The narrators’ pavilion lay a little distance onward. About a hundred persons sat inside waiting, mostly adults, mostly from Eagle and Argosy, though several youngsters and Fleetiving crew also felt they would enjoy the performance. They gave Shaun the salute of greeting as he entered, came down an aisle, and mounted the stage. Rusa Erody was already there. She made a striking sight, clad in a long dress of scales that glittered in the subdued light, herself a genetic throwback, tall and blonde. Her fingers drew vigorous chords from the polymusicon on her lap. The song she sang was as ancient as her looks, translated and retranslated over the centuries, because it spoke to the Kith.
“—The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,
And the Deuce knows what we may do—
But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
We’re down, hull down, on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new!”
Words and notes clanged away. Shaun took the chair beside hers. The tumult outside washed like surf around sudden silence.
He lifted a hand. “Good landing, friends,” he drawled. A comfortable informality was his style at these events. “Thanks for coming, when you’ve got so much else you could be having fun with. Well, you men have had my partner to admire, Rusa Erody, biosafety technician and bard. I’m Ormer Shaun, second mate and occasional storyteller. Those of you who docked here earlier have heard others tell of things that Fleetwing did or encountered or got wind of, sometimes generations ago. Rusa and I will relate a happening on our latest voyage, just finished.”
“But it was well-nigh a hundred years agone, for Aerie is the farthest of all worlds where humans dwell, our last lonely home in the heavens,” the woman half sang. Music wove low beneath her voice. Her role was to call forth a mood and bring a scene to life. If she deemed that meant repeating common knowledge, it worked as a refrain or a familiar line of melody does. “Not even our explorers have quested much beyond, where time must sunder them from us more than the hollow spaces themselves.”
Shaun frowned slightly. A storytelling was not rehearsed, but improvised. The hint that outwardness was faltering fitted ill with the lightness he intended. But Rusa generally knows what she’s doing, he thought. A touch of sad or anxious, like a pinch of sharp spice—He decided to follow suit for a moment, in prosaic wise, before he went on to his tale.
“Well, being that distant, Aerie gets visitors few and seldom. Previous one, as near as we could learn, was about a century before. We figured to do a brisk trade in the goods and information we offered.
“But also, after what we’d just been through on Earth, we didn’t care to see it again soon. Insults, restrictions, place after place that didn’t want us for customers, throat-grip taxes—yes, once a mob threw rocks at some of us, and I saw a woman of ours bleed and heard little children of ours crying—but many of you know this, maybe better than we do. To the Coal Sack with ’em. We’d come back after they were dead, if they hadn’t meanwhile spawned too many like themselves.”
A smile crinkled his face. His tone eased. “Moreover, frankly, a lot of us were curious. What’d been going on, way out at Aerie? What new and odd might we find? We’d been in the Quadrangle Trade for some while and were getting a tad bored with it. Time for a change of scene, a real change.”
“The Quadrangle Trade,” Erody chimed in. “Biochemicals from the seas of Maia’s uninhabitable sister planet Morgana, worth harvesting and transporting because it costs more to synthesize them. Rare, useful isotopes from the system where Aurora orbits. Arts and crafts from Feng Huang. Biostock from Earth, to nourish the Earth life on yonder worlds.”
This was not entirely another chorus for Shaun. Neither Eagle nor Argosy had plied that circuit, and crew-folk of theirs might know it only vaguely. She did not add that it too was declining, losing profitability as the demand for such cargoes diminished. “We fared from the Quadrangle toward the Lion,” she finished.
“A long haul, aye,” Shaun said. “Considering how scarce traders had been on Aerie, and how small the population and industry probably still were, we loaded a lot of stuff more massive than usual, machinery and so on.
“Besides our several hundred men, women, and children as always, their life support, their household treasures, their tools and weapons that they may have need to wield when we arrive, their need to be together, to be families, and thus keep the life of the ship alive.” Not information, for those who sat listening—affirmation, for every Kith member, living, dead, and unborn.
“So our gamma factor was well down, seeing as how our quantum gate’s no bigger than anybody else’s.”
“Not like Envoy’s, for none of our ships is Envoy, crossing five thousand light-years to seek the next nearest starfarers and bearing no more crew than her fabled ten. Well could we wish for an engine like hers, but the gain and loss of trade say no, it cannot pay, and though we travel not for trafficking alone, it is by the traffic that we abide as the Kith.” More rituality, as a priest at a service may recite an article of the creed to strengthen feeling in a congregation that may know it word by word.
“Ninety-seven light-years took us eight zero-zero months. Oh, we were good and tired when we got there-tired, anyway, and cramped and grubby and ready to settle in for a spell.”
“Where ground and grass were under our feet, a breeze and unfeigned odors of growth in our nostrils, heaven blue overhead, and strangers around us, new souls for us to know.”
“Who hadn’t heard every joke and anecdote we could tell, folks who’d think we were glamorous and our wares were marvelous. And they ought to be interesting to us, of course, and have things to trade that’d fetch decent prices back at the heart stars.”
“Yet theirs is a harsh holding.”
“You know Aerie’s not just far off from anywhere else human, it’s a lump that never would’ve been settled if planets where people can settle at all weren’t scarce.”
“Vanishingly scarce. The sun of Aerie dim, its light across the lands of summer like the light of hazy autumn over Earth. The glaciers north and south, mountain-high. The cold seas that clash around the one tropical continent that our race could make its own. But the rings, the remnants of a shattered moon, the rings on a clear night are very beautiful.”
“Well, the land’s not that bad everywhere. The region where we set up our pitch, after Fleetiving took orbit, was shirtsleeve in its fashion. Naturally, that was the spot we negotiated to stay at, and, naturally, it belonged to the grand high rambuck.”
Shaun continued with incidents from first contact, the establishment of groundside camp, trade, personal encounters, mostly as amusing as he could make them. Erody filled in descriptions.
“Our cabins were on pastureland, for they keep herds and sow crops on Aerie,” she explained. “They dare not trust entirely to robotics and synthesis, when quake or storm or meteorite or the mites that gnaw metal may strike terribly in any year. Terrestrial grass stretched away southward from us, deeply green in the pale day, on one side the neatly arrayed houses and shops of the Magistrate’s retainers and their kindred. Northward persisted native forest, a murky realm into which few ventured and none deeply. The castle loomed between us and the wildwood, its towers stark athwart the clouds, No need for curtain walls, when aircraft, missiles, and armed men stood watch. The castle was a community in itself, homes, worksteads, chapels, stadium, even laboratories and a museum.”