Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire Page 7

  "How do you, uh, activate it?"

  "That requires a Skill. To send something, you'd go to the nearest node and pay the woman who lives there. She'd transmit."

  Ridenour nodded. "I see. Actually, I've met setups on nonhuman planets that aren't too different from this." He hesitated. "What do you mean by a Skill?"

  "A special ability, inborn, cultivated, disciplined. You've watched Skills in action on our route, haven't you?"

  "I'm not certain. You see, I'm barely starting to grasp the pattern of your society. Before, everything was a jumble of new impressions. Now I observe meaningful differences between this and that. Take our friend Noach, for one, with his spying quasi-weasels; or Karlsarm and the rest, who use birds for couriers. Do they have Skills?"

  "Of course not. I suppose you might say their animals do. That is, the creatures have been bred to semi-intelligence. They have the special abilities and instincts, the desire, built into their chromosomes. But as for the men who use them, no, all they have is training in language and handling. Anybody could be taught the same."

  Ridenour looked at her, where she stood like a lioness in the filtered green light, stillness and strange odors at her back. "Only women have Skills, then," he said finally.

  She nodded. "Yes."

  "Why? Were they bred too?"

  "No." Astonishingly, she colored. "Whatever we may do with other men, we seldom become pregnant by anyone but a landholder. We want our children to have a claim on him. But somehow, women seem able to do more with hormones and pheromones. A biologist tried to explain why, but I couldn't follow him terribly well. Let's say the female has a more complex biochemistry, more closely involved with her psyche, than a male. Not that any woman can handle any materials. In fact, those who can do something with them are rare. When identified, in girlhood, they're carefully trained to use what substances they can."

  "How?"

  "It depends. A course of drugs may change the body secretions . . . delicately; you wouldn't perceive any difference; but someone like Mistress Jenith will never be stung by her fire bees. Rather, they'll always live near her. And she has ways to control them, make them go where she commands and—No, I don't know how. Each Skill keeps its secrets. But you must know how. Each few parts per million in the air will lure insects for kilometers around, to come and mate. Other insects, social ones, use odor signals to coordinate their communities. Man himself lives more by trace chemicals than he realizes. Think how little of some drugs is needed to change his metabolism, even his personality. Think how some smells recall a past scene to you, so vividly you might be there again. Think how it was proven, long ago, that like, dislike, appetite, fear, anger . . . every emotion . . . are conditioned by just such faint cues. Now imagine what can be done, as between a woman who knows precisely how to use those stimuli—some taken from bottles, some created at will by her own glands—between her and an organism bred to respond."

  "An Arulian concept?"

  "Yes, we learned a lot from the Arulians," Evagail said.

  "They call you Mistress, I've heard. What's your Skill?"

  She lost gravity. Her grin was impudent. "You may find out one day. Come, let's rejoin the march." She took his hand. "Though we needn't hurry," she added.

  As far as could be ascertained, Freehold had never been glaciated. The average climate was milder than Terra's, which was one reason the outbackers didn't need fixed houses. They moved about within their territories, following the game and the fruits of the earth, content with shelters erected here and there, or with bedrolls. By Ridenour's standards, it was an austere life.

  Or it had been. He found his canon gradually changing. The million sights, sounds, smells, less definable sensations of the wilderness, made a city apartment seem dead by contrast, no matter how many electronic entertainers you installed.

  (Admittedly, the human kinds of fun were limited. A minstrel, a ball game, a chess game, a local legend, a poetry reading, were a little pallid to a man used to living at the heart of Empire. And while the outbackers could apparently do whatever they chose with drugs and hypnotism, so could the Terrans. Lickerish rumor had actually underrated their uninhibited inventiveness in other departments of pleasure. But you had only a finite number of possibilities there too, didn't you? And he wasn't exactly a young man any more, was he? And damn, but he missed Lissa! Also the children, of course, the tobacco he'd exhausted, friends, tall towers, the gentler daylight of Sol and familiar constellations after dark, the sane joys of scholarship and teaching: everything, everything.)

  But life could not be strictly nomadic. Some gear was not portable, or needed protection. Thus, in each territory, at least one true house and several outbuildings had been erected, where the people lived from time to time.

  Humans needed protection too. Ridenour found that out when he and Evagail were caught in a storm.

  She had led him off the line of march to show him such a center. They had been en-route for an hour or two when she began casting uneasy glances at the sky. Clouds rose in the north, unbelievably high thunderheads with lightning in their blue-black depths. A breeze chilled and stiffened; the forest moaned. "We'd better speed up," she said at length. "Rainstorm headed this way."

  "Well?" He no longer minded getting wet.

  "I don't mean those showers we've had. I mean the real thing."

  Ridenour gulped and matched her trot. He knew what kind of violence a deep, intensely irradiated atmosphere can breed. Karlsarm's folk must be hard at work, racing to chop branches and make rough roofs and walls for themselves. Two alone couldn't do it in time. They'd normally have sought refuge under a windfall or in a hollow trunk or anything else they found. But a house was obviously preferable.

  The wind worsened. Being denser than Terra's, air never got to hurricane velocity; but it thrust remorselessly, a quasi-solid, well-nigh unbreathable mass. Torn-off leaves and boughs started to fly overhead, under a galloping black cloud wrack. Darkness thickened, save when lightning split the sky. Thunder, keenings, breakings and crashings, resounded through Ridenour's skull.

  He had believed himself in good shape, but presently he was staggering. Any man must soon be exhausted, pushing against that horrible wind. Evagail, though, continued, easy of breath. How? he wondered numbly, before he lost all wonder in the cruel combat to keep running.

  The first raindrops fell, enormous, driven by the tempest, stinging like gravel when they struck. You could be drowned in a flash flood, if you were not literally flayed by the hail that would soon come. Ridenour reeled toward unconsciousness—no, he was helped, Evagail upbore him, he leaned on her and—

  And they reached the hilltop homestead.

  It consisted of low, massive log-and-stone buildings, whose overgrown sod roofs would hardly be visible from above. Everything stood unlighted, empty. But the door to the main house opened at Evagail's touch; no place in the woodlands had a lock. She dragged Ridenour across the threshold and closed the door again. He lay in gloom and gasped his way back to consciousness. As if across light-years, he heard her say, "We didn't arrive any too soon, did we?" There followed the cannonade of the hail.

  After a while he was on his feet. She had stimulated the lamps, which were microcultures in glass globes, to their bright phosphorescence and had started a fire on the hearth. The principal heat source, however, was fuel oil, a system antique but adequate. "We might as well figure on spending the night," she said from the kitchen. "This weather will last for hours, and the roads will be rivers for hours after that. Why don't you find yourself a hot bath and some dry clothes? I'll have dinner ready soon."

  Ridenour swallowed a sense of inadequacy. He wasn't an outbacker and couldn't be expected to cope with their country. How well would they do on Terra? Exploring, he saw the house to be spacious, many-roomed, beautifully paneled, draped and furnished. Evagail's advice was sound. He returned to her as if reborn.

  She had prepared an excellent meal out of what was in the larder, including a heady
red wine. White tablecloth, crystal goblets, candlelight were almost a renaissance of a Terra which had been more gracious than today's. (Almost. The utensils were horn, the knifeblades obsidian. The paintings on the walls were of a stylized, unearthly school; looking closely, you could identify Arulian influence. No music lilted from a taper; instead came the muffled brawling of the storm. And the woman who sat across from him wore a natural-fiber kilt, a fringed leather bolero, a dagger and tomahawk.)

  They talked in animated and friendly wise, though since they belonged to alien cultures they had little more than question-and-answer conversation. The bottle passed freely back and forth. Being tired and having long abstained, Ridenour was quickly affected by the alcohol. When he noticed that, he thought, what the hell, why not? It glowed within him. "I owe you an apology," he said. "I classed your people as barbarians. I see now you have a true civilization."

  "You needed this much time to see that?" she laughed. "Well, I'll forgive you. The Cities haven't realized it yet."

  "That's natural. You're altogether strange to them. And, isolated as they are from the galactic mainstream, they . . . haven't the habit of thinking something different . . . can be equal or superior to what they take for granted is the civilized way."

  "My, that was a sentence! Do you acknowledge, then, we are superior?"

  He shook his head with care.

  "No. I can't say that. I'm a city boy myself. A lot of what you do shocks me. Your ruthlessness. Your unwillingness to compromise."

  She grew grave. "The Cities never tried to compromise with us, John. I don't know if they can. Our wise men, those who've studied history, say an industrial society must keep expanding or go under. We've got to stop them before they grow too strong. The war's given us a chance."

  "You can't rebel against the Empire!" he protested.

  "Can't we? We're a goodly ways from Terra. And we are rebelling. No one consulted us about incorporation." Evagail shrugged. "Not that we care about that in itself. What difference to us who claims the overlordship of Freehold, if he lets us alone? But the Cities have not let us alone. They cut down our woods, dam our rivers, dig holes in our soil, and get involved in a war that may wreck the whole planet."

  "M-m, you could help end the war if you mobilized against the Arulians."

  "To whose benefit? The Cities'!"

  "But when you attack the Cities, aren't you aiding the Arulians?"

  "No. Not in the long run. They belong to the Cities also. We don't want to fight them—our relationship with them was mostly pleasant, and they taught us a great deal—but eventually we want them off this world."

  "You can't expect me to agree that's right."

  "Certainly not." Her tone softened. "What we want from you is nothing but an honest report to your leaders. You don't know how happy I am that you admit we are civilized. Or post-civilized. At any rate, we aren't degenerate, we are progressing on our own trail. I can hope you'll go between us and the Empire, as a friend of both, and help work out a settlement. If you do that, you'll live in centuries of ballads: the Peacebringer."

  "I'd like that better than anything," he said gladly.

  She raised her brows. "Anything?"

  "Oh, some things equally, no doubt. I am getting homesick."

  "You needn't stay lonely while you're with us," she murmured.

  Somehow, their hands joined across the table. The wine sang in Ridenour's veins. "I've wondered why you stood apart from me," she said. "Surely you could see I want to make love with you."

  "Y-yes." His heart knocked.

  "Why not? You have a . . . a wife, yes. But I can't imagine an Imperial Terran worries about that, two hundred light-years from home. And what harm would be done her?"

  "None."

  She laughed anew, rose and circled the table to stand beside him and rumpled his hair. The odor of her was sweet around him. "All right, then, silly," she said, "what have you been waiting for?"

  He remembered. She saw his fists clench and stepped back. He looked at the candle flames, not her, and mumbled: "I'm sorry. It mustn't be."

  "Why not?" The wind raved louder, nearly obliterating her words.

  "Let's say I do have idiotic medieval scruples."

  She regarded him for a space. "Is that the truth?"

  "Yes." But not the whole truth, he thought. I am not an observer, not an emissary, I am he who will call down destruction upon you if I can. The thing in my pocket sunders us, dear. You are my enemy, and I will not betray you with a kiss.

  "I'm not offended," she said at last, slowly. "Disappointed and puzzled, though."

  "We probably don't understand each other as well as we believed," he ventured.

  "Might be. Well, let's let the dishes wait and turn in, shall we?" Her tone was less cold than wary.

  Next day she was polite but aloof, and after they had rejoined the army she conferred long with Karlsarm.

  Moon Garnet Lake was the heart of the Upwoods: more than fifty kilometers across, walled on three sides by forest and on the fourth by soaring snowpeaks. At every season it was charged with life, fish in argent swarms, birds rising by thousands when a bulligator bellowed in a white-plumed stand of cockatoo reed, wildkine everywhere among the trees. At full summer, microphytons multiplied until the waters glowed deep red, and the food chain which they started grew past belief in size and diversity. As yet, the year was too new for that. Wavelets sparkled clear to the escarpments, where mountaintops floated dim blue against heaven.

  "I see why you reacted violently against the attempt to found a town here," Ridenour said to Karlsarm. They stood on a beach, watching most of the expedition frolic in the lake. Those boisterous shouts and lithe brown bodies did not seem out of place; a cruising flock of fowl overhead was larger and made more clangor. The Terran drew a pure breath. "And it would have been a pity, aesthetically speaking. Who owns this region?"

  "None," Karlsarm answered. "It's too basic to the whole country. Anyone may use it. The numbers that do aren't great enough to strain the resources, similar things being available all over. So it's a natural site for our periodic head-of-household gatherings." He glanced sideways at the other man and added: "Or for an army to rendezvous."

  "You are not disbanding, then?"

  "Certainly not. Domkirk was a commencement. We don't intend to stop till we control the planet."

  "But you're daydreaming! No other City's as vulnerably located as Domkirk was. Some are on other continents—"

  "Where Free People also live. We're in touch."

  "What do you plan?"

  Karlsarm chuckled. "Do you really expect me to tell you?"

  Ridenour made a rueful grin, but his eyes were troubled. "I don't ask for military secrets. In general terms, however, what do you foresee?"

  "A war of attrition," Karlsarm said. "We don't like that prospect either. It'll taste especially sour to use biologicals against their damned agriculture. But if we must, we must. We have more land, more resources of the kind that count, more determination. And they can't get at us. We'll outgrind them."

  "Are you quite sure? Suppose you provoke them—or the Imperial Navy—into making a real effort. Imagine, say, one atomic bomb dropped into this lake."

  Anger laid tight bands around Karlsarm's throat and chest, but he managed to answer levelly: "We have defenses. And means of retaliation. This is a keystone area for us. We won't lose it without exacting a price—which I think they'll find too heavy. Tell them that when you go home!"

  "I shall. I don't know if I'll be believed. You appear to have no concept of the power that a single, minor-class spaceship can bring to bear. I beg you to make terms before it's too late."

  "Do you aim to convince a thousand leaders like me and the entire society that elected us? I wish you luck, John Ridenour." Karlsarm turned from the pleading gaze. "I'd better get busy. We're still several kilometers short of our campsite."

  His brusqueness was caused mainly by doubt of his ability to dissemble much longer
. What he, with some experience of Imperialists, sensed in this one's manner, lent strong support to the intuitive suspicions that Evagail had voiced. Ridenour had more on his mind than the Terran admitted. It was unwise to try getting the truth out of him with drugs. He might be immunized or counter-conditioned. Or his secret might turn out to be something harmless. In either case, a potentially valuable spokesman would have been antagonized for nothing.

  An aphrodite? She'd boil the ice water in his veins, for certain! And, while possessors of that Skill were rare, several were standing by at present in case they should be needed on some intelligence mission.

  It might not work, either. But the odds were high that it would. Damned few men cared for anything but the girl—the woman—the hag—whatever her age, whatever her looks—once she had turned her pheromones loose on him. She could ask what she would as the price of her company. But Ridenour might belong to that small percentage who, otherwise normal, were so intensely inner-directed that it didn't matter how far in love they fell; they'd stick by their duty. Should this prove the case he could not be allowed to leave and reveal the existence of that powerful a weapon. He must be killed, which was repugnant, or detained, which was a nuisance.

  Karlsarm's brain labored on, while he issued his orders and led the final march. Ridenour probably did not suspect that he was suspected. He likeliest interpreted Evagail's avoidance of him as due to pique, despite what she had claimed. (And in some degree it no doubt is, Karlsarm snickered to himself.) Chances were he attributed the chief's recent gruffness to preoccupation. He had circulated freely among the other men and women of the force; but not having been told to doubt his good faith, they did not and he must realize it.

  Hard to imagine what he might do. He surely did not plan on access to an aircar or a long-range radio transmitter! Doubtless he'd report anything he had seen or heard that might have military significance. But he wouldn't be reporting anything that made any difference. Well before he was conducted to the agrolands, the army would have left Moon Garnet again; and it would not return, because the lake was too precious to use for a permanent base. And all this had been made explicit to Ridenour at the outset.