Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (16 page)

Anarchy's charm and romance are located in literature only, not in history. Perhaps there are times when the correction of abuses grown intolerable under established government justifies the period of anarchy that is normally part of a mass revolution. A moral man, to choose so black a means, will make very sure of the excellence—and the possibility—of his end, and of the exclusion of every other road.

David Hume may have given us the most important statement in political science.

"As force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. 'Tis therefore on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as the most free and popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination; but he must at least have led his
mamalukes
or praetorian bands like men, by their opinion."

In a word, one may rule through force and fear; but there must still be some way to convince the police and other agents of power.

Now true: this century has brought us refinements the old tyrants never heard of. The Soviet Union, having learned from the Czars, sets all against all, so that no one knows who is an agent of State Security; and to this they added the innovation of consigning sane people to madhouses in order to cure them of their rebellion. Still, a government based on no more than fear is a government ready for collapse. Arthur Koestler, who had every reason to know, said that the necessary and sufficient condition for the collapse of the Soviet system was the free circulation of ideas within it; hence the Soviet dedication to keeping their subjects ignorant of true conditions and attitudes in the West.

Of course in the far future we will have remedied all that. Government will be rational, and command universal respect.

Perhaps.

The name of the ship was
Lapis Lazuli
, and in sunlight, in normal space, she gleamed like the gem she had been named after. She appeared, silently and instantaneously—like all Gilpin ships then or a thousand years earlier. She gleamed there, in the middle of a green wasteland of low mounds, bordered by forest on one side and a rushing river on the other.

That was on the Fourth Planet of a star named Goldenrod.

Lapis Lazuli
's mission, like the mission of her innumerable sisters sent out from Old Earth was, if possible, to find the far-scattered descendants of that great diaspora Saul Gilpin had set off by giving war-threatened Earth his cheap, simple, almost do-it-yourself star drive. Her crew were the New People of Old Earth, for only the unshakably sane had survived the last and most hideous of Earth's wars, and during the succeeding centuries they had bred a new race, an amalgam of all previous races, but one which—perhaps because only those who carried the necessary genes had survived—had sloughed off the least appealing traits of their predecessors. They were a beautiful people, as Greek gods and goddesses were beautiful, or the noble Buddhist statues of Japan's Nara Period. And among themselves, especially within families, they were telepathic, consciously so, and able to shut their minds completely—even to those screamed agonies and horrors of unknown and unknowable beings which, from the beginning, had barred Gilpin's Space to most men, and which only the strange Far Outers had been able to traverse willingly. It had been those Far Outers who, reporting throughout the inhabited Galaxy and beyond, had finally ended Old Earth's post-war quarantine, and it was from them and from the records of long-dead governments and religious sects and merchant venturers that the New People had gathered their data regarding the dispersed. A few had built new civilizations; many had barely maintained their cultural levels; some had reverted to desperate savagery; some had vanished without a trace.

Around the star named Goldenrod, seven planets circled, and there were records of two having been settled, almost simultaneously, only a few years after the Gilpin Drive's introduction. One had been chosen by a consortium of several thousand men and women of different nationalities, all chosen for their scientific and technological sophistication. They had the wealth to purchase the most advanced equipment then available. Everything was computerized. Everything was automated. All Old Earth's learning, all its literature and music, were at their fingertips. Their eighteen ships had reached the most hospitable of the two habitable planets, passing safely enough through Gilpin's Space thanks to their careful choice of passengers.

It was a beautiful, verdant world.

Three decades passed before a Far Outer ship came calling on them. From Gilpin's Space, the Far Outer saw their entire fleet, arrayed in ordered ranks on the broad green plain where it had first landed. It came down next to them, but no one greeted it. The only human being they saw was a sickly, scrawny thing—man or woman?—who fled shrieking out of a ship at their approach. They investigated the ship, and found it strangely intact, and even more strangely ravished. Everything in it that could conceivably have been associated with man's employment of electro-magnetic forces had been dulled, abraded, and somehow, they knew, rendered forever incapable of performing its designed function. And every nuke-pak on the vessel was dead, totally inert. They didn't tarry to investigate the forests, the reed-jungles, the caves of the high hills. They didn't even bother to go near the Sixth Planet. They went away, and passed the word along.

Goldenrod Four remained unvisited until
Lapis Lazuli
's arrival. She came, and like her predecessor so long before, found the abandoned fleet. Now there was much less left, a thousand years of wind and rain and dust had built mounds and ant-heaps where ruined ships had lain.
Lapis Lazuli
's people searched carefully. They found nothing, nobody. Finally, in a cave high on the savage face of a mountain where they had spied the remnants of a no-longer-identifiable artifact, they came upon a grinning, dessicated corpse, half mummified, half eaten. It had built fires there before it died. With it lay a cooking vessel of still bright stainless steel, a broken knife, a belt buckle. Sometime before its death, it had scrawled its despair, scrawled on the smooth gray cave-wall. The message was in ancient French:

Ah Dieu! What's happened? Nothing, nothing works. Nothing turns on, not even solar panels. The ship's dead. Everything's dead. Even lasers don't work. Only guns work—guns, guns to kill with. They work. Hirath has gone out—how long? Oh God, days ago, days! What's happen . . .

It ended in insane repetitions, incoherences.

Molane, who would in an earlier age have been called
Lapis Lazuli
's captain, gazed at the sad remains. "They had
everything
—everything then obtainable. Like every other Gilpin ship, even in those days, they were equipped to conquer any disease; cures could be synthesized in minutes. With them, according to the records, they had foetuses and the sperm and ova of every useful animal on Earth, every prized food fish, and the seeds of every valued plant and flower. And then—"

He paused, trying to shake off the persisting aura of dead despair, and Lahaisa, his golden counterpart, finished the sentence for him. "And then," she said, "there was an
event.
Something came. Or something happened. And it sucked every nuke-pak dry. So everything went dead, every piece of sophisticated equipment, destroying even the unborn life that equipment guarded. And they thought they were prepared for everything."

"For anything but the
event
," said Molane. "Well, perhaps we can find out what it was. Could you—" He used an ancient word, "—could you skry what happened."

"I'd much rather not," she said, "but yes, I will."

She lowered herself to the cave's floor, assuming the lotus posture, and he placed the bright cooking pot in front of her. There was a long silence as he sat beside her, lending her his strength.

Finally, she gasped. She blinked away sudden tears. "Something came, happened—I don't know which. I feel it was alive, from incredibly far away. It was one of the sensate things that scream in the Far Reaches of Gilpin's Space. It was in pain, and it hungered for—for its sustenance, energy, pure energy. Blindly it entered, penetrating every route by which energy might travel, everything that could create energy, convert energy. No, it did not invade any living thing, at least not intentionally, though I feel that there was terrible agony with its passing, partly because of its effect on nervous systems, partly because of sheer shock. Oh, Molane, it was
vast
, incredibly vast! It descended almost but not quite invisibly. Still it was in agony, but now it had fed; it was recharged. It vanished as abruptly as it came, off for a destination even we can't imagine. And it left behind it—" She sat there, weeping silently, and now he held her to him for a time. "It had killed everything they depended on, and they had no way of depending on themselves. They blamed each other, and after they had exhausted their supplies they tried to live on native plants and animals. They blamed each other, group against maddened group. They began to kill each other, senselessly—"

She stopped. "Molane, do you remember that ancient story, The Machine Stops?' Mankind had become totally dependent on a machine. It housed them, fed them, suckled them as infants."

Telepathically, he had shared what she had scried. "And when it stopped," he said, "almost instantly they became savages. So it was here. All the knowledge that made them civilized had been destroyed, all their instruments rendered useless. They were utterly alone with each other, with fear, with themselves."

They stood. "Molane," she said, "after this, is there any use our going on to that Sixth Planet? According to the record, the people who went to settle it weren't well equipped either technically or intellectually. Their leader had proclaimed publicly that they were using Old Earth's science only to escape to some world where they could live simply, close to earth and sea, to other living things, to the forests and the fresh winds blowing through them. But still they were dependent on technology; then it would have been inescapable. Even if their data-banks held only a tiny fraction of what was ruined here, what could they have done without them? After that
thing
had passed they would have had nothing but their memories. Besides, the Sixth Planet is by no means as welcoming as this one. Its extremes of climate, its storms, its ice-toothed mountains and its dreadful jungles—all these were reported by the Far Outers who discovered it."

"But that didn't dissuade the men and women who went there," Molane replied. "Granted, what chance did they have? But still, Lahaisa, we must make absolutely certain, mustn't we?"

Once more aboard
Lapis Lazuli
, and with Goldenrod Four still visible as a Gilpin-ghost—as stars and planets always were from that strange Space—they took counsel with the others of their Eight: Lahaisa's parents, a cousin, an uncle and an aunt, and their own seven-year-old son, Kolali. Among the New People, children always were permitted to be present when affairs of importance were discussed; that was part of the process of growing up. They all agreed that, regardless of how hopeless it might seem, they should not by-pass the Sixth Planet.

Through Gilpin's Space, the traverse would have been a matter of minutes only, but they chose to linger a full Earth-day, partly to compose themselves after the trauma of finding only death and desolation, and partly to learn all that was known of the Sixth Planet and its settlers. After they had supped, they spent an hour or so "listening" to the mind-music of Arilé, Lahaisa's mother, her fantasies weaving and interweaving the voices of all known instruments and many another that never existed except in her mind. They seldom wore any clothing aboard ship, for clothing among people who are truly beautiful, people who retain their beauty even as they age, is never really necessary except to defend against vagaries of climate. So they relaxed, listening to Arilé, sometimes when she made it clear that they should do so adding the music of their minds to hers—all of them except Kolali, who always found it oddly difficult. Gradually the impact of the Fourth Planet was softened; gradually it ebbed. Finally Molane spoke to the ship.

"
Lapis Lazuli
," he said, "tell us all you know about Goldenrod's Sixth Planet, all you know about those people who fled Earth to settle here."

"I shall, Molane." The ship's voice was very soft and very beautiful, synthesized now to caress their minds. "Look!"

Instantly a hologram appeared between them, half sunlit, half in darkness, gleaming with the blue-green of its seas, its browns and umbres, its greens dark and pale, the light tan of its deserts, its white polar caps; and
Lapis Lazuli
told them what the Far Outers had recorded of its continents, its storms, its tectonic upheavals, its infinite variety of living things, its beauties and mysteries and its perils. And they realized it was indeed a far less friendly world than the Fourth Planet. Around the hologram, three small moons circled, one pallid, one dull red, one mirror-bright, and Molane wondered whether that last could perhaps once have been a spaceship.

Lapis Lazuli
caught the thought. "No," she told him, "it's a true moon, but of almost solid ice. When all three are in the sky together at night they can provide some very curious shadow-play."

The Far Outers had found no intelligent autochthones, though there had been mammals and pseudo-mammals whose evolution had paralleled that of more or less similar creatures on Old Earth. They had found one outstanding difference. Archaic reptiles still lived whose counterparts had long since died out on Earth. These they had called dragons.

At that, Kolali spoke up excitedly.
"Dragons?"
he cried out. "
Real
dragons?"