Ark of the Stars

by Frank Borsch

  Solina's gaze lingered longer on the last of the Terrans. He was tall, about Solina's height, and slender. He hung back, as though he didn't quite belong to the prospectors, and followed the introductions with gray-blue eyes that seemed somehow familiar to Solina. Solina and her companions had already introduced themselves, which took some amount of time since custom required that they give their full names, amounting to family trees reaching many generations back, when the tall Terran stepped forward to speak.

  He said simply, "I am Perry Rhodan."

  Solina was grateful that Robol openly lost his composure before she did.

  "You're ... who?" the logistics officer stammered.

  "Perry Rhodan," the Terran repeated and smiled. "Is something wrong?"

  Robol gasped for breath. Ignoring the fact that she found her own mouth gaping, Solina sneered at Robol's behavior, which was certainly unworthy of an Akonian.

  "Robol is occasionally hard of hearing," Solina offered, stepping in before the logistics officer made all three of them look ridiculous. "But I have to admit that I'm a little surprised to find you here. Why didn't Commander Coho advise us of your presence?"

  "Does my presence make a difference?"

  Solina stared at him. "No," she finally shrugged. "Of course not. You're a man like any other."

  Pearl Laneaux chose a direction, and they began moving. Solina voluntarily let Pearl take the lead and made an effort to stay close to Rhodan.

  Did his presence make any difference? What a question. Everything was the same as it had been, except that the universe had been turned upside down. Yesterday she had been stagnating in her cabin on the Las-Toór and counting the minutes until her return to the Blue system. Now she was walking with a fire-ready beamer and a group of Terrans through the largest Lemurian artifact ever discovered, and at her side was a living legend—Perry Rhodan! And the Immortal had asked her if it made any difference.

  Yes, one difference. Never before had she felt so alive.

  19

  They made slow progress. With literally each meter they traveled, one member of the two teams exclaimed, "Stop!", having discovered something that required thorough investigation.

  The pace was fine with Pearl Laneaux. She didn't feel comfortable holding a beamer with the safety off. She knew what to do with a weapon, and more than once in her life she'd had to make use of one, but she preferred to find other ways to reach her goals.

  The Lemurians on board this ship—if they existed—were not their enemies, even if the man who had flown the shuttle away from this ship had preferred suicide over returning on board. She knew nothing about him and it was perfectly possible that the reason for his flight was purely private: a deadly feud between enemy families, or perhaps he was a criminal who had anticipated just punishment for what he did.

  Literally anything was possible.

  Their path led them from the room into which they had burned their way and out into a long, narrow corridor. It was almost completely dark; as they went along, a solitary light ahead of them would flicker to life, then go out after they'd passed it and the next one came on. It smelled strange. Pearl claimed to have a sensitive nose, but she could find no words to describe the odor.

  Robol von Sarwar, an atypically brawny specimen of Akonian, had no difficulty articulating his perceptions. "It stinks in here," he said with a closed mouth, a trick that intrigued Pearl. Only later would she learn the explanation for it.

  The Akonian, packed like a mule with his team's equipment, had nailed it exactly. It stank on board the Lemurian ship. And now that she had been given a word, Pearl could also say of what: decay. She glanced at her multi-function armband. The air's oxygen content was unusually low—not life-threatening, but still below the mix that had been declared physiologically optimal on board Terran ships. Perry Rhodan fell into step next to her. "I feel like holding my nose, don't you?"

  She nodded, wishing she possessed Alemaheyu Kossa's unshakable calm. Rhodan behaved unnervingly like a perfectly normal person—and even so, she found it impossible to respond in kind to his casually friendly tone.

  "Yes," she managed to mutter. Suddenly, she better understood Sharita's resistance to Rhodan. It was unpleasant to be always uncertain how much one's opinion counted against that of an Immortal. "I wonder where it comes from."

  "From the inhabited parts of the ship," Hevror ta Gosz answered.

  Pearl gave the Akonian an confused look. She suddenly felt like she'd missed something in Xenology class. Her instructor had taught that Akonian society was subject to a complicated system of etiquette that choked off any spontaneity in conversation, and by Terran standards Akonians expressed enormous circumspection in conversation with each other. Joining in a conversation uninvited did not match Pearl's conception of "enormous circumspection." Was it a mark of respect that the Akonian spoke with her so familiarly? Or a sign of his contempt for Terrans, that he did not consider them worthy of even basic courtesy?

  "I've given the ship's internal atmosphere a more precise analysis," the Akonian continued, apparently oblivious to Pearl's expression. His skin was weather-beaten and wrinkled, as though he had spent his entire life out in the open without skin cream or sun protection. His velvet-brown skin, typical for Akonians, was marred by numerous light spots. Pearl couldn't begin to estimate his age. Hevror ta Gosz might be fifty, one hundred, or one hundred-fifty years old.

  All she could tell for certain was that he was used to physical activity. He was lean and sinewy, and carried an unfamiliar piece of equipment—a long, slender bag made from something that resembled warty leather—without any visible effort.

  "The composition of the air on board is surprisingly like that of an earthlike planet," the Akonian reported. Above his raised wrist appeared a series of holos that showed various graphs and tables. "I've established traces of more than four dozen different species of plants, along with a large quantity of skin flakes and hair, and have taken samples of both."

  "Animal hair?" Rhodan asked.

  Hevror ta Gosz shook his head in a gesture that seemed so astonishingly Terran that Pearl forgot for a moment with whom she was dealing. "Practically none. The inhabitants of this ship seem to have done without animals almost entirely. Not surprising, if you ask me. Protein can be raised much more simply with plants than with animals, and with considerably less expenditure of energy and labor."

  Perry Rhodan smiled. "So much for the idea that we might meet Noah himself on this ark."

  Noah? Who the hell is Noah? Pearl wanted to ask, but Perry Rhodan must have noticed the inquiring looks on his companions' faces.

  "An old Terran legend," Rhodan explained. "Well, not as old as the Lemurians. Noah built a ship in order to survive a great catastrophe, what we call the Flood. No one would believe him when he said it was coming, and when it did come, only he and his family were aboard the ark along with a pair of every animal there was, in order to repopulate the world after the Flood. Apparently nobody thought of plants. Or they were so obvious that they didn't have to be mentioned."

  "Interesting," Solina Tormas said, and the wide eyes with which she was looking at Rhodan showed that her remark was more than a gesture of politeness. "And was there a basis for this legend?"

  Rhodan shrugged. "One, certainly, but no one knows which. The Flood is a catastrophe that appears in the traditions of many of the Earth's ancient cultures. There's some suspicion that they all refer to the same disaster. There are many scholars who believe that the memory of the sinking of Atlantis fifteen thousand years ago survives in the legend of Noah's Ark. In a way, a world was destroyed then."

  "Do you believe it, too?"

  "Well, I'm at least skeptical. To my knowledge, there was only one survivor of the sinking of Atlantis: my friend Atlan. And he didn't survive in an ark, but in much less romantic circumstances in an undersea dome."

  During their conversation, they had made their way further down the corridor and reached an open hatchway. Solina paused for
a moment to read the faded writing above it. "Sector XV or XXI, Emergency Chamber," the historian murmured. "I can't identify the number any more exactly. In any case it's Lemurian, at a very early stage in the development of the written language."

  They went through the hatchway. The corridor on the other side narrowed. Along both walls, primitive spacesuits that looked essentially like bags waited for their users. The material they were made of was less resiliant than expected. It would be difficult to put on such a suit in the few moments that an emergency would allow. When she pressed her finger with her full strength into a suit, cracks appeared that exposed a shiny orange color underneath. The pale yellow of the surface was evidently the result of the aging process.

  Pearl wondered what Alemaheyu thought of her discoveries, and in particular of Rhodan's story, but the comm officer, who was patched in as before to their conversations and their suit cameras, didn't comment. They proceeded still further down the corridor. Pearl felt uncomfortable in the narrow passage. With each step she brushed against the spacesuits hanging on the walls. What would happen if they met the inhabitants of the ship now? The narrowness of the corridor would make an encounter unavoidable. A fast escape would be impossible even with the help of their antigrav units. They would offer an easy target for long seconds. If the encounter turned hostile, Pearl would be forced to open fire. The thought was not comforting.

  But Pearl's gloomy fears failed to materialize. They walked onward without encountering any Lemurians.

  Just when Pearl wanted to call for a stop to rest, a closed hatch blocked their path.

  "What now?" she asked. The Akonians had not officially granted her leadership of the mixed team. Since she had led the way, she had assumed de facto leadership, but it wasn't something she wanted to put to the test. She raised her beamer and indicated the hatch. "Should we burn our way through again?"

  "No, not that!" came an outraged cry from the rear. Then Solina Tormas squeezed her way past the other members of the expedition. "You can't be serious!" she exclaimed. "Do you really intend to vaporize this unique artifact?"

  "Me?" Pearl needed a moment to regain her composure. "Who burned an entrance into the hull?" she responded indignantly. "I certainly didn't. You—"

  But Solina Tormas was no longer listening to her. The Akonian efficiently shoved her aside to clear the space she needed and began running her hands over and around the hatch.

  A few moments later, Pearl heard a triumphant, "Aha!"

  She saw a small display set in the wall. It was dim and blurred, so she could only discern a few washed-out letters that she assumed were Lemurian.

  Using a virtual keyboard, Solina slowly input commands. Pearl had the impression that the Akonian had to spell out the Lemurian words exactly in her head before pressing the keys. Pearl was forced to look at the historian with new respect; who would have expected she could hack computer systems?

  But when minutes passed without the hatch budging, Pearl wondered if she was giving the Akonian too much credit. Her impatience finally got the better of her. She cleared her throat. "If that hatch is too much for you ... " She raised her beamer, its safety off.

  Solina rolled her eyes. "I figured out the hatch ages ago. I'm checking out the ship's computer."

  "I'm glad you decided to inform us! And what have you found out?"

  "A great deal. This is the most fascinating system I've ever laid hands on. As a historian, I stumble across old computer systems now and then, but it usually takes years to get them running again, and even then they're rarely intact. But this ... actually, to call it a ship's computer is a misnomer. It's more like a decentralized network of computers connected entirely by wires. Imagine: by wires! That's why we didn't detect any communications signals from the ship."

  "Wires? I can hardly think of anything that would take more time, effort and energy. But why use such a system? To prevent hyperdetection?"

  "Possibly. But I suspect other reasons." As she spoke, the historian took a bag of tools from her backpack and spread it out in front of her. "First, robustness. Well-shielded cable connections aren't vulnerable to external interference, like stars active in radio frequencies." Solina reached for a tool that resembled a combination of a screwdriver and a crowbar, and removed the wall-display's cover, exposing a tangle of wires. "Ah, here we are. A second reason is power. In order to maintain uninterrupted wireless connections, you need relatively high transmission strength. I can only guess how they produce energy here on board, but from everything I've seen, it can't be advanced much beyond primitive nuclear fission. The inhabitants of the ship would need their energy more urgently for other things."

  Solina pulled one of the wires out of the wall and attached a comm-plug. A holo formed in front of her and began showing alternating columns of numbers and structural diagrams. "I can hardly believe it! It's packet-based!"

  "Packet-what?" Pearl asked.

  "Based. The data is broken down by the transmitter into small packets that carry with them information as to where they belong in the larger packet and sent on their way. The path they take isn't determined beforehand. They seek it out on their own. At the destination, the packets reassemble themselves. Such a system will survive almost anything ... "

  "Even atomic bombs," Rhodan said, completing her sentence.

  "Yes, that's true." Solina seemed pleasantly surprised that the Immortal had found her explanation worthy of elaboration.

  "I learned about such a network just before my flight to the Moon," Rhodan said. "It's been a few years. At the time, computers on Earth filled whole rooms. The Defense Department had a project to network them. It was called ARPANET, if I remember correctly."

  The historian shook her head. "I've never heard that name."

  "It stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. I'll be glad to tell you more about it when we have an opportunity," Rhodan said. "But right now you should open this hatch for us. Remember: every minute we spend here corresponds to a hundred minutes on our home worlds. We don't want anyone to miss us, do we?"

  "All right." The historian clearly would have preferred to spend the next few hours examining the computer network with Rhodan. "Just one more thing," she murmured, "and then you can have your open hatch." The holo showed a new menu. Pearl watched as Solina quickly worked through a series of symbols, finally chose one, and deactivated the holo.

  "What was that you just did?" Pearl asked.

  The Akonian waved dismissively. "Just a small security measure, so the network doesn't spoil our fun. And now here's your open hatch." She made a bow like a magician performing before an astonished audience.

  The hatch slid squeaking to the side and revealed a view of a steep stairway. Warm sunlight played on the steps and blinded the first officer of the Palenque. She smelled flowers.

  "Mama!" Pearl exclaimed into her suit's microphone. "See that? We're here! You won't believe what it smells like!"

  Alemaheyu didn't reply.

  20

  As Dr. Hartich van Kuespert, the Palenque's hyperphysicist and a willing volunteer for the Terran-Akonian "guest exchange," exited the crawler into one of the Las-Toór's hangars, he met with a disappointment.

  No one was waiting for him.

  The hangar was deserted. No Akonian, not even a robot, had appeared to greet the Terran guest. Hartich tugged irresolutely at the collar of his old-fashioned pullover, from which he was never separated, and looked around. The Akonians knew very well that he had arrived! The Las-Toór's hangar doors had opened for his crawler, the ship's comm officer had given him authorization to enter. What was the meaning of this little game?

  Hartich had to admit to himself that he was baffled. Everyone knew how obsessed the Akonians were with rituals and official ceremonies, how much they loved to march in wearing colorful, shining uniforms and to declaim in their own brand of Intercosmo with its nasally arrogant tone that generations of Terran comedians had specialized in parodying.

  Was he so unimpo
rtant to them that they would pass up this opportunity?

  As though in answer to his question, a small personnel hatch opened in the wall at the rear of the hangar. An Akonian stepped through. He was tall and slender, in keeping with a member of his race, and wore his black hair short—at which the agreement with the image of a typical Akonian in Hartich's mind came to an end.

  The Akonian wore overalls studded with pockets, similar to that commonly worn by a maintenance technician on a Terran starship. Objects protruded from some pockets. Not tools, as Hartich would have expected, but odds and ends: a pen, a handkerchief, a sheet of writing paper. Or was it a piece of packing material?

  The man stopped in front of him and held out his hand in an astonishingly Terran-like gesture.

  "Welcome on board the Las-Toór," he said. "I'm Jere."

  Hartich stared at the hand offered to him for several seconds before he overcame his surprise and clasped it. The Akonian's hand was huge, with long, slender fingers that firmly gripped Hartich's own right hand.

  "Uh ... thank you," the Terran replied. "I am Hartich van Kuespert. Dr. Hartich van Kuespert." The Akonian released his hand. "Jere ... just Jere?"

  "No, no ... Jere von Baloy and a thousand other things, too many to waste time listing them all."

  Jere von Baloy ... von Baloy ... Hartich had heard the name before. He wished he had listened to the communications with the Akonians, but he had been working with the chief technician of the Palenque, Kurt Brodbeck, and his colleague, Huang Lee, on the phenomenon of the Lemurian ship's hyperdetection shield. They had believed they were on the brink of a breakthrough and, their minds dedicated to the task, had blocked themselves almost completely from the outside world. The chatter around him seemed peripheral in that stage of investigating a problem, which always put him in a state of ecstasy. Only when they had failed to prove their theory of the hyperdetection shield did he find an interest in the Akonian ship awakening within him. And then with such intensity that he had been able to get a ticket to that ship for himself—a round-trip ticket, he firmly believed. The Akonians were too intelligent and cultivated to deny a highly regarded scientist like him the respect he deserved.