Agent of the Terran Empire

by Poul Anderson

  Flandry grew slowly aware that she was the opposite of bad-looking. She just hadn’t been sculped into the monotonously aristocratic appearance of Terra’s high-born ladies. The face, half boyish, was her own, the body full and supple where it counted. He swore dismally to himself and went on a more rigorous calisthenic program.

  Slowly the stars formed new patterns. There came a time when Aldebaran stood like red flame, the brightest object in all heaven. And then the needle-point of Vixen’s sun, the star named Cerulia, glistened keen and blue ahead. And Flandry turned from the viewscreen and said quietly: “Two more days to go. I think we’ll have captain’s dinner tonight.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Chives. “I took it upon myself to bring along some live Maine lobster. And I trust the Liebfraumilch ’51 will be satisfactory?”

  “That’s the advantage of having a Shalmuan for your batman,” remarked Flandry to Kit. “Their race has more sensitive palates than ours. They can’t go wrong on vintages.”

  She smiled, but her eyes were troubled.

  Flandry retired to his own cabin and an argument. He wanted to wear a peach-colored tunic with his white slacks; Chives insisted that the dark blue, with a gold sash, was more suitable. Chives won, naturally. The man wandered into the saloon, which was already laid out for a feast, and poured himself an aperitif. Music sighed from the recorder, nothing great but sweet to hear.

  A footfall came lightly behind him. He turned and nearly dropped his glass. Kit was entering in a sheer black dinner gown; one veil the color of fire flickered from her waistsline. A filigree tiara crowned shining hair, and a bracelet of Old Martian silver coiled massive on her wrist.

  “Great hopping electrons,” gasped Flandry. “Don’t do such things without warning! Where did the paintbrush come from to lay on the glamor that thick?”

  Kit chuckled and pirouetted. “Chives,” she said. “Who else? He’s a darlin’. He brought the jew’lry along, an’ he’s been makin’ the dress at odd moments this whole trip.”

  Flandry shook his head and clicked his tongue. “If Chives would accept manumission, he could set himself up in business, equipping lady spies to seduce poor officers like me. He’d own the galaxy in ten years.”

  Kit blushed and said hastily: “Did he select the tape too? I always have loved Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.”

  “Oh, is that what it is? Nice music for a sentimental occasion, anyway. My department is more the administration of drinks. I prescribe this before dinner: Ansan aurea. Essentially, it’s a light dry vermouth, but for once a non-Terran soil has improved the flavor of a Terran plant.”

  She hesitated. “I don’t — I never—”

  “Well, high time you began.” He did not glance at the view-screen, where Cerulia shone like steel, but they both knew there might not be many hours left for them to savor existence. She took the glass, sipped, and sighed.

  “Thank you, Dominic. I’ve been missin’ out on such a lot.”

  They seated themselves. “We’ll have to make that up, after this affair is over,” said Flandry. A darkening passed through him, just long enough to make him add: “However, I suspect that on the whole you’ve done better in life than I.”

  “What do you mean?” Her eyes, above the glass, reflected the wine’s hue and became almost golden.

  “Oh … hard to say.” His mouth twisted ruefully upward. “I’ve no romantic illusions about the frontier. I’ve seen too much of it. I’d a good deal rather loll in bed sipping my morning chocolate than bounce into the fields before dawn to cultivate the grotch or scag the thimbs or whatever dreary technicalities it is that pioneers undergo. And yet, well, I’ve no illusions about my own class either, or my own way of life. You frontier people are the healthy ones. You’ll be around — most of you — long after the Empire is a fireside legend. I envy you that.”

  He broke off. “Pardon me. I’m afraid spiritual jaundice is an occupational disease in my job.”

  “Which I’m still not sure what is — Oh, dear.” Kit chuckled. “Does alcohol act that fast? But really, Dominic, I wish you’d talk a little about your work. All you’ve said is, you’re in Naval Intelligence. I’d like to know what you do.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  She flushed and blurted: “To know you better.”

  Flandry saw her confusion and moved to hide it from them both: “There’s not a lot to tell. I’m a field agent, which means I go out and peek through windows instead of sitting in an office reading the reports of window peekers. Thanks to the circumstance that my immediate superior doesn’t like me, I spend most of my working time away from Terra, on what amounts to a roving commission. Good old Fenross. If he was ever replaced by some kindly father-type who dealt justly with all subordinates, I’d dry up and blow away.”

  “I think that’s revoltin’.” Anger flashed in her voice.

  “What? The discrimination? But my dear lass, what is any civilization but an elaborate structure of special privileges? I’ve learned to make my way around among them. Good frogs, d’you think I want a nice secure desk job with a guaranteed pension?”

  “But still, Dominic — a man like you, riskin’ his life again an’ again, sent almost alone against all Ardazir … because someone doesn’t like you!” Her face still burned, and there was a glimmer of tears in the hazel eyes.

  “Hard to imagine how that could be,” said Flandry with calculated smugness. He added, lightly and almost automatically: “But after all, think what an outrageous special privilege your personal heredity represents, so much beauty, charm, and intelligence lavished on one little girl.”

  She grew mute, but faintly she trembled. With a convulsive gesture, she tossed off her glass.

  Easy, boy, thought Flandry. A not unpleasurable alertness came to life. Emotional scenes are the last thing we want out here. “Which brings up the general topic of you,” he said in his chattiest tone. “A subject well worth discussing over the egg flower soup which I see Chives bringing in … or any other course, for that matter. Let’s see, you were a weather engineer’s assistant for a living, isn’t that right? Sounds like fun, in an earnest high-booted way.” And might prove useful, added that part of him which never took a vacation.

  She nodded, as anxious as he to escape what they had skirted. They took pleasure in the meal, and talked of many things. Flandry confirmed his impression that Kit was not an unsophisticated peasant. She didn’t know the latest delicious gossip about you-know-who and that actor. But she had measured the seasons of her strange violent planet; she could assemble a machine so men could trust their lives to it; she had hunted and sported, seen birth and death; the intrigues of her small city were as subtle as any around the Imperial throne. Withal, she had the innocence of most frontier folk — or call it optimism, or honor, or courage — at any rate, she had not begun to despair of the human race.

  But because he found himself in good company, and this was a special occasion, he kept both their glasses filled. After a while he lost track of how many times he had poured.

  When Chives cleared the table and set out coffee and liqueur, Kit reached eagerly for her cup. “I need this,” she said, not quite clearly. “’Fraid I had too much to drink.”

  “That was the general idea,” said Flandry. He accepted a cigar from Chives. The Shalmuan went noiselessly out. Flandry looked across the table. Kit sat with her back to the broad viewscreen, so that the stars were jewels clustered around her tiara.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said after a moment.

  “You’re probably right,” said Flandry. “What don’t you believe?”

  “What you were sayin’ … ’bout the Empire bein’ doomed.”

  “It’s better not to believe that,” he said gently.

  “Not because o’ Terra,” she said. She leaned forward. The light was soft on her bare young shoulders. “The little bit I saw there was a hard blow. But Dominic, as long’
s the Empire has men like, like you — we’ll take on the whole universe an’ win.”

  “Blessings,” said Flandry in haste.

  “No.” Her eyes were the least bit hazed, but they locked steadily with his. She smiled, more in tenderness than mirth. “You won’t wriggle off the hook with a joke this time, Dominic.

  You gave me too much to drink, you see, an’ — I mean it. A planet with you on its side has still got hope enough.”

  Flandry sipped his liqueur. Suddenly the alcohol touched his own brain with its pale fires, and he thought, Why not be honest with her? She can take it. Maybe she even deserves it.

  “No, Kit,” he said. “I know my class from the inside out, because it is my class and I probably wouldn’t choose another even if some miracle made me able to. But we’re hollow, and corrupt, and death has marked us for its own. In the last analysis, however we disguise it, however strenuous and hazardous and even lofty our amusements are, the only reason we can find for living is to have fun. And I’m afraid that isn’t reason enough.”

  “But it is!” she cried.

  “You think so,” he said, “because you’re lucky, enough to belong to a society which still has important jobs uncompleted. But we aristocrats of Terra, we enjoy life instead of enjoying what we’re doing … and there’s a cosmos of difference.

  “The measure of our damnation is that every one of us with any intelligence — and there are some — every one sees the Long Night coming. We’ve grown too wise; we’ve studied a little psycho-dynamics, or perhaps only read a lot of history, and we can see that Manuel’s Empire was not a glorious resurgence. It was the Indian summer of Terran civilization. (But you’ve never seen Indian summer, I suppose. A pity: no planet has anything more beautiful and full of old magics.) Now even that short season is past. Autumn is far along; the nights are cold and the leaves are fallen and the last escaping birds call through a sky which has lost all color. And yet, we who see winter coming can also see it won’t be here till after our lifetimes … so we shiver a bit, and swear a bit, and go back to playing with a few bright dead leaves.”

  He stopped. Silence grew around them. And then, from the intercom, music began again, a low orchestral piece which spoke to deep places of their awareness.

  “Excuse me,” said Flandry. “I really shouldn’t have wished my sour pessimism on you.”

  Her smile this time held a ghost of pity. “An’ o’ course ’twouldn’t be debonair to show your real feelin’s, or try to find words for them.”

  “Touche!” He cocked his head. “Think we could dance to that?”

  “The music? Hardly. The Liebestod is background for some-thin’ else. I wonder if Chives knew.”

  “Hm?” Flandry looked surprised at the girl.

  “I don’t mind at all,” she whispered. “Chives is a darlin’.”

  Suddenly he understood.

  But the stars were chill behind her. Flandry thought of guns and dark fortresses waiting for them both. He thought of knightly honor, which would not take advantage of the helplessness which is youth — and then, with a little sadness, he decided that practical considerations were what really turned the balance for him.

  He raised the cigar to his mouth and said softly, “Better drink your coffee before it gets cold, lass.”

  With that the moment was safely over. He thought he saw disappointed gratitude in Kit’s hurried glance, but wasn’t sure. She turned around, gazing at the stars merely to avoid facing him for the next few seconds.

  Her breath sighed outward. She sat looking at Cerulia for a whole minute. Then she stared down at her hands and said tonelessly: “Figure you’re right ’bout the Empire. But then what’s to become o’ Vixen?”

  “We’ll liberate it, and squeeze a fat indemnity out of Ardazir,” said Flandry as if there were no doubt.

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head. Bitterness began to edge her voice. “Not if ’tisn’t convenient. Your Navy might decide to fight the war out where ’tis. An’ then my whole planet, my people, the little girl next door an’ her kitten, trees an’ flowers an’ birds, why, ’twill just be radioactive ash blowin’ over dead gray hills. Or maybe the Imperium will decide to compromise, an’ let Ardazir keep Vixen. Why not? What’s one planet to the Empire? A swap might, as you say, buy them peace in their own lifetimes. A few million human bein’s, that’s nothin’, write them off in red ink.” She shook her head again in a dazed way. “Why are we goin’ there, you an’ I? What are we workin’ for? Whatever we do can come to nothin’, from one stroke of a pen in some bored bureaucrat’s hand. Can’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Flandry.

  IX

  Cerulia, being a main-sequence star, did not need vastly more mass than Sol to shine more fiercely. Vixen, the fourth planet out, circled its primary in one and a half standard years, along such an orbit that it received, on the average, about as much radiation as Terra.

  “The catch lies in that word ‘average,’ ” murmured Flandry.

  He floated in the turret with Chives, hands on the control panel and body weightless in a cocoon of pilot harness. To port, the viewscreens were dimmed, lest the harsh blue sun burn out his eyes. Elsewhere, distorted constellations sprawled stark against night. Flandry picked out the Jupiter-type planet called Ogre by the humans of Vixen: a bright yellow glow, its larger moons visible like sparks. And what were its Ymirite colonists thinking?

  “Ogre’s made enough trouble for Vixen all by itself,” complained Flandry. “Its settlers ought to be content with that and not go plotting with Ardazir. If they are, I mean.” He turned to Chives. “How’s Kit taking this free-fall plunge?”

  “I regret to say Miss Kittredge did not look very comfortable, sir,” answered the Shalmuan. “But she said she was.”

  Flandry clicked his tongue. Since the advent of gravity control, there had been little need for civilians ever to undergo weightlessness; hence Kit, susceptible to it, didn’t have the training that would have helped. Well, she’d be a lot sicker if an Ardazirho missle homed on the Hooligan. Nobody ever died of space nausea: no such luck!

  Ardazir would undoubtedly have mounted tight guard over conquered Vixen. Flandry’s detectors were confirming this The space around the planet quivered with primary-drive vibrations, patrolling warcraft, and there must be a network of orbital robot monitors to boot. A standard approach was certain to be spotted. There was another way to land, though, if you were enough of a pilot and had enough luck. Flandry had decided to go ahead with it, rather than contact Walton’s task force. He couldn’t do much there except report himself in … and then proceed to Vixen anyway, with still more likelihood of detection and destruction.

  Engines cold, the Hooligan plunged at top meteoric velocity straight toward her goal. Any automaton was sure to register her as a siderite, and ignore her. Only visual observation would strip that disguise off; and space is so vast that even with the closest blockade, there was hardly a chance of passing that close to an unwarned enemy. Escape from the surface would be harder, but this present stunt was foolproof. Until you hit atmosphere!

  Flandry watched Vixen swelling in the forward viewscreens. To one side Cerulia burned, ominously big. The planet’s northern dayside was like a slice of incandescence; polarizing telescopes showed bare mountains, stony deserts, rivers gone wild with melted snows. In the southern hemisphere, the continents were still green and brown, the oceans deeply blue, like polished cobalt. But cloud banded that half of the world, storms marched roaring over hundreds of kilometers, lightning flared through rain. The equator was hidden under a nearly solid belt of cloud and gale. The northern aurora was cold flame; the south pole, less brilliant, still shook great banners of light into heaven. A single small moon, 100,000 kilometers from the surface, looked pale against that luminance.

  The spaceship seemed tomb silent when Flandry switched his attention back to it. He said, just to make a noise, “And this passes for a terres
troid, humanly habitable planet. What real estate agents they must have had in the pioneer days!”

  “I understand that southern Cerulia IV is not unsalubrious most of the year, sir,” said Chives. “It is only now, in fact, that the northern part becomes lethal.”

  Flandry nodded. Vixen was the goat of circumstance: huge Ogre had exactly four times the period, and thus over millions of years resonance had multiplied perturbation and brought the eccentricity of Vixen’s orbit close to one-half. The planet’s axial inclination was 24?, and northern midsummer fell nearly at periastron. Thus, every eighteen months, Cerulia scorched that hemisphere with fourfold the radiation Terra got from Sol. This section of the orbit was hastily completed, and most of Vixen’s year was spent in cooler regions. “But I daresay the Ardazirho timed their invasion for right now,” said Flandry. “If they’re from an A-type star, the northern weather shouldn’t be too hard on them.”

  He put out his final cigaret. The planet filled the bow screen. Robot mechanisms could do a lot, but now there must also be live piloting … or a streak in Vixen’s sky and a crater blasted from its rock.

  At the Hooligan’s speed, she crossed the tenuous upper air layers and hit stratosphere in a matter of seconds. It was like a giant’s fist. Flandry’s harness groaned as his body hurtled forward. There was no outside noise, yet, but the flitter herself shrieked in metallic pain. The screens became one lurid fire, air heated to incandescence.

  Flandry’s arm trembled with weight. He slammed it down on the drive switches. Chives’ slight form could not stir under these pressures, but the green tail darted, button to dial to vernier. Engines bellowed as they fought to shed velocity. The vessel glowed red; but her metal was crystallized to endure more than furnace heat. Thunder banged around her, within her. Flandry felt his ribs shoved toward his lungs, as direction shifted. Still he could only see flame outside. But his blurring eyes read instruments. He knew the vessel had leveled off, struck denser atmosphere, skipped like a stone, and was now rounding the planet in monstrous shuddering bounces.