Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (52 page)

Make Ready stumbled forward, feeling the drapes pulled from his shoulders. The healer may have disapproved of his madness at the tailors, but Grumm wasn't going to waste its fruit.

Make Ready surveyed the group on the steps. His spirits sank. What could they care about a presumptious bastard from Kelmet's slums? Too late, now, to back out. He squared his shoulders. Placing one foot neatly before the other, the way he had practised, Make Ready walked decorously towards the Mendicant Steps, where waited Duke Corwen Persay, Grand Maitre de Marécage, his guards, and . . . who?

The man in the soiled smock stretched his arms, and yawned. Who would dare to act so casually, dress so slovenly, in the duke's presence? Make Ready's heart leaped in a convulsion which set him trembling. Wearing that laboratory smock . . . it had to be Greville, the duke's geneticist!

Make Ready became aware of silence in the Market alleyways. Shoppers were staring at the youth who presumed to promenade the exclusive alley. The duke had turned to watch him. And Greville? Why was he with the duke? What were those gestures his hands were making? Make Ready's memory flew back to days with the street thieves, recalling a fagin directing minions to a gull.
Greville was signaling in finger code!

Make Ready's pace faltered. Who did Greville signal to? And why? There were rumours aplenty of the geneticist's ruthlessness. Had he decided to get rid of a rival doigt in full view of the duke? Make Ready's back felt bare, exposed. A ball from a concealed musket could snuff him out, and no blame attach to the geneticist.

Make Ready halted before the steps. Raising his left hand, he pointed a stalled digit at the geneticist.

"Messer Greville!" His voice was shrill. "Stop what you are doing—or I'll make an end of you now!"

The man in the smock grew pale.

Behind him, the Mendicant Door opened. Lord Mardy Persay, in white court dress, appeared, buttoning his jacket. Voice light, amused, he asked, "Am I late for the party?"

Duke Corwen ignored his son's arrival. He said, "Get behind me, Greville."

Eyes on Make Ready, the duke brought up his right hand.

Lord Mardy thrust past the guard, reaching out a hand. "Not yet, sire. Ask the youth why."

Make Ready swallowed. Despite the menacing doigt, this was no ogre to fear. This was his father. His nervousness passed. He said, "Sire, your gene-man signals to someone. I fear he wishes me ill."

The duke frowned. "Why should Messer Greville wish you ill, boy?"

Make Ready responded in his mère's old penal patois. "
Sieur, sh'm'appelle
—I am called Mercredi, son of Semée La Douce, who was a transportee from Pont des Larmes in Lontaine France. My mère loved an
inconnu
who abandoned her with an unborn child."

The duke raised his eyebrows. "That is not an unusual story, lad. Why choose to tell me?"

Make Ready hoped he had the right answer. "Because, sire, the child inherited a finger which right now is scaring your scruffy vassal silly."

Lord Mardy, still gripping the duke's arm, whispered, "Sir—he's claiming to have the doigt!"

"Helix!" the duke snapped. "I know that. What do I do about him? I don't want to lose Greville. This wild youth wants to blight him."

Lord Mardy's eyes gleamed with wariness. "If he can do that, we don't want to lose him either." He raised his voice. "Lad! Put down your doigt! I guarantee your life."

Make Ready felt perspiration on his forehead. Greville was eyeing him with open malevolence. The duke still dithered over his execution. Lord Mardy's eyes pleaded. Make Ready slowly lowered his threatening finger.

Larry Greville's glance flicked along the allée. His fingers moved swiftly. Faster still, Lord Mardy's hand came up. Lightning hissed from the tip of his doigt, stabbing at a figure which had appeared in the allée. The figure dropped a musket, and crumpled, cloak smoking.

"Greville!" snarled the duke. "That's enough. Send your men away. Then leave us."

They watched the geneticist go. Lord Mardy examined a hole in his fingerstall. He grinned at Make Ready. "That's a new doigt-clout you owe me, brother."

The duke surveyed Make Ready grimly. "My son seems to have made up his mind somewhat prematurely. Did you intend to blight my gene man?"

Make Ready's mind raced. How should a street arab respond to a noble parent of brief acquaintance, who was surely bound to discover that he had been hoodwinked about a crucial part of that urchin's anatomy?

Only the truth would do. Make Ready went down on one knee. "Sire," he confessed. "I couldn't do no harm to Messer Greville. My doigt hasn't yet come on song. But Messer Greville didn't know that."

Duke Corwen Persay shook his head in reproof. "A risky trick, boy. But for Lord Mardy, you'd be carrion now."

Out of the corner of his eye, Make Ready saw them carrying the smoking corpse from the allée. He inched his gaze upwards from the duke's shoes. "I was hoping you'd see fair play, sir."

The duke's eyebrows climbed towards his flat cap. "Oh—an arbiter, am I? Between my loyal retainers and any young hoodlum who chooses to threaten them?"

Make Ready lowered his eyes again. "No, sir. But I thought you wouldn't see one of your subjects killed without reason."

The duke grunted. "Boy, I've killed dozens of my subjects, myself, without a shred of reason. If you had so much as pointed that dummy doigt in my direction my guards would have cut you down without any objection from me."

Make Ready kept his head down. "You are the duke, sir, and you can get away with it. Messer Greville don't have your authority."

The duke glanced at Lord Mardy. "By Helix—a pocket diplomat, too!" His voice grew harsh. "Boy, how did you come by a copy of my costume?"

Make Ready kept a quaver out of his voice. "Sir, I was told how you would be dressed. I thought I couldn't have a better model."

"And a courtier!" The duke scowled. "You must have allies in the Chateau. Who is your accomplice?"

Make Ready thought of Bregonif, waiting anxiously with the gremgaurs. The man would be in trouble enough, without help from him. He stammered, "I—I'd rather not say, sir."

"And loyal, to boot!" The duke sighed. "I have efficient torturers, boy. Would you face them?"

Make Ready began to tremble. Too late now, to cut and run. What price his smartalick ideas of embarrassing the Grand Maitre! He said, "I'm not keen, sir."

He heard the duke's laugh. Felt himself pulled to his feet. The duke spoke in the old penal tongue. "
Leve-toi, garçon!
Get up, boy. Where did you learn the langue? I haven't used it for years."

Make Ready responded in the same patois. "Sir, it was my mère's tongue when she first came to High Barbary."

The duke's face saddened. "That's true. I recall teaching her how to pronounce some fairly useless phrases in our modern argot. Where is she now?"

Make Ready shrugged. "Sir, I haven't seen, nor heard, from her since I was seven years old."

"And you are now?"

"Seventeen—I think, sir."

"Show me your doigt!"

Make Ready pulled off the fingerstall. The duke took the blackened digit gently in his hand. He turned to his elder son. "This has a few years to go, Mardy. Yet the lad scared the mighty Greville with it!"

Lord Mardy was grinning. "A genuine chip off the Persay block, sir. No one else would dare that kind of trick."

The duke extended his arms to Make Ready. "Come, son, we have tormented you enough. It's time you took your rightful place in the world."

Make Ready went with him, reckless of the consequences.

And the watcher at the end of the allée turned away. Skirting the market stalls, he made circuitously for the sunken garden below the Chateau. Pausing by a marble ballustrade, he waved to the cloaked man who waited at the foot of the steps with three gremgaurs. Bregonif would be pleased to know that the sixlegs wouldn't be required. That his extra five years were a certainty.

The healer smiled. There might be benefits for others who had helped, too.

Hector Garman, when he heard the news, hurried home to report to his secret masters that a new doigt had been found to replace Lord Cledger's.

And, as daylight faded, Make Ready stepped out into the Chateau gardens. Omkrit II, the evening star, gleamed above the treetops.

Make Ready shook his fist at it. What was fantasy for a Kelmet street arab might be possible for a noble of Mary Cage. One day, he would discover who lived up there in Lontaine France—and why they had sent his mère to exile in High Barbary.

Science may save us; it also has its dangers.

I first met Adrian Berry at one of the scientific cocktail parties Larry Niven and I give at the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Adrian is the Science Correspondent for the London
Daily Telegraph
and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. His book
The Iron Sun
is magnificent, as is the older
The Next Ten Thousand Years
. If you haven't discovered Adrian Berry, go out and do so immediately. You'll do yourself quite a favor.

Adrian Berry writes of real futures: of real star wars; and it is no accident that these two essays are presented together.

He will practise against thee by poison.

"As You Like It"

For centuries, communities from Europe to Asia died in agony in huge numbers when their bread became polluted by virulent fungus poisons. Soviet scientists isolated these poisons in the 1930s, and have since been mass-producing them as a means of mass murder.

Most of the advanced nations, it is true, either manufacture or carry out research into chemical weaponry. But the Soviet Union and its allies have outstripped all others in the intensity of their devotion to the development and use of poison.

What are these substances? The most lethal toxins used in modern warfare are still the hideous natural poisons that one associates with the Dark Ages, rather than any synthetic material created in the laboratory.

Democratic countries have been pitifully slow to recognize and counteract the advances which Eastern dictatorships have made in this field. It comes as a dark surprise to today's Western mind that the technological societies of the Communist bloc are but a veneer on a base of mediaeval barbarism, in which poisons extracted from herbs, fungi, snakes, amphibians, and fishes are often the most favored way of getting rid of an enemy.

It was in this tradition that the Soviet Union began its 1980 invasion of Afghanistan with the most terrible arsenal of offensive chemical weapons used by any army in history. Countless Moslem rebels died in convulsions from attacks by clouds of "yellow
rain".

Nor should there be too much surprise at the manner of their death. To quote from an excellent book on chemical warfare, "the Red Army demonstrates a military psychology that makes it possible to use war poisons without hesitation, as simply another weapon." [
Yellow Rain: A Journey through the terror of Chemical Warfare, Sterling Seagrave (M. Evans and Co., New York).]

Let us look at the history of one such poison: ergot, a fungus toxin which has been known for nearly 3,000 years. An Assyrian tablet of 600 BC first mentions it as a noxious pustule found on ears of grain. It probably caused the plague which nearly destroyed Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars, when starving people were forced to eat bad bread. It caused mayhem in Duisberg, Germany, in 857 AD, and in wide areas of France in 943.

A French chronicler of that year speaks of people "shrieking and writhing, rolling like wheels, foaming in epileptic convulsions, their limbs turning black and bursting open." Then he explains: "The bread of the people of Limoges became transformed upon their tables. When it was cut it proved to be wet, and the inside poured out as a black, sticky substance."

The cause of these horrors which became endemic among the ignorant peasantry was bad harvesting and grain storage, that permitted fungal growths on bread. Ergot, and similar fungal poisons, specially treated in Soviet laboratories, are nowadays used against rebel villages in Laos and Afghanistan, as Mr. Seagrave's book reveals in detail.

For mass killings or for individual murder, the ancient poisons are proving most efficacious. The Bulgarian exile Georgi Markov, hated in Sofia for his BBC broadcasts, was murdered in London in 1978 by an agent using an umbrella tipped with ricin, from the castor bean, which the murderer had boasted in a telephone threat to Markov "is a poison the West cannot detect or treat."

The greatest danger of all is that some group of ill-intentioned people might seek to combine the ancient poisons with the techniques of modern science to create a new weapon of unprecedented frightfulness.

It could happen like this. Genetic engineering, the laboratory manufacture of microbes through the alteration of genes, promises much for better medicines. But this hopeful new technology could be perverted to make a "monster microbe" that would colonize the human intestine with "pili," or tentacles, with which to adhere to its walls. For such a poison, there might be neither treatment nor antidote, and anti-bodies would accept it as being normal. A vial of it dropped in the water supply of a few major cities could, within days, produce a catastrophe to rival the Black Death.

One scientist who has warned of just such a danger is Professor Donald B. Louria, of the New Jersey Medical School. Explaining his worst fears, Professor Louria has said: "One microbiologist with whom I discussed this scenario said it could not happen because the experimenters themselves could not avoid becoming victims.

"But this is nonsense. They could immunize themselves against pili before the toxins were added, so that the bacteria could not take hold in their intestinal tracts. I believe there are those among us on this planet so venal, so committed to achieving power, or simply so mentally warped, that they would do exactly as I have outlined."