by John Brunner
She accepted his ministrations dumbly, swallowed the pill as directed, and whispered, “Can I go now?”
“Lie down for a while—you’ll be all right.” Spartak gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder and stood aside for her to leave.
“I’m—sorry,” Vix said with an effort as the door slid to. “You’re right, I oughtn’t to talk to her that way.”
“It’s better to think of points like that in advance and not afterwards,” Spartak answered curtly, and crossed the floor to drop to his knees beside the bound man. “Hm! How long has he been awake?”
“Awake?” Vix echoed in astonishment. “I thought he was still knocked out.”
“Hold it,” Spartak rapped, foreseeing that Vix’s next impulse would be to kick the man into talking. “Let’s see what I can do to loosen his tongue before you—” He reached behind him for an injector and a small phial of grayish liquid.
“What are you going to give him?” Vix demanded.
“It’s one of the old Imperial drugs—not really meant as a truth drug, but supposed to bring forgotten experiences back to consciousness during psychotherapy.” With deft fingers he loaded the injector.
“Why did you think that, of all drugs, might come in handy?” Vix grunted. “Think I might be precessing with my gyros, maybe?”
“You do take everything personally, don’t you?” Spartak sighed. “As a matter of fact, I thought it might help us to find out how this Belizuek cult gets the hold it’s supposed to have over apparently rational people like Hodat. There,” he added, shooting the dose into the bound man’s wrist veins.
“How long does it take to work?”
“A few seconds … Open your eyes, you!”
The bound man complied after an obvious struggle to go on feigning unconsciousness.
“Who are you? Where are you from?” Spartak asked.
“I’m—” Another, equally unsuccessful struggle to still his tongue, and a yielding. “I’m Korisu, and I come from Asconel.”
“From—!” Vix took a pace forward in amazed horror.
“What was your mission and who ordered you to do it?”
His eyes fixed open and seeming glazed, the man whispered, “I was sent by Bucyon to track down Vix and kill him.”
“Why?” thundered Vix.
“Because he’d heard that you planned to raise an army and depose him, and wipe out Belizuek on Asconel.”
“I’m Spartak, Vix’s half-brother,” Spartak said softly. “Does my name mean anything to you?”
“Y-yes. After I’d found and killed Vix, since I was on Annanworld anyway, I was to locate you and eliminate you as well.”
“Has someone been sent after Tiorin?” Vix demanded.
“I—I don’t know for sure. I think so. But nobody knew where he was when I left home. There was a rumor that he had gone towards the hub, to travel in what’s left of the Empire. Someone mentioned Delcadoré.”
“Then that’s where we’ll go!” Vix declared, and strode towards the control board.
“Just a moment,” Spartak said. “There are some other things I want to set straight. You, Korisu—are you a follower of Belizuek?”
“Of course I am. Everyone on Asconel is nowadays.”
Vix uttered a filthy string of oaths.
“What is Belizuek?”
“He is all-seeing and all-powerful. He reads the inmost thoughts of men and no one can stand against him. He’s a superior being and men ought to recognize that and serve him.”
“Is he a telepathic mutation from human stock?”
“I’ve never seen him. But the priests say he’s different. Superior. Deserving of our worship.”
Spartak wiped sweat from his face. “I’m told he demands human sacrifices. Is that true?”
“No, of course not!” Shocked, the bound man tried to sit up, and failed. “The priests say it’s blasphemy to call it sacrifice. It’s a free-will offering, and it’s an honor to serve Belizuek in that way just as in any other.”
Spartak’s jaw set in a grim line. If in such a short time Bucyon and his consort Lydis had managed to persuade all—or even a substantial part—of the citizens of Asconel that this transcendent rubbish was the revealed and mystic truth, their mission wasn’t going to be confined to so simple a task as deposing the usurper and restoring the rightful Warden.
“Where does Belizuek come from?”
“The priests say he’s existed since the beginning of the galaxy.”
“Then where is Brinze?”
“That’s where Shry and Bucyon and Lydis and some of the others come from. But I don’t know where it lies.”
“Delcadoré,” Vix muttered to himself, over at the control board. “I’d not meant to go so close to the hub—there are still idiots around there with dreams of Imperial glory, and it’s risky. But if that’s where Tiorin is said to be …” He glanced over his shoulder. “I have a course set up now. Anything more you want from him?”
“Not right now.” Spartak straightened. “What shall we do with him?”
“Put him where he put Vineta, why not?”
“No, that’s too small—literally and absolutely. In a closet we can lock; that would do.”
“There’s an empty one next to the head,” Vix grunted. “I’ll help you lug him down there.”
Still weary from the mental strain as well as from the physical effort of hauling the reluctant Korisul to his prison, Spartak stole into the lower cabin. Vineta had stretched out on the left bunk, and was sleeping with deep and regular breathing. Near her pillow she had ranged the little objects to which she plainly attached a great deal of value: the shell, the solido, the cheap jewelry.…
Spartak put his medical case away and crept out again.
“You again, Spartak?” Vix called as he re-entered the control cabin. “Say—uh—I ought to thank you. I guess I was too shaken up to remember. It was very smart, the way you stopped the fight. And it was just as well we tackled him your way and not mine. Apart from anything else, I imagine you’re now convinced that I wasn’t spinning you a wild fantasy about what’s happened on Asconel!”
Spartak shook his head distractedly. “It’s incredible,” he muttered. “The speed and completeness of the process, to have produced a fanatic like Korisu in so short a time—it almost persuades me that you were right about witchcraft.”
Vix hesitated. Then he put out his hand. “Brother, I was in two minds whether to go to Annanworld and seek you out. I wondered if I might not burden myself. But ten years is a slice out of any man’s life, and love for a world like Asconel is a bond to bring men together.”
Spartak put his hand into the other’s grasp.
But the full measure of Korisu’s fanaticism did not emerge until much later—until the time when they went to feed him in his cramped prison and found that he had contrived to strangle himself, against all probablity, with the braided leather Vix had used to bind his arms.…
The shadow of that incredible death still lay over them when they gathered in the control room to watch the planet Delcadoré grow beyond the main ports. To break the intolerable silence between them, Vineta—recovered almost completely from her treatment at the hands of Korisu—spoke up.
“What sort of a world is this one, now?”
Vix, occupied with the controls, tossed an answering grunt over his shoulder. “Ask Spartak—he has the head full of knowledge. I’ve not followed the progress of events down here towards the hub. Still too rigid and organized for my taste!”
The girl glanced at Spartak rather shyly—they had hardly yet got to know one another during this brief trip, and she had spent most of her time out of the way of both brothers, although Spartak had seen enough to convince him that Vix still at heart regarded women as expendable; currently, he just did not have the time to get himself another if he lost Vineta, and was doing his clumsy best to keep on her right side.
“Well,” Spartak commenced, “this was formerly one of the main garris
on systems for the Imperial fleet, and when the Empire began to lose its outer reaches this was one of the—the foci, so to speak, on which retrenchments were made. I think it’s now effectively a frontier system. The Empire hasn’t: vanished, of course, but only shrunk to a fraction of its former size.”
“That’s what’s worrying me,” Vix interjected. “I’ve tangled with certain bone-headed parties who seem to imagine the Empire still flourishes. For my part, I think it’s now a farce, and will only prove a handicap to some new and more stable foundation.”
Spartak nodded in surprised agreement.
At that moment a light sprang up on the communicator panel, and Vix reached over to activate the circuit. A voice boomed out with a ring of crude authority. “Identify yourself and your ship!”
“See what I mean?” Vix muttered wryly, and added more loudly, for the benefit of the distant challenger, “Vix of Asconel piloting my own vessel, on private business and landing on Delcadoré.”
“Asconel, hm?” The voice was as clear as if it came from the next room, even when at lower volume it continued, “Where in all of space is that?”
Other voices, much fainter but quite distinct, chimed in. “Asconel—isn’t that where.…? Well, it’s off towards the Rim anyway, so I guess it’ll do.… Anything to shift this problem off my back … Yes, we’ll settle for this one—we don’t want to wait till the galaxy freezes just to find a ship bound for the Big Dark or somewhere really distant.…”
Vix and Spartak exchanged appalled glances, and the first voice roared out again.
“Vix of Asconel, you’re under Imperial requisition. Do you hear and understand? Your ship is under Imperial requisition. Do not attempt to evade this order, or it will be the worse for you!”
“What does this all mean?” Vineta whispered.
“Right now, that’s what it means!” Vix replied in white-lipped fury, and gestured towards the viewport which moments ago had held only Delcadoré, its larger moon and the stars beyond.
Now, like a monstrous fish swimming leisurely to intercept smaller prey, there loomed the gigantic shape of an Imperial ship of the line, the ancient Argian symbols blazoned at prow and stern, for all the galaxy as though Argus could still issue orders to a million planets, and prepared to back this false contention with the all-too-real support of fire-power equal to the output of a minor sun.
VIII
FIGHTING and running were out of the question. When the order was given to make a landing on Delcadoré under the escort of the Imperial battleship, Vix—punctuating his pilot work with oaths that seemed to grow fouler by the second—furiously complied, while Spartak tried to console him with the suggestion that at least so far they weren’t being told to do anything but what they had intended all along.
Meanwhile, Vineta stood close against him, her large dark eyes fixed as though hypnotized on the hull of the escorting ship, her whole body trembling with the unexpressed terror she felt at the nameless threat the “Imperial requisition” implied.
Spartak’s heart lifted, though only briefly, when he saw what forces the Empire could still command—there might be a thousand vessels, he guessed, docked here at what huge illuminated signs still declared to be the Headquarters Port of the Third Imperial Fleet. Then he took a second look at those monstrous hulls, ranged like a forest of branchless metal trees across the concrete plain, and realized he had failed to make an obvious deduction. The Empire, by all accounts, was struggling against decay and rebellion all through the galaxy—why then were so many ships out of the sky at one place and one time? And he began to spot the clues which accounted for their presence: gashed hulls from distant battles, plating removed by the hundreds of square feet to expose the vital equipment within which was being cannibalized to maintain those ships still capable of flight.
Maybe somewhere out near the rim there was a world where ships stood like this in vast numbers, but not antiques used to the limit by reckless commanders—new ships, human-made, ready to bring inwards to the hub those who for ten millennia had been harried away from the Argian domains and had bided their time on the threshold of intergalactic emptiness, waiting for the inevitable collapse.
If there were such a world, he thought, it would be worth hunting for. The shadow of an idea crossed his mind, and was dispelled immediately by the arrival alongside their own vessel of officials from the port controller’s staff.
Vix vented his anger on them in a single blast of abuse and complaint. They ignored him as they might have ignored a breath of wind. Spartak, urging Vix aside, attempted to tackle them on a more rational basis, inquiring the authority for “Imperial requisition” and contesting the legality of giving orders to non-Imperial citizens.
The officials sighed and produced guns. It seemed that this had become the standard substitute for argument on Delcadoré.
All three of them were taken—for Vineta refused to stay alone aboard the ship after her experience on Annanworld—to wait in a large, fight anteroom outside the office of the port controller. There was no one else there apart from a man of early middle age, who to their horror lacked both a leg and an arm. They could not refrain from staring at him; on a world returning to barbarism after the withdrawal of Imperial support, such a sight might have been expected, but Delcadoré was supposed to be an outpost of the still viable Argian civilization.
The man cracked a bitter smile as he saw their eyes covertly turning on his injuries.
“I’m not pretty any longer, am I?” he rasped. “Well, not to wonder at that! If you’d been picked out of an airless wreck the way I was, you’d have …” A fit of coughing interrupted his angry words, and racked his body for a good minute before he could answer Spartak’s tense questions.
“Oh, sure they’ll fix me up sooner or later. But that can wait, they tell me. I’m the only survivor from my whole team, and all they want to know is where they went wrong. I’m going to tell ’em, too! Without mincing my words!”
“What happened?” Vix snapped.
“Fools—gas-brained fools! I could have told them.…” The man’s eyes were unfocused, staring through the wall at a faraway disaster. “Hiring pirates, that’s what they’ve hit on as their latest brain-wave! A whole Imperial fleet revolts under a commander who thinks he can do better than the mud-heads we have in charge at the moment—and who’s to say he couldn’t? Sometimes I think I could! And what do they do to combat this? They hire a ramshackle bunch of pirate ships, thinking to keep them from pillaging some Imperial planet this way, send out a command echelon to give the orders—that’s where I got involved—and sit back and pour some more ancinard. And what happens? Exactly what any schoolchild would have said: you can’t give pirates orders, so they break and run, and the Imperial-trained rebels pick them off like scooting watersliders, and then the Imperials-that-were loot the very planet the pirates were aiming for, to make up for the inconvenience and minor losses they suffered!”
“Which fleet?” Vix demanded.
“The Eighteenth.” The injured man stared at him. “What other did you think it was?”
“What do you mean, ‘what other’?” Vix countered. “The Twenty-Seventh is wiped out, as I well know—but it could have been the Tenth, or the Fortieth, or the Forty-Second, or—” He broke off, the other man’s eyes burning at him.
“Are you sure?” the cripple whispered, after glancing around to make sure there was no one else in earshot.
“Of course. I’ve just come from Annanworld, before that I was at Batyra Dap, and before that Poowadya, and before that—”
“All these fleets are still operating? In revolt, but still operating?”
“At the last hearing, yes. Bar the Twenty-Seventh, as I mentioned.”
“The liars,” the cripple whispered. “The dirty, double-tongued, deceiving, damnable—”
“Vix of Asconel!” a speaker cried from the wall. “Go to the door which will open on your right. Bring your companions with you.”
Puzzled at
the cripple’s reaction, Spartak lingered to put a final question to him, and got the answer he had half expected but was barely able to credit. If a high-ranking officer of the crack Third Imperial Fleet had been lied to about the fate of so many other fleets, lying must have become the general policy of the rump Empire. How long could it stand on falsehood? He had envisaged another century or so before its prestige diminished to the point at which rebels and outlaws were tempted clear down to the hub—ultimately perhaps to Argus itself. But if they were already so desperate at the reduction of their loyalist forces that they were hiring pirates as mercenaries, the word would travel fast, and the next time the Empire would find pirates and rebels combined against it; there would be an end to futile shifts like trying to make the two enemies destroy each other.
Gloomy beyond description, he found he had followed Vix and Vineta into the adjacent office, and there confronted a podgy, gray-haired woman in a uniform encrusted with meaningless decorations and ostentatious badges of rank.
“Sit down,” she said tonelessly. “Which of you is Vix, the alleged owner of the ship we’ve requisitioned?”
“Alleged!” Vix purpled again. “I have clear title—”
“I’m not arguing,” the woman sighed. “If you want to go into legalisms, starships are by definition Imperial property and only leased to corporations, trading companies or—save the mark—individuals.” Her mouth twisted as though in disgust. “But where would it get me to rely on a thin argument like that? I imagine you’re competent to handle the ship, and if I wanted to commandeer it I’d have to pick someone equally skillful, and that’s not easy because next thing you know he’d be headed for the great black yonder.…”
Spartak found himself suddenly pitying the woman, for she had defined herself instantly by what she had said: a weary official trying to keep things going while chaos battered at the structure of law, order and principle by which she had to be guided. He signaled Vix to be quiet, and leaned forward.