The boy drew breath. "Not at first," he said. "I only found I could not bring myself to kill. Is Christmas not when we should be quickest to forgive our enemies? I told them so. Then . . . when suddenly their whole attitude changed . . . I guessed what the reason must be." He searched for words. "They knew—both Dahians and nomads knew—we are strong; we have powers they can't hope to match. That doesn't frighten them. They have to be fearless, to survive in as bleak a country as this.
"Also, they have to be dedicated. To keep going through endless hardship, they must believe in something greater than themselves, like the Imperial dream of Dahia or the freedom of the desert. They're ready to die for those ideals.
"We came, we Earthlings. We offered them a fair, profitable bargain. But nothing else. We seemed to have no other motive than material gain. They could not understand this. It made us too peculiar. They could never really trust us.
"Now that they know we have our own sacrednesses, well, they see we are not so different from them, and they'll heed our advice."
Juan uttered an unsteady laugh. "What a long lecture, no?" he ended. "I'm very tired and hungry. Please, may I go get something to eat and afterward to bed?"
As he crossed the square, the carol followed him:
"—The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight."
INTRODUCTION
The Man Who Counts
A full sky-dance portraying Nicholas van Rijn needs the space of a small book. Several historical novels wherein he figures exist, and maychance you will wish to screen them. For the purpose which his Wyvan gave him, Hloch chooses the following. This is partly because van Rijn is more central in it than in others; partly because the consequences had some importance to Falkayn's home world; and partly because winged sophonts have a special interest for us, rare as they are. In addition, Diomedes, freak among planets, helps remind of the awesome unforeseeability of the universe, a fact before which starfaring races must humble their very deathpride.
While this tale appears to be reasonably factual, its source is uncertain. Original publication was either on Terra or Hermes; separate authors and dates are given on those two worlds, and Rennhi did not feel the matter was worth pursuing further.
—Hloch of the Stormgate Choth
The Earth Book of Stormgate
THE MAN WHO COUNTS
I
Grand Admiral Syranax hyr Urnan, hereditary Commander-in-chief of the Fleet of Drak'ho, Fisher of the Western Seas, Leader in Sacrifice, and Oracle of the Lodestar, spread his wings and brought them together again in an astonished thunderclap. For a moment, it snowed papers from his desk.
"No!" he said. "Impossible! There's some mistake."
"As my Admiral wills it." Chief Executive Officer Delp hyr Orikan bowed sarcastically. "The scouts saw nothing."
Anger crossed the face of Captain T'heonax hyr Urnan, son of the Grand Admiral and therefore heir apparent. His upper lip rose until the canine tushes showed, a white flash against the dark muzzle.
"We have no time to waste on your insolence, Executive Delp," he said coldly. "I would advise my father to dispense with an officer who has no more respect."
Under the embroidered cross-belts of office, Delp's big frame tautened. Captain T'heonax glided one step toward him. Tails curled back and wings spread, instinctive readiness for battle, until the room was full of their bodies and their hate. With a calculation which made it seem accidental, T'heonax dropped a hand to the obsidian rake at his waist. Delp's yellow eyes blazed and his fingers clamped on his own tomahawk.
Admiral Syranax's tail struck the floor. It was like a fire-bomb going off. The two young nobles jerked, remembered where they were, and slowly, muscle by muscle laying itself back to rest under the sleek brown fur, they relaxed.
"Enough!" snapped Syranax. "Delp, your tongue will flap you into trouble yet. T'heonax, I've grown bored with your spite. You'll have your chance to deal with personal enemies, when I am fish food. Meanwhile, spare me my few able officers!"
It was a firmer speech than anyone had heard from him for a long time. His son and his subordinate recalled that this grizzled, dim-eyed, rheumatic creature had once been the conqueror of the Maion Navy—a thousand wings of enemy leaders had rattled grisly from the mastheads—and was still their chief in the war against the Flock. They assumed the all-fours crouch of respect and waited for him to continue.
"Don't take me so literally, Delp," said the admiral in a milder tone. He reached to the rack above his desk and got down a long-stemmed pipe and began stuffing it with flakes of dried sea driss from the pouch at his waist. Meanwhile, his stiff old body fitted itself more comfortably into the wood-and-leather seat. "I was quite surprised, of course, but I assume that our scouts still know how to use a telescope. Describe to me again exactly what happened."
"A patrol was on routine reconnaissance about thirty obdisai north-north-west of here," said Delp with care. "That would be in the general area of the island called . . . I can't pronounce that heathenish local name, sir; it means Banners Flew."
"Yes, yes," nodded Syranax. "I have looked at a map now and then, you know."
T'heonax grinned. Delp was no courtier. That was Delp's trouble. His grandfather had been a mere Sailmaker, his father never advanced beyond the captaincy of a single raft. That was after the family had been ennobled for heroic service at the Battle of Xarit'ha, of course—but they had still been very minor peers, a tarry-handed lot barely one cut above their own crewfolk.
Syranax, the Fleet's embodied response to these grim days of hunger and uprooting, had chosen officers on a basis of demonstrated ability, and nothing else. Thus it was that simple Delp hyr Orikan had been catapulted in a few years to the second highest post in Drak'ho. Which had not taken the rough edges off his education, or taught him how to deal with real nobles.
If Delp was popular with the common sailors, he was all the more disliked by many aristocrats—a parvenu, a boor, with the nerve to wed a sa Axollon! Once the old admiral's protecting wings were folded in death—
T'heonax savored in advance what would happen to Delp hyr Orikan. It would be easy enough to find some nominal charge.
The executive gulped. "Sorry, sir," he mumbled. "I didn't mean . . . we're still so new to this whole sea . . . well. The scouts saw this drifting object. It was like nothing ever heard of before. A pair of 'em flew back to report and ask for advice. I went to look for myself. Sir, it's true!"
"A floating object—six times as long as our longest canoe—like ice, and yet not like ice—" The admiral shook his gray-furred head. Slowly, he put dry tinder in the bottom of his firemaker. But it was with needless violence that he drove the piston down into the little hardwood cylinder. Removing the rod again, he tilted fire out into the bowl of his pipe, and drew deeply.
"The most highly polished rock crystal might look a bit like that stuff, sir," offered Delp. "But not so bright. Not with such a shimmer."
"And there are animals scurrying about on it?"
"Three of them, sir. About our size, or a little bigger, but wingless and tailless. Yet not just animals either . . . I think . . . they seem to wear clothes and—I don't think the shining thing was ever intended as a boat, though. It rides abominably, and appears to be settling."
"If it's not a boat, and not a log washed off some beach," said T'heonax, "then where, pray tell, is it from? The Deeps?"
"Hardly, captain," said Delp irritably. "If that were so, the creatures on it would be fish or sea mammals or—well, adapted for swimming, anyway. They're not. They look like typical flightless land forms, except for having only four limbs."
"So they fell from the sky, I presume?" sneered T'heonax.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised," said Delp in a very low voice. "There isn't any other direction left."
T'heonax sat up on his haunches, mouth falling open. His father only nodded.
"Very good," murmured Syranax. "I'm pleased to see a little imagination
around here."
"But where did they fly from?" exploded T'heonax.
"Perhaps our enemies of Lannach would have some account of it," said the admiral. "They cover a great deal more of the world every year than we do in many generations; they meet a hundred other barbarian flocks down in the tropics and exchange news."
"And females," said T'heonax. He spoke in that mixture of primly disapproving voice and lickerish overtones with which the entire Fleet regarded the habits of the migrators.
"Never mind that," snapped Delp.
T'heonax bristled. "You deck-swabber's whelp, do you dare—"
"Shut up!" roared Syranax.
After a pause, he went on: "I'll have inquiries made among our prisoners. Meanwhile, we had better send a fast canoe to pick up these beings before that object they're on founders."
"They may be dangerous," warned T'heonax.
"Exactly," said his father. "If so, they're better in our hands than if, say, the Lannach'honai should find them and make an alliance. Delp, take the Nemnis, with a reliable crew, and crowd sail on her. And bring along that fellow we captured from Lannach, what's his name, the professional linguist—"
"Tolk?" The executive stumbled over the unfamiliar pronunciation.
"Yes. Maybe he can talk to them. Send scouts back to report to me, but stand well off the main Fleet until you're sure that the creatures are harmless to us. Also till I've allayed whatever superstitious fears about sea demons there are in the lower classes. Be polite if you can, get rough if you must. We can always apologize later . . . or toss the bodies overboard. Now, jump!"
Delp jumped.
II
Desolation walled him in.
Even from this low, on the rolling, pitching hull of the murdered skycruiser, Eric Wace could see an immensity of horizon. He thought that the sheer size of that ring, where frost-pale heaven met the gray which was cloud and storm-scud and great marching waves, was enough to terrify a man. The likelihood of death had been faced before, on Earth, by many of his forebears; but Earth's horizon was not so remote.
Never mind that he was a hundred-odd light-years from his own sun. Such distances were too big to be understood: they became mere numbers, and did not frighten one who reckoned the pseudo-speed of a secondary-drive spaceship in parsecs per week.
Even the ten thousand kilometers of open ocean to this world's lone human settlement, the trading post, was only another number. Later, if he lived, Wace would spend an agonized time wondering how to get a message across that emptiness. But at present he was too occupied with keeping alive.
But the breadth of the planet was something he could see. It had not struck him before, in his eighteen-month stay; but then he had been insulated, psychologically as well as physically, by an unconquerable machine technology. Now he stood alone on a sinking vessel, and it was twice as far to look across chill waves to the world's rim as it had been on Earth.
The skycruiser rolled under a savage impact. Wace lost his footing and slipped across curved metal plates. Frantic, he clawed for the light cable which lashed cases of food to the navigation turret. If he went over the side, his boots and clothes would pull him under like a stone. He caught it in time and strained to a halt. The disappointed wave slapped his face, a wet salt hand.
Shaking with cold, Wace finished tucking the last box into place and crawled back toward the entry hatch. It was a miserable little emergency door, but the glazed promenade deck, on which his passengers had strolled while the cruiser's gravbeams bore her through the sky, was awash, its ornate bronzed portal submerged.
Water had filled the smashed engine compartment when they ditched. Since then it had been seeping around twisted bulkheads and strained hull plates, until the whole thing was about ready for a last long dive to the sea bottom.
Wind passed gaunt fingers through his drenched hair and tried to hold open the hatch when he wanted to close it after him. He had a struggle against the gale . . . Gale? Hell, no! It had only the velocity of a stiffish breeze—but with six times the atmospheric pressure of Earth behind it, that breeze struck like a Terrestrial storm. Damn PLC 2987165 II! Damn the PL itself, and damn Nicholas van Rijn, and most particularly damn Eric Wace for being fool enough to work for the Company!
Briefly, while he fought the hatch, Wace looked out over the coaming as if to find rescue. He glimpsed only a reddish sun, and great cloud-banks dirty with storm in the north, and a few specks which were probably natives.
Satan fry those natives on a slow griddle, that they did not come to help! Or at least go decently away while the humans drowned, instead of hanging up there in the sky to gloat!
"Is all in order?"
Wace closed the hatch, dogged it fast, and came down the ladder. At its foot, he had to brace himself against the heavy rolling. He could still hear waves beat on the hull, and the wind-yowl.
"Yes, my lady," he said. "As much as it'll ever be."
"Which isn't much, not?" Lady Sandra Tamarin played her flashlight over him. Behind it, she was only another shadow in the darkness of the dead vessel. "But you look a saturated rat, my friend. Come, we have at least fresh clothes for you."
Wace nodded and shrugged out of his wet jacket and kicked off the squelching boots. He would have frozen up there without them—it couldn't be over five degrees C.—but they seemed to have blotted up half the ocean. His teeth clapped in his head as he followed her down the corridor.
He was a tall young man of North American stock, ruddy-haired, blue-eyed, with bluntly squared-off features above a well-muscled body. He had begun as a warehouse apprentice at the age of twelve, back on Earth, and now he was the Solar Spice & Liquors Company's factor for the entire planet known as Diomedes. It wasn't exactly a meteoric rise—van Rijn's policy was to promote according to results, which meant that a quick mind, a quick gun, and an eye firmly held to the main chance were favored. But it had been a good solid career, with a future of posts on less isolated and unpleasant worlds, ultimately an executive position back Home and—and what was the use, if alien waters were to eat him in a few hours more?
At the end of the hall, where the navigation turret poked up, there was again the angry copper sunlight, low in the wan smoky-clouded sky, south of west as day declined. Lady Sandra snapped off her torch and pointed to a coverall laid out on the desk. Beside it were the outer garments, quilted, hooded, and gloved, he would need before venturing out again into the pre-equinoctial springtime. "Put on everything," she said. "Once the boat starts going down, we will have to leave in a most horrible hurry."
"Where's Freeman van Rijn?" asked Wace.
"Making some last-minute work on the raft. That one is a handy man with the tools, not? But then, he was once a common space-hand."
Wace shrugged and waited for her to leave.
"Change, I told you," she said.
"But—"
"Oh." A thin smile crossed her face. "I thought not there was a nudity taboo on Earth."
"Well . . . not exactly, I guess, my lady . . . but after all, you're a noble born, and I'm only a trader—"
"From republican planets like Earth come the worst snobs of all," she said. "Here we are all human beings. Quickly, now, change. I shall turn my back if you desire so."
Wace scrambled into the outfit as fast as possible. Her mirth was an unexpected comfort to him. He considered what luck always appeared to befall that pot-bellied old goat van Rijn.
It wasn't right!
The colonists of Hermes had been, mostly, a big fair stock, and their descendants had bred true: especially the aristocrats, after Hermes set up as an autonomous grand duchy during the Breakup. Lady Sandra Tamarin was nearly as tall as he, and shapeless winter clothing did not entirely hide the lithe full femaleness of her. She had a face too strong to be pretty—wide forehead, wide mouth, snub nose, high cheekbones—but the large smoky-lashed green eyes, under heavy dark brows, were the most beautiful Wace had ever seen. Her hair was long, straight, ash-blond, pulled into a knot at
the moment but he had seen it floating free under a coronet by candlelight—
"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?"
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