A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows Read online

  A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS

  ==============================

  Poul Anderson

  =============

  [22 feb 2003--scanned for #bookz]

  [23 feb 2003--proofed for #bookz]

  I

  -

  Every planet in the story is cold--even Terra, though Flandry came home

  on a warm evening of northern summer. There the chill was in the spirit.

  He felt a breath of it as he neared. Somehow, talk between him and his

  son had drifted to matters Imperial. They had avoided all such during

  their holiday.

  Terra itself had not likely reminded them. The globe hung beautiful in

  starry darkness, revealed by a view-screen in the cabin where they sat.

  It was almost full, because they were accelerating with the sun behind

  them and were not yet close enough to start on an approach curve. At

  this remove it shone white-swirled blue, unutterably pure, near dewdrop

  Luna. Nothing was visible of the scars that man had made upon it.

  And the saloon was good to be in, bulkheads nacreous gray, benches

  padded in maroon velvyl, table of authentic teak whereon stood Scotch

  whisky and everything needed for the use thereof, warm and flawlessly

  recycled air through which gamboled a dance tune and drifted an odor of

  lilacs. The Hooligan, private speedster of Captain Sir Dominic Flandry,

  was faster, better armed, and generally more versatile than any vessel

  of her class had a moral right to be; but her living quarters reflected

  her owner's philosophy that, if one is born into an era of decadence,

  one may as well enjoy it while it lasts.

  He leaned back, inhaled deeply of his cigarette, took more smokiness in

  a sip from his glass, and regarded Dominic Hazeltine with some concern.

  If the frontier was truly that close to exploding--and the boy must go

  there again ... "Are you sure?" he asked. "What proved facts have you

  got--proved by yourself, not somebody else? Why wouldn't I have heard

  more?"

  His companion returned a steady look. "I don't want to make you feel

  old," he said; and the knowledge passed through Flandry that a

  lieutenant commander of Naval Intelligence, twenty-seven standard years

  of age, wasn't really a boy, nor was his father any longer the boy who

  had begotten him. Then Hazeltine smiled and took the curse off: "Well, I

  might want to, just so I can hope that at your age I'll have acquired,

  let alone kept, your capacity for the three basic things in life."

  "Three?" Flandry raised his brows. "Feasting, fighting, and--Wait; of

  course I haven't been along when you were in a fight. But I've no doubt

  you perform as well as ever in that department too. Still, you told me

  for the last three years you've stayed in the Solar System, taking life

  easy. If the whole word about Dennitza hasn't reached the Emperor--and

  apparently it's barely starting to--why should it have come to a

  pampered pet of his?"

  "Hm. I'm not really. He pampers with a heavy hand. So I avoid the court

  as much as politeness allows. This indefinite furlough I'm on--nobody

  but him would dare call me back to duty, unless I grow bored and request

  assignment--that's the only important privilege I've taken. Aside from

  the outrageous amount of talent, capability, and charm with which I was

  born; and I do my best to share those chromosomes."

  Flandry had spoken lightly in half a hope of getting a similar response.

  They had bantered throughout their month-long jaunt, whether on a

  breakneck hike in the Great Rift of Mars or gambling in a miners' dive

  in Low Venusberg, running the rings of Saturn or dining in elegance

  beneath its loveliness on Iapetus with two ladies expert and expensive.

  Must they already return to realities? They'd been more friends than

  father and son. The difference in age hardly showed. They bore

  well-muscled height in common, supple movement, gray eyes, baritone

  voice. Flandry's face stood out in a perhaps overly handsome combination

  of straight nose, high cheekbones, cleft chin--the result of a biosculp

  job many years past, which he had never bothered to change again--and

  trim mustache. His sleek seal-brown hair was frosted at the temples;

  when Hazeltine accused him of bringing this about by artifice, he had

  grinned and not denied it. Though both wore civilian garb, Flandry's

  iridescent puff-sleeved blouse, scarlet cummerbund, flared blue

  trousers, and curly-toed beefleather slippers opposed the other's plain

  coverall.

  Broader features, curved nose, full mouth, crow's-wing locks recalled

  Persis d'Io as she had been when she and Flandry said farewell on a

  planet now destroyed, he not knowing she bore his child. The tan of

  strange suns, the lines creased by squinting into strange weathers, had

  not altogether gone from Hazeltine in the six weeks since he reached

  Terra. But his unsophisticated ways meant only that he had spent his

  life on the fringes of the Empire. He had caroused with a gusto to match

  his father's. He had shown the same taste in speech--

  ("--an itchy position for me, my own admiral looking for a nice lethal

  job he could order me to do," Flandry reminisced. "Fenross hated my

  guts. He didn't like the rest of me very much, either. I saw I'd better

  produce a stratagem, and fast."

  ("Did you?" Hazeltine inquired.

  ("Of course. You see me here, don't you? It's practically a sine qua non

  of a field agent staying alive, that he be able to outthink not just the

  opposition, but his superiors."

  ("No doubt you were inspired by the fact that 'stratagem' spelled

  backwards is 'megatarts.' The prospect of counting your loose women by

  millions should give plenty of incentive."

  (Flandry stared. "Now I'm certain you're my bairn! Though to be frank,

  that awesomely pleasant notion escaped me. Instead, having developed my

  scheme, I confronted a rather ghastly idea which has haunted me ever

  afterward: that maybe there's no one alive more intelligent than I.")

  --and yet, and yet, an underlying earnestness always remained with him.

  Perhaps he had that from his mother: that, and pride. She'd let the

  infant beneath her heart live, abandoned her titled official lover,

  resumed her birthname, gone from Terra to Sassania and started anew as a

  dancer, at last married reasonably well, but kept young Dominic by her

  till he enlisted. Never had she sent word back from her frontier home,

  not when Flandry well-nigh singlehanded put down the barbarians of

  Scotha and was knighted for it, not when Flandry well-nigh singlehanded

  rescued the new Emperor's favorite granddaughter and headed off a

  provincial rebellion and was summoned Home to be rewarded. Nor had her

  son, who always knew his father's name, called on him until lately, when

  far enough along in his own career that nepotism could not be thought

  necessary.

  Thu
s Dominic Hazeltine refused the offer of merry chitchat and said in

  his burred un-Terran version of Anglic, "Well, if you've been taking

  what amounts to a long vacation, the more reason why you wouldn't have

  kept trace of developments. Maybe his Majesty simply hasn't been

  bothering you about them, and has been quite concerned himself for quite

  some while. Regardless, I've been yonder and I know."

  Flandry dropped the remnant of his cigarette in an ash-taker. "You wound

  my vanity, which is no mean accomplishment," he replied. "Remember, for

  three or four years earlier--between the time I came to his notice and

  the time we could figure he was planted on the throne too firmly to have

  a great chance of being uprooted--I was one of his several right hands.

  Field and staff work both, specializing in the problem of making the

  marches decide they'd really rather keep Hans for their Emperor than

  revolt all over again. Do you think, if he sees fresh trouble where I

  can help, he won't consult me? Or do you think, because I've been

  utilizing a little of the hedonism I fought so hard to preserve, I've

  lost interest in my old circuits? No, I've followed the news, and an

  occasional secret report."

  He stirred, tossed off his drink, and added, "Besides, you claim the

  Gospodar of Dennitza is our latest problem child. But you've also said

  you were working Sector Arcturus: almost diametrically opposite, and

  well inside those vaguenesses we are pleased to call the borders of the

  Empire. Tell me, then--you've been almighty unspecific about your

  operations, and I supposed that was because you were under security, and

  didn't pry--tell me, as far as you're allowed, what does the space

  around Arcturus have to do with Dennitza? With anything in the Taurian

  Sector?"

  "I stayed mum because I didn't want to spoil this occasion," Hazeltine

  said. "From what Mother told me, I expected fun, when I could get a

  leave long enough to justify the trip to join you; but you've opened

  whole universes to me that I never guessed existed." He flushed. "If I

  ever gave any thought to such things, I self-righteously labeled them

  Vice.'"

  "Which they are," Flandry put in. "What you bucolic types don't realize

  is that worthwhile vice doesn't mean lolling around on cushions eating

  drugged custard. How dismal! I'd rather be virtuous. Decadence requires

  application. But go on."

  "We'll land now, and I'll report back," Hazeltine said. "I don't know

  where they'll send me next, and doubtless won't be free to tell you.

  While the chance remains, I'll be honest. I came here wanting to know

  you as a man, but also wanting to, oh, alert you if nothing else,

  because I think your brains will be sorely needed, and it's damn hard to

  communicate through channels."

  Indeed, Flandry admitted.

  His gaze went to the stars in the viewscreeen. Without amplification,

  few that he could see lay in the more or less 200-light-year radius of

  that rough and blurry-edged spheroid named the Terran Empire. Those were

  giants, visible by virtue of shining across distances we can traverse,

  under hyperdrive, but will never truly comprehend; and they filled the

  merest, tiniest fragment of the galaxy, far out in a spiral arm where

  their numbers were beginning to thin toward cosmic hollowness. Yet this

  insignificant Imperial bit of space held an estimated four million suns.

  Maybe half of those had been visited at least once. About a hundred

  thousand worlds of theirs might be considered to belong to the Empire,

  though for most the connection was ghostly tenuous ... It was too much.

  There were too many environments, races, cultures, lives, messages. No

  mind, no government could know the whole, let alone cope.

  Nevertheless that sprawl of planets, peoples, provinces, and

  protectorates must somehow cope, or see the Long Night fall. Barbarians,

  who had gotten spaceships and nuclear weapons too early in their

  history, prowled the borders; the civilized Roidhunate of Merseia

  probed, withdrew a little--seldom the whole way--waited, probed again

  ... Rigel caught Flandry's eye, a beacon amidst the great enemy's

  dominions. The Taurian Sector lay in that direction, fronting the

  Wilderness beyond which dwelt the Merseians.

  "You must know something I don't, if you claim the Dennitzans are

  brewing trouble," he said. "However, are you sure what you know is

  true?"

  "What can you tell me about them?" Hazeltine gave back.

  "Hm? Why--um, yes, that's sensible, first making clear to you what

  information and ideas I have."

  "Especially since they must reflect what the higher-ups believe, which

  I'm not certain about."

  "Neither am I, really. My attention's been directed elsewhere, Tauria

  seeming as reliably under control as any division of the Empire."

  "After your experience there?"

  "Precisely on account of it. Very well. We'll save time if I run

  barefoot through the obvious. Then you needn't interrogate me, groping

  around for what you may not have suspected hitherto."

  Hazeltine nodded. "Besides," he said, "I've never been in those parts

  myself."

  "Oh? You mentioned assignments which concerned the Merseia-ward frontier

  and our large green playmates."

  "Tauria isn't the only sector at that end of the Empire," Hazeltine

  pointed out.

  Too big, this handful of stars we suppose we know ... "Ahem." Flandry

  took the crystal decanter. A refill gurgled into his glass. "You've

  heard how I happpened to be in the neighborhood when the governor, Duke

  Alfred of Varrak, kidnapped Princess Megan while she was touring, as

  part of a scheme to detach the Taurian systems from the Empire and bring

  them under Merseian protection--which means possession. Chives and I

  thwarted him, or is 'foiled' a more dramatic word?

  "Well, then the question arose, what to do next? Let me remind you, Hans

  had assumed, which means grabbed, the crown less than two years earlier.

  Everything was still in upheaval. Three avowed rivals were out to

  replace him by force of arms, and nobody could guess how many more would

  take an opportunity that came along, whether to try for supreme power or

  for piratical autonomy. Alfred wouldn't have made his attempt without

  considerable support among his own people. Therefore, not only must the

  governorship change, but the sector capital.

  "Now Dennitza may not be the most populous, wealthy, or up-to-date

  human-colonized planet in Tauria. However, it has a noticeable sphere of

  influence. And it has strength out of proportion, thanks to

  traditionally maintaining its own military, under the original treaty of

  annexation. And the Dennitzans always despised Josip. His tribute

  assessors and other agents he sent them, through Duke Alfred, developed

  a tendency to get killed in brawls, and somehow nobody afterward could

  identify the brawlers. When Josip died, and the Policy Board split on

  accepting his successor, and suddenly all hell let out for noon, the

  Gospodar declared for Hans Molitor. He didn't actually dispatch troops

&nbs
p; to help, but he kept order in his part of space, gave the Merseians no

  opening--doubtless the best service he could have rendered.

  "Wasn't he the logical choice to take charge of Tauria? Isn't he still?"

  "In spite of Merseians on his home planet?" Hazeltine challenged.

  "Citizens of Merseian descent," Flandry corrected. "Rather remote

  descent, I've heard. There are humans who serve the Roidhunate, too, and

  not every one has been bought or brainscrubbed; some families have lived

  on Merseian worlds for generations."

  "Nevertheless," Hazeltine said, "the Dennitzan culture isn't

  Terran--isn't entirely human. Remember how hard the colonists of Avalon

  fought to stay in the Domain of Ythri, way back when the Empire waged a

  war to adjust that frontier? Why should Dennitzans feel brotherly toward

  Terrans?"

  "I don't suppose they do." Flandry shrugged. "I've never visited them

  either. But I've met other odd human societies, not to speak of

  nonhuman. They stay in the Empire because it gives them the Pax and

  often a fair amount of commercial benefit, without usually charging too

  high a price for the service. From what little I saw and heard in the

  way of reports on the Gospodar and his associates, they aren't such

  fools as to imagine they can stay at peace independently. Their history

  includes the Troubles, and their ancestors freely joined the Empire when

  it appeared."

  "Nowadays Merseia might offer them a better deal."

  "Uh-uh. They've been marchmen up against Merseia far too long. Too many

  inherited grudges."

  "Such things can change. I've known marchmen myself. They take on the

  traits of their enemies, and eventually--" Hazeltine leaned across the