Star Bridge (7 page)

Horn looked away.

The trumpets screamed a newer, more violent note. And then fell silent.

The silver of the General Manager was approaching the stand. The guards were silver; the car was silver. Silver, too, was Kohlnar's hair as he sat at the foot of the long steps, not stiff and red as it had been in the coin. He waited. Two giant lancers came forward and lifted him out of the car and helped him up the steps.

What was wrong with Kohlnar?

At the platform, he turned and grasped the railing and raised one hand to the thousands in front of him. It was a sign of victory. The Golden Folk exploded with shouts and cheers.

They couldn't see what Horn saw. He stared through the sight, unbelieving. The face was like an old woman's. The seamed, yellow skin hung in loose folds. The cheeks were heavily rouged. The lips were painted scarlet. The hairless eyebrows were penciled black. Flesh had shrunken from the nose; it left a thin, yellow beak.

It was a patient, cunning, ruthless face. It had all the powers of the other Directors, and it held them chained to an iron will. But the General Manager of the Company and through the Company, of Eron, and through Eron, of the Empire, was a dying man. He had spent his strength in a long drive for power and in the use of that power to conquer the Cluster.

Now, at the moment of his triumph here upon the ruins of the world from which the human race swept out into the stars, when Eron was truly the master of all the human-held galaxy, Kohlnar was dying.

While the Directors retired to seats at the back of the platform, Kohlnar clutched the railing with quivering yellow claws. Under the rouge, the lax folds of his skin were a sickly gray. Sweat stood out on his forehead. But when he began to speak, and amplifiers picked up his words and flung them to the far corners of the immense field, his voice was harsh and strong.

“Men of Eron,” he grated. “Sons of Earth. We are here to celebrate not the victory of Eron but the victory of man. Nations, worlds, empires have won many battles. They have lost others. And in the end it did not matter whether they won or lost. The only victory that must be won is man's. And so we have come back to celebrate one more victory in the long, glorious sequence of man's conquest. We have come back to our origins, to Earth, to the mother-world. But let us go back even farther. Let us go back to beginnings.”

He stopped. His breathing came in labored gasps as his fumbling finger found a button. Against the blackness of the monument base behind him, a vast mosaic sprang out, colorful, almost three-dimensional in its reality.

In the background was the primordial universe, vast chaos churning with unborn life. Closer was the misty glory of a spiral nebula, its arms far-flung as it slowly turned. Against it flamed a curling row of suns illustrating the sequence of stellar evolution. Red giants shrank. Planets condensed. At one corner of the scene was gentle Earth. At the other was harsh Eron.

“Out of chaos, order,” Kohlnar said. “Out of order, life.”

He pressed another button. The scene flowed around the corner of the cube and was replaced by another.

This was Earth and the evolution of life. At the left of the broad panorama, something shapeless but alive crept out of a primal sea. Monsters fought in steamy jungles. A caveman kindled a fire against the sharp-toothed cold. Men hunted and planted and reaped and wheeled their produce to market in small villages that grew into empires with marching soldiers. The empires rose and fell but man went on, building higher and better, destroying himself and rising again until he built the towers of Sunport, reaching out toward the stars. At the right Roy Kellon—legendary father of the Golden Folk—stood at the
Nova
's valve ready to set out upon the first interstellar flight.

“For this, man built and suffered and labored, to claim his heritage—the stars.”

Kohlnar pressed a button. The scene on the black face of the cube gave way to another.

Eron. It gleamed cold and steel-gray like the great sphere overhead. Like it, the golden spikes radiated from it toward the far corners of the Empire. Only here they did not end in points. They connected everything to Eron, the near stars and the distant ones. All kinds of stars: giants and super-giants, dense white dwarfs and faint red ones, and the blue-white, white, and yellow of those between. Everywhere there was life and profit, the Tubes reached and siphoned them away to Eron. And one massive Tube stabbed far across the galaxy into the heart of giant Canopus.

Eron. A fat gray spider
, Horn thought,
sitting in the center of its golden web, waiting the tremor that announced the capture of another victim.

Horn shrugged. The Golden Folk screamed their appreciation. “Eron! Eron! Eron!” they shouted, until it rang against the hills.

“Eron, yes!” Kohlnar said, and his amplified voice overwhelmed the shouting. “But more than that—man! Man's greatest achievement—the civilization of the stars. Eron! Man at his peak, one great culture reaching out from Eron in every direction almost five hundred light years, only possible because of Eron. And here—Eron's most recent victory!”

He stabbed a button.

The Cluster behind. In front the colossal ruins of the last demolished fortress on Quarnon Four. The surrender of Peter Sair. Small, stout, white-haired, old, the Liberator knelt in front of a tall, stern Kohlnar and signed the articles of capitulation. Behind Sair were the kneeling ranks of his defeated troops, receiving their yellow number disks. Behind them, symbolically, were numbered slaves toiling in the fields and mines and factories beneath hovering, black, gold-banded cruisers.

“Victory!” Kohlnar's voice was husky and low. “Not for Eron. For man. Those who challenge Eron challenge not the Empire but man's greatness. Let this be their answer. Eron will preserve man's goal, man's inheritance—the stars, strong and united. This is Eron's mission. She will not let it die, though we and others die to preserve it. Now, as a symbol of man's continuity of striving, we dedicate this Tube, uniting Eron with the place from which our ancestors launched the first ships toward the stars.”

Behind him, the Directors stepped forward. Wendre stepped quickly to his side and placed her right arm around him. Duchane and Matal stood at his right, Fenelon and Ronholm at his left. Kohlnar rested his hand upon a golden switch on top of the railing; the others placed their hands on his. They pushed it closed.

The Tube. Suddenly it was there, golden and real, reaching out from the far side of the black cube toward the east, rising through the air, spearing out into space, crossing the thirty light years that separated Earth from Eron.

Horn's eyes followed it up and up until the distance narrowed it to a thread and then the thread was gone. He wondered if it was perspective alone that shrank the one-hundred-meter diameter into nothing. He remembered, vaguely, something about a real dwindling.…

Earth and Eron, linked now a second time, joined by a new umbilical cord. Not to feed the mother, worn and barren from the long agonies of childbirth, but to drain away the last, slow streams of life.

The Empire, held together by these golden cords, nourishing in the womb a great, greedy child. It had grown too large to live independently. It must protect these cords or starve.

Strange, Horn thought, that strength makes weakness. Through being strong, Eron had become the most dependent world in the Empire.

And yet, looking at the Tube, Horn couldn't deny its beauty.

His eyes slid back down the golden cord. A buzzard brushed incautiously against the Tube wall and burned brilliantly. Here and there along the Tube, it flared as insects leaped at it blindly.

That was the Tube: deadly beauty. Beauty to Eron, food for the greedy child. To all others, it was death.

The guards swirled near the reviewing stand. Horn looked down in time to see Denebolan giants drag a man from under it. Horn stared through the gun sight. It was Wu. The ragged old man was protesting vigorously and clinging desperately to his battered suitcase. There was no sign of Lil. Wu was hurried away. On the back of his neck was a large, red carbuncle Horn had never noticed before.

Horn's lips twisted. So it was the thief who was caught, not the assassin.

The gun sight drifted back up the steps to the group on the platform, separated a little now as it acknowledged the audience's enthusiasm.

Like the finger of fate, the sight moved across the faces of the rulers of Eron.

Young, proud Ronholm, flushed with triumph.

Thin, sardonic Fenelon, contemptuous of the herd.

Wendre Kohlnar, radiantly lovely, holding her father's arm with a slim, golden hand.

The dying man, Kohlnar, blinking in the sunlight, his face set with the effort of keeping himself erect.

Duchane, powerful and arrogant, his eyes searching the crowd for those who did not cheer or cheered without enthusiasm.

Short, fat Matal, eyes small and calculating as they estimated how much of the applause was for him.

Which one! The question was idle. Horn knew which one. That was why he was here. To kill a man. To shoot one man down from ambush. The sight wavered.

Why am I here?
The answer this time was a little different.
Because someone wants this man killed.

It had nothing to do with Horn. He was just an instrument. Suddenly he resented that, resented the necessity of doing something he had no interest in doing. The getting here was something different. This thing was easy and distasteful.

But the necessity was there. He had taken the money to do a job. The job was not yet done.

The crosshairs steadied. They centered themselves on the dying man.

Horn gave the thumbscrew another half-twist, estimated the air velocity, and peered through the sight once more. The gun, resting on the wall, didn't waver. The General Manager of Eron seemed only a few meters away. The symbol of Empire waited for the executioner.

Slowly Horn's finger squeezed the trigger. The pistol jumped, just a little. For a second Kohlnar looked surprised, and then his face sagged, blankly, and his body folded gently to the platform.

 

THE HISTORY

Star-wandering.…

That strange, wonderful period after the breakdown of the first interplanetary civilization. That irresistible bursting-forth which scattered man's seed hundreds of light years across the stars. That time of struggle and adventure, villainy and heroism.

There were heroes in those days, men larger than reality and magnified in the retelling. Men like Roy Kellon, they became the demi-gods of a new mythology.

Man didn't emerge from the star-wandering quite the same. The engines of the first interstellar ships were poorly shielded; that changed him. The worlds he settled changed him. Isolation changed him. And he traced his ancestry from heroes and demi-gods.

From such origins should come the superman. But the changes were insignificant. Men were still men, even the three-meter Denebolan giants who formed Eron's elite guard.

Even the Golden Folk of Eron, who lived, loved, and died like other men.

Still, it is unwise to underestimate the psychological importance of a slight variation in pigmentation.

How do you define the superman? The Golden Folk knew.…

 

 

6

FLIGHT

The scene was frozen under an afternoon sun. All eternity seemed concentrated into a moment, unchanging, unchangeable. And then—

Chaos.…

The Directors scattered. Only Wendre remained, kneeling beside the crumpled thing that had been her father, then rising, straight and unafraid, to search the edge of the field.

Horn held her face in the gun sight. It was a caress. His finger was far from the trigger.

The charging guards reached the platform. Their ranks became a living shield, three meters high. The last thing Horn saw was the black hulk of Duchane's hunter. It was dead against the monument. The bullet had passed through Kohlnar and struck down another killer.

The amplifier shouted orders in a sure, powerful voice.
Duchane
, Horn thought.

The voice was quick and accurate. No one would move except the guards. They would assemble under their officers at this side of the monument.

Scoutships climbed into the sky, were launched by battleships, circled with misleading laziness around the field. Companies of guards moved outward from the monument. They carved a pie-shaped sector. Its point was Kohlnar's body; its base enclosed, unerringly, Horn's hiding place in the hollow behind the wall.

“The General Manager is dead,” Duchane said softly. It was a voice used to announce sacrilege and desecration.

For the first time, Horn realized what he had done. To Eron, it was sacrilege, it was desecration. Horn had shattered the symbol of empire, and Eron could not rest until he was caught and punished. All the resources of Eron would be thrown into the search.

Psychological factors are almost as important to empires as the fleets they can muster or the firepower they can assemble. Revolt would be futile, true; Eron could crush any world in a few hours. But let rebellion spring up here and there, continually, let the flow of trade falter, let the mercenaries themselves grow restless—and Eron would tremble.

Eron's rule rested upon a pedestal of omnipotence. No distance was too great for her fleet to go; no slight was too small for her dignity to overlook. Conquerors live by conquest; the first failure is a signal for the conquered to rise against them.

Omnipotence. How else could the Empire control a conquered population exceeding that of the Golden Folk by a million times? But let the slave worlds suspect that the pedestal is cracked—!

If not in outrage, then in calculated policy, Eron had to capture the assassin. Had to! No effort could be too great. And, once captured, his punishment must be salutory. Long, excruciating, and public.

Horn licked his lips. An empire against one man. It was like a death sentence. His chest heaved, sucked air deep into his lungs. The air smelled sweet to the dead man. The sun felt warm.