The Longest Way Home

by Robert Silverberg

  An hour more of driving, after lunch, brought them to an airfield, a smallish one that nevertheless must have been a reasonably important commercial field before the Liberation but now looked somewhat run down. A solitary plane, with dull-toned Liberation emblems painted over whatever insignia it had borne before, was waiting on the runway. The sight of it was another powerful reminder for Joseph of the modern civilized world that was somewhere out there, that he once had lived in and would be returning to now. He wondered how easy it was going to be to fit himself back in. His guards led him aboard, taking him to a seat in the front of the cabin, where he could not see any of his fellow passengers.

  Joseph wondered if this was actually a flight to Helikis. Could that be possible? Had everyone on Homeworld already settled into such a complacent acceptance of the new order of things in liberated Manza that normal air traffic between the continents had resumed?

  He had his answer soon enough. The plane took off, soared quickly to its cruising altitude, moved off on a southerly course. Joseph, sitting in the middle of a group of three seats, leaned forward across the guard at his right to stare out the window, looking hopefully for the narrowing of the land below that would tell him that they were nearing the sea and approaching the Isthmus, the little bridge of land that separated the two continents. But he saw no coastline down there, only an immense expanse of terrain, most of it divided into cultivated patches, reaching to each horizon. They were still in Manza. And now the plane was starting to descend. The flight had lasted perhaps two and a half hours, three at most. They had gone only a relatively short distance, at least as aerial journeys went, though Joseph knew now that it would have taken him several lifetimes to cover that relatively short distance on foot, as he had with so much bravado intended to do. And he was still a long way from home.

  “Where are we landing?” Joseph asked one of his guards.

  “Eivoya,” the guard said. The name meant nothing to Joseph. “It is where the border is.”

  It hardly seemed worthwhile to seek a more detailed explanation. The plane touched down nicely. Another car was waiting for Joseph at the edge of the runway. Once again the two guards took seats on either side of him. This time they drove about an hour more: it was getting to be late in the day, and Joseph was growing very tired, tired of this long day’s traveling, tired of sitting between these two uncommunicative men, tired of having things happen to him. He realized that he was probably as close to home as he had been in over a year, and that this day he had covered a greater distance toward that goal than he had managed to cross by his own efforts in all the time since the burning of Getfen House. Yet he felt no sense of mounting jubilation. He still did not know what further obstacles lay between him and Keilloran. He might not even get there at all. And he was weary to the bone. This is what it feels like to be old, he thought. To cease to care, even about things that you have sought to achieve. I have aged seventy years in just these few months.

  The car pulled up at the edge of what looked like an untilled field. There was nothing in view anywhere around, no farms, no buildings. He saw a few trees a long way off. There was a scattering of gray clouds overhead.

  “This is where you get out,” said the guard to his left. He opened the door, stepped out, waited.

  “Here?” Joseph asked.

  The guard nodded. He scowled and made an impatient backhanded gesture.

  It made no sense. Here, in the middle of nowhere? This forlorn weedy field looked like exactly the sort of place where you would choose to take a prisoner to be executed, but if all they had wanted to do was kill him, why had they bothered to go through all this involved business of loading him on cars, flying him south, driving him around in the countryside? They could much more easily have shot him back at the camp. It would have caused no stir. Tens of thousands of Masters had been massacred in Manza already; the death of one more, even a stranded visitor from Helikis, would hardly make much difference in the general scheme of things.

  “Out,” the guard said again. “This is wasting time.”

  Very well, Joseph thought. Whatever they wanted. He was too tired to argue, and begging for his life was unlikely to get him anywhere.

  The Folker pointed out into the field. “There’s the border marker, out there ahead of you. Now run. Run as fast as you know how, in the direction that I’m pointing. I warn you, don’t go in any other direction. Go! Now!”

  Joseph began to run.

  They will shoot me in the back before I have gone twenty paces, he told himself. The bolt will pass right through my pack, into my body, my lungs, my heart, and I will fall down on my face here in this field, a dead man, and they will leave me here, and that will be that.

  “Run!” the guard called, behind him. “Run!”

  Joseph did not look back to see if they were aiming at him, though he was sure that they were. He ran, ran hard, ran with all the determination he could summon, but it was a tough sprint. The ground was rough beneath his feet, and not even these last few days of decent meals had brought him back to anything like a semblance of strength. He ran with his mouth open, gulping for air. He felt his heart working too quickly and protesting it. Several times he nearly tripped over the extended ropy stem of some treacherous low-growing shrub, lurched, staggered, barely managed to stay upright. He thought back to that time, what seemed like a hundred years ago, when he had lurched and staggered and stumbled and fallen in the forest near Getfen and had done that terrible injury to his leg. He did not want that to happen again, though it was strange to be fretting about anything so minor as an injured leg when two men with guns might be taking aim at him from behind.

  But the shot that he had expected did not come. A few moments more and he ascended a little rise in the field, and when he came down the far side he saw a broad palisade standing before him, a row of stout logs tightly lashed together set in the ground, and he realized that he had arrived at the dividing point that set the two worlds apart, the boundary between the territory of the Liberation and that which must still remain under the sovereignty of his own people.

  There was a gate in the palisade and a guard-post above it. The grim faces of four or five men were looking out at him. Joseph thought he saw the metal face of a gun facing him also.

  Bringing himself to a stumbling halt a few dozen yards before the palisade, he raised his arms to show that he intended no harm. He hoped that they were expecting him.

  “Masters!” he cried, in his own language, with what was nearly his last gasp of breath. “Help me! Help! Help!”

  Then the ground came rushing up toward him and Joseph seized it and held it, because everything was whirling around. He heard voices above him, saw booted feet standing beside him. They were lifting him, carrying him through the gate.

  “What place is this?” he asked, speaking through a thin mist of exhaustion.

  “House Eivoya,” someone said.

  “You are Masters?”

  “Masters, yes.”

  He was lying in a bed, suddenly. There were bright lights overhead. They were washing him. Someone was doing something to his arm, attaching something to it. Someone else was wrapping a kind of collar around his left ankle. Joseph had the impression that they were explaining to him the things that they were doing to him, step by step, but none of it made much sense, and after a time he gave up trying to follow it. It was easier to go to sleep, and he did. When he awoke, sleep still seemed the easier choice, and he glided back into it. The next time he awakened there were two people in the room, a man and a woman, older people, both of them, watching him.

  The woman, he discovered, was his doctor. The man introduced himself as Federigo Master Eivoya, of House Eivoya. “And what is your name?” the man said.

  “Joseph. Joseph Master Keilloran. Am I still in Manza?”

  “Southern Manza, yes. Just north of the Isthmus. —Can you tell me your father’s name, Joseph?”

  “You don’t believe I am who I say I am? Or are you jus
t trying to see whether my mind still works?”

  “Please.”

  “Martin is his name. Martin Master Keilloran. My mother was Mistress Wireille, but she’s dead. My brothers’ names—”

  “You don’t need to go on.”

  “So you believe me?”

  “Of course we believe you. We needed to know, and now we do.”

  The woman said, “You’ll want to rest for a while. You’re half starved, you know. They treated you very badly in that prison camp, didn’t they?”

  Joseph shrugged. “I was in pretty bad shape when I got there. They didn’t make things any better for me, though.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  She gave him something to make him sleep again. He dreamed of Thayle, tiptoeing into the room, climbing naked into the bed beside him, taking his thin ruined body into her arms, holding him against the warmth of her, her firm abundant flesh. He dreamed he was in the village of the Ardardin, discussing the difference between the visible world and the invisible one. At last it all was clear to him. He understood what the Ardardin meant by the axis of the worlds upon which all things spin, and the place where mundane time and mythical time meet. He had never really managed to grasp that before. Then he was back in the forest with the noctambulo, who was reciting noctambulo poetry to him in a low monotonous voice, and then he was in his own room at Keilloran House, with his mother and his father standing beside his bed.

  When he woke his mind was clear again, and he saw that there was a tube going into his arm and another into his thigh, and he knew that this must be a hospital and that they were trying to repair the various kinds of damage that his long journey had inflicted on him. A younger man who said his name was Reynaldo was with him. “I am Federigo’s son,” he told Joseph. “If you have things to ask, you can ask me.” He was about thirty, dark-haired, smooth-skinned, as handsome as an actor. Joseph had things to ask, yes, but he hardly knew where to begin. “Did the Folk conquer all of Manza?” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. That seemed like as good a starting-point as any.

  “Most of it, yes,” Reynaldo said. “All but here.” He explained that the Masters had been able to hold the line at Eivoya, that the rebel forces in the far south had not been strong enough to break through it and eventually they had abandoned the attempt and worked out an armistice acknowledging the continued sovereignty of the Masters over the southern tip of Manza. The rest of the northern continent, he said, was in Folkish hands, and he supposed that most or all of the Great Houses had been destroyed. The fighting had ended, now. Occasional straggling survivors from the north still made their way down here, said Reynaldo, but they were very few and far between these days. He said nothing about any plans to reconquer the territory that had been lost, and Joseph did not ask him about that.

  “And Helikis?” Joseph said. “What happened there?”

  “There was no rebellion in Helikis,” said Reynaldo. “Everything in Helikis is as it always has been.”

  “Is that the truth, or are you just telling me that to make me feel better?”

  “You should have no reason to distrust me,” Reynaldo said, and Joseph let the point drop, though he realized that what Reynaldo had told him had not exactly been a reply to what he had asked.

  He knew that he was very ill. In his struggle to survive, going again and again to the brink of starvation, he must have consumed most of his body’s resources. Perhaps he had been operating on sheer force of will alone, most of the time since he had left Eysar Haven. At his age he was still growing; his body needed a constant rich supply of fuel; instead it had been deprived, much of the time, of even a basic input of nourishment. But they were kind to him here. They knew how to heal him. He was back among his own, or almost so. Joseph had never heard of House Eivoya, but that did not matter: he had never heard of most of the Houses of Manza. He was grateful for its existence and for his presence at it. He might not have been able to survive much longer on his own. It was possible to take the position that his being captured by those rebel troops was the luckiest thing that had happened to him during his journey.

  Once again Joseph began to recover. He realized that the innate resilience of his body must be very great. They took out the tubes; he began to eat solid food; soon he was up, walking about, leaving his room and going out on the balcony of the building. It appeared that the hospital was at the edge of a forest, a very ancient one at that, dark, primordial, indomitable giant trees with their roots in the prehistory of Homeworld standing side by side, green networks of coiling vines embracing their mammoth trunks to create an impenetrable barrier. For a moment Joseph thought that when he left here it would be necessary for him to enter that forest and cross it somehow, to solve all the terrible riddles that it would pose, the next great challenge on his journey, and the thought both frightened and excited him. But then he reminded himself that he had reached sanctuary at last, that he would not have to wander in dark forests any longer.

  “Someone is here to see you,” Reynaldo told him, a day or two later.

  She came to his room, a tall dark-haired young woman, slender, elegantly dressed, quite beautiful. She looked astonishingly like his mother, so much so that for one startled moment Joseph thought that she was his mother and that he must be having hallucinations again. But of course his mother was dead, and this woman was too young, anyway. She could not have been more than twenty and might even be younger. And only then did it occur to Joseph that she must be his sister.

  “Cailin?” he asked, in a small, tentative voice.

  And she, just as uncertainly: “Joseph?”

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  She smiled. “You look so good with a beard! But so different. Everything about you is so different. Oh, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph—”

  He held out his arms to her and she came quickly to him, rushing into the embrace and then drawing back a little from it as though pausing to consider that he was still very fragile, that a hug that had any fervor to it might well break him into pieces. But he clung to her and drew her in. Then he released her, and she stepped back, studying him, staring. Though she did not say it, Joseph could see that she still must be searching, perhaps almost desperately, for some sign that this gaunt bearded stranger in front of her was in fact her brother.

  He too was searching for signs to recognize her by. That she was Cailin he had no doubt. But the Cailin that he remembered had been a girl, tall and a little awkward, all legs and skinny arms, just barely come into her breasts, her face still unformed. This one—a year and a half later, two years?—was a woman. Her arms, the whole upper part of her body, had become fuller. So had her face. She had cut her long, wondrous cascade of black hair so that it reached only to her shoulders. Her chin was stronger, her nose more pronounced, and both changes only enhanced her beauty.

  They were little more than a year apart in age. Joseph had always been fond of her, fonder than he was of any of the others, though he had often showed his liking for her in perversely heartless ways, callous pranks, little boorish cruelties, all manner of things that he had come to regret when it was too late to do anything about them. He was glad that she, rather than Rickard or one of the House servants, had come for him. Still, he wondered why she was the one who had been chosen. Rickard would be old enough to have made the journey. Girls—and that was what she really was, still, a girl—were not often sent on such extended trips.

  “Is everything all right at Keilloran? I’ve heard nothing—nothing—”

  She glanced away, just for the merest instant, but it was a revealing glance none the less. And she paused to moisten her lips before answering. “There have been—a few problems,” she said. “But we can talk about that later. It’s you I want to talk about. Oh, Joseph, we were so sure you were dead!”

  “The combinant was broken. I tried to get in touch, the very first night when they attacked Getfen House, but nothing would happen. Not then or later, and then I lost it. It was taken a
way from me, I mean. By an Indigene. He wanted it, and I had to let him have it, because I belonged to them, I was a sort of slave in their village, their doctor—”

  She was staring at him in amazement. He covered his mouth with his hand. He was telling her too much too soon.

  “Communications were cut off for a while,” Cailin said. “Then they were restored, but not with the part of Manza where you were. They attacked Getfen House—but you got away, and then what? Where did you go? What did you do?”

  “It’s a complicated story,” he said. “It’ll take me quite a while to tell it.”

  “And you’re all right now?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. Thinner. A few scars, maybe. Some changes here and there. It was a difficult time. —How is Rickard? Eitan? The girls?”

  “Fine. Fine, all of them fine. Rickard had a difficult time too, thinking you were dead, knowing that he was going to have to be the Master of the House eventually in your place. You know what Rickard is like.”

  “Yes. I know what Rickard is like.”

  “But he’s been coming around. Getting used to the idea. He’s almost come to like it.”

  “I’m sorry to be disappointing him, then. —And Father?” Joseph said, the question he had been holding back. “How is he? How did he take it, the news that I was probably dead?”