The good old stuff, p.51
The Good Old Stuff, page 51
He set down the goblet and rose, throwing off the light robe, and began to dress for dinner. For a moment, he wondered whether the Democrats or the Republicans would win the election this year—he was sure it was the same year, now, in a different dimension of time—and how the Cold War and the Space Race were coming along.
Verkan Wall, his story finished, relaxed in his chair. There was no direct light on this terrace, only a sky-reflection from the city lights below, so dim that the tips of their cigarettes glowed visibly.
There were four of them. the Chief of Paratime Police, the Director of the Paratime Commission, the Chairman of the Paratemporal Board of Trade, and Chief’s Assistant Verkan Wall, who would be chief in another hundred days.
“You took no action about him?” the director asked.
“None at all. The man’s no threat to the Paratime Secret. He knows he isn’t in his own past, and from things he ought to find and hasn’t he knows he isn’t in his own future. So he knows he’s in the corresponding present in a second time dimension, and he knows that somebody else is able to travel laterally in time. I grant that. But he’s keeping it to himself. On Aryan-Transpacific, in the idiom of his original timeline, he has it made. He won’t take any chances on unmaking it.
“Look what he has that the EuropoAmerican Sector could never give him.
He is a great nobleman; they’re out of fashion on EuropoAmerican, where the Common Man is the ideal. He’s going to marry a beautiful princess, that’s even out of fashion for children’s fairy tales. He’s a sword-swinging soldier of fortune, and they’ve vanished from his own nuclear-weapons world. He’s in command of a good little army, and making a better one out of it, and he has a cause worth fighting for.
Any speculations about what space-time continuum he’s in he’ll keep inside his own skull.
“Look at the story he put out. He told Xentos that he had been thrown into the past from a time in the far future by sorcery. Sorcery, on that timeline, is a perfectly valid scientific explanation of anything.
Xentos, with his permission, passed the story on, under oath of secrecy, to Ptosphes, Rylla, and Chartiphon. The story they gave out is that he’s an exiled prince from a country outside local geographical knowledge. Regular defense in depth, all wrapped around the real secret, and everybody has an acceptable explanation.”‘ “How’d you get it, then?” the Board Chairman asked.
“From Xentos, at the feast. I got him into a theological discussion, and slipped some hypno truth-drug into his wine. He doesn’t remember, now, that he told me.”
“Well, nobody else on that timeline’ll get it that way,” the Commission director agreed. “But didn’t you take a chance getting those things of Morrison’s out of the temple? Was that necessary?”
“No. We ran a conveyer in the night of the feast, when the temple was empty. The next morning, the priests all cried, ‘A miracle! Dralm has accepted the offering!” I was there and saw it.
Morrison doesn’t believe that, he thinks some of these pack traders who left Hostigos the next morning stole the stuff. I know Harmakros’ cavalrymen were stopping people and searching wagons and packs.
Publicly, of course, he has to believe in the miracle.
“As to the necessity, yes. This stuff will be found on Morrison’s original timeline, first the clothing, with the numbered badge still on the tunic, and, later, in connection with some crime we’ll arrange for the purpose, the revolver.
They won’t explain anything, they’ll make more of a mystery, but it will be a mystery in normal terms of what’s locally accepted as possible.”
“Well, this is all very interesting,” the Trade Board chairman said, “but what have I to do with it, officially?”
“Trenth, you disappoint me,” the Commission director said. “This Styphon’s House racket is perfect for penetration of that subsector, and in a couple of centuries it’ll be a very valuable subsector to have penetrated.
We’ll just move in on Styphon’s House, and take it over, the way we did the Yat-Zar temples on the Hulgun Sector, and build that up to general economic and political control.”
“You’ll have to stay off Morrison’s timeline, though,” Tortha Karf said.
“You certainly will!” He was vehement about it. “We’ll turn that timeline over to the University, here, for study, and quarantine it absolutely to everybody else. And about five adjoining timelines, for control study. You know what we have here?” He was becoming excited about it. “We have the start of an entirely new subsector, and we have the divarication point absolutely identified, the first time we’ve been able to do that except from history.
Now, here; I’ve already established myself with those people as Verkan the Grefftscharr trader. I’ll get back, now and then, about as frequently as plausible for traveling by horse, and set up a trading depot. A building big enough to put a conveyer head into ...”
Tortha Karf began laughing. “I knew it,” he said. “You’d find some way!”
“All right. We all have hobbies; yours is fruit-growing and rabbit-hunting on Fifth Level Sicily. Well, my hobby farm is going to be the Kalvan Subsector, Fourth Level Aryan-Transpacific. I’m only a hundred and twenty years old, now. In a couple of centuries, when I’m ready to retire ...”
Semley’s Necklace
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin is so universally respected as a writer these days, and so honored as one of science fiction’s most profound thinkers and complex and subtle artists, that it’s sometimes forgotten that when she first appeared, the writer that she was most often compared to was Leigh Brackett—indeed, she was referred to on at least one occasion as “the New Leigh Brackett.” It’s often also forgotten these days that her first few books—Rocannon World, the strongly van Vogtian City of Illusions, and her best early book, the underrated and still largely overlooked (even by Le Guin fans) Planet of Exile—were published by Ace as pulp-adventure Space Opera of the most basic, lowest—common denominator sort (much as Samuel R. Delany’s first books were also being published as stock Space Opera, at about the same time, by the same publishing house), with garish pulp covers and lurid pulp blurbs such as “Wherever he went, his superscience made him a legendary figure!” and “Was he a human meteor or a time-bomb from the stars?”
As it turned out, Le Guin had a greater destiny to fulfill than to become merely the new Queen Of The SpaceWays—but although she became more than that, and explored literary territories far beyond the purview of Space Opera, the New Leigh Brackett lurks somewhere in her still, a vital component part of her artistic makeup. Indeed, her recent return to the star-spanning, Hainish-settled interstellar community known as the Ekumen (the fictional universe that provided the setting for those early novels) in stories such as “Forgiveness Day” and “A Woman’s Liberation” and “Another Story” demonstrates that she can still spin a tale of Interplanetary Adventure and Intrigue as fast-paced and compelling and compulsively readable as any ever produced by anyone anywhere. with the additional benefit of being able to explore politics, human sexuality, competing social modes and models for civilization, and the fundamental questions of life, death, and moral responsibility, perhaps a bit more fully and more complexly than that early Le Guin of the garish Ace Doubles would have been allowed to do. But then, one thing she has in common with Brackett, and perhaps the thing that made critics compare Le Guin to her in the first place, is that Le Guin rarely if ever forgets about Story, and the fact that the deep heart of any story is provided by the people who live in it.
A lesson she already knew well at the very beginning of her career, as the haunting and yet suspenseful story that follows, one of her first sales, demonstrates very well ...
Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best-known writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre—even ignoring the rest of Le Guin’s work, the impact of this one novel alone on future SF and future SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea would be almost as influential on future generations of High Fantasy writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for children’s literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include The Lathe of Heaven, The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, Searoad, and the controversial multi-media novel Always Coming Home. She has had six collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, and her most recent book, Four Ways to Forgiveness.
How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away?—planets without names, called by their people simply The World, planets without history, where the past is the matter of myth, and a returning explorer finds his own doings of a few years back have become the gestures of a god. Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds.
In trying to tell the story of a man, an ordinary League scientist, who went to such a nameless half-known world not many years ago, one feels like an archaeologist amid millennial ruins, now struggling through choked tangles of leaf, flower, branch and vine to the sudden bright geometry of a wheel or a polished cornerstone, and now entering some commonplace, sunlit doorway to find inside it the darkness, the impossible flicker of a flame, the glitter of a jewel, the half-glimpsed movement of a woman’s arm. How can you tell fact from legend, truth from truth?
Through Rocannon’s story the jewel, the blue glitter seen briefly, returns. With it let us begin, here:
Galactic Area 8, No. 62: FOMALHAUT II. High-Intelligence Life Forms: Species Contacted: Species I.
A. Gdemiar (singular Gdem): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid nocturnal troglodytes, 120-135 cm. in height, light skin, dark head-hair. When contacted these cave-dwellers possessed a rigidly stratified oligarchic urban society modified by partial colonial telepathy, and a technologically oriented Early Steel culture.
Technology enhanced to Industrial, Point C, during League Mission of 252-254. In 254 an Automatic Drive ship (to-from New South Georgia) was presented to oligarchs of the Kiriensea Area community. Status C-Prime.
B. Fiia (singular Fian): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid, diurnal, av. ca.
130 cm. in height, observed individuals generally light in skin and hair. Brief contacts indicated village and nomadic communal societies, partial colonial telepathy, also some indication of short-range TK.
The race appears a-technological and evasive, with minimal and fluid culture-patterns. Currently untaxable. Status EQuery.
Species II.
Liuar (singular Liu): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid, diurnal, av.
height above 170 cm this species possesses a fortress/village, clan-descent society, a blocked technology (Bronze), and feudal-heroic culture. Note horizontal social cleavage into a pseudo-races: (a) Olgyior, “midmen,” light-skinned and dark-haired; (b) Angyar, “lords,” very tall, dark-skinned, yellow-haired—“That’s her,” said Rocannon, looking up from the Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-Forms at the very tall, dark-skinned, yellow-haired woman who stood halfway down the long museum hall. She stood still and erect, crowned with bright hair, gazing at something in a display case.
Around her fidgeted four uneasy and unattractive dwarves.
“I didn’t know Fomalhaut II had all those people besides the trogs,” said Ketho, the curator.
“I didn’t either. There are even some ‘llnconfirmed’ species listed here, that they never contacted. Sounds like time for a more thorough survey mission to the place. Well, now at least we know what she is.”
“I wish there were some way of knowing who she is .... “ She was of an ancient family, a descendant of the first kings of the Angyar, and for all her poverty her hair shone with the pure, steadfast gold of her inheritance. The little people, the Fiia, bowed when she passed them, even when she was a barefoot child running in the fields, the light and fiery comet of her hair brightening the troubled winds of Kirien.
She was still very young when Durhal of Hallan saw her, courted her, and carried her away from the ruined towers and windy halls of her childhood to his own high home.—n Hallan on the mountainside there was no comfort either, though splendor endured.
The windows were unglassed, the stone floors hare; in cold year one might wake to see the night’s snow in long, low drifts beneath each window. Durhal’s bride stood with narrow bare feet on the snowy floor, braiding up the fire of her hair and laughing at her young husband in the silver mirror that hung in their room. That mirror, and his mother’s bridal-gown sewn with a thousand tiny crystals, were all his wealth. Some of his lesser kinfolk of Hallan still possessed wardrobes of brocaded clothing, furniture of gilded wood, silver harness for their steeds, armor and silver mounted swords, jewels and jewelry—and on these last Durhal’s bride looked enviously, glancing back at a gemmed coronet or a golden brooch even when the wearer of the ornament stood aside to let her pass, deferent to her birth and marriage-rank.
Fourth from the High Seat of Hallan Revel sat Durhal and his bride Seen-ley, so close to Hallanlord that the old man often poured wine for Semley with his own hand, and spoke of hunting with his nephew and heir Durhal, looking on the young pair with a grim, unhopeful love. Hope came hard to the Angyar of Hallan and all the Western Lands, since the Starlords had appeared with their houses that leaped about on pillars of fire and their awful weapons that could level hills. They had interfered with all the old ways and wars, and though the sums were small there was terrible shame to the Angyar in having to pay a tax to them, a tribute for the Starlords’ war that was to be fought with some strange enemy, somewhere in the hollow places between the stars, at the end of years. “It will be your war too,” they said, but for a generation now the Angyar had sat in idle shame in their revel-halls, watching their double swords rust, their sons grow up without ever striking a blow in battle, their daughters marry poor men, even midmen, having no dowry of heroic loot to bring a noble husband. Hallanlord’s face was bleak when he watched the fair-haired couple and heard their laughter as they drank bitter wine and joked together in the cold, ruinous, resplendent fortress of their race.
Semley’s own face hardened when she looked down the hall and saw, in seats far below hers, even down among the halfbreeds and the midmen, against white skins and black hair, the gleam and flash of precious stones.
She herself had brought nothing in dowry to her husband, not even a silver hairpin. The dress of a thousand crystals she had put away in a chest for the wedding-day of her daughter, if daughter it was to be.
It was, and they called her Haldre, and when the fuzz on her little brown skull grew longer it shone with steadfast gold, the inheritance of the lordly generations, the only gold she would ever possess ....
Semley did not speak to her husband of her discontent. For all his gentleness to her, Durhal in his pride had only contempt for envy, for vain wishing, and she dreaded his contempt. But she spoke to Durhal’s sister Durossa.
“My family had a great treasure once,” she said. “It was a necklace all of gold, with the blue jewel set in the center—sapphire?”
Durossa shook her head, smiling, not sure of the name either. It was late in warm year, as these Northern Angyar called the summer of the eight-hundred-day year, beginning the cycle of months anew at each equinox; to Semley it seemed an outlandish calendar, a mid-mannish reckoning. Her family was at an end, but it had been older and purer than the race of any of these northwestern marchlanders, who mixed too freely with the Olgyior.
She sat with Durossa in the sunlight on a stone windowseat high up in the Great Tower, where the older woman’s apartment was. Widowed young, childless, Durossa had been given in second marriage to Hallanlord, who was her father’s brother. Since it was a kinmarriage and a second marriage on both sides she had not taken the rifle of Hallanlady, which Semley would some day bear; but she sat with the old lord in the High Seat and ruled with him his domains. Older than her brother Durhal, she was fond of his young wife, and delighted in the bright-haired baby Haldre.
“It was bought,” Semley went on, “with all the money my forebear Ley-Then got when he conquered the Southern Fiefs—all the money from a whole kingdom, think of it, for one jewel! Oh, it would outshine anything here in Hallan, surely, even those crystals like koob-eggs your cousin Issar wears. It was so beautiful they gave it a name of its own; they called it the Eye of the Sea. My great-grandmother wore it.”
“You never saw it?” the older woman asked lazily, gazing down at the green mountainslopes where long, long summer sent its hot and restless winds straying among the forests and whirling down white roads to the seacoast far away.
“It was lost before I was born.”
“No, my father said it was stolen before the Starlords ever came to our realm. He wouldn’t talk of it, but there was an old midwoman full of tales who always told me the Fiia would know where it was.”
“Ah, the Fiia I should like to see!” said Durossa. “They’re in so many songs and tales; why do they never come to the Western Lands?”
“Too high, too cold in winter, I think. They like the sunlight of the valleys of the south.”
“Are they like the Clayfolk?”
“Those I’ve never seen; they keep away from us in the south. Aren’t they white like midmen, and misformed? The Fiia are fair; they look like children, only thinner, and wiser. Oh, I wonder if they know where the necklace is, who stole it and where he hid it! Think, Durossa—if I could ‘i?
