The Madness Season Read online

  Copyright 1990 by C.S. Friedman.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Michael R. Whelan.

  For color prints of Michael Whelan paintings, please contact: Glass Onion Graphics

  P.O. Box 88

  Brookfield, CT 06804

  DAW Book Collectors No. 829.

  First Printing, October 1990

  123456789

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE: -EXILE

  1. EARTH

  2. SHIAN

  3. LONGSHIP TALGUTH

  4. TSING COLONY NINE

  5. EARTH - (TIMEFUGUE)

  6. LONGSHIPTALGUTH

  7. LONGSHIP TALGUTH: THE BLOODING PLACE

  8. TSING COLONY NINE

  9. LONGSHIP TALGUTH

  10. LONGSHIP TALGUTH

  11. LONGSHIP TALGUTH

  PART TWO: -GATHERER

  12. MEYAGA: CANTONA SETTLEMENT

  13. LONGSHIP TALGUTH

  14. TIMEFUGUE

  15. MEYAGA: HONAQA GORGE

  16. YUANG: DOME FIVE

  17. MEYAGA: CANTONA SETTLEMENT

  18. YUANG: DOME FIVE

  19. YUANG: DOME PRIME

  20. MEYAGA: ORIGG MOUNTAINS

  21. MEYAGA: SUYAAG SETTLEMENT

  22. YUANG: DOME FIVE

  23. TIMEFUGUE

  24. YUANG: DOME PRIME

  25. YUANG: DOME PRIME

  26. YUANG: DOME PRIME

  27. YUANG: DOME FIVE

  28. DOME PRIME

  PART THREE: -TYR

  29. LONGSHIP KAMUGWA

  30. LONGSHIP KAMUGWA

  31. MEYAGA: MOUNT SENGEY

  32. TYRQA-ANGDATWA: (HOME)

  33. LONGSHIP KAMUGWA

  34. TYRQA-ANGDATWA (REFUGE)

  35. LONGSHIP KAMUGWA

  36. LONGSHIP KAMUGWA

  37. EARTH

  EPILOGUE

  To the memory of Herbert Friedman

  1931-1988

  Writer, Editor, Teacher, Square Dancer Extraordinaire,

  and beloved father.

  THE ALIEN WITHIN—

  He'd had so many names over the centuries, so many new identities that he could scarcely remember who he had originally been. Now his name was Daetrin, a name given by the alien conquerors of humankind, the Tyr.

  Three hundred years had passed since the Tyr conquered the people of Earth as they had previously overcome numerous races throughout the galaxy. In their victory they had taken the very heart out of the human race, isolating the true individualists, the geniuses, all the people who represented the hopes, dreams, and discoveries of the future, and imprisoning them in dome colonies on planets hostile to human life. There the Tyr, a race which itself shared a unified gestalt mind, had left these gifted individuals to work on projects which would, the conquerors hoped, reveal all of human kind's secrets to them.

  Yet Daetrin's secret was one no scientist had ever uncovered, for down through the years he had succeeding in burying it so well that he had even hidden his real nature from himself. But, taken into custody by the Tyr, there was no longer any place left for Daetrin to run, no new name and life for him to assume. Now he would at last be forced to confront the truth about himself—and if he failed, not just Daetrin but all humans would pay the price....

  Novels by C. S. FRIEDMAN

  IN CONQUEST BORN

  THE MADNESS SEASON

  THIS ALIEN SHORE

  THE COLDFIRE TRILOGY

  BLACK SUN RISING

  WHEN TRUE NIGHT FALLS

  CROWN OF SHADOWS

  PART ONE: EXILE

  EARTH

  When the series of images ended I reached out and flicked the projector switch off, sending the last holo spiraling down into darkness. That was when the years suddenly seemed to bleed one into another; past, present, and future so lacking in definition that for a moment I couldn't tell them apart. I couldn't remember how many names I had worn, or where in my life each one belonged. It was the darkness that triggered it, the absolute darkness of a moonless night, on a campus that had long since let its street lights fall into disrepair. Total blackness, within the classroom and without. And in that utter darkness, silence. Not the relative quiet of a handful of students who had other things to do, other places to be— that would have been reassuringly familiar, a restless silence filled with guarded whispers, the rustling of papers and tapes and clothing, and the barely audible shifting of flesh as one student stretched, another yawned, a third dared to turn off his recorder. But instead, nothing. An absolute silence, the sound of a dozen people who felt more comfortable with stillness than with life. An inhuman silence that had existed on Earth for so long that I could no longer count its years, or separate them in my mind.

  A touch to the control plate brought up the lights, an unhealthy green to illuminate empty, purposeless faces. For a moment I was angry, and dared to hate the creatures that had brought us to this pass. But anger of any kind is a dangerous emotion, it eats at the nerves and eventually makes you careless. And carelessness was a luxury my kind couldn't afford. I took a deep breath to steady myself, and recited once more the litany of my post-Conquest existence: You swore you would accept this. You have no other choice.

  "That's all for now," I announced. Bodies stirred, moving from lethargy to life without obvious reluctance. Why did they come here? What did they want? A comfortable ritual, perhaps, or a taste of the past. It didn't really matter. They came, and I taught them; the ritual exchange permitted us some illusion of purpose, so I encouraged it. At heart it was just another lie, another emptiness . . . but we must hold on to some illusions, and so they learned—or played at learning—and the ancient ritual held sway. Education. Without free thought, it had no meaning; without creativity, it had no purpose. Why did they bother? Why did I?

  They filed out in silence, leaving me alone in the classroom, with only the projector for company. After a moment I turned its motor off. The pockets were in need of repair—had been, for some time now—and one of them jammed when I tried to open it to retrieve my holodisks. Just my luck. I pried back the lip to get the disk out, careful not to do any permanent damage. There were fewer and fewer people to repair such things, in the world that the Tyr had left us, and I hadn't worked in holography for ... well, for long enough. I couldn't have repaired it.

  At last I had them all, three matched disks in their labeled cases. ART OF THE SUBJUGATION, PARTS I, II, AND III. Holding them brought to mind images from our most recent lesson: an earthenware vase supported by ten identical figures, a sculpture of steel and plastic which was tedious in its symmetry, a computer generated light-sculpture too balanced to be dynamic. Disk after disk, holo after holo, the message of the Tyr was driven home: In unity there is strength. Diversity breeds chaos.

  We've learned our lesson well, I thought grimly.

  My image, seen in the shimmer of a plastic window, against the backdrop of the Georgian night: A middle-aged man, well-schooled, retiring, an instructor of night courses in post-Conquest art in one of North-america's few remaining colleges. My age had always been difficult to judge (thirty-five? forty? perhaps a well-preserved fifty?) and now a touch of gray at my temples, artificial, added to the uncertainty. Hair a sandy color, not unappealing, body neither fat nor scrawny, but comfortably lean.

  Once I was considered tall, as the standards of men were measured, then average in height as man's fortune increased, now tall again by comparison. But not excessively so. Averageness was important, it was my only armor against discovery, and so I was carefully, studiously, average. What nature had not provided, cosmetics and tailoring did; my appearanc
e should inspire no curiosity in either human or Tyr.

  But when I looked at my reflection for more than a moment, when I allowed myself to see . . . ah, then the ghosts were visible. Visions arose from the past, images displaced from their natural timeframe, wrapped around my current visage like a mask. What I had been. The things I had failed to do. What I had chosen to accept. If it was true that the coward died a thousand deaths, then I died each time I looked at my reflection. And so I chose the easiest course: to look quickly and then turn away, lest I render myself incapable of maintaining that lie which was now a necessity of my life.

  Mine was the last of the late-night classes, so I locked the building when I left. Coarse steel bars had been placed on the windows, ironic in light of the fact that theft was almost nonexistent. What was the point of accumulating wealth in a world that no longer had purpose? But what little thievery there was, was focused upon the few items of real value—such as sophisticated electronic equipment in working order—so I took the time to check the double doors when I was done, pulling hard at the two of them until I was sure that the ancient locks had caught.

  Don't dwell on the past, I cautioned myself, but the ghosts of memory were legion tonight. The spirit of Earth had been destroyed, but what right did I have to complain? The current world was no threat to me or my kind; how often had I dreamed of that coming to pass? What price would I not have paid, in my youth, to purchase a lifetime of peace?

  Not this, a voice whispered, couched in the cadence of recall. Never this . . .

  Memories: I felt them rising within me, tried not to let them overwhelm me. Of all my unique weaknesses, this was the worst—and the only one which I had not, to some degree, mastered. My brain seemed loath to distinguish between sleeping and waking, and plagued my conscious hours with images that rightly belonged in dreams. Pre-Conquest science had verified the problem—electromagnetic patterns occurred in my waking brain which should only appear during sleep— but had offered no salvation; my own experiments, so successful in every other regard, had failed to provide a solution. All I could do was concentrate on the present, observe my surroundings—

  And stop suddenly, alert. Something was wrong; I knew it, but couldn't say how. I listened: no sound existed that was any more or less than ordinary. I looked, deep into the shadows of night, my vision adequate even in the relative darkness: I saw no shapes or movement which any such night might not contain. The air? I tested it: warm Georgian moisture, rich with the smells of autumn.

  And then the breeze shifted direction and suddenly there was something else—horrible, stifling—that awakened memories so intense that they struck like a fist straight into my gullet, driving the breath from my body in a sudden eruption of fear.

  I ran. Tried to run. The past overlapped the present, raining images down upon me as I dodged that hated smell. But a hand shot out of darkness and grabbed me by the lapel of my coat as I passed the corner of the building. I was swung back, into the brickwork, and there was blinding pain—but that wasn't what terrified me most. It was that smell: a thick, acrid odor, the stink of Earth's defeat.

  Honn-Tyr.

  There were six of them—at least, six that I could see—and they were all heavily armed. Taller than I was by a hands width, with black and mottled green and a dozen other shades of almost-black covering their bodies in random splotches. Identical, all of them, with an absoluteness that bore chilling witness to the unity of their nature. Six armed extensions of a single will, gathered about me like the fingers of a hand, poised to crush. And willing to crush, should I dare to defy them. But there was nothing to be gained by fighting them, I knew that from past experience. No hope of escape, on any terms. I knew that all too well.

  The dark claws reached for me and I held myself still, despite my revulsion—submitted to the odor of their presence as they searched my person, tearing my clothing, discarding their finds—and tried to forget that once, in the distant past, I had dared to fight them. My current identity was passive, nonthreatening; I couldn't afford to lose control of that.

  At last they finished. My disks were scattered, and I saw a clawed foot crush one of them as my assailant shifted his weight. My other possessions were scattered as well, lost in the thick summer grass.

  And the pills on which I depended—my God, if those were lost—

  "Daetrin Ungashak To-Alym Haal."

  My current name, a Tyrran number; voiced in the harsh, staccato whisper of the Honn-Tyr, it was a comment as well as a question.

  I barely managed to get my voice to work. "What do you—"

  "Tiye Kuolqa," my assailant announced. It is the Will. "You will come with us."

  I considered running. Better in some ways to be shot down now, than to face whatever fate the Tyr might have in store for me. But there was, as always, a shadow of cowardice resident within me—and it was this that won out, whispering, Maybe they don't know the truth yet. Maybe there's some other reason they want you. Maybe, if you cooperate, you can talk your way out of this. And so, clinging to that fragile hope, I moved away from the wall—slowly, making no sudden movements—and allowed them to drive me southward, toward the bulk of the campus.

  How had they found me out? Certainly not through any outstanding display of intelligence on my part, or any hint of a rebellious nature. Those things would have stood out like armor-spikes on a human, and I had been careful to suppress them. Since the time of the Conquest, the Tyr had devoted itself to redesigning the human species. From the wholesale slaughter that took place during the Subjugation, to the current system of transportation, it had worked at weeding out all seeds of possible insurrection, removing men of intelligence and spirit from Earth's gene pool in the hope of rendering the human race more tractable. And it appeared that it had succeeded—not for genetic reasons, I suspected, so much as for psychological ones. When any act of unusual intelligence might cause a man to be taken from his native planet, geniuses were loath to advertise their talents. As for whether the spirit of revolution was hereditary, and could thus be eradicated, or whether it was latent in all human beings, ready to spark to life in response to the proper stimulus ... we hardly understood that ourselves, in the years before the Tyr came. How could our conqueror have gained any better comprehension?

  By those standards, I should never have been discovered. With my averageness wrapped around me like a concealing cloak, I should have slipped through the years unnoticed, unharassed. So what had gone wrong? Why had they taken me? Where had I miscalculated?

  "There." A captor nudged me with the point of his weapon. We had reached the concrete bridge that had once spanned a football stadium. They herded me toward the bleacher stairs, and flanked me like hunting dogs, driving me downward. Toward the nightmare vision of a Subjugated landscape.

  Transports had blasted the field clear of grass long ago, fusing the sod and clay beneath into a black, glasslike expanse. The surface was marked with a spiderweb of thin, jagged fissures, some barely discernible and others, which time and ice had widened, of treacherous proportion. The bleachers themselves had long since rotted away, leaving metal struts sticking out of the concrete like twisted knives, red with decay. And in the center of it all—

  A skimship. But not the common, suborbital type which the Tyr often used to patrol its conquered territory. This was clearly an intership shuttle, capable of maneuvering in the dark, empty spaces which lay between the planets.

  My heart nearly stopped as I realized what that meant. I had always known that I might be taken from Earth—that was a possibility we all lived with, subject as we were to the whims of our alien oppressor—but I had stored that knowledge in the dark back rooms of my mind, where such things can be deliberately forgotten. The thought that it might happen here and now was suddenly more than I could handle. My body froze in mid-step, and I felt incapable of moving it.

  No one who leaves the Earth may ever return. That was the conqueror's law; it had never, to my knowledge, been compromised. To lose
Earth now meant losing it forever.

  What was the ancient belief, about leaving one's native soil?

  They forced me across the cracked-glass surface, using the points of their weapons to drive me forward, and into the skimship. There, in the dimly lit interior, one of them shoved me down into an aircushioned plastichair. Not designed for human comfort. Another strapped me into it. With sharp, alien gestures they made their intentions clear. Say nothing. Be still. We will kill you if you try to defy us.

  Trembling, I sank back into the cold plastic seat, wondering where in this conquered universe they were taking me. In the skimship's claustrophobic confines the smell of Honn-Tyr was nigh on overwhelming, awakening memories that were better off forgotten. I fought them for a while, hanging on to the present moment as though it were a lifeline—but then, as the skimship blasted the field yet again, and lifted me from my native soil for the first and probably the last time, despair possessed me utterly and I slid coldly down into memory.

  Icy. Mud. Beneath my fingers, nearly frozen. Pain.

  I drag myself a few inches farther. And farther. Important to get away. The ship is burning, might explode when fire hits a fuel line. I dig my few functional fingers down into the frozen soil an inch, two inches, then hit slick ice beneath; my hands scrape back without finding traction. No farther, then. I lack the strength. I pray that this is far enough. All about me are greater and lesser bonfires, spurting orange and blue sparks into ebony blackness. Pyres of the dead, monuments to our last warplanes' final effort. I lower my head in sorrow and exhaustion; tears, like bits of ice, work their way slowly down my cheek.

  We failed, my world, we failed!

  I try to draw one arm up under me, to raise myself up a bit more, but sudden darting pain from forearm to elbow causes me to drop, gasping, to the ground. Broken, then—or worse. That sleeve of my uniform is still intact, preventing me from assessing the extent of the damage. As for my other arm . . . that, and the whole left side of my body, is a mess of blood and burns. Am I dying? Is this what dying is?