At that, I would have gratefully settled for my button mandolar, with which to play myself to death, but it had no doubt burned, along with everything else from the Asperance. The idiots who believe that olden times were wonderful ought to try living in the real thing for a while.
A place for everything—with everyone in his place.
Each midday, somehow, when the nastiness seeping frozenly out of the rough stone walls began to drip, marking high noon, I would summon up the energy to belly over to the Lieutenant to check him out. Aside from shivering all the time, it was the only exercise I got. I was not strong enough to stand any more, but the Scavians had taken care of that: there was no room in which to do it. If the torch outside was fresh, I would try picking some of the blind, white, writhing things out of the Lieutenant’s decay-blackened arm to squash on an already-slimy floor. He would struggle feebly at the attention, out of his head.
I was especially careful not to drop any of my own load of vermin into the wound. It took real character to move away from him afterward. His rotting infection was the only source of warmth in the place.
He would lie there, breathing raggedly, occasionally moaning, but for the most part leaving me alone with my thoughts, my dreams of home, such as it was, of fair Eleva, which were a subtle torture in themselves.
As thoughts go, they did not amount to much, a stagnant, circular trickle of regret. Three horror-attenuated weeks still had not been enough to accommodate me to my probable fate. A day from now, a week—or never, if they really had forgotten about us down here in the dark—His Excellency the Bishop, His Grace the local Baron, would finally settle between themselves who got to dispose of us and by what means.
Lieutenant Sermander was lucky. He most likely would not last that long.
Me, they would drag to a secular gibbet in the “town”—a thatchy pile of animal-droppings rucked up against the soiled skirts of this castle—or to a more highly sanctified burning-stake in the greater filth-heap that passed for a metropolis, seventy-odd klicks north of here.
Either way it ended here, back home on dear old Vespucci, they would never find out what had happened to their eighteen intrepid Starmen, the flower of the Naval Reserve. With encouragement—not to mention sufficient distraction—the citizenry would eventually forget.
Everyone but Eleva.
Bureaucrats would breathe a discreet (but hardly unanticipated) sigh of relief. It would have been nice, they would tell themselves, to have found a paradise world, ripe for exploitation. Even so, they would remind each other, now there would be seventeen fewer obsolete heroes to worry about. Never mind that it had been the most expensive liquidation, per capita, in the history of Vespucci, simply raise the tax on protein, or on birth or death or water. The warriors who had recently helped batter our beloved planet into political submission—pardon, make that “solidarity”—presently figured in the official mind as nothing more than the likeliest source of counter-revolution: once-convenient nuisances to find a place for, of honorable exile, of dryrot.
The eighteenth?
No hero, certainly, obsolete or otherwise. Just a humble Navy corporal who was good with certain kinds of necessary machinery. I guess you could say I was the single real volunteer aboard, the sole enlisted man, the only one with dirt under his fingernails, therefore, in the view of my superiors, a sort of machine, himself. My reasons are none of your business, but—well, Eleva wanted to marry an officer.
They had promised me ...
The only other individuals neither forgetful nor relieved would be the scientists. But they would be quiet. It was their expertise that had landed us here. Unless they managed somehow to contain their angry curiosity, they would make perfect scapegoats for our failure. Modern Vespuccian methods are more technically certain (for which read: considerably more painful) than any medieval hanging-tree or pyre.
Eleva, dearly beloved, where are you tonight? Are you thinking of me?
Or will you find an officer to marry, after all?
-2-
The Lieutenant groaned, stirring fitfully.
With what amounted to a supreme moral effort, I managed to lift my good foot, to bring it down on the rat nibbling at his fire-streaked fingers.
I missed, of course.
The jar of my boot on the muck-coated floor sent a shock through my sick, cold-stiffened body. The shaggy, naked-tailed creature scrambled back to its hole between two ill-fitted stones, to chitter away displaced frustration among less-venturesome but equally greedy companions.
They could afford to be patient.
Rats were only one surprising familiarity awaiting the Vespuccian expedition to Sca. Since the founding of our (then) Republic, two centuries before, natural philosophers had been accumulating evidence that humankind had originated elsewhere. There was never enough air to breathe, except at the lowest altitudes. There was never enough water to drink. There was never enough food to eat. There was never enough light.
Animal species on the planet were divided sharply: those like us, oxygen-invigorated, bilaterally symmetrical; or those constructed on a radial, seven-lobed architecture that lived by extracting chlorine from the lowland salt-sinks. The latter species predominated, perhaps because they did not lose three or four out of five newborn at every generation.
Each was thoroughly poisonous to the other, a phenomenon that made the ceaseless competition for environmental niches very interestingly deadly.
Recent republican emphasis on reasonable individual liberty, a resulting prosperity, a stable peace wholly unprecedented in the fifteen hundred years of written planetary history, had allowed the philosophers leisure time, among other resources, to dig up—quite literally—astonishing confirmation of a thousand ancient, bitter tales.
We did not belong.
How else could we have realized, from our remotest prehistoric beginnings, that Vespucci was nothing more than a frigid, barren, dried-out husk of a world, circling a dull amber clinker of a primary, never much of a home to anyone, totally without a future? That is what folk-wisdom had always maintained. That is what modern day science had corroborated. If Vespucci had been our natural place in the universe, we would have fit in, like the seven-legged crawlies of the chlorine marshes.
Vespucci would have fit us.
As the planet’s shifting sands were probed, it began to appear that we—some of us, anyway—might try our luck elsewhere. Maybe that bright blue-white star, companion to our own, “merely” two light years away. For the dessicated books, the incredibly well-preserved artifacts the scientists found revealed that there was an abandoned starship orbiting Vespucci somewhere overhead, fashioned by the hands of human beings, our ancestors, who had known more than us, but who had nevertheless marooned their helpless unhappy posterity in this wasteland.
Yet we scarcely expected to find human beings here on Sca, nor ordinary rats. Nor powerful Barons ruling a degenerate barbarism, nor the Bishops of the Holy Order of the Teeth of God, who, in an uneasy alliance with the feudal aristocracy, held their sun-bleached world in a double grasp, one fist of terrifying faith, the other of naked brutality.
Something slithered out from between the mortarless stones behind my neck. I had been hearing the creature off and on, with its bristly sound of stiff body hairs or countless legs, for the past several days, halfway hoping that it was large enough to eat—the rats were too fast for me—or poisonous enough to bring this insanity to an end.
Perhaps I would have time to use it on the Lieutenant, as well.
I moved. It gave a dampish bubbling squeal, then vanished, leaving silence.
-3-
Folks back home had seen us off grandly. Eleva had ’commed me at the skyport quarantine. Military bands blared loudly over every channel as our clumsy shuttles one by one grumbled aloft toward the new, half-completed vespucciostationary satellite, assembled around the remains of an older technology. Fully finished nearby lay the Asperance, product of our two most important sciences: physics; a
rchaeology.
The World State (no longer a republic) had decided to call her a “starclipper”.
Eighteen Starmen (that being what the World State decided to call us) bound themselves into position alongside the flimsy framing, where they would work, eat, sleep—while exercising grimly in place for months. Fireworks followed the speeches; personal interviews were ColorCommed to a grudgingly united world below. Ranks of heavily armed peace-forcers were not shown on camera in the crowd scenes. We floated free of the station, powered the inertia field-generator, spread our sails.
Mankind was free of Vespucci for the first time in their recorded history.
Technically sophisticated as they may once have been, practicing sciences long lost to their grandchildren—our ancestors—we had learned nevertheless that they had arrived a Vespucci by desperate accident.
Their lifeless, dust-filled ship lay in orbit, lifeslip stations gaping, empty. Within, in addition to their records, the scientists had discovered the “Thorens Broach”, the means by which they had ducked around the laws of physics, hemstitching through an unreal continuum where every point in distance-duration is geometrically common with every other—but one’s destination was uncontrollably random. They had definitely had a destination in mind but had not reached it. Their electronic log held horrific stories of a dozen panic-stricken random leaps until, at last, a marginally-habitable planet had been stumbled upon.
It was still only marginally habitable, which was why we were leaving.
I wondered at the time we read the papers, saw the unfolding story on the ColorCom: what had these people fled to take such a chance? What horrors had they willingly traded for the parched nubbin they named Vespucci? I sincerely did not want to know. Neither did anybody else. It was new worlds we looked for, a future for ourselves, for our children.
Generations of desperate hard figuring, plus a leg-up from what had been rediscovered amidst buried shards, orbital trash, propelled Asperance starward on a newer principle, one that made us feel we had won a certain measure of superiority over our unlucky forebears. Her quarter-meter-diameter hollow core was a paragravitic “antenna” spinning out a field rendering everything within her billowing plastic folds inertialess, no longer subject to the normal laws of accelerated mass. Asperance would not try to evade the speed limit, as folk-tales held that those before us had been “punished” for doing; she would remain in normal space, to ignore the theoretical speed limit altogether.
Half of that capability had been achieved by the time I was born. We Vespuccians—in this case meaning the citizens of the single most advanced nation-state that had ultimately forced their country’s name upon an reluctant entire planet—were old hands at navigating the local system, pushed by photon sails kilometers in width, but merely a single molecule thick. We had explored a dozen lifeless, hopeless balls of baked or frozen rock, often taking months or years to travel a few astronomical units, discovering nothing for their effort in the end.
A sun-system, a planet, a nation-state, all known as Vespucci. It betrayed, I thought even as a little child, a certain narrowness of perspective. It was not the sort of insight I could talk about, even with Eleva. By the time of Consolidation, there were even those who wanted to rename our capital city, Volta Mellis, Vespucci. It was easy to understand: our options were as limited as the imaginations of our geographers.
Not particularly coincidentally.
Asperance might make all the difference. We had learned our ancestors’ physics from the textbooks they had unwittingly left us. The sails of our ship were meant to billow before the interstellar tachyon winds, faster than light itself. She could traverse local distances in seconds. Two light years to the nearest star—a little over ten trillion kilometers—would require something under nine weeks.
-4-
Grimly, we hung on.
Daily, we forced down our inedible rations. Dully, we exerted our bodies against elastic cradles to prevent the void from devouring our bones. Under those merciless, cold pin-points of light, we slept only fitfully. Scarcely ever crawling from the racks to which we had been assigned, each of us tried to forget—or at least not to remind one another—that we would have to find some haven in which to survive the two years it would take for our puny signals to carry home the news of whatever we had found. Eventually we might even be followed by other vessels like Asperance, even possibly get back home someday ourselves.
Home.
Eleva.
If.
So, the officers played CC games, watched our meager stock of entertainment tapes until the brown oxide wore off the plastic. I chorded the button-fretted mandolar, wondering what was to become of us, seeing pale blue eyes, coppery hair, the delicate red bow of a mouth, where they had no right to be, against the ebon canopy of space.
Sixty-two days after our departure, we orbited a promisingly cloud-swirled marble hanging before its overwhelming primary. It was green down there, vastly greener than Vespucci, even to the naked eye, heartbreakingly blessed with water, so inviting it stirred primordial caution deep within a company accustomed to less charitable handling by nature. Yet, with a little finagling, perhaps, this paradise was—ours.
We were prepared to pay.
Asperance shut down her inertialess field generator, to shed her filmy wings in free-fall. We eighteen Starmen huddled together in half a dozen tough, spherical lifeshells of carbon filamentized polyresin that she had carried at her stern. During the all-but-endless journey to this place, they had been our only refuge from the pale, frozen stars.
Or from one another.
Now, under the blinding blue-white brilliance of a foreign star, Sca’s thick mantle of atmosphere began to abrade their skins, filling their bottoms with human sweat. Each armored lander became shrouded, isolated from the other five within its own tortured curtain of ionization. We cowered inside, isolated equally, despite the inhuman crowding, each man alone with his thoughts, his fears. Our homeworld, niggardly as it may have been, was out of touch, lost to us perhaps forever.
-5-
The Baron, as heavily-scarred by some nameless infection as the merest of his vassals, enjoyed a complete ignorance of the geography of his own planet. He refused to believe the “superstitious nonsense” I managed to communicate to him: that we were from that bright light in the sky, right there, where I am pointing. We were all invaders, he decided, foreign vandals, common brigands, breakers of his benevolent peace.
He wanted to hang us.
The Bishop, through a live-in delegation at the Baron’s castle, was all too ready to believe, naming us sorcerers, non-human demons, unnatural purveyors of some weird (but, it appeared, not very potent) magic.
He wanted to burn us.
The Bailiff, a squat, evil-eyed old ruffian with a short axe in his belt, did not much appreciate being caught between two absolute powers. I recognized his type immediately: a retired head-trooper, the kind of battered career non-com who has seen it all, done most of it himself, a little of it twice, but still does not believe a word of it.
He was very enthusiastic about my daily interrogation, however. That did not call for divided loyalties, no sir, not at all. He soon discovered my shattered instep, along with the fact that I screamed quite satisfactorily when he ordered it twisted, grinding the broken bone-ends together. Given such “incentives”, I found learning a new language ridiculously easy. Scavian seemed to follow familiar rules, varied from my own Vespuccian more in pronunciation than vocabulary. I began to wonder whether Sca might be the hell-hole my ancestors had fled. Yet how could these savages have constructed even the absurdly unreliable star-drives we had discovered abandoned in orbit above Vespucci?
I became a lot more fluent—also less curious—when they began displaying tongs, pincers, obscenely-shaped irons thrust into buckets of glowing coals. For the most part, however, the Bailiff preferred simply having my foot exercised. It was much less expensive than good charcoal.
I told them everything I
knew, plus plenty I did not know I knew. I remember at one point offering pathetically to go back home to find out more. None of this seems very real, somehow, although many of the scars, inside or out, I will carry to the end of my days. I passed out frequently during those sessions. With no memory of the intervening period of relief, I would often wake the next day to find some poxy minion wrenching my ruined foot again. Eleva’s eyes, her smile, began elude me, abandoning me when I needed their recollection to sustain me.
Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition Page 2