Flandry of Terra Read online

  Flandry of Terra

  Poul Anderson

  First published 1965

  Table of Contents

  The Game of Glory

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  A Message in Secret

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  The Plague of Masters

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  The Game of Glory

  A murdered man on a winter planet gave Flandry his first clue. Until then, he had only known that a monster fled Conjumar in a poisoned wreck of a spaceship, which might have gone twenty light-years before killing its pilot but could surely never have crossed the Spican marches to refuge.

  And the trouble was, even for the Terran Empire, which contained an estimated four million stars, a sphere twenty light-years across held a devil’s number of suns.

  Flandry went through the motions. He sent such few agents as could be spared from other jobs, for they were desperately under-manned in the frontier provinces, to make inquiries on the more likely planets within that range. Of course they drew blanks. Probability was stacked against them. Even if they actually visited whatever world the fugitive had landed on, he would be lying low for a while.

  Flandry swore, recalled his men to more urgent tasks, and put the monster under filed-but-not-forgotten. Two years went by. He was sent to Betelgeuse and discovered how to lie to a telepath. He slipped into the Merseian Empire itself, wormed and blackmailed until he found a suitable planet (uninhabited, terrestroid, set aside as a hunting preserve of the aristocrats) and got home again: whereafter the Terran Navy quietly built an advanced base there and Flandry wondered if the same thing had happened on his side of the fence. He went to Terra on leave, was invited to the perpetual banquet of the Lyonid family, spent three epochal months, and was never quite sure whether he seduced the wrong man’s wife or she him. At any rate, he fought a reluctant duel, gave up hope of early promotion to rear admiral, and accepted re-assignment to the Spican province.

  Thus it was he found himself on Brae.

  This world had been more or less independent until a few months ago. Then military considerations forced the establishment of a new base in the region. It did not have to be Brae, but Brae was asked, by a provincial governor who thought its people would be delighted at the extra trade and protection. The Braean High Temple, which had long watched its old culture and religion sapped by Terran influence, declined. One does not decline an Imperial invitation. It was repeated. And again it was refused. The provincial governor insisted. Brae said it would go over his head and appeal to the Emperor himself. The governor, who did not want attention drawn to his precise mode of government, called for local Navy help.

  Wherefore Flandry walked through smashed ruins under a red dwarf sun, with a few snowflakes falling like blood drops out of great clotted clouds. He was directing the usual project in cases like this-search, inquiry, more search, more interrogation, until the irreconcilables had been found and exiled, the safely collaboration-minded plugged into a governmental framework.

  But when the blaster crashed, he whirled and ran toward the noise as if to some obscure salvation.

  “Sir!” cried the sergeant of his escort. “Sir, not there-snipers, terrorists-wait.’”

  Flandry leaped the stump of a wall, zigzagged across a slushy street, and crouched behind a wrecked flyer. His own handgun was out, weaving around; his eyes flickered in habitual caution. On a small plaza ahead of him stood a squad of Imperial marines. They must have been on routine patrol when someone had fired at them from one of the surrounding houses. They responded with tiger precision. A tracer dart, flipped from a belt almost the moment the shot came, followed the trail of ions to a certain facade. A rover bomb leaped from its shoulder-borne rack, and the entire front wall of the house went up in shards. Before the explosion ended, the squad attacked. Some of the debris struck their helmets as they charged.

  Flandry drifted to the plaza. He saw now why the men’s reaction was to obliterate: it was an invariable rule when a marine was bushwacked dead.

  He stooped over the victim. This was a young fellow, African-descended, with husky shoulders; but his skin had gone gray. He gripped his magnetic rifle in drilled reflex (or was it only a convulsive clutching at his mother’s breast, as a dying man’s mouth will try to suck again?) and stared through frog-like goggles on a turtle-like helmet. He was not, after all, dead yet. His blood bubbled from a stomach ripped open, losing itself in muddy snow. Under that dim sun, it looked black.

  Flandry glanced up. His escort had surrounded him, though their faces turned wistfully toward the crump-crump of blasters and bomb guns. They were marines too.

  “Get him to a hospital,” said Flandry.

  “No use, sir,” answered the sergeant. “He’d be dead before we arrived. We’ve no revival equipment here yet, either, or stuff to keep him functional till they can grow another belly on him.”

  Flandry nodded and hunkered down by the boy. “Can I help you son?” he asked, as gently as might be.

  The wide lips shinned back from shining teeth. “Ah, ah, ah,” he gasped. “It’s him in Uhunhu that knows.” The eyes wallowed in their sockets. “Ai!” ‘List nay, they said. Nay let recruiters ‘list you… damned Empire… even to gain warskill, don’t ‘list… shall freedom come from slave-masters, asked he in Uhunhu. He and his ‘ull teach what we must know, see you?” The boy’s free hand closed wildly on Flandry’s. “D’you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Flandry. “It’s all right. Go to sleep.”

  “Ai, ai, look at her up there, grinning-” Despite himself, Flandry stared skyward. He was crouched by a fountain, which now held merely icicles. A slender column rose from the center, and on top of it the nude statue of a girl. She was not really human, she had legs too long, and a tail and pouch and sleek fur, but Flandry had not often seen such dancing loveliness trapped in metal; she was springtime and a first trembling kiss under windy poplars. The waning marine screamed.

  “Leave me ‘lone, leave me ‘lone, you up there, leave me “lone! Stop grinning! I ‘listed for to learn how to make Nyanza free, you hear up there, don’t lap my blood so fast. It’s nay my fault I made more slaves. I wanted to be free too! Get your teeth out of me, girl… mother, mother, don’t eat me, mother-” Presently the boy died.

  Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, Intelligence Corps, Imperial Terrestrial Navy, squatted beside him, under the fountain, while the marines blew down another house or two for good measure. A squadron of full-armored infantry did a belt-flit overhead, like jointed faceless dolls. A stringed instrument keened from a window across the square: Flandry did not know the Braean scale, the music might be dirge or defiance or ballad or coded signal.

  He asked finally: “Anyone know where this chap was from?”

  His escort looked blank. “A colonial, sir, judging from the accent,” ventured one of the privates. “We sign on a lot, you know.”

  “Tell me more,” snapped Flandry. He brooded a while longer. “There’ll be records, of course.”

  His task had suddenly shifted. He would have to leave another man in charge here and check the dead boy’s home himself,
so great was the personnel shortage. Those delirious babblings could mean much or nothing. Most likely nothing, but civilization was spread hideously thin out here, where the stars faded toward barbarism, and the Empire of Merseia beyond, and the great unmapped Galactic night beyond that.

  As yet he did not think of the monster, only that he was lonesome among his fellow conquerors and would be glad to get off on a one-man mission. At least a world bearing some Africans might be decently warm.

  He shivered and got up and left the square. His escort trudged around him, their slung rifles pointed at a thin blue sky. Behind them the girl on the fountain smiled.

  II

  The planet was five parsecs from Brae. It was the third of an otherwise uninteresting F5 dwarf, its official name was Nyanza, it had been colonized some 500 years back during the breakup of the Commonwealth. It had been made an Imperial client about a century ago, a few abortive revolts were crushed, now there was only a resident-which meant a trouble-free but unimportant and little visited world. The population was estimated at I07. That was all the microfiles had to say about Nyanza.

  Flandry had checked them after identifying the murdered man, who turned out to be Thomas Umbolu, 19, free-born commoner of Jairnovaunt on Nyanza, no dependents, no personal oaths or obligations of fealty, religion “Christian variant,” height 1.82 meter, weight 84 kilos, blood type O plus… His service record was clean, though only one year old. A routine pre-induction hypno had shown no serious disaffection; but of course that hadn’t meant a damn thing since the techniques of deep conditioning became general knowledge; it was just another bureaucratic ritual.

  Flandry took a high-speed flitter and ran from Brae. Even so, the enforced idleness of the trip was long enough to remind him acutely that he had been celibate for weeks. He spent a good deal of the time in calisthenics. It bored him rigid, but a trim body had saved his life more than once and made it easy to get bed partners on softened worlds like Terra.

  When the robopilot said they were going into approach, he spent some while dressing himself. An Intelligence officer had wide latitude as regards uniforms, and Flandry took more advantage of it than most. After due consideration, he clad his tall form in peacock-blue tunic, with white cross-belts and as much gold braid as regulations would stand; red sash and matched guns, needler and blaster; iridescent white trousers; soft black boots of authentic Terran beefleather. He hung a scarlet cloak from his shoulders and cocked a winged naval cap on his long sleek head. Surveying himself in the mirror, he saw a lean sunlamp-browned face, gray eyes, seal-brown hair and mustache, straight nose, high cheekbones: yes, he knew his last plasmecosmetic job had made his face too handsome, but somehow never got around to changing it again. He put a cigarette between his lips, adjusted its jaunty angle with care, inhaled it to light, and went to his pilot’s seat. Not that he had anything to do with the actual piloting.

  Nyanza shone before him, the clearest and most beautiful blue of his life, streaked with white cloud-belts and shuddering with great auroral streamers. He spotted two moons, a smallish one close in and a large one further out. He scowled. Where were the land masses? His robot made radio contact and the screen offered him a caucasoid face above a short-sleeved shirt.

  “Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, Imperial Navy Intelligence, requesting permission to land.”

  Sometimes he wondered what he would do if his polite formula ever met a rude no.

  The visage gaped. “Oh… oh… already?”

  “Hm?” said Flandry. He caught himself. “Ah, yes,” he said wisely.

  “But only today, sal” babbled the face. “Why, we haven’t even thought about sending a courier out yet-it’s been such a nightmare-oh, thank God you’re here, sir! You’ll see for yourself, at once, there isn’t a Technician in the City-on Altla-on all Nyanza, who doesn’t set loyalty to his Majesty above life itself!”

  “I’m sure his Majesty will be very much relieved,” said Flandry. “Now, if you please, how about a landing beam?” After a pause, a few clicks, and the beginning downward rush of his ship: “Oh, by the way, Bubbles. Where did you put your continents today?”

  “Continents, sir?”

  “You know. Large dirty places to stand on.”

  “Of course I know, sir!” The control man drew himself up. “We’re no parochials in the City. I’ve been to Spica myself.”

  “Would it be despicable if you had not?” mused Flandry. Most of him was listening to the fellow’s accent. The inexhaustible variations on Anglic were a hobby of his.

  “But as for the continents, sir, why, I thought you would know. Nyanza has none. Altla is just a medium-sized island. Otherwise there are only rocks and reefs, submerged at double high tide, or even at Loa high.”

  “Oh, I knew,” said Flandry reassuringly. “I just wanted to be sure you knew.” He turned off the receiver and sat thinking. Damn those skimpy pilot’s manuals! He’d have had to go to Spica for detailed information. If only there were a faster-than-light equivalent of radio. Instant communications unified planets; but the days and weeks and months between stars let their systems drift culturally apart-let hell brew for years, unnoticed till it boiled over-made a slow growth of feudalism, within the Imperial structure itself, inevitable. Of course, that would give civilization something to fall back on when the Long Night finally came.

  The spaceport was like ten thousand minor harbors: little more than a grav-grid, a field, and some ancillary buildings, well out of town. Beyond the hangars, to west and south, Flandry saw a greenness of carefully tended forest. Eastward rose the spires of a small ancient city. Northward the ground sloped down in harsh grass and boulders until it met a smothering white surf and an impossibly blue ocean. The sky above was a little darker than Terra’s-less dust to scatter light-and cloudless; the sun was blindingly fierce, bluish tinged. It was local summer: Altla lay at 35° N. latitude on a Terra-sized planet with a 21° axial tilt. The air held an illusion of being cooler than it was, for it blew briskly and smelled of salt and the ultraviolet-rich sun gave it a thunderous tinge of ozone.

  Still, Flandry wished he had not been quite such a dude. The portmaster, another blond caucasoid, looked abominably comfortable in shorts, blouse, and kepi. Flandry took a morose satisfaction in noting that the comfort was merely physical.

  “Portmaster Heinz von Sonderburg, sir, at your service. Naturally, we waive quarantine on your behalf; no Imperial knight would-Ah. Your luggage will be seen to, Captain… Flandry? Of course. Most honored. I have communicated with her Excellency and am happy to report she can offer you the usual official hospitality. Otherwise we would have had to do our poor best for you in the City-“

  “Her Excellency?” asked Flandry when they were airborne.

  “Is that not the proper usage?” Von Sonderburg made washing motions with his hands. “Oh, dear, I am so sorry. This is such an isolated planet-the occasion so seldom arises-Believe me, sir, we are uncouth only in manner. The City, at least, has an enlightened forward-looking spirit of absolute loyalty to the Imperium which-“

  “It’s just that I thought, in a case like this, where the only Terrans on the planet are the resident and family, they’d have appointed a man.” Flandry looked down toward the city. It was old, haphazardly raised out of native stone, with steep narrow streets, teeming pedestrians, very few cars or flyers.

  But the docks were big, sleekly modern and aswarm with ships. He made out everything from plastic pirogues to giant submarines. There was a majority of sailing craft, which implied an unhurried esthetic-minded culture; but they were built along radical hydrodynamic lines, which meant that the culture also appreciated efficiency. A powered tug was leaving the bay with a long tail of loaded barges, and air transport was extensively in use.

  Elsewhere Flandry recognized a set of large sea-water processing units and their attached factories, where a thousand dissolved substances were shaped into usefulness. A twin-hulled freighter was unloading bales of… sea weed?… at the dock of an obvious
plastics plant. So, he thought, most of Nyanza fished, hunted, and ranched the planet-wide ocean; this one island took the raw materials and gave back metal, chemical fuel, synthetic timbers and resins and glassites and fibers, engines. He was familiar enough with pelagic technics-most overpopulated worlds turned back at last to Mother Ocean. But here they had begun as sailors, from the very first. It should make for an interesting society…

  Von Sonderburg’s voice jerked back his attention. “But of course, poor Freeman Bannerji was a man. I am merely referring to his, ah, his relict, poor Lady Varvara. She is an Ayres by birth, you know, the Ayres of Antarctica. She has borne her loss with the true fortitude of Imperial aristocratic blood, yes, we can be very proud to have been directed by the late husband of Lady Varvara Ayres Bannerji.”

  Flandry constructed his sentence to preserve the illusion: “Do you know the precise time he died?”

  “Alas, no, sir. You can speak to the City constabulary, but I fear even they would have no exact information. Sometime last night, after he retired. You understand, sir, we have not your advanced police methods here. A harpoon gun-oh, what a way to meet one’s final rest!” Von Sonderburg shuddered delicately.

  “The weapon has not been found?” asked Flandry impassively.

  “No, I do not believe so, sir. The killer took it with him, portable, you know. He must have crept up the wall with vacsoles, or used a flung grapnel to catch the windowsill and-His Excellency was a sound sleeper and his lady, ah, preferred separate quarters. Ah… you can take it for granted, sir, I am certain, that the murderer did not go through the house to reach Freeman Bannerji’s retiring chamber. The servants are all of Technician birth, and no Technician would dream of it.’

  The resident’s mansion hove into view. It was probably 75 years old, but its metal and tinted plastic remained a blatant, arrogant leap in formal gardens, amidst a shrill huddle of tenements. As the aircar set down, Flandry noticed that the City population was mostly caucasoid, not even very dark-skinned. They were crowded together in child-pullulating streets, blowsy-women waved excited arms and shouted their hagglings, such of the men as did not work in industry kept grimy little shops. A pair of native constables in helmet and breastplate stood guard at the mansion gates. Those were tall Africans, who used stepped-down shockbeams with a sort of casual contempt to prevent loitering.