Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga

by Poul Anderson

  “Events, the upheaval, the uncertainty of everything, have made Paz tense,” Shan U observed. “Riots have happened. I will be glad to depart.”

  Diana nodded. She knew the history of the area, in outline. It had been founded in early Imperial times as a colony of veterans who wished to stay on Daedalus with their families after discharge. Each household received help in establishing itself, especially in converting its grant of land to agricultural usefulness. The practice had continued to this day.

  The trouble was, and worsened decade by decade, that the Empire recruited its defenders from an ever more motley set of human societies on Terra’s daughter and granddaughter planets. Like tended to settle down with like, and not to get along very well with unlike. The situation might have been happier, given more openings to the outside; but Daedalus, afar in a frontier region, was relatively isolated. Rivalries festered. Nonhumans had long since abandoned any thought of living in Paz.

  She remembered her mother quoting a quip of her father’s: “The Terran Empire is a huge melting pot. However, what appears to be melting is the pot.”

  After passing through a couple of hamlets where life seemed to go on about as usual, the road entered one whose walls were mortared stone underneath tile roofs. Nobody else was in sight. Doors stood barred, windows curtained or shuttered. Silence closed in, save for muttering thunder and the spat of raindrops on pavement. Shan U glanced around uneasily. “Best we make haste,” he counselled. “This section has suffered an outbreak of lawlessness, and peaceable people have withdrawn till the Navy can send a patrol.”

  Four men came out of a lane and deployed across the way. They were dirty, unkempt, sour-smelling; beard stubble showed that two had not used any inhibitor for some time. One kept a pistol tucked under his belt, one flourished a club, one carried a knife, while a bola danced in the hands of the fourth.

  “Well, well,” said the first. “Well, well, well. Just stop where you are, if you please.”

  Shan U crouched, mewed, bottled his tail. Chill crawled along Diana’s spine. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “Oh, nothing bad, nothing bad.” They slouched and sidled forward. “Welcome to our fair com-mu-nity, little lady. How’d you like a good time?”

  “Kindly let us by.”

  “Now, now, don’t be in such a rush.” The pistoleer stroked the butt of his weapon. His free thumb he jerked at the bola man, who grinned and sent a ball whistling through the air. “Easy, take it easy. Just a friendly warning. You make a rush to get away, and Chelo here, why, Chelo hasn’t had any live target to practice on for days. That thing could break your ankle, lady. All we want to do is show you a real good time, and maybe have a little fun with the monkey-cat. Come along, now.”

  Diana lunged. Her knife flew forth. It was Tigery steel, the back heavy and rasp-surfaced, the edge sharp enough to cut a floating hair. Suddenly the shirtfront of the pistoleer gushed red. He howled. She pushed him against the clubber. They fell together. She stepped on the Adam’s apple of the clubber, and heard it crack, in the course of attacking the knifeman. He slashed at her not unskillfully, but she parried, gave him the rasp across his face, and opened his fighting arm on the inside from elbow to wrist, after which he lost interest in anything but trying to stanch the blood. At this range the bola artist could not exercise his craft well. She severed the cord of a ball that snapped toward her, swayed back out of the way of the rest, and chased him several meters before letting him escape.

  “C’mon,” she said through the ululations at her feet, “let’s get out of here ’fore the cops arrive.”

  “Hee-yao!” gasped Shan U as they made off. “I thought I knew about handling trouble, but you—”

  “Oh, I don’t go lookin’ for fights,” Diana said. “In fact, I hate them. I’d’ve tried to talk or bluff us past those klongs peacefully. But they weren’t listenin’. Well, I grew up amongst Tigeries on Imhotep, and when they see danger clear before them, they don’t shilly-shally.”

  Targovi, I learned from you. Pain smote her. What has your fate been, dear brotherlin’?

  “Do you think the, the casualties will live?”

  “I didn’t try to do anything fatal, but there wasn’t time for finickin’, was there? Does it matter?”

  Beneath the coolness she felt a dull but strengthening shock. She hadn’t done anything like this before—not really—though Targovi had put her through lots of practice; and she had been around when a couple of Tigery brawls got bloody; and she had, herself, perforce been physically pretty emphatic three or four times when human males got the wrong idea and couldn’t be persuaded out of it otherwise. I’ll prob’ly have the shakes for a while, once the adrenalin wears off. But not for long, I hope. I mustn’t let what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen, prey on my mind. Nothin’ was done here except justice. The war, now, the war is different, people killin’ people they’ve got no grudge against and have never even met. Though some wars in history have been the lesser evil haven’t they?

  I don’t know, she thought in rising weariness. I simply don’t know. How good it’ll be, floatin’ quietly down the river with Axor, if that works out.

  She lost track of time and was a bit startled when they came to the waterfront. Warehouses bulked behind wharfs where a medley of craft lay tied and a hodgepodge of persons, human and nonhuman, bustled about. Machines scurried among them. Beyond, the stream flowed broad and brown. The opposite shore was dimmed by a thickening rain. Shan U registered a feline dislike of the wet, but Diana welcomed its warm sluicing. She felt cleansed.

  They reached Waterblossom. The riverboat was easily a hundred meters long, though so wide that that was not immediately evident. Four loading towers and a couple of three-tiered deckhouses did not much clutter her. The low freeboard was garishly painted in stripes of red and gold; the topworks were white, brass-trimmed. Her captain had said she was made of Terran and Cynthian woods, which Daedalan organisms did not attack, and driven by an electric engine. Should he be unable to recharge its capacitors otherwise, he carried a steam generator which could burn nearly anything.

  Half a dozen Cynthians and two humans were on deck, cheerily helping wheel a cage toward shelter from the rain. “Ay-ah, behold Wo Lia, the performer.” Shan U pointed. “Come aboard and meet her. We can all have a nice cup of alefruit cider.”

  Diana frowned. She hated the idea of confining any creature. Still, yon beast didn’t seem mistreated. More or less mansize, it hunkered on four limbs, black-furred, its head obscured by a heavy mane. She spied a short tail, and the forepaws had an odd, doubled-up look about them. Well, who could possibly know all the life forms, all the wonders of every kind, that filled the Imperial planets, let alone the galaxy and the universe? To fare forth—!

  Shan U led her over the gangplank. She passed near the cage.

  “Hs-s-s, little friend,” went a whisper. Coming from low in the lungs, it sounded like an animal noise to anybody who did not know the Toborko language. “Stay calm. We will talk later. Make sure you and your camarado take passage on this boat.”

  Barely, Diana reined herself in. The humans doubtless noticed how she tensed before relaxing, but could put that down to the exotic surroundings. The Cynthians doubtless paid no heed to her shifts in stance or expression.

  She forced herself to look afar, out again across the river. Underneath tangled strands of mane, the face in the cage was Targovi’s.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Waterblossom set forth after the thunderstorm that had been brewing reached explosion point and then spent itself. Sweeping the length of the valley with that swiftness and violence which the rapid rotation of the planet engendered, it turned the air altogether clear. From her place in the bows, Diana looked westward across a thousand kilometers or more.

  This was the first tranquil moment she had had in hours. The time had been frantic during which she made her way back to Aurea, located Axor, persuaded him—not easily, because her arguments were thin at best, a
nd her excitement didn’t reinforce them—to come along, got their baggage packed, returned through lightning-vivid cataracts of rain, settled into her tiny stateroom and improvised accommodations for the Wodenite down in the hold with the freight. Dinner had been served while the weather slacked off. Now the crew had cast loose and the boat was on her way.

  Diana couldn’t hear the engine, but its purr went as a subliminal quiver through her bare feet, and she did catch a faint gurgle from aft, the turbo drive at work. Speed was low, as ponderous and heavily laden as the hull was. At first traffic teemed, everything from rowboats to hydrofoils, but as Paz fell behind, the river rolled open, a brown stretch two kilometers wide from bank to forested bank, rippling around snags and sandbars, only a couple of barges and a timber raft under tow in the distance ahead. Quiet descended, and a measure of coolness. Flying creatures darted and skimmed, light amber on their wings.

  Never before had Diana seen so far over the horizonless world. Ahead of her, the river and its valley went on. As that view grew ever more remote, they dwindled, shrank together, became at last a shining thread between burnished green darknesses; yet still she could see them. Whenever an opening appeared in the woods brooding on either side of her, she likewise looked across immensity. Left, the green lightened as forest gave way to prairie that eventually blurred off in haziness. Right, beyond foothills, she glimpsed toylike snowpeaks, the mountain range that warded off the glaciers of the Daedalan ice age.

  The sinking sun kindled a sudden gleam far and far ahead. Why, that must be the ocean! Diana’s pulse quickened. Vapors made the disc golden-red, softened its glare till she could gaze directly. It spread itself out until it was a great step pyramid—and out and out, stretching to become arcs of luminance curving north and south around what would have been worldedge on another planet.

  There was no real night. Day slowly turned into a glimmering dusk, shadowless, starless apart from brilliant Imhotep and a few scattered points high overhead. She could easily have read by the light, though the range of vision contracted until everything beyond three or four kilometers—except Paz and Aurea behind her, a couple of villages before her, aglow—faded vaguely into dimness. Gradually sunshine became a complete ring. It was broadest and brightest in the direction of Patricius, a little wider than the disc by day. There it shone orange in hue, with a muted fierceness of white underneath. It narrowed and reddened as it swept away, until when it had closed itself opposite—some while after it had begun to form—it was a fiery streak. The sky near the ring went from pale blue sunside to purple darkside, shading toward violet at the zenith; below, the ring enclosed a darkness which was the planetary bulk.

  Presently the moon Icarus rose in a confusion of silver which coalesced to a half shield as it climbed.

  The forests ashore were full of shadow, but the river sheened like mercury on its murmurous course.

  Diana did not reckon up how long she stood rapt, watching the hours unfold. When the deck shivered beneath hoofs, and a bone-deep basso rumbled forth, she came back to herself with a shock like falling off a cliff.

  “Ah, a beautiful, incredible sight indeed,” said Axor. “What an artist the Creator is. This experience might almost justify our making the journey we are on.”

  Misgiving pierced Diana. “Almost?”

  “Why, I fear ours is a bootless expedition. I have been in the saloon, speaking with person after person, crew and passengers, including the two humans. None can attest to any objects that might be Foredweller remains. One did bespeak large ruins under the northern mountains, but another, who had actually been there, said they are remnants of a Terran mining operation, abandoned centuries ago when the ore gave out.” A sigh boomed. “We should have stayed on Imhotep and completed our investigation as planned. Now we are confined on Daedalus for an indefinite time and . . . I am no longer young.”

  Guilt took her, however lightly, by the throat. “I’m sorry.”

  Axor lifted a hand. “Oh, no, no, dear friend. I do not blame you in the least. You urged upon me what seemed best to you in your—your impetuosity. Nor do I pity myself. That is the most despicable of emotions. I should not have let you rush me into taking this passage. My mistake, not yours. And we are seeing wonders along the way.”

  Diana braced herself. “We may even find what you’re after,” she said, as stoutly as possible. “These are just regular river travelers aboard with us, and, uh, one outworlder. In Lulach we’ll find people who get around more on this planet.” She hesitated. “A Zacharian, maybe. That island is mysterious. You’ve talked to me about how the Ancient relics on Aeneas have influenced the whole culture of the settlers. Could something like that be on Zacharia?”

  “Well, we may hope.” A bit of cheer lifted in Axor’s tones. “‘And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity,’” he quoted. “Yet hope is no mean member of the triad.”

  Again she hated what she was doing to him, and wondered whether the need could ever justify it. She knew so little thus far. She had in fact, she realized, acted on faith—faith in Targovi—with hope for adventure and accomplishment, but damn small charity.

  She squared her shoulders. Maybe some Daedalan place really did hold something for her old pilgrim.

  Axor stretched luxuriously, an alarming sight if you didn’t know him. “I was thinking, before going to bed, I would like a swim,” he said. “Do you care to come along? I can easily catch up with the boat when we are finished, and carry you with me.”

  For a moment Diana was tempted. To frolic in yonder mightily sliding current—But she had no bathing suit, and didn’t want to risk the men aboard seeing her nude. They appeared decent enough, in a rough-hewn fashion. However, after the incident in Paz, she’d rather not give anybody the wrong impression.

  More important, she suddenly and sharply realized, here was her chance to talk to Targovi. “No, thanks,” she said in a haste that drew a quizzical glance. “I’m tired and, uh, I want to watch this spectacle more. Go ahead. Have fun.”

  The Wodenite undulated over the rail. It was astonishing how gracefully he could move when he chose. He entered the water with scarcely a splash. Suffused light shimmered off his scales and spinal sierra. His tail drove him cleanly away.

  Diana glanced aft. A Cynthian lookout perched atop the bridge, within which the pilot was occupied. Neither was paying her any attention, nor would they overhear low-voiced conversation. Everybody else had gone below; most of them were used to the magical ring, as she was not. She pattered over the planks.

  Behind the after deckhouse, an awning had been stretched to shelter the cage which held Wo Lia’s performing beast. It cast a degree of darkness over Targovi. She saw him as a shadowy figure rhythmically astir—exercises, to keep in condition while imprisoned. She hunkered down.

  His catlike eyes knew her instantly. “Aaah, s-s-s, at last,” he breathed, and crouched to face her. “How goes it, sprite?”

  “Oh, I’m all right, but awful puzzled, and poor Axor’s terribly discouraged,” she blurted. “What’s goin’ on, anyway?”

  He changed his language to Toborko, in a monotone which lost many nuances of that most musical tongue, but which would seem to a casual passerby as if the animal were crooning some weird song while the human, curious, listened.

  “Well deserve you what explanation I can give, O valiant child, the more so when I shall belike call upon you to render services and take hazards such as neither of us can foresee. Vast are the stakes in this game, but the rules poorly known and capriciously changeable.

  “You understand I have not been entirely a huckster but also an agent covert of Imperial Intelligence. My part was mainly to pass on to my superiors whatever I came across that seemed of possible interest, on this world near the Merseian marches and visited by beings of countless kinds. Yet did I help uncover one espionage undertaking, and found leads to others.

  “Nevertheless, when I scented something truly enormous upon the wi
nd, not only did my warnings go unheeded, I was forbidden to utter them or to continue in my search. More of that later, when we can talk freely and at length. Enough tonight that I have cause to believe Magnusson’s revolt is not simply another uprising of angry men against bad masters. And from Zacharia the forbidden come breaths of still more strangeness than erstwhile.

  “Aye, in Axor I saw a movable blind for myself. Attention will be upon him, but unlikely ever a suspicion. He can go in his harmlessness where most folk are banned, and I, I can perchance skulk behind. You, Diana Crowfeather, walk betwixt and between. What part you may play is, as yet, hidden in dawn-mists. I think you will play it well. You know my Tigery nature—sorry would I be to lose you, but sorry am I not for putting you at risk. Nor do I suppose you are ireful. You stand to win glory, with all that that may bring in its train. However this may be, clear it was that only through you could I recruit unwitting Axor.

  “Ill was our luck, that the rebellion erupted just as we were approaching Daedalus. Else we could have landed and gone our ways, disappearing into the hinterlands by virtue of nobody thinking to keep watch over us. As was, knowing what standard procedures are, I foresaw that my reappearance at the time of crisis would automatically provoke precautionary detention if naught else. Whereupon the gigantic plot I have smelled would roll unhindered onward.