Legacy (8 page)

"Then
you
came! We've never entirely given up trying to locate Sol, or stopped wondering what became of the Terran branch of humanity. You can't imagine how frustrating it was! We couldn't contact you without revealing our own presence. All we could do was watch while the Korvaasha withdrew to the outer system—except for a few light units they left concealed on this planet—as soon as they detected your arrival."

"You mean," Sarnac demanded, "that there've been
two
cat-and-mouse games going on in this system the whole time we've been here?"

"Surely you could have done
something
to warn us!" Natalya said accusingly.

"We tried to think of something, but we were in a quandary. Especially because we knew that they were only letting you get settled in before attacking. Finally, we decided to risk dispatching an armed courier aircraft to make contact with you three at your camp."

"Piloted by you," Sarnac stated, while assimilating the fact that what they had seen was considered an armed courier, not a full-fledged fighter.

Tiraena nodded. "As bad luck would have it, their attack commenced while I was en route. By the time I was approaching your island, you were headed east, pursued by those two fighters."

"From which you proceeded to save us. I haven't gotten around to thanking you for that."

"Well, I couldn't just do
nothing
," she snapped.

Why so defensive?
Sarnac wondered. Then it hit him: she had acted against orders, running the risk of compromising the Raehaniv base's secrecy, to save them. Sarnac looked at Tiraena with new eyes, seeing a kindred spirit. As if to cover her embarrassment, Tiraena put on her light-gathering goggles. It was getting dark, and a fire was of course out of the question. The other two followed suit, with their bulkier but still effective models.

"At any rate," Tiraena hurried on, "I had to make a very rough landing, and a lot of things were damaged beyond repair—including my sidearm. I had to make do with this." She patted the pouch which held her knife. "At least my suit's chameleon surface was still functioning."

"We wondered about that," Natalya interjected.

"It's useful, but it's only completely effective when you're standing still. There's a finite time gap between the sensors picking up the background and the microcircuits reproducing it." With a slightly playful expression, she spoke a few syllables of what Sarnac assumed was Raehaniv. Suddenly her head and hands floated in midair with no seated body beneath. Then the hands fumbled with the hood behind her neck, and the head vanished as well.

I will
not
gape like a yokel!
Sarnac told himself firmly. He stole a glance at Natalya. She was wearing an expression of grimly determined nonchalance.

Natalya and Sarnac heard more Raehaniv, and Tiraena reappeared, pulling back the hood. "My suit was very expensive," she continued. "It was issued to me in case I found myself in a situation like this one."

"Well, now that you're in it, what do you plan to do?" Sarnac asked.

"Continue down the river to the coast and make contact with the Raehanvoihiv in that area. I can—"

"With the what?" Natalya asked.

"Oh . . . the native sentients. We call this planet Raehanvoi—New Raehan. The culture around the estuary carries on a limited coasting trade with other high-neolithic groups to the south. We can travel concealed on one of their large sailing rafts, and once we reach the southerners' region it will be only a short trip to the base. Even if we don't get all the way there, we'll be in concealment while we await the arrival of the relief fleet."

"Maybe we won't have to wait that long," Sarnac said truculently. "Ever consider the possibility that our squadron may whip the Korvaasha and come back for us?"

"It would be unwise to invest much hope in that. The Korvaash force in this system has a prohibitive advantage in tonnage, and we've seen nothing to indicate that you possess any significant technological advantage." She seemed to realize that she might have been just a mite tactless, and continued in what Sarnac thought probably represented her best effort at a conciliatory tone. "But don't worry. Our fleet will be arriving eventually. In the meantime you are welcome to accompany me to the base. You'll be a sensation: people from the lost homeworld we've been searching for for two centuries!

"But for now," she continued, rising to her feet, "we'd better get some sleep. Your friend will be able to travel in the morning, and we'll want to cover as much ground as possible."

"Wait a minute!" Natalya was almost plaintive. "You can't stop now! You still haven't said anything about the fact—which you asked us to accept, even though it's patently absurd—that homo sapiens could have evolved independently on another planet, this Raehan."

"I never said anything about independent evolution, Lieutenant Liu. The human race did, in fact, evolve on Earth. Its presence on Raehan dates back about thirty thousand of your years."

I really wish she'd stop saying things like that
, Sarnac thought, too numb to feel more than mild irritation with this impossible woman for continuously kicking the foundations out from under his intellectual universe. Aloud: "Uh, Tiraena, do you mean . . ."

"I do. And to answer your next question, we have no idea how our original Raehaniv ancestors—Palaeolithic savages like their Terran contemporaries—got to Raehan." Her face wore an odd little smile. "We're completely in the dark about it, Lieutenant Sarnac. And now your people will join us in that darkness."

Tiraena had a skullcap-like device which granted its wearer electromagnetically induced sleep for any preset period. Sarnac envied her, for sleep would not come to him under the alien stars.

They were following what was clearly a well-used trail when they met the Danuans.

"Let me handle this," Tiraena said. "We've had dealings with this culture before. My translator is programmed with the trade language. I'm afraid the language of the islanders you met isn't even related." She stepped forward, taking a small device from one of her coverall's pockets and putting what resembled an old-style hearing aid in one ear. Then she made a stately gesture to the small group.

The Danuans—Tiraena had adopted the name, admitting that it was shorter than what her people had inflicted on the locals and had a fairly civilized, meaning Raehaniv-like, sound to it—stood their ground calmly, as the handheld voder began translating Tiraena's greeting into their own fluting language. They must have met humans before, or at least heard of them. The latter was not unlikely; this culture might not have metallurgy, or writing, but it was surprisingly cosmopolitan.

Sarnac, with nothing to do except look unthreatening, contented himself with watching the Danuans. It was always eerie looking at a nonhuman life form you knew housed sentience. But compared with the Korvaasha it was easy to meet a Danuan's eyes. For one thing, they
had
eyes, plural—two of them, like they were supposed to. Binocular vision seemed to be the most common pattern, though evolution had produced trinocular arrangements on at least two known planets. The overall form was not unattractive: a slender centauroid, covered with a short cream-colored coat of what was not really fur, not really felt. The head, which tapered to a mouth that performed all the functions of its human equivalent, sat atop a long neck that was flexible enough to point the large dark eyes in any direction. Sarnac wondered how different the Danuans' worldview must be from that of a being like himself, for whom the universe was a hemisphere in front of whatever direction his body was facing.

The conversation concluded, and Tiraena turned back to the other humans. "It's all right. Her name is . . . Cheel'kathu is close enough. She's the leader of a caravan that's proceeding in the direction we want to go. Her clan is organizing a trading voyage south, and the raft will be departing when she arrives. She learned about us from her relatives, and she's eager to help us in exchange for the trade goods I've promised her once we reach the base." She looked grim. "Also, she's heard about the Korvaasha. I told her we're their enemies, and I think she believes me. That's almost enough to make her help us for free."

"Does that mean there are Korvaasha around here?" Frank's voice was almost back to normal now. Only drugs—and Tiraena's promise of a prosthetic hand that would make the Solar Union's state-of-the-art products look like an iron hook—had enabled him to keep pace at first. That, and Natalya's constant attention.

"No, she's just heard stories. They're enough," said Tiraena with a grim look. "Which is to be expected, as even you must know." She instantly looked annoyed with herself. "What I mean, of course, is. . . ."

"Yeah, I know," Sarnac cut her off. He couldn't help thinking of what had been found when Nueva Patagonia had been retaken from the Korvaasha, and the tales the survivors had told.

She must have read his expression. "No, really, I apologize." Wryly: "I remember, as an adolescent, hearing my grandparents wonder out loud if I had been cloned from original cells of my great-great-grandfather Varien hle'Morna."

"Sounds like a compliment," Sarnac ventured. "Wasn't he a great historical figure?"

"Yes. He was also, by all accounts, an insufferable, condescending old
grolofv
." She smiled crookedly. "He didn't suffer fools gladly—and his definition of 'fools' was a bit more inclusive than most people's!" She hefted her pack and motioned the others to follow her, and they set out after the Danuans.

Sarnac and Tiraena walked side by side in a silence which he finally broke. "I suppose we really can't compare our experience of the Korvaasha to yours. I mean, Earth's never been occupied by them."

"No, and you should be thankful. Remember what I told you about why my name is a traditional one in our family? Well, there's another reason: it's a way of reminding ourselves what we still owe the Korvaasha!"

Sarnac glanced sideways at her. She didn't return the look. Her profile was set and hard, eyes focused inward on remembered horrors that he could only guess at. And he decided he was very glad Tiraena DiFalco was on their side, for reasons that had nothing to do with her people's technology.

They continued along the sun-dappled forest trail, and soon the river's mouth appeared through the trees ahead.

* * *

The raft had passed beyond the forest zone in its southward progress, and the shoreline to the left was clothed in the Danuan equivalent of mangrove. Sarnac, relaxing under the awning in the breeze that filled the sail, watched the shore slide by and wondered at the sophistication of the trading network established by Cheel'kathu's people—for "people" was how he had come to think of them.

The raft followed a course that took advantage of the prevailing currents, using the sail—invented only a few generations ago—as auxiliary propulsion. They carried a cargo of obsidian, which the southerners lacked. The return voyage, laden with jewelry, spices and other southern specialties, would be more difficult, despite the countercurrents that made it possible at all for craft such as these. But by then the humans would be gone, proceeding inland toward the Raehaniv base.

When they had passed a certain latitude, Tiraena had risked a short tight-beam message to the base with her pocket communicator. There had been no question of carrying on a conversation; it had been a mere "squeal," letting her fellows know her location and plans. For most of their overland trek, the Raehaniv would be able to keep track of their progress by means of an implanted homing beacon whose signal, Tiraena assured them, the Korvaasha could not detect. Sarnac could only take her word and marvel at the thing's range.

Now, with nothing to do except keep out of sight of any orbital spy-eyes which might by chance focus on this raft, he gazed around him. Frank was resting after the drug-induced overextension that had allowed him to complete the overland journey. Natalya, as usual, was nearby.

It occurred to Sarnac that, of all the surprises he had had lately, what had developed between those two habitual bickerers was not the least. And he found it bothered him a little, inexplicably and almost perversely, as he had never had the slightest sexual interest in Natalya and still didn't. Annoyed with himself, he looked elsewhere. The Danuans were either resting or performing obscure tasks around the piled cargo or with the lines—you couldn't really speak of "rigging"—except for Cheel'kathu, who was deep in conversation with Tiraena.

Again, he found himself wondering how old Tiraena was. She seemed to be in her late twenties, but if she was the great-granddaughter of a couple who had married two hundred years ago, simple arithmetic showed that the Raehaniv must have longer lifespans. Her hair, militarily short when they had met, had grown and now she kept it pulled back and gathered behind her head with brightly colored Danuan string. It was a very dark auburn, as though the reddish tint of her skin had seeped into it. With wide, high cheekbones and a rather prominent, straight nose, her features were not conventionally beautiful, but they were striking in their exoticism and strength.

She finished her talk with Cheel'kathu and strolled in Sarnac's direction. He caught her eye.

"What's the word from the skipper? Are we on schedule?"

"Approximately. But of course a culture on this level has no concept of fixed schedules. That may be even more true of Danuans than it would be of neolithic humans."

"You like them, don't you?"

"Yes. They're fascinating in many ways. There's the sexual pattern, of course." Danuans had three sets of chromosomes; impregnation by both of the two kinds of males was necessary for a female to conceive. "And the fact that they're evolved from hexapods. That's another point of similarity with Raehan, you know. All the higher animals there, except those of Terran origin, have six limbs. That's unusual for oceanic planets, most of which have quadrupeds. Greater numbers of limbs are generally retained on dry planets, where life leaves the sea earlier."

"We haven't explored enough planets with highly developed land animals to generalize," Sarnac admitted. "But Earth itself fits the pattern."