The Rebel of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  “Still,” Ariane said with a shiver of superstitious dread, “could he be an immortal?”

  Kier said flatly, “There are no immortals, Ariane. There never have been.”

  “It is as he says, Queen,” Cavour agreed. “I suggested that the men of the Golden Age might have been able to do things that would seem miraculous to us. But I doubt that even they could conquer death.”

  “And Kelber?”

  “A student of the Warls, Queen,” Cavour said. “Like myself. Like thousands of us all over the galaxy who think the Navigators go too slowly in uncovering the old knowledge.” He pursed his lips and regarded the girl almost with defiance. “If that is heresy, I ask that you keep in mind that I am a Rhadan.” He paused and then went on with the ghost of a smile. “And we Rhadans are a rebellious lot, so I’m told.”

  In the control room of the great starship, the watch was changing. Kalin had completed the ritual of the position report when the Warning sounded.

  For a moment the young Navigator and the novice Brother John, who sat beside him, were startled. The dogma explained the Warning, and all Navigators knew of it, but neither of the two young men had ever been aboard a starship when a Warning was actually sounded.

  From the sealed panel above their heads, the amber-colored light began to flash, and they could hear the mysterious electronic tones sounding within the walls as the ancient machinery began a series of micro-second-swift, all but incomprehensible calculations of speed, declination, and ascension: pinpointing the other vessel in the cosmic immensity ahead.

  A display in three dimensions appeared above the acceleration couches. It was at first a swirling blackness that swiftly cleared into a holographic image of the billions of cubic miles of space ahead of the Rhadan vessel. Brother John’s eyes widened, and he hurriedly made the sign of the Star. The appearance of the display was, to him, a miraculous confirmation of the ancient dogma. In another age an appearance of the Virgin before two members of the priesthood would have been comparable--a thing the Church taught was possible, but miraculous in its reality, nevertheless.

  For Kalin, however, the Warning and the display were unsettling only because he had never actually seen such manifestations. That the starships were capable of producing them he knew.

  The display crystallized. There was no scale of values that either of the two priests could apply. They had no suspicion of the vastness of the space represented. But the moving red spark among the tiny stars was something they understood well enough. It was a starship similar to their own, moving at almost their speed and on exactly the same course--for Sarissa. The detectors had discovered the other vessel at extreme range, hours ahead of them. And even as they watched, the spark reached the edge of the display and vanished.

  Brother John made the sign again and whispered a prayer. “We are most favored among men, First Pilot,” he said fervently. “That we should witness a Warning.”

  Kalin said nothing for a moment, watching with fascinated interest as the insubstantial sphere of star-shot darkness brightened for a moment and then faded as the star-ship ahead passed out of range.

  “Space is huge, Brother John,” he said. “Today a chance meeting of starships is almost impossible. In the Golden Age it must have happened often.”

  “Our brothers aboard that other ship, First Pilot. Did they see us?”

  “If their detectors worked as well as ours, yes.”

  “Blessed be the Name,” Brother John murmured unctuously.

  Kalin sat for a moment, thoughtfully staring at the empty space where the Warning had appeared. Same course, same speed. The other starship’s appearance could mean only one thing. He stood up abruptly and handed the watch to Brother John. Then he hurried from the control room to find his cousin Kier, who must be told.

  12

  Who is so deafe or so blinde as is hee

  That willfully will neither heare nor see?

  Pre-Golden Age proverb

  Unhallowed knowledge brought the Dark Time, and fire from the sky, and death to men in ten times a thousand dreadful ways. So I say this to you: Seek not to know, for to know is to sin. Delve not into the Holy Mysteries. Ask not how, nor how much, nor how far, nor how many. He who disturbs the mysterious ways of the universe is heretic, and an enemy of God and Man, and will burn.

  Talvas Hu Chien, Grand Inquisitor of Navigators

  Interregnal period

  The arbitrary intervals of time that men called “days” in space passed slowly as the Rhadan starship moved deep into that area of the galaxy known to the starfarers of the Second Empire as the Rim.

  In this region the stars were separated by immense gulfs, and great sectors of the sky were dark but for the distant luminosities that some theorists claimed were other, unimaginably isolated galaxies.

  In his quarters the warlock Cavour sat at his worktable, notebooks before him, a spirit lamp burning. A set of polished crystals lying on a piece of dark cloth glistened in the torchlight.

  Ariane, wandering restlessly through the ship, found him so.

  The warlock looked up and would have risen from his seat, but she refused the formality.

  “Tell me what it is that you are doing,” she said. “Everyone on board has something he must do, but I have nothing.”

  Cavour smiled and indicated a seat at his worktable. “In the Golden Age it is said that there were entertainments to help pass the time in space, Queen. But we are more fortunate. We have to stretch our minds for amusement.”

  The girl frowned and sat. “Kier and his cousin have been locked up for days--ever since Kalin received the Warning.”

  “Kier is a fighting man, Queen. And his duty is to guard you.”

  “I know all that,” Ariane said irritably. “But what does it matter if an Imperial starship is ahead of us to Sarissa? For that matter, why can’t we simply go faster and catch it--if that’s what Kier wants.”

  “The speed of starships is great. But it is finite. We can never catch the Imperial in space.”

  Ariane sat in silence, the torchlight bright on her face. She picked up a crystal and turned it over in her fingers. “What is this thing, Cavour? Is it a jewel?”

  “A natural prism, Queen.”

  “What good is it?”

  Cavour smiled. “Let me show you.” He moved the burning spirit lamp and dipped a length of thin rod into a powder. “Ground god-metal, Ariane,” he explained. “Now hold the crystal to your eye and watch the flame through it. What do you see?”

  Ariane exclaimed with pleasure. “A rainbow, Cavour. A band of light from red to blue--no, more than that--to purple.”

  “A spectrum, Queen.” Cavour touched the flame with the powder-laden tip. “Now what do you see?”

  “The same thing. No, a different rainbow. The colors have changed, and there are dark lines in it.” She took the crystal from her eye and regarded the warlock curiously. “What happened to the light?”

  “The god-metal burned and made a different sort of light. The prism, which seems to spread light into its component parts, changed. The light from burning god-metal, when seen through a crystal like that one, is always the same.” He looked at the girl speculatively. “Do you find that remarkable?”

  “Always the same?”

  The warlock nodded. “Powdered gold has a particular pattern. So has lead. Many things. It is easiest to test the theory with pure metals that have been ground. But certain gases--those that will burn--behave the same way through the crystal.”

  “But that’s”--Ariane groped for a suitable word-- “magic.”

  “No, Queen. Not magic. It seems to be natural law.”

  “But you could look through the crystals and learn what things are made of, couldn’t you? For example, if god-metal and gold were mixed--you could tell?”

  “If I had a way of preserving accurately what I saw through the prism. If I could paint it, say. Or capture the image in some other way.”

  Ariane was smiling, intrigued. �
��Why, you could--you could even look at a sun and tell what was burning there.”

  “Yes, Queen. I could.” He paused, considered, and then went on. “In fact, I have. Certain stars, for example, look almost the same through the prism. Earth’s Sol, for example, can scarcely be told from Rhada or Astraris. Sarissa’s sun is different, with less hydrogen burning in it and more metals.”

  “But that is a marvel, Cavour,” the girl said excitedly. “If that’s so, you could survey the stars and discover which of them could support terraform planets--isn’t that so? You could do that without ever once leaving your own world!”

  “You go too fast, Queen,” Cavour said, laughing. “In theory, it could be done. But there are far too many stars for that.” He stood and held her chair. “Come, look at this.” He led her to a diagram that covered one entire wall of his quarters, from floor to overhead.

  “The galaxy?” Ariane asked.

  Cavour said with pleasure, “You have the makings of a scientist, Queen.”

  Ariane frowned at that and made the sign of the Star. She reminded herself that she was, after all, talking to a warlock. Even if he had been bonded to Kier and Kier’s family for most of his life, he was still a magician and a sinner.

  “Look at this.” Cavour touched a single small dot, white on the dark background. As she looked at the drawing, she was struck by the infinite pains that must have gone into its composition. There were literally hundreds of thousands of tiny etched marks. They formed a great spiraling pattern.

  “Earth?” she asked.

  “Sol. On this scale, Earth is less than a dust mote. It could not be seen,” Cavour said. “Step back and regard the galaxy, Queen--or my own crude approximation of it. You see, we have no numbers large enough to express the actual number of stars. These marks represent only a few of them.”

  “But the Empire consists of no more than five thousand worlds--if that,” Ariane murmured doubtfully.

  “Nearer two thousand, Queen.”

  “But this--” She indicated the immense panorama he had etched on his wall.

  Cavour shrugged. “I once suggested that starships travel at a speed of 200,000 kilometers per hour. Warlocks and Navigators laughed at me, because it would mean that the galaxy is more than twelve million miles across--” He shrugged. “But perhaps speed is not what we imagine it to be. Perhaps distance is not to be measured in kilometers or miles. Look at the galaxy as I have found it to be. Why, we have not yet even visited a third of the worlds in this one spiral arm. A hundred lifetimes would not suffice, Queen.”

  “But the Empire--”

  Cavour touched the star map with a finger. “Here is the Rhadan Palatinate. Here the Theocracy of Algol.” Far across the map his finger touched a cluster of stars. “Here is Deneb, and here, half across the spiral, is Fomalhaut. Here is Earth, and across the sky, on the Rim, is Sarissa. The Empire isn’t how many, Queen. It is where. The ancients understood that men could never actually conquer the galaxy. Can a grain of sand conquer the beach? But by being in certain places, man could englobe his galaxy-- as a confederation of cities situated on the shores of a great ocean might dominate the waters they could never truly occupy. That is what your empire is, Queen.”

  Ariane felt the heavy beating of her heart. Never before had she imagined the vastness of her world, the immensity of her dominion. Never before had she considered the tenuousness of the thread with which man sought to bind and control these unbelievably far-flung dominions. A few thousand starships. A half-educated priesthood. A few million fighting men. With these, insolent as it seemed, man imagined he could dominate the stars.

  Yet once, no one really knew how long ago, man had indeed dominated the galaxy--or most of it. The mighty kings of the Golden Age had ruled an empire at least a thousand times greater than the realm Glamiss the Magnificent and a hundred captains like Kier and his father had carved from the ruins of the ancient world.

  That night, alone in her spartan quarters near the outer hull of the Rhadan starship, Ariane listened to the humming whisper of the vessel and tried to imagine the vastness that lay beyond the pulsing god-metal of the wall. She could lay her hand on the cold surface and sense the holy power that pervaded the swiftly moving ship. All her life she had been familiar with the great starships. They were simply there, as they had always been. But this night, after listening to Cavour, she found that she was conscious of uncounted millions of ghosts--the shades of those men like gods who built the starships, who had actually englobed the known galaxy and ruled the mightiest forces in the universe. It seemed to her that these spirits whispered to her in the half-darkness of the metal cabin, their disembodied forms dancing in the smoky light of the tiny oil lantern. Captains, kings, and warriors--ranks of them standing to infinity--and all murmuring to her of destiny and queen-ship and the dim future of the race of men. “Rule, Ariane,” they seemed to say. “But know and seek and understand--”

  And this was surely heresy and counsel of deadly danger, for had not sin, the destroyer of planets, crushed even the god-men of the First Empire?

  Ariane opened her eyes wide in the stillness of the ship’s night. “No,” she said aloud, her heart beating hard. “Men can’t live on the wreckage of the past.” The Empire--her empire--must go forward to another Golden Age.

  But first, she thought with Vykan practicality, it must be won.

  13

  As specialists in the programming of cybernetic organisms, you must bear in mind that you are dealing, in fact, with a machine: a system that relies for motivation on strictest Aristotelian logic. Any sociologist will tell you that this sort of directness can cause immense mischief in human society. Therefore, remember that your charges do not operate within the customary “emotional” and “moral” parameters that govern true men. The cybernetic organism will complete the programmed task at all costs. If programmed by a conscientious and properly trained technician, the cyborg is a useful and productive bio-organism. If indoctrinated by a savage, it would be a dangerous and--

  Golden Age fragment found at Biotech, Bellerive

  As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

  Dawn Age proverb

  Today I read to Tallan the “Thoughts” of Mao, a tribal chieftain of the Dawn Age. Equation: Survival = power violence. One wonders--were Mao, Attila, Hitler, Stalin cyborgs? The Warls do not say.

  From the notebooks of Kelber of Sarissa

  Landro waited.

  He was alone now, in a high-windowed room deep inside the fortress of Sardis, and he was still stunned by the swiftness with which he had been separated from his men and brought to this forbidding place.

  It had been a mistake; he knew that now. Or rather a series of mistakes. And now the event that he and his royal mistress had dreamed might found a dynasty would bring about something very different--a thing that no one might have foreseen--a cyborg sovereign, an artificial man standing astride the star paths. It was incredible, but it was happening.

  Landro stood and paced the silent chamber. The walls were thickly nitred, and the air hung heavily, tasting of salt and decaying reeds. He brushed his eyes with trembling fingers, knowing that he was afraid, dreadfully afraid.

  He had stepped from his starship onto a landing ground so thickly garrisoned with warmen from a dozen star kingdoms that his vessel was taken in minutes--without a fight.

  All Mariana had demanded that Kelber instruct the cyborg to do, he had done. The star kings of Lyra, Al-debaran, Deneb, Altair, Betelgeuse, and half a dozen smaller kingdoms had gathered their forces on Sarissa under Tallan’s command. The troopships were loading. The invasion of Earth and the occupation of Nyor were near--far nearer than anyone on Earth could have imagined. But the standard they would carry was Tallan’s-- not Mariana’s.

  How could it have happened, Landro asked himself. How could our weapon have turned so in our hand?

  A cold wind from the marshes stirred the hangings and made the light of the single torch flutter. Shadows danced abou
t the room.

  He had not seen the cyborg for more than three years, and the change in the android was terrifying. It was little wonder that the Lyri, Altairi, Denebians, and Betelgeui had rallied to him. It was, after all, Landro thought bleakly, the way we planned it.

  The ancient black arts had created a warleader who was more than a man. And I stumbled into his hands, Landro thought bitterly, because Mariana said, Go, and make all things right.

  I have found my death here, Landro thought. He shivered and turned away from the high, barred window and the marsh-scented wind.

  Treason and murder had not shaken the Vegan’s steadfastness, but the presence of the cyborg filled him with dread.

  Tallan stood in the doorway. Landro had been fitfully dozing, and now he woke with a start, his heart set to fluttering wildly by the huge figure in the stone arch.

  Landro shuddered. The black arts were man’s bane. The priest-Navigators warned, and men ignored the warnings and turned everything wrong way to, and fire rained from the sky. Mariana, he thought, we should not have invoked the powers of sin. The Warls have betrayed us as they have betrayed men since time began . . .

  “Landro.” The cyborg’s voice was deep and sonorous.

  “The time for departure is near. We will speak now, you and I.”

  Landro wondered for a moment if he dared to brazen it through and invoke Mariana’s name as Queen-Empress here. Did the cyborg know he was created specifically at her command to lead the star kings in battle? Did he care? The Veg had to suppress a desire to giggle nervously. What am I hoping for, he wondered. Gratitude from this--this thing!