The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Everyone seemed to be finished with breakfast. Hatha looked around impatiently, then gestured peremptorily, which caused the immediate appearance of three of the triads, nine warriors in all. They were all young, younger than either Han or Liszendir, but they seemed confident and dangerous, fanatics accustomed to instant obedience. Moreover, they were armed with several kinds of weapons, some of which Han recognized, and some he did not.

  “Naturally,” Hatha mentioned with a very courteous manner, “to the intelligent, the obvious never need be explained. Why explain such things—it is like explaining a good poem, or perhaps a well-constructed joke; the explanation takes the impact of recognition away.” It would have been a good allusion if addressed solely to humans; but to Liszendir, and Han as well, now that he was also a speaker of Singlespeech, it was doubly pointed. Because every word-root had four meanings, and because the basic roots were “saturated,” every pronounceable combination within the rules was a true root, with the resultant possibilities of confusion and misidentification, Singlespeech abounded with puns, “jokes,” double and triple entendre, and from what Han had gleaned from Liszendir, the poetry was even worse, with severe syntactical compression and odd literary references to add to the confusion. Get the point, indeed. He thought Hatha might be overobvious. To the girl, the attempt at “subtlety” would be as brazen as a raucous shout in a quiet and secluded grove deep in the forest.

  Hatha continued, “I do not wish to be troubled or disturbed by further futile attempts or false bravado. So. Han, you will fly the little ship. Now that I know something of how to operate it, doubtless primitive in technique by your standards, I can observe you to judge if you are performing correctly. I am sure you are able to cause the ship to perform some pervulsion detrimental to us all, but hardly one which will incapacitate ten of us, and yet leave you and Liszendir standing, or should I say, operable.”

  “I understand very well. It shall proceed as you wish.”

  They left the hall with no further ceremony, and went to the place where the ship had been grounded through another winding and dark passageway. After the close, dense darkness, their sudden emergence into the stark, clear openness of Dawn was something of a shock. It was early morning, and the north-autumn light was all around them. The sun was now low in the northeast, just clearing the far ramparts of the high and naked summits of the large eastern range. The air was still, transparent as spring water, full of blues and violets. For Dawn, it was cloudy, with planes and swathes of layered clouds all over the sky, lightening toward steely grey and hints of pearl in the north, darkening into rich, deep blues and violet and darker tones in the south, which now was severely darkened. Han tried to imagine what the extreme of winter would look like from this point; the sun would describe shorter arcs across the northern sky, would move closer to the northern horizon, and would finally disappear, leaving behind only a vague northern glow which would dim and brighten daily. An eerie blue twilight, lit from the north, not the west, and overhead, the stars would shine. The South would be almost completely dark. He looked around, to remember the impression; it was unspeakably beautiful, the shifting planes of the sky, the piercing bright sun, the shadows and tones of the mountains, the spatters of snow left from the storm of two days ago. And the ship was there, too, grounded on a spur of rock. It, too, was beautiful. As they walked toward it, the ground underfoot crunched with frost. Before they entered the Pallenber, Han paused by the foot of the ladder, gazing out at the colossal mountains to the east one more time.

  Hatha noticed. “You approve, you appreciate! That is good, very good! As for the natives of this Leilas district, they haven’t the wit; they are terrified of them. They imagine them the abode of demons.” Han could well believe the tale. Who else could live among those torn and rended surfaces than demons and malevolent spirits. Dawn had its beauty, but is was a terrible beauty which daunted and humbled and cast fears, rather than a beauty which reassured, comforted. Hatha went on, “We call those mountains the Wall Around the World. Technically, it is a misnomer, for they reach north and south only about two-thirds of the half-circumference. As far as I know, there is nothing like them anywhere else, on Dawn or on any other planet. They are so high that they break up the circulation of air, which is actually a help, for if they, and others similar to them, did not break it up, Dawn would be quite uninhabitable. I assure you it would not be so lovely here if the winds followed their natural bent—they would blow with truly hellish velocity. And they tell me that the mountains are still growing!”

  They climbed up the ladder, and entered the Pallenber. As they filed into the control room, Han expected to feel at home, reassured. But he didn’t; he felt profoundly strange, like some wild tribesman out of the bush, suddenly thrown into a room full of incomprehensible machines. The triad guarding him was watching him very closely. He did not think now was the best time; if they were expecting anything, it would be now. Later was better, if he could get the chance again. But he knew it would be better to wait for a better opportunity than act in a situation where there was little or no hope.

  Han went through the sequence of activating the ship, slowly, carefully. When it was fully operable, he turned to Hatha and said, “We’re ready.”

  “Good. Go simply—straight across. I had thought that perhaps we might take a grand tour, but on reconsideration, I think it might be better if we waited for that. Call it a reward, if you will, for good behavior. So, now; proceed!” He turned to the guards, who crowded the control room, and said something to them which Han did not exactly follow. He didn’t need to; the meaning was transparently clear from the situational context. It most likely had been something like “Kill them at the slightest pretext.” Han turned to the controls, but then turned back to Hatha.

  “Wait. You can fly this kind of ship manually, if you want, but the most common practice is to set it up for automatics. It requires less energy of the ship, and definitely less of the pilot. But I can’t insert a course until I know data about the planet—size, mass, reference points for arbitrary latitudes and longitudes.”

  “I don’t have any of that information. We don’t use those . . . what you called them. And size is of no matter. When we want to go anywhere, we just get up high enough to clear obstacles, and go there.” For the first time, Hatha seemed genuinely perplexed.

  “I can rise vertically, calibrate my altitude, and determine the size and mass from measured G force and angular diameter. Then if you tell me which direction you want to go, I can put it in. By your leave?”

  “Of course, of course. Up, then down again. Fly the course in the fringes of the atmosphere; just enough to clear the peaks. There are no other mountains between us and the homeland of the Warriors.” He now seemed not only uncomfortable, but actually embarrassed. Why?

  “Done.”

  Han enabled the drive, and the ship rose vertically until the planet lay below them, mostly dark and shaded, the terminator curiously slewed in respect to the rotation. In the far south, the land was covered by a mist or fog, which grew steadily denser and thicker in the direction of the pole. At the northern edges, nearer the equator, the cover graduated into ragged pieces, shreds and tatters of clouds moving up out of the cold parts of Dawn. Han steadied the ship, and began taking his measurements. Dawn was, as it turned out, quite large, even larger than Chalcedon, which was oversized, as habitable planets went. There was something else notable on all the instrument readings, but it was ambiguous in one sense, so for the time he kept it to himself. Finished, he informed Hatha that he was ready to take the course he indicated, which Hatha gave him, in vague terms. Han thought he knew what Hatha meant, and inserted the course.

  The ship then dropped back down to approximately the level of the highest peaks. Han stared at the maser altimeter: it was indicating 75,000 feet above the top of the trough! He put the course into activate, and sat back, work done until it would be time to pick a landing site. Hatha looked impressed, and Han told him, “There is no
need to fly it yourself, manually, in a gravity well. Besides, it wastes energy. You just set up a suborbital path and the ship flies itself along the minimum energy curve. Energy is low for lift, so all you get is thrust.”

  Hatha looked even more impressed. It occurred to Han that the reason for this must lie in the fact that he had flown the Pallenber from the land of the Warriors to Aving’s castle manually, not even knowing about orbits, or the ability of the ship to follow them automatically, once commanded. But he had already flown space, in a ship of his own! What kind of energy were these idiots playing with? But he did not follow these speculations very far, for they were moving slowly now, crossing the high mountains, the Wall Around the World. The screen was showing titan naked summits so close it seemed that they could reach out and touch them. The effect was deceptive: the peaks they were looking at were miles away, and it was only their size and, at this altitude, the lack of atmosphere which lent them the impression of nearness. Han looked again; they had the same general appearance as free-floating asteroids he had seen. Over them, on the far side of the range, was the sun. Above them, the sky showed totally black, except for a pearly-blue band close to the horizon in the north. Below, the land on the far side of the mountains was a dull gold-brown color.

  The high plains rolled beneath them, as their speed increased. They moved, and pushed the mountains back into the west. Han looked down onto the bare, apparently featureless surface. He supposed that he was looking at the same general area over which he and Liszendir had walked with such difficulty only a few months ago. But he could not make out any feature. Even the crater was invisible, at least so far as they had seen. The altimeter showed a decrease in altitude from the reading they had taken over Aving’s castle. But this was apparent altitude, distance to the ship, not reference altitude above an oceanic level. It was higher than Aving’s castle, as he already suspected very well. And they had walked over that surface. A blemish, a mark, drifted into view from his right, somewhat more to the south than he had expected. It was the crater, and there was the line of brush they had seen from the grounded warship. He could not see anything else.

  “Hatha, when did you notice we were gone from your ship, when we first landed here?”

  “Actually, quite soon. I suspected something when I came into the control room on my ship and found the young lady, here, gone, and the guards, ah, incapacitated. Permanently. I fear that out of gun range, I shall have to keep her under guard by many. She is more docile now, but for a while I thought that it would come to removing all her extremities, in order to keep her safe without doubt, and even with that drastic step, one might not be completely sure.” He nodded politely towards Liszendir. “Correct, dear?” She smiled sweetly in reply, a facial gesture which really did not resemble a smile at all. Under the circumstances, it was thoroughly unpleasant.

  Han turned back to the main screen. Ahead was new country. Below the ship, the land grew hazy, masked by a layer of thicker air, to which the altimeter agreed that the land was indeed lowering slowly in altitude. Some geography began to be visible on the face of the barren plains, and cloud formations could be seen. Ancient traces, mere rock colorings now, showed where mountains had been once, and sluggish lakes and rivers crawled over the surface. The lakes resembled nothing so much as the roots of tuberous plants, or perhaps curious organisms which might have anchored themselves to a sea-bottom, and fed in the upper waters.

  After a time, Han saw, slightly to the right and south of their course, the object he had been looking for. It was near the terminator of approaching night. The trip had indeed taken only about an hour, but now they were on the other side of the world, and winter night was coming. The object was visible, even from suborbital distances, or perhaps it disturbed the weather enough so that was the visible part of it. But whichever it was, there was the ship of the Warriors, a visible bump on the surface of Dawn. As they drew closer to it, they could see that what they had first sighted was the weather it produced, for they could see it more clearly, and observed that it trailed streamers of cloud downstream of its bulk, the shreds and tatters blown away from the cloud masses by the prevailing winds out of the south. A lenticular formation with at least ten layers they could see domed over it, and the overcloud picked up fragments of the pearly light out of the north and spread the iridescent second light all over the area where the warship had been grounded. Han revised his estimates of the size of the warship upwards. He turned to Hatha.

  “How do you ground that monster, and keep it in one piece in a gravity well?”

  “Easy, easy. We simply never turn it off!”

  “Never?”

  “Never. At least not since the great ship was rebuilt and refitted, altered from its old role to fit its new one.”

  Liszendir had been silent the whole trip. But now, as they approached closer to the dreaded oversize warship, she became attentive and alert. She interrupted, “Is that the ler starship, the first one ever built, which left old Earth so many years ago?”

  “Yes. The same. Although it is much changed; the old interior is completely gutted and filled with machinery. It takes a lot of it to be able to move those rocks and control their motion at a distance. The exterior you see is not the old shell, either; the outside part had to be enlarged as well. I must admit that its size is somewhat a problem to us, for as Han has probably guessed already, if we deactivated it while it was grounded, it would collapse under its own weight. Perhaps we could turn it off in space, above the surface, but there, we need its stress-field, because it will not hold air without it. It leaks.”

  “Hatha, we are finally being detected. When we land, may my first task be the chastising of your detection operators? We’ve come well within striking distance, and before they even knew we were coming. I hate to embarrass them, but don’t you think you need some cover?”

  “No. There is no one to watch for. Look at the sky! When you are on the other side of Dawn, by Aving’s castle, that part of the planet is pointed to the main part of the galaxy. But over here, we look out, in winter, on the utter void. Look!”

  Han looked in the upper part of the screen. The stars were indeed few, and the few which were in the field were generally rather bright, as if they were all nearer stars.

  “You look, you see, and perhaps therefrom understand; there is no one to be looking for. You people back in regions where the stars cluster thick as mudsprouts after a rain could have no idea. Out here on the edge there is nothing. It is farther than you think from here to Chalcedon, and even Chalcedon is considered far out towards the void.”

  “Well, I’m no militarist, by any means, and don’t intend to be; what I say is just opinion, unexpert, subjective. I do know that we haven’t found intelligent alien life forms yet. Yet. But the people occupy a very small part of the galaxy, even considering exploration efforts. And were there anyone about in these parts, they could certainly come and go unnoticed, doing as they pleased. And your ship, from space, is a sitting duck. A fish in a barrel. Wide open to attack. Anyone coming in here with half-good detection, or better kinds of gear, such as we have on here, would have you before you ever knew they were in the system. At the least, you need an off-planet watch. And if you can rebuild that warship, surely it’s within your resources to build a couple of orbital forts—have them up, on watch, from alternating polar orbits.”

  “Our capabilities are not for your speculation.”

  “No?” Han felt a slight prickle of the sense of danger, but it was not particularly strong. He could go on a little further. “Well, I assumed that I was now, per our decision, working for you, and my contribution was to be knowledge. That goes further than just building and operating weapon systems. I know that one does not build ballistic missiles and use them for crop-dusting! And there is more about this system you should know. For instance, when I raised the ship to take the measurements, back at the castle, I got a very curious reading—as if I were picking up traces of an anomaly somewhere in this system,
like another spaceship, but with its drives masked or in some kind of standby condition. And it was so well shielded that I couldn’t get a location on it. The energy flux was too low to be resolved from one detection position. To find it accurately, I’d have to take readings from several positions. You can increase the effective resolution power of any sensor system, mechanical, electronic, or logical, if you move it around; it acts as if it were the same size as the area you move it around in, if you synchronize all your readings. But I had time for only one scan of the system, so all I can tell you now is that there is an anomalous, unexplained neutrino source in your system.”

  Hatha said lamely, “That must be the Hammerhand you are picking up.”

  “No. Your warship isn’t an anomaly, it’s a beacon! Now, this ship has good instruments, but not the best there are. But even on this ship, with some looking, I alone could pick up your warship from as far away as the far side of Chalcedon. With both Dawn and Chalcedon between us and shielding you. A trained operator, which I am not, and good detection, really good equipment—why, your ship leaks so bad, they could probably pick you up and track your movements from old Earth. And that’s with the drives shut down! Just sitting there. I can imagine what kind of emissions that thing puts out under battle speeds. You’re lucky all of you haven’t been fried by now, if not sterilized.”