Star Rogue, page 26
Star Rogue
Lin Carter
www.sfgateway.com
Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Excerpts
Author’s Note
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Chronology of Key Historical Events Mentioned in this Novel
Website
Also by Lin Carter
Dedication
About the Author
Copyright
EXCERPTS
“In popular folklore, as differentiated from the formal science of historiography, we encounter a ‘para-reality’ which more than compensates in color and variety for what it lacks in a soberly factual basis. Probably the most intriguing of all the imaginative detail folklore has added as embroidery to the margins of historiography is the concept that, behind the scenes and unknown to us all, the flow of historical events is secretly being manipulated by a super-cabal of telepaths and masterminds known only by the code name of Citadel. Why these mahatmas of mystery, this secret brotherhood of idealistic supermen (controlled since the very founding of the Great Imperium by an undying being most appropriately known as ‘the Eternal’), should bother themselves with the secret mastery of the galaxy—much less how they do it—is, oddly enough, not explained by the inventive imaginations of popular folklore. The sober consensus of all serious historians, to which the present writer most emphatically subscribes, is that we can safely relegate the wonder-working masterminds of the Citadel to the marvelous regions of sheer myth and fable, along with the Space Hag, the Rim ghosts, and the trans-dimensional migrations of the Vokanna, fleeing down the ages from their peculiar, nameless, pursuing doom. For the simple fact remains that if any such super-cabal of supermen were controlling the dynamics of history, we should see the signs of it in every age.”
—HERIAN, Lord Altair: Notes Towards a Science
of History, reel one. Published by Bradis
Recordings, Meridian, The Hub; Year 1187 of
the Imperium.
“The fact of the matter is, simply, that the concept of the Eternal is merely the most recent development in a very old continuum of folk-belief. From the very earliest days of the interstellar age folklore has recorded fables of this kind, from the so-called ‘Wandering Spaceman’ of early Centaurian literature to that long-lived adventurer of the spaceway, ‘Long Tom.’ All of this probably stems from speculations among the under-educated early colonials stimulated by contact with extra-terrestrial races of considerable longevity such as the familiar Boygyar of Tau Ceti. The sequence of thought doubtless went along the lines of: if a Boyg lives a natural lifespan of about four thousand Standard years, maybe a hominid can do the same—and so on. My point is, however, that the notion of an immortal being of Earth lineage and heroic stature is certainly far from new, and very far from being an original component of the sequence of myths centering about the fabulous Citadel. Even in the remote era of the United Systems we read of legendary ‘Saul Everest, Earth’s only immortal man,’ heroic secret mastermind of that ancient government who was destroyed by the rise of Nordonn but who somehow circumvented death to reappear, born anew out of the very crucible of the race, in the early days of the First Imperium. And today we have those puppet masters of history, the secret supermen of the Citadel, and their mysterious captain, the Eternal. The dreams of Man remain the same in every age.
“The unfortunate truth, however, is that hominid man is crucified to the hands of a physiological clock, by which his days are inexorably measured. While advances in nutritional science, geriatric medicine and experiments in controlled genetics have enabled the race to attain a far greater life-expectancy than that enjoyed by the citizens of earlier times, cellular tissue remains mortal, fatigue acids accumulate insidiously, and immortals such as the Eternal of legend remain simply that: a legend, no more.”
—CHOS’F L. GAMMOND, Ch. D.: Gene Surgery,
Longevity, and Human Life (Intro., xvii).
Published by The Beldris Imperia School
of Hominid Medicine, Cassini III, Central Orion,
Carina-Cygnus; Year 3904 of the Imperium.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In a very real sense, any novel laid in the extremely distant future (such as this one) must be regarded as a translation. And, as a translation, in common with all other translations, it must fail.
In another sense, such a novel also partakes of the basic nature of prophecy. And, again in common with all other specimens of its kind, it is foredoomed to failure. By this I mean that while a prophecy may succeed in broad outline, it is certainly going to fail in the details and particulars of the events or developments it strives to predict.
(A note on this matter of prophecy. There are two kinds: the wild guess, and the informed speculation. Oddly enough, the informed speculation usually flops dismally—viz all the “atomic doom” stories popular in Astounding Science Fiction in the years immediately following the close of the Second World War. Uniformly, they predicted an atomic holocaust coming in the next twenty years—say by 1966 at latest—but WWIII has yet to occur, for which I thank the Plenum. Those stories were concocted by engineers and social scientists, yet while they succeeded in extrapolating political tensions visible in their time, as well as the rapid growth of nuclear technology to the degree of expertise needed to make an atomic war a real Armageddon, they failed to predict that nations as dissimilar as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would somehow learn to live with each other and both with the fact of The Bomb.
(But the wild guess often comes uncannily close Like Dean Swift. In Gulliver he made an incredibly precise guess as to the number, relative size, and even the orbits of the moons of Mars … no less than one hundred and fifty-one years before Asaph Hall actually discovered them. Or “01’ World-Wrecker” himself, Edmond Hamilton. Way back in 1942 in one of his marvelous Captain Future yarns he predicted that man would reach the moon by 1971. He was only two years off. Pretty accurate for a guess made twenty-seven years before the event; especially remarkable when you consider that it was the vast advance in technology spurred by World War II that made it possible for Neil Armstrong to take his giant leap so soon.)
But back to the matter of viewing a novel of the distant future as a translation.
Star Rogue is set in the Year 4114 of the Imperium, which works out to A.D. 7177 according to my private fictional chronology. In other words, the scenery of the novel is laid 5207 years from now. It is literally impossible for any author—not just Lin Carter, but anybody—to make a guess at the living conditions fifty-two centuries ahead with anything like the remotest accuracy. You could convene a congress of the most erudite and imaginative philosophers, sociologists, technologists and speculative historians, pose the question of what life will be like fifty-two centuries from now, collate the results—and you’ll come up with a composite picture that is almost certain to be at least 70% dead wrong, at a conservative estimate.
This is because you just cannot predict the unpredictable. And history is made up of unpredictables.
Look at what life was like A.D. 470, which is only fifteen centuries back. Men wore robes, togas, buskins, tunics. They drank watered wine and had two meals a day. They served an absolute monarchy or an autocratic empire with a rigid class system. Save for a couple of hair-brained philosophers, they were certain their world was the center of the universe and probably flat as a pancake. They were merchants, or noblemen, or warriors, or statesmen, or farm laborers. They worshipped either official State pantheons or exotic cults imported from the East. They were middle-aged at forty and
Today—only fifteen centuries later—we wear business suits, ties, jackets, sweaters. We drink coffee and cocktails, smoke tobacco, eat fresh meat and fruit flown half a continent to our table. We live in a social system devoid, to a very large extent, of hereditary privilege and divided largely on by economic lines alone, and managed for us by elected officials chosen to represent geo-political divisions. We comprehend and use the germ theory of disease, are not middle aged until about sixty (and some of us, like Cary Grant and Loretta Young, just never get middle-aged) and die of old age in our eighties, unless cut down earlier by one or another of the very few diseases we have not yet conquered. We are tradesmen, manufacturers, scientists, artists, clerical or executive workers, municipal employees or factory technicians. We pay lip-service to one or another schismatic fragment of a once-worldwide religion but mostly we think for ourselves without the thought-control of official dogma. We have explored, mapped, colonized and tamed the entire globe and are currently engaged in performing the same task throughout the rest of our planetary system.
And these are only the superficial changes reflected on the surface of daily living. Yet most of them are due to those little unpredictables that, by very definition, cannot be foreseen. Before the Conquistadores, who could guess that the South American continent would divulge new substances—like rubber, coffee, chocolate—which would change human living patterns? Before the Bastille fell, who could predict that the cruel excesses of hereditary privilege would produce, in reaction, a classless, self-governing society from which (once the profit-incentive of capitalism was added to it) would spring a wave of technological innovation—telephone, radio, automobile, airplane, electric light—the influence of which would be incalculable?
How, then, can any author—even a Heinlein, an Asimov or a Clarke—make anything like an informed guess at the alterations to be introduced in human society during the next few thousand years? Very simply, they can’t.
For those readers who are interested in this sort of thing, this novel is one of a sequence of novels, connected only by a continuing background history, to which I have given the overall title of History of the Great Imperium. I now visualize this sequence as consisting eventually of at least eight, and perhaps as many as twelve, component novels. The only novel in the History yet published is my The Man Without a Planet (1966), which was set in the fifth year of the empery of Arban IV, of the House of Tridian, in Year 407 of the Imperium (A.D. 3468), or 3709 years before this book, Star Rogue.
As now planned, there will be a gap of centuries, even millennia, between the component novels. Naturally, there will be no overlap of characters—Saul Everest will appear but rarely—and, of course, each novel will or should stand on its own as an individual story which the reader can enjoy and understand without it being necessary that he read all of the other novels in the sequence.
Keeping all of the foregoing points in mind, you will see that the social and technological innovations in Star Rogue are not intended to be serious predictions of Things To Come. But they are designed to represent the fact that major and basic changes in human life will occur over such immense spans of time. My concepts are meant to stand as a sort of shorthand for unpredictable changes to come. It is short-sighted to assume that anything resembling the representational elective government of mid-20th Century America will survive in a galactic society fifty-two hundred years hence: thus my “Imperium” (the term, less familiar than “empire” but obviously related to it, was selected to stand for “something kind of like an empire”), tempered by the influence of a Centumvirate (“something kind of like a parliament, crossed with a council of lobbyists representing the special interests of powerful groups and factions”). It is even more short-sighted to assume that we will still be using such gadgets as radio or television or radar or IBM computers, at least as we now know them. Hence my “deleo” and “asdar” and “thedomin” whose uses are clearly obvious from the context of the story.
And I assume the distant future, with a different kind of society, will speak a different language (hence my “Neoanglic,” as different from today’s English as Norman Mailer is from Chaucer; use different slang terms (“proctor” for “policeman”); and have different modes of address (“Cn. and Cns.” for “Mr. and Miss”). What these terms will be I have no way of knowing. My easy, obvious and not really very original terms are only there to remind you of the fact that there will be new terms.
I have made the average life-expectancy two hundred plus, added telepathy as a new fact of the human condition, and, for good measure, tossed in a couple of new religions (Vuudhana and Plenumola-try). None of this need be taken very seriously.
In fact, you can be certain of only one thing about life in A.D. 7177. It will be totally different in every way from anything Anderson, Blish, Carter, de Camp, Ellison, Farmer, Garrett, Heinlein, Jakes, Kuttner, Laumer, Moorcock, Niven, Oliver, Pohl, Russell, Simak, Tenn, Van Vogt, Williamson, or Zelazny ever dared to dream.
And that is a certainty!
—LIN CARTER
Hollis, Long Island, New York.
THE END
ONE
I was out riding in the hills when the call came. That’s why I didn’t receive it. Maybe I should have had a phone with me, but you get out of the habit of wearing one after awhile. Since no one in the galaxy knew where I was living—or even that I was still alive—a personal phone seemed like a useless ornament to carry around. And it had been at least a century since anything had come up that was urgent enough for one of my monitors to call me directly.
It was a perfect spring morning. The hills above the house were a mass of yellow poplar, hickory, and mountain laurel, thick with bright new buds the color of chartreuse. Robins were frisking about and there were young rabbits in the field. It was one of those days when it was just too beautiful outdoors to stay inside.
When I had Home terraformed, I settled on a Connecticut ecology because that was the most beautiful country I had ever seen. I mean the old Connecticut, of course, back before the days of the mile-high megacities and twenty-five-lane robot expressways. Way back when it was green and lovely in a way no one alive today but myself could remember…
So I started out right after breakfast, told the house to mind the dogs, saddled up Sultan and headed out over the fields. Jewels of dew glittered on the ferns and field mice scampered from under his heavy hooves. We skirted the edge of the woods for a while, going nowhere in particular, just liking the fresh clean smell of dew and sweet grass and the piny tang of the woods. I relaxed and enjoyed the surge of the great horse under me. One glimpse of Sultan would have thrilled the soul of any paleontologist specializing in pre-Imperium Centaurus Sector lifeforms. He was a coal-black thoroughbred, four years old and full of the devil. I suppose he was the last true horse alive; the species is believed to have been extinct for three thousand years or so. As a matter of fact, it is—except for Sultan. And the future Sultans I keep under stasis in the sperm tanks.
After a while we turned into the woods. They were oak and chestnut, hickory and pine, mostly. Last winter’s leaves were turning into mulch underfoot and Sultan snorted and tossed his head at the rank odor of decay that rose as his hooves disturbed the top layers. Rabbits and squirrels scuttled in the underbrush and a blue jay squawked from somewhere above us. We went through the dark green twilight for a time and then took the trail that led to the shore. Sultan’s sire and grandsire and great-grandsire had made that trail. He shied just once, as something crossed the path ahead of us. It was too dark under the trees to see for sure, but from the spicy, musky smell I think it was fat skunk waddling about on his skunkish business.
We came back by way of the seashore. The tide was out and the gulls were busy feeding and quarrelling over the tiny shellfish swept in and then abandoned on the slick wet gray sand by the retreating waves.
When we got to the shore I let Sultan go because I knew he felt like stretching his legs. He was happy with the freedom and frisked like a colt. Then he laid his ears back, stretched out his nose and galloped for all he was worth. The gulls exploded squawking in a startled cloud as we came rocketing down the wet sandy shore, scattering clods behind us. I squinted my eyes half-shut against the wind of our rush and tasted the salt spray on my lips.
