Collected Short Fiction, page 740
“In fact, we should have killed every preman.”
Protest lit half the pillars, and Zhondra Zhey’s pale aura burned blue with indignation.
“Our father race?” That angered shout rang from the image of Kranthar, his sole surviving brother and his chief lieutenant in the war, his rival once for Cynthara, though she had long ago left them both. “Would you yourself repeat Eva’s blunder?”
“True, the premen were our fathers.” He let his nimbus lick a warning tongue at Kranthar. “But that was fifteen centuries ago. Today, they are a breed of miserable vermin—but somehow hatching those same monsters that Eva created to replace us.”
“Have you proof?”
“Proof enough.” Grief dulled his halo, and wrath streaked it with crimson. “My son is dead.”
Shaken, they listened.
“The legend has always been alive among them. The legend of an ultiman or multiman who would in time arise to restore all the greatness they imagined they had lost. I first heard of the myth soon after the war, but I was not concerned about it then—the premen had never trusted the Creators, never loved the trumen or the mumen, never respected me or given up the worship of their old imaginary gods, never stopped expecting to be rescued by their own half-divine messiahs.”
The storm around the peak had grown more savage. Driving snow blurred the star-maps overhead and veiled the transceiver columns.
“I did take precautions.” He raised his voice against a bitter gust that screeched through the pillars and moaned around his throne. “I set up an efficient Inquisition, instructed to seize every preman who displayed any doubt about my own divine supremacy. Over the centuries, tens of millions were burnt.”
“Too many, perhaps?” Kranthar snorted. “If the survivors don’t love you, that could be why.”
“Too few. No matter how many my inquisitors killed, the legend always found new believers. Six centuries ago, as most of you ought to recall, I proposed a logical solution.”
“I remember.” Cynthara’s nimbus flared green with accusation. “You wanted to kill them all.” She nodded at Kranthar. “We vetoed your scheme.”
“Because of our own obligations.” Old antagonisms flared in Kranthar’s aura. “The premen had been our allies. Without the millions of lives they spent, we might have lost the war. We can’t forget our promise—friendship forever.”
“A treaty with premen—” Belthar shrugged his contempt. “I might have ignored your sentimental quibbles, but my own trumen churchmen prayed for the premen, because they still formed most of our labor force and produced most of our food. Their immediate extermination would have resulted in severe economic dislocations.”
Kranthar grinned. “Is your friendship better than your enmity?”
“They never accepted me.” He swept the glints of irritation from his nimbus. “They clung to their own foolish faiths and folkways. Living in the myths of their lost past, they never found—never wanted—any place in my Thearchy. With no dignity left, no pride, they became worthless parasites. A dying race—”
“Perhaps you helped them die.”
“If help can kill.” Belthar shrugged. “We gave them reservations—lands to call their own. We gave them food and care. We tried to share our true culture with them. Every effort failed. They never forgot that they had once owned all the planet. The nearer they came to racial death, the more stubbornly they clung to the blasphemous notion that a new messiah would be born among them to overwhelm the gods and restore the splendor they imagined they had once possessed. It was my own unfortunate mortal son, serving as my Arch-Inquisitor, who found what seemed to be the perfect final solution for the preman problem. With my approval, he chartered Zhondra’s ship to relocate them on Andoranda Five—”
“I didn’t know!” Her aura blazed a brighter blue. “I wasn’t told about that planet. The ugliest world there is. It never evolved dryland life, and your monks failed to terraform it. Terran can’t increase there.”
“The beauty of it.” Belthar smiled reproof through scarlet sparks. “So Quelf persuaded me. His scheme gave us an ultimate practical solution of the preman question in a single generation, with no infraction of those precious treaty rights. But the plan has gone badly.”
He waited through another blast of blinding snow.
“That blasphemous myth of the ultiman was more than just a myth. It turns out now that Eva tricked us. The sleeping beings we found and destroyed in that forgotten copper mine were only decoys. Her actual Fourth Creation was more cleverly concealed.”
Hues of surprise and dismay colored the columns.
“In the genes of the premen!” His anger bellowed, wild as the wind. “Demoniac mutations, designed for our destruction! Lying unsuspected in the cells of that dying race for a thousand years. Quelf’s plan forced them out of hiding.
“He trapped two young demons, born on the last reservation. When he tried to burn them, their power was revealed. They murdered him—brutally! And somehow escaped.”
His nimbus dimmed until he shivered.
“They terrify me. They should terrify you. Because we had planned the burning with every precaution to make sure of them. The male had been drugged, disarmed, and isolated under heavy guard in a cell-many miles from the female, who was also drugged. They were to be burned simultaneously, without warning, with no chance for mutual aid.
“Yet somehow the male got out of his cell and reached the female—at the very instant she was to die. He killed Quelf with his own laser dagger. They both disappeared. The clone chief survived, but he can’t explain what happened or where they went. Except to suggest that they are actual demons, with transvolutionary powers.”
His aura flared against a blast of sleet.
“Demons they are. Eva’s Fourth Creation, in a guise of diabolical innocence. They look like ordinary premen, still only in their teens. A slim, tow-haired boy. A dark-haired girl—lovely enough, the inquisitors reported, to be a bride for me. Unless we find and burn them, they could kill us all.”
“Are you afraid of them?”
Zhondra Zhey had drawn back from him, her aura cold as her tone. Slashing at her with a tongue of crimson fire, he spoke to the rest with a fleeting smile of divine superiority.
“They were cunning enough to deceive Zhondra. She has coddled them since they were infants, and recently she has been begging my permission to find a kinder planet for them and their people. I’m commanding her to help us run them down.”
2.
He carried her off the windy pinnacle where they had arrived on Andoranda Five. Sliding down a treacherous slope, he caught his balance on a narrow blade of sand-worn stone. She shuddered in his arms.
“We’re okay, Bug,” he gasped. “When we find our people.”
“If—”
Her troubled whisper sank into a sigh, and she hung limp against him, her breath sour with the godsgrace drug. When the slippery trail grew wide enough, he bent to lay her down in the lee of a rocky knob and rose to get his breath.
He was suddenly weak and trembling, shaking with a delayed reaction. Somehow, he had won that desperate fight with Belthar’s son. Somehow, they had escaped the Inquisition forces closing in on Redrock castle—somehow jumping across or around the unimaginable gulfs outside of Earth’s space and time to reach this unkind asylum.
Elation, for a moment, had lifted him high. But the effort of that transvolutionary leap had somehow drained the latent energies that still he didn’t understand. He was suddenly shivering with the sweat of weakness, and his head ached where Quelf’s demonburner had grazed it.
He looked down at Buglet. Liquid midnight, her hair spilled over the boulder under her head. Half-closed, her yellow eyes saw nothing. Her gauzy bridal gown, like his own gray prison rag, was too thin for the whipping wind, and her fine skin was already blue with cold. Pity stabbed him.
He stooped to move her farther into the shelter of the rock and saw odd seams across it—crudely mortared joints. Only then did he see that the little knob was artificial, built of rough black lava masses piled up to form circular walls and a crowning dome. The shape of it chilled him.
A chapel of Thar!
His last spark of triumph died, as if the vengeful gods had already overtaken them. Blind panic urged him to pick Buglet up and run. Fighting that, he walked around to the doorway and peered uneasily inside.
All he found was a dark little cave, sifted with years of wind-drifted dust. The altar was only a granite block, roughly squared. There was no transceiver for any actual divine contact—he tried to cheer himself that Belthar’s aura certainly couldn’t reach into this remote universe. The chapel, surely, was merely symbolic.
He caught a dull metal glint beyond the altar and read a black-lettered legend on a tarnished slab, beneath the triple triangle of the Thearchy: ERECTED TO THE WISDOM OF BELTHAR IN THE YEAR 903 OF HIS GLORY BY THE HOLY ORDER OF POLARIS The date was almost a century ago. The chapel must have been the first project of the Polarian monks when they landed to reclaim the planet for Terran life. The task had been too much for them, and he recoiled now from the piercing chill in that dusty chamber as if it had been their tomb.
“Davey—” Buglet was whimpering his name. “I’m so cold—”
“I’ll look for help,” he told her. “I’ll find somebody.”
“Nobody—” Her teeth were chattering. “Nobody—”
He left her lying there and limped down toward the terraforming station the monks had built. The rocky trail hurt his bare feet, and his body felt too heavy. Breathing hard, he began to recall what he had read in truman books about Andoranda Five.
Its gravity was a quarter stronger than Earth’s. For want of land plants, its air was poor in oxygen. Its day was hardly a third of Earth’s, but the year was nine times as long. Its orbit was highly eccentric, causing seasons the monks had found too severe for any sort of dryland life. When their relief ship came back, they had left it gladly.
No ship would ever come to take the preman exiles to any better world, but he groped for crumbs of hope. Chilled as he felt, the season must still be summer. Or only spring, perhaps, with several years of Terran time before the killing winter. Time enough, with luck, for him and Buglet to discover and control their latent powers—if they could live to find help.
But that must come soon. His feet were already nearly too numb to feel the knife-sharp rocks, and his whole body shook with cold. He couldn’t carry Buglet much farther, or keep moving long.
From a bend in the trail, he could see the station, far below and oddly unchanged from the way it had looked on truman wallscreens—it still matched the mental image that had somehow brought them here. The broken circle of metal huts, yellow dots against dust-reddened snow. The narrow landing strip the monks had cut into the foot of the ridge. The rock-free streaks they had cleared for roads.
But where were the premen?
Dread stabbed him, a cold steel blade. Zhondra Zhey’s transvolutionary ship should have left them here months ago, but the long drifts across the strip showed no skidmarks from any landing shuttle. Nothing had tracked the snow on the roads. Nothing moved anywhere.
Could she have landed them somewhere else? Looking away toward the wild horizon, he saw the vast mud-yellowed river, rafted here and there with dirty ice, foaming against treeless banks, winding off into dim infinity. Saw the endless mud-flats its floods had left, unmarked by anything. Saw the mountain ranges lifting far beyond it, dark and dead, veiled in yellow dust.
For a moment he stood there frozen, chilled to the bone with a sense of death. He longed to hear a bird call, to catch a flower scent, to see a hint of green anywhere. But, save for its strange seas, this world had never lived. The monks had failed to fit it for any kind of Terran life, and he saw no hint of the premen anywhere.
When he tried to move, that spell of death held on, promising to blunt the wind’s cruel bite, to ease all his fears and end the tension of trouble. Clinging grimly to life, he shook himself free and climbed back to Buglet. She was sitting up against the chapel wall, and her trustful smile warmed him.
“Take me, Davey.” Her voice was slow and sleepy, muffled with the drug. “I’m so cold, Davey.” She raised her blue bare arms, like a frightened child. “Take me to our people.”
“I can’t—” His voice broke, because he hated to hurt her. “—can’t find anybody.” He caught her cold hands. “And I don’t know anywhere to go. Getting us here was an accident, really. I don’t know how to make it happen again.”
“Please!” she begged. “My head aches so.”
“The drug,” he told her. “But you must walk, if you can. We must get to the station. To some kind of shelter.”
“Try—” she breathed. “Let me try.”
He pulled, and she came trembling to her feet. Leaning on him, moaning when the rocks were sharp, she stumbled with him down the trail. Beyond the shelter of the chapel, bitter gusts set them both to shivering again. When they came to the bend above the station, she sank back against him.
“Sorry!” she sobbed. “Too cold. Too far. Too much snow.” She clung to him, wet eyes pleading. “Can’t you—can’t you just jump us there? The way you did from Redrock?”
“Don’t know how.” He hugged her against him, trying to warm her. “I still don’t understand. But I think I used something up, to get us here. It will come back—I hope! But now we have to walk.”
“Walk,” she echoed drowsily. “If we can—”
They limped on down.
“Davey!” She stopped at another turning of the trail, breathless with delight. “A skimmer!”
Its weathered metal nearly the color of the dust-streaked snow, it lay just off the end of the strip. Hope soaring, they struggled on until he could see the long drift behind it and the Polarian bear outlined on the uptilted tail in faded blue paint.
“Only a wreck.” He felt sick. “The monks crashed it and left it.”
“But what’s that? That yellow thing?”
Blue hand shaking, she pointed at a narrow yellow pod he hadn’t seen, lying in a wind-blown hollow nearer the strip.
“Survival gear!” He stared, hardly daring to believe. “The monks at Redrock showed me a pod like that on one of their skimmers. Things the pilot might need if he had to eject.”
He floundered to it. Emergency only! The words ran along a pointing arrow. Open here. His fingers were only aching hooks, too stiff to catch the red plastic lever, but at last he got it with his teeth. The pod snapped open.
Inside, it smelled like the incense the monks had burned in the chapel of Thar. There were little silver-wrapped ration bricks—the fat dean had let him taste them. There was a coil of rope, a signal lantern, a chemical stove. There were two tight packs that he hoped would be clothing.
Buglet had staggered after him. He went back to help her, and they crouched together in the hollow, warming their hands over the tiny stove. When at last they could open the packs, they found yellow coveralls, complete with hoods and boots and gloves.
“Is it—real?” He stared at her across the precious gear, struck with a pang of disbelief. “Why would the monks leave all this for us?”
“Maybe they were killed.” Frozen for a moment, she turned away from the wreck and tried to smile at him. “Anyhow, we’re very lucky. Now we can stay alive.”
The abrupt night fell while they were squirming into the survival suits. Lying huddled together in the snow hollow, they grew slowly warm enough to sleep. How long they slept, he never knew. Perhaps through two or three of the planet’s fleeting days.
Buglet woke him once, crying his name. When he snapped the lantern on, she was sitting up, staring out across the snow, eyes wide with terror.
“Just a dream,” she whispered. “A dreadful dream!”
He took her in his arms. She clung to him, trembling, but she wouldn’t say what she had dreamed. At last she went to sleep again. He sat watching, wondering what had terrified her, until at last the sky turned to a dusky orange-yellow.
There was no sun. Perhaps there were clouds that hid it, above the wind-blown dust. Used to reading time and direction in the clear skies of Redrock, he felt lost and bewildered.
Trying to show more cheer than he could feel, he started the stove again and melted snow to make a hot drink from a ration cube, whistling as he worked. Buglet started awake, blinking at the snow and the wreck and the bare peak behind them as if terrified again.
“Davey!” She clutched at him desperately, but in a moment she relaxed, smiling uncertainly. “I thought—but I guess we’re okay now.”
“You dreamed again?”
“Forget it. Let’s look for our people.”
The reek of godsgrace gone from her breath, she seemed almost herself again, nearly too lively, as they packed their gear and tramped on across the ice toward the clustered huts.
In hearing range, they stopped to listen. She called out, her voice tight and high. All he heard in answer was the dry wind-whine from the huts. Long drifts lay among them, dusty crusts unbroken.
“Our people—” She turned to stare at him, eyes haunted. “Why aren’t they here?”
He had no reply.
Crunching through old snow, they explored the station. The huts had been left unlocked and empty, though one with windows broken was drifted deep with snow. Bedding and clothing had been taken from the dormitory. Food was gone from the kitchen, equipment from the labs, everything from the supply room.
In the lab section, they read the story of the station. Dead plants in the greenhouses, dried to brown sticks. Brown little mummies in the animal cages. Staring at them, Buglet pressed close against him.
“We’re very lucky, Davey!” she whispered. “Without the pod, that’s what we would be.”
The headquarters hut had been marked with a metal plate that carried Belthar’s triple triangle and the blue Polarian bear. The lower floor was empty, but they found a built-in desk in the glass-walled cupola that had been a weather station, faded charts still taped to its top.
