“My God!”
“Exactly—if it ain’t you at the controls, whoever is surely is your god, and mine, too. Turn it off and you break the system and return us to all the worst features of human civilization we’ve been protected from. But ain’t nobody gonna turn it off, Chief. Not when you can save humanity from that and be God, too.”
“I see. And why have you kept this from us until now?”
“Not all of you, Chief. Warlock knew. She’d read it, too. But she never would’a thought to be a goddess herself, Chief. She just figured to be there on the winner’s side, just like me. Clayben knows—either through his private library, somehow, or maybe he figured it out by deduction from all the rest he knows. And I think Savaphoong knows, somehow, too. Maybe more instinctively than anything else—his type always seems to figure this sort of shit out—but he knows. Or he suspects, and can’t afford not to be there. They’ll be with us all the way—until they get a better deal.”
“And you?”
Raven sighed. “I’m gettin’ old, Chief. I never been all that ambitious, though. The game’s the thing for me. But I’m gettin’ too old to play games. It took me a long while before I realized why Warlock and some of the others stayed on Matriyeh and quit the chase. Less biology and new race psychology than old psychology. She had what she wanted, more or less. A society so wild and violent it kept her crazy part goin’ but also gave her somethin’ solid and real. She couldn’t think of a better place to be, that’s all. Me—I ain’t sure if there is such a place for me.” He sighed again. “Up until now, the game’s been enough. But first Nagy, then Warlock, then Ikira, and now Vulture.”
“We do not know about Vulture yet. I wouldn’t count him out so easily. Is it that you fear that it is your turn, or are you guilty that it is not?”
Raven gave a dry chuckle. “You know, I wish I knew the answer to that one. I do know that I don’t want the control, Chief, but I’d damn well be more satisfied if it was me than the turkeys in the rear like Clayben and Savaphoong. Who’s left, Chief? You, me, China… that’s about it. The rest—they don’t know what they want any more than we do, but they’re not the kind of people to be gods. Star Eagle deserves it, God knows, but he’s out. It has to be people, I’m sure of that.”
“Well, there’s Santiago.”
“She don’t want to be a goddess, Chief. She just wants a strong mate for a partner, a good solid ship, and a little peace and quiet for her kids to grow up in. Like most of ’em—simple dreams, really. The Chows want this nice peasant farm someplace. Bute and the other freebooters, new races and forms or not, just want ships and for everybody to leave ’em alone. That’s what it’s all about for them, Chief. They don’t want to run the system, they’re doin’ all this to get the system off their backs so they can do what they always wanted to do and not worry about it. It’s what most folks want. Deep down it’s what you and Cloud Dancer want. Maybe the human race could use some peasant gods sometime, but the peasants got more sense and more real sense of values, too. No, it’s guys like Clayben and Savaphoong and Chen—those are the god types.”
Hawks smiled and gave a slight shrug. “Then maybe you are the one to be the god, Raven. You don’t really want anything but you understand them. You might at least be fair, which is more than all our race’s gods have been in the past.”
“I can’t imagine anything duller. I been up here tryin’ to decide what I want, and maybe what I want to be.”
“Any conclusions?”
Raven nodded. “I think I want to be a Crow, Chief. No matter what I became I’m still a product of thousands of years of a culture that has real value, real meaning, in this materialistic, mechanistic, messed-up universe. I just want to know that if I’m ever in the position where it is needed that I am, at heart, the representative of my people and that when my time comes, if it comes, they and my ancestors will look upon me with pride. Now, does that sound corny or doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Hawks replied. “It sounds corny as hell. You know something, Raven? I’ve respected you for years, but I’m beginning to be in real danger of liking you.”
Raven just shrugged and said nothing.
“You know, it’s not going to be as simple as you say, even if we win,” Hawks noted. “I mean, what’s Master System, anyway? It’s already done all its real damage; it’s just tryin’ to keep what it’s got. It took even the big machine over two hundred years to do all this damage. We can’t undo it. There’s no way back. No, the problem won’t be any different with any of us than with Master System itself, except, of course, we’ll do it differently.”
That started Raven. “Huh?”
“Like I said, we can’t undo it. It isn’t a matter of being god and working miracles, it’s an engineering problem of system management Do we get rid of the Centers and all their marvels and let all the worlds go their independent way, perhaps forget their origins, and eventually meet when their technological levels grow? Or do we bring the wonders of technology to everybody everywhere, an interstellar empire with the resultant destruction of those cultures? Could, indeed, human beings who could never even get together on Earth because of differences in color or religion or culture get together under any system when they are now so physically different and so culturally aberrant? I’ve gone over and over those questions, Raven, and I have no answers. None. Neither my research, nor Star Eagle’s computer, nor the wisdom of the ages can give a guide.”
Raven nodded sympathetically. “Well, then, I guess we leave it to luck and screw it up as usual. We’re gonna have to fight our way all the way to Master System’s lair. Whoever survives and is the strongest and smartest— whichever five of us have the rings—we’ll decide. It ain’t fair and it ain’t right, but there it is. I’m probably the worst guy for that kind of thing and I don’t even want it, but I’m a survivor. Maybe I’m just gonna wind up with the bad luck to be one of ’em.” He paused a moment. “And then there was one,” he said softly.
Hawks nodded. “Yes. It is time to think of that. We’ve had little luck with it, you know. The one ring missing in all this mess.”
Raven chuckled. “Funny thing is, it’ll probably be the easiest to get. I mean, what’s Master System gonna do? Shove half the SPF and a dozen Vals and ten fleets and task forces around it? That’s all we’d need—a bright sign sayin’ ‘Here it is!’ Oh, there might be some tricky security setup like with the Matriyeh ring, but it’ll be an engineering problem. A heist. Real difficult unless we get Vulture back, but we’re experienced now. It’s about time we grew up. But first we gotta find it and I’m fresh out of patience. Didn’t you say a long time ago that Savaphoong intimated he knew?”
Hawks nodded. “He promised that sooner or later we’d have to come crawling to him.”
Raven got up, stretched, reached down, took a cigar, and lit it. “Give me half an hour to shower and change, Chief. Then I think we pay a little call on Savaphoong. That little bastard’s had a free ride far too long.”
Fernando Savaphoong still lived on his rather luxurious yacht attached to the outer hull of the Thunder, his every wish catered to by the pitiful but beautiful personal slaves he’d taken from his old outpost empire when he’d been forced to flee. With his ship’s transmuter and a few of almost all imaginable luxury items, he’d been able to sustain himself in aloof style for years.
“Ah! Capitan Hawks and Senor Raven! Come in, come in! Might I offer you some wine, perhaps?”
They took seats in his luxury bar and entertainment room. Savaphoong knew that there was no love lost between himself and the others, Hawks in particular, but he was a businessman and trader without a scruple in his body and he never let such things interfere with business. His dull-eyed, oversexed slaves served them, and they relaxed.
“Now, then, what might I do for you gentlemen?” Savaphoong asked genially.
“You know,” Hawks replied evenly. “You were expecting this visit sooner or later. You know that every attempt we’ve made to “locate the fifth ring has failed, and you know that you intimated to me that you knew where it was.”
Savaphoong sat back, savoring the moment. “But, no, Capitan Hawks, I do not know. I think I know, because it is the only place that it could be and remain within the conditions for the possession of the rings that I know of. Certain I am not. But I would wager money on it, and I am not a gambler.”
“We’re all ears, pal,” Raven commented.
Savaphoong sighed. “But, you see, it is all that I have to offer other than hospitality. So far I have contributed little, I admit, but I have taken little as well, and certainly it was I who convinced the freebooters to join our little band. That is worth something—a contribution. Free and without charge, I might add.”
“Many of us have given our lives, Savaphoong,” Hawks pointed out. “Others have lost ships, at least once to your cowardice. Captain Santiago went through a wrenching transmutation from which she has never fully recovered, in part because of the loss of that ship and her comrades, but her new race is a pretty violent one, you know. Without my intercession you’d have suffered a slow death by torture long before now at her hands. You owe her and her dead comrades, at least. And if we hadn’t taken you aboard you would have lived in total isolation without hope for the rest of your life, so don’t give me that favor crap.”
“And you would not have been able to track and steal an entire freighter full of the murylium that powers our vessels, gives them their punch, and fuels our transmitters and transmuters,” the old trader retorted. “No, senors, I think we are even. Not all of us serve in the trenches.”
Raven saw that Hawks was ninety-nine percent ready to leap the table and strangle the man and decided to intercede. “You’re the trader. You have something to trade and we’re interested—if the price is within reason. You haven’t mentioned price.”
Savaphoong sat back and stared at them. “I will play no haggling games. I give you the place, I want the ring. I want to be one of the ones present at the end as an active player.”
“You know the rules. The ones who go and get the ring and risk everything decide who gets to keep it,” Hawks pointed out. “Besides, you don’t want to really be there at the end. It’s likely to be a battle all the way. Lots of shooting and danger. And the targets of choice will be those with the rings.”
The trader shrugged. “I am not averse to risk if it means high gain. I am getting to be an old man. There is no place for me to go and no future for me in any other situation. Remember that I am risking something, too. I do not know how the rings should be used, or where. That is your job, Capitan. And whose ring will you commandeer when it is time? Who is voting you a twenty percent godhood?”
Hawks smiled. “Nobody. If they feel me capable, they will. If not, then it is not my right to take one from them. I have a wife and three children. Godhood sounds like a full-time job, and I am not certain that I want it in any case.”
Raven lost patience. “Look, Savaphoong, we’re not gonna sit and rot here, you know. It won’t take much under Clayben’s mindprobe to find out what we need to know, if you really got anything at all.”
“The machine will not avail you what you seek, it will only kill me. You did not think the proprietor of such a place as Halinachi could ever risk being seized by Master System, do you? I knew too much, and I sold information as well as pleasure. My sources would never have trusted me with anything unless they could be assured it could never be traced to them. No, you cannot probe it out of me, and while I have a high pain tolerance, I am not a strong man. I would prefer to die rather than be tortured or dismembered, and I assure you when my threshold is attained, I will do just that. Again, some assurance for my old customers. And without a ring, why keep on? As I say, I am old, and as you pointed out, I have no place else to go.” He finished his wine. “No, gentlemen, my price is absolute.”
“What’s to keep us from sayin’ yes, then reneging on the deal once we know what you know?” Raven asked him.
“Because the ring I wish is not the ring you seek. Bring me one of the rings we already have and I shall tell you where to find its companion. It is as simple as that.”
Hawks began thinking furiously. For almost five years this situation had haunted him, although not in the way the old trader thought. For almost that whole period, Hawks felt he should know right now just what Sava-phoong knew, and the comments here only intensified that feeling. Why would Savaphoong know? Until he’d joined them he didn’t even know the importance or significance of the rings. And now, after all this time, he just admitted that the ring really wasn’t a factor. He didn’t know—he had deduced it. How? He knew so much, had such a network in the old days, that it might be anywhere…
But it wasn’t. “Son of a bitch!” said Hawks softly, not referring at all to Savaphoong. “Five bloody years and I couldn’t see it.” He sighed. “Forget it, Savaphoong. Die in decadence—or join the hunt and earn the prize. Come on, Raven.”
The Crow was suddenly very confused. “Huh? What?”
“He’s been laughing at us, and particularly me, for years. I already know what he knows. The joke’s on you, Savaphoong.”
The trader was suddenly concerned, his self-assuredness gone. “What do you mean? You could not know.”
“In each of the three other cases the ring has been prominent enough that it was no sweat finding it. Even Matriyeh, which had no Center as such. In the last five years, Kaotan, Chunhoifan, and Bahakatan have checked out every single colonial world on the charts, and Star Eagle has analyzed their origins, their culture, and everything about them we could know. No sign, no clue. We’re pretty sure it’s not on any of them, but we also know it’s not back on Earth. For a long time I was scared it was on the finger of the head of the SPF, but that’s not it, either. Master System would be a little nervous about handing such a thing to somebody with all the technology of the system at his or her command and a lot of ruthless ambition to boot. And what does that leave?”
Raven was blank. “Beats me, Chief.”
“Another colony. One not on the charts. One that’s primitive, so primitive that it can be pretty well divorced from the system and still be counted on. Not air breathers and probably with a ferocious, xenophobic culture to boot. No Centers, no technology at all to speak of, but right in close, in the middle of the rest, so it can be constantly checked on. One that every old spacer knew about but nobody knew anything about, which is why we wound up there first. One almost in Savaphoong’s old backyard. Do what you like, you old bastard. You no longer have anything to trade.”
Hawks got up and Raven followed, leaving the trader just sitting there looking disgusted, not so much at Hawks but at himself. Maybe he was getting too old. In the old days he would never have overplayed such a meager hand.
Hawks wasted no time once he got back inside Thunder. “Star Eagle, I have our destination.”
“I overheard. It is so obvious once you think on it.”
“Yeah, but the point is we didn’t think much on it. We were too damned concerned with ongoing projects and with our own lives here.”
“I should have deduced it at once,” the computer pilot responded. “So much wasted effort! And we really could use Vulture on this one.”
“Well, we may have to go without him. Until he can contact us, we have no way of knowing if he’s even still alive. We should start our planning anyway. How’s Lightning?”
“It was badly damaged, but repairs are coming along nicely. It is capable of standard duty now. Give me a week and it will be better than new.”
Hawks nodded. “Call a captain’s council. Include the surviving company who escaped with us from Melchior, Clayben included.”
Raven stared at the Hyiakutt. “I still don’t get it, Chief. Where the hell are we goin’?”
“Back where we began, Raven. Back to a hot, violent world with coconut palms planted in neat rows but without any apparent civilization at all. To the first alien planet you or I ever set foot upon. To ring number five, which we might well have been within only kilometers of stumbling across mere weeks after our escape!”
The last time they had entered that solar system they were rank amateurs, without much of anything at all except hope and fierce determination. They had lived almost like savages on a little volcanic spot down there for what seemed an eternity while Star Eagle had made the necessary repairs and adjustments to Thunder. Nothing much to remember, really, except the heat and the storms and the terrible humidity and the sense of impending danger when none ever materialized.
Blocking the monitor satellites hadn’t been a problem last time and was even less of one now. They were used to such things as a matter of course.
“We have all heard of this place,” Maria Santiago told Hawks from the first. “A number of freebooters used it as temporary hideaways and for rendezvous since it is at once so accessible and so remote, but none really even looked for inhabitants. I was never here, but I had heard of it.”
Captain ben Suda had much the same memories and even showed it on his charts. “There was some early attempt to carve out a freebooter base or trading post, if I remember the stories,” he told them. “It failed for some reason. Never really got started. There were tales of fierce, suicidal attacks by some kind of creatures, but that’s all—just tales.”
“Yeah, well, there’s somebody livin’ down there all right,” Raven assured them. “I almost forgot about this hole, but thinkin’ about it now brought back all sorts of memories. Me and Nagy, down by the beach, havin’ a less than pleasant chat, and the sense that, somehow, we was bein’ watched. Black blobs in the water, as I remember it, but we never had the means or will to find out about them. That wasn’t our job and this place didn’t mean nothin’ to us except as a hideout. I remember Nagy, though, starin’ across at the next island and suddenly frowning. He said that island looked like it was somebody’s garden, and sure enough, there was these trees all planted in neat rows. We were tempted to go over there but never got the chance.”
Hawks sighed. “How we miss the Vulture now! It’s been too easy to rely on him. How simple to just drop him in and let him tell us all about it. Damn it, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here! Who are they? What culture? Are they water breathers or just water dwellers?”
“Anybody who comes up on land to plant fruit trees isn’t wholly aquatic,” Isaac Clayben noted logically. “Still, there was absolutely no sign at all that anyone or anything with a brain had ever been on ‘our’ island. If they use the land, why not where we were? It wasn’t a bad place, if a bit wild and overgrown. The volcanoes weren’t recently active, and there were even wild fruit-bearing trees if I remember correctly.”
Hawks nodded. “That’s about it. And if we accept the legends of the place as being based on reality, and couple that with history and our own experience, we come up with a real puzzle. An attempted colony or permanent outpost was attacked and wiped out, yet generations of freebooters used it as a contact point and place to stash valuables and make repairs without any reports of molestation. The island we were on wasn’t touched, yet the one not much different than it within easy eyesight on a clear day was cultivated.”
Santiago thought about it. “I have never been there, it is true, but I cannot help being reminded of Matriyeh. The tribes were enemies and had clear hunting and gathering territories, yet there is a unifying religion that made certain places forbidden. That was on land, with a land-based culture spanning two huge continents. Here—I look at the surveys and I see water. Perhaps the total landmass is the equivalent of a continent or more, but this world is one vast sea covered with tiny islands, all the tops of vast underwater volcanic ranges. If a civilization was water-based, might it not have some sort of unifying religion as well, if, as with all the others, it has a single culture?”
“That’s good thinking,” Hawks responded. “Taboos are standard in many societies. The fact that our island had some edible plants indicates that it might have been cultivated once, then abandoned, perhaps centuries before. The fact that they attacked one party and not others indicates that there may be rules for each island and we just got lucky. The Matriyeh model is a good one here, I think, considering the total lack of any signals or signs of any sort of mechanical or electrical power. Even the traditional water-breathing colonies are set up on the Center model; there is power, there are ways to use adapted technology and that shows up. It doesn’t there.”
“But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is not there,” Star Eagle put in through his speaker. “Remember, who would have guessed a magnetic rail system on Matriyeh? We aren’t geared for that sort of detection, and under water—who can say?”
“It’s a point, but somehow I doubt that such things lie hidden here,” Hawks said. “Raven is correct on one point—Master System doesn’t dare defend this one unless it has to. That’s not to say that we can’t expect traps at least as bad as Matriyeh down there. I cannot forget the mystics of Matriyeh who themselves didn’t know they were really an entire SPF division under intense mindprint conditioning with a humanoid Val to worship as a goddess and to control things. No, this is going to be the nastiest little problem we’ve had to solve, if we have no inside man as it were. I would wager, though, from the depth of the legends about this place, that it is old, and that, unlike Matriyeh, it probably remains very much the way it was originally designed. No, I feel now as I felt then—that this was a prototypical colony, one of the first. That it was settled with a distinct people, perhaps a culture that would be very comfortable with a world such as this, and one that might well turn its back on technology.” He sighed. “Well, it’s a dangerous situation and there’s no way around it.”
Raven nodded. “Uh huh. First, we want as good a current orbital survey as can be made of the place. Then we’re gonna have to send a party down there with some mobility, heavily armed and ready for bear, and see what the place looks like. Filially, and this is the worst part, we’re gonna have to draw some of ’em out of the water, and if we can’t talk things over peaceably with them we’ll have to knock ’em cold and bring ’em in. That means exposing a group to dangers unknown by persons or creatures unknown, ones that managed to take out at least some well-armed freebooters. After all, for the most part we only know of the ones who didn’t get hit, right? It also means that, right from the start, we’re gonna have to expose ourselves as aliens. If there’s anything like that Matriyeh gimmick with the SPF, we’re cooked and you’ll have a task force here before you .can learn the name of the place.”