The Silent Invaders

NINE

Before Harris had a chance to react, a strange brightness flooded over him; he seemed to be floating far above his body, and a swirl of colors danced wildly around him, a blaze of light that numbed and dazed him.

With a jolt he realized where he was.

He was looking into the mind of the Medlin who called herself Beth Baldwin. He was seeing the soul of her, laid bare. He could look through every memory of hers as clearly as though it were her own—more clearly. He could see, through her eyes, the memory of a Medlin home, of knife-bladed trees glistening bluely in the sun, of naked Medlin children splashing in a pond. Oddly, the Medlins did not look grotesque to him now. They looked—natural.

Medlin religious ceremonies came to him. Where were the human sacrifices, the blasphemous rituals he had heard about? All he saw were tame things like candle-lighting, and prayers to a Galactic Unity. The prayers sounded very much like the prayers to the Spirit, and he felt a strange sense of dislocation.

He was living Beth’s life, moving along her lifeline with ease, vicariously growing up with her, enduring the strains and shocks of adolescence, the tensions of a ripening body, the timidities of early love. Without embarrassment, he pried into the depths of her, since this was what she wanted him to do.

He saw none of the hideous things he had expected to find in a Medlin mind.

He saw faith and honesty, and a devotion to the truth. He saw dogged courage. He saw many things that filled him with humility.

He saw sins, but they were honest sins, honestly admitted. He saw weaknesses. He saw pettiness. She was no saint, but neither was she the demon that Medlins were held to be.

He saw her entering the service of her people, saw her training for her stint on Earth. He saw her on the operating table, surgeons bent over her to transform her into an Earth-girl. There was a dazzling glimpse of Beth in her new body, naked before a mirror, passing her hands in wonder over the soft volumptuous flesh of her new self. There was Beth learning to carry herself in a womanly way, learning to speak the Earther language idiomatically, Beth journeying to Earth, making contact with her fellow Medlins, then with Wrynn and the other mutants.

It was a soul-searing experience, living in another’s brain. He discovered what it was like to have breasts, what the emotions of a Medlin woman’s ecstasies were like. He saw through her eyes how she had tracked him on his way to Earth, how she had readied herself in his hotel, how she had jostled him.

Startled, he saw himself through the filter of her mind, and the image was not a displeasing one. Her view of him was tinged with distaste for a Darruui, but there was pity as well as dislike. Why pity, he wondered, and then he saw that she pitied him simply for being a Darruui. And there were other emotions—hope, faith, even love for him, and a great abiding sorrow at the thought that he would remain forever among the enemy.

Harris trembled.

Revelation upon revelation poured through his numbed brain.

He lost touch with his own identity. He blurred, he merged, he became the Medlin woman who went by the name of Beth Baldwin.

And he came to pity himself.

Poor cramped bitter Darruui. Poor destroyer. Poor nay-sayer. Why can’t you love? Why can’t you embrace in open amity? Why the fear, why the envy, why the sour sullen hatred of all that’s good and pure and beautiful?

That was her thought. But now it was his as well. He thought his brain would split open from the impact of sharing his mind and hers.

All through history there have been races like yours, she was thinking. The destroyers, the imitators, the killers of the dream. Earth has had them too: the Romans, the Assyrians, the Huns. You Darruui are of that kind.

He shook his head doggedly. We have culture, he cried silently. You simply do not know. We have religion, art, philosophy …

But his own thoughts were hollow and meaningless, and he knew it. They withered and shrivelled in the bright glare of Beth’s mind. His pitiful defenses of Darruui civilization could not stand up against what he now knew.

The universe rocked around him. Stars pinwheeled and burst from their orbits. And still the linkage held, still his mind was gripped tight to Beth’s, still the telepathic conjugation endured. Her soul was his. Everything she had thought and hoped, feared and loved, was his, and she was his, and he was hers, and the blast of purity and goodness was almost intolerably painful.

He could see the truth, now. Shattering as it was, he could see it plain, and he no longer had the capacity to doubt it. The Medlins were scheming their own obsolescence. They were knowingly and eagerly working to bring the new race into being. It was a bewildering concept. It violated everything he held as rational. But they were doing it, gladly, enthusiastically, willingly.

He felt Beth’s mind drawing back from his, now. Desperately, he clung to the linkage, trying to keep it intact, but he could not maintain it.

The linkage broke.

Harris stood alone, trembling, feeling as though he had been stripped naked down to the bones. He stared at Beth, a few feet from him, and he felt as though she were a part of his body that had been abruptly chopped free by the surgeon’s knife.

She was smiling at him, warmly, a smile that betrayed no shame at what he might have seen in her mind.

Beth said, “Now find the mind of his leader Carver, and link him to that.”

“No,” Harris protested in horror. “Don’t…”

It was too late.

Again the world swirled, swung, then locked into place. He sensed the smell of Darruu wine, and the prickly texture of thuuar spines, and the moons gleaming in the sky, and the plains crimson at dawn.

Then the superficial memories parted to give him a moment’s insight into the deeper mind of the Darruui who wore the name of John Carver.

It was a frightening pit of foul hatreds. Harris found himself looking downward into a dark, roiling hole where writhing shapes eddied and gyred, and strange clawed creatures scrabbled hideously and waved feathery tentacles upward. Hatred, murder, every conceivable foulness was there. He could feel the cold muck oozing up out of that pit, covering him, and he shivered. There were sounds, harsh, discordant sounds, tinny cries of rage, ugly belching thunder, and beneath it all a steady sucking sound as of creatures of enormous size turning and twisting in the sticky mud. There was the occasional sharp sickening crunch of mandibles closing on breaking limbs.

It was a nightmare of unthinkable ugliness. Harris staggered backward, shivering, realizing that the Earther mutant had allowed him only a fraction of a second’s entry into that mind.

He sank down onto the carpet, a miserable huddled figure, and covered his face with his hands. His mind still rocked with the vision of those nightmare things, that hideous pit of obscenities and blasphemies that churned and throbbed in the depths of John Carver’s mind, beneath the outer layer of pastoral scenes of lovely Darruu.

After a moment Harris lifted his head. His mouth worked fitfully. Then he said, “What was that—those creatures?”

“Tell us what you saw,” Beth said.

“I can’t describe it. Animals… insects… serpents… everything black, shades of gray. A sickening sight, Beth. Mud and ooze and slime all over.”

“The monsters of the mind,” she said quietly. “The metaphors of John Carver’s soul. You translated them automatically into images.”

He shivered. “Are… we all like that?” he asked. “Every Darruui? Am I? Do I have those things in my mind too?”

“No,” Beth said. “Not—deep down. I couldn’t have borne the linkage if you had. You’ve got the outer layer of hatred that every Darruui has—and every Medlin too, for that matter. But your core is good. You aren’t a home for coiling monsters yet. Carver is rotten. His mind is a cesspool. It is the same with the other Darruui here.”

“I am not like that?”

“Not yet,” she said.

He huddled into himself a moment more, then got uneasily to his feet. His mind was shaken as it had never been shaken before. His memory of the bond with Beth’s gentle mind was overlaid by the foul horrors he had seen in Carver’s mind, and his forehead throbbed with the pain of containing those two experiences.

Coburn said, “Our races have fought for centuries. A mistake on both sides that has hardened into blood-hatred. The time has come to end it.”

“But how?” Harris asked. “How can we turn back and heal the gulf after so long?”

“He’s right,” one of the other Medlins said. “There’s no way. We’re too far apart now. There can’t ever be a healing. We’d have to give the whole Darruui population mass psychotherapy to achieve it.”

That may not be impossible, came the quiet voice of the embryo mutant.

Harris wavered at that. The thought of all Darruu being given mental therapy by these mutants—the entire world brainwashed…

For a moment, his old loyalties surged forward hotly, until he remembered what he had seen in Carver’s mind. Only a sick man refuses to admit that he is sick, Harris thought, chastened.

He said, “What can I do—to help?”

“Seek out your Darruui comrades,” Beth said.

“And?”

“They must die.”

Her voice was firm. Harris said, “How can you heal thousands of years of hatred with new acts of bloodshed?”

“The point is well taken,” Beth said. “But we do not have time to heal your comrades. They are too far gone in hatred. They’ll have to be written off. If we don’t dispose of them quickly, they’ll hamper us in troublesome ways we can’t afford.”

“You want me to kill them?”

Beth nodded silently.

Harris did not reply. He stared at nothing in particular. The five who waited for him on the street nearby were Servants of the Spirit, like himself; members of the highest caste of Darruui civilization, presumably the noblest of all creation’s beings. At least, so he had been taught from the earliest.

To kill a Servant of the Spirit was to set himself apart from Darruu for ever. Every man’s hand would be against him. The shame of it would be impossible to conceal.

“Well?” Beth asked.

“My… conditioning lies deep,” he said. “If I strike a blow against them, I could never return to my native planet.”

“Do you want to return?” Beth asked.

“Of course I do!” Harris cried, surprised.

“Do you?” she asked. “Now that you’ve seen into the mind of a countryman? Your future lies here, don’t you see that? With us.”

Harris considered that. He weighed the possibility that he was still being deceived, and scowled the idea into oblivion. His suspicious Darruui nature would never rest, he saw. But it was impossible now to believe “that this was Medlin deception. He had seen. He knew.

After a long moment he nodded. “Very well,” he said. ” Give me back the gun. I’ll do the job you want.”

“Once before you promised that,” Beth said. “We knew then that you were lying to us.”

“And now?” he asked.

She smiled and gestured to Coburn, who handed him the disruptor he had dropped. Harris grasped the butt of the weapon, hefted it, and said, “I could kill some of you now, couldn’t I? It would take at least a fraction of a second to stop me. I could pull the trigger once.”

“You won’t,” Beth said.

He stared at her. “You’re right.”