THE VAL EXTENDED A COM POD AND ATTACHED TO the
transmitting console. The interstellar transmission system included
complex miniature punches and required much power, which was why it
wasn’t used very often. It also still was slow enough that
the conversation between the two machines, which might have been
done in seconds, instead would take hours. Machines, however, were
patient—when they had to be.
The Val received the sign-on from Master System itself, and
quickly transmitted the entire record, including all the test and
probe data on the suspects and the complete readout of Colonel
Chi.
“If such a being were possible,” the Val added,
“it would explain much.”
“Such a being is theoretically possible,” came the
reply from deep within the greatest computer ever known. “It
would take a computer with vast potential, much biosurgery almost
cell by cell and incredible skill with the principles of cellular
transmutation, and years of trial-and-error research, but such a
creature could theoretically be designed. There was no need for
such a project on my part.”
“But could anyone we know do such a thing? Who would have
the computer with the skills capable of doing so? And could any
human ever dream up such a creature?”
“Humans designed me, with far more primitive tools, and I
am infinitely more complex than that. As to the computer—it
is obvious. The one on Melchior that was stripped of all data was
nonetheless of sufficient size, speed, and capacity for it, if it
were a primary task of research and at least half of it were
constantly devoted to the problem. That means Clayben. He is the
only one who could have done it. An agent who could go through
security systems anywhere undetected, find out
anything . . . Yes. It is obvious now. You are
certain that there is absolutely no alien element of any kind
within any of the suspects, including the children?”
“None that can be measured by any means currently at our
disposal.”
“Very well, then. Order them held in continued isolation
and wait.”
The wait lasted two days.
“I cannot create such a being without much
experimentation, and that takes time,” Master System said at
last. “However, proceeding from what we know about such a
hypothetical creature, I have determined a basic set of methods
that had to be employed in its design. If it is close to what was
finally accomplished on Melchior, it is specifically designed so
that no form of measurement we can employ will unmask it. However,
we do not have to create one. I am certain that there could not be
more than one such creature. Otherwise the game would be up long
before now. They have, however, placed us in an immediate quandary.
Remaking and remolding an entire planetary culture takes time and
resources I do not wish to spare at this time, although Chanchuk is
now a primary candidate for such treatment at the earliest
opportunity. To kill the Holy Lama, her consorts, and their
children is the obvious plan to eliminating this creature, but it
would totally disrupt and turn against us an entire planetary
culture. It would tie down too many resources for too long, and we
are always faced with the possibility, even probability, that no
such creature exists, making the move meaningless as
well.”
“It is true that we are in only tenuous control on
Chanchuk at the moment. The local Center and temple authorities
have refused to aid us and in many cases have shown a willingness
to die rather than cooperate. They have managed to get the word out
to the other Centers in spite of our control and from there to the
masses in the region. There have been massive demonstrations. The
bulk of the population is pacifist, but some are not. Troops have
been harassed, some killed. They demand the restoration of the Holy
Lama and the Sacred Lodge. It is not anything that we cannot
handle, but it is not a good situation. Still, is there another
choice?” The Val seemed uncomfortable with its current
position.
“I believe there is. They already have the ring. They now
face us with creating an entire world of allies and tying up
tremendous resources handling such a thing as well. This is a
double victory I will not permit. Better to wrest a major victory
out of a defeat. They do not have all the rings yet. Without this
creature they are highly unlikely to be able to get inside
information sufficient to steal another without tripping up. Nor
are they likely to have access to a computer capable of creating
another even if they somehow have all the programs. But suppose in
the process of returning them to Wa Chi Center we also
transmuted them?”
“Transmuted? Into what? If we make major alterations in
their holy family it is the same as keeping them.”
“A body of a suitable and similar-looking priestess of
about the Holy Lama’s age can be procured. They are, after
all, all sisters. The reproductive functions can be restored during
the process. The sterilization is surgical, not transmuter induced.
Nine males of the royal lineage can also be procured from the
Centers as models, and their children can be the templates for the
Holy Lama’s children. Each can then be transmuted into the
form of one of the randomly selected templates.”
“I see. And since one cannot be transmuted twice, the
agent will be exposed, perhaps killed.”
“Possibly. I said transmuters were used to create it. I do
not believe it is possible to modify a human being to become one of
these creatures. If it was, then all of the rebels would be like
this thing and we should be lost. No, it must be created and
nurtured in a specially controlled laboratory. It is unlikely that
it has ever used a transmuter for more than transport. It has no
need to do so, and it might actually be threatened by it. But
matter is matter and atoms are atoms to a transmuter program. Have
we not created Vals that are so human none can tell the difference
without instruments? It will not care what this creature is made
of, or how it works. It will simply do a transmute. If it exists at
all, it will emerge back on Chanchuk as the Holy Lama or a male
consort or a child. It will no longer be artificial—it will
be real, and fixed immutably as one of Chanchuk. It is also likely
that memory is stored cellularly, throughout the body, rather than
merely in the brain. If that is true and it is a true mimic to the
end, it is quite possible we may also eliminate most if not all of
the memories, knowledge, and personality beneath the Chanchukian
facade. Either way, it will be neutralized. Do you need specific
programming instructions?”
“No. The only regret in this is that we shall never know
for certain if the colonel is brilliant or if this is a fantasy. I
would like to know.”
“It is probable. It is the most logical way to explain
their successes, as Chi so brilliantly determined. Clayben has the
ability, Melchior is the logical place, and the idea is consistent
with the way Clayben thought. The traitor Nagy could have brought
the creature along, since Nagy would be immune to it. No. I am
convinced that with this move we shall deal them a blow so crushing
that it will be another generation before they succeed in gaining
another ring. We will not let down our guard, for we want to
capture them all, but as far as obtaining all five rings is
concerned, this will halt them in their tracks.”
“It shall be done, and the restoration shall be highly
publicized and with suitable ceremony. I feel certain the Holy Lama
will go along even without mindpripter inducement, which is always
the best way. She is concerned about her people in a genuine way
and anxious to restore normalcy. If such normalcy can be assured,
what do you wish us to do next?”
“The SPF should be withdrawn as soon as possible, but keep
a regional command in the area just in case the Holy Lama is not
altogether clear on where her own and her people’s best
interests lie. I would suggest that Commodore Marquette and his
command be relieved of task force duties and placed in command of a
project to analyze specific SPF training responses. I have done a
complete analysis of his defensive plan and can find no specific
flaws in it. Clearly insufficient force was deployed to defend
Chanchuk, and the pirates’ computers were able to predict the
logical responses of our programs, commanders, and forces and find
the weak links in the chain. It is essential we become less
predictable in the future. Were it not for Colonel Chi, we might
have suffered a total humiliating defeat in this matter and learned
nothing from it.”
“Colonel Chi failed,” the Val pointed out.
“Vals failed on Janipur,” the master
computer noted. “The only reason we struck any blow at the enemy on
Janipur, even with our overwhelming force, was that the enemy was
new at the game and had not been tested in battle or planning. They
lost their ships and personnel because of their own mistakes, not
our efficiency. They are clearly patient and they have learned
well. Chi salvaged something here by showing imagination and
initiative and because she circumvented the rigidity of procedure
and thought that the enemy counted on. I am far removed from the
scene of this fight. Communications cannot be instantaneous. On the
scene, our computers and their computers are equal. The difference,
then, has been their human controllers who clearly have a great
deal of resourcefulness and imagination. This system was created
because it is the best for humans. Perhaps it is time we allowed
the products of that system to have a direct hand in
this.”
“What, then, are your orders?”
“The rings on Matriyeh and Alititi are to be secured with
monitors so that any removal will result in an automatic alarm.
Large automated task forces are to be deployed in waiting stages in
null zones out of detection range, but within monitor range,
capable of closing on either world and sealing it off should either
ring be stolen. Even without their special agent they will try and
perhaps succeed, but I do not want them getting away again. I want
so much force available with such speed that the enemy must bring
all of his ships and weapons to bear. They must be smashed so
thoroughly that they are forced to bring their base ship into the
fight and we must be able to take and secure it. Colonel Chi is
promoted to brigadier and is to be placed in charge of a special
SPF task force with all authority necessary. All Vals and other
extensions of myself shall be at her disposal.
Move!”
Raven had been morose off and on of late. He always had his
moods and his depressions, but this one seemed longer and deeper
than most. The Crow had taken to simply sitting on an overlook,
staring out at the vast worldlet that was the
Thunder’s deep interior.
He’d been up there, staring out, for over two days now,
eating or drinking nothing, and clearly now even out of cigars. The
former was not totally unusual; the latter was history making.
Hawks, concerned, finally decided to make his way up there even
though it broke his own personal rule on disturbing others and
certainly violated the compact that existed now with the remaining
multiracial company.
The Thunder was impressive, and never more so than from
its heights. Its kilometers-long interior, balanced by a
comfortable artificial gravity and landscaped with plants and rocks
from dozens of worlds, actually contained small villages and a
network of paths, central wells, sanitation, and cooking—all
that was needed. There was even a small area for livestock,
although, since some of the races aboard were strict vegetarians,
some by biology and others by custom or religion, it was agreed
that those who chose to remain meat-eaters would eat synthetics in
the interest of harmony.
Raven was a craggy old bastard, with scars all over his body
from his tough early life and career; his long hair, kept straight
at his own insistence, as if to mark him as one apart from the
Hyiakutts like Hawks and Cloud Dancer who wore the traditional
Plains braids most of the time, was steel-gray now. He was built
like a wrestler; a man nature had designed to be large as opposed
to tall, yet more muscular than fat.
As much as he had been a prime mover and shaker in the quest for
the rings and as much as he was a child of his northwest
wilderness, he was also always the cynic, always the materialist
and scoundrel, always the one who looked for profit in everything
he did and approached even the vastness of the universe in coldly
pragmatic terms. In all these years he’d rarely let down his
guard, rarely given anyone a glimpse of what might lie behind those
cold, brown eyes and that impassive, stonelike face. Just enough,
over all this time, to give those with whom he’d lived and
worked and plotted and planned an indication that somewhere under
all that was a far different sort of human being.
Raven, dressed only in a loincloth and sandals, did not move or
acknowledge Hawks’s presence when the leader came up to the
platform level and stepped off just behind him. For a while Hawks
just stood there, wondering if he was doing the right thing. But he
was the leader, and he had to know the condition of his
company.
Hawks approached, then sat down next to the big man,
cross-legged on the metal platform, and stared out at the vast
interior below.
Hawks reached back and took a long object from a box he’d
brought with him. “I brought you another box of
cigars,” the leader said conversationally.
For a moment Raven said nothing, then, without turning or
moving, he responded, “If you came up here and didn’t
bring ’em, I’d’ve thrown you off this
platform.”
“You’ve been up here a long time.”
“Sixty-two standard hours, forty-six minutes, more or
less.”
“You can keep track like that?”
“You kiddin’? The master clock’s just up
there.”
Hawks felt a bit silly. “Yeah. I should have thought of
that. How long do you intend to stay here?”
“I don’t know. It’s either this or I start
hittin’ the bottle. This is healthier. What’s it to
you, Chief, anyway?”
“Because I’m the chief,” Hawks replied.
“Because I think it’s more appropriate for the chief to
check you out than the medicine man, considering that would be
Clayben.”
“Good point. So what’s on your mind,
Chief?”
“I think that question is reversed. What’s on
your mind, Raven? Finally getting to you? All this time,
all this plotting and all this waiting—and we still
don’t know if we’re going to make it.”
“Oh, we’re gonna make it, Chief. Ain’t you
figured that out yet? I don’t know which of us, but some of
us’ll make it. We’ll get there and we’ll figure
it all out and we’ll switch that big mother right out of the
circuit and give it a lobotomy. Somebody will. It’s almost
like we were playing out a script. Not our script, or we
wouldn’t have this much trouble, but somebody’s script.
God’s or something more sinister, I don’t know, but
I’m damned sure of that much. We come too far, Chief. A lot
farther than I ever dreamed, and maybe you, either, in your saner,
less idealistic moments. We got three rings and we know where
another one is. We got just one to snatch and then it’s home.
And we’ll snatch it. And we’ll come home. Whether we
can hold ’em long enough for us to use ’em, I
don’t know, but somebody will.”
“That what you’re worried about? Going home? Holding
on?”
Raven shook his head. “Uh uh. But, see, we—all of
us—been so hot on gettin’ the damned things and
survivin’ to use ’em and all that we ain’t
thought about the one big thing. We been like folks sealed in
detention cells who spend half their lives plottin’ how to
escape and findin’ all the flaws, like us back on Melchior so
long ago. Then they bust out, finally, and they realize they spent
so much time figurin’ how to bust out they ain’t got
the slightest idea where the hell they’re goin’ or what
they want to do. Suppose we get in there and we turn that sucker
off. Ain’t nobody but me ever thought beyond that, I think.
What then? What happens then, Chief?”
Hawks was startled. “I don’t know. We just
don’t have to worry about Master System anymore.”
“Uh huh, and just what do you turn off? The boss,
that’s all. The chief. You knock off the only chief capable
of keepin’ track of, much less rulin’, the tribes and
what happens? You got thousands of little chiefs all at one
another’s throats tryin’ to be the new big chief. You
get tribalism and civil war and you get massive deaths. The people?
They’re still under the rule of the Great White Father they
were born under—or the Great Red Father or the Great Yellow
Father or whatever. The C.A.s are still in charge. They just got
the boss off their backs is all. The interdependent trade system
handled by the automated spaceships also goes down the toilet. No
more resupply, no more innovation, no more external contacts. A
human empire goes the way of all empires and you get four hundred
and fifty plus alien worlds. And I mean alien, Chief. You drop me
as I am down in the middle of Janipur and I’ll either get
worshipped as a god, stoned as a demon, or in the end cut down as a
monster anyways, and they won’t ask about my table manners.
Stick a Janipurian on Chanchuk. Try and hold a solid dialogue on
important affairs on Earth with the average Matriyehan. You see
what I mean?”
Hawks nodded. “I have thought on it. It is not sufficient
to turn the machine off. One must also determine how to replace it
with something infinitely fairer. Your knowledge and understanding
of history are quite surprising, Raven. But doesn’t the
Thunder itself give you hope? Here the children of wildly
differing races play together as friends, and their parents fight
and die alongside and for one another.”
“My business has always been human behavior. You
can’t be a field agent without knowin’ a lot more than
just how to point and shoot a gun or bow. But the
Thunder’s different and you know it. These
folks—they ain’t aliens. They’re space children,
even the old folks. Their parents were freebooters, the best liars
and cheats and thieves in the universe and already alienated from
their own homes as much as we are from ours. The rest started off
as our own people, and we still think of them that way and they
think of themselves that way. So the Chows look like humanoid cows.
You think they’re among their own people on Janipur?
We’re their people. But you stick ’em anyplace
but Janipur or space and you got monsters. You’re the
historian. Am I wrong?”
“No. If anything, you are overly optimistic. History is
filled with examples of times when people hated all who were
different from them even if the differences were quite minor. Our
own people were reduced from proud civilizations to helpless
prisoners on the worst of our own lands, begging our conquerors for
food. We were childlike, primitives, ones who could not accept
technology and so had to perish. Accept technology! Before the
Spaniards none of the nations of America had so much as
seen a horse, let alone a gun. We learned. We took what
was useful and valuable. We rejected the rest because it had little
value to us. Their values were different from ours, their goals,
their cultures, were directed toward things we found dehumanizing.
In the end, their worship of mind, property, nation, and invention
for its own sake, stripped of any moral valuations, led them to
terrible wars and to Master System. I have often reflected on the
irony that some of those now attempting an end to that result are
of the very people they so scorned and nearly destroyed.”
Raven’s head suddenly turned and he looked directly into
Hawks’s eyes. “Are we? Are we, really? Oh, we got the
right bloodlines, but we ain’t no damn men of spirit
and tribe. You’re a damn computer hacker and researcher into
lost records who works in a sophisticated high-tech environment
where the air is filtered and measured and you can be practically
brought back from the dead. Me? I’m a high-tech security man
from the same element. I spent much of my time in the wilds, with
the tribes, it’s true, but I wasn’t one of ’em,
not even among the Crow. I was a smug, superior, patronizing son of
a bitch down there where I was king and the people were blind. Your
precious Hyiakutts weren’t your people, they were some
charming living history exhibit. A way you could go back and study
like Clayben with some new alien bug under his microscope. Funny
thing was, you was playin’ Injun among the primitives and me,
I was playin’ the white man.”
“So? We are not what we like to think we are. It disturbs
me. It disturbs me more to hear you voice it because it is so much
the truth. But what would you have us do? Not turn it
off?”
Raven sighed. “I don’t know, Chief, but I got a real
weird feelin’—I always kind’a had it—that
even after the switch is off, it’s up to us. We can turn it
off and run and hope we’ll be long dead before whatever wars
and new tyranny that follow its death find us, or we can fall into
a trap that’s maybe infinitely worse.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“You ever really read all that
journal?”
“No, and neither did you. It is decomposing someplace in
the middle of the Mississippi River.”
“Come on, Chief. You got the transport copy
Warlock’s boss tried to send to Chen. When I decided to take
this mission I read the one Warlock had, the one we eventually
delivered to Chen along with you. I read all of it, Hawks. All of
it. Them rings—they don’t turn Master System off. They
revert control to the master consoles. In other words, Master
System stops bein’ a run-amok, independent machine and
becomes just a computer again. It don’t stop bein’ the
master system. It just stops bein’ the boss. Whoever’s
at the consoles, whoever’s got the rings—they
become the boss. That’s why Chen’s so hot for
this—if that slimy rat is still even alive. No matter.
Whoever his successor is will be the same guy only lookin’
and talkin’ a bit different. That’s why Clayben’s
been such a good, solid, devoted servant all this time, too. He
knows. You stick in the rings, you unlock the master control
center, and you go in. Then you’re it. You’re God.
You’re Master System. You call the shots and good
old MS and its minions obey. Of course, originally it just allowed
control to return for defense purposes, but Master System has grown
into a big boy after all this time. And it’s all
yours—whoever uses the rings.”
“My God!”
“Exactly—if it ain’t you at the controls,
whoever is surely is your god, and mine, too. Turn it off and you
break the system and return us to all the worst features of human
civilization we’ve been protected from. But ain’t
nobody gonna turn it off, Chief. Not when you can save humanity
from that and be God, too.”
“I see. And why have you kept this from us until
now?”
“Not all of you, Chief. Warlock knew. She’d read it,
too. But she never would’a thought to be a goddess herself,
Chief. She just figured to be there on the winner’s side,
just like me. Clayben knows—either through his private
library, somehow, or maybe he figured it out by deduction from all
the rest he knows. And I think Savaphoong knows, somehow, too.
Maybe more instinctively than anything else—his type always
seems to figure this sort of shit out—but he knows. Or he
suspects, and can’t afford not to be there.
They’ll be with us all the way—until they get a better
deal.”
“And you?”
Raven sighed. “I’m gettin’ old, Chief. I never
been all that ambitious, though. The game’s the thing for me.
But I’m gettin’ too old to play games. It took me a
long while before I realized why Warlock and some of the others
stayed on Matriyeh and quit the chase. Less biology and new race
psychology than old psychology. She had what she wanted, more or
less. A society so wild and violent it kept her crazy part
goin’ but also gave her somethin’ solid and real. She
couldn’t think of a better place to be, that’s all.
Me—I ain’t sure if there is such a place for
me.” He sighed again. “Up until now, the game’s
been enough. But first Nagy, then Warlock, then Ikira, and now
Vulture.”
“We do not know about Vulture yet. I wouldn’t count
him out so easily. Is it that you fear that it is your turn, or are
you guilty that it is not?”
Raven gave a dry chuckle. “You know, I wish I knew the
answer to that one. I do know that I don’t want the control,
Chief, but I’d damn well be more satisfied if it was me than
the turkeys in the rear like Clayben and Savaphoong. Who’s
left, Chief? You, me, China . . . that’s
about it. The rest—they don’t know what they want any
more than we do, but they’re not the kind of people to be
gods. Star Eagle deserves it, God knows, but he’s out. It has
to be people, I’m sure of that.”
“Well, there’s Santiago.”
“She don’t want to be a goddess, Chief. She just
wants a strong mate for a partner, a good solid ship, and a little
peace and quiet for her kids to grow up in. Like most of
’em—simple dreams, really. The Chows want this nice
peasant farm someplace. Bute and the other freebooters, new races
and forms or not, just want ships and for everybody to leave
’em alone. That’s what it’s all about for them,
Chief. They don’t want to run the system, they’re
doin’ all this to get the system off their backs so they can
do what they always wanted to do and not worry about it. It’s
what most folks want. Deep down it’s what you and Cloud
Dancer want. Maybe the human race could use some peasant gods
sometime, but the peasants got more sense and more real sense of
values, too. No, it’s guys like Clayben and Savaphoong and
Chen—those are the god types.”
Hawks smiled and gave a slight shrug. “Then maybe you are
the one to be the god, Raven. You don’t really want anything
but you understand them. You might at least be fair, which
is more than all our race’s gods have been in the
past.”
“I can’t imagine anything duller. I been up here
tryin’ to decide what I want, and maybe what I want to
be.”
“Any conclusions?”
Raven nodded. “I think I want to be a Crow, Chief. No
matter what I became I’m still a product of thousands of
years of a culture that has real value, real meaning, in this
materialistic, mechanistic, messed-up universe. I just want to know
that if I’m ever in the position where it is needed that I
am, at heart, the representative of my people and that when my time
comes, if it comes, they and my ancestors will look upon me with
pride. Now, does that sound corny or doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Hawks replied. “It sounds corny as
hell. You know something, Raven? I’ve respected you for
years, but I’m beginning to be in real danger of liking
you.”
Raven just shrugged and said nothing.
“You know, it’s not going to be as simple as you
say, even if we win,” Hawks noted. “I mean,
what’s Master System, anyway? It’s already done all its
real damage; it’s just tryin’ to keep what it’s
got. It took even the big machine over two hundred years to do all
this damage. We can’t undo it. There’s no way back. No,
the problem won’t be any different with any of us than with
Master System itself, except, of course, we’ll do it
differently.”
That started Raven. “Huh?”
“Like I said, we can’t undo it. It isn’t a
matter of being god and working miracles, it’s an engineering
problem of system management Do we get rid of the Centers and all
their marvels and let all the worlds go their independent way,
perhaps forget their origins, and eventually meet when their
technological levels grow? Or do we bring the wonders of technology
to everybody everywhere, an interstellar empire with the resultant
destruction of those cultures? Could, indeed, human beings who
could never even get together on Earth because of differences in
color or religion or culture get together under any system when
they are now so physically different and so culturally aberrant?
I’ve gone over and over those questions, Raven, and I have no
answers. None. Neither my research, nor Star Eagle’s
computer, nor the wisdom of the ages can give a guide.”
Raven nodded sympathetically. “Well, then, I guess we
leave it to luck and screw it up as usual. We’re gonna have
to fight our way all the way to Master System’s lair. Whoever
survives and is the strongest and smartest—whichever five of
us have the rings—we’ll decide. It ain’t fair and
it ain’t right, but there it is. I’m probably the worst
guy for that kind of thing and I don’t even want it, but
I’m a survivor. Maybe I’m just gonna wind up with the
bad luck to be one of ’em.” He paused a moment.
“And then there was one,” he said softly.
Hawks nodded. “Yes. It is time to think of that.
We’ve had little luck with it, you know. The one ring missing
in all this mess.”
Raven chuckled. “Funny thing is, it’ll probably be
the easiest to get. I mean, what’s Master System gonna do?
Shove half the SPF and a dozen Vals and ten fleets and task forces
around it? That’s all we’d need—a bright sign
sayin’ ‘Here it is!’ Oh, there might be some
tricky security setup like with the Matriyeh ring, but it’ll
be an engineering problem. A heist. Real difficult unless we get
Vulture back, but we’re experienced now. It’s about
time we grew up. But first we gotta find it and I’m fresh out
of patience. Didn’t you say a long time ago that Savaphoong
intimated he knew?”
Hawks nodded. “He promised that sooner or later we’d
have to come crawling to him.”
Raven got up, stretched, reached down, took a cigar, and lit it.
“Give me half an hour to shower and change, Chief. Then I
think we pay a little call on Savaphoong. That little
bastard’s had a free ride far too long.”
Fernando Savaphoong still lived on his rather luxurious yacht
attached to the outer hull of the Thunder, his every wish
catered to by the pitiful but beautiful personal slaves he’d
taken from his old outpost empire when he’d been forced to
flee. With his ship’s transmuter and a few of almost all
imaginable luxury items, he’d been able to sustain himself in
aloof style for years.
“Ah! Capitán Hawks and Señor Raven! Come in, come
in! Might I offer you some wine, perhaps?”
They took seats in his luxury bar and entertainment room.
Savaphoong knew that there was no love lost between himself and the
others, Hawks in particular, but he was a businessman and trader
without a scruple in his body and he never let such things
interfere with business. His dull-eyed, oversexed slaves served
them, and they relaxed.
“Now, then, what might I do for you gentlemen?”
Savaphoong asked genially.
“You know,” Hawks replied evenly. “You were
expecting this visit sooner or later. You know that every attempt
we’ve made to locate the fifth ring has failed, and
you know that you intimated to me that you knew where it
was.”
Savaphoong sat back, savoring the moment. “But, no,
Capitán Hawks, I do not know. I think I
know, because it is the only place that it could be and remain
within the conditions for the possession of the rings that I know
of. Certain I am not. But I would wager money on it, and I am not a
gambler.”
“We’re all ears, pal,” Raven commented.
Savaphoong sighed. “But, you see, it is all that I have to
offer other than hospitality. So far I have contributed little, I
admit, but I have taken little as well, and certainly it was I who
convinced the freebooters to join our little band. That is worth
something—a contribution. Free and without charge, I might
add.”
“Many of us have given our lives, Savaphoong,” Hawks
pointed out. “Others have lost ships, at least once to your
cowardice. Captain Santiago went through a wrenching transmutation
from which she has never fully recovered, in part because of the
loss of that ship and her comrades, but her new race is a pretty
violent one, you know. Without my intercession you’d have
suffered a slow death by torture long before now at her hands. You
owe her and her dead comrades, at least. And if we hadn’t
taken you aboard you would have lived in total isolation without
hope for the rest of your life, so don’t give me that favor
crap.”
“And you would not have been able to track and steal an
entire freighter full of the murylium that powers our vessels,
gives them their punch, and fuels our transmitters and
transmuters,” the old trader retorted. “No, señors, I
think we are even. Not all of us serve in the trenches.”
Raven saw that Hawks was ninety-nine percent ready to leap the
table and strangle the man and decided to intercede.
“You’re the trader. You have something to trade and
we’re interested—if the price is within reason. You
haven’t mentioned price.”
Savaphoong sat back and stared at them. “I will play no
haggling games. I give you the place, I want the ring. I want to be
one of the ones present at the end as an active player.”
“You know the rules. The ones who go and get the ring and
risk everything decide who gets to keep it,” Hawks pointed
out. “Besides, you don’t want to really be there at the
end. It’s likely to be a battle all the way. Lots of shooting
and danger. And the targets of choice will be those with the
rings.”
The trader shrugged. “I am not averse to risk if it means
high gain. I am getting to be an old man. There is no place for me
to go and no future for me in any other situation. Remember that I
am risking something, too. I do not know how the rings should be
used, or where. That is your job, Capitán. And whose ring
will you commandeer when it is time? Who is voting you a
twenty percent godhood?”
Hawks smiled. “Nobody. If they feel me capable, they will.
If not, then it is not my right to take one from them. I have a
wife and three children. Godhood sounds like a full-time job, and I
am not certain that I want it in any case.”
Raven lost patience. “Look, Savaphoong, we’re not
gonna sit and rot here, you know. It won’t take much under
Clayben’s mindprobe to find out what we need to know, if you
really got anything at all.”
“The machine will not avail you what you seek, it will
only kill me. You did not think the proprietor of such a place as
Halinachi could ever risk being seized by Master System, do you? I
knew too much, and I sold information as well as pleasure. My
sources would never have trusted me with anything unless they could
be assured it could never be traced to them. No, you cannot probe
it out of me, and while I have a high pain tolerance, I am not a
strong man. I would prefer to die rather than be tortured or
dismembered, and I assure you when my threshold is attained, I will
do just that. Again, some assurance for my old customers. And
without a ring, why keep on? As I say, I am old, and as you pointed
out, I have no place else to go.” He finished his wine.
“No, gentlemen, my price is absolute.”
“What’s to keep us from sayin’ yes, then
reneging on the deal once we know what you know?” Raven asked
him.
“Because the ring I wish is not the ring you seek. Bring
me one of the rings we already have and I shall tell you where to
find its companion. It is as simple as that.”
Hawks began thinking furiously. For almost five years this
situation had haunted him, although not in the way the old trader
thought. For almost that whole period, Hawks felt he should know
right now just what Savaphoong knew, and the comments here only
intensified that feeling. Why would Savaphoong know? Until
he’d joined them he didn’t even know the importance or
significance of the rings. And now, after all this time, he just
admitted that the ring really wasn’t a factor. He
didn’t know—he had deduced it. How? He knew so
much, had such a network in the old days, that it might be
anywhere . . .
But it wasn’t. “Son of a bitch!” said Hawks
softly, not referring at all to Savaphoong. “Five bloody
years and I couldn’t see it.” He sighed. “Forget
it, Savaphoong. Die in decadence—or join the hunt and earn
the prize. Come on, Raven.”
The Crow was suddenly very confused. “Huh?
What?”
“He’s been laughing at us, and particularly me, for
years. I already know what he knows. The joke’s on you,
Savaphoong.”
The trader was suddenly concerned, his self-assuredness gone.
“What do you mean? You could not know.”
“In each of the three other cases the ring has been
prominent enough that it was no sweat finding it. Even Matriyeh,
which had no Center as such. In the last five years, Kaotan,
Chunhoifan, and Bahakatan have checked out every
single colonial world on the charts, and Star Eagle has analyzed
their origins, their culture, and everything about them we could
know. No sign, no clue. We’re pretty sure it’s not on
any of them, but we also know it’s not back on Earth. For a
long time I was scared it was on the finger of the head of the SPF,
but that’s not it, either. Master System would be a little
nervous about handing such a thing to somebody with all the
technology of the system at his or her command and a lot of
ruthless ambition to boot. And what does that leave?”
Raven was blank. “Beats me, Chief.”
“Another colony. One not on the charts. One that’s
primitive, so primitive that it can be pretty well divorced from
the system and still be counted on. Not air breathers and probably
with a ferocious, xenophobic culture to boot. No Centers, no
technology at all to speak of, but right in close, in the middle of
the rest, so it can be constantly checked on. One that every old
spacer knew about but nobody knew anything about, which is why we
wound up there first. One almost in Savaphoong’s old
backyard. Do what you like, you old bastard. You no longer have
anything to trade.”
Hawks got up and Raven followed, leaving the trader just sitting
there looking disgusted, not so much at Hawks but at himself. Maybe
he was getting too old. In the old days he would never have
overplayed such a meager hand.
Hawks wasted no time once he got back inside Thunder.
“Star Eagle, I have our destination.”
“I overheard. It is so obvious once you think on
it.”
“Yeah, but the point is we didn’t think
much on it. We were too damned concerned with ongoing projects and
with our own lives here.”
“I should have deduced it at once,” the computer
pilot responded. “So much wasted effort! And we really could
use Vulture on this one.”
“Well, we may have to go without him. Until he can contact
us, we have no way of knowing if he’s even still alive. We
should start our planning anyway. How’s
Lightning?”
“It was badly damaged, but repairs are coming along
nicely. It is capable of standard duty now. Give me a week and it
will be better than new.”
Hawks nodded. “Call a captain’s council. Include the
surviving company who escaped with us from Melchior, Clayben
included.”
Raven stared at the Hyiakutt. “I still don’t get it,
Chief. Where the hell are we goin’?”
“Back where we began, Raven. Back to a hot, violent world
with coconut palms planted in neat rows but without any apparent
civilization at all. To the first alien planet you or I ever set
foot upon. To ring number five, which we might well have been
within only kilometers of stumbling across mere weeks after our
escape!”
The last time they had entered that solar system they were rank
amateurs, without much of anything at all except hope and fierce
determination. They had lived almost like savages on a little
volcanic spot down there for what seemed an eternity while Star
Eagle had made the necessary repairs and adjustments to
Thunder. Nothing much to remember, really, except the heat
and the storms and the terrible humidity and the sense of impending
danger when none ever materialized.
Blocking the monitor satellites hadn’t been a problem last
time and was even less of one now. They were used to such things as
a matter of course.
“We have all heard of this place,” Maria Santiago
told Hawks from the first. “A number of freebooters used it
as temporary hideaways and for rendezvous since it is at once so
accessible and so remote, but none really even looked for
inhabitants. I was never here, but I had heard of it.”
Captain ben Suda had much the same memories and even showed it
on his charts. “There was some early attempt to carve out a
freebooter base or trading post, if I remember the stories,”
he told them. “It failed for some reason. Never really got
started. There were tales of fierce, suicidal attacks by some kind
of creatures, but that’s all—just tales.”
“Yeah, well, there’s somebody livin’
down there all right,” Raven assured them. “I almost
forgot about this hole, but thinkin’ about it now brought
back all sorts of memories. Me and Nagy, down by the beach,
havin’ a less than pleasant chat, and the sense that,
somehow, we was bein’ watched. Black blobs in the
water, as I remember it, but we never had the means or will to find
out about them. That wasn’t our job and this place
didn’t mean nothin’ to us except as a hideout. I
remember Nagy, though, starin’ across at the next island and
suddenly frowning. He said that island looked like it was
somebody’s garden, and sure enough, there was these trees all
planted in neat rows. We were tempted to go over there but never
got the chance.”
Hawks sighed. “How we miss the Vulture now! It’s
been too easy to rely on him. How simple to just drop him in and
let him tell us all about it. Damn it, we don’t know what
we’re dealing with here! Who are they? What culture? Are they
water breathers or just water dwellers?”
“Anybody who comes up on land to plant fruit trees
isn’t wholly aquatic,” Isaac Clayben noted logically.
“Still, there was absolutely no sign at all that anyone or
anything with a brain had ever been on ‘our’ island. If
they use the land, why not where we were? It wasn’t a bad
place, if a bit wild and overgrown. The volcanoes weren’t
recently active, and there were even wild fruit-bearing trees if I
remember correctly.”
Hawks nodded. “That’s about it. And if we accept the
legends of the place as being based on reality, and couple that
with history and our own experience, we come up with a real puzzle.
An attempted colony or permanent outpost was attacked and wiped
out, yet generations of freebooters used it as a contact point and
place to stash valuables and make repairs without any reports of
molestation. The island we were on wasn’t touched, yet the
one not much different than it within easy eyesight on a clear day
was cultivated.”
Santiago thought about it. “I have never been there, it is
true, but I cannot help being reminded of Matriyeh. The tribes were
enemies and had clear hunting and gathering territories, yet there
is a unifying religion that made certain places forbidden. That was
on land, with a land-based culture spanning two huge continents.
Here—I look at the surveys and I see water. Perhaps the total
landmass is the equivalent of a continent or more, but this world
is one vast sea covered with tiny islands, all the tops of vast
underwater volcanic ranges. If a civilization was water-based,
might it not have some sort of unifying religion as well, if, as
with all the others, it has a single culture?”
“That’s good thinking,” Hawks responded.
“Taboos are standard in many societies. The fact that our
island had some edible plants indicates that it might have been
cultivated once, then abandoned, perhaps centuries before. The fact
that they attacked one party and not others indicates that there
may be rules for each island and we just got lucky. The Matriyeh
model is a good one here, I think, considering the total lack of
any signals or signs of any sort of mechanical or electrical power.
Even the traditional water-breathing colonies are set up on the
Center model; there is power, there are ways to use adapted
technology and that shows up. It doesn’t there.”
“But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is not
there,” Star Eagle put in through his speaker.
“Remember, who would have guessed a magnetic rail system on
Matriyeh? We aren’t geared for that sort of detection, and
under water—who can say?”
“It’s a point, but somehow I doubt that such things
lie hidden here,” Hawks said. “Raven is correct on one
point—Master System doesn’t dare defend this one unless
it has to. That’s not to say that we can’t expect traps
at least as bad as Matriyeh down there. I cannot forget the mystics
of Matriyeh who themselves didn’t know they were really an
entire SPF division under intense mindprint conditioning with a
humanoid Val to worship as a goddess and to control things. No,
this is going to be the nastiest little problem we’ve had to
solve, if we have no inside man as it were. I would wager, though,
from the depth of the legends about this place, that it is old, and
that, unlike Matriyeh, it probably remains very much the way it was
originally designed. No, I feel now as I felt then—that this
was a prototypical colony, one of the first. That it was settled
with a distinct people, perhaps a culture that would be very
comfortable with a world such as this, and one that might well turn
its back on technology.” He sighed. “Well, it’s a
dangerous situation and there’s no way around it.”
Raven nodded. “Uh huh. First, we want as good a current
orbital survey as can be made of the place. Then we’re gonna
have to send a party down there with some mobility, heavily armed
and ready for bear, and see what the place looks like. Finally,
and this is the worst part, we’re gonna have to draw some of
’em out of the water, and if we can’t talk things over
peaceably with them we’ll have to knock ’em cold and
bring ’em in. That means exposing a group to dangers unknown
by persons or creatures unknown, ones that managed to take out at
least some well-armed freebooters. After all, for the most part we
only know of the ones who didn’t get hit, right? It also
means that, right from the start, we’re gonna have to expose
ourselves as aliens. If there’s anything like that Matriyeh
gimmick with the SPF, we’re cooked and you’ll have a
task force here before you can learn the name of the
place.”
“Doubtful,” said Star Eagle. “Even on Matriyeh
they had a communications link to a master ground computer. No such
link exists here or my probes would have detected it. There
is a monitoring satellite but it is not geostationary.
It’s designed to casually sweep the planet’s surface
and is easily fooled. No, it is probable that Master System here is
relying entirely on its anonymity and the hostility and insularity
of its people. This is not to say that there are not permanent
traps there—an SPF sort, or disguised Vals, or whatever. And
if the latter, there can just as easily be one or more Val ships
down there, hidden, switched off, self-maintained and ready, which
could be impossible for us to detect but available to be switched
on and used as required. All it would take is orbital attainment
and it could send an emergency call through the solar system
monitors.”
“And it might be the wrong place,” China put in
worriedly. “We have no real evidence that this is where the
fifth ring resides. The reason that there is no activity might be
that there is nothing to guard. The reason why these people are on
no charts might be that they are not descended from humans at all
but are an indigenous species.”
“Unlikely,” Clayben responded. “Even from our
crude early examination of the place I can say that it
doesn’t fit the pattern for the independent evolution of
intelligent life. Oh, give it a few million years and I will
readily change my mind, but there is clear evidence here of Master
System’s terraforming methodology, and with the air, water,
and organics present—all clearly introduced and the plants
descended from easily recognizable Earth ancestors—it would
be in some way life as we know it. No. It is circumstantial
evidence, but we must take the risk. Logic says that it is here,
that this is the place. It is consistent with the way Master System
thinks.”
Raven sighed. “I’d say we start where we were
before. It seemed to be a safe spot in the middle of some
civilization, and we’ll have to stick to land at the start,
until we get the full lay of it.”
Takya Mudabur, one of the two remaining unchanged crew of the
Kaotan and the only native-born water creature among them,
spoke up.
“Why do we have to stick to the land? I would enjoy a dip
in such a beautiful ocean.” Her people breathed air but lived
entirely in the sea. She needed to be in water much of the time,
and could be underwater, even in depths as high as five hundred
meters, for hours at a time. She had a rudimentary gill system as
well as lungs.
“Can’t risk it, or you,” Raven replied.
“Butar, Chung, and Min also can handle themselves in water,
and we sure have some weapons that’ll work there easy enough,
but even sending four instead of one in their
element—the element of our unknown people—is like
setting me and Hawks down in the middle of Janipur. Somebody would
notice, and these folks got a reputation for killing first and
wonderin’ later. No, there’ll be a time for that, but
not yet. The only smart way to do this is to draw ’em out
into our element, away from water. Then we get a look at
’em and we got a fighting chance.”
“Who would you want, then?” Hawks asked him.
“I assume the way you’re talking that you’re
volunteering to mastermind all this.”
Raven grinned. “About time I did something, ain’t
it, Chief? And this is just up my trail.” He looked around at
them, thinking. “I want folks with lightning reflexes, in
better condition than me, and real nimble shooters. Any
volunteers?”
“You need warriors to protect you, Raven,” Santiago
said. A great deal of therapy, both mental and physical, had
restored the original personalities of her and her companion Midi
while retaining the aggressive instincts they had needed to survive
on Matriyeh, and now both were resigned to accepting their adopted
race and form. They were once more the primitive warrior women of
that fierce world, yet their old, technologically sophisticated
selves were once again very much in control. Maria was tall, with
almost black skin, little body hair, and small, rock-solid breasts.
Her European-featured face, which was quite reminiscent of her
original looks, was crowned by short, straight black hair. She also
had the gracefully athletic body of a female body builder, and the
strength and reflexes to match, and looked quite Earth-human,
though she was not. Her race was as alien as that of Chanchuk or
Janipur. Midi was much the same, only very slightly shorter and
with different, more Orientalized features reflecting her original
looks.
“You’ve done your share,” Hawks pointed out.
“More than your share. You’ve lost a ship, a crew, and
become one of a colonial race. Besides, you both have children to
think of.”
“Matriyehan children are more independent than
that,” she responded. “I was a freebooter captain and
then I became a warrior. It’s in the genes you stuck me with,
you know. We were talking about it not long ago. We are now
designed as warriors, not as sweet young things to tend the kids
while the menfolk go off to fight. On Matriyeh there are
no menfolk. We crave action. And we are best suited for this kind
of thing.”
Raven shrugged. “I agree you two’d be perfect if you
really want to go. That’s three. I think I’ll need at
least five, maybe six. Somebody’s got to tend camp and
maintain the communications and security links, and I ain’t
too sure I want to go on the other island with less than five good
guns.”
“I’ll go,” said Dora Panoshka. “It is
likely that Kaotan will not be needed at this stage of the
game, and it would be nice to be on the ground for a change. If
Kaotan is needed, then Butar can do for me what I did for
her.” Panoshka, now captain of the Kaotan and the
one responsible for picking up the Chanchuk team, although
humanoid, looked more like a bipedal lion than an Earth-human
woman. She was covered with orange and yellow lionlike fur, her
rather Earth-human-looking hands and feet disguised with pads,
hairy clumps, and nasty retractable claws. Her face was also
fur-covered and had a flared-out all-around mane, and the lipless
mouth opened wide and menacing, as if it could swallow a person
whole. Few would take the time to see that that mouth had no
fanglike teeth at all, merely even rows of large, flat ones that
were for a jaw that moved primarily from side to side and betrayed
her for the absolute vegetarian she and her race were.
“Pardon, but Chunhoifan has been a peripheral
player until now,” said Captain Chun Wo Har. He, too, was a
born colonial, a humanoid but with a hard, chitinous exoskeleton,
bulging black eyes, and the look and manner of a giant insect.
“Such a civilization as might be down there would likely be
of the bow and arrow and spear variety. I doubt that weapons such
as these could pierce my body. I might not be so quick, and I am
certainly getting old and out of practice, but I would be honored
to come along.”
Captain ben Suda sighed. “I, too, feel much the same. We
have fought battles in space and done much scouting, but
Bahakatan is also underrepresented in the real object of
all this. I was quite good with rifle and sidearm in my younger
days, and I feel the need to oil the joints and remove some of the
rust.”
“Well, I’d welcome you both,” Raven responded,
then caught Hawks’s glare.
“No,” said the leader. “Both of you have
intact families predating any of this. And I cannot afford to risk
both of my most experienced surviving captains along with Santiago
and Panoshka on this kind of scouting expedition. There’s
going to be more fighting ahead no matter how this comes out. I
just can’t spare the two of you. I’ve lost San
Cristobal and Indrus. Kaotan is down to a skeleton
crew now and needs supplements to run efficiently. I’m sorry,
but this is a command decision. I don’t want either of you
away from your ships where you’ll be ready at a
moment’s notice for any emergencies.”
Both captains said nothing, immediately sensing Hawks’s
resolve and, as captains themselves, seeing reason in it.
Finally Captain Chun said, “Bahakatan contributed
Chung and Min to the Chanchuk operation. Allow me to consult with
my own crew. Perhaps we can find ones more acceptable to you,
sir.”
Hawks nodded. He understood how much honor meant to Chun, and he
didn’t want to point out that they were running low on people
who could be transmuted. If that was required here, then
Chun’s crew were likely candidates.
“Very well. We don’t have to decide now,” the
chief told them. “It will take some time to fully scout and
plan this out, and I want all care and caution taken both before
and during this operation. Because we have three rings and need
only one more, we’re overanxious. That could kill us, or sink
everything we’ve spent all these years and all these lives in
attaining. Even after we select the team, I’ll want Raven to
work with all of you, drill and practice, until you do the right
thing without thinking. For now, this meeting is
adjourned.”
Cloud Dancer was sketching again. She was an excellent artist,
both drawing and sculpting, and the interior of the
Thunder was filled with her work. Now, though, she had
been doing a simple project, but one that immediately caught
Hawks’s eye.
There were four of them, charcoals, one for each of the known
rings—the three they had and the one they knew was back on
Earth. For some reason, it had never really occurred to Hawks to
study the rings themselves before. True, the designs were there,
but so small, so delicate, that he’d found it impossible to
really see the detail in them. Cloud Dancer, however, was an artist
with an artist’s eye for even the finest detail, and she had
studied them and drawn them folio size. Now, suddenly, seeing them
blown up to so large a size, every tiny detail enlarged and
reproduced, each of the intricate designs seemed too perfect, too
deliberate, to be just ornamental numbers.
He picked them up, then placed them in descending order,
4-3-2-1. He stood back. He stared at them. Suddenly he turned and
went to an intercom.
“Star Eagle—the Fellowship. The five who created the
Master System program and had the rings made.”
“Yes?”
“What religions were they?”
“You asked me this before, a few years ago. Joseph Sung
Yi, born Singapore, China, naturalized citizen: no religion of
record but had dabbled in Buddhism. Golda Pinsky, born Haifa,
Israel: Jewish. Aaron Menzelbaum, born New York City: Jewish
ancestry but an outspoken, rather militant atheist. Maurice
Ntunanga, born Mimongo, Gabon, naturalized citizen: Moslem. Mary
Lynn Yomashita, born Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii: nominally
Buddhist.”
Hawks frowned. “No Christians? None of them were
Christians?”
“No. Everything but. Interesting. The records on them are
quite complete, even in my original pilot’s program. Why
would it be there? I wondered about that the first time you asked,
but dropped it because there was no chance of an answer.”
Hawks sighed. “I think I may have an idea on that.
Let’s just say it doesn’t surprise me. But—no
Christians?”
“No. Apparently that was what originally brought them
together. They were the only born non-Christians among the top team
assembled to oversee the creation of the master core program. Many
of the rest had no known religion or were agnostics or atheists but
they had come out of nominally Christian backgrounds. These others
also tended to go home for Christmas holidays, while the
Fellowship, who had no real family and not even a nominal religious
excuse, stayed on. That is how they all came to know each other so
well and came to found their little group. I had no idea
this stuff was buried in my memory! I’ll be
damned.”
Hawks grinned. “You can’t be damned. You’re a
machine.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more
help.”
“Oh, but you were. In fact, what you told me is
as good as if you had told me the opposite.”
“Huh? Explain.”
“Not now. All of this simply confirms an old theory of
mine, and this final ring will be the proof of it. It is odd,
though. Unless Isaac Clayben had a more traditional upbringing than
I suspect, I may be the only one who knows this. I would prefer
that no one else knew that I knew it. Understand?”
“No. However, if it makes you happy, I will deny all
knowledge of what I do not know and will deny to everyone that you
know anything at all.”
“Good enough,” he responded, feeling quite upbeat
for a change, even though they were entering the most dangerous
phase of the whole quest. Maybe Raven was right. Maybe they
were meant to get the rings.
He had to stop himself before he began to hum an obscure,
forgotten old English tune that only a historian specializing in
presystem cultures might ever have encountered. He didn’t
want to hum that tune. He’d heard it going over many of the
ancient records of old America, but the tune was English, and so
was Isaac Clayben. The old boy might well figure it out, but Hawks
sure as hell wasn’t going to help him.
THE VAL EXTENDED A COM POD AND ATTACHED TO the
transmitting console. The interstellar transmission system included
complex miniature punches and required much power, which was why it
wasn’t used very often. It also still was slow enough that
the conversation between the two machines, which might have been
done in seconds, instead would take hours. Machines, however, were
patient—when they had to be.
The Val received the sign-on from Master System itself, and
quickly transmitted the entire record, including all the test and
probe data on the suspects and the complete readout of Colonel
Chi.
“If such a being were possible,” the Val added,
“it would explain much.”
“Such a being is theoretically possible,” came the
reply from deep within the greatest computer ever known. “It
would take a computer with vast potential, much biosurgery almost
cell by cell and incredible skill with the principles of cellular
transmutation, and years of trial-and-error research, but such a
creature could theoretically be designed. There was no need for
such a project on my part.”
“But could anyone we know do such a thing? Who would have
the computer with the skills capable of doing so? And could any
human ever dream up such a creature?”
“Humans designed me, with far more primitive tools, and I
am infinitely more complex than that. As to the computer—it
is obvious. The one on Melchior that was stripped of all data was
nonetheless of sufficient size, speed, and capacity for it, if it
were a primary task of research and at least half of it were
constantly devoted to the problem. That means Clayben. He is the
only one who could have done it. An agent who could go through
security systems anywhere undetected, find out
anything . . . Yes. It is obvious now. You are
certain that there is absolutely no alien element of any kind
within any of the suspects, including the children?”
“None that can be measured by any means currently at our
disposal.”
“Very well, then. Order them held in continued isolation
and wait.”
The wait lasted two days.
“I cannot create such a being without much
experimentation, and that takes time,” Master System said at
last. “However, proceeding from what we know about such a
hypothetical creature, I have determined a basic set of methods
that had to be employed in its design. If it is close to what was
finally accomplished on Melchior, it is specifically designed so
that no form of measurement we can employ will unmask it. However,
we do not have to create one. I am certain that there could not be
more than one such creature. Otherwise the game would be up long
before now. They have, however, placed us in an immediate quandary.
Remaking and remolding an entire planetary culture takes time and
resources I do not wish to spare at this time, although Chanchuk is
now a primary candidate for such treatment at the earliest
opportunity. To kill the Holy Lama, her consorts, and their
children is the obvious plan to eliminating this creature, but it
would totally disrupt and turn against us an entire planetary
culture. It would tie down too many resources for too long, and we
are always faced with the possibility, even probability, that no
such creature exists, making the move meaningless as
well.”
“It is true that we are in only tenuous control on
Chanchuk at the moment. The local Center and temple authorities
have refused to aid us and in many cases have shown a willingness
to die rather than cooperate. They have managed to get the word out
to the other Centers in spite of our control and from there to the
masses in the region. There have been massive demonstrations. The
bulk of the population is pacifist, but some are not. Troops have
been harassed, some killed. They demand the restoration of the Holy
Lama and the Sacred Lodge. It is not anything that we cannot
handle, but it is not a good situation. Still, is there another
choice?” The Val seemed uncomfortable with its current
position.
“I believe there is. They already have the ring. They now
face us with creating an entire world of allies and tying up
tremendous resources handling such a thing as well. This is a
double victory I will not permit. Better to wrest a major victory
out of a defeat. They do not have all the rings yet. Without this
creature they are highly unlikely to be able to get inside
information sufficient to steal another without tripping up. Nor
are they likely to have access to a computer capable of creating
another even if they somehow have all the programs. But suppose in
the process of returning them to Wa Chi Center we also
transmuted them?”
“Transmuted? Into what? If we make major alterations in
their holy family it is the same as keeping them.”
“A body of a suitable and similar-looking priestess of
about the Holy Lama’s age can be procured. They are, after
all, all sisters. The reproductive functions can be restored during
the process. The sterilization is surgical, not transmuter induced.
Nine males of the royal lineage can also be procured from the
Centers as models, and their children can be the templates for the
Holy Lama’s children. Each can then be transmuted into the
form of one of the randomly selected templates.”
“I see. And since one cannot be transmuted twice, the
agent will be exposed, perhaps killed.”
“Possibly. I said transmuters were used to create it. I do
not believe it is possible to modify a human being to become one of
these creatures. If it was, then all of the rebels would be like
this thing and we should be lost. No, it must be created and
nurtured in a specially controlled laboratory. It is unlikely that
it has ever used a transmuter for more than transport. It has no
need to do so, and it might actually be threatened by it. But
matter is matter and atoms are atoms to a transmuter program. Have
we not created Vals that are so human none can tell the difference
without instruments? It will not care what this creature is made
of, or how it works. It will simply do a transmute. If it exists at
all, it will emerge back on Chanchuk as the Holy Lama or a male
consort or a child. It will no longer be artificial—it will
be real, and fixed immutably as one of Chanchuk. It is also likely
that memory is stored cellularly, throughout the body, rather than
merely in the brain. If that is true and it is a true mimic to the
end, it is quite possible we may also eliminate most if not all of
the memories, knowledge, and personality beneath the Chanchukian
facade. Either way, it will be neutralized. Do you need specific
programming instructions?”
“No. The only regret in this is that we shall never know
for certain if the colonel is brilliant or if this is a fantasy. I
would like to know.”
“It is probable. It is the most logical way to explain
their successes, as Chi so brilliantly determined. Clayben has the
ability, Melchior is the logical place, and the idea is consistent
with the way Clayben thought. The traitor Nagy could have brought
the creature along, since Nagy would be immune to it. No. I am
convinced that with this move we shall deal them a blow so crushing
that it will be another generation before they succeed in gaining
another ring. We will not let down our guard, for we want to
capture them all, but as far as obtaining all five rings is
concerned, this will halt them in their tracks.”
“It shall be done, and the restoration shall be highly
publicized and with suitable ceremony. I feel certain the Holy Lama
will go along even without mindpripter inducement, which is always
the best way. She is concerned about her people in a genuine way
and anxious to restore normalcy. If such normalcy can be assured,
what do you wish us to do next?”
“The SPF should be withdrawn as soon as possible, but keep
a regional command in the area just in case the Holy Lama is not
altogether clear on where her own and her people’s best
interests lie. I would suggest that Commodore Marquette and his
command be relieved of task force duties and placed in command of a
project to analyze specific SPF training responses. I have done a
complete analysis of his defensive plan and can find no specific
flaws in it. Clearly insufficient force was deployed to defend
Chanchuk, and the pirates’ computers were able to predict the
logical responses of our programs, commanders, and forces and find
the weak links in the chain. It is essential we become less
predictable in the future. Were it not for Colonel Chi, we might
have suffered a total humiliating defeat in this matter and learned
nothing from it.”
“Colonel Chi failed,” the Val pointed out.
“Vals failed on Janipur,” the master
computer noted. “The only reason we struck any blow at the enemy on
Janipur, even with our overwhelming force, was that the enemy was
new at the game and had not been tested in battle or planning. They
lost their ships and personnel because of their own mistakes, not
our efficiency. They are clearly patient and they have learned
well. Chi salvaged something here by showing imagination and
initiative and because she circumvented the rigidity of procedure
and thought that the enemy counted on. I am far removed from the
scene of this fight. Communications cannot be instantaneous. On the
scene, our computers and their computers are equal. The difference,
then, has been their human controllers who clearly have a great
deal of resourcefulness and imagination. This system was created
because it is the best for humans. Perhaps it is time we allowed
the products of that system to have a direct hand in
this.”
“What, then, are your orders?”
“The rings on Matriyeh and Alititi are to be secured with
monitors so that any removal will result in an automatic alarm.
Large automated task forces are to be deployed in waiting stages in
null zones out of detection range, but within monitor range,
capable of closing on either world and sealing it off should either
ring be stolen. Even without their special agent they will try and
perhaps succeed, but I do not want them getting away again. I want
so much force available with such speed that the enemy must bring
all of his ships and weapons to bear. They must be smashed so
thoroughly that they are forced to bring their base ship into the
fight and we must be able to take and secure it. Colonel Chi is
promoted to brigadier and is to be placed in charge of a special
SPF task force with all authority necessary. All Vals and other
extensions of myself shall be at her disposal.
Move!”
Raven had been morose off and on of late. He always had his
moods and his depressions, but this one seemed longer and deeper
than most. The Crow had taken to simply sitting on an overlook,
staring out at the vast worldlet that was the
Thunder’s deep interior.
He’d been up there, staring out, for over two days now,
eating or drinking nothing, and clearly now even out of cigars. The
former was not totally unusual; the latter was history making.
Hawks, concerned, finally decided to make his way up there even
though it broke his own personal rule on disturbing others and
certainly violated the compact that existed now with the remaining
multiracial company.
The Thunder was impressive, and never more so than from
its heights. Its kilometers-long interior, balanced by a
comfortable artificial gravity and landscaped with plants and rocks
from dozens of worlds, actually contained small villages and a
network of paths, central wells, sanitation, and cooking—all
that was needed. There was even a small area for livestock,
although, since some of the races aboard were strict vegetarians,
some by biology and others by custom or religion, it was agreed
that those who chose to remain meat-eaters would eat synthetics in
the interest of harmony.
Raven was a craggy old bastard, with scars all over his body
from his tough early life and career; his long hair, kept straight
at his own insistence, as if to mark him as one apart from the
Hyiakutts like Hawks and Cloud Dancer who wore the traditional
Plains braids most of the time, was steel-gray now. He was built
like a wrestler; a man nature had designed to be large as opposed
to tall, yet more muscular than fat.
As much as he had been a prime mover and shaker in the quest for
the rings and as much as he was a child of his northwest
wilderness, he was also always the cynic, always the materialist
and scoundrel, always the one who looked for profit in everything
he did and approached even the vastness of the universe in coldly
pragmatic terms. In all these years he’d rarely let down his
guard, rarely given anyone a glimpse of what might lie behind those
cold, brown eyes and that impassive, stonelike face. Just enough,
over all this time, to give those with whom he’d lived and
worked and plotted and planned an indication that somewhere under
all that was a far different sort of human being.
Raven, dressed only in a loincloth and sandals, did not move or
acknowledge Hawks’s presence when the leader came up to the
platform level and stepped off just behind him. For a while Hawks
just stood there, wondering if he was doing the right thing. But he
was the leader, and he had to know the condition of his
company.
Hawks approached, then sat down next to the big man,
cross-legged on the metal platform, and stared out at the vast
interior below.
Hawks reached back and took a long object from a box he’d
brought with him. “I brought you another box of
cigars,” the leader said conversationally.
For a moment Raven said nothing, then, without turning or
moving, he responded, “If you came up here and didn’t
bring ’em, I’d’ve thrown you off this
platform.”
“You’ve been up here a long time.”
“Sixty-two standard hours, forty-six minutes, more or
less.”
“You can keep track like that?”
“You kiddin’? The master clock’s just up
there.”
Hawks felt a bit silly. “Yeah. I should have thought of
that. How long do you intend to stay here?”
“I don’t know. It’s either this or I start
hittin’ the bottle. This is healthier. What’s it to
you, Chief, anyway?”
“Because I’m the chief,” Hawks replied.
“Because I think it’s more appropriate for the chief to
check you out than the medicine man, considering that would be
Clayben.”
“Good point. So what’s on your mind,
Chief?”
“I think that question is reversed. What’s on
your mind, Raven? Finally getting to you? All this time,
all this plotting and all this waiting—and we still
don’t know if we’re going to make it.”
“Oh, we’re gonna make it, Chief. Ain’t you
figured that out yet? I don’t know which of us, but some of
us’ll make it. We’ll get there and we’ll figure
it all out and we’ll switch that big mother right out of the
circuit and give it a lobotomy. Somebody will. It’s almost
like we were playing out a script. Not our script, or we
wouldn’t have this much trouble, but somebody’s script.
God’s or something more sinister, I don’t know, but
I’m damned sure of that much. We come too far, Chief. A lot
farther than I ever dreamed, and maybe you, either, in your saner,
less idealistic moments. We got three rings and we know where
another one is. We got just one to snatch and then it’s home.
And we’ll snatch it. And we’ll come home. Whether we
can hold ’em long enough for us to use ’em, I
don’t know, but somebody will.”
“That what you’re worried about? Going home? Holding
on?”
Raven shook his head. “Uh uh. But, see, we—all of
us—been so hot on gettin’ the damned things and
survivin’ to use ’em and all that we ain’t
thought about the one big thing. We been like folks sealed in
detention cells who spend half their lives plottin’ how to
escape and findin’ all the flaws, like us back on Melchior so
long ago. Then they bust out, finally, and they realize they spent
so much time figurin’ how to bust out they ain’t got
the slightest idea where the hell they’re goin’ or what
they want to do. Suppose we get in there and we turn that sucker
off. Ain’t nobody but me ever thought beyond that, I think.
What then? What happens then, Chief?”
Hawks was startled. “I don’t know. We just
don’t have to worry about Master System anymore.”
“Uh huh, and just what do you turn off? The boss,
that’s all. The chief. You knock off the only chief capable
of keepin’ track of, much less rulin’, the tribes and
what happens? You got thousands of little chiefs all at one
another’s throats tryin’ to be the new big chief. You
get tribalism and civil war and you get massive deaths. The people?
They’re still under the rule of the Great White Father they
were born under—or the Great Red Father or the Great Yellow
Father or whatever. The C.A.s are still in charge. They just got
the boss off their backs is all. The interdependent trade system
handled by the automated spaceships also goes down the toilet. No
more resupply, no more innovation, no more external contacts. A
human empire goes the way of all empires and you get four hundred
and fifty plus alien worlds. And I mean alien, Chief. You drop me
as I am down in the middle of Janipur and I’ll either get
worshipped as a god, stoned as a demon, or in the end cut down as a
monster anyways, and they won’t ask about my table manners.
Stick a Janipurian on Chanchuk. Try and hold a solid dialogue on
important affairs on Earth with the average Matriyehan. You see
what I mean?”
Hawks nodded. “I have thought on it. It is not sufficient
to turn the machine off. One must also determine how to replace it
with something infinitely fairer. Your knowledge and understanding
of history are quite surprising, Raven. But doesn’t the
Thunder itself give you hope? Here the children of wildly
differing races play together as friends, and their parents fight
and die alongside and for one another.”
“My business has always been human behavior. You
can’t be a field agent without knowin’ a lot more than
just how to point and shoot a gun or bow. But the
Thunder’s different and you know it. These
folks—they ain’t aliens. They’re space children,
even the old folks. Their parents were freebooters, the best liars
and cheats and thieves in the universe and already alienated from
their own homes as much as we are from ours. The rest started off
as our own people, and we still think of them that way and they
think of themselves that way. So the Chows look like humanoid cows.
You think they’re among their own people on Janipur?
We’re their people. But you stick ’em anyplace
but Janipur or space and you got monsters. You’re the
historian. Am I wrong?”
“No. If anything, you are overly optimistic. History is
filled with examples of times when people hated all who were
different from them even if the differences were quite minor. Our
own people were reduced from proud civilizations to helpless
prisoners on the worst of our own lands, begging our conquerors for
food. We were childlike, primitives, ones who could not accept
technology and so had to perish. Accept technology! Before the
Spaniards none of the nations of America had so much as
seen a horse, let alone a gun. We learned. We took what
was useful and valuable. We rejected the rest because it had little
value to us. Their values were different from ours, their goals,
their cultures, were directed toward things we found dehumanizing.
In the end, their worship of mind, property, nation, and invention
for its own sake, stripped of any moral valuations, led them to
terrible wars and to Master System. I have often reflected on the
irony that some of those now attempting an end to that result are
of the very people they so scorned and nearly destroyed.”
Raven’s head suddenly turned and he looked directly into
Hawks’s eyes. “Are we? Are we, really? Oh, we got the
right bloodlines, but we ain’t no damn men of spirit
and tribe. You’re a damn computer hacker and researcher into
lost records who works in a sophisticated high-tech environment
where the air is filtered and measured and you can be practically
brought back from the dead. Me? I’m a high-tech security man
from the same element. I spent much of my time in the wilds, with
the tribes, it’s true, but I wasn’t one of ’em,
not even among the Crow. I was a smug, superior, patronizing son of
a bitch down there where I was king and the people were blind. Your
precious Hyiakutts weren’t your people, they were some
charming living history exhibit. A way you could go back and study
like Clayben with some new alien bug under his microscope. Funny
thing was, you was playin’ Injun among the primitives and me,
I was playin’ the white man.”
“So? We are not what we like to think we are. It disturbs
me. It disturbs me more to hear you voice it because it is so much
the truth. But what would you have us do? Not turn it
off?”
Raven sighed. “I don’t know, Chief, but I got a real
weird feelin’—I always kind’a had it—that
even after the switch is off, it’s up to us. We can turn it
off and run and hope we’ll be long dead before whatever wars
and new tyranny that follow its death find us, or we can fall into
a trap that’s maybe infinitely worse.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“You ever really read all that
journal?”
“No, and neither did you. It is decomposing someplace in
the middle of the Mississippi River.”
“Come on, Chief. You got the transport copy
Warlock’s boss tried to send to Chen. When I decided to take
this mission I read the one Warlock had, the one we eventually
delivered to Chen along with you. I read all of it, Hawks. All of
it. Them rings—they don’t turn Master System off. They
revert control to the master consoles. In other words, Master
System stops bein’ a run-amok, independent machine and
becomes just a computer again. It don’t stop bein’ the
master system. It just stops bein’ the boss. Whoever’s
at the consoles, whoever’s got the rings—they
become the boss. That’s why Chen’s so hot for
this—if that slimy rat is still even alive. No matter.
Whoever his successor is will be the same guy only lookin’
and talkin’ a bit different. That’s why Clayben’s
been such a good, solid, devoted servant all this time, too. He
knows. You stick in the rings, you unlock the master control
center, and you go in. Then you’re it. You’re God.
You’re Master System. You call the shots and good
old MS and its minions obey. Of course, originally it just allowed
control to return for defense purposes, but Master System has grown
into a big boy after all this time. And it’s all
yours—whoever uses the rings.”
“My God!”
“Exactly—if it ain’t you at the controls,
whoever is surely is your god, and mine, too. Turn it off and you
break the system and return us to all the worst features of human
civilization we’ve been protected from. But ain’t
nobody gonna turn it off, Chief. Not when you can save humanity
from that and be God, too.”
“I see. And why have you kept this from us until
now?”
“Not all of you, Chief. Warlock knew. She’d read it,
too. But she never would’a thought to be a goddess herself,
Chief. She just figured to be there on the winner’s side,
just like me. Clayben knows—either through his private
library, somehow, or maybe he figured it out by deduction from all
the rest he knows. And I think Savaphoong knows, somehow, too.
Maybe more instinctively than anything else—his type always
seems to figure this sort of shit out—but he knows. Or he
suspects, and can’t afford not to be there.
They’ll be with us all the way—until they get a better
deal.”
“And you?”
Raven sighed. “I’m gettin’ old, Chief. I never
been all that ambitious, though. The game’s the thing for me.
But I’m gettin’ too old to play games. It took me a
long while before I realized why Warlock and some of the others
stayed on Matriyeh and quit the chase. Less biology and new race
psychology than old psychology. She had what she wanted, more or
less. A society so wild and violent it kept her crazy part
goin’ but also gave her somethin’ solid and real. She
couldn’t think of a better place to be, that’s all.
Me—I ain’t sure if there is such a place for
me.” He sighed again. “Up until now, the game’s
been enough. But first Nagy, then Warlock, then Ikira, and now
Vulture.”
“We do not know about Vulture yet. I wouldn’t count
him out so easily. Is it that you fear that it is your turn, or are
you guilty that it is not?”
Raven gave a dry chuckle. “You know, I wish I knew the
answer to that one. I do know that I don’t want the control,
Chief, but I’d damn well be more satisfied if it was me than
the turkeys in the rear like Clayben and Savaphoong. Who’s
left, Chief? You, me, China . . . that’s
about it. The rest—they don’t know what they want any
more than we do, but they’re not the kind of people to be
gods. Star Eagle deserves it, God knows, but he’s out. It has
to be people, I’m sure of that.”
“Well, there’s Santiago.”
“She don’t want to be a goddess, Chief. She just
wants a strong mate for a partner, a good solid ship, and a little
peace and quiet for her kids to grow up in. Like most of
’em—simple dreams, really. The Chows want this nice
peasant farm someplace. Bute and the other freebooters, new races
and forms or not, just want ships and for everybody to leave
’em alone. That’s what it’s all about for them,
Chief. They don’t want to run the system, they’re
doin’ all this to get the system off their backs so they can
do what they always wanted to do and not worry about it. It’s
what most folks want. Deep down it’s what you and Cloud
Dancer want. Maybe the human race could use some peasant gods
sometime, but the peasants got more sense and more real sense of
values, too. No, it’s guys like Clayben and Savaphoong and
Chen—those are the god types.”
Hawks smiled and gave a slight shrug. “Then maybe you are
the one to be the god, Raven. You don’t really want anything
but you understand them. You might at least be fair, which
is more than all our race’s gods have been in the
past.”
“I can’t imagine anything duller. I been up here
tryin’ to decide what I want, and maybe what I want to
be.”
“Any conclusions?”
Raven nodded. “I think I want to be a Crow, Chief. No
matter what I became I’m still a product of thousands of
years of a culture that has real value, real meaning, in this
materialistic, mechanistic, messed-up universe. I just want to know
that if I’m ever in the position where it is needed that I
am, at heart, the representative of my people and that when my time
comes, if it comes, they and my ancestors will look upon me with
pride. Now, does that sound corny or doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Hawks replied. “It sounds corny as
hell. You know something, Raven? I’ve respected you for
years, but I’m beginning to be in real danger of liking
you.”
Raven just shrugged and said nothing.
“You know, it’s not going to be as simple as you
say, even if we win,” Hawks noted. “I mean,
what’s Master System, anyway? It’s already done all its
real damage; it’s just tryin’ to keep what it’s
got. It took even the big machine over two hundred years to do all
this damage. We can’t undo it. There’s no way back. No,
the problem won’t be any different with any of us than with
Master System itself, except, of course, we’ll do it
differently.”
That started Raven. “Huh?”
“Like I said, we can’t undo it. It isn’t a
matter of being god and working miracles, it’s an engineering
problem of system management Do we get rid of the Centers and all
their marvels and let all the worlds go their independent way,
perhaps forget their origins, and eventually meet when their
technological levels grow? Or do we bring the wonders of technology
to everybody everywhere, an interstellar empire with the resultant
destruction of those cultures? Could, indeed, human beings who
could never even get together on Earth because of differences in
color or religion or culture get together under any system when
they are now so physically different and so culturally aberrant?
I’ve gone over and over those questions, Raven, and I have no
answers. None. Neither my research, nor Star Eagle’s
computer, nor the wisdom of the ages can give a guide.”
Raven nodded sympathetically. “Well, then, I guess we
leave it to luck and screw it up as usual. We’re gonna have
to fight our way all the way to Master System’s lair. Whoever
survives and is the strongest and smartest—whichever five of
us have the rings—we’ll decide. It ain’t fair and
it ain’t right, but there it is. I’m probably the worst
guy for that kind of thing and I don’t even want it, but
I’m a survivor. Maybe I’m just gonna wind up with the
bad luck to be one of ’em.” He paused a moment.
“And then there was one,” he said softly.
Hawks nodded. “Yes. It is time to think of that.
We’ve had little luck with it, you know. The one ring missing
in all this mess.”
Raven chuckled. “Funny thing is, it’ll probably be
the easiest to get. I mean, what’s Master System gonna do?
Shove half the SPF and a dozen Vals and ten fleets and task forces
around it? That’s all we’d need—a bright sign
sayin’ ‘Here it is!’ Oh, there might be some
tricky security setup like with the Matriyeh ring, but it’ll
be an engineering problem. A heist. Real difficult unless we get
Vulture back, but we’re experienced now. It’s about
time we grew up. But first we gotta find it and I’m fresh out
of patience. Didn’t you say a long time ago that Savaphoong
intimated he knew?”
Hawks nodded. “He promised that sooner or later we’d
have to come crawling to him.”
Raven got up, stretched, reached down, took a cigar, and lit it.
“Give me half an hour to shower and change, Chief. Then I
think we pay a little call on Savaphoong. That little
bastard’s had a free ride far too long.”
Fernando Savaphoong still lived on his rather luxurious yacht
attached to the outer hull of the Thunder, his every wish
catered to by the pitiful but beautiful personal slaves he’d
taken from his old outpost empire when he’d been forced to
flee. With his ship’s transmuter and a few of almost all
imaginable luxury items, he’d been able to sustain himself in
aloof style for years.
“Ah! Capitán Hawks and Señor Raven! Come in, come
in! Might I offer you some wine, perhaps?”
They took seats in his luxury bar and entertainment room.
Savaphoong knew that there was no love lost between himself and the
others, Hawks in particular, but he was a businessman and trader
without a scruple in his body and he never let such things
interfere with business. His dull-eyed, oversexed slaves served
them, and they relaxed.
“Now, then, what might I do for you gentlemen?”
Savaphoong asked genially.
“You know,” Hawks replied evenly. “You were
expecting this visit sooner or later. You know that every attempt
we’ve made to locate the fifth ring has failed, and
you know that you intimated to me that you knew where it
was.”
Savaphoong sat back, savoring the moment. “But, no,
Capitán Hawks, I do not know. I think I
know, because it is the only place that it could be and remain
within the conditions for the possession of the rings that I know
of. Certain I am not. But I would wager money on it, and I am not a
gambler.”
“We’re all ears, pal,” Raven commented.
Savaphoong sighed. “But, you see, it is all that I have to
offer other than hospitality. So far I have contributed little, I
admit, but I have taken little as well, and certainly it was I who
convinced the freebooters to join our little band. That is worth
something—a contribution. Free and without charge, I might
add.”
“Many of us have given our lives, Savaphoong,” Hawks
pointed out. “Others have lost ships, at least once to your
cowardice. Captain Santiago went through a wrenching transmutation
from which she has never fully recovered, in part because of the
loss of that ship and her comrades, but her new race is a pretty
violent one, you know. Without my intercession you’d have
suffered a slow death by torture long before now at her hands. You
owe her and her dead comrades, at least. And if we hadn’t
taken you aboard you would have lived in total isolation without
hope for the rest of your life, so don’t give me that favor
crap.”
“And you would not have been able to track and steal an
entire freighter full of the murylium that powers our vessels,
gives them their punch, and fuels our transmitters and
transmuters,” the old trader retorted. “No, señors, I
think we are even. Not all of us serve in the trenches.”
Raven saw that Hawks was ninety-nine percent ready to leap the
table and strangle the man and decided to intercede.
“You’re the trader. You have something to trade and
we’re interested—if the price is within reason. You
haven’t mentioned price.”
Savaphoong sat back and stared at them. “I will play no
haggling games. I give you the place, I want the ring. I want to be
one of the ones present at the end as an active player.”
“You know the rules. The ones who go and get the ring and
risk everything decide who gets to keep it,” Hawks pointed
out. “Besides, you don’t want to really be there at the
end. It’s likely to be a battle all the way. Lots of shooting
and danger. And the targets of choice will be those with the
rings.”
The trader shrugged. “I am not averse to risk if it means
high gain. I am getting to be an old man. There is no place for me
to go and no future for me in any other situation. Remember that I
am risking something, too. I do not know how the rings should be
used, or where. That is your job, Capitán. And whose ring
will you commandeer when it is time? Who is voting you a
twenty percent godhood?”
Hawks smiled. “Nobody. If they feel me capable, they will.
If not, then it is not my right to take one from them. I have a
wife and three children. Godhood sounds like a full-time job, and I
am not certain that I want it in any case.”
Raven lost patience. “Look, Savaphoong, we’re not
gonna sit and rot here, you know. It won’t take much under
Clayben’s mindprobe to find out what we need to know, if you
really got anything at all.”
“The machine will not avail you what you seek, it will
only kill me. You did not think the proprietor of such a place as
Halinachi could ever risk being seized by Master System, do you? I
knew too much, and I sold information as well as pleasure. My
sources would never have trusted me with anything unless they could
be assured it could never be traced to them. No, you cannot probe
it out of me, and while I have a high pain tolerance, I am not a
strong man. I would prefer to die rather than be tortured or
dismembered, and I assure you when my threshold is attained, I will
do just that. Again, some assurance for my old customers. And
without a ring, why keep on? As I say, I am old, and as you pointed
out, I have no place else to go.” He finished his wine.
“No, gentlemen, my price is absolute.”
“What’s to keep us from sayin’ yes, then
reneging on the deal once we know what you know?” Raven asked
him.
“Because the ring I wish is not the ring you seek. Bring
me one of the rings we already have and I shall tell you where to
find its companion. It is as simple as that.”
Hawks began thinking furiously. For almost five years this
situation had haunted him, although not in the way the old trader
thought. For almost that whole period, Hawks felt he should know
right now just what Savaphoong knew, and the comments here only
intensified that feeling. Why would Savaphoong know? Until
he’d joined them he didn’t even know the importance or
significance of the rings. And now, after all this time, he just
admitted that the ring really wasn’t a factor. He
didn’t know—he had deduced it. How? He knew so
much, had such a network in the old days, that it might be
anywhere . . .
But it wasn’t. “Son of a bitch!” said Hawks
softly, not referring at all to Savaphoong. “Five bloody
years and I couldn’t see it.” He sighed. “Forget
it, Savaphoong. Die in decadence—or join the hunt and earn
the prize. Come on, Raven.”
The Crow was suddenly very confused. “Huh?
What?”
“He’s been laughing at us, and particularly me, for
years. I already know what he knows. The joke’s on you,
Savaphoong.”
The trader was suddenly concerned, his self-assuredness gone.
“What do you mean? You could not know.”
“In each of the three other cases the ring has been
prominent enough that it was no sweat finding it. Even Matriyeh,
which had no Center as such. In the last five years, Kaotan,
Chunhoifan, and Bahakatan have checked out every
single colonial world on the charts, and Star Eagle has analyzed
their origins, their culture, and everything about them we could
know. No sign, no clue. We’re pretty sure it’s not on
any of them, but we also know it’s not back on Earth. For a
long time I was scared it was on the finger of the head of the SPF,
but that’s not it, either. Master System would be a little
nervous about handing such a thing to somebody with all the
technology of the system at his or her command and a lot of
ruthless ambition to boot. And what does that leave?”
Raven was blank. “Beats me, Chief.”
“Another colony. One not on the charts. One that’s
primitive, so primitive that it can be pretty well divorced from
the system and still be counted on. Not air breathers and probably
with a ferocious, xenophobic culture to boot. No Centers, no
technology at all to speak of, but right in close, in the middle of
the rest, so it can be constantly checked on. One that every old
spacer knew about but nobody knew anything about, which is why we
wound up there first. One almost in Savaphoong’s old
backyard. Do what you like, you old bastard. You no longer have
anything to trade.”
Hawks got up and Raven followed, leaving the trader just sitting
there looking disgusted, not so much at Hawks but at himself. Maybe
he was getting too old. In the old days he would never have
overplayed such a meager hand.
Hawks wasted no time once he got back inside Thunder.
“Star Eagle, I have our destination.”
“I overheard. It is so obvious once you think on
it.”
“Yeah, but the point is we didn’t think
much on it. We were too damned concerned with ongoing projects and
with our own lives here.”
“I should have deduced it at once,” the computer
pilot responded. “So much wasted effort! And we really could
use Vulture on this one.”
“Well, we may have to go without him. Until he can contact
us, we have no way of knowing if he’s even still alive. We
should start our planning anyway. How’s
Lightning?”
“It was badly damaged, but repairs are coming along
nicely. It is capable of standard duty now. Give me a week and it
will be better than new.”
Hawks nodded. “Call a captain’s council. Include the
surviving company who escaped with us from Melchior, Clayben
included.”
Raven stared at the Hyiakutt. “I still don’t get it,
Chief. Where the hell are we goin’?”
“Back where we began, Raven. Back to a hot, violent world
with coconut palms planted in neat rows but without any apparent
civilization at all. To the first alien planet you or I ever set
foot upon. To ring number five, which we might well have been
within only kilometers of stumbling across mere weeks after our
escape!”
The last time they had entered that solar system they were rank
amateurs, without much of anything at all except hope and fierce
determination. They had lived almost like savages on a little
volcanic spot down there for what seemed an eternity while Star
Eagle had made the necessary repairs and adjustments to
Thunder. Nothing much to remember, really, except the heat
and the storms and the terrible humidity and the sense of impending
danger when none ever materialized.
Blocking the monitor satellites hadn’t been a problem last
time and was even less of one now. They were used to such things as
a matter of course.
“We have all heard of this place,” Maria Santiago
told Hawks from the first. “A number of freebooters used it
as temporary hideaways and for rendezvous since it is at once so
accessible and so remote, but none really even looked for
inhabitants. I was never here, but I had heard of it.”
Captain ben Suda had much the same memories and even showed it
on his charts. “There was some early attempt to carve out a
freebooter base or trading post, if I remember the stories,”
he told them. “It failed for some reason. Never really got
started. There were tales of fierce, suicidal attacks by some kind
of creatures, but that’s all—just tales.”
“Yeah, well, there’s somebody livin’
down there all right,” Raven assured them. “I almost
forgot about this hole, but thinkin’ about it now brought
back all sorts of memories. Me and Nagy, down by the beach,
havin’ a less than pleasant chat, and the sense that,
somehow, we was bein’ watched. Black blobs in the
water, as I remember it, but we never had the means or will to find
out about them. That wasn’t our job and this place
didn’t mean nothin’ to us except as a hideout. I
remember Nagy, though, starin’ across at the next island and
suddenly frowning. He said that island looked like it was
somebody’s garden, and sure enough, there was these trees all
planted in neat rows. We were tempted to go over there but never
got the chance.”
Hawks sighed. “How we miss the Vulture now! It’s
been too easy to rely on him. How simple to just drop him in and
let him tell us all about it. Damn it, we don’t know what
we’re dealing with here! Who are they? What culture? Are they
water breathers or just water dwellers?”
“Anybody who comes up on land to plant fruit trees
isn’t wholly aquatic,” Isaac Clayben noted logically.
“Still, there was absolutely no sign at all that anyone or
anything with a brain had ever been on ‘our’ island. If
they use the land, why not where we were? It wasn’t a bad
place, if a bit wild and overgrown. The volcanoes weren’t
recently active, and there were even wild fruit-bearing trees if I
remember correctly.”
Hawks nodded. “That’s about it. And if we accept the
legends of the place as being based on reality, and couple that
with history and our own experience, we come up with a real puzzle.
An attempted colony or permanent outpost was attacked and wiped
out, yet generations of freebooters used it as a contact point and
place to stash valuables and make repairs without any reports of
molestation. The island we were on wasn’t touched, yet the
one not much different than it within easy eyesight on a clear day
was cultivated.”
Santiago thought about it. “I have never been there, it is
true, but I cannot help being reminded of Matriyeh. The tribes were
enemies and had clear hunting and gathering territories, yet there
is a unifying religion that made certain places forbidden. That was
on land, with a land-based culture spanning two huge continents.
Here—I look at the surveys and I see water. Perhaps the total
landmass is the equivalent of a continent or more, but this world
is one vast sea covered with tiny islands, all the tops of vast
underwater volcanic ranges. If a civilization was water-based,
might it not have some sort of unifying religion as well, if, as
with all the others, it has a single culture?”
“That’s good thinking,” Hawks responded.
“Taboos are standard in many societies. The fact that our
island had some edible plants indicates that it might have been
cultivated once, then abandoned, perhaps centuries before. The fact
that they attacked one party and not others indicates that there
may be rules for each island and we just got lucky. The Matriyeh
model is a good one here, I think, considering the total lack of
any signals or signs of any sort of mechanical or electrical power.
Even the traditional water-breathing colonies are set up on the
Center model; there is power, there are ways to use adapted
technology and that shows up. It doesn’t there.”
“But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is not
there,” Star Eagle put in through his speaker.
“Remember, who would have guessed a magnetic rail system on
Matriyeh? We aren’t geared for that sort of detection, and
under water—who can say?”
“It’s a point, but somehow I doubt that such things
lie hidden here,” Hawks said. “Raven is correct on one
point—Master System doesn’t dare defend this one unless
it has to. That’s not to say that we can’t expect traps
at least as bad as Matriyeh down there. I cannot forget the mystics
of Matriyeh who themselves didn’t know they were really an
entire SPF division under intense mindprint conditioning with a
humanoid Val to worship as a goddess and to control things. No,
this is going to be the nastiest little problem we’ve had to
solve, if we have no inside man as it were. I would wager, though,
from the depth of the legends about this place, that it is old, and
that, unlike Matriyeh, it probably remains very much the way it was
originally designed. No, I feel now as I felt then—that this
was a prototypical colony, one of the first. That it was settled
with a distinct people, perhaps a culture that would be very
comfortable with a world such as this, and one that might well turn
its back on technology.” He sighed. “Well, it’s a
dangerous situation and there’s no way around it.”
Raven nodded. “Uh huh. First, we want as good a current
orbital survey as can be made of the place. Then we’re gonna
have to send a party down there with some mobility, heavily armed
and ready for bear, and see what the place looks like. Finally,
and this is the worst part, we’re gonna have to draw some of
’em out of the water, and if we can’t talk things over
peaceably with them we’ll have to knock ’em cold and
bring ’em in. That means exposing a group to dangers unknown
by persons or creatures unknown, ones that managed to take out at
least some well-armed freebooters. After all, for the most part we
only know of the ones who didn’t get hit, right? It also
means that, right from the start, we’re gonna have to expose
ourselves as aliens. If there’s anything like that Matriyeh
gimmick with the SPF, we’re cooked and you’ll have a
task force here before you can learn the name of the
place.”
“Doubtful,” said Star Eagle. “Even on Matriyeh
they had a communications link to a master ground computer. No such
link exists here or my probes would have detected it. There
is a monitoring satellite but it is not geostationary.
It’s designed to casually sweep the planet’s surface
and is easily fooled. No, it is probable that Master System here is
relying entirely on its anonymity and the hostility and insularity
of its people. This is not to say that there are not permanent
traps there—an SPF sort, or disguised Vals, or whatever. And
if the latter, there can just as easily be one or more Val ships
down there, hidden, switched off, self-maintained and ready, which
could be impossible for us to detect but available to be switched
on and used as required. All it would take is orbital attainment
and it could send an emergency call through the solar system
monitors.”
“And it might be the wrong place,” China put in
worriedly. “We have no real evidence that this is where the
fifth ring resides. The reason that there is no activity might be
that there is nothing to guard. The reason why these people are on
no charts might be that they are not descended from humans at all
but are an indigenous species.”
“Unlikely,” Clayben responded. “Even from our
crude early examination of the place I can say that it
doesn’t fit the pattern for the independent evolution of
intelligent life. Oh, give it a few million years and I will
readily change my mind, but there is clear evidence here of Master
System’s terraforming methodology, and with the air, water,
and organics present—all clearly introduced and the plants
descended from easily recognizable Earth ancestors—it would
be in some way life as we know it. No. It is circumstantial
evidence, but we must take the risk. Logic says that it is here,
that this is the place. It is consistent with the way Master System
thinks.”
Raven sighed. “I’d say we start where we were
before. It seemed to be a safe spot in the middle of some
civilization, and we’ll have to stick to land at the start,
until we get the full lay of it.”
Takya Mudabur, one of the two remaining unchanged crew of the
Kaotan and the only native-born water creature among them,
spoke up.
“Why do we have to stick to the land? I would enjoy a dip
in such a beautiful ocean.” Her people breathed air but lived
entirely in the sea. She needed to be in water much of the time,
and could be underwater, even in depths as high as five hundred
meters, for hours at a time. She had a rudimentary gill system as
well as lungs.
“Can’t risk it, or you,” Raven replied.
“Butar, Chung, and Min also can handle themselves in water,
and we sure have some weapons that’ll work there easy enough,
but even sending four instead of one in their
element—the element of our unknown people—is like
setting me and Hawks down in the middle of Janipur. Somebody would
notice, and these folks got a reputation for killing first and
wonderin’ later. No, there’ll be a time for that, but
not yet. The only smart way to do this is to draw ’em out
into our element, away from water. Then we get a look at
’em and we got a fighting chance.”
“Who would you want, then?” Hawks asked him.
“I assume the way you’re talking that you’re
volunteering to mastermind all this.”
Raven grinned. “About time I did something, ain’t
it, Chief? And this is just up my trail.” He looked around at
them, thinking. “I want folks with lightning reflexes, in
better condition than me, and real nimble shooters. Any
volunteers?”
“You need warriors to protect you, Raven,” Santiago
said. A great deal of therapy, both mental and physical, had
restored the original personalities of her and her companion Midi
while retaining the aggressive instincts they had needed to survive
on Matriyeh, and now both were resigned to accepting their adopted
race and form. They were once more the primitive warrior women of
that fierce world, yet their old, technologically sophisticated
selves were once again very much in control. Maria was tall, with
almost black skin, little body hair, and small, rock-solid breasts.
Her European-featured face, which was quite reminiscent of her
original looks, was crowned by short, straight black hair. She also
had the gracefully athletic body of a female body builder, and the
strength and reflexes to match, and looked quite Earth-human,
though she was not. Her race was as alien as that of Chanchuk or
Janipur. Midi was much the same, only very slightly shorter and
with different, more Orientalized features reflecting her original
looks.
“You’ve done your share,” Hawks pointed out.
“More than your share. You’ve lost a ship, a crew, and
become one of a colonial race. Besides, you both have children to
think of.”
“Matriyehan children are more independent than
that,” she responded. “I was a freebooter captain and
then I became a warrior. It’s in the genes you stuck me with,
you know. We were talking about it not long ago. We are now
designed as warriors, not as sweet young things to tend the kids
while the menfolk go off to fight. On Matriyeh there are
no menfolk. We crave action. And we are best suited for this kind
of thing.”
Raven shrugged. “I agree you two’d be perfect if you
really want to go. That’s three. I think I’ll need at
least five, maybe six. Somebody’s got to tend camp and
maintain the communications and security links, and I ain’t
too sure I want to go on the other island with less than five good
guns.”
“I’ll go,” said Dora Panoshka. “It is
likely that Kaotan will not be needed at this stage of the
game, and it would be nice to be on the ground for a change. If
Kaotan is needed, then Butar can do for me what I did for
her.” Panoshka, now captain of the Kaotan and the
one responsible for picking up the Chanchuk team, although
humanoid, looked more like a bipedal lion than an Earth-human
woman. She was covered with orange and yellow lionlike fur, her
rather Earth-human-looking hands and feet disguised with pads,
hairy clumps, and nasty retractable claws. Her face was also
fur-covered and had a flared-out all-around mane, and the lipless
mouth opened wide and menacing, as if it could swallow a person
whole. Few would take the time to see that that mouth had no
fanglike teeth at all, merely even rows of large, flat ones that
were for a jaw that moved primarily from side to side and betrayed
her for the absolute vegetarian she and her race were.
“Pardon, but Chunhoifan has been a peripheral
player until now,” said Captain Chun Wo Har. He, too, was a
born colonial, a humanoid but with a hard, chitinous exoskeleton,
bulging black eyes, and the look and manner of a giant insect.
“Such a civilization as might be down there would likely be
of the bow and arrow and spear variety. I doubt that weapons such
as these could pierce my body. I might not be so quick, and I am
certainly getting old and out of practice, but I would be honored
to come along.”
Captain ben Suda sighed. “I, too, feel much the same. We
have fought battles in space and done much scouting, but
Bahakatan is also underrepresented in the real object of
all this. I was quite good with rifle and sidearm in my younger
days, and I feel the need to oil the joints and remove some of the
rust.”
“Well, I’d welcome you both,” Raven responded,
then caught Hawks’s glare.
“No,” said the leader. “Both of you have
intact families predating any of this. And I cannot afford to risk
both of my most experienced surviving captains along with Santiago
and Panoshka on this kind of scouting expedition. There’s
going to be more fighting ahead no matter how this comes out. I
just can’t spare the two of you. I’ve lost San
Cristobal and Indrus. Kaotan is down to a skeleton
crew now and needs supplements to run efficiently. I’m sorry,
but this is a command decision. I don’t want either of you
away from your ships where you’ll be ready at a
moment’s notice for any emergencies.”
Both captains said nothing, immediately sensing Hawks’s
resolve and, as captains themselves, seeing reason in it.
Finally Captain Chun said, “Bahakatan contributed
Chung and Min to the Chanchuk operation. Allow me to consult with
my own crew. Perhaps we can find ones more acceptable to you,
sir.”
Hawks nodded. He understood how much honor meant to Chun, and he
didn’t want to point out that they were running low on people
who could be transmuted. If that was required here, then
Chun’s crew were likely candidates.
“Very well. We don’t have to decide now,” the
chief told them. “It will take some time to fully scout and
plan this out, and I want all care and caution taken both before
and during this operation. Because we have three rings and need
only one more, we’re overanxious. That could kill us, or sink
everything we’ve spent all these years and all these lives in
attaining. Even after we select the team, I’ll want Raven to
work with all of you, drill and practice, until you do the right
thing without thinking. For now, this meeting is
adjourned.”
Cloud Dancer was sketching again. She was an excellent artist,
both drawing and sculpting, and the interior of the
Thunder was filled with her work. Now, though, she had
been doing a simple project, but one that immediately caught
Hawks’s eye.
There were four of them, charcoals, one for each of the known
rings—the three they had and the one they knew was back on
Earth. For some reason, it had never really occurred to Hawks to
study the rings themselves before. True, the designs were there,
but so small, so delicate, that he’d found it impossible to
really see the detail in them. Cloud Dancer, however, was an artist
with an artist’s eye for even the finest detail, and she had
studied them and drawn them folio size. Now, suddenly, seeing them
blown up to so large a size, every tiny detail enlarged and
reproduced, each of the intricate designs seemed too perfect, too
deliberate, to be just ornamental numbers.
He picked them up, then placed them in descending order,
4-3-2-1. He stood back. He stared at them. Suddenly he turned and
went to an intercom.
“Star Eagle—the Fellowship. The five who created the
Master System program and had the rings made.”
“Yes?”
“What religions were they?”
“You asked me this before, a few years ago. Joseph Sung
Yi, born Singapore, China, naturalized citizen: no religion of
record but had dabbled in Buddhism. Golda Pinsky, born Haifa,
Israel: Jewish. Aaron Menzelbaum, born New York City: Jewish
ancestry but an outspoken, rather militant atheist. Maurice
Ntunanga, born Mimongo, Gabon, naturalized citizen: Moslem. Mary
Lynn Yomashita, born Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii: nominally
Buddhist.”
Hawks frowned. “No Christians? None of them were
Christians?”
“No. Everything but. Interesting. The records on them are
quite complete, even in my original pilot’s program. Why
would it be there? I wondered about that the first time you asked,
but dropped it because there was no chance of an answer.”
Hawks sighed. “I think I may have an idea on that.
Let’s just say it doesn’t surprise me. But—no
Christians?”
“No. Apparently that was what originally brought them
together. They were the only born non-Christians among the top team
assembled to oversee the creation of the master core program. Many
of the rest had no known religion or were agnostics or atheists but
they had come out of nominally Christian backgrounds. These others
also tended to go home for Christmas holidays, while the
Fellowship, who had no real family and not even a nominal religious
excuse, stayed on. That is how they all came to know each other so
well and came to found their little group. I had no idea
this stuff was buried in my memory! I’ll be
damned.”
Hawks grinned. “You can’t be damned. You’re a
machine.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more
help.”
“Oh, but you were. In fact, what you told me is
as good as if you had told me the opposite.”
“Huh? Explain.”
“Not now. All of this simply confirms an old theory of
mine, and this final ring will be the proof of it. It is odd,
though. Unless Isaac Clayben had a more traditional upbringing than
I suspect, I may be the only one who knows this. I would prefer
that no one else knew that I knew it. Understand?”
“No. However, if it makes you happy, I will deny all
knowledge of what I do not know and will deny to everyone that you
know anything at all.”
“Good enough,” he responded, feeling quite upbeat
for a change, even though they were entering the most dangerous
phase of the whole quest. Maybe Raven was right. Maybe they
were meant to get the rings.
He had to stop himself before he began to hum an obscure,
forgotten old English tune that only a historian specializing in
presystem cultures might ever have encountered. He didn’t
want to hum that tune. He’d heard it going over many of the
ancient records of old America, but the tune was English, and so
was Isaac Clayben. The old boy might well figure it out, but Hawks
sure as hell wasn’t going to help him.