Lower than Angels Page 4

  He saw a commotion at the door of Tylus’s house. Tylus and Pia stood in the doorway. Pia was holding the baby.

  “Look! Hey! Look!” Tylus shouted. The other villagers turned, surprised.

  “Hey! Come look at my baby! Come look at the boy Imbry made well!” But Tylus himself didn’t follow his own advice. As the other villagers came running, forgetting the possessions piled beside the canoes, he broke through them and ran across the square to Imbry and Iano.

  “He’s fine! He stopped crying! His leg isn’t hot anymore, and we can touch it without hurting him!” Tylus shouted, looking up at Imbry.

  Imbry didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He smiled with an agonized twist of his mouth. “I thought I told you not to touch that foot.”

  “But he’s fine, Imbry! He’s even laughing!” Tylus was gesturing joyfully. “Imbry—”

  “Yes?”

  “Imbry, I want a gift.”

  “A gift?”

  “Yes. I want you to give him your name. When his naming day comes, I want him to call himself The Beloved of Imbry.” My God, Imbry thought, I’ve done it! I’ve saddled them with the legend of myself. He looked down at Tylus. “Are you sure?” he asked, feeling the words come out of his tight throat.

  “I would like it very much,” Tylus answered with sudden quietness.

  And there was nothing Imbry could say but, “All right. When his naming day comes, if you still want to.”

  Tylus nodded. Then, obviously, he realized he’d run out of things to say and do. With Imbry the ancestor, or Imbry the-man-with-many-powerful-ancestors; with Imbry the demigod, he could have found something else to talk about. But this was Imbry, the god of all gods, and that was different.

  “Well… I have to be with Pia. Thank you.” He threw Imbry one more grateful smile and trotted back across the square, to where the other villagers were clustered around Pia, talking excitedly and often looking with shy smiles in Imbry’s direction.

  It was growing rapidly darker. Night was coming, and the hurricane was trudging westward with it. Imbry looked at Iano, with his wraparound plastered against his body by the force of the wind and his face in the darkness under the overhanging porch roof.

  “What’ll you do when the storm comes?” Imbry asked, Iano gestured indefinitely. “Nothing, if it’s a little one. If it’s bad, we’ll get close to the trees, on the side away from the wind.”

  “Do you think it looks like it’ll get bad?” Iano gestured in the same way. “Who knows?” he said, looking at Imbry.

  Imbry looked at him steadily. “I’m only a man. I can’t make it better or worse. I can’t tell you what it’s going to be. I’m only a man, no matter what Tylus and Pia think.” Iano gestured again. “There are men. I know that much because I am a man. There may be other men, who are our ancestors and our gods, who in their turn have gods. And those gods may have greater gods. But I am a man, and I know what I see and what I am. Later, after I die and am an ancestor, I may know other men like myself, and call them men. But these people who are not yet ancestors—” He swept his arm in a gesture that encircled the village. “—these people, will call me a god, if I choose to visit them.

  “To Tylus and Pia—and to many others—you are the god of all gods. To myself… I don’t know. Perhaps I am too near to being an ancestor not to think there may be other gods above you. But,” he finished, “they are not my gods. They are yours. And to me you are more than a man.”

  The hurricane came with the night, and the sea was coldly phosphorescent as it battered at the shore. The wind screamed invisibly at the trees. The village square was scoured clean of sand and stones, and the houses were groaning.

  The villagers sat on the ground, resting then’ backs against the thrashing trees.

  Imbry couldn’t accustom himself to the constant sway. He stood motionless beside the tree that sheltered Iano, using his pressors to brace himself. He knew the villagers were looking at him through the darkness, taking it as one more proof of what he was, but that made no difference any longer. He faced into the storm, feeling the cold sting of the wind.

  Lindenhoff would be overjoyed. And Maguire would grin coldly. Coogan would count his money, and Petrick would drink a solitary toast to the helpless suckers he could make do anything he wanted.

  And Imbry? He let the cold spray dash against his face and didn’t bother to wipe it off. Imbry was ready to quit.

  The universe was made the way it was, and there was no changing it, whether to suit his ideas of what men should be or not. The legendary heroes of the human race—the brave, the brilliant, selfless men who broke the constant trail for the rest of Mankind to follow—must have been a very different breed from what the stories said they were.

  A house crashed over on the far side of the village and crushed apart. He heard a woman moan in brief fear, but then her man must have quieted her, for there was no further sound from any of the dim figures huddled against the trees around him.

  The storm rose higher. For a half hour, Imbry listened to the houses tearing down, and felt the spray in his face thicken until it was like rain. The phosphorescent wall of surf crept higher on the beach, until he could see it plainly; a tumbling, ghostly mass in among the trees nearest the beach. The wind became a solid wall, and he turned up the intensity on his pressors. He had no way of knowing whether the villagers were making any sound or not.

  He felt a tug at his leg, and bent down, turning off his pressors. Iano was looking up at him, his face distorted by the wind, his hair standing away from one side of his head. Imbry closed one arm around the tree.

  “What?” Imbry bellowed into the translator, and the translator tried to bellow into lano’s ear.

  “It… very… very bad… very… rain… no rain…”

  The translator struggled to get the message through to Imbry, but the wind tore it to tatters.

  “Yes, it’s bad,” Imbry shouted. “What was that about rain?”

  “Imbry… when… rain…”

  Clearly and distinctly, he heard a woman scream. There was a second’s death for the wind. And then the rain and the sea came in among the trees together.

  White, furious water tore at his legs and pushed around his waist. He gagged on salt. Coughing and choking, he tried to see what was happening to the villagers.

  But he was cut off in a furious, pounding, sluicing mass of water pouring out of the sky at last, blind and isolated as he tried to find air to breathe. He felt it washing into his suit, filling its legs, weighing his feet down. He closed his helmet in a panic, spilling its water down over his head, and as he snapped it tight another wave raced through the trees to break far inland, and he lost his footing.

  He tumbled over and over in the churning water, fumbling for his pressor controls. Finally he got to them and snapped erect, with the field on full. The water broke against his face plate, flew away, and he was left standing in a bubble of emptiness that exactly outlined the field. Sea water walled it from the ground to the height of his face, and the rain roofed it from above.

  Blind inside his bubble, he waited for the morning.

  He awoke to a dim light filtering through to him, and he looked up to see layer after layer of debris piled atop his bubble. It was still raining, but the solid cloudburst was over. There was still water on the ground, but it was only a few inches deep. He collapsed his field, and the pulped sticks and chips of wood fell in a shower on him. He threw back his helmet and looked around.

  The water had carried him into the jungle at the extreme edge of the clearing where the village had stood, and from where he was he could see out to the heaving ocean.

  The trees were splintered and bent. They lay across the clearing, pinning down a few slight bits of wreckage. But almost all traces of the village were gone. Where the canoes with their household possessions had lain in an anchored row, there was nothing left.

  Only a small knot of villagers stood in the clearing. Imbry tried to count them; tried to compar
e them to the size of the crowd that had welcomed him into the village, and stopped. He came slowly forward, and the villagers shrank back. Iano stepped out to meet him and, slowly, Tylus.

  “Iano, I’m sorry,” Imbry said in a dull voice, looking around the ravaged clearing again. If he’d had any idea the hurricane could possibly be that bad, he would have called the mother ship for help. Lindenhoff would have fired into the storm and disrupted it, to save his potential slaves.

  “Why did this happen, Imbry?” Iano demanded. “Why was this done to us?”

  Imbry shook his head. “I don’t know. A storm… Nobody can blame anything.” Iano clenched his fists.

  “I did not ask during the whole day beforehand, though I knew what would happen. I did not even ask in the beginning of the storm. But when I knew the rain must come, when the sea growled and the wind stopped, then, at last, I asked you to make the storm die. Imbry, you did nothing. You made yourself safe, and you did nothing. Why was this done?” lano’s torso quivered with bunched muscles. His eyes blazed. “If you were who we believed you to be, if you made Tylus’s boy well, why did you do this? Why did you send the storm?”

  It was the final irony: Apparently, if Iano had accepted Imbry as a man, he would have told him in advance how bad the storm was likely to be…

  Imbry shook his head. “I’m not a god, Iano,” he repeated dully. He looked at Tylus, who was standing pale and bitter eyed behind Iano.

  “Are they safe, Tylus?”

  Tylus looked silently over Imbry’s shoulder, and Imbry turned his head to follow his glance. He saw the paler shape crushed around the trunk of a tree, one arm still gripping the boy.

  “I must make a canoe,” Tylus said in a dead voice. “I’ll go on a long journey-to-leave-the-sadness-behind. I’ll go where there aren’t any gods like you.”

  “Tylus!”

  But Iano clutched Imbry’s arm, and he had to turn back toward the head man.

  “We’ll all have to go. We can’t ever stay here again.” The grip tightened on Imbry’s arm, and the suit automatically pressed it off. Iano jerked his arm away.

  ’The storm came because of you. It came to teach us something. We have learned it.” Iano stepped back. “You’re not a great god. You tricked us. You’re a bad ancestor—you’re sick—you have the touch of death in your hand.”

  “I never said I was a god.” Imbry’s voice was unsteady. “I told you I was only a man.”

  Tylus looked at him out of his dead eyes. “How can you possibly be a man like us? If you’re not a god, then you’re a demon.”

  Imbry’s face twisted. “You wouldn’t listen to me. It’s not my fault you expected something I couldn’t deliver. Is it my fault you couldn’t let me be what I am?”

  “We know what you are,” Tylus said.

  There wasn’t anything Imbry could tell him. He slowly turned away from the two natives and began the long walk back to the sub-ship.

  He finished checking the board and energized his starting motors. He waited for a minute and threw in his atmospheric drive.

  The rumble of jet throats shook through the hull, and throbbed in the control compartment. The ship broke free, and he retracted the landing jacks.

  The throttles advanced, and Imbry fled into the stars.

  He sat motionless for several minutes. The memory of Tylus’s lifeless voice etched itself into the set of his jaw and the backs of his eyes. It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t be there forever.

  There was another thing to do. He clicked on his communicator.

  “This is Imbry. Get me Lindenhoff.”

  “Check, Imbry. Stand by.”

  He lay in the piloting couch, waiting, and when the image of Lindenhoff’s face built up on the screen, he couldn’t quite meet its eyes.

  “Yeah, Imbry?”

  He forced himself to look directly into the screen. “I’m on my way in, Lindenhoff. I ran into a problem. I’m dictating a full report for the files, but I wanted to tell you first—and I think I’ve got the answer.”

  Lindenhoff grinned slowly. “Okay, Fred.”

  Lindenhoff was waiting for him as he berthed the sub-ship aboard the Sainte Marie. Imbry climbed out and looked quietly at the man.

  Lindenhoff chuckled. “You look exactly like one of our real veterans,” he said. “A hot bath and a good meal’ll take care of that.” He chuckled again. “It will, too—it takes more than once around the track before this business starts getting you.”

  “So you figure I’ll be staying on,” Imbry said, feeling tireder and older than he ever had in his life. “How do you know I didn’t make a real mess of it, down there?”

  Lindenhoff chuckled. “You made it back in one piece, didn’t you? That’s the criterion, Fred. I hate to say so, but it is. No mess can possibly be irretrievable if it doesn’t kill the man who made it. Besides—you don’t know enough to tell whether you made any mistakes or not.”

  Imbry grunted, thinking Lindenhoff couldn’t possibly know how much of an idiot he felt like and how much he had on his conscience.

  “Well, let’s get to this report of yours,” Lindenhoff said.

  Imbry nodded slowly. They walked off the Sainte Marie’s flight deck into the labyrinth of steel decks below.

  It was three seasons after the storm, and Tylus was still on his journey. One day he came to a new island and ran his canoe up on the beach. Perhaps here he wouldn’t find Pia and the nameless boy waiting for him in the palm groves.

  He walked up the sand and triggered the alarm without knowing it.

  Aboard the mother ship, Imbry heard it go off and switched the tight-beam scanner on. The intercom speaker over his head broke into a crackle.

  “Fred? You got that one?”

  “Uh-huh, Lindy. Right here.”

  “Which setup is it?”

  “Eighty-eight on the B grid. It’s that atoll right in the middle of the prevailing wind belt.”

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, Fred. Those little traps of yours are working like a charm.”

  Imbry ran his hand over his face. He knew what was going to happen to that innocent native, whoever he was. He’d come out of it a man, ready to take on the job of helping his people climb upward, with a lot of his old ideas stripped away.

  Imbry’s mouth jerked sideways, in the habitual gesture that was etching a deep groove in the skin of his face.

  But he wouldn’t be happy while he was learning. It was good for him—but there was no way for him to know that until he’d learned.

  “How many this time?” Lindenhoff asked. “Coogan tells me they could use a lot of new recruits in a hurry, in that city they’re building up north.”

  “Just one canoe,” Imbry said, looking at the image on the scanner. “Small one, at that. Afraid it’s only one man, Lindy.” He moved the picture a little. “Yeah. Just one.” He focused the controls.

  “It’s him! Tylus! We’ve got Tylus!”

  There was a short pause on the other end of the intercom circuit. Then Lindenhoff said: “Okay, okay. You’ve finally got your pet one. Now, don’t muff things in the rush.” He chuckled softly and switched off.

  Imbry bent closer to the scanner, though there was no real necessity for it. From here on, the process was automatic and as inevitable as an avalanche.

  Lindenhoff had said it, that time last year when Imbry’d come back up from the planet: “Fred, there’s a price to be paid for everything you learn about what’s in the universe. It has to hurt, or it isn’t a real price. There aren’t any easy answers.”

  Certainly, for any man who had to learn this particular answer, the price could go very^ high. It was, in essence, the same answer Imbry himself had learned. When he had joined the Corporation, he had expected Lindenhoff, Coogan and the others to be gods—of a sort. And of course they weren’t, any more than Imbry was. They were human, and had to do their job in human ways.

  He had confused motive and method. Actually, the Corporation’s motives were not so
different from his, even though they were stated realistically instead of idealistically. To look at it another way, the Corporation simply had a clearer—more sane—knowledge of what it was doing and why.

  Imbry, finding himself considered a god by the natives, had realized his own gods were only men, after all. What better way, then, to get the same natives started on the road to true civilization than to put them in exactly the same position he had been in?

  Imbry watched the protoplasmic robots on the island come hesitantly through the underbrush toward the beach.

  On the island, Tylus stopped. There was a crackle in the shrubbery, and a small, diffident figure stepped out. Its expression was watchful but friendly. It looked rather much like a man, except for its small size and the shade of its skin. Its eyes were intelligent. It looked trustful.

  “Hello,” Tylus said. “I’m Tylus.”

  The little native came forward. Others followed it, some more timid than the first, some smiling cordially. They kept casting glances at the magic tree-pod which could carry a man over the sea.

  “Hello,” the little native answered in a soft, liquid voice. “Are you an ancestor ghost or a god ghost?”

  And Tylus began learning about Imbry.

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