The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Read online

  A real woman like her.

  He tried to make himself loathe her. She was an alien lifeform. She wasn’t even human. But it would take a good microscope to prove that.

  He tried to picture the beginnings of her life: a formless puddle of protoplasm beneath a dead leafbranch on the forest floor…

  But it didn’t work. When you came right down to it, all women, all men, were born, in the last analysis, of amorphous slime. Did it really matter that others took form in wombs while the woman in his arms had sprung full-grown from a gigantic… call it a cocoon…?

  With her all-too-human arms around him, with her better-than-human odor enveloping him, it was hard for the biology of the situation to have any real meaning for Kelton.

  He remembered finding that first teleplasm nest, under a dead leafbranch. His first reaction, despite his training as a biologist, had been disgust.

  There were two stages of the stuff, there on the forest floor: a gray-green puddle of translucent, gelatine-like protoplasm about four feet in diameter; and around its periphery and speckling its surface, cysts, cocoons of various sizes, ranging from pea-size to the size of a large watermelon. It was obvious that the cocoons were made up of the same stuff as the glob.

  Kelton radioed for the ship’s robot, and twenty minutes later, the mechanism arrived—a caterpillar tank with ten boom-like arms, ending in assorted torches, cutters, scoops, borers and handlers. Kelton ordered the robot to transfer the thing on the ground intact to its specimen cage.

  The robot cut a circle in the sod around the glob, about a foot and a half deep, with its cutter-arm. It then inserted a narrow torch-nozzle into the bottom of the groove, swiveled it so that it faced the center of the glob-bearing disc of sod, and under-cut the disc with it. It slipped four handlers under the disc, and lifted it gently through the opening on its back, with the glob still on the sod disc, like a suckling pig on a platter.

  Kelton rode the robot back to the ship.

  “What in hell is that?” grunted Larry Blair, wrinkling his nose at the glob installed in the specimen cage. “It looks like a dish of jello with an acute case of hives.”

  “I’m not sure yet,” said Kelton. “But it may be the fly in this planet’s ointment.”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember when I told you about there being two kinds of females on this planet, type A and type B?”

  “Yeah. So…?” ’

  “Well, I did a cell section on one of those cocoons. It turned out to be female B protoplasm.”

  “So what? So it’s a female B dish of jello with hives.”

  “Guess what was inside the cocoon, Larry?”

  “How should I know?” said Blair impatiently. “A Kewpie-doll?”

  “A female B piperlizard.”

  Blair goggled. “Huh? You mean that thing hatches out the piperlizards?”

  Kelton gestured uneasily at the cocoon covered glob. “Not just piperlizards, Larry,” he said. “Insects. Watersnakes. Leafbirds. Landcrocs. Dozens of different species in those cocoons. Every one of them female B.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Kelton grimaced. “Don’t feel too bad, Larry. I’m the ecologist, and I don’t know if I get it either. All I have is a half-baked theory. Let’s suppose that life started out on this planet as on all other planets—thousands of different species. Then, somehow, something new mutates under this particular sun. A different kind of organism, formless, amorphous like an amoeba, but not microscopic, it’s big. It has to carve out an ecological niche for itself. It’s not a predator. It isn’t really a parasite. It isn’t a symbiote. First, maybe it starts out mimicking things. Simple organisms. Then there’s a new mutation, and the thing becomes… not sentient, but aware, crudely telepathic, but on a cellular level. Call the stuff teleplasm now. An entirely different form of life, a new kind of protoplasm.”

  “You’re starting to make me a little sick,” said Blair. And he didn’t seem to be kidding.

  “I don’t blame you. This stuff is more than an alien lifeform. It’s a whole different concept of life itself. The teleplasm becomes aware of other organisms, on a cellular level, on an organic level. Like all organisms, it must compete for food and living space. But in a weird new way. It’s amorphous, without a form of its own. It takes the form of organisms around it. Piperlizards. Landcrocs. Anything. It has the ability to imitate any lifeform, organ for organ. Now remember, the teleplasm is competing for food. How can it make an easy living?”

  “How should I know? I’m no dish of jello.”

  “Who pays for a wife’s meals?”

  “Her husband, of—Oh my God!”

  “Yeah, Larry. That’s it. Type B females are teleplasm. They begin life as a glob of goo. Then a male organism blunders by, and the teleplasm somehow ‘reads’ its image of an ideal mate and imprints the pattern on a part of itself. It forms a cocoon. When the cocoon opens, there’s a female insect or landcroc or piper-lizard. A type B female. And there’s another wrinkle. The type B females are better than the natural type As. Before I found the teleplasm, I did a statistical study of the females in this area. Seventy percent are type B. The teleplasm is pushing the natural females out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the teleplasm forms females from the ideal images it gets from the males.”

  “You mean it sort of custombuilds females to order for the males?”

  “That’s more or less it. And seven out of ten males seem to prefer ‘Brand BV’ ”

  “Wow! Hey, too bad it won’t work for us!” laughed Blair. “All we’d have to do is concentrate on dreaming up the sexiest dames in the Galaxy, and presto! Out they hatch!”

  For the next few days, Blair got plenty of laughs out of that, especially when he tried to needle the dour Dexter into revealing what kind of woman he’d be likely to order up from the teleplasm.

  But two weeks later, when all the cocoons had hatched out, and the remainder of the teleplasm began to grow and grow, and finally formed three great human-sized cocoons, it stopped being funny.

  The brief shower was over, and a cooling breeze set the huge leafbranches of the sailtrees to creaking and groaning. Ordinarily, it was a sound to lull a man back to sleep…

  But Kelton knew that he would not sleep again that night. He somehow sensed that this was the night when all his vague uneasiness, all his sense of wrongness would coalesce into a decision. The time of temporizing was over.

  And deep within him, he already knew what that decision must be, though he refused to admit it to himself, as yet.

  Just as the three of them had known what waited in those cocoons to be born, long before they hatched…

  And when the day finally came, when the cocoon casings began to crack and warp and shrivel, the three of them waited numbly together by the specimen cage, afraid even to think…

  Life stirred within the cocoons, stirred and tore at the shriveled envelopes and struggled to be born.

  “Should… shouldn’t we cut them out?” whispered Dexter.

  “No,” hissed Kelton, with a ferocity that surprised even himself. “I mean… I don’t think it would be right”

  “Doug, do you really think that there are… women in there?” asked Blair.

  “Depends on your definition, Larry. But there’s nothing in this area whose mates would be as big as those cocoons except us”

  “But will they be intelligent?” said Dexter.

  “Are any dames intelligent?” cracked Blair nervously.

  “I don’t know, Curt,” said Kelton, ignoring Blair. “If the teleplasm is really telepathic, then our subconscious image of a woman should be completely reproduced, down to…”

  The cocoons were parting. The creatures within them threw them aside and stood up.

  The men gasped in unison.

  One was a bosomy blond, with wide sensual hips and a submissive leer.

  Another was dark, fully-built, with an older, calmer, more maternal face on her young-but-so
mehow-sedate body.

  Kelton knew that the third one was his.

  She was tall and swarthy, her body an ounce plumper than willowy. Wild black hair cascaded down her shoulders halfway to the small of her back. Her eyes were deep, deep green, large and elfin. They laughed by themselves, and promised things without names.

  Her mouth was small, but the lips were full, pursed into a frame for tiny, white feral teeth that she licked sinuously with a small pink tongue.

  Kelton felt something turn to liquid fire within him, and his knees began to quiver.

  “Larry!” squealed the blond, and threw herself at Blair.

  “Curt, little one,” sighed the matronly beauty, and enveloped Dexter in a massive hug.

  But Kelton barely noticed that his teammates were leaving with their women.

  His woman was speaking to him in a voice that was black velvet.

  “Hello, Douglas,” she whispered. “You’ve been waiting all your life for me. And I for you.”

  She rumpled his hair with one perfect hand, and he knew that it was true.

  Liquidly, she was in his arms, and he in hers, and her fingers danced a slow tattoo in the pit of his back, and her tongue caressed his knowingly, and her body sidled warm against him, and thought stopped.

  They were lying in the grass at the edge of the forest. Kelton had only the most confused memories of the past few hours. They could not have spoken more than a dozen words to each other, but he knew that he was completely, totally, hopelessly in love with this strange, knowing creature.

  She seemed to know every inch of his body as though it were her own; every sensitive area, every little personal idiosyncrasy, the kind of things it should take a woman months to discover about a man: how he loved to have a woman’s fingers dancing in the pit of his back, the particular rhythm of his lovemaking, the fact that he liked a woman to keep her eyes open when he kissed her…

  Everything.

  He cradled her in his arms and inhaled her incredibly sweet perfume. A part of him knew that he was holding something not human, that this fey creature had been born in a cocoon in the specimen cage, that what he should be feeling was revulsion, selfdisgust…

  But he could not feel it. His body would not accept the reality that this was not a woman, not the most perfect woman that he had ever known…

  “Child of my mind…” he mumbled.

  “What, Douglas?”

  “I said ‘child of my mind’. That’s you, isn’t it?”

  She laughed musically. “What a pretty idea,” she sighed. “A lovely way of thinking of it. Only I don’t feel like a child.” She giggled.

  He propped himself up on one elbow and stared into her laughing face. “What do you feel like?” he said.

  “What do you mean, Douglas?”

  “I mean, do you understand what… er… how you came to be…”

  She laughed, and kissed him gently on the lips and then on the nose.

  “Poor Douglas,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about hurting me. I know I was not born like other women.”

  “Then… how were you born?”

  “Well first, for many years, I was an idea in your mind, a hope, a dream, waiting to be born. I was what you wanted, I was a part of you. And then… a something happened, and I was made flesh. A dream became a real woman.”

  “Do you know how…?”

  “Douglas! Douglas! I told you not to be afraid of hurting me! I know how I was born. From what you call ‘teleplasm’. But I don’t feel like teleplasm. I feel like a woman. A woman in love. I’m a woman down to the smallest detail…” She giggled. “As you well know, darling. How am I different from other women? Under a microscope, perhaps? Do you plan to make love to me under a microscope?”

  He laughed to break the mood. “Well, it would be different.” he said.

  “That’s my Douglas! That’s the man I know and love.”

  “You really do know me, don’t you? Even though you’re only a few hours old.”

  “But Douglas, in another way, I’m as old as you are, and I’ve known you all your life. I’m what you’ve always wanted in a woman, and part of what you want is a woman that knows and loves you completely. And now you have it. Now and always.”

  “I believe you,” he said. “I really do. I don’t quite understand, but I believe. It doesn’t matter to you how you were born, does it?”

  “No, Douglas. It doesn’t matter what I was. What counts is what I am. A woman. Your woman, completely and forever.”

  He took her in his arms, and he kissed her, and once again, he was lost in that sweet madness, and thought stopped.

  Soon it would be dawn, and in the light of this alien sun, he would have to act. Of the three men, he knew that he was the only one still capable of making a rational decision.

  Theoretically, there was no captain on a Survey ship. It would be ridiculous to name one man official leader over a crew of two. But Survey teams were not put together randomly. Kelton was the most introspective of the three, the man with the most highly developed sense of responsibility, the dominant personality, and he knew it. He could be overruled by the other two, since his position of leadership was purely unofficial. But he had been the leader, and Blair and Dexter tacitly acknowledged it.

  But now, Kelton knew, they were no longer a team, but three isolated individuals. The things that had held them together—a job to do, a planet to return to—no longer had meaning.

  Of the things that had made three men into a Survey team, only one was left—the ship. And it took only one man to run the ship, and all three members of a Survey team were always trained pilots.

  But Blair and Dexter would no longer even go near the ship. Indeed, since that day when the women had emerged from the cocoons, they would hardly have anything to do with each other, or with Kelton. Why should they? Dealing with other independent personalities means conflict; it means that you will not always have your way. It means accommodation, compromise.

  They’ve become like children, Kelton thought bitterly. Spoiled brats. They lay around their huts all day, and they have everything they want without lifting a finger, without even an argument. Blair’s woman is his slave, and Dexter’s is an indulgent mother. Why go back to a life that was less than perfect, to women that made demands, who had minds and drives of their own? They were both contented, and they both planned to spend the rest of their lives here, on this garden of a planet, with their women.

  Their perfect women.

  It was a great mental effort, but Kelton had finally understood that Blair and Dexter’s women were perfect, to them, even though they seemed to him like grotesque caricatures of what women should be. But then, the caricatures had been in their minds from the beginning: to Blair, a woman was something less than human, a slave who should be willing to cater to every whim of her lord and master; to Dexter, a woman was something more than human, the source of all satisfaction, all security, the fulfiller of all wants.

  There could be no jealousy here. These women were formed to suit every taste and whim of their mates, however childish, however neurotic.

  Swapping them would be like swapping toothbrushes.

  Kelton knew that, if he wanted it, the ship was his. He could lift-off and leave them, and they wouldn’t give a damn. They had no intention of going back to Earth anyway, and they could do nicely without him.

  But why do I want to leave? I have the perfect woman too, don’t I? To Blair, Woman is Slave. To Dexter, Woman is Mother. What is Woman to me, that I’m not satisfied? It can’t be that we can’t… That was never important to me, personally.

  And I only asked the question casually, in the first place…

  They had been walking in the cool forest, the great leafbranches swaying ponderously in the breeze, the sun filtering between them, dappling the forest floor with light, when he had asked her.

  “No, Douglas,” she answered softly. “We can’t have children.” She frowned. “Does it really matter that muc
h to you?”

  “No,” he said quite truthfully. “I was really just curious. Scientific curiosity. After all, I am a biologist. How does the… er… how do you…?”

  She laughed warmly. “Douglas, must I always keep telling you that speaking about it doesn’t hurt me? I know what I am, and I’m not ashamed. Why should I be?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I just want you to feel about it the way I do, for your own sake. To answer your question, I don’t reproduce. Not in the way you think of it. When you are gone… er…1 mean…”

  “Now who’s afraid to face the truth?” he said gently. “I’ve no illusion about being immortal. When I die, then what?”

  She flushed. “When you… are no longer with me, I die, in a sense. In a way, it’s a beautiful thought. I was born to love you, and when I no longer have you, I will no longer exist in the form that your love gave me. I’ll dissolve back into teleplasm, with no memories and no regrets, until someone else, or something else, comes along, and…”

  Somehow, it hurt him. The idea, not so much that she would outlive him, but that her protoplasm would become so many piperlizards, insects, or whatever else happened along after he was gone. For there would be no other men to form her protoplasm into a woman. He and Dexter and Blair were the only men who would ever see this planet…

  Or were they?

  Kelton knew Survey doctrine. When a ship did not come back, it was searched for, and the search was not given up until it was found. It might take a year, or a decade, or a century, but Survey would find this planet. It was not a matter of altruism, or protecting its own; if a ship did not come back, it meant that something had kept it from returning, and Earth had to know what that something was, before it took more ships, or worse. That something might be a hostile intelligent race, or a deadly lifeform, and Man might be in deadly danger without knowing it, if Survey did not track down all lost ships.

  What if they hadn’t found out about Lathrop III in time?

  Kelton knew that it was a certainty—other men would walk this surface of this planet, sooner or later. It was inevitable.