Queen Of Air & Darkness Read online

  "hiring someone else as well qualified would be prohibitively

  expensive, on a pioneer planet where every hand has a thousand

  urgent tasks to do. Besides, you have a motive. And I'll need that. 1,

  who was born on another world altogether strange to this one, itself

  altogether strange to Mother Earth, I am too dauntingly aware of how

  handicapped we are."

  Night gathered upon Christmas Landing. The air stayed mild, but

  glimmer-lit tendrils of fog, sneaking through the streets, had a cold

  look, and colder yet was the aurora where it shuddered between the

  moons. The woman drew closer to the man in this darkening room,

  surely not aware that she did, until he switched on a Auoropanel. The

  same knowledge of Roland's aloneness was in both of them.

  One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it

  in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian

  Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to

  the present day when spaceships cross even greater reaches. But stars

  in our neighborhood average some nine lightyears apart, and barely

  one percent of them have planets which are man-habitable, and speeds

  are limited to less than that of radiation. Scant help is given by

  relativistic time contraction and suspended animation en route.' These

  make the journeys seem short, but history meanwhile does not stop at

  home.

  Thus voyages from sun to sun will always be few. Colonists will be

  those who have extremely special reasons for going. They will take

  along germ plasm for exogenetic cultivation of domestic plants and

  animals-and of human infants, in order that population can grow fast

  enough to escape death through genetic drift. After all, they cannot

  rely on further immigration. Two or three

  times a century, a ship may call from some other colony. (Not from

  Earth. Earth has long ago sunk into alien concerns.) Its place of origin

  will be an old settlement. The young ones are in no position to build

  and man interstellar vessels.

  Their very survival, let alone their eventual modernization, is in

  doubt. The founding fathers have had to take what they could get in a

  universe not especially designed for man.

  Consider, for example, Roland. It is among the rare happy finds, a

  world where humans can live, breathe, eat the food, drink the water,

  walk unclad if they choose, sow their crops, pasture their beasts, dig

  their mines, erect their homes, raise their children and grandchildren.

  It is worth crossing three-quarters of a light-century to preserve

  certain dear values and strike new roots into the soil of Roland.

  But the star Charlemagne is of type F9, forty percent brighter than

  Sol, brighter still in the treacherous ultraviolet and wilder still in the

  wind of charged particles that seethes from it. The planet has an

  eccentric orbit. In the middle of the short but furious northern

  summer, which includes periastron, total insolation is more than

  double what Earth gets; in the depth of the long northern winter, it is

  barely less than Terrestrial average.

  Native life is abundant everywhere. But lacking elaborate machinery,

  not yet economically possible to construct for more than a few

  specialists, man can only endure the high latitudes. A tendegree axial

  tilt, together with the orbit, means that the northern part of the

  Arctican continent spends half its year in unbroken sunlessness.

  Around the South Pole lies an empty ocean.

  Other differences from Earth might superficially seem more

  important. Roland has two moons, small but close, to evoke clashing

  tides. It rotates once in thirty-two hours, which is endlessly, subtly

  disturbing to organisms evolved through gigayears of a quicker

  rhythm. The weather patterns are altogether unterrestrial. The globe

  is a mere 9500 kilometers in diameter; its surface gravity is 0.42 X

  980 cm/sect; the sea level air pressure is slightly above one Earth

  atmosphere. (For actually Earth is the freak, and

  man exists because a cosmic accident blew away most of the gas that a

  body its size ought to have kept, as Venus has done.)

  However, Homo can truly be called sapiens when he practices his

  specialty of being unspecialized. His repeated attempts to freeze

  himself into an all-answering pattern or culture or ideology, or

  whatever he has named it, have repeatedly brought ruin. Give him the

  pragmatic business of making his living, and he will usually do rather

  well. fie adapts, within broad limits.

  These limits are set by such factors as his need for sunlight and his

  being, necessarily and forever, a part of the life that surrounds him and

  a creature of the spirit within.

  Portolondon thrust docks, boats, machinery, warehouses into the Gulf

  of Polaris. Behind them huddled the dwellings of its five thousand

  permanent inhabitants: concrete walls, storm shutters, high-peaked tile

  roofs. The gaiety of their paint looked forlorn amidst lamps; this town

  lay past the Arctic Circle.

  Nevertheless Sherrinford remarked, "Cheerful place, eh? The kind of

  thing I came to Roland looking for."

  Barbro made no reply. The days in Christmas Landing, while he made

  his preparations, had drained her. Gazing out the dome of the taxi that

  was whirring them downtown from the hydrofoil that brought them,

  she supposed he meant the lushness of forest and meadows along the

  road, brilliant hues and phosphorescence of flowers in gardens, clamor

  of wings overhead. Unlike Terrestrial flora in cold climates, Arctican

  vegetation spends every, daylit hour in frantic growth and energy

  storage. Not till summer's fever gives place to gentle winter does it

  bloom and fruit; and estivating animals rise from their dens and

  migratory birds come home.

  The view was lovely, she had to admit: beyond the trees, a spaciousness

  climbing toward remote heights, silvery-gray under a moon, an aurora,

  the diffuse radiance from a sun just below the horizon.

  Beautiful as a hunting satan, she thought, and as terrible. That

  wilderness had stolen Jimmy. She wondered it she would at least

  be given to find his little bones and take them to his father.

  Abruptly she realized that she and Sherrinford were at their hotel and

  that he had been speaking of the town. Since it was next in size after

  the capital, he must have visited here often before. The streets were

  crowded and noisy; signs flickered, music blared from shops, taverns,

  restaurants, sports centers, dance halls; vehicles were jammed down to

  molasses speed; the several-storieshigh office buildings stood aglow.

  Portolondon linked an enormous hinterland to the outside world. Down

  the Gloria River came timber rafts, ores, harvest of farms whose

  owners were slowly making Rolandic life serve them, meat and ivory

  and furs gathered by rangers in the mountains beyond Troll Scarp. In

  from the sea came coastwise freighters, the fishing fleet, produce of

  the Sunward Islands, plunder of whole continents further south where

  bold men adventured. It clanged in Portolondon,
laughed, blustered,

  swaggered, connived, robbed, preached, guzzled, swilled, toiled,

  dreamed, lusted, built, destroyed, died, was born, was happy, angry,

  sorrowful, greedy, vulgar, loving, ambitious, human. Neither the sun's

  blaze elsewhere nor the half year's twilight here-wholly night around

  midwinter-was going to stay man's hand.

  Or so everybody said.

  Everybody except those who had settled in the darklands. Barbro used

  to take for granted that they were evolving curious customs, legends

  and superstitions, which would die when the Outway had been

  completely mapped and controlled. Of late, she had wondered. Perhaps

  Sherrinford's hints, about a change in his own attitude brought about by

  his preliminary research; were responsible.

  Or perhaps she just needed something to think about besides how

  Jimmy, the day before he went, when she asked him whether he wanted

  rye or French bread for a sandwich, answered in great solemnity-he was

  becoming interested in the alphabet "I'll have a slice of what we people

  call the F bread."

  She scarcely noticed getting out of the taxi, registering, being

  conducted to a primitively furnished room. But after she unpacked, she

  remembered Sherrinford had suggested a confidential conference. She

  went down the hall and knocked on his door. Her knuckles sounded less

  loud than her heart.

  He opened the door, finger on lips, and gestured her toward a corner.

  Her temper bristled until she saw the image of Chief Constable Dawson

  in the visiphone. Sherrinford must have chimed him up and must have

  a reason to keep her out of scanner range. She found a chair and

  watched, nails digging into knees.

  The detective's lean length refolded itself. "Pardon the interruption,"

  he said. "A man mistook the number. Drunk, by the indications."

  Dawson chuckled. "We get plenty of those." Barbro recalled his

  fondness for gabbing. He tugged the beard which he affected, as if he

  were an outwayer instead of a townsman. "No harm in them as a rule.

  They only have a lot of voltage to discharge, after weeks or months in

  the backlands.".

  "I've gathered that that environment-foreign in a million major and

  minor ways to the one that created man-I've gathered that it does do

  odd things to the personality." Sherrinford tamped his pipe. "Of

  course, you know my practice has been confined to urban and suburban

  areas. Isolated garths seldom need private investigators. Now that

  situation appears to have changed. I called to ask you for advice."

  "Glad to help," Dawson said. "I've not forgotten what you did for us in

  the de Tahoe murder case." Cautiously: "Better explain your problem

  first."

  Sherrinford struck fire. The smoke that followed cut through the green

  odors-even here, a paved pair of kilometers from the nearest woods-

  that drifted past traffic rumble through a crepuscular window. "This is

  more a scientific mission than a search for an absconding debtor or an

  industrial spy," he drawled. "I'm looking into two possibilities: that an

  organization, criminal or religious or whatever, has long been active

  and steals infants; or that the Outlings of folklore are real."

  "Huh?" On Dawson's face Barbro read as much dismay as surprise.

  "You can't be serious!"

  "Can't I?" Sherrinford smiled. "Several generations' worth of reports

  shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Especially not when they become

  more frequent and consistent in the course of time, not less. Nor can

  we ignore the documented loss of babies and small children, amounting

  by now to over a hundred, and never a trace found afterward. Nor the

  finds which demonstrate that an intelligent species once inhabited

  Arctica and may still haunt the interior."

  Dawson leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. "Who engaged

  you?" he demanded. "That Cullen woman? We were sorry for her,

  naturally, but she wasn't making sense, and when she got downright

  abusive-"

  "Didn't her companions, reputable scientists, confirm her story?"

  "No story to confirm. Look, they had the place ringed with detectors

  and alarms, and they kept mastiffs. Standard procedure in country

  where a hungry sauroid or whatever might happen by Nothing could've

  entered unbeknownst."

  "On the ground. flow about a flyer landing in the middle of camp?"

  "A man in a copter rig would've roused everybody."

  "A winged being might be quieter."

  "A living flyer that could lift a three-year-old boy? Doesn't exist."

  "Isn't in the scientific literature, you mean, Constable. Remember

  Graymantle; remember how little we know about Roland, a planet, an

  entire world. Such birds do exist on Beowulf-and on Rustum, I've read. I

  made a calculation from the local ratio of air density to gravity, and,

  yes, it's marginally possible here too. The child could have been carried

  off for a short distance before wing muscles were exhausted and the

  creature must descend."

  Dawson snorted. "First it landed and walked into the tent where

  mother and boy were asleep. Then it walked away, toting

  him, after it couldn't fly further. Does that sound like a bird of prey?

  And the victim didn't cry out, the dogs didn't bark!"

  "As a matter of fact," Sherrinford said, "those inconsistencies are the

  most interesting and convincing features of the whole account. You're

  right, it's hard to see how a human kidnapper could get in undetected,

  and an eagle type of creature wouldn't operate in that fashion. But none

  of this applies to a winged intelligent being. The boy could have been

  drugged. Certainly the dogs showed signs of having been."

  "The dogs showed signs of having overslept. Nothing had disturbed

  them. The kid wandering by wouldn't do so. We don't need to assume

  one damn thing except, first, that he got restless and, second, that the

  alarms were a bit sloppily rigged-seeing as how no danger was expected

  from inside camp-and let him pass out. And, third, I hate to speak this

  way, but we must assume the poor tyke starved or was killed."

  Dawson paused before adding: "If we had more staff, we could have given

  the affair more time. And would have, of course. We did make an aerial

  sweep, which risked the lives of the pilots, using instruments which

  would've sported the kid anywhere in a fiftykilometer radius, unless he

  was dead. You know how sensitive thermal analyzers are. We drew a

  complete blank. We have more important jobs than to hunt for the

  scattered pieces of a corpse."

  He finished brusquely. "If Mrs. Cullen's hired you, my advice is you find

  an excuse to quit. Better for her, too. She's got to come to terms with

  reality."

  Barbro checked a shout by biting her tongue.

  "Oh, this is merely the latest disappearance of the series," Sherrinford

  said. She didn't understand how he could maintain his easy tone when

  Jimmy. was lost. "More thoroughly recorded than any before, thus more

  suggestive. Usually an outwayer family has given a tearful but undetailed

  account of their child who vanished and must have been stolen by
the

  Old Folk. Sometimes, years later, they'd tell about glimpses of what they

  swore must have been the grown child, not really human any longer,

  flitting past in

  murk or peering through, a window or working mischief upon them. As

  you say, neither the authorities nor the scientists have had personnel or

  resources to mount a proper investigation. But as I say, the matter

  appears to be worth investigating. Maybe a private party like myself can

  contribute."

  "Listen, most of us constables grew up in the outway. We don't just ride

  patrol and answer emergency calls; we go back there for holidays and

  reunions. If any gang of . . . of human sacrificers was around, we'd

  know."

  "I realize that. I also realize that the people you came from have a

  widespread and deep-seated belief in nonhuman beings with supernatural

  powers. Many actually go through rites and make offerings to propitiate

  them."

  "I know what you're leading up to," Dawson fleered. "I've heard it

  before, from a hundred sensationalists. The aborigines are the Outlings. I

  thought better of you. Surely you've visited a museum° or three, surely

  you've read literature from planets which do have natives-or damn and

  blast, haven't you ever applied that logic of yours?"

  He wagged a finger. "Think," he said. "What have we in fact discovered?

  A few pieces of worked stone; a few megaliths that might be artificial;

  scratchings on rock that seem to show plants and animals, though not

  the way any human culture would ever have shown them; traces of fires

  and broken bones; other fragments of bone that seem as if they might've

  belonged to thinking creatures, as if they might've been inside fingers or