by Bob Shaw
"That being the case, Mister Drumme," Trinchil said, moving towards Bartan's wagon, "I think the time has come to rouse your sleeping passenger and make her start paying her way."
This was the moment Bartan had been hoping to avert since the beginning of the expedition. "Ah… It would occasion a lot of hard work."
"Not as much hard work as crossing those hills and perhaps finding a swamp or desert on the other side."
"Yes, but…"
"But what?" Trinchil tugged at the wagon's stained canvas cover. "You have got an airship in here, and you can fly it, can't you? If it transpired that you had turned my niece's head with a pack of lies I would be very angry. More angry than you have ever seen me. More angry than you can even imagine."
Bartan glanced at Sondeweere, who was just reaching the edge of the group, and was taken aback to see that she was gazing at him with an expression which was frankly questioning, not to say doubtful. "Of course, my airship is in there," he said hurriedly. "Well, it's more of an airboat than an airship, but I can assure you that I am an excellent pilot."
"Ship, boat or coracle—we're listening to no more of your excuses." Trinchil began unfastening the cover and other men willingly went forward to help him.
Not daring to object, Bartan watched the operation in a mood of increasing gloom. The airboat was the only object of any value he had inherited from his father, a man whose passion for flying had gradually impoverished and eventually killed him. Its airworthiness was extremely dubious, but Bartan had concealed that fact when presenting the case for his being allowed to join the expedition. An aerial scout could be of great value to the commune, he had argued, and Trinchil had reluctantly assigned wagon-space to the craft. There had been several occasions during the journey when reconnaissance from the air would indeed have been worth the trouble of sending the boat aloft, and each time Bartan had tested his ingenuity to the limit by devising plausible reasons for remaining on the ground. Now, however, it looked as though the day of reckoning had finally arrived.
"See how eagerly they scrabble," he said, taking up a position beside Sondeweere. "It's like a sport to them! Anyone would think they doubted my ability as a pilot."
"That will be soon put to the test." Sondeweere spoke with less warmth than Bartan would have liked. "I only hope you're better as a pilot than as a guide."
"Sondy!"
"Well," she said unrepentantly, "you must admit you've made a fine pig's arse of everything so far."
Bartan gazed down at her in wounded bafflement. Sondweere's face was possibly the most beautiful he had ever seen—with large, wide-spaced blue eyes, perfect nose and well-delineated voluptuous lips—and his every instinct informed him she had an inner loveliness to match. But now and then she would make an utterance which, taken at its face value, indicated that she was quite as coarse as some of the slovens with whom circumstances of birth had forced her to associate. Was this a matter of deliberate policy on her part? Was she, in her own way, warning him that the agricultural life he was about to embrace was not for milksops? His thoughts were abruptly diverted to more practical matters by the sight of a farmer aboard the wagon picking up a green-painted box and preparing to drop it to the ground.
"Careful!" Bartan shouted, darting forward. "You have crystals in there!"
The farmer shrugged, unimpressed, and lowered the box into Bartan's hands.
"Let me have the purple one too," Bartan said. When he had received the second box he tucked one under each arm and carried them to a safe resting place on a flat-topped boulder. The green pikon and purple halvell crystals—both extracted from the soil by the root systems of brakka trees—were not really dangerous unless allowed to mingle inside a sealed container. But they were expensive and difficult to obtain outside the largest communities, and Bartan was very solicitous with the small quantities remaining to him. Accepting that he was now virtually committed to making a flight in spite of the hazards involved, he began to supervise the unpacking and assembly of the airboat.
Although the little gondola was extremely light he had no worries about its strength, and the jet engine—being made of brakka wood—was practically indestructible. Bartan's main concern was with the gasbag. The varnished linen of the envelope had been in doubtful condition when he had packed it, and the long period of stowage in the back of the wagon was likely to have caused further deterioration. He inspected the material and the stitching of the panels and load tapes as the gasbag was being rolled out to its full length on the ground, and what he found added to his misgivings about the proposed flight. The linen had a papery feel to it and there were numerous loose ends of thread wavering on the tapes.
This is madness, Bartan thought. I'm not going to get myself killed for anybody.
He was choosing between the alternatives of facing up to Trinchil and simply refusing to fly, or of surreptitiously disabling the boat by putting a hole in the envelope, when he noticed that a change was coming over the other members of the group. The men were asking questions about the construction and operation of the craft, and were listening to his replies with interest. Even the unruliest children had become more respectful in their manner. It slowly dawned on Bartan that the settlers and their families had never been close to a flying machine before, and a sense of wonder was stirring to life inside them. The boat and its strange mechanisms, seen for the first time, were proof that he really was a flier. Within minutes his status had improved from that of mistrusted novice farmer, a liability to the commune, to that of a man possessing arcane knowledge, rare skills and a godlike ability to walk the clouds. His new eminence was very gratifying—and it was a pity it was destined to be so brief.
"How long would it take to reach the hills with a device like this?" Trinchil said, with no trace of his usual condescension.
"Thirty minutes or so."
Trinchil whistled. "It is truly wondrous. Are you not afraid?"
"Not in the least," Bartan said, regretting that he could no longer delay making his position clear. "You see, I have absolutely no intention of trying to fly this…"
"Bartan!" Sondeweere arrived at his side in a swirling of yellow tresses and put an arm around his waist. "I'm so proud of you."
He did his best to smile. "There's something I ought…"
"I want to whisper." She drew his head down, at the same time applying her body to his in such a way that he felt the warm pressure of her breasts against his ribs and her pubis nuzzling into his thigh. "I'm sorry I was rude to you," she breathed in his ear. "I was worried about us, you see, and Uncle Jop was getting into such a dark mood. I couldn't bear it if anything got in the way of our marriage, but now everything is all right again. Show them all how wonderful you are, Bartan—just for me."
"I…" Bartan's voice faded as he became aware that Trinchil was staring at him with an inquisitive expression.
"You were about to say something." There seemed to be a rekindling of the old animosity in Trinchil's eyes. "Something about not flying."
"Not flying?" Bartan felt Sondeweere's hand slide down his back and come to rest on his buttocks. "No, no, no! I was going to say I'd be in no danger because I have no intention of trying to fly too fast, or of performing any injudicious aerobatics. Aviation is a business with me, you know. Strictly a business."
"I'm glad to hear it," Trinchil said. "I'd be the last man in the world to tell another how to conduct his business, but may I offer you a pertinent piece of advice?"
"Please do," Bartan replied, wondering why he found the older man's grin less than reassuring.
Trinchil clamped an enormous hand on each of Bartan's shoulders and gave him a mock-playful shake. "If, by any chance, you fail to find good land beyond those hills—keep on flying in a straight line and be sure to put as many leagues as you can between the two of us."
The boat was handling well and—had he not been fearful of a sudden and catastrophic failure of the gasbag—the experience of being airborne again might have produced an equi
valent lift in Bartan's spirits.
Enigmatic though it had seemed to the farmers, the engine designed and built by his father had only three basic controls. A throttle fed pikon and halvell into a combustion chamber, and the hot miglign gas thus generated was exhausted through an aft-facing jet pipe to propel the boat. The pipe could be swivelled laterally by means of a tiller to give some directional control; and when required another lever diverted gas upwards into the envelope to create and maintain buoyancy. As miglign was lighter than air, even when cool, the assemblage was compact and efficient.
Bartan took the boat to a height of fifty feet and sailed it in a circle around the wagons, partly to please Sondeweere, mainly to check that the extra strain of turning would not be too much for the attachment gussets. Relieved at finding the craft still airworthy for the time being at least, he gave a stately wave to the watching farmers and set a course to the west. It was just past noon, with the sun very close to the zenith, so he was riding in the protective shadow of the gasbag and could view his surroundings with unusual clarity. The marshlands stretched out ahead of him like pastel-tinted snow, in contrast to which the distant hills seemed almost black. Apart from the occasional flash of an extra-bright meteor there was little to be seen in the sky. Its brilliance was overpainting all but the brightest stars, and even the Tree—the most important constellation in the southern heavens—was barely visible to his left.
After a few minutes of uneventful flight Bartan began to cease worrying about his safety. The intermittent sound of his jet was fading quickly in the pervasive stillness, and he had little to do but hold his course, now and then pumping the pneumatic reservoir which force-fed crystals to the engine. He might have been able to enjoy the sortie had it not been for Jop Trinchil's parting words, and once again he found himself regretting that he had never been able to persuade Sondeweere to leave the Birthright group.
He had been only two years old at the time of the Migration and had no real memories of the event, but his father had told him much about it and had given him a good understanding of the historical background. When the ptertha plague had forced King Prad to build an evacuation fleet capable of flying to Overland from the sister world, Land, there had been strong opposition from the Church. The basic tenet of the Alternist religion had been that after death the soul flew to Overland, was reincarnated as a baby, lived out another life and returned to Land in the same way, part of an eternal and immutable process of exchange. The proposal to have a thousand ships physically undertake the voyage to Overland had been an affront to the Lord Prelate of the day, and the riots he led had threatened the whole enterprise, but the Migration had been accomplished despite adverse conditions.
When Overland was found to have no human inhabitants, no counterpart to Land's civilisation, religious conviction had largely ceased to exist among the colonists. The fact that it had not disappeared entirely was, according to Bartan's father, a triumph of stubborn irrationality. All right, we were mistaken, was the argument advanced by the remnants of the devout. But that was only because our minds were too puny to appreciate the grandeur of the plan devised by the Great Permanence. We know that after death the soul migrates to another world, and so inadequate was our vision that we presumed that other world to be Overland. We now realise that the departing soul's actual destination is Farland. The High Path is much longer than we realised, brethren.
Farland was roughly twice as distant from the sun as the Land-Overland pair. It would be many centuries before ships from Overland would be able to undertake that kind of journey, Vlodern Drumme had concluded—passing his natural cynicism to his son—so the high priests had made a good choice. Their jobs were safe for a long time to come…
He had been wrong on that point, as it had transpired. In designing Overland's infant society, King Chakkell—an old enemy of the Church—had made certain it contained no vestiges of a state religion. Satisfied with having abolished the clergy as a profession, the King had occupied himself with other matters, careless of the fact that his edicts had created a vacuum to be filled by a new kind of preacher, of whom Jop Trinchil was a good example.
Trinchil had embraced religion late in life. At the age of forty he had willingly taken part in the interworld migration, with no qualms about desecrating the High Path, and for the most part his life on Overland had been one of unremitting hard work on a smallholding in the Ro-Amass region. On nearing his sixties Trinchil had become disillusioned with the normal pattern of agricultural life and had decided to be a lay preacher. Unlettered, uncouth in word and manner, inclined to violence, he nevertheless had a raw force of personality which he was soon exerting over a small congregation, whose donations handsomely supplemented the rewards of his own physical toil.
Finally, he had conceived the idea of leading a flock of the faithful to a part of Overland where they could practise their religion without interference—especially from busybodies who might report Trinchil's illegal activities to the prefect in Ro-Amass.
It was during the preparations for the Birthright Expedition that Trinchil's and Bartan Drumme's paths had intersected. Bartan had been earning a reasonable, if irregular, income by selling cheap jewelry of his own design and manufacture. Normally his commercial judgment was sound, but for a brief period he had allowed himself to become infatuated with the appearance of the newly discovered soft metals, gold and silver. As a result he had been left with a batch of trinkets he found almost impossible to sell in his normal markets, where there was a conservative preference for traditional materials such as glass, ceramics, soapstone and brakka. Refusing to be discouraged, he had started touring the rural areas around Ro-Amass in search of less discerning customers, and had met Sondeweere Trinchil.
Her yellow hair had bedazzled him more than gold had done, and within minutes he was hopelessly in love and dreaming of taking Sondeweere back to the city as his solewife. She had responded favourably to his overtures, obviously pleased by the prospect of marrying a man whose appearance and manner contrasted so sharply with those of the average young farmer. There had been, however, two major obstacles to Bartan's plans. Sondeweere's desire for novelty stopped short of any interest in changing her way of life—she was adamant that she would never live anywhere but on a farm. Bartan's reaction had been to discover within himself a hitherto dormant passion for agriculture and an ambition to work his own plot of land, but the second problem had been far less amenable to a quick solution.
Jop Trinchil and he had taken an immediate dislike to each other. There had been no need for a conflict of interests, or even for a word to be spoken—the mutual antagonism had sprung into existence, deep-rooted and permanent, on the very instant of their first meeting. Trinchil had decided at once that Bartan would be an abject failure as husband and father; and Bartan had known, without having to be told, that Trinchil's only interest in religion was as a means of lining his pocket.
Bartan had to admit that Trinchil was genuinely fond of his niece, and although he seized every opportunity to complain about Bartan's shortcomings he had not forbidden the marriage. That had been the situation up to the present, but Bartan had a feeling that his future was in the balance, and his state of mind had not been improved by Sondeweere's behaviour at the impromptu meeting. She had acted as though her love was beginning to waver, as though she could turn away from him if he failed to make good his latest promise.
The thought caused Bartan to concentrate his gaze on the irregularity at the far edge of the swampy basin. Now that he was closer and higher he was almost certain that it indeed represented an extension of the marsh into an arroyo, in which case the chances that he actually was recalling an aerial view were somewhat improved. Wishing his memory was more trustworthy, he fed several bursts of hot miglign into the gasbag which swayed above him, and slowly he gained the height he would need for crossing the hills. The spires of rock rearing up from the pale surface shrank to the semblance of black candles.
In a short time the boat was sc
udding over the marsh's ill-defined boundary and Bartan was able to confirm that a narrow finger of it ran due west for about two miles. With increasing confidence and excitement he followed the course of the ancient waterway. As grassy contours rose up beneath the boat he saw groups of deer-like animals, disturbed by the sound of the jet, make swerving runs, with white hindquarters beaconing their alarm. Frightened birds occasionally erupted from trees like wind-borne swirls of petals.
Bartan kept his eyes on the slopes ahead. They seemed to form a barrier which was being raised higher and higher to block his view, then he was crossing a ridge and with dramatic suddenness the horizon receded, fleeing into the distance before him. The intervening space was revealed as a complex vista of savannahs, gentle hills, lakes and occasional strips of woodland.
Bartan gave a whoop of glee as he saw that the territory, spilling out in front of him like a rich man's hoard, was a homesteader's dream translated into reality. His first impulse was to turn the airboat and head back to Trinchil and the others with the good news, but the hillside was shelving away beneath him now in a silent invitation to fly onwards. He decided it would do no harm to spend a few extra minutes in getting a closer and more detailed view of the nearer tracts, and perhaps to locate a stream which would afford a good preliminary stopping place. It would help impress on the farmers that he was a competent and practical man.
Allowing the boat to lose altitude naturally through the cooling of the gasbag, Bartan continued sailing west, sometimes laughing aloud with sheer pleasure, sometimes sighing in relief over the nearness of his escape from humiliation and expulsion. The clarity of the air defeated perspective, stacking geographical features on top of each other as in a meticulously executed drawing, allowing him to pick out details of rock formations and vegetation at ranges he would normally have considered impossible. Thus it was that—although he was a good five miles from the white speck on the hillside when he first noticed it—identification was immediate.