JEDDIN HAS LESS FUN
1529 4D
Floating in the innerspace sky, Jeddin thought, This is fun. Immobile, he waited as the birds flew again and again through his disguise. They knew something was there.
Abruptly, the birds vanished in a puff of gray vapor.
Jeddin waited a little longer. Nothing more came in search for him. What were these things? He sent insect eyes down to where the gleams of some shining creatures blazed among hillside trees and carpeted grass.
His remote eyes probed. On the hillside, tall figures stood talking in a group, radiating speech-modulated light that nearly blinded his remote vision. Amazed, he withdrew his insects. As they fled back to him, Jeddin made himself into a scatter of soft pale-blue feathers that rode his thought-gusts gently down to the green hills of the inner world. The feathers alighted here and there in the grasses and flowers at the dazzling feet of the figures. One feather, holding Jeddin‘s link point, wriggled and burrowed into the cyber soil. The others faded to grass-green and thinned, but gave him tiny eyes to look up. Now he could see directly.
Blazing, sunlike, naked, the creatures were female, voluptuous, fecund, mesmerizing, embracing, and Jeddin‘s male responses stirred. They spoke in resonances that wrung him like music. In his growing passion he nearly forgot his concealment. This is more than fun. Half-dazed, he fumbled back through his link, hoping to find a cognator, a system to translate for him. To his surprise, in the earliest archives of the First Dynasty, he found one that worked. The creatures’ words slowly emerged in colors and textures that chimed in Jeddin‘s inner senses, making language.
One said, sharp and gold, “I just came back from the lower city. The evidence is clear to me. These humans will be a threat to us. If they find us, they’ll try to kill us again.” Jeddin recognized her brilliant, edged colors from his first encounter in the street.
Another replied, blue-grained, “But it’s not the same any more. These aren’t as evolved as the earlier ones.”
The first said, “It doesn’t make any difference. We have to trade with them for the ores, and that means giving them an anth.” She stooped, arching brilliance, and raised in her hand a small, deep-blue stone. “They could use the anth to build other instruments to find us. We can’t afford that.” The stone shimmered flashes of crimson.
“Anhmharh, you want to wipe out their kind here, again?”
“Yes.”
“But they’re nearly the last of their species among the worlds. Their Earth died long ago; their only other star colony is dying.”
“I don’t care about that. If we let them, they’ll destroy us. We can’t foresee any of that path — it’s beyond our sheaves. Call the others.”
A summons went out like the shock of clashing of steel. Jeddin waited, feeling around the slope with heightened senses, trying to stay undetected. The trees here anchored their monstrous roots in the soil and rock of the hillside, and every root, every stone and every clot of soil spoke to him in soft voices.
I will tell you the many-poled descent of Orhghailhash, whispered one root-tendril.
Orange from the forge, the star Nhilh Thrhainh sang the verses of Arohsa, murmured a buried boulder, until Mhoarh’s waves consumed its life.
Fascinated, Jeddin sifted his way amid blades of crooning grass, charmed by this babble of soft musics. He came to an open space where the land was rifted by a streambed in which lay a profusion of deep-indigo sapphire pebbles glowing in a saturating orange aura.
He stared; the stones throbbed, and he sensed veins and arteries of light pulsating within them, as if they lived. They sang gently to him, holding him entranced.
Unable to resist his own curiosity, he reached out and took one of the stones, drawing it to him and shrinking again to the murmuring earth. The dark stone, its depths utterly black, had an oddly ponderable feel, as if it held reality back in the world of the City. He drew it close, fondled it, and it pulsed and warmed to him.
The steel summons was answered. From every radiant of the inward sky, the shining creatures came, in the thousands, to overpower the green hillside with white flame, their murmurs flaring pastel shadows. Awed, Jeddin recoiled, hiding once more. A glowing foot trod his link-point, and its owner jumped away, crying out amber. Jeddin buried himself with the link deeper in the cyber earth, clutching his newly-found dark stone. Now his senses came only from his earlier scattering of pale feathers.
A pair of creatures drifted over, effulgent, to stare down at the spot where Jeddin‘s link had been. One extended a lengthening finger to probe the soil. Jeddin hastily slipped the link further down.
Anhmharh, the speaker of gold edges, said, “See, all of you. Even if it’s forbidden, we have to destroy them, just to assure our survival.”
A shorter figure spoke, rose-liquid. “But they’ve done nothing to us. The andros who can see us aren’t a factor — they’re just slaves.”
The finger probing the soil grew tendrils, spread through the dark earth around Jeddin‘s link.
Gold-edged words: “Aoriver, the cusp is thirty-three years from now. Beyond that time, it is closed to us. That should not be.”
Another softer figure asked in sea-froth, “Why assume the worst?”
“Because it happened once already. The first wave of humans came here to Tarnus. They understood brain physics. They entered our range of space and discovered us. To them, we were just enemies, and they hunted and killed many of us. So we reached back in time and terminated them. That saved our lives.”
“Yes, but they were more dangerous than these humans are.” Sea blue-green, in plumes.
A deeper voice joined in, heat-yellow. “Onnhasshakh warned us last time against killing off the humans. She said–“
The gold voice cut in, “We cast Onnhasshakh out. Do you want to follow her?”
“But she could see beyond cusps like this one. Without her, we’re as blind as the humans.”
“We are not planet-scum! We are the Zashinhalh, the first thoughts of Arohsa!” Several voices crashed together, dissonant in splatters of crimson chill.
The deeper voice went on, calm, persistent, shining, “And long ago, we turned from the Kharshfainh, the maker of the anth stones, the Singer.”
“Turiosten,” came the gold-bladed words, “You are daring expulsion yourself. Do you support the outcasts and the Singer?”
Silence. Viragoes of fire danced among the Zashinhalh.
The gold blades flashed, “Arohsa made these humans from a drop of cold slime, but they’re Arohsa‘s. Before we do anything, we’ll find other ways to see them. Then--“
The tendrils had reached beneath Jeddin‘s link and knotted themselves together into a net. Losing the thread of the words, he tried to raise a few feathers to become distracting flitters of light among the creatures, but the tendrils seemed to block his force of action. He was trapped.
“But how can we appear to them?” A new voice in jade spice. “Should we look like them?”
“They’re fools for appearances, and slaves to form.” Gold scythes flowed. “Their Earth-archives hold their expectations of what we should look like.”
Voices murmured in shifting spectra. “Invisible entities.”
“Humans in lumpy clothing.”
“Humans who suck blood.” A sharp burst of laughter in rainbow whorls.
“Yes, I remember that one,” keened a bright-violet petal just above Jeddin‘s presence.
“Humans with misshapen heads.”
“Giant insects.”
“Machines.”
“Big eyes.” Steel-shaving chuckles.
“Tentacles.”
Jeddin struggled to sift between the tendrils. They tightened on him, as if gathering a grip.
“But they’ll be frightened.”
Gold carved through the manycolored thickets. “Here is what we’ll do. We’ll give them some form to stare at. Big eyes, human form, hard skin, tentacles discreetly placed. Then we can ride some of them, and go less-noticed.
“Turiosten, since you’re against all this, you will go to the one who will use the anth to gather fuel for our ship, and learn his mind. This will teach you how dangerous they are.
“We’ll show them the ship, because they’re as curious as they are timid. We’ll learn what they know, and what they want to do, and decide--“
The exploring tendrils gripped Jeddin‘s link-point and ripped it from the soil. A flash of fire, and he opened his eyes in his body in the City, lying in the locked sleep-cubby just off the deserted Poly Town understreet. A pebble fell from his hand, clicking once on the stone floor.
Jeddin could not move or speak. A shadowed and gaunt figure, seemingly an andro, looked down at him from a green doorway hovering in the cramped room, three of its voices softly humming counterpoint from the early works of Trezardin. It smiled with unusually-long yellow teeth and said over its own music, “At last. Some sustenance.”
It bent lower, putting its face just before Jeddin‘s. Paralyzed, he stared into huge faceted black eyes that nearly filled the orbs of their sockets.
“Operating this andro body requires much energy,” it crooned, “and I appreciate your availability.”
A bond fell away, and Jeddin could speak. He whispered, “What are you? Where did you come from?”
“Ah, now, that is a story indeed,” the andro-creature hummed, its melodic counterpoints weaving around the speech. Jeddin recognized the fourth movement of Trezardin‘s Third Concerto for Androvoice. “But my appetite, alas, will not allow its telling. I do not make a habit of conversing at length with my meals.” It ripped away Jeddin‘s City coverall with long shining nails, and bit deep into his liver.
As he began to die, Jeddin realized that he was having a lot less fun.
