Филип Фармер - The Lovers

At 0900 Ship's Time, Yarrow walked into the Gabriel, the scent of morning dew on the grass in his nostrils. As he had a little time before the conference, he looked up Turnboy, the historian joat. Casually, he asked Turnboy if he knew anything of a space flight emigration from France after the Apocalyptic War. Turnboy was delighted to show off his knowledge. Yes, the remnants of the Gallic nation had gathered in the Loire country after the Apocalyptic War and had formed the nucleus of what might have become a new France.

But the swiftly growing colonies sent from Iceland to the northern part of France, and from Israel to the Southern part, had surrounded the Loire. New France found itself squeezed economically and religiously. Sigmen's disciples invaded the territory in waves of missionaries. High tariffs strangled the little state's trade. Finally, a group of Frenchmen, seeing the inevitable absorption or conquest of their state, religion, and tongue, had left in six rather primitive spaceships to find another Gaul rotating about some far-off star. It was highly improbable that they had succeeded.

Hal thanked Turnboy and walked to the conference room. He spoke to many. Half of them, like him, had a Mongolian tinge to their features. They were the English-speaking descendants of Hawaiian and Australian survivors of the same war which had decimated France. Their many-times great-grandfathers had repopulated Australia, the Americas, Japan, and China.

Almost half of the crew spoke Icelandic. Their ancestors had sailed from the grim island to spread across northern Europe, Siberia, and Manchuria.

About a sixteenth of the crew knew Georgian as their native tongue. Their foreparents had moved down from the Caucasus Mountains and resettled depopulated southern Russia, Bulgaria, nothern Iran, and Afghanistan.

The conference was a memorable one. First, Hal was moved from twentieth place to the Archurielite's left to sixth from his right. The lamedh on his chest made the difference. Second, there was little difficulty about Pornsen's death. The gapt was considered a casualty of the undeclared war. Everyone was warned, again, about the nightlifers and other things that sometimes prowled Siddo after dusk. It was not, however, suggested that the Haijacs quit their moonlit espionage.

Macneff ordered Hal, as the dead gapt's spiritual son, to arrange for the funeral the following day. Then he pulled down a huge map from a long roller on the wall. This was the representation of Earth that would be given to the wogs.

It was a good example of the Haijacs' subtlety and Chinese box-within-a-box thinking. The two hemispheres of Earth were depicted on the map with colored political boundaries. It was correct as far as the Bantu and Malay states were concerned. But the positions of the Israeli and Haijac nations had been reversed. The legend beneath the map indicated that green was the color of the Forerunner states and yellow the Hebrew states. The green portion, however, was a ring around the Mediterranean, and a broad band covering Arabia, the southern half of Asia Minor, and northern India.

In other words, if, by an inconceivable chance, the Ozagen succeeded in capturing the Gabriel and built ships with it as a model, and used the navigational data aboard to find Sol, they would still attack the wrong country. Undoubtedly, they would not bother to contact personally the people of Earth, for they would want to use the element of surprise. Thus, the Israeli would never get a chance to explain before the bombs went off. And the Haijac Union, warned, would hurl its space fleet against the invaders.

'However,' said Macneff, 'I do not think that the pseudofuture I have just suggested could ever become reality. Not unless the Backrunner is more powerful than I believe. Of course, you could take the attitude that this course might be best. What better shape could the future take than to wipe out our Israeli enemies through means of these nonhumans?

'But, as you all know, our ship is well guarded against attack by open assault or stealth. Our radar, lasers, audiodetection equipment, and starlight scopes are operating at all times. Our weapons are ready. The wogs are inferior in technology; they have nothing to bring against us that we could not easily crush.

'Nevertheless, if the Backrunner were to inspire them to superhuman cunning, and they did get into the ship, they would fail. If the wogs should reach a certain point in the ship, one of two officers always on duty on the bridge will press a button. This will wipe out all navigational data in the memory banks; the wogs will never be able to locate Sol.

'And if the wogs – Sigmen forbid – should reach the bridge, then the officer on duty there will press another button.'

Macneff paused and looked at those around the conference table. Most of them were pale, for they knew what he was going to say.

'An H-bomb will utterly destroy this ship. It will also annihilate the city of Siddo. And we will be honored forever in the eyes of the Forerunner and the Sturch.

'Naturally, we would all prefer that this not happen.

And I wish I could warn Siddo so that they would not dare to attack. However, to do so would spoil our present good relations with them and might result in our having to launch Project Ozagenocide before we are ready.'

After the conference, Hal gave orders for the funeral arrangements. Other duties kept him till dark, when he returned home.

When Hal locked the door behind him, he heard the shower running. He hung his coat up in the closet; the water stopped splashing. As he went towards his bedroom door, Jeannette stepped out from the bathroom. She was drying her hair with a big towel, and she was naked.

She said, 'Baw yoo, Hal,' and walked into the bedroom, unselfconsciously. Feebly, Hal replied. He turned and went back into the front room. He felt foolish because of his timorousness and, at the same time, vaguely wicked, unreal, because of the pounding of his heart, his heavy breathing, the hot and fluid fingers that wrapped themselves, half-pain, half-delight, around his loins.

She came out dressed in a pale green robe which he had bought for her and which she had recut and resewn to fit her figure. Her heavy black hair was piled on her head in a Psyche knot. She kissed him and asked if he wanted to come into the kitchen while she cooked. He said that would be fine.

She began making a sort of spaghetti. He asked her to tell him about her life. Once started, she was not hard to keep going.

'. . . and so my father's people found a planet like Earth and settled there. It was a beautiful planet; that is why they called it Wuhbopfey, the beautiful land.

'According to my father, there are about thirty million living there on one continent. My father was not content to live the life his grandfathers had lived – tilling the soil or running a shop and raising many children. He and some other young men like him took the only spaceship left of the original six that had come there, and they sailed off to the stars. They came to Ozagen. And crashed. No wonder. The ship was so old.'

'Is the wreck still around?'

'Fi. Close to where my sisters and aunts and cousins live.'

'Your mother is dead?'

She hesitated, then nodded. 'Yes. She died giving birth to me. And my sisters. My father died later. Or rather, we think he did. He went on a hunting party and never came back.'

Hal frowned, and he said, 'You told me that your mother and aunts were the last of the native human beings on Ozagen. That isn't so. Fobo told me that there are at least a thousand small isolated groups in the back-lands. And you said once before that Rastignac was the only Earthman to get out alive from the wreck. He was your mother's husband, naturally... and incredible as it sounds, their union – one of the terrestrial and an extraterrestrial – was fertile! That alone would rock my colleagues on their heels. It's completely contrary to accepted science that their body chemistry and chromosomes should match! But – what I'm getting at is that your mother's sisters had children, too. if the last human male of your group died years before Rastignac crashed, who was their father?'