Viscous Circle (32 page)

Soon solids and liquids and gels were pouring from the machine orifices, out over the floor, getting in the Monsters' way, squishing under bone-filled leg extremities. Angry as well as dizzy from the beginning effect of the enzyme, some of the Monsters picked up what Rondl recognized as pseudo skinless tomatoes and soft-shelled eggs and beverage bulbs and hurled them at the tormenting yellow Bands. Naturally they missed; Bands were excellent at dodging flying objects. Red and yellow gunk splattered across the ship's control mechanisms. Now
this
showed promise!

"Taunt the Monsters, positioning yourselves between them and equipment, or between one Monster and another," Rondl directed.

They did so, getting into the spirit of this game. Sure enough, the tipsy Monsters began throwing food at the baiting Bands—and hitting each other instead. A Monster female got splattered on the back of the head by a cup of chocolate pudding; she whirled in outrage, swept up a meringue pie, and shoved it into the face part of the male Monster nearest her.

Now the Bands were able to withdraw and simply watch in growing amazement. The Monsters, true to their nature, were indulging in an orgy of food abuse. Ripe paper-shelled gourds bounced off the skull bones of standing Monsters; beverage bulbs exploded under trampling foot bones. Mock-lobster dishes clamped their decorative red claws on Monsters' stray finger bones. Bursting baked potatoes bombarded the posteriors of Monsters bending to pick up more ammunition; sausage links wrapped around limbs and necks. Well-sauced spaghetti slid down the front of a prim female Monster, outside and inside her uniform blouse; she let forth a scream that made the walls vibrate and began laying violently about her with a handful of carrots. Carbonated beverage fluid bubbled over the trouser section of the admiral who had once commanded this vessel, and fizzed into his underclothing. The admiral did a dance of discomfort, anger, and confusion, his mouth-orifice shaped into an O fully as round as a Band. Then he dived for a load of cream-filled eclairs just emerging from a machine, and commenced target practice of his own.

"They are distracted," Rondl flashed, satisfied. "Return to the ship-guidance mechanism. Direct the ship toward deep space, away from the Monster-controlled ships."

The Bands went to work, experimenting with the unfamiliar mechanisms. They could affect the magnetic circuits—but control was quite different from disruption. It was far easier to prevent the Monsters from using the ship than it was to use it themselves. The ship lurched, seeming as drunken as the Monsters within it. But slowly it steadied and moved in the desired manner.

A Monster head appeared in the neglected communication screen, its orifices shaping into a scowl. "Block that transmission!" Rondl flashed. Several Bands flew to the screen, and it blanked out again.

But Rondl felt insecure. The Monsters of this ship had been nullified, but this effect was temporary; when they recovered sobriety, they would cause trouble. He was also uncertain what the other Monsters in the other ships would do. He needed to check on that.

Under Rondl's direction they got the incoming messages in laser form, bypassing the clumsy screen. They ignored the scrambled, multifrequency inputs and accepted only non-coded ones. Now they could intercept a certain percentage of messages without alerting the food-throwing Monsters.

The news was not good. "...final warning. Turn about and return to assigned orbit, or we shall open fire in nine minutes."

Trouble! Individual Bands could avoid the explosive shells of the Monsters in space, but this ship could not. If the ship were destroyed, they would all be disbanded with it. They had to flee the ship immediately.

No! Again Rondl reacted like a Monster, not a Band. He had captured the ship; he would fight violently to hold it.

Except that his Bands would not fight in this fashion—and even if they would, they would not be able to handle the complex requirements of space combat. Only Monsters could fight Monster-fashion. Only Rondl himself could do it—and he could not do it alone.

Did he have to? Why not extend the disciplinary system he had set up for the training of Bands? The others did not have to fight, or to understand space mechanics; all they had to do was follow simple directions.
Aim this tube... connect this circuit... now!
And a shell could be on its way to intersect another vessel. Only he, Rondl, would need to grasp the whole.

But he had very little time. The other ships were about to fire on this one. "All available Bands proceed to defensive apparatus," he flashed urgently. It was an anomaly of Monster nomenclature that the most aggressive and offensive paraphernalia were termed defensive. In this case, that fiction was useful.

The Bands flocked to the apparatus and began mastering its circuitry. They were not aware of the overall situation; each worked on a particular aspect, so that individual circuits would be responsive to Rondl's will.

In this manner Rondl got the weapons of the ship functional, and oriented on the pursuing vessels. When the firing commenced, Rondl fired back. His weapons did not have good aim, but at least the action put the Monsters on notice that they could not attack with impunity. Maybe they would desist, and he would succeed in absconding with this ship. What an advantage it would be to have a weapon equivalent to those of the Monsters! He could use the ship to fight, and to train Bands, and—

And convert the Bands into a technological, warring species like the Solarians? He always came up against that horror. What good would such a progression be? To win this war was to lose it!

Then an enemy shell exploded against the hull. The ship jolted. Air leaked out. Pressure dropped. This did not affect the Bands, but it touched the still-brawling Monsters immediately. Suddenly there was insufficient oxygen.

A repair robot slapped a brace on the hole and stopped the leak. New air was pumped in to restore pressure. But those moments of oxygen deprivation caused the enhancement enzyme to operate as it was supposed to. The Monsters were gasping—and suddenly sober.

Abruptly there was organization. Monsters brought out emergency space suits: standard operating procedure when under fire. Now they were not dependent on or vulnerable to the ship's air supply. They no longer imbibed the enzyme.

Suited Monsters were all over, assuming command of the equipment. The Bands could not restrain or distract them. The ship had been abruptly lost.

"Get out!" Rondl flashed. "Concentrate on the space-disposal mechanism; make it eject us all!"

They clustered there. This move caught the Monsters by surprise; before they could act to prevent it, the Bands had had themselves ejected into space.

"Scatter!" Rondl flashed. "Avoid their attack!"

The Monsters aboard all the ships tried to shoot down the Bands, but were not successful. Space was filled with futile laser beams and exploding shells. Soon all the Bands were out of range. They had escaped.

But Rondl knew the Bands had lost the battle—and the war. They had tried their best, and fooled the Monsters, and failed either to capture a Monster ship or to significantly impede the Monsters' progress toward Planet Band. Now, as the result of this effort, the Monsters knew what Bands were capable of, and would not be caught this way again.

Tangt, receiving news of this defeat, would proceed to try to save the Bands her way. It just might work—except that Rondl had given her the wrong information. And he wasn't sure he could locate her to correct the lie before they were both recalled to their Solarian hosts.

 

 

 

Chapter 17:

The Lie

 

 

But by the time Rondl located Cirl, he had changed his mind. Too many Bands had been lost, and the cause of the Monsters was too wrong, to permit a simple hand-over of the Ancient Site. He almost preferred to risk the destruction of all the Bands than to give the gift of victory to the Monsters. Also, he lacked conviction that the Monsters would be magnanimous in victory. They might "teach the Ringers a lesson" by exterminating them as a species.

This was Monster thinking he was doing, he knew—but the very notion of delivering benefit to the forces of wrong, merely to abate further wrongs, was repellent. Appeasement: it had a bad flavor in any framework. And if every species did that, the least scrupulous would inherit the Galaxy. A line had to be drawn somewhere.

Yet he had to be honest with the Bands. It was their species at stake.

Cirl met him gladly, and in that moment he knew he was doing it all for her. She had a right to her own type of existence, and her society had a right to the benefit of Ancient technology to protect that existence.

"Cirl, we must convoke a circle," he flashed immediately. "I have a pressing discussion to initiate."

"Of course," she agreed. "The Monsters are drawing nigh our planet."

They gathered all Rondl's recruits surviving the Monster engagement and formed a huge circle. "Here is the situation," Rondl flashed into it. "We have tried to halt the invasion of the Monsters, and have failed. They will proceed to Planet Band and engage in their usual search schedule, incidentally extirpating the Band species, unless we take one of three courses."

They were with him. They had fought the Monsters and suffered a fifty-per cent attrition. They knew that only Rondl had the capacity to help them.

"First I must inform all of you what some of you have known," Rondl continued. "I am not a true Band. I am a Monster in Band form." A shock flowed around the circle, replete with viscous eddies and return shocks. Some Bands
had
known, but evidently they had respected his privacy and not bruited it about. Had he flashed this news to the Bands individually, some would have disbanded; but the power of the circle held them securely. Only a shock bad enough to destroy them all would destroy any; the circle unified them, providing the strength of mass.

"I did not know this when I commenced this resistance," Rondl continued. "I had amnesia. I thought I was a Band with a special talent for organization. I had nightmares about Monsters. Then I was recalled to Monster host, complete with bone-filled limbs and turgid eyeballs, and knew that I had been sent here to betray the Band species." Again the shock; this was what the Monsters called strong medicine, delivered abruptly. But these Bands knew him; they had worked with him. They trusted him. Cirl was helping him, flashing a steady pulse of acceptance into the circle, making his ugly confession more acceptable. She loved him, despite what she knew. She made him seem better than he was. What would he do without her!

"But I had come to know the Band mode of life. It is better than the Monster mode. So although I knew myself to be a Monster, I tried to help the Bands. I am sorry that I had to employ Monster tactics of violence and confusion; it was the only way I could see to stop the invaders. And I am sorry it was not enough."

They were all sorry; they had all failed.

The circle asked him: what were the three courses he saw to stop the Monsters?

"None of them is pleasant," Rondl said. "The first is to marshal an even larger force of Bands, and fight more violently than before." A tremor went through the circle at the concept "fight," so he hastily modified the thought to "resist." Then he continued: "Last time we tried merely to disrupt Monster progress, and to take over their ships. This time we would have to try actually to destroy ships and kill Monsters. To cut off their life-support—" But he had to halt; the reaction was so strong the whole circle was in danger of destruction. The Bands—his battle-hardened veterans—simply could not tolerate this sort of input.

"This is not acceptable," Rondl flashed quickly. "I describe it only to show the manner Monsters would act. Monsters are uncivilized; they believe the ends of conquest justify the means of extermination. At least some do; some Monsters are less uncivilized than others. They aren't all evil." He thought of his Solarian wife, Helen, whose views he had only recently come to understand. "If Bands were to adopt the tactics of the unethical Monsters, those Bands would be like me: Monsters in Band form. Because you are true Bands, you must reject this." And the horror subsided. They
were
Bands, and they did reject it.

"The second course is to give the Monsters what they want," Rondl flashed. "There is an Ancient Site in the Band System, which we know as a pleasant retreat. It was constructed three million years ago by an unknown species who knew more about magnetism than any Galactic species does today. I believe the early Bands discovered this Site, and drew on its nature to shape the devices that channelize the lines on which we travel. Thus Band society became interplanetary and interstellar, with individuals traveling through space in a manner possible to no other species I know of. Without that Site, Bands might have been limited to primitive natural lines, mostly about Planet Band; you would have had to compete for limited living area and resources, becoming less pacifistic. Civilization as we know it now would not have been feasible. But we no longer need to have possession of the Site; we already have the technology from it that we needed to fashion the lines that give us freedom of space and conscience. If we give the Site to the Monsters—if we tell them where it is, so they will no longer need to search so destructively for it—they might take it over and ignore the Bands. We would be allowed to exist; since the Site is not on Planet Band, they should not go there."

The circle considered that. There was no great shock of revulsion. This was the kind of action the Bands could accept, just as Tangt had thought.

"However, I am not certain this would work," Rondl said. "The Monsters could decide the site is too valuable to leave in the vicinity of an alien species. They might decide to clear us out anyway, or they might suspect that there were other Ancient Sites in this System, and search for them, destroying us anyway. The greed of Monsters has no known limit; they always want more than they possess, and build empires and still are not satisfied, being limited in the end only by force. So though this course is feasible, I do not trust it; it gambles on the goodwill of creatures who have little benevolence toward aliens."