Anderson, Poul - The Man Who Counts

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THE MAN WHO COUNTS - Poul Anderson
THE MAN WHO COUNTS
Poul Anderson
[20 sep 2002—scanned for #bookz]
[09 dec 2002—proofread by #bookz]
Introduction
Thinking about this early novel after a lapse of years, I believe I can see what its wellsprings are. They
include the old pulp conventions of storytelling and a desire to change or, at any rate, spoof these:
Falstaff, Long John Silver, and other amiable literary rogues, as well as a few real figures from the
Renaissance: L. Sprague de Camp's unique combination of humor and adventure: above all, Hal
Clement's marvelously detailed and believable fictional worlds. I do not say that The Man Who Counts
matches any of its inspirers. Certainly I would write it a bit differently today. Yet it does represent my
first serious venture into planet-building and the first full-scale appearance of Nicholas van Rijn. Thus I
remain fond of it.
After being serialized in Astounding (today's Analog) it had a paperback edition. The latter was badly
copy-edited and saddled with the ludicrous title War of the Wing-Men. I am happy that now, at last, the
proper text and name can be restored.
Planet-building is one of the joyous arts, if you have that sort of mind. The object is to construct a strange
world which is at the same time wholly consistent, not only with itself but with what science knows of
such matters. Any extra-scientific assumptions you make for story purposes—e.g., faster-than-light
travel—should not be necessary to the world itself. So, taking a star of a given mass, you calculate how
luminous it must be, how long the year is of a planet in a given orbit around it, how much irradiation that
planet gets, and several more things. (Of course. I simplify here, since you ought also to take account of
the star's age, its chemical composition, etc.) These results will be basically influential on surface
features of the planet, kind of life it bears, evolution of that life, and so on endlessly. There is no rigid
determinism: at any given stage, many different possibilities open up. However, those which you choose
will in their turn become significant parameters at the next stage … until at last, perhaps, you get down to
the odor of a flower and what it means to an alien individual.
Because science will never know everything, you are allowed reasonable guesses where calculation
breaks down. Nonetheless—quite apart from flaws which sharp-eyed readers may discover in your facts
or logic—you can be pretty sure that eventually science will make discoveries which cast doubt, to say
the very least, on various of your assumptions. History will have moved on, too, in directions you had not
foreseen for your imaginary future. You are invited to play what Clement calls "the game" with this
unrevised text of mine.
I was saved from making one grievous error, by my wife. Looking over my proposed life cycle of the
Diomedeans, she exclaimed, "Hey, wait, you have the females flying thousands of miles each year while
they're the equivalent of seven months pregnant. It can't be done. I know." I deferred to the voice of
experience and redesigned. As I have remarked elsewhere, planet-building ought to be good therapy for
the kind of mental patient who believes he's God.
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Despite the hazards, I've come back to it again and again, always hoping that readers will share some of
the pleasure therein.
—Poul Anderson
I
Grand Admiral Syranaxhyr Urnan, hereditary Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet of Drak'ho, Fisher of the
Western Seas, Leader in Sacrifice, and Oracle of the Lodestar, spread his wings and brought them
together again in an astonished thunderclap. For a moment, it snowed papers from his desk.
"No!" he said. "Impossible! There's some mistake."
"As my Admiral wills it," Chief Executive Officer Delp hyr Orikan bowed sarcastically. "The scouts saw
nothing."
Anger crossed the face of Captain T'heonax hyr Urnan, son of the Grand Admiral and therefore heir
apparent. His upper lip rose until the canine tushes showed, a white flash against the dark muzzle.
"We have no time to waste on your insolence, Executive Delp," he said coldly. "I would advise my father
to dispense with an officer who has no more respect."
Under the embroidered cross-belts of office Delp's big frame tautened. Captain T'heonax glided one step
toward him. Tails curled back and wings spread, instinctive readiness for battle, until the room was full
of their bodies and their hate. With a calculation which made it seem accidental, T'heonax dropped a
hand to the obsidian rake at his waist. Delp's yellow eyes blazed and his fingers clamped on his own
tomahawk.
Admiral Syranax's tail struck the floor. It was like a fire-bomb going off. The two young nobles jerked,
remembered where they were, and slowly, muscle by muscle laying itself back to rest under the sleek
brown fur, they relaxed.
"Enough!" snapped Syranax. "Delp, your tongue will flap you into trouble yet. T'heonax, I've grown
bored with your spite. You'll have your chance to deal with personal enemies, when I am fish food.
Meanwhile, spare me my few able officers!"
It was a firmer speech than anyone had heard from him for a long time. His son and his subordinate
recalled that this grizzled, dim-eyed, rheumatic creature had once been the conqueror of the Maion
Navy—a thousand wings of enemy leaders had rattled grisly from the mastheads—and was still their
chief in the war against the Flock. They assumed the all-fours crouch of respect and waited for him to
continue.
"Don't take me so literally, Delp," said the admiral in a milder tone. He reached to the rack above his
desk and got down a long-stemmed pipe and began stuffing it with flakes of dried sea driss from the
pouch at his waist. Meanwhile, his stiff old body fitted itself more comfortable into the wood-and-leather
seat. "I was quite surprised, of course, but I assume that our scouts still know how to use a telescope.
Describe to me again exactly what happened."
"A patrol was on routine reconnaissance about 30 obdisai north-north-west of here," said Delp with care.
"That would be in the general area of the island called … I can't pronounce that heathenish local name,
sir; it means Banners Flew."
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"Yes, yes," nodded Syranax. "I have looked at a map now and then, you know."
T'heonax grinned. Delp was no courtier. That was Delp's trouble. His grandfather had been a mere Sail-
maker, his father never advanced beyond the captaincy of a single raft. That was after the family had
been ennobled for heroic service at the Battle of Xarit'ha, of course—but they had still been very minor
peers, a tarry-handed lot barely one cut above their own crew-folk.
"Syranax, the Fleet's embodied response to these grim days of hunger and uprooting, had chosen officers
on a basis of demonstrated ability, and nothing else. Thus it was that simple Delp hyr Orikan had been
catapulted in a few years to the second highest post in Drak'ho. Which had not taken the rough edges off
his education, or taught him how to deal with real nobles.
If Delp was popular with the common sailors, he was all the more disliked by many aristocrats—a
parvenu, a boor, with the nerve to wed a sa Axollon! Once the old admiral's protecting wings were folded
in death—
T'heonax savored in advance what would happen to Delp hyr Orikan. It would be easy enough to find
some nominal charge.
The executive gulped. "Sorry, sir," he mumbled. "I didn't mean … we're still so new to this whole
sea … well. The scouts saw this drifting object. It was like nothing ever heard of before. A pair of 'em
flew back to report and ask for advice. I went to look for myself. Sir, it's true!"
"A floating object—six times as long as our longest canoe—like ice, and yet not like ice—" The admiral
shook his gray-furred head. Slowly, he put dry tinder in the bottom of his firemaker. But it was with
needless violence that he drove the piston down into the little hardwood cylinder. Removing the rod
again, he tilted fire out into the bowl of his pipe, and drew deeply.
"The most highly polished rock crystal might look a bit like that stuff, sir," offered Delp. "But not so
bright. Not with such a shimmer."
"And there are animals scurrying about on it?"
"Three of them, sir. About our size, or a little bigger, but wingless and tailless. Yet not just animals
either … I think … they seem to wear clothes and—I don't think the shining thing was ever intended as a
boat, though. It rides abominably, and appears to be settling."
"If it's not a boat, and not a log washed off some beach," said T'heonax "then where, pray tell, is it from?
The Deeps?"
"Hardly, captain," said Delp irritably. "If that were so, the creatures on it would be fish or sea mammals
or—well, adapted for swimming, anyway. They're not. They look like typical flightless land forms,
except for having only four limbs."
"So they fell from the sky, I presume?" sneered T'heonax.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised," said Delp in a very low voice. "There isn't any other direction left."
T'heonax sat up on his haunches, mouth falling open. But his father only nodded.
"Very good," murmured Syranax. "I'm pleased to see a little imagination around here."
"But where did they fly from? " exploded T'heonax.
"Perhaps our enemies of Lannach would have some account of it" said the admiral. "They cover a great
deal more of the world every year than we do in many generations; they meet a hundred other barbarian
flocks down in the tropics, and exchange news."
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"And females," said T'heonax. He spoke in that mixture of primly disapproving voice and lickerish
overtones with which the entire Fleet regarded the habits of the migrators.
"Never mind that," snapped Delp.
T'heonax bristled. "You deckswabber's whelp, do you dare—"
"Shut up!" roared Syranax.
After a pause, he went on: "I'll have inquiries made among our prisoners. Meanwhile we had better send
a fast canoe to pick up these beings before that object they're on founders."
"They may be dangerous," warned T'heonax.
"Exactly," said his father. "If so, they're better in our hands than if, say, the Lannach'honai should find
them and make an alliance. Delp, take the Nemnis, with a reliable crew, and crowd sail on her. And bring
along that fellow we captured from Lannach, what's his name, the professional linguist—"
"Tolk?" The executive stumbled over the unfamiliar pronunciation.
"Yes. Maybe he can talk to them. Send scouts back to report to me, but stand well off the main Fleet until
you're sure that the creatures are harmless to us. Also till I've allayed whatever superstitious fears about
sea demons there are in the lower classes. Be polite if you can, get rough if you must. We can always
apologize later … or toss the bodies overboard. Now, jump!"
Delp jumped.
II
Desolation walled him in.
Even from this low, on the rolling, pitching hull of the murdered skycruiser, Eric Wace could see an
immensity of horizon. He thought that the sheer size of that ring, where frost-pale heaven met the gray
which was cloud and storm-scud and great marching waves, was enough to terrify a man. The likelihood
of death had been faced before, on Earth, by many of his forebears; but Earth's horizon was not so
remote.
Never mind that he was a hundred-odd light-years from his own sun. Such distances were too big to be
understood: they became mere numbers, and did not frighten one who reckoned the pseudo-speed of a
secondary-drive spaceship in parsecs per week.
Even the ten thousand kilometers of open ocean to this world's lone human settlement, the trading post,
was only another number. Later, if he lived, Wace would spend an agonized time wondering how to get a
message across that emptiness, but at present he was too occupied with keeping alive.
But the breadth of the planet was something he could see. It had not struck him before, in his eighteen-
month stay; but then he had been insulated, psychologically as well as physically, by an unconquerable
machine technology. Now he stood alone on a sinking vessel, and it was twice as far to look across chill
waves to the world's rim as it had been on Earth.
The skycruiser rolled under a savage impact. Wace lost his footing and slipped across curved metal
plates. Frantic, he clawed for the light cable which lashed cases of food to the navigation turret. If he
went over the side, his boots and clothes would pull him under like a stone. He caught it in time and
strained to a halt.. The disappointed wave slapped his face, a wet salt hand.
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Shaking with cold, Wace finished tucking the last box into place and crawled back toward the entry
hatch. It was a miserable little emergency door, but the glazed promenade deck, on which his passengers
had strolled while the cruiser's gravbeams bore her through the sky, was awash, its ornate bronze portal
submerged.
Water had filled the smashed engine compartment when they ditched. Since then it had been seeping
around twisted bulkheads and strained hull plates, until the whole thing was about ready for a last long
dive to the sea bottom.
Wind passed icy fingers through his drenched hair and tried to hold open the hatch when he wanted to
close it after him. He had a struggle against the gale … Gale? Hell, no! It had only the velocity of a
stiffish breeze—but with six times the atmospheric pressure of Earth behind it, that breeze struck like a
Terrestrial storm. Damn PLC 2987165II! Damn the PL itself, and damn Nicholas van Rijn, and most
particularly damn Eric Wace for being fool enough to work for the Company!
Briefly, while he fought the hatch, Wace looked out over the coaming as if to find rescue. He glimpsed
only a reddish sun, and great cloud-banks dirty with storm in the north, and a few specks which were
probably natives.
Satan fry those natives on a slow griddle, that they did not come to help! Or at least go decently away
while the humans drowned, instead of hanging up there in the sky to gloat!
"Is all in order?"
Wace closed the hatch, dogged it fast, and came down the ladder. At its foot, he had to brace himself
against the heavy rolling. He could still hear waves beat on the hull, and the wind-yowl.
"Yes, my lady," he said. "As much as it'll ever be."
"Which isn't much, not?" Lady Sandra Tamarin played her flashlight over him. Behind it, she was only
another shadow in the darkness of the dead vessel. "But you look a saturated rat, my friend. Come, we
have at least fresh clothes for you."
Wace nodded and shrugged out of his wet jacket and kicked off the squelching boots. He would have
frozen up there without them—it couldn't be over five degrees C—but they seemed to have blotted up
half the ocean. His teeth clapped in his head as he followed her down the corridor.
He was a tall young man of North American stock, ruddy-haired, blue-eyed, with bluntly squared-off
features above a well-muscled body. He had begun as a warehouse apprentice at the age of twelve, back
on Earth, and now he was the Solar Spice & Liquors Company's factor for the entire planet known as
Diomedes. It wasn't exactly a meteoric rise—Van Rijn's policy was to promote according to results,
which meant that a quick mind, a quick gun, and an eye firmly held to the main chance were favored. But
it had been a good solid career, with a future of posts on less isolated and unpleasant worlds, ultimately
an executive position back Home and—and what was the use, if alien waters were to eat him in a few
hours more?
At the end of the hall, where the navigation turret poked up, there was again the angry copper sunlight,
low in the wan smoky-clouded sky, south of west as day declined. Lady Sandra snapped off her torch and
pointed to a coverall laid out on the desk. Beside it were the outer garments, quilted, hooded, and gloved,
he would need before venturing out again into the pre-equinoctial springtime. "Put on everything," she
said. "Once the boat starts going down, we will have to leave in a most horrible hurry."
"Where's Freeman van Rijn?" asked Wace.
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"Making some last-minute work on the raft. That one is a handy man with the tools, not? But then, he
was once a common spacehand."
Wace shrugged and waited for her to leave.
"Change, I told you," she said.
"But—"
"Oh." A thin smile crossed her face. "I thought not there was a nudity taboo on Earth."
"Well … not exactly, I guess, my lady … but after all, you're a noble born, and I'm only a trader—"
"From republican planets like Earth come the worst snobs of all," she said. "Here we are all human
beings. Quickly, now, change. I shall turn my back if you desire."
Wace scrambled into the outfit as fast as possible. Her mirth was an unexpected comfort to him. He
considered what luck always appeared to befall that potbellied old goat Van Rijn.
It wasn't right!
The colonists of Hermes had been, mostly, a big fair stock, and their descendants had bred true:
especially the aristocrats, after Hermes set up as an autonomous grand duchy during the Breakup. Lady
Sandra Tamarin was nearly as tall as he, and shapeless winter clothing did not entirely hide the lithe full
femaleness of her. She had a face too strong to be pretty—wide forehead, wide mouth, snub nose, high
cheekbones—but the large smoky-lashed green eyes, under heavy dark brows, were the most beautiful
Wace had ever seen. Her hair was long, straight, ash-blond, pulled into a knot at the moment but he had
seen it floating free under a coronet by candlelight—
"Are you quite through, Freeman Wace?"
"Oh … I'm sorry, my lady. I got to thinking. Just a moment!" He pulled on the padded tunic, but left it
unzipped. There was still some human warmth lingering in the hull. "Yes. I beg your pardon."
"It is nothing." She turned about. In the little space available, their forms brushed together. Her gaze went
out to the sky. "Those natives, are they up there yet?"
"I imagine so, my lady. Too high for me to be sure, but they can go up several kilometers with no trouble
at all."
"I have wondered, Trader, but got no chance to ask. I thought not there could be a flying animal the size
of a man, and yet these Diomedeans have a six-meter span of bat wings. How?"
"At a time like this you ask?"
She smiled. "We only wait now for Freeman van Rijn. What else shall we do but talk of curious things?"
"We … help him … finish that raft soon or we'll all go under!"
"He told me he has just batteries enough for one cutting torch, so anyone else is only in the way. Please
continue talking. The high-born of Hermes have their customs and taboos, also for the correct way to die.
What else is man, if not a set of customs and taboos?" Her husky voice was light, she smiled a little, but
he wondered how much of it was an act.
He wanted to say: We're down in the ocean of a planet whose life is poison to us. There is an island a few
score kilometers hence, but we only know its direction vaguely. We may or may not complete a raft in
time, patched together out of old fuel drums, and we may or may not get our human-type rations loaded
on it in time, and it may or may not weather the storm brewing there in the north. Those were natives
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who swooped low above us a few hours ago, but since then they have ignored us … or watched
us … anything except offer help.
Someone hates you or old Van Rijn, he wanted to say. Not me, I'm not important enough to hate. But
Van Rijn is the Solar Spice & Liquors Company, which is a great power in the Polesotechnic League,
which is the great power in the known galaxy. And you are the Lady Sandra Tamarin, heiress to the
throne of an entire planet, if you live; and you have turned down many offers of marriage from its
decaying, inbred aristocracy, publicly preferring to look elsewhere for a father for your children, that the
next Grand Duke of Hermes may be a man and not a giggling clothes horse; so no few courtiers must
dread your accession.
Oh, yes, he wanted to say, there are plenty of people who would gain if either Nicholas van Rijn or
Sandra Tamarin failed to come back. It was a calculated gallantry for him to offer you a lift in his private
ship, from Antares where you met, back to Earth, with stopovers at interesting points along the way. At
the very least, he can look for trade concessions in the Duchy. At best … no, hardly a formal alliance;
there's too much hell in him; even you—most strong and fair and innocent—would never let him plant
himself on the High Seat of your fathers.
But I wander from the subject, my dear, he wanted to say; and the subject is, that someone in the
spaceship's crew was bribed. The scheme was well-hatched; the someone watched his chance. It came
when you landed on Diomedes, to see what a really new raw planet is like, a planet where even the main
continental outlines have scarcely been mapped, in the mere five years that a spoonful of men have been
here. The chance came when I was told to ferry you and my evil old boss to those sheer mountains,
halfway around this world, which have been noted as spectacular scenery. A bomb in the main
generator … a slain crew, engineers and stewards gone in the blast, my co-pilot's skull broken when we
ditched in the sea, the radio shattered … and the last wreckage is going to sink long before they begin to
worry at Thursday Landing and come in search of us and assuming we survive, is there the slightest
noticeable chance that a few skyboats, cruising a nearly unmapped world twice the size of Earth, will
happen to see three human flyspecks on it?
Therefore, he wanted to say, since all our schemings and posturings have brought us merely to this, it
would be well to forget them in what small time remains, and kiss me instead.
But his throat clogged up on him, and he said none of it.
"So?" A note of impatience entered her voice. "You are very silent, Freeman Wace."
"I'm sorry, my lady," he mumbled. "I'm afraid I'm no good at making conversation under … uh, these
circumstances."
"I regret I have not qualifications to offer to you the consolations of religion," she said with a hurtful
scorn.
A long gray-bearded comber went over the deck outside and climbed the turret. They felt steel and
plastic tremble under the blow. For a moment, as water sheeted, they stood in a blind roaring dark.
Then, as it cleared, and Wace saw how much farther down the wreck had burrowed, and wondered if
they would even be able to get Van Rijn's raft out through the submerged cargo hatch, there was a
whiteness that snatched at his eye.
First he didn't believe it, and then he wouldn't believe because he dared not, and then he could no longer
deny it.
"Lady Sandra." He spoke with immense care; he must not scream his news at her like any low-born
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Terrestrial.
"Yes?" She did not look away from her smoldering contemplation of the northern horizon, empty of all
but clouds and lightning.
"There, my lady. Roughly south-east, I'd guess sails, beating up-wind."
"What?" It was a shriek from her. Somehow, that made Wace laugh aloud.
"A boat of some kind," he pointed. "Coming this way."
"I didn't know the natives were sailors," she said, very softly.
"They aren't, my lady—around Thursday Landing," he replied. "But this is a big planet. Roughly four
times the surface area of Earth, and we only know a small part of one continent."
"Then you know not what they are like, these sailors?"
"My lady, I have no idea."
III
Nicholas van Rijn came puffing up the companion-way at their shout. "Death and damnation!" he roared.
"A boat, do you say, ja? Better for you it is a shark, if you are mistaken. By damn!" He stumped into the
turret and glared out through salt encrusted plastic. The light was dimming as the sun went lower and the
approaching storm clouds swept across its ruddy face. "So! Where is it, this pestilential boat?"
"There, sir," said Wace. "That schooner—"
"Schooner! Schnork! Powder and balls, you cement head, that is a yawl rig … no, wait, by damn, there is
a furled square sail on the mainmast too, and, yes, an outrigger—Ja, the way she handles, she must have
a regular rudder—Good saints help us! A bloody-be-damned-to-blazes dugout!"
"What else do you expect, on a planet without metals?" said Wace. His nerves were worn too thin for
him to remember the deference due a merchant prince.
"Hm-m-m … coracles, maybe so, or rafts or catamarans—Quick, dry clothes! Too cold it is for brass
monkeys!"
Wace grew aware that Van Rijn was standing in a puddle, and that bitter sea water streamed from his
waist and legs. The storeroom where he had been at work must have been awash for—for hours!
"I know where they are, Nicholas." Sandra loped off down the corridor. It slanted more ominously every
minute, as the sea pushed in through a ruined stern.
Wace helped his chief off with the sopping coverall. Naked, Van Rijn suggested … what was that extinct
ape? … a gorilla, two meters tall, hairy and huge-bellied, with shoulders like a brick warehouse, loudly
bawling his indignation at the cold and the damp and the slowness of assistants. But rings flashed on the
thick fingers and bracelets on the wrists, and a little St. Dismas medal swung from his neck. Unlike
Wace, who found a crew cut and a clean shave more practical, Van Rijn let his oily black locks hang
curled and perfumed in the latest mode, flaunted a goatee on his triple chin and intimidating waxed
mustaches beneath the great hook nose.
He rummaged in the navigator's cabinet, wheezing, till he found a bottle of rum. "Ahhh! I knew I had the
devil-begotten thing stowed somewhere." He put it to his frogmouth and tossed off several shots at a
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gulp. "Good! Fine! Now maybe we can begin to be like self-respectful humans once more, nie?"
He turned about, majestic and globular as a planet, when Sandra came back. The only clothes she could
find to fit him were his own, a peacock outfit of lace-trimmed shirt, embroidered waistcoat, shimmersilk
culottes and stockings, gilt shoes, plumed hat, and holstered blaster.
"Thank you," he said curtly. "Now, Wace, while I dress, in the lounge you will find a box of Perfectos
and one small bottle applejack. Please to fetch them, then we go outside and meet our hosts."
"Holy St. Peter!" cried Wace. "The lounge is under water!"
"Ah?" Van Rijn sighed, woebegone. "Then you need only get the applejack. Quick, now!" He snapped
his fingers.
Wace said hastily: "No time, sir. I still have to round up the last of our ammunition. Those natives could
be hostile."
"If they have heard of us, possible so," agreed Van Rijn. He began donning his natural-silk underwear.
"Brrr! Five thousand candles I would give to be back in my office in Jakarta!"
"To what saint do you make the offer?" asked Lady Sandra.
"St. Nicholas, natural—my namesake, patron of wanderers and—"
"St. Nicholas had best get it in writing," she said.
Van Rijn purpled; but one does not talk back to the heiress apparent of a nation with important trade
concessions to offer. He took it out by screaming abuse after the departing Wace.
It was some time before they were outside; Van Rijn got stuck in the emergency hatch and required
pushing, while his anguished basso obscenities drowned the nearing thunder. Diomedes' period of
rotation was only twelve and a half hours, and this latitude, thirty degrees north, was still on the winter
side of equinox; so the sun was toppling seaward with dreadful speed. They clung to the lashings and let
the wind claw them and the waves burst over them. There was nothing else they could do.
"It is no place for a poor old fat man," snuffed Van Rijn. The gale ripped the words from him and flung
them tattered over the rising seas. His shoulder-length curls flapped like forlorn pennons. "Better I should
have stayed at home in Java where it is warm, not lost my last few pitiful years out here."
Wace strained his eyes into the gloom. The dugout had come near. Even a landlubber like himself could
appreciate the skill of its crew, and Van Rijn was loud in his praises. "I nominate him for the Sunda
Yacht Club, by damn, yes, and enter him in the next regatta and make bets!"
It was a big craft, more than thirty meters long, with an elaborate stempost, but dwarfed by the reckless
spread of its blue-dyed sails. Out-rigger or no, Wace expected it to capsize any moment. Of course, a
flying species had less to worry about if that should happen than—
"The Diomedeans." Sandra's tone was quiet in his ear, under shrill wind and booming waters. "You have
dealt with them for a year and a half, not? What can we await for from them?"
Wace shrugged. "What could we expect from any random tribe of humans, back in the Stone Age? They
might be poets, or cannibals, or both. All I know is the Tyrlanian Flock, who are migratory hunters. They
always stick by the letter of their law—not quite so scrupulous about its spirit, of course, but on the
whole a decent tribe."
"You speak their language?"
"As well as my human palate and Techno-Terrestrial culture permit me to, my lady. I don't pretend to
file:///G|/rah/Poul%20Anderson%20-%20The%20Man%20Who%20Counts.htm (9 of 85) [2/14/2004 12:46:30 AM]
THE MAN WHO COUNTS - Poul Anderson
understand all their concepts, but we get along—" The broken hull lurched. He heard some abused wall
rend, and the inward pouring of still more sea, and felt the sluggishness grow beneath his feet. Sandra
stumbled against him. He saw that the spray was freezing in her brows.
"That does not mean I'll understand the local language" he finished. "We're farther from Tyrlan than
Europe from China."
The canoe was almost on them now. None too soon: the wreck was due to dive any minute. It came
about, the sails rattled down, a sea anchor was thrown and brawny arms dug paddles into the water.
Swiftly, then, a Diomedean flapped over with a rope. Two others hovered close, obviously as guards.
The first one landed and stared at the humans.
Tyrlan being farther north, its inhabitants had not yet returned from the tropics and this was the first
Diomedean Sandra had encountered. She was too wet, cold, and weary to enjoy the unhuman grace of his
movements, but she looked very close. She might have to dwell with this race a long time, if they did not
murder her.
He was the size of a smallish man, plus a thick meter-long tail ending in a fleshy rudder and the
tremendous chiropteral wings folded along his back. His arms were set below the wings, near the middle
of a sleek otterlike body, and looked startlingly human, down to the muscular five-fingered hands. The
legs were less familiar, bending backward from four-taloned feet which might almost have belonged to
some bird of prey. The head, at the end of a neck that would have been twice too long on a human, was
round, with a high forehead, yellow eyes with nictitating membranes under heavy brow ridges a blunt-
muzzled black-nosed face with short cat-whiskers, a big mouth and the bear-like teeth of a flesheater
turned omnivore. There were no external ears, but a crest of muscle on the head helped control flight.
Short, soft brown fur covered him; he was plainly a male mammal.
He wore two belts looped around his "shoulders," a third about his waist, and a pair of bulging leather
pouches. An obsidian knife, a slender flint-headed ax, and a set of bolas were hung in plain view.
Through the thickening dusk, it was hard to make out what his wheeling comrades bore for
weapons—something long and thin, but surely not a rifle, on this planet without copper or iron …
Wace leaned forward and forced his tongue around the grunting syllables of Tyrlanian: "We are friends.
Do you understand me?"
A string of totally foreign words snapped at him. He shrugged, ruefully, and spread his hands. The
Diomedean moved across the hull—bipedal, body slanted forward to balance wings and tail—and found
the stud to which the humans' lashings were anchored. Quickly, he knotted his own rope to the same
place.
"A square knot," said Van Rijn, almost quietly. "It makes me homesick."
At the other end of the line, they began to haul the canoe closer. The Diomedean turned to Wace and
pointed at his vessel. Wace nodded, realized that the gesture was probably meaningless here, and took a
precarious step in that direction. The Diomedean caught another rope flung to him. He pointed at it, and
at the humans, and made gestures.
"I understand," said Van Rijn. "Nearer than this they dare not come. Too easy their boat gets smashed
against us. We get this cord tied around our bodies, and they haul us across. Good St. Christopher, what a
thing to do to a poor creaky-boned old man!"
"There's our food, though," said Wace.
The sky cruiser jerked and settled deeper. The Diomedean jittered nervously.
file:///G|/rah/Poul%20Anderson%20-%20The%20Man%20Who%20Counts.htm (10 of 85) [2/14/2004 12:46:30 AM]
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THEMANWHOCOUNTS-PoulAndersonTHEMANWHOCOUNTSPoulAnderson[20sep2002—scannedfor#bookz][09dec2002—proofreadby#bookz]IntroductionThinkingaboutthisearlynovelafteralapseofyears,IbelieveIcanseewhatitswellspringsare.Theyincludetheoldpulpconventionsofstorytellingandadesiretochangeor,atanyrate,spoofthese:Fal...

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