The Silent Invaders

by Robert Silverberg

  Still the subsonic waves poured forth, as Harris held his hand tightly to the nexus on his hip. To his surprise, Harris saw that the two giants were still remaining on their feet and were semi-conscious, if groggy. They were moving around in vague circles, shuffling and shambling, fighting the subsonic.

  It must be because they’re so big, he thought. It takes longer for the subsonic to knock them out. I’ll just have to keep juicing them for a while.

  Wrynn was sagging now, swaying from side to side like some wounded behemoth. His wife, reeling under the impact of the noiseless waves, slipped to the floor. A moment later her husband followed her, landing with an enormous booming thud as three hundred pounds of bone and muscle crashed to the floor.

  The office was silent. Little puddles of darkness stained the carpet where the falling Medlins had spilled their drink. Six unconscious forms lay sprawled awkwardly on the floor.

  Harris pressed his side again, signalling the all clear to the five Darruui waiting in the street a block away.

  He found the switch that opened the door and pulled it down. That uncanny mechanism whisked the door out of sight, and Harris peered outward into the hall. Three more Medlins lay outside, unconscious. A fourth was running toward them from the far end of the long hall. He was shouting, “What happened? What’s going on? You people sick or something?”

  Harris stared at him and pressed his hip a second time. The Medlin ran into the forty-foot zone and recoiled visibly, but without any awareness of what was happening to him. He staggered forward a few steps and fell, joining his comrades on the thick velvet carpet. Harris let the signal subside.

  Ten of them, he thought.

  Ten Medlins. Plus two more if the two giant Wrynns turned out not to be Earthers. A decent haul, he thought. A tenth of the Medlin task force blotted out in one simple operation.

  He drew the disruptor.

  It lay in his palm, small, deadly. The trigger was nothing more than a thin strand of metal. He needed only to flip off the guard, press the trigger back, aim casually in any direction, and watch the Medlins die of broiled brains and jellied synapses.

  But his hand was shaking.

  He did not fire.

  He bit down hard on his lip and gritted his teeth and lifted the weapon, and tried to force himself to use it. But he could not. He raged at himself, scowled and harangued himself. This was no way for a Servant of the Spirit to behave! Those were Medlins down on the floor, beasts in human guise.

  Kill them! Kill! Kill!

  And he held the disruptor loosely, doing nothing. Sweating, he reached his left hand over, wrenched the guard off the disruptor. His finger curled into place over the trigger. He brought the gun up, pointed it at Beth, aimed it between her breasts. He closed his eyes and tried to strip away the deluding synthetic flesh, tried to carve the Medlin reality out of her, to reveal her as the hideous, pebble-skinned, bony monstrosity that he knew her to be beneath her Earther form. A muscle trembled in his cheek as he fought to pull the trigger and destroy her.

  Then a silent voice within his skull whispered, You could not be trusted after all, could you? You were a traitor through and through, a cheat and a liar. But we had to let the test go on at least to this point, for the sake of our consciences.

  “Who said that?” Harris gasped, looking wildly around in every corner of the room.

  I did.

  It felt like feathers brushing his brain. “Where are you?” he demanded, panicky. “I don’t see you. Where are you hiding?”

  I am in this room, came the calm reply, and Harris wanted to tear his skull apart to find the source of that quiet voice.

  Put down the gun, Harris-Khülom.

  Harris hesitated. His hand moved an inch or two toward his bodily distress-signal. But even that gesture was intercepted, intercepted and understood.

  No, don’t try to signal your friends. Just let the gun fall.

  As though it had been wrenched from his hand, the gun dropped from his fingers. It bounced a few inches on the carpet and lay still.

  Now shut off the subsonic, came the quiet command. I find it unpleasant.

  Obediently Harris deactivated the instrument. His mind was held in some strange stasis; he had no private volitional control whatever. His body throbbed with frustration. How were they doing this to him? They had made him a prisoner in his own mind.

  His lips fumbled to shape words.

  “Who are you? Tell me who you are!”

  A member of that super-race whose existence you find it so difficult to accept.

  Bewildered, Harris looked down at Wrynn and his wife. Both the fallen giants were unconscious, motionless, breathing slowly, regularly.

  “Wrynn?” he asked hoarsely. “How can your mind function if you’re unconscious?”

  I am not Wrynn, came the reply.

  “Not… Wrynn?”

  No. Not Wrynn.

  “Who are you, then? Where are you? Stop driving me crazy! I’ve got to know!”

  I am not Wrynn, came the calm voice, but Wrynn’s unborn child.

  Gently Harris felt himself falling toward the floor. It was exactly as though an intangible, invisible hand had yanked his legs out from under him, then had caught him and eased his fall.

  He lay quiescent, eyes open, neither moving nor wanting to move. He lacked even the power to sound his distress-signal. In some strange way the desire to call for help had been taken from him. Only in the depths of his mind did he boil with fear and frustration.

  As the minutes passed, the victims of the subsonic slowly returned to consciousness.

  Beth woke first. She sat up, stirred, put her hands to her eyes. She turned to the unconscious form of Wrynn’s wife, and now Harris saw the gentle rounding of the giantess’ belly.

  Beth said to the unconscious giantess, “You went to quite an extreme to prove a point!”

  You were in no danger, came the answer.

  The others were awakening now, one by one, sitting up, rubbing their foreheads. Harris, motionless, watched them. His head throbbed too, as though he had been stunned by the subsonic device himself.

  “Suppose you had been knocked out by the subsonic too?” Beth asked, still addressing herself to the life within the giant woman. “He would have killed us. That’s what he came here for.”

  The subsonic could not affect me. I am beyond the reach of its powers.

  Harris found his voice again. “That… that embryo can think and act?” His voice was a harsh, ragged whisper.

  Beth nodded. “The next generation. It reaches sentience while still in the womb. By the time it’s born it’s fully aware, and able to defend itself while its body catches up with the abilities of its mind.”

  “And I thought it was a hoax,” Harris said dizzily. “All this talk of a super-race. Some kind of propaganda stunt.”

  He felt dazed. The values of his life had been shattered in a single moment, and it would not be easy to repair them with similar speed.

  “No,” Beth said. “It was no hoax. No propaganda myth. And we knew you’d try to trick us when we let you go. At least, Wrynn said you would. I was naive enough to doubt him.”

  “Wrynn is telepathic too?”

  “Yes, but only to a limited extent. He can only receive impressions. He can’t transmit telepathically to others, the way his son can.”

  Harris frowned and said, “If you knew what I was going to do, why did you release me?”

  Beth said, “Call it a test. I hoped you might change your beliefs if we let you go. I had a kind of blind faith in you. But you didn’t change.”

  “No,” Harris said. His voice was flat and lifeless. “I came here to kill you.”

  “We knew that the moment you stepped through the door. Wrynn detected your purpose, and his son transmitted it to us. But the seed of rebellion was in you. We hoped you might still be swayed. You failed us. You could not break away from your Darruui self.”

  Harris bowed his head. The signal in his body ras
ped again, but he ignored it.

  Let Carver sweat out there, he thought. This thing is bigger than anything Carver ever dreamed of. He can’t begin to understand.

  “Tell me something,” Harris said haltingly. “Don’t you know what will happen to Medlin—and Darruu as well—once there are enough of these beings, once they begin to throw their weight around?”

  “Nothing will happen,” Beth said calmly. “None of the dire things you imagine. Do you think that they’re a race of petty power-seekers, intent on establishing a galactic dominion?” The girl laughed derisively. “That sort of thinking belongs to the obsolete non-telepathic species. Us. The lower animals of the universe. These new people have different goals.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “They have let us see their minds,” Beth said. “We have no doubt. Power does not interest them. They have no inadequacies that they must compensate for by holding sway over others. They mean to challenge the universe itself—not the peoples of it.”

  “And we’re obsolete, you say?”

  “Completely.”

  “But these mutants wouldn’t have survived if you Medlins hadn’t aided them!” Harris protested. “If we’re all obsolete, who’s responsible? You are! You’ve helped your own race commit suicide—and killed Darruu in the process!”

  Beth smiled oddly. “At least we were capable of seeing the new race without envy. We helped them as much as we could, because we bowed to the inevitable. We knew they would prevail anyway, given time. Their genes were too strong to be dispersed and destroyed. If we hadn’t helped, it might have taken another century, perhaps, or another millenium. We preferred that they look kindly on us when they matured. Our day is done, Harris, and so is the day of Darruu, and the day of the non-telepathic Earthmans as well.”

  “And ours too,” Wrynn said mildly. “We are the intermediates, the transitionals—the links between the old species and the new one that is emerging. I told you: my son will be as far beyond me as I am beyond my parents. You have already seen the proof of that.”

  Harris nodded grimly. He felt the tension within him relax, but he did not reach for his alarm signal, for he knew that the unborn mutant could stop him with ease, moving a thousand or a million times faster than his clumsy limbs, and anticipating his decisions.

  He stared at his hands—the hands of an Earthman, with Darruui flesh under the pink lining.

  He thought: all our striving is for nothing. Everything we have built is hollow.

  A new race, a glorious race, nurtured by the Medlins, brought into being on Earth. The galaxy waited for them. All of space and time lay open to them, eager for their tread. They were demigods.

  He had regarded the Earthers as primitives, creatures with a mere few thousand years of history behind them, mere pale humanoids of no consequence in the galactic scheme of things.

  But he had been wrong.

  Long after Darruu had become a hollow world of past glories, the sons of these giant Earthers would roam the galaxies.

  Looking up, he said in a choked voice, “I guess we made a tremendous mistake, we of Darruu. I was sent here to help sway the Earthers to the side of Darruu. But it’s the other way around, really, isn’t it? It’s Darruu that will have to swear loyalty to Earth, some day soon.”

  “Not soon,” Wrynn said. “The true race is not yet out of childhood. Twenty years more must pass before the first generation is mature. And we have enemies on Earth.”

  “The old Earthmen,” Coburn said. “How do you think they’ll like being replaced? Do you think they’ll stand by with folded hands when they realize what’s sprouting in their midst? They’ll try to root the mutants out. They won’t just nobly wave them on to inherit the future. And that’s why we’re here. To help the mutants until they can stand fully alone. You Darruui are just nuisances getting in the way, bringing old rivalries to a planet that isn’t interested in them.”

  That would have been cause for hot anger, once. But now Harris merely shrugged. His whole mission had been without purpose, he saw now.

  But yet, a lingering doubt remained, a last suspicion. These were Medlins. Since when were Medlins so noble, so eager to abase themselves before a new race?

  The silent voice of the unborn superman said, audible to everyone in the room including Harris, He still is not convinced, despite everything.

  “Is this so?” Beth asked.

  Harris nodded. “I’m afraid the child is right,” he murmured. “I see, and I hear that voice, and I believe—and yet all my conditioning tells me that it’s impossible, that this could be happening. Medlins are hateful creatures; I know that, intuitively. And all laws of self-preservation as a race cry out against aiding mutants the way you claim to be doing.”

  Beth said, “Would you like a guarantee of our good faith?”

  “What do you mean?”

  There is a way to show you the truth in such a way that you can have no further doubts.”

  “How?” Harris asked.

  To the womb-bound godling Beth said, “Link us.”

  NINE

  Before Harris had a chance to react, a strange brightness flooded over him; he seemed to be floating far above his body, and a swirl of colors danced wildly around him, a blaze of light that numbed and dazed him.

  With a jolt he realized where he was.

  He was looking into the mind of the Medlin who called herself Beth Baldwin. He was seeing the soul of her, laid bare. He could look through every memory of hers as clearly as though it were her own—more clearly. He could see, through her eyes, the memory of a Medlin home, of knife-bladed trees glistening bluely in the sun, of naked Medlin children splashing in a pond. Oddly, the Medlins did not look grotesque to him now. They looked—natural.

  Medlin religious ceremonies came to him. Where were the human sacrifices, the blasphemous rituals he had heard about? All he saw were tame things like candle-lighting, and prayers to a Galactic Unity. The prayers sounded very much like the prayers to the Spirit, and he felt a strange sense of dislocation.

  He was living Beth’s life, moving along her lifeline with ease, vicariously growing up with her, enduring the strains and shocks of adolescence, the tensions of a ripening body, the timidities of early love. Without embarrassment, he pried into the depths of her, since this was what she wanted him to do.

  He saw none of the hideous things he had expected to find in a Medlin mind.

  He saw faith and honesty, and a devotion to the truth. He saw dogged courage. He saw many things that filled him with humility.

  He saw sins, but they were honest sins, honestly admitted. He saw weaknesses. He saw pettiness. She was no saint, but neither was she the demon that Medlins were held to be.

  He saw her entering the service of her people, saw her training for her stint on Earth. He saw her on the operating table, surgeons bent over her to transform her into an Earth-girl. There was a dazzling glimpse of Beth in her new body, naked before a mirror, passing her hands in wonder over the soft volumptuous flesh of her new self. There was Beth learning to carry herself in a womanly way, learning to speak the Earther language idiomatically, Beth journeying to Earth, making contact with her fellow Medlins, then with Wrynn and the other mutants.

  It was a soul-searing experience, living in another’s brain. He discovered what it was like to have breasts, what the emotions of a Medlin woman’s ecstasies were like. He saw through her eyes how she had tracked him on his way to Earth, how she had readied herself in his hotel, how she had jostled him.

  Startled, he saw himself through the filter of her mind, and the image was not a displeasing one. Her view of him was tinged with distaste for a Darruui, but there was pity as well as dislike. Why pity, he wondered, and then he saw that she pitied him simply for being a Darruui. And there were other emotions—hope, faith, even love for him, and a great abiding sorrow at the thought that he would remain forever among the enemy.

  Harris trembled.

  Revelation upon revelatio
n poured through his numbed brain.

  He lost touch with his own identity. He blurred, he merged, he became the Medlin woman who went by the name of Beth Baldwin.

  And he came to pity himself.

  Poor cramped bitter Darruui. Poor destroyer. Poor nay-sayer. Why can’t you love? Why can’t you embrace in open amity? Why the fear, why the envy, why the sour sullen hatred of all that’s good and pure and beautiful?

  That was her thought. But now it was his as well. He thought his brain would split open from the impact of sharing his mind and hers.

  All through history there have been races like yours, she was thinking. The destroyers, the imitators, the killers of the dream. Earth has had them too: the Romans, the Assyrians, the Huns. You Darruui are of that kind.

  He shook his head doggedly. We have culture, he cried silently. You simply do not know. We have religion, art, philosophy …

  But his own thoughts were hollow and meaningless, and he knew it. They withered and shrivelled in the bright glare of Beth’s mind. His pitiful defenses of Darruui civilization could not stand up against what he now knew.

  The universe rocked around him. Stars pinwheeled and burst from their orbits. And still the linkage held, still his mind was gripped tight to Beth’s, still the telepathic conjugation endured. Her soul was his. Everything she had thought and hoped, feared and loved, was his, and she was his, and he was hers, and the blast of purity and goodness was almost intolerably painful.

  He could see the truth, now. Shattering as it was, he could see it plain, and he no longer had the capacity to doubt it. The Medlins were scheming their own obsolescence. They were knowingly and eagerly working to bring the new race into being. It was a bewildering concept. It violated everything he held as rational. But they were doing it, gladly, enthusiastically, willingly.

  He felt Beth’s mind drawing back from his, now. Desperately, he clung to the linkage, trying to keep it intact, but he could not maintain it.

  The linkage broke.

  Harris stood alone, trembling, feeling as though he had been stripped naked down to the bones. He stared at Beth, a few feet from him, and he felt as though she were a part of his body that had been abruptly chopped free by the surgeon’s knife.