Winners!

by Poul Anderson

  Impossible. But . . . but there the Flyer was. Half delirious, Erakoum could yet remember that Flyers were seldom that patient.

  What else could befall but death? Nothing. She lay back on the rock shards. Let the Flyer be her doom or be her Mardudek. She had found the courage to surrender.

  The shape hovered. Her hair sensed tiny gusts, and she thought dimly that this must be a difficult place for him too. Speech burst and skirled. He was trying to explain something, but she was too hurt and tired to listen. She folded her hands around her muzzle. Would he appreciate that gesture?

  Maybe. Hesitant, he neared. She kept motionless. Even when his tendrils brushed her, she kept motionless.

  They slipped across her body, got a purchase, tightened. Through the haze of pain, she saw him swelling. He meant to lift her—up to Hugh?

  When he did, her knife wounds opened and she shrieked before she swooned.

  Her next knowledge was of lying on turf under a hasty, red-lit sky. A human crouched above her, talking to a small box that replied in the voice of Hugh. Behind, the Flyer lay shrunken, clutching a bush. Storm brawled; the first stinging raindrops fell.

  In the hidden way of hunters, she knew that she was dying. The human might staunch those cuts and stabs, but could not give back what was lost.

  Memory—what she had heard tell, what she had briefly tasted herself— “Blood of the Flyer. It will save me. Blood of the Flyer, if he will give.” She was not sure whether she spoke or dreamed it. She sank back into the darkness.

  When she surfaced anew, the Flyer was beside her, embracing her against the wind. The human was carefully using a knife on a tendril. The Flyer brought the tendril in between Erakoum’s fangs. As the rain’s full violence began, she drank.—

  A double sunrise was always lovely.

  Jannika had delayed telling Hugh her news. She wanted to surprise him, preferably after his anxiety about his dromid was past. Well, it was; Erakoum would be hospitalized several days in Port Kato, which ought to be an interesting experience for all concerned, but she would get well. A’i’ach had already rejoined his Swarm.

  When Hugh wakened from the sleep of exhaustion which followed his bedside vigil, Jannika proposed a dawn picnic, and was touched at how fast he agreed. They flitted to a place they knew on the sea cliffs, spread out their food, and sat down to watch.

  At first Argo, the stars, and a pair of moons were the only lights. Slowly heaven brightened, the ocean shimmered silver beneath blue, Phrixus and Helle wheeled by the great planet. Wild songs went trilling through air drenched with an odor of roanflower, which is like violets.

  “I got the word from the Center,” she declared while she held his hand. “It’s definite. The chemistry was soon unraveled, given the extra clue we had from the reviving effect of blood.”

  He turned about. “What?”

  “Manganese deficiency,” she said. “A trace element in Medean biology, but vital, especially to dromids and their reproduction—and evidently to something else in ouranids, since they concentrate it to a high degree. Hansonia turns out to be poorly supplied with it. Ouranids, going west to die, were removing a significant percentage from the ecology. The answer is simple. We need not try to change the ouranid belief. Temporarily, we can have a manganese supplement made up and offer it to the dromids. In the long run, we can mine the ore where it’s plentiful and scatter it as a dust across the island. Your friends will live, Hugh.”

  He was quiet for a time. Then—he could surprise her, this son of an outback miner—he said: “That’s terrific. The engineering solution. But the bitterness won’t go away overnight. We won’t see any quick happy ending. Maybe not you and me, either.” He seized her to him. “Damnation, though, let’s try!”

  The End

  ******************************

  The Saturn Game,

  by Poul Anderson

  Analog Feb. 02 1981

  Novella - 20586 words

  Humanity uses psychological tools as well as physical-ones. In space, the most ancient of those tools will take on new uses—and new dangers

  I

  If we are to understand what happened, which is vital if we are to avoid repeated and worse tragedies in the future, we must begin by dismissing all accusations. Nobody was negligent; no action was foolish. For who could have predicted the eventuality, or recognized its nature, until too late? Rather should we appreciate the spirit with which those people struggled against disaster, inward and outward, after they knew. The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides. The Chronos crossed more than an abyss, it crossed a threshold of human experience.

  —Francis L. Minamoto, Death

  Under Saturn: A Dissenting View

  (Apollo University Communications,

  Leyburg, Luna, 2057)

  “The City of Ice is now on my horizon,” Kendrick says. Its towers gleam blue. “My griffin spreads his wings to glide.” Wind whistles among those great, rainbow-shimmering pinions. His cloak blows back from his shoulders; the air strikes through his ring-mail and sheathes him in cold. “I lean over and peer after you.” The spear in his left hand counterbalances him. Its head flickers palely with the moonlight that Wayland Smith hammered into the steel.

  “Yes, I see the griffin,” Ricia tells him, “high and far, like a comet above the courtyard walls. I run out from under the portico for a better look. A guard tries to stop me, grabs my sleeve, but I tear the spider silk apart and dash forth into the open.” The elven castle wavers as if its sculptured ice were turning to smoke. Passionately, she cries, “Is it in truth you, my darling?”

  “Hold, there!” warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana ten thousand leagues away. “I send your mind the message that if the King suspects this is Sir Kendrick of the Isles, he will raise a dragon against him, or spirit you off beyond any chance of rescue. Go back. Princess of Maranoa. Pretend you decide that it is only an eagle. I will cast a belief-spell on your words.”

  “I stay far aloft,” Kendrick says. “Save he use a scrying stone, the Elf King will not be aware this beast has a rider. From here I’ll spy out city and castle.” And then—? He knows not. He knows simply that he must set her free or die in the quest. How long will it take him, how many more nights will she lie in the King’s embrace?

  “I thought you were supposed to spy out Iapetus,” Mark Danzig interrupted.

  His dry tone startled the three others into alertness. Jean Broberg flushed with embarrassment, Colin Scobie with irritation; Luis Garcilaso shrugged, grinned, and turned his gaze to the pilot console before which he sat harnessed. For a moment silence filled the cabin, and shadows, and radiance from the universe.

  To help observation, all lights were out except a few dim glows from the instruments. The sunward ports were lidded. Elsewhere thronged stars, so many and so brilliant that they well-nigh drowned the blackness which held them. The Milky Way was a torrent of silver. One port framed Saturn at half phase, dayside pale gold and rich bands amidst the jewelry of its rings, nightside wanly ashimmer with starlight upon clouds, as big to the sight as Earth over Luna.

  Forward was Iapetus. The spacecraft rotated while orbiting the moon, to maintain a steady optical field. It had crossed the dawn line, presently at the middle of the inward-facing hemisphere. Thus it had left bare, crater-pocked land behind it in the dark, and was passing above sunlit glacier country. Whiteness dazzled, glittered in sparks and shards of color, reached fantastic shapes heavenward; cirques, crevasses, caverns brimmed with blue.

  “I’m sorry,” Jean Broberg whispered. “It’s too beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, and . . . almost like the place where our game had brought us. Took us by surprise—”

  “Huh!” Mark Danzig said. “You had a pretty good idea of what to expect, therefore you made your play go in the direction of something that resembled it. Don’t tell me any different. I’ve watched these acts for eight years
.”

  Colin Scobie made a savage gesture. Spin and gravity were too slight to give noticeable weight, and his movement sent him flying through the air, across the crowded cabin. He checked himself by a handhold just short of the chemist. “Are you calling Jean a liar?” he growled.

  Most times he was cheerful, in a bluff fashion. Perhaps because of that, he suddenly appeared menacing. He was a big, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties; a coverall did not disguise the muscles beneath, and the scowl on his face brought forth its ruggedness.

  “Please!” Broberg exclaimed. “Not a quarrel, Colin.”

  The geologist glanced back at her. She was slender and fine-featured. At her age of forty-two, despite longevity The Saturn Game treatment, the reddish-brown hair that fell to her shoulders was becoming streaked with white, and lines were engraved around large gray eyes.

  “Mark is right,” she sighed. “We’re here to do science, not daydream.” She reached forth to touch Scobie’s arm, smiling shyly. “You’re still full of your Kendrick persona, aren’t you? Gallant, protective—” She stopped. Her voice had quickened with more than a hint of Ricia. She covered her lips and flushed again. A tear broke free and sparkled off on air currents. She forced a laugh. “But I’m just physicist Broberg, wife of astronomer Tom, mother of Johnnie and Billy.”

  Her glance went Saturnward, as if seeking the ship where her family waited. She might have spied it, too, as a star that moved among stars by the solar sail. However, that was now furled, and naked vision could not find even such huge hulls as Chronos possessed, across millions of kilometers.

  Luis Garcilaso asked from his pilot’s chair; “What harm if we carry on our little commedia dell’arte?” His Arizona drawl soothed the ear. “We won’t be landin’ for a while yet, and everything’s on automatic till then.” He was small, swarthy, and deft, still in his twenties.

  Danzig twisted his leathery countenance into a frown. At sixty, thanks to his habits as well as to longevity, he kept springiness in a lank frame; he could joke about wrinkles and encroaching baldness. In this hour, he set humor aside.

  “Do you mean you don’t know what’s the matter?” His beak of a nose pecked at a scanner screen which magnified the moonscape. “Almighty God! That’s a new world we’re about to touch down on—tiny, but a world, and strange in ways we can’t guess. Nothing’s been here before us except one unmanned flyby and one unmanned lander that soon quit sending. We can’t rely on meters and cameras alone. We’ve got to use our eyes and brains.”

  He addressed Scobie. “You should realize that in your bones, Colin, if nobody else aboard does. You’ve worked on Luna as well as Earth. In spite of all the settlements, in spite of all the study that’s been done, did you never hit any nasty surprises?”

  The burly man had recovered his temper. Into his own voice came a softness that recalled the serenity of the Idaho mountains from which he hailed. “True,” he admitted. “There’s no such thing as having too much information when you’re off Earth, or enough information, for that matter.” He paused. “Nevertheless, timidity can be as dangerous as rashness—not that you’re timid, Mark,” he added in haste. “Why, you and Rachel could’ve been in a nice O’Neill on a nice pension—”

  Danzig relaxed and smiled. “This was a challenge, if I may sound pompous. Just the same, we want to get home when we’re finished here. We should be in time for the Bar Mitzvah of a great-grandson or two. Which requires staying alive.”

  “My point is,” Scobie said, “if you let yourself get buffaloed, you may end up in a worse bind than—Oh, never mind. You’re probably right, and we should not have begun fantasizing. The spectacle sort of grabbed us. It won’t happen again.”

  Yet when Scobie’s eyes looked anew on the glacier, they had not quite the dispassion of a scientist in them. Nor did Broberg’s or Garcilaso’s. Danzig slammed fist into palm. “The game, the damned childish game.” he muttered, too low for his companions to hear. “Was nothing saner possible for them?”

  II

  Was nothing saner possible for them? Perhaps not.

  If we are to answer the question, we should first review some history. When early industrial operations in space offered the hope of rescuing civilization, and Earth, from ruin, then greater knowledge of sister planets, prior to their development, became a clear necessity. The effort started with Mars, the least hostile. No natural law forbade sending small manned spacecraft yonder. What did was the absurdity of using as much fuel, time, and effort as were required, in order that three or four persons might spend a few days in a single locality.

  Construction of the J. Peter Vajk took longer and cost more, but paid off when it, virtually a colony, spread its immense solar sail and took a thousand people to their goal in half a year and in comparative comfort. The payoff grew overwhelming when they, from orbit, launched Earthward the beneficiated minerals of Phobos that they did not need for their own purposes. Those purposes, of course, turned on the truly thorough, long-term study of Mars, and included landings of auxiliary craft, for ever-lengthier stays, all over the surface.

  Sufficient to remind you of this much; no need to detail the triumphs of the same basic concept throughout the inner Solar System, as far as Jupiter. The tragedy of the Vladimir became a reason to try again for Mercury, and, in a left-handed, political way, pushed the Britannic-American consortium into its Chronos project.

  They named the ship better than they knew. Sailing time to Saturn was eight years.

  Not only the scientists must be healthy, lively-minded people. Crewfolk, technicians, medics, constables, teachers, clergy, entertainers—every element of an entire community must be. Each must command more than a single skill, for emergency backup, and keep those skills alive by regular, tedious rehearsal. The environment was limited and austere; communication with home was soon a matter of beamcasts; cosmopolitans found themselves in what amounted to an isolated village. What were they to do?

  Assigned tasks. Civic projects, especially work on improving the interior of the vessel. Research, or writing a book, or the study of a subject, or sports, or hobby clubs, or service and handicraft enterprises, or more private interactions, or—There was a wide choice of television tapes, but Central Control made sets usable for only three hours in twenty-four. You dared not get into the habit of passivity.

  Individuals grumbled, squabbled, formed and dissolved cliques, formed and dissolved marriages or less explicit relationships, begot and raised occasional children, worshipped, mocked, learned, yearned, and for the most part found reasonable satisfaction in life.

  But for some, including a large proportion of the gifted, what made the difference between this and misery were their psychodramas.

  —Minamoto

  Dawn crept past the ice, out onto the rock. It was a light both dim and harsh, yet sufficient to give Garcilaso the last data he wanted for descent.

  The hiss of the motor died away. A thump shivered through the hull, landing jacks leveled it, and stillness fell. The crew did not speak for a while. They were staring out at Iapetus.

  Immediately around them was desolation like that which reigns in much of the Solar System. A darkling plain curved visibly away to a horizon that, at man-height, was a bare three kilometers distant; higher up in the cabin, you could see farther, but that only sharpened the sense of being on a minute ball awhirl among the stars. The ground was thinly covered with cosmic dust and gravel; here and there a minor crater or an upthrust mass lifted out of the regolith to cast long, knife-edged, utterly black shadows. Light reflections lessened the number of visible stars, turning heaven into a bowlful of night. Halfway between the zenith and the south, half-Saturn and its rings made the vista beautiful.

  Likewise did the glacier—or the glaciers? Nobody was sure. The sole knowledge was that, seen from afar. Iapetus gleamed bright at the western end of its orbit and grew dull at the eastern end, because one side was covered with whitish material while the other side was not; the dividing line passed ne
arly beneath the planet which it eternally faced. The probes from Chronos had reported the layer was thick, with puzzling spectra that varied from place to place, and little more about it.

  In this hour, four humans gazed across pitted emptiness and saw wonder rear over the world-rim. From north to south went ramparts, battlements, spires, depths, peaks, cliffs, their shapes and shadings an infinity of fantasies. On the right Saturn cast soft amber, but that was nearly lost in the glare from the east, where a sun dwarfed almost to stellar size nonetheless blazed too fierce to look at, just above the summit. There the silvery sheen exploded in brilliance, diamond-glitter of shattered light, chill blues and greens; dazzled to tears, eyes saw the vision glimmer and waver, as if it bordered on dreamland, or on Faerie. But despite all delicate intricacies, underneath was a sense of chill and of brutal mass; here dwelt also the Frost Giants.

  Broberg was the first to breathe forth a word. “The City of Ice.”

  “Magic,” said Garcilaso as low. “My spirit could lose itself forever, wanderin’ yonder. I’m not sure I’d mind. My cave is nothin’ like this, nothin’—”

  “Wait a minute!” snapped Danzig in alarm.

  “Oh, yes. Curb the imagination, please.” Though Scobie was quick to utter sobrieties, they sounded drier than needful. “We know from probe transmissions the scarp is. well. Grand Canyon-like. Sure, it’s more spectacular than we realized, which I suppose makes it still more of a mystery.” He turned to Broberg. “I’ve never seen ice or snow as sculptured as this. Have you, Jean? You’ve mentioned visiting a lot of mountain and winter scenery when you were a girl in Canada.”