Rise of the Terran Empire Page 25

  "Well," Falkayn said, "so you're the new Hermetian ambassador."

  "Oh, no," Eric replied. "By all accounts, Runeberg conducted our affairs very competently throughout the war. We want to keep him on. My title will be special envoy, head of our negotiators with the Commonwealth."

  "Why you? No offense, of course, but what experience have you had at that sort of thing?"

  Eric grinned crookedly. "I wondered too. In fact, I objected with a deal of noise. But Mother insisted. 'Tis a matter of politics. I am the heir apparent, the biggest name Hermes could send save for her, and she's got her hands full and overflowing here. That should carry weight on Earth—a token that we're determined about the peace settlement we want. And, uh, it should help at home likewise, that the Grand Ducal house is still concerning itself with crucial matters."

  "I see." Falkayn studied the homely, strong countenance. "Also, and this time no flattery, I think you're a good choice, you'll be much more than a figurehead. The blood of Sandra Tamarin and Nicholas van Rijn . . . yes."

  Eric flushed. "Maybe. Still, I'm not trained for diplomacy, I know not the ins and outs and roundabouts . . . . David, friend, will you help me? Can you?"

  "How?"

  "Oh, advice and—I know not. You do." Eric dropped his glance. "If, uh, if you'll not be too busy yourself."

  "I'll have plenty to keep me out of mischief, for certain. In effect, I'll take over the Solar Spice & Liquors Company, try to keep it afloat through all the hooraw to come." Falkayn sipped, set his drink down, and reached for his pipe. "On second thought, that'll keep me in mischief."

  Eric stared. "What about Freeman van Rijn?"

  "Damn him, he'll be charging around through space, probably for years to come, mending broken fences and, I have no doubt, making new ones out of pieces stolen from the competition. I wish—Ah, well, I can't do that anyway, me a family man." Falkayn loaded tobacco before continuing. "But yes, Eric, I'll find time and energy somewhere to give you what help I can. Your job is more important than mine. In fact, I might not choose to do mine, if I didn't think it had some value to yours—I mean to getting back some stability throughout what we are pleased to call civilization. A strong private company under the right leadership can contribute toward that end." He started fire and puffed smoke. "For a while," he finished.

  "What imply you?" Eric asked.

  Falkayn shrugged. "I'm coming to share Gunung Tuan's opinion. The wound to the old order of things is too deep, and I don't see anything to replace it that'll be worth having. We can buy time, you and I, maybe as much as a few decades before our splints and bandages give way. Meanwhile you can batten down on Hermes. And I . . . I can look for a place to begin afresh."

  "I never knew you so glum, David," Eric said in a distressed voice.

  Falkayn smiled, a genuine smile though not that of a young man. "Why, I'm basically optimistic, as you should be. Come the necessity, I expect we and those we care about will respond like survivor types. And until then, we can find a lot of happiness." He leaned forward and lightly punched his companion's shoulder. "Think. You're going to Lorna and marry her. I'm going to Coya and our kids." He raised his glass. "Here's to the lot of them."

  "Here indeed," Eric responded with regained eagerness.

  "They're what life is all about, right?" said Falkayn, and drank.

  Van Rijn and Sandra wandered out onto the terrace. Light fell soft from the house, soon losing itself in clear darkness. Above bulks of trees and hilltops reached a sky full of stars, Milky Way, glimmer of a nebula and of a sister galaxy. They reached the parapet and lingered. Beneath them ran the river, dimly agleam, a breath from it blowing upward. The water belled.

  Van Rijn slurped from his beer tankard and threw a sidewise glance at Sandra. She stood tall in a deep blue gown that seemed to make her part of the night. Unbound, her hair flowed below her shoulders and gave back what glow there was. "By damn, but you is a looker yet!" he exclaimed. "You is got too much stuff in you for being just a sovereign."

  She evaded his intent by replying, while she gazed outward, "I may not be that much longer."

  "I heard you got some shatterbrained list of demands dumped on your head." He was very lately back from Babur, where he had been overseeing the dismantling of the Seven's facilities. She had requested it, knowing how few men would be able to make sure that nothing was kept slyly in reserve, somewhere in an entire planetary system.

  "It took the form of a petition. But the real meaning's unmistakable. Christa Broderick's organization has tasted victory, and does have a claim on our gratitude. Also, the revolutionary terror weakened Kindred and Followers, the whole structure of the domains."

  "You is still got plenty who is personal loyal to you, nie? Including the navy."

  "No doubt," she said. "But do I, does anybody in his right mind want to see Hermes a police state ruling a population of helots? The upper classes would have to sacrifice their own freedoms to maintain that, you know.

  "Every side will bargain, and maneuver, and orate, and distort the issues beyond telling what shape they ever had. Because more than two sides are involved. I can't guess how many factions will spring up. The quarreling will belike go on for years. In the end, however—Well, it does give me hope that Broderick agrees we can't hold a constitutional convention till we have a firm peace. Then I fear we must. My guess at the moment is that Hermes will nominally still be a duchy, but in practice a republic.

  "It may be for the best. Who knows?"

  "I doubt it will make much difference in the long running," van Rijn said. "Autocrats, plutocrats, timocrats, bureaucrats, technocrats, democrats, they all tell everybody else at gunpoint what to do. We is bound into an age of crats." He sighed like a receding tide. "Was a good holiday from that while we had it, nie? Till mankind went and spoiled things. Back to school, children of Adam. Maybe after a few more whippings you will learn water not only flows downhill, it reaches bottom."

  She turned her head toward his promontory of a profile. "Mean you the Polesotechnic League is done for?"

  He nodded heavily. "Ja. Oh, we will keep the name. That is what I will dash about for, like a toad in a pot, to patch the old garment so it will hold off the coldest winds till those who is close to me has reached a safe port where they won't need so many metaphors. Afterward I suppose will still be held solemn councils of the League for another century, till some Napoleon type without no sense of humor comes along and ends the farce."

  Almost of itself, her right hand reached to touch his left, which gripped the parapet. "How can you be sure, Nick?" she asked mutedly. "Yes, the Seven are crippled, they may well go under. But the Home Companies are if anything stronger than ever, and likewise your independents, not?"

  He gave her a wry look which lasted. "Where does the strength come from?" he said. "For the Home Companies it is the Commonwealth, which is been kicked into starting a big military establishment and will not forget that kick. The independents, they is allied with you.

  "In both cases, like what the Seven was trying for, a government.

  "Don't you see, the League was once a free association of entrepreneurs what offered goods and services but did not force them on nobody. It is not private outfits what fights wars and operates concentration camps, it is governments, because governments is those organizations what claims the right to kill whoever will not do what they say. Corporations, unions, political parties, churches, God knows what, it makes no matter who gets hold of the machinery of government, they will use it and use it and use it.

  "Ach, we mortals is not wise enough to trust with power.

  "The League . . . it was split before this trouble came out in the open. Now it is had a civil war. Its first. Strang seduced the Seven into that, but he could not have done it if they had not already had their legs spread. We can temporary fake the shadow of what was, but the body is gone. And the spirit went before then, away back when men who had been free began grabbing for control over other men."

&n
bsp; Van Rijn's vision lost itself in the night. "No more important private decisions," he predicted. "Instead, authority takes over. Slogans substitute for thinking, beginning with the intellectuals but soon percolating down to the ordinary working man. Politicians appoint themselves magicians, who by passing laws and jacking up taxes and conjuring money out of thin air can guarantee everybody a soft ride through life. The favored businesses and institutions divide up the territory and strangle out anybody what might have something new. For every shipwreck what government brings about, the cure is more government. Power grows till its appetite is too great for filling on a single planet. Also, maybe troubles at home can be exported on bayonet points. But somehow, the real barbarians is never those that is fought, until too late . . . .

  "War. War. War.

  "I would advise we pray to the saints, except I wonder if the saints is left us."

  He tossed off half the contents of his tankard. "Whoo hoo, but I is been talking! Like yonder stream guggles into the sea, what stays just as salt as it always was, ha?" He laughed. "We should not waste good drinking time God has given us. See, a moon is rising."

  Sandra tugged his sleeve till he faced her. "Believe you seriously what you were saying, Nick?"

  "Well, might not be too bad on Hermes for the next couple generations, if you can put your new regime on a short leash."

  "I mean in general . . . . See you," she forced out, "I've had somewhat the same thoughts and—What intend you to do about it?"

  "I told you. Patch up how best I can."

  "But afterward? If we get an afterward in our lifetimes."

  Suddenly, strangely shy, he looked away. "I don't know. I expect the patching will be fun, you understand. Else maybe I would not try, old tired man like I am. Later—is an interesting question. Maybe later Muddlehead and me—I will be using Muddlin' Through, and should ought to have many a stiff poker game aboard—maybe we will lead a little expedition quite outside of known space, for whatever we may find."

  "I envy you that," she blurted.

  He swung back. "Why, by damn, sweetling," he exploded, "why you not come too?"

  She raised her hands as if to fend him off. "Oh, no, impossible."

  "Bah!" He made a chopping gesture. "How would you violate conservation of energy if you did? Conservation of momentousness, perhaps. But suppose in five, ten years you abdicate. Let Eric take over before time turns him doddery. You take the Long Trail with me!" He drained his tankard, clashed it down, and slapped her bottom. His right hand waved widely across heaven. "A universe where all roads lead to roaming. Life never fails us. We fail it, unless we reach out."

  She drew back from him a little while she laughed a little. "No, do stop, Nick. We came not together for discussing absurd plans—or politics or philosophy—only for being together. I need a drink."

  "Me too," said van Rijn. "Hokay, we will drink that moon down and the sun up, we will sing rowdy songs and try if we can dance a galliard to a Bach oratorio, we will not be solemn fools but honest ones, only you will remember what we spoke of." He offered his arm. She took it and they returned to the house of her fathers.

  Adzel went lurching along a cliffside path to the river, a five-liter mug in his grasp which his freedom fighters had given him. He had repeatedly filled it with martinis. You could hear him singing a kilometer away, "Baw-aw beedle eet bee dum bee bow," like a cheerful thunderstorm. At the water's edge, he saw Chee Lan seated on a rock, and halted. "Ho. I thought I would find you here."

  The Cynthian dipped her cigarette holder to him. The glow at its end traced a tiny red comet-streak. "And I took for granted you'd arrive when you'd tanked away enough to get sentimental," she purred. "You big blundlebumber."

  Adzel loomed slightly unsteady athwart woods, water, sky. Dawn was close. Overhead, between canyon walls that still were hulks of night, the stars were paling and whiteness mounted to eastward. The stream shone, glinted, swirled over bars and foamed past stones, on its way among boulders and gnarly trees. Its voice clanged laughterful from cliff to cliff. He took long breaths of the cold moist air which flowed above, the odors of upland summer.

  "Well, our last chance," he said. "Day after this, we embark on our courtesy rides home to our planets. I look forward, yes, obviously . . . but those were good years. Were they not? I will miss my partners. I told Davy so. I got a phone patch through to Muddlehead at Williams Field and told it so too. It answered that it is not programmed to be touched; but I wonder, I wonder. Here comes your turn. No mercy, small person." A hand descended, amply large to close around her. Quadrupedal, holder jaunty between her teeth, she arched her back to receive the caress, which was very gentle. "Come to Woden sometime," he urged. "Your folk have spacecraft. You will be investing in such ventures, and getting hog-rich. Come visit me."

  "In that gravity and glare?" she snorted.

  "That wild bright openness where the winds run loose, horizons endlessly before us but also flowers underfoot, a land that is the living Nirvana—Aiyu, Chee, I know I babble. Yet I would like to share with you as much of it as you can feel."

  "Why don't you come to me instead? We could rig a set of impellers for you to get a hint of treetop faring."

  "Do you think I can appreciate it?"

  "I should hope you'd have that much wit. Light across a sea of leaves, but down below full of shapes and mysteries, a cry of color on wings and petals, a glen where a rill comes joyful—" The Cynthian shook herself. "Dood en ondergang, you've got me doing it!"

  Adzel smiled around his fangs. "At least we are agreed we should make an occasional rendezvous, to swap lies about bygone times," he said.

  Chee discarded her cigarette butt, ground it out on the rock where she sat, and considered whether to add more narcotic to what she had already taken. Emerald in the mask of her face, her eyes went to Adzel's stein; her tail waved away prudence and she recharged the holder from a pouch at her waist.

  After she had struck fire, she stated rapidly: "Let's be rational for a moment, if you will pardon the expression. I think we will be rejoining forces in years to come, you and I, simply because circumstances won't allow us to enjoy our otium. We can't go home to what we left when we were young; it may still be, but we aren't, nor is the rest of the cosmos. We'll be wealthy, powerful, me more in absolute terms but you more relative to your society . . . while outside, the order of things that the Earthfolk brought goes tumbling down into the Earthfolk's flaming hell.

  "Old Nick knows. He'll be doing what he can, maybe just because he never left a game while a chip remained to him, but anyhow doing what he can against the evil days.

  "Cynthia, Woden—will we sit by and allow them to become victims after we're snugly dead? Or will we spend our money and knowledge working to make them ready?"

  She blew smoke at the huge head. "I don't relish the prospect," she admitted. "Ya-ah, how I curse it, I who imagined I'd retire to domestic comfort and expensive fun! But we'll be conferring, Adzel, for the rest of our days, yes, yes, we will."

  A rippling went the length of the dragon. "I fear you are right," he said. "I have had such forebodings myself, though I tried to dismiss them because they bind one to the Wheel . . . . Well, certain things matter more than one's immediate salvation."

  Chee grinned, a flash in the strengthening light. "Let's neither play noble," she replied. "We enjoyed the trader game as long as that lasted. The power game is less amusing, and at best it merely serves to hold off what is worse. Regardless, we can enjoy it too. And, who knows, could be that our races will build us a monument after they've started a whole new course of history for all the planets."

  "Oh, we'd better keep a sense of proportion," Adzel cautioned. "We may perhaps help them survive. What they do a thousand years hence—return then and see. Reality is more big than we can imagine."

  "Of course," Chee Lan said. "And now suppose we drop the subject, go join the rest, and have a last round of jollity before breakfast."

  "Excellent thinking, old s
hipmate," Adzel answered. "Hop aboard." She leaped to his outstretched arm and thence to his back. Above the cliffs, a few eastern clouds turned red.

  WINGLESS

  INTRODUCTION

  The rest would appear to be everyone's knowledge: how at last, inevitably, the secret of Mirkheim's existence was ripped asunder; how the contest for its possession brought on the Babur War; how that struggle turned out to be the first civil war in the Commonwealth and gave the Polesotechnic League a mortal wound. The organization would linger on for another hundred Terran years, but waning and disintegrating; in truth, already it had ceased to be what it began as, the proud upbearer of liberty. Eventually the Commonwealth, too, went under. The Troubles were only quelled with the rise and expansion of the Empire—and its interior peace is often bought with foreign violence, as Ythri and Avalon have learned. Honor be forever theirs whose deathpride preserved for us our right to rule ourselves!