The Ragged Astronauts

“Just exercise your normal discretion,” Leddravohr said, folding his arms. His acute hearing picked up a ripple of admiring whispers going through the nearby soldiery, and he knew he had added to his reputation as the prince with the common touch. The word would spread fast — Leddravohr loves his people so much that he will even converse with a slimer. The little episode was a calculated exercise in image-building, but in truth he did not feel he was demeaning himself by talking to a man like Owpope, whose work was of genuine importance to Kolcorron. It was the useless parasites — like the priests and philosophers — who earned his hatred and contempt. They would be the first to be purged out of existence when he eventually became King.

He was settling down to watch Owpope apply an elliptical pattern of slime to the curving base of the brakka trunk when his attention was again caught by a movement in the sky to the west. The airship had returned and was scudding through the narrow band of blue which separated Overland from the jagged wall of trees. Its appearance after such a short time meant that it had not landed at G1, the area command centre. The captain must have communicated with the base by sunwriter and then come directly to the forward zone — which made it almost certain that he was carrying an urgent message to Leddravohr from the King.

Mystified, Leddravohr shaded his eyes from the sun’s glare as he watched the airship slow down and manoeuvre towards a landing in the forest clearing.

Chapter 3

Lain Maraquine’s domicile — known as the Square House — was positioned on Greenmount, a rounded hill in a northern suburb of Ro-Atabri, the Kolcorronian capital.

From the window of his study he had a panoramic view of the city’s various districts — residential, commercial, industrial, administrative — as they sifted down to the Borann River and on the far bank gave way to the parklands surrounding the five palaces. The families headed by the Lord Philosopher had been granted a cluster of dwellings and other buildings on this choice site many centuries earlier, during the reign of Bytran IV, when their work was held in much higher regard.

The Lord Philosopher himself lived in a sprawling structure known as Greenmount Peel, and it was a sign of his former importance that all the houses in his bailiwick had been placed in line-of- sight with the Great Palace, thus facilitating communication by sunwriter. Now, however, such prestigious features only added to the jealousy and resentment felt by the heads of other orders. Lain Maraquine knew that the industrial supremo, Prince Chakkell, particularly wanted Greenmount as an adornment to his own empire and was doing everything in his power to have the philosophers deposed and moved to humbler accommodation.

It was the beginning of aftday, the region having just emerged from the shadow of Overland, and the city was looking beautiful as it returned to life after its two-hour sleep. The yellow, orange and red coloration of trees which were shedding their leaves contrasted with the pale and darker greens of trees with different cycles which were coming into bud or were in full foliage. Here and there the brightly glowing envelopes of airships created pastel circles and ellipses, and on the river could be seen the white sails of ocean-going ships which were bringing a thousand commodities from distant parts of Land.

Seated at his desk by the window, Lain was oblivious to the spectacular view. All that day he had been aware of a curious excitement and a sense of expectancy deep within himself. There was no way in which he could be certain, but his premonition was that the mental agitation was leading to something of rare importance.

For some time he had been intrigued by an underlying similarity he had observed in problems fed into his department from a variety of sources. The problems were as routine and mundane as a vintner wanting to know the most economical shape of jar in which to market a fixed quantity of wine, or a farmer trying to decide the best mix of crops for a certain area of land at different times of the year.

It was all a far cry from the days when his forebears had been charged with tasks like estimating the size of the cosmos, and yet Lain had begun to suspect that somewhere at the heart of the commonplace commercial riddles there lurked a concept whose implications were more universal than the enigmas of astronomy. In every case there was a quantity whose value was governed by changes in another quantity, and the problem was that of finding an optimum balance. Traditional solutions involved making numerous approximations or plotting vertices on a graph, but a tiny voice had begun to whisper to Lain and its message was the icily thrilling one that there might be a way of arriving at precise solution algebraically, with a few strokes of the pen. It was something to do with the mathematical notion of limits, with the idea that.…

“You’ll have to help with the guest list,” Gesalla said as she swept into the panelled study. “I can’t do any serious planning when I don’t even know how many people we are going to have.” A glimmering in the depths of Lain’s mind was abruptly extinguished, leaving him with a sense of loss which quickly faded as he looked up at his black-haired solewife. The illness of early pregnancy had narrowed the oval of her face and given her a dark-eyed pallor which somehow emphasised her intelligence and strength of character. She had never looked more beautiful in Lain’s eyes, but he still wished she had not insisted on starting the baby. That slender, slim-hipped body did not look to him as though it had been designed for motherhood and he had private fears about the outcome.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Lain,” she said, her face showing concern. “Did I interrupt something important?”

He smiled and shook his head, once again impressed by her talent for divining other people’s thoughts. “Isn’t it early to be planning for Yearsend?”

“Yes.” She met his gaze coolly — her way of challenging him to find anything wrong with being efficient. “Now, about your guests.…”

“I promise to write out a list before the day is over. I suppose it will be much the same as usual, though I’m not sure if Toller will be home this year.”

“I hope he isn’t,” Gesalla said, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t want him. It would be so pleasant to have a party without any arguments or fighting.”

“He is my brother,” Lain protested amiably.

“Half-brother would be more like it.”

Lain’s good humour was threatened. “I’m glad my mother isn’t alive to hear that comment.”

Gesalla came to him immediately, sat on his lap and kissed him on the mouth, moulding his cheeks with both her hands to coax him into an ardent response. It was a familiar trick of hers, but nonetheless effective. Still feeling privileged even after two years of marriage, he slid his hand inside her blue camisole and caressed her small breasts. After a moment she sat upright and gave him a solemn stare.

“I didn’t mean any disrespect to your mother,” she said. “It’s just that Toller looks more like a soldier than a member of this family.”

“Genetic flukes sometimes happen.”

“And there’s the way he can’t even read.”

“We’ve been through all this before,” Lain said patiently. “When you get to know Toller better you’ll see that he is as intelligent as any other member of the family. He can read, but he isn’t fluent because of some problem with the way he perceives printed words. In any case, most of the military are literate — so your observation is lacking in relevance.”

“Well.…” Gesalla looked dissatisfied. “Well, why does he have to cause trouble everywhere he goes?”

“Lots of people have that habit — including one whose left nipple is tickling my palm at this moment.”

“Don’t try to turn my mind to other things — especially at this time of day.”

“All right, but why does Toller bother you so much? I mean, we are pretty well surrounded by individualists and near-eccentrics on Greenmount.”

“Would you like it better if I were one of those faceless females who have no opinions about anything?” Gesalla was galvanised into springing to her feet, her light body scarcely reacting against his thighs, and an expression of dismay appeared on her face as she looked down into the walled precinct in front of the house. “Were you expecting Lord Glo?”

“No.”

“Bad luck — you’ve got him.” Gesalla hurried to the door of the study. “I’m going to vanish before he arrives. I can’t afford to spend half the day listening to all that endless humming and hawing — not to mention the smutty innuendoes.” She gathered her ankle-length skirts and ran silently towards the rear stairs.

Lain took off his reading glasses and gazed after her, wishing she would not keep reviving the subject of his brother’s parentage. Aytha Maraquine, his mother, had died in giving birth to Toller, so if there had been an adulterous liaison she had more than paid for it. Why could Gesalla not leave the matter at that? Lain had been attracted to her for her intellectual independence as well as her beauty and physical grace, but he had not bargained for the antagonism towards his brother. He hoped it was not going to lead to years of domestic friction.

The sound of a carriage door slamming in the precinct drew his attention to the outside world. Lord Glo had just stepped down from the aging but resplendent phaeton which he always used for short journeys in the city. Its driver, holding the two bluehorns in check, nodded and fidgeted as he received a lengthy series of instructions from Glo. Lain guessed that the Lord Philosopher was using a hundred words where ten would have sufficed and he began to pray that the visit would not be too much of an endurance test. He went to the sideboard, poured out two glasses of black wine and waited by the study door until Glo appeared.

“You’re very kind,” Glo said, taking his glass as he entered and going straight to the nearest chair. Although in his late fifties, he looked much older thanks to his rotund figure and the fact that his teeth had been reduced to a few brownish pegs splayed behind his lower lip. He was breathing noisily after climbing the stairs, his stomach ballooning and collapsing under his informal grey-and- white robe.

“It’s always a pleasure to see you, my lord,” Lain said, wondering if there was a special reason for the visit and knowing there was little point in his trying to elicit the information too soon.

Glo drank half his wine in one gulp. “Mutual, my boy. Oh! I’ve got something… hmm… at least, I think I’ve got something to show you. You’re going to like this.” He set his glass aside, groped in the folds of his clothing and eventually produced a square of paper which he handed to Lain. It was slightly sticky and mid-brown in colour except for a circular patch of mottled tan in the centre.

“Farland.” Lain identified the circle as being a light picture of the only other major planet in the local system, orbiting the sun at some twice the distance of the Land-Overland pair. “The images are getting better.”

“Yes, but we still can’t make them permanent. That one has faded… hmm… noticeably since last night. You can hardly see the polar caps now, but last night they were very clear. Pity. Pity.” Glo took the picture back and studied it closely, all the while shaking his head and sucking his teeth.

“The polar caps were as clear as daylight. Clear as daylight, I tell you. Young Enteth got a very good confirmation of the angle of… ah… inclination. Lain, have you ever tried to visualise what it would be like to live on a world whose axis was tilted? There would be a hot period of the year, with long days and short nights, and a cold… hmm… period, with long days… I mean short days… and long nights… all depending on where the planet was in its orbit. The colour changes on Farland show that all the vegetation is geared to a single… hmm… superimposed cycle.”

Lain concealed his impatience and boredom as Glo launched himself upon one of his most familiar set pieces. It was a cruel irony that the Lord Philosopher was becoming prematurely senile, and Lain — who had a genuine regard for the older man — saw it as a duty to give him maximum support, personally and professionally. He replenished his visitor’s drink and made appropriate comments as Glo meandered on from elementary astronomy to botany and the differences between the ecology of a tilted world and that of Land.

On Land, where there were no seasons, the very first fanners must have had the task of separating the natural jumble of edible grasses into synchronous batches which matured at chosen times. Six harvests a year was the norm in most parts of the world. Thereafter it had simply been a matter of planting and reaping six adjacent strips to maintain supplies of grain, with no long-term storage problems. In modern times the advanced countries had found it more efficacious to devote whole farms to single-cycle crops and to work in six-farm combines or multiples thereof, but the principle was the same.

As a boy, Lain Maraquine had enjoyed speculating about life on distant planets — assuming they existed in other parts of the universe and were peopled by intelligent beings — but he had quickly found that mathematics offered him greater scope for intellectual adventure. Now all he could wish for was that Lord Glo would either go away and let him get on with his work or proceed to explain his visit. Tuning his thoughts back into the rambling discourse he found that Glo had switched back to the experiments with photography and the difficulties of producing emulsions of light- sensitive vegetable cells which would hold an image for more than a few days.

“Why is it so important to you?” Lain put in. “Anybody in your observatory staff could draw a much better picture by hand.”

“Astronomy is only a tiny bit of it, my boy — the aim is to be able to produce totally… hmm… accurate pictures of buildings, landscapes, people.”