Poul Anderson: A Stone in Heaven

Regardless, tears glistened on her lashes. The hand shook that fished a cigarette from a tunic pocket, struck it, and brought it to her mouth. Cheeks caved in with the violence of her smoking. Her voice was hoarse rather than husky, and wavered.

“Avalanche. Wiped out Yewwl’s whole family … and, oh, God, the Shrine, the heart of her clan’s history—like wiping out Jerusalem—” A fist beat itself unmercifully against the console. “I should have guessed. But … no experience … I’m from Dayan, you know, warm, dry, no snow anywhere, and I’ve just been a visitor on worlds like Terra—” Her lips drew wide, her eyes squinched nearly shut. “If I’d thought! That much snowpack, and seven Terrestrial gravities to accelerate it—Yewwl, Yewwl, I’m sorry.”

“Why, that’s terrible,” Polevoy said. After a pause: “Your subject, she’s alive?”

Abrams jerked a nod. “Yes. With nothing to ride, no tent or supplies or tools or anything but what she’s got on her person, and doubtless not a soul for a hundred kilometers around.”

“Well, we’d better send a gravsled for her. It can home on her transceiver, can’t it?” Polevoy was fairly new here.

“Sure, sure. Not right away, though. Don’t you know what grief usually does to a Ramnuan? It’s apt to drive him or her berserk.” Abrams spoke in rough chunks of phrase. “Coping with that is a problem which every society on this planet has had to solve, one way or another. Maybe that’s a main reason why they’ve never had wars—plenty of individual fights, but no wars, no armies, therefore no states—A soldier who lost his buddy would run amok.” Laughter rattled from her. “Too bad we humans don’t have the same trait. We wouldn’t be cobwebbed into our Terran Empire then, would we?” She stubbed out the cigarette, viciously, and started the next. “We’ll go fetch Yewwl when she’s worked off the worst of what’s in her, if she lives through it. Sometime this afternoon.” That would be several standard days hence. “Meanwhile, I can be preparing to take on the wretched Empire.”

Shocked, Polevoy could merely say, “I beg your pardon?”

Abrams slumped. She turned from him and stared out a viewscreen. It gave a broad overlook across the locality. On her right, the Kiiong River flowed seaward, more rapidly than any stream on Terra or Dayan would have gone through a bed as level as was here. Spray off rocks dashed brilliant above water made gray-green by glacial flour. Sonic receptors brought in a booming of great slow airs under more than thirty bars of pressure. Beyond the river was forest: low, thick trunks from which slender branches swayed, upheld by big leaves shaped like parachutes, surrounded by yellowish shrubs.

To her left, eastward, chanced to be rare clarity. Dun pyrasphale rippled across twelve kilometers to Ramnu’s horizon. Trees and canebrakes broke the sameness of that veldt; a kopje reared distance-blued; clouds cruised above, curiously flattened. A small herd of grazers wandered about, under guard of a mounted native. A score of flying creatures were aloft. When Abrams first arrived, this country had swarmed with life.

Overhead, the sky was milky. Niku, the sun, appearing two-thirds as wide as Sol seen from Terra, cast amber light; a frost halo circled it. Diris, the innermost moon, glimmered pale toward the west. It would not set until Ramnu’s long day had become darkness.

“Another ice age on its way,” Abrams mumbled. “The curse of this world. And we could stop it and all its kind. Whatever becomes of us and our Empire, we could be remembered as saviors, redeemers, for the next million years. But the Duke will not listen. And now Yewwl’s people are dead.”

“Uh,” Polevoy ventured, “uh, doesn’t she have a couple of children who’re adult, married?”

“Yes. And they have children, who may well not survive what’s coming down from the north,” Abrams said. “Meanwhile she’s lost her husband, her two youngsters, the last baby she’ll ever bear; her clan has lost its Jerusalem; and none of that needed to happen.” Tendons stood forth in her neck. “None of it! But the Grand Duke of Hermes would never listen to me!”

After more silence, she straightened, turned around, said quite calmly: “Well, I’m done with him. This has been the last thing necessary to decide me. I’m going to leave pretty soon, Ivan. Leave for Terra itself, and appeal for help to the very top.”

Polevoy choked. “The Emperor?”

Abrams grinned in gallows mirth. “No, hardly him. Not at the start, anyhow. But … have you ever perchance heard of Admiral Flandry?”

First she must go to the Maian System, nineteen light-years off, a journey of four standard days in the poky little starcraft belonging to the Ramnu Research Foundation. The pilot bade her farewell at Williams Field on Hermes and went into Starfall to see what fleshpots he could find before returning. Banner also sought the planet’s chief city, but with less frivolous intentions. Mainly she wanted shelter, and not from the mild climate.

She had cut her schedule as close as feasible. The liner Queen of Apollo would depart for Sol in fifty hours. Through Sten Runeberg, to whom she had sent a letter, she had a ticket. However, coming as she did from a primitive world of basically terrestroid biochemistry, she must get a checkup at a clinic licensed to renew her medical certificate. That was a ridiculous formality—even had she been exposed in shirtsleeves to Ramnu, no germ there could have lived a minute in her bloodstream—but the bureaucrats of Terra were adamant unless you held rank or title. Equally absurd, she thought, was the quasi-necessity of updating her wardrobe. She didn’t think Flandry would care if she looked provincial. Yet others would, and her mission was difficult enough without her being at a psychological disadvantage.

Therefore she sallied forth on the morning after she arrived at the Runebergs’ town house, and didn’t come back, her tasks completed, till sundown. “You must be exhausted, fairling,” said her host. “How about a drink before dinner?”

Fairling —The mild Hermetian endearment had taken on a special meaning for the two of them, when he was in charge of industrial operations at Ramnu and they had been lovers whenever they could steal time together. The three-year relationship had ended five years ago, with his inexplicable replacement by taciturn Nigel Broderick; it had never been deeply passionate; now he was married, and they had exchanged no more than smiles and glances during her stay, nor would they. Nonetheless, memory stabbed.

Runeberg’s wife was belated at her office. He, who had become a consulting engineer, had quit work early for his guest and put his child in charge of the governess. He mixed two martinis himself and led the way onto a balcony. “Pick a seat,” he invited, gesturing at a couple of loungers.

Banner stayed by the rail. “I’d forgotten how beautiful this is,” she whispered.

Dusk flowed across the quicksilver gleam of Daybreak Bay. The mansion stood on the southern slope of Pilgrim Hill, near the Palomino River. It commanded a view of the keeps above; of its own garden, fragrant with daleflower and roses, where a tilirra flew trilling and glowflies were blinking alight; of Riverside Common, stately with million-leaf and rainroof trees; of multitudinous old spires beyond and windows that’had begun to shine; of domes and towers across the stream, arrogantly radiant as if this were still that heyday of their world in which they had been raised. The air was barely cooled by a breeze and murmured only slightly of traffic. Heaven ranged from blue in the west to violet in the east. Antares was already visible, rising Venus-bright and ruby-red out of the Auroral Ocean.