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The Web of the Chozen
something like a squirrel although it had a long snout and was obviously semiaquatic.
Something that looked like a meter-tall hare skipped rapidly through the brush, so comically I chuckled in spite of my tension. It looked like what the big herbivores should look like.
There was another animal, somewhat pig-faced but with long, menacing horns, and its nasty expression proved a bluff as it ran squealing when I approached. Insects of various kinds buzzed around, and there were a few types of bird, although they looked more like lizards and seemed to do more gliding than flying as
they ate the insects.
Two things struck me: the lizard-birds were the first carnivores I’d seen on this planet, anywhere and, except for the buzzing of the insects, the rushing of the river, and the rumbling of a light wind, there
were no sounds.
The place reminded me of a game preserve, protected and well managed. Yes, that was ita game preserve for npnpredators. Butif so, what kept the population in check? And who ran it?
I walked into the river, watching my step on the rocks the fast-moving water was slowly pushing down-stream, and started heading up to the split. That would be where J would start my first town and center
if I’d landed as a colonist.
The big herbivores didn’t venture into the water, but they did slowly pace me along the bank. I could see them trying to slow-hop, or drag their heavy bodies along by the power of their front legs alone.
There was a settlement on the point where the two rivers met, but it wasn’t a human one. It was one of the curious villages the herbivores built out of spit. Closer up, it looked even more impressivea broad main street, a network of small buildings constructed with infinite care, many of them looking to be the same kind of standard one-room dwelling; a few oth-16
The Web of the Chozen
ers larger and grander, one even having a point and two subsidiary spires.
Sooner or later, I knew, I would have to face them, but I preferred not to at this stage. I needed to know more, as unaggressive as every animal here seemed. I stopped.
The herbivores bothered me for reasons other than their looks. All evidence said they were somewhat intelligent; the village looked as if it had been thought out rather than built by instinct. Their actions toward me seemed intelligent, too. And yetwell, everything I’d ever been taught about exobiology said that without the ability to handle tools the evolution of a complex intelligence was impossible. But was it?
I seemed to recall that back on Earth they’d had some kind of sea mammal, a dolphin I think it was, with intelligence, language, a large brainand nothing but its mouth. But that animal had developed in a stimulating environment; it was soft like people, had to live in a medium that could kill it as easily as it could kill me, and had lots of predatory enemies. It had to outthink that sort of environment or die.
No such pressures existed here. Plenty of food, fine climate, no predators.
Then suddenly that nagging, pestering thought that wouldn’t focus became clear. Those creatures were designed by a committee, a committee with very lit-tle imagination. I had seen most of the disparate, component elements of their bodiesthe horns, the tail, the long ears, the hind-leg arrangementin terms of other animals. I would probably also find an ani-mal that built by spitting silk somewhere, and marsupials of various kinds all over. The forelegs were based on the mule.
Those creatures had been assembled from patterns drawn from the natural denizens of this world.
They hadn’t evolved, they’d been made up.
They were somebody’s biology experiment.
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The Web of the Chozen
It was hard to believe, I didn’t want to believe it, but there it was. Whoever had done this was damned good if not overly creative. The colonythose herbivores were the colony!
“Oh, my God!” I breathed aloud, both in wonder
and in fear. This was somebody’s game preserve, and if you
moved in you were incorporated into it.
I suppressed my panic and thought things through. Supposing these creatures were the colony? They could hardly have populated the planet in the single generation they’d been here, even if they had a dozen young every month or two. No, the number in this colony was right, but where did the millions of others across eighty degrees of latitude come from? Maybe I was lacking part of the puzzle after all. I decided to take the bull by the horns and go back to the ship and try to face down my curious but distant companions. Given their intelligence, it might be
possible to establish some sort of contact.
I made my way back down the river and eventually spotted my tracks on the bank. Coming through the trees, I was back on the plainand stopped.
There was a new mountain where the ship had been left; consisting of the hard spittle web these creatures
spun, it rose in a huge dome. They had completely sealed the ship in the stuff
in the two short hours I’d been gone.
Thoughts of contact forgotten, I got mad. I didn’t like being played for a sucker, and I wasn’t going to let anybody get away with it. I walked up to the milky-white wall and pushed.
It was hard as a rock. Well, okay, then, I thought, determined, I have
something that will go through a rock.
Standing off to avoid any sort of beam splatter, I put the pistol on full blast and fired its blue-white
lightning at the shell.
I could see an area start to darken, a little smoke
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The Web of the Chozen
rising up. The stuff was tough, but it could be broken.
Suddenly the pistol stopped firing. Puzzled, I looked at it, and examined its charge meter. There should have been a half-hour’s worth in there, but there wasn’t. The meter was dead.
And, so, in fact, was the pistol. I watched in horrible fascination as the plastic corroded before my eyes. On impulse I squeezed and the thing crumbled like so much pumice.
Mad and scared, I took out the portapack and told the computer to take off.
The portapack was corroding before my eyes as I tried to send the codes. Within seconds it was useless; within minutes it was in the same condition as the pistol.
Suddenly my suit felt funny, and it became hard to breathe. I knew what it wasthe agent that had nabbed the pistol and portapack was at the air-filtration system. Within another two or three minutes at most, I would have to get out of the suit, the ah” would just run out.
I screamed in fury, rushed to that web-wall separating me from my world, and banged my fist against the charred spot I’d made. As I did so, my gloves crumbled, and my hands were exposed to the outside air, yet I continued to pound in utter helplessness and frustration, making little cuts as I did so.
Nobody had ever beaten Bar Holliday before.
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Three
In about an hour it was all gone. I sat there in the grass, naked, my head in my hands. Nothing remained of my own artifactsall had crumbled to dust.
Something in me refused ttf admit defeat, even in the face of such unknowable, unguessable power. What could have caused the total destruction of my things? Particularly so quickly and completely? A ray? Nothing in the air surelythat had tested out pretty well.
Or did it? The tests had always been reliable before, sure, but they were still guesses. They tested only for things man had thought of, had imagined or encoun-tered in the past. The computers couldn’t answer questions that hadn’t already been asked. That was why human beings were still sent out as scouts.
The trouble was, I thought grumpily, the humans had forgotten why they were sent. I was a creature of my devices, my machinesI depended on them
utterly.
Now what? I wondered. Do I join the colony? How do they do that?
And who were “they”?
I got up, suddenly feeling hungry. The grass was the only thing around, but my system definitely wasn’t made to eat it. I thought briefly of suicide, but that would be an admission of defeat. No, I couldn’t do thatI couldn’t give them the satisfaction. I was not defeated as long as life and thought remained in me, and I would survive somehow. But to survive I had to eat.
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The Web of the Chozen
I looked at the tubers at the base of the plant, and with some difficulty, I pulled one free. They seemed ediblehad a kind of nice, sweet taste, like a cross between a pear and a domesticated apple. Not bad, although a little hard to chew. I almost choked to death on a piece a little too big, and learned that I had to nibble.
Several of them went down, and they were wonderful. The more I ate, the more I wanted to eat, and I found myself consuming them as quickly and as greedily as I could find them until, finally, I was so stuffed that I could feel the backup in my throat.
I awakened suddenly, as if from a dream, and realized what I was doing. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I thought of something other than eating. Why?
What had induced that incredible hunger in me? And for what purpose? It was clear that nothing on this world happened by chance.
Then it came to me. Raw material. If I was to be changed into one of the herd, then raw material was needed to begin the conversion. I felt sure that I would continue to be hit by starvation spells that could only be satisfied by eating the tubers that would turn me into raw material for them to do with me what they wanted to do.
I looked around and saw many of the herbivores watching me intently, and I thought I could detect both sympathy and sadness on their all-too-human faces. Many of them must have gone through this as well, I realized. They understood.
I wondered how much they understood? Did they know, even now, what had done this to them?
I decided that now was the time to make contact, if possible, but when I started toward them I felt dizzy and eventually had to stop and sit in the grass, which stung as I settled.
I felt strange, funnylike I’d never felt before.
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The Web of the Chozen
Not sick, really, but tremendously tired, disoriented. I wanted only to lie down in the grass and go to sleep, which I did.
The crash-boom of thunder and the pelting of rain-drops woke me. I was still in the field, but the sky was now ominously dark and a big storm was almost upon me. I got up and decided to make for the trees near the river, a place that would at least afford some shelter. I felt really goodnot high, just excellent. I sprinted for the trees, still conscious of the stinging from the grass, and made it just before the big deluge hit the now-empty plains.
More or less protected by the trees, I settled back and examined myself. As far as I could see, I hadn’t changed in any significant way. I relaxed a little, glad that I hadn’t awakened a monster.
So what had changed? I wondered. Where had the mass of tubers gone?
The temperature had dropped dramatically with the storm, and I shivered a little in the chill, which was bad only if contrasted to the temperature before.
Suddenly I knew where some of the tubers had goneI had to take a crap, badly, and I had to do it au naturel. Well, it wasn’t the first time, although in the past I had always had more than cold water to clean up with afterward.
The storm lasted over an hour and then rumbled audibly along down the plain for some time. The area remained cloudy, though, and looked a little threatening, even though the temperature and humidity started to climb back up with astonishing rapidity.
Soon I was perspiring all over, and I felt as if I were covered by a thick, wet blanket. The situation obviously was still too threatening for the herbivores. Some of the other animals were out, but not them.
After about a half-hour, I decided to make my way down to the village. Before I could get started, though, I was starving again.
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The Web of the Chozen
This time the orgy seemed to last much longer and included the grass as well as the tubers. Everything seemed to taste wonderful, and it was a long while before I could get enough of it. When my appetite subsided I was so stuffed that I finally had to spit out the remains of grass-and-tuber mush from my mouth. Having learned my lesson, this time I just sat down rather than trying any activity.
I knew I was right about one thing, though. The stuff that I was eating was to give the transforming agent something to work with. The fact that I ate the grass was in itself remarkable; the fact that it neither cut the insides of my mouth nor tasted bad at all was even more unusual. A great many changes bad been wrought in me, all internal.
I wished I knew how long this nonsense would take. Obviously I could do nothing constructive until the process was completed. I resigned myself to it.
When I awoke the next time, it was morning. I had slept through the entire nightor had I been in some sort of coma?and the clouds were now bro-ken, the warm sun peeking through. The plains were again stirring with life.
Lying there, I wondered why none of the colony had yet come to me, tried to contact me. I was afraid for a moment that they couldn’t, but, I asked myself, why should they? To what purpose, as long as this process was going on? Plenty of time later for introductions.
By this time some of the changes were external. I was starting to grow body hair of the greenish-blue hue I had noticed earlier, and my skin was turning darker and becoming tougher. The grass no longer stung me nor cut as it had. I had that exhilarated feeling again, euphoric, sort of. I felt neither hungry nor thirsty, but I made my way back down to the river, hoping to find some spot which would give me a reflection.
Scouts, it was said, were picked because they alone
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possessed a thousand unique traits necessary to perform their duties; one, certainly, was the ability to accept and adjust to alien experience, something that, in this extreme circumstance, was surprising even me. I wondered sadly how many of that doomed colony had taken their transformation so calmly, how many had, perhaps, committed suicide or gone mad. It must have been a horrifying experience, first to see all of their possessions, their artifacts, dissolve about them, then to go through this slow, uncomfortable process.
Still, I didn’t have a clue as to who was behind the transformation or how it was being done.
I searched the river bank for several hundred meters until I found a small pool of water isolated from the torrent by debris and still enough for a reflection. When at last I looked, there were changes indeed. My face had already begun to take on that broader cast, my mouth was wider, and, when I opened it, I discovered that my teeth were being replaced with larger, flatter ones. A little experimentation showed that I could chew from side to side. My tongue was much larger and thicker, a pale gray in color, and I could see the rather large flap at its tip. My arms were longer my hands came down to my lower calfand they seemed rounder, more sinewy.
Shortly thereafter that insatiable hunger came and I was off again. This time it was difficult to make my arms bend to feed myself, and I started taking in huge gobs of grass and grabbing tubers with my mouth. They were easier to eat now, and everything chewed better, went down smoother.
Again I slept, and when I awoke the sun was high overhead, the plains teeming with life, much of it watching me but making no move in my direction.
I tried to reach up to wipe the sleep from my eyes but found that my arms would no longer bend to that purpose, only back. I looked at them, and they were getting to be thick, long, horselike legs. My hands were lumps, not quite hooves as yet but on the way.
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I was on my side, and rolled over, getting unsteadily to my feetall four of them. The back ones only moved in unison now, and I wasn’t constructed quite right to use them properly as yet, so I could only pull myself along unsteadily with my forelegs, down to the river again, to my still reflecting pool.
Things were developing fast now, I saw. My metabolism must be racing hundreds of times faster than normal. The only way this could be done was by some variant of cancer, some mutation inside each cell of my body which, when completed, stabilized and reproduced itself, discarding the old cells. I once heard it said that the human body completely replaced everything but its brain cells every seven years. My metabolism was enormously speeded up, I knew that would explain the euphoric feelings, the constant fatigue, and the frequent spells of insatiable hunger. Everything worked out down to the smallest detail.
Well, they’d had a lot of practice.
My body hair and chest plate were complete now, I saw in the reflection, and my face was now fully that of the plains herbivore, although, curiously, it retained enough of me to be recognizable. The ears were taking shape, but seemed unformed at this point;
there was, as yet, no sign of the homs or, I saw by twisting around, the tail.
Soon I was starving again, and it was back to the fields. I was like a robomower; kneeling, face practically in the dirt, I gobbled up tubers and grass at an amazing rate. I also gobbled some dirt and small pebbles, and it didn’t seem to matterin this state I could think only of eating.
I awakened again near dusk, noting that it had rained on me. Everything was wet, yet I’d slept through it all.
I was again on my side, a larger bulk than I’d started as, forelegs and the like now fully formed. I
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