World without Stars

by Poul Anderson

  “They told me I should. They want your cooperation, you see.”

  I made a last attempt. “Try to think,” I said. “Your reasoning ability can’t be too much impaired yet.”

  “On the contrary,” he smiled, “you wouldn’t believe what a difference it makes, not to be insecure and obsessed any longer.”

  “So think, blast you! I won’t remind you of what the rest of us want to get back to, everything from friends and families to a decent yellow sunlight. You’ve dropped those hopes. But you’ll live here for centuries, piling up data that can’t be removed, till you go mindless.”

  “No. They can help me better than any machine.”

  “They’re not supernatural! They can’t do everything—can’t do a fraction of what we can—why, we’ve personally outlived a dozen of them, end to end.”

  “So I’ve told them. They say it makes us still more valuable. They’re not jealous, being reborn themselves.”

  “You don’t believe that guff. Do you?”

  “A symbolic truth doesn’t have to be a scientific truth. As a race, at least, they’re more ancient than we dayflies can imagine.”

  “But … but even in psychology, mentalistics—they’re primitive. They don’t speak directly to you, mind to mind, do they?” He shook his head. “I thought not,” I went on. “There are human adepts back home who could. If that’s what you need, you can get it better from them.”

  “I tried them once. No good. Not the same as here.”

  “No,” I said bleakly, “at home you weren’t offered any return to a womb. You weren’t presented with any self-appointed gods. You weren’t tinkered with. Human therapists only tried to help you be your own man.”

  His blandness was not moved. “Evidently I didn’t want that, down inside,” he answered. “Please understand. I don’t bear you ill will. In fact, I love you. I love everything in the universe. I could never do that before.” He broke off for a moment, then finished in a flat voice: “This is being explained to you so that you’ll see you’re beaten and won’t do anything foolish that might get you hurt. We humans have an important role to play in this world.”

  He turned and walked off.

  My radio had been confiscated, of course. Rorn used his own set to call ahead. His message was exactly what our men hoped for. The Niao were a civilized people who would be glad to supply us with workers in exchange for what we could teach. The brief stay of the Yonderfolk had wakened an appetite for progress in them. I was remaining behind for the time being to arrange details, and treated like an emperor. The Azkashi could easily be persuaded to release Valland. Rorn was bringing the first work gang—a large one, for the initial heavy labor of salvage.

  When the wild edge of Lake Silence hove in view, I was taken below. Tied to an upright, I heard snatches of what went on in the following hours. The first exuberant hails, back and forth; the landing; the opened gates; the peaceful behavior, until all possible suspicions were lulled; the signal, and the seizure of each man by three or four Niao who had quietly moved within grabbing distance of him. I heard the Ai Chun wallow past my prison, bound ashore. I sat in darkness and heard the rain begin.

  At last a soldier came to unfasten me. I shouldered my pack and went ahead of him, down a Jacob’s ladder to a canoe, through a lashing blindness of rain and wind to the beach. Day had now come, tinting the driven spears of water as if with blood. My goggles were blinkered with storm; I shoved them onto my forehead and squinted through red murk. I couldn’t see our spaceship. The headland where our compound stood was a dim bulk on my left. No one was visible except my giant guard and the half dozen canoe paddlers. We started off. My boots squelched in mud.

  Well, I thought, hope wasn’t absolutely dead. After a while, getting no report from us, our company would send another expedition. Presumably that crew would take less for granted than we had, and avoid shipwreck. In time, a human base might be founded on this planet. They might eventually learn about us, or deduce the truth after seeing things we’d been forced to make for the Ai Chun.

  Only the downdevils, with Rorn to advise them, would have provided against that somehow. And would probably, after we had gotten their projects organized for them, take time off to give us a good brainwashing and shape us all into Rorns.

  I stumbled. The guard nudged me with a hard thumb.

  Rage exploded. I wheeled about, yanked his knife from the sheath, and slashed. The flint blade was keen as any steel. It laid open the burly arm that grabbed at me. Yellow blood spouted under a yellow flare of lightning.

  The guard roared. I broke into a run. He came after me. His webbed feet did not sink in the mud like mine and his strides were monstrous. He overhauled me and made a snatch. I dodged. His tail swung and knocked me off my feet.

  Rain slapped me in the eyes. He towered above me, impossibly huge. I saw him bend to yank me up again. He kept on bending. His legs buckled. He went down on his belly beside me, trying to staunch the arterial flow with his good hand. His hearts, necessarily pumping more strongly than mine which had hemoglobin to help, drained him in a few seconds.

  The boat crew milled closer. They could have taken me. But they had been bred into peacefulness. I reeled erect and stabbed the air with the knife I still held. They flinched away. I ran from them.

  A glance behind revealed that one dashed off to report. The rest trailed me at a distance. I made inland. Thunder bawled in my ears. Rain hissed before the wind. My pack dragged me and the breath began to hurt my throat.

  The Niao would not leave me. They kept yelping so that when the soldiers had been alerted they could find us. I was no woodsman, least of all on a strange planet. I belonged out among the clean stars that I’d never see again. There was not one chance of my shaking pursuit, not even in the thickest part of the woods that now loomed before me.

  I glanced down at my stone knife. There was a release. I stuck it in my belt and kept going.

  The forest closed about me. My cosmos was leaves, trunks, withes that slapped my face, vines that caught at my ankles, as I plowed through muck. My eyes were nearly useless here. Swamp rottenness choked my nostrils. I heard some wild animal scream.

  It was following me. No … those were Niao voices … they wailed. A lupine baying resounded in answer. I stopped to pant. In a moment’s astounded clarity I knew that of course the Pack had kept a suspicious watch on us. Beneath every fury and fear, I must have remembered and hoped—

  When the Azkashi surrounded me I could just see them, four who looked saurian in the gloom. Their weapons were free and the rain hadn’t yet washed off every trace of the butchery they had done.

  I summoned my few words of their language and gasped, “We go. Shkil come. Go … ya-Valland.”

  “Yes,” said one of them. “Swiftly.”

  Their pace was unmerciful. I’ve only the haziest recollection of that trip into the hills. Memory ends with a red sun in a purple sky, well over the crags and treetops that surround the lairs. Hugh Valland meets me. He’s kept himself and his outfit clean, but hasn’t depilated in some while. His beard is thick, Sol golden, and he stands taller than a god. “Welcome, skipper!” his call rings to me. “Come on, let’s get you washed and give you a doss and some chow. Lord, you look like Satan with a hangover.” I fall into his arms.

  I woke on a bed of boughs and skins, within a painted cave. A native female brought me a bowl of soup made from my rations. She howled out the entrance, and presently Valland came in.

  “How’re you doin’?” he asked.

  “Alive,” I grunted.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I can imagine. Stiff, sore, and starved. But you aren’t in serious shape, far’s I can see, and we’ve got a lot of talkin’ to do.” He propped me in a sitting position and gave me a stimulo from his medikit. Some strength flowed into me, with an odd, detached clearness of thought.

  I looked past Valland’s cross-legged form, through the cave obscurity to the mouth. There was considerable stir outside. Armed
males kept trotting back and forth; the smoke of campfires drifted in to me; I heard the barks and growls of a multitude.

  “S’pose you tell me exactly what happened,” Valland said.

  After I finished, he uttered one low whistle of surprise. “Didn’t think the downdevils had that much goin’ for them.” He extracted his pipe, stuffed and kindled it, while he scowled.

  “We haven’t got much time,” he said. “I’m damn near out of tobacco.”

  “I’m more concerned about food,” I said. “I remember what you took along and what I was carrying. Between us, we might last till sundown.”

  “Uh-huh. I was tryin’ to put the idea in a more genteel way.” He puffed for a bit. “The drums sent word ahead to us here, about the Herd enterin’ our camp and then about you bein’ on your way to us. That last was the best thing you could possibly have done, skipper. Ya-Kela couldn’t have protected me for long if the Pack figured my people had sold out. As was, I got Rorn on the radio. He was pretty frank about havin’ taken over on behalf of the downdevils, once he knew I knew you’d run off. He said I should try to escape from here, and he’d send a troop to meet me. I told him where he could billet his troop, and we haven’t talked since. My guess was he’d turned coat out of sheer funk. I didn’t realize what’d actually happened to him. The poor fool.”

  Hopelessness welled beneath the drug in me. “What can we do except die?” I asked.

  “Hadn’t you any notions when you cut out?”

  “Nothing special. To die like a free man, maybe.”

  Valland snorted. “Don’t be romantic. You haven’t got the face for it. The object of the game is to stay alive, and get back our people and our stuff. Mary O’Meara’s waitin’ on Earth.”

  That last sentence was the soft one, but something about it yanked me upright in my bed. God of Creation, I thought; can a woman have that much power to give a man?

  “Relax,” Valland said. “We can’t do anything right now.”

  “I gather … you’ve been busy, though,” I said.

  “Sure have. I stopped bein’ a prisoner the minute ya-Kela got across to the Pack that my folk were now also downdevil victims. He’d been ready to trust me anyhow, for some while.”

  Afterward, when I knew more Azkashi, I was told that Valland had been along on a hunt in which a twyhorn charged past a line of spearmen and knocked down the One. Before the animal could gore him, Valland had bulldogged it. Coming from a higher gravity was helpful, of course, but I doubt that many men could have done the same.

  “The problem’s been to convince ’em we aren’t helpless,” Valland said. “They still have trouble believin’ that. Throughout their past, they’ve won some skirmishes with the Herd, but lost the wars. I had an ace to play, however. The Herd’s crossed the lake, I said. They’ll build an outpost around our ship. Then, to support that outpost, they’ll call in their loggers and farmers. If you don’t wipe ’em out now, I said, you’ll lose these huntin’ grounds too.” He blew a dragon puff of smoke. “We got the other Packs to agree in principle that everybody should get together and attack this thing while it’s small.”

  “Stone Age savages against energy guns?” I protested.

  “Well, not all that bad. I’ve done soldierin’ now and then, here and there, so I can predict a few things. Rorn can’t put guns in any other human hands. He’ll demonstrate their use to the Herd soldiers. But you know what lousy shots they’ll be, with so little practice. Cortez had good modern weapons too, for his time, and men a lot better disciplined than the Aztecs; but when they got riled enough, they threw him out of Mexico.” Thoughtfully: “He made a comeback later, with the whole Spanish power behind him. We have to prevent that.”

  “What do you propose to do?”

  “Right now,” Valland said, “I’m still tryin’ to hammer into the local heads some notion of unified command and action under doctrine. Fightin’ looks easy by comparison.”

  “But—Hugh, listen, the Packs may outnumber the Herd detachment, but they’ll have to charge across open ground. I don’t care how poorly laid an energy barrage is, they can’t survive. Not to mention arrows. Those Herd archers are good.”

  “So who says we’ll charge?” Valland countered. “For our main operation, anyhow. I’ve got a plan. It should take the downdevils by surprise. Everything you’ve told me fits in with what ya-Kela knows, and it all goes to show they can’t read minds. If they could, they wouldn’t need to transmit words through those midget sensitives. The downdevils read Rorn’s emotional pattern, all right, and shifted it for him. But that was done on a basic, almost glandular level. They couldn’t’ve known what he was thinkin’, nor what we think.”

  “Our men are hostages,” I reminded him. “Not to speak of our food tanks and the other equipment we need for survival.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” His tone was mild and implacable. “We’ll have to take chances, for the men as well as ourselves. Because what have they really got to lose? If we get in fast—”

  A shadow darkened the cave mouth. As he joined us, I recognized ya-Kela. He hailed me with the courtesy that most savages throughout the universe seem to use, before he turned to Valland. I couldn’t follow his report, but he sounded worried.

  Valland nodded. “’Scuse me,” he said. “Business.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Oh, one of those silly things that’re always comin’ up. Some Pack chiefs decided they don’t like my ideas. If cut-and-run guerrilla fightin’ by little independent gangs was good enough for granddaddy, it’s good enough for them, and to hell with this foreign nonsense about unity and assigned missions. Ya-Kela can’t talk sense into them. I’ll have to. If we let anyone go home, pretty soon everybody will.”

  “Do you think you can stop them?” I fretted, for I knew something about pride and politics myself.

  “I been doin’ it, since we started tins project. Now get some rest. You’ll need your strength soon.” Valland left with ya-Kela. He had to stoop to get out.

  I lay there, cursing my weakness that would not let me go too. Noises came to me, shouts, yelps, snarls. There was the sound of a scuffle; Valland told me later that he had had to Underline a logical point with his fist. But presently I heard notes like bugle and drum. I heard a human voice lifted in song, and I remembered some of those songs, ancient as they were, Starbuck and La Marseillaise and The March of the Thousand, forged by a race more warlike than any on this world; then he set his instrument to bagpipe skirls and the hair stood up on my spine. The Packs howled. They didn’t comprehend the language, they hardly grasped the idea of an army, but they recognized strong magic and they would follow as long as the magician lived.

  XIII

  WE CAME DOWN to the shore well south of our objective. By then time was short for Valland and me: little remained of our powdered food. And what had gone on with our people these Earth-days of their captivity? Nevertheless we had to wait on the weather.

  That didn’t take long, though, on this planet. Rain was succeeded by fog. The Packs divided themselves. A very small contingent went with Valland, a larger one with me; the bulk of them trailed through the woods, ya-Kela at their head.

  I was in charge of the waterborne operation, ya-Kela my lieutenant. He was also my interpreter, being among the few who could understand my pidgin Azkashi; for I had no omnisonor to help. And as far as the crews were concerned, he was the commander; I didn’t have Valland’s prestige either. But this was the key to our whole strategy. The Packs kept dugouts by the lake. They had never used them for anything but fishing. How could it be expected that they would assault what amounted to a navy?

  We glided through clouds that were chill and damp, redgray like campfire smoke. Nearly blind, I could only crouch in the bow of my hollow log while six paddles drove me forward. The Azkashi saw better, well enough to maintain direction and formation. But even they were enclosed in a few meters of sight. And so were our enemies.

  I am no warrior. I hate
bloodletting, and my guts knot at the thought that soon they may be pierced. Yet in that hour of passage I wasn’t much afraid. Better to die in combat than starve to death. I dwelt on the people and places I loved. Time went slowly, but at the end it was as if no time had passed at all.

  “We are there,” ya-Eltokh breathed in my ear. “I see the thing ahead.”

  “Back water, then,” I ordered unnecessarily; for my watch said we were in advance of the chosen moment. The waiting that followed was hard. We couldn’t be sure that some boatload of impulsive hunters would not jump the gun and give us away. With a fortress to take, we depended on synchrony as well as on surprise. When the minute came, I screamed my command.

  We shot forward. The spaceship appeared before me, vast and wetly shimmering in the mist. Two canoes lay at the ladder we had built to the above-water airlock. Their paddlers shrieked and fled as we emerged.

  I grabbed a rung. Ya-Eltokh pushed ahead of me, up to the open entrance. A Herd soldier thrust down with a spear. Blowguns sighed at my back. The giant yelled, toppled, and splashed into the lake. Ya-Eltokh bounded inside. His tomahawk thudded.

  My mates boiled after him, forcing the doorway. I came last. Our crew had to be first, for only I could guide our party through the ship. But my knowledge made me too precious to spend in grabbing a toehold.

  I got into battle aplenty, though. Three of the Pack were down, ripped by soldiers who had come pounding at the alarm. Ya-Eltokh dodged, slashing with his ax at two huge shapes. One of them spied me and charged. Valland had had something new made for me, a crossbow. I had already cocked it. I pulled the trigger and the bolt slammed home. The corridor boomed with his fall.

  Then more of our people were aboard. They formed a living wall around me. I cocked and fired as fast as I was able. It wasn’t much help, but I did down a couple of worker Niao who had joined the fray. Ax, knife and spear raged around us. Howling echoed from metal.

  We needed only hold fast for some minutes, till an overwhelming force of hunters had boarded. There weren’t any guards on the ship; no one had looked for this maneuver of ours. When the last of them fell, the workers threw down the tools they had been using for weapons. I tried to stop my people from massacring them, but too much ancient grudge had to be paid off.