The Avatar

by Anderson, Poul

  Fetching the captain unbeknownst presented more of a problem.

  Word came. The door swung aside. A conveyor thrust Williwaw halfway out. The cranes laid hold on the boat, hauled her forth, swung her around so her blast wouldn't touch the mother vessel. In shape her seventy-five-meter length suggested a torpedo, fins at the rear, wings recessed near the waist, lanceolate boom projecting from the nose.

  Vapor gushed from her, too hot to be visible. The cranes let go and she accelerated. A portion of the water condensed kilometers behind, making a cloud that roiled spectral white before dissipating. It was an inefficient system compared to a plasma drive, but it could endure rough passage through an atmosphere. For all her size and the unimaginable energies that her engine released and channeled, Chinook was too fragile for that, or for even landing anywhere.

  Obedient to an officially approved flight plan, Williwaw spent a couple of hours curving toward the planet before she reached the fringes of its stratosphere. Much velocity remained to be shed: slowly, lest she burn. Stubby wings extended. The rockets fell silent; valves closed them off. For a time the pilot and his computer nursed the boat through a long glide. Eventually she was at a level where the jet motors on the wings had a sufficient intake. He kicked in power to them. A rising whine filled the cockpit. Still furiously decelerating, Williwaw was now an aircraft. Solid-state optical transmitters revealed to the pilot a sea of sunlit clouds, far and far below. He had half the globe to round before he landed.

  The moons of Demeter orbit faster than does the Moon of Earth. On this night, Erion was down and Persephone would not rise till after dawn. Thus a larger number of stars showed than before, soft in a violet-blue dusk. The hour was past for torchflies and choristers; quietness dwelt here. Walled by shadow masses of forest, the lake sheened sable. Across the middle of it, Zeus cast a perfect glade. Because the vale which cupped it lay much less high than the cave, warmth lingered, to raise a ghost of smoky fragrance from the sunbloom growing amidst lodix on the open ground where Brodersen and Caitlin sat.

  He stirred upon springy turf. It was becoming damp. "Damnation, Pegeen," he said, "you cannot go, and that's that." At the back of his mind he felt how his vehemence profaned the peace around them.

  She curled calf beneath knee, leaned against him, rumpled his hair, nibbled his ear. "I love you when you're firm," she murmured. "You may take that in any sense you please."

  "This is ridiculous! How often must I repeat? You've no training-"

  "Yourself have promised you'd give me the same, and the learning is easy and there's nothing to equal free-fall screwing."

  "Be serious, will you? I meant a short pleasure trip, no further than to Aphrodite or Ares."

  She dropped her hand to rest her weight on it. Forearm, hip, and thigh continued pressing gently on him. He felt her breath on his cheek as her tone dropped mirth. "Well, then it's serious I will be, dear wurra-wurra-wart. You've confessed you'll have no quartermaster and, what's worse, no medical officer. Can I not be both? Should I let you far off into danger without me when I might help? Think also of your crew, Captain Brodersen. Would you be denying them what might save a life, to be free of fear on my account?"

  "But the trip won't be dangerous."

  "In that case, why refuse me the experience? You know what flying barracks the emigrant ships are. I've more sense of a universe around me here or, aye, watching a newscast from space than ever I got aboard isabella."

  "Well, uh, well, no telling what'll happen. We're steering mighty close to the wind, and-uh-"

  "And your mistress must not be at your side? Daniel, Daniel, it's angry I'd be at you were I not so disappointed."

  "Oh, hell, Pegeen!" He reached around to draw her closer yet.

  "Of course," she said slyly, "if you fear scandal, I could keep decorous with you. Sure some boy aboard would console me."

  "Stop that, you witch." He had known this was the last skirmish in a fight she'd won, by her special weapons, soon after they reached this place. "I give up. You're on." The surrender gladdened him. She sealed her victory by waiting for him to kiss her- thirty seconds? -though immediately after, nobody knew quite who was in charge.

  They halted there, since the boat might appear at any minute, and sat for a while letting serenity well up within them. Presently Caitlin rose. "I will make my farewells," she said. He saw her clear through the twilight, but changed by it to a sight not altogether real, the hue of the Milky Way, moving around the meadow. She dipped a hand into the lake and drank, she plucked a sunbloom petal and crushed it lovingly between lips and teeth, she cast arms around a man-tall koost and hugged the bush to her, burying her face in its leaves. . . . At last she came back to him.

  "You really try to be part of all this, don't you?" he half whispered.

  "No, I am." Her hand swept an arc from stars to water and across the woods. "And you are, Dan. Everything is. Why cannot people feel it?"

  "We can't be you, I suppose. You said something once about maybe having faerie blood. I thought it was just your figure of speech. Tonight I wonder."

  She stared before her. "I wonder my own self."

  "You mean that? I could pretty near believe it, old agnostic me."

  "Oh, no, I'd not give you any mystical blarney. Not even from Yeats will I buy his metaphysics." She looked upward. "Yet sure, and this is a strange cosmos, more strange than we can guess, is that not so, my joy?"

  He nodded. "The size of it alone. I've tried and tried to imagine a light-year, a single light-year, but of course I can't. Then I've tried to imagine the smallness of an atom, and can't. Wave mechanics. Background radiation left over from the Beginning. Expansion forever -into what? Black holes. Quasars. T machines. The Others. Yes." After a silence, touching her: "I think, though, you were getting at a particular mystery."

  "Well, it was a queer story my mother told me, and she a good Catholic."

  "Want to tell me?"

  "That I do, but och, I don't know how. For it is not really a story, anything that truly happened or else was a lie. No, it is in the way and the time of telling, and herself who told it. Would you indeed like to hear?"

  He tightened his arm about her. "Why do you ask me that?"

  Caitlin responded. "Thank you, dear bear that you are.

  "You must first understand, Mother was from Lahinch in County Clare. That's among the parts of Eire which grew poor during the Troubles, until none were left but smallholders, and many of them unlettered. There again they believe in the Slieve, if ever they stopped believing, though I suppose Lady Gregory would not recognize their tales. And knowing about the Others, why under the winter stars should they not believe?"

  Out in the lake, the great black bulk of a wassergeist surfaced, uttered its eldritch whistle, and sank.

  "Well, as I've told you before, Mother came to Dublin on a scholarship to study music, after a professor on a fishing trip had heard her sing," Caitlin went on. "But she was only a little in the opera, for she married Padraig Muiryan and soon bore him two children. Then she fell homesick. He, a physician, could not take free, but he sent her back on holiday to the cottage of her parents, and glad she was to roam about that countryside she loved."

  Caitlin sat straight, twining her fingers hard together, searching her thoughts. Brodersen waited. Her profile against the light night was dear to him.

  "This she related long afterward, and I the first to hear except her priest. My father, that good dry man, fifteen years older than she, would have called it a mere dream, as likely it was. But Mother was seeking to reach me, when she saw me breaking from faith and family both. She wanted me to know that she too had felt what I did, so that she could warn me to beware.

  "And yet she could say no more than this. She had been on a week's tramp, where she would sleep at whatever house the sunset found her near, and they always happy to meet a new person. But this moonlit night beneath Slieve Bernagh was so fair that she spread her bedroll on the moss, and late she lay while her visi
on lost itself upwards.

  "Then there came a music out of the moonlight like flame, and one whose beauty was stich that she wept to see, and he asked her would she go into the mountain with him. No woman born could have refused, or would have been a saint if she could, my mother told me. She left the sod like a bird, and he nested her in his arms and bore her away. But as for what followed, she could only speak of rainbows and suns, purple and gold, wind and wild seas and everything a glory. If that was how he made love to her, then that was how he made love to her. She awoke where she had lain down, and a sunbeam tickled her nose till she sneezed. . . . I've given you in English, Dan, a song I made about it in Gaelic, for Mother lacked the words; I do myself, but I saw her eyes and heard her voice."

  Nor had he aught he could say.

  "Nine months later, I was born, and grew to be the image of her," Caitlin continued after a spell during which a meteor streaked overhead. "Aye, well do I know what you are thinking. My father, the dear, never did. To him, she had carried me a little time long or a little time short, no matter which it was. And how he spoiled me, for I was his single daughter and the last child they had. Dan, he was right. You'll grant me, won't you, I read people well? She has known no other man than him, ever."

  "Oh, I didn't mean that," Brodersen protested clumsily. "Not that I'd give a damn, but- No, I just guess at maybe a fantasy she was nursing-you'll agree she might, huh? -maybe without quite realizing she did- And she got a little high."

  "She was never one for the poteen or the pot." When he tried to apologize, Caitlin laid a palm across his lips. "Aye, you mean she got drunk on moonlight."

  "It happens," he replied when she let go. "Why, I remember an old juniper behind the house that'd talk to me. I forget what it said, but I remember it talking as well as I remember learning to ride a horse at the same age, four or five or whenever that was. Dreams hang on in the oddest ways. And. . . if you're like her, Pegeen, then she's like you, and you're a dreamer- "-except sometimes when you're so practical you scare me."

  She didn't ease and laugh as he'd hoped, though she did smile. "I'm simply a woman, Dan. You men are the romantic sex."

  "All right, what do you suppose happened? If you think she really went into Elhoy -what we call it where I come from- if you think that, I won't scoff. In the same world as the Others, no trouble to accept Underearth."

  "Or devils?" He felt her shiver. "That's what Mother feared it was, hell tempting her and she falling. The priest said not to believe that; likeliest she'd had but a gust in the brain. Yet in her soul she bears the fear to this day. My father has told me how she was light-hearted in her youth, but from about that time grew very devout."

  The pressure toward that would certainly be there, Brodersen reflected. Where the fact of the Others hasn't destroyed religions, it's inspired new ones, or repowered the old. Was any of that their intention? "What is your guess?"

  "Mine? I have none. I know what scientific evidence consists of, and here is naught."

  "But you must have speculated. It obviously matters a lot to you."

  "Naturally. Norah is my mother. Far though I've drifted, I love her and my father and brothers, and hope to see them again on our journey."

  Caitlin took his hand in a close grip. "You recall what started this talk was when you asked about the sense of belonging in the whole universe," she said. "I think she had it that night, stronger than ever myself have. Were she a Buddhist, she would have been speaking of Nirvana or enlightenment or some such wonderful thing. Being an Irish peasant girl, for all she was wedded to a Dublin doctor and had sung in the opera, she recoiled in horror, and dreadful is the pity of that. But as for what brought on her experience and gave it such form, I will not guess."

  "May I?" he responded. "She was as adventurous by nature as you are, as hungry for life, except she never fought her way to freedom the way you did. So-"

  Br-r-roo-oom-m said the sky. They sprang to their feet. Metal high aloft caught light from the hidden sun and glimmered, then dived into eclipse. Nonetheless they could track it as it neared them. The rumble became a roar, leaves trembled, air buffeted. The spaceboat rotated wings, descended vertically, lowered wheels, touched ground, cut motors, and rested. Silence thundered back.

  Brodersen and Caitlin grabbed up their gear and ran toward her.

  X

  The auditorium in the San Geronimo Wheel included an offstage room where speakers or entertainers could wait, preparing themselves if they needed to. Ira Quick didn't, but he spent a few seconds before a mirror, checking out his appearance. It showed him a trim, fine-boned Caucasoid man of forty-four with a high forehead above thin regular features, brown eyes, black Vandyke beard and wavy black hair, barely frosted, which had gotten sparse on top but fell abundant behind the ears and halfway down the neck. That was the mode, as were the quiet iridescence of his tunic and the flare of his dark slacks, noticeably less than last year's: the mode, not the ultra-fashion. "Be not the first by whom the new are tried."

  My, quite the actor, readying for an entrance that will capture the hostile audience, aren't we? he thought, appreciating his ability to jest at himself. Underneath, he felt how he was aware of the deadly seriousness behind his errand here, yes, the tragedy. Tragedy did not consist of a clash between pure good and pure evil; that was mere melodrama. Tragedy occurred when the conflict was ineluctable between persons of equal morality, equal (well, almost equal) intelligence and sensitivity.

  Henry Troxell, director of the guards, stirred. "Are you, uh, about set, sir?" he inquired.

  "Yes," Quick said. "No fancy introduction, please."

  "I couldn't handle that anyway, sir. Okay."

  Troxell went forth. His bull tones reverberated back through the open door: "Damas y caballeros. I have the pleasure- I've explained plenty of times to you that my men and I have just been doing our duty, as assigned us by our government and yours. You've demanded a meeting with somebody who is in charge. Now he's arrived. I have the honor to present Ira Quick, member for the Midwest in the Assembly of the North American Federation, Minister of Research and Development on the Council of the World Union. Sr. Quick." He backed off stage as the newcomer entered, leading the applause until he noticed that he alone was clapping.

  Quick went to the lectern, which he felt was a psychologically valuable prop, and smiled outward. Intended for hundreds, the chamber reached huge and hollow. Twelve prisoners sat in the front row and glowered-the alien not among them, he saw, unsure whether to be annoyed or relieved. Guards, seated or standing, added a similar number; the rest were on station, minuscule though the chance of an emergency was. Everybody wore spaceman's coveralls. The secret service agents bore holstered handguns, mostly sonic stunners, a few pistols.

  Through the silence, he heard ventilation whirr. The air smelled properly fresh; surely a slight mustiness was all in his imagination. Given its near emptiness, the auditorium had bad acoustics, a hint of echoes. Well, he thought, I've spoken in worse. Briefly through him flashed memories, a small-town schoolhouse crammed with well-mannered field hands, a rainy evening in a Masonic hail partly bombed out in the last civil war and not yet repaired, a cruel winter dawn outside the gate of a factory whose workers knew they'd be laid off when automation was restored, the kind of thing to which a bright young attorney who had become a bright young politician must grow accustomed. Desirable in its fashion. Helped me understand the common man.

  "Do you mind if I speak English?" he began. "It's my native language, and you used it as much as Spanish aboard your ship, didn't you?" The sullenness before him was unchanged. "Thank you." Having sounded a note of informality, he leaned his fingertips on the lectern and gave full play to his famous baritone.

  "Good day, ladies and gentlemen. And a good day I hope this will prove, for you and for mankind. More than any language can say, I regret, I grieve at what has happened to you. There you were, back from your expedition, an expedition whose significance dwarfed that of Columbus'. You had toile
d, you had suffered, you had lost three comrades who were dear to you, and meanwhile you had endured. But at last you were bringing back the prize which you sincerely believed would open a new and brighter era. You had every right to expect a triumph, honor for the rest of your lives, immortality in history. Instead-"

  "Ach, drop that shit," called a large blond woman. "Don't throw it at us. We haff had plenty already."

  She must be Frieda von Moltke, gunner and boat pilot like the brown man, Sam Kalahele, who sat beside her. Captain Willem Langendijk turned around in the ultra-correct way that quick remembered, to shush her. Mate Carlos Francisco Rueda Suárez gave his brows the least aristocratic lift in order to cast a look of scorn. . . stageward. Expressions on the rest varied from grins to embarrassment-save for the lean gray-haired woman, Joelle Ky, who stayed impassive.

  Quick lifted a hand. "No offense," he said. "Believe me, I sympathize. I've come the whole way from Earth in order that we can have a meaningful dialogue and reach a modus vivendi that will satisfy you too. I thought I'd give a short talk, and then we would hold a free discussion. Is that agreeable?"

  "Hear him out," Langendijk ordered.

  Quartermaster Bruno Benedetti folded his arms, leaned back, and gave an artificial yawn. "We may as well," he said. "We have nothing else to do."

  "Please." Esther Pinski, medical officer and assistant biologist, spoke timidly (though she had gone through the gate to an unknown destination like the rest, there to study life forms which for all she knew would prove lethal). "Let us be polite."

  "Yes," added engineer Dairoku Mitsukuri. "How else shall we win release?"

  The crew settled down. Quick reassumed his speaker's posture.