They had used Farla to destroy Vilkai, and Farla to destroy Farla. Would they use Farla again, to sub-divide space into smaller and smaller empires until there were no longer any foes to throw their ships back to the piddling solar system from whence they came?
He did not know. But he suspected.
He suspected. But he did not know.
And there had been nothing for him to do but follow either one track or the other, and both roads led to Earth.
Soon, he suspected, all roads, all over the Galaxy, would lead to Earth. To wily, scheming Earth.
The die had been cast.
TIME LAG
Poul Anderson
522 Anno Coloniae Conditae:
Elva was on her way back, within sight of home, when the raid came.
For nineteen thirty-hour days, riding in high forests where sunlight slanted through leaves, across ridges where grass and the first red lampflowers rippled under springtime winds, sleeping by night beneath the sky or in the hut of some woodsdweller—once, even, in a nest of Alfavala, where the wild little folk twittered in the dark and their eyes glowed at her—she had been gone. Her original departure was reluctant. Her husband of two years, her child of one, the lake and fields and chimney smoke at dusk which were now hers also, these were still too marvelous to leave.
But the Freeholder of Tervola had duties as well as rights. Once each season, he or his representative must ride circuit. Up into the mountains, through woods and deep dales, across the Lakeland as far as The Troll and then following the Swiftsmoke River south again, ran the route which Karlavi’s fathers had traveled for nearly two centuries. Whether on hailu-back in spring and summer, through the scarlet and gold of fall, or by motorsled when snow had covered all trails, the Freeholder went out into his lands. Isolated farm clans, forest rangers on patrol duty, hunters and trappers and timber cruisers, brought their disputes to him as magistrate, their troubles to him as leader. Even the flitting Alfavala had learned to wait by the paths, the sick and injured trusting he could heal them, those with more complex problems struggling to put them into human words.
This year, however, Karlavi and his bailiffs were much preoccupied with a new dam across the Oulu. The old one had broken last spring, after a winter of unusually heavy snowfall, and 5000 hectares of bottom land were drowned. The engineers at Yuvaskula, the only city on Vaynamo, had developed a new construction process well adapted to such situations. Karlavi wanted to use this.
“But blast it all,” he said, “I’ll need every skilled man I have, including myself. The job has got to be finished before the ground dries, so the ferroplast can bond with the soil. And you know what the labor shortage is like around here.”
“Who will ride circuit, then?” asked Elva.
“That’s what I don’t know.” Karlavi ran a hand through his straight brown hair. He was a typical Vaynamoan, tall, light-complexioned, with high cheekbones and oblique blue eyes. He wore the working clothes usual to the Tervola district, leather breeches ending in mukluks, a mackinaw in the tartan of his family. There was nothing romantic about his appearance. Nonetheless, Elva’s heart turned over when he looked at her. Even after two years.
He got out his pipe and tamped it with nervous motions. “Somebody must,” he said. “Somebody with enough technical education to use a medikit and discuss people’s difficulties intelligently. And with authority. We’re more tradition-minded hereabouts than they are at Ruuyalka, dear. Our people wouldn’t accept the judgment of just anyone. How could a servant or tenant dare settle an argument between two pioneers? It must be me, or a bailiff, or—” His voice trailed off.
Elva caught the implication. “No!” she exclaimed. “I can’t! I mean… that is—”
“You’re my wife,” said Karlavi slowly. “That alone gives you the right, by well-established custom. Especially since you’re the daughter of the Magnate of Ruuyalka. Almost equivalent to me in prestige, even if you do come from the other end of the continent, where they’re fishers and marine farmers instead of woodsfolk.” His grin flashed. “I doubt if you’ve yet learned what awful snobs the free yeomen of Tervola are!”
“But Hauki, I can’t leave him.”
“Hauki will be spoiled rotten in your absence, by an adoring nanny and a villageful of ten wives. Otherwise he’ll do fine.” Karlavi dismissed the thought of their son with a wry gesture. “I’m the one who’ll get lonesome. Abominably so.”
“Oh, darling,” said Elva, utterly melted.
A few days later she rode forth.
And it had been an experience to remember. The easy, rocking motion of the six-legged hailu, the mindless leisure of kilometer after kilometer—where however the body, skin and muscle and blood and all ancient instinct, gained an aliveness such as she had never before felt; the silence of mountains with sunlit ice on their shoulders, then birdsong in the woods and a river brawling; the rough warm hospitality when she stayed overnight with some pioneer, the eldritch welcome at the Alfa nest—she was now glad she had encountered those things, and she hoped to know them again, often.
There had been no danger. The last violence between humans on Vaynamo (apart from occasional fist fights, caused mostly by sheer exuberance and rarely doing any harm) lay a hundred years in the past. As for storms, landslides, flood, wild animals, she had the unobtrusive attendance of Huiva and a dozen other “tame” Alfavala. Even these, the intellectual pick of their species, who had chosen to serve man in a doglike fashion rather than keep to the forests, could speak only a few words and handle only the simplest tools. But their long ears, flat nostrils, feathery antennae, every fine green hair on every small body, were always aquiver. This was their planet, they had evolved here, and they were more animal than rational beings. Their senses and reflexes kept her safer than an armored aircraft might.
All the same, the absence of Karlavi and Hauki grew sharper each day. When finally she came to the edge of cleared land, high on the slopes of Hornback Fell, and saw Tervola below, a momentary blindness stung her eyes.
Huiva guided his hailu alongside hers. He pointed down the mountain with his tail. “Home,” he chattered. “Food tonight. Snug bed.”
“Yes.” Elva blinked hard. What sort of crybaby am I, anyhow? she asked herself, half in anger. I’m the Magnate’s daughter and the Freeholder’s wife, I have a University degree and a pistol-shooting medal, as a girl I sailed through hurricanes and skindove into grottos where fang-fish laired, as a woman I brought a son into the world… I will not bawl!
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s hurry.”
She thumped heels on the hailu’s ribs and started downhill at a gallop. Her long yellow hair was braided, but a lock of it broke loose, fluttering behind her. Hoofs rang on stone. Ahead stretched grainfields and pastures, still wet from winter but their shy green deepening toward summer hues, on down to the great metallic sheet of Lake Rovaniemi and then across the valley to the opposite horizon, where the High Mikkela reared into a sky as tall and blue as itself. Down by the lake clustered the village, the dear red tile of roofs, the whale shape of a processing plant, a road lined with trees leading to the Freeholder’s mansion. There, old handhewn timbers glowed with sun; the many windows flung the light dazzlingly back to her.
She was halfway down the slope when Huiva screamed. She had learned to react fast. Thinly scattered across all Vaynamo, men could easily die from the unforeseen. Reining in, Elva snatched loose the gun at her waist. “What is it?”
Huiva cowered on his mount. One hand pointed skyward.