POLIMANDER'S MAN-THING [ss], Pat de Graw

A creature well-fitted to its environment needs no tools. It's only the weak, the unfit, who change the world.

Polimander fled before the windblown ice-sand. The wind forced the crystals into his fur, stung his naked, indented crown, lowered his twitching antenna across the nape of his neck. Polimander struggled against the force, his usually placid body shaken by waves of physical hysteria. He rolled himself up tightly, and for a short distance allowed the heavy-handed wind to bowl him over the flat delta land.

At a specific point, the primal sense in Polimander told him he had come to the end of his journey. Before him, in the grit clouds, stood the conical upheaval of tightly packed crystals, three times his own height. At the pinnacle, a hole bored down through the cone, into the solid matter below. Polimander's chubby, vestigially-digited hands clung awkwardly to the sides of the cone. He struggled up its side, propelled as much by fear as by willpower. Then, quite suddenly, his rotund shape plopped into the cone's aperture, leaving the raging winds to swirl a fresh handful of the elements into a dervish in the streaked atmosphere.

Polimander tumbled momentarily, then caught himself aright. He lowered himself gently in the quiet blackness. The moan of the wind retreated as he descended. With his descent Polimander gathered around himself a shell of mental equilibrium. He bathed himself in melliferous vibrations and allowed his consciousness to drop to the edge of sensibility. There he rested even after his furry posterior bumped the well's floor: he hung a few inches off the floor, spherical, unconscious for a time, allowing his body to readjust itself after the ordeal of passage.

"So many risings and settings..." Polimander was thinking as he drew himself back into consciousness, "since I have been out... since I made myself a new nest after our mating..." He shuddered, enlarged the membrane of his "eyes" to gauge the heat around him. In this way he "saw" the shape and size and inertial intent of his environment.

He was in a tunnel, roughly cylindrical in shape, carved into the inert elements of his planet's surface. The delta land above him was frozen: the sand, which the wind blew about incessantly, was composed partially of this material compounded with powdered emerald silicon. There was no light there, but the heat and radio waves produced by the planet's dark sun grudgingly allowed some life to survive beneath the single huge planet's surface. This is how Polimander "saw" with the huge dish-shaped depression in his cranium, using the antenna at its rim to focus incoming radio waves to a locus.

Long before Polimander reached the nest he was in communication with its occupant.

"Polimander?" a faint mind-voice asked.

"It is I, Meyonae," Polimander answered.

"Through the elements?" The note of surprise was sharp.

"I come to see the infant." The heat sensations were much stronger now. Polimander moved down another pipeline which had punctured the first. Many openings appeared along the way. But his pattern through the maze was unerring.

"I grieve, Polimander..."

"I know, Meyonae. I come to see your grief."

A startling, low-pitched moan-thought came from Meyonae. Polimander trembled with impatient misery, and moved faster toward the source of the cry.

"I grieve," Meyonae repeated, the communication a direct result of some inner pain.

The passageway in which Polimander traveled ended abruptly at a spherical repository: it was as though he had been moving through the tube of a thermometer and had suddenly entered the bulb at its end. This was the nest. Meyonae hovered near the center. Other Unity members were in attendance, their minds concentrated on Meyonae's nest while their silent bodies lay back along the passageways, in nests of their own.

Polimander brought himself to a stop near Meyonae. Momentarily he touched her outstretched mandible with his own. About her fingers was an alien coldness which augmented the despair her thoughts relayed. She dampened her anguish now, so as not to inundate Polimander with her grief. This was the custom.

Polimander left her touch and turned to look down at the infant, silent, but alive. It was, as yet, unwound from the curled position of birth.

Polimander mentally searched, prowled, ransacked the currents which filled the nest. He pawed mentally over each vibration. All the other Unity members held in their consciousness as Polimander searched out the unique, distinct vibrations which should have come from the infant.

There was no infantile response. Yet it lived: Polimander could sense the churning organs, the rush of bodily fluids present in his little one. But there was absolutely no mental emission, no Unity.

Sadly, he dropped his sensitive probing down to the level of mutual consciousness where the other members hovered.

"So," he concurred, adding his thought to the assembled minds, "it is true."

Meyonae covered her bald-head with a paw, drew herself into a ball and stilled her consciousness, withdrawing from the gestalt. She hung over the infant in intimate, deeply personal meditation. No one tried to pursue her mind, nor attempted to penetrate her anguished shell. The members concentrated, instead, on Polimander.

"Four solar transversals have passed," he said, "since the last birthing. Some of us witnessed this event. It was from this very nest..." He swiveled his directed wave of thought toward the youngest Unity member, his own first nestling by Meyonae - Tansemander, who already occupied his own nest. Tansemander acknowledged his sire's mental arrow with pride, unconcealed beneath the mantle of sorrow.

"Instead of a day of gladness at a new birthing," continued Polimander, "we have anguished silence. Instead of the addition of a new unit to the Unity, we have a crippled infant who will never be capable of knowing the Unity of his people. This little one will forever be alone, little more than a rock or a wind or a mountaintop. We must never cease to try and illuminate him: but we must be humbled by the fact that we may never be able to accomplish his illumination."

"Have any of the Unity been thusly afflicted before?" Tansemander asked.

"I have never heard of such a thing before." Polimander respectfully directed his thoughts to the disembodied form of the Old One in a sealed nest far away. There was no response, and none was expected: this was a formal gesture to the last member of the Unity who had gone into final sleep. "If the Old One were awake, he might have knowledge that could reach further back than mine." Polimander rolled away his consciousness. He raised his concentration past the level of the majority and sought a single consciousness from the Unity.

"Pacea, old friend..." A mental touching of mandibles. Polimander hung over his sireling.

"Polimander, why did you go into the elements? Why did you leave the nest?"

"There was something I had to do, Pacea. The thoughts I have just expressed... about illuminating the infant. I was sincere. How can I enter the final sleep until my nestling is brought into the Unity?"

"It is an accident of nature."

"I believe I have an answer. But first, I must ask, Pacea, since you are the Understander among us. You know the functions of our individual bodies. You have studied the secretions, the fluids, the rumblings, and the occasional sicknesses of these bodies. What makes my sireling a cripple? Does he lack an Organ? Does he contain poison fluids? Most important, is the little one in pain, such pain that it would require euthanasia?"

"I don't know why the nestling is silent, Polimander." There was great sadness behind the thought.

"And is it suffering pain which it cannot express?"

"I don't think so. Its body is at peace, there is no contortion, none of the obvious bodily evidences of internal pain. The infant is simply lacking the sense of Unity. Of course, I could only listen to the bodily functions. I cannot hear him, as I could a normal member, if there was distress. It is the strangest thing I have ever encountered."

"I wanted to establish these things before I do what I have come to do. Before I came I did much thinking on the condition of the infant."

"And...?"

"Its silence is remarkably like the silence of the menfolk who have been digging in the surface for these few risings and settings..."

Pacea drew back.

"I know you consider the menfolk irrelevant. But ever since their appearance I have considered their function. We have not been able to communicate with them, yet they are sentient."

"What have they to do with the defective infant?"

"Pacea, menfolk build sleds and use devices to achieve a kind of artificial Unity. Last rising I perceived them transporting one of their number, one who had been crushed beneath a rockslide, on a transportation device." Polimander relayed a frozen impression of the scene of the menfolk to Pacea.

"Don't you see, Pacea? Long after I witnessed this, from the solitude of my nest, I have tried to think of the implications of their actions. But it was not until the birthing of Meyonae's defective infant that I really considered what the menfolk had done."

"But the little one has not been crushed. It is perfect, except for the lack of Unity."

"That is the crux of my considerations. The menfolk do not perceive as we do. They take a different part of the spectrum and sense this. They do not sense in natural Unity."

"But how can a single organism function without attachment to its Unity? Polimander, your grief has made you irrational."

"Let me finish. They use devices made from metal, little wave-sleds to transmit thoughts. With a flexible organ on the front of their heads they put thoughts into sound patterns. Then they transmit these patterns through the little devices. I not only perceived the function of the devices, I projected my mind into one to understand how it works."

"And?"

"And I have recreated such a device, attuned not to the menfolk's strange communication, but to our Unity. That's why I had to come to the infant. I am going to attach the device."

"Polimander, this is against the ways of our people. We have never had to create artificial devices for ourselves. We contain all within our bodies and our Unity."

"Exactly. None of us has ever been deficient in Unity before. If we had, one of our number would have tried, at least, to create artificial Unity in some way. Now there is a need, and only luck brought this need with the coincidence of the arrival of the menfolk. I made the device from parts of their devices. The trips to the surface were terrible: once I didn't think I could get back to the nest. Another time one of the menfolk saw me and hurled a rock at me. I am greatly weakened, but I knew I must try out the device on the infant, to see if it works."

Polimander drew something from his anal pouch. It was smaller than his little hands, tangled with foreign materials. It bore no shape in relation to the fur-rock-darkness world of Polimander's people. Polimander moved to the silent ball of fur which was his and Meyonae's nestling. A surge of hope filled him, touched with panic unusual in his ancient people. He only hoped that he had been precise enough, that his extrapolation of the menfolk's device was correct.

Gently, with his clumsy fingers, he attached the device to the bald cranium of his sireling, using pilfered straps and pilfered scraps, stolen tinkerings, wire, screws, and a discarded rheostat which he had taken from the menfolk's tool boxes.

Now, all the Unity's attention was on Polimander and the infant. From distant nests, a hundred minds welled into focus on that spot. Polimander and his infant were the hub of an ancient wheel: the separate minds were the spokes linking the individuals in Unity.

The infant did not move. Polimander was an open receiver, waiting, poised like a mental sponge to catch the slightest vibration.

And it came. The confused, whining, infantile babble crowded into the Unity of the nest.

The infant cried.