The Star Mill Read online

  He stopped. He couldn't move either way. The girl's voiee was a shrill sob, both begging and demanding. It came from the center of the wingbeat sound, invisibly; now it burst out in a strange language of lapping vowels and reiterative consonants like pounding storm tides. And Ilmar understood it! He knew it! Her rush of beseeching idiom washed up on the locked doors of his memory and whispered fragrant tales of lost dreams.

  All of this burst out of nothing. Invisibility.

  Ilmar stared hard. Now it did seem as if the wisps of morning fog were being disturbed by unseen wings.

  "Ilmar! Kuula hyval Alkoon oltako kuolletu! Ole tar-peeUinen!"

  "Parempi kuelle," he said. "Ilmar, rakasl No!"

  "Who are you?" he demanded harshly. "Aino! Don't you know me? You've got to, Ilmar. We are here to save youl" 'We?"

  "Nyyrikki and mel" "NyyrikkiP"

  "Your best friend, your comrade from boyhood. Don't you remember us? What have they done to you!"

  "It happened before, at the lip of the Storm."

  "Now I understand. She did itl But we must hurry—the ships will begin to wonder. Come—get inl"

  Ilmar couldn't move. He strained his eyes in the direction of the voice and now it did seem as if the drifting mist encased something, a craft, an invisible ship with a copter's mobility.

  A new voice broke in, a rich ringing voice that bubbled with vitality. "Hey, Sword-Face! Get over here so we can get you back where you belong."

  "Nyyrikki?" The name came familiarly to his lips. The ringing laughter behind it, the insistence that life was a picnic and to hell with being serious about anything, all of this charged through him, battering at the locked doors.

  "Who else would risk his neck for you, Copper-chin? Now, get those lanky legs moving! Look! The robots are Retting restive—see? They're starting to close in. We may he invisible to them but we don't deflect blast. One random hit and we've had itl"

  "Please, Ilmar," the girl pleaded. "The whole island's nlive with war-robots. This is one of the Fleet bases. I'm tuned in to the robot-controls; they're alerting the whole robot army toward us ..."

  Hope washed him like a joyful tide. He hadn't dared to hope for life. Continuance as a separate organism was too much to ask. No. It was the knowing that he was not alone in the universe, that at least two others cared enough for him to risk their lives. His mind rocked under the wonder of it.

  He made three steps toward the swirling nothing, stopped, frozen.

  "No I I can'tl Don't you see—Aino, Nyyrikki? I'm walking death!"

  "Not for us!" Aino wailed.

  "How do you know I'm not? I must have been inside the Black Storm. I'm deadly. Get away—before it's too late!" He whirled, gnawing his tight lips. He moved toward the ship's ladder. When the voices came again, he ignored them.

  He was reaching for the first rung when a round hand spun him. He got a tumbling glimpse of a grinned square-jaw face and a shock of black curled hair before the fist attached to the stocky figure contacted his cop-perclad chin, hard.

  "Nyyrikki! No!"

  A second fist rapped him, buckling his knees. There was a friendly matter-of-factness to the whole procedure. He had no time to react. The world careened and there he was being hauled away from the ship and dumped into the seat of a vessel he still couldn't see.

  "Get going, Aino!" the laughing voice prompted.

  "Nyyrikki—"

  "Get! Take him to Kaleva. The Vanhat need him, not me. Menne!"

  The whirled-away voice and an indignant protest boiling up within him sloughed off some of the effects of the two cracks on the jaw. Ilmar lifted, squinting, blinking into the suddenly dawn-goldened mist. A dark figure was loping swiftly to the death ship's ladder and up. Nyyrikki was whistling a woodbird trill and next to him in counterpoint Aino was crying. From all sides the war-robots wer£ hemming in the invisible ship; sight of that In nicked figure moving up the ladder and entering the doom rocket halted them. From the sky came the whine of the manned overseer vessels.

  Ilmar made a grab for the girl's arm as she moved her Itands across the controls. She was still weeping. The sudden rise of new dawn over the ocean burst with roaring flame as the black rocketship quivered in its own heat and moved sunward.

  In the diversive rage of Nyyrikki's purloined takeoff, I he invisible ship lifted, too. As they moved above the clouds, cutting the circle of watching Fleet vessels, Ilmar caught a first good look at Aino. The girl in the control seat by his side had large violet eyes and an oval face framed by waves of chestnut-brown hair; her lips were the color of dewy cranberries. Her slim well-curved figure was sheathed in a silver-gray tunic. Aino was beautiful, even in her passion of grief for Nyyrikki.

  "He promised me," she choked out.

  "Nyyrikki was always good at promises." Ilmar wrenched the perception out of agony. "He knew that would stop the robots long enough for us to get away. All they knew was that there had to be somebody on that ship, and who else would want it?"

  Aino nodded mistily as the craft reached a stratospheric altitude and leveled off. Ilmar gripped the arms of his foam-padded couch-seat tight, to believe that this was really happening, while he stared at her in awe. The aroma of her brown hair, the warmth of her closeness, (lie love in her eyes; all of this thickened his throat and slammed his heart against his ribcage in a wild bolero.

  "We must now do Nyyrikki the honor of accepting his sacrifice as it was meant." Her hand touched his.

  Ilmar pulled away sharply. "What is it, rakasF"

  "You touched me. Don't you know I'm lethal?"

  "Not to me." Her cranberry lips lifted slightly. "Not to any of the Vanhat As a matter of fact, I don't believe you did any of those terrible things. Not your body, at least. Your spacesuit, perhaps. Or maybe Captain Grant's ship picked up the contagion somewhere else in the Storm area."

  Ilmar frowned, puzzled.

  "How do you know all of this? You didn't know about my memory loss."

  "The Vanhat have spies among the Ussi. You and I were among them in disguise often, don't you—oh, I forget! You don't remember. Never mind. We've got a long trip ahead of us. Rest."

  Ilmar sighed. His long body sank gratefully on the contoured length of the twin control seat. If he could manage to forget Nyyrikki and those deaths on the ship, maybe he could really sleep for the first time in months.

  "How come they don't put a trace on us?" he asked, over a yawn.

  "The main Fleet bases are all on Luna and Mars. These island bases are small potatoes, by comparison. And since the war action mostly takes place in Deep Space the Terran counteractivity is a little rusty. Anyway, our Vanhat witchcraft scrambles their fixes as fast as they make them, just as it makes our ships invisible."

  Ilmar looked out at the smudged lights of other ships moving sluggishly into their morning's tasks, none of these seemed aware of the Vanhat craft darting among them. He thought about what Captain Grant had said. Wizards and demons who controlled the elements....

  "Witchcraft?"

  "The Vanhat have always been experts at creating tangible illusion. This is part of our generic heritage from Otava. That is why we have survived, aloof and hidden from the Ussi, all these centuries." "Ussi?"

  "The New Breed. All of Terra besides the Vanhat."

  Ilmar frowned in thought. "This witchcraft makes us superior to the Ussi?"

  "Not superior. Different. In a way vulnerable and responsible." She flashed him a fast smile. "Why don't you sleep?"

  "Can't. Now I want to know everything there is to know."

  Aino sighed. "Better wait for Kaleva. It's a long, complex affair and I doubt if I can tell it right. Might be best to let it come gradually." She flicked a button on the panel. "Reach out that flask and have a shot or two. It's like brandy, but with a mild sedative. Help you to rest You'll need it."

  Ilmar swigged from the plastic container. It was wine-lioady, delicious, but it did nothing for his suddenly alert and anxious forebrain.

  "Seems f
unny," Aino said.

  "Funny?"

  "Strange. That the Son of Ilmarinen doesn't know the old songs. The whole history of the Suomi."

  Ilmar took another, deeper pull at the brandy. "It's not funny to me. Can't you fill me in just a little?" He grinned while he coaxed, "Maybe then I can sleep, rakas."

  Aino nodded gravely. "Okay. A touch of ancient history, perhaps. On one of the Scandinavian peninsulas, many centuries ago, was a country called Suomi. Finland, because of its lakes and marshes. Long before any form of written history made its appearance on the earth, u primitive-seeming people made their villages and night-lircs on the edges of Suomi's rocky shores and by the blue lakes. They kept strangely to themselves, even from their nearest neighbors. They kept their odd language pure and inviolable—as they always have. Around the night-fires the finest singers would chant song-stories of Otava and of the three great heroes. While the cavemen of Iberia were painting animal pictures on the walls of Altamira and the skin-clad islanders to the north were building Stonehenge, this strange race of wizards tilled their lands, fished, hunted in the deep forests, and sang their songs.

  "Their songs held fragmentary knowledge of the world in the Great Bear—"

  "Ursae Majoris" Ilmar blurted. "Why did they leave Otava?"

  Aino's eyes clouded. "I don't know. But I think it was because the rest of their race evolved out of their physical bodies and became part of the universe itself. Our group either wished to keep their physical substance— or were not ready for the great change. . .

  "A tag-end backward group?"

  "Perhaps." Aino shrugged off the surge of impenetrable thoughts. "Let's get back to the Vanhat. The remnants of mind-magic they carried with them in their genes could cause things to become—it could under certain conditions take command of the elements, soothe storms or—"

  "Or cause them!" Ilmar thought grimly of Captain Grant's dying outburst. Grant had been right!

  "No," Aino said. "I know all about the old sailor tales. Finns were Jonahs because a Finn could stick his pukko in the ship's mast and extract a tot of rum out of it any time he wanted one. . . . That he could call up a storm. . . . Don't you see? I don't know about the rum, but he could sense a storm coming so accurately that they said he caused it. It was simple precognition—well, not so simple in the case of the Vanhat. It comes from our own.

  All of our magic comes from the existence of our evolved race expanded throughout the stars!"

  Ilmar jumped up and yelled:

  "Then, with their help, we can do anything!"

  "Certainly not," Aino laughed. "If that part of the legend is true and our evolved Otavan offshoot does exist in us and around us and throughout the universe, they are not interested in such trivial matters as tots of rum or even atomic explosions. They are beyond all that.

  "There is another aspect to our so-called magic. Sometimes we call it Ukko, because Ukko is our Power God of the thunder and lightning. What it involves is what the Ussi do in their chemical laboratories. A breakdown of things into component parts. A manipulation mentally of all chemical spectra—"

  "Changing the vibration pattern?"

  "Yes. Kaleva makes it sound simple. Some of the Van-hat still possess the Power and know how to use it; others have it in their genetic chromosomes, but not the key..."

  "Kaleva is our leader?"

  "A true Son of Vainomoinen, the greatest wizard of all. As you are true Son of Ilmarinen. But Kaleva is old, old, old. He will not be with us long; so it is up to you, Ilmar ..."

  But the nostrum in the brandy had taken hold. II-mar's copperclad face was cradled in the crook of his arm. He slept the sleep of a child, a child who has stumbled wretchedly through the benighted depths of a black forest and has suddenly had the night curtain pulled aside to reveal a shining garden of incredible wonder. . ..

  The invisible ship hurtled onward, now down toward a god's frown of snow-shagged cliff. And right into it!

  Ilmar woke up in time to yell out.

  Aino smiled.

  Part Two.

  UNDEREAPiTH

  "Thereupon smith Ilmarinen, He the great primeval craftsman, Welded it and hammered at it, Heaped his rapid blows upon it-Forged with running art the Sampo."

  Kalevala: Runo X

  The death Ilmar braced himself for, the driving bash against that misted cliff, didn't come. Instead—a blur on the retina, a puff of cloud on a brassy September's daybreak. Like the ship's invisibility reversed by Otavan magic—the jutting crag and death itself was illusion. . . .

  What Ilmar saw as the ship glided to a slow landing tangled up in his throat and pained him with beauty. He saw a salmon-gold sunrise weave a carpet of colors across the dark shadows of lofty mountains. He saw the effulgence of it dance with light steps into a wide valley of lake and spruce forest. A village of small log houses couched by twinkling birches and that deep velvet lake. He gulped, blinked stinging eyes, while the dawn changed the first season snow on the rooftops from blue-white to rose-white. Blue woodsmoke from the sod chimneys lazed up; now a gentle morning breeze sent long silver shivers across the velvet lake. Far above the valley, Otava's dipper of stars winked out, one after one.

  "Ilmar!'*

  The old man's arms embraced him while deposed grief shuddered up in gurgles from within that long, white, patriarchal beard.

  Ilmar's mind struggled with the sealed doors, aided and abetted by the poignant swords of memory. Seeing all of this. Seeing this tall ancient in his homespun wool robe. The snowy beard and the crinkled eyes behind round thin-rimmed glasses tinted bright blue. The old gnarled hands wore brown pigment spots from the crush of time, and now they helped his old, old eyes to see Ilmar, trembling up from his shoulders to the red scar on his cheek. "Don't you know me, my son?"

  "Kaleva?" Ilmar wasn't sure whether he really remembered yet, or that Aino had mentioned the ancient Van-hat leader's name. "We call you that because you are our oldest and greatest hero. Because we love youl" It flooded out. "Because you teach us the old songs of Otava."

  The old man nodded. When he spoke, in the old tongue which the Vanhat alone had kept, it was like quavery singing. He chuckled in his beard. "Do not be afraid, Ilmar, my son. You will remember all that you must, in due course. Here in your true home with all of your friends. With Aino." He pointed at the path to the Great-house, at the center of the village. Already the new snow had been packed down by many booted feet, and there they all were—as many as could—lined ten deep along the rising path. They wore colorful woolens, the land their ancestors of ancient times had worn, for this joyful occasion; their glad shouts to Ilmar and chatter among themselves sent little puffs of condensation mist across the brisk autumn dawn.

  "See how glad they are that you have returned to us, Ilmar?" His arm held Ilmar on one side, Aino on the other, while they moved between the Vanhat, who shouted greetings and tried to touch the star wanderer returned to his people.

  "Where are we going?" Ilmar asked Aino.

  "Can't you guess?" Kaleva chuckled. "The women have prepared a feast.- It will be in the manner of the ancients, here in the Greathouse and—"

  "Excuse me, Father," Aino said, when they stepped through the open double-doors onto the plank floor. "Look! Someone else has come to greet Umar!"

  Ilmar turned. He swept his look into the blaze of sunrise, squinting, then shading his eyes. Down the path out of the wood a small dark figure was hurrying. He watched, still not understanding the welling lump in his throat and his hammering heart. The tall figure with the blue shawl over her graying hair moved down through the scarlet-toqued villagers and the yapping dogs in a whirl of excitement. She stopped, waved at him, came on.

  On the first step she stopped to tap the snow off her high old-fashioned shoes, wipe furtively at her eyes with a corner of her kerchief. She moved up, faced him. Her face was lined and bony, her shoulders were round and gawky under her shawl; her plain peasant's dress had a blue apron over it. While she peered at Ilmar with old an
xious eyes, fearful of seeing changes and hurts in him, her shawl fell back to show straight bunned hair with streaks of white penciled through it. The drinking eyes were fiercely blue with flecks of argent silver in them.

  "You are home, Ilmar."

  "Yes." He might have returned from an early hunt for grouse in the forest. But something had hold of his entire being, physical, mental, and whatever else the children of Otava were. She could not move either, at first. Their eyes and their souls touched.

  Then he said it and this time no locked door could hold it back, nor any midwife's sharp knife. "Aiti."

  Lokka said nothing. She was in his arms with a great glad cry; Ilmar rocked with her, back and forth, back and forth.

  The long table of the Greathouse groaned with the feast the women had been hoarding for his homecoming. Ilmar gnawed fresh salmon and bear-steak with relish; he downed a huge mug of kallia; he stuffed his lean, hunger-gaunt body with milk-bread and sweetened cranberries from the bog. Never had it been so fine to be alive, nor so important to stay that way. The warmth of all his friends' smiles, the nearness of Lokka on one side and Aino on the other—and Kaleva telling Jumala of their great joy in the hero's safe return—all of this coalesced to produce within his veins a kind of mad delirium. Especially considering the all-consuming despair that had seemed his lot such a short time ago. Such happiness was too much to believe or to bear. Nor could such happiness last.

  The Vanhat at the feast allowed themselves no such qualms. Young Vaino played on his kantele and sang with lively passion. The laurel-hung rafters of the Great-hall rang with songs, so that the bessalintut from Tapio's green forest came to the open-flung sills of the hall to listen in envy.

  Sang young Vaino:

  "O thou wondersmith, llmarinen, Wherefore is thy mind so saddened? Said the smith, e'en llmarinen, "Yes, my thoughts are home directed To my land, that I may live there, Rest among those scenes familiar ...'"

  Ilmar's heart could not contain his joy. Every face was somehow familiar, every handclasp held ringing truth-even the pungent aroma of the wood in the kitchen stove and the smell of the warm fresh bread—all of this was his. His for now. His to savor and believe and love. What could the great Cities offer that could compare? What could the stars themselves offer?