H Beam Piper & Michael Kurland, page 1
First Cycle
(1982)
Michael Kurland & H Beam Piper
Chapter One
For endless millenia the red dwarf, pulled from its home orbit by some random stellar happenstance, crossed the lonely void between the two galaxies of the near universe. Curving and twisting through the competing attraction-weak but inevitable-of the gravity wells of distant nebulae, it gradually swung around to head toward a particular medium-sized star cluster. Penetrating the cluster, it bore straight toward the eight-planet system of a yellow-white star thirty-eight light years from the cluster's gravitic center.
The eighth planet, and the seventh, and the sixth, were on the far sides of their orbits as the red dwarf approached; but the fifth, a methane giant with three major satellites, was in harm's way. As they closed together, the planet heated; its coating of frigid gasses flowed, and then vaporized. Great tidal forces tore at the planet's dense, solid core. Quakes and explosions shook the surface; the atmosphere burned. For an instant, during which the great planet seemed to hesitate in its orbit, the seismic insult increased past endurance. Two of the three major moons were ripped away; they spiraled inward to the yellow star and disappeared as though they had never been. The third satellite, torn almost equally between its mother planet and the passing dwarf, slowed in its orbit, and then, as the red star passed, came crashing down on its primary. This final shock broke the giant planet into two almost equal halves, and a minor planet's worth of solar debris.
The red dwarf, dragging the broken halves after it, dived toward the yellow star. The fourth planet escaped with no more than superficial damage, the third passed unscathed. But the second was directly in the path of the destroyer. It swung from its orbit, spun madly for an instant, and then hurtled into the red star like a racing scull ramming a battleship.
Relatively, the planet's mass and impact were trivial; the sacrificial collision, however, prevented a greater catastrophe at the center of the system. The invader caromed slightly off course, lost momentum, and was trapped. The attraction of the yellow sun, the lesser attractions of the planet family, and the red dwarfs own new velocity combined to pin it to an orbit slightly greater than that of the planet it had just annihilated. Spinning around one another like a pair of bar-shot on an ever-shortening bar, the two fragments of the fifth planet followed it.
In time, as time is measured in the cosmos, the system stabilized. The frozen outer planets wheeled around their ancient orbits. The shattered fifth had left a wide gap. There was a thin belt of meteoric debris inside the orbit of the third. And, just beyond the orbit of the vanished second, the new comer and her own new satellite chain traced and re-traced the orbits imposed on them; yellow star, red dwarf, and attendant fragments forming a three-body system at the apexes of a one-hundred and fifty million kilometer equilateral triangle.
The two planet fragments slowly accommodated themselves to one another and to the rest of their violently re-formed solar system. They crumbled, pulled together, compressed into spheres. Stripped of all atmosphere in the cataclysm which had sundered them, they formed now gaseous envelopes, lost them as the heated gas molecules escaped, formed other atmospheres, and held them as their surfaces cooled. At first they rotated on their own axes as they revolved around a common center of gravity. As they drew closer together, this axial rotation slowed until, at a quarter-million kilometers, they faced each other as though on opposite sides of a merry-go-round mounted on the rim of a gigantic Ferris-wheel, each slightly bulging toward the other. At the center of their inner, or opposing, hemispheres-, high mountains had pushed outward, surrounded by concentric ranges of lower mountains raised by the tilt of
the rock strata, sloping back into wide plains which extended to the terminator-zones, which were jumbled badlands of great, shattered boulders. On each, at the point antipodal to the other, the crust had sunk into a deep depression, around which chains of great mountains had been formed. In the early stages of their formation, one of this pair had received most of the water available. Thus it differed from its twin in that it was covered by a vast ocean, broken only by the tops-of the mountain chain around the central depression on the outer hemisphere, which formed a circle of small island continents, the largest about three million square kilometers in area. The inner hemisphere, the side always facing the twin, had a permanent high tide, which just covered the top of the great peak at the center.
On the sister planet, the central depression of the outer hemisphere was a shallow, brackish sea; there was a chain of lakes and marshes encircling the terminator or Horizon Zone, and another circle of lakes around the central peaks of the inner hemisphere.
On both planets life emerged, quickly on the water world, more slowly on the arid one. Seaweed sprang up from the marshes, wind and spray borne spores invaded the land, and the green of plant life spread over the mineral reds and yellows and browns and grays. Animal life followed. The world-ocean of the water planet sent wave after wave of invaders ashore-sea-worms which evolved into earthworms, mollusks, crustaceans, and then a vertebrate fish which developed the ability to breathe air and became an amphibian. On the arid planet, vertebrate life never developed in the central sea; but a crawling slugoid, twenty-five centimeters long, which had invaded the land, developed some of its muscles into cartilage. After another million years, the cartilage hardened to bone. With some superficial modification, this was the situation on the twin planets when, in the 572nd year of the Primary Dispersion, the Greater Terran Federation space-cruiserFranklin , G.T.F.H. 17649, Captain Absalom Carpenter, came out of hyperspace at the perimeter of the Canis Venatici star-cluster and picked up the binary system on her scanners.
By custom, commanders of G.T.F. Space Navy Exploration and Discovery vessels named newly discovered planetary systems either for themselves or for their ships, mistresses, wives, or pet dogs. Absalom Carpenter, G.T.F.S.N.E..D. Captain, Commanding, was, however, an odd number even in a service not noted for robot-like conformity. The breast of his dress tunic was polychromatic with decoration and campaign and battle ribbons, but he valued them, even the blue one with the silver stars, far less than the single Lit. D. which theUniversityofMontevideo had awarded him for hisInternal Clues to the Probable Dates and Identities of the Secondary and Tertiary Authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey. So, following some private association-path through the legends of ancientHellas , he named the yellow star Elektra. The red dwarf, obviously, was named Rubra, and he called the watery planet on which the expedition first landed Thalassa, and its arid companion Hetaira.
Chapter Two
By the end of the first billion years, the coastal marshes of Equatorial Thalassa teemed with life. Pools and channels were clogged with water-grasses and water-ferns. Great banyan-like trees dipped their branches, sending out new roots to gain additional resistance to storms and floods. Fish-like and worm-like and snake-like things swarmed the waters; beasts ran and crawled on the silted floors, or flew or scampered among the branches.
Twice a year the sun would stand at zenith as it spiralled back and forth around the planet, briefly parching the treetops and driving the flying and scampering beasts down into the lower shadows. The winds would follow, with violent storms of lightning and down-sheeting rain; the rivers would rise,
spreading over the whole jungle and driving the creatures of the ground up into the trees. Sometimes whole islands would disintegrate, and matted masses of trees would be swept out to sea. Then the storms would end; the air would grow colder; often there would be thin skims of ice on the ponds, and sometimes a few flakes of snow would sift down through the leaf-roof above. And then the air would warm again, there would be fresh vegetation on the flats where the silt had caught, and the jungles would vibrate with life again.
Eventually a small, mammal-like creature made its appearance among these swamps and jungles, living in the trees, sometimes dropping to the ground in search of food. It had four limbs, each terminating in handlike members with four fingers and two opposing thumbs. Its head was almost spherical, a little lopsided at the bottom from heavy jaws. It would eat almost anything-fruit, nuts, grubs, fish, smaller animals, leathery reptile eggs dug out of the mud, and mollusks which it would break out of their shells. At first it used its teeth for this, later it learned to lay the shellfish on a stone and hammer it open with another stone. It learned to use stones to break through the ice in cold weather to catch fish, and to throw when attacked. Eventually it learned to carry quite large stones into the trees and cache them in crotches to drop on larger animals.
The changes of temperature forced it to develop an efficient internal cooling system, and, in addition, its body was covered with a soft down, really microscopic feathers. During the hot season it would moult it away and sweat copiously; as the temperature dropped the down would grow out again. The creature built nests in the trees, lining them with soft grasses and with its own down. As generations passed, it spent more and more of its time on the ground, taking to the trees only to escape the floods or dangerous carnivores; and its physical structure became more and more adapted to life out of the trees. It developed stronger muscles in its rear limbs, and came to rely upon them alone for locmotion, using the hands of its forelimbs for food-gathering. Its posture became more erect; its body grew larger, until, where its little arboreal ancestor had massed eight to ten kilograms, the average mass was now around eighty kilos. It was still covered with greenish down, but it shed it more readil
Like its ancestors, it still built tree-nests, in which it slept. The chance cobbles which its ancestors had used for missiles or hammers no longer satisfied it; it chose stones discriminatingly and improved them by chipping. It manufactured hand-choppers and flake knives. It gained ability to control and produce fire, and, most important of all, it learned to communicate with its fellows by oral sounds which gradually acquired specific informational values and became words.
Among the ponds and salt-marshes of Hetaira's Horizon Zone another small animal looked up to face a mighty destiny. Its immediate ancestor had been a lizard-like rock-dweller which had enjoyed a brief prosperity when, as a result of a complex chain of ecological events, an order of beetle-like insects on which it had fed had suddenly multiplied in numbers. The increased food supply had caused an explosion in the population of the rock dwellers, which resulted in the rapid over-hunting and extermination of the food-insect. Facing a hungry future, the rock-dwellers were forced into readjustments. Some specialized themselves for feeding on another type of insect, developing a long snout and a beautifully efficient digging-paw. Some took to robbing the nests of an oviparous pterodactyl-thing among the high rocks. And some moved up into the woods above the marshes.
Gradually, over hundreds of thousands of years, the progeny of these last developed binocular vision and forepaws with digits-four fingers of unequal length and a thick, short, opposing thumb. Their bodies were covered with bright red fur; they looked, more than anything else, like cats with the limbs of monkeys.
They would eat anything, animal or vegetable. They learned to use sticks for digging out roots and knocking down fruit. They would use long whip-like withes to kill low flying bat-birds and small animals. A couple of them wielding the long withes could even discourage attacks by fairly large animals. When cornered, they were vicious fighters, with nails and teeth but to escape the larger carnivora they relied chiefly upon agility, and developed longer legs for running and jumping, proportionally smaller torsos, and arms and hands more and more specialized for gathering food.
They were incredibly lecherous beasts; the males chased not only the females of their own species, but of any other even remotely similar. On some of these, not too distantly related, they begot hybrids which occasionally bred true and formed new subspecies; but the real importance of this sexual cath olicity was the competitive development of sex-attraction characteristics among their own females. Instead of passively awaiting the male, the female sought him out and flaunted her charms before him. Mating, among these monkey-cats of Hetaira, was not a matter of coy seduction-it was a head-on collision. This pattern led to a certain tolerance and absence of jealousy among the males; each was quite willing to share his plural mates with another. Instead of the family, the social unit became the gang-a dozen or so males and females, the sex ratio changing with circumstance, and the randomly-begotten offspring cared for by all.
Such a gang was more than a match for any of the carnivora of Hetaira, and could pull down and kill any but the very largest herbivores. They learned to use stones for hammers and choppers and hand-weapons and missiles; they invented innumerable tricks of cooperative hunting and fighting, and since cooperation demands communication, they slowly developed the rudiments of speech. They made themselves feared; at the approach of one of their gangs, big meat-eaters that had hitherto been kings of the forest learned to slink away, or they did not live to learn.
So, when one such gang of red-furred scamperers rounded a bend in a game-trail and found themselves confronted by a big pink-and-maroon striped thing with vermillion jowl-tufts like Lord Dundreary whiskers and a single sabre-fang at the apex of a V-shaped jaw, one of them picked up a stone and threw it, hitting the tiger-thing in the face. Instead of fleeing, the beast roared in fury and charged. The gang scattered quickly out of the way. The one directly in front of the animal jumped behind a small bush, pulled it down, waited for an instant, and then released it. The bush lashed forward into the beast's face. Another snatched a ten-foot length of dead branch and shoved it between the animal's front legs. Three more jumped in to catch hold of the tiger-thing's tail; the others swarmed over it with stones and clubs. There was a brief howling, writhing convulsion in the brush, and then the one who had released the bush in the beast's face jumped in with a heavy stone raised in its two hands, and smashed in the thing's head. The others stoned it frantically while it twitched on the ground, and kept stoning it for quite a while after it had stopped twitching. Gradually they realized that the thing was really dead, and the stoning died off and stopped.
Then they saw that their victory had come at a price. One of the females, who had rushed in with a sharp stick when the others had caught the beast's tail, had been ripped from throat to belly by the back-raking claws. The gang stood looking at her for a while, and then first one, then another of them turned and began tearing gobbets of meat from the dead tiger-thing and stuffing them into their mouths. All but one male, whose favorite mate she had been. He remained crouching beside her, clumsily trying to rearrange the mangled viscera, to close the wound, to somehow arouse her from her endless sleep. Some of the others left the feast to join him. One of the females, still chewing on a piece of tiger-thing flank, put a furry arm over his furry shoulder and tried to comfort him. Tearing the meat with her teeth, she offered him half of it. He sank his teeth into the bloody gobbet and chewed, at first mechanically and then with relish. When they finally left the dead female beside the striped body of the beast, he was chewing on a bone and walking beside the female who had comforted him. As he walked the memory of his dead mate began to fade. He liked this female too, and his was not a level of mental activity capable of much projection beyond the immediate.
But somewhere in the back of his mind there smouldered a murderous hatred for the big striped tiger-things. The next time he encountered one, after some twenty sleeps-each of which might have been anywhere from six to twelve hours, broken by waking periods of fifteen to thirty-he snatched up stones and began hurling them rapidly and accurately, gibbering in fury. The maroon-striped, Dundreary-whiskered monster snorted in surprise and fled.
Everything fled or fell before the roving gangs. The whole forest was their playground; they hunted and fed and romped through it for millennia. They might have stopped there, satisfied with the niche they had carved out for themselves, but for one thing. These little red-furred gangsters had begun to think, and to question, and to imagine.
Chapter Three
Upon Thalassa, too, the sun still spiralled up to zenith and back again; the seasons changed and recurred. Forests invaded open grasslands, and grasslands spread after retreating forests. Families and bands of families left the swamp and wandered into the uplands; sometimes other groups, trusting to the protection of their tree-nests, were swept out to sea in the biennial floods, occasionally to survive as castaways upon other shores. Race after race of these primordial humanoids appeared, wandered, vanished, left their scattered monuments of chipped stone weapons and fire-blackened caves and kitchen-middens. On the large, roughly triangular continent which would someday be called Gvarda, a race finally appeared which had reached that point in the journey of physical evolution where they were ready to proceed from rudimentary socialization to true cultural advancement. They were short and stocky, but their feet were narrower and less pronouncedly webbed, and they could use their two-thumbed hands with equal facility in either direction and possessed considerable flexibility in the elbow joint. The body down had completely disappeared from their green-gray skins; there was still down on their heads, blue-green to green in color. They had large eyes, wide, jutting noses, heavy prognathous jaws, and pointed ears that could be moved independently.
