by Poul Anderson
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Dynamic Science
Fiction January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Illustration: Julith clasped the star-man's arm with one hand, while
her other arm gripped his waist. The generator in Jorun's skull
responded to his will ... they rose quietly and went slowly seaward....]
"Look around you, Jorun of Fulkhis. This is _Earth_. This is the old
home of all mankind. You cannot go off and forget it. Man cannot do
so. It is in him, in his blood and bones and soul; he will carry
Earth within him forever."
"No," said the old man.
"But you don't realize what it means," said Jorun. "You don't know what
you're saying."
The old man, Kormt of Huerdar, Gerlaug's son, and Speaker for Solis
Township, shook his head till the long, grizzled locks swirled around
his wide shoulders. "I have thought it through," he said. His voice was
deep and slow and implacable. "You gave me five years to think about it.
And my answer is no."
Jorun felt a weariness rise within him. It had been like this for days
now, weeks, and it was like trying to knock down a mountain. You beat on
its rocky flanks till your hands were bloody, and still the mountain
stood there, sunlight on its high snow-fields and in the forests that
rustled up its slopes, and it did not really notice you. You were a
brief thin buzz between two long nights, but the mountain was forever.
"You haven't thought at all," he said with a rudeness born of
exhaustion. "You've only reacted unthinkingly to a dead symbol. It's not
a human reaction, even, it's a verbal reflex."
Kormt's eyes, meshed in crow's-feet, were serene and steady under the
thick gray brows. He smiled a little in his long beard, but made no
other reply. Had he simply let the insult glide off him, or had he not
understood it at all? There was no real talking to these peasants; too
many millennia lay between, and you couldn't shout across that gulf.
"Well," said Jorun, "the ships will be here tomorrow or the next day,
and it'll take another day or so to get all your people aboard. You have
that long to decide, but after that it'll be too late. Think about it, I
beg of you. As for me, I'll be too busy to argue further."
"You are a good man," said Kormt, "and a wise one in your fashion. But
you are blind. There is something dead inside you."
He waved one huge gnarled hand. "Look around you, Jorun of Fulkhis. This
is _Earth_. This is the old home of all humankind. You cannot go off and
forget it. Man cannot do so. It is in him, in his blood and bones and
soul; he will carry Earth within him forever."
Jorun's eyes traveled along the arc of the hand. He stood on the edge of
the town. Behind him were its houses--low, white, half-timbered, roofed
with thatch or red tile, smoke rising from the chimneys; carved
galleries overhung the narrow, cobbled, crazily-twisting streets; he
heard the noise of wheels and wooden clogs, the shouts of children at
play. Beyond that were trees and the incredible ruined walls of Sol
City. In front of him, the wooded hills were cleared and a gentle
landscape of neat fields and orchards rolled down toward the distant
glitter of the sea: scattered farm buildings, drowsy cattle, winding
gravel roads, fence-walls of ancient marble and granite, all dreaming
under the sun.
He drew a deep breath. It was pungent in his nostrils. It smelled of
leaf-mould, plowed earth baking in the warmth, summery trees and
gardens, a remote ocean odor of salt and kelp and fish. He thought that
no two planets ever had quite the same smell, and that none was as rich
as Terra's.
"This is a fair world," he said slowly.
"It is the only one," said Kormt. "Man came from here; and to this, in
the end, he must return."
"I wonder--" Jorun sighed. "Take me; not one atom of my body was from
this soil before I landed. My people lived on Fulkhis for ages, and
changed to meet its conditions. They would not be happy on Terra."
"The atoms are nothing," said Kormt. "It is the form which matters, and
that was given to you by Earth."
Jorun studied him for a moment. Kormt was like most of this planet's ten
million or so people--a dark, stocky folk, though there were more blond
and red-haired throwbacks here than in the rest of the Galaxy. He was
old for a primitive untreated by medical science--he must be almost two
hundred years old--but his back was straight, and his stride firm. The
coarse, jut-nosed face held an odd strength. Jorun was nearing his
thousandth birthday, but couldn't help feeling like a child in Kormt's
presence.
That didn't make sense. These few dwellers on Terra were a backward and
impoverished race of peasants and handicraftsmen; they were ignorant and
unadventurous; they had been static for more thousands of years than
anyone knew. What could they have to say to the ancient and mighty
civilization which had almost forgotten their little planet?
Kormt looked at the declining sun. "I must go now," he said. "There are
the evening chores to do. I will be in town tonight if you should wish
to see me."
"I probably will," said Jorun. "There's a lot to do, readying the
evacuation, and you're a big help."
* * * * *
The old man bowed with grave courtesy, turned, and walked off down the
road. He wore the common costume of Terran men, as archaic in style as
in its woven-fabric material: hat, jacket, loose trousers, a long staff
in his hand. Contrasting the drab blue of Kormt's dress, Jorun's vivid
tunic of shifting rainbow hues was like a flame.
The psychotechnician sighed again, watching him go. He liked the old
fellow. It would be criminal to leave him here alone, but the law
forbade force--physical or mental--and the Integrator on Corazuno wasn't
going to care whether or not one aged man stayed behind. The job was to
get the _race_ off Terra.
_A lovely world._ Jorun's thin mobile features, pale-skinned and
large-eyed, turned around the horizon. _A fair world we came from._
There were more beautiful planets in the Galaxy's swarming myriads--the
indigo world-ocean of Loa, jeweled with islands; the heaven-defying
mountains of Sharang; the sky of Jareb, that seemed to drip light--oh,
many and many, but there was only one Earth.
Jorun remembered his first sight of this world, hanging free in space to
watch it after the gruelling ten-day run, thirty thousand light-years,
from Corazuno. It was blue as it turned before his eyes, a burnished
turquoise shield blazoned with the living green and brown of its lands,
and the poles were crowned with a flimmering haze of aurora. The belts
that streaked its face and blurred the continents were cloud, wind and
water and the gray rush of rain, like a benediction from heaven. Beyond
the planet hung its moon, a scarred golden crescent, and he had wondered
how many generations of men had looked up to it, or watched its light
like a broken bridge across moving waters. Against the enormous cold of
the sky--utter black out to the distant coils of the nebulae, thronging
with a million frosty points of diamond-hard blaze that were the
stars--Earth had stood as a sign of haven. To Jorun, who came from
Galactic center and its uncountable hosts of suns, heaven was bare, this
was the outer fringe where the stars thinned away toward hideous
immensity. He had shivered a little, drawn the envelope of air and
warmth closer about him, with a convulsive movement. The silence drummed
in his head. Then he streaked for the north-pole rendezvous of his
group.
_Well_, he thought now, _we have a pretty routine job. The first
expedition here, five years ago, prepared the natives for the fact
they'd have to go. Our party simply has to organize these docile
peasants in time for the ships._ But it had meant a lot of hard work,
and he was tired. It would be good to finish the job and get back home.
Or would it?
He thought of flying with Zarek, his team-mate, from the rendezvous to
this area assigned as theirs. Plains like oceans of grass, wind-rippled,
darkened with the herds of wild cattle whose hoofbeats were a thunder in
the earth; forests, hundreds of kilometers of old and mighty trees,
rivers piercing them in a long steel gleam; lakes where fish leaped;
spilling sunshine like warm rain, radiance so bright it hurt his eyes,
cloud-shadows swift across the land. It had all been empty of man, but
still there was a vitality here which was almost frightening to Jorun.
His own grim world of moors and crags and spin-drift seas was a niggard
beside this; here life covered the earth, filled the oceans, and made
the heavens clangerous around him. He wondered if the driving energy
within man, the force which had raised him to the stars, made him
half-god and half-demon, if that was a legacy of Terra.
Well--man had changed; over the thousands of years, natural and
controlled adaptation had fitted him to the worlds he had colonized, and
most of his many races could not now feel at home here. Jorun thought of
his own party: round, amber-skinned Chuli from a tropic world,
complaining bitterly about the cold and dryness; gay young Cluthe,
gangling and bulge-chested; sophisticated Taliuvenna of the flowing dark
hair and the lustrous eyes--no, to them Earth was only one more planet,
out of thousands they had seen in their long lives.
_And I'm a sentimental fool._
2
He could have willed the vague regret out of his trained nervous system,
but he didn't want to. This was the last time human eyes would ever look
on Earth, and somehow Jorun felt that it should be more to him than just
another psychotechnic job.
"Hello, good sir."
He turned at the voice and forced his tired lips into a friendly smile.
"Hello, Julith," he said. It was a wise policy to learn the names of the
townspeople, at least, and she was a great-great-granddaughter of the
Speaker.
She was some thirteen or fourteen years old, a freckle-faced child with
a shy smile, and steady green eyes. There was a certain awkward grace
about her, and she seemed more imaginative than most of her stolid race.
She curtsied quaintly for him, her bare foot reaching out under the long
smock which was daily female dress here.
"Are you busy, good sir?" she asked.
"Well, not too much," said Jorun. He was glad of a chance to talk; it
silenced his thoughts. "What can I do for you?"
"I wondered--" She hesitated, then, breathlessly: "I wonder if you could
give me a lift down to the beach? Only for an hour or two. It's too far
to walk there before I have to be home, and I can't borrow a car, or
even a horse. If it won't be any trouble, sir."
"Mmmm--shouldn't you be at home now? Isn't there milking and so on to
do?"
"Oh, I don't live on a farm, good sir. My father is a baker."
"Yes, yes, so he is. I should have remembered." Jorun considered for an
instant. There was enough to do in town, and it wasn't fair for him to
play hooky while Zarek worked alone. "Why do you want to go to the
beach, Julith?"
"We'll be busy packing up," she said. "Starting tomorrow, I guess. This
is my last chance to see it."