Starfarers (19 page)

“Stars kindled in her eyes behind the tears,” Erody said. “I thought how callous he was to raise her heart thus, when it must be dashed back down onto the stones. Heedless, rather—a boy, a boy.”

“I sort of thought the same,” Shaun went on. “However, like the rest of us, I was busy readymaking. Besides, Alisa’s no crybaby.”

“A gallant little soul. As the day wore on, she swallowed her sorrow and took up her own duties. But she did not smile. Often and often I saw her gaze stray northward to the forest.”

“I glanced that way myself, now and then,” Shaun admitted. “More and more, I fretted. How long did the pup mean to try? What sense did it make? Had he quit, slunk into the castle, not wanted to tell us he’d failed? Really, he couldn’t have expected to succeed. He wasn’t that stupid-cocky. Or might he also have come to grief?”

“It was an evil wood.” Music hissed.

“Hostile, anyway. You and I weren’t the only Kithfolk who worried. Most of us liked Valdi Ronen. We called an inquiry to the castle. Had he checked in? No, he had not.”

“Once more, darkness crept over us. The evening star glowed in western heaven. The rings were a banded bridge of pallid hues, around them the true stars and beyond those the galactic belt, as chill as the airs that sent mists aswirl about our ankles. Afar, some animal howled. Did it crouch above its prey? Windows and windows glowed yellow on the black bulk of the castle. Lights flickered like glowflies in the hands of servants and soldiers, out searching for Valdi. Their shouts drifted to us faint and forlorn.”

“We Kithfolk huddled in. Our blundering efforts couldn’t help. The boy hadn’t phoned. No satellite had spotted anything. Well, Aerie didn’t have many in orbit. Besides, the leaf canopy hindered their spying. Come morning, when a wider spectrum was available, we’d see what they could see.”

“I have heard that now Alisa wept for her friend. Her
mother rocked her in her arms for hours before she won to sleep. They do not trust psychodrugs on Aerie.”

“Me, I lay awake, too, thinking some harsh thoughts. I recollected tales of what could find a human lost in those woods. And night whistlers, clingthorn—I didn’t care to go through the list. Finally I took a soporific. My wife was smarter, she’d already done that.

“Our clock roused us when dawn was sneaking up into the eastern sky. We threw our clothes on and stumbled out, aimed more or less at the nearest mess cabin, desperate for coffee. People grunted and stirred in the shadows around us. Not that I was eager to be fully conscious. When the sun rose, its rays felt as cold as the lingering night mists.

“And then … there across the wet, trampled ground came Valdi Ronen.”

“His hair hung drenched with dew, his clothes dripped, he snuffled and sneezed,” Erody said. “But pressed to his breast he carried a cage, rough-made of withes, and in it stirred and yowled a black furriness.”

“We crowded around, jolted wide awake. Huh? He’d found Rowl? How ever? By what crazy chance? And why hadn’t he called home? We babbled. He looked straight at me in particular—”

“The level young sunlight blazed from his eyes.”

“He answered us quietly, the way a man should. Yes, he’d assumed the cat had strayed into the forest. Being a better woodsman than average, he knew what traces to look for, bent twigs, pug marks in the duff—Well, I’m no tracker myself. I can’t detail it. He didn’t actually go any big straight-line distance, he said. But the hunt was slow, with many false leads. By the time he’d found the beast, night was falling.

“Then he discovered his satphone was dead. Sometimes on Aerie, in spite of every safeguard, metalmites get into equipment. He should have checked before he started out, but didn’t. A boy in a hurry.

“To stumble back through the dark would be too risky. He wove a cage for Rowl out of shoots, so the idiot animal
wouldn’t wander off, and settled down as best he could. Once, he said, something huge passed by—he didn’t see, he heard the brush break, felt the footfalls through the ground—and he wishing his rifle; but nothing happened. At daybreak he started home.”

“Alisa jubilated. Will I ever again see such utter happiness, and afterward such adoration?” wondered Erody. “Alisa’s mother hugged Valdi to her breast and kissed him in sight of every soul. Her father wrung his hand, while swallowing hard.”

“Oh, yes,” Shaun said. “Only a cat rescued, a pet. The Dus, the ship, owed Valdi the reward, our thanks, and nothing else. Still, the lad had proven himself. Maybe he’d been reckless, but that goes with being a boy. Besides, he had in fact carried out a difficult operation. Taking a chance when you have to goes with being Kith.

“And, then, we were in turmoil, also in our feelings—close to departure, we’d nevermore see the friends we’d made, this or that love affair was ending—You understand.

“The upshot was, we adopted Valdi Ronen. He’s apprentice crew. And, I may say, in spite of his handicaps, quite promising.”

“Which pleases Alisa and Rowl,” Erody laughed.

For a short span there was silence, beneath the rollicking of the Fair.

Shaun grinned at his audience. “No doubt you’re puzzled what the point of this story is,” he said. “And no doubt, we being a race of traders, you suspect.

“If so, you’re right I’d had my own suspicions—not unique to me, but I was the officer who took Valdi aside and braced him after the ship was outbound.”

“The sun of Aerie lost to sight,” Erody murmured, “and around us, anew, the stars.”

“‘This was too convenient,’ I told him. ‘I am now your superior and you will obey orders. I want to know what really happened to that poor cat.’

“He laughed. Not a cackle; a man’s laugh, from down in the chest and straight out the throat. ‘What poor cat?’ he
answered. ‘A victim? Why, sir, I lured Rowl with delicacies my father enjoys only on feast days. Yes, then I caged him and kept him hidden away till I could carry him off to the woods. But I kept him fed with the same treats.’

“And in fact,” Shaun remarked, “it took Rowl a while before he stopped turning up his nose at his regular rations.

“‘Didn’t anybody notice that when I let him out he didn’t race for food or water?’ Valdi asked me. ‘I was three-quarters expecting somebody would. But with you about to leave forever, what had I to lose? Uh, sir.’ I saw him struggle to keep a sober face.

“‘Well, it was an emotional scene, as you’d counted on,’ I said. ‘We Kithfolk are slobbery sentimental about things like that.’ I gave him my sternest look. ‘They include the welfare of an innocent little girl.’

“He had the grace to look down at the deck. ‘I’m sorry about that, sir,’ he mumbled. ‘I didn’t really think of her, how hurt she’d be, till too late.’ Maybe this was true. A boy, raised in hard company, often neglected, and possessed by a dream. ‘I will try to make it up to her, sir,’ he finished.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘those of us who guessed have kept quiet, which may count as conniving. Punishment would make Alisa cry more. No society could run for long without a certain amount of hypocrisy to grease the wheels. But you had better justify our estimate of you, Apprentice Ronen.’”

Shaun paused. His glance roved through the pavilion entrance, past the dancing and hallooing, to the sky.

“I didn’t spell out that estimate for him,” he said. “He needed chastening. But our ship needs more bold, clever rascals than she’s got.

“Valdi’s rambling about the Fair today, in the middle of all the glamour he ever wished for. I imagine he’s observing, too, learning, thinking. I hope so.”

Erody’s instrument clanged.

Shaun brought his attention back to the people who had come to hear him and began another story.

Fickle as
Earth’s, because in the narrowness of a ship every inconstancy was a tonic to organisms that evolved on Earth, at present the air through the command center blew slightly chill, wet, tangy with ozone, as if a thunderstorm were approaching. The two persons who stood among instruments and screens gave it no heed, unless subliminally. To one side, enhanced against interior illumination, the cluster burned in splendor. They were also unaware of it. Their eyes were on the view ahead, the stars of their destination.

Nansen spoke slowly, trying for dryness and failing: “There is no more doubt. Here, where the detectors get continuous input—The traces are dying out.”

“What?” Kilbirnie whispered.

“It wasn’t certain earlier. Therefore Yu and I announced nothing. Perhaps that was a mistake. But … throughout the region we’re bound for—and the region has shrunk—we’re receiving signs of less than a fourth as many ships as we observed at home.”

She was mute for a span. The ghost storm gusted around her. A strand of hair fluttered below her headband.

“And that’s as of more than three thousand years ago,” she said at last. “By now, how many are running?”

“‘Now’ means nothing across these distances.”

“Oh, but it does, in a way, when we’re like this, not hell-driving zero-zero but moving no faster than the stars … Have the instruments looked back at Sol?”

Sol, long since lost in the horde, unrecoverable. “No. Why? We would pick up a few traces at best, voyages that were going on when we left.”

Kilbirnie’s gaze remained fixed on the screen, as if she refused to yield and look away. “It would be a comfort, though.”

“I didn’t expect you to need comfort,” he said.

She fashioned a rueful smile and turned her head about to regard him. “No, not really. I am taken aback. I hoped we’d find the Yonderfolk in an even bigger and finer bailiwick.”

His mouth tried to imitate hers. “We all hoped that.” Somberness claimed him. “Perhaps we should not be surprised. They never came tons, did they?”

She strengthened her accent. “Aweel, we still want to ken why.”

He nodded. “That’s why I invited you here, to tell you first. The news would not daunt you.”

“Thank you. Though you’re unfair to my shipmates.”

“None is a coward, I know. But they had their—their different reasons to come aboard, or their demons. Only you wanted to go purely for the sake of going, the adventure. This will be an unnerving shock to them. We may have to make a new, hard decision. I’d value your advice and support.”

The last of any dismay dropped from her. “Losh, no decision to make, no advice or support needed. What’s to do but go on—go on and find out?”

“Will you help me? You can hearten them as nobody else could.”

Her blue gaze met his and held fast. “I’ll help you always, skipper, in any way I can.”

Brent and
Cleland sat in the second engineer’s cabin. It was less individually furnished than others, almost monastic, its principal decoration inactive portraits of his heroes. Currently he was screening Alexander, Charlemagne, and Houghton. A coffeepot stood on the table between the men. They had forgotten about the aroma. Their cups rested half empty, cold.

Brent jabbed a finger at his invited guest “Extrapolate the data points,” he urged. “Every time we stop and take a reading, the traces are more sparse, more closely spaced. Right?
Shorter and shorter interstellar passages, fewer and fewer. At this rate, in another month or two we’ll register nothing.”

Cleland stared beyond him. “And we’ll still have two thousand light-years to go,” he said dully.

“Yeah. When we arrive, starfaring will be four thousand years dead.”

Cleland attempted to square his shoulders. “Unless it’s revived.”

“How likely is that? What are we going on for?”

“To—to learn what happened.”

Brent scowled. “We may wish we hadn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whatever ate that civilization could get us, too. The robots in the cluster—Next time we may not be so lucky.”

“It isn’t the same situation,” Cleland maintained without force. “They have the zero-zero drive yonder.”

“Do they yet?”

Brent let the question sink in. Ventilation whirred.

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad we’ve got some weapons.” His tone went thoughtful. “And studying the machines we captured, yes, very interesting military potential there.”

Cleland winced. “Must you always think about combat?”

“Somebody has to,” Brent replied. “Just in case, let’s say. And then, when we get back to Earth, what then?”

Again Cleland’s look went afar. “Earth,” he sighed.

Brent considered him. “You don’t really want to continue, do you, Tim?”

Cleland bit his lip.

“You can do your planetology as well a lot closer to home,” Brent told him. “Right on Earth, from the databases they must have.”

Cleland straightened, met his eyes, and demanded, “Are you saying we should turn back?”

Brent spoke slowly. “Listen. I signed on to get away from the decadence. I thought we’d return with knowledge our race might never otherwise get. With prestige, power. The power to set right what we found that was wrong, and give humans a new start. A long shot, maybe, but I was willing to
take it. Now, if all that’s ahead of us is the ruins of a dead empire, what can we learn? What’s the sense of keeping on? Why not turn back while we can?”

“What difference would that make? W-we’ve already lost Earth, the Earth we knew.”

“It won’t grow any less foreign with time. Six thousand years gone isn’t as bad as ten thousand.” Brent lowered his voice and leaned over the table. “Though the difference to us might be that we save ourselves, save more than our lives.”

Cleland blinked. “What do you mean?” he asked once more.

“You should know. Six men, four women. And yours is drifting from you pretty fast, isn’t she?”

Cleland bridled. “Wait a minute!”

Brent raised a hand, the peace sign. “No offense, Tim. Think about it, is all. Two years in this Flying Dutchman. In between, five years, if we survive them. What’ll that do to our relationships, our morale, our purpose? To us? What’ll we be fit for at the end of them?”

“We … considered that b-before we set out. Took psych tests, day after day, and got counseling, and—We’re educated, mature—”

“And under a stress like nobody else in history. Sure, the doc can prescribe you something that’ll make you feel better, but it won’t change the causes of the stress. And is it really wise to feel better, when we’re running into trouble nobody foresaw and nobody can guess at? Tim, you know me. I’m not panicking. I just ask where courage leaves off and fool-hardiness begins. What’s the best use for our strength, while we still have it?”