Staurn rotated once in about eighteen hours. Seven such days had passed when Uthg-a-K’thaq finished work on the naval computers and rode a tender down to Orling spaceport.
As his huge cetacean form wallowed into the yacht’s chart-room, Endre Vadász, who had been waiting for him, backed up. Phew! the minstrel thought. Decent and capable he is, but I always have to get reacclimated to that swamp stench … How do I smell to him?
“Hallo, C.E.,” he greeted. “I hope you are not too tired to depart at once. We have spent too much time here already.”
“Quite,” replied the rumbling, burbling voice. “I am in-watient as you wy now. Ewerything else can ’roceed without me and, I weliewe, reach com’letion simultaneously with this swecial missile tur-ret. That is, iw the Staurni system is as good as claimed.”
“Which is what you are supposed to decide.” Vadász nodded. Another irritating thing about Naqsans was their habit of solemnly repeating the obvious. In that respect they were almost as bad as humans. “Well, I’ve seen to your planetside supplies. Get your personal kit together and meet us at the lift platform outside in half an hour.”
“Us-s-s? Who goes to this Nest?”
“You and the skipper, of course, to make decisions, and Gregorios Koumanoudes to interpret. Myself … ah, officially this falls in the steward’s department also, since the extra armament will affect stowage. But in practice the steward’s department is idle, bored, and in dire need of a jaunt. Then there are two from the Quest, Victor Bragdon and Jocelyn Lawrie.”
“Why come they with?”
“They’re here for xenological research, you know. Accompanying us on a business trip to an important kinfather is a unique opportunity to observe laws and customs in action. So Bragdon offered to lend us one of his flyers, provided he and the woman could ride along. He wanted several of his people, actually, but Nesters limit the number of visitors at one time. Suspicious brutes. In any event, by using the flyer, we save this yacht for shuttle work and so expedite our own project.”
“I scent. No, you say ‘I see’ in English.” Uthg-a-K’thaq’s tone was indifferent. He turned and slap-slapped on webbed feet toward his cabin.
Vadász looked thoughtfully at his back until he had disappeared. I wonder how much of our interhuman quarrels and tensions come through to him, the Hungarian reflected. Perhaps none. Surely he will think the business between Gunnar and Jocelyn is utter triviation, if he even notices.
And he may well be right. Thus far, at least, it has only amounted to Gunnar’s being often absent from our vessel. Which has done no harm at the present stage of things. The men gossip, but the tone I hear is simple good-natured envy. For myself, I am the last to begrudge a friend what scrap of happiness he can stumble upon. Therefore—why does it make me uneasy, this?
He threw off worry and pushed buttons on the radiophone extension. A middle-aged, scholarly-looking man glared from Quest’s saloon.
“Good day, Dr. Towne,” Vadász said cheerily. “Would you please remind Captain Heim that we’re leaving in half an hour?”
“Let him remind himself,” the glossanalyst snapped.
“Do you so strongly oppose our little enterprise over here that you will not even give a man an intercom call?” Vadász leered. “Then kindly remind Mme. Lawrie.”
Towne reddened and cut the circuit. He must have some very archaic mores indeed. Vadász chuckled and strolled off to complete his own preparations, whistling to himself.
“Malbrouck se va-t-en guerre—”
—And aboard the Quest, Heim looked at a bulkhead clock, stretched, and said, “We’d better start.”
Jocelyn laid a hand on his roan hair, another beneath his chin, and brought the heavy-boned homely face around until it was close to hers. “Do we have to?” she asked.
The trouble in those eyes hurt him. He tried to laugh. “What, cancel this trip and lose Vie his data? He’d never forgive us.”
“He’d be nearly as happy as I. Because it’s far more important that … that you come out of this lunacy of yours, Gunnar.”
“My dear,” he said, “the only thing that’s marred an otherwise delightful time has been your trying and trying to wheedle me into giving up the raider project. You can’t. In the old Chinese advice, why don’t you relax and enjoy it?” He brushed his lips across hers.
She didn’t respond, but left the bed and walked across the cabin. “If I were young again,” she said bitterly, “I might have succeeded.”
“Huh? No, now, look—”
“I am looking.” She had stopped before a full-length optex beside her dresser. Slowly, she ran her hands down cheeks and breasts and flanks. “Oh, for forty-three I’m quite well preserved. But the crow’s feet are there, and the beginnings of the double chin, and without clothes I sag. You’ve been—good, kind—the last few days, Gunnar. But I noticed you never committed yourself to anything.”
He swung to his own feet, crossed the intervening distance in two strides, and towered over her; then didn’t know what to do next. “How could I?” he settled for saying. “I’ve no idea what may happen on the cruise. No right to make promises or—”
“You could make them conditionally,” she told him. The moment’s despair had left her, or been buried. Her expression was enigmatic, her tone impersonal. “ ‘If I come home alive,’ you might say, ‘I’ll do such and such, if you’re agreeable.’ ”
He had no words. After some seconds she breathed out and turned from him. Her head drooped. “Well, let’s get dressed,” she said.
He put on the one-piece garment which doubled as under-padding for an airsuit, his motions automatic, his mind awash. Okay, what do I want? How much of what I felt, (do I still feel it?) was genuine and how much was just a grab at the past when lonesomeness had me off balance? 1 plain don’t know.
His bewilderment didn’t last long, because he was the least self-analytical of men. He shoved his questions aside for later examination and, with them, most of the associated emotions. Affection for Jocelyn remained in the forefront of his awareness, along’ with regret that she had been hurt and a puzzled wish to do something about it; but overriding all else was eagerness to be away. He’d cooled his heels long enough on this island. The flight to Trebogir’s would be a small unleashing.
“C’mon,” he said with reborn merriment. His hand slapped the woman playfully. “Should be quite a trip, you know.”
She turned about Grief dwelt in her eyes and on her lips. “Gunnar—” She must look down at her fingers, tensed against each other. “You really don’t think I’m … a fool at best, a traitor at worst … for not wanting a war … do you?”
“Hvad for pokker!” he exclaimed, rocked back. “When did I give you that idea?”
She swallowed and found no reply.
He took her by the forearms and shook her gently. “You are a fool if you think I ever thought so,” he said. “Joss, I don’t want war any more than you. I believe a show of force now—one warning snap of teeth—may head off a fatal showdown later. That’s all. Okay, you have a different opinion. I respect it, and I respect you. What’ve I done to make you suppose anything different? Please tell me.”
“Nothing.” She straightened. “I’m being silly,” she said in a machine voice. “We’d better go.”
They went silently downhall. At the locker outside Boat-house Three, Victor Bragdon was donning his airsuit. “Hi, there,” he called. “I’d begun to wonder what was keeping you. One of your men delivered your stuff last watch, Gunnar. Good thing, too. You’d never fit into anybody else’s.”
Heim took the stiff fabric, zipped it shut around himself, and put on gloves and ankle-supporting boots with close attention to the fastenings. If the oxygen inside mingled with the hydrogen outside, he’d be a potential torch. Of course, in a flyer it was only a precaution to wear a full outfit; but he’d seen too often how little of the universe is designed for man to neglect any safety measure. Connecting the helmet to high-pressure air bottles and recycler tank, he hung the rig from his shoulders, but left the valves closed and the faceplate open. Now, the belt of food bars and medicines; canteen; waste unit; not the machine pistol, for you did not come armed into a Nest … He saw that Jocelyn was having some trouble with her gear and went to help.
“It’s so heavy,” she complained.
“Why, you wore much the same type on New Mars,” Heim said.
“Yes, but that was under half an Earth gravity.”
“Be glad we aren’t under the full Staurnian pull, then,” Bragdon said genially. He bent to pick up a carrying case.
“What’ve you got there?” Heim asked.
“Extra camera equipment. A last-minute thought. Don’t get alarmed, though. The field survival kit is aboard and double checked.” Bragdon was still grinning as he walked to the entry lock. His aquiline profile was rather carefully turned toward Jocelyn. Heim felt amused.
The boathouse seemed cavernous. The space auxiliary intended to rest here had been replaced by three atmospheric flyers built for work on subjovian planets; and one of them was out on a preliminary mapping flight. The humans wriggled through the lock of another bulky fuselage and strapped in, with Bragdon at the controls. He phonespoke to his dispatcher. The boathouse was evacuated, Staurn’s air was valved in, the outer doors were opened. With a whirr of power, the vehicle departed.
It set down again immediately, to let in Vadász, Koumanoudes, and Uthg-a-K’thaq. The Naqsan looked still more ungainly in his own airsuit than he did nude, but it confined most of his odor. Bragdon made a last check of his instruments and lifted skyward.
“I’m excited as a boy,” he said. “This’ll be the first real look I’ve had at the planet.”
“Well, you should be able to play tourist,” Koumanoudes said. “No bad weather’s predicted. ’Course, we wouldn’t be aloft anyway in a Staurnian storm. Fee-ro-cious.”
“Indeed? I thought wind velocities were low in a high-density atmosphere.”
“Staurn’s isn’t that dense. About three times Earth pressure at sea level, with gravity accounting for a good deal of it. Also, you’ve got water vapor, which rises to breed thunderstorms. And so damn much solar energy.”
“What?” Jocelyn cast a surprised glance aft, not too near the morning sun. At half again the distance of Sol from Earth, the disc had slightly less angular diameter; and, while it was nearly twice as brilliant, throwing a raw blue-tinged light across the world, its total illumination was likewise a little inferior to home. “No, that can’t be. Staurn gets only—what is it?—20 percent more irradiation than Earth.”
“You forget how much of that is ultraviolet,” Heim reminded her, “with no free oxygen to make an ozone barrier.”
“A poor site for a nudist colony,” Vadasz said. “If the hydrogen, helium, and nitrogen don’t choke you, or the methane and ammonia poison you, the UV will crisp you like a steak.”
“Birr. When it’s so beautiful, too.” Jocelyn pressed her nose against the port by her seat and stared downward.
They were high now, with Orling dropping behind at supersonic speed. The island reared Gibraltar-like from an indigo sea, beaches obsidian black, land turned a thousand subtle shades of red by its forest. There was a final glimpse of a radar, skeletal at the spaceport, then that scar was lost to view and one saw only a great peace brooding under westward cliffs of cumulus. On the edge of vision, kilometers away, a flock of Staurni winged in a V on an unknown errand.
As if to escape some thought, Jocelyn pointed at them and said, “Pardon me if I’m dumb, but how can they fly? I mean, aren’t hydrogen breathers supposed to have less active metabolisms than oxygen breathers? And is the air pressure enough to support them against nearly twice Terrestrial gravity?”
“They have bird-type bones,” Koumanoudes explained.
“As for the energy consideration,” Heim added, “it’s true hydrogen gives less energy per mole than oxygen, reacting with carbon compounds. But there are an awful lot of hydrogen molecules in a lungful, here. Besides, the enzyme systems are efficient. And—well, look. Staurnian plants photo-synthesize water and methane to get free hydrogen and carbohydrates. Animals reverse the process. Only with that flood of ultraviolet on them, the plants build compounds more energy-rich than anything on Earth.”
“I see, I suppose.” She relapsed into her brown study.
The island fell below the wide horizon. They flew over wine darkness, streaked with foam, until the mainland hove into sight. There mountains climbed and climbed, red with wilderness at the foot, gray and ruggedly shadowed above, snowpeaked at the top. Sunlight glinted off a distant metallic speck. Heim tuned his and Jocelyn’s viewport to full magnification. The speck became a flyer, of gaunt unhuman design, patrolling above a cluster of fused-stone towers that clung to a precipice a kilometer over the surf. “The Perch of Rademir,” he said. “Better jog a little farther south, Vie. I’m told he’s somewhat peeved at us, and he just might get an impulse to attack.”
Bragdon adjusted the autopilot. “Why?”
“He wanted to sell us warheads, when Charlie Wong and I arrived to make arrangements,” Koumanoudes said. “But the Roost of Kragan offered us a better price.”
Bragdon shook his head. “I really don’t understand this culture,” he said. “Anarchy and atomic power. They can’t go together.”
“What?” Vadász tautened in his seat. “There is quite a literature on Staurn,” he said very slowly. “Have you not even read it?”
“Oh, sure, sure,” Bragdon answered in haste. “But it’s a jumble. Nothing scientific. My own field work was mainly on Isis.”
“We aren’t the best-prepared expedition that ever went out,” Jocelyn added. “Quite hurriedly organized, in fact. But with all the trouble in this sector, the Research Authority decided it was urgent to get some solid information on the space-traveling societies hereabouts.”
“The Staurni aren’t that, exactly,” Heim said. “They have the capability, but use it only for planetary defense purposes. They’ll trade with visitors, but aren’t interested in looking for business themselves.”
“They must once—Say.” Bragdon turned in his seat to face the others. “We’ve time to kill. Why don’t you give us your version of the situation here? Even when I’ve read it before, it’s helpful to have the material put in different words.”
Vadász narrowed his eyes and remained silent. Heim was chiefly conscious of Jocelyn’s glove resting on his. He thought that somehow she was pleading with him. To keep away from the thing that divided them? He leaned back, easing the weight of his air equipment onto the rest bracket, and said:
“I’m no expert. But as I understand it, the Staurni are a rare thing, a strictly carnivorous intelligent race. Normally carnivores specialize in fighting ability rather than brains, you know. I once talked with a buck who’d visited here and poked around a little. He said he’d noticed fossil outcrops that suggested this continent was invaded long ago by a bigger, related species. Maybe the ancestral Staurni had to develop intelligence to fight back. I dunno. However it happened, you’ve got a race with high-powered killer instincts and not gregarious. The basic social unit is, uh, a sort of family. A big family, with a system of companionate marriage so complicated that no human has ever figured it out, plus retainers with their own females and cubs; but still, a patriarchal household dominated by one big, tough male.” The flyer rocked in a gust. Heim peered out. At their present speed, they were already crossing the spine of the mountains. In the west he saw foothills, tumbling off to the red and tawny plain of the Uneasy Lands.
“I shouldn’t think that would make for advance beyond savagery,” Bragdon remarked.
“They managed it on Staurn, for a while. I don’t know how. But then, does anybody know for sure what the evolutionary laws of human civilization are? Maybe being winged, more mobile than us, helped the Staurni. In time they got a planet-wide industrial culture, split into confederations. They invented the scientific method and rode the exponential curve of discovery on up to nuclear engines and gravitronics.”
“I think,” Uthg-a-K’thaq grunted, “those nations were wuilt on conquest and slawery. Unnatural, and hence unstawle.”
Heim gave the tendriled face a surprised glance, shrugged, and went on: “Could be. Now there is one stabilizing factor. A Staurni male is fiercer than a man during his reproductive years, but when he reaches middle age he undergoes a bigger endocrine change than we do. Without getting weak otherwise, he loses both sex drive and belligerence, and prefers to live quietly at home. I suppose under primitive conditions that was a survival mechanism, to give the females and cubs some protection around the Nest while the young males were out hunting. In civilization it’s been a slightly mellowing influence. The oldsters are respected and listened to, somewhat, because of their experience.
“Nevertheless, the industrial society blew itself apart in a nuclear war. Knowledge wasn’t lost, nor even most of the material equipment, but organization was. Everywhere the Staurni reverted to these baronial Nests. Between the productivity of its automated machines and the return of big game to hunt, each such community is damn near independent. Nobody’s interested in any more elaborate social structures. Their present life suits them fine.”
“What about the Lodge?” Jocelyn asked.
“Oh, yes. There has to be some central group to arbitrate between Nests, defend the planet as a whole, and deal with outworlders. The Lodge grew up as a—I suppose quasi-religious organization, though I don’t know a thing about the symbolism. Its leaders are old males. The more active jobs are done by what you might call novices or acolytes, younger sons and such, who sign on for the adventure and the concubines and the prospect of eventually becoming full initiates. It works pretty well.”
“It wouldn’t with humans,” Bragdon said.
“Yeh,” Koumanoudes answered, “but these people aren’t human.”
“That’s about everything I know,” Heim said. “Nothing you haven’t found in books and journals, I’m sure.”
He looked outside again. The prairie was sliding swiftly beneath; he could hear the whistle and feel the vibration of their passage. A herd of grazing beasts darkened the land and was gone. Eastward the last mountain-tops vanished. No one spoke for a considerable period. Heim was in fact startled to note how much time had gone by while they all sat contemplating the view or their own thoughts, before Brag-don ended the silence.
“One item I have not seen explained,” he said. “Apparently each Nest maintains a nuclear arsenal and military production equipment. What for?”
“To fight,” Koumanoudes said. “They get an argument the Lodge can’t settle, like over territory, and hoo! They rip up the landscape. We’ll probably see a few craters.”
“But … no. That sort of insanity smashed their civilization.”
“The last phase of their civilization, you mean,” Heim said. “The present one isn’t vulnerable. A Nest is mostly underground, and even the topside buildings are nearly blast-proof. Radiation affects a Staurni a lot less than a human, he gets so much of it in the normal course of life; and they have medicines for an overdose here, same as us. And there are no incendiary effects, not in a hydrogen atmosphere. In fact, before atomic energy, the only way to smelt metals was to use a volcanic outlet—which there are plenty of on a big planet with a hot core.”
“So they have no restrictions,” Jocelyn murmured. “Not even on selling the things offworld, for others to kill with.”
“We’ve been over that ground too mucking often,” Koumanoudes growled.
“Free-fall, Greg,” Heim warned. The woman’s face was so unhappy.
Koumanoudes shifted in his seat, glared out, and grew suddenly rigid.
“Hey!” he barked.
“What’s the matter?” Bragdon asked.
“Where do you think you’re headed?”
“Why, to the Aerie of Trebogir.”
The Greek half rose. His forefinger stabbed at the bow viewports. Above the horizon, ghostly in its detachment, floated a white cone. The plain beneath rolled down toward a thread which wound blinding silver through a valley where cloud shadows ran.
“What the hell!” he exploded. “That’s the River Morh. Got to be. Only I know the map. Trebogir doesn’t live anywhere in sight of a snowpeak. It must belong to Kimreth upland. We’re a good five hundred kilometers north of where we should be!”
Sweat sprang forth on Bragdon’s forehead. “I did set a roundabout course, to get a better look at the countryside,” he admitted.
“And never told us?” Koumanoudes yanked at his harness. “I should’ve noticed where the sun is. Get away from that pilot board. I’m taking over.”
Heim’s eyes swung to Jocelyn. Her fists were clamped together and she breathed in deep uneven gulps.
Bragdon darted his hand into the carrying case by his seat. It lifted, and Heim stared down the barrel of a laser pistol.
“Sit back!” Bragdon ordered. “I’ll shoot the first one who unstraps himself.”