Ark of the Stars

by Frank Borsch

  "The metach must leave the Outer Deck. All of them."

  "I'll see to it. What else?"

  "Call the Tenoy together on the Middle Deck. In full battle gear. I'll join you as soon as I can."

  Lemal broke the connection. He injected a dose of painkiller and stood. From a drawer he took a supply of the medicine that was enough to last him for many weeks, then put on his body armor.

  As he glided toward the Middle Deck in the elevator and the gravity pulled him more strongly toward the floor, he checked his weapons. They were functioning and loaded. He holstered them, then his fingers found the chain around his neck and clutched the medallion. He felt how it stimulated him, reminded him why he had made all this effort, what he stood for.

  It took away his fear.

  At least the worst of it.

  24

  Solina Tormas had always been interested in the past. As a child she had pestered her father and mother, her grandparents, her great-grandparents, and her great-great-grandparents—every member of her extended family within reach—and asked them how things used to be. While the other children spent their days with each other on the beaches and dove for glowfish to sell to the tourists, Solina had spent her time at home, preferably with her great-great-grandmother.

  Mesdaq was different from all the others. She didn't shoo Solina away, never admonished her to stop with all those infernal questions about the dead past and occupy herself with something useful, like cleaning the kitchen or making some money from the tourists. Mesdaq never lacked time.

  Only years later, after Solina had grown up, did she understand the source of Mesdaq's patience. Her great-great-grandmother had been an old, worn-out woman waiting for death. The life-sustaining systems in her floatchair had denied her that relief while her mind gradually decayed. Finally, she was only a shadow of the woman she had once been, now living in the past.

  "Mesdaq, what was it like when you were a child?" Solina asked.

  "We were poor," the ancient woman said. "Bitterly poor. The ocean was full of glowfish, but nobody wanted to buy them. All you had to do was throw a net into the sea and pull it back out again, and it was filled with them. You needed a lot of strong arms for that. There were never enough of those. Many people died before we knew which fish we could eat and which not to. There weren't many we could."

  "Why didn't you buy your fish in the stores? Or have them delivered to you?" Solina didn't know anyone who ate fish directly from the sea.

  "There weren't any stores. And nobody who would have given us anything."

  "Why weren't there any stores?"

  "We were new on this world."

  "You ... you weren't from Shaghomin?"

  "No."

  "And there weren't any stores, not a one?"

  "No."

  How dumb, the little Solina thought, moving to a planet where there weren't any stores!

  "Then why did you come here?"

  "They forced us to."

  "Who did?"

  "The government. The Energy Command."

  That's so silly! The government only does good things for us!

  "Why did they do that?"

  "Because they wanted us out of the way."

  "Where did you come from?"

  "From Drorah."

  "Is everybody here from Drorah?"

  "No, but many are."

  "Then is Drorah where we really, really came from?"

  Mesdaq always thought about that question for a long time. At first she answered with "yes," but once she thought about it for so long that Solina believed her great-great-grandmother had nodded off again until she whispered, "No, from Lemur."

  That was the first time Solina heard the name of the world of their origin. It would never let her go.

  The child grew into a teenager. She became cut off from others her age who sensed that she was different from them. Solina acted as though it didn't bother her and buried herself more deeply in her enthusiasm for the past. One day, she discovered that the computer terminal in her room was good for more than just silly games or mindless entertainment. The numerous generations that had come and gone before her lived on within it.

  Before long, she had stopped spending time with Mesdaq. Despite the systems in her floatchair, her great-great-grandmother was now almost always asleep. If an antigrav field hadn't held her head up, it would have constantly fallen forward. The stories that Mesdaq told became more confused and incoherent, and Solina had already heard them anyway.

  The computer, on the other hand, always had something new to tell her, and so Solina learned the history of the Lemurians, the ancestors of the Akonians and thousands of other races. They had all originated on one planet: Lemur, which was now called Terra or Earth.

  Lemur was an inconspicuous world in a remote spiral arm of the galaxy. It was distinguished only by the fact that it bore life—a peculiarity that it shared with many hundreds of thousands of other planets in the Milky Way.

  And yet, a long time ago, within a short (by historical standards) period of a millennium and a half, its inhabitants had risen to become the leading power in the galaxy. From the continent of Lemuria, the Lemurians sent ships of colonists to all parts of the galaxy. Soon the Great Tamanium, as they called their interstellar empire, included more planets than even the Arkonide Empire or the Terrans' Solar Imperium at their peaks. Ultimately, one hundred-eleven Tamans, or administrative districts, belonged to the realm of the Lemurians. Yet even that wasn't enough, and the Tamanium stretched its fingers out to the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

  It seemed destined to endure for all eternity.

  Then the Beasts had come out of the void to attack the Lemurians, and within a few years the Great Tamanium crumbled. The continent of Lemuria, where the Lemurians' civilization had originated, sank beneath the ocean. The Tamans were wiped out. With the help of the multi-star teleporter, some of the Lemurians were able to flee to the Andromeda galaxy. Gradually they forgot their origins and became the Tefrodians. The Tamanium, from which Akon later grew, chose a different escape route, that of total isolation. The plan succeeded in that the Blue system was spared the devastation, but at a high price, as Solina learned later: the petrifaction of an entire culture.

  In one last desperate effort, when the struggle had long been lost, the Lemurians dealt their enemy a decisive blow.

  They did the worst thing possible to their enemy.

  They made him content.

  The Beasts had lived up to their name. They were giants four meters tall with four arms, three eyes, and two brains. One of the brains, called the Overbrain, was capable of performance comparable to a positronic computer. When the Beasts chose to walk on both their arms and legs, they could reach a speed of more than one hundred-twenty kilometers per hour—and keep up that speed for twenty-four hours. They could turn their bodies at will into a crystalline structure harder than any steel; their stomachs transformed even rock into usable nutrients.

  The Beasts were born to kill.

  The Lemurians changed them into peaceful beings of unmatched selflessness.

  The Lemurians succeeded in developing a beam projector called the psychogenic-regenerator and, under its influence, the murderous Beasts mutated into sensitive philosophers. From the Beasts came the Halutians, who voluntarily limited their population to one hundred thousand members, retired to the planet Halute and from then on never again interfered in the affairs of other races. For the Great Tamanium, rescue had come too late, but it allowed many thousands of worlds settled by Lemurians to escape destruction. The Blue system of the Akonians was one of those worlds, and in all probability Lemur as well.

  At first, Solina had tried to tell her great-great-grandmother the story of the origin of their people—no one else she knew would have cared to listen to even a little of it—but she had quickly given up. Mesdaq lived in one particular past, her own world, in which the Lemurians were nothing more than a catchword. Besides, the ancient woman was no longer capable of
enlarging her world—with one exception that made Solina angry beyond measure.

  One day, a woman tourist had emerged from the daily stream that flowed around the big round beach house of Solina's family and pressed a gift into the trembling hands of the pitiable old lady in her floatchair. It was a statue of Vhrato the Sun Herald, a messianic salvation figure who had been worshipped throughout the entire Milky Way fifteen hundred years ago in the hope that Vhrato would free the galaxy from the yoke of the Larean tyranny. The Vhrato cult derived from an old tradition of the Vincranians, Lemurian descendants who had survived the onslaught of the Beasts within the protection of a nebula. The Vhrato cult spread quickly, became a unifying symbol in the struggle against the Lares and subsumed other local cults.

  After the retreat of the Lares, it had appeared at first that Vhrato would be forgotten, but the cult merely underwent a transformation. As a symbol of redemption there was always a need for him somewhere in the galaxy, and over the next millennium an entire family of redeemers grew out of the one Vhrato, whose outward physical form always resembled that of their worshippers.

  The plastic Vhrato that Solina's great-great-grandmother had been given was accordingly in the image of an Akonian with velvet brown skin that was already beginning to flake off in places and long hair tied back in a ponytail, the arms widely outstretched in a gesture of bestowing grace. The family had let the old woman keep the statuette. What harm could a plastic Vhrato do? Mesdaq seemed happy to smile dreamily while running her fingers over its contours.

  Some weeks later, the statuette had disappeared from the old woman's hands. Instead, Solina found it in the main corridor of the house. Someone had made an altar of driftwood, on which the plastic Vhrato now stood. And that was just the beginning: during the years leading up to Mesdaq's death, the altar grew in size, and soon there was an offering left in a bowl for Vhrato every day, usually glowfish that could have been sold to the tourists and which stank terribly.

  No one would admit to knowing how the altar was growing or where the offerings came from. Everyone in the household complained about it, but no one worked up the courage to take the Vhrato away from the old woman, who floated in front of it in her chair every day, smiling blissfully and making it difficult for the rest of the family to move past her.

  Then Mesdaq died. They buried her in the catacomb beneath the house where all members of the family found their final rest, and when Solina came back up, she expected that her father, who had complained the loudest about the altar, would take it apart and throw it into the ocean. But the altar remained untouched where it stood, and a fresh glowfish lay in the offering bowl.

  Solina hadn't been home in several years now, but she was convinced that the altar still existed, perhaps by this time taking up the entire hallway.

  And now she stood before an altar once more. Solina looked past Perry Rhodan, who stood leaning on the guide bar of the vehicle he called a bicycle, at the small clearing between the bushes. The Akonian had the feeling it was a hiding place, as though the cult served by the altar was only reluctantly tolerated.

  As in her family's house on Shaghomin, the altar was improvised. Instead of driftwood, the builders had used branches from the bushes and other nearby plants and assembled them into a larger structure woven together with plastic parts. The inconsistency of the materials that had been used as well as the differing methods for putting them together—Solina was mentally tempted to call them "styles"—suggested to her trained historian's eye that she was looking at a construction that may already have existed for generations, and many hands had been at work on it.

  The result was an oval pedestal that Solina estimated to be about two meters long with a width of roughly one and a half meters. At the foot of the pedestal was a row of securely fastened offering bowls, most of them filled.

  "I don't believe it!" Robol von Sarwar moaned when he saw the figured enthroned on the altar. "I simply don't believe it! That can't be, Solina—can it?"

  The historian didn't reply. Nothing was impossible. "History" was always just a construct of what was known and what a society considered worth noticing. The average citizen's reflex was to dismiss as impossible everything that didn't fit the known picture. Therefore it was the historian's duty to evaluate new facts with as little prejudice as possible and weave them into the picture so that it came a tiny bit closer to the facts. That is, to the extent anyone even believed in such a naive concept as "facts," as did only a few historians in the fourteenth century NGE ... .

  From the corner of her eye, Solina saw that Pearl Laneaux and Hayden Norwell had taken up watch positions with their beamers drawn. That gave her the opportunity to take a closer look at this place of worship.

  The Akonian stepped up close to the altar, knelt down in front of the statue and examined the offering bowls. Two of them contained food: a long pod that reminded Solina of the fruit of the nhemud tree of her homeland, while the second offering seemed to be a piece of bread. In the other bowls she found a primitive handmade chain, a wreath of flowers and a piece of grease-smeared metal. Solina picked up the last item and turned it between her fingers.

  "Maybe it's a tool for their bicycles?" said Rhodan, who had knelt down beside her. "It would represent something very valuable—exactly what someone would offer to a god!"

  "Sounds convincing." Solina picked up a folded piece of paper that had laid under the tool.

  "For the Protector," she read, deciphering the Lemurian handwriting. She unfolded the sheet and on it was written a wish. "Mighty Protector, let me win the race tonight!"

  Solina and Rhodan looked up at the statue of the being that the inhabitants of the ark apparently called the "Protector," then at each other in amazement. Solina was sorely tempted to follow Robol's lead and exclaim, "It can't be!"

  But that was out of the question; she was a historian. Together with Rhodan she examined the other offerings. Under each one was a sheet of paper with a request for the Protector. "Let me be transferred to another Me—!" Solina couldn't make out the final word. "Let my toothache be healed at last!" "Let her yield to me!"

  Solina and Rhodan stood up. The statue of the Protector was about a meter high, but because of the altar on which the being stood, they looked directly into its three eyes. They were bright red. The statue had been made out of a kind of clay that was nearly black and mostly unpainted. The being was naked. It stood on two massive pillarlike legs and had four arms that it held half reaching out, posed as though holding its arms protectively over its worshippers. The head sat on the shoulders without any neck.

  "No doubt about it," Rhodan said, expressing the thoughts of everyone else. "It's a Halutian!"

  "Or a Beast," Hevror ta Gosz put in, having joined the other two.

  "Improbable," Solina contradicted him without taking her eyes off the Protector's statue. She had never seen a Halutian with her own eyes, but the statue was startlingly similar to images she was familiar with from pictures and recordings. "This ship set out long before the Beasts attacked. The distance from its starting point proves that. Its inhabitants couldn't know anything about the existence of the Beasts."

  "But what if there had been an encounter with Beasts along the way?" Hevror demanded.

  "Then the ship wouldn't exist any more," Rhodan replied. "The Beasts never asked questions, not even after shooting. They would have destroyed the ark the second they found out there were Lemurians or the descendants of Lemurians on board."

  "That leaves the Halutians," Solina said. "The ark must have met up with Halutians."

  "That seems to me the only possible explanation," Rhodan agreed. "But to be honest, it doesn't satisfy me, either. For thousands of years, only one hundred thousand Halutians have existed in the galaxy, a vanishingly small number. And hardly any of that little group ever leaves Halute. The odds that Halutians happened to stumble on the ark by chance are right at zero."

  "Perhaps it wasn't by chance?" Hevror suggested. "Perhaps the Halutians learned ab
out the ark somehow?"

  "Also extremely improbable," Solina said. "As far as I know, no one up to now has ever found any hint of the existence of a ship like this. If the Halutians had found one, they would have informed us. And besides, they actually would have helped the inhabitants during their visit instead of taking off again after a quick stop. Isn't that right, Rhodan? You know Halutians personally."

  She was referring to Icho Tolot, who had been allied with the Terrans in a friendship that had lasted more than twenty-five hundred years. The Immortal nodded. "The Halutians are very concerned about atoning for the sins of their ancestors. They would have—" He didn't have a chance to finish his sentence.

  "Perry!" Pearl exclaimed. "There's a na ... a female Lemurian on one of those wheel-things!"

  "Can you catch up with her?" Rhodan asked.

  "Not necessary. She's coming straight toward us!"

  A moment later, she had reached them. She sped on her bicycle into the midst of the team, brought it to a grinding halt and gasped in ancient Lemurian, "Please, strangers, you must help me!"

  Rhodan was the first to recover from the surprise. "How can we help you?" he asked, also in Lemurian.

  "Please help me, or they will kill me!"

  25

  For what seemed like an endlessly long time, the troll led Eniva ta Drorar through the corridors and decks of the Palenque. On the one hand, the Akonian was grateful for the opportunity to look around the foreign starship, and on the other she was amazed by the Terrans' technological backwardness. It was common practice on Akonian ships to use teleporters for even short distances. No one would have conceived of the idea of using an antigrav shaft to traverse more than two decks. Or did the Terrans have some sort of cult about physical activity and rejected teleporters for ideological reasons? She could believe almost anything of the Terrans, and she would have liked to think about it some more ... would have, if Alemaheyu Kossa had kept his mouth shut for even a second.