Kuttner, Henry - We Guard the Black Planet

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2024-11-24 0 0 95.39KB 38 页 5.9玖币

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greet me. Against the sky Freya, my father's gerfalcon, was wheeling. And

high on the crag was the Hall, its tower keeping unceasing vigil over the

northern ocean.

On the porch my father was waiting, a giant who had grown old. Nils

Esterling had always been a silent man. His thin lips seemed clamped tight

upon some secret he never told, and I think I was always a little afraid of

him, though he was never unkind. But between us was a gulf. Nils seemed

—shackled. I realized that first when I saw him watching the birds go south

before the approach of winter. His eyes held a sick longing that, somehow,

made me uneasy.

Shackled, silent, taciturn, he had grown old, always a little withdrawn

from the world, always I thought, afraid of the stars. In the daytime he

would watch his gerfalcon against the deep blue of the sky, but at night he

drew the shades and would not venture out. The stars meant something to

him. Only once, I knew, he had been in space; he never ventured beyond

the atmosphere again. What had happened out there I did not know. But

Nils Esterling came back changed, with something dead inside his soul.

I was going out now. In my pocket were my papers, the result of six

years of exhausting work at Sky Point, where I had been a cadet. I was

shipping tomorrow on the Martins, Callisto bound. Nils had asked me to

come home first.

His smile held no mirth. "That I was ill? Or perhaps dying. No, Arn. I've

been dying for forty years—" He looked at the gerfalcon. "It doesn't matter

a great deal now. Except that I hope it comes soon. You'll know why when I

tell you about —about what happened to me in space four decades ago. I'll

try not to be bitter, but it's hard. Damned hard." Again Nils looked at the

gerfalcon.

He went on after a moment, threading the cord through Freya's jesses.

"You haven't much time, if your ship blasts off tomorrow. What port? New-

ark? Well—what about food?"

"I ate on the ferry, Dad—" I seldom called him that.

He moved his big shoulders uneasily. "Let's have a drink." He sum-

moned the servant, and presently there were highballs before us. I could

not repress the thought that whiskey was incongruous; in the Hall we

should have drunk ale from horns. Well, that was the past. A dead past

now.

Nils seemed to read my thought. "The old things linger somehow, Arn.

They come down to us in our blood. So—"

"Waes had," I said.

"Drinc hael." He drained the glass. Knots of muscle bunched at the cor-

ners of his jaw. With a sudden, furious motion, he cast off the gerfalcon, the

His voice changed; he quoted softly from an old poet.

What is woman that you forsake her,

And the hearthstone, and the home-acre,

To go -with the old gray Widow-maker ....

"Aye," said Nils Esterling, a lost sickness in his eyes. "Our race cannot

be prisoned, or it dies. And I have been prisoned for forty years. By all the

hells of all the worlds!" he whispered, his voice shaking. "A most damnable

prison! My soul turned rotten before I'd been back on earth a week. Even

before that. And there was no way out of my prison; I locked it with my own

hands, and broke the key.

"You never knew about that, Arn. You'll know now. There's a reason

why I must tell you—"

He told me, while the slow night came down, and the bo-realis flamed

and shook like spears of light in the polar sky. The Frost Giants were on the

march, for a sudden chill blew in from the fjord. Overhead the wind

screamed, like the trumpet cries of Valkyries.

Far beneath us surged the sea, moving with its sliding, resistless mo-

tion, spuming against the rocks. Above us, the stars shone brightly.

And on Nils' wrist, where it had returned, the gerfalcon Freya rested,

drowsy, stirring a little from time to time, but content to remain there.

The life toughened him, after a few years.

And in Marspole North, in a satha-divs, he ran into Captain Morse Da-

mon, veteran of the Asteroid War.

Damon told Nils about the Valkyries—the guardians of the Black Planet.

He was harsh and lean and gray as weathered rock, and his black stare

was without warmth. Sipping watered satha, he watched Nils Esterling,

noting the leatheroid tunic worn at cuffs and elbows, the frayed straps of

the elasto sandals.

"You know my name."

"Sure." Esterling said. "I see the newstapes. But you haven't been men-

tioned for a while."

"Not since the Asteroid War ended, no. The pact they made left me out

in the cold. I had a guerilla force raiding through the Belt. In another year I

could have turned the balance. But after the armistice—"

Damon shrugged. "I'm no good for anything but fighting. I kept a ship;

they owed me that. The Vulcan. She's a sweet boat, well found and fast.

But I can't use her unless I sign up with the big companies. Besides, I don't

want to do freighting. The hell with that. I've been at loose ends, blasting

around the System, looking for—well, I don't know what. Had a shot or two

at prospecting. But it's dull, sinking assay shafts, sweating for a few tons of

ore. Not my sort of life."

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