Poul Anderson: The People of the Wind

Therefore it was nonsense to suppose a man got tired from anything except overwork — and, yes, age, in spite of antisenescence. Or was it? Really? As you grew old, as you neared your dead and all who had gone before them, might your being not yearn back to its earliest beginnings, to a manhome you had never seen, but somehow remembered?

Crock! Come off that! Who said eighty-four is old? Holm yanked a cigar from his pocket and snapped off the end. The inhalation which lit it was unnecessarily hard. He was of medium height, and stocky in the olive tunic and baggy trousers worn by human members of the Ythrian armed services. The mongoloid side of his descent showed in round head, wide face, high cheekbones, a fullness about the lips and the blunt nose; the caucasoid was revealed in gray eyes, a skin that would have been pale did he not spend his free time outdoors hunting or gardening, and the hair that was grizzled on his scalp but remained crisp and black on his chest. Like most men on the planet, he suppressed his beard.

He was wading into the latest spate of communications his aides had passed on to him, when the intercom buzzed and said: “First Marchwarden Ferune wishes discussion.”

“Sure!” Holm’s superior was newly back from Ythri. The man reached for a two-way plate, withdrew his hand, and said, “Why not in the flesh? I’ll be right there.”

He stumped from his office. The corridor beyond hummed and bustled — naval personnel, civilian employees of the Lauran admiralty — and overloaded the building’s air system till the odors of both species were noticeable, slightly acrid human and slightly smoky Ythrian. The latter beings were more numerous, in reversal of population figures for Avalon. But then, a number were here from elsewhere in the Domain, especially from the mother world, trying to help this frontier make ready in the crisis.

Holm forced himself to call greetings right and left as he went. His affability had become a trademark whose value he recognized. At first it was genuine, he thought.

The honor guard saluted and admitted him to Ferune’s presence. (Holm did not tolerate time-wasting ceremoniousness in his department; but he admitted its importance to Ythrians.) The inner room was typical: spacious and sparsely furbished, a few austere decorations, bench and desk and office machinery adapted to ornithoid requirements. Rather than a transparency in the wall, there was a genuine huge window open on garden-scented breezes and a downhill view of Gray and the waters aglitter beyond.

Ferune had added various offplanet souvenirs and a bookshelf loaded with folio copies of the Terran classics that he read, in three original languages, for enjoyment. A smallish, tan-feathered male, he was a bit of an iconoclast. His choth, Mistwood, had always been one of the most progressive on Avalon, mechanized as much as a human community and, in consequence, large and prosperous. He had scant patience to spare for tradition, religion, any conservatism. He endured a minimum of formalities because he must, but never claimed to like them.

Bouncing from his perch, he scuttled across the floor and shook hands Terran style. “Khr-r-r, good to see you, old rascal!” He spoke Planha; Ythrian throats are less versatile than human (though of course no human can ever get the sounds quite right) and he wanted neither the nuisance of wearing a vocalizer nor the grotesquerie of an accent.

“How’dit go?” Holm asked.

Ferune grimaced. But that is the wrong word. His feathers were not simply more intricate than those of Terran birds, they were more closely connected to muscles and nerve endings, and their movements constituted a whole universe of expression forever denied to man. Irritation, fret, underlying anger and dismay, rippled across his body.

“Huh.” Holm found a chair designed for him, sank down, and drew tobacco pungency over his tongue. “Tell.”

Foot-claws clicked on lovely-grained wood. Back and forth Ferune paced. “I’ll be dictating a full report,” he said. “In brief, worse than I feared. Yes, they’re scrambling to establish a unified command and shove the idea of action under doctrine into every captain. But they’ve no dustiest notion of how to go about it”

“God on a stick,” Holm exclaimed, “we’ve been telling them for the past five years! I thought — oh, bugger, communication’s so vague in this so-called navy, I’d nothing to go on but impressions, and I guess I got the wrong ones — but you know I thought, we thought a halfway sensible reorganization was in progress.”

“It was, but it moulted. Overweening pride, bickering, haggling about details. We Ythrians — our dominant culture, at least — don’t fit well into anything tightly centralized.” Ferune paused. “In fact,” he went on, “the most influential argument against trading our separate, loosely coordinated planetary commands for a Terran-model hierarchy has been that Terra may have vastly greater forces, but these need to control a vastly greater volume of space than the Domain; and if they fight us they’ll be at the end of such a long line of communication that unified action is self-defeating.”

“Huh! Hasn’t it occurred to those mudbrains on Ythri, the Imperium isn’t stupid? If Terra hits, it won’t run the war from Terra, but from a sector close to our borders.”

“We’ve found little sign of strength being marshaled in nearby systems.”

“Certainly not!” Holm slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. “Would they give their preparations away like that? Would you? They’ll assemble in space, parsecs from any star. Minimal traffic between the gathering fleet and whatever planets our scouts can sneak close to. In a few cubic light-years, they can hide power to blow us out of the plenum.”

“You’ve told me this a few times,” Ferune said dryly. “I’ve passed it on. To scant avail.” He stopped pacing. For a while, silence dwelt in the room. The yellow light of Laura cast leaf shadows on the floor. They quivered.

“After all,” Ferune said, “our methods did save us during the Troubles.”

“You can’t compare war lords, pirates, petty conquerors, barbarians who’d never have gotten past their stratospheres if they hadn’t happened to ’ve acquired practically self-operating ships — you can’t compare that bloody-clawed rabble to Imperial Terra.”

“I know,” Ferune replied; “The point is, Ythrian methods served us well because they accord with Ythrian nature. I’ve begun to wonder, during this last trip, if an attempt to become poor copies of our rivals may not be foredoomed. The attempt’s being made, understand — you’ll get details till they run back out of your gorge — but could be that all we’ll gain is confusion. I’ve decided that while Avalon must make every effort to cooperate, Avalon must at the same time expect small help from outside.”

Again fell stillness. Holm looked at his superior, associate, friend of years; and not for the first time, it came to him what strangers they two were.

He found himself regarding Ferune as if he had never met an Ythrian before.

Standing, the Marchwarden was about 120 centimeters high from feet to top of crest; a tall person would have gone to 140 or so, say up to the mid-breast of Holm. Since the body tilted forward, its actual length from muzzle through tail was somewhat more. It massed perhaps 20 kilos; the maximum for the species was under 30.

The head looked sculptured. It bulged back from a low brow to; hold the brain. A bony ridge arched down in front to a pair of nostrils, nearly hidden by feathers, which stood above a flexible mouth full of sharp white fangs and a purple tongue. The jaw, underslung and rather delicate, merged with a strong neck. That face was dominated by its eyes, big and amber, and by the dense, scalloped feather-crest that rose from the brow, lifted over the head, and ran half the length of the neck: partly for aerodynamic purposes, partly as a helmet on the thin skull.