Starfarers (66 page)

The monorail
set them off at Kith Town, on the edge of the great city. Its blaze of light, red and gold and green looped between high slim towers, pulsed in the sky above them, but here it was dark and still, night had come. Kenri Shaun stood for a moment with the others, shifting awkwardly on his feet and wondering what to say. They knew he was going to resign, but the Kithman’s rule of privacy kept the words from their lips.

“Well,” he said at last, “I’ll be seeing you around.”

“Oh, sure,” said Graf Kishna. “We won’t be leaving Earth again for months yet.”

After a pause, he added: “We’ll miss you when we do go. I—wish you’d change your mind, Kenri.”

“No,” said Kenri. “I’m staying. But thanks.”

“Come see us,” invited Graf. “We’ll have to get a bunch together for a poker game sometime soon.”

“Sure. Sure I will.”

Graf’s hand brushed Kenri’s shoulder, one of the Kith gestures which said more than speech ever could. “Goodnight,” he spoke aloud.

“Goodnight.”

Words murmured in the dimness. They stood there for an instant longer, half a dozen men in the loose blue doublets, baggy trousers, and soft shoes of the Kith in Town. There was a curious similarity about them, they were all of small and slender build, dark complexioned, but it was the style of movement and the expression of face which stamped them most. They had looked on strangeness all their lives, out between the stars.

Then the group dissolved and each went his own way. Kenri started toward his father’s place. There was a thin chill in the air, the northern pole was spinning into autumn, and Kenri hunched his shoulders and jammed his hands into his pockets.

The streets of the Town were narrow concrete strips, nonluminous, lit by old-style radiant globes. These threw a vague whiteness on lawns and trees and the little half-underground houses set far back from the roads. There weren’t many people abroad: an elderly officer, grave in mantle and hood; a young couple walking slowly, hand in hand; a group of children tumbling on the grass; small lithe forms filling the air with their laughter, filling themselves with the beauty and mystery which were Earth. They might have been born a hundred years ago, some of those children, and looked on worlds whose very suns were invisible here, but always the planet drew men home again. They might cross the Galaxy someday, but always they would return to murmurous forests and galloping seas, rain and wind and swift-footed clouds, through all space and time they would come back to their mother.

Most of the hemispheres Kenri passed were dark, tended only by machines while their families flitted somewhere beyond the sky. He passed the home of a friend, Jong Errifrans, and wondered when he would see him again. The
Golden Flyer
wasn’t due in from Betelgeuse for another Earth-century, and by then the
Fleetwing
, Kenri’s own ship, might well be gone—
No, wait, I’m staying here. I’ll be a very old man when Jong comes back, still young and merry, still with a guitar across his shoulders and laughter on his lips. I’ll be an Earthling then.

The town held only a few thousand houses, and most of its inhabitants were away at any given time. Only the
Fleetwing
, the
Flying Cloud
, the
High Barbaree
, the
Our Lady
, and the
Princess Karen
were at Sol now: their crews would add up to about 1200, counting the children. He whispered the lovely, archaic names, savoring them on his tongue. Kith Town, like Kith society, was changeless; it had to be. When you traveled near the speed of light and time shrank so that you could be gone a decade and come back to find a century flown on Earth—And here was home, where you were among your own kind and not a tommy who had to bow and wheedle the great merchants of Sol, here you could walk like a man. It wasn’t true what they said on Earth, that tommies were rootless, without planet or history or loyalty. There was a deeper belongingness here than the feverish rise and warring and fall of Sol could ever know.

“—Good evening, Kenri Shaun.”

He stopped, jerked out of his reverie, and looked at the young woman. The pale light of a street globe spilled across her long dark hair and down her slim shape. “Oh—” He caught himself and bowed. “Good evening to you, Theye Barinn. I haven’t seen you in a long time. Two years, isn’t it?”

“Not quite so long for me,” she said. “The
High Barbaree
went clear to Vega last trip. We’ve been in orbit here about an Earth-month. The
Fleetwing
got in a couple of weeks ago, didn’t she?”

Covering up, not daring to speak plainly. He knew she knew almost to the hour when the great spaceship had arrived from Sirius and taken her orbit about the home planet.

“Yes,” he said, “but our astrogation computer was burned out and I had to stay aboard with some others and get it fixed.”

“I know,” she answered. “I asked your parents why you weren’t in Town. Weren’t you—impatient?”

“Yes,” he said, and a thinness edged his tone. He didn’t speak of the fever that had burned in him, to get away, get downside, and go to Dorthy where she waited for him among the roses of Earth. “Yes, of course, but the ship came first, and I was the best man for the job. My father sold my share of the cargo for me; I never liked business anyway.”

Small talk, he thought, biting back the words, chatter eating away the time he could be with Dorthy. But he couldn’t quite break away, Theye was a friend. Once he had thought she might be more, but that was before he knew Dorthy.

“Things haven’t changed much since we left,” she said. “Not in twenty-five Earth-years. The Star Empire is still here, with its language and its genetic hierarchy—a little bigger, a little more hectic, a little closer to revolt or invasion and the end. I remember the Africans were much like this, a generation or two before they fell.”

“So they were,” said Kenri. “So were others. So will still others be. But I’ve heard the Stars are clamping down on us.”

“Yes.” Her voice was a whisper. “We have to buy badges now, at an outrageous price, and wear them everywhere outside the Town. It may get worse. I think it will.”

He saw that her mouth trembled a little under the strong curve of her nose, and the eyes turned up to his were suddenly filmed with a brightness of tears. “Kenri—is it true what they’re saying about you?”

“Is what true?” Despite himself, he snapped it out.

“That you’re going to resign? Quit the Kith—become an … Earthling?”

“I’ll talk about it later.” It was a harshness in his throat. “I haven’t time now.”

“But Kenri—” She drew a long breath and pulled her hand back.

“Goodnight, Theye. I’ll see you later. I have to hurry.”

He bowed and went on, quickly, not looking back. The lights and the shadows slid their bars across him as he walked.

Dorthy was waiting, and he would see her tonight. But just then he couldn’t feel happy about it, somehow.

He felt like hell.

She had stood
at the vision port, looking out into a dark that crawled with otherness, and the white light of the ship’s walls had been cool in her hair. He came softly behind her and thought again what a wonder she was. Even a millennium ago, such tall slender blondes had been rare on Earth. If the human breeders of the Star Empire had done nothing else, they should be remembered with love for having created her kind.

She turned around quickly, sensing him with a keeness of perception he could not match. The silver-blue eyes were enormous on him, and her lips parted a little, half covered by one slim hand. He thought what a beautiful thing a woman’s hand was. “You startled me, Kenri Shaun.”

“I am sorry, Freelady,” he said contritely.

“It—” She smiled with a hint of shakiness. “It is nothing. I am too nervous—don’t know interstellar space at all.”

“It can be … unsettling, I suppose, if you aren’t used to it, Freelady,” he said. “I was born between the stars, myself.”

She shivered faintly under the thin blue tunic. “It is too big,” she said. “Too big and old and strange for us, Kenri Shaun. I thought traveling between the planets was something beyond human understanding, but this—” Her hand touched his, and his fingers closed on it, almost against his own will. “This is like nothing I ever imagined.”

“When you travel nearly at the speed of light,” he said, covering his shyness with pedantry, “you can’t expect conditions to be the same. Aberration displaces the stars, and Doppler effect changes the color. That’s all, Freelady.”

The ship hummed around them, as if talking to herself Dorthy had once wondered what the vessel’s robot brain thought—what it felt like to be a spaceship, forever a wanderer between foreign skies. He had told her the robot lacked consciousness, but the idea had haunted him since. Maybe only because it was Dorthy’s idea.

“It’s the time shrinking that frightens me most, perhaps,” she said. Her hand remained in his, the fingers tightening. He sensed the faint wild perfume she wore, it was a heady draught in his nostrils. “You—I can’t get over the fact that you were born a thousand years ago, Kenri Shaun. That you will still be traveling between the stars when I am down in dust.”

It was an obvious opening for a compliment, but his tongue was locked with awkwardness. He was a space farer, a Kithman, a dirty slimy tommy, and she was Star-Free, unspecialized genius, the finest flower of the Empire’s genetic hierarchy. He said only: “It is no paradox, Freelady. As the relative velocity approaches that of light, the measured time interval decreases, just as the mass increases; but only to a ‘stationary’ observer. One set of measurements is as ‘real’ as another. We’re running with a tau factor of about 33 this trip, which means that it takes us some four months to go from Sirius to Sol; but to a watcher at either star, we’ll take almost eleven years.” His mouth felt stiff, but he twisted it into a smile. “That’s not so long, Freelady. You’ll have been gone, let’s see, twice eleven plus a year in the Sirian System—twenty-four years. Your estates will still be there.”

“Doesn’t it take an awful reaction mass?” she asked. A fine line appeared on the broad fore head as she frowned, trying to understand.

“No, Freelady. Or, rather, it does, but we don’t have to expel matter as an interplanetary ship must. The field drive reacts directly against the mass of local stars—theoretically the entire universe—and converts our mercury ‘ballast’ into kinetic energy for the rest of the ship. It acts equally on all mass, so we don’t experience acceleration pressure and can approach light speed in a few days. In fact, if we didn’t rotate the ship, we’d be weightless. When we reach Sol, the agoratron will convert the energy back into mercury atoms and we’ll again be almost stationary with respect to Earth.”

“I’m afraid I never was much good at physics,” she laughed. “We leave that to Star-A and Norm-A types on Earth.”

The sense of rejection was strangling in him.
Yes,
he thought,
brain work and muscle work are still just work. Let the inferiors sweat over it, Star-Frees need all their time just to be ornamental.
Her fingers had relaxed, and he drew his hand back to him.

She looked pained, sensing his hurt, and reached impulsively out to touch his cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to … I didn’t mean what you think.”

“It is nothing, Freelady,” he said stiffly, to cover his bewilderment. That an aristocrat should apologize—!

“But it is much,” she said earnestly. “I know how many people there are who don’t like the Kith. You just don’t fit into our society, you realize that. You’ve never really belonged on Earth.” A slow flush crept up her pale cheeks, and she looked down. Her lashes were long and smoky black. “But I do know a little about people, Kenri Shaun. I know a superior type when I meet it. You could be a Star-Free yourself, except … we might bore you.”

“Never that, Freelady,” he said thickly.

He had gone away from her with a singing in him. Three months, he thought gloriously, three ship-months yet before they came to Sol.

A hedge
rustled dryly as he turned in at the Shaun gate. Overhead, a maple tree stirred, talking to the light wind, and fluttered a blood-colored leaf down on him.
Early frost this year,
he thought. The weather-control system had never been rebuilt after the Mechanoclasts abolished it, and maybe they had been right there. He paused to inhale the smell of the wind. It was cool and damp, full of odors from mould and turned earth and ripened berries. It struck him suddenly that he had never been here during a winter. He had never seen the hills turn white and glittering, or known the immense hush of snowfall.

Warm yellow light spilled out to make circles on the lawn. He put his hand on the doorplate, it scanned his pattern and the door opened for him. When he walked into the small, cluttered living room, crowded with half a dozen kids, he caught the lingering whiff of dinner and regretted being too late for it. He’d eaten on shipboard, but there was no cook in the Galaxy quite like his mother.

He saluted his parents as custom prescribed, and his father nodded gravely. His mother was less restrained, she hugged him and said how thin he had gotten. The kids said hello and went back to their books and games and chatter. They’d seen their older brother often enough, and were too young to realize what his decision of resigning meant.

“Come, Kenri, I will fix a sandwich for you at least—” said his mother. “It is good to have you back.”

“I haven’t time,” he said. Helplessly: “I’d like to, but—well—I have to go out again.”

She turned away. “Theye Barinn was asking about you,” she said, elaborately casual. “The
High Barbaree
got back an Earth-month ago.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I met her on the street.”

“Theye is a nice girl,” said his mother. “You ought to go call on her. It’s not too late tonight.”

“Some other time,” he said.