Bedlam Planet (18 page)

“Dan!” Dennis said explosively, and strode forward. At the sound, the big dark man jerked his head around suspiciously, and he found himself looking into a face which was … wrong. The eyes were bright and alert, but no hint of recognition came to the surrounding features. The whole face was a parody.

His heart lurched towards despair. He had been so sure his guesses were correct! But now, as Dan rose and began to make towards him, seeming puzzled, he was poised to turn and flee. The Dan Sakky he knew would have exclaimed with pleasure at seeing an old friend, come to clap him on the back and ask how he had been. Whereas this creature—

“It’s all right, Dennis,” a soft voice said at his side, and he started. Unnoticed, Parvati had crept up. She too was unclothed, but over her shoulder she had a sort of crude basket on a sling, woven from supple plant-stems, in which she had placed a dozen assorted samples of Asgard vegetation. “That’s the price which has to be paid. Though if you worked out enough of the truth to bring you here looking for us, I don’t suppose I need to tell you that.”

She put her hand out, and Dan took it obediently. He

sat down on his heels again and stared curiously at Dennis.

Tearing his attention away, Dennis rounded on Parvati. She at least was sane and in good health, and he wanted to fall on her shoulder and weep away the dreadful anxiety of the past few weeks. But all he could manage to do was say—as it seemed to him, inanely—“I thought I saw you just now. On the base island.”

She smiled and linked her fingers with his. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean the way one’s subconscious keeps sending up messages, and they come though to awareness in the most extraordinary forms … Oh,
Dennis!”

She snatched away the hand that Dan was holding and abruptly flung her arms about his neck. Then there was a time when all he knew was a series of frantic kisses and the touch of her smooth tear-wet face on his stubbly cheek, and vaguely, at the edge of perception, Dan wandering off to inspect another nearby plant, grimacing at them occasionally.

Finally he was able to whisper, close to her ear, “You are really all right, then—all of you?”

“Of course. More or less. I mean, we’re all still alive and well, and we’ve managed to fix up shelters and we’re gradually working out what’s useful and what isn’t. That’s the reason for this basket I’m carrying, of course. And for the state Dan’s in. It’s his turn.”

A blinding light broke in on Dennis’s mind. He stepped back from Parvati and pointed a shaky finger at Dan. He repeated, “His turn? You mean it’s deliberate?”

“It’s the only way, Dennis,” Parvati said soberly. “You must realise that—don’t you?”

Dennis closed his eyes briefly, recalling a period of ten days lost from his life when he had apparently behaved just as Dan was doing now: wandering about the diamond island at the beck and call of instinct, sleeping where he grew tired, sampling the vegetation and digesting it or bringing it up again.

“I—ah—I got poisoned, I think,” he said at last. “I went swimming and crossed the path of something which I guess must be like a stinging jellyfish. And then there were ten days when I don’t remember anything which makes sense. Yet I’m the only person, over there on the base island, who isn’t fit to drop from scurvy. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Parvati looked horrified. “You must have had a terrible time!” she exclaimed. “It must have been violent! Ours was gentle, at least, even though it was alarming before we realised what it was doing to us.”

“What is it doing?” Dennis demanded. “I think if someone doesn’t make it clear to me soon, I’ll start screaming.”

“Did you ever keep a dog?” she said after a moment for thought. “Did you ever see one drag itself across country when it was so sick it could barely stand, in search of a special kind of grass which would make its belly reject the poison it had swallowed? We’ve got to be our own dogs, as it were. Our bodies know things which our minds never can. So what we have to do is turn our minds off, and bit by bit we’re figuring out how.”

Dennis stared in dismay at Dan, who had now located a sort of fungus growing on the side of a woodplant, and was testing a flake of it with a critical expression. Shortly he spat it out and moved on.

“But if one has to go insane in order to stay alive—“ he began, and Parvati cut him short.

“No, Dennis! That’s the whole point! Don’t think of what’s happening to Dan, or what happened to you, as ‘going insane’. It’s the exact opposite! You went
sane—
totally and completely sane!”

H
OPELESSLY BAFFLED
by the paradox Parvati had offered him, Dennis stared at her blankly. She gave an impatient shrug and settled her basket more easily on its sling.

“It’s not much good my talking to you on my own,” she said. “You need Tai’s theory, and Abdul’s, as well as mine, before it’ll come clear. Ill take you to them now. Dan’s almost due to fall asleep, I guess, and I have five or six things in the bag which we haven’t collected before.”

“You mean he—?” Dennis nodded at Dan.

“Yes, of course. What do you think we’re doing? Each of us in turn is acting like a—what’s the term Ulla dredged up? Ah yes!—a truffle-hound. Before they found out how to cultivate truffles commercially, they used to rely on trained dogs or pigs which snuffed them out. We only have ourselves, as I said. So we’re selecting a number of native plants by instinct, which we can later
evaluate consciously. We’ve found a substance we can chew for a bit which does what this poisonous fish did to you—temporarily suspend the higher levels of the mind—and today Dan’s been dosing himself, and I’ve been taking samples of anything he approved of.”

“You—turn your mind off?” Dennis said in dismay, thinking of the shock he would have had if he had encountered Parvati, rather than Dan, in that condition.

“It was my turn yesterday,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s why I’m on basket duty. Tomorrow Dan will go out with Kitty. But come along—let’s not stand around. You too, Dan!”

Compliant as a well-trained dog, Dan fell in behind them as she turned to lead the way.

There was nothing of modern Earth—that sophisticated, domesticated planet—about the settlement to which she brought him,. There were no level plane roofs, no meticulously machined planks. Yet there was incontestably something of mankind about it, for all that it was composed of lean-to structures against a convenient rock wall, made of boughs and sheets of bark plastered over with natural mud and left to dry.

Crude they might be, but these peculiar little sheds were unique. No creatures on Asgard except men built anything on land.

Surrounding the “hamlet”, in which the centrepiece was formed by a large stone hearth piled with ashes, there were patches of cultivated ground, and he recognised established plants of spinach, beans, potatoes, corn, a dozen or more varieties. Each plant was surrounded by a tiny moat into which raw sewage had been poured, judging by the smell. Tai and Kitty were tending them; Abdul was adding a new layer of adobe to one of the walls, and Ulla was doing something with the fibrous stalks of a native plant which rang a chord of memory in Dennis’s mind. As a child he had seen in a history-book a picture of the way in which flax used to be
gathered and allowed to rot before the long strands that became linen could be teased out.

Some problems have the same solution no matter where you are. But others …

At sight of him they dropped their tasks and came running. There was hand-shaking, and clapping on shoulders, and a frantic kiss from Kitty which went on so long it proved that one characteristic of the little Greek meteorologist had survived the astonishing change all these people had undergone. Finally he had a chance to look them over, and was instantly struck by a crucial truth.

Deprived of all the aids which had been brought from Earth to make colonisation of Asgard easy, they had managed to preserve the single indispensable advantage which the people on the well-equipped base island had lost.

They were all healthy.

Underfed to the point of gauntness-Abdul was positively stringy now, and even Tai’s blocky body had hardened down to its essential muscle, innocent of fat—they yet exuded vitality, and were so eager to discuss what they had learned with an outsider that Abdul had to reassert his former chairmanship and call them to order.

They sat down-crosslegged on the ground, because furniture was still in the luxury stage as far as this Asgard subculture was concerned—except for Dan, who lay down against the rock wall where they had sited their lean-tos, and shortly began to snore quietly. Dennis kept uneasily eying him while Parvati went to a natural hollow in the rock which was serving as a dish and dipped from it cupfuls of a dark liquid which she offered around.

“We’re calling this tea,” she explained to Dennis. “It’s an infusion of sun-dried vegetable cuttings. You may not like it, but it does something which feels right. Try it.”

Dubiously he accepted his cup, and Abdul said dryly, “At least the tradition of hospitality towards strangers
is off to a good start on this planet. How does it strike you?”

Dennis shrugged, unable to tell if he liked or disliked the brew. But, like the bit of bark he had chewed earlier, it seemed to assuage an unfamiliar lack. The speed of events had left him behind, though, and he felt dazed.

Sensing his difficulty, Parvati filled a short gap by telling the others about the poisonous creature he had run foul of, and his ten lost days.

“You remember something from the period in question, though?” Abdul suggested.

Dennis licked his lips. “Uh—yes. But the memories don’t fit what I know very well I did!”

“I think you’re probably wrong,” Abdul countered. “Suppose you tell us what you do remember, in the greatest possible detail.”

Frowning, Dennis complied as best he could. Until now, prompted by the obvious interest of his companions, he had dismissed all this as dream-stuff, the product of delirium. As he struggled to organise his impressions, however, he realised they differed from dreams, which fade with time. These images were if anything fresher than at first. Detail he might not have related the following day accrued to his recital until he had elaborated a long, complex and astonishingly coherent story. There was a hero, and there was an island across the western sea, and there was a journey to it, and there were calamities …

Before he had finished, his listeners were jogging up and down with glee they could barely control. The moment he finished, Kitty burst out, “But that’s perfect! It’s exactly what you said, Parvati—isn’t it?”

“Stop the doubletalk!” Dennis almost shouted. “Tell me what’s happened to me!”

“Well, if I understand Parvati’s reasoning,” Abdul said, “you’ve lived a legend. And so have we. For the first time in human history, the people whose experiences will later become the myths and legends which shape the subsequent culture have known what they were
doing when they did it. Thanks to the planners who stocked our minds with images from Earthly tradition before sending us here to fend for ourselves, we have the necessary insights to appreciate our experiences both as individuals and as-well, as demigods.”

Dazed, Dennis shook his head uncomprehendingly.

“Think of it this way,” Parvati said. “Back on Earth, in almost every country, there were real events which became transmuted into legends-which magnify historical facts to supernatural proportions—and myths—which use fact as a basis to symbolise continuing truths of human existence like births and death. Indian tradition glorifies the conquering Aryans, who came with horses and chariots and a divine intoxicant called ‘soma’. Irish tradition dwells wistfully on the former proud independent peoples who were driven to the west by better-armed barbarians, and vanished. Now what we’ve done is—is the stuff of epics, isn’t it?”

“You can say that again,” Ulla murmured. “My Viking ancestors never did anything comparable. Even the Vinland settlers died out. And if they’d survived the most they could have done was exploit a new continent. We’re unique, Dennis, and we don’t have to be modest about it. We’re the only people who tore the whole damned planet out from under our feet and put another one in place of it!”

“And your subconscious knows this,” Parvati said. “That’s what it’s been trying to tell you, in the only language it has available. The island which lay on the sea and looked like the moon—consider that in relation to your obsession with Asgard’s moon, where Pyotr died. And don’t imagine you hid from
me
the jealousy you felt because you wished you had died in his place! Equation: moon equals Land of the Blest equals Asgard, the favoured paradise in the sky to which the hero makes his voyage.”

Kitty, seeing the expression that was spreading over Dennis’s face, chuckled. “I think the man is catching on!”

“Yes!” Excited, Dennis leaned forward. “That fits the
geasa,
too. I must have felt I was cursed by being stranded here. And the magic cauldron I lost by flinging it at the moon in a fit of temper—that’s the
Pinta,
with equipment on board which could have made life safe for us here.”

“And so on,” Parvati nodded. “And that’s what the people on the base island haven’t yet learned. Their bodies are on Asgard, and their bodies know that. But their minds are still half on Earth. Eventually simple hunger may drive them to face the facts, but there’s a dreadful risk they may be too weak from starvation by then to benefit from what their instincts can tell them.”