Orion Shall Rise

by Poul Anderson

  Silence fell. Dawnlight slipped through a windowpane to glow on porcelain displayed in a cabinet. A bookcase stood heavy with volumes and shadows. Otherwise the room was humble. These folk were Soldati, but not of high rank or especial wealth; there were slugai who lived better. Straw mats covered a clay floor. A bench and a couple of chairs stood about a table where the dwellers ate. Warmth and odors of cooking wafted from behind a screen in front of a kitchen alcove.

  The eldest wife spoke shyly. ‘Would the Librarian care to breakfast with us?’

  Vanna considered. She wasn’t hungry. At most, she wanted her usual porridge and tea, followed by a bath and fresh clothes, at home. They would feed her too much here, while making awkward conversation just when she desired solitude.

  But it would mean a great deal to them. ‘You are kind,’ she said.

  – Afterward she did not go straight to her own place. She left the cottage as if she meant to, lest she raise a distressing question in the hearts there, then doubled behind a windbreak row of poplars. This location being on the outskirts of Dulua, the maneuver put her on a road pointed west through meadowland, away from town and lake. She would walk for an hour or two before returning to make herself presentable. No matter that she would be late for work. Nobody would ask why, nor doubt that she had a good reason. And I am not quite indispensable anyway, she thought dryly. She would, though, be a bad influence, however subtle, if she had not first come to terms with that which had happened.

  The sun caressed her, turned grass and leaves wonderfully green, grazing cattle wonderfully red, struck brilliances from dewdrops, called forth scents of earth and blossoms. Quietness lay under heaven, making her doubly aware of her footfalls and thence of her flesh in motion, alive, apulse, One with the entire living planet.

  And dear old Ilya Danivich Li was too – still was, always would be. The Life Force was taking back his worn-out self, but his existence had given its minute urge to the onward streaming; thus he would forever be a part of reality, also after those who loved him had likewise surrendered their separateness. It was enough, overwhelming enough.

  Vanna Uangovna took a while to realize this, not as words but as something more direct than the breath she drew. When she had won to knowledge, a task in which previous victories over loss aided her, grief departed like the morning’s dew and chill. Peace welled up, and ineffable joy. She went: eagerly back to her duties.

  The irony seemed acute that it was later in the same day that the foreign soldiers arrived.

  Events did not release her until evening. Home alone, she could not at once shake herself free of them. Instead, she forgot about making supper while she sounded her books and memories, in search of an understanding that might bring calm, if not acceptance.

  Dusk deepened to night. She lit no lamp but sat motionless among the glooms that were her few furnishings. Light from sky and street trickled through windows she had left open to the breeze. She kept her eyes focused on the ghost-vision of a flower arrangement beneath a calligraphic scroll; it was her chosen mandala.

  She had taken the news composedly, and proceeded composedly to organize the search which the bearer of evil tidings demanded. Underneath, a voice screamed that it was futile. But then what might be helpful? Before she could think, she must overcome horror. The end of a long life was natural, yes, right; this other thing that was going on was neither.

  Gaea, Gaea All-Mother. … We cannot appeal, out of our agony that we bring upon YouTime is both entropy and illusion. That which we name the past is real and unreal equally with that which we name the present or the future. Let me marshal the chronicled centuries as well as the hours of this afternoon. Thereby I may perhaps once again overcome the feeling, which destroys courage, that my troubles and I are in any way unique.

  Dulua was a bare forty kilometers north of the nearest cairn marking the border. Thus, in the course of history, the Krasnayan town had often been penetrated by Yuanese troops, when war broke out. Wars had been common between the two nations, almost as common as those which Yuan, Chukri, Bolshareka, and Ulun fought in the West against the Norrmen and the Free Mericans.

  Here there were no such aliens. All Mericans had long since been domesticated (if you didn’t count hillmen well to the east, and the people beyond them as far as the Sunrise Ocean, wretches whose territories had never been worth conquering). It might seem that the Soldati had no reason to contend with each other. Indeed, it might seem curious how they remained divided among five sovereignties. In the view and the languages of the aborigines, were they not ‘Mong’ together?

  Vanna knew matters were not so simple. It was her business to know things, as well as to help folk into the communion of Gaea. The society of the Soldati was founded on war, or at any rate on the warrior in his regiment. It had been from the beginning, of necessity, when the ancestors fought their way out of desolated Asian lands and across this continent. Moreover, the society was not really one. A Chukrian dweller in the cold forests or on the colder tundras of the North was not, could not be very like an Ulunian rider on the prairies and sagebrush deserts of the South. On the plains in between, Bolsharekans and Krasnayans kept a distinct Rosiyan element in their cultures and bloodlines, whereas the Yuanese were closer kin to the Khalkan, Manchu, Korean, and Sinese parts of the original immigrations.

  Still, their mutual clashes had usually been less ferocious than their strife with the natives. The Lodges of the Northwest Union, the city-states and tribes of the Mericans southward, the Dons of Meyco beyond the Rio Gran, were utterly foreign. When Soldati took land from them, or they took land that Soldati had possessed, it meant more than occupation; it meant the rapid transformation of the defeated, their way of life demolished, their grandchildren growing up strange to them.

  On the other hand, whatever their differences, all Soldati had a common heritage. Their causes of dispute were limited, territory, dynasty, trade, pride. Their masters had no reason to ravage, when the wealth of a region they had invaded might well become theirs. Pillage was generally the work of a beaten army on its retreat – and even then, by ancient law and military discipline, a woman of the Soldati was almost always safe; only female slugai of the enemy’s were to be raped. If a province changed hands, the lives of its inhabitants changed little. It seldom mattered much to the average soldier-herdsman that his regiment now – for example – owed service and tax to the Tien Dziang of Yuan rather than to the Supreme Gospodin of Krasnaya, or that its colonel took its affairs to the Imperial Court in Chai Ka-Go rather than to an encampment of the Sovyet. Many of its sedentary Merican slugai, among the farmers if not the town-dwelling workers, might never know that anything whatsoever had been altered.

  Thus the streets of Dulua remembered how hostile hoofbeats and trumpets had racketed, hostile lances swayed and glittered, again and again; but only once had they seen a bloodbath, only twice a sack, and they had seen nothing but commerce for the past two hundred years or more. Peace had descended on the plains like a twilight; a generation ago its blueness spread up the mountains of the West, and mothers no longer told unruly children, ‘If you do not behave, the Norrmen will come get you.’

  Vanna Uangovna had encountered war nowhere but in history books, reminiscences, and fragmentary news out of distant realms. Rather, she had when young gone into Yuan herself, on a regimental scholarship, to complete her study of physics at the Grandfather University in Chai Ka-Go; in that same country, in the House of Revelation, she had had an experience of Gaea that decided the whole meaning of her life, and later spent years as a disciple of a Yuanese ucheny. Back in her homeland, gaining the name of a proróchina, a seeress, she had no few seekers of enlightenment come to her in their turn across the border. Merchant caravans – wagons in summer, sleighs in winter – from the neighbor were an ordinary sight here, as were freighters and fishing boats from those southeasterly shores of Ozero Visshi that Yuan held. Friction occurred occasionally, but never – by radio, journal, letter, or word of mouth – ha
d she received any hint of serious trouble between the two nations.

  Hence it was a double-pronged stab through her when a Yuanese troop rode unheralded into Dulua, armed for battle.

  She heard the noise and came forth to see what was happening. This was a summer day of a brightness rare in these parts. Her eyes needed a moment to regain full sight, her mind the same time to understand. At first she was mainly aware of warmth that streamed from overhead, drawing resiny odors out of a nearby lumberyard. The second-floor balcony on which she stood overlooked a paved street kept clean by the slugai; the two regiments that shared ownership of this community made a habit of neatness. Likewise well-scrubbed were the cottages of those workers, from steep red tile roofs to painted frame walls. Here and there reared the townhouse of an officer family, dragon-raftered, or the bulk of a mercantile establishment, or the heaven-blue onion dome of a temple. Beyond were the docks, and then the lake reached past the horizon, its glitter of hot silver broken by idle sails or by cargo barges striding along on their oars. Inland, at Vanna’s back, close settlement gave way abruptly to pasture, vegetable fields, and timberlots, with pine woods in the distance, but the Library building hid that.

  Fleetingly she grasped familiarity to her, before she focused on the intruders. They numbered about a hundred horsemen, trailed by pack animals and remounts in charge of boys – a full company. Tunics and trousers were gray-green, helmets crested, which was not true of any Krasnayan unit. Bodies tended more to stockiness, faces to flatness, eyes to obliqueness than was the case in her country. The gonfalon borne in the van did not display a white star on black, but a golden sun on crimson. Otherwise the gear was the same as what she was used to, everyone carrying a sword, principal weapons divided equally among lances, bows, and costly rifles, a radio transceiver on the back of a mule. … Well ahead, Vanna spied a squad of local troopers, quietly reined in. Alarm began to drain from her.

  And yet – why have they come?

  Hard by the standard, a man who had seen her emerge brought his horse around for a closer look. He was as roughly clad as the rest, but insignia on his shoulders flashed beneath the sun, actual metal. His voice boomed at her: ‘Ho-oh, greeting! I want the Librarian.’

  Somehow that sent the last fright out of Vanna. Indignation came in its place: deplorable, no doubt, but she was not just a Gaean, she was a daughter of the Soldati and charged with duties that had been sacred long before Karakan Afremovek had his first Insight. She stiffened where she stood, kept her own voice low but projected it in the way she had learned as part of her Gaean body-consecration: ‘This is the Library at Dulua, open like all Libraries to any who come in desire of knowledge, and the honor has befallen me that I am its Librarian.’

  The man sat for several heartbeats, erect and motionless in the saddle. Was he ashamed, or did he resent being reproached – by a formula, and on the lips of a woman – before his soldiers? When he spoke again, his tone was level: ‘No disrespect meant, reverend lady. I’ve got urgent business here, and it’s important to Krasnaya too. We aren’t invaders, we’ve come by invitaion.’

  A wryness brought the corners of Vanna’s mouth slightly upward. Invitation by demand, she thought. The last peace treaty may have recognized our tight to independence, but it deprived us of our richest holdings. Ever since, we have been a country of meager grazing and niggardly farmlands. Our sole real wealth is in the forest, but timber and furs will not support a large population. Whenever mighty Yuan whistles, Krasnaya wags her tail. … Mostly they’ve left us alone. They wouldn’t arrive like this without strong cause.

  ‘You shall be received, then,’ she called. It would have been more impressive to go inside at once than to linger, but she could not resist watching for a while. The officer gave orders to a subordinate, who passed them on to his sergeants. Bugles sounded, gongs clanged. The company formed ranks and trotted on up Minyasota Street, preceded by the Krasnayans. Probably they were off to a field close by town where they could pitch camp. The commander spoke to a couple of men who had stayed behind, and dismounted. Timidly, Mericans began to emerge from the cottages and mingle with the Soldati who already stood and stared.

  For a moment the Yuanese leader himself paused to gaze. Well he might. The Library at Dulua was old, famous, and well endowed. Including the garden and shrine, its grounds spread over a hectare. They were dominated by the main building, huge, gracefully colonaded, its whitewashed brick inlaid with the words of sages, the Eye of Wisdom above its portal as a mosaic of marble, jade, lapis lazuli, onyx, and gold.

  But this was mere housing. What counted was within. Of the estimated million books, some were physical relics of civilization before Death Time and the Migrations – whether Old Merican or imported later from abroad. More were reprints, meticulously done from originals in other collections. Most represented the art and scholarship of later generations, especially of the past two or three centuries. And there were maps, periodicals, indices, drawings, photographs, charts, research facilities – even, nowadays, a computer shipped the whole way from N’Zealann.…

  Vanna left the balcony. In the cool dimness behind, she summoned her assistants and acolytes. The first group she reassured; they were mainly slugai, albeit of professional status, and therefore bone-terrified of anything warlike. ‘Go about your tasks,’ she said. ‘You have nothing to fear.’ (Inwardly, she wondered the least bit.) The acolytes were Soldat-born, serving in the Library and learning its skills incidentally to their search into the Gaean mysteries under her direction. They numbered a dozen or so, young men with a few young women among them. In Krasnaya, oftener than elsewhere on the plains, girls who showed aptitude were sometimes encouraged to become something other than wives.

  ‘Assume the Excellent Formation and follow me,’ she ordered. A robed and slowly gliding party at her back would help put the foreign officer in his place.

  He waited in the foyer. Sunlight through stained-glass windows splashed the stone floor with color. As she and her followers swept down the grand staircase, he saluted. She decided he was not a bad man. His manners were coarse, but that wasn’t his fault. Already her linguist’s ear had identified him by his accent as hailing from Yo Ming Province. Quite likely he had been in the final border skirmishes with the Northwest Union when he was a youth; very likely he had led hunts for bandits in the foothills.

  ‘Greeting, reverend lady,’ he said. ‘My name is Orluk Zhanovich Boktan, and I’m noyon of the Bison Polk.’ The brass hawks on his tunic repeated it; he ranked just below the colonel of the entire regiment. While he had brought no more than a company with him, his presence bespoke the seriousness of his mission.

  ‘I hight Vanna Uangovna Kim, Librarian of Dulua, who bid you welcome and offer assistance,’ she replied. They both bowed.

  Thereafter they considered each other. She saw a middle-aged man, compact and leathery, shaven-headed and fork-bearded. He saw a woman in her late thirties, small, almost childlike in her slenderness, but with a large head bearing a sharply delicate face. Her gown of office was gray, unadorned save for an embroidered Sinese ‘Knowledge’ character in gold; but at her throat hung a disc of jade, a cross carved into it, the emblem of a Gaean adept.

  He smiled rather stiffly. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he told her. ‘I’m not going to paw through your books. Your Major Kharsov said that if anybody here can help us, it’s you. Could we go off by ourselves and talk?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Dismissing her attendants, Vanna led the way to her sanctum. He seemed a bit surprised by its austerity, amidst an ornateness of murals, but settled down, in cross-legged Western fashion, on the bench in front of her desk. She took the tall, uncushioned stool behind it, raised her brows inquiringly, and waited.

  ‘This is secret,’ he warned. ‘If word got out to the wrong people that we know what we do, and if matters are as buggered up as they maybe are, why, such demons might be loosed that Oktai himself couldn’t chase them back to hell.’

  Momentarily, irrelevantly, s
he wondered if he was a pagan, or simply used the name of the Stormbringer to give force to his words. In either case, his sincerity was unmistakable; beneath his toughness gnawed a rat of dread. Her skin prickled with cold. ‘Say on,’ she murmured.

  He scowled and tugged his beard. Doubtless he wished he could light one of the cigars she saw in a breast pocket. After half a minute, he got it out: ‘Has anyone come by looking for … uranium, plutonium … nuclear explosives?’

  It was like a detonation in her brain. Appalled, she could only stare while he slogged relentlessly on:

  ‘We’ve got reason to think someone’s been collecting them, and for a lot of years. Unexpended missiles from Death Time, their sites forgotten and overgrown – because Maurai agents, you know, tracked down every gram of fissionable they could, around the world, long ago, and I believe their claim is true, that they encased it and sank it in the deepest pan of the sea.

  ‘Nevertheless, lately – and I’ve not been told, but I’d guess it’s because the Maurai warned the Imperial Court – lately we in Yuan have had expeditions out, hunting for overlooked missiles, whether big ones in launch holes or mobile units left behind by the Old Merican army when it scattered and died. We’ve found a number; and the warheads were missing. Stripped – not by Maurai hundreds of years back, but by somebody else within the past decade or two. You can tell by signs like scratches on the metal, how oxidized. … Well. Somebody seems to have plans, like maybe for putting his saddle on the world. And Yuan occupies just one of the territories where the ancients kept their weapons.

  ‘No offense, reverend lady, but Krasnaya doesn’t have the manpower or the organization to go into this as thoroughly as must be. We’ve got to ransack your wildernesses, find the lost hellmakers or at least, we hope, get an idea of who those graverobbers are. The Tien Dziang wrote personally to your Supreme Gospodin. They agreed Yuanese search parties should come. I’m leading the first.’