The Long Night df-10 Page 18

  Its work at present was mainly in astronomy. While some elementary nucleonics had been preserved through the dark ages—being essential to the maintenance of what few atomic power plants rcmaincd—practically all information about the stars had vanished. Today’s astronomers had learned that their sun (as distinguished from their planet) was not typical of its neighborhood. It was unpredictably variable, and not even its ground state could be fitted onto the main sequence diagram. No one had yet developed a satisfactory theory as to what made this sun abnormal, but the consensus was that it must be quite a young star.

  One geologist had proposed checking this idea by establishing the age of the planet. Radioactive minerals should provide a clock. The attempt had failed, partly because of the near-nonexistence of isotopes with suitable half-lives and partly, Tom suspected, because of lousy laboratory technique. But passing references in old books did seem to confirm the idea held by latter-day theorists, that stars and planets condensed out of interstellar gas and dust. If so, Nike’s sun could be very new, as, cosmic time went, and not yet fully stabilized.

  “Aye, Ed guess that myself,” Tom nodded.

  “Good! Important to be sure. You seize, can we make a mathematical model of our sun, then we can predict its variations. Right? And we will never predict our weather until then. Unforeseen storms are our greatest natural woe. Hanno’s self, a southerly land, can get killing frosts any season.”

  “Well, don’t take my authority, son. I’m no scientist. The Imperialists must’ve known for sure what kind o’star they had here. And a scholar of astronomy, from a planet where they still keep universities and such, should could tell you. But not me.” Tom struck new fire to his pipe. “Uh, we’d better stay with less fun topics. Like those ‘friends.’ ”

  Aran’s enthusiasm gave way to starkness. He could relate little. The raiders had not come in any large fleet, a dozen ships at most. But there was no effective opposition to them. They smashed defenses from space, landed, plundered, raped, tortured, burned, during a nightmare of weeks. After sacking a major city, they missiled it. They were human, their language another dialect of Anglic. Whether in sarcasm or hypocrisy or because of linguistic change, they described themselves to the Nikeans as “your friends, come to do business with you.” Since “friend” and “business” had long dropped out of local speech, Tom saw the origin of their present meaning here.

  “Do you know who they might have been?” Aran asked. His tone was thick with unshed tears.

  “No. Not sure. Space’s full o’ their kind.” Tom refrained from adding that he too wasn’t above a bit of piracy on occasion. After all, he observed certain humane rules with respect to those whom he relieved of their portable goods. The really bestial types made his flesh crawl, and he’d exterminated several gangs of them with pleasure.

  “Will they return, think you?”

  “Well probly not. I’d reckon they destroyed your big population centers to make sure no one else’d be tempted to come here and start a base that might be used against ’em. They bein’ too few to conquer a whole world, you see. ‘Course, I wouldn’t go startin’ major industries and such again without husky space defenses.”

  “No chance. We hide instead,” Aran said bitterly. “Most leaders dare allow naught that might draw other friends. Radio a bare minimum; no rebuilding of cities; yes, we crawl back to our dark age and cower.”

  “I take it you don’t pers’nally agree with that policy.”

  Aran shrugged. “What matter my thoughts? I am but a third son. The chiefs of the planet have ‘cided. They fought a war or two, forcing the rest to go with them in this. I myself bombed soldieers of Silva, when its Prester was made stop building a big atomic power plant. Our neighbor cavedom! And we had to fight them, not the friends!”

  Tom wasn’t shocked. He’d seen human politics get more hashed than that. What pricked his ears up was the information that, right across the border, lived a baron who couldn’t feel overly kindly toward Engineer Weyer.

  “You can seize, now, why we feared you,” Aran said.

  “Aye-ya. A sad misunderstandin’. If you hadn’t been so bloody impulsive, though—if you’d been willin’ to talk—we’d’ve quick seen what the lingo problem was.”

  “No! You were the ones who refused talk. When the Engineer called on you to be slaves—”

  “What the muck did he expect us to do after that?” Tom rumbled. “Wear his chains?”

  “Chains? Why… wait—oh-oh!”

  “Oh-oh, for sure,” Tom said. “Another little shift o’ meanin’, huh? All right, what does ‘slave’ signify to you?”

  It turned out that, on Nike, to be “enslaved” was nothing more than to be taken into custody: perhaps as a prisoner, perhaps merely for interrogation or protection. In Hanno, as in every advanced Nikean realm, slavery in Tom’s sense of the word had been abolished a lifetime ago.

  The two men stared at each other. “Events got away from both sides,” Tom said. “Atter what’d happened when last spacemen came, you were too spooked to give us a chanCe. You reckoned you had to get us under guard right away. And we reacted to that. We’ve seen a lot o’ cruelty and treachery. We couldn’t trust ourselves to complete strangers, ‘specially when they acted hostile. So… neither side gave the other time to think out the busi—the matter o’ word shift. If there’d been a few minutes’ pause in the action, I think I, at least, would’ve guessed the truth. I’ve seen lots o’ similar cases. But I never had any such pause, till now.”

  He grinned and extended a broad hard hand. “All’s well that ends well, I’m told,” he said. “Let’s be camarados.”

  Aran ignored the gesture. The face he turned to the outworlder was only physically youthful. “We cannot,” he said. “You wrecked a plane and stole another. Worse, you killed a man of ours.”

  “But—well, self-defense!”

  “I might pardon you,” Aran said. “I do not think the Engineer would or could. It is more than the damage you worked. More than the anger of the powerful Sato family, who like it not if a son of theirs dies unavenged because of a comic mix in s’mantics. It is the policy that he, Weyer’s self, strove to bring.”

  “You ‘mean . nothin’ good can come from outer space… wall Nike off… treat anyone that comes as hostile… right?” Tom rubbed his chin and scowled sullenly.

  Weyer was probably not too dogmatic, nor too tightly bound by the isolationist treaty, to change his mind in time. But Tom had scant time to spare. Every hour that passed, he and his womenfolk risked getting shot down by some hysteric. Also, a bunch of untrained Nikeans, pawing over his spaceship, could damage her beyond the capacity of this planet’s industry to repair.

  Also, he was needed back on Kraken soon, or his power there would crumble. And that would be a mortally dangerous situation for his other wives, children, grandchildren, old and good comrades…

  In short, there was scant value in coming to terms with Weyer eventually. He needed to reach agreement fast. And, after what had happened this day, he didn’t see how he could.

  Well, the first thing he must do was reunite his party. Together, they might accomplish something. If nothing else, they could seek refuge in the adjacent country, Silva. Though that was doubtless no very secure place for them, particularly if Weyer threatened another war.

  “You should slave yourself,” Aran urged. “Afterward you can talk.”

  “As a prisoner—a slave—I’d have precious little bargainin’ leverage,” Tom said. “Considerin’ what that last batch o’ spacers did, I can well imagine we bein’ tortured till I cough up for free everything I’ve got to tell. S’posin’ Weyer himself didn’t want to treat me so inhospitable, he could break down anyhow under pressure from his court or his fellow bosses.”

  “It may be,” Aran conceded, reluctantly, but too idealistic at his age to violate the code of his class and lie.

  “Whereas if I can stay loose, I can try a little pressure o’ my own. I can maybe find some
thin’ to offer that’s worth makin’ a deal with me. That’d even appease the Sato clan, hm?” Tom fumed on his pipe. “I’ve got to contact my women. Right away. Can’t risk their fallin’ into Weyer’s hands. If they do, he’s got me! Know any way to raise a couple o’ girls who don’t have a radio and ‘re doin’ their level best to disappear?”

  * * *

  Sunset rays turned the hilltop fiery. Farther down, the land was already blue with a dusk through which river, bay, and distant sea glimmered argent. Cloud banks towered in the east, blood-colored, dwarfing the Saw-tooth Mountains that marked Hanno’s frontier.

  At the lowest altitude when this was visible—the highest to which a damaged, overloaded flyer could limp—the air was savagely cold. It wasn’t too thin for breathing; the atmosphere’s density gradient is less for small than for large planets. But it swept through the cracked canopy to sear Tom’s nostrils and numb his fingers on the board. Above the drone of the combustion powerplant, he heard Yano Aran’s teeth clatter. Stuffed behind the pilot chair, the boy might have tried to mug his captor. But he wasn’t dressed for this temperature and was chilled half insensible. Tom’s clothes were somewhat warmer. Besides, he felt he could take on any two Nikeans hand-to-hand.

  The controls of the plane were simple to a man who’d used as wide a variety of machines as he. Trickiness came from the broken and twisted airfoil surfaces. And, of course, he must keep a watch for Weyer’s boys. He didn’t think they’d be aloft, nor that they would scramble and get here in the few minutes he needed. But you never knew. If one did show up maybe Tom could pot him with a lucky blast from the guns.

  He swung through another carousel curve. That should be that. Now to skate away. He throttled the engine back. The megafield dropped correspondingly, and he went into a glide. But he was no longer emitting enough exhaust for a visible trail.

  The tracks he had left were scribbled over half the sky. The sun painted them gold-orange against that deepening purple.

  Abruptly, turbulence across the buckled delta wing gained mastery. The glide became a tailspin. Aran yelled.

  “Hang on,” Tom said. “I can ride ’er.”

  Crazily whirling, the dark land rushed at him. He stopped Aran’s attempt to grab the stick with a karate chop and concentrated on his altimeter. At the last possible moment, allowing for the fact that he must coddle this wreck lest he tear her apart altogether, he pulled out of his tumble. A prop, jet or rocket would never have made it, but you could do special things with grays if you had the knack in your fingers. Or whatever part of the anatomy it was.

  Finally the plane whispered a few meters above the bay. Its riding lights were doused, and the-air here was too warm for engine vapor to condense. Tom believed his passage had a fair chance of going unnoticed.

  Hills shouldered black around the water. Here and there among them twinkled house lamps. One cluster bespoke a village on the shore. Tom’s convoluted contrail was breaking up, but slowly. It glowed huge and mysterious, doubtless frightening peasants and worrying the military.

  Aran stared at it likewise, as panic and misery left him. “I thought you wrote a message to your camarados,” tie said. “That’s no writing.”

  “Couldn’t use your alphabet, son, seein’ I had to give ’em directions to a place with a local name. Could I, now? Even Karken’s letters look too much like yours. But those’re Momotaroan phonograms. Dagny can read ’em. I hope none o’ Weyer’s folk’ll even guess it is a note. Maybe they’ll think I went out o’ control tryin’ to escape and, after staggerin’ around a while, crashed… Now, which way is this rendezvous?”

  “Rendez—oh. The togethering I advised. Follow the north shore eastward a few more kilos. At the end of a headland stands Orgino’s Cave.”

  “You absolutely sure nobody’ll be there?”

  “As sure as may be; and you have me for hostage. Orgino was a war chief of three hundred years agone. They said he was so wicked he must be in pact with the Wanderer, and to this day the commons think he walks the ruins of his cave. But it’s a landmark. Let your camarados ask shrewdly, and they can find how to get there with none suspecting that for their wish.”

  The plane sneaked onward. Twilight was short in this thin air. Stars twinkled splendidly forth, around the coalsack of the Nebula. The outer moon rose, gradually from the eastern cloudbanks, almost full but its disk tiny and corroded-bronze dark. An auroral glow flickered. This far south? Well, Nike had a, fairly strong magnetic field—which, with the mean density, showed that it possessed the ferrous core it wasn’t supposed to—but not so much that charged solar particles couldn’t strike along its sharp curvature clear to the equator.

  If they were highly energetic particles, anyhow. And they must be. Tom had identified enormous spots as well as flares on that ruddy sun disk. Which oughtn’t to be there! Not even when output was rising. A young star, its outer layers cool and reddish because they were still contracting shouldn’t have such intensity. Should it?

  Regardless, Nike’s sun did.

  Well, Tom didn’t pretend to know every kind of star. His travels had really not been so extensive, covering a single corner of the old Imperium, which itself had been insignificant compared to the whole galaxy. And his attention had naturally always been focused on more or less Sol-type stars. He didn’t know what a very young or very old or very large or very small sun was like in detail.

  Most certainly he didn’t know what the effects of abnormal chemical composition might be. And the distribution of elements in this system was unlike that of any other Tom had ever heard about. Conditions on Nike bore out what spectroanalysis had indicated in space: impoverishment with respect to heavy elements. Since it had formed recently, the sun and its planets must therefore have wandered here from some different region. Its velocity didn’t suggest that. However, Tom hadn’t determined the galactic orbit with any precision. Besides, it might have been radically changed by a close encounter with another orb. Improbable as the deuce, yes, but then the whole crazy situation was very weird.

  The headland loomed before him, and battlements against the Milky Way. Tom made a vertical landing in a courtyard. “All right.” His voice sounded jarringly loud.

  “Now we got nothin’ much to do but wait.”

  “What if they come not?” Aran asked.

  “I’ll give ’em a day or two,” Tom said. “After that, we’ll see.” He didn’t care to dwell on the possibility. His unsentimental soul was rather astonished to discover how big a part of it Dagny had become. And Yasmin was a good kid, he wished her well.

  He left the crumbling flagstones for a walk around the walls. Pseudo-moss grew damp and slippery on the parapet. Once mail-clad spearmen had tramped their rounds here, and the same starlight sheened on their helmets as tonight, or as in the still more ancient, vanished glory of the Empire, or the League before it, or—And what of the nights yet to come? Tom shied from the thought and loaded his pipe.

  Several hours later, the nearer moon rose from the hidden sea; its apparent path was retrograde and slow. Although at half phase, with an angular diameter of a full degree it bridged the bay with mercury.

  Rising at the half—local midnight, more or less—would the girls never show? He ought to get some sleep. His eyelids were sandy. Aran had long since gone to rest in the tumbledown keep. He must be secured, of course, before Tom dozed off . No. I couldn’t manage a snooze even if I tried. Where are you, Dagny?

  The cold wind lulled, the cold waves lapped, a winged creature fluttered and whistled. Tom sat down where a portcullis had been and stared into the woods beyond.

  There came a noise. And another. Branches rustled. Hoofbeats clopped. Tom drew his blaster and slid into the shadow of a tower. Two riders on horseback emerged from the trees. For a moment they were unrecognizable, unreal. Then the moon’s light struck Dagny’s tawny mane. Tom shouted.

  Dagny snatched her own gun forth. But when she saw who lumbered toward her, it fell into the rime-frosted grass.
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  Afterward, in what had been a feasting hall, with a flashlight from the aircraft to pick faces out of night, they conferred. “No, we had no trouble,” Dagny said. “The _ farmers sold us those animals without any fuss.”

  “If you gave him a thirty-gram gold piece, on this planet, I reckon so,” Tom said. “You could probly’ve gotten hiss house thrown into the deal. He’s bound to gossip about you, though.”

  “That can’t be helped,” Dagny said. “Our idea was to keep traveling east and hide in the woods when anyone happened by. But we’d no strong hope, especially with that wide cultivated valley to get across. Tom, dear, when I saw your sky writing, it was the second best moment of my life.”

  “What was the first?”

  “You were involved there too,” she said. “Rather often, in fact.”

  Yasmin stirred. She sat huddled on the floor, chilled, exhausted, wretched, though nonetheless drawing Aran’s appreciative gaze. “Why do you grin at each other?” she wailed. “We’re hunted!”

  “Tell me more,” Tom said.

  “What can we do?”

  “You can shut up, for the gods’ sake, and keep out o’ my way!” he snapped impatiently. She shrank from him and knuckled her eyes.

  “Be gentle,” Dagny said. “She’s only a child.”

  “She’ll be a dead child if we don’t get out o’ here,” Tom retorted. “We got time before dawn to slip across the Silvan border in yon airboat. After that, we’ll have to play ’er as she lies. But I been pumpin’ my—shall I say, my friend, about politics and geography and such. I think with luck we got a chance o’ staying free.”

  “What chance of getting our ship back, and repaired?” Dagny asked.

  “Well_that don’t look so good, but maybe somethin’ll come down the slot for us. Meanwhile let’s move.”

  They went back to the courtyard. The inner moon was so bright that no supplement was needed for the job on hand. This was to unload the extra fuel tanks, which were racked aft of the cockpit. The plane would lose cruising range, would indeed be unable to go past the eastern slope of the Sawtooths. But it would gain room for two passengers.