Collected Short Fiction, page 839
Nothing followed.
My own career had gone nowhere. I abandoned history to study interstellar navigation and spent a few years as a copilot, but Holaine still haunted my memory. On impulse, after a dark night in too many bars, I quit my job on a freight line and set out to find her. A clerk at the survey office gave me the last-known coordinates of Q845K. and warned me not to trust them.
“They’re a thousand years old. The last fly-bys reported no radio contact. Nothing since.” He frowned at my license badge. “As you know, sir, skip navigation and skip signals depend on very precise locations. Stars drift. You might never find the planet. More likely lose yourself.”
In spite of the warning, I spent my savings for a little single-seat hyper-time skipship that had a million light-years on the log after twenty years of service, and used the survey data to plot a course out into Octant 8. The seventh skip left me within a few light-days of a bright white star. The eighth let me locate a single Earth-type planet.
The ninth skip took me down to orbit. It was Q845K, only a bit larger than Earth, a bit farther from the star. One wide continent lapped across the equator from an ice cap over the north pole. A chain of snow-capped summits curved down the west coast. Gray-brown deserts spread east across the temperate latitudes and a dense cloud cover veiled the tropics.
Scanning the radio spectrum, I got only silence. Calls to Holaine on the universal emergency bands brought nothing. I dropped low enough to sweep the planet with binoculars and found no industrial smoke, no roads, no patterns of farms or cities.
Instead a riddle: seven silver globes flying high above the tropic ocean, holding to a neat V-formation. They looked too large for anything natural, moved too slowly for any ordinary aircraft. Balloons? I’d never seen balloons in formation. The planet’s rotation took them out of view. Clouds had thickened when the ocean returned. I tailed to find them again, and called myself a fool. Perhaps Holaine had never got here. Perhaps she had come and gone. She might never want me, even if I found her.
Yet I’d come too far to quit. I picked a landing spot near a fleck of green in a flat expanse of desert, skipped down into the atmosphere and flew low across a tinyoasis. Palni-like trees lined a narrow lake behind a dam on a dry streambed. I found a single building, or the min of one, and turned back to study it again. A thick stone column, perhaps a hundred feet tall, it stood on a barren ridge beside the lake. A spiral stair wound around it to a flat platform at the top. I saw no openings. Stones crumbling from the edge of the platform had carried sections of the stair away.
I was circling back to look again when something flashed in the cockpit. The instrument lights blinked out. The jets gone silent, the ship went into a dive. I tried to skip away and found the skip engine dead. I pulled out of the dive into a glide across the lake, looking for anywhere to land.
Something flashed again. Something in the instrument console smoked and reeked of heat. I found a big silver globe in the air over the tower and wondered if it had hit me. The ship was veering aside. I fought the controls, got across the lakeshore, and came down too fast toward a rocky ridge above it.
I don’t recall the impact; I must have been knocked out, though only for a moment. The ship had slid down the summit, tipped, and stopped on its side. Hanging there, helpless, I felt an instant of insane relief. My senseless quest was over. I had nothing left except the impulse to stay alive.
I heard something dripping and caught the reek of spilled jet fuel. I unlocked the safety restraints, climbed out of the wreck, and stumbled down the hill. Before I had gone a dozen yards, I heard an explosion behind me and felt a blast of heat. I staggered farther, to a rock where I could sit and get my breath.
The flames roared high behind me. Sitting there, battered and trembling, I felt utterly helpless. I’d had food and bottled water in the luggage bin, camping equipment, even a deadly little handgun. I heard the ammunition popping, and felt myself the idiot Holaine had called me.
The fire died out and I stood up to look around me and found the silver globe again, now sinking toward that lone tower. No common balloon, it had no ropes or basket. I saw no weaponry, but I thought it must have fired whatever brought me down.
It stopped and held steady just above the tower platform. A spidery ladder folded out of it. A man-shaped figure came down. Not quite human, it was naked and gray, moving with a fluid robotic grace. Standing at the crumbled edge of the platform, it stood motionless a few minutes and climbed back into the globe. The ladder folded after it. The globe lifted and climbed away into a cumulus tuft.
I was limping down toward the lake when I heard a roll of drums and found a little group of people marching toward me in a sort of ragged order. Three drummers led, their instruments tuned to make an odd harmony. I waited, watching uneasily. They were brown-bodied and lean, half-naked, half-clad in leather and animal fur. They carried wicked-looking knives and spears. One man dragged an unwilling goat on a rope.
They halted nor far from me, and dropped to their knees. The leader, an iron-bearded, hawk-faced giant in red-beaded buckskin, began a chant, timed to the rhythm of the drums. When he paused, his followers responded in chorus. The language seemed half familiar, and I thought I caught a repeated refrain.
“Oh master man, take mercy on us,” it seemed to go. “Oh master man, take mercy on us!”
I was not sure of the words, or master of anything. All I could do was stand there, wondering if Holaine had ever reached the planet, yet feeling a vast relief that my own fate now seemed to matter more than hers.
The chanting went oil till my knees felt weak front standing. At last the leader stopped the chant and beckoned to the man with the bleating goat. He and another held it up by the hind legs. The leader drew his blade, slit its throat, and caught the blood in a pottery bowl. He knelt again and offered it to me.
My stomach recoiled, but I put it to my lips, handed it back, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. He rose, sipped it, passed it to the others. They gutted the dead goat, tied the legs together, ran a spear between them, hoisted it, and trotted off around the lake.
The leader beckoned for me to follow. The others fell in behind us and the drummers beat a rapid march. Limping to keep up, I fought a bewildered dread. Clearly, they had taken me for somebody I wasn’t. Would I go the way of the goat when they found out the truth?
A narrow footpath took us over the dam. I saw green plots below it and water flowing in an irrigation “ditch. Beyond the lake, the path led us up a long slope into to an odd tittle village: a score of grass-roofed huts set in a half-circle a round an open space. Flat stones for seats were arranged before a crudely hewn block of some black stone, just at the foot of the tower.
The leader gestured me into a seat. They all bowed and knelt. The leader sprang to the stone block, bowed to the sky above the tower, and renewed his chant. Again I caught the phrase “master man,” and thought I’d begun to understand. If I could learn enough to play the role, it might keep me alive. If I failed—
I tried not to dwell upon that.
While the chant went on, women were skinning the goat, cutting it into chunks, roasting hen on an open hearth in the center of the square. The chant stopped at last, and women brought jars of a bitter, beer-like brew. The leader knelt to offer a mug of it to me, then a slab of goat meat on a piece of tough brown bread. When the meal was over, he beckoned me into a hut.
It was one tiny windowless room, furnished with a rough wooden bench, a little table, and a narrow bed made of rawhide strips woven over a frame of something like bamboo. He left me there alone, a prisoner there. I saw no escape except to play the game of master man, with rules I would have to learn.
Night was falling. I lay there in the dark, aching from my bruises and groping for hope, trying to imagine the history of the planet, wondering what had killed its civilization, till something roused me. I saw a light and found a woman in the doorway carrying a flickering candle.
Not speaking, she se: the candle on the table and stood back to let me see her. Young and tall, she moved with a lean-featured grace.
Sleek black hair fell flee to her waist, and a garland of bright red blooms filled room with fragrance. She wore a short skirt and a fringed buckskin jacket. Motionless for a moment, she stripped them off, tossed them to the floor, and stood glaring at me with a mix of dread and stolid defiance.
Clearly she expected me to rape her. If that was part of the game, it was a move I was not prepared to make. I picked up the jacket and reached to hand it to her. She shrank away, but let me drape it back around her high-breasted body I sat back on the edge of the bed and tried to smile. She stood there, staring at me warily, till it struck me that she could be my teacher.
I began touching parts of my face, repeating the names, waiting for her to respond. She soon caught on. Relaxing a little, her hostile silence thawing, she began giving me words and correcting my accents. The lesson went on till I was groggy for sleep. I lay down and beckoned for her to leave.
Instead, she lay down beside me, nude against me in the narrow bed. Trying to ignore her live wannth and good scent, I lay awake a long time and finally fell into an uneasy sleep, haunted with nightmare dreams. I thought she was Holaine, wearing bright-beaded buckskins till she stripped them off to tempt me.
She had stolen this girl’s beauty and the long black hair. She always danced away when I tried to touch her, and said she had work to do. I woke and woke again with hard erections and tided in vain to put a little distance between us. The room grew colder and she always snuggled closer.
I woke at last alone in the bed, bright sunlight falling through the open doorway She had spread a blanket over me. Standing beside me now, she offered a hot mug of that bitter brew and then a bowl of something like oatmeal boiled with bits of goat meat. She was silent, her eyes cast down, but she ate with me when I let her share the worn metal spoon.
When I wanted to relieve myself, she showed me to a malodorous pit down below the village, waited till I was ready, walked behind me down to the lake and back. We resumed the lessons. The language was a dialect of Cosmish, the lingua franca of the starways. Words had been lost and added, accents and vowel values confusingly shifted, but she had become a bright and apt instructor.
Her name was Narayana. Her people were Sek Korar. Or was that the name of the village? Distinctions were hard to establish. She bowed and fell silent when we saw the chief mount the black stone and begin a chant. His name was Kye Kyrel. I caught the phrase “master men” again, but I felt afraid that any questions might reveal too much about me.
With no clock or calendar. I lost track of time. Narayana stayed with me day and night, a watchful slave, dutifully attentive to my every whim. Sleeping with her in the same narrow bed, I tried to deny desire and found myself imagining impossible moments of her companionship in a free life back at home.
I earned more of her language; she learned a little of mine. I asked about her own fife. She had no family Her parents had been killed by marauders she called Sek Ronar, “those who never walk.” When I asked about them, she brought a piece of slate and a lump of charcoal to draw a stick figure on a four-legged animal I took for a horse. They were rovers, she said, who had no home. They grew no food, made nothing useful, lived by killing and plunder.
Trying avoid anything that might give me away I picked up what I could about the master men. They lived in their homes in the sky. Once, I gathered, they had been the rulers, teachers, and friends of the “half men,” as she called her own people. They had taught the arts of fanning, of building, of healing. Their gray slaves had come down to the tower to receive the tithes, a share of the crops and the animals every year.
Now everything had changed. I couldn’t ask why, but Kyrel came to me with a litany of questions.
“Master man, have we offended you?” His voice quivered, and tears shone in his pale old eyes. “Or why have you forgotten us? Why are you blind to our poor offerings and deaf to our prayers? Why have do you dry up the rivers and the lakes and stop the kind rains? Why do you send the bitter dust of spring and the burning wind of summer and the killing cold of winter? Why do you take away the animals we hunted? Must you let us die?”
He wasn’t stupid. I didn’t know what he might believe, and I thought the whole truth could kill me.
“The decision is difficult,” I said. “It is not mine to make.”
He had seen my craft fall and bum. Shrewdly cautious with the questions, he wanted to know if there was trouble in the sky. I admitted that there had been for me. He escorted me back to the wreck, a little pile of burnt and broken metal, and examined bits of it when I gave permission.
The sky folk, Narayana explained, no longer brought new metal. It was precious. He knelt in gratitude when I gave him the wreckage, and took me to see a crude forge down below the village, where a grimy smith was burning charcoal to reshape old metal into tools and weapons.
Narayana woke me one morning, breathless with excitement.
The sky ship was coming!
We watched it sail out of a red eastern dawn and hang just above the tower. The ladder unfolded. A quick gray robot glided down to the platform, carrying a bag and a thick coil of something. A human figure followed, moving more slowly.
“Master man!” Narayana clutched my arm. “Here for you?”
I looked again; it was a woman.
The robot ran back up the ladder. It vanished after him. The woman stood at the edge of the platform, watching the globe lift, dwindle, disappear. I squinted and knew she was Holaine. She stood peering down at village and then off into the distance.
“They left her?” Narayana shook her head. “Why?”
I didn’t know.
People were crowding around the black stone. They knelt when Kyrel climbed on it. Looking up at Holaine, he chanted a prayer. She seemed not to notice. The crowd scattered, and Kyrel send a climber up to the first break in the stair. He found no way past it. Holaine seemed stuck there on the bare platform, left without food or water. Again he had Narayana question me. Did I know her, or why she had been abandoned?
I could only spread my hands.
Next morning we found Holaine still there, looking off into the east. I heard shouts. Narayana listened and clutched my arm, whispering that the Sek Romak were coming. We climbed the ridge to see them, a little file of horsemen winding down a trail.
Men armed themselves. Narayana found a deadly little dagger and offered me a machete. Lacking skill with it, I had more trust in my pilot’s badge. Women gathered their children and prepared for flight, but the horsemen stopped beyond the lake. One lone rider came over the bridge, waving a white flag on the point of a lance.
Kyrel walked to meet him. They talked and came on together, the man leading his horse. He climbed on the black stone, waved at Holaine, spoke on a telephone. We watched her lower her bag on a rope and then rappel down the side of the tower. Kyrel brought her over to the hut where I stood with Narayana. Deeply tanned, she looked lean and hard in well-worn buckskins, a sheathed blade and a holstered handgun on her belt.
“Gillyar! I never expected to see you here.” Knowingly, she grinned at Narayana, who moved closer against me. “Gone native, I see.”
I wondered why I had ever thought I loved her.
“You were with the Galactic Survey,” I said. “They’ve been expecting some kind of report about what you had found here. You once promised to keep me informed.”
“Long ago.” She shrugged, but a sudden animation lit her face. “You want to know what I’ve found here? A new life, really. A new chapter in galactic history, if I ever get it done. Right now, I’m famished.”
I asked Narayana to find a meal for her. Sitting with me at the little table in the hut, she drained a mug of beer and devoured a pone of brown bread and a cold slab of roasted goat before she paused to look up at me.
Had she met the master men?
“Dead.” She shrugged. “Dead for centuries.”
I asked for more, but she finished her meal with a slice of melon before she wiped her lips and spoke again. She had found the planet with no difficulty and studied it from orbit before she landed some two hundred miles east of where we were, in what had been a great city “Dead as the master men.”
She gestured at the empty sky.
“The first colonists found a friendlier environment, the deserts yet to come. This area was dense hardwood forest they cut for expat. Boom times, till they went wrong.”
She pushed her empty plate at Narayana, with an imperative wave for it to be taken away.
“I set the ship down among the charred stumps of dead trees in what must have been a public park. Empty mins all around it. I was there alone for weeks, but the nomads had seen me come down. They made a pilgrimage to the spot and received me like a goddess, as you ought to understand.”
She leered at Narayana.
“The role has let me carry on my research.” She nodded at the warrior waiting behind her. “Five years now. Roving the country with the nomads. Recording what they remember, which isn’t much. They’ve lost electronics. A few of them can read and write, but they don’t make paper, don’t keep archives.
“I’ve heard legends of how the master men found an empty world and sowed it with new life. They seem to have date well at first, but things went sour. The planet wasn’t so kind as it had seemed. The climate was fickle. Native microbes caused troublesome infections. People who could tried to avoid them. The result was what you see.” She nodded smugly at Narayana.
“A division into two social orders. Half mm and master men. The half men did the work, the master men kept the know-how and the power for themselves. They lived aboard their orbital ships or in protected villas outside the cities until they perfected the craft you’ve seen. They were the big riddle I had to crack.”
She glanced at the old tower.
“A landing station. There’s another on a fill near the city where I landed. In better shape than this. A sacred spot, where the half men still come to keep their peace with the gods. I watched the craft touching down there till I decided to take a lock.”
