by Julian May
And so she had given in to him.
The sigma-field generator complex was completed on time and within budget. A hemispheric bubble of force flowed out from it and pushed back the seawater for a radius of three kilometers. A mining village of fourteen hundred and fifty-three souls sprang up within its security, down beneath the frigid waters near Manapouri's South Pole. Eleven months later there was a Class Four . . . 4.18, to be exact. The dome generator failed, the waters reclaimed their hegemony, and two-thirds of the people were drowned.
"The worst thing about it," she added, "was that nobody ever blamed me. It was right on the knife-edge for the oi, Jtaalspecs, with that 4.18. I knew that the thing would have held if we hadn't sneetched, but nobody else thought to question it. It was a borderliner, a tossup, and the thing had crapped out. Tough. The generator complex was so smashed up by the quake and turbidity currents that they didn't bother with much of a fail-analysis. There was more important work to be done on Manapouri than dredge through half a klom of sediment looking for broken parts."
"What about him?"
"He had been killed a few months earlier at a job on Pelon-su-Kadafiron, a Poltroyan world. I thought of killing myself but I couldn't. Not then. I came here instead, looking for God knows what. Punishment, probably. My executive mind-set was all wiped out and I was completely switch-off. You know, take me, stomp me, use me, just don't make me have to think . . . The stud farm setup I landed in after the trip from Castle Gateway seemed like a mad dream. They only take the best of the women for breeding stock. Those under forty, natural or rejuvenated, those who aren't too ugly. The rejects are kept sterile and made available to the gray torcs and the bareneck males. But us keepers had fertility restored by Tanu physicians, and then we were sent to the Finiah pleasure dome. Would you believe there were lots of dopey broads like me who just lay there and took it? I mean, if a dame didn't mind the basic shabbiness of being used, it was a hotsheet paradise. I understand that the Tanu women are better than the men when it comes to incendiary sex, but the men left no chime un-rung as far as I was concerned. The first few weeks were a nympho's delight. And then I got pregnant.
"All the little expectant moms are treated like royalty by the Tanu. My first baby was blond and adorable. And I'd never had any, and they let me nurse him for eight months. I loved him so much I almost came up sane. But when they took him away, I went back on psycholine and wallowed around the pleasure dome with all the rest of the screwed-silly tarts. The next pregnancy was awful and the baby turned out Firvulag. The Tanu sire them one time in seven on humans and one time in three on their own women; but Firvulag parents never have Tanu children. At any rate, they didn't let me nurse the poor little spook, just took him out and left him in the traditional spot in the woods. I hadn't even recovered from him when they were trying to knock me up again. But by then, all the fun had gone out of it. I was sobering up, maybe. It's bad to be too sane in the pleasure dome . . . whether you're a human female or a human male. Too many of those Tanu blasts and you start hurting instead of skyrocketing. It happens sooner with some than with others, but if you're the average human, after a while Tanu sex starts killing you."
"Yeah," said Richard.
She looked at him quizzically. He gave a small humiliated nod. She said, "Welcome to the club . . . Well, I had another blond baby and then a fourth. The last was the caesarian, four and a half kilos of lovely fat girl-child, they said. But I was delirious for a week, so they farmed her out to a wet nurse and gave me six whole months of peace to pull my poor old bod back in shape. They even gave me a treatment with their Skin, which is a kind of poor man's regen-tank, but it didn't do much good. The practitioner said my mind-tone was wrong for it, just as it was wrong for a gray torc. But I knew that I just didn't want to get well and have more babies. I wanted to die. So one lovely night I slipped quietly into the river."
He could think of no words to comfort her. The uniquely feminine abasement was a horror beyond his understanding, although he pitied her and raged inwardly against the ones who had used her, planted a half-human parasite inside of her that fed on her, kicked against her internal organs and belly wall, then violated her again as it burst out into the open air. God! And she'd said that she loved the first baby! How was it possible? (He would have strangled the little bastards before they drew their first breath.) But she'd loved one, and would have loved the others, likely as not, if they hadn't been taken away. She'd loved those pain givers, those unworthy children. Could a man ever make sense of the way of women?
And you'd think she'd never want to look at another male. But somehow she'd fathomed his own need and, yes!, needed him as well. She might even like him a little. Was she as generous as all that?
Almost as though she read his thoughts, she gave a sensuous little chuckle and beckoned him back to her. "We still have time. If you're the man I think you are."
"Not if it would hurt you," he found himself saying even as he came back to life. "Never if it would hurt you." But she only laughed again and pulled him down. Women were amazing.
Off in a remote little nook of his brain, something was typing out a message to him, a conviction that grew to enormous, almost frightening, proportions as the exquisite tension built to its culmination. This person was not "women." She was not, as all the others had been to him, an abstraction of feminine sexuality, a comforter, a receptacle for physical release. She was different. She was Martha.
The message was hard to understand, but any minute now, he was going to figure it out.
Chapter Five
It had been Martha who gave the Bogle his title.
He had been there, sitting on a boulder and regarding them with a misanthropic glare, when they awoke early the next morning in their camp below the southern flank of the Feldberg. After brusquely identifying himself as an emissary from Sugoll, he had ordered them to pack up without even waiting to let Richard make breakfast. The pace he set up a spur ridge of the mountain was deliberately trying and he would have raced them uphill without a rest if Madame had not occasionally demanded that they stop to catch their breath. Plainly, the dwarfish creature was feeling ill-used at having to serve as a guide and had decided to wreak his own petty revenge.
The Bogle was much shorter than any Firvulag they had ever seen before, and much uglier, with a tubby little torso and skinny arms and legs. His skull was grotesquely compressed to the point of being birdlike. Large black eyes with overlapping pouches were set close together above his toucanish nose. Prominent ears drooped flaccidly at the upper margins. His skin shone greasy reddish brown, and his sparse hair twisted into strands like a string mop. The Bogle's clothing, belying his physical repulsiveness, was neat and even beautiful: polished boots and a wide belt of carved black leather, wine-red breeches and shirt, and a long vest embroidered in flamelike patterns and studded with semiprecious stones. He wore a kind of Phrygian bonnet with a large brooch positioned just above his scraggly brows, which were knit in what seemed to be a permanent scowl.
Following their trollish guide, the five travelers skirted the mountain ravines, following a tiny but very distinct trail, and passed through a part of the Black Forest that had nearly as many broadleaf trees as conifers. Wherever the Feldberg brooks slowed enough to pool there were bosky dingles clogged with tall ferns and alders, creeping clematis vines, and fall-blooming primroses with poisonously bright blossoms. They came to a hollow where the waters of a hot spring bubbled to the surface. Lush and unhealthy-looking vegetation crowded the steamy swale. A flock of ravens croaked a sardonic greeting from the half-eaten carcass of a small deer that lay near the edge of a mineral-encrusted puddle. More bones, some clean, some furred with thick moss, were strewn about the undergrowth.
Farther east, the rock formations began to change. Colored limestone outcroppings intruded amongst the granite. "Cave country," Claude remarked to Madame. They were walking side by side now, the path widening as they passed below a wooded cliff. The sun was warm; nevertheless, t
he paleontologist felt a subterranean chill. In the few places where the rock face was visible, they saw scarlet and blue swallows with long forked tails darting in and out of pocks in the limestone. Spiny-ribbed elephant-ears grew in dense patches beneath the trees. They sheltered clumps of distinctive mushrooms, white-stemed, red caps flecked in white.
"They are here," the old woman said abruptly. "All around us! Can you not feel them? So many! And all . . . deformed."
For a moment, he failed to catch the significance of what she was saying. But it fit, fit with the undercurrent of anxiety that had lurked at the edge of his consciousness ever since early morning. Fit with the surliness of the Bogle, whom Claude had mistaken for an ordinary Firvulag. "Les Criards," Madame said. "They follow us. One of them leads us. The Howling Ones."
The path led uphill at an easy slope, entirely free of debris. The swallows flickered among the firs and beeches. Great bars of golden lights slanted down into the forest as if through open windows.
The old woman said, "Such a beautiful place. But there is desolation here, mon vieux, a wretchedness of spirit that at once touches my heart and disgusts me. And it grows stronger."
He lent her his arm, for she was faltering, apparently for no physical reason. Her face had gone dead white. "We could ask the Bogle to stop," Claude suggested.
Her voice was dulled. "No. It is necessary to go on . . . Ah, Claude! You should thank God for not making you sensitive to the emanations of other minds! All sentient beings have secret thoughts, those that remain hidden except to the good God. But there are other thoughts as well, pitched, as it were, on different psychic levels, the nonvocal speech, the currents and storms of emotion. This latter is what I am enveloped in now. It is a most profound enmity, a malevolence that can come only from the most distorted personalities. The Howling Ones! They hate other beings but they hate themselves so much more. And their howling fills my mind . . ."
"Can't you shut it out? Defend yourself as you did against the Hunt?"
"If I had been properly trained," she said forlornly. "But all that I know I have taught myself. I do not know how to counter this horde. They don't offer any concrete threat that I can seize upon." Her expression was very near panic. "All they do is hate. With all their strength . . . they hate."
"Do they seem to be more powerful than ordinary Firvulag?"
"I cannot be sure of that. But they are different in some unnatural way. That is why I called them deformed. With the Firvulag, and even with the Tanu, human metapsychics can feel a certain mental kinship. It is no matter that the exotic is an enemy. But never could I be akin to these Criards! I have never before been so close to so many of them. Only rarely did we encounter them in our little enclave within the Vosges, and there they were wary. But these . . . I . . ." Her voice broke off, harsh and too high-pitched. Her right fingers stroked the golden torc with a feverish urgency while those of her left hand dug painfully into Claude's arm. She kept darting her eyes from side to side, scanning the crags. There was nothing unusual to be seen.
Felice, who had been at the tail end of the line behind them, now closed the distance and announced, "I don't like this place at all. For the past half hour or so I've had the damnedest feeling. Nothing at all like those nervous fantods we got in the Fungus Forest, either. This time, there bloody well is something to be afraid of! Come on, Madame, what's going on?"
"The malign Firvulag, the Howlers, are all around us. Their mental projections are so powerful that even you, in your latent state, can perceive them."
The blonde athlete's mouth tightened to a straight line and her eyes flashed. In her unaccustomed buckskin garb, she looked like a schoolgirl playing at Red Indians. She asked Madame, "Are they getting ready to attack?"
"They will do nothing," the old woman replied, "without the permission of their ruler, Sugoll."
"Only mental intimidation, damn their eyes! Well, they don't scare me!" Felice unstrapped the bow from her pack and checked the arrows expertly without losing stride. The cliff had now become a crazy jumble of blocks and pinnacles with the rising of the land. The trees thinned. They could see far out over the intermontane valleys. Even the distant Alps were barely visible to the south. The Feldberg itself reared up another thousand meters above them, chopped off in a sheer precipice on its southeastern face as though some Titan had taken an axe to it, mutilating the symmetry of the smoothly rounded crown.
Up at the head of the line, the Bogle was holding up one hand. They had arrived at an alpine park, a meadow surrounded on all sides by steep rocks. Precisely in the center of the area was a haystack-shaped knoll of velvety black stone, veined with a weblike tracery of bright yellow.
"This is it," said the Bogle. "And here I gladly leave you."
He folded his arms and, scowling, faded from sight. The scowl lasted longer than the rest of him.
"Well, that's a hell of a . . ." Richard began the rounded torso and skinny limbs of the Bogle. Many had disproportionately large hands and feet. Some of the bodies seemed twisted, as with spinal deformities; others had asymmetric bulges under well-made garments, hinting of tumorous growths or even concealed extra limbs. The heads were grotesque: pointed, flattened, ridged like tree bark, crested, even horn-bearing. Some were too large or too small for the supporting body, or monstrously ill-suited, as the tiny female head with the lustrous curls and lovely features that sat incongruously on the hunched form of a young chimpanzee. Almost all of the faces were hideous, warped or swollen or stretched beyond any semblance of humanoid normality. There were faces covered with red and blue wattles, with hair, with saurian scales, with weeping scabs, with cheeselike exudate. There were eyes bulbous, beady, stalked, misplaced, superfluous. Some of the creatures had mouths so wide as to be froglike; others lacked lips altogether, so that the stumps of rotted teeth were exposed in perpetual ghastly grins. Those mouths ranged from animal muzzles grafted onto otherwise normal skulls to improbable vertical slits, coiled trunks, and parrot beaks. They opened to show fat tusks, close-set narrow fangs, drooling gums, and tongues that might be black or fringed or even double or triple.
Very gently, the misbegotten throng howled again.
On the black rock now sat a fairly tall bald-headed man. His face was beautiful and his body, clad from neck to heel in a tight-fitting purple garment, that of a superbly muscled humanoid.
The howling ceased abruptly. The man said, "I am Sugoll, the lord of these mountains. Say why you come."
"We bring," Madame said in a barely audible voice, "a letter from Yeochee, High King of the Firvulag."
The bald man smiled tolerantly and held out one hand. Claude had to support Madame Guderian as she approached the rock.
"You are afraid of us," Sugoll observed as he perused the piece of vellum. "Are we so disgusting to human eyes?"
"We fear what your minds project," Madame said. "Your bodies can only stir our compassion."
"Mine is an Illusion, of course," said Sugoll "As the greatest of all these", he swept one arm to encompass the quivering mass of creatures, "I must naturally be their superior in all things, even in physical abomination. Would you like to see me as I really am?"
Claude said, "Mighty Sugoll, this woman has been severely affected by your mental emanations. I was once a life-scientist, a paleobiologist. Show yourself to me and spare my friends."
The bald man laughed. "A paleobiologist! See if you can classify me, then." He stood upright on his rock. Richard came and took Madame back, leaving Claude standing alone.
There was a brief flash and all of the humans except the old man were momentarily blinded.
"What am I? What am I?" Sugoll cried out "You'll never guess, human! You can't tell us and we can't tell you because none of us knows!" Peal after peal of mocking laughter rang out.
The handsome figure in purple was once again seated on his rock. Claude stood with feet widely planted, his head down on his breast and his lungs pumping. A trickle of blood oozed from his bitten lower lip. Slowly, h
e raised his eyes to meet Sugoll's.
"I do know what you are."
"What's that you say?" The goblin ruler hitched forward. In one lithe movement he vaulted to the ground and sprang close to Claude.
"I know what you are," the paleontologist repeated. "What all of you are. You are members of a race that is abnormally sensitive to the background radiation of the planet Earth. Even the Tanu and Firvulag who live in other regions have suffered reproductive anomalies because of this radiation. But you, you have compounded the problem by living here. I daresay you've drunk from the deep springs, with their juvenile water, as well as from the shallower fountains and the brooks of melted snow. You've probably made your homes in caverns," he pointed to the yellow-streaked knoll, "full of attractive black rocks like that one."
"It is so."
"Unless I miss my guess and my old memory bank's fritzed out, that rock is nivenite, an ore containing uranium and radium. The deep springs are likely to be radioactive, too. During the years that you people have lived in this region, you've exposed your genes to many times the radiation dose experienced by your fellow Firvulag. This is why you've mutated, why you've changed into . . . what you are."
Sugoll turned and stared at the velvet-black rock. Then he threw back his beautifully formed illusionary skull and howled. All of his troll and bogle subjects joined in. This time the sound was not terrifying to the humans, only unbearably poignant.
At length, the Howling Ones ceased their racial dirge. Sugoll said, "On this planet, with only primitive genotechnology, there can be no hope for us."