New America (15 page)

“Unlikely, of course. The point is, the news had made him realize how suffocated he is in this smug backwater we’ve become. Oh, yes, we have big jobs ahead of us. But who will do them? People exactly like us? If so, what’ll there be afterwards, except sitting back and admiring the achievements of the ancestors?

“I’ll tell you what there’ll be. Hell to pay!

“I’ve heard a great deal of worry expressed about creating a rootless, impoverished proletariat, with no stake or interest in continuing the society that bred it. Ladies and gentlemen, have you considered the danger in creating a proletariat of the soul?

“Let
foreigners in. Welcome unexpected insights, weird ways, astonishing thoughts and feelings. We may not always like them—probably we often won’t—but we’ll experience them and they’ll make us look to the foundations of our own beliefs. If there’s anything at all to the idea of liberty and individual worth, which we’re supposed to be keeping alive, then on the whole, we’ll be the better for being challenged. And it works two ways, you know. They’ll learn from us. Together, the old and the new dweller on Rustum will do and think what neither alone could dream.”

Coffin drew breath. He had gotten a little dizzy from so much talking. Sweat was on his skin and his knees shook.

He finished hoarse-voiced: “As most of you know, seeing how I brag about them, I have a couple of great-grandchildren. I don’t want to protect them from the cosmos, any more than that boy I met wants to be protected.

“No, they deserve better.”

When, after lunations, the debates were ended, the hard bargains driven, the resolutions drawn and passed, the law established that Rustum would greet and help the offspring of Earth—

Daniel Coffin sat alone in his room in the de Smet house. He had turned off the fluoros. Moonlight streamed through an open window, icy as the air. Afar reached the taut silence of winter night, barely disturbed by a rumble from the river, whose hardness had begun to break into floes under a first faint flowing of spring.

The coldness touched Eva’s portrait on a table. He picked it up. His hand trembled. He was very tired; it would be good to lie down and rest.

“Sweetheart,” he whispered. “I wish you could have seen.” He shook his head, ran fingers through his hair.
Maybe you did? I don’t know.

“You see,” he told his memory of her, “I did what I did because that was what you’d have wanted. Only because of you.”

Publisher’s Note:

Here ends the story of High America. But other worlds than Rustum were to receive the seed of Earth. Each responded in its own way to the men and women who had fled their own ruined planet…

THE QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS

The last glow of the last sunset would linger almost until midwinter. But there would be no more day, and the northlands rejoiced. Blossoms opened, flamboyance on firethorn trees, steel-flowers rising blue from the brake and rainplant that cloaked all hills, shy whiteness of kiss-me-never down in the dales. Flitteries darted among them on iridescent wings; a crownbuck shook his horns and bugled. Between horizons the sky deepened from purple to sable. Both moons were aloft, nearly full, shining frosty on leaves and molten on waters. The shadows they made were blurred by an aurora, a great blowing curtain of light across half heaven. Behind it the earliest stars had come out.

A boy and a girl sat on Wolund’s Barrow just under the dolmen it upbore. Their hair, which streamed halfway down their backs, showed startlingly forth, bleached as it was by summer. Their bodies, still dark from that season, merged with earth and bush and rock, for they wore only garlands. He played on a bone flute and she sang. They had lately become lovers. Their age was about sixteen, but they did not know this, considering themselves Outlings and thus indifferent to time, remembering little or nothing of how they had once dwelt in the lands of men.

His notes piped cold around her voice:

“Cast a spell,

weave it well

of dust and dew and

night and you.”

A brook by the grave mound, carrying moonlight down to a hill-hidden river, answered with its rapids. A flock of hellbats passed black beneath the aurora.

A shape came bounding over Cloudmoor. It had two arms and two legs, but the legs were long and claw-footed and feathers covered it to the end of a tail and broad wings. The face was half human, dominated by its eyes. Had Ayoch been able to stand wholly erect, he would have reached to the boy’s shoulder.

The girl rose. “He carries a burden,” she said. Her vision was not meant for twilight like that of a northland creature born, but she had learned how to use every sign her senses gave her. Besides the fact that ordinarily a pook would fly, there was a heaviness to his haste.

“And he comes from the south.” Excitment jumped in the boy, sudden as a green flame that went across the constellation Lyrth. He sped down the mound. “Ohoi, Ayoch!” he called. “Me here, Mistherd!”

“And Shadow-of-a-Dream,” the girl laughed, following.

The pook halted. He breathed louder than the soughing in the growth around him. A smell of bruised yerba lifted where he stood.

“Well met in winterbirth,” he whistled. “You can help me bring this to Carheddin.”

He held out what he bore. His eyes were yellow lanterns above. It moved and whimpered.

“Why, a child,” Mistherd said.

“Even as you were, my son, even as you were. Ho, ho, what a snatch!” Ayoch boasted. “They were a score in yon camp by Fallowwood, armed, and besides watcher engines they had big ugly dogs aprowl while they slept. I came from above, however, having spied on them till I knew that a handful of dazedust—”

“The poor thing.” Shadow-of-a-Dream took the boy and held him to her small breasts. “So full of sleep yet, aren’t you?” Blindly, he sought a nipple. She smiled through the veil of her hair. “No, I am still too young, and you already too old. But come, when you wake in Carheddin under the mountain, you shall feast.”

“Yo-ah,” said Ayoch very softly. “She is abroad and has heard and seen. She comes.” He crouched down, wings folded. After a moment Mistherd knelt, and then Shadow-of-a-Dream, though she did not let go the child.

The Queen’s tall form blocked off the moons. For a while she regarded the three and their booty. Hill and moor sounds withdrew from their awareness until it seemed they could hear the north-lights hiss.

As last Ayoch whispered, “Have I done well, Starmother?”

“If you stole a babe from the camp full of engines,” said the beautiful voice, “then they were folk out of the far south who may not endure it as meekly as yeomen.”

“But what can they do, Snowmaker?” the pook asked. “How can they track us?”

Mistherd lifted his head and spoke in pride. “Also, now they too have felt the awe of us.”

“And he is a cuddly dear,” Shadow-of-a-Dream said. “And we need more like him, do we not, Lady Sky?”

“It had to happen in some twilight,” agreed she who stood above. “Take him onward and care for him. By this sign,” which she made, “is he claimed for the Dwellers.”

Their joy was freed. Ayoch cartwheeled over the ground till he reached a shiverleaf. There he swarmed up the trunk and out on a limb, perched half hidden by unrestful pale foliage, and crowed. Boy and girl bore the child toward Carheddin at an easy distance-devouring lope which let him pipe and her sing:

“Wahaii, wahaii!

Wayala, iaii!

Wing on the wind high over heaven,

shrilly shrieking,

rush with the rainspears,

tumble through tumult,

drift to the moonhoar trees and the dream-

heavy shadows beneath them,

and rock in, be one with the clinking wavelets

of lakes where the starbeams drown.”

As she entered, Barbro Cullen felt, through all grief and fury, stabbed by dismay. The room was unkempt. Journals, tapes, reels, codices, file boxes, bescribbled papers were piled on every table. Dust filmed most shelves and corners. Against one wall stood a laboratory setup, microscope and analytical equipment. She recognized it as compact and efficient, but it was not what you would expect in an office, and it gave the air a faint chemical reek. The rug was threadbare, the furniture shabby.

This was her final chance?

Then Eric Sherrinford approached. “Good day, Mrs. Cullen,” he said. His tone was crisp, his handclasp firm. His faded gripsuit didn’t bother her. She wasn’t inclined to fuss about her own appearance except on special occasions. (And would she ever again have one, unless she got back Jimmy?) What she observed was a cat’s personal neatness.

A smile radiated in crow’s feet from his eyes. “Forgive my bachelor housekeeping. On Beowulf we have—we had, at any rate, machines for that, so I never acquired the habit myself, and I don’t want a hireling disarranging my tools. More convenient to work out of my apartment than keep a separate office. Won’t you be seated?”

“No, thanks. I couldn’t,” she mumbled.

“I understand. But if you’ll excuse me, I function best in a relaxed position.”

He jackknifed into a lounger. One long shank crossed the other knee. He drew forth a pipe and stuffed it from a pouch. Barbro wondered why he took tobacco in so ancient a way. Wasn’t Beowulf supposed to have the up-to-date equipment that they still couldn’t afford to build on Roland? Well, of course old customs might survive anyhow. They generally did in colonies, she remembered reading. People had moved starward in the hope of preserving such outmoded things as their mother tongues or constitutional government or rational-technological civilization… .

Sherrinford pulled her up from the confusion of her weariness: “You must give me the details of your case, Mrs. Cullen. You’ve simply told me your son was kidnapped and your local constabulary did nothing. Otherwise, I know just a few obvious facts, such as your being widowed rather than divorced; and you’re the daughter of out-wayers in Olga Ivanoff Land, who nevertheless kept in close telecommunication with Christmas Landing; and you’re trained in one of the biological professions; and you had several years’ hiatus in field work until recently you started again.”

She gaped at the high-cheeked, beak-nosed, black-haired and gray-eyed countenance. His lighter made a
scrit
and a flare which seemed to fill the room. Quietness dwelt on this height above the city, and winter dusk was seeping through the windows. ‘How in cosmos do you know that?” she heard herself exclaim.

He shrugged and fell into the lecturer’s manner for which he was notorious. “My work depends on noticing details and fitting them together. In more than a hundred years on Roland, tending to cluster according to their origins and thought-habits, people have developed regional accents. You have a trace of the Olgan burr, but you nasalize your vowels in the style of this area, though you live in Portolondon. That suggests steady childhood exposure to metropolitan speech. You were part of Matsuyama’s expedition, you told me, and took your boy along. They wouldn’t have allowed any ordinary technician to do that; hence, you had to be valuable enough to get away with it. The team was conducting ecological research; therefore, you must be in the life sciences. For the same reason, you must have had previous field experience. But your skin is fair, showing none of the leatheriness one gets from prolonged exposure to this sun. Accordingly, you must have been mostly indoors for a good while before you went on your ill-fated trip. As for widowhood—you never mentioned a husband to me, but you have had a man whom you thought so highly of that you will wear both the wedding and the engagement ring he gave you.”

Her sight blurred and stung. The last of those words had brought Tim back, huge, ruddy, laughterful and gentle. She must turn from this other person and stare outward. “Yes,” she achieved saying, “you’re right.”

The apartment occupied a hilltop above Christmas Landing. Beneath it the city dropped away in walls, roofs, archaistic chimneys and lamplit streets, goblin lights of human-piloted vehicles, to the harbor, the sweep of Venture Bay, ships bound to and from the Sunward Islands and remoter regions of the Boreal Ocean, which glimmered like mercury in the afterglow of Charlemagne. Oliver was swinging rapidly higher, a mottled orange disc a full degree wide; closer to the zenith which it could never reach, it would shine the color of ice. Aide, half the seeming size, was a thin slow crescent near Sirius, which she remembered was near Sol, but you couldn’t see Sol without a telescope—

“Yes,” she said around the pain in her throat, “my husband is about four years dead. I was carrying our first child when he was killed by a stampeding monoceros. We’d been married three years before. Met while we were both at the University—’casts from School Central can only supply a basic education, you know— We founded our own team to do ecological studies under contract—you know, can a certain area be settled while maintaining a balance of nature, what crops will grow, what hazards, that sort of question— Well, afterward I did lab work for a fisher co-op in Portolondon. But the monotony, the … shut-in-ness … was eating me away. Professor Matsuyama offered me a position on the team he was organizing to examine Commissioner Hauch Land. I thought, God help me, I thought Jimmy—Tim wanted him named James, once the tests showed it’d be a boy, after his own father and because of Timmy and Jimmy’ and—oh, I thought Jimmy could safely come along. I couldn’t bear to leave him behind for months, not at his age. We could make sure he’d never wander out of camp. What could hurt him inside it? I had never believed those stories about the Outlings stealing human children. I supposed parents were trying to hide from themselves the fact they’d been careless, they’d let a kid get lost in the woods or attacked by a pack of satans or—Well, I learned better, Mr. Sherrinford. The guard robots were evaded and the dogs were drugged, and when I woke, Jimmy was gone.”