Vandange stopped for breath and triumph.
«Well.» Laure shifted uneasily in his seat and wished Jaccavrie weren’t ten thousand kilometers away at the only spaceport. «You have a point. There are contradictions, aren’t there? I’ll bear what you said in mind when I, uh, interview the strangers themselves.»
«And you will, I trust, be wary of them,» Vandange said.
«Oh, yes. Something queer does seem to be going on.»
In outward appearance, the Kirkasanters were not startling. They didn’t resemble any of the human breeds that had developed locally, but they varied less from the norm than some. The fifteen men and five women were tall, robust, broad in chest and shoulders, slim in waist. Their skins were dark coppery reddish, their hair blue-black and wavy; males had some beard and mustache which they wore neatly trimmed. Skulls were dolichocephalic, faces disharmonically wide, noses straight and thin, lips full. The total effect was handsome. Their eyes were their most arresting feature, large, long-lashed, luminous in shades of gray, or green, or yellow.
Since they had refused—with an adamant politeness they well knew how to assume—to let cell samples be taken for chromosome analysis, Vandange had muttered to Laure about nonhumans in surgical disguise. But that the Ranger classed as the fantasy of a provincial who’d doubtless never met a live xeno. You couldn’t fake so many details, not and keep a viable organism. Unless, to be sure, happenstance had duplicated most of those details for you in the course of evolution…
Ridiculous, Laure thought. Coincidence isn’t that energetic.
He walked from Pelogard with Demring Lodden, captain of the Makt, and Demring’s daughter, navigator Graydal. The town was soon behind them. They found a trail that wound up into steeply rising hills, among low, gnarly trees which had begun to put forth leaves that were fronded and colored like old silver. The sun was sinking, the air noisy and full of salt odors. Neither Kirkasanter appeared to mind the chill.
«You know your way here well,» Laure said clumsily.
«We should,» Demring answered, «for we have been held on this sole island, with naught to do but ramble it when the reyad takes us.»
«Reyad?» Laure asked.
«The need to… search,» Graydal said. «To track beasts, or find what is new, or be alone in wild places. Our folk were hunters until not so long ago. We bear their blood.»
Demring wasn’t to be diverted from his grudge. «Why are we thus confined?» he growled. «Each time we sought an answer, we got an evasion. Fear of disease, need for us to learn what to expect—Ha, by now I’m half minded to draw my gun, force my way to our ship, and depart for aye!»
He was erect, grizzled, deeply graven of countenance and bleak of gaze. Like his men, he wore soft boots, a knee-length gown of some fine-scaled leather, a cowled cloak, a dagger and an energy pistol at his belt. On his forehead sparkled a diamond that betokened authority.
«Well, but, Master,» Graydal said, «here today we deal with no village witch-finders. Daven Laure is a king’s man, with power to act, knowledge and courage to act rightly. Has he not gone off alone with us because you said you felt stifled and spied on in the town? Let us talk as freefolk with him.»
Her smile, her words in the husky voice that Laure remembered from his recordings, were gentle. He felt pretty sure, though, that as much steel underlay her as her father, and possibly whetted sharper. She almost matched his height, her gait was tigerish, she was herself weaponed and diademmed. Unlike Laure’s close cut or Demring’s short bob, her hair passed through a platinum ring and blew free at full length. Her clothes were little more than footgear, fringed shorts, and thin blouse. However attractive, the sight did not suggest seductive femininity to the Ranger—when she wasn’t feeling the cold that struck through his garments. Besides, he had already learned that the sexes were mixed aboard the Makt for no other reason than that women were better at certain jobs than men. Every female was accompanied by an older male relative. The Kirkasanters were not an uncheerful folk on the whole, but some of their ideals looked austere.
Nonetheless, Graydal had lovely strong features, and her eyes, under the level brows, shone amber.
«Maybe the local government was overcautious,» Laure said, «but don’t forget, this is a frontier settlement. Not many light-years hence, in that part of the sky you came from, begins the unknown. It’s true the stars are comparatively thin in these parts—average distance between them about four parsecs—but still, their number is too great for us to do more than feel our way slowly forward. Especially when, in the nature of the case, planets like Serieve must devote most of their effort to developing themselves. So, when one is ignorant, one does best to be careful.»
He flattered himself that was a well-composed conciliatory speech. It wasn’t as oratorical as one of theirs, but they had lung capacity for a thinner atmosphere than this. He was disappointed when Demring said scornfully, «Our ancestors were not so timid.»
«Or else their pursuers were not,» Graydal laughed.
The captain looked offended. Laure hastily asked: «Have you no knowledge of what happened?»
«No,» said the girl, turned pensive. «Not in truth. Legends, found in many forms across all Kirkasant, tell of battle, and a shipful of people who fled far until at last they found haven. A few fragmentary records—but those are vague, save the Baorn Codex; and it is little more than a compendium of technical information which the wisemen of Skribent preserved. Even in that case»—she smiled again—«the meaning of most passages was generally obscure until after our modern scientists had invented the thing described for themselves.»
«Do you know what records remain in Homeland?» Demring asked hopefully.
Laure sighed and shook his head. «No. Perhaps none, by now. Doubtless, in time, an expedition will go from us to Earth. But after five thousand trouble-filled years—And your ancestors may not have started from there. They may have belonged to one of the first colonies.»
In a dim way, he could reconstruct the story. There had been a fight. The reasons—personal, familial, national, ideological, economic, whatever they were—had dropped into the bottom of the millennia between then and now. (A commentary on the importance of any such reasons.) But someone had so badly wanted the destruction of someone else that one ship, or one fleet, hounded another almost a quarter way around the galaxy.
Or maybe not, in a literal sense. It would have been hard to do. Crude as they were, those early vessels could have made the trip, if frequent stops were allowed for repair and resupply and refilling of the nuclear converters. But to this day, a craft under hyperdrive could only be detected within approximately a light-year’s radius by the instantaneous «wake» of space-pulses. If she lay doggo for a while, she was usually unfindable in the sheer stupendousness of any somewhat larger volume. That the hunter should never, in the course of many months, either have overhauled his quarry or lost the scent altogether, seemed conceivable but implausible.