L. Warren Douglas - Simply Human

Simply Human

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE The Dry Hills, Earth

BOOK ONE:

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT,

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

EPILOGUE,

Simply Human

by L. Warren Douglas

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-57882-0

Cover art by John Monteleone

First printing, August 2000

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Electronic version by WebWrights

http://www.webwrights.com

Printed in the United States of America

For Sue

Vision With a Kick

"You're sitting on my clothes," she said in a smooth voice as low as his own. "Go away! You don't

belong here."

"You don't own the pond. I'll take off my clothes and join you."

"Don't bother removing them. Just jump in over there." She indicated a spot several yards to one side.

"Now get off my clothes!"

"You'll have to come get them," he said slyly, eying ripples that concealed the lower half of her body.

"Very well then, I will," she said with a determined nod. "Now get off my clothes."

Benadek was still grinning when she jerked her knee up to his chin, and barely changed his expression

when he came to rest flat on his back. He tasted blood. She spun full circle, her hard, bare foot catching

him first alongside his head, stunning him, then again in his ribs, knocking the wind from him. He made it

to his hands and knees before her deadly foot landed across his buttocks and sent him sprawling again.

"Now will you go away, you disgusting child?"

Speechless, humiliated, Benadek stumbled toward camp. He heard her say "Oh, damn! Now I'm all

dirty again," and heard the splash as she dove back into the water.

PROLOGUE

The Dry Hills, Earth

Sweat-soaked, caked with bitter salt-dust, the wizened brown man peered out from the dead rocks at a

scene straight from his guiltiest childhood vision of Hell.

Snarling hounds as big as ponies milled about the narrow defile, slashing at each other and their masters

with finger-sized teeth. Their sparse, coarse hair left dirty gray skin exposed, and failed to hide fresh,

gaping wounds. The whole pack had gone mad.

Horny claws left raking tracks in the soft sandstone. The hellhounds shook their massive heads, blinked

saucer-sized ocher eyes and twitched their long, ratlike noses as the old man's powdery fire-dust seared

their nasal membranes. They howled like canine banshees. They ran in circles and backed across their

own tracks as if desperately avoiding swarms of invisible bees.

Unable to identify the source of their excruciating pain, they fell upon each other blindly; great fangs tore

patchy fur, grimy skin, and dark red flesh. Gobbets of blood-flecked foam dangled from their jaws and

flew through the air as they twisted and spun madly about, oblivious to their hideous wounds and to their

hidden quarry.

The old man allowed himself an almost-silent chuckle that was drowned in the howls and snarls of his

erstwhile pursuers. He held up a tiny leather bag, gave its drawstring a decisive tug, and tucked it away in

his sorcerer's robe. His eyes returned to the bloody carnage beyond.

The dogs' masters, huge men with identical shocks of white-blond, curly hair, waded among the beasts

swinging short clubs and heavy chains, their black leather jerkins and trousers impervious to teeth and

claws. Sweat thickened with alkaline dust glistened on their almost-identical faces. The hidden man noted

with satisfaction that they were reeling with heat and fatigue. A baleful red sun, desert-hot even late in the

day, beat down from a dust-laden sky, casting crimson shadows over a rust and ocher and black

landscape unrelieved by a single growing thing.

The oldster was not pleased they had holstered handguns—lasers, judging by the powerpacks slung

over their buttocks. Forcing his ancient knees to be steady, he rose to his feet and began the arduous

climb to the safety of the heights above the ravine.

Atop the gully, the oldster paused to catch his breath and to reflect. Two thousand years, more or less,

and at times like this it seemed like nothing had really changed. Two thousand years after the Fall of Man

there were still dogs, and leather-clad cops—honches, they were called now. Their wide belts still

sagged with leather packets. They were still a-jingle with chains, their garments studded liberally with

silver bosses, their calf-height boots strapped and buckled. He recognized them for what they were:

shiny, timeless tools of intimidation and threat. Even after two thousand unsuccessful years, those cops

were still chasing the last black man on Earth.

Never mind that the steely-eyed Aryan types were only half-men spliced together from the genes of

military policemen and second-rate TV stars who looked good in uniform—any uniform, from a Roman

centurion's or a Nazi SS colonel's to an NYPD sergeant's. They were still cops.

Never mind that the polymorphic, mutated hounds had brains twice the size of an Alsatian's. They were

still dogs.

The odds were not much worse than they'd been in Detroit or LA. Those eight honches and all their

relatives were identical in mind as well as physiognomy, with none of the quirks or sparks of creativity

that had made real cops dangerous. What would fool one would fool all the others, and with two

millennia of practice, the old man had learned all the tricks.

Even the hounds were not perfect. They resulted from the chemical mutagens that had poisoned the

planet, not from careful design, and were cancer-ridden from the day they were whelped. Their hides

were ulcerated by desert sunlight and irritated by salty dust, and their clever brains never had time to

learn enough to make them truly deadly. Most lived only two or three years, and none reached five.

While the rest of the world, plants and animals alike, was recovering from the PCBs and DDTs and

polyfluorinated this'n that, the honches' unimaginative breeding programs had preserved their hounds'

imperfections along with their great size and their brains.

Rising stiffly to his feet, the oldster shook the dust from his faded robe. The mystic symbols adorning it

were as old as mankind, and were interspersed with benzene rings, flowchart conventions, and

microcircuitry diagrams. Only an educated man would have recognized any of them, and there had been

none on Earth for over a thousand years. He wrapped the robe over his all-weather Everlon®utility suit,

and strode off in search of his mules.

Memo:

Kaledrin—something's wrong with this output. This is no classic myth. Who is this old man? What in the

name of Sapience is a "honch?" Have you been playing games with the biocybes' input again?

(Saphooth, Head Archivist,

Project MYTHIC)

Memo:

Patience, Your Intellect. This is preliminary stuff. Abrovid says that the biocybes are self-calibrating

quasi-organic computers. They need more input, more myths, before they develop the proper algorithms.

(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)

The mules had not strayed far from where he'd hobbled them. One was saddled, and the other bore

battered leather trunks, one on each side. One was four-legged, the other, eight. They had discovered a

rare clump of rock-thistle in a shady crevice, and were deftly pulling fat, succulent flowers from the

prickly bush with their pink lip-tendrils.

His old brown hands stroked the saddle mule's cheek. Some ways off now, down in the rocky defile,

the hellhounds' harsh baying waned. The old man was unworried, secure among the rocks many

man-heights above the trail. His mules stood rested, ready for a long night's work.

A heavy staff crafted of twisted blue beech leaned on a jutting outcrop. Both ends were

bronze-shod—the base a scarred cap and the top a sphere the size of a small apple.

"Well enough, old ass," he murmured, peering over his mount's shoulder and down his back trail, "the

devil-dogs'll recover soon enough. It's getting dark and we must make tracks. Are you rested enough?"

<Rested?> the beast replied querulously. Its voice was as smooth as the old man's, with no trace of

mulish bray. <I carried your sharp-boned carcass for hours, and rested for mere minutes—don't be an

ass, yourself. But I'm not ready to be dog-meat. I'm rested enough.> The mule's words came forth

without visible movement of its lips and their dangling tendrils. It stood motionless, no shine of superior

intelligence in its huge, brown eyes.

<Quit bickering,> said the pack mule, continuing to chew its mouthful of coarse weed even as it spoke.

"Don't talk with your mouth full," the mules' owner said. "Nevertheless, your point's well taken. Your

hoofprints will stand out even by moonlight. We'll have to lose them in the rocks above."

For all their conversational abilities, the two mules responded no differently than their less verbose

ordinary brethren to the old man's attempts to get them moving. Several blows and curses later the trio

were on their way up a narrow trail among dry, broken boulders. The hounds' uproar diminished further.

Still, the mules' hoofprints stood out clearly in the dusty soil.

"Here's a vantage point," the oldster said, "high enough so they won't see us." The defile was a line of

blackness among the rocks, impenetrable to human eyes. The old man swore mildly, fiddled with a tiny

bump on his staff, and mumbled an incantation. The landscape took on an eerie reddish glow quite in

contrast with the sickly moonlight.

"Seven," he whispered. "Where's the eighth?" The red glow intensified. "Ah! There! He's off the trail,

cutting in front of us"

<Oh, no!> The exclamation came from the direction of the saddled mule. <You want us to go over the

top, don't you?>

<With both these trunks on my back?> came from the other beast. <Impossible!>

"Not impossible. You'll prance over those rocks like goats, with my help," their owner said.

<He's going to use his staff,> the saddle mule said, dully resigned.

<Not again!> the other replied. <I'm still queasy from the last time he played that trick. Goats, hah!>

"You'll do it," the old man countered. "That pepper will wear off. Those hounds'll be no happier for their

new scabs and sores."

"It doesn't wind up, you ass. It's a magic staff."

<Magic, shmagic,> said the mule. <I could put your magic in my left ear.>

"It's a big ear, you being a mule."

<S'what I said. Wind it up.>

"Hmmph!"

The old man peered down the hillside a last time. "They're still on our trail. Six behind us, one cutting

ahead, and one staying with the dogs."

There was a route through the rocky, shattered countryside besides the obvious trail—a narrow, difficult

side path over clean, soil-free rock. The honches would follow it, never dreaming that man and mules had

gone straight up the steep hillside.

He hefted his staff. "If I remember how to do this . . . the honches, ahead and behind, will get the worst

of it . . . and you fellows'll feel like colts again." He mumbled another incantation and followed it with,

"C'mon, mules, giddyup!"

Both beasts responded without further prompting. Like goats they took to the heights, finding footholds

where none seemed to exist. Even laden with trunks and elderly rider, they seemed to float over small

obstacles and climbed easily over larger ones. Below, the honches responded to the spell differently: they

moved slowly, without swagger, plodding like fat old men.

The mules reached the top of the ridge. The oldster peered backwards one last time. The six exhausted

honches and the one who had tried to cut the quarry off met in mid-defile, and concluded what the

oldster had wished: that he and his mules had taken the side trail.

<Well!> his mule exclaimed. <It worked.>

"Of course it did. You doubted my sorcery?"

<Sorcery, shmorcery! A mere cone of deflection between us and the Earth's core, a minor reduction in

local gravitation here and an equally minor increase over there. Any horse's arse with the proper

gimmickry could do it. Just don't forget to recharge the batteries this time—square of the distance, isn't

it? If those honches got everything we didn't, that staff's about shot, right now.>

"Don't tell me my business. It's a clear sky—tomorrow'll be sunny. I'll have all the power I need by

noon."

<S'what you said the last time, old man.>

By dawn's first gray glow they were plodding down the northern slope over short, verdant grass.

Songfrogs hopped out of their path, chirping merrily, and flying snakes circled about them, bright,

iridescent colors flashing off their tiny multiple wings. The air was full of humming, whistling, and nattering

creatures, each celebrating the return of day. The bleak lands were behind them.

The old man was less cheery than his surroundings warranted. <What ails you, old fellow?> his mule

demanded. <We lost them, didn't we? And there's a city only a half-day's walk, all downhill.>

"I hope they give up once they're sure they've lost our trail," he replied. "There's a pure-human camp that

way. I'd forgotten about it, or I'd never have steered them that way."

"Whuff!" the mule snorted, in an entirely different, definitely more mulish, voice than before.

"You're right," the man replied, "they'll turn before then. After all, they'll be eager for a night in town, too.

We're lucky Vilbursiton is large—they'll never find us there."

<What willwe find there?> asked the mule.

"Who knows? Perhaps a stable with good oats for you, a warm room and a bottle for me. Then we'll do

magic tricks to fool the yokels, write letters for others, and of course there'll be a temple needing

reprogramming and repair—there's always that," the old man's voice grated bitterly. "A thousand years

and fifty thousand temples . . . and I've barely begun the task."

<Bury your self-pity, old fraud!> his saddle mule scolded mildly. <You're only responsible for half a

continent. Let the other magicians worry about the rest of the world.>

"If there are others," he muttered peevishly. "Old Yasha hasn't reported in for five hundred years—since

the last satlink failed."

<Neither have you, Archie,> the mule replied. <After all, the satellites weren't built to work a thousand

years overtime.>

"Neither was I," the old man said, shaking his head sadly. "Neither was I."

INTERLUDE

The Great School, Midicor IV

Saphooth, head archivist of the MYTHIC* Project, slapped the hard-copy binder on Kaledrin's

worktable. "What'sthat supposed to be?" he growled. "The biocybes were instructed to translate old

myths, not create nonsensical stories." His skinny anthro-form digit pressed itself white on the printout.

Kaledrin grimaced. No one not an anachronism himself used hard copy in this day and age. "I'm sorry if

the output displeases you, Estimable One," he said aloud, failing to suppress a snide overtone. "The

biocybes' instructions were given exactly as specified, and the source-tales were read into their memory

from the earliest and most reliable documents—also exactly as directed." Careful, K, he warned himself.

Old fool he may be, but still he's your employer. Taking a deep breath, he said "If this `Archie' is truly

Achibol the Sorcerer, the next batch of output will tell us. Perhaps he's merely a minor character dredged

from obscurity by whatever sophisticated new algorithms the biocybes have created for themselves."

"Perhaps so. I fail to understand how such programs, intended to clarify ancient tales, present instead

new enigmas. `Honches,' for example. From what forgotten legend do they spring?"

"I don't know, Perceptive One. We've given the biocybes millions of ancient words to digest, from so

many worlds. Speculation is premature. This entry is, after all, a `Prologue.' The next output batch may

arrive tomorrow." Kaledrin leaned back on his nether tentacles, his breath whistling evenly from

wide-open spiracles, the perfect picture of a relaxed and calm human being. "Surely," he said smoothly,

"we can both suppress our . . . curiosity . . . for another day?"

Saphooth spun about on his two bony shanks. "Twenty million neuro-creds," he muttered as the door

irised open before him, "and we get nonsense." He departed abruptly.

"Well?" Kaledrin said, seemingly addressing the musty air of his small office, "Do you see what he's like,

now?"

"A crotchety old soul, indeed," replied a second voice, from behind a stack of dusty data-cubes that

contained the entire history of the planet Obolost, from its primal mud to the glory of its gleaming

interstellar fleets (now themselves dust for several millennia). "But you told him the truth." The speaker

arose with a rattle of chitinous exoskeletal plates. Like Kaledrin, the second man affected the utilitarian,

arthro-molluscoid form indigenous to this world, Midicor IV.

"You're the systems operator, Abrovid," Kaledrin retorted. "Whydoesn't the tale bear closer

resemblance to what we putinto the computers?"

"Stop thinking of the biocybes as computers," Abrovid said. "They're class-A self-programming,

organic-matrix artificial intelligences. Linked together, they're a synergistic quantum leap beyond their

individual selves. We may never know exactly how they think, or why they've chosen to give us output in

the form they have. If you don't like what they're producing, you'll have to change the parameters they're

ordered to work within—or Saphooth will. For now, why not follow your own advice—wait and see

what they give us tomorrow, or the next day?"

Abrovid rose to full height, motational tentacles curled like helical springs, and glided to the door. A shaft

of sunlight fell on him as it opened. "A lovely day for a man to sun himself along the river," he said, but

Kaledrin did not reply.

"Dictation!" Abrovid heard the scholar command his personal AI terminal, buried somewhere amid the

clutter and dust of his lair. "Editor's Introduction."

The first Tome of Achibol the Scrivener,Sorcerer and Ancient Man.Editor's Introduction

Achibol. His name reverberates down the corridors of prehistory, the primal character in a thousand

mythologies. He is Achibol the God, who led the first men from their animal state to true humanity; he is

also the Trickster whose attempts to conquer the universe always fail, instead freeing humanity from its

planetary prisons and giving it the stars.

In some cultures, Achibol is a savior, in others an elfin spirit. Among the Moldabi he is a moltsprite who

trades gold tenday-pieces for infants' outgrown skins. The Yarbandrum stuff effigies of him with

addlewort and dreamdust, and dance in the smoke of his burning, For a tenday they adopt shapes and

semblances glimpsed in their hallucinations, all the while vilifying Achibol, father of lies.

Achibol myths are as varied as the somatoforms of those who tell them. Crustacean water-men of Scyllis

people their tales with arachnoid and simian demons. Among the arachnoids of the Inner Arm, heroes are

eight- or twelve-legged and villains are simian or crustacean or . . . but you, whatever your chosen form,

have surely observed this.

The single unifying thread of the myths is the struggle tobecome , to attain mastery of bodily form,

whatever one's planetary ancestry. All human evolution converges toward that ability, that sets us apart

from lesser lifeforms. But it is the nature of ancestral forms to reject such innovations, and many myths

develop to express that primordial conflict.

Does the uniformity of mythic cycles point toward a single origin-world for all humanity, paleontological

evidence to the contrary? Several persistent cults continue to believe so, and we hope that MYTHIC's

revelations will put paid to such nonsense for once and for all. But these myths have been studied for

millennia, you protest. What new insights can there be, after all this time?

Biocybernetic computers have their roots in prehistory. What is new is the application of the total

resources of the Midicor biocybes to a single problem in literary analysis. Consider: there are 58,000

worlds with physically distinct sentients who share the ability to shift between shapes suitable on different

worlds (and to interbreed freely). There are approximately 58,000 related origin-myths, the Achibol

tales, whose universality suggests that they emerged early in human prehistory, during the "interstellar

threshold stage" of each race's development.

The biocybes of Midicor IV are capable of holding the sum of human knowledge in their tumorlike

memory masses. They have databases of all known languages, current and antique, extensive collections

of myths, legends, and apocryphal tales from scores of worlds, and billions of terabytes of histories,

planetary biologies, and astrophysical compendia.

Use of the Midicor IV facilities by linguists, mythologists, and historians is not new, but the methodology

of this experiment is. The experimenters combed the archives of several thousands of planets for variants

of the Achibol tales, regardless of literary or historic worth. Apocryphal tales were not rejected, nor were

outright works of fiction.* All the data are being entered in the biocybes' memories.

No parameters have been set; no criteria have been stated, no algorithms specified. The biocybes' sole

instruction is to compile a single version of the Achibol tales that is internally consistent, makes maximum

use of the data, contradicts no sound scientific evidence on record, and that has the highest probability of

being a factual account of actual historic events. Thus this first episode, this Prologue, is not a direct

translation of one mythic sequence but a synthesis of many, each passage reconciled for consistency of

form, style, and content by the most sophisticated artificial minds in the galaxy. Without human

preconditions, the story you will read is their own interpretation, derived from the most complete data

ever assembled.

The biocybes' processes are holographic—or intuitive. Secondary programs written by men and lesser

cybernetic minds provide a reliability check on the biocybes themselves, but their function is strictly

hindsight—they cannot duplicate what the biocybes do.

The interactive nature of the biocybes' research has amusing side effects: each time new mythic fragments

are introduced, they are analyzed for consistency not only with the developing narrative, but with

previously rejected data as well. The effect is a story that shifts subtly with each new input, as if the whole

narrative were a fisherman's net, hexagons tied so that the slightest tug causes every other to change. It

has been impossible to pin down the exact origin of particular changes.

Thus the tale you are about to read may change between this issuance and the next. As yet, the

differences are so minor as to be unnoticeable, but the possibility exists that the next newly discovered

myth from some backwater world* may initiate changes that ripple like a stiff breeze through the entire

net. The truth of the whole, and of our human origins, will not be known until the last myth has been input.

(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)

BOOK ONE:

Myths from the

Scattered Worlds

CHAPTER ONE,

wherein the Pure Boy

invades the Sorcerer's

L. Warren Douglas - Simply Human

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