Yasmin regarded him with a dull kind of wonder. “What are you so happy about?” she asked in Anglic. When he had explained, she slumped. “You can laugh . . . at that . . . tonight? Lord Tom, I did not know how alien you are to me.”
Through hours the storm continued.
They sat crowded together, the three of them, in the uneasy candlelight, which threw huge misshapen shadows across the roughness of bulkheads. Rather Dagny sat on the chair, Tom on the foot of the bunk, while Yasmin lay. The wind-noise was muffled down here, but the slap of water on hull came loud. From time to time, thunder cannonaded, or the barge rocked and grated on the sandbar.
Wet, dirty, haggard, the party looked at each other. “We should try to sleep,” Dagny said.
“Not while I got this bottle,” Tom said. “You do what you like. Me, though, I think we’d better guzzle while we can. Prob’ly won’t be long, you see.”
“Probably not,” Dagny agreed, and took another pull herself.
“What will we do?” Yasmin whispered.
Tom suppressed exasperation—she had done a good job in Petar Landa’s house, if nowhere else—and said, “Come morning, we head into the swamps. I s’pose Weyer’ll send his merry men lookin’ for us, and whoever owns this hulk’ll search after it, so we can’t claim squatter’s rights. Maybe we can live off the country, though, and eventually, one way or another, reach the border.”
“Would it not be sanest . . . they do seem to be decent folk . . . should we not surrender to them and hope for mercy?”
“Go ahead, if you want,” Tom said. “You may or may not get the mercy. But you’ll for sure have no freedom. I’ll stay my own man.”
Yasmin tried to meet his hard gaze, and failed. “What has happened to us?” she pleaded.
He suspected that she meant, “What has become of the affection between you and me?” No doubt he should comfort her. But he didn’t have the strength left to play father image. Trying to distract her a little, he said, with calculated misunderstanding of her question:
“Why, we hit a storm that blew us the exact wrong way. It wasn’t s’posed to. But this’s such a funny planet. I reckon, given a violent kind o’ sun, you can get weather that whoops out o’ the east, straight seaward. And, o’ course, winds can move almighty fast when the air’s thin. Maybe young Aran was tryin’ to warn me. He spoke o’ twisty weather. Maybe he meant exactly this, and I got fooled once more by his Nikean lingo. Or maybe he just meant what I believed he did, unreliable weather. He told me himself, their meteorology isn’t worth sour owl spit, ’count o’ they can’t predict the solar output. Young star, you know. Have drink.”
Yasmin shook her head. But abruptly she sat straight. “Have you something to write with?”
“Huh?” Tom gaped at her.
“I have an idea. It is worthless,” she said humbly, “but since I cannot sleep, and do not wish to annoy my lord, I would like to pass the time.”
“Oh. Sure.” Tom found a paper and penstyl in a breast pocket of his coverall and gave them to her. She crossed her legs and began writing numbers in a neat foreign-looking script.
“What’s going on?” Dagny said in Eylan.
Tom explained. The older woman frowned. “I don’t like this, dear,” she said. “Yasmin’s been breaking down, closer and closer to hysteria, ever since we left those peasants. She’s not prepared for a guerrilla existence. She’s used up her last resources.”
“You reckon she’s quantum-jumpin’ already?”
“I don’t know. But I do think we should force her to take a drink, to put her to sleep.”
“Hm.” Tom glanced at the dark head, bent over some arithmetical calculations. “Could be. But no. Let her do what she chooses. She hasn’t bubbled her lips yet, has she? And—we are the free people.”
He went on with Dagny in a rather hopeless discussion of possibilities open to them. Once they were interrupted, when Yasmin asked if he had a trigonometric slide rule. No, he didn’t. “I suppose I can approximate the function with a series,” she said, and returned to her labors.
Has she really gone gollywobble? Tom wondered. Or is she just soothin’ herself with a hobby?
Half an hour later, Yasmin spoke again. “I have the solution.”
“To what?” Tom asked, a little muzzily after numerous gulps from the bottle. They distilled potent stuff in Hanno. “Our problem?”
“Oh, no, my lord. I couldn’t—I mean, I am nobody. But I did study science, you remember, and . . . and I assumed that if you and Lady Dagny said this was a young system, you must be right, you have traveled so widely. But it isn’t.”
“No? What’re you aimed at?”
“It doesn’t matter, really. I’m being an awful picky little nuisance. But this can’t be a young system. It has to be old.”
Tom put the bottle down with a thud that overrode the storm-yammer outside. Dagny opened her mouth to ask what was happening. He shushed her. Out of the shadows across his scarred face, the single eye blazed blue. “Go on,” he said, most quietly.
Yasmin faltered. She hadn’t expected any such reaction. But, encouraged by him, she said with a waxing confidence:
“From the known average distance of the sun, and the length of the planet’s year, anyone can calculate the sun’s mass. It turns out to be almost precisely one Sol. That is, it has the mass of a G2 star. But it has twice the luminosity, and more than half again the radius, and the reddish color of a late G or early K type. You thought those paradoxes were due to a strange composition. I don’t really see how that could be. I mean, any star is something like 98 per cent hydrogen and helium. Variations in other elements can affect its development some, but surely not this much. Well, we know from Nikean biology that this system must be at least a few billion years old. So the star’s instability cannot be due to extreme youth. Any solar mass must settle down on the main sequence far quicker than that. Otherwise we would have many, many more variables in the universe than we do.
“And besides, we can explain all the paradoxes so simply if we assume this system is old. Incredibly old, maybe almost as old as the galaxy itself.”
“Belay!” Tom exclaimed, though not loudly. “How could this planet have this much atmosphere after so long a time? If any? Don’t sunlight kick gases into space? And Nike hasn’t got the gravity to nail molecules down for good. Half a standard Gee; and the potential is even poorer, the field strength dropping off as fast as it does.”
“But my lord,” Yasmin said, “an atmosphere comes from within a planet. At least, it does for the smaller planets, that can’t keep their original hydrogen like the Jupiter types. On the smaller worlds, gas gets forced out of mineral compounds. Vulcanism and tectonism provide the heat for that, as well as radioactivity. But the major planetological forces originate in the core. And the core originates because the heavier elements, like iron, tend to migrate toward the center. We know Nike has some endowment of those. Perhaps more, even, than the average planet of its age.
“Earth-sized planets have strong gravity. The migration is quick. The core forms in their youth. But Mars-sized worlds . . . the process has to be slow, don’t you think? So much iron combines first in surface rocks that they are red. Nike shows traces of this still today. The midget planets can’t outgas more than a wisp until their old age, when a core finally has taken shape.”
Tom shook his head in a stunned fashion. “I didn’t know. I took for granted—I mean, well, every Mars-type globe I ever saw or heard of had very little air—I reckoned they’d lost most o’ their gas long ago.”
“There are no extremely ancient systems in the range that your travels have covered,” Yasmin deduced. “Perhaps not in the whole Imperial territory. They aren’t common in the spiral arms of the galaxy, after all. So people never had much occasion to think about what they must be like.”
“Uh, what you been sayin’, this theory . . . you learned it in school?”
“No. I didn’t major in astronomy, just took some req
uired basic courses. It simply appeared to me that some such idea is the only way to explain this system we’re in.” Yasmin spread her hands. “Maybe the professors at my university haven’t heard of the idea either. The truth must have been known in Imperial times, but it could have been lost since, not having immediate practical value.” Her smile was sad. “Who cares about pure science any more? What can you buy with it?
“Even the original colonists on Nike—Well, to them the fact must have been interesting, but not terribly important. They knew the planet was so old that it had lately gained an atmosphere and oxygen-liberating life. So old that its sun is on the verge of becoming a red giant. Already the hydrogen is exhausted at the core, the nuclear reactions are moving outward in a shell, the photosphere is expanding and cooling while the total energy output rises. But the sun won’t be so huge that Nike is scorched for—oh, several million years. I suppose the colonists appreciated the irony here. But on the human time-scale, what difference did it make? No wonder their descendants have forgotten and think, like you, this has to be a young system.”
Tom caught her hands between his own. “And . . . that’s the reason . . . the real reason the sun’s so rambunctious?” he asked hoarsely.
“Why, yes. Red giants are usually variable. This star is in a transition stage, I guess, and hasn’t ‘found’ its period yet.” Yasmin’s smile turned warm. “If I have taken your mind off your troubles, I am glad. But why do you care about the aspect of this planet ten mega-years from now? I think best I do try to sleep, that I may help you a little tomorrow.”
Tom gulped. “Kid,” he said, “you don’t know your own strength.”
“What’s she been talking about?” Dagny demanded.
Tom told her. They spent the rest of the night laying plans.
Now and then a mid-morning sunbeam struck copper through the fog. But otherwise a wet, dripping, smoking mystery enclosed the barge. Despite its chill, Tom was glad. He didn’t care to be interrupted by a strafing attack.
To be sure, the air force might triangulate on the radio emission of his ruined plane and drop a bomb. However—
He sat in the cockpit, looked squarely into the screen, and said, “This is a parley. Agreed?”
“For the moment.” Karol Weyer gave him a smoldering return stare. “I talked with Fish Aran.”
“And he made it clear to you, didn’t he, about the lingo scramble? How often your Anglic and mine use the same word different? Well, let’s not keep on with the farce. If anybody thinks t’other’s said somethin’ bad, let’s call a halt and thresh out what was intended. Aye?”
Weyer tugged his beard. His countenance lost none of its sternness. “You have yet to prove your good faith,” he said. “After what harm you worked—”
“I’m ready to make that up to you. To your whole planet.”
Weyer cocked a brow and waited.
“S’pose you give us what we need to fix our ship,” Tom said. “Some of it might be kind of expensive—copper and silver and such, and handicrafted because you haven’t got the dies and jigs—but we can make some gold payment. Then let us go. I, or a trusty captain o’ mine, will be back in a few months . . . uh, a few thirty-day periods.”
“With a host of friends to do business?”
“No. With camarados to ’change. Nike lived on trade under the Terran Empire. It can once more.”
“How do I know you speak truth?”
“Well, you’ll have to take somethin’ on my word. But listen. Kind of a bad storm last night, no? Did a lot o’ damage, I’ll bet. How much less would’ve been done if you’d been able to predict it? I can make that possible.” Tom paused before adding cynically, “You can share the information with all Nike, or keep it your national secret. Could be useful, if you feel like maybe the planet should have a really strong Emperor, name of Weyer, for instance.”
* * *
The Engineer leaned forward till his image seemed about to jump from the screen. “How is this?”
Tom related what Yasmin had told him. “No wonder your solar meteorologists never get anywhere,” he finished. “They’re usin’ exactly the wrong mathematical model.”
Weyer’s eyes dwelt long upon Tom. “Are you giving this information away in hopes of my good will?” he said.
“No. As a free sample, to shake you loose from your notion that every chap who drops in from space is necessarily a hound o’ hell. And likewise this. Camarado Weyer, your astronomers’ll tell you my wife’s idea makes sense. They’ll be right glad to hear they’ve got an old star. But they’ll need many years to work out the details by themselves. You know enough science to realize that, I’m sure. Now I can put you in touch with people that already know the details—that can come here, study the situation for a few weeks, and predict your weather like dice odds.
“That’s my hole card. And you can only benefit by helpin’ us leave. Don’t think you can catch us and beat what we know out of us. First, we haven’t got the information. Second, we’ll die before we become slaves, in any meanin’ o’ the word. If it don’t look like we can get killed fightin’ the men you send to catch us, why, we’ll turn our weapons on ourselves. Then all you’ve got is a spaceship that to you is nothin’ but scrap metal.”
Weyer drew a sharp breath. But he remained cautious. “This may be,” he said. “Nonetheless, if I let you go, why should you bring learned people back to me?”
“Because it’ll pay. I’m a trader and a warlord. The richer my markets, the stronger my allies, the better off I am.” Tom punched a forefinger at the screen. “Get rid o’ that conditioned reflex o’ yours and think a bit instead. You haven’t got much left that’s worth anybody’s lootin’. Why should I bother returnin’ for that purpose? But your potential, that’s somethin’ else entirely. Given as simple a thing as reliable weather forecasts—you’ll save, in a generation, more wealth than the ‘friends’ ever destroyed. And this’s only one for instance o’ what the outside universe can do for you. Man, you can’t afford not to trust me!”
They argued, back and forth, for a long time. Weyer was intrigued but wary. Granted, Yasmin’s revelation did provide evidence that Tom’s folk were not utter savages like the last visitors from space. But the evidence wasn’t conclusive. And even if it was, what guarantee existed that the strangers would bring the promised experts?
The wrangle ended as well as Tom had hoped, in an uneasy compromise. He and his wives would be brought to Sea Gate. They’d keep their sidearms. Though guarded, they were to be treated more or less as guests. Discussions would continue. If Weyer judged, upon better acquaintance, that they were indeed trustworthy, he would arrange for the ship’s repair and release.
“But don’t be long about makin’ up your mind,” Tom warned, “or it won’t do us a lot o’ good to come home.”
“Perhaps,” Weyer said, “you can depart early if you leave a hostage.”
“You’ll be all right?” Tom asked for the hundredth time.
“Indeed, my lord,” Yasmin said. She was more cheerful than he, bidding him good-bye in the Engineer’s castle. “I’m used to their ways by now, comfortable in this environment—honestly! And you know how much in demand an outworlder is.”
“That could get dull. I won’t be back too bloody soon, remember. What’ll you do for fun?”
“Oh,” she said demurely, “I plan to make arrangements with quite a number of men.”
“Stop teasin’ me.” He hugged her close. “I’m goin’ to miss you.”
And so Roan Tom and Dagny Od’s-daughter left Nike.
He fretted somewhat about Yasmin, while Firedrake made the long flight back to Kraken, and while he mended his fences there, and while he voyaged back with his scholars and merchants. Had she really been joking, at the very last? She’d for sure gotten almighty friendly with Yanos Aran, and quite a few other young bucks. Tom was not obsessively jealous, but he could not afford to become a laughingstock.
He needn’t have worried. When he m
ade his triumphant landing at Sea Gate, he found that Yasmin had been charming, plausible, devious and, in short, had convinced several feudal lords of Nike that it was to their advantage that the rightful Shah be restored to the throne of Sassania. They commanded enough men to do the job. If the Krakeners could furnish weapons, training, and transportation—
Half delighted, half stunned, Tom said, “So this time we had a lingo scramble without somethin’ horrible happenin’? I don’t believe it!”
“Happy endings do occur,” she murmured, and came to him. “As now.”
And everyone was satisfied except, maybe, some few who went to lay a wreath upon a certain grave.
In the case of the King and Sir Christopher, however, a compliment was intended. A later era would have used the words “awe-inspiring, stately, and ingeniously conceived. ”
THE
NIGHT FACE
INTRODUCTION
At first this was a novelette called “A Twelvemonth and a Day.” I revised and expanded it for book publication, whereupon the then editor stuck it with the ridiculous title Let the Spacemen Beware! My thanks to Jim Baen, now in charge, for recognizing that readers have more intelligence than they were once given credit for having. In return, I admit that he’s probably right in considering the original name too cumbersome; hence the new one.
Otherwise the tale is unchanged. It can stand alone without reference to anything else. However, you may be interested to know that it does fit into the same “future history” as the Polesotechnic League and the Terran Empire. Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, Christopher Holm, Dominic Flandry, and quite a few more characters lived in its past. Now the Empire has fallen, the Long Night descended upon that tiny fraction of the galaxy which man once explored and colonized. Like Romano-Britons after the last legion had withdrawn, people out in the former marches of civilization do not even know what is happening at its former heart. They have the physical capability of going there and finding out, but are too busy surviving. They are also, all unawares, generating whole new societies of their own.
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 44
