Starfarers (58 page)

“Not dragging Ri along. Especially if we want to keep him alive.”

“Oh—But we can’t stay here,” Dau protested. “We’d starve. No, we-we’ll freeze to death. That boat had better land soon.”

“It had best not land at all, anywhere in this country,” Vodra told him. “Have you forgotten?”

Long ago,
when Kith ships explored as well as traded, their crews naturally bestowed names on planets of interest that they found.
Fleetwing
, ranging farther than others, made the most such discoveries, and thereby won the exclusive right to deal with them. Every catalogue of myth was drained early on.
Fleetwing’s
people felt it proper to call worlds where sentient beings dwelt after the crew of
Envoy
. They were half mythic anyway.

Brent was unusually terrestroid and promising. The Hrroch, in particular, had attained iron working. More to the point, they were extraordinary agronomists. While nothing was humanly edible, they had a wide range of biologicals to offer, from luxurious textiles to microbial chemistry. If shrewdly marketed, these should fetch high prices on human-inhabited planets. Of course, once the idea was there, presently someone would find it cheaper to synthesize than to import. But meanwhile the Hrroch ought to hit on new ideas; Kith trade goods often stimulated inventiveness. And art—pictures, patterns, statuary, architecture, music, literature, dance—evolved with a civilization. Likewise did events, language, culture, psychology, an ongoing stream of information. The Brentans were humanlike enough for their minds and works to be comprehensible. They were alien
enough for these to be unpredictable, wellsprings of excitement and inspiration.

Hence their world became a port of call for
Fleetwing
. About once a terrestrial century she arrived from the stars to take orbit and send her boats down. The welcome was always eager. The Hrroch were fascinated, the wares they acquired were fabulous, discourse with crewfolk who had learned the tongue was as enlightening as it was astounding, and you didn’t need speech—signs would do—to show the rest around and have fun with them. These advents lived on in memory, lifetime after lifetime. They conditioned the history.

Perhaps they gentled it. Brentans had their dark side, conflict, violence, oppression; but they never seemed to wreak the absolute horror humankind knew of, while concepts of peace and justice seemed to come easier. Scientific method was harder for them to grasp, whether for cultural or genetic reasons, but by now the Hrroch were in an industrial era, with steam power and mass production.

Had that somehow engaged too much of the spirit? Or did every civilization everywhere in the universe eventually expend, its creativity? Already on her previous visit,
Fleetwing
had found the art disappointing. This time originality was well-nigh dead.

Not quite. A few brilliant new motifs shone like starbursts in a dark nebula. Kithfolk inquired. The work was from overseas, where colonists traded with the Susuich, the dwellers beyond the Cloudpeak Mountains.

Would the Susuich admit guests? Well, maybe. They were a clannish, reclusive folk. Some unfortunate incidents in the past had reinforced the attitude. No Hrroch any longer ventured west of the uplands. Humans, though,
starfarers
, were different. A party of them could fly to a trading post. Interpreters would be available.

Negotiations took a while. The rest of the crew didn’t mind. A spell of leisure, on living turf beneath sun and leaves, on lakes and in breezes—they were shipfolk, space-folk, but Earth was their grandmother and this half-Earth
lifted from them some of a weariness so deep in the bones that they did not really know they bore it.

Word came at length. A flying vessel could touch down at the border village Chura. It could let two strangers off but must then immediately depart, returning only to fetch them at the same spot. A guide would take them as far as the town Ai. They must not expect admission to the Abode of Songs or other holy places. However, the chieftains were willing to discuss possible barter relations.

“Arrogant, aren’t they?” Captain Graim said.

“I’d call it forlorn;’ Vodra replied. “They’re bewildered, maybe terrified, but putting up a brave front. We need to respect it.”

The need was not physical. The Kithfolk had guns, missiles, robots, every means of conquest. But that would destroy the very thing they sought, and also something within themselves.

“Agreements? Science?
Trade? Corpses can’t do anything!” Dau explained. “Besides, if w-w-we don’t report in this evening—”

“I know,” Vodra said. “Let me make the call.”

Her own communicator was intact. Radio waves leaped aloft and back down to that settlement on the eastern seaboard where Arvil Kishna had brought the spaceboat he piloted. The signal activated the transceiver he carried on his person.

Dau stood by. He caught bare snatches of talk. The river boomed too loud, noise ringing off canyon walls. He shivered too hard. And he was not yet accustomed to the
Fleetwing
dialect.

Vodra put the unit back in her pocket. “He’ll call Chura,” she said. The Susuich had agreed to leaving a communicator there. “He’ll ask its chief what can be done, if anything.”

“But how …” The words faltered and died, for Vodra ignored them. She squatted down beside Ri and examined him more closely.

When she had finished he said, in his wretchedness, “You care more about him than us, don’t you?”

“He’s a thinking being, too,” she answered sharply. “They all are, the Brentans. I’ve known them, off and on, for hundreds of their years”—while she herself had been through less than sixty. “Every time, it’s hurt to say good-bye, knowing I’d never meet those friends again. I don’t want to lose one more unnecessarily.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, contrite. “I shouldn’t complain.”

“Well, let’s take care of ourselves … and him. First, out of these wet clothes. They make the windchill worse. We’ll need them dry by nightfall.”

He gulped but obeyed. For a moment, seeing her trim form, he reddened. She ended that by paying it no heed. Following her example, he spread his garments over bushes under the cliff. The gravel hurt his feet.

“How can a chief … yonder in the mountains … notify local people … to help us?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, “but the bargaining about our visit went quicker than runners can account for. Drums, maybe.” She gave him a close look. “You’re shaking yourself to pieces.”

“I’ll t-try to keep warmer.” He started jogging in place.

A laugh escaped her. “Bobblety, bobblety, bobblety! No, that won’t work for long. Not at all for Ri. The trick will be to stay alive till help arrives. Or till the natives have tried and failed, and Arvil gomes after us regardless.”

“How?”

“I’ve had groundside experience, you know.” Stooping, she drew the guide’s big knife. While she whacked at the dead brush, she gave instructions. He was a novice, but like most Kithfolk he had passed considerable time in virtualities, which included forests, lifeways of the past, and the like. Cold lashed him. He quickly understood what she meant.

A shelter grew beneath their hands. Lop off a forked branch about a meter long. Prop it erect between rocks. Lay a three-meter length—that took some searching—with one
end in the crotch, the other on the ground. Lean pieces against this, slanting, for ribs. Cut branches off live shrubs and trees. Weave them into the framework; their leaves make the beginning of walls. Stick lesser pluckings and cuttings in anywhere, anyhow, until the sides are closed. Throw boughs and leaves beneath, a carpet against the wet gravel. The work itself will force blood to move.

It was nearly done when their communicators buzzed. Vodra spoke with the pilot. “Yes, the chief wants to make a rescue attempt,” she told Dau. “Arvil’s not sure whether that’s for the sake of pride or precedent or what. Nor can he make out how they propose to do it.”

“Or if they can. … No. I said I wouldn’t complain.”

Vodra smiled and clapped the young man’s shoulder. “Good. You
are
going to do well aboard
Fleetwing
. All right, let’s complete our job.”

She eased Ri into the shelter before laying a semicircle of stones before its entrance. “Reflector,” she explained. Meanwhile Dau gathered firewood. A flamelighter from her coverall started a small blaze within the arc. They both crawled past, inside, and huddled together, hands spread toward their hearth.

Some warmth crept back into them. He glanced at her. Through the dusk he saw matted dark hair, sharp profile, firm breasts, flat belly. The crow’s-feet and gray flecks didn’t show; she could have been his age. Her flank glowed against his. She smelled of fire smoke and woman.

“You—you shouldn’t be starfaring,” he blurted. “You’re meant for a pioneer.”

She gave him back his look. “But I am a starfarer,” she answered. “So are you. Or you’d have stayed groundside,” when the
Argosy
crew voted to end their voyaging and disband, for the trade had grown too sparse to support every ship remaining in the regions that she plied, and too many among them had lost heart.

“Yes, starfaring was my life,” he sighed, “and I’m lucky you happened to be there and would take me on.” The flames cast slight, uneasy glimmers into the murk where they
hunched. Outside, the river rumbled and hissed. “Though I can understand why most of us were glad to settle down on Harbor. It’s … homelike. Compatible.” He had said that often before. Today he went on: “Not like Aurora.”

“
Fleetwing
hasn’t touched at Aurora for about—a thousand years, I think,” Vodra said slowly. “It isn’t on any of our regular routes, you know. Nor do I recall much talk about it at any rendezvous we’ve made. Has it changed greatly?”

“Yes. I’ve watched it happening. Oh, they stayed friendly enough, in their outlandish way. And … last time we were there … they seemed more interested in what we had to offer, what we had to tell, than their, uh, their great-grandparents were the time before. But it was just novelty to them. Nothing important.”

“I know. I’ve seen the same on Olivares. Different from Aurora, no doubt. In either case, no longer our civilization.”

Serrated towers dispersed over lands apportioned according to intricate rules of kinship. Robes and masks worn in public. Ceremoniousness governing deadly feuds. Multisexual group marriages. Rank achieved by passing examinations, within a hierarchy serving a God who was a demiurge. … That was in the western hemisphere. People on the eastern continent were more enigmatic.

Not that any of them were hostile, or their societies worse than most. But they cared little about the stars or what star-farers brought.

“
Argosy
never got to Olivares,” Dau said.
“Fleetwing’s
traveled farthest of any, hasn’t she?”

“Maybe.” How could you tell, when it was oftenest a matter of chance which ships you met at which world, after centuries? “And maybe that’s why she keeps on traveling.”

Was anything left of the original structure? A worn-out part here, a broken part there, replaced, as the millennia swept by. … Yes, that was also getting harder to do, repair facilities far-scattered and expensive. To be expected, when demand for their services dwindled. …

“I haven’t asked this before.” Was Dau seeking comfort in conversation? “Too much else to learn. You’ve kept exploring,
going beyond known space, when others gave it up. Have you found any more planets where humans could live?”

“And there are no natives they’d have to dispossess? Yes, two possibilities. It didn’t make a big stir when we mentioned it at rendezvous. Why should it? Who’d want them?”

None from Earth, probably, Earth from which the first seeds blew outward on a wind now stilled. Vodra was a child when
Fleetwing
last called there. She remembered talk of Seladorians everywhere, buyers nowhere, and Kith Town, well, tolerated. Afterward she seldom heard any suggestion of going back.

“From Harbor, at least,” Dau said. “Dreamers. Malcontents. It’s no paradise.”

“No human place ever was.” Vodra fed more sticks to the fire. It crackled and jumped, red, yellow, and blue. A bed of coals was forming. That was what would really see her and him and Ri through the night. “None ever will be, I suppose. But how many would go? How’d they pay for a migration? Those planets are not New Earths, any more than the rest were. Less than Harbor or two or three others, in fact. It’d take a huge investment, and then toil, sacrifice, death, for generations, before they were hospitable to our race.”

“With nanotechnics and robotics to produce, Kith ships to ferry—”

“Where’s the capital coming from? And we Kithfolk, we can’t travel for nothing. We have to live, too, and meet our running expenses. If enough people wanted it enough—” Vodra shook her head. “But they don’t.”

“And so we limp along on whatever trade we can scrape up,” Dau said bitterly. “More and more desperate. Like this excursion of ours here.”

“Not desperation,” she maintained. “Scientific interest, if nothing else. And the hope of something tradeworthy. Wait, I should check how Ri is doing.”

She wriggled past him to hunker above the Brentan. Dau leaned over her shoulder. In the vague, shifty light he saw
the chest rise and fall, the eyes partly open but blind. He heard how breath labored.

Vodra returned to the entrance. He joined her. “If he were human,” he offered, “I’d say he’s sinking.”

She nodded. “Yes. I don’t know how long he’ll last without better help than we can give.”

She stared beyond the low flames to the river, the opposite cliff, and the shadows. He barely caught what she murmured.

“Take down the sky.

We shall no longer hide from nothingness,

Now she is gone.

Or he,” she added to herself.

“What?” he said, astonished. “Why, I know that poem. I love it.”

She turned her face to him. “You do?”

“Yes.
‘All daybreak broken—’”

“Then it reached your ship, too? It’s Brentan, you know.”

“It is?”