Rise of the Terran Empire Read online

  "What could Hermes do?" Karagatzis wondered. "What would it? Valya is nothing to your people, I'm sure."

  "Stellar Metals trades with us," he reminded her. "I don't think Wyler's bosses would thank him for provoking a good trading partner."

  "Would one more set of outrages on one more backward world really annoy anybody? If you were back there, if you'd never served here, and heard the story, would you care that much? Be honest with yourself."

  He drew breath. "Freelady, I am here. I must try. Not?"

  "Well . . ." She reached a decision. "Very well, Lord Eric," she said carefully, addressing him as if she too had been born to the dialect of Anglic which they spoke on Hermes. "You may go and see if your influence can help the situation. Don't bluster, though. Don't commit us to something reckless. And don't make any promises to natives." Pain broke through her shell. "It's already hurt too much, having them come bewildered to us when they'd thought humans were their friends, and . . . and having to admit we can do zero."

  Eric cast a glance down at Charlie. The autochthon had sought him out on his return. They had gotten acquainted when the Hermetian was doing field work in the mountains from which Charlie had since become a refugee. Taken aback, he could merely say, "I haven't built up this lad's hopes on purpose, Freelady."

  Karagatzis gave him a bleak smile. "You haven't mine, at least."

  "I oughtn't be gone long," Eric said. "Wish me luck. Goodbye." He strode quickly from her, Charlie beside him.

  A few persons hailed them as they went. The greetings were not cheerful. Directly or indirectly, the invasion jarred on everybody's projects. More to the point, maybe, was the fact that these workers liked the Valyans. It was hard to stand helpless while the mountain folk were being robbed.

  Helpless? he thought. We'll see about that. At the same time, the back of his mind told him that this had been going on for weeks. If it was possible to curb Stellar, wouldn't someone already have acted?

  He and his partners had been on a different continent, mainly to observe dance rituals. Everywhere on the planet, choreography was an intimate, intricate part of life. To minimize the effect of their presence, they had parked their car well away from the site. The risk in thus cutting themselves off from radio contact had not seemed worth worrying about. But then he came back to a woe that he might have been able to prevent . . . .

  Outside the base stood half a dozen knockdown shelters, their plastic garish against the soft reds and browns of vegetation. Karagatzis had told Eric how the Stellar Metals men had chased the few earlier independent gold miners—whose activities had been harmless, as small as their scale was—out of the mountains along with every native who resisted. The victims were waiting for the next supply ship to give them transportation.

  Of the several men whom he saw sitting idle and embittered, one rose and approached him. Eric had met him before, Leandro Mendoza. "Hello, Freeman Tamarin-Asmundsen," he said without smiling.

  For a split second, in his preoccupation, the Hermetian was startled. Who? Surnames were not ordinarily used in conversation with his class; he was "Lord Eric" when addressed formally, otherwise plain "Eric" or, to close comrades, "Gunner." He remembered that Mendoza was using Earth-style Anglic, and swore at himself. "Hail," he said as he came to a reluctant halt.

  "Been away, have you?" Mendoza asked. "Just got the news, eh?"

  "Yes. If you'll excuse me, I'm in haste."

  "To see Sheldon Wyler? What do you think you can do?"

  "I'll find out."

  "Be careful you don't find out the hard way. We did."

  "Uh, yes, I heard his razzos ordered you off your own digs, with guns to back them up. Where's your equipment?"

  "Sold. No choice. We each had a nova's worth of investment in it, and not yet enough earned to pay for shipping it elsewhere. He bought us out at a price that leaves us only half ruined."

  Eric scowled. "Was that wise? Haven't you compromised your case when you bring it to court? You will sue, of course."

  Mendoza rattled forth a laugh. "In a Commonwealth court? If Stellar itself hasn't bought the judge, another company will have; and they swap favors. Our plea would be thrown out before we'd finished making it."

  "I meant the Polesotechnic League. Its ethics tribunal."

  "Are you joking?" After a few breaths, Mendoza added, "Well, run along if you want to. I appreciate your good intentions." Head drooping, he turned away.

  Eric stalked on. "What did your other self say?" Charlie asked—a rough translation of his trilled question. Psychologists were still trying to understand the concept of you-and-me which lay beneath the upland language. And now, Eric thought, the whole upland culture was in danger of disruption by the operations in its country.

  His own vocabulary was meager, the result of sessions with an inductive educator. "He is among those who were taking gold before the newcomers drove them off," he explained.

  "Yes, ourselves know himselves well. They paid generously in tools and cloths for the right to dig a few holes. The newcomers pay nothing. What is much worse, they scatter the woods-cattle."

  "The man who spoke to me did not expect my success."

  "Do you?"

  Eric didn't respond.

  At the garage, he chose a car and motioned Charlie in ahead of him. The Valyan's antennae quivered. He had never flown before. Yet when the vehicle rose on silent negagravity, he regarded the land through the bubble canopy and said, "I can guide you. Steer yonder." He pointed north of east.

  A human with a corresponding background could not have interpreted an aerial view so fast the first time, Eric thought. He had come here about a year ago prepared to feel a little patronizingly amicable toward beings whose most advanced society was in a bronze age. He had progressed to admiring them. Technologically they had nothing to teach a starfaring species. However, he wondered what eventual influence might come from their arts and their philosophies.

  If their societies survived. The foundations of existence are often gruesomely vulnerable. As an immediate example, the uplanders got most of their food from leaf-eating beasts, not wild, not tame, but something which neither of those words quite fitted. By filling the choicest territory with seeking, gouging, roaring machines, the Stellar Metals expedition broke up the herds: and thus became akin to a plague of locusts on ancient Earth.

  By all three blundering Fates, jagged through Eric, why does gold have to be an important industrial resource? The mature part of him said dryly: Its conductivity, malleability, and relative chemical inertness. He protested: Why does an outsider corporation have to come plundering it here, when they could go to thousands of worlds that are barren? The response came: A rich deposit was noticed by a planetologist, and word got out, and a minor gold rush started, which the corporation heard about. The prospecting had already been done; and on Valya men need no expensive, time-consuming life support apparatus.

  Then why did the lode have to occur right where it is? That question had no answer.

  The car flew rapidly over the coastal plain. Land wrinkled upward, turned into a range clad in trees. An ugly bare patch hove in view beside a lake. Charlie pointed, Eric descended.

  On the ground, a pair of guards hurried to meet him as he emerged, a human and a Merseian. "What're you doing here?" the man snapped. "This is a no trespassing zone."

  Eric bristled. "Who gave you property rights?"

  "Never mind. We have them and we enforce them. Go."

  "I want to see Sheldon Wyler."

  "He's seen enough of you slopheads." The guard dropped hand to the blaster holstered at his waist. "Go, or do we have to get tough?"

  "I don't believe he'd appreciate your assaulting the heir presumptive to the throne of Hermes," Eric said.

  The mercenaries could not quite hide nervousness. The Grand Duchy was not many light-years hence, and it did possess a miniature navy. "All right, come along," said the human at length.

  Crossing the dusty ground, Eric saw few workers. Mos
t of them were out raping the forest. Stellar was not content to pick at veins and sift streams. It ripped the quartz from whole mountainsides, passed it through a mobile extractor, and left heaps of poisonous slag; it sent whole rivers through hydraulic separators, no matter how much swimming life was destroyed.

  Inside a prefab cabin was a monastic office. Wyler sat behind the desk. He was bulky and heavy-featured, with a walrus mustache, and at first he was unexpectedly mild of manner. Dismissing the guards, he invited, "Have a chair. Smoke? These cigars are Earth-grown tobacco." Eric shook his head and lowered himself. "So you're going to be Grand Duke someday," Wyler continued. "I thought that job was elective."

  "It is, but the eldest child is normally chosen."

  "How come you're being a scientist here, then?"

  "Preparation. A Grand Duke deals with nonhumans too. Uh, xenological experience—" Eric's voice trailed off. Damn! The illwreaker's already put me on the defensive.

  "So you don't really speak for your world?"

  "No, but—no—Well, I write home. In time I'll be going home."

  Wyler nodded. "Sure, we'd like you to have a good opinion of us. How about hearing our side of the case?"

  Eric leaned forward, fists on knees. "Freelady Karagatzis has, uh, told me what you told her. I know how you got your 'charter for exploration and development.' I know you claim real property is not a local institution, thus you violate no rights. And you say you'll be done in a year or two, pack up and leave. Yes. You needn't repeat to me."

  "Then maybe you needn't repeat what your leader said."

  "But care you not what you're doing?"

  Wyler shrugged. "Every time a spaceship lands on a new planet, you get consequences. We knew nobody had objected to mining by free lances, though they had no charter—no legal standing. I was ready to bargain about compensation for the jumpies . . . the natives. But for that, I'd need the help of your experts. What I got was goddamn obstructionism."

  "Yes, for there's no way to compensate for ruining a country. Argh, why go on?" Eric snarled. "You never cared. From the beginning, you intended being a gang of looters."

  "That's for the courts to decide, wouldn't you say? Not that they'd try a suit, when no serious injury can be shown." Wyler put elbows on desk and bridged his fingers. "Frankly, you disappoint me. I'd hoped you wouldn't go through the same stale chatter. I can claim to be doing good too, you know. Industry needs gold. You'd put the convenience of a few thousand goddamn savages against the needs of billions of civilized beings."

  "I—I—Very well." Eric lifted his head. "Let's talk plainly. You've made an enemy of me, and I have influence on Hermes. Want you to keep things that way, or not?"

  "Naturally, Stellar Metals wants to be friends, if you'll allow. But as for your threat—I admit I'm no expert on your people. But I do seem to remember they've got their own discontented class. Will they really want to take on the troubles of a bunch of goddamn outsiders, long after these operations are over and done with? I doubt it. I think your mother has more sense."

  In the end, Eric went bootless back to his car. It was the first absolute defeat he had ever known. As Karagatzis had warned, telling Charlie made it doubly painful.

  Y minus 5.

  That moon of Babur which humans had dubbed Ayisha was of approximately Lunar size. From a viewport in one of the colony domes, Benoni Strang looked out at dimly lit stone, ashen and crater-pocked. The sky was black and stars shone unwinking through airlessness. The planet hung gibbous, a great amber shield emblazoned with bands of cloud whose whiteness was softened by tints of ocher and cinnabar. Rearing above the near horizon, a skeletal test-pad support for spacecraft seemed like a siege tower raised against the universe.

  Within the domes were more than warmth, Earth-normal weight, air that a man dared breathe. Strang stood on velvety grass, among flowering bushes. Behind him the park held a ball court, a swimming pool, fountains, tables where you could sit to dine on delicate food and drink choice wines. Elsewhere in the base were pleasure facilities of different kinds, ranging from a handicraft shop and an amateur theater to vices as elaborate as any in the known worlds. Folk here did not only need distraction from exacting work. They needed offsets for the fact that they would spend goodly portions of their lives on Ayisha and Babur and in ambient space; that they got no leaves of absence, were allowed no visitors, and had their outgoing mail censored. Those who eventually could endure it no longer, even with high pay accumulating at home, must submit to memory wipe before departing. The agreement was part of their contract, which colony police stood ready to enforce.

  Strang's mind returned to early years, the toil and peril and austerity when men first carved for themselves a foothold in this waste; and he almost regretted them. He had been young then.

  Though I was never especially merry as the young are supposed to be, he thought. I was always too driven.

  "What're you brooding about?" asked Emma Reinhardt.

  He turned his head and regarded her. She was a handsome woman from Germania, an assistant engineer, who might well become his next mistress; they had lately been much in each other's company.

  "Oh," he said, "I was just thinking how far we've come since we began here, and what's left to do."

  "Do you ever think about something besides your . . . your mission?" she asked.

  "It's always demanded everything I had to give," he admitted.

  She studied him in her turn. He was of medium height and slim, graceful of movement, his face rectangular in outline and evenly shaped, his hair and mustache sleek brown, his eyes gray-blue. In this leisure hour he wore an elegantly tailored slacksuit. "I sometimes wonder what'll become of you when this project is finished," she murmured.

  "That won't be for quite a while," he said. "I'm presently estimating six standard years before we can make our first major move."

  "Unless you're surprised."

  "Yes, the unpredictable is practically the inevitable. Well, I trust that what we've built will be sound enough that it can adjust—and act."

  "You misunderstand me," she said. "Of course you've got a lot of leadership ahead of you yet. But eventually matters will be out of your hands. Or at least many other hands will be there too. Then what?"

  "Then, or actually before then, I'm going home."

  "To Hermes?"

  He nodded. "Yes. In a way, for me, this whole undertaking has been a means to that end. I've told you what I suffered there."

  "Frankly, it hasn't seemed very terrible to me," she said. "So you were a Traver born, you couldn't vote, the aristocrats owned all the desirable land, and—Well, no doubt an ambitious boy felt frustrated. But you got offplanet, didn't you, and made your own career. Nobody tried to prevent you."

  "What about those I left behind?"

  "Yes, what about them? Are they really badly off?"

  "They're underlings! Never mind how easy the conditions may seem, they're underlings. They've no say whatsoever in the public affairs of their planet. And the Kindred have no interest in progress, in development, in anything but hanging onto their precious feudal privileges. I tell you, the whole rotten system should have been blasted away a century ago. No, it should have been aborted at the start—" Strang curbed himself. "But you can't understand. You haven't experienced it."

  Emma Reinhardt shivered a bit. She had glimpsed the fanatic.

  Y minus 1.

  Leonardo Rigassi, spaceship captain from Earth, was the man who tracked down the world for which several crews were searching. Astonished, he found that others were present before him. They called it Mirkheim.

  Thereafter came the year which God, or destiny, or chance had ordained.

  I

  Under a full moon, Delfinburg was making its slow way over the Philippine Sea. A thousand colors flared and jumped, voices resounded, flesh jostled flesh through the streets of the pleasure district. There were those who sought quieter recreation. Among places for them was the roof garden of Gondwana House.
At the starboard edge of a leading pontoon, it offered a sweeping overlook of the ocean city on one side, of the ocean itself on another. By day the waters were often crowded with boats, but usually after dark you saw only the running lights of a few patrolling fish herders and, in tropical climes, pumpships urging minerals up from the bottom to keep the plankton beds nourished. They resembled fireflies that had wandered far from land.

  The garden's own fluoros were dimmed tonight and the live orchestra muted. It played dance music of the Classical Revival, waltzes, mazurkas, tangos leading couples to hold each other close and glide softly. Flowers and shrubs surrounded the floor, setting fragrances of rose, jasmine, aurelia, livewell adrift on the mild air. Stars overhead seemed almost near enough to touch.