ON THE LAST AFTERNOON

"You'll have to help us," Mysha said painfully. "One last time. You can do it, can't you?"

The noion said nothing. It hung on its stalk as it had hung since he first found it here in the headland grove: A musty black indescribably shabby object or entity, giving no more sign of life than an abandoned termite nest. No one but he believed it was alive. It had not changed in the thirty years of the colony's life, but he had known for some time that it was dying.

So was he. That was not the point, now.

He pulled himself up from the case of tapes and frowned out over the mild green sea, rubbing his wrecked thigh. The noion's grove stood on a headland beside the long beach. To the left lay the colony's main fields, jungle-rimmed. Below him on his right were the thatch roofs, the holy nest itself. Granary, kilns, cistern, tannery and workshops, the fish sheds. The dormitories, and the four individual huts, one his and Beth's. At the center was the double heart: the nursery and the library-labs. Their future and their past.

The man Mysha did not look there now, because he had never stopped looking at it. Every brick and ditch and pane and wire was mapped in his inner eye, every cunning device and shaky improvisation, every mark of plan or accident down to the last irreplaceable com-

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ponent from the ship whose skeleton rusted at the jungle's edge behind him.

Instead he gazed out, beyond the people laboring and splashing on the jetty in the bay, beyond the placid shoals that stretched to a horizon calm as milk. Listening.

Faintly he heard it: a long sourceless whistle.

They were out there. Out beyond the horizon, where the world-ocean crashed forever on the continent's last reefs, the destroyers were gathering.

"You can do it one last time," he told the noion. "You must."

The noion was silent, as usual.

Mysha made himself stop listening, turned to study the sea-wall being built below him. A cribbed jetty stretched from the headland, slanting out across the shoals to meet a line of piling coming from the far side of the colony beach. They formed a broad arrowhead pointing at the sea. Shelter for the colony.

In the unfinished apex gap brown bodies were straining and shouting among rafts piled with rock. Two pirogues wallowed, towing cribs. Another work-team splashed toward the pilings pulling a huge spliced beam.

"They can't finish in time," Mysha muttered. "It won't hold." His eyes roved the defense-works, reviewing for the thousandth time the placing of the piles, the weak points. It should have been in deeper water. But there was no time, it was all too late. They wouldn't believe him until the stuff had started washing ashore.

"They don't really believe yet," he said. "They aren't afraid."

He made a grimace of pride and agony, looking now at the near beach where boys and girls were binding logs with vine-ropes, assembling the cribs. Some of the girls were singing. One boy jostled another, who dropped his end of the log, tumbling them both. Hoots, laughter. "Get on with it, get on with it," he groaned, pounding his broken thighs, watching old Tomas fuss-

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ing them back to work. Tomas would outlive him if they survived, if any of them survived what was coming. He groaned again softly. His beloved ones, seed of his race on this alien world. Tall, unfearing, unscarred as he had never been.

"Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him" he told the noion. "Add that to your definitions ... You could have warned me. You were here before. You knew. You knew I didn't understand."

The noion continued silent. It was very alien. How could it grasp what this haven had meant to them, thirty years ago? This sudden great pale clearing at the last edge of the land, and they roaring down to death on the rocks and jungle in their crippled ship. At the last minute of their lives this place had opened under them and received them. He had led the survivors out to bleed thankfully into the churned sand.

A tornado, they decided, must have swept it bare, this devastated square mile stretching to the sea. It had been recent; green tips were poking up, fed with fresh water from an underground flow. And the sand was fertile with organic mulm, and their wheats and grasses grew and the warm lagoon teamed with fish. An Eden it had been, those first two years. Until the water—

"Are you not... mobile?" The noion had spoken in his head suddenly, interrupting his thought. As usual it had "spoken" when he was not looking at it. Also as usual its speech had been a question.

From long habit he understood what it meant. He sighed.

"You don't understand," he told it. "Animals like me are nothing, in ourselves, without the accumulated work of other men. Our bodies can run away, yes. But if our colony here is destroyed those who survive will be reduced to simple animals using all their energy to eat and breed. The thing that makes us human will be lost. I speak with you as a rational being, knowing for example what the stars are, only because the work of dead men enables me to be a thinker."

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In fact, he was not a thinker, his inmost mind commented sadly; he was a builder of drainage lines now.

The noion emanated blankness. How could it understand, a creature of solitary life? Hanging forever on its limb, it was more impressed with his ability to move his body than with anything in his mind.

"All right," he said. "Try this. Man is a creature that stores time, very slowly and painfully. Each individual stores a little and dies leaving it to his young. Our colony here is a store of past time." He tapped the box of tapes on which he rested.

"If that generator down there is destroyed, no one can use the time-store in these. If the labs and shops go, the kilns, the looms, the irrigation lines and the grain, the survivors will be forced back to hunting roots and fruits to live from day to day. Everything beyond that will be lost. Naked savages huddling in the jungle," he said bitterly. "A thousand generations to get back. You have to help us."

There was silence. Over the water the eerie whistling suddenly rose, faded again. Or did it fade?

"You do not... ripen?" The noion's "words" probed stealthily in his mind, pricked a sealed-off layer.

"No!" He jerked around, glaring at it. "Never ask me that again! Never." He panted, clenching his mind against the memory. The thing the noion had shown him, the terrible thing. No. No.

"The only help I want from you is to protect them," He built intensity, flung it at the noion. "One last time."

"Mysha!"

He turned. A leathery little woman toiled up the rocks toward him, followed by a naked goddess. His wife and youngest daughter, bringing food.

"Mysha, are you all right up here?"

Bethel's sad bird-eyes boring into his. Not looking at the noion. He took the gourd, the leaf-wrapped fish.

"What I'm doing you can do anywhere," he grumbled, and repenting touched her sparrow wrists. The glorious girl watched, standing on one leg to scratch the

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other. How had these supernatural children come out of Bethel's little body?

It was time to say some kind of goodbye.

"Piet is coming to take you inland," Bethel was saying. "As soon as they get the laser mounted. Here's your medicine, you forgot it."

"No. I'm staying here. I'm going to try something."

He watched her freeze, her eyes at last flicking to the silent brown thing hanging from its branch, back again to him.

"Don't you remember when we came here? This grove was the only untouched place. It saved itself, Bethel. I can make it help us again this time."

Her face was hard.

"Beth, Beth, listen." He shook her wrist. "Don't pretend now. You know you believe me, that's why you're afraid."

The girl was moving away.

"If you don't believe me, why wouldn't you let me love you here?" he whispered fiercely. "Melie!" he called. "Come here. You must hear this."

"We must go back, there isn't time." Bethel's wrist jerked. He held it.

"There's time. They're still whistling. Melie, this thing here, you've heard me call it the noion, it's alive. It isn't native to this planet. I don't know what it is—a spore from space, a bionic computer even maybe—who knows. It was here when we came. What you must know, you must believe is that it saved us. Twice. The first time was before any of you were born, the year when the wells went dry and we almost died."

The girl Melie nodded, looking composedly from him to the noion.

"That was when you discovered the blackwater root," she smiled.

"I didn't discover it, Melie. No matter what they tell you. The noion did it. I came up here—"

He glanced away for an instant, seeing again the stinking mud-flats where the lagoon was now, the dry wells, the jungle dying under the furnace that poured

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white fire on them week after parching week. That had been the year they decided it was safe to breed. Bethel's first child had been lost then along with all the others, dessicated in the womb.

"I came up here and it felt my need. It put an image in my mind, of the blackwater roots."

"It was your subconscious, Mysha! It was some memory!" Bethel said harshly. "Don't corrupt the girl."

He shook his head tiredly. "No. No. Lies corrupt, not the truth. The second time, Melie. You know about the still-death. Why we don't use the soap after the wheat has sprouted. When Piet was a baby .. ."

The still-death ... his memory shivered. It had hit the babies first. Stopped them breathing, with no sign of distress. Martine's baby started it, she'd seen the bubbles stop moving on its lips while it smiled at her. She got it breathing again, and again, and again, and then in the night Hugh's baby died.

After that they watched constantly, exhausted because it was harvest time and a smut had damaged the wheat, every grain had to be saved. And then the adults started to drop.

Everybody had to stay together then, in pairs, one always watching the other, and still it got worse. The victims didn't struggle, those who were brought back reported only a vague euphoria. There was no virus; the cultures were blank. They tried eliminating every food. They were living only on water and honey when Diera and her husband died together in the lab. After that they huddled in one room, still dying, and he had broken away and come up here—

"You were in a highly abnormal state," Bethel protested.

"Yes. I was in a highly abnormal state." On his knees here, cursing, his need raging at the noion. What is killing us? What can I do? Tell me\ The broken gestalt of his ignorance clawing at the noion.

"It was the need, you see. The urgency. It—somehow, it let me complete myself through it. I can't describe it. But the fact remains I learned what to do."

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Adrenaline, it had been, and febrifacients, and making them breathe their own carbon dioxide until they choked and choked again. He had come down from the hill and thrust his baby son's head in a plastic bag with Bethel righting him.

"It was the enzyme in the soap," said Melie calmly. She cocked her head, reciting. "The - soap - traces - potentiate - the - ergot - in - the - wheat - smut - resulting -in - a - stable — uh — choline - like - molecule - which -passes - the - blood - brain - barrier - and - is - accepted -by - the - homeostats - of - the - midbrain." She grinned. I really don't understand that. But, I mean, I guess it's like jamming the regulator on our boiler. They didn't know when they had to breathe."

"Right." He held Bethel more gently, put his other arm around her thin rigidity. "Now, how could that have possibly come out of my mind?" The girl looked at him; he realized with despair that to her there were no limits on what he might know. Her father Mysha, the colony's great man.

"You must believe me, Melie. I didn't know it. I couldn't. The noion gave it to me. Your mother won't admit it, for reasons of her own. But it did and you should know the truth."

The girl transferred her gaze to the noion.

"Does it speak to you, Father?"

Bethel made a sound.

"Yes. In a way. It took a long while. You have to want it to, to be very open. Your mother claims I'm talking to myself."

Bethel's mouth was trembling. He had made her come here and try once, leaving her alone. Afterwards the noion had asked him, "Did anyone speak?"

"It's a projection," Bethel said stonily. "It's a part of your mind. You won't accept your own insights."

Suddenly the whole thing seemed unbearably trivial.

"Maybe, maybe," he sighed. " 'Bethink ye, my lords that ye may be mistaken ...' But know this. I intend to try to get its help once more, if the beasts break

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through. I believe it has the strength to do it just once more. It's dying, you see."

"The third wish." The girl said lightly. "Three wishes, it's like the stories."

"You see?" Bethel burst out. "You see? It's starting again. Magic! Oh, Mysha, after all we've been through—" Her voice broke with bitterness.

"Your mother is afraid you'll make a religion out of it. A fetish in a carved box." His lips quirked. "But you wouldn't believe a god in a box, would you, Melie?"

"Don't joke, Mysha, don't joke."

He held her, feeling nothing. "AH right. Back to work. But don't bother trying to move me, tell Piet to use the time for another load. You have the lab packed, haven't you? If they get through there won't be any time."

She nodded dumbly. He tightened his arms, trying to summon feeling.

"Dying makes one cantankerous." It was not much of a goodbye.

He watched them going down the hill, the girl's peachbloom buttocks gliding against each other. The ghost of lust stirred in him. How solemn they had been, the elaborate decisions about incest ... That would all go too, if the sea wall failed.

Figures were swarming over the water-tower now, mounting the old wrecking laster from the ship. That was Gregor's idea; he'd carried all the young men with him, even Piet. True, the laser was powerful enough to strike beyond the wall—but what would they aim at? Who knew where the things' vital centers were? Worst of all, it meant leaving the generator, all the precious energy-system in place.

"If we lose we lose it all," he muttered. He sat down heavily on the tapes. The pain in his groin was much worse now. Bethel, he thought, I've left them a god in a box after all, if the generator's smashed that's all these tapes will be.

The box held the poetry, the music that had once been his life, back in another world. The life he had

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closed out; his own private meanings. Abandoned it gladly for the work of fathering his race. But after his accident he had asked Piet to lug these up here, telling the noion, "Now you will hear the music of my race." It had listened with him, often the whole night through, and sometimes there seemed to be a sharing...

He smiled, thinking of alien communion in the echoes of music from a brain centuries dead and par-sees away. Below him in the bay he saw the last rocks were being offloaded, into the apex cribs. All the young ones were out there now, lashing a huge hawser in the outer piles.

Suddenly the sea-wall looked better to him. It was really very strong. The braces had gone in now, heavy trunks wedged slanting into the rock. Yes, it was a real fortress. Perhaps it would hold, perhaps everything would be all right.

I am projecting my own doom, he thought wryly. His eyes cleared, he let himself savor the beauty of the scene. Good, it was good; the strong young people, his children with unshadowed eyes ... He had made it, he had led them here out of tyranny and terror, he had planted them and built the complex living thing, the colony. They had come through. If there was one more danger he had one last trick left to help them. Yes; even with his death he could help them one more time, make it all right. What more could a man ask, he wondered, smiling, all calm strength to the bottom of his being, now, all one...

—And the sky fell in, the bottom of his being betrayed him with the memory that he would not remember. What more could a man want? He groaned, clenched his eyes.

... In the spring, it had begun. In the idle days after the planting was in. He and his eldest son, the young giant whose head he had once thrust into a bag, had made an exploration voyage.

A query had been in the back of his mind since Day One, the day the ship landed. In the last tumultuous minutes there had been a glimpse of another clearing, a

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white scar on the far south coast. A good site, perhaps, for a future settlement? And so he and Piet had taken the catamaran south to look.

They had found it. In use.

For a day and a night they had hidden, watching the appalling animals surge upon the devastated shore. And then they had cautiously threaded their way out through the fouled shoal waters toward the outer barrier reefs.

The shoals and keys extended far out of sight of land and a south wind blew forever here. They shipped the sail and paddled outward under a bare mast, blinded by warm flying scud, the roar of the world-ocean ever louder. A huge hollow whistling began, like a gale in a pipe organ. They rounded the last rocky key and saw through the spume the towers and chimneys of the outmost reef.

"My god, it's moving!"

One of the towers was not grey but crimson. It swayed, reared higher. Another loomed up beside it, fell upon it. There was a visceral wail. Under the two struggling pillars mountains thrashed, dwarfing the giant combers breaking over them.

The catamaran retreated, tried another channel. And another, and another, until there was only moonlight.

"They're all up and down the whole damned reef."

"The bulls, perhaps ... hauled up, waiting for the cows."

"They look more like enormous arthropods."

"Does it matter?" he had asked bitterly. "What matters is that they're preparing to come ashore here too. To our clearing. They'll destroy it as they did the other. Get the sail up, Piet. There's enough light. We've got to warn them."

But there was not quite enough light. Piet had brought him home senseless and broken, lashed to half an outrigger.

When he awoke he demanded, "Have they started building the sea-wall yet?"

"The sea-wall?" Doctor Liu tossed a dressing into

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the waste-can. "Oh, you mean your sea monsters. It's early harvest time, you know."

"Harvest? Liu, hasn't Piet told you? Don't they realise? Get Gregor in here right now. And Hugh and To-mas. Piet too. Bring them, Liu."

It was some time after they came that he began to realize he was a ghost. He'd started calmly, aware that they might think his judgment was warped by his condition.

"The area was totally devastated," he told them. "Approximately a kilometer square. There was a decapitated body, still living, near us. It was at least twenty meters long and three or four meters thick. That was by no means the largest. They come ashore periodically it seems, to the same locations to lay eggs. That's what created our clearing, not a tornado."

"But why should they come here, Mysha?" Gregor protested. "After thirty years?"

"This is one of their nest sites. The time doesn't matter, they apparently have a long cycle. Some terran animals—turtles, eels, locusts—have long cycles. These things are gathering out there all along the reef. One group came ashore in the south clearing; another will come here soon. We've got to build defenses."

"But maybe they've changed their habits. They may have been going to the south site every year for all we know."

"No. The newly smashed trees were at least two decades old. They're coming, I tell you. Here!" He heard his voice go up, saw their faces. "I tell you we dare not wait for the harvest, Gregor! If you had seen—Tell them, Piet! Tell them, tell them—"

When his head cleared again there was only Doctor Liu.

And shortly after that he discovered that he was a dead man indeed.

"It's in the lymph system, Mysha. I found it in the groin when I went in to ease the inguineal ligament." Liu sighed. "You'd have heard from it pretty soon."

"How long?" .g

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"Back home we could stretch it out a while. Largely unpleasantly. Here—" he glanced around the little surgery, dropped his hands.

"Outside limits. Tell me, Liu."

"Months. Maybe. I'm sorry, Mysha."

They had let him go out then. When he had found that they were still preoccupied with the harvest he was too weak to plead. Instead he asked them to bring him up here to the noion's grove, to silence.

"You ripen?" the noion had asked him.

He shrugged. "If that's what you call it."

The next day Piet had carried up his tapes and there had been the music and the poetry, and time passed ... until the day when the stuff started to come ashore. Greasy, man-sized wads it was, something like ambergris, or vomit, or sloughed-off hide. Nothing they had ever seen before.

Upon that Piet had been able to persuade Gregor to send a scouting party to the outer reefs, and then, having seen, they began calmly and gracefully to prepare the wall. Mysha found that his nagging did nothing to speed them and went back up to the grove.

A tape of poetry had been running when it happened. He had been half listening, half tracing with his eyes the roof-poles of the new shed housing the fibers and minerals the exploration team had brought in. A water-well was clacking in the near field. There came to him the memory of his arms lifting the capstones of the cistern arch and he frowned, recalling for the thousandth time that they were not quite trued. Next season he would—

Next season he would be dead, leaving all this to the young brown gods. He thought fondly of their occasional curious glances at the ship and then up, up at the sky. They would never know what he knew, but they thought as civilized men. That was what he had made Not Ozymandias; Father. His immortality. I die but do not die.

"You do not ripen?" came the noion's thought.

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The recorder was muttering Jeffers. "Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man . . /'

"You can't understand," he told the noion. "You build nothing, leave nothing. Nothing beyond yourself."

"—This is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught, they say, God when he walked on earth."

He slapped the thing off.

"How could you understand?" he demanded. "A spore, a god-knows-what without species or posterity. Man is a mammal, we build nests, we cherish our young."

An enormous panorama of nests came to him—nests made of spittle or silk or down pulled from the breast, nests excavated, dug into rock, woven in the air, in icebergs; eggs encysted in deserts, in the deep sea mud, carried in pouches of flesh, in mouths, on backs, eggs held for frozen weeks on webbed feet, thrust into victims' bodies, guarded on the wind-torn crags.

"Even those monsters who are coming here," he said. "It's for their eggs, their young, although they die doing it. Yes, I die. But my species lives!"

"Why do you cease?" the noion asked.

That was when the fear started. With his mouth he said angrily, "Because I can't help it. Can you?"

Silence.

His "Can you?" hung in the air, took on unintended meaning ... Could it, this thing he called the noion could it do ... something?

An impalpable tension slighter than the pull of a star feathered his mind, the small cold seed of terror grew.

"Can you—" he started to say, meaning can you cure me? Can you fix my body? But as he framed it he knew it wasn't relevant. The pull was elsewhere, in a direction he did not want to look. He crouched, horrified. The noion meant, it meant—

"You ... ripen?"

The tenderness opened in his mind, he felt a breach through which frightened tendrils of himself were leaking out, nakedly. He felt himself start to slip, to float

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into dark lightness, a vast non-space in which were— voices?—faint beyond galaxies, the ghosts of voices, untraceable filaments of drifting thoughts, a frail web-work of—something—in timelost immensities, in—life? Death's-life? Immaterial energies on the winds of non-being, pulling, subtly pulling at him—pulling—

No! No!

Terrified, he clenched himself, broke, fought, gasped back to life on his hands and knees under the noiorfs bough. Light, air. He gulped it, seized earth—and suddenly reached with his mind for the connection he had broken. It wasn't there.

"Dear mother of god, is that your immortality?"

The noion hung mute. He sensed that it was spent. It had somehow held open a dimension, to show him ...

To invite him.

He understood then; his third, his last wish could be ♦.. this.

He had lain unmoving while the sun ran down the sky, hearing no sounds of the life around him ... To go out, naked, alone ... To go out. Alone ... Those voices . . . had there been meaning, some inconceivable meaning in the ultimate void?... To go out, forever out, to meet .. . strangeness ... to go alone, his essence, his true self free forever from the blood and the begetting and the care ...

It sang to him, a sweet cold song. Out—alone—free ... The other voice in the double heart of man. The deepest longing of that part of him that was most human. To be free of the tyranny of species. To be free of love. To live forever . . .

He had groaned, feeling the sky close, feeling the live blood pumping through his animal heart. He was an animal, a human animal and his young were in danger. He could not do it.

Before the sun set he had sighed, and raised himself.

"No. Your way is not my way. I must stay here with my kind. We won't speak of it again. If you can help me one last time help me save my young."

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That had been weeks ago, before the sea-wall had been raised. He sat looking at it now, trying to seal off the memory, the deep traitorous pull. The laser was installed, he saw, and in the same moments heard footsteps coming up the path.

"Piet."

His tall son stood beside him, looking out to sea. He realized the whistling had grown louder. On the beach they were running now, shouting more urgently.

"Bethel says you're going to stay here."

"That's right I want to try, oh, something ... where will you be?"

"On the laser. Pavel and I drew lots. He got the raft with the repair crew."

"See that your mother and the girls get out, will you? All the way back to the big trees."

Piet nodded. "Melie and Sara are with the nursery team."

They stood silent, listening... Louder now.

"On my way," Piet said. "We're rigging an oil sprayer. We could get some carcasses burning beyond the wall."

He went, leaving a food parcel, and a flask. The afternoon was superbly beautiful, clear tourmaljne sky melting to clear green opal sea.

Only, where sea met sky, was there a stir of clouds, a faint mirage of low hills which shimmered and dissolved and formed again?

The horizon itself was coming closer.

Mysha peered, hearing the whistling strengthen. Under it now and then came a dim groaning, as though the reefs were in pain.

As he watched a file of women carrying babies and bundles came out of the colony below him and began to walk hurriedly down the path toward the jungle. The groaning came again. Two of the women broke into a trot.

On his left the shadows of the horizon thickened, heaved. A mountain seemed to be detaching itself through the misty air. It became identifiable as five

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dune-sized creatures wallowing toward the shoals. Men shouted.

The forerunners were well south of the colony, heading at the flax-oil field. As they came closer they showed as huge soft-looking lobsters with upright heads and thoraxes, their front legs dragging their distended bellies. Mysha knew them as the "cows." They crashed and floundered across the low reefs, groaning hollowly.

Behind them from the mists appeared their five "bulls," staggering with heads thrown back and their enormous tower-like organs erect. It was from them that the whistling came, loud now as a rocket vent. An oddly sad mechanical bedlam ... As they mounted the reefs Mysha saw that the males' bodies were haggard, wasted in upon longitudinal rib-like flutes. All their substance and energy seemed concentrated in their great engorged heads, bulky as horses, and in the colossal members wagging up from their front plates.

The cows' groaning became bellowing. They were in the last shallows now. Their mountainous abdomens heaved fully into view, sleek and streaming. Brilliant spectral colors flared and faded on their flanks. The males pitched in their wakes, closing on them fast.

Two males lurched together, clashing. Both stopped, wailed, flung their heads completely over onto their backs so that their crimson organs reared into the sky. But the threat-response could not last, so close to their goal. Their cows ploughed forward, the males' heads came up and they followed onto the land.

The lead cow was in the flax seedlings now, her belly gouging a canyon, her legs thrashing devastation. The two beyond her struck into jungle. Treetops flailed wildly, went down. The rending and crashing blended with the bellowing of the cows and the siren keening of the males. The last two cows were heading into the field. One struck the catamaran moorings a demolishing blow, ground on ashore.

The lead cow in the flaxfield slowed. Her abdomen was slashed by gouges and wounds, ichor streaming down. Her mate reached her. His forelegs flailed hugely.

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He grappled her head face-to-face and mounted clumsily onto her foreparts in a parody of human coupling.

Under him she began to turn ponderously in place, throwing up a ring-wall down which tumbled tree-stumps, rocks. The male's spermatogonium battered blindly, arching. His mate continued her gargantuan churning, deeper and deeper, carrying him with her. Her head was straining back, exposing gaping frontal plates. The organ of the mounted male caught, penetrated into her thorax.

What followed was not the convulsive orgasm of mammals but archaic, insectile rigidity. The cow's legs continued their piston-like churning, revolving the coupled monsters ever deeper into their crater, while the entire contents of the male's body appeared to drain into his mate. Presently he was only a deflated husk behind his gigantic head. Slowly they went round—and now Mysha saw that the male's forelegs were rasping, sawing at the cow's thorax.

In a few more revolutions he had severed it completely. Her head came loose and was held aloft, spasming. There was no laying of eggs. Instead, the male now pushed, wrenched, so that his own head and fore-limbs tore free from the genital section of his body. With his female's head held high, the bodiless head began lurching toward the sea, repeating in death the first act of his life.

Behind him the decorticate body of the cow churned on, burying itself deeper and deeper, a living incubator for the fertilized eggs within.

Mysha pulled his gaze with an effort from the two vast death's-heads reeling toward the sea in a trail of membranes and fluids. In the field two others were still coupled. Something had gone wrong with one. Her body had struck rock and canted, while her jerking legs toppled her onto the male and drummed on, grinding him under her.

Mysha shook his head, controlled his breathing. The engines of delight ... He and Piet had seen this once efore. He looked down at the colony, saw the watch-

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ers crowding the thatches, the water-tower, on the pilings. "Now you know," he muttered and tried to shout until he heard Piet's roar, getting them moving. His pain was suddenly savage.

More horizon had thickened, was looming closer. It was deafening now, that ceaseless bone-deep whistle. The sun shone brilliantly on the ruined field where the three huge craters quaked. The walking heads had disappeared into the shoals, leaving only the diminishing drumming of the stranded pair.

A woman's voice pealed. Another line of burdened figures was hurrying from the colony on the jungle path. Mysha peered, fist pressed into his pain. Martine, Lila, Hallam, Chena—biologist, weaver, mineralogist, engineer. They looked like little monkeys. Naked primates fleeing with their young. That was how it would be, once the stored heritage was gone, the tools of culture ground to dust.

"If the wall goes you must help me," he told the noion. "You know how to make them turn."

The noion's silence became emptiness. He understood the communication. This is the last, I can do no more. It was very weak.

That was enough, that was all he asked. All. To save his own.

Dead ahead of them a new mountain was rising from the sea. The bellowing rose. Six ship-sized enormities, headed for the apex of the wall. Was this the test? They grew, loomed, floundering with surprising speed straight at the colony. Their males were following close, their organs higher than the water-tower.

Mysha held his breath, willing Piet to fire. The lead cow heaved, dwarfing the fragile wall. No beam came from Piet's laser. Mysha pounded helpless fists, not feeling his own pain. What was wrong with Piet?

Then at the last moment he saw he had misjudged the angle. The lead cow mounted the last reef and stuck, churning so that her followers ploughed on past. They struck the pilings a glancing blow and turned along the reef line to the near fields. The stuck cow

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dragged free, swerved into their trail, and the males lurched after her.

Mysha breathed again. A new herd was coming ashore far to his right beyond the colony, their bellows almost inaudible below the rising bedlam from the field.

But these were only the forerunners. Behond them the horizon boiled with monster shapes.

He groaned, studying the repair crews as they dragged timbers to broken pilings; even that passing blow had done damage.

The oncoming mountains grew, birthed new herds to right and left. Their uproar was passing the quality of sound, becoming an environment of total stress. Numbly Mysha watched a huge mass detach itself from the line and start straight toward the wall. Ten of them.

They were larger and the males behind them towered higher than any yet. The main herd-bulls were coming. The female in the lead crashed on, nearer and nearer. She was following the track of the first cow which had stuck upon the reef before the wall.

But this was a stupendous animal. The reef only slowed her, so that the next cow struck her, rebounded upon the cribs of the side wall and slewed off, spilling rocks. Then the first cow was free, making straight for the apex of the walls. Her forebody reared. The head with its huge blind-looking eyes towered ten meters above the apex, a visitation from hell.

As it hung waiting for its limbs to churn it over a line of light sliced out from the tower. The beam struck her thorax. Mysha saw the plates smoke. A charred crack cut across the monstrous body—it was the abcis-sion line where the male would saw. He understood then what Piet was trying. If the abcission layer broke the body might cease its forward motion, as they had in the fields.

The head wagged drunkenly, fell off backwards. The huge decorticated body heaved, boosting itself onto the crumbling piles of the apex.^lt was still coming—no, it was not! The leg-action changed, began to oar with the

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revolving motion. The tons of belly canted sidewise, skewering itself on the pilings, ripping open to release cascades of boulder-sized eggs. Around it churned, becoming one with the ruins of the apex wall.

The male who had been following was mounting on her now, posturing mindlessly on the heaving mass. Piet's laser bored out again and sliced. The male's head tipped backward, and as it did the female's legs caught on one side and tipped them both. One set of legs came free of the water, still jerking like machines. They were thick as the pilings, a touch would break a man. But the monster-reinforced wall was still there.

Mysha had been so focused on the action at the apex that he had only vaguely seen the press of behemoths making shore along both bases of the wall. A chaos of craters was spreading far back in the fields as newcomers clambered bellowing over the encysted bodies of the earlier arrivals. Here and there among them the dying heads mowed and capered toward the sea, only to be crushed beneath the incoming cows.

The wall was damaged in several places now. Mysha could see men slipping in the ichor jellied over the cribs. They hauled, splashed, mouths working soundlessly. The din around them all was so great that it felt like a wall of agonizing silence. The pain in his groin fought with the pain in his ears; only his eyes lived.

For a long moment no animals came directly at the wall, and then a herd on the far side suddenly veered toward it. The lead cow hit the outer pilings mid-way and reared. As she did so Piet's weapon carved a line of fire into her thorax. But there was not enough time—another cow had reached the corpse-mound at the apex and was clambering up, crashing the dead cow's flailing limb's. Her mate was right beside her, Mysha saw the laser leave the first target half cut, strike at the pair mounting the corpse-pile.

Too late, too late—the incomers toppled forward, crashed into the bay behind the wall raising a thunderous wave. Rafts overturned, heads bobbed. The cow

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reared, bellowing, and smashed across the shoals to the fish-shed. There Piet's laser caught her thorax but she made one more lunge before her forward motion stopped and she began to churn. The fish-shed had vanished. Debris of coracles, nets, sails spewed out, disappeared, flying rocks struck the kilns. Piet was working on the male behind her now.

Suddenly a flame shot from the sea-wall where the partially disabled cow had burst the pilings. The oil-spray crew had ignited her. He watched the male behind her posture and wail and then sheer off.

Mysha panted, clutched against a tree, his eyes going back and forth around the holy wall. Bodies were impaled on it, merged with it in several places now. They were working out to the apex now to fire the corpses there. That must be Gregor's son with the oil. Three huge cows were just ahead of them, coming in. The boys clambered, straining with a drum. The cows came on. Then the bdys leaped for the water and a rolling gout of flame blew out of the pile. Through the smoke Mysha saw the cows lurch, slew sidewise to miss the wall.

He pulled himself upright to look around. The shoals directly ahead were momentarily clear. On either side of them was chaos and carnage as far as he could see. What had been their cropland was utterly unrecognizable, jumbled with the near jungle, heaving with nightmare shapes. Only the colony itself remained huddled behind its wall.

But the wall was still t;here, still holding! Defiance flamed from its oily pyres. Behind it their enclave, the heart of their life was intact, still safe. Except where the dying cow weltered among the outbuildings, nothing had been lost. All held safe! The fires—and Piet up there, his marksman of light—were they really holding them off, stemming the onslaught?

He stared. The horizon seemed thinner. Yes! It was breaking up, there were gaps. The shoals were still thick with wallowing bodies, but no matter. The height of the attack was passing. Let the last ones come—they

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will be met with fire, be turned! The wall will hold, he thought, not feeling the water run from his eyes. The young gods have won through.

By nightfall it would be over. They would be safe.

Safe. They didn't need him.

In the numb heart of the unceasing din Mysha felt the faint stir in his mind, the silver hemorrhage of hope. They didn't need him. He was free! Free to let the noion take him forever to life among the stars .. • He shut the thought fiercely away.

Time later—

—Suddenly a crack louder than all the rest struck him, coming from below the grove. A skein of cloud flew by.

He gave a cry and hobbled forward to look.

From the wreckage of the roof two gigantic eyes glared up at him, timbers collapsing around it. The thing was lying face up, it was the head of the male who had got ashore. Steam billowed out. A boy was lying on the ground. The head skewed into the open, pushed by scrabbling stumps of legs. Pavel and another boy ran into the steam. The steam lessened.

A man—it was Doctor Liu—ran up carrying a beaker. Pavel grabbed it, went after the colossal head which was grinding blind circles toward the generator house. Pavel danced aside from the legs, darted at the door-sized wound where the limb-stumps met. He flung the liquid, leaped back. There was a paroxysm that sprayed a brick-pile into the air. When the dust settled the head had stilled, its ganglia burned out.

But the broken roof had sheltered the main boiler that powered the generator.

The laser—the laser had only the batteries now.

Stunned, Mysha conjured frantic images of the auxiliary boiler that they used to charge the batteries, calculated amperage drains. Too little, too slow. Too slow.

He turned slowly to search the sea. The horizon humped closer, only scattered herds now, breaking apart as he watched. Gaps on both sides of them.

But in the far shoals, straight ahead, a solid phalanx

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was coming. Mysha stared, shaking his head as agonies stabbed at him. The moving mountains rocked, heaved, their course relentless toward the wall. He studied the cribs, the smoking pyres. Pavel had boys tearing at the thatch. For torches that would be.

When the laser gave out they were done for.

They needed him.

Die, hope . . . Loss tore his heart, his face contorted with the pain. I must die.

But that was not enough.

He must want it, he realized. He had to kill this traitor hope, stamp out every trace of it and tune his whole being to the task or it would not work.

Because he knew what moved the noion, what made it act. His need. Only when he hungered totally, intolerably, could the noion fulfill him. He must want this and this only in every living cell of his soul and body, as he had before.

But how can I, Mysha thought despairingly, not hearing the clamor, not seeing the flames and the wreckage. A man can make his body walk into flames for his children's sake, a man can make himself turn away even from life everlasting to save his own. But the deed is not enough, here. I must want with my whole soul. Sobs twisted his sobbing mouth. Too much—too much to ask of man, poor double-soul— that he desire his death with all his heart. To choose between his race and his life and mean it? If only the noion had never shown him—

"I can't," he whispered. "Can't—"

—And was suddenly aware of love returning, rising in him from some deepest, most secret reservoir. The world came back around him his beloved ones came back. And he began to feel he could. He could! Fierceness rose, bringing the blood-need. What would the stars be worth, if he must live forever knowing he had abandoned them?

Through mists he saw that a new group of animals was heading for the wall.

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"I will save you," he said thickly to the air. "The last wish is for you, Melie." And the need was there,

He turned back calmly to the tree from which the noion hung, biting his mouth with pain. A wave of repulsion rose against him, an almost physical push to right or left away from the tree. For an instant he faltered and then remembered what this was—the noion*s defense, the shield that had kept it safe even from the colony's boys.

"No, no," he told it, opening his mind. "You must let me."

The resistance around him shivered. He forced himself on, reached a hand painfully to the noion's bough.

"You must let me," he repeated, letting his need rise. This was not the place. The sea-wall. He felt they must be on the wall, closer.

The thick air thinned, went to nothing. He pulled awkwardly on the bough. It was long dead, but it would not give. Sick from the pain of pulling he fumbled for his knife—and suddenly found himself involuntarily turning.

In silence the noion released its ancient hold, dropped against his chest.

He had touched it only once or twice before, carefully with a finger feeling its peculiar musty, lifeless warmth. Now with the whole creature in his arms his body resonated with its currents, its field. It was hard to keep his arms around it, he enclosed more than held it. Were brush discharges coming out of his hair and elbows? He could see nothing.

He began to hobble with what speed he could down the rocky path to the base of the sea-wall below. The unceasing bellows battered at him, the pain of his body swamped his mind. He was in the smoke now, soot and flying spume rained on him.

When he could risk a glance from the rocks he saw that^ the oncoming army was much closer. Still headed straight in. He stumbled, forced his legs to run. Outside the wall two monsters were grinding by toward the field. The main group did not swerve after them. As he

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started to clamber out on the cribs he saw the defenders were bringing up more oil for the fire. Faces turned toward him. He could see mouths gape, but their voices were lost in that din.

The beslimed rocks were desperately slippery. He scrabbled, stumbled, not daring to free a hand from the core of silence in his arms. A patch of jelly sent him down on his ruined hip. He wrenched himself on sideways with knees and elbows, feeling a grating inside him, a skewering gush. One thigh was against the rocks now, his other foot kicking at the crib logs, somehow moving him on. Like the beasts, he thought. I go on.

A wave washed over him. When he could see again there was a vast flank reeling by him along the wall, shifting the crib he lay on. He was quite near the apex now. A boy seemed to be scrambling back toward him. Over the boy's head nightmares were rising in the smoke.

He sagged, staring at monstrous masks, collecting himself. This was close enough, this would have to do. "Noion, noionJ" he gasped. A cow reared up directly ahead of the flames, too closely flanked to be able to turn. "Noion, help me."

At that moment Mysha felt a connection open in his mind, a tiny struggling like the shadow of a fish on a gossamer line. It was—yes, he was sure it was—contact with the dim life of the cow. The faint spark writhed, as if torn between its driving forward and recoiling from the fire.

This was what the noion could do, had done before to save itself!

As he hung with his outer eyes on the cow and at the same time . . . touching it, the pale streak of the laser came out overhead and scored her armour. She reared higher, her head slumped backward. The inner connection went out—and his eyes saw the cow's terrible bulk surge forward to smash down upon the flame in a blast of water and smoke. The pyre was extinguished.

Another cow was mounting the wall beside her. The

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laser cut, cut, swung to still another coming in. And now a monster of monsters heaved up upon the smoking carcass at the apex. The laser touched her. Its light paled, guttered and went out.

The laser was done.

"Noion, noion!" Despair screamed out of him. "Make her turn! Turn, turn, turn—"

And it was there, the line, the channel—and his need, his need drove out, met, completed itself in potency. Turn! His outer eyes saw only chaos, it was the eye of his mind that sensed when impulse leaped ganglion, when energy became assymetrical and the blind engines unbalanced the mighty belly—turning—veering it along the wall!

But as this web gave, he was aware of the others coming behind her, the dull energy-points of their beings blooming just ahead of his reaching mind. "Now, noion!" he prayed, trying to hurl himself, imploring, "Turn, turn, Oh noion help me—MAKE THEM TURN!"

Emptiness.

Vision came back to his eyes.

Beside him, beyond the wall, the behemoths were grinding ashore. They had turned. He had turned them!

Dazedly he saw others passing the far wall. The herd had split. As he watched, a last male tipped over the pilings, righted himself and lurched away after the cows.

And the shoals ahead were clear as far as he could see through the choking smoke.

He felt unbodied, weightless with exaltation and relief. Pain gouted and wrenched at him from below, but he was remote from the pounding, crashing, bellowing all about. It came to him that he was quite probably dying.

As he thought it he felt also a wave of weakness from the entity in his arms. This was killing them both.

So be it.

Another herd of horrors showed now through the

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smoke ahead. He reached for them from far, found the frail potency, fought, felt them shift, go slewwise. Wind blew the smoke flat.

He realized he was seeing the true horizon, almost empty now. The main herd was past.

Ahead of him on the wall men wrestled torches toward the slippery crest. No one was near him. He found he was sobbing or screaming when he breathed, but he could not hear himself. Memory brushed him: a boy—had it been one of bis sons?—had pawed at him, gone away.

He managed to twist agonizingly on his elbows so that he could look back at the colony.

Yes, there was more damage. The hideous bulk of a cow reared among the dormitories, shedding timbers. But it was still safe. Still safe! His last gift had saved them, his dying had given life to all he held dear. Cocooned in deafness he let his gaze go out to the beloved scene. Still so beautiful, despite the smoke! Golden figures ran as if playing a game. His nest, his life—

His life. Not the stars; this . . .

Why had the scene changed subtly, as if transparency had congealed around it, turning it into something curious and tiny like a toy in plastic? His life work. The species lives, I die. The operative words, / die. Die, he thought, like a faithful ant whose nest lives on. Like those dying head-husks capering to the sea. Only that more may breed and die, to breed and die. The building, the breeding, the towers raised and fallen, without end. Disgust chilled him. For this I have forsaken—

Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man.

His traitor soul gasped, he fighting, fainting. Was it possible that a man could strive with his whole heart all his life for his kind, his young—and at the last turn away? It is my body's dying, only that, he told himself. In the end the brain goes.

He made himself turn back, peer.

They were still coming. One more assault. The last,

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the last ones. It was so dark here. Or was the day ending? All over by nightfall.

Here they come. This one will kill us.

Good, he thought, good! Faithful ant. Forget the soul's weak protest. Those who come after can perhaps—No time. He groped inwardly, eyes closed, for the channel, the focus ... and felt nothing.

Noion!

Faint in his mind: "You need ... this?"

"Yes, yes!" he shouted into the roaring. Oh god, no time—the beasts were at the wall.

"Yes!" he screamed again, forcing himself to feel, to clench his need into the power, to touch, reach—ah! There! It came, it was there, the help, the opening—the noion was with him. He felt the beasts' lives now, touched. Turn, turn, turn! Turn with my last strength, with my death that I give freely! TURN with my death that I did not need to die

The contact faded, was gone.

He opened his eyes.

A tower of armor was bulging through the murk above him, the rock he clung to tilted, slipped.

They had not turned.

They had breached the wall. An avalanche of piling was falling on his inshore side, the thunderous wake rocked his crib. And in the bay, on the beach, blotting out the colony from his horror-filled eyes—

"Noion! Noion!" He screamed, his death suspended over him, rushing in stasis—he knowing what had happened, what he had done. His need, his desire at the end had not held true—he had betrayed them back to the jungle, to the running and the dust. His human heart, his soul had betrayed them all—

"Noion!" his soul shouted. "Take me! Give me the other, give me back myself!"

But the life against his chest was draining, going away. Too late. Too late. Wasted. He felt the wraith-wind of its going in his brain, the alien immensities opening to the imago. Opening—for an instant it was as if the noion were still holding a way open, ofiEering

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to share its dying with him if he could. The longing rose in him, the terrified love toward what he could not imagine—O rich and sounding voices of the airI come! I come!

—But he could not alone, no, and his useless death hung over him, the crashing was beating on his mortal ears. His lips moved, crying "Man is the, is the, that—"

A vast impersonal tonnage fell upon him and the stars ravelled away from his brain.