Chalker, Jack L. – The Web of the Chozen

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“The virus, yes,” I replied, “but nothing to work from or on. Nor, of course, would it be spreading the Communards—just the virus and some semblance of its original people. No, Moses wants us. And, I think, the only way to handle this is to give him what he wants.”

“Huh?” George sounded surprised, and waited for me to continue.

“We’ve got to go on up there and face him, George,” I told him. “We have to convince him he’s wrong, bad for humanity, usurping God’s role. Yes, that might be the best thing—charge him with blasphemy. We have to talk him out of his power drive before he does something desperate anyway, or before my rescuers arrive.”

“What if we can’t?” George asked grimly. “What then?”

, “Then we’ll have to destroy him, somehow. You know the ship and Moses; I don’t. That’s why I need you. Besides, you’re the only one I can trust. Are you game?”

“Curse him to eternal damnation! Yes! Of course!” came the emotional reply.

“Don’t curse him,” I said softly. “Remember—he’s only a machine, just an imperfect mirror of ourselves. We made him what he is—the disease, the cancer.”

There was nothing else to say, because that left only cursing ourselves, and we were already cursed.

We stood out there, the two of us, looking at the hill of silvery strands covering the ship.

“Won’t he stop us?” George asked nervously.

“No,” I told him. “Relax. Remember, we’re doing exactly what he wants us to do.”

This was the first time I’d ever broken into anything by pissing on it, but that was the way of this world. The acids in the Choz waste dissolved the webbing, which was not very thick. I was afraid for a mo-ment that the two of us wouldn’t produce enough to melt the webbing, but we did. There was just enough

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of a hole to wriggle through, down flat on the ground and inching forward on forelegs alone, rear legs dragging behind.

Since there was no color for metal objects, the ship stood out in sharp, yellow-on-black outline. We found just enough room inside the cocoon to crawl around to the air lock, which was still open exactly as I’d left it so long ago.

“I’ll have to go in first,” I told George, “and establish a link with the ship. Besides, there’s only room for one of us, standing on his tail, in the air lock at one time. The lock may look a little strange, but it works the same as air locks have since time immemorial. Just make sure you clear the grooves on the outside or the outer door will chop your tail off.”

I reached the lock, stood up in it, and felt the link with the computer in the ship. Attuned to my brain waves and identity pattern, it would respond only to me and as a part of me as well.

The lock shut, and I almost became a victim of ignoring my own advice. I’m sure several tail hairs were neatly sliced.

When the inner lock finally opened, I entered my home and womb of so long for the first time as an alien. The stark yellow and black of the nonorganic interior plunged me into a world of mist and shadow; only sonar and memory would be my guides.

I felt the computer link, felt the air lock reopen, and felt George enter. Then I closed the outer lock, pressurized, opened the inner, and turned to see a somewhat comforting blue figure enter the cabin.

The place smelled funny and felt uncomfortable, which was strange, too. I hadn’t realized until now how really acute my sense of smell was, my ability to detect thousands of scents and to differentiate individuals by them. The place smelled unpleasant, dry, metallic, antiseptic.

Then, too, the temperature and humidity were set for human-norm, too dry and cool for Choz comfort.

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“Hang on!” I warned George. “We’re busting out of here!”

There was a sensation of lifting and a strong bump as we smashed through the webbing and continued to rise. The pressure was rather uncomfortable. Then, suddenly, we broke free, and the internal systems adjusted to one-G, slightly heavier than we’d been used to and built for but not all that disconcerting.

I immediately caused the thermostat to lower to just a shade above freezing. The temperature dropped so suddenly, in a single blower action, that it came as a terrible shock to us. It must have been an even greater shock to Moses’ viruses, suddenly in an environment where they didn’t function well at all. We felt no pain, only a terrible urge to do something. The whole world glowed with the danger color, almost a pleading. And then release.

For the first time, I felt George and I were in complete control.

“God! It’s cold!” George muttered, and we could feel it even through our thick, hairy hides.

“Notice something, George?” I called to him, although we were very close. “Turn slightly! Look at me!”

“No color!” he gasped. “You have no color at all! We’re strictly on sonar!”

I nodded. “The color was a controlling and programming mechanism. With the virus at least dormant, we’re free from old Moses!”

Instinctively I glanced at my screens and instruments, yet, although I was sure they showed what I expected to see, they were blanks to me. The gauges were all covered by plastic, the screens were two-dimensional optical projections.

I edged past George to the bank of dials and gauges I knew blindfolded. I wished that I could see them, see their display readouts, and be reassured, but I could not be. I was flying blind. Well, so be it, I thought. This ship could fly, if nec-79

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essary, without me at all, so it would have no problems doing what I ordered—providing nothing broke down.

“How long until we reach the Peace Victory?” George asked, shivering from the cold.

“Never, I hope,” I told him. “We’re not going there. I had no way of telling you and being sure old Moses wasn’t listening in, maybe picking things up through the virus strains in my body. We’re heading for an outpost communication relay at the edge of claimed territory, about two days away. From there, through the ship, I can contact Seiglein or the government and give them the story. Then we’ll blast the hell out of old Moses!”

Ten

“I’m getting something on audio,” I called to George. “I bet I know who it is.”

George was down in the lower bay, usually my sleeping quarters, trying to orient himself to the interior of the ship I knew so well.

“Moses?” he asked nervously.

“Nobody else it could be,” I replied. “Shall we hear what he has to say?”

George was uncertain. “Are you sure you want to? I mean, it’s cold as the devil here but who knows what’s cold enough? He could be trying to re-establish contact, to force us back.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “But if he could do it with the virus he’d have done it by now. He’s pretty weak at this point; we’ll have to make an L-jump soon and that’ll put us completely out of range. So let’s see what the old boy wants.”

Opening audio required me to work a couple of controls. This was difficult without hands, but the hooves separated just far enough to get around the scanning knob. Switches I could throw, although with difficulty, since the forelegs were designed to be feet and provided only a limited freedom of movement.

It took some time and trouble for me to tune him in. Finally, with some whistling and popping, I got him locked in. He had a strange voice, one of the strangest I’d ever heard. It was electronic, yes, but it had a three-dimensional character to it, as if we were listening to a recording of someone that had

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then been processed to sound electronic. It was an old man’s voice—emotional, powerful.

“Please! Please! My children! Respond to my call!” it implored.

I opened the contact switch. “Go ahead, Moses. This is Bar Holliday.”

“Why do you do this, my child?” the voice wailed, anguish in its every tone. “Why do you separate yourself from the oneness, run from the great fulfillment of God’s holy plan?”

“It’s not God’s plan,” I snapped. “It’s yours, Moses. You did it. You, alone. You usurped God’s powers, his position. You are replacing God, Moses, committing blasphemy.”

Not bad for a sure-enough socialist atheist, I thought smugly.

“No! No!” Moses protested. “I am only the agent, only fulfilling God’s plan. What I do is God’s will. If it were not His will. He would not permit me to do it; he would tell me what to do.”

“Bullshit,” I replied. “That’s the excuse for half the deaths in human history, the wars, the oppression. More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason.” I liked that—it was one of the few lines I remembered from my history classes.

“But I kill no one!” Moses responded. “No one dies in the colony. I bring only peace, joy without strife.”

I sensed George coming up behind me and could almost feel his fury.

“Moses, this is George Haspinol. I was with you from the beginning. You are wrong, Moses. You have sinned.”

“Elder Haspinol!” Moses exclaimed. “I do not err. The goals of your holy teachings and those of the holy books are most plain.”

“Those goals were not for this life, Moses, but for

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the next,” George replied sadly. “You have misunder-stood.”

“I .cannot misunderstand,” the ship’s computer responded obstinately. “I am self-programming, and I think logically as you cannot. All the centuries of the Faith have awaited someone who could properly interpret them. I am that one, the final prophet—the arm of God.”

“You’ve killed them, Moses,” I put in. “As sure as if you’d blown them up you’ve killed them. You killed their humanity, their past. You have made them ignorant animals.”

“Animals? No! Far greater than that!” the computer huffed. “True, to enter Eden one must be purified of sin by bathing in the holy waters that take memory. It is the only way, as the Beloved Poet said. But now—now they will be happy, taught to glorify God forever.”

I flipped the switch so that we weren’t broadcasting.

“It’s no use,” I told George. “He’s a fanatic. He knows he has the right answers. He—hey! Hold it!” “What’s the matter?” George asked, alarmed. “Bless these sensitive long ears!” I yelled. “His signal’s getting progressively stronger, but I can’t read the instruments! He’s been zeroing in on our signal! I have no way of knowing how close he is, so get below and brace yourself as best you can. I’m going to L-jump just as soon as I can!”

Suddenly the fear was back, strong, and I cursed myself for a fool. I had told Moses where we were from our signal, and I’d stopped, waiting for him. Moses could open the loading bays and scoop us in, and I wouldn’t have the running-start power I needed to L-jump.

“Braced?” I called nervously to George. “As good as I can be, considering,” was the reply from below.

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I ordered straight-line acceleration to put some distance between us and Moses.

Satisfied, I went down on all fours, bracing myself as much as possible against the big padded chair into which I could no longer strap myself, then ordered

the L-jump.

It’s hard to describe the L-jump to anyone not well versed in physics. The best way, I suppose, is to remember that there are many more dimensions than the four in which we live, each with different properties. Depending on the intersection of those dimensions by the outer hull of the ship, we would be placed under a different set of rules, a different set of physical laws, while an energy cocoon would maintain our own conditions inside. When Igor Kutzmanitov discovered them by accident while studying the strange properties just outside the event horizon of black holes—but, no I’m too technical already. Let’s just say that I mentally throw a series of relays and we are suddenly exempt from relativity while speed is multiplied exponentially. It makes for quick trips, weeks or months to places you couldn’t reach in hundreds of years at sublight-speeds.

This would be a short jump, and I actually had to decelerate to match what the ship’s computer told me would be the right velocity in L-space to get me where I needed to go. We weren’t that far outside explored space. But it would take Moses eighty years to get where we would get in eighty days.

Satisfied, I was almost too complacent as the ship’s computer warned of a great mass closing on us fast. Capture would be just a matter of seconds considering my deceleration. I forced the L-jump.

All signs of matter in the vicinity, vanished. The ship’s sensors showed nothing at all now. I’d made it, perhaps with thirty seconds to spare.

The jump itself is a jarring experience, a tremendous bump and bang. I heard George cry out; but the

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force, so routine when I’m strapped in my chair or bunk was enough to throw me off balance, and I crashed into an auxiliary instrument bank. It was armored, of course, and would survive. But my ar-mor was for lighter things, and I felt the sting of several sharp edges cutting into me, not deeply but painfully. I knew that it wouldn’t be long before I felt the bruises.

Such sensations were strange to me now. There had been little pain on Patmos, and the virus saw to efficient repair of any damage in a night. But the virus was inactive in the cold, maybe even dead now.

Carefully, I picked myself up. My bushy tail had broken some of the fall, but my right rear foot had been badly twisted. I hoped it wasn’t broken.

“George!” I called. “Are you all right?”

“I’m going to ache for a week,” he yelled back at me, “but I think I’ll survive. You?”

“Cuts and bruises, and my back foot’s sprained. Damn! I’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel such pain, and when the shock wears off it’ll be worse.”

George made his way into the upper-control-room cabin.

“I wish I could look at it, but I’ll do what I can,” he said. “I was something of a medic, you know, although I’m twenty years out of practice. Lord! Just did a narrow-scan. You’ve got a couple of nasty cuts there. Some blood, but not much. Where do you keep your medical stores?”

“There’s a medicine chest on the wall just before the door to the head,” I told him. “But—I don’t know if the stuff will work on me now.”

“Worth a try,” was the reply. I heard him fumbling a lot with something, and deduced that it must be the pull-and-twist handle on the cabinet door. It took him several minutes to manage it without hands, and I’ll never know to this day how he did it.

“Lots of stuff in here!” he called finally. The aches

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were really coining on strong now, and the bind leg

was giving me fits. “Which is the salve?”

“The big jar,” I called back. “It’s in a recessed

holder on the bottom shelf.”

“I see it!” he responded. “No way to pick it up,

though. Let me see. Hmm …” There was silence for a minute more. I felt some wetness on my right side, and knew that I was still bleeding.

Then I heard him coming back up the ramp and into the cabin where I lay. I scanned him and saw

that he had the jar in his mouth.

“How did you manage that?” I asked, curiosity

overcoming pain.

He put the jar down on the floor and spit some

stuff out of his mouth.

“I shot some webbing on it, then ate the line in

until I had it,” he said matter-of-factly. “But it’s too big a jar to get my hoof around. How the hell do we

get the top off?”

I stared at the outline of the fat jar on the floor

and shook my head slowly. We tried with me holding it between the knees of my forelegs while he pushed, then all sorts of things. Nothing budged it.

I looked up at George, and knew we were both thinking the same thing. For the first time, the very first time, we were both admitting the truth to ourselves. We weren’t human anymore. This was a hu-man ship, designed for humans. We were entirely

different creatures.

“This isn’t going to work, George,” I said softly.

“We aren’t equipped for it.”

He nodded glumly. “Here. Lie flat on the floor,

hind legs out, tail up on your back,” he said grimly.

“Let me feel that wound.” I did so, and he ran his forelegs down until he

touched the leg.

It hurt like hell, and I almost screamed. “Broken,” he affirmed. “And you’re still bleeding.

Even the clotting factor is virus-controlled.” He