The Three Suns of Amara

by William F. Temple

  The Three Suns of Amara

  William F. Temple

  Darrell Schweitzer

  THE THREE SUNS OF

  AMARA

  William F. Temple

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  Contents

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  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE EARTHMEN

  Alexander Sherret: He believed that every man had a right to be himself, and he was ready to fight for that right.

  Captain Maxton: He landed Alex on Amara—and left him.

  Captain Bagshaw: He landed himself on Amara—and left himself.

  THE NATIVES

  Rosala: You could think of her as Circe, but it wasn’t at all accurate. Lee: He was trapped immovably between love and terror.

  Canato: For him, one was company and two was a crowd.

  Ace Books

  A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

  1120 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  THE THREE SUNS OF AMARA

  Copyright ©, 1962, by Ace Books, Inc.

  All Rights reserved

  First Ace printing: April, 1963 Second Ace printing: June, 1963

  Printed in U.S.A.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ^ »

  THERE WAS always something new under the Three Suns.

  Always new and usually inexplicable—if not downright crazy. On the astronomers’ charts the Three Suns bore dull number-plates: CXY

  927340, CXY 927341, CXY 927342. The men from Earth called them simply by their colors: Blue, Yellow, Red. It seemed more than coincidence that these were the three primary colors. But if it were more, who could explain it?

  Who could explain even half of what happened in the everchanging light of the Three Suns?

  For instance, there was the orbit between them of CXY 927340/2-A. (Men again ignored the number-plate. To them, it was Amara.) Amara was a coveted only child, a living planet, and the Three Suns shared it among themselves with scrupulous justice.

  Ethically, that made sense. Physically, it was mad. Mathematicians, who had retained their sanity after years of grappling with the hoary Problem of the Three Bodies, would tend to sink into melancholy after attempting to produce on paper proof of what they indisputably saw in the vicinity of the Three Suns. And this despite the whole mountain range of data concerning the vagaries of gravitational fields which had grown into being since interstellar travel became commonplace.

  Blue, Yellow, and Red were spaced on the corners of an invisible equilateral triangle. Amara circled each sun in turn, rotating on its own axis as it went, providing rainbow-colored days for the Amarans, but never black night. The nearest to night, probably, was when Amara entered upon the passage between Blue and Red. Then the clouds were empurpled and people’s faces seemed dark and strange. But soon Yellow’s contribution came to dispel the shadows, and when Amara swung around to the far side of Yellow the sky became bright indeed. Between Yellow and Blue, grass-green was the light. Between Red and Yellow, a warm orange.

  The juxtapositions of suns and planets, vaporous clouds and dust-clouds, were infinite. The skies of Earth seemed in retrospect like faded window drapes to one who’d seen the glowing, kaleidoscopic heavens of Amara.

  One like Alexander Sherret.

  Sherret remembered Earth with no particular regret. It was a place which everyone pretended was highly significant, if only because it was the cradle of humanity. The significance evaded Sherret. Amara was preferable; plainly, starkly, it mirrored the universe as it really was.

  It was the Grand Doodle.

  The Grand Doodler’s conscious attention had been someplace else—someplace, maybe, that was significant —the while his subconscious idly sketched out the pointless pattern of the universe. An enormously intricate pattern, naturally, from the depths of an enormously intricate mind. But significance it had not. And men became clowns or bores when they assumed they knew, and dilated upon, the meaning of it all.

  All men are Doodles. Why argue?

  But when someone tries to thrust Hobson’s choice down your gullet, you find yourself arguing.

  Captain Maxton was doing the thrusting, and for him it was out of character; usually he had to be pushed.

  “Make up your mind, Sherret. Are you a Goffist or a Reparist?”

  “I’m a Sherretist, sir.”

  “Cut the whimsy. I’ve got to know where I stand.”

  “You should stand on your own feet, sir.”

  The Captain flushed. He said rapidly, to divert attention from this giveaway, “I take it, then, that you’re still a Reparist?”

  “Oh, damn all ’isms,” said Sherret, impatiently. “Men are men. They’re not Goffists, Reparists, Papists, Royalists, Chartists, Communists, Fascists, Buddhists Methodists, Existentialists, or what you have.”

  The Captain looked at him, or nearly. He said, “In any society everyone has to accept the rules, else that society collapses into anarchism.”

  “I’m with you that far, sir.”

  “Yes, but under Reparism the rules are too rigid. If you don’t like ’em, you can’t do much to change them. But a Goffist always gets his chance to change things, and change them as much as he likes. Remold them nearer to the heart’s desire kind of thing. For a time, anyhow. Your turn to be Captain will come.”

  “And go, sir.”

  “Naturally. It’s a law of life. Things come, things go. Else—stagnation. It’s like a symphony orchestra, see? One instrument takes over from another. You’ve got to know when to stop. You can’t blow your own trumpet all the time when the aim is harmony. Look, Sherret, I’m going to leave you alone for thirty minutes. Think it over. Then decide finally whether you’re with us or against us. If you’re against us, you don’t belong here. And you can get to hell out of it. Go over to Bagshaw and his crew—if they’ll have you. And if you get there. For if you go, you’re going to have to walk all of the way on your two flat feet. I’m not risking what little transport we have on a dissenter. That’s it. I’ll be back in a half-hour.”

  Captain Maxton strode out decisively. He would have liked to have slammed the door to show just how decisive he could be. Spaceship doors weren’t free swinging, however. This one sighed benignly shut behind him.

  Sherret echoed the sigh. He relaxed on the bunk by the porthole. He began chewing on a B-stick to help along the relaxation. Like all spacemen, he’d had to break the smoking habit when he left Earth. If pipes were substitutes for feeding bottles at moments of regression into infancy, then a B-stick was a kind of teething ring. It helped when you felt like biting someone.

  Thirty minutes to decide, and the decision was already made. No Goffism for him. Goff was a nut, a psychosociologist who advocated absolute rule by each qualified worker in a local community for a month, and absolute obedience by the rest—until their turn came.

  The scheme was to have as many ideas put into practice as possible, instead of their languishing and dying untried. It was pragmatism plus. If an idea worked, it was true and good.

  “General common sense will ensure the survival of the fittest ideas,” said the prophet of psychosociology.

  Sherret reflected that Goff was inflated with theory and quite devoid of any real knowledge of human nature, its basic irrationality, its perversions, manias and erotic dreams. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It was the scheme of a simple-minded crank to uncage innumerable really dangerous cranks.

  It was a pity that the ship had succeeded in re-establishing contact with Earth, to learn that Goffism was being wid
ely adopted back there. Maxton had jumped at it, of course. It was his chance to relinquish the responsibility he realized he should never have accepted.

  Bagshaw was a different kind of man. Sherret couldn’t imagine him handing over his ship to the assistant cook and staying in bed till noon because the assistant cook didn’t believe in early rising.

  “It’s time to get me a new ship,” said Sherret aloud to the empty cabin. There was an initial difficulty, however, about that. Bagshaw’s ship, the Pegasus, had landed some three hundred miles away, at a place called by the natives Na-Abiza.

  There was a lot of rough country in between. Largely unknown country, inhabited by unknown creatures. Maybe many, maybe few. Maybe hostile, maybe not. Judging from the samples of life hitherto encountered within a radius of twenty miles around Maxton’s ship, there was the promise of novelty. The road to Na-Abiza should be interesting—so long as one remained alive and capable of interest. Thoughtfully Sherret chewed on his B-stick and through the porthole watched the cyclorama of the sky as Amara cruised between her parent suns. Captain Maxton returned as the chronometer ticked the last seconds of the half-hour.

  “Well, Sherret?”

  “I should be grateful if you’d pack me some sandwiches for the trek, sir. Preferably ham. With just a spot of mustard.”

  Red and Yellow shared this sky, while Blue dominated the other side of the world. Sherret shaded his eyes with an orange hand and stared back into orange distance. He’d come five miles, maybe, and the ship was becoming difficult to pick out in the landscape. There were conical rocks around it, and the shape he thought was the ship’s nose was possibly only a rock.

  When it came right down to it, a man felt lonely when he’d left the community he’d lived in for so long. It was a bitter sort of comfort to know that that community would presently dissolve into chaos, conflict, and possibly bloodshed. But there it was. He must make his own way.

  So far he had met, to speak to, only two Amarans, although he had seen others carefully not seeing him in the middle distance. For the most part, the local Amarans had steered clear of the humans since the obtuse Brewster had shot a fat and iridescent bird and brought it home for the cooking pot. The bird turned out to be a council member in a colony of a highly intelligent species of Bird-Amarans. The blunder was, on the surface, forgiven, because there were Birds and birds on Amara, and the latter were truly bird-brained. Nevertheless, the Bird-Amarans afterwards made it plain that they classed humans with the bird-brains so far as intelligence went. And they did not fly within gunshot again. All other intelligent Amarans also kept their distance. The two types of Amarans with whom the humans could be said to have established any contact were both humanoid and weak-minded.

  Humanoid, anyhow. The feeble-mindedness was a spontaneous deduction, but some of the crew had had occasion to think twice about it. The Earthmen had named the types the Paddies and the Jackies. It was a Paddy whom Sherret first encountered on his trek. A hairy, stocky creature with a low gradient forehead and an apelike shamble. Thick was the adjective applied to him—thick in build, in speech, in head. He greeted Sherret surlily, “Don’t kill me, human, because if you do I shall kill you.”

  This typical kind of remark had earned the creature its sobriquet. Sherret smiled. “Don’t be afraid, I shan’t kill you. I’m only out for a walk. Have you ever been to Na-Abiza?”

  “Yes, I have, human, but I didn’t get there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it wasn’t there when I got there.”

  “But you just said you didn’t get there.”

  “Of course I didn’t, human, if it wasn’t there.”

  “Well, is it there now?”

  “How can I tell? I’m here, not there.”

  Sherret laughed and abandoned the attempt. Such crosstalk could go on indefinitely. In trying to learn something of the nature of the flora and fauna of Amara by questioning the dour Paddies, the Earthmen had achieved a state of utter confusion. Lifeforms here were weird, certainly. Maybe the Paddies had the right approach in describing them in terms of Irishisms.

  He bade the Paddy good-bye and walked on.

  He ran into the Jackie a mile further on. When a Jackie stood upright he was, on the average, eight feet tall. As his spine was rubbery he seldom stood upright. Jackies were fleshless and gangling, hinged at every point. The jaw hinge was particularly notable. When a Jackie laughed, the top half of his head lifted clear away. And Jackies always laughed.

  Jackie was a diminutive of jackass.

  “Good morning,” said Sherret.

  The Jackie at once became convulsed with laughter. Jackies laughed at the slightest thing. At first you thought they were laughing at nothing at all. Then you tended to re-examine what you’d said. Perhaps you had said something funny. Or, at any rate, foolish.

  Come to think of it, Sherret reflected, it was foolish to wish anyone good morning on Amara, where there was no morning. Nor afternoon, nor evening, nor night. It was always day—of a kind.

  The laugh continued to saw through the still air, and Sherret reflected further that there was something disturbing about a Jackie’s laugh. It was more than a mere ass bray. There was a maniacal strain, like the release of the hysteria of a sex-killer at the moment of consummation. And yet there was more irony than cruelty in it. The laugher knew you were a fool, but knew that he was too. He was laughing at the nture of things which made sport of him and of you.

  There was bitterness because he had been formed as he was. But this was countered by a note of triumph because in some non-human way he knew more about destiny than you could guess.

  It was a devilishly knowing laugh. When it had died away, the Jackie asked in his peculiarly twanging voice, as though his vocal cords were of thin steel wire, “Where are you going, human?”

  “Na-Abiza.”

  Again Sherret waited patiently for the laugh to end. “Abiza,” in what seemed to be the common language of Amara (for even the Bird-Amarans shrilled it) was a verb as well as a place name. The verb described a bodily function. “Na” meant, variously, no, negative, or unable.

  “Na-Abiza” could mean constipation. Naturally, the Jackie chose to see it that way. When he had laughed his fill, and become untwisted and a recognizably humanoid shape again, the Jackie said, “I wish you an interesting journey. But beware of those who have only two, of those two become three, of that which becomes many.”

  “Well, thanks a lot,” said Sherret. “But do you have to be so cryptic?”

  Even on second thought he could see nothing particularly humorous in this question. But immediately the Jackie was again overtaken by helpless mirth. With repetition, this sort of reaction could become irritating.

  “One day you’ll die laughing,” said Sherret, with a touch of impatience, and strode on.

  It was some time before the unsettling sound was finally lost in the horny brush behind him.

  Eventually he left the thorn belt, crossed an ankle-twisting area of loose rock, then climbed the ridge from which the rocks had rolled. It was there he paused for a parting look back at the ship—if it was the ship.

  He’d come this far in this direction before, but he had only a rough notion of the terrain beyond the ridge. Somewhere there was a lake whose western edge he would have to skirt. He went onto the crest and then along it for some distance until he came to a high promontory. He scaled it.

  From the summit he took survey. A plain stretched to the horizon. A small section of the horizon was thickened by a bright orange streak. That was the lake. He took a bearing, then picked his way down to the plain.

  It was featureless and seemed interminable. Coarse grass matted it. Sometimes he walked springily over the thick tangle. Sometimes his foot sank into a loose patch of it and the grass wound itself around his boot as if it were trying to drag him below ground.

  A breeze sprang up and rapidly strengthened to a wind. The grass stirred like the fur on a moving beast and the wind extracted a
whistling tune from the rough stalks. From over the ridge behind him came sailing on the wind a ball of cloud, like an immense balloon. In Amara’s skies the rare clouds almost always formed compact balls. No one could explain why.

  The twin pools of the cloud’s shadows came sliding, far apart, across the plain. One of them overtook Sherret.

  Briefly, Yellow was eclipsed, and it was as though he had been plunged into a corner of the Inferno. Everything was fire-red.

  The shadow passed. Later he glimpsed it traversing the lake like a moving patch of bright arterial blood. Then the other shadow, moving afar off and so seemingly more slowly, turned the lake water into molten gold as it went. The cloud sank like a satellite over the horizon. The wind lost force and became feeble and directionless.

  Sherret resolved to reach the lakeside and there have his first meal and a rest. He struggled on across the unfriendly grass. On and on, and yet he seemed to get nowhere. He began to wonder if the lake were a mirage receding before him. Then, at last, the grass began to cling damply rather than tightly and he found he was plowing into the marshy verge. He halted. There was no definite edge to the lake; he was just walking gradually into it. He squelched back and found a reasonably dry spot. There he spread his waterproof, rested a while, then unfastened his big rucksack.

  Captain Maxton had played fair. There was enough concentrated food to last an Earth month. Also plenty of more tasty fare, including ham sandwiches—with mustard. There was whiskey. Assorted utensils. And, in a shining plastic container, a delicate compass with a map folded within the lid compartment. The magnetic field of Amara being what it was, the compass needed to be delicate.

  The Captain had also supplied a machete, to double as implement and weapon. Lengths of thin, strong climbing rope, with the comment, “There may be precipices to negotiate. If not, you can always use it to hang yourself.” A battery-powered, electric needle-pistol and a case of small but powerful hand grenades, with the comment, “Hope you won’t need these, but you never know what you might bump into. If it’s too big for the pistol, use the grenades.”

  “Thanks, Captain. Of course, if I don’t meet anything and get bored, I can always use the pistol to shoot myself.”