Orbit 9 Read online

  Behind us the city folk and the scientists pushed and jostled one another as various factions tried to approach the stage. For them, Dragnor’s revelation far outshone the question of extending the Fair, and their shouted questions and speculations drowned out everything else.

  Still, I doubt if a single one of them guessed that the Waxing Star was not nearly so important as what wasnear it.

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  W. Macfarlane

  THE LAST LEAF

  When the Altengaden lifted, there was a prompt investigation. Magniac was brought before the Count, who said, “Your wives despise you and your children hate you. We have lived for half a century on Neuland and you remain an apostle for lost Earth. You are a renegade, you preach sedition, and you are now responsible for the deaths of six young men and six young women.”

  “They will return.”

  “If they do return, they will not find you in Castle Gyepu or the City Gyepu. As an anachronism in our society—”

  “You and I were young together at the court of the Emperor—” Magniac began, and stopped, sullenly ashamed of himself.

  “And so I am foolishly clement. Magniac, you are banished. You may have a wain of goods, oxen and domestic animals. Do not return. You have made your life a matter of indifference to me.”

  The architect of the exodus from Earth left Gyepu with dogs barking and children dancing, his ponderous wagon loaded with previously discarded books and clothing and laboratory equipment. All of his proper tools were aboard the Altengaden. He followed the river north and turned west to the low hills. He built a shelter in a small valley. He transplanted seedlings to establish a coppice of pines. He worked a ledge of native sandstone and built a tower. He planted vines and made wine. As carbon becomes diamond with heat and pressure and time, Magniac’s loathing of this new world crystallized to an adamant hatred that enabled him to endure his solitary life for five lonely years.

  He had seduced twelve young men and women to his purposes, removed the machinery from Castle Gyepu by guile and bribery, and built a second spaceship. He had spent his last resources of influence and credit to equip the Altengaden, but he had not expected to remain behind to answer for his actions. The young people had responded to his exhortations, believed his promises of bountiful Earth, submitted to his tyranny during the construction, and left without him. He could only ascribe the nonreturn of the spaceship to the perfidy of the crew. Seduced once, they would be seducible again. The thought of the twelve, disporting themselves among the teeming millions of old Earth, made Magniac grind his white teeth in rage.

  He was standing on the roof of his tower the day the Altengaden returned. The mote in the sky distracted him from the thousandth weary consideration of a third spaceship. The englobement machinery, the great Orffyreus wheels and the entrainment tubes, these were possible. The Steyr steam engines could be replaced with great labor but the harmonic amplifiers could not, even with the resources of this world at his disposal. There must be electricity for the carbon arc lights that kept the forage alive in the deep void, but to achieve space at all, the harmonics were fundamental. He turned his white impassive face from Gyepu and took comfort in the dark solace of the little pines.

  He turned again and there was theAltengaden, dropping through the heavens. At a distance of six kilometers he saw it whole, half earth and half sky, a perfectly spherical spaceship with the hunting lodge in the center. It sank below the hills and into the lake its departure had left. A sheet of water rose and spread over the valley floor, draining to the river, gullying the river road. Horsemen from Castle Gyepu picked their way toward it through the mud.

  The only outward sign of Magniac’s burning impatience during the next two days was the habit he fell into of buttoning up the tails of his coat. He missed the familiar swish of cloth against the backs of his knees and unbuttoned them. He cleaned and loaded the Parabellum Luger with the special cartridges whose bullets he had cast himself. He carried the awkward pistol under his shirt in a special holster. He buttoned his coattails and unbuttoned them again.

  The committee was a group of his peers who had left old Earth with him. They rode three horses and led a fourth. “It is the Count’s wish you inspect the machinery,” said de Juilly in French.

  Weissech said in Polish, “The ban is not lifted, Magniac.”

  “Flumdiddle,” grumbled Welby. “Come now, don’t lollygag about as if our time’s not worth a scrope. We may be metagrobilized, but bring you out of Coventry to carry a lanthorn? Rum show, a rummy show altogether.”

  Magniac swung to the saddle without a word. There was one good thing about Neuland, after all: the younger generation had adopted German as a common language. It was very well to be polyglot on old Earth, but to do Welby the courtesy of learning schoolboy English was tedium and a bore.

  They approached the lodge from the uphill side. The horses struggled through the mud and displaced soil. A gate had been cut in the peripheral fence and de Juilly dropped his hat when he bent out of the saddle to open it. Magniac was the only one wearing proper clothing. To see his former associates in homespun made him slightly ill. The felted hat de Juilly dropped would better have been left where it lay, to make a nest for some uncritical hen.

  Magniac threw back his cape. The sun was warm and the fodder in the fields was almost old-Earth green. It had survived the journey through space very well. The grazing cattle were strange red and white beasts, blocky and close to the ground. There was a woven-wire pen full of enormous bronze turkeys. So the journey had been successful from many aspects. Magniac sniffed the air with his beaky nose. There was animal effluvium, a faint taste of petroleum, and the blossoms of the forage crop. There was no trace of the crew and no scent of any human breeding stock.

  As soon as he entered the great hall of the lodge, Magniac knew that men had died there. The hundreds of stag horns, each mounted on a mahogany shield with a silver plate, were dusty but not disarranged. The parquetry floor was burnished and smelled faintly of beeswax. A bouquet of unfamiliar red roses was only now beginning to drop petals onto an inlaid tabletop.

  “What happened?” asked Magniac.

  “They funked it,” blurted Welby. “They killed theirselves in their diggin’s.”

  “My dear sir,” said de Juilly, severely, “six men and six women of the highest cultural attainment do not brave the starry empyrean and ‘funk it.’ Why should they return home to blow their brains out?”

  “Don’t bullyrag me. My son was one of them.” Welby honked his nose loudly. “Pax.”

  “The blood had not yet congealed,” said de Juilly. “Such a mass suicide is inexplicable, beyond comprehension.”

  They mounted the stairs to the gallery and walked the hall to a spiral iron staircase. The sun burned through the lace curtains drawn across the windows of the control tower. The Circassian walnut instrument panel was as Magniac had seen it last. The tall bronze levers were polished and set at full stop. The gravitic entrainment wheels were locked at rest. From a cursory inspection, the lodge and its kilometer-diameter englobement could again become the Altengaden and lift through space when steam was up.

  There was a message on a sheet of watermarked paper tin-tacked to the gimbaled steering wheel, now in its neutral horizontal position. It was signed by all twelve of the crew, men and women alike. “Demons inhabit space,” was all it said.

  “Agreed,” said the Count as he entered the room. The years had not changed him. His eyes were luminous and his movements epitomized masculine grace. Magniac had always considered his taste for intelligent women to be dubious at best and he demonstrated an almost feminine patience as Magniac went through the multitudinous details of the mechanical inspection. Magniac asked for steam and was refused; still it took the better part of two hours to check the instrumentation.

  The control room of theAltengaden was an emotionally neutral place to Magniac, nothing at all like the high open tower of Castle Gyepu where he had co
ntrolled the fearful voyage through the stars so many years before.

  In the engine room his heart was clutched by an unfamiliar emotion—nostalgia? There were the grey Steyr engines built to his order in Vienna sixty years before, still bright with bronze and shining brass. There was the heavy generator, the rows of petroleum essence tanks, and the giant Orffyreus wheels built of seasoned fruitwood and sealed with purified fish oil, the pendulums and the weights, the shafts and pistons still gleaming after this long time.

  He crawled along the gravitic entrainment tubes and checked the resonating chambers of the harmonic amplifiers with a tuning fork. Intent upon his work, he had taken the instrument from a small cupboard lagged to the stone, and it was only when he was done with it that recollection washed over him as water washed over the meadows when the Altengaden settled home. This was one of John Shore’s tuning forks made in England, given him as a boy by the Landgrave at Hesse-Cassel. He had pitched their lives against its truth in the hurried construction of these chambers under the desperate pressures to leave Earth.

  The Second Balkan War had been concluded by the treaty of Bucharest on August tenth, but the diplomatic experts gathered at Castle Gyepu (it was curious how many of the gifted of whatever country gravitated to the Foreign Service) anticipated war between Serbia and Albania and further difficulties with Greece. The Irredentist agitation was developing in Transylvania, but both Franz Josef and the Tsar made surreptitious common cause during this breathing space to continue the systematic harassment of the people.

  The world had become suddenly smaller. Distance, great wealth, and position could no longer protect them. The call had gone out in March and the people foregathered by early September. The invasion of Albania by the Serbs on September twenty-third forced the decision to leave old Earth.

  The peasants had been sent away days before—that was the fated error, in Magniac’s opinion—and only the gifted were in the village and the castle when the ten-kilometer englobement rose from Earth. Snow had been falling, and the last snow fell in full sunshine as they left the shadow of Earth for a new home among the stars.

  A clear note sounded from the tuning fork as it struck the cupboard door. “Well, Magniac?” said the Count.

  “Everything—is operational.”

  “On the first of October, nineteen thirteen,” said the Count softly, “with the precious few of our blood gathered from the farthest corners of the globe, these meadows and orchards, the plain and the livestock—the very earth and sky itself—and you threw the master control, did you not, Magniac?”

  “I should have stayed.”

  “To be hunted and harried and caught and pinned with a holly stake? There is a madness in herd-humans, the price perhaps of genius in herd-humans.” The Count dusted his hands delicately. “If memory serves me, there were a few bottles from the vineyards near Tarczal here in the hidden cellar. Did you find them when you appropriated my hunting lodge? No? Then we may again toast Franz Josef in his own Imperial Tokay.”

  The Count had ordered a small buffet set on the Italian table with the drooping red roses and Magniac found himself responding to food he had not tasted for years. The wine was beyond its prime but still excellent, ghostly reminiscent of a lost time and place. Magniac absently turned his glass and was again overwhelmed by memory.

  Magniac’s taste had run to science. He had been intimate with H. L. F. von Helmholtz, Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, and both Curies. He knew Max Planck, and Rutherford and Soddy. The most remarkable man of his acquaintance was Tilah J.B. Bose, an Indian of lowly origin, whose shattering brilliance and intuitive understanding of space-time relationships made possible both the englobement and gravitic entrainment, when combined with Magniac’s unique understanding of the Orffyreus principle and his extrapolation of some unpublished speculations of Helmholtz. Bose gulped this very Tokay and later died a drunkard’s death and was forgotten, except by Magniac here on Neuland, light-years and years from abundant Earth.

  The stem of the glass snapped in his hand.

  The Count ignored the puddled wine through which Diana and her inlaid hounds were hunting on the tabletop. “Gabriel Cilli became leader of your Young Turks,” he said easily, “a name that has never failed to evoke a tiresome cross-language pun in my mind. There were no technical inadvertencies. Your backtrack photography served admirably for astrogation.” He politely inclined his head to Magniac.

  “There is a log of the voyage?”

  For answer the Count glanced at the heaped black ashes in the Carrara fireplace. A groan escaped Magniac. The Count continued, “My lodge was landed in a comparatively inaccessible valley near Belgrade. Our young people established a cordial relationship with the villagers over a period of a month. By judicious use of the gold with which you supplied them, they secured the animals you may have noticed, as well as a variety of new plants and seeds. This rose, for example, comes originally from America and is named the Chrysler Imperial. Of what empire, I have no notion.” He delicately sniffed the fragrance.

  “When may we return?”

  “Abandon hope,” said the Count. “Science and circumstance have made old Earth uninhabitable for us.”

  Magniac kicked his chair back and stood taut with fury.

  The Count sipped his wine. “The crew was subject to a series of increasingly violent respiratory ailments from which they never fully recovered. Compounding their afflictions was the presence of a stowaway, a spy of the Muscovites, who accompanied them on their journey home.”

  “A human! Alive?” Magniac’s eyeteeth glistened.

  “Until—let me see—four days ago. He must have been a brave and foolhardy man. His name was not mentioned in the log, but it may well have been Mithridates. He had ingested the subtle poisons of Earth in many countries—new wonders of chemistry—nothing so simple and healthy as arsenic—”

  Magniac sucked air through his teeth.

  “—and in the mental and physical perturbation of the crew,” the Count continued languidly, “in their justifiable fear of my reaction, the old truth became resurgent. They drank his blood. Knowledge may be power, Magniac, but a revelation of the truth to the philosophically indigent can kill. Our emotional muddleheads were morally overthrown by their action. They became desperately ill as well, from the virulent poisons carried in his bloodstream. In what I must regard as a deplorable excess of idiocy, they agreed to a suicide pact and killed themselves upon landing.”

  “Good riddance!”

  “Agreed,” said the Count soberly.

  “As for the rest of your fantasy,” snarled Magniac, fumbling with the buttons of his ruffled shirt, “you have burned the evidence and truth has never been—”

  There was a dreadful crashing noise from the vaults. “The resonating chambers,” murmured the Count. “No one will leave Neuland now.” He stood and said, “Your banishment is still in force. Depart, you atavistic madman.” De Juilly, Weissech, and Welby stood in the doorway, wrecking bars in their hands. A rose petal fell to the tabletop.

  Magniac slumped, hope destroyed, revenge forgotten. He walked out of the lodge with dragging feet. He plodded across the fields, a figure from another age in his tall silk hat, long frock coat, and red silk-lined black cape.

  The sun set and he welcomed the dark. At his tower he lifted the trapdoor, descended into the crypt, lay in his coffin bed and put a silver bullet through his old heart with the Parabellum Luger.

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  R. A. Lafferty

  WHEN ALL THE LANDS POUR OUT AGAIN

  Anybody want to get away from it all? To make a total change? You had better want to do it: you will do it anyhow. Now is the time. Today is the day.

  Three learned men were in the academic center of a learned metropolis, talking about a thing that hadn’t happened for thousands of years, which perhaps had never happened. You will already know of these men, by reputation at least, if there is anything academic about you at all.

  “
It wasn’t understood the first time it happened, or any of the other times,” Professor George Ruil offered. “In spite of a few studies, it has been understood even less since those times. The accounts of the happenings have been rationalized, falsified, belittled, and that makes it all wrong: it was never rational, it was never false, and it certainly was not little.”

  “It is interesting, George, in the way that so many secondary footprints in the clay of time are interesting,” Dr. Ralph Amerce told his friend, “but it is of no more present importance than are bear burrows or gravels of the third ice age. And it can’t come back.”

  “I’m not sure that George here won’t be able to connect it with bear burrows and gravels of the third ice age,” Nobelist Professor Wilburton Romer jibed. (These were three very learned men: would we tune in on them otherwise?) “But you can’t find any real traces of it, George, only traces of traces. It hasn’t any form we can grasp, it hasn’t any handle we can take hold of, it hasn’t any name we can call it by.”