Their numbers changed. They combined and uncombined. Should one count the foreign star in their number or reckon only the attendant stars, and from what date? How could one reckon whether such activities were auspicious or not?
Neither had the astronomers been able to say, when, a hundred and twenty-two years ago, the foreign star had first begun to grow in the heavens, a star so faint at first that only the strongest eyes could see it, so the story was—a star that rose and set with the moon, in its ancient dance with the sun.
Then the astronomers had been embarrassed, because with their lenses and their orreries they still could not define that apparition as a moon or a star, since in appearance and behavior it was both, and they could not swear to its influence. Some thought it good, some thought it bad and, as many events as proponents could bring up on one side to prove it good, opponents could prove as many of bad issue. Only nand’ Jadishesi had been unequivocal, insisting, cleverly, that it portended change.
But so, also and finally, most astronomers swore, while the star grew in magnitude year by year, and gathered companions to itself: continual instability.
Now dared one call it fortunate?
The tracks yonder, the marks of the machines, were, beyond dispute, real, and bore out the story of repeated excursions from the landing-site—even at dusk, even to the eyes of a city-dweller. The Tachi, who herded in these hills and knew them as well as a city-dweller knew his own street, said that the machines had fallen from the sky, suspended from flowers, and drifted down and down and down by this means until they landed.
So was it indeed from the clouds that the visitations had come, and with those descending flowers, came machines that ran about the land ripping up trees and frightening Tachi children.
Manadgi had doubted that origin in the clouds the same way he doubted that autumn moon-shadow was curative of rheumatism. People nowadays knew that the earth circled the sun, that in the axial tilt they had their seasons confirmed. All such things they had come to understand in this age of reason, and understood them better once the astronomers of the aiji’s court had taken to the problem of the misbehaving star and commissioned better and better lenses.
The moon, as all educated people knew now, was a sphere of planetary nature, traveling through the ether, the same as the earth—their smaller cousin, as it were, measuring its year by the earth as the earth measured its time by the sun.
So the falling of machines out of the heavens was astounding, but not incredible. In considering this awesome track which no farmer’s cart had ever made in the clay, one could easily suppose people lived on the moon. One could imagine them falling down to earth on great white petals, or on canvas sails, which Manadgi hoped to witness for himself tomorrow, that being the full of the moon, the likeliest source of visitors.
Or, for an alternative source of flower-sails, there was the unfixed star, the persistent oddness of which argued at least that it had something to do with this manifestation of machines, since it was a newcomer to the skies, and since it had been, in the last forty years, acquiring a plethora of what might be unfixed moonlets, mere sparks, yet.
But again, Manadgi thought,—the sparks themselves might grow—or come nearer to the earth and deal with men.
Perhaps moon-folk had drawn the foreign star to the position it presently occupied, sailing their created world across the winds of the ether, in the way that ocean-faring ships used the worldly winds.
There had thus far seemed no correspondence between the appearance of the star or the stage of the moon phases when the flower-sails came down.
But one could wonder about the Tachi’s records-keeping as well as their grasp of the situation, when, simple herders that they were, they insisted on flowers instead of ordinary canvas and, in the clear evidence of people falling from the clouds, had endured this event for a quarter of a year debating what to do—until now, now that the machines were well-established and ravaging the land as they pleased, the Tachi aiji demanded immediate and severe action from the aiji of the Mospheiran Association to halt this destruction of their western range and the frightening of their children.
Manadgi stood up, dusted his hands, and found, in the last of the sunlight, a flat stone to take him dry-shod across the brook—a slab of sandstone the wheeled machine had crushed from the bank as it was gouging a track up the hill. It was a curiously made track, a pattern in its wheels repeating a design, its weight making deep trenches where the ground was wet. And not bogging down, evidencing the power of its engine… again, not at all astonishing: if the moon-folk could catch the winds of the ether and ride enormous sails down to earth, they were formidable engineers. And might prove formidable in other ways, one could suspect.
He certainly had no difficulty following the machine, by the trail of uprooted trees and mud-stained grass. Dusk was deepening, and he only hoped for the moon-folk not to find him in the dark, before he could find them and determine the nature and extent of their activity.
Not far, the Tachi aiji had said. In the middle of the valley, beyond the grandmother stone.
Almost he failed to recognize the stone when he climbed up to it. It lay on its side.
Distressing. But one would already suppose by the felling of trees and the devastation of the stream down below, that moon-folk were a high-handed lot, lacking fear of judgment on themselves, or perhaps simply lacking any realization that the Tachi were civilized people, who ought to be respected.
He intended to find out, at least, what was the strength of the intruders, or whether they could be dealt with. That was ahead of other questions, such as where they did come from, or what the unfixed star might be and what it meant.
All these things Manadgi hoped to find out.
Until he crested the next rise in the barren clay track of the wheeled machine, and saw, in the twilight, the huge buildings, white, and square, and starkly unadorned.
He sank down on his heels. There was no other way to hide in the barrenness the moon-folk had made, this bare-earth, lifeless sameness that extended the width of the valley around cold, square buildings painted the color of death, their corners in no auspicious alignment with the hills. He put his hands in front of his mouth to warm them, because the sinking of the sun chilled the air.
Or perhaps because the strangeness suddenly seemed overwhelming, and because he doubted he could go alive into that place so ominously painted and so glaringly, perhaps defiantly, misaligned to the earth—he began to be in dread of what he might find as their purpose, these folk who fell to Earth on petal sails.
II
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The sun eclipsed by the planetary rim was a glorious sight from space, but a station-dweller saw it only from cameras and stored tape—while a planet-dweller saw it once a day, if he cared to go outside, or stop on his way back from work. And Ian Bretano still did care to, because it was still that new to him.
New and disorienting, if he fell to thinking about where he was on the planet… or where home was, or what it was or would be, for the rest of his life.
And sometimes, at night when the stars swung above the valley, sometimes when the moon was above the horizon line and all of space was over their heads, he missed the station desperately and asked himself for a wild, panicked moment why he had ever wanted to be down here at the bottom of a planetary well, why he’d ever left his family and his friends and why he couldn’t have contributed to the cause from the clean, safe laboratories upstairs—Upstairs, they all called it, now, having taken up the word from the first team down.