The canals of Mars stretched toward the nearby desert horizon beneath the shrunken sun, their waters flowing slowly toward the Phoenix Sea.
And, reflected Lieutenant Robert Sarnac, Solar Union Space Fleet, wouldn't that have made a classic pulp science fiction line in the days before there really were canals on Mars?
It was hard to avoid thinking in such terms in this year of 2261, on this planet that was celebrating the bicentennial (Earth-style) of the human-engineered asteroid strike that had initiated its Terraforming. Whenever the war news ran dry, every pundit with time to fill trotted out the well-worn irony that the hard necessities of water distribution had dovetailed with an old fantasy, born of optical illusion and wishful thinking among the pioneering astronomers who had peered through their primitive telescopes at then lifeless Mars.
Of course, Sarnac thought, getting into the spirit of the thing, there were differences. The view from the parapet of the roof landing pad lacked something. Granted, the flat desert of reddish dust beyond the canal's fringe of cultivation was right. But no wild green raiders galloped in from it on thoats and zitadars, and the distant pumping station could not possibly be mistaken for a palace of the dying aristocracy of Leigh Brackett's dying world, or for one of Robert Heinlein's slender Towers of Truth. And there were no hurtling moons overhead—even if Deimos and Phobos did hurtle, you wouldn't have been able to see them do it from beneath Barsoom's . . . er, Mars' thick new atmosphere. Sarnac leaned on the parapet and mourned for romance, for he had not quite outgrown youth's self-conscious and self-congratulatory flourishes of melancholy.
But while romance might be dead, mystery was not. It just didn't get talked about as much, even by the most desperate members of the chattering classes. It was, he thought, too uncomfortable—the mind shied from it. And too big, as though the Titanic, instead of decently sinking, had ended as a Mary Celeste with passengers and crew numbered in the thousands. So even as people recalled the ice asteroid called Phoenix that had smashed into this world two centuries ago, obliterating the old Mars as it birthed the new one, they left unspoken the most haunting of all history's enigmas: the fate of the people who had lit the fusion fires that had launched that asteroid on its sunward course. Or, at least, the nine-tenths of them who had not awakened aboard the lifecraft with no physical marks—but also with no recollection of what had happened since the inexplicable moment when everyone in their habitat-asteroid, Phoenix Prime, had collapsed unconscious.
Coming in a time of endemic mass hysteria, it had perhaps hastened the socio-political collapse that followed. Which in turn, according to certain revisionist historians, might have shortened the interval before the recovery. The decay that had already begun was cut off, however brutally, before it could permeate Western culture to the core of its cells. The collapse would have come anyway; as it was, the rubble of the past could still make sound building material for the future.
Sarnac shivered slightly, not just because the sun was travelling west. No doubt about it, romance was far more comfortable. Hell, practically anything was more comfortable! Like speculating about the limitless commercial possibilities here. Amazing that nobody had thought of opening a theme bar by the banks of the canal, decorated to suggest Mars as it was in the good old days before the early space probes had ruined the Solar System. Graceful towers and gallant red warriors. . . .
He heard a rustle behind him. Dejah Thoris? No, Winsome Rogers. He turned and smiled, for she was a friend and a fellow citizen of the Gulf States/Antilles Confederacy. They had known each other in college, in her native Jamaica, where they had had a brief affair. That had been in the golden prewar years, before the universe that had seemed a limitless starry playground had turned out to contain the Realm of Tarzhgul. Their lives, like those of the rest of humanity, had been bent to a sustained war effort like none since the near-mythical Second World War. They had gone their separate ways, lost touch—and then collided one day in a corridor of the Survey Command Advanced School here at Tharsis.
"Hi, Winnie," he called out, turning his smile up a notch. But she was having none of it.
"Bob, do you have any idea how late it is?" she began with as much sternness as her lilting voice could generate. (The Confederacy's English-speakers hadn't altogether lost their various regional accents, and her origin was obvious to anyone who knew what to listen for. So, too, with Sarnac, due to his birth in what had once been called the Florida panhandle.) "You're going to be late for commencement. That would be all you'd need just now!"
Sarnac made practiced finger movements, as if with an imaginary keyboard, and the time seemed to appear in red digits floating about two feet in front of his eyes. "Oh, God!" he groaned, pushing himself up from the parapet. "I lost track. Pretty late hours last night, you know."
"You might say that! Do you plan to make a career of determining just how much Survey hotshots can really get away with? You should have heard Commander Takashima and Captain Eszenyi in the officers' mess earlier! When I passed their table, I caught something about a fight in the bar."
"I swear I don't remember that!" Sarnac protested, standing fully upright and then thinking better of it and leaning on the parapet again. "Or Carlos falling into the canal. I admit the part about mooning the Patrol," he allowed, managing a grin.
Her face, the color of Blue Mountain coffee with a moderate dose of cream, lost its primness and dissolved into a grin of her own. It was, she decided, more than just the leeway all Survey types were supposed to be allowed. It was simply impossible to stay angry with Bob, as she knew all too well. They hadn't resumed their liaison; that was long ago and far away—or what seems so in one's mid-twenties—and she now had a fiance standing guard on the frontier, at a star the astronomy boffins guessed was probably somewhere in Sagittarius. But they could still be friends, for they both cherished the sunny memories. And while there were other North Americans in their class here, from the various successor states that had reacquired civilization and obtained full Solar Union membership, the two of them were the only Confederates.
She gripped his upper arm and hauled him up from the parapet. "Let's go," she ordered, ignoring his low moan. "This is a command performance. You know how Captain Suslov feels about formal ceremonies, and this one's too formal for any shared virtual reality hookup. At least you remembered to get into your shit-hots." Sarnac's blue, white and gold dress uniform was all regulation, without a flaw that even a Marine drill instructor could have put a finger on—but somehow he contrived to make it look raffish.
"Mercy!" he groaned, then collected himself and stood under his own power. "Yeah, you're right. Can't miss an in-the-flesh formation." He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and after a shaky start, walked a straight line toward the access hatch.
" . . . And now Admiral Entallador would like to say a few words." Captain Suslov, CO of the school, relinquished the podium to the living legend.
Vice Admiral Jaime Entallador y Kruger ran his dark eyes over the new graduates filling the small auditorium. His face, with its harsh Aztec cheekbones and wide slit of a mouth, was as immobile as ever—a mask of elemental strength, with all else worn away by years of unrelenting war. He stood silent for a moment, giving them time to recall his history: the first contact with the Realm of Tarzhgul by the Survey squadron (of which he had brought one half-wrecked ship back to warn Earth) and the Battle of Amaterasu, where he had won the Solar Union time to prepare for the war it had thought it would never have to fight.
"You've all completed your first tour of duty with Survey Command," he finally said, "or you wouldn't be here. And now you've completed advanced training, so you're ready for independent field assignments in exploratory work. Which means you're ready to perform the most important task humans have ever undertaken. We're sending you out into the great dark on a quest for far more than the Holy Grail. What you're looking for is our species' survival.
"In the early days of interstellar exploration, your kind of work was seen as pure glamor. Those were the days when the scientific establishment was firmly convinced that we were the only tool users in the entire history of the galaxy." He smiled slightly. "They had watertight logical arguments for that proposition, believe it or not. The universe was ours for the taking—an endless, risk-free frontier full of readily Terraformable, prebiotic planets, and shirtsleeve-environment worlds with young biospheres. Even when we discovered some evolved biospheres, they merely seemed to add a little variety to the cosmos—color without danger. After all, any sentient life forms must be too primitive to constitute a threat. No vast civilizations can exist, because if they did, they would have colonized the whole galaxy by now. And the chance of there being another race at our particular stage of development at this particular time, is so remote as to be ignorable.
"Or so we thought until we encountered it."
The stillness in the auditorium was disturbed only by Sarnac's whispered "Whatever happened to upbeat commencement addresses?" and subsequent grunt of pain as Winnie punched him in the thigh. Entallador heard neither, and let the silence stretch a little before resuming.
"We've learned very little about the Realm of Tarzhgul except that their technological capabilities are comparable to ours, and that they have absolutely no interest in making peace. In their view, no other intelligent life form has any right to exist, save in a subordinate capacity to their race. They regard themselves as standing in a perpetual state of total war with the rest of the universe."
He didn't flash a projection of one of humanity's enemies on the holo dais, for which Sarnac was thankful. There were weirder-looking life forms around, but none that aroused the queasy sense of wrongness induced in humans by the Realm of Tarzhgul's dominant race, who called themselves—Entallador had forgotten to include it among the facts that had been learned about them—the Korvaasha.
"We don't know the full extent of the Realm," the Admiral continued, "but it's clear that their resources dwarf ours. Their willingness to expend an enormous tonnage of ships, with the personnel losses that must entail, in frontal displacement point assaults has allowed them to press us slowly but inexorably back, in spite of the stolid and unimaginative quality of their tactics. We can't fight them head-to-head on such uneven terms.
"Instead—and this is where you come in, ladies and gentlemen—we've had to push forward our exploration program, not from the scientific curiosity and sheer adventurousness that originally motivated it, but as part of the war effort. We need to discover new displacement chains leading into the Realm. We need to turn this into a war of movement, rather than a slugging match in which they have all the advantages."
He paused. "You're all in Survey Command because you want to explore new frontiers, to look on sights no one else has seen. Someday, perhaps, we humans will once again be able to indulge that need to see what is beyond the next hill, which is one of the qualities that makes us human. But for now your efforts, like everyone else's, must be focused on one overriding imperative: survival. The war has forced a narrowing of all our lives and aspirations, and you are not exempt.
"That's all. May our God, by whatever names you know Him, go with you." He returned to his chair, moving with a natural ease that belied the percentage of him that was bionic replacement parts.
That man has made grimness an art form, Sarnac thought—silently, as one bruise was enough.
Suslov reclaimed the podium. "Thank you, Admiral. And now, ladies and gentlemen, before we conclude, I have an announcement. On the basis of your final class standings and prior service records, the three Scout billets for Commodore Shannon's expedition have been filled." He produced a sheet of hardcopy, smiling at his suddenly electrified audience.
Dierdre Shannon, fast becoming as much a legend as Entallador, was taking a Survey squadron beyond the outermost limits of the Capella Chain, and it was an open secret that she was waiting for this class to graduate before filling her roster of Scouts—the self-admitted corps d'elite who made the initial landings on life-bearing planets. It had lent an added edge to the competition, even among the natural competitors who specialized in Scout work.
Suslov spent a moment fumbling with the hard copy before clearing his throat. He's got a sadistic streak almost as wide as his butt, Sarnac thought.
"The names of the graduates in question are. . . ." Suslov trailed to a halt, did a double take at the hard copy, then resumed in a tone of disapproving skepticism. "Sarnac, Robert . . ."
Sarnac stifled a whoop and slapped himself on the thigh, not noticing that it was the one Winnie had already injured. Nor did he notice Winnie herself, who wasn't a Scout candidate and was now looking at him with an expression that couldn't quite be defined, least of all by her, but which held an inarguable element of sadness. Nevertheless, she smiled; at this moment, his eyes seemed an even more startling blue in a face that was darker than average in his part of the Confederacy. His curly black hair had begun to recede, ever so slightly, from the temples, and his mustache skirted the edge of regulations. Yes, she reflected, there was no disputing that he had a kind of Gypsy attractiveness. If only he hadn't been quite so well aware of it!
". . . Liu, Natalya . . ."
Lieutenant Liu Natalya sighed resignedly, for the comma had been audible. Her family, emigrating from the war-ravaged lands of Manchuria and the Russian Far East to join the first wave of settlers who had resumed Mars' interrupted Terraforming, had been part Chinese and part Russian from the beginning, but they had held to the Chinese custom of putting the surname first. That style of nomenclature was unusual on Mars, and she knew she should probably be used to people getting it wrong by now, but still . . .
". . . and Kowalski-O'Hara, Francis Nicholas Mario."
The chestnut-haired lieutenant junior grade drew himself up in the full dress uniform that seemed made for him (as, in fact, it was made for him, by an expensive tailor), face flushed with pride. Sarnac caught his eye and they exchanged thumbs-up signs. They had become friends at Tharsis after an inauspicious start, for they hailed from two North American nations that wasted little love on each other. The Great Lakes People's Domain had maintained more continuity with the old United States as it had become by the end of the twentieth century under the rule of political careerists. Kowalski-O'Hara, a scion of the Incumbent class of the People's Domain, had arrived at Tharsis with a valet. He assumed that everyone would be properly impressed by the fact that none of his ancestors had sullied the bloodline with even one day of private sector employment since three generations before the East Asian War. He expected deference from the common herd—he called them "Voters," a term that he knew didn't carry an implication of social inferiority everywhere. Regulations had forced him to give up the valet, and his classmates had disabused him of his other assumptions and expectations. And in the end, everyone at Tharsis had reluctantly acknowledged the husky young man's abilities. Family influence might smooth the path to a commission, but it didn't get anybody through this school with top marks! Sarnac was glad to have him, as well as the utterly reliable if frightfully earnest Liu, for the team of which he would be the senior.
Still, some imp made him wonder what had the most to do with Frank's transcendently pleased look: being chosen for one of the coveted billets in Shannon's expedition, or winning his point with the school's authorities and having his name announced in its full form.
At once, he became guiltily aware of the woman sitting beside him, and put on a roguish face. "I'll bring you back a souvenir, Winnie. Of course, they may not have dirty postcards on the planet where I end up. . . ."
". . . And if they do, the models will have green scales and tentacles," she finished for him. "No problem, mon," she continued, slipping from Standard International English into dialect. "Jus' watch you'self."
"One minute to transit."
The ritual announcement didn't even interrupt conversations in the officers' lounge. After all, there was no need for people not directly involved with astrogation or engineering to take any particular action. The ship wasn't under acceleration, and as it coasted toward the displacement point the artificial gravity maintained a steady one gee. And whatever effect the transit would have on them was immaterial, and would have the same impact wherever they were or whatever they were doing. And none of them belonged to the small minority of the human race that could not tolerate displacement transit; if they had, they wouldn't have been here. So the only reaction from the lounge's few occupants was a scattering of involuntary glances toward the viewscreen.
Of course there was nothing to see yet, if one didn't count the innumerable points of unwinking light that were the stars, in the great dark out here beyond the outermost worthless planet of this red dwarf star, which would have only been visible as a zero-magnitude star had it been in the right part of the sky for them to see it at all.
Also outside the screen's pickup were the squadron's other ships. The frigates Ramilles and Sekigahara had already transited, and the tenders and specialist ships were following along, aft of the flagship on which they rode. Commodore Shannon had rated one of the new Sword-class battlecruisers, and Durendal was a never-ending source of awe to those among them who had pulled their deep-space time in the old Survey cruisers. It wasn't that she was opulent. She was unmistakably wartime construction, and the legend-illustrating mural, customary in the officers' lounges of this class of ship, was the only ornamentation in view. (In this one, Roland sounded his horn on the stricken field of Roncesvalles, while colorful Saracen hordes closed in, unmindful of the tedious history buffs who kept insisting that they had really been ragged-assed Basque tribesmen.) But all her systems were on the cutting edge of a technology that had resumed a rate of advancement unknown since the twentieth century, when R&D had also been driven by total war. And the accommodations, however Spartan, were unprecedentedly spacious—including this lounge, where Liu and Kowalski-O'Hara sat across the table from him arguing politics as they waited for the third displacement transit since the squadron had passed beyond the limits of the known.
"But Natasha," Frank was asking, "how can you have true Equality if you let just anybody run for office?" His puzzlement was genuine. So was Liu's incomprehension of how governments unlike the Martian Republic's computer-moderated participatory democracy could function. She had even more trouble with the Confederacy's happy-go-lucky laissez-faire federalism than she did with the system into which Frank had been born.
Nevertheless, she had a ready-made crushing retort for Frank. "All well and good, but it was the twenty-first century United States—the system from which yours is descended—that brought the collapse on the world."
"That wasn't the real American system," Frank argued. "That was after it had gone wrong, fallen under a dictatorship—"
"But the system, as it had become by then, contained the seeds of that dictatorship!" She looked primly triumphant, and Frank couldn't find the rebuttal he so obviously wanted. The understandable self-loathing of the late twentieth century's bankrupt intellectual establishment—its uncomprehending hatred of technology and its simpleminded faith in long-discredited collectivist economic theories—had, with the addition of a nasty strain of anti-Semitism, hardened into the ideology of a new totalitarianism and, by 2060, had put an end to the American experiment in constitutional self-government. Seeking to distract popular attention from the economic collapse it had brought about, the regime had turned to the time-honored expedient of a foreign scapegoat. The Sino-Japanese alliance had been this policy's natural target, the Far Eastern War its inevitable result.
Orbital defensive systems had kept the devastation within the self-repairing capacity of Earth's biosphere, but the intricately interlocked global economy was another matter. Eventually the world had recovered. Even some areas of the old United States and its North American neighbors had won their way back to the heights they had once scaled, and joined with the other polities that had grown up on Earth and elsewhere to form the Solar Union. They had written into the Union's fundamental law the lesson they had learned at such awful cost: societies must be allowed to work out their own destinies in their own way, in defiance of the temptation to universally impose a single set of ideals. The Solar Union was intolerant only of intolerance. A member state could rule itself in any way it chose, as long as it did not seek to force that way on others, and as long as it guaranteed certain elementary human rights, including the uniquely human rights of property and emigration.
It had worked. The totalitarian state had followed slavery and human sacrifice into history's museum of arcane horrors. It had worked so well that Frank and Natalya could sit here and argue their homelands' differences without dreaming that one might try to impose its pattern on the other, while Sarnac—as apolitical as a human being could be and still have a detectable pulse—silently wondered how well the Union would have held together if it hadn't encountered the Korvaasha of Tarzhgul.
"Ten seconds to transit," the computer-generated voice said, and Sarnac shushed the other two. All other conversations in the lounge also ceased as Durendal coasted up to the invisible point in space where this particular star interrupted the gravitational pattern created by the distribution of stellar masses. A faint thrumming and a vibration felt through the soles of the feet were the only signs that the ship's power plant was preparing to momentarily distort space with a pulse of artificial gravity.
All at once, the stars in the screen seemed to clench like a hand forming a fist, and everyone aboard felt an undefinable wrongness as familiar physical reality was violated. Then the stars rearranged themselves into a new pattern—as seen from a point some unknown number of light years from where Durendal had been an immeasurably small fraction of a second before.
The existence of displacement points had been deduced in the last century, but the knowledge had been useful only for winning its originator a Nobel prize. The invention of artificial gravity had changed that. Displacement points only occurred in association with a tiny percentage of stars—including, fortuitously, Sol—and it was only possible to transit from any one such point to one other. But no one felt inclined to nitpick the universe on these minor annoyances. All that mattered was that it was finally possible to cheat Einstein.
"I was reading," Natalya said absently, "a paper theorizing that it may eventually be possible to create artificial displacement points, given an enormously powerful gravity generator that can run continuously, simulating a stellar gravity well—"
Frank snorted derisively. "Crazy science fiction stuff! What would it use for fuel, out in interstellar space? And even if it would work, it wouldn't do us any good. You'd have to send the thing to where you wanted it by ramscoop—the war would be over before it got there!"
"We're only talking long-range theoretical possibilities, Frank," she replied with ostentatious patience. The tone suited her face. Her Russian genes had molded basically Oriental features into a nearly universal standard of severe regularity—too immobile for beauty, despite her long blue-black hair. "Obviously the concept is irrelevant to the war effort—"
"Wait a minute!" Sarnac's voice was so much more serious than usual that it got their instant attention. He pointed at the viewscreen. "Am I going nuts, or is that . . . ?"
"Ursa Minor," Natalya stated flatly.
"And Cassiopeia," Frank added. "Although it looks a little funny."
Constellations were hard to recognize without an atmosphere to filter out all but the brightest of the stellar multitudes. But others were beginning to notice that their new sky was almost, if not quite, the familiar one of home. Lieutenant Rostova, a junior astrogator, was already out of her seat and halfway out the door at a run.
The answer came shortly in a voice that belonged to no computer.
"This is the Captain speaking. As some of you are aware, we have emerged at a displacement point surprisingly close in realspace to Sol. In fact, astronomy has identified the local star as Sirius. This displacement point is very remote from it, as is typically the case with massive stars, so Sirius A appears as an extremely bright star. Sirius B cannot be distinguished visually. If you'll look in the direction of Cygnus, you may note a star that shouldn't be there. That, ladies and gentlemen, is Sol, distance, eight-point-six light-years.
"Standard survey procedures to locate other displacement points are being implemented. Stand by for further announcements. That is all."
The lounge was quiet, as eyes swung toward Cygnus. One of the peculiarities of interstellar travel was that the displacement network brought the stars into a proximity that had nothing to do with realspace distances. The squadron's previous transits had taken it hundreds of light years from Sol, and subsequent ones would do the same. But here they were, in Sol's backyard, with the home sun visible to the unaided eye—and utterly inaccessible. A ramscoop was perennially in the design stage, ever since space-based instruments had detected a life-bearing planet at Alpha Centauri. But none of Commodore Shannon's ships had such equipment, nor did any other operational spacecraft. All their fusion drives had to do was get them from one displacement point, across a planetary system, to another displacement point at which they would instantaneously transit to yet another star.
The odd though by no means unprecedented doubling back of the displacement lines was a conversational staple for a few days. Then the discovery of another displacement point on the far side of Sirius made it old news. The ships followed a flat hyperbola across the planetless skies and transited to another new sky, this time a properly unfamiliar one.
They did it two more times. Then they hit the jackpot.