"It isn't real magic!" We heard Gytha's voice raised from one of the rooms. "Don't you ever read tapes, Pritha? The vibrations, the sounds—they attract the animals and birds. I don't know what Drufin means—it's probably off-world. But it's the sound—and maybe a special kind of pipe to make it." As usual she was quick to distinguish the real from the unreal.
One of the thoughts I sometimes have crossed my mind then—what is real and unreal? Unreal to one people or species can be real to another. Beltane libraries are sadly lacking in information about other worlds—unless it deals with scientific matters. But I had heard stories from spacemen, and perhaps not all of those were tall tales told to astonish the planet bound. Drufin magic meant nothing to me either, but doubtless Gytha's explanation was right. But there were other things beside piping to start the thought of magic growing—
"With a pipe such as that," Thad broke in, "you could go hunting and never come home with an empty bag. Just pipe 'em up and stun 'em."
"No!" Gytha was as quick to counter such speculation as she had been to deny the supernatural. "That is a trap and—"
I moved on into the room. Gytha, her cheeks flushed, faced Thad, indignation expressed in every line of her thin body. Behind her the younger children had drawn together as if to form a support. And Thad had only Ifors Juhlan on his side. It was a clash that had occurred before, and I expected it at intervals. Perhaps someday such a difference of opinions would break Thad loose from the Rovers. He wanted action and more excitement than we could promise him.
"Second Law, Thad," I said now, though that sealed me away into the adult world. But the admonition was strong enough to keep his rebellion bottled.
Second Law—"As we value life and well-being, so does lesser life. We shall not take life without thought or only to satisfy the ancient curse of our species, which is unheeding violence."
There was no need to hunt on Beltane—save for specimens for the labs. And then sure care must be taken of them so that they eventually might be returned unharmed to the Reserves. These were scattered widely, each with its population to be studied. The prizes were the mutants of the over-mountain Reserves. Their intelligence had been raised, and a certain number of such animals had even gone to war, in "beast teams," aligned with human controllers. I hoped to qualify for work on such a Reserve. Since the breakdown of the educational chain, I thought I could persuade the powers in control that practical knowledge of the field type was as useful now as the stated requirements of off-world learning, which might never be in existence again.
I had gone a-hunting with a stunner, and I had shown visa-tapes of this to the Rovers. Perhaps that had been a mistake. Thad—well, we were a nonviolent world, with action mainly confined to cerebration and experimentation within four walls. There had been a case or two during the past few years of killing and pillage without cause. The perpetrators had been sent to the psyche lab at the port and the stories hushed up. But—perhaps not only machines broke under the circumstances that had gripped Beltane for the last decade. I had been thinking of the stalemate in education. If one did not go forward, one did not just remain still; one slipped back. Were we slipping back? We were still conditioned by the laws, intended to keep us at peace with each other and the life about us. But—
"Vere—" Thad changed the subject now, either because he wanted to escape Gytha's accusation or because he was really interested. "What is all this?"
He gestured to indicate the four walls of the room. Time had set lightly here. I believed the Butte must have been sealed airtight. The walls were as bright under the diffused light as if they were newly painted. Three were unbroken; the fourth, with the door, was separated by that into two tall panels. And what they all displayed were maps, each covering a quarter of our continent, north, east, south, and west. All the settlements were marked with small bulbs, unlit. In addition, I picked out some of the long abandoned Security holds, most of them mere sentry posts.
Below each wall was a board with a range of levers and buttons, and in front of each board a chair that slid with ease along the full length of the controls. The center of the room was occupied by a square platform a step above the surface of the floor, and on it was a fifth chair, made to face any wall, as Dinan Norkot had discovered, sitting in it to whirl dizzily about.
Memories of the past when I was about Dinan's age stirred. I had been here once and had seen my father in that center seat—not whirling but turning slowly to watch lights winking on the board. Blue—yes, blue for the sectors, red for the Security posts, and yellow—no, green—for the Reserves.
"This is a com post," I told Thad. Not a com post either, but the com post—more important even than the one at the port. Butte Hold had been the most secure of all the posts, and so the most necessary installations were here.
Did it still work, I wondered? The lights were out, but that might only mean that the boards were closed down, not really dead. I went to the one facing north. The port light—I leaned over the board, discovered that that was too uncomfortable, so seated myself in the chair, and compared numbers on board and wall until I found the button to press.
Voices boomed into the room so that I heard Annet cry out, and we all stared at the wall map from which they seemed to break with a clarity that would have been more natural had the men speaking stood before us.
Dagny Norkot ran over to stand beside my chair. "That's my father," she declared. "But he went to the port—"
"—satisfied with their statements. Then—"
It faded as if Norkot had walked away from an open com mike or else that the power installation weakened. Annet was beside me now.
"We're not supposed to be listening in on a Committee meeting," she said.
That was the truth. But somehow I wanted to know just how effective the whole system still was. I snapped up the port lever and depressed that of Yetholme.
Again we had a pickup. Not clear voices as Norkot's had been, but enough to know that the old setup was partially effective.
"You know"—Thad pushed between Annet and my chair—"this Griss Lugard, he can about hear all that is going on—everywhere—and stay right here! Voice pickup anyway. Isn't there any visa-screen relay?"
Again I remembered. Getting out of the seat before the north board, I went to that center control chair where Dinan had been spinning moments earlier. It took me two false starts before I either remembered, and was not aware of it, or lit by chance on the proper combination of two buttons in the chair arms, plus a foot lever. A section of the wall slid up to disclose a screen.
"Yah!" Thad expressed his excited interest. "Now what do you do?"
I glanced quickly over the rest of the map, having no mind to look at any occupied sector house. The easiest choice would be one of the abandoned Security ports in the far north.
"Thad, press the first lever, first row," I ordered, holding the screen ready with my own fingers.
He did so. There was a flicker on the screen and then a picture, so dim at first that I thought the power was nearly exhausted. But as I continued to hold, it built up into a brighter display, and we were looking at another room. This, too, had banks of controls, a couple of chairs. But there was a great crack in the wall behind the control board and—
"Look—a wart-horn!"
For a moment it was startling. Crouched in the chair, which was still on an even keel, was indeed a wart-horn. Its warty skin, its froglike head and face with the forward pointing horns, made it anything but a pleasant-looking object. But the way it crouched in the chair, its webbed forepaws even resting on the arms as it seemed to lever itself up to meet our gaze, always supposing that our actions here had activated the appearance of a twin screen for reception there and two-way viewing, gave it a disturbing air of intelligence, as if it had been about some secret business of its own in our alien structure and had been surprised.
We watched its throat swell and heard, muted but still recognizable, its harsh croaking grunt. It leaned up and out even farther, its face filling the screen, and I heard Pritha cry out, "No! No!"
I released the com buttons, and the screen not only went dark but also the wall moved to cover it again.
"I don't like it! It looked at us!" Pritha's voice became a wail.
I swung around in the chair, but Annet had already taken her in her arms.
"You know wart-horns," she said soothingly. "They are nothing to be afraid of. And if that one saw us, he probably was just as startled as you were. That"—she turned to me—"was an old sentry post, wasn't it, Vere?" At my nod, she continued. "And it's been left empty for years. I bet the wart-horn may have a den there."
"It looked at us," Pritha repeated.
"And we looked at it," Annet answered. "So we're even. And that place where it is is a long way from here!"
"Two days by hopper, Pritha," I cut in. "Nobody goes there any more."
"Vere"—Gytha was beside Thad, her hand poised above the levers and buttons—"let's try another one—maybe this?"
"No!" Annet snapped before I had a chance to answer. "There's been enough of this listening and peeping. And since Sector-Captain Lugard made off with our lunch, suppose we try to find out what is in the cupboards here. As you said, Vere, he owes us that."
"Indeed he does." I backed her up. But I lingered to make sure I was the last to leave the room, Gytha and Thad going reluctantly, gazing back at the tempting display of possible peeps hither and thither across our world.
"Vere?" A small hand slipped into mine. I looked down into Pritha's almost triangular face. The families that had been brought in to settle Beltane had not been homogeneous in the beginning but came from widely separated worlds, since it had been their special talents and training that selected them. So we did indeed represent types of many kinds, some of which had mutated physically from the ancient norm of our species.
Pritha Wymark, within one month of Gytha's age, was hardly taller than Dagny, five years younger. Her delicate bones and slender body, though, were not those of a small child. She had a quick mind, but she was timid, highly sensitive to things that perhaps the others were never aware of or felt only lightly. Now there was a shadow on her ethereal face.
"Vere," she repeated, and her voice was hardly above a whisper. "That wart-horn—it—it was watching us!"
"Yes?" I encouraged, for behind that statement of fact something troubled her. Dimly I felt it also—that the way the thing had squatted in the chair before the screen, its stance aping that of a man minding the control board, had been disturbing.
"It—it was not—" She hesitated as if she could not put her troubled thoughts into words.
"Perhaps it was just the way it was hunched in the chair, Pritha. Wart-horns have never been submitted to the up-raying, you know. They are too low on the learn-scale. And that was a sentry post we picked up, way out in the wastelands. It was not on one of the Reserves."
"Perhaps—" But I knew she was not satisfied.
"When we get back, Pritha"—I tried to reassure her—"I'll report it. If by chance some wart-horn has been up-scaled and escaped, they will have a record of it. But one does not have to fear even an up-scaled animal—you know that."
"Yes, Vere. I guess it was just the way it sat there, looking at us."
But still she kept her hand in mine until we reached the last of the open doors and looked in upon a scene of activity as Annet examined labels on ration cans taken from a case recently opened and made choices to set out on the table that must once have served the whole garrison for mess.
Lugard's cooking arrangements were simple. He had attached two portable cooking units. And there was another case of mess kits clipped together, which Thad now unpacked with no small clatter.
Against the far wall were the huge units that were dial food, but Lugard's plates were enough for our purposes. Gytha handed the containers Annet selected to Ifors, who fitted them into the heating clips. It was all very brisk and efficient.
"It would seem we are not going hungry," I commented.
Annet wore an excited expression as she turned to me.
"Vere, real caff! Not just parx-seed substitute! And a lot of off-world things. Why, here are camman fowl slices and creamed fass leaves—things we haven't seen for years!"
"Lugard must have been using officers' mess supplies." I crossed to read the labels on some of the cans. We ate well enough on Beltane—perhaps our common fare would have seemed luxury on some worlds, since the bio labs produced new strains adapted to growing here in great variety—but for a long time there had been no imports, and we had heard, if we had never had a chance to taste for ourselves, nostalgic mention now and then of some particular viand our elders remembered.
Prudence finally controlled Annet's selection, and she picked for our eating not the more exotic things she had found, but those that promised few if any upsetting reactions from stomachs unaccustomed to the unknown. We ate cautiously at first and then with our usual good appetites to be satisfied.
When we had done, Annet lined up a small company of containers and looked at me wistfully.
"Do you suppose he would trade?" she asked. "If I could have some of these for Twelfth Day feasting—"
"No harm in asking. He ought to like some fresh dunk bread, or your partin-berry preserves, or even a freeze dinner out of the deep store. Canned rations, even if they are from off-world, must get tiresome after a while.
"Now"—I spoke to the rest—"suppose we set this all to rights again."
Camp discipline held, though I knew they were impatient to go exploring. I had noted that the grav door was shut, and for that I was thankful. They would obey rules, I knew—no opening shut doors.
I was deswitching the heating units when something made me count heads and find two missing, Thad and Ifors. I repeated their names. Annet turned to count, but Dinan had an answer for us.
"They went out—after they packed the mess kits, Vere."
The com room? It would be just like Thad to experiment there, though I thought that the activation of the screens would be something even Thad could not do. But I started down the hall in swift strides, aware that Thad was becoming more the rebel—and I did not want the facedown to come between us here and now.
"—Griss Lugard!"
The volume was up, loud enough so that those words bellowed down the hall, echoing a little. I came into the room just as Thad's hand shot out to the button he had pushed a moment earlier. But, though he was apparently exerting pressure on it, the old fittings were now jammed, and the sound continued to roar.
"That is the situation, Gentle Homos." It was Lugard's voice now with a rasping, grating tone increased by the broadcast. "You cannot trust such treaties—"
"Perhaps you cannot, Sector-Captain." That was Scyld Drax. "The military mind is apt to foresee difficulties—"
"The military mind!" Lugard's interruption came clearly. "I thought I made it simple—the situation is as plain as the sun over you, man! You say you want peace, that you think the war is over. Maybe the war is, the kind we have been fighting, but you don't have peace now—you have a vacuum out of which law, and what little protection any world can depend upon, has been drained. And into this is going to spread, just like one of your pet viruses, anarchy. A planet not prepared to defend itself is going to be a target for raiders. There were fleets wrecked out there, worlds destroyed. The survivors of those battles are men who have been living by creating death around them for almost half a generation, planet time. It has become their familiar way of life—kill or be killed, take or perish. They have no home bases to return to; their ships are now their homes. And they no longer have any central controls, no fears of the consequences if they take what they want from the weaker, from those who cannot or will not make the effort to stand them off. You let this ship land—only one ship, you say, poor lost people; give them living room as we have a sparsely settled world—there is one chance in a hundred you read them aright.
"But there are ninety-nine other chances that you have thrown open the door to your own destruction. One ship, two, three—a home port, a safe den from which to go raiding. And I ask you this, Corson, Drax, Ahren, the rest of you. This was a government experimental station. What secrets did you develop here that could be ferreted out, to be used as weapons to arm the unscrupulous?"
There was a moment of silence. He had asked that as a man might deliver a challenge.
Then we heard Corson. "We have nothing that would serve as such—not now. When the authorities forced certain of us to such experimentation, we refused—and when that authority left, we destroyed all that had been done."
"Everything?" Lugard asked. "Your tapes, your supplies, perhaps, but not your memories. And as long as a man's memory remains, there are ways of using it."
There was a sharp sound, as if a palm had been slapped down hard on some surface.
"There is no need to anticipate or suggest such violence, Sector-Captain Lugard. I—we must believe that your recent service has conditioned you to see always some dark design behind each action. There is not one reason to believe that these people are not what they have declared themselves to be, refugees seeking a new life. They have freely offered to let any one of us come aboard while they are still in off-orbit—to inspect their ship and make sure they come in peace. We would not turn a starving man from our doors; we cannot turn away these people and dare still to call ourselves a peaceful-minded community. I suggest we put it to the vote. Nor do I consider that you, Sector-Captain, are so much one of us as to have a vote."
"So be it—" That was Lugard once more, but he sounded very tired. "'And when Yamar lifted up his voice, they did not listen. And when he cried aloud, they put their hands to their ears, laughing. And when he showed them the cloud upon the mountains, they said it was afar and would come not nigh. And when a sword glinted in the hills and he pointed to it, they said it was but the dancing of a brook in the sun.'"
The Cry of Yamar! How long had it been since anyone had quoted that in my hearing? Why should anyone on Beltane? Yamar was a prophet of soldiers; his saga was one learned by recruits to point the difference between civilian and fighting man.
There was another faint sound that might have been boot heels on a floor. Then a murmur and Ahren's voice rising above that.
"Now—if there are no further interruptions, shall we vote?"
As if Thad had at last loosed the button, though he had ceased to struggle with it some time ago, there was silence in the com room. Thad pushed the button again, as determined now to have it open as he had been earlier to close the channel. But there was no response.
"Vere?" Gytha stood a little behind me. "What was Griss Lugard talking about? Why didn't he want the refugees to land?"
"He was—is—afraid that they may want to turn pirate—or to raid here." Without thinking of my listeners, I gave her the truth.
"Which is simply stupid!" Annet said. "But we must not blame the Sector-Captain. He is a soldier, and he does not understand the kind of life we have here. He will learn. Thad, you should not have listened in on the Committee meeting—"
He looked a little guilty. "I didn't mean to—we were trying to see how many of the stations were still open. I hit that button by mistake, and it stuck there. Truly that is what happened."
"Now"—Annet glanced around the room as if she disliked what she saw—"I think we had better go. We had no right to come here—"
"He said we could go in any room where the door was open," Gytha promptly reminded her. "And this one was. Vere"—she spoke to me—"could we go up in the watchtower and look at the lava lands, even if we can't go out there?"
To me that seemed a reasonable request, and when we found that the door to the upper reaches of the Butte was one of the open ones, we went. There was a short climb and for the last part a steep one. Annet chose to remain below with the Norkot twins and Pritha, who disliked heights. We came out on a windswept sentry go. I unslung my distance lenses to turn them north and west.
Here and there were splotches of green vegetation native to Beltane, not the lighter, cultivated mutant off-world growth that lay about the settlements. In some places it formed odd shadows that seemed almost black. But the stretches of bare lava ran and puddled out in vast rough pockets. There were other runnels of the stuff, and I had never seen a land so forbidding and forsaken. Even if it had any life hiding there, a man could search for a year and perhaps never uncover so much as a trail.
"Yah—" Thad focused his own lenses. "Looks as if someone stuck a paddle down in seal-cor and turned it around a couple of times and then just let it cool. Where are the caves?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," I told him. When I visited the Butte in the old days, I had been too young to go exploring. I could not remember having seen this before, though I had probably been brought up to the lookout.
"Vere, how old is it—the lava flows, I mean?" Gytha asked thoughtfully.
"Read your geology tapes, I wouldn't know that either." I unslung my lenses and passed them to Ifors, who would hand them in turn to Sabian and Emrys.
"But old—very old—" she persisted.
"Undoubtedly that."
"Then the lava caves might have been here a long time, too—as long as Forerunner times?"
"Who knows when those were? And there were more than one lot of Forerunners." I was evasive, trying to catch Gytha's eye and warn her against the treasure-hunting story. But she had leaned both elbows on the parapet and was holding Thad's lenses, giving a searching survey to the wild lands.
"Forerunners?" Unfortunately Thad had heard. "Why worry about Forerunners? There weren't any ruins here—"
Before I could stop her, Gytha answered. "That's all you know! Griss Lugard found Forerunner relics back in a lava cave before the war. If you'd read Beltane history tapes, you'd know a lot more, Thad Maky. There were men coming from off-world to explore—then the war broke out and nobody did any more about it."
"Is that so, Vere?" Thad demanded of me. "Forerunners—here! Is that why Griss Lugard really came back? My father said he was getting the Butte ready for a new garrison and the Committee wouldn't let them in. They'd put the repel rays on at the port if they tried it. Lugard landed before they knew it, but they aren't going to let any more of his kind in. But if he came back just on his own after Forerunner treasure—Maybe he'd let us help him—or the Committee could make him—"
"Thad! Gytha read a rumor in an old news tape. That is all there is to it. We are not going to mention this to Griss Lugard or at home—understand? This is a hold—" I appealed to one of their own private rules. "Holds" were just that, information they kept to themselves, some even secret from me. And I had always respected their reticence. But this was important.
Thad looked steadily back, but there were no reservations and no hint of mutiny in his answer. "Agreed." He used their regular formula.
Then I turned to Gytha. "Hold?"
She nodded violently. "Hold!" And the others followed her.
"Vere." Emrys had aimed the lenses east. "There is something coming—a hopper, I think. And it must be on top circle speed—it's really shooting."
I took back the lenses and followed the pointing of his finger. Our hopper—with Lugard. Perhaps it would be better to make ourselves scarce as soon as we could, so I headed my crew down to the lower levels.