METAMORPHOSIS

His name was Hrlec Brey. He was a big man, and he moved slowly as if he had all the time in the world.

And he had. He had all the time—years and years behind him, years and years ahead. And the world was his, its length and breadth, its skies and seas, the solitude of night, the loneliness of day.

He was eating dinner when the knowledge smashed across his mind: Tonight I am going to die.

He put down his leg of ayala and stared blankly at the plank wall across the room. That he was going to die did not disturb him. That he knew about it did. It was not whimsy that had crossed his mind. He was not given to idle speculation. It was as if a sense of precognition had suddenly developed in his intellect. It was a strange, irrevocable certainty.

His gaze fell on the half-eaten leg of ayala, and he shrugged. A crime to let it go to waste, impending death or not. He picked it up, moved his jaw slowly around the bone. So I'm going to die. Tomorrow I'll be free. Then his eyes hardened and his teeth tore savagely at the last bite of meat. I haven't evolved.

Moving slowly because the pains had been with him all day—he called them "pains" because there seemed no better word—he washed off the table and went out to the front porch of his small farmhouse on Ophiuchus VI to sit in the twilight and smoke his pipe. He was a man of fifty Earth years, whom age had weathered and work had bent, and the strongest thing about him was his will. He had willed to remain sane in his solitary world after the tragedy so many years before, and he had made it. Just made it. He did not even talk to himself.

He settled his bones in the log chair and planted his feet comfortably on the railing. He had willed that he could gaze upon this evening scene and believe it to be Earth. Often he had succeeded. The same colors in the twilight, though it lasted seven hours. A sky with a Milky Way, without a moon. Gravity that made him always just a little tired. Forests and mountains and sea, beauty and peace. And Sol, a pinpoint two thousand light-years off, with no chance of ever getting back.

A living hell.

He lit his pipe, filled with a native weed he'd gotten used to. There was no savor in a pipeful now, with bitterness eating at him. How could he spend his last night? There was only one way. The same as any other of the thousand nights before.

When he died, the last of his race would disappear from the face of Asmarad, sixth planet of the sun Ophiuchus. He was of Earth. Oh, Mother of Comforts, Earth, in the New Galactic Age! It was a long way from the barbarian Old Atomic, almost at the fringe of prehistory. As always, when he remembered his heritage from the distant home that had given him birth, his great bowed shoulders straightened and some of the old fire came back into his eyes.

Though he did not often allow himself to think of the past, his thoughts went back—how many years ago, Earth time?—to the day of triumph, when Brey's ship had put down a mile away by the shore of a salt sea. A thousand men and women with the purpose of carving out from untrodden paths the beginnings of a mighty civilization. To make a little Earth of Asmarad as had been done on a thousand other worlds across the galaxy—and perhaps by now, beyond.

A thousand other worlds—and here they had failed. No, they had not quite failed. Not yet. Not with Brey alive. Not tonight. Tomorrow.

Suddenly restless, he rose painfully and walked down the gravel path to his flower garden. He gazed at the brilliant multicolored web-things native to the region, but the sight for once gave him no pleasure. The restlessness grew stronger. It became an urgency, at once compelling and disturbing. Urgency to do something before he died. Something as important as drawing his next breath. Yet what could possibly be important to Hrlec Brey, landbound Senior Captain of the Space Fleet, the only Earthman left on Asmarad, on the evening of his death?

He looked from the flower garden across the plowed fields of his farm and then beyond, into the broad valley that ended against the blue haze of mountains a hundred miles away. For years the shimmering blue haze had symbolized the impassable wall between him and Earth. He was hemmed in, without machinery to transport himself, without weapons except for a bow and arrow he had made himself.

He heard, far away, two trocoids thrashing aimlessly among the trees, their shrill staccato a lonely yet comforting sound. The animals, too, were almost like Earth animals. They reproduced by fission, like some of the lower forms of life on Earth. The trocoid was like an oversized wasp. The murderous ithycyphos was like a razorback horse, with a cry like a woman under torture. The meat-rich ayala made him think of landbound seals. There were other animals, too, other birds, and fish in the nearby sea.

Still the urgency beat at him and, without quite knowing why, he began to walk across the plowed field to the enclosure where he kept a few ayala to fatten. My animals might be gone, he thought anxiously, my supply of meat might fail. Hurry! his mind told him. Hurry, hurry! His steps quickened.

Now the long twilight deepened and night drifted slowly in from the far blue haze. Always when the slow night of Asmarad began to fall, Brey felt anew the soul-wrenching loneliness. This was a twilight made for the old pleasures that over the centuries had never changed. For gathering by the campfire and singing the old songs, for the spice of well-cooked meat, for whispers in the dark and strolls through the forest, for a woman's lips on yours. And back on Earth, under the shadows of the spaceships ready to hurtle the light-years across the galaxy, there was laughter on the lips of man, and their hearts held room for love.

With aching heart he remembered Ansa. A wisp of a girl she had been, and the first of the women to die—only a month after their landing. How long would they have been married now, had she lived? In this timeless world, it was his one regret that he could never know exactly. He could never celebrate their would-have-been anniversary. The day was different in length, as were the years. And he had no watch to keep track of the hours. He could never count the years she had been gone. But he knew they were many. Oh, how well he knew!

He began to walk faster, and then he began to trot, and then he broke into an urgent, lumbering run, stumbling across the even furrows of the potato-like terna he had planted.

And then an internal grinding shock of terrible power slammed him to the ground.

He was not knocked unconscious, but lay on his face on the rich red dirt, his mind shocked into stupor. At length he shook his head, pushed heavily up with his hands and climbed to shaky feet. He leaned against the logs of the enclosure, gathering strength. The pains were stronger now, the periodic nameless writhings inside him. Terror touched his mind, not at the pains themselves but at their pattern, over the months. Pain that was not quite pain, sensations without an Earth name. They had bothered him now and then, though lately they had come more often. And this was the most terrible of all.

What's been happening inside me all this time? Must be a disease. A native disease. And no doctors, no medicine left, no hospital. And no pretty nurse to hold my hand!

It's beginning, he thought. Death.

He had seen much of death since coming to Asmarad. Too much. First he had seen the babies born dead, the babies conceived on the way. No woman ever became pregnant on Asmarad. Nobody ever knew why. And then he had seen all the women die. Sudden deaths, painless and unexplained. The doctors could only suggest that the female physiology, complex and delicate as it was, could not adapt even to the slight changes on Asmarad. But the doctors never really knew.

Their purpose on Asmarad defeated, the men planned to return to Earth. And then Brey had seen the atomic explosion that had wrecked the ship and the entire community, killing them all. All but Brey.

And no ship was due from Earth for a hundred years.

My own death, Brey thought dully, wiping sweat from his face, will be different. Not silent and painless and mercifully quick.

He heard screaming in the distance and his blood chilled. The ithycyphos were near. Perhaps they would approach his farm. He would be ready if they did. Feeling stronger now, he walked to the gate to enter the enclosure.

The gate was open.

At first shock caught his breath, but upon examining the gate, he saw the latch had broken. He looked sharply into the enclosure for his six ayala. He counted only five. One had wandered off. No—there, far inside the enclosure, two intermediate-sized ayala, fissioned from the body of the other adult, were flopping about in the tall grass.

He grunted with satisfaction. If the others had wandered off, it would be days before he could find them, or catch others. He whistled and the five adults shambled over on nimble fins. He knew he must slaughter some of them. He picked the three fattest.

What instinct led me over here? How could I possibly have known my meat supply might be lost?

Followed by the docile ayala, he hurried back to his farmhouse, herded them inside and closed the door. His bow and arrow would be a match for the ithycyphos, but some instinct told him he needed even more protection. From the adjacent woodshed he got tools and lengths of stout planking and spent half an hour carefully barricading the windows. I've never done that in years. Why now, when I'm going to die?

Finished nailing crisscross planking to the two windows, he tested the barricade thoroughly for strength. Satisfied, he slaughtered the ayala, cut up their meat and packed it in the brine vat. (Enough for a month. But why did I slaughter them now? And why three? Why not more? Or less?)

The screaming sounded again, still far across the valley. He knew he must lay in more food. He had meat now, but his stock of terna was low. There were five hours of twilight left, time enough to fill his bin.

He was busy for three hours digging terna, though three times more he was knocked flat by the terrible shocks, and the pains were with him all the time. His hands had begun to shake, and his eyes would blur and dim and he would have to rest a moment before he could see clearly again. He had begun to feel weaker. He knew the end was not far off.

As he worked, his mind wandered back again to his years with the Space Fleet, to the other planets he'd seen where Earthmen had been able to evolve. An old word, evolution, but in the New Galactic Age, a new meaning. On Earth it had taken a billion years for the human body to evolve into that of an intelligent biped. Now, on some of the more alien planets which imposed severe conditions on the preservation of human life, it took surprisingly less time to evolve in order to meet these conditions. An adaptability existed in the genes that had not been known before. Until it was discovered, colonization had been restricted to a handful of planets whose conditions were nearly identical to Earth's.

But the discovery of the faculty of adaptable evolution had opened a thousand worlds to Earthmen. It took centuries on some planets to evolve, slowly and painfully and with suitable protective measures, only decades on others. It made Brey proud. Proud that the human body was capable of so much. Proud that the inheritors of the galaxy were not the lilithae from the Ridge nor the degenerated mutations from the Hercules cluster, but Earthmen.

Like those Earthmen on Thor of Beta Centaurus whose lungs had evolved for breathing a methane atmosphere. Like those on Remus of Sirius whose lobster-like bodies had evolved to withstand temperatures which reached six hundred. Like those on Betelguese XXX, too far out from its sun for heat and light, whose eyes had atrophied over the generations and now were removed like appendices used to be removed on Earth, and whose perceptions had evolved to meet the new conditions. Or on Jpidr of the sun Deneb Algedi, where Earthmen's digestive systems had evolved to eating the metallic lichens adhering to rocks, the only native form of life. There were a billion Earthmen now on barren Jpidr.

And only one on Asmarad....

Why didn't we evolve before we died? But even if we could, it would have been too late. There were no women. Without a woman, his race must perish.

He finished putting up his supplies, and went back to the front porch to wait for the death that stalked him. He relit his pipe, his mind refreshed, the sense of urgency almost gone. But suddenly fires seared his body and he slumped back in his chair until the racking spasm passed.

Wings whirred past the porch and the screech of a trocoid beat at his ears. He watched the furry creature land at the base of a tree in front of his farmhouse. It waddled awkwardly toward a hole Brey had not noticed before, dragging in its creepers a length of floccose weed, its staple diet. The bird must have been boring out the hole the past several days. As Brey watched, the bird began to close the hole in the tree from inside, with chunks of bark and dirt and moss, cemented with secretion.

Now it was black night at last and the trocoid was for the moment silent inside its tree and Brey felt the wall of silence pressing in upon him.

Ansa, he thought dimly. If only we had died together....

New shocks erupted inside his body and a scream tore from his throat. A new urgency made him scramble inside the farmhouse where he just had time to close the door and slip planks into stays made for that purpose before he fell writhing to the floor.

There came a moment of peace between the shocks. I was thinking of Ansa when it struck. Ansa? My wife. Funny, I can't seem to think. Must be in a daze. I remember Ansa, all right. What was Ansa, anyhow? I know. A woman. They look like Earthmen. Bipeds. I think they have intellects. Must be non-human. Like the lilithae.

From the tree outside he heard the trocoid's muffled screeches. He knew it was the standard routine of the asexual bird for fissioning—when an old trocoid's instinct told it that it was about to die, it found a breeding place safe from the ithycyphos, supplied it with food, barricaded itself inside, and then fissioned into two nearly-grown, mindless trocoids. The food and the protection afforded by their parent would keep the trocoids alive till instinct took hold and they could break free into the world outside.

Brey forgot about the trocoid as his neck suddenly snapped and it became impossible to breathe, and he felt his body being rent asunder, as if something were trying to tear its way out of him.

And before he died, he had one bitter, final thought: I deserve to die. On Asmarad, we never evolved.

And after he died, the two naked humanoid creatures sprang to their feet to stare mindlessly at one another.