Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  THE

  LUCIFER

  COMET

  Ian Wallace

  Copyright ©, 1980, by Ian Wallace.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Gino D’Achille.

  First Printing, December 1980

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. OFF. MARCA

  REGISTRADA. HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN U.S.A.

  DIVISIONS OF THE STORY

  Prevoyance One

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Prevoyance Two

  Part Two

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Prevoyance Three

  Part Three

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Part Four

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Prevoyance Four

  Part Five

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Part Six

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  Conjointly, to

  ALAN

  who long ago gave me part of the idea

  and to

  LISA

  for reasons best known to Alan

  Prevoyance One

  Methuen, with absolute circumstantial clarity, in 2464 previewed the first 2465 attack upon Erth. Without warning, and without any evident reason or cause or means, the Saturn-satellite Nereid ceased to exist; and with it evaporated Erthworld Headquarters, which was located on Nereid.

  The instantaneous evaporative destruction occurred at 0600 hours on 10 January 2465, (Interplanetary Time Convention) and was observed on Manhattan monitors at 1059 the same day. A frantic call for confirmation was immediately dispatched to Nereid, while backup monitors on Erth and in space churned Nereid-vicinity with scanners; but no reply to the query, even if Nereid still existed, could be anticipated before 2058 hours. However, between Nereid and Manhattan there was hourly normal traffic, and no communiques had been received by 1259. It was, to understate, ominous.

  Acting in terms of acute danger, the Chairman of Erthworld Council called an emergency visiradio meeting of the Council and of the presidents of all Erthworld constellations at 1445 hours. Intensive brainstorming elicited no notion of an attack source; but all were convinced that no agency on Erth or in the Sol System could or would have brought this off unless it were some high-placed suicidal paranoiac on Nereid itself. The conference turned then to the question, what should be done on Erth if the destruction of Nereid should be confirmed? The unanimous decision among the world leaders was to keep the business under wraps for at least a week until the secondary echelons on Erth could achieve some sort of provisional governmental stability. Should the newskenners get wind of the disaster, the Council Chairman was authorized to admit it and apprise the newskenners of measures that were being taken. Meanwhile, all military and civilian intelligence services would be pressed into top-priority, top-secret service in an attempt to determine the source and reason for the attack; and all military branches would be placed on red alert.

  The Council adjourned until 2200 hours the same evening.

  At 2200, the Chairman gravely informed the Council that no message had been received from Nereid, and that no spaceship had been able to locate Nereid. .. .

  Methuen awoke from this dire prevoyance with the number 546 reverberating in his mind. At that time, in early summer 2464, Methuen was an Astrofleet commander.

  Part One

  MULTI-MILLENNIUM

  SPREAD

  1

  Narfar was heavy with doom-feeling. Over distance had come into him a telepathic warning that his brother Quarfar was orbitally present, cruising Narfar’s planet Dora, spying on Dora quite uninvited; had touched down repeatedly during a full year. Quarfar had come here following the same celestial trail that Narfar had blazed. It had to mean that Narfar’s wise brother would take over again, undoing everything that Narfar had tried to do. And Narfar, having learned much from his brother on that other planet, thought that here he had been doing so well.

  Now Narfar huddled on the glacier, cloaking himself with his great wings, helpless before the impending doom of himself and all that he had accomplished. Should he fly out to meet Quarfar and settle it in space? He was not ready to decide that.

  (On faraway Erth, at this time, the year was something like 48000 BC.)

  On that earlier world, too, Narfar had thought for a long time that he was doing well. He had found that world swarming with all kinds of beasts, among them a relatively hairless two-legged creature—much like himself, only skin-colored beige, and without wings. This fairly hairless creature had interested Narfar not at all; he was far more engrossed in the beasts, protozoa and insects and fish and mammals alike, whose attributes were so precisely tailored to their several life-styles, whereas those of the two-legged creatures were so useless. Finding himself lord of that world, Narfar had encouraged the beasts, including some so small that almost hairless men could not see them. To Narfar’s delight, these beasts preyed on each other and on man, while man sometimes fought them off with primitive weapons (rocks, clubs) and sometimes huddled in fear around chance lightning-spawned fires as Narfar was now huddling on his ice. He fostered the beasts, he cultivated their excellences; with the result that man was on the verge of extinction, dying in tribal hordes by combined assaults of the large beasts and the invisible beasts.

  An afterthought had then occurred to Narfar. Man was just another beast, but rather interesting, and it was not desirable that any species of beast be wiped off his world. On an impulse, he had called to Quarfar for help.

  And Quarfar had stepped in, on that other planet. Oh, how he had stepped in!

  Almost before Narfar knew it was happening, Quarfar had adopted man as his own. The first stunning surprise for Narfar came when Quarfar took to lumping the females in with the males and calling both humans instead of merely man. The next shock came when Quarfar began to teach this little group and that little group of surviving humans how to use the fire which came to them by chance, even how to make it Women began to cook meat for the men—how revolting! no longer raw meat?—while the men, under Quarfarian tutelage, created and mastered all kinds of skills which eventually began to even up the score with large beasts that Narfar found more attractive, although Quarfar neglected to help humans against the invisible beasts.

  The ultimate brother-shock came when Narfar began giving special favoritism to the occasionally emerging funny children. And Narfar realized hideous climax when the funny children grew up to be a new and formidable species of human which inexorably crowded Narfar’s people into despairing extinction!

  Narfar now understood that his brother Quarfar, who was wingless and much less handsome than Narfar, had to be put away. But Narfar unaided could not do it. He formed a wicked plan, and he prided himself on this plan because it was rather farsighted for him. Noticing that humans put something they called a soul into everything, and that they propitiated these souls (beast-souls for self-protection, weapon-souls for hunting mastery, and so on), Narfar began to cultivate in selected humans the idea tha
t these souls were in fact collective souls, that the collective souls were superhumans called gods and goddesses who dwelt in high places, and that the greatest of these soul-gods was the god of lightning and thunder. Bye and bye the humans began to worship their new gods, particularly the highest god. Whereupon Quarfar, seeing that he was no longer needed, retired himself to a high place and brooded there with mental vultures preying upon his mental liver.

  But eventually, with Quarfar safely gone, Narfar discovered an unhappy consequence of his own innovation. The humans were thinking and saying: If the good gods and goddesses could get about the sky unaided by wings, what sort of being was this winged Narfar who whispered to them while they were asleep? Eventually Narfar was declared to be The Enemy of Humans, continually at war with the sky-gods. And again, Narfar was reduced to impotency—this time, by ritual human rejection.

  In this dire impasse, it occurred to Narfar that his wise brother Quarfar might help him with wisdom, if only Quarfar could be propitiated. Accordingly, one evening, Narfar flew to the high place of Quarfar’s agony; and Narfar demanded of his brother: “How can I regain my mastery of this world?”

  Snarled Quarfar, understandably infuriated: “Your mastery was already done before mine was done, and you are a menace to this world. I am going to put you out of it. If you have any particular distant world in mind, I will fling you there; if you refuse my offer, I will kill you. Choose now, brother!”

  It was Hobson’s choice ages before Hobson. Mortally afraid of his brother, Narfar chose. He scanned the night sky; and to Quarfar he denoted the constellation which was his favorite because he fancied it looked like himself, and the particular star which seemed to be the head of the creature depicted by that constellation. Studying the star, clairvoyantly Quarfar sensed that it owned an inhabited planet; and to that planet Quarfar hurled Narfar.

  Arriving on that planet in a burning instant—on this planet, Dora—Narfar found the world inhabited by beasts such as he loved, plus a handful of groveling humans. And here he began a creation of his own, fancying that he may have learned a thing or two from his brother Quarfar without in any way knuckling down to Quarfar’s weirdest ideas.

  (In the simultaneity of faraway Erth, Narfar’s arrival on Dora occurred somewhen in the fifty-seventh millennium BC.

  What Narfar did on this new planet, which he christened Dora, meaning Nubile Nymph, was (he considered) a masterful compounding of his own interests with what he thought he had learned from his brother.

  First, he gathered all the shivering humans together, informed them that he was a god and their king, and promised to lead them out of darkness into respectful dominance over the beasts, including the sicknesses. And thus he abandoned, with regret but of necessity, his old primary love of lower beasts; and he consecrated himself to the good of humans, without in any way threatening bestial welfare.

  He taught humans as goods all the qualities which Quarfar had banished as evils: superstition, ritual, status-pride, security-worship, and unquestioning obedience to an acknowledged master. And rather than allow them to domesticate and use fire, he taught them that on Dora it was sensible to dwell, not near the northern and southern regions which were perpetually capped with glacial ice, requiring much energy expenditure just to exist, but in the central belt, which was always jungle-warm; so the northern and southern regions became tabu, and it was the equatorial regions of Dora which spawned the pre-civilization of Narfar.

  There Narfar taught the preservation of order and the bridling of creativity. He had diagnosed as the primary cause of Quarfarian disorder, not creativity alone nor progress alone, but the twinning of these themes and their association with the infuriating nonsense idea of endless. He praised creativity in the arts and crafts, but only for its own sake and without reference to social progress. And since he had intuited that endless was a meaningless word, progress was understood to mean advancement toward some definite Narfarian end; and once that end would be attained, the idea of future progress beyond that end would be ridiculous.

  All these modes of living could be preserved by Narfar’s commanding presence, without special methods. He found in this world, however, two perpetually self-reproducing evils which were physically alive, one being human and the other subhuman bestial. He could have annihilated both evils; but to Narfar, any human or animal killing (except for purposes of food or clothing, or in one-to-one combat) was repellent. After generations of study, Narfar partially found and partially created an inescapable box; and into this box he conveyed every specimen of these two evils which he found. Mysteriously they kept reappearing; inexorably he kept boxing them, right up to the moment when he sat hunkered on ice worrying about Quarfar.

  In the beginning, Narfar reigned over merely a thousand people, most of whom were children, all of whom were nature-reduced to abject savagery, which territorial squabbles often changed to angry savagery.

  This condition was only the takeoff phase of the god’s grand plan. Dwelling always among his people as a man, universally recognized as Supreme Ruler because of his power and his wisdom and his wings and his skin color and his flaming hair, Narfar proceeded with patience to educate his world. Using first a small core of pupils who in turn became teachers and teachers of teachers, he led them to comprehend his system of defined ends, and to work toward its total perfection. Minor but persistent human foibles were redirected in simple ways, which proved effective given the persistent god-stimulus. Skills (including athletic skills) were substituted for territories, so that contention for excellence replaced territorial combat Ambition, distorted into a craze under Quarfar on that former world as a by-product of Quarfar’s “endless progress” concept, became friendly rivalry for the favorable attention of one’s chief or father figure who locally represented the god, culminating at the highest levels in friendly bidding for the favor of the god himself.

  The god through his representatives controlled all of Dora including all beings thereon; but what might lie beneath the surface of Dora was tabu. All fire was tabu; so that when a fire started spontaneously by lightning or other agency, the only permissible concern with such a fire was to put it out as an evil.

  The first god-defined imperative was: To learn how to survive and help each other and the god, using only animals and vegetables and water and such minerals as might be found on the surface without digging; and these only within the limits defined by the god (for this planet must not be wasted as that earlier planet was sure to be wasted). People quickly found that they could subsist, without cooking, on meat and on the beaten-out pulps of certain vegetables; later, fermented ensilage became a delicacy. They became able to build shelters (against rain and predatory animals and direct sun, cold being absent) from materials within the defined limits.

  When creative people began ornamenting shelters, Narfar knew that his ends had been finally attained. His pleasure from now onward would be to preserve it all in unchanging vigor.

  But now, at the apex of his achievement, Narfar had learned by long-distance telepathy that Quarfar was reconnoitering Dora, obviously with the purpose of destroying the serene pre-civilization of Narfar and substituting Quarfar’s own sort of mess!

  Fear-filled by this intimation (for the powers of Quarfar were dreadful), Narfar entrusted his government temporarily to his deputies and fled to the far north, to squat miserable upon a glacier and decide what he must do about the threat—whether to go out and attack Quarfar in space or to wait here defensively and meet the enemy as he might come.

  And Narfar was no coward. Driving himself into counter-aggressive action, he lifted off the glacier to meet the enemy aggressively….

  2

  Early in the summer of 2464 AD, the spacedragger Ventura was out after ice-comets. And since these had been declared an endangered species in the solar system, naturally the Ventura was not infesting the comet-concentration in the neighborhood of Neptune, but was cruising instead in a different star area entirely. She was lazily circumnavigati
ng Bellatrix, a high-hot blue-white helium star in the constellation Orion, right ascension 0524 hours, declination 6° 19’, magnitude about 1.7, distance from Earth about 470 light years; Bellatrix had a comet-concentration with no inhabited planet to proscribe comet-collection. The ship’s cruising speed was a sleepy 1000 C at a radius of six parsecs off Bellatrix, completing each circuit in twenty-one days.

  The Ventura was a tight little ship, a hybrid of a destroyer for speedy maneuverability and of a tugboat for tow-power. Her class had been originally designed to clear the interstellar shipping lanes of space junk like asteroids. Lately a number of these craft had been diverted for the ice-comet industry. As polar glaciers on Earth continued to recede, there were fewer and fewer icebergs for oceanic barge-draggers to ensnare and tow equatorward for water supply to the peoples of the expanding deserts. It had long been known that comets in general tended to have varying concentrations of water ice, or of methane ice which could be oxydized to form water with a carbon spin-off, compacted into the space debris which composed them. Once it had been determined (a) that there was a species of comet which contained more ice than rock, and (b) that star systems other than Sol’s had concentrations of such comets, spacedraggers had been drawn into the problem, and gradually comets were replacing icebergs.

  On the Ventura’s tight little bridge, Lieutenant Saul Zorbin (exec, co-pilot, and astrogator), who was tight on his instruments, raised his normally low voice a little as he announced an ice-comet about twenty-two parsecs off. (The Ventura deployed a twenty-five-parsec detection field within which information arrived almost instantaneously.) The reason for Zorbin’s arousal was that this comet was moving at unheard-of comet-velocity: more than three percent of light-velocity, about 9800 kilometers per second.