The Regiment-A Trilogy

by John Dalmas

  "Thank you, Benster, for a good exposition." Benster sat down, and Dak-So's eyes moved again, stopped.

  "Trainee Alsnor, Benster mentioned his interviewer, his Ostrak operator, Lotta. As I recall, she is still a young girl, perhaps fifteen or sixteen. Suppose she was in danger, Alsnor. In immediate danger of being murdered. How would you respond?"

  Jerym's face was stiff. "Sir, I'd do anything in my power to keep it from happening."

  "I'm sure you would, Alsnor, I'm sure you would. Be seated please, and thank you." Dak-So scanned the assembly again. "The operator we talked about, as some of you know, is Alsnor's sister. I did not ask him that question to make him uncomfortable. I wanted to make something real to all of you: That there are circumstances which tend to carry strong polarity with them. Even when a warrior is neutral about his own survival, prepared to accept death, there may be matters about which he has strong preferences. Things he wants and rejects, must have and must not have.

  "As a warrior or a workman, a father, an athlete—whatever roles one plays in life, one can be appraised by the excellence of his performance. Aside from whether he wins or loses. And the excellence of that performance is a reflection of his decisions.

  "T'swa warriors for millennia have been humankind's most successful warriors, but sometimes we lose engagements, even wars, and the great majority of us die in battle. We always intend to win, we always intend to survive and see our friends survive, and most often our actions are such as to bring about victory and survival. But these actions are not compulsive. They are not burdened with a sense of 'must have' or 'must not have.' We are perfectly willing to lose, or to die, or to see our friends die, if that is what transpires."

  The T'swa major paused. "I do not insist that you agree with me on this. If you do, that is fine. If you don't, that is fine too. And in either case it is all right to change your mind. But I will tell you that to the extent you have strong preferences and strong aversions, to that degree you will make decisions which do not conduce to high performance as a warrior.

  "In fact, strong preferences and aversions are likely to result in losing that which one strongly wishes to keep. And in experiencing that which one despises.

  "Feel free to disagree with me. I've told you these things not with insistence, but because I want you to be aware that T'swa warriors hold such a philosophy. Nonpolarity is a key to what we are like."

  Again Dak-So paused to scan them. "Very well, enough of that." He turned to Voker. "Colonel, your regiment."

  Voker stood, stepped forward, grinned. "Feel the floor with your feet!" he ordered. Genially. The wooden floor resounded with the clomping of field boots, the room changing auras with the release of tension.

  "Was the floor there? Did you feel it?"

  "Yes!" came an answering roar.

  "Good. Look at the person on your right! If you're on the extreme right, look at someone else . . . Good! Now tell that person hello! . . . Good! Now stand up! . . . Good! Now stretch! Hard! . . . Good! Now sit down again, and I'll tell you something I believe you'll like to hear."

  They sat.

  "Tomorrow you will begin to learn unarmed combat. You have three weeks to learn it. You will train at it all morning and all afternoon. In the evening you will study various other things, many things. But during the daytime you will learn to fight with your hands and feet.

  "For a week after that, you'll receive training with and against the knife, and improve your skill with the bayonet."

  He felt their incipient cheer, and held up a hand, postponing it a moment. "Do you like that idea?" he asked.

  Their enthusiasm came bellowing out, the most deafening cheers yet. He let it continue till it started to weaken, then cut it off with a single motion. "Good. The people who analyzed your civilian records and tests told us you were intentive warriors. It's obvious they knew what they were talking about.

  "This afternoon, however, you will clean your barracks to the satisfaction of your company commanders, and they will be hard to satisfy. This evening—" He grinned again. "This evening there will be a holo show here from 1915 to approximately 2100. How would you like to see, um . . . 'For Love of Thora'? I understand it's a good cube."

  There was applause.

  "Or would you rather see 'A Crown Prince on Ice,' a cube about a T'swa campaign?"

  Hands beat, feet drummed, throats roared. After some seconds he cut them off. " 'A Crown Prince' it will be then. But I warn you, it's an old cube from before the Kettle War, and the T'swa in it are figments of an uninformed imagination. Considering your experience, you'll no doubt look at it as comedy.

  "Now, when I dismiss you, leave the building in an orderly manner. You are free till 1430. At 1430, you will start cleaning your barracks. Dismissed!"

  Voker and Dak-So watched the trainees file out, talking as they went. They are good young warriors, progressing very well, Dak-So told himself. Given three years training, they will be very good indeed.

  30

  Commodore Igsat Tarimenloku took the bit in his teeth and pressed the two keys. His Reverence's ship Blessed Flenyaagor emerged into real-space with its troopship companion. Everyone was at his battle station, but nothing happened except that they continued at emergence speed in the now star-bannered blackness.

  He hadn't really expected an attack. For the last two hours in hyperspace, he'd stopped, speeded, stopped again, with no sign of a bogey. And it was inconceivable that they were still inside the hostile sector they'd been in before. But as the first minutes passed, he felt the gradual ebbing of tension, leaving him slack, letting him know how tense he'd actually been.

  He'd emerged in a system whose primary was a singlet, a Type F main sequence star, visually a small disk blazing intensely some 800 million miles away. His flagship couldn't evaluate the system for a habitable planet nearly as quickly as the lost survey ship would have, but if any planet had parameters promising enough to call for close examination, he'd know it within the hour and close on it within a day or so. And depending on the outcome of each subsequent phase of observations, he'd determine its critical habitability parameters within a few days more, at most.

  31

  Lord Kristal walked a trifle carefully; his arthritis was flaring up a bit. "We could have done this by cube or beam of course, and saved me the trip," he said. "But I like to see things live when I can. The touch of reality can make a difference."

  The new peiok leaves were out and half expanded, sheltering the lawns with springtime's delicate green. The last time he'd been to Lake Loreen had been— That long ago? Early autumn—more than half a year. Then the leaves had shown the first touches of autumn color: yellow, bronze, scarlet.

  "I'm glad you came down," Kusu answered, and grinned. "For a milestone of sorts."

  They entered the Research Building, and Kusu turned right at the foot of the stairs, stopping at the elevators where he pushed a button. Hmh! thought Kristal. He noticed the knees. Otherwise we'd have walked up. Not much gets by this young man. The doors opened and they stepped on.

  "Is Wellem around?" Kristal asked. "And your parents?"

  "All three, and Laira and Konni. I'm under orders to bring you to lunch if at all possible. If you want to get with any of them singly, I don't suppose there'll be any difficulty with that either."

  The elevator stopped and opened, and it was the roof they stepped out onto, which did not surprise His Lordship. It would have to be the roof; the thing didn't work through walls. A girl was there, a young lady with red hair, standing by the parapet. She turned toward them as they stepped out, as if she'd been watching something and heard the elevator doors open. The "something" had no doubt been the oroval which now was running up a branch of a peiok tree, its long tail undulating behind.

  And there, sitting on an AG sled, was one of the three teleports Kusu had built.

  Kristal returned his attention to the girl. "You must be Lotta Alsnor," he said. "The first person to teleport."

  "Yes sir," sh
e answered. "You're right, as usual."

  He bowed slightly. "I understand you have other talents—qualities and skills that go beyond boldness. Please accept my admiration."

  He turned to Kusu then. "Ernoman you said. There's an ocean between here and there. A horizon and— What? A hundred degrees of curvature? You said it only works on line of sight."

  "I was wrong. And I hope you don't ask me to explain it. One of the problems with inventions that grow out of an intuitive leap is that you may not really understand how they work. And draw wrong conclusions from incomplete observations. Besides that, weak understanding can make things pretty tough to explain, let alone debug and modify. I can teleport objects to Offside Base on Seeren if I hit a limb at a tangent, more or less. It's as if it slides around the circumference then. But if I just aim as if to teleport something on a straight line with Seeren's mass in between, nothing happens. It just sits here; it doesn't go to the intervening mass or anywhere else. It either goes to the coordinate destination, or else it stays.

  "On the other hand, something like a tree trunk is no obstacle."

  Kusu raised a hand slightly, shaking his head. "None of which makes sense, I know, any more than the exclosure limitation does. Theoretically and apparently the object being teleported doesn't traverse the intervening space. It simply ceases to be at one set of coordinates in real space, and instead and instantaneously it's at the other, through their intersection on the back side of reality, so to speak. No physical movement seems to be involved, and hyperspace isn't generated.

  "Sense or not though, it works the way it works. And we seem to be making progress on theory; some, anyway. I've had two grad students working on it for several deks now; they're each taking a different approach, and I'm taking a third. We brainstorm usually once a week. But how long it'll be before we understand it remains to be seen."

  Lord Kristal's eyes left Kusu, moving to Lotta. "And you, I understand, are to make a real trip, the first long jump, so to speak."

  He turned to Kusu. "To Ernoman. Hmh! I'd like to go with her. A step behind, so she'll have the honor of being first. Will you send me?"

  The request took Kusu completely by surprise. Lord Kristal had been brought up in the T'sel, but even so . . . "If Your Lordship wishes. There may still be a risk though."

  Kristal ignored the warning. " 'Your Lordship?' " he parroted. "When did I stop being Emry to you, Kusu Lormagen?"

  Kusu laughed. "Never. But at the same time, you've always been Your Lordship to me, too. Considering all the things you've done and how long you've done them, and how well." Personal aide to the king, he added silently, and to the king before that. The man who sees to things, all kinds of things, takes care of things, without arrogance, upsets, or unwanted notice.

  Kristal had turned to Lotta and spread his hands. "What can I say to someone who butters me up like that?" He grinned, showing still sound teeth. "Lotta, will you accept my company on a brief but long trip?"

  Entering his playful mood, she curtsied. "Your Lordship, I'd be honored."

  "Hmmph! 'Your Lordship' again!" He looked at Kusu. "I believe I'm being put in my place. Are any preparations needed, or can we go now?"

  "I'll power up and we'll give it half a minute." Kusu stepped to the teleport, pressed a switch, and they waited without speaking. Kristal felt his stomach knot a bit, and was mildly surprised at it. After perhaps twenty seconds, a green light came on. "It's ready," Kusu said.

  The nobleman and the girl went to the ankle-high platform, then Kristal gestured. Lotta stepped onto it. "Ready," she said. Kusu pressed another switch and she was gone. In her place was what seemed a rectangular hole in the local reality, a door with the gate for its frame. Through it, seeming both in and beyond it, they could see Lotta's back. Then she stepped aside, disappearing, and Kristal found himself looking onto another roof. Farther off he could see a blurry section of parapet and, blurrier still, what seemed to be an evergreen tree. Obviously the teleport was not much good for televiewing.

  Then Kusu looked at Kristal. "If you're ready," Kusu said, and gestured. "Just step through."

  His Lordship stepped onto the platform too, and through the gate. He hadn't known what to expect, hadn't thought about it. For him, it was like a mild twitch, a whole-body twitch. Then he was on another roof, and it was evening. Lotta Alsnor was standing five feet away, beside a young man His Lordship had never met. Beyond the roof, the trees were not peioks, and in the distance, a row of mountains stretched with snowy upper slopes. It was early evening instead of late morning.

  "Well. I seem to have arrived." He gave his attention to the young man. "I don't suppose you expected me. I'm Lord Kristal."

  "I'm Rinly Barrlis," the young man said. "You know my father, I believe."

  "So I do. So I do." He looked at the nearby teleport, an apparent duplicate of the one he'd just used, and then at Lotta. "I seem to have no business here, beyond arriving, and I do have people to talk with at Lake Loreen. Is there any reason I shouldn't go back directly?"

  "No sir. I should go right back too."

  He turned to young Barrlis. "Will you do the honors, Rinly?"

  "Of course, Your Lordship." He powered up the teleport, and in less than a minute, Kristal was back with Kusu. Lotta followed a few seconds later, and handed Kusu an envelope which he put in a pocket. The test was over. And somehow it all seemed quite natural to His Lordship, not epochal at all.

  * * *

  It was a half hour short of lunch, and Kristal saw no point in interrupting the mornings of busy people, so he and Kusu sat on a sunlit bench, looking out across the lake. A light breeze blew, cool enough to make the old man glad of his jacket. Wavelets chuckled against rowboats tied to a dock.

  "You've teleported objects to Seeren," Kristal said. "What seems to be the feasibility of sending persons to other systems? Persons without a burden of case, of course. Is there any possibility they'd arrive frozen or asphyxiated?"

  "There shouldn't be. The last thing I sent to Seeren was an airtight box with three sand lizards. They arrived there alive and well, which says something about temperature, at least. There's a problem though, in sending anything to other systems. Actually we key a set of conventional coordinates into the teleport's computer. The computer converts those to operational, topological coordinates, using an equation."

  He paused. "Are you familiar with mail-pod astrogation?"

  "Not really."

  "Well, to teleport outsystem, the math we use is analogous to that used in mail-pod astrogation. It guides the pod to an imprecisely predictable location within the target system, where it emerges from hyperspace. From there, the pod homes on a beacon off the target world, normally mounted on the local Postal Outsystem Processing Center, which is parked on a gravitic coordinate outside the radiation belt.

  "But there's always an error of location, an inaccuracy, in the point where the pod actually emerges from hyperspace. A targeting error. At distances like, say, from here to Rombil or Splenn, a typical error is around a hundred thousand miles; an extremely minute error over a distance of several parsecs. But in teleportation we'd like accuracy within yards—close enough that we can correct by eye to as near as need be, which could be at the entrance of a specific building.

  "That's the ideal, of course. At the very least we'd want to land things safely on the planet's land surface."

  Lord Kristal's expression was thoughtful. "What needs to be done to attain that accuracy?"

  "The most basic approach would be to develop a new math that better fits the topological problems involved. The quickest approach though, and the one we can be surest of, is probably to refine the targeting equation. I've started a pair of astrophysicists working on it—members of the Movement of course. They fly down from L.U. on weekends and use the teleport to get data."

  "Hmm. Can someone see the roof and the teleport here from the other side? The destination side?"

  "No. It's a one-way gate and a one-way view."

&
nbsp; "What do you think are the short-term prospects of succeeding?"

  "Assuming that 'short term' isn't too short, the prospect of putting things down on a land surface on the target planet seems fairly good. From there, for a while, we may have to settle for providing our passengers with a beacon, so a shuttle can find them and take them by air to where they want to go."

  Kristal nodded thoughtfully. "Good. Because now that we have this"—he thumbed back toward the Research Building, where the teleport stood—"I have a feeling we're going to need it."

  32

  The reality generators, in a coincidence of factors, had brought forth against the Lok-Sanu Range a desert storm, a rain of rains to rend the night, drowning and nurturing, carving and smoothing. It boomed and banged, lightning pulsing, stabbing mountain ridges, punctuating a darkness otherwise absolute. Wind whoomed. Rain slashed in sheets against thick walls and stubby towers. Torrents, rock-laden, snarled and rumbled down deep ravines.

  Inside his tower-top cell, Master Tso-Ban sat in trance, unaware of the misted spray, the ruptured rain which swirling gusts brought in beneath the eaves and through the open side to wet his skin with unaccustomed coolness.

  His awareness was elsewhere—much farther even than Iryala. In fact, he lay as a sellsu, in a cool ocean current, on a world as wet as his own was (usually) dry. Rose and fell gently, slowly, on oil-smooth swells fathered by some distant storm, his flippers gently stroking to hold him in place. Floated among his pack listening to a poem, a favorite ode among the sullsi, told this night by a master bard who phrased the well-known tale in words and meter of his own. A human maiden, Juliassa, daughter of a chief, had found a sullsit chieftain, Sleekit, left by the tide sick and dying on a beach. She'd cared for him, brought fish to him, protected him from saarkas. Had even learned to speak the sullsit air speech, so they could share stories, until he was well and strong enough to fish and fight again and travel with his own.