“She looks pissed,” Marquoz noted with some amusement.
“Ah, boy! She’ll be a pain in the neck for us before long,” Gypsy predicted. “Once she gets bored she’ll start trying to convert the lot of us.”
He was right. Even before the shuttle touched down at Cadabah spaceport she was at it with a fanatic’s fervor. One thing Marquoz gave her, no matter how crazy her religion,
He wondered how long the most sacred of seals on Council and Com information would hold as the Dreel advanced.
Kwangsi
As it turned out, Marquoz was behind the times.
The Council was composed of politicians, true, but neither great people nor fools. As the Dreel advanced, the Council members read the handwriting on the wall and their judgments were reinforced by their computers and military leaders.
The Com would lose. Worse, as the Dreel accelerated their advance they would build up a sizable reservoir of captive worlds whose resources would be theirs to use. With human populations under control—even immunized ones, the Dreel had a major advantage: they could breed whatever characteristics were required to render immunization worthless. If the Dreel continued at their present rate and were not countered within a year, they would not be withstood. They would be too many, wearing the bodies of their enemy and not only building the additional ships and armament the Dreel needed but using captured industries as modified by advanced Dreel technology. Humans would be flying those ships against the Com, too.
War may be the most efficient stimulus of innovation and technological advance, but there wasn’t time for that sort of thing. It didn’t matter if the ultimate weapon was developed if it could not be manufactured and deployed before the Dreel won. And so the only hope lay in past research, forbidden research, research and information classified by past generations as too dangerous to allow. Everybody knew that such things existed, somewhere, in the files—but no one knew what or why or how.
By a near unanimous vote of the Council the seals came off. Eager researchers pored over the files, often discovering that even the tools needed to understand such interdicted projects were hidden behind yet another set of seals. Much of it was, therefore, useless—and much more was useless because it didn’t bear even slightly on the problem. Some of the material was truly shocking. Ways had been developed to remake humanity, its society and culture, into something alien, and every kind of insanity was represented there. It was this “Mad Scientist Catalog” that most interested the weapons researchers, though; they strengthened their stomachs and kept at it, looking for a quick and easy way to beat the Dreel.
Tortoi Kai was not a scientist but a historian looking in the records for clues to events carefully culled from the open references and filed away to be forgotten. She was chilled to learn how much of the past had been doctored by the historical boards appointed by past Councils. The farther back one went, the worse it got— wholesale attempts to change history by simply rewriting it or editing it to suit one’s purpose—but even as she worked, restoring the past, entire staffs were distorting the present.
Kai was a typical historian; though her world was collapsing around her, she followed minor threads, becoming fascinated by the major and minor people and events that, when suddenly revealed, changed what she had been taught. It started in a thread, a name, encountered from a past 762 years dead; it was during the days of the sponge merchants, a dark time for the Com, long before the discovery of the first nonhuman race. The farther back she looked in the “window” encompassing that period, the more times the name appeared.
Everyone knew that humanity had originally evolved on a beautiful blue-white world called Earth, third planet from a yellow G-type sun. It was a world of conflicting ideologies, a world of rapidly rising population and rapidly diminishing resources, one that pushed out, almost at the last minute, into space. The ancient name of Einstein had decreed that none could surpass the speed of light; his physics held even today, refined and honed to the ultimate degree. But there were ways to circumvent Einstein’s physics by removing oneself from the four- dimensional universe in which they operated. Tell scientists something’s impossible and show them the math and nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand accept the declaration. The other one will devote his entire life to figuring out how to beat it. Add to this Earth’s total acceptance of the necessity for outward expansion and you give that one man the funds and personnel and equipment to let him do it.
Human beings love to break laws, even natural ones.
And break Einstein’s law they did—bent it, anyway—so objects could travel slower than light yet effectively progress at a rate thousands of times light-speed. Expansion was rapid. There were no Earth-type planets anywhere nearby, but within five years scouting expeditions located several toward the core that could be made habitable with some creative planetary engineering. Debris and space junk would provide the resources.
People carried their ideologies with them; Utopians and dystopians all attempted to display their superior system on worlds where corrupting competition did not exist. Cloning, genetic engineering on a planetary scale, social engineering on scales even greater, all created a series of worlds—soon numbering in the hundreds—with the Utopians dominating. Each was sure it had the perfect system; each was determined to bring perfection to the whole race.
Earth could not maintain control. Depleted, dependent on the colonies for her survival, she held power only through military dominance. But the new colonies developed their own industries using their own resources, then, in secret, created their own military machines and trained personnel. It was ultimately easy. Most of the colonies buried their ideological hatchets in a quest for colonial freedom and joined up first to attack Earth’s forces and later Earth itself. The extent of the damage—whole worlds burned away—shocked even the toughest party leaders. But it appeared that in victory they were condemned to wage war against each other.
When fanatics moved to do just that, though, wiser heads prevailed and the Com—the Council of the Community of Worlds—was created. The great weapons were placed in the weapons locker; the Council alone controlled and guarded it—and any technology that might break that control was automatically broadcast to the automated factories of the weapons locker of every Com World’s patent registration computer complex, or destroyed. Research applying to such stored weaponry was placed under an interdict so absolute that near unanimity of the Council was required to get at it. Each planet was free to develop its own social system; the Council had no power there. But a planet could not spread its ways by force to other worlds. There the Council, through its weapons locker and through the Com Police, prevailed. The only ideological battles possible were on the developing worlds of the frontier; the only individuality, the only free souls, left were those who plied the space-ways to maintain the trade between worlds, those who served them, and those on the frontiers.
In the course of interstellar exploration, a microorganism was encountered that interacted with some otherwise harmless synthetic foods to produce a horrible mutation within the brain; a person’s ability to think would slowly be diminished, until he was reduced to a mindless vegetable unable even to feed himself. The only known antidote was a spongelike lifeform native to the home of the microorganism. It contained an arresting agent that the best computers and best medical minds had not been able to duplicate.
The world was interdicted, of course, guarded by automated sentinels so none could reach it. All cultures of the microorganism were destroyed, and it was thought the problem had been solved. However, some of the organism and the sponge from the early researches fell into the hands of the underworld elite on a number of the Com Worlds and quickly was adopted as a means of furthering the aims of their interplanetary organization. By introducing the disease to a planet’s leadership, by letting some examples of deterioration be made and by possessing the only means of arresting that decay—the sponge they now grew in their own secret labs—the syndicate came to control more and more of the Com Worlds.
On the communal, genetically engineered world of New Harmony had lived the syndicate leader, a man not just born but engineered to rule. His name was Antor Trelig. Trelig was the perfect conqueror—a human being with a great intellect and in perfect physical condition, but one totally without morals, scruples, or other inconvenient inhibitions. As the Councillor for New Harmony, he knew who ran what everywhere. Gradually, he and his criminal syndicate had assumed control of world after world, their aim the eventual control of a majority of the
