Poul Anderson - We Have Fed Our Sea

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We Have Fed Our Sea
Poul Anderson
[19 aug 2001 - proofread and re-released for #bookz - v1]
Perhaps the deadest of all things possible in this Universe is the dead cold core of a
burned-out supernova. But Death is, of course, the ulti-mate trap of all living things!
THEY named her Southern Cross and launched her on the road whose end they would never see.
Months afterward she was moving at half the speed of light; if there was to be enough reaction mass for
deceleration and maneuver, the blast must be terminated. And so the long silence came. For four and a
half centuries, the ship would fall.
They manned her by turns, and dreamed other ships, and launched them, and saw how a few of the
shortest journeys ended. Then they died.
And other men came after them. Wars flamed up and burned out, the howling peoples dwelt in
smashed cities and kindled their fires with books. Conquerors followed, and conquerors of those, an
empire killed its mother aborning, a religion called men to strange hilltops, a new race and a new state
bestrode the Earth. But still the ships fell upward through night, and always there were men to stand
watch upon them. Sometimes the men wore peaked caps and comets, sometimes steel hel-mets,
sometimes decorous gray cowls, eventually blue berets with a winged star; but always they watched the
ships, and more and more often as the decades passed they brought their craft to new harbors.
After ten generations, the Southern Cross was not quite halfway to her own goal, though she was
the farthest from Earth of any human work. She was showing a little wear, here a scratch, there a patch,
and not all the graffiti of bored and lonely men rubbed out by their successors. But those fields and
particles which served her for eye, brain, nerve still swept heaven; each man at the end of his watch took
a box of microplates with him as he made the hundred light-year stride to Earth's Moon. Much of this
was lost, or gathered dust, in the century when Earthmen were busy surviving. But there came a time
when a patient electrically seeing machine ran through many such plates from many ships. And so it
con-demned certain people to death.
SUNDOWN burned across great waters. Far to the west, the clouds banked tall above New
Zealand threw hot gold into the sky. In that direction, the sea was too bright to look upon. Eastward it
faded through green and royal blue to night, where the first stars trod forth and trembled. There was just
enough wind to ruffle the surface, send wavelets lapping against the hull of the ketch, flow down the idle
mainsail and stir the girl's loosened pale hair.
Terangi Maclaren pointed north. "The kelp beds are that way," he drawled. "Main source of the
family income, y' know. They mutate, crossbreed, and get seaweed which furnishes all kind of useful
products. It's beyond me, thank the honorable ancestors. Biochemistry is an organized mess. I'll stick to
something simple, like the degenerate nucleus."
The girl giggled. "And if it isn't degenerate, will you make it so?" she asked.
She was a technic like himself, of course: he would never have let a common on his boat, since a
few machines were, in effect, a sizable crew. Her rank was higher than his, so high that no one in her
family worked productively—whereas Mac-laren was one of the few in his who did not. She was of
care-fully selected mutant Burmese strain, with amber skin, exqui-site small features, and greenish-blond
hair. Maclaren had been angling for weeks to get her alone like this. Not that General Feng, her
drug-torpid null of a guardian, cared how much scandal she made, flying about the planet without so
much as an amazon for chaperone. But she was more a crea-ture of the Citadel and its hectic lights than
of the sunset ocean.
Maclaren chuckled. "I wasn't swearing at the nucleus," he said. "Degeneracy is a state of matter
under certain extreme conditions. Not too well understood, even after three hundred years of quantum
theory. But I wander, and I would rather wonder. At you, naturally."
He padded barefoot across the deck and sat down by her. He was a tall man in his early thirties,
slender, with wide shoul-ders and big hands, dark-haired and brown-skinned like all Oceanians; but
there was an aquiline beak on the broad high-cheeked face, and some forgotten English ancestor looked
out of hazel eyes. Like her, he wore merely an informal sarong and a few jewels.
"You're talking like a scholar, Terangi," she said. It was not a compliment. There was a growing
element in the richest fami-lies who found Confucius, Plato, Einstein, and the other clas-sics a thundering
bore.
"Oh, but I am one," said Maclaren. "You'd be amazed how parched and stuffy I can get. Why, as a
student—"
"But you were the amateur swim-wrestling champion!" she protested.
"True. I could also drink any two men under the table and knew every dive on Earth and the Moon.
However, d' you imagine my father, bless his dreary collection of old-fashioned virtues, would have
subsidized me all these years if I didn't bring some credit to the family? It's kudos, having an
astro-physicist for a son. Even if I am a rather expensive astrophysi-cist." He grinned through the
gathering dusk. "Every so often, when I'd been on a particularly outrageous binge, he would threaten to
cut my allowance off. Then I'd have no choice but to come up with a new observation or a brilliant new
theory, or at least a book."
She snuggled a little closer. "Is that why you are going out to space now?" she asked.
"Well, no," said Maclaren. "That's purely my own idea. My notion of fun. I told you I was getting
stuffy in my dotage."
"I haven't seen you very often in the Citadel, the last few years," she agreed. "And you were so busy
when you did show."
"Politics, of a sort. The ship's course couldn't be changed without an order from a reluctant
Exploration Authority, which meant bribing the right people, heading off the opposi-tion, wheedling the
Protector himself . . . d' you know, I dis-covered it was fun. I might even take up politics as a hobby,
when I get back."
"How long will you be gone?" she asked.
"Can't say for certain, but probably just a month. That ought to furnish me with enough material for
several years of study. Might dash back to the ship at odd moments for the rest of my life, of course. It'll
take up permanent residence around that star."
"Couldn't you come home . . . every night?" she mur-mured.
"Don't tempt me," he groaned. "I can't. One month is the standard minimum watch on an interstellar
vessel, barring emergencies. You see, every transmission uses up a Frank tube, which costs money."
"Well," she pouted, "if you think so much of an old dead star—"
"You don't understand, your gorgeousness. This is the first chance anyone has ever had, in more
than two centuries of space travel, to get a close look at a truly burned-out star. There was even some
argument whether the class existed. Is the universe old enough for any sun to have used up its nu-clear
and gravitational energy? By the ancestors, it's conceiv-able this one is left over from some previous
cycle of creation!"
He felt a stiffening in her body, as if she resented his talk of what she neither understood nor cared
about. And for a mo-ment he resented her. She didn't really care about this boat either, or him, or
anything except her own lovely shell. Why was he wasting time in the old worn routines, when he should
be studying and preparing? He knew precisely why.
And then her rigidity melted in a little shudder. He glanced at her, she was a shadow with a palely
glowing mane, in the deep blue twilight. The last embers of sun were almost gone, and one star after
another woke overhead, soon the sky would be crowded with their keenness.
Almost, she whispered: "Where is this spaceship, now?"
A bit startled, he pointed at the first tracing of the Southern Cross. "That way," he said. "She was
originally bound for Al-pha Crucis, and hasn't been diverted very far off that course. Since she's a good
thirty parsecs out, we wouldn't notice the difference if we could see that far."
"But we can't. Not ever. The light would take a hundred years, and I . . . we would all be
dead—No!"
He soothed her, a most pleasant proceeding which became still more pleasant as the night went on.
And they were on his yacht, which had borne his love from the first day he took the tiller, in a calm sea,
with wine and small sandwiches, and she even asked him to play his guitar and sing. But somehow it was
not the episode he had awaited. He kept thinking of this or that preparation, what had he overlooked,
what could he expect to find at the black sun; perhaps he was indeed under the subtle tooth of age, or of
maturity if you wanted a euphe-mism, or perhaps the Southern Cross burned disturbingly bright
overhead.
WINTER lay among the Outer Hebrides. Day was a sullen glimmer between two darknesses, often
smothered in snow. When it did not fling itself upon the rocks and burst in freezing spume, the North
Atlantic rolled in heavy and gnaw-ing. There was no real horizon, leaden waves met leaden sky and misty
leaden light hid the seam. "Here there is neither land nor water nor air, but a kind of mixture of them,"
wrote Pytheas.
The island was small. Once it had held a few fishermen, whose wives kept a sheep or two, but that
was long ago. Now only one house remained, a stone cottage built centuries back and little changed.
Down at the landing was a modern shelter for a sailboat, a family submarine, and a battered aircar; but it
was of gray plastic and fitted into the landscape like another boulder.
David Ryerson put down his own hired vehicle there, sig-naled the door to open, and rolled through.
He had not been on Skula for half a decade: it touched him, in a way, how his hands remembered all the
motions of steering into this place and how the dank interior was unaltered. As for his father—He bit
back an inward fluttering, helped his bride from the car, and spread his cloak around them both as they
stepped into the wind.
It howled in from the Pole, striking them so they reeled and Tamara's black locks broke free like
torn banners. Ryerson thought he could almost hear the wind toning in the rock underfoot. Surely the
blows of the sea did, crash after crash through a bitter drift of flung scud. For a moment's primitive terror,
he thought he heard his father's God, whom he had denied, roar in the deep. He fought his way to the
cottage and laid numbed fingers on the anachronism of a corroded bronze knocker.
Magnus Ryerson opened the door and waved them in. "I'd not expected you yet," he said, which
was as close as he would ever come to an apology. When he shut out the wind, there was a quietness
which gaped.
This main room, brick-floored, whitewashed, irregular and solid, centered about a fireplace where
peat burned low and blue. The chief concessions to the century were a radi-globe and a stunning
close-up photograph of the Sirian binary. One did not count the pilot's manuals or the stones and skins
and gods brought from beyond the sky; after all, any old sea cap-tain would have kept his Bowditch and
his souvenirs. The walls were lined with books as well as microspools. Most of the full-size volumes were
antique, for little was printed in En-glish these days.
Magnus Ryerson stood leaning on a cane of no Terrestrial wood. He was a huge man, two meters
tall in his youth and not greatly stooped now, with breadth and thickness to match. His nose jutted
craggily from a leather skin, shoulder-length white hair, breast-length white beard. Under tangled brows,
the eyes were small and frost-blue. He wore the archaic local dress, a knitted sweater and canvas
trousers. It came as a shock to realize after several minutes that his right hand was artificial.
"Well," he rumbled at last, in fluent Interhuman, "so this is the bride. Tamara Sumito Ryerson, eh?
Welcome, girl." There was no great warmth in his tone.
She bent her face to folded hands. "I greet you most humbly, honorable father." She was Australian,
a typical high-class common of that province, fine-boned, bronze-hued, with blue-black hair and oblique
brown eyes; but her beauty was typical nowhere. She had dressed with becoming modesty in a long
white gown and a hooded cloak, no ornaments save a wedding band with the Ryerson monogram on it.
Magnus looked away from her, to his son. "Professor's daughter, did you say?" he murmured in
English.
"Professor of symbolics," said David. He made his answer a defiance by casting it in the Interhuman
which his wife under-stood. "We . . . Tamara and I . . . met at his home. I needed a background in
symbolics to understand my own specialty and—"
"You explain too much," said Magnus dryly. "Sit."
He lowered himself into a chair. After a moment, David followed. The son was just turned twenty
years old, a slender boy of average height with light complexion, thin sharp fea-tures, yellow hair, and his
father's blue eyes. He wore the tunic of a science graduate, with insignia of gravitics, self-consciously, but
not so used to it that he would change for an ordinary civilian blouse.
TAMARA made her way into the kitchen and began pre-paring tea. Magnus looked after her.
"Well-trained, any-how," he grunted in English. "So I suppose her family is at
least heathen, and not any of these latter-day atheists. That's somewhat."
David felt the island years, alone with his widower father, return to roost heavy upon him. He stifled
an anger and said, also in English: "I couldn't have made any better match. Even from some swinish
practical standpoint. Not without mar-rying into a technic family, and—Would you want me to do that?
I'll gain technic rank on my own merits!"
"If you stay on Earth," said Magnus. "Who notices a colo-nial?"
"Who notices an Earthling, among ten billion others?" snapped David. "On a new planet . . . on
Rama . . . a man can be himself. These stupid hereditary distinctions won't even matter."
"There is room enough right here," said Magnus. "As a boy you never used to complain Skula was
crowded. On the con-trary!"
"And I would settle down with some illiterate beefy-faced good Christian fishwife you picked for me
and breed more servants for the Protectorate, all my life!"
The words had come out before David thought. Now, in a kind of dismay, he waited for his father's
reaction. This man had ordered him out into a winter gale, or supperless to bed, for fifteen years out of
twenty. In theory the grown son was free of him, free of everyone save contractual overlords and
whatever general had most recently seized the title of Protec-tor. In practice it was not so easy. David
knew with a chill that he would never have decided to emigrate without Tamara's unarrogant and
unbendable will to stiffen his. He would prob-ably never even have married her, without more than her
father's consent, against the wish of his own—David gripped the worn arms of his chair.
Magnus sighed. He felt about after a pipe and tobacco pouch. "I would have preferred you to
maintain residence on Earth," he said with a somehow shocking gentleness. "By the time the quarantine
on Washington 5584 has been lifted, I'll be dead."
David locked his mouth. You hoary old fraud, he thought, if you expect to hook me that way—
"It's not as if you would be penned on one island all your days," said Magnus. "Why did I spend all I had
saved, to put my sons through the Academy? So they could be spacemen, as I was and my father and
grandfather before me. Earth isn't a prison. The Earthman can go as far as the farthest ships have
reached. It's the colonies are the hole. Once you go there to live, you never come back here."
"Is there so much to come back to?" said David. Then, after a minute, trying clumsily for
reconciliation: "And father, I'm the last. Space ate them all. Radiation killed Tom, a meteor got Ned, Eric
made a falling star all by himself, Ian just never returned from wherever it was. Don't you want to
preserve our blood in me, at least?"
"So you mean to save your own life?"
"Now, wait! You know how dangerous a new planet can be. That's the reason for putting the initial
settlers under thirty years of absolute quarantine. If you think I—"
"No," said Magnus. "No, you're no coward, Davy, where it comes to physical things. When you
deal with people, though, I don't know what you're like. You don't yourself. Are you running away from
man, as you've been trying to run from the Lord God Jehovah? Not so many folk on Rama as on Earth,
no need to work both with and against them, as on a ship—Well." He leaned forward, the pipe
smoldering in his plastic hand. "I want you to be a spaceman, aye, of course. I cannot dictate your
choice. But if you would at least try it, once only, so you could honestly come back and tell me you're not
born for stars and openness and a sky all around you—Do you understand? I could let you go to your
planet then. Not before. I would never know, otherwise, how much I had let you cheat yourself."
Silence fell between them. They heard the wind as it mourned under their eaves, and the remote
snarling of the sea.
David said at last, slowly: "So that's why you . . . yes. Did you give my name to Technic Maclaren
for that dark star expedition?"
Magnus nodded. "I heard from my friends in the Authority that Maclaren had gotten the Cross
diverted from orbit. Some of them were mickle put out about it, too. After all, she was the first one sent
directly toward a really remote goal, she is far-ther from Earth than any other ship has yet gotten, it was
like breaking a tradition." He shrugged. "God knows when anyone will reach Alpha Crucis now. But I
say Maclaren is right. Alpha may be an interesting triple star, but a truly cold sun means a deal more to
science. At any rate, I did pull a few wires. Maclaren needs a gravitics man to help him take his data. The
post is yours if you wish it."
"I don't," said David. "How long would we be gone, a month, two months? A month from now I
planned to be selecting my own estate on Rama."
"Also, you've only been wed a few weeks. Oh, yes. I under-stand. But you can be sent to Rama as
soon as you get back; there'll be several waves of migration. You will have space pay plus exploratory
bonus, some valuable experience, and," fin-ished Magnus sardonically, "my blessing. Otherwise you can
get out of my house this minute."
David hunched into his chair, as if facing an enemy.
He heard Tamara move about, slow in the unfamiliar kitchen, surely more than a little frightened of
this old barbar-ian. If he went to space, she would have to stay here, bound by a propriety which was
one of the chains they had hoped to shed on Rama. It was a cheerless prospect for her, too.
And yet, thought David, the grim face before him had once turned skyward, on a spring night, telling
him the names of the stars.
THE other man, Ohara, was good, third-degree black. But finally his alertness wavered. He moved
in unwarily, and Seiichi Nakamura threw him with a foot sweep that drew approving hisses from the
audience. Seeing his chance, Nakamura pounced, got control of Ohara from the waist down by sitting on
him, and applied a strangle. Ohara tried to break it, but starving lungs betrayed him. He slapped the mat
when he was just short of unconsciousness. Nakamura released him and squatted, waiting. Presently
Ohara rose. So did the win-ner. They retied their belts and bowed to each other. The abbot, who was
refereeing, murmured a few words which ended the match. The contestants sat down, closed their eyes,
and for a while the room held nothing but meditation.
Nakamura had progressed beyond enjoying victory for its own sake. He could still exult in the
aesthetics of a perfect maneuver; what a delightful toy the human body is, when you know how to throw
eighty struggling kilos artistically through the air! But even that, he knew, was a spiritual weakness. Judo
is more than a sport, it should be a means to an end: ideally, a physical form of meditation upon the
principles of Zen.
He wondered if he would ever attain that height. Rebel-liously, he wondered if anyone ever had, in
actual practice, for more than a few moments anyhow . . . It was an unworthy thought. A wearer of the
black belt in the fifth degree should at least have ceased inwardly barking at his betters. And now enough
of all the personal. It was only his mind reflecting the tension of the contest, and tension was always the
enemy. His mathematical training led him to visualize fields of force, and the human soul as a differential
quantity dX—where X was a function of no one knew how many variables—which applied just enough,
vanishingly small increments of action so that the great fields slid over each other and—Was this a
desirable analogue? He must discuss it with the abbot sometime; it seemed too precise to reflect reality.
For now he had better meditate upon one of the traditional paradoxes: consider the noise made by two
hands clapping, and then the noise made by one hand clapping.
The abbot spoke another word. The several contestants on the mat bowed to him, rose, and went
to the showers. The audience, yellow-robed monks and a motley group of towns-people, left their
cushions and mingled cheerfully.
When Nakamura came out, his gi rolled under one arm, his short thick-set body clad in plain gray
coveralls, he saw the abbot talking to Diomed Umfando, chief of the local Protector-ate garrison. He
waited until they noticed him. Then he bowed and sucked in his breath respectfully.
"Ah," said the abbot. "A most admirable performance to-night."
"It was nothing, honorable sir," said Nakamura.
"What did you . . . yes. Indeed. You are leaving tomorrow, are you not?"
"Yes, master. On the Southern Cross, the expedition to the dark star. It is uncertain how long I
shall be away." He laughed self-deprecatingly, as politeness required. "It is al-ways possible that one
does not return. May I humbly ask the honorable abbot that—"
"Of course," said the old man. "Your wife and children shall always be under our protection, and
your sons will be educated here if no better place can be found for them." He smiled. "But who can
doubt that the best pilot on Sarai will return as a conqueror?"
They exchanged ritual compliments. Nakamura went about saying good-by to various other friends.
As he came to the door, he saw the tall blue-clad form of Captain Umfando. He bowed.
"I am walking back into town now," said the officer, almost apologetically: "May I request the
pleasure of your company?"
"If this unworthy person can offer even a moment's distrac-tion to the noble captain?"
THEY left together. The dojo was part of the Buddhist monastery, which stood two or three
kilometers out of the town called Susa. A road went through grainfields, an empty road now, for the
spectators were still drinking tea under the abbot's red roof. Nakamura and Umfando walked in silence
for a while; the captain's bodyguard shouldered their rifles and followed unobtrusively.
Capella had long ago set. Its sixth planet, I1-Khan the giant, was near full phase, a vast golden
shield blazoned with a hundred hues. Two other satellites, not much smaller than this Earth-sized Sarai on
which humans dwelt, were visible. Only a few stars could shine through all that light, low in the purple
sky; the fields lay drowned in amber radiance, Susa's lanterns looked feeble in the distance. Meteor trails
criss-crossed heaven, as if someone wrote swift ideographs up there. On the left horizon, a sudden
mountain range climbed until its peaks burned with snow. A moonbird was trilling, the fiddler insects
answered, a small wind rustled in the grain. Otherwise only the scrunch of feet on gravel had voice.
"This is a lovely world," murmured Nakamura.
Captain Umfando shrugged. Wryness touched his ebony fea-tures. "I could wish it were more
sociable."
"Believe me, sir, despite political differences, there is no ill will toward you or your men
personally—"
"Oh, come now," said the officer. "I am not that naive. Sarai may begin by disliking us purely as
soldiers and tax collectors for an Earth which will not let the ordinary colonist even visit it. But such
feelings soon envelop the soldier himself. I've been jeered at, and mudballed by children, even out of
uniform."
"It is most deplorable," said Nakamura in distress. "May I offer my apologies on behalf of my
town?"
Umfando shrugged. "I'm not certain that an apology is in order. I didn't have to make a career of the
Protector's army. And Earth does exploit the colonies. There are euphemisms and excuses, but
exploitation is what it amounts to."
He thought for a moment, and asked with a near despair: "But what else can Earth do?"
Nakamura said nothing. They walked on in silence for a while.
Umfando said at last, "I wish to put a rude question." When the flat face beside him showed no
reluctance, he plowed ahead. "Let us not waste time on modesty. You know you're one of the finest
pilots in the Guild. Any Capellan System pilot is—he has to be!—but you are the one they ask for when
things get difficult. You've been on a dozen exploratory missions in new systems. It's not made you rich,
but it has made you one of the most influential men on Sarai.
"Why do you treat me like a human being?"
Nakamura considered it gravely. "Well," he decided, "I can-not consider politics important enough
to quarrel about."
"I see." A little embarrassed, Umfando changed the subject:
"I can get you on a military transport to Batu tomorrow, if you wish. Drop you off at the ‘caster
station."
"Thank you, but I have already engaged passage on the regular interstellar ferry."
"Uh . . . did you ask for the Cross berth?"
"No. I had served a few watches on her, of course, like every-one else. A good ship. A little
outmoded now, perhaps, but well and honestly made. The Guild offered me the position, and since I had
no other commitments, I accepted."
Guild offers were actually assignments for the lower ranks of spacemen, Umfando knew. A man of
Nakamura's standing could have refused. But maybe the way you attained such prestige was by never
refusing.
"Do you expect any trouble?" he asked.
"One is never certain. The great human mistake is to antici-pate. The totally relaxed and unexpectant
man is the one pre-pared for whatever may happen: he does not have to get out of an inappropriate
posture before he can react."
"Ha! Maybe judo ought to be required for all pilots."
"No. I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art."
Nakamura saw his house ahead. It stood on the edge of town, half screened by Terrestrial Bamboo.
He had spent much time on the garden which surrounded it; many visitors were kind enough to call his
garden beautiful. He sighed. A gracious house, a good and faithful wife, four promising chil-dren, health
and achievement, what more could a man reason-ably ask? He told himself that his remembrances of
Kyoto were hazed, he had left Earth as a very young boy. Surely this serene and uncrowded Sarai
offered more than poor tortured antheap Earth gave even to her overlords. And yet some morn-ings he
woke up with the temple bells of Kyoto still chiming in his ears.
He stopped at the gate. "Will you honor my home for a cup of tea?" he asked.
"No, thanks," said Umfando, almost roughly. "You've a fam-ily to . . . to say good-by to. I will see
you when—"
Fire streaked across the sky. For an instant Il-Khan himself was lost in blue flame. The bolide struck
somewhere among the mountains. A sheet of pure outraged energy flared above ragged peaks. Then
smoke and dust swirled up like a devil, and moments afterward thunder came banging down through the
valley.
Umfando whistled. "That was a monster!"
"A . . . yes . . . most unusual . . . yes, yes." Nakamura stammered something, somehow he bowed
good night and somehow he kept from running along the path to his roof. But as he walked, he began to
shake.
It was only a meteorite, he told himself frantically. Only a meteorite. The space around a giant star
like Capella, and especially around its biggest planet, was certain to be full of cosmic junk. Billions of
meteors hit Sarai every day. Hundreds of them got through to the surface. But Sarai was as big as Earth,
he told himself. Sarai had oceans, deserts, uninhabited plains and forests . . . why, even on Sarai you
were more likely to be killed by lightning than by a meteorite and—and—Oh, the jewel in the lotus! he
cried out. I am afraid. I am afraid of the black sun.
IT was raining again, but no one on Krasna pays attention to that. They wear a few light
non-absorbent garments and welcome the rain on their bodies, a moment's relief from saturated hot air.
The clouds thin overhead, so that the land glimmers with watery brightness, sometimes even the
upper-most clouds break apart and Tau Ceti spears a blinding red-dish shaft through smoke-blue masses
and silvery rain.
Chang Sverdlov rode into Dynamogorsk with a hornbeast lashed behind his saddle. It had been a
dangerous chase, through the tidal marshes and up over the bleak heights of Czar Nicholas IV Range,
but he needed evidence to back his story, that he had only been going out to hunt. Mukerji, the chief
intelligence officer of the Protectorate garrison, was get-ting suspicious, God rot his brain.
Two soldiers came along the elevated sidewalk. Rain drummed on their helmets and sluiced off the
slung rifles. Earth soldiers went in armed pairs on a street like Trumpet Road: for a Krasnan
swamprancher, fisher, miner, logger, trapper, brawling away his accumulated loneliness, with a skinful of
vodka or rice wine, a fluff-headed fille-de-joie to impress, and a sullen suspicion that the dice had been
loaded, was apt to unlimber his weapons when he saw a blueback.
Sverdlov contented himself with spitting at their boots, which were about level with his head. It went
unnoticed in the downpour. And in the noise, and crowding, and blinking lights, with thunder above the
city's gables. He clucked to his saurian and guided her toward the middle of the slough called Trumpet
Road. Its excitement lifted his anger a bit. I'll report in, he told himself, and go wheedle an advance
from the Guild bank, and then make up six weeks of bushranging in a way the joyhouses will
remember!
He turned off on the Avenue of Tigers and stopped before a certain inn. Tethering his lizard and
throwing the guard a coin, he entered the taproom. It was as full of men and racket as usual. He
shouldered up to the bar. The landlord recognized him; Sverdlov was a very big and solid young man,
bullet-headed, crop-haired, with a thick nose and small brown eyes in a pockmarked face. The landlord
drew a mug of kvass, spiked it with vodka, and set it out. He nodded toward the ceiling. "I will tell her
you are here," he said, and left.
Sverdlov leaned on the bar, one hand resting on a pistol butt, the other holding up his drink. I could
wish it really were one of the upstairs girls expecting me, he thought. Do we need all this
melodrama of codes, countersigns, and cell organiza-tion? He considered the seething of near-naked
men in the room. A chess game, a card game, a dirty joke, an Indian wrestling match, a brag, a wheedle,
an incipient fight: his own Krasnans! It hardly seemed possible that any of those ears could have been
hired by the Protector and yet…
The landlord came back. "She's here and ready for you," he grinned. A couple of nearby men
guffawed coarsely. Sverdlov tossed off his drink, lit one of the cheap cigars he favored, and pushed
through to the stairs.
At the end of a third floor corridor he rapped on a door. A voice invited him in. The room beyond
was small and drably furnished, but its window looked down a straight street to the town's end and a
sudden feathery splendor of rainbow trees. Lightning flimmered through the bright rain of Krasna.
Sver-dlov wondered scornfully if Earth had jungle and infinite promise on any doorstep.
He closed the door and nodded at the two men who sat waiting. He knew fat Li-Tsung; the gaunt
Arabic-looking fel-low was strange to him, and neither asked for an introduction.
Li-Tsung raised an eyebrow. Sverdlov said, "It is going well. They were having some new
troubles—the aerospores were playing merry hell with the electrical insulation—but I think I worked out
a solution. The Wetlanders are keeping our boys amply fed, and there is no indication anyone has
betrayed them. Yet."
The thin man asked, "This is the clandestine bomb factory?"
"No," said Li-Tsung. "It is time you learned of these matters, especially when you are leaving the
system today. This man has been helping direct something more important than small arms manufacture.
摘要：

WeHaveFedOurSeaPoulAnderson[19aug2001-proofreadandre-releasedfor#bookz-v1]PerhapsthedeadestofallthingspossibleinthisUniverseisthedeadcoldcoreofaburned-outsupernova.ButDeathis,ofcourse,theulti­matetrapofalllivingthings!THEYnamedherSouthernCrossandlaunchedherontheroadwhoseendtheywouldneversee.Monthsaf...

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