Lenda turned to Mordirak. "I'm sorry I asked you here. I'm sorry I bothered you at all today."
Mordirak looked up from the scene below. "I think it's quite interesting."
"Is that all you can say?" Lenda rasped through his teeth. He felt sudden rage clutching at his throat. This man was untouchable! "You're witnessing not only the end of the organization that for fifteen hundred years has guided our race into a peaceful interstellar civilization, but the probable downfall of that very civilization as well! And all you can say is it's 'interesting'?"
Mordirak was unperturbed. "Quite interesting. But I've seen enough, I think. Can I offer you transportation back to Clutch?"
"No, thank you," he replied disdainfully. "I'll make my own accommodations."
Mordirak nodded and left the gallery.
"Who was that?" Petrical asked. He knew only the man's name, but fully shared Lenda's antipathy.
Lenda turned back toward the assembly room. "No one."
XVIII
As he stepped through the lock from the shuttle to his tourer, Dalt considered the strange inner glee that suffused him at the thought of the Federation's downfall. He had seen it coming for a long time but had paid it little heed. In fact, it had been quite some time since he had given much heed at all to the affairs of his fellow humans. Physically disguising himself from them had been a prime concern at one time, but now even that wasn't necessary—a projected psi image of whomever he wished to appear to be proved sufficient in most cases. (Of course, he had to avoid image recorders of any sort, since they were impervious to psi influence.) Humanity might as well be another race, for all the contact he had with it; the symbol of the human interstellar culture, the Federation, was dying and he could not dredge up a mote of regret for it.
And yet, he should feel something for its passing. Five hundred, even two hundred years ago his reactions might have been different. But he had been someone else then and the Fed had been a viable organization. Now, he was Mordirak and the Fed was on its deathbed.
The decline, he supposed, had begun with the termination of the Terro-Tarkan war, a monstrous, seemingly endless conflict. The war had not gone well for the Terrans at first. The monolithic Tarkan Empire had mounted huge assault forces which wrought havoc with deep incursions into the Terran sphere of influence. But the monolithism that gave the Tarks their initial advantage proved in the long run to be their downfall. Their empire had long studied the loose, disorganized, eccentric structure of the Fed and had read weakness. But when early victory was denied them and both sides dug in for a long siege, the diversification of humanity, long fostered by the LaNague charter, began to tell.
Technological breakthroughs in weaponry eventually pierced the infamous Tarkan screens and the Emperor of the Tarks found his palace planet ringed with Terran dread-naughts. He was the seventh descendant of the emperor who had started the war, and, true to Tarkan tradition, he allowed the upper-echelon nobles assembled around him to blast him and his family to ashes before surrender. Thus honorably ending—in Tarkan terms—the royal line.
With victory, there followed the expected jubilant celebration. Half a millennium of war had ended and the Federation had proved itself resilient and effective. There were scars, yes. The toll of life from the many generations involved had reached into the billions and there were planets on both sides left virtually uninhabitable. But the losses were not in resources alone. The conflict had drained something from the Terrans.
As the flush of victory faded, humanity began to withdraw into itself. The trend was imperceptible at first, but it gradually became apparent to the watchers and chroniclers of the Terran race that expansion had stopped. Exploratory probes along the galactic perimeter and into the core were postponed, indefinitely. Extension of the boundaries of Occupied Space slowed to a crawl.
Man had learned to warp space and had jubilantly leaped from star to star. He had made mistakes, had learned from them, and had continued to move on—until the Terro-Tarkan war. The outward urge had been stung then and had retreated. Humanity turned inward. An unvoiced, unconscious directive set the race to tending its own gardens. The Tarks had been pacified; had, in fact, been incorporated into the Federation and given second-class representation. They were no longer a threat.
But what about farther out? Perhaps there was another belligerent race out there. Perhaps another war was in the wings. Back off, the directive seemed to say. Sit tight for a while and consolidate.
But consolidation never occurred, at least not on a productive scale. By the end of the war, the Terrans and their allies were linked by a comprehensive network of Haas gates and were more accessible to one another than ever before. Had the Federation been in the hands of opportunists at that time, a new imperium could have been launched. But the opposite had occurred: Federation officials, true to the Charter, resisted the urge to use the post-war period to extend their franchise over the member planets. They urged, rather, a return to normalcy and worked to reverse the centrist tendencies that all wars bring on.
They were too successful. As requested, the planets loosened their ties with the Federation, but then went on to form their own enclaves, alliances, and commonwealths, bound together by mutual trade and protection agreements. They huddled in their sectors and for all intents and purposes forgot the Federation.
It was this subdividing, coupled with the atrophy of the outward urge, that caused the political scientists the most concern. They foresaw increasing estrangement between the planetary enclaves and, subsequently, open hostility. Without the Federation acting as a focus for the drives and ambitions of the race, they were predicting a sort of interstellar feudalism. From there the race would go one of two ways: complete consolidation under the most aggressive enclave and a return to empire much like the Metep Imperium in the pre-Federation days, or complete breakdown of interstellar intercourse, resulting in barbarism and stagnation.
Dalt was not sure whether he accepted the doomsayers' theories. One thing was certain, however: The Federation was no longer a focus for much of anything anymore.
With the image of the near-deserted General Council assembly hall dancing in his head, he tried to doze. But a voice as familiar by now as the tone of his own thoughts intruded on his mind.
("Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ ... the best lose all conviction.") Don't bother me.
("You don't like poetry, Dalt? That's from one of my favorites of the ancient poets. Appropriate, don't you think?")
I really couldn't care.
("You should. It could apply to your personal situation as well as that of your race.") Begone, parasite!
("I'm beginning to wish that were possible. You worry me lately. Your personality is disintegrating.")
Spare me your trite analyses.
("I'm quite serious about this. Look at what you've become: a recluse, an eccentric divorced from contact with other beings, living in an automated gothic mansion and surrounding himself with old weapons and death trophies, brooding and miserable. My concern is genuine, though hardly altruistic")
Dalt didn't answer. Pard had a knack for cutting directly to the core of a matter and this time the resultant exposure was none too pleasant. He had long been plagued by a gnawing fear that his personality was deteriorating. He didn't like what he had become but seemed unable to do anything about it. When and where had the change begun? When had occasional boredom become crushing ennui? When had other people become other things? Even sex no longer distracted him, although he was as potent as ever. Emotional attachments that had once been an easy, natural part of his being had become elusive, then impossible. Perhaps the fact that all such relationships in the past had been terminated by death had something to do with it.