The Longest Way Home

  None of these showed the slightest fear of him, not even the one that looked like a thorkin. A thorkin of the Southland would have turned and bolted at the first sign of a human, but this animal simply stood its ground and stared. The sleek pack-creatures, who appeared to be browsing for insect nests in the ground, went right on about their business without paying heed to him at all. The big shuffling beast with the small head actually seemed to want to be friendly, wandering up so close that it was Joseph who backed uncertainly away.

  One day he stumbled into a small encampment of poriphars in a clearing at the edge of a grove of handsome little white-barked trees, and understood why there were no Indigene villages in these parts. Indigenes would not trespass on the territory of other intelligent beings; and poriphars, like noctambulos and meliots and a couple of other native species, qualified as intelligent, if only just marginally. They were mere naked nomadic beasts, but it was known that they had a language; they had a tribal structure of some sort; they were advanced enough technologically to have the use of fire and simple tools. That was about all Joseph knew about them. A few wandering tribes of poriphars were found in Helikis, but they were mainly a northern species.

  He came upon them suddenly, and they seemed as uncertain of how to regard the strange being who had materialized among them as Joseph was to deal with them. There were about a dozen of them, graceful impressive-looking creatures about his own size, with taut, muscular bodies that were densely covered with thick black-and-white-striped fur. Their long, narrow, leathery feet ended in powerful curving claws; their black, glossy hands were equipped with small, efficient-looking fingers. They had triangular faces with jutting wolfish snouts terminating in shiny black noses. Their eyes, large and bright and round, a deep blue-black in color, were protected by heavy brow-ridges.

  The poriphars were sitting in a circle around a crude oven made of rocks, roasting spitted fish over the flames. When Joseph stepped out from behind a great gray boulder into their midst, very much to his surprise and theirs, they reacted with immediate uneasiness, moving closer to one another, bodies going tense, nostrils quivering. Their eyes were fixed closely on him, warily, as though a solitary human being, traveling on foot and carrying no visible weapons, might actually pose some threat to this band of strong, sturdy animals.

  Slowly and clearly Joseph said, speaking in Indigene, “I am a traveler. There is no one else with me. I am going southward.”

  No response. The same wary glances.

  “I am hungry. Can you give me some food?”

  The same keen stares, nothing more.

  The aroma of the roasting fish was overwhelming. It filled the air. Joseph felt famished, almost dizzy with hunger. He had eaten nothing but dried meat and berries for days, in decreasing quantities as his supplies began to run low. He had practically none left by now.

  “Can you understand me?” he asked. He patted his abdomen. “Hunger. Food.”

  Nothing.

  He had often heard that all the various intelligent life-forms of Homeworld were able to speak Indigene, but perhaps that was not true. Without much hope Joseph tried Folkish and then Master, with the same result. But when he patted his stomach again and pointed silently to one of the skewers of fish, then to his own lips, and pantomimed the act of chewing and swallowing, they seemed to comprehend at once. A brief debate ensued among them. Their language was one of rapid clicks and buzzing drones, probably impossible for human vocal apparatus to imitate.

  Then one of the poriphars stood—it was a head taller than Joseph; it probably could have killed him with one swipe of those sinewy arms—and yanked a skewer of fish from the fire. Carefully, using those agile little fingers with an almost finicky precision, it pried a thick slab of pale pinkish meat from the fish and handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” Joseph said, with great gravity.

  He performed an elaborate salute, touching his forehead and his chest and bowing. Most likely the gesture had no meaning whatever for the poriphars, but it was the best he could do. He wished he had something to offer them in return, but he doubted that his remaining berries would interest them, and there was nothing else he could spare.

  The temptation to cram the fish into his mouth and bolt it all down at once was a hard thing to resist, but Joseph ate as slowly as he could. It had a sweet, smoky flavor, heartbreakingly delicious. The poriphars remained quite motionless while he ate, watching him. Occasionally one of them made a clicking, buzzing comment. They still seemed uneasy. Their restiveness was an almost palpable thing.

  Joseph had been alone for so many days that he wanted to stay for a while, somehow to talk with them, to tell them about himself and learn things about them, perhaps to find out about the nature of the route that lay ahead, or even about the civil war. But of course all that was impossible. There was no way to communicate. And he did not need a degree in alien psychology to understand that they had no interest in making his acquaintance, that the only thing they desired from him was that he remove himself from their presence without further delay.

  Which he did, after making a final brief speech in Indigene on the off chance that they might indeed know something of that language. He apologized for having disturbed them and told them how grateful he was for their kindness in feeding a lone hungry wanderer, how he would if in any way he could repay their hospitality at another time. To this they made no reply, or showed any indication that they had understood. He walked away from them without looking back.

  A couple of days later he saw a plane pass high overhead—the first manifestation of the outside world since he had fled from the Indigenes. Joseph stood staring up, wondering whether he was experiencing some hallucination brought on by hunger. The plane was so far above him, a mere dark winged speck in the sky, that he could hardly hear it at all, nothing more than a distant faint humming sound such as an insect might have made, nor could he identify it in any way. It was traveling in a northwesterly direction. Whose plane was it? Was it possible that they still could have regular commuter service between Helikis and Manza?

  It seemed like a thousand years ago that he had made his own flight northward. Ten thousand; a million. The airstrip at Keilloran; the excitement of departure; his father and brothers and sisters loading him down with gifts to bring the Getfens; Anceph and Rollin climbing aboard with the luggage, and then Balbus, beckoning to him to follow. The flight had taken eleven hours, the longest flight of his life. How creaky he had felt when he disembarked at the Getfen airstrip! But then, his fair-haired laughing Getfen cousins all around him, sturdy Wykkin and bright-eyed Domian and lovely fragrant Kesti, and dark, stocky Gryilin Master Getfen behind them, his hosts for the summer, his new friends, the companions of his coming-of-age year—

  Ten million years ago. A billion.

  The plane, if a plane indeed was what it was, vanished from sight in the northern sky. Now that it was gone he began to doubt that he had really seen it. There must not be any planes flying any more, he told himself. If you wanted to go from one continent to another these days you would have to do it on foot, a journey that would take three years, or five, or forever. We have become prehistoric here. Something terrible has happened on Homeworld and a great silence has fallen over everything, he thought. The rebellious Folk have risen up in wrath and hurled the world back into medieval times—but not even the medieval time of Homeworld, but that of Old Earth, the time of candlelight and horses and tournaments of chivalry. What actually had horses been? he wondered. Something like bandars, Joseph guessed, swift high-spirited animals that you rode from place to place, or set against one another in races.

  The plane, real or not, had reminded him of how easy it once had been to travel from one place to another on Homeworld, and how difficult, how well-nigh impossible, it had become. Heartsick, he thought of the vast curving breast of the world that lay before him, the great impossible span of distance. What madness it had been to think he could ever walk from Getfen to Keilloran! Joseph sank dow
n against the ground, forehead pressing against his knees. His head swam with despair.

  Up, he told himself sternly.

  Up and get yourself moving. One step and another and another, and someday you will be home.

  Perhaps.

  But the last of the food he had brought with him from the Indigene village was gone. Joseph found himself thinking longingly of the stewed meat they ate in those villages, the porridges, the milky wine. He had not much liked the wine then, but now he tasted it in his mind and it seemed heavenly, the finest taste in the universe. He imagined a silvery shimmering in the air before him and a flask of the wine miraculously dropping out of nowhere at his feet, and perhaps a pan of the braised illimani meat too. That did not happen. All the euphoria of those early springtime days when he had first come down out of the mountains had disappeared. The carpets of pretty pink flowers, the green blush of new foliage, the sweet fresh spring rain falling on his naked body—that was all so far behind him, now, that it seemed like something he had dreamed. I am going to starve to death, Joseph thought.

  He dug along stream-banks in the hope of finding mud-crawlers, but mud-crawlers did not seem to live here. He did find roots and bulbs that looked as though they might be safe to eat, and nibbled on them experimentally, making mental notes about which ones went down easily and which upset his stomach. He chewed the tender new shoots of bushes for their sweet juice. He broke into a nest of sash-weevils and coolly, methodically, ate the little yellow grubs. They had almost no taste; it was like eating bits of straw. But there had to be some nourishment in them somewhere, for they were living things.

  You must not let yourself die of hunger, he told himself. You are Joseph Master Keilloran and you are on your way home to your family, and you need to maintain your strength for the long journey that lies ahead.

  He no longer bothered to wash very often. The fresh, sparkling water of the streams felt too cold against his skin, now that there was so little flesh on his bones. His skin began to break out with little white-tipped red eruptions, but that seemed the least of his problems. He stopped washing his clothing, too, but for a different reason: the fabric had grown so threadbare and tattered that Joseph was afraid the robe would fall apart entirely if he subjected it to the stress of washing it.

  He threw rocks at basking lizards, but never once did he hit one. They always seemed to come awake the moment he raised his arm and go scurrying away with astonishing speed. He ripped the bark from a tree and discovered brightly striped beetles underneath, and in a kind of wondering amazement at his own boldness—or perhaps, Joseph decided, it was only his own desperation—he put them into his mouth, one at a time. He ate ants. He broke a branch from a little tree and swung it through the air, trying to bat down insects with it, and actually caught some that way. He was surprised to observe how easily he could adapt to eating insects.

  He talked to the animals that he met as he went along. They came out and stared at him without fear, and Joseph nodded to them and smiled and introduced himself, and asked whether they had heard anything about the war between Folk and Masters, and invited them to advise him on the edibility of the plants that grew nearby. Since they were creatures that were below the threshold of intelligence, they neither understood nor replied, but they did pause and listen. It occurred to Joseph that he should be trying to catch and kill some of them for their meat instead of holding these nonsensical conversations with them, but by this time he was too slow and weak to try that, and it seemed impolite, besides. They were his friends, companions of the way.

  “I am Joseph Master Keilloran,” he told them, “and I would be most grateful if you would send word to my family that I am on my way home to them.”

  He felt very giddy much of the time. His vision often became blurry. Hunger, he knew, was doing something to his brain. He hoped the damage would not be permanent.

  One night Joseph was awakened by a blazing brightness on the horizon, a lovely red-and-yellow dome that quickly elongated to become a river of light climbing into the sky. Slowly he came to understand that it was a great fire somewhere very far off, and he wondered if the civil war was still going on, and, if so, who was attacking whom, and where. The brightness gave way to black smoke, and then he could see nothing at all.

  Much later that same night, not long before sunrise, the thought came to Joseph as he lay in mazy suspension somewhere between sleep and wakefulness that if he were to hold his toes turned inward in a certain way as he walked he would be able to move two or even three times as fast as he usually did, and might even be able to leave the ground altogether and skate homeward two or three feet up in the air. It was an exciting idea. He could hardly wait for day to arrive, so he could put it to a test. But when he remembered it after he arose he saw the absurdity of it at once and was frightened to think that he had been able to entertain such a lunatic notion more or less seriously, even though he had not been fully awake at the time.

  Whole days went by when Joseph found nothing to eat but ants. He did not even attempt to throw rocks at lizards any more, although they were abundant all around him, plump green ones with spiky red crests. Their meat, he imagined, was wonderfully succulent. But they were much too fast for him. And though he spent a great deal of time crouching beside streams trying to catch small darting fishes with his hand, they eluded him with ridiculous ease. He had stopped digging up roots or pulling green shoots from plants by this time, for he had begun to think they were poisoning him and was afraid to eat them.

  He began to have headaches. His tongue seemed swollen and had a coppery taste. He could hear the blood pounding insistently in his temples. He shook constantly and walked with his arms wrapped tightly about his body as though he were still contending with the cold rain of the wintry highlands, though by all the outward signs he could tell that the days were growing steadily warmer, that it must be getting practically to be summer. Sometimes when Joseph had walked no more than half an hour he found it necessary to sit down and rest for ten or fifteen minutes, and occasionally longer. And then came a day when he could not continue at all after one of those rest-periods, when he simply settled down under a bush and let the time stretch on and on without getting up.

  As he lay there he tried to conjure up a meal for himself out of nothing more than his imagination, a plate of sweet river-crabs followed by roast haunch of heggan in mint sauce, with baked compolls on the side, and a steaming brisbil pudding afterward. He had almost managed to delude himself into believing that he had really done it, that he had just enjoyed a rich, tasty dinner and was feeling much the better for it, when he regained enough clarity of mind to realize that it had been nothing more than a pleasant fantasy, that his stomach was still empty, that in fact he was on the verge of dying of starvation. He knew he was dying and almost did not care.

  He lay back and closed his eyes. It seemed to him then that he heard the sounds of rumbling wheels nearby, of swiftly moving vehicles, as though there might be a highway just beyond the hedge across the way. But that had to be a delusion too. He had walked through this beautiful countryside for days, weeks, maybe even months, without ever finding any trace of civilized life other than the hunters’ camp that he had come upon on his very first day down from the mountains. The nearest settlement of any kind was probably still a hundred miles away. He would not live to see it.

  He realized then that he did care, at least a little, that his life was reaching its end.

  How embarrassing it is, Joseph thought, to be dying like this, not even sixteen years old, the heir to House Keilloran transformed into a ragged bundle of skin and bones lying under a bush in some unknown corner of Middle Manza. He had always been so competent, so very good at looking after himself. What were they going to think back in Keilloran when the news finally reached them of what had happened to him? Martin would not weep, no. One quick wince, perhaps: that would be all the outward sign of emotion he would permit himself to show. His father had not even wept when his own beloved wife
had died, so suddenly and senselessly, of the bite of that harmless-looking little red toad that had fallen from a tree and landed on her arm. Probably he had never wept in his life. But Joseph knew what her death had done to his father inside, and he knew what his own death would do to him, too.

  And his brother Eitan, who was six years younger than Joseph was and had always worshipped him—Eitan would simply not be able to believe that his wondrous brother Joseph had perished in this idiotic way. Eitan would deny the news; he would be angered by it, he would pound the messenger furiously with his fists, he would turn to his father and say in that solemn old-man manner of his, “This is not true, Joseph would never have allowed such a thing to befall him.”

  And Rickard, three years older than Eitan—he would be angry too, but not for the same reason. Rickard, who now would have to become the heir to House Keilloran: how he would boil with rage at the realization that those responsibilities were unexpectedly going to be dumped upon him! Rickard was not the sort to run a Great House: everyone knew that, Rickard best of all. He was a clever boy, too clever for his own good, so bright that his intelligence worked against him. Rickard could always find ways to avoid handling anything difficult. Either he would sidestep any real challenge or he would simply allow it to flow around him like water around a boulder in a riverbed, whichever was easier. But it had never been necessary for him to be otherwise. He was only the second son. Joseph was the heir; Rickard knew he could look forward to a life of ease.

  Perhaps Rickard would change, now that there was no Joseph and he was going to be the first in line to inherit. Now that he could see the duties that went with being the Master of House Keilloran heading toward him like an avalanche. Joseph hoped so. Perhaps Cailin would help him. She was fourteen, old enough to understand these things, old enough to show Rickard that it would no longer suffice for him to slide by on mere cleverness, that he must take the trouble now to put that cleverness of his to responsible uses, inasmuch as his older brother was dead and he would someday be the Master of the House in his own right. She was a wise girl, Cailin, much undervalued by everyone, as girls tended to be. He wished now that he had treated her better.