Free The Caterpillar's Question by Piers Anthony and Philip José Farmer Page B

himself! He was talking like a thug from a grade F movie. But he didn't have time to figure out how to act like a tormented perfectionist from a grade A film.

    The man told him, somewhat awkwardly. It wasn't that he didn't know it, but that he could not believe that Jack didn't, so he kept skipping over elements that he assumed Jack already understood. In the course of this Jack picked up some background about the empire and the planet they were on.

    It seemed that there were several components of the empire. It wasn't exactly an empire, but whatever it was was too complicated for Jack to assimilate at the moment, so he used the term as mental shorthand. It included so many stellar systems that there was no reliable survey listing them all. Human beings were on several of its planets, not because they were native but because they had been imported as labor from overpopulated Earth, which didn't even miss them. The alien rulers were called the Gaol, as it were the gaolers of the empire. They did not care what the human laborers did, as long as they did their jobs; they were allowed to have their own families and entertainments. One of the planets they worked on was this one, where the dominant native species was what Jack thought of as the honkers. The empire was governed by completely alien creatures who had no biological and little intellectual association with human beings, but whose technological power was such that no known force could oppose it.

    Except the Imago. Therefore it was to the Gaol's interest to nullify the Imago. The Imago seemed to be another type of alien entity, possessing no body of its own, other than what for want of a better term was a spirit. It seemed to be singular, though perhaps it was that only one of its kind chose to interact with solid creatures. When it did, it manifested only by the enhancement of the powers of that person. Whether it entered other than human hosts was unknown, but probably it did, because sometimes it skipped a generation of human beings, only to reappear seemingly randomly. It seemed to associate with this honker planet, where spirits had more force than they did elsewhere.

    But when it entered a person, it took time to manifest. At first it was the Larva, largely quiescent, inhabiting the person from conception into childhood. That stage seemed to last for about seven years, until the child was six, and the spirit could not be detected. Then it metamorphosed into the Chrysalis. The child did not change physically, but now the symbiotic entity manifested. The child developed mental or emotional rapport with other life, including animals and plants, and there was a faint mental aura that sophisticated sensors could detect. After another seven years it metamorphosed to its adult stage, whose nature no one knew except the Gaol who governed the empire. It was conjectured that the rapport with other forms of life expanded into full-scale telepathy and the power to modify the emotions of others. If so, it meant the Imago could take over even the minds of the Gaol and make them do its will. That would give it the capacity to rule or to destroy the empire-- even if it was based in the body of a blind human girl.

    "Then why don't you just kill it?" Jack demanded. "So it can't mess with your alien masters?" He still hated to talk this way, as if he didn't care about Tappy. His feeling for her was a strange and wonderful thing, not exactly love and not exactly apart from love. Already he recognized the truth of what the man was telling him: Tappy related to other life, and he felt that relation through his mind and heart. He was beginning to understand why he had made love with her, as the Chrysalis of her nature touched him. If this was only the suggestion of her mature power, what would be its full expression?

    The man explained: The Imago could not be killed. If its host was destroyed, it simply sought a new host. Then, fourteen years later, the threat to the empire returned.