Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (30 page)

You often hear that something needs no introduction. This story is one such. It's just too obviously true.

It all seems so inevitable, now that mankind is spreading out through the galaxy. The only question is: Why wasn't it done sooner? Why did the road to the stars have to wait until 1994 when an Anglo-Chinese merchant fell to musing over his correspondence? But perhaps all of mankind's greatest advances, from fire through the wheel from penicillin through hydrogen fusion, seem inevitable only in retrospect.

Who remembers the faceless thousands who unlocked the secret of nuclear energy, the man who dropped the first atomic bomb? Mankind remembered Einstein.

Who remembers the faceless thousands who built the first moonship, the man who first stepped upon an alien world? Mankind remembered Verne and Ley and Campbell.

As mankind remembers Chap Foey Rider.

Chap Foey Rider's main offices were in New York, not far from Grand Central Station. From them he directed an import-export firm that blanketed the globe. On November 8, 1994, a Friday, his secretary brought him the day's mail. It was 11:34 in the morning.

Chap Foey Rider frowned. Nearly noon, and only now was the mail delivered. How many years had it been since there had been two deliveries a day, morning and afternoon? At least twenty-five. Where was the much-vaunted progress of the age of technology?

He remembered his childhood in London, long before the war, when there had been
three
daily deliveries. When his father would post a letter in the morning, asking an associate to tea, and receive a written reply before tea-time. It was enough to make a bloke shake his head.

Chap Foey Rider shook his head and picked up his mail.

There was a bill of lading from his warehouse in Brooklyn, seven miles away. Mailed eight days ago.

There was a portfolio print-out from his investment counselor in Boston, 188 miles away. Mailed seven days ago.

There was an inquiry from his customs broker in Los Angeles, 2,451 miles away. Mailed four days ago.

There was a price list from a pearl merchant in Papeete, Tahiti, 6,447 miles away. Mailed three days ago.

Chap Foey Rider reached for his calculator.

He then called his branch manger in Honolulu. He told him to mail a letter to the branch manager in Capetown, 11,535 miles away.

The Capetown manager called Chap Foey Rider two days later to advise him that the letter from Honolulu had arrived. Although still Sunday in New York, it was early Monday morning in Capetown.

Chap Foley Rider pondered. The length of the equator was 24,901.55 miles. No spot on Earth could be farther than 12,450.78 miles from any other.

He reached for the World Almanac.

Bangkok was 12,244 miles from Lima. He smiled. He had offices in each city.

A letter from Bangkok reached Lima in a single day.

Chap Foey Rider returned to his calculator.

The extrapolation was staggering.

One further test was required to prove his theory. He pursed his lips, then carefully addressed an envelope:
Occupant, 614 Starshine Boulevard, Alpha Centauri IV.
He looked at his watch: good, the post office was open for another hour. He personally pushed the envelope through the Out-of-Town slot and strolled home.

Returning to his office the next morning, he found in his stack of mail the envelope addressed to Alpha Centauri. Frowning, he picked it up. Stamped across the front in purple ink were the words:
Addressee Unknown, Returned to Sender.

Chap Foey Rider lighted his first cigarette of the day and to conceal his discontent puffed perfect rings toward the ceiling. Was the test actually conclusive? True, the envelope had been returned. But with suspicious speed. He reviewed his chain of logic, then studied the envelope with a magnifying glass. There was, after all, nothing to indicate
which
post office had stamped it.

He ground the cigarette out and reached for a piece of paper. He wrote firmly, without hesitation:

The Rgt. Hon. Chairman
of the Supreme Galactic Council
Sagittarius

 
Sir: I feel I must draw to your attention certain shortcomings in your General Post Office system. Only yesterday I mailed a letter . . .

Chap Foey Rider awaited the morning's delivery. Eventually it arrived.

There was an envelope-sized piece of thick creamy parchment, folded neatly and held together by a complex red seal. His name appeared on one side, apparently engraved in golden ink.

Expressionless, he broke the seal, unfolded the parchment, and read the contents. It was from the Executive Secretary, Office of the Mandator of the Galactic Confederation:

Dear Sir: In reply to yours of the 14th inst. the Mandator begs me to inform you that as per your speculation the Galactic Confederation does indeed exist as primarily a Postal Union, its purpose being to promote Trade and Commerce between its 27,000 members. Any civilization is invited to join our Confederation, the sole qualification of membership being the independent discovery of our faster-than-light Postal Union. His Excellency is pleased to note that you, on behalf of your fellow Terrans, have at long last fulfilled the necessary conditions, and in consequence, as Ambassador-Plenipotentiary from the Galactic Confederation will be arriving on Terra within the next two days. Please accept, Mr. Rider, on behalf of the Mandator, the expression of his most distinguished sentiments.

". . . to promote Trade and Commerce . . ."

Chap Foey Rider restrained himself from rubbing his hands together in glee. Instead he pushed a buzzer to summon his four sons to conference. The stars were coming to mankind, Rider Factoring, Ltd. would be ready for them; he called the mailroom to tell them to be on the alert for a large package from Sagittarius.

Science has a unity about it: invent one branch of technology, and you'll probably discover others. Burke's delightful
Connections
makes that clear. Still, it's not invariable. Technology without science can be sterile. Archeologists tell us that batteries and electroplating were invented in the Levant several thousand years ago; and a very modern-looking calculating machine was found in a ship that went down off the island of Antikythera in Greco-Roman times. Heiro made a working model of a steam engine, and Archimedes did surprising things with winches, levers, and burning glasses. None of this led to anything important.

Harry Turtledove has a doctorate in Byzantine history. There being little formal demand for that skill, he works as an administrator in the Los Angeles County Department of Education— where a knowledge of matters byzantine comes in rather handy at that. One of his duties is to assist teachers in coping with Federal regulations.

John W. Campbell would have loved Turtledove, who has the knack of combining new science with old forms.

Like all the ships Loki flew, Erasmus Chang's scout
Praise of Folly
was too old. She went into or out of hyperdrive with a jolt that twisted a man's guts, her air recycler wheezed, and she had a 5% waver in her pseudogravity, so Chang's weight went through a seven-kilo cycle every twenty minutes.

The computer was old, too. In a way, that was an advantage: the navigation data programmed in were Terran Confederacy, the most far-reaching set even if it was six hundred years out of date. But after enough time, memory dumps or no, a computer will develop a personality of its own—the current flows get set. Chang did not trust his machine very far. It was as cynically underhanded as he was.

"Well, hero, they're still gaining," it said with what he thought was misplaced amusement.

"I can see that for myself, thanks," he growled. He paced up and down the cabin, a lean, trim man a bit below middle height whose wide, high-cheek-boned face was framed by a thin fringe of black beard.

Pace as he would, though, his eyes kept coming back to the hyperdrive detector. There was little enough else to see; with the drive on, none of the normal-space instruments worked. The four glowing points in the detector display were Zanat warships. One he might have challenged. Taking on four was sure suicide, and he could not afford it. Loki and all the worlds in human space needed to know about the Zanat.

Unfortunately, they would overtake him long before he could deliver the news—long before he got out of the Orion Nebula, for that matter.

He punched for a sandwich, ate it. When he looked at the FTL display again, the four warships had slid a little closer.

"I wish I'd chosen a different bar," he said.

"You aren't the only one," the computer told him.

As soon as the shavetail lieutenant had stepped into the London Pub, Chang knew his leave was doomed. The youngster was in uniform, which meant he was on duty, and Chang was the only Service man in the dive. Just my luck, he thought sourly: run a successful mission and not get the chance to celebrate.

The load of books, cassettes, and floppies he'd snaked out of the cathedral on Cienfuegos deserved celebrating, too. Old floppies especially were more precious than gold. Even the Cienfuegans remembered that much; they'd mounted the discs above the altar, by the statues of their gods.

The scout pilot was still fuming when the lieutenant brought him back to Salvage Service Central. B'kila thought it was very funny. "Where did he find you? The London Pub or Nadia's?"

"The London Pub," Chang sighed. That his habits were known did not surprise him; he would have been surprised had it been otherwise.

B'kila looked him over, cocked a critical eyebrow. "That's not much of a beard, either."

The scout pilot put a defensive hand to his chin. He had grown the whiskers on Cienfuegos, to make himself less conspicuous there, and was proud of them. In spite of his name, he had enough caucasoid genes to let him raise a fair crop. "The day you start telling me how to wear my hair, you old harridan, is the day I get out of the Service."

B'kila laughed out loud, a bad sign; things that amused her generally meant trouble for other people. She was a plump black woman with straight, graying hair, the head of what was euphemistically known as the Loki Salvage Service. Loki's few friends called the Service a band of scavengers. Everyone else started with names like pirates, thieves, spies, and went downhill from there.

Having wasted enough time on pointless chatter, B'kila waved Chang to a chair by the big holo tank that took up most of one wall. He sat with the same feeling he had whenever he was in her office—that of being in the center of a spiderweb, watching the spider at work. Being on the same side helped only a little.

"What's gone wrong?" he asked bluntly, sure she would not have recalled him without pressing reason. Operatives got their chance to roister between missions.

She punched a button on her desk. The holo tank sprang to life with a view of that small chunk of the galaxy humans had touched. Stars with planets that were thought from any source, however ancient, to have been settled by men were shown in blue; those about which Loki actually knew something flashed on and off. Red marked the suns of nonhuman species that used the hyperdrive, yellow those of planetbound races. Most others were omitted; the white points here and there were stars with absolute magnitudes bright enough to make them useful nav checks over many light years.

She moved a vernier, touched another control. One of the winking blue points flared brighter for a moment. "Cienfuegos," she said unnecessarily. "I've listened to your report. A good run."

"Thanks." He waited. The compliment was another danger signal. Anything she had to get around to by easy stages was bound to be dicey—not for her, of course. For him.

His suspicion was confirmed when four brilliant orange points sprang to life beyond the glowing mist of the Orion Nebula, which dimmed to show their location more clearly. She said, "As well as I can judge, those spots mark where we've lost ships in the past two years."

"That's impossible," Chang blurted. "There are no human worlds out there." Loki itself was two hundred light-years Terraward from the Nebula, and hardly any blue points lay between it and the great cloud of gas.

"Impossible is not a word used to describe what's already happened," B'kila said in mild reproof, as though to a student who should do better.

"But—" Chang's protest died unspoken. B'kila knew the obvious as well as he. Starships in hyperdrive flew blind, of course; there was always the chance of returning to normal space coincident with solid matter. It was a very long one, though. Aliens might have worked up a trick good enough to snare one ship, he thought, but hardly four, not with the technological lead humans had—and especially humans from a planet like Loki, which still kept most of the skills of the dead Confederacy. That left . . . nothing he could see.

B'kila spoke with seeming irrelevance: "Do you know 'The Road Not Taken,' a poem by a Middle English writer named Frost?"

"Never heard of it."

"You might look up a modern translation when you leave. This Frost person could have been looking a hundred years into his own future."

The galactic map disappeared from the holo tank. A scratchy flat image replaced it: a crowded city scene, with swarms of humans in strange clothes, both civilian and military, milling about at a cautious distance from a starship of a make Chang did not recognize: a pretty crude one, he thought.

"This is Los Angeles—the first Roxolani landing on Terra; it might just as well be Cairo, New York, Moscow, Shanghai, or twenty others. A.D. 2039," B'kila said softly. Seeing that the archaic date meant nothing to Chang, she added, "45 pre-Confederacy." He whistled. No wonder the video was scratchy—it was over twelve hundred years old. He wondered how many times it had been rerecorded.