Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga

by Poul Anderson

  “All right.” Raven felt the rhythm of the dance indicate a backward step for him. He guided Tolteca with a hand to the elbow. “You came here with some idiotic notion of protecting Elfavy. What then?”

  “I, I, I went down to . . . the plaza . . . They were—mumbling. It didn’t make sense, it was ghastly—”

  “Not so loud!”

  “I saw Dawyd. Tried to talk to him. They all, all got more and more excited. Llyrdin’s little daughter yelled and ran from me. He chased her and killed her. The cleaning robots s-s-simply carried off the body. They began . . . closing in on me—”

  “I see. Now, steady. Another backward step. Halt.” Raven froze in his tracks, for many heads turned his way. At this distance under the moon, they lacked faces. When their attention had drifted back to the dance, Raven breathed.

  “It must be a mutation,” he said. “Mutation and genetic drift, acting on a small initial population. Maybe, even if it sounds like a myth, that story of theirs is true, that they’re descended from one man and two women. Anyhow, their metabolism changed. They’re violently allergic to tobacco, for instance. This other change probably isn’t much greater than that, in glandular terms. They may well still be interfertile with us, biologically speaking. Though culturally . . . no, I don’t believe they are the same species. Not any more.”

  “Baleflower?” asked Tolteca. His tone was thin and shaky, like a hurt child’s.

  “Yes. You told me it emits an indole when it blooms. Not one that particularly affects the normal human biochemistry; but theirs isn’t normal, and the stuff is chemically related to the substances associated with schizophrenia. They are susceptible. Every Gwydiona springtime, they go insane.”

  The soundless dance below jarred into a quicker staccato beat. Raven used the chance to climb several tiers in a hurry.

  “It’s a wonder they survived the first few generations,” he said when he must stop again. “Somehow, they did, and began the slow painful adaptation. Naturally, they don’t remember the insane episodes. They don’t dare. Would you? That’s the underlying reason why they’ve never made a scientific investigation of Bale, or taken the preventive measures that look so obvious to us. Instead, they built a religion and a way of life around it. But only in the first flush of the season, when they still have rationality but feel the exuberance of madness in their blood—only then are they even able to admit to themselves that they don’t consciously know what happens. The rest of the time, they cover the truth with meaningless words about an ultimate reality.

  “So their culture wasn’t planned. It was worked out blindly, by trial and error, through centuries. And at last it reached a point where they do little damage to themselves in their lunacy.

  “Remember, their psychology isn’t truly human. You and I are mixtures, good, bad, and indifferent qualities; our conflicts we always have with us. But the Gwydiona seem to concentrate all their personal troubles into these few days. That’s why there used to be so much destruction, before they stumbled into a routine that can cope with this phenomenon. That, I think, is why they’re so utterly sane, so good, for most of the year. That’s why they’ve never colonized the rest of the planet. They don’t know the reason—population control is a transparent rationalization—but I know why: no baleflower. They’re so well adapted that they can’t do without it. I wonder what would happen to a Gwydiona deprived of his periodic dementia. I suspect it would be rather horrible.

  “Their material organization protects them: strong buildings, no isolated homes, no firearms, no atomic energy, everything that might be harmed or harmful locked away for the duration of hell. This Holy City, and I suppose every one on the planet, is built like a warren, full of places to run and dodge and hide and lock yourself away when someone runs amok. The walls are padded, the ground is soft, it’s hard to hurt yourself.

  “But of course, the main bulwark is psychological. Myths, symbols, rites, so much a part of their lives that even in their madness they remember. Probably they remember more than in their sanity: things they dare not recall when conscious, the wild and tragic symbols, the Night Faces that aren’t talked about. Slowly, over the generations and centuries, they’ve groped their way to a system which keeps their world somewhat orderly, somewhat meaningful, while the baleflower blooms. Which actually channels the mania, so that very few people get hurt any more; so they act out their hates and fears, dance them out, living their own myths . . . instead of clawing each other in the physical flesh.”

  The dance was losing pattern. It wouldn’t end after all, Raven thought, but merely dissolve into aimlessness. Well, that would serve, if he could vanish and be forgotten.

  He said to Tolteca, “You had to come bursting into their dream universe and unbalance it. You killed that little girl.”

  “Oa, name of mercy.” The engineer covered his face.

  Raven sighed. “Forget it. Partly my fault. I should have told you at once what I surmised.”

  They were halfway up the terraces when someone broke through the dancers and came bounding toward them. Two, Raven saw, his heart gone hollow. The moonlight cascaded over their blonde hair, turning it to frost.

  “Stop,” called Elfavy, low and with laughter. “Stop, Ragan.”

  He wondered what sort of destiny the accidental likeness of his name to that of a myth would prove to be.

  She paused a few steps below him. Byord clutched her hand, looking about from bright soulless eyes. Elfavy brushed a lock off her forehead, a gesture Raven remembered. “Here is the River Child, Ragan,” she called. “And you are the rain. And I am the Mother, and darkness is in me.”

  Beyond her shoulder, he saw that others had heard. They were ceasing to dance, one by one, and staring up.

  “Welcome, then,” said Raven. “Go back to your home in the meadows, River Child. Take him home, Bird Maiden.”

  Byord’s small face opened. He screamed.

  “Don’t eat me, mother!”

  Elfavy bent down and embraced him. “No,” she crooned, “oh, no, no, no. You shall come to me. Don’t you recall it? I was in the ground, and rain fell on me and it was dark where I was. Come with me, River Child.”

  Byord shrieked and tried to break free. She dragged him on toward Raven. From the crowd below, a deep voice lifted, “And the earth drank the rain, and the rain was the earth, and the Mother was the Child and carried Ynis in her arms.”

  “Jingleballs!” muttered Kors. His scarecrow form slouched forward, to stand between his Commandant and those below. “That tears it.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Raven.

  Dawyd sprang onto the lowest tier. His tone rang like a trumpet: “They came from the sky and violated the Mother! Can you hear the leaves weep?”

  “Now what?” Tolteca glared at them, where they surged shadowed on the moon-gray turf. “What do they mean? It’s a nightmare, it doesn’t make sense!”

  “Every nightmare makes sense,” Raven answered. “The homicidal urge is awake and looking for something to destroy. And it has just figured out what, too.”

  “The ship, huh?” Kors hefted his gun.

  “Yes,” said Raven. “Rainfall is a fertilization symbol. So what kind of symbol do you think a spaceship landing on your home soil and discharging its crew is? What would you do to a man who attacked your mother?”

  “I hate to shoot those poor unarmed bastards,” said Kors, “but—”

  Raven snarled like an animal: “If you do, I’ll kill you myself!”

  He regained control and drew out his miniradio. “I told Utiel to lift ship thirty hours after I’d gone, but that won’t be soon enough. I’ll warn him now. There mustn’t be any vessel there for them to assault. Then we’ll see if we can save our own hides.”

  Elfavy reached him. She flung Byord at his feet, where the boy sobbed in his terror, not having sufficient mythic training to give pattern to that which stirred within him. Elfavy fixed her gaze wide upon Raven. “I know you,” she gasped. “You sat on my g
rave once, and I couldn’t sleep.”

  He thumbed the radio switch and put the box to his lips. Her fingernails gashed his hand, which opened in sheer reflex. She snatched the box and flung it from her, further than he would have believed a woman could throw. “No!” she shrilled. “Don’t leave the darkness in me, Ragan! You woke me once!”

  Kors started forward. “I’ll get it,” he said. Elfavy pulled his knife from its sheath as he passed and thrust it between his ribs. He sank on all fours, astonished in the moonlight.

  Down below, a berserk howl broke loose as they saw what had happened. Dawyd shuffled to the radio, picked it up, gaped at it, tossed it back into the mob. They swallowed it as a whirlpool might.

  Raven stooped down by Kors, cradling the helmeted head in his arms. The soldier bubbled blood. “Get started, Commandant. I’ll hold ’em.” He reached for his gun and took an unsteady aim.

  “No.” Raven snatched it from him. “We came to them.”

  “Horse apples,” said Kors, and died.

  Raven straightened. He handed Tolteca the gun and the dagger withdrawn from the body. A moment he hesitated, then added his own weapons. “On your way,” he said. “You have to reach the ship before they do.”

  “You go!” Tolteca screamed. “I’ll stay—”

  “I’m trained in unarmed combat,” said Raven. “I can hold them a good deal longer than you, clerk.”

  He stood thinking. Elfavy knelt beside him. She clasped his hand. Byord trembled at her feet.

  “You might bear in mind next time,” said Raven, “that a Lochlanna has obligations.”

  He gave Tolteca a shove. The Namerican drew a breath and ran.

  “O the harbuck at the cliff’s edge!” called Dawyd joyously. “The arrows of the sun are in him!” He went after Tolteca like a streak. Raven pulled loose from Elfavy, intercepted her father, and stiff-armed him. Dawyd rolled down the green steps, into the band of men that yelped. They tore him apart.

  Raven went back to Elfavy. She still knelt, holding her son. He had never seen anything so gentle as her smile. “We’re next,” he said. “But you’ve time to get away. Run. Lock yourself in a tower room.”

  Her hair swirled about her shoulders with the gesture of negation. “Sing me the rest.”

  “You can save Byord too,” he begged.

  “It’s such a beautiful song,” said Elfavy.

  Raven watched the people of Instar feasting. He hadn’t much voice left, but he did his lame best.

  “—’Tis down in yonder garden green,

  Love, where we used to walk,

  The fairest flower that e’er was seen

  Is withered to a stalk.

  “‘The stalk is withered dry, my love;

  So will our hearts decay.

  So make yourself content, my love,

  Till God calls you away.’”

  “Thank you, Ragan,” said Elfavy.

  “Will you go now?” he asked.

  “I?” she said. “How could I? We are the Three.”

  He sat down beside her, and she leaned against him. His free hand stroked the boy’s damp hair.

  Presently the crowd uncoiled itself and lumbered up the steps. Raven arose. He moved away from Elfavy, who remained where she was. If he could hold their attention for half an hour or so—and with luck, he should be able to last that long—they might well forget about her. Then she would survive the night.

  And not remember.

  THE

  SHARING

  OF FLESH

  THE SHARING OF FLESH

  Moru understood about guns. At least the tall strangers had demonstrated to their guides what the things that each of them carried at his hip could do in a flash and a flameburst. But he did not realize that the small objects they often moved about in their hands, while talking in their own language, were audiovisual transmitters. Probably, he thought they were fetishes.

  Thus, when he killed Donli Sairn, he did so in full view of Donli’s wife.

  That was happenstance. Except for prearranged times at morning and evening of the planet’s twenty-eight-hour day, the biologist, like his fellows, sent only to his computer. But because they had not been married long and were helplessly happy, Evalyth received his ’casts whenever she could get away from her own duties.

  The coincidence that she was tuned in at that one moment was not great. There was little for her to do. As Militech of the expedition—she being from a half barbaric part of Kraken where the sexes had equal opportunities to learn arts of combat suitable to primitive environments—she had overseen the building of a compound; and she kept the routines of guarding it under a close eye. However, the inhabitants of Lokon were as cooperative with the visitors from heaven as mutual mysteriousness allowed. Every instinct and experience assured Evalyth Sairn that their reticence masked nothing except awe, with perhaps a wistful hope of friendship. Captain Jonafer agreed. Her position having thus become rather a sinecure, she was trying to learn enough about Donli’s work to be a useful assistant after he returned from the lowlands.

  Also, a medical test had lately confirmed that she was pregnant. She wouldn’t tell him, she decided, not yet, over all those hundreds of kilometers, but rather when they lay again together. Meanwhile, the knowledge that they had begun a new life made him a lodestar to her.

  On the afternoon of his death she entered the biolab whistling. Outside, sunlight struck fierce and brass-colored on dusty ground, on prefab shacks huddled about the boat which had brought everyone and everything down from the orbit where New Dawn circled, on the parked flitters and gravsleds that took men around the big island that was the only habitable land on this globe, on the men and the women themselves. Beyond the stockade, plumy treetops, a glimpse of mud-brick buildings, a murmur of voices and mutter of footfalls, a drift of bitter woodsmoke, showed that a town of several thousand people sprawled between here and Lake Zelo.

  The bio-lab occupied more than half the structure where the Sairns lived. Comforts were few, when ships from a handful of cultures struggling back to civilization ranged across the ruins of empire. For Evalyth, though, it sufficed that this was their home. She was used to austerity anyway. One thing that had first attracted her to Donli, meeting him on Kraken, was the cheerfulness with which he, a man from Atheia, which was supposed to have retained or regained almost as many amenities as Old Earth knew in its glory, had accepted life in her gaunt grim country.

  The gravity field here was 0.77 standard, less than two-thirds of what she had grown in. Her gait was easy through the clutter of apparatus and specimens. She was a big young woman, good-looking in the body, a shade too strong in the features for most men’s taste outside her own folk. She had their blondness and, on legs and forearms, their intricate tattoos; the blaster at her waist had come down through many generations. Otherwise she had abandoned Krakener costume for the plain coveralls of the expedition.

  How cool and dim the shack was! She sighed with pleasure, sat down, and activated the receiver. As the image formed, three-dimensional in the air, and Donli’s voice spoke, her heart sprang a little.

  “—appears to be descended from a clover.”

  The image was of plants with green trilobate leaves, scattered low among the reddish native pseudo-grasses. It swelled as Donli brought the transmitter near so that the computer might record details for later analysis. Evalyth frowned, trying to recall what . . . Oh, yes. Clover was another of those life forms that man had brought with him from Old Earth, to more planets than anyone now remembered, before the Long Night fell. Often they were virtually unrecognizable; over thousands of years, evolution had fitted them to alien conditions, or mutation and genetic drift had acted on small initial populations in a nearly random fashion. No one on Kraken had known that pines and gulls and rhizobacteria were altered immigrants, until Donli’s crew arrived and identified them. Not that he, or anybody from this part of the galaxy, had yet made it back to the mother world. But the Atheian data banks were packed with in
formation, and so was Donli’s dear curly head—

  And there was his hand, huge in the field of view, gathering specimens. She wanted to kiss it. Patience, patience, the officer part of her reminded the bride. We’re here to work. We’ve discovered one more lost colony, the most wretched one so far, sunken back to utter primitivism. Our duty is to advise the Board whether a civilizing mission is worthwhile, or whether the slender resources that the Allied Planets can spare had better be used elsewhere, leaving these people in their misery for another two or three hundred years. To make an honest report, we must study them, their cultures, their world. That’s why I’m in the barbarian highlands and he’s down in the jungle among out-and-out savages.

  Please finish soon, darling.

  She heard Donli speak in the lowland dialect. It was a debased form of Lokonese, which in turn was remotely descended from Anglic. The expedition’s linguists had unraveled the language in a few intensive weeks. Then all personnel took a brain-feed in it. Nonetheless, she admired how quickly her man had become fluent in the woods-runners’ version, after mere days of conversation with them.

  “Are we not coming to the place, Moru? You said the thing was close by our camp.”

  “We are nearly arrived, man-from-the-clouds.”

  A tiny alarm struck within Evalyth. What was going on? Donli hadn’t left his companions to strike off alone with a native, had he? Rogar of Lokon had warned them to beware of treachery in those parts. But, to be sure, only yesterday the guides had rescued Haimie Fiell when he tumbled into a swift-running river . . . at some risk to themselves . . .

  The view bobbed as the transmitter swung in Donli’s grasp. It made Evalyth a bit dizzy. From time to time, she got glimpses of the broader setting. Forest crowded about a game trail, rust-colored leafage, brown trunks and branches, shadows beyond, the occasional harsh call of something unseen. She could practically feel the heat and dank weight of the atmosphere, smell the unpleasant pungencies. This world—which no longer had a name, except World, because the dwellers upon it had forgotten what the stars really were—was ill suited to colonization. The life it had spawned was often poisonous, always nutritionally deficient. With the help of species they had brought along, men survived marginally. The original settlers doubtless meant to improve matters. But then the breakdown came—evidence was that their single town had been missiled out of existence, a majority of the people with it—and resources were lacking to rebuild; the miracle was that anything human remained except bones.