for him in a way beyond friendship… if he was alive—oh, let him be alive!
In any event, here was Dagny. She certainly felt grief like a sword in her. But she hid it, planned, guided, guarded. She had stood in the light of a hundred different suns, had warred, wandered, been wife and mother and living sidearm. She knew everything worth knowing (what did ancient texts count for?) except one language. And she was so brave that she trusted her life to what ability an awkward weakling of a refugee might possess.
Please don’t let me fail her.
Thus Yasmin looked forth too and tried to make inferences from what she saw.
The house and outbuildings were frame, not large, well-built but well-weathered. Therefore they must have stood here for a good length of time. Therefore Imperial construction methods—alloy, prestressed concrete, synthetics, energy webs—had long been out of general use in these parts, probably everywhere on Nike. That primitiveness was emphasized by the agromech system.
A couple of horses drew a haycutter. It also was wooden; even the revolving blades were simply edged with metal. From its creaking and bouncing, the machine had neither wheel bearings nor springs. A man drove it. Two half-grown boys, belike his sons, walked after. They used wooden-tined rakes to order the windrows. The people, like the animals, were of long slim deep-chested build, brown-haired and fair-complexioned. Their garments were coarsely woven smock and trousers.
No weapons showed, which suggested that the bay region was free of bandits and vendattas. Nevertheless Dagny did not approach. Instead, she led a cautious way back into the woods and thence toward the house, so that the buildings screened off view of the hayfield.
The Ki-akener woman scowled. “Why?” she muttered.
“Why what… my lady?”
“Why make—” Dagny’s hands imitated whirling blades. “Here. Planet… canted?… little. No cold?”
“Oh. Do you mean, why do they bother making hay? Well, there must be times when their livestock can’t pasture.”
Dagny understood. Her nod was brusque. “Why that ?”
“Um-m-m… oh, dear, let me think. Lord Tom explained to me what he—what you two had learned about this planet. Yes. Not much axial tilt. I suppose not an unusually eccentric orbit. So the seasons oughtn’t to be very marked. And we are in a rather low latitude anyway, on a seacoast at that. It should never get too cold for grass. Too dry? No, this is midsummer time. And, well, they’d hardly export hay to other areas, would they?”
Dagny shrugged.
It is such a strange world, Yasmin thought. All wrong. Too dense. That is, if it had a great many heavy metals, humans would never have settled here permanently. So what makes it dense should be a core of iron, nickel and things, squeezed into compact quantum states. The kind that terrestroid planets normally have. Yes, and the formation of a true core causes tectonic processes, vulcanism, the outgassing of a primitive atmosphere and water. Later we get chemical evolution, life, photosynthesis, free oxygen.
But Nike is too small for that! It’s Mars type. We have a Mars type planet in our own system—oh, lost and loved star that shines upon Sassania—and it’s got a bare wisp of unbreathable air. Professor Nasruddin explained to us. If a world is small, it has weak gravity. So the differential migration of elements down toward the center, that builds a distinct core, is too slow. So few gas molecules get unlocked from mineral combination by heat… Nike isn’t possible!
(How suddenly, shockingly real came back to her the lecture hall, and the droning voice, young heads bent above notebooks, sunlight that streamed in through arched windows, and the buzz of bees, odor of roses, a glimpse of students strolling across a greensward that stretched between beautiful buildings.)
Dagny’s fingers clamped about Yasmin’s arm. “Heed! Fool!”
Yasmin started from her reverie. They were almost at the house. “Heavens! I’m sorry.”
“Talk well.” Dagny’s voice was bleak with doubt of her.
Yasmin swallowed and stepped forth into the yard. She felt dizzy. The knocking of her heart came remote as death. Penned cows, pigs, fowl were like things in a dream. There was something infinitely horrible about the windmill that groaned behind the barn.
Neither shot nor shout met her. The door opened a crack, and the woman who peered out did so fearfully. Why, she’s nervous of us!
Relief passed through Yasmin in a wave of darkness. But an odd, alert calm followed. She perceived with utter clarity. Her thoughts went in three or four directions at once, all coherent. One chain directed her to smile, extend unclenched hands, and say: “Greeting to you, good lady.” Another observed that the boards of the house were not nailed but pegged together. A third paid special heed to the windmill. It too was almost entirely of wood, with fabric sails. She saw that it pumped water into an elevated cistern, whence wooden pipes ran to the house and a couple of sheds. Attachments outside one of the latter indicated that there the water, when turned on, drove various machines, like the stone quern she could see.
No atomic or electric energy, then. Nor even solar or combustion power. And yet the knowledge of these things existed: if not complete, then sufficient to make aircraft possible, radio, occasional motorships, doubtless some groundcars. Why was it no longer applied by the common people? The appearance of this farm and of the fisher village as seen from a distance suggested moderate prosperity. The Engineer’s rule could not be unduly harsh.
Well, the answer must be, Nike’s economy had collapsed so far that hardly anyone could afford real power equipment.
But why not? Sunlight, wood, probably coal and petroleum were abundant. A simple generator, some batteries… Such things took metal. A broken-down society might not have the resources to extract much… Nonsense! Elements like iron, copper, lead, and uranium were surely simple to obtain, even after a thousand years of industrialization. Hadn’t Dagny, who knew, said this was a young planet? Weren’t young planets metal-rich?
Meanwhile the woman mumbled, “Day. You’re from outcountry?”
“Yes,” Yasmin said. No use trying to conceal that. Quite apart from accent and garments (the Hannoan woman wore a broad-sleeved embroidered blouse and a skirt halfway to her ankles), they—were not of the local racial type. But it was presumably not uniform over the whole planet. One could play on a peasantry’s likely ignorance of anything beyond its own neighborhood.
“I am from Kraken,” Yasmin said. “My friend is from Sassania.” If no one on those comparatively cosmopolitan planets had heard of Nike, vice versa was certain. “We were flying on a mission when our aircraft crashed in the hills.”
“That… was the flare… noises… this early-day?” the woman asked. Yasmin confirmed it. The woman drew breath and made a shaky sign in the air. “High ‘Uns I thank! We feared, we, ’twas them come back.”
Obvious who “they” were, and therefore impossible to inquire about them. A little hysterical with relief, the wife flung wide her door. “Enter you! Enter you! I call the men.”
“No need, we thank you,” Yasmin said quickly. The fewer who saw them and got a chance later to wonder and talk about them, the better. “Nor time. We must hurry. Do you know of our countries?”
“Well, er, far off.” The woman was embarrassed. Yasmin noted that the room behind her was neat, had a look of primitive well-being—but how primitive! Two younger children stared half frightened from an inner doorway. “Yes, far, and I, poor farm-wife, well, hasn’t so much as been to the Silva border—”
“That’s the next country?” Yasmin pounced.
“Why… next cavedorn, yes, ‘tother side of the High Sawtooths east’ard… Well, we’re both under the Emp’ror, but they do say as the Prester of Silva’s not happy with our good Engineer… You! A-travel like men!”
“They have different customs in our part of the world,” Yasmin said. “More like the Empire. Not your Empire. The real one, the Terran Empire, when women could do whatever a man might.” That was a safe claim. Throughout its remnants, no one questioned anything wonderful asserted about the lost Imperium—except, perhaps, a few unpleasant scholars, who asked why it had fallen if it had been so great. “Yes, we’re from far parts. My friend speaks little Anglic. They don’t, in her country.” That was why Dagny, clever Dagny, had said they should switch national origins. Krakener place names sounded more Anglic than Sassanian ones did, and Yasmin needed a ready-made supply.
“We have to get on with our mission as fast as possible,” she said. “But we know nothing about these lands.”
“Storm blow you off track?” the woman queried. As she relaxed, she became more intelligent. “Bad storm-
