by Steve White
Andrew did his best to equal the old Lokar’s expressionlessness. He knew he was skirting the edges of revealing Reislon’Sygnath’s double game. He decided on an approach that could do no harm if Svyatog was, in fact, already aware of that game. “Yes, I have. I’m sure I needn’t pretend that I didn’t put these and other questions to him. He was able to give me certain vague hints, based on contacts he had maintained in the Confederated Nations intelligence community after his retirement. But nothing really useful. Which is why I’m here today.”
Over the decades, Svyatog had picked up certain human mannerisms. One was steepling his fingers—twelve altogether, in his case—and peering over them. He now leaned back and did so. “I did, in fact, receive a report on the subject during the period to which you refer, from one of our agents—a very important agent, who reported directly to me. I have never known quite what to make of it, since the agent in question turned out to be playing a double game.”
Andrew held his breath and ordered himself not to mention the name Reislon’Sygnath.
“This was not known to us at the time he submitted the report,” Svyatog went on. “It was not until just after the war ended that we became aware that he had been simultaneously working for Gev-Rogov.”
Afterward, Andrew had the leisure to congratulate himself for the complete expressionlessness he enforced on his features. At the time, he could only wonder how his father’s upload would react to the news that Reislon had been a triple agent.
“We were quite prepared to ‘play’ him, as I believe your own intelligence community puts it, in an effort to exploit his Rogovon contacts. But he dropped from sight after the war. We would of course be very interested in any information as to who his current employers might be.” Svyatog paused significantly, but Andrew maintained his poker face. “At any rate,” Svyatog resumed, “I was obliged to take his report seriously, despite its inherent improbability and its author’s duplicity, because I had independent knowledge of its sources.”
“What were those?”
“First I must give you a little background. Before a Gev-Tizath expedition discovered you, we had never encountered any non-Lokaron races above a Bronze Age technological level. As a result, we had fallen into the fallacy of equating ‘non-Lokaron’ with ‘primitive.’ I fear this engendered certain attitudes and assumptions that caused us to miscalculate in your case. At any rate, your uniqueness naturally aroused interest. During the 2040s and early 2050s, according to your dating system, the study of human cultures enjoyed a certain fad among the intelligentsia of Gev-Harath and Gev-Tizath.”
“Yes, I seem to recall reading that we got a number of curious visitors then.”
“One of them was an extremely wealthy Tizathon amateur named Persath’Loven. He began to publish his findings in 2050. At that time, his work was considered quite sound. But subsequently, he wandered into some dubious byways. In particular, he took an interest in the doctrines of the Imperial Temple of the Star Lords. Indeed, his next two works reflected . . . Ah, did you say something?”
Andrew choked down his smothered laugh and took a deep breath. “No, sir. Sorry to interrupt. But . . . did you say the Imperial Temple of the Star Lords? They’re crackpots—a fringe group!” He took another breath. “You must understand that back in the middle of the last century, when people were expecting the world to end in a nuclear holocaust, one form the general hysteria took was sightings of supposed extraterrestrial spaceships: unidentified flying objects, or ‘flying saucers,’ as they were called. One offshoot of this was the notion that the saucers had visited us thousands of years ago and started humans on the road to civilization. Every impressive relic of ancient times—the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Easter Island statues, you name it—was attributed to godlike beings from the stars.”
“Odd that humans would assume their own ancestors incapable of such works,” Svyatog observed mildly.
“Not if you know humans! It was all a substitute for religion. But then, in 2020, the ships from Gev-Tizath actually appeared, and the flying-saucer believers announced that they’d been vindicated.”
“But the Tizathon carefully explained that neither they nor any other Lokaron had been observing Earth for decades before that, or at any previous time.”
“Yes, and as a result all the nonsense died down—but only for a while. Shortly before the time you’re talking about, around 2040, a con artist named Sebastian Gruber rummaged up the ‘ancient astronauts’ theory, complete with all its bogus archaeology and mythology and linguistics, and added a new twist: the ancient astronauts were humans, who colonized Earth. We today on Earth are a surviving remnant of a prehistoric human galactic empire!”
“But is there not conclusive evidence that your species evolved on Earth?”
“Sure. But many people have never wanted to accept that, and still don’t. By denying evolution, Gruber roped in a whole new category of suckers.”
“And what supposedly became of this human interstellar empire?” Svyatog sounded intrigued.
“Ah, that was Gruber’s masterstroke. It seems the empire fell because it strayed from the true religion—which he, Gruber, had rediscovered and revived. At the same time he left open the possibility that the empire—reformed and chastened—is still out there somewhere, and may return.” Andrew chuckled. “You can see why all this was so appealing. It relegated you Lokaron to the status of Johnny-come-latelys. And if the empire does come back, then the members of the Imperial Temple of the Star Lords that Gruber founded will enjoy special favor for having kept the faith. No question about it, he was a genius in his way. He died twenty years ago, but the Imperial Temple is still going strong—and, as I understand, since his death it’s been run by genuine true believers. To quote a human named P. T. Barnum—although he went to his grave denying he had ever said it—there’s a sucker born every minute.”
“But I understand that the Imperial Temple has sponsored research into evidence of prehistoric extraterrestrial manifestations on Earth, and elsewhere in the Sol system.”
“Oh, yes. Gruber realized he wasn’t going to be able to go on forever milking the stuff he had plagiarized from Von Däniken and Hoagland and others. So he financed some splashy expeditions and claimed anything they dug up, however ambiguous, as proof. All in keeping with the intellectual traditions of this school of thought, if you can call it that.”
“No doubt. Nevertheless, as you have intimated, the Imperial Temple reflected at least an undercurrent of anti-Lokaron sentiment. This made it worth our while to investigate. The agent of whom I previously spoke made it his business to do so, and in the process made the acquaintance of Persath’Loven in the mid-2050s. It was also at this time that . . .” Svyatog hesitated. “This is not general knowledge, and I rely on your discretion. In 2055, a military vessel from Gev-Harath that was paying a courtesy call on this system spotted a formation of unidentified spacecraft—only briefly, for they almost immediately withdrew into the concealment of what seemed to be some very sophisticated cloaking technology. It was naturally assumed that they were experimental craft of yours, but our intelligence agencies were unable to discover any evidence of this.” A Lokaron smile. “Your mention of ‘unidentified flying objects’ in the last century naturally reminded me of this incident.”
“It’s news to me, sir. And I have a very high security clearance.” But not necessarily a need to know, Andrew mentally hedged. But he was quite certain that the CNE possessed no cloaking technology capable of spoofing the Harathon space navy’s cutting-edge sensors as thoroughly as Svyatog implied.
“The year after that, Persath published his last work about Earth. Most found it to be somewhat incoherent, verging on paranoia. Immediately after that, he returned home to Tizath-Asor, where he diverted his personal fortune into secretive researches into some odd byways of physics. Apparently he is still so occupied.
“We might have looked more deeply into the matter. But the following year, in 2057, came the destabilizatio
n of the Kogurche system, and our intelligence resources—including the agent to whom I alluded earlier—were diverted to the developing crisis there. Two years before your war with Gev-Rogov broke out, that agent submitted his highly enigmatic report on the Black Wolf Society. We were puzzled, but his disappearance just after the war prevented us from pursuing the matter.”
“You must have been even more puzzled when you learned he had been betraying you to Gev-Rogov,” Andrew ventured.
“‘Betraying’ is too strong a word. He did remarkably good service for us during that period, and we have never found any evidence that he acted directly against our interests. Rather, he seems to have felt that working for the Rogovon was not incompatible with working for us. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that he considered both to be compatible with his own agenda.”
And presumably he felt the same way about working for Earth. Aloud, Andrew asked, “And you have no idea where he vanished to after the war?”
“No.” Was there just a slight hesitation in Svyatog’s reply? “Our last verified sighting of him was in the Kogurche system.”
“Then, sir, it would seem that my most promising line of inquiry would be this Persath’Loven, who you say is now back in his home system of Tizath-Asor.”
“That would seem to be the case.” Svyatog rose to his feet, indicating that the interview was at an end—yet another human gesture he had picked up. “I am sorry I was not able to be more helpful.”
Andrew also rose. “To the contrary, sir, you’ve been most helpful, as you always have to my family. I suppose my next stop should be the Tizathon embassy, to obtain a visa.” He inclined his head—handshaking was not a Lokaron custom—and departed.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Gev-Tizath embassy, like all the embassies of the gevahon under the new treaties, was in Washington. It made no legal sense—the Confederated Nations of Earth made its capital in Geneva. But it had just worked out that way, in the tumultuous transition period just after 2030. Nowadays, correcting matters would have been more trouble than it was worth. Geographical location meant less and less in today’s global village.
Andrew arrived at the relatively new air-car annex of Reagan National Airport (it had been restored to that name after the overthrow of the Earth First Party) in an acute state of nerves. At some point, his failure to report in to the IID would trickle down through the bureaucracy and there would be pointed questions. For now, he was relying on the general flap over Admiral Arnstein’s death to bury relative trivialities like the tardy movement reports of a certain officer, at the bottom of what was still commonly referred to as the “in basket.”
By the time he drove his rented ground car into the compound of the embassy, in an area of cleared former slum in the northeastern quarter of the District, he had stopped worrying about it, thereby clearing his mind for an infinitely greater worry: how he was going to justify a little side jaunt to Tizath-Asor.
The winter storm in New York had bypassed this latitude, and it was sunny and merely chilly as he parked in a side lot that served the wing of the embassy devoted to the issuance of visas. Getting out and crossing the wide expanse, he saw no Lokaron in evidence and only a few other humans coming and going. Most were obvious business types—no surprise, as the hovahon of Gev-Tizath had many dealings here. But there was one exception: a tall, slender woman striding purposefully across the lot, clad in a sensibly warm dark-maroon business suit but for some indefinable reason seeming to be working in a different world from all the purchasing agents, lawyers, and others hurrying by.
She was bareheaded, allowing her long dark hair to toss in the breeze. Her features were well-marked, her complexion light olive, her nose an aquiline curve, her lips somewhat full but firmly held in a straight, determined line. It was a striking face . . . and one which Andrew felt looked somehow familiar, even though he was certain he’d never met her.
He was still wondering about it when a black, fully enclosed, quasi-military style air-car dropped out of the sky so suddenly that the displaced air almost blew him off his feet. He stumbled to one knee.
At first it didn’t even register, thanks to its sheer unexpectedness and flagrant illegality. Air-cars were inherently more dangerous than ground cars, and anyway by the end of the previous century it had become painfully obvious to anyone who drove the highways that all too many humans lack an adequate sense of relative motion in even two dimensions, much less three. So licenses to operate air-cars were harder to obtain, leading to a revival of the occupation of chauffeur, and they were banned altogether from densely urbanized areas. He decided this one must, in keeping with its overall appearance, have cloaking technology normally unavailable to civilians, to have slipped by the police.
He looked around. People were either running in panic or stunned into immobility. Then a cry wrenched his attention back to the young woman, whom he had momentarily forgotten. The air-car had landed as close to her as it could without actually hitting her, and the ground-pressure effect of its drive had knocked her to the ground. Before it even settled onto its landing jacks, its doors clamshelled open. Two men dressed in ninjalike head-to-toe black leaped out and grasped her.
She screamed, struggling like a wildcat.
That scream brought Andrew to his feet. He launched himself at the two attackers, whose backs were to him as they held on to the woman, one to each arm.
A whole series of desk jobs had intervened since his training in unarmed combat. But he had tried to keep up with refresher courses, and these days forty-one was not as creaky an age as it had once been. He managed a quite creditable flying side-kick that connected with the small of one attacker’s back, sending him staggering into the other.
Andrew landed on his feet with a balance that would have left him feeling smug at any other time. At this moment, his only thought was to grab the young woman by the wrist and pull her away from her two off-balance erstwhile captors.
“This way!” he yelled, with no particular plan except to get her to his ground car. She caught on at once, gripped his wrist as tightly as he was gripping hers, and sprinted in that direction with him . . . and suddenly went limp and became dead weight.
He spun around in time to see her slump to the pavement. Behind her, a third black-clad figure had leaned out of the air-car and was pointing the weapon that Andrew knew had brought her down: a standard M65-A-3 laser rifle, highly illegal for civilians to possess. At least Andrew knew it had brought her down alive, for there had been none of the pinkish-gray explosion of instantly superheated bodily fluids that marked the full-power use of a weapon-grade laser on a human target. So it was set on its stun function, powering down the laser to a mere guide-beam that ionized the air for the passage of an electrical charge.
Then the gunman swung the weapon toward him, and with his right hand made an adjustment that Andrew recognized as switching the setting.
Before he could make a futile attempt to evade a weapon that struck at the speed of light, he heard a somehow familiar voice from inside the air-car. “Take him, too.” The gunman made a reverse adjustment . . . and Andrew lost consciousness in a brief agony of electric shock.
***
Almost twenty years ago, as part of the climax of the Academy’s survival training, Andrew had been hit with a laser stunner. Now the miserable sensations of awakening from it—the splitting headache, the tremulous feebleness of the muscles, the residual nerve pains—all came roaring back as he struggled up to an unwelcome consciousness.
After a while he felt able to take an interest in his surroundings.
He was in a dimly lit, starkly featureless enclosed space with insufficient headroom for a tall man to stand up straight under the metal-raftered ceiling. It was completely nondescript, but a sensation of movement and a faint hum of grav repulsion enabled him to identify it as the cargo hold of an air carrier—a large cousin of air-cars, widely used for economy and quietness whenever the tearing speed of suborbital transports was not needed.
The only interesting thing in view in the semidarkness was the woman, still dressed as he had last seen her, and unbound as he now noticed he himself was. She sat on the deck, hugging her knees and regarding him with what seemed to be clear eyes.
“How long have you been awake?” he asked.
“Only a few minutes,” she replied, which irrationally made him feel better, even though he knew it was only natural that she should have recovered first, being younger. “Thanks for trying to help me.”
“Not very effectively.” He tried to sit up, only to subside with a spinning head. “Do you have any idea who has grabbed us, or what this is all about?”
“I have a pretty good idea what it’s about, at least in very general terms. But I haven’t a clue as to who these people are. That was one of the things I was there at the Gev-Tizath embassy trying to find out—which, I’m sure, was why I was snatched.”
The reply didn’t make a great deal of sense to Andrew. He sat up, with rather more success this time. “Maybe we’d better start with the basics. My name is Andrew Roark.”
“I’m Rachael Arnstein.”
It took some fraction of a second for the name to register. Then he simply stared. “Arnstein? You mean—?”
“Yes.” Her voice held the faint sigh of someone who has had to answer the same question too many times. “I’m Admiral Nathan Arnstein’s daughter.”
All at once, it came back to him. He had always been accustomed to think of the admiral as simply unmarried, but he had known of an earlier marriage, ending in divorce but producing one child. Now he recalled certain photographs on the Admiral’s desk, of a dark-haired girl at various ages . . .
“Well, we have a connection of sorts. I was your father’s chief of staff.”
It was her turn to stare. “Why, yes, I remember him mentioning . . . Then you’re the son of . . . ?”
“Yes.” As soon as it was out of his mouth, he realized the same sigh had crept into his voice that hers had held. A twinkle in her eyes confirmed it.