Ridenour drank smoke and shivered.
He grew peripherally aware of an approach and turned. Evagail joined him on panther feet. She hadn’t yet bothered to dress, but the wetness and chill didn’t seem to inconvenience her. Ridenour scolded himself for being aware of how good she looked. Grow up, he thought; you’re a man with a task at hand.
“Figured I’d join you.” Her husky voice used the Up-woods dialect, which was said to be more, archaic than that of the Cities. The pronunciation was indeed different, slower and softer. But Ridenour had not observed that vocabulary and grammar had suffered much. Maybe not at all. “You look lonesome. Hungry, too, I’ll bet. Here.” She offered him a large gold-colored sphere.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Steak apple, we call it. Grows everywhere this time of year.”
He lay down his pipe and bit. The fruit was delicious, sweet, slightly smoky, but with an underlying taste of solid protein. Ravenous, he bit again. “Thank you,” he said around a mouthful. “This should be a meal by itself.”
“Well, not quite. It’ll do for breakfast, though.”
“I, uh, understand the forests bear ample food the year around.”
“Yes, if you know what to find and how. Was necessary to introduce plants and animals from offworld, mutated forMs that could survive on Freehold, before humans could live here without any synthetics. Especially urgent to get organisms that concentrate, what iron the soil has, and other essential trace minerals. Several vitamins were required as well.”
Ridenour stopped chewing because his jaw had fallen. Savages weren’t supposed to talk like that! Hastily, hoping to keep her in the right mood, he recovered his composure and said: “I believe the first few generations established such species to make it easier to move into the wilderness and exploit its resources. Why didn’t they succeed?”
“Lots of reasons,” Evagail said. “Including, I think, a pretty deep-rooted fear of ever being alone.” She scowled. Her tone grew harsh. “But there was a practical reason, too. The new organisms upset the ecology. Had no natural enemies here, you see. They destroyed enormous areas of forest. That’s how the desert south of Startop originated, did you know? Our first generations had a fiend’s time restoring balance and fertility.”
Again Ridenour gaped, not sure he had heard right.
“Of course, the sun helped,” she went on more calmly.
“Beg pardon?”
“The sun.” She pointed east. The early light was now like molten steel, and spears of radiance struck upward. Her hair was made copper, her body bronze. “F-type star. Actinic and ionizing radiation gets through in quantity, even with this dense an atmosphere. Biochemistry is founded on highly energetic compounds. Freehold life is more vigorous than Terran, evolves faster, finds more new ways to be what it wants.” Her voice rang. “You learn how to become worthy of the forest, or you don’t last long.”
Ridenour looked away from her. She aroused too much within him.
The work of demolishing the aircraft went apace, despite the often primitive equipment used. He could understand why their metal was often desired. The out-backers were known to have mines of their own, but few and poor; they employed metal only where it was quite unfeasible to substitute stone, wood, glass, leather, bone, shell, fiber, glue… But the vehicles were being stripped with unexpected care. Foremen who obviously knew what they were doing supervised the removal, intact, of articles like’transceivers and power cells.
Evagail seemed to follow his thought. “Oh, yes, we’ll use those’ adgets while they last,” she said. “They aren’t vital, but they’re handy. For certain purposes.”
Ridenour finished his apple, picked up his pipe and rekindled it. She wrinkled her nose. Tobacco was not a vice of the woodsfolk, though they were rumored to have many others, including some that would astonish a jaded Terran. “I never anticipated that much knowledgeability,” he said. “Including, if I may make bold, your own.”
“We’re not all provincials,” she answered, with a quirk of lips. “Quite a few, like Karlsarm, for instance, have studied offplanet. They’d be chosen, you see, as having the talent for it. Afterward they’d come back and teach others.”
“But—how—”
She studied him for a moment, with disconcertingly steady hazel eyes, before saying: “No harm in telling you, I suppose. I believe you’re an honest man, John Ridenour—intellectually honest—and we do need some communicators between us and the Empire.
“Our people took passage on Arulian ships. This was before the rebellion, of course. It began generations ago. The humans of the Nine Cities paid no attention. They’d always held rather aloof from the Arulians: partly from snobbishness, I suppose, and partly from lack of imagination. But the Arulians traded directly with us, too. That wasn’t any secret. Nor was it a secret that we saw more of them more intimately, learned more from them, than the City men did. It was only that the City men weren’t interested in details of that relationship. They didn’t ask what their ‘inferiors’ were up to Why should we or the Arulians volunteer lectures about it?”
“And what were you up to?” Ridenour asked. softly.
“Nothing, at first, except that we wanted some of our people to have a look at galactic civilization—real civilization, not those smug, ingrown Nine—and the Arulians were willing to sell us berths on their regular cargo ships. In the nature of the case, our visits were mainly to planets outside the Empire, which is why Terra never heard what was going on. At last, though, some, like Karlsarm, did make their way to Imperial worlds, looked around, enrolled in schools and universities… By that time, however, relations on Freehold were becoming strained. There was no predicting what might happen. We thought it best to provide our students with cover identities. That wasn’t hard. No one inquired closely. No one can remember all the folkways, of all the colonies. This is such a big galaxy.”
“It is that,” Ridenour whispered. The sun climbed aloft, too brilliant for him to look anywhere near.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“Fade into the woods before enemy flyers track us down. Cache our plunder and start for home.”
“But what about your prisoners? The men who were forced to pilot and—”
“Why, they can stay here. We’ll show, them what they can eat and where a spring is. And we’ll leave plenty of debris. A searcher’s bound to spot them before long. Of course, I hope some will join us. We don’t have as many men with civilized training as we could use.”
“Join you?” Ridenour choked. “After what you have done?”
Again she regarded him closely and gravely. “What did we do that was unforgiveable? Killed some men, yes—but in honest battle, in the course of war. Then we risked everything to spare the lives of everybody else.”
“But what about their livelihoods? Their homes? Their possessions, their—”
“What about ours?” Evagail shrugged. “Never mind. I suspect we will get three or four recruits. Young men who’ve felt vaguely restless and unfulfilled. I had hopes about you. But maybe I’d better go talk with someone more .promising.”
She turned, not brusquely or hostilely, and rippled back downhill. Ridenour stared after her.
He stood long alone, thinking, while the sun lifted and the sky filled with birds and the work neared an end below him. It was becoming more and more clear that the outbackers—the Free People, as they seemed to call themselves—were not savages.