Orbit 20

by Damon Knight

  She became aware of Jon’s voice, finishing a question; “… isn’t it?”

  “Sorry? Daydreaming, I’m afraid.”

  “This is the right direction, isn’t it?”

  “Should be. If we keep in line with the shuttle and the edge of that bluff, we’ll run into what was a large settlement a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Kona years?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hope they’re not nomads.”

  “The reports don’t say so,” said Hanna wearily, wondering why she continued to fall into the trap of reassuring Jon after two years’ close working knowledge of him. A sharp, steady breeze was flowing down from the snow-capped mountains to their right, and the long plain of grass rippled endlessly before it. Ahead of them stretched the bluff, darkly forested; the sky beyond was a clear steely blue. Each colour so exact, thought Hanna —the jointed grass a dark khaki, the pine-green of the trees, the even grey-blue skies. She wanted to consider it further, but Jon was talking again.

  “Not a very good report on this one. Even scrappier than the usual prewar type, don’t you think?”

  Hanna considered (hearing all the time the loud whish-whish made by two pairs of feet through the sturdy grass). “Better for me than for you,” she said at last. “The language section was the best, but yes, the rest was a bit sketchy.”

  “Think you’ll be able to make yourself understood?”

  “Yes,” said Hanna patiently (thinking, No birds. I haven’t seen any birds. Even on Terra there are some birds left. No wonder it’s so quiet here). She added aloud, “I have on all the other planets on this tour.”

  “What about Achwa?” Jon reminiscently rubbed at the scar on his arm where an Achwan missile had caught him.

  “They understood us all right. They just didn’t like us. Prewar survey must have mucked that one up.” (And Jon should have been more careful, she thought. It’s hard enough to train ethnologists now without them throwing their lives away.)

  Jon grunted. “Hope the same thing doesn’t happen here while the shuttle’s out of action.”

  No answer. Hanna resolutely fought the impulse to remind Jon that the reports clearly stated the Konans to be “markedly non-aggressive.”

  “Quiet, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Hm.”

  A curious feeling came to Hanna that she and Jon were shrinking under the cold sky, tramping futilely across an unending plain, struggling against the rippling grass as against an immutable current, towards a forest as unattainable as one on a vid-screen.

  “It’s a long way,” said Jon, perhaps feeling something of the same thing.

  They trudged on in silence, listening to the steady swish of feet in the grass.

  But it was no more than five minutes later that a movement appeared at the edge of the belt of trees, and they knew that the Konans had come to meet them. Both of them, as if by reflex, made little preparatory movements—Jon pulled down the sleeves of his anorak, and Hanna straightened her customary slouch an inch or two. By tacit consent, they slowed down, waiting for the Konans to come up to them. Hanna ran through the stock Konan greeting of a hundred and fifty years ago in her mind. One had to have the mental preparation right—the hairline balance between knowing the phrase exactly, and being prepared to pick up the modifications in the answer. She noted that the Konans apparently still rode Konanhorses. At least the report had prepared them for that.

  There were now thirty or forty Konans riding towards them, strung out along the plain in a swift-moving skein. The horses were very tall, and so white that the fleeting shadows on their bodies looked blue. The plain shook softly under their hooves. In a very little time they were near enough for Hanna to see clearly the pale calm face and long hands of the leading rider; and suddenly she felt obscurely resentful that they should so easily and quickly cross the plain that she and Jon had toiled across. Yet at the same time, the beauty of form and movement, the pale changing bow of horsemen over the dark grass pierced into her mind, startling up a flock of shining memories too frail and quick for recognition, but too potent to be ignored.

  The foremost riders cried aloud to their horses (they were all riding bareback and bridleless) and stopped no more than three paces from Hanna and Jon. In less than a minute, the other riders, with undisciplined precision, came to rest in a half-circle around the two Terrans. There was silence.

  Jon said sardonically, “After you.”

  “We are from Terra, and we bring you greeting,” said Hanna. Now that they were all together, she noticed how alike they were, all tall, all classically-featured, all with dark plaits swinging as thick as their wrists. There was no obvious leader to speak to; she addressed the whole group.

  And the whole group answered her, with a kind of subdued clamour, not in chorus, but as if each one replied to her individually and simultaneously. Their faces, she saw, were no longer calm; they were twisted in some strong emotion—anger? bewilderment? joy?—no time or use in speculating. Hanna said above the many voices (aware of her mind automatically adapting her words to the epic quality of the language), “If you would converse, let one among you speak, and we will hear.”

  The group fell silent again. Then hesitantly, after several false starts, one voice sounded. Hanna saw Jon’s gaze flicking round to find the speaker, while she concentrated on the words.

  “They made us not to be, and they are not,” said the voice from one of the group; and when Hanna did not immediately reply, the others chimed in, as if in canon. “They made us not to be … they made us not… and they are not… they made us … they made us . . . are not . . . to be . . . are not . .

  “Who are ‘they’?” asked Hanna loudly. But it was no good. The Konans seemed preoccupied with their own words; over and over again, “They made us not to be . . . they made us not . . . they are not . . .”

  Jon said, “I’m right, am I? That is what they’re saying?” and Hanna nodded. The simple sentence was well within his knowledge. It’s just like the voices on tape, she thought uneasily, and wondered what kind of methods the Konans had for passing on language. She said loudly, “Will you hear us?” There was silence for a moment, but the voices started again almost immediately— “They made us not, they made us not, to be, to be, and they are not . . .”

  “From where did they come?” asked Hanna desperately, seeking the right phrase to break the lock. “What did they do?” and “To whom do you speak?”

  But the Konans seemed almost to have forgotten them. It made no difference what Hanna said to them, or indeed whether she spoke or remained silent. They stayed in their group, chanting, sometimes riding their horses to and fro a few paces. Long after the two Terrans had given up, for the time being, the attempt to communicate, and started the long walk back to the shuttle in the cold evening, the Konan voices Boated back over the plain, clear and desolate in the deepening dusk. “They made us not to be, and they are not . .

  The team discussed the situation that night, talking endlessly, circularly, and almost fruitlessly about it in the cramped control room of the shuttle. Biren had the engineer’s annexe littered with power-pack components, but announced with unruffled cheerfulness that there was very little she could do with them, and that she doubted very much whether the shuttle was fit to fly. That knowledge gave the whole discussion a perceptibly uneasy background.

  “You mean we’re stuck here?” said Gerold in an offended tone.

  Biren grunted, and said that all she needed was another power pack, and that she had already called up orbit craft to send another shuttle down with extra ones.

  “I thought,” said Gerold, heavily sarcastic, “that engineers were supposed to check our shuttles before we all happily fly off to unknown planets with them.”

  “Not my fault,” said Biren, unmoved. “If the morons upstairs will stock an A4 shuttle with A3 substitute blocks, I can’t do anything but swear at them, and I’ve done that.”

  Gerold snorted. Both he and Alissin, Hanna t
hought, seemed to have been affected, like her, by the peculiarly intractable feel of the planet. They had come back late and tired, Gerold making remarks about “blasted planets where you walk all day and get nowhere,” and Alissin saying that she hardly seemed to have done anything in a whole day’s work. As if to disprove the point, she was now sitting at the side desk, laying out specimens.

  Hanna came out of reverie to hear Jon saying, “It’s ridiculous. We’ve never failed to make contact yet.”

  She said, “We’ve made contact. We just don’t understand what they’re saying.”

  “You must have got it wrong,” said Gerold accusingly.

  Hanna let Jon indignantly deny this, and give his opinion that the words were probably some form of ritual.

  Gerold said, “Listen to our clever University ethnologist. Give a thing a name and think you understand it,” and Jon subsided.

  Before the pause became too awkward, Hanna said, “I know I’m not an ethno, but it didn’t look like a ritual to me. It was all so—unplanned. Or it looked like that, don’t you think, Jon? And why should they have a ritual especially for meeting us?”

  “Could be for meeting any strangers.”

  “Attaboy,” muttered Gerold, “my theory right or wrong.” Erring said hastily, “It’s only first meeting, after all. You can’t be expected to get very far in one meeting.”

  “Yes, but if only they’d take some notice of us.” Jon’s voice rose and cracked in frustration.

  “Well, they did,” said Hanna. “They came to meet us, and responded to a greeting. It’s just that we don’t understand the notice they take of us.”

  Jon snapped out, “Oh, stop saying we don’t understand. We know that, you fool—” and then, in the dreadful pause that followed, “Sorry. But you know what I mean.”

  Erring said understanding^, “That’s okay. That’s okay. We know it’s hard on you not having a job to go on with.”

  Biren said, “Do we have to make a really good contact? What’s the priority rating of this place?”

  Alissin looked up from her plant specimens. “It’s quite high. Eight point five, or something like that.”

  “Have we had any higher than that this trip?”

  Everyone tried to repress exasperated sighs. Biren was notoriously vague about anything not directly concerning the working of the ship. Erring said kindly, “Only Vanging, and that was so good the colonists are already going out there.”

  “How would this one compare with it?”

  “We can’t tell yet,” said Alissin calmly. “The air’s very good, and the climate should be all right, but that’s about as far as we’ve got. Oh', and Gerold says the mineral deposits could be all right.”

  “I did not. I said some rock formations like the ones we saw give good results.”

  Alissin shrugged.

  “Don’t need to talk to the locals anyway,” said Biren, persevering. “It’s a big enough planet. Colonists just keep out of the way.”

  Both Hanna and Jon started to speak, and stopped. “Go on,” said Hanna.

  “It’s too dangerous,” said Jon. “They did that three or four times prewar, and none of them really worked. One lot of colonists got massacred about seven years after they arrived, and no one knows why even now, and another lot started a civil war without meaning to, and I forget what happened to the others, but they didn’t work out.”

  “Wouldn’t have any trouble with these if all they can do is sit round and talk nonsense.”

  In the small room, the irritated snorts from Hanna and Jon were perfectly audible. “You know, Biren,” said Erring brightly, “I do think Jon and Hanna are right there. After all, this ‘making people not to be’ could mean killing or dying.”

  “Well, why didn’t they say so?” said Gerold, aggrieved.

  “It could be rit—” began Jon, and stopped.

  Hanna said slowly, “You know, that’s funny. I don’t think the language tapes gave the Kona words for ‘kill,’ or ‘die,’ or ‘dead.’ And they’re on the standard lists, and the tapes were almost complete.”

  “And I suppose if you were an ethno, you would conclude from that, the locals are immortal?” said Gerold, sarcastic again. But Hanna did not even hear him. Her lips moved soundlessly, checking off the known vocabulary of the Kona language.

  Erring looked pointedly at the clock, and said, “It’s getting late. Are we standing watch tonight?”

  “Yes, we are,” said Gerold. “I wouldn’t trust these local bastards as far as I could kick them.”

  Biren yawned and grunted. “You don’t trust anyone that far, so why worry?”

  Erring said immediately, “I’ll go first watch if you like. Hour and a quarter each? That’d take us till about dawn here, and we can’t do much until then.”

  In silence, the other five climbed into rest suits, and disposed themselves around the floor of the small cabin.

  In the middle of the long night, Hanna, sitting watching the red eyes of the alarm system, thought she could hear the chant of Kona voices over the plain. It was too faint to distinguish the words, but inevitably the sentence began in her mind, “They made us not to be, and they are not.” She thought again of the rangy white horses and tall riders galloping together effortlessly over the endless plain, and a phrase floated up in her mind— “sea-white, boundlessly beautiful.” After a little consideration, she tracked it down as a reference to Peter Beagle’s unicorn, in a course she had done on mid-twentieth-century fantasy. She thought of Beagle’s unicorns, immortality and beauty and power incarnate, and because of it, almost irrevocably beyond petty mortal transactions. And suddenly the thought came that even a unicorn could be no whiter, no lovelier, no more unreachable, than a Konanhorse. Outside, the chant went on, as thin as the wind. Hanna felt all at once desperately lonely. She thought, I wish we could talk properly. We didn’t discuss anything tonight, only scored off each other and refused to face issues. What are we doing, anyway, summing up planets at one a month? We’re none of us properly trained or prepared for what we do.

  The image of white horses galloping over a dark plain kept breaking into her mind.

  The next day Biren elected to go with Alissin and Gerold, and Erring decided to come with Jon and Hanna. Once more they tramped through the dark-green grass, and it was no easier than the first time. The breeze was, if anything, stronger than yesterday’s, and colder, more like a river; it quenched even Erring’s bright conversation. But this time they could see, even as they set out, the huddle of horses and riders, and the chant came clearly to meet them.

  Hanna said, “They must have been at it all night. I heard them during my watch.”

  “Well, at least we know they don’t feel the cold,” said Jon. His voice had a resentful edge to it, and his teeth were chattering.

  This time the Konans did not come to meet them; but as the three Terrans approached, the group rearranged itself as effortlessly as before into a half-circle facing them. The chant had changed. Hanna could hear that, but in the confusion of voices she could catch only indistinct phrases. She said quickly, seizing the initiative, “We give you greeting. Will you speak with us?”

  As before, the Konans had difficulty in allowing one voice to speak alone; but in the end, enough Konans fell silent to make the message understandable. Two or three voices said, “Why did they make us not to be, and why are they not?”

  Hanna could hear Jon swearing under his breath; but sudden illumination had come to her. It had taken the Konans all night to reach this question from their previous statement; were they simply very slow conveners, assimilating new ideas only extremely gradually? She said cautiously, “You wish to know why they made you not to be, and why they are not?”

  This time, the response was instant. “Yes, we wish to know . . . why did they make us not? … we wish to know . . . not to be . . . they are . . . why are they not? … we wish to know . . .” She had the reassuring sense of being accepted into their joint comment.

&
nbsp; “What did you say?” asked Erring, and she told him briefly the conversation, and her conclusions. “If I’m right, we can manage now,” she finished off. “We just have to take things very slowly —say a new modification every couple of hours, though that may be rushing it a bit.”

  “Every two hours!” Jon was almost shouting. “We can’t take that long—it’d take us months—we’re supposed to be home next month—we haven’t got time—”

  Erring patted him on the shoulder and said, “Okay. Okay. Take it easy. We’ll work it out.”

  Hanna said curtly, “Well, we can only go at their pace. If we don’t finish in time, it’s too bad.” Half of her mind was listening intently for any change in the Konan chant; she felt quite incapable of dealing with Jon’s problems at the same time. An undercurrent of irritation set up in her mind; against Jon, who was supposed to be interested in aliens, against the dreadful burden of continually adapting to extraterrestrial conditions, against Terran bureaucrats concerned only to push off the monthly quota of colonists from their depleted planet. Deliberately she turned her full concentration to the Konans.