“But why should these wayfarers tell a falsehood?” Jaccavrie sounded honestly puzzled.
“I don’t know. Nobody does. That’s why the Serievan government decided it’d better ask for a Ranger.”
Laure jumped up and started pacing again. He was a tall young man, with the characteristic beardlessness, fair hair and complexion, slightly slanted blue eyes of the Fireland mountaineers on New Vixen. But since he had trained at Starborough, which is on Aladir not far from Irontower City, he affected a fashionably simple gray tunic and blue hose. The silver comet of his calling blazoned his left breast.
“I don’t know,” he repeated. There rose in him a consciousness of that immensity which crouched beyond this hull. “Maybe they are telling the sober truth. We don’t dare not know.”
When a mere few million people have an entire habitable world to themselves, they do not often build high. That comes later, along with formal wilderness preservation, disapproval of fecundity, and inducements to emigrate. Pioneer towns tend to be low and rambling. (Or so it is in that civilization wherein the Commonalty operates. We know that other branches of humanity have their distinctive ways, and hear rumors of yet stranger ones. But so vast is the galaxy—these two or three spiral arms, a part of which our race has to date thinly occupied—so vast, that we cannot even keep track of our own culture, let alone anyone else’s.)
Pelogard, however, was founded on an island off the Branzan mainland, above Serieve’s arctic circle: which comes down to almost 56°. Furthermore, it was an industrial center. Hence most of its buildings were tall and crowded. Laure, standing by the outer wall of Ozer Vandange’s office and looking forth across the little city, asked why this location had been chosen.
“You don’t know?” responded the physicist. His inflection was a touch too elaborately incredulous.
“I’m afraid not,” Laure confessed. “Think how many systems my service has to cover, and how many individual places within each system. If we tried to remember each, we’d never be anywhere but under the neuroinductors.”
Vandange, seated small and bald and prim behind a large desk, pursed his lips. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Nevertheless, I should not think an experienced Ranger would dash off to a planet without temporarily mastering a few basic facts about it.”
Laure flushed. An experienced Ranger would have put this conceited old dustbrain in his place. But he himself was too aware of youth and awkwardness. He managed to say quietly, “Sir, my ship has complete information. She needed only scan it and tell me no precautions were required here. You have a beautiful globe and I can understand why you’re proud of it. But please understand that to me it has to be a way station. My job is with those people from Kirkasant, and I’m anxious to meet them.”
“You shall, you shall,” said Vandange, somewhat mollified. “I merely thought a conference with you would be advisable first. As for your question, we need a city here primarily because upswelling ocean currents make the arctic waters mineral-rich. Extractor plants pay off better than they would farther south.”
Despite himself, Laure was interested. “You’re getting your minerals from the sea already? At so early a stage of settlement?”
“This sun and its planets are poor in heavy metals. Most local systems are. Not surprising. We aren’t far, here, from the northern verge of the spiral arm. Beyond is the halo—thin gas, little dust, ancient globular clusters very widely scattered. The interstellar medium from which stars form has not been greatly enriched by earlier generations.”
Laure suppressed his resentment at being lectured like a child. Maybe it was just Vandange’s habit. He cast another glance through the wall. The office was high in one of the buildings. He looked across soaring blocks of metal, concrete, glass, and plastic, interlinked with trafficways and freight cables, down to the waterfront. There bulked the extractor plants, warehouses, and sky-docks. Cargo craft moved ponderously in and out. Not many passenger vessels flitted between. Pelogard must be largely automated.
The season stood at late spring. The sun cast brightness across a gray ocean that a wind rumpled. Immense flocks of seabirds dipped and wheeled. Or were they birds? They had wings, anyhow, steely blue against a wan sky. Perhaps they cried or sang, into the wind skirl and wave rush; but Laure couldn’t hear it in this enclosed place.
“That’s one reason I can’t accept their yarn,” Vandange declared.
“Eh?” Laure came out of his reverie with a start.
Vandange pressed a button to opaque the wall. “Sit down. Let’s get to business.”
Laure eased himself into a lounger opposite the desk. “Why am I conferring with you?” he counterattacked. “Whoever was principally working with the Kirkasanters had to be a semanticist. In short, Paeri Ferand. He consulted specialists on your university faculty, in anthropology, history, and so forth. But I should think your own role as a physicist was marginal. Yet you’re the one taking up my time. Why?”
“Oh, you can see Ferand and the others as much as you choose,” Vandange said. “You won’t get more from them than repetitions of what the Kirkasanters have already told. How could you? What else have they got to go on? If nothing else, an underpopulated world like ours can’t maintain staffs of experts to ferret out the meaning of every datum, every inconsistency, every outright lie. I had hoped, when our government notified your section, headquarters, the Rangers would have sent a real team, instead of—”He curbed himself. “Of course, they have many other claims on their attention. They would not see at once how important this is.”
“Well,” Laure said in his annoyance, “if you’re suspicious, if you think the strangers need further investigation, why bother with my office? It’s just an overworked little outpost. Send them on to a heart world, like Sarnac, where the facilities and people really can be had.”
“It was urged,” Vandange said. “I, and a few others who felt as I do, fought the proposal bitterly. In the end, as a compromise, the government decided to dump the whole problem in the lap of the Rangers. Who turn out to be, in effect, you. Now I must persuade you to be properly cautious. Don’t you see, if those . . . beings . . . have some hostile intent, the very worst move would be to send them on—let them spy out our civilization—let them, perhaps, commit nuclear sabotage on a vital center, and then vanish back into space.” His voice grew shrill. “That’s why we’ve kept them here so long, on one excuse after the next, here on our home planet. We feel responsible to the rest of mankind!”
“But what—” Laure shook his head. He felt a sense of unreality. “Sir, the League, the troubles, the Empire, its fall, the Long Night . . . every such thing—behind us. In space and time alike. The people of the Commonalty don’t get into wars.”
“Are you quite certain?”
“What makes you so certain of any menace in—one antiquated ship? Crewed by a score of men and women. Who came here openly and peacefully. Who, by every report, have been struggling to get past the language and culture barriers and communicate with you in detail—what in cosmos’ name makes you worry about them?”
“The fact that they are liars.”
Vandange sat awhile, gnawing his thumb, before he opened a box, took out a cigar and puffed it into lighting. He didn’t offer Laure one. That might be for fear of poisoning his visitor with whatever local weed he was smoking. Scattered around for many generations on widely differing planets, populations did develop some odd distributions of allergy and immunity. But Laure suspected plain rudeness.
“I thought my letter made it clear,” Vandange said. “They insist they are from another continuum. One with impossible properties, including visibility from ours. Conveniently on the far side of the Dragon’s Head, so that we don’t see it here. Oh, yes,” he added quickly, “I’ve heard the arguments. That the whole thing is a misunderstanding due to our not having an adequate command of their language. That they’re really trying to say they came from—well, the commonest rationalization is a dense star cluster. But it won’t
work, you know. It won’t work at all.”
“Why not?” Laure asked.
“Come, now. Come, now. You must have learned some astronomy as part of your training. You must know that some things simply do not occur in the galaxy.”
“Uh—”
“They showed us what they alleged were lens-and-film photographs taken from, ah, inside their home universe.” Vandange bore down heavily on the sarcasm. “You saw copies, didn’t you? Well, now, where in the real universe do you find that kind of nebulosity—so thick and extensive that a ship can actually lose its bearings, wander around lost, using up its film among other supplies, until it chances to emerge in clear space? For that matter, assuming there were such a region, how could anyone capable of building a hyperdrive be so stupid as to go beyond sight of his beacon stars?”
“Uh . . . I thought of a cluster, heavily hazed, somewhat like the young clusters of the Pleiades type.”
“So did many Serievans,” Vandange snorted. “Please use your head. Not even Pleiadic clusters contain that much gas and dust. Besides, the verbal description of the Kirkasanters sounds like a globular cluster, insofar as it sounds like anything. But not much. The ancient red suns are there, crowded together, true. But they speak of far too many younger ones.
“And of far too much heavy metal at home. Which their ship demonstrates. Their use of alloying elements like aluminum and beryllium is incredibly parsimonious. On the other hand, electrical conductors are gold and silver, the power plant is shielded not with lead but with inert-coated osmium, and it burns plutonium which the Kirkasanters assert was mined!
“They were astonished that Serieve is such a light-metal planet. Or claimed they were astonished. I don’t know about that. I do know that this whole region is dominated by light elements. That its interstellar spaces are relatively free of dust and gas, the Dragon’s Head being the only exception and it merely in transit through our skies. That all this is even more true of the globular clusters, which formed in an ultratenuous medium, mostly before the galaxy had condensed to its present shape—which, in fact, practically don’t occur in the main body of the galaxy, but are off in the surrounding halo!”
Vandange stopped for breath and triumph.
“Well.” Laure shifted uneasily in his seat and wished Jaccavrie weren’t ten thousand kilometers away at the only spaceport. “You have a point. There are contradictions, aren’t there? I’ll bear what you said in mind when I, uh, interview the strangers themselves.”
“And you will, I trust, be wary of them,” Vandange said.
“Oh, yes. Something queer does seem to be going on.”
In outward appearance, the Kirkasanters were not startling. They didn’t resemble any of the human breeds that had developed locally, but they varied less from the norm than some. The fifteen men and five women were tall, robust, broad in chest and shoulders, slim in waist. Their skins were dark coppery reddish, their hair blue-black and wavy; males had some beard and mustache which they wore neatly trimmed. Skulls were dolichocephalic, faces disharmonically wide, noses straight and thin, lips full. The total effect was handsome. Their eyes were their most arresting feature, large, long-lashed, luminous in shades of gray, or green, or yellow.
Since they had refused—with an adamant politeness they well knew how to assume—to let cell samples be taken for chromosome analysis, Vandange had muttered to Laure about nonhumans in surgical disguise. But that the Ranger classed as the fantasy of a provincial who’d doubtless never met a live xeno. You couldn’t fake so many details, not and keep a viable organism. Unless, to be sure, happenstance had duplicated most of those details for you in the course of evolution . . .
Ridiculous, Laure thought. Coincidence isn’t that energetic.
He walked from Pelogard with Demring Lodden, captain of the Makt, and Demring’s daughter, navigator Graydal. The town was soon behind them. They found a trail that wound up into steeply rising hills, among low, gnarly trees which had begun to put forth leaves that were fronded and colored like old silver. The sun was sinking, the air noisy and full of salt odors. Neither Kirkasanter appeared to mind the chill.
“You know your way here well,” Laure said clumsily.
“We should,” Demring answered, “for we have been held on this sole island, with naught to do but ramble it when the reyad takes us.”
“Reyad?” Laure asked.
“The need to . . . search,” Graydal said. “To track beasts, or find what is new, or be alone in wild places. Our folk were hunters until not so long ago. We bear their blood.”
Demring wasn’t to be diverted from his grudge. “Why are we thus confined?” he growled. “Each time we sought an answer, we got an evasion. Fear of disease, need for us to learn what to expect—Ha, by now I’m half minded to draw my gun, force my way to our ship, and depart for aye!”
He was erect, grizzled, deeply graven of countenance and bleak of gaze. Like his men, he wore soft boots, a knee-length gown of some fine-scaled leather, a cowled cloak, a dagger and an energy pistol at his belt. On his forehead sparkled a diamond that betokened authority.
“Well, but, Master,” Graydal said, “here today we deal with no village witchfinders. Daven Laure is a king’s man, with power to act, knowledge and courage to act rightly. Has he not gone off alone with us because you said you felt stifled and spied on in the town? Let us talk as freefolk with him.”
Her smile, her words in the husky voice that Laure remembered from his recordings, were gentle. He felt pretty sure, though, that as much steel underlay her as her father, and possibly whetted sharper. She almost matched his height, her gait was tigerish, she was herself weaponed and diademmed. Unlike Laure’s close cut or Demring’s short bob, her hair passed through a platinum ring and blew free at full length. Her clothes were little more than footgear, fringed shorts, and thin blouse. However attractive, the sight did not suggest seductive feminity to the Ranger—when she wasn’t feeling the cold that struck through his garments. Besides, he had already learned that the sexes were mixed aboard the Makt for no other reason than that women were better at certain jobs than men. Every female was accompanied by an older male relative. The Kirkasanters were not an uncheerful folk, on the whole, but some of their ideals looked austere.
Nonetheless, Graydal had lovely strong features, and her eyes, under the level brows, shone amber.
“Maybe the local government was overcautious,” Laure said, “but don’t forget, this is a frontier settlement. Not many light-years hence, in that part of the sky you came from, begins the unknown. It’s true the stars are comparatively thin in these partsdistance between them about four parsecs—but still, their number is too great for us to do more than feel our way slowly forward. Especially when, in the nature of the case, planets like Serieve must devote most of their effort to developing themselves. So, when one is ignorant, one does best to be careful.”
He flattered himself that was a well-composed conciliatory speech. It wasn’t as oratorical as one of theirs, but they had lung capacity for a thinner atmosphere than this. He was disappointed when Demring said scornfully, “Our ancestors were not so timid.”
“Or else their pursuers were not,” Graydal laughed.
The captain looked offended. Laure hastily asked: “Have you no knowledge of what happened?”
“No,” said the girl, turned pensive. “Not in truth. Legends, found in many forms across all Kirkasant, tell of battle, and a shipful of people who fled far until at last they found haven. A few fragmentary records—but those are vague, save the Baorn Codex; and it is little more than a compendium of technical information which the Wisemen of Skribent preserved. Even in that case”—she smiled again— “the meaning of most passages was generally obscure until after our modern scientists had invented the thing described for themselves.”
“Do you know what records remain in Homeland?” Demring asked hopefully.
Laure sighed and shook his head. “No. Perhaps none, by now. Doubtless, in time, an ex
pedition will go from us to Earth. But after five thousand trouble-filled years—And your ancestors may not have started from there. They may have belonged to one of the first colonies.”
In a dim way, he could reconstruct the story. There had been a fight. The reasons—personal, familial, national, ideological, economic, whatever they were—had dropped into the bottom of the millennia between then and now. (A commentary on the importance of any such reasons.) But someone had so badly wanted the destruction of someone else that one ship, or one fleet, hounded another almost a quarter way around the galaxy.
Or maybe not, in a literal sense. It would have been hard to do. Crude as they were, those early vessels could have made the trip, if frequent stops were allowed for repair and resupply and refilling of the nuclear converters. But to this day, a craft under hyperdrive could only be detected within approximately a light-year’s radius by the instantaneous “wake” of space-pulses. If she lay doggo for a while, she was usually unfindable in the sheer stupendousness of any somewhat larger volume. That the hunter should never, in the course of many months, either have overhauled his quarry or lost the scent altogether, seemed conceivable but implausible.
Maybe pursuit had not been for the whole distance. Maybe the refugees had indeed escaped after a while, but—in blind panic, or rage against the foe, or desire to practice undisturbed a brand of utopianism, or whatever the motive was—they had continued as far as they possibly could, and hidden themselves as thoroughly as nature allowed.
In any case, they had ended in a strange part of creation: so strange that numerous men on Serieve did not admit it existed. By then, their ship must have been badly in need of a complete overhaul, amounting virtually to a rebuilding. They settled down to construct the necessary industrial base. (Think, for example, how much plant you must have before you make your first transistor.) They did not have the accumulated experience of later generations to prove how impossible this was.
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 59
