Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson Page A

Laska – Ronica grew up. By her mid-teens, through alertness and thinking, she had gained a shrewd idea of what the thunders really were that sometimes rolled from behind the mountains across the inlet.
    She kept silence. At that time, she was aiming to become a Survivor; and she did learn, pass her tests, start to act as a guide and provider, occasionally a tracker and rescuer of lost persons, for those who would reclaim the wilderness for man. She also became a postulant of the Wolf Lodge. That was nearly inevitable, for not only was it her family’s, it had by far the largest membership in the area. (Here as elsewhere, Injuns and Eskimos generally preferred their own traditional groupings, though some belonged to it.) At the age of eighteen, she completed her studies, performed her First Duty – in her case, backpacking medicines to a snowbound settlement that had radioed news of its need – and stood her Vigil.
    When she had been ceremoniously initiated, Lodgemaster Benyo Smith called her to his office. With him were her stepfather Tom Jamis and that Eygar Dreng who was rarely seen in Kenai. The men wore blue robes, and Benyo kept a hat on his head and gripped his emblematic staff. It was clearly a solemn moment. Above the Lodgemaster’s desk, carved into the wainscot, the wolf that had broken its chain ran free.
    ‘Ronica,’ Benyo said, ‘your elders have watched you for a long while, and by and large, what we’ve seen has pleased us. You’re intelligent, brave and adventurous but not reckless, loyal, and … discreet.’ He paused. ‘How much do you know of what’s going on amongst us?’
    Her throat felt thick. ‘Orion shall rise,’ she got out past the thutter of blood.
    Benyo nodded. ‘Let’s not say anything more just yet. A work this big, this meaningful – aimed at the upheaval of the whole world – is hard enough to hide. It would have been impossible to hide, year after year, before the Doom War made places like Kenai lonely again. It gets harder to hide as it goes.’
    He gusted a sigh. ‘We’ve got to recruit new people, and not simply because many of us have grown old or died in the service of Orion. We’ve come so far along that we require some special new combinations of abilities. You seem promising. But let me first warn you, it won’t be a lot: of thrills – scarcely ever. Mostly it’ll be labor and sacrifice, for a cause of liberation that you can hardly have noticed in this backwater where the Maurai never come. If you aren’t prepared to give up a great deal of what you enjoy, what you love, well, tell us right now, straight out. There’ll be no hard feelings, I promise you. You can continue your life as you’ve been leading it. After all, a Survivor is socially useful.’
    ‘But I’ll have to stay in Laska,’ she foretold.
    ‘Until Orion rises,’ Benyo answered.
    ‘If ever it does,’ Eygar Dreng said. ‘We don’t yet have what we must have. Maybe we never will.’
    Tom Jamis gave his stepdaughter a crooked smile.
‘Yes,
the Lodge will expect you to avoid civilization,’ he told her. ‘I myself haven’t left these parts for ten years, you recall. It’s not that anyone’s afraid I’ll betray them, it’s that I can do my work right here; and why take an added risk? But I like it well enough, and you’re entirely at home, aren’t you?’
    Ronica wet her lips. ‘What… would you want me … to do?’
    Eygar Dreng regarded her for a span that felt long before he replied slowly: ‘I’ve examined your school records and talked with your teachers. You could be an engineer. You could work on Orion – not as a leader; frankly, you aren’t brilliant in that area – but as a valuable junior… when you aren’t using your Survivor skills in a search that is vital to us. We’d like to send you south, to study at the University of Vittohrya. It’d be on a scholarship of the kind that Lodges regularly
give
deserving kids.’
    ‘The first thing you must think