Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [24]
Nature was intolerant here. The planet couldn’t support a population. The Living were more devolving than evolving. Families had fewer children, even though they produced as many as they could. Women dutifully produced babies their entire adult lives, by several men, to keep genetics from singularizing. They had developed an Eskimo-like manner of cooperative tribal structure, to be sure children were cared for if their adult relatives didn’t survive the hunts, and to make sure nonhunting families were fed. There was food sharing and a strict hierarchy of distribution, the top of which involved the families of people who had been “chosen” in the hunt. Perfect, to the dreamer’s eye.
Reality was far less kind. Several times, the histories told, this system had broken down. Communalism would support only the very smallest of communities. This inhospitable planet was a test case. When there proved no other way, communalism’s answer had been to make the community smaller, not bigger.
They survived, but didn’t thrive. Starvation, competition, failure. Generation after generation, the pattern repeated itself. The population surge to five hundred thousand had only happened once, and like a flare quickly collapsed. Now they were on their way to another wave of harsh limitation. Their numbers were shrinking. The metal planet would never let them flourish. It didn’t want them.
So they clung to their legend about going home. It was their single enduring plan. They wanted to go. They planned to go. Unless they were “chosen” in the hunt of a free dancer or “Anointed” killed by accident or illness they worked toward the goal of eventually leaving this tin pot.
The plan’s most recent leg had been a mighty monumental one to take thousands of Anointed home, then send a signal for the rest of the people to follow. That signal had never come. Instead, quite another signal had been sent. The Anointed had been summoned down from their pedestals all at once, not by destiny but by Nick Keller in his determination to save his side of the gateway first.
Taking the unexpected “destruction” of the Anointed as a message, the Living had hunkered down once more to the business of collecting energy from the free dancers, but this time with the idea of another ten thousand years of work before trying again. They had used up almost all their stored energy to open the gateway and hold it open, then power Riutta’s spinner fleet. They had to hustle now, hunt more and more often, to gather enough energy to go on surviving.
But Keller had come. He wanted them to use their new power stores in a different way to go through the gateway en masse, as they had originally planned.
He was the only one who knew the clock was ticking to a much nearer alarm. Challenger and the grave ship could hold the gateway open only a few hours on their side, more than a year on this side.
A year… sounded long, but wasn’t. The Living had been waiting years on this side for Riutta and Luntee to send a summons, then instead received a cutoff. They supposed the Anointed had met with tragedy in space. After hundreds of generations, nothing had come of this. They had accepted two new Elders, along with the one left behind, and they had begun again. More than half of these people would die in a stepped-up schedule of hunts, to provide enough energy for the other half to keep existing on this brittle ferrous ball.
What could Keller do? Send a pigeon through the gateway and tell Shucorion to throw another dead guy on the fire?
The gateway was still open. He clung to that.
He clamped his lips on his thoughts as he and Braxan worked side by side, along with hundreds of hunters from all the settlements, to fit woven gum segments into place and seal the seams. The heavy mats, woven with patterns and messages and tributes, would prevent a grounding. Ironically, the mats protected the free dancers