Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
"Up," the guard said again, and prodded me without mercy.
He shoved me aboard a weird kind of vehicle that had no wheels, only peculiar spiderleg-like limbs that ended in huge hand-shaped clamps. It made its way across the face of Alta Hannalanna like some sort of giant bug, grasping and then releasing the strands of the planetary vines as it pulled itself forward. In time it came to a place where the vines parted to create a vast dark hole, and it plunged down into it, and down and down and down, until I was somewhere deep within the heart of the planet.
I was not to see the surface of Alta Hannalanna again for many months. Not that there was much virtue in being up there, for the whole place is an impassable maze of those evil sticky vines; a veil of thick gray clouds perpetually hides the sun; and the rain never ceases, not even for a moment. But down below is even worse. It is all one great solid spongy mass, hundreds of kilometers thick. Wide low-roofed tunnels run through it, crossing and crossing again. The walls of those tunnels are moist and pink, like intestines, and a sort of sickly phosphorescent illumination comes from them, a feeble glow that breaks the darkness without giving comfort to the eyes. The whole planet is like that, from pole to pole. Afterward I learned that the spongy underground of Alta Hannalanna is the substructure of the vines, their mother-substance, a gigantic mass of vegetable matter that completely engulfs the entire globe. The vines that spring from it are its organs of nourishment. They bring moisture to it, and by exposing themselves to the foggy light of the surface they allow some sort of photosynthetic processes to take place below. Apparently the whole thing is one vast organism of planetary size, the vegetable equivalent of the living sea of Megalo Kastro. The real surface of Alta Hannalanna lies buried somewhere beneath it, far down. It shows up on sonar probes, an underlying layer of solid rock, but no one has ever seen any reason to penetrate deep enough to find it.
By God, it is an awful place! I blush to think that it was a Rom who discovered it, that great Gypsy spacefarer Claude Varna, five hundred years ago. To his credit Varna thought it was a horror not worth further examination; but something in the report he filed aroused the curiosity of a biologist in the employ of one of the huge Gaje trading companies a century later, and a second expedition went forth. Alas that it did.
The tunnels are inhabited. Indeed the tunnels were created by their own inhabitants. For they are nothing more than colossal worm-holes, excavated by enormous sluggish flat-topped creatures whose bodies are three times the width of a man's and extend to unbelievable lengths. Slowly, patiently, these things have been gnawing their way through the underground world of Alta Hannalanna since the beginning of time. They are mere eating-machines, mindless, implacable. What they deyour they digest and excrete as thin slime that runs in rivers behind them, gradually to be reabsorbed by the tunnel walls.
There are other life-forms in those tunnels, comparatively insignificant in size, that live as parasites on the great worms or on the surrounding vegetable matter. One of them is a kind of insect, a creature the size of a large dog with a savage beak and huge glittering golden-green eyes, repellent to behold. It is because of these creatures that I spent two years of my life in terrible torment in the tunnels of Alta Hannalanna.
The insects live within the worms. They use their beaks to inject the worms with their gastric juices and actually tunnel into their bodies, where they feed on their tissues and in time lay their eggs. Huge as the worms are, I suppose they would eventually be completely consumed by these little monsters within their bodies if they were not capable of defending themselves. The worm's defense is a chemical one: when it becomes aware that it has been entered-and it may be years before that news penetrates to its dim brain-it secretes a substance that trickles toward the zone of irritation and causes its own tissues to harden into a stony mass. Thus it forms a cyst around the invader, which is trapped within it until it starves. The stony material that forms these cysts is a rich lustrous yellow in color, smooth to the touch, and can be polished to a high gloss. In the commerce of the starways it is sold as Alta Hannalanna jade, although in truth it is more akin to amber. And it fetches a very high price indeed.
The filthy trick of collecting this jade was taught to me by one of my fellow slaves, a gaunt white-haired man named Vabrikant. He was a native of one of the Sempitern worlds; he said he had been on Alta Hannalanna five years; and he looked at me with such appalling pity when I was handed over to him for instruction that I felt my soul beginning to curdle.
In silence he handed me tools: a sort of curving scimitar, a pick, a two-pronged thing with a spring attachment. "All right," he said. "Come on with me."
Together we set out from the slave dormitory, an oval antechamber where several of the tunnels met. Quickly the path narrowed and the ceiling grew lower, until we had to walk with knees bent. Though there was barely light enough to see by, Vabrikant moved from intersection to intersection with the ease of long familiarity. The atmosphere was damp and close and the air had a nauseating sweetness.
We went forward for hours. I couldn't begin to see how we would ever find our way back. Now and then Vabrikant halted and hacked a chunk from the tunnel wall to eat. The first time he offered some to me I refused, and he shrugged; but later he said, "You might as well. It's all you're going to get today."
I nibbled it warily. It was like eating a sponge; but there was a faint residue of musty flavor in my mouth afterward, and the hunger-gripings that I had been feeling were allayed at least for a little while.
Vabrikant smiled. "Better than starving, eh?" "Not by much."
"You get used to it. Gypsy, are you?" "Rom, yes."
"I knew a Gypsy once. A woman. Sweet, she was. The most beautiful little thing, dark eyes, the darkest hair you ever saw. I wanted to marry her, that's how I felt about her. I chased after her across six worlds. She was always kind to me. Married one of her own sort, though." "We seldom marry outside," I said.
"So I discovered. Well, makes no difference now, I guess. I'm in this fucking place for life." He straightened up, sniffed, nodded. "Come on. We're almost there." He shook his head. "You poor bastard. Shipped here so young. You sure must have done something really shitty to have been sent to Alta Hannalanna."
"No. Don't tell me what it was. We don't ever talk about what it was that got us sent up." He pointed ahead. "Look there, Gypsy-lad. There's worm-waste. We've got our worm."
Indeed I saw a stream of pale fluid spreading toward us on the tunnel floor, the worm excretion that I was to get to know all too well. Soon we were moving thigh-deep through it, sliding and slipping with every step. Vabrikant shined his helmet-light ahead. A worm was in the corridor.
We came up behind it. It filled the tunnel nearly from wall to wall, so that we had to walk sideways, our backs to the wall; and even so we could barely get through. We crept on and on for what seemed like miles, stooping so low that I thought my back would crack. The reek of the worm's fluid made me gag at first, but I began to get used to it. Its body was soft, almost buttery. It would have been easy to put my hand right through the yielding skin, deep into its flesh. Vabrikant said nothing for perhaps half an hour. Then he halted and tapped my shoulder.
"You see? Jade-light."