from a Hanshaw.”
Sparling alone chuckled. Maybe, Larreka thought, her English-language remark referred to something on Earth, where the engineer had been born and spent his earlier youth. Did she notice how his gaze, having gone to her, kept drifting back?
“Let’s save the jokes for later.” the mayor urged. “Maybe this evening we can have a poker game.” Larreka hoped so. Over the octads he’d become ferociously good at it, and kept in practice by introducing it to his officers. Then he saw Jill gleefully rub her hands and remembered how she’d played slapdash chess but precocious poker. How tough had she become since?
They sobered when Hanshaw continued, “Commandant, you’re here on unpleasant business. And I’m afraid we’ve got worse news for you.”
Larreka tensed on the mattress where he couched, took a long gulp of beer, and said: “Unleash.”
“Port Rua sent word the other day. Tarhanna has fallen.”
Larreka had kept too much Haelener in him to yelp or swear. He sought what—comfort he could find in the smoke-bite of tobacco before saying flatly, “Details?”
“Not a hell of a tot. Apparently the natives—the barbarians, I mean, not the few civilized Valenneners you’ve got—apparently they made a surprise attack, took the town, threw everybody out, and told the legionary chief as he was leaving that they weren’t there for loot, they intended to garrison it.”
“Bad,” Larreka said after a while. “Bad, bad, and bad.”
Jill leaned forward to touch his mane. Disturbed, a few of the seleks therein leaped out from among the leaves, then scurried back down to the proper business of such small entomoids, keeping it free of vermin and dead matter. “A shock, huh?” she asked softly.
“Yes.”
“Why? I mean, as I understand the case, Tarhanna is… was the Gathering’s main outpost in the interior of Valennen, “way upriver from Port Rua. Right? But what purpose had it except trade? And you always knew trade’ll go to pot as conditions deteriorate.”
“It was a military base, too,” Larreka reminded her. “Thence we could strike at robbers, uppity households, whatever. Now—” He smoked for a second before he proceeded. “Maybe this hits me hardest as a sign. You see, the Zera’s still in good shape. Tarhanna should’ve been able to throw back every landlouper the whole inhabited end of the continent could raise against it. Or, anyhow, hang on till Port Rua sent a relief expedition. Only it didn’t. Also, the enemy feels he can keep it. Therefore, he’s got himself an outfit. Not a bunch of raiders: an organized outfit. Maybe even a confederation.”
He appealed: “Do you see what that means? Final proof of what I’d decided had to be the case. The bandits and pirates were growing too bloody bold, too successful, to be the kind we’d routinely coped with. And of course we were getting a little military intelligence from the outback—and now this—”
“Somebody’s been uniting the barbarians at last. Probably he’s finished, and ready to put the crunch on us. To cast the Gathering out of Valennen altogether.”
“Except that’s a bare start for him. It has to be. In the past, the Rover drove desperate people south. They fell on civilization and helped tear it apart. This time around, it looked like civilization had a chance to pull through. Only somebody has organized the Valenneners to match us. He can’t have but one long-range purpose—to invade the south, kill, enslave, kick us out of our lands, and take over the ruins.
“That’s what I’ve traveled for. To tell the assembly we can’t withdraw ‘temporarily’ from Valennen, we’ve got to hold fast at every cost; to get reinforcements, a second legion at a minimum, up there. But first I want to ask what help you in Primavera can give. It may not be exactly your war. But you’re here to learn about Ishtar. If civilization falls, you’ll have a thin time carrying on,”
That was as long a speech as he had ever made, even addressing the Zera on a high occasion. He turned half wildly to his pipe and beer.
Sparling’s voice yanked him back: “Larreka, this hurts like a third-degree bum to say, but I’m not sure what help we can give you. You see, we’ve been stuck with a war of our own.”
FOUR
Seen from space, all planets are beautiful; but those where humans can breathe have for them a special poignancy. As his flagship maneuvered toward parking orbit, Yuri Dejerine watched Ishtar through the least haze of tears.
Its globe was radiant blue swirled with white and marked with darker hues of continents. The unlikenesses to Earth gave it the kind of glamour that a foreign woman may bear. There were no polar caps and fewer clouds, despite a somewhat larger ocean cover. The browns of soil had no greens blent in, but shades tawny and ruddy. No great scarred Luna swung widely around, only two close-in midget moons; he glimpsed one, flickering as it tumbled, like a firefly against starful blackness.
And the light was eldritch. Most came from Ishtar’s own Bel, slightly less intense than Sol on Earth but the familiar yellow-white. Anu, however, was now so close that it evoked roses and blood in the clouds and tinged the seas purple.
Stopped down to preserve his eyesight, a vision of both suns stood in the viewscreen before him. They appeared nearly the same size, a trick played by their distances. Bel was haloed in a glory of corona. Anu had no clear disc. At the middle was a furnace red where seethed monstrous spots; this dimmed and thinned outward until at last it writhed in a hazy intricacy of flame, tendrils which made Dejerine think of the Kraken.
He turned his look away. As if for companionship, he tried to find sister planets, and believed he could pick out two. And, yes, that really brilliant star, ruby-colored, that must be Ea, six thousand times as remote from here as Bel and outward bound. It wasn’t a reminder of mortality like Anu; as a dwarf, Ea would have a tremendously long though quiet life.
Nevertheless, it touched Dejerine with a sense of its loneliness, and his, and everybody’s, ineluctable. And the splendor of Ishtar held an oncoming agony. His thought went on to Eleanor, how fair she had been and how miserable, on the day she told him that after two years she could try no longer and wanted a divorce. I was trying, too, he told her again. I really was.
He shook himself. No notions for the commander of a flotilla, these. A voice out of a speaker rescued him from silence: “Orbit assumed, sir. All satisfactory.”
“Very good,” he replied automatically. “Men not on regular watch may go off duty.”
“Shall I have a call put through to ground, sir?” asked his exec.
“Not yet. It’s night in that hemisphere—as far as the proper sun is concerned, anyway. They’ve adapted to an eighteen-and-a-half-hour day there and must be mostly asleep at present, whether or not Anu is aloft. We’d be discourteous to rouse their leaders. Let us wait— um-m-m—” Dejerine balanced Ishtarian rotation against Earthspin Navy clocks. “Say till 0700. That’ll give us a few hours to relax, too. If any messages are received before, switch them to me in my cabin. Otherwise beam Primavera at 0700.”
“Aye, sir. Have you further orders?”
“No, I’ll simply rest. I advise you to do the same, Heinrichs. We’ve a busy time ahead.”
“Thank you, sir. Good night.” The thick accent cut off. Dejerine had required talk to be in English, practice for a community where that was well-nigh the exclusive language. (No, native speech also. Don Conway had used a number of words which he explained, on inquiry, were of nonhuman origin.) The captain suspected a lot of Spanish, Chinese, or what-have-you went on in his absence.
He himself had no linguistic problem. His upbringing had made him fluent in several major tongues, and his wife had been from the United States.
He brushed aside the returning memory. He had loved her, and he still wished her well, but after three years it would be ridiculous to pine. There were plenty of other women—had been since his middle teens. He wondered if any on Ishtar would prove available.
Again he considered the planet. Orbit had brought the cruiser into view of its civilized parts. The opposite half held a single continent and countless islands, where no significant number of Ishtarians lived and about which humans had to date learned little. They had more enigmas where they were than they could handle, in spite of
