A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  He flew on, an excitement growing within him.

  Death was everywhere, but ahead of him, beyond the horizon, the living village waited.

  He came to the fields first, and they were nothing to write home about. They were irregular plots of burned-over land that had never known a plow, but there were crops growing in them, including something that looked a good deal like maize. The plants did not seem to be doing well, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why: water.

  There was an irrigation system of sorts, small trenches fed by what should have been a good-sized river. The river terraces were clearly visible from the air, and it was obvious that the river was drying up. Schaefer doubted that it was a quarter of its former size, and the irrigation trenches weren’t drawing that much water out of it by it long shot.

  He saw people, too, poking pointed sticks. They looked up at him as he passed, and from his altitude they didn’t look alien at all. He had the curious feeling that this was not another world, not a planet of another sun, but only the past of Earth; he felt that he had somehow gone back in time, to see his own ancestors fighting the hard fight with wind and sun and the long, long dry spells.

  Then the village was below him.

  It was a town, really, rather than a village. It was walled, just as the abandoned place had been, and it was basically a cluster of square adobe houses and dark crooked streets built around a central market plaza. Schaefer went down low, and he could see stout poles projecting from the sides of the houses over the streets. The slim, long-armed people were swinging through the hot air, hand over hand, from one pole to another. Apparently, they never walked if they could avoid it.

  The town, even to his eyes, was not an attractive place.

  It already had something of the decay of a ruin about it, but it was not clean as a ruin is clean, washed by patient rains and bleaching sunshine. There was garbage in the streets. No wonder they travel on the walls above the streets. I’d do the same, if I could. It was the sort of place that looked as if it was crawling with disease, and his skin prickled when he thought of it.

  But then he saw the market below him as he hovered. It was a gay riot of color, and most of it was shaded by awnings. He looked down at what seemed to be a sea of faces, a million eyes all staring up at him.

  He took a deep breath through his face mask.

  “Ready or not, here I come,” he muttered.

  He hoped the information from the survey ship was correct,

  If not—

  Well, he probably wouldn’t live long enough to realize that he’d made a mistake. There was no turning back now. He aimed his copter for a cleared space in the square, hovering until he was certain there was no one directly under him, and landed.

  The copter blades shivered to a halt.

  He climbed out, his empty hands in plain view.

  In an instant, he was surrounded.

  He stood there in the heat by his copter, and he was two people. One man faced the crowd with level eyes and a determined smile. The other stood back and watched, and felt a vague relief. Schaefer had never been a man of action, and he had often wondered how he would face up to a really dangerous situation.

  He was unarmed, and he could have been quite literally torn apart if things went wrong. He was scared, deep down inside, but he could handle it.

  It was a good thing to know about yourself.

  He looked at them and they looked at him. They didn’t press him too closely, and seemed more friendly than otherwise. He was the tallest man there, but hardly the most powerful. The people’s arms were very long; their fingertips reached their ankles when they stood erect. The arms were slender and graceful, but they were strongly muscled.

  He barely noticed the arms, however. It was the feel of the crowd that impressed him. They were a people of surprising dignity, even in a situation that was unfamiliar to them. Dignity—and courage too, he supposed, for they were probably as afraid of him as he was of them.

  The people watched him with polite curiosity. They were very small-boned, and their tiny noses and wide dark eyes gave their faces an almost frail appearance. They were dressed in bright-colored tunics that left their arms completely free.

  None of the men carried weapons. These were farmers and merchants, not soldiers. The rather elfin children were not at all shy, but they were well-behaved.

  The girls, Schaefer had to admit, were a surprise. Despite their strangeness, they had an elusive grace and vitality, with warm and gentle eyes. Their long supple arms and white canine teeth were just different enough to be really interesting. In fact, he decided, the girls were as genuinely sexy as any he had ever seen.

  That could mean trouble, here as well as anywhere.

  It had its compensations, however.

  The people were very patient, most of them standing in the shade of awnings that covered the market tables and booths. They waited for him to make the first move. Schaefer, standing in the hot sun by his copter, was only too glad to oblige.

  He raised his left hand, the four fingers extended, the thumb folded into his palm.

  There was a murmur from the people, and they moved back respectfully. Schaefer wanted to talk to them, but he knew it wasn’t a good idea for several reasons. For one thing, his command of the language was too shaky. For another, he didn’t know these people well enough to be sure he was saying the proper thing, even if he managed the grammar adequately.

  So he waited, and they waited.

  He could not see the suffering as he studied them. Most of the people did not look thin, and they did not appear to be starving. It was not a dramatic moment where hordes of famine-ridden men and women gazed up at their rescuer with adoration in their eyes. They didn’t know why he had come, and they didn’t even need his help visibly.

  He knew they were dying, nonetheless. A whole town had once lived on that sun-baked plain he had seen, and now lived no more. The people before him were undoubtedly fewer than they had been the year before, and would be fewer still next year. It was a subtle question of the carrying capacity of ruined land, and when the population pressure got too great for the food supply people died. It was all simple and timeless and horrible. He knew the facts in a way they could never know them—facts gathered by experts on the survey team. Within fifty years, this entire portion of the continent would be dead—and there was no way out. These farmers were surrounded by tough hunting peoples that would never give up their territories.

  So a few hundred thousand natives on a forbidden planet light-years from Earth were faced with extinction. No doubt it happened all the time, on worlds Earth did not know and never would know.

  There were many men who could learn of such a tragedy and shrug. So what? Did they ever do anything for us? We’ve nothing against those savages, but it’s their problem, not ours.

  Schaefer looked at the people before him. He knew that he was not such a man, and he was glad of it.

  There was a stir at the edges of the crowd, a buzz of voices.

  Schaefer turned and made the sign again.

  The priests were coming.

  The religious officials wore long blue robes, although their arms were free. It was rather odd to see them come swinging along the wall-poles, hand over hand, their skirts swirling in the air. They did it with a solemn gravity that should have been ludicrous, but wasn’t.

  Once in the market square, they walked straight up to Schaefer and confronted him in a group. Schaefer made the sign, and it was returned.

  The priest who seemed to be the leader said something that was too fast for Schaefer. Schaefer smiled carefully and said one of the sentences he had learned: “I come as your friend, and I wish to be taken to your temple.”

  The priest nodded impassively. He was a striking figure of a man, and the white-striped fur on his head gave him a certain man-of-distinction air. He was obviously no fool; when he saw that Schaefer did not handle the language well, he made no further attempt to speak. Again, Schaefer was amazed
at the courtesy of these people. He was positive that the priest would do almost anything to avoid causing his guest embarrassment.

  Beckoning to him, the priest turned and led the way out of the market. Schaefer fell in behind him without hesitation, knowing that his copter was safe where it was. The other priests kept him pretty well surrounded, but it was more of an escort than a guard.

  He had a bad moment when the leader started to swing up to the wall projections above the street, but the priest looked at Schaefer’s arms and changed his mind. He stuck to the ground, which was quite a concession considering the debris that littered the space between the adobe house walls.

  Schaefer knew that they were wondering about him—a man who, by their standards, was an absolute freak. A man who had come out of the sky. A man who knew their sacred sign and a few words of their dialect. A man who resembled those beings seen several seasons ago, about whom so many stories had been whispered….

  Well, the important thing was to make contact with the men at the top. Schaefer was too well trained to start with the common people, whether he liked them or not. Once you got fouled up with factions, once you were an object of suspicion to the big boys, you never got anywhere in an alien culture. The fact was that humanoid beings, despite their individual differences, always followed certain laws. One such principle was that in an agricultural town of this type the secular and religious authorities were apt to be the same. In other words, it was likely to be a theocracy. This being the case, a man either got along with the priests, or he got out.

  They led him into a house that was little different from the others they had passed, but inside there was a deep stairway lighted by smooth-burning torches. The temple, of course, was underground. Had this not been the case, he would certainly have spotted a pyramid-like structure from the air.

  He followed the priests into a long, winding passage. The light was bad, and there was little to see. Eventually they came into a large chamber in which hundreds of oil-burning lamps were burning. The walls were hung with tapestries. In a depression at one end of the chamber there was a black altar. Spaced around the walls, rather like pictures placed over cloth, were little rings of black skins. Each skin was only a few inches across, but there were lots of them.

  Schaefer was glad to see them. They meant that Sandy was right.

  There was no ceremony. That was for show, for the people. It would come later, if it was needed. For the present, the priests wanted information, and they went about it in a no-nonsense manner.

  Schaefer was escorted into the presence of a man who apparently was the priest-king, although there was no exact translation of his title in English. He sat on a couch in a small, austere room. He was a small man, even for his people, but he absolutely dominated the situation with the force of his personality. He fixed his dark alert eyes on Schaefer’s face and Schaefer was startled by the familiarity of those eyes.

  They were Moravia’s eyes.

  They were haunted eyes.

  There was a whispered conversation between the priest-king and the man who had led Schaefer’s escort. Then Schaefer was left alone with the ruler of the people.

  There was a long silence.

  Schaefer had an uneasy feeling that he was in the presence of a powerful man, who commanded strange gods. But when the man spoke his voice was calm and courteous.

  “I am Marin,” he said slowly. “I wait for your words.”

  Schaefer swallowed and made the speech he had learned. “I am called Schaefer. I have come to help you if you desire help. I come in friendship and without weapons. It is known that your lands shrink, your crops fail, your people die. Your tongue is new to me, and I must learn more of it. Then we will talk. It is my prayer that there will always be friendship between your people and my people.”

  Marin fixed his eyes again on Schaefer’s face, and Schaefer was glad that he had been speaking the simple truth, neither more nor less. Marin was not a man to be trifled with.

  Marin got to his feet, placed his left hand on Schaefer’s right shoulder. His face was shadowed in the lamplight. His grip was strong. “Let it be so, Schaefer. Your prayer is good. Soon we will talk again. Until then, live in peace among us.”

  Marin himself led him out and introduced him to an old priest named Loquav, who was to be his teacher.

  After that, Schaefer settled down for months of hard work.

  He had a lot to learn before he spoke with Marin again.

  A worry he could not identify nagged him as he worked. He sensed an urgency that drove him far into the night, studying by a flickering torch.

  He saw eyes when he slept.

  Moravia’s.

  Marin’s.

  Hurley’s.

  “It is my prayer that there will always be friendship between your people and my people.”

  What could go wrong?

  He thought of Lee, missing her. And he wondered how Sandy was coming along….

  High in the mountains, where the eagle-winds cry out their icy power against the rocks, the snow was falling, in a blanket of white. It was too high for trees to grow, and there was little shelter on the wild outcropping where Tino Sandoval stood.

  He was alone, his boots knee-deep in crusted snow, his eyes narrowed against the cutting wind. His breath, filtered through his mask that concentrated the natural oxygen in the air, was a cloud of freezing vapor that blew away even as it formed.

  Far below him, miles away, he could see the flat plains baking in an autumn sun. The cold had not yet come to the lowlands, and still he stood with his legs half-buried in the middle of winter.

  “Sunlight and plants and animals and water,” he said to himself, speaking in a whisper that would have been audible had there been anyone to hear. Sandoval had often talked to himself at Spring Lake; indeed, he had written that no man was ever lonely when he could to talk to himself with understanding. “It is always the same, wherever man lives, in whatever time.”

  Sunlight. All life comes from the sun. Without the energy of a sun, there could be no life. Many peoples, including some of his own ancestors, had bowed down before the sun, and perhaps they had worshipped more wisely than they knew.

  Plants. If the sunlight falls on bare soil, there is heat, which is lost when the cool night comes. But with grass or leaves it is a different story. The chlorophyll takes the sun’s energy and builds with it, blending air and water and soil to make new leaves and new grasses. The energy is not given up with the night, but is stored. It waits patiently in green forests and waving fields of grass, and then the animals come….

  Animals. They eat the grass and plants and leaves, storing and concentrating the energy in their bodies. And then the grass-eaters are devoured in turn by the meat-eaters, and these may also be eaten, or may die and release their energy again to the living plants. Life is a vast pyramid. Each layer feeds on the layer beneath it, and all live on the sun that is the pyramid’s base. Man stands alone atop the pyramid, and in his pride he imagines that he is independent. It is only when he is thirsty or when his land blows away that he remembers the rain, the magic of water….

  Water. Sandoval nudged the snow with his boot. Water had given birth to life, and life could not survive without it. On Earth, it had taken five thousand pounds of water to produce a single pound of wheat. The water began here, falling from the clouds as the snow that covered the ground and melted against his face. The snow would be on the ground all winter, waiting. Further down the mountain, where the trees grew, banks of snow should accumulate in the shade. It would melt only slowly, and the insulating blanket of conifer needles would prevent the freezing of the soil underneath. The water would sink gradually into the sponge-like humus, and filter down and down, until the mountain became a reservoir of stored water, until great underground rivers flowed and seeped into the soil, giving life. When it reached the plains, the dry vegetation would suck it up, and some of the water would bubble up to the surface in clear springs, and creeks and brooks would
feed the rivers that ran forever to the sea.

  That was under normal conditions, of course.

  Conditions here were not normal.

  That was the trouble.

  The land had been touched by fire and flood and famine. The forests were gone, the grasslands dead. When the water came, it splattered out into the sun-baked plains that could not absorb it. The water gushed through straight gullies and into rivers, carrying what was left of the topsoil with it. The silt-filled rivers rushed the brown flood away to the sea, and it was useless.

  Sandoval shook his head, turned, and began to trudge down toward his copter. The wind cut at his face and his feet were cold in his boots. It was so easy to bring death to the land….

  He passed through a fire-blackened forest, its branches naked against the winter wind. He knew the forest well, every tree of it. He and his men had worked hard these many months, and Sandoval had been happy. This was work he believed in, and work he loved.

  He had killed a million beetles in that dead bark, planted a million trees in that barren soil, calculated innumerable bacteria counts for the forest that would come again.

  And woodpeckers! They looked very much like the woodpeckers of Earth, although they were of different species. After all, he reflected, a woodpecker is such a specialized bird that it has to follow a certain design: a long sturdy bill to drill under the bark with, feet to grip the bark while it works, tail feathers with supporting tips to hold it steady. They had hatched enough woodpeckers to stuff a spaceship, and they had not forgotten the nuthatches who would finish the job by getting the insects in the bark crevices.

  World-savers?

  Yes, they existed.

  Not men.

  Woodpeckers.

  He reached the sheltered valley where his copter waited. He climbed into it with reluctance, despite the cold outside. Sandoval was a man of the land, content to leave the sky for others. He took off and flew down the valley and out into the warm air over the plains.

  He smiled a little, looking down at the rolling country. He knew the plains, too. They had broken its baked surface, ploughed it with heavy remote equipment from the ship, poked holes in it to hold the water when it came. They had dug huge contour furrows to hold back the flooding of the rivers. They had caught and were breeding grazing animals to eat the grass that was as yet invisible. And tiny gophers and ground squirrels and rats to paw and tug at the soil, keeping it loose for other rains. And predators to control the grass-eaters….