Sentenced to Prism Read online

  Sentenced to Prism

  Alan Dean Foster

  A Del Rey Book

  Copyright 1985

  ISBN 0-345-319110-

  First Edition: September 1985

  Cover Art by Barclay Shaw

  CONTENT

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About The Author

  Dedication

  Here's one for Don and Dana Carroll to peruse while they're fixing Italy...

  Chapter One

  A fine day it was; clear and cloudless, bright (oh, how bright!) and cheerful, a day on which all things seemed possible. Even dying. Dying had not been on Evan Orgell's schedule for the day, but that was the result he was on the verge of achieving. And there wasn't a damn thing he could do to prevent it.

  Because his suit was broken.

  All around him the extraordinary, phantasmagorical world called Prism teemed with life. His visit to Prism was supposed to set him up for life. Now it appeared likely it was going to set him up for something else.

  The air centimeters from his face was rich with oxygen he couldn't breathe. Nearby burbled a stream of fresh, cool water he couldn't drink. It flowed through a forest full of plants and animals he couldn't eat.

  Prism's sun warmed his face. It was intensely bright but no hotter than the star which circled Evan's own world, Samstead. At midday the temperature was positively benign. He could breathe the air of Prism, drink its water, eat his own rations, and yet he was going to die. He was going to die because his suit was broken.

  It shouldn't be. It was a very special suit, even by the unique standards of Samstead. It had been built especially for this visit. The engineers and designers had constructed it to protect him from every imaginable danger, every conceivable threat a world like Prism could pose. What the suit's builders did not foresee, could not have foreseen, was the utter alienness of Prism's inhabitants, not to mention their insidious cleverness.

  It wasn't entirely their fault, he had to admit. The engineers were used to building survival suits for work on worlds whose lifeforms were nothing more than variations on a familiar theme, that theme being the carbon atom. Prism was different. There evolution had proceeded from a different beginning to wildly different conclusions.

  It was that evolution which had broken his suit.

  The bright sun continued to beat down on his unshaded form. While the temperature outside his artificial epidermis remained pleasant, it was starting its inexorable upward climb within. Evan desperately wanted a drink of water. He tried to roll over. The permanently sealed servos refused to respond and he stayed as he'd fallen, fiat on his back.

  His left arm wouldn't move at all. The right groaned as he stretched for the water. It was a radical break with procedure, but he thought he might cup some water in his one operable hand instead of trying to draw fluid from the helmet tap.

  Assuming he could do this, though, how could he deliver the water to his mouth through the suit's impenetrable visor? His right arm went limp and he gave it up, exhausted by the attempt, just as he'd been exhausted by Prism ever since he'd touched down on its glittering, disorienting surface.

  It had all seemed so simple and straightforward back on Samstead. An unparalleled opportunity for advancement within the company. There was no way he could fail to carry out the assignment. He'd never failed before, had he? Not Evan Orgell.

  Methodical, brilliant, incisive, overpowering. Also impatient, overbearing, and arrogant. All those descriptions had been applied to him from the beginning of his career by those who admired him as well as those who hated or simply envied him. All were to varying degrees accurate. Failure was not a term which applied to Evan Orgell.

  Until now. Because his suit was broken and survival suits just didn't break. Until now. It was something that did not happen.

  As Prism shouldn't have happened.

  He lay there on his back, trying to gather his remaining strength and regulate his breathing while he considered what to try next. The first thing was to get out of the direct glare of the sun. Using his right arm as a lever, he slipped it beneath him and pushed. The servos whined, his body lifted, and he managed to roll a couple of meters to his right, beneath the torus of a cascalarian. A tiny triumph, a very minor achievement, but it made him feel a little better.

  The cascalarian occupied the same ecological niche on Prism as a shade tree on Earth or Samstead, but it was not properly a tree. It possessed neither leaves nor chlorophyll. The tripartite central trunk was three meters high. From there stiff spines grew parallel to the ground. There supported a transparent glassy torus which was filled, with a great variety of life, some of it motile, all of it part of the parent growth. It reminded Evan of an imploded Christmas tree.

  Everything grew toward the central trunk and the center of the torus. There was no outward expansion. Competition for living space within the torus was fierce and constant, yet all of it was part of the cascalarian's own closed system. The various shapes were competing for food. Which was to say, for sunlight. Like the majority of lifeforms on Prism, the cascalarian was a photovore.

  The thin outer shell of the torus magnified the sunlight falling on it. Within the protective magnifying shell the internal lifeforms were colored lapis blue and aquamarine. Here and there a few patches of royal blue-something twisted and throve. There were also unhealthy-looking patches of pink sponge, but they were rare.

  The cascalarian was an organosilicate structure, as were most of the dominant lifeforms on Prism, for it was a world based as much on silicon as carbon. A world of glass, beauty, and confusion.

  No matter. Shade was shade, he mused.

  By turning his head he could look down at the stream. The cool, pure, fast-running stream that could save his life, if he could get to it. The stream was alive with snow­flakes. Twenty of them would fit easily in the palm of his hand.

  Snowflakes had tiny transparent legs which ended in broad flat pads. Attached to their backs was a single curved sail about the size of a thumbnail. They congregated where the water was still, partying on the surface tension. As the sun rose or fell they adjusted their stance to receive as much of its light as possible, crowding and shoving each other for the best place. Each photoreceptive sail was a different metallic color: carmine red, cobalt blue, deep purple, emerald green. A pair of tiny crystalline eyes marked the location of each head, and the eyes were colored the same intense hue as their owner's sail.

  Powered by Prism's sun, the creatures dashed silently back and forth across the water, using tiny vacuuming mouths to suck up the mineral-rich silico-flagellata washed down from above. Thoughts of predation began to worry Evan. He was in no danger from the cascalarian or the brightly colored snowflakes, but he knew that Prism was home also to creatures which would gladly take him apart. Not for meat, but for the valuable store of minerals his body contained. The human body was a mine of highly prized trace elements. So was his suit. A big scavenger would draw no distinction between man and clothing and would devour both with equal pleasure.

  His body was particularly rich in iron, potassium, and calcium. A mine. My mine is mine, he thought, too tired to laugh. The sun continued to raise the suit's internal temperature, despite the cascalarian's shade. He blinked against his own sweat. He had to do something soon.

  No. He ha
d to do something sooner than that, because something was coming toward him. He was sure his vision wasn't that far gone. Whatever was approaching wasn't very big, but then, it wouldn't have to be to do some real damage, given his helpless semi-comatose state.

  He couldn't see it clearly because the special discriminatory visor of his suit helmet wasn't functioning properly. The visor was necessary because many of Prism's lifeforms were organized according to fractal instead of normal geometry. They tended to blur if you stared at them for very long, as the human eye sought patterns and organization where none existed. Fractals existed somewhere between the first and second dimension or the second and the third. No one, not even the mathematicians, was quite sure.

  It didn't matter so long as you looked through the Hausdorf lenses. They were built into the visor of his suit helmet. Which was broken. As a result, fractally organized figures didn't look quite right when viewed through unadjusted transparencies. Like the whatever it was that was slowly coming toward him.

  It was more than merely disconcerting. You could go crazy. Fortunately he was too tired to care. So very tired.

  He could feel himself drifting, falling asleep or fainting, he wasn't sure which. Not that it mattered.

  He only hoped that the alien entity stalking his motion­less form would start by eating the damn suit instead of its helpless occupant.

  Chapter Two

  The storm raged as Evan strode briskly down Korbyski Avenue. He was enjoying it. Powerful thunderstorms were a frequent visitor to this part of Samstead. The wind, heavy rain, and lightning were exhilarating. Naturally, the weather didn't affect him at all because, like everyone else on Samstead, he was wearing a suit.

  He happened to be clad in a developmental engineer's duty suit, status semiformal. Its internal stabilizers allowed him to stride without strain into a seventy-kph gale. Evaporators and dispersers kept his face visor clear. The thermosensitive weave kept him warm and dry. The light, flexible material was dyed dark green. Black stripes ran diagonally across his chest, left shoulder, and left leg. Two bands of lighter green crossed his right shoulder. Evan was partial to subdued attire.

  The street was crowded with citizens rushing about their daily errands. Each wore a uniquely decorated suit and none paid any attention to the near hurricane battering the city.

  Suits were comforting not only to those who wore them but also to everyone else, since a suit reflected not only its wearer's personal taste, but also his or her profession, wealth, or private interests. Evan passed one woman who was having trouble controlling her offspring, who were fiddling with their stabilizers in order to float freely in the wind a meter above the pavement. He could hear her shouts clearly over the omnidirectional universal communicator. She was late for some kind of business lunch and didn't have time to indulge naughty children. Besides which if they didn't settle down, behave, and walk properly, they were going to miss ballet class.

  That threat convinced the youngsters to reset their stabilizers. They dropped gently to the street and toddled along silently in their mother's wake— though every so often the boy would rise a couple of centimeters off the ground until a sharp backward. glance from his mother would force him to return quickly to the pavement.

  Evan smiled at the byplay between mother and son, turned another corner, and found himself confronting a towering structure with a concave facade. He started through the central courtyard toward the imposing entrance. Over the doorway was the legend THE AURORA GROUP, rendered in blue crystal. In the center of the open courtyard and dominating it was a three-story-tall fountain in the shape of the company logo, three worlds forming a pyramid. The fountain played smoothly despite the constant wind. The water was contained by carefully programmed hydrostatic charges.

  The door recognized him and let him through. As he entered the foyer his suit automatically adjusted to the warmer temperature inside. At the touch of a button on his right wrist, his visor and hood folded back into the neck of his suit, forming a neat high collar of the style favored by British admirals of the seventeenth century.

  By the time the elevator deposited him on the fortieth floor the suit had dried itself and removed its own wrinkles.

  Nothing in his appearance suggested that he'd spent the previous half hour strolling through a whirlwind. Samstead's weather was the reason for the invention of the Samstead duty suit. What had evolved from necessity had been metamorphosed by custom and fashion into something considerably more elaborate. Scientific invention had unintentionally paved the way for the establishment of a social convention that was unique to Samstead.

  Seram Machoka was waiting for him. Since no desk was visible in the president's office, it was apparent that the meeting was going to be conducted on an informal basis. That suited Evan just fine. He was at his best when the diplomatic niceties did not have to be observed.

  He walked right in, unchallenged by human or mechanical intervention. It all looked very casual, but his progress was being monitored by company security. There was no reason to stop him. He was a known company man, in a known company suit.

  Machoka smiled and waved Evan to a couch without rising from the lounger on which he reclined. Then he turned away as if suddenly disinterested to look through the transparent outside wall at the storm still engulfing the city.

  He was wearing a supervisorial communicator's suit modified to resemble leather. A series of concentric circles and alternating bands of yellow and white decorated the upper half of the suit, rising from his waistband to his right shoulder. The left side of the suit bulged slightly. It was stuffed with tactile controls and contact points. A desk was nothing more than a quaint formality. Machoka's suit could put him in contact with every division of the company.

  Evan waited patiently, supremely confident as always but hard pressed to restrain his curiosity. He'd never met Machoka before. There had been no reason for the two men to meet. Evan was an employee of the company and Machoka its president. They moved on different levels. Now there was reason for those levels to interact, and he was intrigued.

  His colleagues at work had teased him about the summons though Evan wasn't easy to tease. That was part of his personality, the part that sometimes angered those who didn't know him and put off those who did. He couldn't understand why he could gain everyone's respect but not their affection. He was friendly and outgoing, always willing to help anyone with a problem. Could he help it if he was smarter than them? His tall frame didn't help in cozying up to acquaintances. Tall people intimidated, short people ingratiated. We're still primitives at heart, he always reminded himself.

  A few close friends understood him well enough to take his daily Olympian pronouncements with a grain of salt and to joke with him about the drawbacks of his personality. They were there to congratulate him on his summons. It might involve a big step up the corporate ladder.

  At least Evan's size wouldn't put Machoka on the defensive. The company president was as tall as Evan, though much darker of skin and scarcer of hair. He wore spiral tattoos on his forehead and neck, and big round metal earrings. A titanium arrowhead was glued to his shaved forehead. His personal adornment was confined to the skull. He wore no rings or bracelets and nothing on his suit. The suit was all business.

  Eventually Machoka turned away from the storm to regard his visitor. " Do sit down, Orgell."

  Despite the office owner's admirable efforts to convey a feeling of ease and relaxation, Evan sensed the tenseness in the president's voice.

  He folded himself into the couch. It was close to the transparent wall. A couple of meters from his left side the gale smashed raindrops against the plexalloy.

  Something in Machoka's suit beeped softly. Irritated, he threw Evan an apologetic half smile while his fingers danced over the rightside controls. He whispered toward his chest and Evan heard him say quietly, "No more calls for the next hour, please." There was no way of telling whether he was commanding a machine or a person.

  Several telltales on
the right side of his suit immediately went dark. Only one remained active. It glowed a steady red.

  "It's a pleasure to meet you, sir," Orgell said politely. He had not expected to be more relaxed than the company president, but it was becoming clear such was the case. It only left him feeling that much more confident. He had not the slightest doubt he would be able to carry out whatever assignment the company had in mind for him. He always had.

  There is a small group of people who are convinced that they can do anything, absolutely anything asked of them. Evan Orgell was one of them. Of course, he wasn't omnipotent. He couldn't do everything. But he was convinced that he could. That kind of conviction carries a power all its own.

  Machoka tugged at his left sleeve until he'd revealed a slim bracelet. So Evan had been wrong about the absence of body jewelry.

  "What do you think of this?"

  Evan leaned forward to study the bracelet. It was bright yellow and faceted all the way around. "I'm not a gemologist. I couldn't tell you if it was a natural stone or artificial, much less if it's worth anything."

  "It's natural." Machoka seemed to be trying to hide his amusement and it occurred to Evan there might be more to the adornment than first met the eye. The president rose, walked over to stand close to Evan, and stuck out his arm, palm up. "Here. Take a closer look."

  Evan did so, wondering what he was supposed to be looking for. Many facets cut by a steady hand, he decided. A dark wire appeared to run through the center of the crystal with smaller wires branching out from it. Inclusions of some sort, or at. integrated support matrix added by the jeweler to strengthen the stone. He said as much to Machoka.

  The older man couldn't conceal his pleasure any further. "No, you're not even close."

  Evan was a little miffed. He had serious work of his own to do, and if the president of the company wanted someone to play guessing games with, he could damn well find another candidate.

  Machoka sensed his discomfort, adopted a more serious mien. "Touch it." He gestured with his wrist. "It has a most interesting feel."