Donovan accepted the news coldly, but he thought the knocking of his heart must shake his whole body. His hands felt chilly and wet. “As you wish. Though what I can do—”
“You’ve been there before and know what to expect. Furthermore, you know the astrogation of that region; our charts are worse than sketchy, and even the Ansan tables have too many blank spots.”
“Well—” Donovan got the words out slowly. “If I don’t have to enlist. I will not take an oath to your Emperor.”
“You needn’t. Your status will be that of a civilian under Imperial command, directly responsible to me. You will have a cabin of your own, but no compensation except the abandonment of criminal proceedings against you.” Jansky relaxed and her voice grew gentler. “However, if you serve well I’ll see what I can do about pay. I daresay you could use some extra money.”
“Thank you,” said Donovan formally. He entered the first phase of the inchoate plan which was taking cloudy shape in his hammering brain: “May I have my personal slave with me? He’s nonhuman, but he can eat Terran food.”
Jansky smiled. There was sudden warmth in that smile, it made her human and beautiful. “As you wish, if he doesn’t have fleas. I’ll write you an order for his embarkation.” She’d hit the ceiling when she found what kind of passenger she’d agreed to, thought Donovan. But by then it would be too late. And, with Wocha to help me, and the ship blundering blind into the Nebula—Valduma, Valduma, I’m coming back! And this time will you kiss me or kill me?
*
The Ganymede lifted gravs and put the Ansa sun behind her. Much farther behind was Sol, an insignificant mote fifty light-years away, lost in the thronging glory of stars. Ahead lay Sagittari, Galactic center and the Black Nebula.
Space burned and blazed with a million bitter-bright suns, keen cold unwinking flames strewn across the utter dark of space, flashing and flashing over the hollow gulf of the leagues and the years. The Milky Way foamed in curdled silver around that enormous night, a shining girdle jeweled with the constellations. Far and far away wheeled the mysterious green and blue-white of the other galaxies, sparks of a guttering fire with a reeling immensity between. Looking toward the bows, one saw the great star-clusters of Sagittari, the thronging host of suns burning and thundering at the heart of the Galaxy. And what have we done? thought Basil Donovan. What is man and all his proud achievements? Our home star is a dwarf on the lonely fringe of the Galaxy, out where the stars thin away toward the great emptiness. We’ve ranged maybe two hundred light-years from it in all directions and it’s thirty thousand to the Center! Night and mystery and nameless immensities around us, our day of glory the briefest flicker on the edge of nowhere, then oblivion forever—and we won’t be forgotten, because we’ll never have been noticed. The Black Nebula is only the least and outermost of the great clouds which thicken toward the Center and hide its ultimate heart from us, it is nothing even as we, and yet it holds a power older than the human race and a terror that may whelm it.
He felt again the old quailing funk, fear crawled along his spine and will drained out of his soul. He wanted to run, escape, huddle under the sky of Ansa to hide from the naked blaze of the universe, live out his day and forget that he had seen the scornful face of God. But there was no turning back, not now, the ship was already outpacing light on her secondary drive and he was half a prisoner aboard. He squared his shoulders and walked away from the viewplate, back toward his cabin.
Wocha was sprawled on a heap of blankets, covering the floor with his bulk. He was turning the brightly colored pages of a child’s picture book. “Boss,” he asked, “when do we kill ’em?”
“The Impies? Not yet, Wocha. Maybe not at all.” Donovan stepped over the monster and lay down on his bunk, hands behind his head. He could feel the thrum of the driving engines, quivering in the ship and his bones. “The Nebula may do that for us.”
“We go back there?” Wocha stirred uneasily. “I don’t like, boss. It’s toombar. Bad.”
“Yeah, so it is.”
“Better we stay home. Manor needs repair. Peasants need our help. I need beer.”
“So do I. I’ll see if we can’t promote some from the quartermaster. Old John can look after the estate while we’re away, and the peasants will just have to look after themselves. Maybe it’s time they learned how.” At a knock on the door: “Come in.”
Tetsuo Takahashi, the ship’s exec, brought his small sturdy form around Wocha and sat down on the edge of the bunk. “Your slave has the Old Lady hopping mad,” he grinned. “He’ll eat six times a man’s ration.”
“And drink it.” Donovan smiled back; he couldn’t help liking the cocky little Terran. Then, with a sudden renewed bitterness: “And he’s worth it. I couldn’t be without him. He may not be so terribly bright, but he’s my only proof that loyalty and decency aren’t extinct.”
Takahashi gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you hate us so much?” he asked.
“You came in where you weren’t asked. Ansa was free, and now it’s just another province of your damned Empire.”
“Maybe so. But you were a backwater, an underpopulated agricultural planet which nobody had ever heard of, exposed to barbarian raids and perhaps to nonhuman conquest. You’re safe now, and you’re part of a great social-economic system which can do more than all those squabbling little kingdoms and republics and theocracies and God knows what else put together could ever dream of.”
“Who said we wanted to be safe? Our ancestors came to Ansa to be free. We fought Shalmu when the greenies wanted to take what we’d built, and then we made friends with them. We had elbow room and a way of life that was our own. Now you’ll bring in your surplus population to fill our green lands with yelling cities and squalling people. You’ll tear down the culture we evolved so painfully and make us just another bunch of kowtowing Imperial citizens.”
“Frankly, Donovan, I don’t think it was much of a culture. It sat in its comfortable rut and admired the achievements of its ancestors. What did your precious Families do but hunt and loaf and throw big parties? Maybe they did fulfill a magisterial function—so what? Any elected yut could do the same in that simple a society.” Takahashi fixed his eyes on Donovan’s. “But rights and wrongs aside, the Empire had to annex Ansa, and when you wouldn’t come in peaceably you had to be dragged in.”
“Yeah. A dumping ground for people who were too stupid not to control their own breeding.”
“Your Ansan peasants, my friend, have about twice the Terran birth rate. It’s merely that there are more Terrans to start with—and Sirians and Centaurians and all the old settled planets. No, it was more than that. It was a question of military necessity.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.”
“Read your history sometime. When the Commonwealth broke up in civil wars two hundred years ago it was hell between the stars. Half savage peoples who never should have left their planets had learned how to build spaceships and were going out to raid and conquer. A dozen would-be overlords scorched whole worlds with their battles. You can’t have anarchy on an interstellar scale. Too many people suffer. Old Manuel I had the guts to proclaim himself Emperor of Sol—no pretty euphemisms for him, an empire was needed and an empire was what he built. He kicked the barbarians out of the Solar System and went on to conquer their home territories and civilize them. That meant he had to subjugate stars closer to home, to protect his lines of communication. This led to further trouble elsewhere. Oh, yes, a lot of it was greed, but the planets which were conquered for their wealth would have been sucked in anyway by sheer economics. The second Argolid carried on, and now his son, Manuel II, is finishing the job. We’ve very nearly attained what we must have—an empire large enough to be socio-economically self-sufficient and defend itself