Blazon

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

At last as they reached out through the ghostly transparencies of the galaxy the men from Earth encountered an alien race completely non-human in appearance. They were the real aliens. Their physiology differed gruesomely from Terrans' - could men hope their psychology would not? The Unknown Non Human Aliens - the Unha - replied to peace overtures with immediate hostility. So, reluctantly, the men from Earth forged a weapon of awesome power. Created out of the shattered bodies of men and women - men like Siegfried Ritter, Giuseppe Tozzi and Eugene Valois - Blazon set fire to the Galaxy. For Doctor Marjorie Rothwell the existence of Blazon challenged the basic assumptions forced on humanity by alien intransigence; but the action-packed story of Blazon does more than explore the running sore of human aggression in its understanding of human sacrifice.

Release date: August 6, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

I

HE HAD not been born on Earth, nor had his parents, his body perfectly handled a one point five gravity, he rode a razor-toothed fork-tailed eight-legged creature he controlled by means of colour changes—and yet he vomited with nausea the first time he saw an alien.

That morning that threatened to last a lifetime Eugene Valois strode down the steps of the family’s villa feeling the sunshine harsh on his body, dragging in deep breaths of the air that, he had been told, contained ten per cent more oxygen than terrestrial air. Valois felt all of life and all of Spring burgeoning in his body.

His father had promised to speak to old Lafarge about Nina—high time a young man of nineteen thought seriously about creating his own family, his father had growled, the craggy skin creasing about his mouth, the rueful sly smile of a strong man admitting he had grown a son.

At thought of Nina—of the golden hair and lissom body and mysterious promise—young Valois wanted to caper about, to dance like crazy, to yell his good fortune at his sun, at the sun Kleber, the only sun he had ever known. Instead he kicked his boots in the hot dust and strode proudly, spine taut, head erect, showing the hands that he was a Valois and the son of his father, big men of a big family, their pride a garment that, although tattered now in face of the combines, yet sustained them in these days of duress.

As though to mock that thought the shrill punctuating whine of a Duroc flier flaunted down the sky. The sound irritated men and beasts on the Valois villa: old Pierre spat viciously and leaped to grasp a chargon, its eight hooves spurting red dust; a shivery ripple of unease spread through the corral; someone dropped an aluminium pan—anything at all that reminded these men of the Valois of the combines brought immediate unreasoning hatred.

“Cursed combines!” Old Pierre had the beast under control, untangling leg irons and soothing with the habits of a lifetime.

Around the villa the land spread out in undulations that merely accentuated the flatness, isolated clumps of upside-down-trees, olive-green sentinels of emptiness in that grazing country, forced the tired eye on and on to the farthest horizons. Those horizons extended widely here on Vidoq giving a man space to breathe, to expand his chest, to know he lived on a planet larger than Earth and therefore somehow superior.

“The combines will get their reckoning one day, never fear.” Marcel Valois, his brother, hard of hand and wide of shoulder, ever-smiling—even now, even as he shared the dark thoughts of the Valois against those grasping materialists of the combines—still smiling as he took his chargon from old Pierre and prepared to mount.

Young Valois swung up beside his elder brother and for a moment they rode knee to knee. Marcel’s face, swarthy, black-moustached, the eyes a strange mixture of merriment and steely mercilessness, that face, Valois knew for his own.

“But every year they press us harder,” he said, flicking the reins. “We have no antigrav fliers, we have no computerised controls, we do not have the financial backing of a dozen inhabited worlds—”

“But we have ourselves, Eugene!” Marcel’s contempt seared.

The pride of race and family could never fail to uplift Eugene Valois. With his brother at his side and the powerful feel of his chargon between his knees, his rifle—an old and well-worn but still lethal and accurate Carnot Twenty Five disruptor—snug in its scabbard under his leg he could feel the surge of pride and of blood; no—while they retained their self-respect no money-grubbing cartel would ever beat the Valois.

“Here comes father.”

The close-held scuffling clip-clop of a chargon’s eight hooves heralded their father as he rounded the corner of the villa and headed towards them. Straight and tall he rode, his hair still jet-black, his eyes as keen as ever without artificial aid, a fine figure of a man, Charles Valois. At once his sons saw something had happened to displease him in the fifteen minutes betwen now and the time they had last seen him after breakfast.

He brought his chargon to ride alongside theirs. Three of a kind, they rode, three tall tough men, proud of their strength and taking strength from their pride.

They waited for their father to speak.

“Syrinx.” The way he said it chilled them. “Lafarge called through. His radioman gave the message before he rode out. Everyone else has gone. We must hurry.”

“Where, father?” asked Marcel.

“At the far end of Fifty Kilometre Dale, where Lafarge’s land marches with ours.”

“Syrinx,” said young Valois. He shivered and then shook himself, ashamed, hoping his father and brother had not seen. “They are very devils—”

“They are the plague of Vidoq—but they are mere animals, mere carnivores—all their teeth and all their talons mean nothing against a Carnot.”

“If only we had proper radar alarms—”

“But we do not! Ride, my sons. While we chatter like old women the Syrinx are having their way with our prize dodos.”

Followed by their dozen hands, the three Valois men rode out of their villa, rode across the sparse grassy plain, kicking red dust in a straight line, heading hard for Fifty Kilometre Dale.

The stiff enamelled feathers covering their chargons in a living quilt of light glistered and glistened in the sun—the sun Kleber that shed hard bright unwavering light upon this planet of Vidoq—their accoutrements jingled with a soft eight-barred rhythmic music of motion always reminding them that the animals’ sure eight-footed gait would not betray their riders while life still breathed in those gorgeous plumaged bodies. He’d reared old Smokey on a milk-concentrate diet when his mother had died, caring for him and replacing that lost mother, and now the chargon repaid him by becoming the single most important factor in his work-life—even if he lost his rifle old Smokey would still save him. If he lost the chargon—the rifle could not compensate for the loss.

The ride took the immediacy out of the problem, until Eugene snapped alert as his chargon changed pace along with the others.

“They went over that crest!” Marcel shouted. “A pair.”

From the shadow of the rounded bulge of the hill ahead three dodos burst, necks outstretched and bodies like rear-engined jets, their long slender legs thrusting, the remaining three pairs of legs fused long ago in evolution’s weird way of reversing direction into useless wing appendages.

They ran as though from medieval demons of hell—they knew they ran from demons. Behind them would slaver the syrinx, red mouthed, fanged, joying in killing for the sake of killing. Vermin, Valois knew without a second thought, vermin to be put down ruthlessly and without compunction. Even Nina, young tender loving Nina, could not find a gramme of compassion for Syrinx, despite their undoubted animal flesh-and-blood relationships to the greater world of life. Life they were; but every man and woman and chargon of Vidoq knew they were evil life.

Someone shouted at the other side of the hill, the voice lingering and thin against the sky. The men checked.

“There’s a hold-up,” his father waved them to a halt. “Engene—ride across and check with Marcel. Don’t show yourself to the syrinx—well, go on—move!”

Rapping out a brisk colour programme and feeling old Smokey lolloping into action beneath him. Valois crushed the quick flush of resentment. He had been lax in thinking of his father as his father; right this minute, here under the familiar sky of Vidoq on their own lands, his father was a commander of troops, in action against an evil and cunning enemy. Here, God forgive them all, was no time for weakness.

He cut swiftly down the shoulder of the hill, red dust drifting flatly away on the lee slope, downwind of the syrinx, angling for the other hill and his brother.

In the cleavage between the mounds grew a thick cactus tree, like a terrestrial cactus run wild on glut-feeding, and without his volition old Smokey picked a course wide of the lush spines and fat water bottles, still more than half-full this way through the dry season. A cactus tree—their Vidoq name was Poison Maes, derived from function and design—could sprinkle the flesh of animals with a crystalline powder, spurted from the hollow spines, that irritated and finally drove to madness the unlucky victim. Most of the higher life on Vidoq had evolved feathers over the years of planetary build-up—some flying, others, like the dodo, an evolutionary stage after flight had been forgotten—and in the amusing upstage way of alien evolution feathers protected from the Poison Mae’s powder.

But old Smokey knew that his master did not have his feathered chaps on in this hunt for Syrinx and so guided away from the Poison Mae.

The shout rose again, like a stammering yowl-bird, from the far side of the hill. No response could be expected from the chargon to a sound he could not hear, and Valois punched out a savage orangey-red full emergency gallop programme. Old Smokey put his head down near the ground, flattened out, and rippled his eight legs under him like a berserk escalator speed-blurred beyond the edge of discrete vision.

II

No shots had been fired from that direction. Everything pointed to trouble there; but it could not be Syrinx.

A riderless chargon burst over the brow of the hill like a Vidoq pheasant springing into the guns and dropping. Eight legs spraddled, the big beast’s body up-ended, cartwheeled and ballooned, crashed down squashingly to bounce all aflop down the hill.

“What the—?” Valois felt the first tremor of understanding that he did not understand. The desire to rein around and return to report to his father had to be fought and resisted; his orders were quite clear. He must find Marcel and the reasons for these disparate and yet probably connected events. And still no gun shots …

Old Smokey did not like the sight and smell of the dead chargon. His dead run deviated yet again as he angled to mount the slope avoiding the carcass.

The sunshine from Kleber splashed a squat shimmering shadow from old Smokey, the red dust puffed dryly beneath his hooves, the sky hammered its copper cauldron lid, bolted and brazed searingly to the horizon, the air parched his lips and tongue and swallowing merely irritated … He rode on over the crest of the hill …

A wash of light like an insubsantial illuminated waterfall fell across his eyes and he blinked. He felt something vanish from between his knees and could not remember what that something was. He felt his right hand constricting on emptiness and wondered why he gripped so tightly with sweaty fingers. His left hand fumbled at his bare chest, feeling smooth powdered flesh, and he wondered fleetingly what he tried to find there.

Like a lone voice shouting helplessly against the meaningless mass roar of a stadium-packed multitude, a phrase, a broken sentence, a confused handful of words with their semantic meanings wrenched from them by ultra-decibel slaverings, splintered in rejection against his consciousness. He knew how important it was for him to understand that ghostly far-off whisper; but he could not stop now, not right this minute, to listen, when he was being prepared for his wedding with Nina.

They bowed and smiled and waved him in, here in the softly carpeted palace of all delights. Golden chandeliers with coruscating crystal pendants flashed welcomes, perfume invisibly streaked the air with heady delights, young girls swayed hypnotically, their hips reciprocals of pleasure to jaded eyes. Ceiling high mirrors doubled everything, reflected reflections trebling, quadruplying, multiplying sensation and artifice into multidimensional boxes of glass baubles. Glass reflections laughed and jeered back at him, white teeth blinding, naked arms swaying like sea anemones, bangles flashing silently, feet intricately placing in wild dances silently—for sound had been absorbed, soaked up and deadened here in this place where he was to be prepared for his wedding.

They took him laughing to the chair, they seated him with demure taps, they wantonly displayed their arms and legs as they prepared his bristly workman’s chin for shaving. Who they were he did not know. They laughed widely in a silent pantomime of pleasure, like dream princesses with trailing hair and streaming dresses they held his head and brought the razors and pumped hot water that steamed and soaped and lathered and pinked his skin, ready f. . .