Orion Shall Rise (6 page)

– if she had been
a
merchantman carrying express cargo. In the event, dozens of crewfolk were on deck. They had ample room. Save for a streamlined bridge, cabins were below; machinery, weapon turrets, lifeboats, and other apparatus occupied little space; the solar collectors were deployed, to charge accumulators and refresh bacterial fuel cells as well as to furnish power, but they were elevated on hydraulic shafts and so formed pergolas in whose shade people might gather. Hardly any did, for Maurai found these waters and this atmosphere cold.

On a civilian craft, the setting would have been less austere. Probably the main prow would have borne a figurehead: very likely religious, the carven Triad, Tanaroa the Creator, Lesu Haristi the Saviour on His right, shark-toothed Nan the Destroyer on His left. Surely planters would have been bright with flowers. As it was, apart from the hues of indurated wood in strakes, planks, and spars, all the color was aft, where the Cross and Stars of the Federation
streamed at the flagstaff.

Yet the crewfolk provided ample gaiety, as they took their pleasure between battles. Some defied the weather and wore nothing but a sarong, plus beads, bracelets, garlands, or leis they had woven from blossoms grown in pots in their quarters. Young, lithe, skin tones ranging from amber through umber to black, they were doubly beautiful amidst their more fully clad mates. Here and there, intricate tattoos rippled to the play of flesh. The majority were male, but, as nearly always on Maurai vessels, adventurous women, not yet married, were enrolled as well.

In little spontaneous groups, they celebrated their aliveness. Japes flew. Feet bounded, hips swayed, hands undulated. Through the wind came sounds of flute, drum, fiddle, accordion, koto, song. Dice rattled; stones moved over a chalk-marked go board. Two persons told stories from their home to listeners from distant islands, neither printed pages nor radio waves transmit the entire diversity of a realm that sprawled across half the Pacific Ocean. A couple embraced; another couple went down an open hatch to make love. Three or four individuals sat apart and contemplated the waves, or their souls.

Amidships at the port rail, Launy hunched his shoulders and dug hands deep into the pockets of the pea jacket lent him. ‘Who’s on watch, anyway?’ he wondered.

Terai shrugged. ‘The usual,’ he replied. ‘First, second, or third officer. First, second, or third engineer. Quartermaster at the wheel. Radio officer; except in emergencies, she’s in charge of the radar too. And, yes, the cook and bull cook must be starting to prepare tea about this time. And I daresay a few more – the carpenter or the gun chief, for instance – have found things that need doing. But Navy or no, we Maurai aren’t much for strict schedules or busywork.’ He grinned. ‘I’ve heard us called sloppy, and not just by Norries like you, but by the Mericans south of you – our own clients, that we converted from freebooters to civilized ranchers and whatnot! However, somehow we manage.’

‘You do,’ said the captive bleakly, and stared for a while at the man beside him.

There was considerable to stare at. Terai Lohannaso loomed a sheer two meters in height. Iron-hard, contoured like a hillscape, his body was broad and thick out of proportion to that. His features were largely Polynesian, wide-nosed, full-mouthed, with a scant
beard that he kept shaved off; but the square jaw, gray eyes, and complexion ivory where seagoing years had not turned it leather-brown, those were a heritage from Ingliss forebears. His voice was pitched like thunder. Reddish-black, his locks were bobbed under the ears and banged across the brow in the style of N’Zealanner men. A short-sleeved shirt revealed hairless chest and forearms, the latter tattooed – on the left, a standard fouled anchor, but on the right, a hammer and tongs. (He had mentioned once that black-smithing was a hobby of his.)

‘Oh, yes, you manage,’ Launy said. ‘You call yourselves easygoing and happy-go-lucky, but your outposts are along every coast of Asia and Africa … and the western side of Normerica and Soumerica, from our border on down … and native rulers do whatever your local “representatives” “suggest” if they know what’s good for them. Meanwhile your explorers and traders – your vanguards – are pushing into Yurrup. … Oh, yes.’

His glance went across the rest of the flotilla. Most of the craft in it were monohull, less fast though more capacious than
Barracuda.
(Stabilities were identical, given extensible spoilers to forestall capsizing.) Their rigs varied, as did their sizes: everything from an archeological-looking schooner to a windmiller whose vanes drove a screw propeller. All were wooden, with scant metal fittings; all appeared frail and innocuous at a distance, even the carrier on whose deck rested a score of airplanes. None bit ferociously through the waves, belching smoke, a-bristle with cannon, like a Northwestern ironclad.

But none, either, were like the big-bellied merchantmen he had taken during the Whale War. He had seen these dancers on the waters pluck apart the squadron in which he served. Now they were bound north to rendezvous with the rest of their kind. Thereafter the combined force would seek the main Union fleet, whose whereabouts were incessantly tracked by Federation scouts. (It was seldom worth-while to fire shells or rockets at those high-hovering blimps and hydroplaning boats. They were astonishingly evasive;
if
hit, they were astonishingly durable; if destroyed, they bore life rafts, and the Maurai had astonishingly effective rescue teams.) And later … he supposed Federation marines would land on Union shores.

Terai shuffled his feet. ‘No, hold on,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I, uh, I sympathize with you – you’ve lost shipmates – but we
don’t
want to rule the world. What’d that get us except a bellyful of
trouble? Anyhow, the whole idea
is
to let the world stay, uh, diverse, so different cultures can learn from each other –’ He flushed and clicked his tongue, ‘Sorry, old chap. I didn’t mean to repeat propaganda at you. But it’s true.’

‘Right. You like quaint customs and ethnic music,’ Launy lashed out. ‘But never something really different. Never something that might upset the Maurai predominance.’

‘That might wreck every civilization again, or life itself,’ Terai said back. His lips tightened off his teeth. ‘Sometimes I wonder if the Downfall didn’t come barely in time, to save the whole biosphere from what the old industry was doing to it.’

‘You talk like a Gaean.’

‘Lesu forbid!’ Terai attempted a laugh. ‘The Mong dislike us worse than you do, and I doubt a single Maurai ever gave Gaeanity a second thought.’

‘Then why do you make “ecology” and “diversity” your catchwords for a holy war?’

Long-smoldering anger spat forth a small blue flame. ‘We share this planet,’ Terai growled. ‘Your reckless coal-burning and chemical effluents were bad enough. When you collected fissionables and set out to build a
nuclear powerplant,
that was too buggering much. When you turned down our ultimatum, what could we do but declare war! Now we’re going to curb you, for everybody’s sake!’

His temper abated as fast as it had flared. He was not a choleric man. ‘Don’t fear, Launy,’ he said, and fumbled in his pockets. ‘We’re not after your kind, just after the exploiters and crazies who’ve grabbed the rudder from you. The few who don’t know, or don’t care, that Earth’s cupboard is flinking close to empty.’ He drew out briar pipe and tobacco pouch.

‘Oh, I know it is,’ the Norrie answered. ‘Remember, my father was an Iron Man – a scavenger – and I’ve read the books and heard the lectures.’

His mind repeated them in synopsis:

The Doom War and its aftermath didn’t wipe out knowledge. Too many records of every sort were left, and in certain lucky areas, certain lucky people sooner or later got a chance to study them. They could have rebuilt – except that the earlier technological civilizations had consumed the abundant, easily accessible materials which had made it possible to build in the first place. No Mesabis were left, no Prudhoe Bays, no vast virgin timberlands, no tonnes of
fertile topsoil on each arable square meter. More and more, the ancestors had been making do with substitutes and rearrangements. The successor societies, cursed with low energy and lean resources, could not afford to restore the industrial plant necessary for that.

So, mostly, those who survived kept going by creating new versions of savagery or barbarism. Few of them have yet climbed any further back. Few, if any, ever will, unless –

The Maurai hold a key, and beyond the door they guard is a stairway to the future. Their own ancestors were lucky. N’Zealann wasn’t
hit. Yes, it got its dose of ultraviolet when the bomb explosions thinned the ozone layer – diebacks and mutations in the microbial foundations of life, famines and pestilences and chaos. But it wasn’t hit. The structures remained, usually. Factories, laboratories, hydroelectric facilities, not to speak of unexhausted iron and coal mines. City people died, but country dwellers tended to live, and on their reservations the aborigines had a tribal fellowship with institutions that were adaptable to the new conditions. As nature began to recover, the N’Zealanners wanted to reconstruct, and found themselves facing a terrible labor shortage. They invested coal and iron in ships that went out recruiting immigrants, who were mainly from the Polynesian islands. It was natural for them to evolve a scientific but parsimonious technology.…

We’re different, we in the Northwest. We started with a richer base. And we didn’t change from what we had been. Throughout the hard centuries, we never stopped looking forward, we never stopped hoping and dreaming.

His pipe charged and between his jaws, Terai produced a lighter. It was a small hardwood cylinder with a close-fitting piston. He removed the latter and shook some tinder from a compartment of his tobacco pouch down the bore. After he had tucked the pouch away, he rammed the piston home, withdrew it again, and emptied the tinder onto his tobacco. Air compression had heated it to the combustion point. With careful inward puffs, a hand screening off the wind, he nursed the fire into complete life.

‘You know,’ Launy murmured, ‘that clumsy thing comes near to being a world-symbol for your civilization.’

Terai smiled; crow’s-feet meshed around his eyes. ‘Oh, it isn’t clumsy when you’ve gotten the knack. Don’t tell me you’d prefer sulfur matches! Why, a smoke would cost you a day’s wages.’

‘What people carry at home is a torch about the size of your
thumb. Plastic case, flint-and-steel igniter. The fuel, generally butane, we derive from coal or by destructive distillation of sawdust.’

‘I know. I’ve seen. A drunken sailor
is
less extravagant.’

‘Now wait a minute, Terai. Your people make use of forests as well as farms. Why, you farm and mine the seas themselves.’

‘We replant. We maintain a balance.’

‘We do too, as far as we’re able. We’d be better able if we had more energy to spend. That’s the solution to everything, energy.’

Terai pointed around the ocean, into the wind, and upward.

‘Oh, sure, your chosen sources,’ Launy said. ‘Sun, wind, water, biomass – but it all goes back in the end to the sun, and the sun’s good for hardly more than a kilowatt per square meter, at high noon on a clear day; a hell of a lot less in practice.’

‘We do use some coal, you know,’ Terai answered, ‘but we treat it for clean burning. You could do likewise.’

‘Not if we’re to live the way we think human beings are entitled to. That calls for high-production industries. Petroleum’s too precious a feedstock to burn, of course, and wood’s too valuable as lumber or just as forest. What’s left but coal? I admit it’s dirty, and it won’t last forever.’

Excitement mounted in Launy. ‘Why won’t you Maurai allow nuclear development?’ he challenged. The plants we designed would’ve been harmless and safe. We’d’ve disposed of the wastes perfectly safely, too, glassified and stored in geologically stable desert areas – innocent compared to coal mines, acids, ash, gases. We were willing to cooperate in precautions against any weapon-making. We’d also have cooperated in research on thermonuclear power, unlimited energy for as long as Earth lasts. Energy to start us back toward the stars.’

He shook his head and sighed. ‘But no. You’d have none of it, nor let us. Why?’

‘That was explained a million times over,’ Terai said, a little wearily. ‘The dangers, in case present systems break down, outweigh any possible gain. Even if the systems worked perfectly, forever, the planet itself would suffer too much from industry on the scale you want.’

‘So you say,’ Launy retorted. ‘But what about power politics, greed, maintaining your, uh, your hegemony? Those have been a mighty big part of your motivation, Maurai. I don’t mean you
personally. You’ve always struck me as an honorable man. It puzzles me how you could serve as a spy between the wars. You could have refused the assignment.’

‘I wasn’t a spy,’ Terai said mildly. ‘Yes, my role as a merchant skipper was a disguise, I was a naval intelligence officer the whole time, but I didn’t steal any secrets. I only got to know your country better.’

‘Against the day when you’d fight us!’ Launy struggled to keep hold of his feelings. ‘No doubt you think of yourself as a simple patriot, a loyal subject of your Queen and member of your tribe. And no doubt that’s true, as far as it goes. Underneath, though – in your quiet, relaxed-looking way, you Maurai are fanatics.’

He paused before he added: ‘My history professor in college had a saying, “Nothing fails like success.” He was right, and your civilization is the prime example. Your achievements were great in their time, but you’ve gotten fixated on them. You worship them more devoutly than you do your Triad. If anything might change the status quo in any real way, you’ll stamp it down … and congratulate yourselves on your stewardship of Earth.’

He snapped after air, gripped the rail, and turned his gaze back over the sea, away from his beleaguered land.

Terai stood mute, exhaling the fragrance. Finally he laid a hand on the Norrman’s shoulder and rumbled, ‘I’m not offended. Say what you like. You need to. I’m still your friend. I’ll take every chance that comes by to prove it.’