Jack Vance - Gaean Reach 01 (10 page)

“It’s ours until we let someone take it away from us. And that’s not going to happen.”

S
chaine and Elvo went out riding on a pair of criptids. Kelse insisted that they carry guns and that two of the ranch-hands accompany them, to Schaine’s annoyance. But as they rode south toward the Skaws she conceded that the precaution was probably well taken. She told Elvo Glissam: “We’re not all that far from the Retent and, as you know, wicked things can happen.”

“I’m not complaining.”

They halted in the shadow of the Great Skaw: a spire of sandstone two hundred feet tall, stratified beige, buff, pink and gray. Morningswake Manor could hardly be seen under the pale green-gums and the darker transtellar oaks. Beyond, the yet darker line of Fairy Forest lay along the horizon. To the west the Chip-chap wandered back and forth and disappeared into the southwest, eventually to flow into Massacre Lake. “When we were little,” said Schaine, “we often came out here on picnics and to look for tourmalines; there’s a pegmatite dike over yonder…This is where the erjin attacked Kelse, incidentally.”

Elvo appraised the surroundings. “Right here?”

“I was over on the pegmatite; Kelse and Muffin were climbing the pinnacle. The erjin came out of that cleft and scrambled up after the boys. It caught Kelse and pulled him down; I heard the noise and ran around to help, but Muffin had shot the erjin, and it was flailing around right where you’re standing. Kurgech arrived and tied up Kelse’s arm and leg and carried him home, and Muffin became the big hero. For about a week.”

“Then what happened?”

“Oh—there was a big quarrel. I flounced off to Tanquil. Then Muffin took himself off to the Retent and now he’s the Gray Prince.” Schaine looked around the area. “I guess I don’t really like it here after all…Poor Kelse.”

Elvo looked uneasily over his shoulder. “Do erjins come here often?”

“Once in a while they’ll come to look over the cattle, but our Aos are marvellous trackers; they’ll follow a trail which you can’t even see. The erjins have learned this and generally they keep to the far wilderness.”

Returning to Morningswake Manor, they found Gerd Jemasze’s battered old Dacy sky-boat on the landing area. Kelse and Gerd were busy in the library and failed to appear until dinner was served in the Great Hall. In accordance with Morningswake custom all had dressed in formal evening wear—Gerd Jemasze and Elvo Glissam in costumes maintained for the use of casual guests. No question, thought Schaine, but what the ritual enhanced the occasion; casual clothes and casual manners would have gone incongruously with the high-backed chairs, the enormous old umberwood table, the chandelier imported from the Zitz Glass Works at Gilhaux on Darybant, and the heirloom dinnerware. Tonight Schaine had taken unusual pains with her appearance. She wore a simple dark green gown and had piled her hair on top of her head after the fashion of Pharistane water nymphs, with an emerald starburst at her forehead.

Reyona Werlas-Madduc had already taken her meal with Hermina Lingolet; four persons only sat at the umberwood table in the Great Hall: those four who had shared the march across a hundred miles of wasteland. As they sipped wine, Schaine leaned back and looked at the men through half-closed eyelids, pretending they were strangers so that she might appraise them objectively. Kelse, she thought, looked older than his relatively few years. He could never be a man as imposing as his father. His face was thin and keen; ridges of assertion clamped his mouth. In contrast Elvo Glissam looked easy and light-hearted, without a care in the world. Gerd Jemasze, to Schaine’s detached view, looked surprisingly elegant. He turned his head and their glances met. Schaine, as usual, felt a small pulse of antagonism or challenge or some other such emotion. Gerd Jemasze dropped his gaze to the goblet of wine; Schaine was both amused and amazed to discover that he had become aware of her presence; through all the years of her life he had ignored her.

“The charter is now circulating around the domains,” said Kelse. “If we get general approval, and I believe we shall, then, ipso facto, we become a political unit.”

“What if you don’t get general approval?” Schaine asked.

“Unlikely. We’ve taken up the matter with everyone.”

“What if they don’t like the structure of your charter and insist on changes?”

“The charter has no structure. It’s merely a statement of common cause, an agreement to agree, a pledge to abide by the will of the majority. This is the basic first step which must be taken; then we’ll approve a more detailed document.”

“So now you must wait. How long?”

“A week or two. Perhaps three.”

“Long enough,” said Gerd Jemasze, “to discover the humor in Uther Madduc’s ‘wonderful joke’.”

Elvo Glissam was immediately interested. “And how do you do this?”

“Follow his route. Somewhere along the way I’ll discover what he considered so funny.”

“And what was his route?” asked Schaine.

“From Morningswake he flew three hundred and twelve miles north, seventeen miles northeast—in other words, to the No. 2 Palga Depot. There he landed.” Gerd Jemasze brought out Uther Madduc’s notebook. “Listen to this: ‘No man dares fly the skies above the Palga. Astonishing paradox! The Wind-runners, so meek, so vague, become demons of ferocity at the sight of an aircraft. Out come the ancient light-cannons; the aircraft is exploded into shreds and shards. I put the question to Filisent: “Why do you shoot sky-craft?”

“‘“Because,” said he, “they are likely to be Blue raiders.” “Oh?” said I. “When have the Uldra raided last?” “Not in my memory, nor in my father’s memory,” said he. “Nevertheless that is how things must be; we will have no flyers in our air.” He gave me leave to examine his cannon: a marvellous implement, and I wondered who had crafted so fine a weapon. Filisent could tell me little. The weapon, with its intricate scrolling and amazing engravements, was an heirloom, reached down father to son over years beyond memory; it might well have arrived with that long forgotten first exploration of Koryphon; who knows?’”

Gerd Jemasze looked up. “He wrote this, so it appears, a few days after landing at No. 2 Depot. Unfortunately there’s not much more. He says: ‘The Palga is a most remarkable land and Filisent is a most remarkable fellow. Like all Wind-runners he is a deft and enthusiastic thief unless dissuaded by fiap or vigilance. Otherwise he is quite a good chap. He owns a barkentine and thirty-seven separate plots of ground which he cultivates along the passage. How closely these people are meshed with wind and sun, cloud and weather! To see them at the steering rod, with the sails billowing above them and great wheels trundling, is to see men rapt in a religious rite. And yet, ask them does three twos equal six and they respond with a blank stare. Ask them of erjins, who trains them and how? and the stare becomes a look of bewilderment. Ask them how they pay for their fine wheels and sailcloth and metal fittings and they gape as if they suspect you to be lacking in reason.’”

Gerd Jemasze turned a page. “Here’s a section which he calls ‘Notes for a treatise’:

“‘Srenki: that amazing and awesome caste, or is it a cult? The knowledge comes to the child through recurrent dreams. He becomes pale and thin and troubled, and eventually wanders away from his wagon. Presently he performs his first wanton deed; and thereafter, in this strange placid land, he concentrates within himself and dissipates the elemental turpitude of all the others, who respond to this now-creature of horror with pity and forbearance. The Srenki are few; in all the Palga they number perhaps only twenty; it can be well understood how ghastly and deep within them runs the cloacal seep.’”

Silence; no one spoke.

Gerd Jemasze turned the page. “Here’s about the last of it. He says: ‘The man’s name is Poliamides. I have swindled him with Kurgech’s trick, and he admits he has seen the erjin training center. “Then take me there!” He demurs. I twirl the prism and my voice comes to him from the sky within his brain. “Take me there!”—the voice of a sun-eyed god! Poliamides accepts the inevitable though he knows he is churning a million destinies into a kind of chaotic soup. “Where and how far?” I ask. “Yonder and at some good distance,” is his reply; and so we will see.’” Gerd Jemasze turned a page. “Next a list of numbers I can’t interpret, and that’s about all. Except for this last page. First two words: ‘Splendor! Marvel!’ and then: ‘Of bittersweet ironies this is the prime. How slow tolls the chime of the centuries! How plangent and sweet is the justice of the tones!’ And then a final paragraph: ‘The situation is so clear that a demonstration is hardly necessary; still this wonderful demonstration now exists, and if any dare to question our right and our justice, I can and I will pin him to the wall of his own doctrinaire absurdity.’”

Gerd Jemasze closed the notebook and tossed it on the table. “That’s all of it. He returned to the Sturdevant. The auto-pilot shows that he flew directly back to Morningswake. Two days later he was dead over the Dramalfo.”

Elvo Glissam said: “I’m puzzled why he went up to the Palga in the first place. To trade?”

“Oddly enough,” said Kelse, “on a mission dear to your heart. Last spring he visited Olanje and took note of Aunt Val’s erjins. No one seemed to know how the erjins were trained so Father went up on the Palga to find out.”

“And did he find out? Is this his ‘wonderful joke’?”

Kelse shrugged. “We don’t know.”

“The Palga must be a remarkable place.”

Schaine said: “I remember all kinds of strange tales—half of them false, no doubt. Babies are traded between wagons, on the theory that a child raised by its own parents becomes overindulged.”

Kelse said, “Remember our old nurse Jamia? She’d scare us silly with bedtime stories about the Srenki.”

“I remember Jamia very well,” said Schaine. “Once she told us how the Wind-runners hang up their corpses in trees, to keep them safe from the wild dogs, so that when you’d walk through a forest, every tree had a skeleton grinning down at you.”

“And not just corpses do they hang up in the trees,” said Jemasze. “The ailing old grandparents, it’s up the tree with them, to save the trouble of returning to the grove later.”

“Charming people,” said Elvo Glissam. “So what do you plan to do?”

“I’ll fly up to No. 2 Depot and pick up Uther Madduc’s trail, by one means or another.”

Kelse shook his head. “The trail’s too old; you’ll never find it.”

“I won’t, but Kurgech will.”

“Kurgech?”

“He wants to come along. He’s never been up on the Palga and he wants to see the wind-wagons.”

Elvo Glissam said expansively: “I’d like to go along myself, if I could be at all useful.”

Schaine clamped her mouth shut; impossible to protest or mention hardship and danger without embarrassing Elvo, nor could she gracefully point out that Elvo had consumed several goblets of heady amber wine.

Gerd Jemasze’s face twitched so slightly that perhaps only Schaine noticed, and her always smouldering dislike of Jemasze flared; again she restrained herself from speaking. Jemasze said politely: “Your company of course is welcome—still we’ll be gone for a week or more, perhaps under rough conditions.”

Elvo Glissam laughed. “It couldn’t be any worse than the trip up from the Dramalfo.”

“I hope not.”

“Well, I’m not exactly frail, and I have a particular interest in the matter.”

Kelse spoke in the most sober of voices, further infuriating Schaine: “Elvo wants to look into the enslavement of erjins at first hand.”

Elvo grinned, showing no embarrassment. “Quite true.”

Without enthusiasm Gerd Jemasze said: “I imagine Kelse can fit you out with boots and a few oddments of gear.”

“No trouble as to that,” said Kelse.

“Very well then; we’ll leave tomorrow morning, if I can find Kurgech.”

“He’ll be up at the old Apple Orchard with his tribe.”

For a reckless instant Schaine thought herself to join the venture, then reluctantly put the idea by. It wouldn’t be fair to Kelse to fly off to the Palga and leave him alone.

T
he sky-car flew north across a land of low hills, wide valleys, winding streams, forests of gadroon, flame-tree, mangoneel, an occasional giant Uaian jinko. Elvo Glissam rode with a feeling of unreality, already dubious in regard to his bravado of the night before. He glanced back the way they had come…By no means, he told himself firmly; he had joined himself to the expedition for good and sufficient reasons: to examine the basic facts of erjin enslavement, a course of action to which he was impelled by moral commitment. And another more visceral reason. What Gerd Jemasze could do, he could do.

Elvo Glissam looked across the car. He was perhaps an inch taller than Gerd Jemasze. Gerd was broader in the shoulders, heavier in the chest, decisive, definite and efficient in his movements; he used no unnecessary flourishes nor any of those idiosyncratic gestures which gave flavor to a personality. In fact, at first impression, and perhaps second and third, Gerd Jemasze’s personality was spare, drab, grim and colorless; he evinced neither dash nor flair nor pungency. Elvo Glissam’s own attitude toward the world was optimistic, positive, constructive: Koryphon, indeed the whole of the Gaean Reach, needed improvement and only through the efforts of well-meaning folk could these changes be effected.

Gerd Jemasze, while sufficiently courteous and considerate, could never be called a sympathetic individual and he certainly viewed the cosmos through a lens of egocentricity. By this same token, Gerd Jemasze was superbly self-assured; the possibility of failure in any undertaking whatever obviously had never crossed his mind, and Elvo felt a twinge of envy or irritation, or even a faint sense of dislike—which he instantly realized to be petty and unworthy. If only Gerd were less arrogant in his unconscious assumptions, less innocent—for Gerd Jemasze’s impervious self-confidence after all could be nothing less than naïveté. In hundreds of capabilities he would show to poor advantage indeed. He knew next to nothing of human achievement in the realms of music, mathematics, literature, optics, philosophy. By any ordinary consideration, Gerd Jemasze should feel uneasy and resentful in regard to Elvo Glissam, not the reverse. Elvo Glissam managed a sour chuckle. The situation was as it was, for better or worse.