Young Moses was flustered: “I could run to one of the shaft cities for help. They’d send a team of Meditecks right out and—”
“And suspend the lot of us. Dan and Moon don’t want to end up hooked to one of their damned suspension machines.”
Moses nodded. He knew that truculent old Moon would trade a few days of fresh air and sunshine for any number of years of vegetating in some underwater suspension coffin. He gathered up an armload of fruit and went back. Moon had hooked the travois on his shoulder and crawled into a stamen hedge row. Moses found them under a screen of branches covered with pollen.
“Thanks for the fruit. This looks like a pretty safe place for now—low enough, and nothing to harvest. Let me check your scalp. Looks fine. Wash it whenever you can. Now get!”
Moses gave him a wry smile—Moon did not like sentiment.
“We’ll be traveling north-by-northeast,” said Toothpick coldly. “Catch up if you can. Here—Moses, hand him my ten-centimeter butt. It will lead him to us if—when he gets on his feet again.”
Moses traveled slowly for the next several months, looking back frequently. No one tried to catch up.
His hatred for the four-toed hunters was more personal now. His body had hardened. He easily covered distances in a day that would have taken him a week during his first year on the Outside. He easily outdistanced the hunters, sleeping while Toothpick stood guard and taking sadistic pleasure in the hunters’ agonies as their skeletal muscles shredded with the continuous exertion. Several times he doubled back to witness the Molecular Reward—a placid, hallucinatory state. The hunters would be completely cut off from their environment, but Moses couldn’t quite bring himself to slit their throats. It would have been easy, and he could see why their mortality rate was so high.
He moved through cooler lands now. Food was scarce. Toothpick kept the course straight on thirty degrees east of north. It was late autumn again—another year, another thousand miles.
“Harvested as far as I can see,” said Moses. “We’ll have to turn south if I’m going to eat again.”
Toothpick ruminated.
“We can foray into a shaft city if we’re quick about it. The doors are only class twelves. I’m a class six,” said the cyber.
A gallbladder and gastric rugal folds waited.
Moses Eppendorff approached the shaft cap through icy air. Rows of misty plankton domes surrounded him. Blobs of sticky scum marked the previous passing of a pond skimmer. Moses picked up a handful of scum. “Do we have to go into the city?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Intertriginous eccrine flowed copious and salty as the evening meld tightened up around fat Walter. Busch flexed. Bitter sighed. Dee Pen wiggled on her belly, moving her Howell-Jolly body through the tangle of arms and legs to her new position on top. Resting her chin on someone’s knee, she smiled down at Walter and continued their conversation.
“Soul?” she said, “Of course modern citizens have souls—a nice comfortable share of society’s collective soul.”
The meld warmed up. Walter extended sweaty arms and wheezed a question.
“What if the term soul applied to the life principle of ancient, individual man—and there was another term for the collective soul?”
“Such as hive—” she suggested. “What difference?”
“If citizens were more of a burden on society—parasites on the hive—wouldn’t the term soul lose much of its meaning? They’d have sold their soul for quarters and calories—not traded it for a piece of the collective soul as you’d like to think.”
Dee Pen was open-mouthed at his anti-ES blasphemy.
Neutral Arthur reached through the meld and patted her soothingly.
“Don’t take Walter too literally—he is just goading you into a philosophical debate. He is a job-holder, and likes to think of all nonworkers as deadwood—parasites.”
“The citizen is not a parasite,” she flared. “He is a useful part of the hive. Look at all the good that the hive has done—cooperation enables the planet to support a hundred times the population of the old prehive cultures.”
“Greatest good for the greatest number?” prodded Walter.
“Of course,” she smiled. “Man has replaced most of the lower life forms on this planet. The hive is a very successful life form. More intelligent life is better than less.”
“A pound of man is better than an equal weight of bugs and worms?” he paraphrased.
“Certainly.”
“What about trees?” he asked.
Dee Pen paused to organize her didactics on trees.
“The tree is just a fabric of the ecosystem in the forest or jungle. Cities are the ecosystem for man. The only trees we need are man’s food chain—flavor trees, calorie trees.”
Walter lost his grip in the moisture and slipped lower in the meld. He struggled to reposition himself and attack her from another point of view.
“Greatest good for the greatest numbers?” he began. “What about men’s minds? Suicide is a symptom of mental malfunction. The incidence seems to be going up as the Big ES increases the population density. How can that be good?”
“Everyone has to die someday,” she parroted. “The hive protects its citizens from many of the ancient causes of death—like accidents, infections, war, tumors—even old age. What can’t be cured today is put into suspension until research comes up with a cure. That leaves only suicides.”
“And murder,” he added.
“And murder,” she admitted. “But suicide and murder are IA—Inappropriate Activity. The weak five-toed gene is not suited for hive living. It was weeded out by IA. So, you see, suicide is Nature’s way of purifying the hive genes—only the four-toeds can be crowded successfully.”
Walter smiled. Little Dee Pen had absorbed all the latest Big ES philosophy. She made it sound wrong to interfere with a suicide—since the death would only remove an undesirable gene anyway. As a Dabber he clung to the pure old philosophy of the Neolithics—dirt, adobe and bamboo. As a follower of Olga he awaited Olga’s return. In this belief he weakened, for he saw his life span coming to an end—with no sign from Olga.
“When hive genes are all four-toed—” he asked, “will IA disappear then?”
Dee Pen shrugged: “I suppose.”
“What will be the most common cause of death then?” he asked.
She smiled. “We’ll see when the time comes.”
Mount Tabulum was hectic. Tons of meat dried in the sun to be pounded into trek sausage. The Hip sent succulent coweye baits to dance in front of the optics of Big ES. Burly spearchuckers stalked the coweye’s trail to draw and quarter any hunters lured out.
Tinker walked up behind Hip, who was supervising the dressing-out process. Coweyes trimmed.
“Looks a bit watery to me,” commented Tinker.
“Agree,” said Hip. “But it is the best there is. The hive always sends us the best—protein-poor protoplasm that it is.”
“Why the large stores? Planning an expedition?”
“A migration. The entire village will trek to the river—The River! Olga returns soon.”
The villagers bowed their heads at the sacred words of their seer. Tinker remained respectfully silent. He had observed the Hip’s little tricks—short trances, lights in the crystal ball—even uncanny predictions. But he didn’t swallow the old wizard’s entire occult fixation. Tinker was a natural scientist. However, as long as Hip was so accurate with the future, he felt that he, Mu Ren and Junior would be safer with the villagers than fighting off hunters alone. He kept his head bowed until Hip finished.