“You must have had an adventurous time,” Brechdan said.
“Well … yes. Occasional sport. And an interesting planet.” The anger still in Elwych flared: “I tell you, though, our people are being betrayed.”
“How?”
“Not enough of them. Not enough equipment. Not a single armed spaceship. Why don’t we support them properly?”
“Then the Terrans will support their mission properly,” Brechdan said.
Elwych gazed long at his father. The waterfall noise seemed to louder behind Dhangodhan’s ramparts. “Are we going to make a real fight for Starkad?” he murmured. “Or do we scuttle away?”
The scar throbbed on Brechdan’s forehead. “Who serve the Roidhun do not scuttle. But they may strike bargains, when such appears good for the race.”
“So.” Elwych stared past him, across the valley mists. Scorn freighted his voice. “I see. The whole operation is a bargaining counter, to win something from Terra. Runei told me they’ll send a negotiator here.”
“Yes, he is expected soon.” Because the matter was great, touching as it did on honor, Brechdan allowed himself to grasp the shoulders of his son. Their eyes met. “Elwych,” Brechdan said gently, “you are young and perhaps do not understand. But you must. Service to the race calls for more than courage, more even than intelligence. It calls for wisdom.
“Because we Merseians have such instincts that most of us actively enjoy combat, we tend to look on combat as an end in itself. And such is not true. That way lies destruction. Combat is a means to an end—the hegemony of our race. And that in turn is but a means to the highest end of all-absolute freedom for our race, to make of the galaxy what they will.
“But we cannot merely fight for our goal. We must work. We must have patience. You will not see us masters of the galaxy. It is too big. We may need a million years. On that time scale, individual pride is a small sacrifice to offer, when it happens that compromise or retreat serves us best.”
Elwych swallowed. “Retreat from Terra?”
“I trust not. Terra is the immediate obstacle. The duty of your generation is to remove it.”
“I don’t understand,” Elwych protested. “What is the Terran Empire? A clot of stars. An old, sated, corrupt people who want nothing except to keep what their fathers won for them. Why pay them any heed whatsoever? Why not expand away from them—around them—until they’re engulfed?”
“Precisely because Terra’s objective is the preservation of the status quo,” Brechdan said. “You are forgetting the political theory that was supposed to be part of your training. Terra cannot permit us to become more powerful than she. Therefore she is bound to resist our every attempt to grow. And do not underestimate her. That race still bears the chromosomes of conquerors. There are still brave men in the Empire, devoted men, shrewd men … with the experience of a history longer than ours to guide them. If they see doom before them, they’ll fight like demons. So, until we have sapped their strength, we move carefully. Do you comprehend?”
“Yes, my father,” Elwych yielded. “I hope so.”
Brechdan eased. They had been serious for as long as their roles demanded. “Come.” His face cracked in another smile; he took his son’s arm. “Let us go greet your kin.”
They walked down corridors hung with the shields of their ancestors and the trophies of hunts on more than one planet. A gravshaft lifted them to the gynaeceum level.
The whole tribe waited, Elwych’s stepmothers, sisters and their husbands and cubs, younger brothers. Everything dissolved in shouts, laughter, pounding of backs, twining of tails, music from a record player and a ringdance over the floor.
One cry interrupted. Brechdan bent above the cradle of his newest grandcub. I should speak about marriage to Elwych, he thought. High time he begot an Heir’s Heir. The small being who lay on the furs wrapped a fist around the gnarled finger that stroked him. Brechdan Ironrede melted within himself. “You shall have stars for toys,” he crooned. “Wudda, wudda, wudda.”
4
Ensign Dominic Flandry, Imperial Naval Flight Corps, did not know whether he was alive through luck or management. At the age of nineteen, with the encoding molecules hardly settled down on your commission, it was natural to think the latter. But had a single one of the factors he had used to save himself been absent—He didn’t care to dwell on that.