Bayley, Barrington J - Novel 10 Read online

  "Your plan is unworkable," the kosho said at once. "My nephew will kill himself rather than be the cause of my permanent imprisonment." And the boy nodded his agreement.

  "If the boy kills himself your life will be immediately forfeit."

  "The equation does not balance. The outcome will be as I have stated."

  Nascimento sipped long and thoughtfully from his glass, staring over the rim at the two. The expression on his face showed that he was accepting what the kosho had told him.

  He sighed, sadly, then placed the glass on a table.

  "I see," he said slowly, his voice suddenly weak. "Well, I can't afford to have such a dangerous enemy abroad. Regrettably, I shall have to destroy you both."

  With his free hand he made a gesture—or rather, he began to make it. At the same moment the kosho, anticipating that he was about to order the pulse blast to fire, sprang.

  Whether his leap would have succeeded was doubtful. In the event, it was redundant. Behind the transparent screen Pout was crouched, listening with increasing excitement. He could contain himself no longer. He fired through the screen, unheedful that perhaps it would impede the action of the gun.

  It did not. And neither was Pout's aim any better than in the weapons house. The pink stitching, more sparkling and thrilling than had been noticeable in the fusty exhibition hall, sprang into being, transfixing the screen, curving through the air, ending at the small of Nascimento's back. The curator crumpled without a sound, his murderous gesture never completed.

  As Pout crept from behind the screen, a refrain sounded in his mind:

  I can maim and 1 can kill With my zen gun.

  The phrases lingered with him as he approached the body and leaned over it. Finally he poked it to make sure it was dead.

  Oh joy! He had killed Nascimento!

  He rounded on those whose lives he had saved. He would have held his fire to let Nascimento destroy them first, if only for the pleasure of seeing how it happened, but the ramshackle education he had received from the robots told him something about this man, something that left him feeling stunned by his good fortune. In a hoarse voice, he spoke.

  "You are a kosho. A perfect warrior."

  Nothing that had happened seemed to have perturbed the kosho in the slightest degree. He was gazing at the gun in Pout's grasp. "What is that weapon?" he asked, holding out his hand. "Let me see it."

  "No! It's mine!" cried Pout, clutching the gun to his chest, and the man let his hand fall.

  "Mixed one, you have destroyed a demented mind. Your motive, however, is as yet unknown to me."

  "You are a kosho," Pout repeated. "And I have saved your life! Yours, and the boy's. I know your code. You are in my debt."

  Anxiously he waited to hear how the kosho would respond to his invocation. The man paused, then nodded slowly.

  "Yes, that is so. You are entitled to name what the repayment shall be. If your demand is disproportionately great, however, there is another way I can discharge the debt, namely by taking my own life."

  "All I want is for you to follow me and be my protector," Pout said. "Fight for me. Do what I say."

  "You are a chimera, are you not?" the kosho remarked thoughtfully. "Part man, part animal. Which part predominates, I wonder?" Pout grimaced, hugging the gun closer to him, and the kosho went on: "And you think you have it in your power to make a slave of a pure man. For a citizen of the second class to own a citizen of the first class. Very well, I shall repay my debt, mixed one. I shall preserve your life if the need arises. But you must understand that my duty to you ends there. I shall not attack others at your command unless in a just cause. If you demand my services beyond this limit, I shall rid myself of my obligation by ending my life, as the code dictates."

  Of this Pout did not understand too much, but his eyes glittered. "Where are your guns and everything?" he rasped.

  "Nearby. But since we shall need to address one another, how are you named?"

  "Named?" Pout blinked. His view of himself scarcely included a name. But he remembered what he had been called. "Pout," he mumbled.

  "I, Hako Ikematsu, you may address as kosho. This, my nephew, is Sinbiane."

  The kosho beckoned, and stepped through a second door on the other side of the room, followed by his boy companion. Pout also followed. Down a corridor was a vestibule; beyond that, a main entrance; then a path leading to a small lodge.

  Pout was exhilarated when he saw the number and variety of the kosho's weapons. He watched greedily while the warrior hung them about himself, fastening them to his harness without ever asking for the assistance of the boy. Then the warrior looked questioningly at him.

  He scanned the savannah again. The sun would soon be down, but the ferocity of his feeling would brook no delay. No sense spending one more minute in this place, his prison. The world lay open before him!

  Wait! What of the man who had set him free? He might still be in the museum somewhere. Perhaps Pout should ...

  "Do we leave?" asked the kosho.

  "Yes. Yes!"

  "Then you must walk ahead. We will follow at a distance."

  This condition disconcerted Pout. On his part it would be the clumsy precursor of treachery ... but limited though his ideas of the world were, he did know that koshos were honourable.

  The party set off across the grassland, lit by the red of the dying sun.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The cat woman positively purred with pleasure. Archier rolled off the low couch where they had disported, and stretched luxuriously.

  A warm breeze rippled across his body. He strolled down the mossy bank and stepped into the chuckling stream at the bottom, bending to splash cool water on his skin. A rainbow fish darted between his legs, evading his half-hearted attempt to catch it.

  "The cat girl leaped in beside him. Her sense of enjoyment, he had noticed, was more deep-seated than his own. With a low laugh she flung herself full-length in the water and rolled about until even her shiny black hair was wet. Then she climbed out and lay on the moss to dry, limbs asplay.

  He remembered the responsive litheness of her musculature, the way she had clawed at him during their lovemaking. Her eyes were golden and caught the light brilliantly. When the pupils contracted it was to slits rather than points.

  "You know," he said, stepping from the brook to stand over her, "it's hard to believe you're no more than ten per cent cat."

  Again she gave her mocking, deep-throated laugh. "Actually, I'm closer to twenty percent."

  "Really?" Archier was perplexed. "But you're a first-class citizen, aren't you?"

  The girl seemed amused. "You think every first-class citizen walking around is a ninety percenter? It's mostly animals and chimeras that run the tests, and they bend the rules. My examiner must have been forty percent ape but he was planning to rig first class for himself."

  Bemused, Archier shook his head. "Did he make it?"

  "I don't know. But it's easy to get round the genetic laws these days. Nobody cares."

  "What you mean is the administration is sloppy to the point of farce," Archier murmured.

  Lazily, she blinked, and Archier noticed a sudden change in the quality of the light falling from the apparent sky. He glanced up. Beside the pink sun hovering over the horizon a red light was winking, like a pulsating companion. It was a signal to tell him duty called.

  He bent down and patted the girl's damp hair. "I must be going. I'm wanted."

  Pushing through a hanging screen of weeping willow, he was suddenly in a crescent-shaped room whose concave wall was a continuous curve with the ceiling, decorated with a floral pattern among which were interspersed oval vision plates. It was his office, containing desks, a mental refresher set alongside the dispenser of flavoured cold drinks, and various apparatuses relating to his position as fleet commander.

  The only other person in the room was Arctus, his elephant adjutant. He stood with trunk extended to a touch control beneath one of the vision plates, whi
ch showed an off-focus, off-colour view of the space torsion room.

  "The inship network is outphasing again," he said in his trumpety voice. "It's time the maintenancers got off their rusty backsides and did some work."

  "It's rather difficult getting them to do anything," Archier said. "They still claim to be on strike, even on fleet duty. But I'll speak to them. Anyway, what's happening, Arctus?"

  The miniature elephant turned to face him, curling his trunk dismissingly in the air. "Nothing that can't wait, Admiral. The enabling data from High Command has arrived, that's all."

  "Oh." Archier glanced behind him to the area of wall, colour-coded tangerine, that was the entrance to the dell and the girl. "Well, I might as well have a look at it. Page it through to me."

  He seated himself at his main desk while Arctus got through and spoke to the boy at the other end. A few seconds later his desk top steamed, then extruded parchment-like sheets bearing the helical crest of Diadem.

  For several minutes Archier studied the sheets, his expression growing serious. Finally he raised his face and stared with glazed eyes into nothing.

  "Arctus," he said at last, "see if you can find Menshek for me, will you? Ask him to come here."

  "Yes, Admiral." Arctus busied himself at his own desk, a low toylike affair at which he kneeled, expertly touching communicator pads with the soft tip of his trunk. While Archier waited the cat girl came in, still damp, her naked body extruding its pungent smell.

  She drew herself a thick, creamy confection from the dispenser and lay curled on a tabletop, smiling archly at Archier and licking the stuff up with a pink tongue.

  He ignored her, and when Menshek arrived, handed him the parchments silently.

  Menshek was pure human and the oldest person aboard Archier's flagship 1CS Standard Bearer. At sixty years of age he was very likely the oldest person in Ten-Fleet, though the artificial face-aging fashionable among the young women made his white hair and wrinkled skin less noticeable than they might otherwise have been. Most people of his age who were in official service held posts in Diadem.

  Archier tended to look up to him as a man of larger experience. The news he had now made him feel he needed to consult such a man.

  Menshek sighed as he laid aside the sheets. "Well, there it is. The thing we feared, that the Star Force fleets are largely in existence to prevent. A rebel force with a fleet of its own."

  "Yes, it does seem we haven't been quite alert enough."

  "No, no, alertness isn't it." Menshek sounded weary. "The fleets just aren't sufficient any more. Once there were thirty-six, now there are only five, and they are all depleted and below strength—why, the very name of Ten-Fleet is a lie, as well you know. Some of the ships might have been in the original Ten-Fleet, but most of them are scavenged from defunct units."

  Archier nodded. He recognised that for a long time now the empire had maintained itself more by bluff than anything. The chief strategy of Star Force was to see to it that no worlds harbouring fond thoughts of secession got a chance to build star fleets of their own, and that could not be done effectively with only the five fleets that remained.

  All the same, he wasn't sure he liked the sound of Menshek's defeatist tone. "Well," he countered, "the information here doesn't make it seem the Escorians have a main fleet—not a purpose-built one. It's mostly converted civilian ships. They probably hope they're a match for us, weakened as they are."

  "Let us hope they're not right."

  "On the face of it, it's rather brave of them—but what do you make of this item, Menshek?"

  Archier pointed to the second paragraph of the data summary. Unlike the first paragraph, it ended with no codes for obtaining the full data in detail. It simply read: 'Oracle predicts presence in Escoria of weapon CAPABLE OF DESTROYING EMPIRE. Locate at all cost or convincingly demonstrate non-existence.'

  Menshek's face became grave. "If that is in the Escorian fleet's armoury, we had better look out."

  "I can't say I've ever paid much attention to Oracle," Archier said, with an attempt at lightness. "It seems a bit too close to superstition to me."

  "I'm afraid I don't share your disbelief, and I'm not superstitious either." Menshek shifted in his seat uneasily.

  "There's a story that a few years ago it predicted the total collapse of the Empire," Archier continued. "But the Empire is still here . . . frankly I don't want to believe such. . . .

  "It also forecast the Hisperian uprising at a time when our intelligence service had no inkling of what was afoot," Menshek interrupted. "Remember, Oracle is only a data machine. All it does is sift data on a huge scale—all available data from every known source. But it does have mysterious properties. It correlates data according to rules of its own—or else according to no rules at all—and its conclusions are seemingly plucked out of thin air. But that's because it has no organised data store, so it's impossible to determine how any particular prediction was arrived at."

  "Exactly! It could be guessing—or simply repeating empty rumour!"

  "High-order guessing is probably the best way to describe its working method," Menshek admitted. "And sometimes it does simply repeat rumour. But I hope you aren't thinking of neglecting that order from High Command."

  "There isn't any High Command," Archier said bitterly. "Didn't you read paragraph three?"

  "Yes, I read it," Menshek replied, his voice quiet and matter-of-fact. "It's hardly unexpected. We weren't put in Condition Autonomy for nothing."

  "What do you think's happening?"

  The parchment had ended with the news that there would be no further communication. High Command had closed down. The fleet admirals now had no one to issue them with either orders or information, and in effect were obliged to consider themselves imperial autarchs for all provinces outside Diadem.

  The situation would continue until the Imperial Council itself despatched the official interdict standing down Condition Autonomy to some lesser status. Archier had wondered what would happen if that interdict never came. It was conceivable that the five fleets would eventually become the nuclei of new, rival empires.

  Or four of them might. Archier promised himself that he, on the other hand, would take his fleet into Diadem and try to rescue it from whatever had beset it.

  "There are several possibilities," Menshek said. "Civil war? The overthrow of the Council, just as the Emperor Protector was overthrown? Personally I believe the explanation is several degrees more mundane. I imagine the High Command had been forced to close down through lack of staff."

  While Archier stared, Menshek went on: "What's probably happened is that they've had to send their last remaining officers out to one or other of the fleets, because they just can't find any other replacements . . . isn't that where all the Empire's difficulties come from, after all? The numbers of pure humans willing to take on the work of preserving the Empire grows smaller all the time. That's why, these days, we resort to using children."

  "You're beginning to sound like an adult chauvinist."

  "If being an 'adult chauvinist' means believing children aren't always as capable of shouldering responsibility as adults, then yes, I suppose I am."

  Menshek, Archier told himself with a frown, was certainly out of tune with the time. It was one of present society's articles of faith that, having received an intensive education up to the age of seven, a young person was thereafter as entitled as any adult with regard to social position, sexuality, or freedom of action. It was slightly shocking to hear Menshek talk so.

  "Recently a twelve-year-old girl was sent out as Admiral of Twenty-Three-Fleet," Menshek added, in a voice of mild disapproval. "You've probably heard of it—it was an attempt to put together a sixth fleet from scavenged or cannibalised vessels, not really a fleet at all. The reason she was Admiral was that she was the only pure-blooded human in the outfit."

  "Yes, I know of it," Archier said. "I heard she performed very well, for the time Twenty-Three-Fleet was in operation. It failed
mainly through having insufficient resources."

  "I agree the appointment was a success in her case," Menshek conceded. "But what about the eight-year-old boy who became Three-Fleet's Fire Command Officer . . . just before they invested Costor."

  ("From what I hear he made an excellent Fire Command Officer."

  "But such lack of restraint! It was needless to wipe out half a planet like that-—Costor's ships weren't that much of a danger!" Menshek made a face. "There was a committee of enquiry over it, you know. The boy had learned his skill on games machines. He hadn't appreciated reality was different."

  "Adults can equally be carried away by excitement," Archier pointed out. "Years don't necessarily make one mature."

  "Well, you may be right . . . certainly it's the fashionable view, or perhaps I should say the 'social philosophy.' Yet these ideological notions are what is killing the Empire. There's no healthy pragmatism. The desperate shortage of pure humans, for instance, could be remedied in a perfectly straightforward manner simply by cloning them in whatever numbers are required. That would be the military solution. But we can't do it because in the official purview every pure human must be a consequence of love, not mere practicality— that is, he must be willed into existence by his parents purely for his own sake. So this rules out mass cloning or extra-hysterine growth of foetuses, except where it's to avoid the inconvenience of pregnancy. And the plain fact is that few humans in Diadem are interested in the bother of raising children ..."

  Softly, Archier laughed. Much as he valued Menshek's advice, he had to admit the older man had some crazy ideas. "Everything we're striving to preserve would be gone if the human beings were to be produced by the state," he objected. "It turns the whole purpose of life upside down—we'd be like ants or bees."

  Menshek shrugged. Changing the subject, Archier said, "I was wondering if you had any inkling as to the possible nature of this new weapon? It would have to be a large-scale development, wouldn't it? Something huge, one imagines. Is Escoria Sector particularly skilled scientifically?"