CHAPTER SIX
Valdes had been as good as his word. There had been no problem about visas. But passage had been booked for Andrew and Rachel Arnstein to Tizath-Asor aboard the Star Wanderer, pride of Spinward, Earth’s premier shipping line. Now the great interstellar ship appeared and grew in the view-forward.
“There’s the Star Wanderer,? Andrew said. His attempt to make conversation was not notable for success. Rachel, who sat across the aisle from him in an attitude of tile-nosed aloofness, gave no acknowledgment save a short nod as the shuttle continued on with the same gentle acceleration its drive core, converting the angular momentum of atomic spin directly into linear thrust, had imparted ever since takeoff. Alas, it was not magic; it still produced sensible acceleration. But at least it required none of the brutal g-forces of the last century’s spacecraft that had needed to worry about reaction mass.
After the first Lokaron had arrived from Gev-Tizath forty-four years earlier, Earth’s physicists had gone into deep denial. Reactionless drives had been almost the least of it. Far worse had been the aliens’ apparent ability to cross the interstellar gulfs in less time than general relativity allowed for, from the standpoint of observers at each end of the journey—and the same amount of time as perceived by the journeyers themselves.
The Lokaron had been compassionate enough to assure them that, yes, Einstein had been right . . . as far as he went. Their ships didn’t really transgress the sacrosanct lightspeed limit. They merely avoided it by means of a higher dimension—“overspace”which points congruent to locations in normal space were only relatively short distances apart, and in which space drives worked normally. All one had to do was enter and leave overspace—a multidimensional tunneling in spacetime known as “transition,”possible only in a gravity field of less than 0.0001 standard Earth G.
And there was the rub. A ship could achieve transition for itself, but only if it carried a massive, energy-intensive generator. Exploration ships and warships did precisely that. But no such ship could earn its keep in the mercantile world of the Lokaron. Fortunately, the same effect could also be produced externally to its generating machinery—the “transition gate.” That machinery was even more massive and energy-intensive than the ship-mounted transition engines. But once in place it paid for itself innumerable times over, for it could be used by any ship that could reach it. It was, in fact, what made interstellar commerce economically viable, and as such it formed the basis of the Lokaron-created interstellar order.
The shuttle gradually slowed to a near-halt relative to the mammoth interstellar ship. It eased through a nonmaterial atmosphere screen and settled onto a cavernous hangar deck. A queasy moment passed before the great ship’s artificial gravity clamped gently down on them. They emerged, and most of the new arrivals, including Rachel, looked slightly apprehensive at having nothing material between them and the vacuum of space. They had all been assured that the atmosphere screen—an application of the same technology that allowed shipboard artificial gravity—was impermeable to atmospheric gasses while permitting the slow passage of massive objects like spacecraft. Still . . .
They were given no time to let it prey on their minds, but were ushered to their cabins. Andrew and Rachel had been assigned quarters on different levels . . . which, he reflected, was probably just as well. He was still getting settled in when the intercom announced departure from orbit. There was only a momentary flutter in weight; the ship followed the standard “aft-equals-down” design philosophy, and the artificial gravity released its hold just as the drive commenced its steady one-gee acceleration. Andrew went on unpacking. Watching Earth recede in the view-aft was no novelty to him.
Later, he went to the lounge for dinner. (The ship was still keeping Earth’s Eastern Standard Time for benefit of its newly arrived passengers but would gradually shift away from it in the course of the voyage so as to eventually conform to the destination planet of Tizath-Asor, thus avoiding a drastic form of “jet lag”; it was yet another way of making interstellar passenger travel practical.) There, the large overhead dome-shaped viewscreen showed the view-aft for the edification of the diners. He spotted Rachel Arnstein, alone at a table, her eyes glued to the shrinking Earth.
“May I join you?” he asked with what he thought was unexceptionable diffidence.
She started. “Oh. Yes. Sure.” But her eyes kept going back to the view-sreen. “I suppose this is old hat for you.”
“Pretty much,” he acknowledged. “But probably not for most of our fellow passengers, from the look of them.”
“No. I notice they’re all human.”
“That’s right. The Spinward Line has yet to provide accommodations acclimatized for Lokaron passengers. Even if it had, they’d probably be amused at the thought of traveling aboard a non-Lokaron shipping line—the first such shipping line in the known galaxy. In fact, I imagine the idea would be too amusing to even seem unpatriotic.”
“They still look down on us, don’t they?”
“In a way—most of them. The wiser ones know better.” Andrew thought of Svyatog. “You can’t blame them, I suppose, given their history; before us, they’d never encountered anybody above the level of pyramid builders. But now, at least, the traditional patronizing attitudes are tempered by a certain respect.”
“Since the war with Gev-Rogov,” she finished the thought for him. The war you fought in, she seemed about to add. But then a steward (live human; the Spinward Line spared no expense) approached, and the moment passed in the flurry of choosing drinks and ordering dinner. The menu held nothing strange or exotic about it, which was hardly surprising given Spinward’s exclusively human clientele.
“So,” said Rachel as a conversation reopener, “I gather that we’re going to take about three days to reach the CNE transition gate.”
“That’s right. It orbits just inside the asteroid belt, which is as deep in the sun’s gravity well as it can be and still function. But we’re in luck; it’s only about thirty degrees ahead of Earth, so at a steady one-g acceleration that’s about how long it should take, even with some maneuvering adjustments that have to be made at the end.” He laughed. “We could have done it in less time if we’d used the Harathon gate—it’s trailing Earth by just a little, so we would only have had to kill our relative velocity. But that would have meant paying a toll. And besides, it’s a matter of prestige. Constructing a transition gate was the greatest project the human race had undertaken since the formation of the CNE—it took a public-private partnership involving Spinward and the other infant space lines, as well as the CNE government. And now we use it whenever possible, instead of the Harathon and Tizathon ones, out of pride as well as toll-avoidance.”
Their drinks arrived and they clinked glasses—chablis for her, bourbon and branch water for him—as though to formalize the breaking of the ice. Andrew reminded himself that he must never lose sight of the multilayered game he was playing.
“Listen,” Rachel said impulsively after the first sip, “I really do appreciate what you tried to do for me back in Washington. And I know you don’t want me along on this trip. But I promise I’ll—”
“No, no. You were perfectly right, and I was probably being too stuffy. I’m still curious, though, as to what made you so certain that the official reports of your father’s death were less than candid. You mentioned something about him ‘not seeming himself.’”
“That began before I happened to find out about his being in communication with this Tizathon researcher . . . You mentioned that you knew of him, too. Persath’Loven, was that his name?”
“That’s right,” said Andrew, who had expected to have to worm the name out of her. Was I ever so candid and artless? he wondered. Probably not.
“Well, he seemed terribly upset to know I had found out—as though the knowledge might put me in some kind of danger. It was afterwards that he stopped communicating. That hurt.” Rachel’s expression reflected that remembered pain. “I wasn’t completely honest when I said he and I stayed in touch pretty regularly. That was only so after I’d moved away from Mother—their divorce had been pretty bitter, you see—and gotten established in San Francisco—I’m a graphic designer. So it was like I was losing something I’d only just gained.”
Dinner was served. The conversation frayed out into inconsequentialities—which was fine with Andrew, who didn’t want to risk pushing too hard. But over coffee he managed to steer the subject to their encounter with Valdes, then spoke with what he hoped wasn’t overdone casualness. “You know, when I asked him if his views weren’t a lot like that of the old Earth First Party, I almost wanted to ask if they weren’t also like those of the Black Wolf Society.”
“Huh? Aren’t they a crime syndicate?”
“On one level. But they also push an ideology that is expansionist and human-supremacist and, if not anti-Lokaron in general, certainly anti-Rogovon. In fact, their name comes from the constellation Lupus—the Wolf. There, and in Sagittarius, is where our interests have come into conflict with Gev-Rogov’s. The Black Wolf’s goal is to drive the Rogovon out of that constellation entirely.”
“I never knew that about their name.”
“Not many people do.” Andrew made his voice even more casual. “Did your father ever mention them?”
She gave him a sharp glance and spoke with a certain abruptness. “No. Why should he have?”
“Oh, no reason.” Andrew changed the subject as quickly as he could without seeming obvious about it.
A little less than three Earth-days later they sat in the lounge to watch the transition, pressed down into their recliners by the sudden, stomach-lurching surge as the ship was pulled into the nonmaterial hole in space-time. This time the dome above them showed the view-forward, and the stars ahead seemed to flow sternward and merge into a tunnel of light that streamed through the spectrum before vanishing into a well of blackness—the utter, disturbing blackness of overspace, into which the tiny blue dot of Earth had preceded it—in a secondary screen that showed the view-aft. It was a sensory experience that not even Andrew had ever really grown used to.
The rest of the voyage was uneventful. Star Wanderer, built by and for humans, was no more alien-seeming than its cuisine. They couldn’t even watch the stars while in overspace, and all external viewscreens were deactivated after transition to guard the passengers’ emotional equilibrium from the sight of the indescribable nothingness that lay outside the hull. There were various recreational and entertainment facilities available, and as time went by Andrew felt that a thaw was beginning to creep into his association with Rachel.
“Listen,” she said in one unguarded moment, “I’m sorry if I seemed to snap at you that first night after departure, at dinner.”
“You mean when I asked if your father had ever mentioned the Black Wolf Society?”
“Right. I’m sure you’re just pursuing every possible lead. But . . . well, I had a friend once, shortly after I’d first moved to San Francisco. He got hooked on drugs—relatively harmless ones at first, or so he thought. But then one led to another, right up to brainbloom.”
Andrew didn’t trust himself to speak. He knew of the utterly illegal designer drug. It produced an explosive enhancement of creativity—for a while. But then . . .
“Dead?” he finally queried.
“That would be better. He might as well be anencephalic. But his brain still produces EEG readings, so they can’t legally pull the plug on him. He’s just a mass of flesh, hooked up to a machine.” She shook herself and spoke a little too briskly. “The police are certain that the Black Wolf Society is behind distribution of the stuff, but they haven’t been able to prove anything. Confidentially, one of them told me they’re swimming against a very strong tide of influence at high places.”
And when I mentioned your father’s name in the same sentence with them . . . “You’re right,” Andrew said quickly. “I was just speculating at random.” He steered the conversation into safer channels. The subject never came up again.
Andrew discovered that his travels hadn’t really prepared him for Tizath-Asor, when they emerged from overspace at one of its transition gates. He had been to Harath-Asor, home of Earth’s closest Lokaron associates and origin of Tizath-Asor’s original settlers. There, he had been struck—as had so many others, including his parents, the first humans to see it—by the strange contrast between the overwhelming presence of transcendent technology and the ancientness of the world itself, with its worn-down landscapes, its enigmatic cyclopean ruins of an extinct pre-Lokaron race, its long days . . . and, in its deep-blue sky, the great orange sun whose tidal pull had produced those long days by slowing its rotation over the eons.
There was none of that here. Tizath-Asor was younger than Earth, and its sun was a G2V like Sol. It still held oceans that covered three-quarters of its surface, even though its surface gravity was only slightly higher than the 0.72 Terran g its Harathon colonists had evolved under. Those colonists had required so little genetic engineering that the two subspecies could still interbreed normally, as was not the case with either of them and the Lokarathon of the species’ homeworld, who represented the original Lokaron genotype—or with the Rogovon, or any of the other gengineered Lokaron subspecies.
They proceeded inward from the transition gate through the crowded spacelanes, passing awesome space habitats, titanic powersats, streaming convoys of ore carriers, and all the rest of what had to be expected in the capital system of a major Lokaron gevah. But as a secondary colony of Gev-Harath, this was a relatively young gevah, and as they approached the planet (reassuringly Earthlike despite its smaller size), its night side wasn’t the almost unbroken dazzlement of city lights Andrew had seen on Harath-Asor. There was, however, the same thread—impossibly thin for its straightness—extending three diameters out from a point on the planet’s equator. Most of the metropolitan Lokaron worlds still had orbital towers utilizing materials technology even now beyond Earth’s horizon, for reactionless drives were a more recent development than the capability of overspace transition. But nowadays such towers were merely tourist attractions. Star Wanderer proceeded to a low-orbit space station where Spinward Line had leased facilities, and shuttles waited to waft them down to the surface in today’s cheap, quiet way.
They disembarked, emerging from a tube connecting Star Wanderer with the station. There was no fluctuation in weight, for gravity, like the diurnal cycle, had gradually been adjusted to the destination planet’s values in the course of the voyage. As they entered the cavernous lobby, a human stepped forth to greet them. He was youngish, short and slender, with straight black hair and regular dark features that reflected an indefinable blend of ethnic origins. Andrew thought he might as well as have had “gofer” tattooed on his forehead.
“Captain Roark? Ms. Arnstein? I’m Amletto Leong, with the CNE embassy to Gev-Tizath. But,” he quickly added, “I’m not here in any official capacity. As part of our latest courier run from Earth—which beat you here by a few days—we got a request from Assemblyman Valdes to extend you any assistance we could. Naturally, we try to accommodate such requests from members of the Legislative Assembly whenever possible. So the ambassador asked me to do whatever I legitimately can for you.”
Translation: the bureaucrats are already sucking up to the man they sense will be the next president-general. “Thank you,” Andrew said aloud. “I suppose our first need is planetside accommodations and transportation.”
“Separate accommodations,” Rachel put in primly.
“Already taken care of.” Leong smiled. “I think you’ll find the accommodations comfortable. Certain Tizathon hotels have gotten quite good about catering to human requirements. They can even give you Earth-normal gravity if you choose. Personally, I enjoy the local version. And an air-car will be available whenever you need it.”
“I’m overwhelmed,” Rachel remarked. “I just hope I’m not equally overwhelmed by the bills.”
“Not to worry,” said Leong with an airy gesture. “That’s been taken care of. Assemblyman Valdes assured us he’d reimburse us for all expenses.”
“Thank you,” said Andrew, somewhat inadequately. This is above and beyond, he thought, and Rachel’s expression made it clear she was thinking the same thing. Of course, the other side of the coin is that everything we do is going to be reported back to Valdes. But there’s nothing I can do about that, and given the time lag I don’t need to worry about it for now. “Our next request is going to be for an introduction to see a certain Persath’Loven.”
Leong’s out-of-character sharp look was smoothed over almost too quickly to be noticed. He pursed his lips. “That could be a little more difficult. How much do you know about him?”
“Only that he spent some time on Earth back in the late Forties and early Fifties, studying Earth’s cultures and history, and that he published some books on the subject.”
“Yes.” Leong nodded. “He’s a type that has pretty much vanished on Earth: the super-wealthy dilettante. In fact, he almost fits into an even older type from Earth’s past: a ‘remittance man,’ but on a fairly grandiose scale, because he’s a collateral relation of one of the established hovathon of Gev-Tizath. Incidentally, he’s a primary male rather than a transmitter, which isn’t as much of a social disability as it would have once been—Gev-Tizath is pretty progressive that way. But you get the general idea. He had an obscene amount of unearned wealth with which to purse his interests.”
“Still,” Andrew persisted, “I understand some of his works on human studies were well-regarded.”
“True. The earlier ones. He’s actually rather brilliant, in an undisciplined, unfocused sort of way. But afterward . . . well, he seems to have fallen under the influence of certain mystical human cranks—the Imperial Temple of the Star Lords, they call themselves—and his later writings verged on sheer hysteria.”
“And now he’s back here on Tizath-Asor?”
“Yes. After his return from Earth he began to pour his money into an obsessive study of some very odd—some would almost say occult—aspects of physics. The whole business is actually very mysterious . . . which has added to its popular appeal and, I gather, even increased sales of his earlier books, making him even richer.” Leong chuckled. “But the point is, he’s very eccentric and has the resources to protect his privacy. He hardly ever sees anyone—even fellow Lokaron, let alone humans.”
“Tell him,” said Rachel, “that I’m the daughter of Admiral Nathan Arnstein, who has died under suspicious circumstances.”
“You might also mention that I was Admiral Arnstein’s chief of staff, and I, too, have reason to believe that the circumstances surrounding his death were questionable.” Andrew paused, trying to decide how much he should reveal. He wanted to mention the Black Wolf Society, but he still wasn’t ready to trust Valdes, with whom Leong was obviously associated, if only indirectly.
“Hmm.” Leong stroked his chin. “This might make him more amenable to your request. I’ll see what I can do. But for now, let’s get you through the local customs—that’s all handled here in the station—and then to your shuttle. I’ll show you to your hotel.”