At first Elva could not understand. An aircraft descending above the lake… what was so odd about that? How else did Huiva expect the inhabitants of settlements hundreds of kilometers apart to visit each other?—And then she registered the shape. And then, realizing the distance, she knew the size of the thing.
It came down swiftly, quiet in its shimmer of antigrav fields, a cigar shape which gleamed. Elva holstered her pistol again and took forth her binoculars. Now she could see how the sleekness was interrupted with turrets and boat housings, cargo locks, viewports. An emblem was set into the armored prow, a gauntleted hand grasping a planetary orb. Nothing she had ever heard of. But—
Her heart thumped, so loudly that she could almost not hear the Alfavala’s squeals of terror. “A spaceship,” she breathed. “A spaceship, do you know that word? Like the ships my ancestors came here in, long ago…. Oh, bother! A big aircraft, Huiva. Come on!”
She whipped her hailu back into gallop. The first spaceship to arrive at Vaynamo in, in, how long? More than a hundred years. And it was landing here! At her own Tervola!
The vessel grounded just beyond the village. Its enormous mass settled deeply into the plowland. Housings opened and auxiliary aircraft darted forth, to hover and swoop. They were of a curious design, larger and blunter than the fliers built on Vaynamo. The people, running toward the marvel, surged back as hatches gaped, gangways extruded, armored cars beetled down to the ground.
Elva had not yet reached the village when the strangers opened fire.
There were no hostile ships, not even an orbital fortress. To depart, the seven craft from Chertkoi simply made rendezvous beyond the atmosphere, held a short gleeful conference by radio, and accelerated outward. Captain Bors Golyev, commanding the flotilla, stood on the bridge of the Askol and watched the others. The light of the yellow sun was incandescent on their flanks. Beyond lay blackness and the many stars.
His gaze wandered off among constellations which the parallax of fifteen light-years had not much altered. The galaxy was so big, he thought, so unimaginably enormous…. Sedes Regis was an L scrawled across heaven. Tradition claimed Old Sol lay in that direction, a thousand parsecs away. But no one on Chertkoi was certain any longer. Golyev shrugged. Who cared?
“Gravitational field suitable for agoric drive, sir,” intoned the pilot.
Golyev looked in the sternward screen. The planet called Vaynamo had dwindled, but remained a vivid shield, barred with cloud and blazoned with continents, the overall color a cool blue-green. He thought of ocherous Chertkoi, and the other planets of its system, which were not even habitable. Vaynamo was the most beautiful color he had ever seen. The two moons were also visible, like drops of liquid gold.
Automatically, his astronaut’s eye checked the claims of the instruments. Was Vaynamo really far enough away for the ships to go safely into agoric? Not quite, he thought— no, wait, he’d forgotten that the planet had a five percent greater diameter than Chertkoi. “Very good,” he said, and gave the necessary orders to his subordinate captains. A deep hum filled air and metal and human bones. There was a momentary sense of falling, as the agoratron went into action. And then the stars began to change color and crawl weirdly across the visual field.
“All’s well, sir,” said the pilot. The chief engineer confirmed it over the intercom.
“Very good,” repeated Golyev. He yawned and stretched elaborately. “I’m tired! That was quite a little fight we had at that last village, and I’ve gotten no sleep since. I’ll be in my cabin. Call me if anything seems amiss.”
“Yes, sir.” The pilot smothered a knowing leer.
Golyev walked down the corridor, his feet slamming its metal under internal pseudogravity. Once or twice he met a crewman and accepted a salute as casually as it was given. The men of the Interplanetary Corporation didn’t need to stand on ceremony. They were tried spacemen and fighters, every one of them. If they chose to wear sloppy uniforms, to lounge about off-duty cracking jokes or cracking a bottle, to treat their officers as friends rather than tyrants—so much the better. This wasn’t the nice-nelly Surface Transport Corporation, or the spit-and-polish Chemical Synthesis trust, but IP, explorer and conqueror. The ship was clean and the guns were ready. What more did you want?
Pravoyats, the captain’s batman, stood outside the cabin door. He nursed a scratched cheek and a black eye. One hand rested broodingly on his sidearm. “Trouble?” inquired Golyev.
“Trouble ain’t the word, sir.”
“You didn’t hurt her, did you?” asked Golyev sharply.
“No, sir. I heard your orders all right. Never laid a finger on her in anger. But she sure did on me. Finally I wrassled her down and gave her a whiff of sleepy gas. She’d’a torn the cabin apart otherwise. She’s probably come out of it by now, but I’d rather not go in again to see, captain.”
Golyev laughed. He was a big man, looming over Pravoyats, who was no midget. Otherwise he was a normal patron-class Chertkoian, powerfully built, with comparatively short legs and strutting gait, his features dark, snubnosed, bearded, carrying more than his share of old scars. He wore a plain green tunic, pants tucked into soft boots, gun at hip, his only sign of rank a crimson star at his throat. “I’ll take care of all that from here on,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” Despite his wounds, the batman looked a shade envious. “Uh, you want the prod? I tell you, she’s a troublemaker.”
“No.”
“Electric shocks don’t leave any scars, captain.”
“I know. But on your way, Pravoyats.” Golyev opened the door, went through, and closed it behind him again.
The girl had been seated on his bunk. She stood up with a gasp. A looker, for certain. The Vaynamoan women generally seemed handsome; this one was beautiful, tall and slim, delicate face and straight nose lightly dusted with freckles. But her mouth was wide and strong, her skin suntanned, and she wore a coarse, colorful riding habit. Her exoticism was the most exciting thing: yellow hair, slant blue eyes, who’d ever heard of the like?
The tranquilizing after-effects of the gas—or else plain nervous exhaustion—kept her from attacking him. She backed against the wall and shivered. Her misery touched Golyev a little. He’d seen unhappiness elsewhere, on Imfan and Novagal and Chertkoi itself, and hadn’t been bothered thereby. People who were too weak to defend themselves must expect to be made booty of. It was different, though, when someone as good-looking as this was so woebegone.
He paused on the opposite side of his desk from her, gave a soft salute, and smiled. “What’s your name, my dear?”
She drew a shaken breath. After trying several times, she managed to speak. “I didn’t think… anyone … understood my language.”
“A few of us do. The hypnopede, you know.” Evidently she did not. He thought a short, dry lecture might soothe her. “An invention made a few decades ago on our planet. Suppose another person and I have no language in common. We can be given a drug to accelerate our nervous systems, and then the machine flashes images on a screen and analyzes the sounds uttered by the other person. What it hears is transferred to me and impressed on the speech center of my brain, electronically. As the vocabulary grows, a computer in the machine figures out the structure of the whole language—semantics, grammar, and so on—and orders my own learning accordingly. That way, a few short, daily sessions make me fluent.”
She touched her lips with a tongue that seemed equally parched. “I heard once … of some experiments at the University,” she whispered. “They never got far. No reason for such a machine. Only one language on Vaynamo.”
“And on Chertkoi. But we’ve already subjugated two other planets, one of ‘em divided into hundreds of language groups. And we expect there’ll be others.” Golyev opened a drawer, took out a bottle and two glasses. “Care for brandy?”