The Star Virus

IX

The Streall engineer did not tell them what he thought of the Stator’s propulsion unit, but half a day later he had brought it into working order. After a journey of a few more days they were hovering above the Contemplation World.

It was a desolation, a planet covered in red rust. A tiny blue sun glittered in the sky, giving the atmosphere an icy appearance and reflecting off the scattered lakes in the southern hemisphere.

The Stator sank down under the Streall’s direction. The creature had already artlessly confirmed what Rodrone already knew by rumor: that the planet had a population of one; that was the usual case with Contemplation Worlds. The philosopher dwelt in underground chambers, devoting himself to philosophy and science.

Before they landed Rodrone put in one last call on the Stator’s space-tensor transceiver. They were near enough to Skelter for communication now, and he had already summoned the squadron to his assistance.

The red-haired visage of Kulthol looked blandly from the screen. “We’ll be there before you’re ready to leave, chief. Depend on us.”

The image faded. Kulthol was not sentimental and did not indulge in long conversations.

The Stator crunched into the surface of the planet, sinking a foot into the red rust on landing. Led by the alien, Rodrone stepped out into the thin air, bringing only Shone to help him carry the lens. They walked for about a hundred yards before the Streall stopped.

A mound grumbled up from the ground, russet particles tumbling from its sides. A down-slanting opening gaped. The Streall set off down it, followed by the others.

It was dark at first, but as they proceeded a gentle glow drifted, up in quiet shades of green and orange. A warmth of air came to meet them, bearing the essence of delicate perfumes.

The philosopher’s apartments were extensive and varied. Some were lavish, paneled in deep-colored woods and rich in furs and tapestries. Some were bare metal, not unlike the interior of the Stator. But they were all silent—except for the almost imperceptible hissing of a burning perfume stick in a translucent blue holder—and at first seemed to be deserted.

Then someone came to meet them. But it was not the philosopher. It was a human woman.

“I thought you said the philosopher was alone?” Rodrone said to their guide.

“Evidently not,” the other replied softly. “It is not mandatory, merely customary.”

The woman was tall, and dressed in a loose flowing gown. At the sight of Rodrone she hurried up to him, reaching out her hand to touch his cheek.

He drew back as he saw the expression on her face, but instantly he felt sorry for the instinctive reaction. Her face was melancholy, lost, beyond the frail pale of sanity. But despite that, there was a grace about her that was irresistible.

“Who are you?” he asked in a shocked tone.

“Sana.” Her voice was mournful. She inclined her head and reached out with her bare foot to stroke the carpet. “I was a singer once. Famous. A singer on Gurtlede… but now I exist only for the pleasure of the Streall thinker.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know. Years… always…”

A door opened behind her. The Streall philosopher appeared. He glanced over the room, and glided forward.

He was a dignified being. His skin was wrinkled with age, and the luster of his eyes had faded to a faint sky blue. He looked first at the lens, and then at Rodrone and Shone. A spitting, sneezing exchange took place between the two Streall, full of overtones some of which were beyond the range of human audibility.

“So the great plan returns, as it must, after an aeon of wandering.” He was looking at Rodrone.

His words excited the freebooter. “So I was right. It is a plan!”

“I have just been told,” the philosopher said after a pause, “of your desire to know the truth about the lens, after which you will be willing to give it up to its rightful owners.”

“I didn’t promise that.”

“No matter. When you know, you will surely agree.”

Rodrone found himself staring at the lens with its ever-present picture show. His voice refused to speak.

“Your first error,” the philosopher continued calmly, “is in thinking that the lens is of Streall manufacture. It is not. It was created by pregalactic beings, by beings of immense intellect who exist somewhere in the universe. Your second mistake is in thinking that it is a map, or copy, or reflection, of galactic development. It is not. It is the original design, the schematic from which the stars of Thiswhirl were formed.”

“That’s impossible. The galaxy evolved from a condensation of hydrogen gas.”

“So we believe.”

“Then what part could the lens play in it?”

“If a saturated solution is seeded with a small crystal, crystals will grow throughout the solution. A tiny seed can gather material and make a huge plant out of it. The lens is a resonant device linking macrocosm and microcosm. By means of very subtle radiations it is in contact with all parts of the galaxy and controls what takes place there.”

“But that’s fantastic! That’s impossible!” The Streall’s claims were so fantastic, so total, that Rodrone was becoming angry through his own inability to grasp it. “And what about all the other galaxies? Do they also owe their existence to these ‘cosmic gods’?”

“Some, perhaps. The special function of the lens is the formation of life. Nature makes dead galaxies. The makers of the lens make galaxies with life. And indeed, we know there is a difference between galaxies where life is present and where it is not.

“But that is not all. The lens is a four-dimensional plan, but a plan with an element of uncertainty in it. That is inevitable due to the quantum mechanical nature of the subatomic world.” As he said this, Rodrone realized that the Streall world-outlook had been misinterpreted by Mard Sinnt. “Hence, it constitutes a control of events, but a control that has to be exercised if the development is to go according to plan. This constitutes a feedback safety mechanism between the lens and Thiswhirl itself, ensuring that the system does not collapse. Certain races, at certain times, are entrusted with the task of exercising this control.”

The philosopher’s voice rose in volume. “At the present period of galactic history, the Streall are the chosen race, the only people given the freedom of the galaxy. But, just as the lens must exist to counteract the uncertainty of nature, and just as a guardian race must exist to counteract the subatomic indeterminacy of the lens, what is there that can safeguard against the incompetence of that chosen race? It was at this point, the weak link in the chain, that disaster struck. One and a half thousand years ago the lens was in transit from one place of safekeeping to another, under the supervision of the despised Seffatt.”

“Seffatt?” Rodrone echoed. “He had something to do with it?”

“You know the name? Perhaps you have heard legends. The ship in which the lens traveled was struck by an unpredicted and unusually powerful charge of radiation from a supernova. The crew lost consciousness and the ship, out of control, wandered into an asteroid belt. Automatically it separated into sections, as our ships are designed to do. The section carrying the lens was never recovered despite all efforts. Yet, centuries later, it must have been found by someone, for only recently the lens became an item of merchandise in man-carried interstellar traffic. Thus you see the burden that has lain on the Streall race all these years.”

“It hardly seems to be Seffatt’s fault,” Rodrone muttered.

“There remains the possibility that, by choosing an alternative route, he could have avoided the catastrophe. Therefore the blame is his.”

Silence descended for nearly half a minute before the Streall spoke again. “The loss of the lens meant that the destiny of the galaxy was at the mercy of random happenings, of chance biological mutations. Our worst fears were realized with the emergence of man and his intrusion into the Hub. There should never have been men in the Hub. You should not have become space creatures. You were only an atom in the galactic drama, to be played on the stage of a single planet and vanish in a little time. Instead, men have become a horror of multiplication, like electrons streaming away from a heavy atom which is constantly replenished, creating new electrons where none should be.

“Men are a cancer, a dangerous virus spreading endlessly!”

“That may be bad fortune for some, but it is good fortune for us,” Rodrone retorted.

“It is bad fortune for everybody. There is in your lives none of the orderliness which the proper function of the lens brings to planetary creatures. You are a horror of chaos and disorder. With you, anything can happen. How perfectly you demonstrate the wisdom of the lens, which ordains that there should at any time be only one star-traveling species in the galaxy! But now, we shall be able to rectify the error. The lens is not limited in its action to the present, it can also range through the future and the past. By amending the fault at the right point, we shall wipe out your past. Humanity will have thrived hardily and fallen into decay, without ever reaching beyond the atmosphere of the home planet.”

“Is that so?” said Rodrone savagely. “Well I like things as they are.”

“Can it really be that your mind does not submit to necessity, now that you have learned the truth?” the philosopher asked in amazement.

“You are truly naive if you think I will submit to being cast into a planetary prison! I think the galaxy is doing all right as it is.”

“It will end in dissolution and disaster!”

Rodrone laughed.

Tentatively, the Streall shuffled towards the lens. “I have often dreamed of such a thing…” he murmured, and bent, staring intently.

Something made Rodrone follow his gaze. As he did so, a strange sense of distance came over him. Following it, he experienced the same speeded-up consciousness that came from the use of the drug DPKL-59.

Perhaps it was his long-standing connection with the drug that caused to happen what happened. It took him some moments to realize exactly what was taking place. The Streall philosopher, impatient to taste the lens’s secrets, was using his knowledge of special mental techniques to enter it. Here at last was the key to controlling it that Rodrone had sought. And as the philosopher created an opening, Rodrone was sucked in alongside him…

Rodrone was hanging in space, yet it was not space as he knew it. It was atomic space, where energies hum and flash with an urgency not known in the slow-moving macrocosm. Although there was no sound, he heard things with his mind—in fact he had no body. He heard a huge grinding noise, which his instinct told him was the change in quantic states of subatomic particles. Then he penetrated further into the great swirl of the atomic galaxy, extending his mind into the very atoms themselves.

Worlds existed within those atoms. They were not the same as planets, there was nothing corresponding to that spatial phenomenon, but they were analogous. And in these worlds, analogy creatures lived.

He recognized that these creatures were identical to the creatures of the macrogalaxy, in that there was a one-to-one relationship. He could not understand how the relationship was maintained, or how the one remained always identical to the other—but what, after all, was cause and effect? Physics had already proved that they didn’t exist.

With a thrill, he realized that this was the world of possible change. This was the meaning of indeterminacy. There was a hint of split paths, as a result of which mutually contradictory events existed simultaneously.

This was the point of contention. In the macrocosm only one out of all the possibilities could become actual. The makers of the lens had carefully prepared their drama and written the script of galactic history, but they had been unable to eradicate indeterminacy from the atomic world. Thus they were faulted by the nature of things. Thiswhirl, Rodrone saw, was becoming the rogue galaxy, splitting up into its own fragmentary playlets as the cancerous energies of man radiated through the Hub. And this was what he wanted! In that disorganized Hub, nearly everything that could happen did happen somewhere. So what if some of it was bizarre? He thought of the deadliners, of Mard Sinnt and his son… but even so, it pleased him more than the vast, orderly system that the Streall wished to institute at the behest of the makers of the lens. The indeterminacy of the atomic world was what made the lens—and through it the real world, the macrocosm—subject to alteration by the action of purely mental forces. All that was needed, in fact, was to cross the protective force-field surrounding it. This the Streall had done—unwittingly, for the both of them! Rodrone felt the presence of the Streall philosopher now, like a powerful, adult system of mental vectors arrowing through the abstract, evanescent realm, bent on change. He intended to enter the past and form a mirror-barrier around an electron that somehow had become too energetic. In this way he could prevent the spread of man.

For a bare moment Rodrone was appalled at his own foolishness in letting the mind of the philosopher loose on the lens. Then, in a flash, he was after him, plunging past humming atoms and speeding transient packets of neutrino energy. He felt the Streall philosopher’s mind ranging alongside his. When either tried to move the other knew it and moved his own powers in to block him. A tussle developed, each trying to confine the fight to themselves and not spill energy that might detonate suns.

For a long time they seemed to altercate, kicking each other up and down the scale of discreet energy. Rodrone knew that it was a life-and-death struggle; but the philosopher’s mind was stronger, and he felt himself beginning to vanish, to disperse into a fading wave, leaving the philosopher free to remake the cosmos.

Nevertheless, Rodrone won. Because he was a philosopher, and had lived for so long in solitude, the Streall had become detached from physical things. Unlike Rodrone, it never occurred to him to transfer part of his attention back to his body existing in the physical macrocosm. He hardly knew it when Rodrone burned him down with his handgun.

Rodrone did not leave the lens immediately. Their struggle had not been without consequences. Two dissonant energy systems that already reverberated faintly through the lens had been exacerbated. He knew what they signified: the confrontation between man and Streall. He hung, bewildered, as they resonated, pinged and sang around him like an unholy chant, aware that he could kick events one way or the other.

Something like a wicked, mocking laugh echoed from Rodrone’s mind. They had tried to destroy man’s freedom. So why not? Why not war?

The discordant clashes of energy mounted in intensity, making his consciousness vibrate. Then he withdrew to the underground apartments.

The remaining Streall had fired at Rodrone with a silver slab which now lay on the floor, its pale beam still emitting. Captain Gael Shone had stepped in to take the shot in the stomach and then had killed the Streall with his own handgun.

Sana pressed herself against the wall, wide-eyed, holding her dress to her bosom. Rodrone glanced at her briefly, then knelt to the captain.

“Shone,” he said quietly, “sorry to see you die like this.”

Shone grinned painfully. “Don’t offer me any hope, will you?”

“I’m sorry,” Rodrone told him, but there it is. “You’re going to die.”

Captain Shone struggled as if to raise his head, then lay back, resigned. He seemed to be looking a long way off.

“I know. But I don’t care… Listen, I’ve seen everything I want to see. I’ve seen worlds you’ve never even heard of. Once we went into deep space outside Thiswhirl, right up to the Barrier. From there you can see the whole galaxy in one sweep, with Andromeda on the other side. What a sight! The whole galaxy in one sweep!”

He had seemed to speak without too much effort, but it must have been for show. His head dropped suddenly to one side.

Rodrone stood up and looked at Sana, seeing the lissome allure of her body. He realized that it was a long time since he had looked at a woman in that way. But he had stayed off DPKL-59 for over a year now.

“You had better come with me, Sana.” He moved to touch her.

She merely pulled back her head with a willowy, graceful movement and stroked her hair wistfully into place over her shoulders. “No. I live here now.”

“But you were his prisoner, his slave. Now he’s dead.”

“I live here, now.”

Turning, Sana stepped through a doorway, down a step and into a set of low-ceilinged, elegant compartments. “He made me over for his pleasure,” she said, half to herself.

Rodrone was not sure she was even aware he had followed. Determined, he came up behind her, stroked her neck, then seized her and swung her around to lay her down on a couch.

As she went unresistingly down, her gown fell partly away to reveal a perfect, shapely body. Desire rose in him. But as he was about to sink down on her, he noticed the look on her face. It was absent-minded, gone, yielding only by default.

Despite his urges, he could not continue. It would have been rape with consent, but rape nevertheless.

“You must come with me,” he repeated, thinking that perhaps he could do something for her. But for answer she only sighed.

He started to argue with her, but suddenly he hadn’t the heart. He took one long last look at her slight form. He didn’t know if she realized he was watching her, but if so, she was completely unpretentious about it. His eyes lingering, he slipped through the door. As he left, she began to sing, as she had been wont to do for the Streall philosopher. Her slow, sad song curled like an eddying vapor through the silent, heavy chambers. It was like something eternal, finding a melancholy repose, hopelessly, as if it would last forever.

She had stirred desire in his blood, reminding him that he had a wife on Sunder. He had been a long time without a woman.

He called the ship and summoned help to collect the lens. When he returned he made bare explanations and walked past the crewmen, climbing silently into the control gallery to brood.

Jermy found him there ten minutes later in a deep revery. “What now?” he interrupted rudely. Rodrone looked up. “What?”

“The captain didn’t come back. He was our Daddy, now he’s dead. You’re our Daddy now. The men want to know where we head for.”

You’re our Daddy now… Rodrone echoed to himself, wondering at the bizarre words. But it was completely understandable. The deadliners needed someone like Shone, or himself, who was a little more alive than they were, less neurotic and with qualities of leadership. Gael Shone was, in many ways, like a father to them, albeit as unnatural as they were.

“Sunder,” Rodrone told him, coming to life and searching the desk for charts. “I’m going to see my wife.”

Half an hour later he gave the order to head into intersystem space.

The Stator moved swiftly towards rendezvous with the squadron while Rodrone, aided by Feeldonet, calculated a course to Land. He looked forward to meeting his wife now.

As their trajectories crossed, Kulthol’s face came up on the screen. “I see you’ve changed ships,” he said curtly. “A pity you had to lose the Stond. Well, are you coming over to join us?”

“No, I’ll stay here.”

“What, with that bunch of—” Kulthol broke off. He had already heard something about who crewed the Stator. “Forgive me, but you might do better to cross over to the Revealer.”

Kulthol was talking sound sense, but sense was not something that had played too large a part in guiding Rodrone’s actions lately. “Maybe, but I’m staying here. Formate the squadron and make for the coordinates I gave you.”

Without waiting for a reply he cut the connection. Luckily he could count on Kulthol to remain loyal despite any churlishness on his part.

Perhaps, he reflected, his real reason for staying with the deadliners was that he did not want to stand face to face with Kulthol and have to tell him how Clave died.

Irritably he dismissed the matter from his mind and turned his attention back to the lens. Since his mental battle with the philosopher he had watched it eagerly to see if the flavor of its dramas would undergo any change. He had not been disappointed. There was a new feverishness in the playlets, an explosiveness in the situations they portrayed.

The insane monk, too, had undergone a change of fortune in his wild ambition. Month after month the superb city had withstood his assaults, until one day a new weapon had been placed in his hands. Where it came from was not certain; but suddenly someone approached him and proffered a strange silver trumpet, its horn fluted and convoluted with elaborate extrusions.

For a while the monk held the trumpet, examining it wonderingly. Then he put it to his lips and blew a blast. The sound must have been withering to hear, for everyone present in the picture flung their hands to their ears, their faces contorted with agony. The banners and flags of the city trembled, and the walls themselves quivered.

Again the monk blew, straining with exertion. Tiny cracks in the glistening white walls, growing and flaking slowly, until with a sudden rush a whole chunk of the ramparts came avalanching down.

The rabble screamed with delight. The brown-garbed monk lifted the trumpet aloft, waving it in triumph. Again and again he blew in a frenzy of destruction, urging his slaves through the breaches which the vibrations of his instrument made in the walls.

Since then, he and his raggle-taggle army had been engaged in a hideous sacking of the city.

Rodrone’s enjoyment of this scene was interrupted by alarm calls that came simultaneously from Kulthol and the Stator’s own warning system manned by Pim.

A sizeable Streall fleet was bearing down on them. As Rodrone saw the angular ships speed into view on the detector screen he felt a cold but thrilling shudder pass down his spine.

There was barely time to put into effect the prearranged battle strategy. The Stator took its place in the motley collection of spaceships, which spread out to form a ring, the ring elongating continuously into variously shaped ellipses according to a computer-operated program, so as to confuse the Streall ranging mechanisms.

The ploy worked well at first. The Streall ships, closely formated, lunged into the ring almost before realizing it and were subjected to a rapid barrage of fire from all sides. In reaction the Streall ships disengaged their various sections and broke up into sub-units, thus losing their chance of adopting a concerted battle plan. For some time the crowd of units milled around, punished by the continuous and deadly fire from the encircling ring.

But gradually the Streall’s superior firepower told. The units spread out, oblivious to losses, until the gathering extended as far as Rodrone’s ships.

Rodrone considered giving the order to scatter, but quickly realized it would be a mistake. There were enough Streall units here to pursue every one of them, pinning them lethally down.

The Stator clanged and stank with the fury of the battle, but received relatively few hits; the deadliners, he thought, seemed to have an understanding with the Angel of Death. Or perhaps their practice at nuclear Brag, the same that had enabled Jermy to manipulate the lens, gave them a head start when it came to picking off approaching missiles. Their manner of fighting was bloodcurdling: the iron interior of the ship echoed to their screams of enjoyment as death crashed all about them, to their hoots and yells of expectation as their own shots were let loose.

But Rodrone’s tally board told a depressing story. The Revealer gone. The Mendicant gone. The Maire Rodex-5 gone. Towards the end, the battle assessor computer became confused. It was no longer possible, in the far-flung junk heap of Streall sections, wreckage, ships and fragments of ships, to tell what was functional and what was dead.

A silence descended, as the surviving units of each side scanned the enemy in attempts to determine where there was still life and the ability to attack or defend. At least, that was what the Stator was doing. The occasional explosions grew rarer, then ceased altogether. No one was firing, for fear of revealing himself.

Nevertheless Rodrone located several functioning enemy units. But so far he had no evidence that anything of his own squadron still lived.

Jermy tugged at his arm. “We can get away, you know.”

“Eh?”

“Our drive is indetectable.”

Doubtfully Rodrone regarded the assessment board. Somewhere out there some of his people might still be alive and needing help, or perhaps injured in crippled ships. But what could he do to help them? Any move to go to their aid would mean his being blasted out of existence.

“All right,” he agreed reluctantly, and prepared to make the maneuver. Unobstrusively they slipped behind a floating wreck, then while masked from the Streall watchers, switched to main drive. In minutes the Stator’s silent, mysterious mode of propulsion had whisked them to safety.

Out of curiosity they began to tune in at random to space-tensor broadcasts. Everywhere the story was the same. Fighting, battles, landings on alien planets. All over the Hub the tension between man and Streall had broken into open war as the two races locked in a titanic struggle. The news filled Rodrone with a sense of dread. He had expected it to happen gradually. The suddenness of events made him feel like an incendiarist.

Still, he told himself, now man would never be intimidated.

For some reason he felt even more anxious to see his wife.

A few weeks later they pulled into the Land system. Rodrone’s joy increased as he saw the gentle violet sun and found the traceries of eleven planets on the miraculous picture-plate behind the desk console. On one of those traces, the fourth from the sun, lived his wife.

But as they penetrated deep into the system he knew that something was wrong. The planet seventh from the sun was smoking. Lurid streams of poisonous vapor rolled out from it into space as it moved in its orbit, the deadly pyre of what had once been a fair world of fifty million inhabitants.

Horrified, he moved closer in to the sixth and seventh worlds. They, too, were blasted lifeless, their atmospheres transformed into radioactive soups. His brief inspection of them brought his anxiety to certainty. After that, he moved on to Sunder almost as a matter of formality.

Jermy and Jublow were with him in the control gallery when they edged close to the planet and Rodrone was able to see it for himself. The Streall had come and gone, blasting the Land system to hell. Sunder was ravaged, blackened, practically ripped apart and scorched down to the very rock mantle. It was inconceivable that even a bacterium could still be alive down there.

Jermy looked at the sight and grinned. “Another dead ’un, eh, Captain?”

Rodrone’s fists clenched convulsively. Seeing the expression on his face, Jermy added, “It’s happening all over, Chief. All over the Hub, on our side and theirs. Don’tcha remember? We picked up lots of pictures.”

“Yeah!” Jublow butted in with little-boy glee. “Lots of planets blowing up!”

Rodrone felt an impulse to kill them both, but he restrained himself and nodded absently. He could hardly expect a deadliner to grieve over either death or parting.