Starfarers (55 page)

“I see what you mean, sir.”

“I doubt you do, except very vaguely. Well, you’ll learn. Don’t expect any favoritism.”

“I don’t want any!” Panthos exclaimed.

Firix overlooked the breach of military manners, this time, and finished: “I’m far too busy for it. I will try to get you assignments suited to your degree of experience and to developing you as an officer.” His features unbent. “For your part, you’ll come to dinner this evening. I’ve no end of questions,
family, the estates, friends, everything, even the animals and adapts.”

In the course of the next year or so Panthos learned about homesickness. Telepresence was thin rations when you never had the bodily reality. Besides, a man was generally too tired at day’s end to make a call, which would have been at an inconvenient antipodal hour anyway. Or he had to attend some social function or he and his fellow juniors were taking their much-needed relaxation or he was playing with a joygirl or—whatever it was.

He also learned that maintaining the Coordinator’s peace involved more than policing the Solar System.

At first he was stationed safely in Sanusco, meeting few natives other than servants, purveyors, and gentry, Jensuized in greater or lesser degree. Going on patrol through the streets, warrens, and sublevels, he discovered that the inhabitants were not a picturesque, undifferentiated rabble but individuals, who belonged to ancient cultures and held by ancient faiths. This education was interesting, occasionally delightful, now and then dangerous. He acquitted himself well, acquired the basics of two important languages, and was put in command of a platoon. They went widely over the continent as need arose, to assist a garrison in difficulties or to apply their special skills directly.

They went at last to Tenoya.

Firix first gave Panthos an intensive private briefing. “It’s as nasty a hole as you’ll find anywhere,” the Executive said. “Aswarm with fanatics. Arods, you know. Nowadays their priests don’t preach insurgency, but they do tell and retell how their valiant ancestors resisted the Pacification, and it wouldn’t take a very hot spark to detonate the whole region. If this Seladorian business gets out of hand, that could just possibly be it.”

Panthos frowned, searching a memory lately overburdened. “Seladorians? A cult, aren’t they, split off from Arodism, but peaceful?”

The Executive scowled. “Peaceful in theory. In practice, unshakeably determined. And only partly Arodish. They’ve
taken notions and practices from a wide range. Their prophet’s father was a Kithman who left his ship to marry an Arodish woman. That made them outcasts in her people’s eyes, and they had to move to Kith Town. She never felt at home there, and after he died young she returned to Arodia with her son. I can imagine the influences on him and in him. It doesn’t help matters a bit that in the end Selador was martyred.

“Now the Seladorians in Tenoya have begun actively expanding their area of cultivation. That’s brought on conflict with their neighbors, which has brought on killings. Retaliating for several deaths, a band of believers has wrecked a number of robots belonging to Arods, and even some municipal machinery. Their creed has technophobic implications, and the extremists among them are mechanoclasts.

“The city’s aboil. The garrison’s barely able to keep a semblance of order. A control team has to go in and attack the trouble at its heart. I’d frankly prefer a more seasoned man, but every one of them is engaged elsewhere. And this could be the making of your career, Panthos.”

Ardency blazed. “Thank you, sir!”

The session went on for a pair of hours. At the end, when they parted, Firix said low, “I wish it didn’t have to be you. Not that I don’t have confidence in you, but—your mother’s been my favorite niece.”

“I’ll be fine, sir,” Panthos assured him. He snapped to attention and lifted his arm in salute. “Service to the Coordinator.”

Firix’s response was correct but without fire. Perhaps he was thinking of that painted giggler who sat in the Uldan Palace.

Panthos chose a slow transport for the flight to his destination. It gave him the time and the equipment-carrying capacity for direct mnemonic input. He arrived with some knowledge of the political situation and well-informed about the geographies. Nonetheless, what he saw from aloft struck him hard.

Perhaps it was the westward desolation, a rain-gullied
plain stretching farther than his sight, dust scudding between scattered shrubs and clumps of harsh grass. Eastward the land sank down to a former lake bottom. That vast expanse of moister soil was green, cropland and groves streaked with irrigation pipes and studded with units processing the materials the plants yielded. Attendant robots moved about; brief sparks flashed where metal reflected sunlight. After the throngs in Sanusco and other cities—and the castles, preserves, villages, and archaic human-worked plantations in their hinterlands—desert and sown felt alike forsaken. Thyria seemed light-years distant, a dream half remembered.

Perhaps it was Tenoya, sprawling over square kilometers. Toward the center, folk and vehicles beswarmed the streets. Tenants filled cyclopean buildings once devoted to other purposes but not yet fallen. Small houses made from wreckage huddled beneath. Here and there lifted the bulbous spire that marked a temple. Three antique towers, refurbished, soared in graceful lines and pastel hues close to the fortified garrison compound.

A haze blued the city core, dust and smoke, man sign. At night, Panthos knew, lights would flare hectic. But, more than the surrounding hectares of ruin and abandonment, this life shocked him. He thought of maggots in the corpse of a beautiful woman.

Enough. He had work to do.

The carrier set down in the compound. He led his men out, told them to wait, and reported to the summarian. “I suggest an immediate reconnaissance, sir,” he said. “We’re fully prepared, and in fact want some movement after all that sitting. It’ll familiarize us, and a show of force ought to make for a healthier attitude.”

“I’m not sure,” the senior officer replied slowly. “Yesterday we got word that Houer Kernaldi is in town. We don’t know when he arrived. Maybe days ago.”

The note of hopelessness, the acceptance of being pretty well bottled up within these walls, chilled Panthos. He kept his tone respectful. “Who, sir?”

“You haven’t heard of him? Houer Kernaldi. Double name, you notice. A Kithman by birth, but a Seladorian convert. He’s been evangelizing and organizing for a good ten years, while maintaining connections with his kinfolk.”

He must be a lonely one
, Panthos thought. If he’d abandoned the star ways, what had he left but tiny Kith Town and the rare ship from outside? Well, there were his fellow believers here on Earth, few though they were. And his god—or Atman, Entelechy, Ultimate Motive, Meaning, whatever the word was in various languages. The Executive and the educator program hadn’t told Panthos much about that. They didn’t know much. “A troublemaker, then, sir?”

“Not really, at least not by intent. He’s never preached sedition, and may well be trying to calm his followers down. It could have the opposite effect, as crazy as everybody in Lowtown is.”

“I definitely need to meet him. Permission to go out, sir?”

“I have orders to allow you broad discretion,” the summarian answered resignedly. “But remember, if you get into a broil, it may touch off general rioting, and if that happens, we may not be able to rescue you.”

Panthos doubted the most besotted fanatic would care to attack a band like his. Still, he should avoid provocation. He took them through the main gate in close order and at a slow pace, not thrusting through the crowds but passing through, causing people to move smoothly aside, as a boat parts the sea.

That was a wistful image. The summer sun burned in a bleached and empty sky. Shadows lay hard-edged. Heat seethed in air so dry that breath stung nostrils. It struck from walls, hammerblows. Stenches worsened with each step onward, unwashed humanity, rankly seasoned cookery, dung, offal, sometimes a dog or giant rat ripening in death. The natives clamored from shopstalls, shrilled at each other; the shuffle of their sandals mingled with wheel-creak from carts and blare from the occasional motor vehicle. They were mostly Arods, lean, of medium stature and light brown skin, black hair hanging braided, faces high in cheekbones and flat
in nose and slant in eyes, men generally in dingy white gowns, women in layers of gaudily striped cloth. A lively lot, Panthos admitted; hands waved, feet hopped, mouths moved incessantly. Sometimes a gaunt yellow desert dweller or a tall ranger from the northern bottomlands came by.

Briefly, Panthos felt lost—he, his troop, his civilization—among these and a hundred different foreignnesses around the globe, grains in a dust storm that blew on and on forever. Nonsense! He led the Coordinator’s men, constables of the Governance. Their two dozen embodied mastery.

Always awesome were the Warriors, two and a quarter meters tall, identical in thick body and stony countenance: adapts, their genes shaped not for civilian service but for battle. The riflemen were generally more useful, being more flexible in their ways. The flittermen, little fellows who looked as if the apparatus on their backs would soon crush them, were the least impressive. However, if things turned jeopardous, suddenly jets would lift them off the ground, whirlyblades deploy, and the opposition find itself covered from above.

Panthos marched in front, unarmored, bearing only a sidearm, the golden rings of Jensu on his cap like a target. That also belonged to the show.

Eastward the streets zigzagged down, narrowing into lanes, pavement cracked and pitted, until the platoon was in shadowed canyons under a ragged strip of sky. Walls gaped with holes, revealing the detritus behind. Panthos reviewed his data. Here was Lowtown, where war and quarrying had uncovered the remnants of earlier cities—before Tenoya, Arakoum; before Arakoum, Cago. … If collapse had not choked a building or if people had grubbed it clear, they occupied it afresh, roofed the top and shuttered the windows with whatever materials they could salvage, peered out at the newcomers, came forth and trailed him in a flock that grew steadily bigger, noisier, more hostile.

To them the constables were invaders. This quarter that they had made from ruins was itself centuries old.

Paceman Bokta advanced to the optionary’s side. “They’re in an ugly mood, sir,” he said.

Panthos nodded. “I can see that,” he replied. “And hear it and smell it.”

“Reminds me of once in Zembu, before your time, sir, when we were putting down Migoro’s Rebellion. On patrol through a district kind of like this. I never found out what set ’em off, but in an eyeblink a howling mob was at our throats. We had to shoot our way clear back to cantonment. Left four good men behind, torn to shreds.”

“Do you think we should withdraw?”

“Well, no, sir, can’t do that exactly. We could turn at the next intersection and take the first upbound street after that. They’ll suppose we’re only making a quick survey.” Bokta’s leathery countenance had stiffened. Plainly, he didn’t like the taste of what he advised.

“Do you know they will? These aren’t Zembui.”

“No, sir. Maybe they wouldn’t get bumptious. I just thought I should take leave to mention it.”

The veteran was no coward. Nor was a crack unit, forewarned, likely to suffer serious casualties. On the other hand, if they had to kill, the consequences could go far beyond serious. As never before, the loneliness of decision caught at Panthos.

He mustn’t hesitate. “This may be our last chance to find somebody who’ll negotiate,” he said. “We will proceed.”

“Yes, sir.” The paceman fell back into formation.

As if to bear him out, a noise awakened ahead. Raw yelps echoed between walls, above a growl that took chilly hold of spine and scalp. The throng dissolved. Men, the fewer women, and the yammering urchins shouted, jostled, ran toward the racket, disappeared down the crooked passages. Emptiness loomed and yawned.

Nobody was left to keep the platoon from returning to base, and return had become impossible. “Alert!” Panthos snapped. “Forward!” He broke into quicksteps. Boots thudded at his back.

The canyon opened. He had reached the Seladorian purlieu.

Another world. Another universe? Right, left, and behind, walls rose in their ravaged tiers like hills enclosing a valley. In front, afar, Panthos spied the lake bed, hazy green to the horizon. Green, too, were the terraces that descended intricately before him, but paler, the green of hardihood and frugality. These grasses, grains, bushes, and trees were not biosynthesizers, they were life in its own right, food for their cultivators. The single extravagance was flower beds, flaunting to the sun. Houses and utility buildings stood along paths, a layout planned for optimum use of space. They, too, were made from salvage, but sturdily and neatly, colored rose or yellow or blue.

Recalling what he had learned, Panthos guessed how the Seladorians had toiled, generation by generation, to create this oasis. More to the point today was their effort to expand farther. Yes, they had acquired lawful title to what they set about razing. That mattered nothing to the inhabitants they displaced, or to kindred and friends of the newly homeless. Besides, in Arodish eyes Seladorians were blasphemers. They wanted to abolish the machines on whose productivity depended the subsidies that kept poor folk alive. Drive them into the desert! Exterminate them! If it weren’t for the damned interfering Governance—

At first Panthos saw no rioters. They had spilled off onto lower terraces. Screams and cries tore through the heat. Smoke began to rise. The structures wouldn’t burn, but what was in them could, and it was ill to think about dwellers who hadn’t escaped.

He studied the map in his brain. “We’ll make for the bottom ledge,” he said. “Refugees will have. Hold your fire till I give the order.”

The platoon jogged across the uppermost terrace and scrambled down a stone stairway. Some of the mob raged below. They kept their distance from the constables, shrieking their hatred. Most were on the third level. Men surged from the homes they were plundering. Shouts; rocks and
debris thrown; the troopers glared and kept going. A bruise, an impact that drew blood, corpsmen could take it. For a while.