Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire

by Jerry Pournelle

  His Eminence Louis Cardinal Freneaux stood framed in the doorway, a wasted figure whose rich robe hung loosely about him. Victoria knew that he made it a point of honor to limit his caloric intake to something commensurate with that of the most deprived member of his vast flock. She respected him for it, and considered him one of the more intelligent churchmen in her acquaintance. Beneath the red skullcap, the Cardinal's eyes were lackluster and sad.

  "You are looking very well, my dear," he said.

  "Thank you, Louis. At my age, I can't imagine a nicer compliment." She bent stiffly as if to kiss the prelate's ring.

  "That . . . is not necessary," he said, withdrawing. "My visit is official, I'm afraid."

  Sra. Duiño straightened slowly. "Is it to be like that?"

  "Please don't be offended, Victoria."

  "I take it the Holy Father is even more displeased with me than usual," she said. "I am truly sorry to have caused him further pain. What is it this time?"

  "Egypt."

  The old woman nodded once. She turned slowly and stumped toward her desk, motioning the Cardinal to a chair. "Four million inhabitants of the Nile Delta, formerly Class Three, were declared Class One last week. I fear there was little choice: the vote was unanimous."

  "Deplorable!" said the Cardinal.

  "No one deplored its necessity more than I. Damanhur, El Mansura and Tanta, Zagazig, El Faiyum and El Minya share the fate of numberless villages scattered along the dry gulch that was once a mighty river."

  "There are many Coptic Christians in Egypt," said Cardinal Freneaux. "They have petitioned the Holy See for redress."

  "Oh?" Victoria's dark eyes flashed. "And why, pray, have they not petitioned the Father and Teacher in Moscow who refuses to allow them to help themselves? More than a decade ago, UNDEP warned of what the Aswan Dam was doing to the Nile. The weight of Lake Nasser upon the land, swollen by spring floods in East Africa, helped create a severe seismic disturbance; the upper Rift Valley developed a subsidiary fracture, and the river found a new path through Nubia to the Red Sea. Today, Cairo is a dusty ruin, as dead and forgotten as the pyramids to the west."

  "Rationalization is useless, Victoria." The Cardinal frowned. "We must be practical."

  "Practical, is it? In modern Egypt, more than three thousand fellahin crowd every remaining square mile of arable land. Something had to give, Louis."

  The Cardinal coughed apologetically. "Four million . . . somethings." he said in a low voice.

  Victoria Duiño reacted as if the Cardinal had slapped her. "That was unkind of you. They are four million helpless human beings; they work and love and have aspirations and laugh together on rare occasions, even as you or I. Unfortunately, they also have appetites. Do you—does the Holy Father—suppose that we enjoy our work?"

  "Of course not, Victoria."

  "Then why does he refrain from exercising whatever influence he has over Eastern Orthodox churchmen inside the Soviet Union? Why can't they aid in making the Kremlin realize that its insensate drive for world domination is literally starving millions? With Soviet help instead of hindrance our triage activities would dwindle significantly."

  Cardinal Freneaux made a small sound of disgruntlement. "You know how little public opinion is worth in Russia."

  Sra. Duiño silently recited a Hail Mary, allowing her temper to subside. She tapped a stylus on the desktop. "Louis, the impoverished portion of the Third World sprawling across Africa, Asia Minor, and the Arabian Peninsula is a Russian creation; it is perpetuated solely as a political weapon. Soviet-controlled military forces outnumber UN forces two to one; we are powerless to inflict our wills upon the Third World, save for the Indian subcontinent and South America, except as Russia allows. The Great Northern Bear graciously condescends to permit triage judgments rendered wherever and whenever we choose, then points a long propaganda finger and calls us 'murderers of millions.'

  "But let us suggest something beneficial, such as the Qattara Project, and the Bear immediately exercises his veto. The measure dies without question of recourse."

  Cardinal Freneaux looked uncomfortable. "I am not familiar with the project," he dissimulated, hoping against hope to divert the old woman's waxing anger.

  "Really?" Victoria's eyes radiated pale fire. She spun a tickler file, then touched a series of buttons on the video controller. A full-color map of the Middle East formed in the large tank. "Just southwest of Alexandria is El Alamein, a town of some historical significance. Near there, Britain's armored forces turned back those of Nazi Germany in one of the climactic land battles of the Second World War.

  "Which is neither here nor there, except that Britain chose that particular site to make her winner-take-all stand for an excellent reason. To the uninitiated, it would have seemed easy for Rommel's Panzers to swing out into the open desert, avoiding Montgomery's trap on his drive toward Alexandria and the Suez. Such was not the case; on a larger scale, the area is a corridor much like Thermopylae, and British strategy much like that of the Greeks who stood off the Persian hordes in classical times. You see, Rommel had neither the petrol, nor supplies, to skirt a huge natural obstacle.

  "Let your eye drift southward from El Alamein, Louis. See the long crescent marked Qattara Depression? It is a vast sink rather like Death Valley, which lies between the Libyan Plateau and the Western Desert, and is more than four hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean in most places.

  "UNDEP's ecosystems engineers proposed a fifty-kilometer-long canal, excavated by use of 'clean' mini-fusion devices from a point east of El Alamein to the depression. A hydroelectric power station was to have been built on the brink: seventy years would have been required for a large, fan-shaped inland sea to form, stretching from Siwa Oasis near the Libyan border to the foundations of the pyramids at El Giza, with a long neck reaching southward along the Ghard Abu Muharik almost to El Kharga. The Qattara Sea would have altered the climate of the Western Desert, bringing rainfall to the parched, rich soil; in ancient times, much of the region was a garden. Egypt could have reclaimed millions of hectares of arable land, helping to alleviate her perpetual famine.

  "The Father and Teacher in Moscow vetoed the proposal out-of-hand." With an abrupt gesture, Victoria switched off the video map. "Pardon me; I did not mean to lecture."

  Cardinal Freneaux shifted disquietedly in his chair. "You make it sound so brave and simple. The situation is much more complex. Visionary schemes, such as this Qattara Project—"

  "There is nothing 'visionary' about it," she said in an icy tone. "I could name a dozen similar UNDEP proposals vetoed by the USSR."

  The Cardinal ran his tongue around his upper lip. He rose and began pacing the office, hands clasped behind his back. "The Church is not blind," he said. "Russia's geopolitical game is far from subtle. Yet the Bear is not to be provoked, Victoria. His Holiness dreads war. Have you any concept of the carnage thermonuclear weapons would wreak among the vast populations of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas?"

  "I have indeed; a global holocaust would either extinguish our species, or reduce our numbers to something the Earth could once again tolerate. Triage on a grand scale, Louis."

  The Cardinal was aghast. "How can you even think such a thing?"

  The old woman shrugged. "There are wars, and then there are wars. We are engaged in a global war right this instant, and one of the major battles is taking place in Egypt. If His Holiness refuses to recognize this fact, I am hard-put to explain it."

  "I've never heard you speak like this before, Victoria."

  Victoria sighed. "I suppose my optimism and diplomacy have begun to wear out, like the rest of me." She searched the Cardinal with her eyes. "No, that isn't true. Louis, we are not winning the war just yet. But, we will—must! There are, after all, only three alternatives left: triage, Armageddon, or a sniveling decline that is certain to end in a whimper."

  Cardinal Freneaux remained silent for a time. "Our conversation has wandered far afield," he said. "Victor
ia, do you consider yourself a good daughter of the Church?"

  "You know that I do."

  The churchman pondered something invisible which had obtruded between himself and the old woman. He cleared his throat. "His Holiness was unusually stern when he dispatched me on this mission. He instructed me to plead immediate reclassification of the four million inhabitants of the Nile Delta. He urged me strongly not to take 'no' for an answer."

  Victoria Duiño looked solemn. "Then the stern Father must discover that he has an equally stern daughter," she said. "My answer must be . . . no. Battles are never without casualties; grain shipments to Egypt have already halted."

  "I warn you; he has spoken of excommunication."

  The old woman grew very pale, very calm. "And do you expect me to be intimidated by such a threat?"

  "I do not. I have known you too long."

  "I am literally amazed that the Holy Father would stoop to attack me personally, would choose to threaten damnation of my immortal soul in order to destroy me professionally. Were he to carry out this awful threat, it would mean absolutely nothing to the Triage Committee or its works. Doesn't he realize that?"

  "I'm not . . . sure."

  Victoria fingered her crucifix. "Louis, what have we come to? The Church, our Church, has grown quite permissive on the question of homosexuality, now countenances therapeutic abortion, even condones euthanasia when the pain of life becomes too great for her sons and daughters to bear, yet obstinately faces away from the fact that without triage judgments our planet will never again be a fit environment for the human species."

  "Discussion is painful to me. I must ask you for a definite answer, Victoria."

  "You have had it. Tell His Holiness that the Matriarch of Death considers eternal fire a small price to pay for the work she does, and must continue to do."

  The Cardinal's eyes were misted. He bowed. "Then I will bid you good-bye, my dear Victoria. I sincerely hope that our next meeting will be more pleasant."

  "I hope so."

  The causal chain of the deterioration is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much CO2—all can be traced easily to too many people.

  Dr. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb

  Monique's package arrived in late forenoon the following day, Dr. Duiño sent two of the suspect birth-control tablets to the UN lab for analysis, receiving a report in less than one hour. Properly stamped with the infertility symbol, the placebos lacked the chop of any pharmaceutical house, and were therefore quite illegal. If found, the seller would be liable to harsh prosecution.

  After an evening snack of thin vegetable soup and soya toast, Sra. Duiño retired to her quarters high on the two-hundredth floor, feeling roughly battered by life. She had been attacked from the left and the right, from above and below.

  She pondered Monique's problem all evening, sitting alone in the cramped two-room suite. She rarely left the UN Tower nowadays; there would be little purpose in it. Almost everything that remained in her life was here: her meager creature comforts, the small chapel on the twelfth floor where she heard mass and went to confession—more and more infrequently of late—and her work.

  Sudden nostalgia spun her mind back to the early days in Argentina when Vicky Ortega, a serious-minded medical student newly risen from the tumbled shacks and endemic poverty of a Buenos Aires barrio, had visited the clinic and been lovestruck at first sight of a young doctor named Enrique Duiño. Love had come in the blink of an eye, in the macrocosmic slice of eternity it had taken for the handsome doctor to look at her infected throat and prescribe three million units of penicillin and bedrest.

  Oh, she had pursued him; no mistake about that—two months of thoroughly premeditated "accidental" encounters, while her studies went neglected and she lived in terror of losing him.

  But she remembered the miraculous day when she had led Enrique up a crooked, debris-strewn alley to the ramshackle lean-to her parents and brothers and sisters called home, the day Enrique had turned his hat brim slowly, nervously in his deft surgeon's hands while he asked her father's permission to make her his bride. Later, mentioning the five children she'd prayed God would allow them to have, Vicky had received the lecture which was to change her life.

  In those days, Enrique had been a walking encyclopedia, stuffed with demographic statistics, facts and figures on family planning, on the fantastic rate at which the world's population was doubling, on the coming extinction of fossil fuels, and on and on. They, he had insisted, would have one child—two at most. At first, Vicky had been horrified, then resentful, then fascinated.

  Their first decade together had been an exciting hodgepodge: the missionary hospital in Bolivia; their studies together in Madrid, and at the Sorbonne, and later in Mexico; finally, the years in America and, somewhat late in life, the birth of young Hector Duiño. That had been the richest, most tranquil period, Victoria reflected. Enrique and she had practiced in San Francisco, and in New York; the boy had grown to manhood almost overnight, so it seemed. And when Enrique's crusading articles won him selection as a delegate to the third International Population Control Convention in New Delhi, she had been so proud, even though her practice had kept her home in New York.

  Curiously enough, Enrique had always tended to neglect his own health. When the cholera epidemic erupted, he had refused to be flown home with the majority of other delegates, staying on in India to lend what help he could. The first prognosis from the hospital where they had taken him had been favorable. But Victoria had had an ugly premonition. All her prayers had gone unanswered; her beloved had come home in a plain wooden casket.

  The ensuing years of loneliness melted into a blur—long years of struggle and disappointment. She had carried on Enrique's great work, making a nuisance of herself by shouting his message into deaf political ears. But at last—not too late, perhaps; but very late—after the Mideast conflagration which all but destroyed Israel and placed the whole of Islam under Russia's thrall, she and the other criers-in-the-wilderness had at last been heard. After much panicking and pointing of fingers, the UN peacekeeping troops had been bolstered and united into a true international armed force. Then—could it be nearly twenty-five years ago?—UNDEP's Triage Committee had been formed. Dr. Duiño had been its first and only chairperson.

  The old woman raised withered hands. There were times when she imagined she could see light streaming through the mottled parchment stretched over her bones. Where was pretty little Vicky Ortega now? Submerged in this twist of exhausted flesh, she supposed.

  She rose with the aid of her bamboo cane and shuffled to the window. It was after midnight, and fairly clear. She looked up at the few visible stars for a time, then stood gazing far out over the inky wash of the Atlantic into the depths of night.

  Two days later, a preliminary report arrived from the UN Intelligence Agents who were investigating the bogus birth-control tablets. The assistant manager of Gilbert's Pharmacy, thirty-third layer, twelfth sector, northwest quadrant of the gargantuan arcology complex where Monique and her husband lived, had recently applied for parenthood. Pressure was brought to bear— and a hint of amnesty if full cooperation were forthcoming. During the ensuing week, the trail led from the pharmacy to a disreputable retired chemist in Cleveland, to a thrice arrested though never convicted Philadelphia dealer in black-market pharmaceuticals, to a drug wholesaler with shady connections in Trenton, and finally to the legman for a prominent Congressman. A second week passed before the UN Intelligence Director called Sra. Duiño and mentioned a name.

  "Are you certain?" she asked, stiffening.

  "No, madame. There's no way short of a trial to be certain, and I doubt whether the DA would indict upon the sort of evidence we've managed to gather."

  "Are you yourself certain?"

  "I . . . yes, madame. I myself am quite certain."

  "Thank yo
u for all your efforts," she said. "Please make sure your findings remain confidential."

  Dr. Duiño snapped off the vidicom and sought her cane. She stumped from the office, startling Harold and three VIP's who were waiting to see her. She rode upward in the private lift, failed to acknowledge everyone who greeted her in the corridor, and spent the remaining afternoon hours closeted with her fellow Triage Committee members behind closed doors.

  Late the following day, Victoria entered Bennett Rook's anteroom, breezing past his receptionist unannounced.

  The inner office was crowded: Rook was at the chalkboard, running over some statistics with a group of underlings. He telescoped the collapsible pointer he had been using. "Dr. Duiño. To what do we owe this honor?"

  "I must speak to you at once in private." She shooed them out with her cane, causing a concerted fumbling for notebooks and other papers. The UNDEP employees filed out, studiously avoiding one another's eyes.