«Not now.» Laure flung himself into a chair web and regarded the prosaic metal, instruments, manual override controls that surrounded him. «This will do.»
«Are you feeling well? Why not go in the diagnoser and let me check you out? We’ve time before we arrive.»
The tone was anxious. Laure didn’t believe that emotion was put on. He refrained from anthropomorphizing his computer, just as he did those nonhuman sophonts he encountered. At the same time, he didn’t go along with the school of thought which claimed that human-sensibility terms were absolutely meaningless in such connections. An alien brain, or a cybernetic one like Jaccavrie’s, could think; it was aware; it had conation. Therefore it had analogies to his.
Quite a few Rangers were eremitic types, sane enough but basically schizoid. That was their way of standing the gaff. It was normal for them to think of their ships as elaborate tools. Daven Laure, who was young and outgoing, naturally thought of his as a friend.
«No, I’m all right,» he said. «A bit nervous, nothing else. This could turn out to be the biggest thing I… you and I have tackled yet. Maybe one of the biggest anyone has, at least on this frontier. I’d’ve been glad to have an older man or two along.» He shrugged. «None available. Our service should increase its personnel, even if it means raising dues. We’re spread much too thin across—how many stars?»
«The last report in my files estimated ten million planets with a significant number of Commonalty members on them. As for how many more there may be with which these have reasonably regular contact—»
«Oh, for everything’s sake, come off it!» Laure actually laughed, and wondered if the ship had planned things that way. But, regardless, he could begin to talk of this as a problem rather than a mystery.
«Let me recapitulate,» he said, «and you tell me if I’m misinterpreting matters. A ship comes to Serieve, allegedly from far away. It’s like nothing anybody has ever seen, unless in historical works. (They haven’t got the references on Serieve to check that out, so we’re bringing some from HQ.) Hyperdrive, gravity control, electronics, yes, but everything crude, archaic, bare-bones. Fission instead of fusion power, for example… and human piloting!
«That is, the crew seem to be human. We have no record of their anthropometric type, but they don’t look as odd as people do after several generations on some planets I could name. And the linguistic computer, once they get the idea that it’s there to decipher their language and start cooperating with it, says their speech appears to have remote affinities with a few that we know, like ancient Anglic. Preliminary semantic analysis suggests their abstractions and constructs aren’t quite like ours, but do fall well inside the human psych range. All in all, then, you’d assume they’re explorers from distant parts.»
«Except for the primitive ship,» Jaccavrie chimed in. «One wouldn’t expect such technological backwardness in any group which had maintained any contact, however tenuous, with the general mass of the different human civilizations. Nor would such a slow, underequipped vessel pass through them without stopping, to fetch up in this border region.»
«Right. So… if it isn’t a fake… their gear bears out a part of their story. Kirkasant is an exceedingly old colony… yonder.» Laure pointed toward unseen stars. «Well out in the Dragon’s Head sector, where we’re barely beginning to explore. Somehow, somebody got that far, and in the earliest days of interstellar travel. They settled down on a planet and lost the trick of making spaceships. Only lately have they regained it.»
«And come back, looking for the companionship of their own kind.» Laure had a brief, irrational vision of Jaccavrie nodding. Her tone was so thoughtful. She would be a big, calm, dark-haired woman, handsome in middle age though getting somewhat plump… «What the crew themselves have said, as communication got established, seems to bear out this idea. Beneath a great many confused mythological motifs, I also get the impression of an epic voyage, by a defeated people who ran as far as they could.»
«But Kirkasant!» Laure protested. «The whole situation they describe. It’s impossible.»
«Might not that Vandange be mistaken? I mean, we know so little. The Kirkasanters keep talking about a weird home environment. Ours appears to have stunned and bewildered them. They simply groped on through space till they happened to find Serieve. Thus might their own theory, that somehow they blundered in from an altogether different continuum, might it not conceivably be right?»
«Hm-m-m. I guess you didn’t see Vandange’s accompanying letter. No, you haven’t, it wouldn’t’ve been plugged into your memory. Anyway he claims his assistants examined that ship down to the bolt heads. And they found nothing, no mechanism, no peculiarity, whose function and behavior weren’t obvious. He really gets indignant. Says the notion of interspace-time transference is mathematically absurd. I don’t have quite his faith in mathematics, myself, but I must admit he has one common-sense point. If a ship could somehow flip from one entire cosmos to another… why, in five thousand years of interstellar travel, haven’t we gotten some record of it happening?»
«Perhaps the ships to which it occurs never come back.»
«Perhaps. Or perhaps the whole argument is due to misunderstanding. We don’t have any good grasp of the Kirkasanter language. Or maybe it’s a hoax. That’s Vandange’s opinion. He claims there’s no such region as they say they come from. Not anywhere. Neither astronomers nor explorers have ever found anything like a… a space like a shining fog, crowded with stars—»
«But why should these wayfarers tell a falsehood?» Jaccavrie sounded honestly puzzled.
«I don’t know. Nobody does. That’s why the Serievan government decided it’d better ask for a Ranger.»
Laure jumped up and started pacing again. He was a tall young man, with the characteristic beardlessness, fair hair and complexion, slightly slanted blue eyes of the Fireland mountaineers on New Vixen. But since he had trained at Starborough, which is on Aladir not far from Irontower City, he affected a fashionably simple gray tunic and blue hose. The silver comet of his calling blazoned his left breast.
«I don’t know,» he repeated. There rose in him a consciousness of that immensity which crouched beyond this hull. «Maybe they are telling the sober truth. We don’t dare not know.»
When a few score million people have an entire habitable world to themselves, they do not often build high. That comes later, along with formal wilderness preservation, disapproval of fecundity, and inducements to emigrate. Pioneer towns tend to be low and rambling. (Or so it is in that civilization wherein the Commonalty operates. We know that other branches of humanity have their distinctive ways, and hear rumors of yet stranger ones. But so vast is the galaxy—these two or three spiral arms, a part of which our race has to date thinly occupied—so vast, that we cannot even keep track of our own culture, let alone anyone else’s.)
Pelogard, however, was founded on an island off the Branzan mainland, above Serieve’s arctic circle: which comes down to almost 56°. Furthermore, it was an industrial center. Hence most of its buildings were tall and crowded. Laure, standing by the outer wall of Ozer Vandange’s office and looking forth across the little city, asked why this location had been chosen.
«You don’t know?» responded the physicist. His inflection was a touch too elaborately incredulous.
«I’m afraid not,» Laure confessed. «Think how many systems my service has to cover, and how many individual places within each system. If we tried to remember each, we’d never be anywhere but under the neuroinductors.»