The Longest Way Home

by Robert Silverberg

  “But we’ll be gone by then.”

  “Surely so. Your cycle will have ended.”

  “Our cycle?”

  “The world passes through a series of cycles. Each follows the last in a predetermined order. We are living now in a period of destruction, of disintegration. It will grow worse. We see the signs already. As the end of the cycle comes upon us, the year will be shortened, the month will diminish, and the day will contract. There will be darkness and fire; and then will come rebirth, a new dawn, the start of the new cycle.”

  This was more than indifference, Joseph realized.

  This was a supremely confident dismissal of all the little petty pretensions of his people. Masters, indeed! To the Indigenes, Joseph saw, nothing mattered on this world except the Indigenes themselves, whose gods lay hidden in an invisible sky and comported themselves in altogether mysterious ways. The humans who had taken so much of this people’s land were just one more passing nuisance, a kind of annoying natural phenomenon, comparable to a sandstorm, a flood, a shower of hail. We think we have been building a new civilization here, he thought. We try to behave kindly toward the Indigenes, but we look upon this planet as ours, now, no longer theirs: our Homeworld, we call it. Wrong. In the eyes of the Ardardin and his race we are a mere short-term phenomenon. We are instruments of their unknown gods, sent here to serve their needs, not our own.

  Strange. Strange. Joseph wondered whether he would be able to explain any of this to his father, if ever he saw Keilloran House again.

  He could not allow himself the luxury of these discursive conversations much longer, though. It was time to begin thinking seriously again of moving on toward the south. His leg was nearly back to normal. And, though it was pleasant enough to be living in this friendly village and engaging in fine philosophical discussions with its chieftain, he knew he must not let himself be deflected from his essential purpose, which was to get home.

  The situation beyond the boundaries of the Ardardin’s village was continuing to worsen, apparently. Indigenes from other villages passed through here often, bringing reports on the troubles outside. Joseph never had the opportunity to speak with these visitors himself, but from the Ardardin he learned that all Manza had by now turned into a war zone: a great many Houses of the Masters throughout the northern continent had been destroyed, roads were closed, rebel troops were on the march everywhere. It appeared also that in certain parts of the continent the Masters were counterattacking, although that was still unclear. Joseph got the impression that fighting was going on between different groups of Folk, too, some loyal to the Masters, others sworn to uphold the rebellion. And bands of refugees were straggling south in an attempt to reach the Isthmus of Helikis and the safety that lay beyond. These must be surviving Masters, Joseph thought. But the Ardardin could not say. It had not seen a need to go into such a degree of detail with its informants.

  None of this chaos seemed to cause much of a problem for the Indigenes themselves. By now Joseph had come to see how completely their lives were bound up in their villages, and in the tenuous ties that linked one village to the next. So long as nobody’s troops came swarming across their fields and their harvests went well, the struggles of Masters and Folk were matters of little import to them. His discussions with the Ardardin had made it clear to him why they had that attitude.

  Commerce between the Indigene villages, therefore, still was proceeding as though nothing unusual were going on. The Ardardin proposed to turn that fact to Joseph’s benefit. Other villages down the line would surely have need of Joseph’s services as a healer. Now that he was capable of traveling, they would convey him to one of the nearby villages, where he could take care of whatever medical problems might need his attention there, and then those villagers would take him on to the next village, and so on and so on until he had reached a point from which he could cross over into the safety of Helikis.

  Joseph, remembering his fears that the Ardardin’s people might not allow him to leave at all, felt a burst of chagrin, and gratitude also for the Ardardin’s kind willingness to help him along his way like this.

  But it occurred to him that it might be just as wrong to imagine kindness here as it had been to fear enslavement earlier. It was a mistake, he realized, to ascribe conventional human feelings—altruism, selfishness, whatever—to Indigenes, indeed to interpret their motivations in any way analogous to human thinking. He had been guilty of that again and again in his dealings with the Ardardin and the villagers, but he knew by this time that it was something to avoid. They were alien beings. They had followed a wholly different evolutionary path for millions of years. They walk on their hind legs like us, he thought, and they have a language with nouns and verbs in it, and they know how to plant and harvest crops and fashion pottery, but that did not make them human in any essential way, and one had best take them on their own terms or else not try to take them at all.

  He had another taste of that when it was time for him to go. He had imagined that there might be a fairly emotional farewell, but the silliness of that bit of self-deception quickly became evident. The Ardardin expressed no regret whatever at Joseph’s departure and no hint that any sort of friendship had sprung up between the two of them: not a syllable of thanks for his work in the infirmary, none for their afternoon conversations. It simply stood looking on in silence while Joseph climbed into the wagon that would take him once again toward the south, and when the wagon pulled out of the village compound the Ardardin turned and went inside, and that was as much of a farewell as Joseph had.

  They are not like us, Joseph thought. To them we are mere transient phenomena.

  3

  ONCE MORE HE RODE IN A WAGON DRAWN BY A TEAM OF DULL-EYED yaramirs, and once more Ulvas traveled with him, along with two other Indigenes whose names were Casqui and Paca. Joseph had no idea of the route he would be traveling now. There did not seem to be any word in Indigene for “map,” and the Ardardin had not offered him much verbal information about the location of the next Indigene village.

  The first part of the journey took him along the same slow, winding road, cobblestoned and narrow, that they had used in the trip to Ludbrek House. An old Indigene road, no doubt. Very old. Five thousand years? Ten thousand, even? It was suitable only for clumsy creaking wagons like this. In all the centuries and tens of centuries since this road had been built, probably nothing in it had been changed but for the replacement of a loose cobble every once in a while. It was just a quiet country road; the Indigenes had never seen any reason to transform it into a major highway.

  It occurred to him that for the Indigenes time must seem to stand virtually still. They looked at everything under the auspices of eternity, the invisible sky, the hidden gods. Their gods were not much interested in change, and therefore neither were they. They made even a sleepy people like the Folk seem ferociously energetic. And the Folk themselves, he thought grimly, were not behaving all that sleepily these days.

  As on his previous journey, a cool southern wind was blowing, stronger than it had been before and moist now, an unmistakable token of the coming rainy season that was still somewhere to the south of them but already sending its harbingers north. It never seemed to let up. Joseph turned sideways in the wagon to avoid its unending direct thrust.

  The second day of plodding travel found them still moving along the road that led toward Ludbrek House. Joseph hoped they were not going to take him back there. He had no desire to see that sad ravaged place again. But that afternoon a second road appeared to their left, a road just as humble as the one they had been on, and the wagondriver Casqui swung the vehicle onto it with a couple of sharp syllables to the yaramirs.

  Though their direction was easterly now rather than southerly, the countryside had not changed much. It was the same flat farmland as before, broken only by gently rolling meadows and, farther away, the purple humps of modest hills.

  In late afternoon a big modern highway came into sight in the distance. It ran from
north to south and thus lay squarely athwart their route. “Get under the furs,” Ulvas told him. “Sometimes now they check the wagons that go by.”

  “Who does?” Joseph asked. “Masters, or Folk?”

  Ulvas made the crossed-arms gesture, the Indigene shrug. “Whoever might be checking things that day. It does not matter, does it?”

  The Indigene road, Joseph saw, ran right up to the great highway that the Masters had designed and the Folk had constructed. It halted at the edge of the highway and, he assumed, resumed on the other side. The broad smooth road was like a wall cutting across the land, marking a place where the native culture of this world and the culture of the Masters met. What had the Indigenes thought when these highways began sprouting on their land? Nothing at all, replied Joseph to his own question. Nothing at all. The highways meant nothing to them; the Masters meant nothing to them; this world itself meant nothing to them. This world was only a film lying over the invisible world that was true reality.

  Trucks, big trucks newly repainted in drab military-looking colors, were moving at a brisk pace in both directions on the highway. Rebel trucks, most likely. There were not enough Masters in this whole continent to staff a real army. The much more numerous Folk seemed to have conjured one up and equipped it with all the industrial and commercial vehicles in Manza, though. Just as he had on his first day in the Getfen forest, Joseph trembled at the thought that the rebels—the Folk, the supposedly obtuse and doltish Folk—had been able very quietly to plan this formidable insurrection and put it into operation while the vastly superior intellects of the dominant Masters had somehow failed to detect that anything unusual was going on. And he wondered for what grim purpose it was that this roaring convoy of trucks was heading across the land.

  An overpass spanned the highway here to handle cross-traffic like this Indigene wagon. Joseph nestled down beneath the thick stack of sour-smelling furs in the back of the wagon, and Ulvas tucked them around him to hide him from view. He would not have thought a pile of furs could have so much weight. They pressed down hard against him, and the one nearest to his face was jammed against his mouth and nostrils so closely that he gagged at the stale leathery odor of its underside. Getting sufficient air to breathe was no simple trick, either. He wondered how long the highway crossing was going to take. Another minute or two and he would have no choice but to stick his head out for a gulp of air, and it would be unfortunate to find himself staring at a rebel crossing-guard when he did.

  But the wagon quickly descended the sloping overpass, and on the far side, once it was toiling away on the cobblestones of the Indigene road again, Ulvas pulled the furs from him. None too soon it was, either. Joseph was just about at the point of nausea.

  “How much longer to the village?” he asked.

  “Soon. Soon.”

  That could mean anything: an hour, a day, a month. Twilight was coming on. He saw lights in the distance, and hoped they were the lights of the village; but then, in another few moments, he was dismayed to realize that what he was seeing were the lights of more trucks moving along yet another highway.

  How could they have come to another highway so soon, though? This one was just as big as the last, and, like the last one, ran at right angles to their own route. In this thinly populated countryside there was no reason to build two such highways running on parallel courses such a short distance apart.

  Nor had any such thing been done, Joseph realized moments later. The markings told him that this was the same highway as before, that the Indigene road must have gone wandering around this way and that and now was crossing the highway for a second time, in some other place. He could see from the deepening darkness to his right that they had returned to a southerly route. Once again Ulvas hastened to pull the stack of hides over him.

  But this time there was a checkpoint of some sort at the approach to the overpass. The wagon came to a halt; Joseph heard muffled voices somewhere above him, discussing something in a language that sounded like a mixture of Folkish and Indigene, though through the pile of furs he could not make out more than an occasional individual word; and then came the unmistakable sound of booted feet very close by. They were inspecting the wagon, it seemed. Yes. Yes.

  Why, he wondered, would anyone, rebel or Master, feel the need to search an Indigene wagon? Certainly anyone who had much knowledge of Indigenes would have little reason to think that the aloof, indifferent Indigenes would get so involved in human affairs as to be transporting anything that might be of interest to one set of combatants or the other.

  Joseph lay absolutely motionless. He debated trying to hold his breath to keep from giving his presence away, and decided that that was a bad idea, that it would lead inevitably to the need to suck air into his lungs, which might reveal his presence under here, or else to make him cough, which certainly would. It seemed wiser to take very small, shallow breaths, just enough to keep himself supplied with oxygen. The horrible reek of the furs was another problem: he fought against the nausea, gagging. He bit down hard on his lip and tried not to notice the smell.

  Someone was thumping around out there, poking this, checking that.

  What if they pulled the hides off and found him lying there? How long would it take for them to identify him as a fugitive Master, and what was likely to happen to a Master, even one from the other continent, who fell into rebel hands?

  But the thumping stopped. The voices faded. The wagon began to roll once more.

  What seemed like ten years went by before Ulvas pulled the furs off him again. Night had fallen. Stars were glistening everywhere. Two moons were in the sky, the little ones, Mebriel and Keviel. He heard the sounds of the busy highway, growing faint now, somewhere behind him.

  “What happened?” Joseph asked. “What did they want? Were they looking for refugees?”

  “They were looking for wine,” Ulvas told him. “They thought we might be carrying that as our cargo and they wanted some. The nights are becoming long this time of year and the soldiers at the checkpoints become bored.”

  “Wine,” Joseph said. “Wine!” A flood of relief came over him and he broke into laughter.

  The wagon continued onward until the highway sounds could no longer be heard. Then they halted and camped for the night, and one of the wagondrivers prepared a meal for them. Afterward Joseph tried to sleep, but he was too keyed up to manage it, and eventually he abandoned the attempt.

  For hours he lay staring upward, studying the stars. It was a clear night, the constellations sharply delineated. He picked out the Hammer, the Whirlwind, the Mountain, the Axe. There was the Goddess plainly visible, her long flowing hair, her breasts, her broad dazzling hips, the bright triangle of stars that marked her loins. Joseph remembered the night his father first had showed her to him, the naked woman in the sky. It is something a man likes to show his son when his son reaches a certain age, his father had said. Joseph had been twelve, then. He had seen real naked women since then, once in a while, not often and usually not at very close range. They always were fascinating sights, although for him they could not begin to equal the voluptuousness of the starry goddess overhead, whose magnificent overflowing body spanned so many parsecs of the sky.

  He wondered whether he would ever hold a woman in his arms, whether he would ever do with her the things that men did with women.

  Certainly the opportunity for that had been there for him already if he had wanted it. None of the Folkish girls of the House would have dared refuse a young Master. But Joseph had not wanted to do it with a girl of the Folk. It would be too easy. There seemed something wrong about it, something cheap and brutal and cruel. Besides, it was said that all the Folkish girls began to make love when they were eleven or twelve, and thus he would be matching his innocence against some girl’s vast experience, which might lead to embarrassment for him and perhaps even for her. As for girls of his own kind, no doubt there had been plenty of those around the estate too who would have been willing, certain flirtatious friend
s of his sister’s, or Anceph’s pretty daughter, or the long-legged red-haired one, Balbus’s niece. And at Getfen House he knew he had entertained fantasies of embracing Kesti, although he knew the dangers that could come from an attempt by the son of the Master of one Great House to enter into a casual affair with the daughter of the Master of another.

  He did not want a casual affair, anyway. He was not sure what he did want. Some sort of fastidiousness within him had held him back from doing anything with any girl. There would always be plenty of time for that, he had thought.

  Now he could no longer be sure of any such thing. He might have died this very night, if the rebel officer searching the wagon for Indigene wine had found a hidden Master instead.

  He lay looking straight up at the Goddess, and imagined himself reaching into the sky and putting his hands over her breasts. The thought brought a smile to his lips. And then the third moon moved into view, big ruddy Sanivark, and the Goddess could no longer be seen. Joseph dozed then, and soon morning came, and they made a quick breakfast of dried meat and berries and moved along.

  The landscape began to change. There were no longer any farms here, just broad fields of scrubby second-growth trees, and plateaus thick with rank sedge and clumps of briar. The soil looked bad, dry and pebbly, cut again and again by deep ravines that displayed white and red striations, layers of sand, layers of clay.

  Then the land began to improve again and on the third day they came at last to the Indigene village that was their destination. It was laid out much like the village where Joseph had been living before, tall conical buildings made from mud that had been thickly but irregularly plastered over a framework of interlaced laths and twigs, all of them set cheek by jowl in tight curving rows surrounding a central plaza that contained ceremonial buildings, with an agricultural zone forming a ring around the entire settlement. The layout was so similar to that of the previous village that Joseph half expected the Ardardin to come out and greet him here. But in place of a single chieftain this village seemed to have a triumvirate of rulers: at least, three dignified-looking older Indigenes, each of them clad in the same sort of painted leather cape and seashell-decorated leather skirt that the Ardardin had worn, presented themselves as Joseph was getting down from the wagon, and stood in aloof, somber silence, watching his arrival in a kind of bleak attentiveness, saying not a word.