by James Gunn
Wu looked at the dismantled gun and shuddered. “It seems as if all these precautions are for you,” he said slowly. “I urge you: don’t use that pistol! One man’s death means nothing—except to himself. And the death that gun holds is yours.”
Horn stared silently across the mesa toward the monument and thought again: Why am I here? To kill a man, he told himself, to do a job no one else could do.
“The man of violence,” Lil said suddenly, “is a dangerous companion.”
“You are right, Lil, as usual,” Wu said.
Before Horn could stop him, the fat, old man had grabbed his suitcase and vaulted the little wall with surprising agility. As Horn listened to him slithering down the other side, his hands were busy snapping the pistol back together.
He pointed the pistol over the wall—and lowered it slowly. Wu and the parrot were already mingling with the throng below. A shot would accomplish nothing now but betrayal.
And yet— Horn indulged in a rare moment of self-reproach. This was the price of softness. It was obvious that the yellow man was going to sell him to save his own ancient skin.
Horn shrugged. There was nothing to do but wait.
THE HISTORY
Secrets don’t keep.…
The facts of nature are written duplicate in atoms, which reveal them with the same phenomena everywhere, for intelligence to see. Intelligence can’t be monopolized.
Yet one secret kept for a thousand years.
Men died to learn Eron’s secret: scientists, spies, raiders. The theory, the mathematics, the technical details were all available in thick manuals and thicker textbooks. Captured technicians could build Terminals, but they couldn’t link them together. One thing was missing: the imponderable, the unguessable. The secret.
Of the many ways to keep a secret, only one is perfect: tell nobody. But some secrets can’t be allowed to die.
Someone had to know. Who? The Directors? The General Manager? At least one of them was always present when a new Tube was activated.
The secret. What was it? Who knew it? Eron guarded it well.
If all men could build bridges, who would pay toll?…
5
ASSASSIN
The seconds passed slowly, but they passed without alarm. Horn’s pulse began to slow. He risked another glance over the wall, his pistol clenched in a sweaty palm. No one was looking toward him. There were no guards in the crowd clustered around Wu and Lil.
Wu stood on his battered suitcase haranguing the curious Golden Folk in a surprisingly loud voice of blustery confidence. Some of the phrases even drifted to Horn.
“… Space-kings! Master-engineers of mighty Eron.… come to visit the mother-world. Pause a moment and see her latest wonder.…”
Lil stretched her ragged wings on Wu’s shoulder, her eye fixed on something in the crowd. The conquerors were tall and blond and proud. Even the men were gorgeously dressed with padded bosoms and femininely symmetrical legs covered with heavy synsilk and furs. And jewels. A huge diamond flashed prismatically from the throat of a bulky matron.
“… the bird with a human brain,” Wu bellowed nasally. “… educated in the arts of calculation … will give the correct answer to any mathematical problem you wish to ask.…”
The purple-clad matron jabbed a jewel-studded cane at the parrot and said something Horn couldn’t hear.
Lil flapped to Wu’s outstretched finger and screamed, “Two and two are four. Four and four are eight. Eight and eight—”
Wu jerked his hand. Lil shut her beak.
A tall man pushed his way forward. On his tunic was the jeweled golden star of a retired space-officer. “Here’s a problem for you,” he shouted drunkenly. “State the elements of the curve of synergy for a unitron vessel entering a G-sub-four type binary system at forty-six degrees to the ecliptic plane and preparing to land on a mass-18 planet in an E-3 orbit. Deceleration constant at 80 G. Planet 8 degrees past relative conjunction.”
Wu turned away hastily and said something to the crowd, but Lil launched herself from Wu’s finger and flew to the officer’s shoulder, croaking in hoarse imitation of his voice.
“You will find the synergic curve to be type y-18 times factor e/¢ plus G-field correction point oh oh nine four.”
The man looked startled.
“Upon complete solution of your problem, however,” Lil went on mockingly, “you will discover that such a landing would be unwise. An E-3 orbit for a mass-18 planet about a G-sub-four binary is radically unstable. In fact, within four hours after crossing the E-3 orbit, the planet in question will collide with the inferior sun.”
The officer gasped. He pulled an astrogator’s manual and a small calculator out of his pocket and started computing feverishly.
Lil flew back to Wu. Horn noticed that the white diamond was missing from the center of the spaceman’s golden star.
Trumpets snarled across the field. The vast, amoebic beast that was the crowd stopped flowing aimlessly and froze, their eyes turned toward Horn. Horn dropped behind the wall, his heart beating fast.
But there was no sound of assault, no firing of guns. There was only the snarling trumpets. Horn waited until waiting became unendurable. Irresistibly his head came up.
Guard companies had cleared five paths from battleships at the perimeter to the monument from across the field. A company of marching, Denebolan lancers led it, their two-meter strides covering the distance effortlessly. The brilliant enamel on their N-iron link armor was blue. Blue, too, were the plumes on their upright, ceremonial lances. Holstered at their sides were gray, unitron pistols.
The shimmering blue car that followed floated a meter above the ground. Its torpedo-shape came to rest at the foot of the steps leading to the platform. Horn raised the pistol to his eye and stared through its telescopic sight at the man who stepped out of the car. It was a young man. He climbed the stairs briskly, tall, his back lean at the waist and swelling to well-muscled shoulders. As he turned, applause beat against the hills.
It was a young man’s face, golden with the pure blood of Eron, hard with confidence and pride. It was smiling now. Horn recognized the man: Ronholm, Director for Commerce.
Along a second lane, another procession was approaching. Its color was green. Green for Transport, Horn translated. Thin, aristocratic Fenelon mounted the steps without haste and turned his hatchet face to the crowd. His eyes were deep-set and powerful. They blazed imperiously at the crowd, demanding its homage. They dragged it out of the formless beast.
They came more swiftly. Orange was next. Matal, Director for Power, panting as he hoisted his short, fat body up the steps, smiling broadly, his yellow jowls shaking as he acknowledged the applause. But the gun sight brought that face close to Horn. Horn saw the eyes, almost concealed in puffy flesh, peering out calculatingly over the crowd and shifting to eye the men on either side of him. Greed, Horn thought, greed and gluttony.
Then black. Black for Security. Black for Duchane. There was no sleek, unitronic car for him. He came on the back of a black hound. The massive beast, almost two meters tall at the shoulder, slavered on the steps as Duchane rode him up onto the platform.
Duchane swung down from the saddle and sent the monster to sit, mouth gaping, like a red-eyed shadow at the back of the platform. The crowd was silent, but that seemed applause enough for Duchane. The square, powerful face on the heavy body looked out over the heads of the people standing beyond the bleachers with a pleased half-smile.
His face was sallow. With his darker eyes and hair, he seemed atypical. But he was, Horn knew, one of the most powerful men of Eron. Certainly, he enjoyed it the most. Ruthless, cruel, lustful, Duchane was the most hated man in the Empire. His agents were everywhere; his power was close to absolute.
Duchane had been staring almost directly at Horn. Horn dropped back. One finger stoppering the barrel, he dusted the gun carefully. When he returned to the wall, there was no chance of betrayal from a sudden reflection of sunlight.
Horn stared through the sight at the lone passenger of the car. The softly golden shoulders and red-gold hair shining down across them could only belong to Wendre Kohlnar. Was she as beautiful as her image in the five-kellon coin? It was impossible, Horn knew; no woman could be so beautiful.
As she climbed the steps, straight, slim, and proud, Horn’s breath stuck in his throat. He waited for her to turn. She turned. Horn gasped as her face filled the gun sight. Here was a woman worth a galaxy, worthy of the name of Eron.
Her bare arm lifted to a thunder of applause; her head, crowned by the same fillet of white diamonds, bowed in recognition. When she looked up, her eyes seemed to look again into Horn’s. Tawny eyes, wide and wise and clear.
Horn looked away.
The trumpets screamed a newer, more violent note. And then fell silent.
The silver of the General Manager was approaching the stand. The guards were silver; the car was silver. Silver, too, was Kohlnar’s hair as he sat at the foot of the long steps, not stiff and red as it had been in the coin. He waited. Two giant lancers came forward and lifted him out of the car and helped him up the steps.
What was wrong with Kohlnar?
At the platform, he turned and grasped the railing and raised one hand to the thousands in front of him. It was a sign of victory. The Golden Folk exploded with shouts and cheers.
They couldn’t see what Horn saw. He stared through the sight, unbelieving. The face was like an old woman’s. The seamed, yellow skin hung in loose folds. The cheeks were heavily rouged. The lips were painted scarlet. The hairless eyebrows were penciled black. Flesh had shrunken from the nose; it left a thin, yellow beak.
It was a patient, cunning, ruthless face. It had all the powers of the other Directors, and it held them chained to an iron will. But the General Manager of the Company and through the Company, of Eron, and through Eron, of the Empire, was a dying man. He had spent his strength in a long drive for power and in the use of that power to conquer the Cluster.
Now, at the moment of his triumph here upon the ruins of the world from which the human race swept out into the stars, when Eron was truly the master of all the human-held galaxy, Kohlnar was dying.
While the Directors retired to seats at the back of the platform, Kohlnar clutched the railing with quivering yellow claws. Under the rouge, the lax folds of his skin were a sickly gray. Sweat stood out on his forehead. But when he began to speak, and amplifiers picked up his words and flung them to the far corners of the immense field, his voice was harsh and strong.
“Men of Eron,” he grated. “Sons of Earth. We are here to celebrate not the victory of Eron but the victory of man. Nations, worlds, empires have won many battles. They have lost others. And in the end it did not matter whether they won or lost. The only victory that must be won is man’s. And so we have come back to celebrate one more victory in the long, glorious sequence of man’s conquest. We have come back to our origins, to Earth, to the mother-world. But let us go back even farther. Let us go back to beginnings.”
He stopped. His breathing came in labored gasps as his fumbling finger found a button. Against the blackness of the monument base behind him, a vast mosaic sprang out, colorful, almost three-dimensional in its reality.
In the background was the primordial universe, vast chaos churning with unborn life. Closer was the misty glory of a spiral nebula, its arms far-flung as it slowly turned. Against it flamed a curling row of suns illustrating the sequence of stellar evolution. Red giants shrank. Planets condensed. At one corner of the scene was gentle Earth. At the other was harsh Eron.
“Out of chaos, order,” Kohlnar said. “Out of order, life.”
He pressed another button. The scene flowed around the corner of the cube and was replaced by another.
This was Earth and the evolution of life. At the left of the broad panorama, something shapeless but alive crept out of a primal sea. Monsters fought in steamy jungles. A caveman kindled a fire against the sharp-toothed cold. Men hunted and planted and reaped and wheeled their produce to market in small villages that grew into empires with marching soldiers. The empires rose and fell but man went on, building higher and better, destroying himself and rising again until he built the towers of Sunport, reaching out toward the stars. At the right Roy Kellon—legendary father of the Golden Folk—stood at the Nova’s valve ready to set out upon the first interstellar flight.
“For this, man built and suffered and labored, to claim his heritage—the stars.”
Kohlnar pressed a button. The scene on the black face of the cube gave way to another.
Eron. It gleamed cold and steel-gray like the great sphere overhead. Like it, the golden spikes radiated from it toward the far corners of the Empire. Only here they did not end in points. They connected everything to Eron, the near stars and the distant ones. All kinds of stars: giants and super-giants, dense white dwarfs and faint red ones, and the blue-white, white, and yellow of those between. Everywhere there was life and profit, the Tubes reached and siphoned them away to Eron. And one massive Tube stabbed far across the galaxy into the heart of giant Canopus.
Eron. A fat gray spider, Horn thought, sitting in the center of its golden web, waiting the tremor that announced the capture of another victim.
Horn shrugged. The Golden Folk screamed their appreciation. “Eron! Eron! Eron!” they shouted, until it rang against the hills.
“Eron, yes!” Kohlnar said, and his amplified voice overwhelmed the shouting. “But more than that—man! Man’s greatest achievement—the civilization of the stars. Eron! Man at his peak, one great culture reaching out from Eron in every direction almost five hundred light years, only possible because of Eron. And here—Eron’s most recent victory!”
He stabbed a button.
The Cluster behind. In front the colossal ruins of the last demolished fortress on Quarnon Four. The surrender of Peter Sair. Small, stout, white-haired, old, the Liberator knelt in front of a tall, stern Kohlnar and signed the articles of capitulation. Behind Sair were the kneeling ranks of his defeated troops, receiving their yellow number disks. Behind them, symbolically, were numbered slaves toiling in the fields and mines and factories beneath hovering, black, gold-banded cruisers.
“Victory!” Kohlnar’s voice was husky and low. “Not for Eron. For man. Those who challenge Eron challenge not the Empire but man’s greatness. Let this be their answer. Eron will preserve man’s goal, man’s inheritance—the stars, strong and united. This is Eron’s mission. She will not let it die, though we and others die to preserve it. Now, as a symbol of man’s continuity of striving, we dedicate this Tube, uniting Eron with the place from which our ancestors launched the first ships toward the stars.”
Behind him, the Directors stepped forward. Wendre stepped quickly to his side and placed her right arm around him. Duchane and Matal stood at his right, Fenelon and Ronholm at his left. Kohlnar rested his hand upon a golden switch on top of the railing; the others placed their hands on his. They pushed it closed.
The Tube. Suddenly it was there, golden and real, reaching out from the far side of the black cube toward the east, rising through the air, spearing out into space, crossing the thirty light years that separated Earth from Eron.
Horn’s eyes followed it up and up until the distance narrowed it to a thread and then the thread was gone. He wondered if it was perspective alone that shrank the one-hundred-meter diameter into nothing. He remembered, vaguely, something about a real dwindling.…
Earth and Eron, linked now a second time, joined by a new umbilical cord. Not to feed the mother, worn and barren from the long agonies of childbirth, but to drain away the last, slow streams of life.
The Empire, held together by these golden cords, nourishing in t
he womb a great, greedy child. It had grown too large to live independently. It must protect these cords or starve.
Strange, Horn thought, that strength makes weakness. Through being strong, Eron had become the most dependent world in the Empire.
And yet, looking at the Tube, Horn couldn’t deny its beauty.
His eyes slid back down the golden cord. A buzzard brushed incautiously against the Tube wall and burned brilliantly. Here and there along the Tube, it flared as insects leaped at it blindly.
That was the Tube: deadly beauty. Beauty to Eron, food for the greedy child. To all others, it was death.
The guards swirled near the reviewing stand. Horn looked down in time to see Denebolan giants drag a man from under it. Horn stared through the gun sight. It was Wu. The ragged old man was protesting vigorously and clinging desperately to his battered suitcase. There was no sign of Lil. Wu was hurried away. On the back of his neck was a large, red carbuncle Horn had never noticed before.
Horn’s lips twisted. So it was the thief who was caught, not the assassin.
The gun sight drifted back up the steps to the group on the platform, separated a little now as it acknowledged the audience’s enthusiasm.
Like the finger of fate, the sight moved across the faces of the rulers of Eron.
Young, proud Ronholm, flushed with triumph.
Thin, sardonic Fenelon, contemptuous of the herd.
Wendre Kohlnar, radiantly lovely, holding her father’s arm with a slim, golden hand.
The dying man, Kohlnar, blinking in the sunlight, his face set with the effort of keeping himself erect.
Duchane, powerful and arrogant, his eyes searching the crowd for those who did not cheer or cheered without enthusiasm.
Short, fat Matal, eyes small and calculating as they estimated how much of the applause was for him.
Which one! The question was idle. Horn knew which one. That was why he was here. To kill a man. To shoot one man down from ambush. The sight wavered.