Poul Anderson: The Day of Their Return

Ordinarily he could sit quiet, but the Hesperian episode had been too shocking, less in itself than in its implications. Whatever they were. How could he plan against the effect on these people, once the news got out, when he, the foreigner, had no intuition of what that effect might be?

He put a cigarette into a long, elaborately carved holder of landwhale ivory. (He thought it was in atrocious taste, but it had been given him for a birthday present by a ten-year-old daughter who died soon afterward.) The tobacco was an expensive self-indulgence, grown on Esperance, the closest thing to Terran he could obtain hereabouts while shipping remained sparse.

The smoke-bite didn’t soothe him. He jumped up and prowled. He hadn’t yet adapted so fully to the low gravity of Aeneas, 63 percent standard, that he didn’t consciously enjoy movement. The drawback was the dismal exercises he must go through each morning, if he didn’t want to turn completely into lard. Unfair, that the Aeneans tended to be such excellent physical specimens without effort. No, not really unfair. On this niggard sphere, few could afford a large panoply of machines; even today, more travel was on foot or animal back than in vehicles, more work done by hand than by automatons or cybernets. Also, in earlier periods—the initial colonization, the Troubles, the slow climb back from chaos—death had winnowed the unfit out of their bloodlines.

Desai halted at the north wall, activated its transparency, and gazed forth across Nova Roma.

Though itself two hundred Terran years old, Imperial House jutted awkwardly from the middle of a city founded seven centuries ago. Most buildings in this district were at least half that age, and architecture had varied little through time. In a climate where it seldom rained and never snowed; where the enemies were drought, cold, hurricane winds, drifting dust, scouring sand; where water for bricks and concrete, forests for timber, organics for synthesis were rare and precious, one quarried the stone which Aeneas did have in abundance, and used its colors and textures.

The typical structure was a block, two or three stories tall, topped by a flat deck which was half garden—the view from above made a charming motley—and half solar-energy collector. Narrow windows carried shutters ornamented with brass or iron arabesques; the heavy doors were of similar appearance. In most cases, the gray ashlars bore a veneer of carefully chosen and integrated slabs, marble, agate, chalcedony, jasper, nephrite, materials more exotic than that; and often there were carvings besides, friezes, armorial bearings, grotesques; and erosion had mellowed it all, to make the old part of town one subtle harmony. The wealthier homes, shops, and offices surrounded cloister courts, vitryl-roofed to conserve heat and water, where statues and plants stood among fishponds and fountains.

The streets were cramped and twisted, riddled with alleys, continually opening on small irrational plazas. Traffic was thin, mainly pedestrian, otherwise groundcars, trucks, and countryfolk on soft-gaited Aenean horses or six-legged green stathas (likewise foreign, though Desai couldn’t offhand remember where they had originated). A capital city—population here a third of a million, much the largest—would inevitably hurt more and recover slower from a war than its hinterland.

He lifted his eyes to look onward. Being to south, the University wasn’t visible through this wall. What he saw was the broad bright sweep of the River Flone, and ancient high-arched bridges across it; beyond, the Julian Canal, its tributaries, verdant parks along them, barges and pleasure boats upon their surfaces; farther still, the intricacy of many lesser but newer canals, the upthrust of modern buildings in garish colors, a tinge of industrial haze—the Web.

However petty by Terran standards, he thought, that youngest section was the seedbed of his hopes: in the manufacturing, mercantile, and managerial classes which had arisen during the past few generations, whose interests lay less with the scholars and squirearchs than with the Imperium and its Pax.

Or can I call on them? he wondered. I’ve been doing it; but how reliable are they?

A single planet is too big for single me to understand.

Right and left he spied the edge of wilderness. Life lay emerald on either side of the Flone, where it ran majestically down from the north polar cap. He could see hamlets, manors, water traffic; he knew that the banks were croplands and pasture. But the belt was only a few kilometers wide.

Elsewhere reared worn yellow cliffs, black basalt ridges, ocherous dunes, on and on beneath a sky almost purple. Shadows were sharper-edged than on Terra or Ramanujan, for the sun was half again as far away, its disc shrunken. He knew that now, in summer at a middle latitude, the air was chill; he observed on the tossing tendrils of a rahab tree in a roof garden how strongly the wind blew. Come sunset, temperatures would plunge below freezing. And yet Virgil was brighter than Sol, an F7; one could not look near it without heavy eye protection, and Desai marveled that light-skinned humans had ever settled in lands this cruelly irradiated.

Well, planets where unarmored men could live at all were none too common; and there had been the lure of Dido. In the beginning, this was a scientific base, nothing else. No, the second beginning, ages after the unknown builders of what stood in unknowable ruins …

A world, a history like that; and I am supposed to tame them?

His receptionist said through the intercom, “Aycharaych,” pronouncing the lilting diphthongs and guttural ch’s well. It was programmed to mimic languages the instant it heard them. That gratified visitors, especially nonhumans.

“What?” Desai blinked. The tickler on his desk screened a notation of the appointment. “Oh. Oh, yes.” He popped out of his reverie. That being who arrived on the Llynathawr packet day before yesterday. Wants a permit to conduct studies. “Send him in, please.” (By extending verbal courtesy even to a subunit of a computer, the High Commissioner helped maintain an amicable atmosphere. Perhaps.) The screen noted that the newcomer was male, or at any rate referred to himself as such. Planet of origin was listed as Jean-Baptiste, wherever that might be: doubtless a name bestowed by humans because the autochthons had too many different ones of their own.

The door retracted while Aycharaych stepped through. Desai caught his breath. He had not expected someone this impressive.

Or was that the word? Was “disturbing” more accurate? Xenosophonts who resembled humans occasionally had that effect on the latter; and Aycharaych was more anthropoid than Uldwyr.

One might indeed call him beautiful. He stood tall and thin in a gray robe, broad-chested but wasp-waisted, a frame that ought to have moved gawkily but instead flowed. The bare feet each had four long claws, and spurs on the ankles. The hands were six-fingered, tapered, their nails suggestive of talons. The head arched high and narrow, bearing pointed ears, great rust-red eyes, curved blade of nose, delicate mouth, pointed chin and sharply angled jaws; Desaii thought of a Byzantine saint. A crest of blue feathers rose above, and tiny plumes formed eyebrows. Otherwise his skin was wholly smooth across the prominent bones, a glowing golden color.

After an instant’s hesitation, Desai said, “Ah … welcome, Honorable. I hope I can be of service.” They shook hands. Aycharaych’s was warmer than his. The palm had a hardness that wasn’t calluses. Avian, the man guessed. Descended from an analog of flightless birds.

The other’s Anglic was flawless; the musical overtone which his low voice gave sounded not like a mispronunciation but a perfection. “Thank you, Commissioner. You are kind to see me this promptly. I realize how busy you must be.”