by Emil Petaja
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The Saga of Lost Earths [Cosmic Kalevala #1]
by Emil Petaja
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Science Fiction
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Renaissance
www.renebooks.com
Copyright ©1966 Emil Petaja
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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THE COSMIC KALEVALA
Book One
THE SAGA OF LOST EARTHS
By
EMIL PETAJA
A Renaissance E Books publication
ISBN 1-58873-247-9
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1966 by Emil Petaja
Reprinted courtesy of the Ackerman Agency
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.
For information contact:
[email protected]
PageTurner Editions
Futures-Past Science Fiction
* * *
DEDICATED TO
HANNA,
My mother
Who loved the Old Songs,
who remembered ...
* * *
PART ONE
OF LOST EARTHS
“O thou most unhappy Iron,
Wretched Iron, slag most worthless,
Steel thou art of evil witchcraft,
Thou hast been for naught developed,
But to turn to evil courses,
In the greatness of thy power."
Kalevala: Runo IX
* * *
CHAPTER I
JIMMY TORE the wrappings off his birthday present with shining eyes. “Wow!"
Inside was an atom-cannon like the old real ones of the Third Great War. It was pressed out of a new plas-metal alloy, and Psych-Head had approved it-for six year olds. Psych-Head reluctantly decided that such toys might relieve latent wisps of antagonistic behavior in children; later, in adolescence, these regrettable symptoms would be removed completely by stringent mental training.
“It shoots real toy bullets!” Jimmy bragged, pointing at the puff-light ammo ready in the fire-tube. Mommy and Daddy watched and smiled to cap his pleasure.
“Who'll I shoot first?” Jimmy's eyes roved the small apartment gleefully. “Oh! I know! I'll shoot Daddy!"
Daddy grinned while Jimmy moved the gun into position.
“Ready ... aim..."
Jimmy put his chubby forefinger on the release.
“Fire!"
Jimmy pushed the release. Daddy dropped dead.
* * * *
“How are you, Carl?"
Carl said; “Fine,” but his dour look of boredom didn't match. He looked up from his deck of blinking computer lights and forced a smile; he tried not to let his wince of active loathing for the row upon row of similar computers show too much. There were acres of them on this level alone. Laura was standing there, holding out his morning's work.
Laura wore the usual brown uniform, was a little bottom heavy (the norm these days) and her smile had wistful yearning in it. She lingered, as she usually did, for an extra five minutes, at Carl's deck.
Her gray eyes took in Carl's six-foot-four of solid muscle—kept that way defiantly from his triple stints in the Levers gym, his close-cut wheat-blonde hair, the somber good humor in his handsome well-planed face, and his unusually penetrating blue eyes under brows darker than the crewcut. Laura smiled her brave best, openly.
“There's a swell new combo on the Level tri-D Vid tonight,” she hinted.
“Sorry. I've got this book."
“Book!"
Laura managed not to sound shocked. No wonder they said bad things about Carl Lempi. He read books. Not texts, but wild fiction about fighting and whatnot. Her best girl friends kept warning Laura: “So he is big and dreamy-built, has that breathtaking viking look, but wow—I'd sure like to get a gander at his Psych-complex record! They say he's had seventeen jobs in less than three years, not to even mention long stints with half a dozen different adjustment analysts. His personal Psych must have the patience of a saint!"
Laura made their hands touch when she handed him his morning's work. Carl grinned.
“Some other time?"
Laura nodded, hoping not too eagerly. So the other girls made remarks. So let them. Carl hadn't come to their apartments for home cooking.
“Sunday for sure?” she breathed. “I've got potatoes, real ones; don't ask me how. And steak-from cows.” She shivered a little over this one. How anybody in this day and age could stand to eat-
“Sure, Laura,” Carl nodded. “Around fifteen o'clock?"
He went to work on his deck, sighing as the girl moved on about her tapes dissemination. What was wrong with him, damn it? Laura was an okay gal. Some of her curves were in the wrong places, but she was a dandy cook. Knocked herself out, broke herself buying organic foods just for Carl, when everybody knew the edibles World-Fed concocted in the oceanic plankton labs were far more wholesome, containing exactly what each segment of the great antiseptically-clean Cities needed in order to fulfill its designated function.
Yeah, he would probably marry Laura. Why not? At least she put up with him when he sounded off, during their Sunday get-togethers in her cubicle. She didn't understand what he was talking about, half the time. Maybe Carl didn't, himself.
Why should anybody gripe the way he did? Why should he want things that were dead and buried and gone? That old festering world had been full of hate and suspicion and war. It had taken the Psychs to clean it up, the only way it could be cleaned up, from inside.
Inside people's mind. Right along with exactly the right kind of food (you are what you eat), and just the correct balance of worktime and playtime.
The cities were marvels of ingenuity, with their billions of cubicle-apartments, central food complexes and work complexes and play complexes. Everything meticulously psyched to prevent war from starting, the way it almost had that fourth time, by coding every human being mentally, classifying, retraining whenever necessary. Everything was so damned well adjusted. Everybody's mind was kept on an even keel.
Except Carl Lempi's.
God knows he tried. He tried hard. He listened to the analysts when they examined him, each time he goofed up a new job, agreed with them as anybody must that the wicked old days of smoldering desperation people had endured—desperation which all too frequently burst out in war and suicide—was inferior in every way to the new welfare Psych-Head controlled world. Medical advances kept people living longer, and the planet was overpopulated, of course, so births bad to be rigidly controlled; colonization of other planets was still enormously expensive; but when the earth's wealth and brainpower could be expended constructively instead of on pointless internal quarreling, there was no end to what mankind might achieve!
That was the theory. Deep inside of Carl rankled the notion that there was something wrong with such a theory. It left no room for the to-hell-with-convention splashout of minds that had once soared beyond the Limits of Space and Time to ... to somewhere.
Carl remembered, while he worked his deck that he had forgotten to take his Downboy pill again this morning. Dutifully, he swallowed the capsule with a dry gulp, and tried to make his overactive mind a blank.
Last night he had run across a poem during his frowned upon reading period (the Level Vids were preferable, because the
entertainment they provided were suitably bland and kept people from latching on to “wrong” ideas) by a man named Robinson. About a man called Miniver Cheevy, who “wept that he was ever born, and he had reasons.” How did it go, again?
Miniver yearned for Priam and Helen of Troy and the wild battles fought in shining armor. He couldn't have them, so he went into one of those fascinating pubs they had two centuries back and got smashed on some allowable alcoholic drink. He had his nerve, that Miniver, complaining. Living during a wild century of do-or-die, before the atom had been split, before the Psychs and cushioned regimentation.
“He was a damn fool!” Carl said, out loud.
“No talking,” said the tape-deck.
“Shut up, damn your blinking eyeballs!"
“No talking,” said the tape-deck.
When a shrill whistle inside his head told Carl it was time to have lunch, he unhooked his legs from the pedal clamps, and stood, closing his eyes and stretching. His replacement, a small hunch-shouldered chap, slid into the bucket seat briskly and clamped his legs into the pedals, with a blank-faced nod for Carl.
“All he needs is a broom.” Carl grimaced and made his way through the labyrinth of computer decks to the lunchroom lift-drop.
In the mechafeteria, he reached for a sandwich and something that looked like a salad out of the slots, and decanted some phony coffee to wash it down with. He found a corner table, where he could sneak the pocket-sized adventure novel out of his brown tunic and read while he ate.
“You are Carl Lempi."
A shadow moved down across his open book. Carl's frown relaxed and grew into a grin that uptilted his eyebrows in something less than belief. The shadow-caster wore the conventional brown uniform; sure she did. But on her it looked more than just good. She had sleek raven's-wing hair, worn shoulder length and turned under, with pageboy bangs. Something that stirred behind those aquamarine eyes brought all of Carl's storybook charmers within the realms of reality.
In a word-fabulous.
He let the book drop. “Yup, I'm Carl Lempi. Call me Carl."
Those enigmatic eyes studied him carefully, taking note of his wide shoulders, sheathed with muscles seldom seen these days, the way his hair curled crisply around his flat-to-head ears.
“'Suppose I call you Lemminkainen. What then?"
It was as if an elfin bell sounded, deep, deep in his mind.
“You?” he blurted.
“Silia."
“Silia who?"
“That's enough for right now.” She smiled with lips like dewy cherries. “Shall we go?"
Carl blinked.
“Go? Go where?” In the middle of a work-day. Incredible! She just nodded, a beckoning nod that dazzled Carl into rising from his chair. He shot a look around him for the Psych-Meds, the usual kind who scooped him up after he had bungled another job so badly that his superiors begged for his dismissal.
Nothing.
“It's not like that,” Silia assured him, smiling. “Come on."
Carl slipped his book in his tunic and moved after her, wondering what kind of a new Psych trick this was. From the little his examiners had leaked out, he was above norm; he didn't belong in Level 7b. It was just that nothing they tried him on worked out. He was a rebel everywhere. He rebelled fiercely at the stringent routine; from the time the Level's mind-nipping awakener routed him out of his bachelor's cubicle, through his Mechafe meals, his stints at the computerdeck, even his playtime. Had it not been for the books, he would have been brainbusted into one of the Psych camps for hopeless nuts.
It was this very tidy routine (after a person's mental-emotional psych had been established) that eliminated all poverty, all war, all disease. It was an antisepticised Utopia. Safe. Safe from antagonisms. Safe from suicide.
Safe from adventure.
Now, to his utter amazement, he was swing-shouldering after a dazzling beauty through a back door in the cafeteria, past windows that showed how the food carrier belts supplied the endless quantities of hydroponics pap in various guises to Level 7b workers, while somewhere below thrummed robot cooks preparing all those meals.
They reached a round tube-drop. The girl gestured Carl inside, then pressed a button. The pancake on which they stood shot down like a pea out of a pea shooter.
Down. Way down. Below street level!
This was something else. Carl's routine hardly ever took him off 7b at all; random movement outside of one's normal sphere was frowned on, even forbidden. So enormous was the population of this particular metro-area that foregatherings of large groups was unthinkable. Why bother, anyway? Each level had its own amusement areas; was, in fact, self-sustaining. No normal person would want to rove about, anyway. Rambling and meandering were primitive syndromes; they could possibly lead to minor social disturbances, even to civil wars.
In the tight windowless passage through which they were moving, Carl quickened his stride to keep up with Silia and the light-tube she flashed ahead of them. The gloom made Carl uneasy; then, when Silia opened a second door at the end of the downramp, he gasped.
Beyond that door was total, primitive dark.
He had never seen dark before. The Psychs had long since decreed that total-dark was unwholesome. The cubicles, which were designed somewhat like giant creches, were always suffused with a gentle happy-yellow glow, to engender pleasant, non-aggressive dreams.
He stared into the stygian night and felt his hackles stiffen. Silia's light-tube pierced the dark.
“Come on! Hurry! They're all waiting!"
Carl sucked in a breath of filtered air and moved in after her. Behind them the door slid shut. Now only Silia's dancing pencil of light kept back utter, elemental dark. They snaked up from deep inside of his bowels, those savage dark-fears from out of genetic ancestry.
For the first time in his life Carl felt fear.
“Why are you standing still?” Silia demanded.
“It's dark."
“So it's dark. Haven't you ever—no, of course not. I forgot. You've never even seen the sky at night."
“Sure I have,” Carl snapped back. “Part of our training program.” He was remembering his infrequent views, on those guided group tours, of a pale bright light they said was the Sun, and then those untidy splashes of random stars, on other occasions. The Simulaturns were much better, everybody agreed. Nature was so crude, so ineffectual. The machines could reproduce all of its phenomena far more attractively.
“Hurry!” Silia swung her light-tube impatiently, so that the tube struck wall and went skittering across the black floor. The stud jarred to off.
Carl moaned as fear flowed into his veins.
“Well, don't just stand there,” the girl's voice came out of the dark. “Help find the light!"
Carl knelt and groped, still shocked by the utter blackness. Once his sweeping movements touched warm flesh. Silia's arm. He took hold of her hand for a few seconds; Silia made a sharp quick sound. Carl had an immediate urge; it pushed up violently from the depths of his healthy young body. He wanted to take hold of Silia. Hold her close, close.
It was as if she felt the want, too. She seemed to yield, trembling. Then she pushed him away.
“We've got to find the tube!” she cried tautly. “There's not a minute to lose!"
Carl swooped his palms across the floor in wide circles.
When his fingers found cold round metal, it happened.
* * *
CHAPTER II
THE SUDDENNESS of the spectrum of light made him cry out. Its swirling brightness seared his optical nerves. While he knelt there, blinking, the argent iris of whirling lights took shape.
A woman.
No. Not a woman. A goddess.
No less appellation could do such a vision justice.
The goddess spoke to him. She spoke in a language new to him, yet not new. An idiom out of his childhood and before, out of his hungry dreams. The silvery words spilled out a chaotic montage of images; they skated giddily acro
ss the surface of his consciousness. Green trees ... clear cobalt lakes ... white surf slamming bleak rocks along a misted cliffline.
“You are so much like him, Son of Lempi. I must call you by his name—Lemminkainen."
His eyes were still englamoured, his throat thick with wonder, his blood hammering in his heart.
Carl forgot Silia, forgot who he was, forgot everything. The goddess with the long silver hair was too beautiful to look at long. He bowed his head.
“Mikd te haluta,” he said. Whatever She wanted to be must be.
When he dared to look up again she was gone; instead, before him was a tall, attenuated patch of blackness so complete it seemed to be a hole in space itself.
A deep voice echoed out.
“The rod you are holding is a weapon,” it told him. “Stand up."
Carl stood, grasping the rod tightly.
“The girl standing near you,” said the Darkness. “She is your enemy. She brought you here to kill you."
“Yes.” Carl swayed back and forth as if mesmerized.
“Point the rod at this ugly creature. With your thumb, release the catch at the end of the rod you hold in your hand. Now, point the rod at this girl."
Carl did as he was told. Something that grew out of the metal itself, something that spread up into his arm muscles and shoulder made him do it.
“Now push the stud. Kill her."
From way off in the dark came a faint scream that made Carl frown in annoyance.
“Kill her!” the cold emotionless voice demanded.
“Kylld,” Carl agreed.
His thumb whitened on the death-stud. The scream of despair loudened by several decibels. Along with it came other voices, agitation. Windy movement around him in the dark corridor. Criss-cross stabs of light.
“No. Carl!"
Along with the protest something heavy smashed against his lower arm. The light-rod leaped out of his convulsive grasp. The patch of non-space moved forward to engulf him, then vanished.
Carl cried out at the loss of his goddess; his cry was sheared off when something like the edge of a practiced hand chopped down on the back of his neck.