Poul Anderson - The Long Way Home

“Yes,” said Langley wearily.

“I thought so. The Solar government’s riddled with their agents. Well, don’t do it.”

A tired, harried anger bristled in Langley. “Look here, son,” he said, straightening till Chanthavar’s eyes were well below his, “I don’t see as how I owe any faction today anything. Why don’t you quit treating me like a child?”

“I’m not going to hold you incommunicado, though I could,” said Chanthavar mildly. “Isn’t worth the trouble, because we’ll probably have that beast before long. I’m just warning you, though, that if he should fall into any hands but mine, it’ll go hard with you.”

“Why not lock me up and be done with it?”

“It wouldn’t make you think, as I’ll want you to think in case my own search fails. And it’s too crude.” Chanthavar paused, then said with a curious intensity: “Do you know why I play out this game of politics and war? Do you think maybe I want power for myself? That’s for fools who want to command other fools. It’s fun to play, though—life gets so thundering tedious otherwise. What else can I do that I haven’t done a hundred times already? But it’s fun to match wits with Brannoch and that slobbering red-beard. Win, lose, or draw, it’s amusing; but I intend to win.”

“Ever thought of—compromising?”

“Don’t let Brannoch bluff you. He’s one of the coldest and cleverest brains in the galaxy. Fairly decent sort—I’ll be sorry when I finally have to kill him—but—Never mind!” Chanthavar turned away. “Come on, let’s get down to the serious business of getting drunk.”

There was darkness around Saris Hronna where he crouched, and a wet wind blowing off the canal with a thousand odors of strangeness. The night was full of fear.

He lay in the weeds and mud of the canal bank, flattening his belly to the earth, and listened for those who hunted him.

There was no moon yet, but the stars were high and clear, a distant pulsing glow on the world’s edge told of a city, and for him there was enough gray light for vision. He looked down the straight line of the canal, the ordered rows of wind-rustling grain marching from horizon to horizon, the rounded bulk of somebody’s darkened hut three miles off; his nostrils sucked in a cool dank air, green growth and the small warm scurry of wildlife; he heard the slow, light dragging of wind, the remote honking of a bird, the incredibly faint boom of some airship miles overhead; his nerves drank the eddies and pulses of other nerves, other beings—so had he lain in the darknesses of Holat, waiting for an animal he hunted to come by, and letting himself flow into the vast murmurous midnight. But this time he was the quarry, and he could not blend himself to the life of Earth. It was too alien: every smell, every vision, every trembling nerve-current of mouse or beetle, was saw-toothed with strangeness; the very wind blew with another voice.

Below his waiting and his fear, there was a gape of sorrow. Somehow he had gone through time as well as space, somehow the planet he knew and all his folk, mate and cubs and kindred, were a thousand years behind him. He was alone as none of his race had ever been alone. Alone and, lonely.

The philosophers of Holat had been suspicious of that human ship, he remembered bleakly. In their world-view, the universe and every object and process within it were logically, inevitably finite. Infinity was a concept which violated some instinct of rightness when taken from pure mathematics into the physical cosmos, and the idea of crossing light-years in no time at all had not made sense.

The blinding sunburst newness of it all had overwhelmed ancient thought. It had been too much of a revelation, those beings from the sky and their ship; it had been too much fun, working with them, learning, finding answers to problems which their un-Holatan minds could not readily see. Caution went by the board for a while.

And as a result, Saris Hronna had fled through a forest like something out of a dream, dodging, ducking, pursued by bolts of energy which sizzled lightning-fashion in his tracks, twisting and turning and hiding with every hunter’s trick he knew, to save a life which was ashen in his mouth.

His dog-teeth flashed white as the lips drew back. There was something to live for, even now. Something to kill for.

If he could get back- It was a thought like one dun candle in a huge and storming night. Holat would not have changed much, even in two thousand years, not unless some human ship had blundered on her again. His folk were not static, there was progress all the time, but it was a growth like evolution, in harmony with the seasons and the fields and the great rhythm of time. He could find himself again.

But—

Something stirred in the sky. Saris Hronna flattened himself as if he would dig into the mud. His eyes narrowed to yellow slits as he focused his mind-senses, straining into heaven for a ghost.

Yes: currents, and not animal but the cold swirl of electrons in vacuum and gas, an undead pulsation which was like a nail scraped along his nerves. It was a small aircraft, he decided, circling in a slow path; reaching out with detectors. It was hunting him.

Maybe he should have submitted meekly. The Explorer humans were decent, for Langley he had a growing affection. Maybe these far kin of his were reasonable too- No! There was too much at hazard. There was his whole race.

They did not have this star-spanning technology on Holat. There it was still tools of bone and flint, travel on foot or in a dugout with sails and oars, food from hunting and fishing and the enormous herds of meat animals half-domesticated by telethymic control. One Holatan on the ground could track down a dozen men and kill them in the green stillness of his forests; but one human spaceship could hang in the sky and lash the planet with death.

The aircraft up there was moving away. Saris Hronna snapped after breath, filling his lungs again.

What to do, where to go, how to escape?

His mind shrieked to be a cub again, small and furry, lying on skins in a cave or sod hut and crowding against the dim vast form of mother. He thought with a sob of the days rolling and tumbling in sunlight, the snug winter nights when they couched underground—singing, talking, joining themselves in the great warm oneness of emotional communion—the times his father had taken him out to learn hunting, even his own turns at herding which had so bored him then. The small, isolated family group was the heart of his society, without it he was lost—and his clan was long dead now.

The aircraft was coming back. Its track was a spiral. How many of them were there, over how many miles of Earth’s night?

His mind quivered, less from fear than from hurt and loneliness. The life of Holat was grounded in order, ceremony, the grave courtesies between old and young, male and female, the calm pantheistic religion, the rites of the family at morning and evening: everything in its place, balance, harmony, sureness, always the knowing that life was one enormous unity. And he had been pitched into the foreign dark and was being hounded like a beast.

The fixed pattern of life had not been onerous, because its tensions were released: in the chase and in the libertine orgies of the fairs where families met to trade, discuss plans and policies, mate off the youths, drink and make merry. But here, tonight—

The thing above was coming lower. Saris” muscles grew rigid, and there was a blaze in his heart. Let it come within range, and he would seize control and smash it into the ground!

He was not wholly unfitted for this moment of murder. There was no domination within a Holatan family, no harsh father or jibing brother, they were all one; and a member who showed real talent was ungrudgingly supported by the others while he worked at his art, or his music, or his thinking. Saris had been that kind, as he emerged from cubhood. Later he had gone to one of the universities.