The Fall of the Families

by Phillip Mann

  All the lights on the parent ship flashed on and then off and on again. It was an ancient farewell, like running colours up the mast.

  Pawl, snug in the cabin of the survival rocket with Odin close beside, saw the lights and waved and flashed his own cabin lights. Slowly the great ship above him turned and began to edge to a wider orbit. It would hold until Pawl was safely down.

  Pawl gave his whole attention to the descent. He was aware, as had been Cordoba and Tank and the other members of that first crew, of the moment when he broke through the planet’s psychosphere. Now the world was as aware of him as he was of it. And like Cordoba and Tank he felt a great upwelling of his creative powers. Things like flies with voices seemed to buzz in his head and he felt merry. “Soon be down there, little one.”

  At about the level of the canopies of the tallest trees, Pawl levelled off and began to look for where he should land.

  He cruised above valleys and lakes and watched the shadow of his ship rise and fall and dart as it traversed the contours of the land. He saw many ships parked below and wondered if the same compulsion that drove him had drawn them here. He wondered if those many pilots were also pioneers of the Craint, painted on the wall of their tower.

  Nothing moved except his shadow. Had he wanted to, Pawl could have located the ancient Fare-Thee-Well. But that was not his plan. He was looking for his own place. He was waiting for a sign, though he knew not what. He thought of Laurel, beautiful in her dark blue gown on the day they married, and wondered how she would have liked this still world. Would she have liked to dive into those dark mysterious pools which seemed to absorb the light rather than reflecting it?

  Away on the horizon something was happening. A beacon lit up. Pawl turned the small rocket in a full curve and headed towards it.

  It was one of the trees. It was behaving as Peron had described and as Pawl had seen in Tank’s sketches. Purple fire flowed from the ground up the stem of the tree in great systaltic bursts. The canopy was incandescent and trembling so that its outline was blurred.

  Pawl hovered some miles from the tree and watched it build to a crescendo. At its climax the tree radiated fire into the air, revealing patterns of stress in the sky. Pawl had to look away, even as the viewplates of the rocket darkened.

  And when he could look again he saw the colours of the tree fading like dye being washed from a pale fabric.

  At the base of the tree there was no waiting ship, but there was a clearing, and Pawl knew that this was his place.

  *

  The survival domes were a tribute to the designer’s art. An injured man with one arm could have erected them. First the domes were ejected from the ship. Then they began to inflate, breaking out of their containers. Joints sealed chemically. Gravity pegs dug deep into the soil of Thule until they found bedrock, and there anchored. A distillation plant orientated itself with respect to the sun and began to filter the air for its first drops of moisture. Pawl lowered one whole side of the rocket and trundled out the cases in which were stored food canisters, seeds, animal embryos, medicines, vivantes … anything a pioneer or a castaway might need to enable him to survive. Pettet had been nothing if not thorough.

  The wheels of the trolleys sank into the moist green earth and Pawl had to drag them, opening up a seam in the planet’s skin. He quickly found himself sweating, for the air was warm and heavy as though a tropical storm had just passed. But he did not feel lethargic. On the contrary, he felt vital and younger, and he laughed to himself as he strained to lift the wheels from the soft earth. He laughed at himself for he could have used the gravity sled to shift the load but he chose rather his own muscles.

  By evening the survival domes were complete and Pawl moved inside to prepare food. Odin was content to rest outside. He had shed completely his Inner Circle gown and now stood like a sheaf of red wheat with his basal tendrils dug deep into the soil. He would not speak, but Pawl was glad to see a deeper redness infuse his fibres as he drank in the planet. The upper flukes waved in the air like blind worms questing for food. Pawl knew that Odin was exploring with his mind.

  As the evening drew into night Pawl felt a tingling down the left hand side of his body. He went outside and found that the tree closest to him, the one under which he had camped, still maintained a faint luminescence.

  The feeling grew in Pawl that he was being watched and several times he looked over his shoulder, convinced that he had seen movement out of the corner of his eye at the edge of the small clearing. But he never saw anything.

  Until late in the night Pawl squatted outside his dome savouring the night. He watched in awe as the gibbous face of Erix rose and bathed the green world in soft purple shadow.

  Erix was looking at him too, thought Pawl. In his mind he likened the giant planet to a cat which stalks outside a mouse’s hole, ready to pounce but unable to reach in.

  When he could stand the eerie presence of Erix no longer, Pawl stood up and went inside. Within minutes he was asleep.

  He dreamed of Laurel – vivid dreams in which he relived moments of his life on Lotus-and-Arcadia and on his Homeworld – and in his dreams he was yet aware of himself sleeping. He saw the tall young man with the coiled dark hair and the fierce eyes and he saw the tired man who lay on his pallet.

  How had Laurel seen him? He awoke with that question on his mind, and when he opened his eyes and looked about he found it was day and a milky light was pouring in through the walls.

  Outside the air was crisp with just enough chill to bring him awake. The tree stood giant and alive, its upper trunk and canopy bathed in bright sunshine. It had the clarity of a painting and Pawl had the uncanny feeling that he could see round the tree. It seemed to him that it had become more real and that by contrast he and Odin and the survival domes and small ship were somehow less substantial.

  That day he explored the thick bush which surrounded his small camp. He found no trace of animals or insects but he did find fruit. He filled his shirt with soft furry green fruits and made his way back and when he reached the camp he found that Odin was moving.

  The creature spoke to him for the first time. The voice was a croak, like a voice from nightmare, but the feel of the thought was unmistakably Odin. “I am dying, Pawl. It will not be yet . . I hope it will rain today. Rain would ease both of us.”

  The voice vanished like an echo in a tunnel. Odin was again completely self-absorbed.

  In the evening it did rain. Water poured off the canopy of the tree in a curtain and sloshed down into the bush. During the night the sky became purple, as Erix made its presence felt. Dreams seized Pawl while he was yet awake. He saw Laurel crying as she spoke of the destruction of Thalatta …

  … and in the morning, when he awoke, he found that he had slept outside in the rain and he was cramped and creased as a rag and felt sick and dirty. The dirtiness was in his mind, some slime that he could not get rid of. He spent the day sitting inside his survival dome, staring at the ground, with his head in his hands.

  The sombre overcast day slipped past. In the early evening a pale watery sun appeared and brought some gold to the clearing. Still Pawl sat.

  And at evening when the sun did set, someone came tapping. She stepped across the clearing from the base of the tree and tapped against the dome wall with her soft white hands.

  Pawl lifted his head slowly and looked. There dimly through the wall he could see a shape. The webbed hand that rested against the wall of the dome was clear enough. Then the face came closer as though she was trying to peer inside.

  “Laurel.”

  47

  ON MORROW

  Although Pawl did not know it, at the same moment that Laurel stared through at him, the last and greatest alien war began. The two events were linked, not like cause and effect, but like music and mathematics. Both events were a signal of the same cosmic order.

  We are in the sewers on Morrow.

  The Spiderets have grown. They are not yet giants but they have grown enough. A f
ew minutes ago a patch of lace, dirty and torn, rose to the surface of the cloaca and tinkled for a few moments before it sank again. Its message was for the young Spiderets which hung clustered and dark round the main inspection vent. Someone is coming to inspect a blockage, the Lyre Beast has said, and now the Spiderets wait.

  *

  The Lyre Beast has done wonders to itself. It has spread through the stone tree, sometimes maintaining its unity by only one strand. So the white filament which gathers dust in the cupola at the very summit of the tree is yet the same beast that lies coiled in Dame Jettatura’s gymnasium and which occupies the same layout as the cables of the vivante and which recently rose in the sewers. It finds the tree most congenial, ideal for the contortions and knots and tensing that give it joy. Many times its music has been heard echoing in the transit shafts.

  Echoes in the sewer. A loud thumping. Someone is hammering at the heavy flanges which hold the trapdoor into the sewer in its place. With a sudden crunch the flanges move and then swing clear. The trapdoor is free. There is a clanking of chains and then, inch by inch, the heavy door is raised. Light peeps round its edges. The rubber-enclosed legs of two sturdy little men can be seen.

  While the trapdoor is still rising the Spiderets move. They dive through the opening, stinging as they run. To the two men in their heavy suits it is as though a giant brown cat has suddenly stuffed its paw out of the sewer. They are stung above the knee and fall and are rolled over the lip and down into the froth.

  The Spiderets spread through the sterile, white-tiled chambers of Sanitation Unit 3. Surprise is their main weapon. Where they meet the small technicians they jump and spit, and there is no battle. No alarm is raised. Above them the tree sleeps.

  Dame Jettatura can’t sleep. She has been an insomniac since she was a child. But tonight, just as she thought she was dropping off, she heard a tinkling once again, like distant wind chimes. Wind chimes! There weren’t any wind chimes on Morrow so far as she knew, unless Clarissa in one of her fads was trying to make the house more musical. Jettatura would see her about that in the morning. Wind chimes indeed. As bad as the Wong!

  Meanwhile, accepting the fact that she now would not sleep until dawn, Jettatura rose from her bed, donned her leotard, brushed her hair and then pinned it into a tight bun. She entered her gymnasium and performed a springy forward roll just to loosen her tight body. Then she climbed to her trapeze, which hung aslant waiting. She would tire her body into sleep. She swung away from the small platform and threw her legs forward to gain momentum. Up, up. With each swing she flew higher until she reached that point where her centrifugal force just matched her weight and she could sweep through the air, delighting in her freedom.

  The Lyre Beast heard the sound of the trapeze. It unwrapped and billowed out of the cupboard where it had lain.

  Jettatura was flying with her eyes closed. In this way she could imagine she was swooping from peak to peak like a silver bird lifted by mighty currents of air. Only when the trapeze naturally lost energy and the swoop became a mere swing, did she open her eyes. Below her she saw a giant billowing parachute with long rents in its fabric. It hung round the walls, even up to her small trapeze platform.

  It was not in Jettatura’s nature to scream; she just gripped more tightly the bar until her knuckles showed white. Then the sound of many bells struck her as the Lyre Beast billowed and stretched and strove with the rhythm of her swinging. A finger of lace reached out and touched the shiny mesh cable that supported the trapeze. The Beast was attempting to give the trapeze energy and the energy it transmitted was heat.

  The bar became hot in Jettatura’s hands. She kicked with all her might for the small platform but it was not enough and the pain became unbearable.

  It was not in Jettatura’s nature to scream, but she screamed as she let go and fell, turning, into the folds of the Lyre Beast. She tore through it and it thought it was under attack. It drew energy from all its tattered threads throughout the stone tree and the energy focused on Jettatura.

  She became, for a moment, what she had in her heart always wanted to be, incandescent. It was not pain she felt but a delirious discharge of energy as her cells transformed to minerals, fused and scattered.

  Far away in her own room, Clarissa turned in her sleep and the little attendants who slept with her muttered to themselves.

  High in one corner of the room a piece of lace which hung from the corner of a tapestry glowed briefly.

  Deep in the roots of the house the Spiderets were on the move. They touched one another and waved their feelers as they gave directions. Their intention was simple: to gain control of the tree. They trusted that the Lyre Beast would fulfil its part of the plan; to neutralize the main electronic circuits.

  One group swarmed up the transit chutes and came to the main powerhouse which was lodged where the great tree forked. The doors were closed.

  Another group climbed up to the Xerxes living quarters, but they found their way stopped by particle screens. They could move no further.

  A third group, looking for the headquarters of the guards, took a wrong turning down one of the side branches and the young Spiderets found themselves looking into the primitive living quarters occupied by the little men who serviced the stone tree.

  Where was the Lyre Beast? Why was it not paying attention now? Now, when the plan was beginning to balance. Young Spiderets found lace in the transit chutes and worried it and tore at it in an attempt to make the Lyre Beast act.

  That strange creature was in a state of shock. The concentration of its energies about the writhing Jettatura had stunned it. Lyre Beasts are creatures with a smooth and easy sensuality. Their passion rises with a million tiny bells and soundings. Not for them the crash and clatter of the Hammer’s sudden passion … though at the height of passion all differences fade.

  But it became self-aware again as it felt the urging of the young Spiderets. Its self-awareness embraced the whole tree. It ran power in the form of rapid vibration through its whole body to still the irritation.

  Circuits blew.

  Alarms clanged.

  Locks opened.

  Doors sealed.

  Pots fell.

  But all this was nothing. Most horrible of all was the destruction of the bio-crystalline brain which received part of the Lyre Beast’s charge. It blackened and twisted and coiled like strips of paper heated in a vacuum. It contracted too, dragging its connections out by the roots. Not all the brain was killed, but enough to maim the operation of the tree house.

  Many Spiderets died in that same moment of energy, but those that survived found their way open and they ran into the powerhouse. Others were able to storm the guard house, where a pitched battle took place. There was no Latani Rama to fight on the Xerxes side and the spirit of the blood-crazed Spiderets, who fought only to die, crushed the guards.

  The particle screen which closed the way to Dame Clarissa held. That lady, startled from her sleep, drew a sheet about her. She tried to contact Jettatura to find what all the fuss was but there was no reply. She noted that the particle screen circuits were all intact but that the vivante circuits were dark.

  Once, some generations earlier, there had been an earthquake on Morrow and that had led to the temporary disorientation of the tree. Vaguely Clarissa decided that this emergency must be similar. Never a dull moment, she thought as she fluffed her feathers, but she wished that someone would turn off the alarm bell. Finally she decided to go and see what was happening for herself.

  She slapped the little men awake (they would sleep through a bomb blast!) and sent them to find news and make chocolate and fetch some guards. One of the men turned off the particle screen before he left the room and Clarissa heard him scream in the corridor.

  Instinct rather than logic made her switch the screen back on. Then she crossed to the door frowning. // this was some sort of… .

  She saw the small Spiderets, each about the size of a football, packed in the corridor behind the sc
reen. They stared at her with their dull grape eyes and she saw their feelers move.

  Clarissa slammed the door and leant against it.

  She did not have time to think about the whys and wherefores; escape was the only thought. She crossed her room and entered the small chamber which housed the transit chute. That, at least, she knew was well-protected. Two of the little men tried to climb in beside her but she swatted them back.

  She tapped the code for the main control room and silently the transport pod closed and began to glide. Beneath her seat was a particle pistol and Clarissa released it and checked its charge. Like all the Xerxes matrons, Clarissa could handle a gun.

  The pod slid into the main control room and there were Spiderets everywhere, tearing at the fine equipment with their mandibles. The pod slowed but Clarissa urged it on and tapped out new coordinates. She felt an icy calm possess her, in which were mixed both pride and defiance. Fleetingly she wondered if this was how Jettatura felt all the time. Where was Jettatura …?

  The pod accelerated and dived. Once it hit something which left a red stain on the transparent roof. Stations flew past. Most were deserted. At some there was evidence of a fight.

  The pod hurtled on and then dived into darkness as it entered the thick lower walls of the tree. It began to slow and finally halted in a corridor of glass cases. All was silent here.

  Clarissa climbed out, her particle pistol held ready. The sheet flapped about her heels and she threw it off. “What need of such things?”

  She approached Dame Rex and saw her own reflection in the glass case. Then she heard in the distance a rustling. Quickly she opened the catches in the front of the case and swung its doors wide. She stepped in and stood beside Dame Rex. They were like mother and daughter.