A Stone in Heaven

II

First she must go to the Maian System, nineteen light-years off, a journey of four standard days in the poky little starcraft belonging to the Ramnu Research Foundation. The pilot bade her farewell at Williams Field on Hermes and went into Starfall to see what fleshpots he could find before returning. Banner also sought the planet’s chief city, but with less frivolous intentions. Mainly she wanted shelter, and not from the mild climate.

She had cut her schedule as close as feasible. The liner Queen of Apollo would depart for Sol in fifty hours. Through Sten Runeberg, to whom she had sent a letter, she had a ticket. However, coming as she did from a primitive world of basically terrestroid biochemistry, she must get a checkup at a clinic licensed to renew her medical certificate. That was a ridiculous formality—even had she been exposed in shirtsleeves to Ramnu, no germ there could have lived a minute in her bloodstream—but the bureaucrats of Terra were adamant unless you held rank or title. Equally absurd, she thought, was the quasi-necessity of updating her wardrobe. She didn’t think Flandry would care if she looked provincial. Yet others would, and her mission was difficult enough without her being at a psychological disadvantage.

Therefore she sallied forth on the morning after she arrived at the Runebergs’ town house, and didn’t come back, her tasks completed, till sundown. “You must be exhausted, fairling,” said her host. “How about a drink before dinner?”

Fairling—The mild Hermetian endearment had taken on a special meaning for the two of them, when he was in charge of industrial operations at Ramnu and they had been lovers whenever they could steal time together. The three-year relationship had ended five years ago, with his inexplicable replacement by taciturn Nigel Broderick; it had never been deeply passionate; now he was married, and they had exchanged no more than smiles and glances during her stay, nor would they. Nonetheless, memory stabbed.

Runeberg’s wife was belated at her office. He, who had become a consulting engineer, had quit work early for his guest and put his child in charge of the governess. He mixed two martinis himself and led the way onto a balcony. “Pick a seat,” he invited, gesturing at a couple of loungers.

Banner stayed by the rail. “I’d forgotten how beautiful this is,” she whispered.

Dusk flowed across the quicksilver gleam of Daybreak Bay. The mansion stood on the southern slope of Pilgrim Hill, near the Palomino River. It commanded a view of the keeps above; of its own garden, fragrant with daleflower and roses, where a tilirra flew trilling and glowflies were blinking alight; of Riverside Common, stately with million-leaf and rainroof trees; of multitudinous old spires beyond and windows that’had begun to shine; of domes and towers across the stream, arrogantly radiant as if this were still that heyday of their world in which they had been raised. The air was barely cooled by a breeze and murmured only slightly of traffic. Heaven ranged from blue in the west to violet in the east. Antares was already visible, rising Venus-bright and ruby-red out of the Auroral Ocean.

“You should have come here more often,” Runeberg said.

“You know I could hardly drag myself away from my work, ever, and then mostly to visit my parents,” Banner replied. “Since Dad’s death—” She broke off.

The big blond man regarded her carefully. She stood profile to, so that he saw the curve of her nose below the high forehead, the set of her wide mouth and the jut of her chin and the long sweep of her throat down to the small bosom. Clad in a shimmerlyn gown—for practice at being a lady, she had said—she stood tall and slim, athletic despite the scattered silver in a shoulder-length light-brown mane. Then she turned around, briefly silhouetting a cheekbone ivory against the sky, and her eyes confronted his. They were perhaps her best feature, large and luminous green under dark brows.

“Yes,” he blurted, “you’ve let yourself get crazily wrapped up in those beings. Sometimes I’d find you slipping into styles of thought, emotion, that, well, that weren’t human. It must have gotten worse since I left. Come back, Miri.”

He disliked calling me Banner, she remembered. “You imply that involvement with an intelligent, feeling race was bad in the first place,” she said. “Why? On the whole, I’ve had a wonderful, fascinating, exciting life. And how else can we get to understand them? A different psychology, explored in depth … What can we not learn, also about ourselves?”

Runeberg sighed. “Who is really paying attention? Be honest. You’re studying one clutch of sophonts among countless thousands; and they’re barbarians, impoverished, insignificant. Their planet was always more interesting to science than they were, and it was investigated centuries back, in plenty of detail. Xenology is a dying discipline anyway. Every pure science is; we live in that kind of era. Why do you think your foundation is marginally funded? Hai-ah, it’d have been closed down before you were born, if Ramnu didn’t happen to have some value to Hermetian industry. You’ve sacrificed every heritage that was yours—for what, Miri?”

“We’ve wasted time on that battleground in the past,” she snapped. Her tone softened. “I don’t want to quarrel, Sten. You mean well, I know. From your viewpoint, I suppose you’re right.”

“I care about you, my very dear friend,” he said. And it hurt you from the start to learn what I’d lost, she did not answer aloud. My marriage—Already established in the profession when he took a fresh graduate from the Galactic Academy for his bride, Feodor Sumarokov had seen their appointments to Ramnu as a steppingstone to higher positions; when he left after three years, she would not. My true love—She had never wedded Jason Kamunya, because they wanted to do that back on Dayan where her parents were, and somehow they never found a time when so long an absence wouldn’t harmfully interrupt their research, and meanwhile they could live and work together … until that day in their fourth year when a stone falling from a height under seven gravities shattered his air helmet and head … My chance for children—Well, perhaps not yet. She was only forty-four. But not all the gero treatment known to man could stave off menopause for more than a decade, or add more than two or three to a lifespan; and where she was, she had had access to nothing but routine cell therapy. My home, my kindred, my whole civilization—

Ramnu is my home! Yewwl and her folk are my kin in everything but flesh. And what is Technic civilization worth any longer? Unless I can make it save my oath-sister’s world.

Banner smiled and reached out to stroke the man’s cheek. “Thank you for that,” she murmured. “And for a lot else.” Raising her glass: “Shalom.”

Rims clinked together. The liquor was cold and pungent on her tongue. She and he reclined facing each other. Twilight deepened.

“You completed your business today?” he inquired.

“Yes. Inconspicuously, I hope.”

He frowned. “You really are obsessive about secrecy, aren’t you?”

“Or forethoughtful.” Her voice wavered the least bit. “Sten, you did do your best to handle my reservation and such confidentially, didn’t you?”

“Of course, since you asked. I’m not sure why you did.”

“I explained. If the Duke knew, he might well decide to stop me. And he could, in a dozen different ways.”

“Why would he, though?”

Banner took a protracted sip. Her free hand fumbled in her sash pocket for a cigarette case. “He’s neutronium-solid set against any project to reverse the glaciation on Ramnu.”

“Hoy? … True, true, you complained to me, in person and afterward in those rare letters you sent, that he won’t consider Hermes making the effort.” Runeberg drew breath for an argument. “Maybe he is being ungenerous. We could afford it. But he may well deem—in fact, you’ve quoted him to me to that effect—that our duty to ourselves is overriding. Hermes isn’t poor, but it’s not the rich, powerful world it used to be, either, and we’re developing plenty of problems, both domestic and vis-a-vis the Imperium. I can understand how Duke Edwin may think an expensive undertaking for the sake of aliens who can never pay us back—how that might strain us dangerously, rouse protest, maybe even provoke an attempt at revolution.”

Banner started her smoke before she said bitterly, “Yes, he must feel insecure, yes, indeed. It’s not as if he belonged to the House of Tamarin, or as if constitutional government still existed here. His grandfather was the latest in a string of caudillos, and he himself eased his elder brother off the throne.”

“Now, wait,” Runeberg protested. “You realize I’m not too happy with him either. But he is doing heroic things for Hermes, and he does have ample popular support. If he has no Tamarin genes in him, he does carry a few Argolid ones, distantly, but from the Founder of the Empire just the same. It’s the Imperium that’s jeopardized its own right to rule—Hans Molitor seizing the crown by force—later robbing us of Mirkheim, to buy the goodwill of the money lords on Terra—” He checked himself. It was talk heard often nowadays, in private. But he didn’t want to speak anger this evening. Moreover, she was leaving tomorrow in hopes of getting help there.

“The point is,” he said, “why should the Duke mind having your project financed and organized from outside? He ought to welcome that. Most of the resources and labor could come from our economic sphere. We’d get nice jobs, profits, contacts, every sort of benefit.”

“I don’t know why he should object,” Banner admitted. “I do know he will, if he finds out. I’ve exchanged enough letters and tapes with his immediate staff. I’ve come in person, twice, to plead, and got private audiences both times. Oh, the responses were more or less courteous, but always absolutely negative; and meeting with him, I could sense outright hostility.”

Runeberg gulped from his drink before he ventured to say: “Are you sure you weren’t reading that into his manner? No offense, fairling, but you are not too well acquainted with humankind.”

“I’ve objective facts in addition, in full measure,” she retorted. “My last request was that he ask the Emperor to aid Ramnu. His answer, through an undersecretary, was that this would be politically inadvisable. I’m not too naive to recognize when I’m being fobbed off. Especially when the message closed by stating that they were tired of this business, and if I persisted in it I could be replaced. Edwin Cairncross is quite willing to use his influence on Terra to crush one obscure scientist!”

She drew hard on her cigarette, leaned forward, and continued: “That’s not the only clue. For instance, why were you discharged from General Enterprises? Everybody I talked to was astounded. You’d been doing outstanding work.”

“I was simply told ‘reorganization,’ ” he reminded her. “I did get handsome severance pay and testimonials. As near as I’ve been able to find out, somebody in a high position wanted Nigel Broderick to have my post. Bribery? Blackmail? Nepotism? Who knows?”

“Broderick’s been less and less cooperative with the Foundation,” she said. “And that in spite of his expanding operations on Ramnu as well as its moons. Though it’s impossible to learn exactly what the expansion amounts to. The time is past when my people or I could freely visit any of those installations.”

“Um-m, security precautions—There’s been a lot of restriction in the Protectorate, too, lately. These are uneasy years. If the Imperium breaks down again—which could give the Merseians a chance to strike—”

“What threat to security is a xenological research establishment? But we’re being denied adequate supplies, that we used to get as a matter of course from Dukeston and Elaveli. The pretexts are mighty thin, stuff like unspecified ‘technical difficulties.’ Sten, we’re being slowly strangled. The Duke wants us severely restricted in our activities on both Ramnu and Diris, if not out of there altogether. Why?”

Banner finished her cigarette and reopened the case.

“You smoke too much, Miri,” Runeberg said.

“And drink too little?” Her laugh clanked. “Very well, let’s assume my troubles have made me paranoid. What harm in keeping alert? If I return in force, maybe my questions will get answered.”

He raised his brows. “In force?”

“Oh, not literally. But with backing too powerful for a mere lord of a few planetary systems.”

“Whose backing?”

“Haven’t you heard me mention Admiral Flandry?”

“Ye-es, occasionally in conversation, I believe. I got the impression he is—was a friend of your father’s.”

“Dad was his first superior in action, during the Starkad affair,” she said proudly. “He got him started in Naval Intelligence. They kept in touch afterward. I met Flandry myself, as a girl, when he paid a visit to a base where Dad was stationed. I liked him, and he wouldn’t have stayed Dad’s friend if he weren’t a decent man at heart, no matter what he may have had to do in his career. He’ll receive a daughter of Max Abrams. And … he has the Emperor’s ear.”

She tossed down her cigarette case, raised her glass, and said almost cheerfully, “Come, let’s drink to my success, and then let’s hear more about what’s been happening to you, Sten, old dear.”

Night rolled westward across Greatland. Four hours after it had covered Starfall it reached Lythe, in the middle of the continent.

That estate of Edwin Cairncross, Grand Duke of Hermes, was among his most cherished achievements. Reclamation of the interior for human settlement had faltered a century ago, as the wealth and importance of the planet declined. Civil war had stopped it entirely, and it had not resumed at once after Hans Molitor battered the Empire back together. He, Cairncross, had seen an extinct shield volcano rising mightily above an arid steppe, and desired an eyrie on the heights. He had decreed that canals be driven, land be resculptured and planted, lovely ornithoids and big game be introduced, a town be founded down below and commerce make it prosper. The undertaking was minor compared to other works of his, but somehow, to him, Lythe symbolized the will to prevail, to conquer.

It was no sanctuary for fantasy, but a nucleus for renewed growth. From it he did considerable of his governing, through an electronic web that reached across the globe and beyond. An invitation to spend some days here could be portentous. This evening he had passed hours alone in his innermost office, hunched above the screen whose sealed circuits brought him information gathered by a bare dozen secret agents. They were the elite of their corps; they reported directly to him, and he decided if their nominal superiors would be told.

Now he must make a heavier choice than that. With a blind urge to draw strength from his land, he strode out of the room and through the antechambers.

Beyond, a sentry snapped a salute. Cairncross returned it as precisely. His years in the Imperial Navy had taught him that a leader is wise to give his underlings every courtesy due them. An aide sprang from a chair and inquired, “Sir?”

“I don’t want to be disturbed, Wyatt,” Cairncross said.

“Sir!”

Cairncross nodded and went on down the hall. Until new orders came, the lieutenant would make sure that nobody, not the Duchess herself, got near the Grand Duke.

A gravshaft brought Cairncross up onto a tower. He crossed its deck and halted at the battlement. That was pure ornamentation, but not useless; he had ordered it built because he wanted to feel affirmed in his kinship to Shi Huang Ti, Charlemagne, Suleiman the Magnificent, Pyotr the Great, every man who had ever been dominant on Terra.

Silence dwelt enormous. The fog of his breath caught the light of a crescent Sandalion; he savored the bracing chill that he inhaled. Vision winged across roofs, walls, hoar treetops, cliffs and crags, a misty shimmer of plains, finally the horizon. He raised his eyes and beheld stars in their thousands.

Antares burned brightest. Mogul was sufficiently near to rival it, an orange spark: Mogul, sun of Babur, the Protectorate. His gaze did not seek Olga, for in that constellation, invisible to him, was the black sun of Mirkheim; and he had no time on hand to think about regaining the treasure planet for Hermes. Sol was hidden too, by distance. But Sol—Terra—was ruler of the rest … He turned his glance from the Milky Way. Its iciness declared that the Empire was an incident upon certain attendants of a hundred thousand stars, lost in the outskirts of a galaxy which held more than a hundred billion. A man must ignore mockery.

Wryness: A man must also buckle down to practical details. What Cairncross had learned today demanded instant action.

The trouble was, he could not do the quick and simple thing. Abrams had been too wary. His fists knotted.

Thank God for giving him the foresight to have Sten Runeberg’s house bugged, after he’d gotten the man fired from Ramnu. Not that Runeberg had made trouble. He might have, though. The family was extensive and influential; Duchess Iva was a second cousin of Sten. And he had been at Ramnu, he had been close to Abrams, he had surely acquired ideas from her … and maybe worse ones afterward, since they did irregularly correspond and meet.

Nothing worth reporting had happened until today. But what finally came was a blow to the guts.

The witch outmaneuvered me, Cairncross thought. I have the self-confidence to realize that. She’d written to Runeberg in care of the spaceship he used in his business; no bug could escape the safety inspections there. She’d arrived unannounced and gone straight to his place. The ducal government lacked facilities to monitor every slightly distrusted site continuously; tapes were scanned at intervals. Given reasonable luck, Abrams would have been in and out of Hermes well before Cairncross knew.

She did chance to pick the wrong time slot. (That was partly because surveillance was programmed to intensify whenever a passenger liner was due in, until it had departed.) But she had anticipated the possibility. Runeberg and a couple of his spacemen were going to escort her tomorrow, not just onto the shuttle but to the Queen in orbit, and see her off. He had objected that that was needless, but to soothe her he had agreed. Meanwhile, his wife and several others knew about it all. There was no way, under these conditions, to arrange an abduction or assassination. Anything untoward would be too damnably suspicious, in a period when a degree of suspicion was already aimed at Cairncross.

Well, I’ve made my own contingency plans. I didn’t foresee this turn of events exactly, but—

Decision crystallized. Yes, I’ll go to Terra myself. My speedster can outrun her by days.

Cairncross made a fighting grin. Whatever came next should at least be interesting!