Seven from the Stars

PROLOGUE

SPECIAL BULLETIN: Released from News Service of Galactic Center, received at Dvaneth.

The starship Northwind, carrying colonists to an isolated sun in the Spiral Arm, has imploded.

The Master Panel, which carries sensitive studs corresponding to the self-destroying implosion units installed, for obvious reasons, in all spacecraft, confirmed today that the implosion device of the Northwind has gone dead.

Cause of the disaster is unknown. It is surmised that the Northwind may have been surprised and threatened with capture by Rhu’inn-dominated ships, and that the crew may have activated the implosion to prevent ship and passengers from falling into Rhu’inn hands.

The exact position of the Northwind at the time of her destruction has not been ascertained. No noticeable mass disturbance on energy detectors has been reported from any inhabited planet. It is probable that the Northwind had deviated considerably from her computed course in an attempt to avoid capture, and perhaps strayed into the Closed Planets.

The escape of any survivors is unlikely. Life-ships are not released prior to implosion unless a planet is detected within life-ship range. The swift death of implosion is more merciful for possible survivors than a lingering death drifting in interstellar space. There are relatively few stars in that section of the Spiral Arm, and of these only a fraction are possessed of habitable planets. The probability that the Northwind’s life-ships may have been released in the vicinity of any of these planets is astronomically small.

The crew and passengers of the Northwind must for all practical purposes be considered legally dead.

CHAPTER ONE

Get clear, get clear, Reidel shouted, the units are set to go off almost at once after we surface! Grab the kits and run, but get clear!

Still dazed with the long agony of deceleration from interstellar space, the handful of survivors stumbled down the steps of the life-ship which, like the mother ship, carried a self-destroying mechanism set to implode upon surfacing, unless set in place before landing by a crew member.

They got their first look at one another in that moment when they emerged into glaring, yellow sunlight and dusty, windswept space. They didn’t waste time looking. They fled, scattering like seed blown by intangible disaster, across sandy wasteland that seemed to heave and sway under their groping feet. Behind Reidel one of the women caught her foot, twisted her ankle and fell heavily to the sand. Reidel, not urgently but with desperate haste, picked her up and shoved her along.

This is far enough, Reidel shouted. Lie flat! Get down! Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the little ship for the first and last time, still glowing red from their brief searing trip through atmosphere.

The old man collapsed, rather than fell, and Reidel bent over him, thrusting a hand into the neck of his shirt. His hand came away reddened. The tall woman dropped to her knees beside them.

Is he—dead? she faltered.

Not quite.

The others had thrown themselves flat in the sand, and Reidel could hear one of them still crying in convulsive spasms. The tall woman alone stood, like a frozen statue, staring at the red pulse of the ship. Reidel, straightening from the old man’s inert body, was gripped by the intense fear in her eyes; he too gazed, almost tranced, at the glowing, pulsating ruby shimmer.

Then the crimson frame buckled and with a slow, almost lazy grace, erupted skyward. Shouting, Reidel threw himself forward, dragging the woman roughly down. The blast of sound and the thundering inrush of tormented air rocked the desert, while the units vibrated, fragmentized, vaporized, atomized. A crimson glow lingered where the ship had been; it wavered, drifted and was gone.

On the sand of the alien world nothing remained but a little heavy, dark-reddish dust, unscattered by the wind.

Well, said Reidel, in a curious flat voice, "that is most emphatically that."

Letting the woman fall, tumbled and passive, from his arms, he rose and looked around.

A flat and sandy wasteland stretched away to a horizon of low hills, speckled with a blackish mottling of small shrubs. In the sand around them dry and bunchy grass grew sparsely in clumps, dried out by long drought. There were some prickly bushes and low, leafless trees, stunted and twisted and blackened. Reidel scowled at the bleak scene. A small, thorny plant grew near him; he bent and touched it with a curious finger, and a drop of blood appeared on the ball of his finger. The leaf was sharp as a needle.

At one edge of the sky a yellow-red sun was either rising or setting. In the flurry of the automatic landing there had been no chance to determine the period of the planet’s rotation, or indeed anything about it except that it was habitable. If the ship’s automatic meters had not registered a range of temperature and atmosphere that could sustain human life, the meters themselves would have locked the implosion units before landing. And then they would have died very quickly and mercifully and without knowing they were going to die.

But habitable? That could mean anything from the icy deserts of Rigel II to the searing jungles of Vialles—or anything in between!

It was cold, or seemed so to the Dvanethy. A brisk and scentless wind, laden with little gritty swirls of dust, blew restlessly around them. The sky was an ugly bluish-brown, dimmed to a dusty haze near the horizon, and through this dust the sun was a bloody inflamed eye.

Reidel looked around again, automatically counting the survivors. Most of them were strangers. Reidel’s work had kept him too busy for the social life of the passengers. But he knew, vaguely, who they were.

The old man with the smashed chest was Kester; he was some sort of minor official on the ship’s staff. They had found him lying, senseless and bleeding, in the life-ship bay, flung there by buckling metal through a gap in the corridor that had not been there seconds before.

The dark slender woman, still stretched out on the sand, was called Cleta; Reidel knew only that she was one of the aristocratic caste of telepaths from Vialles, and even in the crowded society of the spaceship, the Viallan telepaths held themselves haughtily aloof from the rest. Beside her a dark, sturdy boy, just edging out of adolescence, was blinking, half dazed, his head propped in his hands. He was Arran, one of the apprentice engineers in the Rim Room of the starship.

Crouched in a taut huddle, his face hidden, a misshapen dwarf knelt in the sand, oblivious to all but his own agony. He was Mathis—one of the ten telempaths who had been so carefully shielded from contact with the mental babble of the packed humans in the spaceship. Like all his kind he was physically a ruin, warped, and hunchbacked, and though young in years, his dark, coarse hair was already streaked with long dashes of white. At his feet a half-grown albino girl, raised herself to her knees, shielding great bruised eyes from the fierce sunlight. Then she struggled to her feet and glanced, just once, at the empty, charred patch where the spaceship had been.

The seventh and last of the survivors, a young woman heavy with child, had been flung senseless on the clumped grass, and still lay there, dazed by the shock wave, not moving. The albino child went slowly toward her, bent, and raised the pregnant girl with gentle hands.

Here, Linnit, she said in a soft and reedy voice, have a look at our new home, won’t you?

Then she turned, looking up at Reidel with an appraising stare. She had a childish face and a child’s body still immature under a childish smock; but the great eyes were not childish. They were far too wise, too mature, too sad for her few years. She had the freak coloring that marked out the hypersensitive empath, and Reidel shrank before the intense wisdom and compassion in those wide eyes.

She said, I know you, don’t I? You’re Reidel. You looked after the animals, didn’t you?

Reidel nodded. Then, aware that he must speak or die of the idiot laughter that bubbled up in him—he had spent so much time and worry, trying to transport those accursed animals across interstellar space in good condition—he said, I know you, of course, but I’ve forgotten your name.

Dionie, the child said. Do you know all the others?

The pregnant girl was on her feet now, whimpering, trying to pick the thorns from her hands. Dionie took the torn fingers in hers, gently pulling out the prickers.

This is Linnit, Reidel, and that’s Cleta.

Cleta sat up and flung back her long disheveled hair, flinching when she moved her hand. Arran got up and turned toward Reidel.

Do you know what happened?

Reidel shook his head. No. Don’t you? I was off-shift and sleeping, and the alarm bells went off, and the ceiling in my cabin hit the floor, and I decided it was time to get out of there. The next thing I knew, we were all in the life-ship and it was kicking loose.

I don’t know a thing about it, Arran repeated. They’d been running double shifts in all the drive rooms, but none of the engineers would tell me why.

I don’t suppose it makes a bit of difference, Reidel said at last. We’re here. I don’t think any other life-ships got loose, though. Do you know where we are, Arran?

Somewhere in the Closed Planets, I suppose.

What exactly does that mean? Cleta demanded, in the arrogant tone of a woman used to instant deference.

Reidel’s temper was uncertain at the best of times, and now he lost it completely.

Is this a time for questions? If your brain is so empty it needs something to rattle around, you might start collecting the kits, or look after this man, he indicated the bleeding Kester, instead of asking stupid questions about Galactic politics!

I thought it might help to know exactly what we may be facing, Cleta retorted, and you seem to be taking charge!

If you think you can do better, you’re welcome to try! That sun’s lower than it was. If it goes down at that rate, it will be dark in a few minutes. We’ll have to make a fire, there’s no telling how cold it gets here, or— he paused, deciding there was no sense in mentioning other dangers. I wonder if these bushes will burn?

I’d think so. They’re dry enough. Arran studied their black twisted limbs. Ouch! He shook his hand and sucked it. Careful—thorns!

Everything we’ve seen has thorns. Reidel hoped none of them were poisonous and decided not to mention that either. Cleta, moving stiffly, was collecting the survival kits from the life-ship. She knelt to unfasten one, but Reidel’s heavy hand fell on her shoulder.

Leave that for how. You’re able-bodied, come and help gathering wood. Fuel’s what we need most now.

Cleta shook off his hand and obeyed. Reidel worked in tense haste, dragging heavy dead trees into a little hollow where a ridge of banked sand gave some protection from the cutting wind. Dionie, too frail to lift the