The Star Mill Read online

  "Yes. His desire to escape was strong. His mind was confused—yet savagely strong." Kaleva sighed. "Yet, such a hero as Ilmar cannot run from destiny . .."

  Ilmar groaned and pulled himself fully awake; he blinked up at the solemn white-bearded face of Kaleva, at Aino's grave, anxious eyes brimming with fear for him.

  "Where am I?"

  "Easy, my son." Aino gave the cushions behind him a hike and helped his rise to a sitting position. Ilmar's brain still sang with ancestral songs; for a time he could only stare questions at the two of them.

  "We brought you here to one of the infirmaries after I interrupted the Illusion and freed you," Kaleva said.

  Ilmar eyed the hospital white walls, the medical cabinets, the Ussi machines for treating body ills.

  "Underearth?"

  Kaleva smiled gently. "We have lived down here for more than a thousand years. Ever since one of our own among the Ussi sent Hiisi and his Pahaliset back beyond the evil stars from which they came. This is your true home, Ilmar. Nor is it as bad as you have imagined. True, we are sad when our Day is over and we have to come back-sad to leave the forest and the lake. But down here we have everything we need. It has its own kind of beauty, our Underearth."

  "You'll see, Ilmarl" Aino panted. "I show you everything."

  Ilmar nodded. "What about the village? The log huts?"

  "We keep it that way to remind us of ancient days. To tie us with Otava and the old legends. When we go up there, group by group, for our Day, we dress as the ancient Suomalinen dressed. It is a happy thing, to remember simple ways."

  Aino poured Ilmar something in a glass. He drank it and felt new courage and strength pound through his veins.

  "Sleep now, Ilmar. Later Aino will show you—" He leaped off the treatment table, masking his vertigo with a brisk grin. "How about now?" Aino took his arm and they were off.

  Ilmar whistled and clicked his tongue at the ingenuity of the labyrinths which the Vanhat had carved out of the earth under their cold peninsula. They peeked into great chambers where workers were contentedly occupied at diverse tasks; everything was produced underground, all of the" necessities and comforts for the community of over twenty thousand Vanhat of every age. Earth's minute scraps of mineral and chemical wealth were drained off by ingenious siphon-magnets; Ussi-type machines were employed to break down the chemical building blocks and rearrange them to the specific need. Enormous hydro-ponic tanks grew the Vanhat their food; Ilmar saw "gill-men" move up into the ocean above to gather in the bountiful harvest of Ahto himself.

  Aino took Ilmar from one simple yet artful area of endeavor to another with shining eyes.

  "They sing while they work," he said. "They're happy down here away from the sun and the stars?"

  Her prideful pleasure clouded over. "Not entirely. But the singing is part of our Otava heritage."

  "Yes?"

  "It's the song-magic. We all have it in our bones. When the great wondersmith, Ilmarinen, created the Star Mill-when Vainomoinen the great wizard fashioned his copper sky boat—they sang. Their words and the vibratory rhythms of their believing minds told the thing they were creating what it must be. Their songs drew Power from behind the stars."

  "I don't understand."

  "Nor I. I simply believe. Kaleva says belief is the final ingredient in the formula. If you don't believe a thing can be, how can it—ever?"

  "All these workers use this Power?"

  "To a mild degree. We combine it with Ussi technology, as you see, and the results are—well, it has kept us fed and clothed and reasonably happy for a thousand years." She laughed and tugged him away from the central city of shining clean walls into great halfmoon tunnels of natural rock.

  "Where now?"

  "You must see our artwork. Our music chambers. And the Lake ..."

  Ilmar allowed himself to be prodded through a succession of rooms devoted to beauty. All of the arts were featured. He saw luminescent paintings of the Old Gods, imaginative wall-size fantasies of unknown Otava Vahnis becoming stars and song and wind and all that exists. There were murals of Ihnatar creating the Universe, of Osmo the progenitor of Kaleva the Wise, of three-dimensional forests rich with greens and browns and Tapio himself with his animal children. There was Svojatar, the mother of all serpents. There was Kanteletar of the Rainbow, playing her golden harp. Then— "Who-"

  Ilmar felt the curly copper hairs low on his neck stand up and pull flesh with them. They had come to the last of the chambers and he was vis-a-vis a hideous hag standing on a rock-crag, with the purple storm raging behind her, her maenad's hair whipped about a face of unbelievable cruelty and evil. The ancient mouth curved with pitiless craftiness; the green-fire eyes leaped out of sockets like holes in space and defied the gods themselves with such cunning and delight in pure horror that not even Ukko himself had the power to destroy it. Such essence of evil transcended time itself.

  Aino's face blanched too.

  "Come away, Ilmar."

  He stared, transmuted by the alchemy behind these hell-green eyes into a man of stone.

  "I have seen her," Ilmar ground out harshly. "I have seen the Witch of Pohyola! I have felt the rending claws of her demon hounds!"

  Aino shivered against him.

  "You—were—there?'

  Memories like darting vipers leaped out of sudden cracks in the locked doors. The eternal island. The fog. The tower. The witch. His crazy inept try to find something . . . Something . . . And the baying of the huge hell's dogs as they leaped on him through the fog. And the witch's voice from the tower window. Cackling. Careless in her victory. Cackling. The sound of her horrendous cackle echoing across the great void of stars....

  The hag's eyes stabbed the back of his neck all the way to the misted Lake of the Black Swan.

  Ilmar's vision carried him gently into the silver-blue mist that covered the far half of the lake. The roof of this wholly natural phenomenon—or as it might have been fashioned by Vipunen the Titan himself—was softly hidden by clouds that were made warm by some subterranean labyrinth of tunnels that led to icelandic volcanoes. Where he stood with Aino was a haunting-strange garden of curious lichen and ferns and orchidaceous blooms as pale as death itself. A dark rock path led to an ancient wooden pier at which was moored a black barge.

  "What is out there?" Ilmar whispered. "Behind the blue mist?"

  Aino shook her head. Her eyes were sad, wistfully sad. "We don't know. We must all go into the mist where the Black Swan sings. We must an, when it is time, find our rest in ..."

  "Tuonela."

  Time and well-being spawned restlessness in Ilmar. He roved the patterned Underearth cities and watched the others at their tasks with envious eyes. Where was his place? He must be up and doing. He was well now. What was his task?

  He told Lokka, his mother:

  "Why? Why do we skulk down here like moles—away from the Ussi Cities? They send their ships flinging through the fogs of time-skip into the depths of space, and here we hide like skittish animals in the ground! Where is our future? What is the point of going on like this?"

  Lokka's old eyes beseeched patience. "Kaleva has taught us the virtues of simplicity and non-violence, which the Ussi have yet to learn." She added softly, "Are they happy, in their Cities of a hundred Levels, with numbers for names?"

  "No, Mother. Mostly they scramble to get on the lists that will permit them passage on a colony ship, no matter what happens to them when they get there." He smote a fist against his palm. "But, Mother! If we have these star-secrets that can help them to find happiness—isn't it our duty to do what we can? To help instead of hiding from them?"

  "I think," said Lokka, with a swift nod, "that it is time for you to talk with Kaleva."

  Ilmar found the old man resting his dry bones on a couch made out of carven oak, in the round mystical chamber which Kaleva reserved for deep contemplation and for vital decisions. Behind his ancient couch was a fine-spun tatter of Otavan flag, deep blue, swan white, with its
curious Star Bear. There concave steps led to his couch, and a leather-cushioned three-legged stool for Ilmar to fold up his long legs and sit on, when the sage beckoned.

  "I have been waiting for you."

  Ilmar's copper brows hunched closer involuntarily. He could not help saying it. "Why didn't you send for me?"

  Kaleva's old eyes seemed to twinkle. "There is a time for all things. Your time is now. Ask what you will."

  Ilmar's mouth opened in a rush of questions, but now Kaleva's face contorted with pain and under his blue robes the centuries-ancient bones shuddered with racking coughs. Ilmar stared with pity but he knew better than to ask if he could do anything. Kaleva's drawn, pale face said it all. Time was trickling its golden grains down the glass swiftly, nearing those last shimmering flecks.

  He stared around him. The walls were hung with beautiful ancient tapestries which seemed to have woven into them all the things of the earth. Grasses and reeds. Animal furs and skins. Strands of all of the metals, of copper and fine iron and the rare earth metals. Dazzling rubies and emeralds and radiant sapphires. Bits of conch shells from the bottoms of deep oceans. Pine needles and birch barks. Diamonds and swan feathers. All that exists upon the small planet which the wanderers from Otava had chosen for their new home, with anguish and love.

  The four heroes were there, pictured within the lavish natural glory. There was Vainomoinen, the wizard, Vaino of the long beard and the sorcerer s robe; there was Lem-minkainen, the Beautiful Warrior, young, blond, flaunting his sensuous white-toothed smile in search of new conquests in war and love; there was Kullervo, the tragic wanderer of the bleak snows; and—

  Ilmar's look froze on the twenty-foot figure of a red-bearded smith bending over his forge, staring eyes-agleam from the raging yellow fire, at a shining silver sword which his sinewy muscles and his song-magic had created.

  "I am ready now," Kaleva said.

  Ilmar whipped his look from the copperbeard who might have been his older self.

  "Why?" he blurted. "Whyp"

  Kaleva's nod was involved in a spacial sigh.

  "Why are we here? Why Underearth at all? Why are we not amalgamated with the rest of Terra, absorbed into the mainstream of the planet? These are the questions you ask."

  "This melting down of racial identity stopped Terran war," Ilmar said.

  "And brought worse ones through overpopulation." He lifted a bony hand. "Never mind. Aino has told me about your dream or whatever it was. A kind of reliving of II-marinen creating the Sampo."

  "You're not going to tell me he did create the Star Mill!"

  "Yes. Exactly so. As you found out from Aino's historical reference, the Ussi reared us. They feared us because, even in those ancient blundering days, they sensed the potential of alien power within our people. We are of Otava and we do have access to this Power, when we know how to use it. The Ussi can use it, too, if they permit themselves to believe. We are not exclusive. The Power is there, irrefutably locked in the Source that first created the suns and the stars. We have no monopoly, but we do sometimes have the key...."

  "What about those of us who left the Vanhat and went into the Cities, long ago?"

  "They lost the key, or perhaps it is still there, diffused among the Ussi without their knowing it. To our youth who left us, we seemed primitive. Simple. Naive. But among 'primitives' is ESP and the other 'supernormal phenomenon' always highest. The Ussi blamed us for using what they chose to term black magic. They erred. The Vanhat have never been a belligerent people; have never started wars, only fought when provoked into it by aggressors, of which—" The old patriarch sighed and wiped his eyes behind the blue lenses, "—there have been many. Yes, our so-called primitivism sprang from the fact that our empathy with the natural elements, with all living creatures, with the metals, with everything that exists—is very strong. We sense the oneness when we look into the heart of a wood flower—or when we look up into the stars. This oneness with the universe has always been in our music, our other arts, in everything we do. Even in the middle of the Twentieth Century illiteracy was practically nonexistent with our people. If we remained aloof it was out of choice and for good reason."

  Ilmar gave his head an impatient toss. "Surely there are others here on this planet who understand these things! We aren't unique!"

  "No, Ilmar. We aren't. We are humans, like them, but the Otava spark within us enables some of us to use the mind-power linked to the source of all power which some people give the name of God. We call it Jumala. And Ukko. And Ilmatar."

  "Don't tell me our people still believe in the old godsl They were all only created out of fear—they're no longer needed, as Man flings out into Deep Space—"

  "Ah, my son! As Man flings out into Deep Space the gods, or whatever you choose to call these Forces, become more needful and more evident But—forget all this. The Force does exist. The fact that we exist and are able to ponder about it proves itl

  "Let us consider the Ussi and the progress they have made in the direction of knowledge, in spite of all their wars. Here is the pattern. First they thought about creating a spear or a knife to kill the animals for food. Then they created this spear or knife with their hands, out of things they found around them. This led to the atom bombs for domination, or conquest. But the thought was the beginning. Even when they discovered the time-glide which sent them flinging their ships out after new conquests the thought was father of the deed.

  "So—we are now. The more advanced of the Ussi are beginning to ponder this thought: why not eliminate the middle man? Think. Build. Possess. Eliminate build. Create the thing or power-source directly out of the mind itself."

  Ilmar whistled.

  "Which is what Ilmarinen and the Vanhat were able to do thousands of years ago, while the Ussi were blundering about with their sticks and stones to break people s bones!"

  Kaleva nodded somberly.

  "Yes. It has come full circle again. Then we were 'primitives' with the black magic. Now we would be hailed as pioneers, and—I very much fear, exploited."

  "Now I get it" Ilmar scowled. "The Vanhat hid under the ground to keep from revealing their star-power to the Ussil"

  "For their own good as well as ours." Kaleva nodded. "They are brilliant, their Cities are shining examples of a complex technology. Yet they aren't ready for total power. Perhaps they never will be. Perhaps it was never meant to be. The Power is dying out—even among us. Perhaps that is as it was meant to be. ..."

  Kaleva's trembling fervor sent him into a spasm of coughing again. Ihnar's blue eyes sparked with awe and an overwhelming terror. Those there were among the Ussi who would use such power to destroy, not build. First cities and countries. Then planets. Then suns. Then-

  "There is no end to itl" he groaned. "Now I see why we hide. We can't unleash this—this monster!"

  "Unhappily," Kaleva said with forced calm, "this monster, as you call it, has already been unleashed."

  "Some Under earth renegade I"

  Kaleva's eyes moved closer to Ihnar's face. "No. It is true that our people have human weaknesses, too. One among us might have done such a thing—out of fear for the Vanhat, out of hot-blood rage at having to live as we do—a hundred reasons. But we have kept our secret and taught our children Christian meekness and understanding to prevent just such a thing from happening.

  "No. It happened long, long ago ..."

  "Ilmarinen, my ancestorl The Sampol"

  Kaleva sobbed a ragged breath. "Here is the rest of the legend of the Star Mill. Unfortunately it is no legend..."

  VIII

  Ilmab's hand whipped to the flame on his face. Now. Now was time. He must devour every word, every syllable. Then, when he knew what he must know, he must act. ..

  "Your ancestral dream showed you how Ilmarinen sang the Star Mill into being. How he used broken pieces of the ship that brought the Vanhat to earth and the song-magic to create this terrible, beautiful thing. How Louhi, the Witch, repented her bargain and—"

&n
bsp; "How her daughter changed herself into a weeping peasant child who could not bear to leave her homeland." Ilmar snorted. "I think Ilmarinen decided then that he didn't want a wife who could change herself any time she pleased. Who would want such a creature—one day a siren, the next a carping shrew ..."

  "There are many different versions of what happened after Ilmarinen left Pohyola. Around the old night-fires, the minstrel singer of each village sings the deeds of one of the great heroes. Naturally, through the centuries, some of the songs are changed, little by little. There are other versions of what happened after Ilmarinen forged the Sampo—but this is the true one.

  "The smith returned to his homeland and found his people starving and sick. The gods of Tapiola and the shining lakes and oceans had not been land to them. Ilmarinen told his old friend, the wizard, Vainomoinen: 'Here we starve, while in Pohyola the accursed Louhi grinds out provisions on the Sampo. Our children cry for food, and their welfare is eternal!'

  " "Well,' Vainomoinen cried, stroking his long iron-gray beard, '1 see but one thing to do. Louhi cheated you. We will prepare an expedition of warriors and go to Pohyola and demand that she share her bounty with us!'

  'Louhi won't,' Ilmarinen said bitterly. 'She is a greedy hag. Her soul is black with it. Greedy for power and unending wealth.'

  " 'Then we will snatch the Star Mill away from such an abnormal creature!' Vainomoinen cried wrathfully. 'By Hiisi, I shall take that wily witch by her long nose and—

  " 'Calm, old friend. Let us set about our preparation for the journey. I will find Lemminkainen, the Golden Apple of Ilmatar, wherever he is wenching—and all three of us will journey to the misty island. In ships, with a thousand merif

  "The adventures of the three heroes were strange and many but at last their seventy ships and more than three thousand warriors—for others, hearing of the great expedition and the prize, joined in—landed on the befogged coast of Pohja. Louhi, out of pride and malicious bravado, prepared a great feast for them in her black castle. While they feasted and drank the lavish spread, Ilmarinen suggested that Vainomoinen play his kantele and sing for them all. Vainomoinen, nothing loath, sang. But he wove his wizardry into his songs and presently Louhi and all of her household fell into a deep sleep. While they slept the three heroes pinned down their eyelids with magic needles. Then they set about finding the Star Mill where the Witch had hidden it.