by Mike Resnick
“So we land,” Handon Gar said, gesturing broadly toward the clouds below us. “Where?”
“We’ll see,” I told him with a confidence I did not truly feel. Truth be told, Handon Gar’s attitude was beginning to irritate me. He seemed to wax both hot and cold on so many things. His attitude seemed more Kapar than Unis: like the way he reveled at the thought of gassing innocent civilians and the eagerness with which he hoped to find civilizations at war.
It never occurred to him that the inhabitants of Tonos might not only be peaceful but might also be far more advanced than those of Poloda.
I, who had experienced death and rebirth, preferred to find a path to peace and, perhaps, someday, a family. Perhaps, even, a family with Yamoda.
The flight controls bucked as winds picked up, and I found myself concentrating solely on the task at hand.
We descended steadily through fiercer and fiercer winds. I worried that perhaps we were entering a gale or even a hurricane, but then the winds died as we entered the lower atmosphere and steadied down.
“There’s nothing in front of us!” Handon Gar said, waving his hand at the banks and banks of fog that enveloped us.
The Unis had developed a form of radio guidance similar to the ones the Allies were working on back on Earth, but they were subject to jamming and, worse, they could be used as an attack beacon by the Kapars, so they hadn’t progressed far.
“Try the radio!” I told him. Handon Gar looked at me in disbelief but turned the set on anyway. “Just see if you can find any signal.”
Enlightenment shone on his face, and he began to slowly turn the dial, saying, “We should have thought of that on the way here!”
Indeed, we should have, but we hadn’t. As I fought the controls and tried to imagine what our altitude was, Handon Gar worked with the radio, which picked up only static.
Suddenly we burst through the lowest layer of clouds and I found us over water. Ahead was a fuller whiteness—snow? We’d come through some flakes on our way down. Fortunately, our craft was equipped with de-icing gear, so we did not have to worry about our wings or propellers becoming bogged down with ice.
I glanced at our thermometer and saw that the outside temperature had risen to slightly above freezing. I guided our craft closer to what I was calling the shore and began to follow it northward, looking for a likely landing place.
“I see something!” Handon Gar shouted, pointing to his right. I craned my neck and turned our craft to the right. “Wait . . . no, I see a light!”
I didn’t see the light he mentioned but took him at his word. The weather was foul, and I was not at all certain that we’d be able to climb back out. Instead, I looked at the ground and then at the shoreline. There was a possibility. I turned us around, ignoring Gar’s cry of dismay.
“I’m going to land on the sea, and we’ll taxi to the shore,” I told him, pressing the button which deployed our inflatable pontoons and simultaneously reducing our power and lowering our flaps. Our craft settled like a falling rock until I added power to compensate for the change in pitch.
The green lights for the pontoons flashed on my panel, showing that they’d deployed. Of course, I couldn’t be certain, because, when we’d installed them, we’d never considered icy conditions. It was possible that they’d ruptured and that our precious compressed air was hissing out a hole rather than keeping the pontoons inflated.
The only way to know for certain was to land. On the rough sea below.
I turned back to the shore and reduced power further, increasing the flaps to the fullest.
“Get ready,” I called. Gar shot me a nervous look and braced himself in his seat, his hands clenched under his legs, leaving me in sole control of our craft.
I had forgotten how difficult it is to land a floatplane. Watching one land, the whole operation looks easier than landing on a runway or even a grass strip. But there is no horizon to compare against, and our altimeter was useless, as we had no way of knowing what pressure to set.
Even though it was freezing outside, I found myself sweating.
I looked out the side window to better gauge our height. Any moment. I angled our nose up slightly so that we wouldn’t dig in and cartwheel when we touched down.
A sudden lurch to the right caused my heart to skip, but I was experienced enough to compensate even before I knew it. Level again, we lurched another time and then another and then—we were down.
“That’s it?” Handon Gar exclaimed, looking around in amazement. “We’re down?”
“Shh, let me work,” I snapped, still concentrating on the waves and the view in front. Beside me, I could feel Handon Gar fume angrily. I had no time to be polite; the sea was choppy, and I kept our power up so that we didn’t bog down or tip—it was difficult work, made more so by our circumstances and my rustiness in floatplane work.
Steadily we made our way to the shore. I was careful to jig and jag to get different views while never getting our floats stuck in the trough of a wave—where we would be easily capsized.
I identified the least jagged section of shore—it almost looked like it had been made or sculpted—and blipped our throttles to make the floats climb up the grade and pull us out of the sea. When I was certain we were far enough from the shore to avoid any rogue waves, I cut our engines.
The propellers slowed and stopped, and then we were left only with the roar of the surf and the crying of the wind.
Handon Gar and I looked at each other and then back out to the snowy wastes that greeted us. We had travelled 475,000 miles to another planet only to find that it was an icy, barren waste. I’d landed us on the ocean, using our inflatable pontoons, and had then coaxed our craft onto the shore, following the smoothest part of the shoreline.
Gar was convinced that I had killed us: that we would die on this icy, barren hulk. I was not so sure—initially, I thought that he was right, but, as I glanced around at our landing site, I became more and more perplexed.
The ice was too smooth, the slope too gentle. If it had been made on purpose, it could not have been made better as a landing strip.
“Come on,” I said to Gar. “Let’s go.”
“But the air!”
“We’re still in our suits. There’s no reason we can’t go outside in them.”
Handon Gar gave me a long look and then shrugged, clearly deciding that nothing worse could happen.
He was wrong.
We opened the hatch, and I stood for a moment before it, bracing against the chill, and then jumped down with my knees bent to absorb the worst effects of the fall. I was glad I did, for I landed on what seemed to be solid ice, or maybe even glass. Whatever it was, I did not sink—and I was glad I had flexed my knees, for they still hurt from the jarring landing.
“It’s okay!” I called back up to Gar. “Just be sure to bend your knees.”
Once he recovered from his jump, we started to look around. The first thing I did was to check our craft. I was pleased to see that there was no sign of damage to our pontoons—they were rigid with pressure—I had no fear that we couldn’t use them again. I checked the engines, I checked the external surfaces of the power amplifier—all were undamaged, as were our antennas.
That was good, for it meant that we could communicate with anyone who could hear us. One invention of the Unis that I particularly liked was a small pocket-sized communicator, similar in purpose to the handheld walkie-talkies that some of our more advanced troops were using in the war, but far smaller, more advanced and ubiquitous. We had those on our suits, which meant that any communications to our ship would also reach us no matter where we went.
“Let’s look around,” I said to Gar. He gave me an anxious look before nodding jerkily.
We trudged uphill—away from the sea. After a moment, I said to Gar that we should go back and secure our ship where it was, deciding that the slope was sufficient that without securing our craft, it might slip back into the sea and leave us stranded.
W
e took the opportunity to pull out our travelling packs as well as a hammer and spike, which we drove into the icy, glassy “runway.” With a stout rope, we secured our craft.
With our emergency gear—including a day’s worth of rations—we both felt more secure. I took a compass bearing—we’d mapped the magnetic poles of Tonos earlier and so had some idea of where north pointed (oddly enough, it was below us, in what we would both have called south on Poloda).
We had no maps, because, while we’d taken photographs on our descent, we had no way to develop them or convert them into usable printed form.
We trekked forward in the light snow and the cloudy day. We’d gone about a mile when I noticed that the ground in front of us was oddly shaped. It was as though someone had made domes out of the ice—perhaps giant igloos—large enough almost to dome whole cities.
Gar nudged me and pointed at them as if to ask if I was seeing what he was seeing.
“Let’s go look,” I said to him.
With a jerk and a nod, we went off.
We trudged on farther and as we did, the outlines grew larger and larger. Their shape became more and more regular—and more and more artificial. This was not something made by nature, I was convinced.
What sort of technology could have made something that perfect on a planet this cold? And why?
What happened next, I cannot even to this day properly describe. All I can say is, as I moved forward, I heard a cry from Gar behind me. I turned back toward him and saw that he had an arm upraised and a surprised expression on his face—as though he were seeing something too beautiful or too horrible to comprehend. He crumpled to the ground.
I turned to race toward him but something happened to me too and I stumbled and I fell—and I knew nothing more.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in an entirely different place. I was warm, and I was not wearing any of my outer garments, although I was still dressed in my undergarments and my trousers.
I was lying down on a soft bed in a place I’d never before seen. As I looked around the room, I realized that it was a creation of ice—almost translucent, beautiful and amazing in its own way. Glints of rainbow colors peered out from point to point. I could not tell how the light was getting into the room, any more than I could imagine how warmth got in—by rights, the air should have been freezing. But my bed was incredibly soft and conformed to my every movement.
A voice above me spoke but I did not understand the words.
I looked up and saw a beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed female. She looked like some Norse goddess, carven from the very white snow that blanketed this planet.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand you,” I said, sitting up and regretting my lack of a shirt. As it seemed possible that she was in some way responsible for my lack of dress, I hoped she would not take offense.
Her faint blond brows creased and she spoke again with more urgency.
I shook my head again. “No . . . I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
Incomprehension spread across her face, and she again spoke to me, fast, as though I must understand her.
I shook my head again and smiled at her feebly. “I’m very sorry, I still do not understand.”
She stood up abruptly, waved her arms in frustration, and stormed out of the room.
I did not see the door she exited through. In fact, when I looked around, I realized that I could see no door at all. For a moment I wondered if perhaps I had merely imagined her. How did she go, otherwise?
I got up and found my shoes, having discovered that the floor itself was ice, then searched the room. When I touched the wall, I pulled my hand back quickly, because it was freezing. The whole room was ice. Yet the air was warm—how could that be? It was almost as though the ice was so cold that it could not freeze the air around it. I only knew what my senses would tell me. There was nothing more in the room than a chair and a desk and the bed—all made of the same gleaming white, ice-like material.
After searching for a while, with no luck in finding an exit, I returned to my bed and fell asleep.
I woke again to someone poking me in the chest.
“Lakanamos.” It was the the girl again. “Lakanamos,” she said to me, gesturing for me to get up. I got up. She pointed to my shoes. She gestured for me to put them on, saying again, “Lakanamos.”
I put my shoes on and stood. “Okay, where are we going?”
“Lakanamos.”
“Lakanamos,” I repeated doubtfully.
She brightened and walked straight toward one of the walls. I followed her with wide eyes until she disappeared through the wall.
My jaw dropped, and I could do nothing for a moment. She walked back in again, brows furrowed angrily. “Lakanamos!”
“Okay, Lakanamos,” I said in a weak voice and followed her through the wall—that wasn’t a wall and wasn’t a doorway. There was a tingling, and then suddenly we were in a different room. Never before had I encountered such technology. We walked through a narrow corridor, made a few turns, and then finally—with another “Lakanamos”—walked through another wall into a larger room.
In this room there were several people, and I noticed with some relief that there was also Handon Gar.
“Tangor!” he cried on spotting me. “Do you understand these people?”
I shook my head; we were both equally lost.
Handon Gar and I were to spend the next three weeks in this room, returning separately to our beds only for sleep. We were engaged in remedial language lessons.
“Lakanamos,” I learned, meant “Let’s go!”
Slowly but surely I filled in the gaps in the language. I was, in fact, a quicker study than Handon Gar, which surprised him but not me—as I’d already had to learn his native tongue.
It was a long three weeks, during which I learned many things about the people of Tonos.
Most of them bothered me.
The first thing I noticed was the attitude of the men toward the women: they were so obsequious it was almost servile. They would bow and scrape whenever a woman talked to them, and then, when the women weren’t looking, they’d preen and talk to the others about how they’d been favored.
This became even more worrying when I discovered that these men were supposed to be the smartest of the Tonosians.
“It is women’s work,” our guide, whose name we learned was Evina, told us with a shrug. She looked fondly at the group of men. “I know it is hard of us to ask so much of them, but . . .”
Of course, before we could converse like that, most of our three weeks had already passed in intensive learning. It started with me asking Evina a question and not understanding her answer. Slowly, I realized that if I wanted to learn their language, I would have to take charge of learning it.
So we began the game of going around the room and pointing at things and working out the names for them. Verbs came naturally into the discussion, such as when I took a chair and sat in it.
Perhaps the most useful phrase was the one I learned in the first two days; “What do you call this?”
After that, we learned “I understand” and “I don’t understand.” From there we made steady progress . . . up until the point when I asked about their alphabet.
“Alpha-bet?” Evina repeated when I used the Polodan word.
“The list of letters of your language,” Gar added helpfully.
Evina and her friend, Danura, looked at us in confusion. Danura seemed to be the smarter of the two, while Evina had the steadier temper—something that was in great demand during our first few weeks on Tonos.
“Your books, how are they written?” I asked, using the Polodan words for “books” and “written.”
“Describe books,” Danura demanded tersely.
I looked over to Gar for confirmation as I began describing books. “They are made of separate pages, and on each page are written words that form thoughts and describe things.”
“That is nonsense,” Da
nura said.
“Well, how do you learn anything?” Gar asked. “Your young, how do they learn their trades?”
“Trades?” Evina asked, her brows furrowing.
“What your people do?” I added, hoping to be helpful.
“Our people do what they do,” Danura told me.
“They do what you tell them,” Evina said to her slyly.
“They do listen to me,” Danura agreed. “But they are welcome to argue.”
“Not the men,” Gar observed.
“Men are to listen, not to argue,” Evina said, batting her eyelashes. “They do as they are told or they get no more orders, not even the pleasant ones.”
Gar and I exchanged looks. We’d already heard some of the men talking about this, and it was another thing that bothered me. Apparently the men on Tonos were second-class. The women ruled—if that was the right word—the planet.
I hated to admit it, but the men on Tonos were treated much as the women were treated back on Poloda—or Earth. I did not much care for the arrangement.
“How do you teach?” I asked.
“Teach?” Danura repeated the Polodan word with a sour look. “Why do you try to invent words?”
“Maybe they are not as bright as you thought, Danura,” Evina said in what she clearly thought was a voice that we couldn’t hear.
“Our ways are different,” I reminded them. “We are only trying to understand yours.”
“We come from another planet,” Gar added in support.
“Planet, planet, planet!” Danura said, throwing her hands up in disgust. “Another made-up word!”
“They are only men, Danura,” Evina said. “Perhaps they are just making up stories to impress us.”
“Then where did they come from? We’ve asked all the other domes, and no one remembers dark-haired people anywhere!”
“Perhaps,” Evina said. “Perhaps no one remembered them.”
“Perhaps,” Danura said, eyeing me thoughtfully, “they were kept as part of a separate harem and escaped.”