Luscuen

by Aaron Louie

I remember quite clearly how I stumbled upon this kingdom and its strange inhabitants. Almost forty years ago, I was preparing to land on Gresenger-73 in the Kuiper Belt -- the first manned expedition to a deep space asteroid. I, along with my crewmates, was to conduct a variety of tests, including a feasibility study for mining and transport of these rocks.

We landed without incident and promptly anchored our landing module to the mostly featureless surface. I was the first to venture out onto the bleak landscape. The sun was cold and distant out there beyond the orbit of Neptune, but, thanks to the engineers back home, we had enough sunlight to power our equipment -- and our bodies. Attached to the landing module by an umbilical consisting of data cables, power cords, life support, and a strong tether, I eased the thrusters on my pack out into the blackness. Just me and the rock.

I'm not quite sure how long I was out there, scooping up dust and hammering rocks, bathed in the piercing glow of the floodlight of the landing module. The radio chattered in my ear as my crewmates each took their turns telling me what to do, where to go, take this reading, place this probe, and so on. The rovers glided up to my side, and I loaded them up with capsules filled with samples. They flew silently back to the landing module, then returned, waiting for more. Finally, I was done. I gathered up my tools and arranged them in the equipment case.

I stretched out straight and attempted to maneuver my pack around to face the landing module, but somehow I had pressed the wrong button. I twirled about and landed with a jolt, face up on the ground. There I was, floating a few centimeters off the surface of the asteroid, facing straight out toward the pale white disk of the sun. Neptune loomed a greenish-blue crescent at my feet, and the whole of the solar system was laid out before me.

Strangely, the chattering radio had ceased. Perhaps my crewmates had finally decided to let me do my own thing, assuming I was intelligent enough to make my way back to the landing module. Then I noticed something peculiar. The umbilical was waving about in the vacuum, unattached, just out of my reach. My pack, fortunately, had provisions for this sort of emergency, and I wasn't so far away from the module that I couldn't make my way back. I turned my head, trying to see the module or the tether to get my bearings, but, since I had landed on my back on the surface of the asteroid, my vision was limited to the spectacular starscape, which, in other circumstances would have been extremely peaceful. I switched on my remote radio and called for the mission commander. I received no response.

Trying not to panic, I thrust forward with my pack. Nothing happened. I must have damaged the equipment when I did my little acrobatic move. Strangely, a peace, a cold relief, spread over me. I was not worried. I knew that my crewmates would come to my aid. I felt myself sinking into the rock; the sky about me began to close in to a slowly spinning disk above my head. All I needed was to wait -- they would come for me.

Now the whole of the solar system, even Pluto, melted into that swirling orb above me, and I realized, without horror, without pain, that I was somehow trapped in a singularity.

This was, of course, impossible. I couldn't have been alive AND realized that I was trapped in a singularity if I was actually trapped in a singularity. The change in gravitational acceleration from one millimeter to the next would be so great as to tear my body into a fine pulp. All the light in my field of view was being funneled into the great dark maw of this singularity, thus the orb above me. It was spinning quite rapidly now, which told me that the hole had some sort of angular momentum.

And, suddenly, there I was, laying on my back in a field of purple and orange and blue, staring up at an enormous ring. Of course, I realized with passivity, I had fallen through a wormhole. Someone had gone to great lengths to construct a massive machine for the purpose of poking temporary holes in the membrane of space and time. The sky above was blue. I felt heavy. Very, very heavy. I lifted my arm and held it before my helmet. It was still clad in the airtight thermal armor of my pressure suit, every loop and strap weighted down with some sort of tool or electrical device. I laid back and waited for my apathy to subside. That was when I fell asleep.

When I awoke, I was surrounded by people. Now, when I say "people," I don't mean bipedal humans. I mean the inhabitants of this planet that now was to be my home. I mean the Luscuens. They are completely unrelated to any form of life on Earth. There are morphological similarities, of course, since I arrived on a planet with similar gravity, chemical composition, distance from a star, rotational period, and tilt as Terra. But the inhabitants of Luscu are of a completely foreign evolutionary line. As I eventually learned from the many scholars of this planet, the cellular composition and genetic material of these organisms are quite incompatible with Terran biology.

I had come to accept the fact that my life would always be normal. When my bachelor's degree was slapped into my hand, the baton in the next leg of this relay race, the world shimmered with the possibility of opportunity, a mirage filled with promises of success and meaning. I took off running, anxious to get my life underway, excited for the next bend, the next adventure. Adventure never came. The summer after graduation saw me working in a bar, serving drinks to leathery old women as they headed out to the golf course. I was running in place. Four years later, I was still accomplishing nothing with my dreams, answering phones for minimum wage, knocking on doors, selling someone else's dreams to get by. It was then that I decided to change. With childhood and all its trappings, I abandoned all my idealism, romanticism, and most of my dreams at the age of 25. Goals remained my only tools to accomplish my purpose. Simple, rational, unrelenting goals with logical, planned courses of action filled in the gaps left by my leap to adulthood. I set out to gain an advanced degree and... and I didn't plan beyond that. Small steps, I told myself, are progress too. With that, I threw myself wholeheartedly into one project after the next, attaining my goals slowly but surely. Small steps of centimeters turned into meters and kilometers, and I found myself, at 40, in orbit.

By that time, I couldn't remember what those dreams of childhood were. Even if I could have resurrected them from the depths of my past, I doubt I could have believed in them again. My last two decades had been spent eradicating foolish idealism. Now, as I lay on my back in a pressure suit, with a propulsion pack and tool kit weighing me down, in the middle of a field of alien sessile plant life, surrounded by the indigenous folk of this far-off planet, those dreams came flooding back, chiding me for not imagining myself in this situation, for not reading all those science fiction books that I eschewed for geophysical textbooks. I studied rocks, not alien cultures. I visualized tectonics, not interplanetary relations.

But there it was. A giant circle of magnets and circuits, my new wedding ring, which bound me to the surface of Luscu and to this culture.

The culture of Luscu is based on information. Information is their religion, their currency, their sustenance. From the beginning of modern Luscu culture -- about 2400 Terran years before I write this -- they have cherished the preservation of all knowledge. Granted, the knowledge they had when this particular culture was founded was mostly mythical and highly illogical according to today's standards.

Bhedltot was a vornetenskur, a ferocious mythical beast without form. Thus, Bhedltot could not be seen, so she set out to devour one of each kind of living thing in the sky. She ate the muvc, she ate the tsourh, she ate the djymsh, and the gachimandop, and the kefid. She ate all the creatures of the sky, leaving only their shadows, which burned at night from being heated by the wrath of Tchom (the sun), who now glared even more hotly at the terrible behavior of this errant vornetenskur. Bhedltot now moved through the emptiness, full of the flesh and bones of the living creatures. She could now be seen only as the form of an animal she had devoured, which would be devoured by another animal which she had devoured. Sometimes she would appear as a djymsh, great and terrible beneath the hot anger of Tchom. No sooner had Bhedltot taken on the form of the djymsh, it would be devoured by the muvc, which would be swallowed by the gachimandop, which would be swallowed by yet another creature, and so on through the ages.

After a while, the creatures within Bhedltot's gullet began to multiply.