“In fact,” he added, “I’ve helped bring it about now and then-on Terra’s behalf!”
Toghrul entwined nervous fingers. “I believe you,” he said.
“We have all had glimpses, heard rumors… What is to be done? Can we summon the Terrans?”
“Aye-aye-call the Terrans, warn the Mother of Men-” Flandry felt how passion flared up in the scarred warriors around him. He had gathered that the Tebtengri had no use for Subotai the Prophet but built their own religion around a hard-boiled sort of humanistic pantheism. It grew on him how strong a symbol the ancestral planet was to them.
He didn’t want to tell them what Terra was actually like these days. (Or perhaps had always been. He suspected men are only saints and heroes in retrospect.) Indeed, he dare not speak of clottish Emperors, venal nobles, faithless wives, servile commons, to this armed and burning reverence. But luckily, there’s a practical problem at hand.
Terra is farther from here than Merseia,” he said. “Even our nearest base is more distant than theirs. I don’t believe any Merseians are on Altai lat this moment, but surely Oleg has at least one swift spaceship at his disposal, to inform his masters if anything should go wrong. Let us get word Terra, and let Oleg learn this has happened, at do you think he’ll do?” Flandry nodded, “Right, on the first guess! Oleg will send to that nearest Merseian base, where I know a heavy naval force is currently stationed. I doubt very much if the Merseians will write off their investment tamely. No, they will dispatch their ships at once, occupy various points, blast the Tebtengri lands with nuclear bombs, and dig in. It will not be as smooth and thorough a job as they now plan, but it will be effective. By the time a Terran fleet of reasonable size can get here, the Merseians will be fairly well entrenched. The most difficult task in space warfare is to get a strong enemy off a planet firmly held. It may prove impossible. But even if, thanks to our precipitating matters, the Terrans do blast the Merseians loose, Altai will have been made into a radioactive desert.”
Silence clapped down. Men stared at each other, and back to Flandry, with a horror he had seen before and which was one of the few things it still hurt him to watch. He went on quickly:
“So the one decent objective for us is to get secret message out. If Oleg and the Merseiens don’t suspect Terra knows, they won’t hasten their program. It can be Terra, instead, which suddenly arrives in strength, seizes Ulan Balighj establishes ground emplacements and orbit forts. I know Merseian strategy well enough predict that, under those circumstances, they won’t fight. It isn’t worth it, since Altai cannot be used as an aggressive base against them.” should have said will not; but let these people make the heartbreaking discovery for themselves that Terra’s only real interest was to preserve a status quo.
Arghun sprang to his feet. As he crouched under the low ceiling, primness dropped from him. His young leonine face became a sun, he cried: “And Terra will have us! We will be restored to humankind!”
While the Tebtengri whooped and wept at that understanding, Flandry smoked his cigarette with care. After all, he thought, it needn’t corrupt them. Not too much. There would be a small naval base, an Imperial governor, an enforced peace between all tribes. Otherwise they could live as they chose. It wasn’t worth Terra’s while to proselytize. What freedom the Altaians lost here at home, their young men would regain simply by having access to the stars. Wasn’t that so? Wasn’t it?
VIII
Juchi the Shaman, who bound together all these fiefs, spoke in a whisper that pierced: “Let us have silence. We must weigh how this may be alone.”
Flandry waited till the men had seated themselves. Then he gave them a rueful smile. “That’s a good question,” he said. “Next question, please.”
“The Betelgeuseans-” rumbled Toghrul.
“I doubt that,” said another gur-khan. “If I were Meg the Damned, I would put a guard around every individual Betelgeusean, as well as every spaceship, until all danger has passed. I would suspect every trade article, every fur or hide or gem, before it was loaded.”
“Or send to Merseia at once,” shivered someone else.
“No,” said Flandry. “Not that. We can be sure Merseia is not going to take such hazardous action without being fairly sure that Terra has heard of their project. They have too many commitments elsewhere.”
“Besides,” said Juchi, “Oleg Yesukai will not make himself a laughing stock before the screaming for help because one fugitive is loose in the Khrebet.”
“Anyhow,” put in Toghrul, “he knows how impossible it is to smuggle such an appeal out! Those tribes not of the Shamanate may dislike Yesukai tyranny, but they are still more suspicious of us, who traffic with the Ice Dwellers and scoff at that stupid Prophet. Even supposing one of them would agree to brand a hide for us, or slip a letter into a bale of pelts, and even supposing that did get past Oleg’s inspectors, the cargo might wait months to be loaded, months more in some Betelgeusean warehouse.”
“And we don’t have so many months, I suppose, before Oleg overruns you and the Merseians arrive as planned,” finished Flandry.
He sat for a while listening to their desperate chewing of impractical schemes. It was hot and stuffy in here, All at once he could take no mow He rose. “I need fresh air, and a chance to think, he said. Juchi nodded grave dismissal. Arghun jumped up again. “I come too,” he said.
“If the Terran desires your company,” said Toghrul.
“Indeed, indeed.” Flandry’s agreement was absent-minded.
He went out the door and down a short ladder. The kibitka where the chiefs met was a large, covered truck, its box fitted out as austere living quarters. On top of it, as on all the bigger, slower vehicles, the flat black plates of a solar-energy collector were tilted to face Krasna and charge an accumulator bank. Such roofs made this wandering town, dispersed across the hills, seem like a flock of futuristic turtles.
The Khrebet was not a high range. Gullied slopes ran up, gray-green with thornbush and yellow with sere grass, to a glacial cap in the north. Downward swept a cold wind, whining about Flandry; he shivered and drew the coat, hastily sewn to his measure, tighter about him. The sky was pale today, the rings low and wan in the south, where the hills emptied into steppe.
As far as Flandry could see, the herds of the Mangu Tuman spread out under care of varyak-mounted boys. They were not cattle. Terra’s higher mammals were hard to raise on other planets; rodents are tougher and more adaptable. The first colonists had brought rabbits along, which they mutated and cross-bred systematically. That ancestor could hardly be recognized in the cow-sized grazing beasts of today, more like giant dun guinea pigs than anything else. There were also separate flocks of bio-engineered ostriches.
Arghun gestured with pride.
“Yonder is the library,” he said, “and those children seated nearby are being instructed.”
Flandry looked at that kibitka. Of course, given microprint, you could carry thousands of volumes along on your travels; illiterates could never have operated these ground vehicles or the nega-grav aircraft watchful overhead. Certain other trucks-including some trains of them-must house arsenals, sickbay, machine tools, small factories for textiles and ceramics. Poorer families might live crowded in a single yurt, a round felt tent on a motor cart; but no one looked hungry or ragged. And it was not an impoverished nation which carried such gleaming missiles on flatbed cars, or operated such a flock of light tanks, or armed every adult. Considering Bourtai, Flandry decided that the entire tribe, male and female, must be a military as well as a social and economic unit. Everybody worked, and everybody fought, and in their system the proceeds were more evenly shared than on Terra.
“Where does your metal come from?” he inquired.
“The grazing lands of every tribe include some mines,” said Arghun. “We plan our yearly round so as to spend time there, digging and smelting-just as elsewhere we reap grain planted on the last visit, or tap crude oil from our wells and refine it. What we cannot
produce ourselves, we trade with others to get.”
“It sounds like a virtuous life,” said Flandry.
His slight shudder did not escape Arghun, who hastened to say: “Oh, we have our pleasures, too, feasts, games and sports, the arts, the great fair at Kievka Hill each third year-” He broke off.
Bourtai came walking past a campfire. Flandry could sense her loneliness. Women in this culture were not much inferior to men; she was free to go where she would, and was a heroine for having brought the Terran here. But her family were slain and she was not even given work to do.
She saw the men and ran toward them. “Oh… what has been decided?”
“Nothing yet.” Flandry caught her hands. By all hot stars, she was a good-looking wench! His face crinkled its best smile. “I couldn’t see going in circles with a lot of men, hairy however well-intentioned, when I might be going in circles with you. So I came out here. And my hopes were granted.”
A flush crept up her high flat cheeks. She wasn’t used to glibness. Her gaze fluttered downward. “I do not know what to say,” she whispered.
“You need say nothing. Only be,” he leered.
“No-I am no one. The daughter of a dead man… my dowry long ago plundered… And you are a Terran! It is not right!”
“Do you think your dowry matters?” said Arghun. His voice cracked.
Flandry threw him a surprised glance. At once the warrior’s mask was restored. But for an instant, Flandry had seen why Arghun Tiliksky didn’t like him.
He sighed. “Come, we had better return to the kurultai,” he said.
He didn’t release Bourtai, but tucked her arm under his. She followed mutely along. He could feel her tremble a little, through the heavy garments. The wind off the glacier ruffled a stray lock of dark hair.
As they neared the kibitka of the council, its door opened. Juchi Ilyak stood there, bent beneath his years. The wizened lips opened, and somehow the breath carried across meters of blustering air: “Terran, perhaps there is a way for us. Dare you come with me to the Ice Folk?”
IX
Tengri Nor, the Ghost Lake, lay so far north that Altai’s rings were only a pale glimmer, half seen by night on the southern horizon. When Flandry and Juchi stepped from their airboat, it was still day. Krasna was an ember, tinging the snowfields red. But it toppled swiftly, purple shadows glided from drift to drift so fast a man could see them.
Flandry had not often met such quietness. Even in space, there was always the low noise of the machinery that kept you alive. Here, the air seemed to freeze all sound; the tiniest wind blew up fine ice crystals, whirling and glistening above diamond-like snowbanks, and it rippled the waters of Tengri Nor, but he could not hear it. He had no immediate sense of cold on his fur-muffled body, even on his thickly greased face-not in this dry atmosphere-but breathing was a sharpness in his nostrils. He thought he could smell the lake, a chemical pungency, but he wasn’t sure. None of his Terran senses were quite to be trusted in this winter place.
He said, and the unexpected loudness was like a gunshot, shocking, so that his question ended in a whisper: “Do they know we are here?”
“Oh, yes. They have their ways. They will meet us soon.” Juchi looked northward, past the lake shore to the mountainous ruins. Snow had drifted halfway up those marble walls, white on white, with the final sunlight bleeding across shattered colonnades. Frost from the Shaman’s breath began to stiffen his beard.
“I suppose they recognize the markings-know this is a friendly craft-but what if the Kha Khan sent a disguised vessel?”
“That was tried once or twice, years ago. The boats were destroyed by some means, far south of here. The Dwellers have their awareness.” Juchi raised his arms and started swaying on his feet. A high-pitched chant came from his lips, he threw back his head and closed his eyes.
Flandry had no idea whether the Shaman was indulging superstition, practicing formal ritual, or doing what was actually necessary to summon the glacier folk. He had been in too many strange places to dogmatize. He waited, his eyes ranging the scene.
Beyond the ruins, westward along the northern lake shore, a forest grew. White slender trees with intricate, oddly geometric branches flashed like icicles, like jewels. Then thin bluish leaves vibrated, it seemed they should tinkle, that all this forest was glass, but Flandry had never been near a wilderness so quiet. Low gray plants carpeted the snow between the gleaming boles. Where a rock thrust up here and there, it was almost buried under such lichenoid growth, in some place less cold and hushed, Flandry would have thought of tropical richness.
The lake itself reached out of sight, pale blue between snowbanks. As evening swept across the waters, Flandry could see against shadow that mists hovered above.
Juchi had told him, quite matter-of-factly, that the protoplasmic life native to Altai had adapted to low temperatures in past ages by synthesizing methanol. A fifty-fifty mixture of this and water remained fluid below minus forty degrees. When it finally must freeze, it did not expand into cell-disrupting ice crystals, but became gradually more slushy. Lower life forms remained functional till about seventy below, Celsius; after that they went dormant. The higher animals, being homeothermic, need not suspend animation till the air reached minus a hundred degrees.
Biological accumulation of alcohol kept the polar lakes and rivers fluid till midwinter. The chief problem of all species was to find minerals, in a world largely glaciated. Bacteria brought up some from below; animals traveled far to lick exposed rock, returned to their forests and contributed heavy atoms when they died. But in general, the Altaian ecology made do without. It had never evolved bones for instance, but had elaborated chitinous and cartilaginous materials beyond anything seen on Terra.
The account had sounded plausible and interesting, in a warm kibitka on a grassy slope, with microtexts at hand to give details. When he stood on million-year-old snow, and watching night creep up like smoke through crystal trees and cyclopean ruins, hearing Juchi chant under a huge green sunset sky, Flandry discovered that scientific explanations were but little of the truth.
One of the moons was up. Flandry saw something drift across its copper shield. The objects neared, a flock of white spheres, ranging in diameter from a few centimeters to a giant bigger than the airboat. Tentacles streamed downward from them. Juchi broke off. “Ah,” he said. “Aeromedusae. The Dwellers cannot be far.”
“What?” Flandry hugged himself. The cold was beginning to be felt now, as it gnawed through fur and leather toward flesh.
“Our name for them. They look primitive, but are actually well evolved, with sense organs and brains. They electrolyze hydrogen metabolically to inflate themselves, breathe backward for propulsion, feed on small game which they shock insensible. The Ice Folk have domesticated them.”
Flandry stole a glance at a jagged wall, rearing above gloom to catch a sunbeam and flush rose. “They did more than that, once,” he said with pity
Juchi nodded, oddly little impressed. “I daresay intelligence grew up on Altai in response to worsening conditions-the warming sun.” His tone was detached. “It built a high civilization, but the shortage of metals was a handicap, and the steady shrinking of the snow area may have led to a cultural collapse. Yet that is not what the Dwellers themselves claim. They have no sense of loss about their past.” He squinted slant eyes in a frown, seeking words. “As nearly as I can understand them, which is not much, they… abandoned something unsuitable… they found better methods.”
Two beings came from the forest.
At first glance they were like dwarfish white-furred men. Then you saw details of squat build and rubbery limbs. The feet were long and webbed, expandable to broad snowshoes or foldable to short skis. The hands had three fingers opposing a thumb set in the middle of the wrist. The ears were feathery tufts; fine tendrils waved above each round black eye; sad gray monkey faces peered from a ruff of hair. Their breath did not steam like the humans’: their body temperature was well below
the Celsius zero. One of them bore a stone lamp in which an alcohol flame wavered. The other had an intricately carved white staff; in an indefinable way, the circling medusa flock seemed to be guided by it.
They came near, halted, and waited. Nothing moved but the low wind, ruffling their fur and streaming the flame. Juchi stood as quiet. Flandry made himself conform, though his teeth wanted to clap in his jaws. He had seen many kinds of life, on worlds more foreign than this. But there was a strangeness here which got under his skin and crawled.
The sun went down. Thin dustless air gave no twilight. Stars blazed forth, pyrotechnic in a sudden blackness. The edge of the rings painted a remote arc. The moon threw cuprous radiance over the snow, shadows into the forest.
A meteor split the sky with noiseless lightning. Juchi seemed to take that as a signal. He began talking. His voice was like ice, toning as it contracted in midnight cold: not altogether a human voice. Flandry began to understand what a Shaman was, and why he presided over the northland tribes. Few men were able to master the Dwellers’ language and deal with them. Yet trade and alliance-metal given for organic fuel and curious plastic substances; mutual defense against the Kha Khan’s sky raiders-was a large part of the Tebtengri strength.
One of the beings made answer. Juchi turned to Flandry. “I have said who you are and whence you come. They are not surprised. Before I spoke your need, he said their, I do not know just what the word means, but it has something to do with communication-he said they could reach Terra itself, as far as mere distance was concerned, but only through… dreams?”
Flandry stiffened. It could be. It could be. How long had men been hunting for some faster-than-light equivalent of radio? A handful of centuries. What was that, compared to the age of the universe? Or even the age of Altai? He realized, not simply intellectually but with his whole organism, how old this planet was. In all that time-
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