The Solarians

by Norman Spinrad

  Kurowski’s furrowed old face creased into a sardonic smile as he watched Palmer stare at the map. No one could help but be moved to reverie at anything that brought Sol to mind. That was one of the reasons that the map was there; with the map at his back, Kurowski might absorb some of that awed respect accorded Sol.

  “Sorry, sir,” Palmer said, saluting. “It’s just that….”

  Marshal Kurowski nodded his large, white-maned head. “I know, Commander, I know,” he said. “One reason I have that map is to remind me of Sol. I think too many people these days don’t take The Promise seriously.” He waved Palmer to a rather hard and uncomfortable chair in front of the desk.

  Palmer sat down, still finding it hard to take his eyes off the map. He remembered that Kurowski was a Believer, the first Believer to be Supreme Commander in a decade, so they said….

  “Well, Commander Palmer,” Kurowski said sharply, “tell me about Sylvanna.”

  Palmer resisted the urge to look away from the High Marshal, and stared straight into his cold blue eyes.

  “There’s not really very much to be said. We lost the system, and we lost twenty-eight ships. We destroyed eighteen Doogs. I have no excuses to make, sir. We were outnumbered, as usual, and we were forced to retreat, as usual.”

  Kurowski forced a thin smile. “At ease, Commander,” he said. “I’m not putting you on the carpet. Hell, man, if you had pulled off a miracle and held the system, they would have breveted you to Marshal on the spot, awarded you the Confederal Medal of Honor and probably made you the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. We haven’t had a victory in seventeen years, and if we cashiered a fleet commander every time we lost a battle, we’d have no commanders left at this point.”

  Palmer fidgeted in the hardbacked chair. “Sir,” he said, “as I’ve said in the past, I think we’d have a better chance if we didn’t rely so heavily on computation. Take Sylvanna. At the beginning of the battle were able to force the Doogs into the sunward position. If I had been allowed to break formation and attack the Doog computership in the rear, with say half my forces, we might’ve been able to knock it out, and then we’d still be holding Sylvanna now, instead of….”

  Kurowski sighed heavily. “Don’t be juvenile, Commander,” he snapped. “You know as well as I do that even I can’t make a move in violation of computation ‘recommendations.’ I don’t like it any more than you do, but even High Marshals aren’t immune to courts-martial.”

  “But sir, even Computation admits that best estimates show that in another century and a half, we’ll have lost The War, and the Doogs will completely wipe us out. What do we have to lose?”

  “Don’t you believe in The Promise?” Kurowski asked.

  Palmer started to mumble the conventional reply. Then something made him stop. “Sir? May I be completely frank? I mean, I know that you’re a Believer, and no disrespect intended…. That is….”

  “Come on Commander, spit it out!” Kurowski barked. “You’re entitled to your opinions, and by damn, I’m entitled to hear them.”

  “Very well sir. The plain truth is that I don’t. After all, we haven’t heard a peep out of Fortress Sol for nearly two hundred and seventy years. I think that The Promise was just a way of rationalizing Sol’s cowardice when they pulled out of The War. I don’t believe in secret weapons until I see them. If they really haven’t abandoned us to the Doogs, why don’t they do something? Why do they keep the Sol system completely closed off to us? How do we know that they haven’t just made a deal?”

  “A deal? With whom? The Doogs?“

  “Yes, sir. Why not? The Duglaari agree to leave Sol alone, and in return, Sol pulls out of The War, and closes itself completely to all interstellar contact. They throw us to the wolves, and save their own skins.”

  “You ever talked to a Doog, Commander?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well,” sighed Kurowski, “if you had, you’d know why what you suggest is totally impossible. The Doogs started this war with one objective, and one objective only: to completely eliminate the human race. Down to the last planet. Down to the last man. The Doogs…, well they may be mammals like us, they may breathe the same air and thrive in the same temperature range, but their minds work on totally different premises. To them, there are only two kinds of organisms in the Universe: Duglaari and vermin. We are vermin. Would we make deals with cockroaches? If there’s one thing we’ve learned in three hundred years, it’s that you just can’t negotiate with the Doogs.”

  “Well then, why did Sol pull out of The War? If they really face extermination too, why don’t they fight? Why did they quit and leave us with nothing but empty words? ‘We will turn inward and build for Man a fortress in his home system, an impregnable redoubt that will, when the time is right, send forth its hosts to destroy the might of Duglaar, completely and forever.’ Even the language sounds phony. Sure, they’ve built a fortress, but not for Man. For Solarians only.”

  Kurowski shrugged. “I don’t know all the answers,” he said. “Who does? All we really know is that thirty years after The War started, there was some kind of lightning revolution on Earth. We don’t even know what the revolutionaries stood for, it was all over so fast. The leader, MacDay—all we know about hint is that everyone who met him was completely awed by him, and found his motivations completely beyond comprehension. He pulled Sol out of The War, issued The Promise, sealed off the Sol system, and that’s the last we’ve heard from Sol for nearly three hundred years. The way I see it, you have two alternatives. You can believe in The Promise, and then you have the hope that someday, somehow, the tide of The War will turn. Or you can believe that The Promise is just so many empty words, in which case you must resign yourself to the idea of Man’s eventual extinction at the hands of the Duglaari, since all our computations assure us that we cannot win. Most people prefer hope to resignation.”

  “Sir,” said Palmer softly, “do you really believe that the es. You caari are better than we are?”

  “I certainly do not!” roared Kurowski. “It’s just simple mathematics. Three hundred years ago, when our races first met, Man held two hundred fifty-eight systems. The Doogs had three hundred and sixty. Man had had interstellar travel for a hundred and thirty one years; the Doogs had had star-ships for nearly three centuries. There were about a hundred billion Men, and almost two hundred billion Duglaari. They were an older race, a bigger race, and they had a big head start. That doesn’t mean they’re any better than us, Commander! I don’t want to hear that again! An individual man is in every way a match for an individual Doog. They just had the good luck to evolve a little bit ahead of us. That’s all it is—luck, and more planets, more ships, more men.”

  “Sol understood that pretty quickly, didn’t it?” Palmer said bitterly. “They realized that they were the furthest of all Human systems from the Duglaari. So they figured that we colonials could hold them off for a few centuries, with our planets and our ships and our blood, while they sat on their fat cans and piously prayed for a miracle.”

  “Commander,” Kurowski said testily, “we all know that The War is just a holding action, but we’ve got to believe that Sol is doing something. If we don’t, we might just as well lay right down and die. We….”

  The intercom buzzed insistently.

  “Damn,” Kurowski grunted, and picked up the receiver.

  Palmer watched as the High Marshal’s face passed from a scowl to puzzlement, to what was plainly numb amazement.

  Woodenly, Kurowski hung up the receiver.

  “Sir…?”

  “That was Detection Command,” Kurowski whispered hoarsely. “They’ve just picked up a strange ship that came out of Stasis-Space past the orbit of Olympia DC. It’s not one of ours.”

  “A Doog? One Doog attacking Olympia?”

  “It’s not a Doog,” Kurowski said softly. “They’ve made contact with the ship’s captain….”

  The High Marshal swiveled in his chair to stare dazedly at the map behind it.


  “The ship claims to be from Fortress Sol,” he said.

  Being the nerve center, the heart of the Human Confederation military effort, the system of Olympia was guarded by three full fleets of a hundred ships each. Moreover, each of the three inhabited planets in the system was further protected by swarms of intrasystem ships. Beyond that, Olympia III was a vast garrison, containing the greatest concentration of troops in the Confederation.

  A Duglaari attack on Olympia was unthinkable, at least at this stage of The War. It would be a suicide try, and the Doogs were far too methodical and calculating for that.

  Nevertheless, the Human Military Command was not about to take the strange ship’s declaration that it was from Fortress Sol at face value. The whole thing might just conceivably be some far-fetched Duglaari trick. No one had seen a Solarian ship, no one had even heard the voice of a single Solarian for nearly three centuries, and somehow, no matter how unlikely it was that the ship was really a Doog, it was far more unlikely that the ship was really from Sol.

  It was exactly as if the ship’s captain had blandly announced that he was the Messiah, Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha all rolled up into one neat package.

  Indeed, to most of the Human Confederation, Fortress Sol came pretty close to being just that. Mankind was a race doomed to extinction, with the added advantage that it knew it. Decade after decade, the number of Human-held systems dwindled and the size of the Duglaari Empire waxed. The Doogs had a third more ships, nearly twice the population. Better computers and more of them, and a monomaniacal urge to completely destroy their competitors, namely the human race.

  Man had one hope, and one hope only, however vain and superstitious that hope might be—Fortress Sol!

  Sol was the one unknown factor in the carefully calculated pattern of the Human-Duglaari War. Behind the screen of ships and mines that destroyed anything attempting to cross the orbit of Pluto, anything might be abuilding—a weapon that knocks off whole solar systems like clay pigeons, said some; an impenetrable shield of invulnerability, said others; an unbelievably huge armada of robot ships; Conversion Bombs; a virus deadly to Doogs but harmless to men—the catalogue was limited only by the ability of frustrated men to imagine super-weapons.

  And now, after two hundred and seventy years, the hosts of Fortress Sol had at last broken their isolation and sent…one ship?

  The Human Military Command was taking no chances. The Solarian ship was escorted all the way to Olympia III by sixty warships armed to the teeth and ready to shoot at the slightest hint of a trick.

  The moment it landed at the deepspace port outside the south wall of Pentagon City, it was surrounded by a full division of troops, including twenty tanks, and even three unwieldy portable lasecannons.

  High Marshal Kurowski awaited the Solarians at the far end of a corridor of armed soldiers, whose presence was only partly ceremonial. Kurowski was flanked by the Chief of Computation, Lauris Maizel, and Gaston K’nala, the Systemic Defense Commander. Directly behind these three were eight Theater Commanders, and behind them were the seven Fleet Commanders who happened to be in the Olympia system at the time, including Jay Palmer.

  There was something about the whole scene that Palmer could not help finding scandalously entertaining. Behind him was the titanic bulk of Pentagon City, in front, acres of soldiers in olive battle fatigues, tanks, lasecannons…. And all of this military might surrounding one very small ship colored the luminous grass-green of Fortress Sol.

  Palmer could not conceive of anything emerging from that ship that would not be a ludicrous anticlimax.

  And then a port opened and six Solarians stepped out.

  The troops seemed to quiver imperceptibly. The assembled dignitaries wilted ever so slightly. High Marshal Kurowski ran his tongue tentatively over his lips.

  Palmer felt the…otherness. There was an aura about the Solarians that was instantly apparent but impossible to define. They seemed six ordinary human beings, three men, three women. Two of the women—the busty blond and the tall, willowy redhead—might be called striking, but not super-normally so. The third woman was a quite plain-looking, mousey-haired girl. Two of the men were also quite ordinary looking: a slight, sandy-haired man well under six feet; a darker, chunkier man with a thin black moustache. The third man was somewhat more impressive—tall, very well-built, with huge luminous green eyes set deep under craggy brows, and a large expressive mouth—but he too was nothing supernormal.

  They were dressed in simple green tunics; the men wore low boots, the women sandals. The men’s tunics were cut loosely, the women’s tight enough to be interesting without being in bad taste.

  Everything, every major and minor detail about the Solarians was quite ordinary.

  Except the total effect.

  They moved as if they owned the Universe, as if they had casually inherited it generations ago. They smiled to themselves as they surveyed the military display before them as if it were a pageant of particularly clever trained monkeys. The group of Solarians radiated a calm confidence that was far beyond arrogance.

  They sauntered casually up to where the official party stood, and yet the very casualness seemed to convey the power of a full-scale military parade.

  “I am High Marshal Luke Kurowski, Coordinating Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Human Military Command,” Kurowski said stiffly and uneasily.

  The Solarian with the great green eyes parted his full lips in the ghost of a grin.

  “I am called Lingo,” he said. “Dirk Lingo.”

  “You are the captain of the ship?” Kurowski said. “You are in charge?” It immediately seemed a ludicrous question to Palmer. The man called Lingo radiated authority as a star radiates light.

  “I am Leader,” Lingo said. It sounded unmistakeably like a title. “Robin Morel,” he said conversationally, smiling at the redhead. “Fran Shannon.” He waved his hand in the direction of the mousey-haired girl. “Raul Oga,” Lingo said, nodding at the man with the black moustache.

  “And this is Max Bergstrom and Linda Dortin,” he said, giving the blond girl and the sandy-haired man some kind of cryptic signal with his eyebrows.

  Max Bergstrom and Linda Dortin ran their eyes slowly over the official party, in a strange kind of unison, as if they were reading some secret language engraved on the men’s foreheads. Palmer could see a puzzled uneasiness ripple in waves across the face of the official party as the gaze of the Solarians passed over them.

  Then they were looking straight at him.

  He noticed that both pairs of eyes were virtually identical—large, calm and brown, with tiny flecks of blue in the irises. A curious tension flickered across his mind. Then something in his head seemed to laugh warmly, and finally something sensuous and languid stroked his mind, like the hand of a woman caressing a kitten….

  Then the two Solarians averted their eyes and the feeling was gone.

  “W-Welcome to Olympia,” stammered Kurowski dazedly.

  “Thank you,” said Lingo, staring up at the bulk of Pentagon City with a wry grin on his face. “This…ah…edifice is most impressive. A fitting monument to…er…a certain” mentality. We have nothing like it in the Sol system.”

  It did not at all sound like a compliment.

  “May I ask just why you’ve come here, after three centuries of isolation?” asked Kurowski, recovering some of his martial stiffness. “Surely not just to offer opinions on architecture?”

  Lingo laughed. It was a deep, musical laugh, full of complicated and disquieting undertones.

  “Why, why do you think we’ve come?” he said. “To win The War, of course.”

  “To win The War?” grunted Kurowski dubiously. “Just the six of you?”

  “Just the six of us,” said Lingo evenly. “More simply would not materially affect our mission.”

  “You expect us to swallow that?” snapped Kurowski. “After three centuries of doing nothing, after three centuries of leaving us to the mercy of the Doogs, after three cen
turies of…. Sol has the gall to send six people to tell the Confederation how to fight The War? Six….”

  “Marshal Kurowski,” interrupted Lingo, “are you winning The War now? Since you are not, any change will only improve your chances.”

  “And just what do you propose to do?”

  “We have a plan,” said Lingo. “And we have the means to

  carry it out. Or perhaps I should say we are the means of carrying it out.”

  “And just what is this plan?”

  Dirk Lingo smiled disarmingly. “Surely,” he said, “there are better places to discuss such matters than standing on a landing field. Also, I think this is a matter for your final authority to consider…. Some Council, or Executive Board, or….?”

  “I could call a General Staff meeting,” Kurowski suggested grudgingly.

  “That should do nicely,” replied Lingo. “Shall we go inside?”

  And without waiting for an answer, Lingo turned his back on Kurowski and walked towards the entrance to Pentagon City with the other Solarians in his wake. He did not bother to look back to see if the High Marshal and the official party were following.

  But they were.

  Palmer and the other lesser officers trailed after them, in something of a fog, much as Kurowski trailed after Lingo and company.

  As a junior officer aspiring to higher rank, Palmer knew a virtuoso performance when he saw one. In a few short minutes of perfunctory conversation, Dirk Lingo had, with nothing to back him up at all, established himself as Kurowski’s equal in rank, at the very least. And he had done it as if it were merely his natural due, as if it were the most natural and obvious thing in the Universe for an unknown Solarian to treat the Coordinating Commander-in-Chief of the combined military forces of the entire Confederation like…like a junior Fleet Commander!

  Chapter III

  THE GENERAL Staff Meeting Room (L-38, R-4, Room 173) was suitably impressive. The ceiling was a huge duplicate of the wall map in Kurowski’s office. One entire wall was draped with a huge Confederation flag—a five pointed yellow star in a blue field. A huge crescent-shaped duroplast table, with built-in autosecs and a recessed viewscreen filled the better part of the room.