The Long Night df-10 Page 10

  But life could not be strictly nomadic. Some gear was not portable, or needed protection. Thus, in each territory, at least one true house and several outbuildings had been erected, where the people lived from time to time.

  Humans needed protection too. Ridenour fOund that out when he and Evagail were caught in a storm.

  She had led him off the line of march to show him such a center. They had been enroute for an hour or two when she began casting uneasy glances at the sky. Clouds rose in the north, unbelievably high thunderheads with lightning in their blue-black depths. A breeze chilled and stiffened; the forest moaned. “We’d better speed up,” she said at length. “Rainstorm headed this way.”

  “Well?” He no longer minded getting wet.

  “I don’t mean those showers we’ve had. I mean the real thing.”

  Ridenour gulped and matched her trot. He knew what kind of violence a deep, intensely irradiated atmosphere can breed. Karlsarm’s folk must be hard at work, racing to chop branches and make rough roofs and walls for themselves. Two alone couldn’t do it in time. They’d normally have sought refuge under a windfall or in a hollow trunk or anything else they found. But a house was obviously preferable.

  The wind worsened. Being denser than Terra’s, air never got to hurricane velocity; but it thrust remorselessly, a quasi-solid, well-nigh unbreathable mass. Torn-off leaves and boughs started to fly overhead, under a galloping black cloud wrack. Darkness thickened, save when lightning split the sky. Thunder, keenings, breakings and crashings, resounded through Ridenour’s skull.

  He had believed himself in good shape, but presently he was staggering. Any man must soon be exhausted, pushing against that horrible wind. Evagail, though, continued, easy of breath. How? he wondered numbly, before he lost all wonder in the cruel combat to keep running.

  The first raindrops fell, enormous, driven by the tempest, stinging like gravel when they struck. You could be drowned in a flash flood, if you were not literally fhiyed by the hail that would soon come. Ridenour reeled toward unconsciousness—no, he was helped, Evagail upbore him, he leaned on her and—

  And they reached the hilltop homestead.

  It consisted of low, massive log-and-stone buildings, whose overgrown sod roofs would hardly be visible from above. Everything stood unlighted, empty. But the door to the main house opened at Evagail’s touch; no place in the woodlands had a lock. She dragged Ridenour across the threshold and closed the door again. He lay in gloom and gasped his way back to consciousness. As if across light-years, he heard her say, “We didn’t arrive any too soon, did we?” There followed the cannonade of the hail.

  After a while he was on his feet. She had stimulated the lamps, which were microcultures in glass globes, to their bright phosphorescence and had started a fire on the hearth. The principal heat source, however, was fuel oil, a system antique but adequate. “We might as well figure on spending the night,” she said from the kitchen. “This weather will last for hours, and the roads will be rivers for hours after that. Why don’t you find yourself a hot bath and some dry clothes? I’ll have dinner ready soon.”

  Ridenour swallowed a sense of inadequacy. He wasn’t an outbacker and couldn’t be expected to cope with their country. How well would they do on Terra? Exploring, he saw the house to be spacious, many-roomed, beautifully paneled, draped and furnished, Evagail’s advice was sound. He returned to her as if reborn.

  She had prepared an excellent meal out of what was in the larder, including a heady red wine. White tablecloth, crystal goblets, candlelight were almost a renaissance of a Terra which had been more grãcious than today’s. (Almost. The utensils were horn, the knifeblades obsidian. The paintings on the walls were of a stylized, unearthly school; looking closely, you could identify Arulian influence. No music lilted from a taper; instead came the muffled brawling of the storm. And the woman who sat across from him wore a natural-fiber kilt, a fringed leather bolero, a dagger and tomahawk.)

  They talked in animated and friendly wise, though since they belonged to alien cultures they had little more than question-and-answer conversation. The bottle passed freely back and forth. Being tired and having long abstained, Ridenour was quickly affected by the alcohol. When he noticed that, he thought, what the hell, why not? It glowed within him. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “I classed your people as barbarians. I see now you have a true civilization.”

  “You needed this much time to see that?” she laughed. “Well, I’ll forgive you. The Cities haven’t realized it yet.”

  “That’s natural. You’re altogether strange to them. And, isolated as they are from the galactic mainstream, they… haven’t the habit of thinking something different… can be equal or superior to what they take for granted is the civilized way.”

  “My, that was a sentence! Do you acknowledge, then, we are superior?”

  He shook his head with care.

  “No. I can’t say that. I’m a city boy myself. A lot of what you do shocks me. Your ruthlessness. Your unwillingness to compromise.”

  She grew grave. “The Cities never tried to compromise with us, John. I don’t know if they can. Our wise men, those who’ve studied history, say an industrial society must keep expanding or go under. We’ve got to stop them before they grow too strong. The war’s given us a chance.”

  “You can’t rebel against the Empire!” he protested.

  “Can’t we? We’re a goodly ways from Terra. And we are rebelling. No one consulted us about incorporation.” Evagail shrugged. “Not that we care about that in itself. What difference to us who claims the over-lordship of Freehold, if he lets us alone? But the Cities have not let us alone. They cut down our woods, dam our rivers, dig holes in our soil, and get involved in a war that may wreck the whole planet.”

  “M-m, you could help end the war if you mobilized against the Arulians.”

  “To whose benefit? The Cities’!”

  “But when you attack the Cities, aren’t you aiding the Arulians?”

  “No. Not in the long run. They belong to the Cities also. We don’t want to fight them—our relationship with them was mostly pleasant, and they taught us a great deal—but eventually we want them off this world.”

  “You can’t expect me to agree that’s right.”

  “Certainly not.” Her tone softened. “What we want from you is nothing but an honest report to your leaders. You don’t know how happy I am that you admit we are civilized. Or post-civilized. At any rate, we aren’t degenerate, we are progressing on our own trail. I can hope you’ll go between us and the Empire, as a friend of both, and help work out a settlement. If you do that, you’ll live in centuries of ballads: the Peacebringer.”

  “I’d like that better than anything,” he said gladly.

  She raised her brows. “Anything?”

  “Oh, some things equally, no doubt. I am getting homesick.”

  “You needn’t stay lonely while you’re with us,” she murmured.

  Somehow, their hands joined across the table. The wine sang in Ridenour’s veins. “I’ve wondered why you stood apart from me,” she said. “Surely you could see I want to make love with you.”

  “Y-yes.” His heart knocked.

  “Why not? You have a… a wife, yes. But I can’t imagine an Imperial Terran worries about that, two hundred light-years from home. And what harm would be done her?”

  “None.”

  She laughed anew, rose and circled the table to stand beside him and rumpled his hair. The odor of her was sweet around him. “All right,’ then, silly,” she said, “what have you been waiting for?”

  He remembered. She saw his fists clench and stepped back. He looked at the candle flames, not her, and mumbled: “I’m sorry. It mustn’t be.”

  “Why not?” The wind raved louder, nearly obliterating her words.

  “Let’s say I do have idiotic medieval scruples.”

  She regarded him for a space. Is that the truth?”

  “Yes.” But not the whole t
ruth, he thought, I am not an observer, not an emissary, I an he who will call doWn destruction upon you if I can. The thing in my pocket sunders us, dear. You are my enemy, and I will not betray you with a kiss.

  “I’m not offended,” she said at last, slowly. “Disappointed and puzzled, though.”

  “We probably—don’t understand each other as well as we believed,” he ventured.

  “Might be. Well, let’s let the dishes wait and turn in, shall we?” Her tone was less cold than wary.

  Next day she was polite but aloof, and after they had rejoined the army she conferred long with Karlsarm.

  * * *

  Moon Garnet Lake was the heart of the Upwoods: more than fifty kilometers across, walled on three sides by forest and on the fourth by soaring snowpeaks. At every season it was charged with life, fish in argent swarms, birds rising by thousands when a bulligator bellowed in a white-plumed stand of cockatoo reed, wildkine everywhere among the trees. At full summer, microphytons multiplied until the waters glowed deep red, and the food chain which they started grew past belief in size and diversity. As yet, the year was too new for that. Wavelets sparkled clear to the escarpments, where mountaintops floated dim blue against heaven.

  “I see why you reacted violently against the attempt to found a town here,” Ridenour said to Karlsarm. They stood on a beach,, watching most of the expedition frolic in the lake. Those boisterous shouts and lithe brown bodies did not seem out of place; a cruising flock of fowl overhead was larger and made more clangor. The Ter-ran drew a pure breath. “And it would have been a pity, esthetically speaking. Who owns this region?”

  “None,” Karlsarm answered. “It’s too basic to the whole country. Anyone may use it. The numbers that do aren’t great enough to strain the resources, similar things being available all over. So it’s a natural site for our periodic-head-of-household gatherings,” He glanced sideways at the other man and added: “Or for an army to rendezvous.”

  “You are not disbanding, then?”

  “Certainly not. Domkirk was a commencement. We don’t intend to stop till we control the planet.”

  “But you’re daydreaming! No other City’s as vulnerably located as Domkirk was. Some are on other continents—”

  “Where Free People also live. We’re in touch.”

  “What do you plan?”

  Karlsarm chuckled. “Do you really expect me to tell you?”

  Ridenour made a rueful grin, but his eyes were troubled. “I don’t ask for military secrets. In general terms, however, what do you foresee?”

  “A war of attrition,” Karlsarm said. “We don’t like that prospect either. It’ll taste especially sour to use biologicals against their damned agriculture. But if we must, we must. We have more land, more resources of the kind that count, more determination. And they can’t get at us. We’ll outgrind them.”

  “Are you quite sure? Suppose you provoke them—or the Imperial Navy—into making a real effort. Imagine, say, one atomic bomb dropped into this lake.”

  Anger laid tight bands around Karlsarm’s throat and chest, but he managed to answer levelly: “We have defenses. And means of retaliation. This is a keystone area for us. We won’t lose it without exacting a price—which I think they’ll find too heavy. Tell them that when you go home!”

  “I shall. I don’t know if I’ll be believed. You appear to have no concept of the power that a single, minor-class spaceship can bring to bear. I beg you to make terms before it’s too late.”

  “Do you aim to convince a thousand leaders like me and the entire society that elected us? I wish you luck, John Ridenour.” Karlsarm turned from the pleading gaze. “I’d better get busy. We’re still several kilometers short of our campsite.”

  His brusqueness was caused mainly by doubt of his ability to dissemble much longer. What he, with some experience of Imperialists, sensed in this one’s manner, lent strong support to the intuitive suspicions that Evagail had voiced. Ridenour had more on his mind than the Terran admitted.

  It was unwise to try getting the truth out of him with drugs. He might be immunized or counter-conditioned. Or his secret might turn out to be something harmless. In either, case, a potentially valuable spokesman would have been antagonized for nothing.

  An aphrodite? She’d boil the ice water in his veins, for certain! And, while possessors of that Skill were rare, several were standing by at present in case they should be needed on some intelligence mission.

  It might not work, either. But the odds were high that it would. Damned few men cared for anything but the girl—the woman—the hag—whatever her age, whatever her looks—once she had turned her pheromones loose on him. She could ask what she would as the price of her company. But Ridenour might belong to that small percentage who, otherwise normal, were so intensely inner-directed that it didn’t matter how far in love they fell; they’d stick by their duty. Should this prove the case he could not be allowed to leave and reveal the existence of that powerful a weapon. He must be killed, which was repugnant, or detained, which was a nuisance.

  Karlsarm’s brain labored on, while he issued his orders and led the final march. Ridenour probably did not suspect that he was suspected. He likeliest interpreted Evagail’s avoidance of him as due to pique, despite what she had claimed. (And in some degree it no doubt is, Karlsarm snickered to himself.) Chances were he attributed the chief’s recent gruffness to preoccupation. He had circulated freely among the other wen and women of the force; but not having been told to doubt his good faith, they did not and he must realize it.

  Hard to imagine what he might do. He surely did not plan on access to an aircar or a long-range radio transmitter! Doubtless he’d report anything, he had seen or heard that might have military significance. But he wouldn’t be reporting anything that made any difference. Well before he was conducted to the agrolands, the army would have left Moon Garnet again; and it would not return, because the lake was too precious to use for a permanent base. And all this had been made explicit to Ridenour at the outset.

  Well, then, why not give him free rein and see what he did? Karlsarm weighed risks and gains for some time before he nodded to himself.

  The encampment was large. A mere fraction of the Up-woods men had gone to Domkirk. Thousands stayed behind, training. They greeted their comrades with envious hilarity. Fires burned high that night, song and dance and clinking goblets alarmed the forest.

  _ At sunset, Karlsarm and Evagail stood atop a rocky bluff, overlooking water and trees and a northward rise to the camp. Behind them was a cave, from which projected an Arulian howitzer. Several other heavy-duty weapons were placed about the area, and a rickety old war boat patrolled overhead. Here and there, a man flitted into view, bow or blade on shoulder, and vanished again into the brake. Voices could be heard, muted by leaves, and smoke drifted upward. But the signs of man were few, virtually lost in that enormous landscape. With the enemy hundreds of kilometers off, guns as well as picketposts were untended; trees divided the little groups of men from each other and hid them from shore or sky; the evening was mostly remote bird cries and long golden light.

  “I wonder what our Terran thinks of this,” Karlsarm said. “We must look pretty sloppy to him.”

  “He’s no fool. He doesn’t underrate us much. Maybe not at all.” Evagail shivered, though the air was yet warm. Her hand crept into his, her voice grew thin. “Could he be right? Could we really be foredoomed?”

  “I don’t know,” Karlsarm said.

  She started. The hazel eyes widened. “Loveling! You are always—”

  “I can be honest with you,” he said.”Ridenour accused me today of not understanding what power the Imperialists command in a single combat unit. He was wrong.

  I’ve seen them and I do understand. We can’t force terms on them. If they decide the Cities must prevail, well, we’ll give them a hard guerrilla war, but we’ll be hunted down in the end. Our aim has to be to convince them it isn’t worthwhile—that, at the least, their c
heapest course of action is to arrange and enforce a status quo settlement between us and the Cities.” He laughed. “Whether or not they’ll agree remains to be seen. But we’ve got to try, don’t we?”

  “Do we?”

  “Either that or stop being the Free People.”

  She leaned her head on his shoulder. “Let’s not spend the night in this hole,” she begged. “Not with that big ugly gun looming over us. Let’s take our bedrolls into the forest.”

  “I’m sorry. I must stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “So Noach can find me… if his animals report anything.”

  * * *

  Karlsarm woke before the fingers had closed on his arm to shake him. He sat up. The cave was a murk, relieved by a faint sheen off the howitzer; but the entrance cut a blue-black starry circle in it. Noach crouched silhouetted. “He lay awake the whole night,” the handler breathed. “Now he’s sneaked off to one of the blaster cannon. He’s fooling around with it”

  Karlsarrn heard Evagail gasp at his side. He slipped weapon belts and quiver strap over the clothes he had slept in, took his crossbow and glided forth. “We’ll see about that,” he said. Anger stood bleak within him. “Lead on?’ Silent though they were, slipping from shadow, he became aware of the woman at his back.

  Selene was down, sunrise not far off, but the world still lay !lighted, sky powdered with stars and lake gleaming like a mirror. An uhu wailed, off in the bulk of the forest. The air was cold. ICarlsarrn glanced aloft.

  Among the constellations crept that spark which had often haunted his thoughts. The orbit he estimated from angular speed was considerable. Therefore the thing was big. And if the Imperialists had erected some kind of space station, the, grapevine would have brought news from the Free People’s spies inside the Cities; therefore the thing was a spaceship—huge. Probably the light cruiser Isis: largest man-of-war the‹Terrans admitted keeping in this sytem. (Quite enough for their purposes. A heavier craft couldn’t land if needed. This one could handle any probable combination of lesser vessels. If Aruli sent something more formidable, the far-flung scoutboats would detect that in time to arrange reinforcements from a Navy base before the enemy arrived. Which was ample reason to expect that Aruli would not “intervene in a civil conflict, though denouncing this injustice visited upon righteously struggling kinfolk.”)