Star Bridge

by James Gunn

  “But don’t ask me why. I don’t know. It was another man, and I can’t understand him. Men change, of course. That’s axiomatic: a man is never the same two seconds in a row. And when a man lives hard and lives through what I’ve lived through these last days, he changes fast and he changes a lot. I’m not trying to absolve myself. This hand did it; this finger pulled the trigger.”

  She shook her head as if she couldn’t understand. “To kill an unarmed man, cold-bloodedly, without warning—”

  “Unarmed!” Horn exclaimed. “With thousands of guards, dozens of ships, and the firepower concentrated there! And what of the billions of people your father killed, cold-bloodedly, without warning— No! I don’t mean that. When a man lives by his wits, you see, it’s him against the universe, and he gets to thinking that he’s all alone; everyone’s all alone, working against the rest like dogs fighting for a bone. But it isn’t true. We’re linked together, all of us, just as the worlds are linked together by the Tubes of Eron.”

  “It’s no use, don’t you see?” she said passionately. “I’ve got to hate you. Nothing can change the fact that you killed my father.”

  “Then why did you leave instructions to turn the control room over to me?”

  “Because you were right—about Eron being rotten. Once, perhaps, the Empire was worthwhile; once it had something to give to humanity. Now it was only taking. The only way I could save anything that was good about Eron was to help pull it down; you said that only Sair could save it. I thought Sair was dead, and I thought perhaps I could make up for that, a little. If you were right about that I thought you might be right about other things.”

  “I see,” Horn said. He pushed himself up slowly. His head had stopped aching. He started walking down the corridor and bent to scoop up a pistol that a dead man would never use again.

  “Where are you going?” Wendre asked.

  He looked around to see her walking beside him. “I’m going to talk to Duchane.”

  “Why?”

  “There are two things I want to find out: who hired me and who has the secret of the Tubes.”

  “And the person who hired you had to know my father’s plans at the time of the surrender on Quarnon Four. I told you I was the only person who knew them. Why didn’t you suspect me?”

  “I did,” Horn said, “for a moment.”

  “Why don’t you suspect me now?”

  He glanced at her quickly and away. “I believe you.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said hurriedly. “Maybe I can help.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I owe you something. You saved my life three times.”

  “The first two don’t count. One was by instinct, the other by strategy.”

  They stopped talking as they approached the cells. Horn recognized them; he had been behind one of these barred doors not many days ago. Behind one of them was Duchane, one-time Director of Security, one-time General Manager of Eron, prisoner. He leaned against the back wall, his face dark and thoughtful, his arms folded across his chest. He looked up as Wendre approached the door and Horn stayed back beyond recognition in the shadows. Duchane’s lip curled.

  “The only thing worse than a renegade is a civilized woman who has gone native,” he said. “I hope you have pleasant memories of the way you survived the downfall of the greatest empire man has ever known—and how you helped bring it down.”

  “I won’t argue with you,” Wendre said quietly. “You wouldn’t understand actions not motivated by self-interest.”

  “With what I’ve seen of fear and cowardice and treachery in the last few days,” Duchane said bitterly, “I’m glad for the first time that I’m not of the pure golden blood.”

  “You’re not?” Wendre exclaimed. “Then that explains—”

  “What?” Duchane asked violently.

  “Your methods,” Wendre murmured.

  “Do you know what it’s like to be all Eronian except a minute fraction and have that imperceptible dilution bar you from all you want? Do you know what it is to have strength and ability and courage and be forbidden to use them because a remote ancestor was careless? Do you know what it is to try to pass and wonder, always, when the truth may spring upon you and tear away everything you have won?

  “Methods!” Duchane exclaimed. “Yes, I had my methods, and they worked. They should; I learned them from your father. Nothing is important but success; means are only stepping stones to goals. You can’t imagine what I had to do to get where I wanted.” His face darkened, remembering. “I ordered my mother’s death; she was a dangerous link to my past. But it didn’t matter. It made me General Manager of Eron.”

  “For a few days,” Wendre said. “Your methods made the downfall of the Empire inevitable. More than anyone else, you were the one who destroyed it. Was it worthwhile—for a few days?”

  “Better to rule for a few days,” Duchane said proudly, “than to serve for a lifetime.”

  “You wouldn’t have ruled long in any case,” Horn said, speaking for the first time, “without the secret of the Tubes.”

  Duchane peered futilely into the shadows. “That’s true,” he said slowly. He looked back at Wendre. “But you would have given it to me. You would have fought me and suffered but in the end you would have told.”

  “I couldn’t. I didn’t know it.”

  “You had to,” Duchane said bewilderedly. “You were pure blood; it would have worked for you. And Kohlnar must have told you—”

  “It didn’t work for me,” Wendre said slowly, “and he told me nothing more than you were told. Perhaps he didn’t know either. Perhaps nobody knew. It was a joke, a joke on the Empire, but a bigger joke on the Golden Folk. We were so proud and secure in our secret, and we never had it.”

  “It’s a lie!” Duchane protested. “Kohlnar knew. He had to know—”

  “It was a mistake then,” Horn said quickly, recognizing that Duchane was telling the truth, “having the old man killed.”

  “I didn’t!” Duchane came forward, grabbed the bars, peered between them. “Oh, I thought of it. But it was too dangerous. I was bound to be suspected— Who are you!”

  “The assassin,” Horn said softly.

  “Then you know I didn’t do it!” Duchane said violently, pulling on the bars that separated them. “You know who hired you—”

  “But I don’t.” Horn stepped forward so that the light fell across his face.

  Recognition was instantaneous. Duchane fell back several paces. “You! The assassin. The man who sneaked behind me a little while ago. The guard who was with Matal. That’s fantastic. And it wasn’t Matal. Matal was dead. It looked like Matal, but it couldn’t have been. Dead men don’t walk. Fantastic!” His eyes slitted thoughtfully; they opened again. “You were with him; who was he?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” Horn said. “What about Fenelon and Ronholm?”

  “Oh, they’re dead; they’re dead,” Duchane tossed off absently. “I asked the Index that question. It gave me some very interesting data. Reports of dead men walking and two living men being in two places at the same time. All of the men were of the same general build: short and fat.

  “The prototype was a thief, a ragged old man seen frequently with animal companions. He appeared here and there, all over the Empire. He has been imprisoned countless times, and he has always escaped immediately. The record goes back a long way”—Duchane was coming forward, his right hand moving toward the inside of his packet—“right to the beginning of—”

  “Look out!” someone shouted. “He’s got a gun!”

  The pistol in Horn’s hand reacted almost with a life of its own. It jerked up and spat silently. Duchane gasped. His eyes looked past them, wide and staring, as his hand slowly slipped away from his jacket. He folded quietly to the floor beside the bars.

  “Killing,” Wendre said dully, “killing. Do you always have to be killing?” She turned, her head bent, and walked quickly away.

  “I
t seems like it,” Horn said. He swung around. Wu was standing behind him. He was in his space breeches once more, the single suspender, the green synsilk shirt, and the skullcap. Lil, perched on his shoulder, stared one-eyed at Duchane’s crumpled body.

  “Such,” Lil said sadly, “is the end of all ambition.”

  “You seem to make a habit of saving me,” Horn said, letting the cord pull his gun up to his chest.

  Wu shrugged. “It is a pleasure to lengthen the years of one who has so few to spare.”

  “Where have you been? The last I saw of you, you were being taken to Vantee with me.”

  “The prison has not yet been built that will hold us, eh, Lil? Since then we have been here and there, as whim and fortune dictate. It is a good time for picking up diamonds.”

  Horn knelt beside the bars and reached through them to Duchane’s jacket. He felt inside it. When he pulled back his hand, it held a sheaf of papers. “I didn’t understand how they could miss a gun,” Horn said. “He was unarmed.”

  Horn opened the pages and scanned them, his eyes flicking back and forth, the pages turning. When he looked up, his eyes were distant. “It’s a report on you,” he said. “You’ve been at almost every Tube activation.”

  “So?” Wu said. “I had not thought we attended so many. But they are times of ceremony, where even the hours are jeweled.”

  “The Directors didn’t know the secret of the Tube,” Horn said slowly. “And yet the Tubes were activated. Someone else had to know the secret, and yet—I said it once—the secret couldn’t pass down through the hands of any other group without the Directors discovering it. But if a man lived for fifteen hundred years—”

  “I!” Wu chuckled. “If we had known the secret, Lil, we wouldn’t have needed to steal diamonds, eh? We would have sat us down somewhere, and the worlds would have brought them to us.”

  “There were six people on the platform at the Dedication,” Horn went on inexorably, unheeding. “I kept thinking that one of them had to know the secret. But they were at other activations singly. Wendre told me that. It couldn’t be any one of them. It had to be all of them. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any of them. But you were there. You were closer to the platform than anyone else. It has to be you, Wu. It has to be you.”

  “Reductio ad absurdum,” Lil said pontifically.

  “But logical, dear friend,” Wu said. “Very logical.” His voice had changed. It was firmer, colder, harder.

  “You made me shoot Duchane,” Horn went on. “He was going to tell me something about you, and you made me shoot him. Not you. You didn’t shoot him. You got someone else to do it for you. Somebody has pushed,” he muttered. “There’s a pattern in that. Someone who thinks like that might readily hire an assassin.”

  “A pretty argument,” Wu said. “But it doesn’t quite hold true. You see, I have no objection to doing my own killing.”

  It should not have surprised Horn to see the pistol in the yellow hand that Wu thrust forward out of his ragged green sleeve. It did; he had been unable to believe what logic proved. He stared at the gun and looked back at Wu’s lined face. He could not remember now why he had thought the face was harmless and benign. This was a face that had been weathered by a millennium and a half; these were eyes that had seen too much. The face was old and wise and evil.

  “It’s true then,” Horn said dazedly.

  “Should I tell you?” Wu asked. “Of course. What difference does it make? You’ve come too close to the truth, about me and about the Tubes, and so you must die. I hope you will let me explain before I kill you. You want to know the meaning behind all this. And it is a vast relief for me to speak. You can’t know the immense burden of keeping a secret for a thousand years. There was Lil, of course, but, as fine a companion as she is, she isn’t human.”

  “And are you?” Horn asked sharply.

  “I’m not at all sure I am,” Wu said carefully.

  “You did hire me then?”

  “Yes, I hired you to kill Kohlnar. I hired many men, but you were the only one who even reached the foot of the mesa where Sunport once stood. But the story begins a long time before that.”

  “A thousand years before?”

  “Exactly. Eron did not rise haphazardly. It was the only empire that was built, and the tools we used were challenge and response and a little subtle guidance. I choose Eron as my instrument of empire because it had bred a strong, hungry race. Humanity needed the Tube, and it needed Eron to force it upon them. Listen carefully, Horn, and you will be enlightened before you die; you will hear a strange story of human emotions and how they benefit humanity and of good intentions and how they change.”

  “I’m listening,” Horn said grimly, judging the distance between them, estimating his chances. The distance was too great and the chances too slim. He forced himself to wait.

  “The Tube, then. Man needed it if he was to develop an interstellar civilization instead of isolated, divergent, spatially determined cultures which could contribute almost nothing to the race. With the best of motives, then, we gave man the Tube, Lil and I. If mankind were to continue as a single, functioning race, we had to abolish that deadly limitation: the speed of light.”

  “Since the speed of light is a limitation in our universe,” Horn said, moving a little, “then the Tubes enclose a space that is not in our universe.”

  Wu shook his head appreciatively. “I was afraid your experience in the Tube might lead you to that conclusion, and a scientist, with that clue, might be able to activate a Tube. But it isn’t likely. It has been recognized, for longer than I have lived, that gravity is a consequence of the geometry of physical space, which is determined by matter. In other words, it is the matter in the universe that curves space around itself, which effect we recognize as gravity. But it is another thing to build a space not of this universe.”

  Horn nodded and edged a little closer.

  “Light,” Wu went on, “is affected by this curvature of space. It, too, is curved. And in this universe of matter and curved space, speed is restricted to that of light. But outside this universe, this isn’t true. Lil and her people knew this a long time ago. When the uranium in their cavern was gone, they were forced to learn the nature of energy and matter and space and time. They became the greatest mathematicians the universe has ever known.”

  “Go on,” Horn said, sliding one foot forward imperceptibly.

  Wu wiggled his gun. “No, my friend. Do not move. Not if you wish to hear the rest. Our problem, you see, was to provide within this universe a space which was not of this universe. A star was our power source; Lil’s mind was the matrix. Inside the energy cylinder of the Tube was created something never before known: space shielded from the warping effect of matter, shielded from gravity, if you like. Inside the Tube, the universe shaped by matter doesn’t exist; the unnatural limitation set upon velocity by this matter-determined universe does not exist. All our terms are meaningless there: light, sound, energy, matter, velocity, distance. Anything in the Tube exists, if at all, as an anomaly in its own miniature universe with its own space folded around itself; the Tube, by its nature, must reject it.”

  “Then only you and Lil can activate a Tube.”

  “Only Lil,” Wu corrected. “And it has kept us busy. But I get ahead of my story. This fact, though, influenced our choice of Eron as the instrument through which humanity would be reunited. It would have been physically impossible for Lil to have activated Tubes in two or more civilizations. That wasn’t desirable for other reasons; it would have meant conflict, disunion, destruction. We chose Eron.”

  “Ah, those were days to live in,” Lil croaked reminiscently.

  “They were indeed,” Wu agreed. “With the best of intentions, we gave Eron the Tube and built around it a myth of secrecy and greatness; the Golden Folk were quick to believe and go on to build their own myths. At crucial points we helped the Empire continue its growth until only the Pleiades Cluster remained outside. You, my short-lived frien
d, won’t understand how we began to change. Power is habit-forming. We grew addicted to it. Few things survive the centuries’ slow decay: senses grow dull; passions grow weak; and ideals die. Only the taste for power lives on as an excuse for survival.”

  “You began to meddle then,” Horn said grimly, “for the sake of meddling.” He couldn’t move toward Wu; he could never get close enough to hit him or knock the gun aside before Wu fired. His own gun, nestled under his left arm, would be quick to his hand, but Wu’s finger would be quicker. Wait! Horn told himself. Wait!

  “True,” Wu said. “We meddled, but not in the amateurish connotations of the word. We were skillful. Kohlnar needed little help in conquering the Cluster; his own fiery determination carried him on. But this was only postponing the slowly approaching crisis, and the longer it was delayed, the more dangerous it became. Eron was decaying; revolt was inevitable. The only chance to save it was to precipitate the crisis. Against a premature rebellion, Eron might win and gain a second chance.”

  “So you hired me to assassinate Kohlnar,” Horn said. His right hand was inching across his waistband toward the pistol butt hanging above it.

  “I was wrong,” Wu said. “Even the experience of fifteen hundred years can be wrong; even Lil’s fantastic mathematical ability can’t balance the billions of terms implicit in the star-flung problem. We miscalculated. Eron lost.”

  “And you’ve lost, too,” Horn said.

  “We?” Wu chuckled. “Oh, no. We never lose. There will be more strings to pull, more puppets to dance. We will transplant ourselves to the new focal center of power, the Cluster. It is disorganized now, but it will soon grow strong. It will shape the Empire into something new and dynamic, and we will shape the Cluster.”

  “Haven’t you done enough?” Horn asked. “Isn’t it time for men to work out their own destinies?”

  “And remove my one reason for existence?” Wu asked mockingly. “No, my idealistic friend, I can’t permit that. And it is time for you to die. Kohlnar is dead. Duchane is dead. Now you.”

  Horn’s eyes widened briefly. Behind Wu something had moved.