Piers Anthony - Manta 2 - Orn

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Orn by Piers Anthony
Piers Anthony
Orn
Of Man and Manta, book 2
 
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Postscript
 
I: ORN
Orn woke exhausted. His body was cold and somewhat sticky, and his muscles were uncertain. He 
could not remember how he had come here, but he knew it was not safe to yield to his confusion 
now.
Something was wrong. He lifted his head and forced open eyes that had been sealed shut by goo. At 
first the brightness hurt him; then it settled to a wan glow as his sensitive eyes protected themselves. 
He was in a cave, and it was half-light: the start or end of a day. That much he grasped, remembering 
the inanimate cycle.
He was sprawled awkwardly across cold stone. He wedged four sticky, clumsy limbs under his body 
ungracefully, then rose to stand with greater confidence on two.
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Orn by Piers Anthony

Yes—in the gradually brightening light he made out the flat floor and naturally corrugated ceiling,

both descending into darkness beyond him. Nearby was a voluminous tumble of dehydrated stalks: a

nest, containing a single monstrous, elongated egg, and sticky fragments of another.

Orn brushed gingerly against the whole egg. Cold—nothing would hatch from this. Beyond it and the

nest were rocks and bones and other debris of indeterminate origin. All dead.

He walked unsteadily toward the light, avoiding the scattered joints and droppings and teeth and

dehydrated leaves and sticks that lined the track. The exertion warmed his body, and he began to feel

better. But with this physical improvement his mind seemed to backslide, to lose coherence. Strange

visions passed through his awareness, incredible peripheral memories that could not be his own, that

faded as he became aware of them.

He relaxed, not attempting to scrutinize the twitchings of his brain, and then the pictures perversely

took on a sharp focus.

Memory. It began far, far back in the half-light, wetter and warmer than since. He floated in a

nutrient ocean and absorbed what he required through his spongy skin. He reached for the light, a

hundred million years later, needing it... but recoiled, burned, finding it too fierce to approach. He

had to wait, to adapt, and this did not come easily. He held his position and ate what he could and

expanded his mass slowly, very slowly, a billion years slowly. But somehow the larger he grew, the

greater became his hunger. He could not get enough nourishment. Never enough, never enough...

The odd memory dissipated as he turned the corner and stood in the stronger light at the cave's

mouth. Green shrubbery showed beyond, and the intense gray-white of the sky. This was morning:

not the steamy dawn of twenty million years ago, but a chilly and empty rising of the sun.

The corpse of a mighty bird lay on the ground, astride the opening of the cave. In life it might have

stood so tall as to brush the very ceiling, and it had a thick, slightly curved beak, stubby wings, and

cruel, forward-reaching talons. Under the disarray of gray feathers the long strong muscles of the

thighs still bunched, as though it had been running—or fighting when it died. The powerful neck was

twisted so that the head stared stiffly to the side, and dried blood fouled the upper plumes. One eye

peered into the sun, the orb already shrunken with the dehydration of its tissues. Once-handsome tail

feathers were broken off in the dirt.

There had been a desperate battle, and the bird had lost, but the victor had not paused to consume the

flesh. This too was strange.

Looking at her—for he recognized the corpse as female as readily as he was coming to identify all

the things he saw—Orn felt a vague alarm. He did not conjecture the meaning of his own awakening

beside the abandoned nest of this creature, nor did he wonder what had vanquished her. Instead he

searched his troubled memory—and found the bird within.

Sixty to eighty million years ago the hot-bodied aves had completed their divergence from their rep

ancestry, conserving the produce of their internal furnaces by means of scales lengthening into fluffy

down. They lived in tall pines and rocky gullies, where it grew cold at night, and needed continuous

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Orn by Piers Anthony

warmth in order to stay alert and alive in those windy heights. They spread all four legs with

strengthened coverts to add buoyancy, and leaped and glided to safety at the slightest provocation.

For some of the predator reps could climb, and all were hungry. The tree-leaper who fell to the

ground was dead, and not from the fall.

But soon one line of aves had grown too large to escape through the air, and while its light-boned,

light-brained cousins ascended ever higher into the sky and pumped their expanding front wings and

let the hind wings shrivel into claws, this nether line planted its hind limbs firmly in the dread earth

and discarded flight. Here only the fleet of foot survived at all, and the strong of beak, and the firm of

memory. They had to run at times, and fight at times, and to know without hesitation when each was

appropriate in the stronghold of the reps.

They succeeded. They were able to forage in colder areas than the reps, and to travel at night. Other

land-bound lines diverged.

All this Orn knew, his memory triggered by the need, by the sight of this ultimate bird. She was not a

creature of terror to him, but of history, who had come fifty million years along her line to die so

brutally before this cave. Orn did not sorrow for her; such was the nature of existence. The weak, the

careless, the unlucky—these died and were replaced by others.

He stepped around the body and stood in the sun. A towering pine ascended from the nearby turf, as

ancient and grand in its fashion as the bird. The ground was covered with tall ferns, and cycads shook

their fronds in the light breeze. Similar plants had dominated the landscape for a very long time, Orn

knew. Only recently had others come to contest the land, and those others had not been very

successful here.

He scratched the ground experimentally while the rising sun took the chill off the land. His digits

were feeble and tender compared to the thick horned toes of the dead bird, but a few tentative scrapes

exposed the underlying structure. Beneath the surface leaves and twigs and needles lay a spongy

humus teeming with its own awakening life. He put one eye down and concentrated, bringing the

miniature landscape into focus.

Here were cricks and roaches and black-shelled beets busily scavenging microscopic debris. Tiny

springs, those wingless arths who jumped by flipping forked tails against the ground—these too

scrambled for cover, disliking the sun.

Orn knew them. The arths had diverged very long ago, so far back that he had no memory of their

early evolution. Somewhere—sometime in that hot sea as he struggled between the freezing darkness

and the burning light and satisfied his compelling hunger by growing into an absorptive cup, a

cylinder, a blob with an internal gut, as he extruded fins and nascent flukes and swam erratically after

game, and formed eyes to harness the light at last and gills to breathe the water and the lateral line

system to navigate by—somewhere during that complex billion-year development that preceded his

rise to land the little arths had taken their own mysterious but highly successful course. Now they

crawled and flew and fashioned webs and hives and cocoons and burrows and lived their hasty lives

in many-legged, many-winged, virtually mindless certainty...

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Orn by Piers Anthony

Orn moved on, observing everything but questioning nothing. Timorous hairy mams scooted from his

path, afraid of him; these represented innocuous lines. He traveled a shallow valley that led gradually

downward toward a body of water. Soft, flat vegetation of the new type crowded the edge of the

water and floated on the surface, an increasing amount of it bearing flowers. Small fish, piscs, flashed

where a streamlet flowed over naked stone and coursed between round mossy rocks; they were an

ancient and multiple line, and now and then one came to kiss the surface of the lake.

Once more Orn remembered: the flowing water was a different medium from the passive depths of

the sea, as different in its fashion as air from land. The flaccid flesh of the calm ocean depths had had

to develop a stiffened but flexible rod of gristle along its length, lest it be tumbled into danger by the

new phenomenon of current. To this gristle the expanding muscle tissue was anchored; progress was

no longer random but forward, against the flow. Before his line diverged from that of the piscs, they

had invaded the less-habited regions up the current, and changed in the process. The spinal rod

protected increasingly important nerves, for coordination had become essential; then the gristle

hardened into cartilage and then into bone. The skeleton was the gift of flowing fresh water, and so

the land had already affected life in the sea.

But the rivers of the past were fast and shallow, and they flowed from the bleak inhospitable mass of

substance that formed the continent, and from time to time the ambitious swimmer was stranded in

some stagnant pool. He had to gulp life from the surface, even as these fish in the lake did now, and

hold the bubble in his mouth in an effort to absorb from it the breath that had left the water. But his

mouth was now encumbered with jaws and teeth and tongue, all needed for feeding. Thus he was

forced to develop a special cavity in the throat, a bag, a chamber—a lung. When the water of his

isolated pool finally sank to nothing, his fins had to strengthen into four stout limbs to support the

body against the gut-wrenching land gravity, and the new lungs sustained life entirely. It was a brief

but awful trek, that first journey over the cruel land, and almost every fish who tried it perished; but

that fraction who were not only determined and strong but fortunate as well—Orn's own line—won

reprieve in a deeper, fresher pool.

Orn remembered the original home: the water. He remembered the gradually lengthening adventures

over a land inhabited only by pulpy vegetation and rapidly scrambling arths, until most of his life was

spent upon it and he was no longer a true fish. He remembered the hardening of the rind around the

soft eggs, until they withstood to some extent the ravages of sun and air. A small step, but significant,

for it meant that the sea had let slip its last lingering hold. A complete life cycle could occur without

the intervention of the ocean.

By the shore of the lake he found the body of the male bird. This one, too, had perished

violently—but unlike his mate, he had taken his enemy with him. A long, powerful rep lay belly-up

on the sand, its tail in water, its eyes two bloody sockets, its gut an open cavity. Gore on the beak and

talons of the bird betrayed the savagery of its attack, here at the fringe of the rep's demesne; but the

scattered feathers and blood on its breast showed that the teeth of the croc had not fastened on empty

air.

Had the rep reached water before the bird attacked, the rep would have won the battle easily. But it

had not, perhaps because of wounds inflicted by the female bird. Now all three combatants were food

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Orn by Piers Anthony

for the clustered flies.

The croc: as Orn gazed at it he comprehended the course it had taken since its ancestors branched

away from his own, more recently than the fishes. His line had stayed on land in the trees before

returning to the ground, climbing and leaping from branch to branch, becoming warm of body,

omnivorous of diet, and highly specialized of brain. But the croc had returned part way to the water,

hiding behind horny skin, preying on anything that fell in or strayed too near.

This time the croc had ventured too far from its region of strength, perhaps seeking to raid the

enormous eggs in the cave nest while one bird was absent, thinking the remaining bird would not

fight...

Orn did not attempt to work out the details further in his mind. He was weak and tired and alone, and

now ravenously hungry. His heritage of memory finally closed the gap between his evolution and

himself, and he understood that there would be no outside help for his distress. He was a member of

the most advanced species yet to tread the earth of this world—but he had nothing more to sustain

him at the moment than his generalized body and the knowledge within him of the genesis of living

things.

He did not pause to consider what would have happened had the croc reached the two eggs before the

parent birds returned, or the happenstance that the elder egg had been on the verge of hatching the

instant the fatal encounter took place. The mother's warmth had been taken away at the critical

moment, forcing activity or death for the chick. He did not ponder the coincidence of destiny; he did

not contemplate revenge. His mind was designed for far-reaching, comprehensive racial memory

rather than true thought. Racial memory was his instrument of survival—a device like none ever

employed by another species.

Orn shook out his stubby, still-featherless wings and advanced on the piled meat before him. Flies

swarmed up as his beak chopped down. He was hungry, and there was no one to feed him.

II: AQUILON

For two days they orbited: three humans and seven mantas. The shell was tiny for ten occupants, the

sanitary facilities embarrassingly unsophisticated and, the food monotonous. But the mantas were

siblings who could range leagues or freeze in place for hours without suffering, and the human beings

were two men and a woman said to be beautiful. Because the mantas were of fungoid metabolism

(though this description was about as precise as "heated protoplasm" might be for the humans), their

body processes complemented those of the humans, freshening the air to a certain extent. It was a

tidy circumstance, though machine revitalization was still essential for oxygen.

Nevertheless, it was crowded.

By the time the shuttle came to grapple the capsule and haul it in entire for decontamination, the trio

had talked out almost everything inconsequential.

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摘要：

OrnbyPiersAnthonyPiersAnthonyOrnOfManandManta,book2CONTENTSChapter1Chapter2Chapter3Chapter4Chapter5Chapter6Chapter7Chapter8Chapter9Chapter10Chapter11Chapter12Chapter13Chapter14Chapter15Chapter16Chapter17Chapter18Chapter19Chapter20Chapter21Chapter22PostscriptI:ORNOrnwokeexhausted.Hisbodywascoldandsom...

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