The Long Night df-10 Page 24

  Evalyth nodded. “I see.”

  “You understand what this means, I suppose,” Jonafer said. “There’ll be no problem to ending the practice. We’ll simply tell them we have a new and better Holy Food, and prove it with a few pills. Terrestrial-type meat animals can be reintroduced later and supply what’s necessary. In the end, no doubt our geneticists can repair that faulty Y chromosome.”

  He could not stay contained any longer. His mouth opened, a gash across his half-seen face, and he rasped: “I should praise you for saving a whole people. I can’t. Get your business over with, will you?”

  Evalyth trod forward to stand before Moru. He shivered but met her eyes. Astonished, she said: “You haven’t drugged him.”

  “No,” Jonafer said. “I wouldn’t help you.” He spat. “Well, I’m glad.” She addressed Moru in his own language: “You killed my man, Is it right that I should kill you?”

  “It is right,” he answered, almost as levelly as she. “I thank you that my woman and my sons are to go free.” He was quiet for a second or two. “I have heard that your folk can preserve food for years without it rotting. I would be glad if you kept my body to give to your sons;”

  “Mine will not need it,” Evalyth said. “Nor will the sons of your sons.”

  Anxiety tinged his words: “Do you know why I slew your man? He was kind to me, and like a god. But I am lame. I saw no other way to get what my sons must have; and they must have it soon, or it would be too late and they could never become men.”

  “He taught me,” Evalyth said, “how much it is to be a man.”

  She turned to Jonafer, who stood tense and puzzled. “I had my revenge,” she said in Donli’s tongue.

  “What?” His question was a reflexive noise.

  “After I learned about the ‘dipteroid phenomenon,” she said. “All that was necessary was for me to keep silent. Moru, his children, his entire race would go on being prey for centuries, maybe forever. I sat for half an hour, I think, having my revenge.”

  “And then?” Jonafer asked.

  “I was satisfied and could start thinking about justice,” Evalyth said.

  She drew a knife. Moru straightened his back. She stepped behind him and cut his bonds. “Go home,” she said. “Remember him.”

  Some forms of sharing will remain utterly impossible despite fullness of knowledge, strength of will, or depth of love. Yet whatever disasters befall humankind, heroism has a way of outliving horror.

  Consider the colonial planet Vixen. Wrecked by alien invaders in Flandry’s time. It not only recovered and survived the Empire’s fall, it founded its own highly successful colony, New Vixen. The latter was flourishing in the eighth millennium when the descendants of anti-lmperialist rebels banished by Flandry stumbled upon their distant kindred.

  Was any beacon bright enough to guide the exiles home?

  Starfog

  “From another universe. Where space is a shining cloud, two hundred light-years across, roiled by the red stars that number in the many thousands, and where the brighter suns are troubled and cast forth great flames. Your spaces are dark and lonely.”

  Daven Laure stopped the recording and asked for an official translation. A part of Jaccavrie’s computer scanned the molecules of a plugged-in memory cylinder, identified the passage, and flashed the Serievan text onto a reader screen. Another part continued the multitudinous tasks of planetary approach. Still other parts waited for the man’s bidding, whatever he might want next. A Ranger of the Commonalty traveled in a very special ship.

  And even so, every year, a certain number did not come home from their missions.

  Laure nodded to himself. Yes, he’d understood the woman’s voice correctly. Or, at least, he interpreted her sentences approximately the same way as did the semanticist who had interviewed her and her fellows. And this particular statement was as difficult, as ambiguous as any which they had made. Therefore: (a) Probably the linguistic computer on Serieve had done a good job of unraveling their basic language. (b) It had accurately encoded its findings—vocabulary, grammar, tentative reconstruction of the underlying worldview—in the cylinders which a courier had brought to Sector HQ. (c) The reencoding, into his own neurones, which Laure underwent on his way here, had taken well. He had a working knowledge of the tongue which—among how many others?—was spoken on Kirkasant.

  “Wherever that may be,” he muttered.

  The ship weighed his words for a nanosecond or two, decided no answer was called for, and made none. Restless, Laure got to his feet and prowled from the study cabin, down a corridor to the bridge. It was so called largely by courtesy. Jaccavrie navigated, piloted, landed, lifted, maintained, and, if need be, repaired and fought for herself. But the projectors here offered a hill outside view. At the moment, the bulkheads seemed cramped and barren. Laure ordered the simulacrum activated.

  The bridge vanished from his eyes. Had it not been for the G-field underfoot, he might have imagined himself floating in space. A crystal night enclosed him, unwinking stars scattered like jewels, the frosty glitter of the Milky Way. Large and near, its radiance stopped down to preserve his retinas, burned the yellow sun of Serieve. The planet itself was a growing crescent, blue banded with white, rimmed by a violet sky. A moon stood opposite, worn golden coin.

  But Laure’s gaze strayed beyond, toward the deeps and then, as if in search of comfort, the other way, toward Old Earth. There was no comfort, though. They still named her Home, but she lay in the spiral arm behind this one, and Laure had never seen her. He had never met anyone who had. None of his ancestors had, for longer than their family chronicles ran. Home was a half-remembered myth; reality was here, these stars on the fringes of this civilization.

  Serieve lay near the edge of the known. Kirkasant lay somewhere beyond.

  “Surely not outside of spacetime,” Laure said.

  “If you’ve begun thinking aloud, you’d like to discuss it,” Jaccavrie said.

  He had followed custom in telling the ship to use a female voice and, when practical, idiomatic language. The computer had soon learned precisely what pattern suited him best. That was not identical with what he liked best; such could have got disturbing on a long cruise. He found himself more engaged, inwardly, with the husky contralto that had spoken in strong rhythms out of the recorder than he was with the mezzo-soprano that now reached his ears.

  “Well… maybe so,” he said. “But you already know everything in the material we have aboard.”

  “You need to set your thoughts in order. You’ve spent most of our transit time acquiring the language.”

  “All right, then, let’s run barefoot through the obvious.” Laure paced a turn around the invisible deck. He felt its hardness, he sensed the almost subliminal beat of driving energies, he caught a piny whiff of air as the ventilators shifted to another part of their odor-temperature-ionization cycle; but still the stars blazed about him, and their silence seemed to enter his bones. Abruptly, harshly, he said: “Turn that show off.”

  The ship obeyed. “Would you like a planetary scene?” she asked. “You haven’t yet looked at those tapes from the elf castles on Jair that you bought—”

  “Not now.” Laure flung himself into a chair web and regarded the prosaic metal, instruments, manual override controls that surrounded him. “This will do.”

  “Are you feeling well? Why not go in the diagnoser and let me check you out? We’ve time before we arrive.”

  The tone was anxious. Laure didn’t believe that emotion was put on. He refrained from anthropomorphizing his computer, just as he did those nonhuman sophonts he encountered. At the same time, he didn’t go along with the school of thought which claimed that human-sensibility terms were absolutely meaningless in such connections. An alien brain, or a cybernetic one like Jaccavrie’s, could think; it was aware; it had collation. Therefore it had analogies to his.

  Quite a few Rangers were eremitic types, sane enough but basically schizoid. That was their way of stan
ding the gaff. It was normal for them to think of their ships as elaborate tools. Daven Laure, who was young and outgoing, naturally thought of his as a friend.

  “No, I’m all right,” he said. “A bit nervous, nothing else. This could turn out to be the biggest thing I… you and I have tackled yet. Maybe one of the biggest anyone has; at least on this frontier. I’d’ve been glad to have an older man or two along.” He shrugged. “None available. Our service should increase its personnel, even if it means raising dues. We’re spread much too thin across—how many stars?”

  “The last report in my files estimated ten million planets with a significant number of Commonalty members on them. As for how many more there may be with which these have reasonably regular contact—”

  “Oh, for everything’s sake, come off it!” Laure actually laughed, and wondered if the ship had planned things that way. But, regardless, he could begin to talk of this as a problem rather than a mystery.

  “Let me recapitulate,” he said, “and you tell me if I’m misinterpreting matters. A shap comes to Serieve, allegedly from far away. It’s like nothing anybody has ever seen, unless in historical works. (They haven’t got the references on Serieve to check that out, so we’re bringing some from HO.) Hyperdrive, gravity control, electronics, yes, but everything crude, archaic, bare-bones. Fission instead of fusion power, for example… and human piloting!

  “That is, the crew seem to be human. We have no record of their anthropometric type, but they don’t look as odd as people do after several generations on some planets I could name. And the linguistic computer, once they get the idea that it’s there to decipher their language and start cooperating with it, says their speech appears to have remote affinities with a few that we know, like ancient Anglic. Preliminary semantic analysis suggests their abstractions and constructs aren’t quite like ours, but do fall well inside the human psych range. All in all, then, you’d assume they’re explorers from distant parts.”

  “Except for the primitive ship,” Jaccavrie chimed in. “One wouldn’t expect such technological backwardness in any group which had maintained any contact, however tenuous, with the general mass of the different human civilizations. Nor would such a slow, under-equipped vessel pass through them without stopping, to fetch up in this border region.”

  “Right. So… if it isn’t a fake—.their gear bears out a part of their story. Kirkasant is an exceedingly old colony… yonder.” Laure pointed toward unseen stars. “Well out in the Dragon’s Head sector, where we’re barely beginning to explore. Somehow, somebody got that far, and in the earliest days of interstellar travel. They settled down on a planet and lost the trick of making spaceships. Only lately have they regained it.”

  “And come back, looking for the companionship of their own kind.” Laure had a brief, irrational vision of Jaccavrie nodding. Her tone was so thoughtful. She would be a big, calm, dark-haired woman, handsome in middle age though getting somewhat plump… “What the crew themselves have said, as communication got established, seems to bear out this idea. Beneath a great many confused mythological motifs, I also get the impression’of an epic voyage, by a defeated people who ran as far as they could.”

  “But Kirkasant!” Laure protested. “The whole situation they describe. It’s impossible.”

  “Might not that Vandange be mistaken? I mean, we know so little. The Kirkasanters keep talking about a weird home environment. Ours appears to have stunned and bewildered them. They simply groped on through space till they happened to find Serieve. Thus might their own theory, that somehow they blundered in from an altogether different continuum, might it not conceivably be right?”

  —Hm-m-m. I guess you didn’t see Vandange’s accompanying letter. No, you haven’t, it wouldn’t’ve been plugged into your memory. Anyway, he claims his assistants examined that ship down to the bolt heads. And they found nothing, no mechanism, no peculiarity, whose function and behavior weren’t obvious. He really gets indignant. Says the notion of interspace-time transference is mathematically absurd. I don’t have quite his faith in mathematics, myself, but I must admit he has one common-sense point. If a ship could somehow flip from one entire cosmos to another… why, in five thousand years of interstellar travel, haven’t we gotten some record of it happening?”

  “Perhaps the ships to which it occurs never come back.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps the whole argument is due to misunderstanding. We don’t have any good grasp of the Kirkasanter language. Or maybe it’s a hoax. That’s Vandange’s opinion. He claims there’s no such region as they say they come from. Not anywhere. Neither astronomers nor explorers have ever found anything like a… a space like a shining fog, crowded with stars—”

  “But why should these wayfarers tell a falsehood?” Jaccavrie sounded honestly puzzled.

  “I don’t know. Nobody does. That’s why the Serievan government decided it’d better ask for a Ranger.”

  Laure jumped up and started pacing again. He was a tall young man, with the characteristic beardlessness, fair hair and complexion, slightly slanted blue eyes of the Fireland mountaineers on New Vixen. But since he had trained at Starborough, which is on Aladir not far from Irontower City, he affected a fashionably simple gray tunic and blue hose. The silver comet of his calling blazoned his left breast.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated. There rose in him a consciousness of that immensity which crouched beyond this hull. “Maybe they are telling the sober truth. We don’t dare not know.”

  When a mere few million people have an entire habitable world to themselves, they do not often build high. That comes later, along with formal wilderness preservation, disapproval of fecundity, and inducements to emigrate. Pioneer towns tend to be low and rambling. (Or so it is in that civilization wherein the Commonalty operates. We know that other branches of humanity have their distinctive ways, and hear rumors of yet stranger ones. But so vast is the galaxy—these two or three spiral arms, a part of which our race has to date thinly occupied—so vast, that we cannot even keep track of our own culture, let alone anyone else’s.)

  Pelogard, however, was founded on an island off the Branzan mainland, above Serieve’s arctic circle: which comes down to almost 56°. Furthermore, it was an industrial center. Hence most of its buildings were tall and crowded. Laure, standing by the outer wall of Ozer Vandange’s office and looking forth across the little city, asked why this location had been chosen.

  “You don’t know?” responded the physicist. His inflection was a touch too elaborately incredulous.

  “I’m afraid not,” Laure confessed. “Think how many systems my service has to cover, and how many individual places within each system. If we tried to remember each, we’d never be anywhere but under the neuroinductors.”

  Vandange, seated small and bald and prim behind a large desk, pursed his lips. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Nevertheless, I should not think an experienced Ranger would dash off to a planet without temporarily mastering a few basic facts about it.”

  Laure flushed. An experienced Ranger would have put this conceited old dustbrain in his place. But he himself was too aware of youth and awkwardness. He managed to say quietly, “Sir, my ship has complete information. She needed only scan it and tell me no precautions were required here. You have a beautiful globe and I can understand why you’re proud of it. But please understand that to me it has to be a way station. My job is with those people from Kirkasant, and I’m anxious to meet them.”

  “You shall, you shall,” said Vandange, somewhat mollified. “I merely thought a conference with you would be advisable first. As for your question, we need a city here primarily because updwelling ocean currents make the arctic waters mineral-rich. Extractor plants pay off better than they would farther south.”

  Despite himself, Laure was interested. “You’re getting your minerals from the sea already? At so early a stage of settlement?”

  “This sun and its planets are poor in heavy metals. Most local systems are. Not surprising. W
e aren’t far, here, from the northern verge of the spiral arm. Beyond is the halo—thin gas, little dust, ancient globular clusters very widely scattered. The interstellar medium from which stars form has not been greatly enriched by earlier generations.”

  Laure suppressed his resentment at being lectured like a child. Maybe it was just! Vandange’s habit. He cast another glance through the wall. The office was high in one of the buildings. He looked across soaring blocks of metal, concrete, glass, and plastic, interlinked with trafficways and freight cables, down to the waterfront. There bulked the extractor plants, warehouses: and sky-docks. Cargo craft moved ponderously in and out. Not many, passenger vessels flitted between. Pelogard must be largely automated.

  The season stood at late spring. The sun cast brightness across a gray ocean that a wind rumpled. Immense flocks of seabirds dipped and wheeled. Or were they birds? They had wings, anyhow; steely blue against a wan sky. Perhaps they cried or sang, into the wind skirl and wave rush; but Laure couldn’t hear it in this enclosed place.

  “That’s one, reason I can’t accept their yarn,” Vandange declared.

  “Eh?” Laure came out of his reverie with a start. Vandange pressed a button to opaque the wall. “Sit down. Let’s get to business.”

  Laure eased himself into a lounger opposite the desk. “Why am I conferring with you?” he counterattacked. “Whoever was principally working with the Kirkasanters had to be a semanticist. In short, Paeri Ferand. He consulted specialists on your university faculty, in anthropology, history, and so forth. But I should think your own role as a physicist was marginal. Yet you’re the one taking up my time. Why?”

  “Oh, you can see Ferand and the others as much as you choose,” Vandange said. “You won’t get more from them than repetitions of what the Kirkasanters have already told. How could you? What else have they got to go on? If nothing else, an underpopulated world like ours can’t maintain staffs of experts to ferret out the meaning of every datum, every inconsistency, every outright lie. I had hoped, when our government notified your section, headquarters, the Rangers would have sent a real team, instead of—” He curbed himself. “Of course, they have many other claims on their attention. They would not see at once how important this is.”