Starfarers
Page 57
The swimmer shuddered (was the voice conducted to him?) but stayed where he was. Slowly, he raised the trident toward the unseen sun. With a single gesture, he reversed it, thrust it into the sand, let go, and turned his back. A shove of the great legs sent him arrowing off.
The knowledge exploded in Jong. For a century of seconds he stood alone with it.
Regor’s words pierced through: “Get my suit. I’m going after him.”
“I’m all right,” he managed to say. “I found Mons.”
He gathered what he could. There wasn’t much. “Bring me up,” he said.
When he was lifted from the bay and climbed through the air lock, he felt how heavy was the weight upon him. He let fall the sack and trident and crouched beside them. Water ran off his armor.
The doors closed. The boat climbed. A kilometer high, Regor locked the controls and came aft to join the others. Jong removed his helmet just as Neri opened the sack.
Mons’ head rolled out and bounced dreadfully across the deck. Neri strangled a yell.
Regor lurched back. “They ate him,” he croaked. “They cut him to pieces for food. Didn’t they?”
He gathered his will, strode to the port, and squinted out. “I saw one of them break the surface, a short while before you came up,” he said between his teeth. Sweat—or was it tears?—coursed down the gullies in his cheeks. “We can catch him. The boat has a gun turret.”
“No—” Jong tried to rise, but hadn’t the strength.
The radio buzzed. Regor ran to the pilot’s chair forward, threw himself into it, and slapped the receiver switch. Neri set lips together, picked up the head, and laid it on the sack. “Mons, Mons, but they’ll pay,” he said.
Captain Ilmaray’s tones filled the hull: “We just got word from the observer’s boat. It isn’t on station yet, but the magnascreen’s already spotted a horde of swimmers … no, several different flocks, huge, must total thousands … converging on the island where you are. At the rate they’re going, they should arrive in a couple of days.”
Regor shook his head in a stunned fashion. “How did they know?”
“They didn’t,” Jong mumbled.
Neri leaped to his feet, a tiger movement. “That’s exactly the chance we want. A couple of bombs dropped in the middle of ’em.”
“You mustn’t!” Jong cried. He became able to rise too. The trident was gripped in his hand. “He gave me this.”
“What?” Regor swiveled around. Neri stiffened where he stood. Silence poured through the boat.
“Down below,” Jong told them. “He saw me and followed me to the bottom. Realized what I was doing. Gave me this. His weapon.”
“Whatever for?”
“A peace offering. What else?”
Neri spat on the deck. “Peace, with those filthy cannibals?”
Jong squared his shoulders. The armor enclosing him no longer seemed an insupportable burden. “You wouldn’t be a cannibal if you ate a monkey, would you?”
Neri said an obscene word, but Regor suppressed him with a gesture. “Well, different species,” the pilot admitted coldly. “By the dictionary you’re right. But these killers are sentient. You don’t eat another thinking being.”
“It’s been done,” Jong said. “By humans too. More often than not as an act of respect or love, taking some of the person’s mana into yourself. Anyway, how could they know what we were? When he saw I’d come to gather our dead, he gave me his weapon. How else could he say he was sorry, and that we’re brothers? Maybe he even realized that’s literally true, after he’d had a little while to think the matter over. But I don’t imagine their traditions are that old. It’s enough, it’s better, actually, that he confessed we were his kin simply because we also care for our dead.”
“What are you getting at?” Neri snapped.
“Yes, what the destruction’s going on down there?” Ilmaray demanded through the radio.
“Wait.” Regor gripped the arms of his chair. His voice fell low. “You don’t mean they’re—”
“Yes, I do,” Jong said. “What else could they be? How could a mammal that big, with hands and brain, evolve on these few islands? How could any natives have wiped out a colony that had atomic arms? I thought about a slave revolt, but that doesn’t make sense either. Who’d bother with so many slaves when they had cybernetic machines? No, the swimmers are the colonists. They can’t be anything else.”
“Huh?” grunted Neri.
Ilmaray said across hollow space: “It could be. If I remember rightly, Homo Sapiens is supposed to have developed from the, uh, Neandertaloid type, in something like ten or twenty thousand years. Given a small population, genetic drift, yes, a group might need less time than that to degenerate.”
“Who says they’re degenerate?” Jong retorted.
Neri pointed to the staring-eyed head on the deck. “That does.”
“Was an accident, I tell you, a misunderstanding,” Jong said. “We had it coming, blundering in blind the way we did. They aren’t degenerate, they’re just adapted. As the colony got more and more dependent on the sea, and mutations occurred, those who could best take this sort of environment had the most children. A static civilization wouldn’t notice what was happening till too late, and wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if they did. Because the new people had the freedom of the whole planet. The future was theirs.”
“Yeah, a future of being savages.”
“They couldn’t use our kind of civilization. It’s wrong for this world. If you’re going to spend most of your life in salt water you can’t very well keep your electric machines; and flint you can gather almost anywhere is an improvement over metal that has to be mined and smelted.
“Oh, maybe they have lost some intelligence. I doubt that, but if they have, what of it? We never did find the Elder Races. Maybe intelligence really isn’t the goal of the universe. I believe, myself, these people are coming back up the ladder in their own way. But that’s none of our business.” Jong knelt and closed Mons’ eyes. “We were allowed to atone for our crime,” he said softly. “The least we can do is forgive them in our turn. Isn’t it? And … we don’t know if any other humans are left, anywhere in all the worlds, except us and these. No, we can’t kill them.”
“Then why did they kill Mons?”
“They’re air breathers,” Jong said, “and doubtless they have to learn swimming, like pinnipeds, instead of having an instinct. So they need breeding grounds. That beach, yes, that must be where the tribes are headed. A party of males went in advance to make sure the place was in order. They saw something strange and terrible walking on the ground where their children were to be born, and they had the courage to attack it. I’m sorry, Mons,” he finished in a whisper.
Neri slumped down on a bench. The silence came back.
Until Ilmaray said: “I think you have the answer. We can’t stay here. Return immediately, and we’ll get under weigh.”
Regor nodded and touched the controls. The engine hummed into life. Jong got up, walked to a port, and watched the sea, molten silver beneath him, dwindle as the sky hardened and the stars trod forth.
I wonder what that sound was, he thought vaguely. A wind noise, no doubt, as Mons said. But I’ll never be sure. For a moment it seemed to him that he heard it again, in the thrum of energy and metal, in the beat of his own blood, the horn of a hunter pursuing a quarry that wept as it ran.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For information, advice, and much else, I owe thanks to Karen Anderson (as always), Víctor Fernández-Dávila, editor Robert Gleason, the late Kenneth Gray, G. Dayid Nordley, and Aharon Sheer. Special thanks are due Robert L. Forward and Sidney Coleman. The idea of a nuclear “time machine” is the former’s. An idea of the latter’s suggested the concept behind the zero-zero drive to me; he kindly sent me a copy of his paper, but it turns out that my speculation is quite unlike his real-science thought and may even contradict it.
The lines of verse quoted in Chapter
III are from The Book of Songs, translated by Arthur Waley, copyright © 1937, renewed 1965 by Arthur Waley, by permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
The lines of verse by Jorge Luis Borges and their English translation by Richard Howett and César Rennart quoted in Chapter IX are from Selected Poems 1923–1967 by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 by Emecé Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, by permission of the publisher, Bantam Doubleday Dell.
The lines of verse by Rudyard Kipling quoted in Chapter XVII are in the public domain.
Chapter XXI first appeared in a different form as “Ghetto” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1954, copyright © by Fantasy House, Inc., renewed 1982 by Poul Anderson. The lines from the ballad “Jerry Clawson” quoted in it are copyright by the author, Gordon R. Dickson, and used by his permission.
Chapter XVII first appeared in a slightly different form as “The Tale of the Cat” in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, February 1998, copyright © 1998 by Poul Anderson.
No person here named is in any way responsible for any mistakes or other flaws in this book.
About the Author
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) grew up bilingual in a Danish American family. After discovering science fiction fandom and earning a physics degree at the University of Minnesota, he found writing science fiction more satisfactory. Admired for his “hard” science fiction, mysteries, historical novels, and “fantasy with rivets,” he also excelled in humor. He was the guest of honor at the 1959 World Science Fiction Convention and at many similar events, including the 1998 Contact Japan 3 and the 1999 Strannik Conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Besides winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he has received the Gandalf, Seiun, and Strannik, or “Wanderer,” Awards. A founder of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he became a Grand Master, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
In 1952 he met Karen Kruse; they married in Berkeley, California, where their daughter, Astrid, was born, and they later lived in Orinda, California. Astrid and her husband, science fiction author Greg Bear, now live with their family outside Seattle.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Trigonier Trust
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-5040-2468-6
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