Skeen's Search (16 page)

Rallen Tuzeykken. Rallen Firesky.

Sun: Nepoyol

Planets:

3. RALLEN. 0.9 g

diameter - 12,783 km.

continents:

islands:

A HISTORY OF THE YKX OF RALLEN FIRESKY.

The Kinravaly speaks:

This we know. There was a homeworld called Ysterai. There were three colonies planted from Ysterai. Keelava, Tozeed, Tovazh. Tovazh was a world in the middle of emptiness, a way station more than a colony, a place for studies the Elder Kinra considered too dangerous for Ysterai. A fourth colony was planned for a world we named Rallen, not this world. We named this world Rallen because we wished a reminder of what we had lost. We skipped first to Keelava, refueled there and went on. During that second skiptime the trouble happened. The three transports were com-linked while in skip space so they wouldn't emerge in the wrong place. To save on cost there was only one full computer; it was placed in the hen ship, the chicks were little more than vast sleep-pods. It was the Hen that controlled entry to and exit from skip space, though each of the Chicks had a much less complex brain used mainly to regulate life support and pass along data to the Hen. It is not clear what happened. What survivors pieced together afterward was this: something like an infection started in one of the Chick brains and leaped from there into the Hen. It happened so swiftly that two-thirds of the Hen's brain was wiped clean before anyone knew what was happening. The links were broken then, the Hen isolated. The wake crews labored with little rest, struggling to limit, then control, then reverse the damage. The infecting pod was discovered, the sleepers and their support were transferred to another pod brought dangerously close. That was a heroic time, you must believe, we've got many songs celebrating the wake crew and what they did. When the transfer was at last complete, the pod was taken into normspace and sent off into a sun. Gradually the links were re-established between the Hen and the remaining Chick. Then the crew tried to recover the route to the original Rallen. Unfortunately, during the Wild Time, the Hen went into a blind panic flight. There was neither data nor sufficient working computer capacity to trace what happened in that Wild Time. The Hen's captain and the Kinra of the colonists consulted and had to acknowledge they were thoroughly lost. They decided to break out into normspace and take a look around to see if they could identify anything. They came out into a strange sky. The computer proved incapable of star matching, but the ship's sensors did locate a nearby star that had planets. It was Nepoyol and one of the planets proved suitable for sustaining Ykx life. Again the Captain and the Kinra consulted. Having little real choice, they opted to land the pods on the habitable world and wake the colonists who then could consider what they should do. In the end, they brought the Hen down also because they needed the computer and the memory capacity. So much had been destroyed that almost no technical information remained, little history, literature, music, little of the culture with which they meant to make life warm and easy. While crew and colonists did all the things necessary to sustain life, they poured Ykx memories into the blank, frantic to gain a more permanent record of what was left, what existed only in the fragile organic brains of the living Ykx. Even the most technical elements were more an incantation of the possible than a vigorous development of argument. Ykx working at the boundaries of any of the disciplines do not volunteer for colonial expeditions where their special interests are useless and their apparatus not available.

There was a primitive race on Rallen Firesky; they were at the transitional stage between sedentary agriculture and hunter/gatherer; they had several semi-domesticated beasts that provided food and fiber. They were six-limbed creatures, egg layers. The females were larger than the males. Generally six females were hatched for each male, each female produced no more than six eggs during her entire fertile life, two eggs at a time. The males tended to appear as one of the middle pair of eggs. It was not an easy relationship that developed between Ykx and six-legs. There were elements among the colonists who used genetic knowledge and manipulatory skills to enslave and breed the natives like beasts, doing some genetic tinkering to produce subsets of the basic form, lowering intelligence and inducing a docility that tended to result in a reduced lifespan for the six-legs so treated.

The chaos of the landing smoothed away. The world worked its slow changes on the Ykx. WATCHERS died, no more were born so Rallen Ykx lost that skill. Fate played a joke on us, giving us a world we could live on with comfort and even delight, but it was also a world greatly deficient in heavy metals. The elements beyond iron were rare to nonexistent and even iron was not abundant. The technology of Ysterai, even what was left of it, could not be sustained. It was a long slow struggle finding substitutes, most of them organic. We couldn't build lift belts, but we could develop the Wings using a helium-producing bacteria that was self-regulating and kept pressure at the desired level as long as it was exposed to the proper amount of light. By providing or removing the light with a simple on-off process we have since produced flight aids of considerable sensitivity and subtlety. More and more we turned from metals to organics as the millennia passed, using the metals at last primarily for sculpture and other decorative arts. The one thing we could not do was get offworld. By the time we had reordered our lives, by the time we were capable of fighting around the limitation of this world and ready to attempt solving the difficult problems of building a ship of organics, the double motion of the gas cloud and Nepoyol our sun plunged us into the Veils of Fire.

That was a difficult time. Weakened by our genetic tampering, the native six-legs died out except for a few of the hardier wildings. Many Ykx died also. Industry and commerce were shattered by the sudden extinction of many varieties of bacteria and fungi. But we survived this as we had survived earlier disasters. Out of shame at what we'd done to the native species, we did our best to help the remnants of the six-legs survive also, but all our efforts failed and it was a blot on our common conscience. Something we did not speak about or think about, something that came out in nightmares and severe depression. An Ykx would leave his Gather, go out and poke among the ruins in the native preserves, then he would sit facing the west, he would neither eat nor drink nor sleep, just sit until he left his bones with the shells of the six-legs. Periodically one of the Kinra would propose we destroy the relics and put the event completely behind us since there was nothing we could do about it, but that seemed to many of us the final insult to the six-legs, that they be forgotten, so the preserves were left to melt slowly into the soil from which the six-leg structures had risen.

Rallen slid finally into clearer space and we began to regain stability, replacing what had been lost, honors going to those who could discover a new means for doing what had already been done. Redundancy became a never-ending search. But escape from Rallen was lost. The energies that once went into that project were needed elsewhere. The sky was fire curtains pulled across the stars, a symbol our poets have long noted and used. There was no moon to serve as a stepping stone, no nearby stars visible to call out to us, come see, you Ykx, come see what once you had. This was a disturbing thing. There is in us a profound need to soar. It did something to our souls to see a lid on aspiration, to feel our world as a cage we couldn't escape from. We can also see the time coming when we plunge back into the Fire. When that youth who called himself Rostico Burn burst through the Veil and landed here, he found a yeasty chaos that whirled around him, tempted him; he traded and stole, promised nothing, yet promised far too much by his presence and the possibilities he suggested. By the time he left, he had begun, I think, to understand and be afraid of what he had helped to create.