Motion-it would last for several hours, at ever-changing orientations and configurations, as Emissary wove her way through the star gate between Phoebus and Sol. However, at present there was only a straight-forward boost toward the first of the beacons. Joelle stirred and scowled. With less than half her attention engaged, she could not for long dismiss her fear of imprisonment ahead.
But then the viewscreen happened to catch the T machine itself, and she was lifted off into a miracle which never dulled.
At its distance, the cylinder was a tiny streak among hosts and clouds Side 7
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
of stars. She magnified and the shape grew clear, though the dimensions remained an abstraction: length about a thousand kilometers, diameter slightly more than two. It spun around its long axis so fast that a point on the rim traveled at three-fourths the speed of light. Nothing on its silvery-brilliant surface told that to the unaided eye, yet somehow an endless, barely perceptible shimmer of changeable colors conveyed a maelstrom sense of the energy locked within. Humans believed that that gleam came from force-fields which held together matter compressed to ultimate densities. There were moons which had less mass than yonder engine for opening star gates.
In the background glowed two more of the beacons which surrounded it, a purple and a gold; and through the instruments, Joelle spied a third, whose color was radio.
This thing the Others had forged and set circling around Phoebus, as they had set one at Sol and one at Centrum and one at. . . who dared guess how many stars, across how many lightyears and years? What number of sentient races had found them in space, gotten the same impersonal leave to use them, and hungered ever afterward to know who the builders truly were?
Out of those, what portion have crippled themselves the way we’re doing?
Joelle questioned in an upsurge of bitterness. Oh Dan, Dan, it’s gone for nothing, your trying to get the word that could set us free- and then, like a sunburst, she saw what must have come to him early on. He was bound to have thought of it; she remembered him drawling, “Every fox has two holes for his burrow.” Hope kindled within her. She didn’t stop to see how feeble it was, how easily blown out again. For now, the spark was enough.
III
Daniel Brodersen was born in what was still called the state of Washington and had, indeed, not broken from the USA during the civil wars, as several regions attempted and the Holy Western Republic succeeded in doing.
However, for three generations before him, the family chief had borne the title Captain General of the Olympic Domain and exercised a leadership over that peninsula, including the city of Tacoma, which was real while the claims of the federal government were words.
Those barons had not considered themselves nobility. Mike was a fisherman with a Quinault Indian wife, who had invested his money in several boats. When the Troubles reached America, he and his men became the nucleus of a group which restored order in the neighborhood, mainly to protect their households. As things worsened, he got appeals to help an ever-growing circle of farms and small towns, until rather to his surprise he was lord of many mountains, forests, vales, and strands, with all the folk therein. Any of them could always bend his ear; he put on no airs.
He fell in battle against bandits. His eldest son Bob avenged him in terrifying fashion, annexed the lawless territory to prevent a repetition, and set himself to giving defense and rough justice to his land, so that people could get on with their work. Bob felt loyal to the United States and twice raised volunteer regiments to fight for its integrity. He lost two boys of his own that way, and died while defending Seattle against a fleet which the Holies had sent north.
During his lifetime, similar developments went on in British Columbia.
American and Canadian nationalism meant much less than the need for local cooperation. Bob married John, his remaining son, to Barbara, daughter of the Captain General of the Fraser Valley. That alliance ripened into close friendship between the families. After Bob’s death, a special election overwhelmingly gave his office to John. “We’ve done okay with the Brodersens, haven’t we?” went the word from wharfs and docks, huts and houses, orchards, fields, timber camps, workshops, taverns, from Cape Flattery to Puget Sound and from Tatoosh to Hoquiam.