The Narrow Land

by Jack Vance

  "Looks about Earth-size," said Welstead, interest in his voice, and Betty's heart sank a trifle. He tuned the circuit finer, turned up the magnification and the planet leapt at them. "Look at that atmosphere! Thick!" He swiveled across the jointed arm holding the thermocouple and together they bent over the dial.

  "Nineteen degrees Centigrade. About Earth-norm. Let's look at that atmosphere. You know, dear, we might have something tremendous here! Earth-size, Earth temperature ..." His voice fell off in a mutter as he peered through the spectroscope, flipping screen after screen past the pattern from the planet. He stood up, cast Betty a swift exultant glance, then squinted in sudden reflection. "Better make sure before we get too excited."

  Betty felt no excitement. She watched without words as Welstead thumbed through the catalogue.

  "Whee!" yelled Welstead, suddenly a small boy. "No listing! It's ours!" And Betty's heart melted at the news. Delay, months of delay, while Welstead explored the planet, charted its oceans and continents, classified its life. At the same time, a spark of her husband's enthusiasm caught fire in her brain and interest began to edge aside her gloom.

  "We'll name it 'Welstead,'" he said. "Or, no-'Elizabeth' for you. A planet of your own! Some day there'll be cities and millions of people. And every time they write a letter or throw a shovelful of dirt or a ship lands-they'll use your name."

  "No, dear," she said. "Don't be ridiculous. We'll call it 'Welstead'-for us both."

  They felt an involuntary pang of disappointment later on when they found the planet already inhabited, and by men.

  Yet their reception astonished them as much as the has discovery of the planet and its people. Curiosity, even hostilily might have been expected....

  They had been in no hurry to land, preferring to fall in an orbit just above the atmosphere, the better to study the planet and its inhabitants.

  It looked to be a cheerful world. There were a thousand kinds of forest, jungle, savannah. Sunny rivers coursed green fields. A thousand lakes and three oceans glowed blue. To the far north and far south snowfields glittered, dazzled. Such cities as they found-the world seemed sparsely settled-merged indistinguishably with the countryside.

  They were wide low cities, very different from the clanging hives of Earth, and lay under the greenery like carvings in alabaster or miraculous snowflakes. Betty, in whose nature ran a strong streak of the romantic, was entranced.

  "They look like cities of Paradise-cities in a dream!"

  Welstead said reflectively, "They're evidently not backward. See that cluster of long gray buildings off to the side? Those are factories."

  Betty voiced a doubt which had been gradually forming into words. "Do you think they might-resent our landing? If they've gone to the trouble of creating a secret - well, call it Utopia - they might not want to be discovered."

  Welstead turned his head, gazed at her eye to eye. "Do you want to land?" he asked soberly.

  "Why, yes - if you do. If you don't think it's dangerous."

  "I don't know whether it's dangerous or not. A people as enlightened as those cities would seem to indicate would hardly maltreat strangers."

  Betty searched the face of the planet "I think it would be safe."

  Welstead laughed. "I'm game. We've got to die sometime. Why not out here?"

  He jumped up to the controls, nosed the ship down.

  "We'll land right in their laps, right in the middle of that big city down there."

  Betty looked at him questioningly.

  "No sense sneaking down out in the wilds," said Welstead. "If we're landing we'll land with a flourish."

  "And if they shoot us for our insolence?"

  "Call it Fate."

  They bellied down into a park in the very center of the city. From the observation dome Welstead glimpsed hurrying knots of people.

  "Go to the port, Betty. Open it just a crack and show yourself. I'll stay at the controls. One false move, one dead cat heaved at us, and we'll be back in space so fast they won't remember we arrived."

  Thousands of men and women of all ages had surrounded the ship, all shouting, all agitated by strong emotion..

  "They're throwing flowers" Betty gasped. She opened the port and stood in the doorway and the people below shouted, chanted, wept. Feeling rather ridiculous, Betty waved, smiled.

  She turned to look back up at Welstead. "I don't know what we've done to deserve all this but we're heroes. Maybe they think we're somebody else."

  Welstead craned his neck through the observation dome, "They look healthy-normal."

  "They're beautiful," said Betty. "All of them."

  The throng opened, a small group of elderly men and women approached. The leader, a white-haired man, tall, lean, with much the same face as Michelangelo's Jehovah, stood forth.

  "Welcome!" he called resonantly. "Welcome from the people of Haven!"

  Betty stared, and Welstead clambered down from the controls: The words were strangely pronounced, the grammar was archaic-but it was the language of Earth.

  The white-haired man spoke on, without calculation, as if delivering a speech of great familiarity. "We have waited two hundred and seventy-one years for your coming, for the deliverance you will bring us."

  Deliverance? Welstead considered the word. "Don't see much to deliver 'Emn from," he muttered aside to Betty. "The sun's shining, they look well-fed-a lot more enthusiastic than I do. Deliver 'Em from what?"

  Betty was climbing down to the ground and Welstead followed.

  "Thanks for the welcome," said Welstead, trying not to sound like a visiting politician. "We're glad to be here. It's a wonderful experience, coming unexpectedly on a world like this."

  The white-haired man bowed gravely. "Naturally you must be curious-as curious as we are about the civilized universe. But for the present, just one question for the ears of our world. How goes it with Earth?"

  Welstead rubbed his chin, acutely conscious of the thousands of eyes, the utter silence.

  "Earth," he said, "goes about as usual. There's the same seasons, the same rain, sunshine, frost and wind." And the people of Haven breathed in his words as devoutly as if they were the purest poetry. "Earth is still the center of the Cluster and there's more people living on Earth than ever before. More noise, more nuisance ..."

  "Wars? New governments? How far does science reach?"

  Welstead considered. "Wars? None to speak of-not since the Hieratic League broke up. The government still governs, uses lots of statistical machinery. There's still graft, robbery, inefficiency, if that's what you mean.

  "Science-that's a big subject. We know a lot but we don't know a lot more, the way it's always been. Everything considered, it's the same Earth it's always been-some good, a lot of bad."

  He paused, and the pent breath of the listeners went in a great sigh. The white-haired man nodded again, serious, sober-though evidently infected with the excitement that fixed his fellows.

  "No more for the present! You'll be tired and there's much time for talk. May I offer you the hospitality of my house?"

  Welstead looked uncertainly at Betty. Instinct urged him not to leave his ship.

  "Or if you'd prefer to remain aboard ..." suggested the man of Haven.

  "No," said Welstead. "We'll be delighted." If harm were intended - as emphatically did not seem likely - their presence aboard the ship would not prevent it. He craned his neck, looked here and there for the officialdom that would be bumptiously present on Earth.

  "Is there anyone we should report to? Any law we'll be breaking by parking our ship here?"

  The white-haired man laughed. "What a question! I am Alexander Clay, Mayor of this city Mytilene and Guide of Haven. By my authority and by common will you are free of anything the planet can offer you. Your ship will not be molested."

  He led them to a wide low car and Betty was uncomfortably conscious of her blue shorts, rumpled and untidy by comparison with the many-colored tunics of the women in the crowd.

&nbs
p; Welstead was interested in the car as providing a gauge of Haven's technics. Built of shiny gray metal it hung a foot above the ground, without the intervention of wheels. He gave Clay a startled look. "Anti-gravity? Your fortune's made."

  Clay shook his head indulgently. "Magnetic fields, antipathetic to the metal in the road. Is it not a commonplace on Earth?"

  "No," said Welstead. "The theory, of course, is well-known but there is too much opposition, too many roads to dig up. We still use wheels."

  Clay said reflectively, "The force of tradition. The continuity which generates the culture of races. The stream we have been so long lost from...."

  Welstead shot him a sidelong glance. Clay was entirely serious.

  The car had been sliding down the road at rather high speed through vistas of wonderful quiet and beauty. Every direction showed a new and separate enchantment - a glade surrounded by great trees, a small home of natural wood, a cluster of public buildings around a plaza, a terrace checkered with trees and lined with many-colored shops.

  Occasionally there were touches of drama, such as the pylon at the end of a wide avenue. It rose two hundred feet into the air, a structure of concrete, bronze and black metal, and it bore the heroic figure of a man grasping vainly for a star.

  Welstead craned his neck like a tourist. "Magnificent!"

  Clay assented without enthusiasm. "I suppose it's not discreditable. Of course, to you, fresh from the worlds of civilization..." He left the sentence unfinished. "Excuse me, while I call my home." He bent his head to a telephone.

  Betty said in Welstead's ear, "This is a city every planner on Earth would sell his soul to build."

  Welstead grunted. "Remember Halleck?" he muttered. "He was a city planner. He wanted to tear down a square mile of slums in Lanchester, eighteen stories high on the average, nothing but airless three-room apartments.

  "First the real estate lobby tore into him, called him a Chaoticist. A rumor circulated among his friends that he was morally degenerate. The poor devils that lived there tried to lynch him because they'd be evicted. The Old Faithfuls read him out of the party because they pulled the votes of the district. The slums are still there and Halleck's selling farm implements on Arcturus Five."

  Betty looked off through the trees. "Maybe Haven will turn out to be an object lesson for the rest of the cluster."

  Welstead shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Peace and seclusion are not something you can show to a million people- because it isn't peace and seclusion anymore."

  Betty sat up straighter in her seat. "The only way to convince the unbelievers is by showing them, setting them an example. Do you think that if the Lanchester slum-dwellers saw this city they'd go back to their three room apartments without wanting to do something about it?"

  "If they saw this city," said Welstead, "they'd never leave Haven. By hook or crook, stowaway or workaway, they'd emigrate."

  "Include me in the first wave!" said Betty indignantly.

  The car turned into a leafy tunnel, crossed a carpet of bright green turf, stopped by a house built of dark massive wood. Four high gables in a row overlooked a terrace, where a stream followed its natural bed. The house looked spacious, comfortable-rather like the best country villas of Earth and the garden planets without the sense of contrived effect, the strain, the staging.

  "My home," said Clay. He slid back a door of waxed blond wood, ushered them into an entry carpeted with golden rattan, walled with a fabric the color of the forest outside. A bench of glowing dark wood crossed a wall under a framed painting. From no apparent source light flooded the room, like water in a tank.

  "One moment," said Clay with a trace of embarrassment "My home is poor and makeshift enough without exposing it to your eyes at its worst." He was clearly sincere; this was no conventional deprecation.

  He started away, paused and said to his half-comprehending guests, "I must apologize for our backwardness but we have no facilities for housing notable guests, no great inns or embassies or state-houses such as must add to the dignity of life on Earth. I can only offer you the hospitality of my home."

  Welstead and Betty both protested. "We don't deserve as much. After all we're only a pair of fly-by-night prospectors."

  Clay smiled and they could see that he had been put more at his ease. "You're the link between Haven and civilization-the most important visitors we've ever had. Excuse me." He departed.

  Betty went to the picture on the wall, a simple landscape-the slope of a hill, a few trees, a distant range of mountains. Welstead, with small artistic sensibility, looked around for the source of the light-without success. He joined Betty beside the picture. She said half-breathlessly, "This is a-I'm afraid to say it-a masterpiece."

  Welstead squinted, trying to understand the basis of his wife's awe and wonderment. Indeed the picture focused his eyes, drew them in and around the frame, infused him with a pleasant exhilaration, a warmth and serenity.

  Clay, returning, noticed their interest. "What do you think of it?" he asked.

  "I think it's-exceedingly well done," said Betty, at a loss for words which would convey her admiration without sounding fulsome.

  Clay shook his head ruefully, turned away. "You need not praise an inconsequentiality out of courtesy, Mrs. Welstead. We know our deficiencies. Your eyes have seen the Giottos, the Rembrandts, the Cezannes. This must seem a poor thing."

  Betty began to remonstrate but halted. Words evidently would not convince Clay-or perhaps a convention of his society prompted him to belittle the works of his people and it might be discourteous to argue too vehemently.

  "Your quarters are being prepared," Clay told them. "I've also ordered fresh clothing for you both as I see yours are stained with travel."

  Betty blushed, smoothed the legs of her blue shorts. Welstead sheepishly brushed at his faded blouse. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a bit of gravel. "From an asteroid I prospected a few weeks ago." He twisted it around in his fingers. "Nothing but granite, with garnet inclusions."

  Clay took the bit of rock, inspected it with a peculiar reverence. "May I keep this?"

  "Why, of course."

  Clay laid the bit of stone on a silver plate. "You will not understand what this small stone symbolizes to us of Haven. Interstellar travel-our goal, our dream for two hundred and seventy-one years."

  The recurrence of the period two hundred and seventy-one years! Welstead calculated. That put them back into the Era of the Great Excursives, when the over-under space-drive had first come into use, when men drove pell-mell through the galaxy, like bees through a field of flowers and human culture flared through space like a super-nova.

  Clay led them through a large room, simple in effect, rich in detail. Welstead's vision was not analytical enough to catch every particular at first. He sensed overall tones of tan, brown, mellow blue, watery green, in the wood, fabric, glass, pottery-the colors combined to marvelous effect with the waxy umber gleam of natural wood. At the end of the room a case held ten large books bound in black leather and these, by some indefinable emphasis, seemed to bear the significance of an icon.

  They passed through a passage open along one side into a garden filled with flowers, low trees, tame birds. Clay showed them into a long apartment streaming with sunlight.

  "Your bath is through the door," said Clay. "Fresh clothes are laid out on the bed. When you are rested I shall be in the main hall. Please be at leisure - the house is yours."

  They were alone. Betty sighed happily, sank down on the bed. "Isn't it wonderful, dear?"

  "It's queer," said Welstead, standing in the middle of the room.

  "What's queer?"

  "Mainly why these people, apparently gifted and efficient, act so humble, so self-deprecating."

  "They look confident."

  "They are confident. Yet as soon as the word Earth "is mentioned it's like saying Alakland to an exiled Lak. There's nothing like it."

  Betty shrugged, began to remove her clothes. "There's probably som
e very simple explanation. Right now I'm tired of speculating. I'm for that bath. Water, water, water! Tons of it!"

  They found Clay in the long hall with his pleasant-faced wife, his four youngest children, whom he gravely introduced.

  Welstead and Betty seated themselves on a divan and Clay poured them small china cups of pale yellow-green wine, then settled back in his own seat.

  "First I'll explain our world of Haven to you-or have you surmised our plight?"

  Welstead said, "I guess a colony was planted here and forgotten-lost."

  Clay smiled sadly. "Our beginnings were rather more dramatic. Two hundred and seventy-one years ago the passenger packed Etruria, enroute to Rigel, went out of control. According to the story handed down to us the bus-bars fused inside the drive-box. If the case were opened the fields would collapse. If it were not the ship would fly until there was no more energy."

  Welstead said, "That was a common accident in the old days. Usually the engineer cut away the thrust-blocks on one side of the hull. Then the ship flew in circles until help arrived."

  Clay made a wry sad grimace. "No one on the Etruria thought of that. The ship left the known universe and finally passed close to a plante that seemed capable of sustaining life. The sixty-three aboard took to the life-boats and so landed on Haven.

  "Thirty-four men, twenty-five women, four children-ranging in age from Dorothy Pell, eight, to Vladimir Hocha, seventy-four, with representatives of every human race. We're the descendants of the sixty-three, three hundred million of us."

  "Fast work," said Betty, with admiration.

  "Large families," returned Clay. "I have nine children, sixteen grandchildren. From the start our guiding principle has been to keep the culture of Earth intact for our descendants, to teach them what we knew of human tradition.

  "So that when rescue came-as it must finally-then our children or our children's children could return to Earth, not as savages but as citizens. And our invaluable source has been the Ten Books, the only books brought down from the Etruria. We could not have been favored with books more inspiring. ..."