Orion Shall Rise

by Poul Anderson

  The cook set the table. Savory odors filled the room. Because Jovain was brooding, Faylis returned to her book until the woman had left. A maid would appear in the morning, while Faylis still slept, to clean house and lay out her breakfast.

  Seated for dinner, she asked, ‘Now can you tell me, dear?’

  Wine clucked from the bottle in his hand, into crystal goblets. ‘I suppose I must,’ he answered. ‘No, I’m sorry, that was a wrong way to put it. I’ve had to prepare in secret. But I’m ready at last.’

  Fear breathed through her. ‘For what?’

  ‘I thought about telling you before,’ he sighed, ‘but – well –you’ve been unhappy enough, without lying awake nights wondering if I would ruinously overreach myself. Which could have happened, yes. But the alternative is powerlessness, the Captain reduced to a figurehead, control in the hands of the reactionaries.’ He clenched a fist on the tablecloth. That whiteness brought out how sallow his skin had become, how bulged and blue the veins. ‘We can’t let the Enric Restoration be undone, when the world stands in mortal danger.’

  ‘No, certainly not,’ she said, and tried to admire his resoluteness. He was like the hero of an old romance or epic. Except that, well, he didn’t blaze with will and vigor. He was a tired man stumbling along from day to day, ever more openly defied by Aerogens and groundlings both, hagridden by doubts of his own wisdom, even his own righteousness.

  ‘Eat,’ he urged. Faylis put food on her plate, despite having no appetite. Her throat felt constricted and her pulse stuttered.

  ‘Let me explain.’ His tone gained energy. ‘Several weeks ago, an element within the Skyholm staff decided they would not man their posts, they would not do their duty, in case of war or insurrection. Nor would they identify themselves, beyond a speaker. Oh, I have a close idea of who most are. But probably I have not guessed the name of every traitor, nor can I foresee how the rest will behave if matters come to a head.’

  Faylis heard knife and fork clatter from her grasp.

  Jovain nodded. ‘You understand,’ he said, ‘Well, I agreed with the speaker that nobody on either side would mention this. Public reaction would be unpredictable too. Meanwhile, you recall, I eased my demands on Devon, and the Bishop for his part was eager to compromise. Gaean missionaries remain banned, but Gaean centers are allowed for the use of believers.’

  ‘Yes. I… I was overjoyed.’

  ‘I remember.’ Jovain winced. ‘It hurt me to deceive you with a half-truth. For I repeat. I cannot and must not let the Captaincy weaken. Suppose, for example, the Northwesterners throw the allies back – the Norrmen and their atomic power – what then?’

  He took generous portions. ‘I went quietly to work,’ he told her. ‘Your brother was among my invaluable agents. The Espaynians proved cooperative. So did the Maurai. Their ambassador sent an immediate call to Wellantoa, and soon the Federation flew in the team I asked for. Tonight a full replacement staff is waiting down in Tournev. Tomorrow an airship will bring a contingent of them here, and I will tell the present staff to depart on it, and those who are now on ground duty to relinquish their posts and go home.’

  Dizziness swept over Faylis. ‘No, you can’t – can’t –’

  Jovain grinned. ‘Indeed I can. I have my Guardsmen. There’s nothing secret about the construction or operation of Skyholm. Any group of competent technicians can learn the tasks in a few days. And these will serve no factions in the Domain. They will answer to none but the Captain.’

  ‘The ground … replacement parts, food, airfields –’

  ‘We will command the Loi Valley – if necessary, through the Guard – and it has sufficient industries to maintain us. No rebel would dare attack it. ‘Jovain cut a piece of meat and chewed lustily. ‘Can you see what a burden off me this is, what a liberation?’

  Faylis covered her face. Oh, oh, oh, no. Skyholm against its own country!’

  ‘Not in the least.’ He reached across the table to pat her head. ‘Here, don’t cry, darling. Skyholm will render the same services as always, defense, communications, weather, safety monitoring, power supply, everything. We’ll merely put certain insubordinates in their place and reassert the ancient rights of the Captaincy. Wounds will be free to heal. In another year or two, the Domain will be more united, more happy, than ever before.’

  She raised her glance. Tears blurred the view of him and tasted bitter on her mouth. ‘I, thought, that, at first,’ she hiccoughed. ‘But it’s just gotten worse and worse. And now, foreigners in charge of Skyholm – How do you know they’ll get along with each other? How do you know they won’t turn on you?’

  Jovain regarded her for a while before he said slowly: ‘I admit we’ve a difficult transition ahead of us. And you have been isolated, a virtual prisoner. Do you wish to return to ground? The townhouse in Tournev, perhaps? I’ll miss you, but I shan’t be offended.’

  ‘No, never! I want to be with you!’

  He came around to her chairside and comforted her until the storm of weeping passed. Then they picked at food gone cold and found little to say. When that had been endured, Jovain rose.

  ‘No coffee for me,’ he said. ‘I must be early awake. A cognac, music, a sedate book, and bed.’

  Faylis stood too. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she replied. ‘I won’t be long.’ She would seek peace for herself in the Garden.

  Jovain embraced her gently and brushed lips across hers. His beard made the caress silky, but he smelled of stale sweat.

  She hurried down corridors and companionways, to escape their emptiness as soon as possible. Bare surfaces and bright lighting made them the more desolate. Dust and shadows might have held ghosts from the past, the safe past, but these reaches swarmed with the future, whose phantoms had no faces. Stairs clattered underfoot, ventilators whispered, Skyholm quivered.

  To reach the catwalk she had so often betrodden, rough vines, damp moss, greenery and its odors, was like returning home to her father’s forgiveness. Her pace, breath, heart slowed. Chill ebbed out of her. Muscles eased, one by one, and she grew aware that they had been hurting from tension but that this also was being soothed away.

  A bridge, another companionway, a rivulet, a walk among metal abstractions, birds and butterflies. Her course was for the bower which was especially hers and Jovain’s, where she could look down upon Gaea under the moon and become whole again.

  She emerged at a small openness. A fountain leaped and sang; rows of bonsai lined the path leading by the Winter Lord. A woman stood in contemplation of the statue. Faylis thought she recognized that lean little shape, though the back was turned. Talence Elsabet Ormun Iern’s Clanswoman, arctically correct toward me. No, please, I don’t want to meet her, not this night of all nights –

  Memory flashed. A booth was tucked in among the bushes, marked ‘Service.’ She had never had the curiosity to look inside, but there it was on her left, a refuge till Elsabet should take her presence elsewhere. Faylis scurried across turf, parted branches, opened the door, slipped through, and shut herself in. Once more she was breathing hard and her heart pounded.

  The booth was barely of a size for her. Fluorescents made its plastic walls sheen in dull verdancy. A ladder led steeply down a hatch. Warmth, moisture, and pungency drifted upward. Machinery – pumps? – throbbed.

  She might find a less uncomfortable place to wait on the lower level. At least it should be interesting to see what kept this bit of Gaea alive in the sky. Faylis gripped a handrail and descended.

  At first she could not make out the murky tangle of pipes, vats, switchboards, instruments, structural members. A forced draft blew heavily into her eyes, bearing chemical whiffs that stung them. She ventured a short distance along the passage before her, glanced aloft, and spied the roots. The entire ceiling was a mat of roots.

  Some were long, thick, gnarled like arthritic hands; but they ended in tendrils that the wind made stir, that reached down and brushed her. Most were short, thin, corpse-white, and they wriggled a
nd wriggled and wriggled. She was back in a nightmare, which went on beyond sight.

  A tiny voice wailed that here was only aeroponic cultivation, only to be expected. Her screams overrode it. The slowness wherewith she turned and ran – fingers caught at her ankles and tangled themselves in hair. They sought to hold her in this grave, forever.

  – She stumbled into the apartment. Jovain put aside his book and forgot his music. He hurried to go meet her. ‘Darling, darling, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I want to leave,’ said death-dry mouth and throat. ‘I must. Tomorrow. No later. Please, please, no later.’

  3

  Excursions above were scarce and brief. That was not due to fear of Maurai bombers. They came over when the weather was reasonably clear, which was a rare event in winter, and for the most part confined their attentions to areas where man had visibly been at work. This let them shatter buildings and crater roads, but the damage was confined to short radii. One crew missed its way and, by sheer accident, dropped its load near a launch tube. Steel and concrete stood firm. The camouflage layer of dirt was churned about but not blown from its retaining lattice.

  What kept folk below was their enterprise. Eygar Dreng and their own desire drove them like slaves. They took no more holidays, and generally a person did little away from the job except eat hastily and sleep.

  Yet some relaxation was required, especially for those who had the most intellectually demanding tasks, lest brains collapse into porridge. On such an evening, Plik called on Iern and Ronica. He had stopped singing in the Boot Heel, because now it had almost no trade.

  He had brought along a bottle. Iern snatched at it. ‘Hoy, you’re looking woebegone,’ Plik said. To the woman: ‘And you are no angel of hilarity, my dear. Why?’

  ‘The news,’ Iern snapped. He dashed whiskey into glasses. ‘Or the lack of it. Did you know, before the Judgment there were global news organizations? You could follow what was going on halfway around the planet from you. We get what trickles in, random items in radio messages or a post bloody near as random.’

  Plik squeezed his shoulder and said sympathetically, ‘Yes, tales of spreading chaos in the Domain. It must be hard to bear.’

  ‘And the Mong on the march!’

  ‘Eh? But we heard that days ago. And surely you also heard what Dreng claims. Given the difficult terrain and long supply lines easy to cut, he expects our men can delay them enough.’

  Iern plucked three folded sheets of paper off the bureau and flung them on the table. ‘Read this. It came today, in a military courier’s pouch. I don’t know by what route it reached him.’

  Plik folded his lankness onto one of the four straight-backed chairs the room boasted. Otherwise it held hardly more than a double bed, the small board, and storage for clothes. As a childless couple, its tenants rated nothing larger. Rohica had softened it with a reindeer hide on the floor, pictures and a map of Laska on the walls, a fine hardwood gun rack, a knot of bright cloth streamers to flutter in the whirr from the ventilator. Her old cat Pussifer curled asleep on the coverlet.

  Plik read, reread, laid the letter down, and reached for his drink. ‘A touching remembrance of a sweet if somewhat enigmatic little lady,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ Iern rasped. ‘She’s joined that army. She might be killed or, or anything.’

  Ronica, who had stayed seated, kept her face toward her man. ‘You really do care a lot, don’t you?’ she murmured. ‘You’ve been trying not to let on, but you’re no good at it.’

  ‘Don’t you care?’ Iern replied. ‘I mean, you’ve no cause for jealousy. Vanna and I got to be friends in Dulua. When you were gone and I needed a friend. That’s all.’

  Ronica chuckled. ‘I could wish for her sake you were lying, stud, but I believe you. Well, think. She ought to be reasonably safe for the time being, anyhow. She won’t be in front-line combat, will she? Not that I’d predict much of that at the outset. We’ve precious few strong-holds in the East, and they must be grossly undermanned where they aren’t deserted, what with reinforcements rushed to the West and to Orion. Probably the worst hazards the Mong will meet are blizzards and slides.’

  ‘But later the Norrmen must fight them,’ Plik said.

  ‘Yes,’ Iern muttered.

  ‘Can amateur, underequipped, ill-supplied war bands really stave them off for as long as necessary?’ Plik wondered. ‘And what if the Maurai bring up overwhelming strength of their own? I hear rumors of countries such as Beneghal offering them troops, not to speak of the unmobilized manpower scattered across their islands.’

  Iern tossed off the lower half of his drink. Slightly eased by its fieriness, he sat down too, poured himself a fresh shot, and looked across the table at Ronica. She smiled and reached to stroke his hand, as if signaling that come defeat and the quenching of the dream, they would still have each other and that was what most mattered. Light from the fluorescents lost its bleakness in her amber mane, in the highlights and curve-cast shadows of a blue robe she wore.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ he answered the Angleyman. ‘The equinox is our ally, but I think that come summer weather it will be touch and go on the battlefield. If those men can buy us a year, and if Orion Two tests out satisfactorily – at least to the extent that no major modifications prove necessary – then we can quite possibly do it, complete the rest and launch them in time. If not, then not. That’s why Dreng is pushing construction. We’ve nothing to lose by advancing our schedule. If it turns out we’ve committed to a faulty design, well, we’ll get no chance to alter it anyway.’

  ‘Do you mean that everything depends on the next mission?’

  ‘Yes. First, it will show whether the basic systems are good; but in view of the successful unmanned flight, they probably are. Second, most important, it will gather data we must have and don’t yet –data that, ordinarily, a research and development effort would accumulate through a series of trial shots. For instance, how the weapons should be installed – because time forces us to cancel the third flight, which would have provided us the parameters for that. In addition, the crew will handle those matters originally planned for Two, gaining experience in free fall, testing maneuverability, atmospherics –’

  Plik raised his palms. ‘May I be excused?’ he laughed. ‘You waste your technicalities on my pig-ignorance.’

  For her part, Ronica turned grave. ‘This means Iern, like the other pilots, damn near lives in a simulator,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet he could fly the real thing in his sleep by now. Meanwhile we engineers and computer programmers and life-support specialists and who-all else tinker away like demented beavers, and, Yasu, do we get a tongue-lashing when he finds out we’ve made the rig still worse!’

  Iern grew able to smile, in pride. ‘It’s frightening to spin out of control, even if it’s only pretense,’ he said, ‘but you beavers have become marvelous at gnawing. We’re practically ready.’

  Plik started. ‘Do you mean the ship will fly soon?’

  ‘Very soon. As I told you, we’re not installing any actual military equipment, only the experimental apparatus that should give us an idea of how to install it in the rest that are under construction. Work on Two herself has dwindled down to whatever afterthoughts the scientists are having. What may delay us is weather. Not a storm; Orion should be able to thunder her way through any wind. But we want the region thoroughly socked in. It wouldn’t do for the Maurai to identify the precise site. That could make their bombing effective.’

  ‘Pilot, copilot, three engineers, a computerman, their standbys, plus the data-collection team, eh? Do you expect you’ll be among them?’

  Iern sighed like a boy in love. ‘I can hope.’

  A knock on the door interrupted. For privacy’s sake, the panels were too thick to pass a called invitation. Ronica padded the short distance and opened up. Light from room and hall spilled across Wairoa.

  He waited for no word, but stepped directly through, closed and latched the door behind him, and halted m
otionless. They saw him clad in the coveralls usual here, though his feet were bare. The masked, disharmonic face looked the more strange above drab cloth and judas collar. Beneath an arm he carried a large book.

  ‘Well!’ Ronica said. ‘Howdy. Been quite a spell. Sit yourself and tipple.’

  Plik glowered. His companions had never before heard such hostility from him: ‘What harm do you intend?’

  ‘Hold, fellow,’ said Iern, shocked. ‘Never mind politics. Wairoa’s our trail-friend.’

  ‘He’s the friend of Mikli Karst,’ the Angleyman rasped. ‘Haven’t you noticed? They’re together every time Karst is in these caves.’

  ‘Well, m-m, Mikli did give us a rude incident –’

  Plik grinned acidly. ‘That could be taken as all in the day’s dirty work. But he’s evil, fundamentally evil. Can’t you sense it?’

  ‘Stop,’ Ronica ordered. ‘This is my home, and Iern’s. Have a seat, Wairoa, and if Plik won’t give you anything out of his bottle, we have one in a drawer.’ She took a fresh glass off the bureau and waved the Maurai toward the table.

  He did not step forward immediately. ‘I have something to show you, Iern,’ he said low. ‘But if the authorities learn about what we know, we could be dead. Maybe Ronica and Plik should go elsewhere.’

  The woman stared at him, strode to her man, and stood by his side. ‘No, thanks,’ she answered.

  Plik stroked his chin. ‘Conceivably I’ve misjudged you, Wairoa,’ he said. ‘I’m curious. I’m also careful of my neck, therefore discreet. Please let me listen.’

  Wairoa nodded, advanced, and took the fourth chair. Iern poured for him, but he ignored it. Ronica lowered herself and poised catlike. Iern shivered the least bit, while sweat broke out on his skin. Plik sat back and drank.

  ‘I must be quick,’ Wairoa said. Nevertheless, his tone remained level, the Angley softly accented. ‘Yes, I have cultivated Mikli Karst. It was easier to do than he would like to know. He has a jackdaw mind for facts, and of course he hoped for data useful against my side. But mainly, he is a very lonely man. Solipsists are.’