The Avengers of Carrig (7 page)

“Good. All that remains is for you to prove that you mean what you say. All right, Gus—it’s up to you now.”

Langenschmidt hauled himself to his feet “Come with me, Santos,” he said. “We’ll start at once.”

In some ways, Gus Langenschmidt thought, he was better off than Commandant Brzeska or anyone else tied to an on-planet base of the Corps. For instance, you seldom found that more than half the personnel of such a base really cared about the work they were doing—the rest were serving out their time, stacking up their future life ten years for one. Aboard a Patrol cruiser, people
all
cared about the work. They had to. If they didn’t, a single ten-year tour of operations would drive them crazy.

Also he was better off than the commandant because his job took him places; he might actually set foot on ten or a dozen different worlds in the course of a trip—under conditions of fantastic secrecy, naturally—while Brzeska was stuck under this same old dome.

There was one fundamental way, though, in which the commandant had the better of the bargain. If things went seriously wrong, it would be Brzeska’s responsibility as ranking officer in this Galactic sector. But it would be Gus Langenschmidt’s
fault.

He led Maddalena into the office that had been assigned to him for the period of his stay on the base-world, and flung himself into a chair. “Sit down,” he said, waving his hand vaguely. She complied nervously, and he looked her over again.

He was a long way from being sure about Brzeska’s reasoning. The commandant had said, in sum, “Granted she’s not what I’d pick to do your job if there was an alternative. But provided she’s handled right she isn’t hopeless. She’s just discovered how much she values other people’s good opinion of her, which she never imagined she might have to work for. When she first came here, she expected us all to look up to her because she’s beautiful and hails from Earth. We’ve blown that idea to smithereens, and now, in order to rebuild her ego and provide a substantial foundation for her self-esteem, she’s looking for a challenge. Yours is maybe a degree or two tougher
than what I had in mind for her, but at least she’s in the right frame of mind to tackle it with determination.”

Well, when the devil drives …

He said, hearing his voice harsh and grating, “What do you think of the work the Patrol does, and our on-planet agents, and everyone else in this benighted neck of the universe?”

Taken by surprise, she faltered, “Well—I guess …”

“Skip the stock answer you’re trying to remember from your original indoctrination. What have you been in the habit of saying about our work?”

Maddalena bit her lip, but raised her head and looked him straight in the eye. “When I first came out here, I said I couldn’t see why we should waste so much time worrying about the affairs of degenerates grubbing around in the mud. I don’t have that view anymore. But I guess I haven’t acquired another to put in its place.”

“Sounds like an honest answer,” Langenschmidt nodded. He didn’t reveal it, but he was better pleased by her frankness than he’d expected. “So we start level. You can’t figure out what makes people like me tick, and I can’t make out why people like you think they’re ticking at all. I saw you looking puzzled at my gray hair—no, don’t try to deny it.” He raised a hand to forestall her heated denial. “I could practically read off your face what you were asking yourself: If he’s old enough to go gray he must have stacked up centuries of credit—why doesn’t he quit? Well, I
have
been around quite a while, and I haven’t quit because I don’t know a better use to put a spare century of life to than the work I’m doing right now. Okay! I get the impression that while you probably know quite a lot about my beat in the abstract up there in your pretty hollow head, you don’t have any gut-reaction to those cold dispassionate facts they fed you. So I’ll start you from scratch, and if you feel inclined to lose interest because you’ve heard it all before,
don’t.
I’ve been there; I’ve seen and touched and smelt, and what I can tell you might one day save your life.”

He reached to thumb a switch and the office went dark. On one of the walls an offset stereo map of the local systems shone out. Picking up a lightwand, he used it to point at what he was talking about.

“That system has an inhabited planet. That one. That one. All six of that cluster there. Two more beyond that, and some more beyond that still, we’re pretty certain. That’s to say they were inhabited when we last checked, but struggling in conditions too bad for us to risk stationing agents among the survivors. By now an epidemic may have wiped one or more of the populations out. My beat doesn’t go quite so far.

“The reason why these populated worlds are grouped around here so far from the nearest nexus of civilized planets has presumably not escaped your attention—hm?”

She was going to have to stand a hell of a lot of needling, Maddalena reminded herself. As calmly as possible she said, “Zarathustra.”

“Exactly. It was in the direction of those systems that the bulk of the refugee ships from Zarathustra came seven and a half centuries ago—ships full of people who’d picked themselves off their home world when the sky was on fire and the seas were already practically boiling from the nova. In their understandable panic they were content to save their skins; consequently they arrived—those who did arrive somewhere—with practically nothing else. It was a fantastic achievement evacuating as many as they did manage to get away: something on the order of two and a quarter million in three thousand ships. For a long time we were convinced that only the handful that made it to Baucis Alpha on the solward side of Zarathustra had survived; it wasn’t until a hundred and twenty years ago that any of their descendants managed to signal us, and we learned how many more ships had reached habitable worlds.

“By then, of course, things had developed of their own accord. Maybe not to you, because I understand you’re still very young, but to most people who’ve been conditioned by the idea of longevity treatments, a century isnt a very long time. To man in his natural state, though, it’s more realistic to think of it in terms of generations—four, or even six. And thirty generations is quite long enough for Galactic to have evolved on these isolated worlds by way of dialects into individual languages, so that a speaker from the north doesn’t understand another from the south. That’s something they don’t stress enough in their
comfortable lecture-halls back on Earth: what a breakdown in communications can do to the very substance of language!

“Something else they don’t explain properly is this. When you’re sick with some local bug, hungry as hell because your spear broke off short in the last animal you went hunting for; and your fire went out in last Tuesday’s cloudburst so you couldn’t have cooked it even if you had caught it, you put down great-great-grandpa’s tales of flying between the stars and cities with millions of people in them as the senile ramblings of a crazy old man. You’re preoccupied with practical matters. You don’t even bother to read, because it makes more sense to spend the time practicing with your bow and arrows. As to learning to write—who are you going to write to? Everyone else is within shouting distance.

“Consequently, when we began investigating the worlds the refugees from Zarathustra had stumbled on, some of them were full of subhuman savages—dietary deficiencies in childhood mainly accounted for that. But others had sprouted some rather promising indigenous civilizations. They’d hardly had the opportunity to achieve much technology, of course; even if chance had included a mining engineer, for instance, among one party of survivors, it still is a long, long way from finding a vein of iron ore to refining high-grade steel. Further yet from a pitchblende strike to an atomic reactor!

“Well, among our other jobs the Patrol keeps an eye on these civilizations. One of the lessons it’s taken us longest to learn is that we don’t know everything. Moreover, Galactic society seems to some people to be settling into a kind of complacent apathy, with no incentive to strike out in new directions. For all we know, the society on one of these isolated worlds may come up with something we’ve missed—may go further into the human sciences than we’ve gone, for example, or develop biochemistry, as we’ve developed electronics, to a high level of accomplishment. So we haven’t interfered, or made our presence known, or done anything except watch.”

Maddalena felt the promised stir of resentment deep inside her. So far Langenschmidt had told her nothing that hadn’t been covered in her indoctrination before she
was posted here. And yet … somehow it
was
different, coming not from a faraway lecturer but from a man who cared enough about his subject to devote his hard-earned extra lifetime to it. She compelled herself to go on listening attentively.

“Keeping watch, though, is imperative. Two reasons. First is the brand-new angle these cultures give us on human social evolution. We’ve learned more about the way new inventions and discoveries affect a civilization from a century of studying the refugee worlds than we’ve learned from a millennium of analyzing terrestrial history. Second is that the Patrol aren’t the only people who’ve come this way.”

“Slaveworld,” Maddalena said.

“Quite right Slaveworld. Did somebody tell you that, or did you figure it out?”

“I guess somebody told me,” Maddalena muttered.

“Don’t look so sheepish. The point is you remembered it in context. Good! Of course, Slaveworld wasn’t one of the planets colonized from Zarathustra in a panic; its people were systematically kidnapped from their home worlds, forced to settle on a previously uninhabited planet, and all for the sake of a labor force to exploit its resources of light metals. But the plan worked for two hundred and twelve years and proved very profitable until the Patrol was set up and found out what was really going on.”

Langenschmidt settled himself more comfortably in his chair.

“Even with the Patrol keeping guard, there still remains the risk that someone on a world nearer to Earth might see the possibilities of dominating a superstitious and backward populace on a rich and almost virgin planet. As it happens, in the present case the risk is a very acute one. Not that they would get away with it for long—after all, the planet concerned is on my beat and I have five agents scattered over its surface. In a matter of decades at most we’d catch on. But mere knowledge of the existence of men from beyond the sky would foul things up dreadfully, since most of their local cults are founded on fables about starflight. In some of the societies where the relapse to barbarism was never total—this one I’m worried about in particular—they’re working free of the grip of superstition,
but intrusion from space would probably trigger a wave of religious hysteria and set them back a long way.

“That’s the particular system I’m talking about, by the way.” He moved his lightwand and laid its bright beam on a system about twenty-five parsecs from the base. “ZRP—Zarathustra Refugee Planet—number fourteen. Total population, confined to one major continent and the islands immediately adjacent, a little more than two million. They started with fewer than eight hundred; just one shipload set down there. Climatically very comfortable. Also it’s a Class A planet where human beings can eat indigenous plants and the flesh of at least some native animals. The largest city on the planet is a place called Carrig, which dominates the intersection between the chief north-to-south trade route and a navigable river up which the coastal folk trade their dried fish. Carrig has seventeen thousand people and controls an area equivalent to a small nation-state. That was where our agent died, or was killed, we’ve no idea which. Unfortunately he hadn’t made a report for some time; he was posing as a caravan master and he couldn’t very well use a communicator during a trip lasting three weeks over icy hill passes.

“Carrig, so our social geographers inform us, is sited where it’s virtually bound to become the capital city of its continent when communications are sufficiently advanced to permit the extension of government to the coast in all directions. There will probably be several small wars first, but with luck they may be disposed of before any weapons more advanced than bows and catapults can be deployed. Unfortunately the inhabitants of Carrig already possess extremely serviceable gliders—they stretch animal-skins over a framework of light native wood, like bamboo only stiffer, and if it occurs to them to drop liquid fire or poisoned darts from them … Sorry, I’m wandering from the point. I’m trying to tell you about the here-and-now. Where was I?”

“You were describing the location of Carrig,” Maddalena ventured.

“So I was. I was just about to say: Fourteen is building some mountains late in its existence. There’s a good deal of continental drift still in progress, and not far north of Carrig there’s a complex geological stress system that’s
created a fault area with consequent volcanic activity.

“And the volcanic range is crawling with high-number elements. In short, simple geology is making sure that when the local people achieve nuclear technics, Carrig will have the planet’s biggest supply of reactor-fuel right on its doorstep.”

“Slaveworld?” Maddalena said again.

“Well, it would be a temptation for some unscrupulous gang of adventurers, wouldn’t it? And if they decided to pull the trick, they’d have their labor force right on the spot.”

Maddalena hesitated. “But is there any evidence to suspect that someone actually has…?”

“None at all—I’m just illustrating why this is such a sensitive area that we desperately need a substitute agent to hold the fort there. What we have managed to establish as solid fact goes like this. Carrig’s society is organized on a clan-and-totem basis—seven rival clans, plus one nominally neutral and above politics, a kind of priestly caste. In an annual contest they determine the succession by a fantastic airborne duel between men in these gliders I mentioned to you and a winged animal called a parradile, sacred because it symbolizes the qualities of kingship. The winner’s clan becomes the cabinet, so to speak, for the following year and takes over the administration down to and including the collection of taxes. In theory, anyone can have a go at the king-parradile provided he observes certain formalities, but for a long time the practice has been to restrict competition to one select champion from each eligible clan.