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THE THREE-CORNERED WHEEL

I

"No!"

Rebo Legnor's-Child, Marchwarden of Gilrigor, sprang back from the picture as if it had come alive. "What are you thinking of?" he gasped. "Burn that thing! Now!" One hand lifted shakily toward the fire in the great brazier, whose flames relieved a little the gloom of the audience chamber. "Over there. I saw nothing and you showed me nothing. Do you understand?"

David Falkayn let fall the sheet of paper on which he had made the sketch. It fluttered to the table, slowly through an air pressure a fourth again as great as Earth's. "What—" His voice broke in a foolish squeak. Annoyance at that crowded out fear. He braced his shoulders and regarded the Ivanhoan squarely. "What is the matter?" he asked. "It is just a drawing."

"Of the malkino." Rebo shuddered. "And you not even belonging to our kind, let alone a Consecrate."

Falkayn stared at him, as if anyone of Terrestrial descent could read expressions on that unhuman face. Seen by the dull red sunlight slanting through narrow windows, Rebo looked more like a lion than a man, and not very much like either. The body was only roughly anthropoid: bipedal, two-armed, but short and thick in the torso, long and thick in the limbs, with a forward-leaning posture that reduced a sheer two meters of height to approximately Falkayn's level. The three fingers had one more joint than a man's, and narrow black nails; the thumbs were on the opposite side of the hands from those of Genus Homo; the feet were digitigrade. Mahogany fur covered the entire skin, but each hair bore tiny barbs, so that the effect was of rough plumage. The head was blocky and round-eared, the face flat, noseless, with breathing apertures below the angle of the great jaws and enormous green eyes above an astonishingly sensitive, almost womanlike mouth. But whatever impression that conveyed was overwhelmed by the tawny leonine mane which framed the countenance and spilled down the muscular back, and by the tufted tail that lashed the ankles. A pair of short scaly trousers and a leather baldric, from which hung a wicked-looking ax, enhanced the wild effect.

Nevertheless, Falkayn knew, inside that big skull was a brain as good as his own. The trouble was, it had not evolved on Earth. And when, in addition to every inborn strangeness, the mind was shaped by a culture that no man really understood . . . how much communication was possible?

The boy wet his lips. The dry cold air of Ivanhoe had chapped them. He didn't lay a hand on his blaster, but he became acutely aware of its comforting drag at his hip. Somehow he found words:

"I beg your pardon if I have given offense. You will understand that foreigners may often transgress through ignorance. Can you tell me what is wrong?"

Rebo's taut crouch eased a trifle. His eyes, seeing further into the red end of the spectrum than Falkayn's, probed corners which were shadows to the visitor. No one else stood on the floor or behind the grotesquely carved stone pillars. Only the yellow flames acrackle in the brazier, the acridity of smoke from unearthly wood, stirred in the long room. Outside—it seemed suddenly very far away—Falkayn heard the endless wind of the Gilrigor uplands go booming.

"Yes," the Marchwarden said, "I realize you acted unwittingly. And you, for your part, should not doubt that I remain friendly to you—not just because you are my guest at this moment, but because of the fresh breath you have brought to this stagnant land of ours."

"That we have perhaps brought," Falkayn corrected. "The future depends on whether we live or die, remember. And that in turn depends on your help." Well put! he congratulated himself. Schuster ought to have heard that. Maybe then he'd stop droning at me about how I'll never make merchant status if I don't learn to handle words.

"I will not be able to help you if they flay me," Rebo answered sharply. "Burn that thing, I say."

Falkayn squinted through the murk at his drawing. It showed a large flatbed wagon with eight wheels, to be drawn by a team of twenty fastigas. All the way from the spaceship to this castle, he had been aglow with visions of how awed and delighted the noble would be. He had seen himself, no longer Davy-this-and-Davy-that, hey-boy-c'mere, apprentice and unpaid personal servant to Master Polesotechnician Martin Schuster: but Falkayn of Hermes, a Prometheus come to Larsum with the gift of the wheel. What's gone wrong? he thought wildly; and then, with the bitterness common at his seventeen years: Why does everything always go wrong?

Nevertheless he crossed the floor of inlaid shells and cast the paper into the brazier. It flared up and crumbled to ash.

Turning, he saw that Rebo had relaxed. The Marchwarden poured himself a cupful of wine from a carafe on the table and tossed it off at a gulp. "Good," he rumbled. "I wish you could partake with me. It is distressful not to offer refreshment to a guest."

"You know that your foods would poison my race," Falkayn said. "That is one reason why we must transport the workmaker from Gilrigor to our ship, and soon. Will you tell me what is bad about the device I have illustrated? It can be easily built. Its kind—wagons, we call them—were among the most important things my people ever invented. They had much to do with our becoming more than—"

He checked himself just before he said "savages" or "barbarians." Rebo's hereditary job was to keep such tribes on their proper side of the Kasunian Mountains. Larsum was a civilized country, with agriculture, metallurgy, towns, roads, trade, a literate class.

But no wheels. Burdens went on the backs of citizens or their animals, by boat, by travois, by sledge in winter—never on wheels. Now that he thought about it, Falkayn remembered that not even rollers were employed.

"The idea is that round objects turn," he floundered.

Rebo traced a sign in the air. "Best not to speak of it." He changed his mind with soldierly briskness. "However, we must. Very well, then. The fact is that the malkino is too holy to be put to base use. The penalty for transgressing this law is death by flaying, lest God's wrath fall on the entire land."

Falkayn struggled with the language. The educator tapes aboard the What Cheer had given him fluency, but could not convey a better idea of semantic subtleties than the first expedition to Ivanhoe had gotten; and those men hadn't stayed many weeks. The word he mentally translated as "holy" implied more than dedication to spiritual purposes. There were overtones of potency, mana, and general ineffability. Never mind. "What does malkino mean?"

"A . . . a roundedness. I may not draw it for you, only a Consecrate may do that. But it is something perfectly round."

"Ah, I see. A circle, we would call it, or a sphere if solid. A wheel is circular. Well, I suppose we could make our wheels slightly imperfect."

"No." The maned head shook. "Until the imperfection became so gross that the wheels would not work anyway, the thing is impossible. Even if the Consecrates would allow it—and I know quite well they will not, as much from hostility to you as from dogma—the peasants would rise in horror and butcher you." Rebo's eyes glowed in the direction of Falkayn's gun. "Yes, I realize you have powerful, fire-throwing weapons. But there are only four of you. What avail against thousands of warriors, shooting from the cover of hills and woods?"

Falkayn hearkened back to what he had seen in Aesca, on his westward ride along the Sun's Way, and now in this stronghold. Architecture was based on sharp-cornered polygons. Furniture and utensils were square or oblong. The most ceremonial objects, like Rebo's golden wine goblet, went no further than to employ elliptical cross-sections, or mere arcs of true circles.

He felt ill with dismay. "Why?" he choked. "What makes a . . . a figure . . . so holy?"

"Well—" Rebo lowered himself uncomfortably to a chair, draping his tail over the rest across the back. He fiddled with his octagonal ax haft and didn't look at the other. "Well, ancient usage. I can read, of course, but I am no scholar. The Consecrates can tell you more. Still . . . the circle and the sphere are the signs of God. In a way, they are God. You see them in the sky. The sun and the moons are spheres. So is the world, however imperfect; and the Consecrates say that the planets have the same shape, and the stars are set inside the great ball of the universe. All the heavenly bodies move in circles. And, well, circle and sphere are the perfect shapes. Are they not? Everything perfect is a direct manifestation of God."

Remembering a little about Classical Greek philosophy—even if the human colony on Hermes had broken away from Earth and established itself as a grand duchy, it remained proud of its heritage and taught ancient history in the schools—Falkayn could follow that logic. His impulse was to blurt: "You're wrong! No planet or star is a true globe, and orbits are ellipses, and your damned little red dwarf sun isn't the center of the cosmos anyway. I've been out there and I know!" But Schuster had drilled enough caution into him that he checked himself. He'd accomplish nothing but to stiffen the enmity of the priests, and perhaps add the enmity of Rebo, who still wanted to be his friend.

How could he prove a claim that went against three or four thousand years of tradition? Larsum was a single country, cut off by mountain, desert, ocean, and howling savages from the rest of the world. It had no more than the vaguest rumors of what went on beyond its borders. From Rebo's standpoint, the only reasonable supposition was that the furless aliens with the beaks above their mouths had flown here from some distant continent. Reviewing the first expedition's reports of how upset and indignant the Consecrates at Aesca had gotten when told that its ship came from the stars, how hotly they had denied the possibility, Schuster had cautioned his fellows to avoid that topic. The only thing which mattered was to get the hell off this planet before they starved to death.

Falkayn's shoulders slumped. "My people have found in their travels that it does not pay to dispute the religious beliefs of others," he said. "Very well, I grant you wheels are forbidden. But then what can we do?"

Rebo looked up again with his disconcertingly intelligent gaze. He was no ham-headed medieval baron, Falkayn realized. His civilization was old, and the rough edges had been worn off its warrior class, off peasants and artisans and traders, as well as the priest-scribe-poet-artist-engineer-scientist Consecrates. Rebo Legnor's-Child might be likened to an ancient samurai, if any parallels to human history were possible. He'd grasped the principle of the wheel at once, and—

"Understand, I, and many of my breed, feel more than simply benevolent toward your kind," he said low. "When the first ship came, several years ago, a lightning flash went through the land. Many of us hoped it meant the end of . . . of certain irksome restrictions. Dealing with civilized outlanders should bring new knowledge, new powers, new ways of life, into this realm where nothing has changed for better than two millennia. I want most sincerely to help you, for my own gain as well as yours."

Besides the need for tact, Falkayn hadn't the heart to answer that the Polesotechnic League had no interest in trading with Larsum, or with any other part of Ivanhoe, There was nothing here that other worlds didn't produce better and cheaper. The first expedition had simply come in search of a place to establish an emergency repair depot, and this planet was simply the least unsalubrious one in this stellar neighborhood. The expedition had observed from orbit that Larsum possessed the most advanced culture. They landed, made contact, learned the language and a little bit of the folkways, then asked permission to erect a large building which none but visitors like themselves would be able to enter.

The request was grudgingly granted, less because of the metals offered in payment than because the Consecrates feared trouble if they refused. Even so, they demanded that the construction be well away from the capital; evidently they wanted to minimize the number of Larsans who might be contaminated by foreign ideas. Having completed the job and bestowed an arbitrary name on the planet, the expedition departed. Their data, with appropriate educator tapes, were issued to all ships that might take the Pleiades route. Everybody hoped that it would never be necessary to use the information. But luck had run out for the What Cheer.

Falkayn said only: "I do not see how you can help. What other way can that thing be moved, than on a wagon?"

"Could it not be taken apart, moved piece by piece, and put back together at your ship? I can supply a labor force."

"No." Damn! How do you explain the construction of a unitized thermonuclear generator to somebody who's never seen a waterwheel? You don't. "Except for minor attachments, it cannot be disassembled, at least not without tools which we do not carry."

"Are you certain that it weighs too much to be transported on skids?"

"Over roads like yours, yes, I think it does. If this were winter, perhaps a sledge would suffice. But we will be dead before snow falls again. Likewise, a barge would do, but no navigable streams run anywhere near, and we would not survive the time necessary to dig a canal."

Not for the first time, Falkayn cursed the depot builders, that they hadn't included a gravity sled with the other stored equipment. But then, every ship carried one or more gravity sleds. Who could have foreseen that the What Cheer's would be out of commission? Or that she couldn't at least hop over to the building herself? Or, if anybody thought of such possibilities, they must have reasoned that a wagon could be made; the xenologists had noted that wheels were unknown, and never thought to ask if that was because of a law. A portable crane had certainly been provided, to load and unload whatever was needed for spaceship repair. In fact, so well stocked was the depot that it did not include food, because any crew who could limp here at all should be able to fix their craft in a few days.

"And I daresay no other vessel belonging to your nation will arrive in time to save you," Rebo said.

"No. The . . . the distances we cover in our travels are great beyond comprehension. We were bound for a remote frontier world—country, if you prefer—to open certain negotiations about trade rights. To avoid competition, we left secretly. Nobody at our destination has any idea that we are coming, and our superiors at home do not expect us back for several months. By the time they begin to worry and start a search—and it will take weeks to visit every place where we might have landed—our food stocks will long have been exhausted. We carried minimal supplies, you see, in order to be heavily laden with valuables for—uh—"

"For bribes." Rebo made a sound that might correspond to a chuckle, "Yes. Well, then, we must think of something else. I repeat, I will do anything I can to help you. The building was erected here, rather than in some other marchland, because I insisted; and that was precisely because I hoped to see more of your voyagers." His hand went back to his ax. Falkayn had noticed before that the heads of implements were heat-shrunk to the handles. Now the reason came to him: rivets would be sacrilegious. The fingers closed with a snap and Rebo said harshly:

"I am as pious as the next person, but I cannot believe God meant the Consecrates to freeze every life in Larsum into an eternal pattern. There was an age of heroes once, before Ourato brought Uplands and Lowlands together beneath him. Such an age can come again, if the grip upon us is broken."

He seemed to realize he had said too much and added in haste, "Let us not speak of such high matters, though. The important thing is to get that workmaker to your wounded ship. If you and I can think of no lawful means, perhaps your comrades can. So take them back the word—the Marchwarden of Gilrigor cannot allow them to make a, a wagon; but he remains their well-wisher."

"Thank you," Falkayn mumbled. Abruptly the darkness of the room became stifling. "I had best start back tomorrow."

"So soon? You had a hard trip here, and a short and unhappy conversation. Aesca is so far off that a day or two of rest cannot make any difference."

Falkayn shook his head. "The sooner I return, the better. We have not much time to lose, you know."

 

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