Sexual dimorphism was considerable. The female stood fifteen centimeters shorter. She had a mere stub of tail. Her hump was large and softly rounded, unlike his blocky cluster of muscles; her rump was broad and her belly deep; two nipples on an udder which wasn’t large, and the external genitalia, were brilliant red. Accompanying text noted that her odor was sweet and his acrid, and that she commanded a wider range of frequencies in both speech and hearing.
They were unclad aside from ornaments and a belt to support pouch and knife. He carried a spear and a stringed instrument slung across his shoulders; she, a longbow, quiver, and what might be a wooden flute.
“—I know the biochemistry is basically like ours, we can eat a good deal of each other’s food though some essentials are lacking in either case—why, they get drunk on ethanol too.” Dejerine snapped the volume shut. “Homelike, no? Except that men have spent a century on Ishtar, working hard to understand, and you can better tell than I how far off they are from their goal!” He sent the book spinning over to his bed.
“A long ways,” his visitor admitted.
“And those humans. True, true, more than half the population of Primavera is floating: researchers who come for a while to carry out specific projects, technics on time contract, archeologists basing themselves there till they can go on to… Tammuz, is that the dead planet’s name? Nevertheless, they must all have a special devotion to Ishtar. And the core of them are the long-term residents, the careerists, a fair percentage second- or third- generation Ishtarians who have scarcely an atom from Earth in their cells.” Dejerine spread his palms. “Do you see how badly I need a, a briefing? I need more than that, of course, but can’t possibly get it. So… my friend, will you kindly finish your drink and take another? Loosen your tongue. Free-associate. Tell me about your past life, your family, your comrades. In return, I can at least bring them your greetings, and whatever presents you wish to send.
“But help me.” Dejerine knocked back his second glass. “Give me ideas. What shall I say to them, how reconcile them and get them to co-operate, I who come in as the agent of a policy that dashes their fondest hopes to the deck?”
Conway sat for a space, his vision lost in the overlook across Luna, before he said carefully: “You know, you might start by showing them that documentary of Olaya’s which made the big splash last month.”
“On the background of the war?” Dejerine was startled. “But it was generally critical.”
“No, not quite. It tried hard to be objective. Oh, everybody knows Olaya is no enthusiast for this thing. Too aristocratic by temperament, I suppose. But he’s a damn fine journalist, and he did a remarkable job of getting a variety of viewpoints.”
Dejerine frowned. “He skimped the fundamental issue: the Eleutherians.”
Emboldened, Conway answered, “Frankly, I, and I’m not alone, I don’t agree they are the fundamental issue. I admire them, of course, and sympathize, but mainly I think we, humankind, we have to stay on top of events for our survival as a species. On Ishtar I’ve seen such chaos rising—”
Earnestly: “But that’s what I’m getting at. Somebody like, oh, my sister Jill; her whole life spent there… she, her kind of people, they only see the horrors Anu is bringing to their planet. If they could realize that sacrifices have to be made for a higher good—But they’re intelligent, you know, trained in scientific skepticism; they’ve spent their lives coping with the wildest jumble of cultures and conflicts. No slick propaganda pitch is going to win them over.
“That Olaya show, it was honest. It touched reality. I felt that, and… I can tell you my people on Ishtar would. If nothing else, they’d understand we still have free speech here, Earth isn’t a monolithic monster. It ought to help.”
Now Dejerine was quiet for a time which grew, At the end, he jumped to his feet. “All right!” he exclaimed. “I asked for your advice, and—Donald, Don, may I call you? I’m Yuri—immediately you begin. Come, do have some more. Let us settle down to the serious business of getting drunk.”
THREE
Southbound, Larreka and his attendants neared Primavera about noon of the day after he had left his wife at Yakulen Ranch. The human settlement lay three marches upriver from the city of Sehala. No longer was that site a precaution against possible trouble. Surely everyone in Beronnen, and most dwellers elsewhere throughout the Gathering, had come to understand that the Earthfolk were their friends, the last best hope of saving their entire civilization. But the aliens still needed space to raise crops and cattle which could nourish them in ways that raingrain or breadroot, the flesh of els or owas, could not. And those who studied nature, like Jill Conway, preferred readier access to wildlife than the plowlands around Sehala afforded. And those who studied people declared that their own constant presence in the city would be too upsetting.
Not that any such effect could amount to a dust-puff—Larreka had often thought—alongside the upsettingness built into this world.
He swung briskly down a road which paralleled the wide, sheening flow of the Jayin. An important highway, it was brick-paved; he felt heat as well as gritty hardness. But that was enough for a tough-padded old soldier to show himself by putting on buskins. Bad though the time was becoming. South Beronnen always escaped the worst of what the Rover passed out… except indirectly, of course, when starveling hordes invaded this favored land. Furthermore, right now was mid-autumn in the southern hemisphere, the airs easing off toward rainy winter, no matter how hard the Rover tried to screw things up.
Its red glower, low above northern hills which it turned amethyst, was near setting. The Sun stood high and brilliant. Double shadows and blended hues made the landscape strange. It rolled gently away from either bank of the river. This shore was given over to human cultivation. Wheat, corn, and the rest had been harvested, leaving stubblefields; but apples flushed in an orchard, homed fourlegged animals chewed grass behind fences—how green everything was! The opposite side remained native: turf of golden-hued lia studded with scarlet firebloom, trees in coppices tawny (swordleaf) or ocherous (swirlwood and leatherbark) Wingseed birches were propagating yonder, and many pods flapped across the stream before they ran out of stored energy and fell to the ground. Nature’s carelessness: they could no longer take root over here; the soil had been changed too much.
The breeze into which they beat was pleasant after the morning’s sultriness. Larreka heard his mane rustle. He drank the sweet weird odors of Earthside growth with an appreciation learned through a hundred years. The grimness of his present mission didn’t lessen that. A soldier shouldn’t let worry spoil whatever bonuses life tossed his way.
“How much further, sir?” asked one of the half-dozen males at his back. They weren’t needed in these closely settled, food-rich parts. But it had expedited the trek across North Beronnen and over the Thunderhead Mountains, to have some who could be detached to hunt and forage while the rest kept going, and extra hands for camp chores. Larreka figured he might as well let them come the whole way to Sehala and its fleshpots. Poor bastards, they wouldn’t get a lot of fun during their youth. He who had spoken was a native of Foss Island in the Fiery Sea, recruited there and posted directly to Valennen because that was where the Zera was stationed these years. He had never before visited the mother continent.
“Chu, maybe an hour.” Larreka used a unit denoting the sixteenth part of a noon-to-noon, coincidentally quite near to the Earth measurement. “Keep moving. I told you we’ll overnight there.”
“Well, at least Skeela’ll soon be down.”
“Huh?—Oh. Oh, yes.” With as many names as he had heard for the red orb, Larreka could generally spot another.
He himself thought of it as the Rover, since he belonged to the Triadic cult. There it was central, together with the Sun and that Darkness on whose brow smolders the Ember Star. As a youth in Haelen, he had called it Abbada, and had been told it was an outlaw god who returned every thousand years; later he became skeptical, and considered the pagan rites of propitiation a waste of good meat. The barbarians of Valennen were in such awe of the thing that they gave it no name whatsoever, Just a lot of epithets, none of which should be used twice in a row lest its attention be drawn to the speaker. And so the business went, different everywhere, including among the humans. They called the red one Anu, and denied a soul of any kind was in it; and likewise for the Sun, which they called Bel, and the Ember Star, which they called Ea.
In many ways, their concept was the creepiest of the lot. Larreka had had to nerve himself to master their
