The Black Sun

  THE BLACK SUN

  Jack Williamson

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Map

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Website

  Also by Jack Williamson

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  His mother christened him Carlos Corales Carbajal Santiago Mondragon.

  “A large name, Carlito,” his father told him when he was old enough to echo it all, “for a very small niñito. You must grow to fit it.”

  They lived in a poor pueblito called Cuerno del Oro in the Chihuahua mountains a few hundred kilometers southwest of the smoggy sprawl of Juárez. Cuerno del Oro meant horn of gold, but any gold the barren hills ever hid was dug and gone two hundred years ago. The thin soil now gave more rocks than wealth.

  Longing for some right to that great name, he saw no way to earn it till he began to hear Don Ignacio Morelos speak of the stars. The don had gone north and found employment at the nest of the starbirds called White Sands. He came home on holidays with rich gifts for his gente and exciting tales of the roaring birds that carried men off Earth.

  One year there was even a gift for Carlos, a postcard picture of a clumsy metal monster that climbed over bright rocks under a dead black sky on long lever-legs with fat-tired wheels for feet. “La araña de la luna,” he called it. The spider of the Moon.

  “Muchas gracias, don Ignacio.” He bowed in awed appreciation. “When I become a man, I will learn to guide the starbirds and ride the iron spiders over the rocks of the Moon.”

  “Aie, muchachito. Qué tonto!” Don Ignacio tossed his scrawny shoulders and spat the brown juice of tobacco into the dusty street. “No es posible.”

  The Moon had no room for los pobres peónes. The vaqueros of space were men of courage and learning, chosen for vast machismo. The don himself had been allowed to touch the monstrous spiders only when he searched them for insects in the computers that were their brains. Listening humbly, Carlos resolved to master the skills of those daring gringo vaqueros and become himself a man of great machismo.

  He worked hard at his lessons in the village school, even harder after Don Ignacio came home again to speak of swifter starbirds that could vanish faster than a lightning flash and alight in an instant somewhere far off among the stars. The don told of the great Mission StarSeed, which was to build a hundred such phenomenal machines. They would carry colonists farther than telescopes could see, to inhabit new worlds too strange to be imagined.

  Pájaros maravillosos, the don called them. Birds of wonder, they were already flying, lifting the fortunate few from the sin-pits of Earth to dwell forever in the sky. Dreadful chariots of paradise, they rose with deafening thunder and lightning that blinded those who dared to watch.

  What, Carlos dared to ask, was known of those islands of paradise?

  Nada. The don shook his lean-boned head. Nothing at all, because no ships came back. Return was forbidden by some mysterious law of space. Yet new crews of fearless starmen were always waiting to go when they could, and the clever evangelistas of Mission StarSeed always found more dollars to continue the building of those miraculous ships.

  Truly, could the stars have people of their own? Carlos’s duty was to herd his father’s goats. When winter nights found him shivering on the hills with them, and fearful of howling coyotes, he used to watch the sky and wonder. Would such beings be angels? Or devils, perhaps, waiting to capture men for the flames of hell?

  He used to tremble when Father Francisco spoke of souls screaming in the pits of never-ending eternal pain. Yet, kneeling with his mother at mass, he always begged los santos to aid his escape from the dust and mud and want of Cuerno del Oro and open his way to the stars.

  Mission StarSeed became as holy to him as los milagros of Jesus and the promise of paraiso were to his mother and Father Francisco. He was saddened when the don told of the Fairshare fanáticos. Their deeds of sabotage became sins beyond belief.

  “Por qué?” He saw the don waiting for him to say the English word. “Why?”

  “Están locos!” The don drowned an unfortunate fly with a jet of tobacco juice. “They imagine the stars to be the abodes of actual angels in danger from invading starmen, whom they denounce as los demonios del espacio. They plot to kill the birds of space, creating severe difficulties for the Mission.”

  Troubled, he waited in the confession stall to speak of his longings for those unknown worlds.

  “Would El Dios Grandioso allow such lands to exist?” he asked Father Francisco. Would He allow a simple man to reach the heavens without the pain of death? Perhaps to make new gardens to grow the fruits of Earth and live among los santos as his mother longed to, beyond the earthly burdens of ignorance and evil?

  “Think more of your catechism, my child,” el padre advised him, “and less of riddles that only El Dios Himself could ever answer,”

  When he asked his mother, she begged him to forget the birds of space and all such devices of Satanás. His unholy dreams had become a hazard to his soul. Born a simple campesino, he must content himself to die a simple campesino.

  His father was gone by then, wading the river to find employment in el norte. Preparing to follow when he had grown to f
it his name, he led his classes at la escuela. He studied inglés when he found a friend who knew it. He learned from the dusty books the don had used, texts of science and math. When the don gave him a dead computer, he studied its documents and learned to revive it.

  The computer became his buen amigo, a friend who spoke a language he came to love for its purity and beauty. A simple language, whose words were only one and zero, yet a tongue of truth, allowing neither doubt nor duplicity. The computer put him on the path that lead toward the stars, and showed him the vast distance he had to go. When dollars came back from his father, his mother promised to let him go on to the university.

  Sadly, however, the money stopped.

  “Qué lástima!” his mother moaned. “I fear for him. And for your own great plans, hijo mío.”

  When Don Ignacio returned for the next fiesta, they asked him for news. He spat a quick jet at an ant and observed that those too greedy for money sometimes became the victims of evil men or gringo law. A warning that Father Francisco advised him to heed. He got no comfort from el padre, however, when his mother was stricken with a malady of the heart which la curandera couldn’t cure.

  It was his mother’s younger sister who came home from Hermosillo to care for her, and it was Don Ignacio himself who restored his hope to know the stars. Instead of returning to el norte, the don opened a computer shop in Chihuahua City and gave him a job there, with time to study computer science at the university. The first year he did little except sweep the floors, unpack new computers, and greet customers when the don was busy. By the second year, however, he had learned to diagnose the common ills of computers and relieve them of defective chips and disabling viruses.

  He was near graduation when el padre called him home. His aunt had fallen ill and returned to Hermosillo, leaving his mother confined to her bed. All her prayers and tears had never brought his father back. Carlos made the little food she could eat, lifted her when she had to be lifted, and kept a candle burning for her in the church.

  She blessed him before the saints received her, and told him where to find the American dollars his father had sent, dollars she had buried in a glass jar under the floor because she was afraid to spend them. Trusting los santos, he left Cuerno del Oro to search out his way to the stars.

  New electronic devices were punishing those who tried to wade the river, and half his dollars had to go for papers to let him cross the bridge from Juárez. Beyond the mountains, a Las Cruces contractor picked him up and took him on to a tall fence of woven steel that was hung with yellow signs of danger. The wide arch above the gate was lettered,

  We Seed the Stars

  Clumps of dead, black stubble scattered the desert beyond, which the Spanish explorers had named Jornado del Muerto, the Journey of Death. Takeoff flashes, the contractor said, had killed the brush. When Carlos asked about the starbirds, he pointed to a thin silver bullet shape aimed into the dusty sky a dozen kilometers beyond the gate.

  “Number Ninety-nine,” the contractor said. “Taking off tonight.”

  He had no badge to show the guard at the gate. The contractor left him with a little group of people standing outside under a drooping Fairshare banner. Most of them young, they looked as road-worn as he was, sunburnt and grimed with sweat-caked dust. They carried battered signs:

  ALIEN RIGHTS!

  SAVE THE STARS!

  EARTH’S ENOUGH!

  A van from a wrecking yard followed the contractor through the gate, and then a taxi with a woman and two small children in the backseat. He saw her from the edge of the road when the taxi stopped. Una rubia, young and very fair, with a beauty that took his breath. He smiled at the little girl, but she never looked toward him.

  Wondering who they were, he envied those of wealth and learning and power who might hope to earn la rubia’s friendship. The don had warned him of those proud masters of the birds of space. They were often clever and sometimes kind, but they scorned mojados like himself, said to come wet from swimming the river. La rubia’s world was not for him, but he let his eyes follow the cab through the gate.

  When the road was empty again, the Fairshare people dropped their signs and invited him to the ragged tents where they had camped. Sharing their lunch of stale fast food and melting candy bars, they spoke of their long war to stop or delay the StarSeed flights. He thanked them for the food and asked them why the starbirds should not fly.

  “Look back, my friend.” The speaker scowled through a dirty wisp of beard. “Look back at all we’ve done to the forests and rivers and native cultures of our own Earth. What right have we to foul the stars?”

  Carefully polite, he said that he wished only to visit the stars for himself.

  “You’re a little late for that.” Laughing at him, a sun-blistered girl turned to gesture toward that far silver tower. “The Mission’s finished. We’ve killed their crazy dream of another hundred ships. Even killed one of their first. Number Ninety-nine will be the last. It’s taking off tonight.”

  He felt sick.

  “Es posible?” His inglés came slowly, because he still thought in Spanish. “Could one get aboard?”

  “Stow away?”

  “Is that possible?”

  She laughed again, but a man in blue coveralls turned to study him.

  “Why not?” Eyes narrowed, the man looked at the girl. “A man might try. With guts enough and luck enough. And a little money.”

  He could pray for el machismo y la suerte, the guts and the luck. He emptied his pockets to show the dollars he had left. The man counted them, nodded for the girl to follow him out of the tent, and came back to say that perhaps his dollars were enough.

  “I’ve been inside, looking for one last chance to hit the Mission.” He glanced toward the gate and dropped his voice. “Unloading trucks with supplies for Ninety-nine. Pushing dollies and stowing cargo till they laid me off. If you want my badge, we might strike a deal.”

  He wanted the badge. The girl wanted his dollars. Generous, the man gave him the blue coveralls as well as the badge, made him a rough map of the ship, and even marked a spot where perhaps he could hide.

  “If you have to talk, say you’re on the clean-up crew,” the man told him. “They wear the coveralls. The foreman’s named O’Hara. Better duck him. Ride the elevator up to the gym deck. Get under cover as soon as you can. You’ll hear the countdown. What becomes of the ships after takeoff is anybody’s guess. If your weight goes to nothing, you’ll know you’ve been lucky.”

  “We’ll get you on a salvage truck.” The girl made a face at the ship. “But if you’re really looking for luck, you’d better hope they throw you off before the ship ever lifts.”

  Two

  Jonas Roak was born in a small South Texas town, the son of a hell-breathing fundamentalist preacher. They never got along, though his mother did her best to keep the peace. His sixteenth birthday had begun well. His mother baked him a chocolate cake. He got his driver’s license and spent the check his grandmother sent for a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. When he wore the hat to the dinner table, the preacher spoiled it all.

  “Take it off.” The preacher preferred coconut cake. “Beg your mother’s pardon. And thank her for the cake.”

  He cut himself another piece of the chocolate.

  “Get it off!”

  The hat was black, with the crown peaked high like he thought Billy the Kid would have worn it, and Billy was his hero. He pulled it low on his forehead and took a big bite of cake.

  “Listen to me!” The preacher stood up, red in the face and breathing hard. “You ain’t grown up, not by a damn sight. Better cast out the evil rotting your soul, or you’ll wind up in hell.”

  “I ain’t afraid of hell.”

  “Down on your knees!” The preacher unbuckled his belt. “And beg the Lord’s forgiveness—”

  “I don’t need to pray.” He shook his head, grinning. “I know a better way. When I get ready for heaven, I’ll go to New Mexico and ride up to it on one o
f them quantum ships.”

  “Godless—” The preacher stripped off the belt. “You godless whelp!”

  “Joseph!” His mother caught the preacher’s arm. “For Jesus’ sake, not today!”

  “For your mother’s sake,” the preacher muttered, and sat down, but in a moment he was shouting again. “You hell-bent kid, you ain’t to touch my new pickup. Not till you can kneel with your mother and me and make your peace with God.”

  He never knelt. Before daylight next morning he took the preacher’s wallet and the keys to the red Chevy pickup and drove west to try his luck in Las Vegas. Near Flagstaff, he ran off a curve and totaled the pickup. When the police brought him home, the preacher told them to take him on to the lockup where he belonged, but his mother begged till they agreed to drop the charges and send him to a military school.

  He got by for a few years there, till an angry instructor accused him of cheating. The commandant ordered him expelled, but he struck first. Writing checks on the preacher’s account, he disappeared with the commandant’s daughter in the commandant’s brand-new Cadillac. The car was found a few days later, abandoned and out of gas, the girl sprawled in the backseat, dead drunk.

  Missing for months, he was arrested again on narcotics charges and spent three years in a Texas prison. His parents had separated before he got out. The preacher wanted no more of him. Living on Social Security, his mother prayed for him and promised to do anything she could. He forged a check to clean out her savings and called Johnny Vega, a one-time cellmate who was now back in El Paso.

  “Juanito? Remember me?”

  “Who?”

  “Jonas Roak. They used to call me Whale-Bait.”

  “Back then?” Vega didn’t want to think about it. He was driving a taxi, making a new life for himself and his new wife with two new kids. He had no money to spare.

  “Hold it, amigo,” Jonas begged before he could hang up. “Un minuto. Remember how we used to talk about the quantum ships? You told me how you’d seen them taking off. A sure getaway from all the cops and pens, remember?”