Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition Read online

  TOM PAINE MARU

  L. Neil Smith

  Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor, LLC

  Rockville, Maryland

  *************

  Tom Paine Maru copyright © 1984, 2005 (revised), 2009 L. Neil Smith. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Cover copyright © 2009 Arc Manor, LLC. Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally published by Balantine Books (Del Rey), August 1984.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  Licensing Note for this EBook

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.

  *************

  PRINT EDITION ISBN: 978-1-60450-260-2

  www.PhoenixPick.com

  Great Science Ficstion at Great Prices

  *************

  For Cathy, my Butterfly Princess

  *************

  I would also like to thank those who made the 2005 e-edition possible, beginning with Ken Holder, its publisher, “cyberarcheologist” William Stone, whose intrepidity unearthed it from a tomb of obsolete software, Scott Bieser, more and more my good right arm in creative exercises, my wife Cathy and my daughter Rylla who suffered through my cranky absent mindedness, and Jeff Barzyk, who rescued me on the very last day of the rewrite.

  *************

  A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  Tom Paine Maru was intended to be my first “big” novel, with twists, subplots, otherwise admirable characters working to cross purposes, and all that there kinda literary stuff. It also contained my ideas about why so many people struggle to gain and keep power, and why others (or sometimes even the same people) bow down to it. I also tried to make sure that it had “enough sex and violence to satisfy even the most apolitical reader”, but the book was badly cut by its first publisher, and languished until it fell out of print.

  For a short time, after a kind friend painfully extracted it from WordStar 3.0 for CP/M in which I’d written it, I tried to make it available to readers through my website as an e-book, but that never really quite worked out. To proclaim I’m delighted that it’s now being offered by Arc Manor would be an understatement.

  So here’s Tom Paine Maru, fully restored to the novel I meant it to be, and readers may judge for themselves whether my theories encumber or enhance it. I only hope that they enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy seeing it in print again.

  L. Neil Smith

  Fort Collins, Colorado

  August, 2008

  *************

  Tom Paine Maru

  Prologue: Asperance Down

  A soft, fragrant wind heralded the coming of darkness. It brought with it the distant murmur of thunder.

  “Asperance Re-entry Command to Lifeshell Four, come in?”

  Silence.

  “Asperance Re-entry Command to Lifeshell Five, come in?”

  The radio operator’s pleas were rewarded only with an empty static crackle. Eyes streaming, he backed away from the flames as the breeze shifted suddenly in my direction. What is it they say about smoke following beauty?

  Beside him, standing over the smoky fire, the Lieutenant shivered, thrust his hands in the pockets of his uniform, demanding impatiently, “Any luck at all?”

  Still coughing, the operator looked up from where he squatted, trying to coax a signal from the unit in his hand while heating a can of emergency rations at the same time. The expedition’s cook—along with most of our supplies—had been aboard the missing Lifeshell Four.

  “Not a whisper, sir. They might be having problems with their own communicators.”

  “Both units?” The thunder was a great deal louder this time, forcing the Lieutenant to repeat himself. “Both units?”

  “Then again,” the operator held up his own radio, “it might be this one. I would not have any way of knowing—sir.”

  That made a certain sense. The officer squatting by the fire was a botanist. Our regular communications expert was aboard the missing Lifeshell Five, the second of two re-entry vehicles we could not reach. Things would begin to get really interesting when it came time to erect the microwave array for sending a message home. That gear was aboard one of the four ablative-surfaced globes that had managed to—no, it was not quite time, yet, to say “survive”. We did not know whether the others had indeed perished, nor were we certain that we had succeeded at surviving.

  The Lieutenant shook his head, silently mouthing unprintable words.

  The blurry copy-processed expedition manual had ordained a landing at dawn, allowing one full period of daylight in which to establish ourselves on alien, possibly hostile territory. The planet’s searing primary had decreed that we re-write those ineptly-collated pages. Even the few hours that we had spent in orbit, shielded behind nearly-opaqued photo-responsive plastic, had blackened the hardiest of us, covering some in weeping blisters. Thus we had chosen a landing site in the high northern latitudes, prayed, then triggered the retro-igniters.

  The landing had not been quite as bad as the scientist had said it might be. I had fractured a bone in my foot in two places. Four lifeshells had grounded violently within a few klicks of one another. We had not as yet located the other pair, although there was a fresh crater nearby. Where there had once stood eighteen intrepid Starmen, select of nation-state, pride of an entire planet, there now trembled a dozen frightened, homesick souls, variously shattered, unanimously bewildered.

  Again, that low mutter of thunder toward the horizon.

  I checked my makeshift splint before attending to the other wounded. The aluminum pistol cleaning rods kept slipping off my instep to a position either side of the arch, where they could not prevent the flexing of my twice-broken foot. It was growing dark rapidly. Thunder boomed with increasing regularity until it threatened to become a continuous, intimidating roll. I should already have broken out the expedition’s arsenal. But so many wounded needed help—our medical officer, with his precious supplies, was lost in Lifeshell Five—that there had not been time so far to think about my regular duties.

  Dazzled, shaken though we were, the surface of this planet seemed like heaven: rich with life, moist. Even here, on this twilit winter hemisphere the soil was warm, darkly aromatic. Four small moons blazed overhead, their reflected glory unbearable to look upon directly. It was a place to build a new beginning, to love a woman, to raise a family.

  Not a square centimeter was uncovered by green growing things. Ordinary birds, extraordinary in their numbers, filled the trees with music. Pale, day-bleached grasses whispered with the hasty passage of tiny, furry, four-legged creatures, or sparkled with half-hidden multicolored scaly life. Insects swarmed in myriads. Even as we cursed them, we laughed with delighted astonishment while they pricked away at us.

  Not a hundred meters from the landing site there was a brook with a small pond behind a barrier of mud-caked branches made by some broad-tailed swimming mammal. For a solid hour, earlier in the day, I had sat at its edge,
dangling my ruined foot, more running water trickling between my bare toes than my family had used throughout my lifetime.

  Now the thought gave me a feeling of guilty apprehension.

  As a precaution, I crawled back into Lifeshell One, fumbling through the litter at the bottom. I began uncrating hand-weapons—eight millimeter Darrick automatic revolvers—getting them loaded, ready in their racks. Even through the thick walls I could hear the thunder now. Our telescopic survey from orbit had betrayed sparse signs of primitive settlement. On the one-problem-at-a-time principle we had chosen to land as far away from those as possible. Still ... Finding a pair of oblong, foil-wrapped packages, I stripped off the wrapping, exposing a pair of reloaders, tipped one of them into the port of a weapon, then thumbed the triangular plastic cartridges into its grip-magazine. Repeating the procedure, I then fastened two issue holsters to my equipment belt. Now, if something unexpected happened, there would be at least one pistol ready for each of the mission commanders.

  Carrying another half-dozen Darricks, still in their corrosion-proof containers, I crawled out of the lifeshell toward the rack I had erected earlier beside the fire. Already the least injured men were trying, under the Lieutenant’s direction, to inflate our microwave dish, spreading the limp plastic it was made of in a circle safely distant from the sparks being whisked into the air by the twilight breeze. Like one of those sparks, our home star would drift across the sky sometime tonight. Our signals would take two years to get there from here.

  No time like the present to start.

  Thunder boomed!

  This time it did not die. Suddenly ... they were upon us, half-lit figures out of a horror story, come to do their bloody business under the broad light of the moons, night-raiders riding us down from the sweat-foamed backs of tall, long-legged beasts whose disminded screams mingled with those of the helpless victims they helped to slaughter.

  At the edge of the encampment, I watched as an officer was was lifted, impaled on a lance-point, tossed away like refuse, smashed against the hard ground. The frail plastic of the microwave dish, our only link with home, was shredded beneath the monsters’ hooves. Beside the fire, the botanist/radioman went down before a single, crushing sword-slash.

  The sun had not been down an hour.

  The Lieutenant ran at me, his mouth agape with terror. I struggled with a holster-flap, freed the gun, stretched it toward him. He never touched it. A rider, firelight reflecting blood-red off half-tarnished armor, overrode him, cutting him down with a vicious swipe of his sword.

  The Lieutenant stumbled, grunting with surprise as much as pain, then collapsed. The rider swept past him, aiming his broadsword at me. Before I realized what was happening, the Darrick’s sights were on the grill-slotted front of his helmet. I pulled the trigger. Bloody flesh exploded through the helmet’s seams. The beast went on without its rider.

  In a stride, unconscious of my wounded foot, I was standing over the Lieutenant. Above the bellowing clamor of armor, hooves, men possessed by the exultation of killing or the terror of dying, the Darrick’s blast had seized the attention of our attackers. Someone galloped toward me, a huge plume bobbing atop his helmet. He stopped his mount half a dozen meters from me, dipped his lance, kicked the animal’s sides.

  Aiming for a helmet again, I fired, then cocked the Darrick. The empty triangular plastic casing fell at my feet to join the first one I’d fired.

  A second nearly-headless rider toppled, spilling his life over his animal’s neck. I heard a war-cry close beside me. For the first time I was aware that I had the other pistol out of its holster. My front sight found its own way to the mark. Another skull exploded within its steel jacket.

  My right-hand Darrick spoke again. Another alien fell, dashing his bullet-churned insides on the ground. A red haze formed before my eyes as the universe became the sound of my guns, the shadow of both front sights against firelit body-steel, the clash of bloody-edged metal, the flashes of my pistol muzzles in the dark. Men fell, shouting with surprised anger, screaming with agony, gibbering with fear.

  What seemed to take hours must actually have been over with in seconds. Ten star-traversing “heroes” now lay mangled, everything that they had ever been, everything that they had ever done, gone to feed the warm, rich soil. Almost unopposed, the enemy had hacked us to pieces.

  I glanced down at the litter of white plastic cartridges between my feet. The Lieutenant’s arm was all but severed from his body. I found myself standing over him, with a pair of slowly-cooling empty-handled pistols.

  With a merciless swoosh!, the battle-nicked flat of an ancient, carbonless iron swordblade slammed into my head from behind. It did not take my consciousness away altogether, only a certain amount of interest in what was going on. Sullen, pock-marked, bearded faces seemed to swim around me under dented helmets, gabbling words I almost understood.

  Rolling my body aside, they stopped the Lieutenant’s bleeding arm with a rough clot of manure, binding it with twists of something resembling burlap. Quarrelsomely, they divided our pitiably few belongings, stripping what was left of the lifeshells, no doubt, to chink the leaks in peasant hovels or decorate the walls of a crudely-hewn fortress. They hauled us away on a wood-wheeled cart drawn by animals different, stockier than those the metal-suited warriors had ridden.

  My last sight of the encampment was a tower of greasy, roiling smoke.

  I would never return to Vespucci, my home planet.

  I would never see my fair Eleva again.

  ***********************

  PART ONE

  The Starmen

  ***********************

  Dungeon, Fire, and Sword

  Three whole weeks for my eyes to adjust.

  A person would have thought that I could see better by now, even in what little torchlight managed to squeeze through the tiny window, with its three stupid bars, in the rusty iron door of the cell we shared.

  Just as well: that made it lots easier, eating from a crock of half-frozen slush they pushed in at us whenever they remembered. You could ignore the fuzzy stuff growing on its surface, hold your nose, pretend some of the lumps did not squirm as they began to thaw in your mouth.

  Darkness got to be a kindly friend.

  From where I sat, I did not need any floodlight to smell the Lieutenant’s arm rotting off. Why he was not dead already ... Maybe I should have thanked our pre-flight immunizations, but the shots they gave us simply let his nightmare—mine too—stretch out that much further.

  Eleva would have called that defeatism.

  But then, Eleva was not here.

  Of course it could have been that my perspective was all screwed up. In the last month it had shrunk, by abrupt increments, from the sun-filled universe—perhaps too much room out there, too many hard chips of starlight pressing in on us—to this underground kennel, hip-high, only two meters square, lit by the leavings from a jailer’s passageway.

  The Lieutenant—my lieutenant—Lieutenant Third-Rate Enson Sermander, sprawled unconscious in one corner, gradually surrendering to gangrene, provided hypothermia did not claim the both of us first. He had never been much to look at, even in the best of times: tall enough that his scalp had crested through his hairline; a least a year’s eating ahead of his calorie-quota. The man’s face was a brown plastic sack full of stale pastries. He inevitably dressed like an unmade Army cot. Incarceration with infection was not improving him any.

  Another corner was mine.

  A third corner I had crawled to a couple of times every day in the beginning, back when I had still cared. It smelled worse than either one of us. At least that helped attract most of the scavengers away.

  I wondered what Eleva would have said to that.

  I kept thinking that the fourth corner would have been perfect for a table-model ColorCom. But reception was probably terrible down here, even if they had invented CC—or electric lighting, for that matter—on this putrescent alien mudball the natives for some reason ca
lled Sca.