23:31 TS, E Squadron, 2nd Platoon, A Company reunited with our shuttlecraft and returned to the TUPSF Damnation.
23:57 TS, Commander Mishka reported that my ribs were broken, not just cracked, and applied bone-setting compounds along with biokinetic healing, then put me on medical leave for the next five days while my ribs heal. My skull was pronounced “not cracked” and I was given antibiotics to counter any potential xenobiotic infection or sepsis from the cuts made by the Salik technician’s teeth.
What went wrong: Nothing, really. All obstacles were successfully overcome in the course of our mission.
What could have been done better: I need to be faster with my battleaxe next time. I should’ve been able to cut off those tentacles before they grappled me.
Any condemnations of your comrades: Absolutely none; everyone did an excellent job, as usual.
Any additionally commendations of your comrades: Commendations were noted in the timesheet where appropriate.
* * *
“Done… and sent! Now, my beloved, bring me the effigies you have made of my enemies, so that I may drown them in the boiling brown lava that is the Drink of the Gods!” he commanded.
“Yes, my love,” Lilith agreed, and kissed the non-injured top of his head one more time before moving to dispense another mug of hot cocoa for her barbarian mate. “You have definitely earned it.”
He really was quite lucky, Mitch acknowledged, watching her out of the corner of his eye since turning that way fully hurt his ribs too much. Whether of the 5th century variety or of the 25th, not every barbarian had such a willful, wonderful, helpful mate.
As mentioned in Robert Silverberg’s introduction, writers Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett separately are key influences on space opera. In this case, Hamilton joins his wife for her final Eric John Stark story, their only formal collaboration, in the sword-and-planet story tradition, a related subgenre that went on to influence space opera, but flowed out of fantasy. Rousing adventure stories set on other planets, and usually featuring Earthmen as protagonists, the term “sword and planet” derives from the stories’ heroes typically engaging their adversaries in hand-to-hand combat, primarily with simple melée weapons such as swords, even in a setting that often boasts advanced technology. Buried for years, “Stark and the Star Kings” first appeared in 2010 in a Brackett Stark collection, and has only been reprinted a couple of times. It follows dozens of others about the beloved character who here confronts a peril of unending doom.
STARK AND THE STAR KINGS
LEIGH BRACKETT AND EDMOND HAMILTON
The great Rift Valley runs southeast just below the equator, a stupendous gash across the dry brown belly of Mars. Two and a half thousand miles it runs in length, and as much as twenty thousand feet in depth, and all that enormous emptiness is packed and brimming over with the myths and superstitions of more thousands of years than even the Martians can count.
Along the nighted floor of the valley, Eric John Stark went alone.
The summons had been for him alone. It had reached him unexpectedly in the gritty chill of a Dryland camp. A voice of power had spoken in his mind. A quiet voice, as compelling as death.
“Oh, N’Chaka,” the voice had said. “Man-Without-a-Tribe. The Lord of the Third Bend bids you come.”
All Mars knew that the one who called himself Lord of the Third Bend had laired for many lifetimes in the hidden depths of the Great Rift Valley. Human? No one could say. Even the Ramas, those nearly immortal Martians with whom Stark had once done battle in the dead city of Sinharat, had known nothing about him. But they feared his strength.
Stark had thought about it for perhaps an hour, watching red dust blow across a time-eaten land made weird and unfamiliar by the strangely diminished sunlight.
It was odd that the summons should come now. It was odd that the Lord of the Third Bend should know enough about him to call him by that name that few men knew and fewer still ever used; not his true patronymic but his first-name, given him by the subhuman tribe that had reared him. It was odd, in fact, that the Lord of the Third Bend should call him by any name, at any time, as though he might have need of him.
Perhaps he did.
And in any case, it was not often that one was invited into the presence of Legend.
So Stark was riding his scaly beast through the perpetual night of the valley, toward the Third Bend. Although that voice of power had not spoken again in his mind, he had known exactly how to reach his destination.
He was approaching it now.
Far ahead, to the right, a little light showed. The rays were as feeble as though strangled at birth, but the light was there. It grew slowly brighter, shifting in his view as the beast changed direction. They were rounding the Third Bend.
The ruddy glow of light strengthened, contracting from a vague glow into a discrete point.
The beast shied suddenly. It turned its ungainly head and hissed, staring through the darkness to the left.
“And now what?” Stark asked it, his hand going to the weapon at his belt.
He could see nothing. But it seemed to him that he heard a faint sound as of laughter, and not in a human voice.
He took his hand away from his weapon. Stark did not doubt that the Lord of the Third Bend had servants, and there was no reason that the servants need be human.
Stark cuffed his mount and rode on, looking neither to right nor left. He had been invited here, and he was damned if he would show fear.
The beast padded on reluctantly, and the far-off witch-laughter drifted through the darkness, now louder and again soft and far away. The point of ruddy light ahead expanded and became an upright rectangle, partly veiled by mists that seemed to curl through it from beyond.
The glowing rectangle was a great open door, with a light beyond it. The door was in the side of a building whose shape and dimensions were unguessable in the shrouding darkness. Stark got the impression of a huge somber citadel going up into the perpetual night of the abyss and showing only this one opening.
He rode up to the portal and dismounted, and went through into the curling mists beyond. He could see nothing of whatever hall or cavern he had entered, but there was a feeling of space, of largeness.
He stopped and waited.
For a time there was no sound at all. Then, from somewhere in the mist, whispered the sweet and evil laughter that was not quite human.
Stark said to it, “Tell your master that N’Chaka awaits his pleasure.”
There were hidden titterings and scurryings that seemed to circle upon themselves, and then that quiet compelling voice he remembered spoke to him. He was not sure for a moment whether he heard it with his ears or with his mind. Perhaps both. It said,
“I am here, N’Chaka.”
“Then show yourself,” said Stark. “I bargain with no one whose face I cannot see.”
No one appeared, and the voice said with infinite softness, “Bargain? Was there mention of bargaining? Does the knife in one’s hand bargain with its owner?”
“This knife does,” said Stark. “You must have need of me or you would not have brought me here. If you have need of me, you will not destroy out of mere annoyance. Therefore show yourself, and let us talk.”
“Here in my remoteness,” said the voice, “the winds have told me much of the Earthman with two names who is not of Earth. It appears that what I heard was true.”
There came a sound of sandals upon the stone. The mists rolled back. The Lord of the Third Bend stood before Stark.
He was a young man, dressed in the very old High Martian costume of a toga-like garment whose ends brushed the floor. His smooth face was incredibly handsome.
“You may call me Aarl,” he said. “It was my man-name once, long ago.”
Stark felt the hairs lift on the back of his neck. The eyes in that young face were as black as space, as old, and as deep. They were eyes of knowledge and strength beyond anything human, eyes to steal a man’s soul and drown it. They
frightened him. He felt that if he looked full into them he would be shattered like flawed glass. Yet he was too proud to glance away. He said,
“Am I to understand that you have existed in this shape for all these ages?”
“I have had many shapes,” said Aarl. “The outward semblance is only illusion.”
“Perhaps for you,” said Stark. “Mine is somewhat more integral. Well. I have come far and I am tired, hungry, and thirsty. Are wizards above the laws of hospitality?”
“Not this one,” said Aarl. “Come with me.”
They began walking through what Stark took, from the echoes, to be a high-roofed hall of some length. There was no more sound from the unseen servitors.
The mists drew farther back. Now Stark could see walls of dark stone that went up to a great height. Upon them were designs of fire, shining arabesques that constantly moved and changed shape. Something about them bothered Stark. After a moment he realized that the fiery designs were corroded, tarnished, like the sunlight of upper Mars.
“So,” he said. “The darkness is here, too.”
“It is,” said Aarl. He glanced sideling at Stark as they walked. “How do the wise men of science explain this darkness to the people of the nine worlds?”
“You already know that, of course.”
“Yes. Nevertheless, tell me.”
“They say that the whole solar system has moved into a cosmic dust cloud that is dimming the sun.”
“Do they believe that, these wise men with all their instruments?”
“I don’t know. That is what they must say, of course, to forestall panic.”
“Do you believe it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I have been among the tents of the Dryland nomads. Their wise men say differently. They say it is not an inert thing but an active force.”
“They are wise indeed. It is not a dust cloud. It is more than that, very much more than that.”
Aarl stopped walking and spoke with feverish intensity.
“Can you conceive of a vampire something that drinks energy, that steals it from across a great void… a greater void than you imagine? A thing that will, if it is not stopped, devour not only the light of the sun but even the force of gravity that holds this family of worlds together? That will literally destroy the solar system?”
Stark stared at him appalled, not wanting to believe yet knowing somehow that it was so.
The Lord of the Third Bend reached out and grasped Stark’s wrist with an icy hand.
“I’m afraid, Stark. My powers are great, but against this they’re useless without help. That is why I need you. Yes. Need you. Come, and I’ll show you why.”
* * *
They sat in a mist-bordered chamber high in the citadel. And Stark was remembering the words of an ancient bardic chant.
Fear the Lord of the Third Bend. Fear him, for he is the master of time.
“The great void of which I spoke,” said Aarl, “is not only a dimension of space. Look.”
Stark looked at the curtain of mist. And was caught by the incredible scene that formed within it.
A panorama of stars, the great glooms of the void a background for a wilderness of flaring suns. He felt himself drawn into that immensity, to rush through it at incredible speed. Chains of stars rose up before him, mountain ranges of high-piled, shining nebulae loomed on either hand. He swept past them in all their glory and left them far behind.
The view shifted, changed perspective. And Stark beheld ships ahead of him, gleaming starships that raced through the celestial jungle.
He saw them brilliant and small as toys. With a vertiginous wrench he returned to the reality of his own body and the coldness of the stone he sat upon.
“You are adept,” he said, “at putting all this into my mind. Which is what you’re doing.”
“True,” said Aarl. “But it is not mere imagining. You see what I have seen across two hundred thousand years of time. You see the future.”
Stark believed it. The Lord of the Third Bend had not acquired his stature in the minds of generations of men by means of fraud. The sort of shabby trickery known to any village thaumaturgist would not have stood the test. Aarl wielded the lost knowledge of forgotten Mars, a science that differed greatly from the science of Earth but was none the less a science.
He looked at the vision on the screen of mist. Two hundred thousand years.
“Those ships,” said Aarl, “those very powerful ships that travel with such speed, are the ships of the Star Kings.”
That name, heard for the first time, rang in Stark’s mind like the strident call of a bugle.
“The Star Kings?”
“The men who rule that future umiverse, each in his own kingdom, principality, or barony.”
“Ah,” said Stark, and looked again. “That is right and fitting. The starlands are too bright for grubby clerks, and bureaucrats in rumpled suits each trying to be more common than the next. Yes. Let there be Star Kings.”
“You must go there, Stark. Into the future.”
A small pulse began to beat beneath the angle of Stark’s jaw. “Into the future. Bodily? Your knowledge can send me bodily across two hundred thousand years?”
“Two years or two million. It is all the same.”
“Can you bring me back? Bodily.”
“If you survive.”
“Hm,” said Stark, and looked again at the vision. “How would I go? I mean, in what capacity?”
“As an envoy, a messenger. Someone must go and meet these Star Kings face to face.” Aarl’s voice was angry. “I have ascertained that this menace to our solar system exists in their time. I have attempted to contact them by mental arts, without success. They simply did not hear. That is why I sent for you, Stark.”
“You sent for N’Chaka,” Stark said, and smiled. N’Chaka, the Man-without-a-tribe who could not remember his real parents, naked fosterling of the beast-folk of wild sun-shattered Mercury; N’Chaka, who wore his acquired humanity like an uncomfortable garment and who still tended to use his teeth when angered. “Why N’Chaka as an ambassador to the courts of the Star Kings?”
“Because N’Chaka is an animal at heart, though he has a man’s brain. Animals do not lie, they do not turn traitor because of greed for money or power, or because of that worse tempter, philosophical doubt.” Aarl studied him with those space-deep eyes. “In other words, I can trust you.”
“You think that if someone offered me a throne at Algol or Betelgeuse, I wouldn’t take it?” Stark laughed. “The Lord of the Abyss overestimates the purity of the beast.”
“I think not.”
“And anyway, why a bastard Earthman? Why not a Martian?”
“We’re too concerned with our past, too deeply rooted in our own sacred soil. You have no roots. You do have a devouring curiosity, and a rare capacity for survival. Otherwise you would not be here.” He held up his hand to forestall comment. “Look.”
The scene on the mist-curtain changed abruptly. Now a madman’s dream of space appeared, a tangled nightmare of crowding suns, dead stars, filamentary nebulae. Stark seemed to be racing at blinding speed through this cosmic jungle.
“The region at the western limb of the galaxy,” said Aarl. “It is called, in that future time, The Marches of Outer Space. It holds a number of the smaller star-kingdoms. It also holds this.”
Two old red suns like ruby brooches pinned a ragged veil of darkness across the starfield. Stark plunged into the gloom of the dark nebula, past dim drowned stars dragging their nighted planets. The coiling dust seemed to tear like smoke with the wind of his passing. Out on the other side there was light again, but it was strangely bent, distorted around an area of blankness, of nothingness quite different from the dusty darkness of the nebula. He could not see into it. The vision seemed to recoil, as though struck back by a blow.
“Not even my arts can penetrate that blind area,” said Aarl. “But it is from there that the
force comes, leaping back through time, draining the energy from our solar system.”
“And my task, if I go, will be a simple one,” Stark said. “Find out what that force is, who is responsible for it, and put an end to it.” He shook his head. “Your faith in my abilities is touching, but do you know what I think, Aarl? I think you’ve lived in this dark hole far too long. I think your senses have left you.”
He stood up, turning his back to the screen of mist.
“The task is impossible, and you know it.”
“Yet it must be done.”
“If it’s a natural phenomenon, some freak warping of the continuum…”
“Then of course we are helpless. But I don’t think it is.” Aarl rose. He seemed to have grown taller and his eyes were hypnotic in their intensity. “You have no love for Earth because of what Earthmen did to your foster-tribe, yet I think you would not truly wish all those millions dead and the planet with them, long before its time. And what of Mars, which has been something of a home to you? She too has a while to go before the night overtakes her.”
The pulse hammered more strongly under Stark’s jaw. “I wouldn’t even know where to start. It could take a lifetime.”
“We do not have a lifetime,” said Aarl, “nor even half of one. The energy-drain is accelerating rapidly. And I can tell you where to begin. With a man named Shorr Kan, King of Aldeshar in the Marches. The most powerful of the petty kings, and wily enough for two. You will find him sympathetic.”
“How so?”
“Because this strange force is causing him immediate trouble. You must find a way to enlist his help.”
“You speak as though I’ve already made my decision.”
“You have.”
Stark turned and looked at the mist-curtain again. It was blank now, only mist and nothing more. Yet he could still see the ships of the Star Kings and the untamed jungle of the Marches. The future, undiscovered, unexplored. Could he have the chance to see it, and refuse?
Infinite Stars Page 41
