Homecoming

XXXI

There were nineteen people in the narrow conference room, with Matthew and Ram at one end of the table. Ram had said little, and Matthew presided in his usual style, loosely.

Carlos Lao was enjoying the adversary role. “Use a little vision, Nikko. They have a whole city open to them. Other tribes, in Earth’s old history, became civilized in a single generation when they moved into a conquered city and began living there.”

“Come on now, Carl,” said Alex Malaluan, “you don’t seriously think it was the buildings and streets of Rome that civilized the conquering Visigoths, do you? It was the Romans themselves.”

“What makes you think the fifth-century Romans were any more civilized than the Visigoths who conquered them?” Nikko asked.

Alex persisted. “And the Northmen would be moving into an empty city. What sort of skills and manpower would it take to keep it operating? To keep water flowing in the ducts? Keep sewers repaired and functioning, provide labor and the transportation of goods? Warriors and hunters and herdsmen don’t know how to do those things, and they’re probably not inclined to learn. Slaves were the engineers and accountants and laborers, and almost all of them are dead. When they died, the city died; those buildings are the bones.”

Carlos sighed noisily. “All right, I was wrong. And anyway,” he added, smirking at Nikko, “the Northmen would have to be flexible, willing to change, even if the slaves were still available.”

“And?”

“And according to you, they have their poet laureate writing an epic hymn celebrating the victory of the Northmen and their way of life over the corrupt orcs.”

“They are willing to change though,” Nikko corrected. “They have changed, and are changing. Fifteen months ago they were forest dwellers in Scandinavia who rode horses rather little and not very skillfully. They didn’t even have a word for prairie or steppe-didn’t even know there was such a thing. They’ve settled for calling it storang, great meadow. They were an assortment of clans and tribes raiding and feuding with one another. Now they’re united-even refer to themselves collectively as the People-and in less than a year’s time they turned themselves into first-rate cavalry.

“But in a sense you’re right. They do resist change in what they consider cultural basics. They still believe that life as herdsmen and farmers, hunters and warriors, is best for personal and cultural health and vigor. Their changes amount to adjusting their old life-ways to new circumstances and a new physical environment, without changing their principles.

“I’m not sure how smooth and easy it will be for them. They’re getting ready now to explore the foothills and mountains all around the prairie, all the way around to northern Bulgaria. They’re a people used to lots of room, who’ve been crowded together for months. They’ll need to decide on new clan and tribal territories.

“And a tougher job will be to decide on whether and how to change the laws governing feuds and wars among themselves. A lot of them feel they shouldn’t raid each other like they used to. They feel a lot closer to each other since they first met the orcs, and lots of them feel there are plenty of outsiders they can fight. But others feel that outsiders are too easy, that real warrior merit can be earned only by fighting worthy opponents-namely other Northmen. They’d fight outsiders only from necessity.

“And of course there’s the likelihood that if they fight other people too much, the others will pick up Northman tactics and methods of training and so forth and become a lot more dangerous.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “That last bit of reasoning sounds pretty sophisticated,” he said. “Are you sure you didn’t think of it yourself? It doesn’t strike me as a product of the barbarian mind.”

“No, I heard it down there, although I have to admit it was Nils who mentioned it. But there were primitives long ago who were fairly sophisticated in some respects, and we also need to keep in mind that these people may have carried down certain concepts and attitudes from the civilized past.

“At any rate they discuss their problems quite openly; it’s a remarkably open society. Even when I was a hostage they let me wander around camp freely. I talked to whoever didn’t seem too busy, and most of them were happy to visit with that naive and curious star woman. I learned to handle twenty-ninth century Scandinavian pretty well, too. The major changes have been simplifications. For example they’ve dropped the neuter gender, changed the past tense of almost… ”

“Whoa, stop! Enough!” Matt said. “No linguistic analyses.” He looked down the two lines of familiar faces for a moment before continuing. “Ram told me before we came in that one of the things we need to talk about is when we’re going to start home, and this is a good time to get into that. Ram?”

Ram leaned back in his chair. “I’ll let Jomo tell you what he told me,” the captain said quietly. “He’s got the major reasons for a prompt departure.”

The chief medical officer stood up. “Anne Marie and Chandra need treatment we can’t give them here. Especially Chan. All we can do on the Phaeacia is keep him alive, and I’m not sure we can do that for very long. Somewhere within that coma there seems to be a profound wish, or willingness at least, to die; his physical injuries are not actually severe. We need to start for home as soon as we can.”

“Not we, Jomo,” Matthew said. “Chan and Anne. And all they need to take them there is the ship and crew. The exploration team came here to learn, and most of us have hardly set foot on Earth.

“With a landing grid waiting back home, you don’t need the pinnaces; they can stay here with us. Nikko wants to spend more time with the Northmen, and I can base my operations with them. She swears that Big Nils is a new kind of human being, maybe a major new step in human evolution. Incidentally, did you know he’s only twenty-one years old? And there are the Psi Kinfolk that Ilse sprang from-a whole culture of telepaths scattered throughout central and western Europe.”

“The Kinfolk would really be interesting,” Celia broke in. “I wish I could stay and study them myself. From what Ilse told me, they must be a living repository of post-plague history and political lore.”

“And there are the orcs,” Nikko added. “Some of the surviving slaves are educated people, and one of Kazi’s daughters is with them. There’ll be a lot we can learn about the orcs from them, and especially from her.

“Nils insists that Kazi was born before the plague and was one continuous personality, one unbroken ego-memory sequence-he terms it ‘one being’-reincarnated time after time by taking over selected bodies. It sounds preposterous, but it would explain some of the things about orc culture, including the name orc and the black tower of the palace, both right out of the old twentieth-century fantasy classic, Lord of the Rings. And last night I found corroboration of sorts in the history bank. There was a Timur Karim Kazi born in 2064, Earth Reckoning, in Kabul, Afghanistan-a neurophysiologist and professor of Psionics, of which there probably weren’t more than a few dozen on the planet. He was something of a genius.”

“We hoped there’d be a lot to learn here,” Matthew put in. “Now we’re beginning to appreciate how much there is. That ingrown little culture of ours is in for one heck of a shot of ideas.”

Ram looked rueful. “That was Gus’s idea in pushing this project for so long, God rest him. Then, when we got here, too much happened too fast.

“And one thing about leaving you behind-when we get home, they’ll have to let us come back here. It makes an ongoing operation out of it, not an abortion.

“One other thing: Jomo and Cele agree that an optical transplant should be possible for Nils, back home, although apparently it would be more cosmetic than anything else. He is definitely able to see without eyes. But we can take him with us, if he’d like.”

Three days later the Phaeacia’s mass-proximity drive winked, sending her on the first phase of her trip back to New Home-their real home, their own culture, not a home of ancient history and sentiment. While the Alpha and Beta rode down into the troposphere on a gravitic vector through the Northmen’s encampment.