by Jerry
A path had been made across the mud with slabs of pressed-out apple flesh, like porous brown wood. The Boss went first, Billings following. As they walked across the narrow track, men looked up at them, then stepped uncomplainingly off until they had passed. Billings watched the men’s legs sinking to the knees in the brown bog but felt no sympathy for them. He had been used to such things when he was a miner. Now that he was more, it was his right to have privileges. He had worked for them.
The path’s end was well inside the cavity. It yawned like a vast and jagged pit above them. By the light of the oil lamps wedged into the walls, Billings could see the galleried mine rising three hundred feet above him, its face dotted with men. Their echoing voices peopled the dark air with ghostly curses and prayers, underscored and occasionally blotted out altogether by the trickling splash of juice from the cuts they made. An endless drizzle of the sticky sweet liquid fell to the floor of the mine, making their leather clothing glossy and stiff. Drops of the juice trickled off their aprons and fell into the swamp that surrounded them. The air was thick with the smell of decay.
Billings dropped his tool case, unlaced the opening and took out the contents item by item, laying them out in a neat row on the ground. His two blades, something like the billhooks used by the miners, were differently weighted so that the flat, almost square blade at the end of the four-foot handle could bite deeper and stay in longer, its curved talon hanging on to flesh and carapace even when its wielder was unable to strike again. After this there were leather gauntlets and greaves, barbed pitons, a fat coil of rope and spiked boots. It had been some months since Billings had used the boots and greaves, but they had stayed supple inside the bag. He pulled them on, laced them carefully and picked up the rest of the equipment.
“The entrance is up top,” the Boss said.
Billings looked up. There was less activity in the darkness, and he knew why. Word had spread that he was a Killer. He could feel them watching him, hoping—as he had hoped when he was a miner—to see some slip, a fault in his skill. He visualized how it must look to the men hanging in their harness up against the top faces in the dark, their bodies tacky with juice, hands welded to their knives by a congealing glaze of the stuff. In their eyes, used to darkness and yellow light, he would seem a dim and distorted figure, hardly more than an upturned face against the brown of the muddy floor.
He moved quickly and without warning the Boss, so that the man jumped visibly when Billings took his knife from his quiver and, with one neat wrist movement, sliced a horizontal gash in the main face. The flesh was brown, rotten, almost dried out, but another cut showed white. He cut again, severing the overhang so that the firm foothold was exposed from above and shelved beneath by the larger mass of rotted flesh. His right leg came up and the foot wedged deep into the notch while his arm swung again higher up, cutting a further foothold. His gauntleted left hand grabbing at the rough and crumbling surface of the main face, steadying his body for the movements of his blade.
The climb was dangerous, depending on a continued ascent for safety. His hand would steady him for only a few seconds before the rotten flesh collapsed under his touch, and the cleated soles of his boots would hold in a cut for only a moment before sliding out. There was no time for him to see where he was going nor concern himself with the face above him. He had estimated where the ledge was that he must arrive at, and also the best route to approach it. Now he had to depend on his inborn skill. Spidering upwards, his hands grasped, his blade swung, his feet bit and pistoned him up the cliff. His mind was blank—until, after a long moment of doubt, his blade cut air, his fingers grabbed a firm new-sliced edge, and he hauled himself up on to the main upper terrace. As he stood panting on the edge, he heard the miners around and above him muttering, sensed their admiration and was content.
The Boss took another minute to reach the terrace along the roped gallery that zigzagged up the main face. Billings waited without comment, cleaning his blade and scraping the accumulated pulp from between the spikes of his boots. When the Boss arrived he recognized resentment in the man’s stiff face but said nothing.
“Further up,” the Boss said shortly.
They moved along the terrace until it petered out in a dark hollow so small that they had to stoop. A miner brought down a lamp and the Boss took it, holding the light up. In the glow Billings saw the beginning of a tunnel, the ragged edges of transparent, slightly green material that lined it, and smelled the dry and musty scent he had expected.
“It’s an old one,” he said. “Three days maybe.”
He pulled at the tattered edge of the tunnel lining and shredded a piece of it in his fingers.
“Maybe four. It’s dried out a lot.”
“How far in will . . .?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
The Boss held the lamp further towards the tunnel, letting fingers of light probe the darkness. There was nothing to be seen but the smooth-sided circular hole plunging into the heart.
“How long will it take?”
Billings hefted his knives on to his back and took the lamp.
“As long as it takes,” he said shortly and walked down into the darkness.
The Boss looked after him for a moment, then turned to stare at the silent miners hanging in their harness across the face of the crater. Their burning eyes were brighter than the lamps by which they worked. He moved quickly down the gallery without saying anything.
Inside the tunnel it was warm and dark. Billings trimmed the lamp and moved slowly forward, listening. Air moved softly around him, light glinted on the walls.
He remembered his father who had died in a tunnel very like this.
The town where he was born was an apple town. The fruit was an ancient wrinkled mountain still anchored to the earth by a thin bough tufted with leaves, though the bough was long since empty of sap and the leaves were parasols that rustled like sails in the stirring winds of autumn. But the flesh inside was still firm and men were not afraid to cut long galleries through the desiccated exterior where the flesh was juiceless (cells like dust-filled rooms repeated in endless transparency) to reach the sweet white heart.
They had found his father in one of those galleries, a long excavation that intersected the tunnel of a Moth. The body was wadded up into the gallery’s end, a boneless mass of flesh frosted with the drying web-stuff of the insect’s cocoon. . . .
Billings blinked back the image and drew a deep breath. The tunnel was empty around him, and for a few dozen yards in each direction he could see it stretching emptily into the shadows. Lifting the lamp he looked at the walls and saw his face reflected back from the depths of the transparent lining, a long gaunt impassive face that might have been his or his father’s, or that of a ghost haunting the vast mountain of the apple, the spirit of a man lost in the empty halls of the centre, as Billings was lost—as they were all lost.
The deeper he penetrated the less he was afraid. The worst fear was of failing, but when there were no other men around him this fear disappeared. It belonged to ordinary people. The men who hunted Moths were different. They had an understanding with the universe, a heightened sensitivity to the world off which other men merely scavenged. The thick white messy bulk of the apple was a place with its own rules in which Billings was comfortable, at home. He recognized the risks, but they were risks of the apple and of nature, not of men. He faced death, but it was nature’s death, not man’s.
Thick and white the apple bulked around him. Billings could hear it in motion on all sides. Tides surged through its oceanic cells, membranes quivered with a motion as palpable as that of a heart. Above, below, on all sides, he sensed the white flesh sleeping in darkness, perfect, sweet, waiting. He moved in the apple like a god, feeling other gods, his father and his father’s father, waiting in the shadows for him, resting just beyond the green tunnel wall. Layers of civilization began to slough from him like shed skins and, half dreaming, he listened for the expected voice.
Hi
s foot slipped momentarily before the cleats caught again and he realized the tunnel was shelving slightly. At the same time his nose caught a different scent, an edge in the mustiness of the gallery, a suggestion of putrefaction. He unslung his knife. The tunnel was reaching its end, dipping down to intersect the vulnerable heart. His feet slipped more often and he had to cut steps in the floor to hold him from sliding forward. The lamp showed him no ending to the tunnel but an area ahead of him that he could not penetrate with light. Slicing fresh footholds every few feet he slithered forwards. The tunnel ended—and he looked down into a deep chamber whose walls, glossy and transparent, reflecting his own elongated image, tapered some twenty feet below him to a point in which the globular brown shape of a seed was wedged. He had reached the centre.
From now on the real business of his task began. Sitting on the lip of the tunnel, his legs dangling over the edge, he methodically checked his equipment. Then he looked down. The walls were mirror smooth and he could tell from their sheen that they remained slippery even though the seed chamber had been pierced. Wedging a piton into the tunnel wall he threaded his rope through its eye, tossed the rest of the roll out into space and climbed down.
There was no movement or sound, so he could assume his presence was still undiscovered. And when, behind the seed, he found the unguarded doorway to the inner chamber, he knew he could have surprise on his side. Pausing only for a glance back to make sure his rope remained fastened to the tunnel entrance, he dropped quickly into the main seed space.
Seeds hung like tightly cocooned beetles above him, their smooth backs turned out, their unseen claws clutching the central axis of the apple that gave Billings his only indication of the direction in which he was moving.
It lay ten degrees off the horizontal, making the main seed chamber slope slightly upwards. The floor was slippery and being forced to fight uphill was some disadvantage but he depended a great deal on surprise. If he could catch the Moth sleeping or perhaps somnolent, beginning a cocoon—it was their breeding time now and most of them were sleepy and slow—then his job would be easy. He moved forward, keeping the brown kernels on his right, watching the part of the chamber he could see under the rows of seeds for any movement. Each step made an infinitesimal but noticeable sound, a slight creak, as if he walked on transparent leather.
The chamber was quiet, as silent as if it were the centre of the earth. Billings reached the upper end of the space, unslung his knife, and half turned.
A face looked back at him from the chamber.
In the far wall a spot of opacity had appeared in the transparency. The skin was unbroken but a window had been cleared as a new tunnel reached the central core. It widened quickly. A low-held head butted the membrane, lifted to bite through it—and looked at him. He glimpsed for a terrible moment the waving furred antennae, the brow, eyes and mouth of a fearsome face; wide eyes, sharp cornered; high cheek bones; a wide and scarlet mouth. Female, young . . . a talon split the skin and from the tunnel, newborn, the magnificent insect erupted into the silent space.
Backed against the wall, Billings watched the Moth, waiting for its move. The insect was patient, perhaps tired. She stayed near the new tunnel, licking globules of juice from her fur, watching him, preening.
Her body was that of a young Moth, about the size of a human girl, though slimmer than most. Only in the smoothly swelling breasts was there a specific reference to humankind. The down that covered her body in a honey-coloured mist shadowed but did not hide the smooth play of muscle under the flexible skin of the legs and torso, but around the head and shoulders a quick shading off of the fur and the appearance of tight shell across the skull and neck betrayed her insect nature. On first glance there were few other signs, but then she stretched back her arms in a quick gesture and the magnificent beige wings expanded from between her arms and body, their patterns of brown and black scrawling like hieroglyphs across his vision.
Billings blinked. In that moment clawed feet gripped the chamber wall, wings twitched an instant, and she sprang.
A right-hand cut to stop her advance, then Billings scrambled for the seeds hanging like a garland of gunshot down the chamber’s centre. Air buffeted him as her wings gripped, but he was safe, sheltered from the slash of her claws for an instant, allowing him the luxury of a turn and new grip on his blade. Then she was under the seeds and rising to attack him.
Cut. The pointed tip caught a clawed forearm, bit, then slipped. The shrill twittering of her voice filled the air. Then her other arm lashed out and he felt a blaze of agony in his side.
Cut again, back down on the arm buried in him. Blood—green blood. Another lateral slice and wing membrane parted. Another. But she was still coming, her wings, delicate but not vital, taking the blows while her body remained shielded behind them.
Spinning down the chamber from her blow, Billings sensed the hollowness of the wall behind him. He looked down through the membrane into emptiness, a suggestion of mist but nothing else. A further chamber hollowed out beside the others, probably her living place.
Before he had raised his knife she was on his back but he swung down with one last desperate movement and felt the rotted chamber wall rip like paper. They fell down into a warm, steamy space that smelled rotten and corrupt. Billings twisted as he fell and sensed the disappearance of her weight from his back. Then he landed with a sickening suddenness on something soft and thick. He grabbed at it, slithered, hung on.
He was on a ledge of crumbling flesh high in her living chamber. Dimly he took in the rest of the place, the walls that descended in rotting terraces to the floor, the trickling juice that welled out of them in a dozen places, the flaccid sac of her discarded cocoon on which he had landed. From his ledge it fell twenty feet to the floor to lie among the stalagmites of brown flesh in valances of dusty green.
The escaping juice dribbled down to the bottom of the space where a pool of it almost covered a seed brought from one of the other chambers. The juice had partly fermented, and the place was hot, steamy, thick with the smell of decaying matter spiced by the tang of alcohol. Billings felt dizzy and sick. His side was beginning to hurt and he felt blood on his hands.
She lay by the pool, twenty feet below him, her wings sprawled across the juice-wet surface of the poolside, their delicate transparency glued to the smooth tacky surface. She was struggling to rise, her hands fluttering across the floor in front of her.
The room was misty and Billings was wounded. He made a mistake. Unslinging his second knife—the first was lost in the main chamber—he grabbed a handful of the soft cocoon and slid over the edge.
The moment he did so he sensed his error. The cocoon was rotten, eaten to shreds by the humid air. Under his weight it ripped like decayed cloth. He fell, tumbled, scrambled down, enveloped in its clinging folds. His grasping hands tore at the stuff, bringing down fresh curtains of it around him. Then he landed with an impact that emptied his lungs. His knife skidded across the floor.
Billings turned his head to look at the Moth, then bowed it like a sacrifice. Her body, no longer glued to the ground, surged up triumphantly, her magnificent face looked down at him, her talons raised in an embrace. He saw the descending claw, cried out, and was silent forever.
They never found his body as they had found that of his father but it was there for them to find if they had cared to look. Deep in the apple he lay cocooned in her web, his face looking out at her dried carapace. Long dead in the cold currents of autumn that, even deep in the core, she had felt and responded to, she left behind a final sign for him to ponder. Deep in his body the larvae lay that would one day rise to be another Moth, inhabit another apple, just as she had risen from a Moth Killer’s body herself, and others would rise after her.
Though dead, Billings sensed the last great possession of his life and was content. Staring into the silent chambers of his tomb, he waited for resurrection.
THE LAST COMMAND
Keith Laumer
To make a mac
hine intelligent, you must give it the power to judge information—and that is the power to be unreliable!
I come to awareness, sensing a residual oscillation traversing me from an arbitrarily designated heading of 035. From the damping rate I compute that the shock was of intensity 8.7, emanating from a source within the limits 72 meters/46 meters. I activate my primary screens, trigger a return salvo. There is no response. I engage reserve energy cells, bring my secondary battery to bear—futilely. It is apparent that I have been ranged by the Enemy and severely damaged.
My positional sensors indicate that I am resting at an angle of 13 degrees 14 seconds, deflected from a baseline at 21 points from median. I attempt to right myself, but encounter massive resistance. I activate my forward scanners, shunt power to my I-R microstrobes. Not a flicker illuminates my surroundings. I am encased in utter blackness.
Now a secondary shock wave approaches, rocks me with an intensity of 8.2. It is apparent that I must withdraw from my position—but my drive trains remain inert under full thrust. I shift to base emergency power, try again. Pressure mounts; I sense my awareness fading under the intolerable strain; then, abruptly, resistance falls off and I am in motion.
It is not the swift maneuvering of full drive, however; I inch forward, as if restrained by massive barriers. Again I attempt to penetrate the surrounding darkness and this time perceive great irregular outlines shot through with fracture planes. I probe cautiously, then more vigorously, encountering incredible densities.
I channel all available power to a single ranging pulse, direct it upward. The indication is so at variance with all experience that I repeat the test at a new angle. Now I must accept the fact: I am buried under 207.6 meters of solid rock!