Damon Knight - Orbit 16

Occasionally I raised my head to look at the sky. Over the Empire State Building a huge white bug drifted, and from its tubular rear poured a stream of eggs. They bounced when they hit the streets. They were white as they dropped but red when they bounced. The bug covered ten blocks with eggs, and after they stopped bouncing they lay and soaked in the inert nourishment. Over New York I flew, and witnessed my species being cut to ribbons for fodder.

Into the Council Chamber we two crawled every day, and the bugs loved us. Blacky said once in a while that they only loved our sweat, otherwise why did they carefully lick us clean after we tired ourselves out? It made me mad when she said that.

“You stupid nigger.”

“That wasn’t necessary.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Up yours.”

“The same to you and more of it.”

I wished it was anyone but me getting licked. The queen was beautiful and big, and there is no need to mention that she was also terrifying. The tip of her tongue, just the tip, was longer than I am. I never knew when she would tire of tasting me and swallow me. But maybe they didn’t eat meat, once they hatched.

The tongue slid down my back, making me shiver; it ran into my hair to play, fondly nuzzled my silky armpits, bored into my navel. I stayed balanced on my hands and tried to stop shivering; the tongue sucked my leg too hard and some hair went. I think she liked me. Not my taste. My soul. The thing God goofed while making.

“Blacky.”

“Shut up. They can hear. And don’t call me that.”

“They can’t hear,” I said. “And they’re stupid.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why are we getting licked like a pair of lollipops? If they’re dumb, why are they the bosses?”

“I don’t think I can stand this much longer. There’s such a thing as private—”

“Shut up and stand still.”

Being a nigger, she was one up on me in obedience. Her black body shone like grease, unnaturally so, as if something was coming off the queen’s tongue and sticking to her. Jesus, maybe we were being coated with a layer of egg seeds, and maybe the seeds were sinking into our pores.

“Blacky.”

“Don’t be a jerk. She eats vegetables and that shine is oil. She already laid her eggs. She brought them with her.”

“From where?”

“God knows.”

“He doesn’t.”

“Well, we know. They came out of the ground.”

In our wooden shack, I grabbed Blacky around the belly and tried to steal her warmth. It didn’t matter if she froze, as long as I didn’t.

Where did everybody go? What happened, for instance, to the horses that lived here ten thousand years ago? What became of those other species that should have thrived but instead went away in a hurry to oblivion?

Down under the ground lie the eggs of Valene. So flexible are they that it takes a special kind of force to perforate them. They can’t be opened by, say, a section of earth shifting against them. Valene’s eggs flatten out and slide like fluid until they are free. The very pressure assists them in their flight toward open space. A rock falling on one of these eggs does no damage unless it stabs with a sharp edge, and this rapidly, before the shell begins its automatic cringing and sliding activity.

Say you dropped an egg in a field ten thousand years ago. A caveman who had survived the period of your reign came upon the egg and tried to destroy it. He was too demoralized to succeed and so he finally went away and left the egg in the field. Eventually the thing became buried. Ten millennia went by, while the egg lay like a lump of clay, moving not at all, except away from pressure. But one day the egg behaves differently. It swells a bit before a needle-sharp antenna penetrates it from the inside. A child of Valene emerges and begins a patient journey to the earth’s surface. It can bore through almost anything, though it prefers the easy way, and so it will detour around solid rock rather than go through it. Water presents no obstacle to Valene’s child. In fact, the innumerable underground wells and lakes are the reason so many of the monarch’s offspring arrive topside so quickly.

A starving Valenian will leap upon the first moving thing it sees. Animal or vegetable, it matters not, provided the youngster is able to penetrate the organism with its teeth and thereafter swallow pieces of it. A meal is a meal, and a Valenian is omnivorous, and practically anything will make it smack its lips in satisfaction. Of course, if you happen to be either of a pair of little gals named Blacky and Whitey, the Valenian won’t have a craving for your body except in an indirect sort of way.

Was that last part obscure? Well, the eyes of Valene’s child are drawn like magnets to beauty, after which it experiences a visceral blast.

Still obscure? Hmm. Consider a creature that digs pleasure, trips the light fantastic as a way of life, sucks without reservation when it is rewarding, and defines “reward” as anything that feels good. Know anybody like that? Of course you do. We. Us. Valenians are like people—hedonists at heart.

Valene was a big bug-mammal whose fur was whiter than snow. She had the wings of a bird, tail of a bunny, belly of a porcupine, ears like a hound and head like a grasshopper. So short were her legs that she might as well not have had any. The reason why I called her a bug was because her body was in three segments and she also had six legs and four wings.

Long ago, Valene courted a partly mammalian creature, a maguma, who went by the name of Mattu. This was before there were any people on earth. Mattu was scared of his children because they hatched from eggs and were bigger than he. He tried to kill them and Valene. The babies killed him instead, and Valene gathered all magumas into an open pen and slaughtered them, except for the handsomest male. She kept him as a lover. His name was also Mattu. He had a furry white coat, long tail, padded feet, short legs, long snout and ears. A healthy stud, he was easily domesticated and all went well until dying time for the Valenians approached. Because Valene loved Mattu, and for a few other reasons, she commanded that he be treated with chemicals so that he would never die. As for herself, she would go the way of all flesh. Though she winced at the thought of another Valene having her lover, she needed to answer the call of her kind and go down into the grave with her comrades.

Mattu was given special transfusions that made his pituitary halt its normal processes and lie dormant in preparation for regeneration. He looked as if he were dying. His body shrank to a fraction of its former size, his eyes turned rheumy, he became senile and foolish. His body servants stuffed him into an egg sac, poked a feeding tube down his throat, laced the opening securely and transported the egg out over the ocean, where it was dropped. The tube in Mattu’s throat fed him a solution that placed him in suspended animation. At the end of ten thousand years, the call of the wild reached his ears. His pituitary flickered to life and so did all of him.

The next generation of Valenians was pleased with Mattu. He was a good lover to the new Valene. However, being mortal, he needed to die at the end of his normal life span, which had been considerably shortened by the treatment. The alteration of such an essential part of his existence made him extremely argumentative and he turned out to be a far more earnest griper than his ancestor.

In this dispensation of time, the President of the United States was the first human to be killed by a Valenian. It wasn’t part of any plan of Valene’s to have such an important person killed first. To her he didn’t even exist. It simply happened that way. She wasn’t responsible for the places where the children of her predecessor chose to surface after their long sleep.