“Let’s look anyway,” Magnus said. “If the worst is dreadful, the lesser cases may be horrid. We might not be able to bring ourselves to pass them by.”
“Oh, all right,” Alea said with a martyred sigh. “Which hard case is closest?”
They sat in the sybaritic lounge of Magnus’s spaceship Herkimer, computer and ship being so tightly interlocked that it would be impossible to tell the difference. They sat on deeply cushioned chairs that molded themselves to the contours of their bodies as they shifted positions. Between them was a slab of jade on legs of porphyry, and if the substances weren’t strictly natural, only an electron microscope could tell. Around them stretched deep-piled carpet of a dark red. The walls were lost in shadow except for pictures lighted by camouflaged lamps, as were their two chairs. All the rest was hidden in scented gloom. Mozart played softly from hidden speakers.
Alea twisted, feeling guilty at such luxury when people dwelt in the squalor pictured before them in midair, seeming as real as though the people and landscapes were actually before them in the room.
“These are the people of Beta Taurus Four,” Herkimer told them.
Alea found herself staring at a circle of men and women wearing only loincloths and halters, bent low over the spokes of a turnstile that turned a mill wheel. An overseer in a leather jerkin and high boots stood watching, whip in hand. Behind him, oxen wandered, grazing.
“There are far more people than cattle on this planet,” Herkimer told them, “so the men and women labor while the oxen grow fat to provide tender meat for the lords’ banquets. There are fifteen hundred rulers and a million serfs, with twelve thousand overseers and supervisors to keep them healthy enough to work and drive them to exhaustion.”
Alea shuddered. “Worse than the last by far.” She turned to Magnus. “Where did Herkimer find this information?”
“My father’s robot downloaded it into him.” Magnus tried not to think about the details of family and self that Fess had downloaded with it. “My father is an agent for SCENT, the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms. After Terra managed to throw off PEST, the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra, the reactionary government that cut off the frontier planets, SCENT surveyed those colony worlds to see how they had fared during their centuries of isolation. They smuggled in agents who traveled wherever they could, taking pictures with hidden cameras. When their ships picked them up and brought them back to SCENT headquarters, they filed these pictures along with reports of what they had seen.” He shrugged. “PEST lost quite a few records of which planets had been colonized, and later explorers have happened upon some of them.” He didn’t mention that his own home world had been one.
“So there may still be a great number left out there?” Magnus nodded. “To be truthful, no one knows how many. During the last century of colonization, a host of disaffected groups scraped together enough money to buy and equip their own colony ships and went plunging off into the galaxy to try to find habitable planets. Some sent back reports, some didn’t. SCENT assumes a large proportion of those last have died out.”
“But some of them survived?”
“Survived, and don’t want to be found—or at least, their founders didn’t. Some of the groups who set out from Terra to found their own ideas of an ideal society were careful not to let anyone know where they were going. Others meant to but were rather careless. We don’t know which colonies survived and which didn’t.”
Alea shuddered. “But we can’t do anything about them, can we?”
“Not unless we happen upon one accidentally, no.”
“And we have no idea what they’re like?”
“Well, we know they haven’t developed interstellar travel, or we would have heard from them,” Magnus said. “Other than that, we only know that some of the ones we’ve found have developed very bizarre cultures.”
Alea thought about what “bizarre” could mean and hid another shudder. The dread made her a bit more acerbic. “If you people in SCENT know—”
“Not me,” Magnus said quickly, eyes on the scene before him. “I resigned.”
Alea frowned; it was the first he had mentioned of ever having belonged to his father’s organization. She needed to follow that up, find out why he had joined and, even more, why he had quit-but she could see from his face that the time wasn’t right. Instead, she went on. “All right, those people in SCENT. If they know lords are oppressing serfs on so many worlds, why don’t they do something about it?”
“Because there are so many worlds,” Magnus explained. “There are simply too many of them for SCENT to deal with all at once. After all, they have limited personnel, becoming more limited all the time as the old rebels who first staffed it die off or retire.”
“So who’s going to take care of the colonies they haven’t reached yet?” Alea demanded.
“We will.” Magnus flashed her a grin. Alea stared. Then, slowly, she smiled back.
“Alert!” the computer’s voice said. “I have just received a television signal.”
“Television?” Magnus turned back toward the display area, tense as a leashed hound. “In H-space?”
“I can detect it, but I cannot receive it,” Herkimer said. “Shall I drop into normal space and read it?”
“Please do so!”
Alea didn’t understand the terms yet, but she wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment. There was no feeling of a change in motion—the ship’s internal gravity saw to that—but suddenly a woman and two men stood before them dressed in garish clothing. Behind them was an array of flashing lights and screens with abstract patterns. The woman had tears in her eyes and was trying to push her way between the men, who glared at each other as though ready to spring into a fight to the death. The colors kept blurring and bleaching, though, and the whole picture kept breaking into a sea of colored dots that lost their hues, then regained them, managing to pull together into the image again.
“The signal is very faint,” Herkimer said. “I shall have to digitize and process it to make it consistent.”
“Do so, please,” Magnus said. “What is its source?”
“Extrapolating vector,” Herkimer said, then a few seconds later, “There is no recorded planet in that vicinity.”
“No recorded planet?” Gar turned to meet Alea’s eyes, and the same thought rang in both minds: Lost colony!
Arnogle waited until the last glimmer of dusk had faded from the meadow, then came forth from the forest and stretched his arms upward, palms out. The tall cone of his hat pointed backward; his white beard and blue robe ruffled in the breeze, making the golden symbols embroidered there dance and ripple. Arnogle had told Blaize again and again that stretching the arms wasn’t necessary to call ghosts but did help a man direct his thoughts toward them. It was only a trick, a technique, but Arnogle needed every bit of skill he could muster.
Only one or two ghosts came in answer to his summons, rising from the long grass of the meadow like mist, and scarcely stronger than that vapor—rather sorry specimens of their kind, too minor even to groan. Given enough time, of course, Arnogle could, with great effort and skill, call up a dozen or so middling powerful specters, but such summoning wasn’t Arnogle’s strength. That was why he had tracked down the teenaged boy who was making his village a virtual ghost town. Arnogle had sent one of his own peasants to trade with the villagers, making sure to mention what a kind lord his master was and how willing to teach his art. Sure enough, Blaize had found a way to escape from his lord and flee to Arnogle, who had generously enlisted him as apprentice, thereby winning the eternal gratitude of both the boy, who escaped his neighbors’ wrath and censure, and of the villagers, who breathed a massive sigh of relief at being rid of all the specters Blaize attracted. Arnogle had taught Blaize quickly enough how to control his ability to call the ghosts.