Foster, Alan Dean - Humanx 3 - Nor crystal tears

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***************************************************

Author: Alan Dean Foster

Title: Nor Crystal Tears

Series: A Novel of the Humanx Commonwealth

Series No:

Original copyright year: 1982

Genre: Science Fiction

Date of e-text: 12/29/2000

Prepared by:

Last Revised: / /

Revised by:

Version: 1.0

Comments: Download both lit and txt version.

Please correct any errors you find in this e-text,

update the txt file’s version number and redistribute.

***************************************************

A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and

simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Canada.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82&8209;8836

ISBN 0&8209;345&8209;32447&8209;1

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: September 1982

Sixth Printing: January 1985

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Cover art by Michael Whelan

***************************************************

For the tiger with the little&8209;girl voice and the velvet claws,

My agent, Virginia Kidd, with thanks for

Ten years of encouraging purrs and constructive scratches.

***************************************************

Chapter One

It's hard to be a larva. At first there's nothing. Very gradually a dim, uncertain consciousness

coalesces from nothingness. Awareness of the world arrives not as a shock, but as a gray

inevitability. The larva cannot move, cannot speak. But it can think.

His first memories, naturally, were of the Nursery: a cool, dimly lit tubular chamber of

controlled commotion and considerable noise. Beneath the gently arched ceiling, adults conversed

with his fellow larvae. With awareness of his surroundings came recognition of self and of body: a

lumpish, meter&8209;and&8209;a&8209;half&8209;long cylindrical mass of mottled white flesh.

Through simple, incomplete larval eyes he hungrily ab-sorbed the limited world. Adults, equipment,

walls and ceiling and floor, his companions, the cradle he lay in, all were white and black and

in&8209;between shades of gray. They were all he could perceive. Color was a mysterious,

unimag-inable realm to which only adults had access. Of all the unknowns of existence, he most

pondered what was blue, what was yellow&8209;the taste of the withheld spectrum.

The adults who managed the Nursery and attended the young were experienced in that service. They'd

heard generations of youngsters ask the same questions in the same order over and over, yet they

were&8209; ever patient and polite. So they tried their best to explain color to him. The words

had no meaning because there were no possible reference points, no mental landmarks to which a

larva could relate. It was like trying to describe the sun that warmed the sur-face high, high

above the subterranean Nursery. He came to think of the sun as a brightly blazing something that

produced an intense absence of dark.

As he grew the attendants let him move about in his crude humping, wormlike fashion. Nurses

bustled through the Nursery, busy adults gifted with real mobility. Teach-ing machines murmured

their endless litany to the stu-dious. Other adults occasionally came to visit, including a pair

who identified themselves as his own parents.

He compared them with his companions, like himself squirming white masses ending in dull black

eyes and thin mouth&8209;slits. How he envied the adults their clean lines and mature bodies, the

four strong legs, the footarms above serving either as hands or as a third pair of legs, the

deli-cate truhands above them.

They had real eyes, adults did. Great multifaceted com-pound orbs that shone like a cluster of

bright jewels (light gray to him, though he knew they were orange and red and gold, whatever those

were). These were set to the sides of the shining valentine&8209;shaped heads, from which a pair

of feathery antennae sprouted, honestly white. He was fasci-nated by the antennae, as all his

companions were. The adults would explain that two senses were held there, the sense of smell and

the sense of faz.

He understood fazzing, the ability to detect the presence of moving objects by sensing the

disruption of air. But the concept of smell utterly eluded him, much as color did. Along with arms

and legs, then, he desperately wished for antennae. He desperately wished to be complete.

The Nurses were patient, fully understanding such yearn-ings. Antennae and limbs would come with

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time. Mean-while there was much to learn.

They taught speech, though larvae were capable of no more than a crude wheezing and gasping

through their flex-ible mouth&8209;parts. It took hard mandibles and adult lungs and throats to

produce the elegant clicks and whistles of mature communication.

So he could see after a fashion, and hear, and speak a little. But sight was incomplete without

color and he could not faz or smell at all. By way of compensation the teachers explained that no

adult could faz or smell nearly as well as the primitive ancestors of the Thranx, back when the

race dwelt in unintelligence even deeper in the bowels of the earth than they did now, when

artificial light did not exist, and the senses of faz and smell necessarily exceeded that of sight

in importance.

He listened and understood, but that did not lessen the frustration. He would worm his way around

the exercise course because they insisted he needed exercise, but he was ever conscious of what a

pale shadow of true mobility it was. Oh, so frustrating!

Larval years were the Learning Time. Hardly able to move, unable to smell or faz, barely able to

converse, but with decent sight and hearing a larva was adequately equipped for learning.

He was a particularly voracious student, absorbing everything and asking greedily for more. His

teachers and Nurses were pleased, as was the teaching machine attached to his cradle. He mastered

High and Low Thranx, although he could properly speak neither. He learned physics and chemistry

and basic biology, including the danger posed by any body of water deeper than the thorax, where

the adult's breathing spicules were located. An adult Thranx could float, but not forever, and

when the water entered the body, it sank. Swimming was a talent reserved for prim-itive creatures

with internal skeletons.

He was taught astronomy and geology although he'd never seen the sky or the earth, for all that he

lived be-neath the surface. The Nursery was exquisitely tiled and paneled. Other sections of

Paszex, his home town, were lined with plastics, ceramics, metals, or stonework. In the ancient

burrows on the planet Hivehom, where the Thranx had evolved, were tunnels and chambers lined with

regurgi-tated cellulose and body plaster.

Industry and agriculture were studied. History told how the social arthropods known as the Thranx

first mastered Hivehom, adapting to existence above as well as below the surface, and then spread

to other worlds. Eventually theol-ogy was discussed and the larvae made their choices.

Then on to more complex subjects as the mind matured, to biochemistry, nucleonics, sociology and

psychology and the arts, including jurisprudence. He particularly enjoyed the history of space

travel, the stories of the first hesitant flights to the three moons of Hivehom in clumsy rockets,

the development of the posigravity drive that pushed ships through the gulf between the stars, and

the establishment of colonies on worlds like Dixx and Everon and Calm Nursery. He learned of the

burgeoning commerce between Willo&8209;wane, his own colony world, and Hivehom and the other

colonies.

How he wanted to go to Hivehom when he learned of it! The mother world of the people, Hivehom.

Magical, enchanting name. His Nurses smiled at his excitement. It was only natural he should want

to travel there. Everyone did.

Yet something more showed on his profile charts, an un-defined yearning that puzzled the larval

psychologists. Possibly it was related to his unusual hatching. The normal four eggs had

bequeathed not male and female pairs but three females and this one male.

He was aware of the psychologists' concerns but didn't worry about them. He concentrated on

learning as much as possible, stuffing his mind full to bursting with the won-ders of existence.

While these strange adults mumbled about "indecisiveness" and "unwillingness to tend toward a

course of action," he plowed through the learning pro-grams, mitigating their worries with his

extraordinary ap-petite for knowledge.

Couldn't they understand that he wasn't interested in any one particular subject? He was

interested in every-thing. But the psychologists didn't understand, and they fretted. So did his

family, because a Thranx on the Verge always knows what he or she intends to do ... after.

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Gen-eralizations do not a life make.

For a while they thought he might want to be a philoso-pher, but his general interests were of

specifics and not of abstruse speculations. Only his unusually high scores pre-vented their moving

him from the general Nursery to one reserved for the mentally deficient.

On and on he studied, learning that Willow&8209;wane was a wonderful world of comfortable swamps

and lowlands, of heat and humidity much like that of the Nursery. A true garden world whose poles

were free of ice and whose large continents were heavily jungled. Willow&8209;wane was even more

accommodating than Hivehom itself. He was fortunate to have been born there.

His name he knew from early on. He was Ryo, of the Family Zen, of the Clan Zu, of the Hive Zex.

The last was a holdover from primitive times, for only towns and cities existed now, no more true

hives.

More history, the information that the development of real intelligence was concurrent with the

development of egg&8209;laying ability in all Thranx females. Gone was the need for a specialized

Queen. Their newly evolved biological flexibility gave the Thranx a natural advantage over other

arthropods. But Thranx still paid respects to an honorary clanmother and hivemother, echoes of the

biological ma-triarchy that once dominated the race. That was tradition. The people had a great

love of tradition.

He remembered his shock when he'd first learned of the AAnn, a space&8209;going race of

intelligence, calculation, cunning, and aggressiveness. The shock arose not from their abilities

but from the fact that the creatures possessed internal skeletons, leathery skins, and flexible

bodies. They moved like the primitive animals of the jungles but their intelligence was

undeniable. The discovery had caused con-sternation in the Thranx scientific community, which had

postulated that no creature lacking a protective exoskeleton could survive long enough to evolve

true intelligence. The hard scales of the AAnn gave protection, and some felt that their closed

circulatory systems compensated for the lack of an exoskeleton.

All these things he studied and mastered, yet he was un-settled in mind because he also knew that

of all the inhabi-tants of the Nursery who were on the Verge, he alone was unable to settle on a

career, to choose a life work.

Around him, his childhood companions made their choices and were content as the time grew near.

This one to be a chemist, that one a janitorial engineer, the one on the cradle across from Ryo to

become a public Servitor, another opting for food&8209;processing management.

Only he could not decide, would not decide, did not want to decide. He wanted only to learn more,

to study more.

Then there was no more time for study. There was only time for a sudden upwelling of fear. His

body had been changing for months, subtle tremors and quivers jostling him internally. He'd felt

his insides shift, felt skin and self tingling with a peculiar tension. An urge was upon him, a

powerful desire to turn inward and explode outward.

The Nurses tried to prepare him for it as best they could, soothing, explaining, showing him again

the chips he'd studied over and over. Yet the sight of it recorded on screen was clinical and

distant, hard to relate to what was occurring inside his own body. All the chips, all the

infor-mation in the world could not prepare one for the reality.

Worse were the rumors that passed from Nurserymate to Nurserymate in the dark, during sleeping

time, when the adults were not listening. Horrible stories of gross deformi-ties, of monstrosities

put out of their misery before they had a chance to see themselves in a mirror, which others said

were allowed to survive for a life of miserable study as scientific subjects, never to be

permitted out in society.

The rumors grew and multiplied as fast as the changes in his own body. The Nurses and special

doctors came and went and monitored him intensively. Around it all, encap-sulating all the mystery

and terror and wonder and hope, was a single word.

Metamorphosis.

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The process was something you could not avoid, like death. The genes insisted and the body obeyed.

The larva could not delay it.

He had studied it repeatedly with a fervor he had never applied to anything else. He watched the

recordings, mar-veled at the transformation. What if the cocoon was wrongly spun? What if he

matured too soon and burst from the cocoon only half formed or, worse yet, waited too long and

smothered?

The Nurses were reassuring. Yes, all those terrible things had happened once upon a time, but now

trained doctors and metamorphic engineers stood by at all times. Modern medicine would compensate

for any mistake the body might make.

The day came and he hadn't slept for four days before it. His body felt nervous and ready to

burst. Incomprehen-sible feelings possessed him. He and the others who were ready were taken from

the Nursery. Befuddled younger larvae watched them go, some filling their wake with cries of

farewell.

"Good&8209;bye, Ryo ... Don't come out with eight legs!" "See you as an adult," shouted another.

"Come back and show us your hands," cried a third. "Tell us what color is!"

Ryo knew he wouldn't be returning to the Nursery. Once gone, there was no reason to return. It

would belong to another life, unless he opted for Nursery work as an adult. He watched the Nursery

recede as his palette traveled in train with the others down the long central aisle. The Nurs-ery,

its friendly&8209;familiar whites and grays, its cradles and compassion the only companions he'd

ever had, all van-ished behind a tripartite door.

He heard someone cry out, then realized he was the noise-maker. The medical personnel hushed him,

calmed him.

Then he was in a great, high&8209;ceilinged chamber, a dome of glowing darkness, of perfectly

balanced humidity and temperature. He could see the other palettes being placed nearby, forming a

circle. His friends wiggled and twisted under the gentle glow of special lamps.

On the next palette rested a female named Urilavsezex. She made the sound indicative of good

wishes and friend-ship. "It's finally here," she said. "After so long, after all these years.

I'm&8209;I'm not sure I know what to do or how to do it."

"Me either," Ryo replied. "I know the recordings, but how do you tell when the precise moment is,

how do you know when the time is right? I don't want to make any mistakes."

"I feel ... I feel so strange. Like I&8209;like I have to ... . " She was no longer talking, for

silk had begun to emerge magically from her mouth. Fascinated, he stared as she began

single&8209;mindedly to work, her body contorting with a flexibility soon to be lost forever.

Bending sharply, she had begun at the base of her body and was working rapidly toward the head.

Layer upon layer the damp silk rose around her. body, hardening on contact with the air. Now he

could see only her head. The eyes began to disappear. Around him others had begun to work.

Something heaved inside him and he thought he was going to vomit. He did not. It was not his

stomach that was suddenly, eruptively working, but other glands and organs. There was a taste in

his mouth, not bad at all, fresh and clean. He twisted, doubled over, working the silk that

ex-truded in a steady, effortless flow as if he'd spun a hundred times before.

He felt no claustrophobia, a fear unknown to a people who mature underground. Up, high, higher,

around his mouth and eyes now, the cocoon rose. The upper cap nar-rowed over his head. It was

almost closed when a pair of truhands reached in and down through the remaining gap. Moving

quickly, in time to his mouth movements so as not to become entangled in the hardening silk, they

held a tube that was pressed against his forehead.

The hands withdrew. Nothing else remained to concen-trate on except finishing, finishing,

finishing the work. Then the cocoon was complete and the sedative that had been injected into him

combined with his physical exhaus-tion to speed him into the Sleep. A dim, fading part of him knew

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he would sleep for three whole seasons ...

But it wasn't long at all. Only a few seconds, and sud-denly he was kicking with a desperate

intensity. Out, he thought hysterically, I have to get out. He was imprisoned, confined in

something hard and unyielding. He shoved and kicked with all his strength. So weak, he was so

terribly weak. Yet&8209;a small crack, there.

The sight renewed his determination and he kicked hard-er, punched with his hands and began to

pull at the pieces that cracked in front of him. The prison was disintegrating around him. He

whistled in triumph, kicked with all four legs&8209;then sprawled free and exhausted onto a soft

floor.

On his thorax the eight spicules pulsed weakly, sucking air. He turned his head and looked up,

using his truhands to brush at the dampness still clinging to his eyes.

Then other hands were on him, turning him, helping him untangle. Antiseptic cloths brushed at his

eyes and there was a sharp smell of peppermint. A voice spoke sooth-ingly. "It's all over. Relax,

just relax. Let your body gather its strength."

Instinctively he turned toward the sound of the voice as the last film masking his eyes was

sponged away. A male Thranx looked down at him. His chiton was deep purple, so he would be quite

elderly.

Realization came in a rush. Purple. The adult's chiton was purple, and purple was a color that had

been described to him and now he knew what it was and the ceramic inlay in the doctor's forehead

was a single bar of silver crossed by two bars of gold and his ommatidia were red with gold and

yellow central bands and they gleamed in the light of the room and ... and ... It was wonderful.

He looked down at himself, saw the slim body, the seg-mented abdomen, the four glistening wing

cases, vestigial wings beneath, the four strong, jointed legs spraddled to his left. He raised a

truhand, touched it with a foothand, then repeated the motion with the other pair, then touched

all four sets of four fingers together.

All around him he heard uncertain clicks and whistles as strange voices struggled to master new

bodies. Someone brought a mirror. Ryo looked into it. Staring back at him was a beautiful

blue&8209;green adult, still damp but drying rap-idly following Emergence. The

valentine&8209;shaped head was cocked to one side. Cream&8209;white feathery antennae flut-tered

and smothered him in the most peculiar sensations. Smells, they were; rich, dark, pungent, musky,

glowing, va-nilla. The smells of the postcocoon recovery room, of his metamorphosed friends. He

knew he'd been asleep not a few minutes or seconds but for more than half a year, that his body

had changed and matured from a pulpy, barely conscious white thing into a gloriously streamlined

adult.

He tried to gather his legs beneath him and found ready hands on either side, helping him up.

"Easy there ... don't try to rush yourself," a voice told him.

Erect, he turned and discovered a wide window. On the other side stood a host of excited, mature

Thranx. Ryo recognized the markings of two, his sire and dame.

They were no longer kindly gray shapes. They had color now. Evidentially they recognized him, for

they made greeting signs at him. He returned them, realizing that he now possessed the means for

doing so.

The hands left him. He stood by himself on all fours, abdomen stretched out behind him, thorax and

then bthorax inclined upward with his head topping all. He looked back over his shoulder, down at

his body, then down at the floor. He stepped carefully off the soft padding onto the harder

outside ring. Experimentally, he walked in a slow circle.

"Very good, Ryozenzuzex." It was the elderly doctor who'd supervised his Emergence. "Don't rush

yourself. Your body knows what to do."

Around Ryo his companions were taking experimental deep breaths, cleaning their eyes, testing legs

and fingers, females wiggling their shining ovipositors, extending and recoiling them..

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I can walk, he thought delightedly. I can see colors. He sensed the pressure of air around him and

his brain sorted the implications. I can faz, and I can smell, and I can still hear. He thanked

those who'd assisted him and marveled at the clarity of his speech; sharp clicks, beautifully

modu-lated whistles&8209;all the intricate convolutions of Low Thranx. Years of study paid off

now.

He marveled at that, too, his four mandibles moving smoothly against each other as he made sounds

of pure pleasure. Only one thing hung in his thoughts to mar his happiness: his body was complete

but his future was not, for he still had not the vaguest idea what he wanted to do with himself.

Eventually he drifted into agricultural services, for he felt a positive joy at finally being able

to go Above and, unlike his highly gregarious fellow citizens, took pleasure in working outside

the town.

He drowned his personal uncertainties and confusion in work. Pushed by his clan, he took as

premate a bright and energetic female named Falmiensazex. Life settled into a comfortable,

familiar routine. His clan and family ceased to worry about him, and the old, nagging indecision

faded steadily until it was nearly forgotten.

Chapter Two

It was the midday of Malmrep, the third of Willow&8209;wanes five seasons and the time of High

Summer. The weather was rich with moisture and the air rippled with heat.

Ryo checked the readout on the console. Two assistants accompanied him on the scouting expedition

into the jun-gle. They were to survey the feasibility of planting two thousand bexamin vines.

He'd argued long and patiently with the Innmot local council who had intended to plant the newly

drained and cleared land in ji bushes. Ryo insisted that it was time to diversify local operations

further and that bexamin vine, which produced small hard berries of deep ocher hue, was the most

suitable candidate for planting.

The berry fruit was useless, but the single seed that lay at the center of each, when crushed and

mixed with water and a protein additive, produced a wonderfully sweet syrup that was nearly as

nutritious as it was tasty. But the fifteen-meter&8209;long vines required more attention that the

most del-icate ji bush. Nevertheless, the council voted three to two in favor of his suggestion.

Ryo was quite conscious of how much was riding on the success of this planting. While failure

would not shatter his solid reputation within the Company, a good bexamin crop would considerably

enhance it. Whether a grand triumph was a good idea he wasn't sure, but he didn't seem to be

progressing in any other directions. So he thought he might as well rise within the Company

structure.

"Bor, Aen," he said to his two assistants, both of whom were older than he, "break out the transit

sighters. We're going to lay a line down that way." With right foothand and truhand he gestured to

his left, to the northeast.

They acknowledged the order by unpacking the instru-ments and fixing them to the proper mounts on

the side of the crawler. Ryo made sure the stingers were unstrapped and ready for use in case they

should meet with an errilis.

But nothing sprang from the tangled vegetation to chal-lenge them as they powered up the

instruments. Minutes passed and Bor was removing a reflective marker from its case when an

explosion threw him violently to the crawler deck. The concussion bent the thinner trees eastward.

Vines and creepers were torn free of their branches. Only his grip on the steering pylon enabled

Ryo to maintain his footing.

During the silence that followed, the three of them lay stunned, not knowing what to make of the

violence. Then a frantic cacophony of screeks and wails, moans and weeping rose from the startled

inhabitants of the jungle as they recovered from their own shock.

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Foster, Alan Dean - Humanx 3 - Nor crystal tears

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