The Starkahn of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  Gonlanburg is an old town; some of its buildings date back to Interregnal times, and in the years since then it has been relatively untouched by wars. The other towns and cities of Gonlan, the inland agricultural centers and the industrial complexes along the northern coast, are relatively modern (on Gonlan that means they were founded within the last millennium), and they have all been shattered at least once by armies or air forces. But even in the process of taking Gonlan from the Interregnal kings, the warmen of my family treated Gonlanburg kindly. Perhaps it is because the place stirs racial memories of old university towns on Earth, towns that exist no longer save in the memory of men.

  Gonlanburg has been a seat of learning time out of mind. In the days of Kynan the Navigator, who was Star King of the Gonlani-Rhad during the reign of the Galacton Torquas the Poet, in the second century of the sixth millennium GE, the Gonlani warlocks conducted their researches in secret, hiding their rediscoveries of the old knowledge from the members of the holy Order of Navigators. Much of the early work on cyborg rebirth and organ transplantation was done in those days by the warlocks of Gonlanburg.

  It had been some years since I had traveled through the narrow, rose-stone streets of Gonlanburg, and anxious as I was, a part of me was enjoying it. It was dusk, a quiet time in the old university town. The shops were closing down, storekeepers covering their wares with the silver nets they had used in this place to prevent theft for a thousand years. There were students on the streets, as well, more boys than girls (because we are still traditionalists out here on the Rim and do not encourage women to take up intellectual pursuits), but yet some girls (we aren’t barbarians, after all), pretty ones in their student kilts and tunics. Some of the young people carried Vulkish musical instruments, for Gonlanburg is a galactic center of the study of Vulk music and art.

  The students mingled with the townspeople, throngs of them in a bright-colored river of shimmering caps and capes and cloaks. The people of the Rim, perhaps because of the loneliness of their almost empty sky, are lovers of color and light. The old stone buildings blazed with flurons, colored electrics, even with flame sconces, fed by the blue-burning gases piped from far inland. The occasional aluminum and quartz building erected in the last century or so glittered amid the red stones of the ancient town.

  I drove the hovercraft slowly toward the university gardens, in some places stalled by the traffic of hovers, carts, three-wheelers, electrics, and animal-drawn wagons. The Gonlani-Rhad, having been brought into the Palatinate late, were of course more Rhad than the Rhad of Rhada. There were now more Rhadan war horses and mares on Gonlan than on any other world in the Rhadan Republic. Even here on the crowded, dusky streets of Gonlanburg, I could see many riders on their fine specimens--horses, but with a difference: clawed fighting feet and the pads of cats, carniverous teeth and slotted eyes, and--most unusual of all to the stranger from the central galaxy--no reins or head gear, for these animals were telepathic, with a rudimentary language and culture.

  For hundreds of generations the Rhad had bred these splendid animals: once for war, now for show and pleasure. Some said the original stock had been brought in sperm banks from Earth in the time of the First Empire. It might well be so, though there are no Rhadan horses on Earth now save those imported for the Imperial court from Rhada.

  The newsfax telexes on the building cornices carried the ordinary run of news from throughout the Empire. There was not a single word about the doomsday machine, nor about anything untoward happening anywhere within the inhabited galaxy. I wondered if the destruction of Sigma Libra and the Delphinus star was being suppressed--or was it simply that the spread of man throughout the galaxy was so enormous, so sprawling-huge, that the destruction of two small stars out of billions could not force itself through the inertia of workaday news? Either way it was dangerous and frightening, because the threat was real and the death it promised swift and sure.

  I turned away from the commercial districts and fed power to the hover jets, hurrying toward the acropolis where the university stood. As I guided the machine up the winding path, I felt the tingle of an encephalophone transmission coming from a great distance.

  I pressed the powerstud against my skull under the wig, and Ariane immediately began to speak impatiently to me.

  “I’ve been calling you for almost a half hour,” she said crossly.

  “I was in traffic. Too much interference at this range, I guess.”

  “I am sychronized. Eleven hundred sixty-five point four kilometers.”

  “Good.”

  “Erit is waiting for you now in the eucalyptus garden of the science faculty. You know where that is?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have been here before.”

  “Apologies, Starkahn.” Ariane could pick the damnedest times to get snippish and feminine with me. But perhaps her position, in an illegal orbit eleven hundred kilometers over my head, had something to do with her state of mind. Being a cyborg, Ariane was by nature a law-abiding creature. All this carrying on was really against her normal inclinations.

  “Erit has arranged for the two of you to see the alien. She has told the warlocks you are a student of hers from Rhada, a xenobiologist. If they don’t recognize you, it should come off.”

  “And if they do?”

  “Why, then, you will have to think of something very quickly, Starkahn.”

  I should have known that would be her reply. Even in these circumstances, Ariane couldn’t help schooling me. The psychometrists who teamed us must have built a “throw him out of the nest” syndrome into our relationship.

  At the base of the acropolis, I left the hovercraft in a copse of thornbushes. There were no students on the paths at this time of evening. Those who were attending or leaving classes in the clinical departments above would be using the less scenic, but much more efficient, pneumatic tunnels inside the basalt structure of the hill.

  I was some hundred meters now above the level of the town of Gonlanburg proper, and from here I could see the polychromatic spread of the lights of city and spaceport. The port boundaries were outlined in violet high-visibility fluoros, and beyond them lay the restless darkness of the Gonlan Sea. Far down the coast, at Zodiac Bay, the water would be lighted with the firefly glow of hundreds of night divers and the brightness of the underwater hostels like the Coral Sands and the others on the reef.

  But here, in these northern waters, no such tourist attractions existed. The sea was cold off Gonlanburg and very deep. The darkness beyond the starship port was as vast and lonely as the sky above it: an emptiness lit only by the dim outline of the galactic lens and the faint, distant luminosity of the Magellanic Clouds, a long lifetime away, even at translight velocities.

  I hurried up the steeply climbing path toward the garden of the science faculty. The night wind made a sighing sound in the unseen eucalyptus trees: those hundred-meter giants imported long ago from Earth to thrive in Gonlan’s bright sun and sea airs. But I could not see the trees, for Gonlan’s sky at night is dark. The nearest stars are few, and the satellites, Alpha through Omicron, are no more than half a kilometer in diameter. They dart across the sky like meteors but shed no real light on the surface of the planet.

  At the top of the hill, where the path leveled and entered the grove, I stopped. I could hear voices ahead in the darkness, and I had no way of knowing if they were the voices of someone I wanted to avoid or merely students making out in the privacy of the orderly forest.

  Two cowled shapes materialized out of the darkness, and I realized that they were two Navigators, young novices by their voices, and apparently members of the retinue of Nav Peter of Syrtis. Their conversation was about what one would expect of two young men suddenly thrust into the student society of Gonlanburg. Navigators are not celibates, though they live in a largely male world. And Gonlanburg’s female students, while not numerous, were Rim women and more than customarily handsome.

  I leaned against a large tree and listened with some sense of tolerant su
periority. After all, it was my people they were discussing. But then one said: “Still, I’ve seen nothing to match the silver-eyed goddess.”

  “Nor has Nav Peter,” his friend replied in an awed voice. “I’ve never seen him so incensed.”

  “She spat on him and called him ‘Genie.’ Why would she do such a thing? Could there be Navigators where she came from?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Think how long she has been in that capsule, and now--”

  Their voices faded, and I could hear no more, nor did I think it wise to follow them to spy on their conversation. Erit, if I could find her in this darkness, would answer the questions as they arose. Yet the young priests seemed to be saying that Nav Peter was already angry, already hostile to the alien. Gret’s suggestion that the Zealot clergyman might take the alien off to Syrtis rather than to Algol as his superiors ordered became more of a possibility.

  I pressed the power stud on the E-phone and called out to Ariane. The reply was slow and indistinct. The planet’s ionization layer was interfering capriciously. “Where is Erit now?” I asked.

  “Here beside you,” a voice said in the blackness, startling me.

  “Erit,” I said, feeling the sudden warmth of her presence. “Thank the Star you’re here.”

  Now I could make out the small humanoid shape: a duplicate in almost every way of Gret, yet somehow unmistakably “female,” or at least different in some sexual sense from Gret’s “maleness.” She stirred in the darkness and touched my arm. Immediately, my sense of well-being grew.

  “They revived the girl this morning,” Erit said. “They have not questioned her yet. She is still too weak. But Nav Peter saw her.”

  “I heard two of his novices talking,” I said. “There was some sort of trouble.”

  “She grew very agitated. She called him a ‘Genie’ among other things--none of them very complimentary. The girl speaks almost perfect Anglic.”

  The language of the Golden Age, I thought. I had never heard it used. My head spun with the implications of what Erit said. The alien girl must be a living mine of historical data. Was it really possible she had been in that support capsule since First Empire times? And what could she mean by calling a Navigator a ‘Genie’? Was it possible she had never before seen a member of the Order? If that were so, then she must actually be as ancient in origin as I supposed. The Order of Navigators was formed in Interregnal times, after the First Empire, to protect and maintain the starships.

  “She is sleeping now,” Erit said in the darkness. “This afternoon she was given a hypnocourse in lingua spacia. The warlocks decided that would be simpler than trying to locate someone fluent enough in Anglic to converse with her.” She stirred restlessly, and I could feel, quite suddenly, her anxiety to be done with this business and away--back to Gret. And together with her anxiety came the knowledge that she might soon be alone, and the loneliness was a physical ache in the heart.

  I said, “You will always have a home among the Rhad, Erit.” It was a blunt and perhaps insensitive thing to say, and this was a poor time to say it. But I wanted her to know that my family and I acknowledged our debt to her in perpetuity. Gret was very old and would surely die one day--it might be very soon. Certainly Erit felt this, for this was the source of her anxiety and wish to have done with all this--and when it happened, Erit, who had been sister-wife and alter ego to Gret, would be alone as no human being could conceive of being alone. Yet she must know that the place filled by Gret for so long among the Rhad of Rhada was hers--for as many more millennia as she lived. Such knowledge could not assuage the grief that was coming to the Vulk, but it might make the loneliness easier to bear.

  “I know this, Starkahn,” Erit said. “But it is kind of you to understand my anxiousness to be back with him.”

  “Tonight, Erit,” I said. “We will start this very night.”

  “Perhaps, Starkahn.”

  “We will take the girl now,” I said, with a confidence I didn’t completely feel.

  “I will guide you to her,” Erit said, starting up the path. At the crest of the hill we came out of the dark into the glow of the gardens of the clinical wing. There were patients walking on the terraces and some few warlocks, their traditional black robes marking them among the white-clothed inmates of the hospital.

  They made formal greeting to Erit as she led me along the corridors to the isolation wing. I looked for armed guards. Surely, I thought, the Imperials would have so important a “detainee” under some guard. But all I could see were a few young Navigators, none of them obviously armed, except for the traditional flintlock pistols at their belts.

  We descended a shallow ramp into a rotunda where a group of warlocks stood in conversation before the door to a suite. The warlocks were all medical doctors by their scarlet collars, and as Erit approached, they bowed and looked curiously at me.

  “This is Emeric, Doctors. A student of mine from Rhada. I have promised him a moment with our patient,” Erit said.

  “Of a certainty, Clarissima,” the eldest warlock replied. No warlock would refuse so reasonable a request by a Vulk--not in a Rim nation, and most particularly not on any planet of the Rhadan Republic, where Gret and Erit were known and revered by all classes.

  The doctors still regarded me with some puzzlement, but they were too polite to ask questions.

  “Shall we come with you, Clarissima?” the warlock asked. “The observation chamber is open. The alien girl is asleep.”

  “Thank you, we can manage,” Erit murmured, and led on through a series of doors. In the third inner chamber robots produced sterile gowns and respirators. The hospital was taking no chances with alien bacteria, though Erit assured me the girl was quite safe and free of infection of any sort.

  I said, “Have Ariane send a drone now. Do you know which window is the alien’s?”

  “Yes,” Erit said.

  I felt the harmonics of the Vulk’s strong telepathic transmission. It was beamed narrowly to Ariane’s cyborg wavelength, but the overload charged the room and set the primitive colloidal brains of service robots to stirring. Their utilitarian appendages twitched with the strength of impulses they were too incomplete to interpret and translate action. “The drone is launched, Starkahn,” Erit said.

  “It will cause quite a stir in the town, you know,” I said. “And there will be Fleet personnel at the port who will be able to figure out what it is. But not immediately, I hope.” I shrugged. “I’m sorry, in any case. It was the best plan I could devise. The only one, in fact.”

  “It will do,” Erit said. “If we do our part.”

  And, I thought, if no one interferes! Our plan was so lightly cobbled together, using what resources we could muster, that a single unforeseen factor could ruin us.

  I stood finally in the last sterile chamber, the sterile drapes over my cavalier’s wig, tunic, and kilt.

  “She is there,” Erit said, indicating the massive steel and plastic door ahead of us.

  “All right,” I said. My heart was pounding, and I did not know with any degree of certainty whether what I felt was anxiety or suppressed pleasure at the thought of seeing that beautiful woman again.

  Chapter Eight

  The male members of the house of Rhada were, since earliest times, strong warriors and enlightened (if severe) rulers. They were also, one is constrained to say, highly susceptible to women. This, one supposes, is a malady of kings.

  Einar Baltus-Yoka WL.D., The Evolution of the Rhadan Republic,

  late Second Stellar Empire period

  If she is, as you suspect, a descendant of transportees, then it may be that she has knowledge that should be restricted to members of the Order.

  Fragment of a letter from Grand Master of Navigators Briffault

  to Nav Peter of Syrtis, Special Nuncio and Inquisitor,

  late Second Stellar Empire period

  Yes, there may be danger. But the galaxy and the Empire are very large--can I not expect peace in my time?
/>
  Sokolovsky Bel Ami, Galacton, Aphorisms,

  late Second Stellar Empire period

  The room in which the alien girl had been revived was a prison. It was as comfortable as a hospital room can be made, and it was designed for health and well-being. But it was conclusively and unmistakably a cell. I could see the apertures that had been made for laser projectors to be mounted in the walls and the connections for closed-circuit holography. Fortunately for my plans, such as they were, the University of Gonlanburg is no more efficient or competent when dealing with the real world than universities have been for a thousand years or more. The lasers and holocameras had not yet been installed because there was a debate among members of the Humanities Faculty (who had not yet been cleared to interview the revived alien) concerning a possible violation of the alien girl’s civil rights. I thanked the humanists most fervently. Without their irritation with the “establishment” of the college, I would never have been able to extract the girl from Gonlanburg.

  Erit and I came through the door, and there were still two attendants watching us through the one-way glass of the near wall. Erit froze into concentrated immobility, established a mind-touch, and from that moment on what the attendants saw took place only in the mind of the Vulk and not in the room they were supposed to be watching.

  But I froze into immobility of a sort as well. I had not seen the girl since leaving her at the port on my return from deep space. And then, of course, she had been deep in her coma, floating in the clear fluid of the life-support capsule.

  Now, however, she was alive--unmistakably so. There were soft movements, a delicate flush on her cheeks, a tendril of dark hair falling endearingly across her narrow brow. Her breath was slow and deep in natural sleep. This was no specimen in a crystal tube. This was a young and beautiful woman lying with her head on the softly tinted pillows, her small and delicately made hand on the counterpane. She made my chest ache and my breath come more quickly: she was altogether beautiful and touching, for, I reminded myself, had anyone ever been as alone as this girl? The black starship had brought her across an infinity of kilometers from some unknown place through years--eons, probably--of measureless time. And now, even the vessel was gone, and she, small and beautiful and helpless, was alone.