To Save a World

DEDICATION

To four people who—each in his or her own way—kept my sense of wonder alive:

Anne McCaffrey

Juanita Coulson

Ursula LeGuin

and

Randall Garrett

AUTHOR'S NOTE

There is a momentum to every operation of growth. The Terran Empire, like every process of human endeavor, was geometric rather than linear in this progression. It began with a few isolated star systems and planets; they in turn developed, put forth colonies, and then began to burgeon, effloresce, grow in wild and unrestrained proliferation. Within a thousand years a detached scientist might compare their growth—from a perspective of millennia—to that of the spread of the water hyacinth on Earth in the pre-space days; first an isolated phenomenon, then a study in wild growth, finally a menace that threatened to encompass and crowd out everything else.

Something of the same momentum can be seen in the isolated progress of the Terran Empire on a single planet. First a small scientific outpost, then a colony, a Trade City—

Darkover, isolated at the edge of a galaxy, with a sun so dim that its name was known only in star catalogs, had halted in the first stages of this isolation for a hundred years.

But now—look out, Darkover! For the worldwreckers are coming.

—M. Z. B.

WORLDWRECKERS, INC.

THEY DIDN'T CALL it that, of course. But that was what it was all the same, and the men knew it as they went up the long series of interlocking escalators which would take them to the isolated penthouse.

There were two of them, one large and one small, and both with the sort of highly forgettable faces which make for good policemen, detectives or secret agents. The miracles of cosmetic surgery were usually reserved to make people striking; but an astute observer might have guessed that some such cosmetic surgery had been used to remove every trace of individuality from the two faces. Subtly done, of course, but very completely. They had become a part of the crowd, any crowd; and that in itself was a triumph, for they were neither light nor dark, and would not have been noticed, in a crowd of exclusively Afro or Nordic types, as belonging obtrusively to one or the other. If any Masai, or pygmies, had survived on Earth in this year, they would have stood out as not being distinctly of that type; but in this era of highly interracial breeding stock, with the outer extremes of the human phenotype gone forever, they would never be noticed.

One of the men, who used the name Stannard, and had used so many that he did not remember his original name twice in a year, pondered on it as they stepped onto the final escalator.

Worldwreckers. He'd been almost everywhere and done almost everything on any planet which would hold him but he'd never dealt with them before.

Everybody in the Empire knew about them. Mostly it was something you heard about underground and wondered about vaguely, if your business didn't lead you into the tremendous ebb and flow of planetary commerce. What was worldwrecking anyway, you might wonder, and why should anybody care to wreck a world? It sounded like something out of special three-dim cinedrama, and it was vaguely funny.

But to the people who did come into it—like himself, Stannard reflected—it wasn't funny at all.

Neither was it tragic.

It was just business.

But why had they let their business be known by such a name?

He shut off the flow of curiosity—it wasn't what he was paid for—as the last escalator came to a slow halt. There were quiet gold-colored curtains all around and an outer reception hall where a girl, almost as unobtrusive as Stannard and his companion, examined their identity cards and let them pass through a metallic door into a small and plain office. Whatever Stannard had expected of this secret network and semilegal business, it wasn't that it would look like a shipping office with the kind of simple computers which kept records of traffic flow, stored information and gave out instant library service. Nor had he really expected that the central head of this vast network would be a woman.

A woman, quite beautiful and quite young. Or—Stannard amended his thoughts quickly—apparently young. He could detect no scars of cosmetic surgery or molding and he was trained at spotting them, but some tautness around the eyes betrayed that innocent youth had nothing to do with the fair-skinned, unlined face and smooth throat. Her voice was deep and quiet.

"Mr. Stannard and Mr. Bruce. Please sit down. Your principals, as you probably know, have been in communication with me and have paid the advance deposits which we require before negotiations can be made final. My name is Andrea Closson, and I am fully empowered to deal with you."

They took seats and she went on, in the same quiet and dispassionate voice:

"I am prepared to make guarantees, at this point. How much have you been told about this matter of Darkover?"

Stannard said, "We know as much, we were told, as we would need to know for this conference."

"Very well, then. You know, of course, that this is illegal. By the various treaties of the Terran Empire, any planet has a right to a Class D trade agreement, which means, in Darkover's case—" briefly, she consulted the glass plate atop her desk where the computer readout could be seen, a flurry of fast pale lights for trained scan readers to instant-scan, "means construction of a large spaceport for Type Beta traffic flow, services and concessions to cater to spaceport personnel, a Mapping and Exploring division, Medical Exchange services, and clearly defined tradezones, with no Terran infiltration into native areas and vice versa. The Thendara Spaceport on Darkover has been in full operation for—" again she consulted the scan reader, "seventy-eight of their years, consisting of 389 days each. Trade is well-established in small medicinals, steel tools and similar Class D artifacts. Under the terms of a Class D agreement there is no mechanized industry, no mining or surface transit, and no continuous input or outflow of exportable or importable goods or services. All efforts to establish negotiations with native Darkovan authorities with a view to opening the planet to colonization and industrialization have failed. Am I right?"

"Not quite failed," Stannard said. "They've been ignored."

Andrea Closson shrugged that off. "Anyway they have not succeeded, so you are willing to send in our services."

"Worldwreckers," said Bruce. It was the first time he had spoken.

"We prefer to call ourselves a planetary investment corporation," Andrea said smoothly, "although if the undercover branches must be called into use, we cannot operate openly as such. In brief, if a planet refuses exploitation—forgive me, I should have said profitable investment—" but the irony in her expression was apparent, "our agents can give its economy the kind of, shall we say, nudge which will in the long run make it worthwhile for that planet to request outside investors to come in."

"In short," Stannard said, "you wreck the economy so that the planet in question has no recourse but to turn to the Terran Empire to pick up the pieces?"

"That's a harsh way of putting it but I suppose true in essence. And the planet in question, I'm told by the investors, usually profits in the long run. I don't ask
who
it profits. That's not my business."

"It's ours," Stannard said. "Can it be done with Darkover? And how soon? And how much?"

Andrea did not answer at once; she was pushing buttons for the desk-top scan reader. She seemed to have found something suddenly that arrested her attention, for the flickers of her eyes—they were odd eyes, Stannard thought, a very pale, pellucid gray, a color he didn't remember seeing before—the swift flickers of a trained scan reader, suddenly slowed down and stopped. She looked, as far as he could tell, both startled and shocked.

She said abruptly, "Have either of you gentlemen ever been to Darkover?"

Stannard shook his head. "I never go that far off my orbit."

"I have," Bruce volunteered unexpectedly. "I went there once for, well, that doesn't matter." He shivered suddenly. "Hell of a place; I've no idea why anyone wants it opened up; they'll have to give extra pay for volunteers. Cold as space and twice as dismal. Completely unspoiled, as tourist books say. It could use a little spoiling."

"Well, that's what we're here for," said Andrea briskly, turning off the desk-top scanner with a decisive gesture. "Gentlemen, I am prepared to offer terms and guarantees. For the agreed upon sum," she mentioned a sum in milli-credit units, which changed so often it represented a minifortune or a maxifortune that week, "we are prepared to guarantee that within three Central Record Type Empire Years, the planet now known as Darkover will be open to Type B exploitation—to prepare it for Type A exploitation would take twenty years and would never be profitable—with full permission to begin mining and export operations by a limited group of investors. Half of the sum must be paid now, in legal titanium-based hard currency paid into a numbered account on Helvetia II. The remainder will fall due within one Standard Month of the day that Darkover is declared a Class B Open world."

Stannard said, "What's your guarantee that our principals will pay the final installment? Not that they've any intention of defaulting, but it takes Empire Senate action to declare a world Open. Once they've made that legal, why can't my principals simply go in, as any other investors would?"

Andrea smiled, and the smile was so much like a steel trap that Stannard revised his opinion of her age upward by thirty years. "The contract, which you must sign with your principals;' real identities by number, states that upon default your entire interest in the planet in question reverts to Planetary Investments Unlimited—which, as you have pointed out, is known widely as Worldwreckers, Incorporated. Furthermore, default in this arrangement entirely voids the secrecy clause."

They had thought of everything, Stannard realized. Because worldwrecking arrangements were illegal everywhere, and any planetary investment unit, bent on exploitation, which hired the services of a worldwrecker, was permanently warned off from that planet.

"We're quite legitimate on the surface," Andrea said grimly. "You have legally hired our services for public relations and propaganda. Most of our agents, the ones everybody sees, will never be within a light-year of Darkover itself. They'll be at Empire Center, attempting by perfectly legal means to persuade the legislators that Darkover should be a Class B Open world. A few more will be doing the same with the Darkovan authorities."

"And the rest?"

Andrea said, "The rest—are none of your business."

Stannard agreed. He didn't want to know. He had spent a lifetime doing chores of this sort for a thousand principals and he made a good and almost luxurious living by not wanting to know.

They signed papers and produced numbered identity proxies, and then they went away again, and out of Andrea Closson's life, and out of the story of Darkover forever. They were so forgettable that even she forgot them, as individuals, within five seconds of the time they disappeared into her outer office.

But the minute they had gone, she pressed the scan reader button again, setting it to STOP. The words blurred there. But she closed her lids the better to see it inside her eyes, in memory.

High mountains, a familiar skyline, dark against the crimson sky of the lowering sun; a sun like a red and bloody disk. Only the tall buildings of the Trade City, pictured beneath the incredibly familiar mountains and sun, were new and surprising.

So they call it Darkover now.

A murmur of music whispered in her mind, the total recall that she had found intolerable for the first hundred years and had done as much as she could to desensitize; now she could not remember the name of the melody, and spent a few split seconds rummaging in a past she had deliberately put away, before emerging with the name of the melody and the odd, dry sound of reed wood flutes:

"Weary are the hills."

Yes, that was the name. Another of those intolerable clear pictures came into her mind again, a girl in a brief yellow tunic playing on the flute; then her mouth twisted and she opened her eyes. "A girl," she said grimly aloud, "I wasn't even a girl then. I was—what I was is what I decided not to think about. I've been here, and a woman, for—Evanda and Avarra! How long? It doesn't bear thinking about, how long I've been here!"

But the memory persisted, running along a track it was impossible to stop, and finally, knowing it was pure self-indulgence, but also knowing it was the only way to put an end to this, Andrea pressed a button and pulled the message unit toward her, speaking softly.

"Fix me a scan-and-destruct tape on everything which has been written about Cottman's Star IV, called Darkover, a Class D Closed world. I'll handle this one myself."

The voice on the other end of this line had been extensively trained never to sound surprised, but Andrea, with her sudden supersensitized awareness, heard surprise anyhow:

"You are going in person? What cover?"

She considered that briefly. "I will go as an animal handler, considering the transport of small legal quantities of native fur-bearers to nearby worlds for breeding and development there," she said at last. She had been so many things on so many worlds. She understood and liked animals and she need never be on her guard against their intrusive thoughts.

But when the scan-and-destruct had been absorbed and discarded, when she was packed and ready to board her transit on the first leg of the impossibly long transgalactic journey to that small planet out on the rim of nowhere; which now bore the name of Darkover, a fear roused again in her. A fear centuries buried, rousing deep in the curious convolutions of a brain which, living as a human, she used only fractionally.

Suppose, after all this time and all the different people I've been, once I stand again under the four moons and the light of the bloody sun strikes me, suppose—suppose the old me, the real me, the self I was before I was Andrea, before I was wanderer, queen, spaceman; courtesan, businesswoman, suppose the old me came back? What then?

What then? Then at least I would die where I was born, she thought with weary resignation, and pressed her long hands over her eyes. For the moment, if there had been anybody to see, she looked neither human nor woman.

Narzain-ye kui
, she thought in a language long dead; exiled child of the Yellow Forest, where have you not traveled? Return once more, see what the treading feet of the long seasons have made of the world your people could not hold, and then die here; die alone if you must, knowing that not even a memory remains of the footsteps of your folk in the fastnesses of the Mountains of Light . . . .