Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga

by Poul Anderson

  “You mean . . . nothin’ good can come from outer space . . . wall Nike off . . . treat anyone that comes as hostile . . . right?” Tom rubbed his chin and scowled sullenly.

  Weyer was probably not too dogmatic, nor too tightly bound by the isolationist treaty, to change his mind in time. But Tom had scant time to spare. Every hour that passed, he and his womenfolk risked getting shot down by some hysteric. Also, a bunch of untrained Nikeans, pawing over his spaceship, could damage her beyond the capacity of this planet’s industry to repair.

  Also, he was needed back on Kraken soon, or his power there would crumble. And that would be a mortally dangerous situation for his other wives, children, grandchildren, old and good comrades. . . .

  In short, there was scant value in coming to terms with Weyer eventually. He needed to reach agreement fast. And, after what had happened this day, he didn’t see how he could.

  Well, the first thing he must do was reunite his party. Together, they might accomplish something. If nothing else, they could seek refuge in the adjacent country, Silva. Though that was doubtless no very secure place for them, particularly if Weyer threatened another war.

  “You should slave yourself,” Aran urged. “Afterward you can talk.”

  “As a prisoner—a slave—I’d have precious little bargainin’ leverage,” Tom said. “Considerin’ what that last batch o’ spacers did, I can well imagine we bein’ tortured till I cough up for free everything I’ve got to tell. S’posin’ Weyer himself didn’t want to treat me so inhospitable, he could break down anyhow under pressure from his court or his fellow bosses.”

  “It may be,” Aran conceded, reluctantly, but too idealistic at his age to violate the code of his class and lie.

  “Whereas if I can stay loose, I can try a little pressure o’ my own. I can maybe find somethin’ to offer that’s worth makin’ a deal with me. That’d even appease the Sato clan, hm?” Tom fumed on his pipe. “I’ve got to contact my women. Right away. Can’t risk their fallin’ into Weyer’s hands. If they do, he’s got me! Know any way to raise a couple o’ girls who don’t have a radio and ’re doin’ their level best to disappear?”

  Sunset rays turned the hilltop fiery. Farther down, the land was already blue with a dusk through which river, bay, and distant sea glimmered argent. Cloud banks towered in the east, blood-colored, dwarfing the Sawtooth Mountains that marked Hanno’s frontier.

  At the lowest altitude when this was visible—the highest to which a damaged, overloaded flyer could limp—the air was savagely cold. It wasn’t too thin for breathing; the atmosphere’s density gradient is less for small than for large planets. But it swept through the cracked canopy to sear Tom’s nostrils and numb his fingers on the board. Above the drone of the combustion powerplant, he heard Yano Aran’s teeth clatter. Stuffed behind the pilot chair, the boy might have tried to mug his captor. But he wasn’t dressed for this temperature and was chilled half insensible. Tom’s clothes were somewhat warmer. Besides, he felt he could take on any two Nikeans hand-to-hand.

  The controls of the plane were simple to a man who’d used as wide a variety of machines as he. Trickiness came from the broken and twisted airfoil surfaces. And, of course, he must keep a watch for Weyer’s boys. He didn’t think they’d be aloft, nor that they would scramble and get here in the few minutes he needed. But you never knew. If one did show up maybe Tom could pot him with a lucky blast from the guns.

  He swung through another carousel curve. That should be that. Now to skate away. He throttled the engine back. The negafield dropped correspondingly, and he went into a glide. But he was no longer emitting enough exhaust for a visible trail.

  The tracks he had left were scribbled over half the sky. The sun painted them gold-orange against that deepening purple.

  Abruptly, turbulence across the buckled delta wing gained mastery. The glide became a tailspin. Aran yelled.

  “Hang on,” Tom said. “I can ride ’er.”

  Crazily whirling, the dark land rushed at him. He stopped Aran’s attempt to grab the stick with a karate chop and concentrated on his altimeter. At the last possible moment, allowing for the fact that he must coddle this wreck lest he tear her apart altogether, he pulled out of his tumble. A prop, jet or rocket would never have made it, but you could do special things with gravs if you had the knack in your fingers. Or whatever part of the anatomy it was.

  Finally the plane whispered a few meters above the bay. Its riding lights were doused, and the air here was too warm for engine vapor to condense. Tom believed his passage had a fair chance of going unnoticed.

  Hills shouldered black around the water. Here and there among them twinkled house lamps. One cluster bespoke a village on the shore. Tom’s convoluted contrail was breaking up, but slowly. It glowed huge and mysterious, doubtless frightening peasants and worrying the military.

  Aran stared at it likewise, as panic and misery left him. “I thought you wrote a message to your camarados,” he said. “That’s no writing.”

  “Couldn’t use your alphabet, son, seein’ I had to give ’em directions to a place with a local name. Could I, now? Even Kraken’s letters look too much like yours. But these’re Momotaroan phonograms. Dagny can read ’em. I hope none o’ Weyer’s folk’ll even guess it is a note. Maybe they’ll think I went out o’ control tryin’ to escape and, after staggerin’ around a while, crashed. . . . Now, which way is this rendezvous?”

  “Rendez—oh. The togethering I advised. Follow the north shore eastward a few more kilos. At the end of a headland stands Orgino’s Cave.”

  “You absolutely sure nobody’ll be there?”

  “As sure as may be; and you have me for hostage. Orgino was a war chief of three hundred years agone. They said he was so wicked he must be in pact with the Wanderer, and to this day the commons think he walks the ruins of his cave. But it’s a landmark. Let your camarados ask shrewdly, and they can find how to get there with none suspecting that for their wish.”

  The plane sneaked onward. Twilight was short in this thin air. Stars twinkled splendidly forth, around the coalsack of the Nebula. The outer moon rose, gradually from the eastern cloudbanks, almost full but its disk tiny and corroded-bronze dark. An auroral glow flickered. This far south? Well, Nike had a fairly strong magnetic field—which, with the mean density, showed that it possessed the ferrous core it wasn’t supposed to—but not so much that charged solar particles couldn’t strike along its sharp curvature clear to the equator.

  If they were highly energetic particles, anyhow. And they must be. Tom had identified enormous spots as well as flares on that ruddy sun disk. Which oughtn’t to be there! Not even when output was rising. A young star, its outer layers cool and reddish because they were still contracting shouldn’t have such intensity. Should it?

  Regardless, Nike’s sun did.

  Well, Tom didn’t pretend to know every kind of star. His travels had really not been so extensive, covering a single corner of the old Imperium, which itself had been insignificant compared to the whole galaxy. And his attention had naturally always been focused on more or less Sol-type stars. He didn’t know what a very young or very old or very large or very small sun was like in detail.

  Most certainly he didn’t know what the effects of abnormal chemical composition might be. And the distribution of elements in this system was unlike that of any other Tom had ever heard about. Conditions on Nike bore out what spectroanalysis had indicated in space: impoverishment with respect to heavy elements. Since it had formed recently, the sun and its planets must therefore have wandered here from some different region. Its velocity didn’t suggest that. However, Tom hadn’t determined the galactic orbit with any precision. Besides, it might have been radically changed by a close encounter with another orb. Improbable as the deuce, yes, but then the whole crazy situation was very weird.

  The headland loomed before him, and battlements against the Milky Way. Tom made a vertical landing in a courtyard. “All right.” His voice sounded jar
ringly loud. “Now we got nothin’ much to do but wait.”

  “What if they come not?” Aran asked.

  “I’ll give ’em a day or two,” Tom said. “After that, we’ll see.” He didn’t care to dwell on the possibility. His unsentimental soul was rather astonished to discover how big a part of it Dagny had become. And Yasmin was a good kid, he wished her well.

  He left the crumbling flagstones for a walk around the walls. Pseudo-moss grew damp and slippery on the parapet. Once mail-clad spearmen had tramped their rounds here, and the same starlight sheened on their helmets as tonight, or as in the still more ancient, vanished glory of the Empire, or the League before it, or—And what of the nights yet to come? Tom shied from the thought and loaded his pipe.

  Several hours later, the nearer moon rose from the hidden sea; its apparent path was retrograde and slow. Although at half phase, with an angular diameter of a full degree, it bridged the bay with mercury.

  Rising at the half—local midnight, more or less—would the girls never show? He ought to get some sleep. His eyelids were sandy. Aran had long since gone to rest in the tumbledown keep. He must be secured, of course, before Tom dozed off . . . No. I couldn’t manage a snooze even if I tried. Where are you, Dagny?

  The cold wind lulled, the cold waves lapped, a winged creature fluttered and whistled. Tom sat down where a portcullis had been and stared into the woods beyond.

  There came a noise. And another. Branches rustled. Hoofbeats clopped. Tom drew his blaster and slid into the shadow of a tower. Two riders on horseback emerged from the trees. For a moment they were unrecognizable, unreal. Then the moon’s light struck Dagny’s tawny mane. Tom shouted.

  Dagny snatched her own gun forth. But when she saw who lumbered toward her, it fell into the rime-frosted grass.

  Afterward, in what had been a feasting hall, with a flashlight from the aircraft to pick faces out of night, they conferred. “No, we had no trouble,” Dagny said. “The farmers sold us those animals without any fuss.”

  “If you gave him a thirty-gram gold piece, on this planet, I reckon so,” Tom said. “You could prob’ly’ve gotten his house thrown into the deal. He’s bound to gossip about you, though.”

  “That can’t be helped,” Dagny said. “Our idea was to keep traveling east and hide in the woods when anyone happened by. But we’d no strong hope, especially with that wide cultivated valley to get across. Tom, dear, when I saw your sky writing, it was the second best moment of my life.”

  “What was the first?”

  “You were involved there too,” she said. “Rather often, in fact.”

  Yasmin stirred. She sat huddled on the floor, chilled, exhausted, wretched, though nonetheless drawing Aran’s appreciative gaze. “Why do you grin at each other?” she wailed. “We’re hunted!”

  “Tell me more,” Tom said.

  “What can we do?”

  “You can shut up, for the gods’ sake, and keep out o’ my way!” he snapped impatiently. She shrank from him and knuckled her eyes.

  “Be gentle,” Dagny said. “She’s only a child.”

  “She’ll be a dead child if we don’t get out o’ here,” Tom retorted. “We got time before dawn to slip across the Silvan border in yon airboat. After that, we’ll have to play ’er as she lies. But I been pumpin’ my—shall I say, my friend, about politics and geography and such. I think with luck we got a chance o’ staying free.”

  “What chance of getting our ship back, and repaired?” Dagny asked.

  “Well, that don’t look so good, but maybe somethin’ll come down the slot for us. Meanwhile let’s move.”

  They went back to the courtyard. The inner moon was so bright that no supplement was needed for the job on hand. This was to unload the extra fuel tanks, which were racked aft of the cockpit. The plane would lose cruising range, would indeed be unable to go past the eastern slope of the Sawtooths. But it would gain room for two passengers.

  “You stay behind, natural,” Tom told Aran. “You been a nice lad, and here’s where I prove I never aimed at any hurt for you. Have a horse on me, get a boat from the village to Weyer’s place, tell him what happened—and to tell him we want to be his camarados and change with him.”

  “I can say it.” Aran shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “I think no large use comes from my word.”

  “The prejudice against spacemen—”

  “And the damage you worked. How shall you repay that? Since ’tis been ’cided there’s no good in spacefaring, I expect your ship’ll be stripped for its metal.”

  “Try, though,” Tom urged.

  “Should you leave now?” Aran wondered. “Weather looks twisty.”

  “Aye, we’d better. But thanks for frettin’ ’bout it.”

  A storm, Tom thought, was the least of his problems. True, conditions did look fanged about the mountains. But he could sit down and wait them out, once over the border, which ought to remain in the bare fringes of the tempest. Who ever heard of weather moving very far west, on the western seacoast of a planet with rotation like this? What was urgent was to get beyond Weyer’s pursuit.

  Yasmin and Dagny fitted themselves into the rear fuselage as best they could, which wasn’t very. Tom took the pilot’s seat again. He waved good-bye to Yanos Aran and gunned the engine. Overburdened as well as battered, the plane lifted sluggishly and made no particular speed. But it flew, and could be out of Hanno before dawn. That sufficed.

  Joy at reunion, vigilance against possible enemies, concentration on the difficult task of operating his cranky vessel drove weariness out of him. He paid scant attention to the beauties of the landscape sliding below, though they were considerable—mist-magical delta, broad sweep of valley, river’s sinuous glow, all white under the moons. He must be one with the wind that blew across this sleeping land.

  And blew.

  Harder.

  The plane bucked. The noise around it shrilled more and more clamorous. Though the cloud wall above the mountains must be a hundred kilometers distant, it was suddenly boiling zenithward with unbelievable speed.

  It rolled over the peaks and hid them. Its murk swallowed the outer moon and reached tendrils forth for the inner one. Lightning blazed in its caverns. Then the first raindrops were hurled against the plane. Hail followed, and the snarl of a hurricane.

  East wind! Couldn’t be! Tom had no further chance to think. He was too busy staying alive.

  As if across parsecs, he heard Yasmin’s scream, Dagny’s profane orders that she curb herself. Rain and hail made the cockpit a drum, himself a cockroach trapped between the skins. The wind was the tuba of marching legions. Sheathing ripped loose from wings and tail. Now and then he could see through the night, when lightning burned. The thunder was like bombs, one after the next, a line of them seeking him out. What followed was doomsday blackness.

  His instrument panel went dark. His altitude control stick waggled loose in his hand. The airflaps must be gone, the vessel whirled leaf-fashion on the wind. Tom groped until his fingers closed on the grav-drive knobs. By modulating fields and thrust beams, he could keep a measure of command. Just a measure; the powerplant had everything it could do to lift this weight, without guiding it. But let him get sucked down to earth, that was the end!

  He must land somehow, and survive the probably hard impact. How?

  The river flashed lurid beneath him. He tried to follow its course. Something real, in this raving night—There was no more inner moon, there were no more stars.

  The plane groaned, staggered, and tilted on its side. The starboard wing was torn off. Had the port one gone too, Tom might have operated the fuselage as a kind of gravity sled. But against forces as unbalanced as now fought him, he couldn’t last more than a few seconds. Minutes, if he was lucky.

  Must be back above the rivermouths, thought the tiny part of him that stood aside and watched the struggle of the rest. Got to set down easy-like. And find some kind o’ shelter. Yasmin wouldn’t last out this night in the open.r />
  Harshly: Will she last anyway? Is she anything but a dangerous drag on us? I can’t abandon her. I swore her an oath, but I almost wish—

  The sky exploded anew with lightnings and showed him a wide vista of channels among forested, swampy islands. Trees tossed and roared in the wind, but the streams were too narrow for great waves to build up and—Hoy!

  Suddenly, disastrously smitten, a barge train headed from Sea Gate to the upriver towns had broken apart. In the single blazing moment of vision that he had, Tom saw the tug itself reel toward safety on the northern side of the main channel. Its tow was scattered, some members sinking, some flung around, and one—yes, driven into a tributary creek, woods and waterplants closing behind it, screening it—

  Tom made his decision.

  He hoped for nothing more than a bellyflop in the drink, a scramble to escape from the plane and a swim to the barge. But lightning flamed again and again, enormous sheets of it that turned every raindrop and hailstone into brass. And once he was down near the surface of that natural canal, a wall of trees on either side, he got some relief. He was actually able to land on deck.

  The barge had ended on a sandbar and lay solid and stable. Tom led his women from the plane. He and Dagny found some rope and lashed their remnant of a vehicle into place. The cargo appeared to be casks of petroleum. A hatch led below, to a cabin where a watchman might rest. Tom’s flashlight picked out bunk, chair, a stump of candle.

  “We’re playin’ a good hand,” he said.

  “For how long?” Dagny mumbled.

  “Till the weather slacks off.” Tom shrugged. “What comes after that, I’m too tired to care. I don’t s’pose . . . gods, yes!” he whooped. “Here, on the shelf! A bottle—lemme sniff—aye-ya, booze! Got to be booze!” And he danced upon the deckboards till he cracked his pate on the low overhead.