‘Beer indeed,’ Larreka replied. ‘In many large mugs.’ He meant brew of breadroot flavored with domebud; to him, the stuff gotten from Earth grains tasted vile. That wasn’t true of all such plants. After a hearty shoulderclasp with Sparling, he drew a pipe from his pouch and drawled, ‘Furthermore, I haven’t blown tobacco for seven years.’
The engineer grinned, offered his supply, and on getting it back stuffed a briar of his own. He was a tall man – two full meters, which put him brow to brow with Larreka – in his mid-forties, wide-shouldered but otherwise gaunt and raw-boned, hands and feet large and knobbly, movements looking awkward though they did everything he wanted them to. High cheekbones, curved nose, deep creases around the thin lips, weather-beaten skin, unruly black hair tinged with gray, tuneless voice, eyes big and brilliantly gray-green, had little changed since last time. Unlike Hanshaw, Sparling was as careless a dresser as Jill, but lacked her flair.
‘How’re the wife and youngster?’ Larreka asked him.
‘Oh, Rhoda’s about as usual,’ he replied. ‘Becky’s a student on Earth – you didn’t know? Sorry. I always was a rotten correspondent. Yes, she’s back there. I saw her last year on a trip. She’s doing fine.’ Larreka recalled that humans were entitled to home leaves every four of their
native years. Some, like Jill, had never taken any; this was home to them, and they were in no hurry to make an expensive tour. But Sparling returned oftener than that, to present his latest plans and argue for support of them.
‘I’ve kept better track of your work than of your family.’ Larreka meant no offense. Whatever would ease the disasters ahead was top-rank in every civilized mind. ‘Your flood control dams–’ Seeing the engineer scowl, he stopped.
‘That’s become part of our whole problem,’ Sparling said stiffly. ‘Let’s settle down and get at it.’
Olga Hanshaw brought the refreshments her husband had ordered by intercom, and announced lunch in an hour. ‘I’m afraid it’ll be nothing fancy,’ she apologized to Larreka. ‘The storms this past summer hurt the crops, your people’s as well as ours.’
‘Well, we realize in your position, you’ve got to set an example of austerity,’ Jill said to her. ‘I know a hog from a Hanshaw.’
Sparling alone chuckled. Maybe, Larreka thought, her English-language remark referred to something on Earth, where the engineer had been born and spent his earlier youth. Did she notice how his gaze, having gone to her, kept drifting back?
‘Let’s save the jokes for later,’ the mayor urged. ‘Maybe this evening we can have a poker game.’ Larreka hoped so. Over the octads he’d become ferociously good at it, and kept in practice by introducing it to his officers. Then he saw Jill gleefully rub her hands and remembered how she’d played slapdash chess but precocious poker. How tough had she become since?
They sobered when Hanshaw continued, ‘Commandant, you’re here on unpleasant business. And I’m afraid we’ve got worse news for you.’
Larreka tensed on the mattress where he couched, took a long gulp of beer, and said: ‘Unleash.’
‘Port Rua sent word the other day. Tarhanna has fallen.’
Larreka had kept too much Haelener in him to yelp or swear. He sought what comfort he could find in the smoke-bite of tobacco before saying flatly, ‘Details?’
‘Not a hell of a lot. Apparently the natives – the barbarians, I mean, not the few civilized Valenneners you’ve got – apparently they made a surprise attack, took the town, threw everybody out, and told the legionary chief as he was leaving that they weren’t there for loot, they intended to garrison it.’
‘Bad,’ Larreka said after a while. ‘Bad, bad, and bad.’
Jill leaned forward to touch his mane. Disturbed, a few of the seleks therein leaped out from among the leaves, then scurried back down to the proper business of such small entomoids, keeping it free of vermin and dead matter. ‘A shock, huh?’ she asked softly.
‘Yes.’
‘Why? I mean, as I understand the case, Tarhanna is … was the Gathering’s main outpost in the interior of Valennen, ‘way upriver from Port Rua. Right? But what purpose had it except trade? And you always knew trade’ll go to pot as conditions deteriorate.’
‘It was a military base too,’ Larreka reminded her. ‘Thence we could strike at robbers, uppity households, whatever. Now–’ He smoked for a second before he proceeded. ‘Maybe this hits me hardest as a sign. You see, the Zera’s still in good shape. Tarhanna should’ve been able to throw back every landlouper the whole inhabited end of the continent could raise against it. Or, anyhow, hang on till Port Rua sent a relief expedition. Only it didn’t. Also, the enemy feels he can keep it. Therefore he’s got himself an outfit. Not a bunch of raiders: an organized outfit. Maybe even a confederation.’
He appealed: ‘Do you see what that means? Final proof of what I’d decided had to be the case. The bandits and pirates were growing too bloody bold, too successful, to be the kind we’d routinely coped with. And of course we were getting a little military intelligence from the outback – and now this–
‘Somebody’s been uniting the barbarians at last. Probably he’s finished, and ready to put the crunch on us. To cast the Gathering out of Valennen altogether.
‘Except that’s a bare start for him. It has to be. In the past,
the Rover drove desperate people south. They fell on civilization and helped tear it apart. This time around, it looked like civilization had a chance to pull through. Only somebody has organized the Valenneners to match us. He can’t have but one long-range purpose – to invade the south, kill, enslave, kick us out of our lands, and take over the ruins.
‘That’s what I’ve traveled for. To tell the assembly we can’t withdraw “temporarily” from Valennen, we’ve got to hold fast at every cost; to get reinforcements, a second legion at a minimum, up there. But first I want to ask what help you in Primavera can give. It may not be exactly your war. But you’re here to learn about Ishtar. If civilization falls, you’ll have a thin time carrying on.’
That was as long a speech as he had ever made, even addressing the Zera on a high occasion. He turned half wildly to his pipe and beer.
Sparling’s voice yanked him back: ‘Larreka, this hurts like a third-degree burn to say, but I’m not sure what help we can give you. You see, we’ve been stuck with a war of our own.’
Seen from space, all planets are beautiful; but those where humans can breathe have for them a special poignancy. As his flagship maneuvered toward parking orbit, Yuri Dejerine watched Ishtar through the least haze of tears.
Its globe was radiant blue swirled with white and marked with darker hues of continents. The unlikenesses to Earth gave it the kind of glamour that a foreign woman may bear. There were no polar caps and fewer clouds, despite a somewhat larger ocean cover. The browns of soil had no greens blent in, but shades tawny and ruddy. No great scarred Luna swung widely around, only two close-in midget moons; he glimpsed one, flickering as it tumbled, like a firefly against starful blackness.
And the light was eldritch. Most came from Ishtar’s own Bel, slightly less intense than Sol on Earth but the familiar yellow-white. Anu, however, was now so close that it evoked roses and blood in the clouds and tinged the seas purple.
Stopped down to preserve his eyesight, a vision of both suns stood in the viewscreen before him. They appeared nearly the same size, a trick played by their distances. Bel was haloed in a glory of corona. Anu had no clear disc. At the middle was a furnace red where seethed monstrous spots; this dimmed and thinned outward until at last it writhed in a hazy intricacy of flame, tendrils which made Dejerine think of the Kraken.
He turned his look away. As if for companionship, he tried to find sister planets, and believed he could pick out two. And, yes, that really brilliant star, ruby-colored, that must be Ea, six thousand times as remote from here as Bel and outward bound. It wasn’t a reminder of mortality like Anu; as a dwarf, Ea would have a tremendously long though quiet life.
Nevertheless it touched Dejerine with a sense of its loneliness, and his, and everybody’s, ineluctable. And the splendor of Ishtar held an oncoming agony. His thought went on to Eleanor, how fair she had been and how miserable, on the day she told him that after two years she could try no longer and wanted a divorce.
I was trying too,
he told her again.
I really was.
He shook himself. No notions for the commander of a flotilla, these. A voice out of a speaker rescued him from silence: ‘Orbit assumed, sir. All satisfactory.’
‘Very good,’ he replied automatically. ‘Men not on regular watch may go off duty.’
‘Shall I have a call put through to ground, sir?’ asked his exec.
‘Not yet. It’s night in that hemisphere – as far as the proper sun is concerned, anyway. They’ve adapted to an eighteen-and-a-half-hour day there and must be mostly asleep at present, whether or not Anu is aloft. We’d be discourteous to rouse their leaders. Let us wait – um-m-m–’ Dejerine balanced Ishtarian rotation against Earthspin
Navy clocks. ‘Say till 0700. That’ll give us a few hours to relax, too. If any messages are received before, switch them to me in my cabin. Otherwise beam Primavera at 0700.’
‘Aye, sir. Have you further orders?’
‘No, I’ll simply rest. I advise you do the same, Heinrichs. We’ve a busy time ahead.’
‘Thank you, sir. Good night.’ The thick accent cut off. Dejerine had required talk to be in English, practice for a community where that was well nigh the exclusive language. (No, native speech also. Don Conway had used a number of words which he explained, on inquiry, were of nonhuman origin.) The captain suspected a lot of Spanish, Chinese, or what-have-you went on in his absence.
He himself had no linguistic problem. His upbringing had made him fluent in several major tongues, and his wife had been from the United States.
He brushed aside the returning memory. He had loved her, and he still wished her well, but after three years it would be ridiculous to pine. There were plenty of other women – had been since his middle teens. He wondered if any on Ishtar would prove available.
Again he considered the planet. Orbit had brought the cruiser into view of its civilized parts. The opposite half held a single continent and countless islands, where no significant number of Ishtarians lived and about which humans had to date learned little. They had more enigmas where they were than they could handle, in spite of indigenous help.
Anu light lay sinister across a slice which ought to have been dark. By that dull glow he picked out the continents he had read about. Conway had tried to teach him how to utter their names.
Australia-sized Haelen decked the south pole, extending an arm past the Antarctic Circle. Thence a series of archipelagos, visible from here only as changes in the pattern of clouds and currents, led north to Beronnen, roughly India-shaped, dry land from a bit south of the southern tropic to a bit south of the equator. Beyond were more islands, many volcanic – could he identify murkiness in some of the clouds? – until his eye reached Valennen, not far north of
the equator. Like a Siberia stood on end, it stretched nearly to the north pole. The curve of the planet hid its further three quarters from Dejerine, that unknown territory whose life had not been born on Ishtar.
He searched for the rest of his command, parked in advance of him, but failed to see any vessel. No surprise; they were widely spaced for safety and radio relay. Their names made a litany in his head:
Sierra Nevada,
where he was; ranger
Moshe Peretz,
first vessel he had skippered; scout mother
Isabella,
who bore in her womb ten wasps; workship
Imhotep,
which the fighting craft were here to serve and protect. Yes, he thought, he’d come a long way, spectacularly fast, in two senses. That he had been dispatched here, remote from action, was in truth an honor, a mark of trust.
Nevertheless, since his duties were off him for a while, the control bridge felt like a cell. He rose and left it, in search of what home existed in his cabin. His shoes clacked loudly on empty decks. During the voyage he had had the field generators set for 1.18 g. His men and he must arrive at Ishtar with bodies adapted to its heavier pull. Tired, he felt the fourteen kilos added to his weight as if it were lead hung at shoulders and ankles.
Well, he’d be okay after a nap.
But when he had exchanged high-collared blue tunic and white trousers for pajamas, his hermit’s bed held no attraction. He decided to allow himself a small cognac, and lit a cigarette. For a few minutes he prowled about looking at personal things.
His father’s picture … Why didn’t he keep his mother’s? Their marriage had broken when he was six, their sole child, and she had reared him. She had been conscientious about it, too, as much as a growingly important administrative job in the Peace Control Authority permitted. Their life hadn’t lacked excitement, either – frequent moves to different European cities, vacation trips to the rest of Earth and to Luna, parties where eminent guests discussed matters big in the news. … Yet somehow, maybe because they rarely saw each other, maybe because he was always cheerful, ambitious
for little more than the enjoyment of life, Pierre Dejerine came through to the son in a way that Marina Borisovna never could … though surely a part of her in that boy had seen him through the Naval Academy even if it was a part of his father that had sparked him to apply. …
The captain shook his head and grinned at the contents. If he must be stuffy-serious, why not put the mood to use and read over what he had on Ishtar? If nothing else, the boredom of this latest repetition might make him sleepy.
He took the best of the books, relaxed in the lounger, sipped brandy and smoked, and began leafing through.
–Babylonian nomenclature. Other Terrestrial mythologies were spent on planetary systems nearer home. But by chance, the Anubelean was among the first visited, so soon after Mach’s Principle led to the cracking of the light-speed barrier that Diego Primavera’s voyage was an epic of daring.
His main goal was the globular cluster NGC 6656 (M 22) in Sagittarius. At three kiloparsecs’ remove, this is comparatively close, and additionally of special interest to astrophysicists for being small and dense: thus a good place to begin research on groups of its kind. Spaceborne instruments had picked out an isolated stellar system much nearer, which happens in this epoch to be on a direct line between Sol and the cluster heart. That background had camouflaged it from Earthside astronomers, and confused the results of observation from orbit. Accordingly, Primavera’s ship was scheduled to visit it enroute.