The Day Of Their Return Page 6

  "I can't understand why you—I mean, you're cut off from things like library banks, not to mention medical and genetic services, everything you could have—"

  "At what price?" Mikkal made a spitting noise, though he did not waste the water. "We'd either have to take steady work to gain the jingle, or become welfare clients, which'd mean settling down as even meeker law-lickers. The end of the Trains, therefore the end of us. Didn't you know? A tineran can't quit. Stuff him into a town or nail him down on a farm, it's a mercy when death sets his corpse free to rot." "I'd heard that," Ivar said slowly. "But thought the tale must be an extravaganza, hey? No, it's true. It's happened. Tinerans jailed for any length of time sicken and die, if they don't suicide first. Even if for some reason like exile from the Train, they have to turn sitter, 'free workers'"—the tone spoke the quotation marks—"they can't breed and they don't live long.... That's why we have no death penalty. Twice I've seen the king order a really bad offender cast out, and word sent to the rest of the Trains so none would take him in. Both times, the felly begged for a hundred and one lashes instead." Mikkal shook himself. "C'mon, we've work to do. You unhitch the team, hobble them, and bring them to where the rest of the critters are. Dulcy'll answer your questions. Since I've got you for extra hands, I'll get my tools resharpened early, this trek." He performed as juggler and caster of edged weapons and, he added blandly, card sharp and dice artist.

  Men erected a collapsible trough, filled it from a water truck, added the vitamin solutions necessary to supplement grazing upon purely native vegetation. Boys would spend the night watching over the small, communally owned herd and the draught animals. Besides spider wolves or a possible catavale, hazards included crevices, sand hells, a storm howling down with the suddenness and ferocity common anywhere on Aeneas. If the weather stayed mild, night chill would not be dangerous until the route entered the true barrens. These creatures were the product of long breeding, the quadrupeds and hexapods heavily haired, the big neomoas similarly well feathered.

  Of course, all Ironland was not that bleak, or it would have been uncrossable. The Train would touch at oases where the tanks could be refilled with brackish water and the bins with forage.

  Inside the wagon circle, women and girls prepared the evening meal. In this nearly fuelless land they cooked on glowers. Capacitors had lately been recharged at a power station. To have this done, and earn the wherewithal to pay, was a major reason why the migrations passed through civilized parts.

  Virgil went down. Night came almost immediately after. A few lamps glowed on wagonsides, but mainly the troop saw by stars, moons, auroral flickers to northward. A gelid breeze flowed off the desert. As if to shelter each other, folk crowded around the kettles. Voices racketed, chatter, laughter, snatches of song.

  Except for being ferociously spiced, the fare was simple, a thick stew scooped up on rounds of bread, a tarry-tasting tea for drink. Tinerans rarely used alcohol, never carried it along. Ivar supposed that was because of its dehydrating effect.

  Who needed it, anyway? He had not been this happy in the most joyous beer hall of Nova Roma, and his mind stayed clear into the bargain.

  He got his first helping and hunkered down, less easily than they, beside Mikkal and Dulcy. At once others joined them, more and more till he was in a ring of noise, faces, unwashed but crisp-smelling bodies. Questions, remarks, japes roiled over him. "Hey-ah, townboy, why've you gone walkabout? ... Hoping for girls? Well, I hope you won't be too tired to oblige 'em, after a day's hike ... Give us a song, a story, a chunk o' gossip, how 'bout that? . . . Ayuh, Banji, don't ride him hard, not yet. Be welcome, lad ... You got coin on you? Listen, come aside and I'll explain how you can double your money. . . . Here, don't move, I'll fetch you your seconds... ."

  Ivar responded as best he dared, in view of his incognito. He would be among these people for quite a while, and had better make himself popular. Besides, he liked them.

  At length King Samlo boomed through the shadows: "Cleanup and curfew!" His followers bounced to obey the first part of the command. Ivar decided that the chaos earlier in the day, and now, was only apparent. Everyone knew his or her job. They simply didn't bother about military snap and polish.

  Musicians gathered around the throne. "I thought we were ordered to bed," Ivar let fall.

  "Not right away," Dulcy told him. "Whenever we can, we have a little fun first, songfest or dance or—" She squeezed his hand. "You think what you can do, like tell us news from your home. He'll call on you. Tonight, though, he wants— Yes. Fraina. Fraina of Jubilee. Mikkal's sister . . . half-sister, you'd say; their father can afford two wives. She's good. Watch."

  The wanderers formed a ring before their wagons. Ivar had found he could neither sit indefinitely on his hams like them, nor crosslegged on the ground; after dark, his bottom would soon have been frozen. There was no energy to lavish on heated garments. He stood leaned against Redtop, hidden in darkness.

  The center of the camp was bright silver, for Lavinia was high and Creusa hurrying toward the full. A young woman trod forth, genuflected to the king, stood erect and drew off her cloak. Beneath, she wore a pectoral, a broad brass girdle upholding filmy strips fore and aft, and incidental jewelry.

  Ivar recognized her. Those delicate features and big gray eyes had caught his attention several times during the day. Virtually unclad, her figure seemed boy-slim save in the bosom. No, he decided, that wasn't right; her femaleness was just more subtle and supple than he had known among his own heavy folk.

  The music wailed. She stamped her bare feet, once, twice, thrice, and broke into dance.

  The wind gusted from Ivar. He had seen tineran girls perform before, and some were a wild equal of any ballerina—but none like this. They save the best for their own, he guessed; then thought vanished in the swirl of her.

  She leaped, human muscles against Aenean gravity, rose flying, returned swimming. She flowed across ground, fountained upward again, landed to pirouette on a toe, a top that gyrated on and on and on, while it swung in ever wider precessions until she was a wheel, which abruptly became an arrow and at once the catavale which dodged the shaft and rent the hunter. She snapped her cloak, made wings of it, made a lover of it, danced with it and her floating hair and the plume of her breath. She banished cold; moonlight sheened on sweat, and she made the radiance ripple across her. She was the moonlight herself, the wind, the sound of pipes and drums and the rhythmic handclaps of the whole Train and of Ivar; and when she soared away into the night and the music ended, men roared.

  Inside, Mikkal's wagon was well laid out but had scant room because of the things that crowded it. At the forward end stood a potbellied stove, for use when fuel was available. Two double-width bunks, one above the other, occupied the left wall, a locker beneath and extensible table between. The right wall was shelves, cupboard, racks, to hold an unholy number of items: the stores and equipment of everyday life, the costumes and paraphernalia of shows, a kaleidoscope of odd souvenirs and junk. From the ceiling dangled an oil lantern, several amulets, and bunches of dry food, sausages, onions, dragon apples, maufry, and more, which turned the air pungent.

  Attached to the door was a cage. An animal within sat up on its hind legs as Mikkal, Dulcy, and Ivar entered. The Firstling wondered why anybody would keep so unprepossessing a creature. It was about 15 centimeters in length, quadrupedal though the forepaws came near resembling skinny hands. Coarse gray fur covered it beneath a leathery flap of skin which sprang from the shoulders and reached the hindquarters, a kind of natural mantle. The head was wedge-shaped, ears pointed and curved like horns, mouth needle-fanged. That it could not be a native Aenean organism was proved by the glittery little red eyes, three of them in a triangle.

  "What's that?" Ivar asked.

  "Why, our luck," Dulcy said. "Name of Larzo." She reached into the cage, which had no provision for closing. "C'mon out and say hey-ah, Larzo, sweet."

  "Your, uh, mascot?"

  "Our what?" Mikkal r
esponded. "Oh, I grab you. A ju, like those?" He jerked his thumb at the hanging grotesques. "No. It's true, lucks're believed to help us, but mainly they're pets. I never heard of a wagon, not in any Train, that didn't keep one."

  A vague memory of it came to Ivar from his reading.

  No author had done more than mention in passing a custom which was of no obvious attractiveness or significance.

  Dulcy had brought the animal forth. She cuddled it on her lap when the three humans settled side by side onto the lower bunk, crooned and offered it bits of cheese. It accepted that, but gave no return of her affection.

  "Where're they from originally?" Ivar inquired.

  Mikkal spread his hands. "Who knows? Some immigrant brought a pair or two along, I s'pose, 'way back in the early days. They never went off on their own, but tinerans got in the habit of keeping them and—" He yawned. "Let's doss. The trouble with morning is, it comes too damn early in the day."

  Dulcy returned the luck to its cage. She leaned across Ivar's lap to do so. When her hand was free, she stroked him there, while her other fingers rumpled his hair. Mikkal blinked, then smiled. "Why not?" he said. "You'll be our companyo a spell, Rolf, and I think we'll both like you. Might as well start right off."

  Unsure of himself, though immensely aware of the woman snuggled against him, the newcomer stammered, "Wh-what? I, I don't follow—"

  "You take her first tonight," Mikkal invited.

  "Huh? But, but, but—"

  "You left your motor running," Mikkal said, while Dulcy giggled. After a pause: "Shy? You nords often are, till you get drunk. No need among friends."

  Ivar's face felt ablaze.

  "Aw, now," Dulcy said. "Poor boy, he's too unready." She kissed him lightly on the lips. "Never mind. We've time. Later, if you want. Only if you want."

  "Sure, don't be afraid of us," Mikkal added. "I don't bite, and she doesn't very hard. Go on to your rest if you'd rather."

  Their casualness was like a benediction. Ivar hadn't imagined himself getting over such an embarrassment, immediately at that. "No offense meant," he said. "I'm, well, engaged to be married, at home."

  "If you change your mind, let me know," Dulcy murmured. "But if you don't, I'll not doubt you're a man. Different tribes have different ways, that's all." She kissed him again, more vigorously. "Goodnight, dear."

  He scrambled into the upper bunk, where he undressed and crawled into his sleeping bag that she had laid out for him. Mikkal snuffed the lantern, and soon he heard the sounds and felt the quiverings below him, and thereafter were darkness, stillness, and the wind.

  He was long about getting to sleep. The invitation given him had been too arousing. Or was it that simple? He'd known three or four sleazy women, on leaves from his military station. His friends had known them too. For a while he swaggered. Then he met star-clean Tatiana and was ashamed.

  I'm no prig, he insisted to himself. Let them make what they would of their lives on distant, corrupted Terra, or in a near and not necessarily corrupted tineran wagon. A child of Firstmen and scholars had another destiny to follow. Man on Aeneas had survived because the leaders were dedicated to that survival: disciplined, constant men and women who ever demanded more of themselves than they did of their underlings. And self-command began in the inmost privacies of the soul.

  A person stumbled, of course. He didn't think he had fallen too hard, upon those camp followers, in the weird atmosphere of wartime. But a ... an orgy was something else again. Especially when he had no flimsiest excuse. Then why did he lie there, trying not to toss and turn, and regret so very greatly that he should stay faithful to his Tanya? Why, when he summoned her image to help him, did Fraina come instead?

  VII

  Covering a hill in the middle of Nova Roma, the University of Virgil was a town within the city, and most of it older than most of the latter. The massive, crenelated wall around it still bore scars from the Troubles. Older in truth than the Empire, Desai thought. His glance passed over man-hewn red and gray stones to an incorporated section of glassy iridescence. A chill touched his spine. That part is older than humanity.

  Beyond the main gateway, he entered a maze of courts, lanes, stairs, unexpected little gardens or trees, memorial plaques or statues, between the buildings. Architecture was different here from elsewhere. Even the newer structures—long, porticoed, ogive-windowed, until they rose in towers—preserved a tradition going back to the earliest settlers. Or do they? wondered Desai. If these designs are from ancient Terra, they are crossbreeds that mutated. Gothic arches but Russko spires, except that in low gravity those vaultings soar while those domes bulge ... and yet it isn't mismatched, it's strong and graceful in its own way, it belongs on Aeneas as ... I do not.

  Chimes toned from a belfry which stood stark athwart darkling blue and a rusty streak of high-borne dustcloud. No doubt the melody was often heard. But it didn't sound academic to him; it rang almost martial.

  Campus had not regained the crowded liveliness he had seen in holos taken before the revolt. In particular, there were few nonhumans, and perhaps still fewer humans from other colonies. But he passed among hundreds of Aeneans. Hardly a one failed to wear identification: the hooded, color-coded cloaks of teaching faculty, which might or might not overlay the smock of researcher; student jackets bearing emblems of their colleges and, if they were Landfolk, their Firstmen. (Beneath were the tunics, trousers, and half-boots worn by both sexes—among nords, anyhow—except on full-dress occasions when women revived antique skirts.) Desai noticed, as well, the shoulder patches on many, remembrance of military or naval units now dissolved. Should I make those illegal? ... And what if my decree was generally disobeyed?

  He felt anger about him like a physical force. Oh, here a couple of young fellows laughed at a joke, there several were flying huge kites, yonder came a boy and girl hand in hand, near two older persons learnedly conversing; but the smiles were too few, the feet on flagstones rang too loud.

  He had visited the area officially, first taking pains to learn about it. That hadn't thawed his hosts, but today it saved his asking for directions and thus risking recognition. Not that he feared violence; and he trusted he had the maturity to tolerate insult; however— His way took him past Rybnikov Laboratories, behind Pickens Library, across Adzel Square to Borglund Hall, which was residential.

  The south tower, she had said. Desai paused to see where Virgil stood. After two years—more than one, Aenean—he had not developed an automatic sense of how he faced. The compass on a planet was always defined to make its sun rise in the east; and a 25-degree axial tilt wasn't excessive, shouldn't be confusing; and he ought to be used to alien constellations by now. Getting old. Not very adaptable any longer. Nor had he developed a reflex to keep him from ever looking straight at that small, savage disc. Blind for a minute, he worried about retinal burn. Probably none. Blue-eyed Aeneans kept their sight, didn't they? Let's get on with business. Too much else is waiting back at the office as is, and more piling up every second.

  The circular stairway in the tower was gloomy enough to make him stumble, steep enough to make him pant and his heart flutter. Low gravity didn't really compensate for thin air, at his age. He rested for a time on the fourth-floor landing before he approached an oaken door and used a knocker which centuries of hands had worn shapeless.

  Tatiana Thane let him in. "Good day," she said tonelessly.

  Desai bowed. "Good day, my lady. You are kind to give me this interview."

  "Do I have choice?"

  "Certainly."

  "I didn't when your Intelligence Corps hauled me in for questionin'." Her speech remained flat. A note of bitterness would at least have expressed some human relationship.

  "That is why I wished to see you in your own apartment, Prosser Thane. To emphasize the voluntariness. Not that I believe you were arrested, were you? The officers merely assumed you would cooperate, as a law-abiding— citizen." Desai had barely checked himself from saying "subject of His Majesty."<
br />
  "Well, I won't assault you, Commissioner. Have you truly come here unescorted as you claimed you would?"

  "Oh, yes. Who'd pay attention to a chubby chocolate-colored man in a particularly thick mantle? Apropos which, where may I leave it?"

  Tatiana indicated a peg in the entry. This layout was incredibly archaic. No doubt the original colonists hadn't had the economic surplus to automate residences, and there'd been sufficient pinch ever afterward to keep alive a scorn of "effete gadgetry." The place was chilly, too, though the young woman was rather lightly if plainly clad.

  Desai's glance recorded her appearance for later study. She was tall and slim. The oval face bore a curved nose, arched brows above brown eyes, broad full mouth, ivory complexion, between shoulder-length wings of straight dark hair. Old University family, he recalled, steeped in its lore, early destined for a scholarly career. Somewhat shy and bookish, but no indoor plant; she takes long walks or longer animalback rides, spends time in the desert, not to mention the jungles of Dido. Brilliant linguist, already responsible for advances in understanding certain languages on that planet. Her enthusiasm for the Terran classics doubtless kindled Ivar Frederiksen's interest in them and in history . .. though in his case, perhaps one might better say the vision of former freedom fighters inflamed him. She appears to have more sense than that: a serious girl, short on humor, but on the whole, as good a fiancee as any man could hope for.