The sooner it was swept away the better …
In the evening Ishbok was alone in the silence of the blood-red sun. He looked out across the valley at the deep blue shadows cast by the setting sun, and wondered about the future.
He tried to imagine this confederation, this greater world into which his wayside world would emerge. What battles, what disagreements would be possible there? What cycles of birth, decay and death, and new beginnings lay ahead for a civilization spanning the stars? How many isolate worlds were there tucked away in the miserable corners of the universe? He wondered if Cleopatra had better been left unfound, lost among the grains of stars, to rebuild by itself from its family squabbles rather than be shamed by intruders from the stars.
But he knew that it would be impossible now for him to see Cleopatra as the whole world; he had seen his home from beyond the sky, a glowing sphere set in a night of stars. He had seen its oceans, its land, the ring sweeping around the planet like unwanted riches being cast off into the void. He had looked down into the dark hemisphere where this city lay, invisible; he had seen it light up in the night, coming back to life after a thousand years.
Cleopatra circled Caesar, and Caesar was only one star among a countless number, yet all the importance of his life lay here. His own people would mistrust him, and he would mistrust the offworlders; there was no safety in the thought. He would not be able to forget all that was; he would do his best to affect what would be.
Now he would have to be more than a warrior or a hunter or a craftsman, or a father; he would have to be a ruler, a helper.
The sun slid halfway behind the horizon. I will have to learn to speak to my own people, as well as I speak with Hela. My children will have to know more than I do. He thought of the many world histories belonging to the other worlds of the sky. He would ask Hela for them. Maybe there would be something he could learn from such a study. There were other reclaimed worlds entering the confederation. He tried to picture new, unspoiled worlds circling distant suns …
He thought of Anneka and her child. He wondered how the city would react to Foler’s coming sentence, whatever that would be.
The sun was down. Stars appeared in the sky. Below him city light spilled out into the valley. The ring cut a swath in the sky, a carpet preparing the way for chunky Charmian to rise and overtake Iras. Clouds sat on the northern horizon, promising a storm by morning. A black-winged deltasoar sailed into the twilight.
Ishbok stood up, sighing, knowing what he would do. He would govern with all the help there was to be had. He had become someone else, a stranger who would daily startle his earlier self; there was terror in the thought.
He knew that he would be lonely.
In the Distance, and Ahead in Time
“And openly I pledged my heart to the grave and suffering land, and often in the consecrated night, I promised to love her faithfully until death, unafraid, with her heavy burden of fatality, and never to despise a single one of her enigmas. Thus did I join myself to her with a mortal cord.”
—Holderlin, The Death of Empedocles
“How big did they say it is?” Alan asked as he looked up at the new star in the night sky.
“Fifty klicks across,” Gemma said, feeling the wonder of it take hold of her again. “A whole city wrapped around an asteroid core! Just think, Alan, they’re people from Old Earth, like us. They’ll help us.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not like us at all, so why should they help us?”
Her brother’s disapproval of her reaction to the visit worried her, but she was sure he would change his mind when he understood how the habitat would benefit the colony.
“What kind of people lock themselves up like that,” he went on contemptuously, “hiding themselves away from sunlight, generation after generation?”
“It’s not like that at all,” Gemma said softly. “The number of shells going down to the asteroid core must give them at least half the land area of a planet the size of Earth, and all of it usable.”
“Really? How would you know that?”
“Just calculate the area of the inside surface of a sphere and multiply that by the number of shells within shells, allowing for decrease in size toward the core.”
She couldn’t see his face clearly in the starlight, but knew that he was looking at her with that slightly contemptuous look he put on whenever she knew something he didn’t. “And I suppose you’ll tell me they farm it,” he said.
“They have what farms do.”
“What do you know about it?”
“It’s all in the history books,” she replied, and listened to the awkward silence that was his frequent way of reproaching her. You could be doing more work around the farm, instead of wasting your time reading old books. He did not have to say it. She felt a twinge whenever she thought about the fragility of images stored in the old hand-held readers. The only reason they had lasted this long was that very few people wanted to read what was in them.
They watched their world’s rotation carry the visitor below the mountainous horizon, then strolled back toward the farmhouse, which always seemed to be waiting for them, its lone porch lamp pale yellow in the darkness. The glow of the neighboring house, three kilometers south across the plateau, winked out early, probably to save the aging wind generator. Nina Stroeve and her brothers always went to sleep at the same hour. Cyril, her younger brother, was always the first one up, but Nathaniel, the stepbrother, often got to work very late in the morning. Gemma felt a chill, and wondered again if the climate on the plateau was changing faster than expected.
She knew enough about the land to feel insecure. The fertile plateau would one day crumble to the level of the forest that surrounded it on three sides, as its substructure was eroded by underground streams from the mountains in the north. That would eventually cut off the colony’s one hundred square kilometers from the flow of water, turning the plateau into another of the islands that towered over the jungle. She had studied these isolated cakes of land through binoculars, and had concluded that only the ever-weakening bridge to the mountains was delaying the colony’s fate. The plateau’s geologic fate was to become part of the rich forest that crowded around it: and it was the colony’s future to grow and go down into the forest, and really begin to settle the planet. It might take a century or more, once the forest was mapped and its dangers discovered. The greatest danger to the colony would be to cling to the plateau. But whenever she discussed this with Alan, the other farmers, or the mayor of the town, they smiled and said that the problem was too far ahead in time to take seriously. The plateau might stand for a thousand years, which was true, of course; or there might be landslides within a few years.
Years ago, she had noticed within herself and in others an uneasiness about settling the forest, more than a consideration of difficulties or mere reluctance to leave the plateau.
They came to the porch steps and sat down. “What do they want here?” Alan asked uneasily. “What right do they have to disturb us?”
“I think they’re curious about others of their own kind.”
“I know you’re excited, but I wish they’d mind their own business.”
Again, she felt disappointed by his disparaging tone and lack of interest, but did not answer.
“I guess I never imagined that we’d meet people from the mobiles, or from anywhere else but here. Who would’ve thought it?”
“Well, now we’ll have to think about it,” she said as gently as possible.
“I wish they hadn’t come.”
Gemma felt resentful, because there were too many things Alan didn’t want to think about. Now he knew that he might have to start, but was still resisting stubbornly. He never asked why they were still up here on the plateau, nearly a century after the colony had been founded. Sure, everyone was comfortable, so much so that they avoided facing the possibility that human beings might never b
e able to fit in elsewhere on this world. She had discussed the problem with Paul Beares, one of the medical doctors in town. He had admitted that it might be a problem, but not something that anyone alive now would have to deal with. On the plateau, the colonists had been able to impose their own biology and farm the land. But if they tried to live in the teeming forest below, or elsewhere on the planet, they would have to face the bacterial and viral life, something for which their limited medical science was not prepared. Long-term survival required that the growing population, now at nearly ten thousand, leave the plateau; but the planet’s biology might be too complex to fight, and the colony’s isolation had only slowed learning more about the planet.
It might have been different if the old starship had survived. Its teaching programs would have been the basis of a growing educational system that would have helped needed technologies survive into the present. Their loss had only encouraged the preachers who had always condemned the dangerous accomplishments of the past, solidifying the bare, stoic religiosity by which the colonists came to accept their lot.
It had cost their grandparents dearly to come here, but they had been eager to leave the ruined solar system, with its dead Earth and dead Mars, to find open air and sky. The rest of this world might be dangerous, but they had been able to sterilize the plateau and start up their farms on it. There had been no choice for the first settlers. The starship could never have been a home; but life on the plateau became clearly defined, and they could console themselves with the hope that their descendants would one day spread across the planet.
But the plateau was only a fragile piece of soft land jutting out from the mountains, sediment that was slowly being eaten away by the jungle to the south and eroded by water from the north. It had been breaking off into the forest for ages, like a glacier into the sea. Some of the original accounts and observations, still available in the town library, had described this whole region as having once been sea bottom. Currents had filled in a vast area with sediment, and when the ocean had receded, the built-up land had begun to erode and collapse, creating the cakelike plateaus.
The largest area of sediment was here, up against the mountains; it was breaking off to the south at more than a meter per year, as well as being eroded by underground streams from the north. She had been able to measure this much by herself, for five years now. What she could not measure was the underground erosion that was weakening the entire plateau. The community’s reluctance about even sending out survey teams to assess the difficulties of founding another colony was based on the fear of disease, which might be passed between the two communities years later, even if survey teams brought back no obvious infection. If a second colony was to be founded, it would have to remain isolated indefinitely.
She was proud of what she had learned by observation, more so than what she had learned at the library; but this year, the large cracks she had found more than three kilometers from the plateau’s edge had frightened her. The fissures were widening, and might reach the mountains in less than a century.
Alan’s answer to her predictions was to insist that the plateau could easily last for a thousand years or more, and by then a hundred other colonies would be thriving. The mayor had sent out a few people to look at the cracks, but no one knew enough to examine them correctly. Even her own studies were questionable, since she was self-taught. New knowledge was feared, and its absence used to dismiss fear. To deny the colony’s dream, to say that it might one day vanish, was more than many people could face. Land breaking off to the south at a meter per year was nothing to fear, they told themselves; fissures three klicks long were as big as they’d ever get.
Alan got up and said, “I’ll turn on the lights for you.” He started into the house, but paused and glanced up at the stars. “Maybe these visitors will bring us enough biology and medicine to help us settle the forest.”
She didn’t answer, even though she knew he was trying to admit something of what she had insisted on in their arguments and discussions.
“Well, it’s a constructive thought,” he continued. “If they can move their world around, they must know a thing or two. Why shouldn’t they help us out?”
“Maybe they will,” she said, trying to sound agreeable.
“Well,” he said, “I’d better get some sleep. Got to fix the tractor and plow the north field before noon, and you’ve got to start the vegetable preserves.”
“Yes,” she said, sighing, thinking of how many chickens she had killed in her lifetime, and whether to tell him that the well pipe was clogging up just below the kitchen sink, and that maybe the pump itself wasn’t in such good shape either. He had promised to make a better cover for the compost heap, but had never gotten around to it, and the smell didn’t seem to bother him.
He paused in front of the door. “What is it?” she asked.
“I wonder why they’re really here,” he said.
2
It was just past noon when Alan got up from his lunch to get another cup of herb tea. Gemma was still sipping hers, waiting to see if he would turn on the radio.
“I haven’t forgotten,” he said as he switched it on, sat down across from her at the table, and smiled uneasily. He already seemed tired from his morning’s work.
“All of us here at the town meeting,” Mayor Overton was saying, “and those listening at home, welcome you to our community. Most are at work, so only a few of us are here in the hall, but I assure you we are all very curious about your … mobile’s visit to our world. You told me earlier that you had come to discuss some very important matters with us.”
As usual, the Mayor sounded a bit pompous, but Gemma noticed that he also sounded unusually nervous.
“We do have much to discuss,” the offworlder said in a voice that might belong to a man or woman. “I would first like to ask whether my use of your language is clear to you.”
“Strange accent,” Alan said, leaning over and turning up the volume.
“Perfectly fine,” said the Mayor. “Please continue.”
“What happened to your starship?”
The Mayor took an audible deep breath and replied, “When our grandparents came out of cold sleep, they found their automatic ship in a shallow orbit around this planet. Their three shuttles barely had enough time to land people and supplies on this plateau before the orbit decayed and the starship entered the atmosphere. Efforts were made to use the ship’s reaction engines to raise its orbit as the shuttles went back and forth, but time ran out. Some of the passengers had taken too long coming out of cold sleep, and had to be left behind. Those who escaped were fortunate, but we still lack far too much.”
The last part of the Mayor’s statement and his critical tone surprised Gemma, raising her estimation of him. He was alluding to the fact that the colony was founded by people who wanted less, and thought it the better way, using the example of Earth’s destruction as justification.
She expected the visitor to ask why there were no video communications, only radio. “We’ve seen the crater where the starship struck,” the offworlder said. “It was a great disaster for the life there.”
“We’ve never seen it,” Overton replied impatiently. “Too far away. Our shuttles were out of fuel by the time we got everyone down to the planet. What is it that you wish to say to us?”
There was a long pause. Gemma heard the Mayor shifting in his chair. She got up and opened the kitchen window to let out the heat that had built up from the morning sunlight.
“In the three generations of your life on this world,” the offworlder said, “have you ever seen anything of the life in the forest?”
“Well, we do keep to the plateau,” the Mayor replied. “It’s large enough for us. Some of us have observed the forest with field glasses, but we’re too busy to explore, and the climb would be difficult. Besides, it may be dangerous. Diseases might be brought back. We just don’t know
enough. There are stories of four-footed creatures that occasionally stand up on their hind legs, but from the few reports it seems they don’t approach the plateau. I should point out that the clay cliffs are very sheer and nearly impossible to climb from below. We’re isolated.”
“You think that’s a good thing?” the offworlder asked.
“Yes. There’s scarcely ten thousand of us. We’re not ready for the rest of this world.”
“But you will be one day?”
“Someday,” the Mayor said. “Why do you ask?”
“Until now,” the visitor said, “your presence has not altered the planet. Before that happens, we would like to persuade you to abandon this colony and come live with us. You’re welcome to join our world, or build a mobile of your own. We can offer you more than you can imagine.”
“What?” Alan shouted, nearly dropping his cup.
Gemma felt a rush of excitement as she understood why the mobile was here.
“Why?” the Mayor asked, his voice rising. “We’re content here.” Gemma could almost see the bewilderment on his pudgy face as sounds of surprise filled the town hall.
“It’s ridiculous!” someone shouted.
“Exactly,” Alan said, shaking his head and smiling, but when she caught his eye, she saw that he felt threatened and confused.
“Planets should not be invaded,” the offworlder said. “They have their own lives to fulfill.”
“What are you saying?” Mayor Overton demanded.
“Surely it’s occurred to some of you that you’re invaders. While we were nearby, it seemed to some of us that we might discuss this problem with you.”
“Problem?” the Mayor replied. “What problem?”
“What will happen to this world’s intelligent life.”
“But there’s none to speak of.”
The hall suddenly became quiet. Gemma was taken aback by the point: intelligent life might one day develop on this world, but its rise would be cut short when the colony expanded from the plateau. That was what the offworlder was saying, and with disapproval. She had thought about it, but never as a crime waiting to happen.
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