CHAPTER ONE
Visager
1221 A.F. (After the Fall)
305 Y.O. (Year of the Oath)
Commodore
Maurice Farr lifted the uniform cap from his head and wiped at
the sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief. He was standing on
the liner docks on the north shore of Oathtaking's superb
C-shaped harbor. Behind him were the broad quiet streets of Old
Town, running out from Monument Square behind his back. There the
bronze figures of the Founders stood, raised weapons in their
hands-the cutlasses and flintlocks common three centuries ago.
The Empire-Alliance war had ended an overwhelming Imperial
victory. The first thing the Alliance refugees had done was swear
a solemn oath of vengeance against those who'd broken their
ambitions and slaughtered everyone of their fellows who hadn't
fled the mainland.
After
three years in the Land of the Chosen as a naval attaché, Farr
was certain of two things: their descendants still meant it, and
they'd extended the future field of attack from the Empire to
everyone else on the planet Visager. Perhaps to the entire
universe.
West
and south around the bay ran the modern city of Oathtaking, built
of black basalt and gray tufa from the quarries nearby. Rail
sidings, shipyards, steel mills, factories, warehouses, the
endless tenement blocks that housed the Protégé laborers. A
cluster of huge buildings marked the commercial center; six and
even eight stories tall, their girder frames sheathed in granite
carved in the severe columnar style of Chosen architecture. A
pall of coal smoke lay over most of the town below the leafy
suburbs on the hill slopes, giving the hot tropical air a
sulfurous taste. A racket of shod hooves sounded on stone-block
pavement, the squeal of iron on iron and a hiss of steam, the
hoot of factory sirens. Ships thronged the docks and harbor,
everything from old-fashioned windjammers in with cargoes of
grain from the Empire to modern steel-hulled steamers of Land or
Republic build.
Out
in the middle of the harbor a circle of islands linked by
causeways marked the site of an ancient caldera and the modern
navy basin. Near it moved the low hulking gray shape of a
battlewagon, spewing black smoke from its stacks. His mind
categorized it automatically: Ezerherzog Grukin, name-ship
of her class, launched last year. Twelve thousand tons
displacement, four 250-mm rifles in twin turrets fore and aft,
eight 175mm in four twin-tube wing turrets, eight 155mm in
barbette mounts on either side, 200mm main belt, face-hardened
alloy steel. Four-stacker with triple expansion engines, eighteen
thousand horsepower, eighteen knots.
The
biggest, baddest thing on the water, or at least it would be
until the Republic launched its first of the Democrat-class
in eighteen months.
Farr
shook his head. Enough. You're going home. He raised his
eyes.
Snow-capped
volcanoes ringed the port city of Oathtaking on three sides. They
reared into the hazy tropical air like perfect cones, their bases
overlapping in a tangle of valleys and folds coated with rain
forest like dark-green velvet. Below the forest were terraced
fields; Farr remembered riding among them. Dusty gravel-surfaced
lanes between rows of eucalyptus and flamboyants. A little cooler
than down here on the docks; a little less humid. Certainly
better smelling than the oily waters of the harbor. Pretty, in a
way, the glossy green of the coffee bushes and the orange
orchards. He'd gone up there a couple of times, invited up to the
manors of family estates by Chosen navy types eager to get to
know the Republic's naval attaché. Not bad oscos, some of them;
good sailors, terrible spies, and given to asking questions that
revealed much more than they intended.
Also,
that meant he got a travel pass for the Oathtaking District.
There were some spots where a good pair of binoculars could get
you a glimpse at the base if you were quick and discreet. Nothing
earthshaking, just what was in port and what was in drydock and
what was building on the slipways. Confirming what Intelligence
got out of its contacts among the Protégé workers in the
shipyard. That was how you built up a picture of capabilities,
bit by bit. He'd been here three years now, he'd done a pretty
good job-gotten the specs on the steam-turbine experiments-and it
was time to go home.
For
more reasons than one. He dropped his eyes to the man and woman
talking not far away.
What did I ever see in him? Sally Hosten thought.
Her
husband-soon to be ex-husband-stood at parade rest, hands clasped
behind his back. Karl Hosten was a tall man even for one of the
Chosen, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, as trim at
thirty-five as he had been twelve years ago when they married.
His face was square and so deeply tanned that the turquoise-blue
eyes glowed like jewels by contrast; his cropped hair was
white-blond. He wore undress uniform: gray shorts and
short-sleeved tunic and gunbelt.
"This
parting is not of my will," he said in crisp Chosen-accented
Landisch.
"No,
it's mine," Sally agreed, in English.
She'd
spoken Landisch for a long time, her voice had been a little
rusty when she went to the Santander embassy to see about getting
her Republican citizenship back. She'd met Maurice there. And she
didn't intend to speak Karl's language again, if she could help
it.
"Will
you not reconsider?" he said.
Twelve
years together had made it easy for her to read the emotions
behind a Chosen mask-face. The sorrow she sensed put a bubble of
anger at the back of her mouth, hard and bitter.
"Will
you give John back his children?" she said.
A
brief glance aside showed that her son John wasn't nearby
anymore. Where . . . twenty feet or so, bending over a cargo net
with another boy of about the same twelve years. Jeffrey Farr,
Maurice's son.
Karl
Hosten stiffened and ran a hand over his stubbled scalp.
"The law is the law; genetic defects must be-"
"A
clubfoot is not a genetic defect!" Sally said with quiet
deadliness. "It's a result of carriage during
pregnancy"-a spear of guilt stabbed her-"which can be,
was, corrected surgically. And you didn't even tell me you
were having him sterilized in the delivery room. I didn't find
out until he was eleven years old!"
"Would
you have been happier if you knew? Would he?"
"How
happy would he be when he found out he couldn't be Chosen?"
Karl
swallowed and looked very slightly away. He is my son too,
he didn't say. Aloud: "There are many fine careers open to
Probationers-Emeritus. Johan is an intelligent boy. The
University-"
"As
a Washout," Sally said, using the cruel slang term
for those who failed the exacting Trial of Life at eighteen after
being born to or selected for the training system. It was far
better than Protégé status, anything was, but in the Land of
the Chosen . . .
"We've
had this conversation too many times," she said.
Karl
sighed. "Correct. Let us get this over with."
She
looked around. "John!"
John
Hosten felt prickly, as if his own skin were too tight and
belonged to somebody else. Everyone had been too quiet in the
steamcar, after they picked him up at the school. He'd already
said good-bye to his friends-he didn't have many-and packed.
Vulf, his dog, was already on board the ship.
I don't want to listen to them fight, he thought, and began drifting
away from his mother and father.
That
put him near another boy about his own age. John's eyes slid back
to him, curiosity driving his misery away a little. The stranger
was skinny and tall, red-haired and freckled. His hair was oddly
cut, short at the sides and floppy on top, combed-a foreigner's
style, different from both the Chosen crop and the bowl-cut of a
Proti. He wore a thin fabric pullover printed in bizarre colorful
patterns, baggy shorts, laced shoes with rubber soles, and a
ridiculous looking billed cap.
"Hi,"
he said, holding out a hand. Then: "Ah, guddag."
"I
speak English," John said, shaking with the brief hard clamp
of the Land. English and Imperial were compulsory subjects at
school, and he'd practiced with his mother.
The
other boy flexed his fingers. "Better'n I speak
Landisch," he said, grinning. "I'm Jeffrey Farr. That's
my dad over there."
He
nodded towards a tall slender man in a white uniform who was
standing a careful twenty meters from the Hosten party. John
recognized the uniform from familiarization lectures and slides:
Republic of Santander Navy, officer's lightweight summer garrison
version. It must be Captain Farr, the officer Mom had been seeing
at the consulate about the citizenship stuff.
I wish she'd tell me the truth. I'm not a little kid or
an idiot, he
thought. That wasn't the only reason she was talking to Maurice
Farr so much. "John Hosten, Probationer-hereditary," he
replied aloud.
A
Probationer-hereditary was born to the Chosen and automatically
entitled to the training and the Test of Life; only a few
children of Protégés were adopted into the course. Then he
flushed. He wasn't going to be a Probationer long, and he could
never have passed the Test, not the genetic portions. Not with
his foot. He couldn't be anything but a Washout, second-class
citizen.
"You
don't have to worry about all that crap any more," Jeffrey
said cheerfully, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the liner Pride
of Bosson. "We're all going back to civilization."
The
flag that fluttered from her signal mast had a blue triangle in
the left field with fifteen white stars, and two broad stripes of
red and white to the right. The Republic of Santander's banner.
John
opened his mouth in automatic reflex to defend the Land, then
closed it again. He was going to Santander himself. To live.
"Ya,
we're going," he said. They both looked over towards their
parents. "Your mother?"
"She
died when I was a baby," Jeffrey said.
There
was a crash behind them. The boys turned, both relieved at the
distraction. One of the steam cranes on the Bosson's deck
had slipped a gear while unloading a final cargo net on the dock.
The Protégé foreman of the docker gang went white under his
tan-he'd be held responsible-and turned to yell insults and
complaints up at the liner's deck, shaking his fist. Then he
turned and whipped his lead-weighted truncheon across the side of
one docker's head. There was a sound like a melon dropping on
pavement; the docker's face seemed to distort like a rubber mask.
He fell to the cracked uneven pavement with a limp finality, as
if someone had cut all his tendons.
"Shit,"
Jeffrey whispered.
The
foreman made an angry gesture with his baton, and two of the
dockers took their injured fellow by the arms and dragged him off
towards a warehouse. His head was rolled back, eyes disappeared
in the whites, bubbles of blood whistling out of his nose. The
foreman turned back to the ship and called up to the seamen on
the railing, calling for an officer. They looked back at him for
a moment, then one silently turned away and walked towards the
nearest hatch . . . slowly.
The
gang instantly squatted on their heels when the foreman's
attention went elsewhere. A few lit up stubs of cigarette; John
could smell the musky scent of hemp mingled with the tobacco. A
few smirked at the foreman's back, but most were expressionless
in a different way from Chosen, their faces blank and doughy
under sweat and stubble. They were wearing cotton overalls with
broad arrows on them, labor-camp inmates' clothing.
"Hey,
that crate's busted," Jeffrey said.
John
looked. One wood-and-iron box about three meters on a side had
sprung along its top. The stencils on the side read Museum of
History and Nature/Copernik. He felt a stir of curiosity.
Copernik was capital of the Land, and the Museum was more than a
storehouse; it was the primary research center of the most
advanced nation on Visager. He'd had daydreams of working there
himself, of finally figuring out some of the mysterious artifacts
of the Ancestors, the star-spanning colonizers from Earth. The
Federation had fallen over a thousand years ago-it was 1221 A.F.
right now-and nobody could understand the enigmatic constructs of
ceramic and unknown metals. Not even now, despite the way
technology had been advancing in the past hundred years. They
were as incomprehensible as a steam engine or a dirigible would
be to one of the arctic savages.
"What's
inside?" he said eagerly.
"C'mon,
let's take a look."
The
laborers ignored them; John was in a Probationer's school
uniform, and Jeffrey was an obvious foreigner-an upper-class boy
could go where he pleased, and the Fourth Bureau would be
lethally interested if they heard of Protégés talking to an auzlander.
Even in the camps, there was always someplace worse. The foreman
was still trading cusswords with the liner's petty officer.
John
grabbed at the heavy Abaca hemp of the net and climbed; it was
easy, compared to the obstacle courses at school. Jeffrey
followed in an awkward scramble, all elbows and knees.
"It's
just a rock," he said in disappointment, peering through the
sprung panels.
"No,
it's a meteorite," John said.
The
lumpy rock was about a meter across, suspended in an elastic
cradle in the center of the crate. It hadn't taken any damage
when the net dropped-unlike a keg of brandy, which they could
smell leaking-but then, from the slagged and pitted appearance,
it had survived an incandescent journey through the atmosphere.
John was surprised that it was being sent to the museum;
meteorites were common. You saw dozens in the sky, any night.
There must be something unusual about this one, maybe its
chemical composition. He reached through and touched it.
"Sort
of cold," he said. Not quite icy, but not natural, either.
"Feel it."
Jeffrey
stretched a long thin arm through the crack. "Yeah,
like-"
The
universe vanished.
Sally
looked over her shoulder. Where was John? Then she saw
him, scrambling over the cargo net with another boy. With
Maurice's son. She opened her mouth to call them back, then
closed it. It's important that they get along. Maurice
hadn't made a formal proposal yet, but . . . She turned back.
Karl
had his witnesses to either side: his legal children, Heinrich
and Gerta, adopted in the fashion of the Chosen. Heinrich was the
son of a friend who'd died in an expedition to the Far West
Islands; they were dangerous, and the seas between, with their
abundant and vicious native life, even more so. The other had
been born to Protégé laborers on the Hosten estates and
christened Gitana. Karl had sponsored her; she was a bright
active youngster and her parents were John's nurse and attendant
valet/bodyguard, respectively.
Maria
and Angelo stood at a respectful distance; their daughter ignored
them. Ex-daughter; no Chosen were as strict as those Chosen from
Protégé ranks. She was Gerta Hosten now, not Gitana Pesalozi.
A
Chosen attorney exchanged papers with the plump little Santander
consul, then turned to Sarah.
"Sarah
Hosten, née Kingman, do you hereby irrevocably renounce
connubial ties with Karl Hosten, Chosen of the Land?"
"I
do."
"Karl
Hosten, do you acknowledge this renunciation?"
"I
do."
"Do
you also acknowledge Sarah Hosten as bearing full parental rights
to John Hosten, issue of this union?"
"Excepting
that John Hosten may continue to claim my name if he wishes, I
do." Karl swallowed, but his face might have been carved
from the basalt of the volcanoes.
"Heinrich
Hosten, Gerta Hosten, Probationers-adoptee of the line of Hosten,
do you witness?"
"We
do."
"All
parties will now sign, fingerprint and list their geburtsnumero
on this document."
Sally
complied, although unlike anyone born in the Land of the Chosen
she didn't have a birth-number tattooed on her right
shoulderblade and memorized like her name. The ink from the
fingerprinting stained her handkerchief as she wiped her hands.
The
consul stepped forward. "Sarah Jennings Kingman, as
representative of the Republic of Santander, I hereby officially
certify that your lapsed citizenship in the Republic is fully
restored with all rights and duties appertaining thereunto; and
that your son John Hosten as issue of your body is accordingly
entitled to Santander citizenship also. . . . Where is the
boy?"
The
universe vanished. John found himself in a . . . place. It seemed
to be the inside of a perfectly reflective sphere, like being
inside a bubble made of mirror glass. He tried to scream.
Nothing
happened. That was when he realized that he had no throat, and no
mouth. No body.
No body no body nobodynobody-
The
hysteria damped down suddenly, as if he'd been slipped a
tranquilizer. Then he became conscious of weight, breath, himself.
For a moment he wanted to weep with relief.
"Excuse
me," a voice said behind him.
He
turned, and the mirrored sphere had vanished. Instead he saw a
room. The furnishings were familiar, and wrong. A
fireplace, rugs, deep armchairs, books, table, decanters, but
none of them quite as he remembered. A man was standing by a
table, in uniform, but none he knew: baggy maroon pants, a blue
swallowtail jacket, a belt with a saber; a pistol was thrown on
the table beside the glasses. He was dark, darker than a tan
could be, with short very black hair and gray eyes. A tall man,
standing like a soldier.
"Where
. . . what . . ." John began.
"Attention!"
the man said.
"Sir!"
John barked, bracing. Six years of Probationer schooling had made
that a reflex.
"At
ease, son," the dark man said, and smiled. "Just
helping you get a grip on yourself. First, don't worry. This is
real"-he gestured around at the room-"but it isn't
physical. You're still touching the meteorite in the crate.
Virtually no time is passing in the . . . the outside world. When
we've finished talking, you'll be back on the dock and none the
worse for wear."
"Am
I crazy?" John blurted.
"No.
You've just had something very strange happen." The smile
grew wry. "Pretty much the same thing happened to me, lad. A
long time ago, when I wasn't all that much older than you are
now. Sit."
John
sank gingerly into one of the chairs. It was comfortable, old
leather that sighed under his weight. He sat with his feet on the
floor and his hands on the arms of the chair.
"My
name's Raj Whitehall, by the way. And this"-he waved a hand
at the room-"is Center. A computer."
Despite
the terror that boiled somewhere at the back of his mind, John
shaped a silent whistle. "A computer? Like the
Ancestors had, the Federation? I've read a lot about them,
sir."
Raj
Whitehall chuckled. "Well, that's a good start. My people
thought they were angels. Yes, Center's a holdover from the First
Federation. Military computer, Command and Control type. Don't
ask me any of the details. Where I was brought up, experts
understood steam engines, a little. Look there."
John
turned his head to look at the mirrored surface. Instead, he was
staring out into a landscape. It wasn't a picture; there was
depth and texture to it. Subtly different from anything he'd ever
seen, the moons in the faded blue sky were the wrong size and
number, the sunlight was a different shade. It cast black shadows
across eroded gullies in cream-white silt. Out of the badlands
came a column of men in uniforms like Raj's. They were riding,
but not on horses. On dogs, giant dogs five feet high at
the shoulder. They looked a lot like Vulf, except their legs were
thicker in proportion. John whistled again, this time aloud.
The
column of men went by, and a clumsy-looking field gun pulled by
six more of the giant dogs. Then Raj Whitehall pulled up his . .
. well, his giant hound. A woman rode beside him, not in uniform.
Her face was dusty and streaked with sweat, and beautiful.
Slanted green eyes glowed out of it.
The
vision faded, back to the absolutely perfect mirror. John looked
back to Raj. "Where was that?" he said. Then, slowly:
"When was that?"
Raj
nodded, leaning his hips back against the table and crossing his
arms. "That was Bellevue, the planet where I was born. About
a hundred and fifty years ago."
"You're
. . . a ghost?"
"A
ghost in a machine. A recording that thinks it's a man. It's a
convincing illusion, even to me."
John
sat silently for what felt like a minute. "Why are you
talking to me?"
"Good
lad," Raj said. John felt an obscure jolt of pride at the
praise. Raj went on. "Now, listen carefully. You know how
the Federation collapsed?"
John
nodded. Visager had preserved the records; he'd seen them in
school. Expansion from Earth, then rivalries and civil war. Civil
war that continued until the Tanaki Nets were destroyed and
interstellar travel cut off, and then on Visager itself until
civilization was thoroughly smashed. After that a long process of
rebirth, slow and painful.
"That
happened all over the human-settled galaxy. On Bellevue, the
collapse was even worse than here. Center was left in the rubble
underneath the planetary governor's mansion. Center waited a
long, long time for the time to be right. More than a thousand
years; then it found me. Bellevue's problem was internal
division. We were set to slag ourselves down again, this time
right back to stone hatchets, all the more surely because we were
doing it with rifles and not nukes. I was a soldier, an officer.
With Center's help-and some very brave men-I reunited the planet.
Bellevue's the capital of the Second Federation, now."
"You
want me to unite Visager?" John felt his mouth drop
open. "Me?" His voice broke embarrassingly, the
way it had taken to doing lately, and he flushed.
Raj
shook his head. "Not exactly. More to prevent it
being unified, at least by the wrong people." He leaned
forward slightly. "Tell me honestly, John. What do you think
of the Chosen?"
John
opened his mouth, then closed it. Memories flickered through his
mind; ending with the blank, caved-in faces of the dockers as the
unconscious man was carried away.
"Honestly,
sir-not much. Mom doesn't, either. I tried talking to Dad about
it once, but . . ." He shrugged and looked away.
Raj
nodded. "Center can foresee things. Not the future
always, but what will probably happen, and how probable it is.
Don't ask me to explain it-I've had three lifetimes, and I still
can't understand it. But I know it works."
maintenance of your personality matrix is incompatible
with the modifications necessary to comprehend stochastic
analysis.
John
started and put his hands to his ears. The voice had come from
everywhere and nowhere. It felt heavy, somehow, as if the
words held a greater freight of meaning than any he'd ever heard.
The sound of them in his head had been entirely flat and even,
but there were undertones that resonated like a guitar's strings
after the player's fingers left them. The voice felt . . . sad.
"Center
means that if I was changed that much, I wouldn't be me,"
Raj said.
john hosten, the ancient, impersonal voice said. in
the absence of exterior intervention, there is a 51% probability
±6%, that the chosen will establish complete dominance of
visager within 34 years. observe.
John
looked toward the mirrored wall.
An
endless line of men in tattered green uniforms marched past a
machine-gun nest manned by Land troops, Protégé infantry, and a
Chosen officer. Two plainclothes police agents stood by, in long
leather coats and wide-brimmed hats, heavy pistols in their
hands. Every now and then they would flick their hands, and the
soldiers would drag a man out of the line of prisoners, force him
down to his knees. The Fourth Bureau men would step up and put
the muzzles of their guns to the back of the kneeling man's head
. . .
conquest of the empire, Center said. observe:
A
montage followed: cities burning, with their names and locations
somehow in his mind. Ships crowded with slave laborers arriving
in Oathtaking and Pillars and Dorst. A group of Chosen engineers
talking over papers and plans, while a line of laborers that
stretched beyond sight worked on a railway embankment.
consolidation. further expansion.
A
burning warship sank, in an ocean littered with oily guttering
flames, wreckage, bodies, and men who still tried to move.
Hundreds of them were sucked backwards and down as the ship
upended and sank like a lead pencil dropped into a pool, its huge
bronze propellers still whirling as it took the final plunge.
Through the smoke came a line of battlewagons, with the
black-and-gold banner of the Chosen at their masts. Their main
batteries were scorched and blistered with heavy firing, but
silent; their secondary guns and quick-firers stabbed out into
the waters.
destruction of santander.
Even
without Center's information, he recognized the next scene. It
was Republic Hall in Santander City. The great red-granite dome
was shattered; a man in the black frock coat and tall hat of
Republican formality stood before a Chosen general and handed
over the Constitution of the Republic in its glass-cased box. The
general threw it down and ground the heel of his boot into it
while the troops behind him cheered.
consequences.
A
shabby tenement street in a Chosen city. Figures clustered about
the steps, talking, falling silent as a strange-looking steamcar
bristling with weapons hummed by.
"But
those are Chosen," John exclaimed.
Raj
spoke: "What do carnivores do when they've finished off the
game?"
metaphorical but correct, Center's passionless non-voice said. once
consolidation is complete, the chosen lines would fall out with
each other. the planet cannot support so large a ruling class in
conditions of intense competition, not indefinitely; and the
social system resulting from conquest and slavery cannot be
rationally adjusted to maximize productivity. internal
reorganization would lead to the creation of a noble caste and
the exclusion of most chosen lines.
Armies
clashed, armed with strange, powerful weapons. Machines swarmed
through the air, ran in sleek low-slung deadliness over the
earth. Men died, Protégé soldiers, civilians.
the new nobility would fight among themselves. first
with protégé armies. rivalry would build.
A
long sleek shape dropped on a pillar of white fire into a desert
landscape. Landing legs extended, and a hatchway opened.
technological progress would continue to an
interplanetary-transport level, then fossilize. none of the
contending factions on visager could afford to divert sufficient
resources to reestablish stardrive.
A
huge city, buildings reaching for the sun. It took a moment for
John to recognize it as Oathtaking, and then only by the shape of
the circular harbor and the volcanoes that ringed it. Suddenly
one of the giant towers vanished in an eye-searing flash.
one party among the nobility attempts to use the fallen
chosen lines against the other. instead they rise against the
nobility planet-wide, attempting to restore the old system. the
protégés revolt. maximum entropy results.
Rings
of violet fire expanded over the sites of cities, rising until
the fireballs spread out against the top of the atmosphere.
probability 87%, ±6%, Center added.
John
sat, shaken. I'm just a kid, he thought. Not even good
enough to make the Test of Life, a gimp. What'm I supposed to
do about all this?
"Why
can't you do something?" he asked. "You came from the
stars, you've got another Federation-land a starship and tell
people what to do!"
"We
can't," Raj said. "First, we don't have the resources.
There are only four worlds in the Federation, so far. There are thousands
needing attention. And even if we could, that would just set us
up for another cycle of empire, decline and war like the First
Federation. The new worlds have to climb out on their own with
minimal interference, and do so in the right way."
correct,
Center said. a true federation may achieve stability in an
dynamic and mobile sense. a hegemony imposed from without could
not.
"You
want me to . . . somehow to stop the Chosen from taking things
over," John said.
He
felt a flush of excitement. It was a little like what he'd felt
last week, when the housemaid looked back over her shoulder at
him as she plumped the pillows and smiled, and he knew he could
right there and then if he wanted to. But it was stronger,
deeper. He could affect the destiny of a whole planet. Save
the whole world. He, John Hosten with a pimple on his nose and a
foot that still ached when he used it too hard, despite all the
surgeons could do.
specifically, you will act to strengthen the republic of
santander, Center
said. with my advice and that of raj whitehall, you will rise
quickly and be in a position to influence policy. such
intervention will drastically increase the probability of the
republic emerging as the dominant factor in the cycle of wars
which will begin in the next two decades.
"The
Republic will conquer . . . unite the world?"
no. that probability is less than 12%, ±3. observe:
Troops
in the brown uniforms and round hats of the Republic marched out
of a city: Arena, in the Sierra. Crowds lined the streets,
hooting and whistling. Sometimes they threw things.
santander lacks the organizational infrastructure to
forcefully integrate foreign territories.
"No
staying power," Raj amplified. "They can get into wars,
and if you push them to the wall they can mobilize like hell, but
when it's less vital than that, they don't like paying the
butcher's bill or the money either. They'll get into wars
occasionally, and piss away men and equipment and then decide
it's no fun and go home."
correct. santander will exercise a general hegemony,
increasingly cultural and economic rather than military. this
will inaugurate a period of intense competition within a
framework of minimal government. such episodes are unstable but
tend to rapid technological innovation.
"The
Republic will go into space because it gives you as much glory as
war and it's less frustrating," Raj explained.
observe:
A
cylinder taller than a building lifted into the air in a
blue-white discharge. The next view was strange: a white-streaked
blue disk floating in utter blackness, ringed by unwinking stars.
It wasn't until John saw the outline of a continent that he
realized he was seeing Visager from space.
From space!
he thought. A construct of girders floated across the vision. Men
in spacesuits flitted around it and incomprehensible machines
with arms like crabs.
a tanaki displacement net, Center said. in this scenario, visager
would enter the second federation without prior political
unification. an unusual development.
The
visions ceased, leaving only a mirrored wall at the end of a
strange study.
Raj
handed him a glass and sat in the chair facing him. John took a
cautious sip of the sweet wine.
"Lad,
you can leave here with no memories of what you've seen and
heard," he said calmly. "Or you can leave here as
Center's agent-as I was Center's agent-to help get this planet
out of the dead-end it's trapped in and set its people
free."
"I'll
do it," John blurted, then flushed again.
The
words seemed to have come directly from his mouth without passing
through his brain.
Raj
shook his head. "This isn't a game, John. You could die. You
quite probably will die."
The
mirrored wall dissolved into its impossibly real pictures. This
time they were much more personal. John-an older John-lay beside
a hedgerow. His face was slack, eyes unblinking in the thin gray
mist of rain. One hand lay on his stomach, a blue bulge of
intestine showing around the fingers.
John
sat stripped to the waist in a metal chair, waist and limbs and
neck held by padded clamps; another device of levers and screws
held his mouth open. A single bulb shone down from the ceiling. A
Fourth Bureau specialist dressed in a shiny bib apron stepped up
to him with a curved tool in his hands.
"Shame,
Hosten, shame," he said. "You have neglected your
teeth. Still, I think this nerve is still sensitive."
The
curved shape of stainless steel probed and then thrust. The body
in the chair convulsed and screamed a fine mist of blood into the
cellar's dark air.
Another
John stood in the dock of a courtroom. The Republic's flag stood
on the wall behind the panel of judges. They whispered together,
and then one of them raised his head:
"John
Hosten, this court finds you guilty as charged of treason and
espionage. You will be taken from this place to the National
Prison, and there hung by the neck until dead. May God have mercy
on your soul."
The
visions died. John touched his tongue to his lips. "I'm not
afraid to die," he whispered. Then aloud: "I'm not
afraid, and I know my duty. I'll do what you ask, no matter how
long it takes, no matter what the risks."
"Good
lad," Raj said quietly, and gripped his shoulder. "You
and your brother will both do your best."