The Starkahn of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  Before I could make adequate reply to that, the bridge valve dilated, and Erit came through, leading the alien. A suit of Fleet-issue work coveralls had never looked better than on that small but ample form.

  Erit’s featureless face was deeply lined. She was obviously fatigued from her long session with the alien girl and with who could tell what other personal concerns. One tended, in dealing with the Vulks, to forget their deep interdependence and the paucity of their numbers throughout the galaxy. Gret’s debility was a source of concern to me--and to every Rhadan, for the ancient creature was inextricably involved with our history as a nation and a people. But to another Vulk, most particularly to Erit, who had shared the very essence of his being in a way no human could ever completely understand, his weakness threatened a loss of self. Yet, in the manner of her race, Erit was devoting herself almost completely to our human problems.

  Erit, slender, sexless, familiar in tunic and kilt, made the formal gesture of recognition and spoke quietly. “Starkahn, I bring you Marissa Tran Wyeth, Watcher of the Third Death.” The name was strange with its exotic Anglic clicks and sibilants, and the patronymic “Tran” was unknown to me. There were none among the star families so named. But the title “Watcher of the Third Death” shook me. It had a threatening sound to one who had actually seen the black starship in action.

  The girl made a peculiar twisting obeisance, a rigid gesture that was more wary maneuver than respectful salute to my rank. She regarded me evenly with those marvelous silver eyes. “The strange creature you call a Vulk has told me many marvels,” she said in a low, musical voice. “Perhaps they are true, perhaps not. If you are truly a king, you will not lie to me.” Her hypno-leamed lingua spacia was heavily accented with Anglic, but not with modern Anglic. Rather she spoke with the accents heard now only in the recordings of voices of the First Empire.

  “The Vulk don’t lie,” I said. “Whatever Erit has taught you is the truth.” I was filled with questions, anxious to pump the girl’s brain dry of facts. The Star knew how badly we needed them, with her deadly machine loose among the inhabited worlds. But Erit’s mind brushed mine softly with a note of caution, and I remembered that no matter how strange the silver-eyed mutant seemed to us, we must seem infinitely stranger to her. I would have to go carefully with her.

  “This is a small vessel,” the girl said, walking slowly about Ariane’s bridge. There was a touch of scorn in her tone as she inspected the unfamiliar instruments in the tiny control room. “Is it a warship?”

  “Yes. Of a sort.”

  “Imperial.” Her lip curled with deep hatred.

  “A unit of the Fleet,” I said neutrally, wondering what she remembered of her awakening in the laboratories of the Gonlani warlocks and our wild flight on the drone.

  She stood before me and studied my eyes. “Are you all Genies, then? All blue-eyed supermen?” There was a universe of racial anger in her voice.

  I looked helplessly at Erit. The Vulk said quietly, “Eugenicists.”

  For a moment I didn’t understand what she was saying. Then my years of grubbing through remote historical events came to my rescue. Long ago, so long ago no one knew exactly when, a party of eugenic fanatics had dominated the government of the First Empire. But they were legendary, as were so many things that happened before the Dark Time, that uncounted number of years or centuries or even millennia that separated the Second Stellar Empire from the First. I searched my memory for more details and found them. They were part fact, part rumor and legend. In the expanding days of the First Stellar Empire the Eugenicists--the Genies, as they were popularly called--prevailed on the galactic government to “improve the race” by transporting criminals, dissenters, and (I had no doubt) political opponents out of the main galaxy. For five hundred years these unfortunates took “the Long Death”--the trip to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. But since the voyage took three hundred years even at light speeds, no word of a safe arrival in the Cloud had ever reached the main galaxy. Then, in the political upheavals of the time, something called “the Concerned Coalition” had stopped the transports. But nothing more was ever heard of the transportees, and, in time, they were all but forgotten.

  “You know and the eyeless one knows what I mean,” the girl said coldly. “But why have you suffered her to live? She is small, deformed, obviously a mutation--not human, not perfect. “

  “Erit is a Vulk,” I said, controlling my anger. Among the Rhad no one spoke so of the Vulk.

  “A word,” the girl said, her face shut and hostile.

  Was it possible that this person knew nothing of the Vulk? It hardly seemed credible. The Vulk had been among men since before the Interregnum.

  “She knows nothing about us, Starkahn,” Erit said.

  “But what does she know?” I asked in Rhadan.

  “Her mind is well guarded. It needs Triad to delve into it deeply.”

  Marissa listened to our exchange, in a language she obviously did not understand, with deep suspicion. I couldn’t let that emotion deepen and build an impenetrable wall between us. I needed too desperately to know what she could tell me.

  I said, “There have been no Eugenicists among men for--” I was almost at a loss to guess at how long it had been. Nearly ten thousand years, certainly, for the Vulk had been among us for at least that long. I tried to recall that obscure period of human history--it could have been no more than five hundred years in duration--when the Eugenicist party dominated the First Empire. Lord Star, it would take some deep searching among my books and tapes--none of which were aboard Ariane now--to discover the source of this girl’s hatred for us. I finished lamely, “There have been none for many lifetimes. Everything is changed.”

  “Who rules in Nyor?” the girl asked suddenly. Perhaps she was beginning to understand how long she had lain in that support capsule. It would be a terrible shock to her when the realization was complete. I glanced apprehensively at Erit, but the Vulk only shrugged as if to say that the girl must learn at her own pace.

  “Sokolovsky Bel-Ami is Galacton,” I said.

  The name obviously meant nothing to her. “The Raschilids are gone? After all they did to destroy millions, they simply died like common folk?” There was a world of satisfaction and grim pleasure in her question. It shook me badly. The last of the Raschilid Galactons died after the Second Aliya, the second great wave of stellar colonization when the First Empire was still young. It gave me some historical perspective on Marissa Tran Wyeth’s temporal frame, and the knowledge was shocking. She was speaking of a time in human history so remote that only scholars specializing in exotica even knew of it.

  “Marissa,” I said as gently as I knew how. “The last Raschilid died a hundred centuries ago.”

  The girl sat down on the edge of the control couch abruptly, as though I had cut her legs from under her. The silver eyes went dark, and her pale lips parted. “You are lying to me,” she whispered. “You are lying, Genie--”

  “He speaks the truth,” Erit said. “It is as I suspected. You were meant to sleep in your capsule only a short time. It was three hundred ES years. Isn’t that so?”

  Marissa’s breath was sharply indrawn, and I knew that Erit’s question had struck home. It all fell neatly into place for me, and I wondered why it was that I had not thought of it before. The reason was obvious, of course: the time span involved clogged the imagination. But as a spaceman and a student of history, I should have had enough flexibility of mind to realize that time had no meaning on the cosmic scale. In a universe where light took five hundred centuries to travel from the end of one arm of the galaxy to another, what mattered a mere ten thousand years? What were “years” anyway? An arbitrary measurement of time at best, a unit taken by men from the astronomy of their home planet (a small planet of an obscure star, at that) to slice up the illimitable and immortal cosmos. In such a moment of insight, one caught some glimmer of man’s unbelievable arrogance. In this, the Navigators were right. The universe alone was holy, a
nd, in a very real sense, the means to understand it and to voyage through its grandeur, the telescopes and starships, were sacred.

  But no moment of soaring realization could, for me, lessen the human shock of realizing that this frail girl was from the Magellanic Cloud.

  Chapter Ten

  We are the discarded ones, the generations of the lost. The plasma storms between the galaxies invaded our parents and changed our structure, but not our hearts--which are filled with anger. Ours is the rage of the segregated and the abandoned, and it is righteous rage, my children. In this place we will build such an empire as no man has ever seen before. On these bleak rocks we will build a nation. And in that nation we will build death for the oppressors.

  Marius Tran Rosse, Arriver,

  Captain of the Communes of Magellan, 6345 A.D.-6420 A.D.,

  early First Empire period

  --to this date we have dispatched no fewer than three thousand four hundred starships past the Rim, a million five hundred thousand souls into limbo. And what has been the result? Has this enormous expenditure lessened crime or dissent? Has this gigantic effort brought tranquility to the Empire? It has not. Economically, Transportation has been a disaster. Morally, it is genocide. It must end!

  Golden Age fragment found at Tel-Califia, Earth.

  Believed to be part of a manifesto of the Concerned Coalition, early First Empire period

  “The world you thought you were returning to has been dead and fragmented ten thousand years, Marissa,” the Vulk said wearily. “There are no Raschilids, no Genies, no transports. All that died long long ago.” I watched the girl with admiration for her steadiness. How many of the nobles and great ones I knew could take such a pronouncement with her courage? She stood against a console, unmoving, her silvery eyes dark and filled with a grief that I could only dimly understand.

  To know that you had arrived at the end of a long journey--a journey from which there could be no return--was one thing. But to know that this same journey had thrust you a hundred thousand lifetimes forward in time, isolated you utterly--that was a blow beyond human bearing.

  But, I realized suddenly, she wasn’t human--not completely. Somewhere in the intergalactic abyss, the germ plasm of her ancestors had been changed into--what? Homo Magellansis.

  “The communes,” she said in a hushed voice. “What of the communes of Magellan?”

  “We know nothing of any such communes, Marissa,” I said gently. “Most of our people have never heard even of Transportation. The practice ended five hundred years after it began.”

  I could see her struggling with the confusing time values involved now. She said, “My great grandparents were First Arrivers. They took the Long Death in 6350.”

  For a moment I didn’t understand what she meant, and then I translated her archaic dating system into my own and the shock deepened. “Six thousand Anno Domini--we don’t use that form any longer, Marissa--but six thousand A.D. was the first year of the Galactic Era. This is 8760 G.E.”

  The girl closed her eyes and touched her throat in a softly human gesture. Her early anger was lost now, drowned in a sea of terrible enlightenment. “So long?” she murmured.

  “Longer, even, than that,” Erit said. “For between the First Empire and our own came the Interregnum, the Dark Time, and no one, not even my people, know how long that black age lasted.”

  Her sorrow and loneliness struck me. It was like a wave of cobalt sadness. I don’t know how else to express it. It had color and a grieving feel to it. I realize I express it badly, but it is because for a human being there are no words to describe sadness. Every man and woman alive in the galaxy can suffer grief, but who can transmit it to another? Words simply won’t do. Yet the girl projected her emotion to me, and I felt it almost as she did. Much more than eyes the color of silver separated us in kind. Yet her mutation made it possible--no, imperative--that I share what she was feeling.

  And though I cannot take credit for realizing it then, the experience later gave me some insight into how it was possible for a whole people, all the children of those who had “died the Long Death,” to live in communes with one heart and mind, with one aspiration. Here and now it was sadness, grief, a young girl’s loneliness. But there and then it was revenge and hatred for the uncaring society that had rejected them. That was the function of the Magellanic Mutation: to share and project one’s emotions. In such a society there could be no conflict of purpose. And such a society could, and did, build not one but three of the great black starships. Marissa described her worlds.

  “They are--were? How can I know?--bleak lands, but rich in metals and minerals. My home was on the Fifth Commune, the fourth planet of a double star. We lived together, always together, all of us. We were one. We were a family, a family of millions. We hated the people of the main galaxy, but we loved one another--” And as she said it and felt it, I felt it, too: that sense of belonging, of community. It was a strange and terrible experience, though there was more to come later. But even then I felt the strangeness of a deep love for my fellow beings and a rabid hatred of those “outside,” the callous and materialistic billions of the main galaxy who had cast “us” out.

  As we rested in the control pod of Ariane, orbiting my home world, I had that strange feeling that I was living two lives--my own and Marissa’s. I had shared my mind before, with the Vulk. But this was a different experience. It was emotion I shared and, in a way, therefore, greater understanding than I had ever shared before with another being.

  Yet I retained my own identity and my own critical faculty. And it was this that bared the obvious, tragic flaw in the world of communes she described to us in such glowing, grieving words.

  They had been cast out of the main galaxy for dissent. The powers called it criminality, but, truthfully, it was a matter of definition. And perhaps the galactic universal Spirit, whatever one recognizes as God, or Prime Mover, or what-have-you, intervened. As their fathers and mothers took the Long Death, their genes were changed and the Magellanic Mutation was born. I’m a soldier and an historian, not a mystic. But who can say what is chance and what is teleology? Dissent caused their expulsion. The mutation made dissent unbearable. Whatever they felt, they projected to one another, and so a mass consciousness was born. In our race’s dimmest history, there have been political systems that attempted to force communism or community on men. They all failed because man in the main galaxy was never anything but man: vital, quarrelsome, avaricious, predatory (ask the Vulk about that!), and individualistic. The people of the Cloud, Homo Magellansis, could not live that way. The mutation made it impossible.

  “Life in the communes was always hard,” Marissa said, and I felt her terrible longing to see the double sun and share herself with her fellows, “but we were together. We worked together, ate and made love together, learned together--”

  “And hated together,” I said. Her silver eyes flashed for a moment, and I felt her anger, too. Even Erit shivered. “Yes, that, too. We needed that to build the Deaths.”

  “Your starship,” I said cautiously.

  She nodded. “It was the greatest honor to be chosen a Watcher. To go with one of the Deaths. “

  My mouth felt dry as I asked her, “How many were built, Marissa?”

  “Mine was the third. You know nothing of the first two?”

  “Nothing. We found you in Delphinus. The ship--the Death--had been damaged slightly. Perhaps that was why the machines never woke you.”

  She sagged. “Then the others crashed. Or never reached the main galaxy.”

  “No such great starships were ever discovered in the galaxy before,” I said. “Not until we found yours.”

  “So it was all for nothing,” she said bitterly. “Each generation slaved to build a Death that the next generation might launch. But even in my time, the desire for revenge was weakening. The work on Death Four was far, far behind schedule when I entered the capsule.”

  It was strange and terrible to hear her speak of
things that happened so far, far off in space and time as though they had taken place yesterday and nearby.

  And I gave thought to the cosmic irony, the tragedy really, of an entire civilization dedicated to building nothing for themselves but the mightiest engines of destruction the mind could conceive--for revenge on a world that barely outlasted their First Arrivers, had they but known it. It was a fit subject for cosmic, universal, and bitter, bitter laughter.

  The silver eyes searched for mine and held them, and I felt a gentle pity for what I saw there. “The Genies,” she said, “the Raschilids. All of that. Dust for a hundred centuries?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “While I slept in the capsule--”

  “Yes,” I said again, not knowing how to comfort such sadness.

  “And my people never returned.”

  “Never.”

  “Perhaps,” Erit said quietly, “they lost the need for vengeance. Perhaps they turned inward, into the Cloud. There is a whole galaxy out there to know, to live in. A billion stars. Perhaps they did that.”

  The girl began to weep silently. Her tears were tinged with the same silvery color as her eyes. They were like drops of molten starlight on her cheeks. I thought she was the most beautiful thing, and the saddest, that I have ever known. I touched her cheek more gently, more tenderly, than I have ever touched a human being of my own kind.

  “This is enlightening, I’m sure.” Ariane’s voice came into the control pod tinged with some impatience. “But the business at hand is that ship.”

  The Magellanic girl jerked with sudden fright. Her eyes went wide. “Who spoke?”

  “Ariane,” I said. “The ship.”

  “The ship?” Marissa looked about the bridge in utter confusion.