The Long Way Home

5

There was darkness around Saris Hronna where he crouched, and a wet wind blowing off the canal with a thousand odors of strangeness. The night was full of fear.

He lay in the weeds and mud of the canal bank, flattening his belly to the earth, and listened for those who hunted him.

There was no moon yet, but the stars were high and clear, a distant pulsing glow on the world’s edge told of a city, and for him there was enough gray light for vision. He looked down the straight line of the canal, the ordered rows of wind-rustling grain marching from horizon to horizon, the rounded bulk of somebody’s darkened hut three miles off; his nostrils sucked in a cool dank air, green growth and the small warm scurry of wildlife; he heard the slow, light dragging of wind, the remote honking of a bird, the incredibly faint boom of some airship miles overhead; his nerves drank the eddies and pulses of other nerves, other beings—so had he lain in the darknesses of Holat, waiting for an animal he hunted to come by, and letting himself flow into the vast murmurous midnight. But this time he was the quarry, and he could not blend himself to the life of Earth. It was too alien: every smell, every vision, every trembling nerve-current of mouse or beetle, was saw-toothed with strangeness; the very wind blew with another voice.

Below his waiting and his fear, there was a gape of sorrow. Somehow he had gone through time as well as space, somehow the planet he knew and all his folk, mate and cubs and kindred, were a thousand years behind him. He was alone as none of his race had ever been alone. Alone and, lonely.

The philosophers of Holat had been suspicious of that human ship, he remembered bleakly. In their world-view, the universe and every object and process within it were logically, inevitably finite. Infinity was a concept which violated some instinct of rightness when taken from pure mathematics into the physical cosmos, and the idea of crossing light-years in no time at all had not made sense.

The blinding sunburst newness of it all had overwhelmed ancient thought. It had been too much of a revelation, those beings from the sky and their ship; it had been too much fun, working with them, learning, finding answers to problems which their un-Holatan minds could not readily see. Caution went by the board for a while.

And as a result, Saris Hronna had fled through a forest like something out of a dream, dodging, ducking, pursued by bolts of energy which sizzled lightning-fashion in his tracks, twisting and turning and hiding with every hunter’s trick he knew, to save a life which was ashen in his mouth.

His dog-teeth flashed white as the lips drew back. There was something to live for, even now. Something to kill for.

If he could get back- It was a thought like one dun candle in a huge and storming night. Holat would not have changed much, even in two thousand years, not unless some human ship had blundered on her again. His folk were not static, there was progress all the time, but it was a growth like evolution, in harmony with the seasons and the fields and the great rhythm of time. He could find himself again.

But—

Something stirred in the sky. Saris Hronna flattened himself as if he would dig into the mud. His eyes narrowed to yellow slits as he focused his mind-senses, straining into heaven for a ghost.

Yes: currents, and not animal but the cold swirl of electrons in vacuum and gas, an undead pulsation which was like a nail scraped along his nerves. It was a small aircraft, he decided, circling in a slow path; reaching out with detectors. It was hunting him.

Maybe he should have submitted meekly. The Explorer humans were decent, for Langley he had a growing affection. Maybe these far kin of his were reasonable too- No! There was too much at hazard. There was his whole race.

They did not have this star-spanning technology on Holat. There it was still tools of bone and flint, travel on foot or in a dugout with sails and oars, food from hunting and fishing and the enormous herds of meat animals half-domesticated by telethymic control. One Holatan on the ground could track down a dozen men and kill them in the green stillness of his forests; but one human spaceship could hang in the sky and lash the planet with death.

The aircraft up there was moving away. Saris Hronna snapped after breath, filling his lungs again.

What to do, where to go, how to escape?

His mind shrieked to be a cub again, small and furry, lying on skins in a cave or sod hut and crowding against the dim vast form of mother. He thought with a sob of the days rolling and tumbling in sunlight, the snug winter nights when they couched underground—singing, talking, joining themselves in the great warm oneness of emotional communion—the times his father had taken him out to learn hunting, even his own turns at herding which had so bored him then. The small, isolated family group was the heart of his society, without it he was lost—and his clan was long dead now.

The aircraft was coming back. Its track was a spiral. How many of them were there, over how many miles of Earth’s night?

His mind quivered, less from fear than from hurt and loneliness. The life of Holat was grounded in order, ceremony, the grave courtesies between old and young, male and female, the calm pantheistic religion, the rites of the family at morning and evening: everything in its place, balance, harmony, sureness, always the knowing that life was one enormous unity. And he had been pitched into the foreign dark and was being hounded like a beast.

The fixed pattern of life had not been onerous, because its tensions were released: in the chase and in the libertine orgies of the fairs where families met to trade, discuss plans and policies, mate off the youths, drink and make merry. But here, tonight—

The thing above was coming lower. Saris” muscles grew rigid, and there was a blaze in his heart. Let it come within range, and he would seize control and smash it into the ground!

He was not wholly unfitted for this moment of murder. There was no domination within a Holatan family, no harsh father or jibing brother, they were all one; and a member who showed real talent was ungrudgingly supported by the others while he worked at his art, or his music, or his thinking. Saris had been that kind, as he emerged from cubhood. Later he had gone to one of the universities.

There he herded cattle, made tools, swept floors, as fitting return for the privilege of lying in the hut of some philosopher or artist or woodworker, arguing with him and learning from him. His particular flair had been for the physical sciences.

They had their learning on Holat, he thought defensively as the metal death dropped slowly toward him. The books were hand-copied on parchment, but there was sound knowledge in them. Astronomy, physics, and chemistry were elementary beside man’s, though correct as far as they went. Biological technique, the breeding of animals, the understanding and use of ecology, were at least equal in the areas where no instrument but a simple lens and scalpel were needed—possibly superior. And the mathematicians of Holat had an innate ability which towered above that of any human.

Saris remembered Langley’s astonishment at how fast English was learned, at seeing half-grown cubs studying non-Euclidean geometry and the theory of functions. The man had gotten some glimpse of the various schools of philosophy, the lively discussion that went on between them, and had rather ruefully admitted that their rigorous logic, their highly developed semantics, their mutual grounding in a hard empirical common sense, made them more valuable tools than anything of the sort his race had ever produced. It had been a philosopher, the same who first clarified the relationship between discontinuous functions and ethics, who had suggested the key improvement in the Explorer’s circuits.

The craft was hovering, as if it were a bird of prey readying to swoop. Still out of control range—they must have detectors, perhaps of infrared, which made them suspect his presence. He dared not move.

The safest thing for them to do would be to drop a bomb. Langley had told him about bombs. And that would be the end—a flash and roar he could not feel, dissolution, darkness forever.

Well, he thought, feeling how the slow sad wind ruffled his whiskers, he had little to complain of. It had been a good life. He had been one of the wandering scholars who drifted around the world, always welcomed for the news he could bring, always seeing something fresh in the diversity of basically similar cultures which dotted his planet. His sort bound a planet together. Lately he had settled down, begun a family, taught at the University of Sundance-Through-Rain—but if it came to swift death in an unknown land, life had still been kind.

No, no! He brought his mind up sharply. He could not die, not yet. Not until he knew more, knew that Holat was safe from these pale hairless monsters or knew how to warn and defend her. His muscles bunched to break and run.

The airship descended with a swiftness that sucked a gasp from him. He reached out to grasp the swirling electric and magnetic streams with the force-fields of his brain—and withdrew, shuddering.

No. Wait. There might be a better way.

The craft landed in the fields, a good hundred yards off. Saris gathered his legs and arms under him. How many were there?

Three. Two of them were getting out, the third staying inside. He couldn’t see through the tall stand of grain, but he could sense that one of the two carried some kind of instrument which was not a weapon—a detector, then. Blind in the dark, they could still track him.

But, of course, they weren’t sure it was Saris. Their instrument could just as well be registering a stray animal, or a man. He could smell the sharp adrenalin stink of their fear.

In a gliding rush, Saris Hronna went up the bank and four-legged through the grain.

Someone yelled. A bolt of energy snapped at him, the vegetation flamed up where it struck and ozone scorched his nostrils. His mind could not take care of the weapons, it had already clamped down on the engine and communicator of the vessel.

He hardly felt the beam which sizzled along his ribs, leaving a welt of burned flesh. Leaping, he was on the nearest man. The figure went down, his hands tore out its throat, and he sprang aside as the other one fired.

Someone cried out, a thin panicky wail in the darkness. A gun which threw a hail of lead missiles chattered from the boat’s nose. Saris jumped, landing on the roof. The man remaining outside was flashing a light, trying to catch him in its ray. Coldly, the Holatan estimated distances. Too far.

He yowled, sliding to earth again as he did. The flashlight and a blaster beam stabbed where he had been. Saris covered the ground between in three leaps. Rising, he cuffed hard, and felt neck bones snap under his palm.

Now—the boat! Saris snuffled at the door. It was locked against him, and the lock was purely mechanical, not to be controlled by the small energy output of his brain. He could feel the terror of the man huddled inside.

Well- He picked up one of the dropped blasters. For a moment he considered it, using the general principle that function determines form. The hand went around this grip, one finger squeezed this lever, the fire spat from the other end—that adjustment on the nose must regulate the size of the beam. He experimented and was gratified at having his deductions check out. Returning to the boat, he melted away its door lock.

The man within was backed against the farther wall, a gun in his hand, waiting with a dry scream in his throat for the devil to break through. Saris pinpointed him telepathically -aft of the entrance—good! Opening the door a crack, just enough to admit his hand, he fired around the edge of it. The blaster was awkward in a grasp the size of his, but one bolt was enough.

The smell of burned meat was thick around him. Now he had to work fast; there must be other craft in the vicinity. Collecting all the weapons, he hunched himself over the pilot’s chair—it was too small for him to sit in—and studied the control panel.

The principle used was unfamiliar, something beyond the science of Langley’s time. Nor could he read the symbols on the controls. But by tracing the electric currents and gyromagnetic fields with his mind, and applying logic, he got a notion of how to operate the thing.

It rose a little clumsily as he maneuvered the switches, but he got the hang of it fast. Soon he was high in the sky, speeding through a darkness that whistled around him. One screen held an illuminated map with a moving red point that must represent his own location. Helpful.

He couldn’t stay in this machine long, it would be identified and shot down. He must use it to get supplies and then to find a hiding place before dawn, after which it must fly westward to crash in the ocean. He should be able to adjust the automatic pilot to do that.

Where to go? What to do?

He needed some place where he could lie concealed and think, whence he could go forth to spy, to which he could return and make a stand if luck went against him. He needed time in which to learn and decide.

These humans were a strange race. He didn’t understand them. He had talked much with Langley, there was a comradeship between them, but there had been things half-seen in Langley, too, which had crawled on his nerves. That near-religious concept of exploring all space, simply for its own sake—that wasn’t Holatan. Aside from its pursuit of pure, abstract knowledge, the Holatan mind was not idealistic, it found something vaguely obscene in the picture of utter dedication to an impersonal cause.

These new humans who now held Earth might make a cause out of conquering Holat. The distance was enormous, but you never knew.

It might be safest and wisest to destroy their whole civilization, send them back to the caves. That was an ambitious project, probably too much to attempt; but surely he could do something, if only by playing one faction off against another. He had a pretty good notion already of why they were so anxious to catch or kill him.

He would have to wait, and observe, and think, before deciding on a course of deeds. That required a place in which to lie hidden, and he thought he knew where to go. It was worth trying, at least. He studied the unrolling map, comparing it with those of Langley’s he had seen and put into a well-trained eidetic memory, translating the symbolism by correspondence and estimating the effects of five thousand years” change. Then he turned the boat northeastward and crouched down to wait.