The Ginger Star-Volume I of The Book of Skaith Read online

  Volume One of The Book of Skaith

  THE GINGER STAR

  Leigh Brackett

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  The Ginger Star: Copyright ©1974 Leigh Brackett Hamilton. First Edition: October 1974 Del Rey books

  A Baen Ebook

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 0-3453-1827-7

  ISBN 13: 978-0-3453-1827-5

  Cover art by Doug Chaffee

  Maps by Michael Young

  First ebook, February 2008

  Electronic version by WebWrights

  www.webwrights.com

  For Robert and Cecelia

  Eric John Stark

  By Algis Budrys

  Eric John Stark, otherwise known as N'Chaka, was Leigh Brackett's series character, stretching on through tales told of him in the Solar System and then to the world of Skaith, under a ginger-colored, dying star.

  Stark was further known as The-Man-Without-a-Tribe, so named by the half-human aborigines of Mercury's twilight zone who raised him after a murderous group of claim-jumpers wiped out his human family at the Mercury Metals and Mining company installation. For years' N'Chaka lived with his foster parents, scrabbling for the barest necessities of life, often fighting for life itself with the various animals who hunted him among the crumbled rocks and hidden grottoes of his existence, until the claim-jumpers captured him and put him in a cage, from which Simon Ashton eventually rescued him.

  It was Ashton, at that time supervisor of the Mercury mining effort, who took the feral boy, who could speak only in the aboriginal clicks and grunts, and who thought he was an aborigine, and raised him to human appearance and gave him his human name. What Ashton could not do--what no one could do--was to make of Eric John Stark a fully human man. And so Stark grew to manhood, but not to gentleness, and the way he made his living was to rent himself out as a mercenary. So that by the time we first see him he is tall and lean, scarred in any number of places, including his soul. He would as soon kill you as love you . . . in fact, he has very few lovers, although he does have a code of ethics, of a sort.

  We meet him on Skaith, intending to rescue Simon Ashton, who has been captured by Wandsmen, who rule over a gamut of varied people, most of them human, keeping the social order in place. But where Stark lands is Skeg, the only place on the planet where the Wandsmen reluctantly allow starships to land. Starships are hard to reconcile with the Wandsmen's established view of their solar system, which is that Skaith is the only planet in the Universe, and that their mission is to keep the social order quiescent while the planet undergoes constant climactic deterioration. So the Wandsmen are on the verge of ordering the starships to go away, keeping suppressed the rising demand for emigration.

  So begins Stark's adventure on Skaith, on a course that will take him to The Bleak Mountains and the half-legendary Citadel, and, in various stops along the route from its beginning to its thunderous end, to, among others, Irnan and Yorunna, to Tregad and Ged Darod, to Thyra, Izvand and Andape; and The White Islands, The Place of Winds, The Darklands, The Plain of Worldheart, and The Witchfires . . . Brackett's wonderful imagination peoples a world in all its richness.

  You will meet The Fares, The Hounds of Skaith and The Fallarin (who can fly, but not well), Pedrallon, an apostate Wandsmen, Halk, who will kill Stark as soon as their for-the-nonce alliance is no longer necessary, and Baya, the madwoman. You will meet in particular Gerrith, Gerrith's daughter, who says she is nowhere near being the seer her slain mother was, but who predicts that Stark, The Dark Man, will overthrow the planetary social order. (And she is not bad-looking, either, though in the end she parts from Stark.)

  So this is the sweep of Brackett's and Stark's world, and in the end she brings it all to a grand climax, bringing these and many other parts to a fully resolved end, rewarding you richly for having adventures with Stark through all these and other feverish scenes.

  An interesting thing about these adventures is that they are not, strictly speaking, science fiction. In all these adventures on a foreign planet, with every signature of science fiction, there is the constant intrusion of supernatural effects--but not to the point where the magic dominates the action, which would make the story a pure fantasy. So we are dealing with a literature called science fantasy . . . a much rarer breed than either of its parents taken straight. What is particularly interesting is that this is all Leigh Brackett wrote in our domain. Rarely, if ever, did she, over the years of her career, write pure science fiction. Yet she was consistently publishing in science fiction magazines, to great acclaim, and she is consistently thought of as a science fiction writer.

  This tells us something about our field which is not often thought-about. But that will not matter to you who read about Eric John Stark and his action-packed adventures. You will be too busy enjoying the moments . . . which is what Leigh Brackett intended.

  —Algis Budrys

  1

  Stark got his final view of Pax from the tender, going out to the spaceport moon, and that was the best view he had had of it. Pax is the chief habitable planet of Vega. It is also a city, and the proud boast of that hopefully and precariously christened world is that not one single grain of corn grows upon it, nor is one single useful item manufactured.

  The city soars up into the sky. It spreads out over every landmass and swallows up small seas. It burrows underground, level upon level. Large areas of it are especially conditioned and equipped for non-humans. Everything comes into it from the outside. All supplies are shipped to the lunar docks and brought on down by freight tenders. Nothing lives on Pax but bureaucrats, diplomats, and computers.

  Pax is the administrative center of the Galactic Union, a democratic federation of star-worlds flung across half the Milky Way and including, very incidentally, the worlds of little Sol. In this place the millions of problems besetting billions of people inhabiting thousands of diverse planets are reduced to tidy and easily manageable abstractions on tapes, cards, and endless sheets of paper.

  A paper world, Stark thought, full of paper people.

  Simon Ashton was not made of paper. Time, and accomplishments in planetary administration, had promoted him to a comfortable office at the Ministry of Planetary Affairs and a comfortable apartment in a mile-high building which he need not ever leave, if he did not wish to, except to take one of the moving walkways to work. Still, like many of his colleagues in that Ministry, Ashton had never lost his rawhide, taut-wire energy. He often went into the field, knowing that the problems of actual beings in actual places could not be solved merely by the regurgitation of data from a bank of clacking machines.

  He had gone once too often into the field. He had not come back.

  Stark received that information on one of the un-licked worlds outside the Union, where life was a little more relaxed for people like himself. He was, as the old phrase had it, a wolf's-head—a totally masterless man in a society where everyone respectable belonged to something. He bestowed his allegiance only where he chose, usually for pay. He was a mercenary by trade, and there were enough little wars going on both in and out of the Union, enough remote peoples calling on him for the use of his talents, so that he was able to make a reasonable living doing what he did best.

  Fighting.

  He had begun fighting almost before he could stand. Born in a mining colony in Mercury's Twilight Belt, he had fought to live on a planet that did not encourage li
fe; his parents were dead, his foster-parents a tribe of sub-human aboriginals clawing a precarious existence out of the sun-stricken valleys. He had fought, without success, the men who slaughtered those foster-parents and put him in a cage, a snarling curiosity. Later on, he had fought for a different kind of survival, the survival of himself as a man.

  He would never have got past square one—without Simon Ashton.

  He could remember vividly the heat, the raw pain of loss, the confinement of the bars, the men who laughed and tormented him. Then Ashton came, Ashton the wielder of authority, the savior, and that was the beginning of the life of Eric John Stark, as distinguished from N'Chaka, the Man-Without-a-Tribe.

  Now twice-orphaned, Eric/N'Chaka gradually accepted Ashton as his father-in-being. More than that, he accepted Ashton as his friend. The years of his growing-up were associated almost solely with Ashton because they had been much alone in the frontier stations to which Ashton was sent. Ashton's kindness, his counsel, his patience, his strength and his affection were stamped indelibly on the fibers of Stark's being. He had gotten even his name through Ashton, who had searched the records of Mercury Metals and Mining to track down his parents.

  And now Simon Ashton was missing, disappeared, on the world of a ginger star somewhere at the back of beyond, out in the Orion Spur. A newly discovered, newly opened world called Skaith that hardly anyone had ever heard of, except at Galactic Center. Skaith was not a member of the Union but there had been a consulate. Someone had called to the Union for help, and Ashton was the man who went to see about it.

  Ashton had, perhaps, exceeded his authority. Even so, his superiors had done their best. But the local powers closed the consulate and refused entrance to officers of the Union. All attempts to discover Ashton's whereabouts, or the reason for his disappearance, had ended at a blank wall.

  Stark caught the first available ship outbound for Galactic center and Pax. Looking for Ashton had become his personal business.

  The weeks he had spent at Pax had been neither pleasant nor easy. He had had to do a great deal of talking and convincing and, after that, much learning. He was glad to be leaving, impatient to get on with the job.

  The world-city dropped behind him, and he breathed more freely. Presently the enormous intricacies of the lunar spaceport engulfed him, sorted him, tagged him and eventually spewed him into the bowels of a trim little cargo liner which took him about a third of the way to his destination. Three more changes were scheduled after that, progressively downward, into a rickety old tramp—the only sort of ship that served Skaith.

  He endured the voyage, continuing by means of tapes the education into things Skaithian he had begun at Pax. He was not popular among his fellow travelers. His cabin mate complained that he twitched and growled in his sleep like an animal, and there was something in the gaze of his pale eyes that disconcerted them. They called him "the wild man" behind his back and ceased trying to lure him into games, the discussions of schemes for turning a quick profit, or personal reminiscences.

  The tramp trader made several planetfalls along the way. But eventually it creaked and rattled out of FTL drive within sight of a solar system lost in the wilderness of the Orion Spur.

  It was the fourth month, by Galactic Arbitrary Time, after Ashton's disappearance.

  Stark destroyed his tapes and collected his few belongings. The rickety trader settled down on the rickety starport at Skeg, the only one on the planet, and discharged its passengers.

  Stark was the first man off the ship.

  His papers gave his right name, which meant nothing here, but they did not mention Pax as a point of origin for his flight. They said that he was an Earthman, which he was in a way, and a dealer in rarities, which he was not. At the barrier shed a couple of surly men confiscated his purely defensive stunner—he could have it back, they said, when he left—and searched him and his meager luggage for other weapons. He was then given a terse lecture, in bad Universal, on the rules and regulations governing life in Skeg and was sent on his way with the parting information that all roads out of Skeg except the one leading to the starport were closed to off-worlders. He was not under any circumstances to leave the city.

  He rode the ten miles in a jolting cart, past plantations of tropical fruits, waterlogged paddies where some form of grain was growing lushly, and patches of jungle. Gradually the smell of mud and vegetation was overlaid by a smell of sea water, salty and stagnant. Stark did not like it much.

  When the cart topped a low line of jungled hills, he found that he did not much like the look of the sea, either. Skaith had no moon, so there were no tides to stir it, and there was a milky, greasy sheen to the surface. Skaith's old ginger-colored sun was going down in a senile fury of crimson and molten brass, laying streaks of unhealthy brilliance across the water. The sea seemed a perfect habitat for the creatures who were said to live in it.

  Beside the sea, on the bank of a river, was Skeg. The river had grown thin with age, too weak to do more than trickle through a narrow passage where the silt of centuries had all but closed its mouth. A ruined fortress-tower was set on low cliffs to guard a vanished harbor. But the city itself looked lively enough, with lamps and torches glowing out as the sun sank.

  Presently, Stark saw the first of the Three Ladies, magnificent star-clusters—the ornament of Skaith's night skies—that made it impossible to come by a decent darkness. He glowered at the Lady, admiring her beauty but thinking that she and her sisters could make things very difficult for him.

  As though the situation would not be difficult enough.

  The cart eventually came clumping into the town. Skeg was one great open market where almost anything could be bought or sold, and the streets were busy. Shops and stalls were brightly lighted. Vendors with barrows cried their wares. People from all over the Fertile Belt—tall, leather-clad warrior-burghers from the outlying city-states as well as the small silken folk of the tropics—mingled with the off-worlders who came to traffic, exchanging precious foreign items like iron pigs for drugs, or artifacts looted from Skaith's plentiful supply of ruins.

  And of course there were the Farers. Everywhere. A conglomerate of all the races, dressed or undressed in every imaginable fashion, trooping about, lying about, doing whatever happened to occur to them at the moment; the careless itinerant children of the Lords Protector, who neither toiled nor spun, but blew lightly with the winds of the world. Stark noticed some off-worlders among them, drifters who had found the good life here in the warm twilight of a planet where everything went and where, if you belonged to the right groups, everything was free.

  Stark paid off his driver and found lodgings at an inn catering to off-worlders. The room was small but reasonably clean, and the food, when he sampled it, not at all bad.

  In any case, he was not interested in comfort. He was interested in Ashton.

  When he had eaten, he approached the landlord in the common-room of the inn, which was built in the breezy tropical style of Skeg, being mostly windows with reed curtains that rolled down to shut out the rain. It was not raining now, and the sea wind blew through, heavy and damp.

  "How do I find the Galactic Union consulate?"

  The landlord stared at him. He was a dark purple in color, with a face of stone and startlingly light, very cold gray eyes.

  "The consulate? Didn't you know?"

  "Know what?" asked Stark, looking suitably blank.

  "There isn't one. Not anymore."

  "But I was told—"

  "The Farers wrecked it, not quite four months ago. Sent the consul and his staff packing. They—"

  "The Farers?"

  "Surely you were told about them at the starport. All that human garbage littering up the streets."

  "Oh, yes," said Stark. "I was just surprised. They seem—well, too indolent."

  "All they need is the word," said the landlord sourly. "When the Wandsmen say go, they go."

  Stark nodded. "I was warned about the Wandsmen, too. Pain of
death and all that. They seem to be very important men on Skaith."

  "They do the dirty work for the Lords Protector. The Chief Wandsman of Skeg, the almighty Gelmar, led the Farers. He told the consul to get gone and stay gone, they wanted no more outside interference. In fact, for a while it seemed they might kick us all out and close the starport. They didn't, quite. Needed the imports too badly. But they treat us like criminals."

  "I got the feeling that foreigners weren't popular," Stark said. "What was the row about?"

  The landlord shook his head. "Some damned official busybody from Pax. It's a fairly open secret that he was here to arrange emigration from one of the city-states. More fool he."

  "Oh? What happened to him?"

  "Who knows? Except the Wandsmen." The cold eyes regarded Stark suspiciously. "Got a particular interest?"

  "Hardly."

  "Then drop the subject. We've had trouble enough already. What did you want with the consulate, anyway?"

  "Some routine business about travel papers. It'll have to wait till my next port of call."

  He bade the landlord good night and walked out.

  Some damned busybody from Pax.

  Ashton.

  And only the Wandsmen knew what had happened to him.

  Stark had made that assumption himself, some time ago, so he was not downcast. He had not expected to walk into Skeg and find signs posted to tell him his way.

  He walked through the crowded streets, a dark man in a dark tunic—a big man, powerfully muscled, who carried himself as lightly and easily as a dancer. He was in no hurry. He let the city flow around him, absorbing it through all the senses, including one that civilized men have largely lost. But he was not civilized. He was aware of the lights, the colors, the mingled smells, the strange musics made by unnameable instruments and alien voices, the bright banners that hung above the sin-shops, the movements of people; underneath it all he sensed a rich, ripe stink of decay. Skaith was dying, of course, but it did not seem to him to be dying well.