A third of a century had blurred Sandra's memories of Earth. She recalled the hugeness of megalopolitan integrates, but had forgotten how daunting it could be. She had experienced totally synthetic, totally controlled environment, but only now did it come to her that this was in its way more alien than the outer planets of Maia. And in her earlier visit she had been a tourist, free to flit around, available for every adventure that came along; she had not known how heavy were the chains which Earth laid upon the prominent. Each hour was appointed, each meeting a ritual dance of words, each smile measured for its public effect. She was shown some of the remaining natural marvels, but she could only look, she could not scramble down a trail into the Grand Canyon or cast off her clothes and plunge into Lake Baikal. And everywhere, everywhere guards must accompany her.
"Who would want power, here, at this price?" she lamented once.
David Falkayn had grinned wryly and replied, "The politicians don't have that much. They put on a show, but most of the real decisions are made by owners, managers, bureaucrats, union chiefs, people who aren't conspicuous enough to need all that protection or all that secretarial prearrangement of their days . . . . Of course, the politicians think they lead."
So it was immensely good to be back among her own, aboard her flagship, the cruiser Chronos, cramped and sterile though the interior was. Orbiting independently around Sol, the Hermetian flotilla counted as Hermetian soil. After an unpleasant argument, she had even gotten the secret service left behind. And the men and women aboard were bred of the same lands as hers, born to the same skies, walking with the easy gait and talking with the slight burr that were hers, standing together in a loneliness that she shared.
Yet her heart stumbled. This day she would again meet Nicholas van Rijn. No matter that that was in her territory—to prevent electronic eavesdropping, if nothing else—she felt half afraid, and raged at herself for it. Eric, waiting beside her, should have been a tall comfort, but was instead almost a stranger, flesh of this stranger she must receive, reluctantly come from Earth and his Lorna. The spacemen in their white dress uniforms, their double line flanking the airlock, had also gone foreign to her; for what were they thinking behind their carefully smoothed-out faces? Ventilation muttered, touching her with a coolness that said her skin was damp.
The inner valve opened. There he stood.
Her first thought was an astonished How homely he is. She remembered him bulky and craggy rather than corpulent; and he did not belong in the lace-trimmed sylon blouse, iridon vest, purple culottes he had donned for this occasion. Behind him, in plain gray tunic and slacks, Falkayn was downright cruelly contrasting. Why, he's old, Sandra knew, and her embarrassment dropped from her. The stranger was no longer her son but that girl who had once been headstrong.
"Good greeting, gentlemen," she said as if they were anybody with whom she meant to confer.
And then van Rijn, damn his sooty heart, refused to be pitiable but grabbed her hand, bestowed a splashing kiss upon it, and pumped it as if he expected water to gush from her mouth. "Good day, good day," he bawled, "good nights too, cheers and salutations, Your Gracefulness, and may joy puff up your life. Ah, you is a sight for footsore eyes, getting better and better with time like a fine cheese. I could near as damn thank the Baburites for making you come shine at us, except they brought you trouble. For that they will pay through the noses they isn't got but we will make them buy from us at a five hundred percent markup. Nie?"
She disengaged herself. Cold with indignation, she presented the captain and ranking officers of the ship. Eric took over the making of formal excuses to them, since they were not invited to the wardroom for drinks before dinner. They had already been apprised of that; van Rijn's message had asked for a conference in secret. Mechanically they accepted the courtesy due them, their attention mainly on the merchant, the living legend. Could this be he? And what hope for Hermes might he have in his pocket?
He took Sandra's arm when she led off their son and Falkayn. She resented the familiarity but couldn't think how to break loose without a scene. He dropped his voice: "I would say, 'Weowar arronach,'"—the phrase from the Lannachska language of Diomedes was one they had made their own during their first year together—"but is long ago too late. Let me only be glad you was happy afterward."
"Thank you." She was caught off balance anew.
They entered the wardroom. It was not large, but was outfitted in stonebark wainscoting and cyanops leather as a sign of home. Faint odors of them lingered. Pictures hung on the bulkheads, Cloudhelm seen from a wooded Arcadian hilltop, dunes in the Rainbow Desert, the South Corybantic Ocean alive with night phosphorescence. A viewscreen gave a wild contrast, the spaces which encompassed this hull, millionfold stars, billionfold Milky Way, Earth a globule almost lost among them, fragile as blue glass. Eric stepped behind the miniature bar. "I'll be your messboy," he said. "What'll you have?"
It broke a certain tension. Gets he that skill from his father? flashed in Sandra. I've never been quick to transform the mood of a group. Seeing that the men waited for her, she chose an Apollo Valley claret. Van Rijn tried a Hermetian gin and pronounced it scorchful. Falkayn and Eric took Scotch. It struck Sandra as funny—or symbolic, or something—that that should have been hauled the whole way from Edinburgh to Starfall and back.
They settled themselves on the bench which curved around the table: she, Eric, Falkayn, and, to her relief, van Rijn at the far end. But when she took out her cigar case, the trader did likewise, and insisted she have a genuine Havana. She found she had also forgotten how good that was.
Silence fell.
After a minute or two, Eric shifted in his seat, took a gulp from his drink, and said roughly, "Hadn't we better get to our business? We're here because Freeman van Rijn has a word for us. I'm anxious to know what."
Sandra tautened, met the old man's eyes, and felt as if sparks flew. "Yes," she agreed, "we've no right to dawdle. Please tell us." Her look sought Falkayn's. We know. And Eric's. You and I talked about this too, after we had first embraced on Earth.
Van Rijn streamed smoke from his nostrils. "We ought to put on a scene like from a roman policier, where I dump a kilo of clues on the rug and we fit them together in the shape of the villain, us having a guilting bee," he began. "But you has a fair-to-muddling notion of what must be the answer. Mainly we is got to decide what to do.
"Let me lay everything out before us anyways, to make sure we is thinking the same."
For a few breaths he sat quiet. The murmurs of the ship came to Sandra like a single thrum from a plucked string that was stretched close to breaking.
Van Rijn said: "Bayard Story of Galactic Developments, leader of the delegates of the Seven In Space to our council in Lunograd, is Benoni Strang, High Commissioner of Babur on Hermes. There is the fact what makes all the rest tumble into place."
"I suppose not, in spite of the pictures and other evidence Mother brought, I suppose not that could possibly be wrong," Eric ventured with a caution she recognized as new to him.
Van Rijn shook his head. "No. Resemblance is too close. Besides, the identity does explain so much else."
"Especially the help Babur's gotten," Falkayn put in. His tone was that of a judge handing down a sentence. "Armament, military and political intelligence, recruitment of mercenaries, direction of the entire campaign thus far—by the Seven."
"Not as a whole, surely," Eric protested, as if the shock had just now reached him.
"Oh, no," van Rijn said. "That secret could never have kept, it would have spoiled and stunk up the galaxy, did any except a few top managers know—and, of course, the human technicians they engaged and held strictly isolated. Surely, too, not many Baburites is been told."
He laid a fist on the table, big, hairy, knobbly, with power in it to smash. "Makes no difference," he stated. "Policy, orders come from the top down. The Baburites treat the League with contempt because their supreme chiefs know the League is broken from within."
"But what an enormous effort," Eric wondered. "Research, development, construction, decade after decade till a whole giant planet was ready to launch its hordes—how could that ever stay unknown? Why, the cost would show up on the accountants' tapes—"
"You underestimate the size of operations on an interstellar scale," Falkayn told him. "No underling, even a highly placed underling, can keep track of everything a big company does. Spread over several companies, the expense could easily be disguised as statistical fluctuations. It was never overwhelmingly great. Babur undoubtedly supplied most labor. Raw materials came from there as well, and from uninhabited planets and asteroids. Once the basic machine tools were built, comparatively little of the Seven's original capital was tied up. Various persons must have been getting paid fortunes, to get them to live a goodly chunk of their lives cut off from their own civilization. But a fortune to an individual is small change to a major corporation."
He added slowly: "We had an important clue to the whole thing quite some time ago. The Baburite warships seem to have electronic systems certain of whose parts can't be manufactured there, others of which deteriorate in a hydrogen atmosphere. They aren't obliged to; they could do better. We put it down to sloppy engineering, the result of haste, and quite likely the lords of Babur still believe that's the case, if anybody on that planet with scientific training has been given time to stop and think about the matter. But actually . . . the Seven would want to have a hold on their allies, something to keep them subordinate till the objectives of the Seven have been achieved. Why not leave them in chronic need of vital replacement parts which are supplied from outside?"
"The revelation of Mirkheim precipitated action," Sandra said. "'Twas simply too mighty a prize to let slip. But what is the real goal, of Babur and the Seven alike? Why go to war at all? That's what I still can't grasp."
"I am not sure anybody will ever grasp why mortals make war," van Rijn answered somberly. "Maybe someday we will find a sophont species what is not fallen from grace, and they can tell us."
Falkayn addressed the woman: "Well, we can use logic. Successful imperialism does in fact pay off for its leaders, in wealth, power, the sense of glory . . . yes, and often the sense of duty carried out, destiny fulfilled."
"Better we stay with honest greed," van Rijn remarked.
"In the case of the Baburites," Falkayn continued, "we can't be certain till a lot of intensive xenological research has been done—unless we can get hold of Strang's files on them. But we do know they resented being shoved aside in the scramble for a place on the frontier. Influential ones among them may well have decided that nothing but force majeure would win their species its due. And don't forget, Babur was united rather recently, by the conquering Imperial Band. I suspect the wish to go on conquering acquired a momentum, as it's done in most human cases. Also, again like human history, I suspect the rulers saw foreign adventures as a way of giving their empire a common purpose, of securing their grip on the lately acquired lands.
"Be that as it may, Babur was ripe to be coaxed and helped into overrunning its stellar neighborhood. I wouldn't be surprised but what Benoni Strang was the man to whom the idea first occurred, and who persuaded the masters of the Seven to undertake it. He seems to've started his career as a scientist on the planet."
Sandra nodded. Before her rose a vision of her enemy, the fire beneath his armor of courtliness, the often faraway look in his eyes, and words he had now and then let slip.
"And the motives of the Seven?" she asked, though she and Falkayn had talked this over for hours while they fared Solward.
"I already tried to list a few reasons why humans run amok," he reminded her.
"There is this too," van Rijn added. "The Home Companies is become near as damn the government of the Commonwealth. At least, the government does nothings they don't want, and everythings they do want. I, an independent, see the threat in that; but I am not hungry for power myself, I simply want people should let me be to play my little games.
"The owners of the Seven feel different. Else they would not be organized as they are. They must dread the day when the Home Companies do actively move out into space. Against that, what better than to be operating a strong government of their own? Except nothing exists ready-made out there. So they have to build an empire. Then they can afford to let the whole conspiracy be known."
"In alliance with Babur . . . yes, it makes a creepy kind of sense," Eric said. "The two races would not likely fall out with each other; they don't want the same real estate, save the kind that Mirkheim represents, and they could agree to divvy that up. Meanwhile Hermes, under totalitarian rule, would be the human power base in those parts."
He slammed the table. "No!" he shouted.
"That is agreed," van Rijn said. "What we is here today for is to grind out what we can best do. Is everybody clear on what the situation computes to? Hokay, we roll up our sleeves and get down to the nutty-gutty."
Sandra sipped her claret as if its taste of vanished sunshine could give strength. "You do not want to inform the Commonwealth," she foreknew.
"Positive not," van Rijn replied. "They see the weakness, they strike, they win—and who gets Mirkheim? The Home Companies."
"They'd move to utterly crush the Seven," Falkayn supplied. "I don't believe the empire in space that they'd win would be less vicious . . . or more likely to set Hermes free. Oh, they'd make Babur withdraw. But the temptation to impose a 'caretaker' government which'd build a corporate state in the Commonwealth's image and be properly subservient in its foreign relations—they could scarcely resist that."
Van Rijn turned toward Eric. "That is why I got you to stall the co-option of this force into Sol's," he explained. "I only had a hunch then it was best you keep your freedom of action. Now we know it is."
This too had been in Sandra's mind for endless days. Yet voicing it still felt like stepping onto a bridge which her tread must cause to break behind her. "You propose we leave, to carry out our private campaign."
"Ja. Not direct attacks on Babur. We hit holdings of the Seven. They got little defense for those. We can give them choice, either they pull away support from their allies so both must make peace with us, or else we ruin them."
"Let's not be overhasty," Falkayn urged. "For instance, it'd be worthwhile, it'd save lives in the long run, to alert as many independent League members as possible, and get them to join their fighting craft to ours."
"Then they'll want a part in writing the peace," Eric objected.
"Yes," Falkayn said. "Don't you think it's best if they do? That way we might salvage a little stability, a little decency."
In the meantime, Sandra thought, the agony of Hermes goes on. But I myself dare not speak against it. I've not the wisdom to know a better way.
Does anybody?
Again they stood in Delfinburg, David and Coya, and from a balcony of van Rijn's house looked across a nighted sea. In the room behind them, their children slept. Before them was a shadowy drop down to the yacht harbor where boats lay phantomlike at piers. Beyond, under a high wind, waves rushed to break in whiteness, rise, and march onward. Above arched a moonless sky where the stars fled among ragged clouds.
"The third time you're going," she said. "Must you really?"
He nodded. "I couldn't leave Adzel and Chee fighting alone on my planet, could I?"
"But you can leave us—" She caught herself. "No. I'm sorry. Forget that ever crossed my mind."
"This time will be the last," he vowed, and drew her toward him. Neither of them spoke: The last indeed, if one never comes home.
Instead, she told him, "Right. Because afterward, when and wherever you travel, you're taking me along. Me and the kids."
"If I go anyplace, sweetheart. After all the hooraw, I should be quite content to settle down on Earth and let the tropics toast my bones."
She shook her head so the dark hair swirled. "You won't. Nor will I. If nothing else, it's no world for Juanita and Nicky. You don't imagine the war will cleanse it, do you? No, the rot can only grow worse. We're getting the hell out while we still can."
"Hermes—" He was mute for a while. "Maybe. We'll see. It's a big universe."
The wind whistled cold. Chill also, and bitter, was spindrift cast off the booming waters.