Starfarers (18 page)

“Our cabins were on pastureland, for they keep herds and sow crops on Aerie,” she explained. “They dare not trust entirely to robotics and synthesis, when quake or storm or
the mites that gnaw metal may strike terribly in any year. Terrestrial grass stretched away southward from us, deeply green in the pale day, on one side the neatly arrayed houses and shops of the Magistrate’s retainers and their kindred. Northward persisted native forest, a murky realm into which few ventured and none deeply. The castle loomed between us and the wildwood, its towers stark athwart the clouds. No need for curtain walls, when aircraft, missiles, and armed men stood watch. The castle was a community in itself, homes, worksteads, chapels, stadium, even laboratories and a museum.”

“Aerie’s not under a tyranny,” Shaun said. “The way things had worked out—at least, as of when we were there—government was mostly by town meetings scattered around the continent. The Magistrate provided peace and order; police, through his militia, and higher justice—court of appeal, court of legal review—through his telepresence. Otherwise he generally left people alone, which most times is the best thing government can do. But after several generations had passed the office down from one to the next, he held a huge lot of assorted properties, and people didn’t give him much backchat. He was a reasonable sort, though, in his rough-hewn style. We had no trouble ranging about in our own flitters, seeing things and making deals. And we were on a live, uncluttered world. Yes, that was a good three, four months.”

“For us,” Erody laid to this. Her music throbbed and keened. “We were not wholly benign. In some whom we met, we from the stars awakened dreams forgotten, wishes ungrantable, and belike we will never know what has afterward brewed from that discontent.”

“One boy in particular,” Shaun said. “Valdi Ronen, his name was. A bastard son of the Magistrate, raised at the castle in a hit-or-miss way, but with fairish prospects ahead of him. He might become an officer in the militia, for instance, or a rancher or an engineer, he being bright and lively. By Earth reckoning, he was about fourteen.”

“A thin lad, shooting upward, his hands and feet too big
for him, though he was not overly awkward,” Erody remembered. “Pale-skinned, like most on Aerie, hair a flaxen shock, large blue eyes, sharp features. He often went hunting in the wilderness—sometimes alone, despite his mother’s command that he have ever a companion or two; and we gathered that at those times he ventured farther in than men thought wise.”

“He didn’t after we arrived,” Shaun said. “No, he hung around us like a moon around a planet. Most of us had studied and practiced the local language en route, of course. It hadn’t changed a lot from what was in the database. I got pretty fluent, myself. We could talk, we two.

“I was willing to put up with him when I wasn’t too busy, his countless questions, his bursts of brashness, everything that goes with being that age. My son had been, too, not terribly long ago, and had metamorphosed into a presentable human being. Besides, Valdi told me and showed me quite a bit, better than grown-ups probably could, about native wildlife and youngsters’ games and lower-class superstitions and whatnot. Some of that might well go into the documentary our production team was planning, might help it sell when we got back. In fact, Valdi couldn’t do enough for us. If we asked anything of him, he’d try his best, no matter how tough or dirty a chore it was.”

“We meet not wondersmitten youth like this on worlds elsewhere as often as erstwhile, do we?” Erody asked low. “That may be as well. It was painful to see the grief in them when we bade good-bye.”

“Yes, I saw what was coming, and tried to head it off,” Shaun continued. “‘Valdi,’ I told him, ‘starfaring is our life and we wouldn’t change if we could, but we were raised to it’”

“‘We were born to it,’ I told him,” the woman recalled.

“‘Our forebears for many generations were those who wanted it. They who could not endure it left, taking their genes with them. Kithfolk today are as chosen for space as birds are chosen to wing aloft.’ His ancestors had brought some birds here and several species had flourished.”

“‘But people don’t grow wings!’ he argued,” Shaun added. “His voice broke in a squeak. He went red. Just the same, he pushed on. ‘People build ships and—and l-l-learn to sail them.’

“I hadn’t the heart to answer that nobody but a groundhugger would speak of sailing a spaceship. Instead, I set out the grim side for him. I talked about weeks, months, maybe years crowded into a metal shell or into still more cramped seal-domes, never able to step outside for a breath of clean air, only in a suit—because, I reminded him, planets where humans can walk freely are bloody few, and to make the profit that keeps us going we often have to call at other kinds. I talked about danger, death, and the worse than death that environments may bring down on us, bodies crippled, minds gone to ruin, and little our meditechs can do to remedy things. And coming back from even a fairly short voyage, after ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more years have gone by, the people you knew old or dead, and every voyage leaves you more and more an alien. And how they react to this on the planets—Earth—Oh, I laid it on kind of thick, maybe, but I was trying to convince him he’d better be content with what he had.

“No use. ‘You have each other,’ he said. ‘And you go to all those worlds, you go to the stars. Everything here is always the
same
.’” Shaun sighed. “When did a fourteen-year-old boy ever listen to reason?”

Erody nodded. “Yes, he dreamed of joining us.” Her hand struck a chord that was like a cry. “Or else it was the vision that dreamed him, for he came to be consumed by it; nothing else was quite real to him any longer.”

“M-m, I don’t know about that,” Shaun countered. “He stayed smart and cocky. In fact, once in a while he’d revert to his age and be downright obnoxious, like when he slipped what they call a squishbug into Nando Fanion’s shoe or, guiding me around in the woods, got me to fall into a lurk-fang’s muckpit, and in either case stood there cackling with laughter. I’d have decked him if he hadn’t been the Magistrate’s son.” He shrugged. “Or maybe not. A boy, after all, hopelessly in love with what he could never have.”

“Our scoldings eventually stopped the pranks,” Erody said. “He came to me and asked my help in learning our language. I warned him that would be pointless, but he begged, oh, so winningly clumsily, until I set up a program for him. He applied himself as if he were attacking a foe. I was amazed at how quickly he began to speak some Kithic and how fast he improved. And when he heard how widely used Xyrese is around the heart stars, naught would do but that he study this also, and again he was on his way to mastery.”

Shaun nodded. “It got me wondering if he might not actually be recruitable. Planetsiders had joined the Kith now and then in the past. And … some fresh DNA in our bloodlines wouldn’t hurt.

“I hinted to his father, and gathered that
he
wouldn’t mind. He’d never see his son again, but on the other hand, wouldn’t have to worry about providing for him
or
sibling rivalry or whatnot So I put it to Captain Du one day, privately, just for consideration. He wanted no part of it, though. We were too close-knit, he said, our ways too special, a newcomer would have too much to learn. And supposing he could—which I did believe Valdi was able to—would whatever he contributed during the rest of his life be enough to make up for the time and trouble his education, his integration with us, had cost?”

“Our margin is thin at best,” Erody whispered through a rippling of cold string-sounds, “in material profits and still more in the spirit.”

“I tossed the notion aside. Naturally, I didn’t mention any of this to Valdi. But I felt kind of glad that we’d be leaving soon.”

“We know not to this day how he discovered whatever he did discover. He may have had other, more secret friends among us. Ormer was not the sole Kithperson for whom he did favors. Somebody may have heard something in our camp and given it onward to him. Or he may simply have guessed. Bodies—stance, gait, glance, tone—often say what tongues do not. We know only that of a sudden Valdi Ronen grew most kind to little Alisa Du, she of the brown bangs, freckled nose, prim dresses, and great black cat.”

“The captain’s daughter, and the midpoint of his universe,” Shaun explained. “Nothing untoward took place, nothing erotic at all. She was half his age. But she’d been fascinated by him ever since he made himself a fixture amongst us. To her he was as strange and romantic a figure as any of us was to him. She’d follow him around whenever and wherever she possibly could, maybe lugging Rowl in her arms.”

The bard smiled. “Rowl was a ship’s cat, a torn, but pleasant enough when chemoneutered as he usually was, quite intelligent, with a mortgage on Alisa’s love second only to Daddy’s and Mommy’s. He shared her bed and each night purred her to sleep. Yes, she became Valdi’s adoring admirer, her violet eyes never let slip of him while he was nigh, but Rowl was whom she went back to.”

Shaun resumed. “Till now, Valdi hadn’t been more than polite to her. That couldn’t have come easy to him, but he knew what she meant to the captain—well, to quite a few of us. So he spoke kindly, and sometimes told her a story or sketched her a picture. He had a talent for drawing, among other things. If he expected that’d stop her tagging after him, he was wrong. Talk about counterproductive! However, he bore with the nuisance, because he had to if he wanted to stay welcome in our camp.

“Suddenly this changed. He didn’t seek her out or anything, no need of that, but he let her come to him and received her gladly. He’d hunker down and listen to her chatter, carry on a straightfaced conversation like with an equal. He spun longer yarns and drew fancier pictures than before. He showed her flowers and wildlife, took her for a ride in an open hovercar, led her through local skipdances and games like bounceball, till her laughter trilled. And, yes, he took special pains to make friends with Rowl. He brought treats stolen from the castle kitchen, he stroked the cat under the chin and down the belly, he’d sit for an hour or two after Rowl got on his lap and fell asleep, till Rowl deigned to jump off—Ah, every ship has cats. You know what I mean.

“I couldn’t quite figure this out. Surely he didn’t imagine
it would butter Captain Du into approving his adoption—which’d call for a vote anyway, of course. At best, he got the Old Man and the Vanguard Lady to regard him as less of a lout What use that? Vacuum, poison air, hard radiation, celestial mechanics—they’ve got no respect for niceness.”

The music went briefly sinister. “I wondered also,” Erody related. “Could it be a subtle vengeance, striking out at the thwarting of his hopes? Soon we would depart. None now alive on Aerie would see us again, nor would we ever see them. Did he mean to send Alisa off with her heart ripped asunder?” The notes gentled. “No, I could not believe that Valdi had no cruelty in him—”

“No more than most boys,” Shaun muttered.

“—and besides, he must have realized it would not happen. Alisa would miss him for a while, but she was healthy and a child; new adventures awaited her; and she had her Rowl.”

“Then things exploded,” Shaun said. “The sun was going down, it was getting bedtime for kids—Aerie’s got a twenty-six-hour rotation period, you may recall, so we’d easily adapted—and all at once Rowl wasn’t to be found. Consternation!”

“The news spread among us like waves over a pond where someone has thrown in a stone,” Erody adjoined. “No enormous matter, no crisis of life and death. But throughout our camp, we began to peer and grope about The bleak eventide light streamed over us, casting shadows that went on and on across the grass, while the castle hulked ever more darkling to north and beyond it night welled up in the forest. ‘Here, kitty, kitty!’ we cried, ridiculously to and fro, around the shelters, probing under cots and into crannies, while the sun left us, dusk deepened from silver-blue to black, and the rings stood forth in their ghostly magnificence. It mattered not that Captain and Lady Du had offered a reward. Our Alisa wept.”

“No luck,” Shaun said. “The cats had roamed freely. They seldom wandered far outside our perimeter, and never toward the woods. Things there probably didn’t smell right. Rowl, though, even when his tomhood was suppressed, had
always been an active and inquisitive sort. Had he, maybe, come on something like a scuttermouse and chased it till he couldn’t find his way home? I don’t think Alisa’s parents suggested that to her. Nor do I think she slept well through the night.”

“In the morning, we did not entirely go on preparing for departure,” Erody told. “Some who found time to spare went more widely than before, into the very forest. None entered it beyond sight of sunlight aslant between those hunched boles and clutching boughs, down through that dense, ragged leafage. If nothing else, the brush caught at a man, slashed, concealed sucking mudholes, while the bloodmites swarmed, stung, crawled up nostrils until breath was well-nigh stopped. Noises croaked, gabbled, mumbled from the shadows. Hunters in these parts had means and tricks for coping, yet they themselves never ranged deeply. When Captain Du asked whether any of them would help search, they answered nay. If Rowl had strayed into the wildwood, whatever got him could too easily take a human. Those creatures can eat our kind of flesh.”

“Just a cat gone,” Shaun said. “The girl would get over it. We had work to do.

“About midday, Valdi arrived. I asked where he’d been. He told me his school had gotten flappy about him skipping too many lessons, and he’d had to take a remedial section at the instruction terminal. Once free, he’d come straight to us. I gave him the news, not as any big thing.”

“I was there,” Erody said. “I saw him flush red.” A note twanged. “‘I will go look!’ he cried. ‘I know the forest, I’ll find him!’” Her instrument sounded a bugle call.

“The boy’s voice cracked again,” Shaun observed anticlimactically. “Sure, I thought, sure; adolescent heroics. He dashed off. After a while he returned, outfitted like a huntsman, green airbreath skinsuit, canteen and ration pouch and knife at hip, locator on right wrist and satphone oh left, rifle slung at shoulder, and a plume in the hat on that unkempt head of his. Ho, how dramatic! ‘I will find Rowl,’ he
promised Alisa, who’d heard he was there and come out in fairy-tale hopes. And off he loped.”