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THREE

After fifty-seven days, it was really good to get out of FTL mode. We could look out the window and actually see something, including a planet that looked bigger and bigger as we approached it.

I could remember when I was four, and we had come out of FTL. Mom had wakened us kids and brought us into the control room to show us Evdash as a blue and white three-quarter sphere on the viewscreen. The planet we were approaching now looked just about like it. It was neat to see. Planets like that—human-habitable—are scattered really thinly in this galaxy. And I guess that mankind, having been a spacefaring species for tens of thousands of years, has developed some kind of genetic imprint of real pleasure at the sight of one hanging nearby in space.

I know that Mr. Heggens, our biology teacher, would say "flunk!" at something like that, and tell me I was thinking teleologically. But Mr. Heggens never had an idea of his own in his whole life, and he'd never been in space. If it wasn't in a textbook, for him it wasn't true, and it shouldn't be true for anyone else, either.

During several swings around the planet, broad-band radio scanning brought us no signals of human origin on or around this world, so I figured there weren't any picket ships on patrol and almost certainly no radio broadcasts on the surface. But here was what looked like a human-habitable planet right where the navigation program said Fanglith was supposed to be, give or take a few million miles, so we decided it had to be Fanglith.

I moved in closer on the nightside, looking for the lights of cities, and got nothing. That fitted my idea that any people there would be primitive. We spent most of the next three Standard days flying two miles above the local surface, following the dayside around the planet on a systematic line survey of continents and major islands. "Human-habitable" didn't necessarily mean that it actually had people on it, or that you could land anywhere and there they'd be. We needed to find them.

Deneen and I took turns standing six-hour watches, which made it a long three days. Most of Fanglith had no people at all, or at least so few that we didn't see any sign of them, particularly in the big equatorial jungles and the subarctic forests. But some areas had quite a lot of humans, with farms, scattered villages, and even an occasional town. We saw a couple of places big enough to call cities, but even they probably didn't have more than fifty or maybe a hundred thousand people each. They were seaports, with a bunch of crude little sailing ships and ships that traveled around using long oars.

There must have been a few other cities, too, that we didn't see. But on Fanglith, most people, almost all of them, lived out in the country.

At lots of places we stopped for a few minutes and looked things over under high magnification. Almost everything bigger than a village had a defensive wall around it, sometimes made of stone and sometimes only a stockade, maybe surrounded by a ditch. Even some of the villages had stockades around them.

Besides which, there were a lot of forts and castles scattered around, some of them large. But most were small, with a single big house and a few sheds and barns, surrounded by a wall of one kind or another. If the area had quite a bit of forest, the main building was usually of timber, and the wall or walls were usually a palisade of upright logs, or sometimes two palisades. If there wasn't much forest around, the forts were usually farther apart and made of stone. Some of the stone forts were big, and some only amounted to one small stone tower.

Sometimes we'd see a fort or castle in a district that hardly seemed to have any people at all in it, and some of them looked like they weren't used any longer. A lot of the men wore steel caps, and some wore a kind of coat that looked like metal fish scales and had to be armor. Quite a few carried bows, and others had spears. Almost all that seemed to be warriors of any kind wore swords.

We were glad we'd studied the material about the primitive felid societies. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have known what we were looking at—what a bow was for, or a castle—although I suppose we would have figured most of it out, or found out, if we'd lived long enough.

Something else the felid worlds gave us was a frame of social reference—something to judge what the people were like down there. They were dangerous, we both agreed on that.

We certainly didn't see any sign of a rebel staging area, so we had to abandon any real hope of that. There wasn't any indication, visual or instrumental, of power convertors, energy weapons, or even atmospheric flying craft. In fact, we didn't even see any primitive steam-powered machinery. With the exception of ships' sails or an occasional waterwheel, everything seemed to be powered by muscles—animal or human.

Some of the felid planets had been this primitive, while others had used steam for power, or internal combustion engines, or atomic fusion. But human civilization had had power convertors and the space distortion drive for probably 30,000 years, at least. Tradition said a lot longer than that; how much longer depended on which tradition. But anyway, there weren't any known human worlds that were primitive—except, now, this one.

Some, like Evdash, had certain more or less primitive practices. But that was a matter of public or private choice or local economics. Fanglith was probably the only human world that didn't use power converters and the space drive, so it looked as if the story of Emperor Karkzhuk and his prison planet were real instead of myth. We were looking at the evidence.

The most impressive single thing we saw, those three days, was a battle. If we'd had any doubt that this was a warlike world, the battle settled it. We were flying over a sort of semidesert when we noticed two dust clouds, so we detoured to see what was making them. It was two armies of cavalry, with thousands of men in each. The animals they rode on were the standard Fanglith riding animal, which is a lot like a gorn.

And there wasn't any question about it—they were getting ready to fight each other. We sat at about one and a half miles elevation, off to one side so we could see the whole panorama through the wraparound window, and the viewscreen could be adjusted to give us a close-up of men fighting, anywhere in the battle that we wanted.

It might sound kind of bloodthirsty to sit up there and watch real live people chop each other up as if they were in some kind of wild holodrama. But they were going to do it anyway, and it seemed to us that we might as well know what war was like on Fanglith.

In one of the armies the men wore robes, although they may have worn armor underneath. In the other army they wore jacket armor that seemed to be made of small metal plates. After a little bit both sides charged, holding their spears above their shoulders. Stabbing with them, they crashed into each other at a full gallop. Men were down all over the place, and riding animals without riders reared, or trotted in circles, all in a vast cloud of dust. Then the next ranks crashed into the first two, and within seconds, all you could see were men hacking at each other with swords.

Before long the men in the robes were getting overwhelmed, and those who could turned around and tried to get away. The other army chased them, shooting at them now with bows and chopping down anyone they caught up with. There must have been thousands of dead men lying around on the ground, and quite a lot of dead riding animals.

Neither Deneen nor I were saying much when we flew away. But we both were thinking that when it came to savagery, Fanglith had to rank with the wildest of the felid worlds. It was an interesting place to see, but we wouldn't want to live there. One of the things we'd learned in school was that intelligent felids were genetically more warlike and more given to personal violence than humans were. From what we'd seen, it didn't look like it.

The different parts of Fanglith had people of different races that looked more or less like the major branches of humanity in the Federation. And it made sense to suppose that our parents would land in the part where the people looked about like us, an area of probably over a million square miles. That didn't mean that's where mom and dad were, but it made sense to start searching there.

What I actually decided to do was fly a slow grid pattern at fifteen miles above sea level, starting from an ocean on the west. Our detection instrument was Bubba, who lay on the deck beside the control seat, alert to any sign of dad's or mom's minds. We'd been doing this for quite a few hours when he raised his head, his ears forward.

"Here!" he said.

I was surprised it was so soon. Slowing, I made a big circle. "Which way now?" I asked.

He was frowning. "Not sure. Go lower."

I did. "They not together," he said. "Far apart."

"Far apart?" said Deneen. "Where's their cutter?"

"Don't know." He got up and began to pace around, his face with what for him, was a worried expression.

"What's happening with them?" I asked. "What are they thinking about?"

"Can't read thoughts so far. Only close—maybe one, two miles if not many people. Far away, only know they be there."

Deneen had been scanning around while I circled. "Larn," she said, "something flashed down there, something shiny. It's in a forest meadow on the mountainside." While she was saying it, she reached for the magnification controls, and we watched the ground seem to jump up at us. There was the other cutter, sitting among the wildflowers! We were so relieved, we didn't even cheer. We didn't even yip!

Then Bubba threw cold water on our discovery. "They not there," he said. "Not at cutter; not even close. They two different directions from there."

I moved the mass proximity control lever and we started to drop; we were on the ground in less than a minute. That's a nice thing about the distortion drive—no sense of acceleration like there'd be in a floater. If I'd dropped that fast in a floater, it would have squashed us to drop so fast and then stop abruptly the way we did. The last hundred feet to the ground, of course, I took it a lot slower.

And if we hadn't found mom and dad, at least we'd found their cutter. It seemed to me that they were bound to come back to it—unless they'd been arrested by Federation political police or local authorities.

Our equipment locker had two blast pistols, a blast rifle, and two stunners. I got out the rifle and handed it to Deneen, then took one of the stunners.

"I'm going to look the other cutter over," I said to her. "You stand just inside the door here and keep your eyes open. If anyone shows up, other than mom or dad, let me know. And stop them." I turned to Bubba. "And you keep your mind tuned to anyone who might pop up."

"Nobody around here but us," he said. "Not for mile. No danger."

I didn't know what to say to that. I hadn't even thought to ask him! So I just said "good," and went out. But I took the stunner with me anyway.

The other cutter was open, and there was a skinny animal inside, maybe two feet long, including the tail, shiny and near-black. When I came in, it panicked, darted around quick as anything for two or three seconds, then ran down the short aisle and into the bathroom. It was a good place for him; he smelled bad. I looked into each of the little sleeping cabins, then the systems chamber, and finally the bathroom. The animal had left, apparently while I was in the systems chamber, saving himself a headache from the stunner. No one but me was in the cutter. And there was no message, written or in the computer.

So I went back to our own cutter and told them what I'd found. "I have the feeling they haven't been there for a while," I added. "Several days maybe." I turned to Bubba. "Which directions are they from here?"

Bubba motioned with his head. "Dad that way. Mom that way. Pretty far."

"Hoo boy!" I said. "Anybody got any ideas?"

"Sure," Deneen answered. "We fly first in one direction and find out where one of them is, and then the other. Then we decide what to do next."

Not terribly brilliant, I thought, but very doable. I nodded, touched the key that closed the door, then lifted a couple of miles and started southwest. "Is this the right heading for mom?" I asked Bubba.

He nodded.

"How far?"

"Maybe twenty miles."

One thing we knew was that Bubba's expressions of distance got a little vague beyond a mile or so. Twenty could mean anything from about twelve to maybe thirty; twenty was a useful statement of general magnitude. I made a couple of course adjustments on Bubba's instructions and pretty soon we were parked three miles above a set of stone buildings where he assured us she was. The buildings were connected by high stone walls to form a large enclosed courtyard, and they were 21.6 miles from the other cutter.

Bubba was grinning at me. One of the worst things in the galaxy, I thought at him, is a smug canid.

His eyes laughed.

The place below didn't look like a fortress, but it was built so it could be defended. Outside the walls were what looked like vegetable gardens. Inside were flower beds, shrubs, and small roundish trees that might be fruit trees. Women in long heavy-looking robes were working in the gardens. The few men we saw there seemed to be guards or soldiers.

When we'd first arrived at Fanglith, I'd instructed the computer to establish a coordinate grid for the planet. That way, any place we might want to return to, we could record on the grid system. Now I entered the information, "mom's location," into the computer for the coordinates we were at.

"Can you pick up anything from here?" Deneen asked Bubba. "Anything about how she'd doing or what she's thinking?"

"No strong feeling now, but she all right," he answered. "About think—me not know. Too many minds down there together, and she not think to me."

"Can you find dad from here," I asked, "or do we need to go back to the other cutter and take it from there?"

"This way," he said, pointing with his nose.

It was about twenty-five miles, again with a couple of minor course corrections. We took about five minutes to get there, and I recorded the location while we looked the place over. It was a lot like the place where mom was, but bigger, and the fields around it were a lot bigger. Here we didn't see any women at all, only men, and like the women at the other place, they wore robes. There were quite a lot of them working in the fields, hoeing and pulling weeds.

And as with mom, Bubba couldn't sort out dad's thoughts or images from the others.

"Can you tell if he's one of the men working in the fields?" Deneen asked Bubba. "Maybe we could land close by and pick him up."

"No. He inside," Bubba said. "And me think not good for us to be seen. Not go any lower where people are."

"Why?" I asked.

"Not know. Just feel that way."

"Well, at least we know where they are," I said. "And maybe they need to be in those places. Maybe they're doing something they need to do here."

But even while I was saying it, I found myself not believing it.

While we'd been talking, I'd been fiddling with the viewer stick, scanning idly here and there. The buildings were on a slight hill, with a dirt road leading up to the gate. About a mile away, a group of people were walking toward them on foot. Most of the people were more or less ragged.

Then some men came riding out of the nearby forest. They were about as ragged as the people on foot, but the riders had weapons, some of them swords and some bows. I sensed trouble, and all three of us watched. The men with swords jumped off their animals and began to beat up and rob the people. One of the victims held on tightly to a small bag and wouldn't let go, and before we realized what was happening, one of the robbers started hacking him with his short sword. This seemed to excite the other robbers, and within a few seconds several other victims had been stabbed or hacked or shot with an arrow.

When the robbers had everything they wanted, which included their victims' ragged cloaks, they got back on their animals and rode away. The victims who could still walk then trudged on again toward the stone buildings.

The three of us looked at one another. "A nice place," I said.

Deneen nodded. "What do we do now?"

I thought for a second. "I'm going back and lock the other cutter. I'd hate to have people like those bandits get hold of a blast rifle."

Deneen looked thoughtful as we started back. After a couple of minutes she said, "I can't believe mom and dad would leave the cutter like that on their own and leave the door open. Maybe someone was there when they landed, and went over and ambushed them when they came out."

"Well," I said, "the cutter didn't look as if it had been looted. It wasn't messed up or anything." We were directly above it now, looking down at it in the viewer. "And that's a remote place down there. Not the sort of place you'd expect someone to be hanging around."

"True," she said. "And I suppose if people like the robbers we just watched saw a cutter come down out of the sky to land, they'd probably still be running."

I dropped us toward the meadow, then settled the last few yards gently, imagining a band of robbers seeing the cutter land, then running in panic down the mountain, crashing into trees and falling over rocks and blowdowns. "Do you suppose mom and dad have their key cards?" I asked. "It would be terrible if they came back and couldn't get in the cutter."

Instead of answering, she said, "Let me go over there this time."

"How come?"

"It's my turn," she said simply.

I shrugged. It's kind of hard to argue with something like that unless you've got a good reason. So this time I was the one who waited around with the blast rifle, while Deneen walked over with a stunner. I watched her disappear inside. About four or five minutes later she came back out and pressed a key card against the plate, closing the door. Then she stood there with her back to us for about a minute. It looked as if she was writing on the door. Next she walked to the nose of the cutter and knelt down. After that she came back.

"What was all that about?" I asked.

She grinned and held up a marking pen. "It's locked up tight. There was a key card on mom's dressing counter. I hid it outside and wrote on the door where to look for it: directly under the manufacturer's logo on the ship's nose. No one but us on this planet can read it."

"Federation agents can, if they find the cutter," I said.

"No they can't," she answered. "I thought of that." She was still grinning. "Remember that storm last winter when you killed a day of sleet and snow inventing an alphabet for Bubba's language? I wrote it in that—in Bubba's language."

"But can dad and mom read it?" I asked.

"Sure. They'll figure it out. You showed it to all of us and explained it, and we all fooled around writing stuff with it. If I remembered it, they will. Dad never seems to forget anything, and mom left me a note in it once. They'll figure it out."

Her grin went away but her eyes stayed friendly. "You really are a hotshot, brother mine. I'd never have thought of developing an alphabet for Bubba."

"That brings up something else," I said. It was time to change the subject anyway. I've always gotten uncomfortable when anyone praises me. "We need to be able to ask questions on this planet, which means we have to learn the language."

I raised us above the meadow to about eight miles, then slid west about twelve, out over the foothills and valley country where people were. "Why don't you check out the computer and see if Dad got a linguistic analysis program for it. I'm going to look the country over and hope for a bright idea."

I set the viewer on a magnification that made people on the surface look about the size of large bugs, increasing it now and then for closer looks. The country was more forest than fields by quite a lot. There was a main dirt road that wound through woods and farmlands, climbing eastward into the higher mountains. Smaller roads branched off of it here and there, mostly going to what looked to me like large fortified houses. There was even one made out of stone, like the castles of Grounia. Near each of these was one or more tiny hamlets with two or three dozen buildings—huts and sheds—and a patchwork of fields that apparently were farmed by the people who lived in the hamlet.

But it was the main road that interested me most because it had a variety of people. They walked along in dribs and drabs, most of them ragged and poor. Here and there was someone riding on an animal, or a small group of riders.

Most of the riders were warrior types. They wore armor—the kind that, from a distance, looks like fish scales. I learned later that it's called chain mail. And each of them carried a sword and spear. Some led a pack animal behind them.

Whenever one of the warriors met someone walking, the person or group on foot would get out of the warrior's way, often holding out their hands as if begging. Except for the mounted warriors, most travelers traveled in small groups, I suppose to be harder to rob.

Now and then there was a walker who dressed differently from the others, more or less like the men in the fields where dad was. They wore gray or brown robes down to their ankles and a hood that was thrown back in the pleasant weather. Their heads were bald on top, and the bald spot seemed to be artificial instead of natural, because usually there was a ring of hair all the way around it, even in front.

None of the robed men carried a visible weapon, although most walked with a staff about as long as themselves.

"Larn," said Deneen, looking up at me, "the computer not only has a linguistics program, but it looks easy to use. All we need to do is give it a few dozen defined words to start with, and some sentences. We don't have to know what the sentences mean. Then it will tell us what to do next. Apparently it can develop a whole vocabulary and grammar that way."

That got my attention, and I started to feel pretty good. Because now I had something positive to do, a way to do it, and a use for it when I got it done.

"Good," I said back to her. "I know just how we're going to get our words."

 

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