Maybe pursuit had not been for the whole distance. Maybe the refugees had indeed escaped after a while, but—in blind panic, or rage against the foe, or desire to practice undisturbed a brand of utopianism, or whatever the motive was—they had continued as far as they possibly could, and hidden themselves as thoroughly as nature allowed.
In any case, they had ended in a strange part of creation: so strange that numerous men on Serieve did not admit it existed. By then, their ship must have been badly in need of a complete overhaul, amounting virtually to a rebuilding. They settled down to construct the necessary industrial base. (Think, for example, how much plant you must have before you make your first transistor.) They did not have the accumulated experience of later generations to prove how impossible this was.
Of course they failed. A few score—a few hundred at absolute maximum, if the ship had been rigged with suspended-animation lockers—could not preserve a full-fledged civilization while coping with a planet for which man was never meant. And they had to content themselves with that planet. Once into the Cloud Universe, even if their vessel could still wheeze along for a while, they were no longer able to move freely about, picking and choosing.
Kirkasant was probably the best of a bad lot. And Laure thought it was rather a miracle that man had survived there. So small a genetic pool, so hostile an environment… but the latter might well have saved him from the effects of the former. Natural selection must have been harsh. And, seemingly, the radiation background was high, which led to a corresponding mutation rate. Women bore from puberty to menopause, and buried most of their babies. Men struggled to keep them alive. Often death harvested adults, too, entire families. But those who were fit tended to survive. And the planet did have an unfilled ecological niche: the one reserved for intelligence. Evolution galloped. Population exploded. In one or two millennia, man was at home on Kirkasant. In five, he crowded it and went looking for new planets.
Because culture had never totally died. The first generation might be unable to build machine tools, but could mine and forge metals. The next generation might be too busy to keep public schools, but had enough hard practical respect for learning that it supported a literate class. Succeeding generations, wandering into new lands, founding new nations and societies, might war with each other, but all drew from a common tradition and looked to one goaclass="underline" reunion with the stars.
Once the scientific method had been created afresh, Laure thought, progress must have been more rapid than on Earth. For the natural philosophers knew certain things were possible, even if they didn’t know how, and this was half the battle. They must have got some hints, however oracular, from the remnants of ancient texts. They actually had the corroded hulk of the ancestral ship for their studying. Given this much, it was not too surprising that they leaped in a single lifetime from the first moon rockets to the first hyperdrive craft—and did so on a basis of wildly distorted physical theory, and embarked with such naivete that they couldn’t find their way home again!
All very logical. Unheard of, outrageously improbable, but in this big a galaxy the strangest things are bound to happen now and again. The Kirkasanters could be absolutely honest in their story.
If they were.
“:Let the past tend the past,” Graydal said impatiently. “We’ve tomorrow to hunt in.”
“Yes,” Laure said, “but I do need to know a few things. It’s not clear to me how you found us. I mean, you crossed a thousand light-years or more of wilderness. How did you come on a speck like Serieve?”
“We were asked that before,” Demring said, “but then we could not well explain, few words being held in common. Now you show a good command of the Hobrokan tongue, and for our part, albeit none of these villagers will take the responsibility of putting one of us under your educator machine… in talking with technical folk, we’ve gained various technical words of yours.”
He was silent awhile, collecting phrases. The three people continued up the trail. It was wide enough for them to walk abreast, somewhat, muddy with rain and melted snow. The sun was so Ear down that the woods walled it; off; twilight smoked from the ground and from either iide, though the sky was still pale. The wind was dying but the chill deepening. Somewhere behind those dun trunks and ashy-metallic leaves, a voice went “K-krr-r-rukr and, above and ahead, the sound of a river became audible.
Demring said with care: “See you, when we could not find our way back to Kirkasant’s sun, and at last had come out in an altogether different cosmos, we thought our ancestors might have originated there. Certain traditional songs hinted as much, speaking of space as dark for instance; and surely darkness encompassed us now, and immense loneliness between the stars. Well, but in which direction might Homeland lie? Casting about with telescopes, we spied afar a black cloud, and thought, if the ancestors had been in flight from enemies, they might well have gone through such, hoping to break their trail.”
“The Dragon’s Head Nebula,” Laure nodded. Graydal’s wide shoulders lifted and fell. “At least it gave us something to steer by,” she said.
Laure stole a moment’s admiration of her profile. “You had courage,” he said. “Quite aside from everything else, how did you know this civilization had not stayed hostile to you?”
“How did we know it ever was in the first place?” she chuckled. “Myself, insofar as I believe the myths have any truth, I suspect our ancestors were thieves or bandits, or—”
“Daughter!” Demring hurried on, in a scandalized voice: “When we had fared thus far, we found the darkness was dust and gas such as pervade the universe at home. There was simply an absence of stars to make them shine. Emerging on the far side, we tuned our neutrino detectors. Our reasoning was that a highly developed civilization would use a great many nuclear power plants. Their neutrino flux should be detectable above the natural noise level—in this comparatively empty cosmos—across several score light-years or better, and we could home on it.”
First they sound like barbarians bards, Laure thought, and then like radionicians. No wonder a dogmatist like Vandange can’t put credence in them.
Can I?
“We soon began to despair,” Graydal said. “We were nigh to the limit—”
“No matter,” Demring interrupted.
She looked steadily first at one man, then the other, and said, “I dare trust Daven Laure.” To the Ranger: “Belike no secret anyhow, since men on Serieve must have examined our ship with knowledgeable eyes. We were nigh to our limit of travel without refueling and refurbishing. We were about to seek for a planet not too unlike Kirkasant where—But then, as if by Valfar’s Wings, came the traces we sought, and we followed them here.
“And here were humans!
“Only of late has our gladness faded as we begin to see how they temporize and keep us half prisoner. Wholly prisoner, maybe, should we try to depart. Why will they not rely on us?”
“I tried to explain that when we talked yesterday,” Laure said. “Some important men don’t see how you could be telling the truth.”
She caught his hand in a brief, impulsive grasp. Her own was warm, slender, and hard. “But you are different?”
“Yes.” He felt helpless and alone. “They’ve, well, they’ve called for me. Put the entire problem in the hands of my organization. And my fellows have so much else to do that, well, Fm given broad discretion.”