He ran his fingers through his thinning hair, then touched the centuries-old console, the once-gray plastic sheathing now nearly black, not with dirt, but from the continued exposure to the radiation of the interior lights, designed so long ago to supplement the sunlight that had been virtually nonexistent.
Would there he a time when Recorps would not be needed?
He hoped so, but was glad it would not be soon, would not be in his time.
He flicked off the console, and stood, stretching, before he straightened his uniform and headed for his empty quarters. Unlike his predecessor, he lived in quarters, not in New Denv.
He frowned and shook his head as he went out through the open portal.
LVII
THE SLENDER BLOND man halted his work on the painstakingly squared golden log and stood up as he watched the agent vault from the flitter with the grace of the trained hunter.
The uniformed man moved with an easy stride from the flats where he had landed the flitter, a narrow space requiring more than mere skill, more even than recklessness or nerve.
The blond man nodded. He recognized the step of the other. He did not bother to touch the knives hidden in his wide belt, knowing that the other could not have immediate violence on his mind or hands.
He continued to wait until the agent, wearing a sky-blue uniform he did not recognize, with the Imperial crest that he did, halted several meters from him.
The woodworker smiled and set down the tool with which he had been smoothing the log.
"Commodore Gerswin?"
"Answered to that once." He nodded at the uniform. "Corpus Corps?"
"Yes. But not on official business—not the kind you mean."
"No uniform on those missions."
The agent smiled faintly and half nodded in acknowledgment.
"Nice location here."
"For me . . . under the circumstances."
The agent looked around the partly built structure, noting the perfect joint where each golden log had been fitted into place, the dark stones that seemed to fit precisely without mortar, and the way the home-to-be nestled against the cliff behind it.
"You do good work, Commodore, not that you always haven't."
The blond man smiled wryly, dismissing the compliment.
"One way of looking at it."
The agent looked down at the stone underfoot, then back at the man who looked no older than he did.
"Why did you put in the change of address for your retirement pay with the Recorps base here? And why did you use coded entries?"
"Why not? No sense in the Empire having to keep searching. Waste of resources. You either get me, or decide it's not worth it. Too tired to play god much longer."
"You? Too tired? Why didn't you use those tacheads? There were nine left . . . somewhere . . . wherever they are. Not to mention the hellburners."
"Assuming I had any," sighed the thinner man. "Just wanted to get home, not that it is, you understand."
"It isn't? Thought you were from here."
"Was. But you know better. You can't really go home. So long no one really remembers. Why I used codes. Be worse if they knew for sure I was the captain. Won't matter someday. Doesn't matter to the Empire already, I suspect."
The agent frowned, started to shake his head, then stopped, fingering the wide blue leather belt, centimeters from the stunner in the throw-holster.
"You win, Commodore, just like you always did." The words carried a tinge of bitterness.
"Didn't win. Lost. You lost. We both lost. Lerwin, Kiedra, Corwin, Corson—they won. So did the children, those lucky enough to have them . . . and keep them."
"That may be," answered the agent, "but you won. The Empire is coming apart, and the Ydrisians, the Ateys, the Aghomers—you name it, you're their patron saint."
The slender man pursed his lips, waiting.
The Corpus Corps agent studied the wiry man in the thin and worn singlesuit, but kept his lips tightly together.
"You drew the duty of having to tell me?"
"No. I asked. I wanted to see a living legend. I wanted to see the man who single-handedly brought down the Empire."
"I didn't. May have hurried things. But not me." He smiled wryly once more. "Disappointed?"
"No." The agent's tone said the opposite.
The slender man's hands blurred.
Thunk! Thunk!
Twin knives vibrated in the temporary brace by the agent's elbow, both buried to half their length.
"Does that help?"
"A little . . ." The agent took a deep breath. He could not have even touched his stunner in the time the commodore had found, aimed, and thrown the heavy knives. ". . . but how—it couldn't have just been the weapons skills."
"No. Helped me stay alive. Any man who cared about Old Earth, about life . . . any man could have done the rest . . . if he sacrificed as many as I did . . ."
The man in the blue uniform nodded.
"Now. A favor."
"What?" asked the agent cautiously.
"Better that the locals know I'm just a retiree. Don't know more, and they don't need to. Your records will go when the Empire falls."
"Should I? Why? Let you suffer in notoriety. . .
The hawk-yellow eyes of the commodore-who-was caught the agent, and in spite of himself, he stepped back.
"Why?" he repeated, more softly.
"Because, like the Empire . . . out of time . . . out of place . . ."
The agent watched as the commodore's eyes hazed over, looking somewhere, somewhen, for a minute, then another. He waited . . . and waited.
A jay screamed from a pine downhill from the pair, and a croven landed on the rock above the flitter, but the commodore noticed neither the birds nor the man in blue.
Finally, the Corpus Corps agent stepped forward.
Thunk!
A third knife appeared in the brace, and the former I.S.S. officer shook himself.
"Sorry . . . reflex. Hard to keep a thought. Too many memories," apologized the commodore, who still looked to be a man in his middle thirties.
The agent, despite his training, shivered.
"I understand, I think, Commodore." He paused, then saluted, awkwardly. "Good day, ser. Good luck with your house."
He turned and slowly descended the even-set and smooth stone steps, then walked along the precisely laid stone walkway, still shaking his head slowly as his strides carried him back to the flitter.
"We all lost. Him, too."
He was yet shaking his head as the flitter canopy closed and the turbines began to whine.
Behind him, the blond man picked up his tools and returned to smoothing the golden log, smoothing it for a perfect fit, a perfect fit that would last centuries.
LVIII
WEARY OLD. EITHER adjective could have applied to the still-buried building that served as the landing clearing area for the few travelers to visit Old Earth.
The historian/anthropologist took another step away from the shuttle-port entry before stopping. Her recorder and datacase banged against her left hip as she halted to survey the hall. Compared to imperial architecture, the ceiling was low, and despite the cleanliness of the structure, a feeling of dinginess permeated the surrounding. That and emptiness. There had been two passengers on the annual Imperial transport-most of the space was for technical support equipment for Recorps.
She debated taking a holo shot of the receiving area, then decided against it. She squared her uniformed shoulders and stepped up to the console.
A bored clerk in a uniform vaguely resembling hers waited for the lieutenant to present her orders.
He took the square green plastord and eased it into the console.
"Your access code, please, sher."
"I beg your pardon."
"You have special orders, Lieutenant. Service doesn't trust us poor cousins. For me to verify your arrival, you have to punch in your own access code." He pointed to the small keyboard built into the counter.
"Right there."
The lieutenant shrugged. Her precise features, thick, short, and lustrous black hair, and an air of command gave her more of an "official" presence than the Interstellar Survey Service uniform.
Stepping over to the keyboard, she tapped in the access code and waited.
Several seconds later, another console beside the clerk beeped. He retrieved the plastord square and handed it back.
"Welcome to Old Earth, Lieutenant Kerwin."
"Thank you. What's the best way to reach the old Recorps Base?"
"Old Recorps Base? Didn't they tell you? You're in it. There's never been more than one main base. Outside of the work ports in afrique and Hiasi, this is it. Oh . . . we have a few detached officers in Euron and around the globe, but here's the center."
Lieutenant Kerwin looked around the open gray hall, again, even more slowly.
"You want base quarters . . . go to the end of the hall. Take the left fork. That leads to the tunnel to Admin. Plenty of room these days."
"These days . . . ," she murmured.
"Days of the captain are gone, Lieutenant. Lot of nostalgia, especially with the big Atey report," added the suddenly loquacious rating. "Their Institute sent a team last year, but haven't seen a report. May not have one, Captain Lerson says. Lots of nostalgia. Sensicubes all romance it. Don't believe it. Never was a captain, not like that, anyway . . . if you ask me. You'll have to make your own decision."
"Who told you that was my job?" asked the officer softly, with a touch of ice in her tone which pinned the man back against his console.
"Told you what?"
She smiled, and the smile was a cross between sudden dawn and the pleased look of the reintroduced hills cougar sizing up a lost beefalo calf.
"Surely you're joking?" she asked with a laugh, anti the laugh had a trace of silvered bells in it, with steel behind.
In spite of himself, the rating failed to repress a shiver.
Just around, Lieutenant. Someone from the Empire coming in to study the myth of the captain. To check our records. Two passengers, and the other was a hydrologist recruited from Mara. Had to be you."
"Around? That's interesting." She pursed her lips before continuing. "Don't put down myths, Reitiro," she concluded, picking his name off the tag on his tunic pocket, "they all started with reality. You might think about the reality of the captain."
Reitiro frowned as the Survey Service officer turned and left. moving with an easy stride down the hallway toward the tunnel to the Administration building, the tunnel a relic from the days when the environment had been totally out of control.
From before the days of the captain, if the myths were indeed correct.
LIX
THE FACE IN the screen was gray. Whether grayed by the age of the tape or whether the gray reflected the actual physiological age of the man could not be answered.
The tape itself came from a databloc out of the sealed section of the Recorps archives, from a tape that should have been blank, and was not. The exterior had contained neither date nor other identifiable information. Why it had been left remained as much of a mystery as what it contained.
"Commander Lerwin said I ought to scan this and leave it in the back of the archives. Someone should have it."
The silver-haired man had an unlined skin, and neither beard nor mustache. His voice was so soft, even with maximum gain, that the I.S.S. officer and the base archivist/librarian had to strain to catch his words.
"Already, people are doubting what the captain did, or what we all did. As the land improves and there are fewer spouts, they forget the days of the stone rains and the ice that could strip a flitter bare in minutes. The old crews are scattering, dying, having children, and the captain's not here to hold it together. Soon, no one will remember that there was a captain. They'll doubt the records, or change them."
The narrator looked down, blinked, and lifted his head to face the viewers.
"But there was a captain. And he brought the earth back to life when it was dying.
"Am I mad? I suppose I am. But a madman has nothing to tell but the truth. Who designed the river plants? The captain. Who commandeered the dozers when the Empire wrote Old Earth out of the Emperor's budget? The captain. Who forced the creation of Recorps?
"I could go on, but already none of this shows in the histories. How could it? Only a devilkid could have carried it off, and none of them knew he was a devilkid, or what a devilkid was. We knew—"
The man's face was replaced with a swirl of color, and then by an even gray.
"Is the rest of the tape like that?" asked the lieutenant.
"I've run it through twice. That's the only fragment left intact. It was deliberately scrambled, and probably in a hurry."
"Why did they leave the beginning?"
"They didn't know they had. The man who made the recording didn't understand the recording limits. On these older blocs, you were supposed to run twenty to thirty centimeters before beginning the recording. This starts with the first millimeter. Everything beyond thirty is blank."
"But wouldn't a scrambler catch it all anyway?"
"No. The outer layer of the tape expands against the casing. The reason for the procedure is that you can't blank the first lead of a bloc without actually running it."
"Why would anyone want to erase something like that?" Why indeed, wondered the historian.
"It's a pity," observed the librarian. "Now that the days of the captain have become a myth, it would be helpful to have firsthand reference material. Amazing how quickly the process took place. Less than four centuries, and no one knows what really happened back then. Would be nice to know."
"Someone didn't think so."
The rating shrugged. "What can I say, Lieutenant? I finished training less than a year ago, and it's pretty dull. Most of the reclamation here on Noram is done, and they say the natural processes are taking care of the rest.
"No minerals, and with the Empire almost gone—excuse me—with the Empire taking a less aggressive position, we don't get much interest in the archives these days.
"Everyone else just wants to know if we've gotten any of the Imperial sensitapes. Probably have to close Recorps before too long. Not much Imperial funding, and the export trade is down. Two-thirds of the old quarters are already empty."
"Can you tell when the erasure was done?" asked the lieutenant, bringing the issue back.
"Could have been done a hundred stans ago, or two. That swirl pattern doesn't happen when you use what we have now, and our stuff's at least fifty years old. Besides, you saw the dust on that rack."
The officer rose. "You mind if I just browse through the rest of the old blocs?"
"Regs—but who cares. Just don't blow it around."
She smiled at the young rating.
"Thank you. I won't."
The librarian scratched his head as he watched the lieutenant head for the master indices for the archives.
He rewound the old cube and closed down the viewing console before he picked it up to carry it back into the storage area. After that, he'd have to go back to the main console, not that there would be much business.
The word was already out that the Imperial ship hadn't brought any sensitapes.
LX
STARK—THAT WOULD have been the politest word she could have used to describe the interior of the dwelling.
Neat it was, and light enough, though age had darkened the golden wood that comprised the walls and matching roof beams. But there were no hangings on the walls and no coverings on the floors. The air was cool and clean, but the starkness made it seem almost chill.
The hawk-eyed man turned in the antique swivel, but did not stand as his eyes ran over her. The directness, the blaze, of his gaze sent a chill down her spine.
He added to that chill with an odd two-toned whistle so low that she could barely hear it even as she felt its impact.
"First time someone like you has come looking for me."
&n
bsp; His eyes flickered as he took in the uniform.
"Service. Don't recognize the specialty insignia."
3.The Endless Twilight Page 26