The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  "Yes, but the purpose of our voyage . . . ?" Klimov said, no longer peevish but clearly unsatisfied. "The things we have come to see?"

  "Yes," said Daniel. "You want to go hunting, Count, and Countess—Valentina—"

  Catching himself before her slim, beringed finger waggled in his face.

  "—you are a student of ethnology. While you share an interest in pre-Hiatus artifacts."

  "Yes, exactly," said the Count. "What of those things?"

  "He doesn't know yet, but he'll learn," the Countess said. "That is correct, is it not, Captain Dannie?"

  Daniel shrank the starfield so that he could meet the Klimovna's eyes without a milky holographic veil between them. "Countess," he said, "I will promise to call you Valentina henceforth if you promise not to call me Captain Dannie. Are we agreed?"

  "Agreed, Daniel," she said and stretched her hand out over the astrogation tank. He touched fingertips with her and withdrew his hand.

  "And of course your wife is quite right, Count," Daniel continued with a smile. "I don't have enough information yet to give you our intermediary planetfalls; but I will before we lift in seven days. I'm going through my Uncle Stacey's logs. For the most part they deal with sailing directions, but there are notes regarding the planets where he put in for air and reaction mass. More important, I've asked Mistress Mundy to use her resources. She's Mundy of Chatsworth, by the way; one of the most noble houses in the Republic, as your friends the Collesios will tell you."

  "But she is your signals officer?" Klimovna said. "The sort of populations which interest me will not have radios, let alone starships."

  "She's acting as my signals officer," Daniel explained, "but her training in the Academic Collections on Bryce was as a librarian—an information specialist. Mistress Mundy will learn whatever can be learned on Cinnabar about suitable planetfalls. When we reach Todos Santos, she will learn more. You will not be disappointed, sir and madam."

  The Klimovs exchanged a long glance. She nodded and the Count stepped to the hatch and swung it to before returning to face Daniel.

  It was the wife who spoke, however, saying, "There is one further matter, Daniel. Eighty years ago our planet was ruled by a man named John Tsetzes."

  "He was a mercenary soldier who made himself emperor," Klimov put in. "He called himself Emperor Ivan the First. Twenty years later he was overthrown and fled on an armed yacht."

  "I see," said Daniel, a placeholder limited to the very little bit that he did understand thus far. Keeping his mouth shut seemed to be the best way to learn more.

  "Tsetzes took the national collection with him," Valentina said. "Items of great sentimental value to the nation and sometimes more. In particular he took the Earth Diamond. You have heard of it?"

  "No ma'am," Daniel said, "I have not."

  But in thirty seconds Adele could tell you more than you know yourself, he thought, or I miss my bet.

  "Regardless, it is very famous," Valentina said with a dismissive gesture. "It is a perfect diamond, the size of a man's head; spherical and hollowed out."

  "That's indeed impressive," said Daniel. Jewels had value, but no jewel could truly be said to be unique given that all the universe was open to human acquisitiveness. The labor of hollowing out a huge diamond, however, invested it with a value beyond that of the material itself.

  "It is more than that," said Klimov. "The name, the Earth Diamond, is not just words. On the inside of this diamond sphere is carved a map of the continents of Old Earth before the Hiatus, a thing that could never be duplicated in the past two thousand years. Now do you see?"

  "Yes," said Daniel. He blinked with the weight of what he'd just been told. "I do."

  The Hiatus in human civilization occurred when the first tier of star systems colonized from Earth revolted against the home world. The war was fought with asteroids accelerated to slam into planets, distorting the crust and killing all but a few percent of those living on those worlds before the war started.

  It was a millennium before mankind returned to the stars, and the return came from second- and third-tier colonies, worlds like Cinnabar and Pleasaunce which had been too minor for either side to bother destroying. No one today could tell what the Earth looked like before the Hiatus, because the continents had died along with those who lived on them.

  "We know—" Valentina said.

  "We believe!" said her husband.

  "We know," Valentina repeated, "that John Tsetzes fled toward the Galactic North. Deserters from his ship said as much. No sign of him or the treasures he took has ever appeared. We thought, Georgi and I, that if we could perhaps trace Tsetzes, it would be very important for us at home."

  Daniel pursed his lips. "I can see that, yes," he said. "But I must emphasize that ships vanish in the Matrix, and ships crash while trying to land on planets that no one else ever visits. The chance of our finding a vessel that disappeared sixty years ago isn't very great."

  He didn't know enough about the political structure of Novy Sverdlovsk to be sure what "very important" meant in the present context, but the Countess might well be suggesting the return of such an heirloom could be parlayed into leadership of the planet. That was none of Daniel's business, of course.

  "No one has been searching," Valentina said. "Not really."

  "In any case," said the Count, "we will hunt and collect artifacts. And if more eventuates—who knows? Eh?"

  "Indeed, who knows?" said his wife. With a smile that emphasized her unusually wide mouth, she again reached over the astrogation tank.

  Daniel smiled back; but instead of touching hands, he brought up the display. "Sir and madam!" he said, "Mistress Mundy and I will do our best to accommodate you."

  CHAPTER 8

  A barge with two powerful hydraulic winches pulled the Princess Cecile slowly from her slip by cables attached to ringbolts on her outriggers. A tensioning capstan on the quay paid out a third wire cable, attached to the corvette's stern to keep her from sliding into the barge once she started moving.

  By splitting her display, Adele could watch both; but in fact she didn't really understand what was going on, so watching the affair would be a pointless exercise. She'd switched instead to an analysis of Harbor One's message traffic. That had nothing to do with her either, but at least she understood it.

  The noise was quite remarkable. Adele's helmet protected her eardrums, but the cacophonous shrieks and roars and bangs through the hull made her body vibrate.

  Most of the Sissie's hatches were closed, but the bridge access port was still hinged down. Daniel stood on the lip, steadying himself with one hand while he called orders to his own crew and the yard personnel through his commo helmet. He'd clipped a safety line to his equipment belt, but if he slipped from the transom he'd strike hard against the lower curve of the hull before snubbing up.

  Adele grimaced. Daniel didn't expect to slip, and having seen him in the Sissie's rigging she didn't expect him to slip either. Besides, nobody was asking her to do it.

  "Daniel, what is going on?" Countess Klimov asked over what she'd been told was the command channel. "Is everything all right?"

  During undocking and any other time the captain's full attention ought to be on his work, the Klimovs' messages were routed to Adele's console—and stopped there. The only signals going directly to Daniel were those of the Chiefs of Rig and Ship, First Lieutenant Chewning at his station in the Battle Direction Center astern, and the ground staff controlling the winches.

  Acting by the polite reflex of handling something for a friend while he was busy, Adele reverted to the split view and exported it to the Klimovs display. Because the icon at the top of the screen wouldn't mean anything to them, she added a realtime image of her face . . . and a grim, glowering person she looked, she realized.

  She attempted a smile without much improvement and said over the private channel she'd just opened, "Sir and madam, Captain Leary directed me to keep you fully informed while he's immersed in preparations for
liftoff. Do you have any questions about what's going on?"

  "What is going on?" Klimov demanded. "These pictures? What are they?"

  There wasn't room on the corvette's bridge for two additional consoles, but neither was there any practical way to keep the ship's owners off the bridge. Daniel's answer had been to turn his watch cabin into an annex by removing the bulkhead. He'd placed two acceleration couches in the space. Armored conduits welded to the deck connected the Klimovs' jury-rigged displays to the main computer, but their controls worked only to access data unless Adele released the lockout she'd imposed.

  "A tugboat's pulling us into the center of the pool so that we can lift off without damaging other vessels," Adele said calmly. "The images are of our bow and stern."

  The bow pickup was at the base of Antenna Dorsal One; she could see a tiny image of Daniel's head and torso, his right arm gesticulating. You had to know what you were looking at for it to make any sense, of course; which was generally true of life. Context was everything. . . .

  "There's not really much to see," she continued aloud. She chuckled. "Though rather more than there will be as we lift off, since then we'll be in a cocoon of steam and then hydrogen ions. I wonder—would you care to see what I suggested to, ah, Captain Leary for our first planetfall?"

  Adele turned her head to look into the annex, past Sun reclining at the gunnery console. She'd have gotten a better view of the Klimovs by putting their images on her display, but she hoped looking directly at them would seem reassuring. Even as a child she'd been more interested in her privacy than she was in other people, but her present task required that she appear to be social. She supposed she could manage it, at least for the time being.

  "There is a planetfall?" said the Count. "But I have not been told!"

  "She's telling you now, Georgi," his wife said sharply. Adele wasn't sure they realized they were speaking, even to each other, through the communications system rather by ordinary voice. The helmets they wore projected cancellation waves to save their hearing. She went on, "Yes, all right, mistress. Show us the planet. It can only be better than machines and dirty water, yes?"

  "Cuvier Catalogue 4795-C has a sufficiency of dirty water also," Adele said dryly, her wands weaving a set of images from the corvette's computer onto the Klimovs' displays. When Adele had leisure, she slaved whatever computer she was accessing to her personal data unit and used the familiar system as her controls. Occasionally this cost her a few microseconds of machine time, but that was a cheap price to pay for the reflexive assurance she gained. "There are compensations, however."

  The Austines were one-time allies of the Mundy family, though distantly enough that the house had been merely decimated after the Three Circles Conspiracy instead of facing near extermination. They'd provided family documents at Adele's request.

  Ninety years earlier, an Austine had been associated with a colonial survey endeavor. No official reports of the expedition survived so far as Adele could find, but Surveyor Austine's handwritten journal did. With it was a holocube which projected six separate images depending on which face was pressed.

  "It's a little farther out than Captain Leary had intended for our first planetfall," Adele continued. "Eighteen days, he estimates. There are no major ports between Cinnabar and the Ten Star Cluster anyway, and 4795-C at least will supply us with reaction mass."

  The first image was of a rolling, misty landscape in which trees dangled serpentine branches. Occasional highlights gleamed above the fog's monochrome blur, but they were too far away to have shapes.

  Surveyor Austine hadn't used standard notation in her private journal. Adele by herself could no more have identified the planet than she could have flown—but of course she hadn't been by herself. She'd explained the situation to Daniel, and after only a few minutes at the astrogation computer he'd found the world and begun plotting their course. They made a good team.

  "The dominant predator . . . ," she said, cueing the next image. "Ranges up to thirty-five feet in length."

  "Ho!" said the Count. "Yes, a fine trophy! Yes!"

  Austine had called the animal a dragon. For her amusement Adele had checked a zoological database for Cinnabar and its client worlds; she'd found over three thousand species called "dragon" alone or in combination. For all that, the name fit well in this case.

  The pictured creature rested on a point of rock, its head turned toward the camera—which must have been at a considerable distance, judging from the lack of image resolution. Its body was snakelike but it had a pair of strong clawed legs at the point of balance and, barely visible, a pair of slender arms folded against the upper body. The eyes were faceted, set to either side of a great hooked beak.

  "The creatures, the dragons . . . ," Adele said, switching to the next image. "Fly. You can't see it very well, but the source says that the animal extends translucent plates, she calls them feathers, out more than a yard along its midline all along its body."

  The dragon in flight was little more than a twisting shimmer in the sky with a dark line running down the middle of it. Adele had allowed her software to sharpen the image somewhat, but going farther than this would've been invention rather than improvement. Mist, distance, and the creature's movement conspired against clear imaging.

  "Flying?" Klimov said. He turned to his wife. "This is wonderful! Our captain has done well, little dove."

  Adele blinked at the affectionate diminutive—Klimovna certainly wasn't little nor could Adele imagine her as a dove, but that was between the couple. Nor was Adele particularly offended by the Count giving Daniel credit for what she had done; she'd read enough to know that Novy Sverdlovsk society was straitjacketed by preconceptions of rank and gender.

  But it was also true that it didn't make her like Klimov better.

  A warning whistle blew; red icons pulsed on the displays of those within cancellation fields. The Princess Cecile lurched sideways, then steadied with a slap/slap/slap of waves reflected between the outriggers.

  Because in an atmosphere starships used plasma thrusters, whenever possible they landed on enclosed bodies of water. That made it easy to take on reaction mass, and in addition a lake or lagoon absorbed the jets of charged ions harmlessly. A few liftoffs and landings would begin to crater any solid surface, even bedrock or reinforced concrete.

  The Princess Cecile was a long cigar balanced by the outriggers which were now extended; after liftoff they'd be drawn up against the hull so as not to interfere with the antennas and sails. She wasn't a boat, though, but rather a floating solid with no more ability to maneuver than a bobbing cork. All things considered, the yard personnel were doing a competent job of towing the corvette's 1200 deadweight tons from the narrow slip to the center of the pool where her liftoff wouldn't damage the other vessels in the harbor, but it was still an awkward task.

  "Good," Adele said with brusque enthusiasm. She wasn't exactly faking her reaction in order to calm her audience, but in this case the approval she voiced was more intellectual than emotional. She didn't like being sloshed sideways any better than the Klimovs' expressions showed that they did. "There'll be a few final adjustments; then I believe we can expect to lift off."

  She cleared her throat, projected the next two images as a pair, and resumed, "Most of the animals on 4795-C—no one bothered to name the place, of course—are plant eaters. The lesser ones hop—"

  You could see a degree of kinship between dragons and the animal browsing sedges at the margin of a lake, but the herbivore was built more like a bipedal egg than a serpent. It showed no sign of alarm at the photographer whose shadow showed in the image.

  "—whereas the large ones are nearly sessile and sweep the area around them with their tongues. I doubt you'd find them good sport, though they do get very large."

  The image on the right could've been a muddy hillock except for the description Austine had left in his journal. Knowing that it was alive, Adele could see tiny eyes and realize that the curved line at the edge o
f the image area was the creature's thirty-foot tongue rather than a branch waggling from the trunk of a fallen tree. The photographer had kept his distance, perhaps realizing as Adele did that being caught in the tongue's sweep would be fatal even if the creature spat out your remains in disgust a few moments later.

  "No, no, nothing there," Klimov agreed dismissively. "But a dragon, now, that will make a unique trophy."

  "There are also structures on high ground," Adele said, throwing up the final image. She heard the Countess take a sharp breath.

  A tetrahedral crystal pyramid shone on a hilltop. Even in this world's dim sunlight, the shimmering reflections and refractions had overwhelmed the image until Adele's software corrected for them. The pyramid's base appeared to have been cast onto the rocks rising from the slope beneath; rain had splashed mud some distance up the clear sides. In the center of the face toward the camera was an opening, a wedge whose triangular sides paralleled those of the structure itself.

  "The source wasn't able to analyze them, but they're clearly artificial. There were over a thousand of them on the main land mass ninety years ago, and that was on the basis of a very cursory survey from orbit."

  "Yes, this is very interesting!" said Klimovna. "Who is it who built this, please?"

  The words were polite though the tone was peremptory. Adele smiled faintly; she might have done the same, so she couldn't fault the Countess.

  "The source didn't have the faintest idea," she said. "The dragons, the large ones at least, appear to use the structures as their lairs, but it seems unlikely that they were the builders."