Then: “Cheer up, old fellow,” he urged. “It won’t be so bad. You’ll feel a lot better once our psychiatrists have rubbed out those kill-compulsions.”

Varris gave him a bloodshot glare. “I suppose you think you’re a great hero,” he said.

“Lord deliver me, no!” Alak opened a cupboard and took forth the bottle of Scotch. “I’m quite willing to let you have that title. It was your big mistake, you realize. A hero should never tangle with an intelligent coward.”

Ballade of an Artificial Satellite

Thence they sailed far to the southward along the land, and came to a ness; the land lay upon the right; there were long and sandy strands. They rowed to land, and found there upon the ness the keel of a ship, and called the place Keelness, and the strands they called Wonderstrands for it took long to sail by them.
—Thorfinn Karlsefni’s voyage to Vinland, as related in the saga of Erik the Red

One inland summer I walked through rye,
a wind at my heels that smelled of rain
and harried white clouds through a whistling sky
where the great sun stalked and shook his mane
and roared so brightly across the grain
it burned and shimmered like alien sands.
Ten years old, I saw down a lane
the thunderous light on Wonderstrands.
In ages before the world ran dry,
what might the mapless not contain?
Atlantis gleamed like a dream to die,
Avalon lay under faerie reign.
Cibola guarded a golden plain,
Tir-nan-Og was fair-locked Fand’s,
sober men saw from a gull’s-road wain
the thunderous light on Wonderstrands.
Such clanging countries in cloudland lie;
but men grew weary and they grew sane
and they grew grow—and so did I—
and knew Tartessus was only Spain.
No galleons call at Taprobane
(Ceylon, with English); no queenly hands
wear gold from Punt; nor sees the Dane
the thunderous light on Wonderstrands.
Ahoy, Prince Andros Horizon’s-bane!
They always wait, the elven lands.
An evening planet gives again
the thunderous light on Wonderstrands.

Time Lag

522 Anno Coloniae Conditae

Elva was on her way back, within sight of home, when the raid came.

For nineteen thirty-hour days, riding in high forests where sunlight slanted through leaves, across ridges where grass and the first red lampflowers rippled under springtime winds, sleeping by night beneath the sky or in the hut of some woods dweller—once, even, in a nest of Alfavala, where the wild little folk twittered in the dark and their eyes glowed at her—she had been gone. Her original departure was reluctant. Her husband of two years, her child of one, the lake and fields and chimney smoke at dusk which were now hers also, these were still too marvelous to leave.

But the Freeholder of Tervola had duties as well as rights. Once each season, he or his representative must ride circuit. Up into the mountains, through woods and deep dales, across the Lakeland as far as The Troll and then following the Swiftsmoke River south again, the route ran which Karlavi’s fathers had traveled for nearly two centuries. Whether on hailu-back in spring, summer, through the scarlet and gold of fall, or by motorsled when snow had covered all trails, the Freeholder went out into his lands. Isolated farm clans, forest rangers on patrol duty, hunters and trappers and timber cruisers, brought their disputes to him as magistrate, their troubles to him as leader. Even the flitting Alfavala had learned to wait by the paths, the sick and injured trusting he could heal them, those with more complex problems struggling to put them into human words.