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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1977, 2011 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
CHAPTER ONE
I left the house by a small door at the back that had been left on the latch. I guess it was what they’d call the “tradesmen’s entrance.” I was glad to find it—climbing out of windows is so undignified. It let me out into a part of the grounds that were tastefully hidden from the front drive—the kitchen gardens, stocked and laid out for function rather than for show. I set off between the cabbages and the runner beans, heading north until I could veer east without wreaking havoc among the plants.
I put a hundred yards or so between myself and the house before I switched on the flashlight to help me on my way. There were several second and third story windows which still showed cracks of light through their drawn curtains. Going early to bed wasn’t a universal habit hereabouts.... In fact, no sooner had the last of the masters retired than the first of the servants would be getting up. I was pretty confident that no one was following me, but it seemed like a sensible precaution not to show a light until it became necessary. When I finally did use the flash it was because I’d run into a thicket and was both masked from the house and well and truly stuck. The bushes here had never invented thorns but some species had helical filamentous shoots that tangled ankles beautifully.
I used a small knife to cut myself free, wishing it were a machete.
I didn’t have far to go. In daylight it would have taken me about fifteen minutes, but it wasn’t daylight and I wasn’t going the easy way around. I stayed in the star-shadow of the trees wherever possible, and switched off the light when I had to cross open ground.
There was a stiff breeze blowing in off the sea, and it struck shivers into me whenever I was exposed to it, but the trees afforded me shelter from it most of the way. It was late spring, and it should have been warmer, but the weather wasn’t trying this season. The breeding cycle had started late and the corn in the fields was slow in maturing. It didn’t seem as if it was going to be much of a summer for Wildeblood’s empire. Or for us.
I climbed the iron railings that bounded the grounds of the house, thinking for the fortieth time what a criminal waste of iron it must have been in the days when it was built. The colonists had plenty now for their immediate necessities, but in the first hard decades you don’t expect a seven-mile stretch of six-foot railings to come high on the priority list. But James Wildeblood, by all accounts, had been a man of somewhat eccentric priorities. I walked beside the road, in the shadow of the railings, for a little way, prepared to dive into the creeping weeds which decked them at the first sign of company. But I crossed the road into the woods when the time came without having seen a suspicious shadow or heard the ghost of a hoof beat.
The stars shone steadily, looking for all the world like Earthly stars. Even in the dark, colony worlds aren’t often indistinguishable from home, but this one was as good a match to rural north Europe as we were likely to find. No doubt its deserts were a dead spit for the Sahara as well. The thing that really encouraged the illusion that I might be back home was the Milky Way. The patterns of the bright stars against the backcloth of the void were meaningless, but that long river of stardust looked the same as it ever does. Somehow, with a streak of parochial romanticism, I thought of it as belonging to Earth’s skies, and shining here only as a symbol of kinship between the human worlds. The locals, no doubt, thought that it was Wildeblood’s galaxy...maybe Wildeblood’s universe.
The world had officially gone into the records back home as Poseidon. (Official naming policy is horribly unimaginative—watery worlds get watery names, and Oceania and Thalassa had both been taken.) But James Wildeblood had considered that there was only one possible name for use in the colony. It promoted identification between the physical world and the social environment, enhanced the development of the concept of an all-embracing natural order. Here, all was Wildeblood. If they’d had to find a new name for God....
There was a group of cottages ahead of me, and I knew that I’d looped back to the road at the correct spot. They were all dark, all silent. For effect, there should have been a gravedigger about his lonely work. I’d always wanted to say “Alas, poor Yorick!” But the gravediggers worked by day...and the stonemasons.
There were no iron railings round the cemetery. Its boundary was marked by a chain of wooden stakes with long, thin laths of wood connecting them. It was a symbolic boundary. Also a flexible one. The graveyard had room for growth—room, in fact, for virtually limitless expansion. James Wildeblood had believed in graves. Proper graves. Marked graves. Graves to remember people by. He had been very strong on tradition—had made every attempt to start a lot of them. One day, maybe, when his children’s children had conquered the world, this island (where it had all started) would have nothing except the house (the house) and graves. A legion of the dead, equipped with massive stones as identity tabs and testimonials. An awesome array. By then, interogression should have carried Wildeblood genes into every last stagnant eddy of the gene pool, and everyone would claim descent from the Great Ancestor. They would make pilgrimages here from every corner of the world, to find the story of their history written in the stones.
It’s easier to store records on a computer, and if you’re desperate you can always use pencil and paper. But they don’t quite have the personality of a forest of stone slabs rooted amid the rotting bones.
Some of the markers were only a foot or two high, others four or five. But it was in the height that they varied—in terms of basal area they were virtually identical. The plots of ground they labelled were identical, too, and not over-generous. Three feet by two was considered enough. I didn’t know whether they buried people slanted or folded or tied in a knot. I hadn’t asked. I didn’t really want to know.
Even the taller stones were unadorned. No crosses. No angels. No grotesques. It couldn’t be much fun being a stonemason. Their artistic talents were more-or-less limited to the style of the lettering which cut the epitaphs into the stone.
I played the light around, wondering if all the tall stones marked aristocratic graves and so on down the social scale. But the small sample I looked at didn’t bear that out. And there were too many tall ones anyhow. I suspected that the variation was probably random, to break up the deadly evenness of the pattern. The dead, I guessed, would all be equal—a reminder and a promise to set against the gross inequality of the living.
Even such details, I thought, Wildeblood planned. He must have been one hell of a character. Here, written in the whole history of the colony, written literally in the stones, was the legacy of an obsession, of one of the most curious cases of paranoid creativity ever known.
All the stones had names, dates, marriages, children. And comments. Brief, concise, often rather strange. The names I looked at and over. I didn’t take them in. There were too many, all kinds. The dates, too, I didn’t pay much attention to, except to note that longevity wasn’t usual. It was rare for anyone to live much beyond fifty. That wasn’t for lack of medical knowledge—or even in more recent times—for lack of resources. It was because colony life was, and had been, tough. Even so, fifty was low, and I wondered whether it had been tougher than we suspected. But the part of the cemetery I was passing through had been dug between 80 and 90, local figuring (after the landing, of course) and it represented the fate of one of the earliest generations. Not a representative sample.
The one thing which did make an impression on me was the epitaphs. They weren’t long and they weren’t eulogistic. They certainly weren’t versified or sentimentalized, and they lacked the classic touch of irony you often find on old Christian graves on Earth. The epitaphs said things like: She
