The Zen Gun

5

It was with caution that the privateer approached the big, empty bulk of the Imperial warship. In the nose cabin that he used as a control room, Ragshok peered disbelievingly.

“Claire de Lune,” he murmured, reading the name on the ship’s side, among the Imperial blazon, the flags and ensigns painted there. “What the Simplex does that mean, Morgan?”

“I don’t know, chief. It’s some foreign language,” Morgan, a dark-haired, florid man, scratched his head perfunctorily.

“Take us in a bit closer,” Ragshok ordered.

“Yes, chief.”

The vessel loomed. She was not one of the fleet’s biggest ships, not a front-line—o’-war, but she was big enough. If Ragshok knew his ships—and ships was one thing he knew—she was a Planet Class destroyer. She loomed, lights still blazing, drive either idle or defunct… derelict.

Ragshok had watched the battle from a safe distance. He had hoped the rebels would win, naturally, but not overenthusiastically so. He was on the side of political stability because it made the pickings richer, but on the other hand it might lead to merchant ships being better armed and therefore less easy prey. He did not want to be a prospector again, hewing wealth from the natural environment, which was what he had been doing before he realised how wealthy space was with other people’s riches.

The latest news he had was that Ten-Fleet had nearly finished the job of hunting down remnants of the rebel fleet and was beginning to regather. It was easy to understand why Claire de Lune had been abandoned in the first place: she had taken damage, perhaps to her drive, perhaps to her defences or to her offensive weapons, that rendered her a sitting duck. “But why haven’t they come back to her?” he murmured.

“Think she’s just plasma by now, I expect,” Morgan said. “She ought to be, too.”

“Alright, let’s go over and have a look.”

He snapped down his helmet while Morgan went aft to rouse the others. A minute later a force forty strong was floating across the gap, drifting across the bulging, engineered cliff face of the other vessel until they found a port.

Inside, the air was good. Ragshok snapped open his helmet and smelled, with startlement, the sweet perfumes of the ship’s interior environment. Here, close to the hull, the surroundings were more businesslike and he did not see the luxurious furnishings that were later to amaze him.

But it was less than a minute before he realised the effect some of those perfumes were having on him. He gave a strangled cry of incredulity.

“Good grief, Morgan—they were taking drugs during a battle?”

His men spread out through the ship, each one having been briefed on what to find out. Ragshok made his way to the bridge; it was locked, and when he shot the door open, it had the appearance of being disused. Shortly, his ship’s engineer informed him that the ship had apparently been controlled from another place, a sort of command centre. He went there and played with the equipment while reports were brought to him.

The ship was holed, which he had not noticed while approaching, but not, seriously so. The emergency gels had kept her airtight, and it would not cost too much work to draw a new skin over the ruptured parts of the hull. The feetol engines were out of action, which was what caused her to be abandoned. But before leaving, her crew had spiked all the guns.

“Well what about the engines?” Morgan demanded of the engineer while his master, Ragshok, fiddled with a piece of rubbery plastic on the arm of the command throne. He had discovered it gave him weird visual effects.

The engineer was a wiry Salpian. Ragshok had taken him off a passenger liner, had offered to take him home after he had got a junked engine running. But he had preferred to stay with the privateers.

He grinned, “The damage is mostly superficial, except for one thing. They need a new flux unit. Then, with a bit of repair work, she’ll go.”

He paused. “The one we have in the Dare would do the job, at a pinch.”

Ragshok started. “The Dare?” He pulled a face. The Dare was his best and biggest ship…

But look at what he would be getting in exchange, he told himself…

He left off playing with the command throne, and looked about him, musing. He had always dreamed of some great exploit. “Do you remember Varana?” he murmured. “Not a big place. Just a little moon, really, with a littler moon in attendance. But a nice place, and we had it to ourselves for weeks… a million people under our thumbs…”

“Until we scarpered rather than face a proper fight,” Morgan said acidly. “And remember, this tub is just a weaponless hulk now.”

“But what a hulk. You could get thousands in here, armed to the teeth.”

“We don’t have thousands. We only have a couple of hundred.”

“It’s no secret where we could get more, if there’s enticement enough,” Ragshok turned to his Salpian. “How fast could she go if we installed Dare’s flux unit?”

“As fast as she ever went—for a while. You’d have to replace it after a year or so.”

Ragshok leaned back, still thinking. The idea is ludicrous, he admitted dismally to himself. There’s nothing we can do with this thing, except strip it bare of everything valuable.

He knew why he was so reluctant to let the ship go. It was because of his notions of grandeur. To be the outlawed master of a stolen warship of the Empire!

Just then Tengu, his systems engineer—or one of them—came bursting in. The lean, dark-skinned man seemed hot and tense.

“Those stories we heard were true,” he said in a clipped, harsh accent. “They’ve got matter transmitters aboard. They use them to transfer from ship to ship.”

Ragshok stared at him. “You’re sure?”

“Chief, you can eat my brains if I’m ever wrong.”

The privateer captain turned away. His face was slack, his eyes glazed. The idea that was bubbling, fermenting, bursting within his skull was just too good…

The strident clamour that rang through the craft as it approached the edge of the planetary system ahead made Hesper Positana grit her teeth in frustration. It was the “every man for himself” call.

Sheathed in one of the forward bubbles (she was supposed to be manning a dart—a short-range missile launcher), she banged a fist angrily on her communicator and heard the voice of the captain issuing final instructions to his officers.

The ship had once been a licensed police craft and was one of the few vessels in the rebel fleet—one of the few in the whole of Escoria—actually built as a fighting vessel. They had done some fighting, but not nearly as much as they had been running, so it seemed to her, and all her gall was in her voice as she yelled, “What in space’s name is this?”

“We can’t outrun them, Hesper,” the captain’s voice came back. “Save yourself.”

“Then let’s make a fight of it!”

“It’s no good Hesper—it’s the flagship itself that’s after us.”

She swallowed. The alarm was still ringing.

Then, with a snarl and “Tcha” of annoyance, she loosed off all three remaining darts in succession and, moving lithely, snaked herself through the hatch at her back and loped down a narrow corridor to the escape station. There were several survival eggs left. Without more ado she tucked herself into one, pulled down the starting blind, and felt herself go down the chute.

On the glowing screen before her eyes she could see what was happening. The Shark—the ex-police cruiser—was by now ploughing halfway into the planetary system where they had hoped to hide, crossing the orbits of the gas giants. As the survival eggs sprayed out of the feetol field they carried its remanence; they would guide themselves as close as possible to any near inhabited planets.

The screen tracked the paths the eggs were taking. Many were making for a small planet with a reddish hue. But others, herself included, had chosen a different target: the next world inward, of which she could make out little.

Then the dot that was the Shark flared briefly: a point of light momentarily brighter by virtue of a consuming instant of nuclear fusion. A feetol shell had found its mark.

The survival egg was decelerating rapidly but it would probably take her, in the next minute or so, to the inward planet it had selected. Its inertial protection was without sophistication, and barely adequate. She was spun at she did not know what rate, at thousands of rotations per second, on a hundred different axes, as it handled and dissipated the excess inertial energy arising from a slowing down to below the speed of light and lower still, and which would otherwise have converted her to a puff of gas. Even so, she passed out several times.

A calm, confident voice sounded in her ear, designed to encourage a forward-looking attitude in the egg’s occupant. “Atmosphere. Please prepare to look out for a landing place.”

She could hear thin upper air whistling past the eggshell now. There was a blip and a radar map of the terrain below appeared on the screen before her. She squinted and tried to make it out.

She heard, with a crack, the rotor blades opening.

Pout was quivering with pleasure and excitement. He had left his following, telling them to stay in one place until he got back, and had walked two or three miles through the savannah. His people were used to him wandering off and he knew they would wait for him; they had no choice.

The boy Sinbiane had told him there was a village here. Pout had seen the flat roofs of the houses from some distance off. Now, crawling on his belly atop a grassy bank, a perfect vision awaited him.

It was dusk. The air was mild and spicy. And down the other side of the bank, scarcely more than a few yards away, he was staring straight into a girl’s bedroom.

She had her light on; all the cosy details of the room were visible through the open window with perfect clarity. The girl was sitting at a table with a mirror on it; he couldn’t make out quite what she was doing. But now she rose, and in full view of where Pout was lying, pulled off her upper garment over her head. Underneath, she was bare to the waist. Her breasts were heavy and voluptuous, and they bounced when released from the garment.

Pout was only partly human. Sexually his libido was vague. A woman, various female apes, were all capable of arousing him, but to what end was blurry to his mind. His sense of the erotic had, however, found its object.

He brought out the zen gun from where he kept it in his bib, chuckling inanely in his throat. He cradled it to his cheek, crooning.

“I can maim and I can kill, with my zen gun.”

So ran the refrain that passed through his mind whenever he took the gun in his hand. He had learned many tricks with it by now. It did not have to kill every time it fired. Its power was variable. It could just cripple—or simply hurt.

Pout like it when it hurt.

He had set the studs for pain. He pointed the gun. He squeezed the trigger stud. He did not have to aim with any accuracy. His thoughts did the targeting; he had learned that long ago.

The pink stitching wavered leisurely through the air. It entered the window, sparked on the girl’s breasts. First the left breast, then the right breast, then the left breast… prodding at the nipples.

The girl doubled up, her mouth agape in a soundless grimace of agony, clutching at herself, hitting at her breasts as if she could strike off the pain. But she could not strike it off.. Pout kept pointing the gun, directing the stitches with his mind. Left breast, right breast…

His sparse pelt became damp. Unlike other primates, Nascimento’s chimera had both sweat glands and fur.

At last she managed to get her breath long enough to scream, and in a minute other people rushed into the room. Pout slid back down the bank, put away his gun, and began to lope towards the horizon, keeping low and hiding himself behind the tall tufts of coarse grass.

Once he paused. He thought he saw the glimmerings of a falling star in the sky overhead, but then it turned into a white dot which drifted down and finally disappeared.

When he was out of sight of the village he slowed his pace. It was an hour before he returned to his group of followers. Apart from the kosho, who as usual sat cross-legged off by himself, they were gathered round a wood fire.

It was not yet dark, and Pout saw straight away that a stranger sat among his half dozen slaves. He bared his teeth briefly, a reflex of uncertainty, and put his hand to his bib to feel the comforting stock of his gun.

At his approach, they rose. The stranger was staring at him. It was a female, a young woman with a pale, blunt face and black cropped hair. She had a restless, energetic way of moving, a way of looking at one directly, that disconcerted him a little. She wore a form-hugging body garment of sheened black and silver, calf-high black boots, and a wide waist belt that held, among other things, what looked like a scangun. Although bare-headed, she carried a transparent globe helmet in one hand.

“You’re Pout,” she said at once, not waiting for him to speak.

Lacey, the prairie bum who, after the kosho and the boy had been Pout’s first convert, sidled close to Pout and spoke softly in his humble, apologetic way. “She just came in,” he mumbled. “Some kinda shipwreck… dropped outa the sky in an escape capsule. She gave us some grub.” He held out his hand, offering a stick of emergency rations. Pout took it, sniffed, then bit. It was chewy, if not too appetising. He gulped it down, then licked his fingers.

The girl, Hesper Positana, gazed at him with distaste. Her survival egg had come down a couple of miles away. She had been trying to make for what looked like some inhabited structures on a plain to the west, but hadn’t quite made it—the rotors had no power of their own but came down sycamore-seed style, using the early part of the drop to store energy in a flywheel. You were supposed to use this for a few miles of powered flight at a few thousand feet high.

In the end, when she started to lose height, she had spotted the smoke from the campfire. She was almost beginning to wish she hadn’t, because she had landed among a bunch of very odd people. First there was Lacey, some sort of psychological inadequate who she gathered was in the habit of wandering the grasslands that dominated this part of the planet, living off any small animals he could trap. Of the others, four seemed to be brothers who had been thrown out of their community for unspecified crimes, and were now looking for somewhere else to live. Only the boy, Sinbiane, appeared to be normal.

Most peculiar of all was the one who sat by himself in the gathering dark. He was a kosho. Very vaguely, she had heard something about koshos, but had never expected to see one.

Lacey had told her their leader was a chimeric ape called Pout. They had spoken of him with a sort of grumbling admiration, all except Sinbiane, who had said openly to her: “Pout is a bad creature, lady. You should go away. He holds these people under subjection with his gun.”

“I have a gun,” Hesper had said, patting her holster.

“The kosho’s got lots of guns, though,” one of the brothers had said. “Throw tubes, too.”

Just then Pout himself had turned up, and she couldn’t understand how even these people—like Lacey, the brothers didn’t strike her as being any too bright—could allow themselves to be dominated by him. The chimera stared at her, large eyes blinking.

“You come off a spaceship?”

“Yes.”

“From another world?”

“That’s right.”

The thought excited Pout. She prompted the same feelings in him the girl in the village had. He allowed his eyes to rove over her, and then to fix on her breasts. He imagined the stitches of the zen gun playing with them, her body writhing. His jaw became slack.

Hesper put a hand on her hip, and nodded westward. “There are some big towers or buildings or something in that direction. I’m making for them.”

“Cities. We are going there. You want to join us? First you give me that.” He pointed to the scangun in her belt.

She took a step back. “Oh no you don’t. That’s mine.”

“All right.” Pout gestured to the horizon. “Off you go, then. On your own.”

“Okay I will.” Hesper turned and pushed her way through the group to stalk away from the camp. She kept a wary eye on the chimera, but did not see him give a signal to one of the brothers. Before she had got very far she stopped, gasped, and whirled round, her hand on her empty gun holster.

“How did you do that?” she screeched frustratedly to the brother as he tossed the scangun to a delighted Pout. She hadn’t felt anything. Only when she put her hand on the holster out of concern for what the chimera might do had she discovered the flap was unfastened and the weapon gone.

“It’s our skill, lady. It’s what we do.” The brother, a youth in his early twenties, smiled broadly.

“Pickpockets,” she murmured. She stood nonplussed, while Pout crooned and chuckled over his new acquisition. Though it was but a toy compared with the zen gun, he had always wanted one.

He knew something about how to make it work. A modern scangun fired a needle-beam of coherent light which was refracted through an oscillating prism to scan a six foot by two foot rectangle—or whatever size of target it was set for.

With a scanning density of a thousand lines per inch, the effect was more or less total disintegration. Pout raised the gun and peered at the little screen that displayed whatever the muzzle was pointed at. His thumb moved a grooved wheel by the side of the screen. That was the focusing ring: when the target became unblurred and just filled the screen, you were ready to fire.

He pointed it at a twisted tree that stood on a knoll a little further off. Under his thumb, the tree shrank until its branches just brushed the edges of the screen and the picture became sharp. Pout pressed the firing stud. The brief blue ray was an odd sight: not parallel, like ordinary coherent light, but divergent because of the way it scanned.

The tree erupted momentarily and disappeared in a crackle of smoke and drifting ash.

Pout whooped for joy.

Hesper walked slowly back into the light of the campfire and stood boldly before him. “Are you going to give me my gun back?” she asked wearily.

He eyed her. “Why don’t you stay with us, lady? Travel to the plain cities with us. We’ll be good to you. Lacey knows how to catch animals for food. Do you know how to catch animals? You haven’t got enough eating sticks to last long. Better not to be alone.”

She hesitated, confused. She couldn’t fathom this set-up. But, apart from the half-animal, they seemed harmless—and even Pout hadn’t threatened her.

She needed to reach a town of some kind before she could get proper bearings and find out what to do next. The ape was right: it was probably better to have company, especially now she was unarmed.

“All right,” she sighed, “I’ll stay. But don’t get any ideas, ape.”

She helped gather more firewood for the night, then settled down, taking care to put a piece of ground between herself and the others—especially Pout. The repulsiveness of the creature was coming home to her, as she watched him prowl around the camp, and saw how the others cringed in his presence, all apart from the boy, that was.

Before falling asleep, she spent some while staring at the sky. This planet’s sky was clear, and the stars shone fairly brightly. She thought of the battle that had taken place there, in space’s vastness, and in which she had taken part. It all seemed so remote from here.

She didn’t even know this planet’s name, she reminded herself. What did it matter? There were so many planets. Suddenly she felt very, very tired (she had been awake about forty hours), and her eyes closed.

For Pout, too, sleep was preluded by daydreams. He thought about the girl not far away. He would like to be able to fondle such a girl, to prod with his fingers where the zen stitches prodded. And so he would, he promised himself.

His little band was growing, he told himself warmly. All thanks to the zen gun. It wasn’t just what it could do to maim and kill, he realised. It was its mental ability. While he had the gun it seemed to magnify his presence; people respected him.

His chief hold over his followers, however, was still fear. He had deliberately refrained from instilling that fear in the girl—for tonight. Pout had an instinctive understanding of the skill of dominance: first the girl had to grow used to him, to develop her own feelings for him, for or against. That way the relationship, when it came, would be binding.

That would be when he showed her that the zen gun had a facility for personalised targets. Once a target had been registered, it could be invoked any time. The target could not hide. Anywhere it was—anywhere on this planet, anyway—Pout had only to think of it and press the trigger stud. The stitch beam would go glowing out, wavering in the air, round corners, to anywhere in the world, to where that person was. He would prove it to her with one of the others, would send him half a mile away and fire while aiming in the other direction, so she could see the electric stitches bend around and find their mark.

Then he would register her and use the gun on her in the same way, would take his pleasure for a while, in making her suffer.

Then she would be his.

In the morning Hesper woke by the embers of the fire, rose and stretched. The air was slightly misty, the sun (a yellow sun, like her own at home) about twenty degrees off the horizon.

After weeks of being cooped up in the police cruiser and breathing its stale air, the freshness of the day was invigorating. She began to feel cheerful, a contrast to her mood of the night before. Lacey blew on the embers, adding dried grass and bleached wood. The fire started, and he began to cook a long-eared quadruped he had been saving for breakfast.

Pout squatted on the ground, watching the proceedings and blinking soporifically. He looked so pathetic Hesper felt she could have taken her scangun off him at any moment, but she did not try it. It had already become clear Pout was not as helpless as he looked.

The kosho did not seem to have moved a finger since she had seen him the night before. Still he sat cross-legged, spine erect, clad in all his accoutrements. The effect was weird. Curious, Hesper left the group and walked slowly towards him.

Sinbiane appeared by her side, strolling along with her. “Lady, what were you doing in space?”

She stopped, looking down at him. “Fighting a war,” she said. “Escoria has rebelled against the Empire. Didn’t you know?”

Wonderingly he shook his head. “So is Escoria free from the Empire now, lady?”

“No. We lost. The Simplex knows what will happen now.”

“It won’t make much difference here on Earth, lady.”

Hesper stepped closer to the kosho and stared at him in fascination. His eyes were closed, as she presumed they had been since she arrived. The bony cast of his face was accentuated by the way his shiny black hair was swept back and tied in a bun at the back of his head. It was like looking at a statue.

But what was really striking was his collection of weapons, arranged all over the harness he wore over his simple white gown. At his waist, stretched out now along the ground, was a mortar tube which she recognised as capable of throwing a bomb a good few miles. On his back was a whole rack of rifles whose muzzles projected above the back of his head like railings (this puzzled her a little: she would have expected them to be carried stocks uppermost). She was also amused to see, half-hidden beneath the rifles, the flat shape of a curved sword scabbard.

At chest, belly and thighs he carried an armoury of smaller weapons, grenades, bombs, ammunition pouches and fletched hand-thrown darts. Hesper had never seen, even imagined, such a warrior.

“Why does he stay like that?” she murmured to Sinbiane.

“Is he asleep?”

“No, lady, he is not asleep. He has depersonalised his consciousness.”

“What does that mean?”

“It is a state of perfect repose, lady, even deeper than sleep. But he is not oblivious.”

“He’s still aware of his surroundings, then?”

“Only as you are aware of your little toe, lady.”

It was some sort of trance state, Hesper decided. “Does he stay like that all the time?” she asked.

“Whenever he does not need to act, lady. ‘Between actions, timeless being.’ I can do it too, but uncle says boys should stay active.”

“Uncle?”

“This is my uncle, I may be a kosho one day.”

“If koshos are such wonderful warriors,” Hesper said bitterly, her voice rising, “why don’t they fight with us against the Empire?”

“A kosho is a perfect individual, lady. He does not fight for causes. He fights because every act is a conflict with nature.”

“What?” This mystical talk, especially coming from someone so young, confused and annoyed her. “Then why is he a camp follower of—that?” She jerked her thumb to indicate Pout. “Does the ape have him screwed down too?”

“He is beholden to the chimera, lady, that is true.”

“Just what is it about that creature?”

The boy did not answer for a moment. He seemed to be hesitating over something. “Lady,” he said suddenly, “was it your battle that interfered with the moon?”

“Moon? What moon?”

“We have a moon here, lady. I have lived on Earth all my life and it has always been the same size—about the size of the sun. Its phases have always been regular too. But lately something had been going wrong. First, a few weeks ago, it shrank to only half its proper diameter. Then it started growing. The night before last it was about ten times as large as the sun; last night it was more like twenty time. It isn’t following its proper cycle, either.”

She did recall a satellite, an unusually large one for the mass of the planet, registering on her egg’s screen in the last few seconds of her approach. It had seemed disproportionately close to its primary, at that.

She hadn’t seen it since landing. Presumably it was on the other side of the planet from the sun at present, only appearing at night when she had been asleep.

She frowned. The boy was talking nonsense, of course. He had either been dreaming or he didn’t understand the satellite’s orbit.

“No,” she said slowly, “our battle didn’t have anything to do with your moon. It was out among the stars.”

“Then I wonder what is happening? Well, shall we have breakfast, lady?”

She accompanied him back to the fire, where Lacey gave her a piece of meat from the quadruped (which he called a rabbit). The flavour was novel to her; discovering she was ravenously hungry, she gulped it down and wished for more.

Pout himself then scattered the fire, stamping on flame and ember with his bare feet, and ordering the group to begin the day’s march. In single file, Pout in the lead,: they set out to the west.

Hesper glanced behind her. The kosho who had not shared the breakfast, and to whom no one had spoken, rose from the ground, picking up a small mat which had protected his buttocks from the ground and tucking it away somewhere on his person. He walked well to the rear of the rest of the line, and shortly was joined by Sinbiane.

Pout proved to be an indefatigable pace-setter. The sun rose high in the sky and became hot, until Hesper, perspiring and fatigued, began to strip off, unfastening the one-piece sheen suit they had adopted as uniform aboard the Shark, quickly following that by pulling off her undervest. Her boots she put back on and strode along in those and her underpants, carrying her other clothing in one hand.

Pout, glancing back, saw her so disrobed and reminded himself of his plans. A hitch suddenly occurred to him. The boy Sinbiane had assured him they were only a day’s journey from the great level plain where the moving cities were. If they found a city before he had set his seal on her, there would be nothing to hold her to the group…

True, there would be plenty of women in the cities, and perhaps female apes and man-ape chimeras too. Still, the snag tussled in Pout’s mind with his impatience to reach the plain.

The little band he had around him satisfied one aspect of Pout’s nature: his desire to revenge himself on the world by dominating those around him. But he found his vagrant life of the past few months insufficient. Getting food was too difficult. And it became boring, day after day in the wilderness. His lust for life demanded closer, more colourful horizons.

He was able to resolve the difficulty when, near the end of the day, the land sloped down to meet the expected plain. They all stopped to stare when they had a good view of it, for it was just like a grass sea, completely flat as far as the eye could perceive, the more hilly terrain they had crossed curving round it in coves and headlands.

“Is it natural?” Hesper asked of no one in particular.

“It was a sea bottom once,” the eldest of the sneakthief brothers told her. “But it was levelled off a bit, too.”

Sinbiane had joined them. “Earth’s is an ancient culture, lady, and has peculiarities perhaps not found elsewhere. One of these is the culture of the moving cities. For centuries they have roamed this plain.”

“They really move? But why?”

“Come!” ordered Pout. “Down onto the plain!”

They descended. But instead of setting out immediately over the ocean of waving tall grass, as Hesper had expected, Pout stopped and turned to her. From the bib-like garment he wore he drew, not her scangun, but a different-looking gun she had not seen before.

“Time you joined our little gang properly,” he told her in a thick voice, curling back his protruding lips. “We have an initiation rite.”

Hesper looked blankly at the gun.

Lacey was showing signs of distress, a pained look coming over his face. “Aw, boss, not to the lady. It ain’t right to a lady. She’ll be a good girl, won’tcha, lady? She’ll do what she’s told.”

As he said this he reached out his arm to Hesper. She drew away. Pout waved him back. His gaze was fixed on Hesper’s breast.

The muzzle of the zen gun was barely a yard from her as he pointed it at her left nipple.

“Look!” cried Sinbiane.

He was pointing to something that had appeared on the horizon: a hulking yellow shape that heaved itself up, like a rising sun or moon, but which seemed almost too big to be coming over the horizon. It was as if it were only on the other side of a table.

Spellbound, they watched until it came fully into view, even though the process took several minutes. It was like a mobile castle supporting clusters of round, moulded towers, and it gleamed like gold as the sun caught it.

Suddenly, a fear of the unknown entered Pout’s brain. He stabbed at the buttons of his gun, returning it to kill mode. Then he returned it to his bib, and beckoned.

“Come.”

The moving city appeared to be making for the north of the plain; its progress would take it round a long promontory, though at the rate it went it probably would not get there for a day or two. The grass of the plain was taller than on the higher ground; it came to their mid-thighs (in Pout’s and Sinbiane’s case, to their hips) and they waded through it as they half-ran towards the gorgeous vision.

How do they know we’ll be allowed in? Hesper thought.

But no such doubt seemed to have entered the others’ minds. They stopped running after ten minutes, panting, with the city seeming no nearer.

After that they walked, for about three miles, while the structure grew and grew. Hesper could not keep her eyes off it. One did not normally think of a city as a thing—it was a place. But this was a thing, and at the same time, it was undeniably a city.

Or rather, it was like the centre of a city translocated, its skyscrapers torn away from its suburbs to live a freelance life of their own. Hesper found it almost incredible that such a massive object could be mobile, at least on the ground (in space was a different matter). Perhaps, she thought, it had to keep moving to stop itself from sinking into the Earth! As they approached she could see that it was surrounded by a skirt of casings which presumably covered whatever it rode on, and from this emanated a low quivering, rumbling sound.

She estimated the city’s speed at about half a mile per hour. At length they found themselves below the outer wall, peering up at towers, balustrades and walkways. Pout scampered to and fro, desperately searching for an entrance.

It was one of the sneakthief brothers who eventually let out a penetrating whistle and guided them to a ramp which sloped down over the tread casings (gigantic treads, Hesper decided probably were the most economical method of locomotion), gliding over the grassland like the front end of a lawnmower.

The slope was gentle, but quite long. It ended in a portico fifty feet wide, the way barred by a silver grille. This withdrew; they entered, found their way barred by yet a second grille, while the first fell back into place behind them. The area between was capacious. From the floor, a table emerged, bearing flagons, cups, and a large platter of fruit and breads.

There was a gentle tone, followed by a pleasant female voice.

“To our visitors, greetings! You stand at the entrance to Mo City, one of twenty mobile cities that inhabit this flat veldt known as Flatland on the maps. The levelness of the terrain is of assistance, not to the mobility of the cities which are able to negotiate inclines, but so that the human inhabitants may not find their floors and other surfaces tilting. Before entering Mo, it is as well that you should know something of the reason for the existence of the moving cities. They were originally the brainchild of the social scientist and historian Otto Klemperer, whose thesis was that there is a particular form of political constellation which has been especially fruitful for civilisation. This is where a number of independent city states exist within the same geographical area, sharing a common language and a common culture to some extent, but rivals in every other sense. Cases of particular note are the city states of ancient Greece, the city states of the central plain of China of the same period, and the city states of Italy at the time of the Renaissance. In each case, the ideational foundations were laid, within a comparatively short space of time, for the subsequent development of entire civilisations.

“Klemperer, with the backing of the then Emperor of Eurasia, decided to reinstitute the arrangement in modern form, resulting in the cities of the plain of which Mo, named after a scientific philosopher of the Chinese period, is one. To ensure that each city would remain distinct Klemperer placed its government and administration in the hands of a machine mind, so that a city is, in a very real sense, an intelligent entity in its own right. The citizens live in symbiotic relationship with this entity, and are not normally permitted to leave their city. To establish a common cultural heritage with the proper degree of cultural intercourse, the cities were made mobile. From time to time, under the direction of the city minds themselves, they meet up, and then—if you will pardon the term—a kind of cultural copulation takes place. The two cities are connected by bridges and walkways and the two populations mingle with an air of festivity. This is a great occasion in the life of a city.

“The cities of the plain are now three hundred and forty-seven years old. To be honest, the scientific and artistic renaissance Klemperer had anticipated has not yet come about. Nevertheless, Mohists, together with the inhabitants of the other mobile cities, can claim to be the most leisured and continuously educated people in the universe.

“You are welcome to enter. To distinguish you from Mohists proper you will wear an orange badge on your foreheads. Along with all other citizens, you will be required to attend daily lectures in various subjects. For you I have selected a talk entitled ‘Basic Physics.’

“Normally I would add that after three days you may decide whether you wish to become citizens or not. However, astronomical irregularities indicate a strong possibility that our planet may be destroyed in the next few hours. If so, let us endure our fate with philosophical calm and-fortitude!”

At this members of Pout’s party stared at one another. “What irregularities?” Hesper said harshly. There was no answer, other than that the inner grille withdrew, disclosing a path leading, after a few yards, to the interior of the city.

As they stepped onto it, Hesper noted that on the foreheads of her companions circular orange patches had appeared. She put a hand to her own forehead, could feel nothing, but was sure the patch was there.

But there was one exception. The kosho still kept to the rear of the party. Looking back, Hesper noticed that his forehead remained unmarked. She fancied she saw a hint of a smile on his face as he received her attention, as though to convey to her some private joke.

Then they were in Mo. The path gave onto a broad esplanade paved with hexagonal slabs a pale gold in colour. At its fringe people sat at tables under awnings before arcaded doorways, talking and drinking, attended by flimsy-looking robots. At intervals, avenues led to other places.

Hesper lifted her eyes. Up, up and up rose the moulded towers, connected by bridges, interspersed with terraces, suspended plazas and esplanades, all shining in the evening sun. They stood on the ground floor of the city, so to speak, but it had many floors, at dizzying levels.

It was, she had to admit, the most entrancing urban construct she had even seen.

And to think that all this moved.

She pulled on her clothing again, no longer feeling overheated. She reminded herself that she was here for a purpose: to try to join up with whatever remnants of rebel forces their might be, or failing that, to get home.

Pout was staring about himself with a look of idiocy. He seemed to be in shock: culture shock, perhaps.

She patted him on the head. “Well thanks for the company, ape. So long.”

With that, she skipped off lightly to join the Mohists.

Later, she lay back with a sigh on the divan in the delightful accommodation she had been given.

Her conversations with the Mohists had not proved helpful. They seemed disinterested in the outside world beyond the plain. For news of or travel to other planets, she would have to go to some other part of Earth, they had told her. And how did she do that?

She would have to walk. Mo offered no transport facilities, beyond its own enormous treads whose rumblings could, occasionally, be heard in quieter moments.

They had smiled in dazed fashion when she questioned them on the coming end of the world. Earth, they claimed, was about to collide with its own moon. Nothing could prevent it. Mo himself had confirmed the likelihood of it happening.

Recalling what Sinbiane had said, she felt perplexed, almost frightened. Then one of the robots, who seemed to take care of everything, had approached and offered to take her to her apartment. There she had showered, removing the dirt and sweat of the last few days. Now she rested.

The pending satellite collision could not be taken seriously. The universe could be a violent place, but sudden events did not happen without lengthy warning. If this planet’s moon had an orbit so unstable as to decay into its primary, the fact would have been known the Simplex knew how long ago. It would have been the talk of Escoria.

Her own private explanation was that she was being told a cultural fable. The satellite probably had an orbit with variable eccentricity which made it approach closer to the planet at long intervals. That would explain why the boy hadn’t seen it grow visibly bigger before.

As for the Mohists, they were probably crazies, no longer able to separate fable from reality. Centuries of enclosed life, no matter how pleasant the surroundings, under the tutelage of a city-mind that was virtually a god as far as they were concerned, could hardly produce anything else.

A tone suddenly sounded, the same she had heard at the gate. The voice that followed, however, was masculine.

“Visitor, this is Mo speaking. It is time for your evening lecture.”

Hesper started, thrilled despite herself. The voice was that of a young but mature man, vigorous and confident. It brought to mind the sort of visage she had seen on ancient statues, framed in dark curls, handsome, intelligent and strong. The face of a deity…

A thought struck her. Could it be that some of the city minds had female gender?

There could be more ramifications to this society than she had penetrated so far.

Almost coyly, she said. “I’m tired, I’ll skip the lecture, thank you.”

“Education is obligatory,” the godlike voice replied gently. “The whole point of a leisured class is that it may cultivate the mind. Your weariness is in body only. Since you are too tired to walk to the lecture hall, I shall bring it to you by sensurround. Just relax.”

The room darkened. Hesper seemed to be transported to some other place: a semidark hall, quite small in size though she became aware of its slightly echoing acoustics. It had a plush smell, quite different from her perfumed apartment.

In reality she was also aware that she still lay on her bed; sensory beams were being aimed at her. Down the slope of the lecture room, the display area suddenly lit up with the words:

DISCOVERING THE SIMPLEX

The words cleared: there began a sequence of images accompanying a spoken text, which to Hesper’s mild surprise was voiced by Mo himself.

“The foundation of modern physics,” the voice said in cordial, instructing tones, “was established by Vargo Gridban two thousand years ago. He it was who replaced the picture of space and matter then prevailing, involving several types of fundamental particle with several kinds of forces acting between them, with a scheme requiring only one type of elementary particle and one fundamental force.

“Gridban’s work began with the observation that the spacetime in which we live is so constituted that, while it could accommodate forces of repulsion, forces of attraction ought to be impossible in it. Yet attractive forces—gravitation, electromagnetism, nuclear binding force—do appear to exist and are responsible for both the small and large scale structures in our universe, from atoms to galaxies. Instead of simply accepting the existence of these forces, as scientists before him had done, Gridban came to the opposite conclusion and accepted their impossibility. It followed that gravitation, electromagnetic attraction, and nuclear force could only be apparently attractive: they might even depend on a completely opposite type of phenomenon for their effect.

“Gridban’s own special contribution was in the field of gravitation. The supremely subtle set of experiments he proposed established two things. First, that gravitating bodies fail to obey the Newtonian law of action and reaction. That they superficially appear to obey it is due to the acceleration of a gravitating body being independent of its mass. In fact the motion of a satellite, to take in example, is due solely to the presence of its primary. It does not contribute to that motion by reacting to its own influence upon the primary.

“Second, Gridban was able to demonstrate that there is actually no connecting casual link at all between gravitating bodies. That is the reason for the failure of Newton’s third law: gravitating bodies are not, in fact, acting on one another. Eventually Gridban was able to prove that gravitation is a residual phenomenon, not a positive force. The road was opened to our present knowledge of space and its relation to matter.

“Space is kinetic, not static in character. It consists purely of relationships between material particles, and fundamentally there is only one relationship: every particle in existence attempts to recede from every other particle at the velocity of light. The recessive factor between any two particles is known as a recession line. The structure we call ‘space’ consists of a mesh of recession lines. Between lines, in the interstices not on any route between particles, no ‘space’ or anything else exists.

“Actually the spacetime we live in is of a rather special kind. You are probably already acquainted with the following geometrical facts: on a one-dimensional line no more than two points can be selected so as to be equidistant from one another; on a two-dimensional plane, as many as three points may be equidistant, forming the apices of an equilateral triangle; in our real space of three dimensions as many as four points may be equidistant, forming the apices of a tetrahedron; in a four-dimensional continuum a fifth point could be added to form a pentope; and so on. For each extra dimension one more point can be added. Such a configuration of equidistant points is known as a simplex, and each simplex exemplifies a particular dimensional set.

“Originally existence was without spatial dimension as such, or to put it another way, each particle in existence introduced a new dimension. The configuration of existence was that of a stupendous simplex, made up of an infinite number of particles all equidistant from one another and all receding at the standard rate—through ‘recession’ here becomes a rarefied concept, since there were no such entities as time or distance to measure velocity by. The Simplex, as this primordial state is called, still exists, but it had become flawed. Through causes unknown a small part of it has collapsed into three dimensions, and this flattened ‘facet’ constitutes our universe.

“It is postulated that there may be other flattened facets on the Simplex. If a means of entering the Simplex could be found we could presumably travel to these other universes. Not only that, but a route through the Simplex would make all points in our local universe equally accessible, since the Simplex does not recognise relative distances. So far this old scientific dream has resisted all efforts to bring it to reality.

“The forces of nature that make our universe what it is are all consequent on the collapse of matter into three dimensions. Particles that have to share dimensions occlude one another and break the recessional relationship between other particles. A degree of fragmentary disunity then begins to occur in nature.

“The arising of relative velocities below the standard recessional rate is the first result to flow from this. The situation for a material body in the three-dimensional realm is that it is surrounded, at the limit of its Hubble sphere, by an opaque shell of particles receding from it at the standard absolute rate, the velocity of light. But any other body lying within the Hubble sphere will eclipse a part of the circumferential shell, so that each body will receive fewer recession lines from that part of its general environment in which the other lies. The asymmetric distribution of recession lines produces an opposition among them, ending in a modification of the apparent rate of recession between the bodies themselves. Seemingly the bodies recede at a slower rate in proportion to the deficiency in recession lines. In reality, of course, it is the space between them that is altered.

“If the bodies are sufficiently close—as close as the galaxies of our local group, for instance—the recessional pressure of the Hubble shell prevents them from receding at all. Instead, it begins to push them towards one another. This phenomenon we know as gravitation, the first of what are sometimes called the ‘attractive forces,’ though it is really only a screening effect. For reasons which will be covered later, the induced motion becomes an acceleration instead of a velocity, and the strength of the effect follows the law of perspective.

“At very close range, the recessional pressure is magnified to become the nuclear binding force. This also will be covered later in the course.

“A second major area of effects arises as a by-product of what has just been described. What happens to those recession lines connecting particles whose recession has slowed or been reversed? All particles lying within the Hubble sphere are attempting to recede from one another at the standard rate but are constrained from doing so. Recession lines joining these particles are undergoing strain; they respond by acquiring a compensating lateral component. These ‘strain lines’ form their own special kind of space, the space of electric charge.

“So we see that our three-dimensional realm really consists of a hierarchy of interpenetrating three-dimensional spaces. First there is absolute or inertial space consisting of a single standard velocity; this space is exuded by the Hubble shell. Within that relative space arises, containing a range of velocities. And as a by-product of relative space, interwoven with inertial space, is the strain space of electromagnetism, a space independent enough to create its own particles consisting solely of electric charge.

“Our introduction now is ended and we are ready to go into the subject in more detail. Please indicate which aspect interests you most: the historical, the mathematical, or the philosophical.”

Hesper, however, gave no answer. She had fallen asleep.

Mo was considerate enough not to rouse her. She woke two hours later, and feeling refreshed, decided to see more of the city.

After leaving the apartment she began to ascend. Early evening had turned to late dusk. Light had come on all over the moving city: shaded pastel light in the sidewalk eateries and drinkeries, sharp light that blazed on the tessellated plazas, pillars of light that rose up and down the moulded yellow towers. Up Hester went; up moving helter-skelter rampways, up slowly climbing city squares that were gradual elevators, up the gentle slopes of flying boulevards, avoiding, in her eagerness for new impressions, the fast lifts that could have lofted her in seconds, until she found a place where the panorama of Mo and its changing landscape were displayed below.

Pleasant it was to sit on an overhanging terrace, protected by a balustrade of genuine carved oak, sipping the drink that was brought her, enjoying the cool air and taking in that panorama. She had ignored the talk that was all around her as she climbed, being more interested in the smells of various foods from the grills of countless establishments as the Mohists flocked to their evening repast. But now, as she relaxed, she sensed among the others sharing the terrace with her a feeling of anticipation, almost of dread. The feeling seemed incongruous in a people so placid and good-natured, and for that reason alone it filled her with foreboding. She was about to speak to an elderly man at the next table when the cause of their dread appeared on the horizon.

At first it could, perhaps, have been another moving city, but soon it bulked too large for that and could only have been a peculiarly arc-shaped mountain of a yellow-puce colour. And then, as the time inexorably passed, it became too huge for any mountain.

The moon was rising. It was the moon.

Up it came, and up, more and more of it. It had closed the remaining distance to Earth in an amazingly short time. A hush fell over the moving city, a hush that lasted for hours while gradually the moon rose and became a vast plate that covered the world like a lid—though Hesper, an experienced space traveller, easily discerned its sphericity. No one spoke or moved, except to sip at the drinks that continued to be served by the dutiful waiters, both robot and human. Instead, everyone’s gaze and consciousness became transfixed by the new, solid sky that passed over.

The sun illuminated the-face of the satellite throughout from below the horizon, its light filtering round the atmosphere, though the moon’s disk eventually darkened towards the centre. The yellowishness of its early approach quickly vanished and it became first dazzlingly white then greyish and grained. Easily visible were the great craters gaping upside down, the ancient splashes of lighter dust that rayed out from many of them, and the vast flat plains. Visible too, were signs of the past works of man: furrows from mining operations, fine lines that were transport networks.

By midnight the entire disk had lifted itself clear of the landscape, a satellite ceiling hanging so low it was as if one could reach up and touch it, and leaving only a narrow rim of blackness to all points of the compass. Hesper realised it was so close it must be grazing Earth’s upper atmosphere. But how could this be? Long before now its approach should have heaved up such tides in sea, land and air as utterly to destroy everything upon the planet. Not only that, the satellite should be beginning to break up as a result of even greater tidal stresses induced in it by the larger body. It was a long way inside Roche’s limit.

And having come this close, its trajectory should be one ending in direct collision, and that bare minutes away. Instead, this the most stunning spectacle ever beheld upon planet Earth was gliding silently and leisurely by, creating no disturbance and blithely ignoring the laws of physics. Sometime after midnight its apparent diameter began slowly to diminish, so that by dawn, when it was sliding down the opposite horizon in answer to Earth’s turning, it was noticeably smaller. It was receding back into space, having given the planet a near miss.

It was, Hesper thought as the Mohists, indeed all the inhabitants of nightside Earth, stirred from their captivated vigil, just as if Earth and its moon had ceased to exert any gravitational influence on one another at all.