Short Fiction, Poul Anderson [simple e reader .TXT] 📗

“I see,” she said.

“Your great-great-great-grandchildren can be like us, if your people want to be changed thus,” he said.

“They didn’t want to change before,” she answered. “I don’t think they’ll do it now, even in their new home.” Her voice held no bitterness; it was an acceptance.

Privately, Jorun doubted it. The psychic shock of this uprooting would be bound to destroy the old traditions of the Terrans; it would not take many centuries before they were culturally assimilated by Galactic civilization.

Assimilated⁠—nice euphemism. Why not just say⁠—eaten?

They landed on the beach. It was broad and white, running in dunes from the thin, harsh, salt-streaked grass to the roar and tumble of surf. The sun was low over the watery horizon, filling the damp, blowing air with gold. Jorun could almost look directly at its huge disc.

He sat down. The sand gritted tinily under him, and the wind rumpled his hair and filled his nostrils with its sharp wet smell. He picked up a conch and turned it over in his fingers, wondering at the intricate architecture of it.

“If you hold it to your ear,” said Julith, “you can hear the sea.” Her childish voice was curiously tender around the rough syllables of Earth’s language.

He nodded and obeyed her hint. It was only the small pulse of blood within him⁠—you heard the same thing out in the great hollow silence of space⁠—but it did sing of restless immensities, wind and foam, and the long waves marching under the moon.

“I have two of them myself,” said Julith. “I want them so I can always remember this beach. And my children and their children will hold them, too, and hear our sea talking.” She folded his fingers around the shell. “You keep this one for yourself.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I will.” The combers rolled in, booming and spouting against the land. The Terrans called them the horses of God. A thin cloud in the west was turning rose and gold.

“Are there oceans on our new planet?” asked Julith.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s the most Earth-like world we could find that wasn’t already inhabited. You’ll be happy there.”

But the trees and grasses, the soil and the fruits thereof, the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the waters beneath, form and color, smell and sound, taste and texture, everything is different. Is alien. The difference is small, subtle, but it is the abyss of two billion years of separate evolution, and no other world can ever quite be Earth.

Julith looked straight at him with solemn eyes. “Are you folk afraid of Hulduvians?” she asked.

“Why, no,” he said. “Of course not.”

“Then why are you giving Earth to them?” It was a soft question, but it trembled just a little.

“I thought all your people understood the reason by now,” said Jorun. “Civilization⁠—the civilization of man and his nonhuman allies⁠—has moved inward, toward the great star-clusters of Galactic center. This part of space means nothing to us any more; it’s almost a desert. You haven’t seen starlight till you’ve been by Sagittarius. Now the Hulduvians are another civilization. They are not the least bit like us; they live on big, poisonous worlds like Jupiter and Saturn. I think they would seem like pretty nice monsters if they weren’t so alien to us that neither side can really understand the other. They use the cosmic energies too, but in a different way⁠—and their way interferes with ours just as ours interferes with theirs. Different brains, you see.

“Anyway, it was decided that the two civilizations would get along best by just staying away from each other. If they divided up the Galaxy between them, there would be no interference; it would be too far from one civilization to the other. The Hulduvians were, really, very nice about it. They’re willing to take the outer rim, even if there are fewer stars, and let us have the center.

“So by the agreement, we’ve got to have all men and manlike beings out of their territory before they come to settle it, just as they’ll move out of ours. Their colonists won’t be coming to Jupiter and Saturn for centuries yet; but even so, we have to clear the Sirius Sector now, because there’ll be a lot of work to do elsewhere. Fortunately, there are only a few people living in this whole part of space. The Sirius Sector has been an isolated, primi⁠—ah⁠—quiet region since the First Empire fell, fifty thousand years ago.”

Julith’s voice rose a little. “But those people are us!”

“And the folk of Alpha Centauri and Procyon and Sirius and⁠—oh, hundreds of other stars. Yet all of you together are only one tiny drop in the quadrillions of the Galaxy. Don’t you see, Julith, you have to move for the good of all of us?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I know all that.”

She got up, shaking herself. “Let’s go swimming.”

Jorun smiled and shook his head. “No, I’ll wait for you if you want to go.”

She nodded and ran off down the beach, sheltering behind a dune to put on a bathing-suit. The Terrans had a nudity taboo, in spite of the mild interglacial climate; typical primitive irrationality. Jorun lay back, folding his arms behind his head, and looked up at the darkening sky. The evening star twinkled forth, low and white on the dusk-blue horizon. Venus⁠—or was it Mercury? He wasn’t sure. He wished he knew more about the early history of the Solar System, the first men to ride their thunderous rockets out to die on unknown hell-worlds⁠—the first clumsy steps toward the stars. He could look it up in the archives of Corazuno, but he knew he never would. Too much else to do, too much to remember. Probably less than one percent of mankind’s throngs even knew where Earth was, today⁠—though, for a while, it had been quite a tourist-center. But that was perhaps thirty thousand years ago.

Because this world, out of