Polymath: Empire Book 1

by John Brunner

  What chance did a few hundred refugees, with hardly any tools or weapons, a handful of scientists, and no experience of existence at such a primitive level, stand in face of a hostile and unpredictable world?

  “Ornelle! Ornelle!”

  With a guilty start she raised her head. Standing in the rough doorway, one hand holding aside the curtain and the other carrying his medikit, was Doc Jerode. His white shirt and overfoot breeches were yellowing and frayed, and since being out of reach of tricholene treatments his mass of shining gray hair had thinned to a crescent on the back of his head. But he was picking up a healthy-looking tan.

  “I’m sorry, Doc. Didn’t hear you come in.” Ornelle licked her lips. Her throat was stiff after her fit of sobbing, and the words came painfully. “I’m all right. Just a bit tired.”

  “Tired!” the doctor said. “Exhausted is more the word.”

  He strode forward, his feet noisy on the crude planks of the floor, and set his medikit on the table. “Here, I’m going to make sure you haven’t picked up an infection, Get your clothes off.”

  “Oh—oh, very well.” Ornelle rose to her feet and unfastened her shirt Like everyone else, she had been stifled throughout the winter by the sensation of having all possible clothing on against the cold, that daily grew greasier and fouler-smelling, and now was wearing only outer garments. She stood slackly as Jerode ran his diagnoser over her.

  “Nothing on the culture slide except bugs I recognize,” he said at last. He surveyed her curiously. “So you’re right. You’re simply worn out. But… how long have you been at that radio?”

  “Uh… most of the past three days,” she admitted.

  “Have you slept properly? Don’t answer that—I can tell you haven’t. And I’ve watched you gulping your meals in your hurry to get back here. Take one of these.” Jerode selected a tube of small white pills from his kit, giving a rueful glance at how few of them remained. “Blast you, woman! Why do you have to let me down?”

  “What?” Ornelle had a mug of water on the table; she checked in the act of reaching for it to wash down the pill.

  “You heard me. Here I’ve been telling myself that you are one of the reliable people we have, able to think fairly straight in spite of being completely unprepared for this predicament, while so many who are supposed to be trained or talented have taken to running around in circles gibbering! But, like I say, you’re letting me down.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ornelle muttered.

  “To start with, what’s the panic about contacting the other party? They probably had a far tougher winter on high ground. Our antenna collapsed. So may theirs have, and it might still be buried in a snowdrift. Even if they have had time to worry about setting it up again, they may not have anyone to spare to sit by a radio and hope to hear from us. Give them a chance to clear up the mess of winter and get themselves organized.”

  “If they were in bad trouble,” Ornelle said stonily, “the first thing they’d want to know would be if we’re OK If they weren’t in trouble, then they’d want to find out if we were and needed any help. No, I’m afraid there’s not much hope for them.” She sighed and gulped down the pill.

  “So that’s the weight you’ve got on your shoulders. An imaginary one. I thought so.”

  “Weight on my shoulders? What do you mean?”

  “You’re standing there like a—a badly stuffed doll! Here, look at yourself.” Jerode unfolded the lid of his medikit and snapped it to the mirror setting. “You ought to be ashamed of maltreating your body that way.”

  Dully, Ornelle regarded her reflection. Her skin was pallid, there was a slackness around her eyes as well as the red of tiredness and tears, and her breasts, pale-nippled, were like shrunken pears. Whereas her belly was sagging forward.

  Not from fat.

  “Pull it in, woman,” Jerode ordered. “Take a deep breath, set your shoulders back, and look at the improvement.”

  He waited while she obeyed. Then, as he saw a change of expression pass across her face, he shut the kit.

  “You need some sun,” he said. “Ten or fifteen minutes a day for the first few days, no more—I’m troubled enough with sunburn cases. But I want a color on you like mine in ten days, understand? All over. You don’t get much calciferol from sunlight, but we’ve got to take advantage of everything.”

  Flushing, Ornelle turned to pick up her clothes from the chair where she had hung them. “I’m sorry,” she said after a while. “It’s just—oh, you know.”

  Jerode didn’t say anything. She went on, “Anyway, what did you want me for?”

  “A bit of advice. I need a woman’s opinion before I make up my mind on a problem that’s just arisen. You know Delvia?”

  Drawing her shirt on, Ornelle gave a bitter chuckle. “Do I know that—that exhibitionist? Does anyone not?”

  “Yes, she is rather atypical of our group, isn’t she? Conspicuous! Well, she came to see me—one of the sunburn cases I mentioned—and I checked her over. She’s pregnant.”

  Ornelle stared blankly. “Well, I’d never have expected that,” she said at length.

  “Why? Because she’s not the maternal type?”

  “That she’s not! No, I wouldn’t have expected her to be so careless. It’s not that she lacks experience, I’ll swear to that. In fact…” Ornelle hesitated. “In fact I think she’s downright nymphomaniac.”

  “Is it true that you’ve had trouble with her in the single women’s house?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “People tell doctors things, don’t they? And since we don’t have a psychologist… That’s irrelevant, anyway. The point is this. We agreed collectively on arrival that we weren’t going to permit children until we knew more about our environment. Embryonic tissue is fragile, and we don’t want to start off with teratoid births. That was a unanimous decision on my advice. I think we’ll probably be safe in relaxing the rule now—in fact, I planned to ask for volunteer parents at the stocktaking assembly tomorrow. But it still stands at the moment. And, as you agree, Delvia is not the sort of person who’d be suitable. We can’t have people flouting our collective decisions, can we?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So I’ve been wondering whether we oughtn’t to establish a precedent by imposing a compulsory abortion on her”

  Ornelle was silent for a moment. “Are you asking for my personal opinion?” she said eventually. “Or are you asking what the reaction of the other women is likely to be?”

  “Both.”

  “Well… I think most of us would agree that you can’t have people disregarding the rules, and particularly since Delvia is—uh—not too popular, you’d have no trouble getting such a motion carried.”

  “Speaking for yourself, though?”

  Ornelle closed her eyes. “If our stay here is likely to be for good, I’d hate to think it had been marred by that sort of thing right at the start. Besides, that was one of the things that made the winter so intolerable: losing the babies. Having children around is part of life for me—an indispensable part. And since you say you were planning to recommend starting some pregnancies…”

  “Yes.” Jerode rubbed his chin. “If this were anyone but Delvia I’d be inclined to overlook it. I still could. I doubt if she knows herself yet; it’s only five or six days gone. But, as you say, she must have been careless, or else she was defying a rule she doesn’t approve of. Both are dangerous trends, aren’t they? Especially in such a forceful personality.”

  “A compulsory abortion, though… I’ll have to think about it, I’m afraid.”

  “Please do. We’re having a preliminary committee meeting at dark this evening. I’d like you to come to it and tell us your conclusions, all right?”

  “Yes, of course.” And she added as he turned to the door: “Doc, did you have children—back home?”

  “Yes. And I know you did too. Which is why I came to consult you.”

  IV

  Lex slipped into the
water, feeling extraordinarily distant from it because the spacesuit he was wearing insulated him so efficiently. To be in water without feeling its coolness was disconcerting. He hadn’t remarked the fact during the dives he had done last year, but his mind had been taken up by other things. He had been searching for Bendle’s son; on the first dive he had found him, on the second recovered the body—or rather, what was left of it. It had been no consolation at all to see that the hungry marine beasts which had nibbled at his flesh were still clinging, discolored and dying, because some compound in human protoplasm was poisoning them.

  He drew a deep breath, conscious that thinking such morbid thoughts would handicap the speed of his reactions, and caught at the anchor cable so that he could pause before reaching the bottom and take proper stock of his surroundings.

  The silver egg-form of the ship seemed to be about one-third buried. The seabed, for a considerable distance from shore, was composed of the same relatively firm greenish sand as the beach, but out here it was slack and muddy, carpeted with a mass of juicy weed, and the hull had sunk deep. In the wan, diffuse light he could not tell whether the occasional movements he detected among the fronded aquatic plants were due to currents, or whether animal-life was hiding among the branches.

  There were no openings to the ship except the locks: two for the crew, two much larger ones for cargo. He could just discern the top of an open cargo lock on this side of the hull, above the level of the vegetation. That was fortunate. He could enter through there and probably conduct quite an extensive exploration, though sand and mud would doubtless have sifted over much of the gear inside.

  For a moment a stab of anger against fate made him clench his teeth. As though it weren’t bad enough to be stranded on an unknown planet with only the basic resources of a space-freighter and some odds and ends crammed hastily aboard before their takeoff: now much of even that scanty material was out here, spoiled by a winter’s immersion. What they had removed from the ship had been dictated by immediate necessity. They had taken out conventional radio equipment, for instance, because they had foreseen the need to keep in touch with exploring parties even before the question of the other refugees arose.

  But what use was conventional radio when they wanted to broadcast their whereabouts across the interstellar gulf? For that, you needed the ship’s subradios. And those had not been taken out for two good reasons: first, the attenuation factor, and second, their appetite for power. Sub-radio was virtually instantaneous over parsec distances, but it was almost nullified by the blanket of a planetary atmosphere. When calling planet-to-planet it was necessary to relay your message with conventional radio to an orbiting satellite where the signal was automatically converted. And in any case you had to bleed power from the ship’s fusion drive in order to kick your beam between the stars.

  If only, before landing, they had been able to leave a subradio beacon in orbit…. They had broadcast constantly during the flight, of course, but they were almost outrunning their own signals, and by the time they arrived in this system they were half choking with CO2 and anthropotoxins. The ship’s air-purifiers hadn’t been meant to cope with eight hundred people. They had to land at once.

  Maybe it didn’t matter anyhow. They were at least twenty parsecs beyond the limit of previous exploration.

  Maybe no one would have thought to watch for signals from so far out.

  Hence the subradios had been left in the ship. Hence they were at the bottom of the sea and more than likely corroded past repair. Diet-synthesizers, tools, accumulators, solar energy collectors, medical equipment, books, tapes, scientific instruments—what few there were—had been taken inland. But very little else.

  Lex sighed and made to continue his descent. It seemed, when he looked about him, that the water was darker. A cloud crossing the sun? It wasn’t likely; the sky had been clear a few minutes ago. He snapped on his handlight and found that didn’t help. His vision was blurred. But why?

  He spent a short while puzzling out what had happened. Then the glass lens of the handlight gave him the clue. It was coated with a thin greenish film, which easily rubbed off. So was his helmet. In fact the entire surface of his suit was sliming completely over with what he judged to be the local equivalent of plankton. That hadn’t happened on his dives last year—but of course summer had been nearly over, and no doubt spring brought an exuberance of new life.

  He didn’t imagine it would prove dangerous, just inconvenient. Playing the handlight on the ship’s hull, he saw that the bright metal was only misted, implying that the stuff did not build up layer by layer.

  Hooking the light to its helmet mount so that he would not have to release his grip on the cable, he detached a couple of the rocks which weighted his belt. Neutral buoyancy would be better under these conditions than any weight at all. He didn’t like the look of the massed vegetation around the lower edge of the open cargo lock, and wanted to see if he could drift or swim into the ship without touching the plants.

  Something brushed the hand with which he was grasping the cable.

  His head and light turned together. Revealed was a reddish creature with many claw-tipped feet and a baglike body from which fronds like those of the bottom-weed swirled gracefully. It was walking up the cable, holding tight with groups of four claws, and on coming to the obstacle, his hand, had paused to investigate. A leechlike neck with a ring of antennae fringing a dark sucking mouth was fumbling along his arm.

  The light seemed not to affect it at all. Eyes were developing extraordinarily late among these sea-beasts, Bendle had said, although many of them had patches of skin responsive to light and dark.

  It might not be able to harm him, Lex thought. But those claws looked unpleasantly powerful. Besides, it would not be good for Aldric and Cheffy to find this thing swarming up into the boat. It was about four feet long, and a nip or bite from it might be as poisonous to man as human flesh apparently was to the local creatures.

  He readied his hatchet. Then, as the beast decided his arm offered a better course than continuing up the cable, he swung the blade and severed the first six or eight of its clawed legs, expecting it to fall.

  Instantly, the fronded bag at the rear of the creature burst open and the water turned a filthy yellow color Which blinded him completely within seconds. Startled, Lex lost his grip on the cable and began to fall toward the bottom.

  As soon as he was out of the yellow cloud, he twisted around and saw it from a few yards away, a misshapen ball. Out of it, like darts, plunged a score or more of stiff, wriggling-legged miniatures of the thing he had attacked. All of them were heading toward him. He flailed the hatchet violently, beating them off as he tumbled in the water, but two of them attached themselves to his faceplate. He saw how their little leech-mouths opened wide, spread to a diameter of two inches, began to fold back as if the creatures were going to turn completely inside-out.

  His feet found bottom. He straightened and clawed the creatures loose, hurling them from him as far as the resistance of the water would allow. By this time the mouths had folded back halfway along the bodies and the capacity to swim seemed to have been lost altogether. The things dropped among the weed and something—Lex couldn’t tell what because it moved so fast—engulfed them, emitting a moment later a jet of the ubiquitous yellow ink.

  Lex was beginning to regret his offhand decision to make this trip alone. He had never imagined such a totally unwelcoming environment. He had told himself many times during the past winter that now it was up to man to prove himself superior to the competing life-forms by being a more efficient animal. But here for the first time he was beginning to appreciate what the truism really implied.

  He was standing a few yards from the cargo lock, swaying because he had made himself too light for stability yet not light enough to float. The compromise might be satisfactory if it enabled him to make slow leaps like a man in barely perceptible gravity. His legs were calfdeep in the bottom-weed and his boot-soles apparently in squelch
y mud, but he didn’t seem to be sinking in.

  Something passed between him and the gleaming roof of the surface. He glanced up and saw a pulsing creature with a flat planelike body and clusters of irregularly-distributed tentacles dangling beneath. It took no notice of him. Several other creatures, large and small, were likewise pursuing their own affairs overhead.

  Well, if they ignored him, he’d ignore them. He aimed himself at the cargo lock. A carefully-judged leap, dreamlike in the water, brought him with a slight bump against the upper left corner of the opening where he could grip a projection and look inside.

  All the time he had spent here, in crudely-rigged metal-framed bunks hard as tables, came back to memory. This had been the hold in which four hundred men had been crammed for the voyage. Sand had sifted across the tilted floor, and patching it now were weeds and little round sessile animals with fernlike filter-mouths which sorted drifting plankton from the water. On the walls clung sucker-rooted colonies of symbiotic cell-associations, vaguely similar to stranded algae.

  Already the ship was becoming a water-jungle. Lex knew at that first glance that salvage operations were going to take much of this long summer, and at that it was a tossup whether power-tools could be brought down to reclaim the valuable metals from the hull itself.

  Since the sand-floor was relatively clear, he pushed himself down to it and ventured a little farther into the ship. Fortunately, a few of the internal doors were still closed. Strange animals, lost in the corridors, scuttered at his approach or adopted stiff threatening postures which he might have found ludicrous but that on this planet he had no standard yet by which to judge such matters. He made his way along the spinal tunnel of the ship, not wanting to open any sealed doors in case they were still airtight, toward the forward control sections.