The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Read online

  “My people—”

  “Elis and Mijok can outrun them too. They’ll carry all they can.” In spite of the agony of mere hanging on, mere straining to stay alive, he had to think: They were loyal and we got them into this.… Branches slashed across his back, stinging and scraping. Once Susie stumbled and recovered as the group went splattering across some invisible mud, and Paul wondered if Mister Johnson in his terror would run them into quicksand or marsh.

  That ended; there was more thick jungle whipping his back for—five minutes?—an hour…? This too ended.

  Crazed or purposeful, the beasts charged out into open land through a soft roaring of torn grass. Paul could twist his head to glance upward at a field of stars. He could not win a backward look for Elis and Mijok: his neck and arm muscles were stiffened in his grasp of Susie’s ears, and he dared not risk disturbing Nisana’s clutch of him. But to left and right he could make out other shapes under starlight and hear a frantic thudding of hoofs—fleeing asonis, other innocent woodland cattle with a hunger to live. Once he glimpsed a long-bodied thing pass off to the left in wild leaps lifting it above the grass tops: uskaran, he thought, the huge tiger cat, no enemy but a brother in panic.

  The open ground ended at water; here at last the olifants slowed to a halt, unlike the lesser desperate brutes, for Mister Johnson was still wise, considering the stream, aware of his leadership. Paul could shout to the others now, and they all answered. But his backward staring found only the stars, the white mass of Mister Smith, the disturbed darkness that must be meadow. “Elis! Mijok!”

  No answer could have reached him above the bleating and thunder of terrorized harmless things crossing the field and hurtling blindly into the river. Mister Johnson was wading in deliberately. There was splashing at first, then silence, as cool water came up around Paul’s knees and Susie’s motion changed to a smooth throbbing and heaving; he saw small foam where the curve of her lifted trunk cut the water. He whispered to Nisana, “We’re safe, dear. Big river. Kaksmas won’t cross it.…”

  Mister Johnson was leading them in an upstream slant, bearing well to the right while the bobbing frantic heads of other creatures let the moderate current press them away to the left. This way—whether by Mister Johnson’s wisdom or Abara’s guidance—they might be able to come ashore clear of the dangerous passage of the stampede.

  “My people cannot go through the water. We never—”

  “Elis and Mijok can swim. They’ll get them across somehow. Maybe the shield will float, Nisana.”

  The madness behind them dwindled into the faraway. In growing quiet, Wright’s voice came back, not loudly: “I am a murderer.”

  Paul wondered what insight made him call out words not his own: “‘What’s the profit of any effort if the result is thrown away in a time of weakness?’”

  The even motion became a clumsiness of wading in mud. Then there was solid ground. Paul said, “Halt them here if you can, Abara.” Mister Johnson must have shared the sense of safety; they all calmed, heads drooping, shaken breathing slowing to sighs. “Down, Susie.…”

  All but Abara descended. This was still open grassland, but there was a black velvet curtain of jungle not far off. “Doc—still got your flashlight?”

  “Eh? No—lost somewhere.” The old man spoke vacantly; he stumbled to the edge of the water, sat with his head on his knees. “Mijok-Mijok.…”

  Tejron still had her Vestoian, but now the pygmy woman was panting, fully conscious in Tejron’s arms and witless with fear. Tejron said, “She’s trying to break away. Can’t someone talk to her?”

  “Pakriaa!” Paul searched for the princess. “Here—please.”

  Nisana whispered, “I will talk to the Vestoian—yes?”

  “Not yet. If Pakriaa—”

  Pakriaa said thickly, “I am here. What to say? She is nothing.”

  “She is nothing to you, Pakriaa? Then Sears chose a poor student. Brodaa would have spoken to her. I ask you to tell her the war is over and she is among friends.”

  “Friends? She is Vestoian.” Pakriaa approached Wright, who did not look up. “Tocwright—I must speak to the Vestoian kaksma? I owe you my life—will obey you.”

  He groaned: “I do not want you to obey me. If there is nothing inside to tell you what you should do, then I have nothing to say to you.”

  Pakriaa flung up her arm across her eyes as if struck. Tejron muttered, “I can’t restrain her much longer without hurting her.” It was Nisana who gave the Vestoian the message in the pygmy tongue, a ripple of sound that must have conveyed some reassurance, for the struggling ceased.

  “Look!” Paul dug his fingers in Wright’s shoulder. “Over there—”

  The dark spot under starlight was surely the floating shield; behind it, another purposeful splashing, rise and fall of a driving arm.

  “Mijok!” Wright was on his feet. “This way! A little upstream—”

  Both giants were bleeding from small double stab wounds of the kaksma teeth. There were four pygmies on Mijok’s shield. Elis had carried Brodaa and another in his arms and one on his back; they had clung to his fur as he swam the river. Mijok plucked a sodden thing from his thigh; its jaws had clenched in flesh when he smashed its body. He flipped the ratty thing into the water and remarked like a Charin, “Damned if I could ever care for ’em.”

  “The others—”

  “We tried to help them into the trees,” said Elis. “Could be some safety in that if the swarm passes by. But most of them ran blindly, so—beyond that, Doc, don’t ever ask us. We must forget some things. We’ve all done what we could, so—let’s rest a while and go on.”

  “Oh, we go on,” Wright said. “Chaos, or maybe a little bit of light from time to time. What—sixteen of us now…? Which way was the swarm going?”

  “North. Our flight was west. I think this place is safe.”

  Abara called down: “Mister Johnson says it is safe.”

  Paul said, “No more travel tonight. Wait here for daylight. This is not the river we wanted, but we know it reaches the sea somehow. Let’s think about that in the morning. And—if you will, Doc—I’d like to make that my last order. Let Elis be our commander till we reach the island.”

  “I!” Elis was shocked. “But Paul.… I am a big baby, I wonder and wonder and never find the answer to anything.”

  Wright laughed; it sounded like laughter. At any rate when his voice found words it was warm, relieved, more like his own than it had been at any time since the drums sounded on Lake Argo. “That doesn’t matter, Elis. Paul has done all anyone could, done it well, and leadership’s a wearing thing. But you can carry it.”

  Paul wished he could see the black face in the dark; he might learn from it, he thought, so far as a Charin was capable of learning. Elis said dazedly, “If you all wish it—”

  “I wish it,” said Abro Brodaa.

  “Yes,” Mijok said. “Let’s not trouble to vote. We know you, Elis.”

  “I’ll do my best.…”

  Most of the pygmies collapsed in sleep. The bites the giants had received were not numerous enough to be a danger, but both were in some pain, and wakeful; Abara also said he would prefer to watch out the night and not sleep. Paul stretched on the damp grass, aware of Nisana, sitting near him. He tried to make a mental refuge of Dorothy and the island; for a time it was possible, but twice, as he thought he was drifting into true healing sleep, the present pulled at him and the thought was not of Dorothy, but of Pakriaa, throwing up her arm across her eyes as if Wright’s words had been a deeper wound than any she had received in these days of calamity and defeat.

  He woke while it was still night. The red moon had risen, changing the river to deep purple; the stampede was all ended, and stillness was everywhere, underlying the low voices of Wright and Elis. He saw the small silhouette of N
isana beside him; he could make out none of the others, but he heard the soft breathing of the olifants, and at least some of them must have gone to the jungle and returned, for there was a steady munching of coarse leaves. He thought: Sears’ pets—one of his ten thousand gifts we can never live long enough to assess. His laughter was another.…

  Wright was talking placidly: “We suppose it must have been a similar story on this planet, Elis. The major patterns are the same. The small and simple forms must have grown to greater complexity through their millions of years, undoubtedly in the seas, the good saline medium for our kind. Then other millions of years, while the first creatures to try the land were clumsy amphibians, still needing the sea but developing ways to carry it with them, venture a little further. There’s no hurry in history.”

  “And before the beginning of life?”

  “Difficult, Elis. We think (there are other theories) that each star with planets was once two—a binary, our astronomers called it—”

  Someone thin and small came near to Paul, speaking delicately, in an extremity of pain, and not to him. “Nisana,” Pakriaa said. “Nisana—”

  Nisana was looking up, a little afraid, uncertain. “Princess?”

  “Only Pakriaa.… Nisana—I saw how you spoke to the Vestoian, how she was quiet. If you will bring her—and Tejron too? And we go and listen—Tocwright is talking about the stars—the world—I think, maybe, we tell her what he says? Will you come with me, Nisana?”

  PART THREE: THE YEAR TEN

  CHAPTER 1

  Argo IV answered Dunin’s brown hand at the tiller, sliding south under a following breeze. Her chief designer Paul Mason liked to call her a sloop, admitting that on no planet would any sloop have cared to be found dead with a pair of twelve-foot oars amidships. She was thirty-six feet fore and aft. Without a sawmill, shaping boards for her strakes had been harder than trimming and placing the single tree trunk that was her keel. Much of her joining was with wooden pegs; there was iron in her too, from the single deposit of ore on the island of Adelphi. Her building had started seventeen months ago in the Year Nine. One month ago Paul’s daughter Helen had cracked across her bow an earthen flask of wine brought to maturity by Nisana and Argo IV had slipped out of the mouth of the Whitebeach River for a maiden voyage—a forty-mile circuit of the island, including the passage of a strait where a current from open ocean ran formidably between Adelphi and a small nameless island in the south. Since then she had journeyed short distances up and down the coast, learning her own fussy ways and teaching them to her makers.

  Argo II had been a clumsy oared raft of heroic history. Nine Lucifer years ago, roughly the equivalent of twelve Earth years, Argo II had not only brought fifteen survivors of a war to the island, she had also, broadened and repaired, returned to the mainland over the ten-mile channel to pick up a sixteenth survivor, Abara, and the gentle white beasts he had refused to abandon. He had guided them south, through seventy miles of unknown terrors, and ten miles further along the beach, until it came to an end at sheer cliffs; here Argo II found him. One by one—probably no one but Abara could have coaxed them aboard—Argo II had ferried all five of the olifants across. During the rains that came for a dark ending of Year Two, the swollen Whitebeach River had torn Argo II from her moorings and she had been swept away down the channel. Now she would be driftwood scattered over the infinity of the unexplored; she was remembered.

  Argo III, still in existence and more often called Betsy, was only a boxed platform with outriggers and two pairs of oars. With four giants at the oars and a favorable current she could approximate three miles an hour and carry several tons. She had been built in the Year Four and was still busily bringing slabs of building stone from the base of the coastal range. The stone was red and black or sometimes purple, heavy, already smoother than marble without polishing; unlike any common stone of Earth, it was so hard that wind and sun and water over the centuries had done little with it. Wright believed that was why the coastal range could rise to such heights from a narrow base. While the years in their millions had turned other mountains to level ground, the glassy rock remained: it could be broken for use but defied erosion like a diamond.

  Argo IV was unequivocally a ship; after her trial Paul had carved for her bow a figurehead with the dreaming face of Pakriaa.

  “Maybe,” Dunin said, “with a few more like this the first explorations could be around the coast instead of overland? If we had two or three more ships when Kris-Mijok is old enough to go?”

  Paul knew Dorothy had winced, though her face was turned to the evening-reddened field of water. “If he still wants it, when he’s old enough to go.…”

  Kris-Mijok Wright, her third-born child and only son, had been born in the Year Three; in Earth years he was only nine. His hunger for the long journeying might be mainly a reflection of his devotion to Dunin, herself full of visions and not yet a woman. A tentative half joke, a means of channeling a child’s fantasy into patience, had somehow become a sober adult plan: that the first major explorations would begin when Kris-Mijok would have a man’s strength to take part in them.

  “We might have such ships by then.” Paul tried to sound judicial. “Say the Year Eighteen or Nineteen. Yes, a coastal exploration might be better than trying to cross the continent. Not a circumnavigation though, at first.”

  Dunin’s big face blossomed in a grin. “Only about thirty-six thousand miles by the old map made from the air. Open water at north and south poles, plenty of it. Could do it in less than a year.”

  “More like fifty thousand, allowing for deflections, tacking, pull of currents we don’t know. Storms, flat calms, contrary winds, repairs, expeditions ashore for provisions. You pull your horns in just a bit, my girl. Do you remember a desert plateau the map shows in the southern hemisphere? Solid cliff rising out of the sea for over seven hundred miles, and on top of it roasting sand all the way across the continent—and that plateau is only a small part of the coastal desolation down there. From the equator to the 30th parallel I don’t think you’d have a chance to go ashore—and nothing to help you if you did.”

  Dunin still grinned. “Just sail past it.”

  “Yes—well out to sea, with the equatorial sun at work on you. Very few islands in that region, some of them bare rock.” And he thought: If I might go myself…! I am fifty now, in Earth years, a young fifty.…

  He knew also that Dorothy would not prevent him. She would not go herself: she would remain at Adelphi, faithful to the daily things, undramatic labors and loyalties that make civilization something more than a vision. She was a young thirty-eight, though she had already borne five children. If he went away, she would mind the watch fires on the beaches, as she had done nine years ago; she would work in the school, the house, the gardens, stand by Christopher Wright during the depressions that sometimes overcame him. She would grow old waiting. Therefore, Paul knew, he would never leave her. “The explorations will come in good time, Dunin,” he said. “You’ll have 150 years to watch and take part. I think you’ll live to see the other continent too, and the great islands in the southwest. In the meantime—there’s so much exploring to be done right here!” He watched the water too, aware of Dorothy’s face turned to him, sober and appraising. “You know, Dunin—that island we visited today—that could hold a community of a thousand between its two little hills. And I’m remembering the one forty miles north of us. Argo II was swept ashore there: get Doc to tell you that story sometime. I was sick for a week and laid up in one of the limestone caves while the others repaired the raft. A round island less than five miles across. We might sail there next trip.”

  “The other continent,” Dunin murmured, and she watched the rising blue-green mound of Adelphi in the south. “The islands of the southwest.…”

  Dorothy leaned against the hand-hewn rail, looking northeast, saying lightly, “There he is.…”

&nbs
p; The stone figure in the coastal range grew visible as the channel current pressed them a little too far eastward. The vast features were not clear; one could find the line of shoulder. “And Sears said, ‘He looks west of the sun.’ Was it long ago you told me that, Paul?”

  “In a way it was.… Penny for ’em, Dorothy?”

  “Oh—” Her brown face crinkled in the way he hoped for. “I was climbing down off philosophy with my usual bump—wondering what hell the twins have been raising while we’re away. Brodaa’s patience with them passes belief. With her own three sets of twins she’s had practice. I wish Pak could have had children. Twenty-nine—late middle age for her people.… Helen’s going to make a better med student than ever I was—don’t you think, Paul? Seems like more than just a kid’s enthusiasm.”

  “I think so.” And Sears’ plump daughter Teddy (Theodora-Pakriaa) would no doubt find herself too, sometime: there was no hurry. Even Christopher Wright no longer seemed to feel that time was hounding him, though his years by the Earth calendar were sixty-five, his hair and beard were white, his wiry thinness moved deliberately to save the strength he had once been able to spend like unconsidered gold.… “Look!”

  Dorothy said carefully, “But that is impossible.” A column of smoke on the flank of the coastal range, above one of the beaches where building stone was found. Blue-gray against the red and black, it rose straight in untroubled air. “They weren’t taking Betsy out till we got back.”

  “Too high anyway,” Dunin said. “No need to climb so high for the stone.”

  Dorothy whispered, “I have never quite believed that Ed and Ann—”