What seemed to take hours must actually have been over with in seconds. Ten star-traversing “heroes” now lay mangled, everything that they had ever been, everything that they had ever done, gone to feed the warm, rich soil. Almost unopposed, the enemy had hacked us to pieces.
I glanced down at the litter of white plastic cartridges between my feet. The Lieutenant’s arm was all but severed from his body. I found myself standing over him, with a pair of slowly-cooling empty-handled pistols.
With a merciless
swoosh!,
the battle-nicked flat of an ancient, carbonless iron swordblade slammed into my head from behind. It did not take my consciousness away altogether, only a certain amount of interest in what was going on. Sullen, pock-marked, bearded faces seemed to swim around me under dented helmets, gabbling words I almost understood.
Rolling my body aside, they stopped the Lieutenant’s bleeding arm with a rough clot of manure, binding it with twists of something resembling burlap. Quarrelsomely, they divided our pitiably few belongings, stripping what was left of the lifeshells, no doubt, to chink the leaks in peasant hovels or decorate the walls of a crudely-hewn fortress. They hauled us away on a wood-wheeled cart drawn by animals different, stockier than those the metal-suited warriors had ridden.
My last sight of the encampment was a tower of greasy, roiling smoke.
I would never return to Vespucci, my home planet.
I would never see my fair Eleva again.
***********************
PART ONE
The Starmen
***********************
Dungeon, Fire, and Sword
Three whole weeks for my eyes to adjust.
A person would have thought that I could see better by now, even in what little torchlight managed to squeeze through the tiny window, with its three stupid bars, in the rusty iron door of the cell we shared.
Just as well: that made it lots easier, eating from a crock of half-frozen slush they pushed in at us whenever they remembered. You could ignore the fuzzy stuff growing on its surface, hold your nose, pretend some of the lumps did not squirm as they began to thaw in your mouth.
Darkness got to be a kindly friend.
From where I sat, I did not need any floodlight to smell the Lieutenant’s arm rotting off. Why he was not dead already ... Maybe I should have thanked our pre-flight immunizations, but the shots they gave us simply let his nightmare—mine too—stretch out that much further.
Eleva would have called that defeatism.
But then, Eleva was not here.
Of course it could have been that my perspective was all screwed up. In the last month it had shrunk, by abrupt increments, from the sun-filled universe—perhaps too much room out there, too many hard chips of starlight pressing in on us—to this underground kennel, hip-high, only two meters square, lit by the leavings from a jailer’s passageway.
The Lieutenant—my lieutenant—Lieutenant Third-Rate Enson Sermander, sprawled unconscious in one corner, gradually surrendering to gangrene, provided hypothermia did not claim the both of us first. He had never been much to look at, even in the best of times: tall enough that his scalp had crested through his hairline; a least a year’s eating ahead of his calorie-quota. The man’s face was a brown plastic sack full of stale pastries. He inevitably dressed like an unmade Army cot. Incarceration with infection was not improving him any.
Another corner was mine.
A third corner I had crawled to a couple of times every day in the beginning, back when I had still cared. It smelled worse than either one of us. At least that helped attract most of the scavengers away.
I wondered what Eleva would have said to that.
I kept thinking that the fourth corner would have been perfect for a table-model ColorCom. But reception was probably terrible down here, even if they had invented CC—or electric lighting, for that matter—on this putrescent alien mudball the natives for some reason called Sca.
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; archaeology.
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.