The Man Who Counts nvr-1

by Poul Anderson

  “Are you quite through, Freeman Wace?”

  “Oh… I’m sorry, my lady. I got to thinking. Just a moment!” He pulled on the padded tunic, but left it unzipped. There was still some human warmth lingering in the hull. “Yes. I beg your pardon.”

  “It is nothing.” She turned about. In the little space available, their forms brushed together. Her gaze went out to the sky. “Those natives, are they up there yet?”

  “I imagine so, my lady. Too high for me to be sure, but they can go up several kilometers with no trouble at all.”

  “I have wondered, Trader, but got no chance to ask. I thought not there could be a flying animal the size of a man, and yet these Diomedeans have a six-meter span of bat wings. How?”

  “At a time like this you ask?”

  She smiled. “We only wait now for Freeman van Rijn. What else shall we do but talk of curious things?”

  “We… help him… finish that raft soon or we’ll all go under!”

  “He told me he has just batteries enough for one cutting torch, so anyone else is only in the way. Please continue talking. The high-born of Hermes have their customs and taboos, also for the correct way to die. What else is man, if not a set of customs and taboos?” Her husky voice was light, she smiled a little, but he wondered how much of it was an act.

  He wanted to say: We’re down in the ocean of a planet whose life is poison to us. There is an island a few score kilometers hence, but we only know its direction vaguely. We may or may not complete a raft in time, patched together out of old fuel drums, and we may or may not get our human-type rations loaded on it in time, and it may or may not weather the storm brewing there in the north. Those were natives who swooped low above us a few hours ago, but since then they have ignored us… or watched us… anything except offer help.

  Someone hates you or old Van Rijn, he wanted to say. Not me, I’m not important enough to hate. But Van Rijn is the Solar Spice Liquors Company, which is a great power in the Polesotechnic League, which is the great power in the known galaxy. And you are the Lady Sandra Tamarin, heiress to the throne of an entire planet, if you live; and you have turned down many offers of marriage from its decaying, inbred aristocracy, publicly preferring to look elsewhere for a father for your children, that the next Grand Duke of Hermes may be a man and not a giggling clothes horse; so no few courtiers must dread your accession.

  Oh, yes, he wanted to say, there are plenty of people who would gain if either Nicholas van Rijn or Sandra Tamarin failed to come back. It was a calculated gallantry for him to offer you a lift in his private ship, from Antares where you met, back to Earth, with stopovers at interesting points along the way. At the very least, he can look for trade concessions in the Duchy. At best… no, hardly a formal alliance; there’s too much hell in him; even you — most strong and fair and innocent — would never let him plant himself on the High Seat of your fathers.

  But I wander from the subject, my dear, he wanted to say; and the subject is, that someone in the spaceship’s crew was bribed. The scheme was well-hatched; the someone watched his chance. It came when you landed on Diomedes, to see what a really new raw planet is like, a planet where even the main continental outlines have scarcely been mapped, in the mere five years that a spoonful of men have been here. The chance came when I was told to ferry you and my evil old boss to those sheer mountains, halfway around this world, which have been noted as spectacular scenery. A bomb in the main generator… a slain crew, engineers and stewards gone in the blast, my co-pilot’s skull broken when we ditched in the sea, the radio shattered… and the last wreckage is going to sink long before they begin to worry at Thursday Landing and come in search of us and assuming we survive, is there the slightest noticeable chance that a few skyboats, cruising a nearly unmapped world twice the size of Earth, will happen to see three human flyspecks on it?

  Therefore, he wanted to say, since all our schemings and posturings have brought us merely to this, it would be well to forget them in what small time remains, and kiss me instead.

  But his throat clogged up on him, and he said none of it.

  “So?” A note of impatience entered her voice. “You are very silent, Freeman Wace.”

  “I’m sorry, my lady,” he mumbled. “I’m afraid I’m no good at making conversation under… uh, these circumstances.”

  “I regret I have not qualifications to offer to you the consolations of religion,” she said with a hurtful scorn.

  A long gray-bearded comber went over the deck outside and climbed the turret. They felt steel and plastic tremble under the blow. For a moment, as water sheeted, they stood in a blind roaring dark.

  Then, as it cleared, and Wace saw how much farther down the wreck had burrowed, and wondered if they would even be able to get Van Rijn’s raft out through the submerged cargo hatch, there was a whiteness that snatched at his eye.

  First he didn’t believe it, and then he wouldn’t believe because he dared not, and then he could no longer deny it.

  “Lady Sandra.” He spoke with immense care; he must not scream his news at her like any low-born Terrestrial.

  “Yes?” She did not look away from her smoldering contemplation of the northern horizon, empty of all but clouds and lightning.

  “There, my lady. Roughly south-east, I’d guess sails, beating up-wind.”

  “What?” It was a shriek from her. Somehow, that made Wace laugh aloud.

  “A boat of some kind,” he pointed. “Coming this way.”

  “I didn’t know the natives were sailors,” she said, very softly.

  “They aren’t, my lady — around Thursday Landing,” he replied. “But this is a big planet. Roughly four times the surface area of Earth, and we only know a small part of one continent.”

  “Then you know not what they are like, these sailors?”

  “My lady, I have no idea.”

  III

  Nicholas van Rijn came puffing up the companion-way at their shout. “Death and damnation!” he roared. “A boat, do you say, ja? Better for you it is a shark, if you are mistaken. By damn!” He stumped into the turret and glared out through salt encrusted plastic. The light was dimming as the sun went lower and the approaching storm clouds swept across its ruddy face. “So! Where is it, this pestilential boat?”

  “There, sir,” said Wace. “That schooner—”

  “Schooner! Schnork! Powder and balls, you cement head, that is a yawl rig… no, wait, by damn, there is a furled square sail on the mainmast too, and, yes, an outrigger — Ja, the way she handles, she must have a regular rudder — Good saints help us! A bloody-be-damned-to-blazes dugout!”

  “What else do you expect, on a planet without metals?” said Wace. His nerves were worn too thin for him to remember the deference due a merchant prince.

  “Hm-m-m… coracles, maybe so, or rafts or catamarans — Quick, dry clothes! Too cold it is for brass monkeys!”

  Wace grew aware that Van Rijn was standing in a puddle, and that bitter sea water streamed from his waist and legs. The storeroom where he had been at work must have been awash for — for hours!

  “I know where they are, Nicholas.” Sandra loped off down the corridor. It slanted more ominously every minute, as the sea pushed in through a ruined stern.

  Wace helped his chief off with the sopping coverall. Naked, Van Rijn suggested… what was that extinct ape?… a gorilla, two meters tall, hairy and huge-bellied, with shoulders like a brick warehouse, loudly bawling his indignation at the cold and the damp and the slowness of assistants. But rings flashed on the thick fingers and bracelets on the wrists, and a little St. Dismas medal swung from his neck. Unlike Wace, who found a crew cut and a clean shave more practical, Van Rijn let his oily black locks hang curled and perfumed in the latest mode, flaunted a goatee on his triple chin and intimidating waxed mustaches beneath the great hook nose.

  He rummaged in the navigator’s cabinet, wheezing, till he found a bottle of rum. “Ahhh! I knew I had the devil-begotten thing stowed some
where.” He put it to his frogmouth and tossed off several shots at a gulp. “Good! Fine! Now maybe we can begin to be like self-respectful humans once more, nie?”

  He turned about, majestic and globular as a planet, when Sandra came back. The only clothes she could find to fit him were his own, a peacock outfit of lace-trimmed shirt, embroidered waistcoat, shimmersilk culottes and stockings, gilt shoes, plumed hat, and holstered blaster.

  “Thank you,” he said curtly. “Now, Wace, while I dress, in the lounge you will find a box of Perfectos and one small bottle applejack. Please to fetch them, then we go outside and meet our hosts.”

  “Holy St. Peter!” cried Wace. “The lounge is under water!”

  “Ah?” Van Rijn sighed, woebegone. “Then you need only get the applejack. Quick, now!” He snapped his fingers.

  Wace said hastily: “No time, sir. I still have to round up the last of our ammunition. Those natives could be hostile.”

  “If they have heard of us, possible so,” agreed Van Rijn. He began donning his natural-silk underwear. “Brrr! Five thousand candles I would give to be back in my office in Jakarta!”

  “To what saint do you make the offer?” asked Lady Sandra.

  “St. Nicholas, natural — my namesake, patron of wanderers and—”

  “St. Nicholas had best get it in writing,” she said.

  Van Rijn purpled; but one does not talk back to the heiress apparent of a nation with important trade concessions to offer. He took it out by screaming abuse after the departing Wace.

  It was some time before they were outside; Van Rijn got stuck in the emergency hatch and required pushing, while his anguished basso obscenities drowned the nearing thunder. Diomedes’ period of rotation was only twelve and a half hours, and this latitude, thirty degrees north, was still on the winter side of equinox; so the sun was toppling seaward with dreadful speed. They clung to the lashings and let the wind claw them and the waves burst over them. There was nothing else they could do.

  “It is no place for a poor old fat man,” snuffed Van Rijn. The gale ripped the words from him and flung them tattered over the rising seas. His shoulder-length curls flapped like forlorn pennons. “Better I should have stayed at home in Java where it is warm, not lost my last few pitiful years out here.”

  Wace strained his eyes into the gloom. The dugout had come near. Even a landlubber like himself could appreciate the skill of its crew, and Van Rijn was loud in his praises. “I nominate him for the Sunda Yacht Club, by damn, yes, and enter him in the next regatta and make bets!”

  It was a big craft, more than thirty meters long, with an elaborate stempost, but dwarfed by the reckless spread of its blue-dyed sails. Out-rigger or no, Wace expected it to capsize any moment. Of course, a flying species had less to worry about if that should happen than -

  “The Diomedeans.” Sandra’s tone was quiet in his ear, under shrill wind and booming waters. “You have dealt with them for a year and a half, not? What can we await for from them?”

  Wace shrugged. “What could we expect from any random tribe of humans, back in the Stone Age? They might be poets, or cannibals, or both. All I know is the Tyrlanian Flock, who are migratory hunters. They always stick by the letter of their law — not quite so scrupulous about its spirit, of course, but on the whole a decent tribe.”

  “You speak their language?”

  “As well as my human palate and Techno-Terrestrial culture permit me to, my lady. I don’t pretend to understand all their concepts, but we get along—” The broken hull lurched. He heard some abused wall rend, and the inward pouring of still more sea, and felt the sluggishness grow beneath his feet. Sandra stumbled against him. He saw that the spray was freezing in her brows.

  “That does not mean I’ll understand the local language” he finished. “We’re farther from Tyrlan than Europe from China.”

  The canoe was almost on them now. None too soon: the wreck was due to dive any minute. It came about, the sails rattled down, a sea anchor was thrown and brawny arms dug paddles into the water. Swiftly, then, a Diomedean flapped over with a rope. Two others hovered close, obviously as guards. The first one landed and stared at the humans.

  Tyrlan being farther north, its inhabitants had not yet returned from the tropics and this was the first Diomedean Sandra had encountered. She was too wet, cold, and weary to enjoy the unhuman grace of his movements, but she looked very close. She might have to dwell with this race a long time, if they did not murder her.

  He was the size of a smallish man, plus a thick meter-long tail ending in a fleshy rudder and the tremendous chiropteral wings folded along his back. His arms were set below the wings, near the middle of a sleek otterlike body, and looked startlingly human, down to the muscular five-fingered hands. The legs were less familiar, bending backward from four-taloned feet which might almost have belonged to some bird of prey. The head, at the end of a neck that would have been twice too long on a human, was round, with a high forehead, yellow eyes with nictitating membranes under heavy brow ridges a blunt-muzzled black-nosed face with short cat-whiskers, a big mouth and the bear-like teeth of a flesheater turned omnivore. There were no external ears, but a crest of muscle on the head helped control flight. Short, soft brown fur covered him; he was plainly a male mammal.

  He wore two belts looped around his “shoulders,” a third about his waist, and a pair of bulging leather pouches. An obsidian knife, a slender flint-headed ax, and a set of bolas were hung in plain view. Through the thickening dusk, it was hard to make out what his wheeling comrades bore for weapons — something long and thin, but surely not a rifle, on this planet without copper or iron…

  Wace leaned forward and forced his tongue around the grunting syllables of Tyrlanian: “We are friends. Do you understand me?”

  A string of totally foreign words snapped at him. He shrugged, ruefully, and spread his hands. The Diomedean moved across the hull — bipedal, body slanted forward to balance wings and tail — and found the stud to which the humans’ lashings were anchored. Quickly, he knotted his own rope to the same place.

  “A square knot,” said Van Rijn, almost quietly. “It makes me homesick.”

  At the other end of the line, they began to haul the canoe closer. The Diomedean turned to Wace and pointed at his vessel. Wace nodded, realized that the gesture was probably meaningless here, and took a precarious step in that direction. The Diomedean caught another rope flung to him. He pointed at it, and at the humans, and made gestures.

  “I understand,” said Van Rijn. “Nearer than this they dare not come. Too easy their boat gets smashed against us. We get this cord tied around our bodies, and they haul us across. Good St. Christopher, what a thing to do to a poor creaky-boned old man!”

  “There’s our food, though,” said Wace.

  The sky cruiser jerked and settled deeper. The Diomedean jittered nervously.

  “No, no!” shouted Van Rijn. He seemed under the impression that if he only bellowed loudly enough, he could penetrate the linguistic barrier. His arms windmilled. “No! Never! Do you not understand, you oatmeal brains? Better to guggle down in your pest-begotten ocean than try eating your food. We die! Bellyache! Suicide!” He pointed at his mouth, slapped his abdomen, and waved at the rations.

  Wace reflected grimly that evolution was too flexible. Here you had a planet with oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, sulfur… a protein biochemistry forming genes, chromosomes, cells, tissues… protoplasm by any reasonable definition… and the human who tried to eat a fruit or steak from Diomedes would be dead ten minutes later of about fifty lethal allergic reactions. These just weren’t the right proteins. In fact, only immunization shots prevented men from getting chronic hay fever, asthma, and hives, merely from the air they breathed of the water they drank.

  He had spent many cold hours today piling the cruiser’s food supplies out here, for transference to the raft. This luxury atmospheric vessel had been carried in Van Rijn’s spaceship, ready-stocked for extended picnic orgies whe
n the mood struck him. There was enough rye bread, sweet butter, Edam cheese, lox, smoked turkey, dill pickles, fruit preserves, chocolate, plum pudding, beer, wine, and God knew what else, to keep three people going for a few months.

  The Diomedean spread his wings, flapping them to maintain his footing. In the wan stormy light, the thumbs-turned-claws on their leading edge seemed to whicker past Van Rijn’s beaky face like a mowing machine operated by some modernistic Death. The merchant waited stolidly, now and then aiming a finger at the stacked cases. Finally the Diomedean got the idea, or simply gave in. There was scant time left. He whistled across to the canoe. A swarm of his fellows came over, undid the lashings and began transporting boxes. Wace helped Sandra fasten the rope about her. “I’m afraid it will be a wet haul, my lady,” he tried to smile.

  She sneezed. “So” this is the brave pioneering between the stars! I will have a word or two for my court poets when I get home… if I do.”

  When she was across, and the rope had been flown back, Van Rijn waved Wace ahead. He himself was arguing with the Diomedean chief. How it was done without a word of real language between them, Wace did not know, but they had reached the stage of screaming indignation at each other. Just as Wace set his teeth and went overboard, Van Rijn sat mutinously down.

  And when the younger man made his drowned-rat arrival on board the canoe, the merchant had evidently won his point. A Diomedean could air-lift about fifty kilos for short distances. Three of them improvised a rope sling and carried Van Rijn over, above the water.

  He had not yet reached the canoe when the skycruiser sank.

  IV

  The dugout held some hundred natives, all armed, some wearing helmets and breastplates of hard laminated leather. A catapult, just visible through the dark, was mounted at the bows; the stern held a cabin, made from sapling trunks chinked with sea weed, that towered up almost like the rear end of a medieval caravel. On its roof, two helmsmen strained at the long tiller.