The Navigator of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  He remembered the spinning, beautiful, frightening visions of only hours ago: the world of men between his hands, the swirling star clouds like a dust of diamonds against the black emptiness of infinity, infinity--

  He covered his face with his hands and thought again: Why me? I’m only a simple priest, and a very young one at that-- Then why?

  The warlock’s voice was concerned. “Are you all right? Has it come again?”

  Kynan shook his head and said, “No. I am well.” He began to pace the softly humming deck of the compartment. “There was something else,” he said.

  “About General Veg Tran?”

  “About Imperials on Aurora. Now.”

  The warlock waited, not wanting to put his own thoughts into words, for he was a loyal citizen of Gonlan.

  “Someone. Some one of us,” Kynan began heavily, “informed the Imperial general of what happened at Star Field. No, that’s not right. I think it was by General Veg Tran’s order that the attack on Star Field was made. And that means that someone, one of the Gonlani-Rhad, plotted it with him.” He paused, and it was painful for him to continue, because one part of the puzzle had begun to unravel and the unwinding skein was baring something ugly. “It wasn’t Crespus. He wasn’t at Star Field--and he’s too straightforward an old soldier to become involved in something so--so dishonorable.”

  “Not Tirzah, either,” Baltus offered. “Tirzah is a feudal old savage who thinks he is living in the time of Kier, but he loved your bond-father like a brother.”

  “LaRoss, then,” Kynan said, the words like stones in his mouth. “Or my bond-brother.”

  “You have been away from Melissande a long time, Kynan,” Baltus said. “When you say LaRoss, you say Karston. When you say Karston, you say LaRoss. The heir and the First Minister have grown very close since Kreon began to grow old and difficult.”

  “Could my brother actually countenance parricide, Baltus? Could he?” Kynan asked bleakly.

  “It is not an uncommon thing in royal families, Nav Kynan. Sons grow impatient with aging kings.”

  “But my own bond-brother--can I believe that of him?”

  The warlock said, “The poison fed Kreon may not have been intended to do more than incapacitate him while Karston or LaRoss took out the warband.” Baltus did not for one moment believe this, but he could see how the thought of his brother actually involved in treason, regicide, and conspiracy was affecting the young Navigator. Kynan looked physically ill.

  Kynan was too honest to accept the palliative the warlock was offering. “No,” he said. “If it is as we think, then Karston is guilty.” The dark blue eyes turned almost metallic, and the tone of voice was bitter and royal. “And if he is guilty, warlock--if my bond-brother is guilty of our star king’s death--I promise by the Star and by all that I hold dear and holy, I will kill him with my own hands.”

  The warlock made the sign of the Star, certain that he had heard a death sentence pronounced on Karston the Proud, prince of the Gonlani-Rhad. “Let it be so,” he said softly.

  The Warning triggered by the passing of the Imperial squadron through the stratosphere of Aurora was detected elsewhere that evening.

  On the shores of the Inland Sea, where the forests grew down almost to the water’s edge, the starship of the Five lay aground at the Janus River delta. The great vessel, handled with consummate skill, had been floated into a hiding place beneath the huge trees. It rested now, inert, radiating no signals, as the last light of Aurora’s sun sank into the still waters of the great, desolate lake.

  The starship had been grounded athwart the only land approach to the Navigator’s enclave, which lay but half a dozen kilometers to the north, along the shore. As the sky darkened with the onset of night, the cowled Tactician, standing in the open valve of the starship, could see the faint luminosity of the meson screen shimmering beyond the crest of a low-lying hill. The sight gave him a deep, almost savage, satisfaction. The sanctuary, with its complex of uranium-enrichment plants, laboratories, ore-reduction facilities, chapels, and dormitories, was now invulnerable. The forces of the Empire could attack it only at their peril.

  From within the starship came the sounds of the Technician’s tracking equipment. Both Kynan’s vessel and the starship approaching from deep space were on the plotting tables, their tracks converging: Kynan’s slowly, across the map of Aurora’s southern continent--the ship of the Jersey Navigators plunging planetward at a speed only now below that of light. The starship carrying the befuddled Torquas would arrive first, within the hour. The Tactician tensed with nervous anticipation. The plan was approaching its critical point. Within a day’s time, perhaps less, the power of the Order over all the vastness of the Empire would be complete. There would be an end to constant disorder, an end to the petty quarrels of star kings and nobles, an end--praise be to the holy Star--to the bloodshed and suffering of centuries.

  The Tactician breathed deeply of the evening air of Aurora. Such was the bounty of God and his holy Star that there were in the galaxy literally millions of planets like this one: rich, silent, waiting for the cultivating hand of man and his works. To this end did all Navigators work and worship, when all was said and done: to bring man peacefully into his kingdom; to spread a disciplined and devout humankind throughout a galaxy of unbelievable richness and beauty.

  The Order Militant would see to it, the Tactician thought, making the sign of the Star unconsciously on his breast.

  “You surprise me, brother,” the Preacher said at his shoulder.

  The Tactician turned. “Why?”

  “I wouldn’t have expected to see you praying.”

  The Tactician studied the older man’s face. “I am a soldier and a prince of the Order. But I am also a priest. Why should it surprise you that I act as one?”

  The Preacher stood beside his colleague, looking through the great trees to the darkening sky above the Inland Sea. “It is very beautiful, isn’t it.” He seemed to expect no reply and received none. Presently, he said, “The Imperial squadron will land on their next orbit.”

  The Tactician’s face was steely under the dark cowl. “Let them.”

  “Shouldn’t they have some warning? Are we to let men die in the meson screen?”

  “It is hard, but there must be a lesson.”

  “And the Navigators on board those ships?”

  The Tactician’s voice was as hard as his expression. “We all dedicate ourselves when we join the Order. We pledge our lives.”

  “It is your specialty that makes you so unbending, brother,” the Preacher said sadly. “May the Star forgive you.”

  “It is for the Order,” the Tactician said stonily.

  The Preacher looked at the soft radiance in the air: it outlined the forested ridge like some strange witch fire. It brought a shiver of superstitious dread. Once every starship had been capable of generating that destructive power. But the machines that created it had been useless for two thousand years. Yet now, the seekers in the Aurora sanctuary had produced it again--with great cumbersome machines no starship could carry, it was true--but produced it, nonetheless. And soon, men would rediscover still another of the deadly wonders of the First Empire’s dreadful genius. The meson screen absorbed the energy that maintained a starship in flight, converted the magnificent, holy vessel into simply a million metric tons of metal and human flesh and blood. A starship caught in a meson pattern simply ceased to be a starship. It would fall like a stone. Such a thing was horrifying--to the Preacher, blasphemous, the work of Antistar.

  “Is there no other way, brother?” the Preacher asked. “Couldn’t Kynan command the Veg?”

  “Kynan isn’t here yet, nor is Torquas. In any case, the Veg would probably not obey unless something terrifying happens first. The meson screen will provide the instructive lesson.”

  The Preacher ran an almost loving hand over the ancient metal of the starship’s valve. “To kill a starship can only be a heinous sin, brother. It was never part of the plan.�
��

  “Any plan must be flexible. And those who implement it must be ruthless. Think of the purpose,” the soldier- priest said harshly.

  “The end justifies the means?”

  “If you like.”

  The Preacher breathed deeply of the forest smells. In the distance, a great hawk uttered a mournful hunting cry. The tops of the trees, twenty meters overhead, sighed with a breath of the evening wind from the Inland Sea. “May God forgive us,” the old man muttered.

  Before the Tactician could make a bitter reply, the voice of the Technician called from inside. “Starship entering the atmosphere. One track. It is the ship from Earth.”

  The Tactician turned away from his contemplation of the deepening dusk and said to the Preacher, “Come, brother. We had best make ready to receive the last king of the Universe.”

  17

  This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,/ . . . Regent of love rhymes, lord of folded arms,/The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,/ Liege of all loiterers and malcontents.

  Attributed to one William Shakespeare, poet of the pre-Golden Age period.

  Fragment found at Tel-Avon, Earth

  What we know of history tells us that hereditary kingship is not the best of all possible methods of governing the nations of men. Yet what are we to do? We can but follow the kings, obey our consciences, and trust in God.

  Emeric of Rhada, Grand Master of Navigators,

  early Second Stellar Empire period

  For the first time in a life filled with uncertainties, Torquas of Vyka feared not for his life, but for his immortal soul.

  The Navigators who had almost literally abducted him from Nyor had given him no peace on this journey. They had come upon him in the Empire Tower while he lay in a half stupor of drugs, and for a time he had been hard put to know whether he was living a dream or reality had become hallucination.

  Hemp and the drugs prepared by his warlock often brought fantasies of great beauty and satisfaction, dreams in which he was, indeed, the great creative genius he wanted so to be--a poet whose lines made the very skies blaze with transcendental brilliance. But sometimes the dreams were less gratifying, and there were great insects on the walls, and flaming cauldrons where he saw the faces of his people cursing him, and other nightmares too horrible to contemplate.

  And it seemed to him that the Navigators had come to him in one such hallucination and had spoken to him of duty and redemption, and--he had the impression--of retribution, too. They had taken him from his bed and shaved his beard and cropped his hair, washing the stain from his lips and the kohl from his eyes. Then they had dressed him in homespun, like any pilgrim, and had taken him--

  Where? He found it difficult to remember. The river. He remembered crossing the dark waters of the West River. There had been a starship waiting, and he had slept suddenly, a dreamless, weary sleep that was somehow a relief to his fearful, anxious heart.

  That was the tragedy of being Galacton, he thought with infinite self-pity. One was consumed by fear and dare not show it. Fear of everything: plotters, assassins. Fear of friends and enemies. Fear of ambitious relatives, and of wars and revolutions and responsibilities--

  But presently he had found that the hallucination persisted. Or it was no hallucination. He was, in fact, a passenger on a Navigators’ starship, bound for some unknown destination, surrounded by sallow-faced, unlovely priests in black clericals; all of them chanting and praying and treating him with an unroyal mixture of deference, contempt, pity, and disapproval.

  It was unbelievable. He was Galacton. Who would dare to take him where he had no wish to go? Who dared preach to him of duty and kingship? Who kept him from his blessed drugs and colored lights and wild music? Who but the Navigators, the black, funereal, sober, terrible Navigators?

  Was Tran right, after all? Wasn’t this part of a black plague of priests overrunning the Empire, armed with dreadful magical powers?

  And yet, when the surging waves of panic receded, he felt a strange peace. No one could reach him now. Florian couldn’t bedevil him with her razor tongue. The warmen couldn’t press him to display himself to the soldiers and even risk himself in war. No one even knew where he was. In space. Somewhere, far beyond the last stars visible from Earth. Only the Navigators could have taken the King of the Universe from his golden haven and brought him out here, among the stars that he owned, that the kings of Vyka had won for him and for all the Vykans--forever.

  But was it forever? The starship was landing. He could feel the life in the ancient, magical ship subsiding, dying. The Navigators had not merely brought him out among the stars to recapture his health and his soul. They had brought him to some place, for some reason.

  He could hear the footsteps of still more black priests approaching down the long companionway toward his chambers.

  His fear began again.

  The land below lay indistinct in the starlight. Occasionally, Kynan could make out the faint reflection of the Janus. The river was broadening as the starship moved slowly nearer to the Inland Sea.

  “That luminosity on the horizon, First Pilot,” Brother Pius asked tentatively. “Have you ever seen anything like it before?”

  “Is it sky-glow from the sanctuary?” Evart asked.

  It resembled no city sky-glow Kynan had ever seen. The night was still and clear. The sky was a Rim sky, with few stars and a well-defined ribbon of milky brightness defining the edge of the great galactic lens. But there were no clouds to catch the reflected light of a city. Instead, the air itself seemed to pulse with faint illumination, like an Aurora Borealis.

  In a way, it reminded the Navigator of the pulsing ionization of the air that surrounded a starship in flight. Yet this was far too extensive and dim for it to be that familiar phenomenon. That its source was the enclave, however, he did not doubt. Across the next low range of hills lay the Great Inland Sea.

  It had been Kynan’s intention to fly the starship to the edge of the sea and approach the sanctuary in slow atmospheric flight. Now he was not so certain. There was something indefinably menacing about that dark, throbbing radiation.

  He leaned forward, inclining his pilot’s couch so that he could study the dark terrain below. The tops of the great trees shone blackish green in the light cast by the ionization of the air surrounding the starship’s hull. “Slow us down, Brother Evart,” he ordered. “Two percent thrust.”

  “Thrust Two, for the glory of God,” Evart intoned, making the adjustments.

  The starship hung almost motionless above the treetops, tons of superhard steel and dural floating, drifting on the inshore wind.

  “First Pilot!” Brother Clement exclaimed. “Look there! A light!”

  Ahead and below, shining through the dark leaves of the forest tops, a single brilliant point of brightness gleamed. A signal laser. At the same moment Kynan’s head began to ache again. It was as though something, or someone, were attempting to tamper with the very stuff of his brain. The impulse was indistinct, unformed, but the import of it was unmistakable: Land at once.

  He scrubbed at his eyes and studied the pulsations of the signal beam. The message was in open code: “In the name of the Theocracy, you are to touch down immediately.” Then followed the cascade of signals that identified him, Kynan, by name and rank. Only high members of the Order had access to such symbols or to the complex devices for creating a beam to send them.

  Kynan was too disciplined a Navigator to question that imperative, commanding laser signal. For some reason beyond his understanding, there were Navigators down there in the dark forest, two hours’ march from the Auroran sanctuary: Navigators old enough, exalted enough to give him orders. It was a thing he had been wishing for most devoutly--almost, he thought, making the sign of the Star on his black-clothed breast, a proper miracle.

  “Stand by to touch down,” he ordered.

  “Here, First Pilot?” Evart asked fearfully.

  Kynan favored him with an angry look. “Beyond the signal
light,” he said sternly.

  “Mea culpa, First Pilot.” Evart began to give orders for the landing sequence to Clement and Pius.

  Kynan watched the treetops tensely, seeking a clearing. There was none. The starship drifted slowly over the winking, demanding laser beam. In the glow of ionization now, Kynan could make out the great humping backs of two starships aground, side by side. He could see the bare flesh of the huge trees the starships had broken like match- sticks as they touched down in this hidden place.

  “Put her down through the trees, Brother Evart,” he said.

  “Amen, First Pilot,” Evart murmured.

  The humming of the ship’s engines faded to an almost inaudible whisper. The keel touched the tops of the trees, and ionized particles seemed to set the leaves and branches alight with a cold fire that ran down the massive trunks to splash like molten gems on the soft soil of the forest floor.

  The great starship settled, brushing the massive trees aside as though they were nothing, breaking the meters- thick trunks and pulping the uprooted stumps with tons of growing weight. Oddly shaped leaves brushed along the polarized curvature of the bridge, their skeletal structures shimmering with light.

  “Touch down, First Pilot,” Brother Pius reported.

  Kynan could see the dark vaults of the forest stretching all around; he could feel the huge mass of the starship settling comfortably into the loamy ground, cradling itself into the soil.

  “Stand-by sequence,” he ordered.

  “Preflight Energy Level, in the name of the Name,” Evart ordered in his holier-than-thou tone.

  “Holding pulse power,” Pius replied shortly, his attention caught by the vastness of the mysterious forest into which they had penetrated.

  Kynan eased himself from the pilot’s couch. His head was throbbing again. Was it really the Vulk contact that had done this to him? Triad had never been a painful experience to him, but perhaps Gret had penetrated too deeply. The human mind was such a tangle of unknown skeins--