Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra

by Poul Anderson

  A breeze embraced her, scented by flowers, full of the sweet songs of guslars flitting ruddy to and from their nests in the vines. She sat back in her chair and thought, guilty at doing so, what a pity to spend such an hour on politics.

  Her uncle's feet slammed the planks. "Does Molitor imagine we'll never get another Olaf or Josip on the throne?" the Gospodar rumbled. "A clown or a cancer... and, once more, Policy Board, Admiralty, civil service bypassed, or terrorized, or corrupted. If we rely on the Navy for our whole defense, what defense will we have against future foolishness or tyranny? Let the foolishness go too far, and we'll have no defense at all."

  "Doesn't he speak about preventing any more civil wars?" Kossara ventured.

  Bodin spat an oath. "How much of a unified command is possible, in practical fact, on an interstellar scale? Every fleet admiral is a potential war lord. Shall we keep nothing to set against him?" He stopped. His fist thudded on a rail. "Molitor trusts nobody. That's what's behind this. So why should I trust him?"

  He turned about. His gaze smoldered at her. "Besides," he said, slowly, far down in his throat, "the time may come... the time may not be far off... when we need another civil war."}

  "No—" she whispered. "I can't remember more than... resentment among many. The Narodna Voyska has been a, a basic part of our society, ever since the Troubles. Squadron and regimental honors, rights, chapels, ceremonies—I'd stand formation on my unit's parade ground at sunset—us together, bugle calls, volley, pipes and drums, and while the flag came down, the litany for those of our dead we remembered that day—and often tears would run over my cheeks, even in winter when they froze."

  Flandry smiled lopsidedly. "Yes, I was a cadet once." He shook himself a bit. "Well. No doubt your militia intertwines with a lot of civilian matters, social and economic. For instance, I'd guess it doubles as constabulary in some areas, and is responsible for various public works, and—yes. Disbanding it would disrupt a great deal of your lives, on a practical as well as emotional level. His Majesty may not appreciate this enough. Germania doesn't contain your kind of society, and though he's seen a good many others, between us, I wouldn't call him a terribly imaginative man.

  "Still, I repeat, negotiations have not been closed. And whatever their upshot, don't you yourself have the imagination to see he means well? Why this fanatical hatred of yours? And how many Dennitzans share it?"

  "I don't know," Kossara said. "But personally, after what men of the Empire did to, to people I care about—and later to me—"

  "May I ask you to describe what you recall?" Flandry answered. She glared defiance. "You see, if nothing else, maybe I'll find out, and be able to prove to their superiors, those donnickers rate punishment for aggravated stupidity."

  He picked up a sheaf of papers on his desk and riffled them. The report on me must have violated my privacy more than I could ever do myself, she thought in sudden weariness. All right, let me tell him what little I can.

  {A cave in the mountains near Salmenbrok held the sparse gear which kept her and her fellows alive. They stood around her on a ledge outside, but except for Trohdwyr shadowy, no real faces or names upon them any more. Cliffs and crags loomed in darkling solidity, here and there a gnarled tree or a streak of snow tinged pink by a reddish sun high in a purple heaven. The wind thrust slow, strong, chill; it had not only an odor but a taste like metal. A cataract, white and green half a kilometer away, boomed loud through thick air that also shifted the pitch and timbre of every sound. Huddled in her parka, she felt how Diomedes drew on her more heavily than Dennitza, nearly two kilograms added to every ten.

  Eonan of the Lannachska poised almost clear in her mind. Yellow eyes aglow, wings unfurled for departure, he said in his shrill-accented Anglic: "You understand, therefore, how these things strike at the very life of my folk? And thus they touch our whole world. We thought the wars between Flock and Fleet were long buried. Now they stir again—"

  {Both moons were aloft and near the full, copper-colored, twice the seeming size of Mesyatz (or Luna), one slow, one hasty across a sky where few stars blinked and those in alien constellations. The night cold gnawed. Flames sputtered and sparked. Their light fetched Trohdwyr from darkness, where he sat on feet and tail in the cave mouth, roasting meat from the ration box. The smoke bore a sharp aroma. He said to Kossara and her fellow humans: "It's not for an old zmay to tell you wise heads how to handle a clutch of xenos. I'm here as naught but my lady's servant and bodyguard. However, if you want to keep peace among the natives, why not bring some Ythrians to explain Ythri really has no aim of backing any rebellion-minded faction?"

  Steve Johnson—no! Stefan Ivanovich. Why in the name of madness should she think of him as Steve Johnson?—replied out of the face she could not give a shape: "That'd have to be arranged officially. The resident can't on his own authority. He'd have to go through the sector governor. And I'm not sure if the sector governor wants Ythri—or Terra—to know how bad the situation is on Diomedes."

  "Besides," added -?-, "the effects aren't predictable, except they'd be far-reaching. We do have a full-scale cultural crisis here. Among nonhumans, at that."

  "Still," said a third man (woman? And was his/her nose really flat, eyes oblique, complexion tawny?) "whatever instincts and institutions they have, I think we can credit them—enough of them—with common sense. What we will need, however, is a least a partial solution to the Flock's difficulties. Otherwise, dashing their hopes of Ythrian help could drive them to... who knows what?" (If those features were not a mere trick of tattered memory, well, maybe this was a non-Dennitzan whom Uncle Bodin or his agents had engaged.)

  "Yes," Kossara opined, "the trick will be to stay on top of events."

  Was that the very night when the Imperial marines stormed them?

  ***

  {Or another night? Trohdwyr shouted, "Let go of my lady!" In the gloom he snatched forth his knife. A stun pistol sent him staggering out onto the ledge, to collapse beneath the moons. After a minute, quite deliberately, the marine lieutenant gave him a low-powered blaster shot in the belly.

  No surprise that Kossara didn't remember the fight which killed her companions. She knew only Trohdwyr, stirring awake again. His guts lay cooked below his ribs. After she tore loose from the grip upon her and fell to her knees beside him, she caught the smell. "Trohdwyr, dragan!" He coughed, could not speak, maybe could not know her through the pain that blinded him. She raised his head, hugged it close, felt the blunt spines press into her breasts. "Dwynafor, dwynafor, odhal tiv," she heard herself crazily croak.

  A man dragged her away. "Come along." She turned on him, spitting, fingers rigid for a karate attack. Another man got a lock on her from behind. The first cuffed her till the world rocked. "All that fuss over a xeno," he complained, and booted Trohdwyr for a while. She couldn't tell whether the ychan felt the blows; but his body jerked like a dropped puppet.

  {The office was cramped, its air stale. The commander of Intelligence said, "Nothing slow and easy for you, Vymezal. Treason's too urgent a matter; and traitors deserve no careful handling."

  "I am not—"

  "We'll soon find out. Take her away, O'Brien. I want her prepared for hypnoprobing."

  {Downward whirl through shrieks, thunders, flashes, pain and pain, down toward emptiness, but oh, she cannot reach blessed cool nothing; eternity has her.

  The Golden Face, the cinnabar eyes, an indigo plume above, a voice of mercy: "Rest, Kossara. Sleep. Forget." No more.

  {She was still dazed, numb, when the drumhead court-martial condemned her to life enslavement.}

  Flandry considered the papers in his hands. Her few dry words appeared to have turned him as impersonal, for he said in the same tone, expressionless, "Thank you. Not much left in your mind, is there? No explanation of your hatred for the Empire."

  "What do you mean?" exploded from her. "After what I told!"

  "Please," he said. "You're a bright, educated, reasonably objective person. Taking your memorie
s as correct—which they may not be; you could be recalling pieces of delirium—you should be able to entertain the possibility that you and your friends had the bad luck to meet fools and brutes such as infest every outfit. You should consider using established procedures to have them identified, traced, penalized. Unless, of course, you're so set in your attitude that this business seems typical, mere confirmation of what you already knew."

  He glanced up. "Have you been told exactly what's in this report on you? The Intelligence report, that is."

  "No," she got forth.

  "I didn't expect you would. It's secret. Let me give you a summary." His vision skimmed the sheets he flipped through as he recited:

  "Overtly, you and your attendant Trohdwyr arrived at Thursday Landing for a duly approved xenological research project on behalf of your, um, Shkola, among the Diomedeans of the Sea of Achan area. The declared motivation was that Dennitzans have lately opened trade with a comparable species near home, and want an idea of what to expect from continued impact of high-technology civilization on them. Quite normal. The Imperial resident provided you the customary assistance. He and his household depose that you were a charming guest who gave them no hint of bad intentions. However, you were soon off for the field. They never saw you again.

  "Meanwhile, Naval Intelligence was busy throughout that part of space. There was reason to suspect some kind of hostile operation, taking advantage of widespread disorganization caused by the war and not yet amended. Diomedes was certainly a trouble spot, secessionism steadily gaining strength in a principal society of the planet. Those revolutionaries seemed to hope for Ythrian support.

  "But other, more reliable sources indicated Ythri had nothing to do with this. Then who were the humans known, from loyal native witnesses, to be active on Diomedes? If not Avalonians, working for the Domain they live in, who?

  "With the help of informers, Intelligence agents tracked down a group of these subversives to a mountain hideout. Seeing what they took for a Merseian, they leaped to conclusions... not unjustified, it turned out. The gang resisted arrest and, except for you, perished in the fire fight. Blasters in an enclosed space like a cave—the marines were wearing combat armor and your companions were not. The fact that the suspects fought, under those circumstances, seems to prove they were as fanatical as your psychograph says you are.

  "Hypnoprobed, you revealed you were the deputy of your uncle the Gospodar, come to check on the progress. His idea was that Dennitzans posing as Avalonians could incite an uprising on Diomedes. This by itself would draw Imperial attention there. The apparent likelihood of Ythri being behind it would decoy considerable of our armed strength, too. Then at the right moment—you quoted your uncle simply as speaking of a ‘lever' to use on the Imperium, for getting concessions. But you spilled your belief—and you ought to know—that, if events broke favorably, he'd seize the chance to rebel. Depending on circumstances, he'd either try for the throne, or carry out the same plan as the late Duke Alfred was nursing along, to rip a sizable region loose from the Empire and place it under Merseian protection.

  "Which, of course"—Flandry lifted his gaze again—"would give the Roidhunate a bridgehead right in that frontier. Do you wonder that the treatment you got was rough?"

  Kossara sprang from her chair. "How crazy do you think we are?" she yelled.

  "We're bound for Diomedes to find out," he said.

  "Why not straight to Dennitza like an honest man?"

  "Others will, never fear. Detective work on an entire nation, or just on its leaders, takes personnel and patience. A singleton like me does best vis-a-vis a small operation, as I suppose the one on Diomedes necessarily is."

  Flandry's eyes narrowed. "If you want your liberty back, my dear, rather than being resold when I decide you're not worth your keep, you will cooperate," he said. "Think of it not as betraying your folk, but as helping save them from disastrously wrong-headed adventurers.

  "We have a libraryful of material on Diomedes aboard. Study it. Ponder it. Something may jog your memory; a lot that you've forgotten is probably not irretrievably lost. Or you should be able to make deductions—you're a smart girl—deductions about likely rendezvous points remaining, where we can snare more agents. Or, better yet, I'd guess: Diomedeans involved in the movement, never identified by our people, they should recognize you, if you show yourself in the proper ways. They should make contact and—do you see?"

  "Yes!" she screamed. "And I won't!"

  She fled.

  The man sat quiet for a while before he said to the empty air, "Very well, if you wish, Chives will bring you your meals in your cabin."

  VI

  As Flandry conned the Hooligan, Diomedes grew huge in the screens before him. Too heavily clouded for oceans and continents to show as anything but blurs, the dayside glowed amber-orange, with tinges of rose and violet, under the light of a dull sun. The nighted part gave pale whiteness back to moons and stars, reflections off ice and snow. When Kossara last came here, equinox was not long past; now absolute winter lay upon fully half the planet

  Flandry's attention was concentrated on piloting. Ordinarily he would have left that to the automatics, or to Chives if no ground-control facilities existed. But this time he must use both skill and the secret data he had commandeered back on Terra to elude the Imperial space sentries.

  Most were small detector-computer units in orbit, such as supervised traffic around any world of the Empire which got any appreciable amount of it, guarding against smugglers, hostiles, recklessness, or equipment failures. Flandry had long since rigged his speedster to evade them without much effort, given foreknowledge of their paths. But surely the unrest on Diomedes, the suspicion of outside interference, had caused spacecraft to be added. Sneaking past these required an artist. He enjoyed it.

  Just the same, somewhere at the back of awareness, memory rehearsed what he had learned about his goal. Pictures and passages of text flickered by:

  "Among the bodies which men have named Diomedes—among all the planets we know—in many respects, this one is unique.

  "Though not unusually old, the system is metal-poor. To explain that, Montoya suggested chemical fractionation of the original cloud of dust and gas by the electromagnetic action of a passing neutron star.... As a result, while Diomedes has a mass of 4.75 Terra, the low net density gives it a surface gravity of only 1.10 standard. However, so large an object was bound to generate an extensive atmosphere. Between gravitational potential resulting from a diameter twice Terran, and low temperature and irradiation resulting from the G8 sun, much gas was retained. Life has modified it. Today mean sea-level pressure is 6.2 bars; the partial pressures of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide are about the same as on Terra, the rest of the air consisting chiefly of neon....

  "Through some cosmic accident, the spin axis of Diomedes, like that of Uranus in the Solar System, lies nearly in the orbital plane. The arctic and antarctic circles thus almost coincide with the equator. In the course of a year 11 percent longer than Terra's, practically the whole of each hemisphere will be sunless for a period ranging from weeks to months. Chill even in summer, land and sea become so frigid in winter that all but highly specialized life-forms must either hibernate or migrate....

  "Progressive autochthonous cultures had brought Stone Age technology, the sole kind possible for them, to an astonishing sophistication. Once contacted by humans, they were eager to trade, originally for metals, subsequently for means to build modern industries of their own. Diomedes offers numerous organic substances, valuable for a variety of purposes, cheaper to buy from natives than to synthesize....

  "The biochemistry producing these compounds is only terrestroid in the most general sense. It consists of proteins in water solution, carbohydrates, lipids, etc. But few are nourishing to humans and many are toxic. They permeate the environment. A man cannot survive a drink of water or repeated breaths of air, unless he has received thorough immunization beforehand. (Of course, that includes
adaptation to the neon, which otherwise at this concentration would have ill effects too.) Short-term visitors prefer to rely on their basic antiallergen, helmets, protective clothing, and packaged rations.

  "The Diomedean must be similarly careful about materials from offplanet. In particular, most metals are poisonous to him. That he can use copper and iron anyway, as safely as we use beryllium or plutonium, is a tribute to his intelligence. But the precautions by themselves have inevitably joined those factors which force radical change upon ancient customs. Some cultures have adjusted without extreme stress. Others continue to suffer upheaval. Injustice and alienation bring dissension and violence...."

  Although, Flandry thought, if we Imperials packed up our toys and went home, everybody here would soon be a great deal worse off. There've been too many irreversible changes.

  You can't even sit still in this universe and not make waves.

  The sun was never down in summer; but Diomedes' 12 1/2 hour rotation spun it through a circle. At the point in space and time where Hooligan landed, sharply rising mountains to the south concealed the disc.

  The saloon was warm and scented. Nevertheless, what he saw in the screen made Flandry grimace and give an exaggerated shiver. "Brrr! No wonder climes like this foster Spartan virtues. The inhabitants have to be in training before they can emigrate and dispossess whoever lives on desirable real estate."

  "You can't appreciate, can you, here is home for the Lannachska that they only want to keep unruined," Kossara said.

  Couldn't she recognize a joke? Maybe not. She'd held aloof since he interviewed her, studying as he urged but saying nothing about what meaning she drew from it.