horizon was near, surprisingly near. It was a small world. And it was throbbing with vitality.
Chapter Sixteen
Bertt, designer and builder of the finest flyers, was an unhappy man. Not content with changing his world—a world which he had chosen for its remoteness, for its limitless spaces—they were now changing his life and, indeed, his very way of thinking. Although Bertt was not an introspective man—male (he corrected his use of the alien term)—this was perhaps the most disturbing thing of all; to have the thought patterns of a lifetime shattered so casually.
Surely, he thought, God would move. Surely, even a God who had in the recent past shown little interest in the Artonuee, leaving them to the doom signaled by the Fires, would be too proud to see her daughters flaunting themselves, wings unfurled and displayed outside their cloaks, simpering and fawning over and being pawed by the muscular Delanians. Had the entire race gone mad? Did thousands of years of tradition and common sense have so little value?
But it was not only the shamelessness of the new breed of Artonuee females which upset Bertt. He had not been able to get away from his shop, to go roving, solitary and in communication with his God, for months. And the last time he had ventured up into the Big Cold he had been forced to detour away from one of his favorite routes, bumping and sliding over unexplored ice fields, because of the presence of one of the several industrial plants which were springing up from the wild regions of his world like noxious metal growths.
It was his clean air which was being spoiled by the refuse of the huge, clanking plants, by the exhausts of the heavy traffic in drivers. And the temperate zone was becoming impossible. Hastily erected dwellings in multiple units were taking all available land areas, denuding the virgin growth of stunted trees. They were even building into the shallow waters of the equatorial sea, hiding its blue waters beneath metal platforms, defiling even the depths in their efforts to gather more raw materials for the building of still more plants and still more dwellings and
administration buildings. Now there was talk of melting the northern ice cap to uncover more usable land.
As a member of the Council of Five, Bertt had protested mightily. Melting the ice cap, he said, would submerge the tiny amount of temperate land at the equator. No, they told him—the Lady Miaree speaking for the slick-faced aliens—the surplus water would be evaporated and pumped into space. The ladies in Nirrar, he was to discover, while exposing their wings in invitations to the aliens, had decided that this world, his Five, was expendable. His planet, his chosen home, that once empty, beautiful, inhospitable but glorious world, was to be gutted.
"We must stand," he told his fellow male members of the Council of Five (Five was primarily a male world). "We might fight them."
They reacted as frightened walklings. They stuttered and vacillated and wavered and backed down. And his world was changed, almost overnight it seemed, although it had only been four years since the fleet landed on the frozen wastes and disgorged thousands of aliens, men, women and children.
Still, it was impossible not to be impressed by the purpose. He was firmly convinced that it was against God’s,will, but nevertheless, the idea was inspiring. And already the fabric of his religion had been ripped by the mere revelation that the aliens could, with their awesome power sources, prove that God’s Constant was not sacred. And it was exhilarating, in a way, to work with the aliens. He prided himself on being able to grasp immediately the complicated process of their power source, and he was more than equal to them in other fields. Even the most brilliant among them had difficulty in connecting the loose principles which went into the fashioning of a mires expander; but to give credit where credit was due—he was a fair man—once grasped, the principles swirled around in the alien brain and came out with twists which, once expounded, seemed so elementary that he was ashamed of not having thought of them himself.
Yes, there were compensations. He himself had flown. He, Bertt, the builder, had been forced to admit that he was wrong and he, being the male that he was and prideful of it, admitted that he was wrong. Perhaps newness was not all that undesirable when it produced a machine like the Rim Star II.
Aboard that small vessel, he, along with the man called Rei and the Lady Miaree, had vaulted further from the home worlds than any Artonuee male. And now the combination of converters, expanders, and power which had made the Rim Star II blast effortlessly into deep space, eating distance at a God-defying rate, was being developed to power vast star ships, the size of which dwarfed anything ever dreamed. And that—that vast, unbelievable project—was only the beginning.
In spite of his misgivings and his sadness at seeing his world changed, Bertt could not conceal his eagerness. He considered the nights to be wasted, slept only the minimum number of hours, was at his shop before the Fires cooled in the warmth of the distant sun. More often than not he found Untell there ahead of him.
She was there, alien woman, hair chopped carelessly close to her scalp, fleshy body bent over a work bench, on a morning in the beginning of the year, probing into the intricacies of a mires expander, her eyes reddened by sleeplessness. She had been his work mate for four years, and his revulsion toward her largeness, her alien fleshiness, had gradually changed, first into a grudging admission that the alien had a brain, and then into an admiration which, as the months passed, wiped from his mind all his conscious awareness of their differences. Together, they were changing more than a world.
"You have not slept," he said.
"Didn’t want to lose it," she said, not looking up. "I think we can test as soon as I..." She applied a cold torch, fused tiny contact points.
"The new circuit was satisfactory?" Bertt asked, pushing his arms into his working garment and leaning down, head close to Untell’s.
"Perfect," she said.
"Resistance readings?" he asked, watching her fingers move with a nimbleness which he envied.
She chuckled. "As predicted."
He breathed deeply and allowed himself a smile. He had mistrusted his own figures.
His momentary irritation at finding Untell still in the shop faded before his interest, for if he were right— and it was his theory, developed after having his mind opened through contact with the almost heretical courage and intellectual curiosity of the alien woman—he, Bertt, would have a place in the combined history of the Artonuee and Delanian races. If he were right, he, Bertt, the builder, would also bring further curses down on his head from the priests, for his discovery, if it tested, would open new avenues of thinking which would relegate the vengeful God of the Artonuee to a position even more inferior than She now held.
But Bertt was not thinking of God as he busied himself. He was thinking of the fantastic force held there, within the altered mires expander, in two tiny bits of red-brown metal machined to be exactly a 0.1-inch cube.
Untell assisted as he made the last connections, his blunt fingers less nimble, but sure. Then they stood before the assembled expander and the alien smiled and shrugged.
Permission for the test had already been granted by the Lady Miaree, Overlady of Five. The drone driver was fueled and waiting, an obsolete vehicle not deemed worthy of conversion to the new power source. All test units within the driver had been tested and checked repeatedly by assistants.