The Final Planet Read online

  “Ay,” he agreed solemnly. “It just takes me a little time to remember the right Rule.”

  The Captain leaned back on her throne and said very softly, “We can’t be precise, Seamus. We can’t lock onto it. There is something bizarre about Zylong that doesn’t fit our expectations. The culture is so different we can’t process it. That’s why we need a transceiver.…” Her voice trailed off.

  “You mean a psychic bug? I’m not one of those!” he exploded.

  “What makes you so sure?” Now the deep blue eyes locked in on him.

  Somewhere in Podraig’s memory banks was a notation doubtless dating back to childhood. Seamus O’Neill was low in psychic perception powers but had abilities to transmit psychic energy to others. He was being dispatched to Zylong to soak up vibrations and send them back to others to interpret. Damn the woman! Still, there was more coming, those eyes were not ready to let him go. With resignation he slipped back into his chair.

  “You’d better tell me all the bad news.”

  “Zylong may be the final planet.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Those who speak about changing the Rules do not really understand how bad our situation is. If they knew, their talk would be more insistent. We might well have a mutiny on our hands.”

  “The final planet? What do you mean, woman? The cosmos is filled with planets. Sure didn’t Himself create more than enough to go around?”

  “Seamus, I mean the final planet for us. The Iona is tired and old. It doesn’t work as well as it used to. Ours has been the longest Taran pilgrimage; we don’t know how long these ships can last. My own guess is that we’ll be lucky to last another year or two without incapacitating trouble.”

  O’Neill was grimly silent for a moment. “Well, morale is still pretty good,” he argued lamely. “Despite the complaints.”

  “Is it, Seamus? We Celts are a blend of fatalism and hope—that’s why we go on pilgrimages. When the hope wanes,” she sighed, “you have only paralyzing melancholy left. There are a few incorrigible hopers like yourself—” she smiled at him gently “—but melancholy is increasing on this ship. There’s nothing we can do about it. How many marriages have there been among the young Wild Geese? I realize it may be a sensitive matter to raise with you, given Lieutenant Kavanaugh’s choice.”

  “You mean it’s like after the Great Famine on Earth? People just don’t have enough hope to begin new families?”

  Another sigh. “Too many failures, too many frustrations, too many defeats, Seamus, even for a crew of Tarans.” She spoke slowly, heavily, as though she bore the weight of all the sorrows of the pilgrimage.

  “If we don’t land?…” O’Neill asked. Damn it, of course I’ll go. Why does she have to be so indirect about telling me the truth?

  Cardinal Deirdre smiled. “Then it was not to be, and it has been an interesting if overlong pilgrimage.” She dismissed him with a wave. “Now, Seamus O’Neill, off with you. While I am not normally greatly pleased at anything, I would be pleased if you are able to send back good news.”

  It was arranged. Connor McNulty, the monk psychologist, prepared a mixture of drugs and conditioning to present O’Neill to the Zylongi as a harmless and hungry space minstrel. It was a role close enough to what he actually was so that, as McNulty observed, there was an eighty percent probability that the Zylongi probes would not break through the cover. The cover also portrayed O’Neill as having studied anthropology at the university in Tara before being expelled for drinking too much. (“Which of us doesn’t?” said O’Neill.)

  The Prior sang the farewell Mass. It was a nice touch. Had they never expected to see him again, the Abbess herself would have participated in his “last rites.” If they thought he had a good chance, the Subprior would have celebrated; as it was, the Prior’s Mass signaled that Seamus O’Neill’s chances were neither bad nor good.

  “Well, I suppose I had better get your blessing before I go,” he said gruffly to the Captain Abbess after Mass and just before debarkation. “Sure it can’t hurt.” He knelt on one knee to kiss the Celtic cross on her abbatial ring.

  She took his head in her hands. “Go with God, Seamus O’Neill. Come back to us just as you are now.” It was her most solemn benedictory tone.

  The peace that was reputed to be in the hands of an Abbot flowed through his person. Then Seamus Finnbar O’Neill’s whole being was filled with joy and light and the warmth of overpowering love. Sure it didn’t seem right that a holy Abbess herself should feel such love for him. Still, what was wrong with it? She was human and she was a woman and he was kind of a son to her anyway.

  Besides, he loved her too. Like a son. Mostly.

  He was jarred to notice that as she made the sign of the cross over him, she was weeping. The Captain Abbess was not known for sentimentality. His confidence went down considerably at the thought of the Abbess already keening for him. Tears rose in his own eyes.

  Hennessey, his second in command, was waiting with his new wife just in front of the pressure chamber that led to the tiny spacecraft. Ah, well, your best friend marries your girl on you and they both come to see you off. He shook Fergus’s hand and hugged Tessie, saying, “Sure, woman, you made the right choice. Never a doubt about that.”

  As he walked down the long ramp of the pressure chamber to his ship, O’Neill thought that Tessie probably had indeed made the right choice. No one would send the sentimental Hennessey off on such a wild mission. He strode by the great troop carriers Kevin Barry, Thomas Patrick Doherty, and Daniel P. Moynihan, past his beloved training ship Napper Tandy, the abbot’s shuttle Michael Collins, the gunships Bernardette Devlin, Eamon Casey, and John F. Kennedy to the very end of the ramp, where his battered Eamon De Valera was docked. It was allegedly a craft with interstellar capabilities; in fact, it was a cranky, unpredictable tub as expendable as its pilot.

  Through the sound system he could hear the monastery bells chiming vespers as he clanked the door of the Dev shut. Just before he pressed the signal to launch, Podraig, in the mindless singsong of a computer, intoned, “God go with you, Seamus O’Neill.”

  He replied by raising a number of pointed and profane questions about Podraig’s ancestry, slamming off the communications input before the blatherskite had a chance to reply.

  3

  From a great depth O’Neill clawed his way back to consciousness. The Zylongi were bumping and jolting him down a jungle path. They had misjudged the dosage necessary to put him out. He almost wished he were unconscious; he was hot, sweaty, thirsty. The rough ride gave him a headache. Resolutely he kept his eyes closed and began to “read” the environment for the damn crowd up there in herself’s throne room—bad luck to the lot of them.

  With considerable effort and many brisk commands and gentle tugs from the medical woman, they got him into a small hovercraft vehicle that whizzed along a jungle path and then over a wide body of water—a lake or a great river, he couldn’t tell which. Apparently his head was resting in her lap, a position that was intellectually consoling but in his present condition not much else.

  The jungle was teeming with animal life: Kiernan’s food chain. There were a lot of little critters, quite unrecognizable to Seamus. But among them were massive bears, some suspicious-looking medium-sized dinosaurs, a flock of mastodons, and some wandering cats that seemed to be exactly like the pictures Seamus had seen of saber-toothed tigers.

  Just like someone has scooped up creatures from Earth long ago, deposited them here, and then forgot about them.

  Seamus had the impression that there were degrees of jungle and that the wilder critters were way off in the distance. He also noted that his captors were scared stiff of the place and in a hurry to get out of it.

  Then they cut across an intensely cultivated plain, in parts of which, sure enough, there were vast herds of furry cattle. As a product of a culture whose sagas dealt with cattle raids, Seamus was affronted by the furry cattle, but he was too sick and too uncomfortable to take much pleasure in being a
ffronted.

  There were only two or three kinds of crops, presided over by robots and human technicians, with other humans—well, kind of humans—running errands for the technicians. An old and highly sophisticated system of agriculture it seemed.

  Then closer to the City he “saw” wagon trains, long processions of large carts being drawn by animals that looked like squat ungainly horses. These trains streamed back and forth across the plain, bringing in supplies of raw materials, stuff that looked like metal ore and lumber, and tracking back empty for more supplies. As they drew closer to the City, they met mechanical movers, heavy, slow, and clumsy, and an occasional rapid scooter like the hovercraft they were in.

  The City itself loomed up in the distance, a giant manufacturing and commercial center, the throbbing core of life on Zylong, but to Seamus’s psychic senses, a curiously lifeless place, seemingly with less human energy than the comparatively tiny Iona.

  The planet was laid out pretty much the way the chart on the Lady Deirdre’s desk said it should be: a single world island in the Northern Hemisphere—tundra on the very top, trailing off into steppes, and then the plains of which the City was the center. Beneath the City—as you looked down the island—was a massive snow-covered mountain spine with a rain forest on the left, on the fringe of which was Seamus’s landing site, and deserts on the right. The precipitation obviously came from the east.

  The City itself was on the bank of a meandering, sluggish river that originated in the mountains, flowed through the jungle, tumbled over a broad waterfall, and then flowed by the City into a vast delta land and then into the sea.

  Sure I’ve spent my life on a titanium cylinder. I should be enjoying all these wondrous sights, and instead, I’m half-conscious and have a friggin’ headache.

  Finally they landed on a platform at the edge of the City—a place so dazzling physically that, despite its lack of human vitality, it was beyond Seamus’s drowsy comprehension.

  I’ll come back for it later, he promised weakly.

  An armed guard helped to transfer O’Neill to a monorail car that moved him first across a grassy meadow, then along the riverbank—above the wide and slow-moving blue sheet—and then into a deep dark tunnel, where O’Neill would have been perfectly willing to have left his consciousness if that had been possible.

  The medical woman was fussing over him anxiously, now, to tell the truth, bothering him with her chatter and solicitude. Can’t you leave me in peace, woman? Don’t you realize that I’m a sick man? Put my poor head on a pillow, would you please, and let me have a little bit of peace.

  Then the car arose from the tunnel and into the vast and splendid City, a mass of great buildings in light pastel colors, pink and blue and green and lemon, looming on all sides.

  Despite his frigging headache, he read the City to be composed almost entirely of giant towers, forty and fifty stories high, made of a substance that was either rock or very hard metal, each one designed with a distinctive shape or rather in a series of distinctive patterns in which the shape of the building seemed to match the color in which it was painted. No, the colors weren’t painted, they were somehow imprinted on the rock or metal.

  They were windowless and even though it was now well into the Zylongian night, they gleamed in an artificial light radiating up from the ground at their base. There was no sign of vegetation in the City. Between the buildings were huge plazas, boulevards, and wide esplanades of an elegant, formal checkerboard pattern—all swarming with handsome people clad in a dazzling variety of garments in the style of those the police wore, some reaching to the ankles and others, in the case of young women, barely to mid thigh. Seamus was too sick to notice whether the thighs of the young women were attractive.

  Dear God, he prayed, put me out completely. When I am no longer interested in female anatomy, I am too sick altogether, not long for this world, at all, at all.

  Well, almost too sick. It was his impression that the thighs and butts that were displayed were a bit too thick for his tastes, not that he was in any position at the moment to be choosy.

  In addition to the monorail on which he was now riding, O’Neill read tiny individual vehicles scurrying to and fro on the streets like multicolored bugs. There was also an extensive tunnel system into which the monorail plunged, though not, as far as he could see, the bugs. For someone like Seamus, born and bred on a spaceship, the City was dazzling, a glorious vista of civilized living, despite his monumental headache.

  A decayed culture it might be, but, since I have to be here, I might just as well enjoy the decay—a little. Just so long as it doesn’t change me much. And of course that couldn’t happen.

  The drug was beginning to wear off, and he reconsidered his wish that the medical woman leave him alone. If she insists on holding my hand and resting my head against her breasts, I’ll just have to accept that as part of the mission. So the culture’s degenerate. A little bit of degeneracy never hurt anyone.

  As he snuggled closer, still trying to act like a man in a trance, his monorail car plunged once more into a tunnel, deeper, it seemed, than before. Seamus thought he could sense running water, deep streams feeding into the vast river and perhaps providing the City with water. No engineering slouches, these folks.

  The woman was very comfortable indeed. There were undoubtedly others in the car with him. He sensed their presence. But it was dark.

  Ah, now, Seamus me boy, take things as they come. Remember you’re supposed to be unconscious. Then the car ascended to the surface and docked in front of a huge complex of towers, pale lime in color and, his psychic sense told him, bustling with human activity.

  His body must have somehow signaled his alertness. The woman’s firm breasts were, after all, a distraction and a torment. It was hard not to move just a little bit. They were, he realized, about to carry him into this complex. Then there was no chance to reflect further. He felt an instant of pain and then nothing at all.

  The Lord God had heard his prayers for oblivion.

  * * *

  “Good morning, Poet O’Neill. You seem to be feeling better today.” The voice sounded as fragile as a tiny glass bell.

  He was lying on a contour couch in a windowless room illuminated by diffused light. It was much like the dentist’s quarters on the Iona and the woman looked much like a dental assistant in her soft white wrap with light blue jacket over it.

  Where am I, he wondered, and who is this cool person looking down at me with such curiosity? Am I dead? Sure I can’t be in hell because it doesn’t hurt. Maybe it’s heaven, but I don’t hear any harp music and this woman doesn’t look like an angel, though she’ll do till one comes along.

  “I’ve felt worse,” he said, temporizing till he got the lay of the land. “A little weak to tell you the truth.”

  “That will pass quickly.” She smiled. “You are a very interesting patient. It took six of our orderlies to hold you down at one point. We’re…” She hesitated. “I mean no offense, but we’re not used to someone of your size, Poet O’Neill.”

  My size, now what the hell does that mean?

  “I hope I didn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Only a few bruises. We must apologize for seeming to be rough. However, you surely understand that it is not every day that a spaceship lands in our jungle. The First Ones taught us always to be courteous to guests. If we have been discourteous to you, we sincerely apologize.”

  Jungle? What the hell?

  Then he remembered. Zylong. They must have played their mind-probe games. Well, he was still alive so they hadn’t figured too much out.

  “I see you have me programmed to speak your language,” he said, feeling stupid as he spoke. Not very smooth for a master spy.

  “That was no great difficulty, Poet. Our tongues have common ancestors. Yours … let me see…” she consulted a clipboard “… is related to Proto-English and Old Gaelic mixed with some unusual Teutonic features, while ours is of the Romance variety. We could have communicated
without programming you if you had used the translator you carried on your belt.”

  O’Neill looked down. He was clad in a Zylongian kilt that matched the gray color of his tattered poet’s gown perfectly. His translator was gone—probably being analyzed by some electronics technician.

  Then he remembered the woman. The medical person. There were gold stripes on her white uniform, considerably more elaborate than her jungle dress, but still leaving little doubt about her attractions. The stripes spanned ample but neatly shaped breasts and then ran down her flanks, emphasizing, more than any Taran daytime fashion would have dared, the curves of her body. There was more gray in her hair than Seamus had realized, and more delicate lines at her throat. Still, she was more than adequate. Indeed, maybe even proper.

  I’ve never been in love with an older woman before. It might be an interesting experience.

  Seamus O’Neill, get your mind off such things. You’re here to be a spy, not to be involved in ridiculous love affairs.

  Go ‘long with you. Having love affairs is part of being a spy, isn’t it? Certainly your spies have a good time in all the books you’ve read in the monastery library. And herself didn’t say no.

  She didn’t say yes, either. And you know what the Rules say.

  Only if invited. But what if she invites me?

  “I am sorry,” the woman went on, uneasily fingering her clipboard, “that we may have seemed to be unconscionably, ah, brutal with you. It was necessary or…” she hesitated uneasily “… it was thought to be necessary. I trust you will accept my apologies, both official and personal.”

  “Well … Doctor?”

  She nodded as though her title was unimportant.

  “My mother taught me never to make a false move with a spear pointed at my heart.” He tried his most roguish smile, but his lips barely parted.

  She laughed, revealing teeth that were slightly but prettily pointed. Carnivorous ancestors, indeed. Score one for the Lady Deirdre.

  “Poet O’Neill, we have very few visitors to Zylong. Three days ago there were mysterious energy forces at the outer rim of our sensor system. We did not know who or what to expect. Some of our more superstitious people remembered an ancient legend about a red-bearded giant god who would come to destroy Zylong. Even we scientists were disconcerted by the image we received of you when you landed. Yes, I am a doctor. My name is Samaritha and I am Director of Biological Research at the Body Institute.”