Wildeblood's Empire

by Brian Stableford

  Wildeblood had introduced an ecological short-circuit. Now, the slaughter took place at a much earlier stage, before the hatching. The survival rate of those whaleys which were allowed to hatch was cut, but the real sufferers—the immediate sufferers—would be the fish and the invertebrate carnivores. We had taken samples of sea water, analyzed the population of the plankton. I hadn’t had time yet to compare our findings in any great detail against the population of the sea as recorded by the survey team. But I knew now what we would find.

  An ecological catastrophe. Sweeping changes, which had begun in a small way over a hundred years ago but which were now in the process of exponential increase. Whole food chains interrupted, at first on a small scale, but by now on a vast one. Thousands of species threatened with extinction, at least locally.

  Including—and perhaps most significantly of all—the whaleys.

  We’d had so little time to attempt so much. We were short-handed because both Conrad and Linda had gone with Mariel. Single-handed, I might not have detected this until we were in hyperspace, expelled from the planet for imagined crimes concocted in service of the great secret. Philip didn’t want us to know about his underworld full of slaves. Of the wider implications, he had no idea.

  I knew then why James Wildeblood had taken the apparently-ludicrous move of leaving behind a message. I knew now what it said, in the later part that I’d never seen. He’d known that his empire was mortal...temporary. Its decline and fall was ecologically predestined.

  The message was an appeal for help. Help from Earth. Help to save the colony which had developed handsomely in embryo but which must—now or someday—go through the extremely painful process of birth into another kind of reliance upon its own resources and those of the world. James Wildeblood had hoped—and perhaps it was a desperate hope, because there was no way of knowing now what kind of contact with Earth he had envisaged—that there might be a midwife to assist in the process.

  I could see it all now. I realized that without James Wildeblood’s message, I would never have been able to figure it out. I would have discovered the changes that were happening in the sea, but I wouldn’t have known why. I wouldn’t have been able to figure out just what was happening. Not in a month, or a year.

  What kind of a man, I wondered again, was Wildeblood?

  I shook my head, because I just didn’t know. I couldn’t understand him.

  And then a voice behind me, soft and sibilant, spoke my name.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Wrapped up in my dreadful imagination, I had not heard their footfalls. They had come through the doors I had left open without needing to move them. They had come quietly, treading softly.

  They were only two. They hadn’t brought a posse. Naturally not. Just Zarnecki and Cade. All in the family.

  Zarnecki held a naked sword, the point directed at my throat. Cade had a gun—a large calibre revolver like the ones that gendarmes carried. That was pointed in my direction too.

  “How did you know I was here?” I asked.

  Zarnecki smiled. “Your friend told Philip this evening that he knew the key to the code. That puzzled me. It seemed to me that if he’d had it before he would have tried to bargain with it before. It occurred to me that perhaps he’d only recently found out. You told him, Mr. Alexander...in the cell, this morning. Cade heard you whisper but he didn’t know what. I was worried. I’m a very cautious man. I left Philip and your confederate arguing, and came down...just to make sure that all was well. Then I found that someone had let down the rope ladder, and left a wooden pole on the ledge.

  “We’ve been out hunting for you all day, Mr. Alexander. We caught your friend the musician, although some of his friends managed to elude us. We’ll have them all, in due course. We couldn’t imagine where you’d got to; we felt sure that you’d head for the ship. But we didn’t suspect then that you might know the way down here.”

  I stared at the blade of the sword, feeling helpless. The breath that was caught up in my throat eased past my vocal cords, but I couldn’t find words. I didn’t know what to say.

  Zarnecki was having no difficulty, though.

  “Now you know everything,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  I swallowed air, then let my pent-up breath go in a deep sigh. I found my body relaxing, letting itself fall back into readiness.

  I found my voice.

  “Everything,” I said. “Perhaps more than you do.”

  I spoke normally, but the echoes took what I said and stirred it slightly, rippling the remnants round the circular chamber in an eerie residual whisper.

  “I even know why you tipped your hand by giving us the second copy of the code,” I said, slowly. “You’re in trouble. The operation has reached its limit. The colony is expanding and by over-exploitation you’re shrinking the population of the whaleys. This season, you’re at or near to the crossover point, and after that there’s only disaster. You thought—just as the musician did—that the code might hold the secret of an alternative source of supply. You hoped we might give you the key without being able to deduce too much from the initial fragment. You were no cleverer than the big man, your reasoning was almost exactly the same. But you were both wrong.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said Zarnecki, “when your friend deciphers the message for us.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Zarnecki,” I said. “There isn’t an alternative. You must know that. There are other islands, other caves. But to gain access to another system the way you have here is something else again. And even if there is such a thing, who’s going to find it for you? Who’s going to work it? How are you going to keep your secret then? This place is useful to you because you’re sitting right on top of it. Another source on another island splits your power base in two. And that doesn’t just make you twice as vulnerable, it makes an eventual division and argument inevitable. And what happens when you need a third source, and a fourth...? You’re finished, Zarnecki. You and Philip and the family. This season, or next, or the one after. Your time is up.”

  “So is yours, Mr. Alexander,” he said, in a tone which could only be described as pregnant with menace.

  “What do you hope to gain?” I asked. “Even if you keep your secret, it’s no good to you. You can’t keep supplying the whole colony; there isn’t enough....”

  I trailed off. I saw, suddenly, why they wanted rid of us now. They didn’t want us to stay out the summer. They didn’t want us to see how they intended to handle their problem. We had come to make a report on them, to carry back to Earth...and they were ready to let us do that, so long as they could show in a favorable light. But they didn’t want to take the risk of our reporting back to Earth the kind of measures they intended to take when the drug that kept their tyranny moderately benevolent ran out....

  They already had the political apparatus of power. When they could no longer hold it by euphoric persuasion they intended to hold it by force and firepower. They were expecting riots just as soon as the addicts were told that the supply was being withheld. Riots and bloodshed. They didn’t want us around when the lid came off. They wanted to have their war in private...like their little underworld colony of slaves.

  And then I knew that Zarnecki intended to kill me. Exile was no longer enough. He wouldn’t face the thought that the whole thing was out of the bag, ready to be relayed back to Earth. And why not? Primarily, because of his pride. His honor. The system of personal protection that, on a world like this one, meant so much.

  My eyes were held by the point of the sword. I expected it to run me through at any moment.

  But I was wrong.

  Absurdly—but quite logically—I was wrong.

  Zarnecki handed the sword to Cade, who accepted it. Then, from a sheath in Cade’s belt, he took a knife. It had a blade some five inches long, with one sharp edge and a point made by the convergence of a concave curve on the sharp edge and a convex one on the blunt side. From his own belt he took a similar knife—not qui
te identical but near enough. He flipped this one over in his hand after showing it to me, and offered it, hilt first.

  He couldn’t just cut me down. He had to do it by the book. He hadn’t brought his dueling kit with him, so the knives would have to do.

  I almost felt like laughing. But it was serious. Like everything else on this crazy world, it wasn’t a joke. All he had to do was let Cade shoot me dead. But in a very real sense he couldn’t. That was what it was all about, in the final analysis. Preserving the image. Keeping up appearances. A matter of pride.

  They would kill us for that. In the ritual manner.

  I was being offered a chance that no reasonable, ruthless man would have offered. But even so, I could hardly feel confident. In a knife fight, or in any kind of a fight to the death, he had all the advantages except one. He was still a fraction slower, thanks to the drug.

  Unlike Nathan, though, I wouldn’t be artificially speeded up. And I didn’t know the moves. I contemplated refusing to fight...the neo-Christian way. I’d tried it once before, and it had worked. But only by courtesy of an accident. I’d misjudged my man. There could be no misjudging Zarnecki. If I refused to fight he’d feel morally justified in butchering me.

  I took the knife.

  He didn’t just dive in. He took up a sort of crouch, a posture that signaled his readiness to begin. He waited for me to do likewise. I looked at him. He’d placed his feet widely apart, and he was leaning slightly forward, his arms wide.

  Not being a complete idiot, I didn’t copy him. Instead, I aimed a sudden vicious kick at his crotch.

  But he wasn’t a complete idiot, either. He’d never been convinced that I knew how to act like a gentleman and he wasn’t fool enough to take it for granted that I would. He was ready for me.

  He caught my flying boot in his left hand and ever-so-gently redirected its course, pushing it sideways and getting the heel of his hand underneath it. Then he jerked upwards. Without using much force he hurled me over on my back, and I went down like a ton of bricks.

  The rock was very, very hard, and the impact jarred my whole body, sending spears of pain up my back and paralyzing my right arm. Luckily, I had accepted the knife into my left because of the stiffness already inherent in the right.

  If he’d been content to maim me he could have slashed the muscles of my leg and made sure of eventual victory, but he was still fighting by his rules and he wanted a clean kill.

  As he came after me I used my legs again, this time to trap his ankle and trip him. Somehow, I managed it. He went down too, but only to his knees. Nevertheless, I was up first, and backing away before he was ready again. He came after me, carefully, still in his crouch. I continued to retreat, uneasily. When he lunged, bringing his arm across in a great horizontal arc, I didn’t dare try to catch his wrist. I just jumped back out of the way. I had to keep dodging, use my quickness. If it came to a straightforward contest of strength he’d probably win.

  He came on again, with another sweeping flourish of the blade. It seemed silly, because it was such a wide, slow arc that it was easy to avoid it.

  Far too easy.

  I jumped back, and suddenly there wasn’t anything to jump back to. My eyes and my mind had been entirely bound up with watching the blade. I’d forgotten where I was. And I’d reached the second ledge. I fell heavily about three feet, twisting my ankle slightly and falling. I rolled over and over, trying to get out of reach as he came down after me, and rolled off the shelf of rock into the water.

  It was icy cold. As my whole body was immersed the cold stabbed into my flesh with a single convulsive squeeze which nearly took the life out of me. I shut my eyes and my mouth, and tried to curl up as I fell through the water. Somehow, I couldn’t make my legs kick, I couldn’t begin to swim.

  I just went down and down, until I touched bottom....

  Only it wasn’t bottom.

  It was cold and it was smooth, but it wasn’t rock. It was skin. The skin of an amphibian.

  How I managed to react so fast, I don’t know.

  The shock of the cold water had immobilized me, perhaps the second shock simply switched me back on again. But however chance or nature served me, I took full advantage. I twisted in the water, let my feet touch the great expanse of flesh, and thrust upwards, straightening like an arrow as my hands reached out for the surface. Somehow, I had lost the knife, but I didn’t care. There was only one idea in my whole mind and that was the knowledge that I didn’t want to play games in a deep, dark pool with a beast the size of a small whale.

  My eyes opened, and I saw the surface above as a shimmer of gold, roiled and rippled by countless curved shadows. I saw it only for a second before I burst through it, my hands already groping towards the sharp horizon of rock which bordered it.

  I gripped the shelf, my head burst from the water, and I saw the black shadow of Zarnecki reaching down for me. This time there was no conceivable option. As the blade carved the air, heading for my neck, I grabbed the wrist and pulled with all my might. I forced the blade up and past my ear, and continued the pull.

  He was already off balance making the lunge. He toppled right over me and into the water, water that was already beginning to bubble and swell. The coldness had the same effect on him as it had had on me. He went straight under.

  Grabbing the shelf with both hands, and feeling the water surging beneath me, I hauled myself out with a single mighty effort of my whole frame. Once on the rock I rolled away from the edge with a panic-stricken urgency.

  I turned in time to see the head of the whaley break surface. It seemed unbelievably large, the eyes like fiery pits burning yellow in the electric light, the size of soup plates. The skin was white,mottled on the upper part of green. The mouth never opened, but looked something like a gigantic turtle’s beak, hard and curved.

  And from a great long gash behind one eye, dark red blood was gushing.

  On the way down, Zarnecki had met the monster coming up, and had slashed at it with all his might. To the sea-beast, it was but a pin-prick...it was probably only alarm at the invasion of privacy that made the thing twist and turn so, making the water foam and bringing all parts of the creature’s leviathan length into crushing contact with the rocky walls of its mighty cranny.

  But as it thrashed and twisted and churned, and made the pool seem to boil despite its iciness....

  Nothing could survive in the water, then. Nothing.

  Cade was forward and firing—firing at the monstrous head. He hit it, twice at least, though he fired four or five times more. More blood gouted out of two holes ripped in the soft flesh by the large-caliber bullets. The head dived again.

  I knew the whaley wouldn’t die. The bullets, though fired at point-blank range, wouldn’t penetrate the thick skull.

  I took my chance. I came to my feet, kicked Cade in the kidneys, and took the gun from him when he fell. I pointed it at him, threatening him with it although I knew that it was almost certainly empty.

  But then came a voice...yet another voice. This one hadn’t counted the shots, and didn’t appear to be much of a judge of character. What it said was:

  “Alex! For God’s sake don’t shoot!”

  Needless to say, I didn’t.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Nathan and Philip were standing by the open door, on the tall platform. There were a couple of others behind them, standing back where I couldn’t see them clearly. I recognized Elkanah by the bandage on his head.

  Even in the cave itself the audience was growing. There were five of the frail, white ghosts now—two more had come from one of the tunnel mouths, attracted, no doubt, by the shooting.

  I lobbed the useless revolver into the churning water. There was no sign of the amphibian now. I didn’t think it would come back. Who could blame it? I didn’t think Zarnecki would be back either. There was no sign of him.

  “Well now,” I said, with more than the hint of a sneer. “What’s this—a conducted tour?”

  “I
t’s okay,” said Nathan.

  “Oh sure,” I said. “You talked him round, right?”

  “I told Philip that we had the key to the code.”

  “I know,” I said, bitterly. “And that sent Zarnecki down here just to make sure. And when he found me....”

  “He should have stayed a little longer,” said Nathan. “I pointed out to Philip that the secret was out, now. I knew...you knew...Conrad knew...the man in the cell with you knew...and all his friends.”

  I knew better than to raise an eyebrow at the slightly-stretched truth.

  “I offered Philip our help,” said Nathan. “All the help we can give him. I told him that whatever he was facing, we could help him solve it. I made him see that there wasn’t any point in getting rid of us, not any more. When I told him that you already knew what was in the message because of the copy Zarnecki had given us...he agreed to tell me the whole thing.”

  His eyes still said that I’d better be careful, that I mustn’t take the risk of blowing the whole operation by confessing that only I—and now he—really knew any more than the barest elements of the story. And they also said that I had to go along with him.

  “We’ve made a deal, have we?” I said, my voice low and acid. I knew that Philip could hear me, but I didn’t care. “You’re going to save all this for Philip.” I indicated by a gesture that I meant by “all this.” The sweep of my hand took in the alchemist’s nightmare...and the people who operated it.

  “They will be released,” said Philip Wildeblood. His voice was calm, unruffled. Majestic, I suppose you might call it, if you wanted to. Like a king who has power and an absolute right to use it.

  He wasn’t ashamed. It just made no impression on him.

  “And what happens to you when the people get to know?” I asked. It wasn’t the sort of question that Nathan would have wanted me to ask. But I wasn’t feeling very discreet.