The Saga of Lost Earths Read online

  “What about...” Carl jerked a nod back at Kullervo among the bear furs. “Why did the old crone chase him off? Just because he is named Kullervo?"

  Kauppi clouded up thoughtfully.

  “No. It is a something—a sense that one has in this wild country. Like something smells bad, you know? Kullervo smells bad with that other sense. Understand?"

  “I think so. And the ancient crone-"

  “Irde has this sense along with others, more so than any others of our village. She heals sick people with her hands and her rasping songs. She knows when a bad thing is going to happen. Not what bad thing, always, but something. As for him,"—a winced gesture back -"we wish it were not so, but he is born with evil. He cannot help it, perhaps. I don't know. I'm not like Irde, who can see clear bright in the long dark of our Winter. I wish it were not so, Kullervo being akin to the Pahaliset, but...” He shrugged, and cracked his whip over the flanks of the swift-moving animals.

  Carl nodded. Even in his tight cosy world of the patterned Levels, where the witches were Psychs, there were to be found persons who seemed to be born out of evil itself. When cures could not be found, they were put away in farms surrounded by high force field fences, so that they could not spread their tainted psychs. In the bad old days, the hell-years of the Great Wars, it was just such creatures who had caused them.

  “Maybe we should have left him behind in the village?” Carl mused.

  Kauppi shook his tasseled toque vigorously. “No. You brought him this far. It is his destiny to follow, to seek, as you are Seeking. Our village would not accept him; it would spew him out as Death spewed out his namesake of the Old Songs.

  * * * *

  During the next days of monotonous twilight, while the northwind, wailing icily, protested their intrusion into his domain, Carl queried Kauppi about the Rare Earth mines. How, in this largely ignored wasteland, had they come to be discovered suddenly? How was it that the Finns, scrupulously honest and religiously ethical as they were known to be, could permit these malignant rocks to be carried out into the great Cities and take a terrible toll among innocent humans?

  “Our people have known about the network of natural caveshafts since ... since ... since the Great Bear brought us here. But we are not miners. We are hunters, fishermen, followers of the reindeer herds across the tundras.

  “Sometimes children would wander into the caves. Old Irde warned us most severely to stay away from them, but you know how youngsters are. They brought out with them bits of shiny rock. One day a small craft that rides on the wind had a misfortune with its machines; it was almost as if something forced it to land not far from our village. While the pilot was recovering from his injuries and a horseman was sent to the nearest town where they have a radio, to have parts sent up for repair, this pilot found out about the mines and the ore samples."

  Kauppi made an old pagan sign toward the aurora borealis, cascading down the north sky.

  “I get it,” Carl said grimly. “The Force that found a weapon against us through the Rare Earths somehow pulled that stray ship down to this Lake village. They wanted the ores to be discovered and scattered over the planet."

  “It didn't take long.” Kauppi nodded. “In less than a week the mining interests flooded us with tools and food and promises. That winter, as Tuuri told you, game was so scarce that we all knew many days of empty bellies and dark despair. Tuuri accepted the mining company's deal, but only on the provision that we of Imari work the mines alone—no vieras—and in our own way. They would send a cargo airship once each week and we would load it."

  He snapped his whip for emphasis. “As for our knowing that the ore which we wrested from the caves and loaded on those great ships was like a poison we were helping to disseminate across your great Cities -need you ask?"

  “No, of course not. But how about, say, Old Irde? Didn't she and other high-esps suspect anything?"

  Kauppi smiled a grim smile.

  “Old Irde has many suspicions, many dire prophesies. They flash in and out like summer lightning. She knows many, many things. Perhaps even she wishes evil for the vieras; perhaps the Pahaliset twisted her mind-gifts to other forks in the time-stream. We of the Great Bear—” Kauppi stopped bluntly.

  Carl empathized at once. The great space-trek from the Great Bear, Otava, in times so ancient there were no numbers to count, was seldom spoken of, and never to vieras. But Carl was purely of the Vanhat. He could half-know.

  He stared up at the dazzling aurora, thinking, with a thickness in his throat, of Ilmatar, who had once called him her Golden Apple. Would he ever see her again? Was such a privilege possible?

  He thought, too, of Silia.

  His total immersion of thought patterns, vibrating in counterpoint to the soft crunch of their legginged feet through the snow crust, was like an inborn song. A song laden with joy and awe and wonderment that he should be here among the elements, churning and rocking their portion of the cosmic song from which all in this universe borrows its purposeful, non-ending rhythms.

  “You are trying to remember, Lemminkainen,” Kauppi murmured. “Trying to believe that which seems impossible to believe, to one clothed in flesh."

  Carl thought about what Dr. Enoch had told him. It is the topping of the cosmic sonic-vibrations that causes things to exist. For everything, by its atomic structure, is pure vibration: the whirling electrons, the whirling planets, the stars, the great clock that is Time. Everything! And the tremendous power that exists within the human mind is dipped out from that source of endless energy.

  Believe. That was what Kauppi said. To believe, utterly and completely, was to cause that which one believes to be! The Finns had harnessed this power of belief, long, long ago. They had believed their heroic legends, into existence.

  You must become a true hero, Dr. Enoch had told Carl. All trace of modesty must be flung to the winds. It is only as this actual, fierce, indomitable hero that you can save us and yourself.

  They called him Lemminkainen.

  It was the first step.

  * * * *

  Wild cranberry bogs and cattails and bleating lake birds, the rushes where the dark wind rippled water still bore a thin patina of ice: all of this gave way to white birches bending the wind, then, past a brief clearing, to a thick front of eve greens.

  “We will make camp here.” Kauppi put his nose to the wind as if consulting with the natural elements. “Tomorrow midday we will reach the cliff."

  Selecting a spot surrounded by trees, they set about creating a hole-in of branches and windbreak for the darkles night of rest. Kullervo did only what he was told to do, and that in a silence, which Carl found irritating and sinister. H watched Kullervo's bear-Ue shoulders lumber off a small distance from the fire Carl built to heat up their supper, something like an alarm bell clanged in his mind.

  “Yes,” Kauppi nodded across the firelight, “he will be watching.” Carl would remember Kauppi, the hunter, like that: his amiable fire-shadowed face grim with deep precognitive thoughts, standing lithe and tall in his ermine-tailed deer skins, savoring the piney domain of Tapio, god of the forest, fearless yet tautly aware of lurking danger.

  “We'll keep the fire going.” Carl yawned, leg-weary, bone-weary, from their long day's trek. “Shall I take first watch?"

  “No.” Kauppi gave him a grin. “You do well for a City fellow, but right now the marrow of your bones cries out for sleep. Me? Tapiola is my home. The children of Tapio are my friends. Sleep well. I will waken you when it is your turn."

  Obedient to the demands of his muscles and to Kauppi's insistence, Carl pulled into his sleeping bag. He listened to the whispering of the wind up in the branches, tried to remember that quick stab of alarm and put a label on it. But sleep won out.

  Lemminkainen!

  Dream or no, it was her. Ilmatar. Goddess of the rainbow. Her cry was a sword thrust.

  Wake!

  He snapped his eyes open with effort. First he lay there in his nylon cocoon, stiff
as one of the dark fir trunks around their bivouac. His neck muscles protested when he lifted wincing, to refute the painful alarm which had yanked him out of sound sleep.

  “Kauppi,” he whispered, shrugging his shoulder muscles out of their relaxed response to gravity. “How come you didn't wake me and-"

  Kauppi was gone. The fire was ashes.

  Carl unzipped the bag and leaped out in one blurred motion.

  “Kullervo!” He reached the branch-bed Kullervo had fixed for himself beyond a lightning blasted stump, in keeping with his insistence on being alone and unwanted.

  Kullervo was gone, too.

  “Kauppi!” he yelled through cupped hands.

  A wan midsummer's moon glimmered down on the forest. No bird sang. No small animal disturbed the silent mosses, Tapiola lay mantled over with breathless portent.

  The rhythmic vibration of the universe seemed to stop.

  Carl yelled out and crashed, panicked, to where they had left the sledge and the dogs, at the forest's edge. While he ran, his hand worried the leather handle of the knife on his silver-buckled belt. Os pointed pukko.

  Sledge and dogs were gone. He blinked down at the disturbed brush and dry needles in disbelief. From around the sedge and clay bank of the lake came a far off yelping. While he squinted and mumbled imprecations, the faint jangling of the sledge bells and the noise of the dogs receded and vanished on the wind.

  When he swung a look campward he noticed a dark patch huddled off in the trees. Part of a blue ermine-tailed headpiece.

  “Kauppi!"

  Carl wrenched out a groan when he ran to it and saw that it was the hunter. What was left of him. His body was torn and mangled, as if some huge supernormal creature with raping claws had ripped Kauppi into rags, in a wild torrent of rage, then flung him away when its fury was spent.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VIII

  CARL SANK to his knees, retching, sobbing. Kullervo had done this, with some terrible magic, with the think-power of pure evil. Carl had brought him up here and made such a horror possible, in spite of the nagging warnings in his psych. He wept dry tears for the young hunter while he set about preparing his pack for his lonely last thrust in search of Ilmarinen, the wondersmith.

  Jamming cooking gear into his pack, he heard it. He froze, standing there over the dead fire.

  Behind him in the dark trees, a dim roaring and snuffling, like an angered grizzly. It grew louder while he shivered there, the spittle drying in his throat from his sudden mindless fear.

  Kullervo had called forth something from out of his evil id. Filled with flaming hate, Kullervo had created this Thing that had killed Kauppi. Now it was lurking back in the trees, waiting for Carl.

  His lashing fear made it impossible for him to turn. Dr. Enoch had taught him to fear the monsters which the Finns had created out of their implicit belief, as well as the gods and heroes.

  Kullervo was born out of evil, possessed of it, able to create its manifestation. The old Kalevala Kullervo had created bears to devour his hated mistress and all of her household. Now this new Kullervo had created a monsterbear to kill Kauppi.

  “Kauppi died because he was trapped by his inborn ancestral belief in Kullervo's power to do this thing."

  Carl said it, loud. Saying it, thinking it, believing it, Carl turned around.

  There was no giant bear.

  There was nothing.

  * * * *

  He filled his pack from what Kullervo, the thief, had left him, cinched up the straps and heaved it up on his back. Then he set upon his way through the forest, grimly. There was no going back. He had defeated the residuum of Kullervo's hate by refusing to believe in the creature it created. But this lingering Thing was weak, spent, sated. How strong would he be, next time?

  The crackling of brush under his boots was reassuring; somehow the simple sounds of reality pushed back the hovering Unseen. Carl whistled, talked to himself aloud, chanted tuneless bits of doggerel, anything to keep his thoughts off the baleful potential for his destruction that haunted Tapiola, this forest of elemental magic. He refused to see the gray-brown gargoyle faces that peeked out suddenly from behind a gnarled tree trunk or bubbled up malodorously out of the places of quaking bog. Tapiola was alive with vibrations which had no place on Earth, yet lingered, waiting to be believed back into existence.

  Carl kept Them away by concentrating on the prosaic routines of his life in the Cities. Every once in a while he would pull his pukko knife out of its sheath and slash twigs out of his path, or just heft it. Long ago Vainomoinen, the greatest wizard of them all, had tamed iron and its son, steel. What great warlock could tame the Rare Earth from its fumbling paths of destruction?

  He thought about the old days, before the Psychs had dominated all facets of human behavior. The old wars and the old weapons they were fought with were shunned memories. Guns, atomic weapons, stun-needles, all of them were gone from the Cities now. There were no animals to fight in the Cities. Mankind had exploded them out of existence, except for the zoos and protected areas.

  Old dreams of conquest, old hates were no longer permitted. Only in this bleak wilderness were the primitive weapons and the needs for them believed.

  The new psych-clean earth was peculiarly vulnerable to this elemental Force because it had stifled the very idea of need for conflict. Earth was a sitting duck for alien takeover.

  Carl crashed his way through the bracken, stopping only to grope out a round of hardtack bread from his pack and munch it on his dogged path. He shook his water canteen. It was empty; he squinted among the lofty trunks and the underbrush for signs of a spring or clean pond. While he zig-zagged about, following false leads, his thirst mounted to obsessive demand.

  “Tapio!” he yelled out. “Bring me to water!"

  Echoes and bird chirps stirred the silence.

  Then, panting, he saw it, a mossy break in the timber. A deep green field of velvet moss with tufts of yellowish reeds here and there, in the center a gently bubbling pond.

  He ran for the sky-reflecting spot of water.

  Halfway across the mossy carpet his boots began to sink. The greenery was a mock; he was being sucked down into black iridescent slime. Stench of decayed animals which the swamp had eaten, gurgled up in great bubbles as the mosses quaked and parted.

  In less than a minute the mire had him to the waist.

  “Ahti!” he shouted, parch-lipped. “Ilmatar!"

  Echoes mocked. A crow fluttered to the top of a tall pine, cawing doom while it fled from the noise.

  Around him demon mouths chuckled.

  Carl lurched and squirmed while the ooze bubbled up to his chest.

  “Ilmatar!’ he cried again.

  Crying out the name, he turned his face toward the sky. Directly above him was a birch branch; shafts of prism-broken light shimmered through the pale leaves. Carl reached his hands up forlornly. It was hopelessly high.

  Despair clung to him like a leech. He must cast it aside! He must make it happen!

  His brain exploded suddenly with need: Esp, incantation, power, belief!

  “Drop, damn you!” he cried out. “Break!"

  The heavy branch seemed to sway closer; the twinkling lights mocked him, yet beckoned.

  “Ukko!” Carl blared out, from the deepest part of his mental being. All of his h5 power, all of the magic of his ancestors, plus something like a thread of intense cosmic light—all of this rushed together and became one solitary urgent Must.

  Ukko roared thunder. Lightning struck the branch. It fell with a crash that echoed up and up, beyond time and eternity.

  Carl dragged his befouled body onto firm ground; he lay there, face-down, for an hour. He hurt. Every cell of his body hurt; not from his struggles with the swamp, no. From having done the impossible.

  He lifted finally, with a groan. Every muscle of his body ached. He cocked an eyebrow at who was standing fifteen yards away, at the bog's edge, watching him gravely. A doe. An elk doe. She wriggled one
of her long ears to flag off a busily whirling swarm of mosquitoes; her moist black snout quivered; her large luminous brown eyes stuck to Carl's as if held there by sorcery.

  Carl blinked while he maneuvered to his knees, holding back a whistle of surprise. There was a crackling of brush but the doe's eyes kept vigil. Carl adjusted his muddy pack and raised to a crouch.

  The doe watched him. She lifted up one delicate hoof. Then, with a shake of her beautiful head, she showed him her brush, and bounded away.

  The shake seemed to say: Follow.

  Carl rocked dizzily up on his feet. That powder-puff tail bobbed and leaped, over fallen logs and huckleberry bushes, but always it reappeared when Carl's clumsy human feet lagged and he stopped to totter, panting, against a tree trunk. Tapiola, the forest, dwindled into meadowland; the young doe paced him fast, although now the terrain was rising to meet a sheer wall of escarpment so lofty it might well leap its way off the earth itself.

  He dragged wearily up to it with a moan.

  “I'll never make it. Sorry, Ilmar."

  He stared up, up, up into a somber gunmetal shroud of mist, then grunted and deliberately turned his back on such a wall of rock. He plopped down as if he intended never to get up again; his eyebrows met in stubborn anger. This was too much.

  “Go to hell!” he cried out, when the young doe circled him and stood twenty paces off, waiting.

  He dug in his pack for something to eat. He found a foil wrapped bar of chocolate, gnawed at it, trying to ignore the doe's persistent stare.

  “Go to hell!” he said again, and let his head fall back. He slept.

  Icy needles of rain pelting his face woke him. He sat up and looked for the doe. She was gone. “Good riddance!” He grinned, but he didn't fool the sharp pang of guilt in his SISU.

  A high-pitched whinny whirled him toward the cliff. There she was, looking down at him from an outcropping of rock twenty yards straight up. He shivered. He was cold down to the marrow of his bones. And now this drizzle, wind driven across the rising meadowlands.