No World of Their Own

by Poul Anderson

  “We’d have known that,” said Langley bitterly, “except for the trouble with the space positioning. Because of that, it took us so long to find our test rockets that we had no way of observing that a finite time of passage had gone by. On my own voyage, the time lag was lost in the uncertainty of exact stellar positions. No wonder we had such trouble approaching Earth as we came home. Home!” he exploded, with a stinging in his eyes. “We crossed a total of some 5000 light-years. So it must be that many years later we came back.”

  Chanthavar nodded.

  Langley asked wearily: “What’s happened in all that time?”

  Chanthavar shrugged. “The usual. Overpopulation, vanishing natural resources, war, famine, pestilence, depopulation, collapse, and then the resumption of the cycle. I don’t think you’ll find people very different today.”

  “Couldn’t you have taught me—”

  “Like the language? Not very well. That was a routine hypnotic process, quite automatic and not involving the higher centers of the brain. You were interrogated in that state too. But as for your more complex learning, it’s best done gradually.”

  There was a deadness in Langley, a stricken indifference. He twisted away from it by trying to focus his mind on detail—anything, just so it was impersonal enough. “What kind of world is it now? And what can I do in it?”

  Chanthavar leaned forward, elbows on knees, cocking a sidewise eye at the other. Langley forced himself to pay attention. “Let’s see. Interstellar emigration began about your time—not too extensive at first, because of the limitations of the superdrive and the relative scarcity of habitable planets. During later periods of trouble, there were successive waves of such outward movement, but most of these were malcontents and refugees who went far from Sol lest they be found later, and have been lost track of. We presume there are many of these lost colonies, scattered throughout the galaxy, and that some of them must have evolved into very different civilizations. But the universe we actually know something about and have even an indirect contact with, only reaches a couple of hundred light-years. Who would have any reason to explore further?

  “The … let’s see, I think it was the twenty-eighth world war which reduced the Solar System almost to barbarism and wiped out the colonies on the nearer stars. Reconstruction took a long time, but about 2000 years ago the Solar System was unified under the Technate, and this has endured so far. Colonization was resumed, with the idea of keeping the colonists fairly close to home and thus under control, while the emigration would be a safety valve for getting rid of those who didn’t adjust well to the new arrangements.

  “Of course, it didn’t work. Distances are still too great; different environments inevitably produce different civilizations, other ways of living and thinking. About a thousand years ago, the colonies broke loose, and after a war we had to recognize their independence. There are about a dozen such states now with which we have fairly close contact—the League of Alpha Centauri is much the most powerful of them.

  “If you want to know more about outer-space conditions, you can talk to a member of the Commercial Society. At present, though, I wouldn’t bother, not till you’re better up on modern Earth.”

  “Yes, how about that?” said Langley. “What is this Technate system, anyway?”

  “The Technon is merely a giant sociomathematical computer which is fed all available data continuously, by all agencies, and makes basic policy decisions in view of them. A machine is less fallible, less selfish, less bribe-able, than a man.” Chathavar grinned. “Also, it saves men the trouble of thinking for themselves.”

  “I get the impression of an aristocracy—”

  “Oh, well, if you want to call it that. Somebody has to take responsibility for executing the Technon’s policies and making the small daily decisions. The class of Ministers exists for the purpose. Under them are the commoners. It’s hereditary, but not so rigid that occasional recruits from the commons don’t get elevated to the Ministry.”

  “Where I come from,” said Langley slowly, “we’d learned better than to leave leadership to chance—and heredity is mighty chancy.”

  “Not enough to matter nowadays. I told you we had genetic engineering.”

  “What can we—my friends and I—do?” Langley felt a dim annoyance at the strain in his voice.

  “Your status is a bit unusual, isn’t it? I’m appointing myself your patron, and you’ll have a sort of quasi-Ministerial rank with funds of your own for the time being. Not charity, by the way. The Technate does have a special cash-box for unforeseen details, and you are hereby classified as an unforeseen detail. Eventually we’ll work out something, but don’t worry about getting sent to the commons. If nothing else, your knowledge of the past is going to make you the pet of the historians for the rest of your lives.”

  Langley nodded. It didn’t seem to matter much, one way or another. Peggy was dead. He would never see her again. And the child was dust, and his friends were dust, and his nation was dust.

  He bowed his head and wanted to weep, but there were eyes on him.

  “There’s one thing you can help me with right now,” said Chanthavar. “It’s the reason I came here to see you, instead of having you sent to my office. More privacy.”

  Langley touched his lips, remembering how Peggy’s had brushed them and clung to them, fifty centuries ago.

  “It’s about that alien you had along—Saris Hronna. Was that the name you recorded for him?”

  “More or less. What about him?”

  “He escaped, you know. We haven’t found him yet. Is he dangerous?”

  “I don’t think so, unless he gets too annoyed. His people do have a keen hunting instinct, but they’re peaceable otherwise, treated us with great friendliness. Saris came along to see Earth, and as a kind of ambassador. I think he only broke away till he could get some idea of the situation. He must have dreaded the possibility of being caged.”

  “He can control electronic and magnetronic currents. You know that?”

  “Of course. It surprised us, too, at first. His race isn’t telepathic in the usual sense, but they’re sensitive to neural currents—especially emotions—and can project the same. I really don’t know whether he can read a human mind or not.”

  “We have to find him,” said Chanthavar. “Have you any idea where he might go, what he might do?”

  “I’d … have to think about it. But I’m sure he isn’t dangerous.” Langley wondered. He knew so little about the Holatan mind. It wasn’t human.

  “You note their planet as being some thousand light-years from Sol. It’s unknown to us, of course. We don’t intend this alien being any harm, but we have to locate him.”

  Langley glanced up. Under the mobile, smiling mask of his face, Chanthavar seemed almost feverish. There was a hunter’s gleam in his eyes. “What’s the hurry?” asked the spaceman.

  “Several things. Chiefly, the possibility that he may carry some germ to which man has no immunity. We’ve had plagues like that before.”

  “We were on Holat a couple of months. I’ve never been healthier in my life.”

  “Nevertheless, it has to be checked. Furthermore, how’s he going to live except by robbery? Can’t have that, either. Haven’t you any idea where he might have gone?”

  Langley shook his head. “I’ll think hard about it,” he said cautiously. “Maybe I’ll figure out an answer, but I can’t promise anything.”

  “Well,” said Chanthavar wryly, “that’ll have to do for now. Come on, let’s get some dinner.”

  He rose, Langley followed him out, and the two guards fell into step behind. The spaceman paid little attention to the halls and the antigravity rise-shafts along which he went. He was wrapped in his own desolation.

  IV

  There was darkness around Saris Hronna where he crouched. A wet wind blowing off the canal carried with it a thousand odors of strangeness. The night was full of fear. He lay in the weeds and mud of the canal bank, flattening
his belly to the earth, and listened for those who hunted him.

  There was no moon yet, but the stars were high and clear. A distant pulsing glow on the world’s edge told of a city. He looked down the straight line of the canal, the ordered rows of wind-rustling grain marching from horizon to horizon, the rounded bulk of somebody’s darkened hut three miles off. His nostrils sucked in a cool dank air, green growth and the small warm scurry of wildlife. He heard the slow, light dragging of wind, the remote honking of a bird, the incredibly faint boom of some airship miles overhead. His nerves drank the eddies and pulses of other nerves, other beings. So had he lain in the darknesses of Holat, waiting for an animal he hunted to come by, and letting himself flow into the vast murmurous midnight. But this time he was the quarry, and he could not blend himself to the life of Earth. It was too alien: every smell, every vision, every trembling nerve current of mouse or beetle, was saw-toothed with strangeness; the very wind blew with another voice.

  Below his waiting and his fear, there was sorrow. Somehow he had gone through time as well as space, somehow the planet he knew and all his folk, mate and cubs and kindred were a thousand years behind him. He was alone as none of his race had ever been alone.

  His dog-teeth flashed white as the lips drew back. There was something to live for, even now. Something to kill for.

  If he could get back … It was a thought like one dim candle in a huge and storming night. Holat would not have changed much, even in two thousand years, not unless some human ship had blundered on her again. His folk were not static; there was progress all the time. But it was a growth like evolution, in harmony with the seasons and the fields and the great rhythm of time. He could find himself again. But—

  Something stirred in the sky. Saris Hronna flattened himself as if he would dig into the mud. His eyes narrowed to yellow slits as he focused his mind-senses, straining into heaven for a ghost.

  Yes, currents—and not animal but the cold swirl of electrons in vacuum and gas, an undead pulsation which was like a nail scraped along his nerves. It was a small aircraft, he decided, circling in a slow path, reaching out with detectors. It was hunting him.

  Maybe he should have submitted meekly. The Explorer humans were decent; for Langley he had a growing affection. Maybe these far kin of his were reasonable too. No! There was too much at hazard. There was his whole race.

  They did not have this star-spanning technology on Holat. There it was still tools of bone and flint, travel on foot or in a dugout with sails and oars, food from hunting and fishing and the enormous herds of meat animals half-domesticated by telethymic control. One Holatan on the ground could track down a dozen men and kill them in the green stillness of the forests. But one human spaceship could hang in the sky and lash the planet with death.

  The aircraft up there was moving away. Saris Hronna snapped after breath, filling his lungs again.

  What to do, where to go, how to escape?

  The aircraft was coming back. Its track was a spiral. How many of them were there, over how many miles of Earth’s night?

  His mind quivered, less from fear than from hurt and loneliness. The life of Holat was grounded in order, ceremony, the grave courtesies between old and young, male and female, the calm pantheistic religon, the rites of the family at morning and evening: everything in its place, balance, harmony, sureness—always the knowing that life was one enormous unity. And he had been pitched into the foreign dark and was being hounded like a beast.

  The thing above was coming lower. Saris’ muscles grew rigid, and there was a blaze in his heart. Let it come within range, and he would seize control and smash it into the ground!

  He was not wholly unfitted for this moment of murder. There was no domination with a Holatan family, no harsh father or jibing brother—they were all one. And a member who showed real talent was ungrudgingly supported by the others while he worked at his art or his music or his thinking. Saris had been that kind, as he emerged from cubhood. Later he had gone to one of the universities.

  There he herded cattle, made tools, swept floors, as fitting return for the privilege of lying in the hut of some philosopher or artist or woodworker, arguing with him and learning from him. His particular flair had been for the physical sciences.

  They had their learning on Holat, he thought defensively as the metal death dropped slowly toward him. The books were hand-copied on parchment, but there was sound knowledge in them. Astronomy, physics and chemistry were elementary beside man’s, though correct as far as they went. Biological technique, the breeding of animals, the understanding and use of ecology were at least equal in the areas where no instrument but a simple lens and scalpel were needed—possibly superior. And the mathematicians of Holat had an innate ability which towered above that of any human.

  The craft was hovering, as if it were a bird of prey readying to stoop. Still out of control range.… They must have detectors, perhaps of infra-red, which made them suspect his presence. He dared not move.

  The safest thing for them to do would be to drop a bomb. Langley had told him about bombs. And that would be the end: a flash and roar he could not feel, dissolution, darkness forever.

  Well, he thought, feeling how the slow sad wind ruffled his whiskers, he had little to complain of. It had been a good life. He had been one of the wandering scholars who drifted around the world, always welcomed for the news he could bring, always seeing something fresh in the diversity of basically similar cultures which dotted his planet. His sort bound a planet together. Lately he had settled down, begun a family, taught at the University of Sundance-Through-Rain.… But if it came to swift death in an unknown land, life had still been kind.

  No, no! He brought his mind up sharply. He could not die, not yet. Not until he knew more, knew that Holat was safe from these pale hairless monsters, or knew how to warn and defend her. His muscles bunched to break and run.

  The airship descended with a swiftness that sucked a gasp from him. He reached out to grasp the swirling electric and magnetic streams with the force-fields of his brain—and withdrew, shuddering. No. Wait. There might be a better way.

  The craft landed in the fields, a good hundred yards off. Saris gathered his legs and arms under him. How many were there?

  Three. Two of them were getting out, the third staying inside. He couldn’t see through the tall stand of grain, but he could sense that one of the two carried some kind of instrument which was not a weapon. A detector, then. Blind in the dark, they could still track him.

  But of course, they weren’t sure it was him. Their instrument could just as well be registering a stray animal or a man. He could smell the sharp adrenalin stink of their fear.

  In a gliding rush, Saris Hronna went up the bank and four-legged through the grain. Someone yelled. A bolt of energy snapped at him, the vegetation flamed up where it struck and ozone scorched his nostrils. His mind could not take care of weapons; it had already clamped down on the engine and communicator of the vessel.

  He hardly felt the beam which sizzled along his ribs, leaving a welt of burned flesh. Leaping, he was on the nearest man. The figure went down, his hands tore out its throat, and he sprang aside as the other one fired.

  Someone cried out, a thin panicky wail in the darkness. A gun which threw a hail of lead missiles chattered from the boat’s nose. Saris jumped, landing on the roof. The man remaining outside was flashing a light, trying to catch him in its ray. Coldly, the Holatan estimated distances. Too far.

  He yowled, sliding to earth again as he did. The flashlight and a blaster beam stabbed where he had been. Saris covered the ground between in three leaps. Rising, he cuffed hard, and felt neckbones snap under his palm.

  Now … the boat! Saris snuffled at the door. It was locked against him, and the lock was purely mechanical, not to be controlled by the small energy output of his brain. He could feel the terror of the man huddled inside.

  He picked up one of the dropped blasters. For a moment he considered it, using the general
principle that function determines form. The hand went around this grip, one finger squeezed this lever, the fire spat from the other end, and that adjustment on the nose must regulate the size of the beam. He experimented and was gratified at having his deductions check out. Returning to the boat, he melted away its door lock.

  The man within was backed against the farther wall, a gun in his hand, waiting with a dry scream in his throat for the devil’ to break through. Saris pinpointed him telepathically: aft of the entrance—good! Opening the door a crack, just enough to admit his hand, he fired around the edge of it. The blaster was awkward in a grasp the size of his, but one bolt was enough.

  The smell of burned meat was thick around him. Now he had to work fast; there must be other craft in the vicinity. Collecting all the weapons, he hunched himself over the pilot’s chair—it was too small for him to sit in—and studied the control panel.

  The principle used was unfamiliar, something beyond the science of Langley’s time. Nor could he read the symbols on the controls. But by tracing the electric currents and gyro-magnetic fields with his mind, and applying logic, he got a notion of how to operate the thing.

  It rose a little clumsily as he maneuvered the switches, but he got the hang of it fast. Soon he was high in the sky, speeding through a darkness that whistled around him. One screen held an illuminated map with a moving red point that must represent his own location. Helpful.

  He couldn’t stay in this machine long; it would be identified and shot down. He must use it to get supplies and then to find a hiding place before dawn, after which it must fly westward to crash in the ocean. He should be able to adjust the automatic pilot to do that.

  Where to go? What to do?

  V

  There was a party in the home of Minister Yulien, high commissioner of metallurgies. The cream of Solar and foreign society would be there, and Chanthavar brought the Explorer crew along.