Polymath
POLYMATH
John Brunner
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
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They were already colonists of a planet far from Mother Earth. They had been there several generations, they had built their cities and their homes and had tried to construct their better Earth… and then came the alarm.
Their new sun, the star around which their brave new world revolved, was about to explode. All who could must flee—with only hours to spare. Any spaceship available, any crew, anyone who could go out into the uncharted cosmos must do so at once.
Their ship got off… Its crew was makeshift, file refugees’ talents were poorly mixed, and there was but one among them who knew what was required to tame an unknown planet.
But they did not know he knew. And he did not know whether he dared tell them.
“One thing about those damn winter gales,” Delvia said in a make-the-most-of-it tone. “They did give us a bit of stored power to play with.”
“But they took so much more away from us,” muttered Naline.
“I guess so. Still, not to despair. We may find things aren’t as bad as we expected.” Delvia cut the accumulator put of circuit and the whine and thump of the air-compressor died. With capable fingers she uncoupled the latest cylinder from the pipe, checked that its pressure-gauge was operative by bleeding a few pounds off—the air acreeched thinly as it escaped the valve—then dropped it with a clank against the two already lying on the strange greenish sand. Taking an empty one, she began to connect it up.
“You can take those three, Lex,” she added.
“Right,” Lex acknowledged. “Finished, Naline?”
The darker girl, “baby” of the surviving refugees, nodded and turned to catch the eye of the linedfaced man standing a few paces distant along the beach. “Ready for you now, Captain!” she called, pushing back her long black hair behind her shoulders.
Captain Arbogast seemed to return from a long way away. He had been staring out across the blue calm sea Of the bay to where a polished arc of metal showed above the water. He moved mechanically now and came to join Naline.
Lex, his lean tallness emphasized by the odd-looking garb he had on, gathered the three full air-cylinders into arms. He was wearing a spacesuit, the fluorscent orange fabric of which—designed for maximum visibility in space—was almost blinding under the blue-white glare of the morning sun. Naline had tied bands of black, glistening elasticon around his limbs and trunk to gather
the slack of the material. It had been meant for someone much more heavily built.
He picked up his helmet, gave it a rapid wipe to dislodge some grains of blown sand which had adhered to the sealing-ring, and addressed Arbogast.
“I’ll go down and see if the boat’s ready, Captain.”
“Go ahead,” Arbogast answered. His voice sounded dead, and there was no expression on his face. He seemed unable to tear his gaze from that glistening thing in the sea.
“Left wrist, please,” Nadine said. She was performing the same service for him as she had just done for Lex. Arbogast’s suit was his own, but the past winter’s privations had cost him a good twenty pounds of his former weight. Obedient as a puppet, he lifted his arm away from his side.
The compressor started again, and Delvia straightened to her full height. Glancing at Lex, she said, “I do envy you. After the winter I feel dirty clear through. Nothing I’d like more than a long cool swim.”
Well, she was dressed for it—or rather undressed. She had on nothing except a ragged red tabard open down both sides. It was obvious that being half starved had merely fined down her former statuesque proportions; her flesh was firm and shapely, and good muscles moved under her sleek skin. It was reassuring to find that some at least of the refugees were capable of remaining healthy here. Although rubbing the noses of the less-fortunate in the fact might lead to problems later on….
“I shouldn’t try it,” Lex replied soberly. “Not after what happened to young Bendle.”
Delvia nodded and grimaced. Unconsciously she lifted one foot from the ground, supporting herself with a hand on the compressor, and used its sole to scratch at her other calf. Lex looked more closely. There was a reddened area.
“Del!” he said. “Are you itching a lot?”
Embarrassed, she dropped her foot to the ground. She said, “A bit. Sunburn, I guess.”
“Then what are you doing in that skimpy rag? What do you want, a case of lupus from the high ultraviolet? This isn’t—” He broke off, acutely aware that both Naline and Arbogast had turned their eyes on him. He had been going to say, “This isn’t Zarathustra, you know,” And that, of course, was a stupid comment.
He licked his lips. “You ought to be wearing a whole-body garment, Del,” he finished.
.For an instant he thought she was going to snap at him, tell him to mind his own business. Instead, she sighed.
“I know, I know. I’m blonde, so it’s foolish not to. But after the winter it’s unbearable! I’m not joking when I say I feel filthy inside. I never wore the same clothes for so long in my life. It’s as though the dirt’s worked its way down to my bones!” She gave a shudder. “But you’re right I’ll ask Doc Jerode if he can give me a screening ointment.”
“You’ll be lucky,” Lex murmured. With a nod to Arbogast, he turned away.
Behind him he heard Naline utter a grunt of exasperation. “Del! Do you have any scissors?”
“Not me, but I know who has. Why?”
“I’ll get you to chop this hair off for me. Keeps falling in my eyes. The job’s fiddling enough anyway—only one kind of knot will do, and if I don’t get the tension right the bands either slip off or constrict the circulation….” The words tailed off into a mutter, and Lex caught nothing more.
He felt almost cheerful as he approached the spot where Aldric and Cheffy were inspecting their makeshift boat for leaks, despite what he was afraid he and Arbogast were shortly going to discover on the bed of the bay. The gray chilly fogs and the appalling gales of winter had been like a prison for the spirit; now, almost literally oversight, they were released and a summer stretched ahead of them as long as an Earthly year. They had endured the worst their new home could throw at them, and most of them had survived. Even some of those who had thought they ‘would never plan for the future again once their birthworld had been calcined were beginning to act like human beings instead of frightened animals.
Inland, in the cleft-valley where they had huddled for shelter along a riverbank, damaged houses were being mended and new ones planned. Here on the beach a dozen people under the leadership of gray-haired Bendle—recovered from the shock of losing his son last fall—were carrying out a methodical survey of the rocks and pools. Everything was changed, of course. The winter gales had done more than spin the windmills for weeks
on end. The dunes, the shoals, even the huge rocks scattered like currants in a sand-pudding had been stirred into a new arrangement.
Nonetheless, the situation felt—well, promising.
Here and there on the beach were brownish, greenish, and reddish pieces of organic debris. Bendle’s team had looked at these first. Most were harmless fronds of a rooted sea-plant, torn up by the last storms. Those which were mobile and possibly dangerous, though dying out of water, had been marked with a warning splash of white paint, and one had been pegged to the ground with a sharp stake. A circle had been scraped around it in the sand.
Lex paused and examined this creature. Like many of the sea-beasts, it wasn’t easy to kill. Pinkish and greenish, quadrilaterally symmetrical, leaking a sour-smelling fluid, the staked body humped and pulsed; the paired flexible trunklike organs which were limbs, gullets, channels of excretion, and reactor-pipes combined writhed vainly toward him, extending almost but not quite as far as the circular groove.
A long cool swim… Lex shuddered and strode on briskly.
“Admiring our prize exhibit?” Aldric called, turning his dark glasses as Lex approached. He was a stocky redhead, and had been fat. But no longer. Nobody among the refugees was fat this spring.
“You could say so,” Lex agreed, setting down his aircylinders with his helmet on top. “Anyone invented a name for it yet?”
“I want to call it
polystoma abominabilis
,” Cheffy said. He didn’t raise his round head, capped with close-curling black hair. He was using a hot-spray to apply quickset plastic to a pair of pegs projecting from the rim of the boat’s peapod hull. His other hand held a spatula with which he was shaping the pliant material before exposure to air hardened it rock-solid. “That,” he added, “means the disgusting thing with a lot of mouths.”