Robert Silverberg - Nightwings

The Surgeon bade farewell to his Changeling friend, who went on alone ahead of us, and paid a final call on the crystallized village. We stayed back, since there was no point in our going. When he returned, his face was somber. “Four new cases,” he said. “This entire village will perish. There has never been an outbreak of this kind before on Earth—so concentrated an epidemic.”

“Something new, then?” I asked. “Will it spread everywhere?”

“Who knows? No one in the adjoining villages has caught it. The pattern is unfamiliar: a single village wholly devastated, and nowhere else besides. These people see it as divine retribution for unknown sins.”

“What could peasants have done,” I asked, “that would bring the wrath of the Will so harshly upon them?”

“They are asking that too,” said the Surgeon.

Olmayne said, “If there are new cases, our visit yesterday was useless. We risked ourselves and did them no good.”

“Wrong,” the Surgeon told her. “These cases were already incubating when you arrived. We may hope that the disease will not spread to those who still were in full health.”

He did not seem confident of that.

Olmayne examined herself from day to day for symptoms of the disease, but none appeared. She gave the Surgeon much trouble on that score, bothering him for opinions concerning real or fancied blemishes of her skin, embarrassing him by removing her mask in his presence so that he could determine that some speck on her cheek was not the first trace of crystallization.

The Surgeon took all this in good grace, for, while the outworld being was merely a cipher plodding alongside us, the Surgeon was a man of depth, patience, and sophistication. He was native to Afreek, and had been dedicated to his guild at birth by his father, since healing was the family tradition. Traveling widely, he had seen most of our world and had forgotten little of what he had seen. He spoke to us of Roum and Perris, of the frostflower fields of Stralya, of my own birthplace in the western island group of the Lost Continents. He questioned us tactfully about our starstones and the effects they produced—I could see he hungered to try the stone himself, but that of course was forbidden to one who had not declared himself a Pilgrim—and when he learned that in former life I had been a Watcher, he asked me a great deal concerning the instruments by which I had scanned the heavens, wishing to know what it was I perceived and how I imagined the perception was accomplished. I spoke to him as fully as I could on these matters, though in truth I knew little.

Usually we kept to the green strip of fertile land bordering the lake, but once, at the Surgeon’s insistence, we detoured into the choking desert to see something that he promised would be of interest. He would not tell us what it was. We were at this point traveling in hired rollerwagons, open on top, and sharp winds blew gusts of sand in our faces. Sand adhered briefly to the outworlder’s eyes, I saw; and I saw how efficiently it flushed each eye with a flood of blue tears every few moments. The rest of us huddled in our garments, heads down, whenever the wind arose.

“We are here,” the Surgeon announced finally. “When I traveled with my father I first visited this place long ago. We will go inside—and then you, the former Rememberer, will tell us where we are.”

It was a building two stories high made of bricks of white glass. The doors appeared sealed, but they gave at the slightest pressure. Lights glowed into life the moment we entered.

In long aisles, lightly strewn with sand, were tables on which instruments were mounted. Nothing was comprehensible to me. There were devices shaped like hands, into which one’s own hands could be inserted; conduits led from the strange metal gloves to shining closed cabinets, and arrangements of mirrors transmitted images from the interiors of those cabinets to giant screens overhead. The Surgeon placed his hands in the gloves and moved his fingers; the screens brightened, and I saw images of tiny needles moving through shallow arcs. He went to other machines that released dribbles of unknown fluids; he touched small buttons that produced musical sounds; he moved freely through a laboratory of wonders, clearly ancient, which seemed still in order and awaiting the return of its users.

Olmayne was ecstatic. She followed the Surgeon from aisle to aisle, handling everything.

“Well, Rememberer?” he asked finally. “What is this?”

“A Surgery,” she said in lowered voice. “A Surgery of the Years of Magic!”

“Exactly! Splendid!” He seemed in an oddly excited state. “We could make dazzling monsters here! We could work miracles! Fliers, Swimmers, Changelings, Twiners, Burners, Climbers—invent your own guilds, shape men to your whims! This was the place!”

Olmayne said, “These Surgeries have been described to me. There are six of them left, are there not, one in northern Eyrop, one on Palash, one here, one far to the south in Deeper Afreek, one in western Ais—” She faltered.

“And one in Hind, the greatest of all!” said the Surgeon.

“Yes, of course, Hind! The home of the Fliers!”

Their awe was contagious. I said, “This was where the shapes of men were changed? How was it done?”

The Surgeon shrugged. “The art is lost. The Years of Magic were long ago, old man.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But surely if the equipment survives, we could guess how—”

“With these knives,” said the Surgeon, “we cut into the fabric of the unborn, editing the human seed. The Surgeon placed his hands here—he manipulated—and within that incubator the knives did their work. Out of this came Fliers and all the rest. The forms bred true. Some are extinct today, but our Fliers and our Changelings owe their heritage to some such building as this. The Changelings, of course, were the Surgeons’ mistakes. They should not have been permitted to live.”

“I thought that these monsters were the products of teratogenic drugs given to them when they still were within the womb,” I said. “You tell me now that Changelings were made by Surgeons. Which is so?”

“Both,” he replied. “All Changelings today are descended from the flaws and errors committed by the Surgeons of the Years of Magic. Yet mothers in that unhappy group often enhance the monstrousness of their children with drugs, so that they will be more marketable. It is an ugly tribe not merely in looks. Small wonder that their guild was dissolved and they were thrust outside society. We—”

Something bright flew through the air, missing his face by less than a hand’s breadth. He dropped to the floor and shouted to us to take cover. As I fell I saw a second missile fly toward us. The outworld being, still observing all phenomena, studied it impassively in the moment of life that remained to it. Then the weapon struck two thirds of the way up the outworlder’s body and severed it instantly. Other missiles followed, clattering against the wall behind us. I saw our attackers: a band of Changelings, fierce, hideous. We were unarmed. They moved toward us. I readied myself to die.

From the doorway a voice cried out: a familiar voice, using the thick and unfamiliar words of the language Changelings speak among themselves. Instantly the assault ceased. Those who menaced us turned toward the door. The Changeling Bernalt entered.

“I saw your vehicle,” he said. “I thought you might be here, and perhaps in trouble. It seems I came in time.”

“Not altogether,” said the Surgeon. He indicated the fallen outworlder, which was beyond all aid. “But why this attack?”

Bernalt gestured. “ They will tell you.”

We looked at the five Changelings who had ambushed us. They were not of the educated, civilized sort such as Bernalt, nor were any two of them of the same styles; each was a twisted, hunched mockery of the human form, one with ropy tendrils descending from his chin, one with a face that was a featureless void, another whose ears were giant cups, and so forth. From the one closest to us, a creature with small platforms jutting from his skin in a thousand places, we learned why we had been assaulted. In a brutal Aguptan dialect he told us that we had profaned a temple sacred to Changelings. “We keep out of Jorslem,’” he told us. “Why must you come here?”