A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  “Oh!” She brightened. “What’s it like?”

  “Please contain your impatience. When we arrive, you will find out.”

  Viewed from orbit, the next world looked remarkably like all those they had so far visited: a similar color, much the same amount of cloud cover, similar oceans and polar caps.

  Well, that was logical. Planets fit for human occupation had to resemble one another—always excepting the extraordinary triplet of the Veiled World. So what had been the trap that wrecked their chances for its colonists?

  Annica didn’t realize she had spoken aloud—or perhaps she hadn’t and Ship now knew her so well, it could deduce what she was thinking from her expression and her pheromones. However that might be, the answer came at once.

  “Here is a projection of a typical area in what seemed to be the most suitable zone for a first settlement.”

  Suddenly they seemed to be flying over a level plain carpeted with mossy plants of dark bluish-green. Here and there bulkier growths stood out, clustering more densely toward a line of hills on the horizon and becoming rarer as the land sloped toward a body of water: perhaps an estuary. It appeared to be early morning.

  Something leapt upward from the water and fell back with a resounding splash. They realized they could hear as well as see the projection; in fact, they could even smell it. Again as though able to read their thoughts, Ship said dryly, “In case the odors worry you, you’re not actually inhaling the molecules. I’m simulating their effect on your olfactory nerves.”

  “Should we be worried?” Menlee wondered.

  “You would have grounds. This is what an airborne infection did to the settlers’ descendants despite the medical techniques they disposed of and all the data they’d amassed before they landed.”

  The view zoomed at tremendous speed over the estuary—it was definitely a river mouth, for they glimpsed rapids a short distance inland—and shot across a low headland. Beyond …

  Beyond there was a cluster of hovels made of branches, rocks, and mud. The projection halted with the entrance to one of them in close focus. Something was moving in the semidarkness beyond the opening. It emerged as though in intolerable pain. It had a head, two upper and two lower limbs—but they were terribly deformed. Bony excrescences loomed above its eyes; its jaw was monstrously twisted to one side, and lips that could not stretch to close its mouth revealed enormous yellow teeth bulging outward. It seemed unable to bend its knees or elbows, while its hands and especially its feet were bloated into misshapen clods of flesh and dried-on mud.

  Annica failed to repress a cry. Swallowing hard, Menlee spoke for them both.

  “What in all of space happened to them?”

  More of the creatures were emerging now, including children. Those had not yet lost the power to bend their joints and crawled along comparatively quickly on hands and knees. In a group, they moved toward the water, seeming not to know or care about whatever the huge thing was that had leapt from it.

  “This happened to them,” said Ship, and in front of the display there floated a polychrome molecular diagram. Menlee spoke half-aloud as he deciphered it.

  “But none of those groups ought to interfere with human germ plasm … except possibly the one that includes manganese … Manganese? Yes … But even so … Oh!”

  “What is it?” demanded Annica, who was less well versed in stereochemistry.

  “I don’t think this attacked their heredity. I don’t see why it should. Ship?”

  For once there was no answer. Puzzled, Menlee glanced around as though expecting to read an explanation from the air. Annica laid a hand on his arm.

  “Don’t bother it,” she whispered. “Haven’t you realized how it must be feeling?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “It delivered these people’s ancestors here. It allowed them to walk into this appalling trap. It didn’t come back to rescue them before it was too late. And now is the first time it’s had the chance to find out what really went wrong.”

  “The first time—? Yes, of course.” Menlee was sweating despite the equable temperature; he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Yet it was able to warn us we were going to see a failure world, even though it refused to tell us details of the other ones we’ve been to before we actually got there … You were right to say that if there’s any consistency in Ship’s instructions, it’s not obvious.”

  “Well, it’s said all along that it believes itself to be damaged.” In the projection, the half humans were entering the water with grunts and yells as of continual pain. She concentrated on the molecular diagram to distract herself.

  “What do you make of it?” she said after a pause. “Not something that affects the germ plasm, you said.”

  “No. It looks more like something that might affect individual organs, especially bony parts. Not mutational. Possibly congenital. A sort of carcinogen that could well start its work in the womb.”

  “How could they possibly have overlooked it?”

  “They didn’t,” Ship Said quietly, and added, “by the way, Menlee, you’re right. These people’s germ plasm is human. Take a cell from one of their livers, or even the spinal cord, and you would find no significant difference. When it comes to bone, it’s another matter. Their bones become cancerous, not actually in the womb but shortly after they draw their first breath. By puberty the effect is bodywide. The oldest of the people you’re looking at is about twenty. In other words, they still live long enough to breed, but—can I tell you this? Strangely, I find I can—by the time of my next visit they will be extinct.”

  Annica had been containing herself with vast effort. Now she burst out, “I don’t understand! I asked how they could have overlooked such a terrible threat, and you said they didn’t! That doesn’t make sense!”

  “When their ancestors landed here,” Ship said gently, “the threat did not exist.”

  They both stood dumbstruck for a long moment. The molecular diagram vanished, but neither of them returned full attention to the beach scene, where the malformed were grubbing for shoreline weed and creatures corresponding no doubt to shellfish but soft enough to eat whole.

  “Antibody,” Menlee said at last.

  “Oh, the pity of it!” Annica whispered as she realized what he meant.

  “Exactly,” Ship confirmed. “Not even with the resources of my data banks to call on did their forebears begin to suspect that on this planet there exists an antibody system capable of being triggered only by life-forms arriving from outside. Life here began, as on most planets, independently; we are outside the Arrhenian zone of the other systems you have lately visited. Conceivably the phenomenon traces back to the arrival of wandering spores from that zone; there must have been some evolutionary purpose to it, or it would never have arisen. And the spores I left behind in nearby space made matters worse.”

  Their eyes had now been drawn back, as though they were hypnotized, to the projection of the beach. Something was moving in the water, drawing closer. Now and then it broached the surface. Its form could not be discerned, but it was large. Perhaps it was the same creature that had earlier made such a spectacular leap into the air.

  Abruptly one of the largest of the malformed uttered a scream, a cry of utter and indescribable despair, and with clumsy strides waded out to meet it. Some of the others ceased their scavenging for food and gazed dully in his—her?—direction, but most ignored what was going on.

  “Please, no,” Annica whispered, but there was no way to stop it. Something showed partly above, partly below, the surface, like a colossal black suction tube rimmed with orange fangs. A second later there was a spurt of bright red blood.

  The projection vanished. They were looking down from space, as before. Ship said sadly, “You see, even now they still retain enough intelligence to decide when life is not worth living.”

  Eventually Annica roused herself, striving to recover her spirits.

  “At least you promised that the ne
xt world will be as foreign as we can well desire—correct?”

  “Indeed. Though I cannot promise it will cheer you up.”

  HOW IS IT—WHY IS IT— THAT MY CREATORS FORCED ME TO FEEL such misery, such shame, whenever one of the worlds I’ve seeded proves to be a failure?

  In the near-to-nonexistence of tachyonic space, Ship brooded over questions akin to those faced by uncountable humans since the dawn of history.

  Why did they decide to build a machine capable of suffering? Why make me conscious and aware? Could my role not have been performed far more efficiently by a device without emotion, coldly and totally rational?

  Recollection of Stripe’s fate was haunting it.

  Of course there are an infinity of universes where everything is different. That’s known. Likewise there are billions of humans. So why did they design me to make, knowing I must lose them, friends?

  CHAPTER NINE

  EKATILA

  “USKO! USKO! OH, WHERE HAS THAT BOY GOT TO?”

  Bustling around the house’s spiral maze of curving nacre corridors floored with tamped and multicolored clay, issuing orders to servants, scolding a pair of window carvers who were mindlessly cutting a hole where it would look onto a blank wall, pausing here and there to adjust the angle of a branch of flowering cikotika or the hang of a family portrait—which today of all days must be set askew—Osahima, portly in middle age, now and then shouted her son’s name, though with small hope of a reply. Was it not enough that she should have lost her husband? To have an impious son as well: that was too much!

  Then, finally, she chanced on him, emerging with a vast yawn from that most obvious of places, the cellar, blinking at daylight as though he had not expected it. The cellar was not in fact a cellar, being, like the rest of the house, half aboveground, but it was the only part totally devoid of windows and illuminated exclusively by phosfung. Something of their sallow and unwholesome light seemed to have permeated Usko’s face and hands, perhaps his very bones.

  Seemed, though. Only seemed. Had the phenomenon been real, the family’s geneticist would have reacted instantly.

  “So there you are!” Osahima exclaimed crossly. “I’ve been hunting for you everywhere! Go and get dressed!”

  Tilting his thin pale face, Usko glanced down with the air of someone who cared so little about clothing he was quite prepared to discover he was naked. Finding he was in fact clad in his usual rather grubby overall, he looked blankly at his mother.

  “I mean properly dressed!” she roared. “Have you forgotten what day it is?”

  “Ah …” Rubbing sleep from his eyes, fighting the urge to yawn anew, Usko suggested, “Someone’s anniversary?” Osahima cast her eyes heavenward. “May the Being save me!” she cried. “This child who everybody says is so intelligent, so brilliant, can’t even remember that it’s Pilgrimage Time!” Seeming to notice for the first time how gaudily the house was decorated—red cikotika here, yellow pilopika there, everywhere dark green garlands of okalika as though the house had been wrapped up like a gif t… and indeed it had become, in a sense, an offering—Usko had the grace to apologize.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I stayed up late last night because one of my experiments was about to fruit, and I suppose I fell asleep waiting. Missed the great event, anyhow. But”—animation transformed his expression—“this morning it’s coming on fine! By this evening at the latest I should have a score of hingochapla, enough to last the winter and perhaps the spring as well! Won’t you find them useful?”

  “I don’t like hingochapla,” his mother snapped. “The way they always have to repeat your orders twice, three times, and in such a horrid grating voice—”

  “But I’ve designed these to whisper!”

  “Don’t you mean to be trained to whisper?”

  “Uh—of course.”

  “I see.” Osahima set her hands on her hips. “You’re looking for an excuse not to accompany the rest of the family on Pilgrimage. You’re hoping I’ll let you stay at home to train them— Don’t interrupt! I know as well as you do that it has to be done as soon as they start to move around by themselves, most likely sometime this afternoon. Well, my son, you have another think coming.”

  She glanced around, caught sight of a passing yugochapla, and issued crisp orders. The creature hesitated a moment, tom by submental conflict, then carefully set down the pots of rauni it was carrying and headed for the cellar.

  “Mother! You can’t! You mustn’t!”

  “Who says I can’t?” Osahima demanded. “This is my house so long as I live—isn’t it? And today is the first day of Pilgrimage—isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “There are no buts! You are coming with the family to perform the due and fitting ceremonies! Never mind your horrid hingochapla! You can always make more, if you must. Right now— Ah! Just the person I need! Reverend Yekko!”

  Beaming, resplendent in full Pilgrimage garb from his stiff black coronet to his black-booted feet, separated by an overall dyed in twenty vivid colors, the family’s spiritual adviser hastened to answer her summons … and almost collided with the yugochapla as it emerged from the cellar, carrying the results of Usko’s experiment. If it had had a face, one might have imagined it looking gleeful. The yugochapla were barely conscious—that had been proved repeatedly—but some of them were at least dully aware that the larger, livelier, more adaptable hingochapla were due to replace them eventually, and the task of disposing of Usko’s new and promising strain seemed to be affording it some drab counterpart of enjoyment.

  “Bury the whole lot in the garbage pile!” Osahima commanded even as she seized the priest’s arm, and went on with scarcely a pause for breath.

  “Yekko, I have a complaint. Your education of my son has left much to be desired.”

  Alarm spread over Yekko’s bland plump countenance. He ventured, “In what way … ? No, don’t tell me. I see he is not yet dressed for our journey.”

  “Exactly. It would appear he has forgotten his catechism, doesn’t it? Much as I would like to set out right away, I think it would do him good to be reminded of it, even at the cost of an hour’s delay.”

  “Absolutely,” the priest said, trying to sound and look grim. Since at heart he was a jolly, lively person, this cost him considerable effort, but he was sincere in his beliefs, and there was a genuine sense of affront in his tone. Turning to Usko, he was about to launch into the catechism when he realized that they were blocking the path of a string of servants laden with necessaries for Pilgrimage. Being a nine-day expedition, it called for huge amounts of baggage, ranging from changes of clothing to kitchen utensils. One could never rely on finding proper cooking equipment at a roadside inn.

  In the same moment Yekko beckoned Usko aside, Osahima spotted that one of the yugochapla had picked up something she particularly did not want removed from the house and stumped in its wake, shouting.

  Voice too low for her to overhear, Yekko said, “Usko, Usko! What possessed you to annoy her today of all days? You know what she’s going to be like as a result—maybe during the entire trip!”

  The capdoor at the end of the passage they were standing in was wide open. Usko’s eyes were turned that way, fixed on one of the enormous baplabaska that would carry the household and its goods to Penitenka. The vast gray-blue mass was obediently slumping to the ground at the command of its mahuto, and servants were converging from all sides.

  He said at length, “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry!” Yekko’s cheeks turned purple. “You can’t have forgotten about Pilgrimage!”

  “I—uh—suppose not.”

  “Well, you haven’t exactly prepared for it, have you?”

  “No.” Usko shifted from foot to foot.

  “So are you going to tell me exactly what it is you’re playing at?”

  Usko drew a deep breath.

  “I just don’t feel like going to Penitenka this year.”

  That was too much for Yekko. He stamped his
foot. “I never thought I’d have to remind you of this, boy, but apparently I must! This is not something you can disregard because you aren’t feeling like it! This is a sacred duty and an obligation! Your mother told me to run you through the catechism. I hoped to avoid it. Now I’m going to—and the full version if I must! She said she could put up with an hour’s delay, and if that’s how long it takes to restore your sense of responsibility, so be it!”

  “I think she meant—” Usko began.

  “I know precisely what she meant! An hour including the time it’s going to take to make you presentable! Well, if you don’t show proper reverence in your answers, I’ll take you through the entire text again, and if necessary again, and you can put up with being the only member of the household to reach Penitenka in shabby workaday clothes instead of Pilgrimage garb! Is that clear?”

  Yekko was almost shaking with unaccustomed emotion, and Usko flinched. Maybe this time he had gone too far.

  He said placatingly, “Very well, Master Priest. I’m ready and willing to undergo—”

  And realized Yekko was no longer looking at him but past him. He turned and found that his sister Lempi, followed by six or eight of her personal yugochapla, was advancing down the passage. “Advancing” was the word. He was twenty, and she was only eighteen, but she had the air and mannerisms of their mother. Stately in a wide-hipped gown of sunshine yellow, her headdress supported by fluttering hylochapla leashed with bright red ribbons, she constituted a one-person parade. Last year at Penitenka she had been outshone by the eldest daughter of Household Bibirago. Clearly she was determined that the same would not happen again.

  Although it might not be entirely sensible to don so magnificent a gown at the very outset …

  Drawing level with her brother, Lempi favored him with a scornful look.

  “So you aren’t coming. Well, good riddance!”

  And swept past.

  Why, you little—!