by Brian Aldiss
‘Grayan,’ he called, ‘how do the rafts get started? When they’re small, I mean.’
‘Nobody knows yet,’ she said. ‘We were just talking about it. About half of the coastal marsh-fauna of the continent seems to go through a preliminary larval stage in the sea.’ She nodded at the red buds on the raft’s cone. ‘It looks as if Grandpa is going to produce flowers and let the wind or tide take the seeds out through the Straits.’
It made sense. It also knocked out Cord’s still half-held hope that the change in Grandpa might turn out to be drastic enough, in some way, to justify his reluctance to get on board. Cord studied Grandpa’s armoured head carefully once more – unwilling to give up that hope entirely. There were a series of vertical gummy black slits between the armour plates, which hadn’t been in evidence two weeks ago either. It looked as if Grandpa was beginning to come apart at the seams. Which might indicate that the rafts, big as they grew to be, didn’t outlive a full seasonal cycle, but came to flower at about this time of Sutang’s year, and died. However, it was a safe bet that Grandpa wasn’t going to collapse into senile decay before they completed their trip today.
Cord gave up on Grandpa. The other notion returned to him – Perhaps he could coax an obliging bay monster into action that would show the Regent he was no sissy!
Because the monsters were there all right.
Kneeling at the edge of the platform and peering down into the wine-coloured, clear water of the deep channel they were moving through, Cord could see a fair selection of them at almost any moment.
Some five or six snappers, for one thing. Like big, flattened crayfish, chocolate-brown mostly, with green and red spots on their carapaced backs. In some areas they were so thick you’d wonder what they found to live on, except that they ate almost anything, down to chewing up the mud in which they squatted. However, they preferred their food in large chunks and alive, which was one reason you didn’t go swimming in the bay. They would attack a boat on occasion; but the excited manner in which the ones he saw were scuttling off towards the edges of the channel showed they wanted nothing to do with a big moving raft.
Dotted across the bottom were two-foot round holes which looked vacant at the moment. Normally, Cord knew, there would be a head filling each of those holes. The heads consisted mainly of triple sets of jaws, held open patiently like so many traps to grab at anything that came within range of the long wormlike bodies behind the heads. But Grandpa’s passage, waving his stingers like transparent pennants through the water, had scared the worms out of sight, too.
Otherwise, mostly schools of small stuff – and then a flash of wicked scarlet, off to the left behind the raft, darting out from the reeds, turning its needle-nose into their wake.
Cord watched it without moving. He knew that creature, though it was rare in the bay and hadn’t been classified. Swift, vicious – alert enough to snap swamp bugs out of the air as they fluttered across the surface. And he’d tantalized one with fishing tackle once into leaping up on a moored raft, where it had flung itself about furiously until he was able to shoot it.
‘What fantastic creatures!’ Dane’s voice just behind him.
‘Yellowheads,’ said Nirmond. ‘They’ve got a high utility rating. Keep down the bugs.’
Cord stood up casually. It was no time for tricks! The reed bed to their right was thick with Yellowheads, a colony of them. Vaguely froggy things, man sized and better. Of all the creatures he’d discovered in the bay, Cord liked them least. The flabby, sacklike bodies clung with four thin limbs to the upper section of the twenty-foot reeds that lined the channel. They hardly ever moved, but their huge bulging eyes seemed to take in everything that went on about them. Every so often, a downy swamp bug came close enough; and a Yellowhead would open its vertical, enormous, tooth-lined slash of a mouth, extend the whole front of its face like a bellows in a flashing strike; and the bug would be gone. They might be useful, but Cord hated them.
‘Ten years from now we should know what the cycle of coastal life is like,’ Nirmond said. ‘When we set up the Yoger Bay Station there were no Yellowheads here. They came the following year. Still with traces of the oceanic larval form; but the metamorphosis was almost complete. About twelve inches long –’
Dane remarked that the same pattern was duplicated endlessly elsewhere. The Regent was inspecting the Yellowhead colony with field glasses; she put them down now, looked at Cord, and smiled, ‘How far to the farms?’
‘About twenty minutes.’
‘The key’, Nirmond said, ‘seems to be the Zlanti Basin. It must be almost a soup of life in spring.’
‘It is,’ nodded Dane, who had been here in Sutang’s spring, four Earth-years ago. ‘It’s beginning to look as if the Basin alone might justify colonization. The question is still’ – she gestured towards the Yellowheads – ‘how do creatures like that get here?’
They walked off towards the other side of the raft, arguing about ocean currents. Cord might have followed. But something splashed back of them, off to the left and not too far back. He stayed, watching.
After a moment, he saw the big Yellowhead. It had slipped down from its reedy perch, which was what had caused the splash. Almost submerged at the water line, it stared after the raft with huge, pale-green eyes. To Cord, it seemed to look directly at him. In that moment, he knew for the first time why he didn’t like Yellowheads. There was something very like intelligence in that look, an alien calculation. In creatures like that, intelligence seemed out of place. What use could they have for it?
A little shiver went over him when it sank completely under the water and he realized it intended to swim after the raft. But it was mostly excitement. He had never seen a Yellowhead come down out of the reeds before. The obliging monster he’d been looking for might be presenting itself in an unexpected way.
Half a minute later, he watched it again, swimming awkwardly far down. It had no immediate intention of boarding, at any rate. Cord saw it come into the area of the raft’s trailing stingers. It manoeuvred its way between them, with curiously human swimming motions, and went out of sight under the platform.
He stood up, wondering what it meant. The Yellowhead had appeared to know about the stingers; there had been an air of purpose in every move of its approach. He was tempted to tell the others about it, but there was the moment of triumph he could have if it suddenly came slobbering up over the edge of the platform and he nailed it before their eyes.
It was almost time anyway to turn the raft in towards the farms. If nothing happened before then –
He watched. Almost five minutes, but no sign of the Yellowhead. Still wondering, a little uneasy, he gave Grandpa a calculated needling of heat.
After a moment, he repeated it. Then he drew a deep breath and forgot all about the Yellowhead.
‘Nirmond!’ he called sharply.
The three of them were standing near the centre of the platform, next to the big armoured cone, looking ahead at the farms. They glanced around.
‘What’s the matter now, Cord?’
Cord couldn’t say it for a moment. He was suddenly, terribly scared again. Something had gone wrong!
‘The raft won’t turn!’ he told them.
‘Give it a real burn this time!’ Nirmond said.
Cord glanced up at him. Nirmond, standing a few steps in front of Dane and Grayan as if he wanted to protect them, had begun to look a little strained, and no wonder. Cord already had pressed the gun to three different points on the platform; but Grandpa appeared to have developed a sudden anaesthesia for heat. They kept moving out steadily towards the centre of the bay.
Now Cord held his breath, switched the heat on full, and let Grandpa have it. A six-inch patch on the platform blistered up instantly, turned brown, then black –
Grandpa stopped dead. Just like that.
‘That’s right! Keep burn –’ Nirmond didn’t finish his order.
A giant shudder. Cord staggered back towards the water. Then th
e whole edge of the raft came curling up behind him and went down again smacking the bay with a sound like a cannon shot. He flew forward off his feet, hit the platform face down, and flattened himself against it. It swelled up beneath him. Two more enormous slaps and joltings. Then quiet. He looked round for the others.
He lay within twelve feet of the central cone. Some twenty or thirty of the mysterious new vines the cone had sprouted were stretched stiffly towards him now, like so many thin green fingers. They couldn’t quite reach him. The nearest tip was still ten inches from his shoes.
But Grandpa had caught the others, all three of them. They were tumbled together at the foot of the cone, wrapped in a stiff network of green vegetable ropes, and they didn’t move.
Cord drew his feet up cautiously, prepared for another earthquake reaction. But nothing happened. Then he discovered that Grandpa was back in motion on his previous course. The heat-gun had vanished. Gently, he took out the Vanadian gun.
A voice, thin and pain-filled, spoke to him from one of the three huddled bodies.
‘Cord? It didn’t get you?’ It was the Regent.
‘No,’ he said, keeping his voice low. He realized suddenly he’d simply assumed they were all dead. Now he felt sick and shaky.
‘What are you doing?’
Cord looked at Grandpa’s big, armour-plated head with a certain hunger. The cones were hollowed out inside, the station’s lab had decided their chief function was to keep enough air trapped under the rafts to float them. But in that central section was also the organ that controlled Grandpa’s overall reactions.
He said softly, ‘I have a gun and twelve heavy-duty explosive bullets. Two of them will blow that cone apart.’
‘No good, Cord!’ the pain-racked voice told him: ‘If the thing sinks, we’ll die anyway. You have anaesthetic charges for that gun of yours?’
He stared at her back. ‘Yes.’
‘Give Nirmond and the girl a shot each, before you do anything else. Directly into the spine, if you can. But don’t come any closer –’
Somehow, Cord couldn’t argue with that voice. He stood up carefully. The gun made two soft spitting sounds.
‘All right,’ he said hoarsely. ‘What do I do now?’
Dane was silent a moment. ‘I’m sorry, Cord, I can’t tell you that. I’ll tell you what I can –’
She paused for some seconds again.
‘This thing didn’t try to kill us, Cord. It could have easily. It’s incredibly strong. I saw it break Nirmond’s legs. But as soon as we stopped moving, it just held us. They were both unconscious then –
‘You’ve got that to go on. It was trying to pitch you within reach of its vines or tendrils, or whatever they are, too, wasn’t it?’
‘I think so,’ Cord said shakily. That was what had happened, of course; and at any moment Grandpa might try again.
‘Now it’s feeding us some sort of anaesthetic of its own through those vines. Tiny thorns. A sort of numbness –’ Dane’s voice trailed off a moment. Then she said clearly, ‘Look, Cord – it seems we’re food it’s storing up! You get that?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Seeding time for the rafts. There are analogues. Live food for its seed probably; not for the raft. One couldn’t have counted on that. Cord?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘I want’, said Dane, ‘to stay awake as long as I can. But there’s really just one other thing – this raft’s going somewhere, to some particularly favourable location. And that might be very near shore. You might make it in then; otherwise it’s up to you. But keep your head and wait for a chance. No heroics, understand?’
‘Sure, I understand,’ Cord told her. He realized then that he was talking reassuringly, as if it wasn’t the Planetary Regent but someone like Grayan.
‘Nirmond’s the worst,’ Dane said. ‘The girl was knocked unconscious at once. If it weren’t for my arm – but, if we can get help in five hours or so, everything should be all right. Let me know if anything happens, Cord.’
‘I will,’ Cord said gently again. Then he sighted his gun carefully at a point between Dane’s shoulder-blades, and the anaesthetic chamber made its soft, spitting sound once more. Dane’s taut body relaxed slowly, and that was all.
There was no point Cord could see in letting her stay awake; because they weren’t going anywhere near shore. The reed beds and the channels were already behind them, and Grandpa hadn’t changed direction by the fraction of a degree. He was moving out into the open bay – and he was picking up company!
So far, Cord could count seven big rafts within two miles of them; and on the three that were closest he could make out a sprouting of new green vines. All of them were travelling in a straight direction; and the common point they were all headed for appeared to be the roaring centre of the Yoger Straits, now some three miles away!
Behind the Straits, the cold Zlanti Deep – the rolling fogs, and the open sea! It might be seeding time for the rafts, but it looked as if they weren’t going to distribute their seeds in the bay…
Cord was a fine swimmer. He had a gun and he had a knife; in spite of what Dane had said, he might have stood a chance among the killers of the bay. But it would be a very small chance, at best. And it wasn’t, he thought, as if there weren’t still other possibilities. He was going to keep his head.
Except by accident, of course, nobody was going to come looking for them in time to do any good. If anyone did look, it would be around the Bay Farms. There were a number of rafts moored there; and it would be assumed they’d used one of them. Now and then something unexpected happened and somebody simply vanished; by the time it was figured out just what had happened on this occasion, it would be much too late.
Neither was anybody likely to notice within the next few hours that the rafts had started migrating out of the swamps through the Yoger Straits. There was a small weather station a little inland, on the north side of the Straits, which used a helicopter occasionally. It was about as improbable, Cord decided dismally, that they’d use it in the right spot just now as it would be for a jet transport to happen to come in low enough to spot them.
The fact that it was up to him, as the Regent had said, sank in a little more after that!
Simply because he was going to try it sooner or later, he carried out an experiment next that he knew couldn’t work. He opened the gun’s anaesthetic chamber and counted out fifty pellets – rather hurriedly because he didn’t particularly want to think of what he might be using them for eventually. There were around three hundred charges left in the chamber then; and in the next few minutes Cord carefully planted a third of them in Grandpa’s head.
He stopped after that. A whale might have showed signs of somnolence under a lesser load. Grandpa paddled on undisturbed. Perhaps he had become a little numb in spots, but his cells weren’t equipped to distribute the soporific effect of that type of drug.
There wasn’t anything else Cord could think of doing before they reached the Straits. At the rate they were moving, he calculated that would happen in something less than an hour; and if they did pass through the Straits, he was going to risk a swim. He didn’t think Dane would have disapproved, under the circumstances. If the raft simply carried them all out into the foggy vastness of the Zlanti Deep, there would be no practical chance of survival left at all.
Meanwhile, Grandpa was definitely picking up speed. And there were other changes going on – minor ones, but still a little awe-inspiring to Cord. The pimply-looking red buds that dotted the upper part of the cone were opening out gradually. From the centre of most of them protruded something like a thin, wet, scarlet worm: a worm that twisted weakly, extended itself by an inch or so, rested, and twisted again, and stretched up a little farther, groping into the air. The vertical black slits between the armour plates looked deeper and wider than they had been even some minutes ago; a dark, thick liquid dripped slowly from several of them.
In other circumstances Cord knew he would hav
e been fascinated by these developments in Grandpa. As it was, they drew his suspicious attention only because he didn’t know what they meant.
Then something quite horrible happened suddenly. Grayan started moaning loudly and terribly and twisted almost completely around. Afterwards, Cord knew it hadn’t been a second before he stopped her struggles and the sounds together with another anaesthetic pellet; but the vines had tightened their grip on her first, not flexibly but like the digging, bony, green talons of some monstrous bird of prey.
White and sweating, Cord put his gun down slowly while the vines relaxed again. Grayan didn’t seem to have suffered any additional harm; and she would certainly have been the first to point out that his murderous rage might have been as intelligently directed against a machine. But for some moments Cord continued to luxuriate furiously in the thought that, at any instant he chose, he could still turn the raft very quickly into a ripped and exploded mess of sinking vegetation.
Instead, and more sensibly, he gave both Dane and Nirmond another shot, to prevent a similar occurrence with them. The contents of two such pellets, he knew, would keep any human being torpid for at least four hours.
Cord withdrew his mind hastily from the direction it was turning into; but it wouldn’t stay withdrawn. The thought kept coming up again, until at last he had to recognize it.
Five shots would leave the three of them completely unconscious whatever else might happen to them, until they either died from other causes or were given a counteracting agent.
Shocked, he told himself he couldn’t do it. It was exactly like killing them.
But then, quite steadily, he found himself raising the gun once more, to bring the total charge for each of the three Team people up to five.
*
Barely thirty minutes later, he watched a raft as big as the one he rode go sliding into the foaming white waters of the Straits a few hundred yards ahead, and dart off abruptly at an angle, caught by one of the swirling currents. It pitched and spun, made some headway, and was swept aside again. And then it righted itself once more. Not like some blindly animated vegetable, Cord thought, but like a creature that struggled with intelligent purpose to maintain its chosen direction.