West of the sun

by Edgar Pangborn

"You found something for sugar?"

"Can't tell it from terrestrial," Dorothy chattered, "only it's pink. From a tree fruit sort of like a plum. We have a plantation of 'em across the lake. You boil it down to nothing and the sugar crystallizes out. We make another kind from sap, not as good as maple. Flour—that's from the same old wheat that came from Earth. Miniaan—oh, you don't know her yet—Miniaan and Paul have experimented around with the local grass grains—nothing yet that measures up to wheat." Ann picked at the food, crying weakly at the first mouthful. "Ah, don't do that," said Dorothy, looking away. "You came home, that's all."

Later she ate ravenously. "I want to tell you——"

It took a long time in telling. Once she fell asleep but woke an hour later, obsessed with a need to continue....

The lifeboat drifted south, its last remnant of fuel gone in a mad effort to leap the coastal range. Water sneaked in at the seal of the floor window, damaged in an earlier landing, and Ed Spearman talked to himself. "Fugitives from a Sunday school—we'll live." Like a hurt boy he said, "We'll show 'em...." When the current beyond the island swept them toward the cliffs, he opened the door and pulled Ann into the water, dragging her, forgetting that she was herself a strong swimmer. Later, on the beach, he was tender, trying to comfort and reassure her with a vision of the future abundantly real to him. They had no food, no way to light a fire of driftwood. They would go to Vestoia, he said, convince Lantis that they were friends, with something to offer her empire; they would "bring her civilization."

From this beach there seemed to be no passage north. They could have found one by climbing high into the range—Ann did so, nine years later. But Spearman found a ledge of sorts running south: it might take them the eighty-odd miles to the lower end of the range or give out at any point, trapping them. It did give out twice; both times, rather than clamber higher on the cliffs, Spearman hurled his famished body through the breakers and swam south, aided by the current until it was possible to continue along the rocks. Ann followed, not quite wishing for the death the ocean could have given easily. They kept alive with shellfish and seaweed washed ashore and small crustaceans that hid in the tide lines and in crannies of wet rock; there were pools of rain water and violent small streams plunging down the range. It took them fifty days to cover the eighty miles. ("I think I spent a hundred coming back," Ann said. "Couldn't swim, with the baby. It would have been against the current anyway. Climbed—sometimes went back miles from a dead end to try again.") In the afternoons the sun pressed on them with total fury; then they could only crawl into what shadow the rocks gave and wait for the torture to cease.

But at last there were trees. Level ground. In a few miles, a rapid friendly river. ("Are there rivers here? I've forgotten. Nothing prettier in the world. I let that one close over me. Ed pulled me out—we had to go on.")

There were five more of those bright leaping coastal streams in a journey of another fifty miles southeast through good country, where the great range thinned out into rolling jungle and meadowland. There were asonis and small game. Spearman made himself weapons. Ann could remember these days almost with pleasure. They had, she said, something the flavor of a delayed childhood, a glimpse of Eden. Spearman was for a time simply a strong and intelligent man measuring himself against nature for survival, master of a simple environment with none to question his decisions and no social complexities to warp them. ("I wished we could settle in that country, the two of us. I even begged for it. He had to go on.")

From the remembered map, Spearman knew there was an obscure pygmy settlement south of the end of the range, some fifty miles below Vestoia: merely a cluster of parallel lines that had appeared in the photographs, it might or might not be a part of the empire of Lantis. It was near the headwaters of a seventh river, which flowed, not to the coast, but eastward, into the deep, wide, violent outlet of Lake Argo. ("He never told me why he was following that river so cautiously, until we reached the villages. And history repeated itself.")

The villages were a furtive, chronically frightened community. They knew of Vestoia but believed, correctly, that the groping tentacles of empire had not yet found them. Lantis' drive was mainly to the east, where the country was easier and pygmy settlements were numerous; even her war against Pakriaa's people had been a diversion, more a matter of hurt pride than gainful conquest. Between these hidden villages and Vestoia there were meadows, dangerous with omasha, and some swampland; below the two small Vestoian lakes the current of the river Argo was too fierce for the flimsy boats of Lantis. So the villages of the seventh river, under a sly but feeble queen, waited like a rabbit in a hedge. With sharply calculated drama—but smiling this time, Ann said, like a pleased teacher at a blackboard—Ed Spearman overturned another idol and became a god.