Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

They approached the lodge from the uphill side. The horses struggled through the mud and displaced soil. A gate had been cut in the peripheral fence and de Juilly dropped his hat when he bent out of the saddle to open it. Magniac was the only one wearing proper clothing. To see his former associates in homespun made him slightly ill. The felted hat de Juilly dropped would better have been left where it lay, to make a nest for some uncritical hen.

Magniac threw back his cape. The sun was warm and the fodder in the fields was almost old-Earth green. It had survived the journey through space very well. The grazing cattle were strange red and white beasts, blocky and close to the ground. There was a woven-wire pen full of enormous bronze turkeys. So the journey had been successful from many aspects. Magniac sniffed the air with his beaky nose. There was animal effluvium, a faint taste of petroleum, and the blossoms of the forage crop. There was no trace of the crew and no scent of any human breeding stock.

As soon as he entered the great hall of the lodge, Magniac knew that men had died there. The hundreds of stag horns, each mounted on a mahogany shield with a silver plate, were dusty but not disarranged. The parquetry floor was burnished and smelled faintly of beeswax. A bouquet of unfamiliar red roses was only now beginning to drop petals onto an inlaid tabletop.

“What happened?” asked Magniac.

“They funked it,” blurted Welby. “They killed theirselves in their diggin’s.”

“My dear sir,” said de Juilly, severely, “six men and six women of the highest cultural attainment do not brave the starry empyrean and ‘funk it.’ Why should they return home to blow their brains out?”

“Don’t bullyrag me. My son was one of them.” Welby honked his nose loudly. “Pax.”

“The blood had not yet congealed,” said de Juilly. “Such a mass suicide is inexplicable, beyond comprehension.”

They mounted the stairs to the gallery and walked the hall to a spiral iron staircase. The sun burned through the lace curtains drawn across the windows of the control tower. The Circassian walnut instrument panel was as Magniac had seen it last. The tall bronze levers were polished and set at full stop. The gravitic entrainment wheels were locked at rest. From a cursory inspection, the lodge and its kilometer-diameter englobement could again become the Altengaden and lift through space when steam was up.

There was a message on a sheet of watermarked paper tin-tacked to the gimbaled steering wheel, now in its neutral horizontal position. It was signed by all twelve of the crew, men and women alike. “Demons inhabit space,” was all it said.

“Agreed,” said the Count as he entered the room. The years had not changed him. His eyes were luminous and his movements epitomized masculine grace. Magniac had always considered his taste for intelligent women to be dubious at best and he demonstrated an almost feminine patience as Magniac went through the multitudinous details of the mechanical inspection. Magniac asked for steam and was refused; still it took the better part of two hours to check the instrumentation.

The control room of the Altengaden was an emotionally neutral place to Magniac, nothing at all like the high open tower of Castle Gyepu where he had controlled the fearful voyage through the stars so many years before.

In the engine room his heart was clutched by an unfamiliar emotion—nostalgia? There were the grey Steyr engines built to his order in Vienna sixty years before, still bright with bronze and shining brass. There was the heavy generator, the rows of petroleum essence tanks, and the giant Orffyreus wheels built of seasoned fruitwood and sealed with purified fish oil, the pendulums and the weights, the shafts and pistons still gleaming after this long time.

He crawled along the gravitic entrainment tubes and checked the resonating chambers of the harmonic amplifiers with a tuning fork. Intent upon his work, he had taken the instrument from a small cupboard lagged to the stone, and it was only when he was done with it that recollection washed over him as water washed over the meadows when the Altengaden settled home. This was one of John Shore’s tuning forks made in England, given him as a boy by the Landgrave at Hesse-Cassel. He had pitched their lives against its truth in the hurried construction of these chambers under the desperate pressures to leave Earth.

The Second Balkan War had been concluded by the treaty of Bucharest on August tenth, but the diplomatic experts gathered at Castle Gyepu (it was curious how many of the gifted of whatever country gravitated to the Foreign Service) anticipated war between Serbia and Albania and further difficulties with Greece. The Irredentist agitation was developing in Transylvania, but both Franz Josef and the Tsar made surreptitious common cause during this breathing space to continue the systematic harassment of the people.

The world had become suddenly smaller. Distance, great wealth, and position could no longer protect them. The call had gone out in March and the people foregathered by early September. The invasion of Albania by the Serbs on September twenty-third forced the decision to leave old Earth.

The peasants had been sent away days before—that was the fated error, in Magniac’s opinion—and only the gifted were in the village and the castle when the ten-kilometer englobement rose from Earth. Snow had been falling, and the last snow fell in full sunshine as they left the shadow of Earth for a new home among the stars.

A clear note sounded from the tuning fork as it struck the cupboard door. “Well, Magniac?” said the Count.

“Everything—is operational.”

“On the first of October, nineteen thirteen,” said the Count softly, “with the precious few of our blood gathered from the farthest corners of the globe, these meadows and orchards, the plain and the livestock—the very earth and sky itself—and you threw the master control, did you not, Magniac?”

“I should have stayed.”

“To be hunted and harried and caught and pinned with a holly stake? There is a madness in herd-humans, the price perhaps of genius in herd-humans.” The Count dusted his hands delicately. “If memory serves me, there were a few bottles from the vineyards near Tarczal here in the hidden cellar. Did you find them when you appropriated my hunting lodge? No? Then we may again toast Franz Josef in his own Imperial Tokay.”

The Count had ordered a small buffet set on the Italian table with the drooping red roses and Magniac found himself responding to food he had not tasted for years. The wine was beyond its prime but still excellent, ghostly reminiscent of a lost time and place. Magniac absently turned his glass and was again overwhelmed by memory.

Magniac’s taste had run to science. He had been intimate with H. L. F. von Helmholtz, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, and both Curies. He knew Max Planck, and Rutherford and Soddy. The most remarkable man of his acquaintance was Tilah J.B. Bose, an Indian of lowly origin, whose shattering brilliance and intuitive understanding of space-time relationships made possible both the englobement and gravitic entrainment, when combined with Magniac’s unique understanding of the Orffyreus principle and his extrapolation of some unpublished speculations of Helmholtz. Bose gulped this very Tokay and later died a drunkard’s death and was forgotten, except by Magniac here on Neuland, light-years and years from abundant Earth.

The stem of the glass snapped in his hand.

The Count ignored the puddled wine through which Diana and her inlaid hounds were hunting on the tabletop. “Gabriel Cilli became leader of your Young Turks,” he said easily, “a name that has never failed to evoke a tiresome cross-language pun in my mind. There were no technical inadvertencies. Your backtrack photography served admirably for astrogation.” He politely inclined his head to Magniac.