Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga

by Poul Anderson

  “Lost.” Demring stared down at his hands, clenched on the desk before him. When he looked up again, the bronze face was rigid with pain. “I was afraid of this,” he said. “It is why I was reluctant to come back at all. I feared the effect of disappointment on my crew. By now you must know one major respect in which we differ from you. To us, home, kinfolk, ancestral graves are not mere pleasures. They are an important part of our identities. We are prepared to explore and colonize, but not to be totally cut off.” He straightened in his seat and turned the confession into a strategic datum by finishing dry-voiced: “Therefore, the sooner we leave this degree of familiarity behind us and accept with physical renunciation the truth of what has happened to us—the sooner we get out of this cluster—the better for us.”

  “No,” Laure said. “I’ve given a lot of thought to your situation. There are ways to navigate here.”

  Demring did not show surprise. He, too, must have dwelt on contingencies and possibilities. Laure sketched them nevertheless:

  “Starting from outside the cluster, we can establish a grid of artificial beacons. I’d guess fifty thousand, in orbit around selected stars, would do. If each has its distinctive identifying signal, a spaceship can locate herself and lay a course. I can imagine several ways to make them. You want them to emit something that isn’t swamped by natural noise. Hyperdrive drones, shuttling automatically back and forth, would be detectable in a light-year’s radius. Coherent radio broadcasters on the right bands should be detectable at the same distance or better. Since the stars hereabouts are only light-weeks or light-months apart, an electromagnetic network wouldn’t take long to complete its linkups. No doubt a real engineer, turned loose on the problem, would find better answers than these.”

  “I know,” Demring said. “We on Makt have discussed the matter and reached similar conclusions. The basic obstacle is the work involved, first in producing that number of beacons, then—more significantly—in planting them. Many man-years, much shipping, must go to that task, if it is to be accomplished in a reasonable time.”

  “Yes.”

  “I like to think,” said Demring, “that the clans of Hobrok would not haggle over who was to pay the cost. But I have talked with men on Serieve. I have taken heed of what Graydal does and does not relay of her conversations with you. Yours is a mercantile civilization.”

  “Not exactly,” Laure said. “I’ve tried to explain—”

  “Don’t bother. We shall have the rest of our lives to learn about your Commonalty. Shall we turn about, now, and end this expedition?”

  Laure winced at the scorn but shook his head. “No, best we continue. We can make extraordinary findings here. Things that’ll attract scientists. And with a lot of ships buzzing around—”

  Demring’s smile had no humor. “Spare me, Ranger. There will never be that many scientists come avisiting. And they will never plant beacons throughout the cluster. Why should they? The chance of one of their vessels stumbling on Kirkasant is negligible. They will be after unusual stars and planets, information on magnetic fields and plasmas and whatever else is readily studied. Not even the anthropologists will have any strong impetus to search out our world. They have many others to work on, equally strange to them, far more accessible.”

  “I have my own obligations,” Laure said. “It was a long trip here. Having made it, I should recoup some of the cost to my organization by gathering as much data as I can before turning home.”

  “No matter the cost to my people?” Demring said slowly. “That they see their own sky around them, but nonetheless are exiles—for weeks longer?”

  Laure lost his patience. “Withdraw if you like, Captain,” he snapped. “I’ve no authority to stop you. But I’m going on. To the middle of the cluster, in fact.”

  Demring retorted in a cold flare: “Do you hope to find something that will make you personally rich, or only personally famous?” He reined himself in at once. “This is no place for impulsive acts. Your vessel is undoubtedly superior to mine. I am not certain, either, that Makt’s navigational equipment is equal to finding that advanced base where we must refuel her. If you continue, I am bound in simple prudence to accompany you, unless the risks you take become gross. But I urge that we confer again.”

  “Any time, Captain.” Laure cut his circuit.

  He sat then, for a while, fuming. The culture barrier couldn’t be that high. Could it? Surely the Kirkasanters were neither so stupid nor so perverse as not to see what he was trying to do for them. Or were they? Or was it his fault? He’d concentrated more on learning about them than on teaching them about him. Still, Graydal, at least, should know him by now.

  The ship sensed an incoming call and turned Laure’s screen back on. And there she was. Gladness lifted in him until he saw her expression.

  She said without greeting, winter in the golden gaze: “We officers have just been given a playback of your conversation with my father. What is your” (outphasing occurred, making the image into turbulence, filling the voice with staticlike ugliness, but he thought he recognized) “intention?” The screen blanked.

  “Maintain contact,” Laure told Jaccavrie.

  “Not easy in these gravitic fields,” the ship said.

  Laure jumped to his feet, cracked fist in palm, and shouted, “Is everything trying to brew trouble for me? Bring her back or so help me, I’ll scrap you!”

  He got a picture again, though it was blurred and watery and the voice was streaked with buzzes and whines, as if he called to Graydal across light-years of swallowing starfog. She said—was it a little more kindly?— “We’re puzzled. I was deputed to inquire further, since I am most . . . familiar . . . with you. If our two craft can’t find Kirkasant by themselves, why are we going on?”

  Laure understood her so well, after the watches when they talked, dined, drank, played music, laughed together, that he saw the misery behind her armor. For her people—for herself—this journey among mists was crueler than it would have been for him had he originated here. He belonged to a civilization of travelers; to him, no one planet could be the land of lost content. But in them would always stand a certain ridge purple against sunset, marsh at dawn, ice cloud walking over wind-gnawed desert crags, ancient castle, wingbeat in heaven . . . and always, always, the dear bright nights that no other place in man’s universe knew.

  They were a warrior folk. They would not settle down to be pitied; they would forge something powerful for themselves in their exile. But he was not helping them forget their uprootedness.

  Thus he almost gave her his true reason. He halted in time and, instead, explained in more detail what he had told Captain Demring. His ship represented a considerable investment, to be amortized over her service life. Likewise, with his training, did he. The time he had spent coming hither was, therefore, equivalent to a large sum of money. And to date, he had nothing to show for that expense except confirmation of a fairly obvious guess about the nature of Kirkasant’s surroundings.

  He had broad discretion—while he was in service. But he could be discharged. He would be, if his career, taken as a whole, didn’t seem to be returning a profit. In this particular case, the profit would consist of detailed information about a unique environment. You could prorate that in such terms as: scientific knowledge, with its potentialities for technological progress; space-faring experience; public relations—

  Graydal regarded him in a kind of horror. “You cannot mean . . . we go on . . . merely to further your private ends,” she whispered. Interference gibed at them both.

  “No!” Laure protested. “Look, only look, I want to help you. But you, too, have to justify yourselves economically. You’re the reason I came so far in the first place. If you’re to work with the Commonalty, and it’s to help you make a fresh start, you have to show that that’s worth the Commonalty’s while. Here’s where we start proving it. By going on. Eventually, by bringing them in a bookful of knowledge they didn’t have before.”

  Her g
aze upon him calmed but remained aloof. “Do you think that is right?”

  “It’s the way things are, anyhow,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if my attempts to explain my people to you haven’t glided right off your brain.”

  “You have made it clear that they think of nothing but their own good,” she said thinly.

  “If so, I’ve failed to make anything clear.” Laure slumped in his chair web. Some days hit a man with one club after the next. He forced himself to sit erect again and say:

  “We have a different ideal from you. Or no, that’s not correct. We have the same set of ideals. The emphases are different. You believe the individual ought to be free and ought to help his fellowman. We do, too. But you make the service basic, you give it priority. We have the opposite way. You give a man, or a woman, duties to the clan and the country from birth. But you protect his individuality by frowning on slavishness and on anyone who doesn’t keep a strictly private side to his life. We give a person freedom, within a loose framework of common-sense prohibitions. And then we protect his social aspect by frowning on greed, selfishness, callousness.”

  “I know,” she said. “You have—”

  “But maybe you haven’t thought how we must do it that way,” he pleaded. “Civilization’s gotten too big out there for anything but freedom to work. The Commonalty isn’t a government. How would you govern ten million planets? It’s a private, voluntary, mutual-benefit society, open to anyone anywhere who meets the modest standards. It maintains certain services for its members, like my own space rescue work. The services are widespread and efficient enough that local planetary governments also like to hire them. But I don’t speak for my civilization. Nobody does. You’ve made a friend of me. But how do you make friends with ten million times a billion individuals?”

  “You’ve told me before,” she said.

  And it didn’t register. Not really. Too new an idea for you, I suppose, Laure thought. He ignored her remark and went on:

  “In the same way, we can’t have a planned interstellar economy. Planning breaks down under the sheer mass of detail when it’s attempted for a single continent. History is full of cases. So we rely on the market, which operates as automatically as gravitation. Also as efficiently, as impersonally, and sometimes as ruthlessly—but we didn’t make this universe. We only live in it.”

  He reached out his hands, as if to touch her through the distance and the distortion. “Can’t you see? I’m not able to help your plight. Nobody is. No individual quadrillionaire, no foundation, no government, no consortium could pay the cost of finding your home for you. It’s not a matter of lacking charity. It’s a matter of lacking resources for that magnitude of effort. The resources are divided among too many people, each of whom has his own obligations to meet first.

  “Certainly, if each would contribute a pittance, you could buy your fleet. But the tax mechanism for collecting that pittance doesn’t exist and can’t be made to exist. As for free-will donations—how do we get your message across to an entire civilization, that big, that diverse, that busy with its own affairs?—which include cases of need far more urgent than yours.

  “Graydal, we’re not greedy where I come from. We’re helpless.”

  She studied him at length. He wondered, but could not see through the ripplings, what emotions passed across her face. Finally she spoke, not altogether ungently, though helmeted again in the reserve of her kindred, and he could not hear anything of it through the buzzings except: “. . . proceed, since we must. For a while, anyhow. Good watch, Ranger.”

  The screen blanked. This time he couldn’t make the ship repair the connection for him.

  At the heart of the great cluster, where the nebula was so thick as to be a nearly featureless glow, pearl-hued and shot with rainbows, the stars were themselves so close that thousands could be seen. The spaceships crept forward like frigates on unknown seas of ancient Earth. For here was more than fog; here were shoals, reefs, and riptides. Energies travailed in the plasma. Drifts of dust, loose planets, burnt-out suns lay in menace behind the denser clouds. Twice Makt would have met catastrophe had not Jaccavrie sensed the danger with keener instruments and cried a warning to sheer off.

  After Demring’s subsequent urgings had failed, Graydal came aboard in person to beg Laure that he turn homeward. That she should surrender her pride to such an extent bespoke how worn down she and her folk were. “What are we gaining worth the risk?” she asked shakenly.

  “We’re proving that this is a treasure house of absolutely unique phenomena,” he answered. He was also hollowed, partly from the long travel and the now constant tension, partly from the half estrangement between him and her. He tried to put enthusiasm in his voice. “Once we’ve reported, expeditions are certain to be organized. I’ll bet the foundations of two or three whole new sciences will get laid here.”

  “I know. Everything astronomical in abundance, close together and interacting.” Her shoulders drooped. “But our task isn’t research. We can go back now, we could have gone back already, and carried enough details with us. Why do we not?”

  “I want to investigate several planets yet, on the ground, in different systems,” he told her. “Then we’ll call a halt.”

  “What do they matter to you?”

  “Well, local stellar spectra are freakish. I want to know if the element abundances in solid bodies correspond.”

  She stared at him. “I do not understand you,” she said. “I thought I did, but I was wrong. You have no compassion. You led us, you lured us so far in that we can’t escape without your ship for a guide. You don’t care how tired and tormented we are. You can’t, or won’t, understand why we are anxious to live.”

  “I am myself,” he tried to grin. “I enjoy the process.”

  The dark head shook. “I said you won’t understand. We do not fear death for ourselves. But most of us have not yet had children. We do fear death for our bloodlines. We need to find a home, forgetting Kirkasant, and begin our families. You, though, you keep us on this barren search—why? For your own glory?”

  He should have explained then. But the strain and weariness in him snapped: “You accepted my leadership. That makes me responsible for you, and I can’t be responsible if I don’t have command. You can endure another couple of weeks. That’s all it’ll take.”

  And she should have answered that she knew his motives were good and wished simply to hear his reasons. But being the descendant of hunters and soldiers, she clicked heels together and flung back at him: “Very well, Ranger. I shall convey your word to my captain.”

  She left, and did not again board Jaccavrie.

  Later, after a sleepless “night,” Laure said, “Put me through to Makt’s navigator.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that,” said the woman-voice of his ship.

  “Why not?”

  “I presume you want to make amends. Do you know how she—or her father, or her young male shipmates that must be attracted to her—how they will react? They are alien to you, and under intense strain.”

  “They’re human!”

  Engines pulsed. Ventilators whispered. “Well?” said Laure.

  “I’m not designed to compute about emotions, except on an elementary level,” Jaccavrie said. “But please recollect the diversity of mankind. On Reith, for example, ordinary peaceful men can fall into literally murderous rages. It happens so often that violence under those circumstances is not a crime in their law. A Talatto will be patient and cheerful in adversity, up to a certain point: after which he quits striving, contemplates his God, and waits to die. You can think of other cultures. And they are within the ambience of the Commonalty. How foreign might not the Kirkasanters be?”

  “Um-m-m—”

  “I suggest you obtrude your presence on them as little as possible. That makes for the smallest probability of provoking some unforeseeable outburst. Once our task is completed, once we are bound home, the stress will be removed, and you can safely behave toward
them as you like.”

  “Well . . . you may be right.” Laure stared dull-eyed at a bulkhead. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Before long, he was too busy to fret much. Jaccavrie went at his direction, finding planetary systems that belonged to various stellar types. In each, he landed on an airless body, took analytical readings and mineral samples, and gave the larger worlds a cursory inspection from a distance.

  He did not find life. Not anywhere. He had expected that. In fact, he was confirming his whole guess about the inmost part of the cluster.

  Here gravitation had concentrated dust and gas till the rate of star production became unbelievable. Each time the cluster passed through the clouds around galactic center and took on a new load of material, there must have been a spate of supernovae, several per century for a million years or more. He could not visualize what fury had raged; he scarcely dared put his estimate in numbers. Probably radiation had sterilized every abode of life for fifty light-years around. (Kirkasant must, therefore, lie farther out—which fitted in with what he had been told, that the interstellar medium was much denser in this core region than in the neighborhood of the vanished world.)

  Nuclei had been cooked in stellar interiors, not the two, three, four star-generations which have preceded the majority of the normal galaxy—here, a typical atom might well have gone through a dozen successive supernova explosions. Transformation built on transformation. Hydrogen and helium remained the commonest elements, but only because of overwhelming initial abundance. Otherwise the lighter substances had mostly become rare. Planets were like nothing ever known before. Giant ones did not have thick shells of frozen water, nor did smaller ones have extensive silicate crusts. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sodium, aluminum, calcium were all but lost among . . . iron, gold, mercury, tungsten, bismuth, uranium and transuranics—On some little spheres Laure dared not land. They radiated too fiercely. A heavily armored robot might someday set foot on them, but never a living organism.