Breed To Come by Andre Norton

Author:Andre Norton [Norton, Andre]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Ayana studied the bulging webbing—Tan safe, but for how long? His nature had been channeled; he had been educated as a First-in Scout. Once they had landed, he would take off in the flitter—unless there were direct orders against that. Now Ayana hoped that there would be. She could not understand the deepening depression that gathered as a fog about her. It had begun as they had come out of hyper, growing as she watched the visa-screen. As if those winking points of light which were the world awaiting them marked instead the fingers of a great dark hand stretching forth to gather them in. Ayana shivered.

Imagination, that was her weak point, as she had been told in the final sifting when she had almost been turned down for the crew. It was only because she was an apt balance for Tan, she sometimes thought unhappily, that she had been selected at all.

"Well—there they are!" There was no note of depression in Tan's voice. "So far the route equations have proved out." Why could she not share his triumph? For it was a triumph. They had had so little to guide them in this search. The First Ship people had deliberately destroyed their past. A search of more than a hundred years had produced only a few points of reference, which the computer had woven into the information for this voyage.

Five hundred planet years had passed since the First Ships—there had been two—had landed on Elhorn. What mystery had made those in them deliberately destroy not only all references to the world from which they had lifted but some of the instruments to make those ships spaceworthy? The colonists had suffered a slow decline into a primitive existence, which they had actually welcomed, resisting with vigorous fanaticism any attempt by the next generation to discover what lay behind their migration.

There were two—three such stagnated generations. Then, with all those of the first generation gone, their stifling influence removed, again inquiry. Explorers had found a closed compartment in one ship with its learning tapes intact; though those were spotty, sometimes seemingly censored.

After that came rebuilding, rediscovery, the need to know now almost an inborn trait of the following generations. There had been a search lasting close to a hundred years, until at least nearly all the resources of Elhorn had been turned to that quest alone. Not without opposition. There had been those in each generation who had insisted that their ancestors must have had good reason to suppress the past, that to seek the source of their kind was to court new disaster. And those had been gaining followers, too. They might have prevented the present voyage had it not been for the Cloud.

Ayana's face suddenly mirrored years of parched living when she thought of the Cloud. It had been such a little thing in the beginning. Scientists had wished to get at the rare ores their detectors had located on the impenetrable South Island of Iskar, where volcanic action produced unpredictable outbursts of lethal gases.

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