Collected Short Fiction, page 744
“We know the difficulties.” She nodded serenely. “Grateful for them, in fact. They’re why the sacred places have never been disturbed. Your scoffing doesn’t surprise us, because the Ahya have learned to stay out of the way; but we’ve uncovered evidence to show that they had a high culture once. We hope to find it still surviving there in the basin. This is our last chance for a real contact before it is destroyed.”
Leaning toward him, wide-eyed and breathless, full lips quivering with feeling, she triggered a painful pang of desire. Three women had left him: the passionate redhead who tried to baptize him, the witty little artist from the hotlands who found she couldn’t stand the Northcape cold, the lithe-limbed dancer who loved it so much she gave him up for a ski instructor.
Leda Lovato’s urgent nearness chilled him now with a sudden bitter loneliness. He wished for a moment that he could somehow pick her up, but he had resolved not to let himself be hurt again. The High Cascades and the Farside fringes had always offered him deeper mysteries and more enduring beauties than any woman owned, and they had never betrayed him. Quickly, almost guiltily, he looked away from Leda to Padhai’s red-scarred austerity. No doubt she belonged to him.
“The Ahya did try to welcome the first explorers,” her quick voice ran on. “The incident is mentioned in the first reports that got back to Earth, a hundred years before we left. They approached several landing parties, trying to communicate through varied channels. Modulated sound, from their siphons. Modulated light—their species is luminous, remember. Even modulated radio frequencies.
“But they showed no material technology, no visible weapons or tools, nothing to interest those machine-minded Earthmen—except, of course, their radio signals. A few of them were killed and dissected in unsuccessful efforts to find out how those were generated—one tape in the archives compares the creatures to Terran electric eels.
“They soon got enough. They’ve avoided us since then, and we’ve almost forgotten them. We just weren’t concerned about the possibilities of the non-material. We were looking for the sort of thing you have here.” She waved at the window as if to obliterate the silver cones of Chong and the mirror-domed turbines beneath the red-lit wonder of the falls. “Tools to conquer nature, not the wisdom to merge into it.”
“Listen!” Norlund was on his feet, stung by her scorn. “Let me tell you what we have.”
Almost mockingly, she shrugged.
“First, you must understand the tides.” He slowed himself carefully, trying to reach her with reason. “Though Medea keeps Hotside always toward Argo, its axis is a little tipped, so that Argo oscillates north and south in the sky. Only six degrees, but it’s a massive object. The tidal forces are enormous.”
“So?” Padhai frowned. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“In the tropics, you wouldn’t. It’s the polar coasts that feel the heavy tides. A lot depends on the shape of the land. In the funnel-shaped Zaret inlet east of Northcape, there’s a tidal bore that rises five kilometers every Medean day. It pumps over into the Mushanga Sea—which is actually a great tidal lake.”
“Interesting.” Without interest, Padhai flung out his dark-robed arm in an impatient gesture that sent a wave of his puzzling camphor scent across the desk. “But what have Medean tides to do with us?”
“Plenty.” Norlund grinned. “Without them, you wouldn’t be here now. Certainly you couldn’t hope to reach the Banda Basin. We’ve drilled tunnels under the falls to tap the Mushanga Sea for hydroelectric power—the life of Northcape. It heats this room. It drives our industries. It grows our hydroponic food.”
He turned back to the girl, more hopeful that she would understand.
“Before we came, there was only patchy tundra here. The cape was too cold for the fuxes or the balloons or the early colonists. With tidal power, we’ve made an ecological niche for humanity on Medea. A clean new place, all our own—at least until a few smart fuxes began sneaking in.”
“Thank you, Mr. Norlund.” Her tone was only slightly warmer. “You help me see why the early colonists were so quick to forget their great original mission. Fighting for sheer physical survival, I suppose they had no energy left for anything else.”
“I’m no mystic.” He tried again to explain himself, to earn her sympathy. “I do understand physical energy—the power of these tides, of Argo’s heat, of the solar flares. I can see life as a manifestation of energy flow. I have a feeling for the High Cascades.” He waved at their red splendor, beyond the window. “The same sort of feeling, I would guess, that you must have for God. The turbine complex under the falls is almost a temple for me, a place of great and beautiful machines that obey known laws and run for human good.” He grinned at her mute protest. “What I don’t understand is the universal truth you say you hope to discover by watching a few dying firebags fall out of the sky.”
“Perhaps you’ll learn,” she said, “when we come to the Banda Basin.”
“I haven’t agreed to go.”
“Mr. Sakuma said you might be difficult.” She smiled serenely. “I told him we have a way to persuade you.”
II.
They left the docks of the city of Chong on a bright spring Sunday to ride the ebbing tide down Black Canyon to the sea. With the double sun just clearing the looming eastern cliffs the High Cascades had been carving through geologic ages, the wind was brisk and raw.
Norlund stood among his five companions beside the three antiquated ice-crawlers chained and chocked to the deck of the small coast survey ship: Padhai and Leda Lovato, still awkward and uneasy in their stiff new thermal gear, and the three hard men he had found at last to join them, tough veterans of the Northcape frontiers with skill and nerve enough to risk the Farside trip.
Nannuk, the moon-faced nuke engineer, who kept insisting cheerily that the Banda Basin could be no worse than the tundras and the polar seas his Inupik forefathers had known back on the motherworld. Floreal, the wiry glacier guide who loved the ice and claimed to hate it, always saving his pay to buy a safe little Northcape bar but always squandering or giving his savings away and signing on for one more final trip. Dork, the lean, black-bearded geologist, a silent but explosive man, driven by unresting inner urges that made him question everything, kept him tossing pebbles at the sky for target practice or trying to beat the master chess program in his pocket computer.
Norlund felt lifted by a brief elation. After months of effort and tension, they were really on the way. Though the tensions waiting ahead would surely be more severe and the efforts far more desperate, they would be going where men had never been. He didn’t expect the dying firebags to unit them with any mystic galactic supermind; but he was suddenly looking forward, with an eagerness that surprised him, to all the challenges of reaching the Banda Basin and surviving there.
Chong was built on a river bend, safely above the highest tides. The water along the docks was shallow and slack, but soon they were on the deep current that rushed down from the falls. The silver roofs whirled away. Looking beyond them at the endless walls of tidal water thundering down into yellow mist, he wondered a little wistfully if he would ever see Northcape again.
“Magnificent!” Leda stood close beside him, warmly friendly since things were going her way. “Nothing back on Earth is half so wonderful. I see why you love it.”
In the early skirmishes with her and Padhai, he had suffered several stinging defeats and earned a single little victory. The first surrender had been his agreement to go, his hard resolution crumpling before her shrewd appeal. In the Medeana archives, she had found an early orbital survey that reported indications of radioactive deposits on the high plateau that sloped up beyond the glaciers to the worn mountain ridge that rimmed the basin. When he refused to be impressed, she went back to Sakuma.
“Our tidal power is plentiful but stationary,” Sakuma reminded him. “We still depend on nukes for ships and aircraft. If there really is uranium or thorium on that plateau, we need it. I know the climate up there is pretty grim, but men like you can find ways to get it out.”
“I don’t like bringing your machine technology any closer to the Ahya,” Leda admitted when at last he gave up. “But if the ore is really there, you’d find it in spite of us. When we reach the Ahya, we’ll try to warn them, to protect them as far as we can.”
“When?” He was grinning, amused at the will beneath her wide-eyed charm. “Better say if!”
The next setback came when he wanted to leave her behind. “We’ll be out there alone a good many months,” he cautioned Padhai. “If, in fact, we do get back. A long way from any authority and under conditions that can test civilized behavior. We can’t take a woman—”
“Lovato has to come.”
“Not with us. She’s too young. Too—well, appealing. I’m afraid of what might happen. Though I’m looking for decent men, they’ll be vigorous and normal—and armed. You yourself could be in danger, sir.”
“I?” Padhai’s droop-lidded stare held icy indignation. “You assume too much. Lovato and I are not lovers.” After a moment he added, not so sternly: “It’s true we might have been, but we have sacrificed the physical—at least until our work is done.”
The man was insane, Norlund thought. And most unfair to Leda.
“She’s the linguist,” he was explaining. “She has studied all the old records of contacts with the Ahya and all the known languages of their more primitive cousins. She has spent months on a chartered ship, tracing their migrations by radar and recording their own radio signals. Now she has programmed everything useful into a very expensive computer-translator. I couldn’t run it. When we reach the sacred places, she will be the vital link to the higher mind we seek.”
They had beaten him once more, when he wanted to make at least most of the trip by air.
“We can fly to the basin rim,” he suggested. “Or anyhow to the lower plateau, beyond the glaciers. Saving months of time and a good deal of danger—”
“Danger? The danger is that we might alarm the Ahya.” Hoarsely violent, Padhai cut him off. “We’ll take no aircraft. Nothing fast or powerful. We go by sea to the glacier foot. Then by surface crawler.”
“Which may be safer for us, after all.” Leda gave him a quick, apologetic smile. “We’ve uncovered evidence enough that the Ahya don’t like machinery near the basin. There are reliable reports that they have exploded themselves against aircraft that got too near.”
His one small victory came when they tried to disarm the expedition.
“The Ahya fear weapons,” Padhai announced. “With cause enough. We’ll carry none.”
“You don’t know Medea,” Norlund told him.
“We’ve been five years here.”
“In the hotland colonies. They’re pretty well defended. Even here in Chong, life seems safe enough. But there are human renegades and native predators—”
“Down on Hotside.” Padhai scowled through his scar. “I believe the Banda Basin is too cold for most sorts of life.”
“Could be.” Norlund shrugged. “But we wear guns.” He nodded at the holster that hung with his flaremask beside the office door. “I don’t think you’ll find anybody to take you to the basin without his own weapons.”
“You’re afraid?” Leda’s dark eyes narrowed at his hanging gun. “Afraid of the Ahya?”
“I don’t know the Ahya.” He ignored her cutting tone. “I do know Medea. The effort to run an Earth-style socialism down in the hotlands has never worked well. Free spirits keep cutting out, and some go wild. I wear a gun.”
A bend in the canyon had hidden the splendor of the High Cascades before they met the foaming crest of the tide. Riding that rush of wild water down to the sea was an adventure in navigation that Norlund always enjoyed, but Padhai showed no zest for adventure.
“Come along.” Curtly, the tall mystic turned his back on whirling currents and spray-drenched rocks and racing cliffs. “We’ve plans to make.”
Down in his cabin, that persistent camphor reek was strong. Among the charts where he wanted to lay out their route to the glacier coast and over the ice and across the highlands to the Banda Basin, Norlund saw an odd little soot-blackened lamp and learned the secret of Padhai’s odor. He burned tiny sticks of a precious wood he called camphor laurel, brought all the way from Earth.
“For meditation,” Impatiently, he pushed the lamp aside. “A sacred incense. It nourishes the spirit.”
When Norlund got back to the deck, they were out of the estuary. The suns had set, and the tall cliffs of Northcape were only a faint red line in Argo’s glow. That night the captain caught the vast tidal eddy in the Ring Ocean that swept them south till that huge, dark-streaked, sullen disk was visibly higher; east through oily seas choked with vinegar-scented crimson weed; north again toward the Farside coast and on into the latitude of storms.
A late polar front struck them there. For three long Medean days—each a three-day week of human time—the savage weather kept them all below the deck. Norlund was afraid the crawlers might be lost, but when the storm was over he found them safe, frozen beneath half a meter of ice.
They steered out of the tidal eddy.
“A tricky thing,” the captain told him. “It’s an ugly coast, even here below the glacier bays, but we have to keep near enough to steer into the Chikamatsu fjord. Miss that, and we’re caught in the Zaret bore. Whatever floats, you’ll find in the Mushanga Sea, coming back across the falls.”
Neatly, the old seaman brought it off. Catching the crest of a rising, weed-clotted flood, he steered them close to an ice-capped granite headland and into the fjord. The climbing tide carried them up its ice-carved channel and through the white-streaked narrows into a long calm lake, where tall ice-masses drifted in deep water green with rock flour.
“A glacial lake,” the captain said. “As far as we can go.” He dropped his voice, for Norlund alone. “You understand that we’re to wait here only through the summer—we’ll be making a coastal survey. We’ll have to leave before the first winter freeze-up. If you aren’t back by then—I’m afraid you’ll never be.”
He moored against a jutting rock where they could hoist the crawlers ashore. Heavy, steel-tracked machines, they were the model designed a hundred years ago by the first Northcape explorers. With loving skill, Nannuk had rebuilt these three from the best parts of a dozen he had found rusting in junkyards.
Climbing from that hazardous landing to the glacier, they followed a U-shaped valley the ice had cut in some wetter age, grinding over rockslides and wallowing through bogs still stiff with winter ice. Norlund and Floreal led the way at first, with Padhai and Leda in the second machine, the geologist and the nuke mechanic behind. The Seekers stalled their crawler in the first ice-bog, however, and Padhai refused to try to drive again when he learned that its power was nuclear. Floreal took the wheel, and Leda elected to ride with Norlund.
“I guess you think we’re pretty stupid?” She looked sharply at him. “Hating the machines we must use.”
He shrugged. “Anyhow, I’m glad to have you with me.”
Here on the lower glacier, still below the retreating snowline, driving was difficult, especially with the three machines tied together against the dangers of cliffs and crevasses. They lurched and skidded over slick ice hummocks, splashed across torrents of meltwater, pitched and crunched through exposed boulder-beds. Yet, with only half his mind left for Leda, he enjoyed her childish delight in each new vista and her excited sense that they were attempting an ultimate adventure. Aware of his task, she kept silent through the times of stress. When smoother ice let him relax, she began—with a candor that surprised him—to talk about herself.
Her great-grandfather had been a brujo in a mountainous land called Chihuahua, a man of primitive wisdom in an age too late. When starvation came, his son had walked north across the deserts to a richer land where he became a poor farm worker. Her_ father had been a miner, her mother a follower of movements, of this great new cause and that, always meeting and writing and speaking, with no time to make a home. She herself had been a college student at a place called Tulsa when she first met Padhai—Dr. Aum.
A poor student, she said, confused about the meaning of life and uncertain what she wanted from it. After a sad love affair that left her still a virgin, she had tried to kill herself. Her roommate, a girl in the college Seeker Society, had stopped the blood and saved her life, had taken her to hear Dr. Aum when he came to lecture on the campus. When she learned about the future he promised, the mystic union with a universal mind, everything had changed.
After the lecture, she nerved herself to speak to him. He smiled and encouraged her. With meaning now in her life, she had earned Seeker scholarships and fellowships to study linguistics and computer science. She graduated into a research position in the Seeker Society, with the right to wear its symbol. And, finally, Dr. Aum had chosen her to come with him to Medea.
“A great man!” An awed devotion trembled in her voice. “Truly great. His goal is the noblest thing a man could dream of. If he does succeed—and I know he will—he’ll be recognized as the greatest member of our race.”
“You love him, don’t you?”
“Love?” The word seemed to startle her. “We are united.” Looking sharply at him, she added with a child’s directness: “We’ve never had sex. Later, I hope. Now, he says, it might risk our mission.” Her grave eyes studied him. “Perhaps you think we’re foolish?”
Glad for a reason not to answer, he gripped the wheel and swung the crawler to avoid a half-concealed crevasse. Though he didn’t want to get involved again, Leda had begun to haunt his imagination. If she hadn’t been a Seeker—
She went back to Padhai’s crawler when a late spring blizzard stopped them, so blinding that they dared not move. It howled through a long Medean day. Sealed and heated against it, the crawler was secure enough, but Norlund found himself dreaming too often of her, and he had to apologize for his abruptness with Floreal for Floreal’s crude speculations about her relationship with Padhai.
