The World Between and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  Berel sighed. The beam spat straight, Bernisty stood rock-still. The beam cut the ground, cut over Bernisty’s feet, cut on.

  Bernisty stood still grinning. He raised his needle-beam.

  Kallish turned on his heel, strode away, the black cape flapping in the ammoniacal wind.

  Bernisty stood watching; a taut shape, frozen between triumph, pain and fury. Berel waited, not daring to speak. A minute passed. The Kay ships rose up from the dusty soil of New Earth, and the energy burnt down more shoots of the tender young vetch…

  Berel turned to Bernisty: he was stumbling; his face was drawn and ghastly. She caught him under the armpits. From the Blauelm came Blandwick and a medic. They placed Bernisty in a litter, and conveyed him to the sick-ward.

  As the medic cut cloths and leather away from the charred bones, Bernisty croaked to Berel, “I won today. They’re not done…But today—I won!”

  “It cost you your feet!”

  “I can grow new feet—” Bernisty gasped and sweated as the medic touched a live nerve “—I can’t grow a new planet…”

  Contrary to Bernisty’s expectations, the Kay made no further landing on New Earth. Indeed, the days passed with deceptive calm. The sun rose, glared a while over the ocher, yellow and gray landscape, sank in a western puddle of greens and reds. The winds slowed; a peculiar calm fell over the loess plain. The medic, by judicious hormones, grafts and calcium transplants, set Bernisty’s feet to growing again. Temporarily he hobbled around in special shoes, staying close to the Blauelm.

  Six days after the Kay had come and gone, the Beaudry arrived from Blue Star. It brought a complete ecological laboratory, with stocks of seeds, spores, eggs, sperm; spawn, bulbs, grafts; frozen fingerlings, copepods, experimental cells and embryos; grubs, larvae, pupae; amoebae, bacteria, viruses; as well as nutritive cultures and solutions. There were also tools for manipulating or mutating established species; even a supply of raw nuclein, unpatterned tissue, clear protoplasm from which simple forms of life could be designed and constructed. It was now Bernisty’s option either to return to Blue Star with the Blauelm, or remain to direct the development of New Earth. Without conscious thought he made his choice; he elected to stay. Almost two-thirds of his technical crew made the same choice. And the day after the arrival of the Beaudry, the Blauelm took off for Blue Star.

  This day was notable in several respects. It signalized the complete changeover in Bernisty’s life; from Explorator, pure and simple, to the more highly-specialized Master Ecologist, with the corresponding rise in prestige. It was on this day that New Earth took on the semblance of a habitable world, rather than a barren mass of rock and gas to be molded. The vetch over the loess plain had grown to a mottled green-brown sea, beaded and wadded with lichen pods. Already it was coming to its first seed. The lichens had already spored three or four times. There was yet no detectable change in the New Earth atmosphere; it was still CO2, methane, ammonia, with traces of water vapor and inert gases, but the effect of the vetch was geometrically progressive, and as yet the total amount of vegetation was small compared to what it would be.

  The third event of importance upon this day was the appearance of Kathryn.

  She came down in a small space-boat, and landed with a roughness that indicated either lack of skill or great physical weakness. Bernisty watched the boat’s arrival from the dorsal promenade of the Beaudry, with Berel standing at his elbow.

  “A Kay boat,” said Berel huskily.

  Bernisty looked at her in quick surprise. “Why do you say that? It might be a boat from Alvan or Canopus—or the Graemer System, or a Dannic vessel from Copenhag.”

  “No. It is Kay.”

  “How do you know?”

  Out of the boat stumbled the form of a young woman. Even at this distance it could be seen she was very beautiful—something in the confidence of movement, the easy grace… She wore a head-dome, but little else. Bernisty felt Berel stiffening. Jealousy? She felt none when he amused himself with other play-girls; did she sense here a deeper threat?

  Berel said in a throaty voice, “She’s a spy—a Kay spy. Send her away!” Bernisty was pulling on his own dome; a few minutes later, he walked across the dusty plain to meet the young woman, who was pushing her way slowly against the wind.

  Bernisty paused, sized her up. She was slight, more delicate in build than most of the Blue Star women; she had a thick cap of black elf-locks; pale skin with the luminous look of old vellum; wide dark eyes.

  Bernisty felt a peculiar lump rising in his throat; a feeling of awe and protectiveness such as Berel nor any other woman had ever aroused. Berel was behind him. Berel was antagonistic; both Bernisty and the strange woman felt it.

  Berel said, “She’s a spy—clearly! Send her away!”

  Bernisty said, “Ask her what she wants.”

  The woman said, “I speak your Blue Star language Bernisty; you can ask me yourself.”

  “Very well. Who are you? What do you do here?”

  “My name is Kathryn—”

  “She is a Kay!” said Berel.

  “—I am a criminal. I escaped my punishment, and fled in this direction.”

  “Come,” said Bernisty. “I would examine you more closely.”

  In the Beaudry wardroom, crowded with interested watchers, she told her story. She claimed to be the daughter of a Kirkassian freeholder—

  “What is that?” asked Berel in a skeptical voice.

  Kathryn responded mildly. “A few of the Kirkassians still keep their strongholds in the Keviot Mountains—a tribe descended from ancient brigands.”

  “So you are the daughter of a brigand?”

  “I am more; I am a criminal in my own right,” replied Kathryn mildly.

  Bernisty could contain his curiosity no more. “What did you do, girl; what did you do?”

  “I committed the act of—” here she used a Kay word which Bernisty was unable to understand. Berel’s knitted brows indicated that she likewise was puzzled. “After that,” went on Kathryn, “I upset a brazier of incense on the head of a priest. Had I felt remorse, I would have remained to be punished; since I did not I fled here in the space-boat.”

  “Incredible!” said Berel in disgust.

  Bernisty sat watching in amusement. “Apparently, girl, you are believed to be a Kay spy. What do you say to that?”

  “If I were or if I were not—in either case I would deny it.”

  “You deny it then?”

  Kathryn’s face creased; she broke out into a laugh of sheer delight. “No. I admit it. I am a Kay spy.”

  “I knew it, I knew it—”

  “Hush, woman,” said Bernisty. He turned to Kathryn, his brow creased in puzzlement. “You admit you are a spy?”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “By the Bulls of Bashan—I hardly know what I believe!”

  “She’s a clever trickster—cunning!” stormed Berel. “She’s pulling her artful silk around your eyes.”

  “Quiet!” roared Bernisty. “Give me some credit for normal perceptiveness!” He turned to Kathryn. “Only a madwoman would admit to being a spy.”

  “Perhaps I am a madwoman,” she said with grave simplicity.

  Bernisty threw up his hands. “Very well, what is the difference? There are no secrets here in the first place. If you wish to spy, do so—as overtly or as stealthily as you please, whichever suits you. If you merely seek refuge, that is yours too, for you are on Blue Star soil.”

  “My thanks to you, Bernisty.”

  III

  Bernisty flew out with Broderick, the cartographer, mapping, photographing, exploring and generally inspecting New Earth. The landscape was everywhere similar—a bleak scarred surface like the inside of a burned out kiln. Everywhere loess plains of wind-spread dust abutted harsh crags.

  Broderick nudged Bernisty. “Observe.”

  Bernisty, following the gesture, saw three faintly-marked but unmistakable squares on the desert below—vast areas of crumbled st
one, strewed over by wind-driven sand.

  “Those are either the most gigantic crystals the universe has ever known,” said Bernisty, “or—we are not the first intelligent race to set foot on this planet.”

  “Shall we land?”

  Bernisty surveyed the squares through his telescope. “There is little to see…Leave it for the archaeologists; I’ll call some out from Blue Star.”

  Returning toward the Beaudry, Bernisty suddenly called, “Stop!”

  They set down the survey-boat; Bernisty alighted, and with vast satisfaction inspected a patch of green-brown vegetation: Basic 6-D vetch, podded over with the symbiotic lichens which fed it oxygen and water.

  “Another six weeks,” said Bernisty, “the world will froth with this stuff.”

  Broderick peered closely at a leaf. “What is that red blotch?”

  “Red blotch?” Bernisty peered, frowned. “It looks like a rust, a fungus.”

  “Is that good?”

  “No—of course not! It’s—bad!…I can’t quite understand it. This planet was sterile when we arrived.”

  “Spores drop in from space,” suggested Broderick.

  Bernisty nodded. “And space-boats likewise. Come, let’s get back to the Beaudry. You have the position of this spot?”

  “To the centimeter.”

  “Never mind. I’ll kill this colony.” And Bernisty seared the ground clean of the patch of vetch he had been so proud of. They returned to the Beaudry in silence, flying in over the plain which now grew thick with mottled foliage. Alighting from the boat, Bernisty ran not to the Beaudry but to the nearest shrub, and inspected the leaves. “None here…None here—nor here…”

  “Bernisty!”

  Bernisty looked around. Baron the botanist approached, his face stern. Bernisty’s heart sank. “Yes?”

  “There has been inexcusable negligence.”

  “Rust?”

  “Rust. It’s destroying the vetch.”

  Bernisty swung on his heel. “You’ve got a sample?”

  “We’re already working out a counter-agent in the lab.”

  “Good…”

  But the rust was a hardy growth; finding an agency to destroy the rust and still leave the vetch and the lichens unharmed proved a task of enormous difficulty. Sample after sample of virus, germ, blot, wort and fungus failed to satisfy the conditions and were destroyed in the furnace. Meanwhile, the color of the vetch changed from brown-green to red-green to iodine-color; and the proud growth began to slump and rot.

  Bernisty walked sleeplessly, exhorting, cursing his technicians. “You call yourselves ecologists? A simple affair of separating a rust from the vetch—you fail, you flounder! Here—give me that culture!” And Bernisty seized the culture-dish from Baron, himself red-eyed and irritable.

  The desired agent was at last found in a culture of slime-molds; and another two days passed before the pure strain was isolated and set out in a culture. Now the vetch was rotting, and the lichens lay scattered like autumn leaves.

  Aboard the Beaudry there was feverish activity. Cauldrons full of culture crowded the laboratory, the corridors; trays of spores dried in the saloon, in the engine-room, in the library.

  Here Bernisty once more became aware of Kathryn, when he found her scraping dry spores into distribution boxes. He paused to watch her; he felt the shift of her attention from the task to himself, but he was too tired to speak. He merely nodded, turned and returned to the laboratory.

  The slime-molds were broadcast, but clearly it was too late. “Very well,” said Bernisty, “we broadcast another setting of seed—Basic 6-D vetch. This time we know our danger and we already have the means to protect ourselves.”

  The new vetch grew; much of the old vetch revived. The slime-mold, when it found no more rust, perished—except for one or two mutant varieties which attacked the lichen. For a time, it appeared as if these spores would prove as dangerous as the rust; but the Beaudry catalogue listed a virus selectively attacking slime-molds; this was broadcast, and the molds disappeared.

  Bernisty was yet disgruntled. At an assembly of the entire crew he said, “Instead of three agencies—the vetch and the two lichens—there is now extant six, counting the rust, the slime-mold, the virus. The more life—the harder to control. I emphasize most strongly the need for care and absolute antisepsis.”

  In spite of the precautions, rust appeared again—this time a black variety. But Bernisty was ready; inside of two days, he disseminated counter-agent. The rust disappeared; the vetch flourished. Everywhere, now, across the planet lay the brown-green carpet. In spots it rioted forty feet thick, climbing and wrestling, stalk against stalk, leaf lapping leaf. It climbed up the granite crags; it hung festooned over precipices. And each day, countless tons of CO2 became oxygen, methane became water and more CO2.

  Bernisty watched the atmospheric-analyses closely; and one day the percentage of oxygen in the air rose from the ‘imperceptible’ to the ‘minute trace’ category. On this day, he ordered a general holiday and banquet. It was Blue Star formal custom for men and women to eat separately, the sight of open mouths being deemed as immodest as the act of elimination. The occasion however was one of high comradeship and festivity, and Bernisty, who was neither modest nor sensitive, ordered the custom ignored; so it was in an atmosphere of gay abandon that the banquet began.

  As the banquet progressed, as the ichors and alcohols took effect, the hilarity and abandon became more pronounced. At Bernisty’s side sat Berel, and though she had shared his couch during the feverish weeks previously she had felt that his attentions were completely impersonal; that she was no more than a play-girl. When she noticed his eyes almost of themselves on Kathryn’s wine-flushed face, she felt emotions inside her that almost brought tears to her eyes.

  “This must not be,” she muttered to herself. “In a few months I am play-girl no more; I am student. I mate whom I choose; I do not choose this bushy egotistical brute, this philandering Bernisty!”

  In Bernisty’s mind there were strange stirrings too. “Berel is pleasant and kind,” he thought. “But Kathryn! The flair! The spirit!” And feeling her eyes on him he thrilled like a schoolboy.

  Broderick the cartographer, his head spinning and fuzzy, at this moment seized Kathryn’s shoulders and drew her back to kiss her. She pulled aside, cast a whimsical glance at Bernisty. It was enough. Bernisty was by her side; he lifted her, carried her back to his chair, still hobbling on his burnt feet. Her perfume intoxicated him as much as the wine; he hardly noticed Berel’s furious face.

  This must not be, thought Berel desperately. And now inspiration came to her. “Bernisty! Bernisty!” She tugged at his arm.

  Bernisty turned his head. “Yes?”

  “The rusts—I know how they appeared on the vetch!”

  “They drifted down as spores—from space.”

  “They drifted down in Kathryn’s space-boat! She’s not a spy—she’s a saboteur!” Even in her fury Berel had to admire the limpid innocence of Kathryn’s face. “She’s a Kay agent—an enemy.”

  “Oh, bah,” muttered Bernisty, sheepishly. “This is woman-talk.”

  “Woman-talk, is it?” screamed Berel. “What do you think is happening now, while you feast and fondle?—” she pointed a finger on which the metal foil flower blossom quivered “—that—that besom!”

  “Why—I don’t understand you,” said Bernisty, looking in puzzlement from girl to girl.

  “While you sit lording it, the Kay spread blight and ruin!”

  “Eh? What’s this?” Bernisty continued to look from Berel to Kathryn, feeling suddenly clumsy and rather foolish. Kathryn moved on his lap. Her voice was easy, but now her body was stiff. “If you believe so, check on your radars and viewscopes.”

  Bernisty relaxed. “Oh—nonsense.”

  “No, no no!” shrilled Berel. “She tries to seduce your reason!”

  Bernisty growled to Bufco, “Check the radar.” Then he, too, rose to his feet. “I’ll come wi
th you.”

  “Surely you don’t believe—” began Kathryn.

  “I believe nothing till I see the radar tapes.”

  Bufco flung switches, focussed his viewer. A small pip of light appeared. “A ship!”

  “Coming or going?”

  “Right now it’s going!”

  “Where are the tapes?”

  Bufco reeled out the records. Bernisty bent over them, his eyebrows bristling. “Humph.”

  Bufco looked at him questioningly.

  “This is very strange.”

  “How so?”

  “The ship had only just arrived—almost at once it turned aside, fled out away from New Earth.”

  Bufco studied the tapes. “This occurred precisely four minutes and thirty seconds ago.”

  “Precisely when we left the saloon.”

  “Do you think—”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “It’s almost as if they received a message—a warning…”

  “But how? From where?” Bernisty hesitated. “The natural object of suspicion,” he said slowly, “is Kathryn.”

  Bufco looked up with a curious glint in his eyes. “What will you do with her?”

  “I didn’t say she was guilty; I remarked that she was the logical object of suspicion…” He pushed the tape magazine back under the scanner. “Let’s go see what’s been done…What new mischief…”

  No mischief was apparent. The skies were clear and yellowish-green; the vetch grew well.

  Bernisty returned inside the Beaudry, gave certain instructions to Blandwick, who took off in the survey-boat and returned an hour later with a small silk bag held carefully. “I don’t know what they are,” said Blandwick.

  “They’re bound to be bad.” Bernisty took the small silk bag to the laboratory and watched while the two botanists, the two mycologists, the four entomologists studied the contents of the bag.

  The entomologists identified the material. “These are eggs of some small insect—from the gene-count and diffraction-pattern one or another of the mites.”