Aurelia, Page 2

  “Of course all of you have made blunders and will make them. But you will not have made enough blunders to frustrate your design. If it were possible for one of you to make enough blunders to fault your flight, Aurelia would have done it. But she hasn’t.

  “And you will have completely forgotten some important things. After all, you are only fourteen years old and on your first world venturing. But you will not have forgotten any absolutely necessary thing. For instance, you will not have forgotten to make a ‘Monitory Chronometer.’ ” (All but one of them laughed at the absurdity of anyone forgetting to make a ‘Monitory Chronometer.’) “If any of you could possibly have forgotten to make such a thing, it would have been Aurelia. And she hasn’t.”

  Oh, but she had! She had forgotten, and she had absolutely resolved to do it when she had heard the instructor mention it. And (Oh, how could she have!) she had forgotten it again as soon as that session was over with.

  And now (it was two equivalent days after the instructor had made that last speech to them) she was in strange skies without a ‘Monitory Chronometer’ of any sort. Such a Chronometer is an absolute necessity for navigation, and what will happen to you if you do not have it?

  Aurelia had forgotten to make a ‘Compensating Contingency Grid.’ She had forgotten to make a ‘Monitory Chronometer.’ And she had forgotten to make a third important thing whose very nomenclature she had also forgotten.

  Oh, lacking such a Chronometer, you might possibly still reach a world of the type selected for you. But as to which of the worlds of that type you would reach, it would be left up to random chance. And when you got there, you would not even know what world you had come down on. Oh, there are memorized ear-marks by which one might know what world it was. But Aurelia had not well memorized the ear-marks.

  Aurelia might come down on Skokumchuck the Shelni Planet, or on Kleptis which is one of the Trader planets, or on Gaea which is called Telluris or the Earth by its natives. On Yellow Dog, or Bandicoot, or Sireneca (though that’s pretty distant), or Hellpepper Planet, or Dobson’s World, or Hokey Planet, or Aphthonica (World Abounding), or Horner’s Corner, or Sad Dog Planet, or Lotophage, or Lamos, or Paravata, or Analos, or Gelotopolia, or Beggars’ Choice, or Ragsdale, or New Shensi, or Groll’s Planet, or any of fifty-five other deficient worlds that were within the primary dimension-sphere and had been judged in need of even a bit of second-class or immature governing. Some of these were popular names of worlds that Aurelia didn’t even know the chart name of. But she knew that there were seventy-six planets of the type recommended to her, of the type for which she had supposedly programmed her ship, of the type within primary range. But, with no ‘Monitory Chronometer’ at all, it was blindman’s guess which one she should come down on.

  And, in the meanwhile, she was on a very random flight, and random flights are rough. She bled from the nose and mouth and ears. She retched and reeled and swooned. “I’ll be so woe-begone that everything will be sorry for me,” she hoped, “and someone will take care of me. Yeah, the hydrogen atoms, and the nickel-iron meteorites, they will feel sorry for me, I bet!” There was nothing else out there. Aurelia, Aurelia, you had better have more luck than unluck now.

  Three years before, when Aurelia had been eleven years old and in the seventh grade, she had built a living steed as a school assignment. She had built it a little bit like a patrushkoe-horse, since she didn’t have a lot of imagination. But she didn’t make it too much like a patrushkoe, since students were not allowed to mimic already existing species too closely with their creations. She left one thing out when she built that steed, the electronic-bit to guide it with. (Any eleven-year-old child is likely to forget one thing in making a complex animal like that: think of the hundred things that she remembered when she was making it!) But it was a good steed and a tireless one, and Aurelia enjoyed riding it.

  But she didn’t know where it was going, no more than it knew itself. Her contemporaries had made a lot of jokes about Aurelia and her steed that couldn’t be guided.

  Now her little space-ship, well-built in most respects, was another steed that couldn’t be guided at all. But it was a tireless steed. They were in regions of ‘good skies.’ And it was a great thrill just to ride it. But it was a fearsome thrill.

  “There is no fear of falling in space,” and instructor has said. By the Great Blue Jasper, there is a fear of falling in space if you have forgotten the ‘Gyroscopic Struts’ and the ‘Pseudo-Vertical Stabilizers.’ There is a horror-sickness of falling.

  But there was no way that Aurelia could avoid coming down on a world of her designated type. If everything else should go wrong, such a land-fall was still assured by the very style of the shining ship. The seventy-six planets of Aurelia’s assigned type formed, as far as the ship was concerned, and integrated space-net. The programmed attractions for them were very strong. She could not fly out of that net without being captured by it and brought back. It was a huge net, yes, but her speed also was huge and transcending.

  Lacking a ‘Monitory Chronometer’ to select the best world to match up with the talents of Aurelia, the ship would have to take one at random. All the net-planets would be liveable for Aurelia. And every one of them could well do with a little judicious and higher-type governing by one of the ‘Shining People.’ But otherwise than their all being liveable for her, they were not very much alike.

  There would be outright horror waiting on Hell-Pepper Planet, and Aurelia was a person bothered by brazen horror. There would be a wildness that is worse than horror on Bandicoot. Any decent person will feel disgust for Hokey Planet. On Groll’s Planet or on Gaea there was said to be a grossness that really amounted to an enormity of behavior. The dishonesty of the inhabitants of Kleptis or New Shansi was well known. So was the perversity of Yellow Dog. There was the juvenile clownishness on Gelotopolia and Ragsdale, an impudent artiness on Aphthonica, an insulting elegance on Dobson’s World, an intolerable raunchiness on Horners’ Corner. And there was the plain mystery of fifty or so worlds that had been analyzed only from a distance and had never been visited by either explorers or student governors. The only thing they all had in common was that they were insufficiently governed and could use whatever guidance they could get.

  Aurelia had drawn her shoddy class of worlds because she didn’t know what she wanted; and because her fellow students, knowing what they did want, had selected all the better groups while she hesitated. Even so, and considering her restricted list, it was not anticipated that she would land on any of the mystery worlds. Following type, though, none of them could be as mysterious as all that. But likewise it wasn’t anticipated that Aurelia should have forgotten to make a ‘Monitory Chronometer.’

  A jolt, a stir, and the raising of hackles! Aurelia’s space-ship made a move like a hound-dog taking a scent. Aurelia knew that the ship had selected a target, subject to her contradiction. What would she contradict it with? She hadn’t any idea how to identify the target. Sure, there had been the flash cards that one looked at for one twentieth of a second, showing every target against every background of stars. But who remembers all the flash cards now? Aurelia accepted the target, and her ship started down.

  Aurelia considered such parts of her scrappy instructions as she could recall:

  “The first instructions or admonitions are to remember that you are of the ‘Shining People’ and will not really need instructions. What you do will be, by definition, right. That is what it means to be one of the ‘Shining People.’ No one of the ‘Shining People’ can ever make a wrong choice, not when only lesser people are in the vicinity.

  “The second admonition is to remember that you are only a half-formed child of the ‘Shining People’ and that you just possibly might make a wrong choice somehow, in a context that we cannot admit to the inferior people.

  “And the third admonition is that you had better not make that wrong choice, possible or not, or you will not be coming back here, or indeed anywhere.”

  Rou
gh stuff to remember, that, for one suffering from the gravity flesh-crawl and the landing sickness. And then there was this bit surfacing in the memory:

  “On landing, the first step is to achieve firm dominance over the world that you are to govern. All other steps will follow from this first step, and all other steps will be easy to the degree that you have achieved early dominance.”

  The Instructor who had given these instructions had been only two years older than Aurelia and her bunch, so he was sixteen years old, a smart sixteen. But at least he had already completed his successful governorship of an alien world. He had completed that World Government Course, so he was entitled to instruct in it. A full adult might have forgotten some points that were important to the fourteen-year-olds who were going out.

  There had been another bit:

  “As to the purpose and goal of your governorship, it will be the same as the purpose and goal of yourself. If you don’t have it, you can’t give it. If you are aimless, so will your governorship and administration be aimless. But how could any person of the ‘Shining People’ ever be aimless?”

  A little more to the immediate point had been the advice and reasurrance:

  “There isn’t any way that you can make a bad landing. No ship designed by one of the ‘Shining People’ could ever make a bad landing. And none of the ‘Shining People’ could permit it to happen.”

  But that sixteen-year-old instructor hadn’t known Aurelia very well. What if one of the ‘Shining People’ suffered a dim-out? What if blind destruction rises up and gobbles one up completely? Coruscating Contignations! It’s all coming apart. Look out!

  Aurelia made a bad landing.

  There were horse-herders, two of them, in the countryside keeping a night-watch over their horses that night. There were half a hundred sectarians of millennial sort in a summer camp nearby. This was in a group of low mountains around a lake. There was also a multi-media (music and hollering and debauching) ‘with-it’ group in a community quite near that place. There was the River Boat on the lake with all-night gaming and music. There was a tycoon and his menage in a luxury cabin. There was a whole colony of luxury cabins on a fishful part of the mountain lakes.

  There was, moreover, an escaped convict, probably dangerous and certainly insane, who had been sighted in the vicinity. And there were two young men with a “Joe’s Tow Service” tow-truck who were wandering the tilty roads of the region of the false report of booty. So they were typical groups, typical persons inhabiting the land and water on a typical night.

  They all heard the little space-ship, all horns blowing and all lights flashing, come down like a shouting and howling star. It crashed with an impact that was more noise than destruction (the ships of the young ‘Shining People’ were all sturdily made, and so were the young ‘Shining People’ themselves,) so many of the folks of the vicinity came towards the crash site, each at his own pace.

  It was night, and it was in the region of delightful small mountains. The sound of Aurelia’s arrival was like the blowing of all the trumpets of Heaven. Yeah, like all those trumpets blowing out of tune! One thing, seven things really, that Aurelia had installed in her space-ship was horns.

  “I want everyone to hear me coming,” she had said. “I want them all to be able to get out of my way.”

  That was ridiculous.

  “Perhaps you might want to arrive secretly at first,” the instructor had said several days ago, “and survey the situation to ascertain the easiest and quickest ways to secure domination over that world. Almost all of the most successful governors of worlds have arrived on them quietly and secretly.”

  “Quiet and secret after I bank down maybe I will be,” Aurelia had said, “but first I want things to get out of my way.”

  “Things, animate and otherwise, will get out of the ways of any member of the ‘Shining People,’ always, and without even knowing that they do it,” the instructor had explained. “That is the submission that nature and its flora and fauna and encumberances and petrologies owe to the ‘Shining People’—to get out of our way always.”

  “Well, I won’t blow my horns till I’m scared,” Aurelia had said.

  “It would be impossible for any of the ‘Shining People’ to be—what was that word—‘“scared,” the instructor had admonished. “It would be impossible for any adult of the ‘Shining People’ even to remember that there was such a word as ‘scared.’ And even a fourteen-year-old member of the ‘Shining People’ could hardly be scared of anything ever.”

  That instructor had been wrong. Aurelia was scared when she saw the mysterious planet, wrapped in craggy night, rushing up at her and showing no signs of owing any submission at all. She leaned heavily on all of those seven horns, the only instruments on her ship that seemed to have a clear purpose at the moment.

  “People, catch those heavenly horns!” persons of the multi-media ‘with-it’ group cried and bawled to each other as they came out of skittish sleep. “Catch those third and fifth and seventh discords! People, we got to ride those discords wherever they are going!” These ‘with-it’ people knew their discords.

  The horns roared and howled and hollered. And Aurelia’s ship came down with something between an extreme jolt and a mild annihilation. The ship was damaged but not completely destroyed. The same went for Aurelia herself. But she came out of the craft nervously but bravely. Oh, what sort of nameless world would this be?

  (At the same time, and probably not far from there, Aurelia’s counterpart and adversary came down like black lightning, secretly and yet arrogantly. More, perhaps, of Aurelia’s counterpart and nemesis and adversary in a little while.)

  There were acrid and acid clouds. This was a woolly sort of world, but which woolly world was it?

  There was someone or something lurking there when Aurelia climbed out of her ship. It was a thing or person, dark and shambling, that did not get out of Aurelia’s way. It disputed her way rather. It attempted to attack her in a bizarre manner. The thoughts of that thing, as Aurelia was able to gather them, were relentless and at the same time incoherent. It was probably insane. Certainly it was so in appearance.

  “Oh go wash yourself!” Aurelia said crossly. “You’re filthy. And I hear water running there. Go and do it.”

  “Nah,” the things said. “Not dodge me no more, kid. Come here.”

  “I do hope you’re not typical of this world, though first specimens usually are typical,” Aurelia said. “Really, your mind is so boggled that I could hardly call you rational.”

  “Nah,” the thing said. “Get off the coy, kid. Come here.”

  And then the thing definitely assaulted Aurelia, a bad beginning on this planet, whichever one it was. Aurelia, almost automatically, took the counter-action that had been inculcated in her. But she was dismayed by the results.

  The thing or person was twice her size and musky strong, but something was wrong with it. It was unable to take care of itself, and Aurelia apparently damaged it. She may even have killed it. And Aurelia was exasperated over the bad start.

  How could people be put together so badly and be so ill-conditioned as to break or be damaged by a few counteraction strokes such as every nine-year-old child of the ‘Shining People’ uses?

  Well, if the people of this world were so easily handled, Aurelia would have no real trouble in that particular. But she must be careful not to damage them unnecessarily.

  Some of the sectarians of the millennial sort arrived at Aurelia’s ship after her encounter with the dangerous escaped convict. The sectarians came from their cave even before the multi-media ‘with-it’ people arrived from theirs.

  “Hail Messianic Angel, bright Vision from Heaven, and Governess of the World!” these non-shining sectarians greeted Aurelia. “Come with us to our place and protect us in these latter days, and let the rest of the world perish. You just destroyed a murderous lion of the night who was out on a prison break. You are invincible.”

  Now this was amazing. These
odd people knew Aurelia. They understood who she was. And they greeted her in one of the 6A45D languages. Well, so had the murderous lion used such a language, Aurelia recalled. Why, that was fortunate for Aurelia. That was one of the most simple types of language to be found anywhere. The 6A45D was one of the dozen classes of languages that she had learned fairly well, when she had failed to learn a hundred more difficult types at all.

  Why, she could come close enough to this particular variety of the type to fake it. If there were big gaps in her understanding or her expression, then her intuition would flow into those gaps and fill them up. After all, she was a completely intuitive person. She was one of the ‘Shining People.’ She would keep these creatures talking, and the understanding of their tongue would grow in her by the minute. Soon she would understand them perfectly.

  “You are a shining angel, aren’t you?” those millennial sectarians asked her.

  “Oh yes, certainly. As you see, as you see,” Aurelia agreed. She was full of intuition in the special form of telepathy, and she pitched onto easy communication with them very quickly. Well, maybe she was twice as slow about it as would be any other member of her old group. But twice as slow was still pretty quick in this case.

  “And the devil, what will-you do about the devil?” they asked her. “He’s landed too, you know. Will you confound him?”

  “Confound him? Yes, I suppose so. I’ll confound him,” Aurelia said. What the devil was this devil they were talking about, assuming that she was understanding what these people were saying? The devils didn’t come among the ‘Shining People’ very much, and Aurelia wasn’t experienced with them.

  “We are talking about the devil who landed about the same time that you landed,” they explained what she hadn’t asked them. “We mean the devil who came down in a flame of darkness when you came down in a flame of light. He must be confounded.”