Infinity One (21 page)

“No.” The Primary stroked the pointed beard allowed his rank. “But 1 did not expect to. We are doubtless being guided from the new navigational posts ... ah.” He broke off. Expressionless, he crossed his arms in proper greeting. “Salutation, Colonel," he said to the man who had appeared in the companionway.

“Salutation to you bot’.” Iwan Duna’s accent was thicker than Luizo’s; but the fact that he spoke Inglis, which had remained the common language of the Order since American times, helped qualify him as the expedition’s liaison with its passengers. “May I join you?”

Roban clamped teeth together. The living tongue of Norrestland was not much different from this archaic version; and he had heard it spoken in just that way, by armed men in just that baggy uniform, along the shores of Puget Sound.
How can we stop you?
he wanted to say.

“Assuredly, Colonel,” Luizo replied.

“You see,” Duna explained, “you have de best view here, except in de pilot section w’ere dey are busy.” His native speech governed his throat, imposing its own rhythms, softening and shortening vowels while forbidding such consonantal sounds as
th
and
wh.
But his fluency was such that even Roban had almost stopped noticing the pronunciation.

He pushed foot against foot against bulkhead, soared, checked himself with a hand on the headrest of Roban’s chair.
I must not tell you to get away from me,
the techno thought. Sweat welled in his fists. Some broke loose, glittering, dancing droplets.

“We wanted your trip should be enjoyable as possible,” Duna went on. “I am sorry you must be strapped in. Dat iss for your safety in case a sudden maneuver is needed.”

“You have made this voyage several times before, have you not?” Luizo asked.

“Yass. I never tire of watching. Es-specially w’en we pass Mare Tranquillitatis.”

“Why that?”

“You do not know? W’ere de very first men landed.” Duna moved around to the side, so that both Communicators could see him. His gaze fell on Roban. “Your people,” he said. “W’at iss your country wass part of deirs.”

And now part of yours,
seared in Roban.
Oh, a puppet native government; a shadow Assembly; a pretense at a mutual defense pact; but we are under your empire, paying your tribute, quartering your troops, lately fighting m your frontier skirmishes .
. .
oh, God, your huntsmen in our clean mountains and forests, your Protector’s yacht on our clean waters, and the girl I’d hoped for giggling on the arm of one of you!

Still Duna regarded the big blond man. He himself fitted Norrestland’s popular concept of a Baikalan (though that meant little, when his nation was such a kaleidoscope of races and cultures)—short and stocky, broad in features, high in cheekbones, slightly oblique gray eyes, head shaven except for a reddish scalp lock, face marked with clan tattoos. His coverall was similar to the Communicator’s, but green where theirs were blue, sloppy where theirs were neat. At his waist he bore pistol and knife, surely no use here except to remind him that he was supposed to be a warrior-herdsman.

It had been no great surprise to find him affable. Baika-lans were, as a rule, if you didn’t cross them. His attempts to converse of scholarly matters had been less expected; but receiving no encouragement, he soon gave them up.

“Do you really not remember?” he persisted in the same mild tone.

Roban grimaced. “No chance for much education,” he said. “We start work in childhood where I come from, and work hard.”
In rain, fog, storm, hauling on lines and capstan bars till our hands grow too thick to hold a pen; but also on chuckling waves where sunlight dances and seals frolic, and woods stand green ashore, and Ramier’s Peak floats holy in heaven. Our country, no one else's.
“We must... to pay the taxes that pay the tribute.”

Luizo scowled, and Roban wished it hadn’t blurted out of him like that. However, Duna was unruffled. “I know,” he said. “I visited your home grounds once. It isn’t de tribute, friend, it is de fact you cannot afford—you have not de resources—to build or buy enough machines. So you plow wit’ animals and fish wit’ sailing craft. W’at you call tribute is cheaper payment for your defense dan you could manage alone, es-specially if you count cost of dose raids de Eastmen used to make on you. Derefore you will shed de burden of toil quicker.”

Luizo intervened, obviously anxious to find a different subject: “Most of the Order’s recruits are commoners like Brother Roban. They have everything to learn—not simply our organization, rituals, traditions; no, astronomy, mathematics, the whole range of sciences; if they have the talent for it, interstellar linguistics and semantics. Brother Roban is as far along as he is, at his present age, because he started with the advantage of knowing Inglis. But he has not had time to study economics, politics, or the history of Earth.”

Duna glanced ahead, where the blue half disc was rising. “He should. We happen to live dere. Have you explored de past, Primary?”

“To a degree. No more. Besides administration, my work in decipherment has kept me occupied. I need not remind you, in spite of a three-hundred-year hiatus, we are far from a complete understanding of the messages we already have.”

“And yet you want more.”

“Of course.” Luizo gestured at what stars were visible, cold sparks beyond Earth. “What have they been saying to each other, and trying to tell us, while we were away?”

The ship passed over a crater. It resembled neither the volcanic nor the meteoritic sort, but shimmered like black glass under the harsh spatial sunlight; and from its shallow ringwall jutted metal snags. Roban could not forebear to ask, “What’s that?”

“Site of a base,” Duna said. “Struck by a fusion weapon.”

Chill touched Roban. He had seen terrestrial ruins, beginning with those which surrounded Seattle’s city wall. But they were not so stark. Men had quarried them, weather had worn them, the kindly soil had crumbled and buried them with green life. “No wonder spaceflight came to an end,” he said low.

Duna raised his brows. “Oh, dis is not from de last great war. Dis is from de t’ird. More dan a t’ousand years ago. Dat one brought its own collapse.”

The wreckage slid out of sight. Raw mountaintops grabbed after the ship. Then they were likewise gone and a great dark plain lay beneath, curving away over the near horizon. The grimness left Duna’s countenance. He stared downward and outward and whispered something to himself—curiously, in Inglis—that Roban overheard, something about an eagle having landed. The young man wondered what it meant.

Farside Station was near the middle of a natural crater; but Ley being big and the Moon being small, the ramparts could not be seen from it. The land reached ashen, boulder-strewn, pitted, footprinted. Shadows of early morning stretched west from every irregularity, making it stand out more sharply than any canyon crag on Earth. Silence and emptiness magnified other things as well for Roban, sounds of breath and blood, odors of sweat and air purifier. When he overstayed himself in a fixed position, he felt heat gnaw at his sunward side, warmth drain out of the opposite. Mostly, though, he moved, getting the hang of one-sixth gee in a spacesuit, long marvelous bounds through lightness.

Reflection from the ground made his pupils contract. No more stars appeared over the western edge of the world than he had seen where wavelets chuckled and rigging creaked. But a sickle Moon had stood in that sky; and Earth would never stand in this. /
am here,
he thought with wonder.
I am actually here.

A jog at his elbow, a voice in his earplugs: “You start work, huh?”

His joy broke. He turned to confront the squat shape, masked by a self-darkening faceplate, a Baikalan who had acquired some Inglis while stationed in Alaska. “I’m about to,” he snapped.

“You learn Moonwalking fast,” Sergeant Aigunov said.

Roban ignored the attempt at friendliness. He admitted the need for guidance before he could safely travel on the surface; and in fact, the rule that no one went topside alone was sensible. Nevertheless—

“I’ll check the radio telescope first,” he said.

“W'y? No good. Not fix yet.”

“Eactly,” Roban said. “But it, and the optical instruments for that matter—the X-ray receivers, the particle counters, the gravity wave meters, everything here—is the property and responsibility of the Order. You don’t think we simply kept star talk alive for two thousand years, do you? We were always astronomers too. Each time civilization cut its own throat, or just wallowed back in swinish ‘practicality,’ we had to carry science on alone.”

His gaze went to the huge spidery skeleton which overhung the area. Most of the Station was underground. Most of the exterior installations were in buildings sufficiently sturdy to survive three centuries of abandonment. The scattered blockhouse shapes, like the grounded spaceship, were dwarfed in this landscape but hardly touched by its meteoritic sleet. However, the radio dish and its field of antennae had suffered cruelly.

Repairs would cost wealth as well as time and skilled labor. Roban wasn’t sure the Order could do the job unassisted. It had considerable holdings and revenues, but were they that great? Probably not. Earth was still crawling back from impoverishment. Had the Communicators been able to construct spaceships, they would not have waited a decade for the Domination of Bailkal to offer two of them a ride.

Not that the Domination had regained all that was lost when mankind last went crazy. Technical knowledge didn’t go up with cities in radioactive smoke. It was too widely diffused in too many books and microreels. The Order preserved most information; but between them, secular libraries doubtless retained as much of what had been generally known. No, the problem was scarcity of resources, including trained personnel. Theoretically, the first post-collapse spaceship could have been a System-spanning photon-drive giant, totally automated, able to take herself anywhere. In practice, she had to be simple enough for today’s industry to produce.

“If you’d taken us here from the beginning,” Roban said bitterly, “that observatory would be in action right now."
But no. You had to see if you couldn't read the messages that had come in, with the help of renegades from our ranks, and keep what you discovered to yourselves.

He started toward the ’scope. Baikalan reports on it were available, but he ought to investigate personally. Motion eased his mood a trifle, until a grin twitched one comer of his mouth. In the end, as always before, the Order was prevailing over mere armed strength.

Its Board of Directors had protested when the Dominator denied repeated requests to send its people Moon-side. Roban, then a boy, had asked with tearful indignation why it didn’t call down the ban on Baikal. His arithmetic teacher, a female member of Seattle Station, which cooperated closely with what public schools there were, had explained quite frankly.

“Roban, dear, the Communicators haven’t survived the rise and fall of civilizations by being impulsive. We serve the whole human race: eventually, we hope, the whole of intelligent life everywhere in this universe. We do more than gather and safeguard knowledge. We try to keep it working. That’s why anyone who joins us has to renounce his nationality: so he can travel freely, judge and advise impartially. Oh, yes, we charge what seems right for our services, because we must keep our treasury alive. But the important thing is the services themselves, halting a plague, establishing a factory, educating a generation.”

(An ideal, as the boy already vaguely knew. The truth was as complicated and disorderly as human affairs always are—episodes of corruption, crankery, schism, abasement, abuse of trust, over-weening arrogance; but also reforms, scholarship, reunity, martyrdom, honesty, humble helpfulness. The Order endured, in its quest for understanding, because ultimately that quest was religious. Whatever name a Communicator might give to God, including Void, his search across the cosmos was a search into the spirit.)

Sister Marja’s eyes crinkled. “As for the practical politics, Roban, well, we can only invoke the ban—withdraw ourselves from a country—in the gravest cases. If we did it often, governments might decide they could manage without us! Worse, the mass of the people might lose their reverence for us. No, I think here we need merely bide our time.”

She was right. Key information lay hidden—somewhere —in the secret files of the Order. Renegades or no, the Dominator’s agents could not interpret those sendings from the stars. There had been immense laughter in Australia Station’s auditorium when Luizo read aloud the announcement by Yuri Khan himself: “Thanks to the skill and devotion of our space project personnel, technical difficulties have been overcome to the point where it is possible to carry a limited number of foreign guests—”

Bouncing along beside Roban, Aigunov said: “We not fix becausse got odder t’ings first.” His hand chopped across the Milky Way. “We got to reach Mars. Radio say colony did not die. Got to reach asteroids, mine again, use dose minerals to build up Eart’ again. Stars, dey wait.”

Well,
Roban thought,
the Baikalans are scarcely a sentimental folk.

You couldn’t even say that their adherence to dark-age tradition—bonds of kinship, old rites, hunting and herding, the warrior ethic—had such a basis. Rather, it was necessary. Their diversity of peoples, most still more than half barbarian, could never have formed a viable state on the melting pot theory. Nothing would have melted except the pot. Instead, ethnic identity, pride, vying for glory, must be turned into the engine of empire.

And—Roban admitted reluctantly—the imperialism was itself pragmatic. From the beginning, the Dominators had made their objective clear. Several major nations were emerging. Rivalries were sharpening. Baikal would not attempt world conquest; that had always led to disaster. But it would try for military and economic hegemony.

The attempt was succeeding. Through fair means or foul—persuasion, diplomacy, purchase, conquest, alliance —in fact if not everywhere in name, the horse-tailed banner of the Lightning Bolt was flying halfway around the North Pole. And it stood on the Moon. And it was bound for Mars, the Belt, the verges of the Solar System.