“This is a lovely world,” murmured Nakamura.
Captain Umfando shrugged. Wryness touched his ebony features. “I could wish it were more sociable.”
“Believe me, sir, despite political differences, there is no ill will toward you or your men personally—”
“Oh, come now,” said the officer. “I am not that naive. Sarai may begin by disliking us purely as soldiers and tax collectors for an Earth which will not let the ordinary colonist even visit it. But such feelings soon envelop the soldier himself. I’ve been jeered at, and mudballed by children, even out of uniform.”
“It is most deplorable,” said Nakamura in distress. “May I offer my apologies on behalf of my town?”
Umfando shrugged. “I’m not certain that an apology is in order. I didn’t have to make a career of the Protector’s army. And Earth does exploit the colonies. There are euphemisms and excuses, but exploitation is what it amounts to.”
He thought for a moment, and asked with a near despair: “But what else can Earth do?”
Nakamura said nothing. They walked on in silence for a while.
Umfando said at last, “I wish to put a rude question.” When the flat face beside him showed no reluctance, he plowed ahead. “Let us not waste time on modesty. You know you’re one of the finest pilots in the Guild. Any Capellan System pilot is — he has to be! — but you are the one they ask for when things get difficult. You’ve been on a dozen exploratory missions in new systems. It’s not made you rich, but it has made you one of the most influential men on Sarai.
“Why do you treat me like a human being?”
Nakamura considered it gravely. “Well,” he decided, “I cannot consider politics important enough to quarrel about.”
“I see.” A little embarrassed, Umfando changed the subject:
“I can get you on a military transport to Batu tomorrow, if you wish. Drop you off at the ‘caster station.”
“Thank you, but I have already engaged passage on the regular interstellar ferry.”
“Uh… did you ask for the Cross berth?”
“No. I had served a few watches on her, of course, like everyone else. A good ship. A little outmoded now, perhaps, but well and honestly made. The Guild offered me the position, and since I had no other commitments, I accepted.”
Guild offers were actually assignments for the lower ranks of spacemen, Umfando knew. A man of Nakamura’s standing could have refused. But maybe the way you attained such prestige was by never refusing.
“Do you expect any trouble?” he asked.
“One is never certain. The great human mistake is to anticipate. The totally relaxed and unexpectant man is the one prepared for whatever may happen: he does not have to get out of an inappropriate posture before he can react.”
“Ha! Maybe judo ought to be required for all pilots.”
“No. I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art.”
Nakamura saw his house ahead. It stood on the edge of town, half screened by Terrestrial Bamboo. He had spent much time on the garden which surrounded it; many visitors were kind enough to call his garden beautiful. He sighed. A gracious house, a good and faithful wife, four promising children, health and achievement, what more could a man reasonably ask? He told himself that his remembrances of Kyoto were hazed, he had left Earth as a very young boy. Surely this serene and uncrowded Sarai offered more than poor tortured antheap Earth gave even to her overlords. And yet some mornings he woke up with the temple bells of Kyoto still chiming in his ears.
He stopped at the gate. “Will you honor my home for a cup of tea?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” said Umfando, almost roughly. “You’ve a family to… to say good-by to. I will see you when—”
Fire streaked across the sky. For an instant Il-Khan himself was lost in blue flame. The bolide struck somewhere among the mountains. A sheet of pure outraged energy flared above ragged peaks. Then smoke and dust swirled up like a devil, and moments afterward thunder came banging down through the valley.
Umfando whistled. “That was a monster!”
“A… yes… most unusual… yes, yes.” Nakamura stammered something, somehow he bowed good night and somehow he kept from running along the path to his roof. But as he walked, he began to shake.
It was only a meteorite, he told himself frantically. Only a meteorite. The space around a giant star like Capella, and especially around its biggest planet, was certain to be full of cosmic junk. Billions of meteors hit Sarai every day. Hundreds of them got through to the surface. But Sarai was as big as Earth, he told himself. Sarai had oceans, deserts, uninhabited plains and forests… why, even on Sarai you were more likely to be killed by lightning than by a meteorite and — and — Oh, the jewel in the lotus! he cried out. I am afraid. I am afraid of the black sun.
4
It was raining again, but no one on Krasna pays attention to that. They wear a few light non-absorbent garments and welcome the rain on their bodies, a moment’s relief from saturated hot air. The clouds thin overhead, so that the land glimmers with watery brightness, sometimes even the uppermost clouds break apart and Tau Ceti spears a blinding reddish shaft through smoke-blue masses and silvery rain.
Chang Sverdlov rode into Dynamogorsk with a hornbeast lashed behind his saddle. It had been a dangerous chase, through the tidal marshes and up over the bleak heights of Czar Nicholas IV Range, but he needed evidence to back his story, that he had only been going out to hunt. Mukerji, the chief intelligence officer of the Protectorate garrison, was getting suspicious, God rot his brain.
Two soldiers came along the elevated sidewalk. Rain drummed on their helmets and sluiced off the slung rifles. Earth soldiers went in armed pairs on a street like Trumpet Road: for a Krasnan swamprancher, fisher, miner, logger, trapper, brawling away his accumulated loneliness, with a skinful of vodka or rice wine, a fluff-headed fille-de-joie to impress, and a sullen suspicion that the dice had been loaded, was apt to unlimber his weapons when he saw a blueback.
Sverdlov contented himself with spitting at their boots, which were about level with his head. It went unnoticed in the downpour. And in the noise, and crowding, and blinking lights, with thunder above the city’s gables. He clucked to his saurian and guided her toward the middle of the slough called Trumpet Road. Its excitement lifted his anger a bit. I’ll report in, he told himself, and go wheedle an advance from the Guild bank, and then make up six weeks of bushranging in a way the joyhouses will remember!
He turned off on the Avenue of Tigers and stopped before a certain inn. Tethering his lizard and throwing the guard a coin, he entered the taproom. It was as full of men and racket as usual. He shouldered up to the bar. The landlord recognized him; Sverdlov was a very big and solid young man, bullet-headed, crop-haired, with a thick nose and small brown eyes in a pockmarked face. The landlord drew a mug of kvass, spiked it with vodka, and set it out. He nodded toward the ceiling. “I will tell her you are here,” he said, and left.