The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Honath lost the other two by sight as soon as they crept into the dark shrubbery, but he could hear their cautious movements nearby. Nothing else in the gorge seemed to move at all, not even the water, which flowed without a ripple over an invisible bed. There was not even any wind, for which Honath was grateful, although he had begun to develop an immunity to the motionless ground beneath them.

  After a few moments, Honath heard a low whistle. Creeping sidewise toward the source of the sound, he nearly bumped into Alaskon, who was crouched beneath a thickly-spreading magnolia. An instant later, Mathilda’s face peered out of the dim greenery.

  “Look,” Alaskon whispered. “What do you make of this?”

  ‘This’ was a hollow in the sandy soil, about four feet across and rimmed with a low parapet of earth—evidently the same earth that had been scooped out of its center. Occupying most of it were three grey, ellipsoidal objects, smooth and featureless.

  “Eggs,” Mathild said wonderingly.

  “Obviously. But look at the size of them! Whatever laid them must be gigantic. I think we’re trespassing in something’s private valley.”

  Mathild drew in her breath. Honath thought fast, as much to prevent panic in himself as in the girl. A sharp-edged stone lying nearby provided the answer. He seized it and struck.

  The outer surface of the egg was leathery rather than brittle; it tore raggedly. Deliberately, Honath bent and put his mouth to the oozing surface.

  It was excellent. The flavor was decidedly stronger than that of birds’ eggs, but he was far too hungry to be squeamish. After a moment’s amazement, Alaskon and Mathild attacked the other two ovoids with a will. It was the first really satisfying meal they had had in Hell. When they finally moved away from the devastated nest, Honath felt better than he had since the day he was arrested.

  As they moved on down the gorge, they began again to hear the roar of water, though the stream looked as placid as ever. Here, too, they saw the first sign of active life in the valley: a flight of giant dragonflies skimming over the water. The insects took fright as soon as Honath showed himself, but quickly came back, their nearly non-existent brains already convinced that there had always been men in the valley.

  The roar got louder very rapidly. When the three rounded the long, gentle turn which had cut off their view from the exit, the source of the roar came into view. It was a sheet of falling water as tall as the depth of the gorge itself, which came arcing out from between two pillars of basalt and fell to a roiling, frothing pool.

  “This is as far as we go!” Alaskon said, shouting to make himself heard over the tumult. “We’ll never be able to get up these walls!”

  Stunned, Honath looked from side to side. What Alaskon had said was all too obviously true. The gorge evidently had begun life as a layer of soft, partly soluble stone in the cliffs, tilted upright by some volcanic upheaval, and then worn completely away by the rushing stream. Both cliff faces were of the harder rock, and were sheer and as smooth as if they had been polished by hand. Here and there a network of tough vines had begun to climb them, but nowhere did such a network even come close to reaching the top.

  Honath turned and looked once more at the great arc of water and spray. If there were only some way to prevent their being forced to retrace their steps—

  Abruptly, over the riot of the falls, there was a piercing, hissing shriek. Echoes picked it up and sounded it again and again, all the way up the battlements of the cliffs. Honath sprang straight up in the air and came down trembling, facing away from the pool.

  At first he could see nothing. Then, down at the open end of the turn, there was a huge flurry of motion.

  A second later, a two-legged, blue-green reptile half as tall as the gorge itself came around the turn in a single bound and lunged violently into the far wall of the valley. It stopped as if momentarily stunned, and the great grinning head turned toward them a face of sinister and furious idiocy.

  The shriek set the air to boiling again. Balancing itself with its heavy tail, the beast lowered its head and looked redly toward the falls.

  The owner of the robbed nest had come home. They had met a demon of Hell at last.

  * * * *

  Honath’s mind at that instant went as white and blank as the under-bark of a poplar. He acted without thinking, without even knowing what he did. When thought began to creep back into his head again, the three of them were standing shivering in semidarkness, watching the blurred shadow of the demon lurching back and forth upon the screen of shining water.

  It had been nothing but luck, not foreplanning, to find that there was a considerable space between the back of the falls proper and the blind wall of the canyon. It had been luck, too, which had forced Honath to skirt the pool in order to reach the falls at all, and thus had taken them all behind the silver curtain at the point where the weight of the falling water was too low to hammer them down for good. And it had been the blindest stroke of all that the demon had charged after them directly into the pool, where the deep, boiling water had slowed its thrashing hind legs enough to halt it before it went under the falls, as it had earlier blundered into the hard wall of the gorge.

  Not an iota of all this had been in Honath’s mind before he had discovered it to be true. At the moment that the huge reptile had screamed for the second time, he had simply grasped Mathild’s hand and broken for the falls, leaping from low tree to shrub to fern faster than he had ever leapt before. He did not stop to see how well Mathild was keeping up with him, or whether or not Alaskon was following. He only ran. He might have screamed, too; he could not remember.

  They stood now, all three of them, wet through, behind the curtain until the shadow of the demon faded and vanished. Finally Honath felt a hand thumping his shoulder, and turned slowly.

  Speech was impossible here, but Alaskon’s pointing finger was eloquent enough. Along the back wall of the falls, where centuries of erosion had failed to wear away completely the original soft limestone, there was a sort of serrated chimney, open toward the gorge, which looked as though it could be climbed. At the top of the falls, the water shot out from between the basalt pillars in a smooth, almost solid-looking tube, arching at least six feet before beginning to break into the fan of spray and rainbows which poured down into the gorge. Once the chimney had been climbed, it should be possible to climb out from under the falls without passing through the water again.

  And after that—?

  Abruptly, Honath grinned. He felt weak all through with reaction, and the face of the demon would probably be grinning in his dreams for a long time to come. But at the same time he could not repress a surge of irrational confidence. He gestured upward jauntily, shook himself, and loped forward into the throat of the chimney.

  Hardly more than an hour later they were all standing on a ledge overlooking the gorge, with the waterfall creaming over the brink next to them, only a few yards away. From here, it was evident that the gorge itself was only the bottom of a far greater cleft, a split in the pink-and-grey cliffs as sharp as though it had been riven in the rock by a bolt of sheet lightning. Beyond the basalt pillars from which the fall issued, however, the stream foamed over a long ladder of rock shelves which seemed to lead straight up into the sky.

  “That way?” Mathild said.

  “Yes, and as fast as possible,” Alaskon said, shading his eyes. “It must be late. I don’t think the light will last much longer.”

  “We’ll have to go single file,” Honath added. “And we’d better keep hold of each other’s hands. One slip on those wet steps and—it’s a long way down again.”

  Mathild shuddered and took Honath’s hand convulsively. To his astonishment, the next instant she was tugging him toward the basalt pillars.

  The irregular patch of deepening violet sky grew slowly as they climbed. They paused often, clinging to the jagged escarpments until their breath came back, and snatching icy water in cupped palms from the stream that fell down the ladder beside them. There was
no way to tell how far up into the dusk the way had taken them, but Honath suspected that they were already somewhat above the level of their own vine-web world. The air smelled colder and sharper than it ever had above the jungle.

  The final cut in the cliffs through which the stream fell was another chimney. It was steeper and more smooth-walled than the one which had taken them out of the gorge under the waterfall, but narrow enough to be climbed by bracing one’s back against one side, and one’s hands and feet against the other. The column of air inside the chimney was filled with spray, but in Hell that was too minor a discomfort to bother about.

  At long last Honath heaved himself over the edge of the chimney onto flat rock, drenched and exhausted, but filled with an elation he could not suppress and did not want to. They were above the attic jungle; they had beaten Hell itself. He looked around to make sure that Mathild was safe, and then reached a hand down to Alaskon. The navigator’s bad leg had been giving him trouble. Honath heaved mightily and Alaskon came heavily over the edge and lit sprawling on the high mesa.

  The stars were out. For a while they simply sat and gasped for breath. Then they turned, one by one, to see where they were.

  There was not a great deal to see. There was the mesa, domed with stars on all sides and a shining, finned spindle, like a gigantic minnow, pointing skyward in the center of the rocky plateau. And around the spindle, indistinct in the starlight.…

  …Around the shining minnow, tending it, were Giants.

  * * * *

  This, then, was the end of the battle to do what was right, whatever the odds. All the show of courage against superstition, all the black battles against Hell itself, came down to this: The Giants were real!

  They were unarguably real. Though they were twice as tall as men, stood straighter, had broader shoulders, were heavier across the seat and had no visible tails, their fellowship with men was clear. Even their voices, as they shouted to each other around their towering metal minnow, were the voices of men made into gods, voices as remote from those of men as the voices of men were remote from those of monkeys, yet just as clearly of the same family.

  These were the Giants of the Book of Laws. They were not only real, but they had come back to Tellura as they had promised to do.

  And they would know what to do with unbelievers, and with fugitives from Hell. It had all been for nothing—not only the physical struggle, but the fight to be allowed to think for oneself as well. The gods existed, literally, actually. This belief was the real hell from which Honath had been trying to fight free all his life—but now it was no longer just a belief. It was a fact, a fact that he was seeing with his own eyes.

  The Giants had returned to judge their handiwork. And the first of the people they would meet would be three outcasts, three condemned and degraded criminals, three jail-breakers—the worst possible detritus of the attic world.

  All this went searing through Honath’s mind in less than a second, but nevertheless Alaskon’s mind evidently had worked still faster. Always the most outspoken unbeliever of the entire little group of rebels, the one among them whose whole world was founded upon the existence of rational explanations for everything, his was the point of view most completely challenged by the sight before them now. With a deep, sharply indrawn breath, he turned abruptly and walked away from them.

  Mathild uttered a cry of protest, which she choked off in the middle; but it was already too late. A round eye on the great silver minnow came alight, bathing them all in an oval patch of brilliance.

  Honath darted after the navigator. Without looking back, Alaskon suddenly was running. For an instant longer Honath saw his figure, poised delicately against the black sky. Then he dropped silently out of sight, as suddenly and completely as if he had never been.

  Alaskon had borne every hardship and every terror of the ascent from Hell with courage and even with cheerfulness but he had been unable to face being told that it had all been meaningless.

  Sick at heart, Honath turned back, shielding his eyes from the miraculous light. There was a clear call in some unknown language from near the spindle.

  Then there were footsteps, several pairs of them, coming closer.

  It was time for the Second Judgment.

  After a long moment, a big voice from the darkness said: “Don’t be afraid. We mean you no harm. We’re men, just as you are.”

  The language had the archaic flavor of the Book of Laws, but it was otherwise perfectly understandable. A second voice said: “What are you called?”

  Honath’s tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of his mouth. While he was struggling with it, Mathild’s voice came clearly from beside him:

  “He is Honath the Pursemaker, and I am Mathild the Forager.”

  “You are a long distance from the place we left your people,” the first Giant said. “Don’t you still live in the vine-webs above the jungles?”

  “Lord—”

  “My name is Jarl Eleven. This man is Gerhardt Adler.”

  This seemed to stop Mathild completely. Honath could understand why. The very notion of addressing Giants by name was nearly paralyzing. But since they were already as good as cast down into Hell again, nothing could be lost by it.

  “Jarl Eleven,” he said, “the people still live among the vines. The floor of the jungle is forbidden. Only criminals are sent there. We are criminals.”

  “Oh?” Jarl Eleven said. “And you’ve come all the way from the surface to this mesa? Gerhardt, this is prodigious. You have no idea what the surface of this planet is like—it’s a place where evolution has never managed to leave the tooth-and-nail stage. Dinosaurs from every period of the Mesozoic, primitive mammals all the way up the scale to the ancient cats the works. That’s why the original seeding team put these people in the treetops instead.”

  “Honath, what was your crime?” Gerhardt Adler said.

  Honath was almost relieved to have the questioning come so quickly to this point. Jarl Eleven’s aside, with its many terms he could not understand, had been frightening in its very meaninglessness.

  “There were five of us,” Honath said in a low voice. “We said we—that we did not believe in the Giants.”

  There was a brief silence. Then, shockingly, both Jarl Eleven and Gerhardt Adler burst into enormous laughter.

  Mathild cowered, her hands over her ears. Even Honath flinched and took a step backward. Instantly, the laughter stopped, and the Giant called Jarl Eleven stepped into the oval of light and sat down beside them. In the light, it could be seen that his face and hands were hairless, although there was hair on his crown; the rest of his body was covered by a kind of cloth. Seated, he was no taller than Honath, and did not seem quite so fearsome.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “It was unkind of us to laugh, but what you said was highly unexpected. Gerhardt, come over here and squat down, so that you don’t look so much like a statue of some general. Tell me, Honath, in what way did you not believe in the Giants?”

  Honath could hardly believe his ears. A Giant had begged his pardon! Was this still some joke even more cruel? But whatever the reason, Jarl Eleven had asked him a question.

  “Each of the five of us differed,” he said. “I held that you were not—not real except as symbols of some abstract truth. One of us, the wisest, believed that you did not exist in any sense at all. But we all agreed that you were not gods.”

  “And of course we aren’t,” Jarl Eleven said. “We’re men. We come from the same stock as you. We’re not your rulers, but your brothers. Do you understand what I say?”

  “No,” Honath admitted.

  “Then let me tell you about it. There are men on many worlds, Honath. They differ from one another, because the worlds differ, and different kinds of men are needed to people each one. Gerhardt and I are the kind of men who live on a world called Earth, and many other worlds like it. We are two very minor members of a huge project called a ‘seeding program’, which has been going on for thousands of
years now. It’s the job of the seeding program to survey newly discovered worlds, and then to make men suitable to live on each new world.”

  “To make men? But only gods—”

  “No, no. Be patient and listen,” said Jarl Eleven. “We don’t make men. We make them suitable. There’s a great deal of difference between the two. We take the living germ plasm, the sperm and the egg, and we modify it. When the modified man emerges, we help him to settle down in his new world. That’s what we did on Tellura—it happened long ago, before Gerhardt and I were even born. Now we’ve come back to see how you people are getting along, and to lend a hand if necessary.”

  He looked from Honath to Mathild, and back again. “Do you understand?” he said.

  “I’m trying.” Honath said. “But you should go down to the jungle-top, then. We’re not like the others; they are the people you want to see.”

  “We shall, in the morning. We just landed here. But, just because you’re not like the others, we’re more interested in you now. Tell me, has any condemned man ever escaped from the jungle floor before you people?”

  “No, never. That’s not surprising. There are monsters down there.”

  Jarl Eleven looked sidewise at the other Giant. He seemed to be smiling. “When you see the films,” he remarked, “you’ll call that the understatement of the century. Honath, how did you three manage to escape, then?”

  Haltingly at first, and then with more confidence as the memories came crowding vividly back, Honath told him. When he mentioned the feast at the demon’s nest, Jarl Eleven again looked significantly at Adler, but he did not interrupt.

  “And finally we got to the top of the chimney and came out on this flat space,” Honath said. “Alaskon was still with us then, but when he saw you and the metal thing he threw himself back down the cleft. He was a criminal like us, but he should not have died. He was a brave man, and a wise one.”

  “Not wise enough to wait until all the evidence was in,” Adler said enigmatically. “All in all, Jarl, I’d say ‘prodigious’ is the word for it. This is easily the most successful seeding job any team has ever done, at least in this limb of the galaxy. And what a stroke of luck, to be on the spot just as it came to term, and with a couple at that!”