Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire

by Jerry Pournelle

  "I have lived so long

  That I long for the eon

  Of rejected love

  When I was so unhappy,

  Remembering it fondly."

  She poured his tea to refill the tiny cup. "Excuse my liberties with a poem by Kiosuke. Do you have a poem for me or is your mind too young to partake of such frivolity?" The twilight inspired him. He did not know how to create a tanka.

  "Why is the horizon tree

  Fixed against the setting sun

  When it is the sun that is eternal?"

  Their talk concerned the college. Kasumi worried about the quality of the students. She knew that they were not good enough even to get into a Monastery on Lager. He laughed and reminded her of their different perspectives. What seemed a painful and difficult development to her was a miraculously swift growth to him.

  She held his elbow as they strolled along the lake to their solitary cabin which stood half on stilts. The only light she permitted was a candle behind a translucent wall. "Darkness is the friend of age. How fortunate I am. It is an old woman's dream to wake up one morning and find herself in an enchanted land with her favorite long-lost lover, still young of body, potent, and yet not wise enough to have recovered from her charms!"

  They made love on the mats, he amazed by her mellowness, she happy to be young again for an evening.

  "Remember that Engineer who accosted you in the streets the day you arrived on Lager? You had to run away to save yourself."

  "I do! I was terrified."

  "That was me."

  "Not you!"

  "Yeah. That's when I fell in love with you."

  "You beast!"

  "I was zapped out of my mind. I cooked up that whole scheme to sell you ships just to meet you."

  "But you left me!"

  "Don't men always leave their first love? They don't have anyone to compare her with to know what they are losing."

  "Jotar, you fool. Doesn't it terrify you to find men like yourself out among the stars?"

  "The glorious stars gave me you. Is your head comfy on my shoulder? Gods, but I've missed reaching through that barrier to touch you."

  When they reboarded their ship in orbit, Kasumi sent him as a gift her granddaughter by her fourth child. Yawahada was a vexing youth who, her grandmother confided in a covering note, coveted Jotar as a lover because he lived in slow-time and she was displeased with the men available to her and wished for a new generation of men to grow up while she remained young. Kasumi was dead and four new generations had risen before Yawahada of the budding breasts, now pregnant by Jotar, found a lover among her descendants who pleased her fickle heart.

  By then the college was shaping in ways so fast that Jotar spent his full time monitoring its growth. Every tenth day he checked for cultural deviations that might destroy its purpose. He had the power to change what he wanted. Cultural evolution had elevated him almost to the mystical status of Emperor as provided for in the bushido ethic that came with the college as Kasumi founded it—he was the god from slow-time who awoke at intervals and judged.

  After Kasumi's death Jotar began to run the breeding program with an iron hand by the best rules of animal genetics. He never interfered with the natural liaisons which arose among the Misubisis but he alone determined whose chromosomes were carried by every new embryo planted in a womb.

  He selected for physical resemblance to the Akirani and for physical perfection—visual acuity that lasted into old age, longevity, coordination, flawless metabolism. You cannot breed for an ability your environment does not require. Jotar required cooperation, craftsmanship, and analysis and so was able to select for those characteristics. The improvement from generation to generation was remarkable.

  Part of the improvement was cultural. As the college solved its problems of organizing and transmitting its knowledge it became easier for the less brilliant to do outstanding work.

  Part of the improvement was the interaction between culture and breeding. Jotar wanted people predisposed toward fine craftsmanship so he set up a microelectronics industry to build starship brains. He bred the best craftsmen and hardened the electronic specifications from generation to generation until his students were actually selling their extraordinary products in various ports of call. He invented the science of positive and negative mass microstructures to teach kalmakovian fabrications in the limited space available onboard. It was only an exercise in craftsmanship to allow him to sort out his most talented students but they stunned him by producing actual miniature stardrives.

  He never stopped delving through his brain for challenging projects. He had only fifty students but in fast-time they were the equivalent of 7500 students. They designed special ships to probe the fringes of black holes, automatic freighters, ships to penetrate regions of dense interstellar gas, ships to sample the atmospheres of stars, ships that could land on a planet, warships to meet the thrust of an alien invasion, tiny robot ships that could carry messages between the stars, a transport vehicle to carry 100,000 colonists. He listed every known ability required by a shipwright, monitored each individual for those abilities, and selected for them.

  He seized all opportunities. When they were in some stellar port he sold their services to repair damaged ships of designs they'd never seen before. They had to work with their hands in unfamiliar shops and sometimes right out there in spacesuits. He contracted them out to the hardest problems at the cheapest price. They never complained. They did what he told them to do. They would have died for him.

  The strange fast-time culture of the Misubisi took some devious turns. It developed a hedonistic period which produced a literature and spirit that grew up into a wisdom that got lost in a dark brooding upon the Japanese past that gave way to a rediscovery of simple crafts like pottery and multicolored wood block printing that led to a revival of dance and theater which produced a playwright who inspired political revolution and mutiny by twenty students whose places were filled by a new generation of loyalist fanatics whose children adopted the clothes and philosophical games of a passing port of call until their children resurrected an Akiran identity from an almost devout curiosity about the coming Akiran experience.

  And so they arrived at Znark Vasun, facing the empty Noir Gulf, Akira the most brilliant star in a sky forlorn of stars. Eight of the Misubisi jumped ship for passage in a freighter headed across the Gulf. It was the way they chose to reach the Akiran system alive to taste the final triumph of their millennia-long quest. One slender Misubisi woman, filled with a romantic longing for an imagined Akiran paradise, unwilling to die while she was so near to heaven, seduced Jotar and begged him to take her with him in slow-time. He knew the source of her devotion but didn't mind; he liked her company and her body. Another young girl stowed herself away in his cabin, unwilling to grow old and die without building a real ship. He found her nearly starving long after they had left Znark Vasun. She was too afraid of his wrath to come out of hiding.

  The remaining Misubisi continued in fast-time across the Noir Gulf as they always had and died there breeding new generations. The very last generation defied "the god beyond the barrier" by birthing a rash of "love children" who took the ship's population past seventy. They knew they were close to home.

  Jotar weathered it all. Later he laughed and called himself the longest surviving Japanese Emperor in human history. Halfway across the Gulf they entered the peninsula called The Finger Pointing Solward. No one was happier than Jotar when their goal star showed as a disk.

  Akira blazed on the portside.

  They were adrift, the kalmakovian velocity reconverted to rest mass. Photon rockets blazed to life, changing their velocity by fourteen kilometers per second so that they could go into orbit around the planet Ohonshu.

  They were greeted with incredulous enthusiasm. Akirani wept openly in the streets and on the farms. Two honor shuttles were sent to bring them down and, of course, they were landed at Tsumeshumo Beach where the first two shiploads of colonist
s had touched down.

  Each of the Misubisi were given a torch and they knew what to do. Wild with joy they ran along the beach to the Shrine on the Jodai Hill where they embraced and cried and gave their thanks. Jotar marveled. Now he could build his ship! He went into the Demon's Dance with all of his old Engineering Power. And when he was finished he did a flourish of twenty rapid handsprings.

  Panting, he saw that all Misubisis had frozen to watch him. For a second after he finished they stood still, then they bowed. Takenaga's lords were there. They too bowed. The son of the governor of the Rokakubutsu system bowed. Other lords of the outworld systems around Akira bowed.

  The first person to move was a graceful child, not yet a woman, who came forward with flowers. She kneeled and offered them, her eyes cast down, as she delivered a prepared speech thanking him for bringing them home. Strange how these people of his called this planet home.

  He tipped up her face and kissed her cheek and gave her the smile he had often given to women back on Lager when he wanted to encourage their attention. That was his first meeting with Misubisi Koriru. They became friends. When she was older, she became his mistress.

  And so here he was, too old to fight much anymore, philosophical about his last lost battle, going to a celebration that Koriru wanted him to go to when all he wanted to do was get drunk. Why was he starting to do whatever Koriru said?

  Ah, those Misubisi. Those scoundrels that Kasumi had planted and he had nourished. They listened with alertness to everything said by the great Jotar Plaek. They hopped to attention and instantly obeyed his every command. But they always came back and, so sorry, they could not do what he requested, and please would he allow them the honor of disemboweling themselves or some such rot. When he refused they humbly offered a second inferior course of action, which, it always turned out, they had already implemented.

  The ship had arrived to find a shockingly primitive technology on Akira—that was the trouble. Well, not primitive. One's choice of words could not be too strong. Incongruous was the word. Jotar fully expected to find a computer-guided wooden plow one of these days.

  Koriru drove him to the outskirts of Temputo, where they entered the procession that snaked through the city to the Imperial Palace grounds of the Takenagas. Happy people watched. Vendors scurried around selling hot delicacies to the crowd. Children watched from trees. Clowns wearing waldo leggings jumped about the procession to make the crowd laugh. Elaborate paper animals, some of them forty meters long, slithered among the noble daimyo. Computer-implanted birds of paradise added punctuation marks of color to the procession, flying back and forth, resting on the heads of children. Everybody waved paper accordion models of the Massaki Maru on the end of sticks.

  At the Palace, lesser daimyo were separated from greater daimyo for the feasting. Jotar was pillowed with the greatest, the nobles of the Akiran tributary systems: red Rokakubutsu, Hodo Reishitsu, desolate Iki Ta, and beautiful Butsudo. All of these men stood to gain enormous wealth from an Akiran shipbuilding industry. Wily old Takenaga himself—the man who had ended Akiran democracy and money wars between the merchant lords—even put in an appearance.

  They liked the ship. The talk was all about Imperial Akira. Now they could expand down The Finger. At the knuckle end of The Finger was the whole of the Remeden Drift. Power, commerce, glory.

  The moment came when the Massaki Maru was tugged from its assembly cocoon in space, already crewed for its maiden voyage to Butsudo. The Captain was in direct communication with Takenaga at the Palace.

  "Heika, we await your orders!"

  "Do us honor. Launch it!"

  "Hai! Suiginitsu! Generate the field!"

  "Hai!" came Suiginitsu's reply.

  The first starship built on the farside of the Noir Gulf faded from the screen.

  Jotar was not pleased. He was ashamed. Even in ancient times, had such an inferior ship ever come out of the shipyards at Lager? The acceleration of the Massaki Maru was shockingly sluggish. Its top velocity was ninety light speeds. Too many compromises had been made with reliability. Fast-time ruthlessly destroyed unreliable systems. He doubted that the ship would last more than five kilodays in service.

  The Misubisi collective decision had been that it was more economical to build such a ship than to import a better one from across the Noir Gulf. They were right if they manufactured at least twenty of them. Still he was ashamed. He would not have come to the rim of civilization for that.

  Later, as the confusion of the feast brought forth a new course of food, one of the Misubisi women came to him.

  "Hanano! You're as nervous as that day I found you starving in my closet! What is it? I know. You're afraid that load of junk will shed its skin all along the route to Butsudo! No matter. Eat! Sit with us! We'll spend an hour here together and afterwards rub pot bellies!"

  She fingered his hair affectionately. "If I had only known what a monster you were, I'd have chosen to die in the Gulf rather than throw myself at your mercy. Come." She tugged at him. "I beg of you to come with Koriru and me."

  "You will please come," said Koriru.

  They took him to one of the Palace gardens where some thirty of the Misubisi clan had gathered. More of them weren't there only because they had vowed the whole clan would never meet in one place at the same time. The handsome hulk of Misubisi Jihoku confronted them.

  "Hanano! You found him, the Disapproving One! Welcome. Koriru, you've kept him sober! How do we honor such self-sacrifice!"

  "I'm not sober, you pile of shit!" he retorted.

  "In my unworthy opinion, Plaek-san, when you can still walk, you are sober!"

  There was laughter, but nervous laughter. They knew he despised their ship, had not wanted it built.

  "If that junk heap just gets back here, I'll give all gold stars!" Jotar roared drunkenly. "Not for your engineering abilities, but for your monumental good luck!"

  Jihoku laughed. "Water on a frog's face! We have a millennia-long tradition of your insight into our inconsequential efforts, threads holding together a history longer than many planets, longer than Akira's, and throughout it all we have learned the joy and profit to ourselves of carrying you, oh noble bag of complaints, on our backs. Complain away!"

  The Misubisi cheered Jihoku good-naturedly. They were happy. They were celebrating. It was their day.

  Koriru stepped forward. "If I may be allowed to intrude, I have a poem from that tradition. Misubisi Kigyoshin of the twenty-third generation wrote it when the plans of his life's work were cut to pieces by Plaek-san. We were at Kinemon and they had met face to face.

  Built of my sinews

  Flowing over nebula

  My crafted starbridge

  Pleases not our tortoise god

  Whose dreams are swift as wishes.

  "He's been slashing at us since the mists of our time and his criticism has made us great!"

  "Hai!" yelled thirty voices.

  Hanano stepped forward, trembling. She had desperately wanted to build ships and had spent her time with him in the Gulf picking his brain. She was his top engineer. "We wish to give our tortoise god a gift tonight from our hearts and from the hearts of all our ancestors. It will not be good enough but it is our best."

  Jotar was sobering. They were afraid of him, really afraid of his disapproval. And yet . . . somehow . . . they were about to give him something . . . if he disapproved . . . they would be destroyed.

  It was a wooden box the size of a coffin and he opened it. The model of a starship floated out, glowing bluely. The name on the bow, printed not in their chicken-track script but in Anglish, was The Jotar Plaek. It was his ship. But it wasn't.

  "The field fins are wrong," he said.

  "I am so sorry to disagree," said Hanano, "but they are a solution to the field equations subject to the fabrication constraints we have assumed."

  The robed shipwrights were tense.

  "You're telling me that you're building this ship?" He stared about the garden crazil
y.

  "Hai!" said Hanano fiercely. "I have personally checked the entire critical path analysis. We know every problem that will arise, when it will arise, and how to solve that problem. The Plaek is to be a fifth-generation ship. We are to build ships of the Massaki Maru class for two more kilodays, at which time the Akiran craftsmen will be ready to build the next generation's prototype. Our fourth generation will be the first significant departure in starship design since Lager produced the Hammond variation. The fifth generation will be your ships."

  Jotar stared at her. "And how long is this going to take?"

  Jihoku spoke up. "I am very displeased to inform you that you will be dead by then." He bowed to express sorrow.

  "I guessed there was a catch."

  "We respectfully remind you," lashed out Koriru, "that you have asked thousands of us to die in this adventure. Only a handful of us survive!" She swept her arm about the room. "It does not matter that we die before the summit is reach. Banzai!" Ten thousand years. "It matters only that it is reached!"