She wasn’t listening, she was still looking out the port.
“I want you to tell me all about him someday,” Holt said, putting his arm around Lucinda. She moved slightly, ridding herself of a minor irritation that she had hardly noticed. It was Holt’s arm, which dropped away.
“I see,” Holt said, after a while. He went to look after his men.
And so, among men the struggle for power went on whenever the universe would allow it. On at least one planet a fight for leadership had long ago flared into civil war; and on that planet war and plague and isolation had destroyed civilization and history.
From afar my mind, powerless to give help, roamed unperceived among the minds of a barbaric people. They were a people who seemed as helpless as the sheep they tended, when there came down upon them one of the ancient bloody wolves of deep space.
SIGN OF THE WOLF
The dark shape, big as a man, came between the two smallest of the three watchfires, moving in silence like that of sleep. Out of habit, Duncan had been watching that downwind direction, though his mind was heavy with tiredness and with the thoughts of life that came with sixteen summers’ age.
Duncan raised his spear and howled, and charged the wolf. For a moment the fire-eyes looked steadily at him, appearing to be a full hand apart. Then the wolf turned away; it made one deep questioning sound, and was gone into the darkness out beyond the firelight.
Duncan stopped, drawing a gasping breath of relief. The wolf would probably have killed him if it had faced his charge, but it did not yet dare to face him in the firelight.
The sheep’s eyes were on Duncan, a hundred glowing spots in the huddled mass of the flock. One or two of the animals bleated softly.
He paced around the flock, sleepiness and introspection jarred from his mind. Legends said that men in the old Earthland had animals called dogs that guarded sheep. If that were true, some might think that men were fools for ever leaving Earthland.
But such thoughts were irreverent, and Duncan’s situation called for prayer. Every night now the wolf came, and all too often it killed a sheep.
Duncan raised his eyes to the night sky. “Send me a sign, sky-gods,” he prayed, routinely. But the heavens were quiet. Only the stately fireflies of the dawn zone traced their steady random paths, vanishing halfway up the eastern sky. The stars themselves agreed that three fourths of the night was gone. The legends said that Earthland was among the stars, but the younger priests admitted such a statement could only be taken symbolically.
The heavy thoughts came back, in spite of the nearby wolf. For two years now Duncan had prayed and hoped for his mystical experience, the sign from a god that came to mark the future life of every youth. From what other young men whispered now and then, he knew that many faked their signs. That was all right for lowly herdsmen, or even for hunters. But how could a man without genuine vision ever be much more than a tender of animals? To be a priest, to study the things brought from old Earthland and saved—Duncan hungered for learning, for greatness, for things he could not name.
He looked up again, and gasped, for he saw a great sign in the sky, almost directly overhead. A point of dazzling light, and then a bright little cloud remaining among the stars. Duncan gripped his spear, watching, for a moment even forgetting the sheep. The tiny cloud swelled and faded very slowly.
Not long before, a berserker machine had come sliding out of the interstellar intervals toward Duncan’s planet, drawn from afar by the Sol-type light of Duncan’s sun. This sun and this planet promised life, but the machine knew that some planets were well defended, and it bent and slowed its hurtling approach into a long cautious curve.
There were no warships in nearby space, but the berserker’s telescopes picked out the bright dots of defensive satellites, vanishing into the planet’s shadow and reappearing. To probe for more data, the berserker computers loosed a spy missile.
The missile looped the planet, and then shot in, testing the defensive net. Low over nightside, it turned suddenly into a bright little cloud.
Still, defensive satellites formed no real obstacle to a berserker. It could gobble them up almost at leisure if it moved in close to them, though they would stop long-range missiles fired at the planet. It was the other things the planet might have, the buried things, that held the berserker back from a killing rush.
It was very strange that this defended planet had no cities to make sparks of light on its nightside, and also that no radio signals came from it into space.
With mechanical caution the berserker moved in, toward the area scouted by the spy missile.
In the morning, Duncan counted his flock—and then recounted, scowling. Then he searched until he found the slaughtered lamb. The wolf had not gone hungry, after all. That made four sheep lost, now, in ten days.
Duncan tried to tell himself that dead sheep no longer mattered so much to him, that with a sign such as he had been granted last night his life was going to be filled with great deeds and noble causes. But the sheep still did matter, and not only because their owners would be angry.
Looking up sullenly from the eaten lamb, he saw a brown-robed priest, alone, mounted on a donkey, climbing the long grassy slope of the grazing valley from the direction of the Temple Village. He would be going to pray in one of the caves in the foot of the mountain at the head of the valley.
At Duncan’s beckoning wave—he could not leave the flock to walk far toward the priest—the man on the donkey changed course. Duncan walked a little way to meet him.
“Blessings of Earthland,” said the priest shortly, when he came close. He was a stout man who seemed glad to dismount and stretch, arching his back and grunting.
He smiled as he saw Duncan’s hesitation. “Are you much alone here, my son?”
“Yes, Holy One. But—last night I had a sign. For two years I’ve wanted one, and just last night it came.”
“Indeed? That is good news.” The priest’s eyes strayed to the mountain, and to the sun, as if he calculated how much time he could spare. But he said, with no sound of impatience: “Tell me about it, if you wish.”
When he heard that the flash in the sky was Duncan’s sign, the priest frowned. Then he seemed to keep himself from smiling. “My son, that light was seen by many. Today the elders of a dozen villages of most of the Tribe have come to the Temple Village. Everyone has seen something different in the sky flash, and I am now going to pray in a cave, because of it.”
The priest remounted, but when he had looked at Duncan again, he waited to say: “Still, I was not one of those chosen to see the sky-gods’ sign; and you were. It may be a sign for you as well as for others, so do not be disappointed if it is not only for you. Be faithful in your duties, and the sign will come.” He turned the donkey away.
Feeling small, Duncan walked slowly back to his flock. How could he have thought that a light seen over half the world was meant for one shepherd? Now his sign was gone, but his wolf remained.
In the afternoon, another figure came into sight, walking straight across the valley toward the flock from the direction of Colleen’s village. Duncan tightened the belt on his woolen tunic, and combed grass from his hair with his fingers. He felt his chin, and wished his beard would really begin to grow.
He was sure the visitor was Colleen when she was still half a mile away. He kept his movements calm and made himself appear to first notice her when she came in sight on a hilltop within hailing distance. The wind moved her brown hair and her garments.
“Hello, Colleen.”