He came in sight of the woman, and she was Merit, collapsed and weeping on the ground, huddled over a hiking pack. Adam knelt beside her, to lift and turn her gently. Her face was contorted, in agony of some kind, in an agony of grief, and her blank eyes seemed to look up through Adam to the sky.
He saw now that the pack Merit was crouching over was the one that Vito had been wearing. Adam saw also that the shoulder straps of the pack now ended abruptly, in short stumps, and that the very ends of the .straps were burned black, as if a slow laser might have cut them away.
Still not really looking at him, Merit spoke to him suddenly, in a hurried and mumbling voice. It was as if she were hardly conscious of who she was speaking to or what she said.
"… he said, the time has come for defiance—of something. He said that now was the time for a bold decisive step. He told me he was behind what they did to Vito in Stem City." Her eyes came to focus on Adam's face at last. "And he was the one who made Vito try to fight you, at Fieldedge. I thought so, then, I feared so, but I couldn't believe it."
"Who?" Adam asked her. As if he did not already know.
"Ray. Ray, Ray, Raymond Kedro. Then they burned my husband to death just now, he and the others."
"The others?" Adam whispered. He added dazedly: "I saw a burning man."
"The others. Most of our siblings, up in the ship. Most of them follow Ray. They have for years. I followed him too. I did everything he wanted, all these years. Almost everything. I had no children. But still he had to kill Vito. Vito, Vito!"
Merit bent again, swaying from side to side as if in physical agony, and a long keening moan, an almost animal sound, came from her.
Adam spoke to her. He petted her and stroked her hair. Then after a few moments he abandoned the effort and stood up. He could do nothing for Merit right now. He moved on down the ravine.
The raging water was near at hand, and the sound of it was loud, when Adam reached the foot of the rock that Ray was standing on, or rather standing above. Ray still gazed as if entranced across the river, at the Ringwall. Ray's right arm was now almost two meters long. The arm hung grotesquely out of its sleeve, the big hand trailing along the rock below Ray's feet like something Ray had forgotten. The arm was stretched out of all natural shape and proportion. It suggested the deformed members of the creature that Adam had seen on the island, confined in the sunken tank.
Ray, continuing to gaze at the Ringwall, paid no attention to his altered arm, or to Adam, calling up to him.
Adam climbed the rock, with difficulty. By the time he reached the flat top, Ray's feet were down on rock again, and his arm had regained a normal appearance. Adam noticed now that Ray was also missing his pack and weapons and canteen.
The huge man looked at Adam now, calmly and without surprise. "Ours," Ray said, raising an arm and pointing to the Ringwall. "Whenever we choose to take it. And after that, the Field. And, after that, the universe."
"Merit says you killed—"
Ray interrupted, his loud voice riding over Adam's as if he were not aware that anyone might be speaking. "I was wrong, before, when I thought that a greater race than ours might come after us. That would be impossible. I see now that we are the ultimate peak of evolution. I could have allowed pure-bred Jovian children to exist, for they could never have become our superiors. Never. But… it's best after all that we've waited for them. All my decisions are for the best. When this little war is over, we will have a time of peace. There'll be time enough for children then."
Adam grabbed at Ray, seized the arm that a moment ago had been stretched. In his grasp it felt quite human and normal now, plain flesh and bone. "You and the others killed Vito? Why?"
"Easy, Ad. Take it easy." Ray pulled his arm roughly away. "We had to spank Merit, but she'll be all right in a little while. You don't know yet what it is to be a Jovian. So don't try to tell me what to do."
"Spank her?" Adam could hear panic in his own voice. "What are you talking about? Who do you mean, we?"
Had the Field-builders somehow managed to drive Ray mad?
"Our ship's up there, now." Ray pointed overhead; listened to word by word, he sounded rational, as firmly in control of himself and of events as always. "Merit fought us, over that human husband of hers, and so we had to discipline her. I should never have allowed her to have him, to begin with—but she'll get over it. She'll be all right, soon."
Adam backed up, getting as far from Ray as he could on the little plateau. The river roared at the rocks below, not caring what people did.
Why do you kill each other with such enthusiasm?
Ray was looking at him now with an expression of—well, of annoyance. And meanwhile one of Ray's legs was beginning to elongate, doubling up under the big man's massive body. Ray shifted his balance, putting his weight on the other leg, but otherwise he did not appear to notice the new change.
Ray said to Adam: "Don't look so shocked. Remember, Ling was only human."
"Only human."
"Yes." Ray nodded soberly, as if he considered that he was making quite a serious point. "And he was keeping Merit away from us. Away from me especially. And what if she had become pregnant by him, and carried such a hybrid to term? That was a possibility, you know. Interbreeding is still possible, and the purity of the Jovian race must be preserved. She'll be glad, when she finally understands what it means to be a Jovian. Yes, the purity of the race must be preserved." A shadow crossed Ray's face, and he raised his voice. "I tell you, don't look that way at me! After all, we once did the same for you."
The river thundered in Adam's ears.
Alice.
Chapter Eighteen
For combat Brazil was buttoned into his boarding capsule, melded with the machine into a semi-robot that along with a swarm of others like it had been fired out of the flagship into the sunlit vacuum of six hundred kilometers altitude above the Ringwall, where it now clung, a leech among other leeches, to the huge hull of the Jovian ship. Instruments now reported to Boris Brazil, the man inside this particular semi-robot, that one of its metal arms was gone now, burned or blown away already and that the temperature of the capsule's outer surface had risen well past the melting point of lead.
The heat inside the Colonel's capsule was still survivable. It was the hole in the armored hull of it, near his left foot, that might be going to finish him. Something had pierced the capsule at its foot, and had come through the leg of the armored suit the Colonel wore inside it, and clobbered his own left foot and ankle. The suit's hypos and tourniquet had bitten him. Flesh and blood had no business, he thought, mixing into this kind of a fight.
The capsule had sealed itself again around him, and Brazil had no time to worry about his numbed leg. Now he was scrambling his boarding capsule, under semi-automatic control, over the surface of the Jovian "s hull, probing for some weak spot where he could hang on successfully and start trying to dig in. At the same time he was trying to coordinate the similar activities of the rest of the boarding party, which was under his command.
Until about half an hour ago, the Jovians on their ship had behaved like relatively sane people, talking calmly if a bit unreasonably to the three Space Force ships confronting them, while the four of them rode together in formation around the planet, leaving the dawn terminator behind them and keeping the Ringwall below.
Then a disturbance had erupted inside the Jovian ship. It had begun, as far as the Space Force listeners could tell, suddenly. First there was the background noise of verbal wrangling, coming plain over the communications channel open between the ships. Then there were sounds of some more violent trouble.
It began with one voice, that was heard over the radio channel for the first time as it broke into a wrangle over space law and the rights of travelers, crying jubilantly: "We've done it, we've killed with our minds alone!"
Then protest, from other voices, equally fierce and sudden:
"It's wrong!"
"And what of the reaction, have you thought
of that?"
But the protestors had been obviously a minority aboard the Jovian, for they were shouted down. Then pandemonium. They had forgotten to turn off their radio transmitter over there, or they had scorned to do so, or else they had deliberately wanted the human world to hear. To Boris and other outsiders listening, it was as if everyone aboard the Jovian ship had suddenly got drunk, or gone mad.
"For the purity of the race!" one voice, a woman's, had cried out from there, exultantly. And on that note the Jovians, or their prevailing majority, had started the firefight without warning, aiming what must have been everything they had at Lorsch's flagship. The flagship was hurled a hundred and fifty kilometers away, her outer hull punctured in spite of ready defenses, and three of her crew killed instantly.
Lorsch had driven her ship back as fast as possible to where the others were roasting each other, and her three ships had clamped on to the Jovian with forcefields, the flagship using all the power of her space-bending engines, so that the four ships hung locked together now, like atoms in some giant molecule.
While their computers fenced, striking at one another with their flickering hammers of weaponry, women and men huddled in their cocoons of metal and padding, waiting for computers to present them with the next decision that could be made slowly enough for humans to have competency.
General Lorsch made one such decision, and the boarding party was launched, led by yesmen in the first six capsules. The Jovians' smaller weapons picked out and destroyed the yesmen, and killed or wounded the first six human beings to launch, Brazil among them, before any of the boarders reached the enemy hull. And here and there, in a capsule-cocoon that had been penetrated by no apparent physical force, a Space Force man or woman burned silently and perhaps painlessly to death.
To Boris, the battle was experienced largely as electronic signals inside his capsule, and the movements he made with the capsule's inhuman limbs; the gabble of question and answer and noise inside his helmet, and heat and shock and pain. And the gradual conviction that his left foot and ankle were completely gone.
In his helmet a voice said, at intervals: "We're holding, we're holding." The Colonel understood what the voice meant: the engines of the Space Force ships, acting as generators now, were standing the overload of combat, resisting the enemy, and striking at him with weapons of heat and force and disruption, powers like something out of the heart of a sun.
And the enemy was still resisting too, and still hitting back hard, but it seemed that he could spare none of his incredible strength to pick the metal gnats of the boarding party from his armored surface.
Each metal gnat was protected from Space Force weapons by its own friend-or-foe radar beacon; the racing combat computers on the big ships picked the tiny voices of friendship out of the inferno of battle noise, and channeled their violence elsewhere—at least, so matters went in hopeful theory. Practice, to Boris, was being bounced off the hull time and again, when something heavy hit nearby, then getting back to the hull again with his capsule's jets, and scrambling again for a hold.
He was bounced off again, more violently than before, and coming back saw on his capsule's viewscreen a red-rimmed dark hole, a couple of meters in diameter, piercing the smooth bright Jovian hull just ahead of him.
"Breach! Breach!" someone else was shouting, having spotted the hole at the same time.
"Thor, this is Bee, we are entering a breach," Boris called back to the flagship, giving the machine called Fire Control the information that fragile friendly human flesh was about to do just that.
"We're gaining!" shouted the voice that usually said We're holding—the voice of someone who watched an indication of the total force being exerted by the Jovian. The enemy had been hurt now—either that or he was faking, pretending weakness, gathering his strength for an even greater effort to come.
Brazil led his boarding party into the torn-open hull, hoping to stay alive, trying to take the enemy alive. Weapons ready, he scrambled his capsule forward through a slick patch of still semi-molten metal, into the breach.
"You killed Alice. You were behind everything they did to her." Adam spoke as he stood facing Ray on the flat rock, with the wide river roaring below them and the Ringwall looking down.
Ray looked at him calmly, and made a slight dismissive gesture. "Oh yes. Your wife. But never mind that now. We knew best. You have to admit that we always know best." The answer was delivered almost absently, as if Ray were overwhelmingly distracted. Even before he finished speaking he had turned his face partly away from Adam, and was looking up at the Ringwall again.
Ray said: "The Field-builders are in there, with their victims—and they're aware of us out here. Aware at this moment of me here, looking in at them… but our ship is overhead—did I tell you that?" He looked back at Adam, calmly and inquiringly.
Adam stared back. Even rage had to pause. "You've forgotten telling me that, two minutes ago?"
Ray blinked at him, as if Adam's question had no possible relevance. Then Ray, as if continuing with some subject already under discussion, said: "It was years ago when we first began to weed the human garden. For a time, a long time, we were too conservative. We removed only certain very objectionable people—the power-mad, the organizers of hate groups and of crime syndicates—obscene little creatures, unworthy even of our true human ancestors. Then gradually we began to feel more confident, and to do more.
"From now on, we will do more still. You of course were wrong to mate with a human female. But you didn't know then that you were Jovian. We can forgive you."
"You—can forgive me Alice."
Ray ignored the answer. "We were right, of course, to dispose of her. But I see now that we were in—can I call it error?" He shook his head, muttering for a moment to himself. "Of course I can call it error, I can say whatever I like…"
He looked closely again at Adam, and for a moment Ray's old infectious grin was visible. Then the grin as gone, replaced by—something else. A look that would have gone better with a long, scaly neck. "… in error, in our choice of methods. Hired physical violence." Ray's voice expressed contempt, and he shook his head. "You foiled the attempt on Ling in Stem City, and I'm glad now that you did. The use of such means is really beneath us. Now, after we have killed with our minds alone, I understand that… I think my intellect is growing tremendously now, hour by hour, even minute by minute… now I understand that, and now I see the true glory of… of… what was I saying?"
A pebble fell, from out of the clear blue sky. Adam saw it clearly as it fell, as it struck Ray on the shoulder and bounced off to come to rest with minor clatter on the huge flat rock where they were standing.
Ray looked up, puzzling at the sky with slow, vague eyes.
The mighty intelligence was crumbling, the godlike powers falling in upon their center. Adam watched the collapse with cold rejoicing, violent hatred.
Adam said: "Damn you to hell, you deserve what you're getting!"
"Ohhh?" Ray again tore his gaze down from the Ringwall. And now, for the first time since Adam had climbed up on the rock with him, he gave Adam his full attention. Ray's body came jerkily back to normal shape, the elongated leg restoring itself as in some dream, or some conjuror's trick.
Ray said: "One thing you must remember, one thing about being a Jovian. It is that I am your leader, and I am always right. If you dispute that, you must and will be disciplined. We have begun with Merit. I think that it will be preferable to destroy her personality entirely, and then rebuild—"
A trigger pulled in Adam's brain, sending him two steps forward, left, right, and then the front snap kick with the left foot, snapped faster than the eye could follow.
Ray moved almost as fast, and very lightly for all his bulk, sidestepping perfectly. He smiled pityingly, and shook his head. "Adam, Adam, will I have to rebuild you too? How can you hope to fight a telepath physically? One who is bigger and stronger than you are?
"I think I will remove both you and Merit to
the ship, and begin the process there, as soon as the difficulty with the human ships is over." Ray squinted up into the misty sky. "That should be soon now." He turned his back on Adam again to gaze up at the Ringwall. "Later I can return to deal with the—creatures—who live there." Without looking Ray dodged Adam's chop at the back of his neck. Then the huge man spun around, avoiding a driving knee, and swung.
Adam saw the enormous fist coming at him, and thought he had it ducked, but it seemed to swing lower, following the movement of his head. There was a flash in his head and his consciousness was gone—
—for what must have been only a second or two; he found himself rolling onto his back, hands and feet ready for defensive work. There was a numb fogging pressure on his mind, and his eyes were blurring.
Ray was standing back, calm and safe, talking and talking, delivering a lecture:
"—acting like a human—cannot condone—"
Ray, Ray, who was Ray? Alice's killer, Merit's tormentor, freely confessed, standing there in front of him. Adam rolled up into a catlike crouch, and heard himself muttering the gutter words and threats of his childhood. In a few seconds the cold computer in his head was clear enough, the body ready. He started forward in a half-crouch.
"You cannot fight a telepath in such a way." Ray was leaning forward, speaking very distinctly, as if to a child. Then a shade of alarm crossed his face and he started his dodging motion in time to avoid the first kick and the second. Then he parried the smashing backfist strike with his forearm, and launched a kick of his own that Adam was expecting and easily avoided.
There was not much room on the little table of rock for stalking, the cold computer commented unhappily to Adam. He moved in again on Ray, and saw knowledge of his own intentions in Ray's eyes, knowledge disregarded by Ray's supreme confidence.
Adam threw another combination of kicks and blows. Again Ray could not totally avoid the final impact, though he almost succeeded in dodging it, so much of the force was lost. But the last kick caught him just above the knee. This time Ray's counterpunch went only halfway before he jerked it back, just in time to keep from being grabbed by arm and shoulder, levered off his feet, and slammed down onto rock.
The Golden People Page 18