Thunderworld, p.1
Thunderworld, page 1
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Thunderworld by Zach Hughes
BOOK ONE
The Explorers
ROAG the Rememberer, who was first eaten in the Season of the Red Comet, said this:
Love him, the eater of your lost youth; praise him throughout the act of knowing the World.
Thus it was that Roag the Rememberer came to be denied the honor of ultimate fulfillment, was lost in the darkness of melt, was denied the joy of blending and the healing trauma of the teeth of the eater. When life was new, to love the eater was not in the nature of the people.
Roag, melted, lived on, for he had invented history, and that concept lived on after him in the minds of the assigned Rememberers. Roag alive angered Moulan the Strong with his concept of love. It was then that Moulan, inventor of fire, developer of order, first of all the people to discover fulfillment, also invented fear and death.
1
Goroin Melt of Roag hefted a stone atop the barrier which was slowly closing off the narrow entrance to the canyon. He accomplished the task with a grunt and then sat back on his long-muscled haunches to pant wearily. He was old. He was tired. He rested. But from inside the narrow canyon, from the waterhole which formed below a stream bleeding out of the high scarp, he heard the hissing roar of the Great One. The sound moved him, his emotions soaring, giving new strength to the feeble limbs. He worked with his heart pounding, his forelimbs hanging tiredly as he made his way to the rock debris collected at the base of the scarp.
His hinged legs were designed for leaping and running, not for moving heavy burdens. His forelimbs held but a fraction of the strength of his long legs. The fingers of his forelimbs were agile but weak. He was severely limited in his ability to move the fractured and jagged stones. He selected small ones. He had been working a long time. The barrier was growing. He could allow, himself a precious moment. He stood, his ovate body trembling, to peer down the dry canyon. He saw nothing, but he could hear the splashings of the Great One as the beast celebrated the end of weeks of desert browsing without liquids in the coolness of the clear mountain pool.
He measured the barrier with his eyes, panted to gain quick strength, and continued his work. As the light of the sun dimmed, his pace was slower and slower, his burdens smaller and smaller. In the growing darkness he was topping the barrier with stones no larger than his small doubled fists.
He knew that the Great One would sleep near the water, perhaps in it, his body submerged to give him rest from carrying his own huge bulk. Goroin would sleep near the barrier. In preparation, he loosed the string of his pack and pulled forth the light skins which would be both bed and cover. He spread the sleepskins and fell onto them, his overburdened heart slowing at last, even as his spent limbs jerked in painful protest. His eyes lidded swiftly.
He awoke in total darkness to the pains of the world. The earth beneath him lifted, jerked, fell, heaved, and there was the thunder of it in the distance, low and long. He judged the severity of the earthpain to be minor and dismissed it with a sigh of thanks. It would have been unjust if, after his long, lonely seasons of search, after his incredible luck in finding a Great One, his hopes had been shattered by huge masses of rock rumbling down from the jagged scarp to cover the rare Great One under crushing mass.
When he awoke again, it was a shrouded morning. Fine ash coated the sleepskins. A small cloud of dust rose as he stretched one long leg after the other and threw the skins aside. He stood, inhaled, primed his sneezing mechanism and made a snouted grimace as the accumulated dust was expelled from his nares.
The sky was low, a roiling, rolling, dark gray, a thing of apparent solidity, his sky, the sky of his world. From far away, from the direction of the land of eternal fire, he heard the low rumble of atmospheric thunder, but he knew that the rain clouds would be deflected from the desert by the towering, icy mountains beyond the scarp. For this he was thankful, for he would not be faced with an onslaught of abrasive, muddy rainfall as he waited.
He folded his sleepskins carefully and placed them inside the hide pack. When the pack was safely stowed in a crevice at one end of his barrier he tried to move his limbs and found them to be sore, weak, aching.
He froze in midmovement as he heard lumbering footsteps from within the canyon. Then there came the braying, harsh, hissing call of the Great One. His long ears stood, and he felt a growl grow in his throat. He dropped into the shelter of the barrier. It was not yet time to be seen.
The footsteps came closer. He reacted to them with tremors of excitement. He could smell the great beast, could feel its presence. And then he could look up and see the long, slender neck extended over the barrier. The great reptilian head swayed. Dull eyes saw the sky and the canyon beyond the barrier, but not Goroin, below the extended head.
Gorion knew fear, not of the Great One, but for the integrity of his barrier. The piled stones came only to the knees of the Great One.
"Oh, World," he prayed. "Oh, World."
The Great One did not try to climb the barrier, nor to merely step over it, nor did he try to push it away with his great bulk. Inside that admirable head was a brain large in size, minuscule in intelligence. The sheer bulk of the beast ensured implantation into that brain of an instinctive fear of loose footing. Any fall, for that mass of flesh, could be disaster.
The Great One voiced his frustration in a fearful bellow. The very hairs inside Goroin's ears seemed to vibrate with the roar, and he was left breathless in admiration.
"Bellow, Great One," he said silently, as the angry, puzzled roar was repeated. "Bellow, my Great One, but you are Goroin Melt of Roag."
The thought sent his mind whirling in expectation of newness and fulfillment. During the days of waiting which were to follow, his need would become a breast-filling ache.
On the morning of the second day following the completion of the barrier and the Great One's first attempt to pass it, the fall of ash had lessened, there having been no major thunder of earthfires during the night. Goroin awoke to great body pain. The excitement of the search and the ecstasy of discovery were abating, and the toll of his efforts was being felt by his aging bones. When he moved his legs he could hear creaking sounds. He could hear his own groans.
He arose to check the barrier. It was unchanged. Nevertheless, he policed it from one end to the other, moved a small rock here and there. The effort made him vomit. His upper stomach had long been empty, so the heaving produced only a bitter bile. When the heaving stopped he crawled painfully to his pack. The left rear leg of a springer, taken days previously, was dry, tough, slightly rank, but it was food.
He leaned his furred back against the barrier, held the leg and chewed long and thoughtfully. It could be the last food his body would have. He felt quick concern. Without conscious order his force searched out, darting and swooping to cover the area which stretched away from the scarp. There was only lifelessness.
He told himself that the food would be sufficient. He forced himself to be calm and, as a sop to his worry, peered over the barrier. Visibility was good, but the Great One was hidden, near the pool, by an outcrop of rock.
The sounds which came to his ears were reassuring. The Great One was growing restless. Goroin heard tough hide scrape on rock and imagined that the beast was searching for another way out, picking his way carefully among the fallen boulders on the canyon's floor. But there was no other way out. The World had provided. The only spring of clear water within days of walking was at the rear of a narrow, high-walled canyon with only one outlet, and the barrier blocked that.
Almost as if it were an omen the midday clouds swirled high and there was a clear area over the near desert. The blessed sun shone through, poured down through the clearing to make light. Goroin moved to enjoy the rare moment, lifting his snout to feel the sun's energy on his face, to let it soak in, to feel it prickling deep down inside. He reveled in the sun and in the sudden drop in temperature. For long, delicious moments he was, at heart, a springer again, but soon his body sagged in tiredness and he limped back to the barrier to wrap himself in his sleepskins against the chill. Idly, he watched the lights and shadows play over the barren landscape, and he practiced the art of Roag, that which was within him, and he was young and there had been a clearing of the sky and he was romping in the sun and suddenly, wonderfully, she was there. She was even younger, still training. And was new and discovering and was to be named. She was Melin, once Melin the Fruitful, lately eaten, to be named by him, to be called, in closeness, Melin of Grace.
World, how he missed her. How it pained his heart to miss her, the warmness of her, the glad joy of being two together, the sunny, exultant discovery of the fullness of life there as they danced and capered in the sun and chased and fell and rolled together panting. Ah, how young she had been. How they looked into each other's eyes when they felt it rush over them, the knowledge that they would blend.
To leave her was not injustice, not true sadness, for she was younger and his time had come and there is an order in the world which cannot be denied. One ages. One is eaten. One begins anew. That something, or someone, is left behind is the order of things, for Melin, too, would age, and be in pain, and she would seek the eater. The world provided. If the world willed, they would be together again.
But where was Melin's Great One?
His Great One approached the barrier on the third day, bellowing in frustration. His Great One pushed against the barri er with one knee, gingerly, fearfully, lest the rocks fall and become unsteady under the great, splayed feet. So fearful, so huge, and so invincible, once life gave intelligence to that brain. Thank the World that the beast was so stupid, so fearful, that he did not realize he could breech the puny barrier with one push of his extending chest.
Goroin had fed on the last of the springer. He sang happiness, but silently. It was not yet time. Good omens persisted. His body rallied. He no longer ached. There was in him only a knowledge of diminished power, a reluctance to move. The sun shone, a fiery roundness, through a clearing of the yellow-gray sky. And that night, as he heard the Great One moaning in hunger, as he knew the time was near when the beast's instinctive caution would fall victim to the tyranny of the need to supply food-fuel to that great body, he saw the white lights of the night sky, watched them for a long, long, awe-inspiring time before the roiling ash clouds closed them off.
But before the clouds made total darkness he saw still another omen. There, in the midst of the thickest lights, against the black which was as silken as the new fur of a dark springer, he saw it, the omen, his own omen, for one of the sky lights moved, slowly, but it moved as surely as he was Goroin Melt of Roag, as surely as he knew the history of the people through Roag's gift. And in all the history of the people, in all the brief and inspiring observations of the lights in the sky, none had ever moved.
2
A WATER world announces itself to instruments from a million miles away. Captain Donald Duckworth knew this to be a fact, for the ship's instruments had been tested thoroughly using his own planet, good old blue Earth, as a target. Had the instruments not been tested to detect Earth's generous supply of water he might have doubted the readings which began to appear when the starship Santa Maria blinked out of subspace near a feeble, yellowish, Sol-type star.
She was a sick-looking little star as stars go, smaller even than old Sol, and her signatures showed that she was young. She had no name, not then. She'd been analyzed from sixteen light-years away while the Santa Maria's huge generators built power for a jump. A.J. Agagin hadn't even wanted to check her out. A.J. tended to go for the biggies, the impressive giants. They had almost missed her. Over two years in space, over four hundred light-years from home, and they'd almost missed a water world, had almost used a big blue giant as a blink beacon to start the wide circling movement back toward home. Over two years and that incredible distance and uncountable jumps powered by old Jonathan Blink's miracle down in the hull of the big ship and instrument analysis of a thousand planets and they'd almost missed the only one in over two years.
Ellen Partance, on instrumentation, looked at him and winked one big blue eye. "Since A.J. discovered her, we'll call her Agagin's World," she said.
"Unless there's a very small one on the other side of the sun she's a three planet," A.J. said, ignoring Ellen's teasing.
Hell, a man can't be right all the time. The little yellow star hadn't looked too promising. The biggies tended to be the most likely planet producers. Most of the smaller ones just swam alone in the endless night of space spurting out their energy into nothingness.
"A three planet," Ellen said. "Like home."
"That remains to be seen," Duckworth said. He was a large man, but trim. He kept himself tan under the ship's lamps, was a fanatic for physical conditioning. His hair was bushy, brown, and in need of a trim, but he wasn't thinking about having Zees give him a haircut. There was a water world out there.
"Shall I call Zees?" Ellen asked. "I don't think she'd want to miss this."
"Sure," Duckworth said. "A.J., figure us a near miss and let's take a look."
Agagin was already figuring. His dark fingers flew. He had the blink coordinates before the fourth crew member of the Santa Maria came rushing into control, her light-brown hair mussed from sleep. She was buttoning her blouse. So all four were there to share the moment when the generators hummed and there was that peculiar little feeling of being displaced which ended almost as quickly as it had begun and four heads looked automatically toward the port, which was closed, and then to the viewer.
"Oh, no," Zees breathed, as the viewer zoomed in and saw thick, roiling dust clouds.
Agagin and the captain were going through a checklist. Duckworth's voice was crisp, unaccented. Agagin spoke more softly. The gyros began to wind down from their high-pitched hum. There was a lessening of static tensions in the air as the generators came to rest.
"We're tucked in nicely,"Agagin said. "Want the orbital figures?"
"Long as you're sure," Don Duckworth said. In two years and five months he'd learned that he could rely on any information which Breed Agagin gave him.
"Let's take a real look," Ellen Parlance said. She was a tall woman, hips flaring slightly in the comfort of a shipboard tightsuit, hair tucked, red and full, under a nonregulation hat.
Ellen was that sort of woman. She always had to do some little something to show that she was not merely a cog in the wheels of the Space Service. Duckworth, in command, understood.
Zees pushed buttons. The radiation shield over the viewport hummed into the hull. The view was impressive, as always when looking down on a new planet, but disappointing. Instruments still insisted that there was a considerable amount of water down there, but the atmosphere was a boiling cloud of dust.
"Got anything, Breed?" Duckworth asked.
"Very interesting," Agagin said. "She reads good. Along with that dust, lots of silicones, there's some pretty decent air. And she still reads one helluva lot of water."
"I make it volcanic dust," Ellen said.
"Well, it makes sense," Zees said. "She's a chick of a young sun." Zees was the youngest member of the crew. She kept her hair cut short to sweep forward onto her cheeks in an antique style which accentuated her large, almost oriental eyes.
"Maybe it's smog," Don said, with a wide grin. "And when we go down we'll find a pre-atomic culture down there making steel and filling the air with combustion products."
"Volcanic ash," Ellen said.
"Probably swamps," Breed Agagin said. No one called him A.J. Half Choctaw, half white, he was the Breed, the Halfbreed, named early in the trip by Ellen after they'd viewed an antique movie from the ship's library of microreels. The usually staid Agagin rather liked it. He had been the studious type, the type of boy who is never given a nickname. He'd had to grow to be seventy years old, halfway through his allotted span, and travel quite a distance before someone liked him well enough to give him a nickname, a love name in Ellen's case.
"Life?" Duckworth asked. He'd put the ship there. Now it was up to him. He wasn't helpless on the instruments, but he wasn't as fast and efficient as those who had been trained to use them.
"No big concentrations," Zees said, after some study.
"Not much of a sun," Ellen said. "If it weren't for the cloud layer I'd say the average temperature planetside would be just below freezing."
"Not much of a planet, either," Agagin said. "About three-quarters Earth size."
"Well, she's the only planet we have at the moment," Duckworth said.
"Whoops," Ellen said.
"What, what?" Duckworth said. He was an anti-whoops man, hated surprises. One bad surprise aboard a starship can be the last surprise. They were a long way from home.
"Earthquake," Ellen said. "Big one."
"Lots of volcanism," Zees said. "Pretty impressive stuff."
"Don," Agagin said, "get me those readings we made of the sun."
"Next week we've got to get organized," Don said, after an unsuccessful search. He aimed outboard meters and began to take information from the local star. He had his readouts just as Ellen found the previous readout, made from a few light-years away in the direction of 32 Vulpeculae and Deneb and Earth.
"We were a bit off," Zees said, studying both sets of readings. "I'd say all we have to do is wait about two billion years and we'll have a Sol-type sun."
"The first billion will be the hardest," Ellen said.
Duckworth groaned.
"The volcanic ash must be giving a greenhouse effect," Breed said. "Otherwise there wouldn't be any free water to read, only ice."
