Damon Knight - Orbit 20

She became aware of Jon’s voice, finishing a question; “... isn’t it?”

“Sorry? Daydreaming, I’m afraid.”

“This is the right direction, isn’t it?”

“Should be. If we keep in line with the shuttle and the edge of that bluff, we’ll run into what was a large settlement a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Kona years?”

“Yes.”

“Hope they’re not nomads.”

“The reports don’t say so,” said Hanna wearily, wondering why she continued to fall into the trap of reassuring Jon after two years’ close working knowledge of him. A sharp, steady breeze was flowing down from the snow-capped mountains to their right, and the long plain of grass rippled endlessly before it. Ahead of them stretched the bluff, darkly forested; the sky beyond was a clear steely blue. Each colour so exact, thought Hanna—the jointed grass a dark khaki, the pine-green of the trees, the even grey-blue skies. She wanted to consider it further, but Jon was talking again.

“Not a very good report on this one. Even scrappier than the usual prewar type, don’t you think?”

Hanna considered (hearing all the time the loud whish-whish made by two pairs of feet through the sturdy grass). “Better for me than for you,” she said at last. “The language section was the best, but yes, the rest was a bit sketchy.”

“Think you’ll be able to make yourself understood?”

“Yes,” said Hanna patiently (thinking, No birds. I haven’t seen any birds. Even on Terra there are some birds left. No wonder it’s so quiet here). She added aloud, “I have on all the other planets on this tour.”

“What about Achwa?” Jon reminiscently rubbed at the scar on his arm where an Achwan missile had caught him.

“They understood us all right. They just didn’t like us. Prewar survey must have mucked that one up.” (And Jon should have been more careful, she thought. It’s hard enough to train ethnologists now without them throwing their lives away.)

Jon grunted. “Hope the same thing doesn’t happen here while the shuttle’s out of action.”

No answer. Hanna resolutely fought the impulse to remind Jon that the reports clearly stated the Konans to be “markedly nonaggressive.”

“Quiet, isn’t it?” he said.

"Hm."

A curious feeling came to Hanna that she and Jon were shrinking under the cold sky, tramping futilely across an unending plain, struggling against the rippling grass as against an immutable current, towards a forest as unattainable as one on a vidscreen.

“It’s a long way,” said Jon, perhaps feeling something of the same thing.

They trudged on in silence, listening to the steady swish of feet in the grass.

But it was no more than five minutes later that a movement appeared at the edge of the belt of trees, and they knew that the Konans had come to meet them. Both of them, as if by reflex, made little preparatory movements—-Jon pulled down the sleeves of his anorak, and Hanna straightened her customary slouch an inch or two. By tacit consent, they slowed down, waiting for the Konans to come up to them. Hanna ran through the stock Konan greeting of a hundred and fifty years ago in her mind. One had to have the mental preparation right—the hairline balance between knowing the phrase exactly, and being prepared to pick up the modifications in the answer. She noted that the Konans apparently still rode Konanhorses. At least the report had prepared them for that.

There were now thirty or forty Konans riding towards them, strung out along the plain in a swift-moving skein. The horses were very tall, and so white that the fleeting shadows on their bodies looked blue. The plain shook softly under their hooves. In a very little time they were near enough for Hanna to see clearly the pale calm face and long hands of the leading rider; and suddenly she felt obscurely resentful that they should so easily and quickly cross the plain that she and Jon had toiled across. Yet at the same time, the beauty of form and movement, the pale changing bow of horsemen over the dark grass pierced into her mind, startling up a flock of shining memories too frail and quick for recognition, but too potent to be ignored.

The foremost riders cried aloud to their horses (they were all riding bareback and bridleless) and stopped no more than three paces from Hanna and Jon. In less than a minute, the other riders, with undisciplined precision, came to rest in a half-circle around the two Terrans. There was silence.

Jon said sardonically, “After you.”

“We are from Terra, and we bring you greeting,” said Hanna. Now that they were all together, she noticed how alike they were, all tall, all classically-featured, all with dark plaits swinging as thick as their wrists. There was no obvious leader to speak to; she addressed the whole group.

And the whole group answered her, with a kind of subdued clamour, not in chorus, but as if each one replied to her individually and simultaneously. Their faces, she saw, were no longer calm; they were twisted in some strong emotion—anger? bewilderment? joy?—no time or use in speculating. Hanna said above the many voices (aware of her mind automatically adapting her words to the epic quality of the language), “If you would converse, let one among you speak, and we will hear.”

The group fell silent again. Then hesitantly, after several false starts, one voice sounded. Hanna saw Jon’s gaze flicking round to find the speaker, while she concentrated on the words.

“They made us not to be, and they are not,” said the voice from one of the group; and when Hanna did not immediately reply, the others chimed in, as if in canon. “They made us not to be ... they made us not. . . and they are not.. . they made us . . . they made us . . . are not . . . to be . . . are not . . .”

“Who are ‘they’?” asked Hanna loudly. But it was no good. The Konans seemed preoccupied with their own words; over and over again, “They made us not to be . . . they made us not . . . they are not . . .”

Jon said, “I’m right, am I? That is what they’re saying?” and Hanna nodded. The simple sentence was well within his knowledge. It’s just like the voices on tape, she thought uneasily, and wondered what kind of methods the Konans had for passing on language. She said loudly, “Will you hear us?” There was silence for a moment, but the voices started again almost immediately— “They made us not, they made us not, to be, to be, and they are not . . .”

“From where did they come?” asked Hanna desperately, seeking the right phrase to break the lock. “What did they do?” and “To whom do you speak?”

But the Konans seemed almost to have forgotten them. It made no difference what Hanna said to them, or indeed whether she spoke or remained silent. They stayed in their group, chanting, sometimes riding their horses to and fro a few paces. Long after the two Terrans had given up, for the time being, the attempt to communicate, and started the long walk back to the shuttle in the cold evening, the Konan voices floated back over the plain, clear and desolate in the deepening dusk. “They made us not to be, and they are not ...”

The team discussed the situation that night, talking endlessly, circularly, and almost fruitlessly about it in the cramped control room of the shuttle. Biren had the engineer’s annexe littered with power-pack components, but announced with unruffled cheerfulness that there was very little she could do with them, and that she doubted very much whether the shuttle was fit to fly. That knowledge gave the whole discussion a perceptibly uneasy background.

“You mean we’re stuck here?” said Gerold in an offended tone.

Biren grunted, and said that all she needed was another power pack, and that she had already called up orbit craft to send another shuttle down with extra ones.