West Of The Sun Part 25

"Difficult, Elis. We think (there are other theories) that each star with planets was once two--a binary, our astronomers called it--"

Someone thin and small came near to Paul, speaking delicately, in an extremity of pain, and not to him. "Nisana," Pakriaa said. "Nisana--"

Nisana was looking up, a little afraid, uncertain. "Princess?"

"Only Pakriaa.... Nisana--I saw how you spoke to the Vestoian, how she was quiet. If you will bring her--and Tejron too? And we go and listen--Tocwright is talking about the stars--the world--I think, maybe, we tell her what he says? Will you come with me, Nisana?"

Part Three

The Year Ten

1

_Argo IV_ answered Dunin's brown hand at the tiller, sliding south under a following breeze. Her chief designer Paul Mason liked to call her a sloop, admitting that on no planet would any sloop have cared to be found dead with a pair of twelve-foot oars amidships. She was thirty-six feet fore and aft. Without a sawmill, shaping boards for her strakes had been harder than tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and placing the single tree trunk that was her keel. Much of her joining was with wooden pegs; there was iron in her too, from the single deposit of ore on the island of Adelphi. Her building had started seventeen months ago in the Year Nine. One month ago Paul's daughter Helen had cracked across her bow an earthen flask of wine brought to maturity by Nisana and _Argo IV_ had slipped out of the mouth of the Whitebeach River for a maiden voyage--a forty-mile circuit of the island, including the pa.s.sage of a strait where a current from open ocean ran formidably between Adelphi and a small nameless island in the south. Since then she had journeyed short distances up and down the coast, learning her own fussy ways and teaching them to her makers.

_Argo II_ had been a clumsy oared raft of heroic history. Nine Lucifer years ago, roughly the equivalent of twelve Earth years, _Argo II_ had not only brought fifteen survivors of a war to the island, she had also, broadened and repaired, returned to the mainland over the ten-mile channel to pick up a sixteenth survivor, Abara, and the gentle white beasts he had refused to abandon. He had guided them south, through seventy miles of unknown terrors, and ten miles further along the beach, until it came to an end at sheer cliffs; here _Argo II_ found him. One by one--probably no one but Abara could have coaxed them aboard--_Argo II_ had ferried all five of the olifants across. During the rains that came for a dark ending of Year Two, the swollen Whitebeach River had torn _Argo II_ from her moorings and she had been swept away down the channel. Now she would be driftwood scattered over the infinity of the unexplored; she was remembered.

_Argo III_, still in existence and more often called Betsy, was only a boxed platform with outriggers and two pairs of oars. With four giants at the oars and a favorable current she could approximate three miles an hour and carry several tons. She had been built in the Year Four and was still busily bringing slabs of building stone from the base of the coastal range. The stone was red and black or sometimes purple, heavy, already smoother than marble without polishing; unlike any common stone of Earth, it was so hard that wind and sun and water over the centuries had done little with it. Wright believed that was why the coastal range could rise to such heights from a narrow base. While the years in their millions had turned other mountains to level ground, the gla.s.sy rock remained: it could be broken for use but defied erosion like a diamond.

_Argo IV_ was unequivocally a ship; after her trial Paul had carved for her bow a figurehead with the dreaming face of Pakriaa.

"Maybe," Dunin said, "with a few more like this the first explorations could be around the coast instead of overland? If we had two or three more ships when Kris-Mijok is old enough to go?"

Paul knew Dorothy had winced, though her face was turned to the evening-reddened field of water. "If he still wants it, when he's old enough to go...."

Kris-Mijok Wright, her third-born child and only son, had been born in the Year Three; in Earth years he was only nine. His hunger for the long journeying might be mainly a reflection of his devotion to Dunin, herself full of visions and not yet a woman. A tentative half joke, a means of channeling a child's fantasy into patience, had somehow become a sober adult plan: that the first major explorations would begin when Kris-Mijok would have a man's strength to take part in them.

"We might have such ships by then." Paul tried to sound judicial. "Say the Year Eighteen or Nineteen. Yes, a coastal exploration might be better than trying to cross the continent. Not a circ.u.mnavigation though, at first."

Dunin's big face blossomed in a grin. "Only about thirty-six thousand miles by the old map made from the air. Open water at north and south poles, plenty of it. Could do it in less than a year."

"More like fifty thousand, allowing for deflections, tacking, pull of currents we don't know. Storms, flat calms, contrary winds, repairs, expeditions ash.o.r.e for provisions. You pull your horns in just a bit, my girl. Do you remember a desert plateau the map shows in the southern hemisphere? Solid cliff rising out of the sea for over seven hundred miles, and on top of it roasting sand all the way across the continent--and that plateau is only a small part of the coastal desolation down there. From the equator to the 30th parallel I don't think you'd have a chance to go ash.o.r.e--and nothing to help you if you did."

Dunin still grinned. "Just sail past it."

"Yes--well out to sea, with the equatorial sun at work on you. Very few islands in that region, some of them bare rock." And he thought: _If I might go myself...! I am fifty now, in Earth years, a young fifty...._

He knew also that Dorothy would not prevent him. She would not go herself: she would remain at Adelphi, faithful to the daily things, undramatic labors and loyalties that make civilization something more than a vision. She was a young thirty-eight, though she had already borne five children. If he went away, she would mind the watch fires on the beaches, as she had done nine years ago; she would work in the school, the house, the gardens, stand by Christopher Wright during the depressions that sometimes overcame him. She would grow old waiting.

Therefore, Paul knew, he would never leave her. "The explorations will come in good time, Dunin," he said. "You'll have 150 years to watch and take part. I think you'll live to see the other continent too, and the great islands in the southwest. In the meantime--there's so much exploring to be done right here!" He watched the water too, aware of Dorothy's face turned to him, sober and appraising. "You know, Dunin--that island we visited today--that could hold a community of a thousand between its two little hills. And I'm remembering the one forty miles north of us. _Argo II_ was swept ash.o.r.e there: get Doc to tell you that story sometime. I was sick for a week and laid up in one of the limestone caves while the others repaired the raft. A round island less than five miles across. We might sail there next trip."

"The other continent," Dunin murmured, and she watched the rising blue-green mound of Adelphi in the south. "The islands of the southwest...."

Dorothy leaned against the hand-hewn rail, looking northeast, saying lightly, "There he is...." The stone figure in the coastal range grew visible as the channel current pressed them a little too far eastward.

The vast features were not clear; one could find the line of shoulder.

"And Sears said, 'He looks west of the sun.' Was it long ago you told me that, Paul?"

"In a way it was.... Penny for 'em, Dorothy?"

"Oh----" Her brown face crinkled in the way he hoped for. "I was climbing down off philosophy with my usual b.u.mp--wondering what h.e.l.l the twins have been raising while we're away. Brodaa's patience with them pa.s.ses belief. With her own three sets of twins she's had practice. I wish Pak could have had children. Twenty-nine--late middle age for her people.... Helen's going to make a better med student than ever I was--don't you think, Paul? Seems like more than just a kid's enthusiasm."

"I think so." And Sears' plump daughter Teddy (Theodora-Pakriaa) would no doubt find herself too, sometime: there was no hurry. Even Christopher Wright no longer seemed to feel that time was hounding him, though his years by the Earth calendar were sixty-five, his hair and beard were white, his wiry thinness moved deliberately to save the strength he had once been able to spend like unconsidered gold....

"Look!"

Dorothy said carefully, "But that is impossible." A column of smoke on the flank of the coastal range, above one of the beaches where building stone was found. Blue-gray against the red and black, it rose straight in untroubled air. "They weren't taking Betsy out till we got back."

"Too high anyway," Dunin said. "No need to climb so high for the stone."

Dorothy whispered, "I have _never_ quite believed that Ed and Ann----"

"Oh, Dorothy! Well, we----"

"Yes, I saw the lifeboat go down on the channel. It didn't sink." She shut her eyes. "It was a misty evening, lover, more ways than one.

Remember, Dunin?"

"I'll always remember."

"Paul, I know that when the open-sea current below the island took the lifeboat it must have been smashed against the cliffs--oh, of course--and for nine years the sea spiders will have used the pieces of it for their little castles and hideaways. All the same--Ed and Ann could have managed to swim ash.o.r.e. Cross the range somehow or go around it."

"Nothing to eat. Barren rock straight up from the beaches, where there are any beaches, for ninety miles south of the only place where they could have landed and for twenty miles north of it."

"But no kaksmas in the coast range either; no omasha, this side. There _are_ beaches here and there. They might have found--sh.e.l.lfish--blue seaweed."

"Nine years----"

"It _is_ smoke. Our people wouldn't be up there...."

"You've never wanted to talk much about that day."

"No, I--haven't. I didn't behave too well myself. Yes, there are things I've never told.... Paul, Ed Spearman was like somebody I didn't know. He did say in so many words that he planned to go to Vestoia, not to--to throw himself on the mercy of Lantis, but to 'give her civilization'--he said. We tried, Ann and I, tried to reason with him against that. I think he had some alternative plan--maybe flying south of Vestoia as far as the fuel would take him and starting a community of his own--with Ann and me, you know, and himself the old man of the tribe."

"And without us," said Dunin mildly.

"Yes, dear, I recall that. He put that in words...." In a way, Paul did not want her to go on, living it over again, but she had a need to speak of it. "I suppose his plans made a kind of sense if you accepted the premise. As I couldn't, of course. When he said you were all lost, I believed (I had to believe) that he was--not lying perhaps, but telling something he hadn't truly seen. I know that was where I let go--I raged and screamed, and when he grabbed my arm (probably just wanting to quiet me down)--well, if he's living he'll have two or three white scars down his cheek. Uh-huh: the Dope comes clean. I ever think I was trying to get hold of my pistol when Arek took it away, and took his away too. After that she forced him to give a precise account of everything that had happened, every detail. She made him tell it five or six times, watching for contradictions. She was--justice embodied. I was afraid of her myself even while I loved her for it. I knew what he told us then was the truth: the fuel was low, he'd come direct to the island with no real knowledge of what had happened to you. He was saner after the telling. He lost a--a certain look of exalted listening, as if somebody behind Arek's shoulder were telling him what to do. Arek never gave back his pistol. We were on the beach. The giants had been bringing wood all day for a beacon fire. I remember the exact shape of a big sh.e.l.l at my feet, the look of a bit of driftwood tossed in by the channel breakers...."

"And Ann--"

"Oh, Ann! Tom two or three ways as usual. She was very much in love with him, you know, from our first days on Lucifer. But her mind was a battleground with no armistice. I think Ed always knew that. When he pleaded with her--reasonably too--she couldn't think, she could only cry and say: 'I won't go with you--I won't go.' He stopped trying--suddenly, as if he'd knowingly turned off a light inside himself--unsteady light and the only one he had, I reckon. He said, 'So much for the human race: but I'll see what one man can do here before I'm dead without issue.' And he walked off to the lifeboat, while Arek let his pistol dangle from her finger--and, Paul, I shall always think he knew Ann would run after him. I saw her tugging, trying to pull him out of the boat--but she was pulled in and it was gone."

"And I remember," said Dunin, "what you did after we lost sight of it."

"What I did...? What was that, Dunin? I'm blank there."