here he’d been riding along in a Medusan body and hadn’t realized just how damned dark and dangerous the path was.
As he’d hoped, the three elders waited for him across the underground river, eying him without suspicion or fear. He stopped and faced them.
The old woman on the right spoke. “So you have come back after all.”
The comment startled him. “You know who I am?”
“Your body is Warden-dead, yet your spirit shines through,” the other woman told him. “Your walk, your manner, your turn of speech is the same.”
“Then you know why I have come.”
“We know,” the first woman responded. “We will not stop anyone from leaving anywhere on this world, but we will not go.”
“They’re going to do it,” he warned. “They’re really going to do it. The kind of heat and thermal radiation they will use will melt the very crust of this planet. I know you understand what that means. No Warden power is going to save you, and the way the Altavar are acting, they can’t save you, either.”
“We know, and yet to go would be to call our lives and beliefs that we have held for so many years a lie,” the man put in. “When they do as you say, we trust in the God of Medusa to save us, or take us, as is Her will. But no matter what happens there, they will unleash upon themselves a power greater than the pitiful Confederacy can conceive, and She will be angry. We place our faith in Her.”
He sighed. “If you want to be martyrs, I can’t stop you. But you have fifty thousand people across this world, and they are your responsibility, too. They can survive, if we know where they are, and if we can get to them some word that we can be trusted.”
“It is impossible to notify them all in the time remaining,” the first woman pointed out, “but surely more than half have knowledge of what is to come. Some will go, and none will be stopped from going. It is the same here.”
“You have explained to the pilgrims here that they are likely to die in two days?”
“We put it to them just that way,” the man assured him. “We told them that physical death was almost a certainty. Only a very few said that they would like to go, and most of them have not changed their minds.”
“There are two here, though, who should go. I think even you must realize
A few moments later one of the small boats came, bearing two occupants he knew well. They stared at him in frightened bewilderment. He helped them out of the boat, and was immediately aware that both were obviously pregnant, Bura Morphy exceedingly so. Both Bura and Angi just gaped at him. Finally Bura said, “They told us Tari had returned. Who are you?”
“Tari is dead. You know that,” he responded sadly. “I am his—father, in a sense—and his brother.”
Angi gasped, realizing before Bura the implications of that. During the weeks in the wilderness, Tarin Bul had told them of his origin. “You are the man who…” It was all she could manage.
He nodded. “I am. You can’t possibly understand this now, but you must believe me. I was with you in the sewers under Rochande, and with you in the wilderness. I was with you when you came to the pitadel, and with Tarin Bul until the moment of his death. I am not Tarin Bul, but he is with me. I have come to get you.”
“They say they’re going to blow up the planet. Is that true?” Bura asked him.
“That’s true.”
“And nothing can stop it?”
“I tried—Lord, how I tried! But we have an enormous group of men and women who are in the strange position of being totally confident of their power and scared to death at one and the same time. We are trying to save those we can. You carry what future there is for Tarin Bul inside you. Don’t kill him completely. Come with me.”
They looked nervous and uncertain. Bura’s hand took Angi’s and squeezed it tightly. “A pack of mad harrar couldn’t keep us here one more minute if we have a way to get off.”
He grinned. “Fine,” he said, and turned back to the elders. “You may not want to leave, but may I address the others here? Give them one last immediate chance?”
“You have our permission,” the first woman said. “Go to the courtyard, and we will send them to you.”
His speech was impassioned, eloquent, convincing, and mostly futile. Out of perhaps two hundred, only seventeen—all, it turned out, refugees and escapees from the cities—took his offer of escape. He could tell that others, perhaps many others, wanted to go, but were being held back not so much by physical means as by an odd sort of peer pressure. The phenomenon was new to him, and frightened him a little, but he could do ho more.
Not a single one of them had ever been on a spacecraft before, and he had some trouble making the adjustments in restraints and in calming nerves before he could take off. Fifteen of the seventeen were female, all of whom were at least seven months pregnant. The citadel, he knew, was a place where tribes within a weeks’ journey came when it was time for women, to bear their young.
Once over their initial fears, they seemed to enjoy the ride. As time grew shorter and shorter, though, and the evacuation fell more and more behind schedule, he knew that the shuttle would be needed desperately elsewhere. He headed for the Cerberan space station, calling ahead to Dumonia’s people to take on his passengers for now. Ypsir’s Medusan station was already beyond the plane of the Cerberan orbit on its way in-stream by tug, but even if it had been available he wouldn’t have used it. He knew full well what would happen if it were known to Talant Ypsir, as it would be, that two wives of Tarin Bul, pregnant with his children, were within the Lord of Medusa’s station-—all that really remained of Ypsir’s formerly absolute power.
He was surprised to find Dumonia personally waiting for him when he arrived, and after he got the refugees as settled as possible they had a short tune to talk. Dumonia had an easy and relaxed style and the perfect manner, and their talk was pretty wide-ranging, considering the time limit the agent had for turnaround. Dumonia saw the human angle.
“You know,” he said, “that this thing can only end in one of two ways now. Either there will be no more Diamond, or no more Confederacy.”
“Mr. Carroll” nodded. “I’m well aware of that. If there’s no more Confederacy we’re still alive, but in a hell of a fix with no more imports and the Altavar no longer in hiding. On the other hand, if there’s no more Diamond we’ve just done a lot of work for nothing.”
Dumonia grinned. “I think not. You must understand that the Confederacy is ripe for collapse. It won’t take an awful lot to bring that about. Making so many worlds so interdependent has left them far too vulnerable. I’m sure that’s what Kreegan had in mind when he dreamed up this human-replacement business. Unfortunately for all of us, such action was not enough, and if it hadn’t been a desperation scheme it would have been obvious from the start. As fragile and corrupt as the system is, it is still firm enough to keep together a massive population spread out over impossible distances. In its own way the Confederacy was quite amazing, eclipsing any empire in humanity’s past. But it
The agent nodded. “I’ve come to pretty much the same conclusion myself. It seems horrible, though, that so many will have to die.”
“It’s always been the case. Back in the very old days when we were only on one planet with simple weapons, occasional wars—even with bows, arrows, and spears—spurred progress. But it is no different, really, if your population dies by the sword or by a fusion bomb, or laser blast, or any other of our modern ways. Still, we finally reached the point on that old world where we couldn’t afford big wars any more without wiping, ourselves out. So we replaced them with small, limited wars, until even these became too sophisticated for any sort of control. Space took much of the pressure off—colonization did that. But political needs and technology unified us, made a human empire of more than nine hundred worlds possible—and kept us in place for a few centuries. Now it falls under the new barbarians.”
“The Altavar strike me as inhuman, and really frightening, but not as barbarians. I wish I understood them better. I’m not even sure I understand then: actions now. Why not strike—if they can? Or if they can defend Medusa, why allow all this?”
“I don’t know,” the psych told him. “The Four Lords really don’t know, either—except Morah, I think. I doubt if Kreegan knew, although perhaps he did. They, too, bought a bill of goods. The Altavar convinced them that they were no threat to the Diamond, perhaps simply by demonstrating that they’d been here all the time. The Four Lords
