This Fortress World Read online

  This Fortress World

  James Gunn

  An [ e - reads ] Book

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1955 by James Gunn

  First e-reads publication 1999

  www.e-reads.com

  ISBN 0-7592-0275-3

  Author Biography

  James Gunn has worked as an editor of paperback reprints, as managing editor of K.U. alumni publications, as director of K.U. public relations, as a professor of English, and now is professor emeritus of English and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He won national awards for his work as an editor and a director of public relations. He was awarded the Byron Caldwell Smith Award in recognition of literary achievement and the Edward Grier Award for excellence in teaching, was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America for 1971-72 and president of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82, was guest of honor at many regional SF conventions, including SFeracon in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and Polcon, the Polish National SF convention, in Katowice; was presented the Pilgrim Award of SFRA in 1976, a special award from the 1976 World SF Convention for Alternate Worlds, a Science Fiction Achievement Award (Hugo) by the 1983 World SF Convention for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, and the Eaton Award in 1992 for lifetime achievement; was a K.U. Mellon Fellow in 1981 and 1984; and served from 1978-80 and 1985-present as chairman of the Campbell Award jury to select the best science-fiction novel of the year. He has lectured in Denmark, China, Iceland, Japan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union for the U.S. Information Agency.

  Other works by James Gunn also available in e-reads editions

  Crisis!

  Future Imperfect

  Kampus

  Station in Space

  The Listeners

  The Magicians

  Preface

  In 1951, with a dozen published stories, I decided that it was time to start a novel. I worked on it evenings and weekends while serving as an editor for Western Printing and Lithographing (which published Dell Books and Little Golden Books, among others). Then, at my first World Science Fiction Convention, in Chicago, I learned from my agent, Frederik Pohl, that I had sold four stories, and I returned to full-time writing in Chanute, Kansas, and then in Kansas City, Missouri, broken by a three-month stint as assistant director of civil defense for Kansas City. When my agent, Frederik Pohl, sent me a contract for This Fortress World from a publisher just getting into the SF business, Abelard, I gave up the security of a paycheck once again for the uncertain existence of a free-lance writer.

  This Fortress World was my first novel, published the same year, 1955, as Star Bridge, my space-epic collaboration with Jack Williamson. They make a good pair. This Fortress World might be called an anti-space-epic, or in the terminology of a later critical period, a meta-space-epic. At that time space epics were relatively bloodless; billions of rational beings, even entire worlds, could be destroyed without blood-shed. Streets were never grimy; personal needs or hygiene were never mentioned; passions were reserved for politics or science. What I decided to write was a naturalistic space-epic that showed far-future events the way they would seem to someone who actually lived in those distant but disturbing times. Hemingway once said that he was trying to show in his stories and novels "the way things were." I was trying to show "the way things may be." Isaac Asimov used as the model for his Foundation stories The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; I used the Dark Ages.

  When I turned in the manuscript, Abelard asked me to approve some editorial changes, and, being young and inexperienced, I refused and Harry Altshuler, my agent after Fred got out of the business, resold the novel to Marty Greenberg's Gnome Press. When it was published in a good hardcover edition (for $3--$2.50 in Marty's Pick-a-Book plan—today used copies sell for $50 or more) with one of my favorite dust jackets and reprinted as an Ace double-novel (back to back with Robert Silverberg's first novel The Thirteenth Immortal), the novel received little notice (Damon Knight dismissed it in a fan review, later collected in In Search of Wonder). The hardcover and paperback editions earned only its $500 advance; Marty was always behind in his payments to authors, and I learned my first lesson in freelance writing that I later codified for my writing students as Gunn's first law: Sell it twice! Since then the novel has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, and Chinese, and reprinted in England and by Berkley Books. A few writers, such as David Drake, remember it as influential.

  The introduction to my book Breaking Point, a collection of stories written about the same time as This Fortress World, said, "I look back upon them now as my attempts to bring to the task of telling a science-fiction story everything I knew about setting and symbol, theme and character." And: "Interested readers may note the evolution of a writer." I could say the same things about This Fortress World.

  James Gunn

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Prologue

  …Wherever you are, wherever these words have been carried by chance or stealth, you read this in the splintered wreckage of the Second Empire.

  Go out tonight, look at the sky, and see the scattered stars, distinct, separate, alone, divided by infinite chasms of hate, distrust, and the realities of power. See them as they really are—great, gray fortresses guarded by the moats of space, their walls manned against the galaxy.

  The Second Empire. Say it aloud. Let it inflame the imagination. Let its meaning sink into the soul.

  An empire. Within it the numberless worlds of the inhabited galaxy united, working together, living together, trading together. The name alone tells us that much. But how did it work? How was it held together? How were disputes decided, wars avoided? We don't know. We will never know. Only the name comes down to us. We remember it, and we remember, dimly, a golden time, a time of freedom and peace and plenty, and we weep sometimes for what is gone and will not come again.

  The Second Empire. It implies another, an earlier, but of that we have no memory at all.

  The Second Empire. Will there ever be a third? We dream, we hope, but we know, deep down, that the golden days are gone, and we cannot call them back. The Second Empire is splintered, and the wreckage is drifting apart, so far that it can never be pulled together again.

  We are no longer men. We are shadows dancing a shadow dance inside our shadow fortresses, and the golden days are gone…

  —The Dynamics of Galactic Power

  This Fortress World

  Chapter One

  I was running through the infinite dark, alone and afraid. I was afraid because I was alone and alone because I was afraid, and I hurt somewhere, not knowing where, unable to find out because I was running, unable to stop because I was afraid.

&nbs
p; Behind me came the patter of feet, chasing me down an unseen corridor, and the feet were light and almost noiseless because they were disembodied, and the corridor was black and unknowable because it was lost in time and space, as I was, without a home.

  Worst of all was the silence, the complete silence that enveloped me like the darkness and was worse than the darkness because my need to speak and hear was greater than my need to see, and if I could break the silence, the darkness would shatter and I would no longer have to run. And the feet came closer in spite of my speed and the panic that urged me on ever faster through the darkness and the silence, because the feet had no leaden body to hold them back.

  Slowly consciousness of where I hurt came to me. It was my hand, my hand hurt because of the glowing coal I carried there. Fresh fear surged through me, and the fear was mixed with shame, and I let my hand open; I let the coal fall away. And the patter of feet behind faded and my fear left me, but in its place came an aching loneliness because even the corridor was gone now and I was truly alone, floating in blackness without an anchor to anything, and truly without a home.

  My mind spiraled through the emptiness and the silence and the dark, searching for something else alive in the infinite, but there was nothing. Nowhere was there anything to speak to, and if there had been something, there was no way to speak.

  And I woke up, my hand fumbling automatically at my waist pouch for reassurance, but the pebble was gone, and I knew why it was gone, and I remembered. I remembered how fear first entered my world…

  The liturgy was echoing through my mind when I saw the girl step through the flickering golden translucence of the Barrier. She was terrified.

  …your God is here…

  Terror! I recognized it, and I did not know how I knew.

  All my life had been spent within the monastery. The monastery walls are wide, and within them is the world's peace. The monastery walls are high, and the world's torment can never climb them. Behind them I was contented and at peace, and it was quiet joy that the clear pattern of my life would never lead me outside.

  I did not remember ever being outside. I did not remember my father or mother or their names or how they had died, if they were dead, but it did not matter, because the Church was father and mother to me, and I needed nothing else.

  The emotions I knew were few and simple: the Abbot's powerful piety; Brother John's intense, sometimes feverish, search for scientific truth; Father Konek's absorbed contemplation; Father Michaelis's occasional mystic rapture. But terror was an alien. Like the other soul-disturbing passions, it could not pass the Barrier, just as physical objects could not pass.

  …behind the veils of ignorance and doubt you must seek Me, for I am there, as here, if you will see…

  Here in the Cathedral it was a little different, but I had only been on duty here twice before. The people entered the place that had been set aside for them, their place of contact with the life of the Church, seeking what we had so much of—peace. They came through the Barrier troubled, and they left in peace, reconciled with the Universe. I had felt their troubles distantly, and I had pitied them, and I had been glad when their troubles were taken from them.

  But now I knew that the passions I had received in the control room were poor second-hand things. The girl's terror was an aura that surrounded her. It touched me with cold fingers, springing to my eyes from the screen, to my fingers from the gauntlets—

  My eyes flicked to the clock. Already the timing was seconds off. I pulled my right hand free, tripped a switch, adjusted a knob. The Dissipation would have to be abrupt. If the Abbot should learn…

  Below, the mists began to fade, to drift away in wisps, and a nebulous face looked down out of the black depths of space. Nebulous, and yet the worshippers fleshed it out with details from their own need. I knew. I had been below during our own services, and I had seen what they saw, felt what they felt, heard in my mind what they heard.

  …for I am peace, where I am there is peace, where peace is, there you will find me, peace everlasting…

  My eyes returned to the screen, to the girl. She was still there, just inside the Barrier, and as surely as I had known that she was terrified I knew that she was beautiful. I wondered briefly if this was temptation. The thought was fleeting, and I did not pursue it. It was enough that I was twenty, and she was beautiful and afraid.

  She was out of place among the people below. Freedmen and slave came here and occasionally a serf when necessity brought him to the Imperial City. They called this the Slaves' Cathedral. I saw many below, dressed poorly or richly according to their master's wealth but all with their imitation metal collars: gold, silver, iron…

  The girl was obviously patrician. Her bones were fine; her features were delicate. She stood straight and slim and proud. Her skin had never been blighted with the long days under burning skies or the slow destruction of the death-dust rooms; her back had never bent to stir the stubborn soil. Her clothes were rich. Her cloak was a silky, woven plastic glistening with metallic threads; her skirt molded itself to long, slender legs.

  …nothing enters that place set apart for your enlightenment except that which can receive Me and My gift to mankind…

  She was breathing hard. One hand was clenched into a white-knuckled fist at her side; the other was a palm pressed against her breasts, as if to calm their trembling. She looked over her shoulder, back through the Barrier. She stiffened, her chest swelling with a great, half-strangled breath. Then, slowly, she let it out.

  …for here is sanctuary where none but the peace-loving can enter, where strife is forever barred…

  I switched to the outside screen. Four men stood outside the Barrier, looking up the long easy steps toward the Cathedral entrance, toward the golden web. They were dressed alike, but I didn't recognize the uniform. In a world of color, they wore black. They weren't members of the Spaceman's Guild because the black of that uniform is relieved with silver. Neither were they nobles or Peddlers or mercenaries.

  I shivered. They were like black shadows on a cloudy day, shadows of evil, shadows where there should be no shadows.

  I remembered what they were. Once a visiting priest had mentioned them. Father Konek had shuddered, but I had listened eagerly.

  They were mercenaries who did not wear the uniforms of their masters. They were the clever ones who worked with their minds as well as their guns, who slipped soundlessly through the cities of this and other worlds on missions that were secret and sinister. They were deadly, like snakes, and like snakes they were privileged. No man touched them for fear of their fangs.

  I saw other things: the inconspicuous bulge of guns under their arms, their casual, almost languid expressions of indifference. Were they as indifferent to life as the priest had said? Did they kill so easily, and did the killing mean nothing?

  I looked at one face longer than the others. It was dark and bold and amused; cold black eyes were separated by a huge, jutting nose that was grotesque but not funny. It was not funny at all; it was frightening.

  I shivered again and switched back to the view inside…life is chaos, life is hunger, pain, unending struggle, life is death—but death is life…

  The girl paid no attention to the service. She ignored the spectacle revealing itself before her, the words that must be imprinting themselves on her mind as they were on mine. Perhaps she was a skeptic as so many of the patricians were, accepting the fruits of the Church while they scoffed at its tenets, tolerating its existence for the service it rendered in pacifying the people—

  Tolerating? I had come close to heresy. My thoughts had approached a dangerous edge. At the bottom of the precipice beyond were piled the bleached bones of countless unwary thinkers. No one tolerated the Church; it was, it existed by its own spiritual power, it lived by the strength of its faith and the forces that were the physical extensions of that faith.

  Why had the word sprung into my mind?

  …your life that is death render unto those who
have been given power over it, for it is nothing. Your death that is life belongs to you and to Me, and you shall live it insofar as it is of Me…

  Perhaps the girl's terror blinded her eyes and mind to the Message. A complete skeptic could not have passed the Barrier, except seeking sanctuary. Sanctuary was here if she wished to claim it. Beyond the walls protected by the peace of the Church she would never need to move, if she wished to dedicate herself to those things which were the domain of the Church or if she wished merely for peace, peace and forgetfulness, now and hereafter. She had only to pass through the Portal, which was similar to the Barrier except that it was light blue and opaque. It was directly under the Revelation.

  Choose the Portal! I wished. The terror will disappear; you will never tremble again.

  The wish went as quickly as it came. A knowledge that I did not recognize whispered that the girl's life force leaped too high; her death wish was almost non-existent. She could never pass the Portal, even if she wanted to.

  And yet her glance leaped desperately around the Cathedral, searching the smooth walls and floors as if for a place to hide. She stepped nervously toward the front of the Cathedral, toward the hard kneeling-benches dotted with silent worshippers. She stopped, indecisively, and looked back again through the golden veil of the Barrier toward the carelessly watchful men outside in the drab street.

  They could not enter, but she could not leave without facing them and their purpose. Both hands were clenched at her sides now, one slightly larger than the other, her shoulders slumping. Her hands would be cold, I knew suddenly. Mine were cold too, inside the gauntlets.

  …into the hands of My ministers I have given the power of working miracles in My name…