The Longest Way Home

  “Do you want me to show you how to do it?” Joseph asked, holding out his hand. He did not think it was wise to try to take the device from the Indigene by direct action.

  But the Indigene had found the right button. The pink glow appeared, and the sputtering began. That seemed to interest it very much. It brought the combinant up within a couple of inches of its flat-featured face and studied it with what looked like keen fascination; then it turned and displayed the little machine to its two companions; and then it began to turn the thing over and over in its hand, as if searching for some way to make it do something else besides glow and sputter.

  This is very atypical of you, Joseph thought. You people are not supposed to have any interest in our machines. Indeed you scorn them, is that not so? You regard them as the illusory products of an illusory race.

  But either he had misunderstood some of the things the Ardardin had been telling him, or it was an error to imagine that all Indigenes had the same set of philosophical beliefs, or else this mountaineer simply thought the combinant was a particularly pleasing trinket. The three of them were passing it around, now, each taking a turn at pushing its buttons. Joseph felt uneasy about that. The combinant had not been working properly for a long while, either because it was itself broken or the entire worldwide communications system had been brought down, and in any case he doubted that these people could do any further harm to it. But he did not like to see the device in their hands. You were told not to make any artifacts of human technology available to Indigenes. That was the rule. It had been explained to him, once: doing so might tend to dilute the purity of their culture, or some such thing. Although Joseph could not see how letting the inhabitants of this remote village play with a broken combinant could do any harm to the purity of Indigene culture, some vestige of his sense of himself as a Master recoiled from this violation of custom.

  Besides, the combinant was his. He had little enough left of the life that once had been his in the days when he had been Joseph Master Keilloran. What if they found the device so interesting that they decided to keep it—looking upon it, say, as one additional benefit that they were getting in return for the trade-goods they had given the fern-gully people for Joseph?

  And that was exactly what they seemed to intend. The three Indigenes turned and started to go from the room, taking the combinant with them.

  “Wait a minute,” Joseph said. “That instrument is mine. You may not have it.”

  They paused by the door and looked back at him. Their expressions, insofar as he could interpret them at all, appeared to register surprise that he had said something. They did not show any indication that they had understood what he said, although he was sure that they had.

  He held out his hand. “Give it to me,” he said, using the supplicatory mode. “I have need of it.”

  What an Indigene of the Ardardin’s village would have replied, was, almost certainly, “I recognize your need,” and then it would have handed the combinant over. But these people recognized nothing. Once more they turned to leave.

  “No,” Joseph said. “I must have it. Give it to me.” Not using the supplicatory any more: this was a direct request. And, when he saw that they were paying no heed, he followed it with the same statement phrased in the rarely used mode reserved for outright commands, which in this context might well be construed as insulting. It made no difference. They did not care about his grammar; probably they were amazed that he could utter intelligible words at all. But his wishes, his pleas, his orders, were equally unimportant to them. They went from the room and his combinant went with them.

  Let them have it, Joseph thought sullenly, when his first surge of anger and frustration had died away. It was broken anyway.

  Although he knew it meant leaving the combinant behind, he was still resolved to make his escape. The dry weather of recent days was still holding. It was senseless to stay among the Indigenes any longer. Not a day, not an hour, not a moment. He would depart this very night.

  With a sense of growing excitement, even jubilation, he made his preparations, stuffing his pack with as much dried meat and berries as it would hold, filling with fresh water the wine-flask from Getfen House that had served as his canteen during his days in the forest, rolling up the mantle of dark furs an earlier village had given him and tying it around his waist. He looked into the corridor. No one seemed to be on guard out there.

  The night was clear and cold, though not as cold as some recent nights had been. The stars of the Manza sky, which once had looked very strange to him but by now were only too familiar, wheeled overhead. The only moon that was visible was fast-moving little Mebriel, hardly brighter than a star itself. A dull red glow in the east, behind the mountains, told Joseph that big Sanivark would probably be coming over the horizon soon, lighting everything up with its brick-red beams, but he hoped to have this place well to his rear before that happened.

  A bonfire was burning in the village plaza. The sound of singing voices drifted through the air. The Indigenes seemed to gather there most nights after dark, heedless as ever of the cold. Joseph turned and headed in the other direction, down past the infirmary and the town midden. Earlier that day he had seen a path that went behind the midden and seemed to lead on downslope into the woods that lay west of town.

  He passed a couple of shadowy figures as he went. They gave him quick glances, but no one stopped him, no one questioned him. He was not a prisoner here, after all. And the barrier of reserve that existed between these people and him protected him now. Still, he wished he had not been noticed. If his disappearance bothered them when they found him gone in the morning, this would give them a clue as to the direction he had taken.

  The path was steeper than he had expected. The village’s entire site sloped sharply to the west at something like a twenty-degree grade before the far side of the saddle-shaped valley in which the town was contained turned upward again, but the grade was irregular, flattening out in some places and dropping sharply in others. More than once Joseph found himself struggling down the side of what was essentially a huge ravine. The path quickly deteriorated too, now that he was some distance from town, so that in the moonlit darkness he could barely find it among all the brambles and woody briars that were encroaching on it, and on two occasions he wandered from it altogether and had to grope his way back. At all times he picked his way carefully, mindful of his agonizing stumble in the Getfen forest. Haste could be disastrous. His twisted knee had long since healed, but he knew that another such injury, out here by himself in these frosty woods, would mean the end of him.

  Creatures hooted in the night. There were rustlings and cracklings all around him. He ignored all that. He forced himself steadily onward, moving as fast as he dared, guiding himself by a big icy-looking star that lay dead ahead. The only thing that mattered right now was putting distance between himself and the Indigene village.

  It was hard work. Though Joseph had grown accustomed to the altitude after so many weeks in the mountains, he felt the strain of it nevertheless: his heart boomed in his chest and his breath came short, and for long stretches he found himself panting, which dried out his mouth and tempted him to dip into his precious water supply. He fought the temptation back. In this mountain saddle the drainage patterns were all wrong for streams, and he could not say when or where he would find his next source of fresh water: on the other side of the slope, no doubt.

  But then the path showed signs of beginning to turn upward, and the ascent became a continuous one, which told him that he had finally reached the far side of the saddle, the shallow western rise that separated the village from the lowlands beyond. With his goal so close, Joseph stepped up his pace, pushing himself to the limits of his strength. The warmth of his own exertions protected him against the cold. He could feel streams of sweat running down the sides of his rib-cage, not an unpleasant sensation, as he forced himself up the steep trail. There would be time to rest later. He prayed for an easy descent into the low
lands once he was over the summit of the western ridge.

  By the time Joseph attained it, though, he could see that no such easy descent was going to be granted him. Sanivark, emerging at last above the top of the mountains of the east with little Keviel trailing along behind, gleamed like a red lantern over his head, showing him the disheartening sight of a second saddle rolling just to the west of him, and what looked very much like a third one westward of that. Neither one had been visible from the village. He would have to cope with both of them, and who knew what obstacles beyond those, before he reached the lowlands.

  He did not seem to be the object of any pursuit, at any rate. The village was only dimly visible, gratifyingly far behind him to the east—the smoke of its bonfire, the lights of a few of its houses—and there was no sign that anyone was moving toward him through the scrubby woods between there and here that he had just traversed. So he was free, no longer a commodity, no longer trade-goods being passed on from village to village. His only problem now was staying alive in these wintry woods.

  He crouched for a time to the leeward of the saddle-top, catching his breath, letting his sweat dry, nibbling a bit of dried meat, studying the terrain ahead. But there was not going to be any rest for him. When he had stayed there long enough so that he was starting to feel the cold again, Joseph picked up and moved along, scrambling down into the second saddle and onward into the third, which turned out to be a low flattened basin offering no real challenge. The trail had given out, or else he had lost it, but that scarcely mattered. He was fully in the rhythm of it. He moved on and on. There were no more ridges: it was a straight downhill glide now into the misty lands below.

  He thought several times of stopping to sleep, but no, he wanted to be out of the high country, entirely out, before he permitted himself to halt. Sanivark went sailing past him overhead, moving into the western sky and showing him his goal, a shrouded realm of drifting whiteness. The mists thinned as he went down toward it, and just as the pale strands of first light began coming over his shoulder he saw a green meadow not far below him, and a stream or perhaps a small river, itself nearly invisible but outlined by a long bank of fog that clung to it like cotton batting.

  This was as far as he could go without resting. At the place where the last stretch of highland forest shaded into the meadow bordering the riverbank he found a deserted campsite that probably had been used by hunters in the autumn, and settled into it. There was a little cave that someone had roughly excavated out of the side of the hill, a stone fireplace with cold charcoal still in it and the charred bones of some fair-sized animal scattered about nearby, and a stack of firewood perhaps awaiting use by the returning hunters in the spring. Joseph dined on dried meat and berries and crawled into the cave just as the last few stars were disappearing from the rapidly bluing sky. He unwrapped his fur mantle and curled it around himself, tucked his hands into his robes, and closed his eyes. Sleep rolled over him like a tumbling boulder.

  He awoke at midday. A great silence enfolded him, broken only by the screeching caws of the dark birds that were whirling in enormous circles above him in the cloudless sky. The mists had lifted and the sun was bright overhead. He dutifully said his morning prayers and breakfasted sparingly and sat for a long while looking back at the mountains out of which he had come, thinking about his zigzag route through the highlands these past weeks or months and wondering whether in all that time he had succeeded in getting significantly closer to the Southland. He doubted it. Certainly he was somewhat farther south than on the day when he had stood staring at the dismal blackened remains of Ludbrek House, but a map, he suspected, would show him that he had traveled no more than a finger’s breadth of the total distance separating him from his father’s distant lands.

  By this time there would be no reason for anyone at home to think that he was still alive. The Keillorans were basically optimistic people, but they were not fools, and such a degree of optimism would be nothing if not foolhardy. He was here, and they were there, and there was so much territory between that he knew he might just as well start thinking of himself as irretrievably lost, which was not quite the same thing as being dead, but not all that far from it.

  I am the only one in the world who knows where I am, he thought. And all I know is that I am here, though I have no way of knowing where here is.

  Joseph looked up at the blank blue screen that was the sky.

  “Father!” he cried, setting up echoes as his voice reverberated off the mountains from which he had just descended. “Father, it’s me, Joseph! Can you hear me? I’m in Manza, Father! I’m on my way home!”

  That was at least as useful as talking into a broken combinant, he told himself. And it was good to hear the sound of a human voice again, even if it was his own.

  He went down to the stream, stripped, bathed. The water was so cold it felt like fire against his skin, but he had not been able to bathe very often in the mountain villages, and he forced himself through an elaborate ablution. He washed his clothes also, and set them out to dry in the sunlight, sitting naked beside them, shivering but strangely happy in the silence, the isolation, the brightness of the day, the fresh clear air.

  And then it was time to get going. There was nothing like a road here for him to follow, not even a footpath, but the land was flat, and after his nighttime scramble through the mountain foothills this seemed almost preposterously easy. Just put one foot forward and then another, on and on, keep the mountains to your left and the stream to the right and the sun shining on your nose, and you will find that you are heading toward home, getting closer with every step you take.

  No one seemed to live in this district. He wondered why. The soil seemed fertile enough, there was plenty of fresh water, the climate was probably all right. Yet he saw no sign that the Folk had farmed here, and none of the claimstones that would mark land belonging to one of the Great Houses, and no trace of a settlement of Indigenes, even. But of course this was a large continent and much of it, even after all these centuries of the human presence on Homeworld, was still as it had been when the first Folkish explorers had landed here.

  A strange concept, Folkish explorers. Joseph had never examined the glaring contradictions in the term before. The Folk were such stolid, unadventurous, spiritless, passive people, or at least that was how he had always regarded them. Everyone did. One did not think of people like that as explorers. It was hard to imagine that any of them could have had enough fervor of the soul to get themselves out into spaceships and travel across the empty light-years and discover Homeworld, and yet they had. Hadn’t achieved much once they got here, no, but they had managed to go looking for it, and find it, and settle it.

  And yet, stolid and unadventurous and spiritless and passive though they might be, they had also found enough fervor within themselves just now to rise up here in the northern continent or perhaps throughout the entire world and kill most or all of the Masters, and set fire to their houses, and wreck their estates. That was something worth thinking about. Perhaps we have never understood much about the Folk at all, Joseph told himself. Perhaps they are almost as alien to us as the Indigenes or the noctambulos, or the alien races that live on the other worlds of the galaxy.

  He went along steadily, marching from sunrise to sundown, stopping to eat whenever he felt hungry, finding some cave or burrow or other sort of shelter for himself at night. The weather grew better every day. Sometimes there were brief rainstorms, mild and pleasant, nothing like the hard chill downpours of the high country. He often took off his clothes and stood naked in the rain, enjoying the sensation of cool clean water striking his skin.

  This was beautiful country, still completely devoid of any sort of settlement. There was a springtime feel to the air. Green new growth was appearing everywhere. Dazzling carpets of tiny flowers, some pink, some yellow, sprang up after each rain-shower. They seemed to come straight out of the ground, without any leaves. Joseph made no attempt to keep track of the passing of the days. H
e still clung to the fantasy that if only he kept walking at this steady pace, ten miles a day, fifteen, however much he might be able to cover, he would come to the bottom of this continent sooner or later and cross over into Helikis, where, he wanted to believe, there had been no Folkish uprising and he would find people to help him get the rest of the way home.

  He knew there was some element of folly in the belief that he had been clinging to all this while—without a shred of evidence to support it—that everything was still normal in Helikis. If there had been no rebellion in the southern continent, why had the southern Masters not sent aid to their beleaguered cousins in the north? Why were no military planes roaring northward overhead? Why no armies marching swiftly to set thing to rights? But he wanted to think that all was well in the Southland, because this whole long march of his would be pointless, otherwise. Joseph told himself that he had no knowledge about what was going on in most of the world, anyway. In all these months of wandering he had covered only a tiny area of the planet. There might be a tremendous civil war under way on a hundred different battlefields even now, while he, cut off from everything and everyone, plodded southward day by day in solitude through this quiet uninhabited region.

  Uninhabited by Masters and Folk and Indigenes, at any rate. There was plenty of animal life. Joseph did not recognize any of the creatures he encountered as he went along, though some of them seemed to be northern variants of animals that were native to the southern continent. There was a plump round beast, quite large, with coarse red fur and a fat little comical tail, that seemed surely to be a relative of the benevongs of the south. There was another, cat-sized, with huge restless eyes and a formidable cloak of twitching blue spines, that beyond much doubt was the local version of the shy, easily frightened thorkins that he had sometimes seen digging for tasty roots along the banks of country streams. But the rest were completely new to him: a squat, broad-nosed climbing animal with brown and yellow spots; and a big, loose-jointed, thick-thighed creature whose tiny, pointed head seemed to have been borrowed from a much smaller animal; and a low-slung snuffling thing, long and sleek, that moved across the land in tightly clustered packs.