David Falkayn: Star Trader (Technic Civlization)

by Poul Anderson

  "Did no one think of piracy?" Adzel asked.

  "Oh, probable. But why should pirates sack a tiny place like that? Besides, had been no later attacks. Whoever heard of one-shot pirates? Logical theory was, fire wiped out croplands, warehouses, everything the Leandrans needed to live. They went after help, all in their ship, had troubles in space and never made port. The matter is pretty well forgot now. I don't believe nobody has bothered with Leandra since. Too many better places closer to home." Van Rijn scowled at his glass as if it were another enemy.

  "Tonight I guess different. Could be Shenna work. They could of first landed, like friendly explorers from a world what lately begun space travel. They could learn details and figure what to do. Then they could kidnap everybody and set a fire for covering the evidence."

  "I believe I see the further implications," Adzel said softly. "Some attempt, perhaps, to domesticate the older captive humans. Presumably a failure, terminated by their murder, because the youngest ones don't remember natural parents. No doubt many infants died too, or were killed as being unpromising material. Quite possibly the half-dozen of Serendipity are the sole survivors. It makes me doubt that any nonhumans were similarly victimized. Leandra must have represented a unique opportunity."

  "What it proves is bad enough," van Rijn said. "I can't push Beldaniel about her parents. She must feel suspicions, at least, but not dare let herself think about them. Because her whole soul is founded on being a creature of the Shenna. In fact, I got the impression of she being the special property of one among them—like a dog."

  His hand closed around the tumbler with force that would have broken anything less strong than vitryl.

  "They want to make us the same, maybe?" he snarled. "No, by eternal damn! Liever dood dan slaaf! " He drained the last whisky. "What means, I'll see them in Hell first . . . if I got to drag them down behind me!" The tumbler crashed warheadlike on the deck.

  XX

  The rendezvous site was listed in Technic catalogues. Scanning its standard memory units, the ship's computer informed van Rijn that this system had been visited once, about a century ago. A perfunctory survey revealed nothing of interest, and no one was recorded as having gone back. (Nothing except seven planets, seven worlds, with their moons and mysteries, life upon three of them, and one species that had begun to chip a few stones into handier shapes, look up at the night sky and gropingly wonder.) There were so uncountably many systems.

  "I could have told you that," Thea said.

  "Ha?" Van Rijn turned, planet-ponderous himself, as she entered the command bridge. Her smile was shy, her attempt at friendliness awkward from lack of practice. "Obviously we couldn't give you a hint at anything you didn't already know. We picked a sun arbitrarily, out of deserted ones within what we guessed is a convenient volume of space for the Shenna."

  "Hm-hm." Van Rijn tugged his goatee. "I wouldn't be an ungentleman, but wasn't you never scared I might grab you and pump you, I mean for where Dathyna sits?"

  "No. The information has been withheld from me. Only the men, Latimer and Kim, were ever told, and they received deep conditioning against revealing it." Her gaze traveled around the stars which, in this craft built by nonhumans, showed as a strip engirdling the compartment. "I can tell you what you must have guessed, that some of the constellations are starting to look familiar to me." Her voice dropped. She reached her arms forth, an unconscious gesture of yearning. "They, the Shenna, will take me home. Moath himself may be waiting. Eyar wathiya grazzan tolya. . . . " Van Rijn said quietly, into her growing rapture, "Suppose they do not come? You said they might not. What do you do?"

  She drew a quick breath, clenched her fists, stood for a moment as the loneliest figure he remembered seeing, before she turned to him. Her hands closed around his, cold and quick. "Then will you help me?" she begged. Fire mounted in her countenance. She withdrew. "But Moath will not abandon me!" She turned on her heel and walked out fast.

  Van Rijn glowered at the star that waxed dead ahead, and took out his snuffbox for what consolation was in it.

  But his hunch was right, that Thea had no real reason for worry. Sweeping inward, the ship detected emanations from a sizable flotilla, at an initial distance indicating those vessels had arrived two or three days ago. (Which meant they had departed from a point not much over a hundred light-years hence—unless Shenna craft could travel a great deal faster than Technic ones—and this was unlikely, because if the Shenna were not relative newcomers to space, they would surely have been encountered already by explorers—not to mention the fact that today's hyperdrive oscillator frequencies were crowding the maximum which quantum theory allowed—) They accelerated almost at the instant van Rijn came within detection range. Some fanned out, doubtless to make sure he didn't have followers. The rest converged on him. A code signal, which the Shenna must have learned from human slaves, flashed. Van Rijn obeyed, dropped into normal state, assumed orbit around the sun, and let the aliens position themselves however they chose.

  Gathered again in the bridge before the main outercom, all three waited. Thea shivered, her face now red and now white, staring and staring at the ships which drew closer. Van Rijn turned his back on her. "I don't know why," he muttered to Adzel in one of the languages they were sure she did not have in common with them, "but I get some feeling I can't name from the sight of her like that."

  "Embarrassment, probably," the Wodenite suggested.

  "Oh, is that how it feels?"

  "She is unlike me, of course, in her deepest instincts as well as her upbringing," Adzel said. "Regardless, I do not find it decent either to observe a being stripped so naked." He concentrated his attention on the nearest Shenn craft. Its gaunt high-finned shape was partly silhouetted black upon the Milky Way, partly asheen by the distant orange sun. "A curious design," he said. "It does not look very functional."

  Van Rijn switched to Anglic. "Could be hokay for machines, that layout," he remarked. "And why this many of them—fifteen, right?—big and hedgehoggy with weapons and would need hundreds in the crews—to meet one little unarmed speedster like us, unless they is mostly robots? I think they is real whizzards at robotics, those Shenna. Way beyond us. The SI computer system points likelywise." Thea reacted in her joy as he had hoped. She could not keep from boasting, rhapsodizing, about the powerful and complex automatons whose multitudes were skeleton and muscle of the whole Dathynan civilization. Probably no more than three or four living Masters were in this group, she said. No more were needed.

  "Not even for making dicker with us?" van Rijn asked.

  "They speak for themselves alone," Thea said. "You don't have plenipotentiary powers either, you know. But they will confer with their colleagues after you have been interviewed." Her tone grew more and more absent-minded while she spoke, until it faded into a kind of crooning in the guttural Shenn tongue. She had never ceased staring outward.

  "'They will confer with their colleagues,'" Adzel quoted slowly, in the private language. "Her phrase suggests that decision-making authority rests with an exceedingly small group. Yet it does not follow that the culture is an extreme oligarchy. Oligarchs would prefer live crews for most tasks, like us, and for the same reasons. No matter how effective a robot one builds, it remains a machine—essentially, an auxiliary to a live brain—because if it were developed so highly as to be equivalent to a biological organism, there would be no point in building it."

  " Ja, I know that line of argument," van Rijn said. "Nature has already provided us means for making new biological organisms, a lot cheaper and more fun than producing robots. Still, how about the computer that has been speculated about, fully motivated but superior in every way to any being born from flesh?"

  "A purely theoretical possibility in any civilization we have come upon thus far; and frankly, I am skeptical of the theory. But supposing it did exist, such a robot would rule, not serve. And the Shenna are obviously not subordinates. Therefore they have—well, on the whole, perhaps somewhat better robo
ts than we do, perhaps not; certainly more per capita; nevertheless, only robots, with the usual inherent limitations. They employ them lavishly in order to compensate as best they can for those limitations. But why?"

  "Little population? That would explain why they do not have many decision makers, if they do not."

  " Zanh-h-h . . . maybe. Although I cannot offhand see how a society few in numbers could build—could even design—the vast, sophisticated production plant that Dathyna evidently possesses." They had been talking largely to relieve their tension, quite well aware of how uncertain their logic was. When the ship said, "Incoming signal received," they both started. Thea choked a shriek. "Put them on, whoever they is," van Rijn ordered. He wiped sweat off his jowls with the soiled lace of one cuff. The visiscreen flickered. An image sprang forth. It was half manlike; but swelling muscles, great bull head, iridescent mane, thunder that spoke from the open mouth were such embodied volcano power that Adzel stepped backward hissing.

  "Moath!" Thea cried. She fell to her knees, hands outstretched toward the Shenn. Tears whipped down her face.

  Life is an ill-arranged affair, where troubles and triumphs both come in lots too big to cope with, and in between lie arid stretches of routine and marking time. Van Rijn often spoke sharply to St. Dismas about this. He never got a satisfactory reply.

  His present mission followed the pattern. After Thea said Moath her lord commanded her presence aboard the vessel where he was—largest of the flotilla, a dreadnaught in size, fantastically beweaponed—and entered a flitter dispatched for her, nothing happened for forty-seven hours and twenty-nine minutes by the clock. The Shenna sent no further word nor heeded any calls addressed to them. Van Rijn groaned, cursed, whined, stamped up and down the passages, ate six full meals a day, cheated at solitaire, overloaded the air purifiers with smoke and the trash disposal with empty bottles, and would not even be soothed by his Mozart symphonies. At last he exhausted Adzel's tolerance. The Wodenite locked himself in his own room with food and good books, and did not emerge until his companion yelled at the door that the damned female icicle with the melted brain was ready to interpret and maybe now something could be done to reward him, Nicholas van Rijn, for his Griselda-like patience.

  Nonetheless, the merchant was showing her image a certain avuncular courtliness when Adzel galloped in. "—wondered why you left us be when everybody traveled this far for meeting." Seated before a transmitter pickup on the battleship, she was changed. Her garb was a loose white robe and burnoose and her eyes bore dark contact lenses, protection from the harsh light in that cabin. She was altogether self-possessed again, her emotional needs fulfilled. Her answer came crisp: "My lords the Shenna questioned me in detail, in preparation for our discussions. No one else from Serendipity was brought along, you see."

  Below the viewfield of his own sender, van Rijn kept a scrib on his lap. Like fast hairy sausages, his fingers moved across the noiseless console. Adzel read an unrolling tape: That was foolish. How could they be sure nothing would have happened to her, their link with us? More proof they rush into things, not stopping for thought.

  Thea was continuing. "Furthermore, before I could talk rationally, I must get the haaderu. I had been so long away from my lord Moath. You would not understand haaderu. " She blushed the faintest bit, but her voice might have described some adjustment to a machine. "Consider it a ceremony in which he acknowledges my loyalty to him. It requires time. Meanwhile, the scoutships verified no one else had treacherously accompanied us at a distance."

  Van Rijn wrote: Not Jove. The Minotaur. Raw power and maleness.

  "I do not identify the reference," Adzel breathed in his ear.

  What that Shenn beast really is to her. She is only somewhat a slave. I have known many women like her in offices, spinsters fanatically devoted to a male boss. No wonder the SI gang were four women, two men. Men seldom think quite that way. Unless first they are conditioned, broken. I doubt if those people have had any sex relationship. The Latimer marriage was to prevent gossip. Their sexuality has been directed into the channel of serving the Shenna. Of course, they don't realize that.

  "My lords will now hear you," Thea Beldaniel said. For an instant, humanness broke through. She leaned forward and said, low and urgent, "Nicholas, be careful. I know your ways, and I'll translate what you mean, not what you say. But be careful what you mean, too. I won't lie to them. And they are more easily angered than you might think. I—" She paused a second. "I want you to go home unhurt. You are the, the only man who was ever kind to me."

  Bah, he wrote, I played Minotaur myself, once I saw she wished for something like that, though I supposed at the time that it was Jove. She responded, not conscious of what moved her. Not but what she doesn't deserve to be led back into her own species. That is a filthy thing they have done to her.

  Thea gestured. A robot responded. The view panned back, revealing a great conference chamber where four Shenna sat on cushions. Van Rijn winced and mumbled an oath when he saw the decor. "No taste, not by no standards nowhere in the universe or Hell! They skipped right past civilization, them, gone straight from barbarism to decadence." It was Adzel who, as the conference progressed and the focus of view shifted about, remarked on a few ancient-looking objects in that overcrowded room which were lovely.

  A voice rolled from one shaggy deep chest. Dwarfed and lost-looking, but her glance forever straying back to adore the Shenn called Moath, Thea interpreted: "You have come to speak of terms between your people and mine. What is the dispute?"

  "Why, nothings, really," van Rijn said, "except could be a few pieces of dirt we divvy up like friends instead of blowing our profit on squabbles. And maybe we got things we could trade, or teach each other, like how about one of us has a fine new vice?"

  Thea's translation was interrupted halfway through. A Shenn asked something at some length which she rendered as: "What is your alleged complaint against us?"

  She must have shaded her interpretation from that side also, but van Rijn and Adzel were both too taken aback to care. "Complaint?" the Wodenite nearly bleated. "Why, one scarcely knows where to begin."

  "I do, by damn," van Rijn said, and commenced.

  The argument erupted. Thea was soon white and shaking with nerves. Sweat plastered her hair to her brow. It would be useless to detail the wranglings. They were as confused and pointless as the worst in human history. But piece by piece, through sheer stubbornness and refusal to be outshouted, van Rijn assembled a pattern.

  Item: Serendipity had been organized to spy upon the Polesotechnic League and the whole Technic civilization.

  Answer: The Shenna had provided the League with a service it was too stupid to invent for itself. The forced sale of Serendipity was a bandit act for which the Shenna demanded compensation. Item: David Falkayn had been kidnapped and drugged by Shenn agents.

  Answer: One inferior organism was not worth discussing.

  Item: Humans had been enslaved, and probably other humans had been massacred, by Shenna. Answer: The humans were given a nobler life in service to a higher cause than could ever have been theirs otherwise. Ask them if this was not true.

  Item: The Shenna had tried to keep knowledge of a new planet from those who were entitled to it. Answer: The ones entitled were the Shenna. Let trespassers beware.

  Item: Despite their espionage, the Shenna did not seem to appreciate the strength of the Technic worlds and especially the League, which was not in the habit of tolerating menaces. Answer: Neither were the Shenna.

  —About that time, Thea collapsed. The being called Moath left his place and went to stoop over her. He looked, briefly, into the screen. His nostrils were dilated and his mane stood erect. He snorted a command. Transmission ended.

  It was probably just as well.

  Van Rijn woke so fast that he heard his own final snore. He sat up in bed. His stateroom was dark, murmurous with ventilation, a slight sugary odor in the air because no one had adjusted the chemosystem. The mechanical v
oice repeated, "Incoming signal received."

  "Pestilence and pustules! I heard you, I heard you, let me haul my poor tired old body aloft, by damn." The uncarpeted deck was cold under his feet. From a glowing clock face he saw he had been asleep for not quite six hours. Which made over twenty hours since the conference broke off. If you could dignify that slanging match by that name. What ailed those shooterbulls, anyhow? A high technological culture such as was needed to build robots and spaceships ought to imply certain qualities—a minimum level of diplomacy and caution and enlightened self-interest—because otherwise you would have wrecked yourself before you progressed that far. . . . Well, maybe communications had stayed off until now because the Shenna were collecting their tempers. . . . Van Rijn hurried down the corridor. His nightgown flapped around his ankles.

  The bridge was another humming emptiness. Taking its orders literally, the computer had stopped annunciating when it got a response. Adzel, his ears accustomed to denser air, was not roused in that short time. The machine continued as programmed by reporting, "Two hours ago, another spacecraft was detected in approach from the Circinus region. It is still assuming orbit but is evidently in contact with those already present—"

  "Shut up and put me on," van Rijn said. His gaze probed the stars. An eel-like destroyer, a more distant cruiser, a point of light that that could be the Shenn flagship, drifted across his view. No visible sign of the newcomer. But he did not doubt that was what had caused this summons.