Orion Shall Rise (51 page)

‘How do you propose to interrogate a dead man?’ Mikli scoffed.

Till raised his brows. ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’

‘We’re been searching for more than an hour. He’s a strong swimmer, but – how long would you guess a man can survive in this water before the cold kills him, Ronica?’

The woman shrugged, though sorrow dwelt on her face. ‘Half an hour, maybe,
give
or take some,’ she replied. ‘In his case, I’d take; he’s not a white man, nor used to subarctic temperatures.’

‘He could have stayed afloat long enough,’ Till said. ‘We’d soon have gotten to him, especially if he hollered. The question in my mind is whether he struck his head on a strake or something like that and immediately went under, or whether it was deliberate suicide, or – or whatever else.’ He fixed his gaze on Wairoa. ‘What have you to tell, Haakonu?’

The response might have come from a machine: ‘The noise of the lock breaking woke me. I saw him go through. He was enormously strong; it would have been easy for him. By the time I was out of my bunk, men were dashing around so busily that I deemed it best to stay where I was.’

‘But you were his friend!’ ripped from Iern. ‘You must know what he wanted, what made him do it.’
Poor Terai. His stories about his home, that he told by our campfires in the woods, made me hope to visit him there someday. I should write to his widow –when they let me, after Orion has risen…
.

‘I do not read minds,’ Wairoa said. ‘Like everybody else, I saw him brooding. He may have decided he would rather die.’

‘No,’ Ronica declared. ‘Never. He had too much life in him.’

‘Besides,’ the captain said, ‘the witnesses told me he was fully clad. If he intended suicide, why should he take that trouble beforehand?’

Mikli scratched in his beard. ‘You never know about suicides.’ he observed. ‘They do the most peculiar things. I knew a physician who contracted an inoperable cancer. Perhaps he could have been saved if we were allowed to manufacture radioisotopes. As was, he
gave himself a lethal injection. First he sterilized the needle.’

‘And Terai did belong to an alien culture,’ Iern said, however it hurt. ‘A situation like this might drive a Maurai over the brink. Is that possible, Wairoa?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the man with the mask.

Ronica slammed a fist on the table. ‘No, God damn it,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve been exposed to plenty of Maurai in my time, and I know a real he-man when I meet one, too, and in Terai’s case it is
not
possible. What are you holding back, Wairoa?’

The reply was whispery: ‘He did not confide in me. If you are thinking of drugs or torture as means to find out whether I lie, please be advised that my peculiar constitution will make it a waste of your effort.’

Ronica grimaced. ‘Krist, what sort of swine do you suppose we are?’

An idea came to excite Iern. ‘I have a suggestion,’ he said. ‘You remember I made an unlikely sort of escape myself. Terai may have hoped to do similarly. If he could – well, disable the lookout, throw heavy things to put anybody else out of action for a few minutes, lower the lifeboat –’

‘And row from us?’ Till derided. ‘Let’s imagine he raised the mast and sail before we got organized. A mighty big imagining, if you ask me. He’d still have only a fraction of our hull speed.’

‘But it’s a dark and wild night,’ Iern argued. ‘He was a physical prodigy. He just might have carried it off, and eluded you for the hour or two he’d need. How far are we from land?’

‘About five nautical miles. That’s to a chain of islands. Beyond is the Inside Passage, and the mainland beyond it. Everything wilderness, scarcely an inhabitant anywhere, for at least a thousand kilometers in any direction.’

‘The boat carries stores and equipment. Sir, I realize it’d be a gamble against astronomical odds, but I can picture Terai deciding that cast of the dice against his life was worth it, if conceivably he could get to his people and tell them what they need to know to stop Orion. He wouldn’t have told you, Wairoa. Why involve you, when you could scarcely help him? Better to leave you in reserve against his likely failure.’

The Maurai nodded. ‘Your hypothesis sounds plausible,’ he said in a level voice.

Mikli gave him a look that warned:
Don’t think you’ll get any chance to act as his backup
.

The captain tugged his chin. ‘Well,’ he murmured, ‘it does appear to fit what facts we have. Yes, a brave man might have tried it. We’ll never be sure, of course.’

He glanced around. ‘Any further comments? If not, no point in keeping station here. The corpse won’t rise for days, and we’ve no idea where it’ll be carried first. You may as well turn in. I’ll start us on our way again.’

– The bunks were narrow, but Iern and Ronica spent the rest of the night in hers, holding each other, only holding each other close. They both wept a little.

3

Surf raged among skerries below ramparts of cliff. A boat or a man could not live through it. Terai was nearly blind in the windy, sleety, foamy dark, but he heard the waters roar and felt them recoil. He turned left at random and swam parallel to the unseen coast. Maybe he’d find an accessible shore before he drowned.

The pain of exhaustion, the gnawing of cold had faded into numbness – how long ago? He remembered vaguely that he had estimated three hours for the passage. They might as well have been three centuries. He was a thing that swam.

But then, and then – He came into a quietness aflow beneath the wind. His cracked lips tasted less salt. Scarcely more aware than a homing salmon, he started landward, and where a stream emptied into the sea he felt stones under his feet.

He reeled ashore and lay for a while upon blessed hardness.

The wind savaged him. He forced into himself the will to move, sat up, crawled out of his garment. Once in a half-forgotten dream, Ronica had warned that the chill factor in wet clothes could be deadly.

Yet the stuff had saved him. Had freed him. In the minute when a friendly sailor offered a – what did they call it? – a ‘union suit,’ he had thought what to do, how he might escape and be taken for dead yet remain alive.

‘Wool’s the best survival fabric there is,’ Ronica had said by the campfire. ‘Nothing holds heat better, whether or not it’s wet. Raw wool, the natural grease in it, is preferable, but the ordinary cloth is good too. A shame we haven’t got any here.’

Terai had it on shipboard. He and Wairoa latched their cabin
door and
spent an hour rubbing the underwear with butter. When he sundered that door he was fully clad, but merely to hide the fabric beneath, lest someone guess his intention. Overboard, he shed the outer garments
–
he had loaded his pockets to sink them – and swam off in what amounted to a diver’s wet suit
.

At that, he’d barely survived. He would still die if he didn’t seek cover.

He climbed centimeter by centimeter to his feet and staggered toward the glooms that soughed before him. Probably his best bet was to heap a lot of pine duff, leaves, humus, and so on over himself and wait for dawn. Later in the trip he could do better.

Later … better. … He was doubtless on an island. His single possession was a piece of smeared underwear. He was almost certainly the sole human being around. It was an unknown but huge distance, over mountains and through primeval forests, to civilization and the Maurai Inspectorate.

He went in among the trees. They broke the wind and he began to shiver slightly less. He began to think.

First thing in the morning, he should find some suitable rocks and chip out an edged tool, a knife or handax. Then he should construct a shelter, and traps for small animals, and a weir for fish – and, oh, yes, meanwhile live off grubs, roots, tubers, pine nuts, remnant berries, whatever he could get. Presently he should have accumulated bones for awls and daggers, sharp stones for scrapers, gut and sinew for making such things as a fire drill. He’d have to see about clothing; the wool wouldn’t last unless it had protection from brush and ground. Maybe he could kill and skin a large beast. Likelier, for the time being, he must settle for plaiting grass, or something of the kind. Improve the tool kit, smoke meat, collect trail rations in general, develop a way – paddling on a log? – to get his stuff across the narrows to the mainland.…

He dared not dawdle. Winter was fast closing in. He might well perish. But (for a moment of pride, he raised his weary head) he thought his chances were fair. He was strong, and had skillful hands, and had learned a great deal from Ronica Birken.

Beneath the mountains in Laska there was coming to birth a terrible beauty.

Eygar Dreng, director, did not look like a sorcerer. He was a short, stocky man, half Eskimo, his features heavy and rather flat under a shock of grizzled black hair. A wound suffered in the Power War made him limp and use a cane. He dressed carelessly. His manner was affable unless incompetence had angered him, then he could outswear a longshoreman. He was cozily married, with four children whose ages ranged from twenty-five to thirteen; the oldest was wedded too and had overjoyed him with a grandchild. When time allowed, he would attend a party or a hard-fought poker game, and he was active in the Kenai chapter of the Wolf Lodge.

His background was scarcely more spectacular. A native of the area, he had moved south to study mechanical engineering and, later, work on aircraft development. During the war he served in the volunteer army, attaining the rank of major before he was invalided out. While the last battles were fought, he was among the first to dream of Orion and scheme for it. The site was picked at his suggestion, and he was a leader throughout the initial, most cruelly difficult years of preparation. Nevertheless he found moments in which to ‘generate notions’ – his phrase – that engineers drawing up the basic designs found useful. When work on the actual hardware could commence, fifteen years ago, he was a natural choice for boss. Here he had been ever since, coordinating efforts that began with experimental parts, crude, small, scarcely worthy of being called toys, and that failed heartbreakingly at every level of advance, as men and women strove to create a thing which had never existed before.

And yet – ‘The man is a wizard,’ Plik said to Iern after they had met him. ‘A Faust. But with what devil has he made his pact?’

The dedication, the sheer will that drove Orion was in its way more awesome than the achievement. Eygar Dreng never went far from here; likewise his family, and the several hundred workers under him and their families, including spouses and children who had no direct role in Orion and very little knowledge of it. An occasional specialist visited from outside, consultant on a knotty problem, but only when the security officers had convinced themselves absolutely of his trust-worthiness. Secrecy was, however, not the ultimate reason why this community sealed itself off year by year by year. That would have been impossible, especially for Northwesterners, were these not selected for desire as well as abilities. The vision was what held them. Whether or not they knew it, they were preparing the way for their god who had been prophesied unto them.

‘Freedom first, yes,’ Eygar Dreng told the Uropans. ‘We’ve got to have that before we can go on, and when we do, a lot of us will happily retire. But not all; and new ones will pour in. Freedom first, not foremost!’

‘What afterward?’ Iern asked, though Ronica had spoken of it to him earlier.

Thereby she had kindled in him some of the flame that blazed in Eygar: ‘Space! The planets and the stars!

‘Sure, we can’t launch many of these nuke ships from Earth. Too much fallout. Besides, we’d soon run out of explosive. But we won’t have to, either. Given the payload capacity they’ve got, in a few trips we can put the apparatus in Earth orbit and on the moon for a bridgehead, a permanent human presence yonder. From then on, it’ll grow of itself. Can’t help doing so, among all those opportunities. The resources are unlimited. The ancients proved that. We’re got perfectly feasible plans of theirs in the files, waiting. The lunar regolith alone contains nearly every raw material we need. The asteroids contain more, and in more concentrated form. A single asteroid, nudged or solar-sailed into Earth orbit, or maybe mined on the spot by robots that catapult the stuff back – a single nickel-iron asteroid a klick or two in diameter would supply world industry for at least a century. Not just ferrous metals, either, but everything critical for alloys and electronics. And not just the Union, but world industry, including what the retrograded peoples need to lift them back to a decent life.

‘And energy.’ He paced his office like a polar bear in a cage. Its
narrowness and bleakness strengthened the image. Folk in these caverns had not taken time for making them luxurious. ‘As much energy as we can ever use, clean, free, inexhaustible. Only build enough solar collectors, big enough, in space. No limit. No night or weather or dust or birdshit to interfere, ever. Though I’d rather revive another ancient idea, myself. Instead of hanging them in the sky, build Criswell stations on the moon, out of lunar materials. Either way, beam the power down here as microwaves and turn it into electricity. Shucks, in due course we Norries could make the Maurai happy and dismantle the nuclear powerplants we’ll have built on Earth. We won’t need them any longer.

‘Given that kind of energy, we can make all the fuel anybody wants, and not from coal or biomass, but hydrogen straight out of seawater. That includes fuel for chemical spacecraft boosters –unless we decide on laser launches and strictly aerodynamic reentries. No more nuclear blasts in the atmosphere.

‘Actually, with that prospect before us, unlimited power, we can afford to burn up a certain amount of present-day fuel in launches at the beginning. Ten Orion shots to liberate us; ten or twenty more to orbit the really heavy stuff needed for an early start on space development; and that’s all. From then on, the Orion system will only operate out yonder, where it belongs. Where
man
belongs. Of course, it’ll soon be obsolete. Fusion-powered craft are already on some drawing boards.’