Emil Petaja - The Stolen Sun

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The Stolen Sun

by Emil Petaja

Table of Contents

PART ONE

THE TIME GAP

I

II

III

IV

PART TWO

THE COMING OF THE DARK

V

VI

VII

VIII

PART THREE

VIPUNEN THE INFINITE

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

PART ONE

THE TIME GAP

“Then the sky was cleft asunder All the air was filled with windows, Burst asunder by the

fire sparks As the red drop quick descended And a gap gleamed forth in heaven.”

Kalevala: Runo XLVII

I

^ »

The manship dropped into the seething darkness like a predatory fish. This alien-made dark

was as virulent as it was viscuous; it brought corrosive death to anything less than a manship

Destroyer of the Terran Deep Fleet, with its heavy coat of force field armor that deflected the

planet’s lethal triple-shield.

“Go, Lady!”

Warily now, Lady sent out invisible probes to lick out into the stygian dark for Mephiti

ships. Wayne Panu’s eyes were her eyes, hers his.

“So far, so good, your Lady-ship!” Wayne’s mind stroked hers but joined her in a tight

watchfulness.

“Too close to light,” Lady pontificated out of her tapes. “Mephiti detest all light and sound.

That’s why it is impossible for us to communicate, why we keep losing ships. Even the

reflected absorbed light we can’t see, from stored energy and released energy, offends the

Mephiti. So—they kill us out of fear.”

“Or we kill them,” Wayne said grimly. “The first thing we knew about them was losing a

big wedge of Fleet ships in some black goop we couldn’t see. Can’t detect them by sound,

either. The bases of their ecology is completely alien. If it wasn’t for the smell—”

“They are gaseous, obviously. Yet they are highly sophisticated and cunning. As far as our

scientists have been able to deduce they evolved by skips and jumps straight out of N.C.C.

6720 itself, before it started to become a planetary nebula.”

Wayne made a rough noise. “Deep Fleet had some very desirable real estate all pegged out

in this sector of Orion, what with a few million hopeful colonists… Then we slammed into one

of these seething nightmare pockets. Two. Ten. A hundred. Their own roving colonies travel

within these semi-solid shields until they reach a planet they want, then they spread the black

goop all over it and take it from under our noses. Naturally we weren’t happy about this

invasion, and the war was on. But what a war! If it wasn’t that the Mephiti smell so bad—”

“We have concluded that odor is their means of communication. When we tried to get close

enough for the usual sight or sound symbols, trying to make contact, we got killed for our

pains. And they are multiplying fast, oozing in from God-knows-where. Finally we were able to

design our manships to be both sightless and soundless, like us.”

“I keep pointing out,” Wayne grumbled, “that the Mephiti stink to high heaven.”

“To Terran noses, yes. But this is their attempt to communicate with us, warn us away.

Doubtless, like us, they need elbow room and new resources. They presume to take over

planets we had claimed for ours, shrouding each one they take with a protective shield like this

and—”

Wayne gave Lady her head; he had to. Once her micro-tapes were triggered off she was

good for a solid hour or maybe ten. Just like a woman, he thought, grinning. In any case the

Psychs who had engineered that phase of the incredible manships (Wayne preferred to call

them Ladyships) had done this on purpose; it kept the weary enforced silences, after his brain

had been umbilicated to hers, from becoming unendurable. Her microtapes fed his brain vast

stores of mnemonic knowledge, prodding his own memory cells. When the time for action

came, though, Lady shut up, whipping her sophisticated capacities and draining his toward the

immediate end. The built-in irritation kept Wayne’s faculties honed to a fine edge. Lady was,

after all, a machine, unsubject to human vacillations and quixotics; at the same time Wayne’s

agility and reflexive capacities were more able to take care of intangibles and sudden changes.

Wayne was super-high esp, too.

They made a beautiful couple. Everybody said so.

Dr. R. Roland Delph said so, over and over and over. Dr. Delph was the Fleet’s top Psych,

was largely responsible for the manship umbilicus, and he told every new class of tyros the

same thing. Emulate Wayne-plus-Lady for all you’re worth. They were Numero Uno.

The recruits who had made it to Astro Post XXXI were high-esp, of course, and the tests

they had passed were grueling. Physically and psychologically, and para. Extrasensory talent

was still hit and miss, still in the wistful stages. Chemo-therapeutic goosing upped the ante a

little.

But Wayne Panu was special.

“Damn special,” Dr. Delph told each new crop. “Now that we need out-talents desperately

to save our whole Deep Colonization program—where is it? Primitives had more of it than we

do. Like animals, they had to have it to survive. We have our mental gymnastics to depend on,

not to mention our robotic technology. We’ve let these unexplored areas of our mind sit and

atrophy. Even a child—”

“Excuse me, sir,” one bright-eyed recruit said cheerfully, “We’ve already been briefed on all

this. Children and animals empathize with their playthings, etcetera, etcetera. A dog knows

when his master has had a fight with his boss. As the Neanderthals learned to talk and think

they forgot how to esp. If you don’t mind—sir!—tell us about Panu. Just what is it he’s got and

how do we go about getting it?”

Dr. Delph’s shook his loose jowls. “Son, if I could tell you that I would be a reasonably

happy man. We’ve tried to find out. Gone into his ancestry with a fine-tooth comb. Picked his

brains, his glands, his psych—until he threatened to leave Project Manship. Every time he goes

out we send a likely newcomer to tail him, observe, intuit, work him. But how can you explain

the inexplicable? Apart from the purely thought-mechanics, which we ordinarily have to settle

for, how can I explain the manner in which Wayne Panu actually becomes part of his ship?”

“You don’t actually mean—”

“Whatever you are thinking, I mean it! Panu empathizes in toto. He is the hull. He is the

motors. And of course the computer complex.”

Whistles of grudging admiration.

“He must be a mutant. A giant jump in evolution.”

“Or—” Dr. Delph broke off with a vasty sigh.

“Or what, sir?”

“A throwback to an unknown race that had such powers.”

A burst of protest. “But sir! There never was such a race! Not on Terra! Nor anyplace else, as

far as we’ve come!“

“We’re the cream of the crop,” somebody added smugly.

The balding Psych stared into infinity. “Somewhere along the ancestral thread, like a

genetic overfold…”

“Red alert! Red alert!” Lady’s electric arteries put Wayne’s mind on the qui vive.

“Where?”

“Left. Ahead and down.”

“Don’t see a thing in the vid,” Wayne grinned.

“No time for comedy,” Lady said acidly. “Recheck instruments for position. Ready kill-ray.

Confirm speed. Confirm trajectory.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Wayne’s hands went to work on the instrument panel; they snapped on buttons that aimed

the infrared ray on the Mephiti ship’s olfactory nerve center, which Wayne’s nose and the

odor-sensitive detectors had beamed in. As they dipped into Layer Two of the black goop, they

found themselves rapidly nosing toward a lurking sentinal ship of the enemy.

“If we win this war,” Wayne quipped grimly, “we’ll win by a nose.”

Lady was oblivious to his humor at this point. Wayne sent his mind down into the innards

of the shark-shape, checking guns and thrusters. The robotics of Lady accepted his intrusion

with military acumen. Moving up into the ship’s engines, he nudged the accelerators; vectored;

while dipping further into the second layer he made a cortical note of a buzzing connector. A

minor defect, like a human hair out of place, but Wayne took cerebral pride in Lady’s

appearance. Even in her insides. Especially in her insides, since they were most important.

Curious, he sometimes mused, to be roving among his wife’s arteries and organs like this!

“Ten seconds!” Lady’s voice was tart.

The blacker patch in the blackness now bogeyed the smell-scanner, clearly defined. Wayne

held his breath while mind and hands poised for kill. He counted along with Lady.

“Damn!” He broke at six. “He’s spotted us! He—” The bogey was moving out of fire range,

fast. “Now!” Lady shrilled. “Fire now!”

Wayne’s hand had already slammed the trigger studs. Hot red lightning sprayed out of

twenty vents, stabbing the skunk-cloud’s tail in a dozen places. Light limned an odd spiral

shape just before the Mephiti ship imploded and vanished in a thunder of sonics.

Grim-mouthed, Wayne released the four levers that laid destructive eggs on the surface below.

Lady precogged Wayne’s mind; before he even said, “Let’s get to hell out of here!” they

were on their way up. Wayne gasped back against the auto-cushion enveloping him against the

fury of their up-thrust into open space. “What would I do without you, Lady?” he asked,

taking a deep breath and savoring the sight of all those salt-sprinkle stars.

“Without my hull to protect your human body, without the properly mixed air in my

automatic tanks, without—”

“Yeah, I know.” Wayne blew her a quick kiss. “Without you I’d just die!”

Lady reminded him, rather primly, “Have you checked the other manship?”

“Mother of pearl!” Wayne whistled. “I forgot all about the reader Dr. Delph stuck on my

tail!”

II

« ^ »

Chuck Sotomeyer was, taken physically, near to being the antithesis of Wayne. Where Wayne

was lean and hard, with a narrow contoured face, an almost ascetic cast to his jaw-line,

needle-sharp blue eyes, and close-clipped wheat blond hair, Chuck was short, muscular,

stocky, and he wore his sheen-black hair rather long in front so that the crisp curls flung

themselves down over straight-cut black brows and amiable green eyes. His wide young face

had dimples and laugh-lines, his lips red and ready. When there were any women available,

Chuck cut a wide swath.

Just as soon as Wayne tripped the umbilical switch and temporary divorced Lady, Chuck

stuck his happy face in the vid.

“Yeah, buddy! I took it in and got the hell out as soon as Lady gave me the high sign! Gad,

what a blast! Talk about splatter! How many skunks you figured we liquidated?”

Wayne ignored the “we,” but his brows puckered. Not because he didn’t like Chuck. He

did. He liked Chuck best of any of the readers Dr. Delph had saddled him with. Chuck’s

cockiness and good humor pulled him out of the sloughs of despond into which his work as

Destroyer dropped him after the key-up demand for all-out action and target-directed thought

was over. Each day, or almost, meant one more target. One more colony of aliens blasted out of

existence. It wasn’t a fun thing to have on your mind when the whole thing was over and it

was time to go to sleep. If you could sleep.

But no jokes now, please. Not right now. Not right after. Maybe to Chuck it was some kind

of a game, killing “skunks.” But deep inside of Wayne Panu something rebelled; beyond his

punning with Lady, his byplay with Chuck, Dr. Delph’s shoulder-massaging, something

resisted and loathed the whole thing. He killed Mephiti, by the thousands, millions for all he

knew. If he didn’t, they’d kill him, and God knows how many Terran colonists. Still, Wayne

rebelled. Rebelled deep inside of his cells, and resented the super-mental equipment he was

born with because it had brought him to this. …

He didn’t tell anybody. Who could he tell? Not Lady. Her brain wasn’t equipped to

understand compassion. He couldn’t tell Dr. Delph. Delph couldn’t permit himself to agree,

even a little bit. Wayne was the Fleet’s bright hope. Lord! It would never do to let the Psych

Head know that he was starting—insidiously and without volition—to empathize with the

Mephiti…

Wayne’s upbringing was nothing unusual. In fact, it was commonplace these days. Wayne

was born of simple second generation colonists on a farm in Proxima. His grandparents had,

like so many billions, fled the crowded Levels of Terra and the monotonous complexity of

rat-hole living. It was a rough pull, those first fifty years, what with the thin blue light of

Proxima shining down on a virtually lifeless rock. Somehow, as elsewhere, they had survived

and scratched out a scanty existence. Children had been born, married, stayed there on the

scattered farms because there was no money to leave and nowhere else to go. Even Terra closed

behind them after they had once made, the colonial lists, like a sea closes behind a flung stone.

Wayne thrived. He loved to watch the saffron blush of dawn over the jagged crystal peaks,

along the clean green patent-leather shine of com leaves sprouting tall and straight under

anxious loving hands. The corn-stalks talked to Wayne; they whispered secrets about the

paRMblue sun and the soil, and how content they would be to become part of Wayne and the

others who had tended them so faithfully. It was continuance; it was becoming part of

something greater than themselves, to the great time pattern being woven on some cosmic

loom beyond the stars.

Wayne’s thin bones sprouted up with the corn. Hard work sheathed them with efficient

useful muscles. But Wayne was not oriented to the technical sciences. He didn’t know what he

knew. Like the other youngsters, he studied the books and the vid tapes, and he did his share

of squirming about it. Tech books weren’t much fun. But, like most, he had his secret life.

At first it seemed natural to him to “see” into the heart of the corn and the barley. When his

dog, Sisu talked to him, it was the most natural thing in his world. It was only after some

stinging remarks and fist fights that he began to realize that it was best to keep his mouth shut

about these things. When he tried to “see” his mother and father, or his playmates, it didn’t

work. Or just a little, randomly, vaguely. The lack he decided much later, was in them. They

had no transmitter to his receiver.

“You came from a farm on Proxima, eh, buddy-boy?”

Wayne snapped to from Chuck’s casual mind-thrust into his thoughts. After all, like all of

the Manship Project pilots, Sotomeyer was a random esper, and Wayne’s musing cut a deep

rut.

Wayne smiled at him in the bid. “Yes. I got to hating the monotony of the same faces, same

routine. When our twice-a-year offworld supplies were shipped in I’d get thinking about

stowing away. I wanted out in a bad way, then.” He ended, glumly, “I’m not so sure now.”

“You were lucky, buddy-boy,” Chuck grinned. “I had to claw my way up out of Level-84.

Never even saw Sol until I was nine.”

Wayne nodded. His one leave on the mother planet had bothered him, still did. All those

hundreds of eggcrate levels, efficient/antiseptic, stretching out across all the continents. Oh,

there were a few gardens and wild places, but these too were rigidly controlled. Everything was

under control. It had to be; Terra was a technological sardine can. No wonder colonists were

willing to endure anything to get off! And no wonder the Destroyers. Humanly inhabitable

worlds were pitifully few and far between. The nothing in between was endless. And those

planets which could support life already had life. They quite naturally resented intrusion. So.

After the early X-Plor ships had tagged them, the Fleet Destroyers moved in. It took Man a

while to work himself up to All-Destroy, but he made it. It wasn’t the only way, but it was the

best way because it came to that in the end.

Wayne saw death, brought death wherever he went. He watched inoffensive alien

civilizations blown out of existence on their own worlds with steady eyes. Man’s claw-out was

too desperate, too needful. The stakes were too high. And each out-push led to others, like

stepping stones. Man continued to breed and need, and the breeding and the needing shoved

him further and further out in radiating circles from congested Terra. It was all—or nothing…

“How come you didn’t go back home when your stretch in the Fleet ended?” Chuck asked.

“It was my trip to Terra.” Wayne smiled a tight grimace. “The Mephiti had just started.

Manship was cooking. Somebody someplace got a look at my esp chart.”

“Three cheers for the red, white and black.” But Chuck’s green eyes registered a kind of

envy. Chuck had scrambled into Manship the hard way, driven hard to pull himself out of the

ranks of the nonentity numbers. “And now you are Number One.” He whistled as a kind

of^genuflection. “Wanna tell Chuckie-boy about it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Tell me anyway, buddy-boy. We’re not going anyplace and”—he winked—“I’m supposed

to dig you a little. Orders of Dr. Delph.”

Wayne shrugged, gave the automatics a quick check.

Lady was right on course for home, which this time meant Astro Port XXXI, a ragbag of

hangers-on to satisfy the off-tint needs of the Fleet.

“Dr. Delph and his staff must have combed through a billion esp records. Everything from

precog to table tapping. Every possible candidate for Manship got screened. Lots of random,

but random just isn’t enough. In order to succeed in establishing the kind of rapport Dr. Delph

was after, he had to reach way down into the cells, the genes, the molecules, and whatever

comes before them!

“I was just one of the boys. Passed the physical easy enough but when it came to college

level bio-chem and physics I was out on my can. I pointed out that I was a farm boy; I had my

book-learning with the rest, and I was a reader. But not tech stuff. Early sci-fiction. Adventure.

History. Like that. Not much I didn’t know about space pioneering, but toss an equation at me

and I’m lost. I thought here is where I get dumped and goody-goody. Then—the card-esp…”

“One hundred percent!”

“Not first. Delph pulled me in for a personal interview. Here was when I tried to explain

what my trouble was.”

“And?”

“I saw the cards all right. Only I saw them too well. I saw them inside. The numbers on top

didn’t register; I was down inside of the molecular structure of the plastic. I had to train myself

to skim off the top!”

Chuck whistled awe. “How about that! But, listen, if you can get inside of Lady like we are

all supposed to do and can’t quite, how come you can’t read minds?”

“I think I know why. Either because the minds don’t have a good enough amplifier to—”

“Mine does!” Chuck bragged. “All the Manship picks—”

“Sure, Chuck. But there’s more to it. Don’t you see? Our whole civilization is built on a

kind of deviousness, a subtle cheating of each other. Look at the Syndicates and the way they

prey on the colonists. It’s the mental block we’ve unconsciously built up against outside

intrusion. Dr. Delph wonders why our esp talents haven’t kept up with the rest of our mental

faculties. That’s why! We distrust each other! We hide what we know so somebody can’t use it

against us!“

“Defense shield, like the black guck back there.” Chuck scowled. “Yeah. When you think

of all the back-stabbing and phony deals we’ve pulled on each other for thousands and

thousands of years…”

“The more subtle and sophisticated we got the greater was the need for this mental force

field. Me? I was brought up in a clean natural environment. There was no need to lie, at least

my mother and father never bothered to, nor most of the others. None of us had anything

worth stealing or finagling.”

Chuck’s nod was followed by a frown. “Still, lots of the men came from colonies. There

must be more to you than that. Any ideas? Like for instance your people?”

“I’m pretty much of a mongrel like everybody else these days. Since World Idiom and

U.N.”

There was a brief silence, interrupted by the Port’s signal beep for Wayne’s report on the

flight. After he clicked off, Chuck’s wide face grinned back and there was a lustful glint in his

green eyes.

“Hey, buddy-boy, wanna join me in a tour of the bistros tonight? I got this size thirty-six

blonde and she must have a friend for you. Let’s forget all this jazz, wipe the stink of the

skunks off with a couple blashs and—”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“C’monl You brood about all this too much, buddy-boy. I read you loud and clear. You

take it to heart. Hell, it’s dog eat dog out here! Gotta be! C’mon, buddy-boy! Well get Hashed.

Do you good. I insist!”

“Go right ahead and insist,” Wayne smiled. “Those blash sewers don’t do a thing for me.”

III

« ^ »

Wayne’s watch said half past one when the red light above his bunk flashed and the beeper

began to beep. His Captain’s status earned him a cubicle of his own in the cramped Astro XXXI

Base and for this he was grateful. There were times when he couldn’t stand anybody, even

himself. He raised up drowsily and flicked on the intercom. ”Yes?“

“Captain Panu, this is Ensign Gribble in Psych.” Ensign Gribble was excited and plaintive at

the same time. “So?” Wayne stifled a yawn.

“Captain, I know you’ve only had a couple hours sleep, but Dr. Delph told me to tell

you—”

“I know. This one is special. I’m the only one who can handle it.”

“Yes, Captain. That’s it, all right. But—”

“But what?” Already he was dropping his feet to the deck in a wide swing and reaching for

his pants.

“Sotomeyer! He doesn’t answer. We can’t find him. He must be off the Base. Have you any

ideas where—”

“If he hasn’t had any sleep he wouldn’t be much good, anyway. Tell Dr. Delph I’ll make

this run alone.” He was at the basin, dousing his blond head and giving it a vigorous shake to

remove the last shreds of a strange dream about an incredible copper starship that—it was

gone; Ensign Gribble’s voice was taut and high-pitched over a rush of protest. “What’s that?”

he demanded.

“Dr. Delph wants Reader Chuck Sotomeyer with you. He insists. Seems as if the automatic

computers on Sotomeyer’s ship indicate that he is the closest thing to you we’ve hit yet. In

spite of his bronco tendencies and drinking, the Manship-esper curves on his chart—” Ensign

Gribble’s voice lowered to a prim whisper, indicating an earnest desire to keep Chuck out of

trouble, if he could. “If he’s caught off limits one more time, he’s had it.”

Wayne toweled and pulled on his boots, fast. “How much time do I have?”

“Will an hour help, Captain?”

“I’ll find him,” Wayne said grimly. “Do what you can.”

“Sure, Captain Panu. I’ll stall ‘em.”

“Do that.”

While the road-runner jeep he commandeered pummeled loose basalt rock to pumice on

the so-called road toward the double row of bistros on the far side of Astro XXXI, Wayne swore

inwardly at Chuck’s “bronco tendencies.” Sure Chuck was young, but he was smart enough to

know that Space Navy rules were ironclad for good reason. Especially Manship. As for the

bistros, which were presumably there to cater to colonials and frontier civilian workers but in

effect were cosmic camp followers as well, these seamy joints were taboo and fraught with

obvious perils. Most of the Fleet gave them a wide berth; still there were always a few

men—like Chuck—whose libidos demanded the kind of diversion they could not buy in the

PX. Funny how the fact that a man was bright, sharp, sensitive (and Chuck Sotomeyer was all

of those things, besides high-random esp) could not overcome fleshly desires. Perhaps the

closeness to death, the smelling of it and causing it in wholesale lots, was what did it. Tensions

had to be released somehow. The invidious blash that hardcore spacers swilled in the bistros,

and the soft yielding bodies with the hard calculating eyes—even this was something, after the

aching desolation of so muck nothing out there and the everpresent realization that man had in

Deep of his own insignificance in the scheme of things. Not much, but it was something.

Wayne Panu, in his early years, had brushed with the camp followers and the civilian

spacetraps, but something deep inside of him couldn’t cut it. Reading the flashes of thought

within their habitués with his esper’s talent, revealed naked and heartless under the impetus of

blash and raw need, disgusted and pained him. In fact, being high-esp in itself made him

something of a loner. Yes. He understood Chuck, perhaps in a way better than the youngster

did himself. But he didn’t judge him. He liked the lad a lot and he would save him now, if he

could.

Moving into the mud-ruts of the neon-splashed main drag of temporary metal structures,

Wayne glanced with frowning eyes over saloon signs like KENTUCKY MOONSHINE and

MOM’S APPLE PIE, calculated to induce thoughts of “back home,” an oldtime back home that

didn’t even exist any more. The whole thing reminded Wayne of a tri-vid play set. Something

bike the shoot-‘em-up western America dramas.

The characters he saw shambling in and out of of the bars and girl-bistros were mainly

hardfaced frontier colonists; they had to be hard to put up with the discomforts and rigors of

bleak raw planets which had just been stripped of life by Manship for the later influx.

Womanless, mainly, the early colonist ships included construction workers of all kinds whose

job it was to set up some kind of living and functioning quarters for those who panted and

strained at their leashes to get out here from overcrowded Terra, for good or bad.

And the Syndicates.

These were like the old Mafia. New colonies were easy pickings for these under cover

gangs. Misfits. Navy deserters. Natural or unnatural predators. The Syndicates lost no time

muscling in after the far-flung Fleet left, bringing in gifts of supplies which were always in

demand on the outposts. Then they would plant in bosses among the colonists for later

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