Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy

by Al Sarrantonio

  And it was Faran Clan’s son, Pen Clan, who led his followers to newly settled Titan, where the secular religion flourished after persecution on Earth and failure on Mars.

  But Jo—sulfurous, yellow, ravaged, volcanic, odorous—had always been the movement’s mecca from the very beginning.

  It was the cleansing musk of sulfur that had become central to the philosophy of Moral Guidance from the very beginning. It was sulfur, pure, yellow, primeval, elemental, whose properties Faran Clan and his followers found most conducive to their thoughts and symbolic of their thought.

  “Sulfur,” Faran Clan had written, during his second stay in prison during 2157, when his treatise was composed, “denotes both heaven and earth. It is the most elemental of elements, distinctive, pleasant to the touch, yet malevolent when misused. It is the nature of man distilled to nonorganic matter. It is man itself, in symbol.”

  And Moral Guidance put great store in ceremony and symbol, for Faran Clan taught that balance between soul and body could only be attained within by attaining it without. Balance outside the flesh was essential, and desirable, for the attainment of peace, which was Moral Guidance’s goal.

  And thus the great Temple of Faran Clan on Titan, and the others elsewhere.

  And the ceremonies held within.

  The temple on Jo was, secretly, even larger than that on Titan. During the early days on Titan, when the movement’s success was in no way certain on the newly colonized moon, Pen Clan, with the help of certain wealthy interests, had secretly undertaken a project on Jo in case the Titanian experiment was a failure. After Titan, otherwise, there would be nowhere to go; Pluto was in the early stages of terra-forming and was slated only for partial taming—and even then, besides the building of a single city to exploit mining and research, the planet would be used as nothing more than a prison—something the followers of Moral Guidance were well acquainted with and sought at all risks to avoid in the future. That left undeveloped territory; specifically, to the followers of Moral Guidance, it left Jo.

  Jo was already much in their province; as a provider of sulfur so dear to their ceremonies, the movement had naturally been involved in this moon of Jupiter’s limited development. Only that development had been more extensive than the ore commerce it hid. While sulfur was being dug from beneath the surface of Jo, other construction was being done within also. Caverns as spectacular as any found naturally or otherwise on the Five Worlds were excavated, and then, within these underground grottos of yellow-gold, were built secret monuments to Moral Guidance.

  The most spectacular was the Temple of Jo itself.

  And this, then, was where Kamath Clan went for the Cleansing Ritual.

  Already underground, she preferred to walk rather than take the open transport provided for such a trip. As had her walks through the Ruz Balib section on Titan, these walks afforded her the time she needed to contemplate what needed contemplation. There was much, now, as there had been much for some time, such as her worries over Titan, which she had unwillingly left behind; though it might soon fall into Martian hands, that fate was preferable to Wrath Pei’s continued rule. And the Martians, she was convinced, could be dealt with, while Wrath-Pei could not. After all, she still had the girl, Tabrel Kris, to bargain with, and she was convinced that Prime Cornelian would, if he chose to overlook her present treachery as a strategic move, allow her to continue to rule Titan (albeit as a Martian protectorate) in trade for her return of Princess Kris. She had little illusion about Cornelian’s promise of reconciliation between Mars and Titan on the question of the unification of the Houses of Kris and Clan. Though the Martian despot might eschew his promise of public acknowledgment, the act was already a fait accompli, while Tabrel Kris remained married to Jamal, the two houses were already united, whether by public declaration or not. And since Queen Clan was convinced that the girl would be kept alive by Cornelian, it made no difference that the union was not a physical one. It had not been to this point, anyway—so what if a few million miles distance was added to the bride and groom’s separation?

  Jamal

  Here, then, was her great worry. As the queen made her shuffling way through the faintly sulfur-scented tunnel, whose faint illumination sent strange lemon shadows against the walls, she thought on her only son. He was a problem. Shuffling past his room, she heard him moaning within. Slated to one day rule Titan (in whatever capacity that rule would assume, as Martian protectorate or otherwise) but, even more importantly, set to oversee, as Faran Clan’s direct descendant, the reaches of Moral Guidance itself, Jamal was, at the moment, incapable of either. As she thought of what he had become…

  A spasm overtook the queen; she stopped, putting her hands on the soft yellow rock walls of the tunnel for support until it passed. She doubted these intermittent pains would ever cease completely; while the current pain persisted, her mind was blank, and then she gradually returned to herself.

  Poor Jamal

  Once again, thoughts of her son entered her mind. While Quog’s essence had eventually given the queen up, and Tabrel (to the point where she needed other of Kamath’s potions to be kept under control), it had, in the case of Jamal, done something quite different.

  Would he ever rule?

  In either capacity?

  Shuffling on, Kamath Clan turned her mind to different things.—to, specifically, the ceremony awaiting her in the temple, whose intricately carved portal at the end of the tunnel she now approached.

  “Behold within these walls the mind and soul of Clan!”

  The words, spoken by Jon-Ten, echoed portentously in the empty temple. Above the priest’s place at the altar, the temple’s ceiling fled upward, lost in misty heights of sulfurous incense. The temple’s apex actually protruded from Jo’s surface above, letting in a glint of natural light; but it was well hidden and had never been detected.

  With the help of artificial lighting, the temple’s immensity became immediately evident. It dwarfed its sister structure on Titan; and though the workmanship on Titan’s structure had been superb, the best materials had been saved for Jo’s secret shrine. The walls, of precious forest wood, were carved with details from Faran Clan’s writings depicting the aeons of man’s struggle with his own mind, and the search for his own soul. Veritably, the history Faran Clan had absorbed and distilled was here for all to see.

  “Enter, and allow the Cleansing Ritual to begin!”

  Kamath Clan stepped completely into the temple, letting the tunnel’s portal close with an echoing clang behind her. The odor of sulfur was nearly overpowering, but Kamath Clan drank it in.

  As the queen approached the altar, Jon-Ten drew back from the bath of roiling yellow; his bright yellow robes issued the steam they had absorbed, making him appear for a moment, afire.

  Queen Clan drew open her own yellow robe, preparing to step into the bath—

  There came a piercing scream, which stayed Kamath Clan’s foot even as it hovered over the steaming liquid sulfur.

  A second piercing scream sounded—like death itself.

  “Jamal,” Queen Clan breathed.

  She hurried from the temple, the priest following.

  As she opened the portal door into the tunnel, she was met by four black-leather-clad figures, wearing odd-shaped boots and gloves to outline their various missing limbs.

  Two of the soldiers took an immediate hold on Queen Clan, while the other two fired rasers simultaneously at the priest, Jon-Ten, who had stopped, startled, in the open portal and then turned to run. He was cut down with both shots in the back and fell dead to the ground.

  A third piercing scream came from Jamal’s room down the tunnel.

  “My son!”

  Without a word, the black-clad soldiers began to drag the queen toward Jamal’s room; when they arrived, they stopped outside.

  A fourth scream, horrible to Kamath Clan’s ears, issued from within; then the door was opened, and Wrath-Pei’s gyro chair, guided by the boy Lawrence from behind, glided fro
m the room and stopped before the queen. Within, Kamath’s view was blocked by more black-clad soldiers.

  The tunnel’s sulfurous odor was subsumed by a sweet coppery smell. Wrath-Pei lovingly wiped something viscous and red from the tip of his shears and sheathed them.

  He looked at Queen Clan and smiled.

  “Happy to see me?” he said.

  Chapter 19

  Benel Kran called him the Ghost.

  Benel felt like something of a ghost himself. Ever since the war, which had taught him survival skills he had never dreamed of needing, he had avoided human contact. In the beginning, with Martian Marines rounding up every child and plasma soldiers killing every adult, Benel Kran had found himself some very interesting hiding places. The most interesting, and uncomfortable, had been the hollow inside of a feeder tube support column; once inside, Benel had quickly deduced that he was both safe from capture and probably dead anyway, since the squared opening of the tube was now fifty feet above his head and he, at the bottom, had no way to climb out.

  But fate, in the form of luck, had helped him out, as the Martians, not content with their plunder of the feeder tube itself, decided to take its support columns also; after a little jostling, followed by a quick change of direction as the tube was craned from vertical to horizontal, he found himself in the open, at night, under a glorious mantle of stars in a now-empty work area. The next day he watched what had been his prison for five days hauled away atop a massive ground shuttle; watched, through his right eye only, since the cheap corneal implants he had foolishly favored over eyeball replacement had favored him with the left one peeling away and lost, from the safety of a smaller and more convenient hiding place, through the tiny window of a locked (he had jammed the lock himself) construction toilet.

  The first six months after the war’s quick end had gone this way, with Benel always in hiding, often close to capture, but managing to retain his freedom.

  Not bad for a physicist, he had thought.

  And then, gradually, the planet had become quiet.

  He watched the Martian Marines pull out from an empty house in Frolich City; out the kitchen window a breeze was moving a child’s swing on its creaking chain; and, through the space between the chains, and through his right eye, Benel watched the sleek orange Martian Marine shuttles take off, one by one down a row, as if peeling away. Inside those rockets were the last of Venus’s children and loot. In a few moments they were gone, along with their hissing stream of rocket fire.

  Suddenly Benel felt alone, sitting there on a stool munching from a sealed can of peanuts he had found (food had never been a problem from the beginning: the Martians had stripped off anything they favored, but there were many foodstuffs the Martians did not favor, which had left Benel with plenty to eat from a rather restricted menu: dried cereals, nuts, anything generally dry; the Martians greatly prized Venus’s store of vegetables and especially canned fruits, which Benel had come to sorely miss) and watching the last vapors of the Martian rockets dissipate into the powder-blue sky. But his loneliness was short-lived, as a plasma soldier appeared in the backyard, sending Benel scrambling for the house’s attic, a trail of dropped peanuts behind him.

  Which would have sealed his fate, had a Marine been hunting him; but as it was, his perpetual luck held and the plasma soldier, after a cursory examination of the house, went the way he had come.

  And then, soon after, the light soldiers were gone also.

  Their leaving was much more abrupt, and spectacular. Benel, having become a nocturnal scrounger, was poking through a trash heap of tools the Martians had left in the middle of a public street when a monstrous humming sound commenced. When Benel looked around, it seemed the night sky was filled with bright shafts of light bursting from the ground to the sky. Only after the fact did Benel realize that what he had witnessed was the plasma soldiers being dematerialized, literally sucked back up to their orbital transmitters.

  They were gone—just like that.

  “Amazing,” Benel said, out loud, the first words he had uttered in more than half a year.

  He spent the next months being careful, because someone was still bound to be around. And he was not wrong. There were still plasma soldiers to be found, but they were easy to avoid, since their only function seemed to be to guard Venus’s remaining feeder tube stations. Food storehouses and equipment dumps were out of their range of orders (they had absolutely no volition of their own), and so Benel was free to raid them as he wished.

  The Martian Marine presence was, however, ended; and though a few Martian technicians still puttered around here and there, they were even easier to avoid than the plasma soldiers. Being engineers, they were generally loud and clumsy, and disliked to be inconvenienced.

  They, too, eventually left, after denuding the planet of whatever they felt might be valuable.

  Which left (if one didn’t count the robotlike plasma soldiers) only Benel.

  And the Ghost.

  Benel stumbled upon the Ghost on what he later calculated to be the first anniversary of the One-Day War. The physicist had spent the preceding months establishing a laboratory of sorts in what had once been Frolich City’s recreation center. Game tables, he found, made excellent lab benches, and the colorful gaming room had soon been converted into something else, its billiard tables overflowing with electrical equipment, its dart board supporting the thick line of an antenna cable, the smooth long line of its bar sporting beakers and electronic circuit boards where once drinks and pretzel bowls had ruled. The huge Screen, which covered one wall to the left of the bar, had once shown sporting events from Venus and the other Four Worlds; now showed, alternately, the wavy frequency lines of test equipment and the crystal-clear picture from the security cameras Benel had mounted on the recreation center’s roof and jerry-built into the system.

  That was how Benel first saw the Ghost.

  On what he later realized was the war’s anniversary, Benel was absorbed, as he had been all day, and all month, and all year, in miniaturization problems. For Benel, who was not an engineer, it was not the basic problems that were bothersome, but the practical application of them. This, of course, had been his main concern during and after the war. It was something Cast-Prin, a fellow physicist, would have helped him with in a second—but Cast-Prin, unfortunately, had not made it through the war. And now that Benel Kran had every single theoretical problem solved in his project—he had, in effect, solved, a day too late, the problem of how to neutralize the plasma soldiers—he had no way to test it out. The mess of cables, circuitry, and other paraphernalia could only be tested if, incongruously, a plasma soldier walked in front of it. Which wasn’t about to happen, since Benel had chosen a place where plasma soldiers would not bother to come.

  Benel was bent over a particularly nasty nest of wiring, trying to squeeze it into a bulky, unattractive chromium box (how did those engineers manage to make everything look so elegant?) when the chiming alarm on the security camera system went off and the Screen broadened into a view of the outside perimeter.

  A lone figure was making its way past the recreation center, with no apparent interest in the center, or anything else, for that matter.

  “Screen, zoom,” Benel ordered—but by the time the Screen obliged, the figure had rounded a corner and was lost to the camera’s sight.

  Benel hurried from the lab to the street and cautiously looked out.

  But the streets were as empty as they had been before the appearance of the mysterious figure.

  Thinking himself prone to hallucination, Benel returned to the lab and had the Screen review the pictures of the intruder; sure enough, he had been real, though Benel could not make out his features and he seemed vague in other ways—like a man not entirely in control of his own faculties.

  “Wonderful, a crazy man,” Benel mumbled, returning to his work and forgetting for a moment the vision. As long as he didn’t bother Benel, the crazy man could do whatever he wanted. The brief thought that the cr
azy man might bring the attention of the plasma soldiers to Benel’s laboratory gave Benel pause, but he dismissed the threat with a vow to set up his weapon facing the front entrance, just in case.

  Then, if a visit from the light soldiers should occur, he could, at the very worst, test the machine as they stormed in.

  Crazy man.

  Ghost…

  Maybe I’ll never see him again…

  But the Ghost did appear again, the next day, under similar circumstances, though this time in the midst of a rain shower. The streets of Frolich City were being pounded with rain, and above the sound of it on the thin resin roof of the recreation center Benel did not at first hear the chime of the alarm system. By the time he did look up at the Screen, the Ghost was already disappearing, hatless and umbrellaless, around the same corner that had hid him the day before; and, once again, as Benel reached the street there was no sign of him anywhere.

  He may be a ghost, Benel thought, but I’ll find out what he’s up to.

  And so, the next day, under bright sunshine, Benel climbed early up onto the roof and, pushing puddles from yesterday’s storm aside with his boots, realigned one of the security cameras to give a wider sweep.

  The Ghost didn’t appear that day or the next, leading Benel to think that perhaps he was gone for good, or captured, or dead—

  But the following day the security chime went off, and Benel gave his full attention to the Screen.

  “Zoom, and follow,” Benel ordered, and the Screen obeyed. Benel could almost feel the roof camera swiveling to follow the Ghost—but still he could not get a good look. The man’s face was averted, hidden in shadow. He walked like a person in a dream, unheedful of his surroundings, hands at his sides. His tunic looked as if he had worn it for days.

  In the labyrinthine streets surrounding the recreation center, Benel followed him until he was finally lost in the distance. Benel was amazed to see that he was heading for Frolich City’s feeder station, but the camera’s limited range could not overcome distance, and the Ghost was soon, once again, lost from sight.