The Lovers * Dark Is the Sun * Riders of the Purple Wage Page 5

  Hal saw in his mind the rest of Earth: Iceland, Greenland, the Caribbean Islands, and the eastern half of South America. Here the peoples spoke the tongue of Iceland because that island had gotten the jump on the Hawaiian-Americans who were busy resettling North America and the western half of South America after the Apocalyptic War.

  Then there was North America, where American was the native speech of all except the twenty descendants of French-Canadians living on the Hudson Bay Preserve.

  Hal knew that when that side of Earth rotated into the night zone, Sigmen City would blaze out into space. And, somewhere in that enormous light, was his apartment. But Mary would soon no longer be living there, for she would be notified in a few days that her husband had died in an accident. She would weep in private, he was sure, for she loved him in her frigid way, though in public she would be dry-eyed. Her friends and professional associates would sympathize with her, not because she had lost a beloved husband, but because she had been married to a man who thought unrealistically. If Hal Yarrow had been killed in a crash, he must have wanted it that way. There was no such thing as an ‘accident.’ Somehow, all the other passengers (also supposed to have died in this web of elaborate frauds to cover up the disappearance of the personnel of the Gabriel) had simultaneously ‘agreed’ to die. And, therefore, being in disgrace, they would not be cremated and their ashes flung to the winds in public ceremony. No, the fish could eat their bodies for all the Sturch cared.

  Hal felt sorry for Mary; he had a time keeping the tears from welling to his own eyes as he stood in the crowd in the observation dome.

  Yet, he told himself, this was the best way. He and Mary would no longer have to tear and rend at each other; their mutual torture would be over. Mary was free to marry again, not knowing that the Sturch had secretly given her a divorce, thinking that death had dissolved her marriage. She would have a year in which to make up her mind, to choose a mate from a list selected by her gapt. Perhaps, the psychological barriers that had prevented her from conceiving Hal’s child would no longer be present. Perhaps. Hal doubted if this happy event would occur. Mary was as frozen below the navel as he. No matter who the candidate for marriage selected by the gapt…

  The gapt. Pornsen. He would no longer have to see that fat face, hear that whining voice ….

  ‘Hal Yarrow!’ said the whining Voice.

  Slowly, icy yet burning, Hal turned.

  There was the squat, loose-jowled, thick-lipped, vulture-nosed, narrow-eyed man smiling at him. Under the narrow-brimmed conical azure hat, gray-flecked black hair hung down to a high-ruffed black collar. The azure jacket fit snugly over a large paunch—Pornsen had endured many a lecture from his superiors because of his overeating—and a broad blue belt held a metal clasp for the handle of his whip. The thick legs were enclosed in tight azure pants with a black stripe running vertically along the outer and inner sides and with azure knee-high boots. The feet, however, were so tiny they looked ridiculous. On the toes of each boot was a seven-sided mirror.

  There were some dirty stories about the origin of the mirrors circulating among lower-class elements. Hal had once overheard one, and he still blushed whenever he recalled it.

  ‘My beloved ward, my perennial gadfly,’ Pornsen whined. Td no idea that you would be on this glorious voyage. But I might’ve known! We seem to be bound by love. Sigmen himself must have foreseen it. Love to you, my ward.’

  ‘Sigmen love you, too,’ Hal said, and he coughed. ‘How wonderful to see your cherished self. I had thought we’d never see each other again.’

  5

  The Gabriel pointed toward her destination and, under one-gee acceleration, began to build toward her ultimate velocity, 33.1 percent of the speed of light. Meanwhile, all the personnel except those few needed to carry out the performance of the ship went into the suspensor. Here they would lie in suspended animation for many years. Some time later, after a check had been made of all automatic equipment, the crew would join the others. They would sleep while the Gabriel’s drive would increase the acceleration to a point which the unfrozen bodies of the personnel could not have endured. Upon reaching the desired speed, the automatic equipment would cut off the drive, and the silent but not empty vessel would hurl toward the star which was its journey’s end.

  Many years later, the photon-counting apparatus in the nose of the ship would determine that the star was close enough to actuate deceleration. Again, a force too strong for unfrozen bodies to endure would be applied. Then, after slowing the vessel considerably, the drive would adjust to a one-gee deceleration. And the crew would be automatically brought out of their suspended animation. These members would then unthaw the rest of the personnel. And, in the half-year left before reaching their destination, the men would carry out whatever preparations were needed.

  Hal Yarrow was among the last to go into the suspensor and among the first to come out. He had to study the recordings of the language of the chief nation of Ozagen, Siddo. And, from the first, he faced a difficult task. The expedition that had discovered Ozagen had succeeded in correlating five thousand Siddo words with an equal number of American words. The description of the Siddo syntax was very restricted. And, as Hal found out, obviously mistaken in many cases.

  This discovery caused Hal anxiety. His duty was to write a school text and to teach the entire personnel of the Gabriel how to speak Ozagen. Yet, if he used all of the little means at his disposal, he would be instructing his students wrongly. Moreover, getting even this across would be difficult.

  For one thing, the organs of speech of the Ozagen natives differed somewhat from Earthmen’s; the sounds made by these organs were, therefore, dissimilar. It was true that they could be approximated, but would the Ozagenians understand these approximations?

  Another obstacle was the grammatical construction of Siddo. Consider the tense system. Instead of inflecting a verb or using an unattached particle to indicate the past or future, Siddo used an entirely different word. Thus, the masculine animate infinitive dabhumaksanigalu’ahai, meaning to live, was, in the perfect tense, ksu’u’upeli’afo, and, in the future, mai’teipa. The same use of an entirely different word applied for all the other tenses. Plus the fact that Siddo not only had the normal (to Earthmen) three genders of masculine, feminine, and neuter, but the two extra of inanimate and spiritual. Fortunately, gender was inflected, though the expression of it would be difficult for anybody not born in Siddo. The system of indicating gender varied according to tense.

  Other parts of speech—nouns, pronouns, adjectives-adverbs, and conjunctions—operated under the same system as the verbs. To confuse the use of the tongue, different social classes quite often used different words to express the same meaning.

  The writing of Siddo could only be compared to that of ancient Japanese. There was no alphabet; instead, ideograms, lines whose length, shape, and relative, angle to each other were meaningful, were used. Signs accompanying each ideogram indicated the correct inflection of gender.

  In the privacy of his study cubicle, Hal swore mildly by the lost right hand of Sigmen.

  The captain of the first expedition had picked out the continent in the Ozagenian antipodes as his base for research. This happened to be occupied by natives who spoke the most difficult language (for Earthmen) to master. If he had chosen the other continent in the northern hemisphere, he could have had (rather, his linguist could have had) forty different tongues to choose from, some of them comparatively easy in their syntax and with short words. That is, they were if Hal could believe the random sample of them that the linguist had taken.

  Siddo, the land mass in the southern hemisphere, was about the size, though not the shape, of Africa and was separated from the other by ten thousand miles of ocean. If the wog geologists were correct, it had once been part of a Gondwanaland, but then it had drifted away. Evolution had then taken a somewhat different path from that on the other continent. Whereas the other continent had been dominated by insects and their dist
ant cousins, the endoskeletal pseudoarthropods, this land mass had been very hospitable to mammals. Though, Sigmen knew, there was an abundance of insect life on it.

  The sentient species on Abaka’a’tu, the northern land mass, had been, until five hundred years ago, the wogglebug. On Siddo it had been a remarkably human-looking animal. There Homo ozagen had developed a culture at a stage analogous to that of ancient Egypt or Babylon. And then almost all the humans, civilized or savage, had perished.

  This had happened only a thousand years before the first wogglebug Columbus had landed on their great continent. At the time of the discovery and for two centuries after, the wogs had presumed that the indigenes were extinct. But, as the wog colonists began penetrating the jungles and mountains of the interior, they encountered a few small groups of humanoids. These had retreated into the wilderness, where they could hide as successfully as the African pygmies had hidden before the great rain forests were cut down. It was estimated that there might be a thousand, maybe two thousand, scattered over an area of 100,000 square kilometers.

  A few specimens, all males, had been captured by the wogs. Before releasing them, the wogs had learned their languages. They’d also tried to find out why the humanoids had so suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Their informants had explanations, but these were contradictory and of obvious mythical origin. They just did not know the truth, though it might be concealed in their myths. Some explained the catastrophe as a plague sent by the Great Goddess or All-Mother. Others said she had sent a horde of demons to wipe out her worshippers because they had sinned against her laws. One story had it that she had shaken loose the stars so that they fell on all but a few of the people.

  In any event, Yarrow did not have all the data he needed for his study. The linguist on the first expedition had had only eight months to gather his data, and a good part of that had been spent teaching several wogs American before he could really get started. The ship had stayed ten months on Ozagen, but for the first two months the crew had remained aboard while robots collected atmospheric and biota specimens, which were analyzed to make sure that the Terrans could venture forth without being poisoned or stricken by disease.

  Despite all precautions, two had died of insect bites, one had been killed by a peculiar form of predator, and then half of the personnel had been stricken with a very debilitating but not fatal disease. This was caused by a bacterium which was innocuous to the natives but which had mutated in the bodies of its non-Ozagen hosts.

  Fearing that other diseases might occur, and being under orders to make only a survey, not a thorough exploration, the captain had ordered a return to home. The personnel has been quarantined for a long time on a satellite station before they were allowed to touch Earth again. The linguist had died a few days after the landing.

  While the second ship was being built, a vaccine for the disease was prepared. And other collected bacteria and viri were tested on animals and then on human beings who had been sent to H. This had resulted in a number of vaccines, some of which had made the crew of the Gabriel sick.

  For some reason known only to the hierarchy, the captain of the first ship had been disgraced. Hal thought that this could be because he had failed to get samples of the blood of the natives. From what little Hal had learned, and this was only through some rumors, the wogs had just refused to allow their blood to be taken. Perhaps, this was because the suspicious behavior of the Haijacs had infected the wogs. When the Terrestrial scientists had then asked for corpses to dissect—for purely scientific reasons, of course—the wogs had again refused. All of their dead, they claimed, were cremated and their ashes strewn on the fields. It was true that they were often dissected by their own doctors before cremation, but it was part of their religion that this be done ritually. And a wog physician-priest had to perform it.

  The captain had considered abducting some wogs just before the takeoff. But he’d felt that it wouldn’t be wise to antagonize them at this time. He knew that a second expedition in a much larger vessel would be sent to Ozagen after he’d made his report. If its biologists couldn’t talk the wogs into supplying blood samples, then force would be used.

  While the Gabriel was being built, a top-echelon linguist had read the notes and listened to the recordings of his predecessor. But he’d spent too much time in trying to make comparisons with various aspects of Siddo to those of Terran languages, dead or alive. Where he should have been setting up a system by which the crew could learn Siddo in the quickest manner, he’d indulged his scholarly inclinations. Maybe this was the reason he wasn’t going on the ship. Hal didn’t know. He’d been given no explanation of why he was a last-minute substitute.

  So Hal swore and bent to his work. He listened to the sounds of Siddo and studied their waveforms on the oscilloscope. He labored at reproducing them with his un-Ozagenian tongue, lips, teeth, palate, and larynx. He worked on a Siddo-American dictionary, an essential which his predecessor had somewhat neglected.

  Unfortunately, before he or any of his crew mates could become fully conversant in Siddo, its native speakers would be dead.

  Hal worked six months, long after all but the skeleton crew had gone into the suspensor. What annoyed him most about the project was the presence of Pornsen. The gapt would have gone into deep freeze, but he had to stay awake to watch Hal, to correct any unreal behavior on his part. The only redeeming feature was that Hal did not have to talk to Pornsen unless he felt like it, because he could use the urgency of his work as an excuse. But he tired of it after a while and of the loneliness. Pornsen was the most available human being to talk to, so Hal talked to him.

  Hal Yarrow was also among the first to come out of the suspensor. This, he was told, was forty years later. Intellectually, he accepted the statement. But he never really believed it. There was no change in the physical appearance of himself or his shipmates. And the only change outside the ship was in the increased brightness of the star that was their destination.

  Eventually, the star became the brightest object in the universe. Then, the planets circling it became visible. Ozagen, the fourth from the star, loomed. Approximately the size of Earth, it looked—from a distance—exactly like Earth. The Gabriel slipped into orbit after feeding data into the computer. For fourteen days, the vessel whirled around the planet while observations were made from the Gabriel itself and from gigs which descended into the atmosphere and even made several landings.

  Finally, Macneff told the captain to take the Gabriel down.

  Slowly, using immense quantities of fuel because of her vast mass, the Gabriel eased into the atmosphere and toward Siddo, the capital city, on the central-eastern coast. It settled gently as snowfall toward an open stretch in a park in the heart of the city. Park? The entire city was a park; the trees were so plentiful that from the air Siddo looked as if only a few people lived in it, not the estimated quarter of a million. There were many buildings, some ten stories high, but they were so widely separated they did not make an aggregate impression. The streets were wide, but they were overgrown by a grass so tough it could withstand any amount of wear. Only on the busy harbor front did Siddo resemble anything like an Earth city. Here the buildings were clustered close together, and the water was packed with sail ships and paddle-wheeled steamboats.

  Down came the Gabriel while the crowd that had gathered below it ran to the borders of the meadow. Its colossal gray bulk settled upon the grass and at once began imperceptibly sinking into the soil. The Sandalphon, Macneff, ordered the main port opened. And, followed close behind by Hal Yarrow, who was to assist him if he stumbled in his speech to the welcoming delegation, Macneff stepped out into the open air of the first habitable planet discovered by Earthmen.

  Like Columbus, thought Hal. Will the story be the same?

  Afterward, the Terrans discovered that the mighty vessel lay at right angles across and above two underground steam-railroad tunnels. There was, however, no danger of their collapsing. The holes went through solid rock wi
th six meters of another stratum of rock and twenty meters of dirt above it. Moreover, the ship was so long that most of its weight pressed on the area outside the tunnels. After determining this, the captain decided that the Gabriel should stay where it was.

  From sunrise to sunset, its personnel ventured among the natives, learning all they could of their language, customs, history, biology, and other things, data which the first expedition had failed to get.

  To make sure that the wogs didn’t think the Terrans were suspiciously eager to get blood samples, Hal didn’t bring up the matter for six weeks. In the meantime he spent much time—with Pornsen usually present—with a native named Fobo. He was one of the two who had learned American and a little Icelandic during the first expedition. Though he didn’t know any more of the former language than Hal knew of Siddo, he did know enough to speed up Hal’s mastery of Siddo. Sometimes, they talked quite fluently, on a simple level, by mixing up the two tongues.

  One of the things about which the Earthmen were covertly curious was the Ozagen technology. Logically, there was nothing to fear from them. As far as could be determined, the wogs had progressed no further than Earth’s early-twentieth-century (A.D.) science. But the human beings had to make sure that what met the eye was all that was there. What if the wogs were hiding weapons of devastating power, waiting to catch the visitors unawares?

  Missiles and atomic warheads were not to be feared. Obviously, Ozagen was not, as yet, capable of making these. But the wogs did seem to be very advanced in biological science. And this was to be dreaded as much as thermonuclear weapons. Moreover, even if disease was not used to attack the Earthmen, disease remained a deadly threat. What might be a nuisance to an Ozagenian with millennia of acquired immunity could be a swift death to a Terrestrial.