Sudanna Sudanna Read online

  Table of Contents

  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

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  About the Author

  Brian Herbert

  SUDANNA, SUDANNA

  Brian Herbert

  On the peanut-shaped planetoid of Ut, a 15-million-year-old computer named Mamacita rules with dictatorial control. Her every whim is a steadfast rule, and no command is stronger than the ban of Sudanna, the wind that sweeps across Ut spreading the liberating sounds of music.

  Hiley OIV is one of Ut’s most conscientious inhabitants, a man so afraid of losing his head (utpeople have very precarious necks) that a Bad Thought almost never enters his mind. But now his teenage daughter has fallen in love with Prussirian BBD—Ut’s most notorious outlaw—a man who has broken Mamacita’s cardinal rule: he makes music.

  ***

  Smashwords Edition - 2014

  WordFire Press

  www.wordfirepress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61475-017-8

  Copyright 2011 DreamStar Inc.

  Sudanna, Sudanna Copyright 1985, 2011 by DreamStar, Inc.

  First publication 1985 Arbor House

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover design by Janet MacDonald

  Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

  www.RuneWright.com

  Published by

  WordFire Press, an imprint of

  WordFire, Inc.

  PO Box 1840

  Monument CO 80132

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  ***

  CHAPTER ONE

  When we conquered Ut, the utpeople breathed with a single lung located in the center of the chest. Shortly after we abolished all music there (including the stringed flute, or Zuggernaut), a curious thing happened: their lungs atrophied and collapsed, causing their torsos to become nearly flat. With most breathing life forms, this would have been fatal. The utpeople, however, seem capable of subsisting on a daily water intake and solar energy, with nutrients transmitted to their vital organs via the intricate solar collector hairs covering their bodies. The lung was used solely to blow Zuggernaut music. Their music has been correlated with rebelliousness: control it and you control the people.

  —synopsis in U-Lotan Field Journal 1352,

  one of the dust-covered cello-volumes

  placed in storage by Mamacita,

  the planetoid’s mother computer

  The peanut-shaped planetoid of Ut was merely a punctuation mark in the universe, and barely that. In only a matter of U-Lotan standard days, this world would become the scene of one of the most peculiar natural disasters ever recorded.

  At noon one day in its deep rock bowl known as Shriek Loch, a mottled brown-and-white Shriek swam gracefully in chloral argon, arching its boneless, spidery body to hydrodynamic perfection. Six webbed amphibious legs worked at its sides, pulling and waiting out each glide, then pulling again. The Shriek’s white face was concave, with a round, sloping nose, two narrowly set bright yellow eyes, and a large, jag-toothed mouth.

  Far across Ut, beneath the planetoid’s pale red sky, a split-level dwello floated on a different body of liquid. Inside that home, the utwoman Maudrey OIV used the multifunction sensor on her face to watch the flat, liquid-crystal display panel of her family’s plasmaviewer. A low, rumbling noise from chloral argon loch currents came through the machine’s speaker. She watched the faraway Shriek dive deep into green liquid and enter an irregular, rock-lined tunnel. The short tunnel opened into a dimly lit cavern of immersed, phosphorescent rocks. She had seen this airless place, the sleeping den of the Shrieks, before on her screen. Some of the creatures already slept, and their sonar slumber sounds filled the cavern. Maudrey’s screen went black for a moment as the Shriek, projecting to her viewer, blinked its eyes slowly. Then the picture returned.

  My Shriek is following the other, she thought. The dwello lurched beneath her, causing her to brace her stubby, rubber-shoed feet.

  Her family’s dwello floated on a warm current of liquefied Ut soil, entirely separate from the chloral argon enclosed within the rocky confines of Shriek Loch. The soil of Ut, known as galoo, had the consistency of sun-heated taffy during this time of the year. It was Flux season, that three-month period when Ut and its much larger planetary partner, Sudanna (“Rilu” to the conquerors), passed closest to the blue gasball sun. Galoo was a common soil in the Blue Sun 593 Star Group, one of many conquered by the U-Lotans, a powerful race of sociologist-philosophers. Galoo below 27 degrees Centigrade looked and behaved much like dirt found in other solar systems according to one of Maudrey’s science books—forming into clods, mud, and dust. Above that temperature, galoo lost its water solubility and became tacky but not sticky, thinning to a warm liquid above 39 degrees Centigrade.

  A sudden glare across the screen and warmth on Maudrey’s shoulders told her the early afternoon sun had cleared a cloud, casting rays through the high dwello window behind her. She considered drawing the shade, but just then the sunlight dimmed.

  The pedestal-mounted plasmaviewer used by Maudrey’s family resembled any other on Ut, with a square, red plastic cabinet and a small, round Lotanglas screen on each face of the square, thus enabling several people to sit around it and partake in the magnified image simultaneously. Maudrey knew roughly how it worked: inside the mechanism was a tiny mercuric-chilled drop of living Shriek plasma, sealed in thermal magnification Lotanglas. The droplet in her viewer had been extracted from the Shriek whose face she never saw, the one whose eyes, ears, and brain projected images and sounds to her, thousands of kilometers across Ut. Other people used viewers containing the plasma of other Shrieks, and everyone shared Shrieks. There were, after all, only sixty-two Shrieks on Ut and nearly seventeen million utpeople.

  From the wide chair that accommodated her Uttian body, Maudrey looked around the small plasmaviewer room, focusing on a framed color-by-numbers painting on the wall. The painting had been done by her mother, Sperl, and depicted a typical rules class such as the one Maudrey would attend in an hour. Attentive, happy students sat at small desks before a smiling proctor. Maudrey often looked at the picture. Something seemed inexplicably wrong with it.

  Her gaze moved left to a ’glas-doored, recessed bookcase, full of volumes, and read several of the titles, written in U-Lotan script, that appeared on their spines: Statutes of Ut, Series 1 … Good Thought Exercises … Dwello Navigation and Galoomanship … The Joy of Smoothing … This last was new to her, and she resolved to read it sometime.

  The dwello moved beneath her again. Maudrey looked back in the viewer and watched the Shriek nuzzle past a school of little fish into an airle
ss, tight niche between the chloral argon-immersed rocks. The creature was preparing for sleep in its remote loch, wedging its body into a place where currents could not move it. From the shaking of her picture, she realized that her Shriek was doing the same thing. She switched off the viewer.

  Maudrey walked into her parents’ skylighted master bedroom and stood next to another ’glas-doored bookcase, this one bigger and crammed with most of the family’s rule books. They were a typical family in this regard, she thought, with hundreds of volumes covering every aspect of life on Ut. These rules had remained constant for fifteen million years, from the time the U-Lotans had set up this planetoid-size research station. It was one of thousands established around the universe to study every facet of social behavior Maudrey’s people could imagine. Her father’s thick notebook of hazards, crammed with loose-leaf pages, rested atop a Rule Concordance. Bracing her stubby feet to keep her balance, Maudrey opened the case. Using the sucktip suction on the shortest of her two arms, she grabbed hold of the notebook.

  Maudrey glanced up nervously and looked through the skylight at her father, Hiley OIV. Wearing a green solar-conducting jacket and dark trousers, Hiley stood on the top deck of the floating dwello, holding the sucktip of his short arm against the tiller. Turned sideways in relation to her, he did not notice her in the room below. Like all utpeople, Hiley resembled a come-to-life Picasso creation, with a shield-shaped, hair-covered body that was nearly flat, with two stubby, kneeless legs and two thin arms—one long and one short—sharing joints in lower body sockets with the top of the legs. A neckless, anvil-shaped head rested on the tops of the body, with no eyes, ears, mouth, or nose—only a down-turned/crescent-shaped sensor that stretched across the center of the face.

  Hiley had a dark brown beard on an otherwise hairless face and wore a gray glass sensor goggle to shield the intermittent brightness of the afternoon sun. A brown headcap strapped around his leg-armpits kept his head from failing off. In theory, anyway. Actually, very few utpeople ever lost their heads. But a certain percentage—Maudrey did not know the exact figure—had a defect in the way their heads were connected to their bodies. Her father had no indication of such a problem, but wore the cap anyway. He was cautious by nature. Ridiculously so, in Maudrey’s opinion.

  Maudrey stepped away from the skylight in the kneeless, herky-jerk way of her people so as not to be seen. She opened the notebook carefully, flipping slowly through the scrawl-covered white cello-sheets. Her father had filled the pages with personal injury hazards, broken down into categories and listed according to severity. These were the things he worried about most, garnered from personal observation and experience, hearsay, statistics, even nightmares.

  He even worries about his sensor foke falling off during sleep! Maudrey thought, casting an amber sensor glow as she read from a page entitled “Night Hazards.” (Sensor fokes were adjustable devices used by all utpeople to keep their sensors open during sleep. Without fokes, they would die of sensory deprivation—“S.D.”—in approximately six minutes.)

  No one’s foke ever falls off! Maudrey thought, flipping to other pages. Where did he ever get that one?

  Presently, she found the section she wanted, the one marked “Playville Games—Hazard Statistics.” She scanned the page, then flipped to another. And another. Then back to the first.

  She felt the dwello turning.

  “This one,” Maudrey muttered, balanced herself. “The roulette cannon! Highest risk on Ut!” Her words, in the language of the U-Lotan conquerors came through the same multifunction sensor with which she looked at the notebook—her sensorlids moving as she spoke. Game risk factor: one chance of death per thousand attempts. No figure shown for serious injury. A die-or-survive proposition.

  She closed the notebook and returned it to its place on top of the Rule Concordance, then flipped open a covered bowl of water held by a metal wall bracket. She dipped a sucktip inside, drawing lukewarm liquid up her arm and into her body. Like all utpeople, she had to do this several times a day. Hearing a noise at the door, she started and withdrew her sucktip.

  Maudrey’s five-year-old brother, Plick, ten years her junior, poked his anvil-shaped head in. Eleven-year-old sister, Ghopa, stood behind him. These three were all of Hiley and Sperl’s children.

  “I’m gonna tell!” Plick said, twisting his blue-green sensor into a bratty smile. Small for his age, Plick had uncombable black head hair that sprouted cowlicks like weeds on a lawn.

  “Shush!” Maudrey said angrily. She caught the inquisitive gaze of Ghopa’s olive-green sensor over Plick’s shoulder.

  “Dad’s gonna be mad!” Plick said. He had lowered his voice, but not enough to suit Maudrey.

  Maudrey herky-jerked to him and placed a sucktip reassuringly on his shoulder. “I just needed to check on something Daddy told me.”

  “No one’s allowed in Dad’s stuff,” Plick said, ominously. “He’s gonna—”

  Maudrey nudged her brother and sister into the hallway, closing the door behind them. The dwello’s chrome-and-plazbrass battery pack recharger was recessed in the wall behind them. The rectangular unit had sockets for sixteen battery packs. Five small oblong packs were charging at that moment with tiny red lights aglow, drawing electricity from the solar-powered dwello’s storage batteries.

  “Daddy doesn’t have to find out,” Maudrey said. “I didn’t hurt anything.”

  “What’ll you do for me if I don’t tell?” Plick asked.

  Ghopa remained silent, watching and listening.

  “Don’t even think about that,” Maudrey husked. “Think about what I’ll do to you if you do tell.” She pressed a candy scent against his sucktip, then gave another to Ghopa.

  Plick looked up at Maudrey as if the offering were not enough, but accepted it and trudged with Ghopa down the hallway. Their stubby feet clumped on the blue and tan mosaic tiles.

  At the rooftop control station, Hiley looked at his dwello and realized that it was nicer than most. His handyman’s talent helped. The split-level white-and-green home had nine-layer Lotanglas windows for maximum heating and cooling efficiency, a triple-thick hull, eighteen high-efficiency solar cells, a large solar hearth (with a bright plazbrass chimney), and two top-of-the-line galoo launchers—one fore and one aft—for catapulting warm galoo at neighbors and other disliked utpersons. Hiley rarely threw galoo, but enjoyed it on occasion. His dwello was an untethered one, there being only a few Good Thought moorages along the sides of Ut’s limited number of immobile rock formations.

  Hiley felt weary as he moved the long burnished alloy tiller to port, guiding his floating home away from a collision course with a three-story craft of doubtful maneuverability. Unlike Hiley’s dwello, the other galoocraft had sails—a main and a jib—rainbow-hued and slack in the windless air. Such expensive gear seemed a waste to Hiley, for the Sudanna winds on Ut’s surface came in short bursts. Still, he admitted to himself, the sails were beautiful.

  The other dwello appeared a little top-heavy to Hiley, with each level slightly wider than the one below. Deciding it must have a deep keel, he noted its garish lavender paint and yellow dots ringing the hull above the galooline. Hiley swatted an orange-and-black skeeter that persisted in buzzing across his face. Skeeters were voracious, feeding solely on the body fluids of utpeople.

  The other craft changed course the wrong way, returning to a collision course with Hiley’s dwello. Hiley could not see the captain clearly. Someone with an upper body obscured by the mainsail stood at the topside tiller, wearing bright orange or red short pants. The legs were light in color and looked too long to be those of an utperson. Did they have hair? Hiley could not quite tell.

  Damn! Hiley thought. Doesn’t this guy see me? Hiley stepped on his horn button, blasting out three high-pitched toots.

  The dwello kept coming. Hiley saw now that an accursed Earth human stood at the controls—a fat man with a cherubic, dumb face. The man pulled his hands away from the tiller as Hiley watched, grabbed hold
of a camera strapped around his neck and began snapping pictures in Hiley’s direction.

  These stupid tourists! Hiley raged, blasting his horn again. Always coming close for pictures! I’m sick of them!

  “Get away!” Hiley screeched, gesturing wildly with his mismatched arms. “You idiot!”

  The human kept clicking pictures, paying no attention to his dwello controls or to Hiley’s exhortations.

  I hate the Earth-Ut Exchange Program! Hiley thought, fuming as he jerked the tiller to come about hard. It’s the worst planetary exchange program we have! Is Earth a place of fools, or are all of them sent here? Then he remembered something he had heard—that Mamacita might be an Earth name.

  No, he thought. It can’t be true. Too much intelligence in the mother computer.

  The other craft passed within a meter, with its negligent skipper waving and smiling as he went by. Hiley considered launching a load of galoo at the alien, but had second thoughts. One of the many rules Hiley had been required to memorize prohibited this. Galoo could only be thrown at another utperson.

  The voluntary exchange programs with Earth, Sucia, Oknos, and other inhabited planets had been established by the U-Lotans for reasons unknown to Hiley. The programs were full of problems, in his opinion. Any utperson wanting to visit another planet could do so at nominal cost, but had to leave his family members behind. If the traveler defected (and Hiley had never heard of one doing so), the Holo-Cop police force had a rule requiring that they kill all remaining family members. Hiley had no interest in participating, and not because of this threat from Mamacita’s projected hologram creatures of light. He feared the strong winds reputed to exist on other planets, for his body did funny things in the wind.