The Navigator of Rhada (6 page)

“And did they take my brother Karston?”

“Someone took your brother Karston,” Gret said neutrally.

“What do Crespus: and Baltus say?”

“What everyone says.”

“And my father’s minister? LaRoss?“

“All call for war.”

For a moment Kynan felt a certain revulsion. The thought of war between dependencies of the Empire carried with it a taste of horror. One learned to respond that way if one followed the way of the Navigator. The Theocracy abhorred war between nations of men It was the duty of all members of the Order to keep the peace of God, lest the Dark Time return again.

But Kynan was also a Rhad, and the men of the Rhadan worlds were warmen, fighters--perhaps the best fighters the Empire had. When provoked, they were terrible in battle. And even the Rhadan Navigators served their nation in times of battle.

The Vulk stood before the fire now, his lyre in his hand.

Soft thrumming sounds came from the instrument. “I know what you feel, Kynan,” he murmured. “Your love of family and Rhad honor are calling for blood. Yet you are a Navigator, and a Navigator lives to protect the way and the peace of God.”

“We protect it with weapons when we must,” Kynan said grimly.

“What do you know of history?” the Vulk asked.

“What all Navigators know,” Kynan replied.

The Vulk strummed his lyre thoughtfully. “In the beginning--man’s beginning, that is--there was the Dawn Age. This was before men left the Earth. There were endless wars in that time. Did you know that?”

“Little is known of that, Vulk. Our history begins with the First Empire.”

“Far earlier than that, Kynan. There were four thousand Earth years to pass between the time men made their first flight to Earth’s moon and their first journey to the nearest star. They not only had to learn to build starships-- they had to learn to stop killing one another. That took much longer. The year one of the Galactic Era was the year 6,000 in the old calendar. So long it took for what we call the Golden Age to begin.”

The Navigator sat on the edge of his pallet and studied the slender alien figure before the fire. “Even if all that is true--”

The Vulk struck a vibrant note. “Wait, let me go on. That Golden Age--the age of the First Stellar Empire-- lasted for almost five thousand Earth years. And then the Empire fell, and the Dark Time began. No man knows how long the Interregnum lasted. The starships remained, as they may always remain, but men were savages. Only the Order kept the light of knowledge alive.
That
much history you know?”

“Of course.”

“Then Glamiss left his home world of Vyka and began the reconquest. The time of hero-kings, Kynan, and great priests. These men were great because they had a vision far beyond their primitive learning. It is said in the Theocracy, is it not, that they saw the face of God?”

Kynan automatically made the sign of the Star. “We are so taught, Vulk.”

“Glamiss Magnifico, and Kier, the Rebel of Rhada. Aaron, his father, and the beatified Emeric, Grand Master of the Order. These men built our Second Stellar Empire. Warmen of Gonlan, too, were at the last battle against the warlords. A second chance, Kynan. These men gave it to those who would come after.” Gret turned his featureless face toward the young Navigator. “What was it they fought against? What was it that brought down the First Empire and began the Dark Time?”

Kynan replied from the dogma: “Sin. The forbidden weapons of science. The evil knowledge.”

The Vulk shook his head. “A man would say so. But the Vulk know better, Kynan. Oh, how do the Vulk know!” The slender hands made nervous gestures on the lyre strings, and the air was filled with a grief-laden humming. “Since before the Dark Time, men have hunted and killed the Vulk, Kynan. Because we were
different,
because we shared the galaxy with man--only one small part of it in the beginning, to be sure, since we have never built machines--but even that brought the wrath of mankind down on us. You have studied the pogroms, you know how we were driven from place to place, death to death. And I tell you plainly, Kynan, it is this urge to kill and destroy--not the weapons he uses--that has haunted man since his beginnings. It was this that brought the Dark Time and every great evil.”

“But men and Vulks have been--more than friends,
symbiotes
actually, for generations,” protested the Navigator.

“Man hates what he loves and loves what he must kill. It is the nature of the creature,” Gret said. “The most terrible predator ever spawned in the galaxy--that is man.” The oddly articulated fingers drew a gentle melody from the lyre. “But magnificent, Kynan.
Magnificent,
truly. Man is everything the race of Vulks never became. That is why we return love for hatred, admiration for fear and contempt. There have always been men who understood this. This, and the nature of their own kind.” The eyeless face glistened in the firelight. “At certain desperate times in man’s history, such heroes must be found, or all that has been built in the last twelve thousand years will crumble away to final nothing.” He moved closer to the young priest. “This is such a time, Kynan. And
you
must be such a man.”

Kynan shook his head helplessly. “I am only a priest-- a pilot of starships, Vulk. I don’t understand you.” The Navigator was filled with apprehension and self-doubt. Surely the ancient Vulk must understand that he was too young, too inexperienced, too
ignorant
to be involved in great events.

“Then listen. Open your mind to me.
Listen
.” The lyre gave forth strange quadratic sequences of humming sound that seemed to penetrate deep into the mind. Colored sounds, sounds with dimension and texture. Kynan resisted for a moment, overwhelmed by the power of the old Vulk’s mental penetration. Jagged images appeared in his mind: Memories he
knew
were not his own; fragments of scenes he
knew
he could never have witnessed--

--the control room of a starship populated with five cowled figures that he somehow knew were princes of the Order. The chamber was familiar, for it was the bridge of an interstellar vessel. But the instruments were not the ancient consoles he understood. They were new and strange
--

--the face of a man: cold-eyed and menacing with the assurance of the bigot, the fanatic. Imperial badges on his uniform. He stood in an audience chamber surrounded by ranks of warmen. AbasNavs. They raised their clenched fists and vowed to rid the Empire of priests. The man’s name was Tran. He was the hero of Eridanus. He said, “I speak for the Galacton! The time of the Order is gone! The Navigators must be broken!” The gathered ranks roared. It was like the noise of beasts
--

--a woman lay in childbirth in a tapestried, ornate room. The light of a single moon, cold and bright, shone through a mullioned window. A nurse held an infant, and a physician worked to bring forth a second child from the suffering woman. In the shadows, a cowled prince Navigator stood watching
--
--a girl paced a narrow stone room. Janessa! She was much changed from the child who played at Star Field. She was desperate, weeping--and so beautiful. The legendary Ariane must have looked like that
--!

There were other images, a tumbled profusion of them, spilling from the mind of the Vulk into Kynan’s subconscious so rapidly that his forebrain could only note their strongest impressions:
A starfleet leaving Earth. The Navigator’s enclave on Aurora. Armies debouching from the holy starships. His brother Karston’s face, pale and irresolute. Escape
--

There was a wrenching sensation, a cry almost of mental pain. Kynan’s eyes flew open, and he lay back against the wall, his head aching and throbbing.

The First Minister, LaRoss, was in the room. His face was dark as a thundercloud as he addressed the Royal Vulk. “What are you doing here, Master Gret? Kynan must rest. You know that.”

The Vulk stood, head down, trembling with exhaustion. The translucent skin was livid with the terrible mental effort he had made.

LaRoss said sternly, “This is no time for Vulkish mysteries. The council will see you in the morning to assign you your command, Kynan. Gret--come with me.”

Gret allowed himself to be led from the room, but as he reached the door, he turned and the thought exploded in Kynan’s mind:

You know all you need to know. When the time comes, you will remember.

LaRoss’s eyes narrowed, for he had caught the emotional content of the urgent command, though not it’s meaning.

“I would return now to Rhada,” Gret said aloud, his voice thinned and weary. “I need to return.”

Kynan heard LaRoss’s reply, and it brought a chill into his blood. “I think for now you had better remain on Gonlan, Vulk.”

He could hear no more, for the First Minister and the Vulk had moved down the passageway. But Gret’s last thought, flung like a lance, struck him with a final urgency:
“Take the girl and go
--
NOW.’’

The people cry, “Peace!” But there is no peace. The people cry, “Let us live!” But they die. The princes are wolves and the Empire dies and the wars devour us! This is the Dark Time. Spirits of darkness, have mercy on our souls!

Chant from

One more such victory and we are undone.

Attributed to Glamiss of Vyka,
founder of the Second Stellar Empire, after the Battle of Karma

Janessa, heiress of Aurora, studied the phosphorescent waves of the Gonlan Sea crashing on the rocks far below. In the moonless dark, the wind-created swells, with a thousand empty miles behind them, shattered into glowing spindrift against the coast of the Stoneland Peninsula. Soaring night birds, unseen in the stormy sky, gave mournful cries. Their voices made the girl’s flesh prickle. It was like listening to the dead voices of cybs and demons. Sighing, she closed the window, and for a moment her own reflection looked back at her, limned against the ocean darkness. She was a slender girl, tall for her age, which was eighteen Standard Years (twelve of her home planet’s long seasons). Her hair was straight and silvery blond, held with a tiara of green stones, the deep royal color of Aurora.

Ever since childhood she had dreamed of visiting Gonlan and the Palatinate; even the capital world of Rhada. But she had never, in her deepest nightmares, imagined that she would come to this wild and primitive planet as a prisoner. She was the daughter of the Elector of Aurora, a noblewoman of the Empire. And yet, here she was, mewed up in a stone tower like a storybook princess, but without the storybook princess’s hope of rescue. She bit her lips and refused to cry, but it was not easy.

As in a dream, she remembered the sudden, savage violence that had shattered the decorum of her betrothal ceremonies. The well-drilled companies of warmen invading Star Field, moving swiftly and mercilessly among the guests with sword and flail.

She wondered if her father, the Elector, was still alive. Had he managed to rally his surprised troops and drive the invaders away? And Karston--what had happened to her handsome promised husband? Something dreadful, surely, else the men of Gonlan would not have taken her hostage-- She frowned and shivered with outraged dignity.
Hostage.
An Auroran hostage on Gonlan! It seemed almost beyond belief. Yet here she was, with armed warmen at her door. She swept the water jug from the serving table in a sudden fury.
The warmen of Aurora will come and take this Melissande apart stone by stone,
she thought, raging.

She sat suddenly on the narrow bed and rubbed her naked arms. It seemed to have grown very cold. She thought about her actual situation, and a heaviness grew in her breast. The warmen of Aurora might come. Then again, they might not. The Aurorans were the least warlike of the Rim dwellers. Good people, too. They would only be confused and discomfited by this sudden stroke of disaster. She could make no sense of it herself. To attack a betrothal ceremony was insane, meaningless.

And now, she had heard the death songs for a star king. Did that mean that Kreon was dead? Kreon, the marvelous old warrior who called her his daughter and spoke of the time to come when she would give him grandchildren, kings to rule in Gonlan some day?

No one had come to her to tell her the meaning of the death songs. Only Baltus, the warlock, had come to question her and see to her comfort. But he had been closemouthed, refusing to comment on her demand to be heard by Kreon, refusing even to carry her message to Alberic of Rhada, Gonlan’s overlord.

She was a prisoner, cut off from the world outside. Why, the Empire could fall and she wouldn’t even know of it!

“I’ll have their heads on a pike for this,” she told herself, holding back the tears angrily. “And their guts for garters.” That was an expression her father always used when he was angry. She thought about him, surrounded by young warmen, stripped of his power. In her imagination she saw Star Field burning, handsome Karston lying dead, herself orphaned and widowed even before marriage--

It was too much. Janessa of Aurora threw herself on the spartan bed and wept.

She had very nearly wept herself into exhaustion when the locks on her door rattled. She had barely time to stand defiantly before a young man in black clericals appeared.

Kynan. It was years since she had seen the star king’s bond-son. She remembered him as a thin, rather intense young boy who talked only of commanding starships and other religious matters. Now suddenly the boy stood before her, grown into a well-favored warman, in the black of the Order of Navigators.

She had seen no friendly face since being locked up here in this place; save only for the warlock, she had seen no one at all but her guards. Her grief and anger left her, and she allowed herself a moment of hope. Kynan, a holy Navigator and bond-kin to the star king, would surely set things right now.