Time lag

522 Anno Coloniae Conditae

Elva was on her way back, within sight of home, when the raid came.

For nineteen thirty-hour days, riding in high forests where sunlight slanted through leaves, across ridges where grass and the first red lamp-flowers rippled under springtime winds, sleeping by night beneath the sky or in the hut of some woods dweller—once, even, in a nest of Alfavala, where the wild little folk twittered in the dark and their eyes glowed at her—she had been gone. Her original departure was reluctant. Her husband of two years, her child of one, the lake and fields and chimney smoke at dusk which were now hers also, these were still too marvelous to leave.

But the Freeholder of Tervola had duties as well as rights. Once each season, he or his representative must ride circuit. Up into the mountains, through woods and deep dales, across the Lakeland as far as The Troll and then following the Swiftsmoke River south again, the route ran which Karlavi’s fathers had traveled for nearly two centuries. Whether on hailu-back in spring, summer, through the scarlet and gold of fall, or by motorsled when snow had covered all trails, the Freeholder went out into his lands. Isolated farm clans, forest rangers on patrol duty, hunters and trappers and timber cruisers, brought their disputes to him as magistrate, their troubles to him as leader. Even the flitting Alfavala had learned to wait by the paths, the sick and injured trusting he could heal them, those with more complex problems struggling to put them into human words.

This year, however, Karlavi and his bailiffs were much preoccupied with a new dam across the Oulu. The old one had broken last spring, after a winter of unusually heavy snowfall, and 2000 hectares of bottom land were drowned. The engineers at Yuvaskula, the only city on Vaynamo, had developed a new construction process well adapted to such situations. Karlavi wanted to use this.

“But blast it all,” he said. I’ll need every skilled man I have, including myself. The job has got to be finished before the ground dries, so the ferroplast can bond with the soil. And you know what the labor shortage is like around here.”

“Who will ride circuit, then?” asked Elva.

“That^’s what I don't know.” Karlavi ran a hand through his straight brown hair. He was a typical Vaynamoan, tall, light-complexioned, with high cheekbones and oblique blue eyes. He wore the working clothes usual to the Tervola district, leather breeches, mukluks, a mackinaw in the tartan of his family. There was nothing romantic about his appearance. Nevertheless, Elva's heart turned over when he looked at her. Even after two years.

He got out his pipe and tamped it with nervous motions. “Somebody must,” he said. “Somebody with enough technical education to use a medikit and discuss people's difficulties intelligently. And with authority. We’re more tradition-minded hereabouts than they are at Ruuyalka, dear. Our people wouldn't accept the judgment of just anyone. How could a servant or tenant dare settle an argument between two pioneers? It must be me, or a bailiff, or —” His voice trailed off.

Elva caught the implication. “No!” she exclaimed. “I can’t! I mean...that is —”

“You're my wife,” said Karlavi slowly. “That alone gives you the right, by well-established custom. Especially since you're the daughter of the Magnate of Ruuyalka. Almost equivalent to me in prestige, even if you do come from the other end of the continent, where they're fishers and marine fanners instead of woodsfolk.” His grin flashed. “I doubt if you've yet learned what awful snobs the free yeomen of Tervola are.”

“But Hauki. I can't leave him.”

“Hauki will be spoiled rotten in your absence by an adoring nanny and a villageful of tenant wives. Otherwise he'll do fine.” Karlavi dismissed the thought of their son with a wry gesture. I’m the one who’ll get lonesome. Abominably so. ”

“Oh, darling,” said Elva, utterly melted.

A few days later she rode forth.

And it had been an experience to remember. The easy, rocking motion of the six-legged hailu, the mindless leisure of kilometer after kilometer — where, however, the body, skin and muscle and blood and all ancient instinct, gained an aliveness such as she had never before felt — the silence of mountains with sunlit ice on their shoulders, then birdsong in the woods and a river brawling; the rough warm hospitality when she stayed overnight with some pioneer, the eldritch welcome at the Alfa nest — she was now glad she had encountered those things, and she hoped to know them again, often.

There had been no danger. The last violence between humans on Vaynamo (apart from occasional fist fights, caused mostly by sheer exuberance and rarely doing any harm) lay a hundred years in the past. As for storms, landslides, flood, wild animals, she had the unobtrusive attendance of Huiva and a dozen other “tame” Alfavala. Even these, the intellectual pick of their species, who had chosen to serve man in a doglike fashion rather than keep to the forests, could only speak a few words and handle the simplest tools. But their long ears, flat nostrils, feathery antennae, every- fine green hair on every- small body, were always aquiver. This was their planet, they had evolved here, and they were more animal than rational beings. Their senses and reflexes kept her safer than an armored aircraft might.

All the same, the absence of Karlavi and Hauki grew sharper each day. When finally she came to the edge of cleared land, high on the slopes of Hornback Fell, and saw Tervola below, a blindness that stung descended momentarily on her eyes.

Huiva guided his hailu alongside her. He pointed down the mountain with his tail. “Home,” he chattered. “Food tonight. Snug bed.”

“Yes.” Elva blinked hard. What sort of crybaby am I, anyhow? she asked herself, half in anger. I’m the Magnate’s daughter and the Freeholder’s wife. I have a University degree and a pistol-shooting medal, as a girl I sailed through hurricanes and skindove into grottos where fangfish laired, as a woman I brought a son into the world.. I will not bawl!

“Yes,” she said. “Let s hum -.”

She thumped heels on the hailu’s ribs and started downhill at a gallop. Her long yellow hair was braided, but a lock of it broke loose, fluttering behind her. Hoofs rang on stone. Ahead stretched grainfields and pastures, still wet from winter but their shy green deepening toward summer hues, on down to the great metallic sheet of Lake Rovaniemi and then across the valley to the opposite horizon where the High Mikkela reared into a sky as tall and blue as itself. Down by the lake clustered the village, the dear red tile of roofs, the curve of a processing plant, a road lined with trees leading to the Freeholder s mansion. There, old handhewn timbers glowed with sun; the many windows flung the light dazzlingly back to her.

She was halfway down the slope when Huiva screamed. She had learned to react fast. Thinly scattered across all Vaynamo, men could easily die from the unforeseen. Reining in, Elva snatched loose the gun at her waist. “What is it?”

Huiva cowered on his mount. One hand pointed skyward.

At first Elva could not understand. An aircraft descending above the lake... what was so odd about that? How else did Huiva expect the inhabitants of settlements hundreds of kilometers apart to visit each other? — And then she registered the shape. And then, realizing the distance, she knew the size of the thing.

It came down swiftly, quiet in its shimmer of drive fields, a cigar shape which gleamed. Elva holstered her pistol again and took forth her binoculars. Now she could see how the sleekness was interrupted with turrets and boat housings, cargo locks, viewports. An emblem was on the armored prow, a gauntleted hand grasping a planetary orb. Nothing she had ever heard of. But -

Her heart thumped, so loudly that she could almost not hear the Alfavala^’s squeals of terror. “A spaceship,” she breathed. A spaceship, do you know that word? Like the ships my ancestors came in, long ago...Oh, bother! A big aircraft, Huiva. Come on!”

She whipped her hailu back into gallop. The first spaceship to arrive at Vaynamo in, in, how long? More than a hundred years. And it was landing here! At her own Tervola!

The vessel grounded just beyond the village. Its enormous mass settled deeply into the plowland. Housings opened and auxiliary aircraft darted forth, to hover and swoop. They were of a curious design, larger and blunter than the fliers built on Vaynamo. The people, running toward the marvel, surged back as hatches gaped, gangways extruded, armored cars beetled down to the ground.

Elva had not yet reached the village when the strangers opened fire.

There were no hostile ships, not even an orbital fortress. To depart, the seven craft from Chertkoi simply made rendezvous beyond the atmosphere, held a short gleeful conference by radio, and accelerated outward. Captain Bors Golyev, commanding the flotilla, stood on the bridge of the Askol and watched the others. The light of the yellow sun lay incandescent on their flanks. Beyond reached blackness and the many stars.

His gaze wandered off among constellations which the parallax of fifteen light-years had not much altered. The galaxy was so big, he thought, so unimaginably enormous... Sedes Regis was an L scrawled across heaven. Tradition claimed Old Sol lay in that direction, a thousand parsecs away. But no one on Chertkoi was certain any longer. Golyev shrugged. Who cared?

“Gravitational field suitable for agoric drive, sir,” intoned the pilot.

Golyev looked in the sternward screen. The planet called Vaynamo had dwindled, but remained a vivid shield, barred with cloud and blazoned with continents, the overall color a cool blue-green. He thought of ocherous Chertkoi, and the other planets of its system, which were not even habitable. Vaynamo was the most beautiful color he had ever seen. The two small moons were also visible, like drops of liquid gold.

Automatically, his astronaut’s eye checked the claims of the instruments. Was Vaynamo really far enough away for the ships to go safely into agoric? Not quite, he thought — no, wait, he'd forgotten that the planet had a five percent greater diameter than Chertkoi. “Very good, " he said, and gave the necessary orders to his subordinate captains. A deep hum filled air and metal and bones. There was a momentary sense of falling, as the agoratron went into action. And then the stars began to change color and crawl weirdly across the visual field.

“All’s well, sir,” said the pilot. The chief engineer confirmed it over the intercom.

‘Very good," repeated Golyev. He yawned and stretched elaborately. “I’m tired! That was quite a little fight we had at that last village, and I’ve gotten no sleep since. I’ll be in my cabin. Call me if anything seems amiss.”

“Yes, sir.” The pilot smothered a knowing leer.

Golyev walked down the corridor, his feet slamming its metal under internal pseudogravity. Once or twice he met a crewman and accepted a salute as casually as it was given. The men of the Interplanetary Corporation didn’t need to stand on ceremony. They were tried spacemen and fighters, everyone of them. If they chose to wear sloppy uniforms, to lounge about off duty cracking jokes or cracking a bottle, to treat their officers as friends rather than tyrants — so much the better. This wasn’t the nice-nelly Surface Transport Corporation, or the spit-and-polish Chemical Synthesis Trust, but IP, explorer and conqueror. The ship was clean and the guns were ready. What more did you want?

Pravoyats, the captain’s batman, stood outside the cabin door. He nursed a scratched cheek and a black eye. One hand rested broodingly on his sidearm. “Trouble?” inquired Golyev.

“Trouble ain’t the word, sir.”

“You didn’t hurt her, did you?” asked Golyev sharply.

“No, sir, I heard your orders all right. Never laid a finger on her in anger. But she sure did on me. Finally I wrassled her down and gave her a whiff of sleepy gas. She'd a torn the cabin apart otherwise. She’s prob’ly come out of it by now, but I’d rather not go in again to see, captain.”

Golyev laughed. He was a big man, looming over Pravoyats, who was no midget. Otherwise he was a normal patron-class Chertkoian, powerfully built, with comparatively short legs and strutting gait, his features dark, snubnosed, bearded, earning more than his share of old scars. He wore a plain green tunic, pants tucked into soft boots, at hip, his only sign of rank a crimson star at his throat. “I’ll take care of all that from here on,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Despite his wounds, the batman looked a shade envious. “Uh, you want the prod? I tell you, she’s a troublemaker.”

“No.”

“Electric shocks don’t leave any scars, captain.”

“I know. Be on your way, Pravoyats.” Golyev opened the door, went through, and closed it behind him again.

The girl had been seated on his bunk. She stood up with a gasp. A looker, for certain. The Vaynamoan women generally seemed handsome; this one was beautiful, tall and slim, delicate face and straight nose lightly dusted with freckles. But her mouth was wide and strong, her skin suntanned, and she wore a coarse, colorful riding habit. Her exoticism was the most exciting thing: yellow hair, slant blue eyes, who’d ever heard of the like?

The tranquilizing after-effects of the gas — or else plain nervous exhaustion — kept her from attacking him. She backed against the wall and shivered. Her misery touched Golyev a little. He'd seen unhappiness elsewhere, on Imfan and Novagal and Chertkoi itself, and hadn’t been bothered thereby. People who were too weak to defend themselves must expect to be made booty of. It was different, though, when someone as good-looking as this was so woebegone.

He paused on the opposite side of his desk from her, gave a soft salute, and smiled. “What’s your name, my dear?”

She drew a shaken breath. After tying several times, she managed to speak. “I didn’t think... anyone... understood my language. ”

“A few of us do. The hypnopede, you know.” Evidently she did not know. He thought a short, dry lecture might soothe her. “An invention made a few decades ago on our planet. Suppose another person and I have no language in common. We can be given a drug to accelerate our nervous systems, and then the machine flashes images on a screen and analyzes the sounds uttered by the other person. What it hears is transferred to me and impressed on the speech center of my brain, electronically. As the vocabulary grows, a computer in the machine figures out the structure of the whole language — semantics, grammar, and so on — and orders my own learning accordingly. That way, a few short, daily sessions make me fluent.”

She touched her lips with a tongue that seemed equally parched. “I heard once...of some experiments at the University,” she whispered. “They never got far. No reason for such a machine. Only one language on Vaynamo.”

“And on Chertkoi. But we’ve already subjugated two other planets, one of ’em divided into hundreds of language groups. And we expect there’ll be others.” Golyev opened a drawer, took out a bottle and two glasses. “Care for brandy?”

He poured. “I’m Bors Golyevб an astronautical executive of the Interplanetary Corporation, commanding this scout force,” he said. “Who are you?”

She didn’t answer. He reached a glass toward her. “Come, now,” he said. “I’m not such a bad fellow. Here, drink. To our better acquaintance.”

With a convulsive movement, she struck the glass from his hand. It bounced on the floor. “Almighty Creator! No!” she yelled. “You murdered my husband!”

She stumbled to a chair, fell down in it, rested head in arms on the desk and began to weep. The spilled brandy crept across the floor toward her.

Golyev groaned. Why did he always get cases like this? Glebs Narov, now, had clapped hands on the jolliest tawny wench you could imagine, when they conquered Marsya on Imfan: delighted to be liberated from her own drab culture.

Well, he could kick this female back down among the other prisoners. But he didn’t want to. He seated himself across from her, lit a cigar out of the box on his desk, and held his own glass to the light. Ruby smoldered within.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “How was I to know? What’s done is done. There wouldn’t have been so many casualties if they'd been sensible and given up. We shot a few to prove we meant business, but then called on the rest over a loudspeaker, to yield. They didn’t. For that matter, you were riding a six-legged animal out of the fields. I’m told. You came busting right into the fight. Why didn’t you ride the other way and hide out till we left?”

“My husband was there,” she said after a silence. When she raised her face, he saw it gone cold and stiff. “And our child. ”

“Oh? Uh, maybe we picked up the kid, at least. If you’d like to go see —”

“No,” she said, toneless and yet somehow with a dim returning pride. “I got Hauki away. I rode straight to the mansion and got him. Then one of your fire-guns hit the roof and the house began to bum. I told Huiva to take the baby — never mind where. I said I’d follow if I could. But Karlavi was out there, fighting. I went back to the barricade. He had been killed just a few seconds before. His face was all bloody. Then your cars broke through the barricade and someone caught me. But you don't have Hauki. Or Karlavi!”

As if drained by die effort of speech, she slumped and stared into a comer, empty-eyed.

“Well,” said Golyev, not quite comfortably, your people had been warned. " She didn't seem to hear him. “You never got the message? But it was telecast over your whole planet. After our first non-secret landing. That was several days ago. Were you out in the woods or something? — Yes, we scouted telescopically, and made clandestine landings, and caught a few citizens to interrogate. But when we understood the situation, more or less, we landed openly in, uh, your city. Yuvaskula, is that the name? We seized it without too much damage, captured some officials of the planetary government, claimed the planet for IP and called on all citizens to cooperate. But they wouldn’t! Why, one ambush alone cost us fifty good men. What could we do? We had to teach a lesson. We announced we'd punish a few random villages. That's more humane than bombarding from space with cobalt missiles. Isn’t it? But I suppose your people didn't really believe us, the way they came swarming when we landed. Trying to parley with us first, and then trying to resist us with hunting rifles! What would you expect to happen?”

His voice seemed to fall into an echoless well.

He loosened his collar, which felt a trifle tight, took a deep drag on his cigar and refilled his glass. “Of course. I don't expect you to see our side of it at once,” he said reasonably. “You've been jogging along, isolated, for centuries, haven’t you? Hardly a spaceship has touched at your planet since it was first colonized. You have none of your own, except a couple of interplanetary boats which hardly ever get used. That's what your President told me, and I believe him. Why should you go outsystem? You have everything you can use, right on your own world. The nearest sun to yours with an oxygen atmosphere planet is three parsecs off. Even with a very high-powered agoratron, you'd need ten years to get there, another decade to get back. A whole generation! Sure, the time-contraction effect would keep you young — ship's time for the voyage would only be a few weeks, or less — but all your friends would be middle-aged when you came home. Believe me, it’s lonely being a spaceman.”

He drank. A pleasant burning went down his throat. “No wonder men spread so slowly into space, and each colony is so isolated,” he said. “Chertkoi is a mere name in your archives. And yet it’s only fifteen light-years from Vaynamo. You can see our sun on any clear night. A reddish one. You call it Gamma Navarchi. Fifteen little light-years, and yet there's been no contact between our two planets for four centuries or more!

“So why now? Well, that's a long story. Let’s just say Chertkoi isn't as friendly a world as Vaynamo. You'll see that for yourself. We, our ancestors, we came up the hard way, we had to struggle for everything. And now there are four billion of us! That was the census figure when I left. It’ll probably be five billion when I get home. We have to have more resources. Our economy is grinding to a halt. And we can't afford economic dislocation. Not on as thin a margin as Chertkoi allows us. First we went back to the other planets of our system and worked them as much as practicable. Then we started re-exploring the nearer stars. So far we've found two useful planets. Yours is the third. You know what your population is? Ten million, your President claimed. Ten million people for a whole world of forests, plains, hills, oceans... why, your least continent has more natural resources than all Chertkoi. And you've stabilized at that population. You don’t want more people!”

Golyev struck the desk with a thumb. “If you think ten million stagnant agriculturists have a right to monopolize all that room and wealth, when four billion Chertkoians live on the verge of starvation,” he said indignantly, “you can think again.”

She stirred. Not looking at him, her tone small and very distant, she said. “It’s our planet, to do with as we please. If you want to breed like maggots, you must take the consequences.”

Anger flushed the last sympathy from Golyev. He ground out his cigar in the ashwell and tossed off his brandy. “Never mind moralizing, he said. I'm no martyr. I became a spaceman because it’s fun.”

He got up and walked around the desk to her.