Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga

by Poul Anderson

  He would have been equally surprised, and amused, by either legend.

  “Look,” one can imagine his ghost drawling, “we had to eat. For which purpose, it’s sort o’ helpful to keep your throat uncut, no? That was a spiny-tail period. Society’d fallen. And havin’ so far to fall, it hit bottom almighty hard. The ee-conomic basis for things like buildin’ spaceships wasn’t there any more. That meant little trade between planets. Which meant trouble on most of ’em. You let such go on for a century or two, snowballin’, and what’ve you got? A kettle o’ short-lived dwarf nations, that’s what—one-planet, one-continent, one-island nations; all of ’em one-lung for sure—where they haven’t collapsed even further. No more information-collatin’ services, so nobody can keep track o’ what’s happenin’ amongst those millions o’ suns. What few spaceships are left in workin’ order are naturally the most valuable objects in sight. So they naturally get acquired by the toughest men around who, bein’ what they are, are apt to use the ships for conquerin’ or plunderin’ . . . and complicate matters still worse.

  “Well,” and he pauses to stuff a pipe with Earthgrown tobacco, which is available in his particular Valhalla, “like everybody else, I just made the best o’ things as I found ’em. Fought? Sure. Grew up fightin’. I was born on a spaceship. My dad was from Lochlann, but outlawed after a family feud went sour. He hadn’t much choice but to turn pirate. One day I was in a landin’ party which got bushwhacked. Next I heard, I’d been sold into slavery. Had to take it from there. Got some lucky breaks after a while and worked ’em hard. Didn’t do too badly, by and large.

  “Mind you, though, I never belonged to one o’ those freaky cultures that’d taken to glorifyin’ combat for its own sake. In fact, once I’d gotten some power on Kraken, I was a lot more int’rested in startin’ trade again than in anything else. But neither did I mind the idea o’ fightin’, if we stood to gain by it, nor o’ collectin’ any loose piece o’ property that wasn’t too well defended. Also, willy-nilly, we were bound to get into brawls with other factions. Usually those happened a long ways from home. I saw to that. Better there than where I lived, no?

  “We didn’t always win, either. Sometimes we took a clobberin’. Like finally, what I’d reckon as about the worst time, I found myself skyhootin’ away from Sassania, in a damaged ship, alone except for a couple o’ wives. I shook pursuit in the Nebula. But when we came out on the other side, we were in a part o’ space that wasn’t known to us. Old Imperial territory still, o’ course, but that could mean anything. And we needed repairs. Once my ship’d been self-fixin’, as well as self-crewin’, self-pilotin’, self-navigatin,’ aye-ya, even self-aware. But that computer was long gone, together with a lot of other gear. We had to find us a place with a smidgin of industrial capacity, or we were done for.”

  The image in the viewscreens flickered so badly that Tom donned armor and went out for a direct look at the system he had entered.

  He liked being free in space anyway. He had more esthetic sense than he publicly admitted. The men of Kraken were quick to praise the beauty of a weapon or a woman, but would have considered it strange to spill time admiring a view rather than examining the scene for pitfalls and possibilities. In the hush and dreamlike liberty of weightlessness, Tom found an inner peace; and from this he turned outward, becoming one with the grandeur around him.

  After he had flitted a kilometer from it, Firedrake’s lean hull did not cut off much vista. But reflections, where energy beams had scored through black camouflage coating to the steel beneath, hurt his eye. . . . He looked away from ship and sun alike. It was a bright sun, intrinsic luminosity of two Sols, though the color was ruddy, like a gold and copper alloy. At a distance of one and a half astronomical units, it showed a disc thirty-four minutes wide; and no magnification, only a darkened faceplate, was necessary to see the flares that jetted from it. Corona and zodiacal light made a bronze cloud. That was not a typical main sequence star, Tom thought, though nothing in his background had equipped him to identify what the strangeness consisted of.

  Elsewhere glittered the remoter stars, multitudinous and many-colored in their high night. Tom’s gaze circled among them. Yes, yonder was Capella. Old Earth lay on the far side, a couple of hundred light-years from here. But he wanted home, to Kraken: much less of a trip, ten parsecs or so. He could have picked out its sun with the naked eye, as a minor member of that jewel-swarm, had the Nebula not stood between. The thundercloud mass reared gloomy and awesome athwart a quarter of heaven. And it might as well be a solid wall, if his vessel didn’t get fixed.

  That brought Tom’s attention back to the planet he was orbiting. It seemed enormous at this close remove, a thick crescent growing as the ship swung dayward, as if it were toppling upon him. The tints were green, blue, brown, but with an underlying red in the land areas that wasn’t entirely due to the sunlight color. Clouds banded the brightness of many seas; there was no true ocean. The southern polar cap was extensive. Yet it couldn’t be very deep, because its northern counterpart had almost disappeared with summer, albeit the axial tilt was a mere ten degrees. Atmosphere rimmed the horizon with purple. A tiny disc was heaving into sight, the farther of the two small moons.

  Impressive, yes. Habitable, probably according to the spectroscope, certainly according to the radio emissions on which he had homed. (They’d broken off several light-years away, but by then no doubt remained that this system was their origin, and this was the only possible world within the system.) Nonetheless—puzzling. In a way, daunting.

  The planet was actually a midget. Its equatorial diameter was 6810 kilometers, its mass 0.15 Terra. Nothing that size ought to have air and water enough for men.

  But there were men there. Or had been. Feeble and distorted though the broadcasts became, away off in space, Tom had caught Anglic words spoken with human mouths.

  He shrugged. One way to find out. Activating his impellers, he flitted back. His boots struck hull and clung. He free-walked to the forward manlock and so inboard.

  The interior gee-field was operational. Weight thrust his armor down onto his neck and shoulders. Yasmin heard him clatter and came to help him unsuit. He waved her back. “Don’t you see the frost on me? I been in planet shadow. Your finger’d stick to the metal, kid.” Not wearing radio earplugs, she didn’t hear him, but she got the idea and stood aside. Gauntleted, he stripped down to coverall and mukluks and lockered the space equipment. At the same time, he admired her.

  She was slight and dark, but prettier than he had realized at first. That was an effect of personality, reasserting itself after what happened in Anushirvan. The city had been not only the most beautiful and civilized, but the gayest on all Sassania; and her father was Nadjaf Kuli, the deputy governor. Now he was dead and his palace sacked, and she had fled for her life with one of her Shah’s defeated barbarian allies. Yet she was getting back the ability to laugh. Good stock, Tom thought; she’d bear him good sons.

  “Did you see trace of humans?” she asked. He had believed her Anglic bore a charming accent—it was not native to her—until he discovered that she had been taught the classical language. Her gazelle eyes flickered from the telescope he carried in one fist on to his battered and weatherbeaten face.

  “Trace, yes,” he answered bluntly. “Stumps of a few towns. They’d been hit with nukes.”

  “Oh-h-h. . . .”

  “Ease off, youngster.” He rumpled the flowing hair. “I couldn’t make out much, with nothin’ better’n these lenses. We’d already agreed the planet was likely raided, that time the broadcasts quit. Don’t mean they haven’t rebuilt a fair amount. I’d guess they have. The level o’, shall I say in two words, radio activity—” Tom paused. “You were supposed to smile at that,” he said in a wounded tone.

  “Well, may I smile at the second joke, instead?” she retorted impishly. They both chuckled. Her back grew straighter, in the drab one-piece garment that was all he had been able to give her, and somehow the strength of the c
urving nose dominated the tenderness of her mouth. “Please go on, my lord.”

  “Uh, you shouldn’t call me that. They’re free women on Kraken.”

  “So we were on Sassania. In fact, plural marriage—”

  “I know, I know. Let’s get on with business.” Tom started down the corridor. Yasmin accompanied him, less gracefully than she had moved at home. The field was set for Kraken weight, which was 1.25 standard. But she’d develop the muscles for it before long.

  He had gone through a wedding ceremony with her, once they were in space, at Dagny’s insistence. “Who else will the poor child have for a protector but you, the rest of her life? Surely you won’t turn her loose on any random planet. At the same time, she is aristocratic born. It’d humiliate her to become a plain concubine.” .

  “M-m-m . . . but the heirship problem—”

  “I like her myself, what little I’ve seen of her; and the Kuli barons always had an honorable name. I don’t think she’ll raise boys who’ll try to steal house rule from my sons.”

  As usual, Dagny was no doubt right.

  Anxious to swap findings with her, Tom hurried. The passage reached empty and echoing; air from the ventilators blew loud and chilled him; the stylized murals of gods and sea beasts had changed from bold to pathetic—now that only three people crewed this ship. But they were lucky to be alive—would not have been so, save for the primitive loyalty of his personal guardsmen, who died in their tracks while he ran through the burning city in search of Dagny—when the Pretender’s nonhuman mercenaries broke down the last defenses. He found his chief wife standing by the ship with a Mark IV thunderbolter, awaiting his return. She would not have left without him. Yasmin huddled at her feet. They managed to loose a few missiles as they lifted. But otherwise there was nothing to do but hope to fight another day. The damage that Firedrake sustained in running the enemy space fleet had made escape touch and go. The resulting absence of exterior force-fields and much interior homeostasis made the damage worse as they traveled. Either they found the wherewithal for repair here, or they stayed here.

  Tom said to Yasmin while he strode: “We couldn’t’ve picked up their radio so far out’s we did, less’n they’d had quite a lot, both talk and radar. That means they had a pretty broad industrial base. You don’t destroy that by scrubbin’ cities. Too many crossroads machine shops and so forth; too much skill spread through the population. I’d be surprised if this planet’s not on the way back up.”

  “But why haven’t they rebuilt any cities?”

  “Maybe they haven’t gotten that far yet. Been less’n ten years, you know. Or, ’course, they might’ve got knocked clear down to savagery. I’ve seen places where it happened. We’ll find out.”

  Walking beside the girl, Roan Tom did not look especially noteworthy, certainly not like the rover and trader chieftain whose name was already in the ballads of a dozen planets. He was of medium height, though so broad in shoulders and chest as to look stocky. From his father, he had the long head, wide face, high cheekbones, snub nose and beardlessness of the Lochlanna. But his mother, a freedwoman said to be of Hermetian stock, had given him dark-red hair, which was now thinning, and star-blue eyes. Only the right of those remained; a patch covered where the left had been. (Some day, somewhere, he’d find someone with the knowledge and facilities to grow him a new one!) He walked with the rolling gait of a Krakener, whose planet is mostly ocean, and bore the intertwining tattoos of his adopted people on most of his hide. A blaster and knife hung at his waist.

  Dagny was in the detector shack. Viewscreens might be malfunctioning, along with a lot else, but such instruments as the radionic, spectroscopic, magnetic and sonic were not integrated with ship circuitry. They had kept their accuracy, and she was expert—not educated, but rule-of-thumb expert—in their use.

  “Well, there,” she said, looking around the console at which she sat. “What’d you see?”

  Tom repeated in more detail what he had told Yasmin. Since Dagny spoke no Pelevah and only a little pidgin Anglic, while Yasmin had no Eylan, these two of his wives communicated with difficulty. Maybe that was why they got along so well. “And how ’bout you?” he finished.

  “I caught a flash of radiocast. Seemed like two stations communicating from either end of a continental-size area.”

  “Still, somebody is able to chat a bit,” Tom said. “Hopeful.” He lounged against the doorframe. “Anyone spot us, d’ you think?”

  Dagny grinned. “What do you think?”

  His lips responded. A positive answer would have had them in action at once, he to the bridge, she to the main fire control turret. They couldn’t be sure they had not been noticed—by optical system, quickly brushing radar or maser, gadget responsive to the neutrino emission of their proton converter, several other possible ways—but it was unlikely.

  “Any further indications?” Tom asked. “Atomic powerplants?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know what the readings mean that I get, particle flux, magnetic variations and the rest. This is such a confoundedly queer sun and planet. I’ve never seen anything like them. Have you?”

  “No.”

  They regarded each other for a moment that grew very quiet. Dagny, Od’s-daughter in the House of Brenning, was a big woman, a few years his senior. Her shoulder-length yellow mane was fading a bit, and her hazel eyes were burdened with those contact lenses that were the best help anyone on Kraken knew how to give. But her frame was still strong and erect, her hands still clever and murderously quick. It had been natural for an impoverished noble family to make alliance with an energetic young immigrant who had a goodly following and a spaceship. But in time, voyages together, childbirths and child-rearings, the marriage of convenience had become one of affection.

  “Well . . . s’pose we better go on down,” Tom said. “Sooner we get patched, sooner we can start back. And we’d better not be gone from home too long.”

  Dagny nodded. Yasmin saw the grimness that touched them and said, “What is wrong, my . . . my husband?”

  Tom hadn’t the heart to explain how turbulent matters were on Kraken also. She’d learn that soon enough, if they lived. He said merely, “There’s some kind o’ civilization goin’ yet around here. But it may exist only as traces o’ veneer. The signs are hard to figure. This is a rogue planet, you see.”

  “Rogue?” Yasmin was bemused. “But that is a loose planet—sunless—isn’t it?”

  “You mean a bandit planet. A rogue’s one that don’t fit in with its usual type, got a skewball orbit or composition or whatever. Like this’n.”

  “Oh. Yes, I know.”

  “What?” He caught her shoulder, not noticing how she winced at so hard a grip. “You’ve heard o’ this system before?”

  “No . . . please . . . no, my people never came to this side of the Nebula either, with what few ships we had. But I studied some astrophysics and planetography at Anushirvan University.”

  “Huh?” He let her go and gaped. “Science? Real, Imperial-era science, not engineerin’ tricks?” She nodded breathlessly. “But I thought—you said—you’d studied classics.”

  “Is not scientific knowledge one of the classic arts? We had a very complete collection of tapes in the Royal Library.” Forlornness came upon her. “Gone, now, into smoke.”

  “Never mind. Can you explain how come this globe is as it is?”

  “Well, I . . . well, no. I don’t believe I could. I would need more information. Mass, and chemical data, and—And even then, I would probably not be able. I am not one of the ancient experts.”

  “Hardly anybody is,” Tom sighed. “All right. Let’s get us a snack, and then to our stations for planetfall.”

  * * *

  Descent was tricky. Sensor-computer-autopilot linkups could no longer be trusted. Tom had to bring Firedrake in on manual controls. His few instruments were of limited use, when he couldn’t get precise data by which to r
ecalibrate them for local conditions. With no view-screens working properly, he had no magnification, infra-red and ultra-violet presentations, any of the conventional aids. He depended on an emergency periscope, on Dagny’s radar readings called via intercom and on the trained reflexes of a lifetime.

  Yasmin sat beside him. There was nothing she could do elsewhere, and he wanted to be able to assist her in her inexperience if they must bail out. The spacesuit and gravity impellers surrounded her with an awkward bulk that made the visage in the helmet look like a child’s. Neither one of them had closed a faceplate. Her voice came small through the gathering throb of power: “Is it so difficult to land? I mean, I used to watch ships do it, and even if we are partly crippled—we could travel between the stars. What can an aircar do that we can’t?”

  “Hyperdrive’s not the same thing as kinetic velocity, and most particular not the same as aerodynamic speed,” Tom grunted. “To start with, I know the theory o’ sublight physics.”

  “You do?” She was frankly astounded.

  “Enough of it, anyhow. I can read and write, too.” His hands played over the board. Vibration grew in the deck, the bulkheads, his bones. A thin shrilling was heard, the first cloven atmosphere. “A spaceship’s a sort o’ big and clumsy object, once out o’her native habitat,” he said absently. “Got quite a moment of inertia, f’r instance. Means a sudden, hard wind can turn her top over tip and she don’t right easy. When you got a lot o’ sensitive machinery to do the work, that’s no problem. But we don’t.” He buried his face in the periscope hood. Cloudiness swirled beneath. “Also,” he said, “we got no screens and nobody at the guns. So we’d better be choosy about where we sit down. And . . . we don’t have any way to scan an area in detail. Now do be quiet and let me steer.”

  Already in the upper air, he encountered severe turbulence. That was unexpected, on a planet which received less than 0.9 Terran . . . insolation, with a lower proportion of UV to boot. It wasn’t that the atmosphere was peculiar. The spectroscope readout had said the mixture was ordinary oxy-nitro-CO2, on the thin and dry side—sea-level pressure around 600 mm.—but quite breathable. Nor was the phenomenon due to excessive rotation; the period was twenty-five and a half hours. Of course, the inner moon, while small, was close in and must have considerable tidal effect—Hoy!