Wolfbane Page 8

And then the New Sun would be born, and the world would bloom again. Like now. And if Germyn had done his work well, his bank would still have funds on deposit to make loans—to finance new ventures—to plant more farmland—to hope.

  It was the best time of year for bankers, as well as for everyone else. It was the only time when anyone dared hope at all.

  So when Germyn came home one night, he was vastly pleased with his work and his world. He was mulling over the words of mild exultation with which to share his pleasure with his wife when he opened the door.

  The exultation did not last.

  He contemplated his wife from behind his hand, unwilling to believe what reason and evidence told him was true.

  Possibly the events of the past few days had unhinged her reason, but he was nearly sure that she had eaten a portion of the evening meal secretly, in the serving room, before calling him to table.

  He felt sure that it was only a temporary aberration; she was, after all, a Citizeness, with all that that implied. A—a creature, like that Gala Tropile for example, someone like that might steal extra portions with craft and guile. You couldn’t live with a Wolf for years and not have some of it rub off on you. But not Citizeness Germyn.

  There was a light thrice-repeated tap on the door.

  Speak of the devil, thought Roget Germyn most appropriately; for it was that same Gala Tropile. She entered, her head downcast, looking dark and haggard and—well, pretty.

  He began formally, “I give you greeting, Citi—”

  “They’re here!” she interrupted in desperate haste. Germyn blinked. “Please,” she begged, “can’t you do something? They’re Wolves!”

  Citizeness Germyn emitted a muted shriek.

  “You may leave, Citizeness,” Germyn told her shortly, already forming in his mind the words of gentle reproof he would later use. “Now, what is all this talk of Wolves?” He realized with a pang that his words were almost as gracelessly direct as her own. So completely had his wife and Tropile’s erased the sweetness of his day at the bank.

  Gala Tropile distractedly sat down in the chair her hostess had vacated. (Sat without being invited! Not even in a guest chair! How far gone the woman was!) “Glenn and I ran away from you,” she began drearily, “after—you know—after he decided he didn’t want to make his Donation? After he escaped from the House of the Five Regulations? Anyway, we ran as far as we could, because Glenn said there was no reason he should just sit still and let you all murder him just because he helped himself to a few things.” Germyn was shuddering as he listened to that tale of horrors, but what she said next made him sit straight up in shock. “And then—you won’t believe this, Citizen Germyn—and then, when we stopped to rest, a day’s march away, an aircraft came!”

  Citizen Germyn didn’t. “An aircraft!” He allowed himself a frown. “Citizeness, it is not well to say things which are not so.”

  “I saw it, Citizen! There were men in it, and one of them is here again. He came looking for me with another man, and I barely escaped him. I’m afraid!”

  “There is no cause for fear, only an opportunity to appreciate,” Citizen Germyn said mechanically—it was what you told your children. But within himself, he was finding it very hard to remain calm. That word, Wolf—it was a destroyer of calm, it was an incitement to panic and hatred! He remembered Tropile well, and there was Wolf, to be sure. The mere fact that Citizen Germyn had doubted his Wolfishness at first was now powerful cause to be doubly convinced of it; he had postponed the day of reckoning for an enemy of all the world, and there was enough secret guilt in his recollection to set his own heart thumping.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” said Citizen Germyn, in words that the stress of emotion had already made far less than graceful.

  Obediently Gala Tropile said: “I was returning to my home after the evening meal and Citizeness Puffin—she took me in after Citizen Tropile—after my husband was—”

  “I understand. You made your home with her.”

  “Yes. She told me that two men had come to see me. They spoke badly, she said, and I was alarmed. I peered through a window of my own home, and they were there. One had been in the aircraft I saw! And they flew away with my husband.”

  “It is a matter of seriousness,” Citizen Germyn admitted doubtfully. “So that then you came to me?”

  “Yes, but they saw me, Citizen! And I think they followed. You must protect me, I have no one else!”

  “If they be Wolf,” Germyn said calmly, “we will raise hue and cry against them. Now, will the Citizeness remain here? I go forth to see these men.”

  There was a graceless hammering on the door.

  “Too late!” cried Gala Tropile in panic. “They are here!”

  Citizen Germyn went through the ritual of greeting, of deprecating the ugliness and poverty of his home, of offering everything he owned to his visitors; it was the way to greet a stranger.

  The two men lacked both courtesy and wit; but they did make an attempt to comply with the minimal formal customs of introduction. He had to give them credit for that; and yet it was almost more alarming than if they had blustered and yelled.

  For he knew one of these men.

  He dredged the name out of his memory. It was Haendl. This man appeared in Wheeling the day Glenn Tropile had been scheduled to make the Donation of the Spinal Tap and had broken free and escaped. He had inquired about Tropile of a good many people, Citizen Germyn included; and even at that time, in the excitement of an Amok, a Wolf-finding and a Translation in a single day, Germyn had wondered at his lack of breeding and airs.

  Now he wondered no longer.

  But the man made no such overt act as Tropile’s terrible theft of bread, and Citizen Germyn postponed the raising of the hue and cry. It was not a thing to be undertaken lightly.

  “Gala Tropile is in this house,” the man with Haendl said bluntly.

  Citizen Germyn managed a Quirked Smile.

  “We want to see her, Germyn. It’s about her husband. He—uh, he was with us for a while and something happened.”

  “Ah, yes. The Wolf.”

  The man flushed and looked at Haendl. Haendl said loudly: “The Wolf. Sure he’s a Wolf. But he’s gone now, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Gone?”

  Haendl said angrily: “Not just him, but four or five of us. There was a man named Innison, and he’s gone too. We need help, Germyn. Something about Tropile—God knows how it is, but he started something. We want to talk to his wife and find out what we can about him. So will you get her out of the back room where she’s hiding and bring her here, please?”

  Citizen Germyn quivered. He vent over the ID bracelet that once had belonged to the late PFC Joe Hartmann, fingering it to hide his thoughts. He said at last: “Perhaps you are right. Perhaps the Citizeness is with my wife. If this were so, would it not be possible that she was fearful of those who once were with her husband?”

  Haendl laughed sourly. “She isn’t any more fearful than we are, Germyn. Let me tell you something. I told you about this man Innison who disappeared. He was a Son of the Wolf, you understand me? For that matter—” He glanced at his companion, licked his lips and changed his mind about what he had been going to say next. “He was a Wolf. Do you ever remember hearing of a Wolf being Translated before?”

  “Translated?” Germyn dropped the ID bracelet. “But that’s impossible!” he cried, forgetting his manners completely. “Oh, no. Translation comes only to those who attain the moment of supreme detachment, you can be sure of that. I know. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. No Wolf could possibly—”

  “At least five Wolves did,” Haendl said grimly. “Now you see what the trouble is? Tropile was Translated—I saw that with my own eyes. The next day, Innison. Within a week, two or three others. So we came down here, Germyn, not because we like you people, not because we enjoy it. But because we’re scared. What we want is to talk to Tropile’s wife—you too, I guess; we want to talk to an
ybody who ever knew him. We want to find out everything there is to find out about Tropile, and see if we can make any sense of the answers. Because maybe Translation is the supreme objective of life to you people, Germyn, but to us it’s just one more way of dying. And we don’t want to die.”

  Citizen Germyn bent to pick up his cherished identification bracelet and dropped it absently on a table. There was very much on his mind.

  He said at last: “That is strange. Shall I tell you another strange thing?”

  Haendl, looking angry and baffled, nodded.

  Germyn said: “There has been no Translation here since the day the Wolf, Tropile, escaped. But there have been Eyes. I have seen them myself. It—” he hesitated, and shrugged—“it has been disturbing. Some of our finest Citizens have ceased to Meditate; they have been worrying. So many Eyes, and no one taken! It is outside of all of our experience, and our customs have suffered. Politeness is dwindling among us; even in my own household—”

  He coughed and went on: “No matter. But these Eyes have come into every home; they have peered about, peered about, and no one has been taken. Why? Is it something to do with the Translation of Wolves?” He stared hopelessly at his visitors. “All I know,” he said, “is that it is very strange, and therefore I am worried.”

  Haendl boomed: “Then take us to Gala Tropile. Let’s see what we can find out!”

  Citizen Germyn bowed. He cleared his throat and raised his voice just sufficiently to carry from one room to another. “Citizeness!” he called.

  There was a pause and then his wife appeared in the doorway, looking concerned.

  “Will you ask if Citizeness Tropile will join us here?” he requested.

  His wife nodded. “She is resting. I will suggest to her that it would be pleasant to speak together....”

  But that Citizeness Germyn did not do.

  As she turned, there was a sound of two hands loudly clapping from the other room.

  All four of them jumped, and stared. Then the nearly self-admitted Wolf, Haendl, ran for the door and the others followed.

  The thunderclap had been real, though not of any human hands. Air had rushed in to fill a void. The void had been the volume of space that once had been occupied by Citizeness Gala Tropile.

  Roget Germyn turned pale. This woman—this Wolf-tainted woman, surely in no state for the grace of meditation—she had been Translated, too!

  10

  On the binary planet, the former Wolf (and also former human being) named Glenn Tropile had been reprogrammed.

  In some ways, the Earth had been a disappointment to the Pyramids. True, it was wonderfully rich in Components, and the Components seemed perfectly willing to reseed and recultivate and reproduce themselves indefinitely. There were not as many as there once had been, to be sure, but you couldn’t knock a wrist-watch mine that kept on generating new wrist-watches. Moreover, these particular Components were high-grade goods. They were of a usefully high order of complexity, suitable for programming into almost any area of Pyramid concern: calculation, manufacture, repair, processing, data storage, whatever. It was also true that these particular Components had the delightful habit of ripening themselves for the greatest ease of assimilation; often as not, they arrived on the binary with their minds wholly blank and ready for recording upon. (The Pyramids didn’t know this was called “meditation”, and of course would not have cared anyway.)

  The only thing that was really wrong with Earthly Components was their unfortunate anatomy. Because they were land-dwellers, and from a planet with an undesirably high surface gravity at that, they had evolved all that completely unnecessary investment in skeletons and muscles and, of course, digestive and eliminatory systems to support them. The Pyramids liked little Components, with nerve-endings packed closely on the surface of their bodies and small but quick limbs (or tentacles or pseudopods).

  (Of course, this was not really a problem for the Pyramids. There were no problems for the Pyramids. Take-apart-and-shove was good enough for them. The details they left to the million million systems and sub-systems that filled their dead old planet from crust to crust. Those systems, themselves Component-directed, were quite able to make do with odd-shaped Components, though it did involve a certain amount of rearranging—surgical, for example.)

  So the Pyramids dragged their captive planet out of the Earth’s solar system, questing after that dream, the planet of perfect Components. Like any prudent traveler, they took the Earth as a sort of picnic lunch to sustain them on the way. They were not tidy picnickers. They had strewn half the Galaxy with the discards of earlier journeys. Some day, no doubt, they would have consumed all they wanted from the tuck basket that was the Earth. Then they would simply let go of it. There would be no further Re-Creation of the Sun. In only a wink of time—a few decades at the most—the planet would radiate the last of its stored heat, and drift frozen for all the rest of eternity.

  But that moment was not yet.

  Now it was the time for navigation. The Pyramids had taken Earth out past the orbit of Pluto with a simple shove, slow and massive. It had been enough merely to approximate the direction in which, eventually, they would want to go. There would be plenty of time for refining the course later, once the spiral had opened almost to a straight line.

  The systems concerned with such things as navigation knew where they were going, at least in general terms. There was a star-cluster reasonably sure to be rich in Componentiferous planets. It was inherent in the nature of Component mines that eventually they played out. They had always done so.

  That didn’t matter. There were always more mines. If that had not been so it would have been necessary, perhaps, to stockpile Components against future needs. But things being as they were, it was easier to work the vein out and move on.

  This next hop would be quite a short one for the Pyramids, no more than a couple of thousand years at the maximum. Nevertheless, the navigation should be carefully done. Many of the navigation systems had been unused for a long time. Some of them were no longer functioning at optimum levels, because Components had failed. (It was the nature of Components to fail after a while. The Pyramids knew this, though they themselves were made to last forever; they accepted the fact that the life of a component was seldom more than some tens of thousands of years.) Other systems needed new data, small-scale information but important, on regions of the Galaxy not studied before.

  This was all old stuff to the Pyramids. They knew how to handle it. They broke the subject down to its essentials, separated even those into component parts. One set of systems opened great telescopic eyes in all frequencies to gaze at the astronomical objects before them. Others began the endless series of parallel-processed calculations that determined where to shove, and how hard. Maintenance systems within all of the others performed check-tests and identified Components that needed to be replaced.

  When they found a defective Component—human, reptile, protozoan, plant or whatever—they turfed it out and replaced it with a fresh one out of stores. The used Components weren’t wasted. They simply became soup stock for feeding the ones that were still in working order.

  This reinforced the chronic need for new Components. Therefore some stand-by Component-seeking systems were reactivated, by supplying them, of course, with new Components. Finding new components (by issuing appropriate instructions to the single Pyramid on Earth’s Mount Everest) was itself far too complex for a single component, but the Pyramids knew how to handle it. They broke the problem down to its essentials; separated even those into many parts. There was, for example, the subsection of one certain aspect of the logistic problem involved which involved locating and procuring additional Components to handle the load.

  Even that tiny specialization was too much for a single Component, but the Pyramids had resources to bring to bear. The procedure in such cases was to hitch several Components together.

  This was done.

  When the Pyramids finished their neurosurgery, t
here floated in an oversized nutrient tank a thing like a great sea-anemone. It was composed of eight Components—all human, as it happened—arranged in a circle, facing inward, joined temple to temple, brain to brain.

  At their feet, where sixteen eyes could see it, was the display board to feed them their visual Input. Sixteen hands grasped each a moulded switch to handle their binary-coded Output. There would be no storage of the Output outside of the eight-Component complex itself; it went as control signals to the electrostatic generators, funneled through the single Pyramid on Mount Everest, which handled the task of Component-procurement.

  That is, of Translation.

  The programming was slow and thorough. Perhaps the Pyramid which finally activated the octuple unit and went away was pleased with itself, not knowing that one of its Components was Glenn Tropile.

  Nirvana. (It pervaded all; there was nothing outside of it.)

  Nirvana. (Glenn Tropile floated in it as in the amniotic fluid around him.)

  Nirvana...The sound of one hand...Floating one-ness...

  There was an intrusion.

  Perfection is complete; by adding to it, it is destroyed. Duality struck like a thunderbolt. One-ness shattered.

  For Glenn Tropile, it seemed as though his wife were screaming at him to wake up. He tried.

  It was curiously difficult and painful. Timeless poignant sadness, five years of sorrow over a lost love compressed into a microsecond. It was always so, Tropile thought drowsily, awakening; it never lasts; what’s the use of worrying over what always happens....

  Sudden shock and horror rocked him.

  This was no ordinary awakening. No ordinary thing at all, nothing was as it ever had been before!

  Tropile opened his mouth and screamed—or thought he did. But there was only a hoarse, faint flutter in his eardrums.

  It was a moment when sanity might have gone. But there was one curious, mundane fact that saved him. He was holding something in his hands. He found that he could look at it, and it was a switch. A moulded switch, mounted on a board; and he was holding one in each hand.