Authors: Craig Strete
It took a long
time for the bucket to empty and it gave him time to think. His thoughts turned to the time when
he had come here. Five years ago he had been a different person and this world had been all new
to him. The call for volunteers, for pioneers, had come and Gantry had been the restless type,
filled with a burning itch for something different. He'd been one of the first to sign up, one of
the first colonists to settle on Kingane planet, and for five years he had had no
regrets.
He was twenty-four
when he landed, impatient of the stay-at-home life he had left on earth. He had come here hoping
to rid himself forever of the settled ways of his own kind.
But in the end of
his fifth year, as he tended his herd of stefel dogs under the twin moons, a dissatisfaction and
a longing began in him that made his steps slow and uncertain. There was no longer any pleasure
in the long stretches of Kingane summers, summers that brought the darbyo birds across the sky,
circling in complicated patterns above. Beautiful creatures they were, fire red and snow white,
silent like flights of dreams, wheeling like specters across the twilight skies.
But now the coming
of the winter and the pebble storms oppressed him. The weather was always mild in the dead of
winter and though the storms, really meteor-fragment showers, were short, it was necessary to
stay inside for the two months of winter. He had faced four winters without incident, exercising
daily, planning the new buildings, the stefel dog barn he knew he would someday build. But now
this spring, winter yet five months away, he was already looking toward the next winter with a
feeling of being trapped within himself.
He made good
money, more than was quite decent, he sometimes thought. And with that money, he'd filled his
empty cabin with things, amusements, books, that occupied him for a little while. Stefel dogs,
carefully tended until they reached four and one half months old, and then poisoned with
potassium cynanide, produced a very fine crop of nerve tissue—nerve tissue unlike human tissue
in that it could regenerate. It had become the most important discovery of the five new worlds.
It made him a rich man and kept the idle rich on earth very, very young. A rich man would pay
plenty for a stefel-tissue transplant. The stefel tissue replaced nerve tissue, replicating the
exact genetic structure and information encoded on the decaying nerve tissue it replaced. A small
transplant of stefel tissue eventually replaced the entire cellular structure of a man's brain,
becoming an effectual replacement immune to the ravages of time and able to regenerate itself
constantly.
It was the
discovery of the stefel dogs that had given man the promise of immortality. Before stefel
transplants, the ability to synthesize organs had increased the life span of man to two hundred
years. They had synthetic hearts, synthetic lungs, livers, all the organs, even veins, arteries
and skin. All these things had been possible because they could implant grafts taken from each of
these organs and grow them in nutrient plastic, shaping them into new organs tougher than the old
ones. But the one thing beyond man's capabilities was the ability to regenerate brain and nerve
tissue. They could slow down the aging process but they could not stop it entirely, not until
Kingane planet opened itself to colonists and the hardy settlers discovered the stefel
dogs.
The tube had
filled with the honey mixture and the second color change began. Gantry watched them carefully.
It was important that they not separate until he was sure they had each absorbed enough of the
poison. His first year there, they had separated too quickly and the pools of nerve tissue that
the stefel dogs degenerated into at death had been contaminated with unconverted brain tissue, an
unpleasant experience and a very costly one. The unoxidized brain tissue began forming into
crippled stefel dogs, crying pit-eously through their half-formed air sacs, fouling the nerve
tissue with tiny synaptic runners expanded through the pools of oxidized material.
One of the
tendrils near the rim of the feeding tube began fluttering, beginning to uncoil. Just narrowly
missing the waving rows of poisonous spines that clattered up at him, Gantry ran his hand around
the rim of the tube. His quick movement enticed the creatures into thinking that more food was
coming down the tube. The tendril curled back into position as his hand made a complete circuit
of the tube rim. Gantry moved his hand away, satisfied that the tendrils would stay in place long
enough to allow enough poison through to complete the process.
He turned away
from the creatures, absorbed in his thoughts, and walked back into the feeding shed. The sound of
the generators kicking on caused a ripple in the brain-pouch fabrics of the stefel dogs. The
vibration of the pump engines that kicked on as soon as the generators had reached a sufficient
level to run them caused boil-like corrugations across the flat surfaces of the creatures'
hairless bodies. The eyestalks began receding, settling into the folds of flesh above the exposed
air sacs that flowed freely across the surface of the squat, now blue-gray creatures.
Gantry emerged
from the building dragging a flexible length of tubing obviously connected to the machines
within the interior of the feeding shed. There was a nozzle attached to the end of the hose, and
a thin metal tube with a rubberoid bulb attached dangled from a point about five inches away
from the end of the tubing.
Gantry climbed
over the low corral bars and moved toward the low end of the corral. The floor of the corral was
made of hard-formed plastic, tilted at an angle, divided by a shallow trench around the outside
of the enclosure that also bisected the middle of the corral. Mindful of the swinging poison
spines reaching out toward him, Gantry inserted the hose in a groove fitted to the side of the
center pool. The end of the tubing dangled into the center of the trench. He squeezed the bulb
several times to force air out of the line.
Already the tube
of the dogs was beginning to fold in on itself. The air sacs began sinking into the skin as the
structures that held them in place began dissolving. The blood-red color of the last change
suffused through the dying creatures like a dying sunset. There was a hissing, melting sound and
Gantry sensed a harsh, unpleasant chemical tang to the air.
It was this part
of the process that had always disturbed him. It was the alienness of the creatures that
bothered him. Their silence, their lack of struggle. A kind of alien intelligence that seemed in
no way affected by external circumstance, yet was sensitive to things like fear, loneliness and
restlessness, but contained no seeming awareness of its own destruction. At times Gantry was
convinced that the creatures were humoring him, as if they were somehow above mortal
considerations. Once when he had taken ill, he'd found them clustered sympathetically around the
front entrance of his cabin, their poison spines folded inward inoffensively. Of course it was
only his impression of them, but they seemed to radiate emotions, to be sensitive to things
around them. How they had crawled out of their pen without the legs that were removed surgically
at birth, he never knew. He was positive he had sensed their concern, intuited it from the waving
motions of the spinal tendrils. It had been an unnerving experience, one that had remained with
him.
For a long time
after that, he had had dreams about the creatures, about them surprising him one night as he
slept—falling upon him, wrapping his face up in their tendrils, covering his body in the dark
with the slick, ropy nerve endings, tightening, suffocating him with their combined weight,
choking him with their thick, yellow bodily excretions, flaying his body with their razor-sharp
poison spines.
The first stream
of oxidized nerve tissue began trickling down the narrow trench in the floor of the enclosure.
It was like a semi-thick soup, discolored, running slowly. Gantry released the handle on the
nozzle and the hose began sucking in air. Satisfied that his work was finished, he left the
corral and went to the big storage tanks behind the corral. The tanks were partially filled with
liquid nitrogen, a perfect refrigerant for the nerve tissue that would soon be flowing into the
tanks. He checked the gauges in the tanks. They were satisfactory.
The screaming
began and Gantry knew it was time to leave. The screaming was not really unpleasant. It was
rather melodious, a sort of birdlike trill as the air sacs began disintegrating, but still he
knew it for what it was—the death rattle of the creatures—and he was in no mood to listen to
that. He moved away from the cabin, heading down the hill toward the sulfur water
spring.
A family of Riyall
were there before him. The Riyall were the native race of Kingane, strange, aloof peoples,
divided into many different tribes. There were very few of them left. Diseases, unknown to
Kingane before the coming of Earth people, had taken whole groups of them. And then there had
been fighting when many of the more highly civilized of the wild Riyalls had put up a fight
against the encroachments on their land. The first year Gantry had set down on Kingane he'd
signed up in the militia, had engaged in several skirmishes with the revolting Riyall bands and
had personally killed several of them. He neither liked nor disliked them. They were humanoid,
so genetically close to humans that it only required minor genetic surgery to make intermarriage
possible. A thing that some of the settlers had been doing, as the loneliness of a world without
women of their own kind weighed heavily upon them. It was not until his third year that the
danger was really over. The last of the big Riyall bands had been exterminated then, leaving him
free to spend all his time raising stefel dogs and building a small empire on the new world. Even
now, there were occasional incidents, cases where travelers had been found dead, horribly
disfigured by the Riyalls.
It was therefore
with some caution that he advanced toward the spring. He had left the house without his hand
weapons. He had long since stopped wearing a gun, the years of peace seemingly canceling the need
for it.
They were aware of
his coming, had been a minute before he was aware that they were even there. It was a big family
group, one of the largest he'd seen in the last year or so. There were about thirty adults, a
dozen or so young children and a good-sized group of teen-aged youngsters. The group moved away
from the water hole as he approached, falling silently back as he reached the spring.
Gantry raised his
hand and drew one finger across his bared teeth. It was the sign that meant he came in peace. He
moved down by the spring. They stared at him silently, expressionlessly, as he cupped his hands
in the water and drank his fill from the sulfurous water.
Suddenly, as if
they had all reached the same decision, they moved back toward the water, careful to maintain a
guarded distance between themselves and Gantry. Gantry sat back on his heels and watched them
drinking, filling their lizard-bladder containers with water of the spring. They were uninhibited
peoples, both sexes stripping their animal-hide clothes off to slide into the water of the
spring. Having decided to ignore him, the young ones were already playing and splashing in the
water.
Gantry watched
them, watched as even the old ones got caught up in a water-splashing fight. And he envied them.
They were simple people, always moving, rather childlike in their ways. The sight of a
gray-haired old woman, naked as the day of her birth, splashing like a five-year-old child,
filled him with a kind of vicarious pleasure and at the same time, a feeling that he was being
left out.
His eyes appraised
them. They were short, wiry people about 1.73 meters on the average. They had white skin running
to a very dark reddish yellow. There seemed to be a great deal of variety from one group to the
next. Some groups, like the one before him, had orange hair mixed with black, a strange
coloration he found not at all displeasing. Their faces were basically human with the exception
that facial expressions were not possible.- Their faces were flat-planed. They could neither
smile nor frown, lacking the facial muscles for either task. Neither could they close their
eyelids or dilate their eyes. Their eyes were the most disturbing feature. They had twin pupils,
only one of which functioned in the day, while both functioned in the dark. They had a way of
staring, enhanced by their lack of facial expressions and their lidless eyes, that was
unnerving.
They dressed
plainly, wearing cured animal hides, mostly those of the snowfur lizards that lived in the
mountain regions, although occasionally one would have a shirt made of darbyo skin, ornately
beaded with darbyo bones. Their only weakness seemed to be for shiny metal, which they pounded
into bracelets, items highly prized by the Riyall as having magic properties that would aid the
wearer.
Then too, they had
a fondness for alcohol, a fondness that led them to great misfortune since the Riyall did not
have the proper enzymes to ingest alcohol. A small shot of whiskey was enough to make the
strongest of their number drunk. For one of them to drink half a bottle would be fatal, a thing
that the early colonists soon discovered and used to great effect against the natives in the
early stages of the war.
Gantry's eyes were
attracted to a young girl standing beside the spring. She was beautiful even by earth standards.
Her skin was almost white, with a deeper hue of red-yellow. Her body was sleek, with almost a
golden quality in the Kingane sun. She shook her body luxuriously, unselfconsciously, casting off
a fine spray of water from the tawny orange-black mane of hair that hung well past her shoulders.
And as he looked at her, the source of his restlessness became clear to him.