Rise of the Terran Empire

by Poul Anderson

  "I wish this could go on forever," Coya Falkayn murmured.

  Her husband attempted a chuckle. "No, you don't, sweetheart. I never knew a girl who has less tolerance of monotony than you, or more talent for driving it off."

  "Oh, I wish a lot of things would be eternal—but concurrently, you understand," she said. He could hear how she, too, strove for lightness. "Life should be a Cantorian aleph-one. An infinity of infinities to you, my dear mathematical hobblewit."

  Instead, he thought, we move through a single space-time on our single tracks, for a hundred years or thereabouts if we have the best antisenescence regimes available to us—or less, of course, if something happens to chop a particular world line short, I don't mind my own mortality too much, Coya; but how I resent yours!

  "Well," he told her, "I used to daydream about an infinity of women, all beautiful and accessible. But I found that you were plenty, and then some." He bent his head to lay his cheek along hers. Through a hint of perfume he drew in the clean odor of her hair. "Now come on, lass. Since we have to do things sequentially, let's concentrate on dancing."

  She nodded. Though her movements continued deft, he felt no easing of the tension that had risen in her, and her fingers gripped his needlessly hard.

  Therefore, at the end of the number he suggested, "Suppose we drink the next one out," and led her to an offside bar. When a champagne glass was in her hand, she said in turn, "I'd like to watch the sea for a while."

  They found a private place by the outer rail. Vine-heavy trellises screened them from the dance floor and from any other pairs who might also have sought the peace that was here. Luna stood on the starboard quarter, casting a broad track and making the nearer wave crests sparkle; elsewhere the water was like fluid obsidian. Leaves shone wan among shadows. The deck underfoot carried a pulse of engines through feet and bones, as quiet as the pulse of blood in the heart, and a hush-hush-hush around the bows barely reached a keen hearing. A breeze carried the least touch of night chill.

  Falkayn put forth his free hand to lift Coya's chin toward him. He smiled on the left side of his face. "Don't worry about me," he said. "You never did before."

  "Oh, I did when I was a youngster," she answered. "I'd hear about the latest adventure of the fabulous Muddlin' Through team and go icy at the thought of what might have happened to you."

  "I didn't notice you fretting after you'd joined us; and we hit a few turbulences then."

  "That's it. I was there. Either we had nothing to fear or we were too busy to be frightened. I didn't have to stay home wondering if I'd ever see you again."

  Her gaze went from his, skyward, until it reached the ghost-road of the Milky Way and came to rest on a white star within. "Each night I'll look at Deneb and wonder," she said.

  "May I remind you," he answered as genially as he was able, "in that general neighborhood, besides Babur and Mirkheim, is Hermes? If I came from there once, I'll surely repeat."

  "But if war does break out—"

  "Why, my citizenship is still Hermetian, not Commonwealth. And I'm on a straightforward mission of inquiry and unofficial diplomacy, nothing else. The Baburites may not be the most accommodating race in the universe, but they're rational. They won't want to make enemies needlessly."

  "If your task is that simple and safe, why must you go?"

  Falkayn sighed. "You know why. Experience. For over thirty years, I've been dealing with nonhumans; and Adzel, Chee, and I make a damned efficient unit." He grinned anew. "Modesty is the second most overrated virtue in the canon. The first is sincerity, in case you're interested. But I'm dead serious about this. Gunung Tuan was right when he asked us to go. We'll have a better chance than anybody else of accomplishing something useful, or at least of bringing back some definite information. And you know all this, darling. If you wanted to raise objections, why wait till our last evening?"

  She bit her lip. "I'm sorry. I thought I could keep my fears from showing . . . till you were gone."

  "Look, I was being honest, too, when I said bad words on getting the job precisely when you can't come. I really meant it when I wished aloud you could. Would I do that if I anticipated any risk worth fussing about? The biggest unknown in the equation is simply how long we may be gone."

  She nodded slowly. They had both stopped space roving when their Juanita was born, because it meant indefinite absences from Earth. An older, more hedonistic, less settled generation than Coya's had bred enough neurotics that she felt, and made her husband feel, children needed and deserved a solid home. And now she had another on the way.

  "I still don't see why it has to be you," she said in a last hint of mutiny. "After three years in the Solar System—"

  "You're a bit rusty, yes," he finished for her. "But you only had five years of trade pioneering with us. I had more than twenty. The tricks of the trade are practically stamped on my genes. When the old man asked, I couldn't well refuse."

  Not when it was the very world of Mirkheim which caused me to betray his trust in me, eighteen years ago, went through his mind. I've been forgiven, I'm van Rijn's crown prince, but I've never quite forgiven myself, and here is a chance to make amends.

  Coya knew what he was thinking. She raised her head. "Aye, aye, sir. I apologize. If we do get a war, a lot of women will be much worse off than I am."

  "Right," he replied soberly. "It's barely possible that my gang can contribute a smidgen toward keeping the peace."

  "Meanwhile we have hours and hours left." She lifted her glass in the moonlight. Music rollicked forth afresh. "Our first duty is to this excellent champagne, wouldn't you say?"

  "That's my girl talking." Falkayn smiled back at her. The rims clinked together.

  When the two human members of the Muddlin' Through team retired, the two nonhumans went their separate ways. Chee Lan signed on as the xenobiologist of another trade pioneer crew. She didn't feel ready to settle down yet. Besides, she wanted to become indecently wealthy off her commissions, in order to indulge her every whim when at last she returned to that planet which astronomy designates as O2 Eridani A II and the Anglic language calls Cynthia. She happened to be on Earth when the Mirkheim crisis developed, and this was probably what had crystallized Nicholas van Rijn's idea of reviving the threesome—though he must have consulted his company's registry first in hopes of learning that he could indeed contact her immediately.

  "What?" she had spat when he phoned her at her lodge. "Me? To spy and wheedle—No, shut up, I realize you'll call it 'gathering intelligence' and 'attempting negotiations.' You waste syllables like a drunken lexicographer." She arched her back. "Do you seriously propose sending us to Babur . . . in the middle of a possible war? Those barrels of butter you eat every day must have gone to your head."

  Van Rijn's image in the screen rolled eyes piously in the general direction of heaven. "Do not get excited, little fluffcat," urged his most unctuous voice. "Think on traveling once more with your closest friends. Think on helping prevent or stop trouble what gets people killed and maybe cuts into profits. Think on the glory you can win by a daring exploitation, to smear off on your children. Think—"

  "I'll think on what good hard cash you offer," Chee interrupted. "Name a figure."

  Van Rijn spread his hands in a gesture of horror. "You speak so crass in this terrible matter? What are you, anyways?"

  "We know what I am. Now let's decide my price." Chee made herself comfortable on a cushion. In lieu of alcoholic refreshment, which did not affect her nervous system, she put a mildly narcotic cigarette in an interminable ivory holder and kindled it. This was going to take awhile.

  With lamentation by him and scorn by her and much enjoyment on both sides, the fee was haggled out for a service which might be dangerous and certainly would not yield a monetary return. She insisted that Adzel be paid the same. Left to himself, the Wodenite was too diffident, and looking out for the big bumbler's interests could count as her good deed for the month. Van Rijn admitted what she had suspected
, that Adzel had been recruited by a shameless appeal to his sense of duty.

  He was still in the Andes Mountains, and did not intend to leave until the eve of departure. When that time came, Chee found from an update of the registry that he had taken a room in a cheap hotel in Terraport. She recognized its name from former days; it was the kind which had no facilities for approximating the home environment of a nonhuman. Well, she thought, Adzel didn't actually need two and a half standard gravities, thick hot air, the blinding light of an F5 sun, and whatever other delights existed on the world men knew as Woden. He had managed without during the years aboard Muddlin' Through, not to speak of the Buddhist monastery where he had spent the past three as a lay brother. No doubt he figures to give the money he's saving to the poor, or some cause similarly grubby, she guessed, then caught a cab to the nearest airport and the next transoceanic flight from there.

  En route, she drew stares. An extraterrestrial fellow passenger was still rather a rarity on Earth—even from Cynthia, whose most advanced culture was well into the spacefaring stage. She was used to that, and content to let people learn what a truly graceful species looked like. They saw a small being, ninety centimeters in length plus a bushy tail which added half again as much. Her legs were long in proportion, ending in five prehensile toes on each foot; her arms were equally long, the hands six-fingered. Her round head bore huge emerald eyes, pointed ears, a short muzzle with a broad nose, a delicate mouth with exceedingly sharp teeth framed in wiry whiskers. Silky fur covered her body save for the bare gray skin of hands and feet; it was pure white except where it formed a blue-gray mask around her eyes. She had once heard herself compared to a cross between an Angora cat, a monkey, a squirrel, and a raccoon, and idly wondered which of these were supposed to be on what side of the family. The speculation was natural, since she came of a bisexual, viviparous race like Adzel—homeothermic like his, too, though neither of them was strictly a mammal.

  A little boy cried, "Ooh, kitty!" and wanted to pet her. She glanced from her printout of the London Times and said sweetly to the mother, "Why don't you eat your young?" Thereafter she was left in peace.

  Arriving, she hailed another cab and gave it the hotel's address. The time here was after sundown and Adzel should be in. She hoped he wasn't meditating too deeply to notice a buzz at his door. Hearing the dry rustle of scales across scales, she knew he was uncoiling and about to admit her. Good. She'd be glad to see the old oaf again, she supposed.

  The door opened. She looked up, and up. Adzel's head was more than two meters off the floor, on the top of a thick, serpentine neck and a horse-bulky torso which sprouted two correspondingly powerful arms with four-fingered hands. Rearward, his centauroid body stretched four and a half meters, including the crocodilian tail. His head was likewise faintly suggestive of a reptile: long snout, rubbery-lipped mouth, omnivore's teeth that had among them some alarming fangs, large amber-colored eyes protected by jutting brow ridges, bony ears. A serration of triangular plates ran from the top of his skull and down his spine to its end. One behind the torso had been surgically removed in order that comrades might safely ride on him. Scales shimmered over the whole frame, dark green above shading to gold on the belly.

  "Chee Lan!" he boomed in Anglic. "What a splendid surprise. Come in, my dear, come in." Four cloven hoofs carrying a ton of mass made a drum-thunder as he moved aside for her. "I did not expect to greet you before we meet at the ship tomorrow," he went on. "I thought it best if I—"

  "We shouldn't need much preliminary checkout, we three and Muddlehead," she agreed.

  "—if I attempted—"

  "Still, I figured we'd do well to compare notes in advance. You couldn't get Davy loose from his family with a crowbar before rendezvous time, but you and I don't have any current infatuations."

  "I am attempting to—"

  "Do you?"

  "What? I am attempting to brief myself on the current situation." Adzel gestured at the room's video. A man was speaking:

  "—review the background of the crisis. It goes back well beyond the discovery of Mirkheim this past year. In fact, that was a rediscovery. For about fifteen years before, the Supermetals consortium were in possession of the planet, mining its riches without ever letting it be known where the treasure they had to sell came from. They tried to give the impression that their source was a secret manufacturing process, beyond the reach of any known technology. This trick succeeded to a degree. But eventually various scientists concluded it was far more likely that the supermetals had been produced and concentrated by nature—"

  "You've heard that!" Chee jerked her tail at the screen.

  "Yes, of course, but I have hopes he will give me a comprehensive precis of current events," Adzel said. "Remember, for three years I have heard no newscast, read no secular literature besides planetological journals." Chee was glad to learn that he had not neglected his profession. It probably wouldn't be needed on this trip; but you were never sure, and in any event, his keeping abreast of scientific developments showed that he had not been completely spun off the wheel of his particular karma. "We got occasional visitors," the dragon continued, "but I avoided them as much as possible, fearing that my appearance might distract them from the serenity of the surroundings."

  "Seeing your version of the lotus position certainly would," Chee snapped. "Listen, I can brief you better and faster than that klong."

  "Would you like a spot of tea?" Adzel asked, pointing to a five-liter thermos. "I had it brewed at the place where I got supper. Here, this ashtray is clean." He set it on the floor and poured it full for Chee to lap. He himself hoisted the container to his mouth.

  Meanwhile the lecturer skimmed over basic physics.

  From the actinide series onward, the periodic table of the elements holds nothing but radioactives. In the biggest atoms, the mutual repulsion of protons is bound to overcome attractive forces within the nucleus. Beyond uranium, the rates of disintegration become great enough that early researchers on Earth found no such materials in nature. They had to produce neptunium and plutonium artificially. Later it was shown that micro-micro amounts of these two do occur in the rocks. But their presence is a mere technicality. Virtually all that there was in the beginning has vanished, broken down into simpler nuclei. And beyond plutonium, half-lives are generally so short that the most powerful and elaborate apparatus can barely make a quantity sufficient to register on ultrasensitive instruments; then the product is gone.

  Yet theory indicated that an "island of stability" should exist, beginning at atomic number 114 and ending at 122: nine elements, most of whose isotopes are only weakly radioactive. To manufacture infinitesimal amounts of these was a laboratory triumph. Gigantic energy was required to fuse that many particles. Theory went on to hint at physical and chemical properties, whether of the materials themselves or of solid compounds of those that were volatile in isolation. These were an engineer's dream, in catalysts, conductors, components of alloys with supreme strength. Nobody saw any road to the realization of that dream . . . until a sudden thought occurred.

  (It came first to David Falkayn, eighteen years ago. But the speaker was unaware of that. He simply recited the reasoning of later thinkers.)

  We believe all matter began as a chaos of hydrogen, the smallest atom. Some of it was fused in the primordial fireball to form helium; more of this process happened later, in the enormous heat and pressure at the hearts of stars which condensed from that gas. And there the higher elements were built, step by step as atoms interacted. Scattering mass in their solar winds, or as dying red giants, or as novae and supernovae, the early generations of stars enriched with such nuclei the interstellar medium from which later generations of suns and planets would form. The carbon in our proteins, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen we breathe were forged in those ancient furnaces.

  Had no extremely big stars ever formed, the series would have ended with iron. It is at the bottom of the energy curve; to join together still more proton
s and neutrons lies beyond the power of any steadily burning sun. But the monster stars do not die peacefully. They become supernovae, briefly shining on a scale comparable to an entire galaxy. In that moment of unimaginable violence, reactions otherwise impossible take place; and copper, gold, uranium, every element above iron comes into being, and is blown into space to enter the stuff of new stars, new worlds.

  Among the substances thus created are the supermetals of the island of stability. Being as hard to make as they are, they occur only in a tiny proportion, so tiny that at first none were found in nature, not even after man broke free of the Solar System and began exploring his corner of the galaxy. Yet they should be there. The problem was to locate a measurable concentration of them.

  Suppose a giant star had a giant planet, sufficiently massive that its core would survive the explosion. That was not impossible, though theory said it was improbable. The bursting sun would cast a torrent of elements across the core. Those with low volatility should condense, or even plate out. True, they would be a minute fraction of the total which the supernova vomited into space; but that fraction should equal billions of tons of valuable metals, and a lesser amount of immensely more precious supermetals. Given their comparatively slight radioactivity, a worthwhile proportion of the supermetals ought to last for several million years . . . .