Chapter 24
THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES was over, the Night of the Long Knives and the four action packed days and nights that had followed it. The power had fallen into the streets, and Admiral Ajax, warned by his own intelligence service of the scheduled assassinations of himself and his senior captains, had swooped down from the sky to pick it up. The birth machine was destroyed, the caste system had crumbled, and only the patrolling airships of the Navy kept Sparta safe from the jealous attentions of the other city-states. Cresphontes—a mere figurehead—skulked in his palace, dared make no public appearances.
Grimes and his Seeker had played little active part in quelling the disturbances, but always the spaceship had been there, hanging ominously in the clouds, always her pinnaces had darted from one trouble spot to another, her Marines acting as ambulance men and firemen—but ambulance men and firemen backed by threatening weaponry to ensure that they carried out their tasks unmolested.
Brasidus had rejoined his own police unit, and, to his surprise, had found that greater and greater power and responsibilities were being thrust upon him. But it made sense. He knew the spacemen, had worked with them—and it was obvious to all that, in the final analysis, they and the great Federation that they represented were the most effective striking force on the planet. They did not strike, they were careful not to fire a single gun or loose a single missile, but they were there, and where they had come from there were more and bigger ships with even heavier armaments.
The universe had come to Sparta, and the Spartans, in spite of centuries of isolationist indoctrination, had accepted the fact. Racial memory, Margaret Lazenby had said, long and deep-buried recollections of the home world, of the planet where men and women lived and worked together in amity, where the womb was part of the living female body and not a complex, inorganic machine.
And then there was the last conference in John Grimes’ day cabin aboard Seeker. The Lieutenant Commander sat behind his paper-littered desk, making a major production of filling and lighting his pipe. Beside him was Margaret Lazenby, trim and severe in uniform. In chairs facing the desk were the rotund little Admiral Ajax, the tall, saturnine Heraklion, and Brasidus. A stewardess brought coffee, and the four men and the woman sipped it appreciatively.
Then Grimes said, “I’ve received my orders, Admiral. Somewhat garbled, as messages by psionic radio too often are, but definite enough. I have to hand over to the civil authorities and then get the hell out.” He smiled bleakly. “I’ve done enough damage already. I fear that I shall have to do plenty of explaining to my lords Commissioners.”
“No, Commander.” Heraklion’s voice was firm, definite. “You did not do the damage. The situation, thanks to Diomedes, was already highly explosive. You were only the . . . the . . .”
“The detonator,” supplied Ajax.
“Just how explosive was it?” inquired Grimes. “I’d like to know. After all, I shall have a report to make.” He switched on a small recorder that stood among the litter on his desk.
“Very explosive. Some of us at the créche had decided to make women, not only for ourselves but for every man on Sparta. We had decided to revert to the old ways. Diomedes knew of this. I still think that he was actuated by patriotism—a perverted patriotism, but patriotism nonetheless.”
Peggy Lazenby laughed scornfully. “Fine words, Doctor. But what about that female baby who was exposed, the one that Brasidus and I rescued?”
“Yes, the Exposure. That was a custom that we intended to stamp out. But the unfortunate child, as well as being female, was mentally subnormal. She’d have been better off dead.”
“So you say. But you forget that the planets of the Federation have made great strides in medical science during the centuries that you have been stagnating.”
“Enough, Peggy. Enough,” said Grimes tiredly. He put his pipe into a dirty ashtray, began to sort his papers. “As I told you, my orders are to hand over to the civil authorities. Who are they? The King? The Council?” The Spartans smiled scornfully. “All right. I suppose that you gentlemen will have to do. You, Doctor Heraklion, and you, Admiral Ajax, and you—just what rank do you hold these days? I’ve rather lost track, Brasidus. But before I hand over, I want to be sure that the Admiral and friend Brasidus know what it’s all about. Heraklion knows, of course, but even the most honest of us is liable to bend the facts.
“This ship, as you know, is a unit of the fleet of the Federation’s Survey Service. As such she carries, on microfilm, a most comprehensive library. One large section of it is devoted to colonizing ships that are missing. We’re still stumbling upon what are called the Lost Colonies, and it’s helpful if we have more than a vague idea as to their origin. This Sparta of yours is, of course, a Lost Colony. We’ve been able to piece together your history both from our own reference library and from the records salvaged from the créche.
“So far, the history of colonization comes under three headings, the First Expansion, the Second Expansion and the Third Expansion. The First Expansion was initiated before there was a practicable FTL—faster than light—drive. The Second Expansion was carried out by vessels fitted with the rather unreliable Ehrenhaft Drive, the so-called gaussjammers. The Third Expansion made use of timejammers, ships with the almost foolproof Mannschenn Drive.
“The vessels of the First Expansion, the deep-freeze ships, went a long way in a long time, a very long time. They carried at least three full crews—captains, watch-keeping officers, maintenance engineers and the like. The colonists, men and women, were in stasis, just refrigerated cargo, in effect. The crews spent their off-duty months in stasis. But there was, of course, always one full crew on duty.
“As a result of some incredible stupidity on somebody’s part, the crews of many of the early ships were all male. In the later ones, of course, the balance of the sexes was maintained. Doric—the ship from which this Lost Colony was founded—had an all male crew, under First Captain—he was the senior of the four masters—Deems Harris. This same Captain Harris was, probably, a misogynist, a woman hater, when the voyage started. If he were not, what happened probably turned him into one.
“Third Captain Flynn seems to have exercised little control over his officers—or, perhaps, he was the ringleader. Be that as it may, Flynn decided, or was persuaded, to alleviate the monotony of his tour of duty by reviving a dozen of the more attractive colonist girls. It seems to have been quite a party while it lasted—so much so that normal ship’s routine went by the board, vitally important navigational instruments, such as the Very Long Range Radar, were untended, ignored. The odds against encountering a meteoric swarm in deep space are astronomical—but Doric encountered one. Whether or not she would have been able to take avoiding action is doubtful, but with some warning something could have been done to minimize the effects of the inevitable collision. A collision there was—and the sphere in which the female colonists were housed was badly damaged, so badly damaged that there were no survivors. I should have explained before that these deep-freeze ships didn’t look anything like a vessel such as this one; they consisted of globes held together by light girders. They were assembled in orbit and were never intended to make a landing on any planetary surface.
“Anyhow, Captain Flynn aroused Captain Harris and the other masters and their officers after the damage had been done. Captain Harris, understandably, took a somewhat dim view of his junior and formed the opinion that if Flynn had not awakened those women the collision would not have occurred. Oddly enough, as his private journal indicates, he blamed the unfortunate wenches even more than he blamed Flynn. He despised Flynn for his weakness and irresponsibility—but those poor girls he hated. They were thrown into some sort of improvised brig.
“Meanwhile, Doric was far from spaceworthy. Apart from the slow leakage of precious atmosphere, much of her machinery was out of kilter, the automated ‘farm,’ upon which the crew depended for their food and their atmospheric regeneration, especially. Although the world that you know as Sparta was not the ship’s original objective—oddly enough, long-range instrumental surveys had missed it—Doric’s quite excellent equipment picked it up, made it plain to Captain Harris that he could reach it before air and food and water ran out. So, putting all hands save himself and one officer back into stasis, he adjusted his trajectory and ran for this only possible haven.
“His troubles were far from over. The shuttles—relatively small rocket craft used as ferries between the big ship in orbit and the world below—had all been ruined by that meteoric shower. Nonetheless—it was a remarkable feat of spacemanship—he succeeded in getting that unhandy, unspaceworthy and unairworthy near wreck down through the atmosphere to a relatively soft landing.
“At first glance, the survivors were not too badly off. The planet was habitable. The fertilized ova of various animals—sheep, pigs, cattle, dogs and cats, even—had all been destroyed by the crash landing, but the local fauna was quite edible. And the ship had carried a large stock of seed grain.
There was a decided imbalance of the sexes—the only women were Captain Flynn’s hapless ones, and there were all of five thousand men—but even that would right itself in time. The ship—as did all ships of that era—carried equipment that was the prototype of your birth machine, and there were supplies of deep-frozen sperm and ova sufficient to populate a dozen worlds.
“But . . .
“Twelve women, and five thousand and forty-eight men.
“Rank, said Captain Flynn and some of the other officers, should have its privileges. It most certainly should not, said the colonists—among them, of course, the twelve men whose wives the women had been.
“There was trouble, starting off with a few isolated murders, culminating in a full-scale revolt against the officers and those loyal to them. Somehow the twelve girls were . . . eliminated. Deems Harris doesn’t say as much in his journal, but I gained the impression that he was behind it.
“Now, this Deems Harris. It is hard for us in this day and age of quick passages to get inside the skins, the minds of those old-time space captains. Probably none of them was quite sane. Most of them were omnivorous, indiscriminating readers, although some of them specialized. This Deems Harris seems to have done so. In history. By this time, with his colony off to a disastrous beginning, he seems to have hankered after some sort of culture in which women played a very small part—or no part at all. One such culture was that of Sparta, one of the ancient Greek city-states back on Earth. Greek women were little more than childbearing, housekeeping machines—and the Spartan women suffered the lowest status of them all. Sparta was the state that specialized in all the so-called manly virtues—and little else. Sparta was the military power. Furthermore, the original Spartans were a wandering tribe called Dorians. Dorians—Doric—See the tie-up? And their first King was Aristodemus. Aristodemus—Deems Harris.
“The first Aristodemus, presumably, kept women in their proper place—down, well down. This latter-day Aristodemus would go one better. He would do without women at all.” Grimes looked at Margaret Lazenby. “At times I think that he had something.”
“He didn’t have women, that’s for certain. But go on.”
“All right. Aristodemus—as we shall call him now—was lucky enough to command the services of like-minded biochemists. The sperm, of course, was all neatly classified—male and female being among the classifications. Soon that first birth machine was turning out a steady stream of fine, bouncing baby boys. When the adult populace started to get a bit restive, it was explained that the stock of female sperm had been destroyed in the crash. And somebody made sure that the stock was destroyed.”
“But,” Brasidus interrupted, “but we used to reproduce by fission. Our evolution from the lower animals has been worked out in detail.”
“Don’t believe everything you read,” Peggy Lazenby told him. “Your biology textbooks are like your history textbooks—very cunningly constructed fairy tales.”
“Yes,” said Grimes. “Fairy tales. Aristodemus and his supporters were able to foist an absolutely mythical history upon the rising generations. It seems fantastic, but remember that there was no home life. They—like you, Brasidus, and like you, Admiral—knew only the Spartan state as a parent. There were no fathers and mothers, no grandfathers and no grandmothers to tell them stories of how things used to be. Also, don’t forget that the official history fitted the facts very neatly. It should have done—after all, it was tailor-made.
“And so it went on, for year after year, for generation after generation, until it became obvious to the doctors in charge of the birth machine that it couldn’t go on for much longer. That bank of male sperm was near exhaustion. This first crisis was surmounted—ways and means were devised whereby every citizen made his contribution to the plasm bank. A centrifuge was used to separate X-chromosome-bearing sperm cells from those carrying the Y-chromosome. Then the supply of ova started to run out. But still the race was in no real danger of extinction. All that had to be done was to allow a few female children to be born. In fact, this did happen now and again by accident—but such unfortunates had been exposed on the hillside as defective infants. Even so, the doctors of those days were reluctant to admit female serpents into this all-male paradise.
“And now Latterhaven comes into the story. I’m sorry to have to disappoint you all, but there never was a villainous Admiral Latterus. And, apart from the ill-fated Doric, there never were any spaceships owned by Sparta. But while Aristodemus was building his odd imitation of the original, Terran Sparta, the First Expansion ran its course. Then, with the perfection (not that it ever was perfect) of the Ehrenhaft Drive came the Second Expansion. Finally, there was the Third Expansion, and there was the star ship Utah, commanded by Captain Amos Latter. It was Latter and his people who founded the colony—one run on rather more orthodox lines than yours—on Latterhaven, a world only a couple of light years from this one.
“The Latterhaveneers made explorations of the sector of space around their new home. One such expedition stumbled upon Sparta. The explorers were lucky not to be slaughtered out of hand—the records indicate that they almost met such a fate—but they were not, and they dickered with the Spartan top brass, and all parties eventually signed a trade agreement. In return for the spice harvest, Latterhaven would send two ships each Spartan year with consignments of unfertilized ova.
“The situation could have continued indefinitely if we hadn’t come in—or if Diomedes hadn’t found out about the doctors’ secret harem.”
“The situation would not have continued,” stated Heraklion. “As I’ve told you, Commander, it was our intention to introduce a reversion to—the normal way of birth.”
“That’s your story and you stick to it. It could be true, I suppose; it would account for the way that Diomedes hated you.” He refilled and relit his pipe. “The question is, what happens now?”
“What does happen?” asked Admiral Ajax.
“To begin with, I’ve been recalled to base. I shall have to make my report. It is possible that the Federation will replace your birth machine—although, come to that, you should be able to import materials and technicians from Latterhaven. You might even be able to build a new one for yourselves. But . . .
“But the Federation is apt to be a little intolerant of transplanted human cultures that deviate too widely from the norm. Your monosexual society, for example—and, especially, your charming custom of Exposure. This is your world and, as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to it. I’m a firm believer in the fifth freedom—the freedom to go to hell your own way. But you’ve never heard a politician up on his hind legs blathering about the Holy Spirit of Man. If you want to reconstruct your society in your own way, in your own time, you’ll have to fight—not necessarily with swords and spears, with guns and missiles—for the privilege.
“I advise strongly that you send a representative with us, somebody who’ll be able to talk sense with my lords and masters, somebody who’ll be able to take a firm line.”
“There’s Brasidus,” said Peggy Lazenby softly, looking directly at him. You and I have unfinished business, her eyes said.
“Yes, there’s Brasidus,” agreed Grimes. “After all, he knows us.”
And he’ll get to know us better. The unspoken words, her unuttered thought, sounded like a caressing voice in Brasidus’ mind.
“But we need him,” said Heraklion.
“A first-class officer,” confirmed Ajax. “He has what’s left of the Police eating out of his hand.”
“I think that one of my colleagues would be a better choice as emissary,” said Heraklion.
“So,” murmured Grimes. “So . . .” He looked steadily across his desk at the Spartans. “It’s up to you, Lieutenant or Colonel or whatever you are. It’s up to you. I’m sure that Admiral Ajax will be able to manage without you—on the other hand, I’m sure that Doctor Heraklion’s friend will prove a quite suitable envoy.
“It’s up to you.”
It’s up to me, Brasidus thought. He looked at the woman sitting beside the space commander—and suddenly he was afraid. Diomedes’ words about the frightening powers wielded by this sex lingered still in his mind. But, in the final analysis, it was not fear that prompted his answer, but a strong sense of responsibility, of loyalty to his own world. He knew—as the aliens did not, could never know—how precarious still was the balance of power. He knew that, with himself in command—effective if not titular—of the ground forces, peace might be maintained, the reconstruction be commenced.
“It’s up to you,” said Peggy Lazenby.
He said firmly, “I’d better stay.”
She laughed, and Brasidus wondered if he alone were aware of the tinkling malice that brought an angry flush to his face. “Have it your own way, sweet. But I warn you, when those tough, pistol-toting biddies of the Galactic Peace Corps get here, you’ll wonder what’s struck you.”
“That will do, Peggy.” Grimes’ voice snapped with authority. “That will do. Now, gentlemen, you must excuse us. We have to see our ship secured for space. How soon can you get your envoy here, Doctor Heraklion?”
“About an hour, Commander.”
“Very good. We shall lift ship as soon as he’s on board.” He got to his feet, shook hands with the three Spartans. “It’s been a pleasure working with you. It’s a great pity that it was not in pleasanter circumstances.”
This was dismissal. Ajax in the lead, the three men walked out of Grimes’ cabin. Brasidus, bringing up the rear, heard Peggy Lazenby say softly, “The poor bastard!”
And he heard Grimes reply, in a voice that held an unexpected bitterness, “I don’t know. I don’t know. He could be lucky.”
For a long while Brasidus wondered what they meant, but the day came at last when he found out.