Joachim crossed the bunkroom and went down the shaft, out the airlock, and down the retractable gangway ladder again. A dim path wound up from the valley and be took it, moving with a slightly rolling, bearlike gait. The sky was utterly blue overhead; sunlight spilled on the wide green sweep of land; wind brought him the faint crystal laughter of a bellbird. No doubt of it, man wasn’t built to sit in a
metal shell and hurry from star to star. It wasn’t strange that so many had dropped out of Nomad life. Who had that girl been-Sean’s girl, from Nerthus-?
“Salute, Hal.” said a voice behind him.
He turned. “Oh, Laurie. Haven’t seen you for long.”
Vagabond MacTeague Laurie, a walking rainbow in his uniform, fell into step beside Joachim. “Just got in yesterday,” he explained. “We’re the last, I suppose, and we carried word from the Wayfarer and the Pilgrim that they couldn’t make it this year. So this one reckons all the ships are accounted for by now-anyway, Traveler Thorkild said he was calling the meeting for today.”
“Must be. We spoke to the Vagrant out near Canopus, and they weren’t coming. Had some kind of deal on; I suppose a new planet with trading possibilities, and they want to get there before anybody else does.”
MacTeague whistled. “They’re really going far afield. What were you doing out that way?”
“Just looking around,” said Joachim innocently. “Nothing wrong in that. Canopus is still free territory; no ship has
a claim on it yet.”
“Why go on a jump when you’ve got all the trade you could want right in your own territory?”
“I suppose your crew agrees with you?”
“Well, most of them. We’ve got some, of course, that keep hollering for ‘new horizons,’ but so far they’ve been voted down. But-hm.” MacTeague’s eyes narrowed. “If you’ve been prowling around Canopus, Hal, then there’s money out there.”
The Captains’ Hall stood near the edge of a bluff. More than two centuries ago, when the Nomads found Rendezvous and chose it for their meeting place, they had raised the Hall. Two hundred years of rain, wind, and sunlight had fled; and still the Hall was there. It might be standing when all the Nomads were gone into darkness.
Man was a small and hurried thing; his spaceships spanned
the lightyears, and his feverish death-driven energy made the skies of a thousand worlds clangorous with his works, but the old immortal dark reached farther than he could imagine.
The other captains were also arriving, a swirl of color and a rumble of voices. There were only about thirty this rendezvous-four ships had reported they wouldn’t be coming, and then there were the missing ones. The captains were all past their youth, some of them quite old.
Each Nomad ship was actually a clan-an exogamous group claiming a common descent. There were, on the average, some fifteen hundred people of all ages belonging to each vessel, with women marrying into their husbands’ ships. The captaincy was hereditary, each successor being elected from the men in that family, if any were qualified.
But names cut across ships. There had only been sixteen families in the Traveler I, which had started the whole Nomad culture, and adoption had not added a great many more. Periodically, when the vessels grew overcrowded, the younger people would get together and found a new one, with all the Nomads helping to build them a ship. That was the way the fleet had expanded. But the presidency of the Council was hereditary with the Captain of the Traveler, third of that name in the three hundred years since the undying voyage began-and he was always a Thorkild.
Wanderer, Gypsy, Hobo, Voyageur, Bedouin, Swagman, Trekker, Explorer, Troubedour, Adventurer, Sundowner, A,fi(.Yrant-joachim watched the captains go in, and wondered at the back of his mind what the next ship would do for a name. There was a tradition which forbade using a name not taken from some human language.
When everyone else had entered, Joachim mounted the porch himself and walked into the Hall. It was a big and goodly place, its pillars and paneling carved with intricate care, hung with tapestries and polished metal reliefs. Whatever you could say against the Nomads, you had to admit they were good at handicrafts.