Paul Preuss - Re-Entry.pdf - Paul Preuss - margozap

Countdown; Earth, 204 N.E.

Physician, heal thyself.

—Luke iv, 23

The snake eats itself, the dog chases its tail.

—G. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form

"Can you go home?" Susan had asked him, and in his profound hangover he'd

profoundly misunderstood her. What she'd wanted to know was whether he was

awake, and strong enough, and steady enough, to walk out of her life. Preferably

forever. It was not a friendly question.

But he'd taken it metaphysically, and for a moment his foggy brain had wrestled

with possibilities. Could he go home again? What would he do differently, if

suddenly he were given the chance to do it all over?

'Take these," she'd said, thrusting a triad of pills at his face. His half open

eyes had recognized a battery of lipotro-pin derivatives: energy, good will, a

sense of well-being, waiting under bis nose. The clouds of depression would

lift, the sun would come out, the bluebird of happiness would sing.

He'd shifted bis gaze to the gray-brown San Francisco fog outside Susan's soleri

window. Lying on his back on her couch, looking straight up, be couldn't see

anything else. Cold poisonous tentacles of despair, coiling over the glass half

dome. And inside bis skin, it was worse: he could smell the dried sweat and the

vomit, taste the congealed mucus on his tongue. Oh, he'd been a very naughty boy

this time....

"Come on, Phil, take it and get out of here. Chemical sympathy is all you get.

I've got work to do." -

He'd taken the pills, dreading the memories they would restore. Then Susan had

hauled him off the couch and pushed him through the door.

Those were his first wobbly steps on the way home.

Stage One; from Earth to Darwin, 206 N.E.—and before

Humboldt drove upward into star-spangled space, balanced on a column of fire

from her annihilator engines. All her crystal promenades and portals were

ablaze. On this "night" (by the ship's clock) the regal liner was more than

three months from Earth, and only hours from Earth Station, the binary black

hole system that gave forth on all the known accessible worlds of the Starry

Archipelago.

Barring some unimaginable last minute emergency, Humboldt would proceed

unchecked, diving with headlong grace into the space-time vortex around the

orbiting holes, to emerge in no time in the vicinity of Darwin's Star a few

dozen light-years away. The passage of the holes was scheduled for three o'clock

in the morning, ship's time; before then there would not be the slightest

interruption in the smooth .8-gee acceleration Humboldt maintained for the

comfort of her passengers.

Those passengers gathered now by twos and threes and fours, to recline in

leather-cushioned luxury beneath the sunset desert sky and battlemented mud

walls of ancient Timbuktu. Palm fronds rattled in the cool breeze from the air

conditioners. Boredom alone would have brought them to tonight's lecture in the

Sun Grove lounge; that it was to be delivered by Philip Holder insured a full

turnout.

Now if only Phil himself would turn out, fretted Evan Bruneau, Humboldt's

sensie-handsome young Third Officer. He smiled warmly at Vivee Chillingsworth,

and her diamonds, and her escort Robby Fain. Fain winked at Bruneau as he

steered the widow Chillingsworth under the grape arbor and into the lounge, but

Bruneau knew that Robby was only teasing.

Bruneau was beginning to fear the worst; the good doctor Holder was very

distinguished indeed, but more often these past couple of years for his epic

binges than for his contributions to the annals of medicine.

Not that Bruneau was a moralist. His major task was to keep Humboldts passengers

entertained on the ship's long, long voyages among the major ports of the

Archipelago, and Holder, a frequent passenger, was an invaluable resource: he

had an intimate knowledge of the cultures of the inhabited worlds, gained

through years of research, and he was an incurable raconteur. In return for

Holder's services as a lecturer, Bruneau was happy to cancel his bar tabs.

It was after 21:00 already. If Holder didn't show up in a couple of minutes,

Bruneau would have to send a steward around to the bars (Humboldt had eight).

And if Holder wasn't in one of them, Bruneau would be forced to admit defeat.

He'd show the travelogue sensie instead, and bis name would be mud.

Of course he'd know damn well where Holder was. That was another part of then-

unspoken arrangement: Holder took his pounds of flesh (all female, mostly

young), and somehow Bruneau managed never to think of the introductions he

arranged as pimping. Perhaps that was unfortunate— in the present case it left

him no excuse to go rousting one guest out of another's bed. (Excuse me, Loa

darling, but Phil promised...)

But here came Loa Westcliffe now, fully dressed In diaphanous jumper, and all

alone.

Bruneau grinned with relief. "So nice to see you here, Loa darling."

"Where the hell else would I be, dear?" Westcliffe asked, tossing metallic green

locks. "Phil show up yet?"

"I couldn't say, really, I just..."

"In other words, no. If I were you I'd run quick as a bunny down to the Mirror

Room and fish him out of his martini, or you're not going to have a show

tonight." Her pale gray eyes were not smiling; she did not take the prospective

loss of an hour's amusement lightly.

Bruneau went white, and without wasting a word he bounded toward the lift with

improbably long and accurate strides.

Meanwhile Phil Holder sat all alone, sipping thoughtfully on what would have

been his second Scotch after dinner—if he hadn't skipped dinner. A perfectly

sane man would not

have taken the risk of intoxicating himself even a little in the last hours

before an act so audacious as the one Holder now contemplated; Holder, though,

was neither completely sane nor completely foolish. He knew his capacity for

alcohol with intimate precision. He wanted people to believe he was drunk as

usual; moreover, the drinks would take the rasping edge off his nerves, as much

a danger to his plans as alcohol's dullness. And even granted that all the

excuses he could think of amounted to no better than a pile of shifting

rationale, still his drinking would serve as an excellent test of his sincerity:

did he dare remain sober?

He checked his wrist unit: 21:10. Where the hell's Bruneau? Doesn't he care?

Holder took another sip of the foul-tasting Scotch—reputedly an excellent

unblended variety from Lothian, which he drank only for the sake of its

unmistakable odor. He hated Scotch. He grimaced and put down the bulb. Glass

clicked against glass. Glass everywhere.

He rubbed his hand over his face, feeling rubbery skin, trying to avoid his

yellowing eyes in the bar's ubiquitous mirrors. He'd just as soon never see this

particular version of his face again, anyway: a fortyish face, handsome in a

soft-edged, dissolute sort of way, tanned almost black and engagingly wrinkled

by the suns of a dozen worlds—yet somehow looking preserved.

The mirrored walls of the lounge, intended to make a modest space seem larger,

closed in on him instead, mocking him with his own image repeated endlessly

around him, a dozen decadent versions of himself converging at infinity,

reflected in the walls of this alcohol-filled killing bottle.

He was saved by the sudden appearance—a dozen desperate appearances at once—of

Evan Bruneau. H... slap my wrist if Tm pushing, but this was the night you..."

Holder watched Bruneau try to get control of his face, which reflected relief

and contempt before settling into determined obsequiousness. Holder almost

laughed, but he was truly grateful for Bruneau's timely arrival.

"Oh Jeezus Ev, I've let you down again, have I? Probly too late now, huh? Lemme

buy you drink, anyway...."

'That's awfully good of you, Phil, but you could do me a much, much greater

favor." Bruneau grinned sweatily. "The ;|act is, it's just a tad past 21:00...."

',;. Holder peered owlishly at his watch. "Say, you're right as rain, Ev.

There's still time!" Holder pushed himself vigorously away from the bar,

stumbling against Bruneau. ** 'Scuse. Guess me arse is numb."

Bruneau steadied the shorter man with one hand and pressed his thumb against the

countertop charge plate—for all his fumbling, Holder had never been in danger of

paying his own bill. Bruneau steered Holder firmly toward the door.

The lift flashed upward, past a dozen opulent decks visible through the clear

extruded crystal of the pneumatic tube. Holder leaned cozily on Bruneau's

shoulder and closed his eyes. "Ev, 'd I ever tell you about the time at

Epseridan U. when I was so sozzled and I was supposed to give this speech so

I..."

"Sent your friend on instead, pretending to be you?"

"I did tell you!" Holder exclaimed with delight. "And he was so damn convincing!

Ran through all the charts and graphs, knew 'em better than me. Had to call a

stop to it, though," said Holder sternly. "He made too much sense to be a real

ep'demiologist... mislead the public ..."

"Dont get any ideas, Phil. It wouldn't work." Bruneau sighed.

"Oh hell, / know that*' Holder was indignant. "These people already know you."

"But if you really don't feel up to it.. .**

"Relax, kid. IT! be fine," said Holder, miffed. He stood up straight as the lift

doors whispered open.

The projected stars of the desert night twinkled more brightly as the sky light

dimmed in the Sun Grove. Holder stood remarkably steady on the edge of the low

dais, holding the room controls in his left hand. He'd warmed up his audience

with professional aplomb, starting with a few jokes about drunken professors.

Imperceptibly, not letting on that he was turning serious, he began including

scraps of real ideas in his banter.

In the shadows at the back of the room Evan Bruneau allowed his gold-braided

shoulders to relax—it looked as if Phil were going to pull it off after all.

'*... the truth now—it's the lure of the primitive that brings you all to

Darwin, isn't it? Even I still feel it, and I was born and raised here. Even

though I know better than you that ifs a tailor-made brand of primitivism."

Holder laughed.

He fiddled with the room controls as he talked. Slowly an unage began to fade in

all around him, filling one whole end of the darkened room: tree ferns and fat

cycads growing out of dark rich humus, and farther away, the mist-shrouded

shapes of giant redwoods. The plants were merely life-sized, but nevertheless so

big they seemed out of scale. Nothing moved in the dim ruddy light, not even the

tendrils of mist; Holder had not yet activated the scene.

He kept talking all the while. "Once upon a time, hi the good old days—you know

what I mean; I call it the Garden of Eden syndrome—one way or another we all

keep trying to go back. Now, a few years ago I spent some time with the yogis on

Ichtiaque. I learned some things from them, I learned some things about them, I

was lucky enough to solve a problem that had eluded other investigators...." A

few members of the audience murmured politely to indicate they were aware of the

research that had won Holder the Freund Prize. "... whereupon a collection of

armchair experimentalists decided to give me a prize for it," Holder said

blandly, cutting the sycophants dead.

Bruneau was surprised at the acid sharpness of Holder's tone; Holder was a man

who usually lapped up praise. But Bruneau thought that, all in all, Holder was

doing remarkably well.

Bruneau looked at the holofilm with interest. The scene was new to him; Holder's

talks usually began with panoramic views of Upper Cretacia from Mount Owen, one

of Darwin's more inspiring vistas. Holder had brought the forest scene to full

illumination, and had tapped the button that allowed partial animation. Fog

drifted through the trees; water dripped in fat splashes from the spiny fronds

of the cycads; insects flitted through the shadows. The motion cycled on an

imperceptible dissolve, every few seconds—whatever happened later in the scene,

Holder was saving it

It wasn't a professional sensie with smelly-feely tracks, yet it filled the

visual field, and even standing at the back of the room Bruneau felt he was

inside the tableau.

"The yogis, attempting to get back to a presumed state of harmony with Nature

that never could possibly have existed, are the strictest imaginable

vegetarians," Holder was saying. *No animal products of any kind: no milk, no

eggs, they Won't even kill ticks. Yet they were afflicted by a very specific

disease that, so far as we knew, could only be transmitted by eating the meat of

infected loquemels, funny little goat-like creatures indigenous to the planet.

As it turned out, the thing that was making the yogis sick was probably also

keeping them alive."

Holder fingered the controls and the scene stopped cycling. He looked

incongruously at home, standing amid the fronds of the prehistoric forest in his

dark conservative suit and cape, but of course the primeval jungle was illusory.

His head was cocked back and his eyes were fixed on a spot a few dozen meters

back among the dark tree trunks. Unconsciously, every eye in the audience

followed his gaze.

"Seems the disease was carried by a parasite that infested wild loquemel. In the

larval stage, this tiny bug lives in besan pods. Besan provides the yogis with a

staple part of their diet, and they were unknowingly eating an awful lot of the

little grubs with their carelessly cleaned besan—thereby catching the disease.

But those same grubs were providing them with their only complete proteins!

Without that animal protein they would have been just as bad off, or worse."

Holder chuckled. "We couldn't tell them that, of course. We persuaded them to

switch to a different source of besan that just happened to be crawling with

healthy bugs."

At this moment there arose repeated loud crashes in the brush, coming from the

place in the trees Holder was watching. Over the sounds of vegetation being

shredded and crushed came a different, more ominous sound, a guttural, slavering

gurgle, mingled with violent expulsions of breath.

Holder seemed oblivious to his audience's mounting tension. After all, they were

all sophisticates; they'd all seen a thousand skillfully produced sensies,

replete with the most ingenious special effects.

Almost casually he attempted to undercut the excitement. "By the way, I was

thirteen when I took this piece of film, on an expedition organized by my

father. Good old Dad. For those of you who go in for this sort of thing, it was

shot with a Leitz, with the reference beam reflectors set back there on the

trunks of those sequoias, about four meters up."

Bruneau was among those lulled into looking for the equipment Holder mentioned.

As his eyes searched the background, the branches of the redwoods whipped aside

and Bruneau found himself staring down the throat of a roaring Tyran-nosaurus

rex.

Even though he was a dozen meters from the toothy ap-

parition, Bruneau jumped. A collective gasp went up from the audience.

Holder giggled. "Oh come on, this is just a kid's home movie. In a couple of

weeks you'll be on Darwin, where you can see the real thing."

The animal stepped forward. "There! Did you see it?" Holder shouted.

He flicked the controls and froze the tyrannosaur in place, cycling on a

snorting breath. The bulk of the great beast's sixteen-meter length was back in

the brush. Its huge head was carried relatively low and thrust forward, with

rows of sharp teeth curved like Arabian daggers. Its nearly 9,000-kilogram

weight was balanced on colossal three-clawed drumsticks in a running stance:

head, body, and ridiculous stick-like forelegs ahead, massive tail out of sight

behind,

Holder answered his own question. "No, none of you were paying attention." He

reversed the film, and the forest swallowed the creature's head. "Down there, to

the right! Look!" be shouted, as he instantly switched the film to forward.

Smooth naked skin glimmered in the shadows of the underbrush.

Holder froze the image: it was a very young man only partly visible through the

foliage. He wore a necklace of long curved teeth, a coil of rope over one

shoulder, and apparently nothing else. His color was a rich, translucent bronze,

his long golden hair flew out in braids behind his shoulders, and he sported a

full blond beard and mustaches.

"The very picture of the perfect barbarian, eh?" Holder said cheerfully. "He

could be a Viking, a Celt, even a Cro-magnon—right down to the skin color. How

many centuries have gone by since people were that pale?" Holder walked through

the immaterial forest undergrowth until he was standing beside the frozen

figure. "How did this outlandish creature come to be here, playing anachronistic

cave man?"

Holder stood still a moment, then walked back toward the front of the dais,

leaving the ghostly shape behind him. His voice was suddenly mournful. "In a

way, I've spent my life trying to find the answer to that question. I've even

written treatises on the so-called feral tribes of Darwin. But I still cEont

know." In the darkness Holder's expression was unread-t$fe. "Unhappily, I was

never able to discuss it with our t|Bmitive' friend, here."

Bruneau's ears pricked up. Holder's voice sounded dejected, but peculiarly

insincere. What mischief was he about?

Holder started the film. The running man disappeared instantly into the

undergrowth. The tyrannosaur bellowed and exploded from the trees, taking three

frighteningly rapid strides forward. Muffled curses and squeals of fright came

from the audience in the HumboWs lounge.

The odd daintiness of the animal's bird-like gait was more than offset by the

visible, audible effects each time a clawed foot hit the ground: the entire

scene shook dizzily with each thudding step, betraying the unseen laser

recorder's vibrations on its tripod. The nightmare animal stopped in the middle

of the mossy clearing, the red expressionless eyes atop its skull staring

fixedly from under bony orbital ridges. Its mouth hung open, and its breath came

in liquid grunts.

Bruneau shivered. He was awfully glad now that Holder's film was mere sound and

picture. Even in his imagination, the stench of the carnivorous dinosaur's hot,

wet breath was almost overpowering. Then a horrible thought occurred to Bruneau—

just as the great reptile's head twisted and darted forward into the brush.

There was a horrible scream, indisputably human.

"Oh, really, Phil, you mustn't!" Bruneau protested loudly, taking a step

forward.

"For those of you who are still with me," said Holder, "have a look at this...."

Then Bruneau realized he'd been completely fooled; Holder had not been sober for

an instant! The whole episode was a boozy practical joke. Nauseated groans and

shouts failed to deter the intoxicated doctor, who continued to expound. Bruneau

lunged toward the stage to interfere, but found his way blocked by members of

the audience who were in a hurry to leave.

Inside Holder's "home movie" too, there were running figures. Bruneau had time

to make out a boy in his early teens—Holder himself?—running toward the

thrashing in the bushes, and a middle-aged man who suddenly caught up to the boy

and cuffed him out of the way.

Bruneau was almost to the dais now. The fern leaves towered over his head. And

then the tyrannosaur stood erect. It, too, towered over Bruneau, so high and

awesome that Bruneau almost stumbled in fright. The red gobbets that dripped

from its jaws resembled nothing like a man.

"... incidentally demonstrates the answer to a question that puzzled

paleontologists for ever-so-long, before the re-creation of rex," Holder was

remarking, nonchalantly. "Scientists could conceive of no possible adaptive

purpose for the creature's tiny forelegs...."

"Phil, for God's sake!" Bruneau shouted.

"But they are quite useful, as it turns out," said Holder.

The carnosaur ducked its head and lifted a pan- of short, curving little

foreclaws to its mouth. Then it began ....

"Picking its teeth," Bruneau murmured. "Oh, God." He jumped onto the dais and

walked toward Holder. "Phil, please...."

Holder looked at him. "My g'ness, Ev." A bewildered expression came over his

face; he bunked. "Have I gone too far?"

"Yes, Phil. Much too far indeed," said Bruneau, trying to hold his temper.

Paul Preuss - Re-Entry.pdf

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