Orion Shall Rise Read online

  The fact that the men had served on opposite sides in the recent conflict put no constraint on their friendliness. The Whale War had been undeclared and short, the aims of either party strictly limited, and a chivalric code prevailed.

  Terai, eighteen years of age and newly enlisted in the Federation Navy, won a medal when he took charge of his dismasted, burning frigate after all officers perished at the Battle of the Farallones, and kept her afloat under a jury rig the whole way back to Hilo Bay. He always remembered how the nearest of the victorious Union vessels hove to and sent men to help put out the fire, who expressed regrets that they could do no more than that because they must pursue fleeing Maurai units.

  As for Launy, he, somewhat older, had captained one of the privateers that brought commerce to a standstill throughout the eastern Pacific Ocean. With her diesel auxiliary and lavish armament, his craft captured nine merchantmen, plundered them, and sent them to the bottom; but first he transferred their crews, not forgetting ship’s cats. Fascinated by Maurai culture, he treated his ‘guests’ with good cheer equal to any they would have offered in their homes.

  Thus the two could respect and like each other.

  Once or twice they did argue the rights and wrongs of their causes. The last such discussion before the next war occurred in quiet, wainscotted surroundings, a dining room in the Seattle chapter house of Launy’s Wolf Lodge.

  He had invited Terai there for a gourmet meal and a look at something of what his civilization had accomplished, besides manufacture, trade, and exploration. The chamber was large, high-ceilinged, the tables spaced well apart and bearing snowy linen, fine china, ivory utensils. Flames danced in a stone fireplace but were only decorative; electric heating staved off the cold while wind hooted and rain dashed against glass. Likewise electric were the lights, though kept soft. Waterpower was abundant in these parts. In addition, the use of coal throughout the Union increased year by year at a rate that Maurai found horrifying.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Launy,’ Terai said. A bottle of wine and a fair amount of local whiskey had lubricated his tongue. Sober, he was chary of words. ‘A decent fellow like you, fighting to keep a bunch of whalers in business. It’s not as if you had to. There’s no conscription here, and the war was not called a war anyway. Yes, you’ve told me you did well off your raiding, and it was a great adventure. But you’re doing better off your company, and if a man feels restless – Lesu Haristi, he’s got a whole planet to roam, and half of it still mostly unknown!’

  ‘And more than half of it full of nothing but backward starvelings,’ Launy retorted.

  ‘Oh, now, I’ve traveled rather widely, and it isn’t that bad. Not everywhere.’

  ‘Bad enough, and in enough places.’ Launy’s speech quickened. ‘I haven’t just read books, I’ve seen.’

  ‘M-m, how?’

  ‘My father was an Iron Man till he grew arthritic. He took me, a kid, along with him on his final trip. We went clear to the Lantic coast, prospecting. Plenty of stuff yet in the dead cities. We didn’t run into any danger. But I almost wish we had, because the main reason was that the natives were too miserable to be a menace. Instead, they begged. A lot of women tried to rent themselves out, with their families’ consent – for a needle, a plastic cup, anything useful we could spare. I was too young to pay much heed, but I don’t think those poor, scrawny, rickety-boned creatures got many takers.’

  I like him more than ever, Terai thought. He’s straying from my question, maybe on purpose, but he’s not using the change of subject to glamorize himself.

  That would have been easy, his mind went on. The Iron Men were picturesque, and their early exploits had been heroic in a raw fashion as they fought, sneaked, or bargained their way across the Mong-occupied plains in search of metal. Today, however, treaties regulated their passage; Lodge-owned plants near the sources processed materials before those were loaded onto trains that then chugged uneventfully over the prairies and up the mountains; sometimes the freight came from lodes that had been rediscovered, rather than from salvage: coal enormously exceeded it in tonnage. But, true, expeditions did still range through the wilds and barrens of the far East, hunting for the means to give Union industry more muscle. If it could only be given more brain and heart.…

  ‘No, I’ll take a civilized country,’ Launy continued. ‘I’ve been south as far as Corado, and the countries there are all right: political puppets of yours, but living all right. The Mong, too. I’ve visited the Mong, and they’re as different from us as ever in spite of modernizing, but even their serfs eat well and are better educated than you might expect. I’d certainly love to travel through your Federation someday – I mean as a private person – oh, yes. And could be I’ll make it to Yurrup one of these years. Trade’s really begun growing in that direction, hasn’t it? Skyholm must be a wonderful sight. And you can name other lucky areas. But most of ’em –’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘No, thanks. I know about countries where the rich have it good, but I know about their poor, too, and I know about those where everybody is poor, and I tell you, I’ve seen enough.’

  Terai returned to the attack. ‘If you’re so tender-hearted,’ he asked, ‘how can you support the slaughter of whales?’

  ‘You Maurai hunted them in the past. And you tried ranching them, like cattle.’

  ‘That was before out scientists learned – what scientists were finding out shortly before the Downfall – how intelligent the cetaceans are.’ Terai gripped his glass, snuffed the smoky odor, tossed ardency down his throat. ‘Oh, you’ve heard all this. Bit by bit, we decided the world isn’t so impoverished that men need to kill beings like that for meat and oil.’

  He regarded the other across their table. What he saw was a big man, though not as big as himself, heavy-featured, ruddy, with yellow hair combed down to the shoulders and a close-trimmed red-yellow beard. The Norrman was rather typically clad for an evening out: scarf of imported silk tucked into the open collar of a plaid wool shirt, buckskin trousers, solid half-boots. An ivory ring on his left hand declared him married.

  In this climate Terai dressed similarly, but his clothes were plain and their cut, as well as his appearance, foreign to the diners around. Those, mostly husband-and-wife couples, kept trying not to stare.

  ‘You could decide it on your own account,’ Launy said. ‘Not on behalf of the whole human race. When you started seizing Northwest whaling ships –’

  ‘As we’d long been seizing slave ships. You never objected to that.’

  ‘No. We don’t care for slavery here.’ Launy raised a palm. ‘Wait. We care for freedom. But that means the freedom of people, not horses or chickens. Sure, whales are smart animals, and I’d rather we left them alone. But you’ve never proved they’re more than animals. Be honest; all you have is a theory.’

  He drank and spoke fast: ‘You took it on yourselves, in what you thought was your almightiness, to tell free captains what they could and could not do on the high seas. Maybe you realized whaling’s carried on almost exclusively by members of the Fish Hawk and Polaris Lodges, and you didn’t think the rest of this loose-jointed country would help them with its blood. But of course no Lodge forsakes another; the Mong wars taught us loyalty. Of course we told you busybodies to go Rusha. And when you got violent, why, the Lodges raised men and money, they armed and convoyed, they got violent right back at you.’

  And in pitched battles, as well as raids, you persuaded us we had better not insist, Terai admitted. He recalled vessels that were the core of the Union fleet at Farallones, steam-powered, steelplated, devoid of catapults but dragon-headed with cannon that fired explosive shells and tubes that launched rockets. We didn’t understand you. We never guessed – in our, oh, yes, our ‘almightiness’ – that anyone would squander resources on that scale, for no larger reason than yours.

  Launy’s voice dropped. He leaned forward. ‘Look, Terai,’ he proceeded earnestly, ‘let’s not squabble. Let me just add one thing, and afterward
we can get drunk and sing songs and whatever else we feel like. But look. We need sperm oil for fine lubrication. Sure, I know jojoba oil will do. But we can’t import enough from areas where the jojoba plant grows, because there isn’t enough being raised, nor enough trade with them to stimulate it. As for whale meat and lamp fuel and baleen and such, mainly we sell them to the Mong, and buy stuff they have that we want, like coal or the tolls on our railroads through their nations. After we’ve got our industry really well developed, why, we won’t need to go whaling. It won’t pay anymore. Instead of bitching about our development and ob – uh – obstructing it every way you can short of provoking a full-dress war … why don’t you encourage us? We’d stop our whaling that much the sooner. Could it be that you – no, not you, Terai, but your politicians, your merchants – could it be that they don’t want anybody, anywhere in the world, to get as important as the Maurai Federation?’

  ‘No!’ Terai denied, and wished for an instant that he were completely sincere. Well, I am as far as I myself go, I suppose.‘How often have we said it? We don’t want any single civilization lording it over the rest, nor any industry that damages the planet –’

  Launy threw back his head and interrupted his guest with a shout of laughter. ‘Sorry,’ he apologized. ‘It suddenly struck me … how we’re parroting our newspapers and professors and orators … when you’re sailing on tomorrow’s tide. Talk about waste!’

  Terai relaxed and boomed forth a chuckle. ‘You’re right about that, at least. Good drinking time is a nonrenewable resource. And didn’t you mention a girl show?’

  ‘I did that.’

  Neither man felt need of the sleazy resorts in Docktown. Launy’s wife had accompanied him to Seattle, though agreeing not to interfere with his stag night; Terai’s crew included wahines as well as kanakas. However, Seattle strip dances were quite a contrast to the demure Awaiian hulas. It became a memorable evening.

  They had few more. Five years after the Whale War ended, the Power War began; and it was declared – by the Federation upon the Union – and went on for three grisly years, because this time each agonist was determined to break the other.

  That Launy and Terai had become friends was nothing extraordinary. The curious chance was that they met again, early in the second year of the second strife between their peoples.

  A naval engagement took place of the Aurgon coast. The Maurai forces won, as the Maurai were winning everywhere at sea. They had learned their lesson earlier, had closely studied a society which they no longer underestimated, and had made ready for a conflict that the realists among them knew was ineluctable. The strength, skill, wealth, manpower had been theirs all along, needing only to be mobilized – though at that, the Norrmen gave them a hard fight.

  The ship that bore Terai sank an enemy vessel and set about rescuing survivors. Those who were hauled from the water included a radionics officer named Launy Birken.

  2

  Waves ran blue, green white-laced, foam-swirled, from a shadowiness to starboard that was the continent, westward to the world’s edge. They brawled, they whooshed, they hissed and chuckled; the surge of them pulsed upward through timbers and into human bones. The sun stood past noon where a few clouds and many gulls flew like spatters of milk. Air blew spindrift and chill into men’s faces, tossed their hair, filled their ears with skirling.

  Despite her size and the fact that she was beating upwind, Barracuda bounded on her way at twenty knots. She could have gone faster if her lift motors had raised more sail, but would have outpaced most of her flotilla. A science of hydrodynamics that, in the course of centuries, had become almost as precise as ballistics underlay her design. The trimaran structure was intended for speed and maneuverability rather than volume. Her rigging was more conventional – not that Maurai shipbuilders followed a uniform convention – but equally subtle and efficient. Five masts down the length of the main hull each bore five courses of squaresails (translucent synthetic fabric, strong and rot-proof) that were actually airfoils. Computer-controlled, their aileron edge panels created vectors that rotated the masts to whatever the optimum angle of the moment might be; no stays were needed, nor many running lines. Nor were more than four sailors –

  – if she had been a merchantman carrying express cargo. In the event, dozens of crewfolk were on deck. They had ample room. Save for a streamlined bridge, cabins were below; machinery, weapon turrets, lifeboats, and other apparatus occupied little space; the solar collectors were deployed, to charge accumulators and refresh bacterial fuel cells as well as to furnish power, but they were elevated on hydraulic shafts and so formed pergolas in whose shade people might gather. Hardly any did, for Maurai found these waters and this atmosphere cold.

  On a civilian craft, the setting would have been less austere. Probably the main prow would have borne a figurehead: very likely religious, the carven Triad, Tanaroa the Creator, Lesu Haristi the Saviour on His right, shark-toothed Nan the Destroyer on His left. Surely planters would have been bright with flowers. As it was, apart from the hues of indurated wood in strakes, planks, and spars, all the color was aft, where the Cross and Stars of the Federation streamed at the flagstaff.

  Yet the crewfolk provided ample gaiety, as they took their pleasure between battles. Some defied the weather and wore nothing but a sarong, plus beads, bracelets, garlands, or leis they had woven from blossoms grown in pots in their quarters. Young, lithe, skin tones ranging from amber through umber to black, they were doubly beautiful amidst their more fully clad mates. Here and there, intricate tattoos rippled to the play of flesh. The majority were male, but, as nearly always on Maurai vessels, adventurous women, not yet married, were enrolled as well.

  In little spontaneous groups, they celebrated their aliveness. Japes flew. Feet bounded, hips swayed, hands undulated. Through the wind came sounds of flute, drum, fiddle, accordion, koto, song. Dice rattled; stones moved over a chalk-marked go board. Two persons told stories from their home to listeners from distant islands, neither printed pages nor radio waves transmit the entire diversity of a realm that sprawled across half the Pacific Ocean. A couple embraced; another couple went down an open hatch to make love. Three or four individuals sat apart and contemplated the waves, or their souls.

  Amidships at the port rail, Launy hunched his shoulders and dug hands deep into the pockets of the pea jacket lent him. ‘Who’s on watch, anyway?’ he wondered.

  Terai shrugged. ‘The usual,’ he replied. ‘First, second, or third officer. First, second, or third engineer. Quartermaster at the wheel. Radio officer; except in emergencies, she’s in charge of the radar too. And, yes, the cook and bull cook must be starting to prepare tea about this time. And I daresay a few more – the carpenter or the gun chief, for instance – have found things that need doing. But Navy or no, we Maurai aren’t much for strict schedules or busywork.’ He grinned. ‘I’ve heard us called sloppy, and not just by Norries like you, but by the Mericans south of you – our own clients, that we converted from freebooters to civilized ranchers and whatnot! However, somehow we manage.’

  ‘You do,’ said the captive bleakly, and stared for a while at the man beside him.

  There was considerable to stare at. Terai Lohannaso loomed a sheer two meters in height. Iron-hard, contoured like a hillscape, his body was broad and thick out of proportion to that. His features were largely Polynesian, wide-nosed, full-mouthed, with a scant beard that he kept shaved off; but the square jaw, gray eyes, and complexion ivory where seagoing years had not turned it leather-brown, those were a heritage from Ingliss forebears. His voice was pitched like thunder. Reddish-black, his locks were bobbed under the ears and banged across the brow in the style of N’Zealanner men. A short-sleeved shirt revealed hairless chest and forearms, the latter tattooed – on the left, a standard fouled anchor, but on the right, a hammer and tongs. (He had mentioned once that black-smithing was a hobby of his.)

  ‘Oh, yes, you manage,’ Launy said. ‘You call yourselves easygoing and happy-go
-lucky, but your outposts are along every coast of Asia and Africa … and the western side of Normerica and Soumerica, from our border on down … and native rulers do whatever your local “representatives” “suggest” if they know what’s good for them. Meanwhile your explorers and traders – your vanguards – are pushing into Yurrup. … Oh, yes.’

  His glance went across the rest of the flotilla. Most of the craft in it were monohull, less fast though more capacious than Barracuda. (Stabilities were identical, given extensible spoilers to forestall capsizing.) Their rigs varied, as did their sizes: everything from an archeological-looking schooner to a windmiller whose vanes drove a screw propeller. All were wooden, with scant metal fittings; all appeared frail and innocuous at a distance, even the carrier on whose deck rested a score of airplanes. None bit ferociously through the waves, belching smoke, a-bristle with cannon, like a Northwestern ironclad.

  But none, either, were like the big-bellied merchantmen he had taken during the Whale War. He had seen these dancers on the waters pluck apart the squadron in which he served. Now they were bound north to rendezvous with the rest of their kind. Thereafter the combined force would seek the main Union fleet, whose whereabouts were incessantly tracked by Federation scouts. (It was seldom worth-while to fire shells or rockets at those high-hovering blimps and hydroplaning boats. They were astonishingly evasive; if hit, they were astonishingly durable; if destroyed, they bore life rafts, and the Maurai had astonishingly effective rescue teams.) And later … he supposed Federation marines would land on Union shores.

  Terai shuffled his feet. ‘No, hold on,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I, uh, I sympathize with you – you’ve lost shipmates – but we don’t want to rule the world. What’d that get us except a bellyful of trouble? Anyhow, the whole idea is to let the world stay, uh, diverse, so different cultures can learn from each other –’ He flushed and clicked his tongue, ‘Sorry, old chap. I didn’t mean to repeat propaganda at you. But it’s true.’