Suddenly Obrien, having tasted a crumb of koluf, tilted his head thoughtfully and broke off a larger morsel. He tasted again, smiled, nodded, and offered some to the Elder, who tasted it and smiled his own approval. Obrien accepted the platter of meat from the dancers, who returned to the line of waiting chefs to proclaim the winner. They escorted her to the throne, a plump, middle-aged woman delirious with delight. Obrien and the Elder arose and handed her up to the highest seat while around them the villagers slapped bare legs in enthusiastic approval. For with the natives, as with any people revering good food, the ultimate place of honor at any feast belonged to the cook.
In the morning, Obrien and the Elder walked together along the shore and seated themselves on a knoll overlooking the sea. Sweet-scented blossoms crowded up about them, nodding in the breeze. The morning light sparkled on the leaping water. Brightly colored sails of the hunting fleet were pinned flower-like to the horizon. To their left, the village rested sleepily on its hillside, with a single thin plume of smoke wafting skyward. Children of both sexes romped in the surf or walked timidly along the shore to stare up at the Elder and the Langri.
“I am an old man,” Obrien observed wearily.
“The oldest of old men,” the Elder agreed promptly.
Obrien smiled wanly. To a native, “old” meant “wise.” The Elder had paid him the highest of compliments, and he felt only bitterness and frustration. “I am an old man,” he said, “and I am dying.”
The Elder turned quickly and looked at him with concern.
“No man lives forever, my friend,” Obrien said, “and you and I have been cheating the fire of death for a long time.”
“The fire of death never lacks for fuel. Let those cheat it who can. You spoke of a need.”
“Your need. The need of all of your people and of my people.”
The Elder nodded thoughtfully. “As always, we listen well when the Langri speaks.”
Obrien got to his feet, walked forward a few paces, and stood looking at the sea. “You remember that I came from afar and stayed because the skyship that brought me could fly no longer. I came to this land by chance and because I had lost my way and my skyship had a serious sickness.”
“I remember.”
“Others will come,” Obrien said, “and then more others. There will be good men and bad, but all will have strange weapons.”
“I remember. I was there when you slew the maf.”
“Strange weapons,” Obrien repeated. “Our people will be helpless. The men from the sky will take this land—whatever they want of it. They will take the hills and the forests and the beaches and even the sea, the mother of life. There will be boats that sail above and below the waters and poison them, and the koluf, the staple of life, will be driven into deep waters where the hunters can’t find it. Our people will be pushed back into the mountains where there is no food. The strangers will bring strange sicknesses, and entire villages will lie in the fire of death. They will lay waste to the shores, they will hunt the waters and swim, and their dwellings will be taller than the tallest trees and their numbers on the beaches thicker than the marnl at hatching. Our own people will be no more.”
The Elder was silent for a time. Then he said, “You know this to be true?”
“It will not happen this day or the next, but it will happen.”
“It is indeed a terrible need,” the Elder said quietly.
Obrien looked at the awesome beauty of the curving shore and thought, “This beautiful, unspoiled land, this wonderful, generous, beautiful people—” A man was so damned helpless when he was dying.
The Elder got to his feet, and for a time they stood side by side in silence, two old men in bright sunlight waiting for darkness. The Elder placed his hand gently on Obrien’s shoulder. “Cannot the Langri prevent this thing?”
Obrien walked a short distance down the slope and knelt in the lush vegetation. He plucked the flowers, one at a time, and as each glistening, multicolored blossom turned dark in his hand he crushed it, tossed it aside, and plucked another.
The Elder followed and knelt beside him. “Cannot the Langri—”
“The Langri can prevent it—I think—if the men from the sky come this day or the next. If they delay longer the Langri cannot prevent it because the Langri is dying.”
“Now I understand. The Langri must show us the way.”
“The way is strange and difficult.”
“What we must do shall be done. The Langri’s wisdom will light the way.”
“Strange and difficult,” Obrien repeated. “Our people may not be able to follow it, or the path the Langri chooses may be the wrong one.”
“What does the Langri require?”
Obrien got to his feet. “Send the young people to me, two hands at a time. I will make my choices. There must be a village for them, in a place apart. They must eat, though they neither hunt nor gather, and the burden of their food and its preparation must be fairly divided among all the villages.”
“The first will come to you this day, and your wishes will be my wishes.”
They touched hands. Obrien turned and walked away quickly. Fornri and the young paddlers were waiting for him on the beach, and they pushed off at once and hoisted a sail, because the wind was at their back for the return voyage. They moved swiftly out of the bay, and Obrien, looking backward, saw the Elder still standing motionless on the knoll with arm uplifted.
2
Cerne Obrien had been knocking about in space since he was twelve, and when he got sufficiently tired of being the top name on everyone’s duty list, he saved a little money and acquired a battered government surplus survey ship. The sale—at discounted salvage value—was contingent on his junking the ship, but he scraped together some supplies and paid a dispatcher to be looking the other way when he took off.
He was only a dumb mechanic—though a good one—and he had no license to be touching anything at all on a spaceship forward of the retron cells; but he’d seen one piloted often enough to think he knew the fundamentals. The ship had a perverse streak that matched his own, but after he exercised his rich vocabulary of profanity and kicked the control panel a few times it would settle down and behave itself. Pointing it in the right direction was another matter. Probably any bright school kid knew more about celestial navigation than he did, and his only support came from an obsolete Simplified Astrogation for the Layman. He was lost ninety per cent of the time and only vaguely aware of his whereabouts for the other ten, but it didn’t matter.
He wanted to see some places that were off the usual space lanes and maybe do a little illegal prospecting, but especially he wanted to be his own boss and make his own decisions. When supplies got low he looked for a small, privately owned port where there would be no authorities asking to see his nonexistent license. Good mechanics were always in demand, and he could slip in for a night landing, work until he’d earned enough to replenish his fuel and supplies, and slip back into space without exciting anyone.
He went through the motions of prospecting, too, nosing about on dozens of asteroids and moons and small planets that either were undiscovered or forgotten. He would have been reluctant to admit even to himself that the prospecting was in reality an excuse that enabled him to enjoy the contorted strangeness of a stark lunar landscape or experience the awesome thrill of riding a barren, spinning asteroid through an unending procession of glowing dawns and precipitant sunsets.
No one could have been more amazed than Obrien when he actually struck it rich. An asteroid of solid platinum he would have overlooked, but a rich deposit of retron crystals made his ship’s instrumentation misbehave so radically that eventually he got the message. He started back to civilization with a wealth so enormous and so unexpected that he had no notion of what he would do with it.