Anderson, Poul - Psychotechnic League 04

  THE ACOLYTES

  Poul Anderson

  Beyond the green, smiling face that Nerihus showed to men was the dark other — the alien face that is death to see!

  The very first day he was there, Aunt Edith said to him, “Now, Peter, be sure not to leave the grounds alone.”

  “Why not?” he asked, suddenly wondering if this was going to be as much fun as he had thought. It had been a sort of disappointing trip from Sol, days and days locked inside the metal walls of the spaceship. And the steward had taken his mother seriously and watched him so carefully that it had been just like being back in school. And now this—

  “It’s just a matter of common sense, Pete,” said Uncle Gunnar. “We don’t know enough about this planet yet. You could get into trouble. Sure, we’ll go everywhere you want, but not alone. Together. No space explorer who rushes off by himself on a new world and gets in a scrape that his friends have to pull him out of, is a hero. He’s just a bloody fool. You’ve got more brains than that. First chance I get, I’ll show you through the woods—and I’ll take my gun along.”

  That made it different. Wilson Pete was suddenly glad all over to be here—here, on a frontier planet, on his uncle’s farm. And Uncle Gunnar was an old explorer himself, he’d been all over the Galaxy before he settled down on Nerthus. He was a huge man, with bright blue eyes in a tanned strong face. His hair and beard were red as fire. And he knew enough to call a fellow “Pete” instead of that sissy “Peter.” When you’re going on eleven, you like to be talked to man to man.

  “Sure,” said Pete. “Sure, I’m old enough to know that.”

  “Fine,” said Uncle Gunnar. “After all, this is a pretty big place we’ve got. You’ll have quite a bit to see before you want to explore the woods or the hills. How about a look around now?”

  “Oh, that can wait,” said Aunt Edith. “You must be tired from your trip, Peter. Don’t you want to take a nap first?”

  “I’m not tired,” said Pete. “It was an easy trip.”

  He had been a little tired when the spaceship landed at Stellamont, the only city on Nerthus. It was a small place too, just a cluster of buildings stuck on a broad green plain, not much to look at. But Uncle Gunnar had been there to meet him. They’d gone into the noisy dimness of the Spaceman's Haven, where he’d had a glass of ambrosite while Uncle Gunnar had a beer, and he’d met a dozen men he only remembered dimly, the men who were pioneering out among the stars. Then they’d gone to the aircar and flown to the farm.

  It had been a long ride through a lonely sky, hundreds of kilometers of emptiness rolling beneath them. Not really emptiness— there were the hills and forests and lakes, a scacoast glimpsed from afar, broad valleys with long shadows sliding across them. But no men. Wind and sunlight and murmuring rivers, but no men.

  Nerthus was almost disappointingly Earthlike, no moving mountains or columns of fire or glittering alien cities, just the wild green land slipping away beneath a humming airear. But Uncle Gunnar made it sound interesting enough as he talked.

  “There’s tomorrow in this world, it belongs to the future,” he said. “Man has only been here a few years, there aren’t many of us yet, but more are coming in every month. It’s going to be one of the great planets of the Galaxy, and we’re in on the beginning.”

  “Aren’t there any natives?” asked Pete.

  “Not a one. Nerthus is one of the few planets where a man can live without artificial help and have the place all to himself to boot.” Uncle Gunnar sighed. “But sometimes I wish there were natives. It’d make matters a lot easier for us.”

  “How so?” asked Pete. “They couldn’t work any better’n your machines, could they?”

  “No, though Cosmos knows I could do with a little extra help. Edith and Tobur and I have all we can do to manage a farm the size of ours. But it’s a question mainly of ecology. Nerthus may be like Earth basically, and even in rather fine details of biology and chemistry, but still there are some two billion years of independent evolution on the two worlds. Naturally there are differences—and as yet we don’t know just what all those differences are.

  “Well, just take the obvious examples. How do we know what native foods we can eat and what is poisonous to us? We just have to try everything out first, by chemical analysis or by using Terrestrial animals. Then there are the native animals:—which of them can we tame and use, and which are hopeless? The natives could tell us a lot of things we need to know.

  “And eventually we have to understand the way the whole planet works, and fit ourselves into it. Little things like the exact composition of the soil, the bacteria in it, the insects that fertilize some plants, the spectral distribution of sunlight—all that will make a big difference in the success of agriculture. We haven’t had too much success so far in growing Terrestrial plants on Nerthus, for precisely that reason. They’re working in the labs at Stellamont, developing new varieties of staple plants like com and potatoes—Ncrthusian varieties, that will fit in here. It’ll be done, too, but it’s a big job and it’ll take time. Meanwhile, we colonists have to make out the best we can.”

  Pete nodded. Uncle Gunnar was fun to talk to, though it was hard to follow him sometimes.

  Anyway, the trip from Stellamont had been so interesting that Pete wasn’t tired any more. He was all on fire to see the place.

  “Well, it isn’t long till supper,” said Aunt Edith. “I suppose you menfolk might as well loaf around for a while.”

  ‘‘Come on, then,” said Uncle Gunnar, and he and Pete went outside.

  The house was low and white, with a high, peaked roof—on Earth it would have been funny, it looked so ancient, but here it blended with the trees and the sky and the big open fields. As you came out on the front' porch, you saw a broad space of turf and wooded clumps, flowers nodding in the breeze, the tall forest beyond. On one side the fields began, rolling away toward far blue hills, on the other side and toward the rear the lawn sloped off to the farm buildings.

  As they walked toward the barn, someone stepped out of it and approached them. Someone—no, something. Pete caught his breath as he saw that it was an alien.

  He looked like a short, squat man with very wide shoulders and long arms, but he was completely hairless and his skin was blue. A round, flat-nosed, earless, wide-mouthed head sat on a short thick neck. He wore the usual pouched belt, as well as baggy pants around his bowed legs, and nothing else. Huge eyes that were pools of blackness gleamed at them as he came up and smiled.

  ‘‘Hello,” he said. His voice was deep and heavy, with a funny sort of accent that no human throat could have had.

  “Hello, Tobur,” said Uncle Gunnar. “This is my nephew, Wilson Pete, who’s going to stay with us awhile. You remember I told you about him. His father is an engineer on Earth who’s been assigned to a project on Sol VIII. The planet not being fit to live on, Pete’s folks have sent him here for the time being. Pete, this is Tobur of Javartenan, my old batman and now the hired man.”

  “P-pleased to meet you,” said Pete uncertainly.

  “Likewise, I say,” grinned Tobur with an alarming flash of teeth. “How you like here, huh?”

  “I—all right, I guess,” answered Pete.

  “Can you do this?” asked Tobur. He jumped up into the air— way into the air—clicked his heels and turned a somersault on the way down, and landed on his hands.

  “N-no. Goshell, no.”

  “Then I winner,” said Tobur. “Is custom on Javartenan for winner give prize to loser. Winner pay for glory, you see. So I give you prize. Here, take.” He pulled a small knife out of one pouch. “Knife belong Queen of Astafogartistan once, I take a
fter hard battle. Brings luck. Worshiped by natives as god. Keep for souvenir. Pete.”

  “Thanks! Thanks a googol!” Pete held the knife close. “Thanks, Tobur!”

  The alien clapped him on the back. “Is nothing. Friends give presents, no? I have many other souvenirs of battles, sure.”

  Presently the three of them went on toward the bam. Uncle Gunnar explained to Pete: “Tobur and I were together for many years. When I finally decided to settle down, he still followed me. We can at least gas over old times.”

  “But Cosmos, Uncle Gunnar, why did you stop exploring?”

  “Oh—a man gets older, Pete. He’s not quite up to it any more. And then I met your aunt and decided it was time I got a home of my own. Nerthus was wide open, it offered enough of a challenge for anyone. So we came here, and I’ve never regretted it.”

  They came into the cool dusk of the barn, where cows from Earth stood beside native bufoids. Going out the other door they emerged into a big corral where some of the six-legged, greenish-furred native “ponies” were kept.

  “We’ve had pretty good luck taming those,” said Uncle Gunnar. “It’s handy. There isn’t as much machinery available yet as we need, and they can substitute. Also, they can go places and do things that a car or tractor can’t—into- the woods, for instance.”

  He reached out and snagged the halter of one. “Here, Pete. I’ve been saving this one for you. He’s yours.”

  A six-legged pony on an alien planet, an alien ex-spaceman and adventurer for a friend, a whole new world— Cosmos googolplex!

  Pete rode around for a while, getting the feel of the animal. The middle pair of legs gave it a funny humping motion that was a little hard to get used to. They went down to look at the orchard and some of the pens, and glanced across the fence at the waving fields of avertigonite. From that plant came avertigon, the anti-space sickness drug, and it was Uncle Gunnar’s chief money crop.

  “But I’ll be pretty busy when the harvest comes in,” he said. “The neighbors—” he meant everyone within several hundred kilometers— “pool what machinery and labor they have to reap and thresh it, so I’ll have to be away quite a bit. You and Tobur will have to look after Aunt Edith and the farm, Pete.”

  “We’ll do that,” promised Pete, swapping a glance with Tobur. The Javartenanian grinned back at him.

  The sun was low in the west, filling the air with shining gold and slipping long blue shadows over the ground, when they heard Aunt Edith calling them to supper. “Let’s go,” said Tobur, smacking his lips, and waddling quickly ahead.

  Something tinkled in the high grass, a ripple of little glass bells, sweet and laughing in the gentle sunset air. Pete had a glimpse of a green-furred small thing that skittered away from them, chiming and singing as it danced.

  “What’s that?" he asked, very softly.

  Uncle Gunnar shrugged. “We call ’em tinklers,” he said. “They’re found everywhere hereabouts, making that noise. Don’t ask me what they do for a living. Damn nuisance, I think.”

  Pete stared after the retreating tinkler. It gamboled off, stopping now and then to look after them, and the laughter of bells filled the quiet evening.

  They had given him a room to himself, a big cool chamber at the rear of the house, and sent him to bed there not long after supper. He lay for a while thinking of all that there would be to do, thinking about his luck in having Thorleifsson Gunnar for an uncle, thinking about the way he would tell of all this when he got back to Earth. Pretty soon he dropped into a light doze, but it wasn't long before he woke up again and was thirsty.

  For a little while he just lay there, feeling too lazy to get up for a drink. But that only made him more wide awake than before. He looked around the room; it was all black and white with moonglow, the ghostly curtains fluttered in the breeze, and he could hear the faint noises of the night murmuring out there.

  Well, sunspots! He wanted some water bad. So he got up and walked across to the door. The floor was cool and hard under his bare feet, and shadows slid around behind and in front of him, and the wind blew in a faint tingle of unearthly smells. Another world! You couldn’t even see the sun of Nerthus from Sol’s planets—and here he was!

  He went quietly down the corridor toward the bathroom and got his drink. As he came out again, he noticed light coming from around the bend in the hall, from the living room, and he heard a low mutter of voices. His aunt and uncle must still be sitting up, talking.

  It would be fun to sneak up and listen in, the way the Patrolman had listened in on the Scordians in that stereo. It’d be good practice for the time when he would be having adventures, and shoot, it wouldn’t do any harm— He went very softly down the hall and stood just beyond the open living-room door.

  “—I still don’t think they should have done it,” said Aunt Edith.

  “Why not?” rumbled Uncle Gunnar’s deep voice. “Cathy would naturally want to be with her husband, and you can’t have kids along on that devil’s planet. They had to send him somewhere, and this is a healthy sort of place for a youngster.”

  “Oh, Peter is a sweet boy—” Pete's ears burned—“and I’m glad to see him. But is this planet healthy? I wonder!”

  “What in the Galaxy could be dangerous here?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just the trouble, I don’t know. If we did, we could guard against it. But Nerthus is still too much a mystery, Gunnar. Diseases, maybe—”

  “Edith, I’ve told you a million times that the probability of any local germ finding a congenial host in man is vanishingly small. Sure, they did have one epidemic here, of native origin, but that particular thing was soon licked. The chance that another organism can survive a metabolism as alien as ours is so slight that we’ve got a considerably better prospect of being hit by a meteorite.”

  “Well—wild animals—”

  “Come now, sweetheart, you also know that potentially dangerous life forms have been eliminated around all our settlements. I haven’t seen a large carnivore in the woods here for at least two years now.” Uncle Gunnar got up and came across to where she sat; Pete could hear his slow heavy footsteps and feel the floor quivering ever so faintly under them. “Besides, Pete’s under orders to stay on the farm grounds, where even you will agree there’s no danger. And Tobur will keep an eye on him too.”

  “Oh, 1 know it, Gunnar, I know it all. But why have all those other children vanished off farms? What became of them?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I did. Perhaps there are dangers in the woods that we don’t know about. My guess is, their parents got careless and let them go off alone. That’s not going to happen with Pete. Now for Cosmos’ sake, honey, stop worrying—”

  Pete stole back toward his room, not caring to listen any more. He felt a little mad about it—as if he couldn’t take care of himself! But he’d obey orders like a good spaceman, if only to save the folks from worry and himself from a licking.

  As he got back into the room, he heard a noise from outside. He went to the window and leaned out.

  It was a strange, magic scene, a fairyland of streaming moonlight and whispering trees and unknown constellations. There were two moons in the sky, pouring their cold silver light down over the grass to glitter in the dew, throwing weird double shadows of trees. One moon was so close you could almost see it move, could almost see its shadows crawling like live things, as if the world stirred restlessly in its sleep. The stars flashed and gleamed high overhead, sprawling in new figures. Only the pale flood of the Milky Way looked the same.

  The night murmured. Pete knew the nights of Earth and their noises, out in the silence far from man—buzz of insects, chirp of crickets, hoarse croaking of frogs, a million little sounds all blending into one great quiet voice. Nerthus had its language too, but it wasn’t Earth’s; all the tiny parts of it were different and they added up to a strange whisper, the voice of an alien world.

  Insects were there, thrumming and humming. Something was singing, a sweet liqui
d trill running up and down the scale, and something else screamed harshly, far away in the woods and swamps. There was a far-off pattering like the rapid thunder of a small drum, there was a shrill scrape as of metal, there was brief maniac laughter, there was hooting and hissing and chuckling and bubbling, all at the very edge of hearing. And—something else—

  Yes, there it came again. Pete remembered now, harked back to the thing which had chimed and laughed at him in the sunset.

  It came bobbing and dancing out of the shadows and the forest, jumping, bouncing, swatting after the elfin lamps of night-glowing insects, and a million little bells came with it. Pete listened, straining out the window, enchanted by the night and the music.

  He couldn’t see the tinkler very well. It was a dim whiteness in the shifting, tricky moonlight, a small thing that danced under his window and called to him to come out and play. But he could hear it, the bells came high and sweet now.

  They were like silver sleigh-bells on a frosty night, like a sunlit rain-shower, like the laughter of young girls. It was a rush of chiming, a pizzicato on a string of glass, gay and joyous and drunken with life. Come out, come out, come out—come out and run in the moonlight with me!

  “No,” said Pete all at once, and yawned. He was sleepy. Some other time, maybe. Perhaps Tobur would come along—somehow, he didn’t think the bells of Faerie would chime for Uncle Gunnar, but Tobur might understand.

  After all, grownups thought the tinklers were just a nuisance. They came dancing around the house of nights and spoiled your sleep with their wistful laughter. You had to listen to them—

  Tobur leaned back more comfortably against the wall of the shed. “—and there was I,” he went on. “Spacesuit leaking, poison air and minus two hundred degrees all around, natives after me—”

  “Gollikers!” whispered Pete.

  They sat in the shade, letting dinner settle inside them while a hot early-afternoon sun danced and flimmered beyond and the air was drowsy with humming bugs. Tobur had another story to tell.