A Night Without Stars (20 page)

It had been dark for three hours when Florian drove the Openland down to the lake at the base of the valley. His eyes provided him with a grainy green-tinged vision of the landscape, allowing him to keep the headlights off. The only people likely to see the four-by-four would be people doing the same thing as him, but avoiding attention was second nature for Eliters.

The lake was seven kilometers long and three at the widest. Nine streams fed into it, with the river Kellehar running out the far end. It was one of the hundreds of tributary rivers that merged into the river Crisp, which drained the lands to the north of the Sansone Mountains all the way up to the Pritwolds, and from the coast to the west of Opole.

Florian drew up on the edge of the Vatni village and switched the engine off. The aliens had been here for more than sixty years, swimming upstream from the coast to spread down several tributaries. They tended to settle on lakes like this one, which weren't close to any main human towns. Their huts were long cylindrical affairs woven out of pine and browfrey branches that seemed to be connected into a single chaotic maze.

Infrared vision showed him the bright scarlet blobs of fires burning on hearths in the center of the larger huts, the cooler amber haze of smoke rising up through long clay flues. The Vatni didn't have much to trade with humans; the cultures were too different. Back on Aqueous they didn't even have fire. The tiny islands on that world of water had never evolved any kind of woody vegetation; the best their biosphere had come up with was a kind of spiky coral lichen. Yet once those initial Vatni families arrived on Bienvenido, they'd readily taken to the innovation, and they now cooked a lot of food. They said their ancestral memories showed them they'd once had fire back on whatever world they'd originated from prior to the Void. Knives were also a popular item to be traded, along with basic tools. Some of the larger coastal settlements even had electricity, supplied from Bienvenido's grid.

Most Vatni settlements exchanged fish for human goods. The village in Albina Valley supplied Florian with fish from the lake, but mainly he paid them cash for the dalfrond. Cash he used to buy what they wanted from the general store in Wymondon on his fortnightly trips for his own supplies.

It was Mooray that came out to greet him. Like all his kind, the Vatni was nearly three and a half meters long from his nose to the tip of his dorsal tail. His body was a fat cylinder weighing in at nearly a thousand kilograms. Yet despite their bulk, the Vatni were surprisingly lithe, even out of the water. Mooray's hide was a dense gray-brown fur, like bristles that had fused together, which shone with a waxy oil that made it look like he was permanently damp. That color showed he was in his early middle age. As a Vatni got older, the hide would tinge into blotchy rust-red.

He waddled toward Florian on his three flattened tentacle-like tails that wriggled across the compacted ground like synchronized snakes. The thick dorsal tail was the shortest, used for balance alone when Mooray was out of the water, with the lower two providing traction. The trisymmetrical limb configuration was repeated for the mid-body flippers. His dorsal flipper was purely a fin for when he was in the water, while the remaining pair of serpentine flippers were longer and had pincer tips. There were also three tusks protruding from Mooray's triangular mouth, with the longest one at the top, curving down.

Three large gold-hued multisegment eyes peered down at Florian, and Mooray emitted a lengthy liquid squealing sound, as if he were gurgling a thick syrup, interspaced with fast clicking as his tusks drummed together.

Florian brought up his translation routine.

“Greetings, my friend Florian of the land,” Mooray was saying. “Are you meat hunting again this night?”

Florian took the modified flute out of his pocket and positioned the castanets carefully in his right hand. Using Vatni speech was a prolonged operation, even for an Eliter, but the routines governed his lips and tongue movements, allowing him a decent stab at speaking Vatni directly. “My gratitude to you for seeing me, friend Mooray of the water. You are correct in thinking I would hunt this night. Will you honor me with your presence?”

“I will be delighted to go with you. Have you made progress with the killing apparatus?”

“Progress is slow, for which I apologize. I think you would require a pump handle to pull the string back.” Modifying a crossbow for Mooray had been an ongoing project for over a year now. Shaping it to be held by Vatni flippers had been relatively easy, but those pincers didn't really have the strength to crank the string back. An additional mechanism was needed for that. Routines could create basic three-dimensional designs, but Florian's carpentry skills didn't quite match his ambitions.

“No apology is required,” Mooray chirruped and thrummed. “Your attempts are a demonstration of friendship, which I find most honorable.”

“I will succeed eventually,” Florian warbled back.

“All things will be in the end.”

They walked around the huts to the stubby wharf the Vatni had built into the lake. Very occasionally anglers and other country-folk would visit to trade. The Vatni were anxious to make them feel welcome.

The boat waiting at the end had been built for Florian by the Vatni, more rounded than a human rowing boat, but very stable. Florian climbed in and sat on the bench. Teal curled up behind him, while Mooray made the whole thing rock about as he lumbered in and lay at the prow, with his head over the gunnels.

“I'm going to go up to Naxian Valley,” Florian said.

“A good choice for the land meat creatures.”

Florian cast off and swung the long oars out over the side. The Naxian Valley stream that fed into the lake was a good eight hundred meters around the shore. He began rowing.

“It is a clear night,” Florian remarked. Above them, the northern sky revealed the Ring Trees glittering silver-white in a mighty curve around the planet. One less tonight. He'd seen the atomic flash through the drab clouds as Liberty 2,673 successfully destroyed another enemy.

“It is an empty night,” Mooray replied.

“Aqueous should be rising soon. And Trüb is coming back into view from behind the sun. Even Ursell will shine bright before morning, so we can enjoy Mother Laura's triumph.”

“A full sky is a glorious sight.”

Florian smiled to himself. This was how he always got the Vatni talking about other worlds. There weren't many humans who took the time to get to know the Vatni. Contact was mainly limited to official meetings about guarding the coastlines, and merchants looking to trade. But he couldn't get enough of these stories, and their racial memory was extraordinary. Somehow the females passed knowledge on to their offspring while they were still in the second-womb (of three).

It was the Vatni's knowledge that he used to embellish his most precious file, the astronomy one. A mindscape of the whole solar system, where he could tour around the planets at will—as he'd dreamed of doing as an astronaut. Images from telescopes had been incorporated to map out planetary surfaces with great accuracy. Aunt Terannia had even found him an old book that had photographs taken by Mother Laura's team when she opened the wormhole to survey the strange star system the Void had banished them to.

But it was the stories of the Vatni that allowed him to animate them, to make them live. Ursell before the Fireyear, a world with dark seas and wasteland continents, speckled with lights coming from Prime fortress enclaves—then the glorious blue fire enveloping the entire planet, and the still-expanding atmosphere. Macule, with its vast ice caps and berg-cluttered equatorial ocean, the ominous craters pocking its bare sterile lands, carved by nuclear explosions millennia ago. Trüb, the strange uniform gray world, devoid of surface features, circled by its twelve tiny moons; but to the Vatni memory, a world of extraordinary color. Even the moons had been larger in the past, engulfed by mighty petals like a solid rainbow flower. Until the day over a thousand years ago when spaceships from the recently arrived Ursell landed on its smooth surface. The day Trüb's colors died, never to blossom again.

The Vatni, with their remarkable eyes, had spotted Ursell as soon as it appeared in orbit around this star. A century later, the white sparks of the Prime ships had risen from its continents and flown across space. First they went to Trüb. Within days of their landing the surface had darkened, and the petals of the moons withered to nothing. The ships never came back, and the Prime sent no more to Trüb. Instead the next wave of Prime ships headed straight to Aqueous.

They had orbited the ocean globe for several days before departing.

“We know now we had a lucky escape,” Mooray said. “Your great and wise Mother Laura told us the Prime need land, not water, to dwell on.”

The Vatni had watched the ships depart and fly to Macule next—which was also unsuitable for the Prime. They visited Asdil after that, briefly, then went on to examine every world orbiting their new star, an epic two-year voyage that saw them returning to Ursell at the end.

Then four centuries after the ships went home, Ursell began to flash with very bright explosions. Its atmosphere turned sour, and the cloud cover swelled to envelop most of the surface.

“And what of Fjernt?” Florian asked. “What do you remember seeing there?” Fjernt was a planet in the same orbit as Bienvenido and Aqueous, but in conjunction behind the sun, which meant it could never be seen from Bienvenido. All Florian knew was that it had no oxygen in its atmosphere, and 80 percent of the surface was water. Laura Brandt's brief survey had neither detected any radio emissions nor seen anything that could be a city.

“Clouds,” Mooray said. “White as ice. Towers of cloud taller than a dozen land mountains. They spin and they dance as the world turns.”

“All the lands?” he asked, captivated.

As Mooray gurgled his flowery descriptions of the hidden planet, Florian turned the boat up into the stream that ran along the floor of the Naxian Valley. It was wide for a stream, with plenty of water surging along its stony bed, but not quite big enough to qualify as a river in its own right. Rowing against the swift current was hard work. Florian was soon sweating.

A couple hundred meters from the water, the well-maintained track up into the valley curved in from the west and began to follow the stream. It was easy enough to see, even without his superior Eliter vision. Like all country roads on Bienvenido, it was lined with trees in accordance with Captain Iain's law, passed seven hundred years after the Landing, so that travelers would always be able to see the way ahead.

The huge ancient larches marched away into the night, all the way up to the Ealton family's farmhouse—a large stone mansion at the center of half a dozen barns, stables, and yards.

Florian kept rowing, methodically pushing the boat along parallel to the avenue. Naxian was a lot wider than the Albina Valley; its shallow slopes were predominantly pasture, with long swaths of jibracken clinging to the boggy folds. It was excellent terrain for raising herds of mountain sheep. The Ealton family had been doing just that for generations, dating back a thousand years before the Great Transition. Now they carried on under the People's Congress as they had when the Captains ruled, only they did it under state license. A difference that made no difference.

The road slowly split away from the stream, angling westward. When they were a kilometer apart, Florian eventually turned the boat into the shallows and clambered out. Tall stiff volreeds lined the swift water, and he secured the painter to a big rock jutting out of the bank.

The Ealton family farmhouse was another four kilometers upstream. On full magnification, Florian's eyes could just make out a small glimmer of red where the stone walls were a couple of degrees warmer than the night air.

“Can you see anything?” he asked Mooray.

“No people of the land are close.”

Florian reduced his zoom and started to scan the surrounding landscape. The centuries of work that generations of Ealtons had devoted to the valley had resulted in long drystone walls dividing the meadowland into regular pastures, extending across the valley floor and halfway up the slopes, almost reaching the high wild forests. A lot of the walls were in need of repair, with long sections crumbling away—just as they always had been. Strips of temporary wire fencing had been set up to block the bigger gaps.

Flocks of sheep showed up in his infrared vision, red lumps clustered together for security and warmth. He picked the crossbow out of the boat. “This way.”

They set off toward a walled-off pasture a couple of hundred meters away, which contained at least eighty sheep that he could see. The gate was held shut by a simple chain, which he removed quietly. None of the sheep moved when he pushed it open. Mooray and Teal slipped through the gap.

“Wait here,” he told them. Teal let out a tiny whine, but sat obediently next to the Vatni.

Florian loaded a quarrel into the crossbow as he walked toward a pack of seven sheep. They started to stir when he was about twenty meters away. He stood still and took careful aim.

The quarrel shot into the sheep's skull, killing it instantly. The others scattered, bleating in panic as it collapsed onto the ground. Florian scanned around carefully. If any of the shepherds were close, that would attract them. Apart from the sheep, and some smaller creatures he guessed were bussalores, nothing was moving. He let out a low whistle.

Rustling wasn't a huge problem for the valleys, and Florian didn't sneak into the Naxian Valley often enough to draw attention. The Ealtons would likely write off the occasional missing sheep to roxwolves, not that he ever saw much of them; the lean predators tended to stay within the tree line.

Mooray lumbered up out of the darkness as Florian finished strapping a rope harness to the sheep. Between the two of them, the carcass was easy to drag.