The People of the Wind Page 7

  Vodan’s relief was unmistakable. He mumbled through the courtesies and flapped off with Quenna. The city swallowed them.

  Arinnian wondered what to say. He was grateful for the dull light; his face felt hotter than the air. He stared outward.

  Tabitha said at length, softly, “That poor lost soul.”

  “Who, the nightflyer?” All at once he was furious. “I’ve met her sort befere. Degenerates, petty criminals. Pray Vodan doesn’t get his throat cut in whatever filthy crib she’s taking him to. I know what must’ve happened here. He was wandering around lonely, at loose ends, a mountaineer who’d probably never come on one like her. She zeroed in, hit him with enough pheromone to excite — ugh!”

  “Why should you care? I mean, of course he’s a friend of yours, but I hardly believe that pathetic creature will dare try more than wheedling a tip out of him.” Tabitha drank smoke. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “here’s a case of Ythrian cultural lag. They’ve been affected by human ideas to the point where they don’t give their abnormals a quick death. But they’re still not interested in sponsoring rehabilitation or research on cures, or in simple charity. Someday—”

  He scarcely heard the last remark. “Vodan’s to marry Eyath,” he said through the interior grip on his gullet.

  Tabitha raised her brows. “Oh? That one you mentioned to me? Well, don’t you suppose, if she heard, she’d be glad he’s gotten a bit of unimportant fun and forgetting?”

  “It’s not right! She’s too clean. She—” Arinnian gulped. Abruptly he thought: So why not take the risk? Now I need forgetting myself. “Is the matter small to you?” he blurted. “In that case, let’s us do the same.”

  “Hm?” She considered him for a while that grew. Lightning moved closer on heavy gusts. His rage ebbed and he must fight not to lower his eyes, not to cringe.

  At last: “You are bitter for certain, aren’t you, Chris?” A chuckle. “But likewise you’re hopeful.”

  “I’m sorry,” he got out. “I n-n-never meant disrespect. I wanted to give you a, an imaginary example — make you understand why I’m upset.”

  “I might resent your calling it imaginary,” she smiled, though her tone had become more compassionate than teasing, “except I assume it wasn’t really. The answer is no, thanks.”

  “I expected that. We birds—” He couldn’t finish, but stared down into his mug until he lifted it for a quick, deep draft.

  “What d’you mean, ‘we’?” she challenged.

  “Why, we… our generation, at least—”

  When she nodded, her locks caught what illumination there was. “I know,” she said gravely. “That behavior pattern, promiscuous as kakkelaks provided they don’t much respect their partners, but hardly able to touch birds of the opposite sex. You’re a bright lad, Chris; Avalonians aren’t given to introspection, but you must have some idea of the cause. Don’t you want, a wife and children, ever?”

  “Of course. I — of course. I will.”

  “Most of them will, I’m sure. Most of the earlier ones did eventually, when they’d come to terms with themselves. Besides, the situation’s not universal. We birds do have this in common, that we tolerate less prying than the average human. So comparative statistics aren’t available. Also, the problem has gotten conspicuous these days for no deeper reason than that the movement into the choths has begun snowballing. And, finally, Chris, your experience is limited. How many out of thousands do you know well enough to describe their private lives? You’d naturally tend to be best acquainted with your own sort, especially since we birds have gotten pretty good at picking up face and body cues.”

  Tabitha’s pipe had gone out. She emptied it and finished: “I tell you, your case isn’t near as typical as you think, nor near as serious. But I do wish that going bird didn’t make otherwise sensible people lose years in thwarting themselves.”

  Anger pricked him again. What call had she to act superior? “Now wait—” he began.

  Tabitha knocked back her beer and rose. “I’m headed for my hotel,” she said.

  He stared up at her. “What?”

  She ruffled his hair. “I’m sorry. But I’m afraid if we continue tonight, we’ll brew one cyclone of a squabble. I think too well of you to want that. Well take another evening soon if you like. Now I aim to get into bed and have Library Central screen me some of that Homer stuff.”

  He couldn’t dissuade her. Perhaps he took most umbrage at how calm his arguments left her. When he had bidden her a chill goodnight, he slouched to the nearest phoneboard.

  The first woman he called was at work. Defense production was running at seven hours on, fifteen and the odd minutes off, plus overtime. The second female acquaintance said frantically that her husband was home if that was the party he wanted; he apologized for punching a wrong number. The third was available. She was overly plump, chattered without cease, and had the brains of a barysauroid. But what the chaos?

  —He awoke about the following sunset. She was sweating in her sleep, breath stale from alcohol. He wondered why the air had gone hot and sticky. Breakdown in the conditioner? Or, hm, it’d been announced that if force screens must be raised, the power drain would require Environmental Control to shut off—

  Force screens!

  Arinnian jumped from bed… Rain had given way to low overcast, but he glimpsed shimmers across that slatiness. He groped through the dusty clutter in the room and snapped on the holovid.

  A recording played, over and over, a man’s voice high-pitched and his face stretched out of shape: “—war declared. A courier from Ythri has delivered the news in Gray, that Terra has served notice of war.”

  VII

  “Our basic strategy is simple,” Admiral Cajal had explained. “I would prefer a simpler one yet: pitched battle between massed fleets, winner takes all.”

  “But the Ythrians will scarcely be that obliging,” Governor Saracoglu remarked.

  “No. They aren’t well organized for it, in the first place. Not in character for them to centralize operations. Besides, they must know they’re foredoomed to lose any standup fight. They lack the sheer numerical strength. I expect they’ll try to maintain hedgehog positions. From those they’d make sallies, harass, annihilate what smaller units of ours they found, prey on our supply lines. We can’t drive straight into the Domain with that sort of menace at our rear. Prohibitively costly. We could suffer actual disaster if we let ourselves get caught between their inner and outer forces.”

  “Ergo, we start by capturing their advanced bases.”

  “The major ones. We needn’t worry, about tiny new colonies or backward allies, keeping a few ships per planet.” Cajal gestured with a flashbeam. It probed into the darkness of a display tank, wherein gleamed points of luminance that represented the stars of this region. They crowded by thousands across those few scaled-down parsecs, a fire-swarm out of which not many men could have picked an individual. Cajal realized his talent for doing this had small intrinsic value. The storage and processing of such data were for computers. But it was an outward sign of an inner gift.

  “Laura the nearest,” he said. “Hru and Khrau further on, forming a triangle with it. Give me those, and I’ll undertake to proceed directly against Quetlan. That should force them to call in everything they have, to protect the home star! And, since my rear and my lines will then be reasonably secure, I’ll get the decisive battle I want.”

  “Um-m-m.” Saracoglu rubbed his massive chin. Bristles made a scratchy sound; as hard as he had been at work, he kept forgetting to put on fresh inhibitor after a depilation. “You’ll hit Laura first?”

  “Yes, of course. Not with the whole armada. Well split, approximately into thirds. The detached sections will proceed slowly toward Hru and Khrau, but not attack until Laura has been reduced. The force should be ample in all three systems, but I want to get the feel of Ythrian tactics — and, too, make sure they haven’t some unpleasant surprise tucked under their tailfeathers.”

/>   “They might,” Saracoglu said. “You know our intelligence on them leaves much to be desired. The problems of spying on nonhumans — And Ythrian traitors are almost impossible to find, competent ones completely impossible.”

  “I still don’t see why you couldn’t get agents into that mostly human settlement at Laura.”

  “We did, Admiral, we did. But in a set of small, close-knit communities they could accomplish nothing except report what was publicly available to see. You must realize, Avalonian humans no longer think, talk, even walk quite like any Imperial humans. Imitating them isn’t feasible. And, again, deplorably few can be bought.

  Furthermore, the Avalonian Admiralty is excellent on security measures. The second in command, chap named Holm, seems to have made several extended trips through the Empire, official and unofficial, in earlier days. I understand he did advanced study at one of our academies. He knows our methods.”

  “I understand he’s caused not just the Lauran fleet but the planetary defenses to be enormously increased, these past years,” Cajal said. “Yes, we must certainly take care of him first.”

  — That had been weeks ago. On this day (clock concept in unending starry night) the Terrans neared their enemy, Cajal sat alone in the middle of the superdreadnaught Valenderay. Communication screens surrounded him, and humming silence, and radial kilometers of metal, machinery, weapons, armor, energies, through which passed several thousand living beings. But he was, for this moment, conscious only of what lay outside. A viewscreen showed him: darkness, diamond hordes, and Laura, tiny at nineteen astronomical units’ remove but gold and shining, shining.

  The ships had gone out of hyperdrive and were accelerating sunward on gravity thrust. Most were far ahead of the flag vessel. A meeting with the defenders could be looked for at any minute.

  Cajal’s mouth tightened downward at the right corner. He was a tall man, gaunt, blade-nosed, his widow’s peak hair and pointed beard black though he neared his sixties. His uniform was as plain as his rank allowed.

  He had been chain-smoking. Now he pulled the latest cigaret from a scorched mouth and ground it out as if it were vermin. Why can’t I endure these final waits? he thought. Because I will be safe while 1 send men to war?

  His glance turned to a picture of his dead wife, standing before their house among the high trees of Vera F6. He moved to animate but, instead, switched on a recorder.

  Music awoke, a piece he and she had loved, well-nigh forgotten on Terra but ageless in its triumphant serenity, Bach’s Fassacaglia. He leaned back, closed his eyes and let it heal him. Man’s duty in this life, he thought, is to choose the lesser evil.

  A buzz snapped him to alertness. The features of his chief executive captain filled a screen and stated, “Sir, we have received and confirmed a report of initial hostilities from Vanguard Squadron Three. No details.”

  “Very good, Citizen Feinberg,” Cajal said. “Let me have any hard information immediately.”

  It would soon come flooding in, beyond the capacity of a live brain. Then it must be filtered through an intricate complex of subordinates and their computers, and he could merely hope the digests which reached him bore some significant relationship to reality. But those earliest direct accounts were always subtly helpful, as if the tone of a battle were set at its beginning.

  “Aye, sir.” The screen blanked.

  Cajal turned off the music. “Farewell for now,” he whispered, and rose. There was one other personal item in the room, a crucifix. He removed his bonnet, knelt, and signed himself. “Father, forgive us what we are about to do,” he begged. “Father, have mercy on all who die. All.”

  “Word received, Marchwarden,” the Ythrian voice announced. “Contact with Terrans, about 12 a.u out, direction of the Spears. Firing commenced on both, sides, but seemingly no losses yet.”

  “My thanks. Please keep me informed.” Daniel Holm turned off the intercom.

  “As if it were any use for me to know!” he groaned.

  His mind ran through the calculation. Light, radio, neutrinos take about eight minutes to cross an astronomical unit. The news was more than an hour and a half old. That initial, exploratory fire-touch of a few small craft might well be ended already, the fragments of the vanquished whirling away on crazy orbits while the victors burned fuel as if their engines held miniature suns, trying to regain a kinetic velocity that would let them regroup. Or if other units on either side were not too distant, they might have joined in, sowing warheads wider and wider across space.

  He spoke an obscenity and beat fist on palm. “If we could hypercommunicate—” But that wasn’t practical. The “instantaneous” pulses of a vessel quantum-jumping around nature’s speed limit could be modulated to send a message a light-year or so — however, not this deep in a star’s distorting gravitational field, where you risked annihilation if you tried to travel nonrelativistically — of course, you could get away with it if you were absolutely sure of your tuning, but nobody was in wartime — and anyhow, given that capability, the Terrans would be a still worse foe, fighting them would be hopeless rather than half hopeless — why am I rehearsing this muck?

  “And Ferune’s there and I’m here!”

  He sprang from his desk, stamped to the window and stood staring. A cigar fumed volcanic between his teeth. The day beyond was insultingly beautiful. An autumn breeze carried odors of salt up from the bay, which glittered and danced under Laura and heaven; and it bore scents from the gardens it passed, brilliant around their houses. North-shore hills lay in a blue haze of distance. Overhead skimmed wings. He didn’t notice.

  Rowena came to him. “You knew you had to stay, dear,” she said. She was still auburn-haired, still slim and erect in her coverall.

  “Yeh. Backup. Logistic, computer, communications support. And maybe Ferune understands space warfare better, but I’m the one who really built the planetary defense. We agreed, months back. No dishonor to me, that I do the sensible thing.” Holm swung toward his wife. He caught her around the waist. “But oh, God, Ro, I didn’t think it’d be this hard!”

  She drew his head down onto her shoulder and stroked the grizzled hair.

  Ferune of Mistwood had planned to bring his own mate along. Whan; had traveled beside him throughout a long naval career, birthed and raised their children on the homeships that accompanied every Ythrian fleet, drilled and led gun crews. But she fell sick and the medics weren’t quite able to ram her through to recovery before the onslaught came. You grow old, puzzlingly so. He missed her sternness.

  But he was too busy to dwell on their goodbyes. More and more reports were arriving at his flagship. A pattern was beginning to emerge.

  “Observe,” he said. The computers had just corrected the display tank according, to the latest data. It indicated sun, planets, and color-coded sparks which stood for ships. “Combats here, here, here. Elsewhere, neutrino emissions reaching our detectors, cross-correlations getting made, fixes being obtained.”

  “Foully thin information,” said the feathers and attitude of his aide.

  “Thus far, aye, across interplanetary distances. However, we can fill in certain gaps with reason, if we assume their admiral is competent. I feel moderately sure that his pincer has but two claws, coming in almost diametrically opposite, from well north and south of the ecliptic plane… so.” Ferune pointed. “Now he must have reserves further out. To avoid making a wide circuit with consequent risk of premature detection, these must have run fairly straight from the general direction of Pax. And were I in charge, I would have them near the ecliptic. Hence we look for their assault, as the pincers close, from here.” He indicated the region.

  They stood alone in the command bridge, broad though the chamber was. Ythrians wanted room to stretch their wings. Yet they were wholly linked to the ship by her intercoms, calculators, officers, crewfolk, more tenuously linked to that magnificence which darkened and bejeweled a viewscreen, where the killing had begun. Clangor and clatter of activity came faint
to them, through a deep susurrus of power. The air blew warm, ruffling their plumes a little, scented with perfume of cinnamon bush and amberdragon. Blood odors would not be ordered unless and until the vessel got into actual combat; the crew would soon be worn out if stimulated too intensely.

  Ferune’s plan did not call for hazarding the super-dreadnaught this early. Her power belonged in his end game. At that time he intended to show the Terrans why she was called after the site of an ancient battle on Ythri. He had had the Anglic translation of the name painted broad on the sides: Hell Rock.

  A new cluster of motes appeared in the tank. Their brightnesses indicated ship types, as accurately as analysis of their neutrino emanations could suggest. The aide started. His crest bristled. “That many more hostiles, so soon? Uncle, the odds look bad.”

  “We knew they would. Don’t let this toy hypnotize you. I’ve been through worse. Half of me is regenerated tissue after combat wounds. And I’m still skyborne.”

  “Forgive me, Uncle, but most of your fights were police actions inside the Domain. This is the Empire coming.”

  Ferune expressed: “I am not unaware of that. And I too have studied advanced militechnics, both practical and theoretical.” Aloud he said, “Computers, robots, machines are only half the makers of a war-weird. There are also brains and hearts.”

  Claws clacked on the deck as he walked to the view-screen and peered forth. His experienced eye picked out a glint among the stars, one ship. Otherwise his fleet was lost to vision in the immensity through which it fanned.

  “A new engagement commencing,” said the intercom.

  Ferune waited motionless for details. Through his mind passed words from one of the old Terran books it pleasured him to read. The fear of a king is as the roaring of a lion: whoso provoketh him to anger sinneth against his own soul.