Robert Silverberg - Stepsons of Terra

To Randall Garrett

Ewing woke slowly, sensing the coldness all about him. It was slowly withdrawing down the length of his body; his head and shoulders were out of the freeze now, the rest of his body gradually emerging. He stirred as well as he could, and the delicately spun web of foam that had cradled him in the journey across space shivered as he moved.

He extended a hand and heaved downward on the lever six inches from his wrist. A burst of fluid shot forward from the spinnerettes above him, dissolving the web that bound him. The coldness drained from his legs. Stiffly he rose, moving as if he were very old, and stretched gingerly.

He had slept eleven months, fourteen days, and some six hours, according to the panel above his sleeping area. The panel registered time in Galactic Absolute Units. And the second, the Galactic Absolute Unit of temporal measure, was an arbitrary figure, accepted by the galaxy only because it had been devised by the mother world.

Ewing touched an enameled stud and a segment of the inner surface of the ship’s wall swung away, revealing a softly glowing vision-plate. A planet hung centered in the green depths of the plate—a planet green itself, with vast seas bordering its continents.

Earth.

Ewing knew what his next task was. Moving quickly, now that circulation was returning to his thawed limbs, he strode to the compact bulk of the subetheric generator on the opposite wall and spun the contact dial. A blue light glowed.

“Baird Ewing speaking,” he said to the pickup grid. “I wish to report that I’ve taken up a position in orbit around Earth after a successful flight. All’s well so far. I’ll be descending to Earth shortly. Further reports will follow.”

He broke contact. This very moment, he knew, his words were leaping across the galaxy toward his home world, via subetheric carrier wave. Fifteen days would elapse before his message arrived on Corwin.

Ewing had wanted to stay awake, all the long months of his solitary trip. There was reading he wanted to do, and music disks to play. The idea of spending nearly a year asleep was appalling to him; all that time wasted!

But they had been adamant. “You’re crossing sixteen parsecs of space in a one-man ship,” they told him. “Nobody can stay awake all that time and come out of it sane, Ewing. And we need you sane.”

He tried to protest. It was no good. The people of Corwin were sending him to Earth at great expense to do a job of vital importance; unless they could be absolutely certain that he would arrive in good condition, they would do better sending someone else. Reluctantly, Ewing yielded. They lowered him into the nutrient bath and showed him how to trip the foot levers that brought about suspension and the hand levers that would release him when his time was up. They sealed off his ship and shot it into the dark, a lonely raft on the broad sea, a coffin-sized spaceship built for one…

At least ten minutes went by before he was fully restored to normal physiological functioning. He stared in the mirror at the strange silken stubble that had sprouted on his face. He looked oddly emaciated; he had never been a fleshy man, but now he looked skeletonic, his cheeks shrunken, his skin tight-drawn over the jutting bones of his face. His hair seemed to have faded too; it had been a rich auburn on that day in 3805 when he left Corwin on his emergency mission to Earth, but now it was a dark, nondescript mud-brown. Ewing was a big man, long-muscled rather than stocky, with a fierce expression contradicted by mild, questioning eyes.

His stomach felt hollow. His shanks were spindly. He felt drained of vigor.

But there was a job to do.

Adjoining the subetheric generator was an in-system communicator. He switched it on, staring at the pale ball that was Earth in the screen on the far wall. A crackle of static rewarded him. He held his breath, waiting, waiting for the first words he would ever have heard in pure Terrestrial. He wondered if they would understand his Anglo-Corwin.

After all, it was nearly a thousand years since the colony had been planted, and almost five hundred since the people of Corwin had last had intercourse of any land with Earth. Languages diverge, in five hundred years.

A voice said, “Earth station Double Prime. Who calls, please? Speak up. Speak, please.”

Ewing smiled. It was intelligible!

He said, “One-man ship out of the Free World of Corwin calling. I’m in a stabilized orbit fifty thousand kilometers above Earth ground level. Request permission to land at coordinates of your designation.”

There was a long silence, too long to be attributed sheerly to transmission lag. Ewing wondered if he had spoken too quickly, or if his words had lost their Terrestrial meanings.

Finally came a response: “Free World of which, did you say?”

“Corwin. Epsilon Ursae Majoris XII. It’s a former Terrestrial colony.”

Again there was an uncomfortable pause. “Corwin… Corwin. Oh. I guess it’s okay for you to land. You have a warp-drive ship?”

“Yes,” Ewing said. “With photonic modifiers, of course. And ion-beam for atmospheric passage.”

His Earthside respondent said, “Are photonic modifiers radioactive?”

Ewing was taken aback for a moment. Frowning at the speaker grid, he said, “If you mean radioactive in the normal sense of emitting hard particles, no. The photonic modifier merely converts—” He stopped. “Do I have to explain the whole thing to you?”

“Not unless you want to stay up there all day, Corwin.

If your ship’s not hot, come on down. Coordinates for landing will follow.”

Ewing carefully jotted the figures down as they came in, read them back for confirmation, thanked the Earthman, and signed off. He integrated the figures and programmed them for the ship’s calculators.

His throat felt dry. Something about the Earthman’s tone of voice troubled him. The man had been too flip, too careless of mind, too impatient.

Perhaps I was expecting too much, Ewing thought. After all, he was just doing a routine job.

It was a jarring beginning, none the less. Ewing realized he, like all the Corwinites, had a highly idealized mental image of an Earthman as a being compassionately wise, physically superb, a superman in all respects. It would be disappointing to leam that the fabled inhabitants of the legendary mother world were mere human beings themselves, like their remote descendants on the colony worlds.

Ewing strapped himself in for the downward jaunt through the atmospheric blanket of Earth and nudged the lever that controlled the autopilot. The ultimate leg of his journey had begun. Within an hour, he would actually stand on the soil of Earth herself.

I hope they’ll be able to help us, he thought. Bright in his mind was a vivid mental image: faceless hordes of barbaric Klodni sweeping down on the galaxy out of Andromeda, devouring world after world in their relentless drive inward toward civilization’s heart.

Already four worlds had fallen to the Klodni since the aliens had begun their campaign of conquest. The timetable said they would reach Corwin within the next decade.

Cities destroyed, women and children carried into slavery, the glittering spire of the World Building a charred ruin, the University destroyed, the fertile fields blackened by the Klodni scorched-earth tactics—

Ewing shuddered as his tiny ship spiraled Earthward, bobbing in the thickening layers of atmosphere. Earth will help us, he told himself comfortingly, Earth will save her colonies from conquest.

Ewing felt capillaries bursting under the increasing drag of deceleration. He gripped the handrests and shouted to relieve the tension on his eardrums, but there was no way of relieving the tension within. The thunder of his jets boomed through the framework of the ship, and the green planet grew frighteningly huge in the clear plastic of the view-screen…