Orion Shall Rise (49 page)

A regrettable incident, such as history had known beyond numbering – no more, and here was nothing except a traditional reaction, futile save insofar as it bled off some of the grief and rage. Striding through the chill twilight, Rosenn found she could no longer believe that.

Why am I here?
she wondered, almost frantically. I
am a woman of the Aerogens, the wife of its greatest man while he lived; I have an excellent education, I have traveled from end to end of the Domain, I know better than to partake in a primitive rite of resentment, especially when it’s certain that Jovain has me under surveillance
.

She glanced downward at Catan. Side by side, the mother and the foster mother of Talence Iern Ferlay led the procession to the standing stones.
Obligation to my hostess? But why did I seek her at all? She and I have seldom met. We have no ties, except for our separate memories and for the son of his that she rendered unto me, a son who may well have died
.

The anguish ripping through Rosenn told her suddenly what her reasons had been, and were. She reached to grip the other woman’s hand. Catan gave back the pressure, and a long look, but in the deepening dusk Rosenn could not know if she smiled. Maybe, silently, she wept.

Skyholm faded away. Stars twinkled forth.

When the women reached the stones, there was enough light that they could see what they did, from crowding constellations and the icy Via Lactea. On one side of the road, fields reached ghost-gray into darkness. Lamp-glow from a distant farmhouse felt as remote as the stars. On the opposite side, forest made a wall, where bare branches stood against heaven like the spears of warriors. Between it and the road were the megaliths.

The rows of them marched beyond sight. Hoarfrost glimmered on their rough shapes; otherwise shadows lurked thick around and
underneath.
Shadows of time,
Rosenn thought,
shades of unknown folk who raised them in ages before history
. Against all reason, she felt the power in them, a remorseless patience, a communion with the inhuman stars.
How did they get back their sacredness? Was it that in the chaos after the Judgment, when everything else slipped from man’s grasp, they abided?

Snicks and flickers ran through silence, as the women lighted their candles. Each flame brought forth a face within a cowl; none was the face that daylight, husband, or children saw.
Shadows, shadows, only a cheekbone, an eyeball, a gleam of teeth
. Hands shielded fire as every woman sought her stone, then the goblin glows stood clear and tiny, illuminating the way toward night.

Catan led Rosenn to a stance in front of the lines. At their backs were the remnants of a cromlech, below their feet were sere grass and frost; the planet spun toward Northern winter and soon Orion would rise. ‘I should not,’ Rosenn whispered half wildly, ‘I don’t know anything about this, I don’t belong here –’

‘Oh, but you do,’ Catan murmured. ‘We belong together, leading them, we, his mothers, he the true Captain who’ll bring back rightness. Just hold your candle up, a beacon for him to steer by, and wait.’

She lifted her own above her head and lifted her voice. Rosenn knew hardly any Brezhoneg, but Catan had told her in Francey what the chant would mean.

‘In the holy name of Deu, by Zhesu-Crett and every saint on earth and on high and in the Afterworld, we are gathered to call desolation over evildoers. May the sorrow they have wrought and the wrath they have raised turn upon them, upon them whose names we now name
–’

Foremost was Talence Jovain Aurillac.

The
Graym Trader
departed Seattle early on a clear morning. Pujay Sound sparkled gray-green and whitecapped, already well trafficked. Islands and mainland lay vivid with fall, snowpeaks reared afar. Gulls and clouds cruised before a wind that blew cold out of the northwest.

The ship was nothing fast, nothing special such as might have aroused Maurai curiosity. She was a small coastwise freighter of a type common in these parts. Amidships, above the deckhouse, a girder tower upbore a four-bladed rotor, tailed and swivel-mounted so that it could always point itself into the wind. Through a virtually frictionless magnetic transmission it drove twin screws and supplied a modest amount of electricity. A tiny diesel was a standby, grudgingly used; synfuel was expensive.

Coal was too, not so much directly as in the amount of steel required for a steam engine sufficient to drive a vessel of any size. Few stacks were sullying the air – a welcome change from shore, Iern thought. An alcohol-burning turbine would have needed less metal and been clean to boot, but even the Northwesterners were no longer producing that stuff on a large scale; too much land had been ruined in centuries past by consumption of vegetable matter that should have been returned to the soil.

Standing with Ronica at the rail, he saw mostly sails, some rigs of ancient type and some aerodynamically sophisticated. A majority of the larger modern craft flew the Cross and Stars.

In the long run, Northwestern civilization is doomed,
he thought.
While atomic power is forbidden, it can only maintain its kind of high-energy economy by importing coal. Someday, either the Mong will cut off the supply or the fields will give out. Then there are two choices: a technically advanced, somewhat progressive, but diffuse and carefully managed society like the Maurai’s; or

an aristocratic, labor-intensive, basically static society like the Domain
.

Unless Orion
–
And everything is in upheaval
.

Ronica brightened his mood by stretching her arms wide and laughing for happiness. The shadows of the rotors pulsated across her; they made her hair shine twice bright when the sunbeams touched it. ‘We’re on our way,’ she exulted. ‘Yasu almighty, I’m bound for home, and I’ve got
you
along!’

He laid an arm around her shoulders and hugged. A deckhand nearby winked at him. ‘Now can you tell me what we’re going to do?’ he asked.

She sobered. ‘Not yet, darling. That is, I could, but it’d be kind to wait till Terai and Wairoa can listen in.’

‘Eh?’

‘Bad enough that they’ll be in lonely confinement for the next year or two, knowing their people at home are mourning them for dead. Let them at least learn we aren’t monsters.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Under guard below decks. Brought aboard during the night. We can’t risk giving them any freedom in these crowded waters. Terai, for instance, might bull his way to the side, jump overboard, and swim to yonder Mauraiship. Just the commotion of an attempt might draw too much notice. Once we’re in the Strait, nobody else close, we can loosen up.’

– Nevertheless, when they appeared a few hours later, the captives were hobbled, and the two who accompanied them bore sidearms. The skipper and his six-man crew had been chosen carefully; most of the time they plied a regular trade, but occasionally they were called on to do things about which they were to ask no questions and tell no tales.

Ronica, Iern, and Plik waited in the saloon, where a leather-upholstered couch curved around three sides of a table. Sunlight danced in through glass ports. The deck rolled a little and quivered faintly underfoot. Plik’s pipe sent aroma eddying through the air.

Ronica sprang from her seat and seized Terai’s hands in hers. ‘Welcome,’she said. Her sincerity was unmistakable. ‘How good to see you again.’ To Wairoa, in haste: ‘And you.’ She had confessed to Iern that she couldn’t help feeling the hybrid was both pitiable and uncanny.

Terai returned her a sour smile. ‘I’d have preferred it be under different conditions.’

‘Yes, you’ve had an utter bitch of a time, haven’t you, poor dear?
And I’m afraid the end is not yet. But I do hope that what I’m going to tell you will make you feel better about it.’ Ronica gestured at the guards. ‘Okay, you can go.’

‘Uh, wait, Miz Birken, Captain Karst ordered us not to let these guys out of our sight,’ protested one.

Ronica snorted. ‘I countermand the order. If Captain Karst doesn’t like it, he can squabble with me when he’s slept off last night’s drunk. Wait beyond the door if that’ll make you happier.’ She shooed them through and closed it behind them.

‘I suppose we could’ve used Angley in their presence,’ she explained, ‘but I’m not damn-all fluent in the lingo, especially technical terms.’

‘If you will not reveal the secret to your own men, why to us?’ Wairoa asked.

‘Well, you’re safe,’ Ronica answered bluntly. ‘You aren’t going anywhere till Orion has risen. I want you to understand we mean business. That should keep your horns pulled in. I’d hate for you to get killed trying some or other heroic idiocy.’ She smiled. ‘We are trail buddies, remember. Come, let’s have a drink in fellowship.’

She poured for everybody from a carafe, and remained standing while she lifted her glass and proposed solemnly, ‘Here’s to the day when we can meet again, and every one of us free because the world is.’

Iern sipped. The wine was pungent in his mouth, but the headiness he felt came from her tone, her stance, herself a young goddess of victory. Plik emptied his glass in two swallows and reached for a refill. Wairoa hesitated, shrugged, and drank. Terai kept motionless.

Ronica noticed. ‘I understand,’ she told the big man. ‘Maybe you’ll be willing to join in my toast after you’ve heard.’

She sat down, but only physically. Enthusiasm radiated from her. Iern, on her right, imagined he could feel it, a flame. Plik was beside him, the Maurai at the end opposite her.

‘What is Orion?’ she began. The words cataracted forth. ‘Not what you feared, not a bomb or any such hellish thing. Orion is a spaceship. A fleet of them.’

To Iern, the revelation was not totally unforeseen. Nonetheless it went through him like a lightning bolt. Terai grunted, as if hit in the belly; Wairoa did not stir; Plik looked bemused.

‘A ship that can go to the planets,’ Ronica said in glory. ‘They
had the beginnings before the Doom War, you know. They orbited Earth and got as far as the moon, and even beyond for a little. Afterward people lost the dream. They were too busy surviving, and resources were too lean. The old spacecraft were chemical-powered. They burned fuel at a horrendous rate. We could never go back in force if we depended on their sort. Besides, nobody could hide the effort. You Maurai would’ve stopped it at the beginning. And maybe you’d’ve been right, not just maintaining your cozy little supremacy, but right. Where
would
the energy come from, on this poor exhausted world of ours?’

Her fingers tightened along the stem of her glass. ‘From the atom,’ she said.

Terai shuddered and waited for more. Wairoa widened his strange eyes. Plik gasped. A song shouted within Iern.

‘The idea goes way back,’ he heard. To that interplanetary age which died aborning. A man named Freeman Dyson had it and did some theoretical work on it. What a wonderful name for him –“Free-man.” And he gave it the name “Orion,” too.

‘Nothing more happened, mainly for political reasons, I’ve heard. Then civilization went under. The idea lay forgotten for hundreds of years. You’ve never heard of it, have you? Nobody did. Not till folk in the Northwest Union got interested in nuclear power and started going through old material in detail. The Orion papers were there, with references to a huge literature on spacecraft in general. Actually, they weren’t papers anymore, they were mostly on microfiche and so forth, but distributed widely enough that what did not last in one place where the archeologists had dug usually did in another.

‘Well, I’ve heard that some individuals were excited about Orion. But the first order of business then was to get atomic energy plants designed and built. You recall how our searchers located fissionable material the Maurai had missed in their earlier sweep, and expected they could find more. Realizing the Federation would hate this, they kept as discreet as possible, and publicizing Orion would’ve been unnecessarily splashy.’

Ronica sighed. Bitterness entered her voice. The Norrmen did not expect the Federation would react in the fanatic way it did. The Power War … is history. Since, we’ve been saddled with the Inspectorate, and all your limitations on what we may do.’

She tossed off her wine and poured more. ‘Already during the
last couple of war years, when it was pretty clear we’d lose, Orion came up as a thought. That was among members of the Wolf Lodge. Ours has always been heavy on scientific, technical, and managerial types, you know. Orion’s been basically a Wolf undertaking, though of course we’ve brought in useful and trustworthy people from elsewhere.’

Terai nodded stiffly. ‘Yes, I see,’ he mumbled. ‘A widespread, wealthy, influential … but private … organization, whose members generally feel close-knit but don’t demand an accounting from their top leadership – yes.’

‘How does this spacecraft work?’ asked Wairoa in impersonal wise.

Her exuberance returned to Ronica. ‘Offhand, the idea looks insane,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t. You throw out a series of small atomic bombs and detonate them behind a thick plate at the rear of the ship. The explosions accelerate her. I can’t go into too much detail because I’m not in the drive department. My work’s been on control systems. However –’ She laughed aloud, as she had done earlier on deck, a peal of joy. ‘Listen. I didn’t learn this myself till very lately, when Iern and I came back to Seattle. (Sorry, sweetheart. That day I left you in the chapter house –).’ She squeezed her lover’s hand. ‘They made a test shot two or three months ago, unmanned, telemetered, the vehicle recovered at sea. The results were perfectly splendid. Twenty years of work and sacrifice, and by God, we sent her beyond the sky and brought her home again!’

‘It
is
insane,’ Terai groaned. ‘Bombs. Radioactive trash. How many will die of cancer because of that one shot? How many children will be born deformed?’

‘No number you could measure,’ Ronica retorted. She flushed. ‘Okay, some contamination. A firing pit contains most of it, but, yes, a detectable amount of radioisotopes does get into the atmosphere. It increases the background in the immediate neighborhood about as much as you would if you moved that neighborhood to the top of Mount Denali. Everywhere else gets less, and the stuff decays fast.