John Brunner - To Conquer Chaos

There was no mercy. There could be none. Again, Maxall gave the order, and this time a white-faced Keefe obeyed it. He took a javelin from a bystander, aimed carefully, and threw. It sank into the black jelly about where the boy’s throat must be. Black-smeared hands reached up to it, failed in the attempt, and fell back as the life leaked out of his body.

“Burn the corpse!” Keefe said harshly, and two young men moved to pick up a heatbeam projector. Jasper’s mother had released Maxall by now, and was kneeling with her face to the dust, yelling curses.

“What-what happened?” Conrad whispered to Nestamay. In a cold voice she answered.

“Because of something I did-or wouldn’t do-he tried to take his revenge by turning off the alarm which warns us of a thing hatching. It was meant to scare me during my night’s watch. Only a thing came through before he expected. While all the rest of us were out chasing it away and meeting you, he must have come back to try and cover up what he’d done-re-connect the alarm, I imagine. But in his haste, he …”

“He what?” Conrad prompted from a dry throat.

“The black stuff,” Nestamay said. “It’s the seed-mass of one of those plants there. We have a working party out every day to cut back or burn off such seed-masses on the outside where we can get at them and they might get at us. But inside the dome there are huge areas where we can’t venture in, and the seed masses grow there, too. That’s why we can’t get rid of the vegetation permanently. And you see they-well, in some fashion they’re sensitive to movement near them. They burst over things that go too close. I’ve seen it happen to things. I never saw it happen to a person before, and I hope I never see it again!”

She gave a fierce shudder. “They say it doesn’t kill you,” she finished. “You just die, and it takes a long, long time.”

Conrad swallowed hard. By now the searing heatbeam had reduced the miserable corpse of Jasper to a blackened smear and calcined bones, and Maxall was turning to Yanderman again. He was standing noticeably straighter, as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

“One of the dangers of our existence,” he said. “Though nothing compared to what you’ve faced to come to us. I’ll send my assistant Keefe to make certain the alarm is functioning, and perhaps we can enjoy a short rest after the day’s turmoil.”

Yanderman spoke only with an effort. He said, “We faced dangers, as you put it, for a matter of days to get to you. If you’ve had to endure this kind of thing for four and a half centuries, all I can say is that my friend and I had the better bargain!”

Hoping that nobody was paying attention to him, and sure at least that Nestamay wasn’t, because her grandfather had sent her to fetch another jug of the curious fruit-flavoured concoction these people had instead of beer, Conrad leaned back in the corner of the Maxall hovel. It wasn’t much of a building compared with the solid stone-and-timber work of Lagwich, but it had one thing in its favour, which it had taken him a long time to track down. The air was cleaner than in a Lagwich house. Partly it was due to the absence of cooking smells, but mostly, he thought, it was because the people had fresh clothing two or three times a week.

He’d been given a suit of the same kind, and found it very comfortable. But he didn’t pretend to follow the explanation he’d been given about the source of the garments, any more than he was pretending now to follow the conversation between Yanderman, Maxall, Keefe and Egrin.

It seemed the local people would never run out of questions-how big is the barrenland, how long did it take you to get across, where is Lagwich and how big, where is Esberg and how big, are there any other barrenlands, how many people are there in the world …? It was about there that Conrad had decided to lean back and shut his eyes. He drowsed.

“More to drink, Conrad?”

He snapped back to awareness. Nestamay was offering him the jug, and in bending forward also a remarkable view of her young bosom. Remembering he was an explorer, Conrad viewed. A few seconds later, however, the sound of his name spoken by Yanderman made him turn guiltily and say, “Ah-yes?”

But Yanderman wasn’t addressing him. He was explaining the way they had compiled the map to spare themselves the need to carry water, and Grandfather Maxall was shaking his head apparently at the fact that his son had overlooked this possibility.

Did that imply that somebody here had the same gift as himself? Conrad leaned forward and paid attention. The answer was no, but there were salvaged scraps of drawings and diagrams from which at least some information about water could have been extracted, although in every other respect they had been rendered obsolete by the creation of the barrenland.

“You had access to similar maps?” Maxall suggested.

Yanderman shook his head and explained about Conrad’s gift, and there were wondering comments all round. Keefe was the most eager to learn more on this subject, and asked Yanderman directly for a demonstration of trance.

“I think my friend is rather tired,” Yanderman countered, and earned Conrad’s lasting gratitude for his understanding.

“I’m so sorry!” Grandfather Maxall said. “Why, here we’ve been plying you with endless questions, and you’re exhausted! We can show you to beds for the night at once if you wish.”

Conrad felt a stir of hope. But Yanderman wasn’t satisfied. He said, “I’d rather ask you a few questions first, if you don’t mind. You realise, much of what we’ve learned from visions experienced by Conrad here, and by Granny Jassy and others at Esberg, was completely irrelevant, and since we had no idea what might be significant we’ve never made much sense out of it. To start with: what is the barrenland?”

“A quarantine area,” Maxall answered promptly. “The term is traditional, though we often call it the bare ground.”

“What was it for?”

“It was meant to isolate the Station from the rest of the world.”

“How was it-? No, that’s irrelevant at the moment.” Yanderman rubbed his chin; he had sprouted a fair beard since he last saw a razor, and it was irritating him. “All right: what’s this place-the Station, as you call it?”

“A …” Grandfather Maxall hesitated. “Again, I have to use a traditional name. You see, a lot of things we know, we don’t understand. We have the same problem as you-sorting out the useful from the useless information, and I imagine a lot of information which was once useful has been forgotten because the situation altered. So I think I can best define the Station by reading a passage of the traditional lore to you. Nestamay, give me the locked case!”

The girl hurried to fetch it. Sorting through the various charts and drawings in it, Grandfather Maxall came eventually to a piece of paper yellowed and fragile with age. He peered shortsightedly at it.

“If I stumble in my reading, it’s because I haven’t studied this passage for a long time,” he excused himself. “I meant to go over it with Nestamay, but somehow … Well, here it is. It begins with a broken sentence, by the way. See if you can make sense of it with your extra data.”

He cleared his throat. “‘… result of many years of research and development on many different planets.’ That’s the broken sentence. It goes on.

‘“Its capacity is being continually expanded. Indeed, it will continue to expand to match the growing volume of interstellar traffic for the foreseeable future. No other information-processing system would be capable of coping. Only the organochemic cortex has saved interstellar traffic from being overwhelmed by its own complexity. It is predicted that in a century’s time organochemic cortexes will be handling fifty times the present traffic safely and without error.