THE THREE SUNS OF
AMARA
William F. Temple
EBook Design Group digital back-up edition 1.0
click for scan notes and proofing history
valid XHTML 1.0 strict
Contents
|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|
CAST OF CHARACTERS
THE EARTHMEN
Alexander Sherret: He believed that every man had a right to be himself, and he was ready to fight for that right.
Captain Maxton: He landed Alex on Amara—and left him.
Captain Bagshaw: He landed himself on Amara—and left himself.
THE NATIVES
Rosala: You could think of her as Circe, but it wasn’t at all accurate. Lee: He was trapped immovably between love and terror.
Canato: For him, one was company and two was a crowd.
Ace Books
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
1120 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10036
THE THREE SUNS OF AMARA
Copyright ©, 1962, by Ace Books, Inc.
All Rights reserved
First Ace printing: April, 1963 Second Ace printing: June, 1963
Printed in U.S.A.
CHAPTER ONE
^ »
THERE WAS always something new under the Three Suns.
Always new and usually inexplicable—if not downright crazy. On the astronomers’ charts the Three Suns bore dull number-plates: CXY
927340, CXY 927341, CXY 927342. The men from Earth called them simply by their colors: Blue, Yellow, Red. It seemed more than coincidence that these were the three primary colors. But if it were more, who could explain it?
Who could explain even half of what happened in the everchanging light of the Three Suns?
For instance, there was the orbit between them of CXY 927340/2-A. (Men again ignored the number-plate. To them, it was Amara.) Amara was a coveted only child, a living planet, and the Three Suns shared it among themselves with scrupulous justice.
Ethically, that made sense. Physically, it was mad. Mathematicians, who had retained their sanity after years of grappling with the hoary Problem of the Three Bodies, would tend to sink into melancholy after attempting to produce on paper proof of what they indisputably saw in the vicinity of the Three Suns. And this despite the whole mountain range of data concerning the vagaries of gravitational fields which had grown into being since interstellar travel became commonplace.
Blue, Yellow, and Red were spaced on the corners of an invisible equilateral triangle. Amara circled each sun in turn, rotating on its own axis as it went, providing rainbow-colored days for the Amarans, but never black night. The nearest to night, probably, was when Amara entered upon the passage between Blue and Red. Then the clouds were empurpled and people’s faces seemed dark and strange. But soon Yellow’s contribution came to dispel the shadows, and when Amara swung around to the far side of Yellow the sky became bright indeed. Between Yellow and Blue, grass-green was the light. Between Red and Yellow, a warm orange.
The juxtapositions of suns and planets, vaporous clouds and dust-clouds, were infinite. The skies of Earth seemed in retrospect like faded window drapes to one who’d seen the glowing, kaleidoscopic heavens of Amara.
One like Alexander Sherret.
Sherret remembered Earth with no particular regret. It was a place which everyone pretended was highly significant, if only because it was the cradle of humanity. The significance evaded Sherret. Amara was preferable; plainly, starkly, it mirrored the universe as it really was.
It was the Grand Doodle.
The Grand Doodler’s conscious attention had been someplace else—someplace, maybe, that was significant —the while his subconscious idly sketched out the pointless pattern of the universe. An enormously intricate pattern, naturally, from the depths of an enormously intricate mind. But significance it had not. And men became clowns or bores when they assumed they knew, and dilated upon, the meaning of it all.
All men are Doodles. Why argue?
But when someone tries to thrust Hobson’s choice down your gullet, you find yourself arguing.
Captain Maxton was doing the thrusting, and for him it was out of character; usually he had to be pushed.
“Make up your mind, Sherret. Are you a Goffist or a Reparist?”
“I’m a Sherretist, sir.”
“Cut the whimsy. I’ve got to know where I stand.”
“You should stand on your own feet, sir.”
The Captain flushed. He said rapidly, to divert attention from this giveaway, “I take it, then, that you’re still a Reparist?”
“Oh, damn all ’isms,” said Sherret, impatiently. “Men are men. They’re not Goffists, Reparists, Papists, Royalists, Chartists, Communists, Fascists, Buddhists Methodists, Existentialists, or what you have.”
The Captain looked at him, or nearly. He said, “In any society everyone has to accept the rules, else that society collapses into anarchism.”
“I’m with you that far, sir.”
“Yes, but under Reparism the rules are too rigid. If you don’t like ’em, you can’t do much to change them. But a Goffist always gets his chance to change things, and change them as much as he likes. Remold them nearer to the heart’s desire kind of thing. For a time, anyhow. Your turn to be Captain will come.”
“And go, sir.”
“Naturally. It’s a law of life. Things come, things go. Else—stagnation. It’s like a symphony orchestra, see? One instrument takes over from another. You’ve got to know when to stop. You can’t blow your own trumpet all the time when the aim is harmony. Look, Sherret, I’m going to leave you alone for thirty minutes. Think it over. Then decide finally whether you’re with us or against us. If you’re against us, you don’t belong here. And you can get to hell out of it. Go over to Bagshaw and his crew—if they’ll have you. And if you get there. For if you go, you’re going to have to walk all of the way on your two flat feet. I’m not risking what little transport we have on a dissenter. That’s it. I’ll be back in a half-hour.”
Captain Maxton strode out decisively. He would have liked to have slammed the door to show just how decisive he could be. Spaceship doors weren’t free swinging, however. This one sighed benignly shut behind him.
Sherret echoed the sigh. He relaxed on the bunk by the porthole. He began chewing on a B-stick to help along the relaxation. Like all spacemen, he’d had to break the smoking habit when he left Earth. If pipes were substitutes for feeding bottles at moments of regression into infancy, then a B-stick was a kind of teething ring. It helped when you felt like biting someone.
Thirty minutes to decide, and the decision was already made. No Goffism for him. Goff was a nut, a psychosociologist who advocated absolute rule by each qualified worker in a local community for a month, and absolute obedience by the rest—until their turn came.
The scheme was to have as many ideas put into practice as possible, instead of their languishing and dying untried. It was pragmatism plus. If an idea worked, it was true and good.
“General common sense will ensure the survival of the fittest ideas,” said the prophet of psychosociology.
Sherret reflected that Goff was inflated with theory and quite devoid of any real knowledge of human nature, its basic irrationality, its perversions, manias and erotic dreams. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It was the scheme of a simple-minded crank to uncage innumerable really dangerous cranks.
It was a pity that the ship had succeeded in re-establishing contact with Earth, to learn that Goffism was being widely adopted back there. Maxton had jumped at it, of course. It was his chance to relinquish the responsibility he realized he should never have accepted.