Poul Anderson - The Rebel Worlds

“For my sake?” She came close again, close enough to lay hands on his shoulders. Half sobbing, half laughing: “You can’t dream how glad I am.”

He stood in the fragrance of her, fists knotted, and replied, “Not for your sake. For you.”

“What?” she whispered, and let him go. “You called me a knight. Wrong. I won’t play wistful friend-of-the-family rejected suitor. Not my style. I want to be your man myself, in every way that a man is able.” The wind lulled, the river boomed. “All right,” Flandry said to the shadow of her. “Till we reach Port Frederiksen. No longer. He needn’t know. I’ll serve his cause and live on the memory.”

She sat down and wept. When he tried to comfort her, she thrust him away, not hard but not as a coy gesture either. He moved off a few meters and chainsmoked three cigarets.

Finally she said, “I understand what you’re thinkin’, Dominic. If Snelund, why not you? But don’t you see the difference? Startin’ with the fact I do like you so much?”

He said through the tension in his throat, “I see you’re loyal to an arbitrary ideal that originated under conditions that don’t hold good any more.”

She started to cry afresh, but it sounded dry, as if she had spent her tears.

“Forgive me,” Flandry said. “I never meant to hurt you. Would’ve cut my larynx out first. We won’t speak about this, unless you want to. If you change your mind, tomorrow or a hundred years from tomorrow, while I’m alive I’ll be waiting.”

Which is perfectly true, gibed a shard of him, though I am not unaware of its being a well-composed line, and nourish a faint hope that my noble attitude will yet draw her away from that bucketheaded mass murderer Hugh McCormac.

He drew his blaster and pushed it into her cold unsteady clasp. “If you must stay here,” he said, “keep this. Give it back to me when you come down to camp. Goodnight.”

He turned and left. There went through him: Very well, if I have no reason to forswear His Majesty Josip III, let me carry on with the plan I’m developing for the discomfiture of his unruly subjects.

The group spent most of the next day and night sleeping. Then Flandry declared it was needful to push harder forward than hitherto. The remaining Didonian(s?) formed several successive entities, as was the custom when important decisions were to be reached, and agreed. For them, these uplands were bleak and poor in forage. Worse lay ahead, especially in view of the hurts and losses they had suffered. Best get fast over the mountains and down to the coastal plain.

That was a Herculean undertaking. The humans spent most of their time gathering food along the way for the nogas. When exhaustion forced a stop, it likewise forced sleep. Kathryn was athletic, but she remained a woman of thirty, trying to match the pace and toil of men in their teens and twenties. She had small chance to talk, with Flandry or anyone, on trail or off.

He alone managed that. His company looked mutinous when he announced that he must be exempted from most of the labor in order to establish communication with the new entity. Havelock jollied them out of their mood.

“Look, you’ve seen the Old Man in action. You may not like him, but he’s no shirker and no fool. Somebody has to get that xeno cooperating. If nothing else, think how we need a guide through this damned arse-over-tip country … Why not Kathryn? Well, she is the wife of the man who got us dumped where we are. It wouldn’t improve our records, that we trusted her with something this critical … Sure, you’d better think about your records, those of you who plan on returning home.”

Flandry had given him a confidential briefing.

At the outset, talk between man and Didonian was impossible. The personality fought itself, captive ruka pouring hate and fear of the whole troop into a noga and krippo which detested his communion. And the languages, habits, attitudes, thought patterns, the whole Weltanschauungen were at odds, scarcely comprehensible mutually. Linked under duress, the entity slogged along, sometimes sullen, sometimes dazed, always apt to lash out on a half insane impulse. Twice Flandry had to scramble; the noga’s horn missed him by centimeters.

He persevered. So did the two animals which had been in Cave Discoverer. And the noga had had experience with alien partners, the two which had annually joined him to make Raft Farer. Flandry tried to imagine what the present situation felt like, and couldn’t. Schizophrenia? A racking conflict of opposed desires, akin to his own as regarded Kathryn McCormac versus the Terran Empire? He doubted it. The being he confronted was too foreign.

He sought to guide its coalescence, initially by his behavior, later by his words. Once the ruka nervous system was freed from expecting imminent torture or death, meshing was natural. Language followed. Part of the Thunderstone vocabulary had died with Cave Discoverer’s ruka. But some was retained, and more was acquired when, for a time, the krippo was replaced by the other ruka. The savage unit objected violently — it turned out that his culture regarded a two-species three-way as perverted — but got no choice in the matter. The hookup of neurones as well as blood vessels was automatic when tendrils joined. Flandry exerted his linguistic skills to lead the combinations through speech exercises. Given scientific direction, the inborn Didonian adaptability showed quick results.

By the time the party had struggled across the passes and were on the western slope of the mountains, Flandry could talk to the mind he had called into being.

The entity did not seem especially fond of heeshself. The designation heesh adopted, more by repeated usage than by deliberate selection, was a grunt which Kathryn said might translate as “Woe.” She had little to do with heesh, as much because the obvious emotional trouble distressed her as because of weariness. That suited Flandry. Conversing with Woe, alone except for a sentry who did not understand what they uttered, he could build on the partial amnesia and the stifled anger, to make what he would of the Didonian.

“You must serve me,” he said and repeated. “We may have fighting to do, and you are needed in place of heesh who is no more. Trust and obey none save me. I alone can release you in the end — with rich reward for both your communions. And I have enemies among my very followers.”

He would have told as elaborate, even as truthful a story as required. But he soon found it was neither necessary nor desirable. Woe was considerably less intelligent as well as less knowledgeable than Cave Discoverer. To heesh, the humans were supernatural figures. Flandry, who was clearly their chieftain and who furthermore had been midwife and teacher to heesh’s consciousness, was a vortex of mana. Distorted recollections of what he and Kathryn had related to Cave Discoverer reinforced what he now said about conflict among the Powers. The ruka brain, most highly developed of the three, contributed its mental set to the personality of Woe, whose resulting suspicion of heesh’s fellow units in the group was carefully not allayed by Flandry.

When they had reached the foothills, Woe was his tool. Under the influence of noga and krippo, the Didonian had actually begun looking forward to adventuring in his service.

How he would use that tool, if at all, he could not predict. It would depend on the situation at journey’s terminus.

Kathryn took him aside one evening. Steamy heat and jungle abatis enclosed them. But the topography was easier and the ribs of the Didonians were disappearing behind regained flesh. He and she stood in a canebrake, screened from the world, and regarded each other.