The Lantern of God Read online

  THE LANTERN OF GOD

  JOHN DALMAS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1989 by John Dalmas

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  260 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10001

  First printing, May 1989

  ISBN: 0-671-69821-4

  Cover art by Larry Elmore

  Distributed by

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10020

  This story is dedicated to

  Jim Baen

  for his years of encouragement

  And while I'm at it I'd like to acknowledge three persons who've influenced this and other stories of mine:

  Rod Martin (with whom I co-authored THE PLAYMASTERS) for his interesting ideas and work in metaphysics and metapsychology.

  Bill Bailie for access to his personal library, his advice on matters technical and his manuscript critiques.

  And Gail for her manuscript critiques and her understanding tolerance of, for example, my strange working hours (like all night when I'm on a roll). It's interesting how many SF writers share life with a truly outstanding spouse.

  Foreword

  Writers don't want glitches in their stories, so we're likely to ask friends to read and comment on a prefinal draft, to uncover possible problems. Two friends suggested that a list of characters be provided with this story; you'll find it at the end. One also pointed out that some readers might have trouble because of a common cultural mindset. (I suspect that rather few would who are frequent science fiction readers, but some readers may who are new to SF or read it infrequently.) So I'm going to talk about it up front.

  In the United States, our sense of the rates and synchronicity of changes tends to reflect how things developed in North America and western Europe. These things are not hardwired into either the physical universe or the human species. Some cultures have changed very slowly. Many remained in the stone age till the last century, and some till this century, emerging from it only through contact with technically advanced cultures. Although their people demonstrated innate intelligence comparable to that of the Europeans and Americans who broke their isolation.

  Writings from antiquity reflect minds and thinking not basically unlike our own, and certainly not inferior. They just worked with different data bases and viewpoints.

  Some past cultures developed considerable technologies in certain fields and missed others entirely. In some oriental cultures, although millenia passed without the development of comprehensive physical sciences, they came up with considerable empirical technologies and highly cultivated arts and philosophies. It's interesting to contemplate what those cultures would eventually have come to be if they hadn't been impacted by aggressive western nations with their growing experimental sciences.

  It's also interesting to consider what sort of civilizations might develop in the absence of fossil fuels, for example, or in the absence of iron ore. They'd be different from ours, beyond a doubt.

  The exploration of ideas and unfamiliar permutations are things that science fiction does very well. It's a specialty of the field.

  * * *

  Finally, some readers might wonder about two languages (Hrummean and Djezian, in the story) being similar enough that, knowing one, you could rather quickly become competent in the other, yet different enough that at first one could be utterly unable to understand it. As a merchant seaman, I once sailed with a guy newly from Aberdeen, Scotland, and at first encounter I truly had no idea it was English he was speaking! Also, with a modest competence in Swedish, I found I could read Danish without too much difficulty, but not understand a word when it was spoken to me.

  * * *

  And with that, let's roll the story. I hope you have as good a time with it as I did.

  Prolog

  Heskil Brant pressed the security plate. Inside, the bridge lights came on, and the door slid open with a faint hiss. She went in, limped to the contoured captain's chair, and heavily, tiredly, lowered herself onto it. The wrap-around window she left opaqued, its default state; she wanted the sense of solitude—had earned it these past days.

  The door she left open, the last valve in a series that would let in outside air.

  Brant hadn't always been captain, or even a licensed officer. She'd hired on the WS Adanik Larvest as G-4 Life Support Technician (biologist), and for that final trip, acting supercargo. That had been long ago. For the last eight years she'd been the ranking survivor. And throughout their twenty-nine years stranded here, she'd been one of the most important, because like small cargo ships in general, the Larvest carried no physician. In the merchant service, biologists were cross-trained to treat the ill and injured.

  With the computerized clinic, that treatment would ordinarily have been entirely adequate; on the rare occasions when it wasn't, you could put the patient in a stasis chamber till you got to port somewhere, to a doctor. But here, unknown viruses and bacteria had adapted to the crew, over the years, and the clinic wasn't programmed for unknown diseases. The best it could do, with her help, was treat the symptoms and ease the discomfort, which by itself had repeatedly saved lives. The stasis equipment hadn't been used because they weren't going anywhere—this was the end of the road—and the engineer had been against using the backup power system to run it.

  Thus she'd presided over too many deaths, including four of the six children she herself had borne on this world, and two of her four grandchildren. But she was tough. Only the tough—a few of the tough—were still alive.

  She touched the key that powered the vocator, and spoke instructions to the computer, then sat silent for a moment, gathering her thoughts. Since Captain Terlenter had died, two others had been captain, but neither had extended Terlenter's side project: He'd dictated a brief history, or most of one, of the sector of space they'd come from. For the generations to come, who would know only this world, who would never even know anyone that remembered. Then the great puking fever had visited, and Terlenter had been the first adult to die. Briskom and Walter hadn't followed through on it. There was always so much else to do, more immediate, more survival-oriented. And writing, even by vocator, was a difficult—an unnatural—activity for some. For many. It was as if they retained no subroutine for it; had to program it anew each time.

  Terlenter had gotten as far as the beginning of their own voyage. It had started innocuously enough—a small cargo ship with a crew of nine men and six women, and a cargo of 600 pleasure droids in stasis. Then the war had begun, the sector-wide megawar that everyone had feared and been telling each other could never happen. A war with planet busters. So Terlenter had sent them hurtling outward. That much was already on "paper."

  Heskil had taken the story from there, reciting slowly and reflectively to the computer, which extruded a slow succession of printed sheets as she talked. The Adanik Larvest hadn't stopped fleeing till they were well outside human-occupied space. Then, as they hunted for a new home, a patrol had challenged them, three tall, asymmetric ships like neo-baroque sculptures of scrap metal, rods, and wire. The holo plate had shown beings horned and leathery, who'd called themselves something like "Garth." Quickly enough, their computers had learned to talk with each other, and the garths had ordered the humans to leave their sector, then gave them boundary coordinates and let them continue.

  Outside garthid space, this had been only the third system they'd explored—a type-G bachelor sun w
ith twelve planets, not an uncommon assemblage. One of the planets had displayed habitable parameters in terms of gravity, mass, and solar constant. Optically they could see blue ocean, white clouds, thirteen percent land surface . . .. Probes told them the chemistry was right, including the biochemistry, as mankind had learned to expect of worlds where the physics was right.

  From there, she'd told how they'd selected a homesite, on the major island of a large archipelago where the life forms suggested there'd be little or no predator trouble. How they'd unloaded the droids on a continent a third of a planetary circumference away because they'd had no way to program them, then returned to the selected colony site. And how the matric tap had blown on landing, leaving them with only the emergency power system. That had been enough to power the computer, and some ship's accessories including the clinic and lab, but not the complete life support system. They were lucky the local fauna was edible and initially trusting.

  The last time she'd dictated, she'd started on the history of the colony itself. They'd named it Almeon, after a mythical island. It would have been a happier history if they'd been trained and equipped for colonization. Instead it had been a matter of cope, struggle, and innovate. The standard ship's library tank, so often ridiculed by spacemen, had proven a lifesaver.

  And they, from a planet that had long controlled birth privileges, had reinstituted an ancient imperative: "Be fruitful and multiply!" But their gene pool, tiny to start with, had shrunk from illness and accident. Thus rigid breeding rules had been laid down and enforced, to restrict as much as possible the homozygosity of any lethal and sublethal genes.

  Today she continued the history with the first birth on the new world, took it through the first plague, then went on to the first successful forging of local iron, while the silent printer filled sheets with her words, depositing them on the stack in the receiver.

  While she'd dictated, her aging muscles had grown tight and sore, and getting up from the seat, she rotated her shoulders to loosen them. It occurred to her then that there was only one copy of the history. True it was nonflammable, the paper-like material extremely durable, the printing integral within it. But she decided that before she left that day, she'd instruct the computer to produce additional copies of the story, one for each family in the colony.

  Already the children, and to a degree the adults born on this world, lacked a strong sense of their roots. Even within sight of the 285-foot hull-metal cylinder of the Larvest, the problems of primitive colonization coerced the attention, capturing and narrowing one's sense of what was real and important. Even, mostly, her own. It was time for the handful of surviving crew, those whose eyes were still good enough, to start reading the history aloud to the children and grandchildren. Or the native-born adults could read them, those who read well enough, and the elders could explain, clarify, elaborate.

  Then, as she was sitting back down, the wall luminosity went out. The codes disappeared from the suddenly unseeable computer screen—and the door hissed shut behind her. She knew instantly what had happened, felt her skin crawl cold and pebbly, and got up again, groping her way through the utter dark toward the bulkhead and doors behind her.

  The doors would not budge, and for a moment bile rose in her throat. She fought it down. They'd assumed that someday the emergency power would fail, perhaps in a century or so when the fuel slug was exhausted, perhaps sooner when some other element in the system failed. But it had never occurred to her that the doors, this door, were held open by some mechanism and would close if the power went off.

  Again she groped in blackness, looking for something to pry with. All she found was a stylus at the command console, and tried futilely to insert it in the thread-thin space between the doors. That failing, somehow the incipient panic died, leaving her mind clearer than it had been for decades, perhaps ever. She conjured in it the layout of the bridge, looking for a way out—something, anything. If only she had light! She felt for the rocker switch that so many times before had de-opaqued the windows, but when she pressed it, nothing happened.

  There should, it seemed to her, be a way out of the ship, a manual override. Otherwise, a ship without power in space couldn't even open its lifeboat ports. But she was no engineer—they hadn't had one for eight years—and nothing came to her.

  Still, she would miss no bets. Idly she felt over keypads, knowing from memory what most of the keys did, had done. Now they did nothing. The console was lifeless. Dead. The whole ship was dead. And if there was a way out of the corpse, she didn't know of it.

  In her mind she computed the approximate air volume of the bridge, allowing for equipment, multiplying by twenty-four percent to get the oxygen content. But she couldn't take her computations further because she didn't know the rate her breathing would remove it. She supposed she had an hour or more. Perhaps several.

  Mentally she shrugged. She'd lived sixty-four standard years. On this world, that was old. And it would be an easier death than most. Easier than her husband's had been, her children's. It was time, she told herself, for a well-deserved rest.

  A little later it occurred to her to wonder if, in a millenium or ten, one of their descendants would reinvent the electric generator. And if, sometime after that, someone would couple a cable to an external service jack, open the ship and find "the book." It seemed almost bound to happen, in time, if the colony survived.

  What would she look like then? A skeleton, its fat flesh long gone. More important, what would they look like then? With a gene pool no larger than theirs, there'd be genetic drift. Would they still know Interspeak? Hardly. Their language would evolve. But if they retained writing, it might not change too much for the book to be deciphered.

  Meanwhile they'd get along without knowing their cultural roots, their history. They'd grow, setting new roots wide and deep. It was what this planet required of them.

  She reclined her chair a bit—interesting that that was manually controlled—and let her eyes close, let her thoughts idle, almost as if rehearsing death. After a little while she went to sleep, perhaps to work out old dreams.

  One

  The Emperor Dard XII was fifty-five days east of Larvis Harbor, and Elver Brokols was fifty-four days past his time of seasickness. The morning was fair, as most had been, and a brisk breeze out of the southwest drove them smartly eastward, canvas straining, ropes creaking in blocks and deadeyes.

  Now and then a pack of water people swam briefly alongside, keeping pace easily, their sleek, dark-furred bodies forming something akin to sine curves, breaking the surface and often clearing it. Their arms lay snug along their sides, their broad planing fins veed back, powerful tails and flukes driving. Brokols wondered what it would be like to be one of them, to swim like that and seem so carefree. He felt guilty at the thought. Because the water people neither toiled nor laid away for the future—at least not that anyone knew of.

  But they were said to be intelligent, supposedly approaching man in that highest of attributes.

  And a bit ago, just after breakfast, Brokols had glimpsed a sea serpent raise its head briefly above water to peer at the ship from a hundred yards off. Interesting, those serpents. They weren't native to the ocean around Almeon, nor had the first expedition, in its time, reported them from these eastern waters. Nor had this expedition seen one until the previous day, when suddenly they'd been numerous. Some large ones had made bold to swim close alongside, raising their heads higher than the rail, as if curious, and it had seemed to Brokols that the eyes which met his had been intelligent.

  But they'd made him nervous. Their long, toothed jaws had made everyone nervous, and the captain had ordered the gunners to shoot one, some fifty or sixty feet off the starboard bow, with one of the ship's two swivel guns. The four-pound explosive round had struck what he thought of as the shoulders just below the serpentine neck, and a great gout of blood and flesh had erupted. Soon after, another serpent had swum close alongside, barely awash, a hump-like wave rising over its back. Three mar
ines had thrown grenades as it drew alongside, so that it sank from sight in a great cloud of blood, food for the sarrkas now. Unless its own kind ate it first; he saw no sign of that.

  Since then no serpent had come near, nor raised its head for a more distant look for longer than brief seconds, as if somehow they'd communicated the danger, passed it on ahead. For a time, even the water people had kept their distance. And it occurred to Elver Brokols that the captain, in his nervousness, may have made an enemy for Almeon.

  The thought was absurd, of course.

  Comfortable reclining chairs had been set out for Brokols and the several other official passengers; each had his own. He went now to his, took a book from his pocket and sat down. He'd barely opened it to the marker when the lookout on the masthead cried: "Land ho!"

  Brokols looked up; the man was pointing almost dead ahead. Two other men, including the bosun, started up the ratlines to see for themselves. "Describe it!" the captain shouted.

  " 'Tis a headland showing! A hill or mountaintop! About two points off the port bow!"

  Brokols got quickly to his feet and hurried to tell the other mission personnel, tucking the book in his coat pocket without regret. He'd read it several times before. A short companionway led one deck down to a passageway, and he ducked to enter it, the tallest man aboard. At Lord Kryger's door he could hear the chief of mission drilling droid irregular verbs with his aide. Brokols knocked respectfully at the door, and when Kryger's sour voice answered, told him what the seaman had called down. Kryger, who'd been seasick since they'd left Almeon, growled acknowledgement.