Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire

by Poul Anderson

  Flandry regarded her with more care than pleasure. He had not yet understood her attitude. Was it contempt, or merely hatred?

  The sea people of Nyanza were almost entirely African by descent, which meant that perhaps three-fourths of their ancestors had been negroid, back when more or less "pure" stocks still existed. In a world of light, more actinic than anything on Earth, reflected off water, there had been a nearly absolute selection for dark coloring: not a Nyanzan outside the city on Altla was any whiter than the ace of spades. Otherwise genes swapped around pretty freely—kinky hair, broad noses, and full lips were the rule, but with plenty of exceptions. Tessa's hair formed a soft, tightly curled coif around her ears; her nostrils flared, in a wide arch-browed face, but the bridge was aquiline. Without her look of inbred haughtiness, it would have been a wholly beautiful face. The rest of her was even more stunning, almost as tall as Flandry, full-breasted, slim-waisted, and muscled like a Siamese cat. She wore merely a gold medallion of rank on her forehead, a belt with a knife, and the inevitable aqualung on her back . . . which left plenty on view to admire. But even in plumes and gown and rainbow cloak, she had been a walking shout as she entered the resident's mansion.

  However, thought Dominic Flandry, that word "stunning" can be taken two ways. I am not about to make a pass at the Lightmistress of Little Skua.

  He asked cautiously: "Where are the Technicians from?"

  "Oh, those." A faint sneer flickered on her red mouth. "Well, see you, the firstcomers here settled on Altla, but then as more folk came in, space was lacking, so they began to range the sea. That proved so much better a life that erelong few cared to work on land. So sith the positions stood open, ai-hai!—it swarmed in with dirt-loving men and their shes. Most came from Deutschwelt, as it happened. When we had enough of yon ilk, and knew they'd breed, we closed the sluice, for they dare nay work as sailors, they get skin sicknesses, and Altla has little room."

  "I should think they'd be powerful on the planet, what with the essential refineries and—"

  "Nay, Captain. Altla and all thereon is owned in common by the true Nyanzan nations. The Technicians are but hirelings. Though in sooth, they've a sticky way with money and larger bank accounts than many a skipper. That's why we bar them from owning ships."

  Flandry glanced down at himself. He had avoided the quasi-uniform of the despised class and had packed outfits of blouse, slacks, zori, and sash for himself; the winged cap sat on his head bearing the sunburst of Empire. But he could not evade the obvious fact, that his own culture was more Lubberly than pelagic. And an Imperial agent was often hated, but must not ever allow himself to be despised. Hence Flandry cocked a brow (Sardonic Expression 22-C, he thought) and drawled:

  "I see. You're afraid that, being more intelligent, they'd end up owning every ship on the planet."

  He could not see if she flushed, under the smooth black sweat-gleaming skin, but her lips drew back and one hand clapped to her knife. He thought that the sea bottom was no further away than a signal to her crew. Finally she exclaimed, "Is it the new fashion on Terra to insult a hostess? Well you know it's nay a matter of inborn brain, but of skill. The Lubbers are reared from birth to handle monies. But how many of 'em can handle a rigging—or even name the lines? Can you?"

  Flandry's unfairness had been calculated. So was his refusal to meet her reply squarely. "Well," he said, "the Empire tries to respect local law and custom. Only the most uncivilized practices are not tolerated."

  It stung her, she bridled. Most colonials were violently sensitive to their isolation from the Galactic mainstream. They did not see that their own societies were not backward on that account—were often healthier—and the answer to that lay buried somewhere in the depths of human unreasonableness. But the fact could be used.

  Having angered her enough, Flandry finished coldly: "And, of course, the Empire cannot tolerate treasonable conspiracies."

  Tessa Hoorn answered him in a strained voice, "Captain, there's nay conspiring here. Free-born folk are honest with foemen, too. It's you who put on slyness. For see you, I happened by Altla homebound from The Kraal, and visited yon mansion for courtesy's sake. When you asked passage to Jairnovaunt, I granted it, sith such is nay refused among ocean people. But well I knew you fared with me, liefer than fly the way in an hour or two, so you could draw me out and spy on me. And you've nay been frank as to your reasons for guesting my country." Her deep tones became a growl. "That's Lubber ways! You'll nay get far 'long your mission, speaking for a planet of Lubbers and Lubberlovers!"

  She drew her knife, looked at it, and clashed it back into the sheath. Down on the quarterdeck, the crewmen stirred, a ripple of panther bodies. It grew so quiet that Flandry heard the steady snore of the bow through murmurous waves, and the lap-lap on the hull, and the creak of spars up in the sky.

  He leaned back against a blistering bulwark and said with care: "I'm going to Jairnovaunt because a boy died holding my hand. I want to find his parents. . . ." He offered her a cigaret, and helped himself when she shook her head. "But I'm not going just to extend my personal sympathies. Imperial expense accounts are not quite that elastic. For that matter, while we're being honest, I admit I'd hardly invite Bubbles or Flutters to my own house."

  He blew smoke; it was almost invisible in the flooding light. "Maybe you wouldn't conspire behind anyone's back, m' lady. Come to think of it, who would conspire in front of anyone's face? But somebody on Nyanza is hatching a very nasty egg. That kid didn't sign up when the Imperial recruiter stopped by for glory or money: he enlisted to learn modern militechnics, with the idea of turning them against the Empire. And he died in trampled snow, sniped by a local patriot he was chasing. Who lured that young fellow out to die, Lightmistress? And who sneaked up a wall and harpooned a harmless little lonely bureaucrat in his sleep? Rather more to the point, who sent that murderer-by-stealth, and why? Really, this is a pretty slimy business all around. I should think you'd appreciate my efforts to clean it off your planet."

  Tessa bit her lip. At last, not meeting his shielded gaze, she said, "I'm nay wise of any such plots, Captain. I won't speak 'loud 'gainst your Empire—my thoughts are my own, but it's true we've nay suffered much more than a resident and some taxes—"

  "Which were doubtless higher when every nation maintained its own defenses," said Flandry. "Yes, we settle for a single man on worlds like this. We'd actually like to have more, because enough police could smell out trouble before it's grown too big, and could stop the grosser barbarities left over from independent days—"

  Again she bristled. He said in a hurry: "No, please, for once that's not meant to irritate. By and large, Nyanza looks as if it's always been quite a humane place. If you don't use all the latest technological gimcrackery, it's because it's nonfunctional in this culture, not because you've forgotten what your ancestors knew. I'm just enough of a jackleg engineer to see that these weird-looking sails of yours are aerodynamic marvels; I'm certain that paraboloidal jib uses the Venturi effect with malice aforethought. Your language is grammatically archaic but semantically efficient. I can envision some of the bucolic poets at court going into raptures over your way of life. And getting seasick if they tried it, but that's another story. . . . Therefore," he finished soberly, "I'm afraid I'm a little more sympathetic to Hurri Chundra Bannerji, who fussed about and established extrasystemic employment contacts for your more ambitious young men and built breakwaters and ordered vaccines and was never admitted to your clubs, than I am sorry for you."

  She looked over the side, into curling white and purple water, and said very low, "The Empire was nay asked here."

  "Neither was anyone else. The Terran Empire established itself in this region first. The Merseian Empire would be a rather more demanding master—if only because it's still vigorous, expansive, virtuous, and generally uncorrupted, while Terra is the easygoing opposite." That brought her up sharply in astonishment, as he had expected. "Since the Empire must protect its frontiers, lest Terra hers
elf be clobbered out of the sky, we're going to stay. It would not be advisable for some young Nyanzan firebrains to try harpooning space dreadnoughts. Anyone who provokes such gallant idiocy is an enemy of yours as well as mine."

  Her eyes were moody upon his. After a long time she asked him, "Captain, have you ever swum undersea?"

  "I've done a little skindiving for fun," he said, taken aback. He had spoken half honestly and half meretriciously, never quite sure which sentence was one or another, and thought he had touched the proper keys. But this surprised him.

  "Nay more? And you stand all 'lone on a world that's aloof of you where it doesn't, perchance, scheme murder? Captain, I repent me what I said 'bout your folk being Lubbers."

  The relief was like a wave of weakness. Flandry sucked in his cheeks around his cigaret and answered lightly: "They cannot do worse than shoot me, which would distress only my tailor and my vintner. Have you ever heard that the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once?"

  "Aye."

  "Well, after the 857th death I got bored with it."

  She laughed and he continued a line of banter, so habitual by now that most of him thought on other affairs. Not that he seriously expected the Lightmistress of Little Skua to become bodily accessible to him; he had gathered an impression of a chaste folk. But the several days' voyage to Jairnovaunt could be made very pleasant by a small shipboard flirtation, and he would learn a great deal more than if his fellow voyagers were hostile. For instance, whether the imported wine he had noticed in the galley was preferable to native seaberry gin. He had not been truthful in claiming indifference whether he lived or died: not while a supple young woman stood clad in sunlight, and blooded horses stamped on the ringing plains of Ilion, and smoke curled fragrant about coffee and cognac on Terra. But half the pleasure came from these things being staked against darkness.

  IV

  A tide was flowing when they reached Jairnovaunt, and all the rocks, and the housings upon them, were meters under the surface. The Hoorn ship steered a way between pennant-gay buoys to one of the anchored floating docks. There swarmed the sea people, snorting like porpoises among moored hulls or up like squirrels in tall masts. Fish were being unloaded and sails repaired and engines overhauled, somewhere a flute and a drum underlay a hundred deep voices chanting Way-o as bare feet stamped out a rigadoon. Flandry noticed how silence spread ripple-fashion from the sight of him. But he followed Tessa overboard as soon as her vessel was secured.

  No Nyanzan was ever far from his aqualung. They seemed to have developed a more advanced model here than any Flandry had seen elsewhere: a transparent helmet and a small capacitance-battery device worn on the back, which electrolyzed oxygen directly from the water and added enough helium from a high-compression tank to dilute. By regulating the partial pressures of the gases, one could go quite deep.

  This was only a short swim, as casual as a Terran's stroll across the bridgeway. Slanting through clear greenish coolth, Flandry saw that Jairnovaunt was large—sunken domes and towers gleamed farther than his vision reached. Work went on: a cargo submarine, with a score of human midges flitting about it, discharged kelpite bales into a warehouse tube. But there were also children darting among the eerie spires and grottos of a coraloid park, an old man scattered seeds for a school of brilliant-striped little fish, a boy and a girl swam hand in hand through voiceless wonder.

  When he reached the long white hall of the Commander, Jairnovaunt's hereditary chief executive, Flandry was still so bemused by the waving, fronded formal gardens that he scarcely noticed how graceful the portico was. Even the airlock which admitted him blended into the overall pattern, a curiously disturbing one to the Terran mind, for it contrasted delicate traceries and brutal masses as if it were the ocean itself.

  When the water had been pumped out, an airblast dried them, Flandry's shimmerite clothes as well as Tessa's sleek skin. They stepped into a hallway muraled with heroic abstractions. Beyond two guards bearing the ubiquitous harpoon rifles, and beyond an emergency bulkhead, the passage opened on a great circular chamber lined with malachite pillars under a clear dome. Some twoscore Nyanzans stood about. Their ages seemed to range upward from 20 or so; some wore only a 'lung, others a light-colored shirt and kilt; all bore dignity like a mantle. Quite a few were women, gowned and plumed if they were clothed at all, but otherwise as free and proud as their men.

  Tessa stepped forward and saluted crisply. "The Lightmistress of Little Skua, returning from The Kraal as ordered, sir."

  Commander Inyanduma III was a powerfully built, heavy-faced man with graying woolly hair: his medallion of rank was tattooed, a golden Pole Star bright on his brows. "Be welcome," he said, "and likewise your guest. He is now ours. I call his name holy."

  The Terran flourished a bow. "An honor, sir. I am Captain Dominic Flandry, Imperial Navy. Lightmistress Hoorn was gracious enough to conduct me here."

  He met the Commander's eyes steadily, but placed himself so he could watch Tessa on his edge of vision. Inyanduma tipped an almost imperceptible inquiring gesture toward her. She nodded, ever so faintly, and made a short-lived O with thumb and forefinger. I'd already wormed out that she went to The Kraal on official business, remembered Flandry, but she wouldn't say what and only now will she even admit it succeeded. Too secret to mention on her ship's radiophone! As human beings, we enjoyed each other's company, traveling here. But as agents of our kings—?

  Inyanduma swept a sailor's muscular hand about the room. "You see our legislative leaders, Captain. When the Lightmistress 'phoned you were hither-bound, we supposed it was because of his Excellency's slaying, which had been broadcast 'round the globe. It's a grave matter, so I gathered our chiefs of council, from both the House of Men and the Congress of Women."

  A rustling and murmuring went about the green columns, under the green sea. There was withdrawal in it, and a sullen waiting. These were not professional politicians as Terra knew the breed. These were the worthies of Jairnovaunt: aristocrats and shipowners, holding seats ex officio, and a proportion of ships' officers elected by the commons. Even the nobles were functional—Tessa Hoorn had inherited not the right but the duty to maintain lightships and communications about the reefs called Little Skua. They had all faced more storms and underwater teeth than they had debate.

  Flandry said evenly: "My visit concerns worse than a murder, sir and gentles. A resident might be killed by any disgruntled individual, that's an occupational hazard. But I don't think one living soul hated Bannerji personally. And that's what's damnable!"

  "Are you implying treason, sir?" rumbled Inyanduma.

  "I am, sir. With more lines of evidence than one. Could anybody direct me to a family named Umbolu?"

  It stirred and hissed among the councillors of Jairnovaunt. And then a young man trod forth—a huge young man with a lion's gait, cragged features and a scar on one cheek. "Aye," he said so it rang in the hall. "I hight Derek Umbolu, captain of the kraken-chaser Bloemfontein. Tessa, why brought you a damned Impy hither?"

  "Belay!" rapped Inyanduma. "We'll show courtoisie here."

  Tessa exclaimed to the giant: "Derek, Derek, he could have flown to us in an hour! And we meditate nay rebellion—" Her voice trailed off; she stepped back from his smoldering gaze, her own eyes widening and a hand stealing to her mouth. The unspoken question shivered, Do we?

  "Let 'em keep 'way from us!" growled Derek Umbolu. "We'll pay the tribute and hold to the bloody Pax if they'll leave us and our old ways 'lone. But they don't!"

  Flandry stepped into collective horror. "I'm not offended," he said. "But neither do I make policy. Your complaints against the local administration should be taken to the provincial governor—"

  "Yon murdering quog!" spat Derek. "I've heard about Brae, and more."

  Since Flandry considered the description admirable (he assumed a quog was not a nice animal) he said hastily: "I must warn you against lèse majesté. And now let's get to my task. It's not very pleasant for me either. C
aptain Umbolu, are you related to an Imperial marine named Thomas?"

  "Aye. I've a younger brother who 'listed for a five-year hitch."

  Flandry's tones gentled. "I'm sorry. It didn't strike me you might be so closely—Thomas Umbolu was killed in action on Brae."

  Derek closed his eyes. One great hand clamped on the hilt of his sheath knife till blood trickled from beneath the nails. He looked again at the world and said thickly: "You came here swifter than the official news, Captain."

  "I saw him die," said Flandry. "He went like a brave man."

  "You've nay crossed space just to tell a colonial that much."

  "No," said Flandry. "I would like to speak alone with you sometime soon. And with his other kin."

  The broad black chest pumped air, the hard fingers curved into claws. Derek Umbolu rasped forth: "You'll nay torment my father with your devilments, nor throw shame on us with your secrecy. Ask it out here, 'fore 'em all."

  Flandry's shoulder muscles tightened, as if expecting a bullet. He looked to the Commander. Inyanduma's starred face was like obsidian. Flandry said: "I have reason to believe Thomas Umbolu was implicated in a treasonable conspiracy. Of course, I could be wrong, in which case I'll apologize. But I must first put a great many questions. I am certainly not going to perform before an audience. I'll see you later."

  "You'll leave my father be or I'll kill you!"

  "Belay!" cried Inyanduma. "I said he was a guest." More softly: "Go, Derek, and tell Old John what you must."