Poul Anderson: The Day of Their Return

His vision sought the brilliances overhead. Too many suns, too many.

He’d be sending a report Home by the next courier boat. (Home! He had visited Terra just once. When he stole a few hours from work to walk among relics, they proved curiously disappointing. Multisense tapes didn’t include crowded airbuses, arrogant guides, tourist shops, or aching feet.) Such vessels traveled at close to the top hyperspeed: a pair of weeks between here and Sol. (But that was 200 light-years, a radius which swept over four million suns.) He could include a request for policy guidelines.

But half a month could stretch out, when he faced possible turmoil or, worse, terrorism. And then his petition must be processed, discussed, annotated, supplemented, passed from committee to committee, referred through layers of executive officialdom for decision; and the return message would take its own days to arrive, and probably need to be disputed on many points when it did—No, those occasional directives from Llynathawr were bad enough.

He, Chunderban Desai, stood alone to act.

Of course, he was required to report everything significant: which certainly included the Frederiksen affair. If nothing else, Terra was the data bank, as complete as flesh and atomistics could achieve.

In which case … why not insert a query about that Aycharaych?

Well, why?

I don’t know, I don’t know. He seems thoroughly legitimate; and he borrowed my Tagore … No, I will ask for a complete information scan at Terra. Though I’ll have to invent a plausible reason for it, when Muratori’s approved his proposal. We bureaucrats aren’t supposed to have hunches. Especially not when, in fact, I like Aycharaych as much as any nonhuman I’ve ever met. Far more than many of my fellow men.

Dangerously more?

The Hedin freehold lay well east of Windhome, though close enough to the edge of Ilion that westerlies brought moisture off the canals, marshes, and salt lakes of the Antonine Seabed—actual rain two or three times a year. While not passing through the property, the Wildfoss helped maintain a water table that supplied a few wells. Thus the family carried on agriculture, besides ranching a larger area.

Generation by generation, their staff had become more like kinfolk than hirelings: kinfolk who looked to them for leadership but spoke their own minds and often saw a child married to a son or daughter of the house. In short, they stood in a relationship to their employers quite similar to that in which the Hedins, and other Hesperian yeomen, stood to Windhome.

The steading was considerable. A dozen cottages flanked the manse. Behind, barns, sheds, and workshops surrounded three sides of a paved courtyard. Except for size, at first glance the buildings seemed much alike, whitewashed rammed earth, their blockiness softened by erosion. Then one looked closer at the stone or glass mosaics which decorated them. Trees made a windbreak about the settlement: native delphi and rahab, Terran oak and acacia, Llynathawrian rasmin, Ythrian hammerbranch. Flowerbeds held only exotic species, painstakingly cultivated, eked out with rocks and gravel. True blossoms had never evolved on Aeneas, though a few kinds of leaf or stalk had bright hues.

It generally bustled here, overseers, housekeepers, smiths, masons, mechanics, hands come in from fields or range, children, dogs, horses, stathas, hawks, farm machinery, ground and air vehicles, talk, shouting, laughter, anger, tears, song, a clatter of feet and a whiff of beasts or smoke. Ivar ached to join in. His wait in the storeloft became an entombment.

Through a crack in the shutters he could look down at the daytime surging. His first night coincided with a birthday party for the oldest tenant. Not only the main house was full of glow, but floodlights illuminated the yard for the leaping, stamping dances of Ilion, to music whooped forth by a sonor, while flagons went from mouth to mouth. The next night had been moonlight and a pair of young sweethearts. Ivar did not watch them after he realized what they were; he had been taught to consider privacy among the rights no decent person would violate. Instead, he threshed about in his sleeping bag, desert-thirsty with memories of Tatiana Thane and—still more, he discovered in shame—certain others.

On the third night, as erstwhile, he roused to the cautious unlocking of the door. Sam Hedin brought him his food and water when nobody else was awake. He sat up. A pad protected him from the floor, but as his torso emerged from the sack, chill smote through his garments. He hardly noticed. The body of an Aenean perforce learned how to make efficient use of the shivering reflex. The dark oppressed him, however, and the smell of dust.

A flashbeam picked forth glimpses of seldom-used gear, boxes and loaded shelves. “Hs-s-s,” went a whisper. “Get ready to travel. Fast.”

“What?”

“Fast, I said. I’ll explain when we’re a-road.”

Ivar scrambled to his feet, out of his nightsuit and into the clothes he wore when he arrived. The latter were begrimed and blood-spotted, but the parched air had sucked away stinks as it did for the slop jar. The other garment he tucked into a bedroll he slung on his back, together with his rifle. Hedin gave him a packet of sandwiches to stuff in his pouchbelt, a filled canteen to hang opposite his knife—well insulated against freezing—and guidance downstairs.

Though the man’s manner was grim, eagerness leaped in Ivar. Regardless of the cause, his imprisonment was at an end.

Outside lay windless quiet, so deep that it was if he could hear the planet creak from the cold. Both moons were up to whiten stone and sand, make treetops into glaciers above caverns, strike sparkles from rime. Larger but remoter Lavinia, rising over eastern hills, showed about half her ever-familiar face. Creusa, hurtling toward her, seemed bigger because of being near the full, and glittered as her spin threw light off crystal raggedness. The Milky Way was a frozen cascade from horizon to horizon. Of fellow planets, Anchises remained aloft, lambent yellow. Among the uncountable stars, Alpha and Beta Crucis burned bright enough to join the moons in casting shadows.

A pair of stathas stood tethered, long necks and snouted heads silhouetted athwart the house. We must have some ways to go, Ivar thought, sacrificin’ horse-speed in pinch for endurance over long dry stretch. But then why not car? He mounted. Despite the frigidity, he caught a scent of his beast, not unlike new-mown hay, before he adjusted hood and nightmask.

Sam Hedin led him onto the inland road, shortly afterward to a dirt track which angled off southerly through broken ground where starkwood bush and sword trava grew sparse. Dust puffed from the plop-plop of triple pads. Six legs gave a lulling rhythm. Before long the steading was lost to sight, the men rode by themselves under heaven. Afar, a catavale yowled.

Ivar cleared his throat. “Ah-um! Where’re we bound, Yeoman Hedin?”

Vapor smoked from breath slot. “Best hidin’ place for you I could think of quick, Firstlin’. Maybe none too good.”

Fear jabbed. “What’s happened?”

“Vid word went around this day, garth to garth,” Hedin said. He was a stout man in his later middle years. “Impies out everywhere in Hesperia, ransackin’ after you. Reward offered; and anybody who looks as if he or she might know somethin’ gets quick narcoquiz. At rate they’re workin’, they’ll reach my place before noon.” He paused. “That’s why I kept you tucked away, so nobody except me would know you were there. But not much use against biodetectors. I invented business which’ll keep me from home several days, rode off with remount—plausible, considerin’ power shortage—and slipped back after dark to fetch you.” Another pause. “They have aircars aprowl, too. Motor vehicle could easily get spotted and overtaken. That’s reason why we use stathas, and no heatin’ units for our clothes.”