His face was unreadable to her, but his body looked startled. “My, my,” he murmured. “How elaborately you speak, child. Is that local custom? Please enlighten me. I do not wish to be discourteous through ignorance.” He hesitated. “My intentions, I hope, shall always be of the best.”
His vocal organs made Anglic a thunderous rumble, weirdly accented, but it was fluent and she could follow it. She had had practice, especially with Tigeries, who didn’t sound like humans either.
For an instant, she bridled. “Sir, I’m no child. I’m nine—uh, that is, seventeen Terran years old. For the past three of those I’ve been on my own, highlands and lowlands both.” Relaxing: “So I know my way around and I’d be happy to guide you, advise you, help you. I can show testimonials from persons of several species.”
“Hraa . . . I fear I am in no position to, m-m, offer much compensation. I have been making my way—hand-to-mouth, is that your expression?—odd jobs, barter—at which I am not gifted—anything morally allowable, planet to planet, for longer than you have been in the universe, chi—young lady.”
Diana shrugged. “We can talk about that. You’re in luck. I’m not a professional tourist herder, chargin’ a week’s rent on the Emperor’s favorite palace to take you around to every place where the prices are quasar-lofty and expectin’ a fat tip at the end.” She cocked her head. “You could’ve gone to the reception center near the Pyramid. It’s got an office for xenosophonts. Why didn’t you?”
“Gruh, I, I—to be frank, I lost my way. The streets twist about so. If you could lead me to the proper functionaries—”
Diana reached up to take him by the rugged elbow. “Wait a bit! Look, you’re worn out, and you don’t have a pokeful of money, and I can do better by you than the agency. All they really know is where to find you the least unsuitable lodgings. Why don’t we go in where you can rest a while, and we’ll talk, and if I only can steer you downtown, so be it.” She paused before adding, slowly: “But you aren’t here for any ordinary purpose, that’s plain to see, and I do know most of what’s not ordinary on Imhotep.”
He boomed a chuckle. “You are a sprightly soul, no? Very well.” He turned serious. “It may even be that my patron saint has answered my prayers by causing me to blunder as I did. M-m-m . . . my name is Francis Xavier Axor.”
“Hm?” She was taken aback. “You’re a Christian?”
“Jerusalem Catholic. I chose the baptismal name because its first bearer was also an explorer in strange places, such as I hoped to become.”
And I. The heart jumped in Diana’s breast. She had always sought out what visitors from the stars she could, because they were what they were—farers through the galaxy—O Tigery gods, grant that she too might someday range yonder! And, while she agilely survived in Old Town’s dog-eat-dog economy, she had never driven a harder bargain with a nonhuman than she felt that being could afford, nor defrauded or defaulted.
Orders of magnitude more than she wanted any money of his, she wanted Axor’s good will. He seemed like a darling anyway. And possibly, just barely possibly, he might open a path for her. . . .
Business was business, and Hassan’s booze no worse than most in the quarter. “Follow me,” she said. “I’m Diana Crowfeather.”
He offered his hand, vast, hard, dry, warm. Wodenites were not theroids, but they weren’t herpetoids either; they were endothermic, two-sexed, and viviparous. She had, however, learned that they bred only in season. It made celibate careers easier for them than for her species. Thus far she’d avoided entanglements, because that was what they could too readily become—entanglements—but it was getting more and more difficult.
“An honor to meet you,” Axor said. “Hraa, is it not unusual for such a youthful female to operate independently? Perhaps not on Terra or its older colony planets, but here—Not that I wish to pry. Heavens, no.”
“I’m kind of a special case,” Diana replied.
He regarded her with care. Neither of her parents having been born on Imhotep, and both being tall, she was likewise. The gravity had made robust a frame that remained basically gracile; muscles rounded the curves of slim hips and long legs. Weight had not yet caused the small, firm bosom to sag. Her head was round, the face broad, with high cheekbones, tapering down to the chin; a straight nose flared at the nostrils, and the lips were full. Her eyes were large, gold-flecked hazel, beneath arching brows. Black hair, confined by a beaded headband, fell straight to the shoulders. A thin blouse and exiguous shorts showed most of her tawny-brown skin to the sun. Belted at her right side was a little purse for oddments, at her left a murderous Tigery knife.
“Well, but let’s go,” she laughed. Her voice was husky. “Aren’t you thirsty? I am!”
The crowd yielded slowly before them, turbulent again, less interested in the newcomer now that he had been claimed than in its own checkered affairs.
Inside, the Sign of the Golden Cockbeetle amounted to a room broad and dim. Half a dozen men, outback miners to judge by their rough appearance, were drinking at a table with a couple of joygirls and a bemusedly watching Tigery. The latter sipped from a tube inserted through the chowlock of her air helmet. The whine of its pumps underlay voices. While oxygills were far better, not many could afford them or wanted the preliminary surgery, slight though that was. Diana didn’t recognize the individual, but it was clear from her outfit that she belonged to another society than the one around Toborkozan. The group gave Axor a lengthy stare, then went back to their talk, dice, and booze.
The Wodenite ordered beer in appropriate quantity. His biochemistry was compatible with the human, barring minor matters that ration supplements took care of. Diana gave a silent cheer; her commission was going to be noticeably higher, percentagewise, than on distilled liquor. She took a stein for herself and savored the catnip coolness.
“Aaah!” breathed Axor in honest pleasure. “That quenches. God bless you for your guidance. Now if you can aid my quest—”
“What is it?”
“The story is long, my dear.”
Diana leaned back in her chair; her companion must needs lie on the floor. She had learned, the hard way, how to rein in her inquisitiveness. “We’ve got all day, or as much more as you want.” Within her there hammered: Quest! What’s he after, roamin’ from star to star?
“Perhaps I should begin by introducing myself as a person, however insignificant,” Axor said. “Not that that part is interesting.”
“It is to me,” Diana assured him.
“Well—” The dragon countenance stared down into the outsize tankard. “To use Anglic names, I was born on the planet Woden, although my haizark—tribe? community? tuath?—my people are still comparatively primitive, nomads in the Morning Land, which is across the Sea of Truth from the Glimmering Realm to the west where the Terrans and the civilization that they brought are based. My country is mostly steppe, but in the Ascetic Hills erosion has laid bare certain Foredweller ruins. Those were long known to us, and often as a youngster did I regard them with awe. In the past generation, news of them has reached the cities. Watching and listening to the archaeologists who came, I grew utterly fascinated. A wish flowered in me to learn more, yes, to do such delving myself. I worked my way overseas to the Glimmering Realm in hopes of winning a merit scholarship. Such is common among the literate Wodenites. Mine happened to come from the university that the Galilean Order maintains in Port Campbell.”
“Galilean Order—hm—aren’t they, um, priests in the Jerusalem church? I’ve never met any.”
Axor nodded in human wise. “They are the most scientifically minded organization within it. Very fitting that they should conduct studies of Foredweller remains. While under their tutelage, I was converted to the Faith. Indeed, I am ordained a Galilean.”The slow voice quickened. “Father Jaspers introduced me to the great and holy thought that in those relics may lie an answer to the riddle of the Universal Incarnation.”
Diana raised a palm. “Hold on, please. Foredwelle
rs? Who’re they?”
“They are variously known on the worlds as Ancients, Elders, Others—many names—The mysterious civilization that flourished in the galaxy—apparently through far more of it than this fraction of a single spiral arm which we have somewhat explored—vanishing millions of years ago, leaving scanty, glorious fragments of their works—” Dismay quavered in the deep tones. “You have not heard? Nothing like it exists anywhere in this planetary system? The indications seemed clear that here was a place to search.”
“Wait, wait.” Diana frowned into the shadows. “My education’s been catch-as-catch-can, you realize, but—M-m, yes. Remnant walls and such. Rumors that the Chereionites built them once, whoever the Chereionites are or were. But I thought—um, um—yes, a spaceman from Aeneas told me about a lot of such sites on his planet. Except Aeneas is small, dry, thin-aired. He figured the Old Shen—that was his name for them—they must have originated on a planet of that type, and favored the same kind for colonization.”
“Not necessarily. I venture to think that that is simply the kind where remnants are best preserved. The materials were as durable as the structures seem to have been beautiful. But everything in our cosmos is mortal. On airless globes, micrometeoroids would have worn them down. On planets with thick atmospheres, weather would do the same, while geological process wrought their own destructions. However, sometimes ruins have endured on terrestroid worlds, fossilized, so to speak. For example, a volcanic ashfall or a mudslide which later petrified has buried them. Something like this happened in the territory now covered by the Ascetic Hills of Woden. Since, the blanketing soil and rock have been gnawed away by the elements, revealing these wonders.”
Axor sagged out of his excitement. “But you know of nothing anywhere in the Patrician System?” he finished dully.
Diana thought fast. “I didn’t say that. Look, Imhotep is a superterrestrial planet, more than a third again the surface area of Daedalus—or Terra—not much less than that next to Woden, I’ll bet. And even after centuries, it’s not well mapped or anything. This was just a lonely scientific outpost till the Starkadian resettlement. Tigeries, explorin’ their new lands—yes, they tell stories about things they’ve seen and can’t account for—But I’d have to go and ask for details, and then we’d prob’ly have to engage a watership to ferry us, if some yarn sounded promisin’.”
Axor had recovered his spirits. “Moreover, this system contains other planets, plus their larger moons,” he said. “I came here first merely because Imhotep was the destination of the tramp freighter on which I could get passage. The colonized planet sunward, Daedalus?”
“Maybe. I haven’t been on Daedalus since my mother died, when I was a sprat.” Diana considered. Resolve thrilled along her nerves. She would not knowingly lead this sweet old seeker on a squiggle chase, but neither would she willingly let go of him—while hope remained that his search could carry her to the stars.
“As long as you are on Imhotep,” she said, “that’s the place to start, and I do know my way around Imhotep as well as anybody. Now for openers, can you explain what you’re after and why you think you might find a clue here?”
She drained her stein and signalled for more. Hassan brought a bucket to recharge Axor’s mug as well. Meanwhile the Wodenite, serene again, was telling her:
“As for the Foredwellers, their traces are more than an archaeological puzzle. Incredibly ancient as they are, those artifacts may give us knowledge of the Incarnation.
“For see you, young person, some three thousand standard years have passed since Our Lord Jesus Christ walked upon Terra and brought the offer of salvation to fallen man. Subsequently, upstart humankind has gone forth into the light-years; and with Technic civilization has traveled faith, to race after race after race.
“About such independently spacefaring beings as the Ymirites, one dares say nothing. They are too alien. It may be that they are not fallen and thus have no need of the Word. But painfully plain it is that every oxygen-breathing species ever encountered is in no state of grace, but prone to sin, error, and death.
“Now Our Lord was born once upon Terra, and charged those who came after with carrying the gospel over the planet. But what of other planets? Were they to wait for human missionaries? Or have some of them, at least, been granted the glory of their own Incarnations? It is not a matter on which most churches have ventured to dogmatize. Not only are the lives, the souls, so different from world to world, but here and there one nevertheless does find religions which look strangely familiar. Coincidence? Parallel development? Or a deeper mystery?”
He paused. Diana frowned, trying to understand. Questions like this were not the sort she was wont to ask. “Does it matter? I mean, can’t you be as good a person regardless?”
“Knowledge of God always matters,” said Axor gravely. “This is not necessary to individual salvation, no. But think what a difference in the teaching of the Word it would make, to know the truth—whatever the truth may be. If science can show that the gospel account of Christ is not myth but biography; and if it then finds that his ministry was, in empirical fact, universal—would not you, for example, my dear, would not you decide it was only reasonable to accept him as your Saviour?”
Uncomfortable, Diana tried to shift the subject. “So you think you may get a hint from the Foredweller works?”
“I cherish hopes, as did those scholars who conceived the thought before me. Consider the immense timeline, millions of years. Consider that the Builders must have been too widespread and numerous, too learned and powerful—yes, too wise, after their long, long history—to be destroyed by anything material. No, surely they abandoned their achievements, as we, growing up, put away childish things, and went on to a higher plane of existence. Yet surely, too, they nourished a benign desire to ease the path for those who came after. They would leave inscriptions, messages—time-blurred now, nearly gone; but perhaps the writers did not foresee how many ages would pass before travel began again between the stars. Still, what better could they bequeath us than their heritage of Ultimate Meaning?”
Diana had her large doubts. Likewise, obviously, did others, or Axor wouldn’t have had to bum his unpaid way across the Empire. She didn’t have the heart to say that. “What have you actually found?” she asked.
“Not I alone, by no means I alone. For the most part, I have merely studied archaeological reports, and gone to see for myself. In a few instances, however—” The Wodenite drew breath. “I must not boast. What I deal with are the enigmatic remains of occasional records. Diagrams etched into a wall or a slab, worn away until virtually blank. Codings imprinted in molecules and crystals, evocable electronically but equally blurred and broken. Some, nobody can comprehend at all. Some do seem to be astronomical symbols—such as signs for pulsars, with signs for hydrogen atoms and for numbers to give periods and spatial relationships. One can estimate how those pulsars have slowed down and moved elsewhere, and thus try to identify them, and thence the sun toward which a record conceivably points. . . .
“On a barren globe five parsecs from here, amidst the tailings of a former mining operation, I found clues of this kind. They appeared to me to whisper of the sun Patricius.”
Axor broke off, crossed himself, stared into remoteness.
After a while Diana made bold to speak again. “Well, your . . . your reverence, you needn’t despair yet. What say we establish ourselves in town for a few days? You can rest up while I arrange conferences and transportation and so forth. You see, nothin’has turned up in the mountains; but Tigeries do tell about islands with what may be natural formations but might also be ruined walls, except that Imhotep never had any native sophonts. If that doesn’t work out, I can inquire among spacefolk, get us passage offplanet, whatever you want. And it shouldn’t cost you very heavily.”
Axor smiled. The crocodilian expanse of his mouth drew a shriek from a joygirl. “A godsend indeed!” he roared.
“Oh, I’m no saint,” Diana answ
ered. He couldn’t be so naive as to suppose she had immediately fallen in love with his cause—though it looked like being fun. “Why do I offer to do this? It’s among the ways I scratch out my livin’. We got to agree on my daily wage; and I’ll be collectin’ my cumshaws on the side, that you don’t have to know about. Mainly, I expect to enjoy myself.” To mention her further dreams would be premature.
Axor put spectacles on nose to regard her the better. “You are a remarkable young being, donna Crowfeather,” he said, a surprisingly courtly turn of phrase. “If I may ask, how does it happen you are this familiar with the planet?”
“I grew up here.” Impulsively, perhaps because she was excited or perhaps because the beer had started to buzz faintly in her head, she added: “And my father was responsible for most of what you’ll see.”
“Really? I would be delighted to hear.”
It was generally easy to confide in a chance-met xeno, as it was not with a fellow human. Furthermore, Axor’s manner was reassuring; and no secrets were involved. The whole quarter knew her story, as did Tigeries across reaches of several thousand kilometers.
“Oh, my father’s Dominic Flandry. You may have heard of him. He’s become an Admiral of the Fleet, but forty-odd years ago he was a fresh-caught ensign assigned to the planet Starkad, in this same sector. Trouble with the Merseians was pilin’ up and—Anyway, he discovered the planet was doomed. There were two sophont races on it, the land-dwellin’ Tigeries and the underwater Seafolk; and there were five years to evacuate as many as possible before the sun went crazy. This was the only known planet that was enough like Starkad. It helped that Imhotep already had a scientific base and a few support industries, and that Daedalus was colonized and becomin’ an important Naval outpost. Just the same, the resettlement’s always been a wild scramble, always underfunded and undermanned, touch and go.”
“The Terran Empire has many demands on its resources, starting with defense,” said Axor. “Although one must deplore violence, I cannot but admire the gallantry with which Admiral Magnusson cast back the Merseian attack last year.”
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 18