Dumarest 33 - Child of Earth

by Tubb, E. C.

  CHILD OF EARTH

  E.C. Tubb

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Website

  Also by E.C. Tubb

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  He woke counting seconds, rising through interminable strata of ebony chill to warmth, light and a growing awareness. At thirty-two the eddy currents had warmed him back to normal. At fifty-eight his heart began beating under its own power. At seventy-three the pulmotor ceased helping his lungs. At two hundred and fifteen the lid swung open with a pneumatic hiss.

  He lay enjoying the euphoria of resurrection.

  The Winds of Gath, Chapter One

  When Earl Dumarest stepped for the first time from a casket in the cargo hold of an unnamed interplanetary freighter, his creator could not possibly have imagined that the character’s quest for his lost homeworld would still be entertaining readers over four decades later, spawning a purely literary cult at a time when science fiction cults have become almost exclusively the territory of film and television properties. That E.C. Tubb’s best known creation should have achieved such status largely by word of mouth and then, whilst almost entirely out of print, gone on to expand its readership and fanbase in the 21st century is even more remarkable.

  Consistently imaginative, intelligent and exciting throughout its considerable length, Tubb’s Dumarest of Terra is a fast-moving action-adventure in the space-opera mold, focused as closely on character as on plot, and respectful of science—particularly with regard to the realities of interstellar travel—without ever going over the head of the science novice. The canvas is a far future where mankind has spread across the universe, populating hundreds of planets so far distant from Earth that its existence has been forgotten and its whereabouts erased from star maps. Only a handful of people are prepared to believe that mankind once originated on a single planet and that Earth is anything other than a legend.

  Earl Dumarest knows the truth. A native of Earth, he left the planet as a child, stowing away aboard a visiting space freighter to leave behind a savage, primitive life on a world scarred by ancient wars. The captain was kinder than Dumarest deserved: instead of ejecting the boy into space, he took him on as a member of his crew. At the opening of the first Dumarest novel, The Winds of Gath (1967), Dumarest has been travelling for many years and now seeks to return to Earth, searching for clues that will lead him to the lost coordinates of his home planet.

  A skilled fighter with almost superhuman reflexes, Dumarest takes on whatever employment comes his way – mercenary, bodyguard, gladiator, escort, soldier – in order to pay for passage to the next world on his trail. When he can afford it, he rides High, biological processes slowed by drugs to compress the subjective travel time from months to weeks. The alternative is travelling Low: doped, frozen and ninety percent dead, riding in caskets meant for livestock, risking the fifteen percent death rate for the sake of cheap travel.

  Dumarest’s universe is an empire in decline ruled by aristocratic families, merchant houses and consortiums. Often these rulers and landowners are in the thrall of the Cyclan, dispassionate robot-like humans known as cybers, who act as advisors to those in positions of power. Trained from boyhood to extrapolate known data and predict the logical outcome of any action or sequence of events, each cyber has undergone an operation on the thalamus to remove the capacity for emotion. Homochon elements grafted to their skulls enable them to achieve a telepathic communion with the Cyclan gestalt, a collective central intelligence consisting of a million naked brains hooked in sequence at the Cyclan’s secret headquarters buried beneath miles of rock, deep in the heart of a lonely planet.

  Early in his travels, Dumarest discovers that the Cyclan have a hidden agenda, using their influence with the ruling classes to place themselves in a position of absolute power and authority across the universe. Later, he comes to realise that they are also responsible for the proscription of Earth and the purging of all records of the planet’s existence. Following the events of the fourth novel, Kalin (1969), Dumarest becomes a target for the Cyclan when he comes into the possession of the affinity twin, an artificially-created symbiote based on a molecular chain of fifteen units, which has been stolen from a Cyclan laboratory. Injected into the blood stream, the symbiote nestles in the rear of the cortex, meshes with the thalamus and takes control of the central nervous system, enabling one brain to completely dominate another. Dumarest alone knows the correct sequence of the molecular units composing the chain, preventing the Cyclan from using the affinity twin to accelerate their goals of universal supremacy.

  On his long quest Dumarest journeys to the fungus encrusted planet of Scar, the juscar mines of Elysium, the circus of Chen Wei on Baatz and a city of treasure on the fabled Ghost World of Balhadorha, among many other fantastical locations and cultures, all evocatively described by Ted Tubb’s lyrical prose. Everywhere there is danger and death as Dumarest encounters sadistic princes, greedy entrepreneurs, fanatical scientists and vulnerable children with strange psychic abilities, and always there are intimate relationships with fascinating, beautiful and exotic women.

  The origins of Tubb’s Dumarest of Terra can be traced throughout the author’s earlier work in the 1950s when he was a frequent contributor to SF magazines such as New Worlds, Nebula Science Fiction, Science Fantasy and Authentic Science Fiction. Born in London in 1919, Edwin Charles Tubb made his first sale as a writer in 1951, a short story entitled ‘No Short Cuts’ which was published in issue 10 of New Worlds. The same year he was invited to pen three novels for pulp paperback publisher Curtis Warren. Tubb accepted the invitation and Saturn Patrol, Planetfall and Argentis were duly published, but each was credited to one of
Curtis Warren’s house names—King Lang, Gill Hunt and Brian Shaw respectively—denying Tubb the recognition for his work.

  Nonetheless, within three years Tubb had become one of British science fiction’s most prolific and popular writers with a further 27 novels to his name and dozens of short story contributions to SF magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He became a five-time winner of the Nebula Science Fiction Magazine Literary Award (1953-1958) and received the 1955 Cytricon Literary Award for Best British SF Writer. From February 1956 to October 1957, he was also editor of Authentic Science Fiction where his deadlines often meant that he had to write most of the contents too, crediting his stories to a variety of pen names such as Alan Innes, Julian Carey and Alice Beecham.

  “I wrote whatever I could to keep the money coming in,” Tubb recalls of his early writing career. “I did westerns, a few thrillers and some gangster things, but it was the science fiction that I personally enjoyed. I began to write under different names, some of which were my own invention – Charles Grey, Carl Maddox, George Holt and Alan Guthrie—and others which were given to me by publishers as they were house names—Volsted Gridban, Roy Sheldon, Arthur Maclean and so on.

  “I learned that, more than anything else, speed was everything. You had to write fast—don’t edit, just let it flow. Sometimes what you wrote was awful, but mostly it was alright and you got away with it. If you were paid by the word, you would use all sorts of little tricks to fill the page. I had characters spending a whole paragraph just stubbing out a cigarette and going through a door. It was like that in those days.

  “I learned a lot of things in the early days. I was naive and I was ripped off once by a bloke who claimed that he was better known than I was and would be more likely to have a book published than me. He told me that once my book was published he would give me the fee for it and I would have my foot in the door, as it were, with his publisher. He paid me for the first one, so I wrote another two, which he submitted in the same way, as having been written by him. These too were published—but he then vanished, and I was never paid for them! I learned from that.

  “When I was first writing, I used all of the things that I had soaked up about the real universe and astronomy and so on. I had read other people’s stories with characters going to different planets without space-suits or breathing equipment and I just thought it was all a bit daft. I always wanted to make the stories exciting and interesting but I didn’t want them to be totally silly and outrageous. I knew about rockets and the pressures that space flight can put upon the human body so I tried to put all of that into my stories. I always felt that it was a little unfair actually. I don’t claim to be a scientist myself, but I am a writer with an understanding of science. Yet there I was, earning the same as people who were just making up everything with no regard to realism at all. But that was how it was.

  “People have this idea that writing is a kind of romantic life but it isn’t. If you’re already well off and write to express yourself I suppose it is romantic, but for me it was hard work. I had a family to support and really just sitting in front of a typewriter makes it a bloody lonely life, not a romantic one. You don’t meet anybody and you lose touch with the real world because you spend all of your time in one that you have invented – such as the one for the Dumarest stories.”

  The genesis of the universe that Tubb invented for Dumarest to roam can be found in Saturn Patrol (1951), Tubb’s very first novel. Despite the title, the story has nothing to do with Earth’s solar system and is instead set far across the galaxy at an unspecified (presumably future) time. The book follows the exploits of Gregg Harmond, a former space pilot, who leaves an unrewarding life as a farmer on the Rim world of Lagos to join the Warbirds, a band of space mercenaries, before going on to reunify the warring Galactic Centre as the commander of his own Warbird group, the Eagles. Much of the structure and style of the backdrop of Saturn Patrol resembles that of Dumarest of Terra, to the extent that it would be easy for readers to imagine that they are one and the same.

  Five years later, Tubb first wrote about a character named Dumarest in a short story for Galaxy, published in both the American and British editions of the magazine in 1956 and later included in Tubb’s short story collections Ten from Tomorrow (1966) and The Best Science Fiction of E.C. Tubb (2003). A melancholy tale with a devastating twist in the final paragraph, ‘Vigil’ tells of an interplanetary truck-driver and the old man he meets every time he arrives at a cargo terminus on the Moon, a father waiting for his missing son to return home from space. Prototypes of Earl Dumarest—tall, survivalist adventurers with a logical and deductive mind—can be found in many of Tubb’s early works, primarily in Curt Gregson, the protagonist of ‘The Troublemaker’, a novelette published in Nebula magazine in 1953. The Dumarest of‘Vigil’, however, is not one of them, being a hard-drinking colleague of the storyteller with no connection whatsoever to his later namesake. Even so, Tubb clearly thought the name was too good for just a one-off appearance.

  Tubb himself points to another story, ‘The Bells of Acheron’, as the direct forerunner to his Dumarest novels. Originally published in Science Fantasy magazine in 1957 and later collected in A Scatter of Stardust (1972), this too is a melancholy tale, told by the ship’s steward on an interstellar Grand Tour. He relates the events of a visit to the planet Acheron where noises emitted by bell-like glass flowers sound like the voices of dead loved ones to human ears. In his introduction to the English language edition of The Return (1997), the 32nd Dumarest novel, Tubb recalled how The Winds of Gath developed from a desire to revisit the central concept of ‘The Bells of Acheron’, replacing the glass flowers of Acheron with the mountains of Gath, a geological feature on a dying planet which produces a similar effect when lashed by storm winds, but equally capable of inducing insanity and death. Here is a planet that has become a onestop tourist attraction for the rich and powerful, yet has no home industry, no stable society in which a man can find work to earn the price of the get-away fare. If a traveller arrived here by accident, how would he survive and what lengths would he be prepared to go to in order to escape? What sort of a man would he have to be, and what motive could be strong enough to drive him to leave the planet rather than simply accept his fate as others have done before? So Earl Dumarest was born.

  The Winds of Gath was initially picked up by science fiction writer, editor and publisher Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books in New York. The editor of Ace’s pioneering science fiction line, Wollheim had added Tubb to his list ten years earlier when he published the first book edition of The Space-Born (1956), a story originally serialised in New Worlds Science Fiction magazine. Tubb’s best known stand-alone work, The Space-Born is an acknowledged masterpiece of the ‘generational starship’ story, telling of a society who are the sixteenth generation of the original crew of a vast starship which is en route to Pollux from Earth, a journey lasting three hundred years. In a plot which prefigured the central premise of William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson’s Logan’s Run (1967), the protagonist, Jay West, is a psychpoliceman whose job is to eliminate anyone who has become a burden to the society, whether ill, unfit, neurotic, mentally unstable or, crucially, over forty years old. West faces a terrible dilemma when he discovers that his next target is the father of the woman he loves, and his solution changes the lives of everyone on the ship. Bound as an Ace Double – a range of paired paperbacks printed back-to-back – with Philip K. Dick’s The Man Who Japed, The Space-Born made little impact at the time, but Wollheim was keen to retain Tubb’s services and Ace published the American editions of his next three SF novels.

  The Winds of Gath was the company’s fifth Tubb book. Bound with Juanita Coulson’s Crisis on Cheiron and published in October 1967, Dumarest’s debut was virtually overlooked by the science fiction cognoscenti in a year that also saw the first publication of such genre classics as Robert Silverberg’s Thorns, Piers Anthony’s Chthon, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light and Harlan Ellison’s ground-breaki
ng anthology Dangerous Visions. Nonetheless, The Winds of Gath proved so popular with Ace readers that Wollheim immediately commissioned a sequel, Derai, published in 1968, and then six further instalments over the next four years.

  The UK rights to The Winds of Gath were acquired by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, whose self-named publishing company was notable for a number of New Wave science fiction novels and the work of such authors as Ray Bradbury, Thomas M. Disch and Angela Carter. For their British edition of The Winds of Gath, some revisions were made to the original manuscript and the title was cut down to just Gath, but in contrast to the American edition it was published singularly, and in hardback. To the dismay of British readers, HartDavis declined to print the subsequent Dumarest novels and it was another five years before the series finally took off in the UK. In 1973, Arrow Books, an imprint of the Hutchinson Group, picked up the rights and produced the first British paperback edition of The Winds of Gath – reinstating both the original title and Tubb’s original manuscript – together with the first British publications of the next three books in the series, Derai, Toyman and Kalin, in a simultaneous release.

  By this time, the saga had already reached book seven, Technos, in the US and Tubb had finished writing an eighth, Veruchia, thereby completing his existing obligations to Ace Books. Donald Wollheim had left Ace in 1971 to form his own publishing company, DAW Books, which he claimed was the first such company devoted exclusively to science fiction and fantasy. Here, Wollheim published Tubb’s non-Dumarest novel Century of the Manikin (1972), but he desperately wanted to add the ongoing Dumarest series to DAW’s list. He persuaded Tubb to jump ship with Dumarest’s ninth adventure, Mayenne, inviting the author to add an extra 10,000 words to a manuscript which Tubb had already completed, a task which Tubb relished as it gave him the freedom to expand and develop the plot. Mayenne was issued by DAW in May 1973. Curiously, Ace had held back the publication of Veruchia and it did not appear until June that year: the ninth book was published one month before the eighth. From Zenya (1974) onwards, DAW adopted an umbrella title, Dumarest of Terra, for the series. Up to this point, the series had not been known by a collective title—they were simply ‘Dumarest’ novels or ‘Dumarest Space’ novels. Dumarest of Terra was subsequently adopted by Ace for reprints of their Dumarest titles and remains the collective name by which the series is best known in North America.