Nobody keeps a secret from a hypnoprobe.
Virgil slipped beneath an unseen horizon. Night burst forth.
Aeneas rotates in twenty hours, nineteen minutes, and a few seconds. Dawn was not far when Ivar Frederiksen reached Windhome.
Gray granite walled the ancestral seat of the Firstman of Ilion. It stood near the edge of an ancient cape. In tiers and scarps, crags and cliffs, thinly brush-grown or naked rock, the continental shelf dropped down three kilometers to the Antonine Seabed. So did the river, a flash by the castle, a clangor of cataracts.
The portal stood closed, a statement that the occupation troops were considered bandits. Ivar stumbled to press the scanner plate. Chimes echoed emptily.
Weariness was an ache which rose in his marrow and seeped through bones and flesh till blood ran thick with it. His knees shook, his jaws clattered. The dried sweat that he could taste and smell on himself stung the cracks in his lips. Afraid to use roads, he had fled a long and rough way.
He leaned on the high steel door and sucked air through a mummy mouth. A breeze sheathed him in iciness. Yet somehow he had never been as aware of the beauty of this land, now when it was lost to him.
The sky soared crystalline black, wild with stars. Through the thin air they shone steadily, in diamond hues; and the Milky Way was a white torrent, and a kindred cloud in the Ula was our sister galaxy spied across a million and a half light-years. Creusa had set; but slower Lavinia rode aloft in her second quarter. Light fell argent on hoarfrost.
Eastward reached fields, meadows, woodlots, bulks that were sleeping farmsteads, and at last the hills. Ivar’s gaze fared west. There the rich bottomlands ran in orchards, plantations, canals night-frozen into mirrors, the burnished shield of a salt marsh, to the world’s rim. He thought he saw lights move. Were folk abroad already? No, he couldn’t make out lamps over such a distance … lanterns on ghost ships, sailing an ocean that vanished three million years ago …
The portal swung wide. Sergeant Astaff stood behind. In defiance of Imperial decree, his stocky frame bore Ilian uniform. He had left off hood and mask, though. In the unreal luminance, his head was not grizzled, it was as white as the words which puffed from him.
“Firstlin’ Ivar! Where you been? What’s gone on? Your mother’s gnawed fear for you this whole past five-day.” The heir to the house lurched by him. Beyond the gateway, the courtyard was crisscrossed with moon-shadows from towers, battlements, main keep and lesser building. A hound, of the lean heavy-jawed Hesperian breed, was the only other life in sight. Its claws clicked on flagstones, unnaturally loud.
Astaff pushed a button to close the door. For a time he squinted until he said slowly, “Better give me that rifle, Firstlin’. I know places where Terrans won’t poke.”
“Me too,” sighed from Ivar.
“Didn’t do you a lot o’ good, stashed away till you were ready for—whatever you’ve done—hey?” Astaff held out his hand.
“Trouble I’m in, it makes no difference if they catch me with this.” Ivar took hold of the firearm. “Except I’d make them pay for me.”
Something kindled in the old man. He, like his fathers before him, had served the Firstmen of Ilion for a lifetime. Nevertheless, or else for that same reason, pain was in his tone. “Why’d you not ask me for help?”
“You’d have talked me out of it,” Ivar said. “You’d have been right,” he added.
“What did you try?”
“Ambushin’ local patrol. To start stockpilin’ weapons. I don’t know how many of us escaped. Probably most didn’t.”
Astaff regarded him.
Ivar Frederiksen was tall, 185 centimeters, slender save for wide shoulders and the Aenean depth of chest. Exhaustion weighted down his normal agility and hoarsened the tenor voice. Snub-nosed, square-jawed, freckled, his face looked still younger than it was; no noticeable beard had grown during the past hours. His hair, cut short at nape and ears in the nord manner, was yellow, seldom free of a cowlick or a stray lock across the forehead. Beneath dark brows, his eyes were large and green. Under his jacket he wore the high-collared shirt, pouched belt, heavy-bladed sheath knife, thick trousers tucked into half-boots, of ordinary outdoor dress. There was, in truth, little to mark him off from any other upper-class lad of his planet.
That little was enough.
“What caveheads you were,” the sergeant said at last.
A twitch of anger: “We should sit clay-soft for Terrans to mold, fire, and use however they see fit?”
“Well,” Astaff replied, “I would’ve planned my strike better, and drilled longer beforetime.”
He took Ivar by the elbow. “You’re spent like a cartridge,” he said. “Go to my quarters. You remember where I bunk, no? Thank Lord, my wife’s off visitin’ our daughter’s family. Grab shower, food, sleep. I’ve sentry-go till oh-five-hundred. Can’t call substitute without drawin’ questions; but nobody’ll snuff at you.”
Ivar blinked. “What do you mean? My own rooms—”
“Yah!” Astaff snorted. “Go on. Rouse your mother, your kid sister. Get ’em involved. Sure. They’ll be interrogated, you know, soon’s Impies’ve found you were in that broil. They’ll be narcoquizzed, or even ’probed, if any reason develops to think they got clue to your whereabouts. That what you want? Okay. Go bid ’em fond farewell.”
Ivar took a backward step, lifted his hands in appeal. “No. I, I, I never thought—”
“Right.”
“Of course I’ll—What do you have in mind?” Ivar asked humbly.
“Get you off before Impies arrive. Good thing your dad’s been whole while in Nova Roma; clear-cut innocent, and got influence to protect family if Terrans find no sign you were ever here after fight. Hey? You’ll leave soon. Wear servant’s livery I’ll filch for you, snoutmask like you’re sneezewort allergic, weapon under cloak. Walk like you got hurry-up errand. This is big household; nobody ought to notice you especially. I’ll’ve found some yeoman who’ll take you in, Sam Hedin, Frank Vance, whoever, loyal and livin’ offside. You go there.”
“And then?”
Astaff, shrugged. “Who knows? When zoosny’s died down, I’ll slip your folks word you’re alive and loose. Maybe later your dad can wangle pardon for you. But if Terrans catch you while their dead are fresh—son, they’ll make example. I know Empire. Traveled through it more than once with Admiral McCormac.” As he spoke the name, he saluted. The average Imperial agent who saw would have arrested him on the spot.
Ivar swallowed and stammered, “I … I can’t thank—”
“You’re next Firstman of Ilion,” the sergeant snapped. “Maybe last hope we got, this side of Elders returnin’. Now, before somebody comes, haul your butt out of here—and don’t forget the rest of you!”
III
Chunderban Desai’s previous assignment had been to the delegation which negotiated an end of the Jihannath crisis. That wasn’t the change of pace in his career which it seemed. His Majesty’s administrators must forever be dickering, compromising, feeling their way, balancing conflicts of individuals, organizations, societies, races, sentient species. The need for skill—quickly to grasp facts, comprehend a situation, brazen out a bluff when in spite of everything the unknown erupted into one’s calculations—was greatest at the intermediate level of bureaucracy which he had reached. A resident might deal with a single culture, and have no more to do than keep an eye on affairs. A sector governor oversaw such vastness that to him it became a set of abstractions. But the various ranks of commissioner were expected to handle personally large and difficult territories.