Behind them, a whirring thing broke away from the base of the floor, sucking the dirt and dust into itself which they had brought in on their feet.
The group was still on the sandbar. They were clustered together when Mike and Twelve approached.
“Apogee, apogee, apogee!” It was Five’s voice, from the center of the cluster. She was screaming.
The group allowed Mike and Twelve to enter its ranks. Five lay on the sand, with her wild words coming from her mouth in gasps. She was in pain, and she seemed to be saying the words for comfort.
“Seven," she screamed again, then gasped. “It’s trying to get out!”
“What, Five? What’s trying to get out?” He was trying to hold her tossing head on his lap.
“Whatever it was you put in! Apogee! Say the words, everyone, to make the pain go away!” She closed her eyes and stopped writhing for a moment, her breathing a hiss in the evening air.
“What’s wrong with Five?” Mike asked.
“She’s hurting,” said one of the girls.
“I didn’t do anything," sobbed Seven. He turned his terror stricken face toward Mike. Rivulets of tears streamed down his grimy cheeks. Fear brightened the whites of his eyes.
“I told you so,” Mike said.
Softly, at first, one of the group began chanting the song. The others joined in the chorus.
“Intelligence-quotient, irrelevant;
If I only knew what it meant.
Fahrenheit, DNA, surface tension..
Five screamed again, but they only chanted louder, until her screams were part of the chant.
“Father, pregnant, colonial extension!”
They said it all, until the end, and Mike felt himself drawn in, singing with the rest of the group.
When it was over, Five was still. She didn’t writhe. Her face was a white petal against the dark, twisted strands of her hair. The night was gone, and the morning touched the sky over the river valley. They were all asleep now, except for Seven who still held the silent face of Five in his lap. He moved her aside so he, too, could rest, and folded himself into an infant at her side.
Mike awoke first, and sat looking at Five. She was not breathing. Twelve opened her eyes and sat up. Mike stood, stretched, and began walking away. Twelve followed.
“Is she asleep?”
“No!” Four said through his teeth. “She won’t ever sing again, or move, or do something.’” His mind was full of words and pictures, of the thoughts of empty cradles and cradles which were still full. “She’s like a geezzl when it has been run down and stepped on.”
“Wait, Mike .. .”
Mike ran into the bushes, suddenly afraid and not knowing why.
“Tell me what it means, Mike.”
“I don’t know. I’ll never know, now that I’ve broken into Mother.” He turned on her in anger. “Why do you follow me everyplace I go? Ever since we were little, you hang around after me.”
She stood still, her eyes pouring out the laughter and tears and all their times together.
“Why don’t you leave me alone?” He choked.
Her mouth trembled slightly.
“How would you like for me to do that for you?” He screamed at her. “I could, you know! If you don’t stop bothering me, I’m going to put something into you just like Seven did to Five.” The branches of a nearby tree caught at his face when he turned from her gaze.
He sat on the hard ground and cried, and when he stopped shaking, her hand was on his shoulder. “Five won’t ever sing anymore,” he said.
“No.”
“There aren’t any more songs, then.”
“Mike, I can remember the songs, some of them. I even made up one of my own, after hearing Mother talk . . .”
When he turned to Twelve she was laying back against long, brown grass. She smiled.
Mike lay beside her, on his back. “There’s a falling star,” he said, pointing.
“The star of morning,” she said, quietly.
Who would you choose as the five most famous science fiction writers of today? It's certain that anyone's list will include Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov . . . and Poul Anderson. And we're pleased to present all three in this volume. The following short novel tells of the time when men have returned to the Moon . .. for the third time ...
THE COMMUNICATORS
Poul Anderson
After the thrust and hiss of orbital assumption, there was a great silence. The ship freefell around the Moon. She would complete a circuit while her crew verified that all was in order and got a lock-on to Ground Control, before starting descent
Marbled blue and white, scars hidden by remoteness, altogether beautiful, Earth’s lighted half circle dropped beneath the Lunar horizon. That land became a jagged darkness; and because the Comunicators had turned off their cabin illumination, fainter stars appeared to them until their viewport was one wintry blaze.
Brother Roban thought he had grown used to the sight during transit. But suddenly it was as if the knowledge entered him, not as before into his brain or his excited heart, but into his entirety—that the Order was indeed bound home again; today, in his own young person; back to that web of whispers across space and the centuries which was its reason for being and perhaps the reason for life. Weightless in the chair harness, his burly body turned insubstantial as a dream and his awareness whirled forth among the constellations.
A hand fell upon his. A voice murmured, “Steady, son.”
The tenderness in gesture and tone was astonishment enough to recall him. For a moment he gulped. One does not easily leave the fringes of eternity. Flesh enclosed
him in pulse, breath, moist skin, the scratchiness of coarse fabric, a gust of faintly acrid-smelling air from a ventilator. Walls of metal enclosed him in narrowness and bleakness. Knowledge enclosed him in mortality, his own and mankind’s.
Once a trip from Earth to Moon was nothing. Well-nigh flying themselves, the argosies plied in days from Mercury to Pluto. Treasure was aboard them, and humanity and human hopes. But the last such voyage ended more than three centuries ago. The means no longer exist to build that kind of vessel. We are lucky we can again lift off even this clumsily, from the wreckage of our latest dark age.
“You aren’t ready for an ecstatic experience,” Primary Luizo said, still with a gentleness Roban had never met from him before. “Later, yes. I am glad to see you are among those who can have them. But best with preliminary training, and the first few times under guidance. Otherwise it can overwhelm you. I don’t think you would really be happiest as an ascetic.”
“M-m-maybe not . . . sir,” Roban mumbled.
The lean features of his superior stiffened into their usual mask. The accented Inglis harshened anew. Luizo came of the Ali de Marokh family, barons who held their Near Eastern marchlands against raiders from desert and sea when civilization had crashed to its nadir, and afterward were in the vanguard of its return. Though he himself had early joined the Order, the soldierly style had remained with him through the years of his life. Under his directorship, Australia Station operated as much like an army base as a conservatory of learning.
“Besides,” he said, “we have practical problems. Two of us, to get the whole enterprise started over.”
In Roban, anger shouldered wistfulness aside and filled the space where awe had been. “Among a pack of Dom-inists!” he exclaimed. “How much damage have those barbarians done?”
“Control your emotions,” the Primary said. “Nobody 208
would be sent here who was not a technological competent: not when ships and facilities are as crude as now. He wouldn’t survive. It is a bare ten years since spaceflight resumed.”
“That makes ten years they’ve sat on our property.”
“I told you to curb yourself, Brother.”
Roban looked into Luizo’s eyes, glacial green in the dark, aquiline face. “Yes, Primary. I’m sorry.”
He bowed his head, as befitted a mere techno repr
imanded by an administrator who had, moreover, spent a working lifetime among the records of messages from the stars. His floating hands sought each other and twined fingers till the knuckles stood white. It was bitter for Brother Roban of the Order, who had been plain Roban Stacket of Seattle in Norrestland, to be meek toward those who had conquered his country.
He often wondered why Luizo chose him to come when the Domination of Baikal announced it would ferry a pair of Communicators to Farside. He could readily understand that the Board of Directors would vote the honor of heading and organizing that mission to Luizo himself. The Primary had done more than turn half-ruined Australia Station into a secure and prosperous center for scholars and their families. He had also, alone in mystery, found new interpretations that answered old riddles about what the Others meant in certain of their transmissions. If anyone could bring humankind back into the transgalactic web—could even, maybe, regain the Order’s ancient control of the transceivers—Luizo was the man.
But why, out of every possible assistant, did he choose me? I’m just a fisherman's son. I only joined a few years back, after I couldn’t stand any longer seeing foreign troops on my soil that had been free.
Could that be his reason? Roban thought abruptly. The Order of Communicators is supposed to stand outside all politics, all nationality; it speaks to the stars on behalf of our whole species. And by and large, our membership’s really held that attitude. Otherwise I don't suppose we'd have lasted through the ups and downs and ins and outs of two thousand years. Myself, though—well, I've seen the vision too, when studying the archives or standing out in the night and looking upward—but I haven't forgotten bombs and fire when I was small, Mother crying when Dad never came back, slant-eyed men barracking to this day in (whisper it) Liberation House.
With a tingle: If a chance comes . . . to do something ... I’m strong and ready.
Swift in her low orbit, the ship raised the terminator. Day burned, first a thin line ahead, then a pockmarked stone waste beneath; and the constellations paled before human eyes while they reeled across heaven. Roban strained forward in his harness. “Can you spot the Station, sir?” he asked out of a tightening throat.
“No.” The Primary stroked the pointed beard allowed his rank. “But 1 did not expect to. We are doubtless being guided from the new navigational posts ... ah.” He broke off. Expressionless, he crossed his arms in proper greeting. “Salutation, Colonel," he said to the man who had appeared in the companionway.
“Salutation to you bot’.” Iwan Duna’s accent was thicker than Luizo’s; but the fact that he spoke Inglis, which had remained the common language of the Order since American times, helped qualify him as the expedition’s liaison with its passengers. “May I join you?”
Roban clamped teeth together. The living tongue of Norrestland was not much different from this archaic version; and he had heard it spoken in just that way, by armed men in just that baggy uniform, along the shores of Puget Sound. How can we stop you? he wanted to say.
“Assuredly, Colonel,” Luizo replied.
“You see,” Duna explained, “you have de best view here, except in de pilot section w’ere dey are busy.” His native speech governed his throat, imposing its own rhythms, softening and shortening vowels while forbidding such consonantal sounds as th and wh. But his fluency was such that even Roban had almost stopped noticing the pronunciation.
He pushed foot against foot against bulkhead, soared, checked himself with a hand on the headrest of Roban’s chair. I must not tell you to get away from me, the techno thought. Sweat welled in his fists. Some broke loose, glittering, dancing droplets.
“We wanted your trip should be enjoyable as possible,” Duna went on. “I am sorry you must be strapped in. Dat iss for your safety in case a sudden maneuver is needed.”
“You have made this voyage several times before, have you not?” Luizo asked.
“Yass. I never tire of watching. Es-specially w’en we pass Mare Tranquillitatis.”
“Why that?”
“You do not know? W’ere de very first men landed.” Duna moved around to the side, so that both Communicators could see him. His gaze fell on Roban. “Your people,” he said. “W’at iss your country wass part of deirs.”
And now part of yours, seared in Roban. Oh, a puppet native government; a shadow Assembly; a pretense at a mutual defense pact; but we are under your empire, paying your tribute, quartering your troops, lately fighting m your frontier skirmishes . . . oh, God, your huntsmen in our clean mountains and forests, your Protector’s yacht on our clean waters, and the girl I’d hoped for giggling on the arm of one of you!
Still Duna regarded the big blond man. He himself fitted Norrestland’s popular concept of a Baikalan (though that meant little, when his nation was such a kaleidoscope of races and cultures)—short and stocky, broad in features, high in cheekbones, slightly oblique gray eyes, head shaven except for a reddish scalp lock, face marked with clan tattoos. His coverall was similar to the Communicator’s, but green where theirs were blue, sloppy where theirs were neat. At his waist he bore pistol and knife, surely no use here except to remind him that he was supposed to be a warrior-herdsman.
It had been no great surprise to find him affable. Baika-lans were, as a rule, if you didn’t cross them. His attempts to converse of scholarly matters had been less expected; but receiving no encouragement, he soon gave them up.
“Do you really not remember?” he persisted in the same mild tone.
Roban grimaced. “No chance for much education,” he said. “We start work in childhood where I come from, and work hard.” In rain, fog, storm, hauling on lines and capstan bars till our hands grow too thick to hold a pen; but also on chuckling waves where sunlight dances and seals frolic, and woods stand green ashore, and Ramier’s Peak floats holy in heaven. Our country, no one else's. “We must... to pay the taxes that pay the tribute.”
Luizo scowled, and Roban wished it hadn’t blurted out of him like that. However, Duna was unruffled. “I know,” he said. “I visited your home grounds once. It isn’t de tribute, friend, it is de fact you cannot afford—you have not de resources—to build or buy enough machines. So you plow wit’ animals and fish wit’ sailing craft. W’at you call tribute is cheaper payment for your defense dan you could manage alone, es-specially if you count cost of dose raids de Eastmen used to make on you. Derefore you will shed de burden of toil quicker.”
Luizo intervened, obviously anxious to find a different subject: “Most of the Order’s recruits are commoners like Brother Roban. They have everything to learn—not simply our organization, rituals, traditions; no, astronomy, mathematics, the whole range of sciences; if they have the talent for it, interstellar linguistics and semantics. Brother Roban is as far along as he is, at his present age, because he started with the advantage of knowing Inglis. But he has not had time to study economics, politics, or the history of Earth.”
Duna glanced ahead, where the blue half disc was rising. “He should. We happen to live dere. Have you explored de past, Primary?”
“To a degree. No more. Besides administration, my work in decipherment has kept me occupied. I need not remind you, in spite of a three-hundred-year hiatus, we are far from a complete understanding of the messages we already have.”
“And yet you want more.”
“Of course.” Luizo gestured at what stars were visible, cold sparks beyond Earth. “What have they been saying to each other, and trying to tell us, while we were away?”
The ship passed over a crater. It resembled neither the volcanic nor the meteoritic sort, but shimmered like black glass under the harsh spatial sunlight; and from its shallow ringwall jutted metal snags. Roban could not forebear to ask, “What’s that?”
“Site of a base,” Duna said. “Struck by a fusion weapon.”
Chill touched Roban. He had seen terrestrial ruins, beginning with those which surrounded Seattle’s city wall. But they were not so stark. Men had quarried them, weather had
worn them, the kindly soil had crumbled and buried them with green life. “No wonder spaceflight came to an end,” he said low.
Duna raised his brows. “Oh, dis is not from de last great war. Dis is from de t’ird. More dan a t’ousand years ago. Dat one brought its own collapse.”
The wreckage slid out of sight. Raw mountaintops grabbed after the ship. Then they were likewise gone and a great dark plain lay beneath, curving away over the near horizon. The grimness left Duna’s countenance. He stared downward and outward and whispered something to himself—curiously, in Inglis—that Roban overheard, something about an eagle having landed. The young man wondered what it meant.
Farside Station was near the middle of a natural crater; but Ley being big and the Moon being small, the ramparts could not be seen from it. The land reached ashen, boulder-strewn, pitted, footprinted. Shadows of early morning stretched west from every irregularity, making it stand out more sharply than any canyon crag on Earth. Silence and emptiness magnified other things as well for Roban, sounds of breath and blood, odors of sweat and air purifier. When he overstayed himself in a fixed position, he felt heat gnaw at his sunward side, warmth drain out of the opposite. Mostly, though, he moved, getting the hang of one-sixth gee in a spacesuit, long marvelous bounds through lightness.
Reflection from the ground made his pupils contract. No more stars appeared over the western edge of the world than he had seen where wavelets chuckled and rigging creaked. But a sickle Moon had stood in that sky; and Earth would never stand in this. / am here, he thought with wonder. I am actually here.
A jog at his elbow, a voice in his earplugs: “You start work, huh?”
His joy broke. He turned to confront the squat shape, masked by a self-darkening faceplate, a Baikalan who had acquired some Inglis while stationed in Alaska. “I’m about to,” he snapped.
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