Jack Williamson - Eldren 01, page 9
Noël seemed delighted with the dinner and happy with Kerry himself. She even said she liked the lingering scents of starmist. Afterward, while Kerry had gone back to the dome to pick up Jason Kwan’s midnight message, she talked to Quin about the Sunside.
Thirstily he drank up all she said. She had lived in the sky web, had known all the fabulous magnificence he had only dreamed about.
If—
His old hopes were suddenly soaring. If the evacuation took him back Sunside, if he could earn his Sunmark and find his mother, if she would say who his father had been, if he could somehow find or earn the heritage he longed for—
Too many ifs. Common sense told him that, yet the dream was too dear to be denied.
“I’ve known Jason most of my life,” Noël was saying. “Finally too well.” Her lips set hard, and he saw her flinch as if with pain. It was a moment before she went on. “My father was Kwan kin, and we met Jason at a kinship festival when I was still a girl.”
Kwan kinship came by nomination, she explained, not by birth; her grandfather had won nomination for steering the Kwan Moon into Earth orbit, her father for designing the laserlink relay system.
“Jason was just back from the halo when we first met. His father was the new Tycoon, and he already meant to be the next one. I was thrilled when he smiled at me. So handsome! So daring—”
Her voice turned ironic.
“The great space hero!”
He saw her lips compress again. In a moment, however, she had shrugged off whatever she felt. Yet he had seen real pain in her eyes. He wondered how gravely Jason had hurt her.
“Of course my father said I was too young for him, and it was years before I saw him again. Except in holo tanks. He was always in the news. Always exciting. Racing rockets, exploring asteroids, sometimes brawling—he’s got a savage temper, and he has killed men.
“He always had stunning women around him—I used to envy them all, and I longed for all Jason gave them. He had magic. Always climbing higher in the system, higher in his father’s favor. A general in Sun Security. Admiral of the Asteroids. Elected to the Seven.”
Quin had to ask about the Seven. His old illusions not entirely quenched, he wanted to know all he could learn about the remote impossible highside world of the Sunfolk and the Kwans and the Chens and the Company.
“The House of Kwan is a social machine,” she said. “Rebuilt from old Ivan’s original grand design. It began with only four people. The old man and his sons, signing the Charter. It grew with time. Shrewdly run, at least for the first hundred years. Misfits dumped and good new blood brought in. The House has thirty members now, all chosen from the kinship—my father lived and schemed to get into the Thirty, but he was never quite elected.”
She shrugged, a little wistfully.
“He never found out why, or who had schemed against him. The Kwans keep their secrets. Dad never even learned how the Seven are chosen out of the Thirty. They are three Seconds, three Signers, and the Head. The Head has to be one of the Signers. He interprets the Charter. Rules the House. Approves or vetoes. Nowadays, he names the Sun Tycoon—names himself, of course.”
Listening, Quin had been absorbed.
“The House of Kwan—” She made a wry face and shook her head at him, as if amused at his awe. “Once a machine for power. It spun the skywires and claimed the planets and discovered Janoort. But machines break down when incompetents try to run them. I’m afraid the House is breaking down.”
“The Kwans?” He stared. “Incompetent?”
“Are sharks competent?” Bitterness flashed in her eyes. “The Kwans have always been superb power grabbers. Experts in the politics of perjury and succession by assassination.” She leaned intently toward him. “I think you know Jason?”
“Too well.”
“He should be—be in prison now.” He saw her lips quiver. “Or spaced for treason. If his doting father hadn’t sent him here to the halo, out of harm’s way.”
“Treason?”
“Jason—”
Something stopped her voice. She sat for a moment staring blankly past him, her face set hard, before she caught her breath and looked soberly back at him. Slowly she relaxed. Sipping her drink, she raised the bulb in bright-eyed approval of Charbon’s wine.
“Plotting to grab the old Tycoon’s place.” Her voice was smoother, but old emotion still quivered in it. “Probably clever enough to get it. Letting or, more likely, helping his most dangerous rivals get rid of themselves.
“One was Uri Chen—he’s the son of old Boris, the Tycoon old Fernando overturned. Uri was a few years younger than Jason. Just as ambitious, but not so bold. Nor quite so smart—or Jason might be dead.”
Drinking in her words, thirsty for every revelation, he felt a chill of dim foreboding. Keenly as he longed for the Sunside, it struck him now that the House of Kwan was a deadly maze, filled with traps and hazards he was unprepared to face, more perilous than the halo.
“He and Uri played a game,” she was saying. “The prize was a place among the Signers. Uri’s last move was to plant a bomb in Leonid Chen’s Sun Country villa, with evidence arranged to fix the blame on Holyfolk terrorists.
“Jason’s move won the game.”
Quin waited, watching the play of feeling on her vivid features. He saw that Jason still haunted her.
“Coto gossip.” A wry little shrug. “He’s far too cagey to confirm anything, even talking to me. But I gathered from his hints that he had known about the bomb. He even called Security, just too late. Uri was caught and convicted.
“With Leonid blown up and Uri blown through the execution lock, he’s got two rivals out of the way with no actual evidence against him. The rumors won’t matter, not to a Kwan. Risking his neck here in the halo, flying out to challenge our enemies in space, he’s still scheming.”
“Isn’t anybody—” Quin was appalled. “Isn’t anybody decent?”
“My parents were.” Silent for a moment, she shook her head. “The sharks never give the innocents much of a chance. But Jason—”
Her face set tight again.
“I knew—thought I knew what he was.” Her voice had changed, and he heard the pain in it. “I loved him, Quin. Thought I did. That’s most of the reason I volunteered for duty here. I couldn’t help wanting the months in space with him—”
A moment of silence, her wounded eyes wide and empty.
“I’ve told Kerry.” He saw her lip quivering. “Since I’ve said so much, you may as well know. Jason—” Her husky whisper caught. “We were lovers through the first weeks of the voyage. Till I learned what his other lovers were.”
Kerry came back from the dome and poured the rest of the wine. Noël was calmer by then, but still distressed when he told her how he longed to see the Sunside.
“Please, Quin—don’t even think about it. The highsiders do have things to enjoy, but they pay high. Higher every day, with old Fernando sick and all the Earth at the brink of revolt. People poisoned with hate and fear, suspecting one another, till your best friends turn cold.
“I’m so glad to get away. Glad!”
She paused to smile at Kerry, her lips a little parted, her Sunmark flashing. Quin left them alone together.
Midnight after midnight, those curt reports kept coming in. Jason was fifty AU farther into the halo, seventy, ninety. Watching Kerry and Charbon, Quin saw their spirits lifting. The alien base seemed too far to be a threat. Kerry began to hope that Fleet Command might cancel the evacuation order.
Quin himself, uneasily eager, always managed to be waiting for the Sun’s brief rise above the ice and the flight reports from Vira Brun. Hoping for his chance to get Sunside, he went back aboard the old Capella when he could, to learn what Tony Caffodio knew about solarpolitics and Olaf Thorsen and the new technologies of fusion engineering.
Kerry and Noël were always together. A month before the Martian Kwan was due, they decided to marry.
“To make the most,” Kerry said, “of whatever time we have.” Quin heard him warning her that things could get grim if the supply ships quit coming.
“They can get grimmer, back Sunside.” She shrugged and turned to smile at Quin. “We’re going to be halonials—a new word, but one I like. Our children will be the people of the halo.”
Kerry drew her to him, his own smile bleak.
“Even if we fail—” She caught his hand. “We’ll never be sorry.”
Charbon read the brief ceremony. To make space for them, Quin moved into the tiny room that had once been Jomo’s. Watching them together, he felt a little envious.
With Vira Brun still two weeks away, Jason reported that he was nearing the alien base.
“Our spy drone has an object imaged.” His casual highside voice had a ring of easy satisfaction. “A sphere. Diameter ten kilometers. Evidently artificial. Probing with various frequencies, we failed to penetrate it. Nature unknown, though our engineers suggest that it’s an insulating shell built to protect a halo snowball from energies that might evaporate it.
“We’ve been seen. We are detecting laser beams scanning us. Not from the sphere itself, but from a point nearly a hundred kilometers out. Maybe a satellite station.”
Hardly three hours later:
“Contact!” Excitement had quickened the brittle rhythm of his speech. “Contact with the Spica’s missing people. With Reynard Charbon—he’s old Jean’s son, the lost lasercom officer. He’s calling now with signal gear he says the aliens took off the Spica. Telling a surprising story.
“The Spica was disabled by an accident, he says, not by attack. He says her officers were unduly alarmed when they saw the alien starcraft. Trying to escape, they overloaded the drive. The engines failed, with damage they couldn’t repair.
“The aliens were never hostile. So Reynard swears. Instead, they rescued the crew. Most of the ship’s people are still alive and well. The aliens have learned enough English to describe what he calls their pan-galactic culture. Their union is called the Elderhood.
“He is hoping mankind will be invited to join. Our planets are too hostile for the aliens to visit, but they’ve watched our evolution. He says he has been urging them to open contact. We can trade them heavy elements that are rare out here. In return, they could offer us their own science and art and culture. A treasure hoard that Charbon says he can’t yet evaluate—can’t even understand.
“He’s eager to see us. He has already arranged for us to dock and begin negotiations. We’re to pick up a few of the crew who’ll be returning Sunside with what they have learned. Charbon himself has offered to remain, as our first ambassador to the Elderhood. He believes members of my own crew may also ask to stay, when they’ve met our new friends—”
Jason seemed to gasp.
“Sorry!” He was suddenly breathless. “No more now. Something new coming in from Reynard. Details later. Get this report to Charbon’s father—he should be happy. Relay it back to Coto. And forgive my incoherence. Because I’m still giddy. Can’t express my own elation. Nothing in history quite—quite so epochal. Mankind is coming of age!”
Dazed by the message, Quin sent it on to Cotopaxi High.
“Reynard!” Charbon came back to the dome, a squeeze-bulb in his hand, already rosily tipsy. “C’est très bien! Alive and well! When I believed him murdered.”
Kerry was afloat in a pungent haze of starmist.
“Wonderful news! Think what it means! Halo Station will surely be the transfer point between Sunside and the Elderhood. The gateway for humanity, moving from the planets out to space.”
For Quin, it seemed too sudden. Those promised gifts of the Elderhood were too strange and too far for him to grasp. But—a wild elation lifted him. If Halo Station should become a gateway for commerce with the halo, he could surely find his way Sunside, to learn at last what he was born to be.
That sleepless night crawled away. With Kerry and Charbon, he waited in the dome. All silent, each lost in his own soaring anticipations. Kerry breathed his starmist till the air was heavy with it. Charbon finished his wine.
Slowly, slowly, Janoort turned. The stars blazed, slowly wheeling. Jason’s position, the position of the alien base, slid slowly down. Just before it was lost below the near horizon, the lasercom crackled back to life.
“—trapped!” Jason’s voice, now a breathless rasp. “They’ve opened laser fire. From all around us. From the base. From that ice asteroid. From out in space. We’re betrayed! Fighting—fighting for our lives.
“Tricked! Very neatly, though Bela Zar tried to warn us. Tried too late. Remember Bela Zar? Spica’s captain. One of the captives now. He somehow got out of confinement. Reached Charbon’s mike. Gasped out his story—all he had time for. Before the space devils stopped him. Killed him, I imagine.
“But not before he told us what the aliens are. Monstrous! Worse than the Revelator ever claimed. That Reynard—a devil himself. Feeding us all those fantastic lies. Zar says the aliens did attack the Spica. Took the crew. Tortured most of them to death.
“Most didn’t break. Charbon did. Brainwashed, Zar says. Their puppet now. A dirty traitor to the Tycoon and all mankind. Squealing on his fellow humans. Cuddling up to things Zar says he can’t describe. Selling us out. Spilling everything he knows about human technology and human defenses. Coaching alien spies. Helping them plan the conquest of mankind—Zar said they want to keep us in slavery, to dig heavy metals on worlds too big and hot for them.
“Reynard Charbon—a name to live in infamy! He has coaxed us into a hellish trap. The aliens have weapons. Queer devices of their own. Lasers and missiles off the Spica. Now—”
Seconds of thermal noise, then sounds of other voices.
“We’re hit—hard hit!” Jason again, hoarse and desperate. “But not dead yet. Not quite yet. But we’re going silent. For evasive action. Will report again when possible.” His voice grew sharper. “Hit again—harder—”
His voice was cut off.
Old Charbon stumbled toward the tunnel, shattered, sobbing, reeling with his wine. Quin and Kerry waited in the dome until Janoort’s spin broke the transmission link, but nothing else came in. That night they were listening again.
All they heard was the thin galactic hiss.
Commander Sage died in Outpost Vermillion, along with nearly half his staff. The seeker queen caught most of the rest in flight. Greenvane, the senior supervisor, urged his remaining companions to scatter themselves and drift cold, hoping some fortunate few might escape.
He reached Northpoint exhausted and alone, far behind the warning signals Sage and the others had spent their lives to send. Northpoint was the major center of the Newlings, yet hardly a city. Half a dozen small haloids had been towed into a tiny swarm, each mirror-armored to save it from sublimation.
It was hardly a capital; the Newlings were too few and scattered too widely across their empty spaces to need much formal organization. As one proud proverb ran, they required no masters because each reigned as her own mistress. Half a score of orbital shells housed the institutions of their loose union.
On arrival, Greenvane went first to the clustered globes that held the deputations of the Elderhood, along with the varied life support facilities its diverse races required. He felt grateful for emergency aid, but the staff members disheartened him with an air of untroubled duty-as-usual.
He asked to see Swift, the senior resident deputy. Swift’s people were sexless Eternals, whose remote origins must have been planetic, because they still required the ambient pressure and controlled external temperature of a dirigible crystal habitat.
Speaking with a flow of luminescence along the undulant antennae blooming from a convoluted braincase, Swift assured him that Sage’s last messages had been received and relayed. The Council of the Elderhood would no doubt be called into session to consider whether any action should be taken. Luckily, it added, Northpoint was safely out of the creature’s apparent path.
“Sir! Safe?” Greenvane spread flashing wings to let his consternation show. “You can’t imagine the invader. The thing’s enormous and appalling, with no redeeming hint of evolution toward eldredship. I watched it kill a Newling who was trying—too boldly—to warn it away from the halo. Watched it swallow Point Vermillion. We’re all in danger, until—unless we can put an end to it.”
“Too large a problem for us.” The bright antennae rippled to a shrug. “I trust the Council will consider conciliation—”
“Conciliation?” Greenvane blazed. “I saw that tried by the unfortunate Newling. Our survival can’t wait for the Council to debate and do nothing. We must act—”
“With what?” Swift shrugged again, as if its capsule had been adequate armor against all harm. “I imagine all our races have evolved through stages where aggression seemed essential for survival—the same feral stage where this intruder appears to be trapped. But, here in the halo, we’ve left aggression far behind us.”
“Sir, I’m afraid it’s catching up. These creatures beat the Newlings—”
“Because the Newlings tried to fight.” Swift ignored his yellow flash. “Their error, and nearly fatal. Even the Newlings are sadly immature, not far beyond the levels of primal savagery. Speaking for myself, I still question the wisdom of their admission to our society.”
“On some level, sir, the halo has to be defended—”
“We’ve no defense establishment here.” The rhythmic streams of body-color seemed almost smug. “None anywhere, able to engage such a primitive thing on its own primitive terms.”
“In that case, sir—must we allow our own destruction?”
“Really, Greenvane!” Swift’s eye-ring burned with stern reproof. “Asking that, you are failing to display your own eldership. Surely, until the Council sits, the halo’s large enough for all of us.”
“Large enough?” He let his indignation flare. “You don’t know these invaders. Nearly mindless seekers of heat, all they do is eat and fight and breed. The Newlings warn us, sir, that we’ll all be in danger, all across the halo, because they kill for sport—”
