By: Dalibor Perković
Dalibor’s novel All The Blood Of Mankind was published in 2005 and it won the SFERA Award in 2006 for the best SF novel. It tells the story of the future of the mankind that had spread throughout the known universe, but hasn’t yet made contact with alien races. But when an artifact of an alien civilization is discovered in the deep space, a secret mission is launched …
We bring you the first 3 chapters of the novel, translated by Dalibor himself, with some aboriginal help from Ben Peake.
PART ONE
The sequence of events that preceded The Collapse will probably always give the historians, politicians and journalists something to argue about, question, catechise, compare facts, quarrel and insult each other. In short, to do all those things that made the social/political arena interesting for the masses, bloodthirsty and hungry for games since the beginning of time. Fortunately, the basics were known and agreed upon: in one instant there was the Terran Federation, in the second instant there was Chaos.
The previous entity had consisted of four hundred worlds. Thirty one open-aired, terraformed, with bright suns and blue skies; three-hundred and seventy closed inside the underground halls and cities; and one Mother Earth – more and more often called the “Stepmother” – a world packed with human beings whose sole purpose of existence was to go away, move out, escape from a crowded hell, overpopulated by eighty billion souls.
In the beginning, the Federation was more or less a settled community. It had its full complement of laws that might have been good and laws that might have been bad, but it worked for almost two hundred years. In spite of that, The Collapse threw this harmonious community into a burning spiral of violence – bombed planets, invasions, slaughter and everything else that happens when two groups of human beings come at each other’s throats, convinced that they are not the ones who are wrong. These were the facts. Everything else was, as the gentlemen with a substantial expirience in diplomacy would say, subject to interpretation.
The official Taryan version of history claimed that the Federation had grown old and rotten, that the secession of one third of the colonies was a logical response to a silent installation of the dictatorship. On the other hand, the Terran side claimed that the whole process had been arranged by a small group of clever individuals, Taryan gangsters, scientific elitists and defenders of the caste system, who managed to play a strong card just at the right moment, picking up the loot before the rest of the humanity realised what was happening.
A note should be made that the later events proved the points of both sides – Taryan itself never again returned to a democratic rule, while the remaining two thirds of the Federation sunk into some kind of semi-democratic, semi-dictatorial swamp using the “external threat” of secessionists as a good excuse to put its remaining undisciplined population under yet stricter control.
Some theories said that the whole process was set so that the individuals on both sides could satisfy their dictatorial tastes – in that regard the play was a complete success. Some claimed that everything was predestined, and that the issue here was a new stage in a millennial democracy-anarchy-tyranny cycle. Some spoke of the will of God, some spoke of the inevitability of history that doesn’t allow the existence of large empires. Some babbled about the Age of Aquarius that was supposed to be far more unstable than the previous one, as if the past two and a half millennia had been all blossoms, milk and honey. Some entertained themselves with cold pragmatism, claiming that the Federation needed an exhaust valve in the form of war and external threat, and itself started the whole operation. All of them were right in one way, wrong in another, all incomplete and all sure of their infallibility.
Of course, then there were the omnipresent conspiracy theorists, claiming the real truth will never be revealed. According to them, this converging point of history was magnificently small and tied to a small group of conspirators on both sides – Taryan and Terran – who knew full well how to keep their secrets.
Naturally, these theorists were just a paranoid minority. A few individuals cannot determine the history of billions, the mainstream philosophers said, the pressure of the masses is too big for a single group to direct. People have their needs and will act accordingly. There is no magical baton that can make them run in one direction or another, as some conductor might wish. After all, humans are not cattle, and individuals’ feelings that it was time for a change could not possibly be enough to stir up all this confusion and chaos. So, mainstream historians decided that human history had its course to run, and a single event or a single player simply couldn’t influence it’s path. If the key positions within the human race were occupied by other actors, it would all have happened exactly the same way it did. Some worlds would split off, some would not, some would try and fail. It would all happen, at least statistically, just as it was written in the history books of this version of the universe.
How wrong!
1.
The “Beagle’s” gallery was empty and desolated, just what he needed. While the rest of the ship behind him was sinking into alcohol and drug induced havoc, Pavel Stadtler sat near the diamond glass window and looked at the dark-brown planet, appropriately called Eldorado, their dark object of desire and the objective of a two-year-long journey. He was in the darkest of all moods. He raised his legs to a round table in the middle of the room and tried to sink deeper into the soft armchair, to wrap himself into the cosy synthetic fur and not think of the chaos spreading throughout the ship.
An unbearable drumming was rising from the speakers somewhere behind him. It seemed that DJ Misha’s self-control had slipped off, and he’d started playing his new-wave works, although the senior members of the expedition had warned him not to. Considering the noise, the senior members were oblivious enough that they wouldn’t care what came out of the speakers. More or less all the doors in the ship were open, so the noise reached all corners of the living sections. Somebody broke a glass, then somebody screamed, and somebody laughed loudly. Somebody from the nearby hall, probably Matheus, yelled out for instructions to help find something somebody sent him to get, but Pavel didn’t pay any attention. All he could hear was a mocking laughter, ranging from giggling to guffawing. The stars of the unfamiliar sky, spread across the window, were laughing at him and at him only. Congratulations, young man, you did it, they screamed. You have fulfilled all your great wishes and plans, and you are still in your early thirties. Congratulations, because although your life span seems to us just like a swing of butterfly wings, you have succeeded in turning the course of your species’ history so much that even We may notice it.
And really, Pavel had to admit, they were right. Since he was a child he dreamed of becoming a great scientist. He dreamed of becoming important and respected. He dreamed of a scientific study and a scientific career, the one that would give him a chance to participate in a great expedition that would be composed of select scientists, that would start a long, dangerous voyage and return with an epochal discovery.
The finding of an ancient alien base at Tau-Ceti, practically in the middle of the human sphere, came at the right moment to force him to take the path that, in the end, had brought him to this armchair in this gallery on this ship ten thousand light-years away from civilisation. He was seven or eight years old when they’d found the derelict complex. Just the right time for a child to receive a boost to the imagination. That memory would never fade. He remembered the live transmission vividly, people in spacesuits stumbling through the huge, dark underground halls, through strange and ancient workshops, through something that must have been an alien equivalent of a library. He remembered them saying how unbelievably clean everything was, how there was no dust and how some of the devices were still working. For years afterwards, he’d dreamed of finding living aliens. But as he grew older and more serious, he realised he could forget about it. But never mind, he would be quite satisfied with an ordinary epochal discovery that would change the course of human history, that would relieve people from all their worries and put his name next to the names of Newton, Einstein, Planck, Magellan, Cook and Vasco de Gama.
So it happened. They gathered up a scientific expedition, he signed in, got accepted along with another twenty respectable and worthy candidates and left on a trip 10.000 light-years away from home. He found his epochal discovery that will, no doubt about it, change the course of human history, and it is very possible that it will relieve a lot of people of all their worries. And he achieved all this – congratulations, the stars screamed – while still in his early thirties.
Maybe he took it too much to his heart. Because, to be honest, his personal contribution to all this was pretty marginal. Pavel was an assistant to an older scientist who specialised in the field. Since the old man didn’t feel like abandoning everything and going on a voyage lasting years, he’d taken his mentor’s place as the second best available expert in Fluctuation Tunnelling Systems Based On Alien Technology. However, the expedition had a fixed schedule, as they knew exactly where they were going, why they were going and roughly what they could find there. The existence of the second alien base had been rumoured since the discovery of the first one, and when it was finally made public that the coordinates have been decoded and that a ship would be sent to check out what was there, nobody had really been surprised. So there wasn’t much Pavel could do to change the story’s ending. He was, bluntly, Assistant Cannon Fodder.
That didn’t make him feel much better. As soon as they returned home, all their names – including his – would be written into the glorious golden book of brave explorers. They would be etched beside all those who went where no man has gone before, and they would return with an artefact that would be amongst the greatest discoveries since the beginnings of mankind. And when it turned out that this discovery was not that much of a blessing, their names – including his – would still be written in the very same glorious book for everybody to see. But this time they will be subject to less zealous interpretation and analysis. How long will it take, Pavel wondered, for us to turn from angels to demons?
Trembling, he wrapped his arms tight around his body, maybe because of the coldness of the universe behind the diamond glass. However, the ship behind him seemed to reach melting point – the noise was getting louder and the party was getting crazier. He tried to sink deeper into the armchair in an attempt to isolate himself from the noise. All day long he’d been wondering how to avoid the celebration, he planned to say that he was not feeling well or something like that, but it all seemed too naive. The scientists, who under normal circumstances would be serious and stiff, approached the party preparations with almost religious fanaticism, anathematising anybody who decided to fall just a bit below the party level as dictated in the Holy Plan. So he’d simply hidden here. He knew they would look in his cabin and try to drag him to the party and only hoped he would be safe in the gallery room, although, his exposure to the public was just a matter of time.
The sad moment came when, who knows why, a loud group began their sweep across the ship. He heard them coming from the hall and began to relax, pretending he was asleep. It just might work. But his mask was ripped off in the roughest possible way when he heard Cato addressing someone still outside the gallery: “Hey, guys, we’ve found our lost kitten. It thought it could hide, but nobody escapes the Wild Partysans!”
The last words were screamed out, as if announcing some super-popular pop band. Pavel didn’t have time to think because five or six “Wild Partysans”, mostly younger members of the expedition, swarmed into the room, babbling at him, inviting him to the party and shoving glasses under his nose. At that moment, Cato raised his arm like a Roman senator and the crowd came silent.
“Young colleague,” started Cato solemnly. “We have noticed your absence from the festivities and we believe that this is not right. To begin with, have you anything to say for yourself?”
Pavel wasted a few precious moments thinking, but Cato was just starting. “Did you think that your boycott would go unnoticed, sir? We would like you to know that your absence hurts Us deeply.” Cato emphasized the words “us” and “we” so that even Pavel had to restrain from grinning, “And that the only thing you can possibly do to insure our pardon is to repent, admit error of your ways and join…” he took a deep breath and then screamed, “The Wild Partysans!” The surrounding audience cheered.
“So, our young colleague, what is your answer to this noble demand of Ours?” Cato asked and the group’s attention redirected back to the victim who was trying to meld with the armchair. Pavel opened his mouth still not knowing what to say, but the spokesman interrupted again, raising his finger: “He agrees. Away with him!” he commanded and five pairs of hands grabbed Pavel, lifted him and carried him out of the gallery. Drunk and stoned, first they tried to drag him through the door sideways, which didn’t quite work, because the door was too narrow. Then someone got the idea and they pulled him headlong into the corridor.
He was unloaded into the centre of chaos, the room where twenty people were jumping to the rhythm of the noise blaring out of the walls, drinking and pouring alcohol all over the place and themselves. At first, Pavel wanted to grab the first chance to run away. But he realised this was just what they were waiting for and that the Wild Partysans would be delighted to seize the opportunity to hunt him down just for sport. So he just gave up. Anyway, there was a much quicker, less painful and more efficient way to put things to an end. It was simple – he would get drunk fast, throw up, end up in his cabin or – even better – sickbay, and later he would be able to tell everybody how he had a really good time. He might even become the star of the evening.
It took him two glasses in half a minute to get really dizzy. “We have to make a worthy celebration of this great day that gave birth to a discovery that will change the course of human history!”, he prattled to Joseph who gazed as Pavel poured liquid into himself. After the initial two glasses, he sipped only half of the next glass in order not to look too suspicious, and moved away from the spring of remedial fluids. He considered consuming something stronger and getting completely stoned for a while. Misha always carried a small set of various powders, pills and ampoules that were not directly illegal, but whose effects were as if they were. But not yet, he decided. Now that he was getting comfortably numb he might even start enjoying the party. If he didn’t throw up before that.
Everything was fine during the first fifteen minutes. But then somebody turned off the music and Hubert Berenger, chief of the expedition, also ironically called capo di espedizione, but only when not present, lifted his noble trunk upon the improvised stage and held a speech that made Pavel gaze into his glass. I am drunk, but then, why is he talking nonsense? Berenger babbled such rubbish that it was obvious that he began toping long before the party officially started. But that seemed more like getting drunk out of pure spite. The way Pavel had heard it in the corridors earlier, the old fart was resolutely against the party until the last task – sending a report – had been completed. This far from Earth, the laws of physics had their limitations, and the transmitter capacitors had to be charged for hours in order to spurt out a message that could be received at home. Berenger had demanded that the job had to be finished first, and that they could party as much as they wanted afterwards. However, the majority thought otherwise. The report was drawn up, packed and compressed, the capacitors were already charging, the energy would burst into the transmitter at a fixed time, and at the same moment hypersensors in the Solar system would catch the signal and the processors would decompress it. It was all automated and prearranged and there was no point in waiting for an opening ceremony just to get obliterated!
Berenger would have persisted in his rigid formalism, because his word was final and he was the one and only capo dei tutti capi. Fortunately, Helena Leonova, head scientist who didn’t mind being called capessa di scienza, presented him with a fait accompli by simply telling everybody that there would be a party tonight, that there would be liquor and music, and that was it.
And this was why Berenger had got so loaded. He probably wanted to show how great a sport he was, that he was a part of the community, one of them and not just some bossy old fart. So, he’d got so drunk that he wasn’t able to talk properly, and then he’d made a speech. Of course, the speech was met with cheers, and its ending with ecstasy. Then they turned the music on again in order to prevent a potential encore. Then the real party could start. Pavel, fully loaded, even started to shake his ass to the rhythm of the music, dancing up to the eight-metre-wide picture spread across the wall. He stopped there and looked at it, while some strange laughter he remembered from half hour before started to penetrate through his alcohol-induced numbness. He realised what he was looking at.
Who put that there? he thought as his mood sunk deeper and deeper.
The picture showed an object they found in the abandoned alien warehouse on the planet. The artefact resembled a tuning fork, fairly thin, fifteen metres long, with two parallel spikes at one end and a thicker stalk at the opposite end. When he had first seen the picture, only two days ago, it looked like a part of a simple crane.If you plugged the thick end into something and supposed that the pair of spikes, three metres apart, had some kind of antigravity something else, the thing could quite nicely work as a heavy load transporter. Or, alternately, as a giant plug for powering up ships that come to some alien energy supply terminal – a ship approaches, the fork comes out of its casing, the ship removes the metal board that covers the plug, clack, bzzzzt, battery charged, ready for another thousand light-years long flight. In any case, it was obvious that the thick end was supposed to be plugged or connected somewhere, while the spikes, about half the length of the whole artefact, were supposed to stick out and perform the mysterious function that was the machine’s prime purpose.
Within these two days it became clear that the discovery was neither a crane nor a power plug, nor anything that would serve such a benign purpose as a cargo or energy transport or, after all, any function performed at a harmless place such as a warehouse, factory or an orbital terminal. It is known that there is no kind of a harmless object that such as ingenious mind as human couldn’t turn into a dangerous weapon. But this – the discovery, artefact, tuning fork, in short: remote gravity inductor, as baptised by capessa di scienza – could do great things from very large distances. It could induce a “gravitational mass charge” anywhere in space, with the distance and the magnitude of the charge depending solely on the exerted energy. In other words, powered by a big enough generator, the inductor could bend space a few astronomical units away as if the mass equivalent to a black hole was standing there. The effect would last for a few hours, and then the space would unfold itself and go back to normal, having chewed any kind of matter that was unlucky enough to find itself in the vicinity.
At first everybody shook their heads in disbelief at that interpretation, but then Hubert Berenger, capo di espedizione himself, took a team that charged the device and made the test. To Pavel’s and a few others’ great sorrow, the thing worked perfectly and the few asteroids that served as targets were ample judges of that. In addition to the lethality, the device’s precision was unthinkable. While shooting at a distance of ten astronomical units the aberration from the target was only a few kilometres.
Some usages became obvious at once. For example, there was no need to induce a whole black hole – a mass much smaller than the Earth’s Moon, compressed into a single point, could tear a ship apart if it appeared a few kilometres away. Also, using a sufficient amount of energy (unavailable so far, because a generator that powerful hasn’t been built – yet) it would be possible to tear a whole planet apart at a distance of several light-years. All one had to do was supply enough energy, and that was just a technical problem.
And the “Beagle” crew was about to deliver this device to the human race.
All this had passed through Pavel’s mind many times during the past days. He remembered it as he looked at the picture, while around him havoc was raging, and just as he was about to turn around and go away from this source of present and future miseries, he felt somebody’s arm grabbing his shoulder and holding him where he was.
“Do you know… young man… what kind of fuckin’ hot shots… we are…” Berenger mumbled, leaning on Pavel’s shoulder. The air coming out of the old man’s mouth was saturated with alcoholic vapours and Pavel hoped no one would approach with an open flame. He felt that if he made some sudden move, capo di espedizione would fall flat on the floor and probably wouldn’t get up or wake up until treated by some heavy medicine. After this first sentence, all that Pavel heard were scattered fragments randomly taken from the previous incoherent speech, “glory of man”, “organisation”, “central authority”, “written in gold”, “you and me”, “us and me”, “me and me”, “fuckin’ hotshots”, “red carpet and the fanfare”, “run for President”…
After five minutes of Pavel’s stoic suffering, Captain Gerry innocently wandered into the danger zone and Pavel innocently passed the babbling load from his shoulder onto the Captain’s. He slipped away and staggered in Misha’s direction to ask him about the pills and other aromatic additives. He could recall Misha nodding, smiling and putting his hand into the pocket, and then the curtain of darkness fell.
And here he was on Taryan again. At the university, in the great amphitheatre where lectures were held. He hadn’t been here for a long time, but his friends were all in the lecture hall and they looked just as he remembered them. He was younger, too. Well, nice to be back, he thought. And professor Hönick, a sociologist, was out of control again, talking about politics, the Federation, what was wrong, what was right, what needed to be changed and why it will never be done. He complained about the Constitution, history, days of colonization, of colony ships, centralism, autonomism, that every democracy is the rule of mediocrity. All in all, the things about society those were useful to know. But, as natural science students, the listeners present in this room didn’t see anything useful in that. Then Dr. Hönick mentioned the “absolute weapon” and attracted Pavel’s attention.
“A threat to a stable and well-established democracy can come only from the outside. If the system does not support the creation of isolated centres of power, but instead is inclined towards unification, then the circulating power will remain dispersed within a dynamic balance and none of the participants will allow anyone else to grow stronger. Before and during the third industrial revolution on old Earth, the countries confronted each other and there was always the danger that the preoccupation by the external enemy would become more important than preserving the system. However, there is no such danger today. There is a possibility that someone within the system could rise and invert it as a whole, but it hasn’t happened so far and it seems that there are a sufficient number of safety mechanisms. It seems that all the would-be global dictators are satisfied with a bit of corruption here and there and are not eager to bite off something too big for them to chew.”
Then he started talking about other threats to the system, of the global corporations whose strengthening had been stopped by the globalisation of the state, about terrorists that can never succeed simply because, even with ten thousand hostages, there will always be billions of others whose interests will prevail.
“So sacrificing of the hostages will, for the community, be the lesser evil. Simply, maintaining the balance has its price that someone has to pay. Things change if we vary the game’s magnitude. If, say, an individual should get a hold on some kind of an absolute weapon, he may use it to blackmail the billions. In that case, the rules change and the system is crushed by an outside threat. However, for now, the system controls its absolute weapons and it is not very probable that an individual can get his fingers on them. But this possibility should always be kept in mind – power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and an absolute weapon gives absolute power!” he concluded. Pavel thought that all this was very interesting, wondering could the gravity inductor be considered an “absolute weapon”. He should check that.
The next moment he was running around with a small gravity inductor in each hand and making holes in walls: he would point the device, fire it and the black mark would appear on the desired spot. It would then disappear and leave a real hole in the wall. Finally the grown-ups appeared in order to take his toys away. He pointed the inductors and made the effort to activate them, but instead of black holes appearing inside the human bodies and eating up their internals, they just kept approaching with expressions on their faces that said “Enough of this game”. Pavel began crying over his destiny, because it always had to happen to him. He tried and tried, but the inductor simply wouldn’t fire. Then he opened his mouth to get some air, and then he awoke.
