The Rebel of Rhada (14 page)

Landro sat down abruptly. He was shaken by what the cyborg claimed was history and by the vista of a future in which all men would be ruled by creatures such as the godlike man-thing standing before him.
Lord of all the stars,
he thought bleakly,
what have we loosed on the galaxy?

He lay on his bunk in the belly of his own starship, a prisoner and worse.
For ambition’s sake,
he thought feverishly,
and for love for Mariana, I betrayed my liege king. Without thought or heed for the consequences, I have helped to bring the race a new and terrifying slavery.
Did the others know what Tallan was? He could not believe that the star kings would follow a cyborg, but he, Landro, would have no chance to tell them. He had been brought into the ship under guard, kept from the others, separated from his own Navigators and his own warmen. And blasphemy of blasphemies, his vessel was now crewed by Sarissans, by unconsecrated men.

He had lived without honor, he knew. But he was a star king and a man. The immensity of his betrayal of the Empire brought him to the brink of despair.

He felt the ship take flight. The fleet was lifting out of the thick Sarissan air into space. God of space, he thought abjectly, forgive me.

He removed a buckle from his harness and began sharpening the tongue of it against the god-metal walls. When he had done, he bared his chest and began to work, whimpering hysterically against the pain. He was remembering the Warning that his Navigators had reported on the outward voyage. An Imperial starship had been somewhere behind. Long hours, perhaps even days, but
there.
He did not imagine that it could be Kier of Rhada, for Kier should be dead now, at the hands of the Questioner. But somewhere behind had been a starship carrying men---human beings. That was enough.

There was blood streaking his naked flesh, but he went on with it, raking the sharp piece of metal again and again over the wounds. The hieroglyphs stood sanguine and swollen on his breast, and then at last he covered himself, hugging the mailed shirt to him and rocking in his pain.

Tallan of Sarissa stood where no unconsecrated man had stood for more than a thousand years. The walls of the control room were transparent, and he looked out into the cold darkness of the space of the Rim. The starship that had been Landro’s and was now incorporated into the Sarissan fleet had only just reached orbital speed, and in the distance, like sparks of light against the misty surface of Sarissa, Tallan could see the other vessels. There were forty of them, and they carried the cavalry of Lyra and Altair, ten thousand infantry from Deneb and the ceremonial troops of the Betelgeui, as well as his own battalions of brutish Sarissans.

The control room was empty except for the cyborg. He had controlled the ship himself, doing easily what it customarily took a Navigator and two novices to do. But as he looked into space, it was without a sense of wonder or excitement. He had been taught--programmed--to know what history the old warlock Kelber knew and to rule men in battle, nothing more. His precise brain, an ancient and marvelously swift microcomputer, had recognized long ago the logical fact that man, biological man, was an anomaly in the universe. In that immensity where stars and galaxies traveled their predestined orbits across millennia and parsecs, the only reality was one of vast celestial mechanics. The few purely biological creatures that existed in space were simply vermin infesting a few lonely worlds. They could be disregarded, destroyed, or simply ruled.

He thought with a great calm amusement of Mariana and her rather pitiful plot to adorn herself with power. So slight a power in the face of the great machine that was the galaxy--

The vessels of the invasion fleet, shining distantly in the red light of the Sarissan sun, began to wink out as they went into stellar flight. The shift from sub-light speed took milliseconds, yet Tallan’s perceptions noted the exact moment of transition for each starship. They had built well, those ancients who constructed the starships, he thought. They were only men, but they had the knowledge of aeons behind them and the help of the cyborgs to build their great machines. In all the fleet, he thought, there was only one man who knew that Tallan of Sarissa was not human. The warmen and the Navigators and even the star kings served a cyborg without knowing. In a strangely satisfying way, it set to right a dark chapter of the past.

He heard a clash of metal beyond the closed door of the control room, and he walked across the god-metal deck, a shining martial figure banded in leather and iron.

A warman stepped back, away from the sacred chamber, averting his eyes so that he would not see the mysteries and be cursed.

Tallan closed the door behind him and said, “Speak.”

“Warleader. It is the Vegan.”

Tallan half smiled, knowing what would come next.

“He has killed himself, Warleader.”

Tallan nodded. He had been expecting this, but not so soon. Now only Mariana knew.

“Put the body into space while we are still sub-light,” he ordered calmly, and turned back to the control room.

Inside the holy chamber a holograph was fading. There had been a Warning. Tallan’s meticulously logical brain conceived the exactly logical thought that the Warning had been triggered by one of the nearer vessels of the fleet. He was wrong.

In the airlock the Sarissan warman and two members of his unit wrestled the body of Landro into the ejection chute. The heralds were running through the ship announcing the imminence of the shift into stellar flight, but the Sarissans in the lock took time to covet Landro’s fine harness.

“There’s no need to waste good armor,” the Sarissan sergeant said. “Or expensive clothes.”

The soldiers hurriedly stripped the body.

“Gods of space! Look at that--what he did to himself,” one said, making the sign of the Star.

Landro, quondam great noble and star king, traitor to the Empire and to the race, had cut a single word into the flesh of his chest with the same sharp metal he had used afterwards to open his veins. The word, accusing and bloody, written in swollen human tissue, was plainly legible.

But the Sarissans could not read.

They stared, shuddered, as sometimes brutish men will at what they cannot understand, and muttered a prayer to the dark and savage gods of their gloomy world.

Then they tipped the naked body into the chute and shot it, twisting and pinwheeling, into the void.

In the next instant, the starship flashed into stellar drive and vanished from Sarissa, never to return.

Even the most depraved of men is capable of astonishing self-sacrifice. It is this that makes him different from both the uncaring stars and the beasts of the field.

Emeric of Rhada, Grand Master of Navigators,
early Second Stellar Empire

We are a race of savages. Ten clans in concert can conquer a world, ten worlds, the Empire.

Attributed to Glamiss of Vyka after the Battle of Karma

Kier of Rhada regarded his young queen across the spartan soldier’s table. The meal was done, and the star king and his staff, Nevus the general, Cavour, the leader of the star-ship guard, and Kalin the Navigator had drunk the Queen’s health. The Vulks were in the shadows, Gret playing softly on his lyre-like instrument and Erit singing a melancholy Vulk lament that was part love song and part dirge for some unimaginable lost world.

Kalin spoke. “We shall be going sub-light soon, cousin. I’d best attend to my duties.”

Kier smiled slowly and said chidingly, “It is the Queen who gives permission to withdraw here, Kalin.”

Ariane raised an eyebrow and said, “Your cousin, the star king, should have been a singer of songs and legends, friend Navigator. This vessel is Rhadan, and on Rhada no one commands but The Rebel. But go perform your holy offices, sir. We would not detain you.” Then, less formally, she spoke to the others. “You may all go, gentlemen. I would speak with my warleader alone.”

The men rose and saluted and filed out. Only the Vulks and Kier remained. Ariane said, “Kier. I will not return to Rhada with the ship. I will go where you go on Sarissa.”

“Reconsider, Ariane,” Kier said. “We don’t know what we will find there, and you are too--”

“Valuable?” she said, her eyes flashing with quick anger.

“I was going to say ‘too important to the Empire,’ Queen,” Kier said.

“Nothing else?”

“What would you have me say? You are the Queen.”

Ariane studied the young star king’s carefully guarded face. “I would have you say what is in your heart, only that.”

Kier touched the rim of a metal goblet with a fingertip, rubbing it until it sang with a low, ringing tone. “You are the Queen,” he said again.

“We don’t even know that for certain,” Ariane replied. “But even if it is so--”

Kier said cautiously, “Command me, Queen.”

“Damn you,” Ariane said softly.

Kier smiled then. “Shall I tell you I love you, Ariane? And that if you were any other woman, I would simply carry you off to Rhada and keep you there? You know that is so.”

“One likes to hear such things,” Ariane said primly.

Kier laughed aloud. “Then hear it, dear heart. But you
are
the Queen-Empress, so hear it once and remember it. I will not say it again until--” He broke off, knowing how much they must do with how little. “Well, then, until your place is secure and the star kings acknowledge that the Empire is still alive.”

Ariane studied the narrow, slightly melancholy Rhad face. “Why does it mean so much to you, Kier, really? I know you--I know what men like you want most is to be left to rule your lands and lead your men and fight your never-ending wars. Why does the Empire mean anything at all to you?”

“I can’t answer you fairly, Ariane,” Kier said, and she knew it was so, for he was a soldier and not a man of words. “But let me try.” He poured more wine and stood to carry the goblet to the girl. He set the liquor before her and rested against the table, listening to the playing of the Vulks in the shadows. “I’m not an educated man, Ariane. Oh, I know what star kings need to know. I know best how to fight, of course, for that is what I’ve spent most of my life doing--”

Ariane touched his mailed arm. “Such a long life, Kier,” she said gently.

“Long enough to know that I am a Rhad and a star king. But more than that, Queen. You see I listened to your father. I fought with him, of course, as I was bound to do by my king’s oath. But I
listened
to him. You must know what I mean. You were on Karma with us. You knew him. You knew his vision. That’s what it was, a vision of the way men once lived in the galaxy and a dream of the way they might live again. You’ve seen the star map on Cavour’s wall?”

“Yes.”

“Imagine it, Ariane. Worlds without number, stars beyond counting. And many of them--hundreds of thousands, I suppose--filled with men and women living out their lives in peace. With laws to punish the guilty and treasures and miracles to reward the worthy. Oh, it must have been a paradise, Queen--”

“Perhaps not a paradise,” Ariane said, with a woman’s practicality.

“Maybe not. But for five thousand years men lived as men had never lived before. And so it must be again. The Magnifico made me see it. He made my father see it, too, and God knows Aaron of Rhada was not called Aaron the Devil for nothing.”

“Yes,” Ariane said, remembering. “The King-Emperor could brighten the night with his dreams.”

“Far more than that. Think now how few men there are in all the marches of the galaxy--scant millions where they once outnumbered the sand grains on all the beaches of all the seas of Rhada. Think how they die. In battle, mostly--as my father did, and yours, as my older brothers and your cousins and the sons and husbands of weeping women from one edge of space to the other. We are so few, Ariane, and the stars are so many. We must stop warring on one another or we will surely vanish from the universe.” His eyes seemed bright and angry in the torchlight. “And that is what it means to me. Your father and mine trained me well, Ariane. When I speak the word
Empire,
all these things are in my heart. It must be so with you, Ariane. I think that this is what it means to be ‘noble’ and ‘highborn.’ Perhaps it was always so, in the Dawn Age and in that darkness of millennia before men even went into space.”

It seemed to Ariane that she heard her father speak in the voice of the young star king. A great tenderness welled up in her breast, and she thought:
Let the shade of Glamiss witness it. I’ll have this warlike dreamer for my husband. I’ll have you, Rebel, and none other.
And then, as any warrior woman would in that time and place, she mentally made the sign of the Star and added:
If we live beyond this adventure . . .

On the control deck Brother Yakob, priest of the watch, had completed his calculations, checked them against the numbers presented by the ship, and given thanks for an agreement. When Kalin entered, he reported. “We are ready to go sub-light, First Pilot.”

Kalin settled into the command chair and arranged his coarse robes with youthful gravity. Then he turned to Brother John at the power console and indicated that he was ready to begin the litany.

“Energy Level Nine and steady, First Pilot,” Brother John intoned.

“Blessed be the Holy Name,” murmured Yakob.

“Energy Six,” Kalin ordered.

“Six, for the glory of God,” Yakob reported.

Through the transparent nose of the ship, the violet stars began to redden slightly. Their grouping changed into strange new alignments. Beyond them Kalin could see the great darkness of extra-galactic space, and for a moment his mind wandered and he thought about the legends of the people and the stories the old priests told of men who long, long ago had driven far beyond the Rim into the emptiness, to the Magellanic Clouds, to Andromeda and beyond. Could it all be true?

“Energy Six and slowing, First Pilot.” There was a touch of reproach in Yakob’s prim and priestly voice. Kalin stopped his dreaming and assigned himself a hundred hated logarithms as penance. A hundred
more,
he corrected himself. He must still do the five hundred he had assigned himself for the sin of pride on the voyage from Rhada to Nyor. Lord God of space, he thought, that seemed so long ago.