Bedlam Planet Read online

  “When I found myself absent-mindedly chewing on a bit of woodplant bark, I thought for a moment I was crazy,” Dennis said. “If I hadn’t had the evidence of my survival on the diamond island, I’d have rushed straight for a medical check.”

  “Of course.” That was Tai speaking up. The blocky Chinese hunched forward, his face very serious. “Any of us would have felt the same if we hadn’t been—ah—taken by surprise. Look, let me explain what goes on when you try and adapt to an Asgard diet, shall I? It’s complicated, but the essential factor is this. Your body is wiser than your mind; it’s been around longer, and carries memories in its cells which we’ve barely begun to guess at.”

  “I gave him your image of a dog looking for emetic grasses,” Parvati said.

  “And I’d already thought of something related to that,” Dennis said, and quoted the example of the pioneer submariners.

  “That shows insight,” Tai approved. “But there’s another point. Know anything about sheep-farming? No? Well, there’s an important Earthly grazing grass called Phalaris tuberosa which sheep normally eat quite happily. Sometimes, though, when they browse off young spring shoots, they get a disease called staggers from it. That’s due to an unusual concentration of tryptamine alkaloids. What was harmless yesterday suddenly exceeds the tolerance level, and—” Tai snapped his fingers. “Now our tolerance level is much lower than that of a sheep because our nervous system is more complex. Plants like the opium poppy, or the coca plant, can hit us with so damned many permutations of alkaloids it took advanced computers to sort them out, and some of them affect us in such minuscule concentrations you’d need a Shlovsky-Har fractionator to detect them. We lost ours. That was why, when I called for test subjects, I knew I was taking a risk. And the risk proved to exist, although luckily …” He hesitated, scowling into nowhere.

  “You know what a vitamin precursor is?”

  “A substance which the body can metabolise into the vitamin form,” Dennis said promptly.

  “Correct. Well, what we ingest from Asgard vegetation, whether it’s of Earthly or indigenous stock, includes a hallucinogen precursor. And—ho, brother!” Tai chuckled ruefully. “Lysergic acid is weak compared to this stuff! I think what we do is hang a urea group on the molecule, which our test animals couldn’t because they aren’t primates, and I also suspect that it blocks amine oxidase more efficiently than anything we ever dreamed up on Earth, thus shooting the serotonin balance to hell. But that’s irrelevant. What counts is this. What does a hallucinogen do?”

  “It destroys perceptual sets, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s the standard definition,” Parvati said. “But did you ever stop to think exactly what that statement means? ‘Except ye become as little children …’!”

  Drawn as though by a magnet, Dennis’s gaze fixed on the sleeping form of Dan Sakky.

  “That’s right,” Abdul confirmed. “We’ve found a way to strip ourselves of all sophistication. We can approach what grows on Asgard with an animal lack of inhibition, and let our cellular memory judge what’s safe and what isn’t.” He shivered, as though in awe. “It’s almost as though the entire trend of human culture was towards the colonisation of other worlds! That’s what gives me my confidence in our ultimate success. Something’s been working like a leaven in human thinking, preparing us psychologically for the process of dying and being reborn as a different species. Asgard-Man is only the first of many, I’m certain.”

  “What happens when you take this—this drug you’ve discovered?” Dennis said after a pause.

  “The conscious mind is suspended,” Parvati said. “Just as happened to you on the diamond island. It shunts a human being from an Earthly into an Asgard frame of reference.”

  “A species which isn’t hampered by thinking about what it’s doing, but responding to what its belly and glands tell it, has the edge on an alien world.” Looking pleased with his summation, Tai leaned back against the nearby rock wall.

  “But one gets over it?” Dennis demanded.

  “No, it’s cumulative,” Parvati said. “That’s why it took two or three days for the stuff to work the first time on us six.”

  “But you’re communicating with me now okay,” Dennis said.

  “Ah, I see what you mean. You take the stuff, it begins to work, and then for six to eight hours you behave like an animal, retaining only species-recognition and certain other traits we regard as human. Eventually you fall asleep, as Dan’s doing right now, and this gives the brain a chance to absorb and file the alien images acquired during the experience. You do know, presumably, that the only purpose of going to sleep is to get some dreaming done? The human body is far too efficient to need so much inactivity, but the brain isn’t.”

  “Y-yes,” Dennis was frowning with concentration.

  “And, during the sleep, the mind organises the impressions it’s stored into the most acceptable form it can. Your own images drawn from Irish legend are an example. Eventually—at least this is what we’re hoping—we’ll get rid of all our Earthly preconceptions: this food is good, that is bad, this place is safe, that’s dangerous. And we’ll have acquired Asgard replacements for them, which will allow us to relax and be happy here.”

  Parvati leaned forward. “Haven’t you noticed that ever since we arrived the only thing which has made the colonists happy is feeling that we’re making this planet over in the image of Earth? We couldn’t ever do that! We’ve been chasing a ghost!”

  “I suppose we have,” Dennis admitted. “And this is what you were trying to drive them to face when you—ah—sabotaged everything?”

  “We couldn’t make them understand that it was essential to do the same as we’d done,” Abdul said. “Their minds simply closed up, snap! All they could see was that one morning we’d been found babbling about gods and demons, and they wouldn’t admit we could have learned anything from the experience. So on the spur of the moment we thought we’d call in the help of hunger and thirst—smash the dam, put native-grown food in with the supplies, wipe the computer memories to throw them back on what their bodies could tell them …” He sighed. “It didn’t work. It made them more hostile than ever.”

  “Damned right it did,” Dennis muttered. He hesitated for a moment. “You know, the more I think about this, the more sense it makes! Everything fits—even the síd.”

  “What?” Kitty said.

  “The síd in my vision. The fairyland where one night can be a hundred years. It’s a metaphor for the timelessness of qua-space, obviously.” Dennis’s voice rose in excitement. “And there’s something else, too! I suddenly remembered that I was wondering when I set off on my trip to hunt for diamonds whether our skills were too great for what we were trying to do.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Parvati said. “You were the only outsider among us, the only unwilling colonist. You’ve always had detachment the rest of us couldn’t match.” She gave him a warm smile and laid her hand briefly on his. “What’s more, of course, you’d already been overtaken by what you called a trap that Asgard sprung on you.”

  Dennis nodded, thinking of his fit of madness with Sigrid, which had amazingly done him no harm. “How did the truth come to you, then? How did your subconscious interpret it into terms you could understand and act upon?”

  “As I told you,” Abdul said, “this is the first time the protagonists of legends have been able to appreciate them on both levels. All our visions had two things in common. First, they drew images from our own particular traditions, and second, they stressed real-life preoccupations—the moon, where so many of our companions died, the food problem, owing to the outbreak of scurvy, and so on. I saw myself being made to eat the bread and drink the water offered by Ament, the ancient Egyptian goddess who was called ‘The Lady of the West’. And that ties in interestingly with your image of sailing westward beyond the sunset, doesn’t it?” He shook his head wonderingly. “Presumably we’ve always thought of the night sky in which stars appear as ly
ing to the west … Never mind that for the moment, though. What this was supposed to do was to make you a ‘friend of the gods’; in other words, you had to enter the Hall of Double Justice where men’s souls are judged, and once in the other world you could never return to Earth.”

  A shiver of awe went down Dennis’s spine.

  “It bears out what the poet Graves used to teach, back in the twentieth century,” Parvati said. “He maintained there were two kinds of truth, scientific and poetic. He called them Apollonian and Dionysian. We’ve learned a poetic truth. The same sort of thing happened to me. I hammered together images from half a dozen different branches of Indian mythology and they wound up making .sense. The moon in some stories is regarded as the abode of the dead, the kingdom of Yama who was the first man ever to die. But in others it’s the reservoir of the divine intoxicant ‘soma’, which the gods regularly drain—hence the phases of the moon, you see? When I came to myself, I found I was identifying my breasts, as sources of milk, with the waning moon as a source of soma, and covering one of them up because it seemed wrong for there to be two!”

  “I had the moon and the food problem in my visions, too,” Tai Men said. “I was obsessed with the ancient ceremony of making offerings to the moon, which only women took part in because the patron being of the moon—the Hare—is also regarded as the patron of inverts. I think my subconscious was saying a very Chinese thing to me: that if I wanted descendants to do honour to my memory, I must stop paying attention to the moon. In other words, I must stop being afraid of dying under an alien sun, as the crew of the Pinta did, and face the truth of my own mortality.”

  “That’s akin to what I remember!” Dennis exclaimed. “I—uh—I woke up realising that even the great heroes must die.”

  “Most of us seem to have been concerned about that,” Abdul said. “Dan told us about his visions, and they all centred on the ancient tribal secret societies of his ancestors, the initiates who passed on tribal lore from generation to generation, and inspired themselves by inhaling the smoke of sacred herbs-read ‘eating local plants for the sake of the visions they induce’, if you like. He was concerned about the moon, too. He recounted a story about how people tried to build a tower and climb to it, to discover what it was. The tower fell down, and most of them were killed. But the idea of death wasn’t depressing, as he explained it. The spirits of the ancestors who died so that their descendants could live in prosperity were a simple fact of life, not something you could resent.”

  He glanced across at the Negro. “Parvati, I think he’s waking up—will you take care of him?”

  Nodding, Parvati rose and went over to him. Dennis heard her murmuring in a soothing tone as Kitty Minakis took up the tale.

  “I saw the base island as the afterworld,” she said. “The place where the sun never shines—and let’s face it, Old Sol doesn’t shine here except as a star, does it?—surrounded by the rivers you have to buy passage across. And one of them, of course, is Lethe, whose waters you drink to forget about Earth.”

  “That was lucky,” Ulla said wryly. “I’m sure it was your obsession with Charon’s ferry which led you to make off with that cushionfoil! It was the one which had been stocked up for three people to go in search of you,” she amplified for Dennis’s benefit. “We’ve got it hidden in the bushes yonder. When you turned us loose from the cage Saul shut us up in, she came and fetched us off the base island, and the supplies on board kept us going while we made our night-time raids and fetched the seeds and what was left of the gibberellins which made our little garden possible. Not that we have to depend exclusively on Earthly crops, of course—not now. It was you, wasn’t it, who stopped the overnight watch in the Santa Maria?”

  Dennis nodded.

  “We owe you a lot, then. We were terrified when we sneaked in and stole the growth-accelerators!”

  “Nobody told me any had disappeared!” Dennis said, startled.

  “They were probably too confused,” Ulla shrugged. “Thought Tai had poured them down the drain with everything else.”

  “Maybe.” Dennis sighed. “What visions did you have, by the way?”

  “Oh, in the best pessimistic tradition of my ancestors I was obsessed with the resurrection motifs from the story of Odin. The message of those is that it doesn’t matter what you do—embalm the head of all-wise Mimir, i.e. draw on the knowledge in the ship’s computers, or drink Kvasir’s blood and become a skald, i.e. eat the local vegetation—you still wind up dead. It wasn’t till I had a chance to compare what I’d undergone with what my subconscious was saying. You see, after the Ragna rökkr, the Twilight of the Gods, there’s a new creation. And—well, goodness, isn’t this very planet named after the land beyond Bifrost, the rainbow bridge?”

  A great calm was settling on Dennis’s tormented mind. He said, “So what is it we must do? There are all those people on the base island, and—Well, I’ve been watching them the past few weeks, and I can say for sure we can’t rely on them responding to what their bellies tell them to do. They’re sick with scurvy, they’re aware of what it is and what it does, and they must have noticed that while you were shut up in the cage for them to gawp at you remained in reasonable health. Hell, they’ve been hounded and chivvied by me, and I’m certainly not ill and apathetic! Yet in spite of the evidence of their own eyes they’re drifting along in the same rigid pattern as before.”

  “They’re colonising Asgard from the head instead of the guts, then!”

  The call came from Dan Sakky, sitting up with Parvati’s help, his back against the rock wall. “Hello, Dennis,” he added, knuckling sleep from his eyes and fighting a yawn. “Good to see you over here. Parvati says you reached the same conclusions we did, only you took a rather more drastic route.” He lost the battle with the yawn, and the words died in an enormous sigh.

  Astonished, but relieved, at the rapidity with which Dan had recovered from his self-induced mindlessness, Dennis returned his greeting and reverted to the problem he had just voiced.

  “Look, even if we manage to do something like—well, sneaking into the mess-hall by night and pouring native-grown foodstuffs into the supplies—what’s going to become of all those people?”

  “They’re going to do exactly what mankind has done throughout history,” Dan said. He got awkwardly to his feet and hobbled over to take his place in the circle, moving stiffly as though he had become cramped during his deep slumber. “They’re going to become ghosts so that their children’s children may till fertile fields and raise their families in peace.”

  Ghosts? Was this something from the vision Dan’s subconscious had generated during the period he was under the drug? Dennis looked inquiringly at Abdul, and discovered that the latter seemed to have made perfect sense of the remark.

  “That’s right,” he said. “They’re going to measure the seasonal rise and fall of rivers, and go to be judged according to whether they replaced the boundary marks honestly, or moved them in their own favour through misuse of superior knowledge.”

  “They are going to acquire all wisdom,” Ulla said. “And still they will die. It’s the lot of all men.”

  “They are going to work and save and struggle,” Kitty said, “and at the end all they will carry out of the world will be the fare to pay their passage into the land of the dead.”

  “They will call themselves to account by the measure of us their ancestors,” Tai Men said. “They will judge themselves as to wisdom and mercy and justice by what we, here, now, decide is wise and merciful and just.”

  His face was suddenly downcast, as though he had heard his own words in memory and realised what a burden he had taken on himself.

  “The mother of all, who is Kali,” Parvati said, “went mad and killed her man. But that too was divine, the anger which drove her. There is the Creator, there is the Preserver, there is the Destroyer. All three are one, and the time of destruction is upon us.” There was a dreadful authority in her voice which Dennis had never expected to
hear from any living being: the authority which dictated the fate of worlds. “We must go over there to break and burn. We must poison their food and steep bruised stems in their water. And what will happen then will be very terrible.”

  “It’s the end of summer,” Abdul said greyly. “There will be gales, high tides, storms. Perhaps some will not listen to what hunger and thirst tell them. Perhaps they will have to be overpowered. But this is a hard universe, and if there is a law, I suppose it says: ‘Thou shalt live!’ “

  Parvati put her hands to her forehead for a moment, as though giddy, and Dennis wondered if an instant of divine insight had come and gone. Then, suddenly, she smiled quite normally and put her hand out to close it over his.

  “We’ll obey that law,” she said. “Given the chance, so will our friends. And so will our children—won’t they?”

  “Tonight?” Dennis said. He meant two things by the question, and the woman meant two things by the answering nod she gave.

  So, secretly under cover of dark, they went out—the seven of them—and killed all the folk of Earth who were on Asgard. Before dawn the seed of a new species had been planted, which would be master of the planet.

  And the name of that species also was Man.

  XXIV

  Excerpt from Appendix to summary version of official Findings, Third Manned Expedition to Sigma Draconis:

  “In spite of its obvious resemblance to the sacred writings of various ancient Earthly cultures, the foregoing text is in no way regarded by the inhabitants of ‘Asgard’ as constituting a myth or legend. No element of the supernatural attaches to the marvellous events therein recorded, any more than was accorded by the natives to our own arrival. Just as, although the accomplishment of qua-space travel is currently beyond their abilities, they take its feasibility on trust (and not as a matter of faith, but as being consonant with what they have learned for themselves about the nature of the universe), so they accept that the semi-divine characters of this pseudo-historical record—Great Mother Parvati, Kitty the sister of the winter storm, and the rest—were in fact human beings like themselves only operating on a different perceptual basis.