Balance Point (5 page)

EIGHT

Max Polian floated weightless in the Trueborn cruiser’s forward observation blister. The ship again drifted within sight of an inhabited world, but virtually nothing else remained the same since his conversation with Cutler.

Cutler had transferred at the Trueborn-controlled hub at Mousetrap to an Earthbound vessel, as had most of the passengers. And the world ahead was coming closer, not receding as Rand had been.

The sight of home after the long journey caused Polian’s throat to swell. Yavet hung against the blackness of space like a soft, gray pearl, girdled at the equator by the thread-slender silver band of the Ring, twinkling in the sun as it turned slowly around the planet. Yavet’s clouds and the Ring, both symbols and products of mankind’s triumph over the environment, seemed to Polian more meaningfully beautiful than the Trueborn’s blue marble, smudged with uncontrolled smears of white and complemented only by a pocked and lifeless natural moon.

The purser’s voice echoed through the blister, and the other six passengers in the blister turned in the direction of the speakers as though there were something to see. “Ladies and gentlemen, it will take us another hour to match and moor with the Ring of Yavet, which marks our closest approach to the Unified Republics of Yavet, as well as the terminus of our outbound voyage. All passengers are required to disembark at Ring Station, and once disembarked, cannot reboard. The Ring is officially part of Yavet and not affiliated with the Human Union Transport Authority. Downshuttle passage and baggage claim are entirely controlled by Yavi Customs and Immigration. So please be sure to gather all unchecked personal items, as well as your entry documentation, and carry them on your person where they are readily available for inspection. Duty Free, casual dining, and the Slot Slot will remain open until thirty minutes before final approach, for your last minute shopping, snacking and gaming convenience.”

The blister’s other inhabitants swam aft. Polian remained, untempted by Trueborn cheeseburgers and their rigged games of chance.

He stared forward again. The Ring was close, now.

It was the only continuous orbital habitat conceived, much less completed, by mankind. The largest manmade structure in the known universe at a half mile across, thirty-six thousand miles in circumference, even the Trueborns ranked the Ring of Yavet first among the Union’s manmade wonders. Nature herself had produced nothing remotely comparable. The natural rings of other planets were optical frauds, loose assemblages of orbiting dust and rock.

The Trueborns themselves had expanded into near orbital space in much the same way, at first. A clutter of communications satellites, surveillance facilities. Then a sprinkle of facilities to capture solar energy and to manufacture specialty products in perfect vacuum.

But now the Ring marked the divergent history of the Union’s superpowers. The Pseudocephalopod War had depopulated Earth, and spared her the challenges and opportunities of population growth and exponentially accelerated industrialization. Historians said that if one wanted to see Earth as it would have been, but for the Slug War, one should look at Yavet.

Perhaps. The difference, Polian thought, was how one appreciated what one saw. Polian saw greatness, fettered only by the Trueborns and the accident of their starships.

To Polian, the story of the Ring was the story of pragmatic progress. Yavet had avoided nuclear war by melding its nations under a central government. As a unified people, more Yavi needed more, and produced more, and by their industry warmed their planet.

The resultant rising seas shrank the land upon which Yavi lived. This allowed Yavet to raise great cities, and to select among the citizens who inhabited them those who contributed and those who were mere burdens.

The Trueborns complained that the Ring was built by slaves, as an overflow prison for slaves. Easy for them to say, gifted a planet kept pristine by the accident of war, and then further gifted with the means to expand from that planet to other worlds. Yavet had been denied those gifts, but had fashioned greatness from adversity. Yavet and the Ring would prosper for a thousand years.

The Trueborn cruiser drifted stationary above the rotating Ring, so the great edifice sped past below. Linear miles of factories gave way to the agricultural quadrant, its solar arrays drinking in sunlight.

The House, dark and foreboding as befit a penal facility, next flashed past, then the military quadrant crawled by as the cruiser slowed.

At last the cruiser’s speed matched with the Ring’s, and Ring Station came into view, now only a mile beneath the Trueborn ship. Red-winking visible light beacons outlined the sole starship mooring tower. Even the empty, waiting tower dwarfed the Yavi intrasystem ships nearby. They drifted in their berths like flimsy white insects, their anti-matter bottles joined by spindly frames.

Yavet had developed antimatter drive decades before the Trueborns had, years before the Trueborns stumbled into the gravity manipulation of cavorite drive courtesy of their war against the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. A Yavi antimatter drive ship needed months just to reach the other cold rocks that orbited her sun. In a similar time a Trueborn cruiser could travel between, and jump across, temporal fabric insertion points. The Trueborns’ accidental gift let them reach five hundred verdant and diverse planets spread across entire galaxies. The Trueborns exploited their gift to dominate the rest of mankind, and to suffocate it with their self-referential and self-indulgent culture.

An electronic whistle trilled, then the purser spoke again. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our final drift approach into Ring Station. If you aren’t already in line, please move to disembarkation immediately. From your Earth-based flight crew, it’s been our pleasure to show you a little bit of our universe.”

Polian snorted.

The Trueborns claimed that today their cruisers carried only defensive weapons, not nukes. Nobody believed it, and even if it were true, the Trueborns could take nukes aboard as easily as Polian could change his shirt. Enormous as they were, gravity-manipulating cruisers could nonetheless outspeed and outmaneuver any antimatter ship. The Trueborn’s smaller Scorpions were big enough to carry a nuke, too, and were shiftier and stealthier than their cruisers. The power projected by the Trueborn fleet hung above Yavet and the rest of the Union like a sword. When the Trueborns called it “our universe,” they were right.

Polian looked back as he paddled aft. The mooring tower was now just five hundred feet away. He smiled. If things went according to plan, it wouldn’t be the Trueborns’ universe much longer.

The moment he disembarked the cruiser, Polian noticed a bounce in his step. Not entirely due to his pleasure at being home. Unlike starship rotational gravity, the Ring’s rotational gravity was less, and less consistent, than planetary.

As Polian waited in the immigration line like an ordinary tourist, an arrivals steward moved down the line handing out arrivals robes. Unlike the Trueborn’s cruisers, most of the Ring’s interior volume was minimally shielded against the destructive cosmic radiation that a planet’s atmosphere filtered out. The lead-foil-lined robes were more security blanket than protection, given the minimal exposure time transfer passengers experienced.

Polian slipped on a robe like everyone else, anyway, to deflect attention more than to deflect radiation, but also because the lead ballasted him.

At baggage claim, Polian pointed out his bags to a porter. “Bay fourteen.”

The porter eyed the civilian one-piece visible beneath Polian’s arrivals robe, then wrinkled his pale forehead. “There’s an official shuttle in fourteen just now, sir. You want seventeen, maybe.”

“Fourteen.”

The porter’s shoulders slumped. “Fourteen. Right away, sir.” He had probably hoped Polian was bringing in contraband, which might have garnered him a few extra coins in his tip, but no one risked smuggling aboard an official shuttle when it was so easy to do it on a civilian vessel.

The Ring, for all its wonder, presented its share of Cold War contradictions. Yavet’s borders were policed by the External Operations Directorate, not by Polian’s Internal Operations Directorate. Therefore, immigration and customs procedures were ruthlessly and efficiently airtight when it came to blocking Trueborn spies and saboteurs. But Trueborn heroin got smuggled down, and the payments for it up, with a wink and a nod.

Not that Polian minded. The junk palliated the little people. And the human rot and violence that the drugs fueled thinned population without government expense. And best of all, illicit drugs could be blamed on the Trueborns and cited as an example of their system’s decadence and moral bankruptcy.

The skeletal, stooped porter, scarcely taller than Polian’s waist, struggled even with the two modest bags. The fellow was the first second-generation Ringer Polian had seen.

The odds of a child gestated and born in the Ring surviving radiation exposure, muscle atrophy, bone-density depletion, and workload to adulthood were tiny. But the downlevels little people waited years to get up-emigration permits because, regardless of laws and incentives and biologic controls, they wanted to make babies. Tiny odds were still better than the odds of dodging the sterilization codes, then getting a permit for a downlevels birth. And the odds of an Illegal and its parents surviving down below, given the efficiency of Polian’s Directorate, were virtually nil. The porter would be dead inside a year. But there were plenty who longed to take his place.

Polian trailed along at the back of the small knot of returning up-levels Yavi until he reached a door marked “Internal Security. Access Restricted.” He leaned forward, tripped the retinal, slipped through the doorway.

Back at last to the friendly confines of cubic volume he controlled, rather than volume controlled by the External Operations Directorate, Max unbelted his lead robe. Polian’s aide waited in an interrogation room off the corridor beyond the door, and snapped to attention when he saw Polian, so abruptly that the boy’s salute nearly knocked his provi cap off.

“Ease, Varden.”

Provisional Lieutenant Varden relaxed as he straightened his cap. They said that the only thing more awkward than a provi was the long-billed cap provis wore for their first commissioned year.

Varden flashed a thick-lipped smile. “Pleasant trip, sir?”

“Three months among the Trueborns? Successful, perhaps. Pleasant, no. Anyone inquire about my ‘medical leave?’”

Varden removed a uniform bag from a wall hook and held it out to Polian. “No, sir. Everyone knows the best medical’s offworld if you’re—”

“Old?” Polian smiled.

Geriatric medicine wasn’t a priority on an overpopulated planet. The privileged, like Polian, went elsewhere, and went elsewhere quietly. Polian smiled and peeled the bag off a freshly pressed uniform.

A half hour later Max Polian sat beside Varden, the two of them alone in the twenty-four-seat passenger compartment of the downshuttle as it bucked through the leaden clouds of Yavet’s stratosphere.

Polian gripped his seat’s rails until the shuttle’s gyrations smoothed. He opened his briefcase, walked his fingers through the papers and chips in its compartments.

Varden said, “It’s good to have you back, sir.” The boy’s face glowed as he said it. Varden wasn’t a boy, of course. He had worked two tours as a noncommissioned vice inspector, as Polian himself had once, down among the little people in the constriction and grime of the downlevels.

When Polian had needed a new aide, he had chosen Varden not so much because he had worked vice, but because Varden reminded him a bit of Ruberd. Except that Polian’s son had chosen the romance of external service rather than follow his father’s path up through the internal security ranks. And Ruberd’s choice had let the Trueborns kill him.

Polian kept digging through his case until he found what he wanted, a napkin bearing a handwritten scrawl that Cutler had made during one of their meetings on Rand. “As soon as you drop me off, run this.”

Varden unfolded the flimsy cloth, read, then pursed thick lips. “What is it, Director?”

“A surname. A few details.”

Varden frowned. “It’s not much to work with, sir. Priority?”

“Highest.”

“I’ll go straight to the office and get started after I drop you at home, sir.”

Polian shook his head. “Not at home.”

“If I may, sir, you look beat.”

Polian waved his hand as though a fly buzzed between them. “At External Operations.”

The younger man squirmed.

As an inspector, Varden had been accustomed to asking questions and getting answers. As an aide to a cabinet-level official, he knew better.

“Yes, sir. They say not much’s getting done over there these days. Shall I wait?”

Polian shook his head again. “I may be awhile.”