Orion Shall Rise

by Poul Anderson

  The planners had foreseen the slowness. Indeed, the ship was a monohull chosen for sturdiness and capacity, not speed. The Corpsmen aboard required the time for study, and at that, they must be intense about it.

  They were bound for a country, an entire and alien civilization, which none but the two who instructed them knew at first hand. Language was only the most obvious hurdle to overleap. Angley was not like the dialects of Ingliss flourishing in such places as Stralia and Awaii, nor was Francey like the Faranasai heard in the Taiiti region. It was also essential to grasp the elementary facts of geography, ethnology, history, laws, customs, traditions, faiths, contentions … the list continued.

  Modern psychopedagogics made the learning possible, but just barely. The voyage was no pleasure cruise for either the intelligence team or the sailors. Women were absent from both groups, their abilities as well as their company sorely missed; be he right or wrong, the admiral had decided that frustration at sea would distract his agents less than would possible emotional involvements.

  Terai noticed early on that Wairoa Haakonu attended few lectures and joined nobody in memorization exercises or speech practice. Instead, he shut himself up in his cabin with books, or spent hours on deck saying never a word to anybody. Terai determined to find out why. The fellow was supposed to be his partner, the other ten mainly support personnel for those two, but they had only met twice, brief and formal encounters, before they embarked.

  Terai’s opportunity came on the evening when Hivao, bearing south of east, crossed the sixtieth parallel. He emerged from his classroom below in search of cold air to blow the haze of concentration out of him before dinner. In that bleakness the deck appeared abandoned by all but the two crewmen on lookout. Twilight made their heavily clad, hooded forms goblinlike. Aft, a last streak of crimson smoldered on the horizon. Thence an overcast darkened toward the night rolling in from ahead. The sea glimmered dull gray as its waves marched to meet yonder gloom. A pair of albatross soared on high, only visible trace of life beyond the hull. Running before the wind, Hivao bore little sense of its sound or force, but its chill struck deep and spindrift laid salt on Terai’s mouth.

  He strode off on what he planned as several laps around. It would be a respectable distance. Hivao was a five-masted squarerigger, a hundred and fifty meters in length, twenty meters in beam. A low deckhouse, whose glassed-in front was the bridge, and a shelter for the aircraft she carried were the principal interruptions in the sweep of her topside; nearly everything else, even the lifeboat bays, was below for the sake of streamlining. On a vessel this size, that did not limit cargo space too severely.

  Those sails that were set made a spectral firmament but doubled the murkiness beneath. On his way to the rail, Terai almost stumbled over a rigging engine crouched at the foot of the mast it served. Lanterns burned far apart. He walked on across a ventilator grille, hearing the faint whirr of the fan, catching the odorous warmth of expelled air. When he got to the side, he thought he could hear an intake under the gunwale.

  He went forward. Although no sculpture adorned the prow, reflections off the radar as it turned at the foremast head suggested Lesu’s watchfulness against shark-toothed Nan, and Terai offered a soft salute. Religion was no large part of his life, but the Triad seemed to him as sensible a way as any of symbolizing an ultimate mystery; on the whole, its church served the nation fairly well, and the rites ranged from pleasant to awesome.

  He started aft along the port rail. Beyond the deckhouse, he made out the aircraft pod near the stern. A frown crossed his brow. He wished they didn’t have to bring that beast. Its presence was not quite easy to reconcile with their cover story: that they represented a private company sending assorted wares to the Domain on a venture, in hopes of creating a steady trade; that finding the right markets for the different items would require time and travel.

  Well, the fact that the Norrmen had a plane left the Maurai no choice. Probably both were simply a reserve against emergencies – bad emergencies, inasmuch as security officers of the Domain denied foreigners permission to make overflights. If Mikli found reason to violate that edict, Terai would too, and his craft was superior to anything owned by anyone in the Union. The peace treaty after the Power War had set limits which the High Commission and its Inspectorate enforced.

  A man stood at the rail near the pod, hands in pockets, staring outward. As he neared, Terai saw it was Wairoa.

  Ah-ha!

  He drew alongside and halted. ‘Good evening,’ he said.

  ‘Good evening to you, Captain,’ answered a rather high tenor voice. The accent belonged to no island; it was a composite, like the man himself.

  ‘A bit raw to hang around motionless, isn’t it?’

  ‘Most of our folk find it so.’ A slight note of scorn: ‘Altogether unnecessarily. Individual Polynesians have managed well in every climate, once they let their bodies adjust. The Maurai have gone soft.’

  Terai made his gambit. ‘But it is naturally easier for you to adapt, isn’t it?’

  No response. Wairoa continued gazing out to sea. Dusk thickened, minute by minute. Already Terai had lost sight of all but the closest waves that boomed and hissed around him.

  ‘Nothing to see now,’ he persisted. ‘Why not join me in some turns around the deck, and then in my cabin for a tot of rum before mess?’

  ‘I see amply well. And hear, smell, taste, feel with every sense. But I can’t explain.’

  The rudeness stung Terai into aggression. ‘Look here,’ he said from the depths of his throat, ‘we’re supposed to work together in Europai. How the deuce can we, when we’re scarcely acquainted? Like it or no, we’d better do something about that. I’m trying, and I want cooperation.’

  Surprised, Wairoa turned to confront him. For a moment they regarded each other. Terai could make out little, and that was clothed, albeit more lightly than he or the sailors were. He had, though, seen Wairoa sunbathing among men off duty on the first day, before work commenced in earnest. At the time he had wondered if the display of that unnatural body was an act of defiance or an attempt at forestalling curiosity.

  Taken on its own terms, it was not a body deformed in any way. Wairoa Haakonu stood tall, chiefly because of his cranelike legs; his torso was squat, with a thick chest but ropy arms. His skull was very long, his face very broad, bearing wide nose and narrow lips, high forehead, heavy brow ridges, pointed chin. His right eye was blue, his left black. His hair was straight and striped black and brown, back from forehead to nape. His skin was golden except for numerous ebon blotches, one of which covered the upper half of his visage like a mask. An observer from a different planet might well have deemed him handsome.

  ‘My apologies, Captain,’ he said low. ‘I often make mistakes when dealing with people. Especially my own people.’

  If the Maurai yours, thought Terai in sudden compassion. If you can ever have any people, anywhere in the world. That’s all right, Lieutenant Commander Just so we do come to an understanding. I’m especially anxious to know why you’ve been skipping class.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Again the astonishment seemed genuine. ‘Most of that involves subjects I’ve already mastered or that I can learn better by myself. I only need occasional data input from the instructors.’

  ‘What? Do you mean you, uh, you learned those languages before hand?’

  ‘No. But I am learning them fast. The instructors have made the pronunciations clear; grammar and vocabulary are in the texts, idioms in the literary material I took along. Listen.’ Wairoa rattled off sentences first in Angley, then in Francey. As far as Terai, who had a good ear, could tell, he spoke flawlessly.

  ‘The same for the sociology,’ Wairoa continued. ‘Once I’ve caught the drift of a topic, why hear a lecturer drone on and on? You may have noticed me borrowing notes from classmates, speed-reading them, and asking specific questions. Logic and the unconscious logic called intuition fill in the gaps well enough for me.’ He shrugged. ‘After all, no one expe
cts a freak to follow the nuances of social intercourse. I shall do better to acquire more hard facts. I hope you’ll be able to help me there, Captain. I’m woefully ignorant about the Northwest Union. My work has been in countries remote from it.’

  He stopped as if switched off and waited for response.

  His use of the word ‘freak’ had been so casual that it would haunt Terai for days. The big man stood long mute, hunting for a way to be kind. Through the back of his awareness streamed:

  Superman or monster? Does either mean anything, here? Suddenly I’m confused. I thought I knew something about his origins, but whether I do or not, I realize now that I don’t fathom them. I had better start by putting the information in order.

  The Royal Genetic Institute had an honorable mandate, not just to carry on pure science but to go after practical ends such as control of mutations and improvement of breeding stock. Its vanguard laboratories were isolated on Rangatira for safety’s sake. But that may have brought on too strong a feeling of mana. Certainly the career personnel became a kind of society or tribe in their own right.

  There was nothing immoral about experiments on human material. The goal was knowledge, and everything that that spelled for human well-being. Failures were terminated painlessly, or if they weren’t too bad, they were decently taken care of on the island. Wairoa came from an early attempt at combining desirable traits that never naturally occur all in an individual. The hope was that this would throw new light on the molecular biology involved and its functioning throughout the life of the organism.

  Genetic mosaic: Take two fertilized ova in vitro. Let them divide about three times, then nudge them together. If they fuse successfully, implant them in a uterus to grow. The result is a single fetus, but with four parents. It was an old technique, invented before the Downfall, in limited use by modern agriculture and mariculture. Human cells were only the next stage to try.

  The donor-parents were chosen for chromosomes that the researchers thought could be selected from to make an interesting, viable hybrid in which the interplay of heredities would be reasonably clear. They were a Sinese, a black Stralian, a white Merican, and a Maurai. Although he was then in his teens, the Maurai was Ruori Haakonu, Aruturu’s son, who grew up to become High Commissioner in the Northwest Union and die there. … The woman who carried the child to term was also Maurai, a scientist on the island. Thus Wairoa had two fathers and three mothers.

  Or nine mothers, he remarked to me when we talked about it for a couple of minutes in Wellantoa – because they raised the children communally, but his fosterer and six other women took the most care of him. I imagine the first half-dozen years of his life were not unhappy.

  Then the laboratory was closed and its staff scattered.

  Their work had never been illegal or secret, but more and more, they had found it best to stay discreet. Controversy continued to the present day over whether they were in fact pushing things closer to the limit than was wise and right, or whether a multitude had begun taking an old motto, ‘The Federation is the steward of living Earth,’ too seriously. After the Whale War the sentiment against ‘violating nature’ came nigh to hysteria. Journalists discovered what was happening on Rangatira, and the furore that resulted led to the shut-down of the laboratory.

  Wairoa’s fosterer took him to N’Zealann, where she soon married. He didn’t get on with his stepfather. He became a tribeless misfit, a pariah in his age group, lonely, moody, brilliant.

  Aruturu learned of it and adopted this grandson of his.

  I’ve been in that house on Mount Aorangi. It’s odd in many ways, but it was a home for the boy. With no social life, he went into his own brain for companionship; he entered the University at fourteen, took honors in logic and linguistics, transferred to the Academy, and graduated from it into the Naval Intelligence Corps. There he’s been ever since, and he’s now – thirty, is that it? Of course, nobody with his appearance can be a conventional spy, but I’ve heard rumors of exploits.…

  ‘I can tell you more if you wish, Captain. Your background information is essentially correct. Thank you for your sympathy, but the fact is that I don’t feel sorry for myself.’

  ‘Aii?’ After a second, Terai pulled his jaw back up. ‘Can you read minds?’

  ‘Not directly. I have hyperacute hearing, and can lower the threshold of perception at will. It enables me to catch subvocaliza tion at close range. Meanwhile hyperacute vision supplies body language, and as for odors – In short, I obtain clues from which logic can often reconstruct an interior monologue.’

  ‘While the damn thing is going on,’ Terai marveled.

  ‘Actually, it is seldom translatable into grammatical sentences,’ Wairoa admitted. ‘Yours wasn’t, though I daresay you had the concurrent impression that it was – except at moments when your conscious mind was fully engaged and you started literally talking to yourself. Given the general context, I knew what that talk referred to.’ Teeth flashed white in the dusk as he barked a laugh. The temptation to shock you was irresistible.’

  ‘Hu!’ The older man shook his head. ‘I begin to see why the admiral sent you along. You compensate for your conspicuousness in quite a few ways, don’t you? What are the rest?’

  ‘We should not discuss them where we might be overheard, Captain. And, of course, you won’t tell anyone about the demonstration I have given, will you?’

  ‘Oh, no, oh, no.’ Terai rubbed his chin. ‘I’ll need a day or so to realize exactly how glad I am to have you. This changes the whole strategy I was laying out. I begin to think those stories I’ve unofficially heard, about what you did in southern Africa, aren’t overblown but underplayed.’

  ‘What stories, please?’

  ‘How you, bloody near singlehanded, restructured a society that was coming apart, and left it stable and friendly to us.’

  Wairoa turned his face back seaward. Terai suspected his night vision was not greatly inferior to a cat’s. ‘That’s a long and complicated tale, Captain,’ he said low. To oversimplify, they had tried to modernize, failed, and lapsed into worse misery than before. Chaos ensued. The Beneghalis have never forgiven us for sabotaging their clandestine thermonuclear research, and they had traders and political agitators in the area. For them, it was a potential entry to the African interior, and we – we are the Sea People; we can’t occupy the inner continents.

  ‘I was instrumental in helping the distressed nation establish a social order compatible both with its own ethos and with a degree of scientific technology: a hierarchy of classes, as it happened, from king to serf.’

  I’ve heard it muttered that in the course of that, you played a queer part, Terai thought. You took a woman for each class to bed, and begot a prototype child on her.… Was that necessary, given the culture and the objective, or was it your choice? I should imagine you have trouble getting bedmates, except in primitive areas where your appearance lends you mana, or in civilizations that have prostitutes.

  He remembered what he was doing, and swallowed.

  Wairoa laughed anew. It sounded like the coyotes Terai had heard in eastern lands of the Northwest Union. ‘No, I wasn’t listening in on you, Captain,’ he said. ‘I was hearing a whale broach out there – a magnificent sound – You couldn’t?’ He drew breath. ‘Mind you, I wasn’t alone in Africa. I took the initiative in certain respects, but my associates did the essential grubbywork. We were moderately well pleased with the results – things looked promising when we left – but to publicize them would have been to destroy them. We Maurai talk endlessly about encouraging different folk to go their different ways and learn from each other. However, if word got around about an encouragement of serfdom –’

  ‘Right-o,’ Terai said. ‘I’ve dodged the idealists too. Especially in the aftermath of the Power War.’

  ‘Yes, it’s been the great one of this century.’ Still Wairoa’s attention went northward, darknessward. ‘And it isn’t finished yet. That’s why we’re bound where we are, you and I
.’ The wind took the sigh that he heaved and strewed it over the ocean. ‘Destiny is a pernicious illusion, isn’t it, Captain? We Maurai thought we had the world under control, that we’d built a firm foundation for a humane and ecologically sound world order. But we built on sand, because sand is all that’s available to men, and it’s begun sliding out from underneath our house.’

  ‘Hoy, wait.’ Terai forced a chuckle. ‘Pessimism is more dramatic than optimism, but I always say that the one sure way to lose hope is to give up hope. If you’re convinced we’re doomed, why are you aboard?’

  ‘Oh, we may still have a chance,’ Wairoa replied. ‘In any case, it’s exhilarating to be a sort of watchman; and come worst to worst, it will be exciting to blow the last trumpet.’

  The ship plunged on into night.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Talence Toma Sark’s final illness began in spring of his twenty ninth year as Captain of Skyholm. He received the best medical care. Not only were his doctors skilled and well read, they used the Maurai seaborne relays to send television pictures to the specialists in Wellantoa whom they consulted. Given such help, his tough old body endured until a month past solstice.

  Then he said: ‘Enough. I can’t carry out my duties any longer with any competence; I’m a burden on my Domain, my Clan, my family, and myself; let my anim seek a new home.’ The doctors respected his wishes, and soon after setting affairs in order as well as he could, he departed his pain.

  Word flew from end to end of the realm he had governed. Because it was no surprise, the Seniors had already been in conference, at first piecemeal, later more widely. It seemed best to terminate the interim leadership of the Administrative Board as fast as possible, by choosing the new Captain immediately after the funeral.