Poul Anderson - Captive of the Centaurianess
The hero is the child of his times, in that his milieu gives him his motives and means. Yet he seizes the world as he finds it and reshapes it as he will; and he remains eternally an enigma to his contemporaries and to the future.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the famous but ever strange story of the three whose discoveries and achievements, late in the twenty-third century, set entire races of beings upon wholly new courses.
The driving idealism and military genius of Dyann Korlas; the wisdom, mighty, profound, and benign, of Urushkidan; above all, perhaps, the inspired leadership of Tallantyre—these molded history, but we will never truly understand them. The persons who embodied them are still further beyond us. The essential selves of the glorious three will always be mysterious.
—Vallabhai Rasmussen,
Origins of the Galactic Era
I
Floodlit, the tender loomed against night, above the swarm of humanity, like a great golden bullet. Ray Tallantyre quickened his steps. By George and dragon both, he'd made it! The flight from San Francisco to Quito, the nail-gnawing wait for an airbus, the ride to the spaceport, the walk through a terminal building that seemed to stretch on forever—all were outlived and there she was, there the darling stood, ready to carry him up to the Jovian Queen and safety.
He kissed his fingers at the craft and shoved rudely through the crowd. He'd already missed the first trip up to the liner, and the thought of standing around till the third was beyond endurance.
"Hey, you."
As the voice fell on his ears, a hand did on his arm. Ray could have sworn he felt his heart slam against his teeth and his spine fall out of his trousers. Somehow he turned around. A large man was comparing his thin features with a photograph held in the unoccupied paw. "Yes, it's you, all right," this person said. "Come along, Tallantyre."
"¡Me llama Garcia!" the fugitive gibbered. "No hablo inglés."
"I said come along," the detective answered. "We figured you'd try to leave Earth. This way."
Sometimes desperation breeds inspiration. Ray's own free hand crammed the fellow's hat down over his eyes. Wrenching loose, he bolted for the gangramp. En route, he upset a corpulent lady. A volley of Latin imprecations pursued him. Shoving aside another passenger, he sped up the incline—and bounced off the wall which was a Jovian officer.
"Your ticket and passport, please," said that man. He was a tall, muscular blond, crisply white-uniformed, who regarded the new arrival with the thinly veiled contempt of a true Confed for the lesser breeds of life.
Ray shoved the documents at him, meanwhile staring backward. The detective had gotten entangled with the lady, who was beating him around the head with her purse and volubly cursing him. Agonizingly deliberate, the Jovian scanned the engineer's papers, checked them against a list, and waved him on.
The detective won free, followed, and struck the same immovable barrier. "Your ticket and passport, please," said the ship's representative.
"That man's under arrest," panted the detective. "Let me by."
"Your ticket and passport, please."
"I tell you I'm an officer of the law and I have a warrant for that man. Let me by!"
"Proper authorization may be obtained at the security center," said the immovable barrier. The detective tried to rush, encountered a bit of expert judo, and tumbled back into a line of passengers who also grew indignant with him. Every able-bodied Jovian was a military reservist.
"Proper authority may be obtained at the security center," the gatekeeper repeated. To the next person: "Your ticket and passport, please."
In the airlock chamber, Ray Tallantyre dashed the sweat off his brow and permitted himself a laugh, by the time his pursuer had gone through all the red tape, he himself would be on the space liner. Before one of his own country's secret police, the ship's officer would have quailed. However, this was Earth; and the Confeds loved to bait agents of the Terrestrial government; and there was no better way than by putting the victims through channels. Where it came to devising these, the bureaucracy of the Confederated Satellites of Jupiter was beyond compare.
Being in orbit, the vessel counted as Jovian territory; and Ray's alleged offense did not rate extradition.
He went on inside, was shown to a seat, and secured the harness. He was clear! No matter how long, the arm of the Vanbrugh family did not reach as far as he was bound. He could stay till the whole business had blown over. To be sure, he might have difficulty getting a job meanwhile, but he'd worry about that when the time came. Always did want to see the Jovian System anyway, he rationalized.
Sighing, he tried to relax: a medium-sized, wiry young man with close-cropped yellow hair and a countenance a little too sharp to be handsome. Likewise, his scarf was overly colorful, his jacket a trifle extravagantly flared.
The last passenger boarded. The lock valves closed. A stewardess went down the aisle handing out cookies which, Ray knew, contained medication to prevent space sickness. She had the full-bodied Caucasoid good looks of the ideal Jovian together with the faintly repellent air of total efficiency. "No, thanks," he said. "I've been out before. Acceleration and free fall don't bother me."
"The cookies are compulsory," she told him, and watched while he ate his. A throbbing went through the vessel as the engine came to life; outside the hull, a warning siren hooted.
He turned to the passenger beside him, obsessed with the idiotic desire for conversation found in most recent escapers from the law or the dentist. "Going home, I see," he remarked.
That person sat tall in the gray Jovian army uniform, colonel's planets on his shoulders and a haberdashery of ribbons across his chest. He looked about forty-five years old, Terrestrial, though his shaven pate made it hard to estimate; Ray gauged by the deep facial creases running down to the craggy jaw. Fixing the Earthling with a glacier-pale eye, he responded: "And you, I see, are leaving home. Two scintillating deductions." Though English was his mother tongue also—the one on which his polyglot ancestors had agreed even before the Symmetrist Revolution laid a single ideology on them—he made it sound as if it had been issued him.
"Um-m-m, uh, well," said Ray and looked elsewhere, his ears ablaze. The Jovian clutched tighter to his side the large briefcase he bore.
Announcements and orders resounded. The spacecraft shivered, howled, and sprang into the sky. Ray let acceleration pressure push him back into the cushions; the seat flattened itself into a couch; he gazed upward through a viewport and saw splendor unfold, stars and stars and stars, blackness well-nigh crowded out of sight by brilliance. His companion declined to recline.
The boost did not take long, then they were on trajectory and the Jovian Queen appeared. At first the liner was a mere needle to see, shimmery-blue by the light of the Earth she was orbiting. Soon she was close by, and the sun struck her as she swung clear of the planet's shadow cone, and she became huge and radiant. Despite her weight-giving spin, the tender made smooth contact. Whatever you could say against the Jovians—and some people said quite a bit—they did maintain the best transport in the Solar System. Every national fleet on Earth and most private companies were finding it nearly impossible to compete.
The stewardess directed the passengers through joined airlocks and toward their quarters. She promised that luggage would be delivered "in due course." That reminded Ray that he'd checked in a single tiny suitcase containing little but a few changes of clothing. And his third class ticket meant that he'd have to share a cabin, which it would be ludicrous to call a stateroom, with two others. The decline and fall of the Tallantyre credit account was so depressing a subject that the pseudo-gravity, low though it wa
s, bowed his shoulders; and, forgetting to allow for Coriolis force, he bruised a toe as he rounded a corner in the passage. Well and good to have gotten away from Earth free, he thought; but he'd hit Ganymede damn near broke, and he hadn't really considered as yet how he was going to survive there. This had simply been the sole destination in space for which he could get a ticket at exceedingly short notice. . . .
A number identified the door assigned him. He opened it.
"Put—me—down!"
Ray gaped at the spectacle of a Martian struggling in the clutch of a woman two meters tall.
"Put—me—down!" the Martian spluttered again. He had coiled his limbs snakelike around her arms and torso, and the four thick walking tentacles were formidably strong. She didn't seem to notice, but laughed and shook him a bit.
"I beg your pardon," Ray gasped and backed away.
"You are forgiven," the woman replied in a husky contralto with a lilting accent. She shot out one Martian-encumbered hand, grabbed him by the jacket, and hauled him inside. "You be the yudge, my friend. Is it not yustice that I have the lo'er berth?"
"It is noting of te sort!" screamed the Martian. He fixed the newcomer with round, bulging, indignant yellow eyes. "My position, my eminence, clearly entitle me to ebery consideration, and ten tis hulking monster—"
The Earthling's gaze traveled up and down the woman's form before he said softly, "I think you'd better accept the lady's generous offer. But, uh, I seem to have the wrong cabin."
"Is your name Ray Tallantyre?" she asked.
He pleaded guilty.
"Then you belon vith us. I have asked about the passenyer list. You may have the sofa for sleepin."
"Th-thanks." Ray sat down on it. His knees felt loose.
The Martian gave up the struggle and allowed the woman to place him on the upper bunk. "To tink of it," he squeaked. "Tat I, Urushkidan of Ummunashektaru, should be manhandled by a sabage who does not know a logaritm from an elliptic integral!"
Astounded, Ray stared as if this were the first of the race that he had met in his life. Urushkidan's gray-skinned cupola of a body balanced 120 centimeters tall on the walking tentacles; above them, two slim, three-fingered arms writhed bonelessly on either side of a wide, lipless mouth. Elephantine ears and flat nose supported a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, his only garb except for a poisonously green vest full of pockets with all kinds of things in them.
"Not the Urushkidan?" Ray breathed—the mathematician acclaimed throughout the Solar System as a latter-day Gauss or Einstein.
"Tere is only one Urushkidan," the Martian informed him.
For a moment of total irrelevance, Ray's rocking mind wondered how different history might have been if the first probes to Mars hadn't happened to land in two of the Great Barrens—if civilizations upon that world had gone in for agriculture or architecture identifiable by instruments in orbit—if, even, the weird biochemistry of the natives had been unable to endure Terrestrial conditions—
A Homeric shout of laughter brought him back to what he must suppose was reality. The woman uttered it where she loomed over him. "Velcome, male Tallantyre," she cried. "You are cute, I think I vill like you. I am Dyann Korlas of Kathantuma." She took his hand in a friendly grip.
He yelped and got it back not quite crushed. "You're one of the Centaurians, then," he said feebly.
"Yes, so you call us."
He found himself regarding her with some pleasure, overwhelming though her presence was. Hitherto he had only seen her kind on television.
Except for the pointed ears, which her braids concealed, she looked human enough externally, albeit not of any stock which had ever evolved on Earth. The similarities extended to all the most interesting areas, he knew. Memories came back to him of scientific arguments he had read as to whether this was mere coincidence or whether form had to follow function that closely on every globe of a given type. There were plenty of internal differences, of course, among them being bone and flesh which were considerably harder and denser than his. Alpha Centauri A III—or Varann, as its most advanced nation had decided to name it after learning from the first Solar expedition that it was a planet—had, among other striking non-resemblances to his world, half again the surface gravity.
Her size reminded him of alienness which went deeper than appearance. Men of her race were smaller and weaker than women. In every known culture, they stayed home and did the housework while their wives conducted public business. In warlike Kathantuma and its neighbor lands, public business usually meant raids on somebody else with the objective of stealing everything that wasn't bolted down.
Nevertheless, this . . . Dyann Korlas . . . was well worth staring at. She was built like a statuesque tigress. Her skin was smooth and golden-hued. Bronze hair coiled heavy around a face which would have inspired an ancient Hellenic sculptor; but exotic touches, such as a slight tilt to the big, storm-gray eyes, made it look not only Classical but sexy. Her outfit consisted of a knee-length tunic, sandals, a form-fitting steel cuirass with twin demonic visages sculptured on the bust, a round helmet decorated with bat-like bronze wings, a belt upholding purse and sheath knife, and a sword which Lancelot might have reckoned just a trifle too heavy.
Ray found his voice: "Are you sure I belong in this cabin? Hasn't somebody made a mistake?"
She grinned. "Oh, you are safe."
He recalled that the titles of aristocrats in her home country translated into expressions like "chief," "district ruler," "warrior," and the like. A few males had accompanied the Centaurian ladies to the Solar System. Arrogantly indifferent to details of ethnology, the Jovians must have assumed from her honorific, whatever it was —doubtless written down on her behalf by some Extraterrestrial Secretariat underling told off to assist these visitors—that she was among those males.
Well, why should Ray Tallantyre disabuse the ship's officers? The overworked third-class steward wasn't likely to care, or perhaps even notice. Not that the Earthling expected any action with his cabin mate, especially in Urushkidan's presence. Indeed, the idea was somewhat terrifying. However, from time to time the view in here ought to get quite nice. They had no nudity taboo in Kathantuma.
Reminded of the Martian and his manners, Ray glanced toward the upper berth. Urushkidan was morosely stuffing a big-bowled pipe. Tobacco-smoking was a vice on which his race had eagerly seized; they didn't exactly breathe, but by the bellows-and-membrane organ which they also used to form human speech, they could keep the fire going. They usually described the sensation as "tinglesome."
"Uh, sir, I'd like to say I know of your work," the human ventured. "In fact, since I am—was—a nucleonic engineer, I can appreciate what it means."
The Martian inflated his body, his way of smiling or preening. "Doubtless you habe grasped it quite well," he replied graciously. "As well as any Eartling could, which is, of course, saying bery little."
"But if I may ask, uh, what are you doing here?"
"Oh, I habe a lecture series arranged at te jobian Academy of Sciences. Tey are quite commendably aware of my importance. I will be glad to get off Eart. Te air pressure, te grabity, pfui!"
"But a ... a person ... of your distinction, traveling third class—"
"Naturally, tey gabe me a first-class ticket. I turned it in, bought a tird-class, and banked te difference." He glowered at Dyann Korlas.
"To' if I am treated like tis—" He shrugged. A Martian shrugging is quite a sight. "No real matter. We of Uttu—Mars, as you insist on calling it—are so incomparably far adbanced in te philosophic birtues of serenity, generosity, and modesty tat I can accept barbaric mistreatment wit te scorn tat it deserbes."
"Oh," said Ray. To the Centaurianess: "And may I ask why you are bound for Jupiter, Ms.—Ms?—Korlas?"
"You may," she allowed. "And let us use first names, no? That is sveet. . . . vell, I vish to see Yupiter, though I do not think it vill be as glamorous as Earth." She sighed. "You live in a fable! Your beastless carriages, your flyin machine
s, your auto—auto-matic kitchens, your clocks, your colorful clothes, your qvaint customs—haa, it vas vorth the long travel yust to see such things."
Long, for certain; fantastically powerful though they were, the exploratory ships needed ten years to cross the interstellar gulf, and there had only been three expeditions to date. Dyann had arrived with the latest, part of a delegation and inquiry group dispatched by her queen. Ray had heard that the crew had quite a time with that turbulent score until everybody settled down in suspended animation. The visitors had now spent about a year on Earth and Luna, endlessly curious, especially as to what their hosts did to pass the time since the World Union had arisen to terminate the practice of war. By and large, they'd caused remarkably little trouble. A couple of times tempers had flared and Terrestrial bones gotten broken, but the Varannians were always apologetic afterward. To be sure, once one of them had been scheduled to address a women's club.. . .
"Tell me this I am not clear about," Dyann requested. "The Yovians, they did begin on your planet?"
Ray nodded. "Yes. They colonized the moons partly for economic reasons, partly because they didn't like the way Europe was becoming homogenized, Asian and African immigrants were getting numerous, and so on. About sixty years ago, they declared their independence. After a lot of debate, the leaders of Earth decided the issue wasn't worth fighting about. That may have been a mistake."
"Vy?"
"M-m-m . . .well, it's true they had certain economic grievances, after the heroic work their pioneers had done—and they themselves are still doing, I must admit. Nevertheless, they live under a dictatorship that keeps telling them they're the destined masters of the Solar System. Last year they occupied and claimed the Saturnian moon colonies. Their pretext was almighty thin, but the Union was too chicken-livered to do more than squawk. Not that it has much of a navy compared to theirs."
Dyann beamed. "Ha, you might really have a var vile I am here to see? Lovely, lovely!" She clapped her hands.
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