Muscles tightened in his jaw.
“It’s been a black hole. The convict transports didn’t all return. We never knew why, but those who got back called it hell. Before any landing is attempted, we’re sending an undercover agent to look the situation over and report what resistance we should expect. That’s your errand.”
I never returned to my library cubicle. Instead I spent a few hectic months in a class for interstellar intelligence officers, a disappointment to me. I’d hoped for training to face the hazards of the star frontiers, but Cleon I had annihilated the alien foes he found there. These future agents were destined for duty here closer to home.
“Worlds gone soft!” a black-mustached instructor shouted at us. “Rotten to the heart! Maybe loyal Terrans once, but turncoats now, corrupted by all that damned Free Space gibble-gabble. Your future duty is to hunt such traitors down and stop their venomous slander against the Starhawke Presidents.”
Admiral Gilliyar’s mission had not been revealed, yet my part in it gave me a thrill of secret pride. His staff invented a cover story for me. Based on my mother’s claims to presidential kinship, it named me the leader of an exposed Free Space plot to overthrow the President. In flight to escape arrest, I was to become a hunted fugitive, my whereabouts unknown.
On my last day at school, I was hustled out of class and escorted to an empty hangar at the skyport. There, equipped with an oxygen mask and a radio, I was nailed into a rough wooden box stenciled electronic sundries. The radio kept me informed while it was tilted, jarred and jolted, finally loaded into the cargo hold of
That was the ship of a suspected smuggler that had been captured, but released with a warning when the captain paid his excise taxes. And no doubt a bribe; I had learned that even the great Terran Republic is not without corruption.
Our first skip was a stomach-churning lurch. The radio went silent. Elated to be off the Earth and on my way, I got out of the box and hammered on a bulkhead. A startled spacehand let me out of the hold and took me to Bart Greenlaw, master and owner of the ship. A fit youthful man in a bright yellow skip suit, he interrupted my cover story.
“So you are Kiff McCall?” His keen eyes scanned me. “I trade with Free Spacers. The price on your head has them wondering about you and your conspiracy. They’d neverheard of you.”
“We try to keep our secrets,” I told him. “I left friends behind, friends I can’t betray.”
“I understand.” He studied me again, and finally smiled as if he believed me. “I know how my own Free Spacer friends feel about the Republic. Or the Terran Empire, they call it. Power corrupts, they say, until it finally rots itself. The Starhawkes hold too much power. They’ve held it too long.”
His gaze sharpened to study my reaction.
“They say Cleon III is sitting on a bomb, armed and ready to blow.”
I nodded, trying not to show too much emotion. Any connection between the Free Space activists and Devil’s Star was something I must report, but my own mission could have ended then and there if he had guessed the truth.
“One question, if I may ask.” His eyes narrowed. “If you’re an actual freedom fighter, why are you heading for a prison you’ll never escape?”
“We lost a battle.” I groped for anything he might accept. “I had to run while I could, but the war isn’t over. I want the whole picture. I’m fascinated with the little I know about Devil’s Star. I want to do a history of it. Smuggled out to civilization, it might make a difference.”
“Civilization?” His face set hard for an instant, but then he gave me a quizzical smile. “You ought to find us interesting.”
Seeming satisfied, he found a berth for me, and treated me like another member of his little crew. They all were busy, calculating skip congruencies and maneuvering for relaunch positions and relative velocities, but he let me sit with them at meals, where I could listen for anything Admiral Gilliyar might want to know.
In my berth that night, I dreamed the admiral had won his little war. I was with him on his triumphant return to Earth. A military band was blaring when we came off his flagship, and a goose-stepping squad from the Presidential Guard escorted us to the White Palace. Cleon III received us in the Diamond Room to praise the admiral for his heroic victory and make him the sole proprietor of the conquered planet.
As the dream went on, the beaming admiral presented me to Cleon EL Without my daring undercover work, he said, his expedition would have ended in disaster. The President thanked me for my heroic service to the Republic, and pinned a glittering Starhawke Medal of Honor on my chest.
I felt let down when I woke to find that moment of glory gone, yet my elation lingered. After all, I was safely on my way to Lucifer. Greenlaw seemed to trust me. Something like the dream might still come true.
Our flight took a week. The skips themselves are instant; outside our space-time bubble there is no space to cross or time to pass, but any long voyage requires a series of jumps from one point of congruence to another. On the major space lanes these are marked and charted, but contact points are hard to find and markers can drift. Some points are periodic. Some can vanish altogether. Skip navigation takes high skills and a rare grasp of the total cosmos.
I came to admire Greenlaw for his easy-seeming expertise as an extraspatial pilot, and to enjoy his company. A native of Devil’s Star, he loved his planet and liked to talk about its history and geography.
“There’s one big continent,” he said. “Split in half by a high ridge that runs north and south down the middle of it. That’s where we live, between two harsh frontiers, east and west of us. Monsoon rains keep the east half buried under jungle and forest. Dry downslope winds keep the west half hotter than any place on Earth. Both halves are deadly in a dozen ways, yet rich with resources we’ve learned to use.”
I asked about the government.
“We have none.” He grinned at my astonishment. “No laws. No money. No taxes. No cops or prisons. We never forgot the merciless government that dumped us here.” He paused to smooth his bitter voice. “We were political convicts, condemned for wanting freedom. The Terran government dumped us into the desert or that deadly jungle, with freedom to die.”
He glared as if I had challenged him.
“A few of us didn’t. We made it up to the highlands, where survival was barely possible—after we learned to care for one another. That’s our secret. All for each and each for all.” He intoned the words like a mantra. “If you can understand?”
Not sure I did, I shook my head.
“It’s your culture.” He frowned and shook his head. “I saw it when I was a student there. A culture of selfish aggression. You need your laws and cops and prisons to protect yourselves from one another. We don’t, if you get the difference.”
“No money?” I asked. “How do you manage without it?”
“Well enough.” He shrugged. “You would call it a barter economy. We have exchange centers. Through your working life, you make contributions when you can. In return you draw what you need, a loaf of bread, a farm tool, the service of a surgeon. You continue to serve and be served as long as you live. We have no idle millionaires, no homeless beggars.”
“No public services?” I asked. “Don’t you need roads, schools, fire departments, hospitals?”
“Of course we do.”
“With no money and no taxes, who pays for them?”
“Why pay?” His tone was almost scolding. “We build them. Where you have laws, and lockups for those who break them, we have customs. Our own folkways. A culture of altruism. Every young person spends a year in some service of his or her own choice—and one of our years is nearly two of Earth’s. I spent mine sweating down in the desert, at work on date farms and a new angel wood plantation.
“The rest of our lives, we serve one day a week. Teaching, nursing, farming, building roads or bridges, doing what we can for others, trusting them to do for us. When I’m unable to care for myself, others will care for me. Not for money, but because that’s our way of life.”
“Don’t people shirk?”
