2
What does he mean, no recorded planet?” Alea asked.
“Just what you’re thinking.” Magnus grinned. “And so am I. Which of us thought it first?”
“Both at the same time.” Alea spoke sharply to hide the hope that she might be a more talented telepath than she knew. “There is such a thing as coincidence, you know.”
“Yes, and similar answers to the same question,” Magnus said. “But we both think it’s a lost colony, so let’s see if we’re right. Vision, Herkimer, please.”
The image that appeared was flat, an elongated rectangle in bright colors. “Rather primitive,” Herkimer explained. “The picture was originally displayed on a screen.”
“Yes, we understand that it was television, not holovision—but this was a colony, after all, and bound to lack a few of the refinements.” Magnus’s gaze was glued to the picture before them.
They saw a man with long black hair and beard, wearing a burgundy robe, standing in front of a scene showing people in leather jerkins and hose with hawks on their forearms and shoulders. He was saying, “…steady progress in terraforming and developing the land. The Dragon Clan has perfected the taming and training of the local wyverns. Watch, now, as the dragoneer sends the beast hunting.”
One of the leather-clad men swelled in the picture, and Alea saw that the reddish-brown creature on his wrist was no bird, but a sort of pterodactyl, though its head did look rather like that of a horse and its neck and backbone sprouted a row of triangular plates that stretched down its tail to an arrowpoint on the end. Now she realized why its handler wore leather—the claws were long, hooked, and sharp.
The man tossed his wrist and the wyvern leaped into the air, wings beating until it found an updraft. The picture stayed with it, following, making it larger and larger in the screen as it spiraled upward, riding the wind, then suddenly plummeted to earth. It rose again in an instant with a small animal in its claws—but grew smaller and smaller in the picture; its handler and his friends appeared at the edge and zoomed toward the middle, and the narrator swam back in front of them. He watched them, nodding, as the wyvern settled back onto its handler’s wrist. “The dragoneer tells us the secret to controlling the reptile is thinking with it, every step of the way. Whether by mind reading or by training, the little dragons are bringing home dinner for their handlers as well as themselves.”
He turned to smile at his viewers as the picture behind him dissolved into a scene of a broad wheat field. “Halfway across the continent, the Clan of the Mantis has succeeded in breeding insect predators that banished the crop feeders destroying their wheat.”
The wheat behind him expanded until a few huge heads of grain filled the screen. Alea found herself looking at a dozen beetles stripping the grain from the stalk astonishingly quickly, but a bigger beetle came crawling behind them to gobble them up like so many pieces of candy.
“Neatly and efficiently done,” the narrator said cheerfully. “In this case, big bugs have little bugs for biting.”
He went on, the picture changing behind him as he told all the latest tidbits with delight. The Khayyam Clan had perfected its geodesic tent; a few people stood near the structure to show that it was three times their height. The Polite Barbarian Clan had plotted the grasslands available to each of the cattle-herding clans during each season. The Appleseed Clan was sending couriers to all the other clans with seeds for their new insect resistant varieties of fruit.
Magnus sat, dazed by the variety of clans and the way in which they had split up the task of developing the planet. “Truly amazing,” he murmured.
“But how long has it been? Several hundred years at least.” Alea frowned. “And they’re still adapting themselves to their world?” Then she answered her own question. “No, of course not. These pictures are coming to us at the speed of light, radiating outward from the planet, and the oldest ones reach us first.”
Magnus gazed at her, feeling himself swell with pride, even though it was Herkimer who was her teacher, not himself. But she learned so quickly and reasoned out so much from it! Really, it was an honor to be her companion.
The narrator before them went on as the scene displayed a picture of a dozen saffron-robed people, the men bearded, the women without cosmetics and with simple hairstyles. Most had gray hair; all looked compassionate and concerned. The narrator told his viewers, “The gurus of all the clans tell us that their people are paying entirely too much attention to worldly things.” Behind him, the picture changed to a grid with the faces of men and women in small squares. Most of them were gray haired, too, but they fairly glowed with enthusiasm.
“The clan leaders held a teleconference to consider that issue,” the narrator told his viewers, “and replied that all the clans together were performing a massive study in ecology, though that may not have been what they intended. By developing their animals and crops, they’re gaining a greater sense of how all life-forms fit together and interact. The clan leaders claim this is another route toward achieving harmony with the Infinite—and the gurus agreed! I do have to say, though, that the Wise Ones didn’t seem too enthusiastic about it.”
Alea objected, “The people in each of those ‘clans’ don’t look anything like one another! How could they be related?”
“They probably aren’t,” Gar replied, “or at least they weren’t, until their mothers and fathers married. I suspect they share interests, not genes. People concerned with herding cattle band together, people who want to grow oats band together, and those who want to raise maize gather together, too.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Alea. admitted. “After all, oats and maize grow best in different climates—and their farmers would have to live together.”
“Besides, village life that way would give them the feeling of belonging to an extended family,” Gar said thoughtfully, “and I suspect these colonists were very lonely before they formed a group.”
The narrator’s voice began to crackle and the picture broke up into a swirling mass of colored dots.
Alea frowned. “What’s happening? Oh! We’re going toward the planet faster than light.”
“Correct, Alea,” Herkimer’s voice said. “We have passed the range of the oldest television signal emitted from the planet. There are younger ones, of course. How many years should I let pass by us before I record one to display again?”
“Let pass?” Alea frowned. “How many are there?”
“An uninterrupted stream, broadcasting over a period of a hundred years or more.”
“Only one century?” Magnus’s eyes glittered. “There should be seven. Let’s see what happened.” He turned to Alea. “Every twenty-five years?”
“That should give us some idea of their progress,” Alea agreed—but she felt misgivings, felt out of her depth, so she asked, “Why so many?”
“I want a quick overview of the planet,” Gar explained. “But we gain it by moving closer to the planet,” Alea objected. “If we decide we want more detail, it will be too late to go back and find it.”
She expected him to argue and felt her blood quicken with the thought, but Magnus only nodded judiciously and said, “A good idea. Store all the signals, Herkimer, but show us only those that come in every quarter-century. Then if we wish to retrieve others, we can.”
Alea felt both pleased and chagrined: pleased that he took her thoughts seriously, chagrined that she had missed a chance for an argument. Magnus knew how to argue properly—taking her seriously and intending to win, but not too seriously and not minding if she proved to be right.
For the next hour, Herkimer showed them snippets of dramas, comedies, programs of singers and dancers, and shows in which ordinary people matched wits against a master of ceremonies—though they called him a guru—trying to answer obscure questions such as, “When was the I Ching written?”