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Copyright ® 1972 by Marion Zimmer Bradley

All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by George Barr.

Border art by Richard Hescox.

DAW Book Collectors No. 36.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The songs quoted in the text from the New Hebrides Commune are all fromthe
 
Songs of the Hebrides,
 
collected by Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser and published 1909, 1922, by Boosey and Hawker.
 
The Seagull of the Land-Under-Waves,
 
English words by Mrs. Kennedy-Fraser,from the Gaelic of Kenneth Mac-Leod.
 
Caristlona,
 
words traditional, English by Kenneth MacLeod.
 
The Fairy's Love Song,
 
English words by James Hogg (adapted).
 
The Mull-Fisher's Song,
 
Englishwords by Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser.
 
The Coolies of Rum,
 
English words by Elfrida Rivers, by specialpermission.

First Printing, December, 1972

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES -MARCA

REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

ISBN 0-88677-234-6

Page 1

Chapter

ONE

The landing gear was almost the least of their worries; but it made a serious problem in getting in andout. The great starship lay tilted at a forty-five degree angle with the exit ladders and chutes comingnowhere near the ground, and the doors going nowhere. All the damage hadn't been assessed yet--notnearly--but they estimated that roughly half the crew's quartets and three-fourths of the passengersections were uninhabitable.

Already half a dozen small rough shelters, as well as the tent like field hospital, had been hastilythrown up in the great clearing. They'd been made, mostly out of plastic sheeting and logs from theresinous local trees, which had been cut with buzz-saws and timbering equipment from the supplymaterials for the colonists. All this had taken place over Captain Leicester's serious protests; he hadyielded only to a technicality. His orders were abso-lute when the ship was in space; on a planet the Colony Expedition Force was in charge.

The fact that it wasn't the
 
right
planet was a technical-ity that no one had felt able to tackle... yet.

It was, reflected Rafael MacAran as he stood on the low peak above the crashed spaceship, abeautiful planet. That Is, what they could see of it, which wasn't all that much. The gravity was a little lessthan Earth's, and the oxygen content a little higher, which itself meant a certain feeling of web-being andeuphoria for anyone born and brought up on Earth. No one reared on Earth in the twenty-first century, lie Rafael MacAran, had ever smelled arch sweet and resinous air, or seen faraway hdlg through such aclean bright morning.

The hills and the distant mountains rose amend them in an apparently endless panorama, fold beyond

fold,

5

gradually losing color with distance, turning first dim green, then dimmer blue, and finally to dimmest violet and purple. The great sun was deep red, the color of spilt blood; and that morning they had seen the four moons, like great multicolored jewels, hanging off the horns of the distant mountains.

MacAran set his pack down, pulled out the transit and began to set up its tripod legs. He bent toadjust the instrument, wiping sweat from his forehead. God, how hot it seemed after the brutal ice-cold oflast night and the sudden snow that had swept from the mountain range so swiftly they had barely hadtime to take shelter! And now the snow lay in melting runnels as he pulled off his nylon parka andmopped his brow.

He straightened up, looking around for convenient horizons. He already knew, thanks to thenew-model alti-meter which could compensate for different gravity strengths, that they were about athousand feet above sea level--or what would be sea level if there were any seas on this planet which

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they couldn't yet be sure of. In the stress and dangers of the crash-landing no one except the Third Officer had gotten a clear look at the planet from space, and she had died twenty minutes after impact while they were still digging bodies out of the wreckage of the bridge.

They knew that there were three planets in this system: one an oversized, frozen-methane giant, theother a small barren rock, more moon than planet except for its solitary orbit, and this one. They knewthat this one was what Earth Expeditionary Forces called a Class M planet --roughly Earth-type andprobably habitable. And now they knew they were on it. That was just about all they knew about it,except what they had discovered in the last seventy-two hours. The red sun, the four moons, theextremes of temperature, the mountains all had been dis-covered in the frantic intervals of digging out andiden-tifying the dead, setting up a hasty field hospital and drafting every able-bodied person to care forthe injured, bury the dead, and set up hasty shelters while the ship was still inhabitable.

Rafael MacAran started pulling his surveying instru-ments from his pack but he didn't attend to them. He had needed this brief interval alone more than he had realized; a little time to recover from therepeated and terrible

6

shocks of the last few hours-the crash, and a concussion which would have put him into a hospital on crowded, medically hypersensitive Earth. Here the medical officer, harried from worse injuries, tested his reflexes briefly, handed him some headache pills, and went on to the seriously hurt and the dying. His head still felt like an oversized toothache although the visual blurring had cleared up after the first night's deep. The next day he had been drafted, with all the other able-bodied men not on the medical staff or the engineering crews in the ship, to dig mass graves for the dead. And then there had been the mind-shaking shock of finding Jenny among them.

Jenny. He had envisioned her safe and well, too busy at her own job to hunt him up and reassurehim. Then among the mangled dead, the unmistakable silver-bright hair of his only sister. There hadn'teven been time for tears. There were too many dead. He did the only thing he could do. He reported to Camilla Del Rey, deputizing for Captain Leicester on the identity detail, that the name of Jenny MacAranshould be transferred from the lists of unlocated survivors to the list of definitely identified dead.

Camilla's only comment had been a terse, quiet `Thank you, MacAran.' There was no time forsympathy, no time for mourning or even humane expressions of kindness. And yet Jenny had been Camilla's close friend, she'd really loved that damned Del Rey girl like a sister--just why, Rafael hadnever known, but Jenny had, and there must have been some reason. He realized somewhere below thesurface, that he had hoped Camilla would shed for Jenny the tears he could not manage to weep. Someone ought to cry for Jenny, and he couldn't. Not yet.

He turned his eyes on his instruments again. If they had known their definite latitude on the planet itwould have been easier, but the height of the sun above the horizon would give them some rough idea.

Below him in a great bowl of land at least five miles across filled with low brushwood and scrubbytrees, the crashed spaceship lay. Rafael, looking at it from this distance, felt a strange sinking feeling Captain Leicester was supposed to be working with the crew to assess the damage and estimate the timeneeded to make repairs. Rafael knew nothing about the workings of starships--his

7

Page 3

own field was geology. But it didn't look to him as if that ship was ever going anywhere again.

Then he turned off the thought. That was for the engineering crews to say. They knew, and he didn't. He'd seen some near-miracles done by engineering these days. At worst this would be an uncomfortableinterval of a few days or a couple of weeks, then they'd be on their way again and a new habitable planetwould be charted on the Expeditionary Forces star maps for colonization. This one, despite the brutalcold at night, looked extremely habitable. Maybe they'd even get to share some of the finder's fees,which would go to improve the Coronis Colony where they'd be by then.

And they'd ail have something to talk about when they were Old Settlers in the Coronis Colony, fifty

or sixty years from now.

But if the ship never did get off the ground again... .

Impossible. This wasn't a charted planet, okayed for colonizing, and already opened up. The Coronis Colony---Phi Coronis Delta--was already the site of a flourishing mining settlement. There was afunctioning spaceport and a crew of engineers and technicians had been working there for ten yearspreparing the planet for settlement and studying its ecology. You couldn't set down, raw and unhelped bytechnology, on a completely unknown world.

It couldn't be done.

Anyway, that was somebody else's job and he'd better do his own now. He made all theobservations he could, noted them in his pocket notebook, and packed up the tripod starting down thehill again. He moved easily across the rock-strewn slope through the tough underbrush and trees carryinghis pack effortlessly in the light gravity. It was cleaner and easier than a hike on Earth, and he cast alonging eye at the distant mountains. Maybe if their stay stretched out more than a few days, he could bespared to take a brief climb into them. Rock samples and some geological notations should be worthsomething to Earth Expeditionary and it would be a lot better than a climbing trip on Earth, where every National Park from Yellowstone to Himalaya was choked with jet-brought tourists three hundred days ofthe year.

He supposed it was only fair to give everyone a chance at the mountains, and certainly the

slidewalks and lifts installed to the top of Mount Rainier and Everest and

8

Mount Whitney had made it easier for old women and children to get up there and have a chance to seethe scenery. But still, MacAran thought longingly, to climb an actual wild mountain--one with noslidewalks and not even a single chairlift! He'd climbed on Earth, but you felt silly struggling up a rock cliffwhen teen-agers were soaring past you in chairlifts on their effortless way to the top and giggling at theanachronist who wanted to do it the hard way!

Some of the nearer slopes were blackened with the scars of old forest fires, and he estimated thatthe clearing where the ship lay was second-growth from some such fire a few years before. Lucky theship's fire-prevention systems had prevented any fire on impact--otherwise if anyone had escaped alive, it

Page 4

might have been quite literally from a frying pan into a raging forest fire. They'd have to be careful in the woods. Earth people had lost their old woodcraft habits and might not be aware any more of what forest fires could do. He made a mental note of it for his report.

As he re-entered the area of the crash, his brief euphoria vanished. Inside the field hospital, throughthe semi-transparent plastic of the shelter material, he could see rows and rows of unconscious orsemiconscious bodies. A group of men were trimming breaches from tree trunks and another small groupwas raising a dymaxion dome--the kind, based on triangular bracings, which could be built in half a day. He began to wonder what the report of the Engineering crew had been. He could see a crew ofmachinists crawling around on the crumpled bracings of the starship but it didn't look as if much had beenaccomplished. In fact, it didn't look hopeful for getting away very soon.

As he passed the hospital, a young man in a stained and crumpled Medic uniform came out and

called.

"Rafe! The Mate said report to the First Dome as soon as you get back--there's a meeting there and they want you. I'm going over there myself for a Medic report --I'm the most senior man they can spare." He moved slowly beside MacAran. He was slight and small, with light-brown hair and a small curly brown beard, and he looked weary, as if he had had no sleep. MacAran asked, hesitatingly, "How are things going in the hospital?"

"Well, no more deaths since midnight, and we've taken

9

four more people off critical. There evidently wasn't a leak in the atomics after all--that girl from Comm checked out with no radiation burns; the vomiting was evidently just a bad blow in the solar plexus. Thank God for small favors--if the atomics had sprung a leak, we'd probably all be dead, and another planet contaminated."

Yeah, the M-AM drives have saved a lot of lives,-" MacAran said. "You look awfully tired,

Ewen--have you had any sleep at all?"

Ewen Ross shook his head. "No, but the Old Maws been generous with wakers, and I'm still racingmy motors. About midafternoon I'm probably going to crash and I won't wake up for three days, butuntil then I'm holding on." He hesitated, looked shyly at his friend and said, "I heard about Jenny, Rafe. Tough luck. So many of the girls back in that area made it out, I was sure she was okay."

"So was I.' MacAran drew a deep breath and felt the clean air like a great weight on his chest. "I

haven't seen Heather--is she--"

"Heather's okay; they drafted her for nursing duty. Not a scratch on her. I understand after this meeting they're going to post completed lists of the dead, the wounded and the survivors. What were you doing, anyway? Del Rey told me you'd been sent out, but I didn't know what for."

"Preliminary surveying," MacAran said. "We have no idea of our latitude, no idea of the planet's size or mass, no idea about climate or seasons or what have you. But I've established that we can't be too far off the equator, and--well I'll be making the report inside. Do we go right in?"