The Space Opera Novella

by Frank Belknap Long

  B’dikkat whispered, as if filled with awe. “The Instrumentality has been reached, and a Lord of the Instrumentality is about to talk to you.”

  There was nothing for Mercer to do, so he sat back in a corner of the room and watched. The Lady Da, her skin healed, stood pale and nervous in the middle of the floor.

  The room filled with an odorless intangible smoke. The smoke clouded. The full communicator was on.

  A human figure appeared.

  * * * *

  A woman, dressed in a uniform of radically conservative cut, faced the Lady Da.

  “This is Shayol. You are the Lady Da. You called me.”

  The Lady Da pointed to the children on the floor. “This must not happen,” she said. “This is a place of punishments, agreed upon between the Instrumentality and the Empire. No one said anything about children.”

  The woman on the screen looked down at the children.

  “This is the work of insane people!” she cried.

  She looked accusingly at the Lady Da, “Are you imperial?”

  “I was an Empress, madam,” said the Lady Da.

  “And you permit this!”

  “Permit it?” cried the Lady Da. “I had nothing to do with it.” Her eyes widened. “I am a prisoner here myself. Don’t you understand?”

  The image-woman snapped, “No, I don’t.”

  “I,” said the Lady Da, “am a specimen. Look at the herd out there. I came from them a few hours ago.”

  “Adjust me,” said the image-woman to B’dikkat. “Let me see that herd.”

  Her body, standing upright, soared through the wall in a flashing arc and was placed in the very center of the herd.

  The Lady Da and Mercer watched her. They saw even the image lose its stiffness and dignity. The image-woman waved an arm to show that she should be brought back into the cabin. B’dikkat tuned her back into the room.

  “I owe you an apology,” said the image. “I am the Lady Johanna Gnade, one of the Lords of the Instrumentality.”

  Mercer bowed, lost his balance and had to scramble up from the floor. The Lady Da acknowledged the introduction with a royal nod.

  The two women looked at each other.

  “You will investigate,” said the Lady Da, “and when you have investigated, please put us all to death. You know about the drug?”

  “Don’t mention it,” said B’dikkat, “don’t even say the name into a communicator. It is a secret of the Instrumentality!”

  “I am the Instrumentality,” said the Lady Johanna. “Are you in pain? I did not think that any of you were alive. I had heard of the surgery banks on your off-limits planet, but I thought that robots tended parts of people and sent up the new grafts by rocket. Are there any people with you? Who is in charge? Who did this to the children?”

  B’dikkat stepped in front of the image. He did not bow. “I’m in charge.”

  “You’re under people!” cried the Lady Johanna. “You’re a cow!”

  “A bull, ma’am. My family is frozen back on Earth itself, and with a thousand years’ service I am earning their freedom and my own. Your other questions, ma’am. I do all the work. The dromozoa do not affect me much, though I have to cut a part off myself now and then. I throw those away. They don’t go into the bank. Do you know the secret rules of this place?”

  The Lady Johanna talked to someone behind her on another world. Then she looked at B’dikkat and commanded, “Just don’t name the drug or talk too much about it. Tell me the rest.”

  * * * *

  “We have,” said B’dikkat very formally, “thirteen hundred and twenty-one people here who can still be counted on to supply parts when the dromozoa implant them. There are about seven hundred more, including Go-Captain Alverez, who have been so thoroughly absorbed by the planet that it is no use trimming them. The Empire set up this place as a point of uttermost punishment. But the Instrumentality gave secret orders for medicine”—he accented the word strangely, meaning super-condamine—“to be issued so that the punishment would be counteracted. The Empire supplies our convicts. The Instrumentality distributes the surgical material.”

  The Lady Johanna lifted her right hand in a gesture of silence and compassion. She looked around the room. Her eyes came back to the Lady Da. Perhaps she guessed what effort the Lady Da had made in order to remain standing erect while the two drugs, the super-condamine and the lifeboat drug, fought within her veins.

  “You people can rest. I will tell you now that all things possible will be done for you. The Empire is finished. The Fundamental Agreement, by which the Instrumentality surrendered to the Empire a thousand years ago, has been set aside. We did not know that you people existed. We would have found out in time, but I am sorry we did not find out sooner. Is there anything we can do for you right away?”

  “Time is what we all have,” said the Lady Da. “Perhaps we cannot ever leave Shayol, because of the dromozoa and the medicine. The one could be dangerous. The other must never be permitted to be known.”

  The Lady Johanna Gnade looked around the room. When her glance reached him, B’dikkat fell to his knees and lifted his enormous hands in complete supplication.

  “What do you want?” said she.

  “These,” said B’dikkat, pointing to the mutilated children. “Order a stop on children. Stop it now!” He commanded her with the last cry, and she accepted his command. “And lady—”

  He stopped, as if shy.

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “Lady, I am unable to kill. It is not in my nature. To work, to help, but not to kill. What do I do with these?” He gestured at the four motionless children on the floor.

  “Keep them,” she said. “Just keep them.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “There’s no way to get off this planet alive. I do not have food for them in the cabin. They will die in a few hours. And governments,” he added wisely, “take a long, long time to do things.”

  “Can you give them the medicine?”

  “No, it would kill them if I give them that stuff first before the dromozoa have fortified their bodily processes.”

  The Lady Johanna Gnade filled the room with tinkling laughter that was very close to weeping. “Fools, poor fools, and the more fool I! If super-condamine works only after the dromozoa, what is the purpose of the secret?”

  B’dikkat rose to his feet, offended. He frowned, but he could not get the words with which to defend himself.

  The Lady Da, ex-empress of a fallen empire, addressed the other lady with ceremony and force: “Put them outside, so they will be touched. They will hurt. Have B’dikkat give them the drug as soon as he thinks it safe. I beg your leave, my lady…”

  Mercer had to catch her before she fell.

  * * * *

  “You’ve all had enough,” said the Lady Johanna. “A storm ship with heavily armed troops is on its way to your ferry satellite. They will seize the medical personnel and find out who committed this crime against children.”

  Mercer started to speak. “Will you punish the guilty doctor?”

  “You speak of punishment,” she cried. “You!”

  “It’s fair. I was punished for doing wrong. Why shouldn’t he be?”

  “Punish—punish?” she said to him. “We will cure that doctor. And we will cure you too, if we can.”

  Mercer began to weep. He thought of the oceans of happiness which super-condamine had brought him, forgetting the hideous pain and the deformities on Shayol. Would there be no next needle? He could not guess what life would be like off Shayol. Was there to be no more tender, fatherly B’dikkat coming with his knives?

  He lifted his tear-stained face to the Lady Johanna Gnade and choked out the words, “Lady, we are all insane in this place. I do not think we want to leave.”

  She turned her face away, moved by enormous compassion.
Her next words were to B’dikkat. “You are wise and good, even if you are not a human being. Give them all of the drug they can take. The Instrumentality will decide what to do with all of you. I will survey your planet with robot soldiers. Will the robots be safe, cow-man?”

  B’dikkat did not like the thoughtless name she called him, but he held no offence. “The robots will be all right, ma’am, but the dromozoa will be excited if they cannot feed them and heal them. Send as few as you can. We do not know how the dromozoa live or die.”

  “As few as I can,” she murmured. She lifted her hand in command to some technician unimaginable distances away. The odorless smoke rose about her and the image was gone.

  A shrill, cheerful voice spoke up. “I fixed your window,” said the Customs robot. B’dikkat thanked him absentmindedly. He helped Mercer and the Lady Da into the doorway. When they got outside, they were promptly stung by the dromozoa. It did not matter.

  B’dikkat himself emerged, carrying the four children in his two gigantic, tender hands. He laid the slack bodies on the ground near the cabin. He watched as the bodies went into spasm with the onset of the dromozoa. Mercer and the Lady Da saw that his brown cow eyes were rimmed with red and that his huge cheeks were dampened by tears.

  Hours or centuries.

  Who could tell them apart?

  The herd went back to its usual life, except that the intervals between needles were much shorter. The once-commander, Suzdal, refused the needle when he heard the news. Whenever he could walk, he followed the Customs robots around as they photographed, took soil samples, and made a count of the bodies. They were particularly interested in the mountain of the Go-Captain Alvarez and professed themselves uncertain as to whether there was organic life there or not. The mountain did appear to react to super-condamine, but they could find no blood, no heart-beat. Moisture, moved by the dromozoa, seemed to have replaced the once-human bodily process.

  CHAPTER V

  And then, early one morning, the sky opened.

  Ship after ship landed. People emerged, wearing clothes.

  The dromozoa ignored the newcomers. Mercer, who was in a state of bliss, confusedly tried to think this through until he realized that the ships were loaded to their skins with communications machines; the “people” were either robots or images of persons in other places.

  The robots swiftly gathered together the herd. Using wheelbarrows, they brought the hundreds of mindless people to the landing area.

  Mercer heard a voice he knew. It was the Lady Johanna Gnade. “Set me high,” she commanded.

  Her form rose until she seemed one-fourth the size of Alvarez. Her voice took on more volume.

  “Wake them all,” she commanded.

  Robots moved among them, spraying them with a gas which was both sickening and sweet. Mercer felt his mind go clear. The super-condamine still operated in his nerves and veins, but his cortical area was free of it. He thought clearly.

  “I bring you,” cried the compassionate feminine voice of the gigantic Lady Johanna, “the judgment of the Instrumentality on the planet Shayol.

  “Item: the surgical supplies will be maintained and the dromozoa will not be molested. Portions of human bodies will be left here to grow, and the grafts will be collected by robots. Neither man nor homunculus will live here again.

  “Item: the underman B’dikkat, of cattle extraction, will be rewarded by an immediate return to Earth. He will be paid twice his expected thousand years of earnings.”

  The voice of B’dikkat, without amplification, was almost as loud as hers through the amplifier. He shouted his protest, “Lady, Lady!”

  She looked down at him, his enormous body reaching to ankle height on her swirling gown, and said in a very informal tone, “What do you want?”

  “Let me finish my work first,” he cried, so that all could hear. “Let me finish taking care of these people.”

  The specimens who had minds all listened attentively. The brainless ones were trying to dig themselves back into the soft earth of Shayol, using their powerful claws for the purpose. Whenever one began to disappear, a robot seized him by a limb and pulled him out again.

  “Item: cephalectomies will be performed on all persons with irrecoverable minds. Their bodies will be left here. Their heads will be taken away and killed as pleasantly as we can manage, probably by an overdosage of super-condamine.”

  “The last big jolt,” murmured Commander Suzdal, who stood near Mercer. “That’s fair enough.”

  “Item: the children have been found to be the last heirs of the Empire. An over-zealous official sent them here to prevent their committing treason when they grew up. The doctor obeyed orders without questioning them. Both the official and the doctor have been cured and their memories of this have been erased, so that they need have no shame or grief for what they have done.”

  “It’s unfair,” cried the half-man. “They should be punished as we were!”

  The Lady Johanna Gnade looked down at him. “Punishment is ended. We will give you anything you wish, but not the pain of another. I shall continue.

  “Item: since none of you wish to resume the lives which you led previously, we are moving you to another planet nearby. It is similar to Shayol, but much more beautiful. There are no dromozoa.”

  * * * *

  At this an uproar seized the herd. They shouted, wept, cursed, appealed. They all wanted the needle, and if they had to stay on Shayol to get it, they would stay.

  “Item,” said the gigantic image of the lady, overriding their babble with her great but feminine voice, “you will not have super-condamine on the new planet, since without dromozoa it would kill you. But there will be caps. Remember the caps. We will try to cure you and to make people of you again. But if you give up, we will not force you. Caps are very powerful; with medical help you can live under them many years.”

  A hush fell on the group. In their various ways, they were trying to compare the electrical caps which had stimulated their pleasure-lobes with the drug which had drowned them a thousand times in pleasure. Their murmur sounded like assent.

  “Do you have any questions?” said the Lady Johanna.

  “When do we get the caps?” said several. They were human enough that they laughed at their own impatience.

  “Soon,” said she reassuringly, “very soon.”

  “Very soon,” echoed B’dikkat, reassuring his charges even though he was no longer in control.

  “Question,” cried the Lady Da.

  “My Lady…?” said the Lady Johanna, giving the ex-empress her due courtesy.

  “Will we be permitted marriage?”

  The Lady Johanna looked astonished. “I don’t know.” She smiled. “I don’t know any reason why not—”

  “I claim this man Mercer,” said the Lady Da. “When the drugs were deepest, and the pain was greatest, he was the one who always tried to think. May I have him?”

  Mercer thought the procedure arbitrary but he was so happy that he said nothing. The Lady Johanna scrutinized him and then she nodded. She lifted her arms in a gesture of blessing and farewell.

  The robots began to gather the pink herd into two groups. One group was to whisper in a ship over to a new world, new problems and new lives. The other group, no matter how much its members tried to scuttle into the dirt, was gathered for the last honor which humanity could pay their manhood.

  B’dikkat, leaving everyone else, jogged with his bottle across the plain to give the mountain-man Alvarez an especially large gift of delight.

  THE SUPERSTITION SEEDERS, by Edward Wellen

  Originally appeared in Infinity Magazine, December 1956.

  Flaming and hissing, the jets tattooed the ground. In a chained reaction the spaceship came quiveringly alive but failed to rise.

  In the control room, Van Gutyf saw that the captain’s hand was avoiding
the take-off key. He lifted an eyebrow but said nothing.

  Captain Sy Barnett caught the lifting, a movement so slight he must have been looking for it. He smiled. Then he wiped the smile off and tuned in the spaceport channel.

  Eyes splatted on the screen and stared at them inquiringly.

  “Emergency!” Captain Burnett said, looking anxious. “Power failure. Please send take-off assistance.”

  The eyes blinked acknowledgment. And shortly six squat figures emerged from the maintenance shop and waddled in single file across the tarmac. Van saw as they neared that the combined lettering in lingua galactica on their uniforms spelled out MUANIK.

  Captain Burnett frowned and began thumbing through his glossary, muttering, “Now what the blazes is muanik?”

  Van had gone through the captain’s glossary once, at the beginning of the trip. For him, once was enough. A word leaped to his lips. “‘Milkmaid.’”

  “‘Milkmaid’!? Now why the—”

  “Take it easy, Captain, Van said, smiling. “I think another letter will be along in a moment.”

  And in a moment another K emerged from the maintenance shop, came puffing up, and squeezed between U and A.

  “Ah!” Captain Burnett said. “That’s more like it. ‘Mechanic.’”

  M gave a sign and they halted. Together they opened their toolboxes and brought out what seemed to be baseball bats. M set fire to his and put his torch to the other torches. M gave another sign and they formed a wide circle around the spaceship. Together they jabbed the fiery tips at the ground, let out their breath in one long hissing, and leaped into the air.

  Captain Burnett motioned Van down and himself settled back in his seat. Hiding the move from the eyes on the screen he flicked the take-off key. The craft rose on a gaseous column. The eyes vanished.

  When his plumbing unkinked and the green feeling passed, Van said quietly, “All right, Captain. I’m getting the idea. That was mimetic magic back there. On Whuud it was contagious magic. On Nyllu it was—”

  “Yes, yes,” Captain Burnett said impatiently, slicing the edge of his hand down. He sighed gloomily. “So now you see what Man is up against. I ask you,” he said plaintively, “what if we really had been in a spot back there? I’ll tell you. Those jumping jacks would up and down until the snap went out of their tendons—and we’d still be grounded. That—and worse—has happened, because superstition has started up wherever Man touches.” And he glared at Van.