The Regiment-A Trilogy
Page 33
Mrs. Lormagen was going with them on the picnic, and Lotta realized now that the woman was wearing rough slacks, a plain shirt, and casual beach sandals. Of course. The boat's seats might not be clean, or the picnic benches. For just a moment the little girl considered running back upstairs to change, then dismissed the thought. She liked to wear her yellow dress.
Mr. Bosler came out then, and Mrs. Bosler. Each carried a large wicker basket covered with a towel. The Lormagens' grown son Kusu was with them. Lotta knew that Kusu was too old, twenty-two, for her ever to marry. Twenty-two was fifteen years older than seven, more than three times as old. Although . . . when he was thirty-five, she'd be twenty. But someone else would marry him by then. Kusu was beautiful: he was tall and had muscles, and blond hair with some red in it, but not nearly as much red as hers. And he laughed a lot. His area was Wisdom/Knowledge like hers, and he was home from the Royal University.
Kusu grinned at her, a flash of teeth, then hopped off the veranda and loped across the yard toward the boathouse, where the oars were kept. Mr. Bosler grinned at her too. He was sixty something, she'd heard, and didn't have much hair; none at all in front. He led them across the yard to the dock, where they got in one of the larger rowboats, and Kusu came down with two sets of oars, one for himself and one for Mr. Bosler. When everyone was seated, they pushed away from the dock and started rowing.
Lotta watched the oars push them through the water, making little whirlpools at the end of every stroke. Mr. Bosler was strong too, though not as strong as Kusu of course, and they rowed in perfect unison, as if they practiced together.
"How're you doing on the selection of your doctoral research?" Mr. Bosler asked over his shoulder.
"I've decided to open up the project I talked to you about," Kusu said, "and establish its feasibility. You and I are pretty sure it's feasible, but Fahnsmor and Dikstrel are positive it's not, so what I'm proposing is a study of the nature of hyperspace."
He laughed. "It's remarkable how long we've used hyperspace travel without anyone knowing or wondering about things like that. I'm sure that neither Fahnsmor nor Dikstrel got the real Sacrament when they were little, but they're at Work, on Jobs. And educated when they were, they don't have the faintest idea of what research is about. They want a study plan with no room for the unknown, so I'll give them what looks like one, and we can be surprised together."
Lotta wondered what Fahnsmor and Dikstrel were like. Fahnsmor she pictured as tall and lanky, Dikstrel as short and pudgy, and wondered if they really were. She knew the difference between imagination and reality, but she also knew that people sometimes knew things subliminally they didn't know they knew, and called what they knew imagination to account for it.
"You haven't been home for a few deks2," Mr. Bosler said to Kusu. "Have you heard the idea your dad's been playing with recently?"
"I guess not. Something in addition to translating the T'swa history of the old Home Sector?"
"Right. There's been a frequency increase, the last dozen years, in disorderly pupils in the public schools. It's not conspicuous, but teachers and school administrators have definitely noticed it. Varlik had a survey done on sample schools, and more than seventy percent of disorderly students belong in the same slot in the Matrix of T'sel."
Lotta saw Kusu's eyebrows arch. "Warriors," he said.
"Right. An unprecedented bunch of little warriors have gotten themselves born, with nowhere to fight." Mr. Bosler grinned, his mouth and eyes both.
Lotta knew a child at home like they'd been talking about: her older brother Jerym. He'd gotten in trouble at school for fighting. Once he'd told her he was going to be a T'swi when he grew up. She hadn't had the T'sel yet then, so she'd thought that was a dumb thing to say. The T'swa were born, not made; she'd already known that. Now she realized that T'swa meant different things to different people—a human species that lived on the planet Tyss, and the mercenary warriors from there. And that a long time ago, in the Kettle War, Mr. Lormagen, Kusu's father, was called "the White T'swi," which was wrong grammatically—T'swa was plural or an adjective—but that was how people said it on Iryala. Kusu was even named for a T'swa: Mr. Lormagen's sergeant on Kettle.
"What's Varlik's idea?" Mrs. Bosler asked. "Or was getting the statistics it?"
"Tell her, Mauen. He's talked to you since he has to me."
"He's proposed to Lord Kristal that regiments of children be formed and trained. Like the T'swa mercenary regiments: starting with six- and seven-year-olds."
Jerym's too old then, way too old, Lotta thought. Ten.
"Who'd train them? T'swa?" asked Mrs. Bosler.
"The first ones trained would be a cadre unit. T'swa would train them. Then the cadre unit would train the white regiments."
"Would they be mercenaries like the T'swa? If they were part of the Iryalan army, they could easily spend their entire career without fighting."
"He's thinking in terms of having them trained under the O.S.P. He doesn't think it would work to have the army do it; they'd want it done their way. Then, when an actual regiment finishes training, they'd become part of a special branch of the Defense Ministry. The Movement would hire them from Defense as a mercenary unit, and contract them out to warring factions on the trade worlds."
"Wouldn't they be competing with the T'swa?"
"Not really. The trade worlds would hire twice as many T'swa regiments if they were available."
They were just about to Gouer Island. Most of it was woods, but the end they were coming to was grassy, like a lawn with shade trees. The grass was even short like a lawn. Lotta could see two sets of outdoor picnic tables, far enough apart for privacy, and a big, open-sided shelter with tables of its own, in case it rained. Kusu had stopped rowing, and crouched ready to grab the dock. Mr. Bosler dabbed with his oars to guide them in. Lotta reached down, unbuckled her white shoes and took them off, along with her socks, so they wouldn't get dirty on the island. But her main attention was on the grownups talking.
"We can use the profits from the contracts to open more schools," Mrs. Lormagen was saying. "With the teeth taken out of the Sacrament, society needs a new and better glue. Or it will when the various centrifugal factors have been operating for a while."
Lotta understood almost all the words they'd been using, and being a Wisdom/Knowledge child, she knew pretty much what they'd been talking about, even what Mrs. Lormagen meant about glue: People who knew the T'sel liked other people more.
But Mr. Lormagen wouldn't have to worry about contracting his regiments out. They'd fight for the Confederation; she had a feeling about that.
The boat slid alongside the dock; Kusu grabbed one of the posts it was built on, and tied up to it. Lotta was the first one off, running barefoot up the dock to explore.
1
Excerpt from Historical Abstract of the Home Sector, translated from the Tyspi, with commentary by Sir Varlik Lormagen. Until otherwise authorized, distribution of this book is restricted to The Movement. The material summarized here was compiled and refined over several millennia by T'swa seers. An entire monastery of the Order of Ka-Shok was occupied with the task for more than a millennium, and the work is continually being updated.
The ancient home of humankind was dubbed "the Home Sector" of the galaxy by early investigators. . . . This civilization, an empire consisting of fifty-three planets, was destroyed by a megawar more than 21,000 years ago, the principal source of destruction being His Imperial Majesty's ship Retributor, an immense warship designed to destroy planets.
Rumors of the emperor's intention to build the Retributor undoubtedly caused the confrontation between the imperium and its antagonists. Otherwise the megawar might never have happened, for the imperium was decaying, and the opposition, usually factionalized, might well have resigned itself to awaiting the empire's self-generated dissolution. As it was, rebellion and mutinies, more or less coordinated, broke out on a number of worlds, involving powerful forces both loyal and in rebellion.
Eventually they did increase, but they had lost every trace of civilization and history. After a long time, civilization re-emerged, and eventually, on the planet Varatos, a culture arose that reinvented science. In time there was hyperspace travel again. By 19,000 years after the megawar, the other ten surviving planets, two of them populated, had been rediscovered, and those without humans had been colonized.
The eleven worlds found themselves surrounded by a vast region of space without habitable planets. They didn't know why, of course. In fact, it seemed to them that they occupied an aberration—a region with habitable planets in a universe where there seemed to be no others. Science provided no convincing rationale; by that time it was in serious decline. . . .
In the year 742 Before Pertunis, the eleven worlds became a religious empire—the Karghanik Empire. The statutory structures within the empire are largely but not entirely uniform. Actually, the "empire" consists of eleven somewhat autonomous, single-system sultanates, mutually engaged in political and economic rivalries. Neither the empire nor its sultanates are true theocracies. In each, the religious hierarchy shares power with a secular aristocracy.
The imperial worlds are tied together by a complex network of political treaties and trade agreements administered largely through an artificial intelligence known as SUMBAA.4 It is probably only through SUMBAA that the Karghanik empire has survived in the face of rivalries and especially of distance. Each planet has its SUMBAA; the SUMBAA for Varatos serves the imperial administration.
The empire has a fleet and army more than sufficient to its rather modest needs.5 Its ships are manned by a mixed crew from all the worlds of the empire, the mixes and proportions being based on recommendations by SUMBAA. The higher command strata are filled largely by officers from Varatos, the Imperial Planet. Army and marine units, up to battalions, are each from a different world, each with its own officers, and no imperial battalion is stationed on its home world. Divisions never contain more than two battalions from the same world.
Each world has its own flag, and also its own several warships and planetary forces under its own command, partly for purposes of home-planet security and partly for reasons of prestige.6
The monastery named Dys Tolbash stood on a narrow side ridge that descended from a much higher ridge to the east. The building, long and proportionately narrow, was constructed in the form of three uneven steps, accommodating it to the sloping ridge crest. It seemed almost to have grown out of the ridge crest. The lower step stood on an outlook, below which the crest slanted down abruptly like the edge of some rough plowshare, to the boulder-cluttered valley at its foot.
A tower stood at each corner of each step, eight irregular towers in all, overlooking the desert valley two thousand feet below and the two ravines whose craggy walls formed the ridge sides.
It was summer, a season of furnace heat on Tyss, a heat scarcely moderated by the elevation of 3,400 feet. In the west, the evening sun squatted on the horizon, and the temperature had fallen a bit, to 121°F. Master Tso-Ban didn't know that—there was no thermometer at the monastery—and he'd have given it no importance if he had known. At the moment he was climbing the stone stairs that slanted up the outer north wall of a tower.
His tower was at an upper corner, and therefore one of the two highest. At the top step, he paused to scan the rhyolite outcrops and the bristly scrub that broke their starkness here and there. In the pale sky, a carrion bird rode an updraft, tilting, watching, silent. A lesser movement caught Tso-Ban's large, still-sharp eyes. A rock goat, male and solitary, stood browsing with careful tongue among the leaves of a fishhook bush.
The old T'swa monk turned then and entered the top of the tower, a small cell with thick stone walls on three sides, open to the north, away from the sun. On the others, wide eaves-shaded windows gave access to whatever breeze might come. The only furnishings were two pegs in the wall, and a stone platform a foot high, padded with a hide over which a straw mat was spread. On one peg he hung his waterbag, on the other his unbleached white robe. At his age, the skin he exposed was no longer the black of a blued gun barrel, but a flat, faintly grayish black. Seating himself on the platform, he arranged his legs in a full lotus.
In seconds his eyes lost focus; in seconds more they saw nothing, though they did not close. It took a moment to find his unwitting connection, a man who never imagined that someone like Tso-Ban existed, or the planet Tyss. Unfelt, Tso-Ban touched him, and in a sense, in that moment, was no longer on Tyss, in a tower in the Lok-Sanu foothills. His attention was on the bridge of a warship, the flagship of a small exploration flotilla, outward bound from a world named Klestron.
Tso-Ban was a player at Wisdom/Knowledge, and had taken the Home Sector world of Klestron as his psychic playground. For some time, the Sultan of Klestron had been his unknowing connection. The sultan, an ambitious man, had decided to gamble, to send out a flotilla of three ships, with orders not to return until they'd found a new, habitable world. This action was quite unprecedented, by imperial standards illogical and arguably illegal. So of course it attached Tso-Ban's interest.
The sultan had given command of the flotilla to a brevet admiral, Igsat Tarimenloku, making him its commodore. Tarimenloku wasn't brilliant, but he was loyal, a devout son of Kargh, and a friend of the sultan, insofar as the sultan had friends.
Tarimenloku had become the T'swa monk's new connection. Tso-Ban could have used the ship as his connection, but far more information was available this way. In trance he became almost one with Tarimenloku, perceiving through him and with him, sensing his emotions, his surface thoughts, and in a general way his underlying intentions. But always there was a certain separation, Tso-Ban remaining an observer.
It was ship's night in the command room, the light soft, free of glare. Others were there, but Tarimenloku's—and with it Tso-Ban's—attention went to them only now and then. Mostly the commodore watched his instruments, which after a bit told him that in real space there were a major and a minor nodus adjacent to his ship's equivalent location in hyperspace. If he emerged now, he'd find a previously unknown solar system near enough to examine.
It would be better though to be nearer. Tarimenloku tapped keys, changing course, moving "nearer" to the major nodus and "farther" from the minor. He touched a key, and a bell tone alerted all personnel of impending emergence—a standard courtesy and precaution—then touched two other keys. Together his three ships emerged into "real-space," Tso-Ban sharing the commodore's moment of mild disorientation. And there, only 1.8 billion miles away, was a system primary, as he'd known there'd be, at 277.016° course orientation, with a gas giant barely near enough to show a disk unmagnified, at 193.724°. His survey ship, small, totally automated, crewless except for a dozen maintenance personnel, began scanning to locate the system's planets and compute first approximations of their orbits, radioing its data to the flagship's computer as well as storing it in its own. The troop ship followed, its marine brigade inert, unconscious in their stasis lockers.
Tarimenloku's main screen showed the alien vessel almost as quickly as his instruments found it, showed it newly emerged at a distance of only twelve miles. Looking like a disorderly stack of scrap metal and rods welded together, it was presumably a patrol ship. The commodore stared, alarmed: Clearly it had perceived him in hyperspace with a most unusual precision, to have emerged so remarkably near and on a matched course: Clearly t
he alien had technology well beyond his own. The alternative explanation was coincidence, and the odds of that were too small to compute.
Suddenly, on the screen, he was looking into what seemed to be their bridge, the first of his species, so far as he knew, to see an intelligent alien life form. The screen showed creatures vaguely humanoid, with thick leathery skin and vestigial horns, and somehow it seemed to him they were larger than men.
If there'd been any doubt of their technical superiority before, this dispelled it. Their instruments and computer were sufficiently sophisticated that in seconds they'd remote-analyzed the flotilla's electronics sufficiently to beam video signals compatible with Klestronu7 equipment.
Then a voice came out of his speaker, seemingly a computer simulation of human speech. But the words—they certainly sounded like words—meant nothing to Tarimenloku. There was about a sentence-worth of them; then they stopped. After a pause of two or three seconds they were repeated.
"I do not understand you," he answered, and repeated it three times.
DAAS, his computer, spoke to him. "Commodore, there is an alien electronic presence in my databank, scanning."
Tarimenloku's brows knotted and he set his exit controls. "Gunnery," he said quietly, "do you have a fix on the alien?"
"Yes, commodore."
"Have you identified his control structure?"
"Yes, commodore."
"Fire bee-pees one through four."
As soon as his systems screen told him the pulses had been fired, he touched the flotilla control key with one hand and the exit key with the other. His three ships flicked back into hyperspace.
Then he keyed his microphone to confidential. He'd better record right now his justification for what he'd done. (Second thoughts were already pressing his consciousness, and he pushed them away.) It wouldn't do to have the alien reading, and surely recording, the contents of his databank uninvited; simply to try could be considered a hostile act. (But there was a subliminal awareness that the alien might have had no hostile intention at all.)