Orbit Unlimited Read online

  Orbit Unlimited

  Poul Anderson

  Contents

  Part 1: Robin Hood’s Barn

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part 2: The Burning Bridge

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part 3: And Yet So Far

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 4: The Mills Of The Gods

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Preview: New America

  About the Author

  Part 1: Robin Hood’s Barn

  1

  Svoboda was about sixty years old. He did not know his exact age. The Lowlevel seldom counted such things, and his earliest memory was of weeping in an alley while rain fell past an overhead beltway that roared. Afterward his mother died and someone who claimed to be his father but probably wasn’t sold him to Inky the thiefmaster.

  Sixty was ancient for a man of the masses, whether he slunk cat-fashion through soot and noise and sudden death in a city Lowlevel or – more healthfully if with less freedom – squirmed along a mine shaft or tended engine on a plankton reaper. For an upper-level Citizen, or a Guardian, sixty was only middle-aged. Svoboda, who had spent half his life in either category, looked as old as Satan but could hope for another two decades.

  If you wanted to call it hope, he thought wryly.

  His left foot was paining him again. It was a lump within the special shoe. When he was twelve or so, scrambling over a garden wall with a silver chalice contributed by one Engineer Harkavy, an explosive slug from a guard’s pistol had smashed the bones. He got away somehow, but it was a cruel thing to happen to one of the most promising lads in the Brotherhood. Inky reapprenticed him to a fence, which forced him to learn reading and writing and thus started him on a long road up. Twenty-five years afterward, when Svoboda was Commissioner of Astronautics, a medic recommended prosthetizing the broken foot.

  ‘I can make you one that you can hardly tell from the real thing, sir,’ he offered.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Svoboda. I have seen our older Guardians tottering around with prosthetic hearts and prosthetic stomachs and a sort of prosthetic eye. I am sure the onward march of science will soon come to a prosthetic brain, which can hardly be told from the real thing. Some of my colleagues lead me to think this has already been achieved.’ He shrugged skinny shoulders. ‘No. I’m too busy. Later, perhaps.’

  The busyness consisted in breaking out of the Astronautical Department, a notorious dead end into which nervous superiors had maneuvered him. And having done so, he was at once preoccupied with something else. There had never been time. You had to run pretty fast just to stay where you were.

  How many people nowadays had read Alice? he wondered.

  But the foot did often pain him. He stopped to let the throbbing ease.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ asked Iyeyasu.

  Svoboda looked at the giant and smiled. His other six guards were nonentities, the usual efficient impersonal killing machines. Iyeyasu did not pack a gun; he was a karate man, and he could reach into your rib cage and pull your lungs out if you displeased Svoboda.

  ‘I’ll do,’ said the Commissioner of Psychologics. ‘Don’t inquire exactly what I’ll do, but there must be something.’

  Iyeyasu offered an arm and his master leaned on it. The contrast was ridiculous. Svoboda stood barely 150 centimeters tall, with a hairless dome of skull and a face all dark wrinkles and scimitar nose. His childish frame was gaudy in a cloak like fire, iridescent high-collared tunic, and deep-blue trousers cut in the latest bell-bottomed style. Whereas the Okinawan wore gray, and had a shoulder-length black mane and hands deformed by a lifetime’s cracking bricks and punching through boards.

  Svoboda fumbled with yellow-stained fingers after a cigaret. He stood on a landing terrace, immensely high up. Below was none of the parkscape which most Commissioners chose for their buildings; Svoboda had put his departmental tower in the same city which spawned him. It stretched under his feet as far as he could gaze through airborne filth. But past the floating docks, on the world’s eastern edge, he could see a mercury gleam that was the, open Atlantic.

  Dusk was creeping over the planet. Spires etched themselves black against the surly red remnants of sundown. Highlevel walls and streets began to glow. Lowlevel was a darkness beneath, and a muted unending growl of beltways, generators, autofactories, sparks to show a window waking to life or a pedicar headlamp or the flashbeams of men going in cudgel-armed parties for fear of the Brotherhood.

  Svoboda drew smoke through his nostrils. His eyes wandered past the aircar which had borne him here from his oceanic house, to the sky. Venus stood forth, white against royal blue. He sighed and gestured at it. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’m almost glad the colony there has been discontinued. Not because it wasn’t paying for itself, though God would know we can’t waste resources these days, if God existed. For a better reason.’

  ‘What is that, sir?’ Iyeyasu sensed that the Commissioner wanted to talk. They had been together for many years.

  ‘Now there’s one place you can go to get away from humankind.’

  ‘Venus air is no good, sir. You can go to the stars and get away, and not wear armor.’

  ‘But nine years in deepsleep to the nearest star! A bit extreme for a vacation.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And then the planets you find are as bad as Venus … or they’re like Earth, but not enough like Earth, and men break their hearts. Come on, let’s go play at being important.’

  Svoboda leaned back onto his crutch and went quickly over the terrace, through an arched portal and down a long luminous-walled corridor. His guards fanned out, ahead and behind, their eyes never still; Iyeyasu stayed close. Not that Svoboda expected assassins. There was a night shift at work, because Psychologies was a major fief within the Federation government, but at this hour there would be no underlings on this floor.

  At the hall’s end was a teleconference room. Svoboda hobbled to an easy chair, lyeyasu helped him into it and set a desk in front of him. Most of the men who looked from the screens had advisors beside them. Svoboda was alone, except for his guards. He had always worked alone.

  Premier Selim nodded. Behind his image was a window opening on palm trees. ‘Ah, there you are, Commissioner,’ he said. ‘We were just beginning to wonder.’

  ‘I apologize for my lateness,’ answered Svoboda. ‘As you know, I never transact business from my home, so I had to come here for the conference. Well, a caisson under my house sprang a leak, the; gyrostabilizers failed, and before I knew what had happened I was reading the time off a seasick octopus. It was ten minutes slow.’

  Security Chief Chandra blinked, opened a bearded mouth to protest, then nodded. ‘Ah, you make a joke. I see. Ha.’ He sat in India at sunrise; but the rulers of Earth were used to irregular hours.

  ‘Let us begin,’ said Selim. ‘We will dispense with formalities. However, before we start the business at hand, is there anything else of urgency?’

  ‘Er—’ Rathjen, the present Commissioner of Astronautics, spoke timidly. He was the weak son of the late Premier; his father had given him this post and nobody since had bothered to take it away. ‘Er, yes, gentlemen, I should again like to raise the question of repair funds for … I mean to say, we have several perf
ectly good spaceships which only need a few million in repair funds to, er, reach the stars again. And then the astronautical academies. Really, the quality of new recruits is as low as the quantity. I should think, that is, if we – Mr. Svoboda especially, it seems to be in his department – an intensive propaganda campaign, directed at younger sons of the Guardian families … or Citizens of professional status … persuading them of the importance, giving the profession the, er, the glamor it once had —’

  ‘Please,’ interrupted Selim. ‘Another time.’

  ‘I might make a remark, though,’ said Svoboda.

  ‘What?’ Novikov of Mines turned a surprised eye on him. ‘You are the one who brought this special conference about. Do you want to waste it on irrelevancies?’

  ‘Nothing is irrelevant,’ murmured Svoboda.

  ‘What?’ said Chandra.

  ‘I was only quoting Anker, the philosophical father of Constitutionalism,’ Svoboda told him. ‘Someday you might try understanding the things you want to suppress. I have. been assured that it works wonders.’

  Chandra flushed with annoyance. ‘But I don’t want—’ he began, and decided otherwise.

  Selim looked baffled. Rathjen said plaintively, ‘You were going to comment on my business, Mr. Svoboda.’

  ‘So I was.’ The small man struck a fresh cigaret and inhaled deeply. His eyes, a startling electric blue in the mummy face, leaped from screen to screen. ‘Commissioner Novikov could give you a good reason for the decay of astronautics: more people and fewer resources every day. We can no more afford interstellar exploration than we can afford representative government. The vestiges of both are being eliminated as fast as the anguish of yourself, and the Constitutionalists, permits. Which I know is not as fast as some of you gentlemen would like. But by pushing social change too hard, the government provoked the North American Rebellion twenty years ago.’ He grinned. ‘Therefore we must take the lesson to heart and not goad the Astronautical Department into revolt. It’s easier to operate a few spaceships for a few more decades than to storm barricades of filing cabinets manned by desperate bureaucrats waving the bloody flag in triplicate. But you on your side, Mr. Rathjen, must not expect us to expand, or even maintain, your fleet.’

  ‘Mr. Svoboda!’ gasped Rathjen.

  Selim cleared his throat. ‘We all know the Psychologics Commissioner’s sense of humor,’ he said ponderously. ‘But since he has mentioned the Constitutionalists, I trust he means to proceed to our real business.’

  The dozen faces turned upon Svoboda and did not let go. He veiled his own stare in smoke and replied, ‘Very well. I daresay Commissioner-baiting is a cruel sport, and instead I should pick good-looking Citizen girls off the streets for several weeks of Special Instruction.’ Now Larkin of Pel-agiculture was the one who glared. ‘Perhaps you aren’t all familiar with the issue on hand. I’ve submitted a new report on the Constitutionalists to Premier Selim, Mr. Chandra, and the Commandant of North America. It proved so controversial that the whole Guardian Commission has been asked to debate it.’

  He nodded at Selim. The Premier’s harsh gray face looked a bit startled. It was almost as if Svoboda had given him permission to go ahead. He harrumphed, glanced at the paper on his desk, and said:

  ‘The trouble is, the Constitutionalists are not a political group. If they were, we could round them up tomorrow. They are not even formally organized, and there is no total agreement among them. What they subscribe to is only a philosophy.’

  ‘Bad,’ murmured Svoboda. ‘Philosophies rationalize emotional attitudes. The very name of this one is a Freudian slip.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Novikov.

  ‘You ought to know,’ said Svoboda sweetly. ‘You’re rather an expert. To continue, though. Officially, the name ‘Constitutionalism’ refers merely to an attitude toward the physical universe, an advocacy of bashing thought patterns on the constitution of reality. Anti-mysticism, you might say. But I grew up here in North America, where half the population still speaks English. And I can tell you that in English, that word Constitution is loaded! The North American insurrection was brought on when the Federation government persistently and flagrantly violated – not the spirit of their poor old much-amended Constitution; they were always good at that themselves – but the letter of it.’

  ‘I know that much,’ said Chandra. ‘Don’t think I haven’t investigated these so-called philosophers. I know that many were in the revolt, or had fathers who were. But they aren’t dangerous. They may grumble to themselves, but as a class they’re not doing so badly. They have no reason to start another futile uprising.’ He shrugged. ‘Actually, most of them must be intelligent enough to see that that Bill of Rights or whatever it was simply doesn’t work when there are half a billion people on their continent, eighty percent illiterate.’

  ‘What are they, anyway?’ asked Dilolo of Agriculture.

  ‘Mostly North American,’ said Svoboda. ‘I mean of the old stock, not the more recent Oriental immigrants. But their doctrines are spreading through educated Citizens of every race, over the whole world. I imagine if you quizzed, you’d find a fourth of the literate population – rather more than that among scientists and technicians – in substantial agreement with Constitutionalist doctrine. Though of course not so many would consciously think of themselves as Constitutionalists.’

  ‘In other words,’ said Chandra, ‘it’s not just another new religion. Not for the yuts. Nor for Guardians – as a rule’ – he gave Svoboda a lingering glance – ‘or top-level Citizens. I know that already. I’ve investigated too. And I found Constitutionalism appealed chiefly to the hard-working, prosperous-but-not-rich man: the sober, solid type, who has won a little more status than his father and hopes his son may have a little more than himself. Such people aren’t revolutionaries.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Svoboda, ‘Constitutionalism is becoming a great deal stronger than you would expect from the small number of formal adherents.’

  ‘How?’ asked Larkin.

  ‘You leave your engineers’ daughters alone, don’t you?’ said Svoboda.

  ‘What has that – I mean, explain yourself before I lodge a criticism!’

  Svoboda grinned. He could break Larkin any time he chose. ‘The Guardians have the power,’ he said, ‘but what’s left of Earth’s middle class has the influence. There’s a distinction. The masses don’t try to imitate the Guardians, or really listen to us. The gap is too great. Their natural leaders are the lower-middle-class Citizenry. Who in turn look to the middle and upper middle classes. As for us Guardians, we may decree the irrigation of Morocco, and round up a million convicts to dig canals and die; but only if an upper-middle-class engineer has assured us it’s feasible. He probably advised it in the first place!

  The trouble with Constitutionalism is that it’s too likely to give this middle class an awareness of their potential power, and thereby start them agitating for a corresponding voice in the government. Which could be more than a little bit lethal to us.’

  There was a pause. Svoboda finished his cigaret and struck another. He felt the air wheeze in his throat. All the world’s biomedics couldn’t make up the abuse he visited on lungs and bronchial tubes. But what else is there to do? he thought in his private darkness.

  Selim said, ‘This is not a question of menace to ourselves personally, gentlemen. But the Psychologics Commissioner has persuaded me that if we care about our children and grandchildren, we must think seriously on this matter.’

  ‘You don’t mean arrest the Constitutionalists en masse?’ asked Larkin, alarmed. ‘But you can’t do that! I know how many of my key technical personnel are – I mean, it would be a disaster to every pelagic city on Earth!’

  ‘You see?’ smiled Svoboda. He shook his head. ‘No, no. Besides such practical, immediate difficulties, large-scale arrests might provoke new conspiracies to overthrow the Federation. I’m not that stupid, my friends. I propose to undermine the Constitutionalist movement, not batte
r at it’

  ‘But see here,’ objected Chandra, ‘if it’s a simple question of a propaganda campaign against these beliefs, you don’t need the whole Guardian Commission to —’

  ‘More than propaganda. I want to close the Constitutionalist schools. Never mind the adults. Let them go on thinking what they choose. It’s the next generation that we’re worried about.’

  ‘You wouldn’t let their brats into our schools, would you?’ gasped Dilolo.

  ‘I assure you, they don’t have vermin,’ said Svoboda. ‘Though they might be infected with a little originality. But no, I’m not that drastic. However, my idea is radical enough to need full Commission approval. I want to revive the old system of free compulsory education.’

  After the hubbub had faded, which it did because he sat and Ignored it, he went on: ‘Oh, modified, to be sure. I don’t plan to rope in the hopeless 75 percent of the population. Let them go their merry way. We can easily rig admission standards so as to keep them out. What I do want is a decree that all basic education will be financed by the government and must meet official requirements. Which means my requirements. I’ll leave the apprentice centers, academies, monasteries, and other useful or harmless educational institutions alone. But the schools maintained according to Constitutionalist principles will be found to have a deplorably low standard. I’ll fire their teachers and install some good loyal hacks.’

  ‘There’ll be trouble,’ warned Dilolo.

  ‘Yes. But not too much. Of course the parents will object. But what can they say? Here the state, in a sudden gush of benevolence, is lifting the burden of school costs off their shoulders (never mind where the taxes come from) and making sure that their children will be properly taught and properly adjusted to society. If they want to instill their funny little beliefs in addition, why, they can do so in the evenings and on holidays.’

  ‘Ha!’ Chandra laughed. ‘A lot of good that will do.’

  ‘Just so,’ agreed Svoboda. ‘A philosophy has to be lived. You can’t acquire it in an hour a day from a weary father who lectures you while you’d rather be out playing ball. Your non-Constitutionalist classmates are going to ridicule your oddities. And at the same time, the parents will scarcely be able to stir up popular support. This isn’t the kind of issue which brings on revolutions. We will, almost literally, kill Constitutionalism in its cradle.’