Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra

by Poul Anderson

  "I've known Guards, some of whom have been on spaceport duty. They told me how carefully the Red Star folk are watched."

  "Are you sure Biocontrol will pull the switch?"

  "Sure enough. They can take a final dose of medicine and flee in the other ships."

  "If those were sabotaged, though—?"

  "Oh, not every man of them would ruin the world for sheer spite. Perhaps not even most. Especially if it meant their own deaths. But they all stand watches at the vats... and Dominic, all it needs is one fanatic, and there is more than one. No!" Luang discarded her cigarette and took his arm again, digging sharp nails into his flesh. "If ever I find you scheming any such lunacy, I will tell Kemul to break your neck. Now I am starving, and this is also the day when I should get my pill."

  Flandry sighed.

  He let her go first down the ladder to the trail. They walked precariously, unused to such steepness, and entered the crowds at lower levels. An engineer, in gaily embroidered tunic and the arrogance of a well-paid position, had a way cleared for him by two brawny miners. A yellow-robed priest walked slowly, counting his beads and droning a charm; from a cave mouth several meters above the path, a wrinkled wizard in astrological cloak made faces at him. A vendor cried his wares of fruit and rice, carried up from the valley at the ends of a yoke. A mother screamed and snatched her child from the unfenced edge of a precipice. Another woman squatted in a tunnel entrance and cooked over a tiny brazier. A third stood outside a jabbering joy cave and propositioned a gaping yokel from some jungle village. A smith sang invocations as he thrust a knife blade into the tempering solenoid. A rug seller sat in a booth and called his bargains to every passerby. High overhead, a bird of prey soared among the last ragged mists. Sunlight struck its wings and made them gold.

  From a vantage point Flandry could see how the city came to an end and the raw mountain slope stretched northward: cinders, pinnacles, and congealed lava flows. Across a few kilometers of wasteland he spied a concrete dyke, banking the magma channel. Smoke hazed it, as the liquid rock oozed downward and froze. Above all tiers of city and all naked scours lifted the volcanic cone. The wind was blowing its vapors away, which was one thing to thank the lean cold wind for.

  "Oh. This is the dispensary. I may as well get my medicine now."

  Flandry stopped under the Biocontrol insigne. Actually, he knew, Luang had a couple of days' grace yet, but the law permitted that much overlap. He also knew she had illicit pills and didn't really need to buy her ration—but only a dead man could fail to do so without drawing the instant notice of the authorities. He accompanied her through the rock-hewn entrance.

  The office beyond was small, luxuriously furnished in the low-legged cushions-and-matting style of Unan Besar. A door led to the living quarters which went along with this job; another door was built like a treasury vault's. Behind a desk sat a middle-aged man. He wore a white robe with an open hand pictured on the breast, and his pate was shaven; but the golden brand was not on his brow, for employees like him were not ordained members of Biocontrol.

  "Ah." He smiled at Luang. Most men did. "Good day. I have not seen you before, gracious lady."

  "My friend and I are newly arrived." With her to look at, Flandry didn't think the dispenser would notice him much. She counted ten silvers, the standard price, down on the table. The dispenser didn't check them for genuineness, as anyone else would have. If you passed bad money to Biocontrol, you'd be in trouble enough the next time! He activated a small electronic machine. Luang put her hands flat on a plate. The machine blinked and hummed, scanning them.

  Flandry could imagine the system for himself. Her print pattern was flashed by radio to a central electronic file in Kompong Timur. In seconds the file identified her, confirmed that she was indeed ready for her ration, established that she was not wanted by the Guards, made the appropriate addition to her tape, and sent back its okay. As the machine buzzed, Luang removed her hands from it. The dispenser took her money and went to the vault, which scanned his own fingers and opened for him. He came back without the coins, the door closed again, he gave Luang a blue capsule.

  "One moment, my dear, one moment. Allow me." He bustled over to fill a beaker with water. "There, now it will go down easier. Eh-h-h?" Flandry doubted if he was as attentive to the average citizen. At least, not judging from the way he used the opportunity to do a little pinching.

  "Where are you staying in our city, gracious lady?" he beamed.

  "For now, noble sir, at the Inn of the Nine Serpents." Luang was plainly unhappy at having to linger—but, equally plainly, you were never impolite to a dispenser. In law he had no rights over you. In practice, it was not unknown for a dispenser to block the signaler, so that GHQ never recorded a given visit, and then hand his personal enemy a capsule without contents.

  "Ah, so. Not the best. Not the best. Not suitable at all for a damsel like yourself. I must think about recommending a better place for you. Perhaps we could talk it over sometime?"

  Luang fluttered her lashes. "You honor me, sir. Alas, business compels me to hurry off. But... perhaps, indeed, later—?" She left while he was still catching his breath.

  Once outdoors, she spat. "Ugh! I'll want some arrack in my tea, to get the taste out!"

  "I should think you would be used to that sort of thing," said Flandry.

  He meant it in all thoughtless innocence, but she hissed like an angry snake and jerked free of him. "What the blue deuce?" he exclaimed. She slipped into the crowd. In half a minute, he had lost sight of her.

  IX

  He checked his stride. Chattering brown people thronged by, forcing him off the trailstreet and onto a detritus slope. After some while, he realized he was staring past the stone wall which kept these rocks off terraces below, downward to an ore processing plant. Its stack drooled yellow smoke, as if ambitious to be a volcano too. Nothing about it merited Flandry's unbroken attention.

  Well, he thought in a dull and remote fashion, I still haven't had my breakfast.

  He began trudging over the scree, paralleling the trail but in no mood to go back and jostle his way along it. The downslope on the other side of the low wall became steeper as he went, until it was a cliff dropping fifty meters to the next level of dwellings. Stones scrunched underfoot. The mountain filled half his world with black massiveness, the other half was sky.

  His first dismay—and, yes, he might as well admit it, his shock of pity for Luang and loneliness for himself—had receded enough for him to start calculating. Trouble was, he lacked data. If the girl had simply blown a gasket when he touched some unsuspected nerve, that was one thing. He might even use the reconciliation to advance his argument again, about escaping from Unan Besar. But if she had dropped him for good and all, he was in a bad situation. He couldn't guess if she had or not. A man thought he understood women, more or less, and then somebody like Luang showed up.

  Of course, if the worst comes to the worst—but that's just what it's likely to do—

  Hoy! What's this?

  Flandry stopped. Another man had left the trail and was walking across the slope. A boy, rather: couldn't be more than sixteen, with so round a face and slender a body. He looked as if he hadn't eaten lately and had hocked everything but his kilt. Yet that was of shimmery velvety cloth, not cheap at all. Odd.

  Something about his blind purposefulness jabbed understanding into Flandry. The Terran began to run. The boy sprang up on the wall. He stood there a moment, gazing into the wan sky of Unan Besar. Sunlight flooded across him. Then he jumped.

  Flandry did a belly whopper across the wall and caught an ankle. He almost went over too. "Oof!" he said, and lay draped with the boy squirming and swinging at the end of his arm. When his breath returned, he hauled his burden back over and dumped it on the ground. The boy gave one enormous shudder and passed out.

  A crowd was gathering, quite agog. "All right," panted Flandry, "all right, the show's over. I thank you for your kind attention. Anyone who wishes to pa
ss the hat is free to do so." A Guard shoved through. No mistaking that green kilt and medallion, the knife and club, or the built-in swagger.

  "What's this?" he said, in the manner of policemen the universe over.

  "Nothing," said Flandry. "The boy got a little reckless and nearly had an accident."

  "So? Looked to me as if he jumped."

  "Only a game. Boys," said Flandry with sparkling wit, "will be boys."

  "If he's contracted or enslaved, suicide would be an evasion of obligations and attempted suicide would rate a flogging."

  "No, he's free. I know him, Guardsman."

  "Even a free man has no right to jump within city limits. He might have hit somebody underneath him. He'd have made a mess for someone to clean up, that's certain. Both of you come with me now, and we'll look into this."

  Flandry's spine tingled. If he got himself arrested on so much as a malicious mopery charge, that was the end of the party. He smiled and reached inside his kilt pocket. "I swear it was only a near accident, Guardsman," he said. "And I'm a busy man." He extracted one of his purses. "I haven't time to argue this officially. Why don't you... ah... take ten silvers and go settle any claims there may be? It would be so much easier all around."

  "What? Do you mean—"

  "Quite right. The aggrieved parties ought to have at least two goldens between them. You know this city, Guardsman, and I'm a newcomer. You can find who deserves the payment. I beg you, do not burden my soul with debts I cannot settle." Flandry thrust the coins into his hand.

  "Ah. Ah, yes." The Guard nodded. "Yes, it would be best that way, wouldn't it? Seeing that no actual damage was done."

  "I am always pleased to meet a man of discretion." Flandry bowed. The Guard bowed. They parted with murmurs of mutual esteem. The crowd lost interest and continued on its various ways. Flandry knelt beside the boy, who was coming to, and cradled the dark head in his arms.

  "Take it easy, son," he advised.

  "Oa-he, tuan, why did you stop me?" A shaken whisper. "Now I must nerve myself all over again."

  "Ridiculous project," snorted Flandry. "Here, can you get up? Lean on me."

  The boy staggered to his feet. Flandry supported him. "When was your last meal?" he inquired.

  "I don't remember." The boy knuckled his eyes, like a small child.

  "Well, I was on my way to breakfast, which by now is more like luncheon. Come join me."

  The thin body stiffened. "A man of Ranau takes no beggar's wage."

  "I'm not offering charity, you gruntbrain. I want to feed you so you can talk rationally, which is the only way I can learn whether you're the person I want to hire for a certain job."

  Flandry looked away from the sudden, bitterly resisted tears. "Come!" he snapped. His guess had been right, the youngster was out of work and starving. A stranger to this area: obviously so, from the intricate foreign pattern of his batik and from his dialect. Well, an outlander might prove of some use to a stranded Imperialist.

  A tea house wasn't far off. At this sunny time of day, most of its customers sat on a ledge outside beneath giant red parasols, and looked down on a ravine full of clouds. Flandry and the boy took cushions at one table. "Tea with a jug of arrack to lace it," Flandry told the waiter. "And two of your best rijstaffels."

  "Two, sir?"

  "To begin with, anyhow." Flandry offered the boy a cigarette. It was refused. "What's your name, younker?"

  "Djuanda, son of Tembesi, who is chief ecologist on the Tree Where the Ketjils Nest, which is in Ranau." The head bowed above folded hands. "You are kind to a stranger, tuan."

  "I'm one myself." Flandry lit his own tobacco and reached for his tea cup as it arrived. "From, ah, Pegunungan Gradjugang, across the Tindjil Ocean. Name's Dominic. I came here in hopes of my fortune."

  "Half the world does, I think." Djuanda slurped his tea in the approved Pulaoic manner. His voice had strengthened already, which underlined the anger in it. "So half the world are fools."

  "Commoners have become rich men here, I am told."

  "One in a million, perhaps... for a while... until he loses it to a cheat. But the rest? They rot their lungs in the mines, and their wives and children cough like amphibians in the rice paddies, and at the end they are so far in debt they must become slaves. Oh, tuan, the sun hates Gunung Utara!"

  "What brought you, then?"

  Djuanda sighed. "I thought the Trees of Ranau were not high enough."

  "Eh?"

  "I mean... it is a saying of my folk. A tree which grows too high will topple at last. Surulangun Ridge is the earth-buried bole of such a tree. It fell a thousand years ago, three hundred meters tall, and the forest still bears the scars of its falling, and the Ridge is still hot from its slow decay. The old people made a parable of it, and told us not to strive beyond reason. But I always thought—how splendid the great tree must have been while it lived!"

  "So you ran away from home?"

  Djuanda looked at the fists clenched in his lap. "Yes. I had a little money, from my share of our trade with outland merchants. It got me passage here. Tuan, believe I never scorned my folk. I only thought they were too stiff in their ways. Surely modern engineering skills could be of value to us. We might build better houses, for example. And we ought to start industries which would bring more cash money to Ranau, so we could buy more of what the merchants offered—not merely toys and baubles, but better tools. This I told my father, but he would not hear of it, and at last I departed without his blessing."

  Djuanda glanced up again, anxious to justify himself. "Oh, I was not altogether foolish, tuan. I had written to the mine chiefs here, offering myself as an engineer apprentice. One of them had written back, agreeing to give me a position. I knew it would be humble, but I could learn in it. So I thought."

  "Have a drink," said Flandry, sloshing arrack into his guest's cup. "What happened?"

  Djuanda demurred. It took several minutes and numerous sips of the now high-octane tea before he broke down and admitted he'd been played for a sucker. The job was as advertised—but he had to buy equipment like respirators out of the company slop chest, at a staggering markup. Before long he was in debt. Someone took him out on a bender to forget his troubles, and steered him into a clip joint. What with one thing and another, Djuanda lost what he had, borrowed from a loan shark to recoup, lost that too, and finally faced the prospect of crawling back to the loan shark to borrow ten silvers for his next pill.

  "Couldn't you write home for help?" Flandry asked.

  The immature face grew stiff with pride. "I had defied my father's will, tuan. In the hearing of all our Tree, I said I was now a man able to look after myself. Did I not at least make my own way home again, his dignity would suffer as much as mine. No. I found another eager young man, the gods be pitiful toward him, who wanted my position and could pay me somewhat for it. I sold all I owned. It was still not enough. I went to the dispenser and told him he could keep my last pill, recording it as issued to me, for fifty goldens. He would only give me five." (Black market resale value, one hundred goldens, Flandry remembered. The poor rube from Ranau had had no concept of haggling.) "So I could not buy passage home. But at least I now had enough to clear my name from debt. I flung the coins in the moneylender's face. Then for days I tried to find other work, any work, but it was only offered to me if I would become a slave. No man of Ranau has ever been a slave. I went forth at last to die honorably. But you came by, tuan. So I suppose the gods do not want me yet," finished Djuanda naively.

  "I see." To cover his own need for a thinking space, as well as the boy's, Flandry raised his cup. "Confusion to moneylenders!"

  "Damnation to Biocontrol," said Djuanda, with a slight hiccough.

  "What?" Flandry set down his own cup and stared.

  "Nothing!" Fear rose in the dark liquid eyes. "Nothing, tuan! I said not a word!"

  This might bear further investigation, Flandry thought with excitement. I was wondering what the hell to do about this lad—coul
dn't have him tagging along with his big wet ears a-flap in the breeze—not when my scalp is still wanted—But this makes him, perhaps, a lucky find. The first I've heard who's said anything against Biocontrol itself. He's too young to have thought of it on his own. So... somewhere in his home town, at least one older person—probably more—has daydreamed about a revolution—

  The soup arrived. Djuanda forgot his terrors in attacking it. Flandry poured more liquor and ate at a calmer pace. While they waited for the main course, he said conversationally, "I've never heard of Ranau. Tell me about it...."

  A rijstaffel, properly made, is a noble dish requiring a couple of hours to eat. Then there was sherbet, with more tea and arrack. And a pair of strolling dancers came up to earn a few coppers by entertaining the wealthy man. And another jug of arrack seemed indicated. And there was a never ending string of toasts to drink.

  The white sun climbed to the zenith and toppled. Shadows rose under the mountain. When the sun went behind the crater, the sky was still blue, but it duskened rapidly and the evening star was kindled over eastern ridges. A low cold wind piped along ashen slopes, whipping the first streamers of cloud before it.

  Flandry stood up, relieving cramped muscles in a giant yawn. "We'll go back to my room," he suggested. Djuanda, unhardened to drinking, gave him a blurry look. Flandry laughed and tossed the boy his cloak. "Here, better put this on. You look as if you can stand an overnight nap. We'll talk further after sunrise." It seemed as good a way as any of putting Djuanda on the shelf while he assessed his own situation with respect to Luang. (And to Kemul. Never forget those enormous strangler's hands.) Alcohol glowed along Flandry's veins, but his new confidence could also be justified logically. If Luang had indeed decided to hate him—or even if she remained too stubborn about an escape attempt—Djuanda offered a ready-made entree to Ranau. What hints he had gotten suggested to Flandry that Ranau could prove useful. Very useful, perhaps.