by Neil Clarke
“These are your papers,” Nicanor Ternera told him. “You’ll hold formal ambassadorial accreditation as head of a trade legation that’s based on Gavial, which as I think you know is a planet of the Cruzeiro system. You will not be going as a representative of the Imperium itself, but rather as a diplomat affiliated with the regional government of the Cruzeiro worlds. As you are already aware, the rebels won’t at present allow officials of the Imperium to arrive on Hermano, but they’re not otherwise closed to visitors from outside, even during the present period of trade embargo, which they describe as a temporary measure while they await recognition by the Imperium of their independent status.”
“They’ll wait a long time,” said the Colonel. “Especially if they won’t allow anyone from the Imperium to go in and explain the error of their ways to them.” He glanced at the papers. “For the purpose of this mission my name is Petrus Haym?” “Correct.”
“Lanista will recognize me instantly for who I am. Or is this going to be the sort of mission I’ll be doing in disguise?”
“You’ll be disguised, to some degree, for the sake of being able to obtain entry. Once you’ve succeeded in getting access to Hermano as Petrus Haym of Gavial, you can decide for yourself when and how to reveal yourself to Lanista, which beyond any doubt you will at some point find necessary to do in order to bring the mission to a successful conclusion. From that point on you’ll be functioning openly as an agent of the Imperium.”
“And what leverage am I to have over them?” the Colonel asked.
“The ultimate,” said Nicanor Ternera.
“Good,” said the Colonel. He had expected no less. He would have accepted no less. Still, it was better to have it offered readily than to have to demand it.
Nicanor Ternera said, “You’ll be accompanied on the trip by three genuine government people out of Gavial and another Imperium agent, a woman from Phosphor named Magda Cermak, who’ll have the official rank of second secretary to the mission. She’s been in the Service for a dozen years and has a good grasp of the entire situation, including your prior relationship with Geryon Lanista.”
“You don’t think I’d be better off handling this project entirely on my own?”
“It’s altogether possible that you could. But we’d rather not take the risk. In any case it’s essential to maintain the fiction of a trade delegation at least until you’re safely on Hermano and have made contact with Lan-ista, and a properly plausible delegation involves five or six members, at least.” Ternera looked to the Colonel for approval, which he reluctantly gave. “As these documents will show you, the crux of Gavial’s issue is Hermano’s termination of the export of a drug called cantaxion, the properties of which are beneficial to people suffering from a manganese deficiency, something that’s chronic on Gavial. You’ll find all the details in the attached documents. Gavial has already asked for an exception to the embargo, which you are now going to try to negotiate. Ostensibly the Hermanans are willing to discuss resumption of cantaxion exports in return for military weapons to be manufactured on Bacalhao, another of the Cruzeiro worlds.”
“Which would be, of course, in complete violation of Imperium law, since the Imperium has placed an embargo of its own on doing business with Hermano. Am I supposed to conclude that Gavial is considering rebelling against the Imperium also?”
“Most definitely not. At our strong urging Gavial has indicated that it’s at least open to the idea of entering into such transactions, provided they can be kept secret. That doesn’t mean it actually would. How far you want to proceed with any of this once you make contact with Lan-ista himself is entirely up to you, naturally. I doubt that he’ll find the idea that this is simply a trade mission very credible, once he realizes that it’s you that he’s dealing with, but of course that won’t matter at that point.”
“Of course,” said the Colonel, who was already six moves ahead in the game that had to be played once he reached Hermano, and wished that Nicanor Ternera would hand over the rest of the briefing papers and disappear, which eventually he did, though not as swiftly as the Colonel would have preferred.
The first stop on his journey to Hermano was Entrada, where the Service’s main operational center was located. Going to Entrada would be to make what could be thought of as a long jump in the wrong direction. Hermano, like Galgala, was a Core world, close to the center of the galaxy, whereas Entrada was one of what had once been called the Inner Worlds, and therefore was actually out on the Rim, because all distances had been measured from Earth in those early days. Earth itself was a Rim world, and Entrada, just a couple of dozen light-years distant from it, was off in the same obscure corner of the galaxy, far from the galactic core, as the original mother planet. But stellar distances had no significant meaning in Velde transmission and Entrada was where the Service had its most important base. Here the Colonel would undergo his transformation into Petrus Haym, diplomat from Gavial.
He had undergone so many transformations in his time that the Service had a better idea of what his baseline self looked like than he did himself. He knew that he was slightly above the median in height, that he was of mesomorphic build with longer-than-average limbs, and that the natural color of his eyes was olive-green. But his eyes had been blue and brown and violet and even scarlet on various occasions, his hair had been tinted every shade in the book and sometimes removed entirely, and his teeth and nose and ears and chin had been subjected to so much modification over the years that he no longer remembered their exact original configuration. When he had retired from the Service they had restored him, so they claimed, to baseline, but he was never entirely sure that the face he saw in the mirror each morning, the pleasant, thoughtful, agreeably nondescript face of a man who was certainly no longer young but nowhere near the end of his days, was really anything like the one that had looked back at him in the days before all the modifications had begun.
The concept of a baseline self was pretty much obsolete, anyway. Short of making fundamental rearrangements in a person’s basic skeletal structure—and they were working on that one—it had, for many hundreds of years, been feasible to give anyone any appearance at all. Rebuilds were standard items for everyone, not just operatives of the Service. You could look young or old, benign or cruel, open-hearted or brooding, as you wished, and when you tired of one look you could trade it in for another, just as, up to a point, you could roll back the inroads of the aging process by fifty years or so every now and then. That sort of mutability had been available even in the Colonel’s grandfather’s day, and by now everyone took it for granted. It was only his sheer obstinate perversity of will that had led the Colonel’s father to insist on retaining, for the last seventy years of his life, the limp that he had acquired while carrying out an assignment on one of the worlds of the Magnifico system and that he had proudly displayed forever after.
The Colonel hesitated only the tiniest part of a moment when finally he stood before the Elsinore doorway. Some fraction of him still did not want to do this, but it was, he knew, only an extremely small fraction. Then he stepped through and was annihilated instantly and just as instantly reconstituted at the corresponding doorway on Entrada.
It was close to a century since the Colonel had last been to the operations center on Entrada. Entrada was a place he had hoped never to see again. He remembered it as a tropical world, much too hot from pole to pole, humid and jungly everywhere, with two potent white suns that were set close together in the sky and went whirling around each other three or four times a day, giving the appearance of a single, weird, egg-shaped mass. Only Entrada’s great distance from those two sizzling primaries made the planet habitable at all. The Colonel hated its steambath heat, its thick, almost liquid greenish-gold atmosphere, its lunatic profusion of vegetation, the merciless round-the-clock glare of those twin suns. And also it was a world severely afflicted by the presence of a strong lambda field, lambda being a force that had been unknown until the early days of Velde travel. In
those days anyone making the transition from a low-lambda world to a high-lambda world found himself knocked flat on his back during a period of adaptation that might stretch across several months. The problem of lambda differential had been conquered over a thousand years ago, but even now some minor effects could be felt by new arrivals to a high-lambda world, a lingering malaise, a sense of spiritual heaviness, that took days or even weeks to shake off.
But the Colonel, having come once more to Entrada despite all expectation, found it easy enough to shrug off all its discomforts. This would be only a brief stop, and there would never be another, of that he was certain beyond all question. He went through it as one goes through a bad dream, waiting for the release that morning brings.
Obsequious Service officers met him at the transit station, greeting him in an almost terrified way, with a kind of heavy-handed stifling reverence, the way one might greet some frightful spectre returned from the tomb, and conveyed him to the operations center, which was ten times the size of the building the Colonel remembered. Once he was inside its windowless mass he might have been on any planet at all: Entrada and all its tropic hyperabundance had no presence within these well insulated halls.
“Colonel, this is how you are going to look,” they told him, and a full-size image of Petrus Haym sprang into view in the air before him.
They had conceived Petrus Haym as a stolid burgher, round-cheeked, complacent, with heavy-lidded sleepy eyes, full lips, a short thick neck, a fleshy body, the very model and essence of what he was supposed to be, a man who had devoted his life to issues of tariff regulation and balances of trade. Indifferently the Colonel gave his approval, offering no suggestions whatever for revisions in the Haym format, though they seemed to be expecting them. He didn’t care. The format they had conceived would do. To look like an animated stereotype of a trade commissioner would make it all the simpler for the Colonel to assume the identity he was supposed to take on.
That he would be able to operate convincingly as the accredited leader of a trade delegation from a planet he knew nothing about was not anything that he doubted. He was a quick study. In his time he had assumed all kinds of roles: he had been a priest of the Goddess, an itinerant collector of zoological specimens, an organizer of disenfranchised laborers, a traveling musician, a deeply compassionate counselor to the bereaved, and many other things, whatever was required to fit the task at hand, which was always, ultimately, the engineering of consent. Preserving the integrity of the Imperium had been his constant goal. The Imperium’s scope verged on the infinite; so too, then, must his.
When they had done all that they needed to do with him at the operations center, and he had done all that he needed to do as well, he went on to the next stop on his journey, Phosphor, where the rest of his team was awaiting him.
Like many of the worlds of the Imperium, Phosphor was a planet of a multiple-sun system. The Colonel had visited it once before, early in his career, but all he remembered of the visit was that he had gone there to seek out and eliminate a veteran agitator who was living there in exile from his home world and laying plans to return home to engage in a fresh round of destabilizing activities. The Colonel recalled carrying out the job successfully, but the planet itself he had forgotten. Seeing it now, he still did not remember much about his earlier stay there. He had seen so many worlds, after all. Here, a huge cool red sun, old and dying, lay like an angry blemish in the east by day, and a hot blue one that was at least a couple of hundred units away blazed out of the west, bright as a beacon in the sky. Even at night—the unnerving, intensely black night of a Rim world that the Colonel had never learned to like—stray tendrils of light from one sun or the other streamed into view at the hemisphere’s darkside edge.
The people of Phosphor did not seem to go in for somatic modification. The likeness they bore toward one another indicated that they seemed to cling almost defiantly to the somatotypes of the original handful of settlers of thousands of years ago, who must predominantly have been short, sinewy, broad-based folk, swarthy-skinned, beady-eyed. Magda Cermak, who was waiting for the Colonel at the Velde station, was the perfect exemplar of her people, a dark-haired, sharp-nosed woman who stood only chest-high to the Colonel but who was so solidly planted atop her thick, sturdy legs that a rolling boulder could not have knocked her down. She seemed about fifty, no more than that, and perhaps she actually was. She welcomed the Colonel in an efficient, uneffusive way, addressing him as Petrus Haym, inquiring without real curiosity about his journey, and introducing him to the three delegates from Gavial, two men and a woman, who stood diffidently to one side, a well-nigh invisible trio of pallid bureaucrats, fidgety, self-effacing, like the supernumeraries that in fact they were in the drama to come.
His point of arrival on Phosphor was its capital city, a sprawling, untidy place that bore the ancient historical name of Jerusalem. At the Imperium headquarters there, Magda Cermak provided the Colonel with an update on the activities of Geryon Lanista—Martin Bauer, as he was now—since their paths had last crossed on that ill-starred world, Trist-essa, half a century before.
“The one part of the trail we don’t have,” Cermak said, “covers the period between his escape from Tristessa’s companion planet and his arrival in the Aguila sector. The period in the immediate aftermath of the faked suicide, that is. We figure that he spent about twenty years as far out of sight as he could keep himself. Our best guess is that he may have been moving around in the Rim worlds during those years. One informant insists that he even spent a certain amount of time on Earth itself.”
“Could that be so?” asked the Colonel.
Magda Cermak shrugged. “There’s no way of knowing. He’s probably capable of managing it, wouldn’t you say? But if he did get to Earth, Earth doesn’t know anything about it, and Lanista isn’t going to tell us either.”
“All right. That’s twenty blank years. What about the next thirty?”
“He first turns up under the name of Paul Thurm as a grape farmer on Iriarte, but he doesn’t last long there. A legal problem arises, Thurm vanishes, and at that point a couple of years are gone from the record. When we pick up the trail again we find him in one of the Aguila Sector systems as Heinrich Bauer, supposedly an expert on land reclamation. He spends four years on a planet called Thraka, teaching the locals how to drain swamps, and then he moves on to Alyatta, a world of an adjacent system, where he shows the people how to irrigate a desert.”
“A highly versatile man,” the Colonel said.
“Very. He’s on Alyatta for six or seven years, apparently marrying and having a couple of children and acquiring substantial properties. Then once again he vanishes abruptly, leaving his family behind, and shows up on Gran Chingada, where his name now is Martin Bauer. We don’t know the motive for the switch. Something to do with the abandonment of his family, perhaps, although why he didn’t change the surname too is hard to understand. Possibly the ‘Heinrich’ entry was erroneous all along. Keeping detailed track of a whole galaxy full of people is only approximately possible, you know.—You have been to Gran Chingada, I understand.”
“A long time ago. It’s a rough place.”
“It’s quieter now. They got rid of their worst malconents thirty years back.”
“Shipping them off to Hermano, two star-systems away, I’m told.”
“Correct.”
“Was Martin Bauer among those who was sent into exile?”
“No. He emigrated voluntarily, a dozen years ago, after the settlement on Hermano was fairly well established. Supposedly he was brought in by the plantation owners who grow the herb from which cantaxion is made, on account of his old specialty, land reclamation. He became a plantation owner himself in a major way, and involved himself very quickly in politics there, and before long he had won election to the Council of Seven, the oligarchy that was the ruling body on Hermano before its declaration of independence from the Imperium.”
“An oligarchy whose members are elected?�
� said the Colonel. “Isn’t that a little unusual?”
Magda Cermak smiled. “‘Politics’ on Hermano doesn’t mean that they have universal suffrage. The richest land-owners have run the place from the beginning. In the days of the Council of Seven, new members of the Council were chosen by the existing ones whenever a vacancy developed. It appears that Bauer got very rich very fast and was able to buy his way onto the Council. From what I hear, he was always an extremely persuasive man.”
“Quite,” the Colonel said.
“The last report of the Imperium commissioners before their expulsion indicates that he quickly made himself the dominant figure on it. He was the one, as I expect you’ve already guessed, who maneuvered Hermano into breaking with the Imperium.”
“And what is he now, King of Hermano? Emperor of Hermano?”
“First Secretary of the Provisional Government is his title. He and four other members of the old Council of Seven make up the provisional government.”
“An oligarchy of five being more manageable than an oligarchy of seven, I suppose. The next phase in the process being the replacement of the provisional government with an even more manageable one-man dictatorship.”
“No doubt,” said Magda Cermak.
She had more to tell him, little details of Martin Bauer’s life on Hermano—he had married again, it seemed, and had had another set of children, and lived in monarchical splendor on a great estate on the southern coast of Hermano’s one settled continent. The Colonel paid no more attention to what she was saying than professional courtesy required. It came as no surprise to hear that Geryon Lanista was looking after himself well. That had always been a specialty of his.