The Star Mill Read online

  THE COSMIC STORM

  THAT HAD TO BE STOPPED

  About THE STAR MILL:

  Like SAGA OF LOST EARTHS this science-fantasy was inspired by the little-known Finnish Epic, the KALEVALA. But its stage is not simply a North European peninsula and a folk who put a new word of courage into the warring world—sisu—a land of sunlit lakes and forests during the months of all-summer, of howling flint-starred skies in the all-dark; like the music of the Finnish titan, Jean Sibelius, and the godfraught dreams spun around those ancient fires, it presumes to reach out to far stars, to include even the Powers that cause what is to be.

  Wondersmith Hero Umarinen fashioned a Sampo of infinite power. The Star-Witch of Pohyola twisted its atom-shuffling power to destroy and not recreate. There will be no end to this destruction until all matter, animate and inanimate, has been shattered. Through endless generations the Vanhat must wait until a new hero can be reassembled out of ancestral crumbs of heroic power, gene by gene. For it shall be he and he alone who can become the starpower axis that can destroy the destroyer.

  —Emil Petaja

  THE STAR MILL

  by

  EMIL PETAJA

  ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

  the star mill.

  Copyright ©, 1966, by Emil Petaja An Ace Book. All Bights Reserved.

  Direct quotations from Kalevala, The Land of Heroes, are by the kind permission of E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. Translated from the original Finnish of Elias Lonnrot, compiler, by W. F. Kirby in the Everyman's Library Edition.

  Cover by Jack Gaughan To

  Sime and Senia

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Pabt One

  THE DERELICT

  "Then did Pohyola's old Mistress Speak aloud the words of portent: 'Still can I devise a method, 'Gainst thy ploughing and thy sowing, 'Gainst thy children and their children ...'

  Kalevala: Runo XLIII

  I

  First awareness of existence as a living organism brought him only the symptom of pain. Pain pinned down his skull. Pain twisted his nerves. Pain shuddered down the length of his long body. It was as if this lithe, well-muscled form that was suddenly him had been carelessly flung onto the rocky surface like a piece of galactic debris.

  This must be the way one is born. An abrupt wrench, and this wretched chunk of matter suddenly possesses sentience. Unwillingly. Pell-mell. Only he was born with the potential to understand that it happened.

  He forced open his eyes. That simple act of his eyelids' muscles caused hideous pain. But here he was, shivering from the mauling pain, and he must force his senses to take account, one by one.

  He looked up.

  He shivered harder. Up there was raw black space. He lay very still, staring up into it with horror. Those needles driving down on him were stars, unnaturally bright because there was no atmosphere of any kind between him

  and them. Inside his cells something recoiled, whimpering. It didn't want to be born. It didn't want the pain of being alive.

  Time lashed him, changing him from baby to boy in seconds. Then, more slowly, a man....

  He found a voice in himself. He groaned. Now an arm trembled up along the metallic suiting that protected his sudden body from the deadly cold of space and provided it with air. His gloved fingers explored him; they discovered that a plastic helmet bulbed out around his head, noting with some interest the phenomenon of the glove flattening out inches from his eyes.

  He was learning, in spite of the pain. By winces he worked up to a sitting position. Little by little he took inventory. Of himself. Of his surroundings.

  The rock on which he had been flung must be some land of asteroid. Some small mote or dust-fleck out in the endless gaping maw of deep space. The inverse curve of skyline told him the rock was small. And something more subtle, some intuitive knowledge thrusting out of his cells, told him that he was quite, quite alone on it.

  He shook uncontrollably for a long minute, looking up at those mocking winks of light far above. Hungrily his eyes moved along the perimeter of the effulgent corona of reflected starlight for some scrap of himself. A Man. But there was nothing. No Ship. No empty food container. Nothing. Not a hint that anyone besides him existed anywhere in the universe.

  He retreated back into his pain.

  Why did he hurt?

  Spastic muscular contortion brought some answers. He inferred that before he had been flung onto the rock he had been savagely beaten. There were long welts and sore bruises on his muscular arms and legs. His face hurt, too. It had been a hand-to-hand battle, without the suit, of course. He had fought his enemy with every shred of his youthful strength. And he had won!

  He had defeated his enemy, by physical force or mental agility and—miraculously—somehow pulled himself into the spacesuit he was wearing, escaping to this rock. Yes. The enemy had not put him there. That must be it. He had escaped this far; either his enemy could not follow him, or didn't bother, assuming that he would die here within a short time.

  Which, of course, he would.

  Meanwhile—

  "Who—" He staggered up on his feet, pivoting his face at those mocking far-off suns and yelling: "Who am I? Who am I?"

  The stars burned coldly down. They were indifferent to him and his pitiful existence. These small creatures that moved briefly among them were of measureless insignificance. This one was no better than the rest. Let him shout. Soon he would die from lack of air, water, food. So what?

  Or—was it possible that something or someone up there in all that vacancy cared? Hope flickered, died.

  Time went. The stars moved on their paths. The little asteroid did its part in the intricate cosmic mobile.

  Sometimes he went on a ramble across the broken metallic rock. His wounds hurt less but his mental agony grew and grew. There was water in the suit's canteen, enough for perhaps two weeks. There was capsulated food in the wide black belt. The suit itself kept him warm. But the emptiness in his brain, the oblivion that ought to have been memory, crushed most of his instinct to survive.

  Lie down and die.

  He found a rocky outcrop, curled up, waited.

  Bitterness tormented him. His body told him he was young. He didn't want to die. Especially he didn't want to die not knowing what he was all about.

  Hunger stretched his belly. His lips cracked like small deserts. The heat-power in his suit began to fail; his fingers and toes went numb.

  Death clawed down. Up in the blackness stars started to form designs. Patterns, as if they wanted to tell him something. Maybe it was the cold, the thirst, the hunger. Yes. His drained mind was beginning to make its own wild fantasies. There were three of them. Three heroic giants striding down out of the windows in the sky. One young, careless: golden blond hair framed a handsome laughing face. One old: the beard lying against his deep blue tunic was white as a swan; the combed brown face was stern in prodigious thought One lanky and in-between, with his pointed chin and his wide mouth decorated by a crop of copper-red hair like ornamental twists of wire.

  He stared at the heroic figures while the space-cold cut through his veins. They seemed about to speak but a roar of thunder inside his brain smashed back their words. The hand of death scraping his eyes tore them away; the sky was empty and black again.

  He shrank against the icy rock, mumbling.

  Now, whether from inside the bolted chambers of his mind or from that black starless patch to his left, came a harsh, gleeful cackling laugh. It teased his dying consciousness. It spun from out of that black nebular patch, hovering just over his head. The cackler was insane, invisible—and triumphant.

  He lifted a few inches. It took every shred of strength left in his half-frozen body.

  "Autta!"
/>
  The plea bubbled out of cold-locked jaws.

  Death visions tortured him again. He saw a wide black lake and a black swan swimming majestically through blue mists, singing. He saw a girl with auburn hair and green eyes that wept uncontrollably—for him. Shafts of silver light seemed to stab his retreating mind. A clap of cosmic thunder shattered the galaxy.

  "Ukko!"

  Again the overwhelming vibration like thunder. I AM HERE.

  A crack opened in his locked mind. He glimpsed a wide snow-blanketed valley, a clutch of brown log huts, and, beyond the dark green forest path, a lake. Thunder rolled benevolently down from the high crags that completely surrounded the woodsmoke misted valley.

  I AM HERE, SON OF ILMARINEN.

  Then:

  Sudden, utter silence. Silence like the end of all that has been, is, or will be.

  Beyond his consciousness something told him that this was personal death. But what was that curious buzzing noise? It nagged down into the abyss he was halfway down, coaxing his dead senses back to life. It overcame his pleasant wish for extinction.

  Voices. Random voices, exploding in excited meaningless phrases. The audio within his suit, activated automatically by transmission from within its acceptance radius, was pulling in sound.

  "Good God, it is a man! I saw him move!"

  "How the hell did he get way out here, Captain? This sector of Ursae Majoris is nowhere, man!"

  "Poor bastard, we've got to pick—"

  "No . . . Too close to the Storm . . . We're not sure what he is."

  "Could be a Mocker."

  "Now—that war is over, man!"

  "Shall we break out the lifeboat, Captain Grant?"

  INo"

  "Hell! We can't just sail off and leave the poor—" "Yes, we can."

  "No, Captain! We just can't!"

  "We can. We're too close to the Black Storm."

  "But not inside it. Lord, Cap—"

  "No."

  "Excuse me, Captain Grant, but I feel that all three of us have a say in this. It's a man's life."

  "Brooks is right, Cap. If we pull out, all our lives well sweat blood from wondering whether..."

  "A vote, Captain Grant! Let's vote on it!"

  "No. Absolutely no. I am captain on my ship and my job is to protect my crew, even from themselves. I know just how you feel. I'm human, damn it! I'm as curious as both of you are to know what that derelict is all about. I've been a starman for twenty-nine years. I know how you feel. It's a long pull between anything habitable out here. Every human life is like gold."

  "Then put it to a vote! McGinn and I'll sign anything you want us to releasing you from responsibility. Hurryl Can't you see he's dying?"

  II

  I Ik awoke alone, alone in a small metal cubicle. It was so small that the wall above his bunk had a twenty-decree curve to it. He hurt in various places, so he knew he hadn't died on the rock; his spacesuit had been removed along with his claw-raped tunic, which had been replaced with a close-fitting gray uniform. For a while he just lay there, wary and taut. Beneath him thrummed motors of some land; he was aware by instinct or cellular familiarity of thrust, movement.

  He was on a spaceship. A small starship.

  He blinked down at the long limbs attached to a flat-belly torso. This was him. He was young, strong, alert. But who in the hell was he?

  With a silent swift movement he slid down off the bunk. He found some boots near the foot of the anchored bunk; he put them on. Thoughts began to crystallize. He remembered the rock and the weird visions when the creeping cold took over. What had happened next? Oh, yes. The voices on the audio. So they had voted to save him, in spite of the Captain's demurs. The other two members of the small starship had won out. They had picked him up, fed and doctored him, then left him alone to sleep off the effects of exposure and exhaustion. How long? No telling.

  He tried his legs. They worked fine. His muscles creaked and his sore spots twinged, but he was a functional organism again, whole and ready. Ready for what?

  "Who am IP" His voice was a raw whisper across the ten-foot cubicle.

  Whirling toward the closed hatch he saw that it had a long mirror set in it. Forcing his fists to uncurl, his legs to relax their fighting stance, he moved to the mirror.

  He stared in.

  Who .. . ?

  Anyway, not a two-headed monster. He saw a human face: long, narrow, saturnine. Hollow caves. The dour, sardonic cast of it was relieved somewhat by a generous mouth with uptilted laugh creases—and a ragged copper-wires beardl He wasn't pretty, for a fact. The face had character and a land of amiability, but the planes were too sharp, the cheekbones too prominent. The hungry gauntness wore the ragged copper-red moustache and beard with a land of joviality, matched by keen deep blue eyes that wore over them heavy thatches of that same flamboyance.

  There was something else. He moved closer to the mirror.

  Across his left cheek, flaming off an overlong red side-burn down to less than an inch from his wide mouth, was an angry crimson scar, shaped like a scimitar.

  He stared at the scar and something inside of him went ice-cold. It was like a brand. He was branded, marked like a leper or—

  The hatch opened cautiously, putting the scar reflected in its mirror closer to him.

  "You're awake?"

  He stepped back so that the youngster poking his dark head in could move all the way in. He closed the hatch behind him, quickly and furtively. His wide-nosed face split a grin.

  "I'm Joe McGinn. First Mate, it says on my stripe. Actually, on one of these X-Plor mosquitoes First Mate means everything down to chief cook and lav scrubber." He held out a plastic mug that steamed with inky liquid. "Brought you some coffee. That's the first thing I want when I wake up. You?"

  The monosyllabic inquiry included quite a bit more. First Mate Joe McGinn's Black Irish eyes were agog with curiosity about the castaway his vote had helped save.

  When the stranger said nothing, he chortled on. "You were out like a light when Brooks and I scooped you into the boat. Cap, that's Captain George T. Grant of T.D.S. X-Plor Fleet, made us jettison your suit and your clothes, just in case. You know. The Black Storm."

  He tried. The words that dragged out slowly and awkwardly didn't mean much because there wasn't much conscious memory to back them up. It was almost as if some other language besides universal space-idiom would come easier. Yet he did understand and absorb what Joe McGinn was telling him. He was on one of the small Terran Fleet exploratory vessels, small to conserve fuel for the long time-jumps and for versatility when they found something worth close investigation. Captain George Grant hadn't wanted to pick him up. Brooks, ecology tech and ship's medic, had joined McGinn in overriding the Captain's veto.

  His answers to the youngster's curiosity were mostly questions. McGinn obliged. He was a great talker.

  "Why'd we do it—pick you up? Hell, new faces are few and far between in this part of Big Ursa. We've been out seven months this time, haven't seen anything even near human until you." He chuckled boyishly. "You know, I'm not supposed to be here. Cap said don't go near the cabin. He's got a bug in his ear about the Storm. That's why he stuck you way down here by yourself."

  He held out the steaming mug. "Drink your coffee."

  When he reached for it their fingers touched. He pulled the mug and his hand back with a convulsive motion. He wanted to scream at the boy to get the hell out of here. Do what your Captain told youl Keep awayl Don't touch me!

  He didn't, though. He just stood there with the coffee slopping over his shivering hand. McGinn blinked.

  "Hey, you're not in too good shape yet. Better lay down and flake out some more." He opened the door behind him and backed out. "Sony, fella. You take it easy now."

  The hatch slapped briskly shut and there was that copper-decorated face staring at him again, like an accusing ghost. The red scar seemed to blaze in the mirror.

  A light insistent tapping pulled him out of nightmarish
slumber. The hatch opened on a new face this time. This face wore -a transparent helmet over it; the tall man it belonged to wore a metallic suit and gloves. An aquiline nose almost brushed the glasslike curve; it projected down off a high freckled forehead of thinning sandy hair. The smile and the gray eyes were provisionally friendly, courteous, less openly buddy-buddy than young McGinn.

  "I'm Jeff Brooks. I run the ecology tests when there's anything to run, which is seldom in these parts. Captain Grant would like a word with you in his cabin if you're up to it."

  He nodded and followed the suited figure down the narrow hatchway and up an abrupt metal stairs. Across a catwalk was the Captain's roomy quarters, roomy because it served multiple-duty as chart room and dining room; the half-open door across it gave him a wedged look at the controls deck. McGinn was at the controls. He, like Brooks and the Captain, wore anti-radioactivity gear.

  The man who whipped briskly out from behind a wide chart table wore a dapper black Starman's tunic under the transparent r.a. gear. He was below medium height, slim, athletic, military in every gesture. There were patches of white at his temples. His triangular face appeared stiff, almost waxy; only his eyes showed animation, glinting with cold brown fire. He wore all of his ribbons and braid, even on such a long lonely trek.

  His brief sharp glance was all-inclusive. After a silent moment his thin tight mouth relaxed and produced a faint smile of welcome.

  "I am Captain George Grant."

  The derelict nodded. That was the best he could do to acknowledge the introduction. The Captain's graying eyebrows pinched closer.

  "How do you feel?" he asked.

  "All right."

  "Good. Then you can relieve our curiosity a little by telling us who you are, and how you got way off here where, as far as we know, nothing human can exist."