The Ship Who Saved the Worlds

by Anne McCaffrey

  Slowly, she rolled the tape against the heads, comparing the scan pattern produced on her wave-form monitor with thousands of similar patterns.

  "Can you read it?" Keff asked.

  "We'll see," Carialle said "There are irregularities in the scan, which I attribute to poor maintenance of the recording device that produced it. Of all the lazy skivers, why did one have to be recording this most important piece of history? It would have been no trouble at all to keep their machinery in good repair, damn their eyes."

  "Did you want it to be easy, lady fair? Do you know, I just realized I'm hungry," Keff announced, turning to the others. "Plenna, we've had nothing since last night, and damned little then. May I buy you lunch?"

  The magiwoman turned her eyes toward him with relief. Her face was beginning to look almost hollow from strain.

  "Oh, that would be very nice," she said thinly. A timid croak from the side of the weight bench reminded him Brannel was still with them. He was hungry, too.

  "Right. Three coming up. Chaumel?"

  "No, very kindly, no," the silver magiman said, waving a hand, although keeping an eye on him that was anything but casual. Keff gave instructions to the synthesizer, and in moments removed a tray with three steaming dishes.

  "Very simple: meat, potatoes, vegetables, bread," Keff said, pointing the food out to his guests.

  "Hold it, Keff," Carialle said. "I don't trust our captor." Keff aimed his optical implants at each plate in turn. "Uh-huh. Just checking."

  "Thank you, lady dear. I count on your assistance," Keff said subvocally. Placing the first plate on its tray in Plenna's lap, he handed the second filled dish and fork to Brannel before he settled on the weight bench to enjoy his own meal.

  Brannel was still staring at the divided plate when Keff turned back.

  "What's the matter?" Keff asked. "It's good. A little heavy on the carbohydrates, perhaps, but that won't spoil the taste."

  Wordlessly, Brannel turned fearful eyes up to him.

  "Ah, I see," Keff said, intuiting the problem. "Should I try some first to show you it's all right? We're all eating the same thing. Would you like my dinner instead?"

  "No, Mage Keff," Brannel said after a moment, glancing wild-eyed at Chaumel, "I trust you."

  If he had any misgivings, one taste later the worker was hunched over his lunch, shoveling in mouthfuls inexpertly with his fork. He probably would have growled at Keff if he had tried to take it away. In no time the dish was empty.

  "You packed that away in a hurry. Would you like another plate? It's no trouble."

  Eyes wide with hope, Brannel nodded. He looked guilty at being so greedy, but more fascinated that "another plate" was no trouble. As soon as the second helping was in his hands, he began wolfing it down.

  "Huh! Crude," Chaumel said, fastidiously disregarding the male. "Well, if you want to keep pets . . ."

  Brannel didn't seem to hear the senior mage. He sucked a stray splash of gravy off his hairy fingers and scraped up the last of the potatoes.

  "How's my supply of synth, Cari?" Keff asked, teasingly. The worker stopped in the middle of a mouthful. "I'm teasing you, Brannel," he said. "We're carrying enough food to supply one man for two years—or one of you for six months. Don't worry. We're friends."

  Plenna ate more sedately. She smiled brightly once at Keff to show she enjoyed the food. Keff patted her hand.

  "Bingo!" Carialle said, triumphantly. "Got you. Gentlemen and madam, our feature presentation."

  A wow, followed by the hiss of low-level audio, issued from her main cabin speakers. Carialle diverted her main screen to the video portion of the tape. On it, a distant, spinning globe appeared.

  "The scan is almost vertical across the width of the tape," Carialle explained. "Very densely packed. You could measure the speed in millimeters per second, so where glitches appear there's no backup scan. Because this was done on a magnetic medium, some is irrevocably lost, though not much. I have filled in where I could. This is not the full, official log. I think it was a personal record kept by a biologist or an engineer. You'll see what I mean in the content."

  The tape showed several views of Ozran from space, including technical scans of the continents and seas. Loud static accompanied the glitches between portions. Carialle found the technology was as primitive as stone knives and bearskins compared to her state-of-the-art equipment, but she was able to read between the lines of scan. She put up her findings on a side screen for the others to read.

  "Looks like a damned fine prospect for a colony," Keff said, critically assessing the data as if it were a new planet he was approaching. "Atmosphere very much like that of Old Earth."

  "Ureth," Plennafrey breathed, her eyes bright with awe.

  Keff smiled. "Uh-huh, I see why they made planetfall. Their telemetry was too basic. We wouldn't miss above-ground buildings and the signs of agriculture from space, no matter how slight, but they did. Hence, first contact was made."

  The Bigelow's complement had been four hundred and fifty-two, all human. Keff fancied he could see a family resemblance to the flamboyant Mage Omri in the dark-skinned captain's face.

  Chaumel lost his veneer of sophistication when the first Old One appeared on screen. He stared at it open-mouthed. Keff, too, was amazed by the alien being, but he could appreciate that, to Chaumel, it was analogous to the gods of Mount Olympus visiting Athens.

  "I have never seen anything like them. Have you, Carialle?"

  "No, and neither has Xeno," Cari said, running a hasty cross-match through her records. "I wonder where they came from? Somewhere else in R sector? Tracing an ion trail at this late date would be impossible."

  What could not have been indicated by the still image in the folders which Keff has seen was that each of the alien's five eyes could move independently. The flat bodies were faintly amusing, like the pack of card-men in Through the Looking-Glass. The tapes compressed many of the early meetings with the host species, as they showed the crew of the Bigelow around their homes, introduced them to their offspring, and demonstrated some of the wonders of their seemingly inexplicable manipulation of power.

  The Old Ones had obviously once had a thriving civilization. By the time the crew of the Bigelow arrived, they were reduced to two small segments of population: the number who lived singly in the mountains and the communal bands who tilled the valley soil. Being few, they hadn't put much of a strain on the available resources, but it wasn't a viable breeding group, either.

  Keff listened to the diarist's narration and repeated what he could understand into IT for the benefit of the Ozrans.

  The narrator described the Old Ones and how happy they were to have the humans come to live with them. He's talking about ugly skills possessed—no, fabulous skills possessed by these ugly aliens, who promised to share what they knew. Whew, that is an old dialect of Standard."

  An Old One was persuaded to say a few words for the camera. It pressed its frightful face close to the video pickup and aimed three eyes at it. The other two wandered alarmingly.

  "I can understand what it says," Chaumel said, too fascinated to sound boastful. "How it speaks is what we now call the linga esoterka. 'How joy find strangejoy find strange two-eyes folk,' is what this one says."

  "He's pleased to meet you," Keff said with a grin. He directed IT to incorporate Chaumel's translation into his running lexicon of the second dialect of Ozran. "It sounds as though a good deal of Old One talk was incorporated into a working language, a gullah, used by the humans and Old Ones to communicate."

  The mystical sign language Keff had observed was also in wide usage among the green indigenes, but the narrator of the tape hadn't yet observed its significance. Keff could feel Carialle's video monitors on him, as if to remind him of the times that IT ignored somatic signals. He grinned over his shoulder at her pillar. This time, IT was coming through like the cavalry.

  "So that is where the expression 'to look in many directions at once' comes from," Chaumel said exci
tedly. "We cannot, but the Old Ones could."

  In his corner, Brannel was hanging on to every word. Keff realized that his three guests comprehended far more of the alien languages than he could. The two mages chimed in cheerfully when the Old Ones spoke, giving the meaning of gestures and words in the common Ozran tongue, which Keff knew now was nothing more than a dialect of Human Standard blended with the Old Ones' spoken language. Somewhat ruefully, he observed that, with Carialle's enhanced cognitive capacity, he, the xenolinguist, was the one who would retain the least of what was going by on the screen. Carialle signaled for Keff's attention when a handful of schematics flashed by.

  "Your engineer identifies those microwave beams that have been puzzling me," she said. "They're the answerback to the command function from the items of power telling the Core of Ozran how much power to send. Each operates on a slightly different frequency, like personal communicators. The Core also feeds the devices themselves. Hmm, slight risk of radioactivity there." One of Carialle's auxiliary screens lit with an exploded view of one of the schematics. "But I haven't seen any signs of cancers. In spite of their faults, Ozrans are a healthy bunch, so it must be low enough to be harmless."

  Another compression of time. In the next series of videos, the humans had established homes for themselves and were producing offspring. Some, like the unknown narrator, had entered into apprenticeships to learn the means of using the power items from the Old Ones. The rest lived in underground homes on the plains.

  "Hence the division of Ozrans into two peoples," Keff said, nodding. "It's hard to believe this is the same planet."

  The video changed to views of burgeoning fields and broad, healthy croplands. Ozran soil evidently suited Terran-based plant life. The narrator aimed his recorder at adapted skips full of grain and vegetables being hauled by domesticated six-packs. The next scene, which made the Ozrans gasp with pleasure, showed the humans and one or two Old Ones hurrying for shelter in a farm cavern as a cloudburst began. Heavy rain pelted down into the fields of young, green crops.

  In the next scene, almost an inevitable image, one proud farmer was taped standing next to a prize gourd the size of a small pig. Other humans were congratulating him.

  Keff glanced at the Ozrans. All three were spellbound by the images of lush farmland.

  "These cannot be pictures of our world," Plenna said, "but those are the Mountains of the South. I've known them since my childhood. I have never seen vegetables that big!"

  "It is fiction," Chaumel said, frowning. "Our farms could not possibly produce anything like that giant root."

  "They could once," Carialle said, "a thousand years ago. Before you mages started messing up the system you inherited. Please observe."

  She showed the full analysis of the puff of air that had been trapped in the tape cassette. Keff read it and nodded. He understood where Carialle was headed.

  "This shows that the atmosphere in the early days of human habitation of Ozran had many more nitrogen/oxygen/carbon chains and a far higher moisture content than the current atmosphere does." Another image overlaid the first. "Here is what you're breathing now. You have an unnaturally high ozone level. It increases every time there is a massive call for power from the Core of Ozran. If you want more . . ."

  In the middle of the cabin Carialle created a three-dimensional image of Ozran. "This is how your planet was seen from space by your ancestors." The globe browned. Icecaps shrank slightly. The oceans nibbled away at coastline and swamped small islands. The continents appeared to shrink together slightly in pain. "This is how it looks now."

  Plenna hugged herself in concern as Ozran changed from a healthy green planet to its present state.

  "And what for the future?" she asked, woebegone eyes on Carialle's image.

  "All is not lost, Magess. Let me show you a few other planets in the Central Worlds cluster," Carialle said, putting up the image of an ovoid, water-covered globe studded with small, atoll-shaped land masses. "Kojuni was in poor condition from industrial pollution. It took an effort, but its population reclaimed it." The sky of Kojuni lightened from leaden gray to a clear, light silver. "Even planet Earth had to fight to survive." A slightly flattened spheroid of blue, green, and violet spun among them. The green masses on the continents receded and expanded as Carialle compressed centuries into seconds. For additional examples, she showed several Class-M planets in good health, with normal weather patterns of wind, rain, and snow scattering across their faces. The three-dimensional maps faded, leaving the image of present-day Ozran spinning before them.

  Chaumel cleared his throat.

  "But what do you say is the solution?" he asked.

  "You overlords have got to stop using the power," Keff said. "It's as simple as that."

  "Give up power? Never!" Chaumel said, outraged, with the same expression he would have worn if Keff had told him to cut off his right leg. "It is the way we are."

  "Mage Keff." Brannel, greatly daring, crept up beside them and spoke for the first time, addressing his remarks only to the brawn. "What you showed of the first New Ones and their kind—that is what the workers of Klemay have been trying to do for as long as I have lived." He looked at Plenna and Chaumel. "We know plants can grow bigger. Some years they do. Most die or stay small. But I know—"

  "Quiet!" Chaumel roared, springing to his feet. Brannel was driven cowering into the corner. "Why are you letting a fur-face talk?" the silver mage demanded of Keff. "You can see by his face he knows nothing."

  "Now, look, Chaumel," Keff said, aiming an admonitory finger at him, "Brannel is intelligent. Listen to him. He has something that no other farmer on your whole world does: a working memory—and that's your fault, you and your fellow overlords. You've mutated them, you've mutilated them, but they're still human. Don't you understand what you saw on the tape? Brannel knows when, and probably why your crops have failed, so let the man talk."

  Brannel was gratified that Mage Keff stuck up for him. So he gathered courage and tried, haltingly, in the face of Chaumel's disapproval, to describe the failed efforts of years. "We seek to feed the earth so it will burgeon like this—I know it could—but every time, the plants either die or the cold and dryness come back when the mages have battles. The farms could feed us so much better, if there was more water, if it was warmer. Of the crops"—he held up all eight of his digits—"this many do not survive." He folded down five fingers.

  "You're losing over sixty percent of your yield because you like to live high," Keff said. "Your superfluous use of power, to show off, to play, to kill, is irresponsible. You're killing your world. One day your farms won't be able to sustain themselves. People will die of starvation. No matter what you think of their mental capacity, you couldn't want that because then you'd have no food and no one to do the menial labor you require."

  Chaumel looked from Keff's grim face to the spinning globe of Ozran, and sat down heavily in the crash couch.

  "We are doing that," he said, raising his long hands in surrender. "Everything he says, he knows. But if I lay down my items of power to help, my surrender will not stop all the others, nor will appealing to wisdom. We mages distrust each other too much."

  "Then we need to negotiate a mass cease-fire," Carialle said.

  "Not without a ready alternative," Chaumel returned promptly. "Our system is steeped in treachery and the counting of coup."

  "I found references to that, too," Keff said, consulting a page of the first manual. "Somebody made a bad translation for your forefathers of instructions given to officers seeking promotion. It says 'consideration for continued higher promotion will be given to those individuals who complete the most successful projects in the most efficient manner.' It goes on to say that those projects should benefit the whole community, but I guess that part got lost over time. There's a similar clause in our ship's manual, just in updated language."

  Chaumel groaned.

  "Then all this time we have been making an enormous mistake." He appealed to Keff
and the image of Carialle. "I didn't know that we were acting on bad information. All my life I thought I was following the strictures of the First Ones. I sought to be worthy of my ancestors. I am ashamed."

  Keff realized that Chaumel was genuinely horrified. By his own lights, the silver mage was an honorable man.

  "Well," Keff said, slowly, "you can start to put things right by helping us."

  Chaumel chopped a hand across.

  "Your ship is free. What else do you want me to do?"

  "Seek out the Core of Ozran and find out what it was really meant to do, what its real capacity is," Carialle said at once. "It's possible, although I think unlikely, that you can retain some of your current lifestyle, but if you are serious about wanting to rescue your planet and future generations—"

  "Oh, I am," Chaumel said "I will give no more trouble."

  "Then it's time to redirect the power to its original purpose, as conceived by the Ancient Ones: weather control."

  "But what shall we do about the other mages?" Plennafrey asked.

  "If we can't convince 'em," Carialle said, "I think I can figure out how to disable them, based on what our long-gone chronicler said about answerback frequencies. With a little experimentation, I can block specific signals, no matter how tight a wave band they're broadcast on. The others will learn to live on limited power, or none at all. It's their choice."

  "We'd employ that option," Keff said quickly when he saw Chaumel's reaction, "only if there is no other way to persuade them to cooperate."

  "And that is where I come in," Chaumel said, smiling for the first time. "I am held in some esteem on Ozran. I will use my influence to negotiate, as you say, a widespread mutual surrender. With the help of the magical pictures you will show us"—he bowed to Carialle's image—"we will persuade the others to see the wisdom in returning to the ways of the Ancient Ones. We must not fail. The size of that gourd . . ." he said shaking his head in gently mocking disbelief.