Foster,Alan Dean - Humanx 5 - Sentenced To Prism

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Author: Alan Dean Foster

Title: Sentenced to Prism

Series: A Novel of the Humanx Commonwealth

Series No:

Original copyright year: 1985

Genre: Science Fiction

Date of e-text: 01/07/2001

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Version: 1.0

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By Alan Dean Foster : Published by Ballantine Books:

The Icenggger Trilogy

ICERIGGER

MISSION TO MOULOKIN

THE DELUGE DRIVERS

The Adventures of Flinx of the Commonwealth

FOR LOVE OF MOTHER‑NOT

THE TAR‑AIYM KRANG

ORPHAN STAR

THE END OF THE MATTER

FLINX IN FLUX

MID‑FLINX

BLOODHYPE

THE HOWLING STONES

The Damned

Book One: A CALL TO ARMS

Book Two: THE FALSE MIRROR

Book Three: THE SPOILS OF WAR

THE BLACK HOLE CACHALOT

DARK STAR THE METROGNOME and Other Stories

MIDWORLD NOR CRYSTALTEARS

SENTENCED TO PRISM SPLINTER OF THE MIND'S EYE

STAR TREK@ LOGS ONE‑TEN VOYAGE TO THE

CITY OF THE

DEAD

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . . . ... WHO NEEDS

ENEMIES?

MAD AMOS PARALLELITIES*

* forthcoming

Books published by The Ballantine Publishing Group are available at quantity

discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund‑raising, and

special

sales use. For details, please call 1‑500‑733‑3000.

***************************************************

A Del Rey Book

Rabllshed by Ballantire Books

Copyright O 1985 by Alan Dean Foster

Conventions.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random

House,

Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada

Limited,

Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85‑9'0718

ISBN 0‑345‑319110‑

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: September 1985

Cover Art by Barclay Shaw

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Here's one for Don and Dana Carroll to peruse

while they're fixing Italy...

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Chapter one

A fine day it was; clear and cloudless, bright (oh, how bright!) and cheerful,

a

day on which all things seemed possible. Even dying. Dying had not been on

Evan

Orgell's schedule for the day, but that was the result he was on the verge of

achieving. And there wasn't a damn thing he could do to prevent it.

Because his suit was broker.

All around him the extraordinary, phantasmagorical world called Prism teemed

with life. His visit to Prism was supposed to set him up for life. Now it

appeared likely it was going to set him up for something else.

The air centimeters from his face was rich with oxygen he couldn't breathe.

Nearby burbled a stream of fresh, cool water he couldn't drink. It mowed

through

a forest full of plants and animals he couldn't eat.

Prism's sun warmed his face. It was intensely bright but no hotter than the

star

which circled Evan's own world, Samstead. At midday the temperature was

posi-tively benign. He could breathe the air of Prism, drink its water, eat

his

own rations, and yet he was going to die. He was going to die because his suit

was broken.

It shouldn't be. It was a very special suit, even by the unique standards of

Samstead. It had been built especially for this visit. The engineers and

designers had constructed it to protect him from every imaginable danger,

every

conceivable threat a world like Prism could pose. What the suit's builders did

not foresee, could not have fore-seen, was the utter alienness of Prism's

inhabitants, not to mention their insidious cleverness.

It wasn't entirely their fault, he had to admit. The engineers were used to

building survival suits for work on worlds whose lifeforms were nothing more

than var-iations on a familiar theme, that theme being the carbon atom. Prism

was different. There evolution had pro-ceeded from a different beginning to

wildly different con-clusions.

It was that evolution which had broken his suit.

The bright sun continued to beat down on his unshaded form. While the

temperature outside his artificial epider-mis remained pleasant, it was

starting

its inexorable upward climb within. Evan desperately wanted a drink of water.

He

tried to roll over. The permanently sealed servos refused to respond and he

stayed as he'd fallen, fiat on his back.

His left arm wouldn't move at all. The right groaned as he stretched for the

water. It was a radical break with procedure, but he thought he might cup some

water in his one operable hand instead of trying to draw fluid from the helmet

tap.

Assuming he could do this, though, how could he deliver the water to his mouth

through the suit's impenetrable visor? His right arm went limp and he gave it

up, exhausted by the attempt, just as he'd been exhausted by Prism ever since

he'd touched down on its glittering, disorienting surface.

It had all seemed so simple and straightforward back on Samstead. An

unparalleled opportunity for advance-ment within the company. There was no way

he could fail to carry out the assignment. He'd never failed before, had he?

Not

Evan Orgell.

Methodical, brilliant, incisive, overpowering. Also impatient, overbearing,

and

arrogant. All those descrip-tions had been applied to him from the beginning

of

his career by those who admired him as well as those who hated or simply

envied

him. All were to varying degrees accurate. Failure was not a term which

applied

to Evan Orgell.

Until now. Because his suit was broken and survival suits just didn't break.

Until now. It was something that did not happen.

As Prism shouldn't have happened.

He lay there on his back, trying to gather his remaining strength and regulate

his breathing while he considered what to try next. The first thing was to get

out of the direct glare of the sun. Using his right arm as a lever, he slipped

it beneath him and pushed. The servos whined, his body lifted, and he managed

to

roll a couple of meters to his right, beneath the torus of a cascalarian. A

tiny

triumph, a very minor achievement, but it made him feel a little better.

The cascalarian occupied the same ecological niche on Prism as a shade tree on

Earth or Samstead, but it was not properly a tree. It possessed neither leaves

nor chloro-phyll. The tripartite central trunk was three meters high. From

there

stiff spines grew parallel to the ground. There supported a transparent glassy

torus which was filled, with a great variety of life, some of it motile, ail

of

it part of the parent growth. It reminded Evan of an imploded Christmas tree.

Everything grew toward the central trunk and the cen-ter of the torus. There

was

no outward expansion. Competition for living space within the torus was fierce

and constant, yet all of it was part of the cascalarian's own closed system.

The

various shapes were competing for food. Which was to say, for sunlight. Like

the

majority of lifeforms on Prism, the cascalarian was a photovore.

The thin outer shell of the torus magnified the sunlight falling on it. Within

the protective magnifying shell the internal lifeforms were colored lapis blue

and aquamarine. Here and there a few patches of royal blue‑something

twisted and

throve. There were also unhealthy‑looking patches of pink sponge, but

they were

rare.

The cascalarian was an organosdicate structure, as were most of the dominant

lifeforms on Prism, for it was a world based as much on silicon as carbon. A

world of glass, beauty, and confusion.

No matter. Shade was shade, he mused.

Icy turning his head he could look down at the stream. The cool, pure,

fast‑running stream that could save his life, if he could get to it. The

stream

was alive with snow-flakes. Twenty of them would fit easily in the palm of his

hand.

Snowflakes had tiny transparent legs which ended in broad fiat pads. Attached

to

their backs was a single curved sail about the size of a thumbnail. They

congregated where the water was still, partying on the surface tension. As the

sun rose or fell they adjusted their stance to receive as much of its light as

possible, crowding and shoving each other for the best place. Each

photoreceptive sail was a different metallic color: carmine red, cobalt blue,

deep purple, emerald green. A pair of tiny crystalline eyes marked the

location

of each head, and the eyes were colored the same intense hue as their owner's

sail.

Powered by Prism's sun, the creatures dashed silently back and forth across

the

water, using tiny vacuuming mouths to suck up the mineral‑rich

silicoflagellata

washed down from above. Thoughts of predation began to worry Evan. He was in

no

danger from the cascalarian or the brightly colored snowflakes, but he knew

that

Prism was home also to creatures which would gladly take him apart. Not for

meat, but for the valuable store of minerals his body contained. The human

body

was a mine of highly prized trace elements. So was his suit. A big scavenger

would draw no distinction between man and clothing and would devour both with

equal pleasure.

His body was particularly rich in iron, potassium, and calcium. A mine. My

mine

is mine, he thought, too tired to laugh. The sun continued to raise the suit's

internal temperature, despite the cascalarian's shade. He blinked against his

own sweat. He had to do something soon.

No. He had to do something sooner than that, because something was coming

toward

him. He was sure his vision wasn't that far gone. Whatever was approaching

wasn't very big, but then, it wouldn't have to be to do some real damage,

given

his helpless semicomatose state.

He couldn't see it clearly because the special discrim-inatory visor of his

suit

helmet wasn't functioning prop-erly. The visor was necessary because many of

Prism's lifeforms were organized according to fractal instead of normal

geometry. They tended to blur if you stared at them for very long, as the

human

eye sought patterns and organization where none existed. Fractals existed

some-where between the first and second dimension or the sec-ond and the

third.

No one, not even the mathematicians, was quite sure.

It didn't matter so long as you looked through the Hausdorf lenses. They were

built into the visor of his suit helmet. Which was broken. As a result,

fractally orga-nized figures didn't look quite right when viewed through

unadjusted transparencies. Like the whatever it was that was slowly coming

toward him.

It was more than merely disconcerting. You could go crazy. Fortunately he was

too tired to care. So very tired.

He could feel himself drifting, falling asleep or fainting, he wasn't sure

which. Not that it mattered.

He only hoped that the alien entity stalking his motion-less form would start

by

eating the damn suit instead of its helpless occupant.

Chapter Two

The storm raged as Evan strode briskly down Korbyski Avenue. He was enjoying

it.

Powerful thunderstorms were a frequent visitor to this part of Sam-stead. The

wind, heavy rain, and lightning were exhila-rating. Naturally, the weather

didn't affect him at all because, like everyone else on Samstead, he was

wearing

a suit.

He happened to be clad in a developmental engineer's duty suit, status

semiformal. Its internal stabilizers allowed him to stride without strain into

a

seventy‑kph gale. Evap-orators and dispersers kept his face visor clear.

The

thermosensitive weave kept him warm and dry. The light, flexible material was

dyed dark green. Black stripes ran diagonally across his chest, left shoulder,

and left leg. Two bands of lighter green crossed his right shoulder. Evan was

partial to subdued attire.

The street was crowded with citizens rushing about their daily errands. Each

wore a uniquely decorated suit and none paid any attention to the near

hurricane

battering the city.

Suits were comforting not only to those who wore them but also to everyone

else,

since a suit reflected not only its wearer's personal taste, but also his or

her

profession, wealth, or private interests. Evan passed one woman who was having

trouble controlling her offspring, who were fiddling with their stabilizers in

order to float freely in the wind a meter above the pavement. He could hear

her

shouts clearly over the omnidirectional universal com-municator. She was late

for some kind of business lunch and didn't have time to indulge naughty

children. Besides which if they didn't settle down, behave, and walk

prop-erly,

they were going to miss ballet class.

That threat convinced the youngsters to reset their stabilizers. They dropped

gently to the street and toddled along silently in their mother's

wake‑though

every so often the boy would rise a couple of centimeters off the ground until

a

sharp backward. glance from his mother would force him to return quickly to

the

pavement.

Evan smiled at the byplay between mother and son, turned another corner, and

found himself confronting a towering structure with a concave facade. He

started

through the central courtyard toward the imposing entrance. Over the doorway

was

the legend THE AURORA GROUP, rendered in blue crystal. In the center of the

open

courtyard and dominating it was a three‑story‑tall foun-tain in

the shape of the

company logo, three worlds form-ing a pyramid. The fountain played smoothly

despite the constant wind. The water was contained by carefully pro-grammed

hydrostatic charges.

The door recognized him and let him through. As he entered the foyer his suit

automatically adjusted to the warmer temperature inside. At the touch of a

button on his right wrist, his visor and hood folded back into the neck of his

suit, forming a neat high collar of the style favored by British admirals of

the

seventeenth century.

By the time the elevator deposited him on the fortieth floor the suit had

dried

itself and removed its own wrin-kles.

Nothing in his appearance suggested that he'd spent the previous half hour

strolling through a whirlwind. Sam-stead's weather was the reason for the

invention of the Samstead duty suit. What had evolved from necessity had been

metamorphosed by custom and fashion into some-thing considerably more

elaborate.

Scientific invention had unintentionally paved the way for the establishment

of

a social convention that was unique to Samstead.

Seram Machoka was waiting for him. Since no desk was visible in the

president's

office, it was apparent that the meeting was going to be conducted on an

informal basis. That suited Evan just fine. He was at his best when the

diplomatic niceties did not have to be observed.

He walked right in, unchallenged by human or mechan-ical intervention. It all

looked very casual, but his prog-ress was being monitored by company security.

There was no reason to stop him. He was a known company man, in a known

company

suit.

Machoka smiled and waved Evan to a couch with-out rising from the lounger on

which he reclined. Then he turned away as if suddenly disinterested to look

through the transparent outside wall at the storm still engulfing the city.

He was wearing a supervisorial communicator's suit modified to resemble

leather.

A series of concentric cir-cles and alternating bands of yellow and white

decorated the upper half of the suit, rising from his waistband to his right

shoulder. The left side of the suit bulged slightly. It was stuffed with

tactile

controls and contact points. A desk was nothing more than a quaint formality.

Machoka's suit could put him in contact with every division of the company.

Evan waited patiently, supremely confident as always but hard pressed to

restrain his curiosity. He'd never met Machoka before. There had been no

reason

for the two men to meet. Evan was an employee of the company and Machoka its

president. They moved on different levels. Now there was reason for those

levels

to interact, and he was intrigued.

His colleagues at work had teased him about the sum-mons though Evan wasn't

easy

to tease. That was part of his personality, the part that sometimes angered

those who didn't know him and put off those who did. He couldn't understand

why

he could gain everyone's respect but not their affection. He was friendly and

outgoing, always willing to help anyone with a problem. Could he help it if he

was smarter than them? His tall frame didn't help in cozying up to

acquaintances. Tall people intimi-dated, short people ingratiated. We're still

primitives at heart, he always reminded himself.

A few close friends understood him well enough to take his daily Olympian

pronouncements with a grain of salt and to joke with him about the drawbacks

of

his personality. They were there to congratulate him on his summons. It might

involve a big step up the corporate ladder.

At least Evan's size wouldn't put Machoka on the defensive. The company

president was as tall as Evan, though much darker of skin and scarcer of hair.

He wore spiral tattoos on his forehead and neck, and big round metal earrings.

A

titanium arrowhead was glued to his shaved forehead. His personal adornment

was

confined to the skull. He wore no rings or bracelets and nothing on his suit.

The suit was all business.

Eventually Machoka turned away from the storm to regard his visitor. " Do sit

down, Orgell."

Despite the office owner's admirable efforts to convey a feeling of ease and

relaxation, Evan sensed the tense-ness in the president's voice.

He folded himself into the couch. It was close to the transparent wall. A

couple

of meters from his left side the gale smashed raindrops against the plexalloy.

Something in Machoka's suit beeped softly. Irritated, he threw Evan an

apologetic half smile while his fingers danced over the rightside controls. He

whispered toward his chest and Evan heard him say quietly, "No more calls for

the next hour, please." There was no way of telling whether he was commanding

a

machine or a person.

Several telltales on the right side of his suit immediately went dark. Only

one

remained active. It glowed a steady red.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, sir," Orgell said politely. He had not expected

to

be more relaxed than the company president, but it was becoming clear such was

the case. It only left him feeling that much more confident. He had not the

slightest doubt he would be able to carry out whatever assignment the company

had in mind for him. He always had.

There is a small group of people who are convinced that they can do anything,

absolutely anything asked of them. Evan Orgell was one of them. Of course, he

wasn't omnipotent. He couldn't do everything. But he was con-vinced that he

could. That kind of conviction carries a power all its own.

Machoka tugged at his left sleeve until he'd revealed a slim bracelet. So Evan

had been wrong about the absence of body jewelry.

"What do you think of this?"

Evan leaned forward to study the bracelet. It was bright yellow and faceted

all

the way around. "I'm not a gem-ologist. I couldn't tell you if it was a

natural

stone or artificial, much less if it's worth anything."

"It's natural." Machoka seemed to be trying to hide his amusement and it

occurred to Evan there might be more to the adornment than first met the eye.

The pres-ident rose, walked over to stand close to Evan, and stuck out his

arm,

palm up. "Here. Take a closer look."

Evan did so, wondering what he was supposed to be looking for. Many facets cut

by a steady hand, he decided. A dark wire appeared to run through the center

of

the crystal with smaller wires branching out from it. Inclu-sions of some

sort,

or at. integrated support matrix added by the jeweler to strengthen the stone.

He said as much to Machoka.

The older man couldn't conceal his pleasure any fur-ther. "No, you're not even

close."

Evan was a little miffed. He had serious work of his own to do, and if the

president of the company wanted someone to play guessing games with, he could

damn well find another candidate.

Machoka sensed his discomfort, adopted a more seri-ous mien. "Touch it." He

gestured with his wrist. "It has a most interesting feel."

Frowning, Evan reached out with his right hand. He received the impression of

something slick and waxy before a sharp sting made him jerk his hand back. The

bracelet twisted slightly before resetting itself on Machoka's wrist. As it

twisted, it separated for an instant. Evan could just make out two small

yellow

imperfections at the point of separation: eyes. Then the head slipped neatly

back into a groove in the tail and the bracelet relaxed once more.

Machoka raised his hand and admired the ornament. "Not much of a charge, but I

imagine it's enough to scare of the majority of predators."

"If it was supposed to be funny, it wasn't." Evan nursed his tingling hand.

Machoka looked down at him. "I was told that you had a terrific sense of

humor‑except when the joke was directed at you." This time Evan wisely

said

nothing. "We're calling it a Spanset. It's an organosilicate life-form."

Evan's curiosity quickly overcame his upset. "Like a diatom?"

"Far more advanced than that."

The Spanset clung to Machoka's wrist without moving, looking exactly like a

chunk of cut citrine. "So it's alive. What do you feed it? I can see right

through it and I don't see anything like a stomach or normal internal organs."

Machoka turned to the transparent wall and held up his arm. The light passed

cleanly through the Spanset's body. "They can be trained to recognize

individuals. It identifies me through my body's electric field. That's what

the

biologists tell me, anyway. Feed it? It's a photovore."

"A what? I mean, I know what that should mean, but I've never heard the term

used before."

Machoka turned back to him and shrugged. "It's the best thing we've been able

to

come up with. It's a light-eater. It lives on sunlight." He ran an

affectionate

finger over the crystalline surface, which did not stir. "It pos-sesses its

own

little photovoltaic system. Instead of con-verting sunlight into chemical

energy, as plants do, it converts light directly into electricity. That's fine

for a machine, but not for a living creature, and the principles are driving

our

research people crazy. Mathematically it's all possible, but applying the math

to a living thing is something else again."

"Where did it come from? What's the world like?"

"Easy. One miracle at a time, Orgell." Machoka resumed his seat. "As to what

its

home world is like, we don't know yet. Rut we do know where it is. Prism."

Evan's expression twisted. " fire we talking physics, philosophy, or the

beautiful eyes of the new Records Department Comptroller?"

"It's a world. A new world."

"Sure is. First I've heard of it, and I don't miss much."

"It was intended that you and everyone else miss this. One of the company's

hunters stumbled across it. Very few people within the organization know about

it, and we've worked hard to keep the discovery out of the media. Now one more

person knows about it."

Conscious of the small honor just received, Evan proceeded cautiously. "I can

see why you're trying to keep it a secret." He nodded toward Machoka's wrist.

"if that's an example of the commercial possibilities‑imagine Jew-elry

that

defends itself against thieves."

Again the president gestured with his wrist. "This is nothing, nothing. A

bauble, a toy. According to what little we've learned about this place thus

far,

the possibilities there are..." He swallowed, started again. "We can't even

begin to imagine the possibilities. I certainly can't. Scientifically I'm

little

more than a layman. I'm an admin-istrator, not a chemist, not a products

analyst." He rose abruptly and began pacing back and forth in front of his

visitor.

"Orgell, we don't know what we've got here except that it's big. Bigger than

anything anybody's dreamed of. Bigger than any single project the company's

ever

tackled before. This world is not just new; it's radical. It's so strange my

people are still arguing over whether biologists or geologists should be in

charge of exploration and initial development. This business of organosilicate

lifeforms is not unique. Some exist here on Samstead, some on Earth. But not

on

this scale. And the whole class of photovores is brand‑new."

Evan eyed the Spanset again. "It exists solely on sun-light?"

"No. It does ingest modest doses of certain minerals and salts. Call it a kind

of food." He hesitated. "You'll get a full briefing before you go."

"Before I go where, sir?" Evan asked quietly, even though he'd already pretty

well divined the answer.

"Prism, of course."

"I'm neither a biologist nor a chemist, sir."

Machoka turned to his right and touched a panel on his chest. A

leather‑backed

video screen about ten centi-meters square emerged from the arm of the

lounge‑chair. The president rested his chin in one hand while he studied

the

display thus presented, spoke without looking up from the screen.

"No, you're not. You're an interdisciplinarian, a jack--

of‑all‑trades. You take

a little from this field and a little from that and come up with solutions to

problems." He looked up from the display. " We already have specialists

working

on Prism. Evidently they are not getting the job done. It seems they are in

some

difficulty."

"What kind of difficulty?"

"We don't know. That's part of our problem. We don't know because we haven't

been able to make contact with the station there in quite a while. If it was

something easily repaired or coped with the station staff would have han-dled

it

by now. They haven't. It may be nothing more than a simple breakdown in

communications requiring a part they don't happen to have in stock."

"Then why bring me into it? Send in a communications crew."

"You were one of those responsible for the develop-ment of the Avilla

Off‑World

Exploration software, weren't you?”

"Not exactly. I was the one responsible for its devel-opment."

"So even though your in vivo off world experience is limited, you have via

computer and the software you designed actually been on and coped with

literally

hun-dreds of difficult and complex new world crises?"

Evan nodded. "That's right."

"So in that regard you're probably better prepared to deal with whatever

problem

has arisen on Prism than most of our field people."

"Perhaps. That still doesn't explain why you don't send in a crew. If you want

to send a generalist, then I'm your man, but I don't see why you don't

surround

me with a few specialists."

Machoka was drumming the fingers of his right hand on the arm of the couch.

Suddenly he gave the top of the video screen a hard slap, driving it back down

into its cubicle.

"You asked why you haven't heard about Prism's dis-covery. You deserve an

answer."

"I think I've already inferred‑one."

"Then you deserve confirmation. You haven't heard about it because the Aurora

Group's presence there at this time is, well, let's call it semilegal."

Evan tried not to smile. "Does that mean someone else might refer to it as

semi‑illegal?"

"Only if he were less than tactful," said Machoka qui-etly. "We've managed to

set up a small research station on the surface. That's all, so far. That's

where

what little information we've acquired to date has come from."

"Along with your pet."

Machoka admired his wrist. "Yes. Communications at best were infrequent and

subject to heavy coding. Despite such precautions I fear they are being

monitored. It's not easy keeping the discovery of an entire world hidden from

the rest of the Commonwealth.

"If we announce our discovery, then by Common-wealth law Prism is thrown open

to

development by any company or individual that wants to go to Terra or Hive-hom

and file a Research and Exploration Claim. Soon you have government types from

the Standards Bureau run-ning all over the place making sure that you're not

abusing your permits, infringing on the claims of others; and gen-erally

making

it difficult for your own people to do busi-ness."

"I understand."

Machoka nodded slowly. "I was certain that you would. The point of all this is

that if the project is being moni-tored, we have to keep our activity to a

Foster, Alan Dean - Humanx 5 - Sentenced To Prism

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