Traitor's Sun (2 page)

When Lew Alton had still been Senator, he had had somewhat larger quarters, and a home on Thetis as well. But those days were gone now, and few if any members of the legislature had off-world places unless they were inherited ones. The Office of Finance had imposed strict travel limitations a few years earlier, which restricted the movements of the members. They could go to their home worlds for elections every five Terran years, but Herm never had returned to Darkover. He had not been elected, but instead had been appointed by Regis Hastur, a man he had never actually met, twenty-three years before. He had worked for eight years in the Chamber of Deputies, and when Lew Alton had vacated the Senate seat, he had taken his place.

Policy changes imposed by the Office of Finance, and numerous other dictates over the years, had ultimately left the legislature prisoner to the whims of Premier Sandra Nagy and her Expansionist cronies. Despite its name, the Expansionists were an austere bunch of autocrats, and each year had seen more and more restrictions imposed on everyone except the most favored members of the Party. As he had told his wife once, on a rare occasion when he was moderately certain there were no listening devices nearby, “The Expansionists say there are limited resources in the Federation—and all of them are the rightful property of the Expansionists!” She had not even laughed.

The three-room apartment was a better domicile than most ordinary Terrans possessed, but Herm had grown up in Aldaran Castle, with stone walls around him, and great, roaring hearths sending out gusts of scent-laden sooty, heated air. An odd thing to miss, after more than two decades. But the scentless, stifling atmosphere of the apartment, which was warm all the year round because of the central controls of the building, still made him feel like a trapped animal. There were eight billion people on the planet, and more every year. He had a great longing for space, for stretches of conifers and the smell of mountain balsam, for the cry of the Hellers’ hawks, their russet plumage bright against a sky illuminated by a ruddy sun.

It was not simply a nostalgia for unsullied expanses of gleaming snow that stirred him. Even after two decades, he remained uncomfortable with his situation—felt alien. Herm had never felt entirely clean after using a sonic shower, although it removed all the dead skin and oil from his body. Water, like everything else, was rationed and taxed, and he had a deep longing for a great wallow in a tub of steaming water, scented with oil of lavender. A thick towel of Dry Town cotton to dry with, and a robe of felted wool over his body completed the pleasant fantasy. No clammy synthetic on his skin. . . .

It made his heart ache to think of those things, and he wondered at himself. He had spent almost half his life off Darkover, and felt he should have accustomed himself to it by now. But if anything, his homesickness grew worse and worse. For a moment he remembered his younger self, a yokel by Federation standards, arriving to represent his world in the lower chamber. He had been awed by the huge buildings, the hives and skyscrapers, the presence of technologies unimaginable on his far-distant world. Despite having grown up with various Terrans who were welcomed at Aldaran Castle, and having a mother who claimed Terra as the planet of her birth, he had quickly realized he was incredibly ignorant. He did not remember much about his mother, for she had died when he was three. And certainly nothing he remembered her saying prepared him for the reality he experienced during his first year in the Chamber of Deputies. She had granted him a strange, unDarkovan name which he understood now was ancient and unusual even by Terran standards, a predisposition toward baldness, and beyond that only distant fragmented memories.
Dom
Damon Aldaran’s wives, all three of them, had perished—his father had been tragically unlucky.

It had been fortunate that Lew was there to help him through those first few years. He had learned how to use the technology, how to access newsfeeds on a computer and communicate with people almost instantly. More importantly, Lew Alton had set him to studying the literature and philosophy of a hundred planets, and the complex history of the Federation itself. At first he had been unsure of the purpose of these efforts, and had only read the texts in order to please the older man. But slowly he had come to understand how uneducated he was for the task he had been chosen to perform. With great difficulty he had started to understand the thinking of the Federation, how it was founded on ancient ideas that had never taken root on Darkover—some of them very good ideas.

But now he knew that these ideals were being abandoned, and that the Federation was moving into an area of military dominance and oppression. It had happened before, in the history of humans, but he wished it was not occurring during his own lifetime. And it was not something he could discuss openly, as had been possible when he first came from Darkover. Like every other person on the planet, he was subject to constant observation. And there was nothing he could do about it, since disabling the spy eyes that watched and listened was a serious offense. He wondered what the average person thought about it or if they thought at all. Likely they did not, hypnotized as they were with mediafeeds and vidrams.

But Herm knew that the situation was bad and getting worse all the time. Trillions of credits were disbursed every year to create new technologies. At the same time, very little was spent on the day-to-day existence of ordinary people, whose lives became ever more difficult. He had tried to understand this phenomenon, but it still made no sense to him, and, like most of his fellow legislators, he was virtually powerless to change it.

He was being morbid. It must just be the strain of recent days. Regis Hastur had never filled his original place in the Chamber of Deputies after Herm had vacated it, and he had not encountered another native of his planet in sixteen years. This rarely weighed on him, but he was so tired now that it seemed a heavy burden.

Of late, sleep had become a rare commodity, as the meetings, both public and private, in the two chambers of the Federation legislature had gone far into what passed for night in this dreadful place. Any of Zandru’s frozen hells seemed preferable at that moment. The Senate, his labor of almost sixteen years now, was a hornet’s nest stirred with an Expansionist stick, and the Chamber of Deputies was little better. But he had dealt with political crises before without waking up in the middle of the night with his heart trying to hammer its way through his chest.

As much as Herm hated living in the Federation, he actually enjoyed the constant turmoil of political life. Or he had until a few months before, when the Expansionist party had finally achieved a slim majority in both houses, and begun to implement policies he opposed. New taxes had been passed for all member planets of the Federation, to build a fleet of dreadnaughts, great fighting ships, when there was no foe to defend against. Some worlds had protested, and even tried to rebel, and combat troops had been sent in to “keep order.” It had gone from being a game at which he excelled, with his natural talent for verbal interplay, and the cunning which had always been his mainstay, to a daily nightmare from which he feared he would never awaken.

Recently the flow of events had disturbed a few of the more moderate Senators in the Expansionist Party itself. With what Herm regarded as enormous courage, these men and women had voted against their own majority on a critical defense bill, effectively destroying it, and bringing both the Senate and the Chamber to an impasse. Pressure had been brought, persuasion had been used, but to no avail. Except for endless conferences, meetings, and some lengthy speeches on the floor, no actual business had been conducted for nearly six weeks now, and it did not appear that any would be in the near future. The leaders of the Expansionists were becoming more and more desperate, and the only good that had come out of the mess was that no more new taxes had been passed in the interim. But no benefit could ultimately come from a paralyzed parliament. A government unable to act could inadvertently do more harm than good.

Herm tried to shake away the dour mood that enveloped his mind, and found himself remembering one of the last conversations he had had with Lew Alton, just before Lew had resigned his office and returned to Darkover. Lucky man. He wasn’t balancing his bottom on a stingy stool, trying to make sense out of a hysteria that had grown and grown over the past decade. What had he said? Ah, yes. “There may come a time when the Federation loses its collective mind, Hermes, and when that happens, if it does, I cannot really advise you what to do. But when that day arrives, you will know it in your bones. And then you must decide whether to stay and fight, or run from the fracas. Believe me, it will be evident to your intelligence. Trust your instincts then, young man.”

Good advice, and still sound. But things were different now than when Lew had still been Darkover’s Senator. Then Herm had not been married—what a singularly foolish thing to have done, to wed a widow from Renney with a small son, Amaury. But he had been hopelessly in love! Now they had their own child, his daughter Terése, a delightful girl of nearly ten. They were the light of his life, and he knew that without the anchor of Kate and the children he would have been even more miserable than he was. He realized he had not thought the matter through thoroughly when he met her, fell totally in love, and married her a month afterward. Certainly he had not considered the problems of a half-Darkovan child reaching an age where threshold sickness and the onset of
laran
were real concerns. And he had never told Katherine about the peculiar inbred paranormal talents of his people, although he had always intended to . . . someday. The moment just had never seemed right. And what, after all, would he say? “Oh, by the way, Kate, I’ve been meaning to tell you that I can read the minds of other people.”

Herm shuddered at the imagined scene that would certainly follow. No, he had not told her the truth, not clever Herm. He had just gone on, wheeling and dealing, keeping Darkover safe from Federation predators, and put the matter off until another day. A wave of regret and guilt swept through him, and his stomach felt full of angry insects.

After his mother’s death, he had became a private child and had grown into a secretive adult, a habit which had stood him in good stead during his years in the Federation. The very walls had ears and eyes, even those in this miserable excuse for a kitchen—the so called FP Station. Well, two counters, a tiny sink, a cool box and heating compartment were nothing like a vast stone chamber with a beehive-shaped oven in one corner, one or two large fireplaces, and a long table where the servants could sit and eat and gossip. The old cook at Aldaran Castle—she was probably dead now—had had a way of fixing water fowl with vegetables that was wonderful, and his mouth watered at the thought of it. He had not tasted fresh meat since he and Katherine had gone to Renney nine years before. Vat-grown protein had no flavor, even if it did nourish his body.

He forced the delightful vision of a plump fowl running with fat and pinkish juices out of his mind and tried to focus on his abrupt arousal. What had brought him out of his desperately needed rest? He had no sense of a dream, so it must have been something else. Herm shivered all over, in spite of the warmth of the room, and watched the flesh crinkle along his forearms. He had not been dreaming at all. No, it was almost certainly an occurrence of the Aldaran Gift, a foresight he would probably wish to avoid, once he remembered what it was. His
laran
was decent, good enough to catch the occasional thoughts of the men and women he dealt with every day, an advantage he was careful not to display or abuse. He relied much more on his native cunning than on his telepathy—it was a more dependable talent, and less ethically dubious.

Besides, he was a diplomat, not a spy, and just because the Federation kept a watchful eye and ear on his every movement did not seem sufficient reason to imitate them. But he did wonder what the unseen auditors made of his love trysts with Kate. Nothing, most likely, since they must record millions of such incidents every night. Still, the lack of real privacy rankled, the more so because he was sure he was being observed even now. The things that human beings would do in the name of order never failed to astound him.

Now, all he had to do was remember what had awakened him, and get back to sleep. Something was most assuredly up, but it had felt that way for weeks. He had caught the occasional thoughts in the minds of his fellow legislators, and they were deeply perturbed. This was not limited to the opposition either, for he had noticed more than a few Expansionist Senators mentally squirming, their thoughts giving lie to the words issuing from their mouths. Lacking the extremely strong
laran
which had given his predecessor such an advantage, Herm made do with scraps of unguarded thought, and what he mostly heard was more banal or self-serving than useful.

The halls and conference rooms of the Senate Building were permeated with fear these days, and Herm had observed long-time allies eyeing one another suspiciously. There was good reason to be afraid. Opposition to Expansionist strategies was dangerous, and more than a few Senators had had unexplained accidents or sudden illnesses in the last few years. Trust and the capacity for reasonable compromise, the foundation stones of representative government, had vanished almost completely, replaced by a wariness and paranoia that was chilling to glimpse in the unguarded minds of his fellows. It made the actions of people like Senator Ilmurit appear impossibly brave. She had crossed the aisle with seven other moderates and unwound the tenuously held majority the Expansionists had achieved with such enormous effort, and not a little treachery as well.

His eyes itched furiously, and his muscles twitched. It was infuriating, too, for he knew that he would not have had a vision for any trivial matter. He did not have the Aldaran Gift very strongly, but when it manifested itself, it was always important. Twice in the years he had served as Darkover’s Senator it had helped him avoid political traps and betrayals.