Frederik Pohl & Cecil Kornbluth - Wolfbane

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WOLFBANE

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to

real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Books.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises 260 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10001

First printing, June 1986

ISBN: 0-671-65576-0

Cover art by Jael

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER TRADE PUBLISHING GROUP 1230 Avenue of the Americas _.New York,

N.Y. 10020

Roget Germyn, banker, of Wheeling, West Virginia, a Citizen, woke gently from a

Citizen s dreamless sleep. It was the third-hour-rising time, the time proper to a day of

exceptional opportunity to appreciate.

Citizen Germyn dressed himself in the clothes proper for the appreciation of great

works—such as viewing the Empire State ruins against stormclouds from a small boat; or

walking in silent single file across the remaining course of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or—

as today; one hoped that it would be today— witnessing the re-creation of the Sun.

Germyn with difficulty retained a Citizen's necessary calm. When the rekindling of the

Sun was late one was tempted to meditate on improper things: would die Sun in fact be

re-created? What if it were not? He put his mind to his dress. First of all he put on an old

and storied bracelet, a veritable identity brace-

let of heavy silver links and a plate which was inscribed:

Korea 1953

PFC JOE HARTMANN

His fellow jewelry-appreciators would have envied him that bracelet—if they had

been capable of such an emotion as envy. No other ID bracelet as much as two

hundred and fifty years old was known to exist in Wheeling. His finest shirt and pair

of light pants went next to his skin, and over them he wore a loose parka whose seams

had been carefully weakened. When the Sun was re-created, every five clock-years or

so, it was the custom to remove the parka gravely and rend it with the prescribed

graceful gestures . . . but not so drastically that it could not be stitched together again.

Hence the weakened seams. This was, he counted, the forty-first day on which he and

all of Wheeling had donned the appropriate Sun-re-creation clothing. It was the forty-

first day on which the Sun—no longer white, no longer blazing yellow, no longer even

bright red—had risen and displayed a color that was darker maroon and always darker.

It had, thought Citizen Germyn, never grown so dark and so cold in all of his life.

Perhaps it was an occasion for special viewing? For surely it would never come again,

this opportunity to see the old Sun so near to death. . . .

One hoped.

Gravely Citizen Germyn completed his dress-

ing, carefully thinking only of the act of dressing itself. Apparel-donning was by no

means his specialty, but he considered when it was done that he had done it well, in

the traditional flowing gestures, with no flailing, at all times balanced lightly on the

ball of the foot. It was all the more perfectly consummated in that no one saw it but

himself.

He woke his wife gently, by placing the palm of his hand on her forehead as she lay

neatly, in the prescribed fashion, on the Woman's Third of the bed.

The warmth of his hand gradually penetrated her layers of sleep; her eyes demurely

opened.

"Citizeness Germyn," he greeted her, making the assurance-of-identity sign with his

left hand.

"Citizen Germyn," she said, with the assurance-of-identity inclination of the head

which was prescribed when the hands are covered.

He retired to his tiny study to wait.

It was the time appropriate to meditation on the properties of connectivity. Citizen

Germyn was skilled in meditation, even for a banker; it was a grace in which he had

schooled himself since earliest childhood.

Citizen Germyn, his young face composed, his slim body erect as he sat, but in no way

tense or straining, successfully blanked out, one after another, all of the external

sounds and sights and feelings that interfered with proper meditation. His mind was

very nearly

vacant except of one central problem: Connectivity.

Over his head and behind, out of sight, the cold air of the room seemed to thicken and

form a blob; a blob of air.

There was a name for those blobs of air; they had been seen before; they were a known

fact of existence in Wheeling and in all the world. They were recognized as something

associated with meditation on connectivity. They came. They hovered. Then they went

away . . . and often did not go away alone.

If someone had been in the room with Citizen Germyn to look at it, he would have seen a

distortion, a twisting of what was behind the blob, like flawed glass, a lens; like an eye.

And they were called Eye.

Germyn meditated . . .

The blob of air grew and slowly moved. A vagrant current that spun out from it caught a

fragment of paper and whirled it to the floor; Germyn stirred; the blob retreated as his

meditation, for a moment, was disturbed.

Germyn, all unaware, disciplined his thoughts to disregard the interruption, to return to

the central problem of connectivity. The blob hovered . . .

From the other room, his wife's small, thrice-repeated throat-clearing signaled to him that

she was decently dressed. Germyn got up to go to her, his mind returning to the world.

Meditation, for that time, was over.

The Eye overhead spun restlessly for a moment. It moved back and forth indecisively, as

a man might pace along a train platform when someone with whom he expected to share a

journey did not show up. Then it disappeared.

Some miles east of Wheeling, Glenn Tropile, a Jack of every trade who secretly wondered

whether he was a human being, awoke on the couch of his apartment.

He sat up, shivering. It was cold. Damned cold. The damned sun was still damned bloody

dark outside the window, and the apartment was soggy and chilled.

He had kicked off the blankets in his sleep— why couldn't he learn to sleep quietly, like

anybody else? Lacking a robe, he clutched them around him, got up and walked to the

unglassed window.

It was not unusual for Glenn Tropile to wake up on his couch. This happened because

Gala Tropile had a temper and was inclined to exile him from her bed after a quarrel. He

knew he always had the advantage over her for the whole day following the night's exile.

Therefore the quarrel was worth it. An advantage was, by definition, worth anything you

paid for it ... or else it was no advantage.

He could hear her moving about in one of the other rooms and cocked an ear, satisfied.

She hadn't waked him. Therefore she was about to make amends. A little itch in his spine

or his brain—it was not a physical itch, so he couldn't locate it; he could only be sure that

it was there—stopped troubling him momentar-

ily; he was winning a contest. It was Glenn Tropile's nature to win contests, and his nature

to create them.

Gala Tropile, young, dark, attractive, with a haunted look, came in tentatively carrying

coffee from some secret hoard of hers.

Glenn Tropile affected not to notice. He stared coldly out at the cold landscape. The sea,

white with thin ice, was nearly out of sight, so far had it retreated as the little sun waned

and the spreading polar ice caps hoarded more and more of the water of the seas.

"Glenn—"

Ah, good! Glenn. Where was the proper mode of first-greeting-one's-husband? Where

was the prescribed throat-clearing upon entering a room? Assiduously he had untaught

her the meticulous ritual of manners that they had all of them been brought up to know;

and it was the greatest of his many victories over her that sometimes, now, she was the

aggressor, she would be the first to depart from the formal behavior prescribed for

Citizens. Depravity! Perversion! Sometimes they would touch each other at times which

were not the appropriate coming-together times, Gala sitting on her husband's lap in the

late evening, perhaps, or Tropile kissing her, awake in the morning. Sometimes he would

force her to let him watch her dress—no, not now, for the cold of the waning sun made

that sort of frolic unattractive; but she had permitted it before; and such was his mastery

over her that he

knew she would permit it again, when the Sun was re-created. . . .

If, a thought came to him, if the Sun was re-created.

He turned away from the cold outside and looked at his wife.

"Good morning, darling." She was contrite.

He demanded jarringly: "Is it?" Deliberately he stretched, deliberately he yawned,

deliberately he scratched his chest. Every movement was ugly. Gala Tropile quivered but

said nothing.

Tropile flung himself on the better of the two chairs, one hairy leg protruding from under

the wrapped blankets. His wife was on her best behavior—in his unique terms; she didn't

avert her eyes. "What've you got there?" he asked. "Coffee?"

"Yes, dear. I thought—"

"Where'd you get it?"

The haunted eyes looked away. Good again, thought Glenn Tropile, more satisfied even

than usual; she's been ransacking an old warehouse again. It was a trick he had taught her,

and like all of the illicit tricks she had learned from him a handy weapon when he chose

to use it. It was not prescribed that a Citizeness should rummage through Old Places. A

Citizen did his work, whatever that work might be—banker, baker or furniture repairman.

He received what rewards were his due for the work he did. A Citizen never took

anything that was not his—no, not even if it lay abandoned and fated to spoil.

It was one of the differences between Glenn Tropile and the people he moved among.

I ve got it now, he exulted; it was what he needed to clinch his victory over her. He spoke:

"I need you more than I need coffee, Gala."

She looked up, troubled. "What would I do," he demanded, "if a beam fell on you one day

while you were scrambling through the fancy groceries? How can you take such chances?

Don't you know what you mean to me?"

She sniffed a couple of times. She said brokenly: "Darling, about last night—I'm sorry—"

and miserably held out the cup. He took it and swallowed the coffee thoughtfully. Then

he set it down. He took her hand, looked up at her, and kissed the hand lingeringly.

He felt her tremble. Then she gave him a wild, adoring look and flung herself into his

arms.

A new dominance cycle was begun at the moment he returned her frantic kisses.

Glenn knew, and Gala knew, that he had over her an edge—an advantage; the weather

gauge; initiative of fire; percentage; the can't-lose vigorish. Call it anything, but it was life

itself to Glenn Tropile's kind. He knew, and she knew, that having the advantage he

would press it and she would yield—on and on, in a rising spiral. He did it because it was

his life, the attaining of an advantage over whomever he might encounter; because he was

a Son of the Wolf.

A world away a Pyramid squatted sullenly on the planed-off top of the highest peak of the

Himalayas.

It had not been built there. It had not been carried there by man or man's machines. It had

come in its own time for its own reasons.

Did it wake on that day, the thing atop Mount Everest? For that matter, did it ever sleep?

Nobody knew. It stood or sat, there, approximately a tetrahedron. Its appearance was

known; constructed on a base line of some thirty-five yards, slaggy, midnight-blue in

color. Human beings had toiled up Everest's grim slopes to learn that much. Almost

nothing else about it was known to mankind.

It was the only one of its kind on Earth; though men thought (without much sure

knowledge) that there were more, perhaps many more, like it on the unfamiliar planet that

was now Earth's binary, swinging around the miniature Sun that now hung at their

common center of gravity. But men knew very little about that planet itself, for that

matter, only that it had come out of space, and was now there.

Time was when men had tried to give a name to that binary, more than two centuries

before, when it first appeared. "Runaway Planet." "The Invader." "Rejoice in Messias, the

Day Is at Hand." The labels might as well have been belches; they were sensefree; they

were x's in an equation, signifying only that there was something there which was

unknown.

"The Runaway Planet" stopped running when it closed on Earth.

"The Invader" didn't invade; it merely sent down one slaggy, midnight-blue tetrahedron to

Everest.

And "Rejoice in Messias" stole Earth from its sun—with Earth's old moon, which it

converted into a miniature sun of its own.

That was the time when men were plentiful and strong—or thought they were; with many

huge cities and countless powerful machines. It didn't matter. The new binary planet

showed no interest in the cities or the machines. They didn't show any interest in Earth's

weapons, either—no, not even when the worst and most deadly of them were deployed

against the invaders. The invaders simply went about their business.

Whatever that was.

For four billion years and more the Earth had rolled decorously around the Sun, always in

its proper place between the orbits of Venus and Mars, always with its captive Moon for a

companion. There was no reason that should ever change.

It did change, though. Something reached out from the interloper planet and changed

everything. That something, whatever it was, took hold of the Earth as it sailed around the

Sun, and the Earth left its ancient round and followed after, Moon and all. At first the

motion was very slow. Then it quickened.

In a week astronomers knew something was happening. In a month the old Sun was per-

ceptibly farther away, tinier, less warming. There was panic about that—added to all the

other panics that swept the globe.

Then the Moon sprang into flame.

That was a problem in nomenclature, too. What do you call a Moon when it becomes a

Sun? It did, though. Just in time, for already the parent Sol was visibly more distant, and

in a few years it was only one other star among many.

When the inferior little sun was burned to a clinker they—whoever "they" were, for men

saw only the one Pyramid—would hang a new one in the sky; it happened every five

clock-years, more or less. It was the same old moon-turned-sun; but it burned out, and the

fires needed to be rekindled. The first of these suns had looked down on an Earthly

population of ten billion. As the sequence of suns waxed and waned there were changes;

climatic fluctuation; all but immeasurable differences in the quantity and kind of radiation

from the new source.

The changes were such that the forty-fifth such sun looked down on a shrinking human

race that could not muster up a hundred million.

A frustrated man drives inward; it is the same with a race. The hundred million that clung

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摘要：

WOLFBANEThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1986byFrederikPohlandC.M.KornbluthAnearlierandsubstantiallydifferentversionofthisworkwaspublishedunderthesametitle©1959byBallantineBooks.Allrig...

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