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II
Avalon rotates in 11 hours, 22 minutes, 12 seconds, on an axis tilted 21° from the normal to the orbital plane. Thus Gray, at about 43° N., knows short nights always; in summer the darkness seems scarcely a blink. Daniel Holm wondered if that was a root of his weariness.
Probably not. He was born here. His ancestors had lived here for centuries; they arrived with Falkayn. If individuals could change their circadian rhythms — as he’d had to do plenty often in his spacefaring days — surely a race could. The medics said that settling down in a gravity field only 80 percent of Terra’s made more severe demands than that on the organism; its whole fluid balance and kinesthesia must readjust. Besides, what humans underwent was trivial compared to what their fellow colonists did. The Ythrians had had to shift a whole breeding cycle to a different day, year, weight, climate, diet, world. No wonder their first several generations had been of low fertility. Nevertheless, they survived; in the end, they flourished.
Therefore it was nonsense to suppose a man got tired from anything except overwork — and, yes, age, in spite of antisenescence. Or was it? Really? As you grew old, as you neared your dead and all who had gone before them, might your being not yearn back to its earliest begi
Crock! Come off that! Who said eighty-four is old? Holm yanked a cigar from his pocket and snapped off the end. The inhalation which lit it was u
He was wading into the latest spate of communications his aides had passed on to him, when the intercom buzzed and said: “First Marchwarden Ferune wishes discussion.”
“Sure!” Holm’s superior was newly back from Ythri. The man reached for a two-way plate, withdrew his hand, and said, “Why not in the flesh? I’ll be right there.”
He stumped from his office. The corridor beyond hummed and bustled — naval perso
Holm forced himself to call greetings right and left as he went. His affability had become a trademark whose value he recognized. At first it was genuine, he thought.
The honor guard saluted and admitted him to Ferune’s presence. (Holm did not tolerate time-wasting ceremoniousness in his department; but he admitted its importance to Ythrians.) The i
Ferune had added various offplanet souvenirs and a bookshelf loaded with folio copies of the Terran classics that he read, in three original languages, for enjoyment. A smallish, tan-feathered male, he was a bit of an iconoclast. His choth, Mistwood, had always been one of the most progressive on Avalon, mechanized as much as a human community and, in consequence, large and prosperous. He had scant patience to spare for tradition, religion, any conservatism. He endured a minimum of formalities because he must, but never claimed to like them.
Bouncing from his perch, he scuttled across the floor and shook hands Terran style. “Khr-r-r, good to see you, old rascal!” He spoke Planha; Ythrian throats are less versatile than human (though of course no human can ever get the sounds quite right) and he wanted neither the nuisance of wearing a vocalizer nor the grotesquerie of an accent.
“How’dit go?” Holm asked.
Ferune grimaced. But that is the wrong word. His feathers were not simply more intricate than those of Terran birds, they were more closely co
“Huh.” Holm found a chair designed for him, sank down, and drew tobacco pungency over his tongue. “Tell.”
Foot-claws clicked on lovely-grained wood. Back and forth Ferune paced. “I’ll be dictating a full report,” he said. “In brief, worse than I feared. Yes, they’re scrambling to establish a unified command and shove the idea of action under doctrine into every captain. But they’ve no dustiest notion of how to go about it”
“God on a stick,” Holm exclaimed, “we’ve been telling them for the past five years! I thought — oh, bugger, communication’s so vague in this so-called navy, I’d nothing to go on but impressions, and I guess I got the wrong ones — but you know I thought, we thought a halfway sensible reorganization was in progress.”
“It was, but it moulted. Overweening pride, bickering, haggling about details. We Ythrians — our dominant culture, at least — don’t fit well into anything tightly centralized.” Ferune paused. “In fact,” he went on, “the most influential argument against trading our separate, loosely coordinated planetary commands for a Terran-model hierarchy has been that Terra may have vastly greater forces, but these need to control a vastly greater volume of space than the Domain; and if they fight us they’ll be at the end of such a long line of communication that unified action is self-defeating.”
“Huh! Hasn’t it occurred to those mudbrains on Ythri, the Imperium isn’t stupid? If Terra hits, it won’t run the war from Terra, but from a sector close to our borders.”
“We’ve found little sign of strength being marshaled in nearby systems.”
“Certainly not!” Holm slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. “Would they give their preparations away like that? Would you? They’ll assemble in space, parsecs from any star. Minimal traffic between the gathering fleet and whatever planets our scouts can sneak close to. In a few cubic light-years, they can hide power to blow us out of the plenum.”
“You’ve told me this a few times,” Ferune said dryly. “I’ve passed it on. To scant avail.” He stopped pacing. For a while, silence dwelt in the room. The yellow light of Laura cast leaf shadows on the floor. They quivered.
“After all,” Ferune said, “our methods did save us during the Troubles.”
“You can’t compare war lords, pirates, petty conquerors, barbarians who’d never have gotten past their stratospheres if they hadn’t happened to ’ve acquired practically self-operating ships — you can’t compare that bloody-clawed rabble to Imperial Terra.”
“I know,” Ferune replied; “The point is, Ythrian methods served us well because they accord with Ythrian nature. I’ve begun to wonder, during this last trip, if an attempt to become poor copies of our rivals may not be foredoomed. The attempt’s being made, understand — you’ll get details till they run back out of your gorge — but could be that all we’ll gain is confusion. I’ve decided that while Avalon must make every effort to cooperate, Avalon must at the same time expect small help from outside.”