Enemies of the System (5 page)

She followed Dulcifer. She wondered if something in his stocky figure, his air of confidence, reminded her of the director of the crèche in which, with a thousand other infants, she had spent the tender years of infancy, following her exobirth.

Under the low cliffs where the river had once flowed, the land was strewn with debris. Here and there, the terrain had been built up into long winding tunnels, standing over a meter high. It was hard to determine whether these odd features were natural or artificial. Between the tunnels and on top of them grew fleshy ferns which sprayed rusty spores into the air as Dulcifer and Sygiek brushed past. Several tunnels led under the embankment on which the road was built.

Dulcifer kicked at the soil. “Here's where the road collapsed. There's no doubt in my mind that these tunnels are made by the mole-like animals. They would be safe in their tunnels from most other predators. They burrowed under the road and the freeway collapsed—presumably by accident, not from intent. Depends how intelligent they are. All the same …”

He noticed her expression. “You're looking upset. What's the trouble?”

She drew herself up. “Utopianist Dulcifer, I have observed how free you are at expressing opinions. You hold an ill-concealed contempt for democratic consensus opinion, that's obvious. Then you casually order me to follow you here, as if I were some inferior—an ateptotic from Centauri, say. In my judgment, you are at least a potential deviationist, and I advise you to keep a check on your behavior.”

While he stared at her, a bead of sweat ran down his brow, into his eyelashes, distorting the image of her. As be cleared his eye with a finger, he said, “Or else you'll put in a report, eh? I did not order you down here. You followed me.”

“We are not supposed to split up.”

“Let's forget it and concentrate on real problems.” He took a step toward her. “You're bossy but you are no fool, Sygiek. We can be attacked at any time, once these foul creatures get used to us and realize we are not a menace. By attacked, I mean attacked, overcome and eaten, you understand. The question is, what do we do? I wanted to see—”

“Hey, you two!” The Moscow bureaucrat, Georg Morits, was scrambling down the embankment toward them, his figure outlined against the tan sky. They faced him as he slithered to a halt and wagged a finger at them. “Aren't you forgetting some elementary rules? ‘Action is corporate …' We are setting up an action committee, and we require that you both return to the LDB at once.”

Dulcifer made a move toward him, and Morits backed against one of the tunnels.

“Don't chant slogans at me, fellow. I don't sit on my arse in a Moscow office all day. Survival is not to be had through mouthing dogma. I'll come when I'm ready. Tell Kordan that.”

Morits pressed himself against the tunnel wall, saying weakly, “Don't attack me for what was a unanimous decision. There are unknown dangers here and the—uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-…”

As his voice failed, his face went ashen. His body seemed to shrivel. He staggered but could not fall. A cry almost like a solid thing was torn from his throat.

Rushing to take hold of him, Sygiek and Dulcifer saw sharp claws and leathery paws grasping the bureaucrat's thighs, biting deep into his flesh until blood seeped across his clothes. Those terrible hands had struck at him through the wall of the tunnel from behind. Had Morits been sitting there, the claws would have struck his throat and he would already be dead.

Calling loudly for assistance, the two Utopians seized Morits's arms and tried to drag him forward. He uttered another desolate scream. As they pulled him slowly away, part of the tunnel wall behind him collapsed. Amid falling sand milled several of the mole-creatures. Their trap had been sprung and they were still clasping their prey. Their muzzles were bloodied. Morits was already being devoured.

For a moment they crouched at the hole, as if contemplating an attack. Other faces appeared in the gap, sniffing.

Dulcifer let go his hold on Morits and kicked out, catching a bristling flank with his boot.

“Stand back!” Sygiek ordered. She pulled a small gun out of her tunic. Dulcifer barely had time to duck before she straightened her arm and fired two shots in a professional manner into the hole.

The gun was hetrasonic. Even as two buzzing notes sounded, two of the mole-creatures fell forward, clutching their bellies as they went. Writhing, they dropped to the ground, but hardly were they there before their fellows had taken them, dragging them into the tunnel. Bellowing, Dulcifer rushed forward and grabbed one of the wounded creatures, wrenching it away from its fellows, kicking out to fend off another attack. The rabble had had enough. Holding the other wounded creature, they retreated into the hole and disappeared from view.

Dulcifer and Sygiek turned and stared at each other. Both were pale. Dulcifer dashed sweat from his brow.

“You are not permitted to carry a gun,” he panted. “System legality and so on.”

She said, “I have a license.”

He wiped at the sweat again and looked stupidly down at the ground. He required no more explanation. Millia Sygiek was a member of the dreaded USRP, and Reason Police were authorized to carry weapons and fire when necessary.

“So you hunt with that pack,” he said heavily. “I'm sorry to hear it. I took you for a decent woman.”

The tourist party on the embankment had heard the scuffle. Some of them were already hurrying down to help. Dulcifer stood back and let them. He retained his hold on the mole-creature which Sygiek had shot; it was now dead. He followed as the others tenderly carried Morits up to the road and into the shade of the overturned bus. A trail of blood dripped from the wounded bureaucrat.

Kordan and the grey-haired hydraulics technician, Lao Fererer, had established themselves as provisional co-directors of the party. They cleared a space for the bodies and called for bandages.

The guide, Rubyna Constanza, climbed into the bus, reappearing with bandages and medicaments. She set to work in a business-like way to tend Morits, kneeling by him and turning him gently over on his face. Then she cried aloud. Morits's clothing, the small of his back, his buttocks, thighs, calves, part of one arm, had been eaten away as if by rats, exposing bone. Blood was seeping over the road. Mercifully, Morits was unconscious.

Constanza looked up into the tense faces round her.

“What can we do about his wounds here? He will surely die. In the Unity, at Peace City, the accident units could grow replacement arteries and flesh but here … Death's certain.”

Nobody spoke. It was the obscene word “death” which shocked them. At home, there was only a fulfilled Passing On, as the citizen moved into an all-embracing pallor which was in harmony with the system. Here on Lysenka II, you went out in crimson, the hue of rage and passion.

Kordan spoke, mastering his voice. “Do what you can for him, Rubyna Constanza. Now we see why we are inevitably screened before we can visit an Extra-solar Planet. Instead of Eternal Security, we are faced with Eternal Anarchy. In the System, before the days of Biocom and the establishment of World Unity—”

“We already have the speeches by heart,” Sygiek cut in. “It is not an hour since this vehicle crashed and already one of us is severely wounded. Danger surrounds us, and our first duty to the state is to triumph over that danger and survive. All of you make sure you now understand exactly the situation in which we find ourselves. Ecologically and ideologically, these creatures are our enemies.” Her arm swept round to cover the wilderness about them. “We are Number One Target for every living monster out there.”

Dragging the dead mole-creature by its mane of hair, Dulcifer pushed his way into the center of the group. He dumped it beside the bleeding body of Georg Morits.

“Sygiek is right. We don't want speeches, we want action. We don't want propaganda, we want information. We aren't in Utopia now. You know what permits Utopia to flourish? I'll tell you—protein. A plentiful supply of protein, eh? The one prime fact about Lysenka you'd better remember is that from the word go it suffered from protein-deficiency on a grand scale. Know what that means, comrades?
We can be eaten
. To the things that exist here, we are protein on the hoof, and we have to fight. Otherwise, we'll be more thoroughly chewed up and gulped down something's digestive tract than even poor Comrade Morits.”

V

A murmur of shock and protest rose from the stranded tourists, but Dulcifer pushed on through it.

“We may be efficient in the System, but we have had no external enemies for countless centuries. Here, we are inefficient. On this dud, murderous world, we are just bait. Food, nothing more. We need knowledge and leadership to survive for even a few hours.”

“Collective leadership,” said Lao Fererer, to a murmur of agreement. “We have lived by our principles—we are certainly not going to abandon them in a crisis.”

“We adapt,” Dulcifer said firmly. “Lysenka II is just entering what corresponds with the start of Earth's Carboniferous Age, hundreds of millions of years ago. We are as good as stuck in the past, long before Biocom was thought of. We need to understand that situation as clearly as possible. Rubyna Constanza, you're the guide—give us a quick summary of planetary conditions as we have to face them in this Rift Valley.”

Constanza had finished bandaging the badly wounded man. She rose to her feet and faced them. After a swift glance at Kordan, the Outourist girl spoke as if still delivering an address on her consigned vehicle.

“The evidence for Lysenka's having just emerged from a Devonian Age is complex, and has much to do with the state of the local sun. But geological and biobotanical evidence reinforce a general picture. Essentially, we have here a world of primitive life. In the oceans are fish some meters long with bony head armor. Also trilobites. System scientists have discovered bones of tetrapod amphibians in this valley which resemble a terrestrial rhipidistian order. That is to say, not fossil bones—the creatures existed recently but were all eaten by the invaders. In other parts of the planet, toward the tropics, they still exist, haunting the shores of the Borodinian Lakes.

“The plant life is of a matching antiquity, as we would expect. You may see dragonflies of up to seventy centimeters' wing span. They are becoming extinct because their larvae in the rivers are regarded by the animals as a delicacy. They lived particularly in the swamp region to the west of this road, where there are forests of giant-scale trees. Such forests are more frequent near the equator. Here you will mostly find cage trees, horsetails, calamites, maybe some gingkoes, and of course fern trees and fern, with no seed-bearing plants. There are no flowers on Lysenka II, a fact which some of our visitors have complained about. There are also giant sequoias, bearing their stiff wooden flowers or cones.

“Thus we see that the only brains on the planet are dim and instinct-driven. No creature at all resembling mankind could possibly have emerged for millions of years, if it had not been for the capitalist ship which crash-landed in this region so long ago.”

The tourists had listened attentively if anxiously to all this. Running a hand through his sandy hair, Takeido said, “Yes, I would like to amplify briefly what Rubyna Constanza has been saying. I am an exobotanist with five years' field-work on the planet Sokolev. As Constanza implies, here on Lysenka nature has yet to invent the angiosperm. That's seeds in an encased ovary, the opposite of gymnosperms. An angiosperm is a nutritious little food-package which supports seeds in the primary stage of their life. Spores or unpackaged seeds have no such advantage—they fend for themselves and their mortality rate is high. You can't eat spores. But angiosperms—those little food-packages are what caused the first proliferation of mammals over the face of Earth. They can make a world get up and go. So this world is a non-starter—as yet, at least. Thank you.”

“As for the question of grass,” began Regentop, but Dulcifer cut her off.

“That's the essence of it. There are no grasses on this world, no cereals, no high-energy packets for animals to eat—no basic requisite for the support of a grazer-predator system such as grew up on Earth and Sokolev and elsewhere. Lysenka has not yet reached a stage where it can naturally support anything called animal life.”

“You talk a great deal, Utopianist Dulcifer,” said Fererer, and pointed to the dead mole-creature, “but this animal you brought here—”

“You should not lead even a sedentary committee,” said Dulcifer, pointing a finger at Fererer, “if you have not grasped the salient point that there was reason for our being screened before we were allowed on Lysenka II. This is not an animal. There are no real animals on Lysenka II. The whole grazer-predator system is
human
in origin.”

With his toecap, he rolled the mud-covered tunneler over until it sprawled on its back with its wound visible, one arm stretched across the road, one limp across its chest.

“Look at it, Fererer, and you others. Look and feel pity. See its retractable genitals, its joints, its anatomical structure. It is made what it is by harsh conditioning. It is just a poor savage misfit. This is what it has been reduced to, generation by generation. But its ancestors were our ancestors. They were human,
homo sapiens
, a poor confused race that blundered around until it found the stars. Same goes for every damned animal we are likely to encounter in this valley. They're ex-human stock. That's the danger we have to understand. We are up against—not instinct, but cunning.”

It was the statement, “Its ancestors were our ancestors,” which provoked the biggest murmur. Sygiek's voice cut through their comments.

“Utopianist Dulcifer, I hereby give you notice that you will be reported for deviationism on our return to Unity. You waste valuable time, and you discuss Classified information before someone who is not a member of the élite.”