The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  At least that was how it affected Torq.

  In passing, he reached out one of his second hands and dug deeply, mercilessly into the wood, gouging up long splinters of red-grained wood.

  The Cwrth flinched…Torq was pleased. That was the first sign of perturbation she had shown during their interchanges.

  Just as a matter of principle, he flicked with pillar with a first hand, causing it to rock perceptibly. The carving seemed to slide a bit, then stop, as if there were come low barrier he couldn’t see that kept it from crashing to the stone floor.

  This time she held herself in check. She was again unflappable, calm.

  He continued: “This is our final requirement. Before sunfall, you will surrender to us—that is to say, to me—all armaments and other implements that might be used against the Koleic. You will acknowledge us as overlords, without reservation, and you will accept your condition as tributary, permanently and without question. You will turn over such materials—metals and minerals—as we require, as well as any fuel elements adaptable to our needs.

  “You—and here I include all of your people—will do these things without complaint or rebellion. Otherwise, and this I promise, I will destroy your world. Koleic do not threaten. They do. We destroy what we cannot subjugate.”

  He paused. The trans-comm began its task of morphing his clear, precise words, his meticulous diction, into meaningless streams of unintelligible sounds. It whistled and screeched, enough to drive even a name mad…had he not been standing there to fulfill the commission of his God.

  He allowed his eyen to gaze around the room. The Cwrth’s servants—no more than a dozen when he had arrived—had all withdrawn from the chamber, leaving it even emptier than it had been when he first strode in. His numbers had stationed themselves around the walls, standing a few tarsi-lengths from the ubiquitous drapery that obscured everything except the central window in each wall.

  He twitched. The room still felt…wrong. Bad?

  He wasn’t certain that he wanted to attach moral value to mere architectural curiosity—this was an alien world, after all, unused to the higher refinements and beauties of the Koleic.

  The Cwrth straightened slightly, making her form look even more drawn, more vulnerable.

  He liked that.

  She opened her mouth to speak.

  Would she?

  She did.

  “So be it.”

  He started to respond, when she turned to face him directly.

  He was shocked anew by the awfulness of those dual eyes, soft, colored, fluid-filled spheres without compounds, without the familiar flash of faceted black. Flaps of tissue dropped down over them from time to time, even though in battle, those ridiculous flaps would clearly provide no protection from blasts or thrusts.

  And more.

  Her already impossibly fragile body was especially marred by one grotesquery that the draped fabric half-hid when she was turned away but now opened slightly to reveal in all of its odious detail.

  Just above the jointure of her lower limbs, her body was swollen. The body covering—that was the word the trans-comm devised for what was obviously not exoskeleton but somehow performed many of the same functions—the body covering was tight, taught, bulging enough to nearly double her girth and to throw the rest of her body out of symmetry.

  He had never seen such an abomination before…and had been even more horrified, shocked almost beyond words, to discover early in their interchanges that she was…that is, the she would…that she was in the process of bearing young!

  His tarsi clicked faintly, disapprovingly.

  His God was one thing. She performed her function discretely, almost silently, and none were there to observe except the chosen tens…excepting, of course, that single emergency that had brought Torq before here.

  And even then, he had seen nothing except her upper carapace; the rest of her long body had been covered, as tradition demanded, by sumptuous cloth.

  There had been nothing to indicate, to suggest, that.…

  Well, truthfully, there had been something:

  Plop.

  Plop.

  Plop.

  But this, this public posturing.

  It was bad enough to have to treat with an admitted female, but this was not even an egg-layer. No, she was bringing something alive from within her body.

  He tried not to look at the shiny, stretched tissue, or notice that it occasionally rippled, almost heaved, as if something inside were struggling to escape its imprisonment.

  And something was.

  He had no idea what a Cwrth-grub would look like. And he had no interest in finding out. This creature, this…thing had no business even appearing in public in such a state, let alone accepting the conditions that would permanently subjugate herself and everything like her on this world.

  She should have long since retired to the sanctity and the privacy of a Hatchery.

  Or whatever she called a place where she could.…

  The trans-comm interrupted his thoughts with a short burst—damnably familiar—then a slightly longer staccato of sounds.

  “So be it.… Thus it is to call outward in, spew inward out.”

  This was different.

  The trans-comm faltered slightly on the final phrases, as if unsure of the translation. When it did repeat them in Koleic, there was still a hesitancy, along with a certain feeling of ritualism.

  The tone itself grated on Torq. He crossed the room to stand before one of the seven windows and stared at meticulously tended fields fanning out between the convergence of two rivers.

  In fact, the richness of the enclave—large as it was, expanding southward well beyond the limits of vision—had startled Torq when he had first arrived.

  From space, the ship had transmitted crisp images of most of the planetary surface. Anomalous clouds had seemed to hover over a few specific areas, never moving, as far as the ship’s instruments had reported. They seemed lower than clouds should be, almost but not quite touching the land, and within them the instruments reported frequent flashes. Torq might have passed the phenomena off as lightning—or this planet’s equivalent—except that the instruments also indicated that the flashes consisted not only of light but of color. It some way the instruments could not define, it was physical color. Torq did not understand.

  When Torq ordered several numbers to test further, he received an even more anomalous response.

  Yes, there were definitely colors associated with the flashes.

  But no, they do not fit into the spectrum of light as we understand it.

  One of the numbers had allowed its carapace to curve slightly when Torq questioned further but had ultimately remained standing.

  Still, there was something about those flashes that had startled, upset, and frightened—or terrified­—the numbers.

  In addition to the clouds there had been huge patches of grey spreading over whole quadrants of the surface, looking like the horrible fungoid growth that occasionally tormented the oldest and weakest of the Koleic. Tests had confirmed that these vast expanses were covered with dust, ash, something of that sort. But even there, there were suggestions of the indescribable color. Much of the planet was already afflicted by the devastation. From all indications, it was spreading.

  And then, nestled among them, surrounded by an unbroken chain of mountains and glittering with colors that felt normal to Torq’s eyen, lay the enclave. In itself, it was huge, covering perhaps an eighth of the planet’s visible surface, but compared with the clouds and the dust bowls, it seemed fragile, vulnerable.

  Torq turned slightly.

  To his left, the squat outline of his lander shimmered in the late afternoon light. It seemed…wrong, he suddenly realized, out-of-place, alien.

  He shifted his compounds, then focused back on the lander, and saw it as he had always seen it. For an instant, he decided, he had been so overwhelmed by the incongruous angles and surfaces of the enclave that he had almost perc
eived it as the Cwrth might have.

  His ventral plates rippled.

  The idea was absurd.

  He stepped back two paces but spoke without turning to face the Cwrth.

  “This place, this community, is rich. It is fertile. It has extensive reserves of minerals and elements that will be useful to use. Even the waste lands surrounding you are rich, although no longer capable of growing crops.”

  He stopped and allowed the trans-comm to repeat what he had said.

  The Cwrth did not respond. She did not even allow the eyes-flaps to flutter down but stared at him disconcertingly with her dual orbs. They were, he noted, almost the same color as the sky outside the windows…blue but tinged with the fire of sunfall.

  He waited a moment.

  She did not speak.

  He continued: “You have told me that you have no armies, no government. That you yourself are merely a…I have forgotten.”

  He turned to the trans-comm and entered a search-memory command, then waited until it replied.

  “Ah, yes. You are a ‘distal-appendage/female-that-has-not-yet-given-birth.’ You claim you hold no office other than Cwrth—‘talker’—yet it is with you that I must deal.

  “Who governs you? To whom do you take conflicts? Who monitors wealth to ascertain that all have sufficient according to their station?”

  Again he paused and waited for the trans-comm.

  This time, when it had completed its litany of whistles, gurgles, wheezes, and crackles, the Cwrth began to speak.

  And this time he did not hear the repetitious sounds that signified, “So be it.”

  Line by line, the trans-comm iterated her alien thoughts in Torq’s own speech.

  “We of the enclave are content. You are correct…and you are incorrect. We have no one to take our conflicts to because we have no conflicts. We have no armies because we have no one to fight. We have no riches because we all have what we need. We use our world as we require not as we wish. We live well.”

  The trans-comm fell silent.

  “No conflicts? No enemies? And the Koleic are the first to come upon you?”

  A moment later: “No. No, we have no conflicts. No, we have no enemies. And no, you”—here the term was not Koleic but something untranslatable, although the trans-comm indicated that at the base of the Cwrth word were undertones of disgust, revulsion, aversion, and dislike of something that scuttled upon the earth—“And no, you are not the first to come upon us. We have received visitors”—invaders, attackers—“before. We have received demands before. We have been warned, threatened, intimidated. But each time, the visitors have failed.

  “We have been succored.”

  Torq tensed as he heard her tone alter. Absolute certainty radiated from her even before her words filtered through the trans-comm. He dreaded what he would hear next. Sufficient reports had come back to the home world from earlier seeding missions for him to recognize the pattern, as little as he had expected it on this world. There had been none of the obvious signs, no panoply, no paraphernalia, no ceremonials. Yet her words were inevitable, invariable in sense if not in form. They had been heard by other Chaptains on other worlds—and the Koleic had invariably, systematically destroyed the unspoken hope implicit in them.

  “Our God stands with us. He will suffice. Surely.”

  She had spoken.

  A religious cult.

  In spite of his certain knowledge that he was following the God’s commands by being here and, eventually it now seemed, destroying this world—and in spite of his attempts over and again to educate her about his God—she had held onto some secret soteriology.

  No wonder she had been so calm.

  And no need to waste time on any more questions.

  He didn’t care which of the infinite permutations of belief her god might take. He didn’t care what natural, physical manifestations the Cwrth had misunderstood as miraculous, magical, mystical. He didn’t care to debate with her.

  His God was waiting.

  He has seen her, had spoken to her.

  For Her Sake, he had mated with her on that single never-to-be-forgotten flight.

  His knowledge was absolute.

  He did not care to hear the minutiae of this…this creature’s faith.

  He shifted into command mode. He was after all, the Chaptain, the possessor of all power on this world, the single individual who would decide whether this creature should live or die, whether her entire world would be allowed to exist or would become what parts of it already were—lifeless, dust-and-ash-ridden wastes.

  “I have power you cannot understand. My ship sits within the sky. I can order it to incinerate you, yours, everything you hold dear. I could incinerate the planet if I so chose, reduce it to a glowing ball of cinder.”

  He stopped. The trans-comm chittered away, although Torq thought he heard more rigidity, more authority in the sounds that emerged from it.

  The Cwrth did not change her position, her mien. Nor did she answer.

  “My numbers—my warriors—carry weapons you cannot imagine. We are many, almost infinite; you are few and fragile. You cannot withstand us. Do not oppose us.

  “Do not place hope in an impossibility.

  “I have already shattered worlds.” As he spoke those words, he realized that he had made up his mind. He knew how his God would want him to act. “I shall shatter yours as well.”

  * * * *

  As the trans-comm stuttered out Torq’s warning, he stared without moving out the window.

  Silent, impervious, unassailable—the epitome of the Koleic.

  His gaze rover over the impossibly slender spires of the enclave, often canted at angles that made his head seem to ache, as if at any instant they might shiver into fragments, and then—perhaps even before the fragments struck the ground—into dust.

  He stared at the stark, barren mountains. They surrounded the plain where the enclave was situated, he knew, but were much closer here than further south. He could see their lofty ramparts, their razor-like ridges. As far as he could tell there were no cuts in the chain of peaks, no exit from here into the wastes that were the rest of the world.

  From there he looked into the sky. His element now. His universe. His memory flickered through the planets he had visited…and conquered…and destroyed.

  As was his Destiny!

  The Cwrth began humming in her typical, monotonous way.

  He turned to watch her now, instead of the landscape.

  Her mouth was…was twisted. Elongated somehow. The ends where the two mouth-flaps joined were slightly raised. Vertical creases deformed her face there and elsewhere. It was hideous, the way their boneless flesh manipulated itself. Never had Torq felt prouder of…or so protected by…his unmoving ventral plates, his glossy chitin, even the thin, barbed lengths of his tarsi. Everything about him, about the Koleic, was immeasurably superior to this…this.…

  Her voice stopped, and the machine began.

  “We have heard this before.” Even through the metallic translator, Torq thought he could detect the thrumming of strong emotion, something the Cwrth had not yet shown. She had always remained patient, gentle, even resolved to her obvious fate. And the fate of her people.

  She repeated the first phrase, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps for clarification: “We have heard this before. Not often. Twice. Perhaps three times in our long, long history. None alive remember such things, even though we also live long, long lives. But the stories have been handed down.”

  The machine pause, sputtered meaningless hisses and gurgles, almost as if it were sentient and did not want to say the next few lines.

  “Such invaders”—she had apparently used a different word than ‘visitors’ and in doing so made her attitudes toward the Koleic clear for the first time—“such invaders did not succeed. They died. As will you. Our God will succor us. He will suffice.”

  Torq clicked his tarsi. He had tried to prepare himself for such a moment, given the report
s of earlier Chaptains. He had never had to speak the words; the first worlds he had conquered had not risen to the sophistication of religions, even such a patently absurd one as was practiced here.

  Stand up to the might of the Koleic, indeed!

  Yet in spite of his preparations, he felt…unquiet. Even numbers died for reasons. They might forget themselves and curl. They might disobey a name. They might even have been born to supply nutriment to the Gods who even now were questing through the depths of space, scattering their seed far and wide.

  But to die for an imaginary guardian.

  Still, the needs—the requirements—of the Koleic came first. No one could circumvent Destiny.

  He spoke a harsh command. The three stationed at the exit to the chamber hastened forward, its carapace glistening and burnished in the evening light. It carried a comm in one first hand. The second was outstretched toward Torq.

  “Report.” Torq’s voice was rougher than usual, not because of anything the three had done but because of his frustration with the Cwrth…the one standing stock-still before him and all of them on this pitiable ball of dust.

  The three clicked nervously, chitin against chitin.

  “Report!”

  “My lord!” Several of its compounds just might have flickered toward the pouch where Torq carried the thin metal rod. But it said nothing more.

  “Report, I said.” And this time the anger in his voice—in his whole demeanor—was indeed directed at the three.

  “My lord, they have…they have…disappeared.”

  “What? Who?”

  “My lord, scanners onboard the lander indicate that virtually all life forms in this enclave have…have…disappeared?” It was as if the guard had searched for a different word, a better word, and finally gave up in defeat.

  “But when we landed, there were hundreds, thousands clustered around this building.”

  “My lord, yes. But as the time has passed, and no order being given from you to the contrary, they…withdrew, yes, withdrew into their domiciles. Guards posted outside reported that we were being watched, observed, but none of the creatures made any gestures or overtures that we could read as threats. And.…” The three stopped abruptly, as if it were afraid of the consequences of what it had already stated and was terrified to continue.