by Ivan Cat
The old Pilot steps up to the porthole. "Decide now."
"We need more time," Tesla asks.
"Your chosen scientist has already expended the allotted weeks."
"But I should have been awakened at the same time," Tesla protests. "I am the representative of my dreamers and I did not get a chance to guide Dr. Yll's investigation."
"You were removed from dream capsules at the same time," Malda says. "We cannot be expected to allow for exceptionally slow rates of fugue withdrawal."
Tesla reaches out a conciliatory hand. "Please—"
Malda jerks back. "Do not presume to touch me! Decide now or risk return to your..." he searches for the right word, "cosmopolitan homeworld."
Tesla growls at the thought. CG-667-A. Better known as Evermore. Summer on that green sphere brings flowering plants that fill the air with pollens that rival the most potent narcotics discovered by man. The planet's entire population is forced to migrate from southern to northern hemispheres and back again each year to stay in relatively unpolluted, winter environments. And even so, a huge proportion of the population is incapacitated at any one time, the narcotics polluting their bodies and minds.
"They have lost the way," Tesla says disparagingly.
"Morals have evolved on Evermore," Talaylan objects. The apprentice Pilot, like Tesla and his dreamers, is also a native of Evermore. Tesla regards Talaylan as an incompetent and he suspects Malda does, too; he suspects the mummified-looking senior Pilot would do anything to be rid of the young interloper, so that he could stay with his precious ship and not be forced into retirement, but Tesla does not know how to use this knowledge to his advantage.
"Society thrives on Evermore," Talaylan laments haughtily. "I left it only to serve the greater good."
Society thrived on Evermore, because norms of morality had devolved to suit the planet. It was not the kind of society Olin Tesla wanted any part of.
Tesla realizes the choice is made. This is where his Fallen people shall make their New Ascension; this is where they will strive to attain the Body Pure.
"Wake my wife first," he requests.
Malda inclines his head, seeming almost sympathetic for a heartbeat; his loose neck skin sways. "A wise choice. I respect your dream, and it might have been lost. The seeding begins."
Tesla's gut tightens. In a few months the new colony will be established. Kismet will leave the system. There is no turning back.
The island fortress grew on the horizon, proud, challenging the surrounding seascape with a brown band of walls and guard towers. Trimmed and orderly plant life peeked over its battlements in a defiant affront to the profusion of leaf and tree which overflowed from every Feral island. Trees within the fortress grew in rows. Sunlight glinted from prefab rooftops, also planted in rows.
Karr was reminded of a prison island on Solara.
"Bear right," said Jenette.
Karr steered the heavy lifter where she pointed, closing the final stretch to the large island, slowing, setting down a few dozen yards from the island and then coasting through a waterway cleared of tube-and-bladder kelp to an immense gate in the defensive walls. He cut the engines as the hull nudged against a broad corrugated ramp. The fortifications loomed above, five stories high. Constructed from layered composite fibers, they flexed with the faint motion of the large island. Heavy mount pulse-cannons bristled from evenly spaced towers.
There was no sign of activity, no people on the battlements, no vessels on the water, no sound of activity behind the walls.
"Is it always this quiet?" Karr asked.
Jenette looked around warily. "No." Why were the gates closed, she wondered. They were customarily open during daylight hours. Where were the fishing craft, which cleared Enclave waters of sharkworms and provided food for the domestic population?
Two soldiers appeared from a small door beside the large gates. They jogged down and moored the lifter to the ramp. To Karr's eye they appeared over-young, recruits fresh out of boot camp, but their movements were practiced, precise, and formal. They snapped to attention as Jenette stepped off the lifter.
"Consul Tesla," they greeted, careful not to eyeball her—and especially careful not to eyeball Karr as he stepped onto the ramp behind her.
"Where's my father?" Jenette asked suspiciously.
Olin Tesla was nowhere to be seen. He had been acting strangely ever since first meeting Karr. That night of their meeting, Tesla had listened to Karr's synopsis of his arrival, never interrupting. All the time the uncharacteristic awe and relief was plain on his face. When Karr was unable to stay awake any longer, Tesla had returned to his skimmer without saying a word to Jenette. She spent the night sleepless. The few yards of water between the two vehicles might as well have been an ocean. The next day, Tesla led off before she could speak to him. He and Karr played a slowly paced game of tag across the ocean, the lifter capable of traveling much faster, but forced to stop more and more frequently as the engines began to overheat. When they stopped for the night near FI-716, Jenette again tried to speak to her father, but he was back to his domineering old self, extolling the virtues of the New Ascension Enclave, painting a heroic picture of their struggle to bring civilization to a barbarous world, and conversing with Jenette just enough so as not to arouse suspicion in Karr. Tesla didn't actually need words to show his displeasure with her, accusing eyes or averted shoulders did that quite effectively. Tesla slept in the skimmer again and took off the next morning, racing ahead at full speed to attend to "pressing Enclave matters," and instructing Jenette to meet him at the main gate. Tesla kept Arrou on the skimmer the whole time, an unspoken hostage to Jenette's compliance.
"You are requested to proceed through the gates," one of the Guards said, in tight-lipped response to Jenette's query. Jenette started toward the small door the Guards had appeared from. "By your leave, Consul," the same Guard interrupted, gesturing to the main gate itself. A mighty boom resounded behind the walls and the huge doors rumbled open, just wide enough for two people to pass through.
Karr shot a questioning glance at Jenette. She shrugged and shook her head and led on up the ramp. Karr followed, not knowing what to expect as they passed through the imposing vertical opening. Inside was a short alley ringed with high walls and with another set of double doors on its opposite side. The Prime Consul waited for them on the back of a low-slung crawler, which had official seals on the doors and flags on the engine cowl and polished metal railings on the rear deck. An honor squad of six Guards stood double file ahead of it. Two more stood at either side of carpeted boarding steps at its rear.
Jenette cringed at the sight.
She and Karr climbed on. Tesla motioned for them to stand in the place of honor behind the cab.
Karr felt like a bug in a web.
"Ostentatious displays are not absolutely necessary," he muttered, beginning to fear where events were heading.
"Nonsense," said Tesla. "You are a Pilot and must be treated with ceremony befitting your rank."
Karr looked up. Battlements ringed the high walls, well positioned to rain down death on uninvited guests. Again, he was reminded of a prison.
Tesla stood at Karr's right, Jenette on the left. The rear Guards folded the steps, locked a railing into place and fell into line with those out front.
Tesla rapped on the cab. "Drive on."
Another boom resounded. The inner gates grumbled open. The crawler lurched across the threshold, honor guard preceding in perfect lock step.
Karr did not know what to expect. He had seen many strange colonies on many strange planets, but none of those other worlds quite prepared him for New Ascension's human colony and its combination of the mundane and surreal. A cobblestoned avenue, the color of twenty-four-carat gold, stretched inland from the gates; it was lined with rows of shooting-star palms and scattered human structures, weathered prefab units rubbing shoulders with constructs of local material, whose component materials looked plant-like and were frayed at the edge
s. At the far end, Karr caught the unmistakable metal sheen of a seed-colony container, high and wide compared to the buildings clustered densely around it. His overall impression of the colony was of ivory and khaki cubes set in a profusion of sensuous greens. Golden cobblestone arteries snaked off the main avenue into tiled agricultural plots, which Karr could have seen on a dozen other worlds, but these fields teemed with working domestics, as did the rest of the colony. On Karr's left, they tended orchards of mysterious, squid-like bushes. In the distance on his right, they carried heavy head-sized polyps to and from a grouping of military buildings. Everywhere else they worked at a profusion of tasks both pedestrian and peculiar. And, last but not least on the scale of surreal, was the view of the whole landscape rolling with the big island's lurid, gentle motion upon the ocean. The Enclave was a sight to see.
And nowhere near as weird as the gathering horde of human faces.
Hundreds of heads turned toward the crawler. Mouths hung open. Silent. Not cheering, not welcoming, like the crowds of other worlds. Enraptured colonists stared, unblinking, eyes locked, focused in religious fervor.
A murmur swept down the street. "The man in white... A Pilot... Can it be?"
The crowd parted as the crawler inched forward.
"The Body... the Body Pure...."
The crowd was young, eerily young. Some were tall like adults, but all were too thin. Males were gangly and awkward, females sprightly like gymnasts. Their adolescent faces gaped at Karr, changed by the alien forces of New Ascension. Jenette had warned Karr about hormone inhibitors, but it was startling to see the effects en masse. It was a colony of proto-humans, not quite teenagers, not quite adults, looking ghostly with their gray-white hair and simple earthen-colored coveralls. Here and there were young adults, men and women hardly older than Jenette, but who were world-weary where youthful optimism should have reigned. More rare still were those nearing their thirties, worn beyond their years, glowering at Karr bitterly but unable to turn away. Tesla was the only truly old face. And there were no children.
"Welcome to your new home," said Tesla.
Karr gulped, wanting to flee from the hollow faces. He had nothing in common with them, a Pilot, born and bred to solitary life between the stars, bound to duty, to sacrifice, to self-reliance. These were victims. Unmoving. Needy. They didn't even look human. What did they want from him?
The gates boomed shut behind Karr. Cell doors, locking.
The horde pressed closer as the crawler inched on, their strange stillness holding, for now. Halfway down the street, where buildings crowded closer to the golden pavement, a colonist suddenly dove at the crawler, his arm thrusting in over the crawler deck, fingers brushing Karr's boot before he tumbled off. Karr looked back as the young man picked himself up, waving his hand triumphantly.
"I touched him! I touched him!"
The man licked his hand.
Like a pebble starting an avalanche, the zombie crowd began to move. Outstretched hands pressed in, straining to reach Karr. And they found their voices, calling for his attention.
"Me, pick me, touch me... please!"
"Father..." Jenette warned, worried by the crowd's behavior. They began to push and shove. Hundreds of hands tried to get closer to Karr.
"Out of my way! The Pilot! I must touch the Pilot! No, me!"
The crawler jerked to a halt, its path jammed. Karr clutched the deck railing, feeling the same uneasy dread as when crazy Bob had danced around him like a high-speed gnat. Looking back anxiously for orders, the honor guard tried to hold the colonists off.
"Stand clear!" Tesla thundered. The colonists bunched up momentarily. "I bring you a Pilot and this is how you shame me, how you shame the Enclave? How dare you!"
Karr saw that the colonists were beyond words, immobile for a few split seconds like a frozen wave, but indignant, swelling stronger in anticipation of its final crash on shore. Fear motivated them—the same fear that told Karr to run. He felt that. Fear about to explode.
Tesla motioned the Guards to arm their rifles.
"No," Karr said suddenly. There were too few soldiers; all they could do was trigger the explosion. And Karr had seen enough riots to know he didn't want to be at the center of one. Because he was a Pilot, he was bad with crowds; because he was a Pilot, he must now take action. "It's all right. It's okay."
Before Tesla could stop him, and before he lost his nerve, Karr slipped over the railing onto the crawler's engine cowl and reached out to the frightening mob. The wave of humanity broke then, a surf of hands rushed up onto him. Warm hands, sweaty hands, cold clammy fingers, callused palms, soft palms. So many, so close. The sticky intimacy threatened to overwhelm Karr.
"Easy! Easy!" roared Tesla.
Karr focused on single faces in the ghoulish crowd. There was need and terror. There was shock and wonder. On the right were faces full of longing and there on the left were hopeful ones. Karr reached from side to side; there were the disbelieving and the eager. Obsessed and desperate swept by as the crawler began to move again, as well as angry and jealous. Karr saw adulation and felt tears against his palms. These people looked strange, but they had human emotions.
And there, at least, Karr saw common ground. A place he could cling to and not be completely overwhelmed by his fear.
The crawler made the slow journey up the street. More people poured onto the cobblestones from buildings and alleys. Jenette and Tesla watched nervously, hoping the tenuous balance would hold.
XXI
4609 A.D.
New Ascension colony at Elysium island. Three months after seeding.
Olin Tesla's blood-engorged face stares down at Dr. Ponder Yll. Yll fears. Tesla's meaty hands clutch the collar of Yll's pristine labjumper, shaking the smaller, slender man. Tesla's wintry blue eyes are shot with red.
"Please Olin!" Yll squeaks. "Control yourself!"
"Control myself?" Tesla rages. "It's too late for control! We're all dying, you stupid sonofabitch!" Tesla's grip tightens.
"Olin, please!"
"It's all your fault, Yll!"
Yll gasps, thin appendages clawing at Tesla's overpowering limbs. "Olin, you're choking me."
Tesla shoves Yll away. The smaller man slumps against a counter as the big man angrily sweeps a rack of test tubes and glass piping to the floor. Crash!
"You told me there was no disease on this planet!" Tesla pitches a beaker into a wall. The purple fluid of another failed vaccine trickles down sterile surfaces.
"Very little disease," Yll squeaks.
"Eleven hundred dead and you banter words?" Tesla turns a darker shade of red. More beakers shatter against walls and floor.
Yll cringes. The dream is dying. Olin's dream, Yll's dream, the colony's dream. To live the Body Pure, free of corrupting intoxicants, masters of their own bodies and minds—but the human colonists have exchanged the narcotic vapors of Evermore for another, less forgiving contagion.
The New Ascension of Fallen to the Body Pure may not happen now.
Three months ago, Kismet off-loaded two thousand dreamers, fifty percent men and fifty percent women. This day barely half that number survives. Five hundred women, those who were pregnant in transit, gave birth, as planned, two weeks ago. Today they are all dead. Six hundred of the colony's nine hundred sexually active men are also dead.
"I'll... I'll ask Pilot Malda for a dustoff," Yll stammers as Tesla trashes more beakers full of failed science. "I'll reason with him, beg him, whatever it takes—"
"There isn't going to be any dustoff," Tesla spits. "Didn't you hear? Pilot Malda has just declared this planet a Plague World. Interdicted. No contact. We stay. We stay and we live or we stay and we die, but nobody's going to help us. Do you understand? Nobody!"
Yll flinches, understanding all too well.
A lot more dying is to come.
A second wave of prescheduled pregnancies was set in motion before the first mothers began to die, before the awful discovery that the human population was
infected with a pestilence the likes of which had never been seen on a human-settled world. Too late came the knowledge that what Yll at first believed to be a shared planetary super-immune system, was actually a deadly pathogen; there appeared to be no other disease on New Ascension because that pathogen was territorial and aggressive, allowing no other organism to harm one of its hosts before it eventually decided to consume that host. Too late came the knowledge that this pestilence—the Scourge, as Olin has named it—is triggered by the very basic biological function that New Ascension's human colony depends on for survival: procreation.
The lab is in shambles. Yll cowers, unable to escape Olin's abhorrent physical violence.
"We must talk about the third wave of pregnancies," Yll blurts, a desperate act of courage for the frail man.
Tesla stomps over. "Third wave? There will be no third wave! "
"There must be," the scientist yells from the floor, "if you want this colony to survive!" Like a cornered rat, Yll does not back down as Tesla looms over him. "So far there have been five hundred births to eleven hundred deaths. I have discontinued gestation-acceleration in the hopes of decreasing second-wave mortality, but I hereby serve notice that if another four hundred of us die, there will be too few breeding adults to maintain a healthy genetic cross-section—and another four hundred are certain to die. Our first generation gene pool is doomed. Our only hope now is to birth a sufficiently large second generation gene pool. Allowing for child mortality, accidental death, and other unforeseen decreases in stock size, I estimate that three thousand infants would be a safe number."
"Three thousand?" Tesla repeats, dumbfounded. "Who is going to raise three thousand orphans when their parents are all dead?"
The scientist breathes rapidly. "I don't know, I don't know. But without a third wave consisting of at least fifteen hundred more infants this colony will inbreed and perish. I know that as certainly as anything I've ever known."