The Veils of Azlaroc - Fred Saberhagen, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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THE VEILS OF AZLAROC
Fred Saberhagen
CONTENTS
Day V minus 17
Day V minus 16
Day V minus 15
Day V minus 14
Day V minus 13
AZLAROC
THE SETTLERS, WHO CANNOT LEAVE:
Sorokin-in a buried holograph lies the portal to riches and freedom-or to his death.
Ramachandra-the richest, and the loneliest, man on Azlaroc dares to consider escape- through the heart
of a neutron star!
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Timmins-trapped on Azlaroc for hundreds of years, he knows that this year Veilfall will be early-and he
knows that his own past seeks to punish him for the warning.
THE VISITORS, WHO DARE NOT STAY:
Hagen-he returns at last to Azlaroc, searching for the love he left behind him so many veils ago.
Ditmars-a professional adventurer, hired to steal back a poet’s book of poems from the one place the
poet cannot go...
ALL OF THEM TRAPPED IN THE MYSTERY OF
THE VEILS OF AZLAROC
THE VEILS OF AZLAROC
FRED
SABERHAGEN
ace books
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY
360 Park Avenue South
New York,New York10010
THE VEILS OF AZLAROC
Copyright © 1978 by Fred Saberhagen
A portion of this book appeared in substantially different form in SCIENCE FICTION
DISCOVERIES, ed. Carol and Frederik Pohl, Bantam 1976, copyright © 1976 by Fred Saberhagen.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for
the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.
An ACE Book
Cover art by Dean Ellis
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First Ace printing: October 1978
Published simultaneously inCanada
Printed inU.S.A.
Day V minus 17
Cruising toward blacksky, Sorokin had noticed progressively fewer and fewer signs of other travelers;
now he could see no tracks at all ahead of him upon the plain. It was an almost lunar surface that he
traveled. He knew that in other regions it had preserved vehicle tracks and even unchanging human
footprints for more than four hundred standard years. The absence of any predecessors’ traces proved
his destination to be monumentally unpopular. Well, that came as no surprise.
His dun-colored tractor was a functional vehicle. Its weight was slung low between wide treads, the
driver’s seat man-high above the ground in an open cab. Sorokin’s ride was comfortably cushioned in
the open-roofed cab, and almost silent as he drove at an easy hundred kilometers per standard hour. He
had discovered that to drive much slower outside the city made him feel that the trip was being prolonged
unbearably. And going faster brought on the sensation that blacksky was going to leap at him like a beast
from beyond the rim of the landscape ahead.
In that direction a ridge of land now lay straight as a ruler across his path, bringing the horizon near. The
horizon was generally distant on Azlaroc, whose air was clear beneath the constriction of its sky, whose
surface was much larger, and therefore curved more gently, than that of a planet. The vastness of this
world, spreading the small population thin, was one of the reasons-as Sorokin frequently reminded
himself-that he had chosen years ago to settle here. With the city now only an hour behind him, he was
already out of sight of all the faces and works and debris of humanity. At the moment, in fact, the vast
land that he was crossing, essentially flat beneath the sunless surface that was not quite a sky, appeared
to be completely lifeless; although he knew that was not true.
No dust rose into the clear, warm air behind the tractor’s quietly speeding treads. There was no dust to
rise. Even the regular, lightly impressed pattern of the tractor’s trail looked no more artificial than the land
it crossed.
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Everywhere the natural features of the landscape were geometrically regular. The land threw up forms
that looked as if they had been spawned inside some mathematician’s dreaming mind-pyramids having
three sides, four, or more; rhomboid solids; footballs and spheres that, when grown, sometimes broke
free to roll with the motion of the land when next it became unquiet. Instead of bushes or trees or
boulders or eroded ravines, these regular shapes and others marked the plain. These outcroppings
ranged in size from the almost microscopic to the gigantic. All were of the land’s own substance and
color: on this particular stretch of plain a slightly mottled yellow-gray.
Now, the foot of the high ridge that had been blocking Sorokin’s view ahead made a gentle thud
beneath the tractor’s treads. It was a gentle slope, but it began as abruptly as a doorway. Its beginning
creased the land in an unbroken straight line that extended for many kilometers to right and left. Autopilot
maintaining a steady speed, the tractor climbed toward the ridge’s crest, an equally straight line against
the background of the sky.
The flat slope went up for a long minute’s drive. In the moment before his vehicle tilted its broad nose
down again Sorokin could feel his hair rise lazily from his uncovered scalp. The top of his head was
passing within a few meters of the sky of Azlaroc. What made his hair rise was a phenomenon
analogous-but no more than analogous-to static electricity. He need not fear to have his skull split by a
bolt of lightning. Nor had the ridge elevated him enough to make possible an actual, probably lethal,
contact with the sky. When land and sky drew close as that, they invariably produced some warning
signals. In twenty years Sorokin had learned to read the warnings well.
A few kilometers ahead he could now see another ridge that he was going to have to cross. It was as
regular as the one whose rear slope he was now descending. In the rectilinear valley between the two
parallel elevations Sorokin was surprised to see the undulating curve of another vehicle track. The double
tread marks moved roughly parallel to Sorokin’s own course across the valley, first sidling near, then
dancing away coyly.
“Couldn’t make up your mind if you were going on or not?” he asked aloud. As if offended or frightened
by the question the marks swayed off again to vanish inconclusively in dots and dashes on entering a hard
surfaced area. He smiled briefly to himself. No doubt many of the old track’s twists and turns had been
caused by an unequal creeping of the surface land toward some fast subduction zone nearby. The tracks
could have been there years, decades, even centuries.
Thud again, and now up the front slope of the new ridge Sorokin was riding his steady tractor. It was a
sturdy and imperturbable device that cared not what destination it might be bound for. The moment he
reached the top of this ridge he could see, straight ahead and distant, an ebony meterstick laid across the
far edge of the golden sky. His hands stayed firm on the steering wheel. This was unnecessary, but a
reminder that he could stop and turn back at any time.
Toward that bar of ebon sky ahead the plain ran flat and once more trackless. Now, it seemed
disturbingly emptier than before. There was no physical reason why people could not dwell here within
sight of blacksky or even directly under it. Their artificial lights would work as well against that night as
against any other. Under blacksky or under cheerfully glowing yellow, clean air of the same temperature
and humidity would fill their lungs and move across their skins. Even so, to the best of Sorokin’s
knowledge no one had ever lived in the vast portion of the Azlarocean surface under that shade, or even
within sight of it. Perhaps no one ever would.
Imagine the darkest and most ominous thunderstorm of Earth. Imagine the totality of Sol’s eclipse or
deepest night beneath a cloud of poisonous volcanic ash. Multiply the effect of terror by whatever factor
will quickly overload your nerves. The overload is blacksky, cutting off almost half of Azlaroc’s vast
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surface.
Sorokin continued to drive toward it. He had known before he started that there was no light aboard his
vehicle. The approaching dimness began to cover the control panel before him like a fog. A little further,
and he reached out to switch off the autopilot and bring the tractor to a stop.
He still had light enough to drive, plenty of light here where there was no traffic. But it was as if his inner
mind had recognized some limit beyond which this journey, this pilgrimage, was not to be entrusted to
machinery. He climbed down from the tractor as soon as it had ceased to move and stood testing the
overwhelming silence left by the cessation of its drive. A breath of wind, faintly cool as if presaging
impossible rain, came from the direction of the Night. Sorokin’s body underwent a single violent shiver;
he forced his fingers to let go the metal of the door. Why should his fingers think that hanging on there
could preserve him?
Without thinking, he began to walk toward the dark lands that lay invisible beneath blacksky. Behind him
his tractor was left waiting open-doored in the silent wilderness.
The darkness ahead of him rose with every step. As Sorbkin paced he kept repeating silently that there
was nothing intrinsically dangerous in blacksky. Nothing under it worse than the occasional risks to be
encountered in the naturally lighted half of Azlaroc where men lived. What looked like terrible cloud
ahead was only a failure, for several well-understood reasons, of the radiation that elsewhere caused the
apparent sky of Azlaroc to glow. However often Sorokin repeated these things to himself, blacksky still
leaped closer to him with every stride.
He had no light with him. He had no light.
He walked into the pall until it reached Zenith, stretching out of sight to right and left in a fuzzy boundary
of mild collision with the lively glow. He walked on into the dark on trembling legs, unable to understand
why he was making himself do this. It had to be partly a sheer fascination with his own fear. There was
an exquisite sensation to be found in clinging to the certainty that he could go back. Yes, he could turn
around and go back any time.
The faint, diffuse bandwork of his own shadow, cast by the light of living sky behind, strode on ahead of
him into the dark country. Beyond five meters ahead he could not even see his own shadow.
Nothing, Walking there, he moved beyond terror to something else.
He went on in this way for an exhaustingly great distance, not looking back. In the utter darkness he
began to stumble blindly over some of the small pyramids and other landforms. They grew here just as in
the lighted territory, indifferent to the lack of radiation.
It came to Sorokin that twenty steps ahead of him now, maybe ten steps, maybe five, there could be a
sphere or an angled shape as tall as a ten-story building, and he would not be able to detect it until he
touched it. He had to thrust this thought away from him at once, or stop. He did not stop. He accidentally
kicked an invisible small sphere, and heard it roll, a heavy slithering. He felt that gravity must be stronger
here, although he knew it was steady, close to Earth normal, all across the physically habitable part of
Azlaroc.
For many strides now, a long time, he had been afraid to turn back and see how far he was getting from
the light. This fear was abruptly supplanted by a greater one: that he was liable to walk too far, that when
he did turn the light would be entirely gone from the sky and he would have no way to find his way back
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