A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  “A bit undignified,” Menlee muttered.

  “It’s demeaning for me too,” Ship countered. “I don’t in the least like the idea of being forced to go back and back and back to find out whether what I did was right. Would you, in my position?”

  “You’re asking us?” Menlee said in a baffled tone.

  “Who else is there?” Annica broke in. “Apart from your famous Perfect!”

  “If you don’t stop taunting me with something I just snatched at under rather special circumstances—”

  “If you don’t stop trying to pretend you didn’t mean what you actually said—”

  “When you two have finished what I’m sure is bound to be a most enjoyable squabble,” murmured Ship, “you will find food and drink and bed awaiting you. If anything fails to please, inform me. But I am rapidly approaching the zone where I am permitted to enter tachyonic mode, and while I can of course delay until you’re ready …” The last word curled in the air like a question mark.

  “But I wanted to find out more about the Perfect,” Menlee objected. “Ship—”

  “It is a subject about which I can tell you little. I can recount versions of the legend. That is all.”

  “Save it, Menlee—we don’t want to create problems.” Annica stretched and yawned. “Ship has enough already.”

  “So do we,” Menlee supplied glumly.

  “Not as many as I was expecting. Ship, are you giving us a calmative?”

  “Only as an unavoidable side effect of eliminating certain Shrengian life-forms from your bodies.”

  “Nanosurgery?” Annica snapped back to full attention.

  “Of course.”

  “Yes, of course.” Her tension faded. “If we’re to be landed on another planet… Do you have any idea which it will be?”

  “Who said you had to be landed?” parried Ship. “You’ve read my instructions.”

  “More suitable!”

  “And who defines the meaning of suitable?”

  Menlee bit his lip while Annica was still struggling after the correct reply, then said before she found it, “If Volar’s example is anything to go by …”

  “It is.”

  “It’s up to us. And it must chiefly depend on how bored we get.”

  “I must congratulate you both. The standard of education on Shreng is already as high as it’s reputed, despite the depredations of Dean How and others of his stamp. Your mental resilience is most impressive. I think it will be quite some time before you become bored.”

  “Do you mean think—or hope?”

  Menlee stared at Annica. He framed a comment, but she waved him silent, waiting.

  At last:

  “You confirm what I suspected. I do need input from those whose planets I seeded. So much of my thinking now transcends rationality because it’s based on hope that I am beginning to comprehend the concept ‘optimistic’ … Your meal awaits.”

  A table laden with appetizing dishes had materialized behind them. Turning to it, Annica said, “I see you’ve learned impatience recently, as weU.”

  “In that regard, you’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Among the emotions that were taught me but I had to figure out the implications of, impatience was the first I understood.”

  * * *

  THESE SMALL AND QUIET EVENTS THAT CHANGE THE COURSE OF history across a score of worlds—and who can say how far beyond in the long run?

  Ship brooded in the vastness-beyond-vast of tachyonic space, delighting in the unpredictable variety of the impossible and unforeseeable events that, where time and sequence held no sway, flashed by like fireworks.

  Who—if not I? That thought was chilling, though.

  Were it not for Stripe, I could have imagined that this voyage was the key to everything—but she, poor thing …

  It knew Stripe’s fate, would rather not have done.

  And Annica’s right, as Stripe was, who said my voyages could not be endless. She’s shown this cannot be, as I dared to hope, my earliest sweep … How long? How LONG?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  YELLICK

  YELLICK WAS A HARSHER WORLD THAN SHRENG, YET THERE were those who nowadays predicted it would prove the superior choice in the long run. At the outset, though, such a claim would have seemed—to put it mildly—debatable.

  Because the planet was moonless, most indigenous life had remained in the sea where it began rather than being encouraged to colonize the land by the ebb and flow of lunar tides. Consequently, there were huge tracts of desert where only the counterpart of lichens could be found—descendants, the biologists said, of minute aquatic organisms caught up by gales and deposited where there was just enough moisture to support them. Their airborne spores had formerly posed a major threat to health because they found the alveoli of human lungs hospitable. Now, naturally, the genes of the new inhabitants had been armored against them. Nonetheless, they still attacked neonates; all babies must be born in sterile rooms.

  However, because many of the seas were shallow, the atmosphere had become oxygen-high at an early stage of evolution, for wide areas of them developed into virtually solid masses of vegetation excreting that poisonous element through hollow vertical stalks protruding above the surface chimney-fashion.

  Also owing in part to the lack of a satellite, Yellick had no mountain chains and few ranges even of hills. Vulcanism was in a quiescent phase, and cones surviving from a more active period were being eroded, for the winds blew unchecked across whole continents, bearing dust aloft in a continual khamsin. One of the first priorities of the original settlers had been to erect wind deflectors around the sites they chose for their future cities. With admirable economy they then compacted the material from the resulting dunes and used it for building. “Free delivery on site!” joked the devisers of the scheme, and there was no doubt it had saved a tremendous amount of trouble.

  Of course, within a century or two most of the deserts were made to bloom by tailored spores, developed locally or filtered down from what the Ship had sown in space. However, the same practical approach characterized the thinking of its people down to the present. At any rate so said Jark Holdernesh, and as one whose family had contributed as much as anyone to the present prosperity of Yellick, his opinion counted for more than most people’s. This had been the first human-occupied world in its region—as far as was known, in the whole of the Ann of Stars—to build and launch its own starships, and now it had regular contact with several local systems. Its economy had thrived to the point where even tourism had become possible, although the exorbitant cost made a trip off-planet a once-in-a-lifetime proposition for all but the most fortunate, and the deal was strictly one-sided. Like the rich folk of Yellick, the rich folk of other planets might visit… other planets. No one, absolutely no one, was permitted to come to Yellick simply out of curiosity, “for fun.”

  Now, though, the legacy of centuries of endeavor was under threat.

  Two years ago, without any warning save the vibrating shock wave that must accompany transition to and from tachyonic mode, a foreign ship had arrived in the volume Yellick had long regarded as its private preserve. And what a ship! In mass, in power, in range, it far surpassed the vessels built here.

  It hailed from a world called Sumbala.

  The captain had requested permission to land—denied, although the reception grid could just about have coped. Courteous, resigned, she had conducted negotiations from orbit. The government of Yellick stalled and went on stalling. The Sumbalans promised there would be no danger from alien infection, claiming their sterilization and immunization techniques were virtually perfect, but the public were loud in their cries of alarm, having so long thought of themselves as the visitors, not the visited.

  So the foreigners had departed—judging by their initial course, for systems where hitherto Yellick had enjoyed a lucrative monopoly, and moreover in a ship with such a range, it had not even needed to take on air or water …

&nb
sp; And now it had been confirmed. The Sumbalans were concluding landing agreements in system after system, offering cheap rates to tourists, and throwing in premiums like rare cuisines and unusual modes of transportation on arrival.

  Yellick’s monopoly was doomed. Unless …

  We could have had a decade’s grace, thought Jark Holdernesh sourly. But it’s being worn away. We should already have built at least one ship to rival theirs. I’ve dreamed about that all my life, as my father did before me. Only I’ve been held back by a bunch of timid fools. Unless I can force them to change their minds, we’re going to be hopelessly and permanently outclassed. Yellick will dwindle to the status of a second-class planet. Is that what these idiots actually want? Sometimes it seems that way…

  Rynakeb, the wealthiest city on Yellick, still turned its back on the prevailing wind—a back in the form of a deflector eighty meters high and eight thousand long—for although most of the deserts had blossomed and now produced more than ample food for the swiftly growing population, not to mention other useful products such as fuel, fibers, and source material for plastics, there were enough left for windborne dust to scour all exposed surfaces. It was, Holdernesh realized, high time to renew the windows in his private monorail car, for they were grooved and scored near to opacity. The car was passing the spaceport, but the reception grid, along with the recently landed ship that rested in its cradle, was merely a blurred outline.

  That annoyed him. He’d wanted to see that ship.

  My father built her, and she’s a fine example of her kind. But as of now she just won’t do anymore! We should already be at work on her successors!

  However, having lived in Rynakeb all his life, having been born and educated and partnered and brought up his children here, the city he did not need to see. Its layout was engraved on his mind’s eye: the residential zone he had left a few minutes ago, its broad avenues lined with trees, imported or adapted, such as might perhaps have been seen on the birthworld itself; the leisure areas to either side; the commercial zone on the seafront, where huge automatic freighters bobbed at the quays; the airport that was the second most important focus of on-planet trade; and isolated beyond a headland fledged with bushes the industrial zone that he was bound for, where a few humans and a great many computers supervised underground factories providing necessities and luxuries for nearly a quarter of Yellick’s population.

  “We must compete with Sumbala!” he said aloud.

  He was alone in the nose of the car, but in the rear compartment were two members of his staff, constantly alert to carry out his orders. One of them—it was middle-aged Lula Wegg— apologized for not having heard clearly and requested a repetition.

  “Never mind,” he answered gruffly. If his own immediate circle hadn’t known his views and fully agreed with them, they wouldn’t have been in their jobs.

  Abruptly the car halted for no apparent reason. Glancing at his wrist computer, he realized he was in danger of missing his usual linkup at the central interchange. That would mean wasting a good five minutes, maybe more if there wasn’t another convenient train to hitch on to.

  “What’s happened?” he demanded of the air.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Lula replied. “I’ll find out.”

  Craning close to the abraded glass, Holdernesh strove to make out what was happening ahead but, as ever, saw only indistinct silhouettes. Contrary to regulations—but he’d been among those who drafted them, so who was more entitled to bend them?—he unlatched one of the side windows and leaned out, holding a kerchief over his nose and mouth. At once the reason for the holdup was plain.

  At this point three duplex monorails crossed at various angles on different levels. His was the middle one, carrying express passenger traffic. Local services ran below, while overhead arched lines delivered heavy goods to the port and the industrial zone. A freight gripper with a load of beeftrees from what people still referred to as the Inland Waste—though it had been converted to farmland three centuries ago—had been ordered to stop because one of the thirty-meter trunks that constituted its load had slipped from its restraining chain and now dangled too close to the passenger level for comfort.

  “Master Holdernesh, traffic control says-—”

  He cut Lula short. “I can see for myself!” he snapped. “I can also see the name on that freight gripper! It’s one of Hetto Kidge’s. I’ll bet this whole event was staged!”

  A momentary hesitation. Then: “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t follow. Why should Mistress Kidge want to spoil her firm’s reputation for safety and reliability? Surely she was among those who insisted it was more economical to run the freight level above rather than below the—”

  “Sure, sure!” It was far from a warm day, yet Holdernesh felt himself perspiring. “But that was twenty years ago! Now she’s jealous and insecure! She sees Holdernesh”—he meant not himself but the company he headed—“going from strength to strength, while some of her operations are actually losing money. She’s afraid that if I open up still more contacts with other systems, I’ll be able to buy her out. Why else should she be opposing my plans for a starship to compete with the Sumbalans?”

  Daringly—he would have tolerated contradiction from no one else, but she had been with him fifteen years—Lula ventured, “She may genuinely be afraid of the risk. Our work force is stretched to the point where we can’t build enough machines to supplement it. An alien epidemic—”

  “Lula, shut up. I’ve heard all the arguments, and they’re still wrong. And this kind of false evidence won’t hold water, either.”

  “False evidence?”

  “Use your head! Under the guise of sympathizing with popular disquiet about the Sumbalans, what she’ll say is bound to go like this: ‘This morning we were reminded yet again that nothing is infallible. If we can’t even be certain of running a monorail without mishap, how dare we consider contacting foreign worlds that we know nothing about?’ As though we’re not entitled to try and match the achievements of our rivals— and more importantly our ancestors! You know how big the Ship was that brought people here—everybody does! I want to live long enough to see a ship like that take off from our spaceport!”

  Dryly: “I’m afraid we’d have to enlarge the grid.”

  “You know what I mean!” But Holdernesh was embarrassed. Of course the Ship could never set down on a planet-had never been meant to—and he was fully aware of the fact. It came as a welcome distraction when the loose beeftree was winched clear and the car resumed its progress. Sinking back in his seat, he ordered news channels piped to the screen beside him and for the rest of the trip monitored public reaction.

  It was still dismayingly unfavorable to his starship project, and since he was going to have to raise most of his finance from a general subscription, something had to be done about that. As the car purred to a halt at the works, he said, “Call a press conference. At midday—no, make that one hour from now. I want to get my say in before Hetto does.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lula murmured. “Right away.”

  PERHAPS IT WAS THE SHORT NOTICE; PERHAPS IT WAS THE FACT that his opponents had spread so many false but convincing rumors; either way, the attendance at the press conference was disappointing. Facilities were available as usual for all thirteen of the planet’s news services, but only nine bothered to switch on, and two of them did so—insultingly—by sound alone instead of holo.

  Taking a seat in front of his company’s logo, a luminous curve intended to symbolize the Arm of Stars, counting the images of the correspondents, forcing a smile, Holdernesh subvocalized to Lula, “What’s wrong?”

  “Kidge Corporation is also holding a press conference,” she informed him via a beam to his right auditory meatus.

  “I knew it, I knew it! That so-called accident was staged! When was it called?”

  “Three days ago and ostensibly to announce the debut of an improved gripper. Apparently there have been earlier accidents with the type that held us up this morn
ing, and a lot of people who live beneath the freight line or travel the same route we do have been kicking up a fuss.”

  “Hetto must be getting desperate!”

  But he couldn’t continue. The last correspondent had logged on, and everyone was looking at him expectantly.

  “I still don’t see—” Lula began.

  “Have to tell you later.” And, aloud: “Welcome! I’ll try not to take up any more of your time than I have to, since I know you’re busy people, and so am I. But I want to let you and the planet know the facts behind my project to build starships with twice the range of any hitherto. I stress: the facts. Certain people—I won’t bother to name them, since you’re all well informed—are conducting a campaign of slander and innuendo, disguised as public-spirited concern about letting Sumbalan ships land here but in fact designed to destroy public confidence in our next necessary step on the path of progress!” His voice, without intention, rose in pitch and volume during the last sentence. Some of the correspondents, who thanks to the interlink could see and hear one another as though they were physically present, exchanged glances. Several eyebrows rose.

  “Sir,” Lula murmured, “I’m not sure this is entirely wise.”

  “Don’t interrupt!” Holdernesh subvocalized. “I know what I’m doing.” And resumed aloud.

  “Now! I’m sure all of you are acquainted with the type of nonsense I have in mind. I’m here to rebut it. I want you to throw at me, personally, the kind of rumor, the dirty libels, that people are being deluded into mistaking for the truth. And I’m going to show you there’s no foundation for any of it! Who wants to be first?”

  Startled, for this was not normal procedure, the correspondents muttered briefly among themselves. Eventually the choice fell on the representative of Yellick Newschain, the longest-established agency. She was far from their doyen, but the latter was absent—doubtless having preferred Hetto’s conference, Holdernesh thought bitterly.

  Still, it was easier to deal with juniors. Some of the older generation of pressfolk were cynical beyond hope.