F. Wilson - The Tery

The message was received. But this was in the days of the beleaguered outworld Imperium that had little interest in rescuing diseased Shapers. So the message was dutifully recorded and forgotten. After the LaNague Federation rose from the ruins of the Imperium, the Cultural Survey teams were started in an attempt to bring surviving splinter worlds back into the mainstream of humanity. That was when the transcript of the five-volume transmission was found.

Steven Dalt, fresh from his infiltration of the feudal splinter culture on Kwashi, was given the job.

"Are you following me so far?"

The tery neither shook his head nor nodded. "What is a planet?" he asked.

"What's a pla —?"

Dalt then realized that for all his native intelligence, Jon's mind was too unsophisticated to grasp cosmological concepts. The stars were points of light, the planet on which they stood was "the world," and the primary it circled, "the sun." Dalt’s talk of the LaNague Federation and splinter worlds and interstellar colonization had been lost on the tery — like discussing the big bang theory with someone who still believed in a geocentric universe.

Yet Jon had listened patiently and with interest, whether through personal regard for Dalt or through a desire to have someone — anyone — address him as a fellow rational being, Dalt could not say.

"Let's put off that explanation for some other time, Jon, and just accept the fact that I was sent from a faraway land to see how things were going here."

Things were not going at all well, as he had discovered soon after landing and camouflaging his craft. A preliminary survey had located the population centers, made language recordings, and returned to Fed Central. Dalt absorbed the language — a pidgin version of Old Earth Anglic — via encephalo-augmentation and was readied to pose as one of the natives to assess their suitability to handle modern technology. Since they favored hard consonants in their male names, he’d turned his own around. And since he did not want too close contact with the locals, he posed as a reclusive potter deep in the forests.

His advent coincided with Mekk's order for extermination of the Talents and he found himself acting as potter and confidant to a unique group of telepaths. Here was something every Cultural Survey operative dreamed of finding: A group of humans split off from the mainstream of the race, developing a separate and distinct lifestyle. This was the very purpose for which the CSS had been formed.

But on this planet they were marked for extinction.

So Dalt had sent an urgent request by subspace laser for an intervention by the Federation Defense Force to protect these psis and let them follow their course. And had been turned down.

"It's up to you and me, my furry friend," he told Jon. "I'll get no help from my friends back in my homeland — and I can't even use a blaster, though I'll be damned if I won't carry one with me when we go to the Hole — so we're going to have to carry the show. Let's go see Rab."

"Here's an entry port to the observation corridor," Dalt said, pointing to a small, dark blot on the map. Then he sketched an arc with his finger. "And here's the perimeter of the routine patrols around Mekk's fortress."

The blot fell between the arc and the fortress.

"We can sneak past the patrols," Rab said.

"We need to do more than sneak. We're going to have to dig our way in. The port is buried."

Rab frowned. "That's a problem. They'll catch us sure."

"That's where your people come in. Can we count on them?"

"Of course. What do you need?"

"A war."

"Now wait just a —"

"A small war," Dalt said with a smile. "One played by our rules."

The Talents moved their camp deeper into the forest, putting more distance between themselves and Mekk's fortress. Then the archers moved forward and ringed the fortress in small groups.

The war began.

The Talents developed into a perfectly coordinated guerrilla force, striking then disappearing like fish in the sea. When Mekk's generals sent a hundred men out to search the surrounding trees, they found nothing. When they sent ten men out to investigate a minor disturbance, none came back.

The net result of these seemingly random skirmishes was a gradual withdrawal of the patrol lines toward the fortress, a tightening of the perimeters, just as Dalt had intended. This gave him, Rab, and Jon a chance to locate the old entry port.

Working all night and well into the next day, as swiftly and silently as they could, they moved rocks and dug through the dirt until they had made an opening just big enough for the tery to slip through.

Dalt nodded to Rab as he prepared to follow Jon. Rab was to wait by the entrance and use his Talent to summon help if necessary.

He squeezed through the opening –

And entered the anteroom to Hell.

Dalt had been expecting the worst, but nothing hinted at in his transcript of the Shaper history had prepared him for the sights that greeted him.

The forgotten corridor stretched before them with a gentle curve to the left. The left wall was composed of a thick transparent substance that jutted out into the Hole at a forty-five degree angle. A mixture of dried blood, excrement, and dirt, smeared its far surface, traces left by generations of Hole inhabitants trying to claw their way out.

But there was no way out. The rock of the floor, sides, and ceiling of the Hole had been treated by the Teratol clique to make it impervious to any digging or tunneling. The only access to the outside world was through the vertical shafts leading to the ventilation grates, and these were lined with the same impenetrable glassy substance that now separated Dalt and Jon from the Hole.

The porous rock that lined the inner surface of the Hole had been treated in another way: It glowed. The light arose from all sides, totally eliminating shadow, creating an endless twilight that added to the surreal, nightmarish quality of the hellish panorama before them.

For food, the Teratols had developed a rapidly growing fungus that hung from the ceiling of the Hole in stalagtitic abundance. For water there were a number of underground springs that fed into a large pool at the center of the cavern. The temperature was a damp, cool, subterranean constant. For those who required shelter, a hidey-hole could be dug into the porous rock that had not been treated against it. No wood, no fire, no tools of any sort.

None of the Teratol mistakes would ever escape, none would ever starve, none would ever die of thirst, none would ever freeze.

And none would ever know a moment's peace.

The Hole had no social order. The strongest, the fiercest, the ones that hunted best in packs — these ruled the Hole. The weak, the timid, the sick, the lame became either food or slaves. The sense of entrapment and foul living conditions, compounded by generations of inbreeding, had reduced the inhabitants to a horde of savage, imbecilic monstrosities.

"This is the darkest side of the human soul, Jon," Dalt said. "Anything that's good and decent within us has been banished from here."

With Jon gliding behind him, Dalt walked along the corridor, queasily watching as scenes of nightmarish barbarism that were a part of day-to-day existence in the Hole played out before him.

A creature with an amorphous body, six tentacles, and a humanoid head shuffled along, picking up morsels of fungus and stuffing them into its mouth. Without warning, a reptilian creature with horny plates projecting from its back — and again, the humanoid head, always a humanoid head — launched itself from a burrow about a meter off the floor and landed on the tentacled creature's back. With sharp fangs it tore into the