Ensign Flandry df-1

by Poul Anderson

  “We’ll have two or three Navy chaps with us. Might interest you. Diff’rent from courtiers and bureaucrats.”

  She brightened further. “Who?”

  “Well, Commander Abrams and I got talkin’, and next thing I knew I’d suggested he come along as our expert on the waterfolk. We could use one. Rather have that Ridenour fellow, ’course; he’s the real authority, insofar as Terra’s got any. But on that account, he can’t be spared here.” Hauksberg drew in a long tail of smoke. “Obvious dangers involved. Abrams wouldn’t leave his post either, if he didn’t think this was a chance to gather more information than he can on Starkad. Which could compromise our mission. I still don’t know but what I was cleverly maneuvered into co-optin’ him.”

  “That old bear, manipulating you?” Persis actually giggled.

  “A shrewd bear. And ruthless. Fanatical, almost. However, he can be useful, and I’ll be sure to keep a spot on him. Daresay he’ll bring an aide or two. Handsome young officers, hm?”

  “You’re handsome and young enough for me, Mark.” Persis rubbed her head against him.

  Hauksberg chucked his cigaret at the nearest disposal. “I’m not so frightfully busy, either.”

  The day was raw and overcast, with whitecaps on a leaden sea. Wind piped in rigging; timbers creaked; the Archer rocked. Astern lay the accompanying fleet, hove to. Banners snapped from mastheads. One deck was covered by a Terra-conditioned sealtent. But Dragoika’s vessel bore merely a tank and a handful of humans. She and her crew watched impassive as Ridenour, the civilian head of xenological studies, went to release the Siravo.

  He was a tall, sandy-haired man; within the helmet, his face was intense. His fingers moved across the console of the vocalizer attached to one wall. Sounds boomed forth which otherwise only a sea dweller’s voice bladder could have made.

  The long body in the tank stirred. Those curiously human lips opened. An answer could be heard. John Ridenour nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Let him go.”

  Flandry helped remove the cover. The prisoner arched his tail. In one dizzying leap he was out and over the side. Water spouted across the deck.

  Ridenour went to the rail and stood staring down. “So long, Evenfall,” he said.

  “That his real name?” Flandry asked.

  “What the phrase means, roughly,” the xenologist answered. He straightened. “I don’t expect anyone’ll show for some hours. But be ready from 1500. I want to study my notes.”

  He walked to his cabin. Flandry’s gaze followed him. How much does he know? the ensign wondered. More’n he possibly could learn from our Charlie, or from old records, that’s for sure. Somehow Abrams has arranged—Oh, God, the shells bursting in Ujanka!

  He fled that thought and pulled his gaze back, around the team who were to go undersea. A couple of assistant xenologists; an engineer ensign and four burly ratings with some previous diving experience. They were almost more alien to him than the Tigeries.

  The glory of having turned the battle of Golden Bay was blown away on this mordant wind. So, too, was the intoxicating sequel: that he, Dominic Flandry, was no longer a wet-eared youngster but appreciated as he deserved, promised a citation, as the hero of all Kursoviki, the one man who could talk the landfolk into attempting peace. What that amounted to, in unromantic fact, was that he must go along with the Terran envoys, so their mission would have his full approval in Tigery eyes. And Ridenour had told him curtly to keep out of the way.

  Jan van Zuyl was luckier!

  Well—Flandry put on his best nonchalance and strolled to Dragoika. She regarded him gravely. “I hate your going down,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Wonderful adventure. I can’t wait.”

  “Down where the bones of our mothers lie, whom they drowned,” she said. “Down where there is no sun, no moons, no stars, only blackness and cold sliding currents. Among enemies and horrors. Combat was better.”

  “I’ll be back soon. This first dive is just to ask if they’ll let us erect a dome on the bottom. Once that’s done, your fleet can go home.”

  “How long will you be there yourself, in the dome?”

  “I don’t know. I hope for not more than a few days. If things look promising, I—” Flandry preened—“won’t be needed so much. They’ll need me more on land again.”

  “I will be gone by then,” Dragoika said. “The Archer still has an undelivered cargo, and the Sisterhood wants to take advantage of the truce while it lasts.”

  “You’ll return, won’t you? Call me when you do, and I’ll flit straight to Ujanka.” He patted her hand.

  She gripped his, “Someday you will depart forever.”

  “M-m … this isn’t my world.”

  “I would like to see yours,” she said wistfully. “The stories we hear, the pictures we see, like a dream. Like the lost island. Perhaps it is in truth?”

  “I fear not.” Flandry wondered why the Eden motif was universal in the land cultures of Starkad. Be interesting to know. Except for this damned war, men could come here and really study the planet. He thought he might like to join them.

  But no. There was little pure research, for love, in the Empire any more. Outwardness had died from the human spirit. Could that be because the Time of Troubles had brutalized civilization? Or was it simply that when he saw he couldn’t own the galaxy and consolidated what little he had, man lost interest in anything beyond himself? No doubt the ancient eagernesss could be regained. But first the Empire might have to go under. And he was sworn to defend it. I better read more in those books of Abrams’. So far they’ve mainly confused me.

  “You think high thoughts,” Dragoika said.

  He tried to laugh. “Contrariwise. I’m thinking about food, fun, and females.”

  “Yes. Females.” She stood quiet a while, before she too laughed. “I can try to provide the fun, anyhow. What say you to a game of Yavolak?”

  “I haven’t yet straightened out those cursed rules,” Flandry said. “But if we can get a few players together, I have some cards with me and there’s a Terran game called poker.”

  A head rose sleek and blue from the waves. Flandry couldn’t tell if it belonged to Evenfall or someone else. The flukes slapped thrice. “That’s our signal,” Ridenour said. “Let’s go.”

  He spoke by radio. The team were encased in armor which was supposed to withstand pressures to a kilometer’s depth. Wish I hadn’t thought of “supposed” Flandry regretted. He clumped across the deck and in his turn was lowered over the side. He had a last glimpse of Dragoika, waving. Then the hull was before his faceplate, and then green water. He cast loose, switched his communicator to sonic, and started the motor on his back. Trailing bubbles, he moved to join the others. For one who’d been trained in spacesuit maneuvers, underwater was simple … Damn! He’d forgotten that friction would brake him.

  “Follow me in close order,” Ridenour’s voice sounded in his earplugs. “And for God’s sake, don’t get trigger happy.”

  The being who was not a fish glided in advance. The water darkened. Lightbeams weren’t needed, though, when they reached bottom; this was a shallow sea. Flandry whirred through a crépuscule that faded into sightlessness. Above him was a circle of dim radiance, like a frosted port. Below him was a forest. Long fronds rippled upward, green and brown and yellow. Massive boles trailed a mesh of filaments from their branches. Shellfish, often immense, covered with lesser shells, gripped lacy, delicately hued coraloid. A flock of crustaceans clanked—no other word would do—across a weed meadow. A thing like an eel wriggled over their heads. Tiny finned animals in rainbow stripes flitted among the sea trees. Why, the place is beautiful!

  Charlie—no, Evenfall had directed the fleet to a spot in midsea where ships rarely passed. How he navigated was a mystery. But Shellgleam lay near.

  Flandry had gathered that the vaz-Siravo of Zletovar lived in, and between, six cities more or less regularly spaced around a circle. Tidehome and Reefcastle were at the end of the
Chain. The Kursovikians had long known about them; sometimes they raided them, dropping stones, and sometimes the cities were bases for attacks on Tigery craft. But Shellgleam, Vault, Crystal, and Outlier on the verge of that stupendous downfall of sea bottom called the Deeps—those had been unsuspected. Considering how intercity traffic patterns must go, Flandry decided that the Sixpoint might as well be called the Davidstar. You couldn’t make good translations anyway from a language so foreign.

  A drumming noise resounded through the waters. A hundred or more swimmers came into view, in formation. They wore skull helmets and scaly leather corselets, they were armed with obsidian-headed spears, axes, and daggers. The guide exchanged words with their chief. They englobed the party and proceeded.

  Now Flandry passed above agricultural (?) lands. He saw tended fields, fish penned in wicker domes, cylindrical woven houses anchored by rocks, A wagon passed not far away, a skin-covered torpedo shape with stabilizer fins, drawn by an elephant-sized fish which a Siravo led. Belike he traveled from some cave or depth, because he carried a lantern, a bladder filled with what were no doubt phosphorescent microorganisms. As he approached town, Flandry saw a mill. It stood on an upthrust—go ahead and say “hill”—and a shaft ran vertically from an eccentric drive wheel. Aiming his laser light and adjusting his faceplate lens for telescopic vision, he made out a sphere at the other end, afloat on the surface. So, a tide motor.

  Shellgleam hove in sight. The city looked frail, unstable, unreal: what a place to stage that ballet! In this weatherless world, walls and roofs need but give privacy; they were made of many-colored fabrics, loosely draped so they could move with currents, on poles which gave shapes soaring in fantastic curves. The higher levels were more broad than the lower. Lanterns glowed perpetually at the corners, against night’s advent. With little need for ground transport, streets did not exist; but whether to control silt or to enjoy the sight, the builders had covered the spaces between houses with gravel and gardens.

  A crowd assembled. Flandry saw many females, holding infants to their breasts and slightly older offspring on leash. Few people wore clothes except for jewelry. They murmured, a low surf sound. But they were more quiet, better behaved, than Tigeries or humans.

  In the middle of town, on another hill, stood a building of dressed stone. It was rectangular, the main part roofless and colonnaded; but at the rear a tower equally wide thrust up and up, with a thick glass top just below the surface. If, as presumably was the case, it was similarly sealed further down, it should flood the interior with light. Though the architecture was altogether different, that whiteness reminded Flandry of Terra’s Parthenon. He had seen the reconstruction once … He was being taken thither.

  A shape darkened the overhead luminance. Looking, he saw a fish team drawing a submarine. The escort was a troop of swimmers armed with Merseian-made guns. Suddenly he remembered he was among his enemies.

  8

  Once a dome was established outside town and equipped for the long-term living of men, Flandry expected to make rapid progress in Professor Abrams’ Instant Philosophy of History Course. What else would there be to do, except practice the different varieties of thumbtwiddling, until HQ decided that sufficient of his prestige had rubbed off on Ridenour and ordered him back to Highport?

  Instead, he found himself having the time of his life.

  The sea people were every bit as interested in the Terrans as the Terrans in them. Perhaps more so; and after the horror stories the Merseians must have fed them, it was astonishing that they could make such an effort to get at the truth for themselves. But then, while bonny fighters at need and in some ways quite devoid of pity, they seemed less ferocious by nature than humans, Tigeries, or Merseians.

  Ridenour and his colleagues were held to the Temple of Sky, where talk went on endlessly with the powers that were in the Davidstar. The xenologist groaned when his unoccupied followers were invited on a set of tours. “If you were trained, my God, what you could learn!—Well, we simply haven’t got any more professionals to use here, so you amateurs go ahead, and if you don’t observe in detail I’ll personally operate on you with a butter knife.”

  Thus Flandry and one or another companion were often out for hours on end. Since none of them understood the native language or Eriau, their usual guide was Isinglass, who had some command of Kursovikian and had also been taught by the Merseians to operate a portable vocalizer. (The land tongue had been gotten gradually from prisoners. Flandry admired the ingenuity of the methods by which their technologically backward captors had kept them alive for weeks, but otherwise he shuddered and hoped with all his heart that the age-old strife could indeed be ended.) Others whom he got to know included Finbright, Byway, Zoomboy, and the weise Frau Allhealer. They had total individuality, you could no more characterize one of them in a sentence than you could a human.

  “We are glad you make this overture,” Isinglass said on first acquaintance. “So glad that, despite their helpfulness to us, we told the Merseians to keep away while you are here.”

  “I have suspected we and the landfolk were made pieces in a larger game,” added Allhealer through him. “Fortunate that you wish to resign from it.”

  Flandry’s cheeks burned inside his helmet. He knew too well how little altruism was involved. Scuttlebutt claimed Enriques had openly protested Hauksberg’s proposal, and yielded only when the viscount threatened to get him reassigned to Pluto. Abrams approved because any chance at new facts was good, but he was not sanguine.

  Nor was Byway. “Peace with the Hunters is a contradiction in terms. Shall the gilltooth swim beside the tail-on-head? And as long as the green strangers offer us assistance, we must take it. Such is our duty to the cities and our dependents.”

  “Yet evidently, while they support us, their adversaries are bound to support the Hunters,” Finbright said. “Best might be that both sets of foreigners withdrew and let the ancient balance return.”

  “I know not,” Byway argued. “Could we win a final victory—”

  “Be not so tempted by that as to overlook the risk of a final defeat,” Allhealer warned.

  “To the Deeps with your bone-picking!” Zoomboy exclaimed. “We’ll be late for the theater.” He shot off in an exuberant curve.

  Flandry did not follow the drama which was enacted in a faerie coraloid grotto. He gathered it was a recently composed tragedy in the classic mode. But the eldritch grace of movement, the solemn music of voices, strings, percussion, the utter balance of every element, touched his roots. And the audience reacted with cries, surges back and forth, at last a dance in honor of author and cast.

  To him, the sculptures and oil paintings he was shown were abstract; but as such they were more pleasing than anything Terra had produced for centuries. He looked at fishskin scrolls covered with writing in grease-based ink and did not comprehend. Yet they were so many that they must hold a deal of accumulated wisdom.

  Then he got off into mathematics and science, and went nearly delirious. He was still so close to the days when such things had been unfolded for him like a flower that he could appreciate what had been done here.

  For the People (he didn’t like using the Kursovikian name “Siravo” in their own home, and could certainly never again call them Seatrolls) lived in a different conceptual universe from his. And though they were handicapped—fireless save for volcanic outlets where glass was made as a precious material, metalless, unable to develop more than a rudimentary astronomy, the laws of motion and gravity and light propagation obscured for them by the surrounding water—they had thought their way through to ideas which not only made sense but which drove directly toward insights man had not had before Planck and Einstein.

  To them, vision was not the dominant sense that it was for him. No eyes could look far undersea. Hence they were nearsighted by his standards, and the optical centers of their brains appeared to have slightly lower information-processing capability. On the other hand, their perception of tactile, therma
l, kinesthetic, olfactory, and less familiar nuances was unbelievably delicate. The upper air was hostile to them; like humans vis-à-vis water, they could control but not kill an instinctive dread.

  So they experienced space as relation rather than extension. For them, as a fact of daily life, it was unbounded but finite. Expeditions which circumnavigated the globe had simply given more weight and subtlety to that apprehension.

  Reflecting this primitive awareness, undersea mathematics rejected infinity. A philosopher with whom Flandry talked via Isinglass asserted that it was empirically meaningless to speak of a number above factorial N, where N was 75 the total of distinguishable particles in the universe. What could a larger number count? Likewise, he recognized zero as useful notion, corresponding to the null class, but not as a number. The least possible amount must be the inverse of the greatest. You could count from there, on to NI, but if you proceeded beyond, you would get decreasing quantities. The number axis was not linear but circular.

  Flandry wasn’t mathematician enough to decide if the system was entirely self-consistent. As far as he could tell, it was. It even went on to curious versions of negatives, irrationals, imaginaries, approximational calculus, differential geometry, theory of equations, and much else of whose Terran equivalents he was ignorant.

  Physical theory fitted in. Space was regarded as quantized. Discontinuities between kinds of space were accepted. That might only be an elaboration of the everyday—the sharp distinction between water, solid ground, and air—but the idea of layered space accounted well for experimental data and closely paralleled the relativistic concept of a metric varying from point to point, as well as the wave-mechanical basis of atomistics and the hyperdrive.

  Nor could time, in the thought of the People, be infinite. Tides, seasons, the rhythm of life all suggested a universe which would eventually return to its initial state and resume a cycle which it would be semantically empty to call endless. But having no means of measuring time with any precision, the philosophers had concluded that it was essentially immeasurable. They denied simultaneity; how could you say a distant event happened simultaneously with a near one, when news of the former must be brought by a swimmer whose average speed was unpredictable? Again the likeness to relativity was startling.