The Planet Dweller

by Palmer, Jane;

  Realising there was nothing legal or illegal he could do about it, Mr Turner resolved to pay a visit to the parish church for the first time in years and see the vicar to make his peace with God just in case. Climbing wearily into his battered land rover, he drove off to go and count sheep out of the dip.

  ***

  The freighter had released its load of beacons and slipped out of range of the space-distort net. The device would effectively twist anything within its compass inside out and back again - if the sequence, and all else, Jannu and Tolt had guessed at were right. They had enough doubts, and were keeping them to themselves. The Mott commander had the same doubts gnawing at his badly designed bowels. Despite his misgivings, he insisted on remaining in the blasting zone with them on board Kulp’s powerful ship.

  Kulp had prepared everything to suit his efficient way of working, and this alone effectively confused his two partners.

  ‘Right trajectory of the planet won’t be long now,’ Tolt informed the others. ‘The sun must be directly behind it and the collapsar at its side.’

  ‘Where does it say that?’ demanded Jannu.

  ‘On Kulp’s sequence list.’

  ‘If he had a sequence list made out all the while, why have we been guessing at everything?’

  ‘I didn’t think we could trust it. He might have just left it for us to find in case we dumped him, and kept the sequence in his head. He’s shrewd enough to remember it.’

  ‘Then why trust it now?’ hissed Jannu out of the Mott’s translator range.

  ‘Because I have this feeling of desperation overtaking me and I’ve got to trust something,’ he hissed back. ‘Got any better suggestions?’

  ‘No, only don’t do anything to make the Mott more nervous than he is. He keeps passing wind and it is very unpleasant.’

  Tolt knew what Jannu meant and carefully started to arm the terminals. Kulp had already armed the one on the planet before he decided to kill them, and both of them knew not even he could have disarmed it. Still nursing fears that Kulp might find some way of getting back to his ship, Tolt began to speed up the dangerous process.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Jannu reminded him, ‘Remember to give us enough time to get out of here.’

  ‘Now Ea 8 88 won’t respond,’ hissed Tolt petulantly.

  ‘It’s probably a conspiracy with Ex 8 89.’

  ‘It’s not funny!’ Tolt snapped. ‘You should have checked their maintenance on the way here.’

  ‘That was your job as well.’

  ‘It was not. You told me you were going to check them. I was plotting the sequence.’

  The Mott was lost for words at their sudden display of petulance, and weighed up the pros and cons of killing them then and there. Unfortunately, however unreliable these two were, they knew more about the space-distort net than he did. In fact, all the glowing intellects who could have done something about it were on the planet’s surface, though none of them were engaged in profound thoughts that might have improved the situation.

  ***

  Perched on the edge of a cliff behind a boulder just light enough for him to move and heavy enough to crush a Torran, Kulp waited with fanatical patience for his prey to lope past. With impeccable precision, Kulp sent the heavenly gift tumbling down to crush Dax at the instant she was directly beneath. Kulp was already celebrating so he didn’t bother to look over the edge of the cliff to see the result of his handiwork right away, preferring to relish the moment like old brandy.

  When his three-toed feet had stopped springing him up and down in delight, Kulp’s pink features poked themselves over the edge to savour the sight of a squashed Dax.

  With injured innocence, Dax was standing amongst the remains of the shattered boulder, looking back up at her attacker with something resembling pity for his mental condition.

  Logic had always been Kulp’s strong point, and this last incident had no place in it. He had hit her. He couldn’t have missed, and when the furry creature called up to him, ‘Look, I know you’re enjoying yourself, but I really can’t stop to play any more,’ he launched himself from the cliff to see if he could do what the boulder hadn’t.

  Dax stepped aside so he could break his fall on the shattered boulder, then looked down at the breathless body. ‘There’s no need to take it so badly. I’ve got to get back now. Time must be getting short.’

  The genetic engineers had designed his bones to be as strong as steel, but Kulp felt his internal organs judder about inside him and his brain cells slop around in his skull. He hauled himself to his feet, wondering whether his increasing insanity would be contagious to the self-sure Torran. Something in that addled soup of his mind must have told him that this Dax was not the one he had known and loved to hate. Nevertheless, he could take satisfaction in despising this one even more.

  ‘I suppose you might be a little happier if you were to become your normal colour again?’

  Kulp wasn’t sure what she had said at first. He was listening to his own thoughts preparing her destruction.

  ‘Would you calm down if you were to return to that indelicate shade of green?’

  Kulp could hardly believe his ears. Hating this creature was obviously getting him nowhere except painfully dented. Then a glimmer of lucid thought snapped open a part of his brain that had never functioned before. It had been deliberately left undeveloped by the genetic engineers for fear of it weakening the species. Could he be the first Olmuke for millions of years to hear its faint cry? ‘Why bother to waste all this energy on hate?’ it asked. ‘Can’t you find better things to engage your huge intellect?’ Kulp wasn’t able to answer it right away as the idea was such a novelty. He above all others had managed to control his emotions with cool malice, and any sentiments managing to escape through the veneer had more to do with greed than benevolence. This surely couldn’t be the only priority available to an excellent mind like his.

  Dax’s furry hand flicked swiftly in front of the Olmuke’s pink face.

  Kulp felt the tickle of change go through him. He raised his hands and saw that they had reverted back to their normal green. He pounced on the nearest rock with a vein of reflecting crystal running through it, and saw that his face was its normal ugly colour. Kulp’s immediate reaction was to wonder what the catch was, but then, a creature with that sort of power didn’t need to be devious like him. Then the thought of thoughts filtered through his mind. Should he or should he not cease being Kulp the unspeakable, and become Kulp the reasonable?

  The enormity of his own potential encouraged the green super-being to assess those avenues that his mind had always shuttered off before. There, twinkling like new star systems, hung clusters of tempting invitations. They begged him to contrive the execrable in the name of that mystic cult of justice the Torrans had adopted. If they could do outrageous things in the name of justice and be revered for it, why not he? Thanks to the Mott, he was wealthy enough to afford the luxury of morals. Kulp knew he had no hope of transforming into anything like one of the ethereally innocent creatures which lived in lace webs, were born and died in a puff of vapour, lived off clean thoughts, and minded their business so well few had ever seen one. Nevertheless, he resolved to put his evil ideas to a good use. What were good and evil if not a matter of opinion anyway? One just made a quicker return than the other.

  With the change of mind came a flutter of euphoria that substituted for the rapturous elation most others would have experienced at seeing the light. Kulp liked the sensation. Reassured that there was no dishonour in capitulating to any creature a thousand times more menacing than himself, Kulp decided he could also afford the luxury of staying alive while the offer still stood.

  His returning presence of mind told him that these creatures were not to be trifled with like the usual run of galaxy hoi polloi. They were potentially so dangerous and indestructible he would have to control any latent urge to betray them should it ever cross his mind. If he didn’t show some signs of moderate behaviour, he could well end up s
pinning in space like the doomed Moosevan.

  Although she was in a hurry to return to more important matters, Dax hesitated to evaluate the changing thoughts of Kulp. If they revolved sufficiently to her way of seeing things, he might well be worth recruiting. For a greedy, ruthless, genetically manipulated specimen, he did have a remarkably useful brain. If its encounter with her hadn’t left it with irreversible damage, it might well prove invaluable.

  ‘Do you want to join your friends now?’ Dax asked to measure his reaction.

  ‘I’d only have to kill them if I did, and that would be a waste of energy.’

  ‘Would you like to kill them?’

  ‘No need. They don’t know enough about the net to operate it. They’re bound to kill themselves when they try.’

  That was half way to what Dax wanted to hear. She raised a long finger to caution him. ‘With us there is no deceit. While you are weighing up the benefits of being trustworthy, remember that.’

  ‘All right,’ Kulp agreed. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You must realign the beacons and arm the terminals in their correct sequence,’ Dax told him. His bottom jaw dropped. ‘If they are fired in the sequence your friends have programmed they will not only destroy this planet, but themselves as well.’

  ‘I’d have to kill them to get near, though,’ protested Kulp.

  ‘That will not be necessary. As they are preparing the device for the final countdown, we’ll have to move quickly.’

  Still puzzled, though not ungrateful for being given the chance to realise the potential tucked secretly away in his brain for so many years, Kulp listened compliantly to his instructions.

  ***

  Having retreated to what they thought would be the safety of the Mott monitoring station, Tolt and Jannu were installing the firing mechanism for the net. Unable to forget his concern for Mott property, even under those ringlet-raising conditions, the Mott commander looked worried.

  ‘The damage to that console will be deducted from the payment you get,’ he whined, as he saw them levering pieces of it away to reach the circuits beneath; it didn’t improve his mood that Jannu had managed to talk his own service robots into helping them.

  ***

  ‘I can remember where everything goes,’ Tolt told him.

  ‘It’s a pity you couldn’t do the same for the net,’ retorted the Mott. ‘If this goes wrong you know what will happen, don’t you?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Jannu quipped, ‘We won’t get the Mott award for practical engineering.’

  ‘We’ve got to do some damage to the console to install the firing device,’ explained Tolt, ‘and every second we spend doing this means we’re not able to monitor the beacons. We can’t reconnect the scanner until we’ve finished. Did you want to stay in Kulp’s ship and discover some booby trap in the middle of firing, would you?’

  At last the botching and bumbling about was completed. Tolt activated the monitor’s scanner sitting in a pile of materials that had once been the Mott’s console.

  ‘Great, great,’ sang out Jannu in uncharacteristic delight. ‘Ex 8 89 and Ea 8 88 have aligned themselves.’

  ‘That was lucky,’ said Tolt.

  They were both incompetent enough to take the unlikely occurrence as being more fortuitous than sinister.

  ‘We must have got it right after all,’ Jannu went on. ‘The sequence lights are checking out.’

  At that there was a gasp of relief from both ends of the Mott commander who had been thinking more of his court martial than a closer death.

  ‘Luck must finally have paid us a visit,’ Tolt said. ‘Shall we order Kulp’s ship out of range now?’

  ‘Not now we know things are going to work out,’ replied Jannu. ‘We may not have to make a run for it after all,’ he added in a low whisper.

  CHAPTER 13

  ‘What do you mean? You can’t get through?’ demanded Dax.

  ‘She keeps making barriers,’ Reniola protested. ‘I thought she would have wanted us to save her, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she had made the control malfunction in the first place.’

  ‘What would she want to do that for?’

  ‘Well, there must be some things even we don’t know.’

  ‘Moosevan is going to be saved whether she likes it or not,’ Dax said firmly. ‘Once we get through to the control equipment she’ll have no choice in the matter. Everything will be ruined if she isn’t.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem as though she’s going to speak to us either.’

  ‘Of all the planet dwellers the Mott could have chosen, they had to pick this one. We can’t wait around any more. Kulp is due to trigger the net soon.’

  ‘You are sure we can trust him?’ asked Reniola.

  ‘Now his latent conscience cells have been activated there’ll be no problem, even though he’s still learning to use them. In the Olmuke they had been artificially suppressed so if any of them did happen to have a good side to their nature they would never have known about it. Where is the accretion control anyway?’

  ‘A long way down. Couldn’t you think of more suitable bodies to get into than these?’

  ‘No. We need fingers and legs and a large enough brain to hold the information. Stop grousing, can’t you?’

  ‘I don’t like bodies,’ Reniola persisted, leading Dax to where she thought she had blasted an entrance into Moosevan’s crust. ‘They’re uncomfortable, need too much maintenance and can hurt if they don’t get it.’

  ‘You wanted that one,’ Dax reminded her.

  ‘Only because it looked more comfortable. Someone might have told us what to expect.’

  ‘Who would have known anything about the life here if the Torrans hadn’t broken the Jaulta Code? Who’d have thought anyone would have evolved enough to try?’

  ‘It’s going to be one heck of a job evacuating this galaxy when the time comes. We’ve got to find somewhere to put them, and all within a million years or so.’

  ‘Let’s finish this job first. We can worry about taking the Mott’s little toys from them after that.’ Dax stopped before the sheer wall of solid rock Reniola’s path led them to. ‘Now where’s the entrance?’

  Reniola looked up at the barrier with a mixture of amazement and pique. ‘Moosevan has filled it in.’

  ‘That did occur to me.’ Dax drew a matchbox-sized instrument from behind one of her large furry ears. ‘If that’s her attitude she certainly won’t enjoy this very much.’

  Reniola twitched her nose and flinched as a shaft of concentrated light hit the rock face. At first only slithers of its surface spun away to be filled in just as rapidly. Dax increased and localised the beam on one spot then began to bore a way through too rapidly for Moosevan to compensate.

  Enough rock was boiled away for their luminous Torran eyes to look down into the abyss of a fault that had not been there on Reniola’s first journey. Being solid may have come in handy in some ways, but if either of them fell to the bottom of that, it would take too long to clamber back up.

  ‘Get ready to jump,’ Dax told Reniola, and sprang across the void before she had time to hear the inevitable complaint.

  Reniola was far from keen, so Dax shouted, ‘You’ll have to do it! I can’t fix the control without you.’

  Reniola pondered why, after so many years of existence, she hadn’t taken provision against such an eventuality as having to jump across an abyss in somebody else’s skin. Finding no adequate answer, she took a deep breath and launched her plump body after Dax – and missed. As her grip slithered away from the hold she had on the crumbling rock, she at last realised there was a use for that long furry tail she thought such a nuisance. Dax seized the swishing appendage and swung her up and out of the abyss to safety.

  ‘I thought Moosevan never entertained ideas of murder?’ Reniola retrieved her stretched tail from Dax’s grip.

  ‘She probably knows we can’t be killed. She’s pitting her strength against our wits.’

  ‘This
is a very elaborate way to try and commit suicide, though. There must be more to it than that?’

  ‘Why not ask her?’

  ‘It’s easier blasting holes through rock than trying to get her to say something to us. I suppose as temporary mortals we should feel aggrieved by this uncooperative attitude?’

  ‘The only thing I feel at the moment is impending doom for this mission if we can’t get her to pass through the gate to her new body.’

  Reniola scratched her muzzle. ‘Perhaps she doesn’t like the neighbourhood?’

  ‘The planet hasn’t even been assembled yet. That’s what you‘re down here to rectify.’

  ‘Once I’ve fixed that she can move it to wherever she wants, then do whatever she likes with it: add as many extras as she wants, like a multi-banked cloud system she could blow about a bit, or self-draining oceans - she doesn’t have that much water on this one - or even make an ice palace for that little creature she’s taken a fancy to.’

  ‘If she isn’t going to consult with us on the matter, it’s all irrelevant,’ Dax reminded her. ‘You might as well throw in half a dozen satellites she can juggle with for all the difference it’ll make.’ She hesitated. ‘What little creature she’s taken a fancy to?’

  ‘The one Kulp and his friends were going to operate on,’ Reniola told her impatiently.

  ‘Of course. She was quite upset when Kulp was going to throttle it.’

  ‘Nothing much could have come of it, though. The age difference would have been a bit on the uncomfortable side.’

  ‘Really... These planet dwellers live more from their recollections than direct experience, so she could keep him alive as a memory after he was dead.’

  ‘I suppose so. I only hope she remembers to put him back where he came from in time.’

  ‘Oh, she probably will,’ replied Dax. ‘It’s us she wants to be shot of - Look out!’

  From somewhere in the high ceiling of the cavern a cascade of jagged stalactites rained down so rapidly on them they combed their fur.

  Reniola took cover. ‘I can do without a fur trim.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. They can’t harm us.’