Starfarers

by Poul Anderson

  “How can a chief … yonder in the mountains … notify local people … to help us?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, “but the bargaining about our visit went quicker than runners can account for. Drums, maybe.” She gave him a close look. “You’re shaking yourself to pieces.”

  “I’ll t-try to keep warmer.” He started jogging in place.

  A laugh escaped her. “Bobblety, bobblety, bobblety! No, that won’t work for long. Not at all for Ri. The trick will be to stay alive till help arrives. Or till the natives have tried and failed, and Arvil gomes after us regardless.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve had groundside experience, you know.” Stooping, she drew the guide’s big knife. While she whacked at the dead brush, she gave instructions. He was a novice, but like most Kithfolk he had passed considerable time in virtualities, which included forests, lifeways of the past, and the like. Cold lashed him. He quickly understood what she meant.

  A shelter grew beneath their hands. Lop off a forked branch about a meter long. Prop it erect between rocks. Lay a three-meter length—that took some searching—with one end in the crotch, the other on the ground. Lean pieces against this, slanting, for ribs. Cut branches off live shrubs and trees. Weave them into the framework; their leaves make the beginning of walls. Stick lesser pluckings and cuttings in anywhere, anyhow, until the sides are closed. Throw boughs and leaves beneath, a carpet against the wet gravel. The work itself will force blood to move.

  It was nearly done when their communicators buzzed. Vodra spoke with the pilot. “Yes, the chief wants to make a rescue attempt,” she told Dau. “Arvil’s not sure whether that’s for the sake of pride or precedent or what. Nor can he make out how they propose to do it.”

  “Or if they can. … No. I said I wouldn’t complain.”

  Vodra smiled and clapped the young man’s shoulder. “Good. You are going to do well aboard Fleetwing. All right, let’s complete our job.”

  She eased Ri into the shelter before laying a semicircle of stones before its entrance. “Reflector,” she explained. Meanwhile Dau gathered firewood. A flamelighter from her coverall started a small blaze within the arc. They both crawled past, inside, and huddled together, hands spread toward their hearth.

  Some warmth crept back into them. He glanced at her. Through the dusk he saw matted dark hair, sharp profile, firm breasts, flat belly. The crow’s-feet and gray flecks didn’t show; she could have been his age. Her flank glowed against his. She smelled of fire smoke and woman.

  “You—you shouldn’t be starfaring,” he blurted. “You’re meant for a pioneer.”

  She gave him back his look. “But I am a starfarer,” she answered. “So are you. Or you’d have stayed groundside,” when the Argosy crew voted to end their voyaging and disband, for the trade had grown too sparse to support every ship remaining in the regions that she plied, and too many among them had lost heart.

  “Yes, starfaring was my life,” he sighed, “and I’m lucky you happened to be there and would take me on.” The flames cast slight, uneasy glimmers into the murk where they hunched. Outside, the river rumbled and hissed. “Though I can understand why most of us were glad to settle down on Harbor. It’s … homelike. Compatible.” He had said that often before. Today he went on: “Not like Aurora.”

  “Fleetwing hasn’t touched at Aurora for about—a thousand years, I think,” Vodra said slowly. “It isn’t on any of our regular routes, you know. Nor do I recall much talk about it at any rendezvous we’ve made. Has it changed greatly?”

  “Yes. I’ve watched it happening. Oh, they stayed friendly enough, in their outlandish way. And … last time we were there … they seemed more interested in what we had to offer, what we had to tell, than their, uh, their great-grandparents were the time before. But it was just novelty to them. Nothing important.”

  “I know. I’ve seen the same on Olivares. Different from Aurora, no doubt. In either case, no longer our civilization.”

  Serrated towers dispersed over lands apportioned according to intricate rules of kinship. Robes and masks worn in public. Ceremoniousness governing deadly feuds. Multisexual group marriages. Rank achieved by passing examinations, within a hierarchy serving a God who was a demiurge. … That was in the western hemisphere. People on the eastern continent were more enigmatic.

  Not that any of them were hostile, or their societies worse than most. But they cared little about the stars or what star-farers brought.

  “Argosy never got to Olivares,” Dau said. “Fleetwing’s traveled farthest of any, hasn’t she?”

  “Maybe.” How could you tell, when it was oftenest a matter of chance which ships you met at which world, after centuries? “And maybe that’s why she keeps on traveling.”

  Was anything left of the original structure? A worn-out part here, a broken part there, replaced, as the millennia swept by. … Yes, that was also getting harder to do, repair facilities far-scattered and expensive. To be expected, when demand for their services dwindled. …

  “I haven’t asked this before.” Was Dau seeking comfort in conversation? “Too much else to learn. You’ve kept exploring, going beyond known space, when others gave it up. Have you found any more planets where humans could live?”

  “And there are no natives they’d have to dispossess? Yes, two possibilities. It didn’t make a big stir when we mentioned it at rendezvous. Why should it? Who’d want them?”

  None from Earth, probably, Earth from which the first seeds blew outward on a wind now stilled. Vodra was a child when Fleetwing last called there. She remembered talk of Seladorians everywhere, buyers nowhere, and Kith Town, well, tolerated. Afterward she seldom heard any suggestion of going back.

  “From Harbor, at least,” Dau said. “Dreamers. Malcontents. It’s no paradise.”

  “No human place ever was.” Vodra fed more sticks to the fire. It crackled and jumped, red, yellow, and blue. A bed of coals was forming. That was what would really see her and him and Ri through the night. “None ever will be, I suppose. But how many would go? How’d they pay for a migration? Those planets are not New Earths, any more than the rest were. Less than Harbor or two or three others, in fact. It’d take a huge investment, and then toil, sacrifice, death, for generations, before they were hospitable to our race.”

  “With nanotechnics and robotics to produce, Kith ships to ferry—”

  “Where’s the capital coming from? And we Kithfolk, we can’t travel for nothing. We have to live, too, and meet our running expenses. If enough people wanted it enough—” Vodra shook her head. “But they don’t.”

  “And so we limp along on whatever trade we can scrape up,” Dau said bitterly. “More and more desperate. Like this excursion of ours here.”

  “Not desperation,” she maintained. “Scientific interest, if nothing else. And the hope of something tradeworthy. Wait, I should check how Ri is doing.”

  She wriggled past him to hunker above the Brentan. Dau leaned over her shoulder. In the vague, shifty light he saw the chest rise and fall, the eyes partly open but blind. He heard how breath labored.

  Vodra returned to the entrance. He joined her. “If he were human,” he offered, “I’d say he’s sinking.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I don’t know how long he’ll last without better help than we can give.”

  She stared beyond the low flames to the river, the opposite cliff, and the shadows. He barely caught what she murmured.

  “Take down the sky.

  We shall no longer hide from nothingness,

  Now she is gone.

  Or he,” she added to herself.

  “What?” he said, astonished. “Why, I know that poem. I love it.”

  She turned her face to him. “You do?”

  “Yes. ‘All daybreak broken—’”

  “Then it reached your ship, too? It’s Brentan, you know.”

  “It is?”

  “Oh, a translation, adapted for humans, of course. But we heard it i
n Hrrochan. Later we sold reproduction rights on Feng Huang, Harbor, and Maia for good sums.” Defensively, because he was young, his ideals vulnerable: “Why not? Bringing it to them was a service.”

  “Of course. We dealt in information, too, in Argosy. It wasn’t that kind, though, at least not often.”

  “They’re wonderfully musical and poetical everywhere on Brent, as far as we’ve seen. Maybe that’s due to the nature of their speech. If we can get the Susuich to trust us—That cultural treasure their religion keeps hoarded—”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “I’m sorry, Dau. I don’t mean to be patronizing. I’m tired, my skull’s empty, I babble about whatever sounds hopeful.”

  “I’m glad you do,” he said. “It keeps me going.”

  They drew closer.

  Nothing untoward happened. He was bashful and she was wise. After a while their clothes were dry enough to don. Yet those hours lived always within them. Long afterward, when he was the newly chosen captain of Fleetwing, he would order an energy gun to engrave her name on a loose asteroid, a memorial among the stars.

  Night fell. Chill deepened. The fire wavered, but heat radiated from its bed and the stones beyond. The humans dozed.

  A cry roused them—not a shout, a triumphant skirling, like the pipes of ancient warriors bound into battle. They jerked awake and stumbled forth. A full moon had risen over the eastern steeps. Its light flickered and flared on the river. A creature like a gigantic snake, head high, surged downstream, coil upon coil swinging to and fro to drive it onward. Half a dozen Brentans rode on its back. When they saw the pair on the shore they and their mount swept into the shallows. They sprang off.

  Vodra beckoned at the shelter. One who must be some kind of physician went inside. His night vision was superior to hers. When he came out, another interpreted for him: “We shall care for Ri here until he is ready for carrying elsewhere. He will live and regain health. You have done well.”

  A third, with a bronze armlet that seemed to betoken authority, touched a fourth and spoke. The interpreter said: “As for you two, K’hraich will now guide you. When you reach Ai, you may enter the Abode of Songs.”

  47.

  Earth shone in the viewscreen as the brightest among the stars, lapis lazuli, with Luna a nearby point of tarnished gold. To Nansen in his command center, it was as if nothing had changed, as if he had never been away. Observation of them and their sister planets gave the exact time span. A few millennia were not enough for chaos to change their orbits beyond calculation.

  Lives—of humans, civilizations, dreams—went faster. The length of recorded history had—what? tripled?—through how many births and agings and deaths, end to end, since last he beheld his world?

  Envoy would not get there for another day. How slowly it passed. Already, though, her crew spent most of their waking hours at duty stations, straining to discern and understand and keep guard against whatever the unknown might cast at them. Only Nansen was idled. The captain must hold himself ready to decide and command. But nothing happened except reports, and thus far the data were sparse. It was a lonely feeling. Silence pressed in on him.

  Dayan’s voice broke it, urgent over the intercom. “Hold. Another signal just registered. It goes on.”

  “I have it, too,” said Yu. “Here’s a visual.” The display appeared for Nansen also. To him it was like previous ones, shifting waveforms, a graphical equivalent rendered by a computer as an aid to study.

  Dayan sighed. “The same kind as the rest.”

  Sundaram repeated his earlier judgment: “No language. A stereotyped code.”

  “Signals between robots,” Yu agreed. Radio and laser beams that Envoy chanced to intercept along her path.

  Strange. Shouldn’t the technology be far advanced, undetectable by mere antennae? Or maybe this ought not to be surprising.

  “Is everything in Solar space robotic?” wondered Mokoena. She spoke from Sundaram’s workroom. On the return voyage she had learned sufficient linguistics to become his assistant.

  Nansen harked back to telescopic glimpses of a few asteroids and Mars as the ship moved inward. “Off Earth, evidently yes,” he said. “And minimal.” Industries, settlements, human presence growing when we left, the germs of whole new nations—empty now, abandoned, one with Nineveh and Tyre.

  Mokoena’s tone shuddered. “What of Earth itself?” Their transmissions ahead had drawn no response.

  Zeyd avoided the worst inference. “A limited economy. Not necessarily impoverished. It could recycle with high efficiency to support a small, stable population.” Machinery purred around his words. For his part, he had qualified himself for second engineer, not expert but able to take routine off Yu’s hands.

  “Like Tahir,” she said. “People who have turned their backs on space.”

  Nansen looked past Earth to the stars. They shone cold and remote. None of the rare traces of travel had seemed to touch Sol, coming or going.

  Dayan’s dispassion cracked. “Why the devil don’t we make directly for where the last starships are?”

  “Earth is the mother world,” Sundaram said gently.

  “Yes,” Mokoena added. “Don’t you care to know what she’s become?”

  “And we promised we would come back,” Nansen finished.

  To eyes watching from polar orbit, the planet danced from day to night and back to dawn, agelessly beautiful. Still were the oceans a thousand shades of blue, burnished under the sun, starlit and moonlit after dark. Still did land masses sprawl, green, tawny, dun, in their familiar shapes. Cloud dappled the whole with fleeces and great swirls. The ice caps reached farther than formerly; snowfields ruled over most mountains. But this had merely enriched the temperate zones and mildened the tropics. In the cold valley of the glacial cycle, technics held global winter at bay.

  Subtle arts, Nansen thought when he studied the instrument readouts. More carbon dioxide and methane than he once breathed—not that he’d notice the difference—and doubtless the concentration was well controlled. However, that couldn’t be the whole story; the factors and interactions that make climates are millionfold. If a cybernetic system maintained this balance, it could not simply measure physical quantities and compute how much of what should be increased or decreased. It must be integrated with the ecology, the entire living world; for life is itself a geological force.

  Installations seen on Luna and in Earth orbit strengthened his impression of a system complex, powerful, and self-sufficient. Though none aboard Envoy could tell what those domes, dishes, towers, lattices, and less nameable structures were for, she picked up indications of solar energy collected and beamed to chosen Earthside locations that varied minute by minute; and there appeared to be a widespread, buried electrical network, coupled to nodal points where buildings clustered aboveground.

  Otherwise they saw something like an Eden. It was no single garden. Down from tundra and taiga swept wind-billowing steppes; boreal forest yielded to broadleaf woods and these to jungle; wings stormed above marshes and along seashores; plantations and croplands mingled in, not as conquerors but as parts of a planetary whole. Habitation was in scattered villages and a few small, compact cities. Traffic between was thin and largely aerial. No galaxies of illumination clustered on the dark side, though Nansen speculated that lighting was designed to minimize sky glow.

  Alone in the command center, he heard Yu report yet another fruitless attempt at making contact. “Again, nothing.”

  “I wish we had the Holont trick in our hardware,” snapped Dayan. “Give their damned electronics a good shaking.”

  “Patience,” Mokoena advised. “We can’t expect their equipment to be compatible with ours, can we?”

  “We can expect some technical wit,” Dayan retorted. “And even some provision for our return.”

  “After eleven thousand years?” gibed Zeyd.

  “Keep trying,” Nansen said.

  Abruptly the formlessness in his outercom screen coalesced in
to a face.

  Dayan whooped. “Transmission from the ground! They’ve figured our system out!”

  “What breed of human is that?” breathed Mokoena.

  Nansen stared. The head was both long and wide, the features male but beardless, skin amber, shoulder-length hair reddish black, nose thin, lips full, eyes big and violet. The mouth opened. Musical syllables resounded.

  “More to the point,” Sundaram asked, awe in his tone, “what language is that?”

  “Over to you, Ajit,” Nansen said for them all.

  It went quickly. A few computer-generated pictures and diagrams established the fact of Envoy’s journey and the approximate date of her departure from Sol. Then it was a matter of trying out ancient languages lying in scholarly databases. When this brought forth Chinese, Sundaram explained that English was the mutual tongue aboard. Presently he could call his shipmates to join him in the common room. They sat, in their various degrees and ways of tension, before the big screen they had used for entertainments. Dayan had reprogrammed the system for two-way transmission.

  The groundside scene was of graceful columns and ogive windows open on a garden. A line of men in close-fitting green uniforms were perhaps an honor guard, though they bore no visible weapons. Their features were varied; races had not completely melted together. In the foreground a tall woman in a flowing, iridescent robe occupied an elevated seat. She was of the type the crew had first seen. Her coifed head bore a golden circlet from which arched two stylized wings. Beside her stood a stubby, balding man, dark white. His long tunic and flared trousers were gray, nondescript, carelessly worn. “A professor, I’ll bet,” Dayan whispered into Nansen’s ear. He tried not to smile, as solemn as they seemed on Earth.

  The woman crossed hands on breast. Nansen rose, gave her a salute, and sat down again. She spoke. When she stopped, the little man piped up. “The Unifier Areli bids peace, pax, calm, harmony,” he said. His accent made the English hard to follow.