Picnic on Nearside (14 page)

“I want to touch her with my hands,” Parameter thought.

“Go ahead. But don’t forget there’s another coming in a few minutes.”

“Hold it up. I want to enjoy this one first.”

She put her hands on the invisible surface of Equinox and they sank in until she was holding the child. It stirred and opened its mouth, but no sound came. There seemed to be no trauma involved for the brand-new human being; she moved her arms and legs slowly but seemed content to lie still for the most part. Compared to most human children, she hadn’t really been born at all. Parameter tried to interest her in a nipple, but she didn’t want it. She was the prettiest thing Parameter had ever seen.

“Let’s get the next one out,” she said. “This is so extravagant I still can’t believe it. Five!”

She drifted into a wonderful haze as the others arrived, each as pretty as the last. Soon she was covered with tiny bodies, each still tied to an umbilicus. The cords would be left in place until Equinox had finished her childbirth and had five semiautonomous baby Symbs to receive the children. Until then, the children were
still a part of her. It was a feeling Parameter loved; she would never be closer to her children.

“Can you hear them yet?” Equinox asked.

“No, not yet.”

“You’ll have to wait a while longer for mind contact. I’m tuning out. Are you all right? I shouldn’t be longer than about two hours.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. In fact, I’ve never been happier.” She stopped verbalizing and let a wave of intense love flood over her; love for her invisible mate. It was answered by such an outpouring of affection that Parameter was in tears. “I love you, earthmother,” she said.

“And you, sunshine.”

“I hope it’ll be as good for you as it was for me.”

“I wish I could share it with you. But back to business. I really think we’ve shaken the hunters. There’s been no signal from them for an hour, and their projected path is well away from us. I think we’ll be safe, at least for a few hours.”

“I hope so. But don’t worry about me. I’ll get along while you’re away. I’m not scared of the dark.”

“I know. It won’t be for long. See you later.”

Parameter felt her mate slipping away. For a moment she
was
afraid, but not of the dark. She was afraid of the loneliness. Equinox would be unavailable to her for the time it took to give birth to her children, and that meant she would be cut off from the outside. That didn’t matter, but the absence of Equinox from Parameter’s mind was a little frightening. It recalled an unpleasant incident in her past.

But as the lights faded she realized she was not alone. Cut off from sight, sound, smell, and taste by the shutdown of Equinox’s interpretative faculties, she still had touch, and that was enough.

She floated in total darkness and felt the sharp tingle as a mouth found a nipple and began to suck. Imperceptibly, she drifted into sleep.

*   *   *

She awoke to a vague feeling of discomfort. It was small and nagging, and impossible to ignore. She felt in her mind for Equinox,
and couldn’t find her. So she was still in the process of giving birth.

But the feeling persisted. She felt helpless in the dark, then she realized it wasn’t totally dark. There was a faint pinkness, like looking into closed eyelids. She could not account for it. Then she knew what was wrong, and it was worse than she could have imagined. The babies were gone.

She felt over her body with increasing panic, but they were nowhere to be found. Before her panic overwhelmed her, she tried to think of what could have happened that would have separated them, and all she could come up with was the hunters. But why would they take the babies? Then she lost control; there was nothing she could do in the darkness without Equinox to create the universe for her.

She was drawn back to rationality by a thought so black she could hardly credit it. In torment, she opened her eyes.

She could see.

She was floating in the center of a room hollowed out of bare rock. There was another person in the room, or rather another symbiote; all she could see was the dark-green, curved form of the Symb.

“Equinox!” she yelled, and heard herself. In a dream, she looked down at her body and felt the bare reality of it. She touched herself; there was no resistance. She was alone. Half of her was gone.

Her mind was dissolving; She watched it go, and knew it to be preferable to facing life without Equinox. She said good-bye to the last shreds of reality, rolled her eyes up into her head, and swallowed her tongue.

*   *   *

The figure looked like a cartoon of a human drawn by a three-year-old, one who was confused about sex. The broad shoulders and bullish neck were ludicrously like the build of a weightlifter, and the narrowing waist and bulbous ass were a moron’s idea of a well-built woman. He was green, and featureless except for an oval opening where his mouth should have been.

“Just why do you want to become a Ringer?” The sound issued from the hole in his “face.”

Parameter sighed and leaned back in her chair. The operation at Titan was anything but efficient. She had spent three days talking to people who had been no help at all and finally found this man, who seemed to have the authority to give her a Symb. Her patience—never very long—was at an end.

“I should make a tape,” she said. “You’re the fourth bastard who’s asked me that today.”

“Nevertheless, I must have your answer. And why don’t you keep the smart remarks to yourself? I don’t need them. For two cents I’d walk out of here and forget about you.”

“Why don’t you? I don’t think you can even get out of that chair, much less walk out of here. I never expected anything like this. I thought you Consers wanted new people, so why are you giving me such a runaround? I might get up and walk out myself. You people aren’t the only Ringers.”

He proved her wrong by rising from the chair. He was awkward but steady, and, even more interesting, there was something in his hand that could only be a gun. She was amazed. He was sitting in a bare room, and had been empty-handed. Suddenly there was this gun, out of nowhere.

“If you mean that you’re thinking of going over to the Engineers, it’s my duty to blow your brains out. You have ten seconds to explain yourself.” There was no trace of anger. The gun never wavered.

She swallowed hard, keeping very still.

“Uh, no, that’s not what I meant.”

The gun dropped slightly.

“It was a foolish remark,” she said, her ears burning with shame and anger. “I’m committed to the Conservationists.”

The gun vanished into the Symb he was wearing. It could still be in his hand for all she could tell.

“Now you can answer my question.”

Keeping her anger rigidly in check, she started her story. She was quite good at it by now, and had it condensed nicely. She recited it in a singsong tone that the interrogator didn’t seem to notice.

“I am seventy-seven Earth years old, I was born on Mercury, the Helios Enclave, the child of an extremely wealthy energy magnate. I grew up in the rigid, confining atmosphere that has
always existed in Mercury, and I hated it. When I turned twelve, my mother gave me twenty percent of her fortune and said she hoped I’d use it wisely. Luckily for me, I was an adult and beyond her reach, because I disappointed her badly.

“I bought passage on the first ship leaving the planet, which happened to be going to Mars. For the next sixty years I devoted myself to experiencing everything the human organism can experience and still survive.

“It would be tedious and overlong to tell you everything I did, but so you won’t think I’m hiding something, I can give you a random sample.

“Drugs: I tried them all. Some only once. Others for years at a time. I had to have my personality rebuilt three times and lost a lot of memory in the process.

“Sex: with two, three, four partners; seven partners; thirty partners; three hundred partners. All-week orgies. Men, women, girls, boys. Infants. Elephants. Pythons. Corpses. I changed sex so many times I’m not sure if I grew up as a male or a female.

“I killed a man. I got away with it. I killed a woman and got away again. I got caught the third time and spent seven years in rehabilitation.

“I traveled. I went to the Belt, to Luna, to the moons of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. I went to Pluto, and beyond with a holehunter.

“I tried surgery. I joined up with a pair-cult and was connected for a year to another woman as a Siamese twin. I tried out weird new organs and sex systems. I tried on extra limbs.

“A few years ago I joined a passivity cult. They believed all action was meaningless, and demonstrated it by having their arms and legs amputated and relying on the mercy of random strangers to feed them and keep them alive. I lay for months in the public square beneath Coprates. Sometimes I went hungry and thirsty. Sometimes I stewed in my own filth; then someone would clean me up, usually with a stern lecture to quit this way of life and go straight. I didn’t care.

“But the second time a dog used me for a urinal, I gave it up. I asked someone to carry me to a doctor, and walked out a changed woman. I decided I had
done
everything and had better start looking for an elaborate and original suicide. I was so bored, so jaded, that
breathing
seemed like too much of a bother.

“Then I thought of two places I’d never been: the sun and the Rings. The sun is the fancy suicide I told you about. The only way to get to the Rings is in a Symb. I tend to sympathize with you people over the Engineers. So here I am.”

She settled back in her chair. She was not optimistic about being allowed to join the Conservationist Church, and was already planning ways to get over to the Engineers. If there was ever an unprepossessing story, it was hers, and she knew it. These Consers were supposed to be dedicated people, and she knew she couldn’t present a very convincing line. In point of fact, she didn’t give any thought at all to the Grand Design of the Engineers. Why should she care if a band of religious fanatics were trying to paint one of Saturn’s Rings?

“The next to the last statement was a lie,” the man informed her.

“Right,” she spat. “You self-righteous bastards. It’s the custom in polite society to inform someone when they’re undergoing a lie-detector test. Even ask their consent.” She got up to go.

“Please sit down, Parameter.” She hesitated, then did so.

“It’s time some false impressions were cleared up. First, this is not ‘polite society,’ this is war. Religious war, which is the dirtiest kind. We do what we have to in the interest of security. The sole purpose of this interview was to determine if your story was true. We don’t care what you have done, as long as you haven’t been consorting with our enemy. Have you?”

“No.”

“That is a true statement. Now for the other mistake. We are not self-righteous bastards. We’re pragmatists. And we’re not religious fanatics, not really, though we all come to believe deeply in what we’re doing out here. And that brings us to the third mistake. The primary reasons we’re out here have little to do with defeating the Engineers. We’re all out here for our own personal reasons, too.”

“And what are they?”

“They’re personal. Each of us had a different reason for coming. You are out here to satisfy the last dregs of a jaded appetite; that’s a common reason. You have some surprises coming up, but you’ll stay. You’ll have to. You won’t be able to bear leaving. And you’ll like it. You might even help us fight the Engineers.”

She looked at him with suspicion.

“We don’t care why you’re out here. Your story doesn’t impress me one way or the other. You probably expected condemnation or contempt. Don’t flatter yourself. As long as you’re not here to help paint Ring Beta red, we don’t care.”

“Then when do I get a Symb?”

“As soon as you can undergo a bit of surgery.” For the first time he unbent a little. The corners of the slit that covered his mouth bent up in a silly attempt at a smile. “I must confess that I
was
interested by one thing you said.
How
do you have sex with an elephant?”

Parameter kept a perfectly straight face.

“You don’t have sex
with
an elephant. The best you can do is have sex
at
an elephant.”

*   *   *

The Symb was a soft-looking greenish lump in the center of the room. With the best will in the world, Parameter could not see that it resembled anything so much as a pile of green cow manure. It was smaller than she had expected, but that was because it had no occupant. She was about to remedy that.

She stumped over to it and looked down dubiously. She had no choice but to walk awkwardly; her legs were no longer built for walking. They had been surgically altered so that the best she could do was a grotesque bowlegged prancing, stepping high so her long fingers would clear the floor. She was now ideally suited for a weightless existence. In a gravitational field, she was clumsy beyond belief.

The man who had interviewed her, whom she now knew by the name of Bushwacker, was the only other occupant of the room. He handled himself better than she did, but only slightly. He was itching to get back to the Rings; this base duty galled him. Gravity was for poor flatfoots.

“Just touch it, that’s all?” she said. Now that it had come to it, she was having second thoughts.

“That’s right. The Symb will do the rest. It won’t be easy. You’ll have between six weeks and three months of sensory deprivation while the personality develops. You’d go crazy in two days, but you won’t be alone. All you’ll have to hang on to will
be the mind of the Symb. And it’ll be a baby, hard to get along with. You’ll grow up together.”

She took a deep breath, wondering why she was so reluctant. She had done things easily that were much more repulsive than this. Perhaps it was the dawning realization that this would be much more than a simple lark. It could last a long time.

“Here goes.” She lifted her leg and touched one of her ped-fingers to the blob. It stuck. The Symb slowly began stirring.

The Symb was . . . warm? No, at first she thought so, but it would be more accurate to say it was no temperature at all. It was thirty-seven degrees: blood temperature. It oozed up her leg, spreading itself thinner as it came. In a short time it was inching up her neck.