Starfarers (70 page)

“Oh, you must meet, I know you’ll like each other—” Dorthy was speaking fast, her voice high. “This is Kenri Shaun. I’ve told you enough about him, haven’t I?” A nervous little laugh. “Kenri, my uncle, Colonel from Canda of the Imperial Staff, and my nephew, the Honorable Lord Doms. Fancy coming back and finding you have a nephew your own age!”

“Your honor, sir.” The colonel’s voice was as stiff as his back. Doms giggled.

“You must pardon the interruption,” went on from Canda. “But I wished to speak to … to Shaun as soon as possible. You will understand, sir, that it is for the good of my niece and the whole family.”

Kenri’s palms were cold and wet. “Of course,” he said. “Please sit down.”

“Thank you.” From Canda lowered his angular frame onto the bench, next to the Kithman; Doms and Dorthy sat at opposite ends, the young man slumped over and grinning. “Shall I send for some wine?”

“Not for me, thanks,” said Kenri huskily.

The cold eyes were level on his. “First,” said the colonel, “I want you to realize that I do not share this absurd race prejudice which is growing up about your people. It is demonstrable that the Kith is biologically equal to the Star families, and doubtless superior to some.” His glance flickered contemptuously over to Doms. “There is a large cultural barrier, of course, but if that can be surmounted, I, for one, would be glad to sponsor your adoption into our ranks.”

“Thank you, sir.” Kenri felt dizzy. No Kithman had ever gone so high in all history. That it should be
him
—! He heard Dorthy’s happy little sigh as she took his arm, and something of the frozenness within him began to thaw. “I’ll … do best—”

“But will you? That is what I have to find out.” From Canda leaned forward, clasping his gaunt hands between his knees. “Let us not mince words. You know as well as I that there is a time of great danger ahead for the Empire, and that if it is to survive the few men of action left must stand together and strike hard. We can ill afford the weaklings among us; we can certainly not afford to have strong men in our midst who are not wholeheartedly for our cause.”

“I’ll be … loyal, sir,” said Kenri. “What more can I do?”

“Much,” said the colonel. “Considerable of it may be distasteful to you. Your special knowledge could be of high value. For example, the new tax on the Kith is not merely a device to humiliate them. We need the money. The Empire’s finances are in bad shape, and even that little bit helps. There will have to be further demands, on the Kith as well as everyone else. You can assist us in guiding our policy, so that they are not goaded to the point of abandoning Earth altogether.”

“I—” Kenri swallowed. He felt suddenly ill. “You can’t expect—”

“If you won’t, then you won’t, and I cannot force you,” said from Canda. There was a strange brief sympathy in the chill tones. “I am merely warning you of what lies ahead. You could mitigate the lot of your … former…people considerably, if you help us.”

“Why not … treat them like human beings?” asked Kenri. “We’ll always stand by our friends.”

“Three thousand years of history cannot be canceled by decree,” said from Canda. “You know that as well as I.”

Kenri nodded. It seemed to strain his neck muscles.

“I admire your courage,” said the aristocrat. “You have started on a hard road. Can you follow it through?”

Kenri looked down.

“Of course he can,” said Dorthy softly.

Lord Doms giggled. “New tax,” he said. “Slap a new one on fast. I’ve got one tommy skipper on the ropes already. Bad voyage, debts, heh!”

Red and black and icy blue, and the shriek of lifting winds.

“Shut up, Doms,” said the colonel. “I didn’t want you along.”

Dorthy’s head leaned back against Kenri’s shoulder. “Thank you, uncle,” she said. There was a lilt in her voice. “If you’ll be our friend, it will all work out.”

“I hope so,” said from Canda.

The faint sweet odor of Dorthy’s hair was in Kenri’s nostrils. He felt the gold waves brushing his cheek, but still didn’t look up. There was thunder and darkness in him.

Doms laughed. “I got to tell you ’bout this spacer,” he said. “He owes the firm money, see? I can take his daughter under contract if he doesn’t pay up. Only his crew are taking up a collection for him. I got to stop that somehow. They say those tommy girls are mighty hot. How about it, Kenri? You’re one of us now. How are they, really? Is it true that—”

Kenri stood up. He saw the room swaying, and wondered dimly if he was wobbling on his feet or not.

“Doms,” snapped from Canda, “if you don’t shut your mouth—”

Kenri grabbed a handful of Lord Doms’ tunic and hauled him to his feet. The other hand became a fist, and the face squashed under it.

He stood over the young man, weaving, his arms hanging loose at his sides. Doms moaned on the floor. Dorthy gave a small scream. From Canda leaped up, clapping his hand to a sidearm.

Kenri lifted his eyes. There was a thickness in his words. “Go ahead and arrest me,” he said. “Go on, what are you waiting for?”

“K-k-kenri—” Dorthy touched him with shaking hands.

From Canda grinned and nudged Doms with a boot. “That was foolish of you, Kenri Shaun,” he said, “but the job was long overdue. I’ll see that nothing happens to you.”

“But this Kith girl—”

“She’ll be all right too, I daresay, if her father can raise that money.” The hard eyes raked Kenri’s face. “But remember, my friend, you cannot live in two worlds at once. You are not a Kithman any longer.”

Kenri straightened. He knew a sudden dark peace, as if all storms had laid themselves to rest. His head felt a little empty, but utterly clear.

It was a memory in him which had opened his vision and shown him what he must do, the only thing he could do. There was a half-human face and eyes without hope and a voice which had spoken:
“A man isn’t really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he’d gladly die.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “But I am a Kithman. I will always be.”

“Kenri—”
Dorthy’s tone broke. She held his arms and stared at him with wildness.

His hand stroked her hair. “I’m sorry, dearest,” he said gently.

“Kenri, you can’t go, you can’t, you can’t—”

“I must,” he said. “It was bad enough that I should give up everything which had been my life for an existence that to me is stupid and dreary and meaningless. For you, I could have stood that. But you are asking me to be a tyrant, or at least to be a friend of tyrants. You’re asking me to countenance evil. I can’t do it. I wouldn’t if I could.” He took her shoulders and looked into the unseeing bewilderment of her eyes. “Because that would, in the end, make me hate you, who had so twisted my own self, and I want to go on loving you. I will always love you.”

She wrenched away from him. He thought that there were psychological treatments to change her feelings and make her stop caring about him. Sooner or later, she’d take one of those. He wanted to kiss her farewell, but he didn’t quite dare.

Colonel from Canda extended a hand. “You will be my enemy, I suppose,” he said. “But I respect you for it. I like you, and wish—well, good luck to you, Kenri Shaun.”

“And to you, sir … Goodbye, Dorthy.”

He walked through the ballroom, not noticing the eyes that were on him, and out the door to the elevator. He was still too numb to feel anything, that would come later.

Theye Barinn is a nice girl,
he thought somewhere on the edge of his mind.
I’ll have to go around and see her soon. We could be happy together.

It seemed like a long while before he was back in the Town. Then he walked along empty streets, alone within himself, breathing the cool damp night wind of Earth.

Now and then,
on that planet, Jong Errifrans thought he heard the distant blowing of a horn. It would begin low, with a pulse that quickened as the notes waxed, until the snarl broke in a brazen scream and sank sobbing away. The first time he started and asked the others if they heard. But the sound was on the bare edge of audibility for him, whose ears were young and sharp, and the men said no. “Some trick of the wind, off in the cliffs yonder,” Mons Rainart suggested. He shivered. “The damned wind is always hunting here.” Jong did not mention it again, but when he heard the noise thereafter a jag of cold went through him.

There was no reason for that. Nothing laired in the city but seabirds, whose wings made a white storm over the tower tops and whose flutings mingled with wind skirl and drum roll of surf; nothing more sinister had appeared than a great tiger-striped fish, which patrolled near the outer reefs. And perhaps that was why Jong feared the horn: it gave the emptiness a voice.

At night, rather than set up their glower, the four would gather wood and give themselves the primitive comfort of a fire. Their camping place was in what might once have been a forum. Blocks of polished stone thrust out of the sand and wiry grass that had occupied all streets; toppled colonnades demarked a square. More shelter was offered by the towers clustered in the city’s heart, still piercing the sky, the glasite windows still unbroken. But no, these windows were too much like a dead man’s eyes, the rooms within were too hushed, now that the machines that had been the city’s life lay corroded beneath the dunes. It was better to raise a tent under the stars. Those, at least, were much the same, after twenty thousand years.

The men would eat, and then Regor Lannis, the leader, would lift his communicator bracelet near his mouth and report their day’s ransacking. The space-boat’s radio caught the message and relayed it to the
Golden Flyer
, which orbited with the same period as the planet’s twenty-one-hour rotation, so that she was always above this island. “Very little news,” Regor typically said. “Remnants of tools and so on. We haven’t found any bones yet for a radioactivity dating. I don’t think we will, either. They probably cremated their dead, to the very end. Mons has estimated that engine block we found began rusting some ten thousand years ago. He’s only guessing, though. It wouldn’t have lasted at all if the sand hadn’t buried it, and we don’t know when that happened.”

“But you say the furnishings inside the towers are mostly intact, age-proof alloys and synthetics,” answered Captain Ilmaray’s voice. “Can’t you deduce anything from their, well, their arrangement or disarrangement? If the city was plundered—”

“No, sir, the signs are too hard to read. A lot of rooms have obviously been stripped. But we don’t know whether that was done in one day or over a period maybe of centuries, as the last colonists mined their homes for stuff they could no longer make. We can only be sure, from the dust, that no one’s been inside for longer than I like to think about.”

When Regor had signed off, Jong would usually take out his guitar and chord the songs they sang, the immemorial songs of the Kith, many translated from languages spoken before ever men left Earth. It helped drown out the wind and the surf, booming down on the beach where once a harbor had stood. The fire flared high, picking their faces out of night, tinging plain work clothes with unrestful red, and then guttering down so that shadows swallowed the bodies. They looked much alike, those four men, small, lithe, with sharp, dark features; for the Kith were a folk apart, marrying between their own ships, which carried nearly all traffic among the stars. Since a vessel might be gone from Earth for a century or more, the planetbound civilizations, flaring and dying and reborn like the flames that warmed them now, could not be theirs. The men differed chiefly in age, from the sixty years that furrowed Regor Lannis’s skin to the twenty that Jong Errifrans had marked not long ago.

Ship’s years, mostly, Jong remembered, and looked up to the Milky Way with a shudder. When you fled at almost the speed of light, time shrank for you, and in his own life he had seen the flower and the fall of an empire. He had not thought much about it then—it was the way of things, that the Kith should be quasi-immortal and the planetarians alien, transitory, not quite real. But a voyage of ten thousand light-years toward galactic center, and back, was more than anyone had ventured before; more than anyone would ever have done, save to expiate the crime of crimes. Did the Kith still exist? Did Earth?

After some days, Regor decided: “We’d better take a look at the hinterland. We may improve our luck.”

“Nothing in the interior but forest and savannah,” Neri Avelair objected. “We saw that from above.”

“On foot, though, you see items you miss from a boat,” Regor said. “The colonists can’t have lived exclusively in places like this. They’d need farms, mines, extractor plants, outlying settlements. If we could examine one of those, we might find clearer indications than in this damned huge warren.”

“How much chance would we have, hacking our way through the brush?” Neri argued. “I say let’s investigate some of those other towns we spotted.”

“They’re more ruined yet,” Mons Rainart reminded him. “Largely submerged.” He need not have spoken; how could they forget? Land does not sink fast. The fact that the sea was eating the cities gave some idea of how long they had been abandoned.

“Just so.” Regor nodded. “I don’t propose plunging into the woods, either. That’d need more men and more time than we can spare. But there’s an outsize beach about a hundred kilometers north of here, fronting on a narrow-mouthed bay, with fertile hills right behind—hills that look as if they ought to contain ores. I’d be surprised if the colonists did not exploit the area.”

Neri’s mouth twitched downward. His voice was not quite steady. “How long do we have to stay on this ghost planet before we admit we’ll never know what happened?”

“Not too much longer,” Regor said. “But we’ve got to try our best before we do leave.”

He jerked a thumb at the city. Its towers soared above fallen walls and marching dunes into a sky full of birds. The bright yellow sun had bleached out their pastel colors, leaving them bone-white. And yet the view on their far side was beautiful, forest that stretched inland a hundred shades of shadow-rippled green, while in the opposite direction the land sloped down to a sea that glittered like emerald strewn with diamond dust, moving and shouting and hurling itself in foam against the reefs. The first generations here must have been very happy, Jong thought.