At the time appointed the escort returned. Two officers guided Davis. The passages through which he went fascinated him. Their opulence belonged to a wholly spaceborne civilization, sparing of mass, lavish with energy. Trellises of variously colored alloys, the lattices twined in curves that never repeated, lifted on either side to form the arcades giving access to three tiers of shops, worksteads, bistros, gambling dens, amusement parlors, and places less recognizable. In deck and overhead, light-shapes danced to a music that ranged from gut-deep basses to blade-sharp keening on no scale he could name. Curtains of radiance rippled in archways. Small globes of ball lightning whirled inside a transparent column. Along an uninhabited stretch he went surrounded by aurora, and the single sound was the hiss of it. Elsewhere a passage broadened into a plaza at whose middle sprang, cascaded, and roared a fountain of fire.
Though thronged, the ways felt uncrowded. Lunarians did not jostle, gesticulate, or speak loudly. Their clothing was little changed from the richness of olden days, but on every left breast, male, female, juvenile, he saw the badge of a phyle. They came from all over the Alpha Centaurian System, apart from Demeter and the lesser bodies claimed by Demetrians. While Zamok Sabyel’ was the castle of Phyle Ithar, it was also a city, entrepôt, market, cultural center, rendezvous for the entire race: wherefore Arcen and Yanir had combined to try storming it.
In one other detail, costume had altered. Most women wore an elegant stiletto. Most men wore a rapier. Those were not tools like Davis’. They were sometimes bloodied.
At the end he came to a door that was an iridescent sheet, three meters high. The bulkhead around it resembled mosaic, but the gaunt, big-eyed figures moved. The officers gestured and the door retracted. They ushered Davis through an entry decorated with calligraphy to the room beyond. There they saluted and turned back.
That chamber was a hemiellipsoid some twenty meters in length. From planters lining it, flowers, ferns, and trees grew lavishly, many arching halfway across the overhead or drooping down to form arbors. Lilies, azaleas, orchids, rhododendrons, bougainvillea, heliconia splashed rainbows into the green and scented the subtropical air. Willow, bamboo, dwarf maple soughed and swayed in ventilation’s breezes. Among them were cages wherein sang thrush, canary, nightingale. Butterflies fluttered at liberty. The only furnishings were a couch and table, the materials of them thin and mostly transparent, making them stand half lost against the garden. But, a shattering contrast, at the center of the rosy-hued deck gaped a well, sealed off with hyalon, that looked straight out into space. Passing it on his way to the couch, Davis saw the stars wheel by in their multitudes.
Rusaleth of Ithar rose and came fluidly to meet him. She matched his height, slender and supple as a whip save for the subtleties of hips and bosom. Hair fell in platinum waves past great amber eyes, Athene-chiseled features, long throat set off by a gold filigree collar. Her skin seemed twice white against an ankle-length deep-red velvyl gown. She bore no weapon that he could see.
Her greeting used musically accented English: “Welcome, my lord Captain Davis.”
He saluted after the manner of his kind, carefully took the hand she extended to him, and said, “Most gracious Lady Commander,” which was the best he could do. This close, he saw the traces of her years upon her, but they were slight, nearly invisible in the soft illumination.
Both stayed on their feet, common practice in low weight until sitting down was definitely indicated. Rusaleth’s smile relieved the cold purity of her countenance. In fact, he soon found that a bewildering play of expression was hers when she chose. “May your journey hither have been pleasant,” she said.
Davis grinned lopsidedly. “Well, it was quick, Lady Commander, once this meeting had been agreed on. We didn’t want to keep you waiting,” and risk a mercurial shift of mood or politics.
“Have you satisfaction in your lodging?”
“It’s luxurious. You’re receiving us very hospitably, especially on such short and, uh, pressing notice.”
Rusaleth arched her brows. “We are not stupid, lord Captain, which we would have been did we refuse.” Again she smiled, brilliantly, and took his elbow. “Come, here is refreshment before we dine.”
“Thank you.” Davis accompanied her to the table. It bore a crystal decanter, filled goblets, and delicacies. She raised a glass. He followed suit.
“Uwach yeia,” she toasted. “Aloft.”
“Happy endings,” he responded. Rims clinked together. When he sipped, the wine was aromatic, spicy, quick to make itself felt.
“Happy ending to our negotiations?” Rusaleth asked.
“What else?” Davis countered. “Otherwise, Lady Commander, there won’t be much happiness for anybody.”
“ ‘Negotiation’ may be a euphemism. Some would give to that which you bring the name ‘ultimatum.’“
“My lady!”
She captured his gaze. “Without offense, Captain, I deem you ill suited to unctuous words and devious maneuvers. The lord Guthrie knows his folk. If he chose you to speak for him to me—face to face rather than I with him over a time-lagged beam—then he intends a blunt conversation.”
Best meet this attack on its own ground. “Pardon me if I’m no diplomat, Lady Commander. It’s not my regular job.”
She nodded. “Well do I know.” Her tone was amicable. “You led your men shrewdly and valiantly”—after Guthrie decided to aid her phyle in its deadly quarrel with the Arcen and Yanir—”though they were but engineers and the like, virgin to combat. Certain of your tactics were naught less than lovely.”
He grimaced. That was not how he would describe using superlasers, explosives, rocks, and spaceship jets as weapons, or systematically exploiting the low acceleration tolerance of his opponents.
“You are a warrior born,” Rusaleth finished.
Davis shook his head. “No, my lady, never. I improvised, and I hated every millisecond. If it had been a real war, like what the histories tell of on Earth, instead of a few short actions, I wonder if I could have stood it. No, I’m just a spatial engineer.”
“Spoken like the lord Guthrie, with an ingenuousness I suspect is about as genuine as his,” she said merrily. “Are you perchance of his blood?”
“Yes, he, alive, was an ancestor of mine. But that’s true of most Demetrians by now, I suppose.”
“A lusty breed.” She drank.
Davis did too. Tingling in his veins, the wine gave impulse to resolution. “With respect, Lady Commander, since you take me for a charging bull, may I ask when we can start discussions? That wasn’t made clear in the remote communication.”
“We have commenced.”
He stared.
Her mien shifted from light to serious, if not quite grave. “You and I shall sup unattended and speak frankly. Can we arrive at agreement, all else is pro forma. Can we not— But that hour, that woe.”
“Uh . . . well, you have the authority to make a treaty on your own, I ... I think.” Would he ever really fathom this civilization? When she spoke of speaking openly, was it in earnest or a joke? “I don’t. We aren’t organized like that.”
Rusaleth nodded again. The wan locks slithered down her bosom. She tossed them back. “Yes, in such regard, we Lunarians are more honest.”
He looked his inquiry.
“The Centaurian Domain makes no pretense of being other than obedient, somewhat, to the overlings of whichever phyle is strongest at the moment,” she explained. “You Demetrians style yourselves a republic, yet is it imaginable that your Folkhouse would ever contravene the lord Guthrie?”
Davis felt abruptly on the defensive. “He gives us no reason to. He believes the main business of government is to let people alone.” Calming: “But—I see your meaning, Lady Commander. If I make recommendations that he accepts, we won’t get much argument on our planet.”
“Exactly thus, Captain.” Rusaleth smiled and took his arm anew. “Let us be seated.”
Side by side on the couch, they drank of the
ir wine, inhaled the flower-heavy air, listened to the birds, watched the tinted wings flutter by.
“Now, then,” said Rusaleth after a time. “You came to the help of Ithar, you Demetrians, because Arcen and Yanir are, or were, hostile to you. Their lords would fain end intercourse between the two races, holding that we have no more to gain thereby and much to dread. In evidence they cite what became of Luna, its polity engulfed, its ways extinguished by the neighbor more populous and wealthy. Have I put the matter starkly enough?”
“It’s not so simple, Lady Commander,” Davis argued. “If we’d let friction worsen—for instance, over the claim that Orain of Yanir was making in the asteroids—” He stopped. “But, yes, we can talk in those general terms. Of course Guthrie protects and furthers the interests of his people.”
“Of course.”
“And first and foremost among those interests is that, several centuries from now, they have got to be off Demeter.”
“Say on,” Rusaleth urged. “Fear not rousing anger. This pleases me.” Her nostrils dilated. If he was not a warrior by temperament, Davis thought, she was.
“We can’t afford to waste time and resources on conflict,” he stated. “And we do need Lunarian cooperation. For obvious reasons, your astronautics is ahead of ours. What could we do but help the faction that, at least, didn’t call for an open breach with us?”
“I will not hide that colleagues of mine in Ithar have contemplated it likewise.”
“Then may I add, Lady Commander, that we’ll keep on pursuing our interests? You know Guthrie is as ruthless as necessary.” He thought for a moment and decided he would say: “I’ll tell you one thing he told me. ‘If they insist on playing Kilkenny cats, we’ll play them off against each other. It won’t be hard to do. Eventually we’ll have tame survivors.’“
“Oh, grandly conceived!” cried Rusaleth, delighted. “Later you must describe Kilkenny cats to me. Still, I seize his intent. And yours, I presume?”
“Well,” Davis said, “Demeter is my home, my people.” His mother, lifetimes removed. “But our races don’t have to be in conflict. That’s what I’m here about.”
Once more she nodded. “Already has Ithar acknowledged this in principle. The question is, how far need the races, or should they, be in contact?”
“More than I suppose you prefer, my lady; but the next generation may feel differently. True, we no longer have much to exchange in the way of goods, we’re self-sufficient on both sides. Services, though— If you care about your descendants,” and Davis wondered whether she did, “you have every reason to work with us. Let me remind you, when the planets collide—one of them retrograde, remember—they’ll fill Centaurian space with the shards. Even for Lunarians, it’ll be dangerous, for millions of years to come. Do you really want all your eggs in one basket?”
She laughed. “Another delicious expression. The lord Guthrie’s, I daresay. Go on, Captain, I bid you.”
He looked straight at her. That, and the wine singing in him, made it an effort to stay businesslike. “Better join us in preparing. We’ve got resources to offer that you lack, including a larger population and a higher acceleration tolerance.”
“Robustness, yes,” she purred.
“Uh, investigating other stars, founding a new colony where possible— between us, our races have built the industrial base for it. We ought to start at once. It’ll take a couple hundred years at least.”
Eagerness blazed. “And if soon we begin, a sufficiency of heroes may yet be born. Much later will be too late.”
“I, I beg your pardon, my lady?”
“It is an ancient quandary,” she said. “What shall a society do when its heroic age draws to a close? Our forebears trekked hither, strove, suffered, died but first begot, and wrought gigantically, until today we reign in ampleness. What next? I believe you dwell in peace on Demeter only because you have your revered, immortal leader, the lord Guthrie, and the awesome presence of the Life Mother. Yet despite them, I learn, folk more and more go their own petty ways, whether into nature for an existence simple and contemplative or in the hectic selfishness of the towns. Now that their world is tamed, what is there to dream of and sacrifice for, when ultimately it is doomed? And thus the sense of despair creeps inward.”
Though she exaggerated, Davis realized, unprepared, that she had brains not merely for politics. “What . . . about you Lunarians?”
“Erstwhile we bred fewer fratricidal contentions.”
Joy leaped. “A fresh common purpose—keep the heroic age going—”
“In the face of reality.”
“Uh, m-m?”
“The nature of things, of this our universe.” Rusaleth pointed at the well where the stars went marching.
“Guthrie’s told me more than once,” Davis said, “he has a, a gut feeling, he calls it—that the universe isn’t as lifeless as the sophotects on Earth claim.”
“We cannot dismiss their word, whether or not we hate the solitude in it,” Rusaleth answered, instantly somber. “Their intellect has flared beyond our reach.”
“Guthrie said about that, uh, he said anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.”
Rusaleth threw back her head. Laughter pealed. “I’d fain meet him! He’s like a gust of the sea wind I’ve never felt save in a quivira. Failing him—” She gave Davis a sidelong glance and leaned closer.
Unsure, he said fast, “We get rumors you Lunarians are on the track of designs for real interstellar ships.”
“That lies outside my orbit,” she replied. “But since we shall be candid, you and I, seeking for a range of harmony—a physicist has told me he thinks we may become able to course on the very heels of light.”
“What?” exclaimed Davis. “How?”
“He spoke of transferring momentum between ship and cosmos, reaction against space itself. But his arts are not mine.”
Davis’ mind bounded to and fro. “Space? Virtual particles? We can get work out of the vacuum, that’s been known since the twentieth century, the Casimir effect—tiny, but— If something like your physicist’s idea is right, then the energy cost of reaching a given speed drops way down, and—”
“Can we reach agreement, I and you and the lord Guthrie, your scientists shall see the mathematics and the laboratory results. He warned me this is no full release. The energy needed, though far less, continues immense.”
“Obviously. A small vessel, similar to the one that brought the downloads to Demeter, could push light velocity. But if you tried to move a big ship, hundreds or thousands of bodies in suspended animation, no, it wouldn’t go. Even if it could be built, which I doubt, radiation leakage would cripple it and kill them. Besides, we’ve extended the time we can keep a suspend revivable, but to no more than about a hundred years, and background count and quantum effects make me think we never will get much beyond that.”
Rusaleth ran fingers across the back of his hand. “Ah, you are indeed an engineer,” she gibed gently.
Startled, he returned to immediacies. “Your pardon, Lady Commander. Limitations or no, it’s such an exciting prospect. If nothing else, it increases our exploratory range enormously. Keep your man at it, and we’ll see what we can do on our side.”
“First must come this meeting of minds that you seek, with an exchange of promises and hostages.”
“Hostages?”
Rusaleth smiled into his eyes. “Emissaries, spokespeople, if you will. Lunarians in satellite at Demeter, Demetrians out among us. They ought not find their service wearisome, as I trust I may prove to you.”
His temples thudded. “I, I do expect I’ll be here for some time while we, uh, discuss matters.”
“And indulge in other games,” she murmured. “Refill our glasses, lord Captain, that we may drink at leisure before we go to our supper and whatever else may follow.”
* * * *
61
It is evident from your recent communications that you and the limited artific
ial intelligences you employ no longer find us comprehensible. Unless you care for news of what unintegrated humans are left on Earth, and we project that that would be of no more significance to you than to us, further contact is purposeless and probably, for you, inadvisable.
* * * *
A
lthough larger and more powerful than anything had been at Sol before the exodus, its components extending across interplanetary space, the Astronomy Web at Alpha Centauri had found no more planets with oxygen in their atmospheres. Those that were known circled the stars 82 Eridani, Beta Hydri, and one in Puppis which had merely a catalogue number, HD44594. The colonists studied them intensively, learned much, and in due course began to explore them.
Harvest of Stars - [Harvest of Stars 01] Page 58
