The Navigator of Rhada (2 page)

It was a huge vessel, as large as a small planetoid, and though only a dozen men were presently aboard her, she had been built to carry five full divisions of Imperial troops.

On her prow was emblazoned the spaceship and star of the First Empire, an insignia that the Theocracy of the Navigators had made their own. Within her kilometer- long hull, no man tended her powerful, eternal engines. Even the scientists of the Order had not yet solved the riddle of the power that had, for five millennia, driven this ship and a few thousand others back and forth across the galaxy at speeds that her present users were still unwilling to credit.

In the civilization of the Second Empire, the starships were the responsibility of the Order, and only the Order. Navigators trained in the Theocracy of Algol served every noble, every warleader in the galaxy--even the Galacton h
im
self.

As late as a generation ago, the great starships had been lit within by torches, and their flight range had been limited by the slow fouling of the air within the hulls. But now the ancient life-support systems had been reactivated, the exterior scanning beams repaired. The holy Navigators, after three hundred centuries of study, retreat, inquisition, and devotions without end, were beginning to understand the miraculous machines bequeathed to them by the scientists of the Golden Age.

In the control room of the great ship, five cowled figures sat before the consoles. The bulkheads of the domed chamber were energized and transparent, so that the men and their machines seemed to float in open space against the cloud-girt disk of the planet below.

All wore the spaceship and star of the Theocracy. These were the Five: princes of the Order and controllers of the Navigators’ galaxy-spanning intelligence apparatus.

The original Five had been assembled in the time of Torquas X (called the Heretic), the first Vykan Galacton to persecute the clergy. In times of danger to the Order, they commanded vast powers. Yet such was their knowledge that they, better than any men alive in this fourth century of the Second Stellar Empire, knew how many greater powers prowled the galaxy.

A tone sounded.

“Sensor beam locked on,” the Technician reported.

Panels lighted before the five Navigators. Tiny three-dimensional figures moved along a path above a crashing surf. A tiny Rhadan mare shambled along a path to the sea.

“They’ve found him again,” the Logician commented.

The Tactician said coldly, “If they take him, the game is over. Suggest we intervene.”

“Negative,” the Logician said sharply. “Our scanning area is limited. We can’t tell who is in sight of that promontory. It could be anyone.”

“Or no one,” the Tactician grunted. The Technician made an adjustment on his instruments, and the brightness of the tiny holographs increased. “We can’t intervene without killing him--and blasting Gonlanburg and half the peninsula into gas.”

“Suggest we consider just that,” the Tactician said. “From the military point of view it would be justified. We still have the girl as a contact. We could activate the alternate plan.”

The Theologian, least influential of the Five, said, “We are not justified in taking such action. May the God of Stars forgive you for even considering it.”

The Tactician persisted. “We can’t help him. Our weapons are too powerful and nonselective. And we cannot allow him to be taken. He is a nexus.”

The Logician intervened. “If they had taken the girl, I would agree. That was what we foresaw when we had her implanted. But they didn’t. She’s in the cells at Melissande. A warhead would probably kill her, too.”

The Tactician displayed a soldier’s impatience. “The plan was always doubtful from the military point of view. We would do better to sterilize the area and begin again.” The last member of the group to speak was the Psychologist. Among his other duties was the coordination of the Five’s activities. His voice was sonorous and persuasive. “The plan was never conceived as a military operation. Even the Order Militant can’t face the Empire on those terms--and it should not even try. You are too much the soldier, Tactician. Humanitarian considerations aside, a nuclear blast would bring the Imperials down on Gonlan and Rhada in force. We could never run the full course then. Not for another fifty years, perhaps more. The Galacton--”

“--is a fool,” the Tactician said roughly.

“Precisely. We have waited three generations for this chance. In fifty years we may have another Glamiss Magnifico on the throne. We cannot risk too obvious a move now. Besides, I helped train the boy. He has powers he doesn’t dream of. Let the plan operate.”

“They are moving in on him,” the Technician said.

“Pity the lad,” the Theologian murmured. “Pray for him.”

“You pray for him,” the Tactician said grimly. “I’ll just watch him die--and the plan with him--because people like you send men out armed with museum pieces.” The irritation in his voice increased as he watched the tiny figure in his screen shielding his cumbersome flintlock weapon from the rain. “We could arm our people so that no one in the galaxy would dare touch them--and we pretend
that
is the best we can do.”

“If the Empire suspected our energy weapons, the Theocracy would be a smoking ruin in a week,” the Logician said sharply.

“And the Empire in a year,” the Theologian added. “Shall we bring the Dark Time again?”

“I sometimes wonder if there ever really was a Dark Time,” the Tactician grumbled.

The Psychologist laughed gently. “You are forgetting history, my military friend. It’s time you went into Triad again.”

The Tactician expelled his breath with a hissing sound. “Vulks make me sick.”

“Vulks are children of the Star, too,” the Theologian murmured with clerical unctuousness.

The Psychologist’s mind touched for a moment the labyrinth of the Order’s internal politics. The Theologian seemed more and more to tend toward the Stellar Heresy --that personification of God in the physical aspect of the stars. There were now priests who contended that the stars, in and of themselves, were holy. This verged on polytheism, and the gentle Yamasaki, current Grand Master of Navigators, had recently published an admonition on the subject.

The Psychologist sighed and considered how primitive still was the society of the Second Empire. That there could actually be controversy--even bloodshed--over so barbaric a dispute as the Stellar Heresy seemed grotesque in an age rediscovering atomic energy. Yet once, in the Dawn Age, men of the clergy had disputed over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Nothing really changed-- He returned his attention to the holograph before him. “What’s happening now? I can’t see him.”

“He has gone under the rock outcrop,” the Tactician said. “It will give him some cover while he reloads that antique firearm he’s cursed with.”

The Psychologist leaned forward for a clearer view of the tri-D display. In spite of all the training he had undergone to keep him objective and uninvolved during evolutions such as this one, he found that his heart was pumping sympathetically and there was a dryness in his throat.

The boy down there on the planet was a favorite of the Grand Master of the Order--though he would have been amazed to know it. The Psychologist had met him on a number of occasions and knew him to be a bright, dedicated, and almost painfully sincere priest of the Order.

For a moment the older man suffered a qualm of distaste for the way in which great movements used individuals. It was well enough to say that the good of the Order-- the good of the Empire, for that matter--sometimes required great sacrifices of innocents. It was ever so in human history: before the Golden Age, before the Dark Time of the Interregnum, before, even, man had left his home planet to voyage among the stars.

But was it right, the Psychologist wondered as he had so many, many times before, to use men without their knowledge or consent? Did it matter that the boy preparing to fight for his life on that rain-swept coast below would gladly lay down his life for his faith, for the Order, and even for the Empire? Wasn’t it a matter of morality rather than expediency? No, not expediency. That was too shallow a word for the needs of human destiny. One must live by certain great truths, the Psychologist told himself. For a priest of the Order of Navigators, the most shining of these truths was the absolute conviction that no temporal power could ever be allowed to interfere with the sacred freedoms of the Order. The five men in the starship control room believed it. The young Navigator on the sea cliff believed it. A million members of the Order spread across eight hundred thousand parsecs of space believed it.

That,
en fin,
was the heart of the dogma.

The Theologian (whom the others sometimes called the Preacher) subvocalized an Ave Stella for the young man a thousand kilometers below. The boy must reach Melissande before Kreon died. Only the old warleader could tell him
who he was and what he must do.

The Preacher remembered Kynan’s birth and the hopes it brought to the Order. He remembered, too, the spiriting away of the newborn, and the journey across the galaxy to Rhada and thence to Gonlan, to the holding of Kreon, devout and fierce true son of the faith.

The old priest raised his eyes from the holograph before him and looked into the night of space. The stars were thinly laid here on the edge of the known universe, but at the zenith he could see quite clearly the distinctive luminosity of the galactic lens.

He considered the forces at work in that spiral of stars and planets without number: the Empire, the Order, the uncommitted worlds where the Dark Time still lived. Currents of power sweeping across a mere two thousand worlds --and what else lived there on worlds where men had not ruled since the Golden Age?

We dare not fight among ourselves,
he thought.
We men are too few, the powers of space too great.

Fight well, boy,
the Preacher prayed.
Much depends on it.

“Is this Veg Tran’s doing?” The Tactician asked suddenly. “It has an AbasNav flavor.”

“I doubt it,” the Psychologist cautioned. “Tran can’t know about the boy. The orders were probably given locally. But those thugs
are
anticlericals. They have that fanatic look.”

“If not General Tran, then who?” the Preacher asked.

The Psychologist did not reply. It
was
possible that some petty power-seeker’s urge to murder could shatter the plan
--the
plan that spanned the galaxy.
That,
he thought bitterly,
is the irony of history.

Though the way of the Navigator is peaceful, there will unfortunately always be those--unenlightened or irreligious
--
who may seek to interfere with him. A priest must avoid the use of force whenever possible, for we serve all mankind and concern ourselves with the saving of souls as well as the service of the holy vessels. Thus we are occasionally presented with a paradoxical choice: to submit to the ungodly or to do violence at the peril of our
own
souls. The beatified Emeric (of blessed memory
)
suggests the following: “If violence be unavoidable, the Navigator must seek to mitigate his sin of self-defense by fighting well. For it is well known that excellence in all things is the way of the Navigator and pleasing to God. After violence, however, a Navigator must seek a confessor and be assigned such penance as the confessor, in his wisdom, thinks suitable.”

There was no doubt in his mind about their intentions now. He watched them close in, urging their nervous mounts down the slippery track. As they reached the inland edge of the narrow rock shelf, they seemed to realize that their quarry was alert to their intentions, ready and armed to fight for his life. This gave them pause. They knew of the explosive weapons of the Navigators.

Kynan watched them carefully. From his vantage point below them, he could see that they wore ordinary Rhadan harness, the working gear of the thousands of free-lance warmen to be found on the worlds of the Rhad. Each man carried a flail slung on his back and a dagger at his belt. They were not poor, for they both owned mailed shirts-- new ones. In addition to flail and knife, each carried a short lance at his saddlebow.

They had dark, rather brutal faces. They were Gonlan-born: their stocky build proclaimed it. Gonlan was the most massive of the Rhad worlds. Their strong build might indicate that they were cyborgs and not men at all, but Kynan doubted it. Cyborgs were very rare on the Rim, almost unknown in the Rhadan Palatinate.

As Kynan continued to watch, the two men dismounted and spoke to one another in whispers. Kynan waited.

Presently, one called to him. “Come out, Navigator. We mean you no harm.”

Kynan made no reply.

“I tell you there’s nothing to worry about,” the darker of the two said, ingenuously spreading his empty hands in the rain. “My sister is sick. She needs a priest. That’s all.”

Kynan cocked his pistol. The click of the mechanism was very clear in the dusk.

The warmen stepped behind their horses and conferred again. When Kynan saw them next, they had separated as much as the narrow track permitted, and one of them had unslung his lance and held it ready for a throw.

“Look, Nav,” the other called, squinting into the half-light. “Come on out of there. There’s nothing to be skittish about.”

Kynan’s legs ached with the effort of holding himself on the outcrop. He moved one foot to a more secure position. The man with the lance reacted swiftly. The missile arced through the rain to crash against the edge of the path, the steel point sparking. Kynan heard it, a moment later, clattering among the rocks far below.