Текст книги "To Conquer Chaos"

Автор книги: John Brunner

Соавторы: John Brunner
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XIX

To Conrad, seeing the towering monster approach, it had been for an instant as though the rest of the universe had ceased to exist. All his childhood terror of thingsfrom the barrenland leapt up to dominate his mind. Here was that terror incarnate, howling and flailing its uncountable limbs. The dome, the people, the outside world ceased to matter. There was only Conrad and the raging menace.

Then Yanderman spoke softly beside him. “Aim carefully, boy. Aim at the underside. At this range your slug will strike high rather than low.”

Aim? Slug?With a start Conrad remembered. He had been given a gun salvaged from Duke Paul’s camp, an eternity and an infinity ago. Gasping, thinking the monster was almost on him, he flung down his other equipment and jammed the gun’s stock to his shoulder as Yanderman had told him.

“Work the bolt and cock the gun,” Yanderman whispered. With a handful of thumbs Conrad managed it, a full second after Yanderman. He closed one eye and squinted along the barrel. Underside? What underside did a beast like that have? It was nothing but a seething mass of-

“Now!” Yanderman barked, and more by reflex than anything else Conrad fired. The two shots sounded very slightly apart, but it wasn’t the combined noise that startled Conrad; it was the way the gun had hit back at him, bruising his shoulder.

“Hold it tighter this time,” Yanderman instructed, as coolly as if the oncoming thinghad been a harmless bit of game. “Work the bolt now. Aim again.”

The second time was much better. The two shots were simultaneous. The thinguttered a pain-crazed scream and seemed to lose control of its numerous legs. It swayed and lowered some of its tentacles, revealing huge smears of bluish-grey ichor on the front of its body.

“We’re getting it!” Conrad yelled, and without waiting for Yanderman’s order fired again. A moment later, having taken more care with his aiming, Yanderman let go his own third shot.

And the thinggave a bubbling moan and fell sidelong to the ground.

Conrad jumped up, clutching his gun in both hands, to stare at the dying monster, and would have gone rashly forward had not Yanderman caught his arm.

“It may take a long time to die!” he warned. “Keep well clear of those tentacles. See what I mean?”

As though to illustrate the lesson, a lashing limb had whipped through the air and cracked whipwise to the ground at least thirty feet from the prostrate body. Conrad shivered and took a reflex step back.

“I doubt if it’s in a fit state to come after us,” Yanderman murmured. “All we have to worry about now is the reception committee. I just hope they weren’t saving this beast for some special purpose!”

Conrad blanched. Yanderman sounded appallingly serious, though it was hard to imagine what purpose a thinglike this could possibly be wanted for. Nonetheless, it was true that the people who had come in pursuit from the dome at the foot of the slope and who now had seen the two newcomers were approaching with some wariness, pausing to retrieve javelins and arrows expended on the fleeing monster.

“Wait for them to react first,” Yanderman recommended. It was a strain on Conrad, but he complied.

The reaction was a peculiar one. Instead of coming close at once, or even calling out a greeting, the dome people halted the other side of the dying thing,out of reach of its tentacles, and stared up the slope. There was some discussion among themselves in tones too low for Conrad to catch, while still more people moved from the direction of the dome to join them.

“Ah, I see,” Yanderman said with a nod. “Waiting for a leader of some kind, I imagine. See the old man, the one with grey hair, being helped along by another man and a girl?” He pointed. Conrad did see the trio he was referring to.

The guess was correct. It was the old man himself who broke the spell after a moment’s quick consultation with two or three other mature men of the group. He put his hands to his mouth and called out.

“We are the descendants of Station Repair and Maintenance Crews A through G!” he shouted, his voice cracking a little. “Who are you?”

Silently uttering a prayer in memory of the Duke, who had accurately predicted this encounter, Yanderman called back. “Jervis Yanderman of Esberg and-uh-Conrad Lagwich! I hope we did right to kill this thingyou drove towards us!”

Conrad gave him a respectful glance. He had barely managed to follow the old man’s pronunciation, let alone make sense of the words he used. He whispered, “ Whatdid he say they were?”

Surprised, Yanderman glanced at him. “Don’t you-? Oh, of course not. That was something I dug out of you in trance, which you don’t remember consciously. I’ll explain later.”

“Come forward and be welcome!” the old man shouted. “It’s a long time since we saw anyone from the outside world!”

“How long?” Yanderman asked. There was a pause for consultation. When the answer came, Conrad could hardly believe it.

“About four hundred and sixty years, we think!”

Now some of the old man’s more venturesome companions were cautiously closing on the collapsed monster. A last tentacle twitched, and a young man with an axe dived to the ground to avoid it, while one of his companions, wielding a single-edged sword, slashed it in two. The severed part seemed to have a life of its own, and writhed for minutes, making Conrad’s scalp crawl.

He tried to concentrate on the people instead. They were all, without exception, short and wiry and most of them were heavily tanned. Their clothing was various; some of them wore jerseys and pants of dark but clean-looking material, while others wore only a kind of kilt supplemented with belts and other body-harness. They were staring at him with just as much curiosity as he was exhibiting, but not at all uncivilly. It was as though they had been waiting personally for this moment … waiting four hundred and sixty years.

With gravity, the old man bowed to Yanderman and then put out his hand. “Do you-do you have any news of my son?” he said after a pause.

“Your son?” Yanderman said slowly. He looked around the silent group of isolates. “Was it your son who set out to cross the barrenland and reach the outside world? About twelve years ago?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am afraid he is dead. The journey was too much for him. But it was because we found his remains that we set out in search of you.” Yanderman phrased the half-truth instantly.

The old man winced and put his hand on the arm of the girl beside him for support. He said, “So! Still, if his death served to bring you here, that’s a reward.” He coughed, a dust-dry noise. “Well, no matter now. I myself am Maxall-Chief Engineer, I suppose one would say if one kept up the ancient forms. Ah … Keefe, crew boss Maintenance,” he went on, indicating the one-eyed man who had helped him out from the vicinity of the dome. “Egrin, crew boss Hydroponics-oh, and my granddaughter Nestamay here.”

The girl at his side shook back her long hair and smiled, and Conrad felt suddenly faint.

He had seen that face before. He had copied that face, struggling to make it more like Idris’s, as he carved his fine white block of soap the day of Yanderman’s arrival in Lagwich, the day his life was turned topsy-turvy for good and all.

But he had no chance to utter the words that boiled up in his mind. Nestamay was looking at him with frank physical interest, and he realised abruptly that among these lean, almost starved-looking people he was as much taller than the average as Duke Paul’s troops had been in Lagwich. Moreover, the days when he had been Idle Conrad, the dirty soap-maker, were past. Now he was Conrad the explorer of the barrenland, Conrad the gifted visionary who could remember the secrets of the past, Conrad the killer of monsters!

Well … amonster, anyway. Nobody could question this second one.

The girl was smiling broadly now, and there was no doubt what was pleasing to her. Conrad smiled back, hoping the expression wouldn’t spread into an idiot grin. He cut it short and tried to look purposeful instead, as Yanderman did.

“Maxall,” Keefe was saying, “we can’t stand out here till sunset, you know. There’s business to attend to-a little matter of an alarm which should have gone off and didn’t.”

“Yes!” Nestamay took her eyes off Conrad for the first time in some while and turned to her grandfather. “Now you don’t need to swallow Jasper’s dreadful behaviour any longer!”

The old man sighed and nodded. He spoke to Yanderman in terms of courtly apology.

“It’s quite true. We must see why the alarm which usually warns us of the advent of a dangerous thingfailed to operate this time. You must be tired and hungry after your magnificent journey, and as soon as we’ve settled this urgent question we’ll place ourselves at your disposal. If you’ll come with us …?”

The curious but largely silent group fell in behind the old man and Yanderman, and made their way towards the dome. Nestamay stepped to Conrad’s side.

“Hello!” she said.

“Ah-er-hello!” Conrad echoed. “Ah-er-ah-oh yes! It was-uh-your father, wasn’t it, who tried to contact the outside world? He must have been a brave man.”

Not a good choice of subject.The girl’s face clouded. She said after a pause, “Not brave. Desperate. You two are the brave ones. You weren’t driven to it, were you?” She paused. “It must have been a terrible journey.”

“No, it wasn’t as bad as we thought,” Conrad said, wishing he could convey that he wasn’t being modest, only speaking the plain truth. “We had a compass, you see, which perhaps your father didn’t have, and Yanderman made a map of all the streams and rivers so we didn’t have to carry our own water all the time. Eight hours was the longest we had to spend away from water.”

“A map?” Nestamay sounded astonished. “Where did you get a map?”

“Yanderman drew it up.”

“But from what?” she persisted.

“Well-” Conrad was about to explain, when he realised the party had halted facing the dome. He heard Yanderman.

“You mean the thingjust tore clear through the dome to the outside?” he was demanding, his eyes on the enormous gash it had left. Conrad glossed the words: why, this must be the place where the thingsoriginated, as Yanderman had suspected! And yet here were all these people …

“Ohhhh!” Nestamay’s fingers were suddenly tight on his arm; with the other hand she was pointing into the darkness under the dome. Something moved there-another monster? No, a human shape. A human shape beginning to scream as it emerged into the open. There was a wave of shock and terror tangible about them.

“Jasper!” she whispered. “It is-it is!”

How she recognised him, Conrad could not tell. For his head and shoulders were completely covered with a glistening black jelly-like mass, at which his hands clawed hopelessly while his voice grew weak with shrieking.

For a long second nothing moved except the condemned Jasper. Then Grandfather Maxall stirred and spoke.

“Kill him,” he said in a voice like death itself.

“No! No!” A woman came running from the fringe of the group, clawing at the old man with crazed violence. “No, you can’t kill my son!”

“If you would rather watch him die as the seeds grow on his body,” the old man said, and let the rest hang in the air. The woman paid no attention, but clung to him and cried for mercy.

There was no mercy. There could be none. Again, Maxall gave the order, and this time a white-faced Keefe obeyed it. He took a javelin from a bystander, aimed carefully, and threw. It sank into the black jelly about where the boy’s throat must be. Black-smeared hands reached up to it, failed in the attempt, and fell back as the life leaked out of his body.

“Burn the corpse!” Keefe said harshly, and two young men moved to pick up a heatbeam projector. Jasper’s mother had released Maxall by now, and was kneeling with her face to the dust, yelling curses.

“What-what happened?” Conrad whispered to Nestamay. In a cold voice she answered.

“Because of something I did-or wouldn’t do-he tried to take his revenge by turning off the alarm which warns us of a thinghatching. It was meant to scare me during my night’s watch. Only a thingcame through before he expected. While all the rest of us were out chasing it away and meeting you, he must have come back to try and cover up what he’d done-re-connect the alarm, I imagine. But in his haste, he …”

“He what?” Conrad prompted from a dry throat.

“The black stuff,” Nestamay said. “It’s the seed-mass of one of those plants there. We have a working party out every day to cut back or burn off such seed-masses on the outside where we can get at them and they might get at us. But inside the dome there are huge areas where we can’t venture in, and the seed masses grow there, too. That’s why we can’t get rid of the vegetation permanently. And you see they-well, in some fashion they’re sensitive to movement near them. They burst over thingsthat go too close. I’ve seen it happen to things.I never saw it happen to a person before, and I hope I never see it again!”

She gave a fierce shudder. “They say it doesn’t kill you,” she finished. “You just die, and it takes a long, long time.”

Conrad swallowed hard. By now the searing heatbeam had reduced the miserable corpse of Jasper to a blackened smear and calcined bones, and Maxall was turning to Yanderman again. He was standing noticeably straighter, as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

“One of the dangers of our existence,” he said. “Though nothing compared to what you’ve faced to come to us. I’ll send my assistant Keefe to make certain the alarm is functioning, and perhaps we can enjoy a short rest after the day’s turmoil.”

Yanderman spoke only with an effort. He said, “We faced dangers, as you put it, for a matter of days to get to you. If you’ve had to endure this kind of thing for four and a half centuries, all I can say is that my friend and I had the better bargain!”

XX

Hoping that nobody was paying attention to him, and sure at least that Nestamay wasn’t, because her grandfather had sent her to fetch another jug of the curious fruit-flavoured concoction these people had instead of beer, Conrad leaned back in the corner of the Maxall hovel. It wasn’t much of a building compared with the solid stone-and-timber work of Lagwich, but it had one thing in its favour, which it had taken him a long time to track down. The air was cleaner than in a Lagwich house. Partly it was due to the absence of cooking smells, but mostly, he thought, it was because the people had fresh clothing two or three times a week.

He’d been given a suit of the same kind, and found it very comfortable. But he didn’t pretend to follow the explanation he’d been given about the source of the garments, any more than he was pretending now to follow the conversation between Yanderman, Maxall, Keefe and Egrin.

It seemed the local people would never run out of questions-how big isthe barrenland, how long did it take you to get across, where is Lagwich and how big, where is Esberg and how big, are there any other barrenlands, how many people are there in the world …? It was about there that Conrad had decided to lean back and shut his eyes. He drowsed.

“More to drink, Conrad?”

He snapped back to awareness. Nestamay was offering him the jug, and in bending forward also a remarkable view of her young bosom. Remembering he was an explorer, Conrad viewed. A few seconds later, however, the sound of his name spoken by Yanderman made him turn guiltily and say, “Ah-yes?”

But Yanderman wasn’t addressing him. He was explaining the way they had compiled the map to spare themselves the need to carry water, and Grandfather Maxall was shaking his head apparently at the fact that his son had overlooked this possibility.

Did that imply that somebody here had the same gift as himself? Conrad leaned forward and paid attention. The answer was no, but there were salvaged scraps of drawings and diagrams from which at least some information about water could have been extracted, although in every other respect they had been rendered obsolete by the creation of the barrenland.

“You had access to similar maps?” Maxall suggested.

Yanderman shook his head and explained about Conrad’s gift, and there were wondering comments all round. Keefe was the most eager to learn more on this subject, and asked Yanderman directly for a demonstration of trance.

“I think my friend is rather tired,” Yanderman countered, and earned Conrad’s lasting gratitude for his understanding.

“I’m so sorry!” Grandfather Maxall said. “Why, here we’ve been plying you with endless questions, and you’re exhausted! We can show you to beds for the night at once if you wish.”

Conrad felt a stir of hope. But Yanderman wasn’t satisfied. He said, “I’d rather ask you a few questions first, if you don’t mind. You realise, much of what we’ve learned from visions experienced by Conrad here, and by Granny Jassy and others at Esberg, was completely irrelevant, and since we had no idea what might be significant we’ve never made much sense out of it. To start with: what isthe barrenland?”

“A quarantine area,” Maxall answered promptly. “The term is traditional, though we often call it the bare ground.”

“What was it for?”

“It was meant to isolate the Station from the rest of the world.”

“How was it-? No, that’s irrelevant at the moment.” Yanderman rubbed his chin; he had sprouted a fair beard since he last saw a razor, and it was irritating him. “All right: what’s this place-the Station, as you call it?”

“A …” Grandfather Maxall hesitated. “Again, I have to use a traditional name. You see, a lot of things we know, we don’t understand. We have the same problem as you-sorting out the useful from the useless information, and I imagine a lot of information which was once useful has been forgotten because the situation altered. So I think I can best define the Station by reading a passage of the traditional lore to you. Nestamay, give me the locked case!”

The girl hurried to fetch it. Sorting through the various charts and drawings in it, Grandfather Maxall came eventually to a piece of paper yellowed and fragile with age. He peered shortsightedly at it.

“If I stumble in my reading, it’s because I haven’t studied this passage for a long time,” he excused himself. “I meant to go over it with Nestamay, but somehow … Well, here it is. It begins with a broken sentence, by the way. See if you can make sense of it with your extra data.”

He cleared his throat. “‘… result of many years of research and development on many different planets.’ That’s the broken sentence. It goes on.

‘“Its capacity is being continually expanded. Indeed, it will continue to expand to match the growing volume of interstellar traffic for the foreseeable future. No other information-processing system would be capable of coping. Only the organochemic cortex has saved interstellar traffic from being overwhelmed by its own complexity. It is predicted that in a century’s time organochemic cortexes will be handling fifty times the present traffic safely and without error.

‘“The organochemic cortex combines the reliability of inorganic cortexes with the flexibility and self-programming ability of the human brain. Terminal Station ‘A’ is the first, but it will not for long be the only, interstellar transit station to be completely supervised by an organochemic cortex.’ ”

He put the paper aside, looking hopefully at Yanderman. “Have you learned anything from these memories of the past which will help you to clarify that?”

Yanderman shook his head. “All I gathered was that, first, this place was a transit station, right? In other words, you could really walk to other worlds from here, something which I’d dismissed as absurd. And second, the organochemic cortex-whatever that might be-was very important.”

“It’s not absurd, this walking to other worlds story,” Keefe put in. “After all, that mechanism is one of the ones still functioning.”

Both Conrad and Yanderman looked at him in bewilderment.

“So you finally decided to agree with me!” Grandfather Maxall roared, slapping his knee. Keefe looked uncomfortable, and explained to the puzzled newcomers.

“We say, out of habit, that the things ‘hatch’ in the Station. Maxall has always said that wasn’t right-they must come from somewhere else, where they have others of their own kind to breed with. That much figures. And things like the ovens, the power accumulators, the clothing-dispensers-they certainly have gone on working all this time without much help from us.”

“What’s more, though we don’t know what the organochemic cortex is, exactly,” Maxall put in, “we know where it is. You saw that dense mass of dangerous vegetation which fills up a great deal of the dome? Of course you did. And you probably wondered why we don’t just go in with heatbeams and burn it out. Well, the reason is that according to tradition the cortex is located somewhere under the plants, and without it we’d freeze, starve and go naked because it too is still working and maintaining the services which support us.”

He gulped down his drink and held out his mug for more. Nestamay hesitated before pouring for him. She said, “Grandfather-doesn’t this mean that we can change that?”

“How so?” Maxall blinked at her.

“Why, if it’s been proved possible to cross the barrenland, can’t we stop worrying about the risk of putting the Station out of action? Can’t we make plans to evacuate to the outside world and then try and burn our way into the dome and-?”

She let the last words trail away.

“That’s not what we’re here for!” the old man snapped. “We are here to maintain and repairthe Station! In other words, it’s not up to us to wreck it just to prevent a few more lousy thingsbreaking through and terrorising us! And now we’re in contact with the outside again, we have grounds for hope.”

Cheeks crimson, Nestamay muttered something about fetching more drink, and slipped out of the hovel again. Conrad stared after her musingly.

“Hmmm …” Yanderman said at length. “Now you said the barrenland was a quarantine area. What against?”

“I’ll have to refer to something else I don’t properly understand,” Maxall said. He sorted through his case of documents again. “This is apparently an official decree. It’s headed ‘Bureau of Traffic’ and ‘Bureau of Public Health’, and it says: ‘As of the receipt of this notice Terminal Station A and routes serviced therefrom are to cease operation. Immediate Class One-Plus quarantine restrictions are placed on all stations subject to recent traffic from areas known to be foci of encephalosis dureri.’Legend says this was a kind of contagious madness, by the way,” he added. On Yanderman’s curt nod– yes, I know-he resumed.

‘“Terminal Station A is declared subject to absolute quarantine exclusive only of repair and maintenance technicians, who must sign a voluntary release before entering the banned zone.’”

“That clears up a lot of problems I had after listening to you, Conrad,” Yanderman said, turning. Then: “Conrad!”

With a start, Conrad looked round. “I’m sorry! I was trying to work out … Yanderman, please explain this. If my visions come from the distant past, how is it that I could have seen Nestamay in them? So clearly that when I tried carving a girl’s head out of soap the day you came to Lagwich, I made it look like her instead of like Idris, as I intended?”

“A family resemblance,” Yanderman said curtly, and went back to his discussion with Maxall.