Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  Long before they came to her target-crater, the height of its walling, in the perspective of Narfar’s low flying, eliminated any possibility of seeing its interior. As the sun sank late in the west and darkness followed quickly, already the image of circularity had been lost and the shark-tooth walling loomed like a continuous linear barrier quickly lost in darkness except as its top-silhouette vagued against stars.

  Narfar dropped to the ice and made camp at ridge-foot. His own body needed no shelter; but he clawed up ice and formed a tight-packed igloo into which he and Dorita crawled, a lightless dungeon not two meters in diameter and no more than a meter in central height, but a dungeon which sealed in his own body warmth so that it radiated without heat loss to warm the body of his bride. There they broke out the bag of rations; it now included a huge slab of nael blubber which had held nicely in flight-refrigeration; he tore away a chunk for Dorita, and she gnawed at the cold stuff hungrily, chewing it with enormous difficulty, but relishing the oily juices which gradually began to trickle down her gullet. After a while, the warmth from Narfar caused her to shed her outer pelt; the inner fur followed as inward warmth began to pervade her from the blubber; and before long she lay comfortable, entirely naked like Narfar, on the double blanket of the gadzyook furs.

  She lay inert now, weary-indolent, yet intensely conscious that she lay just beneath the walling of her dream. She could only surmise, from Narfar’s hints, what might be contained within that walling; but once within, she would know what it was, and then she would decide what to do about it.

  Then slowly the inner misery of Narfar percolated into her.

  She mind-said presently, not daring to speak aloud to him: What the trouble, Narfar?

  His mind spoke to her stumblingly, she could not see him, probably he was not looking her way. This deep. This bad. This worst of all for me. I bring you to what / should not bring you to.

  His inward anguish was heart-piercing. For the first time in her very young life, Dorita found herself up against an honest emotional conflict between a desire that was supreme to her and a creature she loved—loved?

  But how could she love Batwing Neanderthal Narfar?

  —Except that she did, in dismay she comprehended.

  Narfar had oriented the doorway of their igloo to the east; both of them awoke almost simultaneously when the pre-sunrise dawn was snow-reflected in. Dorita was outdoors at once, clutching one fur about her, hands and feet thrust into the paw-mittens, zeal-gazing up at the shark-tooth rocks. Narfar crawled out behind her like a piteous wingwet moth working its way out of its chrysalis; he came up behind her, arm-enfolded her shoulders, and stared where she stared.

  She said blunt: “Take me up. I go down in.”

  He said stolid; “Dorita not go down in.”

  She stamped a paw-mittened foot: “This I have to do. You let me go.”

  Pause. Then: “Narfar go down in with you.”

  “No. Narfar stay out. T go in alone.”

  “They kill you in there.”

  “Who they?”

  “Never mind.”

  “They not kill Dorita. I know what to do. I show yon what I do. Narfar, you think this: I kill you, Dorita. Think it honest, get real mad, try to grab my throat.”

  “I not do that to Dorita—”

  Do, Narfar, do! Her affirmative was overpowering.

  “Okay,” he said. “Watch out!” His upper lip curled, showing fangs; he panted, he sweated in the frigidity, he roared: “I KILL YOU DORITA!” He lunged at her throat—and was brought up short by a negative suggestion so powerful that it paralyzed him.

  She went to her frozen batman, smiled at him, kissed him. It released him from the paralysis and the trumped-up rage; he stood panting, weak.

  “You see,” she told him, “they not kill me, I know what to do.”

  He fly-carried her to the top of the ridge. He alit atop a tooth and set her gently down. The tooth actually was not all that sharp, once you were up there. They stood on an irregular rock-top having a surface of several square meters; even alone, she could have stood there with reasonable safety, except that stiff winds gusted and were hard to predict. At this altitude, she could see the pale horizon-sun of early morning.

  Fur-bundled over her Erth clothes, she stared around and down in. The crater’s diameter might have been five kilometers, it was enormous; and all around it jagged the unbroken wall. Down to the outside ice, the altitude was a dizzying three kilometers vertical; down to the inside crater-bottom, it might have been deeper yet; the sun was too low to shine into the crater, she could not see the bottom.

  She turned to Narfar. “What it like in there, down there?”

  “Warm. Trees. Grass.”

  “Why green in there? We in ice!”

  “I put roof on, keep bads in. That keep warm in too, make rain. Here, I show you.” With folded wings he stepped out into space over the crater, teetering slightly because he could not see the floor that he was walking on—a floor that was a ceiling and a sealing for the crater. How had he done it? Had he in his godhead commanded the lighting to form a force-field roof?

  Dorita could infer what she could not see. Because of the invisible roof, the crater was a gigantic herbarium which had established its own ecological balance. Carbon-dioxide exhalations from the creatures imprisoned here had collected near the transparent ceiling, transmuted sunlight into diffuse warmth, melted the imprisoned snow-ice which had run down into rock-holes and ravines to form ponds and lakes. Plant cysts, ever present even in ice, had germinated, grown, generated oxygen, proliferated into jungle…

  Returning, Narfar stood again on the crag, looking down at her.

  She asserted with total decision: “I go down in.”

  “Dorita—”

  “Open place in roof for me, I go down in. After that, close place if you want to, I get out again anyhow.”

  “I go down in with you!”

  “No!” The force of her negation nearly threw him off the pinnacle; had it done so, it is a question whether he would have tried to save himself by flying.

  He capitulated. “Place is open now, I just think open, it open. You be careful. You come back. I wait here for you.”

  “Narfar, you shouldn’t wait up here, might be long time. You go home, I come back to you there.”

  He asserted with dignity: “I wait here.” Her mind felt his mind: it had an irrevocable decision-force of its own.

  She inspected the nearly sheer inwardness of the walling, as far down as she could see it before it was lost in shadow; inspected it with the amateur expertise gained during summers in childhood and youth scaling difficult heights with her father. There were plenty of crevasses and crannies; she felt that she could make it.

  She looked at Narfar. He had turned his back on her and had folded arms and wings, standing spread-legged, facing outward; the hairy-massive shoulders, back buttocks, thigh-backs, and calf-backs would have inspired Auguste Rodin beyond all his monumental inspirations. They might have inspired Gustave Doré, too: was Narfar the devil, the worldly ruler of worlds, in perpetual combat with sky-focusing Quarfar?

  Then she saw those shoulders convulse in one paroxysmic heave, and quiet again. Her gorge filled, tears burst; she clutched his shoulders and pressed herself against him, mind-urging: Narfar, you good, I love you, I come back to you, I have to do this thing but I come back, after this flung I be good always.

  He mind-uttered: You do bad for me. But I know you have to do it. And I have to let you. Now you go down, Dorita.

  Prevoyance Four

  “We believe,” Methuen told the Council Chairman, Erth’s pro-tem top executive, while the chief of Norwestian CIS sat nodding approbation, “that an enemy planet somewhere along the five-forty-six gradient is using the gradient with intelligent precision to knock out our political and military potential. The planet could be as far away as Saiph. I have no idea of their motive unless it is to invade us and acquire our resources. And I do not know who the
y are.” It seemed to be 26 January 2465.

  The Chairman countered: “But Saiph is very remote. Even if they have singled us out for some reason, how could they bring off these precision attacks?”

  Methuen spoke with great difficulty. “Sir, there is a planet of Saiph called Dora; it has a very high civilization. I was there last year with a party of scientists, and some of us were psychoprobed, and those who were subjected to this probing are now useless vegetables. The Dorians may well have acquired detailed knowledge of our political and military structure and of our resources. They may also have learned about the gradient. Along the gradient, they could transmit programmed rekamatic impulses at nearly instantaneous velocity, and such impulses could have incinerated Nereid and knocked out our grounded spaceships and our army ammo. I regret, sir, that I did not pattern on this possibility last summer; I might have used the gradient for near-instantaneous communication.”

  “So they knock out our political organization and our defenses. What then can they do?”

  “Sir, we were able to travel along the gradient from Erth to Saiph and back in three weeks each way. And they can do the same sort of thing with attack ships, perhaps just as fast. I beg you to remember that the first attack upon us came sixteen days ago; within days, their invasion may be upon us—”

  A phone ring interrupted; taking it, the Chairman re* marked, “My calls are screened, this is situationally important or it would not come through, I want you to hear it.”

  A male voice filled the room. “Sir, this is the Fleet Admiral. At the time when our spaceships were grounded, we had about a hundred out in space. Despite Captain Methuen’s warning, they keep blundering into the five-forty-six gradient and perishing. Our surviving force numbers one battleship, three frigates, and seven destroyers—”

  Awakening, Methuen mulled this fourth dream in the prevoyant series. The logic of developing events were continuing impeccably. But a new factor had entered: Methuen’s dream-report of a high civilization on this Dora which had nothing more advanced than the friendly fireless barbarians of Narfar.

  A remark by Quarfar came back to Methuen: “On Dora there is a potential threat to Erth; but whether and how that threat may be realized will depend on my interplay with a woman named Dorita.”

  Part Five

  DORITA’S CRATER

  Days Thirty through Thirty-Six

  31

  Day Thirty

  Wearing only her Erth clothes, shoes soled with rubberoid, Dorita maneuvered cautiously down the nearly sheer inner face of the crater wall, making a very great point of not looking back up toward abandoned Narfar.

  She was wiry; and even though she had never attempted a descent of this magnitude, she knew that a twenty-meter fall can kill you as surely as two thousand meters. She had watched cinemas of highly experienced climbers in action on formidable steeps (but how about the nobody who perched perilously apart taking the pictures, when all the mountaineers in the party were on camera?). She knew the fundamentals: find a solid hand-and-foot perch; plan out the course of your downward progress as far as you can see it clearly, looking for continuous faults along which you can move, but watching out also for rock-decay along the route; project your next few moves in detail, making sure that if you err, you can get back up to your prior position; execute the moves with great care, never being afraid, but never being overconfident either; and so on. Above all, don’t overtax your strength: be on the lookout for resting places, and use them. Prior climbs and descents had taught her about the inexorable body-drag of gravity, including the relative weights of her slight body’s parts; for instance, on a precipice she ceased to pride herself on the slimness of her hips, and instead used every opportunity to keep them tucked in and minimize their drag.

  Before she had descended a hundred meters, a tiny fraction of the whole altitude, all critical muscles, long disused, ached almost beyond the point of tolerance; particularly, there were shrill complaints from her back. That was when she sought the first resting place. She found one in a semi-horizontal crevasse which was practically a shallow ledge; and there she huddled for minutes, stretching this and that muscle cautiously in minimal ways so that she would not lose grip or balance and roll to her death.

  While resting, she went into a quasi-yoga discipline which she had learned: suspend conscious thought about down-climbing techniques; instead, let your total body-mind subconsciously integrate all that it has experience-learned about the kinesthetics of the business.

  After a half-hour, she thought she was ready. And it went more smoothly and therefore faster after that, although never did she relax caution.

  Before noon, she was well into the crater shadow; outside, the dividing line would have been sharp, but in this tropical interior humidity it was diffuse. Now she was working in the day-long twilight of the pit, and the paucity of light trebled the hazard. When you are young, though, the irises adapt quickly, and so do the brain’s optic centers, and so do all cerebral sub-centers involved with correcting raw visual impressions—and so does the mind. This twilight was the governing condition of her down-climbing; down-climb she would, so she made do with it—slip-sliding a couple of times, recovering both times, remembering more lore (for instance, don’t trust those little dwarf shrubs which cling to rock-crannies).

  At a rest stop, she studied what lay below, able now to see the spread of thick jungle. And now she could also see a foot-feature of this inner mountain wall, a feature which could give her trouble. The finale of her descent was going to be like the inside of a smooth bowl: no foothold or handhold crannies, just a swift crippling or killing down-slide. Now how would she negotiate that? But the concept of giving up never entered her mind; there had to be a way. She pondered, letting her mind loose-fish for inspiration. Presently she thought of an untried backtiming technique which might help her. She resumed the descent, thinking about the new time-trick along the rugged way, but never losing her concentration on the opportunities and perils of the pit.

  The dilute sun reached shallow zenith, overpassed zenith, began to decline: it made no temperature difference, the upper carbon-dioxide layer moderated all changes; only one factor affected temperature, and that was altitude, for the lower she descended the hotter it grew.

  She clung now to a ledgelet which was not fifty meters above the final hundred of smoothery. And smoothery it was indeed: gazing downward, she marveled at it: surely the power of Narfar had mind-polished it, heat-treating the rock, perhaps, to keep in what he wanted to keep in; for the bowl-interior was vitreous, in sunlight it would have mirror-shone, there was no foothold for anything at all. In the uncertain light, was she deceived by the appearance of smoothness? Could she really feel safe in sliding down? And once down, with the momentum of a hundred-meter sliding, could she surely brake herself to safety with psychokinetic thrust?

  You never learn your own powers until you think of trying something. It hit Dorita: if she could project thoughts and imperatives, if she could move objects in spacetime and herself in time, if she could psychokinetically brake herself— could she perhaps mindfinger the rock-surface and feel how smooth it really was? She tried: nothing; the clear mind-sense was that she simply couldn’t reach it from here. As a control, she tried mindfingering the roughnesses just below her feet: to her amazement, the mind-image superimposed itself upon her visual image in perfect register, with the addition that her mind could feel depths and even toughnesses. Aa! she grinned, wishing she could release a hand to slap her own forehead: now she’d learned about the ability—and she could have been using it all the way down here!

  Bit by bit she tested, mindreaching farther and farther down, until she lost range fifty meters below, just at the top edge of the smoothery. So it was a question of descending a bit farther, in order to mindtouch the smoothery for testing; and further descent was necessary anyhow, before she could body-reach it.

  Vaguely now she sensed animal motion at crater-bottom. Was something awaiting her down there? It
was a new hazard, one not anticipated: her notion had been that she would get to the bottom, hide, and by stealth size up the nature of the imprisoned evils before acting with respect to them; but now she wondered if something might pounce upon her when helpless she slid to bottom. If the thing had a mind, perhaps even at this distance she could detect its field. Putting out sensors, faintly she encountered an inferior mind of puzzling form and great ferocity. Not encouraging, not encouraging at all.

  She beamed an impression at it: I friend.

  The response seemed non-sequitur: You food?

  She replied: No food. Friend.

  After a moment of perceptible confusion, it answered: You not food, you not friend.

  Well, it had to be done. Utilizing her eyes and her newfound mindtouch faculty, she charted a somewhat zigzag course down the fifty meters to smoothery’s edge. Then she began to work her way downward along that course, always making sure before committing herself to a descent-step that she could if necessary reascend. All went well; and perhaps twenty meters short of the smoothery, she paused four-limb-clinging to rock projections, meaning again to mind-test the final surface below….