The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  Game on Earth and Demeter didn’t make that kind. When asked, Fidelio said the same was true on Beta. Well, Pandora could be different.

  Brodersen led the way down the path, followed Indian file by Caitlín, Dozsa, and Fidelio. The party bore weapons, walkie-talkies, canteens from which they often swigged, light backpacks of assorted gear. Rueda stayed behind in the boat; he had objected strenuously, but such a reserve was essential and he was the logical choice. Save for wind-sough and an occasional croak or trill, the forest was quiet. “Trees”—they looked more like giant succulents of varied species—and “canebrakes” grew well apart, probably for lack of water, but their widespread foliage made a roof, so that shadows speckled by green sunbeams turned the surroundings just a little cooler than the open was. Now and then a creature droned or fluttered or scurried by; once the party glimpsed at a distance an animal as big as a pony, likewise bearing a dorsal fin; but on the whole, this was an unfruitful wilderness.

  “Life swims upstream, until overwhelmed and sunk,” Fidelio had philosophized. “When the sun of Pandora began to betray it, higher species must have died, unless the sapients took a few along when they fled. There remained lesser, simpler breeds; and evolution started over. The sun did not change too fast for them in the next few million years.” He had drooped his whiskers, a sign of regret or pain. “It will. Another massive extinction; another rally; another and another, though I think each is more weak and starveling: until the end. When will Pandora lie wholly bare? In a billion years, perhaps.”

  A billion years, Brodersen remembered as he walked. Counting to a billion, at a standard rate of four numbers per second, would take—he had checked a minicomp—almost eight years. A billion real-time years—that’s a mighty long rearguard action to fight against the Norns.

  Though does any race of being ever fight anything else?

  The walk was brief, through an afternoon that would linger for Earthdays. They came out beneath brazen heaven and saw the houses of unknownness.

  Only turf, brush, and younglings of larger plants grew right around them. Clifflike, rainbowlike, walls lifted sheer until they became intricately recessed, colonnaded, intermingled. No doors or windows broke their smoothness. A portal did give on a courtyard. Brodersen took his followers through. Here also nature strove to return. Roots had not split paving or siding (yet) but low vegetation decked corners where dust had gathered and tendrils crawled up convoluted pilasters. A creature flew from a gallery; had it a nest there?

  The newcomers paid scant heed. In the middle of the yard was a pair of statues.

  The pedestals were stone, the sculpture in the same(?) perdurable material as the facades. Realistic tints lent a conviction that these were portraits. The entities represented were twice human height, which might be art but which Brodersen suspected was truth. Nudity revealed them as two-sexed (probably, Fidelio said; and Brodersen remembered reading about a plaque on the first things man had sent out of the Solar System). Bulky, short-legged, long-armed, stub-tailed bipeds, they had three eyes but flat beakless countenances. A blueness covered them that was not hair or scales or feathers…. The catalogue of their appearance could go on.

  In four-fingered hands, one held aloft a hammer and unmistakable wood ax, one a sheet of hide or fabric which bore pictographs (or hieroglyphs or—). No matter how foreign the shapes, their stances bespoke tranquility.

  After silence had lasted, Caitlín murmured, “Goodfate to you, people of Pandora.”

  “Or are they the Others?” Dozsa asked in as hushed a tone.

  Brodersen shook his head. “Hardly,” he answered. “The Others build moon-heavy machines out of star stuff for crossing the universe, space and time both. They wouldn’t bother with this kind of thing.”

  “Could the Pandorans be apprentice Others?” Caitlín wondered.

  Dozsa turned pragmatic: “Are these Pandorans? How can we tell?”

  “I think they must be,” Fidelio replied. “They have the four-limbed, trioptic anatomy. Features like the dorsal fin and beaks instead of jaws doubtless stem back to primitive animals from which the higher forms of the present epoch developed.”

  As if placental mammals died out, or evacuated Earth, and ages afterward new species arose whose ancestors were platypuses, Brodersen thought. Or lizards or worms.

  “Well, let’s poke around,” he said.

  There must be a way into the buildings, but none existed that the strangers could find.

  “They return at intervals and clear away the weeds in this area,” Brodersen posited. “Else it’d be choked.”

  “How often, though?” Dozsa demanded.

  “To estimate that,” Fidelio said, “we would have to know growth rates. Those would take us a year or two to learn. And then we would merely have a guess. Ten years? Twenty? You could establish yourselves here, the gravity would suit your bodily needs, but I do not imagine you could live off the country.”

  Caitlín winced and hugged him. He had less than one year. He gave her a moment’s response before his whisker-dithering, tail-twitching curiosity took over again.

  “Uh-huh,” Brodersen said slowly. “It doesn’t seem practical. I did think we might leave a message, maybe engraved on stainless steel set next to these figures. Symbols that read… oh… quote, ‘We’re lost, we plan to grope on through gate after gate according to such-and-such a pattern, but please come after us.’”

  “Would they pay any attention?” Dozsa challenged.

  “Would you not?” Caitlín flung back. He nodded. “But how shall we be making them understand?” she inquired of Fidelio.

  “I seize no slightest idea,” he admitted. “In eight years of intimate relationship with your expedition, we achieved a little comprehension back and forth. And it seems our two races are more alike than most.”

  He sat for a while on feet and flukes, a long, graceful mahogany shape among oven-hot high-colored walls. The claws and webs of an upper hand closed on his muzzle, the fingers of both lower hands were bridged. “No,” he said at last, croaking and piping the Spanish that perhaps hurt his throat, “I sense nothing. Remember, if you do go on, you go on at the risk of emerging on emptiness. The Pandorans are not the Others. Unless they know the Others—why should they necessarily, more than your folk or mine?—even if they can translate your appeal, they would be sending a crew in your wake at the same hazard. Caitlín, female of love, would you order that?”

  She stood dumb.

  After another while, Fidelio said, “For my part, I am very willing to swim with the school. You may choose to stay, in hopes of help before your supplies are gone. My counsel, which could be wrong, is that you seek onward. But make your own judgment, dear friends.”

  “No!” burst from Caitlín, in English. “A selkie like him to be dying on this mummy world? If he cannot have the sea back, let him at least have stars!”

  Brodersen smiled sadly and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’re too fast off the mark, honey,” he reproached. “I wanted to say that.”

  They could do nothing more as they were, and the heat was sapping them. Sunburn would hit them too, quicker and crueller than on Earth, if they didn’t take care. “We’ll quit for now,” Brodersen told Rueda over the radio, “rest a few hours in the boat—you keep that air conditioner going, hear me?—and figure what to try next. Maybe we should snoop around the landing field in case we can learn something. Maybe we should rig ladders to reach these high-level arcades. Or maybe we should take off right away, though personally I’d rather not. Anyhow, we’ll be along pronto.”

  “I’ll have food ready for you,” Rueda promised.

  The party went out through the portal in no special order and started across the more or less open section of second growth that separated it from the virgin stand. The green sun scorched and glowered, the wind resounded.

  Fidelio cried aloud. Not before had the humans heard surprise and agony in a Betan voice.

  Brodersen saw shafts fly from the woods,
short, thick, vaned at the rear, with triple-barbed metal heads. “Drop!” he roared, and hit the dirt himself. His rifle snarled, spraying the forest, ripping chunks off its suddenly nightmare stems, raking in among them.

  A high ululation responded. Forth from the ambush sprang a couple of beings. Later Brodersen would learn that Caitlín had snatched the chance to turn her camera on them. For him, that was needless. He saw with total clarity and he would not forget while he lived.

  They were bipeds, slender, chest-high to him. Their heads were three-eyed and beaked, their hands had three evenly spaced fingers, their feet were hooflike, their backs sprouted fins, their color was brown. They wore short trousers in whose belts were knife and tomahawk. One clutched a sort of crossbow. The other had been wounded; black blood ran from an arm.

  They did not charge but bounded off right and left while they shrieked. Brodersen fired at the nearest. “Don’t!” Caitlín shouted. “They’re fleeing, frightened—Dan, they have minds!”

  He let them go but gave the woods a fresh burst. Dozsa joined in. More than two savages had been in that attack. No retaliation came. Scared the lot of ’em off, Brodersen decided. The pair who ran out were sheerly panicked. Maybe I nailed a few. Hope so.

  He released his trigger. A searing silence rolled over him, deepened by the wind. He rose to a crouch and looked around. No sign of further danger met him. “Stand guard, Stef,” he directed. “If you think you see a movement, any kind of movement, shoot.”

  He went over to Fidelio. The Betan lay in a lake of blood. His was purple. More pumped out of the wound which the quarrel had torn through his body between the upper and lower arms. It had already soaked Caitlín, where she knelt trying to stanch the flow.

  She glanced at Brodersen as he neared. “No use,” she told him dully. “I’ve not the equipment nor the knowledge nor the time. A major artery, a vital organ—” The flow was diminishing. Fidelio’s harsh breathing was too, and he relaxing out of his death struggle.

  Caitlín moved to lay his head on her lap. The blue eyes sought toward her. “Fidelio,” she said in Spanish, “can you hear me?”

  “Si,” rattled faint.

  “Fidelio, we’ll get home. And we’ll help your people learn what they need to about our ways of love, though I think they’ve much to teach us of that.”

  “Gracias—” Brodersen could barely hear.

  Caitlín stroked hands along his fur and sang very low:

  Sleep, my babe, for the red bee hums the silent twilight’s fall. Aeobhaill from the grey rock comes to wrap the world in thrall.

  She had sung it for Brodersen’s children, the ancient “Gartan Mother’s Lullabye.” The melody was beautiful.

  Alend van och, my child, my joy, my love, my heart’s desire, The crickets sing you lullabye, beside the dying fire.—

  Brodersen left them alone and, taking every soldierly precaution possible, went to scout the thickets. He found no killed or wounded, though wet black spashes told him he’d hit oftener than once. Probably the band had borne its casualties away, as a troop ought to. He gathered a few dropped weapons for later examination and returned. By then, Fidelio was gone.

  Having reported to an appalled Rueda, Brodersen commanded, “No you stay put. This space here’s too small for a safe landing, especially when you’d have to work the boat alone. You ought to be secure enough. But if in doubt, scramble! Williwaw’s too much a key to everybody else’s survival to jeopardize on our account.” After a protest: “Shut up, mister, and obey orders.”

  He turned to Caitlín and Dozsa. “Okay, let’s start. You in the middle, Pegeen. Keep alert. Fire on the slightest suspicion. We’ll hold fast in the boat till Chinook’s ready to receive us.”

  She pointed mutely at the shape below her feet. He shook his head. “No. We can’t, when we might be bushwhacked on our way. I won’t organize a detail to recover him afterward, either. Wish we could, but—would you want your friends to endanger their lives for your corpse? I can’t believe he would.

  “Come along.”

  XXXV

  THE SPACESHIP BLASTED, away from the planet, back to the T machine for her next leap. On the first evenwatch after mess, the common room lay unused. Nobody wanted to look at Pandora and its green sun, nor confess dauntedness by suggesting viewscreens be turned off. In pairs or alone, crewfolk drifted to their quarters.

  Brodersen and Caitlín lowered their bed because only thus could they really sit next to each other, leaned against pillows and bulkhead. They had put on pajamas, which they seldom did, and poured stiff whiskies. Their adjacent hands were linked.

  The liquor slopped about in his tumbler. He took a draught of its smoke and fire, and another, and saw his grip grow steadier. “Oh, God, Pegeen, oh, God,” he groaned, “I lost a crewman again. I did.”

  “It couldn’t be helped, darling,” she answered. “Nobody blames you.”

  “Except me!”

  She let him stare at nothing and gulp air for half a minute before she put her drink on a sideshelf, took him by the jaw, and dragged his head around to face her “Now that will do, Daniel Brodersen,” she snapped. “It’s pitying yourself you are, the which is the lowest emotion there is.”

  He met her gaze, stern in a frame of unbound bronze hair, swallowed hard, and nodded. “Yeah. You’re right and I’m sorry. It was a damnable shock, but I should have taken it like a man.”

  She put her arm about his neck. “No, dearest, don’t feel at fault about that either. You’ve borne a load you can let go at last—must let go.” She kissed him, long though tenderly rather than passionately.

  When they were at ease, she sighed. “Truth to tell, I’d no great fret about you. Phil Weisenberg, however, I fear he’s in a bad way.”

  “Huh? Well, he skipped dinner, but a setback like this could destroy anybody’s appetite.”

  Caitlín bit her lip. “You didn’t hear him when he called me to say he’d be absent. Nor did you see him when we embarked, or afterward while we made ready to boost…. Oh, aye, you saw him, but you can’t have noticed; you’d too much else on your mind. He’s being a quiet, efficient, polite robot.”

  Brodersen scowled. “That’s rough news for sure.”

  Caitlín squeezed his hand. “Don’t take on this worry yet, my heart. Let me see what I can do. You’re old friends, I know, but I’ve a notion he’d not open to you simply for fear of adding to your burdens. He may find me safer.”

  “M-m-m… well, you do have a gift…. All right.” Brodersen drank further. Abruptly, hoarsely, “Maybe you can guess why those devils attacked us.”

  Caitlín gathered words. “They are not devils, Dan,” she then said. Her tone was gentle. “They are intelligent beings like you and me—still hunters, whose few scattered dwellings in the wilderness we did not see from above—but our ancestors were the same, not very long ago. Oh, glad I am we seem to have killed no one of them.”

  “After what they did?”

  “Think. What are they? A race evolved from lower animals in the past few million years, after the sun changed.”

  “Yes, that’s obvious.”

  “Think further, Dan. The older race had departed. They might come back on occasion, out of reverence or a sorrowful curiosity, but why would they establish that base, to hold a flotilla of ships, and raise those buildings in the ancient style, and set forth images of themselves? Why, unless to help their successors? Abolish the worst horrors of such an environment. Give the new beings what is useful—as it might be iron for forging boltheads for the hunt—but a piece of technology at a time, maybe once in a century, so they can grow into the use, not the misuse—” Caitlín laid a palm over Brodersen’s mouth. “Hush, macushla; let me finish. I suppose the elders guide the whole younger culture in its development, or all of what different cultures exist on poor Pandora. I suppose too this guidance is even more slow and careful, not to wither the native spirit and genius but to let them flower. That would explain, would it not, the statues—reminders
of the teachers who return after generations and reopen their school—teachers that I think do everything they can not to become gods.

  “In the end, though well before the planet is much worse burnt, there should be a civilization ready and able to move out among the stars.”

  Caitlín smiled, sipped, brushed lips across Brodersen’s cheek. “Does that sound reasonable, my sweet?” she asked.

  “Well…. We can’t do more than guess—” He banged his tumbler against his own shelf. “Why in hell’s name did they shoot at us?” he rasped.

  “How could they know what we were? We none of us looked like the teachers. We could be demons invading their holiest shrine. Or we could be two new kinds of beast, to kill as a precaution or to kill for meat. Fidelio said he thought this is the season of ingathering, against a frightful winter—for mates, children, everybody they care about. He might have died in the Wheel for evil cause. This was only because of a mistake, and because of love.”

  “We didn’t foresee. The universe took us by surprise.”

  “It always will, Dan. You know that.”

  He nodded jerkily, drained his drink, set it down, and turned to her. “Pegeen, you make things good again—”

  They clung to each other, nothing more. When she felt the tension going from him, she urged him with her arms to lie down. He closed his eyes. She kissed the lids. He smiled. She drew alongside him. Soon he was asleep.

  She had taken but little whisky. Rising, she paced around barefoot, fingers tightly interlocked, a growing distress on her countenance. At length, after a glance at the man to make sure he was soundly at rest, she went to the private line intercom and punched a number.

  Weisenberg’s voice dragged from the receiver. “Yes?”