She smiled a little, to herself'. Actually, her most active work in those three years had amounted to occasionally rescuing a prisoner of these same jack-booted imitation soldiers, when this could be done without giving away her true identify. Mostly, her job had been to provide reassurance to the local Kultans. So that they, like the other dominated peoples of' the Younger Worlds, would know they had not been entirely forgotten by those still holding out behind the phase-shield of Old Earth. Holding yet, against the combined strength of the Younger Worlds and the self-named, multitalented Others who ruled them.
But now, her hopes lifted. Those following had delayed almost too long. She had at last reached the little hillock of flourishing undergrowth and young trees, which she had transplanted here three years before with great care and labor. She stopped, and, almost casually, began to tear up a strip of turf between two of the trees.
That, she thought, should intrigue them enough to keep them from rushing upon her too swiftly. The turf came free, as it had been designed to do, being artificial, rather than real, like the rest of the vegetation in the hillock. Below it was the metal face and handle of a ship's entry port.
At last, she moved swiftly, now. A second later the door was open and she was inside, closing it behind her. As she turned the handle to locking position, the blast from a power rifle rang ineffectively against its outer side. She took two strides, seated herself in the chair before the command panel and laid hands on the controls.
A Dorsai courier vessel did not need time to warm its atmosphere drive before responding, even after three years of idleness. Almost in the same moment as she gripped the control rod, the ship burst from the hillock, sending an explosion of earth, grass and trees in all directions. On ordinary atmosphere drive she lifted and hedgehopped over the nearest ridge. As soon as she knew she was out of her pursuers' sight, she phase-shifted the craft clear of the planet in one jump. Her next shift was almost immediate, to two light-years beyond the sun just now rising, which was the star called Beta Procyon by those on Old Earth.
Out at last in interstellar space, she was beyond pursuit and discovery by any ship of the Younger Worlds. Here in deep space, she was as unfindable as a minnow in a world-wide Ocean.
She glanced around the unkempt interior of the vessel. It was hardly in condition for a formal visit to Old Earth, let alone to the Final Encyclopedia. But that was beside the point. What mattered was that she had got away safely past whatever ships had been on guard patrol around the Worlds under Beta Procyon. Ahead of her still lay the greater task, the matter of reaching Old Earth itself - which would mean running the gauntlet of the Younger Worlds' fleet besieging that world. Somehow she must slip safely through a thick cordon of much better armed and ready battleships, to which her own small vessel would indeed be a minnow by comparison.
But that was a problem to be dealt with when she came to it.
CHAPTER 2
Through the library window, the cold mountain rain of early winter in the north temperate zone of Old Earth could be seen slanting down on the leafless oaks and the pines around the little lake before the estate building that was the earliest home he could remember, as Hal Mayne. Overhead, obscuring the peaks of the surrounding mountains, the sky was an unbroken, heavy, gray ceiling of clouds, and the gusts from time to time slanted the rain at a greater angle, and made the treetops bow momentarily. The darkness of the day and the lowering clouds made the window slightly reflective, so that he saw what was barely recognizable as an image of his face, looking back at him like the face of a ghost.
An unusually early winter had commenced upon the Rocky Mountains of the North American continent. An early winter, in fact, was upon the whole northern hemisphere of the planet. Outside, the day was chill and dismal, sending forest creatures to their dens and holes. Within the library a fire burned brightly in the fireplace, with the good smell of birch wood, started by the automatic machinery of the house on a signal from a satellite overhead. The ceiling lighting was bright on the spines of the antique books that solidly filled the shelves of the bookcases covering all the walls of the room.
This was the home where the orphan Hal had been raised by his tutors, the three old men he had loved - and the place where he had watched those three killed when he had been sixteen eleven years ago. It was an empty house now, as it had been ever since, but usually he could find comfort here.
They're not dead, he reminded himself. No one you love ever dies - for you. They go on in you as long as you live. But the thought did not help.
On this cold, dark day he felt the emptiness of the house inescapably around him. His mind reached out for consolation, as it had on so many such occasions, to remembered poetry. But the only lines of verse that came to him now did not comfort. They were no more than an echo of the dying year outside. They were the lines of a poem he had himself once written, here in this house, on just such a day of oncoming winter, when he had just turned thirteen.
Now, autumn's birch, white-armed, disrobed for sorrow,
In wounded days, as that weak sun slips down
From failing year and sodden forest mold,
Pray for old memories like tarnished bronze.
And when night sky and mist, like sisters, creeping,
Bring on the horned owl, hooting at no moon
Mourn like a lute beneath the wotfskin winds,
That on the hollow log sound hollow horn.
A chime rang its silvery note on his ear. A woman's voice spoke.
"Hal," said the voice of Ajela, "conference in twenty minutes."
"I'll be there," he said.
He sighed. "Clear!" he added, to the invisible technological magic that surrounded him. The library, the estate and the rain winked out. He was back in his quarters at the Final Encyclopedia, in orbit far above the surface of the world he had just been experiencing. The rain and the wind and the library, all as they would actually be at the estate in this moment, were left now far below him.
He was surrounded by silence - silence, four paneled walls and three doors, one door leading to the corridor outside, one to his bedroom, and one to the carrel that was his ordinary workroom. About him in the main room where he stood were the usual padded armchair floats and a desk, above a soft red carpeting.
He was once again where he had spent most of the past three years, in that technological marvel that was an artificial satellite of the planet Earth, the Final Encyclopedia. Permanently in orbit about Earth. Earth, which in this twenty-fourth century its emigrated children now called Old Earth, to distinguish it from the world of New Earth, away off under the star of Sirius and settled three hundred years since.
Around him again was only the silence - of his room, and of the satellite itself. The Final Encyclopedia floated far above the surface of Earth and just below the misty white phase-shield that englobed and protected both world and Encyclopedia. Too far off to be heard, even if there had been atmosphere outside to carry the sound, were the warships which patrolled beneath that shield, guarding both the satellite and Earth against any intrusion by the warships of ten of the thirteen Younger Worlds, beyond the shield.
Hal stood for a moment longer. He had twenty minutes, he reminded himself'. So, for one last time, he sank into a cross-legged, seated position on the carpeting and let his mind relax into that state that was a form of concentration, although its physical and mental mechanisms were not the usual ones for that mental state.
They were, in fact, a combination of the techniques taught him as a boy by Walter the InTeacher - one of those three who had died eleven years ago - and his own self-evolved creative methods for writing the poetry he had used to make. He had developed the synthesis while he was still young, and Walter the InTeacher, the Exotic among his tutors, had still been alive. Hal remembered how deeply and childishly disappointed he had been then, when he had not been able to show off the picture his mind had just generated, of the birch tree in the wet autumn wood. The raw image of the poem he had just written.