Rise of the Terran Empire Read online

  Falkayn and his comrades did not linger. They had lives of their own to lead. From time to time they would come back, eager to learn how the work had gone; and always the toilers would bless them.

  Y minus 12.

  When he descended on Babur, Strang no longer walked, but traveled about at comparative ease, held in a harness atop a gravsled. The natives knew he could handle himself sufficiently well on their world to merit their respect. He had proved that over and over—occasionally at mortal risk, when the violent land suffered an outburst, a quake, or an avalanche. Today he sat in a chamber built of ice and talked for hour after hour with one he called Ronzal.

  That was not the Baburite's true name. There was a set of vibrations which the computer in a vocalizer decided to render as "Ronzal." Conceivably it was not nomenclature at all. Strang had never found out for certain. Nonetheless, in the course of time he and the bearer had become friends, as nearly as was possible. And who could tell how near that was?

  Which language they used during their discussion depended on what either wanted to say. Anglic or League Latin lent themselves best to some concepts, "Siseman" to others. (Those three syllables were another artifact of the vocalizer.) And still, every now and then they must grope about for a way to express what they meant. They were not even sure always what they thought. Though they had spent their careers patiently trying to build bridges across the differences of their brains and their histories, the endeavor was far from reaching an end.

  Yet Ronzal could say what wakened trumpets in Strang: "The final opposition has yielded. The entire globe is meshed in the Imperial Band. Now we are ready to look outward."

  At last, at last! But years lie ahead before we—Babur and I—can do more than look. Calm, Benoni, lad, calm. The human hauled back down his soaring thoughts. "Wonderful," he said. That was about as much enthusiasm as he saw any point in showing. The two races did not rejoice alike. "My colleagues and I have been expecting it, of course. You've rolled up victories till I was puzzled why any society dared resist you. In fact, I'm just back from a conference with my"—he hesitated—"my superiors." They aren't really. No longer. As events here gathered momentum, as it grew more and more likely that Babur can in fact become the kind of instrument I foresaw, and I am now their vital principal liaison with Babur; I have become their equal. In the end, I am going to be their chieftain.

  No matter now. No sense in boastfulness. It's a weary way yet till I stand again on Hermes.

  "I'm authorized to begin talks about creating a space navy for you," he said.

  "We have considered among ourselves how that can be an economic possibility," Ronzal responded. "How can we meet the cost?"

  Fighting for coolness against the thrill that went through him, Strang spoke with caution. "It may be our relationship is ready to go beyond the immediate value-for-value we've exchanged hitherto. Obviously you can't buy weapons development from us with the resources you have to offer."

  (Gold and silver, cheap on Babur because, at its temperatures, solid mercury filled their industrial roles better. Plant secretions which were convenient starting points for organo-halogen syntheses. Some other materials that formed links in a chain of trades, from planet to planet, till the traders finally got what they wanted. Commerce between worlds so mutually foreign would always be marginal at best.)

  "Our races can exchange services as well as goods," Strang said.

  Ronzal fell silent, doubtless pondering. How deeply dared it trust monsters who breathed oxygen, drank liquid water, and radiated oven-hotly from their armor? Strang sympathized. He had passed through the same unsureness; he would never be quite at ease either. As if to remind himself how out of place he was here, he squinted through gloom at the Baburite.

  When both stood erect, Ronzal's head reached the man's waist. Behind an upright torso stretched a horizontal barrel, tailless, mounted on eight short legs. It seemed to bear rows of gills. Actually those were the opercula protecting tracheae which, given a dense hydrogen atmosphere, aerated the body as efficiently as Strang's lungs did his. From the torso sprang a pair of arms terminating in lobsterlike claws; extending from the wrists above these were strong tendrils to serve as fingers. The head consisted mostly of spongy snout, with four tiny eyes behind. The smooth skin was striped in orange, blue, black, and white. A filmy robe covered most of it.

  The Baburite had no mouth. It ground up food with its claws and put this into a digestive pouch on the abdomen to be liquefied before the snout dipped down to absorb the nourishment. Hearing and smell centered in the tracheal organs. Speech arose from vibrating diaphragms on the sides of the head. The sexes were three, and individuals changed cyclically from one to the next according to patterns and circumstances which Strang had never managed to elucidate fully.

  An untrained human would only have perceived grotesqueness. He, looking at the being in its own environment, saw dignity, power, and a curious beauty.

  A humming behind the vocalizer asked, "Who of us will gain?"

  "Both of us." Though Strang knew his words would have no meaning to the listener, he let them clang forth: "Security. Mastery. Glory. Justice."

  Y minus 9.

  Seen from an activated transparency in Nicholas van Rijn's penthouse atop the Winged Cross, Chicago Integrate was a godland of spires, towers, many-colored walls, crystalline vitryl, gracefully curving trafficways, flickering emblems, here and there a stretch of trees and greensward, the sky and the lake as aglitter with movement as the ground itself. Whenever they visited, the Falkayns never tired of that spectacle. To David it was comparatively fresh; he had spent most of his life off Earth. But Coya, who had been coming to see her grandfather since before she could walk, likewise found it always new. Today it beckoned their attention more than ever before: for they would soon be embarked on their first shared voyage beyond Sol's outermost comets.

  The old man was giving them a small, strictly private farewell dinner. The live servitors whom he could afford didn't count, they were well trained in discretion, and he had sent both his current mistresses to his house in Djakarta to await his arrival in a day or so. Knowing that van Rijn's idea of a small dinner took a couple of hours, from the first beluga caviar to the last magnificently decadent cheese, the Falkayns brought good appetites. A Mozart sonata lilted them welcome; tankards of beer stood beside icy muglets of akvavit and a dozen varieties of smoked seafood; incense from Tai-Tu drifted subtle on the air. Their host had in their honor put on better clothes than he usually wore, full-sleeved shirt, lace at his throat and wrists, iridescent vest, plum-colored trousers—though his feet were in straw slippers—and he seemed in boisterous good humor.

  Then the phone chimed.

  "Wat drommel?" van Rijn growled. "I told Mortensen no calls from anybody less rank than the angel Gabriel. That porridge brain he got is gone cold and pobbery with lumps in, ha?" His huge form slap-slapped across an expanse of trollcat rug to the instrument at the opposite end of the living room. "I give him his just deserts, flambé, by damn!" A hairy finger poked the accept button.

  "Freelady Lennart is calling, sir," announced the figure in the screen. "You said you would speak to her whenever she answered your request for a conversation. Shall she be put through?"

  Van Rijn hesitated. He tugged the goatee which, beneath waxed mustaches, ornamented his triple chin. His beady black eyes, close set under a sloping forehead on either side of a great hook nose, darted toward his guests. It was not really true what many asserted, that the owner of the Solar Spice & Liquors Company had a cryogenic computer as prosthesis for a soul. He rather doted on his favorite granddaughter, and her newly acquired husband had been his protégé before becoming his agent. "I know what she got to honk-honk about," he rumbled. "Grismal. Not for our happy fun gastogether."

  "But you'd better grab the chance to contact her when it comes, right, Gunung Tuan?" Coya replied. "Go ahead. Davy and I will admire the view." She didn't suggest he take the call in a different room. That he co
uld trust them as he did himself went without saying. As confidence dwindled in public institutions, those of the Solar Commonwealth and the Polesotechnic League alike, loyalties grew the more intensely personal.

  Van Rijn sighed like a baby typhoon and settled himself into a chair, paunch resting majestically on lap. "I won't be long, no, I will currytail discussion," he promised. "That Lennart, she gives me indigestion, ja, she makes my ghastly juices boil. But we got this need for standing back to back, no matter how bony hers is . . . . Put her through," he told his chief secretary.

  Falkayn and Coya took their drinks back to the transparency and looked out. But their glances soon strayed, for they found each other a sight more splendid than anything below or around them.

  He might have been less in love than she, being eighteen years older and a wanderer who had known many women in many strange places. But in fact he felt that after all that time he had finally come to a haven he had always, unknowingly, been seeking. Coya Conyon, who proudly followed a custom growing in her generation and now called herself Coya Falkayn, was tall and slender in a scarlet slack-suit. Her dark hair fell straight to her shoulders, framing an oval face where the eyes were wide and gold-flecked green, the mouth wide and soft above a firm little chin, the nose snubbed like his own, the complexion sun-tinged ivory.

  And she could not yet sate her gaze with him. He was tall, too; his gray outfit showed off an athletic build; his features were lean in the cheeks and high in the cheekbones, his eyes the blue and his hair the yellow common among the aristocratic families of Hermes. He also had the erect bearing of that class; but his lips denied their heritage, creasing too readily into laughter. Thus far he needed no meditechnic help to look younger than his forty-one years.

  They touched tankards and smiled. Then van Rijn's bellow jerked their minds willy-nilly across the room.

  "What you say?" The merchant reared where he sat. Black ringlets, the style of three decades ago, swirled about his beefy shoulders. Through Falkayn flitted recollection of a recent episode when a rival firm had mounted an elaborate espionage operation to find out if the old man was dyeing his hair or not. It might be a clue to whether age would soon diminish his rapacious capacities. The attempt had failed.

  "You shouldn't make jokes, Lennart," van Rijn bawled on. "Is not your style. You, in a clown suit with a red balloon snoot and painted grin, you would still look like about to quote some minor Hebrew prophet on a bad day. Let's talk straight about how we organize to stop this pox-and-pestilence thing."

  Across several thousand kilometers, Hanny Lennart's stare drilled into his. She was a gaunt and sallow blonde, incongruously wearing a gilt-embroidered tunic. "You are the one acting the fool, Freeman van Rijn," she said. "I tell you quite plainly, the Home Companies will not oppose the Garver bill. And let me make a suggestion for your own good. The popular mood being what it is, you would be most ill-advised to turn your above-ground lobbyists and your undercover bribe artists loose against it. They would be bound to fail, and you would gain nothing except ill will."

  "But—Hel en verdoeming! Can't you see what this will bring? If the unions get that kind of voice in management, it won't be the camel's nose in our tent. No, by damn, it will be the camel's bad breath and sandy footprints, and soon comes in the rest of him and you guess what he will do."

  "Your fears are exaggerated," Lennart said. "They always have been."

  "Never. Everything I warned against has been happening, year by year, clomp, clomp, clomp. Listen. A union is a profit-making organization same as a company, no matter how much wind it breaks about the siblinghood of workers. Hokay, no harm in that, as long as it stays honest greedy. But these days the unions are political organizations as well, tied in with government like Siamese twin octopuses. You let them steer those funds, and you are letting government itself into your business."

  "That can be reciprocal," Lennart declared. "Frankly—speaking personally for a moment, not as a voice of the Home Companies—frankly, I think your view of government as a natural enemy of intelligent life, I think it belongs back in the Mesozoic era. If you want a clear-cut example of what it can lead to, look out beyond the Solar System; see what the Seven do, routinely, brutally, on world after world. Or don't you care?"

  "The Seven themselves don't want open competition—"

  "Freeman van Rijn, we are both busy. I've done you the courtesy of making this direct call, to tell you not to waste your efforts trying to persuade the Home Companies to oppose the Garver bill, so you may know we mean it. We're quite content to see the law pass; and we feel reasonably sure it will, in spite of anything you and your kind can do. Now shall you and I end this argument and get back to our proper concerns?"

  Van Rijn turned puce. He gobbled a few words which she took for assent. "Goodbye, then," she said, and switched off. The vacant screen hummed.

  After a minute, Falkayn approached him. "Uh, that seemed like bad news," he ventured.

  Van Rijn slowly lessened his resemblance to a corked volcano. "Wicked news," he mumbled. "Unrighteous news. Nasty, sneaking, slimy news. We will pretend it was never spewed out."

  Coya came to stand beside his chair and brush a hand across his mane. "No, talk about it, Gunung Tuan," she said quietly. "You'll feel better."

  Between oaths and less comprehensible phrases in various languages, van Rijn conveyed his tidings. Edward Garver, Lunograd delegate in Parliament, had introduced a bill to put the administration of private pension funds credited to employees who were citizens of the Commonwealth, under control of their unions. In the case of Solar Spice & Liquors, that meant principally the United Technicians. The Home Companies had decided not to oppose passage of the measure. Rather, their representatives would work with the appropriate committees to perfect it for mutual satisfaction. This meant that the Polesotechnic League as a whole could take no action; the Home Companies and their satellites controlled too many votes on the Council. Besides, the Seven In Space would likely be indifferent, such a law affecting them only slightly. It was the independent outfits like van Rijn's, operating on an interstellar scale but with much of their market in the Commonwealth, which would find themselves hobbled as far as those monies were concerned.

  "And when United Technicians say where we invest, United Technicians got that much extra power," the merchant finished. "Power not just in our affairs, but in finance, business, government—and government is getting more and more to be what runs the show. Ach, I do not envy the children you will have, you two."

  "Don't you see any hope of heading this off?" Falkayn asked. "I know how often you've played skittles with whoever got underfoot. How about a public relations effort? Pressure on the right legislators; logrolling, oh, every trick you know so well . . ."

  "I think no chance, with the big five against us," van Rijn said heavily. "Maybe I am wrong. But . . . ja, ja, I am thirty years your senior, Davy boy, and even if I got long-life chromosomes and lots of good antisenescence treatment, still, in the end a fellow gets tired. I will not do much."

  He shook himself. "But hoy, what fumblydiddles is this I am making? We are supposed to have a happy evening and get drunk, before Coya ships out with your team and finds me lots of lovely new profits." He surged to his feet. "We need more drink here! Mars-dry we are. Where is that gluefoot butler? More beer, I say! More akvavit! More everything, by damn!"

  Y minus 7.

  The sun Elena was a dwarf, but the nearness of its planet Valya made its disc stand big and red-orange in an indigo heaven. At midmorning it would not set for almost forty hours. The ocean sheened calm as a lake. Land rolled away from it under a russet cover of shrubs and turf. Tiny, glittery flyers which were not insects rode a warm, faintly iron-tangy breeze.

  Outside the headquarters building of the scientific base, Eric Tamarin-Asmundsen spoke his anger and his intent to the commander, Anna Karagatzis. Beside them, long-limbed, spindly, blue-furred, head like a teardrop with antennae, crouched the native they called Charlie.


  "I tell you, you can do nothing there but waste your time," the woman said. "Do you think I haven't gone from protests to pleas to threats? And Wyler laughed at me—till he grew irritated and threatened me in turn if I didn't stop pestering him."

  "I didn't know that!" Eric stiffened. Blood heated his face. He tried to calm himself. "A bluff. What would they dare do to any of us? What could they?"

  "I'm not sure," Karagatzis sighed. "But I've been to their camp and seen how well armed they are. And we, what are we but a community of researchers and support personnel who've never been shot at in their lives? Stellar's men can do anything they want. And we're outside every civilized jurisdiction."

  "Are we? The Commonwealth claims a right to punish misdeeds by its citizens wherever they are, not?"

  "True. But I suspect many, perhaps all of this group have different citizenship. Besides, we'd get no police investigation here, across more than two hundred light-years."

  "Hermes isn't so far."

  Karagatzis gave him a probing look. He was large. His weather-browned features seemed older than his twenty-one standard years: broad, Roman-nosed, square-jawed, hazel-eyed, ordinarily rather pleasantly ugly but now taut with wrath. In the style of men on his home planet as well as Earth, he went beardless and cropped his black locks above the ears. His garb was plain coverall and boots; however, a shoulder patch bore the insigne of his ducal family.