I suppose I'm lucky at that, Falkayn thought with a shudder. The pebble could have ripped right through Me. Of course, then the others would have been all right, with no more than a job of hull patching to do. But at his age Falkayn didn't think that was preferable.
He had to admire the way Captain Mukerji had gotten them here. By commandeering every charged accumulator aboard ship, he'd kept the engines going as far as Ivanhoe. Landing on the last gasp of energy, by guess, God, and aerodynamics, took uncommon skill. Naturally, the sensible thing had been to make for Aesca, the capital, rather than directly for Gilrigor. One did not normally bypass local authorities, who might take offense and cause trouble. Who could have known that the trouble was already waiting there?
But now the spaceship sat, without enough ergs left in her power packs to lift a single gravity sled. The accumulators in the depot were insufficient for transportation; besides, they were needed for the repair tools. The spare atomic generator couldn't recharge anything until it had been installed in the ship, for it functioned integrally with engines and controls. And a thousand wheelless kilometers separated the two. . . .
Something stirred. One of the fastigas brayed. Falkayn's heart jumped into his gullet. He sprang erect with a hand on his blaster.
A native male trod into the little circle of firelight. His fur was fluffed out against the night cold and the breath steamed from below his jaws. Falkayn saw that he carried a rapier and—yes, by Judas, there was a circle emblazoned on his breastplate! The flames turned his great eyes into pools of restless red.
"What do you want?" Falkayn squeaked. Furiously, he reminded himself that the Ivanhoan's hands were extended empty in token of peace.
"God give you good evening," the deep voice answered. "I saw your camp from afar. I did not expect to find an outlander."
"N-n-nor I a Sanctuary guard."
"My corps travels widely on missions for the Consecrates. I hight Vedolo Pario's-Child."
"I, I . . . David, uh, David Falkayn's-Child."
"You have been on a visit to the Marchwarden, have you not?"
"Yes. As if you did not know!" Falkayn spat. No, wait, watch your manners. We may still have a chance of talking the Consecrates into giving us a special dispensation about wheels. "Will you join me?"
Vedolo hunkered, wrapping his tail about his feet. When Falkayn sat down again, the autochthon loomed over him on the other side of the flames, mane like a forested mountain against the Milky Way. "Yes," Vedolo admitted, "everyone in Aesca knew you were bound hither, to see if that which your fellows laid in the sealed building was still intact. I trust it was?"
Falkayn nodded. Nobody in the early Iron Age could break into an inertium-plated shed with a Nakamura lock. "And Marchwarden Rebo was most kind," he said.
"That is not surprising, from what we know of him. As I understand the matter, you must get certain spare parts from the building to repair your ship. Will Rebo, then, help you transport them to Aesca?"
"He would if he could. But the main thing we need is too heavy for any conveyance available to him."
"My Consecrate masters have wondered somewhat about that," Vedolo said. "They were shown around your vessel, at their own request, and the damaged section looked quite large."
That must have been after I left, Falkayn thought. Probably Schuster was trying to ingratiate us with them. And I'll bet it misfired badly when they saw the circular shapes of things like meter dials—stiffened their hostility to us, even if they didn't say anything to him at the time.
But how can this character know that, unless he followed me here? And why would he do so? What is this mission of his?
"Your shipmates explained that they had means of transport," Vedolo continued. "That makes me wonder why you returned this quickly, and alone."
"Well . . . we did have a device in mind, but there appear to be certain difficulties—"
Vedolo shrugged. "I have no doubt that folk as learned as you can overcome any problems. You have powers that we thought belonged only to angels—or to Anti-God—" He broke off and extended a hand. "Your flame weapons, for instance, which the earlier visitors demonstrated. I was not present in Aesca at the time, and have always been most curious about them. Is that a weapon at your belt? Might I see it?"
Falkayn went rigid. He could not interpret every nuance in the Larsan voices, so strangely unresonant for lack of a nasal chamber. But—"No!" he snapped.
The delicate lips curled back over sharp teeth. "You are less than courteous to a servant of God," Vedolo said.
"I . . . uh . . . the thing is dangerous. You might get hurt."
Vedolo raised an arm in the air and lowered it again. "Look at me," he said. "Listen carefully. There is much you do not understand, you bumptious invaders. I have something to tell you—"
In Ivanhoe's thick air, a human heard preternaturally well. Or perhaps it was only that Falkayn was strung wire taut, trembling and sweating with the sense of aloneness before implacable enmity. He heard the rustle out in the brush and flung himself aside as the bowstring sang. The arrow buried its eight-sided shaft in the earth where he had been.
Vedolo sprang up, sword flashing free. Falkayn rolled over. A thornbush raked his cheek. "Kill him!" Vedolo bawled and lunged at the human. Falkayn bounced erect. The rapier blade snagged his coat as he dodged. He got his blaster out and fired point blank.
Light flared hellishly for an instant. Vedolo went over in smoke, with a horrible squelch. Afterimages flew in rags before Falkayn's eyes. He stumbled toward his animals, which plunged and brayed in their panic. Through the dark he heard someone cry, "I cannot see, I cannot see, I am blinded!" The flash would have been more dazzling to Ivanhoans than to him. But they'd recover in a minute, and then they'd have much better night vision than he did.
"Kill his fastigas!" called another voice.
Falkayn fired several bolts. That should make their aim poor for a while longer, he thought in chaos. His lead animal reared and struck at him. Its eyeballs rolled, crimson against shadow-black in the streaming flame light. Falkayn sidestepped the hooves, got one hand on the bridle, and clubbed the long nose with his gun barrel. "Hold still, you brute," he sobbed. "It's your life, too."
Feet blundered through the brush. A lion head came into view. As he saw the human, the warrior yelled and threw a spear. It gleamed past, flattened shaft and iron head. Falkayn was too busy mounting to retaliate.
Somehow he got into the saddle. The remount shrieked as two arrows smote home in its belly. Falkayn cut it loose with a blaster shot.
"Get going!" he screamed. He struck heels into the sides of his beast. The fastiga broke into a rocking gallop, the pack animal behind at the end of its reins.
An ax hewed and missed. An arrow buzzed over his shoulder. Then he was beyond the assassins, back on the Sun's Way, westward bound again.
How many are there? it whirled in him. Half a dozen? They must have left their own fastigas at a distance, so they could sneak up on me. I've got that much head start. But no remount anymore, and they certainly do.
They were sent to waylay me, that's clear, to cause delay that might prove fatal while the others wondered what had happened and searched for me. They don't know about my radio. Not that that makes any difference now. They've got to catch me, before I get to Rebo's protection.
I wonder if I can beat them there.
With hysterical sardonicism: Anyhow, I guess we can forget about that special dispensation.
III
The What Cheer sat in a field a kilometer north of Aesca. By now thousands of local feet had tramped a path across it; the Ivanhoans were entirely humanlike in coming to gape at a novelty. But Captain Krishna Mukerji always rode into town.
"Really, Martin, you should, too," he said nervously. "Especially when the situation has all at once become so delicate. They don't consider it dignified for anyone of rank to arrive at the, er, the Sanctuary on foot."
"Dignity, schmignity," said Master Polesotechn
ician Schuster. "I should wear out my heart and my rump on one of those evil-minded animated derricks? I rode a horse once on Earth. I never repeat my mistakes." He waved a negligent hand. "Besides, I've already told the Consecrates, and anyone else that asked, the reason I go places on foot, and don't bother with ceremony, and talk friendly with low-life commoners, is that I've progressed beyond the need for outward show. That's a new idea here, simplicity as a virtue. It's got the younger Consecrates quite excited."
"Yes, I daresay this culture is most vulnerable to new ideas," Mukerji said. "There have been none for so long that the Larsans have no antibodies against them, so to speak, and can easily get feverish. . . . But the heads of the Sanctuary appear to realize this. If you cause too much disturbance with your comments and questions, they may not wait for us to starve. They may whip up an outright attack, casualties and the fear of a punitive expedition be damned."
"Don't worry," Schuster said. Another man in his position might have been offended; a first-year Polesotechnic cadet was taught not to clash head-on with the basics of an alien creature, and he had been a Master for two decades. But his face, broad and saber-nosed under sleek black hair, remained blandly smiling. "In all my conversations with these people, feeling them out, I've never yet challenged any of their beliefs. I don't intend to start now. In fact, I'm simply going to continue my seminar over there, as if we hadn't a care in the universe. To be sure, if I can steer the talk in a helpful direction—" He gathered a sheaf of papers and left the cabin: a short tubby man in vest and ruffled shirt, culottes and hose, as elegant as if he were bound for a reception on Earth.
Emerging from the air lock and heading down the gangway, he drew his mantle about him with a shiver. To avoid eardrum popping, the hull was kept at Ivanhoan air pressure, but not temperature. Br-r-r, he thought. I don't presume to criticize the good Lord, but why did He make the majority of stars type M?
The afternoon landscape reached somber, to his eyes, as far as he could see down the valley. Grainfields were turning bluish with the first young shoots of the year. Peasants, male, female, and young, hoed a toilsome way down those multitudinous rows. The square mud huts in which they lived stood at no great separation, for every farm was absurdly small. Nevertheless families did not outgrow the capacity of the land; disease and periodic famines kept the population stable. To hell with any sentimental guff about cultural autonomy, Schuster reflected. This is one society that ought to be kicked apart.
He reached the highroad and started toward the city. There was considerable traffic, food and raw materials coming from the hinterlands, handmade goods going back. Professional porters trotted under loads too heavy for Schuster even to think about. Fastigas dragged travois with vast bumping and clatter. A provincial Warden and his bodyguard galloped through, horns hooting, and the commoners jumped aside for their lives. Schuster waved to the troop as amiably as he did to everyone else that hailed him. No use standing on ceremony. In the couple of Earth-weeks since the ship landed, the Aescans had lost awe of the strangers. Humans were no weirder to them than the many kinds of angel and hobgoblin in which they believed, and seemed to be a good deal more mortal. True, they had remarkable powers; but then, so did any village wizard, and the Consecrates were in direct touch with God.
Not having been threatened by war in historical times, the city was unwalled. But its area was pretty sharply defined just the same, huts, tenements, and the mansions of the wealthy jammed close together along the contorted trails that passed for streets. Crowds moved by bazaars where shopkeepers' wives sang songs about their husbands' wares. Trousers and tunics, manes and fur, glowed where the red light slanted through shadows that were thick to Schuster's vision. The flat but deep Ivanhoan voices made a surf around him, overlaid by the shuffle of feet, clop of hooves, clangor from a smithy. Acrid stenches roiled in his nostrils.
It was a relief to arrive at one of the Three Bridges. When the Sanctuary guards had let him by, he walked alone. Only those who had business with the Consecrates passed here.
The Trammina River cut straight through town, oily with the refuse of a hundred thousand inhabitants. The bridges were arcs of a circle, soaring in stone to the island in the middle of the water. (Falkayn had relayed from Rebo the information that you were allowed to use up to one third of the sacred figure for an important purpose.) That island was entirely covered by the enormous step-sided pyramid of the Sanctuary. Buildings clustered on the lower terraces, graceful white structures with colonnaded porticos, where the Consecrates lived and worked. The upper pyramid held only staircases, leading to the top. There the Eternal Fire roared forth, vivid yellow tossing against the dusky-green sky. Obviously natural gas was being piped from some nearby well; but the citadel was impressive in every respect.
Except for what it cost those poor devils of peasants in forced labor and taxes, Schuster thought, and what it's still costing them in liberty. The fact that thousands of diverse barbarian cultures existed elsewhere on the planet proved that Pharaonism didn't come any more naturally to the Ivanhoans than it did to men.
White-robed Consecrates, most of their manes gray with age, and their blue-clad acolytes walked about the pyramid on their business, aloof in pride. Schuster's cheery greetings earned him little but frigid stares. He didn't let it bother him but bustled on to the fourth-step House of the Astrologers.
In a spacious room within, a score or so of the younger Consecrates sat around a table. "Good day, good day," Schuster beamed. "I trust I am not late?"
"No," said Herktaskor. A lean, intense-eyed being, he carried himself with something of the martial air of his Warden father. "Save that we have been eagerly awaiting the revelation you promised us this morning, when you borrowed that copy of the Book of Stars."
"Well, then," Schuster said, "let us get on with it." He went to the head of the table and spread out his papers. "I trust you have mastered those principles of mathematics that I explained to you in the past several days?"
A number of them looked unsure, but other shaggy heads nodded. "Indeed," said Herktaskor. His voice sank. "Oh, glorious!"
Schuster took out a fat cigar and got it going while he squinted at them. He had to hope they were telling the truth; for suddenly his little project, which had begun as a pastime, and in the vague hope of winning friends and sneaking some new concepts into this frozen society, had grown most terribly urgent. Last night Davy Falkayn radioed that shattering news about wheels being taboo, and now—
He thought, though, that Herktaskor was neither lying nor kidding himself. The Consecrate was brilliant in his way. And certainly there was a good foundation on which to build. Mathematics and observational astronomy were still live enterprises in Larsum. They had to be, when religion claimed that astrology was the means of learning God's will. Algebra and geometry had long been well developed. The step from them to basic calculus was really not large. Even dour Sketulo, the Chief of Sanctuary, had not objected to Schuster's organizing a course of lectures, as long as he stayed within the bounds of dogma. Quite apart from intellectual curiosity, it would be useful for the learned class to be able to calculate such things as the volumes and areas of unusual solids; it would make still tighter their grip on Larsum's economy.
"I planned to go on with the development of those principles," Schuster said. "But then I got to wondering if you might not be more interested in certain astrological implications. You see, by means of the calculus it is possible to predict where the moons and planets will be, far more accurately than hitherto."
Breath sucked in sharply between teeth. Even through the robes, the man could see how bodies tensed around the table.
"The Book of Stars gave me your tabulated observations, accumulated over many centuries," he went on. "These noontide hours I have weighed them in my mind." Actually, he had fed them to the ship's computer. "Here are the results of my calculations."
He drew a long breath of tobacco smoke. The muscles tightened in his belly. Every word must now be chos
en with the most finicking care, for a wrong one could put a sword between his guts.
"I have hesitated to show you this," he said, "because at first glance it seems to contradict the Word of God as you have explained it to me. However, after pondering the question and studying the stars for an answer, I felt sure that you are intelligent enough to see the deeper truth behind deceptive appearances."
He paused. "Go on," Herktaskor urged.
"Let me approach the subject gradually. It is often a necessity of thought to assume something which one knows is not true. For example, the Consecrates as a whole possess large estates, manufactories, and other property. Title is vested in the Sanctuary. Now you know very well that the Sanctuary is neither a person nor a family. Yet for purposes of ownership, you act as if it were. Similarly, in surveying a piece of land, you employ plane trigonometry, though you know the world is actually round. . . ." He went on for some time, until he felt reasonably sure that everybody present understood the concept of a legal or mathematical fiction.
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