Return to Fanglith

PART TWO

Deneen's nap was a long one-about four hours. Not that I kept track of the time. Now that the pressure was off, it was as if I'd been hit by a sandbag, and for a while I sat around in a sort of daze. I'd lost Jenoor, and Piet, and maybe my parents to the Empire, yet I didn't feel hate or anger or anything with enough juice in it to call grief. I guess desolation would be the word. Anyway, when Deneen came back out and I looked at the chronometer, four hours had passed.

Tarel woke up a little later, and the three of us discussed destinations. We decided to go to Fanglith after all. It wasn't that Deneen argued me into it; she'd have preferred Grinder, too, but the ship's astrogation cube had nothing on a planet named Grinder. Nothing at all. And neither did the one that dad had left us, nor the old survey cube, of course. A nickname, I thought. Grinder was a nickname. And Piet wasn't there to tell us what its real name was. So I ran a computer search for the name Grinder, hoping that somewhere in data storage it might be mentioned and cross-referenced to an official name. But there wasn't a single place in all our cubes where "grinder" occurred with a capital G.

There were coordinates for probably all the old colonies, of course, but we didn't know enough about them to make intelligent guesses on which ones the Imperials might leave alone for a while. Or where they might already be. Going to any of them would take time, during which we'd be using up our food supplies, and we could find ourselves arriving somewhere to find an Imperial flotilla sitting there. While Fanglith-Fanglith was probably the last place the Empire would ever get around to. And while Fanglith had lots of dangers, at least they were dangers we knew something about- dangers we were at least somewhat prepared for.

Also, as Deneen pointed out, dad had left us a copy of the old survey cube, as if he'd wanted us to have Fanglith as an option. The medkit contained a broad-spectrum immunoserum, especially important on a world like Fanglith that didn't have significant medical facilities. It didn't take more than half an hour to talk it all out. Then I went aft to sleep, and found out I had juice enough for grief after all. I don't believe I'd cried since I was ten; now I cried hard enough in five minutes to more than make up for it. Then I slept-for more than six hours, and without a dream, so far as I could tell. When I woke up, I was functional again.

Fifty-seven days was a long trip. The library cubes mom and dad had left in the package helped-especially Tarel. He studied the files on primitive felid worlds that had helped Deneen and me prepare for Fanglith on our first trip, plus the debrief I'd recorded-I'd entitled it Fanglith-describing my experiences there.

There was the problem of food, of course. Even Tarel, with his "something out of nothing" metabolism, wasn't in any danger of getting fat. The ship's stocks- ten days of food for six-came out to fifteen days for four, of course. At normal consumption rates, plus there were some dried emergency rations. What made the trip feasible was the chest Deneen and Bubba had dragged aboard-the one we'd supposedly gone to the landing field to deliver. It had extra marine field uniforms and a few other things, but also it had dried field rations. After an hour of reading packages, recording the data on a note cube, and instructing the computer, it came out that we had about thirty days' worth of dried food to go with the scout's regular rations.

Deneen, Tarel, and I lived pretty much on the dried rations, because whoever had put our field rations together had overlooked one thing-canid food. Most of the dry stuff wasn't suitable for Bubba's system, so he got most of the regular food-and even that wasn't really suitable for him-while none of us ate more of anything than we had to.

It could have been worse. The ship's log told us that the life support systems had been inspected and okayed just the day before we'd stolen her, so air and water were no problem. And there was an exercise machine. Also, Deneen and I recorded all we could remember, which was most of it, of the mixture of Norman French and Provencal we'd used on Fanglith. Then Tarel, using the learning program, learned to speak it, too-with our mispronunciations, of course.

One thing that surprised me was how well all of us stood the trip, especially considering how it had started. After my heavy grief surge that first day, the only time I got really depressed was a couple of days later. That's when it hit me really thoroughly that Jenoor was truly gone-that I'd never see her again. After that, I rarely even fantasized that she was with me.

I did fantasize a few good killing sprees though, the first few days. I butchered the Imperial Council all the ways I could think of-but not the marine gunners, Some Evdashian marines in a gun tower, following orders, had poured gunfire into some people they didn't know-strangers a couple of hundred yards away in the semidark. They'd had nothing against us, and chances are they'd wished they hadn't had to. Maybe they'd even tried to shoot a little wild. After all, Deneen and Bubba had escaped without even being wounded, which seemed to me to go beyond luck.

Whatever. The facts were the facts: Jenoor and Piet were dead; Deneen and Tarel and Bubba and I were alive. About mom and dad we could hope.

Deneen didn't talk much the first day or so out; after that, she seemed pretty much her usual self. Tarel did, too, most of the time. His one outsurge seemed to take care of his grief, too, and he'd been rational and decisive when it was needed-at just the time I'd gone momentarily crazy. On the trip he'd been quiet, but no quieter than usual. And although he'd never seen the controls of a spacecraft before, he was soon as familiar with them as Deneen and I were. He did dry runs on flying until he felt at ease with them. And we all familiarized ourselves with the ship's armament.

Bubba was the one who surprised me. Before this trip, his emotions had always seemed really healthy- more so than those of any human I'd ever known. Mostly, he'd been cheerful ever since dad had brought him home to live with us. He'd often been playful, in his way, and somber only rarely. When necessary, he'd been tough-all smarts and action-like when the Norman hunters and their hounds had chased him for hours as a native wolf on Fangiith. And when, days later, we'd had the run-in with the Federation political police in Normandy.

But for the first several days out from Evdash, he kept to himself a lot more than usual, seeming positively moody. I'd never seen him that way before. He knew when I first noticed, of course, and had gone into his own cabin and closed the door, so I never asked him about it. I figured if he ever wanted to tell me, he would. After about the third day, though, he got back at least to semi-normal, except that the diet got to him like it did the rest of us.

One of the things we got around to talking about, after a week or so, was what we'd do when we got to Fangiith. The surface was really dangerous there; it seemed as if fighting and wars were their most important activities, with robbery and murder pretty popular too. Actually, Fangiith was considerably more dangerous than Evdash under the Empire, a realization that kind of took me by surprise. On Fangiith it seemed like a case of cultural immaturity. With the Empire it seemed more like cultural degeneracy.

On Fangiith there was also the problem of not blending in with the people there. Oh, for brief periods maybe, or to someone who wasn't really looking, but that was all. Physically we looked about the same, sure, but we thought and acted differently. Without realizing it, we did things they didn't, while we didn't know things that everyone else there knew. We didn't know how to be peasants or nobles, we had no skill with their weapons, we'd be in constant risk of saying or doing something that might outrage or insult them or mark us as fools.,. And, of course, every time we spoke, we were obviously foreigners.

So what could we possibly accomplish there? Our main reason for leaving Evdash, so far as I could see, was to foment revolution against the Glondis Empire. But the more I looked at it, the more impossible that seemed on Fanglith. It was the wrong kind of world, with the wrong kind of history and the most primitive technology. And actually, from what little I knew of it, their governments were worse than the Empire-at least some of them were.

Operating on Fanglith would be up to me, more than to anyone else. I was the oldest, and the only one with much experience on the surface there. And I was male- that was important on their world. I'd have to be the one to land, get provisions, make deals and arrangements.

So naturally, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the responsibility, and I told the others just how I felt about it. Deneen just leaned on the little galley table and looked me calmly in the eye.

"Brother mine," she said, "the last time you complained about how impossible things were was on Fanglith. I was a prisoner on a Federation police corvette, but I've heard you and mom and dad talk about it. And Bubba. You were all stuck down there on the surface of the planet with nothing more than hand weapons to work with-hand weapons and some Norman warriors who'd have happily cut all your throats to get hold of your pistols."

Her eyes grabbed mine and wouldn't let them go. "And you pulled that one off."

That was beside the point, I wanted to tell her. That had been then. The situation had been

different. I'd been lucky. But all I could answer was: "Dad had as much to do with it as I did."

"Not according to him he didn't." Her gaze withdrew for a minute. "I can see the difficulties you're talking about, and the dangers. But it seems to me that when we get down to it, having a scout ship will make up for a lot. And if things don't shape up for us there, we can take on fresh provisions and try another world somewhere. The fuel slug on this rig is good for years and years if we don't run her too long at high speeds in proximity mode."

She had a point. I'd been letting myself get bogged down in the difficulties. And although dad had played as big a role as I had in the final showdown on Fanglith, all in all, it had been my show. So I said okay, she'd made sense, and we didn't talk much about it the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, Tarel and I let our hair grow, to look more like Fanglithans. Also, we found a drawer with several remotes-small receiver units you can put in your ear for confidential radio reception. They operate on a wireless relay from your belt communicator, and with our hair over our ears, no Fanglithan would know we had them.

Eventually, one day near ship's "midnight," the scout's honker woke us up. We'd set it to let us know when the computer kicked us down out of FTL mode. Ahead of us we could see the system's primary-the sun that Fanglith circled. Seen from where we were, it was a glaring, small white globule against a star-frosted backdrop of deepest black. We were farther out from Fanglith than we'd expected-part of the tiny error inherent in servomechanisms and ancient equations-but still less than a day away in mass-proximity mode.

I had flitter bugs in my stomach. I wasn't sure how much of it was just plain excitement and how much was fear, There'd be enough of both in store for me on Fanglith. I took a deep breath. Whatever, I told myself. When we'd taken care of a few preliminaries, we'd be eating real food again, all of us, breathing unrecycled air, and seeing the surface of a planet where surely the Empire hadn't landed.