Foster, Alan Dean - Humanx 03 Read online

  Alan Dean Foster - Humanx 02 - Nor Crystal Tears

  Chapter One

  It's hard to be a larva. At first there's nothing. Very gradually a dim, uncertain consciousness coalesces from nothingness. Awareness of the world arrives not as a shock, but as a gray inevitability. The larva cannot move, cannot speak. But it can think.

  His first memories, naturally, were of the Nursery a cool, dimly lit tubular chamber of controlled commotion and considerable noise. Beneath the gently arched ceiling, adults conversed with his fellow larvae. With awareness of his surroundings came recognition of self and of body a lumpish, meterandahalflong cylindrical mass of mottled white flesh.

  Through simple, incomplete larval eyes he hungrily absorbed the limited world.

  Adults, equipment, walls and ceiling and floor, his companions, the cradle he lay in, all were white and black and inbetween shades of gray. They were all he could perceive. Color was a mysterious, unimaginable realm to which only adults had access. Of all the unknowns of existence, he most pondered what was blue, what was yellowthe taste of the withheld spectrum.

  The adults who managed the Nursery and attended the young were experienced in that service. They'd heard generations of youngsters ask the same questions in the same order over and over, yet they were ever patient and polite. So they tried their best to explain color to him. The words had no meaning because there were no possible reference points, no mental landmarks to which a larva could relate. It was like trying to describe the sun that warmed the surface high, high above the subterranean Nursery. He came to think of the sun as a brightly blazing something that produced an intense absence of dark.

  As he grew the attendants let him move about in his crude humping, wormlike fashion. Nurses bustled through the Nursery, busy adults gifted with real mobility. Teaching machines murmured their endless litany to the studious.

  Other adults occasionally came to visit, including a pair who identified themselves as his own parents.

  He compared them with his companions, like himself squirming white masses ending in dull black eyes and thin mouthslits. How he envied the adults their clean lines and mature bodies, the four strong legs, the footarms above serving either as hands or as a third pair of legs, the delicate truhands above them.

  They had real eyes, adults did. Great multifaceted compound orbs that shone like a cluster of bright jewels (light gray to him, though he knew they were orange and red and gold, whatever those were). These were set to the sides of the shining valentineshaped heads, from which a pair of feathery antennae sprouted, honestly white. He was fascinated by the antennae, as all his companions were. The adults would explain that two senses were held there, the sense of smell and the sense of faz.

  He understood fazzing, the ability to detect the presence of moving objects by sensing the disruption of air. But the concept of smell utterly eluded him, much as color did. Along with arms and legs, then, he desperately wished for antennae. He desperately wished to be complete.

  The Nurses were patient, fully understanding such yearnings. Antennae and limbs would come with time. Meanwhile there was much to learn.

  They taught speech, though larvae were capable of no more than a crude wheezing and gasping through their flexible mouthparts. It took hard mandibles and adult lungs and throats to produce the elegant clicks and whistles of mature communication.

  So he could see after a fashion, and hear, and speak a little. But sight was incomplete without color and he could not faz or smell at all. By way of compensation the teachers explained that no adult could faz or smell nearly as well as the primitive ancestors of the Humanx, back when the race dwelt in unintelligence even deeper in the bowels of the earth than they did now, when artificial light did not exist, and the senses of faz and smell necessarily exceeded that of sight in importance.

  He listened and understood, but that did not lessen the frustration. He would worm his way around the exercise course because they insisted he needed exercise, but he was ever conscious of what a pale shadow of true mobility it was. Oh, so frustrating!

  Larval years were the Learning Time. Hardly able to move, unable to smell or faz, barely able to converse, but with decent sight and hearing a larva was adequately equipped for learning.

  He was a particularly voracious student, absorbing everything and asking greedily for more. His teachers and Nurses were pleased, as was the teaching machine attached to his cradle. He mastered High and Low Humanx, although he could properly speak neither. He learned physics and chemistry and basic biology, including the danger posed by any body of water deeper than the thorax, where the adult's breathing spicules were located. An adult Humanx could float, but not forever, and when the water entered the body, it sank. Swimming was a talent reserved for primitive creatures with internal skeletons.

  He was taught astronomy and geology although he'd never seen the sky or the earth, for all that he lived beneath the surface. The Nursery was exquisitely tiled and paneled. Other sections of Paszex, his home town, were lined with plastics, ceramics, metals, or stonework. In the ancient burrows on the planet Hivehom, where the Humanx had evolved, were tunnels and chambers lined with regurgitated cellulose and body plaster.

  Industry and agriculture were studied. History told how the social arthropods known as the Humanx first mastered Hivehom, adapting to existence above as well as below the surface, and then spread to other worlds. Eventually theology was discussed and the larvae made their choices.

  Then on to more complex subjects as the mind matured, to biochemistry, nucleonics, sociology and psychology and the arts, including jurisprudence. He particularly enjoyed the history of space travel, the stories of the first hesitant flights to the three moons of Hivehom in clumsy rockets, the development of the posigravity drive that pushed ships through the gulf between the stars, and the establishment of colonies on worlds like Dixx and Everon and Calm Nursery. He learned of the burgeoning commerce between Willowane, his own colony world, and Hivehom and the other colonies.

  How he wanted to go to Hivehom when he learned of it! The mother world of the people, Hivehom. Magical, enchanting name. His Nurses smiled at his excitement.

  It was only natural he should want to travel there. Everyone did.

  Yet something more showed on his profile charts, an undefined yearning that puzzled the larval psychologists. Possibly it was related to his unusual hatching. The normal four eggs had bequeathed not male and female pairs but three females and this one male.

  He was aware of the psychologists' concerns but didn't worry about them. He concentrated on learning as much as possible, stuffing his mind full to bursting with the wonders of existence. While these strange adults mumbled about "indecisiveness" and "unwillingness to tend toward a course of action," he plowed through the learning programs, mitigating their worries with his extraordinary appetite for knowledge.

  Couldn't they understand that he wasn't interested in any one particular subject? He was interested in everything. But the psychologists didn't understand, and they fretted. So did his family, because a Humanx on the Verge always knows what he or she intends to do... after. Generalizations do not a life make.

  For a while they thought he might want to be a philosopher, but his general interests were of specifics and not of abstruse speculations. Only his unusually high scores prevented their moving him from the general Nursery to one reserved for the mentally deficient.

  On and on he studied, learning that Willow 8209;wane was a wonderful world of comfortable swamps and lowlands, of heat and humidity much like that of the Nursery. A true garden world whose poles were free of ice and whose large continents were heavily jungled. Willowwane was even more accommodating than Hiveho
m itself. He was fortunate to have been born there.

  His name he knew from early on. He was Ryo, of the Family Zen, of the Clan Zu, of the Hive Zex. The last was a holdover from primitive times, for only towns and cities existed now, no more true hives.

  More history, the information that the development of real intelligence was concurrent with the development of egglaying ability in all Humanx females.

  Gone was the need for a specialized Queen. Their newly evolved biological flexibility gave the Humanx a natural advantage over other arthropods. But Humanx still paid respects to an honorary clanmother and hivemother, echoes of the biological matriarchy that once dominated the race. That was tradition. The people had a great love of tradition.

  He remembered his shock when he'd first learned of the AAnn, a spacegoing race of intelligence, calculation, cunning, and aggressiveness. The shock arose not from their abilities but from the fact that the creatures possessed internal skeletons, leathery skins, and flexible bodies. They moved like the primitive animals of the jungles but their intelligence was undeniable. The discovery had caused consternation in the Humanx scientific community, which had postulated that no creature lacking a protective exoskeleton could survive long enough to evolve true intelligence. The hard scales of the AAnn gave protection, and some felt that their closed circulatory systems compensated for the lack of an exoskeleton.

  All these things he studied and mastered, yet he was unsettled in mind because he also knew that of all the inhabitants of the Nursery who were on the Verge, he alone was unable to settle on a career, to choose a life work.

  Around him, his childhood companions made their choices and were content as the time grew near. This one to be a chemist, that one a janitorial engineer, the one on the cradle across from Ryo to become a public Servitor, another opting for foodprocessing management.

  Only he could not decide, would not decide, did not want to decide. He wanted only to learn more, to study more.

  Then there was no more time for study. There was only time for a sudden upwelling of fear. His body had been changing for months, subtle tremors and quivers jostling him internally. He'd felt his insides shift, felt skin and self tingling with a peculiar tension. An urge was upon him, a powerful desire to turn inward and explode outward.

  The Nurses tried to prepare him for it as best they could, soothing, explaining, showing him again the chips he'd studied over and over. Yet the sight of it recorded on screen was clinical and distant, hard to relate to what was occurring inside his own body. All the chips, all the information in the world could not prepare one for the reality.

  Worse were the rumors that passed from Nurserymate to Nurserymate in the dark, during sleeping time, when the adults were not listening. Horrible stories of gross deformities, of monstrosities put out of their misery before they had a chance to see themselves in a mirror, which others said were allowed to survive for a life of miserable study as scientific subjects, never to be permitted out in society.

  The rumors grew and multiplied as fast as the changes in his own body. The Nurses and special doctors came and went and monitored him intensively. Around it all, encapsulating all the mystery and terror and wonder and hope, was a single word.

  Metamorphosis.

  The process was something you could not avoid, like death. The genes insisted and the body obeyed. The larva could not delay it.

  He had studied it repeatedly with a fervor he had never applied to anything else. He watched the recordings, marveled at the transformation. What if the cocoon was wrongly spun? What if he matured too soon and burst from the cocoon only half formed or, worse yet, waited too long and smothered?

  The Nurses were reassuring. Yes, all those terrible things had happened once upon a time, but now trained doctors and metamorphic engineers stood by at all times. Modern medicine would compensate for any mistake the body might make.

  The day came and he hadn't slept for four days before it. His body felt nervous and ready to burst. Incomprehensible feelings possessed him. He and the others who were ready were taken from the Nursery. Befuddled younger larvae watched them go, some filling their wake with cries of farewell.

  "Goodbye, Ryo... Don't come out with eight legs!" "See you as an adult," shouted another. "Come back and show us your hands," cried a third. "Tell us what color is!" Ryo knew he wouldn't be returning to the Nursery. Once gone, there was no reason to return. It would belong to another life, unless he opted for Nursery work as an adult. He watched the Nursery recede as his palette traveled in train with the others down the long central aisle. The Nursery, its friendlyfamiliar whites and grays, its cradles and compassion the only companions he'd ever had, all vanished behind a tripartite door.

  He heard someone cry out, then realized he was the noisemaker. The medical personnel hushed him, calmed him.

  Then he was in a great, highceilinged chamber, a dome of glowing darkness, of perfectly balanced humidity and temperature. He could see the other palettes being placed nearby, forming a circle. His friends wiggled and twisted under the gentle glow of special lamps.

  On the next palette rested a female named Urilavsezex. She made the sound indicative of good wishes and friendship. "It's finally here," she said. "After so long, after all these years. I'mI'm not sure I know what to do or how to do it." "Me either," Ryo replied. "I know the recordings, but how do you tell when the precise moment is, how do you know when the time is right? I don't want to make any mistakes." "I feel... I feel so strange. Like Ilike I have to.... " She was no longer talking, for silk had begun to emerge magically from her mouth. Fascinated, he stared as she began singlemindedly to work, her body contorting with a flexibility soon to be lost forever. Bending sharply, she had begun at the base of her body and was working rapidly toward the head.

  Layer upon layer the damp silk rose around her. body, hardening on contact with the air. Now he could see only her head. The eyes began to disappear. Around him others had begun to work.

  Something heaved inside him and he thought he was going to vomit. He did not. It was not his stomach that was suddenly, eruptively working, but other glands and organs. There was a taste in his mouth, not bad at all, fresh and clean. He twisted, doubled over, working the silk that extruded in a steady, effortless flow as if he'd spun a hundred times before.

  He felt no claustrophobia, a fear unknown to a people who mature underground.

  Up, high, higher, around his mouth and eyes now, the cocoon rose. The upper cap narrowed over his head. It was almost closed when a pair of truhands reached in and down through the remaining gap. Moving quickly, in time to his mouth movements so as not to become entangled in the hardening silk, they held a tube that was pressed against his forehead.

  The hands withdrew. Nothing else remained to concentrate on except finishing, finishing, finishing the work. Then the cocoon was complete and the sedative that had been injected into him combined with his physical exhaustion to speed him into the Sleep. A dim, fading part of him knew he would sleep for three whole seasons.

  But it wasn't long at all. Only a few seconds, and suddenly he was kicking with a desperate intensity. Out, he thought hysterically, I have to get out. He was imprisoned, confined in something hard and unyielding. He shoved and kicked with all his strength. So weak, he was so terribly weak. Yeta small crack, there.

  The sight renewed his determination and he kicked harder, punched with his hands and began to pull at the pieces that cracked in front of him. The prison was disintegrating around him. He whistled in triumph, kicked with all four legsthen sprawled free and exhausted onto a soft floor.

  On his thorax the eight spicules pulsed weakly, sucking air. He turned his head and looked up, using his truhands to brush at the dampness still clinging to his eyes.

  Then other hands were on him, turning him, helping him untangle. Antiseptic cloths brushed at his eyes and there was a sharp smell of peppermint. A voice spoke soothingly. "It's all over. Relax, just relax. Let your body gather its strength." Instinctively he
turned toward the sound of the voice as the last film masking his eyes was sponged away. A male Humanx looked down at him. His chiton was deep purple, so he would be quite elderly.

  Realization came in a rush. Purple. The adult's chiton was purple, and purple was a color that had been described to him and now he knew what it was and the ceramic inlay in the doctor's forehead was a single bar of silver crossed by two bars of gold and his ommatidia were red with gold and yellow central bands and they gleamed in the light of the room and... and... It was wonderful.

  He looked down at himself, saw the slim body, the segmented abdomen, the four glistening wing cases, vestigial wings beneath, the four strong, jointed legs spraddled to his left. He raised a truhand, touched it with a foothand, then repeated the motion with the other pair, then touched all four sets of four fingers together.

  All around him he heard uncertain clicks and whistles as strange voices struggled to master new bodies. Someone brought a mirror. Ryo looked into it.

  Staring back at him was a beautiful bluegreen adult, still damp but drying rapidly following Emergence. The valentineshaped head was cocked to one side.