Lieutenant Kapunan was especially pleased with that. Such medicines as he had were keeping his patients from getting worse, but the stress of travel hadn’t let them improve much. If he could remain here with them while the rest went after help — Flandry agreed. The march might produce casualties of its own, but if so, they ought to be fewer.
Everyone took off for the house. The humans felt dwarfed by the lumbering bulks around them: all but Kathryn. She laughed and chattered the whole way. “Kind of a homecomin’ for me, this,” she told her companions. “I’d ’most forgotten how ’scitin’ ’tis, field work on Dido, and how I, well, yes, love them.”
You have a lot of capacity to love, Flandry thought. He recognized it as a pleasing remark that he would have used on any other girl; but he felt shy about flattering this one.
When they topped the ridge, they had a view of the farther slope. It dropped a way, then rose again, forming a shelter for the dwelling place. Artificial channels, feeding into a stream, must prevent flooding. In the distance, above trees, a bare crag loomed athwart the clouds. Thence came the rumble of a major waterfall. Kathryn pointed. “They call this region Thunderstone,” she said, “’mong other things. Places come closer to havin’ true names than entities do.”
The homestead consisted of turf-roofed log buildings and a rude corral, enclosing a yard cobbled against the frequent mudmaking rains. Most of the structures were sheds and cribs. The biggest was the longhouse, impressive in workmanship and carved ornamentation as well as sheer size. Flandry paid more heed at first to the corral. Juveniles of all three species occupied it, together with four adults of each kind. The grownups formed pairs in different combinations, with immature third units. Other young wandered about, dozed, or took nourishment. The cows nursed the noga calves — two adults were lactating females, one was dry, one was male — and were in turn tapped by fuzzy little rukas and fledgling krippos.
“School?” Flandry asked.
“You might say so,” Kathryn answered. “Primary stages of learnin’ and development. Too important to interrupt for us; not that a partial entity ’ud care anyway. While they grow, the young’ll partner ’mong themselves also. But in the end, as a rule, they’ll replace units that’ve died out of established entities.”
“Heh! “If youth knew, if age could.’ The Didonians appear to have solved that problem.”
“And conquered death, in a way. ’Course, over several generations, a given personality ’ull fade into an altogether new one, and most of the earlier memories ’ull be lost. Still, the continuity — D’ you see why they fascinate us?”
“Indeed. I haven’t the temperament for being a scientist, but you make me wish I did.”
She regarded him seriously. “In your fashion, Dominic, you’re as much a filosof as anybody I’ve known.”
My men are a gallant crew, he thought, and they’re entitled to my loyalty as well as my leadership, but at the moment I’d prefer them and their big flapping ears ten parsecs hence.
The doors and window shutters of the lodge stood open, making its interior more bright and cool than he had awaited. The floor was fire-hardened clay strewn with fresh boughs. Fantastically carved pillars and rafters upheld the roof. The walls were hung with skins, crudely woven tapestries, tools, weapons, and objects that Kathryn guessed were sacred. Built in along them were stalls for nogas, perches for krippos, benches for rukas. Above were sconced torches for night illumination. Fires burned in pits; hoods, of leather stretched on wooden frames, helped draw smoke out through ventholes. Cubs, calves, and chicks, too small for education, bumbled about like the pet animals they were. Units that must be too aged or ill for daily toil waited quietly near the middle of the house. It was all one enormous room. Privacy was surely an idea which Didonians were literally incapable of entertaining. But what ideas did they have that were forever beyond human reach?
Flandry gestured at a pelt. “If they’re herbivorous, the big chaps, I mean, why do they hunt?” he wondered.
“Animal products,” Kathryn said. “Leather, bone, sinew, grease … sh!”
The procession drew up before a perch whereon sat an old krippo. Gaunt, lame in one wing, he nevertheless reminded Flandry of eagles. Every noga lowered the horn to him. The flyer belonging to Cave Discoverer let go and flapped off to a place of his (?) own. That noga offered his vacated tentacle. The ancient made union. His eyes turned on the humans and fairly blazed.
“Many Thoughts,” Kathryn whispered to Flandry. “Their wisest. Heesh’ll take a minute to absorb what the units can convey.”
“Do that fowl’s partners belong to every prominent citizen?”
“Sh, not so loud. I don’t know local customs, but they seem to have special respect for Many Thoughts … Well, you’d ’spect the units with the best genetic heritage to be in the best entities, wouldn’t you? I gather Cave Discoverer’s an explorer and adventurer. Heesh first met humans by seekin’ out a xenological camp 200 kilometers from here. Many Thoughts gets the vigor and boldness of the same noga and ruka, but heesh’s own journeys are of the spirit … Ah, I think heesh’s ready now. I’ll have to repeat whatever information went away with the former krippo.”
That conversation lasted beyond nightfall. The torches were lit, the fires stoked, cooking begun in stone pots. While the nogas could live on raw vegetation, they preferred more concentrated and tasty food when they could get it. A few more Didonians came home from the woods, lighting their way with luminous fungoids. They carried basketsful of edible roots. No doubt hunters and foragers remained out for a good many days at a stretch. The lodge filled with droning, fluting, coughing talk. Flandry and his men had trouble fending curiosity seekers off their injured without acting unfriendly.
At last Kathryn made the best imitation she could of the gesture of deference, and sought out her fellow humans. In the leaping red light, her eyes and locks stood brilliant among shadows. ” Twasn’t easy,” she said in exuberance, “but I argued heesh into it. We’ll have an escort — mighty small, but an escort, guides and porters. I reckon we can start in another forty-fifty hours … for home!”
“Your home,” growled a man.
“Dog your hatch,” Flandry ordered him.
X
Centuries before, a rogue planet had passed near Beta Crucis. Sunless worlds are not uncommon, but in astronomical immensity it is rare for one to encounter a star. This globe swung by and receded on a hyperbolic orbit. Approximately Terra-size, it had outgassed vapors in the ardor of its youth. Then, as internal heat radiated away, atmosphere froze. The great blue sun melted the oceans and boiled the air back into fluidity. For some years, appalling violence reigned.
Eventually interstellar cold would have reclaimed its dominion, and the incident would have had no significance. But chance ordained that the passage occur in the old bold days of the Polesotechnic League, and that it be noticed by those who saw an incalculable fortune to be won. Isotope synthesis on the scale demanded by a starfaring civilization had been industry’s worst bottleneck. Seas and skies were needed for coolants, continents for dumping of radioactive wastes. Every lifeless body known had been too frigid or too hot or otherwise unsuitable. But here came Satan, warmed to an ideal temperature which the heat of nuclear manufacture could maintain. As soon as the storms and quakes had abated, the planet was swarmed by entrepreneurs.
During the Troubles, ownership, legal status, input and output, every aspect of relationship to the living fraction of the universe, varied as wildly for Satan as for most worlds. For a while it was abandoned. But no one had ever actually dwelt there. No being could survive that poisonous air and murderous radiation background, unless for the briefest of visits with the heaviest of protection. Robots, computers, and automatons were the inhabitants. They continued operating while civilization fragmented, fought, and somewhat reconstructed itself. When at last an Imperial aristocrat sent down a self-piloting freighter, they loaded it from a dragon’s hoard.
The defense of S
atan became a major reason to garrison and colonize Sector Alpha Crucis.
Its disc hung darkling among the stars in a viewscreen of Hugh McCormac’s command room. Beta had long since dwindled to merely the brightest of them, and the machines had scant need for visible light. You saw the sphere blurred by gas, a vague shimmer of clouds and oceans, blacknesses that were land. It was a desolate scene, the more so when you called up an image of the surface — raw mountains, gashed valleys, naked stone plains, chill and stagnant seas, all cloaked in a night relieved only by a rare lamp or an evil blue glow of fluorescence, no sound but a dreary wind-skirl or a rushing of forever sterile waters, no happening throughout its eons but the inanimate, unaware toil of the machines.
For Hugh McCormac, though, Satan meant victory.
He took his gaze from the planet and let it stray in the opposite direction, toward open space. Men were dying where those constellations glittered. “I should be yonder,” he said. “I should have insisted.”
“You couldn’t do anything, sir,” Edgar Oliphant told him. “Once the tactical dispositions are made, the game plays itself. And you might be killed.”
“That’s what’s wrong.” McCormac twisted his fingers together. “Here we are, snug and safe in orbit, while a battle goes on to make me Emperor!”
“You’re the High Admiral too, sir.” A cigar in Oliphant’s mouth wagged and fumed as he talked. “You’ve got to be available where the data flow in, to make decisions in case anything unpredicted happens.”
“I know, I know.” McCormac strode back and forth, from end to end of the balcony on which they stood. Below them stretched a murmurous complex of computers, men at desks and plotting consoles, messengers going soft-footed in and out. Nobody, from himself on down, bothered with spit-and-polish today. They had too much work on hand, coordinating the battle against Pickens’ fleet. It had learned where they were from the ducal guards they chased off and had sought them out. Simply understanding that interaction of ships and energies was beyond mortal capacity.
He hated to tie up Persei when every gun spelled life to his outnumbered forces. She was half of the Nova-class dreadnaughts he had. But nothing less would hold the necessary equipment.
“We could do some fighting in addition,” he said. “I’ve operated thus in the past.”
“But that was before you were the Emperor,” Oliphant replied.
McCormac halted and glowered at him. The stout man chewed his cigar and plodded on: “Sir, we’ve few enough active supporters as is. Most bein’s are just prayin’ they won’t get involved on either side. Why should anybody put everything at stake for the revolution, if he doesn’t hope you’ll bring him a better day? We could risk our control center, no doubt. But we can’t risk you. Without you, the revolution ’ud fall apart ’fore Terran reinforcements could get here to suppress it.”
McCormac clenched his fists and looked back at Satan. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m being childish.”
“ ’Tis forgivable,” Oliphant said. “Two of your boys in combat—”
“And how many other people’s boys? Human or xeno, they die, they’re maimed … Well.” McCormac leaned over the balcony rail and studied the big display tank on the deck beneath him. Its colored lights gave only a hint of the information — itself partial and often unreliable — that flowed through the computers. But such three-dimensional pictures occasionally stimulated the spark of genius which no known civilization has succeeded in evoking from an electronic brain.
According to the pattern, his tactics were proving out. He had postulated that destruction of the factories on Satan would be too great an economic disaster for cautious Dave Pickens to hazard. Therefore the Josipists would be strictly enjoined not to come near the planet. Therefore McCormac’s forces would have a privileged sanctuary. That would make actions possible to them which otherwise were madness. Of course, Pickens might charge straight in anyway; that contingency must be provided against. But if so, McCormac need have no compunctions about using Satan for shield and backstop. Whether it was destroyed or only held by his fleet, its products were denied the enemy. In time, that was sure to bring disaffection and weakness.
But it looked as if Pickens was playing safe — -and getting mauled in consequence.
’ S’pose we win,” Oliphant said. “What next?”
It had been discussed for hours on end, but McCormac seized the chance to think past this battle. “Depends on what power the opposition has left. We want to take over as large a volume of space as possible without overextending ourselves. Supply and logistics are worse problems for us than combat, actually. We aren’t yet organized to replace losses or even normal consumption.”
“Should we attack Ifri?”
“No. Too formidable. If we can cut it off, the same purpose is better served. Besides, eventually we’ll need it ourselves.”
“Llynathawr, though? I mean … well, we do have information that your lady was removed by some government agent—” Oliphant stopped, seeing what his well-meant speech had done.
McCormac stood alone, as if naked on Satan, for a while. Finally he could say: “No. They’re bound to defend it with everything they have. Catawrayannis would be wiped out. Never mind Kathryn. There’re too many other Kathryns around.”
Can an Emperor afford such thoughts?
A visiscreen chimed and lit. A jubilant countenance looked forth. “Sir — Your Majesty — we’ve won!”
“What?” McCormac needed a second to understand.
“Positive, Your Majesty. Reports are pouring in, all at once. Still being evaluated, but, well, we haven’t any doubt. It’s almost like reading their codes.”
A piece of McCormac’s splintering consciousness visualized that possibility. The reference was not to sophont-sophont but machine-machine communication. A code was more than changed; the key computers were instructed to devise a whole new language, which others were then instructed to learn and use. Because random factors determined basic elements of the language, decipherment was, if not totally impossible, too laborious a process to overtake any prudent frequency of innovation. Hence the talk across space between robots, which wove their ships into a fleet, was a virtually unbreakable riddle to foes, a nearly infallible recognition signal to friends. The chance of interpreting it had justified numerous attempts throughout history at boarding or hijacking a vessel, however rarely they succeeded and however promptly their success caused codes to be revised. If you could learn a language the hostile machines were still using—
No. A daydream. McCormac forced his attention back to the screen. “Loss of Zeta Orients probably decided him. They’re disengaging everywhere.” I must get busy. We should harry them while they retreat, though not too far. Tactical improvisations needed. “Uh, we’ve confirmed that Vixen is untouched.” John’s ship. “No report from New Phobos, but no positive reason to fear for her.” Colin’s ship. Bob’s with me. “A moment, please. Important datum … Sir, it’s confirmed. Aquilae suffered heavy damage. She’s almost certainly their flagship, you know. They won’t be meshing any too well. We can eat them one at a time!” Dave, are you alive?
“Very good, Captain,” McCormac said. “I’ll join you right away on the command deck.”
Aaron Snelund let the admiral stand, miserable in blue and gold, while he chose a cigaret from a jeweled case, rolled it in his fingers, sniffed the fragrance of genuine Terra-grown Crown grade marijuana, inhaled it into lighting, sat most gracefully down on his chair of state, and drank the smoke. No one else was in the room, save his motionless Gorzunians. The dynasculps were turned off. The animation was not, but its music was, so that masked lords and ladies danced without sound through a ballroom 200 light-years and half a century distant.
“Superb,” Snelund murmured when he had finished. He nodded at the big gray-haired man who waited. “At ease.”
Pickens did not relax noticeably. “Sir—” His voice was higher than before. Overnight he had become old.
Snel
und interrupted him with a wave. “Don’t trouble, Admiral. I have studied the reports. I know the situation consequent on your defeat. One is not necessarily illiterate, even with respect to the Navy’s abominable prose, just because one is a governor. Is one?”
“No, Your Excellency.”
Snelund lounged back, cross-legged, eyelids drooping. “I did not call you here for a repetition viva voce of what I have read,” he continued mildly. “No, I wished for a chat that would be candid because private. Tell me, Admiral, what is your advice to me?”
“That’s … in my personal report … sir.”
Snelund arched his brows.
Sweat trickled down Pickens’ cheeks. “Well, sir,” he groped, “our total remaining power must be not greatly inferior to the, the enemy’s. If we count what did not go to Satan. We can consolidate a small volume of space, hold it, let him have the rest. The Merseian confrontation can’t go on forever. When we have heavy reinforcements, we can go out for a showdown battle.”
“Your last showdown was rather disappointing, Admiral.”
A tic vibrated one comer of Pickens’ mouth. “The governor has my resignation.”
“And has not accepted it. Nor will.”
“Sir!” Pickens’ mouth fell open.
“Be calm.” Snelund shifted his tone from delicate sarcasm to kindliness, his manner from idle humor to vigilance. “You didn’t disgrace yourself, Admiral. You just had the misfortune to clash with a better man. Were you less able, little would have been salvaged from your defeat. As matters went, you rescued half your force. You lack imagination, but you have competence: a jewel of high price in these degenerate times. No, I don’t want your resignation. I want you to continue in charge.”
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