Planet Of Exile

CHAPTER THREE: The True Name of the Sun

WHAT CAUSED the tides along this coast, the great diurnal swinging in and swinging out of fifteen to fifty feet of water? Not one of the Elders of the City of Tevar could answer that question. Any child in Landin could: the moon caused the tides, the pull of the moon... .

And moon and earth circled each other, a stately circle taking four hundred days to complete, a moonphase. And together the double planet circled the sun, a great and solemnly whirling dance in the midst of nothingness. Sixty moonphases that dance lasted, twenty-four thousand days, a lifetime, a Year. And the name of the center and sun— the name of the sun was Eltanin: Gamma Draconis.

Before he entered under the gray branches of the forest, Jakob Agat looked up at the sun sinking into a haze above the western ridge and in his mind called it by its true name, the meaning of which was that it was not simply the Sun, but a sun: a star among the stars.

The voice of a child at play rang out behind him on the slopes of Tevar Hill, recalling to him the jeering, sidelong-looking faces, the mocking whispers that hid fear, the yells behind his back—"There's a farborn here! Come and look at him!" Agat, alone under the trees, walked faster, trying to outwalk humiliation. He had been humiliated among the tents ot Tevar and had suffered also from the sense of isolation. Having lived all his life in a little community of his own kind, knowing every name and face and heart, it was hard for him to face strangers.

Especially hostile strangers of a different species, in crowds, on their own ground. The fear and humiliation now caught up with him so that he stopped walking altogether for a moment. /'// be damned if I'll go back there! he thought. Let the old fool have his way, and sit smoke-drying himself in his stinking tent till the Goal come. Ignorant, bigoted, quarrelsome, mealy-face, yellow-eyed barbarians, wood-headed hilfs, let 'em all burn!

"Alterra?"

The girl had come after him. She stood a few yards behind him on the path, her hand on the striated white trunk of a basuk tree. Yellow eyes blazed with excitement and mockery in the even white of her face. Agat stood motionless.

"Alterra?" she said again in her light, sweet voice, looking aside.

"What do you want?"

She drew back a bit. "I'm Rolery," she said. "On the sands—"

"I know who you are. Do you know who I am? I'm a falseman, a farborn. If your tribesmen see you with me they'll either castrate me or ceremonially rape you—I don't know which rules you follow.

Now go home!"

"My people don't do that. And there is kinship between you and me," she said, her tone stubborn but uncertain.

He turned to go.

"Your mother's sister died in our tents—"

"To our shame," he said, and went on. She did not follow.

He stopped and looked back when he took the left fork up the ridge. Nothing stirred in all the dying forest, except one belated footroot down among the dead leaves, creeping with its excruciating vegetable obstinacy southward, leaving a thin track scored behind it.

Racial pride forbade him to feel any shame for his treat- ment of the girl, and in fact he felt relief and a return of confidence. He would have to get used to the hilfs' insults and ignore their bigotry. They couldn't help it; it was their own kind of obstinacy, it was then- nature. The old chief had shown, by his own lights, real courtesy and patience. He, Jakob Agat, must be equally patient, and equally obstinate. For the fate of his people, the life of mankind on this world, depended on what these hilf tribes did and did not do in the next thirty days. Before the crescent moon rose, the history of a race for six hundred moonphases, ten Years, twenty generations, the long struggle, the long pull might end. Unless he had luck, unless he had patience.

Dry leafless, with rotten branches, huge trees stood crowded and aisled for miles along these hills, their roots withered in the earth. They were ready to fall under the push of the north wind, to lie under frost and snow for thousands of days and nights, to rot in the long, long thaws of Spring, to enrich with their vast death the earth where, very deep, very deeply sleeping, their seeds lay buried now. Patience, patience ...

In the wind he came down the bright stone streets of Landin to the Square, and passing the schoolchildren at their exercises in the arena, entered the arcaded, towered building that was called by an old name: the Hall of the League.

Like the other buildings around the Square, it had been built five years ago when Landin was the capital of a strong and nourishing little nation, the time of strength. The whole first floor was a spacious meeting-hall. All around its gray walls were broad, delicate designs picked out in gold. On the east wall a stylized sun surrounded by nine planets faced the west wall's pattern of seven planets in very long ellipses round their sun. The third planet of each system was double, and set with crystal. Above the doors and at the far end, round dial-faces with fragile and ornate hands told that this present day was the 391st day of the 45th moonphase of the Tenth Local Year of the Colony on Gam- ma Draconis III. They also told that it was the two hundred and second day of Year 1405 of the League of All Worlds; and that it was the twelfth of August at home.

Most people doubted that there was still a League of All Worlds, and a few paradoxicalists liked to question whether there ever had in fact been a home. But the clocks, here in the Great Assembly and down in the Records Room underground, which had been kept running for six hundred League Years, seemed to indicate by their origin and their steadfastness that there had been a League and that there still was a home, a birthplace of the race of man. Patiently they kept the hours of a planet lost in the abyss of darkness and years. Patience, patience ...

The other Alterrans were waiting for him hi the library upstairs, or came in soon, gathering around the driftwood fire on the hearth: ten of them all together. Seiko and Alia Pasfal lighted the gas jets and turned them low. Though Agat had said nothing at all, his friend Huru Pilotson coming to stand beside him at the fire said, "Don't let 'em get you, Jakob. A herd of stupid stubborn nomads—they'll never learn."

"Have I been sending?"

"No, of course not." Huru giggled. He was a quick, slight, shy fellow, devoted to Jakob Agat. That he was a homosexual and that Agat was not was a fact well-known to them both, to everybody around them, to everyone in Landin indeed. Everybody in Landin knew everything, and candor, though wearing and difficult, was the only possible solution to this problem of over-communication.

"You expected too much when you left, that's all. Your disappointment shows. But don't let 'em get you, Jakob. They're just hilfs."

Seeing the others were listening, Agat said aloud, "I told the old man what I'd planned to; he said he'd tell their Council. How much he understood and how much he believed, I don't know."

"If he listened at all it's better than I'd hoped," said Alia Pasfal, sharp and frail, with blueblack skin, and white hair crowning her worn face. "Wold's been around as long as I have—longer. Don't expect him to welcome wars and changes."

"But he should be well disposed—he married a human," Dermat said.

"Yes, my cousin Arilia, Jakob's aunt—the exotic one in Wold's female zoo. I remember the courtship," Alia Pasfal said with such bitter sarcasm that Dermat wilted.

"He didn't make any decision about helping us? Did you tell him your plan about going up to the border to meet the Gaal?" Jonkendy Li stammered, hasty and disappointed. He was very young, and had been hoping for a fine war with marchings-forth and trumpets. So had they all. It beat being starved to death or burned alive.

"Give them time. They'll decide," Agat said gravely to the boy.

"How did Wold receive you?" asked Seiko Esmit. She was the last of a great family. Only the sons of the first leader of the Colony had borne that name Esmit. With her it would die. She was Agat's age, a beautiful and delicate woman, nervous, rancorous, repressed. When the Alter-rans met, her eyes were always on Agat. No matter who spoke she watched Agat.

"He received me as an equal."

Alia Pasfal nodded approvingly and said, "He always had more sense than the rest of their males."

But Seiko went on, "What about the others? Could you just walk through their camp?" Seiko could always dig up his humiliation no matter how well he had buried and forgotten it. His cousin ten times over, his sister-playmate-lover-companion, she possessed an immediate understanding of any weakness in him and any pain he felt, and her sympathy, her compassion closed in on him like a trap. They were too close. Too close, Hum, old Alia, Seiko, all of them. The isolation that had unnerved him today had also given him a glimpse of distance, of solitude, had perhaps waked a craving in him. Seiko gazed at him, watching him with clear, soft, dark eyes, sensitive to his every mood and word. The hilf girl, Rolery, had never yet looked at him, never met his gaze. Her look always was aside, away, glancing, golden, alien.

"They didn't stop me," he answered Seiko briefly. "Well, tomorrow maybe they'll decide on our suggestion. Or the next day. How's the provisioning of the Stack been going this afternoon?" The talk became general, though it tended always to center around and be referred back to Jakob Agat.

He was younger than several of them, and all ten Al-terrans were elected equal in their ten-year terms on the council, but he was evidently and acknowledgedly their leader, their center. No especial reason for this was visible unless it was the vigor with which he moved and spoke; is authority noticeable in the man, or in the men about him? The effects of it, however, showed in him as a certain tension and somberness, the results of a heavy load of responsibility that he had borne for a long time, and that got daily heavier.

"I made one slip," he said to Pilotson, while Seiko and the other women of the council brewed and served the little, hot, ceremonial eupfuls of steeped basuk leaves called ti. "I was trying so hard to convince the old fellow that there really is danger from the Gall, that I think I sent for a moment. Not verbally; but he looked like he'd seen a ghost."

"You've got very powerful sense-projection, and lousy control when you're under strain. He probably did see a ghost."

"We've been out of touch with the hilfs so long—and we're so ingrown here, so damned isolated, I can't trust my control. First I bespeak that girl down on the beach, then I project to Wold—they'll be turning on us as witches if this goes on, the way they did in the first Years...

. And we've got to get them to trust us. In so short a time. If only we'd known about the Gaal earlier!"

"Well," Pilotson said in his careful way, "since there are no more human settlements up the coast, it's purely due to your foresight in sending scouts up north that we have any warning at all. Your health, Seiko," he added, accepting the tiny, steaming cup she presented.

Agat took the last cup from her tray, and drained it. There was a slight sense-stimulant hi freshly brewed ti, so that he was vividly aware of its astringent, clean heat hi his throat, of Seiko's intense gaze, of the bare, large firelit room, of the twilight outside the windows. The cup in his hand, blue porcelain, was very old, a work of the Fifth Year. The handpress books hi cases under the windows were old. Even the glass in the windowframes was old. All their luxuries, all that made them civilized, all that kept them Alterran, was old. In Agat's lifetime and for long before there had been no energy or leisure for subtle and complex affirmations of man's skill and spirit. They did well by now merely to preserve, to endure.

Gradually, Year by Year for at least ten generations, their numbers had been dwindling; very gradually, but always there were fewer children born. They retrenched, they drew together. Old dreams of domination were forgotten utterly. They came back—if the Winters and hostile hilf tribes did not take advantage of their weakness first—to the old center, the first colony, Landin. They taught then: children the old knowledge and the old ways, but nothing new. They lived always a little more humbly, coming to value the simple over the elaborate, calm over strife, courage over success. They withdrew.

Agat, gazing into the tiny cup hi his hand, saw in its clear, pure translucency, the perfect skill of its making and the fragility of its substance, a kind of epitome of the spirit of his people.

Outside the high windows the air was the same translucent blue. But cold: a blue twilight, immense and cold. The old terror of his childhood came over Agat, the terror which, as he became adult, he had reasoned thus: this world on which he had been born, on which his father and forefathers for twenty-three generations had been born, was not his home. His kind was alien. Profoundly, they were always aware of it. They were the Farborn. And little by little, with the majestic slowness, the vegetable obstinacy of the process of evolution, this world was killing them—rejecting the graft.

They were perhaps too submissive to this process, too willing to die out. But a kind of submission—their iron adherence to the League Laws—had been their strength from the very beginning; and they were still strong, each one of them. But they had not the knowledge or the skill to combat the sterility and early abortion that reduced then" generations. For not all wisdom was written in the League Books, and from day to day and Year to Year a little knowledge would always be lost, supplanted by some more immediately useful bit of information concerning daily existence here and now. And in the end, they could not even understand much of what the books told them. What truly remained of their Heritage, by now? If ever the ship, as in the old hopes and tales, soared down in fire from the stars, would the men who stepped from it know them to be men?

But no ship had come, or would come. They would die; their presence here, their long exile and struggle on this world, would be done with, broken like a bit of clay.

He put the cup very carefully down on the tray, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Seiko was watching him. He turned from her abruptly and began to listen to Jon-kendy, Dermat and Pilotson.

Across his bleak rush of foreboding he had recalled briefly, irrelevant and yet seeming both an explanation and a sign, the light, lithe, frightened figure of the girl Rolery, reaching up her hand to him from the dark, sea-besieged stones.