The Canopy Of Time Part 10

She would consider that his opinion as an industrial ecologist was not worth having, and refused to yield enough to convention to ask him anyway.

Finally, Cyro said, "Whatever this super-conscious new species was, man would give it little chance to establish its supremacy-or even to survive. It would be blotted out before it had a chance to multiply.

After all, we could hardly be expected to be hospitable to the usurpers of our comfortable place in the cosmos."

"Pamlira says," Gerund told her, "that evolution would take care of that if it really wanted man out of the way. The new species would be given some sort of defence- or weapon-to render it invulnerable against the species it was superseding."

"How?" she asked indignantly, as if he had said some-thing stupid. "Evolution is a completely neutral-blind -process."

"That's what worries Pamlira!" Gerund said. He could see she considered this remark superficial. So it was; it had been designed to cover his uncertainty of what Pam-lira had actually said on that point.

Para-evolution was stiff reading; Gerund had only waded through it for Gyro's sake, because he knew the subject would interest her.

"All right," he thought angrily, "she'd understand the book: I wouldn't. Why should that upset me? She doesn't understand me."

Para-evolution and its attendant woes were presently driven out of both their minds. Jeffy appeared, framed bulkily in the door dividing the control-room from the cabin, while the plane roared on above the Sara on auto-pilot.

"There's a call coming in for a doctor," he said, trund-ling his words out one by one. "It's coming from Cap-verde Sub-port, almost dead ahead. They've got an underseaman in urgent need of healing." He looked im-ploringly at Gyro as he spoke.

"Of course I'll take it," she said, getting up and brush-ing past him into the control-room.

The call was coming through again as she reached the wireless. She listened carefully to it, and then answered.

"Thank you, Doctor Gyres," the Capverde operator said relievedly. "We'll wait for your arrival. Out."

They were now only some six hundred miles from the Capverde Islands; already they had covered nearly twice that distance from Barbe Barber. Even as Cyro left the wireless, the Lanic Sea showed ahead. On this desolate stretch of the continental coast, the saddest on Yinnisfar for all its blinding sun, the desert stretched right to the water's edge-or, to take it conversely, the beach extended from here to Barbe Barber. They flashed across the dividing line between sand and sea and headed W.S.W. Almost at once, cloud formed like a floor below them, blotting out the turning globe.

Within ten minutes, checking his instruments, Jeffy took them down, down, finally skimming under low nimbo-stratus to find the fourteen islands of the Gap-, verde archipelago to their left ahead.

"Nicely calculated," Gerund said. Jeffy played the metal think-box like a child genius conjuring Britzi-parbtu from a ch.e.l.lo-organ; he had that flair for machines only granted to the half-witted.

The plane banked to port round Satago and plunged down towards the sea, dropping vertically. The grey waters came up to meet them like a smack in the face, boiled round them, swallowed them, and the altimeter finger on the instrument panel, swooping past the "Zero" sign, began to read fathoms instead of feet.

Jeffy was in radio contact with the sub-port again. Beacons at ten-fathom intervals lit their way down to the underwater city. Finally a hangar, poised about a hundred-fathom gulf, loomed whale's-mouth wide in front of them; they jetted in and the jaws closed behind them. Powerful valves immediately began to suck the water from the hangar, replacing it with air.

Already mentally composing herself for what was to come, Gyro was out of the flier before the dock hand on the vacobile could get round to collect up the trapped fish and blow the floor dry. Gerund and Jeffy were left to follow as best they might.

Outside the hangar, two port officials greeted Cyro.

"Thank you for coming so quickly, Doctor Gyres," one of them said. "They probably told you the details of the case on the wireless. It's the chief engineer of the undersea trawler Bartlemeo who's in trouble. . .

As he related the cogent facts of the case, the official ushered Gyro, Gerund and Jeffy aboard a small, open bus. The other official drove, and they sped along the strange waterfront where, despite all the usual bustle connected with a dock, no water could be seen.

For ages, the human species had regarded the seas as either a perilous highway or a suitable place in which they could make hit-and-run raids on the shoals of fish there; then, belatedly, it had taken the oceans in hand and tended them with the same care it bestowed on the land; now they were fanned rather than fished. As more and more personnel turned to work on the savannahs of the deep, so the sub-ports had grown up, underwater towns which paid little homage to their softer counter-parts on dry land.

Capverde Sub-port, because of its favoured position in the Lanic and its proximity to Little Union, the second greatest of Yinnisfar's cities, had been one of the first such ports to be established. The quarter of the city in which the open bus now stopped was more than ten centuries old. The hospital into which they were ushered presented a crumbling facade to the world.

Inside were the usual monastic arrangements of hos-pitals everywhere. From a cloister, doors gave on to a waiting-room, a primitive kitchen, a radio room, small cells; in one of the cells lay Je Regard, chief engineer of the Bartlemeo, with a dose of hard radiation in his kidneys.

An ancient bondman, bent and grey-bearded, an-nounced himself as Laslo; he was on duty: apart from him and the sick man, the musty-smelling place was empty.

"Well, see what you can do for the poor fellow, Doctor," one of the officials said, shaking Cyro's elegant hand as he prepared to depart. "I expect the captain of the Bartlemeo will call through soon.

Meanwhile, we will leave you in peace."

"Thank you," Cyro said, a little blankly, her mind already far from them. She turned away, went into the sick man's cell and closed the door behind her.

For some while after she had gone and the officials had left in their bus, Gerund and Jeffy stood aimlessly in the cloister. Jeffy wandered to the archway and looked out at the street. Occasionally a bonded man or woman pa.s.sed, looking neither to the right nor the left. The dully-lit fronts of the buildings, many of them carved from the rock, looked like the dwellings of the dead.

Jeffy wrapped his great arms about his torso.

"I want to go home," he said. "It's cold here."

A bead of moisture fell from the roof overhead and splashed on his cheek. "It's cold and damp here," he added. The grey-bearded guard regarded him with a sardonic eye, without speaking. For a long while there was no more speech. They waited almost without thought, their level of consciousness as dim as the lights outside.

As soon as Gyro Gyres entered the cell, she climbed on to the bunk with the sick man.

Regard was a heavy fellow. Under the single blanket, his vast frame laboured up and down with the effort of breathing. The stubble on his face thrust up through three great, pallid jowls. Lying beside him, Gyro felt like Mahomet visiting the mountain.

That the mountain was unconscious only made Gyro's task easier. She placed her bare arm over Regard's bare arm and closed her eyes. She relaxed her muscles, slow-ing her breathing rate. This was, of course, all standard professional procedure. Efficiently, Gyro reduced the rate of her heart's beat, concentrating on that vital pulse until it seemed to grow and grow, and she could submerge herself in it.

She was sinking down through a dull red haze, a featureless haze, a haze stretching from pole to pole.

But gradually, a mirage forming in a distance, striations appeared through the haze. As her viewpoint sank, it magnified; the islands of the blood slid up to meet her. The islands moved with the clerical purpose of vultures, expanding, changing, ranging, rearranging, and still she moved among them. Though she moved, all sense of direction was entirely shed. Here the dimensions carried no sense of up or down; even near and far were con-fused to her sight which was no longer sight.

Not only sight had she lost. Almost every other ability except volition had been stripped from her when she took this plunge into the somatic world of her own bodily universe, as a man throws off all his clothes before diving into a river. She could not: think, remember, taste, touch, turn, communicate or act; yet a shadow of all these things remained with her; much as the dragonfly lava, climbing its reed out of the ooze, carries a vague image of the creature it will become, Gyro had some memory of herself as the individual she had been. And this pale memory stayed with her by dint of the years of training she had received in Medical Meditation at Barbe Barber, otherwise she would have been lost in that most terrible trap of all: the universe of one's own body.

Almost without will, she headed down her blood-stream. It was swimming (flying? crawling?) through an endless everglade, flooded above the tree tops, treacle-thick with fish, minnow, mackerel, mace and manta ray. It was creeping (climbing? drifting?) down a gla.s.s can-yon, whose walls flickered with more than earthly fire-, light. So, so, until before her loomed a wavering cliff.

The cliff ran round the universe, tall as time, insub-stantial as muslin, pock-marked with rabbit holes, through which phantasmic creatures came and went. She drifted through it almost without resistance, like plankton sucked through a sponge.

Now she had pa.s.sed her lobe of consciousness, her psyche into Je Regard's arm, into his soma.

Her surroundings were as weird, as strange, as familiar, as they had been before. Submerged on this cellular level there could be no difference between his body and hers. Yet a difference was there. From the forests of his flesh, strange and always unseen eyes watched her, and a silent and malevolent regard traced her course; for she was an intruder venturing into the interior of an alien world especially designed to show an intruder no mercy. Little jellies of death twinkled as she pa.s.sed, and only the confidence of her step held the defending powers at bay.

As she moved on, corpuscles like stars about her, the surrounding activity grew more intense. She was swept along, as by a glutinous current, moving under arches, among branches, past weed tangles, through nets, and the way ahead grew dark and stagnant; though she still drifted forward, the half-live things about her were squirming away, repulsed, flickering with crude blue-prints of pain.

She was nearly at the infected kidneys now.

Only the stern disciples of Medical Meditation now prompted her on. The atmosphere was so thickly repel-lent, she might have been wallowing in a sewer. But medicine had long ago discovered the powers of self-healing that lie within a body; high-ega and the yogas on which it was founded had pointed the way to releas-ing those powers. Nowadays, with the psyche of one of the Order of Medicine to spur it on, a patient's body could be made to regenerate itself: to grow a new limb, a new lung, a new liver. The doctors, the modern skin divers, submerged to marshal the martial forces of the anatomy against its invaders.

Cyro called to those forces now. About her, layer on layer, horizon-high, the cells of the invaded body, each with its thirty-thousand genes, lay silent and seemingly deserted. Then, slowly, reluctantly, as her summons per-sisted, reinforcements came to her, like rats crawling out of a ruined city. The enemy is ahead; she pulsed to them, moving forward into the tattered darkness, leading them. More and more, they were coming to her cause, lighting the sewer with their internal fires.

Things like little bats hurtled, chittering, at them out of the heart of the darkness, were struck down, were devoured. And then the enemy launched his a.s.sault against them. He struck with the suddenness of a closing trap.

He was one, he was a million!

He was nothing the textbooks knew of, unknown, un-knowable.

He fought with laws and powers entirely his own.

He was monstrous, b.e.s.t.i.a.l, occult, a greed with cobra fangs, a horned horror, newly hatched. He was so over-whelming that Cyro hardly felt fear: the puissance of the unknown can kill everything but calm in us.

She was aware only that a random radioactive particle had struck down and buried itself into a random gene, pro-ducing-with a ferocious defiance of the laws of chance -a freak cell, a mutant cell with unfamiliar appet.i.tes; nothing in her training prepared her to understand what the appet.i.tes were.

Those appet.i.tes had lain dormant until she approached. She had triggered them, woken them. She had breathed her touch of consciousness on to them, and at once the cell had filled with its own awareness.

And its awareness was of the desire to conquer.

She could see-feel-hear-sense-that it was tearing through cell after cell, like a maniac through empty rooms, filling them with its rebellion. The healing forces about her turned and fled in panic, winging and swim-ming against a wind which held them helpless. Gyro, too, turned to escape. Her own body was her only refuge, if she could get there.

But the nailed streamers came out of the darkness and wrapped themselves about her. She cracked open her jaws to their toothed extremes, struggling to scream; at once her mouth was filled with sponge, from which little creatures flung themselves and scampered wildly through her being, triumphing. . . .

Gerund and Jeffy sat smoking on a bench under the eye of the grey-bearded bondman, Laslo. Empty mugs stood beside them; Jeffy had boiled them a hot drink in the kitchen. Now they sat waiting uneasily for Gyro to reappear, their uneasiness growing as the time slipped away.

"I've never known her to take so long on a case before," Gerund said. "Five minutes is generally all she needs. As soon as she has organized the powers of recovery, she comes back."

"This engineer-he sounded pretty bad," Jeffy said.

"Yes, but all the same. .. . Five minutes more and I'm going in to see her."

"That's not permitted," declared the grey-beard; it was almost the first time he had spoken. What he said was no less than the truth. The etiquette governing doctor and patient was very strict, in their own interests; they could not be viewed together, unless by another doctor. Gerund was perfectly familiar with this rule; he had, indeed, a reluctance to see his wife in a trance state, knowing that the sight would only serve to emphasize the restraint he felt between them. All the same, Gyro had been in that room for a half an hour; something must be done.

He sat there for two more minutes before getting up and going over to the cell door. Laslo also rose, shouting angrily. As he started to intercept Gerund, Jeffy blocked his way.

"Sit down or I'll pull your nose off," Jeffy said un-emotionally. "I'm very strong and I got nothing better to do."

The old man, taking one look into Jeffy's face, went obediently back and sat down. Gerund nodded at his servant, opened the cell door and slipped inside.

One glance told him that something was wrong here- gravely wrong. His wife and the ma.s.sive engineer lay side by side on a bunk, their arms touching. Their eyes were open, bulging coldly out into s.p.a.ce like cod's eyes on a slab, containing no life whatsoever. But their bodies were alive. Every so often, their frames vibrated and bulged and settled again. Cyro's right heel kicked briefly against the bunk, beating a meaningless rat-tat on the wooden bed foot. Her skin was gradually suffusing with a crim-son blush like a stain; it looked, thought Gerund, as if every shred of flesh in her body had been beaten to a pulp. For a while he stood there transfixed in horror and fear, unable to collect his wits and decide what to do.

A big c.o.c.kroach swarmed up the leg of the bed. It pa.s.sed within six inches of Je Regard's foot, which pro-truded bare from under his blanket. As the c.o.c.kroach moved by, a section of the sole of the foot suddenly grew into a stalk, a dainty thing like a blade of gra.s.s; the stalk licked out as quickly as a tongue and caught the c.o.c.kroach, its legs waving. Gerund slid quietly to the ground in a faint.

Now the flesh on the bed began to change more rapidly. It had organized itself. It slid and smeared out of shape, or flowed in on itself with smacking noises. The c.o.c.kroach was absorbed. Then, compressing itself, the ma.s.s formed back into one human form: Cyro's. Face, body, colour of hair, eyes: all became like Gyro's, and every drop of flesh was squeezed into her making. As her last finger-nail formed, Gerund rolled over and sat up.

Surprise seized him as he stared about the cell.

It had seemed to him that he had been senseless only a second, yet the sick man had gone! At least Gyro looked better now. She was smiling at him. Perhaps, after all, his anxiety had produced some beastly kind of optical illusion when he entered the cell; perhaps every-thing was all right. But on looking more closely at Gyro, his returning sense of rea.s.surance vanished.

Something had happened. It was uncanny! The per-son sitting on the bed was Gyro. And yet-and yet- every line of her face, every subtle contour Gerund loved so well, had undergone an indefinable trans.m.u.tation. Even the texture of her flesh had changed. He noticed that her fingers had grown. And there was another thing -she was too big. She was too thick and too tall to be Cyro, as she sat on the bed looking at him, trying to smile.

Gerund stood up, faintness threatening to overwhelm him again. He was close to the door. He could run, or he could call for Jeffy, as his instincts bid him.

Instead, he conquered his instincts. Gyro was in trouble, supreme trouble. Here was Gerund's chance, possibly his final one, to prove his devotion to her; if he ran from her now, his chance would have pa.s.sed for ever -or so he told himself, for Gerund could not believe his wife's frigidity rested on anything but a distrust of integrity.

He turned back to her, ignoring her frightfulness.

"Gyro, Gyro, what is wrong?" he asked. "What can I do? Tell me what I can do to help. I'll do anything."

The creature on the bed opened its mouth.

"I shall be better in a minute," it said huskily. The words did not quite coincide with its lip movements.

With a heave, it stood on its feet. It was over seven feet tall, and burly. Gerund stared at it as if hypnotized, but managed with an effort of will to hold out a hand to it. "It's my wife," he told himself; "it's only my wife." But as it lumbered towards him, his nerve broke. The look on its face was too terrible. . . .

He turned, too late to get away. It stretched out its arms and caught him almost playfully.

In the cloister, Jeffy was growing bored. For all the affection he bore his master, he found the life of a bond-servant a tedious one at times. Under the fishy eye of the old guard, he spread himself along the bench, pre-paring for a nap; Gerund would call him soon enough when he was wanted.

A bell rang in the radio room.

Casting one last suspicious look at Jeffy, the old man went to answer the call. Jeffy settled back to doze.

In a minute, scuffling sounds made him open an eye. A mon-strous form, its details lost in the feeble lighting, lumped along on eight or ten legs and vanished into the street. Jeffy was on his feet instantly, a wave of cold horror brushing tenderly over his skin. He turned and made at a run for the sick cell, instinctively connecting this monster with a threat to those he served.

The cell was empty.

"Here, what are you up to?" asked a voice behind him; the grey-beard had come up at the sound of Jeffy's foot-steps. He peered past Jeffy's elbow into the room. As soon as he saw it was empty, he pulled out a whistle and began to blow wildly on it.

Judge: "You offer as an explanation of the disappear-ance of your master and mistress the possibility that they may have been-er, devoured by this monster you claim you saw?"

Jeffy: "I didn't say that, sir. I don't know where they went to. I only say I saw this tiling slipping out of the hospital, and then they were gone."

Judge: "You have heard that n.o.body else in the sub-port has seen any such monster. You have heard the evidence of Laslo, the hospital guard, that he saw no such monster. Why then do you persist in this tale?" Jeffy: "I can only say what happened, can't I?" Judge: "You are supposed to say what happened."

Jeffy: "That is what happened. It's the truth! I've no secrets, nothing to hide. I was fond of my master. I would never have done away with him-or my mistress."

Judge: "Bonded servants have expressed such senti-ments before, after their masters were dead. If you are innocent of what you are accused, why did you attempt to escape when old Las...o...b..ew his whistle for the police?"

Jeffy: "I was rattled, sir, do you understand? I was frightened. I'd seen this-thing, and then I'd seen the empty cell, and then that ruddy old fool started blowing that row in my ear. I-I just hit him without thinking."

Judge: "Hm. You do not reveal yourself as a very responsible man. We have already heard the witness Laslo's account of the way you threatened him with force soon after you arrived at the hospital."

Jeffy: "And you've heard me tell you why I did so."

Judge: "You realize, I hope, the serious position you are in? You are a simple man, so I will put it to you simply: under world law, you are charged with the double murder of your master and mistress, and until their bodies are recovered or further evidence comes to light, you are to be housed in our prison."

There were two ways up from the sub-port to the sur-face of the Lanic. One way was the sea route, by which both the Bartlemeo and the Gyres' plane had arrived. The other was a land route. An underground funicular railway climbed through three thousand feet of rock from the submerged city to the station in Praia, the capital of the island of Satago. It was by this route that Jeffy was brought to prison.

Overlooking a dusty courtyard sheltered by a baobab, Jeffy's cell window allowed him a glimpse of the sea. It was good to be above ground again, although the cloudy overcast created a greenhouse atmosphere which was particularly oppressive after the cool airs of the sub-port: Jeffy sweated perpetually. He spent a lot of his time standing on his wooden bed, staring out into the heat. Other convicts, out for exercise, talked to each other under his window in the local lingua crioula, but Jeffy understood not a word of it.

Towards the evening of the second day of his confine-ment, Jeffy was at his usual perch when a wind arose. It blew hotly through the prison, and continued to blow. The heavy cloud was shredded away, revealing the blue of the sky for the first time in days. The chief warder, a swarthy man with immense moustaches, came out into the courtyard, sampled the air, approved, and strolled over to a stone seat under the baobab tree. Dusting it carefully with his handkerchief, he lay down and relaxed.

On top of the wall behind the warder, something moved. A thing like a python uncoiled itself and began to drop down into the courtyard; it seemed to spread over the wall like a stain as it came, but the heavy foliage of the baobab made it difficult to see what was happen-ing. It looked to Jeffy now as if a rubbery curtain set with jewels and starfish were gliding down the wall. Now it landed behind the warder.

Whatever the thing was, it raised a flapper like a snake about to strike and clamped it over the unsuspecting warder's face. Then the rest of its bulk flowed over the man, damping his struggles and covering him like a cloak. Jeffy cried out furiously from his cell, but n.o.body answered, n.o.body cared; most of the staff were down on the waterfront with their girls.