The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson

by Roger Elwood

  Nothing happened at that camp. Sherrinford said he hadn’t expected it would. The Old Folk seemed cautious this near to any settlement. In their own lands they must be bolder.

  And by the following “night,” the vehicle had gone well into yonder country. When Sherrinford stopped the engine in a meadow and the car settled down, silence rolled in like a wave.

  They stepped out. She cooked a meal on the glower while he gathered wood, that they might later cheer themselves with a campfire. Frequently he glanced at his wrist. It bore no watch—instead, a radio-controlled dial, to tell what the instruments in the bus might register.

  Who needed a watch here? Slow constellations wheeled beyond glimmering aurora. The moon Aide stood above a snowpeak, turning it argent, though this place lay at a goodly height. The rest of the mountains were hidden by the forest that crowded around. Its trees were mostly shiverleaf and feathery white plumablanca, ghostly amidst their shadows. A few firethorns glowed, clustered dim lanterns, and the underbrush was heavy and smelled sweet. You could see surprisingly far through the blue dusk. Somewhere nearby, a brook sang and a bird fluted.

  “Lovely here,” Sherrinford said. They had risen from their supper and not yet sat down again or kindled their fire.

  “But strange,” Barbro answered as low. “I wonder if it’s really meant for us. If we can really hope to possess it.”

  His pipestem gestured at the stars. “Man’s gone to stranger places than this.”

  “Has he? I … oh, I suppose its just something left over from my outway childhood, but do you know, when I’m under them I can’t think of the stars as balls of gas, whose energies have been measured, whose planets have been walked on by prosaic feet. No, they’re small and cold and magical; our lives are bound to them; after we die, they whisper to us in our graves.” Barbro glanced downward. “I realize that’s nonsense.”

  She could see in the twilight how his face grew tight. “Not at all,” he said. “Emotionally, physics may be a worse nonsense. And in the end, you know, after a sufficient number of generations, thought follows feeling. Man is not at heart rational. He could stop believing the stories of science if those no longer felt right.”

  He paused. “That ballad which didn’t get finished in the house,” he said, not looking at her. “Why did it affect you so?”

  “I couldn’t stand hearing them, well, praised. Or that’s how it seemed. Sorry for the fuss.”

  “I gather the ballad is typical of a large class.”

  ‘Well, I never thought to add them up. Cultural anthropology is something we don’t have time for on Roland, or more likely it hasn’t occurred to us, with everything else there is to do. But—now you mention it, yes, I’m surprised at how many songs and stories have the Arvid motif in them.” “Could you bear to recite it?”

  She mustered the will to laugh. “Why, I can do better than that if you want. Let me get my multi lyre and I’ll perform.” She omitted the hypnotic chorus line, though, when the notes rang out, except at the end. He watched her where she stood against moon and aurora.

  “—the Queen of Air and Darkness

  cried softly under sky:

  ” ‘Light down, you ranger Arvid,

  and join the Outling folk.

  You need no more be human,

  which is a heavy yoke.’

  “He dared to give her answer:

  ‘I may do naught but run.

  A maiden waits me, dreaming

  in lands beneath the sun.

  ” ‘And likewise wait me comrades

  and tasks I would not shirk,

  for what is ranger Arvid

  if he lays down his work?

  ” ‘So wreak your spells you Outling,

  and cast your wrath on me.

  Though maybe you can slay me,

  you’ll not make me unfree.’

  “The Queen of Air and Darkness

  stood wrapped about with fear

  and northlight-flares and beauty

  he dared not look too near.

  “Until she laughed like harpsong

  and said to him in scorn:

  ‘I do not need a magic

  to make you always mourn.

  “ ‘I send you home with nothing

  except your memory

  of moonlight, Outling music,

  night breezes, dew, and me.

  “ ‘And that will run behind you,

  a shadow on the sun,

  and that will lie beside you

  when every day is done.

  “ ‘In work and play and friendship

  your grief will strike you dumb

  for thinking what you are—and—

  what you might have become.

  “ ‘Your dull and foolish woman

  treat kindly as you can.

  Go home now, ranger Arvid,

  set free to be a man!’

  “In flickering and laughter

  the Outling folk were gone.

  He stood alone by moonlight

  and wept until the dawn.

  The dance weaves under the firethorn .”

  She laid the lyre aside. A wind rustled leaves. After a long quietness Sherrinford said, “And tales of this kind are part of everyone’s life in the outway?”

  “Well, you could put it thus,” Barbro replied. “Though they’re not all full of supernatural doings. Some are about love or heroism. Traditional themes.”

  “I don’t think your particular tradition has arisen of itself.” His tone was bleak. “In fact, I think many of your songs and stories were not composed by human beings.”

  He snapped his lips shut and would say no more on the subject. They went early to bed.

  Hours later, an alarm roused them.

  §

  The buzzing was soft, but it brought them instantly alert. They slept in gripsuits, to be prepared for emergencies. Sky-glow lit them through the canopy. Sherrinford swung out of his bunk, slipped shoes on feet, and clipped gun holster to belt. “Stay inside,” he commanded.

  ‘What’s here?” Her pulse thuttered.

  He squinted at the dials of his instruments and checked them against the luminous telltale on his wrist. “Three animals,” he counted. “Not wild ones happening by. A large one, homeothermic, to judge from the infrared, holding still a short ways off. Another … hm, low temperature, diffuse and unstable emission, as if it were more like a … a swarm of cells coordinated somehow … pheromonally? … hovering, also at a distance. But the third’s practically next to us, moving around in the brush; and that pattern looks human.”

  She saw him quiver with eagerness, no longer seeming a professor. “I’m going to try to make a capture,” he said. “When we have a subject for interrogation—Stand ready to let me back in again fast. But don’t risk yourself, whatever happens. And keep this cocked.” He handed her a loaded big game rifle.

  His tall frame poised by the door, opened it a crack. Air blew in, cool, damp, full of fragrances and murmurings. The moon Oliver was now also aloft, the radiance of both unreally brilliant, and the aurora seethed in whiteness and ice-blue.

  Sherrinford peered afresh at his telltale. It must indicate the directions of the watchers, among those dappled leaves. Abruptly he sprang out. He sprinted past the ashes of the campfire and vanished under trees. Barbro’s hand strained on the butt of her weapon.

  Racket exploded. Two in combat burst onto the meadow. Sherrinford had clapped a grip on a smaller human figure. She could make out by streaming silver and rainbow flicker that the other was nude, male, long haired, lithe, and young. He fought demoniacally, seeking to use teeth and feet and raking nails, and meanwhile he ululated like a satan.

  The identification shot through her: A changeling, stolen in babyhood and raised by the Old Folk. This creature was what they would make Jimmy into.

  “Ha!” Sherrinford forced his opponent around and drove stiffened fingers into the solar plexus. The boy gasped and sagged: Sherrinford manhandled him toward th
e car.

  Out from the woods came a giant. It might itself have been a tree, black and rugose, bearing four great gnarly boughs; but earth quivered and boomed beneath its leg-roots, and its hoarse bellowing filled sky and skulls.

  Barbro shrieked. Sherrinford whirled. He yanked out his pistol, fired and fired, flat whipcracks through the half-light. His free arm kept a lock on the youth. The troll shape lurched under those blows. It recovered and came on, more slowly, more carefully, circling around to cut him off from the bus. He couldn’t move fast enough to evade it unless he released his prisoner—who was his sole possible guide to Jimmy—

  Barbro leaped forth. “Don’t!” Sherrinford shouted. “For God’s sake, stay inside!” The monster rumbled and made snatching motions at her. She pulled the trigger. Recoil slammed her in the shoulder. The colossus rocked and fell. Somehow it got its feet back and lumbered toward her. She retreated. Again she shot, and again. The creature snarled. Blood began to drip from it and gleam oilily amidst dewdrops. It turned and went off, breaking branches, into the darkness that laired beneath the woods.

  “Get to shelter!” Sherrinford yelled. “You’re out of the jammer field!”

  A mistiness drifted by overhead. She barely glimpsed it before she saw the new shape at the meadow edge. “Jimmy!” tore from her.

  “Mother.” He held out his arms. Moonlight coursed in his tears. She dropped her weapon and ran to him.

  Sherrinford plunged in pursuit. Jimmy flitted away into the brush. Barbro crashed after, through clawing twigs. Then she was seized and borne away.

  §

  Standing over his captive, Sherrinford strengthened the fluoro output until vision of the wilderness was blocked off from within the bus. The boy squirmed beneath that colorless glare.

  “You are going to talk,” the man said. Despite the haggardness in his features, he spoke quietly.

  The boy glared through tangled locks. A bruise was purpling on his jaw. He’d almost recovered ability to flee while Sherrinford chased and lost the woman. Returning, the detective had barely caught him. Time was lacking to be gentle, when Outling reinforcements might arrive at any moment. Sherrinford had knocked him out and dragged him inside. He sat lashed into a swivel seat.

  He spat. “Talk to you, manclod?” But sweat stood on his skin, and his eyes flickered unceasingly around the metal which caged him.

  “Give me a name to call you by.”

  “And have you work a spell on me?”

  “Mine’s Eric. If you don’t give me another choice, I’ll have to call you . .. m-m-m … Wuddikins.”

  “What?” However eldritch, the bound one remained a human adolescent. “Mistherd, then.” The lilting accent of his English somehow emphasized its sullenness. “That’s not the sound, only what it means. Anyway, it’s my spoken name, naught else.”

  “Ah, you keep a secret name you consider to be real?” “She does. I don’t know myself what it is. She knows the real names of everybody.”

  Sherrinford raised his brows. “She?”

  “Who reigns. May she forgive me, I can’t make the reverent sign when my arms are tied. Some invaders call her the Queen of Air and Darkness.”

  “So.” Sherrinford got pipe and tobacco. He let silence wax while he started the fire. At length he said:

  “I’ll confess the Old Folk took me by surprise. I didn’t expect so formidable a member of your gang. Everything I could learn had seemed to show they work on my race— and yours, lad—by stealth, trickery, and illusion.”

  Mistherd jerked a truculent nod. “She created the first nicors not long ago. Don’t think she has naught but dazzlements at her beck.”

  “I don’t. However, a steel-jacketed bullet works pretty well too, doesn’t it?”

  Sherrinford talked on, softly, mosdy to himself: “I do still believe the, ah, nicors—all your half-humanlike breeds—are intended in the main to be seen, not used. The power of projecting mirages must surely be quite limited in range and scope as well as in the number of individuals who possess it. Otherwise she wouldn’t have needed to work as slowly and craftily as she has. Even outside our mindshield, Barbro— my companion—could have resisted, could have remained aware that whatever she saw was unreal … if she’d been less shaken, less frantic, less driven by need.”

  Sherrinford wreathed his head in smoke. “Never mind what I experienced,” he said. “It couldn’t have been the same as for her. I think the command was simply given us, You will see what you most desire in the world, running away from you into the forest.’ Of course, she didn’t travel many meters before the nicor waylaid her. I’d no hope of trailing them; I’m no Arctican woodsman, and besides, it’d have been too easy to ambush me. I came back to you.” Grimly: “You’re my link to your overlady.”

  ‘You think I’ll guide you to Starhaven or Carheddin? Try making me, clod-man.”

  “I want to bargain.”

  “I s’pect you intend more’n that.” Mistherd’s answer held surprising shrewdness. “What’ll you tell after you come home?” “Yes, that does pose a problem, doesn’t it? Barbro Cullen and I are not terrified outwayers. We’re of the city. We brought recording instruments. We’d be the first of our kind to report an encounter with the Old Folk, and that report would be detailed and plausible. It would produce action.” “So you see I’m not afraid to die,” Mistherd declared, though his lips trembled a bit. “If I let you come in and do your manthings to my people, I’d have naught left worth living for.”

  ‘‘Have no immediate fears,” Sherrinford said. “You’re merely bait.” He sat down and regarded the boy through a visor of calm. (Within, it wept in him: Barbro, Barbro!) “Consider. Your Queen can’t very well let me go back, bringing my prisoner and telling about hers. She has to stop that somehow. I could try fighting my way through—this car is better armed than you know—but that wouldn’t free anybody. Instead, I’m staying put. New forces of hers will get here as fast as they can. I assume they won’t blindly throw themselves against a machine gun, a howitzer, a fulgurator. They’ll parley first, whether their intentions are honest or not. Thus I make the contact I’m after.”

  “What d’ you plan?” The mumble held anguish.

  “First, this, as a sort of invitation.” Sherrinford reached out to flick a switch. “There. I’ve lowered my shield against mind-reading and shape-casting. I daresay the leaders, at least, will be able to sense that it’s gone. That should give them confidence.”

  “And next?”

  “Next we wait. Would you like something to eat or drink?”

  During the time which followed, Sherrinford tried to jolly Mistherd along, find out something of his life. What answers he got were curt. He dimmed the interior lights and settled down to peer outward. That was a long few hours.

  They ended at a shout of gladness, half a sob, from the boy. Out of the woods came a band of the Old Folk.

  Some of them stood forth more clearly than moons and stars and northlights should have caused. He in the van rode a white crownbuck whose horns were garlanded. His form was manlike but unearthly beautiful, silver blond hair falling from beneath the antlered helmet, around the proud cold face. The cloak fluttered off his back like living wings. His frost-colored mail rang as he fared.

  Behind him, to right and left, rode two who bore swords whereon small flames gleamed and flickered. Above, a flying flock laughed and trilled and tumbled in the breezes. Near them drifted a half-transparent mistiness. Those others who passed among trees after their chieftain were harder to make out. But they moved in quicksilver grace and as it were to a sound of harps and trumpets.

  “Lord Luighaid.” Glory overflowed in Mistherd’s tone. “Her master Knower—himself.”

  Sherrinford had never done a harder thing than to sit at the main control panel, finger near the button of the shield generator, and not touch it. He rolled down a section of canopy to let voices travel. A gust of wind struck him in the face, bearing odors of the roses in his mother’s garden.
At his back, in the main body of the vehicle, Mistherd strained against his bonds till he could see the oncoming troop.

  “Call to them,” Sherrinford said. “Ask if they will talk with me.”

  Unknown, flutingly sweet words flew back and forth. “Yes,” the boy interpreted. “He will, the Lord Luighaid. But I can tell you, you’ll never be let go. Don’t fight them. Yield. Come away. You don’t know what ’tis to be alive till you’ve dwelt in Carheddin under the mountain.”

  The Outlings drew nigh.

  §

  Jimmy glimmered and was gone. Barbro lay in strong arms, against a broad breast, and felt the horse move beneath her. It had to be a horse, though only a few were kept any longer on the steadings, and they only for special uses or love. She could feel the rippling beneath its hide, hear a rush of parted leafage and the thud when a hoof struck stone; warmth and living scent welled up around her through the darkness.

  He who carried her said mildly, “Don’t be afraid, darling. It was a vision. But he’s waiting for us, and were bound for him.”

  She was aware in a vague way that she ought to feel terror or despair or something. But her memories lay behind her— she wasn’t sure just how she had come to be here—she was borne along in a knowledge of being loved. At peace, at peace, rest in the calm expectation of joy . ..