The Starkahn of Rhada (11 page)

Ariane, with half of her systems lying idle as we orbited the planet, was in a ruminative mood. Perhaps it was our situation, or perhaps it was the fact that the silver-eyed alien was aboard, but she spoke to me in her most feminine and seductive voice: a veritable whisper from the console speakers.

“Do you realize, Kier, that it was hardly more than two months ago that we were surveying Delphinus? It seems much, much longer than that.”

Since a cyborg has one of the most keenly developed senses of time passage imaginable, I could only assume that Ariane was speaking figuratively--and reply in the same mood. “We were having an argument about Nav Anselm Styr, weren’t we?”

“Not really an argument. We don’t argue, Kier.”

I considered that statement for a while before risking a reply. “Well,” I said finally, “sometimes we have discussions.”

“No more than that,” the cyborg said dreamily.

“Are you all right, Ariane?” I asked worriedly.

“Of course.”

I blanked out the walls and played with a holograph of near space. We didn’t dare use our instruments, and for Erit to contact Gret comfortably, we had to wait for the planet below to rotate under us. The lands of the Rhad family were still beyond the sunlit limb of the watery world we orbited. Ariane said, “You seem nervous, Kier.”

“I can’t imagine why I should be,” I said with a touch of sarcasm. “We are deserters from the Fleet, kidnapers, priest-attackers, hospital robbers, and the Star knows what else we are being accused of at this moment. Why should I be the slightest bit nervous?”

“That isn’t the reason,” the cyborg said evenly.

“Meaning what?”

“The girl. She’s what makes you jittery.” There was an edge of resentment in Ariane’s voice.

“You can’t mean it,” I said.

“She’s very beautiful, of course. In a human way.” By all the little stars and comets, there was a touch of archness in Ariane’s manner. A dash of--jealousy. Yes, my cyborg partner was jealous of the alien.

“My interest is purely practical,” I said. Then I wondered why I said something so obviously as untrue as that. Ariane, of all persons, would know me well enough to know what I was feeling--even before I, myself, might put it into perspective.

“You should have seen yourself when you came aboard,” Ariane said. “Like a cadet on his first rendezvous.”

“That was one hellishly exciting ride you gave us on the drone, Cyb Ari,” I said, using her formal title for the first time in weeks.

“It was the girl,” Ariane said stubbornly. Then she added darkly, “If this were back in the olden days you like so well, she would probably be burned as witch. Just because of those silver eyes.”

“She’s obviously a mutant,” I said stiffly. It wasn’t like Ariane to carry on like this. “You’ve seen human mutations before.”

“None like that one,” Ariane said. “You know,” she went on obliquely, “I could look like that if I chose.”

That was approximately true, of course. An ADSPS cyborg, after his or her tour of duty, could ask to be reintegrated into a humanoid form and programmed to lead a planetary life. Not many did, but it was possible.

“You mean you’d trade the freedom you have--
our
freedom to roam the whole galaxy--just for a pretty girl’s figure?” I was so aghast at the thought that I lost track of the fact that the only reintegration and reprogramming we could look forward to now was the criminal code variety.

Ariane didn’t, however, and she began to laugh. It was familiar, warm laughter, far more human than cyborg, and it relieved me because it indicated that her mood was passing and she was acting more like herself and less like an imitation of a jealous wife.

She made a humming sound that indicated derision, and she said, ”Well, we mustn’t quarrel before our guests, Starkahn. Erit has finished with our victim, and they are about to join us. I hope you can withstand the shock at such close range. But I forget--you brought her aboard clutched to your bosom, didn’t you?”

Before I could make adequate reply to that, the bridge valve dilated, and Erit came through, leading the alien. A suit of Fleet-issue work coveralls had never looked better than on that small but ample form.

Erit’s featureless face was deeply lined. She was obviously fatigued from her long session with the alien girl and with who could tell what other personal concerns. One tended, in dealing with the Vulks, to forget their deep interdependence and the paucity of their numbers throughout the galaxy. Gret’s debility was a source of concern to me--and to every Rhadan, for the ancient creature was inextricably involved with our history as a nation and a people. But to another Vulk, most particularly to Erit, who had shared the very essence of his being in a way no human could ever completely understand, his weakness threatened a loss of
self
. Yet, in the manner of her race, Erit was devoting herself almost completely to our human problems.

Erit, slender, sexless, familiar in tunic and kilt, made the formal gesture of recognition and spoke quietly. “Starkahn, I bring you Marissa Tran Wyeth, Watcher of the Third Death.” The name was strange with its exotic Anglic clicks and sibilants, and the patronymic “Tran” was unknown to me. There were none among the star families so named. But the title “Watcher of the Third Death” shook me. It had a threatening sound to one who had actually seen the black starship in action.

The girl made a peculiar twisting obeisance, a rigid gesture that was more wary maneuver than respectful salute to my rank. She regarded me evenly with those marvelous silver eyes. “The strange creature you call a Vulk has told me many marvels,” she said in a low, musical voice. “Perhaps they are true, perhaps not. If you are truly a king, you will not lie to me.” Her hypno-leamed
lingua spacia
was heavily accented with Anglic, but not with modern Anglic. Rather she spoke with the accents heard now only in the recordings of voices of the First Empire.

“The Vulk don’t lie,” I said. “Whatever Erit has taught you is the truth.” I was filled with questions, anxious to pump the girl’s brain dry of facts. The Star knew how badly we needed them, with her deadly machine loose among the inhabited worlds. But Erit’s mind brushed mine softly with a note of caution, and I remembered that no matter how strange the silver-eyed mutant seemed to us, we must seem infinitely stranger to her. I would have to go carefully with her.

“This is a small vessel,” the girl said, walking slowly about Ariane’s bridge. There was a touch of scorn in her tone as she inspected the unfamiliar instruments in the tiny control room. “Is it a warship?”

“Yes. Of a sort.”

“Imperial.” Her lip curled with deep hatred.

“A unit of the Fleet,” I said neutrally, wondering what she remembered of her awakening in the laboratories of the Gonlani warlocks and our wild flight on the drone.

She stood before me and studied my eyes. “Are you
all
Genies, then? All blue-eyed supermen?” There was a universe of racial anger in her voice.

I looked helplessly at Erit. The Vulk said quietly, “Eugenicists.”

For a moment I didn’t understand what she was saying. Then my years of grubbing through remote historical events came to my rescue. Long ago, so long ago no one knew exactly when, a party of eugenic fanatics had dominated the government of the First Empire. But they were legendary, as were so many things that happened before the Dark Time, that uncounted number of years or centuries or even millennia that separated the Second Stellar Empire from the First. I searched my memory for more details and found them. They were part fact, part rumor and legend. In the expanding days of the First Stellar Empire the Eugenicists--the
Genies
, as they were popularly called--prevailed on the galactic government to “improve the race” by transporting criminals, dissenters, and (I had no doubt) political opponents out of the main galaxy. For five hundred years these unfortunates took “the Long Death”--the trip to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. But since the voyage took three hundred years even at light speeds, no word of a safe arrival in the Cloud had ever reached the main galaxy. Then, in the political upheavals of the time, something called “the Concerned Coalition” had stopped the transports. But nothing more was ever heard of the transportees, and, in time, they were all but forgotten.

“You know and the eyeless one knows what I mean,” the girl said coldly. “But why have you suffered
her
to live? She is small, deformed, obviously a mutation--not human, not
perfect
. “

“Erit is a Vulk,” I said, controlling my anger. Among the Rhad no one spoke so of the Vulk.

“A word,” the girl said, her face shut and hostile.

Was it possible that this person knew nothing of the Vulk? It hardly seemed credible. The Vulk had been among men since before the Interregnum.

“She knows nothing about us, Starkahn,” Erit said.

“But what
does
she know?” I asked in Rhadan.

“Her mind is well guarded. It needs Triad to delve into it deeply.”

Marissa listened to our exchange, in a language she obviously did not understand, with deep suspicion. I couldn’t let that emotion deepen and build an impenetrable wall between us. I needed too desperately to know what she could tell me.

I said, “There have been no Eugenicists among men for--” I was almost at a loss to guess at how long it had been. Nearly ten thousand years, certainly, for the Vulk had been among us for at least that long. I tried to recall that obscure period of human history--it could have been no more than five hundred years in duration--when the Eugenicist party dominated the First Empire. Lord Star, it would take some deep searching among my books and tapes--none of which were aboard Ariane now--to discover the source of this girl’s hatred for us. I finished lamely, “There have been none for many lifetimes. Everything is changed.”

“Who rules in Nyor?” the girl asked suddenly. Perhaps she was beginning to understand how long she had lain in that support capsule. It would be a terrible shock to her when the realization was complete. I glanced apprehensively at Erit, but the Vulk only shrugged as if to say that the girl must learn at her own pace.

“Sokolovsky Bel-Ami is Galacton,” I said.

The name obviously meant nothing to her. “The Raschilids are gone? After all they did to destroy millions, they simply died like common folk?” There was a world of satisfaction and grim pleasure in her question. It shook me badly. The last of the Raschilid Galactons died after the Second Aliya, the second great wave of stellar colonization when the First Empire was still young. It gave me some historical perspective on Marissa Tran Wyeth’s temporal frame, and the knowledge was shocking. She was speaking of a time in human history so remote that only scholars specializing in exotica even knew of it.

“Marissa,” I said as gently as I knew how. “The last Raschilid died a hundred centuries ago.”

The girl sat down on the edge of the control couch abruptly, as though I had cut her legs from under her. The silver eyes went dark, and her pale lips parted. “You are lying to me,” she whispered. “You are lying, Genie--”

“He speaks the truth,” Erit said. “It is as I suspected. You were meant to sleep in your capsule only a short time. It was three hundred ES years. Isn’t that so?”

Marissa’s breath was sharply indrawn, and I knew that Erit’s question had struck home. It all fell neatly into place for me, and I wondered why it was that I had not thought of it before. The reason was obvious, of course: the time span involved clogged the imagination. But as a spaceman and a student of history, I should have had enough flexibility of mind to realize that time had no meaning on the cosmic scale. In a universe where light took five hundred centuries to travel from the end of one arm of the galaxy to another, what mattered a mere ten thousand years? What were “years” anyway? An arbitrary measurement of time at best, a unit taken by men from the astronomy of their home planet (a small planet of an obscure star, at that) to slice up the illimitable and immortal cosmos. In such a moment of insight, one caught some glimmer of man’s unbelievable arrogance. In this, the Navigators were right. The universe alone was holy, and, in a very real sense, the means to understand it and to voyage through its grandeur, the telescopes and starships, were sacred.

But no moment of soaring realization could, for me, lessen the human shock of realizing that this frail girl was from the
Magellanic Cloud
.

We are the discarded ones, the generations of the lost. The plasma storms between the galaxies invaded our parents and changed our structure, but not our hearts--which are filled with anger. Ours is the rage of the segregated and the abandoned, and it is righteous rage, my children. In this place we will build such an empire as no man has ever seen before. On these bleak rocks we will build a nation. And in that nation we will build death for the oppressors.

Marius Tran Rosse, Arriver,
Captain of the Communes of Magellan, 6345 A.D.-6420 A.D.,
early First Empire period

--to this date we have dispatched no fewer than three thousand four hundred starships past the Rim, a million five hundred thousand souls into limbo. And what has been the result? Has this enormous expenditure lessened crime or dissent? Has this gigantic effort brought tranquility to the Empire? It has not. Economically, Transportation has been a disaster. Morally, it is genocide. It must end!

Golden Age fragment found at Tel-Califia, Earth.
Believed to be part of a manifesto of the Concerned Coalition, early First Empire period

“The world you thought you were returning to has been dead and fragmented ten thousand years, Marissa,” the Vulk said wearily. “There are no Raschilids, no Genies, no transports. All that died long long ago.” I watched the girl with admiration for her steadiness. How many of the nobles and great ones I knew could take such a pronouncement with her courage? She stood against a console, unmoving, her silvery eyes dark and filled with a grief that I could only dimly understand.