Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga

by Poul Anderson

  “Well, maybe so.”

  Raven wondered how much lethal dust he was already breathing. Not enough to matter, yet, he decided. The air was still clean in his nostrils, he could still see far across hills and down forested slopes. The heavy particles and stones were not dangerous. It was the finely divided material, slowly settling over many hectares, which could kill men.

  Like a mind-reader, Dawyd said to him, “The Holy City will be almost ideal for us. Airflow patterns protect it too from the ash, where it lies right under the Steeps of Kolumkill. The site was chosen with that in mind, even though our local volcanoes very rarely erupt. We shall have to wait there till the next rain, which may take a few days at this season. That will carry down the last airborne dust, leach from the soil what has fallen, wash the poison into the rivers and so into the sea, safely diluted. The City has ample food supplies, and I see no reason why we should not avail ourselves of them.”

  He rose. “But first we must get there,” he finished. “Does everyone have his breath back?”

  VI

  The rest of the journey was little remembered. They went at a dogtrot, along well-kept trails, under cool leaves; they halted a few minutes at a time when it seemed indicated; but toward the end men lurched along in each other’s arms. Three Namericans collapsed. Dawyd had poles chopped and raincoats spread to make litters for them. No one complained at the burden. Perhaps that was only because no energy was left to complain.

  When he entered the Holy City, Raven himself scarcely saw it. He retained enough strength to spread a bedroll for Elfavy, who sprawled quietly down and passed out. He brought a cup of water for Dawyd, who lay on his back and stared with eyes emptied of awareness. He even washed the grime and sweat from himself before crawling into his own bag. But then darkness clubbed him.

  When he awoke, it took a few seconds before he knew his own name, and a bit longer to fix his location. He rallied those drilled reflexes by which he could deny to himself that he was stiff and aching. Shadow from a wall covered him, but he looked straight up to the stars. Had he slept so long? The sky was utterly clear; men were indeed safe in this place. The constellations glittered in unfamiliar patterns. He could barely recognize the one they called The Plowman on Lochlann: its distortion made him feel cold and alone. The Nebula, dimming some parts of the sky and blotting out others, was somehow less alien.

  He left his bag, hunkered in the dark and opened the packsack that had been his pillow with fingers too schooled to need light. Quickly he dressed. Dagger and pistol made a comforting drag on his flanks. He threw a wide-sleeved tunic over the drab route clothes, for it flaunted the crests of his family and nation, and he glided between men still unconscious, into the open.

  The night was very quiet. He stood in a forum, if it could be so named. There was no paving in the Holy City, but thick pseudomoss lay cool and full of dew under his feet. On every side rose white marble buildings, long and low, fluted delicate columns upholding portico roofs where figures danced on friezes. Their doorless main entrances gaped wide atop mossy ramps, but the windows were mere slits. Colonnades and wings knitted them together in a labyrinthine unity. Behind the square that they defined stood a ring of towers, airily slender, with bronze cupolas that must show a soft green by daylight. The entire place was surrounded by an amphitheater, or whatever you wanted to call it: low moss-carpeted tiers enclosing the city like the sides of a chalice. Trees grew thickly on its top.

  Down here on the bottom there were no trees; but many formal gardens—rather, a single, reticulated one, interwoven with the houses and the towers—held beds of Terran violets and thornless roses, native jule and sunbloom and baleflower and much else which Raven didn’t recognize. Southward, above the rim of the chalice, those cliffs called the Steeps of Kolumkill shouldered against the stars.

  He was able to see much detail, for the moon She was rising in the west. Its retrograde path would take it over the sky and through half a cycle of phases during half a night period. Already it was a white semicircle, a degree in angular diameter, filling the hollow with unreal light.

  A fountain tinkled in the middle of the forum. Raven had cleaned himself there before he slept. He crossed to its little moss-grown bowl and drank until his mummy gullet felt alive again. The water gurgled back down a whimsical drainpipe, a grotesque fish face. Well, why shouldn’t there be humor in the geometric center of sacredness? thought Raven. The people of Gwydion laughed more than most, not raucously like a Namerican or wolfishly like a Lochlanna, but a gentle mirth which found something comical in the grandest things. The water must come from some woodland spring, it had a wild taste.

  He heard a noise and whirled about, one hand on his gun. Elfavy entered the moonlight. “Oh,” he said stupidly. “Are you awake, milady?”

  She chuckled. “No. I am sound asleep in my bed in Instar.” Treading close: “I woke an hour or more ago, but didn’t want to move. Not for a day, at least! Then I saw you here and—” Her voice trailed off.

  Raven directed his heartbeat to slow down. It obeyed poorly. “Someone should keep watch,” he said. “May as well be me.”

  “No need, far-friend. There are no dangers here.”

  “Wild animals?”

  “Robots keep them off. Other robots maintain the grounds.” She pointed to a little wheeled machine weeding a rosebed with delicate tendrils.

  Raven grinned. “Ah, but who maintains the robots?”

  “Silly! An automatic unit, of course. Every five years—local years, I mean, so it’s about once in a generation—our engineers hold a midwinter ceremony where they inspect the facilities and bring in fresh supplies.”

  “I see. And otherwise no one ever comes here except at, uh, Bale time?”

  She nodded. “No reason to. Shall we look around? Walking might get the cramp out of my legs.” She made the suggestion with no trace of awe, as if offering to show him any local curiosum.

  Their feet fell noiseless on the moss, and its springiness seemed to remove much of their exhaustion. The buildings looked like faerie work, there under the brutal mass of Kolumkill; but as he reached a doorway, Raven saw that their walls were heavy and strong as the rest of Gwydiona architecture. Within, light came from fluoros, recessed in the high ceiling; probably solar battery powered, Raven thought. The illumination was dim, but there was little to see anyhow: a gracious anteroom, archways opening on corridors.

  “We mustn’t go very deeply in,” said the girl, “or we could get lost and blunder around for quite some time before finding our way out. Look.” She pointed down a hall, toward an intersection whence five other passages radiated. “That is only the edge of the maze.”

  Raven touched a wall. It yielded to his fingers, the same rubbery gray substance that covered the floor. “What’s this?” he asked. “A synthetic elastomer? Does it line the whole interior?”

  “Yes,” said Elfavy. Her tone grew indifferent. “There’s nothing in here, really. Let’s go up in one of the towers, then you can see the total pattern.”

  “A moment, if you grant.” Raven opened one of the doors which marched along the nearest corridor. It was steel, as usual, though coated with the soft plastic, and had an inside bolt. The room beyond was ventilated through a slit-window. A toilet and water tap were the only furnishings, but a heap of stuffed bags filled one corner. “What’s in those?” he inquired.

  “Food, sealed in plastiskins,” Elfavy answered. “An artificial food, which keeps indefinitely. I’m afraid you won’t find it very exciting when we must live off it, but everything necessary for nutrition is included.”

  “You seem to live rather austerely at Bale time,” said Raven. He watched her from the edge of an eye.

  “It is no time to worry about material needs. Instead, you grab a sack of food and slit it open with your thumbnail when hungry, drink from a tap or fountain when thirsty, flop down anywhere when sleepy.”

  “I see. But what is the important thing you do, to which keeping alive is just
incidental?”

  “I told you.” She left the room with a quick nervous stride. “We are God.”

  “But when I asked you what you meant by that, you said you couldn’t explain.”

  “I can’t.” She evaded his glance. Her voice was not perfectly level. “Don’t you see, it goes beyond language. Any language. Mankind employs several, you realize, besides speech. Mathematics is one, music another, painting another, choreography another, and so on. According to what you have told me, Gwydion seems to be the only planet where myth was also developed, deliberately and systematically, as still a different language—not by primitives who confused it with the concepts of science or common sense, but by people trained in semantics, who knew that each language describes one single facet of reality, and wanted myth to help them talk about something for which the others are inadequate. You can’t believe, for instance, that mathematics and poetry are interchangeable!”

  “No,” said Raven.

  She brushed back her tousled hair and went on, eager now. “Well, what happens at Bale time could only be described by a fusion of every language, including those no human being has yet imagined. And such super-language is impossible, because it would be self-contradictory.”

  “Do you mean that during Bale you perceive, or commune with, total reality?”

  They came out into the open again. She hastened across the forum, through the barred shadow of a colonnade to the spires beyond. He had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of her running in the moonlight. She stopped at a tower doorway, it cast a darkness over her and she said from the darkness, “That’s merely another set of words, liatha. Not even a label. I wish you could be here yourself and know!”

  They entered and started upward. A padded ramp wound around small rooms. The passage was wanly lit and stuffy. After a silence, Raven asked, “What was it you called me?”

  “What?” He couldn’t be sure in the gloom, but he thought her face was stained with quick color.

  “Liatha. I don’t know that word.”

  Her lashes fluttered down. “Nothing,” she mumbled, “An expression.”

  “Ah, let me guess.” He wanted to make a joke, to suggest that it meant oaf, barbarian, villain, swinedog, but remembered that Gwydiona had no such terms. Since she looked at him with enormous expectant eyes he must blunder, “Darling, beloved—”

  She stopped, shrinking back against the wall in dismay. “You said you didn’t know!”

  The discipline of a lifetime kept him walking. When she rejoined him he made himself say, lightly, through a clamor, “You are most kind, peacemaker, but I don’t need any further flattery than the fact that you have time to spare for me.”

  “There will be time enough for everything else,” she whispered, “after you are gone.”

  The highest room, immediately under the cupola, was the only one which possessed a true window, rather than a slit. Moonlight cataracted past its bronze grille. The air was warm, but that light made Elfavy’s hair seem to crackle with frost. She pointed out at the intricate interlocking of labyrinth, towers, and flowerbeds. “The hexagons inscribed in circles mean the laws of nature,” she began in a subdued voice, “their regularity enclosed in some greater scheme. It is the sign of Owan the Sunsmith, who—” She stopped. Neither of them had been listening. They searched each other’s faces under the fenced-off moon.

  “Must you go?” she asked finally.

  “I have made promises at home,” he said.

  “But after they are fulfilled?”

  “I don’t know.” He considered the stranger sky. In the southern hemisphere, which was oriented more nearly toward the direction whence he had come, the constellations would be less changed. But no one lived in the southern hemisphere. “I’ve known people from one place, one culture, who tried to settle into another,” he said. “It rarely works.”

  “It might. If there were willingness. A Gwydiona, for example, could be happy even on, well, on Lochlann.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Will you do something for me? Now?”

  His pulses jumped. “If I can, milady.”

  “Sing me the rest of that song. The one you sang when we first met.”

  “What? Oh, yes, The Unquiet Grave. But you couldn’t—”

  “I would like to try again. Since you are fond of it. Please.”

  He hadn’t brought his flute, but he sang low in the chilly light:

  “‘ ’Tis I, my love, sits on your grave

  And will not let you sleep;

  For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips

  And that is all I seek.’

  “‘You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips;

  But my breath smells earthy strong.

  If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips

  Your time will not be long.’”

  “No,” said Elfavy. She gulped and hugged herself, seeking warmth. “I’m sorry.”

  He recalled again that there was no tragic art on Gwydion. None whatsoever. He wondered, what a Lear or an Agamemnon or an Old Men At Centauri might do to her. Or the real thing, even: Vard of Helldale, rebelling for a family honor he didn’t believe in, defeated and slain by his own comrades; young Brand who broke his regimental oath, gave up friends and wealth and the mistress he loved more than the sun, to go live in a peasant’s hut and tend his insane wife.

  He wondered if he, himself, was healthy enough within the skull to live on Gwydion.

  The girl rubbed her eyes. “Best we go down again,” she said dully. “Others will soon be awake. They won’t know what has become of us.”

  “We’ll talk later,” said Raven. “When we aren’t so tired.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  VII

  Rain came the following afternoon; first thunderheads banked over Kolumkill like blue-black granite, lightning livid in their caverns, then cataracts borne on a whooping east wind, finally a long slacking off when the Gwydiona romped nude on turf that glittered where sunbeams struck through the pillars of slowly falling water. Tolteca joined the ball game, as vigorous a one as he had ever played. Afterward they lounged about indoors, around a fire built on a hearth improvised from stones, and yarned. The men probed his recollections with an insatiable wish to learn more about the galaxy. They had tales to give in exchange, nothing of interhuman conflict—they seemed puzzled and troubled by that idea—but lusty enough, happenings of sea and forest and mountain.

  “So we sat in that diving bell waiting to see if their grapple would find us before we ran out of air,” Llyrdin said, “and I never played better chess in my life. It got right thick in there, too, before they snatched us up. They could have had the decency to be a few minutes longer about it, though. I had such a lovely end game planned out! But of course the board was upset as they hauled on the bell.”

  “And what might that symbolize?” Tolteca teased him.

  Llyrdin shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not much of a thinker, myself. Maybe God likes a joke now and then. But if so, Vwi has a pawky sense of humor.”

  After the storm had passed, the party went on to the spaceport site. Tolteca put in a busy day and night investigating the area. It would serve admirably, he decided.

  Though Bale time was drawing near and the Gwydiona were anxious to get home, Dawyd ordered a roundabout route. The rain had laid the volcanic dust, but more precipitation would be needed to purify the ground entirely. It would be foolish to retrace their path across that tainted soil. He aimed for a shoulder of the mountains which jutted out of the massif on the north, between the expedition and the coast. The pass across it rose above timberline, and travel was rugged. They stopped for some hours in the uppermost woods to rest before the final ascent. That was in the middle morning.

  After he had eaten, Tolteca left camp to wash in a pool further down the stream which flowed nearby. Glacier-fed, the water numbed him, but after he had toweled himself he felt like a minor sun. He donned his clothes and wandered restlessly in s
earch of a fall he could hear in the distance. A game trail led through the brush toward its foot. He was about to emerge there when he heard voices. Raven and Elfavy!

  “Please,” the girl said. Her tone trembled. “I beg you, be reasonable.”

  The distress in her shocked Tolteca. For a moment of rage he wanted to burst forth and have it out with Raven. He checked himself. Eavesdropping was ungentlemanly. Even if—or perhaps especially because—those two had been so much in each other’s company since the first night in the Holy City. But if she was in some difficulty, he wanted to know about it so he could try to help her, and he didn’t think she would tell him what the matter was if he put a direct question. There were cultural barriers, taboo or embarrassment, which only Raven was callous enough to hammer down.

  Tolteca wet his lips. His palms grew sweaty and the pulse thuttered in his ears, nearly as loud as the stream that jumped over the bluff before him. To Chaos with being a gentleman, he decided violently, slipped behind a natural hedge and peered through the leaves.

  The water foamed down into a dell filled with young trees. Their foliage made a shifting pattern of light and shadow under the deep upland sky. Rainbows danced in the water smoke, currents swirled about rocks covered with soft green growth, the stones on the riverbed seemed to ripple. Cool and damp, the air rang with the noise of the fall. High overhead wheeled a single bird of prey.

  Raven stood on the bank, a statue in a black traveling cloak. The harsh face might have been cast in metal as he regarded the girl. She kept twisting her own gaze away from his, and her fingers wrestled with each other. Tiny droplets caught in her hair broke the sunlight into flaming shards, but that unbound mane was itself the brightest thing before Tolteca’s eyes.

  “I am being reasonable,” Raven snapped. “When my nose is rubbed in something for the third time running, I don’t ignore the smell.”