The Navigator of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  “If the Empire suspected our energy weapons, the Theocracy would be a smoking ruin in a week,” the Logician said sharply.

  “And the Empire in a year,” the Theologian added. “Shall we bring the Dark Time again?”

  “I sometimes wonder if there ever really was a Dark Time,” the Tactician grumbled.

  The Psychologist laughed gently. “You are forgetting history, my military friend. It’s time you went into Triad again.”

  The Tactician expelled his breath with a hissing sound. “Vulks make me sick.”

  “Vulks are children of the Star, too,” the Theologian murmured with clerical unctuousness.

  The Psychologist’s mind touched for a moment the labyrinth of the Order’s internal politics. The Theologian seemed more and more to tend toward the Stellar Heresy --that personification of God in the physical aspect of the stars. There were now priests who contended that the stars, in and of themselves, were holy. This verged on polytheism, and the gentle Yamasaki, current Grand Master of Navigators, had recently published an admonition on the subject.

  The Psychologist sighed and considered how primitive still was the society of the Second Empire. That there could actually be controversy--even bloodshed--over so barbaric a dispute as the Stellar Heresy seemed grotesque in an age rediscovering atomic energy. Yet once, in the Dawn Age, men of the clergy had disputed over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Nothing really changed-- He returned his attention to the holograph before him. “What’s happening now? I can’t see him.”

  “He has gone under the rock outcrop,” the Tactician said. “It will give him some cover while he reloads that antique firearm he’s cursed with.”

  The Psychologist leaned forward for a clearer view of the tri-D display. In spite of all the training he had undergone to keep him objective and uninvolved during evolutions such as this one, he found that his heart was pumping sympathetically and there was a dryness in his throat.

  The boy down there on the planet was a favorite of the Grand Master of the Order--though he would have been amazed to know it. The Psychologist had met him on a number of occasions and knew him to be a bright, dedicated, and almost painfully sincere priest of the Order.

  For a moment the older man suffered a qualm of distaste for the way in which great movements used individuals. It was well enough to say that the good of the Order-- the good of the Empire, for that matter--sometimes required great sacrifices of innocents. It was ever so in human history: before the Golden Age, before the Dark Time of the Interregnum, before, even, man had left his home planet to voyage among the stars.

  But was it right, the Psychologist wondered as he had so many, many times before, to use men without their knowledge or consent? Did it matter that the boy preparing to fight for his life on that rain-swept coast below would gladly lay down his life for his faith, for the Order, and even for the Empire? Wasn’t it a matter of morality rather than expediency? No, not expediency. That was too shallow a word for the needs of human destiny. One must live by certain great truths, the Psychologist told himself. For a priest of the Order of Navigators, the most shining of these truths was the absolute conviction that no temporal power could ever be allowed to interfere with the sacred freedoms of the Order. The five men in the starship control room believed it. The young Navigator on the sea cliff believed it. A million members of the Order spread across eight hundred thousand parsecs of space believed it.

  That, en fin, was the heart of the dogma.

  The Theologian (whom the others sometimes called the Preacher) subvocalized an Ave Stella for the young man a thousand kilometers below. The boy must reach Melissande before Kreon died. Only the old warleader could tell him who he was and what he must do.

  The Preacher remembered Kynan’s birth and the hopes it brought to the Order. He remembered, too, the spiriting away of the newborn, and the journey across the galaxy to Rhada and thence to Gonlan, to the holding of Kreon, devout and fierce true son of the faith.

  The old priest raised his eyes from the holograph before him and looked into the night of space. The stars were thinly laid here on the edge of the known universe, but at the zenith he could see quite clearly the distinctive luminosity of the galactic lens.

  He considered the forces at work in that spiral of stars and planets without number: the Empire, the Order, the uncommitted worlds where the Dark Time still lived. Currents of power sweeping across a mere two thousand worlds --and what else lived there on worlds where men had not ruled since the Golden Age?

  We dare not fight among ourselves, he thought. We men are too few, the powers of space too great.

  He looked again into the scanner screen. Doll-like figures moved against the gloom of a rain-washed sea.

  Fight well, boy, the Preacher prayed. Much depends on it.

  “Is this Veg Tran’s doing?” The Tactician asked suddenly. “It has an AbasNav flavor.”

  “I doubt it,” the Psychologist cautioned. “Tran can’t know about the boy. The orders were probably given locally. But those thugs are anticlericals. They have that fanatic look.”

  “If not General Tran, then who?” the Preacher asked.

  The Psychologist did not reply. It was possible that some petty power-seeker’s urge to murder could shatter the plan --the plan that spanned the galaxy. That, he thought bitterly, is the irony of history.

  3

  Though the way of the Navigator is peaceful, there will unfortunately always be those--unenlightened or irreligious-- who may seek to interfere with him. A priest must avoid the use of force whenever possible, for we serve all mankind and concern ourselves with the saving of souls as well as the service of the holy vessels. Thus we are occasionally presented with a paradoxical choice: to submit to the ungodly or to do violence at the peril of our own souls. The beatified Emeric (of blessed memory) suggests the following: “If violence be unavoidable, the Navigator must seek to mitigate his sin of self-defense by fighting well. For it is well known that excellence in all things is the way of the Navigator and pleasing to God. After violence, however, a Navigator must seek a confessor and be assigned such penance as the confessor, in his wisdom, thinks suitable.”

  From the

  Handbook for Novices, Order of Navigators,

  middle Second Stellar Empire period

  Crouched under the rocky outcrop, a hundred meters above the sea, Kynan waited for his assailants.

  There was no doubt in his mind about their intentions now. He watched them close in, urging their nervous mounts down the slippery track. As they reached the inland edge of the narrow rock shelf, they seemed to realize that their quarry was alert to their intentions, ready and armed to fight for his life. This gave them pause. They knew of the explosive weapons of the Navigators.

  Kynan watched them carefully. From his vantage point below them, he could see that they wore ordinary Rhadan harness, the working gear of the thousands of free-lance warmen to be found on the worlds of the Rhad. Each man carried a flail slung on his back and a dagger at his belt. They were not poor, for they both owned mailed shirts-- new ones. In addition to flail and knife, each carried a short lance at his saddlebow.

  They had dark, rather brutal faces. They were Gonlan-born: their stocky build proclaimed it. Gonlan was the most massive of the Rhad worlds. Their strong build might indicate that they were cyborgs and not men at all, but Kynan doubted it. Cyborgs were very rare on the Rim, almost unknown in the Rhadan Palatinate.

  As Kynan continued to watch, the two men dismounted and spoke to one another in whispers. Kynan waited.

  Presently, one called to him. “Come out, Navigator. We mean you no harm.”

  Kynan made no reply.

  “I tell you there’s nothing to worry about,” the darker of the two said, ingenuously spreading his empty hands in the rain. “My sister is sick. She needs a priest. That’s all.”

  Kynan cocked his pistol. The click of the mechanism was very clear in the dusk.

  The warmen steppe
d behind their horses and conferred again. When Kynan saw them next, they had separated as much as the narrow track permitted, and one of them had unslung his lance and held it ready for a throw.

  “Look, Nav,” the other called, squinting into the half-light. “Come on out of there. There’s nothing to be skittish about.”

  Kynan’s legs ached with the effort of holding himself on the outcrop. He moved one foot to a more secure position. The man with the lance reacted swiftly. The missile arced through the rain to crash against the edge of the path, the steel point sparking. Kynan heard it, a moment later, clattering among the rocks far below.

  There was another whispered talk between the two warmen, and one returned to where the horses stood waiting. He unslung the remaining lance and returned to stand with his companion.

  The range was not more than twenty meters, and Kynan considered risking a shot. Still, the pistols were notoriously inaccurate at anything less than belly range and, once fired, took more than a minute to reload, prime, and cock. He decided to wait for better odds.

  The man who had thrown his lance now unsheathed his electric flail. Kynan could hear the chains crackling and see the blue sparks through the curtain of falling rain.

  The man with the lance raised his weapon and took careful aim. Kynan waited until his arm swept forward before straightening and moving sideways onto the rock ledge. At that instant, the assassin with the flail charged him. Kynan lifted his pistol and fired. The heavy bullet struck the man in the stomach, doubling him up and flinging him back against the cliff. He fell face down across his own flail, and there was a flash and the smell of scorched flesh as the weapon overloaded and burned out.

  Kynan felt a stab of pain in his thigh and looked down to see that the thrown lance had pierced his leg just above the knee. He stumbled and fell, snapping the haft of the weapon, the ripped muscle drawing a moan of agony from him.

  The second assassin was charging, flail held high. Kynan dropped his useless pistol and pulled his sword over his shoulder. He caught the first sweep of the flail on his blade, and a shower of sparks scattered over the rubber grip of the sword.

  Kynan forced himself to his feet and leaned against the cliff as his assailant took a fighting stance with his back to the sea.

  The man was breathing hard, and his face was distorted with anger. “All right, holy Joe. Now--now, we’ll see!”

  Kynan put his weight on his uninjured leg and thrust. He could not afford a long fight--he was losing too much blood for that. Even with the lance point in his thigh, he must attack or die.

  The flail crackled by his face, trailing sparks. Kynan aimed a series of head cuts, feinted, swept his point down across the hand holding the flail.

  The man screamed with pain and anger and changed weapon hands. He charged heedlessly and caught a ringing blow on his steel cap. A single chain brushed across Kynan’s injured leg, and the electric shock almost knocked him down. He could feel the warm blood streaming, and he felt a growing weakness.

  The light was going swiftly, and the rain made the footing dangerous. Kynan caught the assassin’s cheek with his point and laid the dark face open to the bone.

  The warman, more heavily built than the Navigator, closed with him hilt to hilt. Sparks showered as the chains touched the sword blade. Kynan looked into the dark eyes, the bloody face, and saw the look of the priest-hater. There were many such throughout the galaxy, men who hated the clergy for real or imagined wrongs. But they were rare on Gonlan, and Kynan wondered what had happened among the Rhad to conjure up this kind of dark passion.

  “I’ll kill you--Nav--kill you--” The man’s voice was harsh, strangling in his throat.

  Kynan could feel himself weakening. There was no time now for anything but survival. His free hand found his knife and drew it. The Navigator let the other force him back a step, then twisted toward the cliff’s edge.

  The man lost balance, and Kynan, with a short, desperate motion, drove the knife home.

  The assassin dropped the flail, turned, and ran--his hands holding his stomach. He ran headlong into the rock wall, feeling nothing but his mortal wound, turned, ran again across the track and straight over the edge. He made no sound as the rain and night consumed him.

  For what seemed to be a long time, Kynan stood on the ledge, his breath coming in deep, painful sobs. It was dark now, and the wind drove the rain in gusts before a rising storm.

  Kynan’s wounded leg gave way abruptly, and he found himself stretched out on the wet rocks of the path with the rain stinging his face.

  He was very weak, and his whole side seemed on fire with the pain of the lance head in his thigh. But he dragged himself toward the body of the assassin he had killed with his pistol.

  Still stretched out at full length and with his strength all but gone, Kynan inspected the contents of the dead man’s pouch by the tiny light of his electric torch.

  There was nothing significant: only a half-dozen Imperial coins. The bearded image of Torquas, the Galacton, was etched familiarly into the stainless steel disks.

  The lance head felt like a drop of molten metal in his thigh. He dropped the torch, and it went out. He fumbled for it among the wet rocks and could not find it.

  He called out to the assassin’s horses to come to him, but the beasts had wandered away up the path now that the fighting was done.

  Kynan tried next to drag himself into the lee of the cliffs, for he had begun to shiver uncontrollably with cold and shock. In his confusion he crept in the wrong direction. He had reached the edge of the drop to the sea and was almost over the edge when he fainted.

  4

  Fear the Vulk, for he sees without eyes and knows the black arts and dreams of the blood of children. He is not as men. He is without loyalty.

  Preface to The Vulk Protocols, authorship unknown,

  Interregnal period

  --and it is my wish that my descendants honor this Patent while the House of Rhad rules in Rhada. The Vulk known to men as Gret has been my honored friend and my father’s friend. My trust in him is complete and without condition. For howsoever long the Vulk Gret wishes to serve the House of Rhad, let him be known as Royal Vulk to this family. Given this thirtieth day of the seventh month of the year 6,001 Galactic Era: this sixtieth year of my reign as Kier, second star king of Rhada.

  Excerpt from a Patent of Nobility, The Rhadan Archives,

  early Second Stellar Empire period

  The alien creature with the ancient title faced the councilors of the Gonlani-Rhad in the hall of Melissande. Like all of his kind, Gret was small in stature--not more than a meter and a half high--and delicately made. His overlarge head, quite hairless and pallid, gleamed in the torchlights. The angry warmen who faced him stood silent, watching the smoothly featureless face, the sensitive mouth, and the motionless, tapering hands resting on the carved bow of the lyre he carried.

  The men of Gonlan: Crespus, the General; Kreon’s warlock, Baltus; Tirzah, the Constable; and LaRoss, the First Minister, were hearing counsel from the Vulk--counsel they did not want to heed.

  “There was no need for the star king to send you, Master Gret,” General Crespus said, after a long silence. “This is a local matter. We can handle it ourselves.”

  Gret gave a very human sigh. For years beyond counting, he had lived among men. He had served the first star king of Rhada, and the star king Kier of blessed memory. He had counseled Kier’s son and grandson and now his great-grandson, Alberic, who was growing old. In Gret’s nonhuman mind lay the memories of millennia and a profound understanding of the savage and wondrous creatures called men.

  Gret’s fingers struck a vibrant note from the lyre. “The making of war on an allied nation-state is scarcely a local matter, General. The noble Rhad asks that you consider very carefully. The friendship between the Rhad and the Aurori is long standing, sanctioned by the Order and the Empire.” Privately, Gret wondered about the Empire in this connection. But this was hardly the place to voice his d
oubts. Long ago, in Kier’s time, the ties between the Empire and the Rhadan Palatinate were close. Gret remembered Ariane, sister of the first Torquas, who had married into the royal family of Rhada. The troubadours had sung of her:

  Men called her Princess,

  Men called her Queen,

  Wore she armor of purest gold

  And loved she well her Rim-world king,

  She whom the warmen called--Ariane!

  But these were old memories of other times. The world was now, as one found it. With the threat of civil war on the Rim--

  “You have already brought war very near,” Gret said, “by stealing the heiress Janessa from Star Field. Alberic offers to mediate.”

  “Alberic is growing old,” growled Tirzah. “Perhaps he forgets what it means to be a Rhad warman, but we have not, Master Gret.”

  Baltus, the warlock, said, more mildly, “Our king is dying, Gret. Poisoned on Aurora where he went in friendship. Our heir is captured. You know young Karston. He is not called the Proud for nothing. By now he may have been killed. I can’t imagine anyone holding him alive for very long. So then, are we expected to do nothing?”

  The Vulk inclined his head. “I admit your provocation has been great, and the men of Gonlan are honorable. The noble Rhad takes all this into consideration. But he asks that you think what war on the Rim will mean.” The thin lips formed a sad smile. “I know better than most what civil strife brings. I remember the Dark Time. Long before any of you were born, I fled from world to world in peril of my life because I was a Vulk, and for my kind there is safety only in the rule of laws--laws that crumble in war. Five hundred years ago men fought with spears and swords and dropped stones from the starships. Now, thanks to science”--he nodded ironically to the warlock--”we have rediscovered gunpowder and the art of bombing cities. Are we to light the fuse here on the Rim? What are laws for, then? What is the purpose of the Empire and the nation-states if not to bring justice without war?”