Mayday Orbit Read online

  VII

  Ahghun Tiuksky thrust his head forward. A sunbeam, trickling through one small window in the kibitka, touched his face and etched it strongly against shadow. The other men who sat crosslegged in a ring on the floor became a mere background for him.

  “Your deed was evil,” he declared. “Nothing can justify setting -a grass fire. No luck can come of it.”

  Flandry studied him. This noyon of the Mangu Tuman was quite young, even for these times when few Tebtengrian men reached any great age. And he was a dashing, gallant warrior, as everyone said and as he proved the night of the fire. But to some extent, Arghun was the local equivalent of a prude.

  “The fire did no great harm, did it?” asked the Terran mildly.

  “And the motive justified the act,” said Toghrul Vavilov, Gur-Khan of the tribe. He stroked his beard and exchanged knowing smiles with Flandry: a kindred hypocrite. “I only regret we failed to rescue you at once.”

  A visiting chieftain exclaimed: “Your noyon verges on blasphemy himself, Toghrul. Sir Dominic is from Terra! If a lord of Mother Terra wishes to set a blaze, for any reason or none, who may deny him?”

  Flandry felt he ought to blush, but decided not to. “Be that as it may,” he said, “I couldn’t improve any better plan.” “So today this council has been called,” added Toghrul Vavilov, as pompously as redundantly. “The chiefs of every tribe allied with our own must hear what this distinguished guest has to relate.”

  “But the fire!” mumbled Arghun.

  Eyes went through gloom to an old man seated under the window. Furs covered frail Juchi Ilyak so thickly that his bald parchment-skinned head looked disembodied. The Grand Shaman stroked a wisp of white beard, blinked eyes that were still sharp in their web of wrinkles, and murmured with a dry little smile:

  “This is not the time to dispute whether the rights of a man from Holy Terra override the Yassa by which Altai lives. The question seems rather, how shall we survive in order to raise such legal quibbles at another date?”

  Arghun tossed his reddish-black hair and snorted. “Oleg’s father, and the whole Nuru Bator dynasty before them, tried to conquer the Tebtengri. But still we hold the north-lands. I do not think this will change overnight.”

  “Oh, but it will,” said Flandry in his softest voice. “Unless something is done soon, it will.”

  He treated himself to one of his few remaining cigarettes and leaned forward so that the light would pick out his own features. Straight gray eyes and long thin nose were exotic on this planet, hence impressive. “Let me summarize your situation as I understand it,” he said. “Throughout their history, Altaians have used chemical power and stored solar energy. The only nuclear generators demanded by their way of life are a few small, stationary ones at Ulan Baligh and at the mines. Your internecine wars on Altai have also been confined to chemical and electrical energy weapons. Your economy would not have supported atomic war, even if the feuds and boundary disputes which started your fights were worth such destruction. Hence you Tebtengri always had sufficient military strength to hold the northlands. Though the rest of the planet were to ally against you, it would not be able to bring enough force to bear on these sub-arctic pastures to drive you out of them. Am I right?”

  They nodded. He continued: "But that situation has now been changed. Oleg Khan is getting help from outside this planet. Some of his new toys I have seen with my own eyes. Craft that can fly flourishes around your best, or can go beyond the atmosphere to swoop down elsewhere; battle-cars whose armor your strongest chemical explosives cannot pierce; missiles that can devastate so wide an area that no amount of dispersal can save you. As yet, Oleg hasn’t got much modem equipment like that. But more will arrive within the next several months. When he has enough to crush you with ease, he’ll do so.

  “What’s still worse, from my viewpoint, he will have allies that are not human.”

  They stirred uneasily. Only Juchi the Shaman remained quiet, watching Flandry with impassive eyes. A clay pipe in his hand sent bitter incense toward the roof. “We have nonhuman friends of our own,” he said calmly. “Who are these creatures that Oleg has invoked?”

  “Merseians,” Flandry answered. “They’re another starfaring, imperial race—and man stands in the path of their ambitions. For a long time now, we’ve been deadlocked with them, nominally at peace, actually skirmishing, subverting, assassinating, probing for weaknesses. They have decided Altai would make a useful naval base.

  “Outright invasion would be expensive, especially since Terra would be sure to notice so massive an operation and would probably interfere. But there’s a more subtle approach, by which Altai can be taken over under Terra’s nose. The Merseians will supply Oleg with enough help that he can conquer the whole planet. In exchange, once he has done so, he will let in the Merseian engineers. Altaians will dig and die to build fortresses; this entire world will become one impregnable nest of strongholds; then, and only then, will the Merseian fleet move in, because then it will be too late if Terra realizes what has been happening!” “Does Oleg himself know about these plans?” asked Toghrul roughly.

  Flandry shrugged. "Insufficiently well, I imagine. He thinks he can drive a good bargain. Like many another puppet ruler, hell wake up one morning and see the strings they’ve tied on him. But then he’ll be helpless too. I’ve watched this sort of thing occur elsewhere.”

  In fact, he added to himself, I’ve helped bring it about now and then—on Terra’s behalf.

  Toghrul entwined nervous fingers. “I believe you,” he said. “We have had glimpses, heard rumors, gotten bits of information from travelers and spies. What you have told us makes the puzzle fall together. , . , But what can we do? Can we summon the Terrans?”

  “Aye—aye, call the Terrans, warn the Mother of Men!” Flandry felt how passion flared in the scarred warriors beside him. He had gathered erenow that the Tebtengri had no use for Subotai the Prophet (a major reason why the southern tribes were hostile to them) but built their own religion around a hard-boiled sort of humanistic pantheism. It grew on him how strong a symbol the ancestral planet was to them.

  He didn’t want to tell them what Terra was actually like these days. (Or, perhaps, had always been. He suspected men are only saints and heroes in retrospect.) Indeed, he dared not speak of sottish emperors, venal nobles, faithless wives, servile commons, to this armed and burning reverence. But luckily, there’s a practical problem at hand.

  “Terra is farther from here than Merseia is,” he pointed out. “Even the nearest base we've got is more distant than their nearest one. I’ve no reason to believe there are any Merseians on Altai at this moment; but surely Oleg has at least one fast spaceship at his disposal to inform them if anything goes wrong. Suppose we do get word of the facts to Terra, and Oleg knows we have done so. What do you think he will do?” Flandry nodded, owlishly. “Correct on the first guess! Oleg will send a message to that closest Merseian base. I know that a heavy naval force is currently stationed there, and 1 doubt very much if the Merseians will abandon their investment here tamely. No, they- will dispatch their ships at once to this planet, blast the Tebtengri lands with nuclear bombs, and dig in. That won’t be as smooth and thorough a job as present plans call for, but it will be effective. By the time a Terran fleet of reasonable size can get here, die Merseians will be quite well entrenched. The hardest task in space warfare is to get a strong enemy off a planet firmly held. Under the present logistic circumstances, it may prove impossible. But even if, thanks to our precipitating matters ahead of the Merseian timetable, even if the Terrans do blast them loose, Altai will have been turned into a radioactive desert in the process.”

  Silence clapped down. Men stared at each other and back to Flandry with a horror he had seen before and which still hurt him to behold. Wherefore he continued hastily:

  “So the one rational objective for us, right now, is to get a secret message out. If Oleg and the Merseians don’t suspect that Terra knows about their s
cheme, they won’t hurry it up. Instead of Merseia, it can be Terra which suddenly arrives here in strength, seizes Ulan Baligh, establishes underground emplacements and orbital forts. Under such circumstances, Merseia will not fight at all. They’ll write Altai off. I know their basic strategy well enough to predict that much with absolute certainty. You see, they’ll no longer be able to make Altai an offensive base against Terra—the cost would be out of proportion to any gain—on the other hand, Terra, in full possession of Altai, cannot use it as a base for aggression against them.” He should have said will not; but he let these people make the heartbreaking discovery for themselves, that Terra’s only real interest was to preserve a fat status quo.

  Arghun sprang to his feet. As he crouched under the low ceiling, primness dropped from him. His leonine, young face became a sun; he cried, “And Terra will have us! We will be restored to humankind!”

  While the Tebtengri whooped and laughed aloud at that realization, Flandry smoked his cigarette with care. After all, he thought, provincial status needn’t corrupt them. Not too much. There would be a small naval base, an Imperial governor, an enforced peace between the tribes, and a reasonable tax. Otherwise, they could live pretty much as they chose. Proselytization wasn’t worth Terra’s while. What freedom the Altaians lost here at home, their young men would regain simply by having access to the stars. Wasn’t that so?

  Juchi, the Shaman, whose office bound together all these chiefs, spoke in a whisper that pierced: “Let us have silence. We must weigh how this may be done.”

  Flandry waited till the men had calmed somewhat before he gave them a rueful smile. “That's a good question,” he said. “Next question, please.”

  “The Betelgeuseans—” rumbled Toghrul.

  “I doubt if we can get our message out through them,” said another gurkhan. "Were I Oleg the Damned, I would put a guard around every individual Betelgeusean, as well as every spaceship, until the danger is past. I would inspect every article of trade, every fur or hide or smoke gem, before it was loaded.”

  “I myself would send to Merseia at once,” shivered someone else.

  “No, we needn’t fear that,” said Flandry. "I’m sure the Merseians won’t commit themselves to so hazardous an action as the immediate occupation of Altai, unless they’re fairly sure that Terra does have knowledge of their project. They have too many commitments elsewhere to go off half-cocked at every hint of possible trouble.”

  “Besides,” said Juchi, “Oleg has pride. He will not make himself a laughing stock to his masters, screaming for help because one fugitive is loose in the Khrebet.”

  “Anyhow,” put in Toghrul, “he knows how impossible it is for Orluk Flandry to smuggle the information out. Those tribes who do not belong to our Shamanate may dislike the harsh Yesukai rule, but they are still more suspicious of us, who traffic with the Ice Dwellers and scorn their stupid Prophet. We aren’t likely to get the help of any southerner. Even supposing someone would agree to brand our message on an outgoing hide, or slip a letter into a bale of pelts, or microscribe it on a gem, and even supposing such words did get past Oleg’s inspectors, the cargo would still, most likely, wait months in some Betelgeusean warehouse before anyone looked at it.”

  “We don’t have many months before Oleg overruns your country, and the Merseians arrive,” finished Flandry.

  He sat for a while listening to them chew desperate and impractical schemes. The air in here was hot and stuffy. All at once he could take no more. He rose. “I need a fresh breath and a chance to think,” he said.

  Juchi nodded grave dismissal. Arghun jumped up again. “I come too,” he said.

  “If the Terran desires your company,” said Toghrul. “You might show him our ordu, since he came directly from his sleep to this conference.”

  “Thanks,” said Flandry absent-mindedly.

  He went out the door and down a short ladder. The kibitka in which the chiefs met was actually a large truck. Its box was fitted out as austere living quarters. On its top, as on top of all the larger and slower vehicles, the flat black plates of a solar-energy collector were tilted to face Krasna. The accumulator banks, thus charged, were auxiliary sources of power for the nomads. Such roofs made this wandering town seem like a flock of futuristic turtles scattered across the hills.

  The Khrebet was not a high range. Gullied slopes, gray-green with thombush and yellow with sere grass, climbed in the north. Somewhere beyond that horizon they were buried under the glacial cap. Downward swept a cold wind, whining about Flandry. He shivered and drew tighter about him the coat hastily sewn to his measure. The sky was very pale today, almost white; the rings stood low and wan in the south, where the hills emptied into steppe.

  As far as Flandry could see, the herds of the Mangu Tuman were spread out in care of boys mounted on var-yaks. They were not cattle. Terra’s higher mammals are not easily raised on other planets; rodents are tougher and more adaptable. The first colonists brought rabbits with them, which they mutated and crossbred by the usual genetic engineering methods. That ancestor could hardly be recognized in the cow-sized grazing beasts of today. They looked more like giant dun-colored guineau pigs than anything else. Separate from them Flandry saw occasional flocks of transformed ostriches.

  Arghun gestured with pride.

  “Yonder kibitka houses the ordu library,” he said. “Those children seated on the ground nearby are being taught the alphabet.”

  Flandry nodded appreciation, though he was not surprised. Obviously illiterates could not have operated the ground vehicles he saw or the negagrav aircraft patrolling overhead. Nomadism was quite compatible with a high education. Given microprint, you could carry thousands of volumes along on your travels. Arghun indicated the trucks —sometimes organized in trains—that held the camp arsenals, sickbay, machine ships, and small factories for textiles and ceramics.

  The poorer families had no kibitkas but were crowded into yurts: dome-like tents of felt, mounted on motor carts. But no one seemed hungry or ill-clad. It was not an impoverished nation which carried such" gleaming missiles on flatbed cars, or operated such a fleet of light tanks, or armed every adult with such efficient (if somewhat outmoded) infantry weapons. In answer to Flandry’s questions, Arghun explained that the entire tribe, male and female, was a military as well as a social and economic unit. Everybody worked and everybody fought. While unequal wealth did exist, no one was allowed to go without the necessities.

  “Where does your metal come from?” the Terran inquired.

  “The grazing lands of each tribe include some mines,”

  Arghun said. “In our yearly round with the herds, we spend some time there, digging and smelting. Elsewhere on the circuit we reap semi-wild grain planted the year before; and we tap crude oil from wells we possess and pass it through a robotic refiner plant. What we cannot produce ourselves, we trade with others to get. One reason the Tehtengri Shamanate has survived despite opposition is that between its various tribes, it has in its circumpolar lands all needful natural resources. In fact, right yonder in the Khrebet lies one of Altai’s few really rich iron ore deposits.”

  “It sounds like a virtuous life you lead,” said Flandry.

  His slight shudder did not escape Arghun, who hastened to say: “Oh, we have our pleasures too, Orluk; feasts, games and sports, the arts, the great fair at Kievka Hill when the tribes meet and—” He broke off.

  Bourtai came walking past a campfire. Flandry could sense her loneliness. Women in this culture were not much inferior to men. She was free to go whither she would, and was a heroine for having brought the Terran here. But her dan was slain. She had not even been given any work to do.

  She saw the men and ran toward them. “What has been decided?”

  “Nothing yet.” Flandry caught her hands. Now that he was rested, he could appreciate her good looks. His face crinkled its best smile. “I couldn’t see going in circles with a lot of men when I might be going in circles with you. So I came out here,
hoping to find you. And my hopes were granted.”

  A flush crept up her high, flat cheeks. She wasn’t used to glibness. Her gaze fluttered downward. "I do not know what to say,” she whispered.

  “You need say nothing. Only be,” he leered.

  “No, I am no one. The daughter of a dead man . . . my dowry long ago plundered . . . and you are a Terran orluk! It is not right!”

  “Do you think your dowry matters?” asked Arghun.

  A strained note in his voice drew Flandry’s attention. “Have you two met?” the Terran inquired.

  “Yes. We spoke for a while this morning,” said Arghun stiffly.

  He clamped dignity back on himself like a mask. Flandry gave him a long glance, shrugged, and sighed. “Come on,” he said. “We’d better return to the kurultai.”

  He didn’t release the girl, but tucked her arm under his. She came along mutely. Through the heavy garments he could feel her tremble a little. The wind ruffled a stray lock of dark hair.

  As they neared the kibitka of the council, its door opened. Juchi Ilyak stood there, thin and bent. Somehow, though, his low voice carried across meters of blustering air:

  “Orluk, perhaps there is a way for us. We can at least seek wiser counsel. Dare you come with me to the Ice Flock?”

  VIII

  Tenghi Nor, the Ghost Lake, lay far in the north. When Flandry and Juchi stepped from their airboat, it was still day, and the rings were invisible. At night, the Shaman said, they were a glimmer, half seen on the southern horizon. Krasna looked like an ember in this air, at this time; the snowfields were tinged red. But as the sun toppled toward darkness, purple shadows glided from drift to drift.

  Flandry had not often met such quietness as this. Even in space, there was always the low noise of the machinery that kept one alive. Here, the air seemed to freeze all sound. The tiniest of winds blew up fine, ice crystals, whirling and glistening above the snowbanks; but he could not hear it. His fur-muffled body and heavily greased face felt no immediate cold—not in so dry an atmosphere—but breath was whetted in his nostrils. He thought he could smell the lake, but he wasn’t sure. None of his Terran senses were quite to be trusted in this winter place.