Leigh Brackett

“ Kerrel looked mildly surprised. "I thought Edri would have told you. No? But you have, of course, heard of Orthis, the discoverer of the mutational process. He was a great man, Trehearne. A brilliant man, a genius, the founder of our race. But he was not a practical man. He lived alone too much in space, worked alone too long in his laboratory ship. He didn't know human beings, he didn't understand the hard grimy necessities of life, the law of self-preservation. He wanted to give the mutation—and the freedom of the stars—to everyone." ”

“ Ships lay in most of them, recumbent monsters taking their ease, while men and machines in vast numbers and great complexity waited on their needs. The ringing air was heavy with smells, strange spices and subtle unidentifiable things mingling with the reek of oil and hot metal, cargoes of unimagined riches from unimaginable worlds. Trehearne stood, feeling the tremendous pulse beat through him, hardly aware for the moment that Edri was trying to steer him to a kiosk at the end of the dock, or that the young Vardda was amused at his wide-eyed astonishment. ”

“ In endless hordes, men swarmed upon the looming hulls and went busily along the docks, testing, checking, guiding and managing the machines. They were not Vardda men. They were men from the other worlds, who could not fly the stars. A lot of them—and here Trehearne's eyes opened even wider, because even though he had been told, seeing is another thing—were not at all what he would have called human. But in spite of their strangeness, they seemed familiar. They were like any of the cheerful, hard-handed, competent men to be seen around any port of Earth, serving the ships and the planes. ”

“ And Joris snorted. "Course! If I can keep one jump ahead of that cruiser I'll be satisfied."
The Mirzim skimmed over the darkling world of Thuvis into the starless night. Trehearne sat and brooded, thinking of Shairn, thinking of the two men who were bent over the final calculations of a dream that had balked men for a thousand years. He thought of what a dream can do to a man, of how far it can lead him away from the good safe life of common sense to the ultimate voids of creation. He hoped that Edri and Arrin would find what they wanted. He hoped they would live to find it. ”

“ He led the way down the muddy road, and Trehearne followed.
Night came. The glorious sky of the Cluster crashed down on them, sown to bursting with stars as bright as moons. The crystalline trees took on opaline fires. The hut walls glittered. Around the two Vardda gathered a crowd of sloe-eyed children, silent and solemn, with hides of dusky green. Women watched them from the doorways. Human enough and pretty enough too, the younger ones, sleek and olive-colored, wearing bright silks from Llyrdis about their hips and baubles in their hair. ”

“ The Saarga creaked and groaned and lurched her way deeper and deeper into the Cluster, touching like a tramp freighter at this port and that one, wherever there was trading to do and cargo to be had. Only her ports were planets, and her seas were the nighted gulfs between them. The memory of what had happened on the world of the variable star faded out of Trehearne's conscious mind, though he sometimes started awake in his bunk with the ghastly feeling of suffocation strong on him from a dream. ”

“ Vardda women lovely as sin, dressed in a thousand fashions from a thousand worlds, smiling with red mouths. Music throbbing, beating, wailing, unknown melodies plucked from unknown strings, passionate, soft, mingling with the smell of wine and perfume and the sharp sea-wind. Dancing girls with emerald skins, outlandish beasts that capered with an eerie cleverness, a spinning whirl of pleasure-palaces, terraces, gardens, parks and squares, nameless trees blowing under the triple moons, Shairn's laughing face, Joris flushed and jovial, a grey-polled ox on holiday, Edri.... ”

“ The long arc of deceleration was completed. The starship was cruising now at planetary speed. Aldebaran had grown from a remote point of fire to a giant sun, terrifyingly near at hand. The small companion was visible only as a faint disc above the upper limb, its bluish light drowned out in the flooding ruddy blaze of the larger star.
The Vardda had crowded up into the observation dome, eager for the first glimpse of home. A heavy shield now covered the dome to sunward and in its shadow the returning travellers pressed and chattered. ”

“ The generators throbbed incessantly. The Saarga groaned and shrieked in all her iron bones, moving in erratic bursts of speed and sudden brakings, pitching and swerving as she felt her way in through shoals of suns, fighting the complex, ever-shifting gravitational fields. Trehearne got the feeling that he was trapped inside a giant football being battered back and forth between the stars.
Yann grinned. "It gets worse as you go farther in."
It did. Trehearne thought it was impossible for any ship to live in those mighty cross-currents of gravitation as the suns thickened like swarming bees. ”

“ The compound was large and chiefly empty, except for an open-sided building like a fair pavilion at one end of it. There was no factory, only the compound adjoining a landing field, outside the city. Large crowds were gathered beyond the low walls, much like any crowd on Earth, laughing, pushing, pointing at the ship, sending up an incessant gabble of talk. But the compound had only a few dozen men in it. They were inside the pavilion, waiting, and Trehearne was treated to the unusual spectacle of the Vardda captain and his officers marching humbly forward to ask permission to trade. ”

“ The ropy vines that crept and clambered among the crystal trees were like nooses set to catch his feet. He fell, and rose, and ran again, and the spongy ground gave softly under his feet like sand. It was very hot, and he was heavy, heavy with the drag of a heavy world.
Behind him, clear and shrill, came the yap-yap-yaahhh! of Kurat's weasel hounds, racing over a fresh scent. The crystal branches gleamed and sparkled, tipped with star-fire, sharp-tipped like spears. Trehearne stopped and tried to break one and it was like trying to break a bar of steel with his bare hands. ”

“ The giant star—a sick, mad star, Trehearne thought, like all the short-period true variables—brooded in the poisonous sky, past the maximum peak of its brilliance now but still pouring out its febrile energies in a purplish glare. Trehearne grimaced, and shook his head. "This," he said, "is a planet only Weizsacker could love."
Perri's voice came over the helmet phone, curiously thin but so close at hand that Trehearne started. "Who's Weizsacker?"
"An Earthman with a theory. He advanced the idea that most stars have planets." ”

“ Lying on the black rock, on the iron ridges of frozen air that flowed between, Trehearne watched the clumsy dance of men in shapeless pressure suits and round blank helmets, in and out of the sharp bright beam that was empty now except for themselves. They had moved around Kerrel in the blackness and the silence and come upon him from the back, but their hands were hampered by the gauntlets and the bulging fabric of Kerrel's suit was hard to hold. ”

“ Shairn's face grew misty and indistinct. The solid ground, the Earth on which he stood, slipped out from under him and vast yawning windows opened on all sides, windows into space, into darkness and wild light....
He said to Edri, quite reasonably, "But that isn't possible."
Somebody put a wine-cup in a hand that didn't belong to him any more, and Edri's voice spoke to him from miles away. "But it is. Drink up, Trehearne. Sovereign remedy for practically everything. Take in the idea slowly, with the wine. We come from another world, another sun. It seems incredible to you. ”

“ The "logs" that formed the stockade and made the walls of the warehouses were of crystal, cut from the crystalline forests that covered much of the land. Trehearne thought of them as trees and forests, simply because they had stems and branches, but they were inorganic, the glittering proliferation of sublimated alien chemicals. They glowed and flashed under the fierce green sun, showing glints of weird color where a prism formation broke the light. And also, in their shining branches, they netted the many-colored rays of the brighter stars that burned even in the daylight sky. ”

“ Outside the keep a man's voice shouted. Someone said, "The ship!" More voices shouted, and the door was flung open. Something dark and cruel came into Trehearne's face. He looked at Shairn and said. "I'll live to thank you." He let her go. People were moving toward the door. He moved with them, as in a dream, but knowing that he would not wake. He lost track of individuals. There were only shadows around him, sounds, motion, without meaning. The walls were gone, and the light. Wet, cold, dark, the outside, the moor, the wind and the naked sky. ”

“ Slowly, painfully, exposed to all the dangers of unknown radiations and unexplored, uncharted wilderness in its most ultimate sense, exposed to the most terrible loneliness and isolation that living beings had ever endured, they toiled their way to a landing on the world of another star and then—and this, to Trehearne, seemed the most incredible bravery of all—they took off again for Llyrdis, which to this intermediate generation was only a name and a tradition, and which they knew they would never live to see. ”

“ Kerrel said, "Suppose they didn't fail. Suppose it's all over, the thousand years of Vardda life. Should they be allowed to enjoy the thing they've done?"
"Fine talk," Trehearne said. The darkness was deep and close, outside the beam. "Noble talk. Maybe I even believe it. But you've got another reason, too."
"I admit it. But in this, it doesn't matter. No woman ever born was important enough to matter in this." ”

“ When the freighter found her dock and wallowed into it, Joris was on hand to watch his ship come in. He had been in contact with the Saarga by ultra-wave radio and now he boarded her before the ports were fairly open. The skipper had given him good news of the venture and he was in jovial spirits, clapping shoulders all around, peering at manifests, firing questions, demanding to know how Trehearne had acquitted himself.
"A good voyage, eh?" he cried. "Too bad about Yann, but any voyage through the Cluster is a good one if only one gets killed!" ”

“ Joris laughed. "The Council believed it. Furthermore, I believe it, Shairn believes it—even Trehearne believes it, don't you, Trehearne?"
"Of course."
"Well, it's done now," Kerrel said, as though it had ceased to matter.
Shairn picked up one of the musky flowers and tossed it into Kerrel's lap. "Have you forgotten me?" she asked him, with a curious edged sweetness. "I know you. You're a bad loser, and it's no use pretending you're not. Besides, I've seen you this way before. Just what are you meditating in your little mind?" ”

“ Trehearne's skin crept in little waves of cold. He could hear the beating of his own blood in his ears, the dull throbbing of his own heart. He moved with the others, lonely figures in a tomb, and he started like a child at every shape the light picked out.
The whole after section of the ship was a laboratory. Much of the delicate equipment was shattered, either by speed-vibration or a hard landing. Trehearne could make nothing of the tortured mass of metal and splintered crystal, but Quorn said, very softly, "He was studying interstellar radiation. ”

“ A swift death, and better than a slow one as the air-pumps fail. After that, I shall wait. What I dreamed will never be forgotten. Some day there will come others who believe as I have always believed, that the stars are for all men."
Edri fell silent. And Quorn said, "He watched the Galaxy for a thousand years, and waited."
Trehearne forced himself to move, to break the spell. "Unless we hurry, it will not have done him any good." ”

“ When his own job was finally finished, he found Rohan and Perri still hard at it, but Yann was through and waiting for him.
"Come on with me now," said Yann, and smacked his lips. "Wine, cooled in deep wells. Make a new man of you."
"A hell of a world," said Trehearne.
"You should see the others of this system. This is the pick of the lot."
They walked through the outer compound, a sort of caravanserai crowded with folk from the other planets, brought in for the trading. Cold-blooded creatures with crimson eyes, ophidian princes of the inner worlds, wrapped in golden mantles against the chill. ”

“ He measured the trees with an eye to climbing one for refuge. They were glassy and badly shaped, and they were low. He remembered the long whipcord bodies of the weasel-like beasts. He thought they could leap as high as they needed to pull him down. He staggered on, and every time he fell it was harder to get up again. A terrible rage was on him, rage against Yann. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to make a man run for his life on a world where he couldn't run. The cry of the pack came closer.
Abruptly, from somewhere ahead of him, rose the challenging voices of other hounds.
Trehearne stopped. ”

“ They were crammed now with crates and packing cases, not wooden ones, Trehearne noticed, but light, strong plastic, marked with unfamiliar symbols. Others were being fetched up through openings in the stone that led apparently into the cellars beneath the keep. The men who handled them, with a good deal of laughter and loud talk, were mostly young, and all of the Vardda stock, and their dress was as strange as their language. Trehearne could think of no national costume that included quite that kind of a tunic belted over loose trousers, nor that particular type of sandal. ”

“ Edri was his chief teacher. For some reason, the ugly man with the unhappy eyes and unfailing cheerfulness of speech had taken a liking to him, and Trehearne was glad of it. He needed friends. But there were others, too. Men and women, mostly young, healthy and full of themselves, loving the life they lived and enjoying to the hilt his own wide-eyed reactions to it. ”