Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  “Right,” Methuen acknowledged. “I’ll do it with an inoffensive arm-touch or two.”

  Quarfar brought his spear with him; they had seen him shatter it, but now somehow it was whole; it would never leave him, even in bed.

  They steered Quarfar into a skimmercab, told the cab where to go and settled back studying the mighty humanoid while he peered about at the remarkable sights of Manhattan. Almost no communication was attempted; even a stab at it would require the clumsy flake-playback procedure for voice-frequency correction. Zorbin made one attempt with a monosyllable: pointing to the top of Quarfar’s head, he said, “Tall”; raising his hand high above the cab-floor, he repeated, “Tall”; then, pointing to a lofty building, he reiterated, “Tall.” Having studied the skyscraper, Quarfar turned back to Zorbin. Pointing at the scalp of the lieutenant, whose height was below average at 170 centimeters, he profundoed “Meeko.” (That would be the approximate phonetic of what they heard.) Holding his hand close to cab-floor, “Meeko”; pointing to a two-story building, “Meeko.”

  Semi-dazed, Zorbin turned to Methuen—who repressed a smile as he commented, “You know, I think meeko means short”

  “In fact,” Zorbin uttered, “ancient Tellene for small was mikros.”

  At dinner in the fifth-story three-bedroom apartment, the two officers ate silently, feeling excluded, watching Dorita and Quarfar engaging each other in animated mind-chitchat. The nose of Methuen, in particular, was disjointed; his intimacy with Dorita had been associated with her entree to this alien who now monopolized her, although Methuen was chairman of the alien’s committee. Methuen knew now that for sure he was in love, but accurately he felt used.

  After a quarter-hour of it, the new captain found an official excuse to intervene. “Dorita, how about flaking translations of some of this? We’re making no progress with this language.” She relayed the request to Quarfar; looking surprised, the alien mind-responded. Dorita explained to Methuen, “He says that would only slow his own progress with us. Cheer up, Captain, I’ll give you a full report later. I have perfect telepathic memory.” And again Dorita and the alien were off.

  Giving up for now, the officers watched. And they noticed that as Quarfar grew more and more animated, Dorita grew more and more disconcerted. Presently the alien leaped erect, pulled Dorita out of her chair, and drew her into the kitchenette, where he pointed at one gadget after another; and there was conversation over each gadget, disturbed on the part of Dorita, exuberant on the part of Quarfar. At length she brought him back to the table, and things calmed for a bit.

  Over wine, though, Quarfar went into a brood, during which Dorita and Methuen and Zorbin mutely consulted each other. At length Methuen said, “See if you can get him to bed, Dorita, and then let’s talk out here.”

  She consulted the alien; he nodded absently. She refilled the alien’s wineglass and, carrying it, conducted him to his bedroom. Inside, Quarfar examined the bed, sat on it and bounced to test the springiness, shed all his clothing and reached for the wine. She surrendered it and waited, wondering what this demigod would do. Quarfar drained the glass, leaped raw into bed, drew up the sheet, turned on his side away from Dorita, embraced his spear, went to sleep.

  Batwing Narfar cruised the new exciting city by night. Presently he sensed a lone lorn female readiness. Following the mindscent downward on a long gradient, he paused where the scent was highest: at a seventh-story window in an apartment house. He window-peered; it was a bedroom, and a woman tossed in the bed, and the woman was no longer young but her need was definitive. Unfortunately, she was one of the funny people; on the other hand, Narfar had seen only funny people on this planet, and ultimately a hungry woman was a hungry woman.

  He proceeded according to instinctual techniques, projecting through the glassoid window a sexual summons blended with a suggestion that the woman was asleep and dreaming. She somnambulated out of bed, came to the window, saw the grinning Neanderthal face and the batwings, murmured, “O my god,” opened the window. He snatched her to him and flew aloft with her. Once with him nearly did her in; and when he redeposited her in the bed, she smiled contentedly with closed eyes and went into real sleep.

  Self-satisfied but not yet sated, Narfar lazily cruised on, looking for another mindscent: this city was challenging. The next two scents, however, he had to pass up after examining the situations: one was a young girl yearning for a first lover; another was the wife of a traveling salesman, a wife yearning specifically for her husband. These were tabu areas for Narfar; and even though it was he who had established the tabus, they governed him nevertheless—or, perhaps, all the more. And there must surely be further tabu-free clients….

  Sure enough, before the night was out, he had found and satisfied five more true frustrates, always under the guise of a dreaming. Dawn approached; Narfar found a lofty shelter, hung himself upside-down by his knees and fell asleep invisible.

  Six had been consoled supemally, and guiltlessly, because for them it had been only a marvelous and uncontrollable dreaming. None had been hurt, their species being reproductively nonviable with Narfar. Nothing would be reported. Narfar was almost content here.

  “What I’m going to report,” began Dorita, curling her legs on the sofa, “you aren’t going to believe. Lieutenant Zorbin, I need a drink, a long one; the makings are in the kitchenette; Scotch and water, half and half.” Methuen requested the same, and Zorbin departed for bartending.

  Methuen complained, “But Dorita, we haven’t advanced a single step toward language interpretation—”

  “Be calm,” she counseled. “I’ll put in several hours on interpretative flakes tomorrow morning. I can talk with Quarfar now, in a limited way, but the mindstuff still is easier.”

  “All right. Tell me what I won’t believe.”

  “The batwing Neanderthal is named Narfar. He is Quarfar’s brother. And Narfar is king of a planet.”

  “No!” Might it be the 546 planet? Was Nafar indeed winged Lucifer?

  Zorbin said, returning with drinks, “You mean, Narfar was king of a planet. About five hundred centuries ago. I doubt that he’s king any longer.”

  ‘Touché, Lieutenant!”

  “Please call me Saul,” Zorbin urged.

  “And lay off that Captain stuff off duty,” Methuen added. “Here in our apartment, I’m just B.J., remember?”

  Dorita shot: “Stands for what?”

  Glancing at Zorbin who would know he was lying, Methuen answered blandly: “My parents christened me B.J. to let me match my own names to the initials. I never bothered. Let’s get to business. Apparently Quarfar was also on that planet, since they got caught by the comet together. How about that?”

  She frowned. “Quarfar was vague about that; I don’t think he’s ready to answer the question. But he was there, all right, and he wants to go back.”

  “What planet? What star?”

  “I asked him about that, but I don’t know how we can identify either. He tried to give me a few guidelines—want to get into that now?”

  “Absolutely!” Methuen affirmed. Zorbin nodded.

  “Well, here, I don’t know much about astronomy, but he tried to specify some stars in the planet’s neighborhood; and I’ll just have to tell you what he told me, if it makes any sense to you. The planet is called Dora, and it is the third planet out from its sun—”

  Zorbin inserted: “How many planets altogether?”

  “Well, I’m afraid we didn’t get into other planets. Anyhow, the sun is a blue-white star. Quarfar mentioned some dominant element in it; his word meant nothing, but I got a mental sense of an atom having two electrons. I was lousy at chemistry—”

  “Helium!” Zorbin snapped. “Blue-white, okay; you’re sure of this color-meaning?”

  “I sensed visually the color he had in mind. It was our blue-white.”

  “How large a star? Did he say?”

  “He said it was bigger than most stars, but not the biggest he knew. He thought it mig
ht be a lot bigger and hotter than our sun, but he couldn’t tell for sure, because he didn’t know how far out we were from ours.”

  The officers exchanged long looks. Methuen commented: ‘Type B0, helium dominant, pretty damn big, pretty damn hot. How many are there like it, Saul?”

  “About eleventy-seven million. But it’s a start. Go on, Dorita.”

  “Well, I got thinking about our constellations, and I asked him about Dora’s constellations. He said that in Dora folklore, the most important one looked like a giant mizdorf— that’s the word I got, mizdorf—flung headlong out of the sky by a demon and falling upon their planet while the demon watched on high. I know that sounds pretty weird, but that’s what he—”

  Methuen prodded: “What’s a mizdorf?”

  “That’s like the other creature in the comet.”

  “Like that batwing Neanderthal? Like—Narfar?”

  “That was Quarfar’s picture.”

  “Did you ask Quarfar what he thought might have happened to Narfar—here on Erth, I mean?”

  Dorita was chagrined. “Sorry about that, boss.”

  Zorbin urged, “Let’s stay with the constellation. Dorita, is there any chance that you could draw it for us?”

  While she meditated, Zorbin went to the desk and found paper and stylus which he handed to her with a book-backing. Hesitantly she drew a picture; labels were added later as she discussed it.

  The men mused over it Zorbin muttered, “Yes, I can see how it does resemble a down-plunging mizdorf with a bright demon overhead. B.J., do you know any space-place where some constellation looks like that?”

  Methuen shook his head in slow negation, remarking, “However, Saul, remember that the identification of constellations is a traditional thing in any culture on any planet If you and I could shake off our own traditional identifications, it’s possible that we might be able to make up this sort of diagram out of stars in our own Erth-sky.”

  “Question of gestalt?”

  “Exactly. Dorita, did Quarfar give you any details about the stars in this mizdorf constellation?”

  She closed eyes, concentrating. Eyes open, she began to lecture, diagram-pointing. “He said that the brightest one as seen from Dora was right there, it is the demon who flung down the mizdorf; it’s another blue-white star even bigger and hotter than the Dora-sun. The next-brightest is right there, in the right wing of the mizdorf when you look at him from the back, another blue-white but not nearly as big or as hot as the Dora-sun—”

  “Great,” Zorbin growled. “So far, three B-type stars, counting their sun. Unique identification.”

  “Wait,” Methuen urged. “Dorita, concentrate—what was the next-brightest—did you get that far with it?”

  She nodded. “Forgetting the Dora-sun, the third-brightest is right there, the left knee of the mizdorf, another blue-white about as hot as their sun. The fourth is right there, just below the knee of the same leg, blue-white again, about like their sun. The fifth is another one like their sun, there, the left foot. How am I doing?”

  “Fine, I guess,” grated Zorbin.

  “Stay at it,” urged Methuen, proud of her; you could not call this a hot trail because of the plethora of B-type stars, but my god, this girl was marvelous… .

  Dorita thrust ahead, lost in her detail memory. “The sixth-brightest from Dora is there, the head of the mizdorf. That one is different, its color is orange-red—hey, so was Narfar’s hair! That’s the coolest of all the stars in the mizdorf,’ if you can call a star cool; its major chemical component has twenty-two electrons—”

  Zorbin barked: “Type M! Titanium! Finally, a different kind of star!”

  Methuen murmured, “Like Betelgeuse—”

  “And,” amended Zorbin, “like at least eleventy-seven other named stars ranging from Antares to Yed Prior. Dorita, do you remember any others?”

  “Quarfar mentioned three more. The seventh-brightest star is another blue-white, again like their sun, here in the right wing. The eighth is the hottest blue-white of all, here in the left wing. The ninth again is different, yellow-white, hotter than the orange-red head but cooler than all the others: this one, the right knee. In Quarfar’s mind I saw other stars in the pattern, and I put some of them in this drawing; but the nine I named are the brightest as seen from Dora.”

  The officers looked at each other—this kept happening. Methuen remarked: “Legs, wings, but no arms.”

  Zorbin shook his head, commenting, “Probably no problem, folklore does have a way of simplifying star patterns. Incidentally, Quarfar’s grasp of science must be fairly sophisticated if he was able to identify dominant elements in the star-spectra.”-

  Dorita added, “He also mentioned three nebulae.”

  “Nebulae?” Zorbin shot. “In that constellation? He knew they were nebulae?”

  “Nebulae is my word; he called them star-like clouds which were not stars. Two here in the right wing between the second and seventh brightest stars, and a third here in the left wing beyond the eighth-brightest star.”

  “How do the nebulae rank with the stars in magnitude as seen from Dora?”

  “He said one of the pair in the right wing was bright and beautiful.”

  Methuen arose to refresh his drink, not thinking about his companions. When he returned, he met Zorbin going in for a refresher; Dorita sat nursing her drink and some thought. Methuen gazed upon her: she was a tiny, appealing, petulant Dresden doll. Abruptly he comprehended that his love for her was an urge for fatherly possession sharpened by a sexual memory. This he would have to sort out….

  He sat, forcing his mind back to the problem of the comet’s origin. “Dorita—did Quarfar give you any indication what quarter of the Dora-sky the constellation occupies?”

  . She frowned prettily, staring past him. “Yes, but this is hard for me to translate. He told me that the best place and time to see the mizdorf constellation is in the heart of the jungle at midnight when the orange-red head of the mizdorf is right at the top of the sky where the sun is at noon. Does that help you any?”

  Zorbin mused, “That would have to be the date when Dora is precisely between its sun and the mizdorf. It just might mean that their celestial equator passes through the orange-red star.”

  “What’s a celestial equator?”

  “I can only tell you how we establish ours, here on Erth. We take the plane of Erth’s equator and imaginatively expand it into infinity, and we call that the celestial equator. We use that as a basis for plotting star coordinates.”

  “Want to give me a for-instance?”

  “I’ll give you a for-general. Across the equator plane from Erth we extend an imaginary line in the direction of an arbitrary point in the constellation Pisces, and we call that line east, and from it we go around the equatorial circle to plot the directions of stars—”

  “Permanent directions?”

  “Permanent within limits.”

  ‘The world turns, the sky does not?”

  “The sky does turn, but not fast enough for us to notice during centuries; and the stars within a couple of thousand light-years from Erth hardly change their relative positions during many thousands of years. Now: from Pisces or east, we mark off that celestial equator into three hundred sixty degrees like any circle; but for convenience, we designate each segment of fifteen degrees as one hour on a twenty-four-hour clock, with east being zero hours. This clock-hour measurement around the equator is called the Right Ascension of a star. Thus one o’clock Right Ascension is fifteen degrees clockwise from east, two o’clock is thirty degrees, and so on.”

  “So twelve o’clock Right Ascension is celestial west?”

  “You can say that, but forget about north and south: they’re up and down, it would only mix you up.”

  Dorita nodded. “Then I understand Quarfar’s mind-picture, partly. He didn’t use clock-hours, but I get it that you might say, the head is at zero o’clock relative to Dora, and the body along with the overhead demon sp
reads maybe to 0300. But that only handles the horizontal spread; how about the up-and-down stuff?”

  “Glad you noticed that, Dorita. Well, for up and down, we take another celestial circle at right angles to the equator, and we mark it off in degrees, and we don’t use hours. That’s called Declination. So if you know the Right Ascension in hours and the Declination in degrees, you can plot any star on a map.”

  “Just like Erth geography? Right’ Ascension is longitude, Declination is latitude?”

  “You’re a quick read!”

  “Well,” she sighed, “I can’t help you with the declinations. Have I helped you at all?”

  “Not much,” Methuen ruminated, “if you mean that these data might help us find Dora. You see, Dorita, Quarfar’s conventions may be entirely different; he may not use Dora’s planetary equator as a celestial equator, although his remark about jungle-heart suggests that; and the axis of Dora may not even be tipped the same way as Erth’s. Did he say anything about their seasons?”

  “He said the concept of season does not apply to Dora. There it is always warm in the central latitudes and cold at the poles and moderate in between. No changes.”

  “He did use the idea of poles?”

  “Yes, I’m pretty sure.”

  Zorbin interjected, “Then evidently Dora’s axis isn’t tipped like ours, it is tangent to their sun-surface; their sunrays always come in directly at the equator and become more oblique northward and southward until the angles near the poles are most acute. So no seasons.”

  “On the other hand,” Methuen pointed out, “Quarfar does have the concept of season, since he denied it for Dora. Which may mean that he came to Dora from some other planet which does have seasons. Well, Dorita, you’ve been most helpful, but we’re keeping you out of your sofa-bed.”