Rediscovery (14 page)

Ysaye was fascinated. And she could see how such an evolutionary development

was logical here. If the storm they had survived was typical of the kind of weather on this planet, some kind of accommodation would have to be made. If the trees and shrubs had to shed their foliage every time there was snow, they’d never survive. If the lower plants died every time the temperature dropped below freezing, they would never form seeds. They must have had something like antifreeze in their veins, besides the waxy outer coat, the protective pods, and the tropic response to dark and cold. A fascinating adaptation altogether.

They went up a long hill, following the path in the snow and down into a little

valley. Then they came to what seemed to be a village: a cluster of dark, one-and two-storied wooden buildings; impossible to tell whether they were dwellings, animal housing, or both. But beyond them, partway up another slope was the building they had seen from the shuttle, the one Elizabeth had dubbed a “castle.”

More than imposing to the Terrans, it was constructed of gray stone, and loomed

over the village as if it brooded protectively over the buildings and inhabitants. It was multistoried and multitowered, and almost as far beyond the tech level of the shelter as one of the domes on the moon were beyond it. This castle of Elizabeth’s was surely the most impressive thing they had yet seen on the planet! Ysaye’s expectations took an abrupt upward turn. Any culture that could produce a structure like this one had to be well organized and at least sophisticated enough to have some engineering and

mathematics. She tried not to think of the other possible implications—that any culture that would produce a structure like this one, so obviously meant for defensive purposes, must have something it needed to defend against.

The native led them through a formidable set of gates and doors, and into the

shadows inside.

They paused for a moment in a kind of anteroom. The men conferred among

themselves, and one went off by himself. Ysaye studied what little furniture was in the room with them; mostly benches and tables of heavy, functional wood. Odd to think that here wood was so common that houses were built of it, when back on Terra it was so expensive that one of those benches would represent a year of Ysaye’s salary.

Finally a woman appeared and indicated that Ysaye, Elizabeth, and Aurora should

follow her.

Were they trying to split up the party?

Ysaye shot an alarmed look at Commander Britton, who shook his head at her.

“Go along with what they want,” he said to the three women. “I don’t think anyone intends any harm at the moment. And you’ve all been trained in elementary hand-to-hand anyhow; you should be safe enough. It doesn’t look to me as if these people would ever expect a woman to be combat trained.”

Ysaye bit her lip nervously, but she truly didn’t have much choice. The three

women followed the native upstairs to a spacious room, longer and wider than the shelter with obviously human furniture; stools, a chair or two, dressers and some low tables, with benches along one of the walls that held a fireplace. There was another woman there, apparently some sort of attendant, who produced clothing for them from the heavy dressers that stood along one wall. The first woman indicated that they should follow the attendant’s directions, then left. Ysaye was a little nervous, but they were three to the attendant’s one; if anything went wrong, surely they could overpower one somewhat primitive woman. The clothing was suitable for the kind of weather here and the inefficient heating; a fire was burning on the hearth, but it could not be said to be heating the room much. After a long moment of hesitation, while the woman made

encouraging noises at them, the three Terrans shed their wet uniforms and donned the native gear. It was either that, or risk catching something.

Ysaye was glad of the long heavy skirts and petticoats, although she felt a bit

foolish when the attendant had to show her how to put them on. There were layers of inner skirts and camisoles of flannel, covered by blouses, and outer skirts of wool in various tartan patterns. Ysaye, accustomed to the tunic and trousers of her uniform, wondered how she was going to be able to move dressed like this.

Well, at least they were warm, and she knew that women had worn skirts like this for centuries on Terra. In fact, when she looked at Elizabeth, it was oddly like seeing a portrait from an old biography come to life. Elizabeth looked quite at home in this costume. It still seemed a bit odd to Ysaye to base garments on the sex of the wearer, rather than on what the wearer expected to do while wearing them, but she supposed it must make sense to these people.

The attendant gave them a scented lotion and indicated that it should be rubbed

onto hands, feet, and face. Aurora examined it carefully as she rubbed it onto her hands.

“It seems to be some sort of chapped skin or frostbite palliative; I’ll bet they use it here a lot. It would probably be good for burns, too.” She looked at the open fireplace at the end of the room. “And burns probably are fairly common here.”

The woman who had brought them upstairs reappeared and signaled them to

follow her back downstairs, to an even larger chamber, where tables had been laid with plates of cold sliced meats, bread of some sort, thick and heavy, and pitchers of some kind of hot drink. Groups of natives sat eating at the tables, sparing them curious glances as they came in.

“Can we eat this stuff?” Ysaye said doubtfully.

Aurora shrugged. “We could eat the rations in the shelter. This is the same sort of thing, only fresh—fresh meat instead of dry, fresh-baked bread instead of that trail-bread. I don’t know what the drink is, but if it isn’t alcoholic and doesn’t trigger an allergic reaction, I’d say you’re safe.”

Ysaye sat with the others at a long wooden table, and cautiously tried the drink, taking a little on her tongue and waiting for the warning tingle that would indicate she was violently allergic to it. After a minute, when she didn’t seem to be reacting to it, she tried a few more sips, fairly sure now that even if it made her sick after a while, it wouldn’t send her into shock and kill her before she could get help.

The drink turned out to be very similar to hot chocolate, but somewhat more bitter than Ysaye was used to. There was also something that was obviously beer, but Ysaye decided, after one cautious sip, that she liked it even less than Terran beer, which she considered fit only for washing hair. The mugs were tall and had faces carved on one side, and Ysaye realized that either the carvings were intended to face away from the drinker, or—

Aurora, on her right, had apparently noticed the same thing. “Look around the

tables, Ysaye,” she murmured quietly. “The people here are almost all left-handed.”

“You’re right,” Ysaye replied. “Tell Elizabeth to be careful what she does with her elbow—it won’t win us any points if she jabs it into her neighbor’s ribs.”

“I wish we could talk to them,” Aurora said. “I’d love to know about their medical supplies.”

Ysaye stared cautiously at the thick sandwich she had put together, hoping that all the ingredients were as innocuous as they appeared. “It would be a lot better to be able to send a message to the ship.” She looked around at the natives, surreptitiously. “They look as though they could be of Terran ancestry, but apparently they don’t speak Standard.”

“There were about a half-dozen ships that went off before there
was
a Standard language,” Elizabeth said, listening intently to the buzz of conversation in the hall. “I know bits of some of the old languages, and I’m not sure, but I think I’m picking up a word or two here and there.”

“Now that you mention it,” Ysaye said, a little surprised. “I know what you mean.

It feels like trying to identify a piece of music you haven’t heard before by a composer whose style you know well.”

“Maybe it really is a colony from a Lost Ship,” Elizabeth said excitedly. “I

wonder where it could have been from. Any ideas?”

“I think we can safely rule out the one from Zaire,” Ysaye replied dryly. “They’re staring at me and at Commander Britton as if they’d never seen dark skin before. And there’s not a one of them who doesn’t look like Northern European stock. That should narrow it down quite a bit—once I can get back to the computer and check the old ship lists!”

“But if they’re Terran stock, shouldn’t we be able to understand more of what

they’re saying?” Aurora asked. “After all, language can’t have changed that much!”

“You don’t think so?” Elizabeth chuckled. “I hate to disillusion you.”

“But—” Aurora protested, “there are medical terms that haven’t changed in

millennia!”

“If they’re one of the really early ships,” Ysaye said, “they could have had over two thousand years for the language to change.” She glanced over at Elizabeth, who nodded encouragingly. She continued. “That’s plenty of time for a language to diverge.

Look at the difference between Old English and Middle English—and only a few

centuries separated them, on a very small island.”

“Which, if I recall correctly,” Elizabeth said, “was being intermittently invaded by foreigners.”

That brought up another thought to all three of them. The obviously defensive

nature of this structure could mean that these people were under attack fairly often. If that were so, were
they
under suspicion of being enemies?

“If they consider us invaders,” Aurora pointed out, indicating a new group of

people entering the hall, “they’re certainly treating us well. Giving us clothing, food, and even including us in their mealtime entertainment.”

Elizabeth turned to look. “Minstrels!” she said, in mingled pleasure and

speculation. “Oh, I can’t wait to hear what their music is like! If they
are
from a Lost Ship, there might be something I can recognize—songs stay intact longer than the original languages. I hope they sing.”

Ysaye looked curiously at the instruments the musicians were carrying. There

were some that looked rather like a cross between guitar and a lute, though the number of strings varied from four to fourteen. When the number of strings exceeded fourteen, they seemed to change to something strung like a harp but held across the player’s lap.

After several minutes of rather pleasant-sounding tuning, they began to sing. They hadn’t even reached the first chorus when Elizabeth gasped. “That’s a form of Gaelic,”

she exclaimed, “and I know that song!”

“You know that song?” It was Evans who asked, coming up to the women,

looking curiously at Elizabeth. The men had finally made their own appearance, and they had been garbed like the natives as well.

But it was Ysaye who answered. “Not only does she know it, she’s sung it. I’ve

heard her.”

Elizabeth added, “This means they
are
one of the Lost Colonies, they
must
be. I even think I know which one!”

Evans looked at her skeptically. “How do you know that?”

Elizabeth was not to be put off by him this time. “I had relatives on the ship; it’s an old family tradition—and a mystery. They went out before the modern ships—back when we hardly had navigational systems at all. Any little thing could throw them off course: a gravitic storm, for instance, which today would be nothing at all. As far as I know there was only one colony which was Gaelic-speaking; it was manned by

something called the New Hebrides Commune. Terra lost contact with them, and logged them as lost. They were mostly Neo-Luddites, and they had—”

“Hold on,” interrupted Evans, “Slow down. What in the world—any world—were

neo-whatever-you-callems?”

“Well, the original Luddites were radicals who went around smashing textile mills and power looms because they believed they were going to put so many hand weavers out of work,” Elizabeth explained. “In general, Neo-Luddite was a name given to

anybody who was generally, politically, against too much technology—or whatever they happened to think was too much—or who wanted less technology than the governments did.” She shrugged. “Kind of a catch-all term that covers quite a few of the early colonies.”

Evans laughed; a short, sharp bark. “That would include an awful lot of people

even these days.”

There was something about that laugh that Ysaye didn’t like, but Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice anything. “Well this lot were in general all artsy-craftsy and primitivist; so they were welcomed joyously by the Colony Authority of that day because they

usually were willing to live without modern conveniences for a couple of years—and in fact rather enjoyed the idea.”

Evans grinned. “I can imagine. What luck for them! Too bad no one told them

how many of those ships tended to get lost.”

Elizabeth went on, “My own ancestry is Scottish—that’s how I came to hear

about them. It was a kind of romantic, sad story in my family, the ‘lost ones.’ They thought they would be able to recreate the Scotland and Ireland of the ancient days, before ‘the English contamination.’ Everyone was supposed to speak Gaelic fluently.

When I joined the Space Service—well, that’s neither here or there. But I do know a lot of old Gaelic folk songs. Gaelic as a language has died out back on Terra. And if these people preserved their language, a lot of the songs that have died out on Earth may have been preserved here. In fact, probably were,” she exclaimed. “What an incredible opportunity!”

“Yeah, lots of work for you, and David, if you’re right,” Evans said. “Recreating the language from living speakers— and with the new surge of interest in ancient music

—”

“But I never thought anything on this world would turn out to be within my own

field of expertise,” Elizabeth said happily. “Now, I guess the thing to do is to tell the Captain—”

“Have to wait until we can get in touch with him,” Evans reminded her. “Do you

speak whatever that language was?”

“Gaelic? No, I only know a few words—whatever is in the songs I know,” she