The Palace of Eternity

Book 116: Gateway Essentials

by Bob Shaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Shrouded by its shell of drifting lunar fragments, the planet Mnemosyne is a refuge for creative artists and poets, a place isolated from the desperate, losing struggle of the humans against the Syccans. But then COMsac, theFederation's High Command, come to Mnemosyne, and suddenly the planet is more a military colony than a place for artists. For Mack Taverner, the dilemma is stark: either go along with the brutal military visitation or join the hopeless resitance and become a 'traitor'. His choice has awesome and extraordinary consequenses . . .

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 218

Sample

IN SPITE OF all his efforts, Tavernor was unable to remain indoors when it was time for the sky to catch fire.

Tension had been gnawing at his stomach for most of the evening, and the repair job on the boat turbine seemed to have grown progressively more difficult, although he knew it was simply that his concentration was failing. Finally, he laid his welding pistol down and switched off the lights above the workbench.

Immediately there was a nervous fluttering among the caged leatherwings at the opposite end of the long room. The compact, bat-like creatures disliked any sudden change in light intensity. Tavernor went to the cage and steadied it with his hands, feeling the wires vibrate like harpstrings under his fingers. He put his face close to the cage, swallowing as the cool air from the wingbeats caught in his throat, and projected his thoughts towards the squeaking, silver-eyed mammals.

Be calm, little friends. All is well. All is well …

The clamor within the cage ceased almost at once, and the leatherwings returned to their perches, the mercury-specks of their eyes shining at him in the similitude of intelligence.

“That’s better,” Tavernor whispered, aware that the creatures’ telepathic faculties had picked up the undercurrents of his own edginess.

He locked the workshop door behind him, crossed the living room and went out of the single-story building into the warm October night. The year on Mnemosyne had almost five hundred days, and there were virtually no seasons, but men had carried their own calendars into space. Back on Earth’s northern hemisphere, trees were being transmuted to copper and gold—so it was October on Mnemosyne and a hundred other colonized worlds.

Tavernor checked the time with his watch. Less than five minutes to go.

He took his pipe from his pocket, loaded it with moist strands of tobacco and lit up. The ignited glowing shreds on top writhed upwards and Tavernor pressed them down with a work-hardened fingertip, calming himself with the rites of patience. He leaned against the wall of the darkened house while the smoke carried its message of sanity away on the night air. Tavernor imagined the fragrance reaching into nests and burrows in the surrounding forest, and wondered what their furry inhabitants would make of it. They had had barely a hundred years to get used to humanity’s presence on their world, and—with the exception of the leatherwings—had maintained a somber, watchful reserve.

At two minutes before zero hour Tavernor transferred his attention to the sky. The heavens above Mnemosyne were unlike those of any planet he had ever visited. Many geological ages earlier two large moons had coursed overhead, drawing closer and closer together until they had collided. Traces of that cosmic impact could be found all over the craters, but the main evidence was in the sky.

A shell of lunar fragments—many of them large enough for their irregularity of outline to be visible to the naked eye—constantly drifted on the background of fainter stars, forming a curtain that reached from pole to pole. The pattern of brilliant shards never repeated itself, and adding to the spectacle was the fact that the screen was dense enough for eclipses to take place on a continuous basis. As Mnemosyne’s shadow swept across the sky groups of moonlets would pass from white right through the colors of the spectrum, vanish into blackness, then reappear, to run the penumbral gamut in reverse. The total light cast was about equal to that of a normal moon but as it was diffused, coming from every part of the sky, there were no shadows—just a faint silvery ambience.

Against a sky like that, even a first magnitude star was difficult to pick out, but Tavernor knew exactly where to look. His eyes fastened on the single, wavering speck of light that was Neilson’s Star. Almost seven light-years distant, it was lost in the kaleidoscope of Mnemosyne’s night sky, but its insignificance was soon to be a thing of the past.

As the final seconds ticked away, the tension inside Tavernor’s guts increased until he could feel it as a hard bullet of apprehension. I’m indulging this thing, he told himself. After all, the event itself had taken place seven years ago. That had been when Earth’s Stellar Engineering Corps (the vast egotism of the title never failed to dismay Tavernor) had selected Neilson’s Star, noting with approval that it was of the classical type for their purpose. A close binary, the popularized reports had stated. Principal component, in the giant sequence of the Hertz-sprung-Russell diagram; secondary component, small and dense; planets, none. Prognosis for modification: excellent.

That was when the Corps’ great butterfly ships had come swarming on their magnetic wings, surrounding the doomed giant, raking its surface with the stings of their lasers, pouring in energy at gamma ray frequencies until the influx reached insupportable intensities, until…

Tavernor’s teeth clenched on the mouthpiece of his pipe as—with the suddenness of a room lamp being switched on—the house, the surrounding forest, the distant mountain ranges, the whole sky, all was bathed in hard white light. Its source was Neilson’s Star, which was now a point of searing brilliance so fierce that he had to jerk his eyes away from it. Even at the distance of seven light-years the nova’s initial fury could have pricked through his retinas. Forgive us, he thought; please forgive us.

The forest lay still for a disbelieving moment, as though stunned by the nova’s intangible hammer-blow, then it erupted in protest against this supremely unnatural event. A billion wings beat the air in a kind of diffused explosion. The flood of light pouring down from the transformed sky was dimmed momentarily as every creature capable of flight projected itself into the air, wheeled and darted for safety. Their concerted defiance of gravity gave Tavernor the fleeting sensation that it was he who was sinking; and then the sound reached him. Screams, squawks, whistles, whimpers, roars, clicks, hisses, combined with the flurry of wings, clatter of dry leaves, scampering of feet, followed by …

Utter silence.

The forest watched and waited.

Tavernor found himself gripped by the ghastly stillness, reduced to the level of one of Mnemosyne’s forest creatures, virtually mindless, yet he had in that moment a sense of being aware of Life’s relationship to the space-time continuum in a way that men no longer understood. The vast and transparent parameters of the eternal problem seemed to parade on the surface of the gestalt mind of which he might suddenly have become a part. Life. Death. Eternity. The numinous. Panspermism. Tavernor felt a tremendous elation. Panspermism—the concept of ubiquitous life. Justification for believing that every mind in existence was linked to every other mind that had ever been? If so, then novae and supernovae were only too well understood by the quivering inhabitants of the dark burrows and shielded nests around him. How many times in this galaxy alone had a star gone berserk? A million times? And in the eternity of galaxies? How many civilizations, how many incomputable billions of lives had been blasted out of existence by the star-death? And had each being, intelligent or otherwise, in that last withering second, fed the same message into the panspermic all-mind, making it available to every sentient creature that would ever exist in the continuum’s dark infinities? Look out, little brother whether you walk, crawl, swim, burrow or fly—when the sky suddenly floods with light, make your peace, make your peace …

Tavernor felt his elation increase—he was on the brink of understanding something important—and then, because the emotion was a product of his individuality, the nebulous contact was lost, with an accelerating yearning slide into normalcy. There was a moment of disappointment, but even that vanished into something less than a memory. He re-lit his pipe and tried to get used to the altered appearance of his surroundings. Statements issued by the War Bureau had said that for two weeks Neilson’s Star would become about a million times brighter than before, but would nonetheless still be ten thousand times less brilliant than Mnemosyne’s own sun. The effect was similar to bright moonlight on Earth, Tavernor realized. Only the suddenness of the illumination had made it awesome, after all—the suddenness and his knowledge of the deadly purpose behind it.

The sound of a ground-effect machine approaching from the direction of the Center disturbed Tavernor’s reverie. Tuning his ears to the engine note, he recognized the smoothly expensive whine of Lissa Grenoble’s personal machine even before he saw its headlights splaying their topaz fingers through the trees. His heart began to thud steadily and peacefully. He remained immobile until the vehicle had almost reached the house, then became aware that he was deliberately trying to display the attributes she most admired in him—solidity, self-sufficiency, brooding physical power. There’s no fool like a middle-aged fool, he thought, as he shouldered himself off the wall.

He caught the handle of the passenger door and steadied the machine as it sank to the ground. Lissa got out at the far side, smiling whitely. As always, the sight of her turned his inside into a volcano which had its base somewhere in his loins. Framed by shoulder-length black hair, Lissa’s face was dominated by a generous mouth and large gray eyes. Her nose was slightly upturned and a little too broad for classical beauty. It was a face that was almost a caricature of warm femininity, perfectly matching a body in which breasts and thighs were slightly more ample than current fashion demanded.

“Engine still sounds good,” he remarked, for want of something better to say.

Lissa Grenoble was the daughter of Howard Grenoble, the planetary administrator, but Tavernor had met her in the same way that he usually met people on Mnemosyne—through being asked to repair a machine. The planet was virtually without metallic deposits, and no butterfly ship could ply through its shell of lunar fragments with cargo from Earth or any of the nearer manufacturing centers. So even Mnemosyne’s first family, which was also its richest, preferred to pay for repeated repairs to an older vehicle, rather than go to the fantastic expense of importing a new one by way of butterfly ship, orbital station and reactor-powered stage ship.

“Of course the engine sounds good,” Lissa replied lightly. “You made it better than new, didn’t you?”

“You’ve been reading my promotional literature.” Tavernor was flattered in spite of himself.

Lissa came around the vehicle, caught his arm and leaned against him, purposefully. He kissed her once, drinking in the incredible reality of her the way a thirsting man gulps his first draught of water. Her tongue felt hot, hotter than any human’s ought to feel.

“Hey!” He broke away from her. “You started early tonight.”

“What do you mean, Mack?” Lissa pouted beautifully.

“Sparks. You’ve been drinking sparks.”

“Don’t be silly. Do I smell of sparks?”

Tavernor sniffed doubtfully, twisting his head away as she playfully tried to nip the end of his nose. The volatile, meadows-in-summer aroma of sparks was absent, but he was not quite satisfied. He never drank the dream-liquor himself, preferring whiskey—another reminder that Lissa was nineteen and he was exactly thirty years older. People no longer showed their age much, so there was no physical barrier between them; but the years were there in his mind just the same.

“Let’s go inside,” he said. “Away from this ghastly light.”

“Ghastly? I think it’s romantic.”

Tavernor frowned. Lissa was laying it on too thick. “Romantic! You know what it means?” He glanced up at the intense point of light, now easily the most prominent object in the sky, which Neilson’s Star had become.

“Yes, of course. It means they’re opening a high-speed commercial lane to Mnemosyne.”

“No.” Tavernor felt his tension return. “The war’s coming this way.”

“Now you are being silly.”

Lissa tugged his arm and they went into the house. Tavernor reached for the light switch, but she stayed his hand, closing with him again. He responded instinctively, then part of his mind which never relaxed its guard injected a niggling little idea through the emotional turmoil. This, he thought, is the clumsiest attempt at a seduction I’ve ever seen.

Feeling somehow like a cheat, Tavernor abstracted himself sufficiently to be able to review his relationship with Melissa Grenoble, from the time they had met three months earlier until the present moment. Although the attraction had been both instantaneous and mutual, the friendship had been an uneasy one, mainly because of the difference between their positions in Mnemosyne’s tightly knit social structure. Howard Grenoble’s appointment was perhaps the least political of its kind in the Federation—thanks to the planet’s numerous peculiarities—but he still carried the rank of Administrator, and his daughter was not expected to become involved with …

“Just think of it, Mack,” Lissa was whispering. “Ten whole days on the south coast. Just the two of us.”

Tavernor tried to focus on her words. “Your father would love that.”

“He won’t know. There’s a painting exhibition going south at the same time. I told him I was going on it. Kris Shelby’s organizing the trip, and you know he’s the soul of discretion …”

“You mean he can be bought like a stick of gum.”

“What’s that got to do with us?” There was the faintest edge of impatience in Lissa’s voice.

“Why are you doing this?” He used calculated stolidity, trying to anger her. “Why now?”

She hesitated, then spoke with a matter-of-factness he found strangely disturbing. “I want you, Mack. I want you, and there’s a limit to how long I can wait. Is that so difficult to understand?”

Standing with her in the confined darkness, breast to breast, thigh to thigh, Tavernor felt his detachment begin to crumble. Why not? The blood-red thought hammered at him. Why not? Aware of his capitulation, Lissa snaked her arms around his neck and sighed comfortably as he lowered his face to hers. He froze for a second and abruptly pushed her away, filled with a sudden bleak anger.

In her open mouth, visible only because of the room’s utter blackness, he had seen golden fireflies spinning.

“You shouldn’t have stopped me switching on the lights,” Tavernor commented a few minutes later as they drove towards the Center, following the glittering surface of a forest stream.

“Mack! Are you going to tell me what’s the matter?”

“You can kill the smell of sparks easily enough—the luminescence is a little tougher.”

“I …”

“What’s it all about, Lissa?”

“I’ve told you already.” Her voice was dull.

“Of course. Our beautiful natural relationship. But you had to tank up on sparks first.”

“I don’t see what difference my having a drink makes.”

“Lissa,” he said impatiently. “If we can’t be honest with each other, let’s not speak at all.” Listen to me, he thought. Old Man Tavernor.

There was a long silence, during which he concentrated on keeping the fast-skimming vehicle in the center of the stream. The trees on each bank were limned from above with silver from Neilson’s Star, and on their undersurfaces with gold from the machine’s powerful headlights, giving them a look of unreality. Tinsel trees lining a fairy highway. Tavernor edged the throttle forward and the finely tuned engine responded immediately.

Traveling at close to a hundred miles an hour, the vehicle screamed out into the stream’s final broadening sweep and arrowed out to sea, slicing the tops off waves and converting them into an undulating plume of white spray which faded away far to the rear. The broad black ocean lay ahead, and Tavernor had a sudden urge to escape the war he knew to be coming by pushing the throttle to the end of its slot and holding a straight course, scribing a bright line on the dark waters, until the turbines destroyed themselves, and him, and the vast storehouse of his guilt …

“That’s interesting,” Lissa said conversationally. “The rev counter’s gone all the way into the red. I’ve never managed to get it through the orange sector.”

“That,” said Tavernor, gratefully returning to his senses, “was before I made your power plant better than new. Remember?” He slowed the vehicle to a more respectable speed and eased it into a wide turn which brought the lights of the Center marc. . .