Valikili felt the spurt of blood and knew that he had only moments before losing consciousness. He ducked his head, jamming his sliced arm into his stomach to stop the bleeding. A club caught his shoulder and drove him down, rolling him over. The knife drove into his back, aimed for his kidney but deflected by his movement. He rolled forward and the knife thrust in again, tearing the muscles of his back and glancing off a rib.

He plunged into the vegetation, struck the river and fell forward. The stream was small, but swift. It carried him southward, bouncing him against rocks and mudbars. Blackness swept in and receded. He caught at the bottom with scrabbling fingers and reached the bank, then rolled in the mud trying to stop the wounds in his back. He felt consciousness slipping again and rolled over on his face, forcing his open forearm into the mud and pressing it under the weight of his body.

***

Marcel LaBarge found him, but Valikili remembered nothing until the pain of movement awakened him. By that time a dozen men had gathered around and Dr. Marcuse was bandaging his arm with practiced efficiency. “There,” he said, seeing Val’s eyes open “that should hold you together long enough to get you back to camp. What did you tangle with – a longneck?”

“Forget it, Doc.” It was Jan and his eyes bore fire. “Don’t pretend ignorance. You know damned well those are knife slashes.”

Valikili reached up with his free hand and Jan took it. “Helene?”

“She staggered into camp with a concussion. Nothing very serious, but it set off our search for you.”

Valikili relaxed into unconsciousness. Marcuse looked sideways at Jan and said, “Don’t make a big thing out of this. You have to expect violence when the sex ratio is this disturbed.”

“Just a jealous boyfriend. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“Stick to your stitches, Doc. You don’t have the faintest damned idea what’s going on.”

***

The snow came nearly every night, layer upon thin layer, moisture squeezed from the upper atmosphere by the cold.

The palisade was nearly completed and there were some makeshift brush and mud shelters inside. Everyone was constantly cold. They had collected only enough furs for blankets, though soon they would have enough to start making clothing. The coveralls that were standard for shipboard wear were scant protection here, and Dr. Marcuse had two cases of pneumonia as well as the slowly recovering Valikili housed in his makeshift infirmary in the hold of the landing craft.

Nur Mohammet closed the hide curtain behind him and crossed to the central fire. He shook out the blanket he had wrapped about him and laid it near the hearth, then dropped onto it. Marcel Damle stirred the dung-cake fire and asked, “How is he?”

“Better. He was actually in good spirits today.”

“That’s a switch,” Risley said.

Nur grinned. It always took Tenn by surprise when Nur’s solemn face opened up. “His girl came to see him.”

“Helene?” Tenn asked.

“She took her sweet time,” Jan added. “Why?”

“She told Valikili that she was scared to go to him before.”

“Bull breeze.”

“No, Tenn,” Jan said, “I believe her. She really was scared.”

Henri looked up from his work; his scars showed pale in the firelight as he asked, “Was she raped?”

Jan shrugged, “Marcuse knows, but he’s not talking. With only six or eight decent looking women in a colony full of young bucks, you figure it out.”

Staal cursed and his hands shook. Marcel touched his knee and spoke softly, “Henri, marry Marie. Don’t wait until someone else takes her away from you. Also, once you are living with her, you can protect her.”

Nur turned to Jan. “You don’t think rape was the motive, do you?”

Jan shook his head. “I think it was an excuse, an afterthought, and a diversion. I think they were out to kill Val.”

“Because he is one of the crew?”

“No. Because he isn’t a Monist.” more tomorrow

Chapter 3

Valikili crouched lower. Claude Delacroix was on sentry duty and, sleepy though he might be, the colonist would take great pleasure if he were to catch Val slipping past the cordon. No punishment would be exacted, of course, but considerable embarrassment – for Helene as well as himself. Delacroix and Helene had once had an understanding. On Bordeaux, before their emigration, they had talked of marriage. Helene had told Valikili of this, but their new situation had thrown all old understandings into question.

Delacroix disappeared behind the half-completed stockade wall and Valikili trotted down toward the river. There was no cover, so stealth was pointless. He had to drop below the break in the land before the sentry returned.

He did not see the figures that followed him.

Valikili was the Lydia‘s third engineer and, though he felt allegiance to his fellow crewmembers, he was adapting rapidly. He was a short, powerful Polynesian; his face reflected his open nature and his body was a statue sculpted in muscle. He was not unaware of his beauty.

Nor were the colonist girls. He had his pick, and he had chosen Helene Dumezil.

Helene was not related to Angi or the patriarch. Two-thirds of the colonists were named Dumezil after Louis Dumezil, the founder of their religion, and there weren’t enough first names to keep track by.

Valikili reached the river and started upstream toward their meeting place. A fringe of tough vegetation grew along the water’s edge – the only vegetation that survived into the dry season. He avoided its suggestive darkness. No incident had yet justified the sentries that Jan had placed, but Valikili, more than the colonists, respected his judgment. Besides, there were the precursors; everyone was speculating as to what had happened to whoever built those ruins.

It was unlikely that this generation would find time to explore that mystery and the next generation – what would they be like, so unnaturally cut off from the rest of mankind. Valikili shuddered at the thought.

His mood was anything but playful when he reached their appointed meeting place. Helene was not there. Valikili squatted to wait, uneasily watching the shadows. He regretted arranging the tryst and regretted his mood, which might well ruin it anyway. Something about the shadows of the vegetation near the water looked odd. He tried to ignore it, but his eyes kept straying back. It looked like a crumpled, human form.

Precursor? A superstitious shiver ran up his spine, followed immediately by a more urgent fear. Helene?

He approached the shadow warily. It was – something. Closer; it was a humanoid form, sprawled face downward.

“Helene?”

It was. He dropped beside her, feeling for her carotid pulse and drew back a hand sticky with blood. “No!” He felt closely, found a lump at the base of her skull, detected a weak pulse.

Something moved in the bushes.

He crouched over her and snarled, “Come out of there!” A figure rose, human, but anonymous in the darkness. It raised a knife to catch the moonlight.

Valikili crouched lower, trying to remember the rudimentary fighting skills he had been taught so many years before. The figure advanced and Valikili circled, trying to draw him out into the light. .

Something struck him from behind, knocking him to his knees, while his first adversary swept the knife forward, cutting him from elbow to wrist. Valikili felt the spurt of blood and knew that he had only moments before losing consciousness.

*****

Two-thirds of the colonists were named Dumezil after Louis Dumezil, the founder of their religion, and there weren’t enough first names to keep track by. I still like this conceit, but it painted me into a corner. Even I had a hard time keeping track of everybody, and I can only assume that it was worse for my readers. Rule one for new writers – make sure your characters’ names are easy for your readers to remember.

By the way, over in A Writing Life the post Science Fiction in the Wild will tell you why so few of my works take place in cities.

They had covered the body with a sleeping bag. Jan threw it back and grimaced. Jason was badly crushed and his clothing was matted with blood. There was no need to look closer, but habit made Jan do so. He found tiny bits of moss embedded in the wounds near the base of Jason’s skull, but nowhere else. Suspicion was mirrored in his expression, and he tried to suppress it. The colonists had levered the bole off Jason but had not moved him. The bole was bare of moss.

The old, down limbs scattered about on top of the snow were not. Happenstance? Or had Jason been clubbed into unconsciousness and left in the path of the tree?

“How the hell did this happen?”

Dumezil answered, “He was gathering down wood and apparently didn’t hear the warning.” Chambard and Dubois looked uneasy, but nodded their agreement.

“Who cut the tree?”

“I did,” Dumezil said.

***

Angi left her family to join Jan. Even now he kept vigil, never trusting the land around him. The line of mourners circled beneath the low hillock where he watched. Angi stopped beside him and laid her hand gently on his arm. “He was the first,” Jan said, “but he won’t be the last.”

There were two bundles and two graves. Tom Dennison’s body had been coated with polyfoam and irradiated to preserve it after the explosion in the computer bay. Caught up in the press of immediate needs, the colonists had not taken time to begin a cemetery until now.

A white, amorphous, anonymous bolus of plastic lay beside one grave; a hide-wrapped bundle lay beside the other. Both killed by the same mad act – and every other death this planet will witness attributable to the one who stranded us here. Jan grimaced and started down the hill.

Marcel Dumezil, the leader of the Monists, read the service. Jan doubted that Dennison would have appreciated it. He was a Pentecostal Baptist from NorAm, the only one aboard the Lydia who had actually been born on Earth.

As for Jason, he had been a Pertoskan Monist. He had argued into the night with Alex Chambard the day before he died, disputing the points of doctrine which separated his sect from the Benedictine Monism embraced by the colonists.

Coincidence?

Dumezil closed his Monomythos and stepped back.

Alex and Lucien lowered Jason into the earth; Nur and Valikili lowered Tom Dennison. Then Valikili took a shovel and gently broke away a portion of the polyfoam. “Once the man is gone,” he said, “it is wrong to preserve the body.”

Jan nodded, all the time knowing that the permafrost would preserve both bodies better than any work of man.

They shoveled in the cold, dry earth. Jan watched the colonists as the graves were filled, wondering who had thrown the bomb, and why. It had to be on everyone’s mind.

Tears flowed freely as Henri Staal saw his watchmate under. He had mostly recovered from his burns, though he would always bear scars. Jan touched his shoulder as they left the cemetery to say, “I’m sorry.”

Staal looked around at the bleak horizon and shuddered. “Why, Jan? Why would anyone do this?”

There was no answer he could give.

*****

I suppose every beginning writer chooses names that make him cringe later in his career. Clearly Benedictine is one of these. There is no hidden connection to the Order of St. Benedict. It was just a dumb mistake.

“What do you know about sensory deprivation?”
“Enough to recognize my own problem,” she snapped.

Andrax smiled. “Then you know that drawing into yourself at this moment is the worst thing you can do. Would it help to know that almost all the colonists feel as you do?”

Her shrug said I don’t know.

“Talk to Helene about it. Odds are she’ll share your feelings and you’ll both be better for the conversation.”

Jan continued to circulate, looking for trouble. At this crucial point, the psychological state of his charges bore more potential for danger than the environment. Later, when the first groups had begun to adjust, they would form a stable core on which the remaining colonists could lean.

He let his eyes encompass the empty horizon.

Damn! It was easier in the green belt where the danger was constant, but where there was not the potential for mass madness – a potential exacerbated by the religious temper of the colony.

Within half a local year, the melt and the herds would reach this spot. Before that time, they must erect fortifications. For that they would need timber, but as yet he could spare no timber-cutting parties.

That girl, Angi. She had shown more signs of vertigo than most, but he had had an ulterior motive in seeking her out. She was young, pretty, and very female. With sixty-two male and only thirty-six female colonists, only those who adapted most quickly and realized the permanence of their plight, would find wives.

Polyandry would come later. It was inevitable.

***

Every day the landing craft brought down new colonists. Nur Mohammet and Tennyson Risley of the crew were working on a ground-effect machine to be used for surface transportation. Relying only on the landing craft to transport their daily meat would be unwise.

A month passed. The skimmer took over the run to the green belt – a shorter run every day. Only Captain Childe remained in orbit, unwilling yet to give up on the Lydia.

Jan took time every day to spend at least a few minutes with Angi, not neglecting to give attention to the half-dozen other girls of appropriate age. In his estimation, none of the others matched Angi, but one never knew. Angi’s suitors were increasing in number and boldness.

Jan had just managed to catch Angi alone when Tenn Risley found him.

“Jan. It‘s Jason. He’s been killed.”

Jan felt himself stiffen up inside. Of all his companions, the only one he would have called a friend was Jason. Angi touched his arm, saying, “I’m sorry.”

“How did it happen?”

“Tree fell on him.” Jason had piloted the skimmer with a crew of colonists up into the mountains on a cutting expedition. “Dubois just called in to tell us. Someone has to hike up there because none of the cutters can run the skimmer.”

“Was anyone else hurt?” Angi asked.

“They didn’t say, so I suppose not. Oh, one of your brothers was on the crew, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Jean.

***

Jan and Tenn started at daybreak. The skimmer required a fairly flat roadway, so it had followed the river Lydia. Jan and Tenn would have had to follow it anyway to stay near water. The air was so dry that they required vast quantities of liquid.

The cutters met them and Jan offered each a brief nod. He knew everyone by now. It was his job to do so. Jean Dumezil, Angi’s younger brother, wore his usual flat expression, but Alexandre Chambard and Lucien Dubois were clearly moved.

They had covered the body with a sleeping bag.

*****

A couple of notes here on words I would change if I were rewriting.

Paragraph 6, exacerbate. It’s exactly the right word for meaning, but the wrong word for mood. Today I would say made worse.

Paragraph 9, polyandry. Again, the perfect word was the wrong word. I should have said polygamy and accepted the slight loss of accuracy. By the way, if you didn’t take Anthropology 101, polygamy is multiple spouses, polygyny is multiple wives, and polyandry is multiple husbands.

Unbroken by vegetation, a land of gently rolling hills stretched to the horizon. To the east, ramparts of hills rose, similarly naked, and in the distance one could see the massed green and white above the melt line where trees grew through the perpetual snow. Near at hand the ground was tortured and broken with the fossil prints of last melt’s herd.

Angi Dumezil negotiated the ramp gingerly, bowed under the weight of her share of the supplies. Papa Marcel, leader of the colonists, and her brother Anton stayed near her; the others were strangers. Jan Andrax directed their egress and hurried them beyond the flash perimeter. When they were sheltered below a nearby hillock, he signaled to the landing craft and it leaped skyward, then rolled into the gentle arc that would carry it northward to the green belt to take on meat for the colonists remaining overhead.

Angi shaded her eyes against the cool sunlight until she could no longer see the departing speck.

Andrax had called them into a circle. He squatted negligently, scratching a map into the ground. “We are here, two kilometers above the camp. The river Lydia runs here, though it is little more than a stream this time of year. We’ve hardly begun with shelters. There is no wood nearby; until the melt comes and we can float it down from the hills, we are experimenting with rammed earth and adobe.”

Angi looked around, drawing. her jacket tighter about her. Now that the landing craft had gone, there was no work of man and no bit of vegetation to break the endless monotony of the rolling land. The whole of her vision was encompassed by gray-brown soil and red-brown rocks. (see below) She closed her eyes tightly against a feeling of vertigo and missed the rest of the instructions Andrax was giving.

They shouldered their burdens and walked to the base. Whenever they topped a rise, hundreds of square kilometers lay stretched out before them, but all so uniform that the eye refused to acknowledge the scale. No haze muted the distance.

Andrax did not move to aid the colonists with their burdens, but paced up one side of the column and down the other with his express pistol ready at hand. What creature could possibly inhabit that wilderness, Angi could not imagine.

By the time they reached camp, Angi was suffering from thirst. Though the day was cool, the air seemed utterly devoid of moisture and sucked away her body fluids with every breath. Rows of adobe bricks lay at the water’s edge, all split and crumbled in the cold, dry air.

A single building stood, a long, low dormitory framed with driftwood from the river and coated with dried mud. There was a fire built of the dung cakes that lay so abundantly on all the hills.

After they had eaten and drunk, Andrax set them to work. It was a kindness; once her hands were busy, Angi’s unease abated somewhat. She worked with a girl of her own age, Helene, unpacking and cataloging the crates they had brought. Jan drifted by from time to time, once stopping to ask, “Feeling better?”

“What do you mean?” Angi replied, turning away to mask her irritation.

“Don’t be evasive. I’m not much of a psychologist, but I’m the best we have. It’s part of my training. Tell me what you felt hiking in. Vertigo?”

She nodded.

“What do you know about sensory deprivation?”

“Enough to recognize my own problem,” she snapped.

*****

Oops. I goofed, and it took me forty years to catch it. All Angi would see is snow. This description is of what she would see a few months later after the melt has come and gone. When I wrote the first draft, the melt cycle wasn’t yet clear to me, and in all my revisions I missed this error. Oh, well! more tomorrow

If you have been following this blog, you may have seen the rest of chapter one excerpted here and there. This is the piece of writing that spawned Cyan.

“Something you said bothers me. You said that we would be here as long as we survive. What exactly did you mean by that?”

Jan did not answer at once. His restless eyes never stopped their circuit. “Jase, do you know what the mortality rate is for Scouts on a new planet? Trained men whose whole life is dedicated to survival?”

“No.”

“Ten percent for each new planet.” Jason greeted that with stunned silence.

“Jase, the first planet I explored, three of my twenty companions died; nor was it an exceptionally dangerous planet. On my second planet two of my friends were cut down before my eyes by an innocuous-looking flying mammal whose poison was deadly to humans.

“I came through my third planet with no particular difficulty, but on the last one I tangled with a large, horned herbivore during my first day planetside and left in a coma. I spent a total of two hours on her surface.

“Those were planets which had been properly scanned from orbit. I was working with trained and experienced Scouts and the latest of equipment. Here .  .  . ” 

Jan broke off as something caught his attention. What it was, Jason could not tell, but it apparently posed no danger because the Scout relaxed again and continued, hardly aware of the interruption.

“Here, I’d give odds that there won’t be a human alive inside ten years.”

Chapter 2

Computer printout found folded and
placed in the log of Jan Andrax

Monists. Full title, Universal Monists. A religious group founded by Louis Dumezil in S.Y. 767. The premise of this group is that all religions were founded by the same spirit (deity?) and that a true religion can be found by collating the elements common to all religions while rigorously discarding those elements confined to particular religions or families of religions. The text containing this distillate was published S.Y. 767, hence the founding date, and was called the Monomythos. Dumezil further refined his text through eleven revisions culminating in the Grand Monomythos in S. Y. 801. After his death, further revisions led to the splitting of the Universal Monists into denominations based on increasingly fine points of doctrine. Each sect publishes its own subtly different Monomythos. As of S.Y. 872 four hundred distinct Universal Monist sects were known. Several ecclesiastical wars have been fought among them, the most violent being on Hallam in S.Y. 851-859.

The story of where I got the idea of Universal Monists was told last week over in A Writing Life, in 118. Jandrax redux.

The three men remained motionless until the trihorns had passed.

Adrian Dumezil wiped sweat from his face and grinned. “Now there goes a beast I wouldn’t like to tackle. I thought this was a desert planet.”

“It is,” Jan replied. Because of the cold, and because most of the planet’s water was tied up in the massive icecaps, it never rained. Much of the year the land was barren desert, but in the winter ice crystals formed in the upper atmosphere and fell as sleet, snow, and hail. Throughout the winter this accumulated and, with the coming of spring, melted to release water for the growth of plants. Within a few weeks of its coming, the melt would pass, leaving desert again.

This was the stationary view. From space the area of the melt was a broad band of green moving slowly southward. Along the route of the green belt moved massive herds of herbivores and attendant carnivores, caught up in a perpetual migration. .

The landing craft had set down on the forefront of the green belt three weeks earlier and already the herds had largely passed by. Within days it would be necessary to move the hunting base southward several hundred kilometers.

They marched in silence then, broken only when Jan or Jason showed Adrian how to recognize siskal, lal, and greenhorn bushes and the tracks of the three major herbivores and their corresponding carnivores: the leers – huge, toothed, flightless birds – and longnecks, whose sinous necks and compact musculature made them particularly dangerous, and the tiny, scavenger krats.

***

They were ruins. Despite the stats he had studied, Jan had not believed that they would be.

The ruins topped a butte that rose perhaps a hundred meters above the surrounding countryside and extended for about a square kilometer. It took a sharp scramble to reach them and, when they had, there was little to reward the climb. Few of the stone walls remained more than waist-high and most of the city/castle/fortification/whatever was reduced to rubble by time. There was little to show what manner of creature had inhabited the place until Jason found a mural on one of the plastered inner walls. Its faded pigment showed a potbellied, winged mammal with what appeared to be grasping hands. In a corner of the mural, isolated by fractured plaster, were the foot and ankle of another creature. Jan stared long at it, then rummaged without success for the lost pieces of plaster. Adrian joined him, asking “Why so intent?”

“Because,” Jan answered, “that foot looks uncannily human.” They did not find the missing plaster, nor anything else to identify the masters of the ruin.

It was well past noon when they left the site, intent on returning to the camp by nightfall. Jason seemed troubled and managed to fall back slightly to speak to Jan alone.

“Something you said to Dumezil bothers me. You said that we would be here as long as we survive. What exactly did you mean by that?”

*****

The precursors, as the makers of the ruins come to be called, are here because I felt that a survival story alone would be a bit dry and uninteresting without some hint of mystery. When I wrote these paragraphs, I had no idea how much this decision would influence the second half of the book.

Also, regarding the krats –  Wild Kratts, the PBS nature show, was years in the future when my krats were born.

more tomorrow