Henry Kuttner - We Guard the Black Planet

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 51.22KB 24 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

WE GUARD THE BLACK PLANET!

Henry Kuttner

The stratoship dropped me at Stockholm, and an air-ferry took me to Thunder

Fjord, where I had been born. In six years nothing had changed. The black

rocks still jutted out into the tossing seas, where the red sails of Vikings

had once flaunted, and the deep roar of the waters came up to 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Shackled, silent, taciturn, he had grown old, always a little withdrawn from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.

So I was here, and the gerfalcon came down wheeling, dropping, its talons

clamping like iron on my father's gloved

wrist. It was like a w^lcorne. Freya was old, too, but her golden eyes were

stil^ bright, her grip still deadly.

Nils shook hands with me without rising. He gestured me to a chair. "I'm glad

you came back, Arn. So you passed. That was good to hear. You'll be in space

tomorrow."

"For Callisto," I said. "How are you, Nils? I was afraid—"

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? Newark?

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 summoned 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 corners of

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

slipping through the jesses. Freya took to the air with a hoarse, screaming

cry.

"The instinct of flight is in our race," Nils said. "To be free, to fight, and

to fly. In the old days we went Viking because of that. Leif the Lucky sailed

to Greenland; our ships went down past the Tin Isles to Rome and Byzantium; we

sailed even to Cathay. In the winter we caulked our keels and sharpened our

swords. Then, when the ice broke up hi the fjords, the red sails lifted again.

Ran called us—Ran of the seas, goddess of the unknown."

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 7 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 motion,

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.

It had been thus forty years and more ago, Nils said, in his youth, when the

hot blood went singing through his veins, and the Viking spirit flamed within

him. The seas were tamed.

The way of his ancestors was no longer open to him. But there were new

frontiers open—

The gulfs between the stars held mysteries, and Nils signed as A. B. on a

spaceship, a cranky freighter, making the Great Circle of the trade routes.

Earth to Venus, and swinging outward again to the major planets.

The life toughened him, after a few years.

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

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 mentioned

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'ttt 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."

"There's a war on Venus."

"Penny-ante stuff. I'm on the trail of something big now. On the trail of—" he

smiled crookedly—"ghosts. Valkyries."

"Mars isn't the place, then. Norway, on Earth—"

Damon's gaze sharpened. "Not Norway. Space. Valkyries, I said—women with

wings."

Esterling drank satha, feeling the cold, numbing liquor slide down his throat.

"A new race on some planet? I never heard of winged humans."

"You've heard of Glory Hole and Davy Jones* Locker. Mean to say you've been in

space three years and never heard of the Valkyries—the Black Planet?"

Esterling put down his glass gently. How did Damon know that he'd been a

spaceman for three years? Till now he had thought this merely a casual

acquaintance, two Earthmen drinking together on an alien world. Now—

"You mean the legend," he said. "Never paid much attention. When a ship cracks

up in space, the crew go to the Black Planet after they die. Spaceman's

heaven."

"Yeah. A legend, that's all. When wrecks are found, all the bodies are found

in 'em—naturally! But the story is that there are winged women—call them

Valkyries—who live in an invisible world somewhere in the System."

"You think they exist?"

"I think there's truth behind the legend. It isn't merely a terrestrial

belief. Martians, Vesuvians, Callistans—they all have their yarns about winged

space-women."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Henry Kuttner - We Guard the Black Planet.pdf

共24页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Henry Kuttner - We Guard the Black Planet

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: