Rise of the Terran Empire Page 8

  And yet, he thought, yonder suns were not quiet. They were appallingly aflame; and the spaces roiled with matter, seethed with energy, travailed with the birth of new suns and new worlds. Nor was the universe eternal; it had its strange destiny. To look into it was to know the sorrow and glory of being alive.

  More than once Coya had gotten her wish that they make love here.

  Falkayn's eyes sought in the direction of Sol, though it had long since dwindled from sight. His trained gaze could still find its way among constellations that had changed, some beyond recognition, and were nearly drowned in the number of stars that shone through airlessness. How are you doing now, darling? he wondered, knowing full well that "now" was a noise without meaning when cried across the interstellar reaches. I didn't expect to feel homesick on this trip. I forgot that home is where you are.

  He recognized his regret as being partly guilt. He had not been frank with her. In his judgment, this journey held more dangers than he had admitted. (But then, she had tried to hide from him that she thought the same.) Regardless, when van Rijn broached the idea, the blood had leaped in him, after three staid years. Some lines passed through his head, from the archaic poetry which was a special interest of his:

  "I am a part of all that I have met;

  Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

  Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades

  For ever and for ever when I move.

  How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

  To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

  As though to breathe were life . . . ."

  Consoling himself with smoke, he decided he might as well admit that he had a hopeless case of go-fever. Coya and, yes, the kids could come a-roving with him later. Meanwhile

  "My mariners,

  Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

  That ever with a frolic welcome took

  The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

  Free hearts, free foreheads—"

  A chuckle interrupted. Neither Adzel nor Chee Lan would take kindly to the idea of manning oars in a Grecian galley. Not but what they hadn't done equally curious things from time to time, and might again. He'd better get back to the game. After dinner, if their mood suited, he'd break out his fiddle and play for them. The sight of those two dancing a jig together never wearied him.

  V

  The sun of Babur was more than twice as bright as Sol; but the planet was more than six times as far from its luminary as Earth. Thus Mogul stood in the spatial sky as a tiny disc of unbearable brilliance. A moon of Babur's four was close enough to show craters; the rest were like small sharp sickles. The world itself was a tawny globe partly shaded by night, partly veiled by bands and swirls of cloud, white tinged with gold, brown, or pale red. The majesty of the sight gave Falkayn to understand why its human discoverer had named it for a conqueror who went down in the memory of India as the Tiger. He didn't know how well he chose, he thought.

  The bridge where he sat felt profoundly silent, only a breath from the ventilators to be heard. Hyperdrive was off and Muddlin' Through maneuvering on gravs at a true speed of a few kilometers per second. Chee was in the weapons control turret, Adzel in the engine room: their trouble stations. On Falkayn rested the burden of deciding when danger grew so great as to require fight or flight. He doubted that either would be possible here. The two warcraft that had challenged the ship as she approached and escorted her in now flanked and paced her arrowhead hull like wolves herding along a prey. Distance made them tiny until Falkayn magnified their sections of the view; then he saw them the size of a Technic destroyer but much more heavily armed, flying arsenals.

  When Muddlehead spoke, he started, fetching up short against the safety web that held him in his seat. "I have commenced analysis of data obtained from neutrino and mass detectors, radar, gravity and hyperdrive pulse registers, and the local interplanetary field. Subject to correction, approximately fifty vessels are in wide orbit around Babur. Only one is of a size to be a possible dreadnought or equivalent thereof. Many of the rest appear to be noncombatant, perhaps groundable transports. More detailed information should be available presently."

  "Fifty? Huh?" Falkayn exclaimed. "But we know—Babur put on that show near Valya—we know its fleet is at least equal to the Commonwealth's. Where are the majority?"

  His companions had been listening on the intercom. Adzel's slow basso rolled forth: "It is fruitless to speculate. We lack facts about Babur's plans, or even about the society whose masters have hatched those plans."

  Nobody paid attention until too late, Falkayn thought. Not to hydrogen breathers, who are alien, who can offer us oxygen breathers very little in the way of markets or resources, and by the same token should find nothing to quarrel with us about. There were too many planets which did lure us with treasure, with homesteads, with native beings not hopelessly unlike ourselves. We scarcely remembered that Babur existed—a whole world, as old and many-faced and full of marvels as ever Earth was.

  "I think I know where their missing ships are," Chee said. "They were never intended to orbit idle."

  Falkayn's mind paced a rutted track: How did Babur do it—how build up so great a strength in a mere twenty or thirty years? They couldn't simply put armament on copies of the few merchant vessels they'd produced. Nor could they simply work from plans of human men-of-war. Everything had to be adapted to the peculiar conditions of Babur, the peculiar requirements of its life forms.

  He recalled the shapes of the ships escorting his, bulge-bellied as if pregnant (with what sort of birth to come?). The extra volume housed cryogenic tanks. Air recycling alone was not adequate for hydrogen breathers, whose atmosphere leaked slowly out between the atoms of a hull and must be replenished from liquid gases. A thin plating of a particular supermetal alloy could cure that—but no Baburite knew there was a Mirkheim when the decision was made to found a navy. And the leakage problem was only the most easy and obvious of those the engineers had met.

  The research and development effort before manufacture could begin must have been extraordinarily sophisticated. How could the Baburites complete it in the time it had actually taken, they who had never gotten off their home world when men first found them?

  Could they have hired outside experts? If so, whose, and how could they pay them?

  His repetition of questions which had been raised since the menace first manifested itself, to no avail, was broken off. Muddlehead was making one of its rare contributions to talk: "Conceivably the Baburites have been anticipating fights with other hydrogen breathers."

  "No," Adzel replied. "There aren't any with comparable technology, anywhere in known space, except the Ymirites; and they are as different from the Baburites as they are from us."

  "I suggest you write me a program in political science," the computer said.

  "Will you two klooshmakers stop snakkering?" Falkayn barked. "The fact is they've got far fewer ships here than we know they own. And I share Chee's foul notion of where the rest of those ships have gone. If we—"

  His outercom chimed. He switched it on, and the screen filled with the image of a Baburite.

  Around the eldritch caterpillar-centaur-lobster shape, which did not really look like any of those animals, shadowy figures flitted through gloom. Four tiny eyes behind a spongy snout could not make true contact with his. The being hummed its League Latin, noises which a vocalizer transposed into the proper phonemes. "We have notified the Imperial Band of Sisema and you are about to receive your instructions. Stand by." The statement was neither polite nor rude; it announced how things were.

  Then the image faded out. For a minute Falkayn sat alone with his thoughts. Again they ran back over what little he knew.

  "Sisema" was nothing but the vocalizer's rendition of a sound that in the original was a thin droning. "Imperial Band" was a Baburite attempt, probably suggested by earlier human visitors, to translate a concept that had no counterpart o
n Earth. Seemingly in Acarro—as the vocalizer called one region on the planet—the unit of society was not individual, family, clan, or tribe. It was an association of beings, tied together by bonds more powerful and pervasive than any that men could experience, involving some mutuality or complementarity of their sexual cycles but extending from this to every aspect of life. Each Band had its own personality, which differed more from that of its fellow Bands than members of any did from each other. Yet informants had told xenologists that every single member was unique, with a special contribution to make; the merging together was not subordination, it was communication (communion?) on a level deeper than consciousness. Telepathy? It was hard to know what such a word might mean on this world, and the informants had been unwilling or unable to speak further. A Baburite did radiate variably at radio frequencies, strongly enough to be detected by a sensitive instrument in the neighborhood. If that was due to neurochemistry(?), perhaps another nervous system(?) could act as a receiver. Perhaps in this way a part of tradition was not oral or written but directly perceived.

  Potentially immortal, a Band recruited itself by adoption as much as by reproduction. Cross-adoptions linked various groups as cross-marriages had once allied human families. The Imperial Band seemed to have first choice in such cases, and to that extent was dominant, providing a leadership that had finally brought the entire planet under its sway. Yet it was not a true monarchy or dictatorship. Self-regulating, not given to conflict with their own kind, the Bands needed little government in the Terrestrial sense.

  Which made their sudden aggressiveness all the less comprehensible, Falkayn thought. They'd tried some sharp business in this sector thirty years ago, and been worsted by the Solar Spice & Liquors factor—but sunblaze, that was a trivial incident, no cause for them lately to start trumpeting about their "right to control ambient space." Nor did the idea of dividing the stars up into spheres of interest seem like a safe one. The League could not tolerate that, if the League wanted to survive as a set of free-market entrepreneurs. The Commonwealth might accept the principle . . . but not if that involved loss of Mirkheim, the exact explosive issue Babur had chosen for precipitating the crisis.

  I suppose even the agents of those companies of the Seven that formerly traded here have been baffled to foresee what minds so strange to us will do next—Hoy!

  Again the screen gave him the picture of a Baburite. Though Falkayn was well schooled in noting individual differences between non-humans, he identified this one as new only by the color and cut of robe. The outlandishness of the whole simply drowned every detail in his perception. "You are Captain Ah-kyeh?" the being demanded without preamble. It had not heard his name well enough to hum an accurate equivalent. "This member speaks to you for the Imperial Band of Sisema. You have told our sentinels your purpose in coming. Redescribe it, in exact detail."

  The muscles tightened around Falkayn's belly and between his shoulderblades. For an instant he was more conscious of stars, planet, moons, sun in the hemisphere above him than he was of the image he confronted. To go down in death, losing all that splendor, losing Coya and Juanita and the child unborn . . . But those warcraft hemming him in would not wantonly open fire. Would they? The habit of courage took charge of him and he answered steadily:

  "Forgive me if I leave off a greeting or similar courtesy. I've been told your people don't employ such phrases, at least not with a foreign species." Sensible. What rituals could we possibly have in common? "My partners and I are here not on behalf of any government, but as representatives of a company in the Polesotechnic League, Solar Spice & Liquors. We know you had a dispute with us on the planet we call Suleiman, somewhat more than two of your years ago. We hope this won't prevent you from listening to us now."

  He employed a vocalizer himself, not because he knew anything of the other sophont's language, but in order that it might convert his words into sounds that the latter could readily hear. He wondered how badly his meaning got distorted. If the Siseman speech had been tonal like Chinese, little but gibberish would have gotten through. The Baburite was wise to require reiteration.

  "We listen," it said.

  "I'm afraid I haven't any precise plan to describe. The conflict over Mirkheim disturbs us greatly. By 'us' I mean, here, the company for which my companions and I work. And of course the leaders of associated firms feel the same way. A war would be as disastrous to trade as to everything else. Besides, uh, economic motives, common decency demands we do whatever we can to help prevent it. You doubtless know the Polesotechnic League is not a government, but commands comparable power. It will gladly lend its good offices toward reaching a peaceful agreement."

  "You do not speak for the entire League. It no longer has a single voice."

  Touché! thought Falkayn, and felt indeed as if a blade had pierced him. How in cosmos do the Baburites know that? They ought to be as ignorant of the ins and outs of Technic politics as we are of theirs.

  True, if they've been preparing for a long time to fight us, they'd investigate us carefully beforehand. But when did they, and how? A Baburite traveling around among us and asking questions would be too conspicuous for van Rijn not to have heard about. And surely they couldn't rely on occasional traders from the Seven for such information, especially after that trade became practically extinct.

  The fact that they are this well-informed is a flamingly important datum all by itself. Van Rijn needs to know.

  He had reached his conclusion in a nearly intuitive leap. Best not to let the officer(?) guess how dismayed he was. "We will be glad to discuss that with you, and anything else," he temporized. "If we can give some understanding, and gain some for ourselves, that will make our journey a success. I'd like to emphasize that we don't represent the Commonwealth in any way. In fact, none of us three is a citizen of it. No matter who gets Mirkheim in the end, companies of the League will be dealing with them," unless Babur gets it and then keeps the supermetals exclusively for itself. "I hope you will regard us as ambassadors of a sort," who double in espionage if they get the chance. "We're experienced in dealing with different races, so maybe we have more chance than average of exchanging information and ideas."

  The Baburite fired several disconcertingly shrewd queries, which Falkayn answered as evasively as he dared. Since the being knew the League was divided against itself, he strove to give the impression of a less serious breach than was the case. At last his interrogator said, "You will be conducted to a landing place on Babur. Earth-conditioned quarters will be provided."

  "Oh, we can quite well stay in our ship, in orbit, and communicate by screen," Falkayn said.

  "No. We cannot allow an armed vessel, surely equipped with surveillance devices, to remain loose in local space."

  "I can see that, but, um . . . we could set down on a moon."

  "No. It will be necessary to study you at length, and you may not have access to your ship. Else you might try to break away from us if the process takes an inconvenient turn. A guide vessel is on its way. Do as its chieftain commands you." The screen blanked.

  Falkayn sat still for a while, hearing Chee swear. "Well," he said at last, "if nothing else, we'll get a close look at the ground. Keep those surveillance devices busy, Muddlehead."

  "They are," the computer assured him. "Data analysis is also proceeding. It has become evident that most of the ships around Babur belong to oxygen breathers."

  "Huh?"

  "Infrared radiation shows their internal temperatures are too high for denizens of this planet."

  "Yes, yes, obviously," Chee's voice came. "But what are the crews? Mercenaries? How in the name of Nick van Rijn's hairy navel did the Baburites contact them, let alone recruit them?"

  "I suspect those are questions we are better off not asking," Adzel said. "To be sure, we must try to find the answers."

  The guide came in sight, larger than Muddlin' Through but with similar streamlining proving that she was groundable. The part of her armament that showed was by it
self more than the League ship carried. Falkayn did not propose making a dash for freedom.

  Having received his travel orders and turned them over to Muddlehead to execute, he gave his attention to the viewscreen hemisphere. From time to time he rotated the scene or enlarged a part of it. He wanted to see everything he could, and not merely because an item might prove useful. This was a new, utterly strange world on which he was about to tread. A world. After all his years of roving, and even today when he fared under guard, the old thrill tingled through him.

  Babur swelled in his sight as the ships accelerated inward. The approach curve took him around the globe, and he saw the tiny, fiery sun set in gold and rise in scarlet over an ocean of subtly tinted clouds. Then he was braking heavily and the planet was no longer before him or beside him, it was below. A thin scream of split atmosphere reached his ears. The stars of space vanished in a sky gone purple. Lightning flared across a storm far under this hurtling hull.