A Circus of Hells df-2 Read online

  “As for your question, datholch is a civilian rather than a military rank.” He did not speak in exact equivalents, for Merseia separated “civilian” and “military” differently from Terra, and less clearly; but Flandry got the idea. “It designates an aristocrat who heads an enterprise concerned with expanding the Race’s frontier.” (Frontier of knowledge, trade, influence, territory, or what? He didn’t say, and quite likely it didn’t occur to him that there was any distinction.) “As for my standing, I belong to the Vach Urdiolch and”—he stood up and touched his brow while he finished—“it is my high honor that a brother of my late noble father is, in the glory of the God, Almighty Roidhun of Merseia, the Race, and all holdings, dominions, and subordinates of the Race.”

  Flandry scrambled to his feet and yanked Djana to hers. “Salute!” he hissed in her ear, in Anglic. “Like me! This chap’s a nephew of their grand panjandrum!”

  Who might or might not be a figurehead, depending on the circumstances of his reign—and surely, that he was always elected from among the Urdiolchs, by the Hands of the Vachs and the heads of Merseian states organized otherwise than the anciently dominant culture—from among the Urdiolchs, the only landless Vach—surely this was in part a check on his powers—but surely, too, the harshest, most dictatorial Protector regarded his Roidhun with something of the same awe and pride that inspired the lowliest “foot” or “tail”—for the Roidhun stood for the God, the unity, and the hope of the warrior people—Flandry’s mind swirled close to chaos before he brought it under control.

  “Be at ease.” Ydwyr reseated himself and gestured the humans to do likewise. “I myself am nothing but a scientist.” He leaned forward. “Of course, I served my time in the Navy, and continue to hold a reserve commission; but my interests are xenological. This is essentially a research station. Talwin was discovered by accident about—uh-h-h-h—fifteen Terran years ago. Astronomers had noted an unusual type of pulsar in this vicinity: extremely old, close to extinction. A team of physicists went for a look. On the way back, taking routine observations as they traveled, they detected the unique orbital scramble around Siekh and investigated it too.”

  Flandry thought sadly that humans might well have visited that pulsar in early days—it was undoubtedly noted in the pilot’s data for these parts, rare objects being navigationally useful—but that none of his folk in the present era would venture almost to the ramparts of a hostile realm just to satisfy their curiosity.

  Ydwyr was proceeding: “When I learned about Talwin’s extraordinary natives, I decided they must be studied, however awkwardly near your borders this star lies.”

  Flandry could imagine the disputes and wire-pullings that had gone on, and the compromise which finally was reached, that Talwin should also be an advanced base for keeping an eye on the Terrans. No large cost was involved, nor any large risk…nor any large chance of glory and promotion, which last fact helped explain Morioch’s eagerness to wring his prisoners dry.

  The lieutenant wet his lips. “You, uh, you are most kind, sir,” he said; the honorific appeared implicitly in the pronoun. “What do you wish of us?”

  “I would like to get to know you well,” Ydwyr said frankly. “I have studied your race in some detail; I have met individual members of it; I have assisted in diplomatic business; but you remain almost an abstraction, almost a complicated forcefield rather than a set of beings with minds and desires and souls. It is curious, and annoying, that I should be better acquainted with Domrath and Ruadrath than with Terrans, our one-time saviors and teachers, now our mighty rivals. I want to converse with you.

  “Furthermore, since any intelligence agent must know considerable xenology, you may be able to help us in our research on the autochthons here. Of a different species and culture, you may gain insights that have escaped us.

  “This is the more true, and you are the more intriguing in your own right, because of who you are. By virtue of my family connections, I obtained the story—or part of the story—behind the Starkad affair. You are either very capable, Dominic Flandry, or else very lucky, and I wonder if there may not be a destiny in you.”

  The term he used was obscure, probably archaic, and the man had to guess its meaning from context and cognation. Fate? Mana? Odd phrasing for a scientist.

  “In return,” Ydwyr finished, “I will do what I can to protect you.” With the bleak honesty of his class: “I do not promise to succeed.”

  “Do you think, sir…I might ever be released?” Flandry asked.

  “No. Not with the information you hold. Or not without so deep a memory wiping that no real personality would remain. But you should find life tolerable in my service.”

  If you find my service worthwhile, Flandry realized, and if higher-ups don’t overrule you when they learn about me. “I have no doubt I shall, sir. Uh, maybe I can begin with a suggestion, for you to pass on to the qanryf if you see fit.”

  Ydwyr waited.

  “I heard the lords speaking about, uh, ordering that the man who hired me—Leon Ammon—” might as well give him the name, it’ll be in Rax’s dispatch “—that he be eliminated, to eliminate knowledge of Wayland from the last Terrans. I’d suggest going slow and cautious there. You know how alarmed and alerted they must be, sir, even on sleepy old Irumclaw Base, when I haven’t reported in. It’d be risky passing on an order to your agents, let alone having them act. Best wait awhile. Besides, I don’t know myself how many others Ammon told. I should think your operatives ought to make certain they’ve identified everyone who may be in on the secret, before striking.

  “And there’s no hurry, sir. Ammon hasn’t any ship of his own, nor dare he hire one of the few civilian craft around. Look how easy it was to subvert the interplanetary ferrier we used, without ever telling him what a treasure was at stake. Oh, you haven’t heard that detail yet, have you, sir? It’s part of how I was trapped.

  “Ammon will have to try discovering what went wrong; then killing those who betrayed him, or those he can find or thinks he’s found; and making sure they don’t kill him first; and locating another likely-looking scoutship pilot, and sounding him out over months, and waiting for assignment rotation to put him on the route passing nearest Wayland, and—Well, don’t you see, sir, nothing’s going to happen that you need bother about for more than a year? If you want to be ultra-cautious, I suppose you can post a warcraft in the Mimirian System; I can tell you the coordinates, though frankly, I think you’d be wasting your effort. But mainly, sir, your side has everything to lose and nothing to gain by moving fast against Ammon.”

  “Khraich.” Ydwyr rubbed palm across chin, a sandpapery sound—under the storm-noise—despite his lack of beard. “Your points are well taken. Yes, I believe I will recommend that course to Morioch. And, while my authority in naval affairs is theoretically beneath his, in practice—”

  His glance turned keen. “I take for granted, Dominic Flandry, you speak less in the hope of ingratiating yourself with me than in the hope of keeping events on Irumclaw in abeyance until you can escape.”

  “Uh—uh, well, sir—”

  Ydwyr chuckled. “Don’t answer. I too was a young male, once. I do trust you won’t be so foolish as to try a break. If you accomplished it, the planet would soon kill you. If you failed, I would have no choice but to turn you over to Morioch’s inquisitors.”

  Chapter XIII

  The airbus was sturdier and more powerful than most, to withstand violent weather. But the sky simmered quiet beneath its high gray cloud deck when Flandry went to the Domrath.

  That was several of Talwin’s eighteen-hour days after he had arrived. Ydwyr had assigned the humans a room in the building that housed his scientific team. They shared the mess there. The Merseian civilians were cordial and interested in them. The two species ate each other’s food and drank each other’s ale with, usually, enjoyment as well as nutrition. Flandry spent the bulk of his time getting back into physical shape and oriented about this planet. Reasonably reconciled w
ith Djana—who’d been caught in the fortunes of war, he thought, and who now did everything she could to mollify her solitary fellow human—she made his nights remarkably pleasant. In general, aside from being a captive whose fate was uncertain and from having run out of tobacco, he found his stay diverting.

  Nor was she badly off. She had little to fear, perhaps much to gain. If she never returned to the Empire, well, that was no particular loss when other humans lived under the Roidhunate. Like a cat that has landed on its feet, she set about studying her new environment. This involved long conversations with the thirty-plus members of Ydwyr’s group. She had no Merseian language except for the standard loan words, and none of her hosts had more than the sketchiest Anglic. But they kept a translating computer for use with the natives. The memory bank of such a device regularly included the major tongues of known space.

  She’ll make out, Flandry decided. Her kind always does, right up to the hour of the asp.

  Then Ydwyr offered him a chance to accompany a party bound for Seething Springs. He jumped at it, both from curiosity and from pragmatism. If he was to be a quasi-slave, he might have a worse master; he must therefore see about pleasing the better one. Moreover, he had not inwardly surrendered hope of gaining his freedom, to which end anything he learned might prove useful.

  Half a dozen Merseians were in the expedition. “It’s fairly ordinary procedure, but should be stimulating,” said Cnif hu Vanden, xenophysiologist, who had gotten friendliest with him. “The Domrath are staging their fall move to hibernating grounds—in the case of this particular group, from Seething Springs to Mt. Thunderbelow. We’ve never observed it among them, and they do have summertime customs that don’t occur elsewhere, so maybe their migration has special features too.” He gusted a sigh. “This pouchful of us…to fathom an entire world!”

  “I know,” Flandry answered. “I’ve heard my own scholarly acquaintances groan about getting funds.” He spread his hands. “Well, what do you expect? As you say: an entire world. It took our races till practically yesterday to begin to understand their home planets. And now, when we have I don’t know how many to walk on if we know the way—”

  Cnif was typical of the problem, crossed his mind. The stout, yellowish, slightly flat-faced male belonged to no Vach; his ancestors before unification had lived in the southern hemisphere of Merseia, in the Republic of Lafdigu, and to this day their descendants maintained peculiarities of dress and custom, their old language and many of their old laws. But Cnif was born in a colony; he had not seen the mother world until he came there for advanced education, and many of its ways were strange to him.

  The bus glided forward. The first valve of the hangar heatlock closed behind it, the second opened, and it climbed with a purr of motor and whistle of wind. At 5000 meters it leveled off and bore north-northeast. That course by and large followed the river. Mainly the passengers sat mute, preparing their kits or thinking their thoughts. Merseians never chattered like humans. But Cnif pointed out landmarks through the windows.

  “See, behind us, at the estuary, what we call Barrier Bay. In early winter it becomes choked with icebergs and floes, left by the receding waters. When they melt in spring, the turbulance and flooding is unbelievable.”

  The stream wound like a somnolent snake through the myriad blues of jungle. “We call it the Golden River in spite of its being silt-brown. Auriferous sands, you see, washed down from the mountains. Most of the place names are unavoidably ours. Some are crude translations from Domrath terms. The Ruadrath don’t have place names in our sense, which is why we seldom borrow from them.”

  Cnif’s words for the aborigine were artificial. They had to be. “Dom” did represent an attempt at pronouncing what one of the first communities encountered called themselves; but “-rath” was an Eriau root meaning, approximately, “folk,” and “Ruadrath” had originally referred to a class of nocturnal supernatural beings in a Merseian mythology—“elves.”

  The forested plain gave way to ever steeper foothills. The shadowless gray light made contours hard to judge, but Flandry could see how the Golden ran here through a series of deep canyons. “Those are full to the brim when the glaciers melt,” Cnif said. “But we’ve since had so much evaporation that the level is well down; and we’ll soon stop getting rain, it’ll become first fog, later snow and hail. We are at the end of the summer.”

  Flandry reviewed what he had read and heard at the base. Talwin went about Siekh in an eccentric ellipse which, of course, had the sun at one focus. You could define summer arbitrarily as follows: Draw a line through that focus, normal to the major axis, intersecting the curve at two points. Then summer was the six-month period during which Talwin passed from one of those points, through periastron, to the other end of the line segment. Fall was the six weeks or so which it took to get from the latter point to the nearest intersection of the minor axis with the ellipse. Winter occupied the fifteen months wherein Talwin swung out to its remotest distance and back again to the opposite minor-axis intersection. Thereafter spring took another six weeks, until the point was reached again which defined the beginning of summer.

  In practice, things were nowhere near that simple. There were three degrees of axial tilt; there were climatic zones; there were topographical vibrations; above all, there was the thermal inertia of soil, rock, air, and water. Seasons lagged planetary positions by an amount depending on where you were and on any number of other factors, not every one of which the Merseians had unraveled. Nonetheless, once weather started to change, it changed with astonishing speed. Cnif had spoken in practical rather than theoretical terms.

  Vague through haze, the awesome peaks of the Hell-kettle Mountains came to view beyond their foothills. Several plumes of smoke drifted into gloomy heaven. An isolated titan stood closer, lifting scarred black flanks in cliffs and talus slopes and grotesquely congealed lava beds, up to a cone that was quiet now but only for now. “Mt. Thunderbelow.” The bus banked left and descended on a long slant, above a tributary of the Golden. Vapors roiled white on those waters. “The Neverfreeze River. Almost all streams, even the biggest, go stiff in winter; but this is fed by hot springs, that draw their energy from the volcanic depths. That’s why the Ruadrath—of Wirrda’s, I mean—have prospered so well in these parts. Aquatic life remains active and furnishes a large part of their food.”

  Fuming rapids dashed off a plateau. In the distance, forest gave way to sulfur beds, geysers, and steaming pools. The bus halted near the plateau edge. Flandry spied a clearing and what appeared to be a village, though seeing was poor through the tall trees. While the bus hovered, the expedition chief spoke through its outercom. “We’ve distributed miniature transceivers,” Cnif explained to Flandry. “It’s best to ask leave before landing. Not that we have anything to fear from them, but we don’t want to make them shy. We lean backwards. Why…do you know, a few years past, a newcomer to our group blundered into a hibernation den before the males were awake. He thought they would be, but they weren’t; that was an especially cold spring. Two of them were aroused. They tore him to shreds. And we refrained from punishment. They weren’t really conscious; instinct was ruling them.”

  His tone—insofar as a human could interpret—was not unkindly but did imply: Poor animals, they aren’t capable of behaving better.

  You gatortails get a lot of dynamism out of taking for granted you’re the natural future lords of the galaxy, the man thought, but your attitude has its disadvantages. Not that you deliberately antagonize any other races, provided they give you no trouble. But you don’t use their talents as fully as you might. Ydwyr seems to understand this. He mentioned that I could be valuable as a non-Merseian—which suggests he’d like to have team members from among the Eoidhunate’s client species—but I imagine he had woes enough pushing his project through a reluctant government, without bucking attitudes so ingrained that the typical Merseian isn’t even conscious of them.

  Given a radio link to the base, the expedition leade
r didn’t bother with a vocalizer. He spoke Eriau directly to the computer back there. It rendered his phrases into the dialect spoken here at Ktha-g-klek, to the limited extent that the latter was “known” to its memory bank. Grunting, clicking noises emerged from the minisets of whatever beings listened in the village. The reverse process operated, via relay by the bus. An artificial Merseian voice said: “Be welcome. We are in a torrent of toil, but can happen a sharing of self is possible.”

  “The more if we can help you with your transportation,” the leader offered.

  The Dom hesitated. A primitive’s conservatism, Flandry recognized. He can’t be sure airlifts aren’t unlucky, or whatever. Finally: “Come to us.”

  That was not quickly done. First everybody aboard must get into his heat suit. One had been modified for Flandry. It amounted to a white coverall bedecked with pockets and sheaths; boots; gauntlets—everything insulated around a web of thermoconductor strands. A fish-bowl helmet was equipped with chowlock, mechanical wipers, two-way sonic amplification, and short-range radio. A heat pump, hooked to the thermoconductors and run off accumulators, was carried on a backpack frame. Though heavy, the rig was less awkward than might have been expected. Its weight was well distributed; the gloves were thick and stiff, but apparatus was designed with that in mind, and plectrum-like extensions could be slipped over the fingers for the finer work. Anyway, Flandry thought, consider the alternative.

  It’s not that man or Merseian can’t survive awhile in this sauna. I expect we could, if the while be fairly short. It’s that we wouldn’t particularly want to survive.