Flandry of Terra

I

A murdered man on a winter planet gave Flandry his first clue. Until then, he had only known that a monster fled Conjumar in a poisoned wreck of a spaceship, which might have gone twenty light-years before killing its pilot but could surely never have crossed the Spican marches to refuge.

And the trouble was, even for the Terran Empire, which contained an estimated four million stars, a sphere twenty light-years across held a devil’s number of suns.

Flandry went through the motions. He sent such few agents as could be spared from other jobs, for they were desperately under-manned in the frontier provinces, to make inquiries on the more likely planets within that range. Of course they drew blanks. Probability was stacked against them. Even if they actually visited whatever world the fugitive had landed on, he would be lying low for a while.

Flandry swore, recalled his men to more urgent tasks, and put the monster under filed-but-not-forgotten. Two years went by. He was sent to Betelgeuse and discovered how to lie to a telepath. He slipped into the Merseian Empire itself, wormed and blackmailed until he found a suitable planet (uninhabited, terrestroid, set aside as a hunting preserve of the aristocrats) and got home again: whereafter the Terran Navy quietly built an advanced base there and Flandry wondered if the same thing had happened on his side of the fence. He went to Terra on leave, was invited to the perpetual banquet of the Lyonid family, spent three epochal months, and was never quite sure whether he seduced the wrong man’s wife or she him. At any rate, he fought a reluctant duel, gave up hope of early promotion to rear admiral, and accepted re-assignment to the Spican province.

Thus it was he found himself on Brae.

This world had been more or less independent until a few months ago. Then military considerations forced the establishment of a new base in the region. It did not have to be Brae, but Brae was asked, by a provincial governor who thought its people would be delighted at the extra trade and protection. The Braean High Temple, which had long watched its old culture and religion sapped by Terran influence, declined. One does not decline an Imperial invitation. It was repeated. And again it was refused. The provincial governor insisted. Brae said it would go over his head and appeal to the Emperor himself. The governor, who did not want attention drawn to his precise mode of government, called for local Navy help.

Wherefore Flandry walked through smashed ruins under a red dwarf sun, with a few snowflakes falling like blood drops out of great clotted clouds. He was directing the usual project in cases like this-search, inquiry, more search, more interrogation, until the irreconcilables had been found and exiled, the safely collaboration-minded plugged into a governmental framework.

But when the blaster crashed, he whirled and ran toward the noise as if to some obscure salvation.

“Sir!” cried the sergeant of his escort. “Sir, not there-snipers, terrorists-wait.’”

Flandry leaped the stump of a wall, zigzagged across a slushy street, and crouched behind a wrecked flyer. His own handgun was out, weaving around; his eyes flickered in habitual caution. On a small plaza ahead of him stood a squad of Imperial marines. They must have been on routine patrol when someone had fired at them from one of the surrounding houses. They responded with tiger precision. A tracer dart, flipped from a belt almost the moment the shot came, followed the trail of ions to a certain facade. A rover bomb leaped from its shoulder-borne rack, and the entire front wall of the house went up in shards. Before the explosion ended, the squad attacked. Some of the debris struck their helmets as they charged.

Flandry drifted to the plaza. He saw now why the men’s reaction was to obliterate: it was an invariable rule when a marine was bushwacked dead.

He stooped over the victim. This was a young fellow, African-descended, with husky shoulders; but his skin had gone gray. He gripped his magnetic rifle in drilled reflex (or was it only a convulsive clutching at his mother’s breast, as a dying man’s mouth will try to suck again?) and stared through frog-like goggles on a turtle-like helmet. He was not, after all, dead yet. His blood bubbled from a stomach ripped open, losing itself in muddy snow. Under that dim sun, it looked black.

Flandry glanced up. His escort had surrounded him, though their faces turned wistfully toward the crump-crump of blasters and bomb guns. They were marines too.

“Get him to a hospital,” said Flandry.

“No use, sir,” answered the sergeant. “He’d be dead before we arrived. We’ve no revival equipment here yet, either, or stuff to keep him functional till they can grow another belly on him.”

Flandry nodded and hunkered down by the boy. “Can I help you son?” he asked, as gently as might be.

The wide lips shinned back from shining teeth. “Ah, ah, ah,” he gasped. “It’s him in Uhunhu that knows.” The eyes wallowed in their sockets. “Ai!” ‘List nay, they said. Nay let recruiters ‘list you… damned Empire… even to gain warskill, don’t ‘list… shall freedom come from slave-masters, asked he in Uhunhu. He and his ‘ull teach what we must know, see you?” The boy’s free hand closed wildly on Flandry’s. “D’you understand?”

“Yes,” said Flandry. “It’s all right. Go to sleep.”

“Ai, ai, look at her up there, grinning-” Despite himself, Flandry stared skyward. He was crouched by a fountain, which now held merely icicles. A slender column rose from the center, and on top of it the nude statue of a girl. She was not really human, she had legs too long, and a tail and pouch and sleek fur, but Flandry had not often seen such dancing loveliness trapped in metal; she was springtime and a first trembling kiss under windy poplars. The waning marine screamed.

“Leave me ‘lone, leave me ‘lone, you up there, leave me “lone! Stop grinning! I ‘listed for to learn how to make Nyanza free, you hear up there, don’t lap my blood so fast. It’s nay my fault I made more slaves. I wanted to be free too! Get your teeth out of me, girl… mother, mother, don’t eat me, mother-” Presently the boy died.

Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, Intelligence Corps, Imperial Terrestrial Navy, squatted beside him, under the fountain, while the marines blew down another house or two for good measure. A squadron of full-armored infantry did a belt-flit overhead, like jointed faceless dolls. A stringed instrument keened from a window across the square: Flandry did not know the Braean scale, the music might be dirge or defiance or ballad or coded signal.

He asked finally: “Anyone know where this chap was from?”

His escort looked blank. “A colonial, sir, judging from the accent,” ventured one of the privates. “We sign on a lot, you know.”

“Tell me more,” snapped Flandry. He brooded a while longer. “There’ll be records, of course.”

His task had suddenly shifted. He would have to leave another man in charge here and check the dead boy’s home himself, so great was the personnel shortage. Those delirious babblings could mean much or nothing. Most likely nothing, but civilization was spread hideously thin out here, where the stars faded toward barbarism, and the Empire of Merseia beyond, and the great unmapped Galactic night beyond that.

As yet he did not think of the monster, only that he was lonesome among his fellow conquerors and would be glad to get off on a one-man mission. At least a world bearing some Africans might be decently warm.

He shivered and got up and left the square. His escort trudged around him, their slung rifles pointed at a thin blue sky. Behind them the girl on the fountain smiled.

II

The planet was five parsecs from Brae. It was the third of an otherwise uninteresting F5 dwarf, its official name was Nyanza, it had been colonized some 500 years back during the breakup of the Commonwealth. It had been made an Imperial client about a century ago, a few abortive revolts were crushed, now there was only a resident-which meant a trouble-free but unimportant and little visited world. The population was estimated at I0⁷. That was all the microfiles had to say about Nyanza.

Flandry had checked them after identifying the murdered man, who turned out to be Thomas Umbolu, 19, free-born commoner of Jairnovaunt on Nyanza, no dependents, no personal oaths or obligations of fealty, religion “Christian variant,” height 1.82 meter, weight 84 kilos, blood type O plus… His service record was clean, though only one year old. A routine pre-induction hypno had shown no serious disaffection; but of course that hadn’t meant a damn thing since the techniques of deep conditioning became general knowledge; it was just another bureaucratic ritual.

Flandry took a high-speed flitter and ran from Brae. Even so, the enforced idleness of the trip was long enough to remind him acutely that he had been celibate for weeks. He spent a good deal of the time in calisthenics. It bored him rigid, but a trim body had saved his life more than once and made it easy to get bed partners on softened worlds like Terra.

When the robopilot said they were going into approach, he spent some while dressing himself. An Intelligence officer had wide latitude as regards uniforms, and Flandry took more advantage of it than most. After due consideration, he clad his tall form in peacock-blue tunic, with white cross-belts and as much gold braid as regulations would stand; red sash and matched guns, needler and blaster; iridescent white trousers; soft black boots of authentic Terran beefleather. He hung a scarlet cloak from his shoulders and cocked a winged naval cap on his long sleek head. Surveying himself in the mirror, he saw a lean sunlamp-browned face, gray eyes, seal-brown hair and mustache, straight nose, high cheekbones: yes, he knew his last plasmecosmetic job had made his face too handsome, but somehow never got around to changing it again. He put a cigarette between his lips, adjusted its jaunty angle with care, inhaled it to light, and went to his pilot’s seat. Not that he had anything to do with the actual piloting.

Nyanza shone before him, the clearest and most beautiful blue of his life, streaked with white cloud-belts and shuddering with great auroral streamers. He spotted two moons, a smallish one close in and a large one further out. He scowled. Where were the land masses? His robot made radio contact and the screen offered him a caucasoid face above a short-sleeved shirt.

“Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, Imperial Navy Intelligence, requesting permission to land.”

Sometimes he wondered what he would do if his polite formula ever met a rude no.

The visage gaped. “Oh… oh… already?”

“Hm?” said Flandry. He caught himself. “Ah, yes,” he said wisely.

“But only today, sal” babbled the face. “Why, we haven’t even thought about sending a courier out yet-it’s been such a nightmare-oh, thank God you’re here, sir! You’ll see for yourself, at once, there isn’t a Technician in the City-on Altla-on all Nyanza, who doesn’t set loyalty to his Majesty above life itself!”

“I’m sure his Majesty will be very much relieved,” said Flandry. “Now, if you please, how about a landing beam?” After a pause, a few clicks, and the beginning downward rush of his ship: “Oh, by the way, Bubbles. Where did you put your continents today?”

“Continents, sir?”

“You know. Large dirty places to stand on.”

“Of course I know, sir!” The control man drew himself up. “We’re no parochials in the City. I’ve been to Spica myself.”

“Would it be despicable if you had not?” mused Flandry. Most of him was listening to the fellow’s accent. The inexhaustible variations on Anglic were a hobby of his.

“But as for the continents, sir, why, I thought you would know. Nyanza has none. Altla is just a medium-sized island. Otherwise there are only rocks and reefs, submerged at double high tide, or even at Loa high.”

“Oh, I knew,” said Flandry reassuringly. “I just wanted to be sure you knew.” He turned off the receiver and sat thinking. Damn those skimpy pilot’s manuals! He’d have had to go to Spica for detailed information. If only there were a faster-than-light equivalent of radio. Instant communications unified planets; but the days and weeks and months between stars let their systems drift culturally apart-let hell brew for years, unnoticed till it boiled over-made a slow growth of feudalism, within the Imperial structure itself, inevitable. Of course, that would give civilization something to fall back on when the Long Night finally came.

The spaceport was like ten thousand minor harbors: little more than a grav-grid, a field, and some ancillary buildings, well out of town. Beyond the hangars, to west and south, Flandry saw a greenness of carefully tended forest. Eastward rose the spires of a small ancient city. Northward the ground sloped down in harsh grass and boulders until it met a smothering white surf and an impossibly blue ocean. The sky above was a little darker than Terra’s-less dust to scatter light-and cloudless; the sun was blindingly fierce, bluish tinged. It was local summer: Altla lay at 35° N. latitude on a Terra-sized planet with a 21° axial tilt. The air held an illusion of being cooler than it was, for it blew briskly and smelled of salt and the ultraviolet-rich sun gave it a thunderous tinge of ozone.

Still, Flandry wished he had not been quite such a dude. The portmaster, another blond caucasoid, looked abominably comfortable in shorts, blouse, and kepi. Flandry took a morose satisfaction in noting that the comfort was merely physical.

“Portmaster Heinz von Sonderburg, sir, at your service. Naturally, we waive quarantine on your behalf; no Imperial knight would-Ah. Your luggage will be seen to, Captain… Flandry? Of course. Most honored. I have communicated with her Excellency and am happy to report she can offer you the usual official hospitality. Otherwise we would have had to do our poor best for you in the City—”

“Her Excellency?” asked Flandry when they were airborne.

“Is that not the proper usage?” Von Sonderburg made washing motions with his hands. “Oh, dear, I am so sorry. This is such an isolated planet-the occasion so seldom arises-Believe me, sir, we are uncouth only in manner. The City, at least, has an enlightened forward-looking spirit of absolute loyalty to the Imperium which—”

“It’s just that I thought, in a case like this, where the only Terrans on the planet are the resident and family, they’d have appointed a man.” Flandry looked down toward the city. It was old, haphazardly raised out of native stone, with steep narrow streets, teeming pedestrians, very few cars or flyers.

But the docks were big, sleekly modern and aswarm with ships. He made out everything from plastic pirogues to giant submarines. There was a majority of sailing craft, which implied an unhurried esthetic-minded culture; but they were built along radical hydrodynamic lines, which meant that the culture also appreciated efficiency. A powered tug was leaving the bay with a long tail of loaded barges, and air transport was extensively in use.

Elsewhere Flandry recognized a set of large sea-water processing units and their attached factories, where a thousand dissolved substances were shaped into usefulness. A twin-hulled freighter was unloading bales of… sea weed?… at the dock of an obvious plastics plant. So, he thought, most of Nyanza fished, hunted, and ranched the planet-wide ocean; this one island took the raw materials and gave back metal, chemical fuel, synthetic timbers and resins and glassites and fibers, engines. He was familiar enough with pelagic technics-most overpopulated worlds turned back at last to Mother Ocean. But here they had begun as sailors, from the very first. It should make for an interesting society…

Von Sonderburg’s voice jerked back his attention. “But of course, poor Freeman Bannerji was a man. I am merely referring to his, ah, his relict, poor Lady Varvara. She is an Ayres by birth, you know, the Ayres of Antarctica. She has borne her loss with the true fortitude of Imperial aristocratic blood, yes, we can be very proud to have been directed by the late husband of Lady Varvara Ayres Bannerji.”

Flandry constructed his sentence to preserve the illusion: “Do you know the precise time he died?”

“Alas, no, sir. You can speak to the City constabulary, but I fear even they would have no exact information. Sometime last night, after he retired. You understand, sir, we have not your advanced police methods here. A harpoon gun-oh, what a way to meet one’s final rest!” Von Sonderburg shuddered delicately.

“The weapon has not been found?” asked Flandry impassively.

“No, I do not believe so, sir. The killer took it with him, portable, you know. He must have crept up the wall with vacsoles, or used a flung grapnel to catch the windowsill and-His Excellency was a sound sleeper and his lady, ah, preferred separate quarters. Ah… you can take it for granted, sir, I am certain, that the murderer did not go through the house to reach Freeman Bannerji’s retiring chamber. The servants are all of Technician birth, and no Technician would dream of it.’

The resident’s mansion hove into view. It was probably 75 years old, but its metal and tinted plastic remained a blatant, arrogant leap in formal gardens, amidst a shrill huddle of tenements. As the aircar set down, Flandry noticed that the City population was mostly caucasoid, not even very dark-skinned. They were crowded together in child-pullulating streets, blowsy-women waved excited arms and shouted their hagglings, such of the men as did not work in industry kept grimy little shops. A pair of native constables in helmet and breastplate stood guard at the mansion gates. Those were tall Africans, who used stepped-down shockbeams with a sort of casual contempt to prevent loitering.

Lady Varvara was caucasoid herself, though the Chinese strain in the Ayres pedigree showed in dark hair and small-boned body. She posed, exquisite in a simple white mourning gown, beside a full-length stereo of her late husband. Hurri Chundra Bannerji had been a little brown middle-aged Terran with wistful eyes: doubtless the typical fussy, rule-bound, conscientious civil servant whose dreams of a knighthood die slowly over the decades. And now he was murdered.

Flandry bowed over Lady Varvara’s frail hand. “Your Ladyship,” he said, “accept my most heartfelt sympathy, and grant me forgiveness that I must intrude at a moment of such loss.”

“I am glad you came,” she whispered. “So very glad.”

It had a shaken sincerity that almost upset Flandry’s court manners. He backed off with another ritual bow. “You must not trouble yourself further, your Ladyship. Let me deal with the authorities.”

“Authorities!” The word was a bitter explosion among her few thin pieces of Terran crystal. Otherwise the room was dominated by the conch-whorls of an art that had not seen Earth in centuries.’ ‘What authorities? Did you bring a regiment with you?”

“No.” Flandry glanced around the long low-ceilinged room. A noiseless City-bred butler had just placed decanter and glasses by the trellis-wall which opened on the garden. When he left, there did not seem to be anyone else in earshot. Flandry took out his cigarettes and raised his brows inquiringly at the woman. He saw she was younger than himself.

Her colorless lips bent into a smile. “Thank you,” she said, so low he could almost not hear it.

“Eh? For what, your Ladyship? I’m afraid it’s a frosty comfort to have me here.”

“Oh, no,” she said. She moved closer. Her reactions were not wholly natural: too calm and frank for a new-made widow, then suddenly and briefly too wild. A heavy dose of mysticine, he guessed. It was quite the thing for upper-class Imperials to erect chemical walls against grief, or fear or- What do you do when the walls come down? he thought.

“Oh, no,” repeated Lady Varvara. Her words flowed quick and high-pitched. “Perhaps you do not understand, Captain. You are the first Terran I have seen, besides my husband, for… how long? Something like three Nyanzan years, and that’s about four Terran. And then it was just a red-faced military legate making a routine check. Otherwise, who did we see? The City Warden and his officers paid a few courtesy calls every year. The sea chiefs had to visit us too when they happened to be on Altla… not for our sake, you understand, not to curry favor, only because it was beneath their dignity not to observe the formalities. Their dignity!” Her cheeks flamed. She stood close to him now glaring upward; her fists drew the skin tight over bird-like knuckles. “As you would feel obliged to notice the existence of an unwelcome guest!”

“So the Empire is not popular here?” murmured Flandry.

“I don’t know,” she said pallidly, relaxing. “I don’t know. All I know is the only people we ever saw, with any regularity-our only friends, God help us, friends!-were the Lubbers.”

“The what, my lady?”

“City people. Technicians. Pinkskins. Whatever you want to call them. Like that fat little von Sonderburg.” She was shrill again. “Do you know what it’s like, Captain, to associate with no one but an inferior class? It rubs off on you. Your soul gets greasy. Von Sonderburg now… always toadying up to Hurri Chundra… he would never light a cigar in my presence without asking me, in the most heavy way-exactly the same words, I have heard them a million times, till I could scream-‘Does my lady object if I have a little smoke?’ ”

Varvara whirled from him. Her bare shoulders shuddered. “Does my lady object? Does my lady object? And then you come, Captain-your lungs still full of Earth air, I swear-you come and take out a cigarette case and raise your eyebrows. Like that. No more. A gesture we all used at Home, a ritual, an assumption that I have eyes to see what you’re doing and intelligence to know what you want-Oh, be welcome, Captain Flandry, be welcome!” She gripped the trellis with both hands and stared out into the garden. “You’re from Terra,” she whispered. “I’ll come to you tonight, any time, right now if you want, just to repay you for being a Terran.”

Flandry tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail, put it to his lips at half mast, and drew deeply. He glanced at the sad brown eyes of Hurri Chundra Bahnerji and said without words: Sorry, old chap. I’m not a ghoul, and I’ll do what I can to avoid this, but my job demands I be tactful. For the Empire and the Race

“I’m sorry to intrude when you’re overwrought, your Ladyship,” he said. “Of course, I’ll arrange for your passage to provincial headquarters, and if you want to return Home from there—”

“After all these years,” she mumbled, “who would I know?”

“Uh… may I suggest my lady, that you rest for a while—?”

An intercom chime saved both of them. Varvara said a shaky “Accept” and the connection closed.

The butler’s voice came: “Beg pardon, madam, but I have just received word of a distinguished native person who has arrived. Shall I ask postponement of the formal visit?”

“Oh… I don’t know.” Varvara’s tone was dead. She did not look at Flandry. “Who is it?”

“Lady Tessa Hoorn, madam, Lightmistress of Little Skua in Jairnovaunt.”

III

When they reached the Zurian Current, the water, which had been a Homeric blue, turned deep purple, streaked with foam that flashed like crystallized snow. “This bends to north beyond Iron Shoals and carries on past the Reefs of Sorrow,” remarked Tessa Hoorn. “Gains us a few knots speed. Though we’ve naught to hurry for, have we?”

Flandry blinked through dark contact lenses at the incredible horizon. Sunlight glimmered off the multitudinous laughter of small waves. “I suppose the color is due to plankton,” he said.

“Plankton-like organisms,” corrected Tessa. “We’re nay on Earth, Captain. But aye, off this feed the oilfish, and off them the decapus, both of use to us.” She pointed. “Yonder flags bear Dilolo stripes, quartered on Saleth green: the fishing boats of the Prince of Aquant.”

Flandry’s dazzled eyes could hardly even see the vessels, in that merciless illumination. Since the wind dropped, the Hoorn ship had been running on its auxiliary engine and now there was no shade from the great sails. An awning was spread amidships and some superbly muscled deck hands sprawled under it, clapping time to an eerie chant-pipe, like young gods carved in oiled ebony. The Terran would have given much for some of that shadow. But since Tessa Hoorn stood here in the bows, he must admit. It was an endurance contest, he recognized, with all the advantages on her side.

“Does your nation fish this current too?” he asked.

“A little,” she nodded. “But mostly we in Jairnovaunt sail west and north, with harpoons for the kraken-ha, it’s a pale life never to have speared fast to a beast with more of bulk than your own ship and smaller game. Then T’chaka Kruger farms a great patch of beanweed in the Lesser Sargasso. And in sooth I confess, not alone the commons but some captains born will scrape the low-tide reefs for shells or dive after sporyx. Then there are carpenters, weavers, engineers, medics, machinists, all trades that must be plied: and mummers and mimes, though most such sport is given by wandering boats of actors, masterless madcap folk who come by as fancy strikes ‘em.” She shrugged broad shoulders. “The Commander can list you all professions in his realm if you wish it, Imperial.”

Flandry regarded her with more care than pleasure. He had not yet understood her attitude. Was it contempt, or merely hatred?

The sea people of Nyanza were almost entirely African by descent, which meant that perhaps three-fourths of their ancestors had been negroid, back when more or less “pure” stocks still existed. In a world of light, more actinic than anything on Earth, reflected off water, there had been a nearly absolute selection for dark coloring: not a Nyanzan outside the city on Altla was any whiter than the ace of spades. Otherwise genes swapped around pretty freely-kinky hair, broad noses, and full lips were the rule, but with plenty of exceptions. Tessa’s hair formed a soft, tightly curled coif around her ears; her nostrils flared, in a wide arch-browed face, but the bridge was aquiline. Without her look of inbred haughtiness, it would have been a wholly beautiful face. The rest of her was even more stunning, almost as tall as Flandry, full-breasted, slim-waisted, and muscled like a Siamese cat. She wore merely a gold medallion of rank on her forehead, a belt with a knife, and the inevitable aqualung on her back… which left plenty on view to admire. But even in plumes and gown and rainbow cloak, she had been a walking shout as she entered the resident’s mansion.

However, thought Dominic Flandry, that word “stunning” can be taken two ways. I am not about to make a pass at the Lightmistress of Little Skua.

He asked cautiously: “Where are the Technicians from?”

“Oh, those.” A faint sneer flickered on her red mouth. “Well, see you, the firstcomers here settled on Altla, but then as more folk came in, space was lacking, so they began to range the sea. That proved so much better a life that erelong few cared to work on land. Most came from Deutschwelt, as it happened. When we had enough of yon ilk, and knew they’d breed, we closed the sluice, for they dare nay work as sailors, they get skin sicknesses, and Altla has little room.”

“I should think they’d be powerful on the planet, what with the essential refineries and—”

“Nay, Captain. Altla and all thereon is owned in common by the true Nyanzan nations. The Technicians are but hirelings. Though in sooth, they’ve a sticky way with money and larger bank accounts than many a skipper. That’s why we bar them from owning ships.”

Flandry glanced down at himself. He had avoided the quasi-uniform of the despised class and had packed outfits of blouse, slacks, zori, and sash for himself; the winged cap sat on his head bearing the sunburst of Empire. But he could not evade the obvious fact, that his own culture was more Lubberly than pelagic. And an Imperial agent was often hated, but must not ever allow himself to be despised. Hence Flandry cocked a brow (Sardonic Expression 22-C, he thought) and drawled:

“I see. You’re afraid that, being more intelligent, they’d end up owning every ship on the planet.”

He could not see if she flushed, under the smooth black sweat-gleaming skin, but her lips drew back and one hand clapped to her knife. He thought that the sea bottom was no further away than a signal to her crew. Finally she exclaimed, “Is it the new fashion on Terra to insult a hostess? Well you know it’s nay a matter of inborn brain, but of skill. The Lubbers are reared from birth to handle monies. But how many of ‘em can handle a rigging-or even name the lines? Can you?”

Flandry’s unfairness had been calculated. So was his refusal to meet her reply squarely. “Well,” he said, “the Empire tries to respect local law and custom. Only the most uncivilized practices are not tolerated.”

It stung her, she bridled. Most colonials were violently sensitive to their isolation from the Galactic mainstream. They did not see that their own societies were not backward on that account-were often healthier-and the answer to that lay buried somewhere in the depths of human unreasonableness. But the fact could be used.

Having angered her enough, Flandry finished coldly: “And, of course, the Empire cannot tolerate treasonable conspiracies.”

Tessa Hoorn answered him in a strained voice, “Captain, there’s nay conspiring here. Free-born folk are honest with foemen, too. It’s you who put on slyness. For see you, I happened by Altla homebound from The Kraal, and visited yon mansion for courtesies sake. When you asked passage to Jaimovaunt, I granted it, sith such is nay refused among ocean people. But well I knew you fared with me, liefer than fly the way in an hour or two, so you could draw me out and spy on me. And you’ve nay been frank as to your reasons for guesting my country.” Her deep tones became a growl. “That’s Lubber ways! You’ll nay get far ‘long your mission, speaking for a planet of Lubbers and Lubberlovers!”

She drew her knife, looked at it, and clashed it back into the sheath. Down on the quarterdeck, the crewmen stirred, a ripple of panther bodies. It grew so quiet that Flandry heard the steady snore of the bow through murmuring waves, and the lap-lap on the hull, and the creak of spars up in the sky.

He leaned back against a blistering bulwark and said with care: “I’m going to Jairnovaunt because a boy died holding my hand. I want to find his parents… ” He offered her a cigarette, and helped himself when she shook her head. “But I’m not going just to extend my personal sympathies. Imperial expense accounts are not quite that elastic. For that matter, while we’re being honest, I admit I’d hardly invite Bubbles or Flutters to my own house.”

He blew smoke; it was almost invisible in the flooding light. “Maybe you wouldn’t conspire behind anyone’s back, m’ lady. Come to think of it, who would conspire in front of anyone’s face? But somebody on Nyanza is hatching a very nasty egg. That kid didn’t sign up when the Imperial recruiter stopped by for glory or money: he enlisted to learn modern militechnics, with the idea of turning them against the Empire. And he died in trampled snow, sniped by a local patriot he was chasing. Who lured that young fellow out to die, Lightmistress? And who sneaked up a wall and harpooned a harmless little lonely bureaucrat in his sleep? Rather more to the point, who sent that murderer-by-stealth, and why? Really, this is a pretty slimy business all around. I should think you’d appreciate my efforts to clean it off your planet.”

Tessa bit her lip. At last, not meeting his shielded gaze, she said, “I’m nay wise of any such plots, Captain. I won’t speak ‘loud ‘gainst your Empire-my thoughts are my own, but it’s true we’ve nay suffered much more than a resident and some taxes—”

“Which were doubtless higher when every nation maintained its own defenses,” said Flandry. “Yes, we settle for a single man on worlds like this. We’d actually like to have more, because enough police could smell out trouble before it’s grown too big, and could stop the grosser barbarities left over from independent days—”

Again she bristled. He said in a hurry: “No, please, for once that’s not meant to irritate. By and large, Nyanza looks as if it’s always been quite a humane place. If you don’t use all the latest technological gimcrackery, it’s because it’s nonfunctional in this culture, not because you’ve forgotten what your ancestors knew. I’m just enough of a jackleg engineer to see that these weird-looking sails of yours are aerodynamic marvels; I’m certain that paraboloidal jib uses the Venturi effect with malice aforethought. Your language is grammatically archaic but semantically efficient. I can envision some of the bucolic poets at court going into raptures over your way of life. And getting seasick if they tried it, but that’s another story… Therefore,” he finished soberly, “I’m afraid I’m a little more sympathetic to Hurri Chundra Bannerji, who fussed about and established extrasystemic employment contacts for your more ambitious young men and built breakwaters and ordered vaccines and was never admitted to your clubs, than I am sorry for you.”

She looked over the side, into curling white and purple water, and said very low, “The Empire was nay asked here.”

“Neither was anyone else. The Terran Empire established itself in this region first. The Merseian Empire would be a rather more demanding master-if only because it’s still vigorous, expansive, virtuous, and generally uncorrupted, while Terra is the easygoing opposite.” That brought her up sharply in astonishment, as he had expected. “Since the Empire must protect its frontiers, lest Terra herself be clobbered out of the sky, we’re going to stay. It would not be advisable for some young Nyanzan firebrains to try harpooning space dreadnaughts. Anyone who provokes such gallant idiocy is an enemy of yours as well as mine.”

Her eyes were moody upon his. After a long time she asked him, “Captain, have you ever swum undersea?”

“I’ve done a little skindiving for fun,” he said, taken aback. He had spoken half honestly and half meretriciously, never quite sure which sentence was one or another, and thought he had touched the proper keys. But this surprised him.

“Nay more? And you stand all ‘lone on a world that’s aloof of you where it doesn’t, perchance, scheme murder? Captain, I repent me what I said ‘bout your folk being Lubbers.”

The relief was like a wave of weakness. Flandry sucked in his cheeks around his cigarette and answered lightly: “They cannot do worse than shoot me, which would distress only my tailor and my vintner. Have you ever heard that the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once?”

“Aye.”

“Well, after the 857th death I got bored with it.”

She laughed and he continued a line of banter, so habitual by now that most of him thought on other affairs. Not that he seriously expected the Lightmistress of Little Skua to become bodily accessible to him; he had gathered an impression of a chaste folk. But the several days’ voyage to Jairnovaunt could be made very pleasant by a small shipboard flirtation, and he would learn a great deal more than if his fellow voyagers were hostile. For instance, whether the imported wine he had noticed in the galley was preferable to native sea-berry gin. He had not been truthful in claiming indifference whether he lived or died: not while a supple young woman stood clad in sunlight, and blooded horses stamped on the ringing plains of Ilion, and smoke curled fragrant about coffee and cognac on Terra. But half the pleasure came from these things being staked against darkness.

IV

A tide was flowing when they reached Jairnovaunt, and all the rocks, and the housings upon them, were meters under the surface. The Hoorn ship steered a way between pennant-gay buoys to one of the anchored floating docks. There swarmed the sea people, snorting like porpoises among moored hulls or up like squirrels in tall masts. Fish were being unloaded and sails repaired and engines overhauled, somewhere a flute and a drum underlay a hundred deep voices chanting Way-o as bare feet stamped out a rigadoon. Flandry noticed how silence spread ripple-fashion from the sight of him. But he followed Tessa overboard as soon as her vessel was secured.

No Nyanzan was ever far from his aqualung. They seemed to have developed a more advanced model here than any Flandry had seen elsewhere: a transparent helmet and a small capacitance-battery device worn on the back, which electrolyzed oxygen directly from the water and added enough helium from a high-compression tank to dilute. By regulating the partial pressures of the gases, one could go quite deep.

This was only a short swim, as casual as a Terran’s stroll across the bridgeway. Slanting through clear greenish coolth, Flandry saw that Jairnovaunt was large-sunken domes and towers gleamed farther than his vision reached. Work went on: a cargo submarine, with a score of human midges flitting about it, discharged kelpite bales into a warehouse tube. But there were also children darting among the eerie spires and grottos of a coraloid park, an old man scattered seeds for a school of brilliant-striped little fish, a boy and a girl swam hand in hand through voiceless wonder.

When he reached the long white hall of the Commander, Jairnovaunt’s hereditary chief executive, Flandry was still so bemused by the waving, fronded formal gardens that he scarcely noticed how graceful the portico was. Even the airlock which admitted him blended into the overall pattern, a curiously disturbing one to the Terran mind, for it contrasted delicate traceries and brutal masses as if it were the ocean itself.

When the water had been pumped out, an airblast dried them, Flandry’s shimmerite clothes as well as Tessa’s sleek skin. They stepped into a hallway muraled with heroic abstractions.

Beyond two guards bearing the ubiquitous harpoon rifles, and beyond an emergency bulkhead, the passage opened on a great circular chamber lined with malachite pillars under a clear dome. Some twoscore Nyanzans stood about. Their ages seemed to range upward from 20 or so; some wore only a ‘lung, others a light-colored shirt and kilt; all bore dignity like a mantle. Quite a few were women, gowned and plumed if they were clothed at all, but otherwise as free and proud as their men.

Tessa stepped forward and saluted crisply. “The Lightmistress of Little Skua, returning from The Kraal as ordered, sir.”

Commander Inyanduma III was a powerfully built, heavy-faced man with graying woolly hair: his medallion of rank was tattooed, a golden Pole Star bright on his brows. “Be welcome,” he said, “and likewise your guest. He is now ours. I call his name holy.”

The Terran flourished a bow. “An honor, sir. I am Captain Dominic Flandry, Imperial Navy. Lightmistress Hoorn was gracious enough to conduct me here.”

He met the Commander’s eyes steadily, but placed himself so he could watch Tessa on his edge of vision. Inyanduma tipped an almost imperceptible inquiring gesture toward her. She nodded, ever so faintly, and made a short-lived O with thumb and forefinger. I’d already wormed out that she went to The Kraal on official business, remembered Flandry, but she wouldn’t say what and only now will she even admit it succeeded. Too secret to mention on her ship’s radiophone! As human beings, we enjoyed each other’s company, traveling here. But as agents of our kings—?

Inyanduma swept a sailor’s muscular hand about the room. “You see our legislative leaders, Captain. When the Lightmistress ‘phoned you were hither-bound, we supposed it was because of his Excellency’s slaying, which had been broadcast ‘round the globe. It’s a grave matter, so I gathered our chiefs of council, from both the House of Men and the Congress of Women.”

A rustling and murmuring went about the green columns, under the green sea. There was withdrawal in it, and a sullen waiting. These were not professional politicians as Terra knew the breed. These were the worthies of Jairnovaunt: aristocrats and shipowners, holding seats ex officio, and a proportion of ships’ officers elected by the commons. Even the nobles were functional-Tessa Hoorn had inherited not the right but the duty to maintain lightships and communications about the reefs called Little Skua. They had all faced more storms and underwater teeth than they had debate.

Flandry said evenly: “My visit concerns worse than a murder, sir and gentles. A resident might be killed by any disgruntled individual, that’s an occupational hazard. But I don’t think one living soul hated Bannerji personally. And that’s what’s damnable!”

“Are you implying treason, sir?” rumbled Inyanduma.

“I am, sir. With more lines of evidence than one. Could anybody direct me to a family named Umbolu?”

It stirred and hissed among the councillors of Jairnovaunt. And then a young man trod forth-a huge young man with a lion’s gait, cragged features and a scar on one cheek. “Aye,” he said so it rang in the hall. “I hight Derek Umbolu, captain of the kraken-chaser Bloemortein. Tessa, why brought you a damned Impy hither?”

“Belay!” rapped Inyanduma. “We’ll show courtesy here.”

Tessa exclaimed to the giant: “Derek, Derek, he could have flown to us in an hour! And we meditate nay rebellion-” Her voice trailed off; she stepped back from his smoldering gaze, her own eyes widening and a hand stealing to her mouth. The unspoken question shivered, Do we?

“Let ‘em keep ‘way from us!” growled Derek Umbolu. “We’ll pay the tribute and hold to the bloody Pax if they’ll leave us and our old ways ‘lone. But they don’t!”

Flandry stepped into collective horror. “I’m not offended,” he said. “But neither do I make policy. Your complaints against the local administration should be taken to the provincial governor—”

“Yon murdering quog!” spat Derek. “I’ve heard about Brae, and more.”

Since Flandry considered the description admirable (he assumed a quog was not a nice animal) he said hastily: “I must warn you against lese majeste. And now let’s get to my task. It’s not very pleasant for me either. Captain Umbolu, are you related to an Imperial marine named Thomas?”

“Aye. I’ve a younger brother who ‘listed for a five-year hitch.”

Flandry’s tones gentled. “I’m sorry. It didn’t strike me you might be so closely related, Thomas Umbolu was killed in action on Brae.”

Derek closed his eyes. One great hand clamped on the hilt of his sheath knife till blood trickled from beneath the nails. He looked again at the world and said thickly: “You came here swifter than the official news, Captain.”

“I saw him die,” said Flandry. “He went like a brave man.”

“You’ve nay crossed space just to tell a colonial that much.”

“No,” said Flandry. “I would like to speak alone with you sometime soon. And with his other kin.”

The broad black chest pumped air, the hard fingers curved into claws. Derek Umbolu rasped forth: “You’ll nay torment my father with your devilments, nor throw shame on us with your secrecy. Ask it out here, ‘fore ‘em al|.”

Flandry’s shoulder muscles tightened, as if expecting a bullet. He looked to the Commander. Inyanduma’s starred face was like obsidian. Flandry said: “I have reason to believe Thomas Umbolu was implicated in a treasonable conspiracy. Of course, I could be wrong, in which case I’ll apologize. But I must first put a great many questions. I am certainly not going to perform before an audience. I’ll see you later.”

“You’ll leave my father be or I’ll kill you!”

“Belay!” cried Inyanduma. “I said he was a guest.” More softly: “Go, Derek, and tell Old John what you must.”

The giant saluted, wheeled, and stalked from the room. Flandry saw tears glimmer in Tessa’s eyes. The Commander bowed ponderously at him. “Crave your pardon, sir. He’s a stout heart… surely you’ll find nay treason in his folk… but the news you bore was harsh.”

Flandry made some reply. The gathering became decorous, the Lightmasters and Coast-watchers offered him polite conversation. He felt reasonably sure that few of them knew about any plottings: revolutions didn’t start that way.

Eventually he found himself in a small but tastefully furnished bedroom. One wall was a planetary map. He studied it, looking for a place called Uhunhu. He found it near the Sheikhdom of Rossala, which lay north of here; if he read the symbols aright, it was a permanently submerged area.

A memory snapped into his consciousness. He swore for two unrepeating minutes before starting a chain of cigarettes. If that was the answer-

V

The inner moon, though smaller, raised the largest tides, up to nine times a Terrestrial high; but it moved so fast, five orbits in two of Nyanza’s 30-hour days, that the ebb was spectacularly rapid. Flandry heard a roar through his wall, switched on the transparency, and saw water tumbling white from dark rough rock. It was close to sunset, he had sat in his thoughts for hours. A glance at the electric ephemeris over his bunk told him that Loa, the outer satellite, would not dunk the hall till midnight. And that was a much weaker flow, without the whirlpool effects which were dangerous for a lower-case lubber like himself.

He stubbed out his cigarette and sighed. Might as well get the nasty part over with. Rising, he shucked all clothes but a pair of trunks and a ‘lung; he put on the swimshoes given him and buckled his guns-they were safely waterproof-into their holsters. A directory-map of the immediate region showed him where Captain John Umbolu lived. He recorded a message that business called him out and his host should not wait dinner: he felt sure Inyanduma would be more relieved, than offended. Then he stepped through the airlock. It closed automatically after him.

Sunset blazed across violet waters. The white spume of the breakers was turned an incredible gold; tide pools on the naked black skerry were like molten copper. The sky was deep blue in the east, still pale overhead, shading to a clear cloudless green where the sun drowned. Through the surfs huge hollow crashing and grinding, Flandry heard bells from one of the many rose-red spires… or did a ship’s bell ring among raking spars, or was it something he had heard in a dream once? Beneath all the noise, it was unutterably peaceful.

No one bothered with boats for such short distances. Flandry entered the water at a sheltered spot, unfolded the web feet in his shoes, and struck out between the scattered dome-and-towered reefs. Other heads bobbed in the little warm waves, but none paid him attention. He was glad of that. Steering a course by marked buoys, he found old Umbolu’s house after a few energetic minutes.

It was on a long thin rock, surrounded by lesser stones on which a murderous fury exploded. The Terran paddled carefully around, in search of a safe approach. He found it, two natural breakwaters formed by gaunt rusty coraloid pinnacles, with a path that led upward through gardens now sodden heaps until it struck the little hemisphere. Twilight was closing in, slow and deeply blue; an evening planet came to white life in the west.

Flandry stepped onto the beach under the crags. It was dark there. He did not know what reflex of deadly years saved him. A man glided from behind one of the high spires and fired a harpoon. Flandry dropped on his stomach before he had seen more than a metallic glitter. The killing missile hissed where he had been.

“If you please!” He rolled over, yanking for his sleepy-needle gun. A night-black panther shape sprang toward him. His pistol was only half unlimbered when the hard body fell upon his. One chopping, wrist-numbing karate blow sent the weapon a-clatter from his grasp. He saw a bearded, hating face behind a knife.

Flandry blocked the stab with his left arm. The assassin pulled his blade back. Before it could return, Flandry’s thumb went after the nearest eye. His opponent should have ignored that distraction for the few necessary moments of slicing time-but, instead, grabbed the Terran’s wrist with his own free hand. Flandry’s right hand was still weak, but he delivered a rabbit punch of sorts with it and took his left out of hock by jerking past his enemy’s thumb. Laying both hands and a knee against the man’s knife arm, he set about breaking same.

The fellow screeched, writhed, and wriggled free somehow. Both bounced to their feet. The dagger lay between them. The Nyanzan dove after it. Flandry put his foot on the blade. “Finders keepers,” he said. He kicked the scrabbling man behind the ear and drew his blaster.

The Nyanzan did not stay kicked. Huddled at Flandry’s knees, he threw a sudden shoulder block. The Terran went over on his backside. He glimpsed the lean form as it rose and leaped; it was in the water before he had fired.

After the thunder-crash had echoed to naught and no body had emerged, Flandry retrieved his needler. Slowly, his breathing and pulse eased. “That,” he confessed aloud, “was as ludicrous a case of mutual ineptitude as the gods of slapstick ever engineered. We both deserve to be tickled to death by small green centipedes. Well… if you keep quiet about it, I will.”

He squinted through the dusk at the assassin’s knife. It was an ordinary rustproof blade, but the bone hilt carried an unfamiliar inlaid design. And had he ever before seen a Nyanzan with a respectable growth of beard?

He went on up the path and pressed the house bell. The airlock opened for him and he entered.

The place had a ship’s neatness, and it was full of models, scrimshaw, stuffed fish, all the sailor souvenirs. But emptiness housed in it. One old man sat alone with his dead; there was no one else.

John Umbolu looked up through dim eyes and nodded. “Aye,” he said, “I ‘waited you, Captain. Be welcome and be seated.”

Flandry lowered himself to a couch covered with the softscaled hide of some giant swimming thing John Umbolu had once hunted down. The leather was worn shabby. The old man limped to him with a decanter of imported rum. When they had both been helped, he sat himself in a massive armchair and their goblets clinked together. “Your honor and good health, sir,” said John Umbolu.

Flandry looked into the wrinkled face and said quietly: “Your son Derek must have told you my news.”

“I’ve had the tidings,” nodded Umbolu. He took a pipe from its rack and began to fill it with slow careful motions. “You saw him die, sir?”

“He held my hand. His squad was ambushed on a combat mission on Brae. He… it was soon over.”

“Drowning is the single decent death,” whispered the Nyanzan. “My other children, all but Derek, had that much luck.” He lit his pipe and blew smoke for a while. “I’m sorry Tom had to go yon way. But it is kind of you to come tell me of it.”

“He’ll be buried with full military honors,” said Flandry awkwardly. If they don’t have so many corpses they just bulldoze them under. “Or if you wish, instead of the battle-casualty bonus you can have his ashes returned here.”

“Nay,” said Umbolu. His white head wove back and forth. “What use is that? Let me have the money, to build a reef beacon in his name.” He thought for a while longer, then said timidly: “Perchance I could call further on your kindness. Would you know if… you’re’ware, sir, soldiers on leave and the girls they meet… it’s possible Tom left a child somewhere… ”

“I’m sorry, I wouldn’t know how to find out about that.”

“Well, well, I expected nay more. Derek must be wed soon then, if the name’s to live.”

Flandry drew hard on a cigarette, taken from a waterproof case. He got out: “I have to tell you what your son said as he lay dying.”

“Aye. Say forth, and fear me nay. Shall the fish blame the hook if it hurts him a little?”

Flandry related it. At the end, the old man’s eyes closed, just as Derek’s had done, and he let the empty glass slip from his fingers.

Finally: “I know naught of this. Will you believe that, Captain?”

“Yes, sir,” Flandry answered.

“You fear Derek may be caught in the same net?”

“I hope not.”

“I too. I’d nay have any son of mine in a scheme that works by midnight murder-whatever they may think of your Empire. Tom… Tom was young and didn’t understand what was involved. Will you believe that too?” asked John Umbolu anxiously. Flandry nodded. The Nyanzan dropped his head and cupped his hands about the pipe bowl, as if for warmth. “But Derek… why, Derek’s in the Council. Derek would have open eyes-Let it nay be so!”

Flandry left him with himself for a time, then: “Where might any young man .. , first have encountered the agents of such a conspiracy?”

“Who knows, sir? ‘Fore his growth is gained, an Umbolu boy has shipped to all ports of the planet. Or there are always sailors from every nation on Nyanza, right here in Jairnovaunt.”

Flandry held out the knife he had taken. “This belongs to a bearded man,” he said. “Can you tell me anything about it?”

The faded eyes peered close. “Rossala work.” It was an instant recognition, spoken in a lifeless voice. “And the Rossala men flaunt whiskers.”

“As I came ashore here,” said Flandry, “a bearded person with this knife tried to kill me. He got away, but—”

He stopped. The old sea captain had risen. Flandry looked up at an incandescent mask of fury, and suddenly he realized that John Umbolu was a very big man.

Gigantic fists clenched over the Terran’s head. The voice roared like thunder, one majestic oath after the next, until rage at last found meaningful words. “Sneak assassins on my very ground! ‘Gainst my guest! By the blazing bones of Almighty God, sir, you’ll let me question every Rossalan in Jairnovaunt and flay yon one “live!”

Flandry rose too. An upsurging eagerness tingled in him, a newborn plot. And at the same tune-Warily, child, warily.’ You’ll not get cooperation at this counter without some of the most weasel-like arguments and shameless emotional buttonpushing in hell’s three-volume thesaurus.

Well, he thought, that’s what I get paid for.

VI

Hours had gone when he left the house. He had eaten there, but sheer weariness dragged at him. He swam quite slowly back to the Commander’s rock. When he stood on it, he rested for a while, looking over the sea.

Loa was up, Luna-sized, nearly full, but with several times the albedo of Earth’s moon. High in a clear blackness, it drowned most of the alien constellations. The marker lights about every rock, color-coded for depth so that all Jairnovaunt was one great jewelbox, grew pallid in the moon-dazzle off the ocean.

Flandry took out a cigarette. It was enough to be alone with that light: at least, it helped. Imperial agents ought to have some kind of conscience-ectomy performed… He drew smoke into his lungs.

“Can you nay rest, Captain?” The low woman-voice brought him bounding around. When he saw the moonlight gleam off Tessa Hoorn, he put back his gun, sheepishly.

“You seem a wee bit wakeful yourself,” he answered. “Unless you are sleep-walking, or sleep-diving or whatever people do here. But no, surely I am the one asleep. Don’t rouse me.”

The moon turned her into darknesses and lithe witcheries, with great marching waters to swirl beneath her feet. She had been swimming-Loa glistened off a million cool drops, her only garment. He remembered how they had talked and laughed and traded songs and recollections and even hopes, under tall skies or moonlit sails. His heart stumbled, and glibness died.

“Aye. My net would nay hold fast to sleep this night.” She stood before him, eyes lowered. It was the first time she had not met his gaze. In the streaming unreal light, he saw how a pulse fluttered in her throat. “So I wended from my bunk and-” The tones faded. “Why did you come here again?” he asked. “Oh… it was a place to steer for. Or perchance… Nay!” Her lips tried to smile, but were not quite steady. “Where were you this evening, sith we are so curious?”

“I spoke to Old John,” he said, because so far truth would serve his purpose. “It wasn’t easy.”

“Aye. I wouldn’t give your work to an enemy, Dominic. Why do you do it?”

He shrugged. “It’s all I really know how to do.”

“Nay!” she protested. “To aid a brute of a governor or a null of a resident-you’re too much a man. You could come… here, even-Nay, the sun wouldn’t allow it for long… ”

“It’s not quite for nothing,” he said. “The Empire is-” he grinned forlornly-“less perfect than myself. True. But what would replace it is a great deal worse.”

“Are you so sure, Dominic?”

“No,” he said in bitterness.

“You could dwell on a frontier world and do work you are sure is worth yourself. I… even I have thought, there is more in this universe than Nyanza… if such a planet had oceans, I could—”

Flandry said frantically: “Didn’t you mention having a child, Tessa?”

“Aye, a Commander-child, but sith I’m unwed as yet the boy was adopted out.” He looked his puzzlement and she explained, as glad as he to be impersonal: “The Commander must not wed, but lies with whom he will. It’s a high honor, and if she be husbandless the woman gets a great dowry from him. The offspring of these unions are raised by the mothers’ kin; when they are all old enough, the councillors elect the best-seeming son heir apparent.”

Somewhere in his rocking brain, Flandry thought that the Terran Emperors could learn a good deal from Nyanza. He forced a chuckle and said: “Why, that makes you the perfect catch, Tessa-titled, rich, and the mother of a potential chieftain. How did you escape so far?”

“There was nay the right man,” she whispered. “Inyanduma himself is so much a man, see you, for all his years. Only Derek Umbolu-how you unlock me, Terran!-and him too proud to wed ‘bove his station.” She caught her breath and blurted desperately: “But I’m nay more a maid, and I will nay wait until Full Entropy to be again a woman.”

Flandry could have mumbled something and gotten the devil out of there. But he remembered through a brawling in his blood that he was an Imperial agent and that something had been done by this girl in southern waters which they kept secret from him.

He kissed her.

She responded shyly at first, and then with a hunger that tore at him. They sat for a long while under the moon, needing no words, until Flandry felt with dim surprise that the tide was licking his feet.

Tessa rose. “Come to my house,” she said.

It was the moment when he must be a reptile-blooded scoundrel… or perhaps a parfait gentile knight, he was desolately uncertain which. He remained seated, looking up at her, where she stood crowned with stars, and said:

“I’m sorry. It wouldn’t do.”

“Fear me naught,” she said with a small catch of laughter, very close to a sob. “You can leave when you will. I’d nay have a man who wouldn’t stay freely. But I’ll do my best to keep you, Dominic, dearest.”

He fumbled after another cigarette. “Do you think I’d like anything better?” he said. “But there’s a monster loose on this planet, I’m all but sure of it I will not give you just a few hours with half my mind on my work. Afterward-” He left it unfinished.

She stood quiet for a time that stretched.

“It’s for Nyanza too,” he pleaded. “If this goes on un-reined, it could be the end of your people.”

“Aye,” she said in a flat tone.

“You could help me. When this mission is finished—”

“Well… what would you know?” She twisted her face away from his eyes.

He got the cigarette lighted and squinted through the smoke. “What were you doing in The Kraal?”

“I’m nay so sure now that I do love you, Dominic.”

“Will you tell me, so I’ll know what I have to face?”

She sighed. “Rossala is arming. They are making warcraft, guns, torpedoes-none nuclear, sith we have nay facilities for it, but more than the Terran law allows us. I don’t know why, though rumor speaks of sunken Uhunhu. The Sheikh guards his secrets. But there are whispers of freedom. It may or may not be sooth. We’ll nay make trouble with the Imperium for fellow Nyanzans, but… we arm ourselves, too, in case Rossala should start again the old wars. I arranged an alliance with The Kraal.”

“And if Rossala should not attack you, but revolt against Terra?” asked Flandry. “What would your own re-armed alliance do?”

“I know naught ‘bout that. I am but one Nyanzan. Have you nay gained enough?”

She slammed down her ‘lung helmet and dove off the edge. He did not see her come up again.

VII

With a whole planetful of exotic sea foods to choose from, the Commander hospitably breakfasted his guest on imported beefsteak. Flandry walked out among morning tide pools, through a gusty salt wind, and waited in grimness and disgruntlement for events to start moving.

He was a conspicuous figure in his iridescent white garments, standing alone on a jut of rock with the surf leaping at his feet. A harpoon gunner could have fired upward from the water and disappeared. Flandry did not take his eyes off the blue and green whitecaps beyond the breakers. His mind dwelt glumly on Tessa Hoorn… God damn it, he would go home by way of Morvan and spend a week in its pleasure city and put it all on the expense account. What was the use of this struggle to keep a decaying civilization from .being eaten alive, if you never got a chance at any of the decadence yourself?

A black shape crossed his field of vision. He poised, warily. The man swam like a seal, but straight into the surf. There were sharp rocks in that cauldron-hold it!-Derek Umbolu beat his way through, grasped the wet stone edge Flandry stood on, and chinned himself up. He pushed back his helmet with a crash audible over the sea-thunder and loomed above Flandry like a basalt cliff. His eyes went downward 30 centimeters to lock with the Terran’s, and he snarled:

“What have you done to her?”

“My lady .Hoorn?” Flandry asked. “Unfortunately, nothing.”

A fist cocked. “You lie, Lubber! I know the lass. I saw her this dawn and she had been weeping.”

Flandry smiled lop-sided. “And I am necessarily to blame? Don’t you flatter me a bit? She spoke rather well of you, Captain.”

A shiver went through the huge body. Derek stepped back one pace; teeth caught at his lip. “Say nay more,” he muttered.

“I’d have come looking for you today,” said Flandry. “We still have a lot to talk about. Such as the man who tried to kill me last night.”

Derek spat. “A pity he didn’t succeed!”

“Your father thought otherwise, seeing the attempt was made on his own rock. He was quite indignant.”

Derek’s eyes narrowed. His nostrils stirred, like an angry bull’s, and his head slanted forward. “So you spoke to my father after all, did you, now? I warned you, Impy—”

“We had a friendly sort of talk,” said Flandry. “He doesn’t believe anything can be gained by shooting men in their sleep.”

“I suppose all your own works would stand being refereed?”

Since they would certainly not, Flandry donned a frown and continued: “I’d keep an eye on your father, though. I’ve seen these dirty little fanaticisms before. Among the first people to be butchered are the native-born who keep enough native sense and honor to treat the Imperial like a fellow-being. You see, such people are too likely to understand that the revolution is really organized by some rival imperialism, and that you can’t win a war where your own home is the battleground.”

“Arrgh!” A hoarse animal noise, for no words were scornful enough.

“And my would-be assassin is still in business,” continued Flandry. “He knows I did talk to your father. Hate me as much as you like, Captain Umbolu, but keep a guard over the old gentleman. Or at least speak to a certain Rossalan whom I don’t accuse you of knowing.”

For a moment longer the brown eyes blazed against the glacial gray blandness of the Terran’s. Then Derek clashed his helmet down and returned to the water.

Flandry sighed. He really should start the formal machinery of investigation, but he went back to the house with an idea of borrowing some fishing tackle.

Inyanduma, seated at a desk among the inevitable documents of government, gave him a troubled look. “Are you certain that there is a real conspiracy on Nyanza?” he asked. “We’ve ever had our hotheads, like all others… aye, I’ve seen other planets, I ‘listed for the space Navy in my day and hold a reserve commission.”

Flandry sat down and looked at his fingernails. “Then why haven’t you reported what you know about Rossala?” he asked softly.

Inyanduma started. “Are you a telepath?”

“No. It’d make things too dull.” Flandry lit a fresh cigarette. “I know Rossala is arming, and that your nation is alarmed enough about it to prepare defensive weapons and alliances. Since the Empire would protect you, you must expect the Empire to be kicked off Nyanza.”

“Nay,” whispered Inyanduma. “We’ve nay certainty of aught. It’s but… we won’t bring a horde of detectives, belike a Terran military force, by denouncing our fellow nation… on so little proof… And yet we must keep some freedom of action, in case—”

“Especially in case Rossala calls on you to join in cutting the Terran apron strings?”

“Nay, nay—”

“Under such circumstances, it would be pathetic.” Flandry shook his tongue-clicking head. “It’s so amateurishly done that I feel grossly overpaid for my time here. But whoever engineered the conspiracy in the first place is no amateur. He used your parochial loyalties with skill. And he must expect to move soon, before a pre-occupied Imperium can find out enough about his arrangements to justify sending in the marines. The resident’s assassination is obviously a key action. It was chance I got here the very day that had happened, but someone like me would surely have arrived not many days later, and not been a great deal longer about learning as much as I’ve done. Of course, if they can kill me it will delay matters for a while, which will be helpful to them; but they don’t seem to expect they’ll need much time.”

Flandry paused, nodded to himself, and carried on. “Ergo, if this affair is not stopped, we can expect Rossala to revolt within a few weeks at the very latest. Rossala will call on the other Nyanzan nations to help-and they’ve been cleverly maneuvered into arming themselves and setting up a skeleton military organization. If the expert I suspect is behind the revolution, those leaders such as yourself, who demur at the idea, will die and be replaced by more gullible ones. Of course, Nyanza will have been promised outside help: I don’t imagine even Derek Umbolu thinks one planet can stand off all Terra’s power. Merseia is not too far away. If everything goes smoothly, we’ll end up with a nominally independent Nyanza which is actually a Merseian puppet-deep within Terran space. If the attempt fails, well, what’s one more radioactive wreck of a world to Merseia?”

There was a stillness.

In the end Inyanduma said grayly: “I don’t know but what the hazard you speak of will be better than to call in the Terrans; for in sooth all our nations have broken your law in that we have gathered weapons as you say. The Imperials would nay leave us what self-government we now have.”

“They might not be necessary,” said Flandry. “Since you do have those weapons, and the City constabulary is a legally armed native force with some nuclear equipment… you could do your own housecleaning. I could supervise the operation, make sure it was thorough, stamp my report to headquarters Fantastically Secret, and that would be the close of the affair.”

He stood up. “Think it over,” he said.

It was peaceful out on the rock. Flandry’s reel hummed, the lure flashed through brilliant air, the surf kittened gigantically with his hook. It did not seem to matter greatly that he got never a nibble. The tide began to rise again, he’d have to go inside or exchange his rod for a trident…

A kayak came over drowned skerries like something alive. Derek Umbolu brought it to Flandry’s feet and looked up. His face was sea-wet, which was merciful; Flandry did not want to know whether the giant was crying.

“Blood,” croaked Derek. “Blood, and the chairs broken, I could see in the blood how he was dragged out and thrown to the fish.”

Hollowness lay in Dominic Flandry’s heart. He felt his shoulders slump. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

Words ripped out, flat, hurried, under the ramping tidal noise:

“They center in Rossala, but someone in Uhunhu captains it. I was to seize control here when they rise, if Inyanduma will nay let us help the revolution. I hated the killing of old Bannerji, but it was needful. For now there will be nay effective space traffic control, till they replace him, and in two weeks there will come ships from Merseia with heavy nuclear war-weapons such as we can’t make on this planet. The same man who gaffed Bannerji tried for you. He was the only trained assassin in Jairnovaunt-and a neighbor gave you alibi-so I believe none of his whinings that he’d nay touched my father. His name was Mamoud Shufi. Cursed be it till the sun is cold clinkers!”

One great black hand unzipped the kayak cover. The other hand swooped down, pulled out something which dripped, and flung it at the Terran’s feet so hard that one dead eye burst from the lopped-off head.

VIII

Elsewhere on Nyanza it growled battle, men speared and shot each other, ships went to the bottom and buildings cracked open like rotten fruit. Where Flandry stood was only turquoise and lace. Perhaps some of the high white clouds banked in the west had a smoky tinge.

A crewman with a portable sonic fathometer nodded. “We’re over Uhunhu shoals now, sir.”

“Stop the music,” said Flandry. The skipper transmitted several orders, he felt the pulse of engines die, the submarine lay quiet. Looking down gray decks past the shark’s fin of a conning tower, Flandry saw crewmen gathering in a puzzled, almost resentful way. They had expected to join the fighting, till this Terran directed the ship eastward.

“And now,” said Derek Umbolu grimly, “will you have the kindness to say why we steered clear of Rossala?”

Flandry cocked an eyebrow. “Why are you so anxious to kill other men?” he countered.

Derek bristled. “I’m nay afraid to hazard my skin, Impy… like someone I could name!”

”’There’s more to it than that,” said Flandry. He was not sure why he prattled cheap psychology when a monster crouched under his feet. Postponing the moment? He glanced at Tessa Hoorn, who had insisted on coming. “Do you see what I mean, Lightmistress? Do you know why he itches so to loose his harpoon?”

Some of the chill she had shown him in the past week thawed. “Aye,” she said. “Belike I do. It’s blood guilt enough that we’re party to a war ‘gainst our own planetmen, without being safe into the bargain.”

He wondered how many shared her feelings. Probably no large number. After he and Inyanduma flew to the City and got the Warden to mobilize his constables, a call had gone out for volunteers. The Nyanzan public had only been informed that a dangerous conspiracy had been discovered, centered in Rossala, that the Sheikh had refused the police right of entry, and that therefore a large force would be needed to seize that nation over the resistance of its misguided citizens and occupy it while the Warden’s specialists sniffed out the actual plotters. And men had come by the many thousands, from all over the planet.

It was worse, though, for those who knew what really lay behind this police operation.

Flandry mused aloud, “I wonder if you’ll ever start feeling that way about your fellowmen, wherever they happen to live?”

“Enough!” rapped Derek Umbolu. “Say why you brought us hither and be done!”

Flandry kindled a cigarette and stared over the rail, into chuckling sun-glittering waves so clear that he could see how the darkness grew with every meter of depth. He said:

“Down there, if he hasn’t been warned somehow that I know about him, is the enemy.”

“Ai-a!” Tessa Hoorn dropped a hand to her gun; but Flandry saw with an odd little pain how she moved all unthinkingly closer to Derek. “But who would lair in drowned Uhunhu?”

“The name I know him by is A’u,” said Flandry. “He isn’t human. He can breathe water as well as air-I suppose his home planet must be pretty wet, though I don’t know where it is. But it’s somewhere in the Merseian Empire, and he, like me, belongs to the second oldest profession. We’ve played games before now. I flushed him on Conjumar two Earth-years ago: my boys cleaned up his headquarters, and his personal spaceship took a near miss that left it lame and radioactive. But he got away. Not home, his ship wasn’t in that good a condition, but away.”

Flandry trickled smoke sensuously through his nostrils. It might be the last time. “On the basis of what I’ve seen here, I’m now certain that friend A’u made for Nyanza, ditched, contacted some of your malcontents, and started cooking revolution. The whole business has his signature, with flourishes. If nothing else, a Nyanzan uprising and Merseian intervention would get him passage home; and he might have inflicted a major defeat on Terra in the process.”

A mumbling went through the crewfolk, wrath which was half terror. “Sic semper local patriots,” finished Flandry. “I want to be ruddy damn sure of getting A’u, and he has a whole ocean bottom to hide on if he’s alarmed, and we’ll be too busy setting traps for the Merseian gunrunners due next week to play tag for very long. Otherwise I’d certainly have waited till we could bring a larger force.”

“Thirty men ‘gainst one poor hunted creature?” scoffed Tessa.

“He’s a kind of big creature,” said Flandry quietly to her.

He looked at his followers, beautiful and black in the sunlight, with a thousand hues of blue at their backs, a low little wind touching bare skins, and the clean male shapes of weapons. It was too fair a world to gamble down in dead Uhunhu. Flandry knew with wry precision why he was leading this chase-not for courage, nor glory, nor even one more exploit to embroider for some high-prowed yellow-haired bit of Terran fluff. He went because he was an Imperial and if he stayed behind the colonials would laugh at him.

Therefore he took one more drag of smoke, flipped his cigaret parabolically overboard, and murmured: “Be good, Tessa, and I’ll bring you back a lollipop. Let’s go chilluns.”

And snapped down his helmet and dove cleanly over the side.

The water became a world. Overhead was an area of sundazzle, too bright to look on; elsewhere lay cool dusk fading downward into night. The submarine was a basking whale shape… too bad he couldn’t just take it down and torpedo A’u, but an unpleasant session with a man arrested in Altla had told him better-A’u expected to be approached only by swimming men. The roof of sunlight grew smaller as he drove himself toward the bottom, until it was a tiny blinding star and then nothing. There was a silken sense of his own steadily rippling muscles and the sea that slid past them, the growing chill stirred his blood in its million channels, a glance behind showed his bubble-stream like a trail of argent planets, his followers were black lightning bolts through an utterly quiet green twilight. O God, to be a seal!

Dimly now, the weed-grown steeps of Uhunhu rose beneath him, monstrous gray dolmens and menhirs raised by no human hands, sunken a million years ago… A centuries-drowned ship, the embryo of a new reef ten millennia hence, with a few skulls strewn for fish to nest in, was shockingly raw and new under the leaning walls. Flandry passed it in the silence of a dream.

He did not break that quietude, though his helmet bore voice apparatus. If A’u was still here, A’u must not be alarmed by orders to fan out in a search pattern. Flandry soared close enough to Derek to nod, and the giant waved hands and feet in signals understood by the men. Presently Flandry and Derek were alone in what might once have been a street or perhaps a corridor.

They glided among toppling enormities; now and then one of denser shadow, but it was only a rock or a decapus or a jawbone the size of a portal. Flandry began to feel the cold, deeper than his skin, almost deeper than the silence.

A hand clamped bruisingly on his wrist. He churned to a halt and hung there, head cocked, until the sound that Derek had dimly caught was borne past vibrator and ocean and receiver to his own ears. It was the screaming of a man being killed, but so far and faint it might have been the death agony of a gnat.

Flandry blasphemed eighteen separate gods, kicked himself into motion, and went like a hunting eel through Uhunhu. But Derek passed him and he was almost the last man to reach the fight.

“A’u,” he said aloud, uselessly, through the bawl of men and the roil of bloodied waters. He remembered the harpoon rifle slung across his shoulders, unlimbered it, checked the magazine, and wriggled close. Thirty men-no, twenty-nine at the most. A corpse bobbed past, wildly staring through a helmet cracked open-twenty-eight men swirled about one monster. Flandry did not want to hit any of them.

He swam upward, until he looked down on A’u. The great black shape had torpedoed from a dolmen. Fifteen meters long, the wrinkled leather skin of some Arctic golem, the gape of a whale and the boneless arms of an elephant… but with hands, with hands… A’u raged among his hunters. Flandry saw how the legs which served him on land gripped two men in the talons and plucked their limbs off. There was no sound made by the monster’s throat, but the puny human jabber was smashed by each flat concussion of the flukes, as if bombs burst.

Flandry nestled the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Recoil sent him backward, end over end. He did not know if his harpoon had joined the score in A’u’s tormented flanks. It had to be this way, he thought, explosives would kill the men too under sea pressure and… Blood spurted from a transfixed huge hand. A’u got his back against a monolith, arched his tail, and shot toward the surface. Men sprayed from him like bow water.

Flandry snapped his legs and streaked to meet the thing. The white belly turned toward him, a cliff, a cloud, a dream. He fired once and saw his harpoon bite. Once more! A’u bent double in anguish, spoke blood, somehow sensed the man and plunged at him. Flandry looked down a cave of horrible teeth. He looked into the eyes behind; they were blind with despair. He tried to scramble aside. A’u changed course with a snake’s ease. Flandry had a moment to wonder if A’u knew him again.

A man flew from the blood-fog. He fired a harpoon, holding himself steady against its back-thrust. Instead of letting the line trail, to tangle the beast, he grabbed it, was pulled up almost to the side. The gills snapped at him like mouths. He followed the monster, turn for turn through cold deeps, as he sought aim. Finally he shot. An eye went out. A brain was cloven. A’u turned over and died.

Flandry gasped after breath. His helmet rang and buzzed, it was stifling him, he must snatch it off before he choked… Hands caught him. He looked into the victory which was Derek Umbolu’s face.

“Wait there, wait, Terra man,” said a remote godlike calm. “All is done now.”

“I, I, I, thanks!” rattled Flandry.

His wind came back to him. He counted the men that gathered, while they rose with all due slowness toward the sun. Six were dead. Cheap enough to get rid of A’u.

If I had been cast away, alone, on the entire world of a hideous race… I wonder if I would have had the courage to survive this long.

I wonder if there are some small cubs, on a water planet deep among the Merseian stars, who can’t understand why father hasn’t come home.

He climbed on deck at last, threw back his helmet and sat down under Tessa Hoorn’s anxious gaze. “Give me a cigarette,” he said harshly. “And break out something alcoholic.”

She wrestled herself to steadiness. “Caught you the monster?” she asked.

“Aye,” said Derek.

“We close to didn’t,” said Flandry. “Our boy Umbolu gets the credit.”

“Small enough vengeance for my father,” said the flat voice of sorrow.

The submarine’s captain saluted the pale man who sat hugging his knees, shivering and drinking smoke. “Word just came in from Rossala, sir,” he reported. “The Sheikh has yielded, though he swears he’ll protest the outrage to the next Imperial resident. But he’ll let the constables occupy his realm and search as they wish.”

Search for a number of earnest, well-intentioned young patriots, who’ll never again see morning over broad waters. Well-I suppose it all serves the larger good. It must. Our noble homosexual Emperor says so himself.

“Excellent,” said Flandry. His glance sought Derek. “Since you saved my life, you’ve got a reward coming. Your father.”

“Hoy?” The big young man trod backward a step.

“He isn’t dead,” said Flandry. “I talked him into helping me. We faked an assassination. He’s probably at home this minute, suffering from an acute case of conscience.”

“What?” The roar was like hell’s gates breaking down.

Flandry winced. “Pianissimo, please.” He waved the snarling, fist-clenching bulk back with his cigarette. “All right, I played a trick on you.”

“A trick I could have ‘waited from a filthy Impy!” Tessa Hoorn spat at his feet.

“Touch me, brother Umbolu, and I’ll arrest you for treason,” said Flandry. “Otherwise I’ll exercise my discretionary powers and put you on lifetime probation in the custody of some responsible citizen.” He grinned wearily. “I think the Lightmistress of Little Skua qualifies.”

Derek and Tessa stared at him, and at each other.

Flandry stood up. “Probation is conditional on your getting married,” he went on. “I recommend that in choosing a suitable female you look past that noble self-righteousness, stop considering the trivium that she can give you some money, and consider all that you might give her.” He glanced at them, saw that their hands were suddenly linked together, and had a brief, private, profane conversation with the Norn of his personal destiny. “That includes heirs,” he finished. “I’d like to have Nyanza well populated. When the Long Night comes for Terra, somebody will have to carry on. It might as well be you.”

He walked past them, into the cabin, to get away from all the dark young eyes.