POUL ANDERSON
The Queen of Air
and Darkness
The last glow of the last sunset would linger almost until midwinter. But
there would be no more day, and the northlands rejoiced. Blossoms
opened, flamboyance on firethorn trees, steelflowers rising blue from
the brok and rainplant that cloaked all hills, shy whiteness of kiss-me-
never down in the dales. Flitteries darted among them in iridescent
wings; a crownbuck shook his horns and bugled. Between horizons the
sky deepened from purple to sable. Both moons were aloft, nearly full,
shining frosty on leaves and molten on waters. The shadows they made
were blurred by an aurora, a great blowing curtain of light across half
heaven. Behind it the earliest stars had come out.
A boy and a girl sat on Wolund's Barrow just under the dolmen it
upbore. Their hair, which streamed halfway down their backs, showed
startlingly forth, bleached as it was by summer. Their bodies, still dark
from that season, merged with earth and bush and rock, for they wore
only garlands. He played on a bone flute
and she sang. They had lately become lovers. Their age was about .
sixteen, but they did not know this, considering themselves Out..lings
and thus indifferent to time, remembering little or nothing of how they
had once dwelt in the lands of men.
His notes piped cold around her voice:
"Cast a spell, weave it well of dust and dew and night and you."
A brook by the grave mound, carrying moonlight down to a hillhidden
river, answered with its rapids. A flock of hellbats passed black beneath
the aurora.
A shape came bounding over Cloudmoor. It had two arms and' two legs,
but the legs were long and claw-footed and feather covered it to the end
of a tail and broad wings. The face was half, human, dominated by its
eyes. Had Ayoch been able to standwholly erect, he would have reached
to the boy's shoulder.
The girl rose. "He carries a burden," she said. Her vision was not.. meant
for twilight like that of a northland creature born, but she had learned
how to use every sign her senses gave her. Besides the,fact that ordinarily
a pook would fly, there was a heaviness to his haste.
"And he comes from the south." Excitement jumped in the boy, sudden
as a green flame that went across the constellation Lyrth. He sped down
the mound. "Ohoi, Ayoch!" he called. "Me here,: Mistherd!"
"And Shadow-of-a-Dream," the girl laughed, following.
The pook halted. He breathed louder than the soughing in the growth
around him. A smell of bruised yerba lifted where he
stood.
"Well met in winterbirth," he whistled. "You can help me bring this to
Carheddin."
He held out what he bore. His eyes were yellow lanterns above. It moved
arid whimpered.
"Why, a child," Mistherd said.
"Even as you were, my son, even as you were. Ho, ho, what a snatchl"
Ayoch boasted. "They were a score in yon camp by Fallowwood, armed, and
besides watcher engines they had big ugly dogs aprowl while they slept. I
came from above, however, having spied on them till I knew that a handful
of dazedust "
"The poor thing." Shadow-of-a-Dream took the boy and held him to her
small breasts. "So full of sleep yet, aren't you?" Blindly, he sought a
nipple.
She smiled through the veil of her-hair. "No, I am still too young, and you
already too old. But come, when you wake in Carheddin under the mountain,
you shall feast."
"Yo-ah; " said Ayoch very softly. "She is abroad and has heard
and seen. She comes." He crouched down, wings folded. After a
moment Mistherd knelt, and then Shadow-of-a-Dream, though
she did not let go the child.
The Queen's tall form blocked off the moons. For a while she regarded the
three and their booty. Hill and moor sounds withdrew from their awareness
until it seemed they could hear the northlights hiss.
At last Ayoch whispered, "Have I done well, Starmother?"
"If you stole a babe from a camp full of engines," said the beautiful voice,
"then they were folk out of the far south who may not endure it as meekly
as yeomen."
"But what can they do, Snowmaker?" the pook asked. "How can they track
us?"
Mistherd lifted his head and spoke in pride. "Also, now they too have felt
the awe of us."
"And he is a cuddly dear," Shadow-of-a-Dream said. "And we need more like
him, do we not, Lady Sky?"
"It had to happen in some twilight," agreed she who stood above. "Take
him onward and care for him. By this sign," which she made, "is he claimed
for the Dwellers."
Their joy was freed. Ayoch cartwheeled over the ground till he reached a
shiverleaf. There he swarmed up the trunk and out on a limb, perched half
hidden by unrestful pale foliage, and crowed.
Boy and girl bore the child toward Carheddin at an easy distancedevouring
lope which let him pipe and hey sing:
"Wahaii, wahaii!
Wayala, laii! -
Wing on the wind
high over heaven,
shrilly shrieking,
rush with the rainspears,
tumble through tumult,
drift to the moonhoar trees and the dream-heavy
shadows beneath them,
and rock in, be one with the clinking wavelets of
lakes where the starbeams drown."
*
As she entered, Barbro Cullen felt, through all grief and fury, stabbed by
dismay. The room was unkempt. Journals, tapes, reels, codices, file boxes,
bescribbled papers were piled on every table. Dust filmed most shelves and
corners. Against one wall stood a laboratory setup, microscope and
analytical equipment. She recognized it as compact and efficient, but it was
not what you would expect in an office, and it gave the air a faint chemical
reek. The rug was threadbare, the furniture shabby.
This was her final chance?
Then Eric Sherrinford approached. "Good day, Mrs. Cullen," he said. His
tone was crisp, his handclasp firm. His faded gripsuit didn't bother her.
She
wasn't inclined to fuss about her own appearance except on special
occasions. (And would she ever again have one, unless she got back Jimmy?)
What she observed was a cat's personal neatness.
A smile radiated in crow's feet from his eyes. "Forgive my bachelor
housekeeping. On Beowulf we have-we had, at any ratemachines for that, so
I never acquired the habit myself, and I don't want a hireling disarranging
my tools. More convenient to work out of my apartment than keep a
separate office. Won't you be seated?"
"No, thanks. I couldn't," she mumbled.
"I understand. But if you'll excuse me, I function best in a relaxed
position."
He jackknifed into a lounger. One long shank crossed the other knee.
He drew forth a pipe and stuffed it from a
pouch. Barbro wondered why
he took tobacco in so ancient a way. Wasn't Beowulf supposed to have
the up-to-date equipment that they still couldn't afford to build on
Roland? Well, of course old customs might survive anyhow. They
generally did in colonies, she remembered reading. People had moved
starward in the hope of preserving such outmoded things as their
mother tongues or constitutional government or rational-technological
civilization ....
Sherrinford pulled her up from the confusion of her weariness. "You
must give me the details of your case, Mrs. Cullen. You've simply told
me your son was kidnapped and your local constabulary did nothing.
Otherwise, I know just a few obvious facts, such as your being widowed
rather than divorced; and you're the daughter of outwayers in Olga
lvanoff Land who, nevertheless, kept in close telecommunication with
Christmas Landing; and you're trained in one of the biological
professions; and you had several years' hiatus in field work until
recently you started again."
She gaped at the high-cheeked, beak-nosed, black-haired and gray-eyed
countenance. His lighter made a scrit and a flare which seemed to fill the
room. Quietness dwelt on this height above the city, and winter dusk
was seeping through the windows. "How in cosmos do you know that?"
she heard herself exclaim.
He shrugged and fell into the lecturer's manner for which he was
notorious. "My work depends on noticing details and fitting them
together. In more than a hundred years on Roland, tending to cluster
according to their origins and thought habits, people have developed
regional accents. You have a trace of the Olgan burr, but you nasalize
your vowels in the style of this area, though you live in Portolondon-
That suggests steady childhood exposure to metropolitan speech. You
were part of Matsuyama's expedition, you told me, and took your boy
along. They wouldn't have allowed any ordinary technician to do that;
hence, you had to be valuable
enough to get away with it. The team was conducting ecological'
research; therefore, you must be in the life sciences. For the same
reason, you must have had previous field experience. But your skin is
fair, showing none of the leatheriness one gets from prolongedexposure
to this sun. Accordingly, you must have been mostly
indoors for a good while before you went on your ill-fated trip. As: for
widowhood-you never mentioned a husband to me, but you have had a
man whom you thought so highly of that you still wear both the
wedding and the engagement ring he gave you."
Her sight blurred and stung. The last of those words had brought Tim
back, huge, ruddy, laughterful and gentle. She must turn from this other
person and stare outward. "Yes," she achieved saying, "you're right."
The apartment occupied a hilltop above Christmas Landing Beneath it
the city dropped away in walls, roofs, archaistic chimneys and lamplit
streets, goblin lights of human-piloted vehicles,' to the harbor, the
sweep of Venture Bay, ships bound to and from the Sunward Islands and
remoter regions of the Boreal Ocean, which glimmered like mercury in
the afterglow of Charlemagne. Oliver was swinging rapidly higher, a
mottled orange disc a full degree wide; closer to the zenith which it
could never reach, it would shine the color of ice. Alde, half the
seeming size, was a thin slow crescent near Sirius, which she
remembered was near Sol, but you couldn't see Sol without a telescope
"Yes," she said around the pain in her throat, "my husband is about four
years dead. I was carrying our first child when he was killed by a
stampeding monocerus. We'd been married three years before. Met
while we were both at the University-'casts from School Central can
only supply a basic education, you know-We founded our own team to
do ecological studies under contractyou know, can a certain area be
settled while maintaining a balance of nature, what crops will grow,
what hazards, that sort of question-Well, afterward I did lab work for a
fisher co-op in Portolondon. But the monotony, the . . . shut-in-ness .
. . was eating me away. Professor Matsuyama offered me a position on
the team he was organizing to examine Commissioner Hauch Land. I
thought, God help me, I thought Jimmy-Tim wanted him named James,
once the tests showed it'd be a boy, after his own father and because of
'Timmy and Jimmy' and-oh, I thought Jimmy could safely come along. I
couldn't bear to leave him behind for months, not at his age. We could
make sure he'd never wander out of camp. What could hurt him inside it?
I had never believed those stories about the Outlings stealing human
children. I supposed parents were trying to hide from themselves the fact
they'd been careless, they'd let a kid get lost in the woods or attacked by
a
pack of satans or- Well, I learned better, Mr. Sherrinford. The guard
robots were evaded and the dogs were drugged and when I woke, Jimmy
was gone."
He regarded her through the smoke from his pipe. Barbro Engdahl Cullen
was a big woman of thirty or so (Rolandic years, he reminded himself,
ninety-five percent of Terrestrial, not the same as Beowulfan years),
broad-shouldered, long-legged, full-breasted, supple of stride; her face was
wide, straight nose, straightforward hazel eyes, heavy but mobile mouth;
her hair was reddish-brown, cropped below the ears, her voice husky, her
garment a plain street robe. To still the writhing of her fingers, he asked
skeptically, "Do you now believe in the Outlings?"
"No. I'm just not so sure as I was." She swung about with half a glare for
him. "And we have found traces."
"Bits of fossils," he nodded. "A few artifacts of a neolithic sort. But
apparently ancient, as if the makers died ages ago. Intensive search has
failed to turn up any real evidence for their survival."
"How intensive can search be, in a summer-stormy, wintergloomy
wilderness around the North Pole?" she demanded. "When we are, how
many, a million people on an entire planet, half of us crowded into this
one city?"
"And the rest crowding this one habitable continent," he pointed out.
"Arctica covers five million square kilometers," she flung back. "The
Arctic Zone proper covers a fourth of it. We haven't the industrial base
to establish satellite monitor stations, build aircraft
we can trust in those parts, drive roads through the damned darklands and
establish permanent bases and get to know them and tame them. Good
Christ, generations of lonely outwaymen told stories about Graymantle,
and the beast was never seen by a I proper scientist till last year!"
"Still, you continue to doubt the reality of the Outlings?" -
"Well, what about a secret cult among humans, born of isolation and
ignorance, lairing in the wilderness, stealing children when they can for-"
She swallowed. Her head dropped. "But you're supposed to be the expert."
"From what you told me over the visiphone, the Portolondon
constabulary questions the accuracy of the report your group ` made,
/>
thinks the lot of you were hysterical, claims you must have omitted a due
precaution, and the child toddled away and was lost beyond your finding."
His dry words pried the horror out of her. Flushing, she snapped, "Like
any settler's kid? No. I didn't simply yell. I consulted Data Retrieval. A
few too many such cases are recorded for accident to be a very plausible
explanation. And shall we totally ignore the frightened stories about
reappearances? But when I t went back to the constabulary with my facts,
they brushed me off. _ I suspect that was not entirely because they're
undermanned. I think they're afraid too. They're recruited from country
boys, and .. Portolondon lies near the edge of the unknown."
Her energy faded. "Roland hasn't got any central police force," she
finished drably. "You're my last hope."
The man puffed smoke into twilight, with which it blent, before he said in
a kindlier voice than hitherto: "Please don't make it a high hope, Mrs.
Cullen. I'm the solitary private investigator on this world, having no
resources beyond myself, and a newcomer to boot."
"How long have you been here?"
"Twelve years. Barely time to get a little familiarity with the relatively
civilized coastlands. You settlers of a century or more- ' what do you,
even, know about Arctica's interior?"
Sherrinford sighed. "I'll take the case, charging no more than I must,
mainly for the sake of the experience," he said. "But only if you'll be
my guide and assistant, however painful it will be for you."
"Of course! I dreaded waiting idle. Why me, though?"
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