Lodestar

Lightning reached. David Falkayn heard the crack of torn air and gulped a rainy reek of ozone. His cheek stung from the near miss. In his eyes, spots of blue-white dazzle danced across night. “Get aboard, you two,” Adzel said. “I’ll hold them.”

Crouched, Falkayn peered after a target for his own blaster. He saw shadows move beneath strange constellations-that, and flames which tinged upward-roiling smoke on the far side of the spacefield, where the League outpost was burning. Shrieks resounded. “No, you start,” he rasped. “I’m armed, you’re not.”

The Wodenite’s bass remained steady, but an earthquake rumble entered it. “No more deaths. A single death would have been too much, of folk outraged in their own homes. David, Chee: go.” Half-dragon, half-centaur, four and a half meters from snout to tailtip, he moved toward the unseen natives. Firelight framed the hedge of bony plates along his back, glimmered off scales and bellyscutes. Chee Lan tugged at Falkayn’s trousers. “Come on,” she spat. “No Bopping that hairy-brain when he wambles off on an idealism binge. He won’t board before us, and they’ll kill him if we don’t move fast.” sneer: “I’ll lead the way, if that’ll make you feel more heroic.” Her small, white-furred form shot from the hauler behind which had taken refuge. (No use trying to get that machine aloft. The primitives had planned their attack shrewdly, must have hoarded stolen explosives as well as guns for years, till they could demolish everything around the base at the same moment as they fell upon the headquarters complex.) Its mask-markings obscured her bluntmuzzled face in the shuddering red light; but her bottled-up tail stood all too clear.

A Tamethan saw. On long thin legs, beak agape in a war-yell, he sped to catch her. His weapon was merely a spear. Sick-hearted, Falkayn took aim. Then Chee darted between those legs, tumbled the autochthon on his tocus and bounded onward.

Hurry! Falkayn told himself. Battle ramped around Adzel. The Wodenite could take a certain number of slugs and blaster bolts without permanent damage, he knew, but not many ... and those mighty arms were pulling their punches. Keeping to shadow as well as might be, the human followed Chee Lan.

Their ship loomed ahead, invulnerable to the attackers. Her gangway was descending. So the Cynthian had entered audio range, had called an order to the main computer .... VWiy didn’t we tell Mttddlehead to use initiative in case of trouble? groaned Falkayn’s mind. W7iy didn’t we at least carry radios to call for its help? Are we due for retirement? A sloppy trade pioneer is a dead trade pioneer. A turret gun flashed and boomed. Chee must have ordered that. It was a warning shot, sent skyward, but terrifying. The man gusted relief. His rangy body sped upramp, stopped at the open airlock, and turned to peer back. Combat seemed to have frozen. And, yes, here Adzel came, limping, trailing blood, but alive. Falkayn wanted to hug his old friend and weep.

No. First ive haul mass out of here. He entered the ship. Adzel’s hoofs boomed on the gangway. It retracted, the airlock closed, gravity drive purred, and Muddlin’ Through ascended to heaven.—Gathered on the bridge, her crew stared at a downward-viewing screen. The fires had become sparks, the spacefield a. scar, in an illimitable night. Far off, a river cut through jungle, shining by starlight like a drawn sword.

Falkayn ran fingers through his sandy hair. “We, uh, well, do you think we can rescue any survivors?” he asked.

“I doubt there are any by now,” Adzel said. “We barely escaped: because we have learned, over years, to meet emergencies as a team.”

“And if there are,” Chee added, “who cares?” Adzel looked reproof at her. She bristled her whiskers. “We saw how those slimesouls were treating the aborigines.”

“I feel sure much of the offense was caused simply by ignorance of basic psychology and mores.”

“That’s no excuse, as you flapping well know. They should’ve taken the trouble to learn such things. But no, the companies couldn’t wait for that. They sent their bespattered factors and field agents right in, who promptly set up a little dunghill of an empireYa-pti-tjeli!” In Ghee’s home language that was a shocking obscenity, even for her.

Falkyan’s shoulders slumped. “I’m inclined to agree,” he said. “Besides, we mustn’t take risks. We’ve got to make a report.”

“Why?” Adzel asked. “Our own employer was not involved.”

“No, thanks be. I’d hate to feel I must quit .... This is League business, however. The mutual-assistance rule—”

“And so League warcraft come and bomb some poor little villages?” Adzel’s tail drummed on the deck.

“With our testimony, we can hope not. The Council verdict ought to be, those klongs fell flat on their own deeds.” Falkayn sighed. “I wish we’d been around here longer, making a regular investigation, iastead of just chancing by and deciding to take a few days off on a pleasant planet.” He straightened. “Well. To space, Muddlehead, and to-m-m-m, nearest major League base-Irumclaw.”

“And you come along to sickbay and let me dress those wounds, you overgrown bulligator,” Chee snapped at the Wodenite, “before you’ve utterly ruined this carpet, drooling blood on it.” Falkayn himself sought a washroom, a change of clothes, his pipe and tobacco, a stiff drink. Continuing to the saloon, he settled down and tried to ease away his trouble. In a viewscreen, the world dwindled which men had named Tametha-arbitrarily, from a native word in a single locality, which they’d doubtless gotten wrong anyway. Already it had shrunk in his vision to a ball, swirled blue *nd white: a body as big and fair as ever Earth was, four or five oilhon years in the making, uncounted swarms of unknown life forms, sentiences and civilizations, histories and mysteries, become a marble game ... or a set of entries in a set of data banks, for profit or in a few cities a hundred or more light-years remote.

™ thought: Tliis isn’t the first time I’ve seen undying wrong done. Is it really happening oftener and oftener, or am I just getting more aware of it as I age? At thirty-three, I begin to feel old. Chee entered, jumped onto the seat beside him, and reported Adzel was resting. “You do need that drink, don’t you?” she observed. Falkayn made no reply. She inserted a mildly narcotic cigarette in an interminable ivory holder and puffed it to ignition. “Yes,” she said, “I get irritated likewise, no end, whenever something like this befouls creation.”

“I’m coming to think the matter is worse, more fundamental, than a collection of episodes.” Falkayn spoke wearily. “The Polesotechnic League began as a mutual-benefit association of companies, true; but the idea was also to keep competition within decent bounds. That’s breaking down, that second aspect. How long till the first does too?”

“What would you prefer to free enterprise? The Terran Empire, maybe?”

“Well, you being a pure carnivore, and coming besides from a trading culture that was quick to modernize-exploitation doesn’t touch you straight on the nerves, Chee. But Adzel-he doesn’t say much, you know him, but I’ve become certain it’s a bitterness to him, more and more as time slides by, that nobody will help his people advance ... because they haven’t anything that anybody wants enough to pay the price of advancement. And-well, I hardly dare guess how many others. Entire worldsful of beings who look at yonder stars till it aches in them, and know that except for a few lucky individuals, none of them will ever get out there, nor will their descendants have any real say about the future, no, will instead remain nothing but potential victims—”

Seeking distraction, Falkayn raised screen magnification and swept the scanner around jewel-blazing blackness. When he stopped for another pull at his glass, the view happened to include the enigmatic glow of the Crab Nebula.

“Take that sentimentalism and stuff it back where it came from,” Chee suggested. “The new-discovered species will simply have to accumulate capital. Yours did. Mine did soon after. We can’t give a free ride to the whole universe.”

“N-no. Yet you know yourself-be honest-how quick somebody already established would be to take away that bit of capital, whether by market manipulations or by thinly disguised piracyTametha’s a minor example. All that those tribesbeings wanted was to trade directly with Over-the-Mountains.” Falkayn’s fist clamped hard around his pipe. “I tell you, lass, the heart is going out of the League, in the sense of ordinary compassion and helpfulness. How long till the heart goes out in the sense of its own survivability? Civilization needs more than the few monopolists we’ve got.” The Cynthian twitched her ears, quite slowly, and exhaled smoke whose sweetness blent with the acridity of the man’s tobacco. Her eyes glowed through it, emerald-hard. “I sort of agree. At least, I’d enjoy listening to the hot air hiss out of certain bellies. How, though, Davy? How?”

“Old Nick-he’s a single member of the Council, I realize—”

“Our dear employer keeps his hirelings fairly moral, but strictly on the principle of running a taut ship. He told me that himself once, and added, ‘Never mind what the ship is taught, ho, ho, ho!’ No, you won’t make an idealist of Nicholas van Rijn. Not without transmuting every atom in his fat body.”

Falkayn let out a tired chuckle. “A new isotope. Van Rijn-235, no, likelier Vr-235,000—”

And then his glance passed over the Nebula, and as if it had spoken to him across more than a thousand parsecs, he fell silent and grew tense where he sat.

This happened shortly after the Satan episode, when the owner of Solar Spice & Liquors had found it needful once more to leave the comforts of the Commonwealth, risk his thick neck on a cheerless world, and finally make a month-long voyage in a ship which had run out of beer. Returned home, he swore by all that was holy and much that was not: Never again!

Nor, for most of the following decade, had he any reason to break his vow. His business was burgeoning, thanks to excellently chosen personnel in established trade sites and to pioneers like the Muddlin’ Through team who kept finding him profitable new lands. Besides, he “*d maneuvered himself into the overlordship of Satan. A sunless Wandering planet, newly thawed out by a brush with a giant star, “Hade a near-ideal site for the manufacture of odd isotopes on a scale commensurate with present-day demand. Such industry wasn’t his *•**& of tea “or,” he declared, “my glass Genever that molasses-onfhrto-footed butler is supposed to bring me before I crumble away non> thirst.” Therefore van Rijn granted franchises, on terms calcu—lated to be an Sngstrom short of impossibly extortionate. Many persons wondered, often in colorful language, why he didn’t retire and drink himself into a grave they would be glad to provide, outsize though it must be. When van Rijn heard about these remarks, he would grin and look still harder for a price he could jack up or a competitor he could undercut. Nevertheless, compared to earlier years, this was for him a leisured period. When at last word got around that he meant to take Coya Conyon, his favorite granddaughter, on an extended cruise aboard his yacht-and not a single mistress along for him-hope grew that he was slowing down to a halt. I can’t say I like most of those money-machine merchant princes, Coya reflected, several weeks after leaving Earth; but I really wouldn’t want to give them heart attacks by telling them we’re now on a nonlntman vessel, equipped in curious icays but unmistakably battle-ready, bound into a region that nobody is known to have explored.

She stood before a viewport set in a corridor. A ship built by men would not have carried that extravagance; but to Ythrians, sky dwellers, ample outlook is a necessity of sanity. The air she breathed was a little thinner than at Terrestrial sea level; odors included the slight smokiness of their bodies. A ventilator murmured not only with draft but with a barely heard rustle, the distance-muffled sound of wingbeats from crewfolk off duty cavorting in an enormous hold intended for it. At 0.75 standard weight she still-after this long a trip-felt exhilaratingly light.

She was not presently conscious of that. At first she had reveled in adventure. Everything was an excitement; every day offered a million discoveries to be made. She didn’t mind being the sole human aboard besides her grandfather. He was fun in his bearish fashion: had been as far back as she could remember, when he would roll roaring into her parents’ home, toss her to the ceiling, half-bury her under presents from a score of planets, tell her extravagant stories and take her out on a sailboat or to a live performance or, later on, around most of the Solar System .... Anyhow, to make Ythrian friends, to discover a little of how their psyches worked and how one differed from another, to trade music, memories, and myths, watch their aerial dances and show them some ballet, that was an exploration in itself.

Today, however-They were apparently nearing the goal for which they had been running in a search helix, whatever it was. Van Rijn remained boisterous; but he would tell her nothing. Nor did the Ythrians know what was sought, except for Hiiharouk, and he had passed on no other information than that all were to hold themselves prepared for emergencies cosmic or warlike. A species whose ancestors had lived like eagles could take this more easily than men. Even so, tension had mounted till .she could smell it.

Her gaze sought outward. As an astrophysicist and a fairly frequent tourist, she had spent a total of years in space during the twenty-five she had been in the universe. She could identify the brightest individual stars amidst that radiant swarm, lacy and lethal loveliness of shining nebulae, argent torrent of Milky Way, remote glimmer of sister galaxies. And still size and silence, unknownness and unknowability, struck against her as much as when she first fared forth. Secrets eternal ... why, of course. They had run at a good pseudovelocity for close to a month, starting at Ythri’s sun (which lies 278 light-years from Sol in the direction of Lupus) and aiming at the Deneb sector. That put them, oh, say a hundred parsecs from Earth. Glib calculation. Yet they had reached parts which no record said anyone had ever done more than pass through, in all the centuries since men got a hyperdnve. The planetary systems here had not been catalogued, let alone visited, let alone understood. Space is that big, that full of worlds.

Coya shivered, though the air was warm enough. You’re yonder somewhere, David, she thought, if yon haven’t met the inevitable final surprise. Have you gotten my message? Did it have any meaning to you?

She could do nothing except give her letter to another trade pioneer whom she trusted. He was bound for the same general region as Falkayn had said Muddlin’ Through would next go questing in. The crews maintained rendezvous stations. In one such turbulent place he might get news of Falkayn’s team. Or he could deposit the letter there to be called for.

Guilt nagged her, as it had throughout this journey. A betrayal of «er grandfather-No! Fresh anger flaied. // he’s not brewing someming bad, what possible harm can it do him that David knows what *«te I knew before we left-which is scarcely more than the old devil *» let me know to this hour?

And he did speak of hazards. I did have to force him into taking me along (because the matter seemed to concern you, David, oh, David). If we meet trouble, and suddenly you arriveStop romancing, Coya told herself. You’re a grown girl now. She found she could control her thoughts, somewhat, but not the tingle through her blood.

She stood tall, slender almost to boyishness, clad in plain black tunic, slacks, and sandals. Straight dark hair, shoulder-length, framed an oval face with a snub nose, mouth a trifle too wide but eyes remarkably big and gold-flecked green. Her skin was very white. It was rather freakish how genes had recombined to forget nearly every trace of her ancestry-van Rijn’s Dutch and Malay; the Mexican and Chinese of a woman who bore him a girl-child and with whom he had remained on the same amicable terms afterward as, somehow, he did with most former loves; the Scots (from Hermes, David’s home planet) plus a dash of African (via a planet called Nyanza) in that Malcolm Conyon who settled down on Earth and married Beatriz Yeo.

Restless, Goya’s mind skimmed over the fact. Her lips could not help quirking. In short, I’m a typical modern human. The amusement died. Yes, also in my life. My grandfather’s generation seldom bothered to get married. My father’s did. And mine, why, we’re reviving patrilineal surnames.

A whistle snapped off her thinking. Her heart lurched until she identified the signal. “All hands alert.”

That meant something had been detected. Maybe not the goal; maybe just a potential hazard, like a meteoroid swarm. In uncharted space, you traveled warily, and van Rijn kept a candle lit before his little Martian sandroot statuette of St. Dismas.

A moment longer, Coya confronted the death and glory beyond the ship. Then, fists knotted, she strode aft. She was her grandfather’s granddaughter.

“Lucifer and leprosy!” bellowed Nicholas var Rijn ‘You have maybe spotted what we maybe are after, at extreme range of your instruments tuned sensitive like an artist what specializes in painting pansies, a thing we cannot reach in enough hours to eat three good rijstaffels, and you have the bladder to tell me I got to armor me and stand around crisp saying, ‘Aye-yi-yi, sir’?” Sprawled in a lounger, he waved a two-liter tankard of beer he clutched in his hairy left paw. The right held a. churchwarden pipe, which had filled his stateroom with blue reek.

Hirharouk of the Wryfields Choth, captain of the chartered ranger Gaiian ( = Dewfall), gave him look for look. The Ythrian’s eyes were large and golden, the man’s small and black and crowding his great hook nose; neither pair gave way, and Hirharouk’s answer held an iron quietness: “No. I propose that you stop guzzling alcohol. You do have dnigs to induce sobriety, but they may show side effects when quick decision is needed.”

While his Anglic was fluent, he used a vocalizer to convert the sounds he could make into clearly human tones. The Ythrian voice is beautifully ringing but less flexible than man’s. Was it to gibe or be friendly that van Rijn responded in pretty fair Planha? “Be not perturbed. I am hardened, which is why my vices cost me a fortune. Moreover, a body my size has corresponding capacity.” He slapped the paunch beneath his snuff-stained blouse and gaudy sarong. The rest of him was huge in proportion. “This is my way of resting in advance of trouble, even as you would soar aloft and contemplate.” Hirharouk eased and fluted his equivalent of a laugh. “As you wish. I daresay you would not have survived to this date, all the sworn foes you must have, did you not know what you do.”

Van Rijn tossed back his sloping brow. Long swarthy ringlets in the style of his youth, except for their greasiness, swirled around the jewels in his earlobes; his chins quivered beneath waxed mustaches and goatee; a bare splay foot smote the densely carpeted deck. “You mistake me,” he boomed, reverting to his private version of Anglic. “You cut me to the quiche. Do you suppose I, poor old lonely sinner, /a, but still a Christian man with a soul full of hope, do you suppose / ever went after anything but peace-as many peaces as I could get? No, no, what I did, I was pushed into, self-defense against sons of mothers, greedy rascals who I may forgive though God cannot, who begrudge me what tiny profit I need so I not become a charge on a state that is only good for grinding up taxpayers anyway. Me, I am like gentle St. Francis, I go around ripping off olive branches and covering stormy seas with oil slicks and watering troubled fish.” He stuck his tankard under a spout at his elbow for a refill. Hirharouk observed him. And Coya, entering the disordered luxury of the stateroom, paused to regard them both.

She was fond of van Rijn. Her doubts about this expedition, the message she had felt she must try to send to David Falkayn, had been a sharp blade in her. Nonetheless she admitted the Ythrian was infinitely more sightly. Handsomer than her too, she felt, or David himself. That was especially trite in flight; yet, slow and awkward though they were aground, the Ythrians remained magnificent to see, and not only because of the born hunter’s inborn pride.

Hirharouk stood some 150 centimeters tall. What he stood on was his wings, which spanned five and a half meters when unfolded. Turned downward, they spread claws at the angle which made a kind of foot; the backward-sweeping alatan surface could be used for extra support. What had been legs and talons, geological epochs ago, were arms and three-fingered two-thumbed hands. The skin on those was amber-colored. The rest of him wore shimmering bronze feathers, save where these became black-edged white on crest and on fanshaped tail. His body looked avian, stiff behind its jutting keelbone. But he was no bird. He had not been hatched. His head, raised on a powerful neck, had no beak: rather, a streamlined muzzle, nostrils at the tip, below them a mouth whose lips seemed oddly delicate against the keen fangs.

And the splendor of these people goes beyond the sunlight on them when they ride the wind, Coya thought. David frets about the races that aren’t getting a chance. Well, Yf/iri was primitive when the Grand Survey found it. Tlie Ythrians studied Technic civilization, and neither licked its boots nor let it overwhelm them, but took what they wanted from it and made themselves a power in our corner of the galaxy. True, this was before that civilization was itself overwhelmed by laissez-faire capitalismShe blinked. Unlike her, the merchant kept his quarters at Earthstandard illumination; and Quetlan is yellower than Sol. He was used to abrupt transitions. She coughed in the tobacco haze. The two males grew aware of her.

“Ah, my sweet bellybird,” van Rijn greeted, a habit he had not shaken from the days of her babyhood. “Come in. Flop yourself.” A gesture of his pipe gave a choice of an extra lounger, a desk chair, an emperor-size bed, a sofa between the liquor cabinet and the bookshelf, or the deck. “What you want? Beer, gin, whisky, cognac, vodka, arrack, akvavit, half-dozen kinds wine and liqueur, ansa, totipot, slumthunder, maryjane, ops, gait, Xanadu radium, or maybe—” he winced “—a soft drink? A soft, flabby drink?”

“Coffee v>ill do, thanks.” Coya drew breath and courage. “Canting Ttian, I’ve got to talk with you.”

“]a, I outspected you would. Why I not told you more before is because-oh, I wanted you should enjoy your trip, not brood like a hummingbird on ostrich eggs.”

Coya was unsure whether Hirharouk spoke in tact or truth: “Freeman van Rijn, I came to discuss our situation. Now I return to the bridge. For honor and life ... khr-r-r, I mean please ... hold ready for planlaying as information lengthens.” He lifted an arm. “Freelady Conyon, hail and fare you well.”

He walked from them. When he entered the bare corridor, his claws clicked. He stopped and did a handstand. His wings spread as wide as possible in that space, preventing the door from closing till he was gone, exposing and opening the gill-like slits below them. He worked the wings, forcing those antlibranchs to operate like bellows. They were part of the “supercharger” system which enabled a creature his size to fly under basically terrestroid conditions. Coya did not know whether he was oxygenating his bloodstream to energize himself for command, or was flushing out human stench. He departed. She stood alone before her grandfather.

“Do sit, sprawl, hunker, or how you can best relax,” the man urged. “I would soon have asked you should come. Time is to make a clean breast, except mine is too shaggy and you do not take off your tunic.” His sigh turned into a belch. “A shame. Customs has changed. Not that I would lech in your case, no, I got incest repellent. But the sight is nice.”

She reddened and signalled the coffeemaker. Van Rijn clicked his tongue. “And you don’t smoke neither,” he said. “Ah, they don’t put the kind of stuff in youngsters like when I was your age.”

“A few of us try to exercise some forethought as well as our consciences,” Coya snapped. After a pause: “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to sound self-righteous.”

“But you did. I wonder, has David Falkayn influenced you that way, or you him?-Ho-ho, a spectroscope would think your face was receding at speed of light!” Van Rijn wagged his pipestem. “Be careful. He’s a good boy, him, except lie’s not a boy no more. Could well be, without knowing it, he got somewhere a daughter old as you.”

“We’re friends,” Coya said half-furiously. She sat down on the edge of the spare lounger, ignored its attempts to match her contours, twined fingers between knees, and glared into his twinkle. “What the chaos do yon expect my state of mind to be, when yon wouldn’t tell me what we’re heading for?”

“Yon did not have to come along. Yon shoved in on me, armored in black mail.”

Coya did not deny the amiably made statement. She had threatened to reveal the knowledge she had gained at his request, and thereby give his rivals the same clues. He hadn’t been too hard to persuade; after warning her of possible danger, he growled that lie would be needing an astrophysicist and might as well keep things in the family.

I Itope, God, how I hope he believes mij motive was a hankering for adventure as I told liiin! He ought to believe it, and flatter liimself I’ve inherited a lot of his instincts .... No, lie can’t have guessed my real reason was the fear that David is involved, in a wrong way. If he knew that, he need only have told me, “Blab and be damned,” and I’d have hail to stay home, silent. As is ... David, in me you have here an advocate, whatever you may have done.

“I could understand your keeping me ignorant while we were on the yacht,” she counterattacked. “No matter how carefully picked the crew, one of them might have been a commercial or government spy and might have managed to eavesdrop. But when, when in the Quetlan System we transferred to this vessel, and the yacht proceeded as if we were still aboard, and won’t make any port for weeks-why didn’t you speak?”

“Maybe I wanted you should for punishment be like a Yiddish brothel.”

“What?”

“Jews in your own stew. Haw, haw, haw!” She didn’t smile. Van Rijn continued: “Mainly, here again I could not be full-up sure of the crew. Ythrians is fearless’and I .suppose more honest by nature than men. But that is saying microbial little, me? Here too we might have been overheard and-Well, Hirharouk agreed, he could not either absolute predict how certain of them would react. He tried but was not able to recruit everybody from his own choth.” The Planha word designated a basic social unit, more than a tribe, less than a nation, with cultural and religious dimensions corresponding to nothing human. “Some, even, is from different societies and belong to no choths at allses. Ythrians got as much variation as the Commonwealth-no, more, because they not had time yet for technology to make them into homogeneouses.”

The coffeemaker chimed. Coya rose, tapped a cup, sat back down, and sipped. The warmth and fragrance were a point of comfort in an infinite space.

“We had a long trek ahead of us,” the merchant proceeded, “and a lot of casting about, before we found what it might be we are looking for. Meanwhiles Hirharouk, and me as best I was able, sounded out those crewbeings not from Wryfields, got to understand them a weenie bit and-Hokay, he thinks we can trust them, regardless how the truth shapes up or ships out. And now, like you know, we have detected an object which would well be the simple, easy, small dissolution to the riddle.”

“What’s small about a supernova?” Coya challenged. “Even an extinct one?”

“When people ask me how I like being old as I am,” van Rijn said circuitously, “I tell them, ‘Not bad when I consider the alternative.” Bellybird, the alternative here would make the Shenn affair look like a game of pegglety-mum.”

Coya came near spilling her coffee. She had been adolescent when the sensation exploded: that the Polesotechnic League had been infiltrated by agents of a nonhuman species, dwelling beyond the regions which Technic civilization dominated and bitterly hostile to it; that war had barely been averted; that the principal rescuers were her grandfather and the crew of a ship named Muddlin Tlirough. On that day David Falkayn was unknowingly promoted to god (j.g.). She wondered if he knew it yet, or knew that their occasional outings together after she matured had added humanness without reducing that earlier rank.

Van Rijn squinted at her. “You guessed we was hunting for a supernova remnant?” he probed.

She achieved a dry tone: “Since you had me investigate the problem, and soon thereafter announced your plans for a ‘vacation Wp,’ the inference was fairly obvious.”

** A

Any notion why I should want a white dwarf or a black hole instead of a nice glass red wine?”

Her pulse knocked. “Yes, I think I’ve reasoned it out.” And I think David mcnj have done so before cither of us, almost ten years ago. Wlien you, Grandfather, asked me to use in secret-the data hanks and computers at Luna Astrocenter, where she worked, lie had given a typically cryptic reason. “Could be this leads to a nice gob of profit nobody else’s nose should root around in because mine is plenty big enough.” She didn’t blame him for being close-mouthed, then. The League’s self-regulation was breaking down, competition grew ever more literally cutthroat, and governments snarled not only at the capitalists but at each other. The Pax Mercatoriu was drawing to an end and, while she had never wholly approved of it, she sometimes dreaded the future.

The task he set her was sufficiently interesting to blot out her fears. However unimaginably violent, the suicides of giant suns by supernova bursts, which may outshine a hundred billion living stars, are not rare cosmic events. The remains, in varying stages of decaywhite dwarfs, neutron stars, in certain cases those eldritch not-quitethings known as black holes-are estimated to number fifty million in our galaxy alone. But its arms spiral across a hundred thousand lightyears. In this raw immensity, the prospects of finding by chance a body the size of a smallish planet or less, radiating corpse-feebly if at all, are negligible.

(The analogy with biological death and decomposition is not morbid. Those lay the foundation for new life and further evolution. Supernovae, hurling atoms together in fusing fury, casting them forth into space as their own final gasps, have given us all the heavier elements, some of them vital, in our worlds and our bodies.) No one hitherto had-openly-attempted a more subtle search. The scientists had too much else to do, as discovery exploded outward. Persons who wished to study supernova processes saw a larger variety of known cases than could be dealt with in lifetimes. Epsilon Aurigae, Sinus B, and Valenderay were simply among the most famous examples.

Coya in Astrocenter had at her beck every fact which Technic civilization had ever gathered about the stellar part of the universe. From the known distribution of former supernovae, together with data on other star types, dust, gas, radiation, magnetism, present location and concentrations, the time derivatives of these quantities: using well-established theories of galactic development, it is possible to compute with reasonable probability the distribution of «n” discovered dark giants within a radius of a few hundred parsecs. The problem is far more complex than that, of course; and the best of self-programming computers still needs a highly skilled sophont riding close herd on it, if anything is to be accomplished. Nor will the answers be absolute, even within that comparatively tiny sphere to which their validity is limited. The most you can learn is the likelihood (not the certainty) of a given type of object existing within such-and-such a distance of yourself, and the likeliest (not the indubitable) direction. To phrase it more accurately, you get a hierarchy of decreasingly probable solutions.

This suffices. If you have the patience, and money, to search on a path defined by the equations, you will in time find the kind of body you are interested in.

Coya had taken for granted that no one before van Rijn had been that interested. But the completeness of Astrocenter’s electronicrecords extended to noting who had run which program when. The purpose was to avoid duplication of effort, in an era when nobody could keep up with the literature in the smallest specialty. Out of habit rather than logic, Coya called for this information and-I found out that ten years earlier, David wanted to know precisely what you, Grandfather, now did. But he never told you, nor said where he and his partners went afterward, or anything. Pain: Nor has he told me. And I have not told you. Instead, I made you take me along; and before leaving, I sent David a letter saying everything 1 knew and suspected.

Resolution: All right, Nick van Rijn! You keep complaining about how moralistic my generation is. Let’s see how you like getting some cards off the bottom of the deck!

Yet she could not hate an old man who loved her.

“What do you mean by your ‘alternative’?” she whispered.

‘Why, simple.” He shrugged like a mountain sending off an avalanche. “If we do not find a retired supernova, being used in a Way as original as spinning the peach basket, then we are up against * civilization outside ours, infiltrating ours, same as the Shenna didexcept this one got technology would make ours let go in its diapers ^W scream, ‘Papa, Papa, in the closet is a boogeyman!’” Unaccustomed grimness descended on him. “I think, in that case, really is • boogeyman, too.”

Chill entered her guts. “Supermetals?”

“What else?” He took a gulp of beer. “Ha, you is guessed what got me started was Supermetals?”

She finished her coffee and set the cup on a table. It rattled loud through a stretching silence. “Yes,” she said at length, flat-voiced. “You’ve given me a lot of hours to puzzle over what this expedition is for.”

“A jigsaw puzzle it is indeed, girl, and us sitting with bottoms snuggled in front of the jigsaw.”

“In view of the very, very special kind of supernova-and-companion you thought might be somewhere not too far from Sol, and wanted me to compute about-in view of that, and of what

Supermetals is doing, sure, I’ve arrived at a guess.”

“Has you likewise taken into account the fact Supermetals is not just secretive about everything like is its right, but refuses to join the League?”

“That’s also its right.”

“Truly true. Nonetheleast, the advantages of belonging is maybe not what they used to was; but they do outweigh what small surrender of anatomy is required.”

“You mean autonomy, don’t you?”

“I suppose. Must be I was thinking of women. A stern chaste is a long chaste .... But you never got impure thoughts.” Van Rijn had the tact not to look at her while he rambled, and to become serious again immediately: “You better hope, you heathen, and I better pray, the Supermetals what the agents of Supermetals is peddling do not come out of a furnace run by anybody except God Himself.” The primordial element, with which creation presumably began, is hydrogen-1, a single proton accompanied by a single electron. To this day, it comprises the overwhelming bulk of matter in the universe. Vast masses of it condensed into globes, which grew hot enough from that infall to light thermonuclear fires. Atoms melted together, forming higher elements. Novae, supernovae-and, less picturesquely but more importantly, smaller suns shedding gas in their red giant phase-spread these through space, to enter into later generations of stars. Thus came planets, life, and awareness.

Throughout the periodic table, many isotopes are radioactive. From polonium (number 84) on, none are stable. Protons packed together in that quantity generate forces of repulsion with which the forces of attraction cannot forever cope. Sooner or later, these atoms will break up. The probability of disintegration-in effect, the halflife-depends on the particular structure. In general, though, the higher the atomic number, the lower the stability.

Early researchers thought the natural series ended at uranium. If further elements had once existed, they had long since perished. Neptunium, plutonium, and the rest must be made artificially. Later, traces of them were found in nature: but merely traces, and only of nuclei whose atomic numbers were below 100. The creation of new substances grew progressively more difficult, because of proton repulsion, and less rewarding, because of vanishingly brief existence, as atomic number increased. Few people expected a figure as high as 120 would ever be reached.

Well, few people expected gravity control or faster-than-light travel, either. The universe is rather bigger and more complicated than any given set of brains. Already in those days, an astonishing truth was soon revealed. Beyond a certain point, nuclei become more stable. The periodic table contains an “island of stability,” bounded on the near side by ghostly short-lived isotopes like those of 112 and 113, on the far side by the still more speedily fragmenting 123, 124 ... etc .... on to the next “island” which theory says could exist but practice has not reached save on the most infinitesimal scale. The first is amply hard to attain. There are no easy intermediate stages, like the neptunium which is a stage between uranium and plutonium. Beyond 100, a half-life of a few hours is Methuselan; most are measured in seconds or less. You build your nuclei by main force, slamming particles into atoms too hard for them to rebound-though not so hard that the targets shatter.

To make a few micrograms of, say, element 114, eka-platinum, was a laboratory triumph. Aside from knowledge gained, it had no industrial meaning.

Engineers grew wistful about that. The proper isotope of ekaplatinum will not endure forever; yet its half-life is around a quarter million years, abundant for mortal purposes, a radioactivity too weak to demand special precautions. It is lustrous white, dense (31.7), of high melting point (ca. 4700°C.), nontoxic, hard and tough and “Distant. You can only get it into solution by grinding it to dust, then it with H2F2 and fluorine gas, under pressure at 250°.

tan alloy to produce metals with a range of properties an engineer would scarcely dare daydream about. Or, pure, used as a catalyst, it can become a veritable Philosopher’s Stone. Its neighbors on the island are still more fascinating.

When Satan was discovered, talk arose of large-scale manufacture. Calculations soon damped it. The mills which were being designed would use rivers and .seas and an entire atmosphere for cooling, \vhole continents for dumping wastes, in producing special isotopes by the ton. But these isotopes would all belong to elements below 100. Not even on Satan could modern technology handle the energies involved in creating, within reasonable time, a ton of eka-platinum; and supposing this were somehow possible, the cost would remain out of anybody’s reach.

The engineers sighed ... until a new company appeared, offering supermetals by the ingot or the shipload, at prices high but economic. The source of supply was not revealed. Governments and the Council of the League remembered the Shenna.

To them, a Cynthian named Tso Yu explained blandly that the organization for which she spoke had developed a new process which it chose not to patent but to keep proprietary. Obviously, she said, new laws of nature had been discovered first; but Supermetals felt no obligation to publish for the benefit of science. Let science do its own sweating. Nor did her company wish to join the League, or put itself under any government. If some did not grant it license to operate in their territories, why, there was no lack of others who would. In the three years since, engineers had begun doing things and building devices which were to bring about the same kind of revolution as did the transistor, the fusion converter, or the negagravity generator. Meanwhile a horde of investigators, public and private, went quietly frantic.

The crews who delivered the cargoes and the agents who sold them were a mixed lot, albeit of known species. A high proportion were from backward worlds like Diomedes, Woden, or Ikrananka; some originated in neglected colonies like Lochlann (human) or Catawrayannis (Cynthian). This was understandable. Beings to whom Supermetals had given an education and a chance to better themselves and help out their folk at home would be especially loyal to it. Enough employees hailed from sophisticated milieus to deal on equal terms with League executives.

Tin’s did not appear to be a Shenn situation. Whenever an individual’s past life could be tiaced, it proved normal, up to the point when Stipermetals engaged linn (hei, it, yx ... )-and was not really abnormal now. Asked point blank, the being would say he didn’t know himself wheie the factoiy was 01 how it functioned or who the ultimate owners were. He was meiely doing a well-paid job for a good, wnpiitico outfit. The evidence boie him out.

(“I suspect, me, some detectiving was done by kidnaps, dings, and afterward murder,” van Rijn said bleakly. “I would nevei allow that, but fact is, a few Supermetals people have disappeared. And ... as youngsters like you, Coya, get moie piudish, the companies and governments get more biutish.” She answered “The second is part of the reason for the fast”)

Scontships trailed the canieis and leained that they always rende/vonsed with smaller craft, built for speed and agility. Thiee or four of these would unload into a merchantman, then dash off in unpredictable directions, using every evasive maneuver in the book and a few that the League had thought were its own seciets. They did not stop dodging until their instruments confirmed that they had shaken their .shadoweis.

Politicians and capitalists alike organized expensive attempts to duplicate the discoveries of whoever was behind Supermetals. Thus far, progrevs was nil. A body of opinion grew, that that order of capabilities belonged to a society as far ahead of the Techmc as the latter was ahead of the neolithic. Then why this quiet invasion? “I’m surprised nobody but you has thought of the snpemova alternative,” Coya said.

“Well, it has barely been three years,” van Rijn answered. “And the business began small. It is still not big. Nothing flashy-splashy: some kilotons arriving annually, of stuff what is useful and will get more useful after more is leained about the piopeities. Meanwlnles, everybody got lots else to think about, the usual skulduggeries and unknowns and whatnots. Fmalwise, remember, I am pustulent”°od en ondergang, this Anglic!-I am postulating something which •sttonomically is hyperimprobable. If you asked a colleague offhand, JT* ™it response would be that it isn’t possible. His second would be, n* is a sensible man, How would you like to come to his place for “ He knocked the dottle from his pipe. “No doubt somebody more will eventual think of it too, and sic a computer onto the problem of: Is this sort of thing possible, and if so, where might we find one?”

He stroked his goatee. “Howsomever,” he continued musingly, “I think a good whiles must pass before the idea does occur. You see, the ordinary being does not care. He buys from what is on the market without wondering where it come from or what it means. Besides, Supermetals has not gone after publicity, it uses direct contacts; and what officials are concerned about Supermetals has been happy to avoid publicity themselves. A big harroo might too easy get out of control, lose them votes or profits or something.”

“Nevertheless,” Coya said, “a number of bright minds are worrying; and the number grows as the amount of supermetals brought in does.”

“/«. Except who wears those minds? Near-as-damn all is corporation executives, politicians, laboratory scientists, military officers, and-now I will have to wash my mouth out with Geneverbureaucrats. In shorts, they is planetlubbers. When they cross space, they go by cozy passenger ships, to cities where everything is known except where is a restaurant fit to eat in that don’t charge as if the dessert was eka-platinum a la mode.

“Me, my first jobs was on prospecting voyages. And I traveled plenty after I founded Solar, troublepotshooting on the frontier and beyond in my own personals. I know-every genuine spaceman knows, down in his marrow like no deskman ever can-how God always makes surprises on us so we don’t get too proud, or maybe just for fun. To me it came natural to ask myself: What joke might God have played on the theorists this time?”

“I hope it is only a joke,” Coya said.

The star remained a titan in mass. In dimensions, it was hardly larger than Earth, and shrinking still, megayear by megayear, until at last light itself could no longer escape and there would be in the universe one more point of elemental blackness and strangeness. That process was scarcely started-Coya estimated the explosion had occurred some 500 millennia ago-and the giant-become-dwarf radiated dimly in the visible spectrum, luridly in the X-ray and gamma bands. That is, each square centimeter emitted a gale of hard quanta; but so small was the area in interstellar space that the total was a mere spark, undetectable unless you came within a few parsecs. Standing in the observation turret, staring into a viewscreen set for maximum photoamplifieation, she discerned a wan-white speck amidst stars which thronged the sky and, themselves made to seem extra brilliant, hurt her eyes. She looked away, toward the instru merits around her which were avidly gathering data. The ship whispered and pulsed, no longer under hyperdrive but accelerating on negagravity thrust.

Hirharouk’s voice blew cool out of the intercom, from the navigation bridge where he was: “The existence of a companion is now confirmed. We will need a long baseline to establish its position, but preliminary indications are of a radius vector between forty and fifty a.u.”

Coya marveled at a detection system which could identify the light-bending due to a substellar object at that distance. Any observatory would covet such equipment. Her thought went to van Rijn: // you paid what it cost, Gunung Tuan, you were smelling big money.

“So far?” came her grandfather’s words. “By damn, a chilly ways out, enough to freeze your astronomy off.”

“It had to be,” she said. “This was an A-zero: radiation equal to a hundred Sols. Closer in, even a superjovian would have been cooked down to the bare metal-as happened when the sun detonated.”

“Ja, I knows, I knows, my dear. I only did not foresee things here was on quite this big a scale .... Well, we can’t spend weeks at sublight. Go hyper, Hirharouk, first to get your baseline sights, next to come near the planet.”

“Hyperdrive, this deep in a gravitational well?” Coya exclaimed. “Is hokay if you got good engines well tuned, and you bet ours is tuned like a late Beethoven quartet. Music, maestro!”

Coya shook her head before she prepared to continue gathering information under the new conditions of travel.

Again Dewfall ran on gravs. Van Rijn agreed that trying to pass within visual range of the ultimate goal, faster than light, when to Wem it was still little more than a mystery wrapped in conjectures, Would be a needlessly expensive form of suicide.

standing on the command bridge between him and Hirharouk, °ya stared at the meters and displays filling an entire bulkhead, as if they could tell more than the heavens in the screens. And they could, they could, hut they were not the Earth-built devices she had been using; they were Ythrian and she did not know how to read them. Poised on his perch, crested carnivore head lifted against the Milky Way, Hiiharouk said: “Data are pouring in as we approach. We should make optical pickup in less than an hour.”

“Hum-hum, better call battle stations,” the man proposed. “This crew needs scant notice. Let them slake any soul-thirst they feel. God may smite some of us this day.” Through the intercom keened a melody, plangent strings and thuttering drums and shiilling pipes, like nothing Earth had brought forth but still speaking to Coya of hunters high among their winds.

Terror stabbed her. “You can’t expect to fight!” she cried. “Oh, an ordinary business precaution,” van Rijn smiled.

“No! We mustn’t!”

“Why not, if they are here and do rumblefumbles at us?”

She opened her lips, pulled them shut again, and stood in anguish. / can’t tell you why not. How can I tell yon these may be David’s people?

“At least we are sure that Supermetals is not a whinna for an alien society,” Hiiharouk said. Coya remembered vaguely, through the racket in her temples, a demonstration of the whinna during her groundside visit to Ythri. It was a kind of veil, used by some to camouflage themselves, to resemble floating mists in the eyes of undying prey; and this practical use had led to a form of dreamlovely airborne dance; and-And here I was caught in the wonder of what we have found, a thing which must be almost unique even in tin’s galaxy full of miracles ... and everything’s gotten tangled and ugly and, and, David, what can we do?

She heard van Rijn: “Well, we are not total-sure. Could be our finding is accidental; or maybe the planet is not like we suppose. We got to check on that, and hope the check don’t bounce back in our snoots.”

“Nuclear engines are in operation around our quarry,” Hirharouk said. “Neutrinos show it. What else would they belong to save a working base and spacecraft?”

Van Rijn clasped hands over rump and paced, slap-slap-slap over the bare deck. “What can we try and predict in advance? Forewarned is forearmed, they say, and the four arms I want right now is a knife, a blaster, a machine gun, and a rover missile, nothing fancy, maybe a megaton.”

“The mass of the planet—” Hirharouk consulted a readout. The figure he gave corresponded approximately to Saturn.

“No bigger?” asked van Rijn, surprised.

“Originally, yes,” Coya heard herself say. The scientist in her was what spoke, while her heart threshed about like any animal netted by a stooping Ythrian. “A gas giant, barely substellar. The supernova blew most of that away-you can hardly say it boiled the gases off; we have no words for what happened-and nothing was left except a core of nickel-iron and heavier elements.”

She halted, noticed Hirharouk’s yellow gaze intent on her, and realized the skipper must know rather little of the theory behind this venture. To him she had not been repeating banalities. And he was interested. If she could please him by explaining in simple terms, then maybe laterShe addressed him: “Of course, when the pressure of the outer layers was removed, that core must have exploded into new allotropes, a convulsion which flung away the last atmosphere and maybe a lot of solid matter. Better keep a sharp lookout for meteoroids.”

“That is automatic,” he assured her. “My wonder is why a planet should exist. I was taught that giant stars, able to become supernovae, do not have them.”

“Well, they is still scratching their brains to account for Betelgeuse,” van Rijn remarked.

“In this case,” Coya told the Ythrian, “the explanation comes CMier. True, the extremely massive suns do not in general allow planetary systems to condense around them. The parameters aren’t right. However, you know giants can be partners in multiple star systems, and sometimes the difference between partners is quite I”tt8e—So, after I was alerted to the idea that it might happen, and a program which investigated the possibility in detail, I that, yes, under special conditions, a double can form in one member is a large sun and one a superjovian planet.

* extrapolated backward things like the motion of dust and changes in galactic magnetism, et cetera-it turned out that such C°Uld CXiSt ‘n thlS neighborhood—”

glance crossed the merchant’s craggy features. You found a cine in the appearance of the supermetals, she thought. David got the idea all by himself. The lean smihnosed face, the Vega-blue eyes came between her and the old man.

Of course, David may not have been involved. Tliis could be a coincidence. Please, God of my grandfather Whom I don’t believe in, please make it a coincidence. Make those ships ahead of us belong not to harmless miners but to the great and terrible Elder Race. She knew the prayer would not be granted. And neither van Rijn nor Ilirharouk assumed that the miners were necessarily harmless. She talked fast, to stave off silence: “I daresay you’ve heard this before, Captain, but you may like to have me recapitulate in a few words. When a supernova erupts, it floods out neutrons in quantities that I, I can put a number to, perhaps, but I cannot comprehend. In a full range of energies, too, and the same for other kinds of particles and quanta-Do you see? Any possible reaction must happen. “Of course, the starting materials available, the reaction rates, the yields, every quantity differs from case to case. The big nuclei which get formed, like the actinides, are a very small percentage of the total. The supermetals are far less. They scatter so thinly into space that they’re effectively lost. No detectable amount enters into the formation of a star or planet afterward.

“Except-here-here was a companion, a planet-sized companion, turned into a bare metallic globe. I wouldn’t try to guess how many quintillion tons of blasted-out incandescent gases washed across it. Some of those alloyed with the molten surface, maybe some plated out-and the supermetals, with their high condensation temperatures, were favored.

“A minute fraction of the total was supermetals, yes, and a minute fraction of that was captured by the planet, also yes. But this amounted to-how much?-billions of tons? Not hard to extract from combination by modern methods; and a part may actually be lying around pure. It’s radioactive; one must be careful, especially of the shorter-lived products, and a lot has decayed away by now. Still, what’s left is more than our puny civilization can ever consume. It took a genius to think this might be!”

She grew aware of van Rijn’s eyes upon her. He had stopped pacing and stood troll-burly, tugging his beard.

A whistle rescued her. Planha words struck from the intercomIlirharouk’s feathers rippled in a .series of expressions she could not read; his tautness was unmistakable.

She drew near to the man’s bulk. “What next?” she whispered. “Can you follow what they’re saying?”

“Ja, pretty well; anyhow, better than I can follow words in an opera. Detectors show three ships leaving planetary orbit on an intercept course. The rest stay behind. No doubt those is the working vessels. What they send to us is their men-of-war.”

Seen under full screen magnification, the supermetal world showed still less against the constellations than had the now invisible supernova corpse-a ball, dimly reflecting star-glow, its edge sharp athwart distant brightnesses. And yet, Coya thought: a world. It could not be a smooth sphere. There must be uplands, lowlands, flatlands, depths, ranges and ravines, cliffs whose gloom was flecked with gold, plains where mercury glaciers glimmered; there must be internal heat, shudders in the steel soil, volcanoes spouting forth flame and radioactive ash; eternally barren, it must nonetheless mumble with a life of its own.

Had David Falkayn trod those lands? He would have, she knew, merrily swearing because beyond the ship’s generated field he and his space gear weighed five or six times what they ought, and no matter the multitudinous death traps which a place so uncanny must hold in every shadow. Naturally, those shadows had to be searched out; whoever would mine the metals had first to spend years, and doubtless lives, in exploring, and studying, and the development and testing and redevelopment of machinery ... but that wouldn’t concern David. He was a charger, not a plowhorse. Having made his discovery, told chosen beings about it, perhaps helped them raise the initial funds and recruit members of races which could better stand nigh weight than men can-having done that, he’d depart on a new adventure, or stop off in the Solar Commonwealth and take Coya Conyon out dancing.

“///an wherill-ll cha qiielhm.”

The words, and Hirharouk’s response, yanked her back to this iastant. “What?”

Shush.” Van Rijn, head cocked, waved her to silence. “By damn, *is sounds spiky. I should tell you, Shush-kebab.”

*». » •*

Hirharouk related: “Instruments show one of the three vessels is almost equal to ours. Its attendants are less, but in a formation to let .em teke full advantage of their firepower. If that is in proportion to ze. which I see no reason to doubt, we are outgunned. Nor do they act as if they simply hope to frighten us off. That formation and its paths are well calculated to bar our escape spaceward.”

“Can you give me details-? No, wait.” Van Rijn swung on Coya. “Bellybird, you took a stonkerish lot of readings on the sun, and right here is an input-output panel you can switch to the computer system you was using. I also ordered, when I chartered the ship, should be a program for instant translation between Anglic language, Arabic numerals, metric units, whatever else kinds of ics is useful-translations back and forth between those and the Planha sort. Think you could quick-like do some figuring for us?” He clapped her shoulder, nearly felling her. “I know you can.” His voice dropped. “I remember your grandmother.”

Her mouth was dry, her palms were wet, it thudded in her ears. She thought of David Falkayn and said, “Yes. What do you want?”

“Mainly the pattern of the gravitational field, and what phenomena we can expect at the different levels of intensity. Plus radiation, electromagnetics, anything else you got time to program for. But we is fairly well protected against those, so don’t worry if you don’t get a chance to go into details there. Nor don’t let outside talkings distract you-Whoops!” Hirharouk was receiving a fresh report. “Speak of the devil and he gives you horns.”

The other commander had obviously sent a call on a standard band, which had been accepted. As the image screen awoke, Coya felt hammerstruck. Adzel!

No ... no ... the head belonged to a Wodenite, but not the dear dragon who had given her rides on his back when she was little and had tried in his earnest, tolerant fashion to explain his Buddhism to her when she grew older. Behind the being she made out a ravenfaced Ikranankan and a human in the gaib of a colony she couldn’t identify.

His rubbery lips shaped good Anglic, a basso which went through her bones: “Greeting. Commodore Nadi speaks.”

Van Rijn thrust his nose toward the scanner. “Whose commodore? he demanded like a gravel hauler dumping its load.

For a second, Nadi was shaken. He rallied and spoke firmly: “Kho, I know who you are, Freeman van Rijn. What an unexpected honor, that you should personally visit our enterprise.”

“Which is Supennetals, me?”

“It would be impolite to suggest you had failed to reach that conclusion.”

Van Rijn signalled Coya behind his back. She flung herself at the chair before the computer terminal. Hirharouk perched imperturbable, slowly fanning his wings. The Ythrian music had ended. She heard a rustle and whisper through the intercom, along the hurtling hull.

Words continued. Her work was standardized enough that she could follow them.

“Well, you see, Commodore, there I sat, not got much to do no more, lonely old man like I am except when a girl goes wheedlewheedle at me, plenty time for thinking, which is not fun like drinking but you can do it alone and it is easier on the kidneys and the hangovers next day are not too much worse. I thought, if the supermetals is not made by an industrial process we don’t understand, must be they was made by a natural one, maybe one we do know a little about. That would have to be a supernova. Except a supernova blows everything out into space, and the supermetals is so small, proportional, that they get lost. Unless the supernova had a companion what could catch them?”

“Freeman, pray accept my admiration. Does your perspicacity extend to deducing who is behind our undertaking?”

“/a, I can say, bold and bald, who you undertakers are. A consortium of itsy-bitsy operators, most from poor or primitive societies, pooling what capital they can scrape together. You got to keep the secret, because if they know about this hoard you found, the powerful outfits will horn themselves in and you out; and what chance you get afterward, in courts they can buy out of petty cash? No, you will keep this hidden long as you possible can. In the end, somebody is bound to repeat my sherlockery. But give you several more years, and you will have pumped gigacredits clear profit out of here. You may actual have got so rich you can defend your property.”

Coya could all but see the toilers in their darkness-in orbital «*tions; aboard spacecraft; down on the graveyard surface, where robots dug ores and ran refineries, and sentient beings stood their itches under the murk and chill and weight and radiation and millionfold perils of Eka-World

J^adi, slow and soft: “That is why we have these fighting ships, “eeman and Captain.”

‘‘ **Y j iou do not suppose,” van Rijn retorted cheerily, “I would come *?•* tar in my own precious blubber and forget to leave behind a message they will scan if I am not home in time to race for the Micronesia Cup?”

“As a matter of fact, Freeman, I suppose precisely that. The potential gains here are sufficient to justify virtually any risk, whether the game be played for money or ... something else.” Pause. “If you have indeed left a message, you will possess hostage value. Your rivals may be happy to see you a captive, but you have allies and employees who will exert influence. My sincere apologies, Freeman, Captain, everyone aboard your vessel. We will try to make your detention pleasant.”

Van Rijn’s bellow quivered in the framework. “Wat drommel? You sit smooth and calm like buttered granite and say you will make us prisoners?”

“You may not leave. If you try, we will regretfully open fire.”

“You are getting on top of yourself. I warn you, always she finds nothing except an empty larder, Old Mother Hubris.”

“Freeman, please consider. We noted your hyperdrive vibrations and made ready. You cannot get past us to spaceward. Positions and vectors guarantee that one of our vessels will be able to close in, engage, and keep you busy until the other two arrive.” Reluctantly, van Rijn nodded. Nadi continued: “True, you can double back toward the sun. Evidently you can use hyperdrive closer to it than most. But you cannot go in that direction at anywhere near top pseudospeed without certain destruction. We, proceeding circuitously, but therefore able to go a great deal faster, will keep ahead of you. We will calculate the conoid in which your possible paths spaceward lie, and again take a formation you cannot evade.”

“You is real anxious we should taste your homebrew, ha?”

“Freeman, I beg you, yield at once. I promise fair treatment-if feasible, compensation-and while you are among us, I will explain why we of Supermetals have no choice.”

“Hirharouk,” van Rijn said, “maybe you can talk at this slagbrain.” He stamped out of scanner reach. The Ythrian threw him a dubious glance but entered into debate with the Wodenite. Van Rijn hulked over Coya where she sat. “How you coming?” he whispered, no louder than a Force Five wind.

She gestured at the summary projected on a screen. Her comput3’ tions were of a kind she often handled. The results were shown in such terms as diagrams and equations of equipotential surfaces, familiar to a space captain. Van Rijn read them and nodded. “We got enough information to set out on,” he decided. “The rest you can figure while we go.”

Shocked, she gaped at him. “What? Go? But we’re caught!”

“He thinks that. Me, I figured whoever squats on a treasure chest will keep guards, and the guards will not be glimmerwits but smart, trained oscos, in spite of what I called the Commodore. They might well cook for us a cake like what we is now baked in. Ergo, I made a surprise recipe for them.” Van Rijn’s regard turned grave. “It was for use only if we found we was sailing through dire straits. The surprise may turn around and bite us. Then we is dead. But better dead than losing years in the nicest jail, me?” (And she could not speak to him of David.) “I said this trip might be dangerous.” Enormous and feather-gentle, a hand stroked down her hair. “I is very sorry, Beatrix, Ramona.” The names he murmured were of her mother and grandmother.

Whirling, he returned to Hirharouk, who matched pride against Nadi’s patience, and uttered a few rapid-fire Planha words. The Ythrian gave instant assent. Suddenly Coya knew why the man had chosen a ship of that planet. Hirharouk continued his argument. Van Rijn went to the main command panel, snapped forth orders, and took charge of Dewfall.

At top acceleration, she sprang back toward the sun.

Of that passage, Coya afterward remembered little. First she glimpsed the flashes when nuclear warheads drove at her, and awaited death. But van Rijn and Hirharouk had adjusted well their vector relative to the enemy’s. During an hour of negagrav flight, no missile could gather sufficient relative velocity to get past defensive fire; and that was what made those flames in heaven.

Then it became halfway safe to go hyper. That must be at a slower pace than in the emptiness between stars; but within an hour, the fleeing craft neared the dwarf. There, as gravitation intensified, she had to resume normal state.

Instead of swinging wide, she opened full thrust almost straight toward the disc.

Loya was too busy to notice much of what happened around her. Mte must calculate, counsel, hang into her seat harness as forces tore ner which were too huge for the compensator fields. She saw the unclead supernova grow in the viewscreens till its baneful radiance rilled them; she heard the ribs of the vessel groan and felt them shudder beneath stress; she watched the tale of the radiation meters mounting and knew how close she came to a dose whose ravages medicine could not heal; she heard orders bawled by van Rijn, fluted by Hirharouk, and whistling replies and storm of wingbeats, always triumphant though Dew/all flew between the teeth of destruction. But mainly she was part of the machinery.

And the hours passed and the hours passed.

They could not have done what they did without advance preparation. Van Rijn had foreseen the contingency and ordered computations made whose results were in the data banks. Her job was to insert numbers and functions corresponding to the reality on hand, and get answers by which he and Hirharouk might steer. The work filled her, crowded out terror and sometimes the memory of David.

Appalled, Nadi watched his quarry vanish off his telltales. He had followed on hyperdrive as close as he dared, and afterward at sublight closer than he ought to have dared. But for him was no possibility of plunging in a hairpin hyperbola around yonder incandescence. In all the years he had been stationed here, not he nor his fellows had imagined anyone would ever venture near the roiling remnant of a sun which had once burned brighter than its whole galaxy. Thus there were no precalculations in storage, nor days granted him to program them on a larger device than a ship might carry.

Radiation was not the barrier. It was easy to figure how narrow an approach a crew could endure behind a given amount of armor. But a mass of half a dozen Sols, pressed into the volume of an Earth, has stupendous gravitational power; the warped space around makes the laws of nature take on an eerie aspect. Moreover, a dwarf star spins at a fantastic rate: which generates relativistic forces, describable only if you have determined the precise quantities involved. And pulsations, normally found nowhere outside the atomic nucleus, reach across a million or more kilometersAfter the Ythrian craft whipped around the globe, into weirdness, Nadi had no way of knowing what she did, how she moved. He could not foretell where she would be when she again became detectable. And thus he could plan no interception pattern.

He could do nothing but hope she would never reappear. A ship flying so close, not simply orbiting but flying, would be seized, torn apart, and hauled into the star, unless the pilot and his computers knew exactly what they did.

Or almost exactly. That was a crazily chancy ride. When Coya could glance from her desk, she saw blaze in the screens, Hirharouk clutching his perch with both hands while his wings thundered and he yelled for joy, van Rijn on his knees in prayer. Then they ran into a meteoroid swarm (she supposed) which rebounded off their shieldfields and sent them careening off trajectory; and the man shook his fist, commenced on a mighty oath, glimpsed her and turned it into a Biblical “Damask rose and shittah tree!” Later, when something else went wrong-some interaction with a plasma cloud-he came to her, bent over and kissed her brow.

They won past reef and riptide, lined out for deep space, switched back into hyperdrive and ran on homeward.

Coincidences do happen. The life would be freakish which held none of them.

Mttddlin’ Tliroiigh, bound for Eka-World in response to Goya’s letter, passed within detection range of Dewfall, made contact, and laid alongside. The pioneers boarded.

This was less than a day after the bnish with oblivion. And under no circumstances do Ythrians go in for tumultuous greetings. Apart from Hirharouk, who felt he must represent his choth, the crew stayed at rest. Coya, roused by van Rijn, swallowed a stimpill, dressed, and hastened to the flying hold-the sole chamber aboard which would comfortably accommodate Adzel. In its echoing dim space she threw her arms partway around him, took Chee Lan into her embrace, kissed David Falkayn and wept and kissed him and kteed him.

Van Rijn cleared his throat. “A-hem!” he grumbled. “Also bgr-rrm. * Been sitting here hours on end, till my end is sore, wondering when everybody elses would come awake and make celebrations by me; •O” I get word about you three mosquito-ears is coming in, and by »X own self I hustle stuff for a party.” He waved at the table he had **•> bottles and glasses, platesful of breads, cheeses, sausage, lox,—*™r> tanuba, from somewhere a vaseful of flowers. Mozart lilted in ™* Background. “Well, ha, poets tell us love is enduring, but I tell us good food is not, so we take our funs in the right order, me?” Formerly Falkayn would have laughed and tossed off the first icy muglet of akvavit; he would have followed it with a beer chaser and an invitation to Goya that they see what they could dance to this music. Now she felt sinews tighten in the fingers that enclosed hers; across her shoulder he said carefully: “Sir, before we relax, could you let me know what’s happened to you?”

Van Rijn got busy with a cigar. Goya looked a plea at Adzel, stroked Ghee’s fur where the Cynthian crouched on a chair, and found no voice. Hirharouk told the story in a few sharp words. “A-a-ah,” Falkayn breathed. “Judas priest. Goya, they ran you that close to that hellkeltle—” His right hand let go of hers to clasp her waist. She felt the grip tremble and grew dizzy with joy. “Well,” van Rijn huffed, “I didn’t want she should come, my dear tender little bellybird, /«, tender like tool steel—” Goya had a sense of being put behind Falkayn, as a man puts a woman when menace draws near. “Sir,” he said most levelly, “I know, or can guess, about that. We can discuss it later if you want. What I’d like to know immediately, please, is what you propose to do about the Supermetals consortium.”

Van Rijn kindled his cigar and twirled a mustache. “You understand,” he said, “I am not angry if they keep things under the posies. By damn, though, they tried to make me a prisoner or else shoot me to bits of lard what would go into the next generation of planets. And Goya, too, Davy boy, don’t forget Goya, except she would make those planets prettier. For that, they going to pay.”

“What have you in mind?”

“Oh ... a cut. Not the most unkindest, neither. Maybe like ten percent of gross.”

The creases deepened which a hundred suns had weathered into Falkayn’s countenance. “Sir, you don’t need the money. You stopped needing more money a long while back. To you it’s nothing but a counter in a game. Maybe, for you, the only game in town. Those beings aft of us, however-they are not playing,”

“What do they do, then?”

Surprisingly, Hirharouk spoke. “Freeman, you know the answer. They seek to win that which will let their peoples fly free.” Standing on his wings, he could not spread gold-bronze plumes; but his head rose high. “In the end, God the Hunter strikes every being ancl everything which beings have made. Upon your way of life I see His shadow. Let the new come to birth in peace.”

From Falkayn’s hands, Coya begged: “Gitnung Titan, all you have to do is do nothing. Say nothing. You’ve won your victory. Tell them that’s enough for you, that you too are their friend.”

She had often watched van Rijn turn red-never before white. His shout came ragged: “Ja! Ja! Friend! So nice, so kind, maybe so farsighted—Who, what I thought of like a son, broke his oath of fealty to me? Who broke kinship?”

He suspected, Coya realized sickly, but he wouldn’t admit it to himself till this minute, when I let out the truth. She held Falkayn sufficiently hard for everyone to see.

Chee Lan arched her back. Adzel grew altogether still. Falkayn forgot Coya-she could feel how he did-and looked straight at his chief while he said, word by word like blows of a hammer: “Do you want a response? I deem best we let what is past stay dead.” Their gazes drew apart. Falkayn’s dropped to Coya. The merchant watched them standing together for a soundless minute. And upon him were the eyes of Adzel, Chee, and Hirharouk the sky dweller. He shook his head. “Hokay,” said Nicholas van Rijn, well-nigh too low to hear. “I keep my mouth shut. Always. Now can we sit down and have our party for making you welcome?” He moved to pour from a bottle; and Coya saw that he was indeed old.

The rest would appear to be everyone’s knowledge: how at last, inevitably, the secret of Mirkheim’s existence was ripped asunder; how the contest for its possession brought on the Babur War; how that struggle turned out to be the first civil war in the Commonwealth and gave the Polesotechnic League a mortal wound. The organization would linger on for another hundred Terran years, but waning and disintegrating; in truth, already it had ceased to be what it began as, the proud upbearer of liberty. Eventually the Commonwealth, too, went under. The Troubles were only quelled with the rise and expansion of the Empire-and its interior peace is often bought with foreign violence, as Ythri and Avalon have learned. Honor be forever theirs whose deathpride preserved for us our right to rule ourselves!

Surely much of that spirit flies through time from David and Coya Conyon/Falkayn. When they led to this planet humans who would found new homes, they were doing more than escaping from the chaos they foresaw; they were raising afresh the ancient banner of freedom. When they obtained the protection and cooperation of Ythri, they knew-it is in their writings-how rich and strong a world must come from the dwelling together of two races so unlike. Thus far the common wisdom. As for the creation and history of our choth upon Avalon, that is in The Sky Book of Stormgate. Yet Hloch has somewhat more to give you before his own purpose is fully served. As you well know, our unique society did not come easily into being. Especially in the early years, misunderstandings conflicts, bitterness, even enmity would often strike talons into fofk’ Have you heard much of this from the human side? Belike not It is fitting that you learn.

Hloch has therefore chosen two final tales as representative. That they are told from youthful hoverpoints is, in his mind, very rHit The first of them is the last that Judith Dalmady/Lund.’reiAvrote for Morgana. Though she was then in her high old age, the memories upon which she was drawing were fresh.