The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (55 page)

A Rukuchp figure came up beside Marie.

“Gafka?” said Marie.

“Gafka,” intoned the figure. The voice sounded sleepy.

Laoconia leaned across the instrument-packed floater. “What are they doing now, Gafka?” she demanded.

“All new song we make from music you give,” said Gafka.

“Is the sing all ended?” asked Marie.

“Same,” breathed Gafka.

“What's this about a new song?” demanded Laoconia.

“Not have your kind song before correct,” said Gafka. “In it too much new. Not understand we how song make you. But now you teach, make right you.”

“What is all this nonsense?” asked Laoconia. “Gafka, where are your people all going?”

“Going,” sighed Gafka.

Laoconia looked around her. “But they're departing singly … or … well, there don't seem to be any mated pairs. What
are
they doing?”

“Go each to wait,” said Gafka.

And Marie thought of caryocinesis and daughter nuclei.

“I don't understand,” complained Laoconia.

“You teach how new song sing,” sighed Gafka. “New song best all time. We keep this song. Better much than old song. Make better—” the women detected the faint glimmer-haze lidding of Gafka's vision cap—“make better young. Strong more.”

“Gafka,” said Marie, “is the song all you do? I mean, there isn't anything else?”

“All,” breathed Gafka. “Best song ever.”

Laoconia said: “I think we'd better follow some of these…”

“That's not necessary,” said Marie. “Did you enjoy their music, Dr. Wilkinson?”

“Well…” There appeared to be embarrassment in the way the older woman turned her head away. “It was very beautiful.”

“And you
enjoyed
it?” persisted Marie.

“I don't see what…”

“You're tone deaf,” said Marie.

“It's obviously a stimulant of some sort!” snapped Laoconia. “I don't understand now why they won't let us…”

“They let us,” said Marie.

Laoconia turned to Gafka. “I must insist, Gafka, that we be permitted to study all phases of your breeding process. Otherwise we can be of no help to you.”

“You best help ever,” said Gafka. “Birthrate all good now. You teach way out from mixing of music.” A shudder passed upward through Gafka's bellows muscles.

“Do you make sense out of this?” demanded Laoconia.

“I'm afraid I do,” said Marie. “Aren't you tired, Gafka?”

“Same,” sighed Gafka.

“Laoconia, Dr. Wilkinson, we'd better get back to the hut,” said Marie. “We can improvise what we'll need for the Schafter test.”

“But the Schafter's for determining
human
pregnancy!” protested Laoconia.

The red light glowed in front of Laoconia. She flipped the switch. “Yes?”

Scratching sounds from the earphones broke the silence. Marie felt that she did not want to hear the voice from the ship.

Laoconia said: “Of course I know you're monitoring the test of … Why should I tell Marie you've already given Schafter tests to yourself…” Laoconia's voice climbed. “WHAT? You can't be ser … That's impossible! But, Helen, we … they … you … we … Of course I … Where could we have … Every woman on the ship…”

There was a long silence while Marie watched Laoconia listening to the earphones, nodding. Presently, Laoconia lifted the earphones off her head and put them down gently. Her voice came out listlessly. “Dr. Bax … Helen suspected that … she administered Schafter tests to herself and some to the others.”

“She listened to that music?” asked Marie.

“The whole universe listened to that music,” said Laoconia. “Some smuggler monitored the ship's official transmission of our recordings. Rebroadcast stations took it. Everyone's going crazy about our
beautiful
music.”

“Oh, no,” breathed Marie.

Laconia said: “Everyone on the ship listened to our recordings. Helen said she suspected immediately after the broadcast, but she waited the full half hour before giving the Schafter test.” Laoconia glanced at the silent hump of Gafka standing beside Marie. “Every woman on that ship who could become pregnant is pregnant.”

“It's obvious, isn't it?” asked Marie. “Gafka's people have developed a form of group parthenogenesis. Their Big Sing sets off the blastomeric reactions.”

“But we're humans!” protested Laoconia. “How can…”

“And parts of us are still very primitive,” said Marie. “This shouldn't surprise us. Sound's been used before to induce the first mitotic cleavage in an egg. Gafka's people merely have this as their sole breeding method—with corresponding perfection of technique.”

Laoconia blinked, said: “I wonder how this ever got started?”

“And when they first encountered our
foreign
music,” said Marie, “it confused them, mixed up their musical relationships. They were fascinated by the new musical forms. They experimented for new sensations … and their birthrate fell off. Naturally.”

“Then you came along,” said Laoconia, “and taught them how to master the new music.”

“Exactly.”

“Marie!” hissed Laoconia.

“Yes?”

“We were right here during that entire … You don't suppose that we … that I…”

“I don't know about you,” said Marie, “but I've never felt more certain of anything in my life.”

She chewed at her lower lip, fought back tears. “I'm going to have a baby. Female. It'll have only half the normal number of chromosomes. And it'll be sterile. And I…”

“Say I to you,” chanted Gafka. There was an air of sadness in the singsong voice. “Say I to you: all life kinds start egg young same. Not want I to cause troubles. But you say different you.”

“Parthenogenesis,” said Laoconia with a show of her old energy. “That means, of course, that the human reproductive process need not … that is, uh … we'll not have to … I mean to say that men won't be…”

“The babies will be drones,” said Marie. “You know that. Unfertile drones. This may have its vogue, but it surely can't last.”

“Perhaps,” said Laoconia. “But I keep thinking of all those rebroadcasts of our recordings. I wonder if these Rukuchp creatures ever had two sexes?” She turned toward Gafka. “Gafka, do you know if…”

“Sorry cause troubles,” intoned Gafka. The singsong voice sounded weaker. “Must say farewell now. Time for birthing me.”

“
You
are going to give birth?” asked Laoconia.

“Same,” breathed Gafka. “Feel pain on eye-top.” Gafka's prehensile legs went into a flurry of digging in the ground beside the floater.

“Well, you were right about one thing, Dr. Wilkinson,” said Marie. “She-he is not a
him.
”

Gafka's legs bent, lowered the ovoid body into the freshly dug concavity in the ground. Immediately, the legs began to shrink back into the body. A crack appeared across the vision cap, struck vertically down through the bellows muscles.

Presently, there were two Gafkas, each half the size of the original. As the women watched, the two half-sized Gafkas began extruding new legs to regain the normal symmetry.

“Oh, no,” whispered Marie.

She had a headache.

 

TRY TO REMEMBER

Every mind on earth capable of understanding the problem was focused on the spaceship with the ultimatum delivered by its occupants.
Talk or Die!
blared the newspaper headlines.

The suicide rate was up and still climbing. Religious cults were having a field day. A book by a science fiction author,
What the Deadly Inter-Galactic Spaceship Means to You!
, had smashed all previous best-seller records. And this had been going on for a frantic seven months.

The ship had
flapped
out of a gun-metal sky over Oregon, its shape that of a hideously magnified paramecium with edges that rippled like a mythological flying carpet. Its five green-skinned, froglike occupants had delivered the ultimatum, one copy printed on velvety paper to each major government, each copy couched faultlessly in the appropriate native tongue:

“You are requested to assemble your most gifted experts in human communication. We are about to submit a problem. We will open five identical rooms of our vessel to you. One of us will be available in each room.

“Your problem. To communicate with us.

“If you succeed, your rewards will be great.

“If you fail, that will result in destruction for all sentient life on your planet.

“We announce this threat with the deepest regret. You are urged to examine Eniwetok atoll for a small display of our power. Your artificial satellites have been removed from the skies.

“You must break away from this limited communication!”

Eniwetok had been cleared off flat as a table at one thousand feet depth … with no trace of explosion! All Russian and United States artificial satellites had been combed from the skies.

All day long a damp wind poured up the Columbia Gorge from the ocean. It swept across the Eastern Oregon alkali flats with a false prediction of rain. Spiny desert scrub bent before the gusts, sheltering blur-footed coveys of quail and flop-eared jackrabbits. Heaps of tumbleweed tangled in the fence lines, and the air was filled with dry particles of grit that crept under everything and into everything and onto everything with the omnipresence of filterable virus.

On the flats south of the Hermiston Ordnance Depot the weird bulk of the spaceship caught pockets and eddies of sand. The thing looked like a monstrous oval of dun canvas draped across upright sticks. A cluster of quonsets and the Army's new desert prefabs dotted a rough half-circle around the north rim. They looked like dwarfed out-buildings for the most gigantic circus tent Earth had ever seen. Army Engineers said the ship was 6,218 feet long, 1,054 feet wide.

Some five miles east of the site the dust storm hazed across the monotonous structures of the cantonment that housed some thirty thousand people from every major nation: linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, doctors of every shape and description, watchers and watchers for the watchers, spies, espionage and counter-espionage agents.

For seven months the threat of Eniwetok, the threat of the unknown as well, had held them in check.

Towards evening of this day the wind slackened. The drifted sand began sifting off the ship and back into new shapes, trickling down for all the world like the figurative “sands of time” that here were most certainly running out.

Mrs. Francine Millar, clinical psychologist with the Indo-European Germanic-Root team, hurried across the bare patch of trampled sand outside the spaceship's entrance. She bent her head against what was left of the windstorm. Under her left arm she carried her briefcase tucked up like a football. Her other hand carried a rolled-up copy of that afternoon's
Oregon Journal.
The lead story said that Air Force jets had shot down a small private plane trying to sneak into the restricted area. Three unidentified men killed. The plane had been stolen.

Thoughts of a plane crash made her too aware of the circumstances in her own recent widowhood. Dr. Robert Millar had died in the crash of a transatlantic passenger plane ten days before the arrival of the spaceship. She let the newspaper fall out of her hands. It fluttered away on the wind.

Francine turned her head away from a sudden biting of the sandblast wind. She was a wiry slim figure of about five feet six inches, still trim and athletic at forty-one. Her auburn hair, mussed by the wind, still carried the look of youth. Heavy lids shielded her blue eyes. The lids drooped slightly, giving her a perpetual sleepy look even when she was wide awake and alert—a circumstance she found helpful in her profession.

She came into the lee of the conference quonset, and straightened. A layer of sand covered the doorstep. She opened the door, stepped across the sand only to find more of it on the floor inside, grinding underfoot. It was on tables, on chairs, mounded in corners—on every surface.

Hikonojo Ohashi, Francine's opposite number with the Japanese-Korean and Sino-Tibetan team, already sat at his place on the other side of the table. The Japanese psychologist was grasping, pen fashion, a thin-pointed brush, making notes in ideographic shorthand.

Francine closed the door.

Ohashi spoke without looking up: “We're early.”

He was a trim, neat little man: flat features, smooth cheeks and even curve of chin, remote dark eyes behind the inevitable thick lenses of the Oriental scholar.

Francine tossed her briefcase onto the table and pulled out a chair opposite Ohashi. She wiped away the grit with a handkerchief before sitting down. The ever-present dirt, the monotonous landscape, her own frustration—all combined to hold her on the edge of anger. She recognized the feeling and its source, stifled a wry smile.

“No, Hiko,” she said. “I think we're late. It's later than we think.”

“Much later when you put it that way,” said Ohashi. His Princeton accent came out low, modulated like a musical instrument under the control of a master.

“Now we're going to be banal,” she said. Immediately, she regretted the sharpness of her tone, forced a smile to her lips.

“They gave us no deadline,” said Ohashi. “That is one thing, anyway.” He twirled his brush across an inkstone.

“Something's in the air,” she said. “I can feel it.”

“Very much sand in the air,” he said.

“The wind has us all on edge,” he said. “It feels like rain. A change in the weather.” He made another note, put down the brush and began setting out papers for the conference. All at once, his head came up. He smiled at Francine. The smile made him look immature, and she suddenly saw back through the years to a serious little boy named Hiko Ohashi.