"Ah!" said Zara, vastly relieved. "I'm glad for her. What a nice thing to hear about yourself!"
"And you yourself, Mrs. Gentry? I see you're married. Are you planning a family?"
"Why, very likely," she said, "but I'm not pregnant now."
He nodded and closed her folder. "I think that takes care of all the loose ends," he said. "See the legal officer; get a few more shots. Then you'll be all ready to go."
"I'm ready now," Zara Gentry said.
When she was through with the legal officer—an episode which left her with the feeling she had signed a part of herself into slavery—she took the express elevator that dropped her into the physical-training rooms below ground. The splat of firearms told her the weapons class was in session. She tarried at the door, looking in at the range. The cassettes had been quite candid about the possibility of physical danger on Cuckoo. Several transportees had already experienced close calls, and two were dead. Besides the known predators—winged creatures like flying seals, armed savages, creatures like Sheliaks gone mad, and others—there were countless trillions of square miles of surface that had been only sketchily photomapped from orbit. What dangers they held no one could tell.
The other thing that troubled Zara in the conscious part of her mind was that the Zara who went to Cuckoo would not be, quite, the Zara Gentry who filled the stereostage receivers on Earth. Cuckoo's surface gravity was so preposterously slight that the first transportees had nearly destroyed themselves leaping about like jumping beans. Her physical attributes would therefore be slightly modified. They had promised that her appearance would not be changed, but she would be a little weaker, a little slower in reaction time. Even so, they said, she would have to watch herself; but it was thought that a little extra strength and speed might be helpful, against the known and unknown dangers of Cuckoo.
The class was ending, and one of the men caught sight of her, grinned, waved, checked his gun with the instructor, and came toward her. "Three bull's-eyes and twelve in the first circle," he said proudly, running a hand though his tousled mop of red hair. He was no taller than Zara, but weighed more than she did, and had muscles like steel and a great barrel chest. He would need a great deal of editing, she thought, leaning forward to be kissed. "I'm all set, dear," she said. "We're due for shots in half an hour, and that's the last."
"Great," her husband said, putting an arm around her. "Cuckoo, here come the Gentrys!"
EIGHT
Org Rider's knife was at the stranger's throat before he could check himself; but the man was so helpless, so battered, that even the white-hot rage that the threat to the egg brought boiling up in him wavered.
The man was both desperate and startled. He brought his arm up, less in a gesture of defense than as pure reflex. He was tremendously strong. His gesture brushed Org Rider's hand and knife away as if they belonged to a child. The violence of his own movement set him lurching against the sheet rock wall behind the waterfall; his head met rock, and he slumped to the ground, stunned.
Org Rider dropped to his knees and embraced the egg fearfully. Its bright curve showed no damage. He pressed an ear against its warm, pliant shell, and heard the even, faint throb of the young org's heart, along with a random skittering noise that, Org Rider knew, meant the creature was close to hatching.
Then he turned to the intruder.
The crawling sensation at his back was still there. There was no doubt of it, the man who lay before him was the man the Watchers had killed. Yet here he was, alive! Cut, scratched, battered—all of those things. But he was not dead, although he had been.
The boy studied him carefully. His clothing was not quite the same as before; the colors were different, and the puff-sleeved tunic he wore was torn and filthy. The bright metallic things on his arms seemed different, but they were the same class of things as he had worn before.
No doubt about it, it was the same man!
It dawned on the boy that this man was the figure he had seen falling from the slamming machine. Perhaps in that there was some sort of explanation; perhaps the machine laid eggs that hatched into identical creatures like this one. He had never heard of such a thing, but he had never heard of a dead man being alive again, either.
Remembering that the man in his previous life had spoken a few intelligible words, Org Rider said carefully, "Are you hungry?"
The man opened his eyes warily. There was no comprehension in them. He stroked die metallic clutter on his wrist with his other hand as if the effort were too much for him, and motioned the boy to speak again.
"Are you hungry?" Org Rider repeated. "I have some food."
The stranger shook his head, but his eyes fell on the pouch of food Org Rider had dropped. He stretched out his hand toward it.
"You are hungry, then," Org Rider said. Quickly he cut a slice of flesh from a watersnake and tried it. The taste was sweetish and good. He put a thin strip of it against the stranger's bearded lips. The man whimpered and sucked at it eagerly.
"It will be better cooked," the boy said, and offered some of the tender purple stalks. The stranger chewed at them while Org Rider whittled a drill, twirled it to light a fire, and set some of the snake meat to roast. It did not take long, and the fragrant scent of roasting meat was as tantalizing to Org Rider as to his guest; they shared the first half-cooked strips contentedly while the rest were cooking.
Then Org Rider forgot the stranger, because the egg made a sound like ripping cloth.
In the nest, the egg was rocking from the thrusts of some internal eruption. A dark split opened, and spread across the luminious, bronze-flecked blue shell.
Org Rider squatted next to the nest, watching in fascination, urgently needing to help but not knowing how. Inside the egg dull thumping sounds accompanied thrusts against the thick internal membrane. It ripped, and ripped again.
And through the rips the boy could see the dark, wet head of the baby org glistening.
The stranger limped over to watch him, then shrugged and went to the waterfall. He drank thirstily out of the shell of a seed cone, his eyes fixed on the boy and the hatching egg.
The org's head burst through the slit, slick and black. Almost at once it began to dry, changing to a pale, tawny color. The huge eyes opened, the pupils wide and black and mysterious, rimmed with luminous blue. It fixed its gaze at once on the boy.
Fascinated, Org Rider stared back. It seemed to be resting, and he thought its gaze was pleading with him. For what? He could not guess, until he saw that the infant org was laboring for breath and realized that the effort to tear through the membrane was exhausting for it. Org Rider seized the edge of the glistening membrane and hacked at it with his knife.
The rest of the great head came free. The short trunk uncoiled, opened, waved. The hatchling made a faint, strangled, mewing cry, and the odor of its breath came up around the boy, a warm, sharp scent like the nest it had come from, a little like the odor of parching grain. Org Rider leaned forward and wiped from the tip of the infant's trunk a thick brown clot. It was breathing more freely now.
Satisfied, the boy relaxed his attention and realized for the first time that, over the clash of the waterfall, the stranger was shouting at him. Org Rider turned, and saw the man, face savage with fear, pointing toward the sky.
The boy ran out from under the waterfall, and peered upward. Was it the Org's parents, still hunting their offspring?
As soon as he was out from under the falls the sound he heard told him it was not: a roaring, familiar whine.