Voyage Across the Stars Read online

  Risa either read or deduced the doubt in the castaway’s mind. “Our ancestors were slow-ship colonists,” she said. “That wasn’t working for many reasons, so they found a way to escape from their vessel. But I guess it’d be better if you heard the details of all that from my parents.”

  “This seems a very lovely world,” Slade said carefully, “and a very peaceful one.” He did not know whether the girl was lying to him or if she were merely retailing the lie which had been told her in the guise of history. That was not important, but it was crucial for Slade to learn enough of the present situation for him to tailor his own lies to meet it. He was a lone traveler, and his hopes of getting home depended on the impression he made on the people he was about to meet.

  “Oh, very much so,” Risa agreed with another bright smile. “That’s the main reason we don’t mix very much with other, well, cultures. There’d be problems—sometimes not even everybody here on Elysium agrees about what to do or how. If we opened ourselves to the rest of the galaxy, some of the problems might become violent. Avoiding violence was very important to our ancestors, and to us.”

  “Well,” said Don Slade, “a merchant like me who’s bounced around on a lot of planets sees violence, I’m afraid. And I can only respect the way you folk have managed to avoid it.” There was, Slade realized, as much truth to that statement as not.

  Risa had not called her base, home, whatever, so far as Slade could tell. He had noticed that the girls in the accompanying cars were speaking. Though there were no microphones evident, it was obvious that they were reporting to someone. Six or eight kilometers ahead, on the shore of a lake that reflected the clouds above it, was a settlement of a few hundred houses and a probable public building or two. None of the structures looked particularly impressive, though that opinion might be affected by distance and the way the walls managed to blend with their surroundings. “This is the nearest town, then?” Slade asked.

  “This is the town,” Risa said, “though we call it the city.” For a moment the girl’s smile was replaced by something gentle but wistful. “We’ve seen real cities, you know,” she said. “But none of us have visited one.”

  Risa touched a plate in the dashboard. It glowed green, reassuring her about the state of the power-pack. The car’s instrumentation was unobtrusive but very slick, certainly nothing some farmer had cobbled together during a long winter. “This isn’t everyone,” the girl said. “Lot of families like to live alone or with just a few neighbors. But there aren’t very many of us, as I said.”

  “Well, the . . .” Slade said, frowning now in open puzzlement. “These air cars. They are made on Elysium, aren’t they? Or do you—?”

  “Oh, the machinery!” Risa said delightedly. “Oh, my goodness, you thought you’d see that! All of that is underground, right here, most of it, under the houses and some distance beyond, I believe. I’m sure they’ll show it to you if you’d like, but it isnthe sort of thing we—on Elysium—wanted in the open. My goodness,” she repeated, her laughter bubbling into the sky as an image occurred to her. “You must have thought you were on a planet where you’d have to grow a long white beard and learn to card wool. Really, I’m sure my parents can help you get home.”

  “Risa,” said some undifferentiated part of the dashboard in a bass voice, “why don’t you bring our guest by the house first. We have some clothes for him. After he’s had a chance to bathe and change, your mother and I will walk him over to the Hall for dinner.”

  “All right, Dad,” the girl replied. Slade could not see how she was keying the mike, but there could have been a button on the control stick. Risa made a moue over her shoulder at the man. “I hope you like red,” she said. “Kelwin dearly loves it, and I doubt anyone else in town has clothes to lend that might fit you. Not that you’re as heavy as Kel. . . .”

  People were standing on porches or against vine-covered fences, watching the car approach. The individual yards were separated by walkways, but there did not seem to be any provision for ground vehicles. That was not completely inexplicable, but the only air cars Slade had seen were the quartet that had rescued him. Additional transport should have been parked in the yards, even if none of it happened to be airborn at the moment.

  Then Risa guided her vehicle—a trifle too fast at first, because she was unused to compensating for Slade’s considerable mass—around a house of weathered stone. An older man and woman waved from where they stood, well clear of the opened back wall. Risa tilted the fans forward to balance momentum with their thrust. Then she drove neatly into the building and parked beside two very similar cars.

  The garage was well lighted. Slade had expected the floor and walls to be stone or concrete. It was with a sense of surprise that he realized these were some synthetic which glowed without any external light source.

  The older couple had walked in as Risa shut the fans down. They could have passed as Slade’s age or less, but the castaway’s instinct was that they were much older. The man had Risa’s hair and features, while the woman was nearly blond and somewhat less fine-drawn. Both smiled warmly at the girl and her passenger. “I’m Nan,” said the woman as she stretched out a hand to Slade, “Risa’s mother; and this is my husband Onander. I’m sure our daughter has welcomed you to Elysium, but let me assure you that the welcome was from the whole community.”

  The hull and seat-back flexed beneath Slade’s weight when he levered himself out of the space in which he had ridden. He touched Nan’s hand as he stepped from the vehicle, though he was careful not to put any strain on her. “Lady,” he said, conscious of his image but able nonetheless to be sincere, “your daughter and her friends saved my life. I can’t think of any welcome better than that one. And if there’s any way you might help me get home, the way the Terzia thought you might, I—well, how could I owe you for more than my life? But I would appreciate it.”

  “Of course we’ll help you,” said Onander. He clasped the bigger man, hand to biceps, in a gesture that brought their left wrists together as if they were mingling blood. “But I hope you’ll accept a night of our hospitality here. We dare allow few visitors, but someone the Terzia recommended is welcome not only as a guest but also as a font to slake our curiosity. But you will—” he glanced down at Slade’s garment with a smile and not censure—“be more comfortable in proper clothes, won’t you? They’re right upstairs in the bathroom.”

  Nan and Onander were already leading the way around the parked cars to the staircase in a corner. The outside door had pivoted shut unnoticed. That was the sort of effortless control to be expected in a room with smoothly-gleaming surfaces; but the stairs took Slade aback again. They were of dark wood, old enough to show wear in the gentle bowing of the treads. Each tread was pegged, not nailed or glued, to the stringers. The fit appeared flawless.

  “Via, this is a fine piece of work,” Slade said aloud as he let his fingers brush the balustrade. He felt that he had to be as careful with it as he had been with his hostess, though the dense wood barely flexed beneath his foot. It struck him that the Elysians themselves might be less fragile than his nervousness seemed to be warning him.

  Nan glanced back at the big man. “My mother’s mother built it,” she said. “To replace the extruded one. I’m told that it was almost six years before she called it finished—not that she was working on it full time.”

  Nan paused at the stair head and rapped the balustrade. The sound had a life that masonry or synthetics would not have duplicated. “They were both, this and the plastic, utilitarian in that they permitted people to walk between the garage and the first floor,” the woman continued. “But this had a utility for my grandmother while she was working on it, too . . . and for us, to remember her every time a step sounds on the tread.”

  As he mounted the last step himself, Slade glanced over his shoulder and smiled. Risa still waited at the foot of the stairs, watching the play of the castaway’s muscles. When his eyes caught hers, the girl blushed before she grinned back.<
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  CHAPTER TEN

  “The seat of honor, Mister Slade,” Onander said as he pointed to the chair at the center of the cross table. The chair to either side of the central one was empty also. Nan took the guest’s hand lightly to bring him forward, much as her daughter had led Slade to the car.

  There were about thirty adults already sitting at the two side tables and at the seats to either end of the table that crossed them into a square-based U. They clapped lightly as the castaway entered the room. There were decanters and covered dishes on the tables, but the meal had waited for Slade’s arrival.

  Slade’s tunic and shorts were red, as he had been warned. The garments were comfortably light in the warm evening, and they were loose enough to give him occasional twinges as he remembered his garb on landing. Other Elysians were wearing similar clothing, though mostly of printed cloth. There was no certain cut or style. One man was nude at least from the tabletop to his cap of iridescent feathers.

  Nan sat in one of the flanking chairs. Onander pulled out the central one and gestured Slade into it. Before the Elysian himself sat down, however, he called, “Friends? Our guest would probably be better for a meal in him. Afterwards, we hope he’ll join us in the other room and tell us something about himself and the things he’s seen; but for now, let’s all eat in peace.”

  There was another patter of hands beneath a rainbow of Elysian smiles.

  The Slammers were normally fed with ration packs, standardized food. It might once have had a Dutch emphasis, but when reconstituted it tended to be as featureless as a hooker’s thirtieth trick of the night. The mercenary troops themselves came from worlds as varied as those on which a contract might station them. It was better to accept the cost and inconvenience of standardized rations than to lose thirty percent of your effectives to diarrhea or constipation every time you shifted planets.

  Slade, however, had made a practice of eating on the local economy wherever possible. He hadn’t joined Hammer to be bored, and he’d always figured he pulled his weight even when he had the runs. The big man therefore appreciated the meal before him as few of his fellows would have been able to do.

  Not that the food was exotic in any normal sense. There was roast meat, vegetables both raw and cooked—nothing Slade recognized, and nothing particularly striking except a dish that looked like cole slaw and tasted like napalm—and bread, which was almost certainly baked from Terran wheat. The wine was probably better than Slade had a palate to enjoy. He had grown up on Tethys with stim cones, not alcohol. His introduction to the latter as a low-ranking trooper had been regimental stash, valued for reasons apart from its piquant subtleties of flavor.

  “You know,” he said around a bite of roast—from the end, where it was cooked gray, not pink—“I sort of thought you might be vegetarians. It, well, I thought you might.”

  “Some of us are,” Onander said as he forked more meat from the tray between the two men. “Down at the far end,” he noted, with a gesture toward one of the side tables, brief enough to be unobtrusive. “We haven’t a large population on Elysium, but neither is it a monolithic one. You wouldn’t prefer, ah, vegetable protein, would you? Really, I should have checked.”

  Slade had not been conscious of being the center of attention. The other people in the hall had been eating and chatting in normal fashion. Now, however, the big wood-paneled room had noticeably stilled. “Oh, not at all,” the castaway said in embarrassment. “It’s mostly seafood of one sort or another . . . a lot of it compressed and textured plankton, but animals to start out even if they were little ones.”

  He grinned and looked around the room. “Tell the truth, a lot of what I was raised to eat was about as bland as regimental food.” He raised a bite of roast on his fork. “Nothing as good as this,” he closed, putting an obvious period to the explanation by eating the morsel.

  Slade had not done any physical labor since his last bout of exercise on the lifeboat. The tension of the landing, however, had itself kept his metabolism cooking at a high rate. He plowed on through repeated servings, vaguely conscious without focusing on it that those around him continued to eat though at a much lower rate. When Slade finished, covering a belch with his hand, there was almost simultaneous movement among his hosts to push their plates away and lean back.

  Nan stood. “I think,” she said, “that if we’ve all eaten, we can adjourn to the Assembly Room to listen to our visitor. If he wouldn’t mind?” she added, looking down at Slade. The question was real and hopeful, not a rhetorical exercise.

  “Ah, I’d be delighted,” said the big man. When he got up, he found that his muscles were wobbly with exhaustion and the pleasant burden of food being digested. Natural courtesy aside, Slade owed these friendly people a duty for their hospitality. It did not occur to him to shirk his duties simply because he was tired.

  “Of course everyone couldn’t gather to meet you directly tonight,” said Onander as he opened the door behind his own chair. A two-meter long hallway, open at the further end, lay beyond. “But from the Assembly Room, we can broadcast and share your talk with the whole community.”

  Slade had noticed that the dining room into which he had first been ushered was only half the exterior size of the building. The Assembly Room filled the remainder, save for the length of the hall between them. Too narrow for a kitchen, he would have thought . . . and none of his business; Slade wasn’t searching this city for contraband.

  The Assembly Room took his breath away with its abruptness.

  They had dined beneath bare rafters, seated on wood and eating from hand-thrown pottery. The Assembly Room was by contrast as technically advanced as anything Slade had seen. It was of a style that was wholly new to him as well.

  Elysians who passed as Slade stepped aside were reclining on what seemed to be a bare floor. The surface rose and mounded, not only beneath their weight but by meeting their bodies at comfortable angles. The feet of those walking to places to sit did not affect the floor in any visible manner.

  But it was the walls that made Slade pause just inside the doorway. They held his attention in growing horror. The covering material had its own light as had that of the air car garage. This time the wall was not a wash of blank color but rather a mural painting with life and depth and movement.

  “It’s a scene from our history,” Nan said with quiet dignity. “Our ancestors were slow-ship colonists. There was a higher level of radiation aboard than the designers had allowed for, or perhaps they just failed to allow for the passage of time on a closed system. There was, at the end, fighting between our ancestors and other passengers who had—deviated further from the original stock.”

  More than Slade’s eyes were absorbed. He could not have seen the objects on the black background more clearly: rusty iron, the golden gleam of a join brazed instead of welded, the silvery polish of the lands against the shadowed grooves of a gun barrel. To another man, they would have been crude steel boxes, crawling their way one at a time through narrow darkness. But Slade was a tanker. His palms sweated and his heart began to race. “No,” he whispered. It was not only other men in those tanks, it was him again.

  The lead vehicle disintegrated. There was a spark on the glacis, then a globe of orange fire. Fuel and ammunition had exploded. For that brief instant, the surroundings were more than hints in shadow: girders interlacing, reaching far beyond visibility. Nowhere in sight was there a longitudinal connection except the catwalk down which the armored boxes struggled.

  “The main drive was in East Section,” Nan was saying. All the others who had dined with Slade were now seated on the floor. “For generations, our ancestors had used auxilliary units in West for power, but at the end it was necessary to tap the main drive.”

  The next vehicle clumsily shoved aside the remains of the first. Glowing fragments slipped over the edge of the catwalk and pirouetted, as softly as thistle seeds, toward the black that swallowed them and their warmth. Flashes lighted slots in the bulkhead at the walk�
�s far end. Projectiles rang and splashed from girders, from the walkway, from the armored targets waddling forward.

  “You can’t just bull your way in!” Slade said. “Not if they’re waiting, not if they’re hardened and you give them time to pick and—”

  The leading vehicle had been firing toward its goal with three automatic weapons. Now a pale amber beam threaded through the girders at an angle and touched the vehicle’s flank.

  “—choose, it’s—”

  Another orange explosion.

  “—suicide!”

  “There was no choice,” the Elysian said. Her firm hands held one of Slade’s to keep the castaway from gouging himself with his cropped nails. “There was only one vehicular connection between East Section and West. The crews knew what they were doing.”

  The third vehicle might have been lighter than its fellows, or perhaps even machinery could feel and react to desperation. The tank rocked through the wreckage at speed. The laser touched it but did not bite out the vehicle’s heart. The beam left only a scar that glowed white, then red, as it cooled. As the tank neared its goal, the guns in the bulkhead fired at an increasing deflection. Shots still hit. The weapons replying from the vehicle’s bow fell silent. But there were not so many hits, and they did not have the seam-splitting accuracy of moments before.

  “At the time this was going on—” Nan continued. A white flash beneath the lumbering vehicle scattered the three iron road-wheels on the left side. They spun off the catwalk as the tank lurched the other way. Their edges glowed and disappeared.

  “—a team was entering the power room from outside, unnoticed by the inhabitants who were concentrating on the bulkhead.”

  A door from somewhere ahead of the disabled vehicle spewed others onto the catwalk. The remaining gun on the tank fired until the barrel shone. Weapons from West Section itself must have joined, because the flecks of projectiles ricochetting patterned the vehicle’s quarter for the first time. It made no difference. The others were over the tank like maggots on the third day’s corpse. They were humanoid, but they had huger bodies and fewer eyes than men. They began to devour the vehicle’s crew even as they dragged them through the prized-open hatches.