by Simon Hawke
I let out my breath slowly. "Higgins, you're a maniac."
He grinned at me. "And you're a couple of psychos. Fine bunch we make!" The sled gave a sudden lurch. "Uh-oh ..."
He instantly became serious and stabbed at the console, rapidly flicking switches on and off, checking the instruments, his mouth drawn in a tight grimace. I wasn't reassured by the sight of all the flashing lights that had not been there before.
"What the hell is happening?" I yelled at him, over the wind blast.
"We've got a problem!" he shouted back.
He hit the switch to slide the canopy back over us again, cutting out the wind blast and making the various little flashing lights and warning alarms that much more ominous as their rapid beeps became audible.
"Looks like we're running out of fuel," he said.
"What? Out here in the middle of nowhere?"
"I can't understand it," he said. "The gauge shows full. And the stabilizers aren't responding, either."
He was struggling with the joystick as the sled pitched wildly, its jets spurting, cutting out. He grimaced as the controls became leaden and struggled to keep the sled's glide under control as it rapidly lost momentum.
"Shit, hang on!" he said through clenched teeth.
The undercarriage scraped, the sled rebounded, scraped again, and Higgins barely managed to get the nose elevated slightly before the tail section caught and slammed the body of the sled into the ground, sending out plumes of dust and dirt as it plowed a long furrow in the desert before coming to a shuddering stop.
Higgins leaned back against his seat, blood running down his face from a cut on his forehead. He took a ragged breath and let it out in a long and heavy exhalation. "Damn. We made it. I was afraid we'd tumble when we hit. That would've been a real mess. Is everybody all right?"
"We're all right back here," said Breck. "O'Toole?"
"Barely," I said. I turned on Higgins furiously. "Well, that sure was fun! Your stupid stunt going through that cactus forest was what probably damaged the damn sled!"
"No way," said Higgins emphatically. "We only scraped by a couple of those plants, just barely touched 'em. That wouldn't have been enough to rupture any of the fuel cells or cause a failure in the stabilizer system. Besides, the gauge was showing full! I can't understand it. I checked the sled myself this morning!"
"But I suppose anyone could've gotten to it since then," said Breck.
"Are you saying someone sabotaged it?"
"Someone or some thing," said Breck. "What sort of shape are we in?"
"Not good." Higgins stabbed at the buttons on the console. It was dead. He shook his head. "This sled isn't going anywhere. We've torn up the entire undercarriage. It's nothing but a pile of junk now."
He released the canopy, but it wouldn't open all the way. He swore and hammered at it several times, but it wouldn't budge.
"Great! We'll fry in here when the sun comes up."
"Allow me," Breck said.
He rose up in his seat, grabbed hold of the canopy, grunted, and shoved with all his might. There was the sound of metal buckling in protest, then it scraped back with a grating whine into the fully retracted position. I felt the cool night air on my face. The silence was eerie.
Higgins jumped down lightly to the ground, Breck and Tyla followed. I climbed down out of the cockpit, thinking back to the last time I was on Purgatory, when those crewmates of mine had gotten drunk and taken a sled out into the desert.,.
Higgins reached inside the cockpit and pulled out his small backpack, then he tossed our packs down. "Might as well start walking," he said.
"Wait a minute," I said. "What are you talking about? We're miles from anywhere! Wouldn't we be better off staying with the sled?"
"What for? There won't be any help coming," Higgins said, hiking the pack up onto his shoulders. "The locator beacon's out and we don't have any radios. Your people at Psychodrome could send for help, but even with tachyon broadcast, by the time anyone got out here to pick us up, about a dozen different things could happen to us, none of them very pleasant. We've got some nocturnal predators out here that could be dangerous, but the ones active during the day, you really wouldn't want to meet, believe me. We'd best try to make the high country before daybreak."
I could barely see the hills against the night sky. "We'll never make it," I said.
"Of course we will," said Higgins. "Remember, Tyla's people have lived out here for generations. She'll get us through."
I glanced at her, standing casually off to one side as if nothing unusual had happened, looking almost bored by our discussion. She was barefoot, dressed only in a hide skirt that was belted at the waist and fastened at the shoulder, leaving the opposite shoulder and both arms bare. It was crudely made from the skin of some native animal, light-colored, thin and supple, cut high on one hip to allow for freedom of movement. It was a garment meant to be purely utilitarian and not in the least bit decorative, though she looked terrific in it. Her lush, manelike hair hung long and loose, blowing in the wind. In the moonlight, her shadowed form standing with legs slightly apart, hair rippling in the wind and arms hanging loosely at her sides, she seemed like an archetype of the primal female. She certainly didn't seem worried. But then, she wasn't human, either.
"He's right," said Breck, checking his weapons and shouldering his pack. "It will be easier traveling on foot at night than during the day. Let's not waste any time. It seems someone doesn't want us to contact Tyla's tribe. Since we already know there are ambimorphs on Purgatory, I wonder what it is they don't want us to find out."
"I'll settle for finding out how we're going to get out of this alive," I said.
We started walking, heading toward the distant hills. Tyla led the way. She had a graceful, easy walk, springy and absolutely soundless. She placed one foot almost directly in front of the other, holding her body upright, sniffing the air on occasion as she walked. By contrast, I felt clumsy. The two small bright moons of Purgatory made the night a cool, shadowy blue rather than an impenetrable black. The figures of Tyla and Breck looked like ghostly shadows moving ahead of me. Higgins walked in the rear with me, no doubt to make sure I didn't straggle and get lost.
I was in good condition-or at least I thought I was-but after a while, the seemingly easygoing pace set by Tyla started to feel exhausting and I began to fall behind. Breck, of course, had no trouble keeping up with her. She could have sprinted and he'd probably have been able to run rings around her. However, what little solace my ego could have derived from the fact that Breck was superhuman and Tyla wasn't human at all was dissipated by Higgins, who wasn't tiring anywhere near as quickly as I was. Several times, he had to call out to Tyla in her native tongue as she and Breck started to get too far ahead. Then they'd stop and wait for us-for me-and I'd feel humiliated at the easy way she stood there, head cocked, watching me as I closed the distance between us. Then she would turn and go on at what seemed to be a slower pace, only to have me start falling behind again after about a mile or two.
Under other circumstances, I might even have enjoyed it. A little. Maybe. The ground sloped very gently upward as we headed toward the foothills. The wind was brisk and it was subtly perfumed with the piquant smells of the flowering scrub brush all around us and the short, grasslike growths with delicate stalks surmounted by whispy blooms rising out of the centers of the clumps. All around us was a lovely surreal vista in hues of blue and black and purple, eerie and peaceful save for the occasional piercing cry of some nightflyer giving warning of our presence. But I would have appreciated the primeval beauty of the Purgatory landscape more if we'd been able to turn back when we got tired.
Anyone tuning in to me would be feeling the apprehension of civilized urban man out of his element in the wild. The uncertainty of not knowing if we were going to make it, despite what Higgins said. The exhaustion of strenuous exercise in an atmosphere I wasn't used to. The surge of adrenaline with every sound that broke the utter stillness of the nig
ht. The fear of what might be lurking out there in the darkness.
Every now and then, Tyla would stop, her head held high, moving slightly back and forth, her nostrils flaring. She would hold her arm out, silently motioning us to keep still. Then, when the unknown danger had passed, we would go on again. After the first time, I asked Breck if he had smelled anything at all. He shook his head, saying, "It's difficult to separate the unfamiliar smells." The second time it happened, he shook his head again, frustrated at her ability to discern an odor he could not, and the third time, he finally sensed something.
"It's very faint," he said, sniffing the breeze. "Something rather musky. I was barely able to pick it up at all. It had to be a good distance away, because I could neither see nor hear anything. Her olfactory sense must be incredible. Do you have any idea what it was, Higgins?"
"If it was musky, it was probably a herd of unicorns," he said.
"A herd of what?" I said.
"Well, that's what we call them, anyway," Higgins said.
"It's a one-horned, antelopelike creature, quite small, only about knee-high, with long, very shaggy hair that stinks like you wouldn't believe. They're night grazers."
"They don't sound very dangerous," I said.
"Unless they charge and try to stick you with their horns, they aren't really. However, if you get a good whiff of one, the smell alone is liable to make you want to chop your nose off. It's also an irritant that gets into your eyes and mucous membranes. Burns like hell. The Nomads have learned to give them a wide berth. But the real danger is the sandcats that prey on the herds."
"Those are the nocturnal predators you mentioned?" I said, shifting the weight of my pack slightly as we walked.
Higgins nodded. "They're large, roughly the size of a lion or a tiger, only longer and leaner, built closer to the ground. They're all muscle and they're fast as hell. If one of them takes off after you, you'd better be a damn good shot, because you're not going to get a second chance. Incredibly ugly brutes."
"I think I've seen one," I said.
"What? Where?"
"No, no, not out here," I said quickly. "I meant the am-bimorph that attacked me back at Cody's Place. It assumed a shape like what you just described before Breck killed it."
"Then you were very lucky," Higgins said. "A sandcat could rip you apart in seconds. These ambimorphs must be amazing creatures. It seems to go against every scientific principle we know that they can take virtually any form, with no discernible difference, even on the microscopic level. It's got to take an incredible amount of energy for any creature to undergo a change like that."
"I guess so. Why? What are you getting at?"
"Simply that they have to have some limitations. No living thing I know of has an inexhaustible supply of energy and the mind boggles at the amount of energy that must be required for the ambimorphs to transmutate the way they do. They must have absolutely fantastic metabolic rates. And logic would suggest that the more they transmutate or shapechange, the more energy they'd need. You said they reproduce by fission?"
"Our people originally thought it could be something like binary fission," I said, "as with unicellular organisms, but now it looks as though they're not actually independent entities at all. The latest theory is that they're a sort of 'hive' of microscopic protoplasmic creatures, existing in a complex symbiotic relationship and functioning as a unit."
"In a sense, that's exactly what we are, as well," said Higgins, with a smile. "Our cells are simply not as flexible. I keep thinking about that footage you told me about, where the am-bimorph in human form suddenly seemed to explode into a flock of birds . . . exactly the same way Strang changed into a swarm of insects. Maybe that was more than transmutation. Has it occurred to you that it could have been the creature reproducing itself?"
I stared at him. "No. It couldn't be."
"Why not?"
"Because Breck and I both saw the creature shortly afterward. And it didn't look any different. I mean ... it wasn't smaller or anything ..."
My voice trailed off.
"You see my point, don't you?" Higgins said excitedly. "How would you know? It may be a multicellular organism that behaves as if it's unicellular, dividing like bacteria, by geometric increase, only at a much faster rate than any bacteria we've ever seen!"
"What are you saying, that the damn things are a disease!"
"No, what I'm suggesting is that it's possible they reproduce by multiple division, very much the same way that bacteria do. Similar to a disease, if you like."
"But if an ambimorph reproduced by multiple division," I said, "then it would follow that it would have to be much smaller after reproduction, wouldn't it? It couldn't possibly divide and still retain the same mass."
"No," said Higgins, "but how would you know simply by looking at it? There's more to mass than size, you know. There's also density."
I frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Take that ambimorph you saw back on Earth, the one that divided into a flock of birds and then re-formed once again in human shape. You say you saw it both before and after the transmutation. But suppose one or two of those birds didn't rejoin with the others to re-form into the same body once again? The difference in mass would have been very slight, perhaps not even noticeable, and even if there was a noticeable decrease in mass, the creature might have altered its density slightly to compensate for the loss."
I walked on for a few steps without saying anything, profoundly disturbed by the implications of what Higgins was suggesting.
"It's possible, isn't it?" said Higgins, the xenobiologist in him excited by the theory. "Then whatever part did not re-form with the main body would be much smaller. There would have to be enough of it to sustain a separate existence, because some of those insects Strang changed into-the ones who weren't incinerated by your blast-fell dead into the fountain, so we know there has to be some sort of minimum mass for the creature to sustain total separation from the parent colony, but the result would be a baby ambimorph!
"It could survive by adopting protective coloration," Higgins continued with excitement, "taking the shape of smaller creatures and avoiding unnecessary transmutation to conserve its strength while it grew . . . and considering what their metabolic rates must be and the amount of energy they must consume, their growth rate must be phenomenal! Considering all the energy they must burn up, how long could their lifespan be? There has to be a powerful reproductive imperative. They'd probably die if they didn't reproduce. Listen, O'Toole, that ambimorph you encountered back on Earth . . . after it had re-formed again, back into human shape, was there anything about it, the way it looked or acted, that suggested it could have been in a weakened condition?"
I remembered how Breck and I had trailed it, how Breck had run on ahead of me and entered the slum building the creature had gone into. It had taken on the form of a cyberpunk, connected with a young cyberpunk girl, and gone back with her to her apartment in the box warrens on the ground level of the city. A place to hide out and recuperate after reproduction? Breck had already gone inside by the time I got there. As I arrived, out of breath, I saw the cyberpunk girl leaving.
Breck had gone in; she had come out. I ran after her, drawing my gun and aiming, I yelled and she had turned around . . . and it was Stone's face that had looked back at me. Only Stone was dead. It all came back to me.
"Arkady! Don't! It's me, Stone!"
Coles was screaming in my mind, "O'Toole! Don't kill it! I want that thing alive!"
The creature spoke in Stone's voice. "Let me go, Arkady. Please. They'll hurt me."
It hadn't changed. Like "Strang," it could have transmutated into a cloud of insects and swarmed away. It could have turned into a flock of birds or some other sort of creature, they could change so quickly, but it hadn't. It had stood there, helpless, pleading with me and only Saqqara's assassins striking at that precise moment had allowed it to escape. It had not tried to fight back, nor had it killed Breck, choosing instead to k
nock him out and flee. Why? Because it had been in a weakened condition from reproducing? I remembered what the shapechanger had told us back on Draconis, about how consuming human flesh had made it violently ill. Maybe that was all that had saved Breck, its weakness and its fear of being incapacitated.
Had the creature used up its last reserves of strength by assuming Stone's form in a desperate gamble for its life? It had made only a partial change, only the face, since it had already been in the shape of a human female. Did it choose that tactic simply because it was the only option left to it, because it had strength enough only for a partial transformation?
"There was something, wasn't there?" said Higgins, watching me intently as he walked beside me.
"Yes," I said, slowly, "there was."
"I knew it! God, I wish I could examine one of those creatures!"
"I know someone who feels much the same way you do," I said, thinking of Coles. I had a feeling that if we ever got back alive, Higgins would probably come to regret his wish.
After a while, even the loquacious Higgins abandoned conversation in favor of conserving his energy. We'd been walking for hours, but it seemed like days. Sometimes we followed a desultory course, stopping for a while to let something pass by in the night that only Tyla could sense or making a detour around an unseen herd of night grazers, but for the most part, we kept heading steadily toward the high country.
The desert plains of Purgatory had a desolate magnitude about them that brought back memories of the red dust plains of Mars. I had spent much of my life in cities, but there was something about the vastness of a sweeping desert vista, the trackless scope of unpopulated country stretching out to the horizon that always instilled silence. It was humbling. It seemed somehow inappropriate for man to make his paltry noise out in the midst of all that pristine wilderness.
Perhaps that was why we always congregated in cities, responding to some primeval herding instinct. Maybe it was because we were frightened by the wilderness, not so much by the dangers there-because there were far more dangers in our cities-but because the wilderness put us in our place. It was difficult to stand out in the middle of a desert and say, "I am the Master." Your voice would sound so small.