Part 4

"Well, Kerrel's an agent of the Council, highly respected, got a lot of influence and so on, but we Vardda count our wealth in ships, and Kerrel's poor. Shairn inherited thirty, the fourth largest fleet in space. In other words, he's got more than Shairn to lose."

"He can keep her," Trehearne said. "And her ships."

"You don't know the lady. I do. And I can tell you that staying away from her is no easy job when she doesn't want to be stayed away from."

"Oh, the heck with her," said Trehearne impatiently. It was a long way down from the stars to petty gossip, and it annoyed him. "I don't see what it's got to do with me, anyway."

"I told you, I know the lady. And I know Kerrel. He's your enemy already--"

Trehearne was amazed. "Why?"

"Because it's his duty to be. Because the whole structure of the Vardda society, which he is sworn to protect, is based on a few ironclad rules, and you're liable to break every one of them. Oh, it isn't just you. There are larger issues involved--I'll explain them, but that'll take time--and you're sort of automatically mixed up with them. Kerrel is a just man as he sees it, but his justice is not tempered with mercy. I've seen him in action too often, Trehearne. You'll have trouble enough. Don't give him a personal motive, too."

Edri's manner was so serious that Trehearne began to feel uneasy. A great blank wall rose up before him, behind which lay the life and complexities, the politics and philosophies and contentions of the Vardda state, and he couldn't see through it or over it. He said, "I've got an awful lot to learn. It scares me, how much. You and Kerrel don't exactly love each other, do you?"

Edri shrugged. "He suspects me of harboring ideas not in agreement with his own. On Llyrdis as it is on Earth, Trehearne, beware of a man with a belief." Suddenly he laughed. "Well, that's enough of that. As you just remarked, you have a lot to learn. We might as well get started."

Trehearne followed him obediently, to begin his re-education as a Vardda.

SEVEN

It was amazing how quickly Earth, with all its habits and memories, slipped away from Trehearne. The pangs and wrenchings of homesickness still came to him now and then, mostly when he lay alone in his bunk, just before sleep. But they were less and less violent. He began to have for his native world the nostalgic affection one has for a foster-parent far less than perfect, but all the same a part of one's life--a part done with now, but with its bright and kindly interludes to look back upon. He was not sorry that he had left it. By a freak of genetics he had been born an alien, and he had never fitted there. Now, rapidly and easily, he was finding himself.

At first there were periods when he felt that he was dreaming, that the ship and all within it would disappear and he would waken. But as his mind readjusted itself, shaking free from the narrow horizons where it had been prisoned, ancestral pride and ancestral longing began to stir. And with that stirring came an insatiable hunger for knowledge.

Edri was his chief teacher. For some reason, the ugly man with the unhappy eyes and unfailing cheerfulness of speech had taken a liking to him, and Trehearne was glad of it. He needed friends. But there were others, too. Men and women, mostly young, healthy and full of themselves, loving the life they lived and enjoying to the hilt his own wide-eyed reactions to it. For a while they regarded him very much as he would have regarded an animal that had suddenly learned to talk and do sums, but they got used to him, and there was never any malice in their conduct. He liked them. They were his kind of people. They _were_ his people.

Kerrel remained civil, but aloof. Shairn spoke to him when she felt like it, as casually as though they had known each other all their lives and nothing of interest had ever happened between them. But sometimes he thought she looked at him in a way that was not casual at all, and he could not tell what she was thinking. He played along. It was hard, when he got to remembering things. But he did it. And he had enough to do to keep his mind off women. There weren't hours enough in the ship's day to supply him.

He learned the Vardda tongue. He learned the rudiments of Vardda history and the outlines of their social structure. But most of all, with an inborn sureness, he learned the Vardda mind, the Vardda point of view, and his own character expanded, having found a meaning for itself. He was a Vardda, and they were the Starmen--Galactic Man, as Edri had put it once, a unique species, specialized and fitted for the most splendid work of all, the conquest of the stars.

The power, the magnificence of that voyaging! No wonder the little ships and little skies of Earth had seemed so futile. This was his heritage, the freedom of the stars, the long, long roads of outer space, the swift ships plying between the island continents of suns, the windless, timeless, boundless gulf that washed the shores of a galaxy.

He haunted the ship's bridge, studying the intricate controls and cracking his brain over the staggering complexities of astrogation. In the generator rooms he learned by heart the pulse of the ship, listening to the silence of free flight after acceleration was complete. He deviled the engineers, the pilots, the technicians, with questions, understanding less than half of what they told him but always avid for more. He learned much, and yet it was nothing, and he was mad for learning, mad to hold under his own hands one of these proud giants of the starways.

The Vardda understood him. His hunger was their own, but they had not been barred from satisfaction. They accepted him. They loved to talk, and Trehearne had no lack of language teachers. His head spun to the tales they told him, of travels around the galaxy, of foreign worlds and happenings in far-off clusters of suns, of dead stars wheeling forever dark through darkness with their frozen worlds, of the sudden dreadful flaring of the novae, of what happens when a ship collides with a rogue star at many times the speed of light.

Trehearne was happy. He was living again as a child lives, in a world of wonders, where everything was new and bright and as yet untarnished. But one dark cloud hung over him--the threat of Vardda law and the Council. They might still take away from him all he had found. That threat got bigger and blacker the closer he came to the end of the voyage, and by the time the ship actually went into deceleration it had grown until it blotted out the whole horizon.

He had learned more now. He understood how the whole vast structure of Vardda economy rested on the unassailable position of the Starmen themselves and their unique ability to endure interstellar velocities. In this case, the blood, the race, was everything. There could not be any compromises, there could not be any challenges of that superiority. And here was he, Earth-born of Earth stock, with only a set of bastard genes to link him with the Vardda, a compromise and a challenge in himself.

"But damn it," he said furiously to Edri, "they can't refuse me now! And why, when you come right down to it, would one Vardda more or less make that much difference? The mutation process has been lost anyway, I certainly can't infect anybody else with it, and I don't see what they're afraid of."

Edri gave him a sombre look. "Listen, Trehearne, I haven't helped myself any by being friendly to you, as it is, and I'm not going to make matters worse for both of us by talking treason into the bargain. If you want the full, official answer to that question, go ask Kerrel."

"I will."

He found Kerrel in the lounge, engaged with Shairn and several other people in the complicated game that seemed to serve the Vardda in the place of bridge. Inside a gigantic crystal globe were suspended a number of little solar systems. Activated by magnetic currents, the tiny suns wheeled along and their planets spun in orbits around them, and it was a dizzying thing to look at. Within this microcosm were a dozen or so tiny ships, operated by the players by remote control, and for hazards there were miniature nebulae, dark clouds, and tiny comets. The object was to move the ships about without losing any, one team racing the opposing team's fleet to a selected destination. Trehearne had played a few times, but with no success whatever.

"I want to talk to you," he said, and Kerrel motioned him to wait. Very rapidly and skillfully he pressed a series of buttons on the control board in front of him. Inside the globe a ship depressed its arc, allowing a sparkling comet to pass safely above it, skirted the edge of a dark nebula, shifted course thirty-five degrees and made a perfect landing on a flying worldlet no larger than a pebble. At the top of Kerrel's panel a signal light glowed green.

Beside him Shairn lost two ships in collision and got two red lights for her pains, the "wrecks" being automatically retired out of play. Shairn wasn't watching the globe. She was watching Trehearne, and her eyes were very bright.

Kerrel turned over his place to another man and stood up. "The library's quiet," he said. "We can talk there." He went away with Trehearne. Behind them, Shairn gave up her board and followed.

The ship's library was small, with microbooks racked on the walls. They were mostly technical books, and Trehearne hadn't been able to get much out of them. He had struggled with a few on the theory and practical operation of starships, but it was a hopeless job and he hadn't pursued it. His vocabulary was still limited, and even if it hadn't been the technology involved was miles over his head.

Now he faced Kerrel and said, "I asked Edri a question, and he referred me to you. So I'll ask it again. Why would the Vardda Council be afraid to accept me?"

Kerrel put his hands on the back of a chair and thought a minute. "You understand the Vardda position among all the other races of the galaxy."

"Yes. And I don't see how I could possibly alter it."

"Then your understanding isn't complete. There are many worlds in space, Trehearne. Countless millions of people live on them. Do you know how they feel about us?"

"I hadn't thought."

"They hate us. They envy us. It's natural enough. They're prisoned in their own solar systems, forced to watch strangers carry on all their commerce with other stars. But natural or not, it's a factor we have to reckon with."

Trehearne said impatiently, "What can they do about it? They can't mutate, and they can't even try to force you to share the process with them. The thing was lost a thousand years ago. You're safe."

"There are still Orthists."

"Who are they?"

Kerrel looked mildly surprised. "I thought Edri would have told you. No? But you have, of course, heard of Orthis, the discoverer of the mutational process. He was a great man, Trehearne. A brilliant man, a genius, the founder of our race. But he was not a practical man. He lived alone too much in space, worked alone too long in his laboratory ship. He didn't know human beings, he didn't understand the hard grimy necessities of life, the law of self-preservation. He wanted to give the mutation--and the freedom of the stars--to everyone."

He paused, as though he were waiting for Trehearne to speak. But Trehearne, though he was thinking hard, kept his mouth shut.

"Orthis," Kerrel said, "was not able to see what, fortunately, others did see--that giving the mutation to all the races of the galaxy would mean wars and conflicts of such staggering dimensions that whole solar systems, including ours, might very well be destroyed. He clung stubbornly to his views and eventually fled from Llyrdis in defiance of the government, determined to have his own way. He was pursued, of course, and driven away from his objective, so that his attempt failed, but he was never captured. He vanished far out on the rim of the galaxy, and the process went with him. And that's where the trouble is, Trehearne. Some time later Orthis sent back a certain message, which gave his adherents hope that his ship had not been destroyed, that it was, in fact, waiting somewhere to be found again, and the process with it. Now, after a thousand years, they still hope."

Trehearne shook his head. "I certainly can't tell them where the ship is. So how does it affect me?"

"Don't you see how you could be used? An alien, a mongrel, but able to fly the stars--the effect on the Orthist movement would be tremendous, and not only on Llyrdis. People all over the galaxy, wanting what we have, would take you up as a symbol of what they consider their emancipation. I have a lively imagination, but it balks at trying to conceive all the trouble that could breed out of that situation."

A cold sensation was creeping over Trehearne, centering in the pit of his stomach. What Kerrel said made sense. He hated to admit it, but it made sense. He said harshly, "All right, but there must be a way around it. Around me, I mean. I take it that the Vardda Council is made up of politicians, and a politician can get around anything he wants to."

"They can," said Shairn from the doorway. "Particularly when the right people convince them they should."

Both men swung around, surprised. She strolled in, smiling at them impartially. Trehearne made nothing out of it but a smile, but Kerrel's face went suddenly hard.

"I don't know," she said to Trehearne, "whether anyone has mentioned it, but I'm quite an influential person on Llyrdis."

Kerrel said, "Would you mind very much leaving us alone?"

"Yes. You see, Kerrel, I feel rather possessive about him. It's my fault in a way he's here, and I'm going to look out for him, whether he likes it or not."

"That's fine," Trehearne said. "That puts me right in the middle."

"You're there anyway. Isn't he, Kerrel?"

"Shairn, I don't wish to quarrel with you here--"

"I'm not going to quarrel. I'm only stating a fact. Michael has developed into a very proper Vardda, and I don't intend to have him tucked away on Thuvis until he's done something to warrant it."

Kerrel said, as though it were a statement and not a question, "You're going to make an issue of this."

"I'm going to fight you for him. You need to be fought with, Kerrel. You're getting too sure of practically everything."

He moved until he stood in front of her. Trehearne had never seen anyone so angry, and so thoroughly under control. In that moment he began to understand that Kerrel was a dangerous man. Shairn drew a deep breath and threw her head back, and Trehearne knew that she had thought about this for a long time, planning it, working it out, waiting for the chance, and that she was happy about it. It wasn't himself and whether he lived or died. He was only the convenient peg. This was Kerrel and Shairn and a long situation.

Kerrel said, "I've taken a great deal from you, Shairn, but there's a limit. I've reached it."

"I hoped you'd feel that way."

He stood looking at her, and she did not speak, meeting his gaze steadily and with a queer kind of amusement. Finally Kerrel said, "I wish you hadn't done it this way. Not for him. Not for a--"

"But Kerrel," she told him gently, "it had to be something like this, or you wouldn't take no for an answer. I know. I've been trying for the longest time."

Kerrel turned and went out. He said nothing more, and he did not even glance at Trehearne as he passed him. Trehearne looked after him and shivered.

"You've been a great help to me," he said bitterly to Shairn. "The first time you didn't quite get me killed, but I believe now you're going to make it."

"Kerrel isn't that important. All he can do is recommend, and he'd have recommended Thuvis anyway." She laughed. "I feel wonderful. He was really beginning to weigh on me."

"Congratulations. And what is Thuvis?"

"I'll show you." She searched along the wall racks until she found the spool she wanted and clipped it into a viewer. "This is the astro-manual for a sector of space that is fortunately very little used. Here, have a look."

Trehearne bent over the magnilens. Equations were gliding slowly across it to the whirring of the unwinding spool, coordinates of a position in space.

"We have no capital punishment on Llyrdis," she said. "Matter of fact, we have very few criminals. But such as there are are sent into permanent exile, here."

She pressed a stud, and the whirring stopped. On the lens was the picture of a dim red sun lost in a dark wilderness, with hardly a distant star to break the desolation. Around it circled one lonely planet, grey, forlorn, and hopeless.

After a long while Trehearne said, "But I'm not a criminal. They couldn't--"

"They could judge you a danger to society, as they judge the Orthists. Kerrel will do his best to put you there--as a matter of principle."

Dying star, and dying world, alone on the edge of nothing. Trehearne looked at it. "What do they do there?"

"Nothing. They just wait."

"For what?"

He knew the answer before she told him. No more ships, no more voyaging, nothing to look forward to but the only release there was. Trehearne drew back from the viewer. Shairn smiled.

"Afraid?"

"Yes."

"I'm on your side."

"Are you? Or are you just using me to punish Kerrel, because he bores you?"

"Don't you trust me?"

"No!"

"But there isn't much you can do about it, is there?"

"I guess not."

"Then you might as well make the best of it."

EIGHT

The long arc of deceleration was completed. The starship was cruising now at planetary speed. Aldebaran had grown from a remote point of fire to a giant sun, terrifyingly near at hand. The small companion was visible only as a faint disc above the upper limb, its bluish light drowned out in the flooding ruddy blaze of the larger star.

The Vardda had crowded up into the observation dome, eager for the first glimpse of home. A heavy shield now covered the dome to sunward and in its shadow the returning travellers pressed and chattered. Trehearne stood among them, listening to their excitement and feeling at a loss in it. Their talk was the talk of strangers, full of names and references that were meaningless to him, strident with a joy he could not share. They were coming home, and he was homeless, the loneliest man in the galaxy. Before him loomed the imagined faces of the Vardda Council, passing judgment, and beyond them in the desolate wastes of space the dying world of Thuvis waited.

Shairn tugged at his sleeve. "There!" she cried. "There it is, Michael. Llyrdis!"

He followed her pointing hand, squinting against the tawny glare, and saw a golden planet wheeling toward them, bright and beautiful, with a trio of circling moons. Suddenly the majesty and splendor of this landing out of space swept over him, and drove away his fears. It was an awesome, a godlike thing, to come into a solar system from outside, drenched in the naked blazing of a foreign sun, and see the planets from far off, no bigger than a child's ball, circling the parent star in their slow eternal orbits. He became as excited as the Vardda, but for a different reason. Presently he would stand on the soil of a strange world, in the light of an alien sun, and the winds that blew would come from far peaks nameless to him, and off of unknown oceans. He watched with the others, as tensely as they.

Edri looked at his face, and smiled. "Mirris is on the other side of the sun, but if you'll look hard off there to your right you'll see Suumis, the outer one of our two immediate neighbors."

Suumis appeared against the farther reaches of space like a little red apple, accompanied by a throng of sparkling motes that Trehearne knew must be moons. He stared at it, trying to realize that the little red apple was a world as big as Earth, gave it up, and turned back again to Llyrdis. It had grown. It fairly leaped toward them as the ship swept in upon it, and Trehearne began to make out misty continents and the shadow-forms of oceans, wrapped in a cloud-shot atmosphere that burned a reddish gold in Aldebaran's light. Then it was closer still, it filled the sky, it spread out monstrously and began to fall....

Edri laughed. "Optical illusion. But a striking one, isn't it?"

Trehearne braced his knees and said it was. His heart was in his throat, the rest of his insides had fallen away somewhere, and the ship was plunging at a terrible speed to meet the toppling planet. It touched the atmosphere, and went into it as into a bath of fire. Down it went, rushing, tearing down with a long triumphant scream, and in the lower air the clouds rolled and whipped in golden fury where the dark hull clove them. Trehearne shut his eyes. When he opened them again the ship was sweeping low over an ocean the color of hammered brass, and at length he saw ahead a low shore, and beyond it a rolling plain girdled with tall mountains. On that plain he made out the gleaming vastness of a city that made New York a village.

"There it is," said Edri. "The hub and center of the galaxy."

Trehearne only shook his head. By this time he had no words. He watched the boundaries of the city widen, he watched the towers of its buildings lift and rise until they seemed to bear the sky upon them, and he was silent. Still dropping, but slowly now in a soundless glide, the ship bore to the southward. Here for miles the spaceport ran, the great docks that cradled the giants of the stars. Here was an ordered, ceaseless, swarming chaos of men and machines, seen from Trehearne's position now as a sort of yeasty ferment lapping around and over the apparently endless rows of titanic docks. The sheer size of it was crushing.

The warning bells rang. Trehearne came partly out of his daze and went below with the others to await the landing. Seconds ticked by, and the blood was hammering in his temples, and his muscles twitched with a nervous excitement. Landing. Landing on a strange world, under a strange new sun....

Smoothly, softly, the great keel touched down, home again from the edges of the universe.

Trehearne stood up. The others were already moving, pouring into the corridor, laughing, talking, eager for the opened lock and home. Trehearne would have followed them, but Edri's hand was on him, and Kerrel was in front of him.

"You'll wait," said Kerrel. "Edri, you're responsible for him. See that he doesn't leave the ship."

He went out, and suddenly, for Trehearne, that keen fine edge of wonder was all gone. Shairn came up and gave him a reassuring smile. "Don't worry, Michael. Old Joris is a friend of mine." She went out, too, and Trehearne said to Edri, "Who is Joris?"

"The Coordinator of the Port. In his younger days he flew for Shairn's father." Edri sank down into a chair again. "Might as well take it easy. Kerrel's gone to make his report to Joris in person. This isn't the sort of thing you want too widely broadcast."

"Why Joris? I thought Kerrel worked for the Council."

"He does. But everything that goes in or out of this port has to clear through the Coordinator's office. Sit down, Trehearne, you make me nervous."

"Do you think she'll be able to do anything?"

"I hope so. Damn it, sit down!"