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  Tramontane

  Emil Petaja

  PART ONE

  Wayfarer

  “And the friendless one reflected:

  ‘Wherefore have I been created?

  Who has made me and has doomed me

  Thus ’neath moon and sun to wander

  Through the starry wastes forever?‘ ”

  KALEVALA: Runo XXXIV

  (Rev. SONG OF THE VANHAT:

  Runo LI, Cir. 5168)

  I

  If one’s destiny is to be expunged like some monstrous mistake by a death-squad of three perverted louts, then the new hell-hot colony planet of Ryler 8 on the frontier of known space is as good a place for it to happen as any.

  Better.

  Fed by seven star-suns, the lately formed world still seethed savagely under its rusty red shell; Mothership Control had named it according to precedent in honor of the pioneer, Captain Ose Ryler, who discovered it. Ryler and all his scout-ship crew had been charred into meaningless flakes by the then unguessed gaseous discharge from one of the cracks in the hell-planet’s crust. Ryler 8 was of ugly sanguinary color and uglier disposition, an uneasy stepping-stone to Still Further Out. Custom entitled it only the hardiest, most desperate of Mothership colonists; its motley bag of humanity included misfits and problem types of many varieties who had to be finally decanted from their Mothership somewhere.

  Kullervo Kasi was such a misfit. If there were any hidden character traits on the worthy side of the ledger they could not be detected in his wide dour face, in the animal slope of his thick shoulders, in the lumbering splayfoot gait his ill-fit cast-off boots displayed. His sackcloth blouse had been patched up out of hydroponics tank shoddy; his pantaloons were forever dirty; his thick hairy legs were bare from knobby knees to half down his knotted calves, whereupon the one mismatched bright note took over. His synth-wool stockings were self-knitted, unusual in itself, and they were vivid blue. Kullervo Kasi’s stockings brought smiles even from the quasis programmed to do handwork for the Mothership computers. From others, colonists and regulars, they brought frowns or open jeers. They didn’t suit that face, that grotesque body. This odd bid for beauty was out of keeping. It was a bone of contention for more universal contempt. He would be better off without them. His ugliness of form and nature must be unrelieved, total.

  Sloughing along across the brittle orange terrain, head adangle, Kullervo Kasi made no slight demur against his fate. The kicks, when he didn’t move fast enough, didn’t register. Besides, the Dantesque agony of twisted rock landscape, plus the near-intolerable heat outside the Colony Bubble, precluded coherent thought. His fate was a foregone conclusion, predestined in his genes.

  Kullervo Kasi. The name itself was alien. More than just alien, out here at the star frontier, where alienness was a common commodity. There was no information about him on his current Mothership, nor indeed on any of the ten thousand Motherships that wheeled the galaxy and beyond, spitting out human pips by the thousands and ten thousands whenever worlds could be found that would tolerate them. Of course Kullervo had been displaced from Mothership to colony to Mothership to another colony so often that perhaps it is no wonder that his Nee-ship, not to mention his age, antecedents—his very Nee-number on Central Recordship—was missing. This, of course, was not entirely new. Births were of course controlled rigidly but hole-in-corner alliances were not unheard of among so many billions of billions.

  Kullervo’s existence was scarcely noteworthy in Man’s great splashout through his galaxy and well beyond (in Motherships now, the small planet of his origin was so dimmed that its very mention brought winces of contempt, as if Earth were a dirty name) in a titanic pattern-wheel that brushed on some three hundred thousand star-colonies at latest count. Who cared who he was? Get rid of him! This time hope it would stick. His Placement card would run through the record-computer again, stamped “Kullervo Kasi—Origin Unknown,” and off he would go. Not for long, unhappily. His temperament, some aura he cast off, would cause grown men to shiver and children to hide and throw rocks at him; it happened over and over again. It happened in direct proportion to the available space, to the establishment of new colonies so desperate for muscle that they would take even Kullervo. Robots were expensive. Man was cheap. And if ever a man was expendable, that man was Kullervo Kasi.

  Ryler 8 was finis. The period at the end of Kullervo Kasi’s worm’s existence. In a millieu where man fought against androids and cybernetics to give his own children a chance to get born, an excrescence like him was scarcely tolerable. Like so many other colonies with atmosphere that was breathable but not for sustained periods, certainly not over generations, Ryler 8 wore a plas-dome over its only city to shield its new citizens from the pitiless glare of those seven great eyes, to reduce the heat and keep them and their frugal necessaries from shriveling away until the next time the Mothership returned for a look-see. Away she went to offer teat to one of her other offspring, always hoping that each new colony would stick and later provide room to slough off more of her endless supply of children.

  “You are an ugly bastard, Kullervo.” The heat exploded one of his executioners into breaking the torpid silence. Kullervo acknowledged the gratuitous shove that went with the insult by swabbing sweat out of his eyes so that he could move along faster.

  Two sniggered approval. Three, as a gesture of hostility encompassing the whole of his new hellish home and the distasteful job at hand, decided to find fault with one.

  “Knock it off, Pot,” he grumbled. “The sucker’s going to get blasted and chucked down that volcanic fissure when we get to it. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “No!” Pot’s voice was a raw crackle from his parched craw. “It ain’t enough! Not nearly enough, Al! Crud played around with my little sister!”

  “Bat-dung! I saw the whole thing. Those vicious sluts at the kangaroo court only twisted what happened to look like that. Your little sister was needling the creep, like that bunch of brats do every morning, waiting on the corner for him to come out of his hole so they could shag rocks at him. Your sister ran up and spit in his face. Kullervo grabbed hold of her arm—”

  “He touched her, damn him!”

  “So?”

  Something in the tone riled Pot into a snarl. He swung out a mean hook; Al ducked easily. “Hell, I didn’t mean anything, Pot. Your sister’s only twelve. What I meant was he only just touched her arm, krissake. So what? Those damn kids do that every morning. Shag rocks at Kullervo when he comes out of that hole he sleeps in since they kicked him out of the dorm. Call him names. Krissake. What would you do?”

  Pot wiped off sweat. “Kids got nothing else to do. You can’t blame ‘em. Teach-meck’s on the blink and no damn place to play. Got to have some fun.” He stared blamefully at Kullervo’s broad bowed back, then, on impulse, grabbed him and spun him around. “Look! Take a good look, Al! Look at that puss! Wouldn’t you say it was made to get spit in?”

  Al looked. He looked carefully, for the first time. Curiosity stirred vaguely through the boiling heat. Like most of the other men he had ignored Kullervo as beneath his notice. Too stupid to even yell about it when the colonists’ kids screamed bad names at him and hit him with rocks, or when somebody jolted him out of the way on the narrow dome streets.

  Maybe there was more to the guy. Maybe.

  The face was too wide, as if somebody had taken hold of those hairy ears and pulled hard. Kullervo’s nose was a misplaced lump, not so much oversize as it was distorted. The mouth was purple and wide. The dry-cracked lips bled a little, but it was the big animal teeth, spaced with gaps between, and the tongue lolling out like a h
og liver, that made it impossible to even laugh at the guy. His hair straggled like a pile of urine-soaked hay over scabby ears. The eyes seemed to have no color whatever, or else it was because they were set in so deep and the puckers around them were so deep that it just seemed so. The shapeless chin had a cleft in it like another lipless mouth and was vaguely obscene. His chest, bare where the blouse had been ripped in the manhandling during the street-court trial, was heavily matted with yellow-gray hair and there was more of it on the backs of his stubby-fingered hands.

  “Yeah. You’re right, Pot. You’re damn right.” He whistled thoughtfully. Colony Captain Ralph Langois had been right when he didn’t interfere with the kangaroo court, when he took the word of the vicious scandalmongers who said they had seen Kullervo slinking around during the sleep-periods, molesting kids. Nothing was proved and nobody, even Captain Langois, really believed there was anything to prove. But there was something about Kullervo… Something un-nameable. Something that hinted that with a creature like him any outrage was possible, even probable.

  Captain Langois’ job of running Ryler 8 was no easy one. If just having Kullervo Kasi around made people behave like that then the thing to do was get rid of him. For good. No shunting him back to the Mothership next time it called. Do them all a favor.

  “Cap Longois was right to stand by the kangaroo court’s decision,” Al said aloud.

  “Sure he was. We’re a democracy, ain’t we? What the majority says goes, don’t it?” He gave Kullervo a forward shove with his boot. “Only why’n hell did Cap have to pick us?”

  They reached the brink of the volcanic fissure. It was deep. The writhing crack belched up tendrils of vomit-making gases. You couldn’t see how far down it went because of those angry orange-red clouds.

  Pot shoved Kullervo Kasi close to the drop; all three of the kill-detail backed up and raised their blasters. Kullervo stood at the drop, his ugly face washed by the sudden dawning of the largest of the seven suns, which Ryler 8 termed morning. This hot star turned Kullervo satanic red, made him blink and grimace, standing there by the volcanic wrinkle, arms dangling helplessly. He seemed not to understand what was about to happen to him, yet when the muzzles of the three long blasters converged on his misshapen body his hands moved up in an age-old gesture of surrender.

  Surrender wasn’t enough. Die, Kullervo Kasi! Die!

  The poising fingers stayed, as if to savor this death or reluctant to cause it. Then, awkwardly, Kullervo moved. His right hand darted like a hairy spider into his torn shirt. Something bright and pointed caught the new red sunlight. It made the executioners blink from the backlash, lower blasters.

  “Sucker’s got a knife!” Pot cried.

  “So? Get him before he decides to throw it.”

  “No! I want it! I need a blade. Looks like a good one. No use letting it go down the drop with him.”

  Pot moved forward warily. For the first time Kullervo showed fight. Like his curious blue stockings, this bone-handled blade was a personal talisman. His and his alone. He must not lose it, even in death. When Pot’s strides brought him within feet, Kullervo jumped aside with an animal yelp. He went into a crouch, made his antique weapon cut the air between them in swift inconclusive jabs.

  Pot grinned and touched his blaster’s trigger-stud. Fire leaped. Kullervo gave a wolfish howl and flung himself flat on the crusty ground. Like all his movements, it was lumbering and awkward, but for the moment it paid off. He managed to undershoot the deathline. Yet it put him at a disadvantage because he couldn’t use his knife as Pot rushed him, angrily. He did attempt to arch up enough to hurl the poinard blade at his enemy but, with a laughing shout, Pot leaped, planning to bring his heavy boot down on Kullervo’s wrist.

  Kullervo dragged his arm back to save himself from crushed bones. The eight-inch blade caught in a flinty outcrop of laval rock. The boot struck down on Kullervo’s fingers and wrung an involuntary scream of agony from him. The blow made him lose hold of his precious knife and sit up, shaking the broken fingers as if to shake off the ravening demon pain. It was half a minute before he remembered his treasure and groped down for it, left-handed.

  Pot looked at it and swore.

  The silver-steel blade had an ancient look to it and that animal-bone handle, blackened by eons, was archaic beyond belief. It spoke of primitive ways on a primitive world.

  When he saw what had happened Kullervo Kasi loosed a great cry. It ululated from the depths of an anguished soul. Triangulated between the rock shard and the ground the knife blade had snapped off clean at the bony hilt.

  “Damn thing was no good anyway,” Pot rationalized. “Too old.” Still, he was not inclined to be happy about it and he took out his anger on Kullervo. “On your feet, crud! We got a job to do!”

  Kullervo Kasi’s pale deep-set eyes were rooted on the broken blade. He began to moan. Nothing else seemed to matter. He didn’t hear Pot or feel his boot nudge. He picked up the handle and the blade and held them close to him, crooning hard gritty sobs of intolerable grief for the loss of his one and only treasure, his one and only friend. He was alone. Alone. Alone. His secret thing, his pukko, was broken and useless.

  “Get up!” Pot commanded. The others waited, grumbling. The big sun was beginning to blast. They were supposed to have finished by now.

  Kullervo wailed his grief, rocking back and forth. Then, at Pot’s volley of curses, his wide face turned up ominously. He rocked up on his feet, making raw animal sounds deep in his throat. Then he began to talk. The first words anyone within memory had ever heard him say. It wasn’t space-idiom. No. It was a roaring torrent of biting alien words like rocks being crushed by raging tides. A language forgotten for millennia, spewed up out of Kullervo Kasi’s cells in a storm because of what had happened to his pukko.

  Pot rolled back under the wave of harsh noises. Al called out, “C’mon back here! He’s gone ape! Stand away! I’ll cut the sucker down!”

  Pot wrenched his eyes away from what had always seemed a docile beast of burden, a butt for every man’s errant hostility, and what had suddenly about-faced into a thunderstorm of unbridled fury. Then all three of them started blasting.

  Kullervo turned on them with a feral snarl. Then, with a doleful croak like a crow’s caw, he ran to the brink of the fissure and jumped.

  They gaped cautiously over the edge at the swirling cloud masses of demoniac color and frightful stink. Not even a sigh came back up to them as the ugly unwanted lump of life-tissue vanished into the raw planetary wound.

  II

  While it was no novelty to be prodded awake by something sharp, this time an angry difference made Kullervo Kasi leap to his feet faster than usual.

  Where was he? Why could he feel pain? For that matter: why was he?

  His eyes told him nothing. It was dark around him, dark and dank and cold. While his sleep-sanded eyes dug around him for hints, his hands groped the corner he lay in, finding the stony angles indeed clammy and tomb-like. The dark and the cold suggested death (not the fiery death of Ryler 8, surely!), but the biting hurt in his forearm didn’t. He labored his mind over thoughts of being alive and guessed he must be. His legs and arms were prickling and tingling as from a long sleep, as his blood began pumping sluggishly out of his heart and around his arterial channels.

  “If I’m not dead…” All his life Kullervo had talked to himself, since nobody else would unless it was something derisive or to issue him an order; usually both. “Or maybe this is Hell? Is this Hell, I wonder?” Someplace he had heard about where bad people went when they died, and there was no doubt at all that Kullervo was bad. Wicked. Evil. He had been told so often enough and there was no reason not to believe them; they were so clever and important.

  Kullervo sighed.

  He was content, in a way, Before, trying so hard to understand what life was all about, with nobody patient or interested enough to help him (even to hook him up to a machine), he had been left with an ever-present sense of burning shame about himsel
f. Maybe it had something to do with his mother. He didn’t know much about her, since she died soon after he was born. She wasn’t much good, he was told or overheard: he couldn’t remember for sure. What happened was that she had birthed him secretly behind the trash disposers, then tried to open one of the sealed hoppers and throw him in. She couldn’t get it open, fainted out of weakness, and Kullervo was left there for the Mothership’s kitchen menials to find next morning. Later, when he was five or six, he used to sneak out of the orphan’s sector of the great wheeling starship and down to the trash grinders and obliterators. Laying his cheek against the warm thrumming surface of a giant machine he would imagine it to be his mother. Nobody liked him, even then, so Kullervo had to flounder out things for himself, and with his thick skull that wasn’t easy.

  His father? Who knows? Perhaps nobody, not even the white stars salted across the endless skies…

  Nobody had liked him, this much he knew all too well. Why? He had only to look casually into one of the polished surfaces of the great cookers in the kitchens where he toiled. The medics who demicrobed him and made him live didn’t. His teachers didn’t, usually finding an excuse to expel him from their classes as a disruptive influence. So this is how it had ended up. Down here in the stygian dark where nobody could see how ugly he was.

  A coldness that was alive slithered over his legs. Reaching down to fling it away his hands discovered that it had fangs on one end. He found that out when they bit into his arm.

  “Owwwww!” he howled. His wolfish protest echoed dolefully across the dank stony surfaces.

  Now he knew what had wakened him. A nibbling serpent. His howl rippled a sea of hissing around him and a sinister rustling. Snakes. Hundreds. Thousands. A dungeon-ful of them, slithering like great black worms over and under and around each other; now, it seemed to Kullervo Kasi, moving methodically toward him to fang the intruder.