“Besides,” Macandal continued, “I’ve got my hands full,” She always did, her own work, what she shared with Pa-tulcius, what belonged to the community; and at three years, Joseph was several handsful by himself. Her laugh rolled. “Also my belly.” Their second. Pregnancy was not disabling, bodies had hardened to Xenogaian weight, but you had better be careful. “Don’t worry, we’ll pitch in to see your man through; and maybe you won’t be gone long.” Soberly: “Take what time you need, though. This means a great deal to them. It might mean everything to us.”
Therefore Aliyat packed her gear and rations, and departed.
Coming out of her house in the morning, she stopped for a minute and looked. Not yet was the scene too familiar to see. The sky reached milky, an overcast riven in places to reveal the wan blue beyond. Nowhere beneath were the clouds that should have brought rain. Air hung still and hot, full of sulfjury smells. The stream that ran from the eastern hills through the settlement had become little more than a trickle; she barely heard it fall over the verge nearby and tumble to the river. Down in the estuary, banks and bars shone wider than erstwhile at low tide.
Regardless, Hestia abided. The three homes and several auxiliary buildings stood foursquare, -solidly timbered. Russet native turf between them had withered, but watering preserved the shade trees and the beds of roses, hollyhocks, violets along walls. A kilometer northward, robots were busy around the farmstead and in the fields; the meadow and its cows made a fantastic vividness of green and red. Farther off, the spaceboat reared above the aircraft hangar, into heaven, like a watchtower over the whole small realm. From this height Aliyat spied a brighter gleam on the eastern horizon, the Amethyst Sea.
We’ll survive, she knew. At worst, the synthesizers will have to feed us and our livestock till the drought breaks, and next year we’ll have to start over. Oh, I hope not. We’ve worked so hard—machines too few—and hoped so much. An enlarged base, surplus, the future, the children— All right, I have been selfish, not wanting to be bothered with any of my own, but isn’t Hestia glad that I’m free today?
Elsewhere Minoa reached as of old. South, across the river, forest crowns bore a thousand hues, ocher, brown, greenish bronze, dulled by dryness. The same growth bordered the cleared land on the north; then, westerly on this side, hills climbed. Above their ridges lifted a white blur, Mount Pytheas wrapped in its mists.
Human names. Throat and tongue could form the language of the dwellers after a fashion, understandably if they paid close attention, but soon grew hoarse. The concepts behind that speech were more difficult.
Aliyat turned to kiss Tu Shan goodbye. His body was hard, his arms strong. Already at this hour he smelled of sweat, soil, maleness. “Be careful,” he said anxiously.
“You be,” she retorted. Xenogaia surely harbored more surprises and treacheries than had struck thus far. He’d been injured oftenest. He was a darling, but drove himself overly hard.
He shook his head. “I fear for you. From what I have heard, this is a sacred matter. Can we tell how they will act?”
“They’re not stupid. They won’t expect me to know their mysteries. Remember, they asked if somebody would come and—“ And what? It wasn’t clear. Help, counsel, judge? “They haven’t lost their awe of us.”
Had they not? What did a creature not of Earth, no kin whatsoever, feel? The natives had certainly been hospitable. They readily gave this piece of ground, had indeed offered a site closer to their city; but the humans feared possible ecological problems. There had been abundant exchange of objects as wejl as ideas, useful as well as interesting or beautiful. But did this prove more than that the Ithagene— another Greek word—had their share of common sense and, one supposed, curiosity?
“I’ve got to go. Keep well.” Aliyat walked off, as fast as was safe under a backpack. She’d developed muscles like a judo black belter’s, which gave a terrifically sexy figure and gait, but bones remained all too breakable.
Someday we’ll leave. Phaeacia waits, promising us to be like Earth. Does she lie? How much will we miss this world of toils and triumphs?
Four Ithagene waited at the head of the path. They wore mesh mail and their hook-halberds gleamed sharp. They were an honor guard; or so she thought of them. Deferential, they divided to precede and follow her down the switchbacks across the fjord wall to the river. At the floating dock, the envoy was already in the vessel that brought them. Long, gracefully curved at prow and stern, it little resembled the two human-made boats tied nearby. No more did it have rowers, though, and the yards were bare of sails. A motor, such as the fabricator robots had lately, accumulated the resources to make, was an imperial gift. Supplies of fuel renewed it ongoingly.
The humans often wondered what they were doing to this civilization, for good or ill—ultimately, to this world.
Aliyat recognized S’saa. That was as closely as she could render the name. She did her best with a phrase that they guessed, in Hestia, was half formal greeting, half prayer. Lo responded in kind. (“Lo, le, la.” What else could you say when sexes were three, none corresponding quite to male or female or neuter, and the language lacked genders?) She and her escort boarded, a crew member cast off, another took the rudder, the motor purred, they bore upstream.
“May you now tell me what you want?” Aliyat asked.
“The matter is too grave for uttering elsewhere than in the Halidom,” S’saa answered. “We shall sing of it.”
The notes keened forth to set an emotional tone, prepare both body and mind. Aliyat heard distress, anger, fear, bewilderment, resolution. Surely much escaped her, but in the past year or two she had finally begun to comprehend, yes, feel such music, as she had failed to do with many kinds on Earth. Wanderer and Macandal were experimenting with adaptations of it, composing songs of quiet, eerie power.
You wouldn’t have thought of these beings as artists. Barrel torsos, some one hundred fifty centimeters tall on four stumpy limbs, covered with big scales or flaps, brown and leathery, that could individually lift to show a soft pink un-dersurface for fluid intake, excretion, sensing; no head to speak of, a bulge on top where a mouth underlay one scale and four retractable eyestalks protruded; four tentacles below, each terminating in four digits, that could be stiffened at will by turgor. But how repulsive did a body look that was scaleless as a flayed corpse? The humans took care always to be fully clothed among Xenogaians.
Rapidly driven, the boat passed several galleys bound the same way, then numbers of lesser craft “fishing” or freighting. None were going downstream; the tide had begun to flow, and although the moon was fairly distant today, the bore up the river would be considerable. At ebb the argosies would set forth. This was a seafaring nation (?) whose folk hunted great aquatic beasts and harvested great weed fields, traded around the coasts and among the islands, occasionally fought pirates or barbarians or whatever their enemies were. As tactfully as possible, the six at Hestia refused to give any military aid. They didn’t know the rights or wrongs, they only knew that this appeared to be the most advanced civilization on the planet but someday they’d want to start getting acquainted with more. Of course, doubtless .their local friends had found uses both warlike and peaceful for what they acquired from them.
A pair of hours slipped by. On the south side, forest gave way to orchards and croplands. Foliage drooped sere. On die north, while hills heightened in the background, bluffs declined to gentle slopes. Towers came into hazy view, grew clearer, loomed sheer above masts crowded along the wharfs; and Aliyat went ashore into Xenoknossos.
Warded by stream and fleet, the city had no need of outer walls. Along wide, clean streets, colonnades and facades rose intricately sculptured. Glass flashed in color patterns of contrasting simplicity. The effect was not busy but harmonious, airy, like trees and vines in wind or kelp in currents, undersea, strange to behold on a world that dragged so heavily. The raucous turbulence of human crowds was absent. Dwellers moved deliberately; even the looks and remarks that fol
lowed Aliyat were decorous. It was their voices that danced, twittered, strove, joined together—their voices and the sounds of instruments from places where they took their pleasure.
Not all was thus. Climbing a hill, she saw down to a camp outside the city, a wretched huddle of makeshift shelters. The beings within stood ominously bunched. Armed guards were posted about. Chill touched her. This must, somehow, be the reason she was called.
On the hilltop fountained the building she knew as the Halidom. Its stone had weathered pale amber. Nothing like its interwoven, many-branched vaults and arches, spiral wm-dows and calyx eaves, was ever on Earth. Imagination yonder had never ranged in those directions. When the images arrived, architecture, together with musk and poesy and much else, might well have a rebirth, if anybody still cared about such things.
S’saa accompanied her inside. A chamber vast and dim opened before them. The mighty of Xenoknossos had gathered, expectant, in a half circle before a dais. Thereon were those three, one of each sex, who reigned or presided or led. Hearing tell of them, Hanno had from space proposed dubbing them the Triad, but later those at Hestia thought a better word might be the Triune.
She approached.
That night she radioed back from the apartment lent her. She camped in it, really, as ill suited as the furnishings were; but it served. A window was unshuttered to warm darkness, the booming of a breeze. The small horned moon tinted clouds and cast ghostly shimmers on the river. Fires burned sullen among the squatters in the field.
Exhaustion flattened her voice, though her mind had seldom felt more awake. “We’ve been at it all day,” she said. “Not that the trouble is complicated in itself, but it involves beliefs, traditions, prejudices, everything that’s so knitted into a person— Think of a pagan Celt and a pious Muslim trying to explain, to justify, the status and rights of women to each other.”
“The Ithagene did have the wisdom to ask for an outside opinion,” Patulcius remarked. “How many human societies ever did?”
“Well, this is unprecedented,” Wanderer answered from the outback. “We never had any real aliens among us on Earth. Maybe in future we’ll benefit— Go on, Aliyat.”
“It’s how they breed,” copulating in fresh water, which must be still if conception was to result; a certain concentration of certain dissolved organic materials was essential. That set no more of a handicap, on a world where most regions were normally wet, than loss of the ability to synthesize vitamin C in the body had done for her species. “You remember, the city people use that lake in the hills behind town.” Holy Lake became the human name, for it seemed lovemaking was a religious rite in this society. “Well, throughout the hinterlands, most others have dried up to the point where they’re useless. The habitants have gotten together and demand access to Holy Lake till the drought’s over. It’s badly shrunken too, but enough is left for everybody if triples ration their turns.” Aliyat’s laugh clanked. “How that would go over with our race! But of course the Ithagene don’t think of it the way we do. What has the Xenoknossians up in arms is the thought of ... outsiders profaning their particular mystery, the presence of their, their tutelary spirit or god or whatever it is. The Triune told the countryfolk to go home and wait out the bad times. They shouldn’t breed anyway till the rains come again. But you know about the sacred Year-Births—”
“Yes,” Tu Shan said. “Besides, they live primitively, infant mortality is always high, they feel they must be fecund whatever happens.”
“The realm, this whole section of Minoa, is close to civil war,” Aliyat told them. “There’ve been killings. Now the, uh, tribes have jointly sent two or three thousand here, who insist that soon, come what may, they’ll go to the lake. Nothing can stop them, short of a massacre. Nobody wants that, but to give in could tear things apart almost as terribly.”
Macandal whistled low. “And we had no idea. If only they’d come to us sooner.”
“I don’t suppose it occurred to them before they got desperate,” Patulcius guessed. “If we don’t find a solution fast, I suspect it will be too late.”
“That’s why you went, Aliyat.” Macandal’s tone wavered. “I gathered, from S’saa’s hints, that it concerned this kind of thing, and you, with your experience— Don’t misunderstand!”
“No offense,” Aliyat said. “I did, I hope, slowly get a feel for what’s going on, and a notion. It may be worthless.”
“Tell us,” Svoboda begged.
If you could use human words for Ithagenean emotions and make sense, Aliyat thought, then the assembly next morning was appalled. “No!” exclaimed the le of the Triune. “This is impossible!”
“Not so, Foreseers,” she maintained. “It can be quickly and easily done. Behold.” She unfolded a sheet of paper. Copied thereon, a transmission from Hestia to a machine she had earned along, was an enlarged aerial photograph of Holy Lake and its vicinity. The Ithagene didn’t object to overflights, though none had ever accepted an invitation to ride. (Did some instinct forbid, was it a prohibition, or what?) She pointed. “The lake lies as hi a bowl, fed by rain and runoff. Here, a short way below, is a hollow. Let us clear it of trees and brush, then dig a channel through the hill above. Some of the life-giving water will drain out to fill it, while enough will remain for yon after the channel is closed again. There, out of sight of your people, the countryfolk can engender according to their own customs. For you this would be a huge undertaking, but you know of our machines and explosives. We will do it for you.” Hissings and rustlings filled the, gloom. S’saa must explain to Aliyat, patching out the native language with what human speech lo commanded: “Although they are reluctant, they would agree, lest worse befall. However, they fear the habitants will refuse, will take the proposal as a deadly threat. Knowing Kth and Hru’ngg, the leaders, I think this is true. For a life-site is not any pond; it is hallowed by ancient use, by the life it has given in the past. To triple elsewhere would be to set the work) awry. The rains might never return, or the violators might never have another birth.” Dismay struck whetted. “You don’t believe that!”
“Not we who are here, no. But those are simple upcoun-try folk. And it is true that not all bodies of water grant the blessing. Many do not, though surely they were tried at some time.”
“That is because—oh—oh, Christ, what’s the use?”
“Water flows from your eyes. Do you invoke?”
“No, I— You have no word. Yes, I invoke the dead, and the loss, and— Wait! Wait!”
“You leap, you raise your arms, you utter noises.”
“I, I have a new thought. Maybe this will serve. I must ask the council. Then I must... must doubtless go to the habitants and ... learn if it feels right to them.” Aliyat turned around to face the Triune.
For days heaven had been almost dear, an iron-hard blue, clouds nowhere but in the west. Heat lightning sometimes nickered yonder, and thunder muttered into windlessness. Now sunset reddened those reaches. Its beams struck through gaps and down valleys until they splashed the new tarn as if with human blood. Trees bulked black against h. More and more, the Ithagene gathered in their hundreds became masses of shadow, a wall around the water. Their singing beat like a heart.
Out of them trod the Eldritch Ones, three couples, for it was known that that was their nature. On their right walked the Foreseers of the City, lanterns aloft on poles to cast many-patterned light; on their left, torches flared and smoked among the Sower Chieftains. These halted at the marge. The six went onward.
Aliyat felt drowned turf crisp beneath her feet. The water lapped around her ankles, knees, loins. Warmth from the day remained in it, but a coolness was rising from below, a pledge to years unborn. “Here’s where we stop,” she said. “The bottom slopes fast. Farther on, we’d soon be over our heads.” She couldn’t fight back a giggle. “That’d make it bard to go about this dignified, wouldn’t it?”
“I am not sure what we should do,” Tu Shan confessed.
“Nothing much. We have o
ur clothes on, after all. They don’t know how we make babies anyway. But we must take our time and—“ A sudden odd shyness: “And get them to see we love each other.”
His arms enfolded her. She pressed herself close. Their mouths met. Vague in the twilight, she glimpsed Patulcius and Macandal, Wanderer and Svoboda. The hymn from the shore reached into her.
A necking party in a pool, she thought craztty. Ridiculous. Absurd as real lovemaking, as everything human, everything alive. We’ve sailed from those stars blinking forth overhead, to stage a Stone Age fertility rite.
But it was working. It consecrated the mere, it kindled the magic. In peace would Minoa await the resurrection of the land.
“Tu Shan,” she whispered, straining against him, “when we get home, I want your child.”
31
“Joyful is the word that has come to us,” related the Allos whom the humans thought of as Lightfall. “Share it. From rendezvous has it fared, the closest rendezvous, 147 light-years yonder.” Many-branched fingers marked off a part of the sky, then closed on a point within. Made by a shape that looked so frail, limned against naked space as revealed in a transparency of the ship, the gesture became doubly strong.
The direction was well away from Sol, but not toward Pegasi. The Alloi had roved widely from the world that mothered their race.
“Rendezvous,” said Yukiko, perforce aloud and in a language of Earth. She was understood, as she understood what was communicated to her. However, difficulties and failures of comprehension were still many. That was inevitable, when minds could not translate directly what senses perceived, but must pass it through a metalanguage worked out in the course of years. “I do not quite identify your reference.”
“Starfarers have established stations, orbital about chosen suns, to which they report their discoveries and experiences,” Quicksilver explained. “These pass the information on to the rest. So do nodes of knowledge grow, and the beams between them form nets that piece by piece knit together.”
The Boat of a Million Years Page 57
