Ecce and Old Earth tcc-2

by Jack Vance

  Ecce and Old Earth

  ( The Cadwal Chronicles - 2 )

  Jack Vance

  The planet Cadwal has an ecosystem unique in the human-explored galaxy; a thousand years past it was set aside as a natural preserve, protected by law and covenant against colonization and exploitation.

  But now the elite Conservator culture that has developed on Cadwal is facing a conspiracy of humans and aliens to open the planet, and its rich resources, to full commercial use. Glawen Clattuc, scion of one of the scientific houses of Cadwal, must discover who exactly is behind all the sabotage, and bring them to interplanetary justice.

  But Glawen soon discovers that he is investigating his own family — there are ancient crimes to be discovered, as well as the key that will resolve the crisis that threatens Cadwal and its way of life.

  Jack Vance. Ecce and Old Earth

  PRECURSORY

  I. THE PURPLE ROSE SYSTEM

  (Excerpted from: THE WORLDS OF MAN, 48th edition.)

  Halfway along the Perseid Arm near the edge of the Gaen Reach, a capricious swirl of galactic gravitation has caught up ten thousand stars and sent them streaming off at a veer, with a curl and a flourish at the tip. This strand of stars is Mircea’s Wisp.

  To the side of the curl, at seeming risk of wandering away into the void, is the Purple Rose System, comprising three stars: Lorca, Sing, and Syrene. Lorca, a white dwarf and Sing, a red giant, orbit close around each other: a portly pink-faced old gentleman waltzing with a dainty little maiden dressed in white. Syrene, a yellow-white star of ordinary size and luminosity, circles the gallivanting pair at a discrete distance.

  Syrene controls three planets, including Cadwal, an Earth-like world seven thousand miles in diameter, with close to Earth-normal gravity.

  (A list and analysis of physical indices is here omitted.)

  II. THE NATURALIST SOCIETY

  Cadwal was first explored by the locator R. J. Neirmann, a member of the Naturalist Society of Earth. His report prompted the Society to dispatch an official expedition to Cadwal, which, upon its return to Earth, recommended that Cadwal be protected as a conservancy, or nature preserve, secure forever from human settlement and commercial exploitation.

  To this end, the Society registered the world in its own name, and after securing the Certificate of Registration found itself in sole and perpetual tenancy of Cadwal Planet with no further formalities other than periodic renewals of the certificate; a task devolving upon the secretary of the Society.

  The Society issued an immediate decree of conservancy: the Great Charter to which were attached the Regulations of Conservancy: the basic political instrument of Cadwal. Charter, By-laws and Certificates were stored in the Society’s archival vaults, and an administrative staff dispatched to Cadwal.

  III. THE WORLD CADWAL

  The landscapes of Cadwal were endlessly various spectacular and almost always — to human perceptions — pleasant, or inspiring, or awesome, or idyllically beautiful Tourists who made the rounds of the wilderness always left Cadwal with regret and many returned again and again.

  The flora and fauna were approximately as diverse as those of Old Earth, which is to say that they challenged generations of research biologists and taxonomists with profusion of their species. Many of the larger beasts were savage; others exhibited aspects of intelligence and what seemed to be an aesthetic capability. Certain varieties of andrils used a spoken language which, try as they might, linguists were unable to interpret.

  The three continents of Cadwal were Ecce, Deucas and Throy. They were separated by expanses of empty ocean, unbroken by islands or smaller masses of land, with a few trifling exceptions.

  Ecce, long and narrow lay along the equator a flat tract of swamp and jungle, netted by sluggish rivers. Ecce palpitated with heat, stench, color and ravenous vitality. Ferocious creatures everywhere preyed upon one another, and made the land unsuitable for human settlement; the Naturalist had attempted not even a wilderness lodge on Ecce. Three objects alone broke the flat landscape: one dormant and a pair of active volcanoes.

  The early explorers gave Ecce little serious attention; no more did the later scholars, and Ecce, after the first flurry of biological and topographical surveys, remained for the most part a land abandoned and unknown.

  Deucas, five times as large as Ecce, occupied most of the North Temperate Zone on the opposite side of the planet, with Cape Journal, the continents southernmost extremity at the end of a long narrow peninsula which trust a thousand miles below the equator. The fauna of Deucas, neither as grotesque nor as monstrous as that of Ecce, was yet, in many cases, savage and formidable, and included several non-intelligent species. The flora tended to resemble that of old Earth, to such effect that the early agronomists were able to introduce useful terrestrial species at Araminta Station: bamboo, coconut palms, wine-grapes and fruit trees without fear of an ecological disaster[1].

  Throy, to the south of Deucas and about equal in area to Ecce, extended from the polar ice well into the South Temperate Zone. The terrain of Throy was the most dramatic of Cadwal. Crags leaned over chasms; dark forests roared in the wind.

  Three small islands, all ancient sea-volcanoes, were located off the east coast of Deucas. These were Lutwen Atoll, Thurben Island and Ocean Island. Elsewhere the oceans spread open and empty around the globe.

  IV. ARAMINTA STATION

  An enclave of a hundred square miles had been established on the east coast of Deucas, halfway between Cape Journal to the south and Marmion Head to the north. Here was Araminta station, the agency which monitored the conservancy and enforced the terms of the Charter. Six bureaus performed the necessary work:

  Bureaus

  A: Records and statistics.

  B: Patrols and surveys: Police and security services.

  C: Taxonomy, cartography, natural sciences.

  D: Domestic services.

  E: Fiscal affairs: exports and imports

  F: Visitors accommodations.

  The original six superintendents were Deamus Wook, Shirry Clattuc, Saul Diffin, Claude Offaw, Marvell Veder, and Condit Laverty. Each was allowed a staff not to exceed forty persons which they all recruited from family and guild kinships, and which brought to the early administration a cohesion which otherwise might have been lacking After many centuries, much had changed but much remained the same. The Charter prevailed as law of the land, though certain factions were intent upon modifying its terms. Others — notably the Yips of Lutwen Atoll — paid no heed whatever to the Charter. At Araminta station, the original rude encampment had become a settlement dominated by six palatial edifices, where lived the descendants of the Wooks, Offaws, Clattucs, Diffins, Veders and Lavertys.

  As time passed, each House developed a distinctive personality, which its residents shared, so that the wise Wooks differed from the flippant Diffins, as did the cautious Offaws from the reckless Clattucs.

  The station early acquired a hotel to house its visitors; also an airport, a hospital, schools and a theater: the ‘Orpheum'. When subsidies from society headquarters on Old Earth dwindled and presently stopped altogether, the need for foreign exchange became urgent. Vineyards planted at the back of the enclave began to produce fine wines for export, and tourists were encouraged to visit any or all of the wilderness lodges, which were established at special sites and managed so as to avoid interaction with the environment.

  Over the centuries, certain problems became acute. How so many enterprises could be staffed by a complement of only two hundred and forty persons? Elasticity was necessarily the answer. First, collaterals[2] were allowed to accept middle-status positions at the station.

  By a loose reading of the Charter, children, retired persons, domes
tic servants and 'temporary labor not in permanent residence' were exempted from the forty-person limit. The term 'temporary labor' was extended to include farm labor, hotel staff, airport mechanics — indeed, workers of every description, and the Conservator looked the other way so long as the workforce was allowed no permanent residence.

  A source of plentiful, cheap and docile labor had always been needed at Araminta Station. What could be more convenient than the folk who inhabited Lutwen Atoll, three hundred miles to the northeast? These were the Yips, descendants of runaway servants, fugitives, illegal immigrants, petty criminals and others, who at first furtively, then brazenly, had taken up residence on Lutwen Atoll.

  The Yips fulfilled a need, and so were allowed at Araminta Station on six-month work permits. So much the Conservationists grudgingly allowed, but refused to yield an iota more.

  V. THE CONSERVATOR AND THE NATURALIST OF STROMA

  At Riverview House, a mile south of the agency, lived the Conservator, the Executive Superintendent of Araminta Station. By the terms of the Charter, he was an active member of the Naturalist Society, a native of Stroma, the small Naturalist settlement on Throy. With the waning of the Society to little more than a memory, the directive necessarily had been interpreted loosely and — at least for this purpose, where no realistic alternative offered itself — all Naturalists resident at Stroma were considered equivalent to members of the Society.

  A faction dedicated to 'advanced' ideology, calling itself the 'LPF, Peace and Freedom Party', began to champion the cause of the Yips whose condition they declared to be intolerable and a blot on the collective conscience. The situation could be relieved only by allowing the Yips to settle on the Deucas mainland. Another faction, the ‘Chartists,' acknowledged the problem, but proposed a solution not in violation of the Charter: namely, transferring the entire Yip population off-world. Unrealistic declared the LPFers, and ever more categorically criticized the Charter. They declared the Conservancy an archaic idea, non-humanist and out of step with 'advanced' thinking. The Charter, so they asserted, was in desperate need of revision, if only that the plight of the Yips might be ameliorated.

  The Chartists, in refutal, insisted that both Charter and Conservancy were immutable. They voiced a sardonic suspicion that much of LPF fervor was hypocritical and self-serving; that the LPFers wanted to allow Yip settlement of the Marmaton Foreshore in order to set a precedent which would permit a few deserving Naturalists — no doubt defined as the most vigorous and ardent LPF activists — to establish estates for themselves out of the beautiful Deucas countryside, where they would employ Yips for servants and farmhands and live like lords. The charge provoked the LPFers to such violent spasms of outrage that cynical Chartists asserted that the vehemence of their protests only underscored their covert ambitions.

  At Araminta Station, ‘advanced’ ideology was not taken seriously. The Yip problem was recognized, as real and immediate, but the LPF solution had to be rejected, since any official concessions would formalize the Yip presence on Cadwal, when all efforts should be exerted in the opposite direction, i.e. transfer of the entire Yip population to a world where their presence would be useful and desirable.

  This conviction was reinforced when Eustace Chilke, the station airport manager, discovered that the Yips had long been systematically stealing from the airport warehouse. Their booty was primarily spare parts for the station flyers, which in due course could be assembled into whole flyers at Yipton. They also took tools, weapons, ammunition and energy packs, apparently with the connivance of one Namour co-Clattuc, Agency Commissioner of Temporary Labor, and in this connection Namour and Chilke came to blows. The two fought an epic battle. Namour, a Clattuc, fought with typical Clattuc flair and courage; Chilke fought a methodical backroom style: essentially a technique of backing the opponent up against a wall and pummeling him until he fell to the floor, exactly as Namour eventually found himself doing.

  Chilke was born near the town ldola, on the Big Prairie of old Earth. Early in his life little Eustace was influenced by his grandfather Floyd Swaner, a collector of stuffed animals, old oddments, purple brlc-a-brac, rare books, and anything else which caught his fancy. When Eustace Chilke was a child, his grandfather presented him with a wonderful ATLAS OF THE UNIVERSE, depicting all the inhabited worlds of the Gaean Reach, including Cadwal. The ATLAS stimulated young Eustace to such an extent that he became a wanderer half vagabond, half jack-of-all-trades.

  The route which brought him to Araminta Station was devious but certainly not accidental. Chilke one day described the circumstances to Glawen:

  “I was working as a tour-bus operator out of Seven Cities, on John Prestons World." Chilke told how he became aware of a big pie-faced lady with lots of bosom, wearing a tall black hat, who joined Chilke's morning tour four days in succession. At last she engaged him in conversation, commenting favorably upon his conduct.

  Chilke responded modestly: “It’s nothing special, just my stock in trade."

  The lady introduced herself as Madame Zigonie, a widow from Rosalia, a world to the back of the Pegasus Rectangle. After a few minutes of conversation she suggested that Chilke join her for lunch: an invitation which Chilke saw no reason to refuse.

  Madame Zigonie selected a fine restaurant where they were served an excellent lunch. During the meal she encouraged Chilke to talk of his early years on the Big Prairie and the general facts of his family background. Presently, as if on sudden impulse, Madame Zigonie mentioned her clairvoyant powers which she ignored only at grave risk to herself, her fortunes, and all others involved in the revelations. “Perhaps you have wondered at my interest in you. The fact is that I must hire an overseer for my ranch and my inner voice insisted that you were the right and proper person for the position."

  “That is very interesting," said Chilke cautiously. “The salary is high and you plan to pay a substantial advance?”

  “You will be paid in the standard fashion, after you render the duties I will require of you."

  “Hmm,” said Chilke. The remark was ambiguous and Madame Zigonie, large, somewhat over-dressed, with small narrow eyes glinting from a broad-cheeked face the color of putty, lacked all appeal.

  In the end Madame Zlgonie's inducements overcame his reluctance and Chilke became superintendent of the Shadow Valley Ranch on Rosalia.

  Chilke's duties required that he direct the activities of a large workforce, composed entirely of indentured Yips brought to Rosalia by a labor contractor named Namour.

  Chilke's puzzlement with circumstances became extreme when Madame Zigonie declared her intention of marrying him. Chilke refused the honor, and Madame Zigonie discharged him in a rage, though she neglected to pay his salary.

  In the town Lipwillow on the Big Muddy River Chilke was approached by Namour and offered a job as airport manager at Araminta Station. Namour here far exceeded his authority, but Chilke managed to secure the post on his own merits. Madame Zigonie’s off-again on-again romantic interest and Namour's sympathetic assistance was a mystery to which he found no ready solution. Other even more urgent mysteries hung in the air. How many illicit flyers had the Yips constructed from the stolen parts? How many had they acquired by other means? If such existed, where were they located?

  The superintendent of Bureau B was Bodwyn Wook: a small man, bald, yellow of skin; thin, active and sharp-eyed as a ferret. Bodwyn Wook was notable both for his caustic tongue and his indifference to the dictates of stylish convention. The discovery of the Yip thefts prompted him to a swift response. Yipton was raided; two flyers and a machine shop were destroyed

  Another sinister discovery followed hard upon the first. Yips of the Araminta workforce were found to be armed with a variety of weapons, as if in preparation for a grand massacre of Agency personnel. The work-permits were instantly canceled; the Yips were sent back to Yipton. When questioned, Namour merely shrugged his shoulders and denied complicity in the affair. No one could prove differently and, indeed, it seemed incredible
that the personable and popular Namour would involve himself in crimes so horrendous, and suspicion, while always latent, lost its edge as time went by. Namour proceeded with his regular routines, indifferent to lingering doubts.

  Namour was a person impossible to categorize. He was strong, innately graceful and of good physique; his features were classically regular. He wore his clothes with flair and seemed to know everything worth knowing. At all times Namour conducted himself with an engaging deliberate ease and understatement, suggesting passion under careful control: an attribute which many ladies found appealing, and indeed Namour's name had been linked with many others, including both Spanchetta and Smonny, whom he apparently served on a continuing basis as a joint paramour, to the satisfaction of both.

  Namour was not universally admired, especially at Bureau B. His critics considered him a stone-hearted opportunist, lacking all compunction and capable of any crime. This view, in the end, proved correct, but before Namour’s crimes could be brought home to him, he quietly slipped away from Araminta Station, to the intense regret of Bodwyn Wook.

  VI. THE YIPS AND YIPTON

  The typical Yip was by no means deformed or unprepossessing: to the contrary, at first glance, the ordinary Yip seemed extraordinarily handsome, with large luminous hazel eyes, hair and skin of the same golden color, well-shaped features and excellent physique. The Yip girls were notorious up and down Mircea's Wisp for their comeliness, docility and mild disposition, and also for their absolute chastity unless they were paid an appropriate fee. For reasons not wholly understood, Yips and ordinary Gaeans were mutually infertile. Some biologists suggested that the Yips were a mutation and represented a new human species; others suspected that the Yip diet, which included mollusks from the slime under Yipton, gave rise to the situation. They pointed out that Yips indentured to work on other worlds, after a passage of time, regained a normal procreative ability.