Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe May 1954. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed.
_Here is high fidelity fiction at Philip Jose Farmer's
story-telling best. It's a vibrant, distractingly different
tale of three centuries into the future. And as you read
you'll have a vague, uneasy feeling that it's all taking
place somewhere in the unexplored parts of the universe, even
today._
rastignac the devil
_by ... Philip Jose Farmer_
Enslaved by a triangular powered despotism--one lone man
sets his sights to the Six Bright Stars and eventual freedom
of his world.
* * * * *
_After the Apocalyptic War, the decimated remnants of the French
huddled in the Loire Valley were gradually squeezed between two new
and growing nations. The Colossus to the north was unfriendly and
obviously intended to absorb the little New France. The Colossus to
the south was friendly and offered to take the weak state into its
confederation of republics as a full partner._
_A number of proud and independent French citizens feared that even
the latter alternative meant the eventual transmutation of their
tongue, religion and nationality into those of their southern
neighbor. Seeking a way of salvation, they built six huge space-ships
that would hold thirty thousand people, most of whom would be in deep
freeze until they reached their destination. The six vessels then set
off into interstellar space to find a planet that would be as much
like Earth as possible._
_That was in the 22nd Century. Over three hundred and fifty years
passed before Earth heard of them again. However, we are not here
concerned with the home world but with the story of a man of that
pioneer group who wanted to leave the New Gaul and sail again to the
stars...._
* * * * *
Rastignac had no Skin. He was, nevertheless, happier than he had been
since the age of five.
He was as happy as a man can be who lives deep under the ground.
Underground organizations are often under the ground. They are formed
into cells. Cell Number One usually contains the leader of the
underground.
Jean-Jacques Rastignac, chief of the Legal Underground of the Kingdom
of L'Bawpfey, was literally in a cell beneath the surface of the
earth. He was in jail.
For a dungeon, it wasn't bad. He had two cells. One was deep inside
the building proper, built into the wall so that he could sit in it
when he wanted to retreat from the sun or the rain. The adjoining cell
was at the bottom of a well whose top was covered with a grille of
thin steel bars. Here he spent most of his waking hours. Forced to
look upwards if he wanted to see the sky or the stars, Rastignac
suffered from a chronic stiff neck.
Several times during the day he had visitors. They were allowed to
bend over the grille and talk down to him. A guard, one of the King's
mucketeers,[1] stood by as a censor.
[Footnote 1: Mucketeer is the best translation of the 26th century
French noun _foutriquet_, pronounced _vfeutwikey_.]
When night came, Rastignac ate the meal let down by ropes on a
platform. Then another of the King's mucketeers stood by with drawn
epee until he had finished eating. When the tray was pulled back up
and the grille lowered and locked, the mucketeer marched off with the
turnkey.
Rastignac sharpened his wit by calling a few choice insults to the
night guard, then went into the cell inside the wall and lay down to
take a nap. Later, he would rise and pace back and forth like a caged
tiger. Now and then he would stop and look upwards, scan the stars,
hunch his shoulders and resume his savage circuit of the cell. But the
time would come when he would stand statue-still. Nothing moved except
his head, which turned slowly.
"Some day I'll ride to the stars with you."
He said it as he watched the Six Flying Stars speed across the night
sky--six glowing stars that moved in a direction opposite to the march
of the other stars. Bright as Sirius seen from Earth, strung out one
behind the other like jewels on a velvet string, they hurtled across
the heavens.
They were the six ships on which the original Loire Valley Frenchmen
had sailed out into space, seeking a home on a new planet. They had
been put into an orbit around New Gaul and left there while their
thirty thousand passengers had descended to the surface in
chemical-fuel rockets. Mankind, once on the fair and fresh earth of
the new planet, had never again ascended to re-visit the great ships.
For three hundred years the six ships had circled the planet known as
New Gaul, nightly beacons and glowing reminders to Man that he was a
stranger on this planet.
When the Earthmen landed on the new planet they had called the new
land _Le Beau Pays_, or, as it was now pronounced, _L'Bawpfey_--The
Beautiful Country. They had been delighted, entranced with the fresh
new land. After the burned, war-racked Earth they had just left, it
was like coming to Heaven.
They found two intelligent species living on the planet, and they
found that the species lived in peace and that they had no conception
of war or of poverty. And they were quite willing to receive the
Terrans into their society.
Provided, that is, they became integrated, or--as they phrased
it--natural. The Frenchmen from Earth had been given their choice.
They were told:
"You can live with the people of the Beautiful Land on our terms--war
with us, or leave to seek another planet."
The Terrans conferred. Half of them decided to stay; the other half
decided to remain only long enough to mine uranium and other
chemicals. Then they would voyage onwards.
But nobody from that group of Earthmen ever again stepped into the
ferry-rockets and soared up to the six ion-beam ships circling about
Le Beau Pays. All succumbed to the Philosophy of the Natural. Within a
few generations a stranger landing upon the planet would not have
known without previous information that the Terrans were not
aboriginal.
He would have found three species. Two were warm-blooded egglayers who
had evolved directly from reptiles without becoming mammals--the
Ssassarors and the Amphibs. Somewhere in their dim past--like all
happy nations, they had no history--they had set up their society and
been very satisfied with it since.
It was a peaceful quiet world, largely peasant, where nobody had to
scratch for a living and where a superb manipulation of biological
forces ensured very long lives, no disease, and a social lubrication
that left little to desire--from their viewpoint, anyway.
The government was, nominally, a monarchy. The Kings were elected by
the people and were a different species than the group each ruled.
Ssassaror ruled Human, and vice versa, each assisted by
foster-brothers and sisters of the race over which they reigned. These
were the so-called Dukes and Duchesses.
The Chamber of Deputies--_L'Syawp t' Tapfuti_--was half Human and half
Ssassaror. The so-called Kings took turns presiding over the Chamber
for forty day intervals. The Deputies were elected for ten-year terms
by constituents who could not be deceived about their representatives'
purposes because of the sensitive Skins which allowed them to
determine their true feelings and worth.
In one custom alone did the ex-Terrans differ from their neighbors.
This was in carrying arms. In the beginning, the Ssassaror had allowed
the Men to wear their short rapiers, so they would feel safe even
though in the midst of aliens.
As time went on, only the King's mucketeers--and members of the
official underground--were allowed to carry epees. These men, it might
be noticed, were the congenital adventurers, men who needed to
swashbuckle and revel in the name of individualist.
Like the egg-stealers, they needed an institution in which they could
work off anti-social steam.
From the beginning the Amphibians had been a little separate from the
Ssassaror and when the Earthmen came they did not get any more
neighborly. Nevertheless, they preserved excellent relations and they,
too, participated in the Changeling-custom.
This Changeling-custom was another social device set up millennia ago
to keep a mutual understanding between all species on the planet. It
was a peculiar institution, one that the Earthmen had found hard to
understand and ever more difficult to adopt. Nevertheless, once the
Skins had been accepted they had changed their attitude, forgot their
speculations about its origin and threw themselves into the custom of
stealing babies--or eggs--from another race and raising the children
as their own.
_You rob my cradle; I'll rob yours._ Such was their motto, and it
worked.
A Guild of Egg Stealers was formed. The Human branch of it guaranteed,
for a price, to bring you a Ssassaror child to replace the one that
had been stolen from you. Or, if you lived on the sea-shore, and an
Amphibian had crept into your nursery and taken your baby--always
under two years old, according to the rules--then the Guildsman would
bring you an Amphib or, perhaps, the child of a Human Changeling
reared by the Seafolk.
You raised it and loved it as your own. How could you help loving it?
Your Skin told you that it was small and helpless and needed you and
was, despite appearances, as Human as any of your babies. Nor did you
need to worry about the one that had been abducted. It was getting
just as good care as you were giving this one.
It had never occurred to anyone to quit the stealing and voluntary
exchange of babies. Perhaps that was because it would strain even the
loving nature of the Skin-wearers to give away their own flesh and
blood. But once the transfer had taken place, they could adapt.
Or perhaps the custom was kept because tradition is stronger than law
in a peasant-monarchy society and also because egg-and-baby stealing
gave the more naturally aggressive and daring citizens a chance to
work off anti-social behavior.
Nobody but a historian would have known, and there were no historians
in The Beautiful Land.
Long ago the Ssassaror had discovered that if they lived meatless,
they had a much easier time curbing their belligerency, obeying the
Skins and remaining cooperative. So they induced the Earthmen to put a
taboo on eating flesh. The only drawback to the meatless diet was that
both Ssassaror and Man became as stunted in stature as they did in
aggressiveness, the former so much so that they barely came to the
chins of the Humans. These, in turn, would have seemed short to a
Western European.
But Rastignac, an Earthman, and his good friend, Mapfarity, the
Ssassaror Giant, became taboo-breakers when they were children and
played together on the beach where they first ate seafood out of
curiosity, then continued because they liked it. And due to their
protein diet the Terran had grown well over six feet in height and the
Ssassaror seemed to have touched off a rocket of expansion in his body
with his protein-eating. Those Ssassarors who shared his guilt--became
meat-eaters--became ostracized and eventually moved off to live by
themselves. They were called Ssassaror-Giants and were pointed to as
an object lesson to the young of the normal Ssassarors and Humans on
the land.
* * * * *
If a stranger had landed shortly before Rastignac was born, however,
he would have noticed that all was not as serene as it was supposed to
be among the different species. The cause for the flaw in the former
Eden might have puzzled him if he had not known the previous history
of _L'Bawfey_ and the fact that the situation had not changed for the
worst until the introduction of Human Changelings among the
Amphibians.
Then it had been that blood-drinking began among them, that Amphibians
began seducing Humans to come live with them by their tales of easy
immortality, and that they started the system of leaving savage little
carnivores in the Human nurseries.
When the Land-dwellers protested, the Amphibs replied that these
things were carried out by unnaturals or outlaws, and that the
Sea-King could not be held responsible. Permission was given to
Chalice those caught in such behavior.
Nevertheless, the suspicion remained that the Amphib monarch had, in
accordance with age-old procedure, given his unofficial official
blessing and that he was preparing even more disgusting and outrageous
and unnatural moves. Through his control of the populace by the Master
Skin, he would be able to do as he pleased with their minds.
It was the Skins that had made the universal peace possible on the
planet of New Gaul. And it would be the custom of the Skins that would
make possible the change from peace to conflict among the populace.
Through the artificial Skins that were put on all babies at birth--and
which grew with them, attached to their body, feeding from their
bloodstreams, their nervous systems--the Skins, controlled by a huge
Master Skin that floated in a chemical vat in the palace of the
rulers, fed, indoctrinated and attended day and night by a crew of the
most brilliant scientists of the planet, gave the Kings complete
control of the minds and emotions of the inhabitants of the planet.
Originally the rulers of New Gaul had desired only that the populace
live in peace and enjoy the good things of their planet equally. But
the change that had been coming gradually--the growth of conflict
between the Kings of the different species for control of the whole
populace--was beginning to be generally felt. Uneasiness, distrust of
each other was growing among the people. Hence the legalizing of the
Underground, the Philosophy of Violence by the government, an effort
to control the revolt that was brewing.
Yet, the Land-dwellers had managed to take no action at all and to
ignore the growing number of vicious acts.
But not all were content to drowse. One man was aroused. He was
Rastignac.
They were Rastignac's hope, those Six Stars, the gods to which he
prayed. When they passed quickly out of his sight he would continue
his pacing, meditating for the twenty-thousandth time on a means for
reaching one of those ships and using it to visit the stars. The end
of his fantasies was always a curse because of the futility of such
hopes. He was doomed! Mankind was doomed!
* * * * *
And it was all the more maddening because Man would not admit that he
was through. Ended, that is, as a human being.
Man was changing into something not quite _homo sapiens_. It might be
a desirable change, but it would mean the finish of his climb upwards.
So it seemed to Rastignac. And he, being the man he was, had decided
to do something about it even if it meant violence.
That was why he was now in the well-dungeon. He was an advocator of
violence against the status quo.
II
There was another cell next to his. It was also at the bottom of a
well and was separated from his by a thin wall of cement. A window had
been set into it so that the prisoners could talk to each other.
Rastignac did not care for the woman who had been let down into the
adjoining cell, but she was somebody to talk to.
"Amphib-changelings" was the name given to those human beings who had
been stolen from their cradles and raised among the non-humanoid
Amphibians as their own. The girl in the adjoining cell, Lusine, was
such a person. It was not her fault that she was a blood-drinking
Amphib. Yet he could not help disliking her for what she had done and
for the things she stood for.
She was in prison because she had been caught in the act of stealing a
Man child from its cradle. This was no crime, but she had left in the
cradle, under the covers, a savage and blood-thirsty little monster
that had leaped up and slashed the throat of the unsuspecting baby's
mother.
Her cell was lit by a cageful of glowworms. Rastignac, peering through
the grille, could see her shadowy shape in the inner cell inside the
wall. She rose langorously and stepped into the circle of dim orange
light cast by the insects.
"_B'zhu, m'fweh_," she greeted him.
It annoyed him that she called him her brother, and it annoyed him
even more to know that she knew it. It was true that she had some
excuse for thus addressing him. She did resemble him. Like him, she
had straight glossy blue-black hair, thick bracket-shaped eyebrows,
brown eyes, a straight nose and a prominent chin. And where his build
was superbly masculine, hers was magnificently feminine.
Nevertheless, this was not her reason for so speaking to him. She knew
the disgust the Land-walker had for the Amphib-changeling, and she
took a perverted delight in baiting him.
He was proud that he seldom allowed her to see that she annoyed him.
"_B'zhu, fam tey zafeep_," he said. "Good evening, woman of the
Amphibians."
Mockingly she said, "Have you been watching the Six Flying Stars,
Jean-Jacques?"
"_Vi._ I do so every time they come over."
"Why do you eat your heart out because you cannot fly up to them and
then voyage among the stars on one of them?"
He refused to give her the satisfaction of knowing his real reason.
He did not want her to realize how little he thought of Mankind and
its chances for surviving--as humanity--upon the face of this planet,
L'Bawpfey.
"I look at them because they remind me that Man was once captain of
his soul."
"Then you admit that the Land-walker is weak?"
"I think he is on the way to becoming non-human, which is to say that
he is weak, yes. But what I say about Landman goes for Seaman, too.
You Changelings are becoming more Amphibian every day and less Human.
Through the Skins the Amphibs are gradually changing you completely.
Soon you will be completely sea-people."
She laughed scornfully, exposing perfect white teeth as she did so.
"The Sea will win out against the Land. It launches itself against the
shore and shakes it with the crash of its body. It eats away the rock
and the dirt and absorbs it into its own self. It can't be worn away
nor caught and held in a net. It is elusive and all-powerful and
never-tiring."
Lusine paused for breath. He said, "That is a very pretty analogy, but
it doesn't apply. You Seafolk are as much flesh and blood as we
Landfolk. What hurts us hurts you."
She put a hand around one bar. The glow-light fell upon it in such a
way that it showed plainly the webbing of skin between her fingers. He
glanced at it with a faint repulsion under which was a counter-current
of attraction. This was the hand that had, indirectly, shed blood.
She glanced at him sidewise, challenged him in trembling tones. "You
are not one to throw stones, Jean-Jacques. I have heard that you eat
meat."
"Fish, not meat. That is part of my Philosophy of Violence," he
retorted. "I maintain that one of the reasons man is losing his power
and strength is that he has so long been upon a vegetable diet. He is
as cowed and submissive as the grass-eating beast of the fields."
Lusine put her face against the bars.
"That is interesting," she said. "But how did you happen to begin
eating fish? I thought we Amphibs alone did that."
What Lusine had just said angered him. He had no reply.
Rastignac knew he should not be talking to a Sea-changeling. They were
glib and seductive and always searching for ways to twist your
thoughts. But being Rastignac, he had to talk. Moreover, it was so
difficult to find anybody who would listen to his ideas that he could
not resist the temptation.
"I was given fish by the Ssassaror, Mapfarity, when I was a child. We
lived along the sea-shore. Mapfarity was a child, too, and we played
together. Don't eat fish!' my parents said. To me that meant 'Eat
it!' So, despite my distaste at the idea, and my squeamish stomach, I
did eat fish. And I liked it. And as I grew to manhood I adopted the
Philosophy of Violence and I continued to eat fish although I am not a
Changeling."
"What did your Skin do when it detected you?" Lusine asked. Her eyes
were wide and luminous with wonder and a sort of glee as if she
relished the confession of his sins. Also, he knew, she was taunting
him about the futility of his ideas of violence so long as he was a
prisoner of the Skin.
He frowned in annoyance at the reminder of the Skin. Much thought had
he given, in a weak way, to the possibility of life without the Skin.
Ashamed now of his weak resistance to the Skin, he blustered a bit in
front of the teasing Amphib girl.
"Mapfarity and I discovered something that most people don't know," he
answered boastfully. "We found that if you can stand the shocks your
Skin gives you when you do something wrong, the Skin gets tired and
quits after a while. Of course your Skin recharges itself and the next
time you eat fish it shocks you again. But after very many shocks it
becomes accustomed, forgets its conditioning, and leaves you alone."
Lusine laughed and said in a low conspirational tone, "So your
Ssassaror pal and you adopted the Philosophy of Violence because you
remained fish and meat eaters?"
"Yes, we did. When Mapfarity reached puberty he became a Giant and
went off to live in a castle in the forest. But we have remained
friends through our connection in the underground."
"Your parents must have suspected that you were a fish eater when you
first proposed your Philosophy of Violence?" she said.
"Suspicion isn't proof," he answered. "But I shouldn't be telling you
all this, Lusine. I feel it is safe for me to do so only because you
will never have a chance to tell on me. You will soon be taken to
Chalice and there you will stay until you have been cured."