“Are you free to come and go here?”
“Oh, yes, prech Ramarren. The Lords have been very kind. They have long been seeking for any…other survivors of the Expedition. Do you know, prechna, if any of the others…”
“I do not know.”
“All that Kradgy had time to tell me, when I got here a few minutes ago, was that you had been living in the forest in the eastern part of this continent, with some wild tribe.”
“I’ll tell you that if you want to know. But tell me some things first. I do not know who I am, who you are, what the Expedition was, what Werel is.”
“We are Kelshy,” the boy said with constraint, evidently embarrassed at explaining on so low a level to one he considered his superior, in age of course, but also in more than age. “Of the Kelshak Nation, on Werel—we came here on the ship Alterra—”
“Why did we come here?” Falk asked, leaning forward.
And slowly, with digressions and backtrackings and a thousand question-interruptions, Orry went on, till he was worn out with talking and Falk with hearing, and the veil-like walls of the room were glowing with evening light; then they were silent for a while, and dumb servants brought in food and drink for them. And all the time he ate and drank Falk kept gazing in his mind at the jewel that might be false and might be priceless, the story, the pattern, the glimpse—true vision or not—of the world he had lost.
7
A SUN LIKE a dragon’s eye, orange-yellow, like a fire-opal with seven glittering pendants swinging slowly through their long ellipses. The green third planet took sixty of Earth’s years to complete its year: Lucky the man who sees his second spring, Orry translated a proverb of that world. The winters of the northern hemisphere, tilted by the angle of the ecliptic away from the sun while the planet was at its farthest from the sun, were cold, dark, terrible: the vast summers, half a lifetime long, were measurelessly opulent. Giant tides of the planet’s deep seas obeyed a giant moon that took four hundred days to wax and wane; the world was rife with earthquakes, volcanoes, plants that walked, animals that sang, men who spoke and built cities: a catalogue of wonders. To this miraculous though not unusual world had come, twenty years ago, a ship from outer space. Twenty of its great years, Orry meant: something over twelve hundred Terran years.
Colonists and hilfers of the League of All Worlds, the people on that ship were committing their work and lives to the new-found planet, remote from the ancient central worlds of the League, in the hope of bringing its native intelligent species eventually into the League, a new ally in the War To Come. Such had been the policy of the League ever since, generations before, warnings had come from beyond the Hyades of a great wave of conquerors that moved from world to world, from century to century, closer toward the farflung cluster of eighty planets that so proudly called itself the League of All Worlds. Terra, near the edge of the League heart-zone and the nearest League planet to the new-found planet Werel, had supplied all the colonists on this first ship. There were to have been other ships from other worlds of the League, but none ever came: the War came first.
The colonists’ only communications with Earth, with the Prime World Davenant, and the rest of the League, was by the ansible, the instantaneous transmitter, aboard their ship. No ship, said Orry, had ever flown faster than light—here Falk corrected him. Warships had indeed been built on the ansible principle, but they had been only automatic death-machines, incredibly costly and carrying no living creatures. Lightspeed, with its foreshortening of time for the voyager, was the limit of human voyaging, then and now. So the colonists of Werel were a very long way from home and wholly dependent on their ansible for news. They had only been on Werel five years when they were informed that the Enemy had come, and Immediately after that the communications grew confused, contradictory, intermittent, and soon ceased altogether. About a third of the colonists chose to take the ship and fly back across the great gap of years to Earth, to rejoin their people. The rest stayed on Werel, self-marooned. In their lifetimes they could never know what had become of their home world and the League they served, or who the Enemy was, and whether he ruled the League or had been vanquished. Without ship or communicator, isolated, they stayed, a small colony surrounded by curious and hostile High Intelligence Life Forms of a culture inferior, but an intelligence equal, to their own. And they waited, and their sons’ sons waited, while the stars stayed silent over them. No ship ever came, no word. Their own ship must have been destroyed, the records of the new planet lost. Among all the stars the little orange-yellow opal was forgotten.
The colony thrived, spreading up a pleasant sea-coast land from its first town, which was named Alterra. Then after several years—Orry stopped and corrected himself, “Nearly six centuries, Earth-style, I mean. It was the Tenth Year of the Colony, I think. I was just beginning to learn history; but Father and…and you, prech Ramarren, used to tell me these things, before we made the Voyage, to explain it all to me…” After several centuries, then, the colony had come onto hard days. Few children were conceived, still fewer born alive. Here again the boy paused, explaining finally, “I remember your telling me that the Alterrans didn’t know what was happening to them, they thought it was some bad effect of inbreeding, but actually it was a sort of selection. The Lords, here, say it couldn’t have been that, that no matter how long an alien colony is established on a planet they remain alien. With gene-manipulation they can breed with natives, but the children will always be sterile. So I don’t know what it was that happened to the Alterrans—I was only a child when you and Father were trying to tell me the story—I do remember you spoke of selection towards a…viable type…Anyhow, the colonists were getting near extinction when what was left of them finally managed to make an alliance with a native Werelian nation, Tevar. They wintered-through together, and when the Spring breeding season came, they found that Tevarans and Alterrans could reproduce. Enough of them, at least, to found a hybrid race. The Lords say that is not possible. But I remember you telling it to me.” The boy looked worried and a little vague.
“Are we descendants of that race?”
“You are descended from the Alterra Agat, who led the colony through the Winter of the Tenth Year! We learned about Agat even in boy-school. That is your name, prech Ramarren—Agad of Charen. I am of no such lineage, but my great-grandmother was of the family Esmy of Kiow—that is an Alterran name. Of course, in a democratic society as Earth’s, these distinctions are meaningless, aren’t they…?” Again Orry looked worried, as if some vague conflict was occurring in his mind. Falk steered him back to the history of Werel, filling out with guesses and extrapolation the childish narrative that was all Orry could supply.
The new mixed stock and mixed culture of the Tevar-Alterran nation flourished in the years after that perilous Tenth Winter. The little cities grew; a mercantile culture was established on the single north-hemisphere continent. Within a few generations it was spreading to the primitive peoples of the southern continents, where the problem of keeping alive through the Winter was more easily solved. Population went up; science and technology began their exponential climb, guided and aided always by the Books of Alterra, the ship’s library, the mysteries of which grew explicable as the colonists’ remote descendants relearned lost knowledge. They had kept and copied those books, generation after generation, and learned the tongue they were written in—Galaktika, of course. Finally, the moon and sister-planets all explored, the sprawl of cities and the rivalries of nations controlled and balanced by the powerful Kelshak Empire in the old Northland, at the height of an age of peace and vigor the Empire had built and sent forth a lightspeed ship.
That ship, the Alterra, left Werel eighteen and a half years after the ship of the Colony from Earth landed: twelve hundred years, Earth style. Its crew had no idea what they would find on Earth. Werel had not yet been able to reconstruct the principles of the ansible transmitter, and had hesitated to broadcast radio-signals that would betray their location to a possible h
ostile world ruled by the Enemy the League had feared. To get information living men must go, and return, crossing the long night to the ancient home of the Alterrans.
“How long was that voyage?”
“Over two Werelian years—maybe a hundred and thirty or forty light-years—I was only a boy, a child, prech Ramarren, and some things I didn’t understand, and much wasn’t told me—”
Falk did not see why this ignorance should embarrass the lad; he was much more struck by the fact that Orry, who looked fifteen or sixteen, had been alive for perhaps a hundred and fifty years. And himself?
The Alterra, Orry went on, had left from a base near the old coast-town Tevar, her coordinates set for Terra. She had carried nineteen people, men, women and children, Kelshak for the most part and claiming Colonist descent: the adults selected by the Harmonious Council of the Empire for training, intelligence, courage, generosity, and arlesh.
“I don’t know a word for it in Galaktika. It’s just arlesh.” Orry smiled his ingenuous smile. “Rale is…the right thing to do, like learning things at school, or like a river following its course, and arlesh derives from rale, I guess.”
“Tao?” asked Falk; but Orry had never heard of the Old Canon of Man.
“What happened to the ship? What happened to the other seventeen people?”
“We were attacked at the Barrier. The Shing got there only after the Alterra was destroyed and the attackers were dispersing. They were rebels, in planetary cars. The Shing rescued me off one. They didn’t know whether the rest of us had been killed or carried off by the rebels. They kept searching, over the whole planet, and about a year ago they heard a rumor about a man living in the Eastern Forest—that sounded like it might be one of us…”
“What do you remember of all this—the attack and so on?”
“Nothing. You know how lightspeed flight affects you—”
“I know that for those in the ship, no time passes. But I have no idea how that feels.”
“Well, I don’t really remember it very clearly. I was just a boy—nine years old, Earth style. And I’m not sure anybody could remember it clearly. You can’t tell how—how things relate. You see and hear, but it doesn’t hang together—nothing means anything—I can’t explain it. It’s horrible, but only like a dream. But then coming down into planetary space again, you go through what the Lords call the Barrier, and that blacks out the passengers, unless they’re prepared for it. Our ship wasn’t. None of us had come to when we were attacked, and so I don’t remember it, any—any more than you, prech Ramarren. When I came to I was aboard a Shing vessel.”
“Why were yon brought along as a boy?”
“My father was the captain of the expedition. My mother was on the ship too. You know, otherwise, prech Ramarren—well, if one came back one’s people would all have been dead, long long ago. Not that it mattered—my parents are dead, now, anyhow. Or maybe they were treated like you, and…and wouldn’t recognize me if we met…”
“What was my part in the expedition?”
“You were our navigator.”
The irony of that made Falk wince, but Orry went on in his respectful, naive fashion, “Of course, that means you set the ship’s course, the coordinates—you were the greatest prosteny, a mathematician-astronomer, in all Kelshy. You were prechnowa to all of us aboard except my father, Har Weden. You are of the Eighth Order, prech Ramarren! You—you remember something of that—?”
Falk shook his head.
The boy subsided, saying at last, sadly, “I can’t really believe that you don’t remember, except when you do that.”
“Shake my head?”
“On Werel we shrug for no. This way.”
Orry’s simplicity was irresistible. Falk tried the shrug; and it seemed to him that he found a certain rightness in it, a propriety, that could persuade him that it was indeed an old habit. He smiled, and Orry at once cheered up. “You are so like yourself, prech Ramarren, and so different! Forgive me. But what did they do, what did they do to make you forget so much?”
“They destroyed me. Surely I’m like myself. I am myself. I’m Falk…” He put his head in his hands. Orry, abashed, was silent. The quiet, cool air of the room glowed like a blue-green jewel around them; the western wall was lambent with late sunlight.
“How closely do they watch you here?”
“The Lords like me to carry a communicator if I go off by aircar.” Orry touched the bracelet on his left wrist, which appeared to be simple gold links. “It can be dangerous, after all, among the natives.”
“But you’re free to go where you like?”
“Yes, of course. This room of yours is just like mine, across the canyon.” Orry looked puzzled again. “We have no enemies here, you know, prech Ramarren,” he ventured.
“No? Where are our enemies, then?”
“Well—outside—where you came from—”
They stared at each other in mutual miscomprehension.
“You think men are our enemies—Terrans, human beings? You think it was they that destroyed my mind?”
“Who else?” Orry said, frightened, gaping.
“The aliens—the Enemy—the Shing!”
“But,” the boy said with timid gentleness, as if realizing at last how utterly his former lord and teacher was ignorant and astray, “there never was an Enemy. There never was a War.”
The room trembled softly like a tapped gong to an almost subaural vibration, and a moment afterward a voice, disembodied, spoke: The Council meets. The slit-door parted and a tall figure entered, stately in white robes and an ornate black wig. The eyebrows were shaven and repainted high; the face, masked by makeup to a matte smoothness, was that of a husky man of middle age. Orry rose quickly from the table and bowed, whispering, “Lord Abundibot.”
“Har Orry,” the man acknowledged, his voice also damped to a creaking whisper, then turned to Falk. “Agad Ramarren. Be welcome. The Council of Earth meets, to answer your questions and consider your requests. Behold now…” He had glanced at Falk only for a second, and did not approach either Werelian closely. There was a queer air about him of power and also of utter self-containment, self-absorption. He was apart, unapproachable. All three of them stood motionless a moment; and Falk, following the others’ gaze, saw that the inner wall of the room had blurred and changed, seeming to be now a depth of clear grayish jelly in which lines and forms twitched and flickered. Then the image came clear, and Falk caught his breath. It was Estrel’s face, ten times lifesize. The eyes gazed at him with the remote composure of a painting.
“I am Strella Siobelbel.” The lips of the image moved, but the voice had no locality, a cold, abstract whisper trembling in the air of the room. “I was sent to bring to the City in safety the member of the Werel Expedition said to be living in the east of Continent One. I believe this to be the man.”
And her face, fading, was replaced by Falk’s own.
A disembodied voice, sibilant, inquired, “Does Har Orry recognize this person?”
As Orry answered, his face appeared on the screen. “This is Agad Ramarren, Lords, the Navigator of the Alterra.”
The boy’s face faded and the screen remained blank, quivering, while many voices whispered and rustled in the air, like a brief multitudinous discussion among spirits, speaking an unknown tongue. This was how the Shing held their Council: each in his own room, apart, with only the presence of whispering voices. As the incomprehensible questioning and replying went on, Falk murmured to Orry, “Do you know this tongue?”
“No, prech Ramarren. They always speak Galaktika to me.”
“Why do they talk this way, instead of face to face?”
“There are so many of them—thousands and thousands meet in the Council of Earth, Lord Abundibot told me. And they are scattered over the planet in many places, though Es Toch is the only city. That is Ken Kenyek, now.”
The buzz of disembodied voices had died away and a new face had appeared on the screen, a man’s face, with
dead white skin, black hair, pale eyes. “Agad Ramarren, we are met in Council, and you have been brought into our Council, that you may complete your mission to Earth and, if you desire, return to your home. The Lord Pelleu Abundibot will bespeak you.”
The wall abruptly blanked, returned to its normal translucent green. The tall man across the room was gazing steadily at Falk. His lips did not move, but Falk heard him speak, not in a whisper now but clearly—singularly clearly. He could not believe it was mindspeech, yet it could be nothing else. Stripped of the character and timbre, the incarnateness of voice, this was comprehensibility pure and simple, reason addressing reason.
“We mindspeak so that you may hear only truth. For it is not true that we who call ourselves Shing, or any other man, can pervert or conceal truth in paraverbal speech. The Lie that men ascribe to us is itself a lie. But if you choose to use voicespeech do so, and we will do likewise.”
“I have no skill at bespeaking,” Falk said aloud after a pause. His living voice sounded loud and coarse after the brilliant, silent mind-contact. “But I hear you well enough. I do not ask for the truth. Who am I to demand the truth? But I should like to hear what you choose to tell me.”
Young Orry looked shocked. Abundibot’s face registered nothing at all. Evidently he was attuned to both Falk and Orry—a rare feat in itself, in Falk’s experience—for Orry was quite plainly listening as the telepathic speech began again.
“Men razed your mind and then taught you what they wished you to know—what they wish to believe. So taught, you distrust us. We feared it would be so. But ask what you will, Agad Ramarren of Werel; we will answer with the truth.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Six days.”
“Why was I drugged and befooled at first?”
“We were attempting to restore your memory. We failed.”
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