It consisted of low, massive log-and-stone buildings, whose overgrown sod roofs would hardly be visible from above. Everything stood unlighted, empty. But the door to the main house opened at Evagail’s touch; no place in the woodlands had a lock. She dragged Ridenour across the threshold and closed the door again. He lay in gloom and gasped his way back to consciousness. As if across light-years, he heard her say, “We didn’t arrive any too soon, did we?” There followed the cannonade of the hail.
After a while he was on his feet. She had stimulated the lamps, which were microcultures in glass globes, to their bright phosphorescence and had started a fire on the hearth. The principal heat source, however, was fuel oil, a system antique but adequate. “We might as well figure on spending the night,” she said from the kitchen. “This weather will last for hours, and the roads will be rivers for hours after that. Why don’t you find yourself a hot bath and some dry clothes? I’ll have dinner ready soon.”
Ridenour swallowed a sense of inadequacy. He wasn’t an outbacker and couldn’t be expected to cope with their country. How well would they do on Terra? Exploring, he saw the house to be spacious, many-roomed, beautifully paneled, draped and furnished, Evagail’s advice was sound. He returned to her as if reborn.
She had prepared an excellent meal out of what was in the larder, including a heady red wine. White tablecloth, crystal goblets, candlelight were almost a renaissance of a Terra which had been more gracious than today’s. (Almost. The utensils were horn, the knifeblades obsidian. The paintings on the walls were of a stylized, unearthly school; looking closely, you could identify Arulian influence. No music lilted from a taper; instead came the muffled brawling of the storm. And the woman who sat across from him wore a natural-fiber kilt, a fringed leather bolero, a dagger and tomahawk.)
They talked in animated and friendly wise, though since they belonged to alien cultures they had little more than question-and-answer conversation. The bottle passed freely back and forth. Being tired and having long abstained, Ridenour was quickly affected by the alcohol. When he noticed that, he thought, what the hell, why not? It glowed within him. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “I classed your people as barbarians. I see now you have a true civilization.”
“You needed this much time to see that?” she laughed. “Well, I’ll forgive you. The Cities haven’t realized it yet.”
“That’s natural. You’re altogether strange to them. And, isolated as they are from the galactic mainstream, they… haven’t the habit of thinking something different… can be equal or superior to what they take for granted is the civilized way.”
“My, that was a sentence! Do you acknowledge, then, we are superior?”
He shook his head with care.
“No. I can’t say that. I’m a city boy myself. A lot of what you do shocks me. Your ruthlessness. Your unwillingness to compromise.”
She grew grave. “The Cities never tried to compromise with us, John. I don’t know if they can. Our wise men, those who’ve studied history, say an industrial society must keep expanding or go under. We’ve got to stop them before they grow too strong. The war’s given us a chance.”
“You can’t rebel against the Empire!” he protested.
“Can’t we? We’re a goodly ways from Terra. And we are rebelling. No one consulted us about incorporation.” Evagail shrugged. “Not that we care about that in itself. What difference to us who claims the over-lordship of Freehold, if he lets us alone? But the Cities have not let us alone. They cut down our woods, dam our rivers, dig holes in our soil, and get involved in a war that may wreck the whole planet.”
“M-m, you could help end the war if you mobilized against the Arulians.”
“To whose benefit? The Cities’!”
“But when you attack the Cities, aren’t you aiding the Arulians?”
“No. Not in the long run. They belong to the Cities also. We don’t want to fight them—our relationship with them was mostly pleasant, and they taught us a great deal—but eventually we want them off this world.”
“You can’t expect me to agree that’s right.”
“Certainly not.” Her tone softened. “What we want from you is nothing but an honest report to your leaders. You don’t know how happy I am that you admit we are civilized. Or post-civilized. At any rate, we aren’t degenerate, we are progressing on our own trail. I can hope you’ll go between us and the Empire, as a friend of both, and help work out a settlement. If you do that, you’ll live in centuries of ballads: the Peacebringer.”
“I’d like that better than anything,” he said gladly.
She raised her brows. “Anything?”
“Oh, some things equally, no doubt. I am getting homesick.”
“You needn’t stay lonely while you’re with us,” she murmured.
Somehow, their hands joined across the table. The wine sang in Ridenour’s veins. “I’ve wondered why you stood apart from me,” she said. “Surely you could see I want to make love with you.”
“Y-yes.” His heart knocked.
“Why not? You have a… a wife, yes. But I can’t imagine an Imperial Terran worries about that, two hundred light-years from home. And what harm would be done her?”
“None.”
She laughed anew, rose and circled the table to stand beside him and rumpled his hair. The odor of her was sweet around him. “All right,’ then, silly,” she said, “what have you been waiting for?”
He remembered. She saw his fists clench and stepped back. He looked at the candle flames, not her, and mumbled: “I’m sorry. It mustn’t be.”
“Why not?” The wind raved louder, nearly obliterating her words.
“Let’s say I do have idiotic medieval scruples.”
She regarded him for a space. Is that the truth?”
“Yes.” But not the whole truth, he thought, I am not an observer, not an emissary, I an he who will call doWn destruction upon you if I can. The thing in my pocket sunders us, dear. You are my enemy, and I will not betray you with a kiss.
“I’m not offended,” she said at last, slowly. “Disappointed and puzzled, though.”
“We probably—don’t understand each other as well as we believed,” he ventured.
“Might be. Well, let’s let the dishes wait and turn in, shall we?” Her tone was less cold than wary.
Next day she was polite but aloof, and after they had rejoined the army she conferred long with Karlsarm.
Moon Garnet Lake was the heart of the Upwoods: more than fifty kilometers across, walled on three sides by forest and on the fourth by soaring snowpeaks. At every season it was charged with life, fish in argent swarms, birds rising by thousands when a bulligator bellowed in a white-plumed stand of cockatoo reed, wildkine everywhere among the trees. At full summer, microphytons multiplied until the waters glowed deep red, and the food chain which they started grew past belief in size and diversity. As yet, the year was too new for that. Wavelets sparkled clear to the escarpments, where mountaintops floated dim blue against heaven.
“I see why you reacted violently against the attempt to found a town here,” Ridenour said to Karlsarm. They stood on a beach,, watching most of the expedition frolic in the lake. Those boisterous shouts and lithe brown bodies did not seem out of place; a cruising flock of fowl overhead was larger and made more clangor. The Ter-ran drew a pure breath. “And it would have been a pity, esthetically speaking. Who owns this region?”
“None,” Karlsarm answered. “It’s too basic to the whole country. Anyone may use it. The numbers that do aren’t great enough to strain the resources, similar things being available all over. So it’s a natural site for our periodic-head-of-household gatherings,” He glanced sideways at the other man and added: “Or for an army to rendezvous.”
“You are not disbanding, then?”
“Certainly not. Domkirk was a commencement. We don’t intend to stop till we control the planet.”
“But you’re daydreaming! No other City’s as vulnerably located as Domkirk was. Some are on other continents—”
“Where Free People also live. We’re in touch.”
“What do you plan?”
