It was amazing how quickly Earth, with all its habits and memories,
slipped away from Trehearne. The pangs and wrenchings of homesickness
still came to him now and then, mostly when he lay alone in his bunk,
just before sleep. But they were less and less violent. He began
to have for his native world the nostalgic affection one has for a
foster-parent far less than perfect, but all the same a part of one's
life--a part done with now, but with its bright and kindly interludes
to look back upon. He was not sorry that he had left it. By a freak of
genetics he had been born an alien, and he had never fitted there. Now,
rapidly and easily, he was finding himself.
At first there were periods when he felt that he was dreaming, that the
ship and all within it would disappear and he would waken. But as his
mind readjusted itself, shaking free from the narrow horizons where it
had been prisoned, ancestral pride and ancestral longing began to stir.
And with that stirring came an insatiable hunger for knowledge.
Edri was his chief teacher. For some reason, the ugly man with the
unhappy eyes and unfailing cheerfulness of speech had taken a liking
to him, and Trehearne was glad of it. He needed friends. But there
were others, too. Men and women, mostly young, healthy and full of
themselves, loving the life they lived and enjoying to the hilt his own
wide-eyed reactions to it. For a while they regarded him very much as
he would have regarded an animal that had suddenly learned to talk and
do sums, but they got used to him, and there was never any malice in
their conduct. He liked them. They were his kind of people. They _were_
his people.
Kerrel remained civil, but aloof. Shairn spoke to him when she felt
like it, as casually as though they had known each other all their
lives and nothing of interest had ever happened between them. But
sometimes he thought she looked at him in a way that was not casual at
all, and he could not tell what she was thinking. He played along. It
was hard, when he got to remembering things. But he did it. And he had
enough to do to keep his mind off women. There weren't hours enough in
the ship's day to supply him.
He learned the Vardda tongue. He learned the rudiments of Vardda
history and the outlines of their social structure. But most of all,
with an inborn sureness, he learned the Vardda mind, the Vardda point
of view, and his own character expanded, having found a meaning for
itself. He was a Vardda, and they were the Starmen--Galactic Man, as
Edri had put it once, a unique species, specialized and fitted for the
most splendid work of all, the conquest of the stars.
The power, the magnificence of that voyaging! No wonder the little
ships and little skies of Earth had seemed so futile. This was his
heritage, the freedom of the stars, the long, long roads of outer
space, the swift ships plying between the island continents of suns,
the windless, timeless, boundless gulf that washed the shores of a
galaxy.
He haunted the ship's bridge, studying the intricate controls and
cracking his brain over the staggering complexities of astrogation.
In the generator rooms he learned by heart the pulse of the ship,
listening to the silence of free flight after acceleration was
complete. He deviled the engineers, the pilots, the technicians, with
questions, understanding less than half of what they told him but
always avid for more. He learned much, and yet it was nothing, and he
was mad for learning, mad to hold under his own hands one of these
proud giants of the starways.
The Vardda understood him. His hunger was their own, but they had not
been barred from satisfaction. They accepted him. They loved to talk,
and Trehearne had no lack of language teachers. His head spun to the
tales they told him, of travels around the galaxy, of foreign worlds
and happenings in far-off clusters of suns, of dead stars wheeling
forever dark through darkness with their frozen worlds, of the sudden
dreadful flaring of the novae, of what happens when a ship collides
with a rogue star at many times the speed of light.
Trehearne was happy. He was living again as a child lives, in a world
of wonders, where everything was new and bright and as yet untarnished.
But one dark cloud hung over him--the threat of Vardda law and the
Council. They might still take away from him all he had found. That
threat got bigger and blacker the closer he came to the end of the
voyage, and by the time the ship actually went into deceleration it had
grown until it blotted out the whole horizon.
He had learned more now. He understood how the whole vast structure
of Vardda economy rested on the unassailable position of the Starmen
themselves and their unique ability to endure interstellar velocities.
In this case, the blood, the race, was everything. There could not be
any compromises, there could not be any challenges of that superiority.
And here was he, Earth-born of Earth stock, with only a set of bastard
genes to link him with the Vardda, a compromise and a challenge in
himself.
"But damn it," he said furiously to Edri, "they can't refuse me now!
And why, when you come right down to it, would one Vardda more or less
make that much difference? The mutation process has been lost anyway,
I certainly can't infect anybody else with it, and I don't see what
they're afraid of."
Edri gave him a sombre look. "Listen, Trehearne, I haven't helped
myself any by being friendly to you, as it is, and I'm not going to
make matters worse for both of us by talking treason into the bargain.
If you want the full, official answer to that question, go ask Kerrel."
"I will."
He found Kerrel in the lounge, engaged with Shairn and several other
people in the complicated game that seemed to serve the Vardda in the
place of bridge. Inside a gigantic crystal globe were suspended a
number of little solar systems. Activated by magnetic currents, the
tiny suns wheeled along and their planets spun in orbits around them,
and it was a dizzying thing to look at. Within this microcosm were a
dozen or so tiny ships, operated by the players by remote control, and
for hazards there were miniature nebulae, dark clouds, and tiny comets.
The object was to move the ships about without losing any, one team
racing the opposing team's fleet to a selected destination. Trehearne
had played a few times, but with no success whatever.
"I want to talk to you," he said, and Kerrel motioned him to wait. Very
rapidly and skillfully he pressed a series of buttons on the control
board in front of him. Inside the globe a ship depressed its arc,
allowing a sparkling comet to pass safely above it, skirted the edge of
a dark nebula, shifted course thirty-five degrees and made a perfect
landing on a flying worldlet no larger than a pebble. At the top of
Kerrel's panel a signal light glowed green.
Beside him Shairn lost two ships in collision and got two red lights
for her pains, the "wrecks" being automatically retired out of play.
Shairn wasn't watching the globe. She was watching Trehearne, and her
eyes were very bright.
Kerrel turned over his place to another man and stood up. "The
library's quiet," he said. "We can talk there." He went away with
Trehearne. Behind them, Shairn gave up her board and followed.
The ship's library was small, with microbooks racked on the walls. They
were mostly technical books, and Trehearne hadn't been able to get much
out of them. He had struggled with a few on the theory and practical
operation of starships, but it was a hopeless job and he hadn't pursued
it. His vocabulary was still limited, and even if it hadn't been the
technology involved was miles over his head.
Now he faced Kerrel and said, "I asked Edri a question, and he referred
me to you. So I'll ask it again. Why would the Vardda Council be afraid
to accept me?"
Kerrel put his hands on the back of a chair and thought a minute. "You
understand the Vardda position among all the other races of the galaxy."
"Yes. And I don't see how I could possibly alter it."
"Then your understanding isn't complete. There are many worlds in
space, Trehearne. Countless millions of people live on them. Do you
know how they feel about us?"
"I hadn't thought."
"They hate us. They envy us. It's natural enough. They're prisoned in
their own solar systems, forced to watch strangers carry on all their
commerce with other stars. But natural or not, it's a factor we have to
reckon with."
Trehearne said impatiently, "What can they do about it? They can't
mutate, and they can't even try to force you to share the process with
them. The thing was lost a thousand years ago. You're safe."
"There are still Orthists."
"Who are they?"
Kerrel looked mildly surprised. "I thought Edri would have told you.
No? But you have, of course, heard of Orthis, the discoverer of
the mutational process. He was a great man, Trehearne. A brilliant
man, a genius, the founder of our race. But he was not a practical
man. He lived alone too much in space, worked alone too long in his
laboratory ship. He didn't know human beings, he didn't understand the
hard grimy necessities of life, the law of self-preservation. He wanted
to give the mutation--and the freedom of the stars--to everyone."
He paused, as though he were waiting for Trehearne to speak. But
Trehearne, though he was thinking hard, kept his mouth shut.
"Orthis," Kerrel said, "was not able to see what, fortunately, others
did see--that giving the mutation to all the races of the galaxy would
mean wars and conflicts of such staggering dimensions that whole
solar systems, including ours, might very well be destroyed. He clung
stubbornly to his views and eventually fled from Llyrdis in defiance
of the government, determined to have his own way. He was pursued, of
course, and driven away from his objective, so that his attempt failed,
but he was never captured. He vanished far out on the rim of the
galaxy, and the process went with him. And that's where the trouble is,
Trehearne. Some time later Orthis sent back a certain message, which
gave his adherents hope that his ship had not been destroyed, that it
was, in fact, waiting somewhere to be found again, and the process with
it. Now, after a thousand years, they still hope."
Trehearne shook his head. "I certainly can't tell them where the ship
is. So how does it affect me?"
"Don't you see how you could be used? An alien, a mongrel, but able to
fly the stars--the effect on the Orthist movement would be tremendous,
and not only on Llyrdis. People all over the galaxy, wanting what
we have, would take you up as a symbol of what they consider their
emancipation. I have a lively imagination, but it balks at trying to
conceive all the trouble that could breed out of that situation."
A cold sensation was creeping over Trehearne, centering in the pit of
his stomach. What Kerrel said made sense. He hated to admit it, but it
made sense. He said harshly, "All right, but there must be a way around
it. Around me, I mean. I take it that the Vardda Council is made up of
politicians, and a politician can get around anything he wants to."
"They can," said Shairn from the doorway. "Particularly when the right
people convince them they should."
Both men swung around, surprised. She strolled in, smiling at them
impartially. Trehearne made nothing out of it but a smile, but Kerrel's
face went suddenly hard.
"I don't know," she said to Trehearne, "whether anyone has mentioned
it, but I'm quite an influential person on Llyrdis."