J. F. Bone, page 2
Earth?
This wasn’t Earth, this rust-brown drab reticulated monster hanging above the dome, with its faintly greenish atmosphere shell gleaming against the inky violet of space. This ugly, virtually cloudless ball couldn’t be Earth.
I dropped my kit bag and grabbed a passing spaceport flunky. “Where am I?” I asked. “What planet is this?”
“Arthe,” he said.
“The hell it is! I was born on Earth. I’m an Earthman.”
“Arthe,” he said patiently. “A-R-T-H-E. It’s a contraction of Arthur and Theodore; ARthur and THEodore Blunt, see? The planet was rediscovered about two centuries ago, but by then it had a native population, all descendents of the colonists brought here by the Blunt brothers back in 2200. This isn’t Earth, it’s Arthe, get it?”
“I get it,” I said, “but I don’t like it. I’ve gotten off at the wrong station. I want to go to Earth.”
“You’ve got a long way to go,” the attendant said. “It’s clear on the other side of the circle.”
I groaned and turned back to the ship. I might as well get this straightened out now, because from the look of the planet, we’d probably be here only long enough to say hello and goodbye.
The robogate stopped me. “I.D. please,” it said in its flat metallic voice. “State serial number, name, ship, and final destination. Please put your ticket in the scanner slot.”
I flashed my I.D. card in front of its scanner, and slipped my travel orders in the scanner slot. “My serial number is 0-7B-1630-52G. My name is Samuel Long-branch Williams. I am a Colonel retired, formerly CAF Medical Division, now a passenger on ship Star Raker, destination Earth.”
The machine clicked, beeped, whirred and blinked a red light. “Passage denied,” it said. “You have reached your destination.”
“But I’m not on Earth—” I said before I realized that there is no sense arguing with a robot. Mildly outraged, I checked my baggage and went in search of the spaceline offices.
The spaceline agent was sympathetic, but not encouraging. “It’s a mixup that occurred on Gakan,” she said. “They happen now and then. Arthe is not only an anagram of Earth, it also has a similar pronunciation. If the transportation officer was using a voicewriter to put your orders such a mistake could easily happen.”
“That’s all very well,” I said, “but does that get me to Earth?”
“Not right away,” she said. “You’ll have to stay here until the confusion is straightened out, unless you wish to pay the regular fare to Earth. You can, of course, remain at this station and the company will charge you minimum board and room, but it would be better for you to go planetside and get a job.”
“Just how long is this going to take?” I asked.
“There’s no Dirac connections to Gakan. The message will have to be sent to the nearest inhabited planet and mailed from there. I’d imagine you should hear in a year or so. Of course, you can pay the fare to Earth and leave on the Star Raker tomorrow.”
“I can, but I won’t. Hell would freeze over before I ever got it back from the Fiscal Division.”
“Then you will have to wait until your originating headquarters sends new orders. You will have to request that your transportation request be amended. We’ll do what we can to expedite the processing.”
“It might help if you mention that I’m an RM, and if you route the message through Sector Headquarters on Kilroy Three. Sometimes it makes things move faster to go through the top brass.” My voice was faintly acid and I felt like stringing a certain lieutenant colonel up by the thumbs. As I remembered the fracas at the club, Chubby was wearing transportation insignia on his collar. He was probably the sneaky slithian who did this to me; since he couldn’t make me suffer one way, he could do it another.
“You might check with the Galactic Patrol,” the agent said. She looked and sounded concerned. “Maybe they’ve got a cruiser that’s going to the Inner Worlds, and you can hitch a ride. If you try to go through channels from here, it’s going to take an awfully long time.”
I shook my head. “No, I’ll sweat it out here. I have a fairly good idea who did this, and I’d like to see him stew. If I get out of this fix too easily, the powers-that-be might forget it, but if I keep screaming, someone is going to take notice, and somebody else is going to get chewed until the blood flows.”
“I don’t think I’d want to have you angry with me,” she said with a faint smile.
“I’m an unforgiving soul,” I said as I gave her a soft salute and left the office.
I wandered back to the common room and watched the activity. At the moment there was a troop movement in progress. Files of green-clad troopers were debarking from a starliner and embarking on shorthaul ships and assault craft. Somewhere in this sector of the galaxy was trouble. It wasn’t unusual. In something as big and diverse as the Confederation, it would be odd if all was sweetness and light.
Right then I made a decision. Rather than go to Earth and face a pariah-like existence until I was healed, I’d take my chances with Arthe. A frontier world should be easier and if it turned out to be too bad, I could always go somewhere else. So I took the shuttle down to Thermopolis.
To my delight, I discovered that Arthe had a congenial personality. The dome cities were like base fortresses and the people who walked their streets kept their eyes and their thoughts to themselves. Of course, there were a few of the less desirable types, but the nosy, the sympathetic, and the sensation seekers were scarce. Arthe was a nice place.
I knocked around for a couple of months, getting the feel of the place, visiting the Free domes and the Company domes. There wasn’t much difference between them. I went a short distance into the Outlands, wearing a rented respirator, and together with a guide and a gaggle of tourists I visited one of the ancient slag heaps that mark the canal intersections. Our guide said the place was once a city, but it would have taken a better man than I to recognize it. It had been destroyed (according to the guide) by the Cataclysm that had wiped out the Old Race shortly after the Blunts and their colonists came to this world. The Old Race, I learned was not to be confused with the Shambra. The Shambra were here first. The Old Race were their pets or protégés, and when the Shambra left Arthe they had left the Old Race behind. I shrugged the explanation off as nonsense and spent my time wondering what sort of a weapon had melted the city. We had nothing like it in our arsenals, at least as far as effect was concerned. The Patrol’s supers could do a comparable job of obliterating a target, but they left a radioactive slag heap behind that interdicted the entire area. There is no profit to civilization in slag heaps that radiate for centuries.
But here, there wasn’t a trace of radioactivity. The area had simply been fused into an inextricable mélange of metal and glass. If any radioactivity had been produced, it was short lived and had disappeared years ago. I questioned our guide about it, but he knew little except the legends and archaeology. He did say that the approximate date of the Cataclysm was 1900 years ago, and that the Cataclysm was triggered by the death of the Old Race who had inhabited these cities.
There are, of course, pre-human artifacts. Not as many as students would like to have, but enough to show that the Old Race had a highly developed technology. And in addition to the hardware, there are the Shambra Legends. This is a vast body of poetic mythology that many of the natives and halfcastes known by heart. The Chanters are a kind of priesthood among the natives and the ‘breeds (as the halfcastes are called by the dome dwellers). Both native and ‘breed Chanters know the Legends in the human and the Old Tongue. The non-human version was supposed to have been given to the first settlers by the Old Race, a gentle, somewhat unworldly lot of humanoids who lived in the canal cities. They probably had died from contact with some human-borne virus or bacterium that no one had the least idea would be pathogenic. The sterilized areas could have been made to stop the spread of the disease.
At any rate, whatever the cause may have been, the first settlers were soon left with an empty world to develop as they saw fit. But they never saw. They were content to live a nomadic existence in the great canals that form a gridwork over Arthe’s surface, and by the time they were rediscovered they had regressed to semi-savagery.
Why had they regressed? There are a lot of hints, but there is nothing definite. And that is the problem with Arthe. There are too many questions. Were the Old Race the Shambra? The natives say no, that they were the Shambra’s pets, and that the Shambra vanished millennia before men came to Arthe. But there is no proof, and all the digging that has been done among the accessible ruins has revealed no trace of the remains of an individual of the Old Race let alone a Shambra. The Old Race cremated their dead according to the Legends, and the Shambra never died; so, if the legends are true, there is no evidence that either race existed—if there were two races.
What had levelled the canal cities? The natives say The Power did it; the same power that cut the waterways across the planet’s surface; the same power that cut the tangential tunnels for hundreds of kilometers through the living rock of Arthe’s crust; the same power that plays the title role in the Song of The Power in the Shambra Legends. Judging from the Song, The Power was just about anything the mind of man could imagine.
After a few weeks, speculation began to bore me, and I got tired of being a tourist. Archaeology is all right, and so are bars, bistros and bordellos, but too much of them can be a drag. I took a good look at myself and came to the conclusion that I had better go to work. I didn’t have to. My pension had caught up with me and my back pay was now in my bank account in Thermopolis. I could live my life without turning a hand at any occupation, but I was sick and tired of loafing.
It wasn’t too hard to make up my mind about what to do. Actually I didn’t have too much choice. With my nightmare face I couldn’t practice medicine, and I felt uncomfortable in civilian clothes, and undressed without a weapon. A lot of my military conditioning was still with me. I didn’t have the right technical training for Patrol work; so I really had two choices, the planetary police or a security guard in one of the domes. I thought I might like being a cop.
I didn’t worry too much about the cops not wanting me. As a combat veteran I’d get every break in the book and I didn’t think my record would be too bad except for that hospital brawl on Gakan. Arthe’s police force liked ex-servicemen and medal winners. For an RM they might roll out the red carpet.
However, I thought it might be a good idea to plan ahead; so I found out who the big wheels in the Police were, and laid out a small campaign to make the acquaintance and possibly the friendship of one or two of them. I discovered that the two men who would more or less complete control of my destiny if I applied were Chief Inspector John Lantham and Commissioner Warren Crowninshield. The commissioner was a political type, and the inspector a professional. The power theoretically lay in Crowninshield’s hands, but Lantham actually ran the outfit.
I took the easiest task first. I went after Crowninshield. It wasn’t too hard. In a week I was introduced to him. In two weeks I took him to lunch on the pretext of asking his advice about secure investments and career opportunities. I let it drop that I was an RM. In three weeks he knew more about me than was needful.
Lantham was harder. I couldn’t find a way to get at him. He stayed to himself when he was off duty, and he seldom went out. I did learn that his nickname was “Old RandR”. Somehow I didn’t think that those letters stood for rest and recreation. They didn’t. They stood for rules and regulations. That killed the sort of contact I had made with Crowninshield. The only thing that could work with Lantham was a direct approach. So I went to Planetary Police Headquarters and asked for an appointment with him.
For an organization that was responsible for the law enforcement of an entire world, Headquarters was remarkable for its absence of red tape. I suppose that the informality devolved from the fact that Arthe was a primitive and uncivilized sort of a place. It was less than twenty minutes after I had stated my business to a clerk in the outer office when I was looking across the desk of Chief Inspector John Lantham at the man himself.
Lantham eyed me and seemed satisfied with what he saw. He paid no attention to my face. I felt it was the bulk of my body that interested him. He had an eye like a slave dealer. I’d bet he knew that I was in my early thirties, stood a hundred ninety three centimeters in my socks, and weighed a hundred and five kilograms Earth scale. Some years ago on Earth the girls used to call me rugged and handsome. Gakan had scratched the handsome off the label but her gravity had added to the rugged.
Lantham nodded. “Sit down,” he said. He opened an ornate bronze pot standing on his desk, extracted a plastic tube, slid a fat brown cigar from it, puffed the self light end to a glow and blew a fragrant cloud of Havana smoke in my direction. He noticed my appreciative sniff and smiled. “Have one,” he said, gesturing at the pot.
“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t smoke, but the smell brings back memories.”
“It’s just as well that you don’t. These weeds are expensive. I really can’t afford them but I save by scrimping on food and drink.” He drew a long pull of smoke into his lungs and let it dribble out of his nostrils. “It costs a small fortune to have them shipped from Earth.”
“Are you from there?” I said.
“Once, long ago,” he said.
“Pardon the curiosity,” I said, “but what brought you here?”
He laughed. “You know, I can’t really tell you. It was a whole series of accidents starting with the Patrol academy and ending with the punitive expedition.”
“But that was a century ago,” I said.
“Gerontology is a wonderful science,” he said. “But that’s not the reason why I stayed here. You see, I picked up second degree laser burns during the punitive expedition. I was a Patrol lieutenant then, and I had no desire to stop being a law officer because I had an arm burned off. So when I was offered the job as police chief of Thermopolis, I took it.”
I looked at him, at the lean hard lines of his body. There was no sign of a prosthesis on either arm.
“I had to wait nearly twenty years before the techniques and a proper donor came along,” he said.
I nodded. Transplants of limbs are common enough, but he had confused me with his age. He didn’t look a day over fifty, and he had to be at least a hundred and twenty five, and transplants don’t take on people loaded with antigerontics and agathics. My trouble was that I was too young to remember that transplant surgery was even more ancient that spaceflight. Lantham could have gotten a whole limb transplant eighty years ago.
He kept smiling at me with his mouth and watching me with his eyes. He was evaluating my reactions, wondering if the Geek radiation that had fried my face had fried my brain as well. He knew why I was here, and he was trying to make up his mind if he should take a chance with someone who might be psychotic.
The silence between us grew and thickened as I got my nervous system under control and relaxed. He had an amazing ability to put me at ease. It was much like the ability Pete Krasna had, a kind of sublime indifference that took the pressure off and let me handle myself. I relaxed. There was no sense in making more problems than already existed.
If he turned me down, I couldn’t really blame him, and even though I could make a fuss about it, I wouldn’t. He would only be doing what he thought was best for the police force. I waited for his verdict, hoping that he wouldn’t turn me down, and, as I waited, I examined him as he was examining me.
I liked what I saw. This lean, gray, middle-sized man with the faint lines of plastic surgery on his neck was a natural leader, a man I’d enjoy working for. He was a brother in suffering, too. His scars and his history proved it.
Lantham’s voice cut across my musings. “Let’s have it,” he said.
“What?”
“Everything. Who you are. What you were. Where you came from. Why you want to join the force. And anything else you want to tell me about yourself.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have me fill out an application?”
“No. I’d rather listen to you. I learn a lot more about a man by listening to him. You can hide behind written words, but not behind talk.”
I shrugged. If this was what he wanted, I’d let him have it. I told him the whole story. I didn’t leave anything out, not even Chubby and the aborted courtmartial. He looked at me for a long time after I had finished, and then said that I’d be a good candidate for the Medical Examiner’s Section. I said that I didn’t want that, and that I was through with medicine and was looking for action. He nodded approvingly—and then he blew my cool.
“There’s only one thing,” he said. “You’ll have to get some plastic surgery done. You can’t run around with that mask. Not that I mind, and in a tough dome like Consol 27 your face might be an asset, but you’re promotion material, not a beat pounder. We’ve never had an MD or an RM before. But you simply can’t be promoted with that face. It’s lousy advertising.”
He should have known what would happen. I stared at him for about ten seconds, and then I blew my stack. “You stupid son of a bitch,” I snarled. “Do you think I enjoy looking like this? I can’t get surgery. It hasn’t been long enough since I was burned. Grafts won’t heal. I’m still full of residuals and mutagens. I know what I look like better than you do. Maybe you’d like to see.” I pulled the mask off and let him have a good look. His face turned white, and I felt as sick as he looked. Couldn’t the damn fool see that I’d give my soul to look like a human being? I heaved my body out of the chair and started for the door, knowing as I moved that I had blown everything. What he had done was deliberate. He had to know what I really felt and how I would react to shock. Well, he knew now, and I wished him joy in the knowledge.
I was reaching for the door when his voice stopped me. “Just where do you think you’re going?”
I turned and looked at him. “I thought you’d have figured it out,” I said. “I’m going quietly. Doesn’t that make you happy?”
