by David Drake
Slade cursed, very softly. Then he stepped into the building the three soldiers had just left.
The interior was much like that of the first dive Slade had entered, though the greeter here was male. “Good day, sir,” the local said from his chair. “How can we help you?”
The automated bar in this entry lounge was unoccupied. Slade had been concerned that the hundreds of outlaws would overwhelm Toler with consequent disaster, but the cribs and dives were in adequate supply. What they did in the long intervals between landings was another question. For that matter, most freighters would have a score or fewer crewmen. Only fifteen of GAC 59’s complement were actually Levine’s men. “Stim cones?” Slade asked through dry lips.
The greeter shrugged. “Sorry, not on Toler,” he said. He gestured to the bar. “There’s alcohol, of course. And the sorm.”
“Yeah,” said the tanker. He opened the right-hand door and entered the sorm parlor he had expected to find there. “I’m not a coward,” he said, but the sounds Slade’s lips and tongue formed were too soft for even the speaker to hear them.
“Yes, sir?” said a local, one of the two men within the good-sized room. The other man wore ship’s coveralls. Blaney, Slade thought his name was, one of the drive operators. The man lay on one of six narrow couches. He was flaccid except for rhythmic shudders moving from his torso to his extremities.
“He’s all right?” the tanker asked. His finger traced the path of undulations. Slade was trying desperately to keep his voice normal.
“Certainly,” said the attendant without a sneer or condescension. He was changing the covering of the end couch. The cushion was overlaid with a thin, hard sheet that might have been either vegetable or synthetic. A pair of used sheets lay crinkled on the floor. “The sorm makes his muscles shudder at intervals to keep up their tone. Not that there’s any need for that in a short touch, but the plant does its best for its clients.” The attendant gave Slade a glass-smooth smile. “After a time,” he added, can work perfectly well without uncoupling, you see.”
The attendant’s own tendril waggled back to the wall as he tucked in the sheet.
There was a grommetted hole in the cushion. It was at about the point where a man’s neck would rest if he lay supine on the couch. The sheet covered that hole, but the material was too thin to stop a tendril probing up, through it and skin and into the base of the brain. “I see,” said the tanker. He was sure his voice was squeaking. “How much does a touch cost?”
“The first is free,” said the attendant. He gathered up the used sheets and stuffed them into a chute in the wall beneath his tendril. “After that—” the local man turned around. “You’re from Friesland, sir?”
“I’ve been there,” Slade answered guardedly.
“Then the equivalent of thirty Frisian talers per touch,” the attendant explained with a smile. “The length varies. This man and two others were touched at the same time.” He gestured at Blaney. The crewman was quiescent again after his bout of “exercise.” “The others have left—not dissatisfied, I’m sure. But this man’s mind permitted a greater level of interaction with the sorm, and consequently even greater—pleasure—for the client.”
The local man must have correctly interpreted Slade’s grimace, for he shook his head at the tanker and added gently, “No, Captain Slade. The client can sever the connection at will.” The attendant arched his neck back slightly as if he were baring his throat to a razor.
“No!” said the tanker. “No, I’ve seen that, you don’t have to show me again.” Then he said, “You know my name, friend?”
The local man’s body relaxed. There may have been a hint of relief in his expression. “We aren’t peasants here on Toler, Captain Slade,” he said with dignity. “Our culture doesn’t lend itself to crystal and metal, but we have a very satisfactory data bank. The Port Commandant entered information on our visitors, and the information was made available to potential users. You are, of course, a noteworthy man.”
In a sharper tone of voice, the attendant went on, “You don’t have to stand here and feed your fears, Captain. You can walk away. There’s no sin in being afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” said Slade harshly. “I just lie down here?” He sat, swinging his legs onto the nearest couch, even as the attendant nodded agreement.
The sheet rustled beneath Slade’s neck. The big man relaxed all his muscles. He had been operated on without anesthetic. This pain would be nothing.
But the pain had nothing to do with his fear, either. Hairs prickled as something brushed past them, but even so Slade did not feel any touch on his skin proper. Then a sense of euphoria swept away every other feeling. He was still aware of his former fears, but his mind held them up to his detached appraisal and his laughter.
Slade slipped deeper into an outside awareness with the ease of a diver entering a blood-warm lagoon.
The attendant had been quite truthful about Toler’s data bank, but the statement was a joke as well. The sorm’s joke, in a way, because the sorm colony connected all those humans who were in fact that data bank.
The tree had developed its properties as a means of ensuring pollination and good planting locations on a dry and windswept world. Some of the runners by which the sorm colonies spread learned—and the term could not be understood to imply intellection—to contact the nervous systems of small burrowing animals. This gave the adapted sorms a degree of mobility unmatched by any other plants on the world. Moreover, as a colony added symbiotes, it gained a level of consciousness which no single animal mind could equal.
The adapted colonies spread and flourished. Tendril-dragging animals scampered from anther to distant pistil. When the symbiosis became more complete, animals could carry out tasks without being in immediate contact with the sorm. They would return after they had scrambled over barriers to plant nuts or whatever other task had been set them. It was less the attitude of a junkie seeking another fix than it was the thankful longing of a laborer returning home after a hard day. The result was a true and flawless partnership for the individual animals and for the sorm species as a whole.
The human settlement of Toler provided an increase of potential knowledge and reasoning power of a magnitude which humans had taken several million years to develop. That the amalgam outstripped in its way any single human was inevitable. And that the amalgam none the less resembled a human society was perhaps also inevitable. After contact, the Toler colony needed further human contacts to survive; and in any case, the amalgam built from the instincts and memories of its animate partners.
The sorm’s problem was that its symbiotes could not reproduce themselves. Male symbiotes lost the capacity to ejaculate and, after a few days or weeks of linkage, no longer even produced sperm. By the time the symbiosis was complete enough for the sorm to guide its partner in the complex operation, the animal was sterile.
Ovulation was not affected, perhaps because its cyclic nature recovered more quickly from suppression of hormones which the sorm’s touch entailed. Prostitutes—female members of the colony in estrus—provided an indigenous birthrate when the sparse interstellar traffic cooperated. Recruits directly from that traffic made up the rest of the colony’s requirement.
Slade’s body trembled. His muscles massaged themselves and squeezed the blood in his veins back to feed his heart’s slow pumping. Slade was unaware of that movement save as a datum reported through the eyes of the smiling attendant.
The Toler colony never stripped a visiting ship. It was common on any port for one or two of the crew to go missing: jailed or floating in a ditch or simply jumping ship to await a better berth on a future vessel. On Toler, the minds that stayed behind in blissful comfort were those with a particular sharpness of focus which fused best with the structure of the sorm. They were not always the minds that would have rated highest in human tests of intelligence, though that was often a concomitant.
And all but the core of Slade’s being rejoiced to know that his was
one of the minds that would be permitted to merge with the colony.
The feeling was not simply that of drug euphoria or the instant before orgasm, though it encompassed those things. There was also an enormous sense of physical well-being and the triumphant riding-down of an opponent. There was no dream quality to Sladeperceptions. They had the clarity of cells in a diamond lens. The tanker was barred from the control of his own body only by his multiplicity of viewpoints as a part of the sorm colony. The physical Don Slade was a needle among thousands of needles, safe and discrete but unnecessary for the moment.
“I am,” insisted Slade’s being. “I am.”
And of course he was, healthy still and happier than every man who had not been to Toler, had not merged with the sorm. But Slade’s mind was drawing away, plunging toward the roiling sea of Tethys.
Slade hit the surface and tendrils of the sorm recoiled from the droplets of the harsh gray salt. A shudder wracked the tanker’s body. His arms drove him upward, clutching madly for the spray-drenched air.
Slade had fallen off the couch. The big man hyperventilated. His arms swam several flailing strokes before consciousness reasserted itself. “Blood and Martyrs,” he wheezed as he stared at the impassive attendant. “Blood and Martyrs!”
Blaney was trembling again on the next couch. There were tiny speckles of blood on the sheet on which Slade had lain. Through the hole in the sheet gently quested the sorm tendril. Its tip was not a single tube as Slade had expected. It was a brush of tiny filaments, now drawn to a ghostly point and slick with fluids from Slade’s neck.
Slade rocked to his feet. His limbs worked. He had his sense of balance. Don Slade had a body and soul once more. He gave the attendant an open-handed slap that rocked the smaller man against the wall without stunning him as it should have. Slade’s hand throbbed beneath its calluses.
The tanker strode through the door and the lobby, then back into the street. The greeter’s expression had the same drugged calm as the attendant’s when Slade recovered from the couch.
There was some activity around the ship when Slade returned. The tanker had seen no sign of food-shops, now that he thought about it. Hunger must have driven back at least some of the outlaws. At the entry hatch stood one of the crewmen with a ration packet in his hand.
“Get me Levine,” Slade said. They were his first words since his whispered prayer in the sorm parlor. “It he’s not on board, raise him through his implant.”
“Implant?” the crewman repeated as if he had never heard of a bio-electrical commo link implanted in the user’s mastoid. Maybe he hadn’t. This ship was crewed by trash as ignorant as most of its passenger list.
“Via!” the tanker snarled. He strode aboard with his boots clanging on the deck and short shrift for the man who had half-blocked his way. “He’s got some sort of radio with him, doesn’t he?”
Captain Levine was scurrying down the corridor toward Slade already.
“Slade, praise heaven I’ve found you,” the spacer called. “We have troubles!”
“Curst true we’ve got troubles,” the tanker agreed. He looped Levine in an arm to turn the smaller man back to the bridge with him. “Sound recall, however you do that, and we’ve got to lift ship fast.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Levine insisted. “We can’t lift ship. I haven’t got enough crew.”
Slade took his arm away from the spacer. “Come on,” he said quietly. “We may as well talk on the bridge anyway. Tell me about the problem.”
“It’s the sorm trees,” Levine explained as he scurried along. “You know about them?”
Slade’s brief nod was all the affirmation he trusted himself to make.
“Well, a lot of my boys went under and didn’t come back,” the captain explained. “They seem all right—” The pair of leaders entered the bridge where three nervous-looking spacers already waited. “But they won’t rouse for shaking or cold water. The attendants just shrug and look away.”
“Right,” Slade said. He glanced around the four spacers. “You tried it? Tried the sorm?”
“I did,” said one man slowly. “It didn’t make anything to me. I mean, I just felt good. But my buddy’s still there on the table.” He waved generally toward the settlement beyond the bulkhead.
“This isn’t a ship that—” Levine began. “Well, we need three people each in Navigation and Drive when we Transit. The controls aren’t slaved to one master, each unit’s separate and it has to be synched within parameters. Right now we’ve got a shift in Drive, but only me and Keltie in Navigation. And look, you don’t run with a single shift very long. Shift and shift’s bad enough.”
“All right, sound recall anyway,” the tanker said. “You’ve got a siren or something, don’t you? I know where Blaney is, at least. I’ll round up half a dozen mercs and see what I can do.”
The big man paused in the hatchway on his way to the hold where the arms were stored. “And Levine?” he said. “Wait for me to come—no, you come along too. I wouldn’t want to get back here and find the ship had left me in this hellhole. And believe me, the people who left me would live to regret it too.”
And even without reading Slade’s mind, no one who heard him could doubt the truth of that threat.
Slade had no difficulty finding the building in which the sorm had touched him. He might not have been able to give directions, however, to find it in the skewed checkerboard of identical walls. The building’s door was now closed.
“Should I blast it?” demanded Blackledge. Slade had picked the first outlaws he met to accompany him and the captain. The other mercs carried pistols or submachine guns. The big tanker himself had chosen a 2 cm shoulder weapon this time.
“No,” said Slade. He kicked at where he judged the latch would be, though nothing was visible from the outside. The panel exploded inward ahead of the tanker’s boot-heel.
The greeter had disappeared, leaving the lobby empty. There was a small hole in the wall above the greeter’s arm-chair, but the tendril was gone also. Slade had taken a certain pleasure in kicking the door down. Before he could smash into the sorm parlor the same way, however, the attendant opened the door from within. The local stepped back. “Your pleasure, sirs?” the man asked.
“Blaney,” said Slade. He strode through the door with his gun in a patrol sling, muzzle forward. He did not expect that kind of trouble here, but he would have welcomed the excuse to open up. The crewman lay much as Slade had left him. “How do we bring him back?” Slade demanded. “Fast, and no cop. We’re right on the edge here, you know it yourself.”
The remainder of the group was filing into the parlor. They were nervous, even the three like Blackledge and Slade whose necks were scabbed from a tendril puncture. Their hands tightened on their guns as the attendant said, “The client can separate at will, Captain Slade. You know that. There is no other way to separate him that will not cause the individual’s death.”
“Cop!” said Blackledge. He slid a long knife from his boot. His left hand gripped Blaney’s hair and drew the crewman’s head off the couch. The tendril slid further through the cover sheet without relaxing its hold on the comatose human.
“Wait, please,” said the attendant. The local man’s voice held emphasis but no real concern. “If the trunk is injured or the root severed, the orphaned filaments will—”
Blackledge drew his blade across the tendril. The knife had a razor edge, and the steel was density-enhanced to retain that keenness. The cut ends of the root flipped up with a drop of sap on either of them.
Blaney spasmed on the couch like a pithed frog. His jaw was opening and clopping shut again to pass gulping sounds. That was not an attempt to scream, nor were his arms trying to wave help closer as they flailed. The brain itself has no pain receptors.
The thrashing stopped. Blaney lay still. His eyes were open and his body was as flaccid as if his skin were filled with hot wax. The crewman’s face was growing freckled. Then the tips of the fila
ments waved through in a hundred places above the skin, gleaming with blood.
One of the outlaws screamed and emptied his submachine gun into the attendant’s body. The cyan flashes lighted the close room and heated it in a gush of vaporized flesh. The local man slumped. His eyes were calm until they glazed. As the outlaws bolted from the sorm parlor, the tendril withdrew from the attendant’s neck. It whisked itself back within the bolt-scarred stone.
Slade’s finger was on the trigger as he stood, alone of living men, within the parlor. He did not fire.
The black-haired man was not even particularly angry as he walked back into the street. The sorm had its ways, just as Don Slade had his. The sorm had caused some difficulties just now by being the way it was, but the weather did that . . . and only fools got mad at the weather.
The trick in this case was going to cause some difficulties right back for the sorm. That was a lot more useful than losing your temper and going berserk.
The refrain trailed again through Slade’s mind: “Down to the bottom of the sea!”
The wail of the ship’s siren had gathered in most of the complement by the time Slade returned to the vessel. The bridge hatch was closed. Slade had to hammer on it and shout his name into a sound-plate before a crewman would admit him.
“Slade,” said the harrassed-looking Captain Levine. “I think we’ll be all right if we’re left alone for a while. M’kuru here knows a little about navigation—” one of the four Drive crewmen nodded to Slade— “and I’m giving him a crash course that’ll let us lift. After what happened in there, I’d say the quicker we all got off here, the better we were. Even with a short crew.”
“No,” said the tanker simply. “We’re going to get your people back.” A tic lifted a corner of his mouth. “Not Blaney, but the others. I’ve been into the system.”