The starmen

by Leigh Brackett

"Very soon now," said Edri, in such a sombre tone that Trehearne was startled partly out of his daze, enough to see that Edri looked at him with pity, as one looks at a man about to die. A new alarm took hold of Trehearne, and he cried out,

"What's the matter? What are you hiding from me?"

"An ordeal." Once more Shairn stood before him, and her eyes were searching into him, and she had ceased to smile. "You've been given what you wanted, a chance to learn the truth about yourself."

He rose and put his hands on her as he had once before, and not in tenderness. "Go on."

Her red mouth parted a little to show him the edges of her teeth. "Only a true Vardda can endure the velocities of starflight. Are you afraid, Michael?"

"Yes," he said. "I am." He stood for a long moment, with the blood pounding in his temples and everything, herself, the world, all the years of his own life that had gone before, lost and vague beyond a blinding mist, and then he said slowly, "But you're right, I've got what I wanted."

Outside the keep a man's voice shouted. Someone said, "The ship!" More voices shouted, and the door was flung open. Something dark and cruel came into Trehearne's face. He looked at Shairn and said. "I'll live to thank you." He let her go. People were moving toward the door. He moved with them, as in a dream, but knowing that he would not wake. He lost track of individuals. There were only shadows around him, sounds, motion, without meaning. The walls were gone, and the light. Wet, cold, dark, the outside, the moor, the wind and the naked sky. It had stopped raining. There was a wide rift in the clouds, a valley of stars, and in the valley was a presence, solemn, silent, huge and strange. He watched it, and it settled down, gently as a drift of the night itself, and it sang as it came, a quiet humming that filled all the space between the horizons with a quivering echo more felt than heard. Power. Immensity, and strength. Trehearne drew in a deep unsteady breath. His heartbeats rocked him as he stood. Instinctively his hands moved, a flier's hands, remembering the might of pistons and of jets, groping toward a greater thing. He was not conscious of the motion. He was cold, and the wind flowed through his bones. The great dim bulk dropped down and lay quiet on the moor. Its hull was scored and pitted by the atmospheres of unnamed worlds. Its ports had looked upon infinities where the stars were swallowed up like clouds of fireflies. Trehearne began to walk toward it. If there were others with him, he did not know it. His eyes were on the ship.

A lock-door opened high in the looming flank. White light blazed from it. A folding metal stair came down, and then people descended it and mingled with those that were on the ground. A larger hatch clanged open, lower down. More light blazed out. Machinery began to clatter, and men went back and forth and shouted. The things that were made ready in the sheds began their transfer to the ship. Trehearne reached the foot of the ladder.

He looked up. The vast alien bulk of the ship was above him. It hung over him like the end of the world. It had come out from the darkness between the stars, and it would return there, and he was going with it. There were voices all around him, and some of them were speaking to him, but he did not hear them. He saw no faces. He saw nothing but the curved immensity of the hull that had made such voyages. There were tears in his eyes. They were not of fear, nor of self-pity. They were of exaltation. Men had done this thing. Men had reached out and taken the stars in their hands. They were not men of Earth, but they were of his own race. And they had done it.

He began to climb the ladder, and the treads rang hollow beneath his feet.