Part 25 (1/2)
Quite recently, in the summer of 1953, to be exact, I commissioned the remodelling of my family home near York, Pennsylvania. Among the bundles of old books and papers stored in the attic was a box of personal effects, labelled ”H. M. Backmaker.” In it was the ma.n.u.script concluding with an unfinished sentence, reproduced above.
My father used to tell me that when he was a boy there was an old man living on the farm, nominally as a hired hand, but actually as a pensioner, since he was beyond the age of useful labor. My father said the children considered him not quite right in his mind, but very entertaining, for he often repeated long, disjointed narratives of an impossible world and an impossible society which they found as fascinating as the Oz books. On looking back, he said, Old Hodge talked like an educated man, but this might simply be the impression of young, unaccustomed minds.
Clearly it was in some attempt to give form and unity to his tales that the old man wrote his fable down, and then was too shy to submit it for publication. This is the only reasonable way to account for its existence. Of course he says he wrote it in 1877, when he was far from old, and disconcertingly, a.n.a.lysis of the paper shows it might have been written then.
Two other items should be noted. In the box of Backmaker's belongings there was a watch of unknown manufacture and unique design. Housed in a cheap nickel case, the jeweled movement is of extraordinary precision and delicacy. The face has two dials, independently set and wound.
The second is a quotation. It can be matched by similar quotations in any of half a hundred volumes on the Civil War. I pick this only because it is recent and handy.
From W. E. Woodward's Years of Madness, p. 202: ”...Union troops that night and next morning took a position on Cemetery Hill and Round Top... The Confederates could have occupied this position but they failed to do so. It was an error with momentous consequences.”
POUL ANDERSON.
A multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Poul Anderson has written dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories since his science-fiction debut in 1947. His long-running Technic History saga, a multibook chronicle of interstellar exploration and empire building, covers fifty centuries of future history and includes the acclaimed novels War of the Wing-Men, The Day of Their Return, and The Game of Empire. Anderson has tackled many of science fiction's cla.s.sic themes, including human evolution in Brain Wave (1954), near-light-speed s.p.a.ce travel in Tau Zero (1970), and the time travel paradox in his series of Time Patrol stories collected as Guardians of Time. He is renowned for his interweaving of science fiction and mythology, notably in his alien-contact novel The High Crusade. He also has produced distinguished fantasy fiction, including the heroic sagas Three Hearts and Three Lions and The Broken Sword, and a novel detailing an alternate history of Earth according to Shakespeare, A Midsummer Tempest. He received the Tolkien Memorial Award in 1978. With his wife, Karen, he wrote the King of Ys Celtic fantasy quartet. With Gordon d.i.c.kson, he has auth.o.r.ed the popular comic Hoka series. His short story ”Call Me Joe” was chosen for inclusion in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1974, and his short fiction has been collected in several volumes, notably The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, All One Universe, and The Best of Poul Anderson.
EUTOPIA.
Poul Anderson
”G if thit nafn!”
The Danska words barked from the car radio as a jet whine cut across the hum of motor and tires. ”Identify yourself!” Iason Philippou cast a look skyward through the bubbletop. He saw a strip of blue between two ragged green walls where pine forest lined the road. Sunlight struck off the flanks of the killer machine up there. It wailed, came about, and made a circle over him.
Sweat started cold from his armpits and ran down his ribs. I must not panic, he thought in a corner of his brain. May the G.o.d help me now. But it was his training he invoked. Psychosomatics: control the symptoms, keep the breath steady, command the pulse to slow, and the fear of death becomes something you can handle. He was young, and thus had much to lose. But the philosophers of Eutopia schooled well the children given into their care. You will be a man, they had told him, and the pride of humanity is that we are not bound by instinct and reflex; we are free because we can master ourselves.
He couldn't pa.s.s as an ordinary citizen (no, they said mootman here) of Norland. If nothing else, his h.e.l.lenic accent was too strong. But he might fool yonder pilot, for just a few minutes, into believing he was from some other domain of this history. He roughened his tone, as a partial disguise, and a.s.sumed the expected arrogance.
”Who are you? What do you want?”
”Runolf Einarsson, captain in the hird of Ottar Thorkelsson, the Lawman of Norland. I pursue one who has brought feud on his own head. Give me your name.”
Runolf, Iason thought. Why, yes, I remember you well, dark and erect with the Tyrker side of your heritage, but you have blue eyes that came long ago from Thule. In that detached part of him which stood aside watching: No, here I scramble my histories. I would call the autochthons Erythrai, and you call the country of your European ancestors Danarik.
”I hight Xipec, a trader from Meyaco,” he said. He did not slow down. The border was not many stadia away, so furiously had he driven through the night since he escaped from the Lawman's castle. He had small hope of getting that far, but each turn of the wheels brought him nearer. The forest was blurred with his speed.
”If so be, of course I am sorry to halt you,” Runolf's voice crackled. ”Call the Lawman and he will send swift gild for the overtreading of your rights. Yet I must have you stop and leave your car, so I may turn the fa.r.s.eer on your face.”
”Why?” Another second or two gained.
”There was a visitor from Homeland”-Europe-”who came to Ernvik. Ottar Thorkellson guested him freely. In return, he did a thing that only his death can make clean again. Rather than meet Ottar on the Valfield, he stole a car, the same make as yours, and fled.”
”Would it not serve to call him a nithing before the folk?” I have learned this much of their barbaric customs, anyhow!
”Now that is a strange thing for a Meyacan to say. Stop at once and get out, or I open fire.”
Iason realized his teeth were clenched till they hurt. How in Hades could a man remember the hundreds of little regions, each with its own ways, into which the continent lay divided? Westfall was a more fantastic jumble than all Earth in that history where they called the place America. Well, he thought, now we discover what the odds are of my hearing it named Eutopia again.
”Very well,” he said. ”You leave me no choice. But I shall indeed want compensation for this insult.”
He braked as slowly as he dared. The road was a hard black ribbon before him, slashed through an immensity of trees. He didn't know if these woods had ever been logged. Perhaps so, when white men first sailed through the Pentalimne (calling them the Five Seas) to found Ernvik where Duluth stood in America and Lykopolis in Eutopia. In those days Norland had spread mightily across the lake country. But then came wars with Dakotas and Magyars, to set a limit; and the development of trade-more recently of synthetics-enabled the people to use their hinterland for the hunting they so savagely loved. Three hundred years could re-establish a climax forest.
Sharply before him stood the vision of this area as he had known it at home: ordered groves and gardens, villages planned for beauty as well as use, lithe brown bodies on the athletic fields, music under moonlight... Even America the Dreadful was more human than a wilderness.
They were gone, lost in the multiple dimensions of s.p.a.ce-time, he was alone and death walked the sky. And no self-pity, you idiot! Spend energy for survival.
The car stopped, hard by the road edge. Iason gathered his thews, opened the door, and sprang.
Perhaps the radio behind him uttered a curse. The jet slewed around and swooped like a hawk. Bullets sleeted at his heels.
Then he was in among the trees. They roofed him with sun-speckled shadow. Their trunks stood in ma.s.sive masculine strength, their branches breathed fragrance a woman might envy. Fallen needles softened his foot-thud, a thrush warbled, a light wind cooled his cheeks. He threw himself beneath the shelter of one bole and lay in it gasping with a heartbeat which all but drowned the sinister whistle above.
Presently it went away. Runolf must have called back to his lord. Ottar would fly horses and hounds to this place, the only way of pursuit. But Iason had a few hours' grace.
After that-He rallied his training, sat up and thought. If Socrates, feeling the hemlock's chill, could speak wisdom to the young men of Athens, Iason Philippou could a.s.sess his own chances. For he wasn't dead yet.
He numbered his a.s.sets. A pistol of the local slug-throwing type; a compa.s.s; a pocketful of gold and silver coins; a cloak that might double as a blanket, above the tunic-trousers-boots costume of central Westfall. And himself, the ultimate instrument. His body was tall and broad-together with fair hair and short nose, an inheritance from Gallic ancestors-and had been trained by men who won wreaths at the Olym-peion. His mind, his entire nervous system, counted for still more. The pedagogues of Eutopia had made logic, semantic consciousness, perspective as natural to him as breathing; his memory was under such control that he had no need of a map; despite one calamitous mistake, he knew he was trained to deal with the most outlandish manifestations of the human spirit.
And, yes, before all else, he had reason to live. It went beyond any blind wish to continue an ident.i.ty; that was only something the DNA molecule had elaborated in order to make more DNA molecules. He had his beloved to return to. He had his country: Eutopia, the Good Land, which his people had founded two thousand years ago on a new continent, leaving behind the hatreds and horrors of Europe, taking along the work of Aristotle, and writing at last in their Syntagma, ”The national purpose is the attainment of universal sanity.”
Iason Philippou was bound home.
He rose and started walking south.
That was on Tetrade, which his hunters called Onsdag. Some thirty-six hours later, he knew he was not in Pentade but near sunset of Thors-dag. For he lurched through the wood, mouth filled with mummy dust, belly a cavern of emptiness, knees shaking beneath him, flies a thundercloud about the sweat dried on his skin, and heard the distant belling of hounds.
A horn responded, long brazen snarl through the leaf arches. They had gotten his scent, he could not outrun hors.e.m.e.n and he would not see stars again.
One hand dropped to his gun. I'll take a couple of them with me.... No. He was still a h.e.l.lene, who did not kill uselessly, not even barbarians who meant to slay him because he had broken a taboo of theirs. I will stand under an open sky, take their bullets, and go down into darkness remembering Eutopia and all my friends and Niki whom I love.
Realization came, dimly, that he had left the pine forest and was in a second growth of beeches. Light gilded their leaves and caressed the slim white trunks. And what was that growl up ahead?
He stopped. A portal might remain. He had driven himself near collapse; but the organism has a reserve which the fully integrated man may call upon. From consciousness he abolished the sound of dogs, every ache and exhaustion. He drew breath after breath of air, noting its calm and purity, visualizing the oxygen atoms that poured through his starved tissues. He made the heartbeat quit racketing, go over to a deep slow pulse; he tensed and relaxed muscles until each functioned smoothly again; pain ceased to feed on itself and died away; despair gave place to calm and calculation. He trod forth.
Plowlands rolled southward before him, their young grain vivid in the light that slanted gold from the west. Not far off stood a cl.u.s.ter of farm buildings, long, low, and peak-roofed. Chimney smoke stained heaven. But his eyes went first to the man closer by. The fellow was cultivating with a tractor. Though the dielectric motor had been invented in this world, its use had not yet spread this far north, and gasoline fumes caught at Iason's nostrils. He had thought that stench one of the worst abominations in America-that hogpen they called Los Angeles!-but now it came to him clean and strong, for it was his hope.
The driver saw him, halted, and uns.h.i.+pped a rifle. Iason approached with palms held forward in token of peace. The driver relaxed. He was a typical Magyar: burly, high in the cheekbones, his beard braided, his tunic colorfully embroidered. So I did cross the border! Iason exulted. I'm out of Norland and into the Voivodate of Dakoty.
Before they sent him here, the anthropologists of the Parachronic Research Inst.i.tute had of course given him an electrochemical inculcation in the princ.i.p.al languages of Westfall. (Pity they hadn't been more thorough about teaching him the mores. But then, he had been hastily recruited for the Norland post after Megasthenes' accidental death; and it was a.s.sumed that his experience in America gave him special qualifications for this history, which was also non-Alexandrine; and, to be sure, the whole object of missions like his was to learn just how societies on the different Earths did vary.) He formed the Ural-Altaic words with ease: ”Greeting to you. I come as a supplicant.”
The farmer sat quiet, tense, looking down on him and listening to the dogs far off in the forest. His rifle stayed ready. ”Are you an outlaw?” he asked.
”Not in this realm, freeman.” (Still another name and concept for ”citizen”!) ”I was a peaceful trader from Homeland, visiting Lawman Ottar Thorkelsson in Ernvik. His anger fell upon me, so great that he broke sacred hospitality and sought the life of me, his guest. Now his hunters are on my trail. You hear them yonder.”