 CHAPTERS 19-21 of SPACE VIKING by H. B. Piper, read by Mark Nelson. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. SPACE VIKING CHAPTERS 19. Prince Trask of Tanneth and Prince Simon Bintrick were dining together on an upper terrace of what had originally been the mansion house of a Federation period plantation. It had been a number of other things since. Now it was the municipal building of a town that had grown around it, which had somehow escaped undamaged from the Dun and Blitz. Normally about five or ten thousand, the place was now jammed with almost fifty thousand homeless refugees from half a dozen other towns that had been destroyed, overflowing the buildings and crowding into a sprawling camp of hastily built huts and shelters, and already permanent buildings were going up to accommodate them. Obviously locals, Marduckans, and SPACE Vikings had been busy with the work of relief and reconstruction. This was the first meal the two commanders had been able to share in any leisure at all. Prince Bintrick's enjoyment of it was somewhat impaired by the fact that from where he sat he could see in the distance the sphere of his disabled ship. I doubt we can get her off-planet again, let alone into hyperspace. Well, we'll get you and your crew to Marduck in the nemesis then. They were both speaking loudly above the clank and clatter of machinery below. I don't know how either of us will be received. SPACE Vikings haven't been exactly popular on Marduck lately. They may thank you for bringing me back to stand trial," Bintrick said bitterly. Why, I'd have anybody shot who let his ship get caught as I did mine. Those two were down in atmosphere before I knew they'd come out of hyperspace. I think they were down on the planet before your ship arrived. Oh, that's ridiculous, Prince Trask, the Marduckan cried. You can't hide a ship on a planet, not from the kind of instruments we have in the Royal Navy. We have pretty fair detection ourselves, Trask reminded him. There's one place where you can do it, at the bottom of an ocean, with a thousand or so feet of water over her. That's where I was going to hide the nemesis, if I got here ahead of Dunnan. Prince Bintrick's fork stopped halfway to his mouth. He lowered it slowly to his plate. That was a theory he'd like to accept if he could. But the locals, they didn't know about it. They wouldn't. They have no off-planet detection of their own. Come in directly over the ocean, out of the sun, and nobody'd see the ship. Is that a regular space viking trick? No, I invented it myself, on the way from Seashat. But if Dunnan wanted to ambush your ship, he'd have thought of it, too. That's the only practical way to do it. Dunnan, or nevel-orm, he wished he knew, and was afraid he would go on wishing all his life. Bintrick started to pick up his fork again, changed his mind, and sipped from his wine-glass instead. You may find you're quite welcome on Marduk at that, he said. These raids have only been a serious problem in the last four years. I believe, as you do, that this enemy of yours is responsible for all of them. We have half the Royal Navy out now patrolling our trade planets. Even if he wasn't aboard the Enterprise when you blew her up, you've put a name on him and can tell us a good deal about him. He set down the wine-glass. Why, if it weren't so utterly ridiculous, one might even think he was making war on Marduk. From Trask's viewpoint it wasn't ridiculous at all. He merely mentioned that Andrei Dunnan was psychotic and let it go at that. The Victrix was not completely unreparable, although quite beyond the resources at hand. A fully equipped engineer ship from Marduk could patch her hull and replace her Dillingham's and her Abbot lift and drive engines and make her temporarily space-worthy until she could be gotten to a shipyard. They concentrated on repairing the Nemesis, and in another two weeks she was ready for the voyage. The six-hundred-hour trip to Marduk passed pleasantly enough. The Marduken officers were good company and found their space-viking opposite numbers equally so. The two crews had become used to working together on Autholma and mingled amicably off-watch, interesting themselves in each other's hobbies and listening avidly to tales of each other's home planets. The space-vikings were surprised and disappointed at the somewhat lower intellectual level of the Mardukens. They couldn't understand that. Marduk was supposed to be a civilized planet, wasn't it? The Mardukens were just as surprised and inclined to be resentful that the space-vikings all acted and talked like officers. Hearing of it, Prince Bintrick was also puzzled. Folksal hands on a Marduken ship belong definitely to the lower orders. There's still too much free land and free opportunity on the sword worlds, Trask explained. Nobody does much bowing and scraping to the class above him. He's too busy trying to shove himself up into it, and the men who ship out as space-vikings are the least class-conscious of the lot. Think my men will have trouble on Marduk about that? They'll all insist on doing their drinking in the swankiest places in town. No, I don't think so. Everybody will be so amazed that space-vikings aren't twelve feet tall, with three horns like a Zarathustra dam thing and a spiked tail like a faff near Mantachore that they won't even notice anything less. Might do some good in the long run. Crown Prince Edvard will like your space-vikings. He's much opposed to class distinctions and caste prejudices. Says they have to be eliminated before we can make democracy really work. The Mardukans talked a lot about democracy. They thought well of it. Their government was a representative democracy. It was also a hereditary monarchy, if that made any kind of sense. Trask's efforts to explain the political and social structure of the sword worlds met the same incomprehension from Bintrick. Why, it sounds like feudalism to me. That's right, that's what it is. A king owes his position to the support of his great nobles. They owe theirs to their barons and land-holding knights. They owe theirs to their people. There are limits beyond which none of them can go. After that, their vassals turn on them. Well, suppose the people of some barony rebel. Won't the king send troops to support the baron? What troops? Outside a personal guard and enough men to police the royal city and hold the crown lands, the king has no troops. If he wants troops, he has to get them from his great nobles. They have to get them from their vassal barons, who raise them by calling out their people. That was another source of dissatisfaction with King Angus of Graham. He had been augmenting his forces by hiring off planet mercenaries. And the people won't help some other baron oppress his people. It might be their turn next. You mean the people are armed? Prince Bintrick was incredulous. Great, Satan, aren't yours? Prince Trask was equally surprised. Then your democracies are farce, and the people are only free on sufferance. If their ballots aren't secured by arms, they're worthless. Who has the arms on your planet? Why, the government? You mean the king? Prince Bintrick was shocked. Certainly not. Horrid idea. That would be, why, it would be despotism. Besides, the king wasn't the government at all. The government ruled in the king's name. There was the assembly, the Chamber of Representatives, and the Chamber of Delegates. The people elected the representatives, and the representatives elected the delegates, and the delegates elected the Chancellor. Then there was the Prime Minister. He was appointed by the king, but the king had to appoint him from the party holding the most seats in the Chamber of Representatives. And he appointed the ministers, who handled the executive work of the government. Only their subordinates in the different ministries were career officials, who were selected by competitive examination from the bottom jobs and promoted up the bureaucratic ladder from there. This left Trask wondering if the Marduken Constitution hadn't been devised by Goldberg, the legendary old Terran inventor who always did everything the hard way. It always left him wondering just how in Gehenna the government of Marduk ever got anything done. Maybe it didn't. Maybe that was what saved Marduk from having a real despotism. Well, what prevents the government from enslaving the people? The people can't, you just told me that they aren't armed, and the government is. He continued, pausing now and then for breath, to catalog every tyranny he had ever heard of, from those practiced by the Terran Federation before the big war, to those practiced at Eglensby on Amaterasu by Pedrosan Pedro. A few of the very mildest were pushing the nobles and people of Graham to revolt against Angus I. And in the end, he finished, the government would be the only property owner and the only employer on the planet, and everybody else would be slaves, working at assigned tasks, wearing government-issued clothing and eating government food, their children educated as the government prescribes and trained for jobs selected for them by the government, never reading a book or seeing a play or thinking a thought that the government had not approved. Most of the Mardukans were laughing now. Some of them were accusing him of being just too utterly ridiculous. Why, the people are the government! The people would not legislate themselves into slavery! He wished Otto Harkman were there. All he knew of history was the little he had gotten from reading some of Harkman's books and the long, rambling conversations aboard ship in hyperspace or in the evenings at Rivington. But Harkman, he was sure, would have furnished hundreds of instances on scores of planets and over ten centuries of time, in which people had done exactly that and hadn't known what they were doing, even after it was too late. They have something about like that on Aeton, one of the Mardukan officers said. Oh, Aeton, that's a dictatorship, pure and simple. That planetary nationalist gang got into control fifty years ago, during the crisis after the war with Balder. They were voted into power by the people, weren't they? Yes, they were, Prince Bintrick said gravely. It was an emergency measure, and they were given emergency powers. Once they were in, they made the emergency permanent. That couldn't happen, our Marduk, a young nobleman declared. It could have Zaspar McCann's party wins control of the assembly at the next election, somebody else said. Oh, then Marduk's safe, the sun'll go Nova first, one of the junior Royal Navy officer said. After that, they began talking about women, a subject any spaceman will drop any other subject to discuss. Trask made a mental note of the name of Zaspar McCann, and took occasion to bring it up in conversation with his ship-board guests. Every time he talked about McCann to two or more Mardukans, he heard at least three or more opinions about the man. He was a political demagogue. On that, everybody agreed. After that, opinions diverged. McCann was a raving lunatic, and all the followers he had were a handful of lunatics like him. He might be a lunatic, but he had a dangerously large following. Well, not so large. Maybe they'd pick up a seat or so in the assembly, but that was doubtful. Not enough of them in any representative district to elect an assemblyman. He was just a smart crook, milking a lot of half-witted plebeians for all he could get out of them. Not just plebes, either. A lot of industrialists were secretly financing him, in hope that he would help them break up the labor unions. Yarrr, nuts! Everybody knew the labor unions were backing him, hoping he'd scare the employers into granting concessions. Yarrr, both nuts! He was backed by the mercantile interests. They were hoping he'd run the Gilgameshers off the planet. Well, that was one thing you had to give him credit for. He wanted to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favour of that. Now, Tras could remember something he'd gotten from Harkaman. There had been Hitler, back at the end of the first century pre-atomic. Hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was in favour of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the Albingensians, or somebody? Twenty. Marduk had three moons, a big one, fifteen hundred miles in diameter, and two insignificant twenty-mile chunks of rock. The big one was fortified, and a couple of ships were in orbit around it. The nemesis was challenged as she emerged from her last hyperjump. Both ships broke orbit and came out to meet her, and several more were detected lifting away from the planet. Prince Bintrick took the communication screen and immediately encountered difficulties. A commandant, even after the situation had been explained twice to him, couldn't understand. A Royal Navy Fleet unit knocked out in a battle with space vikings was bad enough, but being rescued and brought to Marduk by another space viking simply didn't make sense. He then screened the Royal Palace at Malverton on the planet. First, he was icily polite to somebody, several echelons below him in the peerage, and then, respectfully polite to somebody, he addressed as Prince Vandervant. Finally, after some minutes wait, a frail, white-haired man in a little black cap of maintenance appeared on the screen. Prince Bintrick instantly sprang to his feet, so did all the other Mardukans in the command room. Your Majesty, I am most deeply honoured. Are you all right, Simon? The old gentleman asked solicitously. They haven't done anything to you, have they? Saved my life and my men's, and treated me like a friend and comrade, Your Majesty. Have I your permission to present, informally, their commander, Prince Trask of Tanneth? Indeed you may, Simon. I owe the gentleman my deepest thanks. His Majesty, Mikil VIII, Planetary King of Marduk, Prince Bintrick said. His Highness, Lucas, Prince Trask, Planetary Viceroy of Tanneth, for his Majesty Angus I of Graham. The elderly monarch bowed his head slightly. Trask bowed a little more deeply from the waist. I am very happy, Prince Trask. First I confess, at the safe return of my kinsmen, Prince Bintrick, and then at the honour of meeting one in the confidence of my fellow sovereign, King Angus of Graham. I will never be ungrateful for what you did for my cousin and for his officers and men. You must stay at the palace while you are on this planet. I am giving orders for your reception, and I wish you to be formally presented to me this evening." He hesitated briefly. Graham, that is one of the sword-worlds, is it not? Another brief hesitation. Are you really a space viking, Prince Trask? Maybe he'd expected space vikings to have three horns and a spiked tail and stand twelve feet tall himself. It took several hours for the nemesis to get into orbit. Bintrick spent most of them in a screen booth and emerged visibly relieved. Nobody's going to be sticky about what happened on Aud-Hulma, he told Trask. There will be a board of inquiry. I'm afraid I had to mix you up in that. It's not only about the action on Aud-Hulma, everybody from the Space Minister down wants to hear what you know about this fellow Dunnan. Like yourself we all hope he went to MC Square along with his flagship, but we can't take it for granted. We have over a dozen tray planets to protect and he's hit more than half of them already. The process of getting into orbit took them around the planet several times, and it was a more impressive spectacle at each circuit. Of course Marduk had a population of almost two billion and had been civilized with no hiatus of neo-barbarism since it had first been colonized in the fourth century. Even so the space vikings were amazed and stubbornly refused to show it at what they saw in the telescopic screens. Look at that city! Patrick Moreland whispered. We talk about civilized planets, but I never realized they were anything like this. Why, this makes Excalibur look like Tanneth. The city was Malverton, the capital. Like any city of a contra-gravity using people it lay in a rough circle of buildings towering out of green interspaces, surrounded by the smaller circles of spaceports and industrial suburbs. The difference was that any of these were as large as Camelot on Excalibur or four warts havens on Gram, and Malverton itself was almost half the size of the whole barony of Traskin. They aren't any more civilized than we are, Patrick. There are just more of them. If there were two billion people on Gram, which I hope there never will be, Gram would have cities like this too. One thing, the government of a planet like Marduk would have to have something more elaborate than the loose feudalism of the sword worlds. Maybe this Goldbergocracy of theirs had been forced upon them by the sheer complexity of the population and its problems. Alvin Carford took a quick look around him to make sure none of the Mardukans were in earshot. I don't care how many people they have, he said. Marduk can be had. A wolf never cares how many sheep there are in the flock. With twenty ships we could take this planet like we took Eglensby. There'd be losses coming in, sure, but after we were in and down we'd have it. Where would we get twenty ships? Tanneth, at a pinch, could muster five or six, counting the free space vikings who used the base facilities. They would have to leave a couple to hold the planet. Bay Wolf had one and another almost completed, and now there was an Amaterasu ship. But to assemble a space viking armada of twenty he shook his head. The real reason why space vikings had never raided a civilized planet successfully had always been their inability to combine under one command insufficient strength. Besides, he didn't want to raid Marduk. A raid if successful would yield immense treasures, but cause a hundred even a thousand times as much destruction, and he didn't want to destroy anything civilized. The landing stages of the palace were crowded when he and Prince Bintrick landed, and, at a discreet distance, swarms of air vehicles circled, creating a control problem for the police. Parting from Bintrick he was escorted to the suite prepared for him. It was luxurious in the extreme but scarcely above sword-world standards. There were a surprising number of human servants, groveling and fawning and getting under foot, and doing work robots could have been doing better. What robots there were were inefficient, and much work and ingenuity had been lavished on efforts to copy human form to the detriment of function. After getting rid of most of the superfluous servants he put on a screen and began sampling the newscasts. There were telescopic views of the nemesis from some craft on orbit nearby, and he watched the officers and men of the Victrix being disembarked. There were other views of their landing at some naval installation on the ground, and he could see reporters being chevied away by naval ground police, and there was a wide range of commentary opinion. The government had already denied that, one, Prince Bintrick had captured the nemesis and brought her in as a prize, and, two, the space Vikings had captured Prince Bintrick and were holding him for ransom. Beyond that the government was trying to sit on the whole story, and the opposition was hinting darkly at corrupt deals and sinister plots. Prince Bintrick arrived in the midst of an impassioned tirade against pew-cellanimous traitors surrounding his majesty, who were betraying Marduk to the space Vikings. Why doesn't your government publish the facts and put a stop to that nonsense? Trask asked. Oh, let them rave, Bintrick replied. The longer the government waits, the more they'll be ridiculed when the facts are published. Or the more people will be convinced that the government had something to hush up and had to take time to construct a plausible story. He kept the thought to himself. It was their government, how they mismanaged it was their own business. He found there was no bartending robot. He had to have a human servant bring drinks. He made up his mind to have a few of the nemesis robots sent down to him. The formal presentation would be in the evening. There would be a dinner first, and because Trask had not yet been formally presented, he couldn't dine with the king. But because he was, or claimed to be, viceroy of Tanneth, he ranked as a chief of state and would dine with the Crown Prince, to whom there would be an informal introduction first. This took place in a small ante-chamber off the banquet hall. The Crown Prince and Crown Princess and Princess Bintrick were there when they arrived. The Crown Prince was a man of middle age, graying at the temples with the glassy stair that betrayed contact lenses. The resemblance between him and his father was apparent. Both had the same studious and impractical expression that might have been professors on the same university faculty. He shook hands with Trask, assuring him of the gratitude of the court and royal family. You know, Simon is next in succession, after myself and my little daughter, he said. That's too close to take chances with him. He turned to Bintrick. I'm afraid this is your last space-adventure, Simon. You'll have to be a spaceport spaceman from now on. I shan't be sorry, Princess Bintrick said. And if anybody owes Prince Trask gratitude I do. She pressed his hands warmly. Prince Trask, my son wants to meet you very badly. He's ten years old, and he thinks space vikings are romantic heroes. He should be one for a while. He should just see a planet space vikings had raided. Most of the people at the upper end of the table were diplomats. Ambassadors from Odin and Balder and Isis and Ishtar and Eitan and the other civilized worlds. No doubt they had naturally expected horns and a spiked tail, or even tattooing and a nose ring, but after all, space vikings were just some sort of neo-barbarians, weren't they? On the other hand, they had all seen views and gotten descriptions of the Nemesis, and had heard about the ship action on Audholma, and this Prince Trask, a space viking prince, that sounded civilized enough, had saved a life with only three other lives, one almost at an end, between it and the throne. And they had heard about the screen conversation with King McHill, so they were courteous through the meal and tried to get as close as possible to him in the procession to the throne room. King McHill wore a golden crown topped by the planetary emblem, which must have weighed twice as much as a combat helmet, and four edged robes that would weigh more than a suit of space armor. They weren't nearly as ornate, though, as the regalia of King Angus I of Graham. He rose to class Prince Bintrick's hand, calling him Dear Cousin, and congratulating him on his gallant fight and fortunate escape. That knocks any court-martial talk on the head, Trask thought. He remained standing to shake hands with Trask, calling him, Valued Friend to Me and My House. First person singular. That must be causing some lifted eyebrows. Then the King sat down, and the rest of the roomful filed up onto the dais to be received. And finally it was over, and the King rose and proceeded, followed by his immediate sweet between the bowing and curtsying court and out the wide doors. After a decent interval Crown Prince Edvard escorted him and Prince Bintrick down the same route, the others falling in behind, and across the hall to the ballroom where there was soft music and refreshments. It wasn't too unlike a court reception on Excalibur except that the drinks and canapes were being dispensed by human servants. He was wondering what sort of court functions Angus I of Graham was holding by now. After half an hour a posse of court functionaries approached and informed him that it had pleased his majesty to command Prince Trask to attend him in his private chambers. There was an audible gasp at this. Both Prince Bintrick and the Crown Prince were trying not to grin too broadly. Evidently this didn't happen too often. He followed the functionaries from the ballroom and the eyes of everybody else followed him. Old King McHill received him alone in a small comfortably shabby room behind vast ones of incredible splendor. He wore fur-lined slippers and a loose robe with a fur collar, and his little black cap of maintenance. He was standing when Trask entered. When the guards closed the door and left them alone he beckoned Trask to a couple of chairs with a low table, on which were decanters and glasses and cigars between. It's a presumption on royal authority to summon you from the ballroom, he began after they had seated themselves and filled glasses. You are quite the sinister, you know. I'm grateful to your majesty. It's both comfortable and quiet here and I can sit down. Your majesty was the center of attention in the throne room, yet I seemed to detect a look of relief as you left it. I tried to hide it as much as possible. The old king took off the little gold-circled cap and hung it on the back of his chair. Majesty can be rather wearying, you know. So he could come here and put it off. Trask felt that some gesture should be made on his own part. He unfastened the dress-dagger from his belt and laid it on the table. The king nodded. Now we can be a couple of honest tradesmen. Our shops close for the evening, relaxing over our wine and tobacco, he said. A. Goodman Lucas. It seemed like an initiation into a secret society whose ritual he must guess at step by step. Right, Goodman Mikhil. They lifted their glasses to each other and drank. Goodman Mikhil offered cigars, and Goodman Lucas held a light for him. I hear a few hard things about your trade, Goodman Lucas. All true and mostly understated. We are professional murderers and robbers, as one of my fellow tradesmen says. The worst of it is that robbery and murder become just that, a trade, like servicing robots or selling groceries. Yet you fought two other space vikings to cover my cousin's crippled victrix. Why? So he must tell his tale so worn and smooth again. King Mikhil's cigar went out while he listened. And you have been hunting him ever since? And now you can't be sure whether you killed him or not? I'm afraid I didn't. The man in the screen is the only man Dunnan can really trust. One or the other would stay wherever he has his base all the time. And when you do kill him, what then? I'll go on trying to make a civilized planet of Tannath. Sooner or later I'll have one quarrel too many with King Angus, and then we will be our majesty Lucas I of Tannath, and we will sit on a throne and receive our subjects. And I'll be glad when I can get my crown off and talk to a few men who call me shipmate instead of your majesty. Well, it would violate professional ethics for me to advise a subject to renounce his sovereign, of course, but that might be an excellent thing. You have met the ambassador from Ithavall at dinner, did you not? Three centuries ago Ithavall was a colony of Marduk. It seems we can't afford colonies any more, and it seceded from us. Ithavall was then a planet like your Tannath seems to be. Today it is a civilized world, and one of Marduk's best friends. You know, sometimes I think a few lights are coming on again, here and there in the old Federation. If so, you space vikings are helping to light them. You mean the planets we use as bases and the things we teach the locals? That too, of course. Civilization needs civilized technologies, but they have to be used for civilized ends. Do you know anything about a space viking raid on Aetan over a century ago? Six ships from Hulteclear, four destroyed, the other two returned damaged, and without booty. The king of Marduk nodded. That raid saved civilization on Aetan. There were four great nations. The two greatest were at the brink of war, and the others were willing to pounce on the exhausted victor and then fight each other for the spoils. The space vikings forced them to unite. Out of that temporary alliance came the League for Common Defense, and from that the planetary republic. The republic's a dictatorship now, and just between Goodman Mikhil and Goodman Lucas it's a nasty one, and our majesty's government doesn't like it at all. It will be smashed sooner or later, but they'll never go back to divided sovereignty and nationalism again. The space vikings frighten them out of that when the danger's inherent and it couldn't. Maybe this man Dunnan will do the same for us on Marduk. You have troubles? You've seen de-civilized planets. How does it happen? I know how it's happened on a good many. War. Destruction of cities and industries. Survivors among ruins. Too busy keeping their own bodies alive, to try to keep civilization alive. Then they lose all knowledge of how to be civilized. That's catastrophic de-civilization. There is also de-civilization by erosion, and while it's going on nobody notices it. Everybody is proud of their civilization, their wealth and culture. But trade is falling off, fewer ships coming in each year. So there is boastful talk about planetary self-sufficiency. Who needs off-planet trade anyhow? Everybody seems to have money, but the government is always broke. Deficit spending and always the vital social services for which the government has to spend money. The most vital one, of course, is buying votes to keep the government in power, and it gets harder for the government to get anything done. The soldiers are sloppier at drill, and their uniforms and weapons are taken care of. The non-coms are insolent, and more and more parts of the city are dangerous at night, and then even in the daytime. And it's been years since a new building went up, and the old ones aren't being repaired anymore. Tras closed his eyes. Again he could feel the mellow sun of Graham on his back, and hear the laughing voices on the lower terrace. And he was talking to Lothar Fael and Rovard Groffis, and Alex Gorham and cousin Nicolay and Otto Harkaman. He said... And finally nobody bothers fixing anything up, and the power reactors stop and nobody seems to be able to get them started again. It hasn't quite gotten that far in the sword worlds yet. It hasn't here, either, yet. Goodman McHill slipped away, and King McHill VIII looked across the low table at his guest. Prince Trask, have you heard of a man named Zaspar McCann? Occasionally, nothing good about him. He is the most dangerous man on this planet, the king said, and I can make nobody believe it, not even my son. XXI. Prince Bintrick's ten-year-old son, Count Stephen of Ravery, wore the uniform of an ensign of the Royal Navy. He was accompanied by his tutor, an elderly Navy captain. They both stopped in the doorway of Trask's suite and the boy saluted smartly. Permission to come aboard, sir, he asked. Welcome aboard, Count. Captain. Belay the ceremony and find seats. You're just in time for a second breakfast. As they sat down, he aimed his ultraviolet light pencil at a serving robot. Unlike Marduken robots, which looked like surrealist conceptions of pre-atomic armored knights, it was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor on its own contragravity. As it approached, its top opened like a bursting beetle shell and hinged trays of food swung out. The boy looked at it in fascination. Is that a sword-world robot, sir, or did you capture it somewhere? It's one of our own. He was pardonably proud. It had been built on Tanneth a year before. As an ultrasonic dishwasher underneath, and it does some cooking on top at the back. The elderly captain was, if anything, even more impressed than his young charge. He knew what went into it, and he had some conception of the society that would develop things like that. I take it you don't use many human servants with robots like that, he said. Not many. We're all low-population planets, and nobody wants to be a servant. We have too many people on Marduk, and all of them want soft jobs as noble servants, the captain said, those that want any kind of jobs. You need all the people for fighting men, don't you? the boy Count asked. Well, we need a good many. The smallest of our ships will carry five hundred men, most of them around eight hundred. The captain lifted an eyebrow. The complement of the Victrix had been three hundred, and she'd been a big ship. Then he nodded. Of course, most of them are ground fighters. It started Count Stephen off. Questions about battles and raids and booty and the planets Trask had seen. I wish I were a space viking. Well, you can't be, Count Ravery. You're an officer of the Royal Navy. You're supposed to fight space vikings. I won't fight you. You'd have to, if the king commanded, the old captain told him. No. Prince Trask is my friend. He saved my father's life. And I won't fight you either, Count. We'll make a lot of fireworks, and then we'll each go home and claim victory. How would that be? I've heard of things like that, the captain said. We had a war with Odin, seventy years ago. That was mostly that sort of battles. Besides, the king is Prince Trask's friend, too, the boy insisted. Father and mummy heard him say so right on the throne. Kings don't lie when they're on the throne, do they? Good kings don't, Trask told him. Ours is a good king, young Count of Ravery declared proudly. I would do anything my king commanded, except fight Prince Trask. My house owes Prince Trask a debt. Trask nodded approvingly. That's the way a sword-world noble would talk, Count Stephen, he said. The Board of Inquiry, that afternoon, was more like a small and very sedate cocktail party. An admiral Schefter, who seemed to be very high, high brass, presided while carefully avoiding the appearance of doing so. Alvin Carford and Van Larch and Patrick Morland were there from the Nemesis, and Bintrick and several of the officers from the Victrix, and there were a couple of naval intelligence officers, and somebody from operational planning, and from ship construction and research and development. They chatted pleasantly and in a deceptively random manner for a while. Then Schefter said, Well, there's no blame or censure of any sort for the way Commodore Prince Bintrick was surprised. That couldn't have been avoided at the time. He looked at the research and development officer. It shouldn't be allowed to happen many more times, though. Not many more, sir. I'd say it'll take my people a month, and then the time it'll take to get all the ships equipped as they come in. Ship construction didn't think that would take too long. Well, see to it that you get full information on the new submarine detection system, Prince Trask, the admiral said. You gentlemen understand you'll have to keep it under your helmets, though, one of the intelligence men added. If it got out that we were informing space vikings about our technical secrets, he felt the back of his neck in a way that made Trask suspect that beheadment was the customary form of execution on Marduk. We'll have to find out where that fellow has his base, operational planning said. I take it, Prince Trask, that you're not going to assume that he was on his flagship when you blew it and just put paid to him and forget him. Oh, no! I'm assuming that he wasn't. I don't believe he and Orm went anywhere on the same ship after he came out here and established a base. I think one of them would stay home all the time. Well, we'll give you everything we have on them, Shepter promised. Most of that is classified, and you'll have to keep quiet about it, too. I just skimmed over the summary of what you gave us. I daresay we'll both get a lot of new information. Have you any idea at all where he might be based, Prince Trask? Only that we think it's a non-territide planet. He told them about Dunnans' heavy purchases of air and water recycling equipment and karniculture and hydroponic material. That of course helps a great deal. Yes, there are only about five million planets in the former Federation space volume that are inhabitable in artificial environment, including a few completely covered by seas where you could put in underwater dome cities if you had the time and material. One of the intelligence officers had been nursing a glass with a tiny remnant of cocktail in it. He'd downed it suddenly, filled the glass again, and glowered at it in silence for a while. Then he drank it briskly and refilled it. What I should like to know, he said, is how this double obscenity of a Dunnan knew we'd have a ship on Audholma just when we did, he said. You're talking about underwater dome cities reminded me of it. I don't think he just pulled that planet out of a hat and then went there prepared to sit on the bottom of the ocean for a year and a half waiting for something to turn up. I think he knew the Victrix was coming into Audholma and just about when. I don't like that Commodore, Schefter said. You think I do, sir? The intelligence officer countered. There it is, though. We all have to face it. We do, Schefter agreed. Get on it, Commodore, and I don't need to caution you to screen everybody you put on to it very carefully. He looked at his own glass, it had a bare thimble-full in the bottom. He replenished it slowly and carefully. It's been a long time since the Navy's had anything like this to worry about. He turned to Trask. I suppose I can get in touch with you at the palace whenever I must. Well, Prince Trask and I have been invited as house guests at Prince Edvard's, I mean Baron Cragdale's, Hunting Lodge, Bintrick said. We'll be going there directly from here. Ah! Admiral Schefter smiled slightly. Beside not having three horns and a spiked tail, this space viking was definitely persona grata with the royal family. Well, we'll keep in contact, Prince Trask. The Hunting Lodge where Crown Prince Edvard was simple Baron Cragdale lay at the head of a sharply sloped mountain valley done which a river tumbled. Mountains rose on either side in high scarps, some topped with perpetual snow, glaciers curling down from them. The lower ranges were forested, as was the valley between, and there was a red mauve alpin glow on the great peak that rose from the head of the valley. For the first time in over a year Elaine was with him, silently clinging to him to see the beauty of it through his eyes. He had thought that she had gone from him forever. The Hunting Lodge itself was not quite what a sword-worlder would expect a Hunting Lodge to be. At first sight from the air it looked like a sundial, a slender tower rising like a gnomon above a circle of low buildings and formal gardens. The boat landed at the foot of it, and he and Prince and Prince's bentric and the young Count of Ravery and his tutor descended. Immediately they were beset by a flurry of servants. The second boat, with the bentric servants and their luggage was circling in to land. Elaine, he discovered, wasn't with him anymore, and then he was separated from the bentrics and was being floated up and inside shaft in a lifter-car. More servants installed him in his rooms, unpacked his cases, drew his bath, and even tried to help him take it and fussed over him while he dressed. There were over a score for dinner. Bentric had warned him that he'd find some odd types, maybe he meant that they wouldn't all be nobles. Among the commoners there were some professors, mostly social sciences, a labor leader, a couple of representatives, and a member of the Chamber of Delegates, and a couple of social workers, whatever that meant. His own table-companion was a lady Valerie Albarath. She was beautiful, black hair and almost startlingly blue eyes, a combination unusual in the sword-worlds, and she was intelligent, or at least cleverly articulate. She was introduced as the lady-companion of the Crown Prince's daughter. When he asked where the daughter was, she laughed. She won't be helping entertain visiting space vikings for a long time, Prince Trask. She is precisely eight years old. I saw her getting ready for bed before I came down here. I'll look in on her after dinner. Then the Crown Prince Melanie, on his other hand, asked him some question about sword-world court etiquette. He stuck to generalities, and what he could remember from a presentation at the Court of Excalibur during his student days. These people had a monarchy since before Graham had been colonized. He wasn't going to admit that Graham's had been established since he went off-planet. The table was small enough for everybody to hear what he was saying and to feed questions to him. It lasted all through the meal and continued when they adjourned for coffee in the library. But what about your form of government, your social structure, that sort of thing? Well, we don't use the word government very much, he replied. We talk a lot about authority and sovereignty, and I'm afraid we burn entirely too much powder over it. But government always seems to us, like sovereignty interfering in matters that don't concern it. As long as sovereignty maintains a reasonable semblance of good public order and makes the more serious forms of crime fairly hazardous for the criminals, we're satisfied. But that's just negative. Doesn't the government do anything positive for the people? He tried to explain the sword-world feudal system to them. It was hard, he found, to explain something you have taken for granted all your life to somebody who is quite unfamiliar with it. But the government, the sovereignty, since you don't like the other word, doesn't do anything for the people, one of the professors objected. It leaves all the social services to the whim of the individual lord or baron. And the people have no voice at all. Why, that's tyranny, a professor-assemblyman added. He tried to explain that the people had a very distinct and commanding voice and that barons and lords who wanted to stay alive listened attentively to it. The assemblyman changed his mind, that wasn't tyranny, it was anarchy, and the professor was still insistent about who performed the social services. If you mean schools and hospitals and keeping the city clean, the people do that for themselves. The government, if you want to think of it as that, just sees to it that nobody's shooting at them while they're doing it. That isn't what Professor Poolewell means, Lucas. He means old age pensions, Prince Bintrick said, like this thing Zaspar McCann's whooping for. He'd heard about that on the voyage from Autholma. Every person on Marduk would be retired on an adequate pension after thirty years regular employment or at the age of sixty. When he wanted to know where the money would come from, he had been told that there would be a sales tax and that the pensions must all be spent within thirty years, which would stimulate business, and the increased business would provide tax money to pay the pensions. We have a joke about three Gilgameshers space-wrecked on an uninhabited planet, he said. Ten years later, when they were rescued, all three were immensely wealthy, from trading hats with each other. That's about the way this thing will work. One of the ladies social workers bristled. It wasn't right to make derogatory jokes about racial groups. One of the professors harromped. Wasn't a parallel at all. The self-sustaining rotary pension plan was perfectly feasible. With a shock, Trask recalled that he was a professor of economics. Alvin Carford wouldn't need any twenty ships to loot Marduk, just infiltrate it with about a hundred smart confidence men, and inside a year they'd own everything on it. That started them all off on Zaspar McCann, though. Some of them thought he had a few good ideas, but was damaging his own case by extremism. One of the wealthier nobles said that he was a reproach to the ruling class. It was their fault that people like McCann could gain a following. One old gentleman said that maybe the Gilgameshers were to blame themselves for some of the animosity toward them. He was immediately set upon by all the others and verbally torn to pieces on the spot. Trask didn't feel it proper to quote Goodman McKill to this crowd. He took the responsibility upon himself for saying, From what I've heard of him, I think he's the most serious threat to civilized society on Marduk. They didn't call him crazy, after all, he was a guest, but they didn't ask him what he meant either. They merely told him that McCann was a crackpot with a contemptible following of half-wits, and just wait till the election and see what happened. I'm inclined to agree with Prince Trask, Bintrick said soberly, and I'm afraid the election results will be a shock to us, not to McCann. He hadn't talked that way on the ship. Maybe he'd been looking around and doing some thinking since he got back. He might have been talking to Goodman McKill, too. There was a screen in the room. He nodded toward it. He's speaking at a rally of the People's Welfare Party at Dreplen now, he said. May I put it on to show you what I mean? When the Crown Prince ascended he snapped on the screen and twiddled at the selector. A face looked out of it. The features weren't Andre Dunnans, the mouth was wider, the cheekbones broader, and the chin more rounded. But his eyes were Dunnans, as Trask had seen them on the terrace of Carvel House. Mad eyes. His high-pitched voice screamed, Our beloved Sovereign is a prisoner. He's surrounded by traitors. The ministries are full of them. They're all traitors. The bloodthirsty reactionaries of the falsely so-called Crown Loyalist Party. The grasping conspiracy of the interstellar bankers. The dirty Gilgameshers. They're all leagueed together in an unholy conspiracy. And now this space viking, this bloody-handed monster from the sword-worlds, shut the horrible man off somebody was yelling in competition with the hypnotic scream of the speaker. The trouble was they couldn't. They could turn off the screen, but Zaspar McCann would go on screaming, and millions all over the planet would still hear him. Ventric twiddled the selector. The voice stuttered briefly and then came echoing out of the speaker. But this time the pickup was somewhere several hundred feet above a great open park. It was densely packed with people. Most of them wearing clothes, a farm tramp on graham would be found dead in. But here and there among them were blocks of men in what was almost but not quite military uniform. Each with a short and thick swagger stick with a knobbed head. Across the park in the distance the head and shoulders of Zaspar McCann loomed a hundred feet high in a huge screen. Whenever he stopped for a breath a shout would go up, beginning with the blocks of uniformed men. McCann! McCann! McCann the leader! McCann to power! You even let him have a private army? he asked the crown prince. Oh! those silly buffoons and their musical comedy uniforms, the crown prince shrugged. They aren't armed. Not visibly, he granted. Not yet. I don't know where they'd get arms. No, Your Highness, Prince Bintrick said. Neither do I. That's what I'm worried about. Space Viking. 22. He succeeded the next morning in convincing everybody that he wanted to be alone for a while and was sitting in a garden watching the rainbows in the midst of a big waterfall across the valley. Elaine would have liked that, but she wasn't with him now. Then he realized that somebody was speaking to him in a small bashful voice. He turned and saw a little girl in shorts and a sleeveless jacket, holding in her arms a long-haired blonde puppy with big ears and appealing eyes. Hello, both of you, he said. The puppy wriggled and tried to lick the girl's face. Don't, Mopsie. We want to talk to this gentleman, she said. Are you really and truly the Space Viking? Really and truly. And who are you two? I'm Myrna, and this is Mopsie. Hello, Myrna. Hello, Mopsie. Hearing his name, the puppy wriggled again and dropped from the child's arms. After a brief hesitation he came over and jumped onto Trask's lap, licking his face. While he petted the dog, the girl came over and sat on the bench beside him. Mopsie likes you, she said. After a moment she added, I like you too. And I like you, he said. Would you want to be my girl? You know, a Space Viking has to have a girl on every planet. How would you like to be my girl on Marduk? Myrna thought that over carefully. I'd like to, but I couldn't. You see, I'm going to have to be queen some day. Oh! Yes, grandpa is king now, and when he's through being king, Papa will have to be king. And then when he's through being king, I can't be king because I'm a girl, so I'll have to be queen. And I can't be anybody's girl because I'm going to have to marry somebody I don't know for reasons of state. She thought some more and lowered her voice. I'll tell you a secret. I am a queen now. Oh! You are? She nodded. We are queen in our own right of our royal bedroom, our royal playroom, and our royal bathroom. And mobsy is our faithful subject. Is your majesty absolute ruler of these domains? No, she said disgustedly. We must at all times defer to our royal ministers, just like grandpa has to. That means I have to do just what they tell me to. That's Lady Valerie, and Margo, and Dame Eunice, and Sir Thomas. But grandpa says they're good and wise ministers. Are you really a prince? I didn't know space Vikings were princes. Well, my king says I am. And I am ruler of my planet. And I'll tell you a secret. I don't have to do what anybody tells me. Gee! Are you a tyrant? You're awfully big and strong. I'll bet you've slain hundreds of cruel and wicked enemies. Thousands, your majesty. He wished that weren't literally true. He didn't know how many of them had been little girls like Myrna and little dogs like Mobsy. He found that he was holding both of them tightly. The girl was saying, but you feel bad about it. These children must be telepaths. A space Viking who is also a prince must do many things he doesn't want to do. I know, so does a queen. I hope grandpa and papa don't get through being king for just years and years. She looked over his shoulder. Oh, and now I suppose I've got to do something else I don't want to do. Lessons, I bet. He followed her eyes. The girl who had been his dinner companion was approaching. She wore a wide sun-shade hat and a gown that trailed filmy gauze like sunset-colored mist. There was another woman in the garb of an upper-servant with her. Lady Valerie, and who else, he whispered, Margo, she's my nurse. She's awful strict, but she's nice. Prince Trask. Has her highness been bothering you? Lady Valerie asked. Oh, far from it. He rose, still holding the funny little dog. But you should say her majesty. She has informed me that she is sovereign of three princely domains, and of one dear-loving subject. He gave the subject back to the sovereign. You should not have told Prince Trask that, Lady Valerie chided. When your majesty's outside her domains, your majesty must remain incognito. Now your majesty must go with the minister of the bed-chamber the minister of education awaits an audience. Arithmetic, I bet. Well, good-bye, Prince Trask. I hope I can see you again. Say good-bye, Mopsie. She went away with her nurse, the little dog looking back over her shoulder. I came out to enjoy the gardens alone, he said, and now I find I'd rather enjoy them in company. If your ministerial duties do not forbid, could you be the company? But, gladly, Prince Trask, her majesty will be occupied with serious affairs of state, square root. Have you seen the grottoes? They're down this way. That afternoon one of the gentlemen attendants caught up with him. Baron Cragdale would be gratified if Prince Trask could find the time to talk with him privately. Before they had talked more than a few minutes, however, Baron Cragdale abruptly became Crown Prince Edvard. Prince Trask, Admiral Schefter tells me that you and he are having informal discussions about cooperation against this mutual enemy of ours, Dunnan. This is fine, it has my approval, and the approval of Prince Vandervant, the prime minister, and, I might add, that of Goodman McHill. I think it ought to go further, though. A formal treaty between Tanneth and Marduk would be greatly to the advantage of both. I'd be inclined to think so, Prince Edvard, but aren't you proposing marriage on rather short acquaintance? It's only been fifty hours since the Nemesis orbited in here. Well, we know a bit about you and your planet beforehand. There's a large Gilgamesher colony here. You have a few on Tanneth, haven't you? Well, anything one Gilgamesher knows they all find out, and ours are cooperative with naval intelligence. That would be why André Dunnan was having no dealings with Gilgameshers. He would also be what Zaspar McCann meant when he rented about the Gilgamesh interstellar conspiracy. I can see where an arrangement like that would be mutually advantageous. I'd be quite in favor of it. Cooperation against Dunnan, of course, and reciprocal trade rights on each other's trade planets, and direct trade between Marduk and Tanneth. And Beowulf and Amaterasu would come into it too. Does this also have the approval of the Prime Minister and the King? Goodman McHills in favor of it. There's a distinction between him and the King, as you'll have noticed. The King can't be in favor of anything till the Assembly or the Chancellor express an opinion. Prince Vandervant favors it personally. As Prime Minister, he is reserving his opinion. We'll have to get the support of the Crown Loyalist Party before he can take an equivocal position. Well, Baron Craigdale, speaking as Baron Trask of Traskin, suppose we just work out a rough outline of what this treaty ought to be, and then consult, unofficially, with a few people whom you can trust and see what can be done about presenting it to the proper government officials. The Prime Minister came to Craigdale that evening, heavily incognito, and accompanied by several leaders of the Crown Loyalist Party. In principle they all favored a treaty with Tanneth. Politically they had doubts. Not before the election. Too controversial a subject. Controversial, it appeared, was the dirtiest dirty name anything could be called on Marduk. It would alienate the labor vote. They'd think increased imports would threaten employment in Marduken Industries. Some of the interstellar trading companies would like a chance at the Tanneth planets. Others would resent Tanneth ships being given access to theirs. And Zaspar McCann's party were already shrieking protests about the nemesis being repaired by the Royal Navy. And a couple of professors who inclined toward McCann had introduced a resolution calling for the court-martial of Prince Bintrick and an investigation of the loyalty of Admiral Schefter. And somebody else, probably a stooge of McCann's, was claiming that Bintrick had sold the Victrix to the space vikings and that the films of the Battle of Out-Hulma were fakes, photographed in miniature at the Navy moon base. Admiral Schefter, when Trask flew in to see him the next day, was contemptuous about this last. Ignore the whole bloody thing. We get something like that before every general election. On this planet you can always kick the Gilgameshers and the armed forces with impunity. Neither have votes, and neither can kick back. The whole thing will be forgotten the day after the election. It always is. That's if McCann doesn't win the election, Trask qualified. That's no matter who wins the election. They can't any of them get along without the Navy, and they bloody well know it. Trask wanted to know if intelligence had been getting anything. Not on how Dunnan found out the Victrix had been ordered to Out-Hulma, no, Schefter said. There wasn't any secrecy about it. At least a thousand people, from myself down to the shoeshine, boys, could have known about it as soon as the order was taped. As for the list of ships you gave me, yes. One of them puts into this planet regularly. She spaced out from here only yesterday morning, the Honest Horus. Well, great Satan, haven't you done anything? I don't know if there's anything we can do. Oh, we're investigating, but, you see, this ship first showed up here four years ago, commanded by some kind of a Neobarb, not a Gilgamesher, named Horus Sastrov. He claimed to be from Scathe. The locals there have a few ships. The space vikings had a base on Scathe about a hundred or so years ago. Naturally, the ship had no papers. Trap trading among the Neobarb's, it might be years before you'd put in on a planet where they'd ever heard of ships' papers. The ship seems to have been in bad shape, probably abandoned on Scathe as a junk a century ago and tinkered up by the locals. She was in here twice, according to the commercial shipping records, and the second time she was in too bad shape to be moved out, and Sastrov couldn't pay to have her rebuilt, so she was libeled for spaceport charges and sold. Some one-lung trading company bought her and fixed her up a little. They went bankrupt in a year or so, and she was bought by another small company, Star Traders Limited, and they'd been using her on a milk-run to and from Gimli. They seemed to be a legitimate outfit, but we're looking into them. We're looking for Sastrov too, but we haven't been able to find him. If you have a ship out Gimli-way, you might find out if anybody there knows anything about her. You may discover that she hasn't been going there at all. We might at that, Schefter agreed. We'll just find out. Everybody at Cragdale knew about the projected treaty with Tanneth by the morning after Trask's first conversation with Prince Edvard on the subject. The queen of the royal bedroom, the royal playroom, and the royal bathroom was insisting that her domain should have a treaty with Tanneth too. It was beginning to look to Trask as though that would be the only treaty he'd sign on Marduk, and he was having his doubts about that. Do you think it would be wise, he asked Lady Valerie Alvarath? The queen of three rooms and one four-footed subject had already decreed that Lady Valerie should be the space Viking Prince's girl on the planet of Marduk. If it got out, these people's welfare lunatics would pick it up and twist it into evidence of some kind of a sinister plot. Oh, I believe Her Majesty could sign a treaty with Prince Trask. Her Majesty's Prime Minister decided. But it would have to be kept very secret. Gee, Myrna's eyes widened. A real secret treaty, just like the wicked rulers of the old dictatorship. She hugged her subject ecstatically. I'll bet Grandpa doesn't even have any secret treaties. In a few days everybody on Marduk knew that a treaty with Tanneth was being discussed. If they didn't, it was no fault of Zaspar McCann's party, who seemed to command a disconcertingly large number of telecast stations, and who drenched the ether with horror stories of space Viking atrocities and annunciations of carefully unnamed traitors surrounding the King and the Crown Prince who were about to betray Marduk to Rappen and Plunder. The leak evidently did not come from Cragdale, for it was generally believed that Trask was still at the Royal Palace at Malverton. At least that was where the Mechanists were demonstrating against him. He watched such a demonstration by screen. The pick-up was evidently on one of the landing stages of the palace, overlooking the wide park surrounding it. They were packed almost solid with people, surging forward toward the thin cordon of police. The front of the mob looked like a checkerboard, a block in civilian dress, then a block in the curiously effeminate-looking uniforms of Zaspar McCann's People's Watchmen, then more in ordinary garb, and more People's Watchmen. Over the heads of the crowds, at intervals, floated small contra-gravity lifters on which were mounted the amplifiers that were bellowing, SPACE VIKING GO HOME! SPACE VIKING GO HOME! The police stood motionless at parade rest. The mob surged closer. When they were fifty yards away, the blocks of People's Watchmen ran forward, then spread out until they formed a line six deep across the entire front. Other blocks from the rear pushed the ordinary demonstrators aside and took their place. Hating them more every second, Trask grudged approval of a smart and disciplined maneuver. How long, he wondered, had they been drilling in that sort of tactics? Without stopping, they continued their advance on the police, who had now shifted their stance. SPACE VIKING GO HOME! SPACE VIKING GO HOME! FIRE! He heard himself yelling, Don't let them get any closer! FIRE NOW! They had nothing to fire with. They had only truncheons, no better weapons than the knobbed swagger sticks of the People's Watchmen. They simply disappeared after a brief flurry of blows and the McCann stormtroopers continued their advance. And that was that. The gates of the palace were shut. The mob behind the front of McCann's People's Watchmen surged up to them and stopped. The loudspeakers bellowed on, reiterating their four-word chant. Those police were murdered, he said. They were murdered by the man who ordered them out there unarmed. That would be Count Naitnair, the Minister of Security, somebody said. Then he's the one you want to hang for it. What else would you have done, Crown Prince Edvard challenged? Put up about fifty combat cars, drawn a deadline, an open machine gun fire as soon as the mob crossed it, and kept on firing till the survivors turned tail and ran. Then sent out more cars and shot everybody wearing a People's Watchmen uniform all over town. Inside forty-eight hours there'd be no People's Welfare Party and no Zaspar McCann either. The Crown Prince's face stiffened. That may be the way you do things in the sword-worlds, Prince Trask. It's not the way we do things here on Marduk. Our government does not propose to be guilty of shedding the blood of its people. He had it on the tip of his tongue to retort that if they didn't the people would end by shedding theirs. Instead he said softly, I'm sorry, Prince Edvard, you had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it, but it's too late now. You've torn down the gates. The barbarians are in. 23 The colored turbulence faded into the gray of hyperspace, five hundred hours to Tanneth. Guat Kirby was securing his control panel, happy to return to his music, and Van Larch would go back to his paints and brushes, and Alvin Carford to the working model of whatever it was he had left unfinished when the nemesis had emerged at the end of the jump from Mount Holma. Trask went to the index of the ship's library and punched for History Old Terran. There was plenty of that thanks to Otto Harkman. Then he punched for Hitler Adolf. Harkman was right, anything that could happen in a human society had already happened in one form or another somewhere and at some time. Hitler could help him understand Zaspar McCann. By the time the ship came out, with the yellow sun of Tanneth in the middle of the screen, he knew a great deal about Hitler, occasionally referred to as Schickelgruber, and he understood, with sorrow, how the lights of civilization on Marduk were going out. Beside the lamea, stripped of her Dillinghams and crammed with heavy armament and detection instruments, the space scourge and the Queen Flavia were on off-planet watch. There were half a dozen other ships on orbit just above atmosphere. A Gilgamesher, one of the Gram Tanneth freighters, a couple of freelance space vikings, and a new and unfamiliar ship. When he asked the moonbase who she was, he was told that she was the sun goddess Amaterasu. That was, by almost a year, better than he had expected of them. Otto Harkman was out in the Coruscandi, raiding and visiting the trade-planets. He found his cousin, Nicolet Trask, at Rivington, when he inquired about Traskin, Nicolet Cursed. I don't know anything about Traskin. I haven't anything to do with Traskin any more. Traskin is now the personal property of our well-loved, very well-loved Queen Evita. The Trask's don't own enough land on Gram now for a family cemetery. You see what you did, he added bitterly. You needn't rub it in, Nicolet. If I'd stayed on Gram, I'd have helped put Angus on the throne, and it would have been about the same in the end. It could be a lot different, Nicolet said. You could bring your ships and your men back to Gram and put yourself on the throne. No, I'll never go back to Gram. Tanneth's my planet now, but I will renounce my allegiance to Angus. I can trade on morgley, or joeus, or flambeurs, just as easily. You won't have to. You can trade with New Haven and Bigler Sport. Count Lionel and Duke Joris are both defying Angus. They've refused to furnish him men. They've driven out his tax collectors, those they haven't hanged, and they're building ships of their own. Angus is building ships, too. I don't know whether he's going to use them to fight Bigler Sport and New Haven or attack you, but there's going to be a war before another year's out. The good hope and the speedwell, he found, had gone back to Gram. They were commanded by men who had come into favor at the court of King Angus recently. The Black Star and the Queen Flavia, whose captain had contemptuously ignored an order from Gram to rechristen her Queen Evita, had remained. They were his ships, not King Angus. The captain of the Merchant Man from Wardshaven, now on orbit, refused to take a cargo to New Haven. He had been chartered by King Angus and would take orders from no one else. All right, Trask told him. This is your last voyage here. You bring that ship back under Angus of Wardshaven's charter and we'll fire on her. Then he had the regalia he had worn in his last audiovisual to Angus dusted off. At first he had decided to proclaim himself King of Tannath. Lord Valprie, Baron Rathmore, and his cousin all advised against it. Just call yourself Prince of Tannath, Valprie said. The title won't make any difference in your authority here, and if you do they claim to the throne of Gram nobody can say you're a foreign king trying to annex the planet. He had no intention of doing anything of the kind, but Valprie was quite in earnest. So he sat on his throne as sovereign Prince of Tannath and renounced his allegiance to Angus Duke of Wardshaven, self-styled King of Gram. They sent it back on the otherwise empty freighter. Another copy went to the Count of Newhaven, along with a cargo in the Sun Goddess, the first non-space viking ship into Gram from the old Federation. Seven hundred and fifty hours after the return of the Nemesis, the Coruscanti too emerged from her last microjump, and immediately Harkamon began hearing of the Battle of Outulma and the destruction of the yo-yo and the Enterprise. At first he merely reported a successful raiding voyage, from which he was bringing rich booty. Oddly variegated booty it was remarked when he began itemizing it. Why, yes, he replied, second-hand booty. I raided Dagon for it. Dagon was a space viking base-planet, occupied by a character named Phaedric Baragon. A number of ships operated from it, including a couple commanded by Baragon's half-breed sons. Baragon ships were raiding one of our planets, Harkamon said. Ganpat. They looted a couple of cities, destroyed one, killed a lot of the locals. I found out about it from Captain Ravalo of the Black Star on Indra. He'd just been from Ganpat. Beowulf wasn't too far out of the way, so he put in there, and found the Grendels Bane just ready to space out. The Grendels Bane was the second of Beowulf's ships, sister to the vikings' gift. So she joined us, and the three of us went to Dagon. We blew up one of Baragon's ships and put the other one down out of commission, and then we sacked his base. There was a Gilgamesher colony there, we didn't bother them. They'll tell what we did, and why. That should furnish Prince Victor of Zachidl something to ponder, Trask said. Where are the other ships now? The Grendels Bane went back to Beowulf. She'll stop at Amaterasu to do a little trading on the way. The Black Star went to Zachidl. Just a friendly visit, to say hello to Prince Victor for you. Ravalo has a lot of audio-visuals we made during the Dagon operation. Then she's going to Jiganath to visit Nicky Graetham. Harkman approved his attitude and actions with regard to King Angus. We don't need to do business with the sword worlds at all. We have our own industries, we can produce what we need, and we can trade with Beowulf and Amaterasu, and with Zachidl and Jiganath and Hoth, if we can make any sort of agreement with them. Everybody agrees to let everybody else's trade planets alone. It's too bad you couldn't get some kind of an agreement with Marduk. Harkman regretted that for a few seconds, and then shrugged. Our grandchildren, if any, will probably be raiding Marduk. You think it'll be like that? Don't you? You were there. You saw what's happening. The barbarians are rising. They have a leader, and they're uniting. Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization and wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers, the people who create nothing and who don't appreciate what the others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what they can understand of it, luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Fui! What do they have a government for? Trask nodded. And now the hitchhikers think they know more about the car than the people who designed it, so they're going to grab the controls. Zaspar McCann says they can, and he's the leader. He poured a drink from a decanter that had been looted on Pushan. There was a planet where a republic had been overthrown in favor of a dictatorship four centuries ago, and the planetary dictatorship had fishened into a dozen regional dictatorships. And now they were down to the peasant village and handcraft industry level. I don't understand it, though. I was reading about Hitler on the way home. I wouldn't be surprised if Zaspar McCann had been reading about Hitler, too. He's using all Hitler's tricks. But Hitler came to power in a country which had been impoverished by a military defeat. Marduk hasn't fought a war in almost two generations, and that one was a farce. It wasn't the war that put Hitler into power. It was the fact that the ruling class of his nation, the people who kept things running, were discredited. The masses, the home-made barbarians, didn't have anybody to take their responsibilities for them. What they have on Marduk is a ruling class that has been discrediting itself, a ruling class that's ashamed of its privileges and shirks its duties, a ruling class that has begun to believe that the masses are just as good as they are, which they manifestly are not, and a ruling class that won't use force to maintain its position. And they have a democracy, and they are letting the enemies of democracy shelter themselves behind democratic safeguards. We don't have any of this democracy in the sword-worlds, if that's the word for it, he said. And our ruling class aren't ashamed of their power, and our people aren't hitchhikers, and as long as they get decent treatment they don't try to run things. And we're not doing so well. The morgley dynastic war of a couple of centuries ago, still sputtering and smoking, the Oscarson-Elmerson war on Durendal into which Flambeirge and now Joyeuse had intruded, and the situation on Grame, fast approaching critical mass, Harkman not at agreement. You know why? Our rulers are their barbarians among us. There isn't one of them, Napoleon of Flambeirge, Rodolf of Excalibur, or Angus of about half of Grame, who is devoted to civilization, or anything else outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian. What are you devoted to, Otto? You! You are my chieftain! That's another mark of the barbarian. Before he had left Marduk, Admiral Schefter had ordered a ship to Gimli to check on the Honest Horus. A few men and a pinnace would be left behind to contact any ship from Tannath. He sent Boke Valkenhayne off in the Space Scourge. Lionel of New Haven's Blue Comet came in from Grame with a cargo of General Merchandise. Her captain wanted fishnables and gadolinium. Howt Lionel was building more ships. There was a rumor that Amphrey of Glasbeth was laying claim to the Throne of Grame in the right of his great-grandmother's sister, who had been married to the great-grandfather of Duke Angus. It was a completely trivial and irrelevant claim, but the story was that it would be supported by King Conrad of Haltecler. Immediately Baron Rathmore, Lord Valprie, Lothar fail, and the other grand people began clamoring that he should go back with a fleet and seize the Throne for himself. Harkamon, Valkenhayne, Carford, and the other space vikings were as vehement against it. Harkamon had the loss of the other Coruscandi on Durendal to remember, and the others wanted no part in sword-world squabbles, and there was renewed agitation that he should start calling himself King of Tanneth. He refused to do either, which left both parties dissatisfied. So partisan politics had finally come to Tanneth. Maybe that was another milestone of progress. And there was the Treaty of Capara between the princely state of Tanneth, the Commonwealth of Beowulf, and the Planetary League of Amaterasu. The Caparans agreed to allow bases on their planet, to furnish workers and to send students to school on all three planets. Tanneth, Beowulf, and Amaterasu obliged themselves to joint defense of Capara, to free trade among themselves and to render one another armed assistance. That was a milestone of progress, and no argument about it. The space scourge returned from Gimli, and Valkenhayne reported that nobody on the planet had ever seen or heard of the Honest Horus. They had found a Marduken Navy ship's pinnest there, manned entirely by officers, some of them Navy intelligence. According to them, the investigation into the activities of that ship had come to an impasse. The ostensible owners claimed, and had papers to prove it, that they had chartered her to a private trader, and he claimed, and had papers to prove it, that he was a citizen of the Planetary Republic of Aeton, and as soon as they began questioning him he was rescued by the Aetonian ambassador, who lodged a vehement protest with the Marduken Foreign Ministry. Immediately the People's Welfare Party had leaped into the incident and branded the investigation as an unwarranted prosecution of a nation of a friendly power, at the instigation of corrupt tools of the Gilgamesh Interstellar Conspiracy. So that's it, Valkenhayne finished. It seems they're having an election and they're afraid to antagonize anybody who might have a vote, so the Navy had to drop the investigation. Everybody on Mardukes scared of this McCann. You think there might be some tie-up between him and Dunnan? The ideas occurred to me. Have there been any more raids on Marduk trade planets since the Battle of Autholma? A couple. The Bolide was on Autholma a while ago. There were a couple of Marduken ships there and they had the Vitrix fixed up enough to do some fighting. They ran the Bolide out. A study of the time between the destruction of the Enterprise and Yo-Yo and the appearance of the Bolide could give them a limiting radius around Autholma. It did. Seven hundred light years, which also included Tannath. So he sent Harkaman in the Coruscandi and Ravallo in the Black Star to visit the planets Marduk traded with, looking for Dunnan ships and exchanging information and assistance with the Royal Marduken Navy. Almost at once he regretted it. The next Gilgamesher into orbit on Tannath brought a story that Prince Victor was collecting a fleet on Zochitel. He sent warnings off to Amaterasu and Beowulf and Capara. A ship came in from Bigler Sport, a heavily armed, chartered freighter. There was sporadic fighting in a dozen places on Gram now, resistance to efforts on the part of King Angus to collect taxes, and raids by unidentified persons on estates confiscated from alleged traders and given to Garvin Spasso, who had now been promoted from Baron to Count. And Rovart Grafas was dead, poisoned, everybody said, either by Spasso or Queen Evita or both. Even with the threat from Zochitel some of the former Wardshaven nobles began talking about sending ships to Gram. Less than a thousand hours after he had left Ravallo was back in the Black Star. I went to Gimli and I wasn't there fifty hours before a Mardukan Navy ship came in. They were glad to see me. It saved them sending off a pinnace for Tannath. They had news for you and a couple of passengers. Passengers? Yes. You'll see who they are when they come down. And don't let anybody with side whiskers and button-up coats see them, Ravallo said. What those people know gets all over the place before long. The visitors were Lucille, Princess Bintrick, and her son, the young Count of Ravery. They dined with Trask. Only Captain Ravallo was also present. I didn't want to leave my husband, and I didn't want to come here and impose myself and Stephen on you, Prince Trask, she began, but he insisted. We spent the whole voyage to Gimli concealed in the captain's quarters. Only a few of the officers knew we were aboard. Mckann won the election, is that it, he asked. And Prince Bintrick doesn't want to risk you and Stephen being used as hostages. That's it, she said. He didn't really win the election, but he might as well have. Nobody has a majority of seats in the Chamber of Representatives, but he's formed a coalition with several of the splinter parties, and I'm ashamed to say that a number of Crown Loyalist members, crowd of disloyalists I call them, are voting with him now. They've coined some ridiculous phrase about the wave of the future, whatever that means. If you can't lick them, join them, Trask said. If you can't lick them, lick their boots, the Count of Ravery put in. My son is a trifle bitter, Prince, as Bintrick said. I must confess to a trace of bitterness, too. Well, that's the representatives, Trask said. What about the rest of the government? With the splinter party and disloyalist support they got a majority of seats in the delegates. Most of them would have indignantly denied a month before having any connection with McCann, but a hundred out of a hundred and twenty are his supporters. McCann, of course, is Chancellor. And who is Prime Minister, he asked, Andre Dunnan? She looked slightly baffled for an instant, then said, Oh, no! The Prime Minister is Crown Prince Edvard. No, Baron Cragdale. That isn't a royal title, so by some kind of a fiction I can't pretend to understand he is not Prime Minister as a member of the royal family. If you can't, the boy started, Stephen, I forbid you to say that about Baron Cragdale. He believes, very sincerely, that the election was an expression of the will of the people, and that it is his duty to bow to it. He wished Otto Harkman were there. He could probably name without stopping for breath a hundred great nations that went down into rubble because their rulers believed that they should bow instead of rule and couldn't bring themselves to shed the blood of their people. Edvard would have been a fine and admirable man, as a little country baron, where he was, he was a disaster. He asked if the people's watchmen had dragged their guns out from under the bed and started carrying them in public yet. Oh yes, you were quite right, they were armed all the time. Not just small arms, combat vehicles and heavy weapons. As soon as the new government was formed, they were given status as a part of the planetary armed forces. They have taken over every police station on the planet. And the king? Oh, he carries on, and shrugs, and says, I just reign here. What else can he do? We've been whittling down and filtering away the powers of the throne for the last three centuries. What is Prince Bintrick doing? And why did he think there was danger that you two would be used as hostages? He's going to fight, she said. Don't ask me how, or what with. Maybe as a gorilla in the mountains, I don't know. But if he can't lick them, he won't join them. I wanted to stay with him and help him. He told me I could help him best by placing myself in Stephen where he wouldn't worry about us. I wanted to stay, the boy said. I could have fought with him. But he said that I must take care of mother. And if he were killed, I must be able to avenge him. You talk like a sword, Worlder. I told you that once before. He hesitated, then turned again to Princess Bintrick. How is little Princess Myrna, he asked, and then, trying to be casual, added, and Lady Valerie. She seems so clearly real and present to him, blue eyes and space-black hair, more real than Adlain had been to him for years. There at Cragdale, they'll be safe there, I hope. 24. Attempting to conceal the presence on Tanneth of Prince Bintrick's wife and son was pushing caution beyond necessity. Admitted that the news would leak back to Marduk via Gilgamesh, it was over seven hundred light-years to the latter and almost a thousand from there to the former. Better that Princess Lucille should enjoy Rivington Society, such as it was, and escape for a moment now and then from anxiety about her husband. At ten, no, almost twelve. It had been a year and a half since Trask had left Marduk. The boy count of Ravery was more easily diverted. At last he was among real space vikings on a space-viking planet, and he was trying to be everywhere and see everything at once. No doubt he would be imagining himself a space viking returning to Marduk with a vast armada to rescue his father and the king from Zaspar McCann. Trask was satisfied with that. As a host he left much to be desired. He had his worries too, and all of them bore the same name, Prince Victor of Zachtchiddle. He went over with Manfred Ravallo everything the captain of the Black Star could tell him. He had talked once with Victor. The Lord of Zachtchiddle had been coldly polite and noncommittal. His subordinates had been frankly hostile. There had been five ships on orbit or landed at Victor's spaceport beside the usual Gilgameshers and itinerate traders, two of them Victor's own, and a big armed freighter that had come in from Haltecler as the Black Star was leaving. There was considerable activity at the shipyards and around the spaceport, as though in preparation for something on a large scale. Zachtchiddle was a thousand light-years from Tanneth. He rejected, immediately, the idea of launching a preventive attack. His ships might reach Zachtchiddle to find it undefended, and then return to find Tanneth devastated. Things like that had happened in space war. The only thing to do was sit tight, defend Tanneth when Victor attacked, and then counterattack if he had any ships left by that time. Prince Victor was probably reasoning in the same way. He had no time to think about Andre Dunnan, except, now and then, to wish that Otto Harkeman would stop thinking about him and bring the Coruscandi home. He needed that ship on Tanneth, and the wits and courage of her commander. More news, Gilgamesh-sources, came in from Zachtchiddle. There were only two ships, both armed merchantmen, on the planet. Prince Victor had spaced out with the rest and estimated two thousand hours before the story reached him. That was twice as long as it would take the Zachtchiddle armada to reach Tanneth. He hadn't gone to Beowulf. That was only sixty-five hours from Tanneth, and they would have heard about it long ago. Or Amaterasu, or Capara. How many ships he had was a question. Not fewer than five, and possibly more. He could have slipped into the Tanneth system and hidden his ships on one of the outer, uninhabitable planets. He sent Balconhane and Ravallo microjumping their ships from one to another to check. They returned to report in the negative. At least Victor of Zachtchiddle wasn't camped inside their own system, waiting for them to leave Tanneth open to attack. But he was somewhere and up to nothing, even resembling good. And there was no possible way of guessing when his ships would be emerging on Tanneth. The only thing to do was wait for him. When he did, Trask was confident that he would emerge from hyperspace into serious trouble. He had the Nemesis, the Space Scourge, the Black Star, and Queen Flavia, the strongly rebuilt Lamia, and several independent space Viking ships, among them the damn thing of his friend Roger Fenn Moraville Esthersan, who had volunteered to stay and help in the defense. This, of course, was not pure altruism. If Victor attacked and had his fleet blown to MC Square, Zachtchiddle would lie open and unprotected, and there was enough lude on Zachtchiddle to cram everybody's ships. Everybody's ships, who had ships when the battle of Tanneth was over, of course. He was apologetic to Princess Bintrick. I'm very sorry you jumped out of Zaspar McCann's frying-pan into Prince Victor's fire, he began. She laughed at that. I'll take my chances on the fire. I seem to see a lot of good firemen around. If there is a battle, you will see that Stevens in a safe place, won't you? In a space attack there are no safe places. I'll keep him with me. The young Count of Ravery wanted to know which ship he would serve on when the attack came. Well, you won't be on any ship count. You'll be on my staff. Two days later the Coruscanti came out of hyperspace. Archiman was guardedly noncommittal by screen. Trass took a landing craft and went out to meet the ship. Marduk doesn't like us any more, Archiman told him. They have ships on all their trade planets, and they all have orders to fire on any, repeat, any space vikings, including the ships of the self-styled Prince of Tanneth. I got this from Captain Garavay of the Vindex. After we were through talking, we fought a nice little ship-to-ship action for him to make films of. I don't think anybody could see anything wrong with it. This order came from a can? From the Admiral commanding. He isn't your friend Schefter. Schefter retired, on account of, quote, ill health, unquote. He is now in a, quote, hospital, unquote. Where's Prince Bintrick? Nobody knows. Charges of high trees and were brought against him, and he just vanished. Gone underground, or secretly arrested and executed, take your choice. He wondered just what he'd tell Princess Lucille and Count Stephen. They have ships on all the planets they trade with. Fourteen of them. That isn't to catch Dunon. That's to disperse the navy away from Marduk. They don't trust the navy. Is Prince Edvard still Prime Minister? Yes, as of Garavay's last information, it seems MacKan is behaving in a scrupulously legal manner, outside of making his people's watchmen part of the armed forces, protesting his devotion to the king every time he opens his mouth. When will the fire be, I wonder? Huh? Oh yes, you were reading up on Hitler. That I don't know. Probably happened by now. He just told Princess Lucille that her husband had gone into hiding. He couldn't be sure whether she was relieved or more worried. The boy was sure that he was doing something highly romantic and heroic. Some of the volunteers tired of waiting after another thousand hours they spaced out. The Vikings' gift of Beowulf came in with cargo, and went out on orbit after discharging it to join the watch. A Gilgamesher came in from Amaterasu and reported everything quiet there. As soon as her captain had sold his cargo, with a minimum of haggling, he spaced out again. His behavior convinced everybody that the attack would come in a matter of hours. It didn't. Three thousand hours had passed since the first warning had reached Tanneth. That made five thousand since Victor's ships were supposed to have left Zachiddel. There were those, Boke-Valkenhayn among them, who doubted now if he ever had. The whole thing's just a big Gilgamesher lie, he was declaring. Somebody, Nicky Graetham, or the Everards, or maybe Victor himself, paid them to tell us that, to pin our ships down here. Or they made it up themselves so they could make hay on our trade-planets. Let's go down to the ghetto and clean out the whole gang, somebody else took up. Anything one of them's in, they're all in together. Niflheim with that. Let's all space out for Zachiddel, Manfred Ravallo proposed. We have enough ships to lick them on Tanneth. We have enough to lick them on their own planet. He managed to talk them out of both courses of action. What was he anyhow? Sovereign Prince of Tanneth? Or the non-ruling King of Marduk? Or just the chieftain of a disciplineless gang of barbarians? One of the independent spaced out in disgust. The next day, two others came in, loaded with booty from a raid on Bragy, and decided to stay around a while and see what happened. And four days after that, a five hundred foot hyperspace yacht bearing the daggers and chevrons of Bigler Sport came in. As soon as she was out of the last microjump, she began calling by screen. Trask didn't know the man who was screening, but Hugh Rathmore did. Duke Joris, Confidential Secretary. Prince Trask, I must speak to you as soon as possible, he began, almost stuttering. Whatever the urgency of his mission one would have thought that a three thousand hour voyage would have taken some of the edge out of it. It is of the first importance. You are speaking to me. This screen is reasonably secure, and if it's of the first importance, the sooner you tell me about it. Prince Trask, you must come to Gram with every man and every ship you can command. Satan only knows what's happening there now, but three thousand hours ago, when the Duke sent me off, arm-free of Glasbeth was landing on Wordshaven. He has a fleet of eight ships, furnished to him by his wife's kinsmen, the King of Haltoclear. They are commanded by King Conrad's space-viking cousin, the Prince of Zochitl. Then a look of shock surprise came into the face of the man on the screen, and Trask wondered why, until he realized that he had leaned back in his chair and was laughing uproariously. Before he could apologize, the man on the screen had found his voice. I know, Prince Trask, you have no reason to think kindly of King Angus, the former King Angus, or maybe even the late King Angus, I suppose he is now, but a murderer like arm-free of Glasbeth. It took a little time to explain to the confidential secretary of the Duke of Biglarsport the humor of the situation. There were others at Rivington to whom it was not immediately evident. The professional space-vikings, men like Valkenhayne and Ravallo and Alvin Carford, were disgusted. Here they'd been sitting on combat alert all these months and if they'd only known they could have gone to Zochitl and looted it clean long ago. The Graham Party were outraged. Angus of Wordshaven had been bad enough with the hereditary taint of the mad baron of Blackcliff and Queen Evita and her rapacious family, but even he was preferable to a murderous villain, some even called him a fiend in human shape like arm-free of Glasbeth. Both parties, of course, were positive as to wear their prince's duty lay. The former insisted that everything on Tanneth that could be put into hyperspace should be dispatched at once to Zochitl to haul back from it everything except a few absolutely immovable natural features of the planet. The latter clamored, just as loudly and passionately, that everybody on Tanneth who could pull a trigger should be embarked at once on a crusade for the deliverance of Graham. You don't want to do either, do you? Harkhamen asked him, when they were alone after the second day of acrimony. Niflheim, no. This crowd that wants an attack on Zochitl, you know what would happen if we did that. Harkhamen was silent, waiting for him to continue. Inside a year, four or five of these small planet holders, like Graetham and the Everards, would combine against us and make a slag-pile out of Tanneth. Harkhamen nodded agreement. Since we warned him the first time, Victors kept his ships away from our planets. If we attack Zochitl now, without provocation, nobody know what to expect from us. People like Nicky Graetham and Tobin of Nurgile and the Everards of Hoth get nervous around unpredictable dangers, and when they get nervous, they get trigger-happy. He puffed slowly on his pipe and then said, then you'll be going back to Graham. That doesn't follow, just because Valconhane and Rivalo, and that crowd are wrong, does it make Valprie and Rathmore and fail right? You heard what I was telling those very people at Carvel House the day I met you, and you've seen what's been happening on Graham since we came out here. Otto, the Sword Worlds are finished. They're half de-civilized now. Civilization is alive and growing here on Tanneth. I want to stay here and help it grow. Look, Lucas, Harkamon said. You're Prince of Tanneth, and I'm only the admiral. But I'm telling you, you'll have to do something, or this whole setup of yours will fall apart. As it stands, you can attack Zochitl, and the back to Graham party would go along. Or you can decide on this crusade against Amfrey of Glaspath, and the raid Zochitl now party would go along. But if you let this go on much longer, you won't have influence over either party. And then I will be finished, and in a few years Tanneth will be finished. He rose and paced across the room and back. Well, I won't raid Zochitl. I told you I, and you agreed. And I won't spend the men and ships and wealth of Tanneth in any sword-world dynastic squabble. Great Satan Otto, you were in the Durendal War. This is the same thing, and it'll go on for another half a century. Then what will you do? I came out here after Andrei Dunin, didn't I? He asked. I'm afraid Ravallo and Valprie, or even Valconhane and Morlin, won't be as interested in Dunin as you are. Then I will interest them in him. Remember, I was reading up on Hitler, coming in from Marduk. I will tell them all a big lie. Such a big lie that nobody will dare to disbelieve it.