The Fresco (39 page)

JOURNEY OUT OF TIME

Benita woke in a coffinlike cubby hung on the hull of the ship. She was not conscious of time having passed, not even of a night gone by, as she usually was in the morning when she woke. She'd simply lain down and slept and now was awake, without any sense of laterness at all. When she lay down, she was still in a state of speechless surprise about where the ship had been all that time. They had walked into the elevator, and suddenly the back of it opened up like a buttonhole and they slipped through, bag and baggage, into the ship. Chiddy explained that it was coexistent with the entire third floor of the building, wall to wall, and that what Benita had thought of as the lower roof was also the outer integument of the ship.

Her first thought was Sasquatch. He had committed indecencies on the ship, time after time. Chiddy didn't mention it or seem concerned, however, so she decided it was not worth mentioning.

They came aboard, Carlos, thank God, sufficiently impressed to be silent. They drank a glass of something celebratory (and quite likely sedative) with the two Pistach, they lay down in the allocated cubbies. Later, Chiddy told
Benita's cubby to wake her, and also Chad's, though he let Carlos remain asleep.

Without asking, Benita knew why Chiddy left Carlos asleep. There was no point in waking him any earlier than needful. She started to go through her usual Carlos litany, all the things she might have done differently, the help she might have sought, the influences she might have brought to bear. If there had been more time. If there had been more money. If she had not been so young. In the current surroundings, however, the litany of self-blame lacked force and conviction. Carlos had been a petulant, screaming, stubborn baby; a whiny little boy; a bully in the playground. He had been a slacker at school. He had never been abused, not even by Bert, in any physical sense. He could be charming, when he thought it would get him something, but most of the time he was not. She decided not to play the game with herself anymore. Mother bears didn't play such games. They knew their cubs had to go. So, let him go.

Once awake, Chad and Benita were told they had arrived near Flibotsia, which they admired through a suddenly opened view screen. Chiddy spoke to someone on the ground, and then the ship went down, light as a bubble.

Chad made himself responsible for the recording equipment. When they stepped outside the ship it was like stepping into a meadow full of huge butterflies that smelled like flowers. Several of them, larger and more brightly colored than the others, approached at once, clustering around Chiddy and Vess to thank them for some event in the past when the Pistach had solved a great problem, or so Benita inferred from the slightly embarrassed expressions on the Pistach faces.

“What was that about?” asked Benita, during a hiatus while the Flibotsi prepared a festive meal to be laid out, picnic style, in the grassy clearing near the ship.

“A fertility problem,” said Chiddy. “Those larger beings are empresses of this world, their home world, and some years ago, they were becoming infertile. Vess and I found out why and fixed it for them.”

“They seemed very grateful,” said Chad.

Chiddy nodded. “They are. Even though it was more by luck than skill that we figured it out.”

The banquet was duly provided, tiny containers of various syrups and pastes, to be drunk or spread on sweet crackers or just sniffed, for all of them smelled as marvelous as they tasted. Chiddy whispered that many of them were euphorics, as well. It was, Benita thought, rather like being happily drunk. She felt jolly and joyous, with no thoughts of problems or pains, and also, Chiddy assured her, no need to worry about a possible hangover later.

When they parted from the Flibotsi with mutual expressions of regard, and while they were on their way to the next stop, Chad asked Chiddy about the fertility problem the two Pistach had solved, and after hemming and humming for a time, Chiddy agreed to tell them about it.

“The Flibotsi are trisexual, with a few breeding females—the empresses—a few more breeding males—the consorts—and many unsexed ones who do a little work but mostly just enjoy life. When I read your fairy tales of little winged people, I think of the Flibotsi. Of course, as you have seen, they are not small. Indeed they are larger than we, but they are also more fragile, since their planets are low-gravity ones.”

“I didn't notice,” said Chad.

“The ship projected a field around each of us that prevented our doing so,” said Vess. “We weren't staying long enough for you to acclimate, and we did not wish to run the risk of gastric upset. It would have offended our hostesses.”

Nodding agreement, Chiddy went on. “The worker Flibotsi are excellent gardeners, and they eat many types of flowers which gives each of them a lovely and quite particular scent. The filaments that grow on their heads and down their backs, their breath, indeed, even their skin smells of flowers, and as you have experienced, being in the midst of a hovering group of Flibotsi is an olfactory delight.

“We were called in because the empresses were becoming unable to produce male offspring, a certain number of whom are needed to continue the race. Vess and I asked at once if males from some of the other Flibotsi settled worlds couldn't simply be reassigned to the home world. This would be by
far the easiest way to make up the lack, but the empress told us how difficult interstellar travel is for them. It is more than mere dislike of being shut up in close quarters; it amounts almost to terror. Also, they told us, the cost is great. They must pay huge amounts to starship owners whenever they decide to establish a new colony.

“They have no ships of their own. They do not, as a matter of fact, manufacture many artifacts of any kind, which explains their lack of exchangeable currency. Their entire off-world economy is supported by their trade in botanicals and perfumes. The few artifacts they make include writing implements, of course, as poetry and song are important to them, and musical instruments, mostly stringed ones that are either bowed or plucked, plus drums and chimes. They construct many shrines, small ones, exquisitely made, and they plant gardens and groves everywhere. All this work is done by the unsexed ones, the neuters.

“Males grow up in the homes of their empress mothers, then are traded to other empresses in the general vicinity when they reach breeding age. Since their aptitudes are more or less the same as those of a registered male poodle on your world, they are pampered and well groomed, and also, for the most part, amusing, affectionate, and capable of sustained sexual activity.

“All the nonsexual eggs are parthenogenically produced as sterile copies of the empress herself. Both empress and male eggs, however, are fertilized by the male. Following mating flights, during which a supply of sperm is inserted into the empress's vlasiput, a kind of internal purse or sac, the sperm is very slowly leaked into the oviduct, male eggs being laid at the rate of about one per two hundred sexless ones, and female empress eggs at the rate of one or two per thousand. In the recent past, the rate of male eggs, distinguishable through color and size, had fallen to a level so low that there were some mature empresses who had had no males when they were ready for their maiden flights.

“The Flibotsi live in
flissits
, which are built high around the trunks of great trees, roofed with thatch and caulked with fresh moss that takes root on the sides of the structure
and soon covers the entire flissit, making it both weather-tight and cushiony. When well sheathed by moss, the flissits completely disappear into the forest scene, small ones for one Flibot, larger ones for two or three or even more, so that nothing intrusive or untidy mars the beauty of the landscape. Though there were a hundred flissits within seeing distance of the glade where we feasted, I doubt that you noticed even one of them, for the Flibotsi have a horror of what I have heard you, Benita, refer to as ‘tackiness.'

“Very large flissits in giant trees provide apartments for the empresses and their consorts as well as for hatcheries, brooders, and nurseries for the young. The moss covering royal flissits is of a different sort, a paler green, and it grows down the trunk of the tree and then spreads radially, though very slowly, bits of it running off in all directions, like the spokes of a wheel. It has a strong, pungent, though not unpleasant odor.

“Vess and I, together with a consultant committee of proffi—scientists, physicians, and the like—set about determining why male eggs were not being laid. The cause was not environmental; the soil and water and air had no poisons in them. We found no inimical radiation, nothing in the food or drink. It wasn't genetic. It wasn't the weather or the climate or some new cultural habit that had recently begun. In fact, everything we postulated failed to prove out.

“When everything else had been exhausted as a possibility, Vess and I decided to go on to our last resort: hanging about and chatting with people. No matter how pleasant, one must put this off, as otherwise one might be misled. Once there is no other recourse, however, one may relax and enjoy it.

“So we talked to the empresses, who are rather complacent and preoccupied with their sex lives. And to the unsexed ones, who are mostly delightful. And to the male partners, who are the only Flibotsi to demonstrate what you on Earth call
angst
. We asked all kinds of questions. We chatted with aged brooder and incubator managers, with ancient gardeners, one of whom actually gave us the first clue.

“ In my day,' it said, ‘when I was under-gardener to old
Flargee at Empress Magh's, there wasn't another empress within flying distance. Now, well, now, there's Empress Irin, Empress Flitch, Empress Moggys, Empress Tryff, Empress (so on and so on, as the gardener listed a dozen or more) all within a bit of a fly, and many close enough to walk to!'

“This rang a bell with me, and with Vess. Something we had heard or seen or read about. We sat up late that night, in a visitors' flissit, thinking and chatting, hoping some idea would pop out of the moss walls. In fact, I said at one point, ‘Some idea should pop out of the moss walls,' and Vess said, ‘That's it.'”

“Vess reminded me that there are certain trees and mosses and other plants that make a kind of herbicide in their roots or leaves, and this chemical keeps other trees or bushes or mosses from growing in their immediate vicinity. Sometimes it keeps all growth away, sometimes only certain growths. You have such trees on Earth, dear Benita. The black walnut tree, I believe is one. Such a compound would not be something one would look for when seeking pollutants or poisons.

“So, we sent for moss samples from the flissits of the Empresses in the neighborhood. We found that each moss was slightly different, each exuding a slightly different pheromone, each one lethal to the male sperm in any vlasiput except that of the local empress. We sent for samples of the moss in the wild and found it exuded no pheromones at all.

“This was interesting. We obtained samples of skin and flesh and fluids from the empresses and immediately hit, as you say, pay dirt. The empresses have highly individual attractant odors that are produced during their first mating flights and continue to exude during their lives, a kind of olfactory fingerprint. During the mating flights, the particular scent is fixated upon by the males. Thereafter, a mated male cannot be utilized by any other empress. It would do no good, as that empress would not have the proper pheromone.

“The odors emanate, we found, from waxy secretions created by bacteria living in pores in the empresses' skins. The bacteria are subject to constant mutation, and thus each population of bacteria is unique. The bacteria rub off on the
moss, the moss incorporates them into its own structure where they reproduce and spread radially, creating an area that is recognizable to all as the territory of that particular Empress because it smells like her.

“However, when empresses are crowded together, one empress's scent actually abuts and interpenetrates the moss spread of one or more neighboring empresses. Inimical scents are picked up by worker Flibotsi and carried into the vicinity of the empress and the male sperm in the vlasiput are affected.

“Once we were sure how it happened, we didn't take time to investigate the biology of the situation. It was enough to know where the problem lay, and we had no wish to infringe further upon the privacy of the Flibotsi empresses.”

“They needed to move farther apart,” suggested Chad.

Chiddy nodded. “As you saw, however, when we were orbiting the planet, the forest lands cover only a small portion of Flibotsia. The Flibotsi cannot live in the sea or on the deserts or even in the great prairies which, so we were told, had been forested until several centuries ago, when the Flibotsi sold the timber to alien lumbermen in return for transport to new colonies.”

“So there was no room for them to separate, was there?” said Benita.

“You are correct. In order to make more room between empresses, new empresses could not be allowed to mature until several old empresses had died, opening up a space. Any new empresses for which there was no vacant slot had to settle off planet, no matter how traumatic they found the journey. We also suggested that they begin reforestation of the plains to provide for future living space. Until this is well underway, the population must be very strictly controlled.

“We also suggested the immediate retirement of the more aged empresses and the roll-back of their mosses.”

“Did it work?” asked Chad.

“As you saw,” said Chiddy, “they have reduced the number of empresses by half. Each time we return, they thank us again and again for our intervention.”

The next planet was Vixbotine, a desert world full of dunes and tormented stone, interrupted here and there by
fertile oases and permeated by caverns which were cool, moist, and sheltered from the sun and everlasting winds. They landed near one such cavern, were welcomed by several small, slender persons who seemed to be hollow. Their living parts, so Chiddy informed the humans in an aside, were just beneath the skin, as in a tree on Earth, while the center portion was a sound box that grew longer and larger as the Vixbot aged.