Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
with feasting, mirth, decorations, gifts, and reunions. Hallway around the Demetrian year they found a different occasion for gatherings, more frankly bacchanalian. Then bonfire signalled to bonfire across rugged distances, while around them went dancing-drinking, eating, singing, japing, gaming, sporting, lovemaking-from sundown to sunrise.
For the past three years, Caitlin Margaret Muiryan had given music at that season to those who met on Trollberg, when she wasn’t busy with associated pleasures. She was again on her way, afoot along a dirt road, since the journey was part of the fun. As she went, she practiced the latest song she had made for the festival, skipping to its waltz time while her clear soprano lifted.
In silver-blue, the dew lies bright.
The midsummer night
Is a brim with light.
Come take each other by the hand,
For music has wakened
All over the land.
Fingers bounced across the control board of the sonador she held in the crook of her left arm. Programmed to imitate a flute, though louder, the mahogany-colored box piped beneath her chorus.
Go gladly up and gladly down.
The dancing flies outward like laughter
From blossom field to mountain crown.
Rejoice in the joy that comes after!
Dust puffed from under her shoes. Around her, the heights dreamed beneath the amber glow of a Phoebus declining westward, close to its northernmost point in a sky where a few clouds drifted white. The road followed the Astrid River, which rippled and gurgled, green with glacial flour, on her right, downward bound to Aguabranca where it would enter the mighty Europa.
Beyond the stream lay untouched native ground, steeply falling into a dale already full of dusk, clothed in bluish-green growth wherever boulders did not thrust forth-lodix like a kind of trilobate grass or clover, gemmed with petals of arrowhead and sunbloom, between coppices of tall redlance and supple daphne.
Insectoids swarmed, gorgeously hued flamewings, leaping hopshrubs, multitudinous humbugs. A bright-plumed frailie cruised among them, a minstrel warbled from a bough, a couple of bucearos swooped overhead, and a draque hovered lean, far Above -not birds, these, but hypersauroids, like every well developed vertebrate which Demeter had brought forth. Pungencies that roused memories of resin and cinnamon drifted on a south breeze which was rapidly cooling off the afternoon.
On Caitlin’s left ran a rail fence. Somewhat level, till it met a scarp three or four kilometers off, the soil thus demarked had been converted to pasture for Terrestrial livestock and, further on, barley fields for humans. To the invaders from space, Demetrian meat and vegetation were often edible, occasionally delicious; she had been plucking moonberries, pearl apples, and dulcifruct ever since she got off the bus at Freidorp. But they lacked the whole complement of vitamins and amino acids, while containing several that were useless. The imported plants were intensely verdant, the cattle that grazed them fantastically red.
Behind her, the road twisted out of sight around a hill. Ahead, it climbed like a snake. Beyond the next ridge she could see Trollberg, wooded and meadowed to its top. Ghost-faint at its back floated the Phaeacian snowpeaks, Mount Lorn their lord.
The music sparkles fleet and sweet.
She sways there before him
On eager feet,
So lithe and blithe, and garlanded
With roses and starshine
Around her dear head.
Go gladly up and gladly down.
The dancing flies outward like laughter- Caitlin halted. From a wilderness thicket had appeared a garm. Gray-furred, round-snouted, bob-tailed, tiger-sized, it flowed along in a gracefulness that brought a gasp of admiration from her. Neither need fear. Demetrian carnivores didn’t like the scent of Terrestrial animals and never attacked them. For their part, human hunters tried Side 20
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
to preserve the balance of a nature which provided them skins for the market, and the upland Folkmeet had declared garms a protected species.
The beast stopped too, and stared back at her. It saw a young woman.
(Her exact age was thirty-four, though being Earth-born she thought of it as twenty-five.) Of medium height, full-bosomed, withy-slender, long in the legs, she bore aloft a curly, bronzebrown mane which fell to her shoulders. Her face was wide in the brow, high in the cheekbones, tapering to the chin; but her mouth was broad and full. Beneath arching dark brows were emerald eyes and a short, tilted nose. Weather had turned a fair skin tawny and added a dusting of freckles. Her tunic and trousers had seen rough use. A crios belt, gaudy rainbow sash, encircled them. A backpack carried changes of clothing, sleeping bag, a little dried food, the poems of Yeats, and other travel gear.