Authors: Poul Anderson
Shadows stole across the room. It grew cooler and the traffic noises dwindled. Barbro asked mutedly, “But what could this do?”
“In many ways,” Sherrinford answered, “the outwayer
is
back in the Dark Ages. He has few neighbors, hears scanty news from beyond his horizon, toils to survive in a land he only partly understands, that may any night raise unforeseeable disasters against him, and is bounded by enormous wildernesses. The machine civilization which brought his ancestors here is frail at best. He could lose it as the Dark Ages nations had lost Greece and Rome, as the whole of Earth seems to have lost it. Let him be worked on, long, strongly, cunningly, by the archetypical Outworld, until he has come to believe in his bones that the magic of the Queen of Air and Darkness is greater than the energy of engines; and first his faith, finally his deeds will follow her. Oh, it wouldn’t happen fast. Ideally, it would happen too slowly to be noticed, especially by self-satisfied city people. But when in the end a hinterland gone back to the ancient way turned from them, how could they keep alive?”
Barbro breathed, “She said to me, when their banners flew in the last of our cities, we would rejoice.”
“I think we would have, by then,” Sherrinford admitted. “Nevertheless, I believe in choosing one’s destiny.”
He shook himself, as if casting off a burden. He knocked the dottle from his pipe and stretched, muscle by muscle. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t going to happen.”
She looked straight at him. “Thanks to you.”
A flush went up his thin cheeks. “In time, I’m sure, somebody else would have—What matters is what we do next, and that’s too big a decision for one individual or one generation to make.”
She rose. “Unless the decision is personal, Eric,” she suggested, feeling heat in her own face.
It was curious to see him shy. “I was hoping we might meet again.”
“We will.”
Ayoch sat on Wolund’s Barrow. Aurora shuddered so brilliant, in such vast sheafs of light, as almost to hide the waning moons. Firethorn blooms had fallen; a few still glowed around the tree roots, amidst dry brok which crackled underfoot and smelled like woodsmoke. The air remained warm, but no gleam was left on the sunset horizon.
“Farewell, fare lucky,” the pook called. Mistherd and Shadow-of-a-Dream never looked back. It was as if they didn’t dare. They trudged on out of sight, toward the human camp whose lights made a harsh new star in the south.
Ayoch lingered. He felt he should also offer good-bye to her who had lately joined him that slept in the dolmen. Likely none would meet here again for loving or magic. But he could only think of one old verse that might do. He stood and trilled:
“Out of her breast
a blossom ascended.
The summer burned it.
The song is ended.”
Then he spread his wings for the long flight away.
HOME
Like a bullet, but one that hunted its own target, the ferry left the mother ship and curved down from orbit. Stars crowded darkness, unwinking and wintry. Yakov Kahn’s gaze went out the viewpoint over the pilot board, across thirty-three light-years to the spark which was Sol. Almost convulsively, he looked away again, sought the clotted silver of the Milky Way and the sprawl of Sagittarius. There, behind dust clouds where new suns were being born, lay the galaxy’s heart.
Once he had dreamed of seeking thither himself. But he was a boy then, who stood on a rooftop and peered through city sky-glow and city haze, wanting only to be yonder. Afterward the dream struck facts of distance, energy, and economics. The wreck had not gone under in an instant. His sons, his grandsons—
No. Probably no man ever would.
Beside him, Bill Redfeather’s craggy features scowled at instruments. “All systems check,” he reported.
Kahn’s mouth twitched slightly upward. “I should hope so.”
Redfeather looked irritated. It was the pilot’s, not the co-pilot’s, responsibility to be sure they wouldn’t burn as a meteorite in the atmosphere of the planet.
Its night side swelled before them, a monstrous darkness when you remembered the lights of Earth, but rimmed to dayward with blue and rosy red. An ocean sheened, polished metal scutcheoned with a hurricane; and that was alien too, no pelagicultural cover, no floating towns or crisscrossing transport webs. As he watched how Kahn regarded the sight, Redfeather’s mood turned gentle.
“You think too damn much, Jake,” he said.
“Well—” Kahn shrugged. “My last space trip.”
“Nonsense. They’ll need men yet on the Lunar run.”
“A nice, safe shuttle.” Kahn’s Israeli accent harshened his English. “No, thank you. I will make a clean break and stay groundside. High time I began raising a family anyway.”
If I can find a girl Almost seventy years will have passed since we started out And even then I was an anachronism, too many missions to too many stars… . Cut that! No self-pity allowed.
“I wonder what they’ve become like,” Red-feather said.
“Eh?” Kahn pulled himself out of his thoughts. “Who?”
“The people, of course. A century here, cut off from the rest of the human race. That must have done things to them.”
Thus far the crew had talked little about what they would find. Too depressing. But evasion had to end. “They will probably seem more familiar to you than to me,” Kahn said, “being drawn from North America. Their radio reports haven’t suggested any more social change than one would expect in a scientific base. A certain primitivism, I imagine; nothing else.”
“Even among nonhumans?”
“They don’t appear to have been significantly influenced by their neighbors. Or vice versa, for that matter. Too large a difference. I should think the primary effect on them was due to Mithras itself.”
“How?”
“Room to move around. Wilderness. Horizons. But we will see.”
The ferry was coming into daylight now. Groom-bridge 1830 rose blindingly over the curve of its innermost planet. Clouds drifted gold across plains and great wrinkled mountains.
“Think we can get in some hunting and such?” Redfeather asked eagerly. “I mean the real thing, not popping loose at a robot in an amusement park.”
“No doubt,” Kahn said. “We will have time. They can’t pack up and leave on no more notice than our call after we entered orbit.”
“Damned shame, to end the project,” Red-feather said. “I hope they solved the rotation problems, anyhow.”
“Which?”
“You know. With the tidal action this sun must exert, why does Mithras have only a sixty-hour day?”
“Oh, that. That was answered in the first decade the base was here. I have read old reports. A smaller liquid core makes for less isostatic friction. Other factors enter in, too, like the absence of a satellite. Trivial, compared to what they have been learning since. Imagine a biochemistry like Earth’s, but with its own evolution, natives as intelligent as we are but not human, an entire
world.”
Kahn’s fist smote the arm of his chair. He bounced a little in his harness, under the low deceleration pressure. “The Directorate is governed by idiots,” he said roughly. “Terminating the whole interstellar program just because some cost accountant machine says population has grown so large and resources so low that we can’t afford to keep on learning. My God, we can’t afford not to! Without new knowledge, what hope have we for changing matters?”
“Could be the Directors had that in mind also,” Redfeather grunted.
Kahn gave the co-pilot a sharp glance. Sometimes Redfeather surprised him.
The houseboat came down the Benison River, past Riptide Straits, and there lay the Bay of Desire. The sun was westering, a huge red-gold ball that struck fire off the waters. Kilometers distant, on the opposite shore, the Princess reared her blue peak high over the clustered, climbing roofs of Withylet village; closer at hand, the sails of boats shone white as the wings of the sea whistlers cruising above them. The air was still warm, but through an open window David Thrailkill sensed a coolness in the breeze, and a smell of salt, off the Weatherwomb Ocean beyond the Door.
“Want to take the helm, dear?” he asked Leonie.
“Sure, if you’ll mind Vivian,” said his wife.
Thrailkill went aft across the cabin to get a bottle of beer from the cooler. The engine throb was louder there, and didn’t sound quite right. Well, an overhaul was overdue, after so long a time upriver. He walked forward again, with his seven-year-old daughter in tow. (That would have been three years on Earth, an enchanting age, though already he could see that she would have her mother’s blond good looks and a touch of his own studiousness.) Leonie chuckled at them as they went by.
Strongtail was on the porch, to savor the view. They were following the eastern bayshore. It rose as steeply as the other side, in hills that were green from winter rains but had begun to show a tinge of summer’s tawniness. Flameflowers shouted color among pseudograsses and scattered boskets. Thrailkill lowered his lanky form into a chair, cocked feet on rail, and tilted the bottle. Cold pungency gurgled past his lips, like water cloven by the twin bows. “Ahhh!” he said. “I’m almost sorry to come home.”
Vivian flitted in Strongtail’s direction, several balls clutched to her chest. “Juggle?” she begged.
“Indeed,” said the Mithran. The girl laughed for joy, and bounced around as much as the balls. Strongtail had uncommon skill in keeping things aloft and awhirl. His build helped, of course. The first expeditipn had compared the autochthons to kangaroos with bird heads and arms as long as a gibbon’s. But a man who had spent his life among them needed no chimeras. To Thrailkill, his friend’s nude, brown-furred small form was a unity, more graceful and in a way more beautiful than any human.
The slender beak remained open while Strong-tail juggled, uttering those trills which men could not imitate without a vocalizer. “Yes, a pleasant adventure,” he said. “Fortune is that we have ample excuse to repeat it.”
“We sure do.” Thrailkill’s gaunt face cracked in a grin. “This is going to rock them back on their heels in Treequad. For nigh on two hundred and fifty years, we’ve been skiting across the world, and never dreamed about an altogether fantastic culture right up the Benison.
Won’t
Painted Jaguar be surprised?”
He spoke English. After an Earth century of contact, the Mithrans around the Bay understood even if they were not able to voice the language. And naturally every human kid knew what the flutings of his playmates meant. You couldn’t travel far, though, before you met strangeness; not surprising, on a planet whose most advanced civilization was pre-industrial and whose natives were nowhere given to exploration or empire building.
Sometimes Thrailkill got a bit exasperated with them. They were too damned gentle. Not that they weren’t vigorous, merry, et cetera. You couldn’t ask for a better companion than Strongtail. But he lacked ambition. He’d helped build this boat, and gone xenologizing on it, for fun and to oblige his buddy. When the mores of the riparian tribes became evident in all their dazzling complexities, he had not seen why the humans got so excited; to him, it was merely an occasion for amusement.
Thrailkill dismissed that recollection.
Mithras is their planet
, he reminded himself, not for the first time.
We’re here simply because their ancestors let us establish a base. If they seldom take any of the machines and ideas we offer; if they refuse chance after chance to really accomplish something, that’s their own affair. Maybe I just envy their attitude.
“I do not grasp your last reference,” said Strongtail.
“Hm? Painted Jaguar? An old story among my people.” Thrailkill looked toward the sun, where it touched the haze around the Princess with amber. Earth’s sun he had watched only on film, little and fierce and hasty in heaven. “I’m not sure I understand it myself, quite.”
Point Desire hove in view, the closest thing to a city that the region possessed, several hundred houses with adobe walls and red tile roofs on a headland above the docks. A dozen or so boats were in, mainly trading ketches from the southern arm of the Bay.
“Anxious though I am to see my kindred/’ the Mithran said, “I think we would do wrong not to dine with Rich-in-Peace.”
Thrailkill laughed. “Come off it, you hypocrite. You know damn well you want some of her cooking.” He rubbed his chin. “As a matter of fact, so do I.”
The houseboat strode on. When it passed another craft, Strongtail exchanged cheerful whistles. That the blocky structure moved without sails or oars was no longer a cause of wonder, and never had been very much. The people took for granted that humans made curious things.
“Indeed this has been a delightful journey,” Strongtail mused. “Morning mists rolling still and white, islands hidden among waterstalks, a fish line to trail aft, and at night our jesting in our own snug world. … I would like a houseboat for myself.”
“Why, you can use this one any time,” Thrailkill said.
“I know. But so many kin and friends would wish to come with me, years must pass before they have each shared my pleasure. There should be at least one other houseboat.”
“So make one. I’ll help whenever I get a chance, and you can have a motor built in Treequad.”
“For what fair value in exchange? I would have to work hard, to gather food or timber or whatever else the builder might wish.” Strongtail relaxed. “No, too many other joys wait, ranging Hermit Woods, lazing on Broadstrands, making music under the stars. Or playing with your cub.” He sent the balls through a series of leaps that made Vivian squeal.
The boat eased into a berth. There followed the routine of making fast, getting shipshape, packing the stuff which must go ashore. That went quickly, because several Mithrans stopped their dockside fishing in order to help. They seemed agitated about something, but wouldn’t say what. Presently everyone walked to the landward end of the dock. Planks boomed underfoot.