Easy to Be a God, page 16
“Henryan Darski?”
Hearing his name, mispronounced as always, he thought it was a deathbed vision, one of those he had heard about so many times during his service on numerous ships. He nodded, unable to utter a word. He heard footsteps; someone came up to him, and then another one. The steps were quiet, devoid of the distinctive clang of the armor.
“Man, you look like shit,” one of the newcomers said in an amused tone.
“And you stink like it, too,” his companion added.
Darski felt them grab him under his arms and pull toward the light. And I was so scared of the end, he thought, when he was seated on something hard. No longer blinded, he could see bright spots around him and blurry shadows moving among them. He closed his eyes to squeeze the tears out, and when he opened them again, he saw a woman’s face. She was quite ugly for an angel.
“I’m Commodore Ursulavinia Derrick. Welcome aboard the courier ship of the Admiralty,” she said.
Henryan could already see well enough to make out the outlines of objects and silhouettes of people in unmistakable uniforms. Everyone looked at him with a mixture of interest and disgust.
“The Admiralty?” he repeated the last word involuntarily. “I’ve been released?”
“Looks like it,” she said, grinning. “Something tells me we’ve arrived at the last minute.”
He felt someone’s hands under his armpits again. He was already conscious enough not to be in need of support. He was standing on his own, but still couldn’t believe Draccos had released him from his clutches. The long, hot bath, clean clothes, and a soft bunk helped him calm down, but not enough to definitely get rid of a deep-rooted fear, the fear that all this was a setup, that when he finally demonstrated his joy, the curtains would suddenly go down and he would be brutally returned to the reality of the prison. Whenever he was standing before the door, he had the impression that when he opened it he would see the warden and his henchmen, who would drag him back under the dome of the penal colony with mocking smiles, and throw him into solitary confinement for eternity.
Meanwhile, the hours passed and he was still onboard the courier ship, surrounded by astronauts, who—although keeping their distance—treated him like a human being. He ate a sumptuous meal with them, much tastier than the mush served him for the last three years, then another, only slightly more modest. He slept through the night, waking up many times, and listening with his heart pounding loudly for hateful metallic steps outside the door. He didn’t dare put out the light. He feared his heart would not stand another second of complete darkness.
The admirals didn’t confide their plans to couriers sent into space; he wasn’t, therefore, able to find out from the crew any details about his unexpected release. However, Ursulavinia gave him a headreader with a set of crystals, indicating that he should get familiar with the latest versions of the communication software. It was the only order regarding Henryan that Commodore Derrick received … except picking him up from the penal colony, of course.
The next morning, when he returned to his cabin after breakfast, he noticed a red light flashing on the comlink panel. Someone tried to reach him. He hesitated a moment, holding a finger over the display, but in the end his curiosity took over.
He regretted his decision the moment he saw the holographic face of Draccos.
“Don’t be too happy, seven two one,” the warden said through clenched teeth. “It’s just a furlough. You’ll come back to us, and then …”
Henryan turned off the comlink without a word.
TWENTY-TWO
THE XAN 4 SYSTEM, X-RAY SECTOR
09/03—09/05/2354
The basic training lasted three days. During that time Darski not only got familiar with his duties—that is, coordinating all the intra-system communications, mainly with the research outposts on the planet’s surface—but he also learned more about Aliens: the first Humankind encountered in the surveyed part of the Galaxy.
What he heard from the scientists surprised him to such an extent that he forgot his own problems for a while. Xan 4 was really a remarkable system. A binary star nursed three circumbinary planets in its orbit: a gas giant nine and a half astronomical units away, a scorched rocky globe orbiting less than seventy million clicks from the system’s barycenter, and a celestial body called Beta, circulating between the other two on the edge of the system’s ecosphere. Darski understood very little of the scientific gibberish explaining the uniqueness of the planetary system in which he found himself, but one fact got imprinted in his memory: Beta’s orbit was very unstable, and therefore every five hundred million years this planet, traveling away from the two stars, would leave the system’s ecosphere. This was, however, happening so slowly that the complete glaciation followed only after tens of millions of years of gradual global cooling. During the equally slow return to the ecosphere, temperature increased by tenths of a degree per millennium, and those remains of life that had survived the glacial period evolved, over time conquering the land and sea emerging from the permafrost.
If one could believe the recent study results, Beta had already gone through seven such eras of flourishing life and was now preparing for another departure from the ecosphere. Three or four million years that separated the planet from the beginning of the next Ice Age were, however, an unimaginably long period, especially from the human perspective.
Fortunately for plants and animals living on Beta, the glaciation process spread over eons. The local fauna and flora had time to adapt to the inexorably changing conditions, so some of the species managed to survive. There was of course no question of preserving the advanced life forms; nevertheless, each return of the planet to the system’s ecosphere released the spores, hidden deep within the ice, which started new evolutionary processes.
During his ten years of active service, Darski had visited twenty star systems. He was stationed at twenty-eight planets and four orbital stations. Besides, he spent almost thirty-six months in a helon mine located within the asteroid belt traversing unnamed regions of the inter-system void. On most of the visited “stones,” as the crews called planets in their jargon, more or less developed life forms awaited him. Sometimes very different from those that can be found in human-friendly places, where the sky is blue, and vegetation green. Darski had seen such a paradise only once, in a remote sector, when he was stationed onboard the battleship Lem as a senior expert in the communications section, and under Admiral Dustr visited the outer colonies belonging mainly to large corporations. Delta in the Rubicon System was said to be unique, but even there no intelligent life forms evolved. Many men, seeing this idyllic planet, wished for only one thing: to give up the uniform and get a mining job somewhere in the system. Henryan thought about it, too. Those were the good old days. Back then he didn’t know what it is like to drill a gravity-free shard of rock, circulating in the boundless void.
He’d spent most of his service time on red-hot or icebound planets that belonged to the fifth category, or lower, where the crown of creation were bacteria or lichens at best.
Here, things were different. Beta’s atmosphere, although as toxic to humans as the water, allowed for the evolution of two intelligent races. Both appeared in the last interglacial period, evolving from the remnants of an earlier era of flourishing life, or rather, from two eras. The scientists studying this world’s history suspected that blue-blooded (literally) Gurds were the descendants of the organisms one or even two cycles older than those which developed into primitive Suhurs. The reason for this hypothesis was that it was hard to find any—even genetic—similarity between these two unusual races.
Gurds had a cylindrical torso, thick black skin, four identical prehensile limbs, and a telescopic appendage that grew from the top of their body, whose spherical end was called by the human scientists “a sensory node.” The blue-blooded inhabitants of the continent called Gurdu’dihan had no eyes or nostrils, and the external stimuli were imbibed by them—this word was probably closest to the truth—in such a strange way, it was difficult to understand for a xenobiologist, let alone a layman.
These creatures communicated by means of acoustic waves generated in the subcutaneous organ in the front part of the torso. When the class instructor played the converted recording of their speech, Henryan winced, hearing a series of piercing modulated shrieks.
Gurds didn’t hunt. It was unthinkable for them to eat other living creatures. They fed on the sprouts of plants they cultivated on a large scale, but their digestive system didn’t resemble anything known on Earth.
When Darski saw clumsy Gurds for the first time, they reminded him of the mythical centaurs. He couldn’t say exactly why—their rounded bodies and symmetrically placed prehensile limbs didn’t resemble a cross between a man and the noble mount—but nevertheless that was his impression.
This race originated on the swampy plains of the larger of the two Beta continents. Bluebloods settled there twelve thousand local years ago. They referred to years as floodings—from periodic floods occurring at the end of each cold season.
The Gurds’ habits were as odd as their appearance. They didn’t know the concept of god, they didn’t have religions or rituals. It might seem that they didn’t understand the concept of the supernatural life. This didn’t change even after they’d been confronted with a developed system of beliefs of their primitive neighbors called Suhurs.
Gurds lived in herds, forming dense clusters of even tens of thousands of individuals, but unlike Suhurs, they weren’t divided into clans, or tribes. Each stranger who joined or just visited a community was treated on a par with locals, even though he could be coming from the opposite end of the continent larger than both Americas taken together. The basic social unit of Gurds was a family consisting of three adults and their offspring—for Gurds were organisms with three sexes. In order to reproduce, they gave ova and sperm, but the donors of the gametes, the counterparts of Earthian males (called seeders) and females (referred to as egglayers), needed to mate—not necessarily at the same time—with a third partner, or a fetuscarrier. It’s in its body that a fertilized ovum nested, and it carried the young throughout all of the thirteen standard months of pregnancy.
The offspring became self-sufficient very fast, which could indicate that in the distant past Gurds, like Earthian herbivorous animals, had been exposed to predation. Interestingly, when people began to observe Beta, they couldn’t find a predator anywhere in Gurdu’dihan that might be a threat to these—only seemingly defenseless—creatures. It wasn’t until the excavations had been made that the scientists found a compelling evidence that as recently as a few centuries earlier, the life of Bluebloods was nothing like the current idyll. However, no one was able to determine what could be the reason for the extinction of so many species of predators, especially those that prevailed on the greater continent for thousands, and in some cases, even millions of years. According to some scientists, study on Gurds’ behavior, and especially on their relationship with Suhurs, was supposed to shed new light on this mystery.
In any case, without natural enemies in recent times, Gurds started to build the foundations of civilization at an ever-increasing pace, and as soon as they reached the level of development of a medieval man and sufficiently mastered sailing the local troubled waters, they reached for the second continent, situated in the northern hemisphere of the planet. So began the conquest of the domain of the more primitive Suhurs.
This warlike race, with thick brown gore flowing in their “veins,” created their first communities seventy thousand years earlier than Gurds. Its members gained the title of the Warriors of the Bone, because the skeletons of hunted animals served them to manufacture ornaments, weapons, and even shacks in which the clans lived. Judging from the excavations, Suhurs had colonized their continent thousands of years before the first fire was kindled in Gurdu’dihan. In spite of that, they were currently behind their blue-blooded neighbors in every way. In their case, the evolution stopped centuries ago. If a Suhur from the ancient past could be transported into a modern clan’s seat, he would feel there at home. He might not even notice the difference.
The native inhabitants of Suhurta, despite their huge backwardness, did extremely well. They lived in harmony with nature, developing a belief system whose central characters were three gods. Kored and Thub represented both suns of the system—constantly fighting with each other, as cosmology of the Warriors of the Bone presented the conjunctions of the two stars, which merged together in the sky in an incredibly spectacular way. The history of the third deity, called Yabha, was even more interesting. According to the Warriors of the Bone, he was once the third sun, which in ancient times was defeated by the constantly fighting pair, and after scattering into the myriad debris, hung in the firmament in the form of cold stars. In the lecture on the beliefs, also another interesting difference between the two Beta civilizations was explained to Henryan. It concerned the measure of time. Gurds had a calendar that counted the actual years, or full revolutions of the planet around the sun, while Suhurs counted the conjunctions, which were also regular, but happened four times every three astronomical years.
Almost all aspects of the Suhurs’ culture revolved around fighting and killing. Even their units of weights and measures reflected their combative attitude to the world. When a Suhur wanted to describe the distance traveled during hunting, he counted it in bowshots or spear throws. When the clan collected the sagr seeds, they could gather a shield, a helmet, or a hubcap full of them, all of which were the parts of the armor that protected their bodies.
The Warriors of the Bone—incredibly strong, hardy, and ruthless—were natural born killers. What’s more, they lived to die in battle, and that was the main purpose of their existence, starting almost from a nestling. And although they seemed more humanoid than Gurds, they were nothing like people.
Warriors of the Bone didn’t know such concepts as compassion or love. They didn’t know what sex was, either, because nature hadn’t equipped them with sex organs. Despite several years of observation and research, the scientists failed to decipher the factors that made some individuals of this species become pregnant. After reaching maturity, a small part of the population formed a kind of fetal ventricles called “pelchavkas.” These had a form of bubbles growing out of the upper, mainly “back,” part of the body, at the point of contact of the external skeleton’s plates, though in some cases they could be more scattered all over the body. Four to seven nestlings hatched in a single brood.
Suhurs called the pregnant individuals a “densha.” Each densha was isolated and locked in a special pen in the middle of the settlement, where the nestlings remained until they became self-sufficient. Childbirth, if the ending of the bizarre pregnancy could be called such, occurred after less than four months of pregnancy. When the swollen pelchavkas began to burst, releasing sticky mucus, the clan’s priests carefully cut them open with bone blades. The individual freed from stigmatizing pelchavkas shed their remains, and within a few days returned to being a full-fledged warrior.
But sometimes nature played tricks and embryos in individual pelchavkas did not develop properly, or died, and thus, there was nothing to cut open. Nothing flaked off, either. One in twenty Suhurs became a densha, while a dried pelchavka occurred once in every few thousands of successful breedings. A Warrior of the Bone, upon whom this misfortune fell, became a pariah. Being a perpetual “female” meant the loss of prestige and a humiliating—albeit badly needed in the primitive community—function of a lifelong nurse for the other warriors’ nestlings. In any clan’s seat there could be only one densha. If a new one appeared, the old one was killed—as cruel tradition dictated—by fettering his limbs and leaving him in the killing pit.
The physiology of the Warriors of the Bone was also very interesting. They breathed through the membranes in the upper part of the body. They communicated through the membranes spread all over the body, which could—just like microphones used by people—send and receive almost every sound. Imitating animal sounds was as easy for these creatures as a conversation, which made them unrivaled hunters. With three eyes evenly distributed on the dome-shaped top of the body—and called “head” by some scientists—Suhurs could see all around them. Thus, the concepts such as “front” and “back” didn’t have much meaning for them. A Suhur could watch the whole area around him, and sneaking up to him in an open space would be a miracle. A fight against several opponents attacking from different directions wasn’t much of a challenge for a fit Warrior of the Bone. Numerous ball and socket joints allowed greater freedom of movement than in humans. The spheroidal equivalent of elbows and knees, of which Suhurs had twice as many as humans, bent equally well in both directions. If they’d known wrestling, a joint-locking technique would not be an effective tactic against them.
A speeding Suhur changed direction without turning back. He could also hit with equal precision both the opponent in front of him, and the one behind his “back.”
Two long arms, reaching below the second pair of knees, were equipped with eight claw-like fingers, one of which served as an opposable thumb. A third, and much shorter, upper limb grew from the place where people have a sternum and resembled rather a tentacle than a hand. Only because of it, and the hole leading to the digestive bladder (located in the top part of the body, but slightly below the eyes), it could be determined where the “front” of these beings might be.
The membranes used for breathing were situated between the eyes, spaced out—like the organs of sight—one hundred and twenty degrees from one another, except the largest of them was over the right arm and the other two in front of and behind the left shoulder joint. The Suhurs’ respiratory system differed from anything known on Earth so much that lecturers describing Beta’s natural environment to Henryan didn’t even try to explain the details, saying unanimously that such knowledge would be of no use to someone who was supposed to take care of a technical side of the project “Two Suns.” During the training, he was given only general information, and also advised that in case of a serious need, he could turn to the resources of the onboard library.
