Anderson, Poul - Queen of Air & Darkness

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sight. In 1953 Anderson married Karen Kruse, herself an author of

fiction and poetry. They have one daughter, Astrid. They make their

home in Orinda, California.

Anderson's dazzling versatility as a writer is reflected in James

Blish's description of him as "... the scientist, the technician, the

stylist, the bard, the humanist and the humorist - a non-exhaustive

list." He ranks as one of the most prolific science fiction writers of

all times (a recently compiled bibliography, published in the April

1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction, fills

seven pages!). From poetry to novels to short stories to nonfiction

books and articles on a variety of subjects, he brilliantly combines

the saga and song of his Scandinavian heritage with the searching

mind and speculative science of the scholar. He also finds time for

such varied activities as houseboat building, sailing, mountain

climbing, gardening, chess, poker, Science Fiction Writers of

America, Mystery Writers of America, and the Society for Creative

Anachronism (where he is known as Bela of Eastmarch in its

medieval tourneys)-another non-exhaustive list.

Under his own name and his two pseudonyms, Winston P.

Sanders and Michael Karageorge, he is the author of some fifty

books and perhaps two hundred shorter items. His stories "No

Truce with Kings," "The Longest Voyage" and "The Sharing of Flesh"

won Hugo Awards. His mystery novel Perish by the Sword won the

Cock Robin Award. Well-known science fiction novels are Brain

Wave, The High Crusade, Three Hearts and Three Lions,

Earthman's Burden (with Gordon R. Dickson), The Broken Sword,

Alter Doomsday and Tau Zero. Recently anthologized stories are

"Call Me Joe" (selected for inclusion in the SFWA Hall of Fame,

Volume 2), "The Man Who Came Early," "Sam Hall," "Kings Who

Die" and "Journeys End." His Time Patrol series was collected in

Guardians of Time. Other series concern Nicholas van Rijn, the

interstellar trader, Dominic Flandry and Trygve Yamamura.

to sable. Both moons were aloft, nearly full, shining frosty on leaves

and molten on waters. The shadows they made were blurred by an

aurora, a great blowing curtain of light across half heaven. Behind

it the earliest stars had come out.

A boy and a girl sat on Wolund's Barrow just under the dolmen it

upbore. Their hair, which streamed halfway down their backs,

showed startlingly forth, bleached as it was by summer. Their

bodies, still dark from that season, merged with earth and bush

and rock, for they wore only garlands. He played on a bone flute

and she sang. They had lately become lovers. Their age was about

sixteen, but they did not know this, considering themselves

Outlings and thus indifferent to time, remembering little or nothing

of how they had once dwelt in the lands of men.

His notes piped cold around her voice:

"Cast a spell, weave it well of dust and dew and night and you."

A brook by the grave mound, carrying moonlight down to a

hillhidden river, answered with its rapids. A flock of hellbats passed

black beneath the aurora.

A shape came bounding over Cloudmoor. It had two arms and

two legs, but the legs were long and claw-footed and feather covered

it to the end of a tail and broad wings. The face was half, human,

dominated by its eyes. Had Ayoch been able to standwholly erect,

he would have reached to the boy's shoulder.

The girl rose. "He carries a burden," she said. Her vision was not

meant for twilight like that of a northland creature born, but she

had learned how to use every sign her senses gave her. Besides the

fact that ordinarily a pook would fly, there was a heaviness to his

haste.

"And he comes from the south." Excitement jumped in the boy,

sudden as a green flame that went across the constellation Lyrth.

He sped down the mound. "Ohoi, Ayoch!" he called. "Me here,:

Mistherd!"

dogs aprowl while they slept. I came from above, however, having

spied on them till I knew that a handful of dazedust "

"The poor thing." Shadow-of-a-Dream took the boy and held him

to her small breasts. "So full of sleep yet, aren't you?" Blindly, he

sought a nipple.

She smiled through the veil of her-hair. "No, I am still too young,

and you already too old. But come, when you wake in Carheddin

under the mountain, you shall feast."

"Yo-ah; " said Ayoch very softly. "She is abroad and has heard

and seen. She comes." He crouched down, wings folded. After a

moment Mistherd knelt, and then Shadow-of-a-Dream, though she

did not let go the child.

The Queen's tall form blocked off the moons. For a while she

regarded the three and their booty. Hill and moor sounds withdrew

from their awareness until it seemed they could hear the

northlights hiss.

At last Ayoch whispered, "Have I done well, Starmother?"

"If you stole a babe from a camp full of engines," said the

beautiful voice, "then they were folk out of the far south who may

not endure it as meekly as yeomen."

"But what can they do, Snowmaker?" the pook asked. "How can

they track us?"

Mistherd lifted his head and spoke in pride. "Also, now they too

have felt the awe of us."

"And he is a cuddly dear," Shadow-of-a-Dream said. "And we

need more like him, do we not, Lady Sky?"

"It had to happen in some twilight," agreed she who stood above.

"Take him onward and care for him. By this sign," which she made,

"is he claimed for the Dwellers."

Their joy was freed. Ayoch cartwheeled over the ground till he

reached a shiverleaf. There he swarmed up the trunk and out on a

limb, perched half hidden by unrestful pale foliage, and crowed.

and rock in, be one with the clinking wavelets of

lakes where the starbeams drown."

As she entered, Barbro Cullen felt, through all grief and fury,

stabbed by dismay. The room was unkempt. Journals, tapes, reels,

codices, file boxes, bescribbled papers were piled on every table.

Dust filmed most shelves and corners. Against one wall stood a

laboratory setup, microscope and analytical equipment. She

recognized it as compact and efficient, but it was not what you

would expect in an office, and it gave the air a faint chemical reek.

The rug was threadbare, the furniture shabby.

This was her final chance?

Then Eric Sherrinford approached. "Good day, Mrs. Cullen," he

said. His tone was crisp, his handclasp firm. His faded gripsuit

didn't bother her.

She wasn't inclined to fuss about her own appearance except on

special occasions. (And would she ever again have one, unless she

got back Jimmy?) What she observed was a cat's personal neatness.

A smile radiated in crow's feet from his eyes. "Forgive my

bachelor housekeeping. On Beowulf we have-we had, at any

ratemachines for that, so I never acquired the habit myself, and I

don't want a hireling disarranging my tools. More convenient to

work out of my apartment than keep a separate office. Won't you be

seated?"

"No, thanks. I couldn't," she mumbled.

"I understand. But if you'll excuse me, I function best in a

relaxed position."

He jackknifed into a lounger. One long shank crossed the other

knee. He drew forth a pipe and stuffed it from a pouch. Barbro

wondered why he took tobacco in so ancient a way. Wasn't Beowulf

the daughter of outwayers in Olga Ivanoff Land who, nevertheless,

kept in close telecommunication with Christmas Landing; and

you're trained in one of the biological professions; and you had

several years' hiatus in field work until recently you started again."

She gaped at the high-cheeked, beak-nosed, black-haired and

gray-eyed countenance. His lighter made a scrit and a flare which

seemed to fill the room. Quietness dwelt on this height above the

city, and winter dusk was seeping through the windows. "How in

cosmos do you know that?" she heard herself exclaim.

He shrugged and fell into the lecturer's manner for which he was

notorious. "My work depends on noticing details and fitting them

together. In more than a hundred years on Roland, tending to

cluster according to their origins and thought habits, people have

developed regional accents. You have a trace of the Olgan burr, but

you nasalize your vowels in the style of this area, though you live in

Portolondon- That suggests steady childhood exposure to

metropolitan speech. You were part of Matsuyama's expedition, you

told me, and took your boy along. They wouldn't have allowed any

ordinary technician to do that; hence, you had to be valuable

enough to get away with it. The team was conducting ecological

research; therefore, you must be in the life sciences. For the same

reason, you must have had previous field experience. But your skin

is fair, showing none of the leatheriness one gets from prolonged

exposure to this sun. Accordingly, you must have been mostly

indoors for a good while before you went on your ill-fated trip. As for

widowhood - you never mentioned a husband to me, but you have

had a man whom you thought so highly of that you still wear both

the wedding and the engagement ring he gave you."

Her sight blurred and stung. The last of those words had brought

Tim back, huge, ruddy, laughterful and gentle. She must turn from

this other person and stare outward. "Yes," she achieved saying,

"you're right."

"Yes," she said around the pain in her throat, "my husband is

about four years dead. I was carrying our first child when he was

killed by a stampeding monocerus. We'd been married three years

before. Met while we were both at the University-'casts from School

Central can only supply a basic education, you know - We founded

our own team to do ecological studies under contract you know, can

a certain area be settled while maintaining a balance of nature,

what crops will grow, what hazards, that sort of question-Well,

afterward I did lab work for a fisher co-op in Portolondon. But the

monotony, the ... shut-in-ness ... was eating me away. Professor

Matsuyama offered me a position on the team he was organizing to

examine Commissioner Hauch Land. I thought, God help me, I

thought Jimmy-Tim wanted him named James, once the tests

showed it'd be a boy, after his own father and because of 'Timmy

and Jimmy' and-oh, I thought Jimmy could safely come along. I

couldn't bear to leave him behind for months, not at his age. We

could make sure he'd never wander out of camp. What could hurt

him inside it? I had never believed those stories about the Outlings

stealing human children. I supposed parents were trying to hide

from themselves the fact they'd been careless, they'd let a kid get

lost in the woods or attacked by a pack of satans or- Well, I learned

better, Mr. Sherrinford. The guard robots were evaded and the dogs

were drugged and when I woke, Jimmy was gone."

He regarded her through the smoke from his pipe. Barbro

Engdahl Cullen was a big woman of thirty or so (Rolandic years, he

reminded himself, ninety-five percent of Terrestrial, not the same as

Beowulfan years), broad-shouldered, long-legged, full-breasted,

supple of stride; her face was wide, straight nose, straightforward

hazel eyes, heavy but mobile mouth; her hair was reddish-brown,

cropped below the ears, her voice husky, her garment a plain street

robe. To still the writhing of her fingers, he asked skeptically, "Do

you now believe in the Outlings?"

"Arctica covers five million square kilometers," she flung back.

"The Arctic Zone proper covers a fourth of it. We haven't the

industrial base to establish satellite monitor stations, build aircraft

we can trust in those parts, drive roads through the damned

darklands and establish permanent bases and get to know them

and tame them. Good Christ, generations of lonely outwaymen told

stories about Graymantle, and the beast was never seen by a I

proper scientist till last year!"

"Still, you continue to doubt the reality of the Outlings?" -

"Well, what about a secret cult among humans, born of isolation

and ignorance, lairing in the wilderness, stealing children when

they can for-"

She swallowed. Her head dropped. "But you're supposed to be

the expert."

"From what you told me over the visiphone, the Portolondon

constabulary questions the accuracy of the report your group `

made, thinks the lot of you were hysterical, claims you must have

omitted a due precaution, and the child toddled away and was lost

beyond your finding."

His dry words pried the horror out of her. Flushing, she

snapped, "Like any settler's kid? No. I didn't simply yell. I consulted

Data Retrieval. A few too many such cases are recorded for accident

to be a very plausible explanation. And shall we totally ignore the

frightened stories about reappearances? But when I t went back to

the constabulary with my facts, they brushed me off. _ I suspect

that was not entirely because they're undermanned. I think they're

afraid too. They're recruited from country boys, and .. Portolondon

lies near the edge of the unknown."

Her energy faded. "Roland hasn't got any central police force,"

she finished drably. "You're my last hope."

The man puffed smoke into twilight, with which it blent, before

he said in a kindlier voice than hitherto: "Please don't make it a

"Hiring someone else as well qualified would be prohibitively

expensive, on a pioneer planet where every hand has a thousand

urgent tasks to do. Besides, you have a motive. And I'll need that. I,

who was born on another world altogether strange to this one, itself

altogether strange to Mother Earth, I am too dauntingly aware of

how handicapped we are."

Night gathered upon Christmas Landing. The air stayed mild,

but glimmer-lit tendrils of fog, sneaking through the streets, had a

cold look, and colder yet was the aurora where it shuddered

between the moons. The woman drew closer to the man in this

darkening room, surely not aware that she did, until he switched on

a Auoropanel. The same knowledge of Roland's aloneness was in

both of them.

One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could

walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the

Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and

continuing to the present day when spaceships cross even greater

reaches. But stars in our neighborhood average some nine

lightyears apart, and barely one percent of them have planets which

are man-habitable, and speeds are limited to less than that of

radiation. Scant help is given by relativistic time contraction and

suspended animation en route.' These make the journeys seem

short, but history meanwhile does not stop at home.

Thus voyages from sun to sun will always be few. Colonists will

be those who have extremely special reasons for going. They will

take along germ plasm for exogenetic cultivation of domestic plants

and animals-and of human infants, in order that population can

grow fast enough to escape death through genetic drift. After all,

they cannot rely on further immigration. Two or three times a

century, a ship may call from some other colony. (Not from Earth.

Earth has long ago sunk into alien concerns.) Its place of origin will

Roland.

But the star Charlemagne is of type F9, forty percent brighter

than Sol, brighter still in the treacherous ultraviolet and wilder still

in the wind of charged particles that seethes from it. The planet has

an eccentric orbit. In the middle of the short but furious northern

summer, which includes periastron, total insolation is more than

double what Earth gets; in the depth of the long northern winter, it

is barely less than Terrestrial average.

Native life is abundant everywhere. But lacking elaborate

machinery, not yet economically possible to construct for more than

a few specialists, man can only endure the high latitudes. A

tendegree axial tilt, together with the orbit, means that the northern

part of the Arctican continent spends half its year in unbroken

sunlessness. Around the South Pole lies an empty ocean.

Other differences from Earth might superficially seem more

important. Roland has two moons, small but close, to evoke

clashing tides. It rotates once in thirty-two hours, which is

endlessly, subtly disturbing to organisms evolved through gigayears

of a quicker rhythm. The weather patterns are altogether

unterrestrial. The globe is a mere 9500 kilometers in diameter; its

surface gravity is 0.42 X 980 cm/sect; the sea level air pressure is

slightly above one Earth atmosphere. (For actually Earth is the

freak, and man exists because a cosmic accident blew away most of

the gas that a body its size ought to have kept, as Venus has done.)

However, Homo can truly be called sapiens when he practices his

specialty of being unspecialized. His repeated attempts to freeze

himself into an all-answering pattern or culture or ideology, or

whatever he has named it, have repeatedly brought ruin. Give him

the pragmatic business of making his living, and he will usually do

rather well. He adapts, within broad limits.

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sight.In1953AndersonmarriedKarenKruse,herselfanauthoroffictionandpoetry.Theyhaveonedaughter,Astrid.TheymaketheirhomeinOrinda,California.Anderson'sdazzlingversatilityasawriterisreflectedinJamesBlish'sdescriptionofhimas"...thescientist,thetechnician,thestylist,thebard,thehumanistandthehumorist-anon-ex...

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Anderson, Poul - Queen of Air & Darkness

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