was David. He felt enormous reluctance to take part in analytic processes. It didn't matter who had killed Cat, or why, and the others were only discussing it because Skunk said it was important—they were accepting Skunk's dictum out of habit, because they were used to the idea of Skunk being right about that sort of thing, just as they were used to the idea of Bird being right about the threat of a particle-storm. Those were part of their functions but it didn't mean that Skunk was in command—no one was, or they all were. They collected information through their nine senses, relayed it if necessary through the Bandicoots, and David collated it with what he knew and interpreted the resulting probabilities. Then, always till now, it had become clear what they should do next, and there had been no point on taking a vote, or even discussing the issue. They were a crew, a unit like a beehive or a termite nest. They had lost their previous Hippo because they'd landed on a quaking planet and the only way to take off from its jellylike surface was for that Hippo (a young one, male, mauve) to hold the ship upright from the outside while they blasted clear. At the time it had seemed sad, but not strange, to leave poor Hippo roasted there, and Hippo seemed to think so too. The Whizzers had sung a hymn as they'd blasted off, he remembered. But now . . .

Now he sat in the ring of creatures round the campfire and felt no oneness with them. They were aliens. They squeaked and boomed and lowed and rasped in words he could scarcely understand, though they were all speaking standard English. The fire reflected itself from the facets of Bird's eyes: her mandibles clashed like punctuation marks in the flapping talk from her wing-cases. Doc had withdrawn his pseudopod from Cat's drained body and the surface of his water was frothy with the by-products of his feast. The Bandicoots had joined the circle and were engrossed in the talk, all four heads perking this way and that as if joined by a crank-rod. The Whizzers lay half folded together, like a pair of clasped hands. Mole had absentmindedly dug himself down and was listening with his elbows at ground level and his snout resting on his little pink palms with their iron-coloured claws Skunk, too, had forgotten himself enough to be producing vague whiffs and stinks, as if trying to supplement the difficult business of speech with the communication system he used among his own kind.