Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

The shapes on the radar flicker in and out with increasing frequency now. Some are shaped like fat pods, but some appear vaguely oblong smudges. I want to see a pod ride by with Moon-woman in it, waving. If that happens, I will extend a grappling hook, gently as I can, and bring the moon-pod close to me so she can crawl into my little craft and share a tube of tea. But no, there is no likelihood of moon-pods being this far away from Dhara. After all, the Ashtan system is a few months away. The star is discernibly a round yellow eye, no longer a point, and the planets around it, including Ashta, appear disk-like as well, although I need my telescope to clearly see them. I can just see Ashta’s polar ice caps. It is far from my spaceship at the moment, but when I enter the system it should be at a point in its orbit that brings it close to my trajectory. I have to be careful that the Antarsa current does not pass directly through the planet, because I will simply crash into it, then. I am anticipating some delicate maneuvering, and there is no time like this moment to practice.

After a long while, I discover something.

My companions move unobtrusively away as I approach them, which means, of course, that they can sense my presence. Are they simply making room for me, or is it something else? However, what I’ve found through this experiment is that the Antarsa current, the central, fastest channel at least, has widened considerably. It took me much longer to find its edges, where there are dangerous eddies and rivulets. The speed of the current has not changed, however. Mystified, I continue on my way.

I send my offer of kinship out, but as yet there is no answer but silence.

Listening to the silence, I am reminded of a story my father, the trader, told me when I was small. Among our people the Kinships are fairly self-sufficient, but we do have need of small shipments at regular intervals: metals from the Himdhara mountains, cloth from Tura-Tura and so on. We send out our herbs and jewelry. There is constant flow of information between the Kinships (except for the People of the Ice, about whom my father told this story) and also with Ship University. Most things are transported where possible by boat, in a rare while by flyer or shuttle, but there are also wandering caravans that go overland, and my father has traveled with many of these. He is from a kinhouse of my own people further east of here, deeper in the forest and he met my mother during one of his journeys. Neither was interested in a permanent partnership but they remain cordial when they meet. And always he has tried to come see me, to bring me a shell from the Western Sea, or a particularly pretty pebble from Himdhara.

The People of the Ice stopped speaking to us from the time that the second generation of humans was grown. By that time the Kinships had each chosen their place, depending on where they felt most accepted and would do the least harm to the beings already present. My people of the Devtaru had genetically modified ourselves to digest certain local proteins; the Western sea folk had modified their bodies to be more agile in the water and to hold their breath longer than any other human. The People of the Himdhara could thrive in the thin mountain air. The People who settled in the Northern edge of the great continent, where there is ice even in the summer, adjusted themselves to live in that terrible cold. It was said that they grew hairy pelts like the beasts that dwelt there, but this could have been a joke. All the Kinships tell jokes about each other, and most are reasonably good-natured, but the People of the Ice got the worst of it because they were so remote, in both geography and temperament.

When I was little, my father said, his caravan was asked by the World Council to go into the North to find out what had happened to the People of the Ice. Was it that they did not answer radio calls because something terrible had befallen them, or were they being obstreperous as usual?

Take only a few people, said the Council, so that they don’t feel invaded. So my father and three others—a man and two women—went. They wandered for days and weeks through forest and scrubland, desert and plateau, until they came to the land of perpetual snow. Here the trees grew up into tall spires, and the wild creatures all had thick, luminous coats and some knew the use of fire. My father knows this because one night the party followed a flickering light through a snowfall, and found large, hairy creatures huddling before a fire, tossing twigs into it and grunting. As is our custom, the four travelers sat some distance away and waited, speaking softly the offering of kinship, until the creatures waved their paws at them and invited them, through expressive grunts, to join them. My father says these were shaggorns, and fortunately this group was full of meat and therefore amiable. They are very curious and they poked at the travelers with twigs to see what they would do (some of his companions laughed but my father only smiled and gently poked back) and one of them wanted to try on my father’s coat—my father allowed this, but had to give him his watch to get his coat back.

It was bitterly cold, but the four survived with the help of the shaggorns, and one late afternoon they found themselves at the edge of an icy plain, over which rose a city.

The city was made of ice. The buildings were constructed with ice blocks and had slit windows, and the streets were ice. People moved about them on skates, and the travelers could not tell whether they wore hairy pelts or if they had grown their own. The travelers set themselves down outside the city’s perimeter but in plain sight, in keeping with the tradition of waiting for an invitation.

But there was none. People skated across the ice, from building to building, and didn’t even look at the travelers. One little girl stared at them but was roughly pulled away by an adult. The four travelers sang the offering of kinship, but there was no response. This was a terrible thing to witness, my father said, because they had come so far and endured so much to make sure that their kin were safe. They were cold, hungry and tired, and the song was acquiring rather angry overtones. So they stopped their song, and set up camp there because the evening was setting in.

In the morning they found some supplies—meat, some cooked roots, all frozen by now, a pelt blanket. The meaning was clear: the People of the Ice did not desire kinship, but they meant no harm. There was no weapon left symbolically at the edge of the camp. They did not want a kinship of enmity—they simply wanted to be left alone.

So the travelers began their return journey, somewhat mollified. The next evening, before they were able to go very far (they were tired, as my father said), they saw a small dwelling in the forest. To their surprise they recognized the home of a farsister. Farsisters and farbrothers are people who wander away from their Kinships for a life of solitude, usually seeking some kind of spiritual solace. Some of them have done terrible things and seek to redress them or have suffered a loss and need to find a reason to live. Others simply wander in search of something they can’t identify, and when they find it, usually in a place that calls to them, they settle down there.

The farsister’s courtyard was snowy and bare, and furnished with only two low flat-topped rocks that my father assumed were intended to be chairs. This meant that the farsister did not like company, but one person would be tolerated. There was an intricately carved block of ice near the door, which indicated the occupation of the person within. That she was female was indicated by a red plume of feathers that hung from her door.

My father sat outside the courtyard and waited. She made him wait for several hours, by which time it was night and getting very cold. Then she came out and ushered him in. She turned out to be a grim, dour woman who seemed to be made of ice as well. The inside of her little hut was just as cold as the outside and this didn’t seem to bother her.