The Starkahn of Rhada (5 page)

Ariane was refitted at New Kynan and given leave, too. She chose to spend her rest period playing manta in the Gonlan Sea. I think she did it for me, knowing I’d want someone on Gonlan while I paid my respectful duty to Lady Nora on the home estates in Rhada. Ariane called me by hyperphone every three days to keep me informed about what was happening to the silver-eyed girl in the capsule. “After all,” Ariane explained, “she is as much my responsibility as she is
yours
, Starkahn.” I didn’t know what to make of such remarks, but I was glad she took the trouble to report to me.

On the twelfth day of Iceblue, our coldest month on Rhada, Ariane called me to say that the weather was warm and balmy on the Gonlanburg coast, that the sea was clear and the diving good, and that, incidentally, a commission of warlocks and Navigators had recommended that the university medical staff attempt to revive the alien girl within a month or less, since the power sources available did not match exactly the systems of the life-support capsule and they feared a malfunction might produce irreversible damage. “They say they have to take a chance on revival,” Ariane reported, “because the starship is gone and, well, you know the rest of it--”

I did, indeed, know the rest of it. If they tried and failed to revive the alien girl, I would be forever damned as the idiot who had killed mankind’s only contact with whatever mysterious branch of the race had created the vast technology that had produced the greatest starship ever heard of in the main galaxy.

“Reserve accommodations for me at Zodiac Bay,” I told Ariane. “I have to be there when the magicians try to wake her.”

“Not a sensible decision, Starkahn,” Ariane said. “But more like you than skulking about at home nursing your wounds. I will expect you in thirty hours.”

As I rang off, I became conscious of the Lady Nora watching me. She stood in the doorway of my suite, looking statuesque and quite properly framed by the ancient stones of the archway.

“That was Ariane, I suppose,” she said.

“Yes, Lady Mother,” I replied formally and politely, like a well-brought-up child. The truth was that I always felt a bit like a child in Lady Nora’s presence. She was certainly one of the most beautiful women of the Empire, even though she was close to seventy years old. She had never undergone geri-genesis, and consequently she hadn’t that parchment-skin quality that old reborns get. In an earlier age, Lady Nora would have passed easily for a woman in her early thirties--perhaps even younger than that. One must remember that she is a noblewoman of the Empire: a personage who has never known a day’s want or an hour’s hardship. Yet, for all of that, Lady Nora is typical of the great ladies of our time--all of them descendants of generations of warrior queens who helped their men tame not nations, but whole star systems. Pampered she might be, but she was made of stern stuff.

She swept into the room (not meaning to, but unable to move without the grace and power of a starship of the line) and began her interrogation. “Ariane is well?” Fruitless question. She knew perfectly how well Ariane was at the moment, as well as where she was and how she was spending her leave.

“Yes, Lady Mother,” I said. “I was thinking of joining her at Gonlanburg.”

Nora frowned. “You want to go off-world so soon? You have barely gotten home, Kier.”

She meant “home” to the estate, not home to Rhada. She was too tactful to mention the weeks of the military inquiry.

“Tell me about the creature you captured, Kier,” she said, settling on a formless chair that rose to greet her.

“I didn’t exactly ‘capture’ her, Mother,” I said cautiously.

“I understand she was very lovely. Exotic, of course. One expects that. But physically quite--appealing.”

I suppressed an urge to smile at that. Mother is a Great Vegan, and Vegans are notoriously prudish. The fact that the alien girl had lain naked within her life-support capsule would have already been reported to the Lady Nora, who would somehow feel this reflected discredit on whatever strange and alien culture dispatched the girl and the black starship on their incomprehensible mission.

“Quite appealing, Lady Mother,” I said.

“Ariane said ‘beautiful.’ Yes, I think that was the word she used.”

Ah
, I thought,
the mysterious female ways of my cyborg alter-ego
. Was it possible for a slip of a girl of fifteen metric tons to be jealous in the ordinary female way? Devious, she was. Of that I could be absolutely certain.

“Well,” I said. “I suppose one might--in certain circumstances--think the girl was beautiful, Lady Mother.-’

“Silver eyes, I am told.” Lady Nora had been told a good deal, and about things more significant than the color of an alien’s eyes.

“Yes. Silver,” I said, remembering them with a shiver--the way she seemed to be looking at me through that liquid-filled chrysalis.

“Unusual,” Lady Nora murmured. “But scarcely unique. There are silver-eyed blacks on Bellatrix Delta V.” My mother settled the embroidered panels of her gown about her so that she looked even more regal, very much a part of the old room in the ancient house of the Rhadan kings. “Kier,” she said, regarding me with steady, cobalt-blue eyes, “you know that there are some members of our family who consider me a domineering woman...”

“Surely not, Mother,” I said with gentle irony

“Oh, yes,” she went on with classic disregard of my small thrust. “Your granduncle of Aurora, for example. And all of his kin. Marfan of Xanthis, Kreon, all the Melissande connections. In fact, almost all of that side of the family--”

“Father’s relatives,” I said.

“Quite so. Your father’s kinfolk. All rather socialist in their leanings for nobles of the Empire, you know. Your father was a dear man, and I loved him very much, Kier. But he never lived up to his breeding, not as he should have. He was warleader and star king, after all.”

“He was Starkahn of the Rhadan Republic, Lady Nora,” I said with a coolness of formality in my tone. I knew what was coming, more or less, and I wanted to prevent an argument if possible. The Lady Nora was a royalist to her fingertips. I could not imagine that she would ever become involved in active treason against the Republic, but one could not avoid knowing where her sympathies lay--nor could not escape her aristocratic conviction that every event, every chance, should be exploited toward a restoration of the old regime.

“Starkahn, then,” my mother said scornfully. “We know what the title means, you and I, Kier. And so do plenty of others. Including the Galacton.”

She was right about that, in any case. There was always a strong royalist movement in Rhada. The Republic had only come about because of the dilution of this sympathy by the populations of Aurora and Xanthis and the other principalities forcibly welded to the Palatinate by my warrior ancestors. They had, in effect, brought about the downfall of our family dynasty by their own success in war. But the royalist party remained strong on the home world, and everyone knew that a royalist coup on Rhada would bring no reprisals or interference from the heir of great Glamiss who ruled as Galacton in Nyor. So long as Rhada remained loyal to the Empire, it mattered to no one outside the former Palatinate whether Rhada was monarchy or republic.

But the royalist movement on Rhada, though strong, had always been small, and it had one other great disadvantage. It had
me
as heir presumptive to the feathered cape and golden regalia of star king.

And now? I wondered. Since the Court of Inquiry, I had remained in seclusion. But the Lady Nora’s attitude suggested that perhaps something had changed to make the royalist cause stronger. I dreaded the possibility.

“I am sorry you are choosing this particular time to go off-world Kier,” she said. “Your people have had very little chance to become reacquainted with you.” Mother had a way of making it sound as though all Rhadans were tenants on some huge farm owned by the family.

“ ‘My people’ as you call them, Mother, have always thought me a bit of a twit. They can hardly have changed that opinion,” I said.

“They have thought you perhaps a bit overly studious, Kier. But they have always loved you.”

“The Rhad don’t love anyone who isn’t cast in the heroic mold, my Lady Mother, and you know it well. I’ve always been ‘that book-bagging Rhad.’ Nose pinned to a tape-viewer. All that.” I had my moments of wishing the Rhad saw me as some sort of reincarnation of Kier the Rebel. But they didn’t. There was no use pretending about it.

Lady Nora said, “The story of the manner in which you went alone into the strange starship and captured the alien is common knowledge in the Palatinate by now, Kier. The people are pleased.”

I had to smile at that. “Are you suggesting I’m some sort of hero?”

“The Rhad like bravery,” Lady Nora declared.

“But what I did wasn’t particularly brave. It wasn’t even very clever. The starship is gone, and the alien was only a girl in a life-support capsule--a girl who was quite out of it, by the way. Hardly able to defend herself, if it comes to that. The Court of Inquiry thought I was more stupid than heroic.”

Lady Nora wasn’t going to accept that. “You have been out of touch with people these last few days. Your story is well known in Rhada--”

Trust my mother for
that
--

“--it has the makings of a guest song: how you tried to take the black starship singlehanded and how it blasted the Delphinus star.”

“Mother,” I protested. “We don’t
know
that the starship had anything to do with the nova.”

“You haven’t heard, then.”

“Heard what?”

“The great ship was sighted again. In Libra. Sigma Libra went nova within three ESH of the sighting.”

I was appalled in the evident satisfaction Lady Nora took from this news. The Sigma Libra system was uninhabited except for a small commo-station on the farthermost planet, but the loss of life could have been enormous if the black starship had struck elsewhere. I felt out of my depth and in need of allies. My mother often made me feel this way, but this was no simple family matter. Plainly, the situation was out of hand. The Empire was in danger--and the aristocrats like Lady Nora refused to see anything more in the events of the last weeks than an opportunity to play politics.

“I shall consult Gret,” I said. The Royal Vulk, with his wisdom of millennia, would know what must be done.

“
You
are the Starkahn.
Not
Gret.” Did I detect a note of anti-Vulkish prejudice there? I hoped not.

“And Rhada is a republic, Mother. The age of the star kings is over here on the Rim.”

Lady Nora’s eyes flashed angrily. “Don’t talk to me like a shopkeeper, Kier. Your responsibility--”

I cut her off with unaccustomed abruptness. “You have just told me that an attack of some sort, delivered by means unfamiliar to us, has destroyed a stellar outpost of the Empire. Yet in the same breath you seem to suggest I should stay home and play at plotting to bring back the monarchy. Mother, what are you dreaming of? I am Fleet officer of the Empire--”

“You are the Starkahn of Rhada.”

“I am a citizen of the Rhadan Republic, madam. And so are you. Our duty is to protect the state and the Empire of which it is a part--not to try to overturn it.”

My mother regarded me coldly, as though I were some stranger who had found his way into her home by mistake and against her wishes. “It has always been my belief that it was a mistake to allow your education to be overseen by the Vulk. Now I am even more certain of it. Your father wished it so because it is a tradition in the family. Very well. Seek counsel where you will. I respect Gret for what he has been to the noble Rhad since the first star king’s time. I do not accept his notions of universal brotherhood and equality. Now you may do as you see fit.”

With that cold pronouncement, Lady Nora Veg-Rhad,
quondam
princess of Rhada and Great Vega, swept from the room more regally than any present-day Galacton. Regretfully, I watched her go--and my thoughts turned to my tutor, Gret.

To understand Rhadans, one must also understand the Vulk and their relation to us as a people. Only once, in all the millennia of star-voyaging, has man discovered another intelligent race. The first contact between humans and the Vulk is lost in the mists of antiquity. They are a strange people, small of stature, humanoid, but very different from men. Within their bulging skulls lie brains with almost mystical powers of telepathy and mind-sharing. Lacking eyes and ears, they do not see as men do. In ancient times men believed they “saw” men’s souls. And during the Dark Time, millions of Vulks paid for men’s fears and superstitions with their lives.

It is strange that even after thousands of years of living with the Vulk, men know so little of them. Their home world was destroyed in some celestial catastrophe, yet there are still thousands of them scattered through die reaches of the Empire. They are not male and female as men are, yet they have a counterpart of sex. Gret, my tutor, for example, had lived much of his life with a consort, Erit.

Among the Rhad there is an ancient custom called Triad, established, some say, by my ancestor Kier the Rebel. This is a mind-link among two Vulk and a human being. It is a clumsy thing, according to the Vulk, because man’s mind is not yet sufficiently developed for true telepathy. But it is by Triad that much instruction is given to the Rhadan young. It lends itself as a technique for teaching history--for the Vulk are extremely long-lived. Some say twenty thousand years, perhaps even longer.

Gret, the Royal Vulk of Rhada, had grown old in the service of my family. He knew Kier the Rebel and the glorious Queen Ariane. He knew Kynan the Navigator, Star King of the Gonlani-Rhad, who some say might have been Galacton had he chosen to be, eight hundred years ago. Gret was my father’s friend and my teacher, and, some said, the wisest creature in Rhada. It was to him I felt I must now turn.

--and it is my wish that my descendants honor this Patent while the House of Rhad rules in Rhada. The Vulk known to men as Gret has been my honored friend and my father’s friend. My trust in him is complete. . . . For howsoever long the Vulk Gret wishes to serve the House of Rhad, let him be known as Royal Vulk to this family. Given this thirtieth day of the seventh month of the year 6,001 Galactic Era: this sixtieth year of my reign as Kier, second star king of Rhada.