Пол Андерсон: Orbit 1

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, then added 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 trumpetings, insects chirred from the pseudograsses. Below, Treequad was a darkness filling the flatlands between hills and Bay. Lights could be seen from windows, and the Center tower was etched slim against the waters. But the impression was of openness and peace, with some underlying mystery to which men could not 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 did not mind, though. He had recognized his own sort of man in the dark, moody captain; that 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 shown. We ourselves, he thought, have a thousand years’—ten thousand years’ worth. But of course now those questions never will 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 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, he burst out, “Damn you on Earth! You’re terminating us too soon!”

“I agree,” Kahn said. “If it is 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 star 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 had not occurred to him before, in the excitement of meeting the ferriers, 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 grown 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 Snowtoothe, 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, and 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.

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 plowed home across the water.

Well, those were private memories anyway.

He realized they had been walking for 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.”

“I don’t know,” Kahn said. “Teach, perhaps.”

“Something technical, no doubt.”

“I could, if need be. Science and technology no longer change from generation to generation. But I would prefer history. I have had considerable time to read history, in space.”

“Really? I mean, the temporal contraction effect-”

“You forget that at one gravity acceleration, a ship needs a year to reach near-light speed, and another year to brake at the end. You passengers will be in suspended animation, but we of the crew must stand watch.”

Kahn lit a cigarette. Earlier, Thrailkill had experimented with one, but tobacco made him ill, he found. He wondered for a moment if Earth’s food had the savor of Mithras’. Funny. I never appreciated kernelkraut or sour nuts or filet of crackler till now, when I’m about to lose them.

The cigarette end brightened and faded, brightened and faded, like a tiny red watchlight in the gloaming. “After all,” Kahn said, “I have seen many human events. I was born before the Directorate came to power. My father was a radiation technician in the Solar War. And, too, mine are an old people, who spent most of their existence on the receiving end of history. It is natural that I should be interested. You have been more fortunate.”

“And the Mithrans are luckier yet, eh?”

“I don’t know. Thus far, they are essentially a historyless race. Or are they? How can you tell? We look through our own eyes. To us, accomplishment equals exploitation of the world. Our purest science and art remain a sort of conquest. What might the Mithrans do yet, in Mithran terms?”

“Let us keep up the base,” Thrailkill said, “and we’ll keep on reporting what they do.”

“That would be splendid,” Kahn told him, “except for the fact that there will be no ships to take your descendants home. You have maintained yourselves as an enclave of a few hundred people for a century, You cannot do so forever. If nothing else, genetic drift in that small a population would destroy you.”