The Stars, Like Dust Read online

  “It depends on what you do.”

  “I’ll try to do the right things.”

  She seemed too humble, Biron thought suspiciously, and then the reason for it came out.

  “I’m awfully frightened,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  He wanted to say no, not at all, but it didn’t come out that way. He smiled sheepishly, and said, “Sort of.”

  Oddly enough, that comforted her. She knelt down on the floor beside him and looked at the thick volumes opened before him and at the sheets of calculations.

  “They had all these books here?”

  “You bet. They couldn’t pilot a ship without them.”

  “And you understand all that?”

  “Not all that. I wish I did. I hope I understand enough. We’ll have to Jump to Lingane, you know.”

  “Is that hard to do?”

  “No, not if you know the figures, which are all here, and have the controls, which are all there, and if you have experience, which I haven’t. For instance, it should be done in several Jumps, but I’m going to try it in one because there’ll be less chance of trouble, even though it means a wasteful use of energy.”

  He shouldn’t tell her; there was no point in telling her; it would be cowardly to frighten her; and she’d be hard to handle if she got really frightened, panicky frightened. He kept telling himself all that and it did no good. He wanted to share it with somebody. He wanted part of it off his own mind.

  He said, “There are some things I should know that I don’t. Things like the mass density between here and Lingane affect the course of the Jump, because that mass density is what controls the curvature of this part of the universe. The Ephemeris—that’s this big book here—mentions the curvature corrections that must be made in certain standard Jumps, and from those you’re supposed to be able to calculate your own particular corrections. But then if you happen to have a super giant within ten light-years, all bets are off. I’m not even sure if I used the computer correctly.”

  “But what would happen if you were wrong?”

  “We could re-enter space too close to Lingane’s sun.”

  She considered that, then said, “You have no idea how much better I feel.”

  “After what I’ve just said?”

  “Of course. In my bunk I simply felt helpless and lost with so much emptiness in all directions. Now I know that we’re going somewhere and that the emptiness is under our control.”

  Biron was pleased. How different she was. “I don’t know about its being under our control.”

  She stopped him. “It is. I know you can handle the ship.”

  And Biron decided that maybe he could at that.

  Artemisia had tucked her long unclad legs under her and sat facing him. She had only her filmy underclothes for cover, but seemed unconscious of the fact, though Biron was definitely not.

  She said, “You know, I had an awfully queer sensation in the bunk, almost as if I were floating. That was one of the things that frightened me. Every time I’d turn, I’d give a queer little jump into the air and then flop back slowly as if there were springs in the air holding me back.”

  “You weren’t sleeping in a top bunk, were you?”

  “Yes, I was. The bottom ones give me claustrophobia, with another mattress six inches over your head.”

  Biron laughed. “Then that explains it. The ship’s gravitational force is directed toward its base, and falls off as we move away from it. In the top bunk you were probably twenty or thirty pounds lighter than on the floor. Were you ever on a passenger liner? A really big one?”

  “Once. When Father and I visited Tyrann last year.”

  “Well, on the liners they have the gravitation in all parts of the ship directed toward the outer hull, so that the long axis of the ship is always ‘up,’ no matter where you are. That’s why the motors of one of those big babies are always lined up in a cylinder running right along the long axis. No gravity there.”

  “It must take an awful lot of power to keep an artificial gravity going.”

  “Enough to power a small town.”

  “There isn’t any danger of our running short of fuel, is there?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Ships are fueled by the total conversion of mass to energy. Fuel is the last thing we’ll run out of. The outer hull will wear away first.”

  She was facing him. He noted that her face had been cleaned of its make-up and wondered how that had been done; probably with a handkerchief and as little of the drinking water as she could manage. She didn’t suffer as a result, for her clear white skin was the more startlingly perfect against the black of her hair and eyes. Her eyes were very warm, thought Biron.

  The silence had lasted a little too long. He said hurriedly, “You don’t travel very much, do you? I mean, you were on a liner only once?”

  She nodded. “Once too often. If we hadn’t gone to Tyrann, that filthy chamberlain wouldn’t have seen me and—I don’t want to talk about that.”

  Biron let it go. He said, “Is that usual? I mean, not traveling.”

  “I’m afraid so. Father is always hopping around on state visits, opening agricultural expositions, dedicating buildings. He usually just makes some speech that Aratap writes for him. As for the rest of us, however, the more we stay in the Palace, the better the Tyranni like it. Poor Gillbret! The one and only time he left Rhodia was to attend the Khan’s coronation as Father’s representative. They’ve never let him get into a ship again.”

  Her eyes were downcast and, absently, she pleated the material of Biron’s sleeve where it ended at the wrist. She said, “Biron.”

  “Yes—Arta?” He stumbled a bit, but it came out.

  “Do you think Uncle Gil’s story can be true? Do you suppose it could be his imagination? He’s been brooding about the Tyranni for years, and he’s never been able to do anything, of course, except to rig up spy beams, which is only childish, and he knows it. He may have built himself a daydream and, over the years, gradually come to believe in it. I know him, you see.”

  “Could be, but let’s follow it up a little. We can travel to Lingane, anyway.”

  They were closer to one another. He could have reached out and touched her, held her in his arms, kissed her.

  And he did so.

  It was a complete non sequitur. Nothing, it seemed to Biron, had led to it. One moment they were discussing Jumps and gravity and Gillbret, and the next she was soft and silky in his arms and soft and silky on his lips.

  His first impulse was to say he was sorry, to go through all the silly motions of apology, but when he drew away and would have spoken, she still made no attempt at escape but rested her head on the crook of his left arm. Her eyes remained closed.

  So he said nothing at all but kissed her again, slowly and thoroughly. It was the best thing he could have done, and at the time he knew it.

  Finally she said, a bit dreamily, “Aren’t you hungry? I’ll bring you some of the concentrate and warm it for you. Then, if you want to sleep, I can keep an eye on things for you. And—and I’d better put on more of my clothes.”

  She turned as she was about to go out the door. “The food concentrate tastes very nice after you get used to it. Thank you for getting it.”

  Somehow that, rather than the kisses, was the treaty of peace between them.

  When Gillbret entered the control room, hours later, he showed no surprise at finding Biron and Artemisia lost in a foolish kind of conversation. He made no remarks about the fact that Biron’s arm was about his niece’s waist.

  He said, “When are we Jumping, Biron?”

  “In half an hour,” said Biron.

  The half hour passed; the controls were set; conversation languished and died.

  At zero time Biron drew a deep breath and yanked a lever the full length of its arc, from left to right.

  It was not as it had been on the liner. The Remorseless was smaller and the Jump was consequently less smooth. Biron staggered, and for a
split second things wavered.

  And then they were smooth and solid again.

  The stars in the visiplate had changed. Biron rotated the ship, so that the star field lifted, each star moving in a stately arc. One star appeared finally, brilliantly white and more than a point. It was a tiny sphere, a burning speck of sand. Biron caught it, steadied the ship before it was lost again, and turned the telescope upon it, throwing in the spectroscopic attachment.

  He turned again to the Ephemeris, and checked under the column headed “Spectral Characteristics.” Then he got out of the pilot’s chair and said, “It’s still too far. I’ll have to nudge up to it. But, anyway, that’s Lingane right ahead.”

  It was the first Jump he had ever made, and it was successful.

  12. THE AUTARCH COMES

  The Autarch of Lingane pondered the matter, but his cool, well-trained features scarcely creased under the impact of thought.

  “And you waited forty-eight hours to tell me,” he said.

  Rizzett said boldly, “There was no reason to tell you earlier. If we bombarded you with all matters, life would be a burden to you. We tell you now because we still make nothing of it. It is queer, and in our position we can afford nothing queer.”

  “Repeat this business. Let me hear it again.”

  The Autarch threw a leg upon the flaring window sill and looked outward thoughtfully. The window itself represented perhaps the greatest single oddity of Linganian architecture. It was moderate in size and set at the end of a five-foot recess that narrowed gently toward it. It was extremely clear, immensely thick, and precisely curved; not so much a window as a lens, funneling the light inward from all directions, so that, looking outward, one eyed a miniature panorama.

  From any window in the Autarch’s Manor a sweep of vision embracing half the horizon from zenith to nadir could be seen. At the edges there was increasing minuteness and distortion, but that itself lent a certain flavor to what one saw: the tiny flattened motions of the city; the creeping, curved orbits of the crescent-shaped stratospherics, climbing from the airport. One grew so used to it that unhinging the window to allow the flat tameness of reality to enter would seem unnatural. When the position of the sun made the lenslike windows a focus for impossible heat and light, they were blanked out automatically, rather than opened, rendered opaque by a shift in the polarization characteristics of the glass.

  And certainly the theory that a planet’s architecture is the reflection of a planet’s place in the Galaxy would seem to be borne out by the case of Lingane and its windows.

  Like the windows, Lingane was small yet commanded a panoramic view. It was a “planet state” in a Galaxy, which, at the time, had passed beyond that stage of economic and political development. Where most political units were conglomerations of stellar systems, Lingane remained what it had been for centuries—a single inhabited world. This did not prevent it from being wealthy. In fact, it was almost inconceivable that Lingane could be anything else.

  It is difficult to tell in advance when a world is so located that many Jump routes may use it as a pivotal intermediate point; or even must use it in the interests of optimal economy. A great deal depends on the pattern of development of that region of space. There is the question of the distribution of the naturally habitable planets; the order in which they are colonized and developed; the types of economy they possess.

  Lingane discovered its own values early, which was the great turning point of its history. Next to the actual possession of a strategic position, the capacity to appreciate and exploit that position is most important. Lingane had proceeded to occupy small planetoids with neither resources nor capacity for supporting an independent population, choosing them only because they would help maintain Lingane’s trade monopoly. They built servicing stations on those rocks. All that ships would need, from hyperatomic replacements to new book reels, could be found there. The stations grew to huge trading posts. From all the Nebular Kingdoms fur, minerals, grain, beef, timber poured in; from the Inner Kingdoms, machinery, appliances, medicinals, finished products of all sorts formed a similar flood.

  So that, like its windows, Lingane’s minuteness looked out on all the Galaxy. It was a planet alone, but it did well.

  The Autarch said, without turning from the window, “Start with the mail ship, Rizzett. Where did it meet this cruiser in the first place?”

  “Less than one hundred thousand miles off Lingane. The exact coordinates don’t matter. They’ve been watched ever since. The point is that, even then, the Tyrannian cruiser was in an orbit about the planet.”

  “As though it had no intention of landing, but, rather, was waiting for something?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way of telling how long they’d been waiting?”

  “Impossible, I’m afraid. They were sighted by no one else. We checked thoroughly.”

  “Very well,” said the Autarch. “We’ll abandon that for the moment. They stopped the mail ship, which is, of course, interference with the mails and a violation of our Articles of Association with Tyrann.”

  “I doubt that they were Tyranni. Their unsure actions are more those of outlaws, of prisoners in flight.”

  “You mean the men on the Tyrannian cruiser? It may be what they want us to believe, of course. At any rate, their only overt action was to ask that a message be delivered directly to me.”

  “Directly to the Autarch, that is right.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “They at no time entered the mail ship?”

  “All communications were by visiplate. The mail capsule was shot across two miles of empty space and caught by the ship’s net.”

  “Was it vision communication or sound only?”

  “Full vision. That’s the point. The speaker was described by several as being a young man of ‘aristocratic bearing,’ whatever that means.”

  The Autarch’s fist clenched slowly. “Really? And no photoimpression was taken of his face? That was a mistake.”

  “Unfortunately there was no reason for the mail captain to have anticipated the importance of doing so. If any importance exists! Does all this mean anything to you, sir?”

  The Autarch did not answer the question. “And this is the message?”

  “Exactly. A tremendous message of one word that we were supposed to bring directly to you; a thing we did not do, of course. It might have been a fission capsule, for instance. Men have been killed that way before.”

  “Yes, and Autarchs too,” said the Autarch. “Just the word ‘Gillbret.’ One word, ‘Gillbret.’”

  The Autarch maintained his indifferent calm, but a certain lack of certainty was gathering, and he did not like to experience a lack of certainty. He liked nothing which made him aware of limitations. An Autarch should have no limitations, and on Lingane he had none that natural law did not impose.

  There had not always been an Autarch. In its earlier days Lingane had been ruled by dynasties of merchant princes. The families who had first established the subplanetary service stations were the aristocrats of the state. They were not rich in land, hence could not compete in social position with the Ranchers and Grangers of the neighboring worlds. But they were rich in negotiable currency and so could buy and sell those same Ranchers and Grangers; and, by way of high finance, they sometimes did.

  And Lingane suffered the usual fate of a planet ruled (or misruled) under such circumstances. The balance of power oscillated from one family to another. The various groups alternated in exile. Intrigues and palace revolutions were chronic, so that if the Directorship of Rhodia was the Sector’s prime example of stability and orderly development, Lingane was the example of restlessness and disorder. “As fickle as Lingane,” people said.

  The outcome was inevitable, if one judges by hindsight. As the neighboring planet states consolidated into group states and became powerful, civil struggles on Lingane became increasingly expensive and dangerous to the planet. The general
population was quite willing, finally, to barter anything for general calm. So they exchanged a plutocracy for an autocracy, and lost little liberty in the exchange. The power of several was concentrated in one, but that one, frequently enough, was deliberately friendly to the populace he sought to use as a make-weight against the never-reconciled merchants.

  Under the Autarchy, Lingane increased its wealth and strength. Even the Tyranni, attacking thirty years earlier at the height of their power, had been fought to a standstill. They had not been defeated, but they had been stopped. The shock, even of that, had been permanent. Not a planet had been conquered by the Tyranni since the year they had attacked Lingane.

  Other planets of the Nebular Kingdoms were outright vassals of the Tyranni. Lingane, however, was an Associated State, theoretically the equal “ally” of Tyrann, with its rights guarded by the Articles of Association.

  The Autarch was not fooled by the situation. The chauvinistic of the planet might allow themselves the luxury of considering themselves free, but the Autarch knew that the Tyrannian danger had been held at arm’s length this past generation. Only that far. No farther.

  And now it might be moving in quickly for the final, long-delayed bear hug. Certainly, he had given it the opportunity it was waiting for. The organization he had built up, ineffectual though it was, was sufficient grounds for punitive action of any type the Tyranni might care to undertake. Legally, Lingane would be in the wrong.

  Was the cruiser the first reaching out for the final bear hug?

  The Autarch said, “Has a guard been placed on that ship?”

  “I said they were watched. Two of our freighters”—he smiled one-sidedly. “Keep in massometer range.”

  “Well, what do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know. The only Gillbret I know whose name by itself would mean anything is Gillbret oth Hinriad of Rhodia. Have you had dealings with him?”

  The Autarch said, “I saw him on my last visit to Rhodia.”

  “You told him nothing, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Rizzett’s eyes narrowed. “I thought there might have been a certain lack of caution on your part; that the Tyranni had been the recipients of an equal lack of caution on the part of this Gillbret—the Hinriads are notable weaklings these days—and that this now was a device to trap you into final self-betrayal.”