Before Jack Sharp happened to visit K’Tarsis, the planet had survived some very strange events meant to dramatically impact its history. We wouldn’t have learned about it, hadn’t one character of this very special world been leading his diary which we were lucky to find. The diary is damaged and the entries are encoded, yet we try our best to recover and decode the texts. We are going to keep you informed about our progress. Today we would like to show you one record we’ve just handled. The date of the record suggests that it is no way the first one.
- Beginning of the message –
I rue the day when my mother with just another bunch of scared and exhausted by the journey travelers set her foot from the ramp of the free space-trader on the surface of this damn planet. So she had her reasons while I had no choice. At least I – being only a year and something – survived during the journey. The spacers claimed it was a miracle for little children were most unlikely to live in such flights. Still for me it was nothing but a bitter irony of fate. I was born in Citadel and have a citizenship of the Empire, but who cares? Just another trigger for the grudge of the locals.
The outskirts for such poor unfortunate souls as me and my mother were according to the sweet-voiced recruiters nothing but the land of promise. Sure, a certain chance to kick the bucket in reality. Some even might be lucky to do it quick while the others have to pay up their naivety by the long years of the back-breaking work and hand-to-mouth existence. I have to admit that during the last 20 years the number of ways to end up worm food has increased dramatically. Now we are not to complain about the lack of variety. You just need to leave the guarded area and you already take a risk of having most unpredictable journey to heaven. I’d even say unforgettable one. Anyway, that is already another story which is not to mention unless you are looking for trouble.
The Confederation had been offering carefree existence in this “paradise”, still the very early days I remember proved it was a dumpy place. Tarsis 853 K… this mysterious combination of letters and digits revealed a god’s forgotten dusty globe, which among all the good things had only the atmosphere more or less suitable for breathing, as well as plants and animals from the Earth somehow genetically adjusted to the local climate. Though they hadn’t been very successfully adjusted and by far not everywhere. We just have the air to breathe and something to eat. This is, of course, in case we can force these damn hybrids to fruit on the local soils and under the local sun. Either such gardening or working in the mine. Nothing else to do.
I haven’t witnessed the high-day of the Rush and the tremendous inflow of the luck-hunters. Already at that time the colony was agonising, abandoned to the mercy of chance by those who had been picturing it in their commercials. All I can recall is a slow decline. The constant shortage of something vital: chow-down that would do, medicines, booze, bullets, spare parts. Only free-trades hardly managing to make ends meet would land here, and at times corporate ore carriers. Decent merchants wouldn’t land there for all the booties of the dusty planet. Doom and gloom, to cut the long story short. No longer were we dreaming about easy money, the new El Dorado – all of a sudden discovered goldmine, no longer gabbling about purest antigravium nuggets to match the size of an abory’s green butt.
The corporate rats used to bleed the large minefields white. Their workers looked just like walking dead. Some wild-looking man – the free prospectors – rooted through the waste banks around the big mines and cut each other’s throats for the more or less worthy pieces of land. The first wave of the digges dissolved just as quickly as it had come, leaving to the newcomes almost no hope for gain. Everything here is just about wrecks of men and wasted lives. We are those who arrived here by the momentum – the next wave, left to drink as they have brewed. The aggressive and poorly explored planet had been looking forward to be tamed, and that was the challenge we faced.
I witnessed a couple of native’s riots, some major wars between the most violent diggers gangs, a few epidemics, let alone abnormally powerful pulsations. I outlived my two wives and all my children, may their souls rest in peace. I wonder what for. My mother always believed that I was destined to do something significant. Well, if keeping the only worthy pub in this poky hole of a place can be regarded as significant, I have to agree. I don’t ask for more. This is my place, my home. I am used to it. May it be set on fire, I’ll have to burn with the old good “Bullet”.
I’ve started the writings for two reasons. Firstly, to kill the time. While I’m killing it, it’s slowly killing me. I have to keep myself busy with something during these sleepless hours before the dawn when the bitter thoughts just stubbornly refuse to leave my head. “As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb!” joke the locals. “Just pull the trigger and rid yourself of the troubles constantly looming ahead.” Have to say this way out doesn’t attract me much. Let’s for now call it Plan B. Secondly, I write because I am afraid, but not of being stabbed or shot. I am over the hill, quite fat and bald – just where has all the grace gone? I can hardly see anything further than 20 steps and suffer from haemorrhoids. These all is complicated with growing more and more sentimental. Still, despite the shaking hands, I am more dexterous than most locals and always the first to shoot. It’s not a big deal that I sometimes shoot from under the bar counter or from the pocket. At least I’m still alive.
I thought nothing more could scare me to death for I had witnessed too much. It was a mistake.
Having closed the bar, I typically have a couple of sundowner drinks and sit, my arms around the shotgun. I am afraid. Afraid of the big changes for at the place like this the big changes are never for better. My nights have grown even more sleepless for I know the big war is coming up. This time really big one.
And here is the reason why: a week ago my bar got visited by Wilson of the Moor. Nobody had been seeing him around in the city for a decent while, and this made many people think that Wilson must have kicked the bucket, holding tenderly his bottle of hooch on his old rusty barge.
But no! Here he came: alive, skinny as if starving, wearing his shabby clothes, looking anxiously around. He looked pleased with himself – didn’t only dance with joy. There was such an eager look in Wilson eyes as only some psychos can have. Stumbling, he approached the bar counter. I dare say he smelled as if he had really died a week before and after that had been exposed to the sun. It seemed the man had gone nuts at his venomous moor.
So he was staring at me and smiling foolishly his rotten teeth revealed.
“Make me a Prospector’s Special, junior!” he finally spitted it out.
Yes, I’d always been for him ‘junior’ – he had grey hair when I was only knee-high to a mosquito. For the most locals he was already just an old cuckoo man running about in search of El Dorado, yet I was one to recall him being quite a tough man and one of the best diggers around. I distinctly remember how he saved my life a couple of times. Once he rescued me from the drowning in morass, and the other time defeated the cave fever, which was already about to conquer me for the other world. He had been nursing me without being afraid to catch the lethal disease. Such things one can hardly forget.
So I reached for the ingredients stored in the secret reinforced drawer. I keep them there for the last free trader crashed from above on this planet two pulsations ago and there aren’t any good reasons to wait for the other spirits to be imported. The peculiarity of the ‘Special’ is that all the ingredients have to be imported, thus, being madly expensive. Like purest green antigravium dust. I mixed it up and poured the lingering liquid into the schooner, throwing there a bit of the clear crystal. The glass vibrated and lit up with almost acid green. I put a match to it and the flames danced on the surface of the booze. The Prospectors’s Special is nothing to sneeze at. It is served in two cases: when a lucky man has scooped, for example, having found enormously bid dyke or when he finally decided to give up. Cast in stone. Wilson didn’t seem to have made this sort of decision. Не was getting strange with age but had never forgotten to pay his bills, which probably made me prepare the drink for him.
I was patiently waiting for him to cope with the whole pint of the eye-watering mixture and hawk the rare crystal back to the schooner. So it was to be done. Yet the buzzard was savoring the drink – having blown out the flames he was smacking his lips. He ought to have been an actor and to have left his moor in peace. It all was happening before the noon and there weren’t many visitors, yet almost all the heads were now turned. Everyone was listening attentively and looking daggers at Wilson. I should have asked him what he was celebrating right away, but I was waiting like a fool for him to finish with the drink, to wipe his haggish grayish moustache with a sloppy sleeve – just as he did in my childhood – and to lay at the table fist size green slug or a glittering bag of the pure green dust.
Wilson took out a strange slightly glittering angulated object instead.
“Look, junior, what a doodad I have. Worth a couple of thousands Terro, ha?” he said with a fawning smile, his voice sounding somewhat naive.
I reflexively stretched out my hand (such a fool!) to take the thing from him. I was turning it in my hand each time at a different angle to the light. A strange object it was: a regular triangle pyramid made of non-transparent substance. It was inside a metal frame somewhat alike to bronze, some symbols carved on the frame. The scrawl was definitely not for human eyes: tiny and unreadable without a magnifying glass. The material inside the frame was frosted black, as if absorbing light. The heavy and cold pyramid seemed to soak the warmth out of my hand. Quite unpleasant feeling. Let alone being too heavy for its size, as if made of lead.
“How comes you got such a fortune?” I wondered, looking for the joints at the surface of the pyramid’s faces. Would he tell me! Sure! The first thing a prospector ought to remember is that a rich dyke waits for the one, not for two people. Found something? Great! Be happy and care not to tell anyone where it was.
Yet Wilson told me where it had come from – why didn’t he only bite off his tongue, old fart!
“There’s a little island on the moor. There I saw some ruins, arches, colonnades, wells with water. I came across this thing. Аccidentally. Fell into such a well. Slipped and fell. Not a big wonder if you walk on the moor, ha? I was trying to get out and saw some interesting things there. I picked them up, together with this artifact.”
I kept twiddling the pyramid trying to figure out who could have made it and what for. Humans can’t have made it. For a trinket of abories it was also too sophisticated and neat. Too polished, too perfect. There was not a single scratch. No damage or signs of age either. Nothing. Only some dirt, the presence of which was explicable. This thing was of much more interest for xenoarchaeologists, had they been here.
While I was hesitating mesmerized by this astonishing finding, the old Wilson hurried away as if having suddenly remembered something important. He greedily grabbed the artifact from my hand, hid it somewhere in his shabby clothes and headed for the exit. I was watching him my jaw dropped – it was not very becoming not to pay for the drinks.
“I’ll pay as soon as I move the stuff! I’ll pay’ya all! Don’t worry, junior!” he croaked. “I’ll run a tab, ok? Old Wilson always pays back – ask any dirty digger on this side of the Big Scar. See ya!”
He skedaddled. Only doors cracked pitifully behind. I just keep forgetting to grease them.
I tried to look as if nothing special had happened. Foolish of me it had been to treat him with the ‘Special’, still that was nothing to be done. Would it be a good idea to run after and squeeze the last farthings out of him when watched by all my clients? I didn’t think so. If I had been away, my visitors could have easily stolen something. These guys rarely mind grabbing all they can lay their hands on. To hell with Wilson! I’ll teach him to behave. I kinda calmed down, picked up a random glass from the shelf and started wiping it out… and here it dawned on me!
I remembered one thing. One story about the colony in the Small Magellan [Cloud], which is to be told in whisper and among trustworthy people. A bad story, in other words. And what is worse, a truthful one. I just wonder what the hell! Why this insane moor worm should have came and shown this damn thing exactly in my pub? Blow this old scarecrow! I wish he would go straight to hell (in case the hell is worse than this damn planet, of course).
It will be me, not this old buzzard, to face the music. He will simply take the damn thing to Siberius pawnshop to earn some Terros and disappear again in his moor – and then watch his smoke! The rumors, of course, remain and so will I. And they will start with me for I am the only Wilson’s learnee, almost godson. There was a period of time when I was making an impression of quite a cool digger. That was until one pacey abory shot me. Now it’s time for the pay back for my rebellious youth.
Unlike the local drinkers and diggers, I know who Wilson’s artifacts can attract. And I know what can happen because of such things. All I want is just to live for ten or twenty pulsations in peace, give the pub to someone, teach him how to handle it. And then fly away one fine morning. To heaven.
Now hardly this is possible.
Nothing unusual this week: the local folks entertain themselves by waiting on the main street for the clock to strike at noon only to shoot each other in duels, or by lynching an abory, by racing on gravycycles, betting last money on someone or something. As always somebody from the caravanneer doesn’t come back… Only I turn into count Drunkula each night, trying to forget about Wilson’s booties. Still I can’t fight the insomnia and wait for the guests. For the guests who will not only level to the ground this pub or town, but turn to dust the whole colony.
I have nobody to share my fears and concerns. I don’t have a shoulder to cry on. So I started the diary, a kind of chronicle, hoping that in a thousand years some ugly aliens rediscover this place, happy as pigs in muck, believing to have found the biggest antigravium deposits in history. Just as we did two centuries ago. I also hope they’ll finally screw it up, just as we did. Perhaps, someone will find my records and will be able to decode them. If I was really destined for something, let at least these aliens learn how it all really started. Perhaps, they will recall us from time to time.
I finally managed it. Just one more shot and I’m a couple of chapters into the novel.
That’s it for today.
Pulsation 194, day 25
Empire style: October, 25, 2987 A.D.
- End of the message -
Footnotes:
Abory(-ies) - the native inhabitants of K’Tarsis, the shortening from aborigines.
Antigravium, the greeny – valuable mineral used for levitation plates/gravitational engines and other devices influencing gravitation. The main reason of K’Tarsis colonization.
The Big Scar – a giant canyon crossing the northern hemisphere of the planet very close to the equator. A big obstacle on the way of all travelers and caravans.
Free trader – a space travelling merchant independent of any organization or league. Exists as a class of society only in infamous Frontier worlds. Such businessman often deal with smuggle and slave trade.
Pulsation – the period of time on K’Tarsis, local “year”. The star giving light to K’Tarsis has an unpleasant peculiarity: every 186 days it rapidly extends becoming 1.5 times bigger and then gets back to its initial size, thus generating an intensive outburst of radiation in all spectra. On K’Tarsis this is the time of ionic storms and enhanced radiation danger. It’s not known what causes such activity of the star. The pulsations hinder the mining of antigravium by high-tech equipment. Every 186 days all electronic equipment is at risk of damaging or irreparable breakdown. The effective shielding is too expensive.
Spacer — a person spending most of his time in space, on spaceships or space stations.
