Poul Anderson - New America

“You have not heard?” she caroled.

“No, our radio went out on the way back.” Thrailkill replied. “What’s happened?”

She spread her hands. They had three fingers apiece, at right angles to each other. “But so wonderful!” she exclaimed. “A ship has come from your country. They say you can go home.” As if the implications had suddenly broken on her, she stopped. After a moment: “I hope you will want to come back and visit us.”

She doesn’t realize , flashed through the stupefaction in Thrailkill. He was only dimly aware of Leonie’s tight grasp on his arm. That’s a one-way trip.

Sunset smoldered away in bronze and gold. From the heights above Treequad, Kahn and Thrailkill could look past the now purple hills that flanked the Door, out to a glimpse of the Weather-womb Ocean. The xenologist sighed. “I always wanted to build a real seagoing schooner and take her there,” he said. “Coasting down to Gate-of-the-South—what a trip!”

“I am surprised that the natives have not done so,” Kahn said. “They appear to have the capability, and it would be better for trade than those toilsome overland routes you mentioned.”

“I suggested that, and my father before me,” Thrailkill answered. “But none of them cared to make the initial effort. Once we thought about doing it ourselves, to set an example. But we had a lot of other work, and too few of us.”

“Well, if the natives are so shiftless, why do you care about improving their lot?”

Thrailkill bristled at the insult to his Mithrans, until he remembered that Kahn could not be expected to understand. “‘Shiftless’ is the wrong word,” he said. “They work as hard as necessary. Their arts make everything of ours look sick. Let’s just call them less adventurous than humans.” His smile was wry. “Probably the real reason we’ve done so much here, and wanted to do so much more. Not for altruism, just for the hell of it.”

The mirth departed from him. He looked from the Door, past the twinkling lanterns of Goodwort and Withylet which guarded it, back across the mercury sheet of the Bay, to Treequad at his feet.

“So, I’m not going to build that schooner,” he said. Roughly: “Come on, we’d better return.”

They started downhill, over a trail which wound among groves of tall sweet-scented sheathbud trees. Leaves rustled in the twilight, a flock of marsh birds winged homeward with remote trum-petings, insects chirred from the pseudograsses. Below, Treequad was a darkness filling the flat-lands between hills and Bay. Lights could be seen from windows, and the Center tower was etched slim against the waters; but the whole impression was of openness and peace, with some underlying mystery to which men could not quite put a name.

“Why did you establish yourselves here, rather than at the town farther north?” Kahn asked. His voice seemed flat and loud, and the way he jumped from subject to subject was also an offense to serenity. Thrailkill didn’t mind, though. He had recognized his own sort of man in the dark, moody captain, which was why he had invited Kahn to stay with him and had taken his guest on this ramble.

Good Lord, what can he do but grab blindly at whatever he notices? He left Earth a generation ago, and even if he read everything we sent up till then, why, we never could transmit more than a fraction of what we saw and heard and did. He’s got two and a half—well, an Earth century’s worth of questions to ask.

Thrailkill glanced around. The eastern sky had turned plum color, where the first few stars trod forth. We ourselves , he thought, have a thousand years’ worth; ten thousand years’. But of course now those questions will never be asked.

“Why Treequad?” he said slowly. “Well, they already had a College of Poets and Ceremonialists here—call it the equivalent of an intellectual community, though in human terms it isn’t very. They made useful go-betweens for us, in dealing with less well-educated natives. And then, uh, Point Desire is a trading center, therefore especially worth studying. We didn’t want to disturb conditions by plumping our own breed down right there.”

“I see. That is also why you haven’t expanded your numbers?”

“Partly. We’d like to. This continent, this whole planet, is so underpopulated that— But a scientific base can’t afford to grow. How would everyone be brought home again when it’s terminated?”

Fiercely: “Damn you on Earth! You’re terminating us too soon!”

“I agree,” Kahn said. “If it makes any consolation, all the others are being ended too. They don’t mind so greatly. This is the sole world we have found where men can live without carrying around an environmental shell.”

“What? There must be more.”

“Indeed. But how far have we ranged? Less than fifty light-years. And never visited half the stars in that radius. You don’t know what a gigantic project it is, to push a ship close to the speed of light. Too gigantic. The whole effort is coming to an end, as Earth grows poor and weary. I doubt if it will ever be revived.”

Thrailkill felt a chill. The idea hadn’t occurred to him before, in the excitement of meeting the fer-riers, but— “What can we do when we get there?” he demanded. “We’re not fitted for… for city life.”

“Have no fears,” Kahn said. “Universities, foundations, vision programs, any number of institutions will be delighted to have you. At least, that was so when I left, and society appears to have gotten static. And you should have party conversation for the rest of your lives, about your adventures on Mithras.”

“M-m-m, I s’pose.” Thrailkill rehearsed some fragments of his personal years.

Adventure enough. When he and Tom Jackson and Gleam-of-Wings climbed the Snowtooths, white starkness overhead and the wind awhistle below them, the thunder and plumes of an avalanche across a valley, the huge furry beast that came from a cave and must be slain before it slew them. Or shooting the rapids on a river that tumbled down the Goldstream Hills, landing wet and cold at Volcano to boast over their liquor in the smoky-raftered taproom of Monstersbane Inn. Prowling the alleys and passing the lean temples of the Fivedom; standing off a horde of the natives’ half-intelligent, insensately ferocious cousins, in the stockade at Tearwort; following the caravans through the Desolations, down to Gate-of-the-South, while drums beat unseen from dry hills; or simply this last trip, along the Benison through fogs and waterstalks, to those lands where the dwellers gave their lives to nothing but rites that made no sense and one dared not laugh—Indeed Earth offered nothing like that, and the vision-screen people would pay well for a taste of it to spice their fantasies.

Though Thrailkill remembered quieter times more clearly, and did not see how they could be told. The Inn of the Poetess, small and snug beneath the stormcloud mass of Demon Mountain, firelight, songs, comradeship; shadows and sun-flecks and silence in Hermit Woods; sailing out to Fish Hound Island with Leonie on their wedding night, that the sunrise might find them alone on its crags (how very bright the stars had been—even little Sol was a beacon for them); afterward, building sand castles with Vivian on Broadstrands, while the surf rolled in from ten thousand kilometers of ocean. They used to end such a day by finding some odd eating place in Kings Point Station or Goodwort, and Vivian would fall asleep to the creak of the sweeps as their ferry trudged home across the water.

Well, those were private memories anyway.

He realized they had been walking for quite some time in silence. Only their footfalls on the cobbles, now that they were back in town, or an occasional trill from the houses that bulked on either side, could be heard. Courtesy insisted he should make conversation with the vaguely visible shape on his right. “What will you do?” he asked. “After we return, I mean.”