Trullion: Alastor 2262

TRULLION: Alastor 2262

JACK VANCE

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER 1633 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10019

COPYRIGHT 1973, BY JACK VANCE.

All Rights Reserved. Cover art by David B. Mattingly.

FIRST DAW PRINTING, JANUARY 1981

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DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. OFF. MARCA REGISTRADA. UK. CSO EH U.S.A

TRULLION:

Alastor 2262

1.1Welgen Sound

2. Welgen Spit

3. Blacklyn Broad

4. Lace Islands

5. Ripil Broad

6. Mellish Water

7. Near, Middle, Far Islands

8. Seaward Broad

9. Athenry Water

10. Rorwquin’s Tooth

11. Clinkhammer Broad

12. Sarpassante Island

13. Sarpent Channel

14. Tethryn Broad

15. Prefecture Commons

16. Zeur Water

17. Fleharish Broad

18. llfish Water

19. Bellicent Island

20. Five Islands

21.Selma Water

22. Vernice Water

23. Fogle Island

24. Harkus Island

25. Farwan Water

26. Ambal Island

27. Rabendary Islai

28. Ambal Broad

29. Gilweg Water

30. Gilweg Island

Out toward the rim of the galaxy hangs Alastor Cluster, a whorl of thirty thousand live stars in an irregular volume twenty to thirty light-years in diameter. The surrounding region is dark and, except for a few hermit stars, unoccupied. To the exterior view, Alastor presents a flamboyant display of star-streams, luminous webs, sparkling nodes. Dust clouds hang across the brightness; the engulfed stars glow russet, rose, or smoky amber. Dark stars wander unseen among a million subplanetary oddments of iron, slag and ice: the so-called “starments.”

Scattered about the cluster are three thousand inhabited planets with a human population of approximately five trillion persons. The worlds are diverse, the populations equally so; nevertheless they share a common language and all submit to the authority of the Connatic at Lusz, on the world Numenes.

The current Connatic is Oman Ursht, sixteenth in the Idite succession, a man of ordinary and undistinguished appearance. In portraits and on public occasions he wears a severe black uniform with a black casque, in order to project an image of inflexible authority, and this is how he is known to the folk of Alastor Cluster. In private Oman Ursht is a calm and reasonable man, who tends to under-rather than over-administrate. He ponders all aspects of his conduct, knowing well that his slightest act-a gesture, a word, a symbolic nuance-might start off an avalanche of unpredictable consequences. Hence his effort to create the image of a man rigid, terse and unemotional.

To the casual observer, Alastor Cluster is a system placid and peaceful. The Connatic knows differently. He recognizes that wherever human beings strive for advantage, disequilibrium exists; lacking easement, the social fabric becomes taut and sometimes rips asunder. The Connatic conceives his function to be the identification and relief of social stresses.

Sometimes he ameliorates, sometimes he employs techniques of distraction. When harshness becomes unavoidable he deploys his military agency, the Whelm. Oman Ursht winces to see an insect injured; the Connatic without compunction orders a million persons to their doom. In many cases, believing that each condition generates its own counter-condition, he stands aloof, fearing to introduce a confusing third factor. When in doubt, do nothing: this is one of the Connatic’s favorite credos.

After an ancient tradition he roams anonymously about the cluster. Occasionally, in order to remedy an injustice, he represents himself as an important official; often he rewards kindness and self-sacrifice. He is fascinated by the ordinary life of his subjects and listens attentively to such dialogues as:

OLD MAN (to a lazy youth}: If everybody had what they wanted, who would work? Nobody

YOUTH: Not I, depend on it.

OLD MAN: And you’d be the first to cry out in anguish, for it’s work what keeps the lights on. Get on with it now, put your shoulder into it. I can’t bear sloth.

YOUTH (grumbling): If I were Connatic I’d arrange that everyone had their wishes. No toil! Free seats at the hussade game! A fine space-yacht! New clothes every day! Servants to lay forth delectable foods!

OLD MAN: The Connatic would have to be a genius to satisfy both you and the servants. They’d live only to box your ears. Now get on with your work.

Or again:

YOUNG MAN: Never go near Lusz, I beseech you! The Connatic would take you for his own!

GIRL (mischievously): Then what would you do? YOUNG MAN: I’d rebel! I’d be the most magnificent starmenter* ever to terrify the skies! At last I’d conquer the power of Alastor-Wilhelm, Connatic and all-and win you back for my very own.

starmenters: pirates and marauders, whose occasional places of refuge are the so-called “starments.”

GIRL: You’re gallant, but never never never would the Connatic choose ordinary little me; already the most beautiful women of Alastor attend him at Lusz.

YOUNG MAN: What a merry life he must lead! To be Connatic: this is my dream!

GIRL: (makes fretful sound and becomes cool.)

Lusz, the Connatic’s palace, is indeed a remarkable structure, rising ten thousand feet above the sea on five great pylons. Visitors roam the lower promenades; from every world of Alastor Cluster they come, and from places beyond-the Darkling Regions, the Primarchic, the Erdic Sector, the Rubrimar Cluster, and all the other parts of the galaxy which men have made their own.

Above the public promenades are governmental offices, ceremonial halls, a communications complex, and somewhat higher, the famous Ring of the Worlds, with an informational chamber for each inhabited planet of the cluster. The highest pinnacles contain the Connatic’s personal quarters. They penetrate the clouds and sometimes pierce through to the upper sky. When sunlight glistens on its iridescent surfaces, Lusz, the palace of the Connatic, is a wonderful sight and is often reckoned the most inspiring artifact of the human race.

Chamber 2262 along the Ring of the Worlds pertains to Trullion, the lone planet of a small white star, one spark in a spray curling out toward the cluster’s edge. Trullion is a small world, for the most part water, with a single narrow continent, Merlank,* at the equator. Great banks of cumulus drift in from the sea and break against the central mountains; hundreds of rivers return down broad valleys where fruit and cereals grow so plentifully as to command no value.

The original settlers upon Trullion brought with them those habits of thrift and zeal which had promoted survival in a previously harsh environment; the first era of Trill history produced a dozen wars, a thousand fortunes, a caste of hereditary aristocrats, and a waning of the initial dynamism. The Trill commonalty asked itself: Why toil, why carry weapons when a life of feasts, singing, revelry and ease is an equal option? In the space of three generations old Trullion became a memory. The ordinary Trill now worked as circumstances directed: to prepare for a feast, to indulge his taste for hussade, to earn a pulsor for his boat or a pot for his kitchen or a length of cloth for his paray, that easy shirtlike garment worn by man and woman alike. Occasionally he tilled his lush acres, fished the ocean, netted the river, harvested wild fruit, and when the mood was on him, dug emeralds and opals from the mountain slopes, or gathered cauch.** He worked perhaps an hour each day, or occasionally as much as two or three; he spent considerably more time musing on the verandah of his ramshackle house. He distrusted most technical devices, finding them unsympathetic, confusing and — more important — expensive, though he gingerly used a telephone the better to order his social activities, and took the pulsor of his boat for granted.

* Merlank: a variety of lizard. The continent clasps the equator like a lizard clinging to a blue glass orb.

* cauch: an aphrodisiac drug derived from the spore of a mountain mold and used by Trills to a greater or lesser extent. Some retreated so far into erotic fantasy as to become irresponsible, and thus the subject of mild ridicule. Irresponsibility, in the context of the Trill environment, could hardly be accounted a critical social problem.

As in most bucolic societies, the Trill knew his precise place in the hierarchy of classes. At the summit, almost a race apart, was the aristocracy; at the bottom were the nomad Trevany, a group equally distinct. The Trill disdained unfamiliar or exotic ideas. Ordinarily calm and gentle, he nonetheless, under sufficient provocation, demonstrated ferocious rages, and certain of his customs — particularly the macabre ritual at the prutanshyr — were almost barbaric.

The government of Trullion was rudimentary and a matter in which the average Trill took little interest. Merlank was divided into twenty prefectures, each administered by a few bureaus and a small group of officials, who constituted a caste superior to the ordinary Trill but considerably inferior to the aristocrats. Trade with the rest of the cluster was unimportant; on all Trill only four spaceports existed; Port Gaw in the west of Merlank, Port Kerubian on the north coast, Port Maheul on the south coast, and Vayamenda in the east.

A hundred miles east of Port Maheul was the market town Welgen, famous for its fine hussade stadium. Beyond Welgen lay the Fens, a district of remarkable beauty. Thousands of waterways divided this area into a myriad islands, some tracts of good dimension, some so small as to support only a fisherman’s cabin and a tree for the mooring of his boat.

Everywhere entrancing vistas merged one into another. Gray-green menas, silver-russet pomanders, black jerdine stood in stately rows along the waterways, giving each island its distinctive silhouette. Out upon their dilapidated verandahs sat the country folk, with jugs of homemade wine at hand. Sometimes they played music, using concertinas, small round-bellied guitars, mouth-calliopes that produced cheerful warbles and glisssndes. The light of the Fens were pale and delicate, and shimmered with colors too transient and subtle for the eye to detect. In the morning a mist obscured the distances; the sunsets were subdued pageants of lime-green and lavender. Skiffs and runabouts slid along the water; occasionally an aristocrat’s yacht glided past, or the ferry that connected Welgen with the Fen villages.

In the dead center of the Fens, a few miles from the village of Saurkash, was Rabendary Island, where lived Jut Hulden, his wife Marucha, and their three sons. Rabendary Island comprised about a hundred acres, including a thirty-acre forest of mena, blackwood, candlenut, semprissima. To the south spread the wide expanse of Ambal Broad. Farwan Water bounded Rabendary on the west, Gilweg Water on the east, and along the north shore flowed the placid Saur River. At the western tip of the island the ramshackle old home of the Huldens stood between a pair of huge mimosa trees. Rosalia vine grew up the posts of the verandah and overhung the edge of the roof, producing a fragrant shade for the pleasure of those taking their ease in the old string chairs. To the south was a view of Ambal Broad and Ambal Isle, a property of three acres supporting a number of beautiful pomanders, russet-silver against a background of solemn menas, and three enormous fanzaneels, holding then-great shaggy pompoms high in the air. Through the foliage gleamed the white facade of the manse where Lord Ambal long ago had maintained his mistresses. The property was now owned by Jut Hulden, but he had no inclination to dwell in the manor, his friends would think him absurd.

In his youth Jut Hulden had played hussade for the Saurkash Serpents. Marucha had been sheirl* for the Welgeen Warlocks; so they had met, and married, and brought into being three sons, Shira and the twins Glinnes and Glay, and a daughter, Sharue, who had been stolen by the merrlings.**

sheirl: an untranslatable term from the special vocabulary of hussade: a glorious nymph, radiant with ecstatic vitality, who impels the players of her team to impossible feats of strength and agility. The sheirl is a virgin who must be protected from the shame of defeat.
Merlings: amphibious half-intelligent indigenes of Trullion, living in tunnels burrowed into the riverbanks. Merlings and men lived on the edge of a most delicate truce; each hated and hunted the other, but under mutually tolerable conditions. The merlings prowled the land at night for carrion, small animals, and children. If they molested boats or entered a habitation, men retaliated by dropping explosives into the water. Should a man fall into the water or attempt to swim, he had intruded into the domain of the merlings and risked being dragged under. Similarly, a merling discovered on land was shown no mercy.

Glinnes Hulden entered the world crying and kicking; Glay followed an hour later, in watchful silence. From the first day of their lives the two differed an appearance, in temperament, in all the circumstances of their lives. Glinnes, like Jut and Shira, was amiable, trusting, and easy-natured; he grew into a handsome lad with a clear complexion, dusty-blond hair, a wide, smiling mouth. Glinnes entirely enjoyed the pleasures of the Fens: feasts, amorous adventures, star-watching and sailing, hussade, nocturnal merling hunts, simple idleness.