Silverberg, Robert - Homefaring.pdf - Robert Silverberg - chomikbob7

Homefaring

by Robert Silverberg

McCulloch was beginning to molt. The sensation, inescapable and

unarguable, horrified him—it felt exactly as though his body was going to

split apart, which it was— and yet it was also completely familiar,

expected, welcome. Wave after wave of keen and dizzying pain swept

through him. Burrowing down deep in the sandy bed, he waved his great

claws about, lashed his flat tail against the pure white sand, scratched

frantically with quick worried gestures of his eight walking-legs.

He was frightened. He was calm. He had no idea what was about to

happen to him. He had done this a hundred times before.

The molting prodrome had overwhelming power. It blotted from his

mind all questions, and, after a moment, all fear. A white line of heat ran

down his back—no, down the top of his carapace—from a point just back

of his head to the first flaring segments of his tail-fan. He imagined that

all the sun's force, concentrated through some giant glass lens, was being

inscribed in a single track along his shell. And his soft inner body was

straining, squirming, expanding, filling the carapace to overflowing. But

still that rigid shell contained him, refusing to yield to the pressure. To

McCulloch it was much like being inside a wet-suit that was suddenly five

times too small.

— What is the sun? What is glass? What is a lens? What is a wet-suit?

The questions swarmed suddenly upward in his mind like little busy

many-legged creatures springing out of the sand. But he had no time for

providing answers. The molting prodrome was developing with

astounding swiftness, carrying him along. The strain was becoming

intolerable. In another moment he would surely burst. He was writhing in

short angular convulsions. Within his claws, his tissues now were

shrinking, shriveling, drawing back within the ferocious shell-hulls, but

the rest of him was continuing inexorably to grow larger.

He had to escape from this shell, or it would kill him. He had to expel

himself somehow from this impossibly constricting container. Digging his

front claws and most of his legs into the sand, he heaved, twisted,

stretched, pushed. He thought of himself as being pregnant with himself,

struggling fiercely to deliver himself of himself.

Ah. The carapace suddenly began to split.

The crack was only a small one, high up near his shoulders— shoulders?

—but the imprisoned substance of him surged swiftly toward it, widening

and lengthening it, and in another moment the hard horny covering was

cracked from end to end. Ah. Ah. That felt so good, that release from

constraint! Yet McCulloch still had to free himself. Delicately he drew

himself backward, withdrawing leg after leg from its covering in a precise,

almost fussy way, as though he were pulling his arms from the sleeves of

some incredibly ancient and frail garment.

Until he had his huge main claws free, though, he knew he could not

extricate himself from the sundered shell. And freeing the claws took

extreme care. The front limbs still were shrinking, and the limy joints of

the shell seemed to be dissolving and softening, but nevertheless he had to

pull each claw through a passage much narrower than itself. It was easy to

see how a hasty move might break a limb off altogether.

He centered his attention on the task. It was a little like telling his

wrists to make themselves small, so he could slide them out of handcuffs.

— Wrists? Handcuffs? What are those?

McCulloch paid no attention to that baffling inner voice. Easy, easy,

there—ah—yes, there, like that! One claw was free. Then the other, slowly,

carefully. Done. Both of them retracted. The rest was simple: some

shrugging and wiggling, exhausting but not really challenging, and he

succeeded in extending the breach in the carapace until he could crawl

backward out of it. Then he lay on the sand beside it, weary, drained,

naked, soft, terribly vulnerable. He wanted only to return to the sleep out

of which he had emerged into this nightmare of shellsplitting.

But some force within him would not let him slacken off. A moment to

rest, only a moment. He looked to his left, toward the discarded shell.

Vision was difficult—there were peculiar, incomprehensible refraction

effects that broke every image into thousands of tiny fragments—but

despite that, and despite the dimness of the light, he was able to see that

the shell, golden-hued with broad arrow-shaped red markings, was

something like a lobster's, yet even more intricate, even more bizarre.

McCulloch did not understand why he had been inhabiting a lobster's

shell.

Obviously because he was a lobster; but he was not a lobster. That was

so, was it not? Yet he was under water. He lay on fine white sand, at a

depth so great he could not make out any hint of sunlight overhead. The

water was warm, gentle, rich with tiny tasty creatures and with a swirling

welter of sensory data that swept across his receptors in bewildering

abundance.

He sought to learn more. But there was no further time for resting and

thinking now. He was unprotected. Any passing enemy could destroy him

while he was like this. Up, up, seek a hiding-place: that was the

requirement of the moment.

First, though, he paused to devour his old shell. That too seemed to be

the requirement of the moment; so he fell upon it with determination,

seizing it with his clumsy-looking but curiously versatile front claws,

drawing it toward his busy, efficient mandibles. When that was

accomplished—no doubt to recycle the lime it contained, which he needed

for the growth of his new shell—he forced himself up and began a slow

scuttle, somehow knowing that the direction he had taken was the right

one.

Soon came the vibrations of something large and solid against his

sensors—a wall, a stone mass rising before him—and then, as he

continued, he made out with his foggy vision the sloping flank of a dark

broad cliff rising vertically from the ocean floor. Festoons of thick, swaying

red and yellow water plants clung to it, and a dense stippling of

rubbery-looking finger-shaped sponges, and a crawling, gaping, slithering

host of crabs and mollusks and worms, which vastly stirred McCulloch's

appetite. But this was not a time to pause to eat, lest he be eaten. Two

enormous green anemones yawned nearby, ruffling their voluptuous

membranes seductively, hopefully. A dark shape passed overhead, huge,

tubular, tentacular, menacing. Ignoring the thronging populations of the

rock, McCulloch picked his way over and around them until he came to

the small cave, the McCulloch-sized cave, that was his goal.

Gingerly he backed through its narrow mouth, knowing there would be

no room for turning around once he was inside. He filled the opening

nicely, with a little space left over. Taking up a position just within the

entrance, he blocked the cave-mouth with his claws. No enemy could enter

now. Naked though he was, he would be safe during this vulnerable

period.

For the first time since his agonizing awakening, McCulloch had a

chance to halt: rest, regroup, consider.

It seemed a wise idea to be monitoring the waters just outside the cave

even while he was resting, though. He extended his antennae a short

distance into the swarming waters, and felt at once the impact, again, of a

myriad sensory inputs, all the astounding complexity of the reef-world.

Most of the creatures that moved slowly about on the face of the reef were

simple ones, but McCulloch could feel, also, the sharp pulsations of

intelligence coming from several points not far away: the anemones, so it

seemed, and that enormous squid-like thing hovering overhead. Not

intelligence of a kind that he understood, but that did not trouble him: for

the moment, understanding could wait, while he dealt with the task of

recovery from the exhausting struggles of his molting. Keeping the

antennae moving steadily in slow sweeping circles of surveillance, he

began systematically to shut down the rest of his nervous system, until he

had attained the rest state that he knew— how?—was optimum for the

rebuilding of his shell. Already his soft new carapace was beginning to

grow rigid as it absorbed water, swelled, filtered out and utilized the lime.

But he would have to sit quietly a long while before he was fully armored

once more.

He rested. He waited. He did not think at all.

After a time his repose was broken by that inner voice, the one that had

been trying to question him during the wildest moments of his molting. It

spoke without sound, from a point somewhere within the core of his

torpid consciousness.

— Are you awake?

— I am now, McCulloch answered irritably.

— I need definitions. You are a mystery to me. What is a McCulloch?

— A man.

— That does not help.

— A male human being.

— That also has no meaning.

— Look, I'm tired. Can we discuss these things some other time?

— This is a good time. While we rest, while we replenish ourself.

— Ourselves, McCulloch corrected.

—Ourself is more accurate.

— But there are two of us.

— Are there? Where is the other?

McCulloch faltered. He had no perspective on his situation, none that

made any sense.— One inside the other, I think. Two of us in the same

body. But definitely two of us. McCulloch and not-McCulloch.

— I concede the point. There are two of us. You are within me. Who are

you?

— McCulloch.

— So you have said. But what does that mean?

— I don't know.

The voice left him alone again. He felt its presence nearby, as a kind of

warm node somewhere along his spine, or whatever was the equivalent of

his spine, since he did not think invertebrates had spines. And it was fairly

clear to him that he was an invertebrate.

He had become, it seemed, a lobster, or, at any rate, something

lobster-like. Implied in that was transition: he had become. He had once

been something else. Blurred, tantalizing memories of the something else

that he once had been danced in his consciousness. He remembered hair,

fingers, fingernails, flesh. Clothing: a kind of removable exoskeleton.

Eyelids, ears, lips: shadowy concepts all, names without substance, but

there was a certain elusive reality to them, a volatile, tricky plausibility.

Each time he tried to apply one of those concepts to himself—"fingers,"

"hair," "man," "McCulloch"—it slid away, it would not stick. Yet all the

same those terms had some sort of relevance to him.

The harder he pushed to isolate that relevance, though, the harder it

was to maintain his focus on any part of that soup of half-glimpsed

notions in which his mind seemed to be swimming. The thing to do,

McCulloch decided, was to go slow, try not to force understanding, wait

for comprehension to seep back into his mind. Obviously he had had a bad

shock, some major trauma, a total disorientation. It might be days before

he achieved any sort of useful integration.

A gentle voice from outside his cave said, "I hope that your growing has

gone well."

Not a voice. He remembered voice: vibration of the air against the

eardrums. No air here, maybe no eardrums. This was a stream of minute

chemical messengers spurting through the mouth of the little cave and

rebounding off the thousands of sensory filaments on his legs, tentacles,

antennae, carapace, and tail. But the effect was one of words having been

spoken. And it was distinctly different from that other voice, the internal

one, that had been questioning him so assiduously a little while ago.

"It goes extremely well," McCulloch replied: or was it the other

Silverberg, Robert - Homefaring.pdf

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