John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

They got no argument from anyone, me least of all.

Now we would go to Grinder, just the way Piet had intended. It had at least one smuggler base, dad said, dug into a mountain. We could get the Jav's power transfer module rebuilt there.

Grinder had a false but carefully nurtured reputation as an abandoned world, in a system where the sun was supposed to be heating up. A planet with a worsening climate, where hardly anyone, if anyone at all, still lived. It was at the blurry edge of explored space, without commercial resources and far from any trade route. And with far too few people left to maintain technology, any human remnants would have degenerated to primitive survivalism.

So the story went. But Piet had been there, and knew what the real situation was. There actually weren't a lot of people on Grinder, but enough. They'd retained the technology that counted, and they taught it. They all belonged to a single culture that placed a high value on independence, they were resourceful, and they regarded themselves as one people.

And what they knew of the Glondisans, they didn't like at all.

What they were short on was organizational and military expertise. Dad was experienced at organization, and had made a study of military history. "You," he told me, "are the one with some experience."

I didn't consider my military experience to amount to much, and it didn't seem like the kind a rebel movement would find useful, but dad disagreed.

"Larn," he said, "I'm not trying to tell you that what you've gotten here on Fanglith amounts to a military education. It doesn't. But you've learned to adapt, innovate, and survive. And you've also proven yourself resourceful, able to face death, and a survivor.

"A formal military education probably only touches on the tactics we'll need, anyway-tactics well develop on our own. Mostly, any actual insurgency will have to be guerrilla warfare for years-probably lots of years- both on colony worlds and the urbanized central worlds. Chances are we'll never wage formal warfare against the Empire."

He grinned then. "You realize what you've done, don't you? You've recruited a couple of specialists in military thinking: Arno and Gunnlag must have an ingrained, almost instinctive feel for tactics. What they need is to be educated in technological weapons and equipment. And about the enemy.

"Meanwhile, with your education and having grown up in a technological culture, plus your experience now with warlike primitive cultures, you're the obvious person to work with them. To help translate Norman and Varangian wisdom into tactics and military organization that can work for us.

"So we'll call your a training operation and recruiting mission," he added, then stood. "And frankly, I can't think of a better place you could have gone for that than Fanglith." He turned to mom. "Aven, let's you and I take a hike on the beach. We've been penned up all too long."

That afternoon, Jenoor and I took a long hike into the hills and didn't return till nearly dark, getting to know one another again. We stayed six days on the island, giving Arno time to get the Varangians to Palermo and hired out as mercenaries-those who were interested. It also gave the Jaw's fuel cell time to fully decrystallize.

Then, power on, Deneen checked to make sure the scout's astrogation program included Tagrith Four. The plan now was that when we left Fanglith, Jenoor, Deneen, and I would fly the Rebel Javelin, taking Gunnlag, Moise, and the two pups. The Jav had quite a bit more room than our family cutter.

Arno would go with dad and mom and Tarel. Bubba and Lady would keep them company. I was willing to take Arno, but I'd to!d them about his romantic interest in Deneen, and we agreed it might be awkward if she was cooped up with him for sixty-eight days flying to Grinder. And while neither Deneen nor I brought it up, of course, it seemed to me it might be easier on Tarel if Deneen was with us on the scout, instead of with him on the cutter.

We would transfer Arno's fealty to dad; Arno would agree to that if he really wanted to leave with us. The way Amo's mind worked, you swore fealty to someone and then you were pretty much loyal unless you came up with some incentive to double-cross them and some technicality to make it all right. Which I didn't expect from him under the circumstances. And the espwolves would know if he got treacherous ideas.

Meanwhile I'd have Gunnlag to educate. I looked forward to it. Compile a data base of Norse and Standard, run it through the linguistics program, and have him learn Standard; we'd use it now instead of Evdashian. Evdashian was an offshoot dialect of Standard used only on Evdash, and chances were we'd never see Evdash again.

On the evening of the sixth day, the scout and the cutter lifted for Palermo. With the wolves scanning, we located Arno and Gunnlag, and put Moise down with a communicator to arrange the pickup. By communicator, I told Arno to arrange for a couple mule-loads of food and take it to the pickup point, outside Palermo. I'd have preferred three or more loads, but we didn't have storage.

Larger spacecraft would have been nice, for the biovats if nothing else. As it was, we'd have to ration pretty strictly on the long trip to Grinder.

It took Moise and Arno two days to get the food we needed and get it to the edge of an orange grove a couple of miles outside the city. Actually, Arno was nearly broke, way too poor now to buy that much food. But Gunnlag had received a bounty from Guiscard for bringing his Varangians to the recruiter, and that had been enough. (Guiscard and Roger never had enough Norman foot soldiers, and were always looking for high-quality mercenaries.) Arno had borrowed the two mules, and one of the Varangians had gone along to take them back to town.

Bubba okayed the pickup scene, so dad landed the cutter to get the food and the two warriors. Then we all got together on a hill a few miles southeast, got everything distributed, and said goodbye to one another.

The goodbyes were hard, believe me. We wouldn't see each other again for sixty-eight days. But there was no way around it, and at least Jenoor and I were together.

Sixty-eight days in FTL gave us a lot of time to talk-about what might be, how we'd like to have things turn out (and why), what problems we might run into, and even occasionally about what might have been. To give Gunnlag practice in Standard, we had him tell us about his people and others, the places he'd been, things he'd seen and done…

Moise too. Although he was a lot younger, and had less to tell, there was more than you might think, and it was more interesting than he realized. Fanglith and its people in general were marvelously interesting-I'd only seen a small sample myself.

Their stories strengthened our conclusion that it wasn't the place for us. To coin a phrase: It's an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

We worked on Gunnlag's and Moise's education. If you want to develop a better understanding, more insights, into your own culture, try educating someone in it who's from a totally different culture. That can be worth a whole series of university courses to you. Gunnlag, like Moise, was marvelously adaptable and had a quick mind. And of course, they each had some unusual and surprising ways of looking at the things we told them about.

But the most meaningful talks, for me, were some between Jenoor and me in the privacy of her tiny cubbyhold cabin or mine. (There were no cabins for two on the scout.) Talks about the future. And once again, I-we-knew too little, had too little information to plan with, beyond the next step or two, or in broad, vague terms. That kind of planning we could do.

At first, we considered the possibility of settling down as sort of "backup revolutionaries." Not get involved too deeply. That way we could live a semi-normal life, enjoy some stability, raise a family.