Bayley, Barrington J - Novel 10 (6 page)

 
          
The
phrases lingered with him as he approached the body and leaned over it. Finally
he poked it to make sure it was dead.

 
          
Oh
joy! He had killed Nascimento!

 
          
He
rounded on those whose lives he had saved. He would have held his fire to let
Nascimento destroy them first, if only for the pleasure of seeing how it
happened, but the ramshackle education he had received from the robots told
him something about this man, something that left him feeling stunned by his
good fortune. In a hoarse voice, he spoke.

 
          
"You
are a
kosho.
A
perfect warrior."

 
          
Nothing
that had happened seemed to have perturbed the
kosho
in the slightest degree. He was gazing at the gun in Pout's
grasp. "What is that weapon?" he asked, holding out his hand.
"Let me see it."

 
          
"No!
It's mine!" cried Pout, clutching the gun to his chest, and the man let
his hand fall.

 
          
"Mixed
one, you have destroyed a demented mind. Your motive, however, is as yet
unknown to me."

 
          
"You
are a
kosho,"
Pout repeated.
"And I have saved your life!
Yours,
and the
boy's. I know your code.
You are in my
debt."

 
          
Anxiously
he waited to hear how the
kosho
would
respond to his invocation. The man paused,
then
nodded
slowly.

 
          
"Yes,
that is so. You are entitled to name what the repayment shall be. If your
demand is disproportionately great, however, there is another way I can
discharge the debt, namely by taking my own life."

 
          
"All
I want is for you to follow me and be my protector," Pout said.
"Fight for me. Do what I say."

 
          
"You
are a chimera, are you not?" the
kosho
remarked thoughtfully.
"Part man, part animal.
Which part predominates, I wonder?" Pout grimaced, hugging the gun closer
to him, and the
kosho
went on:
"And you think you have it in your power to make a slave of a pure man.
For a citizen of the second class to own a citizen of the first
class.
Very well, I shall repay my debt, mixed one. I shall preserve
your life if the need arises. But you must understand that my duty to you ends
there. I shall not attack others at your command unless in a just cause. If you
demand my services beyond this limit, I shall rid myself of my obligation by
ending my life, as the code dictates."

 
          
Of
this Pout did not understand too much, but his eyes glittered. "Where are
your guns and everything?" he rasped.

 
          
"Nearby.
But since we shall need to address one another, how are you named?"

 
          
"Named?"
Pout blinked. His view of himself scarcely included a name. But he remembered
what he had been called. "Pout," he mumbled.

 
          
"I,
Hako Ikematsu, you may address as
kosho.
This,
my nephew, is Sinbiane."

 
          
The
kosho
beckoned, and stepped through a
second door on the other side of the room, followed by his boy companion. Pout
also followed. Down a corridor was a vestibule; beyond that, a main entrance;
then a path leading to a small lodge.

 
          
Pout
was exhilarated when he saw the number and variety of the
kosho's
weapons. He watched greedily while the warrior hung them
about himself, fastening them to his harness without ever asking for the
assistance of the boy. Then the warrior looked questioningly at him.

 
          
He
scanned the savannah again. The sun would soon be down, but the ferocity of his
feeling would brook no delay. No sense spending one
more
minute
in this place, his prison. The world lay open before him!

 
          
Wait!
What of the man who had set him free? He might still be in the museum
somewhere. Perhaps Pout
should ...

 
          
"Do
we leave?" asked the
kosho.

 
          
"Yes.
Yes!"

 
          
"Then
you must walk ahead. We will follow at a distance."

 
          
This
condition disconcerted Pout. On his part it would be the clumsy precursor of
treachery ... but limited though his ideas of the world were, he did know that
koshos
were honourable.

 
          
The
party set off across the grassland, lit by the red of the dying sun.

 
          
The
cat woman positively purred with pleasure. Archier rolled off the low couch
where they had disported, and stretched luxuriously.

 
          
A
warm breeze rippled across his body. He strolled down the mossy bank and
stepped into the chuckling stream at the bottom, bending to splash cool water
on his skin. A rainbow fish darted between his legs, evading his half-hearted
attempt to catch it.

 
          
"The
cat girl leaped in beside him. Her sense of enjoyment, he had noticed, was more
deep-seated than his own. With a low laugh she flung herself full-length in the
water and rolled about until even her shiny black hair was wet. Then she
climbed out and lay on the moss to dry, limbs asplay.

 
          
He
remembered the responsive litheness of her musculature, the way she had clawed
at him during their lovemaking. Her eyes were golden and caught the light
brilliantly. When the pupils contracted it was to slits rather than points.

 
          
"You
know," he said, stepping from the brook to stand over her, "it's hard
to believe you're no more than ten per cent cat."

 
          
Again
she gave her mocking, deep-throated
laugh.
"Actually, I'm
closer to twenty percent."

 
          
"Really?"
Archier was perplexed. "But you're
a
first-class citizen, aren't you?"

 
          
The
girl seemed amused. "You think every first-class citizen walking around
is a ninety percenter? It's mostly animals and chimeras that run the tests, and
they bend the rules. My examiner must have been forty percent ape but he was
planning to rig first class for himself."

 
          
Bemused,
Archier shook his head. "Did he make it?"

 
          
"I
don't know. But it's easy to get round the genetic laws these days. Nobody
cares."

           
"What you mean is the
administration is sloppy to the point of farce," Archier murmured.

 
          
Lazily,
she blinked, and Archier noticed a sudden change in the quality of the light
falling from the apparent sky. He glanced up. Beside the pink sun hovering over
the horizon a red light was winking, like a pulsating companion. It was a signal
to tell him duty called.

 
          
He
bent down and patted the girl's damp hair. "I must be going. I'm
wanted."

 
          
Pushing
through a hanging screen of weeping willow, he was suddenly in a
crescent-shaped room whose concave wall was a continuous curve with the ceiling,
decorated with a floral pattern among which were interspersed oval vision
plates. It was his office, containing desks, a mental refresher set alongside
the dispenser of flavoured cold drinks, and various apparatuses relating to his
position as fleet commander.

 
          
The
only other person in the room was Arctus, his elephant adjutant. He stood with
trunk extended to a touch control beneath one of the vision plates, which
showed an off-focus, off-colour view of the space torsion room.

 
          
"The
inship network is outphasing again," he said in his trumpety voice.
"It's time the maintenancers got off their rusty backsides and did some
work."

 
          
"It's
rather difficult getting them to do anything," Archier said. "They
still claim to be on strike, even on fleet duty. But
I'll
speak to them.
Anyway, what's happening,
Arctus?"

 
          
The
miniature elephant turned to face him, curling his trunk dismissingly in the
air.
"Nothing that can't wait, Admiral.
The
enabling data from High Command has arrived, that's all."

 
          
"Oh."
Archier glanced behind him to the area of wall, colour-coded
tangerine,
that
was the entrance to the dell and the girl. "Well, I might as
well have a look at it. Page it through to me."

 
          
He
seated himself at his main desk while Arctus got through and spoke to the boy
at the other end. A few seconds later his desk top steamed, then extruded
parchment-like sheets bearing the helical crest of Diadem.

 
          
For
several minutes Archier studied the sheets, his expression growing serious.
Finally he raised his face and stared with glazed eyes into nothing.

 
          
"Arctus,"
he said at last, "see if you can find Menshek for me, will you? Ask him to
come here."

           
"Yes,
Admiral."
Arctus busied himself at his own desk, a low toylike
affair at which he kneeled, expertly touching communicator pads with the soft
tip of his trunk. While Archier waited the cat girl came in, still damp, her
naked body extruding its pungent smell.

 
          
She
drew herself a thick, creamy confection from the dispenser and lay curled on a
tabletop, smiling archly at Archier and licking the stuff up with a pink
tongue.

 
          
He
ignored her, and when Menshek arrived, handed him the parchments silently.

 
          
Menshek
was pure human and the oldest person aboard Archier's flagship 1CS
Standard Bearer.
At sixty years of age
he was very likely the oldest person in Ten-Fleet, though the artificial
face-aging fashionable among the young women made his white hair and wrinkled
skin less noticeable than they might otherwise have been. Most people of his
age
who
were in official service held posts in Diadem.

 
          
Archier
tended to look up to him as a man of larger experience. The news he had now
made him feel he needed to consult such a man.

 
          
Menshek
sighed as he laid aside the sheets. "Well, there it is. The thing we
feared, that the Star Force fleets are largely in existence to prevent. A rebel
force with a fleet of its own."

 
          
"Yes,
it does seem we haven't been quite alert enough."

 
          
"No,
no, alertness isn't it." Menshek sounded weary. "The fleets just
aren't sufficient any more. Once there were thirty-six, now there are only
five, and they are all depleted and below strength—why, the very name of
Ten-Fleet is a lie, as well you know.
Some
of the ships might have been in the original Ten-Fleet, but most of them
are scavenged from defunct units."

 
          
Archier
nodded. He recognised that for a long time now the empire had maintained itself
more by bluff than anything. The chief strategy of Star Force was to see to it
that no worlds harbouring fond thoughts of secession got a chance to build star
fleets of their own, and that could not be done effectively with only the five
fleets that remained.

 
          
All
the same, he wasn't sure he liked the sound of Menshek's defeatist tone.
"Well," he countered, "the information here doesn't make it seem
the Escorians have a
main
fleet—not a
purpose-built one. It's mostly converted civilian ships. They probably hope
they're a match for us, weakened as they are."

 
          
"Let
us
hope they're not right."

           
"On the face of it, it's rather
brave of them—but what do you make of
this
item, Menshek?"

 
          
Archier
pointed to the second paragraph of the data summary. Unlike the first
paragraph, it ended with no codes for obtaining the full data in detail. It
simply read:
'Oracle predicts presence in
Escoria of weapon CAPABLE OF DESTROYING EMPIRE. Locate at all cost or
convincingly demonstrate non-existence.'

 
          
Menshek's
face became grave. "If
that
is
in the Escorian fleet's armoury, we had better look out."

 
          
"I
can't say I've ever paid much attention to Oracle," Archier said, with an
attempt at lightness. "It seems a bit too close to superstition to
me."

 
          
"I'm
afraid I don't share your disbelief, and I'm not superstitious either."
Menshek shifted in his seat uneasily.

 
          
"There's
a story that a few years ago it predicted the total collapse of the
Empire," Archier continued. "But the Empire is still here . . .
frankly I don't
want
to believe such.
. . .

 
          
"It
also forecast the Hisperian uprising at a time when our intelligence service
had no inkling of what was afoot," Menshek interrupted. "Remember,
Oracle is only a data machine. All it does is sift data on a huge scale—
all
available data from
every
known source. But it does have
mysterious properties. It correlates data according to rules of its own—or else
according to no rules at all—and its conclusions are seemingly plucked out of
thin air. But that's because it has no organised data store, so it's impossible
to determine how any particular prediction was arrived at."

 
          
"Exactly!
It could be guessing—or simply repeating
empty rumour!"

 
          
"High-order
guessing is probably the best way to describe its working method," Menshek
admitted. "And sometimes it
does
simply
repeat rumour. But I hope you aren't thinking of neglecting that order from
High Command."

 
          
"There
isn't any High Command," Archier said bitterly. "Didn't you read
paragraph three?"

 
          
"Yes,
I read it," Menshek replied, his voice quiet and matter-of-fact.
"It's hardly unexpected. We weren't put in Condition Autonomy for
nothing."

 
          
"What
do you think's happening?"

 
          
The
parchment had ended with the news that there would be no further communication.
High Command had closed down. The fleet admirals now had no one to issue them
with either orders or information, and in effect were obliged to consider
themselves imperial autarchs for all provinces outside Diadem.

 
          
The
situation would continue until the Imperial Council itself despatched the
official interdict standing down Condition Autonomy to some lesser status.
Archier had wondered what would happen if that interdict never came. It was
conceivable that the five fleets would eventually become the nuclei of new,
rival empires.

 
          
Or
four of them might. Archier promised himself that he, on the other hand, would
take his fleet into Diadem and try to rescue it from whatever had beset it.

 
          
"There
are several possibilities," Menshek said.
"Civil
war?
The overthrow of the Council, just as the Emperor Protector was
overthrown? Personally I believe the explanation is several degrees more
mundane. I imagine the High Command had been forced to close down through lack
of staff."

 
          
While
Archier stared, Menshek went on: "What's probably happened is that they've
had to send their last remaining officers out to one or other of the fleets,
because they just can't find any other replacements . . . isn't that where all
the Empire's difficulties come from, after all? The numbers of pure humans
willing to take on the work of preserving the Empire grows smaller all the
time. That's why, these days, we resort to using children."

 
          
"You're
beginning to sound like an adult chauvinist."

 
          
"If
being an 'adult chauvinist' means believing children aren't always as capable
of shouldering responsibility as adults, then yes, I suppose I am."

 
          
Menshek,
Archier told himself with a frown, was certainly out of tune with the time. It
was one of present society's articles of faith that, having received an
intensive education up to the age of seven, a young person was thereafter as
entitled as any adult with regard to social position, sexuality, or freedom of
action. It was slightly shocking to hear Menshek talk so.