Exodus to the Stars

by Andreas Brandhorst

  #3 Exodus to the Stars

  by Andreas Brandhorst

  Perry Rhodan has discovered a huge space ship, an ark in space, carrying a population of humans who set out on their journey 55,000 years ago, from Earth – Lemurians, the legendary forefathers of mankind.

  A virus, prepared by the creator of the arks long ago, sends Perry Rhodan into a coma and takes him on a mental journey 55,000 years into the past. Rhodan finds out there are more arks than he has known about – he becomes a witness to the birth of the arks of the stars...

  LEMURIA 3

  Exodus to the Stars

  by Andreas Brandhorst

  Translated

  by Dwight R. Decker

  Pabel-Moewig Verlag KG, Rastatt

  1

  Jorgal

  The machines no longer sang in this cold, dark place. If they did anything at all they only whispered and moaned. Jorgal thought that was very sad. They are dying, just as we are dying, he thought sorrowfully. Their death is our death.

  "Did you hear that?" asked Tanira from the darkness that surrounded Jorgal. Her voice trembled with worry.

  There was a cracking in the darkness, a metallic groaning that had become unpleasantly familiar to Jorgal since it disturbed the machines' last melodies.

  "Structural instability," replied Darhel, who knew about such things and could make connections that always astounded Jorgal. Often Jorgal wondered how so much complex knowledge could find room in a single head. "We're here in the outer region of the wreck section, in a sector where the Collision caused more damage than in the inner areas."

  "We should have stayed inside," the ever-fearful Hilaila moaned softly.

  "Everything is dead inside," Jorgal said, surrounded by blackness. "The song of the machines has gone silent for good in there."

  "I feel sorry for you," said Memerek, who knew how much the song meant to Jorgal, who was often called the Machine Whisperer. Without those melodies, he all but choked on the feeling of loneliness even though he knew the entire Group was nearby. Or what was left of it, anyway. Some of them had died along the way.

  "I feel sorry for all of us," Jorgal replied in a low voice.

  "I have memorized the floor plans precisely," Darhel said. "It can't be far now to the capsule compartment."

  How long have we been on the way? Jorgal wondered, feeling weariness bear down like a heavy weight on his mind and body. It had always been difficult for him to get an exact impression of the amount of elapsed time. Even his own age was a quantity with only a vague meaning. He often felt young, younger than the others, often old, even ancient, especially when he had to go without the song of the machines for an extended period.

  The cracking sound repeated itself, louder and more threatening. Jorgal heard a faint whimpering from a little further away than the other voices, then soothing words that came from Tanira. She had assumed the task of taking care of the youngest in the Group.

  "Jorgal?" Darhel asked.

  "The machines here are whispering so faintly that I can hardly hear anything. Perhaps they can sing again further ahead."

  "Memerek? Do you see anything?"

  Jorgal knew that Memerek could see warmth. Or more precisely: she saw temperature differences. It struck him as strange, and he had often wondered how eyes could see that which was revealed only to his sense of touch. But he knew that such questions were pointless. There were many strange things about the children of the Group; that was why they belonged to the Group.

  "Yes," he heard Memerek's voice say. "The hatch is not far now. But something has burst on the left side in front of it. Sharp-edged pieces of debris hang over the path."

  "Can we avoid them?" asked Darhel, who had taken over the leadership of the Group since Anhalo's death in the devastated room with the plants.

  "There's a gap on the right that we can climb through," Memerek replied. "I'll help you."

  Jorgal heard a clicking as Darhel tried to turn on his lamp. The light he hoped for did not appear. The lamp had stopped singing long before.

  A hand touched his arm and pulled gently. "Come," Memerek said. "We are the first. I'll show you the way."

  Jorgal dragged his third, currently useless leg behind him as he followed Memerek. She was now humming softly in order to help the others orient themselves. He ducked his head when she told him to, going along with the others, and soon they reached the end of the corridor. There was a wall there, and in it a door with closed seals.

  While Memerek helped the others pass by the obstacle without coming up against the sharp edges, Jorgal concentrated on the door. A faint, very faint voice sang within it, and its melody was not nearly as lovely and invigorating as those he had heard and enjoyed before the Collision. But when he reached his third leg out to it, he could establish a connection, and as he did so, he remembered one of Darhel's pieces of advice. Before opening a door, one must determine whether there was still air on the other side. Without air, Darhel had emphasized, one could no longer breathe, and when one could no longer breathe, one died. How strange. There were so many things that could make one die, but only a few that gave life.

  Jorgal listened past the singing and heard an echo that indicated the presence of air. He had learned one thing by now: no echo meant emptiness.

  There was a hiss as Jorgal loosened the seals with the low song, and then he only had to pull on the lever to open the door. Light fell on him, not nearly as bright as it was in the rooms before the Collision, but bright enough for his eyes to see again.

  A dead body floated two meters in front of him, as though held in the air by invisible hands. The lack of a melody told Jorgal that there was no longer any gravity on the other side of the door. That was why the corpse did not fall to the floor.

  Darhel paused next to Jorgal. "One of the Normals," he said when he saw the body.

  It was not the first time that he had used the term, but it still surprised Jorgal since the word meant that he himself, the Machine Whisperer, was not normal. And that seemed to him as strange as certain other things, since he felt normal and had never felt any differently. That is because you know nothing else, was Darhel's explanation, but that did not really explain anything at all because how could he know anything else? After all, he had always been Jorgal since his birth, always connected to the song of the machines.

  "There is no force-that-pulls-down in there," Jorgal said. He found this description much more apt, but he still added the technical term that Darhel used. "No gravity."

  Darhel nodded, his head seemingly about to come loose from his body. His head sat like a large globe on a thin neck reinforced by flexible support rods, and it seemed very heavy. Perhaps it was because so much knowledge was inside. How much did intelligence weigh?

  "The capsule is over there," Darhel said, sounding very relieved. "So I wasn't wrong after all."

  Jorgal looked in the indicated direction and on the opposite side of the room he saw a silver sphere with nozzle-like extensions in several places. Jets, he knew. Maneuvering jets. And inside the sphere waited a sleeping song.

  "The Normals used that for maintenance of the outer areas of the Ship," Darhel added. "The capsule can take us away from here."

  Jorgal looked to the right, to the wide window—from there came the light that allowed his eyes to see. It came not only from the stars and a distant, coldly shining sun, but also from a glowing object in space. Jorgal thought he understood.

  "You're right, Darhel," he said. "There are other fragments. But they're ... burning?"

  Darhel looked towards the window as well and a shadow seemed to flit across his face. Jorgal thought he could see sadness and despondency, then confidence quickly pushed both aside. "We have to leave in any case
. We can't stay here. The structural instability is increasing all the time. It's only a question of time until this section of the Ship breaks apart." Darhel gestured to the capsule. "Can you reach it and make it ready for use?"

  "I feel the song within it," the Machine Whisperer replied. "It's asleep but I can awaken it."

  "Then let's not waste any time. I'll help the others."

  Jorgal pushed against the wall with all three legs and flew towards the capsule. He passed closely by the Normal, seeing his empty face gone slack in death. The dull, sightless eyes, then the gaping wound in the back of his head, the blood further down, a cloud of red drops that reached to the wall, up to a large splotch on a sharply edged surface. When the Collision happened, the back of the man's head must have struck the edge. How many faces Death had ...

  Jorgal reached the capsule and, weightless, held on to one of the jets, and then looked back. Darhel and the Seer Memerek—slender, supple Memerek with big emerald-green eyes that could also see in darkness, with soft, downy skin and jointless, flexible fingers—helped the others: Tanira, Hilaila, Tortek, Mindahon, and the Youngest Ones, a chirping band of seven Group children who had not completed their amorphous stage and kept changing their shape. Fourteen out of nineteen who had fled after the Collision had—nearly—brought the world to an end. Five of them had died along the way because they had not been careful and paid attention or because the Sickness had made them weak at just the wrong moment.

  That was what the Normals called what had made Jorgal a Machine Whisperer, Memerek a Seer, and the others what they were: Sickness. But Jorgal did not feel sick, just tired, and besides, he remembered the discussion that Darhel had had with a Normal shortly before the Collision. They had been talking about the attempt to bring the Sickness under control with genetic manipulation, and that the intervention of genetic engineering had made everything even worse.

  Jorgal was not an expert in such things, nor did they especially interest him. His interest was primarily in the songs that the machines sang for him. When he heard their melodies, he was transported into a realm of contentment in which everything else—even the things that often happened to his body—no longer mattered. But since the Collision the machines sang less and less, and more faintly. As a result he felt increasingly lonely. Besides, he lacked the strength of the songs.

  It was a simple matter for him to open the capsule's hatch, and as he slid inside, he saw that there was enough room for them all if they pressed together a little. He felt over the central control console with his third leg until he touched the low standby melody, made contact with it, and then gently awakened the main melody.

  The capsule sang for him.

  Light shone in its interior, and the displays on the central console lit up. The humming and whirring of the capsule's systems joined in with the song of the machine and, for a while, Jorgal lost himself in it without paying attention to anything else. The feeling of loneliness only partly faded away because this was a tiny machine in relation to the great machine that the ship had been before the Collision. Filled with melancholy, he listened to the song that reminded him of a great, beautiful symphony that had given his spirit wings and filled him with joy. At least the quiet song lent him new strength and it was pleasant to lose the feeling of weakness.

  "Jorgal?"

  He turned without taking his third leg from the central console. Darhel appeared in the hatchway and helped Memerek, Tanira, and the others into the capsule. Jorgal heard not only the chirping of the Youngest Ones but also something else: a cracking and groaning that came from the innermost reaches of the fragment. It was the dissonant melody of destruction and death.

  "Hurry, hurry!" he urged and pointed to the places within. "On the floor. No, don't hold on to the walls. When the down-pulling force returns, you'll fall and perhaps hurt yourselves. Hurry, hurry!"

  "Jorgal ... " Darhel began once more, after he had pushed Hilaila into the capsule, slid inside, and closed the hatch after him. "Can you take us outside and ... steer?"

  Jorgal gave a start. "I thought you ... "

  Darhel shook the large, heavy head in which there was so much knowledge. "I could absorb the contents from the data storage unit, but it would take too long to sort through the information, process it, and understand it. If you become part of the navigation song ... "

  Jorgal knew what he meant. Before, when the Ship was still whole, he had often played at becoming part of this or that machine. He had been happiest when he managed an especially deep merger, when he became a tone in the machine's own song.

  Something moved.

  "Hang on!" Jorgal exclaimed and reached for the central console with both hands.

  Something broke outside the maintenance capsule, and along with it could be heard a loud hissing that rapidly faded away. The capsule started moving, and through the window Jorgal saw that it was approaching a gash that had appeared in the outer hull and through which the air was escaping. Metal struck metal and for a moment Jorgal feared that the capsule had been damaged. But he heard the song as before, unchanged.

  Darhel and the others looked at him.

  "All right, I'll try," Jorgal said and closed his eyes. He tried to imagine beginning a game, opening himself completely to the melody, comparing its sequences of notes with each other, and watching for the structure that allowed him to add himself to the song as an additional note. He let himself be carried and embraced by the resonances and tickled in a pleasant manner by the vibrations. He rested in the short pauses that separated the individual parts of the melody from each other and gave them their depth. This was his world; he belonged here, in the world of the song of the machines. Here there was nothing he had to fear. Here shelter and protection awaited him. Why had the Normals never understood this? Why had they broken off the connection when he had once almost succeeded in merging completely with the Ship's symphony?

  Jorgal let the vibrations of the note sequences show him the way. He explored their numerous variations, and suddenly he knew which notes he needed to change in order to open a hatch with a radio signal, to activate the steering jets, and to guide the capsule outside.

  Something touched him on his third leg and he opened his eyes without breaking the connection. Images were superimposed on each other. One of them showed him Darhel at his side and next to him Memerek, the gentle gaze of her large eyes—almost as beautiful as the song of the machines—turned towards him.

  "There." Darhel pointed through the window to something that stood out from the stars like a shadow. "Take us there. It's another fragment of the Ship, larger than the one we just left. And the sensors show that its environmental systems are functioning. Perhaps we'll find safety there."

  Jorgal hoped for more than that. He hoped he would soon be hearing machines singing in full chorus, loud and strong.

  2

  Roder Roderich

  Two large starships trailed behind the four crawlers. Both ships were spherical, though one had an equatorial rim while the other was flattened at the poles: the PALENQUE and the LAS-TOOR. On the displays and screens in front of Roder Roderich, they shrank along with the planet on which the largest part of the star ark LEMCHA OVIR had crashed.

  "Crawler I to PALENQUE," Catchpole's voice said from the hypercom speaker. "Confirming full operational readiness."

  The two other crawlers also reported, then Roderich called in. "Crawler IV here, Grandma. Everything is operating perfectly for us, too."

  "If you call me 'Grandma' again, Junior, I'll wring your neck." The image on the display changed and showed the commander of the PALENQUE, Sharita Coho, who was more than seventy years old. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes flashed as she gave him a feigned angry look and pointed her finger threateningly at him.

  "It'd be easier for you to try that on my long-necked companions," Roderich replied and grinned. "Catch you later, Grandma!" He switched off the transmission channel.

  Something chirped behind him.

  "You forgot to turn
on the Translator again, Yu'lli," Roderich said.

  There was a slight click, then an impressive bass voice could be heard. "Someday it will be too much for her and then she will make her threat a reality. And my name is not Yu'lli, but Yu'lhan-Nyulzen-Y'sch-Takan-Nyuel."

  Roderich raised his eyebrows in surprise, then turned and looked at the Blue. "You did that on purpose."

  "What?"

  "Programmed the Translator to speak in such a deep voice. It almost sounds like it came from a grave."

  "I feel quite alive. In contrast to you when Sharita finally really does blow her top, as you so quaintly put it."

  Yu'lhan sat two meters behind the pilot at the complex controls of the scanning systems, with his back to Roderich. He did not need to turn around, of course, since his disc-shaped head, almost half a meter in diameter and only about ten centimeters thick, had two ellipsoid eyes at the back.

  A second Blue came out of the tiny laboratory area at the stern of Crawler IV, ducking through a doorway that was too low for him. Tru'lhan-Nyulzen-Y'sch-Takan-Nyuel, called Tru'lli by Roderich, was two meters and twelve centimeters tall, exceeding his brother by exactly ten centimeters. There was yet another difference: a yellow spot over the front right eye. Apart from that, they seemed to Roderich as identical as two peas in a pod.

  He smiled as something occurred to him. "Has anyone ever called you 'the Blues Brothers?'" he asked.

  "I suspect that is some sort of humorous reference," Yu'lhan said in his deep, sepulchral voice.

  "We do not understand why you always attempt to be humorous," Tru'lhan said, his Translator set to a normal vocal range. He was inclined to speak for his brother as well.

  "Because life is so serious, you'd have to break down crying if there wasn't something to laugh about now and then," Roderich replied. His smile grew wider as he looked at the Blues. Yu'lli and Tru'lli were among his best friends, not just among the prospectors of the PALENQUE, but overall, and no matter what others may have claimed, Blues did have expressions. Of course, they were very subtle, but Roderich thought he could make out the half-hidden hints. No matter how serious and solemn Yu'lli and Tru'lli pretended to be, they also enjoyed the little verbal duels. "I often have the feeling that only Catchpole understands me. He doesn't have such a narrow viewpoint."