DEDICATION
To Roy A. Squires
BOOK ONE: The Painter
Chapter 1
Dominion, it was called—a network that eventually encompassed a hundred stars in a field five thousand light-years across—and it was the most ambitious social experiment humans had ever embarked upon. It was a nation of more than a hundred planets, united by the Transport spaceships, the freighters that made possible the complex economic equations of supply and demand that kept the unthinkably vast Dominion empire running smoothly. Food from the fertile plains and seas of planets like Earth was shipped out to the worlds that produced ore, or vacuum-and-low-gravity industry, or simply provided office space; and the machinery and nutrients and pesticides from the manufactory worlds kept the farm worlds functioning at peak efficiency. Planetary independence was a necessity of the past—now no planet’s government need struggle to be self-sufficient; each world simply produced the things it was best suited to, and relied on the Transport ships to provide such necessities as were lacking.
For centuries Dominion was a healthy organism, nourished by its varied and widespread resources, which the bloodstream of the Transport ships distributed to all its parts.
FRANK Rovzar sat slouched against the back of the horse-drawn cart, hemmed in by a dozen hot, unhappy kitchen servants. They were all moaning and asking each other questions that none of them knew the answers to: Where are we going? What happened? Who are these people? Frank was the only silent one in the cart; he sat where he’d been thrown, staring intensely at nothing. From time to time he flexed his tightly bound wrists.
The cart rattled along southward on the Cromlech Road, making good time, for the Cromlech was one of the few highways on the planet that received regular maintenance. Within two hours of leaving the devastated palace they had arrived at the Barclay Transport Depot southwest of Munson, by the banks of the Malachi River. The cart, along with fifteen others like it, was taken through a gate in the chain-link fence that enclosed the depot, and across the wide, scorched concrete plain, and finally was brought to a halt in front of a bleak gray four-storey edifice.
Small-cargo scales had been dragged up from somewhere and now stood in a row by the doors. The bedraggled occupants of the carts were pulled and prodded out onto the pavement, weighed, lined up according to sex and mass, and then divided into groups and escorted into the building.
AFTER many centuries and dozens of local Golden Ages, Dominion began to weaken. It had expanded too rapidly, and the expected breakthroughs in faster-than-light communication and portable nuclear-fusion reactors simply never happened. Fossil fuels and Uranium-235 were inadequate in quantity and distribution. Transportation became increasingly expensive, and many things were no longer worth shipping. The smooth pulse of the import/export network had taken on a lurching, strained pace.
“NAME.” The officer’s voice had no intonation.
“Francisco de Goya Rovzar.”
“Age.”
“Twenty.”
“Occupation.”
“Uh ... apprentice painter.”
“Okay, Rovzar, step over there with the others.” Frank walked away from the desk and joined a crowd of other prisoners. The room they were in seemed calculated to induce depression. The floor was of damp cement, with drains set in at regular intervals; the paint was blistering off the pale green walls; the ceiling was corrugated aluminum, and naked light bulbs swung on the ends of long cords in the perpetual chilly draft.
The perfunctory interrogation continued until all the prisoners taken that morning had been questioned and stood in a milling, spiritless crowd. The officer who had been asking the questions now stood up and, flanked by two others who carried machine guns, faced the prisoners. He was short, with close-cropped sandy hair and a bristly moustache; his uniform was faultlessly neat.
“Give me your attention for a moment,” he said, unnecessarily. “You are here as prisoners of the Transport Authority, and of Costa, who two hours ago was confirmed as the new Duke of this planet. Ordinarily each of you would be allowed a court hearing in which to contest the charge of treason laid against you, but the entire planet of Octavio has, as of this morning, been declared to be under martial law.” He was reciting all this as dispassionately as a tired waiter announcing that the daily special is all gone. “When this condition is lifted you will be free to appeal your sentence. The sentence, like the crime, is the same for each of you: you are to be lifted tomorrow on a Transport freighter and ferried to the Orestes system to atone for your offenses in the uranium industry. Are there any questions?”
There were none. A few people laughed incredulously, for it was actually illegal for uranium miners to reenter normal society. Frank, his mind only now beginning to recover from the shock of his father’s murder, heard the sentence, but its irony, whether intentional or just negligent, was wasted on him. He filed the news away without thinking about it.
THE situation did not improve. Transportation became more and more sporadic and unreliable. Industrial planets were often left for weeks without food shipments, and agricultural planets were unable to replace broken machinery or obtain fuel for what worked. The Transport Company was losing its grip on the wide-flung empire; the outer sections were dying. Transport rates climbed, and the poorer planets, unable to maintain contact with the Dominion, were forced to drop out and try to survive alone. In time even the richest planets began working to be self-sufficient, in case the Transport Company should one day collapse entirely.
LATE that night Frank sat awake in the darkness of one of the depot detention pens. His cot and thin mattress were not particularly uncomfortable, but his thoughts were too vivid and alarming for him to sleep. The six other men in the pen with him apparently didn’t care to think, and slept deeply.
My father is dead, Frank told himself; but he couldn’t really believe it yet, not emotionally. Impressions of his father alive were too strong—he could still see the old man laughing over a mug of beer in a tavern, or sketching strangers’ faces in a pocket notebook, or shaking Frank awake in the predawn dimness so that they could gulp some coffee while they bundled up canvas and brushes and paints and thinners before getting on the horses and galloping off somewhere to catch a subject in the perfect light. Frank thought of how his life would be without old Rovzar to take care of, and he shied away from the lonely vision.
His destination was the Orestes mines. That was bad—about as bad as it could be. The mines riddled all four planets of the relatively young Orestes system, and working conditions ranged from desiccating desert heat to cold that could kill an exposed man in seconds. But the sovereign danger—and eventual certainty—was radiation poisoning. Panic grew in him as it became clear that he was about to be devastatingly punished by men who had never seen him before and were totally indifferent to him.
Only this morning—or was it now past midnight? Probably; only yesterday morning, then—he’d been playing with practice weapons at the Strand Fencing Academy. Now in this disinfectant-smelling darkness he wondered how he could have failed to see the shadow of the world’s true nature in the formalities of the stylized combat—the points and edges were imaginary, but the foils were models of a killing-tool ... a killing-tool every bit as real and routinely used as the pot in which a cook boils lobsters.