The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 21

  Paul laughed. “Ed could have designed a better sloop.”

  Wright dismissed that with a chuckle. “Ach—she floats, boy. She sails.… When I get angry or impatient or discouraged—when I stick too tight to a plan of my own and fail to hear the opposing argument—then I remember that Jensen had a charity, a patience, a kindliness, almost as great as Sears had—”

  “Tocwright,” said Pakriaa, half amused, “why do you search yourself? Must you always be sitting in judgment on your own mind?”

  “Why, yes, dear, I must.” His fingers played in his white beard. “Cod-and-baked-beans origin … Remember my fussy little History of the Americas, the first book Dorothy and Nisana copied out for me when we found how to make good paper from the marsh grass…? But self-searching is a vice-and-virtue not limited to the Charin tribe, Pakriaa—ask yourself. And ask Elis.” The black giant smiled. “So—I’ll go on with it just a little. Paul, is it weakness in me to ask that when we find Ed Spearman, you do most of the talking? I want to be—merely friendly if I can, not say much. At least until we know what sort of man he’s become. Nine years ago, I don’t think he ever had much resentment against you. You hear both sides—usually the surest way to make an extremist hate you bitterly, but somehow people don’t. You’re a—kindly listener; I only try to be, pushing down a big part of my natural temperament to do it.… Why, I think I never even appreciated the full nastiness of sarcasm until one time (it’s not such a small matter)—one time on the space ship, when Sears reproached me for it: something that went against his own nature, by the way, because he was always too afraid of finding fault with others.”

  “I’ll talk with him first, Doc, if you want me to. But I wonder what I can say. I keep seeing Ann. The things she told us—he things Miniaan has told us today.”

  “A city that never was,” said Miniaan sleepily, “never was even in the old times. Maybe I dreamed it. If you are quiet, maybe I will allow us to wake up in a moment on the island of Adelphi.…”

  “Ann is not changed,” Muson reflected, “even though the baby died.”

  Mijok said, “I’m not sure. I think she is. In what way I can’t define. But she’s not the same sad little thing I watched when she was sleeping in that fever. Well now, that was truly long ago. She puzzled me more than the rest of you, and you were all a great mystery—and I with a dozen words and the old terrors crawling on my skin like lice. Maybe it was her seeming weakness, her secret look of listening—which I thought I began to understand when she taught me the Earth music, but I don’t suppose I ever did understand it.” Mijok laughed and looked away. “Doc, it was very difficult for me to grasp that you were not begotten out of the west wind by a thunderbolt. You’ll never know how difficult, because you were never a savage. You were born to be articulate. Those twenty thousand years of blundering—bad I don’t doubt they were, but they gave you something. I am as if the forest had generated me, with no past.”

  Miniaan murmured and rolled over on her back to look up into the leaves. “I too. I was never born. Someone with no father nor mother looked at that filthy mound they say is the grave of the Queen of the World. The mind of a white-furred Charin is my father and my mother.”

  Elis suggested: “Ann has come neater to the immediate present.”

  “Why, Elis—” Pakriaa was surprised. “She said something like that to me herself, a short while before we came away. She said, ‘My yesterdays became tomorrows before I lived them. I want to find today, Pakriaa. Where is today?’”

  Miniann pursued the dark stream of her own thought, which now seemed to be giving her pleasure and not pain: “This morning I found how yesterday can bury itself with only the smallest scattering of years. There will be other cities. Never again Vestoia.”

  Wright asked gently, “But you can remember good and pleasant things of the old city, the way it was when you were young there?”

  “Oh, I can, I can. But I’ll have today, too. I think I found it first when I bore my little sons, at Adelphi.” She sat up, leaning on Pakriaa’s shoulder. “I’ve had good todays at Adelphi. I don’t understand how it could have been abandoned by this Spearman I’ve never seen.”

  “In a way,” Paul said, “you did see him. You were one of those who came on the canoes up Lake Argo. You saw the boat set your fleet afire.”

  “Yes. That was war.… And before I was wounded I killed, I think, seven of your people, Pakriaa. One with a blue skirt. I wounded her in the throat, and I have heard she died in the forest, looking north.”

  “Yes, Tamisraa. My sister Tamisraa was a bitter woman,” Pakriaa said, “and quite brave. Miniaan, all that was over long ago, in a forgotten country. Now we pull weeds in the same garden.”

  Night came tranquilly. Elis, who kept the last quarter of the watch, waked them before first-light. There was the help of a full red moon, and they followed the sound of a swift river which flowed into North Lake through the palace district of Vestoia.

  For more than a mile outside the city the jungle was like a park, undergrowth removed, vines cut away. But the vines were coming back. Greedy purple fingers curled to recapture and reclaim.…

  In the outskirts no one halted or questioned them. They saw no armed women; here and there a man crouched in a weedy doorway with staring children half hidden behind him. Mijok, Elis, Sears-Danik and Arek walked on the outside, with shields upheld against a possible arrow or thrown spear. Rifles and pistols were now history, all ammunition spent; they lay in a closet off Wright’s room at Adelphi which he called the Terrestrial Museum. Paul, Wright, and Elis had Earth-made hunting knives, still keen. Miniaan, leading them, held a spear, but there was a blue-flower garland below its blade, symbol of peace. Pakriaa and Nisana preferred to carry no weapons; Muson and young Dunin had never handled one in their lives. Miniaan said over her shoulder, “There is the old stockade. Here we turn right, toward the palace.”

  There was scurrying and disturbance now. Beyond Mijok’s shield Paul saw a few lean women running; one of them halted at Miniaan’s call and approached uneasily. There were questions, dubious replies. At the far end of the shaded avenue was a growing cluster of red bodies before a thatched building with one tall doorway. Miniaan explained: “I told her that we come peacefully and want to talk with Spearman-abron-Ismar. And she says she thinks he would be asleep at this hour.”

  “So?” Wright frowned and fretted. “But the word you left yesterday would certainly have reached him.” The Vestoian twittered a last word or two and ran away down the street; Paul saw her elbowing through the crowd in front of the palace. “We might go forward a little.…”

  Most of the group melted away; some forty armed women remained, in a ragged formation blocking the entrance. They made no threatening or even warning gestures, but their staring was heavy and cold. The volunteer messenger returned, pushing through them to speak again with Miniaan; once or twice a halting gabble of something like pidgin English made Miniaan wave her hand impatiently. She turned to Paul. “It seems Spearman told her to say that he is under the—the climate? The weather? Is this meaningful?”

  Wright said, “Tell him his third-born son is dead and the doorway of his palace is too narrow for our friends. Wait.… He asked nothing about Ann?”

  “She does not say so.”

  “I can send him no message. You see what I meant, Paul? Paul—you—send whatever word you think best.”

  “Well … Miniaan, ask her to tell him that—Ann could not come with us. That we want to talk with him and, as Doc said, that his door is too narrow for some of us.”

  The soldiers seemed to catch a glimmering of it; they made way for the messenger, and it might be there was less suspicion in them, more curiosity. Sears-Danik, Tejron’s dreamy eldest boy, whispered to Paul, “I am trying to remember him. Not much hair on his head—it was brown. I was only seven when he flew us to Adelphi. His voice�
�heavy.”

  “Yes. His hair may be gray now, Danny, as mine is. His face will look older—it never had a young look. His body will not have changed much.”

  Dunin asked, “He is older than you?”

  “No, dear, a little younger.”

  But Spearman seemed older by far, appearing abruptly in the doorway, arms spread against its frame, face thrust intently forward and eyes squinting as if they troubled him. He wore a black loincloth of bark fabric, nothing else. His sparse hair was wholly gray with streaks of white at the temples, his cheeks, leathery, deeply grooved, and flushed. “I didn’t believe her,” he said. Seeing him, the guards held their spears as if they were Earth-born soldiers presenting arms, then grounded the butts; they remained rigidly at attention when Spearman paid them no heed. “I didn’t suppose…” Spearman hiccuped; he rubbed both hands across his face.

  Seeing tormented uncertainty in Christopher Wright, Paul stepped forward. “Sears died, long ago. Doc and I got through, with—some of our friends.” He paused, short of the guards, and held out his hand, and Spearman stared at it, communing somehow with himself, approaching at last, clumsily, to take hold of it in the old Earth gesture. There was alcohol on his breath; his bloodshot eyes fought an open struggle with bewilderment; his handclasp was damp, unsteady, quickly withdrawn.

  “Sorry,” he said, “not well. Hard to get it through my head. Well—Christ, I’m a bit drunk. Not strange, is it…? Mijok.” His glance traveled over Pakriaa and Nisana without recognition; it lingered at Arek, but he did not speak her name. There was the beginning of a stiff smile, unreadable, as his eyes fixed on Christopher Wright.

  “Ann—reached us,” Wright said, hardly audible. “She—”

  “Why don’t you speak up, man?”

  “She came along the coast,” Wright said, not much more clearly. “The baby died—a little while before she reached us.”

  Spearman blinked, glanced at his hands, let them drop. He noticed the tight soldiers; in the antique military manner of Earth he said, “At ease.…”

  The spearwomen relaxed part way, eyes front. “Maybe,” Spearman said, “maybe you came too soon.”

  “What do you mean?” Paul asked. “We had to come as soon as we knew you were alive.… Are your other children well, Ed? Are they here?”

  “Oh…? Yes, I see.… You came too soon. I still have a little town of seven or eight thousand and some very loyal followers.”

  Wright struck his fist into his palm. “We are not your enemies. We never were. There was a place for you at Adelphi. There is now.”

  “Oh…? I can imagine it. So—Ann—”

  “Ann came back to us. It took her a hundred days, she says. She was—is—skin and bone—”

  Paul said, “She’ll recover, Ed. Only needs rest and food. She wants John and David—naturally. They’re her children too, Ed.”

  Spearman said almost absently, “Are they?”

  “What!”

  “I don’t exactly believe your story, you know.… You must have been—watching—for a long time.”

  Behind him Paul heard Nisana’s miserable whisper: “What is it? What is it?” And Wright’s muffled answer: “A sickness.”

  “There’s no truth in that, Ed,” Paul said. “Five days ago we still supposed that you and Ann were lost when the lifeboat went down in the channel.”

  Spearman shrugged. “Yes—I think you’ve come too soon. You should have worked longer in the dark. We had an epidemic here. Many died. And another trouble—mental—well, you’ve kept track of that, of course: the way they’ve fallen away from me, gone back to the forest and the old life, when I could have given them a golden age. A prophet without honor.” He coughed and straightened heavy shoulders. “My God, I can’t blame the poor fools—now that I know how it was done.” His voice did not rise. “Without the conspiracy and interference, I could soon have started them in building a ship that—Never mind that now. I have the designs, of course. That what you came for?”

  Mijok broke in, utterly bewildered: “What are you saying?”

  Spearman dismissed the giant with a stare and a voice of cold politeness: “I don’t blame you either. I remember you well. I suppose you had to do whatever your god ordered, without question.…”

  The twin boys had appeared in the doorway, dressed like their father in bark fabric: slim, well-knit children, thin-faced like Ann, nine Earth years old. They halted uncertainly, perhaps driven by curiosity to violate an order of their father’s. Paul tried to smile at them, and one responded but then blushed and looked worriedly away with a hand over his mouth; the other stared like a pygmy without expression. Spearman did not appear to notice them, though Paul’s smile must have told him of their presence. Elis broke the silence: “Mijok and the others of my people do not create gods. We live by our own light so far as it reaches, without fear of the mysteries beyond it.” His voice, so seldom loud in anything but laughter, boomed and echoed back from the thatched walls. “At Adelphi, orders derive from the laws, which are made by all of us and understood by all of us.”

  “Yes,” Spearman nodded, upper lip drawn in, as one who saw his saddest predictions verified. “Yes, he would teach you to say that.”

  Arek said disgustedly, “There’s no conversation here. He listens to his own mind, no other’s. As it was on the beach, years ago—I remember—”

  Spearman said sharply, “Wright, be careful! You’ve brought your bullies here, but I ought to warn you, this is the country where I still rule. There are some left who love me and understand me.”

  Dunin muttered to Paul, “Bullies—what word is that?” Paul squeezed her wrist, a warning to be silent.

  Speaking with care and difficulty, Wright said, “Ed, your boys are about nine, Earth time. Would you say that is old enough to make certain decisions? Would you be willing, Ed, to ask them whether they want to go to Adelphi and see their mother again?”

  Spearman glanced back at them. He would be seeing, Paul knew, how the boy who had smiled was staring at Wright with his mouth fallen open, how the other’s blank look had crumpled into a grimace foretelling tears. “Now I really understand it!” Spearman said softly. “So it was a kidnaping—a real kidnaping. I simply would not believe it when my messengers came from Spearman City—but I should have known, I should have known. You stole Ann in order to get my children too, for your—”

  There was a murmuring among the guard and in the crowd of pygmy spectators who had gathered at a safe distance. Uncomprehendingly, Paul saw a few wildly pointing arms, saw one of the guards throw away her spear and run blindly down the street. Others were doing the same. The swelling murmur was broken by thin screams. Those of the guard who remained were staring into the northeast quarter of the sky, where a break in the trees permitted a view of it, and they were transfixed—the guard and Spearman’s boys and now Spearman himself, glaring at that blue patch of morning heaven with total unbelief. But then Spearman did believe it, was perhaps the first to believe it, tears starting from his gray eyes and running unregarded down the hard channels of his face. “From home! Home—oh, my God, so long a time…!”

  The spot seemed small and slow in its descent, riding on a cushion of flame brighter than sunlight.…

  The Vestoian pygmies were all running now. Not into their houses, nor the palace, but away down the tree-sheltered streets, a mindless stampede, weapons tossed away with an agonized crying of tiny voices.

  Paul’s eyes found it, held it, saw the white flame change to a vast outpouring of brilliant green like the burning of copper. “Charlesite!” Spearman cried. “They’ve found how to use charlesite for braking! No radioactivity.”

  The ship must be aiming for the open ground twenty miles away. They could hear the roaring now, almost gentle with distance.

  Arek’s red arm became a warmth over Paul�
�s shoulders. She said, “I’m afraid.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The gap in the leaves was blank, the green flame gone. Edmund Spearman gazed at the spot where the descending ship had been, unaware of his sons, unaware that his pygmy followers had been scattered by fear as swallows are scattered by a storm; unaware, Paul guessed, of the two men who had been friends and now were strangers—but these he presently saw again. His gray eyes measured Paul and Wright, the unspeaking giants, the small shaken figures of Pakriaa and Nisana and Miniaan, as if they were rocks or tree stumps and his only problem how to step around them. Addressing Wright and Arek, whose big arm was still warm around his shoulders, Paul said carefully, “It will come down on the meadow ground about twenty miles from here. They must have seen Vestoia from the air; they probably made sure there was no settlement in the open land.”

  Wright whispered, “It may not even have been from Earth.”

  “Oh!” Mijok’s black lips smiled. “It is, Doc. I forget our eyes are better at distance. You didn’t see the letters? Black on silver, reaching halfway up the body of the ship. J-E-N-S-E-N.”

  “So?” In Wright’s face was a sudden blaze of belief.

  Spearman stared. He said, “Quite an imagination. Glad it was you who made it up, and not one of the men who knew the real Jensen—a name that ought not to be taken in vain.”

  “I have good eyes,” said Mijok gently. “I made up nothing.”

  Spearman’s eyebrows lifted, a fury of mimic politeness. He stepped around the group as if they were not rocks but dangerous animals. He passed down the street in long strides, not looking back even for his sons. Paul stupidly watched him go, saw him reach the turning by the meat-slave stockade and break into a loping run. Stout Muson muttered, “So changed! What sickness could make such a change?”