“Not many. Not often. Not long.” He laughed. “A few have tried to live alone. They find how much we need each other.”
“With no government at all?”
“You will see.” He paused and spoke again, more reflectively. “As a student on Earth, I saw enough of the rotten Terran government you say is hunting you now. I learned to cope with cops and laws and rules and regulations and stupid bureaucrats. Give me freedom!”
Listening, I felt uncomfortable. I had begun to like him. My mission meant trouble for him, trouble for the world he loved. I had to remind myself that I was a Terran soldier, bound to a path of duty I must follow, whatever the cost to me.
Our final skip brought us into planetary orbit. The first hemisphere we saw was all blue ocean. The single huge continent slid into view, the east half-hidden under white monsoon clouds, the western desert a naked waste of dull reds and bright yellows, wrinkled with bare brown hills.
“My home!” Smiling like a happy child, Greenlaw pointed to the highlands, a thin green slash between desert and cloud. “The Vale of Avalon.”
The next skip took us lower. I made it out, a high valley between two mountain ridges. A little river ran north between green slopes from a white-capped volcanic cone to a long narrow lake.
“The Avalon River.” He pointed. “Most of our settlements are scattered along it, some grown into towns.”
He landed at Benspost, a cluster of red tile roofs at a bend in the river. His father, Ben Greenlaw, owned the trading post, a sprawling building with low walls of roughly shaped stone. A little crowd had gathered to welcome him home, calling eager greetings as we came down the ramp.
Men in fringed brown buckskin, women in brighter cottons, wide-eyed children, all anxious to see the wonders he had brought back from the stars. He waved to a smiling, dark-haired woman in slacks and a neat leather jacket.
“Laurel,” he said. “My kid sister. She’s just back from her service year, down in the jungles. You’ll meet our father. He’s crippled from hell fever he caught there when he was young. I hope she came back better.”
She ran to hug him when we stepped off the ramp.
“All okay.” Smiling into his face, she looked fit enough and trimly attractive. “It was a great adventure, really. We were cutting a road across the flood plain to the Styx.”
That was the great river than drained half the rainy lowlands.
“Kiff McCall.” He introduced me. “A runaway rebel, in flight from the wrath of Cleon III.”
“From old Earth?” She appraised me with clear green eyes, smiled, and gave me a strong handshake. “I want to hear all about it.”
“I want to hear about the jungle.”
“They call it hell, but I had a great year there!” Flushed with the excitement of the moment, she was beautiful. “We got all the way to the river. Set up a sawmill. Cut lumber to build a little boat with a sawmill engine. The first steamer on the Styx.”
I stood stupidly silent, longing for her to like me and thinking how she would hate me when she learned what I was.
“Kiff will be our guest,” Bart told her. “If you can find him a room.
“I certainly can.”
She wanted to carry my bag. It held things I didn’t want to show, a gun, my long-range radio, electronic gear to record and encode my reports to the admiral. I clung to it, and followed her through the store. Flushed with pride in Bart and his daring voyages, she showed me tables stacked with goods he had brought in: books and holo sets, watches, radios, computers.
“Things we don’t make yet,” she said. “But we’re learning fast.”
Uneasy with her, thinking of the painful lessons the admiral would soon be teaching, I followed her through the tables loaded with local goods. Shoes and clothing, hardware, flour, dried meats, native fruits and nuts with names strange to me.
A clerk was filling an order, punching prices into a barter card. As eager as a child with a birthday, she showed me a hunting rifle she wanted to buy with her savings from the service year. It was the work of a native craftsman, beautifully finished, the stock inlaid with silver, but useless to stop the admiral’s battlecraft.
The family lived at the back of the single-story building. We left my bag in a clean little room with white- plastered walls and a comfortable bed, and she took me to meet her father. We found him at a desk facing a big window that looked out across the wide green valley to that old volcano in the south.
A heavy man with a withered leg, he gripped the edges of the desk to haul himself upright and shake my hand. I saw patches of dead-white scar tissue on his face and hands, saw his grimace of pain. Yet his grasp was strong. He smiled warmly at me and then at Laurel, when she came to put her arm around him.
“Relics of the hell country.” He raised his hands to show the scars. “I spent my service year there, back before we discovered angel wood. Laurel was luckier.”
“Kiffs a freedom fighter,” she told him. “In flight from Cleon III”
“Welcome, sir!” He shook my hand again. “They’ll never touch you here.”
Sitting again, he listened to my cover story with a shrewd intentness that left me afraid he might see through the lies.
“We’ll keep you safe.” Laurel’s eyes were shining. “You’ll like it here.”
She took me out see the town, a cluster of low stone buildings along a single cobblestone street. There were no motor vehicles, but I saw people on huge ungainly native creatures she called camels, larger than the Terran sort and able to carry half a ton of weight.
“I rode them down into the rain country,” she told me. “They have evil tempers, but they’re addicted to the silvernuts that grow there. When one gets unruly, a handful of nuts will make him kneel and beg.”
She pointed to wires strung from poles along the street.
“Something my grandfather brought us. He found a junkyard of wrecked landing craft down in the desert
where they used to unload the convicts, and salvaged parts to rebuild one that got him off the planet. He got aboard an old prison transport that had been lost in orbit when mutineers killed the officers.
“He taught himself skip navigation from the texts and tools he found aboard. The first skip took him nowhere, but a few more got him out to the home planet of our ancestors. He found kinsmen, made Free Space friends—and spent a dozen years on Earth learning everything he could. He’d abandoned the old transport, but he finally got home in a modern ship, with a cargo that changed life here.”
I hated to think how Gilliyar would change it again.
“Electricity!” Her voice had risen. “Lights. Telephones. Radio. We’ve found no oil or coal to burn for power, but now we have windmill generators up in mountain gaps where the trade winds are steady. I wish we could get nuclear power.”
I thought of the fusion engines on the admiral’s battlecraft.
That uneasy awareness of my mission kept me troubled and silent that evening at dinner. Laurel’s mother, Martha, had grown most of the food in her own kitchen garden. A genial, generous woman, she kept piling my plate with servings too large and seemed troubled that I had no better appetite.
In spite of such a welcome, the passing days left me no happier. I was there for months, waiting for Gilliyar’s armada to arrive in orbit and preparing to tell him that the outlaws had no defenses worth concern. Laurel arranged a barter card for me. In return, I agreed to teach classes or tutor students in what they wanted to know about the outside worlds.
She became my first student. My cover story made me a romantic figure in her mind, the lone survivor of a heroic rebellion crushed by ruthless Terran power. Her face used to light when she saw me, in a way that wrenched my heart. I knew the truth would come out, knew it would destroy me.
I longed to reveal myself and beg for her forgiveness. Yet I was still a Terran soldier, bound by my oath of allegiance and a lifetime of loyal emotion, hopelessly trapped by all the lies I had told. Keeping silent because I had to, I let her enjoy the days that brought a tortured joy to me. She became an eager guide to her world: the lofty ridge that sliced like a blade between the jungle and the desert. She had seen enough of the jungle, but she took
