The Starkahn of Rhada (8 page)

“But that’s absurd, Ariane. To do something like this, a person would have to have tremendous influence in Imperial circles--among high officers of the Fleet at Nyor. And he--or she--would have to be almost paranoiac about investigating spatio-historical probabilities . . .“ My voice trailed off into uncertainty because it sounded vaguely as though I were describing someone I’d heard about recently--an influential fanatic.

“I know what you are thinking,” Ariane said. “But there is another possibility.”

“There are dozens of possibilities,” I said irritably. “Maybe hundreds. It’s just that we don’t know about any of them. We are only guessing.”

“Nav Peter of Syrtis,” Ariane said. “Or Lady Nora.”

I grew really angry at that: Ariane grouping the fanatic Navigator with my mother.

“Think about it,” Ariane said. “An Inquisitor a few thousand years out of his time and yearning for the good old days could do something like this. We found the alien, after all. The black starship could be the scourge of God, the sword of the holy Star, in his mind. You name it. Your history is filled with that kind of thinking. And when you are a fanatic, you don’t investigate growing legends--you
encourage
them.... They are the way to power. And remember--the Fleet can send out a hundred cruisers--but the only ones with any real chance of locating the black ship again are you and me. There is one possibility. Has the monk enough influence with the Galacton to pull the right wires and separate us?”

“He might well have,” I said, still angry. “But that’s only your first guess. What about Lady Nora?”

“That is a different matter,” Ariane said. “We both know her. We both know her ambitions for you. She could put up with our relationship to one another as long as you were just a frustrated historian--yes, it’s so, and there is no denying it, so don’t try. I have the greatest admiration for the Lady Nora Veg-Rhad, and we have a great many things in common. Our wishes for you, for example. But she wants to bring back the past on Rhada. She wants to build a great, antique social pyramid and put you, the Starkahn, on the top of it. Now that you are a hero to the Rhada, a source of concern to the Imperials and the clergy, too, I wouldn’t be surprised, why the thing to do is obvious. Make dead certain you stay on Rhada to play politics. How better to do that than pull some strings and have one of her friends in the Fleet--that lady admiral, for example--arrange a discreet shuffle of computer cards in Bu Personnel?”

“She wouldn’t do that,” I protested. But, of course, I knew that she would. And she would with only the best will in the world. My Lady Mother, sad to relate, would happily dismantle my entire life and career to serve some mystical sense of
noblesse
and family ambition. Ariane knew it, and so did I.

“That is why,” the cyborg said matter-of-factly, “I have no intention of returning to the Fleet base at New Kynan when my leave is up. At least not until we’ve delivered that silver-eyed creature to Gret-Erit and found her ghastly machine as well.”

I assimilated that with difficulty. There has not been an authenticated case of mutiny in the Fleet since the Interregnum, and I was about to start reading the
Articles for the Governance of the Fleet
to Ariane when I realized that she was absolutely right and functioning with direct cyborg honesty and logic. The threat of random destruction of stellar systems had to be met with intelligence, not with greater force--for there was no greater force, not in any nation that we knew, nearby or across the spiral arms of the galaxy.

“All right,” I said finally. “When do we begin our short happy careers as mutineers?” Before she replied, I knew the answer.

“Erit is waiting for us in Gonlanburg now” Ariane said.

“So my question is academic?” I said, half resentfully.

“The decision is really yours to make, Kier,” Ariane said.

“They have revived the alien?”

“This morning. So Erit says.”

I didn’t ask how Ariane knew. If she said she did, then she knew. It came as no surprise that there could be a telepathic bond between Vulk and cyborg. Both of their minds were, in that sense, more highly developed than man’s.

“Then,” I said, “I suppose the time is now.”

“Yes,” Ariane said, and I felt her leap from the darkness of the sea.

Kier, the king, and Ariane, the silver princess,
Rode the night wind, and in their hands were truth swords,
And righteousness mantled their shoulders,
And honor was in their heads--
Yet the way was difficult. So it is.
Even for heroes.

Guest Song,
authorship unknown,
early Second Stellar Empire period

Wjen Ey be dead And long forgotten, then lyt it be Syd of me that Ey dyd my duty to My People; wielding in Thyr Name thye myghtiest Engines and Weapons of destruction thyt Men hyve yyt Conceived and using thyr own Scyence that thyye have corrupted for the

Banishment of all that is best and Fynest among Thye People....

Oath administered to Watchers of each of the three
Deaths
before their departure from the Communes of Magellan.
Engraving found on the bulkhead wreckage of
Death Two
during the early Confederate period

So I came back to Gonlanburg: a naked man with the tubes of an artificial gill still jutting from my chest, aboard a cyborg ship already allotted to some other Survey pilot.

The change in assignments, Ariane and I surmised, was not yet official, so there was no immediate problem about our whereabouts and whether or not we were together. Thus it was possible for her to remain quite openly at the civil spaceport while I, playing the bookish Starkahn, had a haberdasher come aboard to outfit me in a tunic and kilt of the sort worn by students at the university. I bought a wig from the man, too, so that I could wear the encephalophone contacts on my mastoid bones without causing too much curiosity among the school people. Long hair is far more common in the colleges of the Rim than are bits of SW equipment such as E-phones.

It was nearly evening when I was finally ready to leave the port and go searching for Erit in the university gardens. Ariane’s presence in the civil docking area was causing more of a stir than either of us thought safe or suitable: the merchant fleets have nothing comparable to the ADSPS cyborgs. It was only a matter of time until someone, the Lady Nora perhaps, or the Fleet authorities, or even some misguided Navigator working for the Zealots, would locate us and become interested in what it was brought us to the same city as the alien we had discovered in Delphinus. So we filed a flight plan for Ariane back to Rhada, and as I left the port in a rented hovercraft, I caught a glimpse of Ariane’s manta silhouette rising above the jumble of gantries, hangars, and veetols docked in the port.

We had deliberately filed for a free-fall course out to Gonlan-Omicron’s orbit, and then translight to the Rhada sun. This would leave Ariane unreported for the better part of eleven hours--which was enough time for her to establish herself in synchronous orbit directly over Gonlanburg and wait for my E-phone call. She could act as commo satellite between me and Erit, as well, if conditions for Vulk-to-cyborg telepathy were good.

Filing a false flight plan was a reprogramming offense for both Ariane and for me, but it seemed that the more deeply we involved ourselves in the recovery of the alien girl, the more we found ourselves in conflict with the establishment and the law. I am not, as my famous ancestor was, a rebel by nature. But when every instinct warns me that the powers-that-be are handling something important in a rash and ill-considered way, then I will take personal action. I am, after all, the Starkahn and a Rhad. I explained many transgressions that way in my lifetime. But I had a feeling that if things went badly now, the explanation wouldn’t save me.

Yet there was something else to consider, as a mental discipline only, because it is quite impossible for a man--one single man--to come to terms, actual terms, with the destruction of whole solar systems. As a soldier, one might readily understand the sort of death and havoc created by a laser rifle, or even nuclear torpedo. But carnage on a planetary scale, let alone on a stellar one, is simply impossible to conceive, except as an abstract notion. I personally had witnessed the destruction of the Delphinus star, yet I had no genuine grasp of the meaning of such power, such genocide plus. Nor, I suspected, did the unknowns who constructed the black starship. By such minds were pogroms launched and epidemics started in the murk of human history.

I was certain that no single human being could come to working terms with the meaning of a real doomsday machine. What did that leave, then, as the markers of it? True aliens? I thought of the girl’s silver eyes and wondered if that were her only “difference.” Or the mass hysteria of some rabid human organization so maddened with self-amplifying hate that it would contrive the random death of stars--and in so doing consign to glowing plasma billions of living things?

The result of this soul-searching was to make it crystal clear that my potential personal troubles were academic. If the black starship came to Rhadan space (and why should it not?), then the local authorities, the Rhadan units of the Fleet, a few hundred civilian starships, Gret, Erit, my mother, the alien girl, Ariane, the faculty warlocks of Gonlanburg, Nav Peter the Fanatic, the Rhadan Royalists (
and
the Rhadan Republicans, Collectivists, Anarchists, Disciplinarians, and so on), this city and all the other cities in Rhada, together with Sublieutenant the Honorable Kier Kynan Emeric Veg-Rhad, Starkahn of Rhada, would be superheated molecules of gas in free space, driven into the intergalactic void by light-pressure from a swollen and dying star.
That
much, I
knew
. The knowledge didn’t allow much room for maneuver.

Gonlanburg is an old town; some of its buildings date back to Interregnal times, and in the years since then it has been relatively untouched by wars. The other towns and cities of Gonlan, the inland agricultural centers and the industrial complexes along the northern coast, are relatively modern (on Gonlan that means they were founded within the last millennium), and they have all been shattered at least once by armies or air forces. But even in the process of taking Gonlan from the Interregnal kings, the warmen of my family treated Gonlanburg kindly. Perhaps it is because the place stirs racial memories of old university towns on Earth, towns that exist no longer save in the memory of men.

Gonlanburg has been a seat of learning time out of mind. In the days of Kynan the Navigator, who was Star King of the Gonlani-Rhad during the reign of the Galacton Torquas the Poet, in the second century of the sixth millennium GE, the Gonlani warlocks conducted their researches in secret, hiding their rediscoveries of the old knowledge from the members of the holy Order of Navigators. Much of the early work on cyborg rebirth and organ transplantation was done in those days by the warlocks of Gonlanburg.

It had been some years since I had traveled through the narrow, rose-stone streets of Gonlanburg, and anxious as I was, a part of me was enjoying it. It was dusk, a quiet time in the old university town. The shops were closing down, storekeepers covering their wares with the silver nets they had used in this place to prevent theft for a thousand years. There were students on the streets, as well, more boys than girls (because we are still traditionalists out here on the Rim and do not encourage women to take up intellectual pursuits), but yet some girls (we aren’t barbarians, after all), pretty ones in their student kilts and tunics. Some of the young people carried Vulkish musical instruments, for Gonlanburg is a galactic center of the study of Vulk music and art.

The students mingled with the townspeople, throngs of them in a bright-colored river of shimmering caps and capes and cloaks. The people of the Rim, perhaps because of the loneliness of their almost empty sky, are lovers of color and light. The old stone buildings blazed with flurons, colored electrics, even with flame sconces, fed by the blue-burning gases piped from far inland. The occasional aluminum and quartz building erected in the last century or so glittered amid the red stones of the ancient town.

I drove the hovercraft slowly toward the university gardens, in some places stalled by the traffic of hovers, carts, three-wheelers, electrics, and animal-drawn wagons. The Gonlani-Rhad, having been brought into the Palatinate late, were of course more Rhad than the Rhad of Rhada. There were now more Rhadan war horses and mares on Gonlan than on any other world in the Rhadan Republic. Even here on the crowded, dusky streets of Gonlanburg, I could see many riders on their fine specimens--horses, but with a difference: clawed fighting feet and the pads of cats, carniverous teeth and slotted eyes, and--most unusual of all to the stranger from the central galaxy--no reins or head gear, for these animals were telepathic, with a rudimentary language and culture.

For hundreds of generations the Rhad had bred these splendid animals: once for war, now for show and pleasure. Some said the original stock had been brought in sperm banks from Earth in the time of the First Empire. It might well be so, though there are no Rhadan horses on Earth now save those imported for the Imperial court from Rhada.

The newsfax telexes on the building cornices carried the ordinary run of news from throughout the Empire. There was not a single word about the doomsday machine, nor about anything untoward happening anywhere within the inhabited galaxy. I wondered if the destruction of Sigma Libra and the Delphinus star was being suppressed--or was it simply that the spread of man throughout the galaxy was so enormous, so sprawling-huge, that the destruction of two small stars out of billions could not force itself through the inertia of workaday news? Either way it was dangerous and frightening, because the threat was real and the death it promised swift and sure.

I turned away from the commercial districts and fed power to the hover jets, hurrying toward the acropolis where the university stood. As I guided the machine up the winding path, I felt the tingle of an encephalophone transmission coming from a great distance.