“That’s funny, coming from him,” said Charm. “It wasn’t so long ago he was telling people the past was garbage.”
“’Too long we have dwelt in the past, and as a result we have continued to make the same mistakes, generation after generation,”
I quoted, whispering. “That was because he couldn’t stardream. Now he’s realized that nobody can challenge his knowledge of Phu and the Great Lox and that stuff, because it’s all a myth anyway. He can invent whatever he likes.”
“But why?”
“To hold onto his leadership.”
“Hush!” somebody hissed. “Show some respect!”
“I’ve heard enough,” I said. “Come on, Charm.”
“… . so let us bow our heads and give thanks to the great god Phu for his mercies… .”
The Noss motorcart arrived in due course, good as new, in convoy with a glittering human vehicle. The humans made a brief speech of regret, heard in a stony silence. They were the enemy, so Stance had persuaded people. And their buggy was a symbol of their crass materialism. By the time they left, the buggy’s glossy surface had been defaced by deep scratches. That same day Cuff, Lonessa and the other Noss people left for home.
Two days later Smith and Smitha arrived to tell us the last shuttle had left and Devon station was officially abandoned. A new trailer of obviously human origin was attached to his cart, piled high with artifacts.
“You should see the stuff they’ve left behind,” he told us enthusiastically. “Enough junk for generations. I’m off to Alika to tell our son. There’s plenty of stuff he can use. And you should get up there yourself come next thaw, Stance. There’s stuff could make life much easier in Yam.”
“We want no part of human artifacts.”
“You don’t?” Smith glanced at him curiously. “Oh, well, that’s your problem.”
“And we don’t want to see anything human around Yam, Smith. Take it away. I’m sure there are plenty of godless villages where you can ply your trade without bothering us.”
Smith’s face darkened. “You were grateful enough for my help when you broke down on the moors.”
“Times change, and we’re flexible enough to change with them. Now we see things differently, here in Yam. We don’t need you and we don’t need humans.”
Smith looked at me. I shrugged. There were about a dozen people gathered in Stance’s cottage. Rain dripped steadily through the roof and I knew why. The knack of weaving the roofing leaves is built up through generations of memory. Stance and Trigger lacked the memory and the knack.
Smith said, “I take it you’re depending on the Great Lox to fix your roof and feed you all.”
“We’ve been seduced by human technology for too long.”
“Argh, I can’t talk to you, Stance. To Rax with the lot of you.”
He swung around and left, and shortly after we heard the chaff-chaff of his departing motorcart. He left behind a thoughtful silence.
“Another victory!” cried Stance, so suddenly that some of us started. “The ice-devil tempted us, and we resisted him as Drove and Browneyes themselves would have done. This is an occasion for giving thanks to the Great Lox, for lending us his mighty strength!”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Charm. Once we were back in our own cottage she said, “I wish he wouldn’t bring Drove and Browneyes into it. I’ve always rather liked them.” She sighed, looking around. “It’s nice here, Hardy, and I’ve really loved being with you this last few days.”
I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. She was leading up to something rotten. “And your mother seems to have accepted the situation.”
“But I don’t belong here,” she concluded to my dismay.
“You belong with me,” I said weakly.
“And you don’t belong here either. You’re wasting your time, my love. Stance has Yam under his spell and there’s nothing you can do about it unless you expose him for a fake, and I know you’re not going to do that.”
“I can expose him any time!” But I knew she was right. I’d often pictured myself jumping to my feet in the temple during one of Stance’s orations and calling out, “You’re a fraud, Stance. Your can’t even remember your own father’s childhood. By rights I should be leading these people. You dispute it? All right, let’s have a little test of our memories, right here in front of everyone!”
No. I couldn’t do anything so crude.
Was it a queer loyalty? Or was it irresponsibility; an unwillingness to take over leadership at a time when Yam faced starvation?
“You’re too nice,” said Charm. “You don’t like him, but you don’t hate him that much. You can’t truly believe he killed your Dad, can you? Or that he tried to kill you.”
“I’m sure he did.” Or was I? Stance’s attitude toward me had been different since the abortive trip to Devon Station. He’d treated me like an adult. He’d even asked my advice in small matters.
“We’re going back to Noss,” said Charm decisively. “We’re not sitting around here while Stance fattens you up for the kill. You’re gullible, Hardy. It’s a good thing you’ve got a strong woman at your side. That’s me, by the way. So let’s gather up our stuff, get a couple of lox and get the Rax out of this place before your uncle sticks his spear through you. Accidentally, of course.”
“Noss?”
“We have a nice cottage there, remember? And plenty of food.”
“But… . I’m needed here, Charm. I can’t run out on these people, just like that.”
“Of course you can. Just let’s make sure they don’t see you doing it. I have a feeling your uncle prefers to have you where he can keep an eye on you.”
So early the following morning we dressed in waxed skins over heavy furs, took two pack lox from the stables and set off southward before Yam awakened. I felt very sad about it. I didn’t have the heart to say good-bye to Spring, even. She, for one, would feel I was running out on my responsibilities. And Stance would tell everybody that was exactly what I’d done. Maybe he was right.
It was mid-afternoon before Mister McNeil’s residence showed dimly through the rain; lox travel slowly during the drench, sighing in dispirited fashion.
“I think we should stop here,” said Charm, who seemed to have taken charge. My thoughts were still busy with Stance and Yam. “We’re not going to reach Noss before nightfall at this rate.”
I was reluctant. I didn’t want to enter the house where Mister McNeil and I had so many pleasant times, but Charm was right; we had no alternative. I felt he’d deserted us — although I couldn’t see what else he could have done — and the house was tainted as a result. So I hesitated a long time at his front door.
“Oh, come on, for Phu’s sake, Hardy. The humans have gone. There’s nobody for you to ask permission from.”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
But as I reached up for the doorknob the door swung open. Somebody was already here. In that brief instant I expected to see the Nowhere Man or his new woman Helen.
But a totally unexpected figure stood there. Much taller. Very familiar.
“Mister McNeil!” I gasped.
We sat in his living room. Three of us in a little group; Helen and Jon somewhere else in the shadows.
I was still in shock. “We asked for you at Devon Station. The man told us you’d left on a shuttle days ago.”
“He wouldn’t have known. He was just a front man, trying to get rid of you painlessly.”
“You haven’t all gone, then? You’ve left your agents behind? We thought you humans had pulled out completely.”
“We have.” His face was gray. “I’m the only one left. By my own request.”
“When are they coming back for you?”
“They’re not.”
“Never?”
He shook his head.
This made no sense to me. “But you love Earth. Your place h
as always been full of Earth things. You always talk about Earth. Why did you pass up the chance of going home?”
He shook his head again, slumped in his chair and staring at the floor.
“You love Earth but you love this place more?” Charm guessed.
Now he met her eyes. “There’s nowhere like Earth.”
“So?”
He rose, crossed the room to a table, poured drinks from a bottle of amber liquid, and handed us one each, keeping one for himself. He drank.
I shivered suddenly. I’d had a backflash so terrible I’d tried to forget it instantly with a kind of personal geas. But the emotion and the place it was connected with was still with me. And the emotion was utter hopelessness, and the place was Pallahaxi.
“We’re clever people, we humans,” Mister McNeil was saying. “Some of our cleverness you can see, like our buggies and shuttles and Starnose. Some things you can’t, like the waves we send through the air. And the way we can predict the future.”
“Nobody can predict the future,” said Charm. “Not even humans. If you could, you’d have known the lorin would cause problems at your mine. You’d never have settled here in the first place.”
“That’s true. We didn’t predict the effect of the lorin. But some things we can predict. Some things follow a pattern, and once we know that pattern, we know what will happen next. The movement of stars and their planets, for example. They follow a pattern.” He watched us. “Your own planet’s journey through space is a good example.”
“I thought we just went round and round the sun, Phu,” said Charm. “That’s what memories tell us.”
“Maybe you haven’t stardreamed far enough back.”
Now Charm turned pale. Maybe she’d had the same backflash as I. “What would we find, if we did?” she whispered.
“You already know Phu and Rax form a binary system,” he said carefully. “Phu is similar to our own sun Sol; Rax is a huge dead planet. They revolve around each other. And your world is revolving around Phu, as you said. But it hasn’t always been like that. Long ago your world revolved around Rax.”
I felt very cold, as though Rax himself were in the room with us. Perhaps it was the brush of death that made me clutch religion, as a freezing person might clutch a hot brick. “We know that. Then the Great Lox dragged the world away from Rax and into the warmth of Phu.”
“And so he did, if you want to look at it that way.” His face was somber. “But there is a pattern, and our instruments have analyzed it and made calculations. You’ve noticed the weather getting colder this past few years. Well—”
And he hesitated, and took a deep gulp from his glass, and finally spoke words that seem to crackle like ice in our very souls.
“— now Rax is about drag the world back.”
Much later, I said, “How long will the next freeze last?” And the biggest horror was not death by freezing, but my life with Charm ending.
“The coming freeze will last forty years. Rax’s pull is weak compared to Phu’s. In forty years time this world will be orbiting Phu again.”
“Nobody can survive a forty years freeze!”
“Not without human technology, and that’s all gone now. Now there’s just myself. That’s why I stayed on. To try to help. I had to tell you the worst, to give you a chance to prepare. Nobody else would.”
“Why not?” I asked angrily. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
“My leaders didn’t want the responsibility. They foresaw thousands of your people trying to fight their way into Devon Station before we’d all got out. Hundreds would have been killed. What good would that have done?”
“It would have given us longer to prepare.”
“We only discovered the truth a short while ago when we investigated the recent fall in annual mean temperatures.”
“That’s why your people pulled out in such a hurry, isn’t it?” said Charm bitterly. “It’s nothing to do with the lorin or economics. It’s because of the freeze. Another Great Freeze. The old religion is right after all.”
“Is there any chance you could be wrong?” I asked.
“None.”
“You said you were here to help. Do you have any suggestions?”
“Not yet. We need meetings with village chiefs, to get some ideas together.”
After the first moment of panic, we seemed to be handling it well. I was glad Stance and Trigger weren’t there. They’d still be screaming and banging their heads against the wall. Charm even came up with something positive.
“All this must have happened before,” she said, “and some of our ancestors survived. They must have, otherwise we wouldn’t be here now. They must have lived through something like this, to have come up with the Great Lox and Drove and Browneyes and all that stuff. The legends have to have some basis.” She looked at Mister McNeil hopefully.
“You were here when we came,” he said, “but you may not have been here long. As I told you, we believe the kikihuahuas created you.”
“They wouldn’t have set us down on a world that would kill us.”
“They might not have known. They don’t have the kind of technology to find out.”
Charm took my hand. “There’s only one thing to do,” she said. “We have to stardream back as far as we can. Perhaps we’ll find out what really happened.”
“I’ll hold the village meetings,” said Mister McNeil. “I can get around quickly; I still have my buggy. “I’ll tell people what’s happening. Helen and Jon can come with me if they like. Meanwhile you two stay here. I understand you need peace and quiet for stardreaming.”
He made his way upstairs, but we were not to get peace and quiet, not yet. The door burst open and a crowd of men poured in, carrying spears.
Stance was at their head.
“So here you are,” he said grimly. “I guessed it. Well, now you can come with me.”
“Why?” I asked, remaining in my seat.
It was a simple enough question, but he was accustomed to instant obedience. He became disconcerted. And a disconcerted Stance was a blustering Stance. “Why? What do you mean, why? You run out on our people in their time of need, and you ask why?”
“Yes.”
“By Phu, you need to be taught a lesson in loyalty!” He wheeled round. “Men!” he shouted, “take him!”
There were eight of them, but they hesitated. I was Bruno’s son and I outmemoried them. Old customs die hard.
“Take me where?” I asked, to add to the confusion.
“Nowhere! Not yet, anyway. Just take him!” shouted Stance angrily.
“Seize him, men!” snapped Quorn, clarifying his leader’s point.
“But there’s no need to seize him,” said Patch reasonably. “He’s sitting down. You can’t exactly seize someone sitting down. We’d have to sit down beside him. It’s not as if he’s running or anything.”
“Why don’t you sit down yourselves,” I suggested. “We can talk things over.”
The hunting team, glad to be let off the hook, arranged themselves comfortably around the floor, laying down their spears. Stance alone remained standing. Charm moved over, patting the seat beside her as an invitation. This had the effect of enraging Stance further.
“By Phu!” he yelled, scarlet in the face, “I wouldn’t sit next to a flounder!” Taking refuge in physical action, he raised his spear and jabbed it toward my chest. “Get up! Get up!”
The spear smoked briefly and fell in half. Mister McNeil stood at the foot of the stairs, laser pistol in his hand. “That’s enough, Stance,” he said quietly.
My uncle’s mouth dropped open. The remains of the spear clattered to the floor. “I… . We… . We thought you’d gone away.”
“I haven’t, as you see. Now take a seat, there’s a good fellow. There’s a lot of explaining to be done around the villages, and you’re a good person to start with.”
Still staring at Mister McNeil, Stance
slumped onto the long seat beside Charm. She smiled at him. “This is really important, Yam Stance.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he muttered, his gaze fixed on the laser pistol.
We sat in the fading light while the human explained. The electric lighting was switched on long before he approached the end of his story. His audience were not so familiar with human culture and technology as I; indeed some of them had never spoken to a human. The lighting itself was a novelty and distracted them even more than the strange artifacts around the room. Questions had to be answered, simple concepts had to be elaborated, but Mister McNeil persevered despite outbreaks of snorting from my Uncle. And by the end he was winning his audience over.
The evidence was clear, after all. Last year had been the coldest in memory; this year colder yet, and the drench was turning to sleet much earlier than usual. Charm and I already knew the weak point of his story: we were convinced that our race had survived a previous Great Freeze. But we didn’t know how.
“I know how!” said Stance.
“Tell us,” said the human.
“Through prayer, of course!”
And there was a murmur of agreement from his men. “The Great Lox delivered us,” agreed Patch. “So they say.”
“Let’s just suppose he did,” said Mister McNeil. “It still doesn’t explain how you survived forty years of freezing cold with no heat source.”
“The answer lies in the caverns of Pallahaxi,” said Stance. “The holy fount, birthplace of Browneyes. Our people sat out the Great Freeze in the caverns, warmed by prayer until they were led into the sunlight by Drove and Browneyes.”
Mister McNeil hadn’t attended any of Stance’s prayer meetings; in fact he hardly knew him. He saw my uncle as a funny little stilk. He didn’t appreciate how compelling Stance’s personality was, to another stilk. I foresaw a danger the human couldn’t see.
I had no alternative but to put the question to Stance.
“How do you know?” I asked.
I heard Charm’s quick intake of breath.
Stance stiffened. “How do I know? How does anyone know? Through our culture and our religion, of course. Are you challenging the Great Lox himself, boy?”
Pallahaxi Page 46
