'But you can't keep it,' she said. 'They might as well line you up before a firing squad. And you know extinction is coming.'
'On the contrary. No need to italicize your words at me, miss. I told you before that we are free from dying. You look ahead to a tedious gradual aging and loss of faculties and inevitable sickness and death. That is a lifelong dying. I look forward only to a completed mission and a paid vacation. I don't have to worry about age or disability, or even be concerned about the future. Death is not a spectre to me. I know that all of my conscious life I will be a virtual superman facing the world's most intriguing challenges. The best of any life is reserved for me.'
'Do you realize you've been hanging by one arm for six minutes?'
'Five minutes, thirty-five seconds at the mark,' he said. 'Mark.'
She looked at her watch. 'You are quite a man. You can let go now.'
Subble dropped noiselessly to the floor. 'Technically, I'm not a man, in that sense. I'm a number. I'm identified by a three-letter code, SUB, with a humanizing suffix. I differ from SUA or SUC or SUD no more than my code does.'
'I don't believe it,' she said, nettled. 'You must have feelings.'
'Not on duty. After this mission is over, I will have a few days to remember you and your friend Veg and appreciate your doubtless charming individual qualities. But at the moment-'
'Oh,' she said, rising to the challenge. 'So you have no normal human reactions right now. No pleasure, no anger, no. ...?'
'I have them, but they are completely controlled.'
She was silent a few seconds. 'I have to do a series for a "Nature" magazine. The law doesn't allow it through the fax, but it still has a fair mechanical circulation. Just toss your Tarzan suit over there.'
'You are asking me to pose naked?'
'Unless you have human scruples.' She poised her brush before a new canvas expectantly.
Subble removed the loincloth.
Aquilon stared at him for thirty seconds before speaking. 'This will illustrate the cover of an issue with a guaranteed circulation of four hundred and twenty thousand,' she said at last.
'Agents have appeared on covers before.'
'You go this far - just to obtain the answers to a few questions?'
'An agent will do anything within reason to maintain a harmonious relationship and uphold the integrity of the service. My body is public property, and you appear to have a valid use for it. Once you have confidence in me, perhaps you will no longer wish to withhold the information I need.'
'Put your arms forward as though about to dive into a pool,' she said. 'Give me a three-quarter view.' Then, as he posed, she began to talk about herself. 'It's a triangle. Veg and Cal and I - we're in love. I know that sounds funny. But
I have to choose one of them, and I can't. I just can't make the decision. That's why we split up, mainly. It just wasn't possible, together, any more, in spite of - of what happened. I have to go to one of them - when I can.' She paused apprehensively. 'How much did Veg tell you?'
'That he loved you. That the three of you were marooned on Nacre. That he killed a "manta".'
'That was all? Just to the-'
'That was all. He felt that was his share, and that the rest belonged to you and Calvin.'
'Yes ...' She painted quietly for a while. 'Well, now I have to choose. I might make love with one, but then I'd have to do it with the other, too, to be fair. That would be promiscuity, and they'd both know it. I care too much for them both to hurt them like that. It's too intimate. I could sleep with someone I didn't care about, because that's only the body, public property, as you say. It's the emotion that counts. Who my heart sleeps with.'
She paused again, studying him frankly. 'I could sleep with you, the sexual part I mean, because I'm not involved with you. It would just be a physical release. An impersonal thing. Would you like that?'
'My preferences have no bearing on my duty.'
'So if I offered myself to you, physically right now, you'd decline?'
'Unless there were legitimate contrary reason, yes.'
'Legitimate reason!'
'Do you wish me to continue this pose?'
'No, but stay where you are. I want to know just how far this control of yours extends.' She touched her toga and it unwrapped languorously from her body. She wore nothing underneath. 'Now take a good look at me.'
Subble obliged. 'Is comment required?'
She sighed. 'You've proved your point, if that isn't an abysmal pun. You haven't been fooled at all, have you? You knew I meant to vamp you, to avoid telling you about Nacre.'
'Veg tried to use his fists.'
'With equivalent success, I'm sure. And Cal will use his mind. And you'll absorb it all unmoved and complete your assignment on schedule.'
'I have no schedule. I was impressed by Veg's nature, as I am by yours. You should not mistake my physical control for disparagement.'
She marched to her collection of costumes and tossed him a man's bathrobe. 'Let's get drunk.'
Dressed in HIS and HERS robes, they started for her kitchenette. She put out a hand. 'Wait.'
He waited.
She made her decision and turned about. 'This way.'
He followed her out the door and down the hall to the elevator. She punched for the basement forty stories below. The other passengers stared straight ahead, not deigning to notice the intimate dishabille: loose hair, bare legs and feet, matching bathroom attire - but Subble could pick up the remarks of those who got off. He smiled. The basement did seem like a peculiar destination for such a couple....
The basement - actually, he was sure, the first of a number of unnumbered sublevels - was an austere compartment opening into several hallways. There was a directory billboard, but Aquilon ignored it. She led him down one of the central passages.
Pipes of tremendous girth crossed the low ceiling, and tunnel-like offshoots led to pits with collections of valves and indicators. There was a light but pervasive aroma compounded of - he sniffed and isolated the principal components - mildew, animal dung, seed pellets, insecticide, ammonia, machine oil and offal. This would be the area's intensive livestock production unit; many residentials had their own, to avoid interstate controls, shipping charges and taxes.
One other smell: the same suggestion of alienness he had noted when searching for the vanishing trace of the thing in Veg's forest. The - creature had been here within a day. Was that why she had brought him here?
At the end of the hall a man sat at a desk poring over a chart. He looked up as they approached. He smiled. 'Good to see you, 'Quilon,' he said, rubbing his puffy eyes. Subble read the ingrained fatigue in him, the subdued desperation and misery. This man was unhappily married, sick of his job, bored and ridden with guilt. His pulse quickened as Aquilon came near him. He was not smitten with her, being too realistic for that, but he appreciated her physical qualities fiercely. He daydreamed, almost certainly, of an eventual liaison - but that was not the source of the guilt.
' 'Lo, Joe,' Aquilon replied, and smiled. The man's expression did not change, but Subble picked up the electric glow that shot through his physique and vitalized him; he was a sucker for the attentions of a lovely woman, particularly one so suggestively garbed. Aquilon, obviously, was using him; her smile was a cynical, calculated thing, as though the current were controlled by rheostat - yet she was prepared to arouse and oblige his passions in a certain not unlikely circumstance. She, like Veg, had come to terms with certain necessities - whatever these might be. It would be necessary to find out why she was cultivating Joe, Subble realized; probably it did involve the alien presence. The thing was hiding there, and a report by this man could betray it. 'I'd like to show my guest the farm, if it's all right.'
Joe looked at Subble. 'What's a government agent doing here?' he demanded suspiciously. 'We're inspected regularly. We're a top-classification unit.'
'Please,' Aquilon said gently, leaning over the desk. The man basked in her warmth, ready to yield
her anything.
'But it's all in order,' he said in a final defensive reflex as he returned to his chart.
They entered the unit - and the smell magnified tremendously. 'He's really a computer programmer,' she said as she led the way down a narrow, straw-lined corridor. 'But they put him here because he was assigned to streamline the farm. He has to be thoroughly familiar with it before he can set up new flow charts. The distribution of feed, the percentage of calcium in the formula, the intensity of the light - the stock is sensitive to little things and the program has to
be modified for each unit or the profit ratio suffers.' Her tone showed that she had little sympathy with the suffering profit ratio. 'It's all automated, of course, so he's the only one on duty except for a mechanic, until he gets the job done. That makes him the veterinarian, now, even though he hasn't been trained for it. And he hates it.'
Subble nodded. Such things were common. Programmers too often wound up in outre situations, as did agents. Yet the popular imagination clothed them both in glamor and, oddly, a certain concurrent dislike.
'These are our bunnies,' she said.
They stood in a well-lighted room decked on either side with lined cages, the lowest set so close to the center that there was less than a yard to walk in. The second layer was set back a foot, and the third another foot, so that there was a good deal of space at head height, just under the swishing air-ducts. The room was not air-conditioned; these appeared to be oxygenating units only, and it was hot. The odor was stifling.
'These are the growing hutches,' she explained, "See, they have no floors, just wire mesh so the droppings can fall through. The nesting boxes are more comfortable - they have solid plastic at the bottom and genuine bedding. How would you like to spend your life in one of these?'
Subble inspected the nearest cage at her direction. A conveyor-trough brought the nutrient pellets through and a drip-valve provided water. Another conveyor transported the descending dung away slowly. The cage was about four feet long and half as wide with clearance barely high enough for the occupants to assume a normal stance. Within it were a mother rabbit, pure white, and her litter of nine pink-eared babies.
'She has to raise twelve families in two years then she goes to the slaughter herself,' Aquilon said. 'Her pelt will find its way into some man's hat, and her delicate flesh will be packaged as quality broiler. She will never see honest daylight, and her only moment of pleasure, if that's what it is, is when the buck covers her. He doesn't get much leisure - he gets fed strictly according to the number of does he services, and if he falters, that's the end.'
She got ready to tell him something important, but balked and led him into another area. What was it that worried these people so? Veg, had not been frightened for himself, and neither was Aquilon, but both were frightened by something.
'Antibiotics are put in their food, but still a lot die in the cages. Flies get in somehow, and mold. Fungus pops up everywhere, and it seems to mutate so rapidly that they can't keep up with it.'
'As on Nacre?'
The question disturbed her. 'Sometimes I wish it were. This is the henhouse.'
Here the lights were low and red. Subble had no difficulty, but Aquilon had to wait a moment while her vision adjusted. 'It's so they won't flutter about and peck each other,' she said. 'Some are de-beaked anyway, or given blinders; but with only four to a cage there isn't too much trouble. It's all down to a science. The music helps, too.'
Sure enough: the speakers were playing Bach's 'Sheep May Safely Graze', as though sweet melodies could add to the freshness of the eggs.
'They aren't sheep, they can't graze, and they certainly aren't safe,' Aquilon remarked sourly.
The strains and harmonies were incongruous in the gloom and stink of the battery. The cages were similar to those for the rabbits except that their mesh floors were tilted to make the eggs roll into external troughs where they were borne gently away.
'What do you think of it?' she inquired as they proceeded to another room.
'Good, standard outfit,' he said. 'Seems as efficient as the state of the art can make it.'
She went on in silence.
The slaughtering section was more active, though also fully automated. The selected young chickens were funnelled into cul-de-sacs, urged on by moving brushes, where a machine looped cord about their feet, lifted them squawking and fluttering, and shackled them upside-down to an elevated conveyor-rod. At the end of the line another machine caught their struggling heads and slit their throats. The blood spouted into yet another trough.
'They aren't even stunned first,' Aquilon said, shuddering. 'Because their flapping helps the blood flow out more quickly, or something. I tried to have Joe write a stunner into the program, and he wanted to, but he said he'd be fired if he tried to include anything that would increase the cost like that. He's trapped in this mess, just as we all are.'
Subble nodded agreement, though the realities of the situation did not strike him as a moral issue. A slaughter operation was not suitable for a man with scruples about pain but the fate of a worker fired for inefficiency was not a sanguine one.
'If they don't die soon enough,' she continued tightly, the scalding tank takes care of that detail. Or the defeatherer, or the eviscerator. Most of the chickens, I'm sure, are dead by the time they are packaged, anyway.' She no longer tried to play down the irony. 'Still, their lot is better than that of the calves or pigs.'
Subble saw that she was quite upset about it. This was not what she had intended to show him originally, but the issue was a serious one with her. She must have looked for a place to hide the alien - and found this, then become concerned with the conditions she found in the farm.
'Let's get out of here,' she said. She had changed her mind again, still hesitating to reveal the secret overtly, though she must have realized that he would become aware of it. What held her back?
Back in the apartment she washed convulsively and in full view, as though her body had been soiled by flying blood. 'Do you understand, now?' she asked as she toweled arms and breasts and donned a new bathrobe.
He stripped and washed, knowing that she would find him contaminated if he did not. 'Why you have not eaten meat or eggs in several months? No,' he said, giving her a chance to explain it herself. She needed a case to argue before she could settle down.
'If we can do this to our animals today, what will we be doing to ourselves tomorrow?' she demanded. Her voice was bitter, her eyes becoming red. 'Don't you see how close we are already? This whole district - one mass of hutches for people, tier upon tier, each one fed by piped-in pellets called groceries and cleaned by communally flushing toilets. Every mind distracted by standard-formula canned entertainment that someone has programmed so there won't be too much fuss. They have to give tranquilizing drugs to the chickens so they won't turn to cannibalism when they get too crowded in their dark unnatural habitat - and we have drugs too, don't we, so we can stand it all a little longer.'
She walked jerkily to the kitchenette and brought out a quart bottle of gin. 'Come, deaden your mind with me,' she invited, pouring two four-ounce portions.
'It is no kinder in nature,' Subble pointed out. 'What man does in the effort to feed himself is only a more disciplined extension of-'
'I know,' she exclaimed. 'I know, I know! It's absolutely logical, this terrible cruelty. So we have to starve the little calves of iron so their meat will be white, and force naturally cleanly pigs to wallow in filth to save a few pennies. There's reason to it all - but where is the heart in it? Isn't there some better way than this?'
'Emotionalism doesn't help.'
'As chickens to the slaughter,' she declaimed, brandishing her empty glass, 'so mankind to the Bomb! I'm ready! Just water me and breed me and pluck me and-'
'If it is any consolation, I understand that intensive farming is on the decline,' Subble said, disturbed by her attitude. 'The need to rework the programs is evidence of that. Synthetics are more efficient.
'
'It doesn't matter,' she said, collapsing into despair. 'I still can't stand to be a member of a species that brutalizes this way. Veg is right. I'm an - an omnivore.'
'All of us must be what we are - and it is not entirely evil. There are redemptions, even glories. You know that.'
'My mind, not my heart,' she said, sipping at another glass. 'Ignorance is not bliss. I never knew what I was, until Nacre. Now I wish I could undo it all - a lifetime of thoughtless evil. I wish I were back there, the three of us back on Nacre, to stay forever and ever.' She changed the subject abruptly. 'You know, Veg called us "Beauty, Brains and Brawn",' she said, demure for the moment. 'I think of it as physical, emotional and intellectual - except I have the order mixed up - well, you know. But really it's - do you know Omar Khayyam?'
Of Man and Manta Omnibus Page 6