Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Read online

  THE TECHNIC CIVILIZATION SAGA

  FLANDRY’S

  LEGACY

  POUL ANDERSON

  Compiled by

  Hank Davis

  Baen Books by Poul Anderson

  The Technic Civilization Saga

  The Van Rijn Method

  David Falkayn: Star Trader

  Rise of the Terran Empire

  Young Flandry

  Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire

  Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra

  Flandry’s Legacy

  The High Crusade

  To Outlive Eternity and Other Stories

  Time Patrol

  Hoka! Hoka! Hoka! (with Gordon R. Dickson)

  Hokas Pokas! (with Gordon R. Dickson)

  FLANDRY'S LEGACY

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

  fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  "Introduction" copyright © 2011 by Hank Davis.

  "A Chronology of Technic Civilization" by Sandra Miesel copyright © 2008 by Sandra Miesel.

  "The Price of Buying Time" (revised version) by Sandra Miesel copyright © 2011 by Sandra Miesel.

  "Afterword to The Night Face" (revised version) by Sandra Miesel copyright © 2011 by Sandra Miesel.

  Acknowledgements

  A Stone in Heaven, copyright © 1979 by Poul Anderson, original publication by Ace Books, October 1979.

  The Game of Empire, copyright © 1985 by Poul Anderson, original publication by Baen Books, May 1985.

  “A Tragedy of Errors,”copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corp., original publication in Galaxy, February 1968.

  “The Night Face,” copyright © 1963 by Ace Books, Inc., original publication under the title of Let the Spacemen Beware by Ace Books, 1963. Reprinted as The Night Face by Ace Books, February 1978. A shorter version was published in Fantastic Universe, January 1960, as “A Twelvemonth and a Day.”

  “The Sharing of Flesh," copyright © 1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corp., original appearance in Galaxy, December 1968.

  “Starfog,” copyright © 1967 by Condé Nast Publications, Inc., original publication in Analog, August 1967.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4391-3427-6

  Cover art by David Seeley

  Maps by Karen Anderson

  First Baen printing, April 2011

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Anderson, Poul, 1926-2001.

  Flandry's legacy / by Poul Anderson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3427-6 (trade pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3551.N378F55 2011

  813'.54--dc22

  2011000592

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THE WHEEL TURNS

  Whether the wheel (or mandala) of time or the ceaselessly rotating wheel of the galaxy—time passes. The captains and the kings depart. And the admirals and the emperors as well . . .

  This seventh volume of Poul Anderson’s monumental Technic Civilization future history completes the series as it was published in bits and pieces over four decades, now assembled, for the first time, complete and in internal chronological order. The saga, spanning future centuries, is an impressive achievement, and yet (there’s no pleasing some people), one might wish for a few more stories set during the “little night” (between the sacking of Earth by space-voyaging barbarians and the rise of the Terran Empire) and the Long Night (between the simultaneous collapse of the Terran Empire and the Merseian Roidhunate, and the rebirth, millennia later, of interstellar civilization).

  Perhaps Poul Anderson found such bleak times uninteresting and didn’t wish to chronicle them. Or maybe he thought he had already explored enough of the darker aspects of humans and their universe in the stories which he did write, (not all of them in the Technic Civilization series). Two stories included herein are unabashed tragedies, and one of those two is a hundred-megaton heartbreaker.

  After all, one might wish for more stories, but considering the bounty that a prolific and inventive author provided, greed is not called for. And gratitude for what we do have is most certainly called for.

  These include the novel, A Stone in Heaven, wherein Dominic Flandry is now a Vice Admiral who isn’t quite in the good graces of the present Emperor, who’s not the man his father was. Miriam Abrams, daughter of Imperial Intelligence spymaster Max Abrams, who recruited and mentored young Dominic Flandry long ago, is another character. Unlike the present Emperor, she is the human her father was . . . so to speak. . . . A xenologist, she’s trying to get help for the Ramnuans, who cannot survive on their rapidly cooling homeworld without Terran help. But such help is not forthcoming. Worse, when she travels to Earth, she finds that people who might be able to grease the bureaucratic wheels refuse to talk to her.

  But Flandry lends a sympathetic ear, of course, and finds something more sinister than monolithic bureaucratic inertia is at work. The present emperor may be a disappointment, but at least he isn’t the tyrant another character will become if his scheme to seize the throne succeeds. Bracing action ensues and, at the end, this time Flandry actually walks off into the sunset (or, “into the autumn”) with the girl. Before that happens, there’re plenty of droll quips from Flandry, such as when he meets Cairncross, the villain of the piece:

  “Well, well,” [Cairncross] said. “So this is the legendary Admiral Flandry.”

  “No, the objectively real Admiral Flandry, I hope. Some would say the objectionably real.”

  One might also note that the dying planet Ramnu is an echo of the dying Terran Empire. And there’s that password that Flandry imparts to Miriam: the name of a town in England. Does the town still exist in the 31st century? Could Flandry, who repeatedly claims no interest in music, be making a reference to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore? I have no trouble believing that pair’s operettas could survive for another millennium, and if the music didn’t appeal to him, the witty dialogue might.

  Next comes the last novel in the saga, The Game of Empire. There’s a new Merseian maneuver to be countered. Flandry is a player therein, and we learn that he and Miriam are now married, but the novel belongs to Diana Crowfeather, Flandry’s daughter, along with her client, Axor, a visiting Wodenite, and her friend Targovi, a felinesque Tigery. Those who have read earlier installments of the saga will recall another of the reptilian centauroid Wodenites, Adzel, valuable member of Nicholas van Rijn’s trader team. As for the Tigeries, not only did they play a crucial role in young Ensign Flandry’s first extravagant adventure, but a Tigery who knew Flandry back then makes a brief appearance here.

  That is the last we see of Dominic Flandry. Possibly, he had other adventures, but the bard named Anderson did not record them. Even with life-extending drugs, Flandry likely didn’t live to see the Terran Empire’s fall. (Did his daughter? One wonders . . .) At some point, he, Miriam, and Chives must have set course for Valhalla in Hooligan, where they may have joined up with Nick van Rijn, David Falkayn, Adzel, Chee Lan, and maybe even Muddlehead.

  The remaining chapters of the Technic Civilization saga are set centuries, even millennia apart, with
no recurring characters. Only one is set during the Long Night itself, over half a century after The Game of Empire: “A Tragedy of Errors,” which features a flamboyant rogue reminiscent of C.L. Moore’s immortal Northwest Smith. (He might remind others of Han Solo, though the Anderson novella appeared almost a decade before Star Wars.) Interstellar communications have broken down, and the characters have no idea what’s going in elsewhere in the sphere of galactic space which once was the dominion of Terra. Consequently, neither do we readers. The falling apart of the Empire is underlined by the way that languages are beginning to change, leading to an unfortunate misunderstanding that sets the story in motion.

  But far more than languages were mutating. In the novella “The Night Face,” some star colonies are slowly rebuilding human civilization and sending expeditions to other star systems. However, the humans of one long-isolated colony have changed from the original human blueprint, and when the nature of the change becomes apparent, stark tragedy ensues. At the same time, quiet heroism takes center stage: no blazing blasters, no battling starships, just a fatal choice and a personal sacrifice. Poul Anderson well understood both the tragic and the heroic aspects of living in a universe that does not care.

  A century later, humans on a planet who have lost all but the simplest technology are discovered by other humans who have regained interstellar travel, and once again the passage of time in isolation has wrought a deadly change in the former. “The Sharing of Flesh” has aspects of a mystery story—though the question is not “whodunit” but “whydunnit”—as well as being a inquiry into the nature of justice. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for the year it was published.

  The end of the saga comes over three millennia later. In “Starfog,” human civilization has rebounded, surpassing the technology of the days of Dominic Flandry, and possibly surpassing the freedom and lack of regimentation of the earlier days of Nicholas van Rijn as well. This far future tale hearkens back to the past, as descendants of the rebels who fled into unexplored space in the Dominic Flandry novel, The Rebel Worlds, make contact with the new civilization, but cannot find their way home again. The solution to that problem is ingenious—but this story’s ending is also bittersweet.

  Will the new, looser interstellar civilization have a longer life than the long-fallen Terran Empire? Perhaps, since no competing nonhuman sentients are mentioned in “Starfog.” That doesn’t mean that some might not be waiting elsewhere in the galaxy. The Terran Empire, it should be remembered, only occupied a small part of one arm of our spiral galaxy, and almost certainly other intelligences exist elsewhere, waiting to be discovered. And not all of them could be expected to be friendly or even nonbelligerent. Even without competition, water runs downhill, entropy increases, and as long as humans are still human, the social structures they erect will likely have a limited sell-by date. One should remember that galaxies and even the protons making up matter are thought to have limited lifetimes. But while the stars still burn, human will find new opportunities for adventures, possibly villainous, hopefully noble, certainly heroic, as humans and other sentients continue to attempt (if I may borrow a phrase from E. E. “Doc” Smith) to unscrew the inscrutable.

  And, as the saga ends, I’ll borrow another phrase, overused but very true, and say that it has been an honor and a privilege to have been entrusted with assembling these seven volumes which comprise a major landmark of science fiction.

  * * *

  As with some of the earlier installments, two essays by Sandra Miesel, noted authority on the works of Poul Anderson, are included with the e-book version of Flandry’s Legacy: “The Price of Buying Time” (originally written as an afterword to A Stone in Heaven) and an afterword to “The Night Face.” They are far more intelligent and illuminating than this introduction. Go to www.baen.com for details.

  —Hank Davis, 2011

  A

  STONE IN

  HEAVEN

  DEDICATION

  To John K. Hord

  A STONE IN HEAVEN

  I

  Through time beyond knowing, the Kulembarach clan had ranged those lands which reach south of Lake Roah and east of the Kiiong River. The Forebear was said to have brought her family up from the Ringdales while the Ice was still withdrawing beyond the Guardian Mountains. Her descendants were there on the territory she took when traders from West-Oversea brought in the arts of ironworking and writing. They were old in possession when the first Seekers of Wisdom arose, and no few of them joined the College as generations passed. They were many and powerful when the long-slumbering fires in Mount Gungnor awoke again, and the Golden Tide flowed forth to enrich this whole country, and the clans together established the Lords of the Volcano. They were foremost in welcoming and dealing with the strangers from the stars.

  But about that time, the Ice began returning, and now the folk of Kulembarach were in as ill a plight as any of their neighbors.

  Yewwl had gone on a long hunt with her husband Robreng and their three youngest children, Ngao, Ych, and little Ungn. That was only partly to get food, when the ranchlands could no more support enough livestock. It was also to get away, move about, unleash some of their rage against the fates upon game animals. Besides, her oath-sister Banner was eager to learn how regions distant from Wainwright Station were changed by cold and snow, and Yewwl was glad to oblige.

  The family rode east for an afternoon and most of the following night. Though they did not hurry, and often stopped to give chase or to rest, that much travel took them a great ways, to one of the horn-topped menhirs which marked the territorial border of the Arrohdzaroch clan. Scarcity of meat would have made trespass dangerous as well as wrong. Yewwl turned off in a northwesterly direction.

  “We will go home by way of the Shrine,” she explained to the others—and to Banner, who saw and heard and even felt what she did, through the collar around her neck. Had she wished to address the human unheard by anybody else, she would have formed the words voicelessly, down in her throat.

  The alien tone never came to any hearing but Yewwl’s; Banner had said the sound went in through her skull. Eighteen years had taught Yewwl to recognize trouble in it: “I’ve seen pictures lately, taken from moon-height. You would not like what you found there, dear.”

  Fur bristled, vanes spread and rippled, in sign of defiance. “I understand that. Shall the Ice keep me from my Forebear?” Anger died out. For Banner alone, Yewwl added softly, “And those with me hope for a token from her—an oracular dream, perhaps. And . . . I may be an unbeliever in such things, because of you, but I myself can nonetheless draw strength from them.”

  Her band rode on. Night faded into hours of slowly brightening twilight. The storminess common around dawn and sunset did not come. Instead was eerie quiet under a moon and a half. The nullfire hereabouts did not grow tall, as out on the veldt, but formed a thick turf, hoarfrost-white, that muffled the hoofbeats of the onsars. Small crepuscular creatures were abroad, darters, scuttlers, light-flashers, and the chill was softened by a fragrance of nightwort, but life had grown scant since Yewwl and Robreng were young. They felt how silence starkened the desolation, and welcomed a wind that sprang up near morning, though it bit them to the bone and made stands of spearcane rattle like skeletons.

  The sun rose at last. For a while it was a red step pyramid, far and far on the blurry horizon. The sky was opalescent. Below, land rolled steeply upward, cresting in a thousand-meter peak where snow and ice flushed in the early light. That burden spilled down the slopes and across the hills, broken here and there by a crag, a boulder, a tawny patch of uncovered nullfire, a tree—brightcrown or saw-frond—which the cold had slain. A flyer hovered aloft, wings dark against a squat mass of clouds. Yewwl didn’t recognize its kind. Strange things from beyond the Guardian Range were moving in with the freeze.

  Ungn, her infant, stirred and mewed in her pouch. Her belly muscles seemed to glow with it. She might have stopped and dismounted to feed him, but a ruddy canyon and a tarn gone ste
el-hard told her through memory how near she was to her goal. She jabbed foot-claws at her onsar’s extensors and the beast stepped up its pace from a walk to a shamble, as if realizing, weary though it was and rapidly though the air was thinning, that it could soon rest. Yewwl reached into a saddlebag, took forth a strip of dried meat, swallowed a part for herself and chewed the remainder into pulp. Meanwhile she had lifted Ungn into her arms and cuddled him. Her vanes she folded around her front to give the beloved mite shelter from the whining, seeking wind.

  Ych rode ahead. The sun entered heaven fully, became round and dazzling, gilded his pelt and sent light aflow over the vanes that he spread in sheer eagerness. He was nearly grown, lithe, handsome; no ruinous weather could dim the pride of his youth. His sister Ngao, his junior by three years, rode behind, leading several pack animals which bore camp gear and the smoked spoils of the hunt. She was slightly built and quiet, but Yewwl knew she was going to become a real beauty. Let fate be kind to her!

  Having well masticated the food, the mother brought her lips around her baby’s and, with the help of her tongue, fed him. He gurgled and went back to sleep. She imagined him doing it happily, but knew that was mere imagination. Just six days old—or fourteen, if you counted from his begetting—he was as yet tiny and unshapen. His eyes wouldn’t open for another four or five days, and he wouldn’t be crawling around on his own till almost half a year after that.