The Star Fox (2 page)

Now we ask him!
flared in Heim. His voice would not remain calm any longer; but Vadász didn’t notice. ‘Your story, I gather from what bits and pieces have leaked past this unofficial official censorship – your story is that the people are not dead on New Europe. Right?’

‘Right, sir. They fled into the mountains, every one of them.’

The Haute Garance,’ Heim nodded. He had all he could do merely to nod. ‘Good guerrilla country. Lots of cover, most never mapped, and you can live off the land.’

‘You have been there!’ Vadász set the bottle down and stared.

‘Pretty often, while in the Navy. It was a favourite spot to put in for overhaul and planet leave. And then I spent four months in a stretch on New Europe by myself, recovering from this.’ Heim touched the mark on his forehead.

Vadász peered close through the dappled moonlight. ‘Did the Aleriona do that to you?’

‘No. This was over twenty years ago. I bought it while we
were putting down the Hindu-German trouble on Lilith, which you’re probably too young to remember. The skirmishes with Alerion didn’t begin till later.’ Heim spoke absently. For this moment the drive and ferocity in him were overlaid by—

Red roofs and steep narrow streets of Bonne Chance, winding down along the River Carsac to the Baie des Pècheurs, which lay purple and silver to the world’s edge. Lazy days, drinking Pernod in a sidewalk cafè and lapping up the ruddy sunshine as a cat laps milk. When he got better, hunting trips into the highlands with Jacques Boussard and Toto Astier … good bucks, open to heart and hand, a little crazy as young men ought to be. Madelon—

He shook himself and asked roughly, ‘Do you know who is, or was, in charge?’

‘A Colonel de Vigny of the planetary constabulary. He assumed command after the
mairie
was bombed, and organized the evacuation.’

‘Not old Robert de Vigny? My God! I knew him.’ Heim’s fist clenched on the concrete. ‘Yes, in that case the war is still going on.’

‘It cannot last,’ Vadász mumbled. ‘Given time, the Aleriona will hunt everyone down.’

‘I know the Aleriona too,’ Heim said.

He drew a long breath and looked at the stars. Not toward the sun Aurore. Across a hundred and fifty light-years, it would be lost to his eyes; and it lay in the Phoenix anyway, walled off from him by the heavy curve of Earth. But he could not look straight at the minstrel while he asked, ‘Did you meet one Madelon Dubois? That’d be her maiden name. I expect she’s long married.’

‘No.’ Vadász’s drink-slurred voice became instantly clear and gentle. ‘I am sorry, but I did not.’

‘Well—’ Heim forced a shrug. ‘The chances were way against it. There’s supposed to be half a million people on New Europe. Were the … the casualties heavy?’

‘I heard that Coeur d’Yvonne, down in Pays d’Or, was struck by a hydrogen missile. Otherwise – no, I do not believe so. The fighting was mostly in space, when the Aleriona fleet disposed of the few Federation Navy ships that happened to be near. Afterwards they landed in force, but in uninhabited areas at first, so that except for a couple of raids with nothing worse than lasers and chemical bombs, the other towns had time to
evacuate. They had been called on to surrender, of course, but de Vigny refused and so many went off with him that the rest came too.’

Damn it, I have
got
to keep this impersonal. At least till I know more
. ‘How did you escape? The newscasts that mentioned you when you first arrived were vague about it. Deliberately, I suppose.’

Vadsáz made the bottle gurgle. ‘I was there when the attack came,’ he said, thickly again. The French commandeered a merchant vessel and sent it after help, but it was destroyed when scarcely above the atmosphere. There was also a miner in from Naqsa.’ He got the non-human pronunciation nearly right. ‘You may know that lately there has been an agreement, the Naqsans may dig in Terre du Sud for a royalty. So far off, they had seen nothing, knew nothing, and cloud cover above Garance would keep them ignorant. After a radio discussion, the Aleriona commander let them go, I daresay not wanting to antagonize two races at once. Of course, the ship was not allowed to take passengers. But I had earlier flitted down for a visit and won the captain’s fancy – that a human should be interested in
his
songs, and even learn a few – so he smuggled me aboard and kept me hidden from the Aleriona inspectors. De Vigny thought I could carry his message – hee, hee!’ Vadász’s laugh was close to hysteria. Fresh tears ran out of his eyes. ‘From Naqsa I had to, what you call, bum my way. It took time. And was all, all for nothing.’

He laid the guitar across his knees, strummed, and sang low:

‘
“Adieu, ma mie, mon coeur,

Adieu, ma mie, adieu, mon coeur,

Adieu, mon espérance
—”’

Heim took the bottle, then abruptly set it down so hard that it clanked. He jumped to his feet and began pacing. His shadow wove back and forth across the minstrel, his cloak fluttered against the moonlight on the water.

‘
Nej, ved fanden!
’ he exploded.

‘Eh?’ Vadász blinked up at him.

‘Look, do you say you have proof?’

‘Yes. I have offered to testify under drugs. And de Vigny gave me letters, photographs, a whole microfilm packet with every bit of information he could scrape together. But no one on Earth will admit it is genuine. Few will even look at it.’

‘I will,’ Heim said. The blood roared in his ears.

‘Good. Good. Right here, the package is.’ Vadász fumbled in his soiled tunic.

‘No, wait till later. I’ll take your word for now. It fits in with every other scrap of fact I’ve come across.’

‘So I have convinced one man,’ Vadász said bitterly.

‘More than that.’ Heim drew a long breath. ‘Look, friend, with due respect for you – and I respect anyone who’s had the guts to go out and make his own kind of life – I’m not a raggedy-ass self-appointed troubadour. I’m boss and chief owner of Heimdal.’

‘The nuclear motor makers?’ Vadász shook his head, muzzily. ‘No.
Non. Nein. Nyet
. You would never be here. I have seen your motors as far from home as the Rigel Domain.’

‘Uh, huh. Damn good motors, aren’t they? When I decided to settle on Earth, I studied the possibilities. Navy officers who’ve resigned their commissions and don’t want to go into the merchant fleet have much too good a chance of ending down among the unemployables. But I saw that whoever was first to introduce the two-phase control system the Aleriona invented would lock gravs on the human market and half the non-human ones. And … I’d been there when Tech Intelligence dissected an Aleriona ship we captured in the set-to off Achernar. My father-in-law was willing to stake me. So today I’m – oh, not one of the financial giants. But I have ample money.

‘Also, I’ve kept in touch with my Academy classmates. Some of them are admirals by now. They’ll pay attention to my ideas. And I’m a pretty good contributor to the Libertarian Party, which means that Twyman will listen to me too. He’d better!’

‘No.’ The dark tousled head moved from side to side, still drooping. ‘This cannot be. I cannot have found someone.’

‘Brother, you have.’ Heim slammed a fist into his palm with a revolver noise. A part of him wondered, briefly, at his own joy. Was it kindled by this confirmation that they were not dead on New Europe? Or the chance that he, Gunnar Heim, might personally short-circuit Alerion the damned? Or simply and suddenly a purpose, after five years without Connie? He realized now the emptiness of those years.

No matter. The glory mounted and mounted.

He bent down, scooped up the bottle with one hand and
Vadászwith the other. ‘
Skål!
’ he shouted to Orion the Hunter, and drank a draught that made the smaller man gape. ‘Whoo-oo! Come along, Endre. I know places where we can celebrate this as noisily as we damn please. We shall sing songs and tell tales and drink the moon down and the sun up and then we shall go to work. Right?’

‘Y-yes—’ Still dazed, Vadász tucked his guitar under an arm and wobbled in Heim’s wake. The bottle was not quite empty when Heim began The Blue Landsknechts’, a song as full of doom and hell as he was. Vadász hung the guitar from his neck and chorded. After that they got together on ‘La Marseillaise’, and ‘Die Beiden Grenadiere’, and ‘Skipper Bullard’, and about that time they had collected a fine bunch of roughneck companions, and all in all it turned out to be quite an evening.

1700 hours in San Francisco was 2000 in Washington, but Harold Twyman, senior senator from California and majority leader of United States representatives in the Parliament of the World Federation, was a busy man whose secretary could not arrange a sealed-call appointment any earlier on such short notice as Heim had given. However, that suited the latter quite well. It gave him time to recover from the previous night without excessive use of drugs, delegate the most pressing business at the Heimdal plant to the appropriate men, and study Vadász’s evidence. The Magyar was still asleep in a guest room. His body had a lot of abuse to repair.

Shortly before 1700 Heim decided he was sufficiently familiar with the material Robert de Vigny had assembled. He clicked off the viewer, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. An assortment of aches still nibbled at him. Once – Lord, it didn’t seem very long ago! – he could have weathered twenty times the bout he’d just been through, and made love to three or four girls, and been ready to ship out next morning.
I’m at the awkward age
, he thought wryly.
Too young for antisenescence treatment to make any difference too old for
–
what?

Nothing, by Satan! I simply sit too much these days. Let me get away for a bit and this paunch I’m developing will melt off
.
He sucked in his stomach, reached for a pipe, and stuffed the bowl with unnecessary violence.

Why not take a vacation?
he thought. Go into the woods and hunt; he had a standing invitation to use Ian McVeigh’s game preserve in British Columbia. Or sail his catamaran to Hawaii. Or order out his interplanetary yacht, climb the Lunar Alps, tramp the Martian hills; Earth was so stinking cluttered. Or even book an interstellar passage. He hadn’t seen his birthplace on Gea since his parents sent him back to Stavanger to get a proper education. Afterwards there had been Greenland Academy, and the Deepspace Fleet, and Earth again, always too much to do.

Sharply before him the memory rose: Tau Ceti a ball of red gold in the sky; mountains coming down to the sea as they did in Norway, but the oceans of Gea were warm and green and haunted him with odours that had no human name; the Sindabans that were his boyhood playmates, laughing just like him as they all ran to the water and piled into a pirogue, raised the wingsail and leaped before the wind; campfire on an island, where flames sprang forth to pick daoda fronds and the slim furry bodies of his friends out of a night that sang; chants and drums and portentous ceremonies; and – and—

No
. Heim struck a light to his tobacco and puffed hard. I
was twelve years old when I left. And now Far and Mor are dead, and my Sindabans grown into an adulthood which humans are still trying to understand. I’d only find an isolated little scientific base, no different from two score that I’ve seen elsewhere. Time is a one-way lane
.

Besides
– his gaze dropped to the micros on his desk –
there’s work to
do here
.

Footfalls clattered outside the study. Glad of any distraction, Heim rose and walked after them. He ended in the living room. His daughter had come home and flopped herself in a lounger.

‘Hi, Lisa,’ he said. ‘How was school?’

‘Yechy.’ She scowled and stuck out her tongue. ‘Old Espinosa said I gotta do my composition over again.’

‘Spelling, eh? Well, if you’d only buckle down and learn—’

Worse’n
correcting spelling. Though why they make such a fuss about that,
me
don’t know! He says the semantics are up-whacked. Old pickleface!’

Heim leaned against the wall and wagged his pipe stem at
her. ‘“Semantics” is a singular, young’un. Your grammar’s no better than your orthography. Also, trying to write, or talk, or think without knowing semantic principles is like trying to dance before you can walk. I’m afraid my sympathies are with Mr. Espinosa.’

‘But Dad!’ she wailed. ‘You don’t
realize!
I’d have to do the whole paper again from
go
!’

‘Of course.’

‘I
can’t
!’ Her eyes, which were blue like his own – otherwise she was coming to look heartbreakingly like Connie – clouded up for a squall. ‘I got a date with
Dick
—Oh!’ One hand went to her mouth.

‘Dick? You mean Richard Woldberg?’ Lisa shook her head wildly. ‘The blaze you don’t,’ Heim growled. ‘I’ve told you damn often enough you’re not to see that lout.’

‘Oh, Dad! J-j-just because—’

‘I know. High spirits. I call it malicious mischief and a judge that Woldberg Senior bought, and I say any girl who associates with that crowd is going to get in trouble. Nothing so mild as pregnancy, either.’ Heim realized he was shouting. He put on his court-martial manner and rapped: ‘Simply making that date was not only disobedience but disloyalty. You went behind my back. Very well, you’re confined to quarters for a week whenever you’re not in school. And I expect to see your composition tomorrow, written right.’

‘I hate you!’ Lisa screamed. She flung out of the lounger and ran. For a second the bright dress, slender body, and soft brown hair were before Heim’s gaze, then she was gone. He heard her kick the door of her room, as if to make it open for her the faster.

What else could I do?
he cried after her, but of course there was no reply. He prowled the long room, roared at a maid who dared come in with a question, and stalked forth to stand on the terrace among the roses, glaring across San Francisco.

The city lay cool and hazed under a lowering sun. From here, on Telegraph Hill, his view ranged widely over spires and elways, shining water and garden islands. That was why he had picked this suite, after Connie died in that senseless flyer smash and the Mendocino County house got too big and still. In the past year or so Lisa had begun to whine about the address being unfashionable. But the hell with her.