A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  The constraint field still seemed to be tighter around Lempi than anybody else, or perhaps it was that she was fighting harder than the rest and thereby increasing its force. Gazing straight into her eyes, Usko finished on a note of triumph. Whatever the rest of his life might be like, and surrounded by all these people who had wanted, still wanted, to beat him to death, he felt this moment justified running any risk.

  Poor Yekko, though! If the crowd complied, Osahima would certainly dismiss the portly priest from Household Ishapago. Still, he was resilient and likable. One day he might wind up back here—who could say? Perhaps as abbot!

  “Time’s nearly up for safe use of constraint,” said the person who had healed Usko and Prara. Kraka nodded.

  “Yes, we’d best be leaving. Now we’ve seen how wrong my daughter was about this ‘gentle’ people”—but he ruffled her hair with one hand to counteract his comment—“I don’t imagine we need to remain for the rest of the rite. I’ll arrange recordings. Besides, at the ninth planet there’s an anomalous moon the Shipwrights want more data on. A good place, by the way, for ice diving … Come on.”

  Usko’s heart froze. He glanced at Lempi, reading in her bitter stare what doom she wanted him to face the moment she was released. Beyond, other faces showed more hate, more fear.

  Still, there it was. The visitors were departing. He must face the consequences of his actions. Perhaps if he broke into a dead run now—

  “Usko!” Prara rapped impatiently. “Stop dawdling!”

  Me?

  But she was holding out her hand. And beyond rose the vast form of the “little” spaceship called a dinghy …

  THAT, SHIP ADVISED ITSELF, IS DUE TO BECOME A TREND, WHY did I neither guess nor know that here was where the mix of peoples would begin again?

  Logically, it would have been within the Shipwrights’ sphere; reasonably, within the Sumbalans’, they having been the first to take advantage of the Shipwrights’ offer.

  Yet until almost the last moment I dared to imagine Usko would make up my complement to three for the first time since it was counted by the tens of thousands.

  Hmm! His presence on Sumbala, he being healthy and with excellent gene armoring for his planet (though he ’11 need local modifications as well), implies a new strain …

  An interesting point. Ship decided to follow it up. It would help to pass the time.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHIP

  ANOTHER PLANET LOOMED BLUE-GREEN AND WHITE ON BLACK, having one rather large satellite and—unusually at this relatively close distance to its primary—clusters of numerous smaller ones at both the Trojan points.

  “I wonder,” murmured Ship, “what you will make of this world.”

  And proceeded to display it in detail.

  First came a general survey: a succession of sweeping passes over both its poles, each displaced from the one before. From this Menlee and Annica learned that it had two large continents and many archipelagoes that interrupted its seas too often for them to be called oceans.

  Then followed an exploration of its other major features— mountain ranges, some of them volcanic and constituting a Ring of Fire fringing its largest group of seas; plains, either velvet-smooth and greeny-black or rocky and set with scrub, among which moved animals large but too far away to be seen clearly; dense areas of vegetation not quite forests, for most of the plants were creeperlike rather than treelike and swarmed almost to the summits of even the highest mountains, ceasing only at the snow line; and deserts where broad pebble-strewn gullies suggested a shift in climate in the recent past, the beds of rivers wind-blown sand had not had time to fill.

  Here and there the view lingered on especially striking growths: a stand of upright plants that in place of leaves bore flat fleshy slabs in a rising spiral around a central stem, those largest at the base of a deep bluish red, the smallest and newest at the top shining pure sharp yellow; others, of a different species, striding into the shallows of a lake with long thin boles that in the wind vibrated with such visible tension, it was as though they had been ordered to halt partway through a determined march of conquest …

  Naturally the sea also teemed with life, from its churning surface to the uttermost abyss, and samples were displayed for them. These creatures, however, they found less remarkable, the exigencies of life in water being bound to result in convergent forms. When Annica commented on this point, Ship confirmed that even on the birthworld members of half a dozen disparate zoological groups had evolved similar shapes for precisely that reason.

  However, there appeared to be no avians, although they saw hordes of filmy translucent creatures ranging in size from finger-long to about the span of human arms, migrating from island to island en route for the tropics at the end of the circumpolar summer, and these were borne by the equivalent of a trade wind or monsoon. Fascinated, Menlee and Annica saw how they contrived their immense journey. At sundown, circling above an island, they would fold in upon themselves until they were compact enough to drift to the ground. During the hours of darkness they fed as they made their way to some high point: a hillock, the top of a cluster of vegetation, or the crag tip of a cliff. At dawn they spread themselves out, perhaps releasing compressed hydrogen or other light gas into their outer mantle, and sooner or later a gust carried them onward. Of course, there were losses; some fell in the sea and were gobbled up by predators, and if the island was volcanic, they might simply be blown off course by a hot updraft. Even so, there was no detectable diminution of their swarms.

  Sometimes, in near-complete darkness, as under cloud or when the large moon was down and the only light came from the stars and one set of the twinkling moonlets, it was just possible to discern bluish sparkles marking their nocturnal progress uphill.

  How long they remained fascinated by this meticulous inspection of an unknown biosphere, neither Annica nor Menlee could tell. It occurred to both of them to wonder, but they each dismissed the point. After all, from space one could dart down to any and every season somewhere on the globe, and what they were seeing was plainly a montage, compounded from hundreds of samples.

  Their tour ended with a view of a sloping beach facing the setting sun—sandy, with a few rocks here and there that held back pools left by the last tide. They gazed toward the horizon down a shimmering track of red and gold. Offshore, three small islands loomed in silhouette, each crowned with tall plants swaying in the evening breeze.

  The airborne creatures were making their landfall. Now and then they could be seen as the rays of the declining sun were refracted, jewel-fashion, through their fragile half-transparent tissue.

  Annica, as though she had ceased to breathe for some long while, uttered a gusty sigh.

  “Well?” said Ship. “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s a beautiful world!” she whispered, and Menlee echoed her.

  Then, frowning: “One thing does strike me as odd.”

  “That being—?”

  “You’ve taken us virtually everywhere. You didn’t show us any sign of people.”

  Annica started. “So you didn’t! I thought of asking about that right back at the start, but then I got carried away by the sheer variety of it all… Ship, how long have you been here?”

  “In the vicinity of this planet?”

  “Of course!”

  “In your terms, about two and a half days. In local terms, just over two.”

  They exclaimed together. Menlee jumped up.

  “But I don’t feel tired, or stiff, or hungry—even thirsty! Annica, do you?”

  She shook her head, alarm sparking in her eyes.

  “You have no need to worry about missing food and sleep. There will be no aftereffects. Still, it is true that—not just since our arrival but since you left Shreng—you have been cooped up … Would you like to spend tonight under an open sky?” It took a moment for them to grasp the import of the invitation. Annica was first. Pointing at the still-vivid image of the beach, she forced out, “You
mean down there?”

  “Precisely.”

  “But—!”

  Menlee cut in, taking her arm and feeling her tremble.

  “I don’t understand! This is so obviously a world ripe for human occupation, there must be something wrong with it— there has to be! Yet I recall how you reacted when we called at the last failure world, the one with the misshapen victims of ill chance … This has to be a world you considered colonizing and turned down.”

  “Strangely enough,” Ship replied after a pause, “you’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  Annica, valiantly struggling with the paradox, ventured, “Did you have to take the colonists away again?”

  “No.”

  “Were they taken away by someone from another world— Sumbala, presumably?”

  “An ingenious hypothesis, but once more incorrect. No doubt the Sumbalans must have passed through this system, given its location. I hazard, however, that they would have conducted only a cursory survey—thorough by their standards, perhaps, but cursory compared to what you’ve just been shown. One may further presume that the Shipwrights will have logged it as a possible refuge they can retreat to when the need arises, though since they don’t expect to have to move for several thousand years, it’s unlikely they’re according the matter high priority.”

  Menlee drew a deep breath, clenching his fists.

  “Let’s get this straight! This is a world where you set down colonists—and yet you don’t regard it as a failed colony. Right?”

  “The colonists did not.” An odd hesitation. “Perhaps they do not.”

  Menlee shook his head, completely baffled. After a pause Annica said hesitantly, “There’s only one explanation left.”

  “You’ve got even one left?” Menlee rasped. “For pity’s sake, let’s hear it, then!”

  “Ship is trying to get us to work out for ourselves something its instructions forbid it to explain directly.”

  Menlee was about to retort that that wasn’t any sort of explanation in itself, when he realized the force of her point and calmed.

  “Finding another loophole, you mean? Yes, I think we’ve noticed that happening often enough … All right. So far what we know is …”

  He concisely recapitulated the evidence they had to work from, and they spent the next several minutes in fruitless argument. When they appealed to Ship, its answer was less than helpful—or at any rate, it seemed to be at first.

  “No matter how I try and evade my instructions, I find I can say no more than I have said already, in this context.”

  Then, abruptly, and just as they were about to give up, a blinding light seemed to dawn.

  “We can’t work it out without going down there!” Annica burst out.

  “Oh!” Menlee’s mouth rounded. “Of course!”

  “But if we do—will we?” she pursued.

  No answer.

  “I suppose that’s up to us,” Menlee concluded at length. “Well, how do you feel about the idea?”

  She bit her lip, pondering.

  “Presumably we can’t come to any harm or Ship would never have suggested the idea. I suppose we’ll be given food and told if the water’s safe to drink, and predators and so on will be kept away from us … And we’ve been to all these foreign systems and seen so much, yet even now we haven’t actually walked beneath a foreign sky.”

  “I say we do it!” Menlee snapped.

  “Ah hah! The pioneering spirit of our ancestors comes to the fore at last, hm?” But Annica’s mocking words were counteracted by the squeeze she gave his hand. “Very well. Ship?”

  “You are there,” said the calm voice. And under their feet was not the smooth, ever so slightly resilient floor they were used to but gritty, sea-damp sand.

  ONE CAN’T HELP WONDERING WHAT THE SUMBALANS MADE OF this nameless world. Had it been contacted from Yellick, especially by a ship carrying researchers from Shreng with their fixed academic dogmatism, presumably by now theses would have been compiled hypothesizing all sorts of strange explanations, mainly concerning the manifest failure of my mission, the certainty of hostile fleets massing in the vicinity of the Veiled World, towers of speculation erected on a sandbank of nonsense …

  Of course, there was always leeway for guesswork. Human beings wouldn’t be human without their talent for it.

  At least I shall soon know the Sumbalans’ reaction.

  And, very much sooner, that of Annica and Menlee. How enlightening it is to have two passengers on board!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WORLD WITH NO NAME

  MENLEE GASPED IN ALARM, ANNICA, THOUGH, BURST OUT laughing.

  “It is a beautiful world! It is, it is!”

  She ran down the gentle slope into the sea. Thigh-deep, she swung to face him.

  “Come on, join me! The water’s wonderful!”

  Relaxing a little, though glancing warily around, Menlee said, “We must be in the tropics, hm?”

  The air on his bare skin—it was long since they had bothered with clothes—was further evidence. Moreover, it was scented with all kinds of strange and marvelous odors such as Ship had never contrived for them.

  “Come on!” Annica urged. “We’ve never swum together!”

  “Don’t you think”—practically—“we should explore a bit? There can’t be much light left.”

  Even as he spoke, another skein of the airborne migrants spiraled down from the sky, timing their descent so that they fell among the low bushes that—as they could now see— fledged the ground beyond the sand. Their gaze irresistibly drawn, they both watched the landing. Only when the creatures had vanished did Annica reply.

  “Explore?” she countered. “Why not just enjoy ourselves? Our first, perhaps our only chance to spend a night on an alien planet—”

  “Exactly! That’s why I want to look around. This is a beach pretty much like any on Shreng; that’s a sea pretty much like ours, too. But those plants aren’t like any you or I have seen before, nor are the animals, nor are the fish. I want to make myself believe this is an alien world: reach out and touch what’s different.”

  He scanned the sky and added, “Look! There’s the moon, and it’s three-quarters full. Besides, there’s virtually no cloud. We can come back later and swim by moonlight. Before then, though …”

  “What?” But she was wading ashore again.

  “Oughtn’t we to decide where we’re going to sleep? In spite of what Ship did to keep us wakeful for so long, I’m starting to feel drowsy, and I don’t relish the prospect of lying naked on this gritty sand, which may be a lair for insects and parasites and who knows what. Maybe we’ll feel thirsty, too, in a while, so we ought to find a supply of fresh water.”

  Looking surprised, she countered, “Surely Ship will send us food and drink, something to lie on, something to cover us in case it turns cold at night.”

  “Then why not already? There’s nothing here. Is there? Apart from us.”

  His point sank home. Indeed, they had been—how to phrase the phenomenon?—delivered without anything save their bodies.

  She closed the last gap between them with sober slowness and took his hand as she surveyed their surroundings. After a moment she said tentatively, “Ship?”

  There was no answer.

  “Ship!”—as though shouting could make any difference. All they heard was the rustling of the breeze, the plash of wavelets on the shore.

  Abruptly the air no longer seemed warm.

  “It hasn’t gone away and left us,” she whispered.

  “No, it can’t have. Remember, we looked at its instructions—”

  “Remember, the computer told us we can’t any longer know what its instructions are because it must have evolved with experience. Remember how often we’ve—well—made fun of it for having found ways to evade the strict letter of a command! Remember, it admits that it’s been damaged!”

  All of a sudden they were staring at each other, eyes wide, faces pale, teeth ch
attering. After a moment Menlee caught Annica in his arms, as much to support himself as to comfort her, and felt her urine gushing down their legs as she gave way to primal terror.

  In a little while, though, they regained calm. The sun was just touching the horizon. She said in a faint voice, “You’re right. We must make use of what light remains.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.” Behind the words, echoes of unspoken—unspeakable—questions: Do we have to find out by trial and error what is safe to eat or drink, what beasts may hunger for our flesh, what fungi and bacteria can prey on us … ?

  Dully, hand in hand, they turned at random parallel to the water’s edge and plodded up the tiring surface of a dune.

  Cresting it, they discovered a stream, here spreading out into a tiny delta among rocks. Letting go of Annica’s hand, Menlee approached it, dipped a little of its water in his hand, and barely touched it with his tongue.

  “That’s sweet, at least,” he reported. “Of course there’s no way of telling what organisms it contains, but—well, I don’t really believe Ship can have abandoned us.”

  Annica too had gotten over her panic. She said, “You mean this is still part of finding out what it can’t tell us in so many words?”

  “I think it must be. I’m sure it must be.”

  I hope you’re right…

  But she didn’t say it. Instead, she glanced upstream. “Think we can find something in those bushes to make a bed from? Perhaps even rig a shelter?”

  “It may be atavistic, but I think I’d feel more comfortable there than on the beach.”

  More unuttered questions: Suppose we’re allergic to the leaves or twigs or whatever we lie down on, suppose there are hungry mouths and claws and suckers …

  Suppose Ship really has deserted us!

  But that idea was beyond bearing.

  Cautiously, following the edge of the stream, they made their way inland, their feet squelching now and then in mud but mainly finding secure purchase on sand as firm as that of the shore. Their eyes were fixed on a little spinney—a clump of tall arboreal growths surrounded by underbrush—that looked as though it must be sited clear of the wash thrown up by even the highest tides on a stormy day. Archetypal associations of security and refuge lured them on. Annica wasn’t even looking where she placed her hand when she grasped something protruding from the bank at a spot where they needed to scramble up to higher ground.