Sarnath's peculiar ambiance of sophisticated urban continuity, together with its economic importance, had made it the natural capital city for Raehan's world government. Inevitably, it had become the focus of much of the Tareil system's financial activity. Varien, born in Trelallieu (though of mixed ancestry like nearly everyone else), had moved the headquarters of his enterprises to Sarnath when Tarlann was still a boy. It was among the narrow streets and picturesque taverns of the Old Town's university district that he had undergone the adolescent discovery (unique in all history, as it always is) that the world was not precisely as he had been led to believe as a child.
Now he was back in Old Town, walking incognito—he had always managed to keep out of the public eye—along a street which ended at a seawall overlooking the estuary of the Lural, on whose opposite shore the modern towers blocked out half the sky like a wall of faceted light. It was a fine spring night—the seasons had returned to normal, as the planetary weather had cleansed itself of the atmospheric detritus of the Korvaash nuclear strikes—and he could almost imagine himself a young man again. Almost.
Even Old Town had changed. It had not escaped the creeping squalor that seemed to be growing over all of urban Raehan like a fungus as more and more resources were diverted to feed the conquerors' forced-draft heavy industries. The social fissures that were opening as real want began to encroach on Raehan's lower income levels were a matter of indifference to the Korvaasha. Indeed, Tarlann often wondered if they secretly welcomed any source of divisiveness among their subjects. Even if they had never thought of it on their own, it might well have been suggested to them by those who now swaggered past in the orange coveralls of the Implementers of the Unity.
The first Raehaniv collaborationists, Tarlann reflected as he stepped aside as was required, had been motivated by classic Raehaniv rationalism—or, at least, able to frame their motivations in rationalistic terms. After all, were the Korvaasha not utterly indifferent to human life? Had they not shown that the continuity of human society concerned them only insofar as that society supported the industry which now served them? And so, the argument ran, would humans not be better off under a puppet government of their own kind than under the direct rule of aliens whose language contained no such concept as "mercy"?
And yet, Tarlann thought as he stepped off the curb into the stinking runoff of a sewage system whose new energy allocation was more and more overloaded, the well-meaning intellectuals of the early days had been elbowed aside and pushed out by thugs like these two who strode past in such a way as to take up the entire sidewalk. The human type that had supplied the totalitarian regimes of the Global Wars era with secret policemen and concentration-camp guards had never disappeared, as people had fondly imagined after the Unification. It had merely bided its time, awaiting better days; and now it had returned to Raehan, wearing an orange coverall and restrained only by its alien masters' requirement that productivity not be impaired.
He stepped back onto the sidewalk after the two Implementers had moved on, dourly contemplated the filth on his expensive shoes, and proceeded along the street toward Dormael's wineshop.
The taproom was narrow but extended far back from the street entrance. Only a few furtive customers clustered around the small tables under the low ceiling with its age-darkened beams.
Dormael approached, smiling. He had the look of the original Khaemiriv-speaking people of this city: short and stocky on Raehaniv standards, getting fat in middle age.
"Ah, Tarlann! Welcome! It's been a long time."
"Yes," Tarlann drawled. "I've been in Norellarn. Ghastly place. What a relief to be back in civilization! Speaking of which . . . I trust you have, ah, entertainment tonight?" His left eyebrow rose with his inflection.
Dormael's expression grew even more unctuous. "But of course! Please come this way." As he turned to usher Tarlann through an inconspicuous door in the rear wall, he signalled almost imperceptibly to one of the drinkers and received an equally subtle acknowledgment.
They proceeded along a narrow, crooked corridor, Tarlann's assumed personna slipping from him as he walked. (He sometimes wondered if he overdid the languid foppishness. Not
all
the Implementers were stupid brutes, after all. A few of them were clever brutes.) The final doorway on the right gave access to a small, functionally furnished room. Dormael let him in, then departed without a word. As he entered, a lean middle-aged man rose from a table.
"Greetings, Tarlann! You can talk; I've been able to use my equipment freely in here, and I guarantee this room is secure."
"Then it's secure." Tarlann gave the forty-five-degree bow that was the equivalent of a firm and enthusiastic handclasp. "I was worried, Tharuv. After your last escape . . . well, never mind. How is Arduin?"
"Older and tougher. Also crazier. Everybody in the asteroids is by now." For an instant his eyes saw far beyond old Sarnath to the asteroid belt where the Free Raehaniv fleet continued to disrupt the flow of raw materials and harass the Korvaasha.
Tarlann seated himself and stared at the tabletop. "You know, I've often daydreamed about joining you out there."
Tharuv looked at him sharply. "Don't talk nonsense, Tarlann! What you're doing here—what you're in a unique position to do—is far more important than playing space pirates! We couldn't function without you as our planetside contact . . . ."
"Yes, yes, I know. But have you ever thought of how
bloodless
that all is, Tharuv?" His eyes held a look that would have shocked anyone who had known him in the prewar era that seemed to be receeding beyond memory, leaving people wondering if they had merely dreamed such a world. "I have to sit around, playing the fool and watching them ruin Raehan, and I've never once been able to do anything direct—I've never been able to strike back at them!"
Tarlann stopped abruptly. He couldn't even voice his real source of frustration: the utter lack of news from his father, as the years had passed and they had learned of the Korvaasha's discovery of the fourth displacement point and subsequent exploration of the Lirauva Chain. So he hadn't even been able to bury his hopes—they lingered on, undead.
But he knew that he was only fantasizing about seeking oblivion in space combat. If nothing else, there was his family to consider. And this Tharuv also knew.
"Well," the Free Raehaniv officer finally said, "here's something you can do to help
us
strike back at them: get Luraen hle'Nizhom offworld for us!"
Tarlann looked up sharply at the name of the eminent gravitic engineer. "You're in contact with him?"
Tharuv nodded, which meant the same thing to the Raehaniv that it did to most Terrans. "He wants to join us. We can arrange the contact with your people. If you can provide him with a new identity and get him into space, we'll take it from there."
"Of course," Tarlann nodded. "I was just in Norellarn, greasing the people we need so that the company's passenger manifests for the orbital tower aren't looked at too closely. I'll . . ."
An ear-bruising explosion shook the building, followed by a chaos of screams and shouts. Their eyes locked for an instant, before Tarlann spoke with a steadiness which pleased and surprised him.
"Come on; Dormael has an emergency exit in the hallway."
Without a word, Tharuv rose to his feet and they moved toward the door—just before it was flung open and Dormael staggered in, clutching a bleeding abdomen. Tharuv ran to him, weapon already out—a laser pistol, characteristic arm of a spaceman, for whom its lack of recoil more than made up for its susceptibility to the defensive aerosols that nobody wanted to fill a closed-cycle artificial environment with anyway. The taverner had just collapsed in his arms when the Implementers appeared in the doorway, orange coveralls largely hidden by the combat dress they wore.
Tharuv dropped Dormael and got off one shot, stopped by the reflective material that made up one layer of his target's combat dress. The Implementer staggered backwards from the kinetic energy transfer, but two others' railgun carbines opened up on full automatic with a horrible crackling sound as the steel needles went supersonic. Rows of tiny holes appeared in Tharuv's back, and the wall behind him was sprayed with blood. The little hypervelocity flechettes didn't knock a man over backwards; Tharuv just stood still for a fraction of a second, then blood gushed from his mouth and he collapsed. Tarlann, not even in shock yet, managed to raise his hands, palms outward.
The Implementers crowded into the room, two of them grasping Tarlann by both arms while a third searched him. An assault leader swaggered in, idly swinging a truncheon. He surveyed the room supercilliously, finally running his eyes over Tarlann's expensive clothes. He started to turn away . . . and then, without any warning, raised his truncheon and brought it down on Tarlann's right kneecap with all his strength.
Beyond a certain level, pain overloads the nervous system's capacity to perceive it as pain. Tarlann, passing this point as he collapsed, heard as if from a great distance his own screams and the assault leader's rasping voice.
"Kill the others but bring this rich piece of shit along. The Director wants to question him."
They had given him something to dull the sickening pain, and he was able to appreciate—if that was the word—the headquarters from which Gromorgh, Director of Implementation, oversaw the subjugation of Raehan.
Whole city blocks had been demolished to make room for the fortresslike structure, so typical of Korvaash construction (you could not call it "architecture") in its massive, crude, utilitarian hideousness. The inside, he decided, was even worse. No attempt had been made to ameliorate any noise, stench, inconvenience, filth, or ugliness in a structure whose perpetrators had stopped at minimum functionality.
The Korvaasha, he thought through his haze of drug-masked pain, must have been civilized once. Surely civilization was a precondition to the development of high technology. Which led him to the depressing conclusion that technology could survive the death of the civilization that had created it. Or—even more depressing—perhaps this was what civilization looked like in its Korvaash manifestation.
He had little but these dreary thoughts to occupy him as he waited in a cold, dimly lit chamber—brutally massive, grimy, with bunches of power cables hanging fron the overhead against unfinished walls—with three Implementers (the assault leader and two underlings) who shuffled their feet and darted furtive glances around the home of their owners. The Implementers' attitude was not doglike; they were as incapable of loyalty as they were of any other decent impulse. They felt nothing for their Korvaash masters but fear.
Suddenly, the huge door slid open with a grinding crash, and two Korvaash guards stalked in.
It was difficult to make sense of the Korvaasha at first glance—alienness posed a barrier to coherent impressions. It was hard to say why; the overall design—bilaterally symmetric two-armed biped, averaging a third again the height of a man—wasn't fundamentally weird. Of course, part of that height was accounted for by a long thick neck, and the blocky torso itself was broad even in proportion. And the skin was thick, tough and wrinkled, in shades of gray, with no apparent hair. But it was an indescribable wrongness about every angle and proportion, and about the mechanics of movement, that gave humans the flesh-crawling sensation that the Korvaasha did not belong in the universe . . . that, and the head. The head was the worst.
Four slits on each side of the neck performed the functions of respiration and speech. The head itself—armored with serrated ridges of bone under skin that was unpleasantly thin on top—held a wide gash of a mouth that served only for the ingesting of food (a process that no normal human, and few abnormal ones, could watch without nausea), pulsating tympanums that served for ears on the sides, and the single eye that, while perhaps not overtly repellant, was the most deeply disturbing feature of all. It was a darkly glowing amber, with a faceting pattern that allowed for depth perception. A human was ill-advised to gaze into it for long.
But what was most instantly noticeable about the guards was not their alien physiology but the extent to which that physiology had been replaced by machinery. The Raehaniv had made a fine art of lifelike bionic replacements; the Korvaasha had never bothered. Artificial arms with built-in weapons, sense-enhancing implants, and the rest were attached obscenely to the flesh that had been chopped away to make room for them. But at least these two were only ordinary warriors, not the totally cyborgian elite of whom little that was natural remained other than the brain.
The two enhanced Korvaasha took up positions on either side of the door, and Gromorgh himself entered. The stench of fear exuded by the Implementers grew truly disgusting.
The Director of Implementation was short for a Korvaasha, and lacked any visible enhancements. But he wore around his neck the pendant that produced realtime Raehaniv translation of the wearer's speech, in frequencies humans could hear rather than the inaudibly low Korvaash speech. (The Raehaniv had once thought the aliens communicated by telepathy, especially given the distance the subsonic speech carried.) Likewise, a device attached by suction to the head beside the ear-membrane enabled him to understand human speech. It was a kind of technology that had been successfully discouraged on Raehan, on the grounds that it would remove all incentive for linguistic unity.
At a gesture from the assault leader, his two subordinates grabbed Tarlann by the arms, hauled him up from the floor and slammed him to his feet. No drugs could suppress the pain that shot from his knee through his entire being; only nausea prevented him from fainting.
The assault leader stepped forward, demonstrating that it is possible to crawl in an erect posture. "Director, we have brought our fellow inferior being Tarlann hle'Morna as you commanded. He is . . ."