Rebel (24 page)

A week had passed.

The bodies—those that remained intact and identifiable—were rounded up and buried in a mass grave on Durstan IV, the nearest oxygen world.

The Duke offered free drinks for a week to anyone who had been involved in the fighting, but furiously ended the policy within a day when eleven thousand men, women, and aliens showed up, each claiming to have been aboard one of the ships.

Aboard the
Teddy R,
Cole called a meeting, not just of his senior staff, but of every member of the crew. Christine transmitted his words and image to every corner of the ship, and signaled him when it was completed.

"Paul had his revelation at Tarsus," began Cole. "I had mine last week, when I saw a brave young man refuse to surrender aboard the Navy's flagship. He knew that the battle was lost, that he was the only survivor on his ship, possibly the only survivor from a fleet of three hundred ships. He had been badly injured hours earlier, but he wasn't going to surrender his ship to what he had been told was the enemy." Cole paused. "I found myself admiring that young man. He didn't know what happened on Braccio II. He didn't know about any of the Navy's abuses. If he attacked a world, it was because commanders he trusted told him that world deserved to be attacked. I am sure he was told that he was coming to Singapore Station to avenge a heinous surprise attack on the Navy.

"As I looked at that young man, I realized that
he
was not the enemy. He was doing exactly what every one of us did for years: He was following orders because he believed in the rightness of those orders."

Cole looked from Jacovic to Christine to Val, and then to those of the crew who had crowded onto the bridge.

"Just as that young man was not the enemy, the Navy is not the enemy." He saw a few puzzled expressions. "The Navy is the
tool
of the enemy. I suppose I've known it all along: The enemy is the Republic. I didn't issue my ultimatum to keep out of the Inner Frontier to the Navy; I issued it to the Republic.

"Well, it didn't work. They came here to punish us for our audacity, and while we were fortunate enough to win this time, they won't allow it to stand. They'll be back, which is what we have to discuss. We can either stay where we are, and fend off each attack against greater and greater odds until we lose—or we can carry the battle to
them."

"To the Republic?" asked Pampas.

"To Deluros VIII itself," answered Cole.

"Well, goddamn!" said Val. "It's about time!"

"At the risk of disappointing the Valkyrie, this will not be a frontal assault," said Cole. "How could it be? I am asking you to go up against the most powerful entity in the history of the galaxy. Even Christine's computer couldn't dope out the odds against us. So anyone who wants to stay out here has one Standard day to take their gear and move it to the station."

"Have you spoken to the Octopus?" asked Rachel.

"He's with us. So are Lafferty's men, of course. We won't be just one ship. We're going to organize the Inner Frontier, and we'll pick up still more support within the Republic itself."

"The Republic," repeated one of the men dully.

"The Republic," replied Cole. He waited for more questions from his stunned crew. There weren't any. "All right," he said. "This meeting is over. You have one Standard day to make your decisions."

The meeting dispersed, and he went down to the mess hall for some coffee, where he was joined by Sharon.

"You don't pick small targets, I'll give you that," she said.

"This target picked itself," he said. "I served it loyally for most of my life." He grimaced. "Makes me feel like a damned fool."

"Let's see how much smarter you feel when we're facing three million warships."

Suddenly he smiled. "Three thousand, three million—when you're our size, what's the difference?"

"I think that's what I meant," she said, returning his smile. Suddenly the smile vanished. "Do you really think we have a chance?"

"Everyone's got a chance."

"But against the
Republic!"

"Ever hear of St. George?"

"Yes," said Sharon. "Why?"

"Think you'd have heard of him if he'd fought a dragonfly?"

"He had armor and an enchanted sword."

"We've got the
Teddy R,"
replied Cole. "I'll settle."

THE ORIGIN OF THE

BIRTHRIGHT UNIVERSE

It happened in the 1970s. Carol and I were watching a truly awful movie at a local theater, and about halfway through it I muttered, "Why am I wasting my time here when I could be doing something really interesting, like, say, writing the entire history of the human race from now until its extinction?" And she whispered back, "So why don't you?" We got up immediately, walked out of the theater, and that night I outlined a novel called
Birthright: The Book of Man,
which would tell the story of the human race from its attainment of faster-than-light flight until its death eighteen thousand years from now.

It was a long book to write. I divided the future into five political eras—Republic, Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, and Anarchy—and wrote twenty-six connected stories ("demonstrations,"
Analog
called them, and rightly so), displaying every facet of the human race, both admirable and not so admirable. Since each is set a few centuries from the last, there are no continuing characters (unless you consider Man, with a capital
M,
the main character, in which case you could make an argument—or at least, I could—that it's really a character study).

I sold it to Signet, along with another novel, titled
The Soul Eater.
My editor there, Sheila Gilbert, loved the Birthright Universe and asked me if I would be willing to make a few changes to
The Soul Eater
so that it was set in that future. I agreed, and the changes actually took less than a day. She made the same request—in advance, this time—for the four-book Tales of the Galactic Midway series, the four-book Tales of the Velvet Comet series, and
Walpurgis III.
Looking back, I see that only two of the thirteen novels I wrote for Signet were
not
set there.

When I moved to Tor Books, my editor there, Beth Meacham, had a fondness for the Birthright Universe, and most of my books for her— not all, but most—were set in it:
Santiago, Ivory, Paradise, Purgatory, Inferno, A Miracle of Rare Design, A Hunger in the Soul, The Outpost,
and
The Return of Santiago.

"When Ace agreed to buy
Soothsayer, Oracle,
and
Prophet
from me, my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, assumed that of course they'd be set in the Birthright Universe—and of course they were, because as I learned a little more about my eighteen-thousand-year, two-million-world future, I felt a lot more comfortable writing about it.

In fact, I started setting short stories in the Birthright Universe. Two of my Hugo winners—"Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge" and "The 43 Antarean Dynasties"—are set there, and so are perhaps fifteen others.

When Bantam agreed to take the Widowmaker trilogy from me, it was a foregone conclusion that Janna Silverstein, who purchased the books but had moved to another company before they came out, would want them to take place in the Birthright Universe. She did indeed request it, and I did indeed agree.

I recently handed in a book to Meisha Merlin, set—where else?— in the Birthright Universe.

And when it came time to suggest a series of books to Lou Anders for the new Pyr line of science fiction, I don't think I ever considered any ideas or stories that
weren't
set in the Birthright Universe.

I've gotten so much of my career from the Birthright Universe that I wish I could remember the name of that turkey we walked out of a! I those years ago so I could write the producers and thank them.

THE LAYOUT OF THE

BIRTHRIGHT UNIVERSE

The most heavily populated (by both stars and inhabitants) section of the Birthright Universe is always referred to by its political identity, which evolves from Republic to Democracy to Oligarchy to Monarchy. It encompasses millions of inhabited and habitable worlds. Earth is too small and too far out of the mainstream of galactic commerce to remain Man's capital world, and within a couple of thousand years the capital has been moved lock, stock, and barrel halfway across the galaxy to Deluros VIII, a huge world with about ten times Earth's surface and near-identical atmosphere and gravity. By the middle of the Democracy, perhaps four thousand years from now, the entire planet is covered by one huge sprawling city. By the time of the Oligarchy, even Deluros VIII isn't big enough for our billions of empire-running bureaucrats, and Deluros VI, another large world, is broken up into forty-eight planetoids, each housing a major department of the government (with four planetoids given over entirely to the military).

Earth itself is way out in the boonies, on the Spiral Arm. I don't believe I've set more than parts of a couple of stories on the Arm.

At the outer edge of the galaxy is the Rim, where worlds are spread out and underpopulated. There's so little of value or military interest on the Rim that one ship, such as the
Theodore Roosevelt
, can patrol a couple of hundred worlds by itself. In later eras, the Rim will be dominated by feuding warlords, but it's so far away from the center of things that the governments, for the most part, just ignore it.

Then there are the Inner and Outer Frontiers. The Outer Frontier is that vast but sparsely populated area between the outer edge of the Re/files/06/74/10/f067410/public/Democracy/Oligarchy/Monarchy and the Rim. The Inner Frontier is that somewhat smaller (but still huge) area between the inner reaches of the Re/files/06/74/10/f067410/public/etc. and the black hole at the core of the galaxy.

It's on the Inner Frontier that I've chosen to set more than half of my novels. Years ago the brilliant writer R. A. Lafferty wrote, "Will there be a mythology of the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code?" I decided that I'd like to spend at least a part of my career trying to create those myths of the future, and it seems to me that myths, with their bigger-than-life characters and colorful settings, work best on frontiers where there aren't too many people around to chronicle them accurately, or too many authority figures around to prevent them from playing out to their inevitable conclusions. So I arbitrarily decided that the Inner Frontier was where
my
myths would take place, and I populated it with people bearing names like Catastrophe Baker, the Widowmaker, the Cyborg de Milo, the ageless Forever Kid, and the like. It not only allows me to tell my heroic (and sometimes antiheroic) myths, but lets me tell more realistic stories occurring at the very same time a few thousand light-years away in the Republic or Democracy or whatever happens to exist at that moment.

Over the years I've fleshed out the galaxy. There are the star clusters—the Albion Cluster, the Quinellus Cluster, a few others. There are the individual worlds, some important enough to appear as the title of a book, such as Walpurgis III, some reappearing throughout the time periods and stories, such as Deluros VIII, Antares III, Binder X, Keepsake, Spica II, and some others, and hundreds (maybe thousands by now) of worlds (and races, now that I think about it) mentioned once and never again.

Then there are, if not the bad guys, at least what I think of as the Disloyal Opposition. Some, like the Sett Empire, get into one war with humanity and that's the end of it. Some, like the Canphor Twins (Can-phor VI and Canphor VII), have been a thorn in Man's side for the better part of ten millennia. Some, like Lodin XI, vary almost daily in their loyalties depending on the political situation.

I've been building this universe, politically and geographically, for a quarter of a century now, and with each passing book and story it feels a little more real to me. Give me another thirty years and I'll probably believe every word I've written about it.