The Heaven Makers (18 page)

I gave him nothing, Thurlow thought.

“He was crazy,” Ruth whispered. “They’re all crazy.”

Yes, this creature had a special kind of madness and it was dangerous, Thurlow told himself. I was right to deny him. He was capable of killing us.

All crazy? Thurlow wondered. He recalled Kelexel’s brief recital of Chem society. There were more of the creatures then. What would they do if they found two natives with a dead Chem?

“Should we do something?” Ruth asked.

Thurlow cleared his throat. What did she mean? Artificial respiration, perhaps? But he sensed madness in such action. What did he know about Chem metabolism? Futility in his eyes, Thurlow looked up at Ruth and was just in time to see two more Chem press past her.

Ruth stood where the two Chem pushed her, obviously unable to move. Her face mirrored terror and defeat.

But the Chem acted as though they were alone in the room. They moved Kelexel’s body on the bed.

Thurlow was caught by the tightly frozen looks on their faces. One, green-cloaked like Kelexel, was a bald, round-faced female, her body solid and barrel-like. She bent over Kelexel with a gentle sureness, probing, palpitating. There was a feeling of professional sureness about her. The other, in a black cloak, had craggy features, a hooked nose. The skin of both was that weirdly metallic silver.

Not a word passed between them while the female made her examination.

Ruth stood watching as though nailed to the floor. The female was Ynvic, and Ruth remembered the sharp encounter with the shipsurgeon. The male Chem, though, was another matter, a person she’d seen only on the room screens as Kelexel talked to him—Fraffin the Director. Even Kelexel’s tone had changed when speaking of Fraffin. Ruth knew she could never forget that haughty face. Here stood the embodiment of Chem power, the one who’d killed her parents to provide a brief amusement for his people. He’d killed countless humans for no better reason. His acts transcended brutality to a point where they no longer could be called brutal. They were acts of casual expediency, less direct even than stepping on an ant.

Presently, Ynvic straightened, spoke in shiptongue: “He has done it. He has certainly done it.” There was a blank emptiness in her voice.

The sound was gibberish to Thurlow, but he sensed the horror.

To Ruth, a product of storyship education imprinters, the words were as clear as English, but there were overtones of meaning which escaped her.

Ynvic turned to stare at Fraffin. The look that passed between them was filled with the poignancy of defeat. They both knew what had really happened here.

Fraffin sighed, shuddered. The blurred-off moment of Kelexel’s death had come to him through Tiggywaugh’s web, the Chem oneness momentarily shattered by that impossible demarcation. Feeling that death, sensing its direction, Fraffin had known the identity with terrifying sureness. Every Chem in the universe had felt it, of course, and turned in this direction, no doubt, but Fraffin knew that few had shared his certain knowledge of identity. It was as though he’d anticipated the event.

Dying, Kelexel had defeated him. Fraffin had known this even as he dashed with Ynvic for a flitter and homed on this point in space. The sky up there was full of craft from the storyship, all of the crewmen afraid to come closer. Most of them had guessed who’d died here, Fraffin realized. They knew the Primacy wouldn’t rest until it identified the dead one. No Chem out there would rest until the mystery was solved.

Here was the first immortal Chem to die, the first in all that crazy endless Time. This planet would soon be aswarm with the Primacy’s minions, all the storyship’s secrets exposed.

Wild Chem! It’d be an emotional blast through the Chem universe. There was no telling what might be done with these creatures.

“What… killed him?” Ruth ventured, speaking shiptongue.

Ynvic turned a glassy stare on her. The poor stupid female! What could she know of Chem ways? “He killed himself,” Ynvic said, her voice soft. “It’s the only way a Chem can die.”

“What’re they saying?” Thurlow asked. He heard his voice come out overloud. “He killed himself,” Ruth said. “That’s the only way a Chem can die…”

Ruth heard herself translating as though it were another person revealing this to some part of her which had been sleeping. The only way a Chem can die…

Fraffin, hearing the exchange, felt the need to speak lest he fall into an abyss which lay within his own skull. He spoke in English to Thurlow: “It has never happened before. A Chem has never died before.”

Thurlow absorbed this and thought: You’re mistaken. You have to be mistaken. There would’ve been other Chem deaths… long ago. Otherwise these Chem could not be what they obviously were—fugitives. They were fugitives from death. Thurlow almost spoke this thought, but he saw that Fraffin had fallen into a reverie approaching trance. The female Chem had finished examining the body on the bed and was staring at her companion.

Presently, Ynvic spoke in shiptongue: “It was the only way he could defeat us.”

Fraffin nodded, hearing Ynvic as though from a distance. What a price to pay for victory. What a story it would’ve made for the empatheaters of the Chem universe! For a Chem to kill himself… Fraffin looked at Ruth, beautiful, exotic creature. He felt an abrupt communication with her and with all the others like her. They have no past except the past I gave them. The thought was filled with despairing pride. He knew he had lost his world. Kelexel… the Primacy had won. And not one among that Primacy could really know what they had won.

His nostrils were suddenly filled with the same smell of bitter salt he’d inhaled once in the sistral winds of Carthage. He felt his own life identified with Carthage.

The Primacy would exile him to lonely, Chemless foreverness, he knew. It was the only punishment they could inflict on a fellow Chem, no matter what the crime.

How long will I be able to withstand it before I take Kelexel’s way out? he wondered.

Again, he inhaled the dusty, salt smell—Carthage, leafless, contaminated, stripped in the blaze-light of Cato’s gloating, its survivors crouching, terrified.

“I told you it’d end this way,” Ynvic said.

Fraffin closed his eyes against the sight of her. In his self-imposed darkness, he could see his own future: the eagle’s eyrie come to shame, hidden in a dooryard. He could see it by the dark of the blood that fed the ravenous oracle within him. They’d fit him with every machine and device for comfort and foreverness—everything except a fellow Chem or any other living creature.

He imagined an automatic toaster erupting and himself begging life into it. His thoughts were like a skipped rock touching the surface of a lake. His memories of this planet would not let him alone. He was the skipped rock, condensing eons: A tree, a face… the glimpse of a face, and his memory shaped out Kallima-Sin’s daughter given in marriage (at a Chem’s direction) to Amenophis III in three thousand five hundred puny year-beats ago.

And facts: he remembered that King Cyrus had preferred archeology to the throne. The fool!

And places: a wall in a dirty village along a desert track, a place called Muqayyar. One wall and it called up mighty Ur as he had seen it last… In his mind, Tiglath-Pileser was not gone, but marched yet before the Chem recorders, through Ishtar Gate, along Procession Street. It was a timeless parade with Sennacherib, Shalmanessar, Isem-Dagan, Sinsarra-iskun, all dancing to the Chem tune.

There was a worldpulse in Fraffin’s mind now, a sinepounding timewave: diastole/systole, compelling blacksnake ripples that whipped across generations.

His thoughts dipped briefly into the Babylonian Lingua-franca that had served the merchant world for two thousand years before he’d stirred the pot by giving them Jesus.

Fraffin felt then that his own mind was the sole repository for his creatures, his person the only preservation they had—a place of yearnings, full of voices and faces and entire races whose passage had left no mark except distantly outraged whispering… and tears. And all of it played only in his own memories. That was the only empatheater left to him: the awareness within his own head. These thoughts produced a terminal flare of consciousness so that he saw then something of what Kelexel had seen in those final moments.

Again, he looked at Ruth… at Thurlow. Their fear lay so obvious upon their features. Fraffin felt his mind spinning. This, he knew, had to be the making of maturity for himself. And after maturity…

I’m seeing life from their point of view! he thought. I’ve become one of my own creatures!

All the history of this planet… his planet lay collapsed and condensed now within him.

From Sheba’s time his memory handed him a vision of her camel-station metropolis, a place that withstood Aelius Callus and his legions, but now like Carthage and himself was reduced to petty walls of crumbled dust, kitchen middens, sandspume, silent stones—a place waiting for some King Cyrus with shovels to expose its empty skulls.

Aurum et ferrum, he thought. Gold and iron.

And he wondered if there’d be a wink-flare of reason before the burning darkness.

I’ll have no activity in which to hide my mind, he thought, nothing at last to protect me from boredom.

Epilogue

BY ORDER OF THE PRIMACY:

No further applications will be taken during this cycle from persons wishing to observe the wild Chem in their native habitat. Applications for the next cycle will be taken only from observers qualified in genetics, sociology, philosophy and Chem history and their related fields.

Applications for interviews with the native witch doctor, Androcles Thurlow, and his mate, Ruth, are subject to the following restrictions:

1. Interviewer is prohibited from discussing mortality.

2. Interviewer is prohibited from discussing the punishment of Director Fraffin, Shipsurgeon Ynvic or their storyship crewmembers.

3. Interviewer may not question the native female on her relationship with Investigator Kelexel.

4. All interviews must be conducted at the witch doctor’s hut on the native reserve planet under the usual security limitations.

Be it noted that no requests to adopt wild Chem infants from the native reserve planet or the seeded planets can be honored until completion of studies upon the offspring of Kelexel and the native female. Studies and tests of selected wild Chem infants are now being conducted and results will be announced when those studies are completed.

For security reasons, all unauthorized attempts to visit the native reserve planet are subject to severe punishment.

(SEALED THIS DAY IN THE NAME OF THE PRIMACY)

The End