The Final Planet Read online

  Overstaffed and with broken-down equipment, he summarized for himself and anyone who might be listening on Iona. Of course, they may have the resources to be able to afford both.

  “You benefited from the tour?” Samaritha demanded when she found him later, reclining, half-asleep, on his couch.

  “Fascinating,” he replied. “Incidentally, one question. What is the meaning of the metal—I’d call it silver—band many of you wear around your neck?”

  “This?” She touched her band shyly. “It is our mating band. On the day my man—the Music Director—and I were formally mated, he put this link around my neck. And I a similar one around his. It represents—” she hesitated “—a chain of love which is to bind us together for life. Do you not have a similar custom?”

  “We use rings, same symbolism, however.”

  “Interesting … you do not wear such a ring, Poet O’Neill?”

  “When one is a space tramp like myself, how would one find a woman? And what kind of a woman would mate with me anyway?”

  His self-pity was so convincing that he almost believed the story was true.

  “Interesting.” Yet another note. “And lamentable, of course.”

  “Terrible altogether.”

  “Now as to your residence during your sojourn with us.” She became very official. “You may rest for several more hours. At sunset you may come to the living space of Music Director Ornigon and make your home with us. The Committee has decided that he and I will be your hosts. We will take refreshment there. Technical Student Horor, our son, may join us, and perhaps the Secretary and the Guide will visit us briefly. Some companions of our quarter will take nourishment with us. Afterward there will be a contest. Does this meet with your pleasure?”

  She sounded like Podraig reading out a program. “And if it doesn’t?” he said dryly and not too politely.

  Her eyes locked with his again in the same vulnerable plea that he had seen at the landing site. There was a fleeting moment of shared desire. She looked away—more slowly this time.

  So, I trouble you just as you trouble me? O’Neill thought. She was the kind of woman you wanted to take in your arms. He imagined the frightened, eager beating of her heart as his hands tightened around her. Slow down, Seamus. This is a flirtation, nothing more. Remember that, you dummy.

  “I am afraid, Poet O’Neill, that I do not understand,” she said slowly, as though quite mystified. “Perhaps we should postpone the scheduled events?”

  O’Neill assured her that whatever events she wanted to have today were just fine with him. She left the room—or was it a cell?—still puzzled by the Taran’s response.

  The lovely doctor spoke formally. Was that the way the Zylongi always talked? She accepted that he was a down-and-out space tramp—at least she said she did. A “Director of Research” and a “Music Director” (her husband?—she had spoken of their son) were obviously important people. Why would they host a space bum? The “Secretary” and the “Guide” must be very important, too, otherwise why would a brief visit be described with such awe? Why would such personages waste their time with someone who was no threat? The first stirring of suspicion began to poke at the back of his brain. The good doctor knew more than she was telling.

  He wondered if the refreshment had a bit of “the creature” in it. Sure a wee touch of it wouldn’t hurt a bit.

  4

  O’Neill fell in love with Lieutenant Marjetta on sight. Not the way he loved his hostess, Sammy—a mild and, he hoped, harmless, if exciting, flirtation. Not the way he loved any of the objects of his crushes on Iona, not even the way he loved Tessie. No, this is, Seamus mentally insisted, the real thing. Marjetta was his fate, his destiny, the one great love of his life. It had taken him a long time to make that decision—slightly in excess of a half minute.

  This conclusion might notably affect his mission to Zylong, if only by distracting him something terrible. It would certainly involve the eventual landing of Iona on the island in the river that Podraig had tentatively chosen. Marjetta would have to forsake her heathen ways. All these were minor details. This was the proper woman Seamus had been searching for all his long and hectic life.

  Well, for the last six months anyway.

  To begin with, she treated Seamus with total contempt. He was, she implied by her tilted chin and stony brown eyes, a worthless derelict, a loudmouthed braggart, a bit of a biological freak, a poseur who might deceive the older folks on Zylong but was transparent to the superior wisdom of her nineteen years (Taran time).

  No one appealed to Seamus O’Neill more than a woman who saw right through him.

  Moreover, she was devastatingly lovely, tall for a Zylongi, tall even for a Taran, lithe and willowy, short brown hair, a gently curved face, strong, expressive mouth, flashing eyes, absolutely irresistible legs, the confident shoulders of a competent military officer—Ah, my dear Margie, you’re the most proper of proper women. ‘Twill be hard to win you, but that’s part of the fun.

  She was not part of Sammy and Ernie’s crowd, but rather a friend of their son, Horor, and his “promised,” a cold, rather hard-eyed young woman named Carina, both of whom seemed to be students somewhere and neither of whom would give Seamus O’Neill the time of day—behaving, in other words, the way he had toward his elders only a few years ago. If the older generation on Zylong found him fascinating and interesting, the younger generation clearly found him boring if not disgusting. Red-bearded giant space tramp? What could be more deadly dull?

  At first Seamus was annoyed. After all, didn’t his program claim he was a bit of a rebel? And shouldn’t young people identify with a rebel? Besides, didn’t he have a quick smile and a quicker tongue? Didn’t women invariably find him charming? Why, then, did Carina and especially Marjetta turn away in disgust when he would pay a certainly not undeserved compliment to one of the older women guests as they ate the candied fruits that apparently played the same preprandial role on Zylong as the poteen, straight up, did among Tarans?

  (The “candy” in the fruit, or maybe even the fruit itself, contained a chemical at least as powerful as the poteen—loosening O’Neill’s admittedly loose tongue even more.)

  Anyway, they didn’t like him, which was a challenge to O’Neill. He almost forgot that the space-lout mask he wore concealed the real O’Neill, whom, of course, Marjetta would find irresistible. Didn’t everyone? Why should he feel defensive about a persona which wasn’t his anyway?

  “And so what do soldiers do on this planet?” he had inquired, harmlessly enough.

  “Protect it from invaders,” he was told tersely, with a slight shrug of absolutely glorious shoulders.

  “How many of those have you had lately, not counting myself of course?”

  “None.”

  “Ah then, there can’t be much work to do.”

  “We manage to occupy ourselves.”

  “Sure I suppose there are scores of you assigned to watch me and you’ll be my constant escort—to keep an eye on me, of course.”

  “It would appear that no one believes you are much of a threat.”

  “But you don’t agree?”

  “I would not worry about a thousand red-bearded space tramps.” A contemptuous twist of her lovely lips. “Nor red-bearded gods of hordi legend who are supposed to return to redeem them.”

  “Kind of confident of your military capability, aren’t you?”

  Another pretty shrug. “It is adequate for our needs.”

  “Where did the hordi get this legend?”

  “Ask them. Perhaps it is a memory of the species which brought them here before we came.”

  “Ah, is that what happened?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it is an interesting question of whether there is hordi blood in a lot of you folk.”

  He waited for an explosion.

  “Are you trying to shock me by challenging the official wisdom? Come now, Space Tramp O’Neill, surely you have noted the sligh
tly pointed teeth?”

  “Not on you.… And why did a lovely woman like you become a member of the officer caste?”

  “My family has always been in command positions. I was assigned to my role.”

  “When you were a wee lass.”

  “When I was born. Were you assigned to be a wandering minstrel?” In a tone of voice that couldn’t have cared less.

  “Ah, no. I chose it of my own free will.”

  “How degenerate.”

  “Would you want to be something else, I mean not a soldier at all?”

  “That is an absurd question.”

  Ah, thought Seamus proudly, I’m making great progress—well, maybe I am at that. There is contempt in some of them for the party line. And anger, lots of anger.…

  The relationship between Horor, the son of the house, and his “promised” mate was strange. They snapped unpleasantly at one another and argued almost every time they opened their mouths. He treated her like an empty-headed flake, and she reacted to him like he was a stuffy dullard. Yet, later on they left the apartment, following the gorgeous Marjetta, hand in hand.

  Sammy whispered a hasty explanation in his ear. On Zylong young people were assigned their spouses and their careers shortly after birth, based on a careful study of their antecedents, so that the best possible genetic combinations would result. Sometimes they resisted this sorting process and refused to mate with their “promised.” This was possible. Marjetta, a truly remarkable young woman, Sammy declared nervously, had insisted in delaying indefinitely her mating with the soldier to whom she had been promised. This could mean a life in which one did not marry, though sometimes the Committee would make exceptions, particularly if the petitioner was more humble than Marjetta was ever likely to be. Other young people would accept their fate but never become emotionally attached to their mate.

  Yet others would find love after they had been mated for some time. Carina and Horor, the Most High be praised, were falling in love now, though they had to pretend to hate each other because that was the way with young people.

  “They will be happy, we now know it with certainty,” Sammy concluded breathlessly.

  “This is the way you and himself got together,” O’Neill nodded in the direction of his handsome, cultivated, gentle host.

  “But of course. And you see how well we are matched. The Committee is very wise, is it not?”

  O’Neill didn’t think that this intense, almost manic woman was at all well matched with her reflective, melancholy mate. Whether they loved each other or not was less clear. Sammy was, however, a Zylongi Panglossa, the kind of enthusiast who had to persuade others and herself that everything was for the best.

  “Marjetta is a lovely girl,” he commented carefully.

  “So you are of the same humanity as we,” she grinned, almost wickedly. “All men think that. Perhaps someday she will find a man for herself. She may have to pay a heavy price, however.”

  O’Neill did not want to know what that heavy price might be. “And her parents are both dead.”

  “Yes,” Sammy said, with a sad shake of her curls—and there was even more gray in them than O’Neill had noticed before, “both killed in battle.”

  “I thought there were no invaders here. Who is there to fight?”

  Sammy looked around nervously, fearful that other guests might hear them. “It is not wise to discuss that.”

  Aha. It’s matters like that you’re supposed to be investigating, Seamus O’Neill, not taking off Lieutenant Marjetta’s clothes in your imagination.

  Well, you can do both, can’t you? After all, you’re young and the juices are flowing like they’re supposed to.

  So the party went on, and Seamus Finnbar O’Neill found himself even more puzzled by his strange hosts. On the one hand, they purported to kiss only their mates and them only in the “private chamber”; on the other hand, they seemed to be preparing to turn the party in his honor into an orgy. If they were going to be decadent—and at the moment Seamus was prepared to be tolerant on that point—why couldn’t they be consistently decadent?

  Then the event for which everyone had anxiously waited—the arrival of the Guide and the Fourth Secretary. The former was a doddering old man who smiled politely, nodded in answer to his own routine questions, and fluttered around shaking hands with everyone. He apologized to Poet O’Neill for any discourtesy. The First Ones and especially the Founder had strictly forbidden discourtesy. Before Seamus could praise the courtesy, the old man went on in a singsong voice, “You are welcome. Strangers are always welcome. We are honored. Enjoy your stay. Tell good things about us. Thank you thank you.”

  “If it’s all the same to you,” Seamus whispered to the Deity, “I’ll keep the Lady Deirdre if you don’t mind.”

  The Fourth Secretary was something else, a gombeen man if Seamus ever met one—short, fat, oily, leering at the women (which no one else on Zylong did), patronizing the men with false geniality, reveling in the power he obviously had over their lives.

  He especially offended O’Neill by his frankly lascivious fascination with Marjetta—who in her turn treated the Fourth Secretary with the same contempt she had turned on Seamus.

  I’m not that type at all, at all, he protested in his head.

  “Well, I see the red-bearded god has come at last,” the Fourth Secretary smiled at Seamus. “You are, of course, most welcome.”

  “Only if impoverished space travelers without fuel or money can be considered gods,” Seamus replied evenly.

  “You are too modest. Our probes reveal that you are a man of many talents.”

  “All which pale before the talents of the population of this astonishing civilization.”

  “You speak well.” The Fourth Secretary did not seem happy about that fact.

  “Poets do.”

  “So do you like our planet? What about our women? Have you seen anything like them in the universe?”

  “There is much beauty in the universe. Zylong is especially rich in it.”

  Sure did Margie actually smile a little at that?

  “You will stay with us long?”

  “Only till my vehicle is repaired or till you grow tired of me.”

  “Oh, we never grow tired of giant red-bearded gods.”

  “Don’t you now?”

  If you’re listening up there, Your Ladyship, this one is the Enemy.

  With a crude guffaw, the Fourth Secretary took his leave. Everyone seemed to unwind; the worst was over.

  The three young people wanted to leave a few minutes after the politician, but Sammy demanded that they stay while Seamus sang for them.

  “Space bards are noted singers,” she said primly.

  The three kids made faces of resigned disgust. Seamus chose to ignore them and to concentrate on the lovely Lieutenant while he sang.

  It is well for small birds that can rise up on high

  and warble away on the one branch together

  Not so with myself and my millionfold love

  that so far from each other must rise every day.

  She’s more white than the lily and lovely past Beauty,

  more sweet than the violin, more bright than the sun,

  with a mind and refinement surpassing all these …

  O God in Your Heaven give ease to my pain!

  “Good-bye, Honored Guest,” Marjetta said with what in someone else would be described as a sneer. “I’m sure we’ll not meet again.”

  Not a word about my song, even though I did it just for you?

  “That would be a tragedy for me. Don’t I get a little credit because himself doesn’t like me.”

  “A very little,” she said, blessing him with a grudging smile.

  “Not enough to say you’d like to meet me again?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Women, they’re the devil.

  A half hour later he was telling himself—in mental tones of vigorous warning, not unmixed with anticipation—that if th
e woman reclining next to him brushed her hair against his shoulder once more, he would go to pieces altogether. He took another wee sip of “refreshment” to calm his nerves and contemplate the torso of Energy Supervisor Niora, which was hardly an inch away from his face.

  It looked like he had gotten himself into a Zylongi orgy all right, a cultivated, civilized orgy indeed, but then those might be the worst kind. From wondering which of the women he might be supposed to sleep with, he had turned to fearing that he might have to sleep with them all.

  A fantasy which, for all his self-image as a horny young male, scared the living daylights out of Seamus Finnbar O’Neill.

  And for all his talk and fantasy about love, when it came to action—Seamus O’Neill was prepared to admit to himself at the moment—he was not particularly experienced or confident. Not when faced with these mature and certainly practiced beauties who lolled around the table, blatantly flirting with him while their husbands watched with no stronger emotion than amusement.

  Brigid, Patrick, and Columcile, save and protect me, he pleaded with considerable fervor.

  Soft light glowed from the lemon-colored walls of the “living space.” Matching music and odors filled the air. The bodies of the guests were languid. Hairless male chests and soft female shoulders crowded around the table. Hemming him on either side, the relaxed forms of Energy Supervisor Niora and State Painter Reena were almost enough to keep his mind off the legs of his hostess as she padded around the table serving food with the aid of a chimpanzeelike hordi.

  Research Director Samaritha, he mused, you have as satisfactory a pair of legs as I’ve ever seen, save for Marjetta’s, of course, but that was another matter. No, your legs and thighs are not too stocky at all. And the rear end is practically perfect.

  All you can think about, O’Neill, is women.

  Well, under the circumstances, how can I think of anything else?

  “You think it strange,” Niora said softly, “that we do not try to improve on Mozart?”