Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga

by Poul Anderson

  Suddenly the gloom thickened. Evalyth fought for breath. Too hot and silent here; too long a wait; she must do something or her will would desert her and she would be unable to squeeze the trigger.

  She stumbled to her feet and into the lab. The fluoro blinded her for a moment when she turned it on. She went to his computer and said: “Activate!”

  Nothing responded but the indicator light. The windows were totally black. Clouds outside shut off moon and stars.

  “What—” The sound was a curious croak. But that brought a releasing gall: Take hold of yourself, you blubbering idiot, or you’re not fit to mother the child you’re carrying. She could then ask her question. “What explanations in terms of biology can be devised for the behavior of the people on this planet?”

  “Matters of that nature are presumably best explained in terms of psychology and cultural anthropology,” said the voice.

  “M-m-maybe,” Evalyth said. “And maybe not.” She marshalled a few thoughts and stood them firm amidst the others roiling in her skull. “The inhabitants could be degenerate somehow, not really human.” I want Moru to be. “Scan every fact recorded about them, including the detailed clinical observations made on four of them in the past several days. Compare with basic terrestrial data. Give me whatever hypotheses—anything that does not flatly contradict established facts. We’ve used up the reasonable ideas already.”

  The machine hummed. Evalyth closed her eyes and clung to the edge of the desk. Donli, please help me.

  At the other end of forever, the voice came to her:

  “The sole behavioral element which appears to be not easily explicable by postulates concerning environment and accidental historical developments, is the cannibalistic puberty rite. According to the anthropological computer, this might well have originated as a form of human sacrifice. But that computer notes certain illogicalities in the idea, as follows.

  “On Old Earth, sacrificial religion was normally associated with agricultural societies, which were more vitally dependent on continued fertility and good weather than hunters. Even for them, the offering of humans proved disadvantageous in the long run, as the Aztec example most clearly demonstrates. Lokon has rationalized the practice to a degree, making it a part of the slavery system and thus minimizing its impact on the generality. But for the lowlanders it is a powerful evil, a source of perpetual danger, a diversion of effort and resources that are badly needed for survival. It is not plausible that the custom, if ever imitated from Lokon, should persist among every one of those tribes. Nevertheless it does. Therefore it must have some value and the problem is to find what.

  “The method of obtaining victims varies widely, but the requirement always appears to be the same. According to the Lokonese, one adult male body is necessary and sufficient for the maturation of four boys. The killer of Donli Sairn was unable to carry off the entire corpse. What he did take of it is suggestive.

  “Hence a dipteroid phenomenon may have appeared in man on this planet. Such a thing is unknown among higher animals elsewhere, but is conceivable. A modification of the Y chromosome would produce it. The test for that that modification, and thus the test of the hypothesis, is easily made.”

  The voice stopped. Evalyth heard the blood slugging in her veins. “What are you talking about?”

  “The phenomenon is found among lower animals on several worlds,” the computer told her.

  “It is uncommon and so is not widely known. The name derives from the Diptera, a type of dung fly on Old Earth.”

  Lightning flickered. “Dung fly—good, yes!”

  The machine went on to explain.

  Jonafer came along with Moru. The savage’s hands were tied behind his back, and the spaceman loomed enormous over him. Despite that and the bruises he had inflicted on himself, he hobbled along steadily. The clouds were breaking and the moon shone ice-white. Where Evalyth waited, outside her door, she saw the compound reach bare to the saw-topped stockade and a crane stand above like a gibbet. The air was growing cold—the planet spinning toward an autumn—and a small wind had arisen to whimper behind the dust devils that stirred across the earth. Jonafer’s footfalls rang loud.

  He noticed her and stopped. Moru did likewise. “What did they learn?” she asked.

  The captain nodded. “Uden got right to work when you called,” he said. “The test is more complicated than your computer suggested—but then, it’s for Donli’s kind of skill, not Uden’s. He’d never have thought of it unassisted. Yes, the notion is true.”

  “How?”

  Moru stood waiting while the language he did not understand went to and fro around him.

  “I’m no medic.” Jonafer kept his tone altogether colorless. “But from what Uden told me, the chromosome defect means that the male gonads here can’t mature spontaneously. They need an extra supply of hormones—he mentioned testosterone and androsterone, I forget what else—to start off the series of changes which bring on puberty. Lacking that, you’ll get eunuchism. Uden thinks the surviving population was tiny after the colony was bombed out, and so poor that it resorted to cannibalism for bare survival, the first generation or two. Under those circumstances, a mutation that would otherwise have eliminated itself got established and spread to every descendant.”

  Evalyth nodded. “I see.”

  “You understand what this means, I suppose,” Jonafer said. “There’ll be no problem to ending the practice. We’ll simply tell them we have a new and better Holy Food, and prove it with a few pills. Terrestrial-type meat animals can be reintroduced later and supply what’s necessary. In the end, no doubt our geneticists can repair that faulty Y chromosome.”

  He could not stay contained any longer. His mouth opened, a gash across his half-seen face, and he rasped: “I should praise you for saving a whole people. I can’t. Get your business over with, will you?”

  Evalyth trod forward to stand before Moru. He shivered but met her eyes. Astonished, she said: “You haven’t drugged him.”

  “No,” Jonafer said. “I wouldn’t help you.” He spat.

  “Well, I’m glad.” She addressed Moru in his own language: “You killed my man. Is it right that I should kill you?”

  “It is right,” he answered, almost as levelly as she. “I thank you that my woman and my sons are to go free.” He was quiet for a second or two. “I have heard that your folk can preserve food for years without it rotting. I would be glad if you kept my body to give to your sons.”

  “Mine will not need it,” Evalyth said. “Nor will the sons of your sons.”

  Anxiety tinged his words: “Do you know why I slew your man? He was kind to me, and like a god. But I am lame. I saw no other way to get what my sons must have; and they must have it soon, or it would be too late and they could never become men.”

  “He taught me,” Evalyth said, “how much it is to be a man.”

  She turned to Jonafer, who stood tense and puzzled. “I had my revenge,” she said in Donli’s tongue.

  “What?” His question was a reflexive noise.

  “After I learned about the dipteroid phenomenon,” she said. “All that was necessary was for me to keep silent. Moru, his children, his entire race would go on being prey for centuries, maybe forever. I sat for half an hour, I think, having my revenge.”

  “And then?” Jonafer asked.

  “I was satisfied and could start thinking about justice,” Evalyth said.

  She drew a knife. Moru straightened his back. She stepped behind him and cut his bonds. “Go home,” she said. “Remember him.”

  STARFOG

  STARFOG

  “From another universe. Where space is a shining cloud, two hundred light-years across, roiled by the red stars that number in the many thousands, and where the brighter suns are troubled and cast forth great flames. Your spaces are dark and lonely.”

  Daven Laure stopped the recording and asked for an official translation. A part of Jaccavrie’s computer scanned the molecules of a plugged-in m
emory cylinder, identified the passage, and flashed the Serievan text onto a reader screen. Another part continued the multitudinous tasks of planetary approach. Still other parts waited for the man’s bidding, whatever he might want next. A Ranger of the Commonalty traveled in a very special ship.

  And even so, every year, a certain number did not come home from their missions.

  Laure nodded to himself. Yes, he’d understood the woman’s voice correctly. Or, at least, he interpreted her sentences approximately the same way as did the semanticist who had interviewed her and her fellows. And this particular statement was as difficult, as ambiguous as any which they had made. Therefore: (a) Probably the linguistic computer on Serieve had done a good job of unraveling their basic language. (b) It had accurately encoded its findings—vocabulary, grammar, tentative reconstruction of the underlying worldview—in the cylinders which a courier had brought to Sector HQ. (c) The reencoding, into his own neurones, which Laure underwent on his way here, had taken well. He had a working knowledge of the tongue which—among how many others?—was spoken on Kirkasant.

  “Wherever that may be,” he muttered.

  The ship weighed his words for a nanosecond or two, decided no answer was called for, and made none.

  Restless, Laure got to his feet and prowled from the study cabin, down a corridor to the bridge. It was so called largely by courtesy. Jaccavrie navigated, piloted, landed, lifted, maintained, and, if need be, repaired and fought for herself. But the projectors here offered a full outside view. At the moment, the bulkheads seemed cramped and barren. Laure ordered the simulacrum activated.

  The bridge vanished from his eyes. Had it not been for the G-field underfoot, he might have imagined himself floating in space. A crystal night enclosed him, unwinking stars scattered like jewels, the frosty glitter of the Milky Way. Large and near, its radiance stopped down to preserve his retinas, burned the yellow sun of Serieve. The planet itself was a growing crescent, blue banded with white, rimmed by a violet sky. A moon stood opposite, a worn golden coin.

  But Laure’s gaze strayed beyond, toward the deeps and then, as if in search of comfort, the other way, toward Old Earth. There was no comfort, though. They still named her Home, but she lay in the spiral arm behind this one, and Laure had never seen her. He had never met anyone who had. None of his ancestors had, for longer than their family chronicles ran. Home was a half-remembered myth; reality was here, these stars on the fringes of this civilization.

  Serieve lay near the edge of the known. Kirkasant lay somewhere beyond.

  “Surely not outside of spacetime,” Laure said.

  “If you’ve begun thinking aloud, you’d like to discuss it,” Jaccavrie said.

  He had followed custom in telling the ship to use a female voice and, when practical, idiomatic language. The computer had soon learned precisely what pattern suited him best. That was not identical with what he liked best; such could have got disturbing on a long cruise. He found himself more engaged, inwardly, with the husky contralto that had spoken in strong rhythms out of the recorder than he was with the mezzo-soprano that now reached his ears.

  “Well . . . maybe so,” he said. “But you already know everything in the material we have aboard.”

  “You need to set your thoughts in order. You’ve spent most of our transit time acquiring the language.”

  “All right, then, let’s run barefoot through the obvious.” Laure paced a turn around the invisible deck. He felt its hardness, he sensed the almost subliminal beat of driving energies, he caught a piny whiff of air as the ventilators shifted to another part of their odor-temperature-ionization cycle; but still the stars blazed about him, and their silence seemed to enter his bones. Abruptly, harshly, he said: “Turn that show off.”

  The ship obeyed. “Would you like a planetary scene?” she asked. “You haven’t yet looked at those tapes from the elf castles on Jair that you bought—”

  “Not now.” Laure flung himself into a chair web and regarded the prosaic metal, instruments, manual override controls that surrounded him. “This will do.”

  “Are you feeling well? Why not go in the diagnoser and let me check you out? We’ve time before we arrive.”

  The tone was anxious. Laure didn’t believe that emotion was put on. He refrained from anthropomorphizing his computer, just as he did those nonhuman sophonts he encountered. At the same time, he didn’t go along with the school of thought which claimed that human-sensibility terms were absolutely meaningless in such connections. An alien brain, or a cybernetic one like Jaccavrie’s, could think; it was aware; it had conation. Therefore it had analogies to his.

  Quite a few Rangers were eremitic types, sane enough but basically schizoid. That was their way of standing the gaff. It was normal for them to think of their ships as elaborate tools. Daven Laure, who was young and outgoing, naturally thought of his as a friend.

  “No, I’m all right,” he said. “A bit nervous, nothing else. This could turn out to be the biggest thing I . . . you and I have tackled yet. Maybe one of the biggest anyone has, at least on this frontier. I’d’ve been glad to have an older man or two along.” He shrugged. “None available. Our service should increase its personnel, even if it means raising dues. We’re spread much too thin across—how many stars?”

  “The last report in my files estimated ten million planets with a significant number of Commonalty members on them. As for how many more there may be with which these have reasonably regular contact—”

  “Oh, for everything’s sake, come off it!” Laure actually laughed, and wondered if the ship had planned things that way. But, regardless, he could begin to talk of this as a problem rather than a mystery.

  “Let me recapitulate,” he said, “and you tell me if I’m misinterpreting matters. A ship comes to Serieve, allegedly from far away. It’s like nothing anybody has ever seen, unless in historical works. (They haven’t got the references on Serieve to check that out, so we’re bringing some from HQ.) Hyperdrive, gravity control, electronics, yes, but everything crude, archaic, bare-bones. Fission instead of fusion power, for example . . . and human piloting!

  “That is, the crew seem to be human. We have no record of their anthropometric type, but they don’t look as odd as people do after several generations on some planets I could name. And the linguistic computer, once they get the idea that it’s there to decipher their language and start cooperating with it, says their speech appears to have remote affinities with a few that we know, like ancient Anglic. Preliminary semantic analysis suggests their abstractions and constructs aren’t quite like ours, but do fall well inside the human psych range. All in all, then, you’d assume they’re explorers from distant parts.”

  “Except for the primitive ship,” Jaccavrie chimed in. “One wouldn’t expect such technological backwardness in any group which had maintained any contact, however tenuous, with the general mass of the different human civilizations. Nor would such a slow, under-equipped vessel pass through them without stopping, to fetch up in this border region.”

  “Right. So . . . if it isn’t a fake . . . their gear bears out a part of their story. Kirkasant is an exceedingly old colony . . . yonder.” Laure pointed toward unseen stars. “Well out in the Dragon’s Head sector, where we’re barely beginning to explore. Somehow, somebody got that far, and in the earliest days of interstellar travel. They settled down on a planet and lost the trick of making spaceships. Only lately have they regained it.”

  “And come back, looking for the companionship of their own kind.” Laure had a brief, irrational vision of Jaccavrie nodding. Her tone was so thoughtful. She would be a big, calm, dark-haired woman, handsome in middle age though getting somewhat plump . . . “What the crew themselves have said, as communication got established, seems to bear out this idea. Beneath a great many confused mythological motifs, I also get the impression of an epic voyage, by a defeated people who ran as far as they could.”

  “But Kirkasant!” Laure protested. “The whole
situation they describe. It’s impossible.”

  “Might not that Vandange be mistaken? I mean, we know so little. The Kirkasanters keep talking about a weird home environment. Ours appears to have stunned and bewildered them. They simply groped on through space till they happened to find Serieve. Thus might their own theory, that somehow they blundered in from an altogether different continuum, might it not conceivably be right?”

  “Hm-m-m. I guess you didn’t see Vandange’s accompanying letter. No, you haven’t, it wouldn’t’ve been plugged into your memory. Anyway, he claims his assistants examined that ship down to the bolt heads. And they found nothing, no mechanism, no peculiarity, whose function and behavior weren’t obvious. He really gets indignant. Says the notion of interspace-time transference is mathematically absurd. I don’t have quite his faith in mathematics, myself, but I must admit he has one common-sense point. If a ship could somehow flip from one entire cosmos to another . . . why, in five thousand years of interstellar travel, haven’t we gotten some record of it happening?”

  “Perhaps the ships to which it occurs never come back.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps the whole argument is due to misunderstanding. We don’t have any good grasp of the Kirkasanter language. Or maybe it’s a hoax. That’s Vandange’s opinion. He claims there’s no such region as they say they come from. Not anywhere. Neither astronomers nor explorers have ever found anything like a . . . a space like a shining fog, crowded with stars—”