The Long Night df-10 Read online

  “Your population must be larger than is guessed, then.”

  “I don’t know what the current guess is in the Cities. And we don’t bother with, uh, a census. But. I’d estimate twenty million of us on this continent, and about the same for the others. Been stable for a long time. That’s the proper human density. We don’t crowd each other or press hard on natural resources. And so we’ve got abundant free food and stuff. No special effort involved in satisfying the basic needs. At the same time, there are enough of us for specialization, diversity, large-scale projects like road building. And, I might add, gifted people. You know, only about ten per cent of mankind are born to be leaders or creators in any degree. We’d stagnate if we were too few, same as we’d grow cramped and over-regulated if we became too many.”

  “How do you maintain a level population? You don’t appear to have any strong compulsion mechanism.”

  “No, we haven’t. Tradition, public opinion, the need to help your neighbor so he’ll help you, the fact that out-and-out bastards get into quarrels and eventually get killed—such factors Will do, when you have elbow room. The population-control device is simple. It wasn’t planned, it evolved, but it works. Territory.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “A man claims a certain territory for his own, to support him and his family and retainers. He passes it on to one son. How he chooses the heir is his business.

  Anybody who kills the owner;’ or drives him off, takes over that parcel of land.”

  Ridenour actually registered a little shock, though he managed a smile, “Your society is less idyllic than some young City people told me,” he said.

  Karlsarm laughed. “We do’all right—most of us. Can any civilization claim more? The landless don’t starve, remember. They’re taken on as servants, assistants, guards and the like. Or they become itinerant laborers, orentrepreneurs, or something. Let me remind.you, we don’t practice marriage. Nobody needs to go celibate. It’s only that few women care to have children by a landless man.” He paused. “Territorial battles aren’t common any more, either. The landholders have learned how to organize defenses. Besides, a decent man can count on help from his neighbors. So not many vagabonds try to reave an estate. Those that do, and succeed—well, haven’t they proven they’re especially fit to become fathers?”

  The paths ranged aboie timberline. The land became boulder-strewn, chill and stark. Ridenour exclaimed, “But this road’s been blasted from the cliffside!”

  “Why, of course,” said RowIan. “You didn’t think we’d chip it out by hand, did you?”

  “But what do you use for such jobs?”

  “Organics. Like nitroglycerine. We compound that—doesn’t take much apparatus, you know—and make dynamite from it. Some other explosives, and most fuels, we get from vegetables we’ve bred.” Rowlan tugged his gray beard and regarded the Terran. “If you want to make a side trip,” he offered, “I’ll show you a hydroelectric plant. You’ll call it ridiculously small, but it beams power to several mills and an instrument factory. We are not ignorant, John Ridenour. We adopt from your civilization what we can use. It simply doesn’t happen to be a particularly large amount.”

  Even in this comparatively infertile country, food was plentiful. There were, no more fruits for the plucking, but roots and berries were almost as easily gotten in the low brush, and animals—albeit of different species from the lowlands—continued to arrive near camp for slaughter. Ridenour asked scholarly little Noach how that was done; he being a beast operatof himself. “Are they domesticated and conditioned?”

  “No, I wouldn’t call them that, exactly,” Noach replied. “Not like horses or dogs. We use the proper stimuli on them. Those vary, depending on what you’re after and where you are. For instance, in Brenning Dales you can unstopper a bottle of sex attractant, and every gruntleboar within ten kilometers rushes straight toward your bow. Around the Mare we’ve bred instincts into certain species to come when a sequence of notes is played on a trumpet. If nothing else, you can always stalk for yourself; any place. Hunting isn’t difficult when critters are abundant. We don’t want to take the .

  time on tms journey, though, so Mistress Jenith has been driving those cragbuck with her fire bees.” He shrugged. “There are plenty of other ways. What you don’t seem to realize, as yet, is that we’re descended from people who applied scientific method to the problem of living in a wilderness.”

  For once, the night was clear above Foulweather Pass. Snow glistened on surrounding peaks, under Selene, until darkness lay drenched with an unreal brilliance. Not many stars shone through. But Karlsarm scowled at one, which was new and moved visibly, widdershins over his head.

  “They’ve put up another satellite.” The words puffed ghost white from his lips; sound was quickly lost, as if it froze and tinkled down onto the hoarfrosted road. “Or moved a big„ spaceship into near orbit without camouflage.Ohy?”

  “The war?” Evagail shivered beside him and wrapped her fur cloak ;tighter about her. (It was not her property. Wartn.outfits were kept for travelers in a shed at the foot Of the pass, to be returned on the other side, with a small rental paid to the servant of the landholder.) “What’s been happening?”

  “The news is obscure, what I get of it on that mini-radio we took along,” Karlsarm said. “A major fight’s developing near Sluicegate. Nuclear weapons, the whole filthy works. By Oneness, if this goes on much longer we won’t be left with a planet worth inhabiting!”

  “Now don’t exaggerate.” She touched his hand. “I grant you, territory’s that’s fought on, or suffers fallout, is laid waste. But not forever; and it isn’t any big percentage of the total.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you were the owner. And what about the ecological consequences? The genetic? Let’s not get overconfident about these plant and animal species we’ve modified to serve our needs while growing wild. They’re still new and unstable. A spreading mutation could wipe them out. Or we might have to turn farmers to save them!”

  “I know. I know. I do want you to see matters in perspective. But agreed, the sooner the war ends, the better.” Evagail turned her gaze from that sinister, crawling spark in the sky. She looked down the slope on which they stood, to the camp. Oilwood fires were strewn along the way, each economically serving a few people. They twinkled like red and orange constellations. A burst of laughter, a drift of song came distantly to her ears.

  Karlsarm could practically read her thought. “Very well, what about Ridenour?” he challenged.

  “I can’t say. I talk with him, but he’s so locked into himself, I get no hint of;what his real purpose may be. I could almost wish my Skill were of the love kind.”

  “Why yours?” Karlsarm demanded. “Why don’t you simply wish, like me, that we had such a Mistress with us?”

  Evagail paused before she chuckled. “Shall I admit the truth? He attracts me. He’s thoroughly a man, in his quiet way; and he’s exotic and mysterious to boot. Must you really sic an aphrodite onto him when we reach Moon Garnet?”

  “I’ll decide, that at the time. Meanwhile, you can help me decide and maybe catch forewarning of any plot against us. He can’t hide that he’s drawn to you. Use the fact.”

  “I don’t like to. Men and women—of course, I mean women who don’t have that special Skill—they should give to each other, not take. I don’t even know if I could deceive him.”

  “You can try. If he realizes and gets angry, what of it?” Beneath the shadowing carnivore headpiece, Karlsarm’s features turned glacier stern. “You have your duty.”

  “Well…” Briefly, her voice was forlorn. “I suppose.” Then the wide smooth shoulders straightened. Moonfrost sparkled on a mane lifted high. “It could be fun, too, couldn’t it?” She turned and walked from him.

  Ridenour sat at one campfire, watching a dance. The steps were as intricate as the music that an improvised orchestra made. He seemed not only glad but relieved when Evagail seated herself beside him.
/>   “Hullo,” she greeted. “Are you enjoying the spectacle?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but largely in my professional capacity. I’m sure it’s high art, but the conventions are too alien for me.”

  “Isn’t your business to unravel alien symbolisms?”

  “In part. Trouble is, what you have here is not merely different from anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s extraordinarily subtle—obviously the product of a long and rigorous tradition. I’ve discovered, for instance, that your musical scale employs smaller intervals than any other human music I know of. Thus you make and use and appreciate distinctions and combinations that I’m not trained to hear.”

  “I think you’ll find that’s typical,” Evagail said. “We aren’t innocent children of nature, we Free People. I suspect we elaborate our lives more, we’re fonder of complication, ingenuity, ceremoniousness, than Terra herself.”

  “Yes, I’ve talked to would-be runaways from the Cities,”

  She laughed. “Well, the custom is that we give recruits a tough apprenticeship. If they can’t get through that, we don’t want them. Probably they wouldn’t survive long. Not that life’s harder among us than in the Cities. In fact, we have more leisure. But life is altogether different here.”

  “I’ve scarcely begun to grasp how different,” Ridenour said. “The questions are so many, I don’t know where to start.” A dancer leaped, his feather bonnet streaming in Selene light, flame light, and shadow. A flute twittered, a drum thuttered, a harp trilled, a bell rang, chords intertwining like ripple patterns on water. “What arts do you have besides… this?”

  “Not architecture, or monumental sculpture, or murals, or multi-sense taping.” Evagail smiled. “Nothing that requires awkward masses. But we do have schools of—oh, scrimshaw, jewelry, weaving, painting and carvings, that sort of thing—and they are genuine, serious arts. Then drama, literature, cuisine… and things you don’t have—to call them contemplation, conversation, integration—but those are poor words.”

  “What I can’t understand is how you can manage without those awkward masses,” Ridenour said. “For example, everyone seems to be literate. But what’s the use? What’is there to read?”

  “Why, we probably have more books and periodicals than you do. No electronics competing with them. One of the first things our ancestors did, when they started colonizing the outback in earnest, was develop plants with leaves that dry into paper and juice that makes ink. Many landholders keep a little printing press in the same shed as their other heavy equipment. It doesn’t need much metal, and wind or water can power it. Don’t forget, each area maintains schools. The demand for reading matter is a source of income—yes, we use iron and copper slugs for currency—and the transporters carry mail as well as goods.”

  “How about records, though? Libraries? Computers? Information exchange?”

  “I’ve never met anybody who collects books, the way some do in the Cities. If you want to look at a piece again, copies are cheap.” (Ridenour thought that this ruled out something he had always considered essential to a cultivated man—the ability to browse, to re-read on impulse, to be serendipitous among the shelves. However, no doubt these outbackers thought he was uncouth because he didn’t know how to dance or to arrange a meteor-watching festival.) “Messages go speedily—enough for our purposes. We don’t keep records like you. Our mode of life doesn’t require it. Likewise, we have quite a live technology, still developing. Yes, and a pure science. But they concentrate on aFeas of work that need no elaborate apparatus: the study of animals, for instance, and ways to control them.”

  Evagail leaned closer to Ridenour. No one else paid attention; they were watching the performance. “But do me a favor tonight, will you?” she asked.

  “What? Why, certainly.” His gaze drifted across the ruddy lights in her hair, the shadows under her cloak, and hastily away. “If I can.”

  “It’s easy.” She laid a hand over his. “Just for tonight, stop being a research machine. Make small talk. Tell me a joke or two. Sing me a Terran song, when they finish here. Or walk with me to look at the moon. Be human, John Ridenour… only a man… this little while.”

  * * *

  West of the pass, the land became a rolling plateau. Again it was forested, but less thickly and with other trees than in the warm eastern valleys. The travelers met folk more often, as population grew denser; and these were apt to be mounted. Karlsarm didn’t bother with animals. A human in good condition can log fifty kilometers a day across favorable terrain, without difficulty. Ridenour remarked, highly centralized empires were held together on ancient Terra with communication no faster than this…

  Besides, the outbackers possessed them: not merely an occasional aircar for emergency use, but a functioning web. He broke into uncontrollable laughter when Evagail first explained the system to him.

  “What’s so funny?” She cocked her head. Though they were much together, to the exclusion of others, they still lacked mutual predictability. He might now be wearing outbacker garb and be darkened by. Freehold’s harsh sunlight and have let his beard grow because he found a diamond-edge razor too much trouble. But he remained a stranger.

  “I’m sorry. Old saying.” He looked around the glen where they stood. Trees were stately above blossom-starred grasses; leaves murmured in a cool breeze and smelled like spice. He touched a green tendril that curled over one trunk and looped to the next. “Grapevine telegraph!”

  “But… well, I don’t recognize your phrase, John, but that kind of plant does carry signals. Our ancestors went to a vast amount of work to create the type and sow and train it, over the entire mid-continent. I confess the signals don’t go at light speed, only neural speed; and the channel isn’t awfully broad—but it suffices for us.”

  “How do you, uh, activate it?”

  “That requires a Skill. To send something, you’d go to the nearest node and pay the woman who lives there. She’d transmit”

  Ridenour nodded. “I see. Actually, I’ve met setups on nonhuman planets that aren’t too different from this.” He hesitated. “What do you mean by a Skill?”

  “A special ability, inborn, cultivated, disciplined.

  You’ve watched Skills in action on our route, haven’t you?”

  “I’m not certain. You see, I’m barely starting to grasp the pattern of your society. Before, everything was a jumble of new impressions. Now I observe meaningful differences between this and that. Take our friend Noach, for one, with his spying quasi-weasels; or ICarlsarm and the rest,, who use birds for couriers. Do they have Skills?”

  “Of course not. I suppose you might say their animals do. That is, the creatures, have been bred to semi-intelligence. They have the special abilities and instincts, the desire, built into their chromosomes. But as for the men who use them, no, all they have is training in language and handling. Anybody could be taught the same.”

  Ridenour looked at her, where she stood like a lioness in the filtered green light, stillness and strange odors at her back. “Only women have Skills, then,” he said finally.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Why? Were they bred too?”

  “No.” Astonishingly, she colored. “Whatever we may do with other men, we seldom become pregnant by anyone but a landholder. We want our children to have a claim on him. But somehow, women seem able to do more with hormones and pheromones. A biologist tried to explain why, but I couldn’t follow him terribly well. Let’s say the female has a more complex biochemistry, more closely involved with her psyche, than a male. Not that any woman can handle any materials. In fact, those who can do something with them are rare. When identified, in girlhood, they’re carefully trained to use what substances they can.”

  “How?”

  “It depends. A course of drugs may change the body secretions… delicately; you wouldn’t perceive any difference; but someone like Mistress Jenith will never be stung by her fire bees,Rather, they’ll always live near her. And she has ways
to control them, make them go where she commands and—No, I don’t know how. Each Skill keeps its secrets. But you must know how. Each few parts per million in the air will lure insects for kilometers around, to come and mate. Other insects, social ones; use odor signals to coordinate their communities. Man himself lives more by trace chemicals than he realizes. Think how little of some drugs is needed to change his metabolism, even his personality. Think how some smells recall a past scene to you, so vividly you might be there again. Think how it was proven, long ago, that like, dislike, appetite, fear, anger… every emotion… are conditioned by just such faint cues. Now imagine what can be done, as between a woman who knows precisely how to use those stimuli—some taken from bottles, some created at will by her own glands—between her and an organism bred to respond.”

  “An Arulian concept?”

  “Yes, we learned a lot from the Arulians,” Evagail said.

  “They call you Mistress, I’ve heard. What’s your Skill?”

  She lost gravity. Her grin was impudent. “You may find out one day. Come, let’s rejoin the march.” She took his hand. “Though we needn’t hurry,” she added.

  As far as could be ascertained, Freehold had never been glaciated. The average climate was milder than Terra’s, which was one reason the outbackers didn’t need fixed houses. They moved about within their territories, following the game and the fruits of the earth, content with shelters erected here and there, or with bedrolls. By Ridenour’s standards, it was an austere life.

  Or it had been. He found his canon gradually changing. The million sights, sounds, smells, less definable sensations of the wilderness, made a city apartment seem dead by contrast, no matter how many electronic entertainers you installed.

  (Admittedly, the human kinds of fun were limited. A minstrel, a ball game, a chess game, a local legend, a poetry reading, were a little pallid to a man used to living at the heart of Empire. And while the outbackers could apparently do whatever they chose with drugs and hypnotism, so could the Terrans. Lickerish rumor had actually underrated their uninhibited inventiveness in other departments of pleasure. But you had only a finite number of possibilities there too, didn’t you? And he wasn’t exactly a young man any more, was he? And damn, but he missed Lissa! Also the children, of course, the tobacco he’d exhausted, friends, tall towers, the gentler daylight of Sol and familiar constellations after dark, the sane joys of scholarship and teaching: everything, everything.)