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V

The sun of Babur was more than twice as bright as Sol; but the planet was more than six times as far from its luminary as Earth. Thus Mogul stood in the spatial sky as a tiny disc of unbearable brilliance. A moon of Babur's four was close enough to show craters; the rest were like small sharp sickles. The world itself was a tawny globe partly shaded by night, partly veiled by bands and swirls of cloud, white tinged with gold, brown, or pale red. The majesty of the sight gave Falkayn to understand why its human discoverer had named it for a conqueror who went down in the memory of India as the Tiger. He didn't know how well he chose, he thought.

The bridge where he sat felt profoundly silent, only a breath from the ventilators to be heard. Hyperdrive was off and Muddlin' Through maneuvering on gravs at a true speed of a few kilometers per second. Chee was in the weapons control turret, Adzel in the engine room: their trouble stations. On Falkayn rested the burden of deciding when danger grew so great as to require fight or flight. He doubted that either would be possible here. The two warcraft that had challenged the ship as she approached and escorted her in now flanked and paced her arrowhead hull like wolves herding along a prey. Distance made them tiny until Falkayn magnified their sections of the view; then he saw them the size of a Technic destroyer but much more heavily armed, flying arsenals.

When Muddlehead spoke, he started, fetching up short against the safety web that held him in his seat. "I have commenced analysis of data obtained from neutrino and mass detectors, radar, gravity and hyperdrive pulse registers, and the local interplanetary field. Subject to correction, approximately fifty vessels are in wide orbit around Babur. Only one is of a size to be a possible dreadnought or equivalent thereof. Many of the rest appear to be noncombatant, perhaps groundable transports. More detailed information should be available presently."

"Fifty? Huh?" Falkayn exclaimed. "But we know—Babur put on that show near Valya—we know its fleet is at least equal to the Commonwealth's. Where are the majority?"

His companions had been listening on the intercom. Adzel's slow basso rolled forth: "It is fruitless to speculate. We lack facts about Babur's plans, or even about the society whose masters have hatched those plans."

Nobody paid attention until too late, Falkayn thought. Not to hydrogen breathers, who are alien, who can offer us oxygen breathers very little in the way of markets or resources, and by the same token should find nothing to quarrel with us about. There were too many planets which did lure us with treasure, with homesteads, with native beings not hopelessly unlike ourselves. We scarcely remembered that Babur existed—a whole world, as old and many-faced and full of marvels as ever Earth was.

"I think I know where their missing ships are," Chee said. "They were never intended to orbit idle."

Falkayn's mind paced a rutted track: How did Babur do it—how build up so great a strength in a mere twenty or thirty years? They couldn't simply put armament on copies of the few merchant vessels they'd produced. Nor could they simply work from plans of human men-of-war. Everything had to be adapted to the peculiar conditions of Babur, the peculiar requirements of its life forms.

He recalled the shapes of the ships escorting his, bulge-bellied as if pregnant (with what sort of birth to come?). The extra volume housed cryogenic tanks. Air recycling alone was not adequate for hydrogen breathers, whose atmosphere leaked slowly out between the atoms of a hull and must be replenished from liquid gases. A thin plating of a particular supermetal alloy could cure that—but no Baburite knew there was a Mirkheim when the decision was made to found a navy. And the leakage problem was only the most easy and obvious of those the engineers had met.

The research and development effort before manufacture could begin must have been extraordinarily sophisticated. How could the Baburites complete it in the time it had actually taken, they who had never gotten off their home world when men first found them?

Could they have hired outside experts? If so, whose, and how could they pay them?

His repetition of questions which had been raised since the menace first manifested itself, to no avail, was broken off. Muddlehead was making one of its rare contributions to talk: "Conceivably the Baburites have been anticipating fights with other hydrogen breathers."

"No," Adzel replied. "There aren't any with comparable technology, anywhere in known space, except the Ymirites; and they are as different from the Baburites as they are from us."

"I suggest you write me a program in political science," the computer said.

"Will you two klooshmakers stop snakkering?" Falkayn barked. "The fact is they've got far fewer ships here than we know they own. And I share Chee's foul notion of where the rest of those ships have gone. If we—"

His outercom chimed. He switched it on, and the screen filled with the image of a Baburite.

Around the eldritch caterpillar-centaur-lobster shape, which did not really look like any of those animals, shadowy figures flitted through gloom. Four tiny eyes behind a spongy snout could not make true contact with his. The being hummed its League Latin, noises which a vocalizer transposed into the proper phonemes. "We have notified the Imperial Band of Sisema and you are about to receive your instructions. Stand by." The statement was neither polite nor rude; it announced how things were.

Then the image faded out. For a minute Falkayn sat alone with his thoughts. Again they ran back over what little he knew.

"Sisema" was nothing but the vocalizer's rendition of a sound that in the original was a thin droning. "Imperial Band" was a Baburite attempt, probably suggested by earlier human visitors, to translate a concept that had no counterpart on Earth. Seemingly in Acarro—as the vocalizer called one region on the planet—the unit of society was not individual, family, clan, or tribe. It was an association of beings, tied together by bonds more powerful and pervasive than any that men could experience, involving some mutuality or complementarity of their sexual cycles but extending from this to every aspect of life. Each Band had its own personality, which differed more from that of its fellow Bands than members of any did from each other. Yet informants had told xenologists that every single member was unique, with a special contribution to make; the merging together was not subordination, it was communication (communion?) on a level deeper than consciousness. Telepathy? It was hard to know what such a word might mean on this world, and the informants had been unwilling or unable to speak further. A Baburite did radiate variably at radio frequencies, strongly enough to be detected by a sensitive instrument in the neighborhood. If that was due to neurochemistry(?), perhaps another nervous system(?) could act as a receiver. Perhaps in this way a part of tradition was not oral or written but directly perceived.

Potentially immortal, a Band recruited itself by adoption as much as by reproduction. Cross-adoptions linked various groups as cross-marriages had once allied human families. The Imperial Band seemed to have first choice in such cases, and to that extent was dominant, providing a leadership that had finally brought the entire planet under its sway. Yet it was not a true monarchy or dictatorship. Self-regulating, not given to conflict with their own kind, the Bands needed little government in the Terrestrial sense.

Which made their sudden aggressiveness all the less comprehensible, Falkayn thought. They'd tried some sharp business in this sector thirty years ago, and been worsted by the Solar Spice & Liquors factor—but sunblaze, that was a trivial incident, no cause for them lately to start trumpeting about their "right to control ambient space." Nor did the idea of dividing the stars up into spheres of interest seem like a safe one. The League could not tolerate that, if the League wanted to survive as a set of free-market entrepreneurs. The Commonwealth might accept the principle . . . but not if that involved loss of Mirkheim, the exact explosive issue Babur had chosen for precipitating the crisis.

I suppose even the agents of those companies of the Seven that formerly traded here have been baffled to foresee what minds so strange to us will do next—Hoy!

Again the screen gave him the picture of a Baburite. Though Falkayn was well schooled in noting individual differences between non-humans, he identified this one as new only by the color and cut of robe. The outlandishness of the whole simply drowned every detail in his perception. "You are Captain Ah-kyeh?" the being demanded without preamble. It had not heard his name well enough to hum an accurate equivalent. "This member speaks to you for the Imperial Band of Sisema. You have told our sentinels your purpose in coming. Redescribe it, in exact detail."

The muscles tightened around Falkayn's belly and between his shoulderblades. For an instant he was more conscious of stars, planet, moons, sun in the hemisphere above him than he was of the image he confronted. To go down in death, losing all that splendor, losing Coya and Juanita and the child unborn . . . But those warcraft hemming him in would not wantonly open fire. Would they? The habit of courage took charge of him and he answered steadily:

"Forgive me if I leave off a greeting or similar courtesy. I've been told your people don't employ such phrases, at least not with a foreign species." Sensible. What rituals could we possibly have in common? "My partners and I are here not on behalf of any government, but as representatives of a company in the Polesotechnic League, Solar Spice & Liquors. We know you had a dispute with us on the planet we call Suleiman, somewhat more than two of your years ago. We hope this won't prevent you from listening to us now."

He employed a vocalizer himself, not because he knew anything of the other sophont's language, but in order that it might convert his words into sounds that the latter could readily hear. He wondered how badly his meaning got distorted. If the Siseman speech had been tonal like Chinese, little but gibberish would have gotten through. The Baburite was wise to require reiteration.

"We listen," it said.

"I'm afraid I haven't any precise plan to describe. The conflict over Mirkheim disturbs us greatly. By 'us' I mean, here, the company for which my companions and I work. And of course the leaders of associated firms feel the same way. A war would be as disastrous to trade as to everything else. Besides, uh, economic motives, common decency demands we do whatever we can to help prevent it. You doubtless know the Polesotechnic League is not a government, but commands comparable power. It will gladly lend its good offices toward reaching a peaceful agreement."

"You do not speak for the entire League. It no longer has a single voice."

Touché! thought Falkayn, and felt indeed as if a blade had pierced him. How in cosmos do the Baburites know that? They ought to be as ignorant of the ins and outs of Technic politics as we are of theirs.

True, if they've been preparing for a long time to fight us, they'd investigate us carefully beforehand. But when did they, and how? A Baburite traveling around among us and asking questions would be too conspicuous for van Rijn not to have heard about. And surely they couldn't rely on occasional traders from the Seven for such information, especially after that trade became practically extinct.

The fact that they are this well-informed is a flamingly important datum all by itself. Van Rijn needs to know.

He had reached his conclusion in a nearly intuitive leap. Best not to let the officer(?) guess how dismayed he was. "We will be glad to discuss that with you, and anything else," he temporized. "If we can give some understanding, and gain some for ourselves, that will make our journey a success. I'd like to emphasize that we don't represent the Commonwealth in any way. In fact, none of us three is a citizen of it. No matter who gets Mirkheim in the end, companies of the League will be dealing with them," unless Babur gets it and then keeps the supermetals exclusively for itself. "I hope you will regard us as ambassadors of a sort," who double in espionage if they get the chance. "We're experienced in dealing with different races, so maybe we have more chance than average of exchanging information and ideas."

The Baburite fired several disconcertingly shrewd queries, which Falkayn answered as evasively as he dared. Since the being knew the League was divided against itself, he strove to give the impression of a less serious breach than was the case. At last his interrogator said, "You will be conducted to a landing place on Babur. Earth-conditioned quarters will be provided."

"Oh, we can quite well stay in our ship, in orbit, and communicate by screen," Falkayn said.

"No. We cannot allow an armed vessel, surely equipped with surveillance devices, to remain loose in local space."

"I can see that, but, um . . . we could set down on a moon."

"No. It will be necessary to study you at length, and you may not have access to your ship. Else you might try to break away from us if the process takes an inconvenient turn. A guide vessel is on its way. Do as its chieftain commands you." The screen blanked.

Falkayn sat still for a while, hearing Chee swear. "Well," he said at last, "if nothing else, we'll get a close look at the ground. Keep those surveillance devices busy, Muddlehead."

"They are," the computer assured him. "Data analysis is also proceeding. It has become evident that most of the ships around Babur belong to oxygen breathers."

"Huh?"

"Infrared radiation shows their internal temperatures are too high for denizens of this planet."

"Yes, yes, obviously," Chee's voice came. "But what are the crews? Mercenaries? How in the name of Nick van Rijn's hairy navel did the Baburites contact them, let alone recruit them?"

"I suspect those are questions we are better off not asking," Adzel said. "To be sure, we must try to find the answers."

The guide came in sight, larger than Muddlin' Through but with similar streamlining proving that she was groundable. The part of her armament that showed was by itself more than the League ship carried. Falkayn did not propose making a dash for freedom.

Having received his travel orders and turned them over to Muddlehead to execute, he gave his attention to the viewscreen hemisphere. From time to time he rotated the scene or enlarged a part of it. He wanted to see everything he could, and not merely because an item might prove useful. This was a new, utterly strange world on which he was about to tread. A world. After all his years of roving, and even today when he fared under guard, the old thrill tingled through him.

Babur swelled in his sight as the ships accelerated inward. The approach curve took him around the globe, and he saw the tiny, fiery sun set in gold and rise in scarlet over an ocean of subtly tinted clouds. Then he was braking heavily and the planet was no longer before him or beside him, it was below. A thin scream of split atmosphere reached his ears. The stars of space vanished in a sky gone purple. Lightning flared across a storm far under this hurtling hull.

The surface came in view. Mountains glimmered blue-white, either sheathed in ice or purely glacial. Here water was a solid mineral. The liquid that took its place was ammonia. Air was hydrogen and helium, with traces of ammonia vapor, methane, and more complex organic compounds. Certain materials had gone on to become alive.

A sea heaved gray beneath rosy clouds. It was small for a body with twelve and a third times the mass of Earth, two and four-fifths times the diameter. Ammonia is less plentiful than water. The interiors of the enormous continents were arid; there the black vegetation grew sparsely, glittering dust scudded across the horizon's vast circle, and never a trace of habitation showed.

A volcano blew flame and smoke on high. It did not erupt like one on Earth; it was melting itself, streams raging forth and congealing into mirror-bright veins and sheets. The very structure of Babur was unearthly, a metallic core overlaid with ice and rocky strata, water in the depths compressed into a hot solid ever ready to expand explosively when that pressure happened to ease. Here there were true Atlantises, lands that sank beneath the waves in a year or less; new countries were upheaved as fast. Falkayn glimpsed such a place, hardly touched as yet by life, raw ranges and plains still ashudder with quakes.

On their downward slant, the ships passed above a second desert and then a fertile seaboard. A forest was squat trees on which long black streamers of leaves were fluttering. Aerial creatures breasted a gale on stubby wings. A leviathan beast wallowed blue in a gray lake beneath a lash of ammonia rain. Wilderness yielded to farms, darkling fields laid out in hexagons, houses built of gleaming ice and anchored with cables against storms. By magnification, Falkayn spied workers and their draft annuals. He could barely tell the species apart. Would a Baburite see as little distinction between a man and a horse?

A city appeared on the shore. Because it could not grow tall, it spread wide, kilometers of domes, cubes, pyramids in murky colors. In what seemed to be a new section, buildings were aerodynamically designed to withstand winds stronger than would ever blow across Earth. Wheeled and tracked vehicles passed among them, aircraft above—but remarkably little traffic for a community this size.

The city went below the curve of the world. "Make for that field," directed the guide. Falkayn saw a stretch of pavement, studded with great circular coamings that were mostly covered by hinged metal discs. A few stood open, revealing hollow cylinders beneath, sunk deep into the ground. It had been explained to him that for safety's sake, spacecraft which landed here were housed in such silos. The guide told him which to take, and Muddlehead eased its hull down.

"Here we are," Falkayn said unnecessarily. The words came dull and loud, now that his view was only of fluoro-lit blankness. "Let's get our suits on pronto. Our hosts might not like to be kept waiting . . . . Muddlehead, hold all systems ready for action. Don't let anybody or anything in except one of us. In case of arguments about that, refer the arguer to us."

"We might want a countersign," came Adzel's voice.

"Good thinking," Falkayn said. "Hm . . . does everybody know this?" He whistled a few bars. "Somehow I doubt the Baburites have ever heard 'One-Ball Riley.'" Beneath his cheerfulness, he thought, What does it matter? We're totally at their mercy. And then: Not necessarily, by God!

At the main personnel lock, he, Adzel, and Chee donned their spacesuits. They took time for a complete checkout. The walk ahead of them was short, but the least failure would be lethal. "Fare you well, Muddlehead," said Adzel before he closed his faceplate.

"Provided you don't sit here inventing new distortions of poker," Chee added.

"Would backgammon variations interest you?" asked the computer.

"Come on, let's move along, for Job's sake," Falkayn said.

Having completed their preparations, they took each a ready-packed personal kit and cycled through the lock. A platform elevator in a recess in the silo wall, with an up-and-down lever control, bore them to the top. Adzel was forced to use it alone, and at that most of him hung over the edge. Nevertheless, the fact that it could carry him was suggestive. It was meant solely for passengers; elsewhere on the field Falkayn had seen support cradles for ships that were to be loaded or unloaded, and cargo handling equipment. So the Baburites had visitors bigger than themselves often enough to justify a machine like this, did they?

As he emerged, Falkayn paid attention also to the controls of the hatch cover. A wheel steered a small motor which ran the hydraulic system moving the heavy piece of metal up or down.

Heavy . . . Unrelieved by his vessel's interior gee field, weight smote him. Without optical amplification, his eyes saw the world as twilit. Mogul glared low above buildings on his left, near the end of Babur's short day. Clouds hung amber in purple heaven; beneath them blew a ruddy wrack. With three and a third Terrestrial atmospheres of pressure behind it, the wind made motion through it feel like wading a river. Its sound was shrill, as was every noise borne by this air.

Several Baburites met him. They carried energy weapons. Pointing the way to go, they led the newcomers trudging across the expanse. A complex occupied an entire side of it. When close, able to make out details through the dusk, Falkayn recognized the structure. No workshop or warehouse of ice such as shimmered elsewhere, this was a man-made environmental unit, a block fashioned of alloys and plastics chosen for durability, thick-walled, triple-insulated. Light from some of the reinforced windows glowed yellow. Inside, he knew, the air was warm and recycled. As part of that cycle, the hydrogen that seeped through was catalytically treated to make water. The helium that entered took the place of a corresponding amount of nitrogen. A fifth of the gas was oxygen. A grav generator kept weight at Terrestrial standard.

"Our home away from home," he muttered.

Chee's astonishment sounded in his radio earphones: "This large a facility? How many do they house at a time? And why?"

A member of the escort thrummed into a communicator beside an airlock. Evidently it summoned assistance from within, for after a couple of minutes the outer valve swung back. The three from Sol entered the chamber in response to gestures. There was barely room for them. Pumps roared, sucking out Babur's air. Gas from the Interior gushed through a nozzle. The inner valve opened.

Beyond was an entryroom, empty save for a spacesuit locker. Two beings waited. They were lightly clad, but they carried sidearms. One was a Merseian, a biped whose face was roughly manlike but whose green-skinned body, leaning stance, and ponderous tail were not. The other was a human male.

Falkayn stepped out, almost losing his balance as the pull on him dropped. He unlatched his faceplate. "Hello," he heard. "Welcome to the monastery."

"Thanks," he mumbled.

"A word of warning first," the man said. "Don't try making trouble, no matter how husky your Wodenite friend is. The Baburites have armed watchers everywhere. Cooperate with me, and I'll help you settle in. You'll be here for quite a spell."

"Why?"

"You can't expect they'll let you go till the war is over, can you? Or don't you know? The main fleet of Babur is off to grab Mirkheim. And scoutboats have reported human ships on their way there."

 

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