The blue sun was touching the dark hills above the old part of the city, and the sky was flooded with a purple dusk when Birrel came home. His house was a fluently curved, white glimmer, behind which the flitter landed him. He went eagerly through the rooms, all cool and bare in the Vegan manner, but there was no one in them.
Lyllin had chosen to wait for him out on the terrace that looked across the soft lights of Vega City. She came toward him. She was all Vegan and looked it, her flesh showed pale as new gold, with the darker masses of her hair picking up the same tint and turning it to copper. She was dressed in the fashion of her own people, in a chiton so mistily transparent that her fine, slender body seemed to be draped in a bit of the deepening twilight itself.
He held her for a time before he told her his news. He was surprised that it did not seem to make her happy.
"To Earth?" she murmured. "Just for the space-flight anniversary? It's so strange—"
"But this time you'll be with me," he said. "Not on the voyage—you'll ride transport, of course—but on Earth, all the time I'm there."
"How long will that be, Jay?"
He did not know, and said so. He felt guilty not to be telling her the whole truth, but he knew Ferdias well enough to know that when he said "anyone" that included everyone.
Lyllin's face had shadowed subtly, but now she smiled brilliantly and said,
"I'll get you a drink."
He sat with her for a while on the terrace, watching the night come on. The lights of the city went far away and, in the distance, the great, black ranges shouldered against the stars. There was a buzz and drone of flitters in the sky. He liked this world, this place, best of all the places where he had based.
After a time he went in and called his Vice-Commander. Brescnik's face looked irritated, in the instrument.
"Yes, I got an order on it a little while ago. We'll have to work damned fast to have transports and all ready by that time. A real bright thing, making all this trouble for a celebration."
"What's the matter with you?" Birrel asked. "Haven't you got any reverence for the anniversary of star-flight?"
Brescnik answered that in some short and pungent monosyllables, and Birrel grinned.
"All right, you've made yourself clear. I didn't dream this thing up. Just make sure to get things started at the base right away. I'll be over tomorrow."
He went back out to the terrace where Lyllin was still sitting looking up at the star-groups. She had been very quiet, but she had a way of silence, and he did not find that strange.
"Brescnik is burning," he told her. "Let him sweat. What's the use of having rank if you can't use it to pass some of the dirty work off onto someone else?"
She looked up at him and said, "I shall hate it at Earth."
Birrel was surprised and shocked. He had been married to her all these three years now and yet he had never got used to the way she would bring unexpected things out of her silence.
"Why in the world—?" he started to say. Then he said impatiently, "Lyllin, that's ridiculous! You've never seen the place, you hardly know anything about it. You may like it."
She said, looking away across the lights, "No."
"But why not?"
For a moment she did not answer. Then she turned and looked directly at him, her face a pale blur in the purple night.
"It's your place, your people, not mine. You'll be all right there, but what will they think of me?" She looked away from him again and said in a low voice, "What will you think of me, there among your own people?"
Birrel was so angry that he would not speak for a moment. Then he took hold of her with rough hands and turned her around. He said,
"I'm ashamed of you. If you could even think a thing like that—" He resisted a temptation to shake her. He had learned very early in their married life that there was a tone you could not take with Lyllin, and so he made himself speak patiently. "Listen to me! Earth is no more to me than it is to you. It's a name, a place where my grandfather happened to be born. That's all it is. Nearly everybody in space has Earth blood in them, you know that."
"You have more of it than anything else," she said.
"Sure," he said. "My father came from Sirius to take service with Lyra, and my mother's father happened to be an Earthman too. Does all that make me belong to a place I've never seen?"
She looked up at him and he could not clearly see her shadowed face, but he thought that she wanted to be convinced. He was not good with words and the only way he could think of convincing her was to put his arms around her.
She kissed him with a sudden, passionate possessiveness. But he did not think she was yet convinced. It suddenly occurred to him that he did not know much about Earth and could not really be sure how they would regard his Vegan wife there. She had her people's pride, and if they treated her at Earth like an alien, a freak—
Birrel was still worrying about that when he went next day to the base. But there, when he went over preliminary flight-plans with Staff, he received fresh cause for anxiety.
Ewer, the plump and usually cheerful Third of Staff, gave him disquieting news on their way to the chartroom.
"Orion's First and Third squadrons have been on the move. And we've lost them."
"What do you mean, lost them?" said Birrel.
"Just what I say. Here, I'll show you."
They had entered the vast, darkened room that contained a glittering representation of a part of the galaxy. It was only that comparatively small part which human civilization had yet reached, beyond it lay the unpictured, unexplored reaches of stars which no one had yet visited. But even this small section contained thousands of stars and worlds and nebulae all reproduced accurately by projected images of light. They looked like stars caught in spider-webs because of the reference-grid of pale lines that ran through them. Each world had a glowing symbol beside it—a symbol that said it was an E-type human-peopled world, or an E-type with alien life and so not to be bothered, or a non-E-type, or a non-habitable planet, or something else.
Ewer, using a beam-pointer, indicated a region in the extreme east of Orion Sector, nearer to distant Sol than Vega was and not far from the blue line that delimited Lyra space. His beam flicked along a broad, ragged region of dimness, all along the side of which a familiar symbol was repeated.
"A very big radio-emission area across here," he said.
Birrel nodded understandingly. The symbol was the one for so-called "hot hydrogen" clouds, attenuated atom-scatterings that emitted all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, fouling up all communications.
"Orion's First and Third went across here—" Ewer's gleaming wand traced a course southeastward, a path that went beyond the symbol-marked dimness. "Our long-range radar watch-stations here and here and here—" The wand touched a dead star, and then the planet of a small sun with the symbol for "no oxygen, no life," and then another dead star, and Birrel thought of the lonely nature of those watchers' duty, "—tracked them that far," Ewer was saying. "But when they got behind that big area of radio-emission, we lost them. Of course they went there deliberately, to evade our watch."
"Where would you estimate they are now?" Birrel asked.
Ewer shook his head. "I can't hazard a guess on a thing like that. Somewhere in this region."
The beam he swung cut an area between Vega and distant Sol, that, in this compressed microcosm, seemed choked with stars and stellar debris. A real mess, thought Birrel, and the Fifth would have to go through it. Along one side stretched a perfect cemetery of cosmic cinders, dead suns and drift. Along the other was a parsec-long sprawl of "cool hydrogen" which normally only emitted on the 21 centimeter band. But it was riddled by vast filaments of gaseous matter, the debris of a super-nova of long ago that was moving through it, and, by collision with the atoms of cool hydrogen, would cause terrific radio-emissions.
"They could be anywhere in there, but it would take powerful short-range radar to find them," said Ewer. And he added, "If they're hiding in there, it's somewhere not too far from your flight-line to Sol."
"That," said Birrel irritably, "I'd already figured out."
"Sorry," said Ewer.
The First and Third Orion were Solleremos' crack squadrons. You did not move such forces around idly. Birrel did not like the look of it. When he thought of the transports that would be with the Fifth, and of Lyllin in one of them, he liked it even less.
"Will you have alternative flight-lines set up, and we'll go over them tomorrow?" he asked Ewer.
He went out and told his flitter-pilot to take him to Government House. But he had to wait there for more than an hour before he got to see Ferdias.
Ferdias said promptly, "I know about the First and Third Orion. And I'm sure it's a feint by Solleremos, a threat to keep the Fifth from going to Earth."
"Suppose it's not a feint," Birrel said. "They could be waiting to hit the Fifth, and no bluff about it."
Ferdias nodded. "They could be, but I don't think so."
"With transports to protect, we'd be in a bad situation if it came to fighting," said Birrel.
"I realize it, but we have to take a calculated risk." Ferdias looked impatient. "Do we have to go over this again? I tell you, the UW won't let the Fifth come to Earth at all if it comes stripped down to battle-strength. They weren't too eager there about a whole squadron coming, and this is the only way I could get them to welcome you. Suspicious as they are, still they don't figure you'd bring your wives and children along if you meant trouble."
This was a new thought to Birrel. "Then they're suspicious of us, at Earth?"
"Of course they are. Karsh reports that Orion's agents have been busy whispering to the UW officials there. They're trying to put it across that I am out to grab Earth. Then Solleremos would have an excuse to step in, to prevent my wicked intentions."
Birrel liked the sound of it less and less, but there was a point beyond which you did not argue with Ferdias. He got up and looked across the desk at Ferdias and said,
"I'll do the best I can for you, on this."
"I know that, Jay."
"But I just want to say, you're sending the wrong man to handle a diplomatic tangle."
Ferdias smiled. "I know men, and I don't think so. Anyway, you'll have Karsh there to steer you."
And that, Birrel thought dourly as he walked out of the room, was a fine, comforting directive for a man going into a thing like this. The more he heard about this job, the more dubious it seemed. And he was still worried by the way Lyllin felt about it.
To his surprise and relief, when he got home that night he found Lyllin bright and gay and dressed in her finest.
She laughed at his stare. "Some of my people wanted to give us a going-away party—you don't mind?"
Birrel had counted on staying home this night, but he was too relieved by her bright spirits to object. A flitter took them down to Old Town and they walked through the rambling streets and graceful, white walls and arcades and the scattered, drowsy light of the older city. Enormous, white flowers grew between the stones, drenching the night with a sweet fragrance, and the soft, slurred Vegan speech was all around them, with hardly a word of Basic.
They were almost all purebred Vegans in the ancient courtyard-garden where they ate spicy food and drank the sweet, fruit wines. They were a volatile folk, and their talk and laughter echoed off the walls like the chatter of birds. Birrel, watching Lyllin sparkle, almost forgot his worries about the mission. He liked Lyllin's people, they had completely accepted him. After a lifetime spent, first as a child playing around family barracks, as a youngster in space academy and then in endless starships with brief worldfalls, he felt as though he had found friends and a home when he found Lyllin.
He was surprised when a laughing girl told him, "We're all going up to a Varn festival—they're being held up in the western pass villages tonight. Don't you love them?"
"I've heard of them, but I've never seen one," Birrel said.
"They're very old, and a bit foolish, but they're fun," she promised.
He had indeed heard of the Varn festivals that the Vegan folk of the high mountain villages held and had held for centuries, but somehow Lyllin had never wanted to go to them. He had had the feeling that because these folk-festivals were vestigial survivals from the old, wild past of her people, she did not want him to see them. He looked now for her to excuse them from going, but instead Lyllin smilingly took his hand and went along with the others to the flitters.
The flitters took them up into the bright starlight and away from Old Town toward the northern mountains. They landed in a chill, misty high pass, where one of the old stone villages showed in the starlight, vague against the swirling fog of the great, deep valley beyond. There were many other flitters here, and the party Birrel was with walked along the gritty, stone road to a point where the village street began and where quite a number of Vegan folk were standing, laughing and chattering and looking expectantly toward the village.
The village lay dark and silent beneath the stars. It was as though every soul in it was asleep, but Birrel knew this could not be so on the night of the ancient festival. He knew that the people in these lofty, isolated little communities had not taken so completely to the new civilization the starships had brought as those in the lowlands. These were small landholders, miners, metal-workers, who held faster to old Vegan ways. He supposed they were all inside their houses, and he wondered what kind of a festival this was.
The chattering folk around him quieted, an expectant hush came over them. They stood in the cold mist, looking down the silent street to where it dipped out of sight into the vast valley beyond the pass. They, and the silent dark houses, all seemed waiting for something. Then a whisper of excitement, and a nervous titter, passed through them as something appeared at the far end of the street.
A figure had come up out of the valley and stood, vague in the curling mists. Blurred as it was by fog and distance, it was a figure of nightmare—a man-high, erect shape that was like a hideous travesty of humanity, a lizard-thing walking upright on bowed, powerful legs, the scaly hide glittering in the starlight, the flat head turning this way and that, the filmy eyes staring.
"Varn," said the whisper among the people around Birrel, and some of them laughed again, but the laughter was nervous.
Birrel knew that the thing was, of course, one of the villagers here masked and suited in a clever costume. But the costume was so cunningly perfect that the illusion was horrifyingly real.
There had been no Varn living on this world for hundreds of years. Long before the starships came the Vegans had fought to its end their age-long struggle against the brainless, ferocious lizard-folk who lived in the deep mists of the vaster chasms and came over the ranges to raid and rob and slay. But the memory of that terrible struggle was still strong and he could understand why a silence and a shiver ran through his companions when a second hideous figure appeared in the mist, and then a third and fourth.
Eight of the pseudo-Varn in all came into the street, ran from locked door to locked door, scrabbling and mewing. There was a hideous realism about their capering, and Birrel felt Lyllin's small hand tighten on his fingers. Then, suddenly, the doors of houses opened.
Men emerged, dressed in the ancient Vegan style and carrying long whips. They rushed upon the pseudo-Varn. They swung the whips and the long lashes whistled and cracked, and the pseudo-monsters screeched and made mock charges and recoiled again from the whips. From inside the houses came now the fierce and rhythmic sound of an old battle-song.
Birrel felt the reaction of the people around him. There was no amused chattering, no tittering now. They leaned forward, eyes glittering, as the whips rose and fell, as the men beat back the charges of the mewing not-men. They began to shout themselves, fragmentary, half-forgotten phrases of the fierce, old anthem. They were shaking, quivering, sweating with fierce excitement, no longer at all the pleasant, gay companions of an hour before. Lyllin was shivering and her eyes were bright as she too watched, her lips moving.
Birrel thought he understood now. He did not know people the way Ferdias knew them. He knew men of his own sort pretty well, but women not at all. However, you could not live with a wife without at least partly understanding one woman.
He bent to Lyllin and said quietly in her ear, "That's enough for now. It's late."
She made no objection as they went back to the flitter. But all the way back home she said nothing, but hummed the fierce old rhythm under her breath.
In their house, she turned and smiled brightly and spoke rapidly. "Did you enjoy it? It's a little uncivilized, I know, but then we're not a very civilized people, really."
Birrel knew then he had been right. He said nothing, but stood looking at her, and in the face of his silence she rushed on, with an edge of desperation in her brittleness.
"In fact, I'm such an incurable savage underneath that I'd better stay home and wait for you. I wouldn't fit in on Earth. I'd be—"
He stepped forward and took hold of her. "No matter where we go, you'll be Lyllin. And I'll love you."
Her mouth became soft and uncertain, like a child's, and her eyes had tears in the corners of them now. And when he kissed her, her lips were bitter with those sudden tears. She said nothing more but he knew that she was still afraid, afraid of what Earth might do to them. In the depths of his soul, Birrel cursed Solleremos and his ambitious schemes.