Jack williamson eldren.., p.1
Jack Williamson - Eldren 01, page 1
LIFEBURST
JACK WILLIAMSON
Del Rey/ Ballentine
Contents:-
EVENTS IN THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SUN TYCOONS
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright © 1984 by Jack Williamson
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-3088
ISBN 0-345-32977-5
Cover art by Don Dixon
EVENTS IN THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SUN TYCOONS
1923 (Oldstyle) In flight from the Cheka, or so he says, “Ivan Ivanoff” reaches Hong Kong on a forged Portuguese passport. A wiry little man with a strong nose and a spent pistol bullet lodged in the socket of his blind right eye, he speaks seven languages, all of them loudly but badly, Russian no better than the rest. He carries diamonds he says are Czarist sewed into the lining of his astrakhan cap. Confounding foes with a wild eloquence and a one-eyed leer, he recovers his health and takes the name of his Eurasian mistress. As Ivan Kwan, he sets out to regain the imperial station he claims the Bolsheviks have raped away.
Cycle of the Elderhood 77:54:03
Among the ice-moons of the outermost planet of a G2 corestar in Draco, a young heatseeker queen yields to her princely suitor. Consuming the male in the way of her kind, she then sets out in solitary flight to found a new hive. Her destination is the Sun.
1951 Ivan Kwan’s three sons, banker, mathematician, and shipping magnate, sign a secret charter to form the House of Kwan, pledging themselves to live for his imperial plan.
1969-1974 Sergei, the banker’s black sheep heir, refuses to sign the Kwan charter. Drummed out of the family, he leaves Hong Kong. Fails as poet, fails as artist, fails as impresario. Destitute and sick, he finds refuge with Penny Morang, an unemployed cocktail waitress in Little Rock, Arkansas. John Kwan is born on her father’s hardscrabble Ozark farm.
1977-1986 John Kwan, entranced by TV coverage of the Voyager flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, discovers the wonder of space. When his father dies, leaving them on welfare, his mother takes him to Hong Kong. Possessing his great-grandfather’s “Romanoff nose,” he is welcomed into the House of Kwan.
Cycle of the Elderhood 77:54:05
Goldengene, a graduate student of galactic dynamics at a Newmarch university, is assigned to duty as the Newling attaché at Point Vermillion, an isolated observatory maintained on the northward fringes of the solar halo, to watch for the approaching Black Companion. Her people, the Newlings, are refugees from the seeker conquest of their natal star, and she is alert for possible pursuit.
1996 Smolensk-Atlanta Incident. City of Smolensk hit by robotic missile launched by protestors trying to vandalize it. Atlanta destroyed in retaliation. Millions are killed, more millions injured, but total nuclear holocaust is averted.
1997 Antinuclear Gottesvolk Movement spreads from East Germany, its underground leaders proclaiming the fall of Marxism and the rise of the Republic of God.
1999 Sri Lanka Accords. All nuclear weapons and nuclear materials are transferred to Supranational Nucleonics Repository. To assure compliance, all national space programs are terminated.
2000 John Kwan secures funds for a civilian space project, Kwan Planetary Laboratories, headquartered in Hong Kong and dedicated to his dreams of space conquest.
Sun Year 1 Kwan Labs engineers invent kwanlon, a monomolecular fiber with theoretical strength enough to link Earth with geosynchronous satellites.
Cycle of the Elderhood 77:54:06
The Council of the Elderhood receives reports of primitive spacecraft in flight between inner planets of the corestar. The Eldermost establishes the corestar observatory to determine the nature and intentions of these evolving spacefolk.
Sun Year 3 House of Kwan forms subsidiary, Sun Power, Inc., to hang skywires. “Ladders to the planets,” these will be the means to realize old Ivan’s dream.
Sun Year 7 Moon mines in production. Mars Station planted.
Sun Year 13 Solar power beamed to Earth. Kwan Labs designs genetic tests to select individuals able to live and work effectively in minimum-gravity environments.
Sun Year 17 Comet Yamamoto captured and steered into Earth orbit to supply water, oxygen, and other volatiles for the Company’s space operation.
Sun Year 19 First test skywire fails when unpredicted harmonics snap ballast link. Falling cable drags satellite out of orbit. Cable burns in atmosphere, but satellite strikes Quito. Killed and injured number 2 million.
Sun Year 23 Successful skywire dropped from satellite station Kilimanjaro High to Kenya Down.
Sun Year 25 Sun Company obtains outlawed nuclear materials from Nucleonics Repository to be used as fuel for reactors located in the ballast masses that support the skyweb, 100,000 kilometers out from Earth. Secretly, House of Kwan diverts nuclear arms into highside arsenals.
Sun Years 28-31 Vogelkop Accords signed at Vogelkop Down. In return for energy, ores, and manufactures from space, the power-starved signatory nations yield terminal concessions, police privileges, and diplomatic recognition to Sun Company.
Sun Year 33 Company heiress Sonya Kwan marries financier Li Chang Chen.
Sun Year 39 The Holyfolk Front, a radicalized revival of the Gottesvolk Movement, begins underground campaign to liberate the mother planet from space dominion. Members take “Earthblood oath” to destroy the Company and the House of Kwan.
Sun Year 41 Sun Security is set up to counter Holyfolk terrorism.
Sun Year 47 Kwan Labs improve genetic tests and introduce the laser-printed Sunmark to identify individuals with “genes fit for space.”
Sun Year 53 Kerry Kwan, chairman of the Company and Director-General of Sun Security, becomes first Sun Tycoon. Claims that evolving genetic differences will soon separate Sunbred and Earthbred populations.
Sun Year 55 Metal-rich asteroid Kwan Moon towed into Earth orbit.
Sun Year 58 Kwan Moon mines in production. Gravity power replaces solar power. Efficient infall energy generated by ore buckets sliding down skywires.
Sun Year 60 Kwan Labs engineers test first successful fusion-powered ion drive. Lunar skywire hung. First manned flight beyond Mars.
Sun Year 62 Dissension splits the House of Kwan. Chen faction secures control. Boris Chen ousts Kerry Kwan, becoming the second Sun Tycoon.
Sun Year 71 Unmanned Pluto probe detects laser bursts from far beyond its flight range. Kwan Labs engineers interpret burst as signals from alien spacecraft.
Sun Year 77 First Holyfolk Rebellion breaks out in Quito Nuevo, spreads to three continents. Crushed by worldwide power blackouts and threat of space bombardment. Resulting famines and disorders widely fatal.
Sun Year 79 Fernando Kwan commands first starside expedition, leaving Cotopaxi High with three spacecraft to search for solar halo. Fusion cruiser Spica reported lost in encounter with alien spacecraft.
Sun Year 81 With two remaining cruisers, Capella and Aldebaran, Kwan reaches the small halo iceball he names Janoort. He plants Halo Station as a starside defense outpost against unidentified space aliens.
Sun Year 82 Fernando Kwan returns Sunside to challenge Tycoon Chen. Chen accuses him of inventing space aliens as a solarpolitical ploy. Fernando ousts him, becoming the third Sun Tycoon.
Sun Year 84 Quin Dain is born aboard S.S. Aldebaran, relief craft en route to Halo Station.
Sun Year 88 Fanatic Holyfolk leader, “The Revelator,” creates world panic with illicit holo broadcasts predicting invasion of Earth by demons from space.
Sun Year 89 Revelationists, known as Los Santissimos in Spanish America, are suppressed by “warning shots”—missile strikes from Cotopaxi High against selected target cities. Estimated casualties, 18 million dead.
Sun Year 93 Mars skyline hung, Contra-Neptune Relay Station put in place, enabling laser and radio contact with Halo Station.
Cycle of the Elderhood 77:54:08:01
Newling attaché Goldengene reported killed in seeker attack on Point Vermillion. Survivors warn of twin dangers to Elderhood. Black Companion is nearing passage and marauding heatseeker is at large in the halo.
Sun Year 95 Revelator preaches that space aliens are the demons of the old religions, attacking mankind under Satan’s command. He claims they interbreed with human space explorers, that Sunfolk have demon blood.
Cycle of the Elderhood 77:54:08:02
Seeker queen establishes hive in Trojan asteroid.
Sun Year 107 Fall of the skyweb and death of the last Tycoon.
SHE ADORED THE PRINCE.
He was a guest in the hive, bolder and hotter in the belly than any of her swarming siblings. A magnificent creature, armored in glistening crimson, gold scales flashing, fangs and talons black as space, he pursued her almost from the moment she burst from her egg.
He vanquished all the other suitors rash enough to challenge him, and entranced her with the ballads of his hunting adventures in their halo fringe. Though the vermin surviving there were tiny things, their cunning and their rarity made them exciting game.
When her sweet sisters tried to warn her of his hot-bellied passion, she su
In love too long, intoxicated even by their shared peril, they dared too much. They dived too near the maddening fire of their star. Caressing each other with the wild ferocity of the seeker kind, kissing and touching and parting, they laughed at the madness of regeneration, insanely hoping to defeat it forever.
Passion overtook them on a cold flight-food moon where they had alighted to feast on the creamy snow. She had been teasing him, flashing the flaming colors of love. Tempting her wickedly, he kept stroking her shimmering labrum. Trembling with her own hot desire, she tried to lock herself and fly away.
Tried too late. The flame of his semen ignited a nova inside her. Crazed, yielding to delirium, she seized him with all her talons, his splendid head between her jaws, and crushed all his ripeness into her. Screaming, burning, stabbing deeper, he fought till he died.
He was dead, and joy was gone.
She woke to that fatal fact when the madness had ebbed. It chilled the fire in her bowels. Until that dreadful instant, her whole world had loved her. Secure in her royal mother’s devotion and the hive’s safe warmth, a happy sharer at the family feasts of rich life-metals the workers brought from the starward planets, she had known neither care nor fear.
Lying alone and forlorn, there in that deep pit where the blaze of their union had thawed the snow, feeling dead as the bright shards of his armor still clutched in her claws, she longed for all she had lost. In sad recollection, she was hatched again into the hive’s happy music. She rode once more into space on a grumbling worker’s back and learned to fly again, riding her blazing jets.
In wistful retrospection, she danced around their playground moons again in the splendid constellations of her gifted sisters, renewing the racial rituals of life and love and death. In joyous unison, they memorized the classic sagas of their warrior kind. She lost herself again in the sacred games of fight-and-kill in the tunnels of their hive. Wickedly she flirted again with the bright-shining rivals of her prince, teasingly testing his devotion.
All that, forever ended.
Her sisters would scorn her now, and her former suitors would shun her for killing their noble companion. The food worlds would be forbidden, and the hive would be shut against her, a dreadful trap where even the last sad relic of her once-loving mother would be lurking to assail her.
In that bitter aftermath, too sick even to suck at the last of her lover’s freezing juices, she lay there amid the glittering bits of his empty armor till the furious princes swarmed down to drive her into the interstellar night, away from all she had ever loved.
Flying out into the dead emptiness of space, she clung to all those sad recollections until a new and dreadful hunger overwhelmed them with a terrible imperative, driving her on through the heatless dark to seek a place for her own new hive, a world where her firstborn neuter foragers might find life-metals and flight food for new generations as splendidly daring as their noble father had been.
As ruthless as her own fatal lust, that new ravening chose a star where she could sense no rival hive. Driven by it, helpless as a hatchling, she flew out across the halo where her prince had hunted and on into the black gulf beyond.
The flight took too long. Unfed, her prince’s precious seed had to burrow too soon into her own willing flesh. The first ecstatic agonies of that gave her a proud theme for her new saga, but they soon became eternities of delirium.
Nightmare dreads swarmed like maddened males around her, haunting her back into awareness. Her mass sacs had drained too fast. Her inner fires had grown too cold. She was too young, not yet fit for all the fearful hazards she must overcome. She thought the star ahead might have no planets fit to feed her brood. Some rival queen might get there first. Some native race might possess weapons not recorded in the sagas.
The gas giants cheered her when she found them, until she came near enough to sense points of heat far out in this new halo, most of them fixed but a few in motion almost as swift as her own. Enemy princes, out of a hive she hadn’t seen, swarming to kill her?
Yet, whatever the hazards, her time was too near to let her turn back. There was no other star near enough to reach before her flight sacs were altogether empty, before the fire metals cooled in her belly, before she died, consumed by her own dying brood. Agony and terror spurred her on, until she could sense sizes and make out shapes.
What she sensed killed her dread and edged her hunger. For these were no defending warriors. Nesting on the snow-clumps of the halo, or sometimes in flight between them, these were tiny creatures, strangely slow in flight and harmless as the idiot midges in the ballads of her hunter prince.
Some of them, surely, would be fat enough for food.
Janoort. Ice haloid on inner fringe of Oort halo, 600 AU out from the Sun (600 times as far out as Earth is). A mix of water, ammonia, and methane ices surrounding a heavier core formed of interstellar dust. Diameter, 129 kilometers: mean density, .9; surface gravity, 2 cm/sec²; day, 19.08 hours. Site of Halo Station.
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THE LIFE OF THE STATION HUNG BY A KWANLON thread. So Kerry used to say. That thread wound the master magnets in the fusion reactors that fought the interstellar cold. If it ever broke, there would be no light or heat, no food, no air.
Yet Kerry seldom seemed to worry.
“Par Dios, we’ll hold out.” He used to grin at Quin, while he sniffed his hot-smelling starmist. “Hoping somebody learns to spin a better thread.”
“I will,” Quin promised. “When I grow up.”
He was five years old.
“Somebody will.” Kerry’s blue eyes looked far away. “Somebody at the Kwan Labs most likely. Back Sunside.”
“I’m going Sunside,” Quin said. “I’ll find the thread and send it back.”
“Maybe you will.” He breathed his reeking starmist. “But you’ll have to grow up first.”
Quin might have been born on Halo Station if the old Aldebaran had been a faster ship, but he had come prematurely while they were still in space, six months out from Cotopaxi High and weeks before they found Janoort. His mother never told him who his father was, and he always wondered.
Nobody Earthbred. He felt certain of that, because the Earthbred weren’t allowed in Sun country except to be servants. A dashing Sunblood lover? A space lord, maybe, with fabulous wealth in Company shares?
Even one of the Kwans?
People said they all had the Romanoff nose. Inherited from a mad monk named Rasputin. When he asked about that, Kerry gave him a Sun-dollar coin that had an image of the first Tycoon under its shiny plastic. He frowned at the bright gold head with its considerable nose, and hurried to the mirror to peer at his own. It looked very ordinary.
Yet he kept on wondering.
His mother never said why she’d come so far away from home. That always troubled him, because she was never well or really happy at the station. He used to think she must be homesick for Earth and the skyweb and all the Sunside planets. Longing sadly, he imagined, for all the splendor she had left behind.
Once she let him see an old holo of her, taken back Earthside. In Sun country, she said, near Vogelkop Down. Staring, he hardly knew her. She was thin and pale now, with wrinkles around her eyes and her pale hair worn in a knot at the back of her neck. In the holo, she looked so lovely he ached for her.
The camera had caught her wading off a tropical beach, white water swirling around her knees, her hair bright as gold, loose and blowing in the wind. Her beauty seemed to light everything around her. The sky was strangely blue, with giant trees called palms leaning over the breaking waves and magic towers of white-shining cloud climbing under a dazzling Sun.
